Chapter Text
It was always strange to be woken by silence. Not by the harsh crackle of an alarm clock, not by the wail of a siren outside the window, and not even by her own scream, but by silence. A deafening, oppressive, unsettling silence.
Rose opened her eyes five minutes before her alarm was set to go off. The air was thick with the anticipation of its bronze voice, and the expectation sent shivers down her skin. She stretched, and her hand automatically reached for the nightstand to switch off the annoying mechanism before it could start its racket. Her fingers, still stiff with sleep, only lightly closed around the plastic casing.
There was a short, muffled crunch.
Rose froze, then slowly unclenched her palm. On the hard surface of the nightstand lay plastic shards, twisted little gears, and a thin, coiled spring. The clock face had cracked in two, limp and powerless, and the hands were frozen in the shame of a perpetual five-minutes-to-go.
"Again," she exhaled quietly, sinking onto her back and covering her eyes with her hand.
Irritation, bitter and familiar, rose in her throat. Now she'd have to run to the shop on Oxford Street after her shift. She remembered with a pang how the salesman, a dandy with a perfect part in his hair, had rapturously told her about the "newest impact-resistant glass" and "anti-vandal casing."
"It'll survive even if you throw it against a wall, Miss!" he had boasted.
What a bastard. The lengths marketers would go to just to make a sale. The warranty, apparently, did not cover the supernatural strength of a lycanthrope waking from sleep.
With that realization, she got out of bed. Her movements were careful, measured, as if she was afraid of crushing not just the alarm clock, but the very space around her. The floor beneath her bare feet didn't collapse; the doorknob didn't come off in her hand. A victory already.
The morning ritual was honed to automaticity: a shower, brushing her teeth (she had to handle the toothbrush as if it were a crystal vase), getting dressed.
She stopped in front of the mirror in the hallway, her fingers gripping the wooden frame. The reflection was hers, undoubtedly. The same features, the same hair pulled into a messy ponytail. But something was off. Something that made passersby on the street instinctively look away, and her former colleagues speak to her a little more quietly and politely.
Rose leaned closer to the glass, peering into her own eyes. Brown. Ordinary brown eyes. That's how the Doctor had known them. That's how she had seen herself her whole life. But now, in the grey light of the London morning filtering through the curtains, a strange, honeyed glint lurked in their depths. Not golden, no. Not yet golden. Just a gilding around the edge of the iris, barely perceptible, like the light from a distant star you can see with your peripheral vision, but which vanishes when you look straight at it.
"My face is back, but my eyes are letting me down," she whispered to her reflection.
It wasn't a physical pain. She hardly felt physical pain anymore. It was the pain of realizing that her body, her perfectly ordinary, human body, had become alien territory for her—a minefield where she was both the sapper and the potential victim.
She took a deep breath, let go of the frame (leaving barely noticeable dents in the wood), and threw on her jacket. Time for work. In her pocket were her apartment keys, a few coins, a couple of banknotes, and a crumpled sheet with her schedule. The ordinary life of the ordinary Rose Tyler.
If only ordinary girls didn't crush alarm clocks with a single touch and see the glint of a foreign, wild soul in their own eyes in the mirror.
She left the apartment, the lock clicking shut behind her. The silence behind her back was once again absolute, broken only by the flickering light from the shattered clock face on the nightstand—the silent witness to the force that woke her every morning instead of an alarm.