Chapter Text
Rose wondered if there would ever be a day that she didn't see the Doctor's face in every man she passed. The first time she saw a man wearing a tan trenchcoat over a pin-striped suit she passed out in the street. Her life, which once had been so ignorantly pleasant, was now haunted by memories of a peculiar man in a blue box who had changed the way she looked at everything. She thought she'd be with him forever, and she still goes to that wall that cut her off from him forever.
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That sound plagued Donna in her sleep. Every night, without fail, she would start awake to the strangest wheezing roar whose identity she couldn't pinpoint. At first, she thought she was going mad, but as the frequency of the sound increased, she found herself taking comfort in it. As she heard it, she inexplicably dreamed of the sky and the stars, beautiful turning galaxies in indescribably mixtures of colour. But in her dream, she was hollow, and ached for that unknown thing that was missing.
******
Sometimes Donna would hear a voice or see a precise blue colour, and her mind would go blank for a moment. An ache would consume her mind like fire licking at the base of a tree. She never understood those moments, when she felt that hollow, gaping hole in her chest and even breathing required herculean effort. But after a while, Donna found she could look up to the sky, and it almost faded away.
******
Rose dove into the freezing water of Bad Wolf Bay. It wasn't as easy as it used to be; her joints ached and creaked with movement. Her wrinkled, sagging skin billowed in the water. Every year, for sixty-five years she had come to Bad Wolf Bay, to swim in the water as salty as the tears she shed in the water. Now she was an old woman, with the memories of far more than one life, and John was dead. It was now time for Mrs. Smith to join him. With her last breath, she said to the sky, "I never stopped loving you." The Doctor was out there somewhere, cut off from her, and Rose had remembered that every day of her life.