The sky is pale pink. It isn’t quite morning and her hair is tied up in a bun. There are thin, dark blue sheets everywhere. They crumple into shapes that are indistinguishable in the dark. The bed comforter is lying on the floor. He hardly sleeps, she knows. She closes her eyes, doused in the enjoyably cloying smell of void stuff. 

Rose opens her eyes. No, not void stuff. Just him. And her. In their apartment. Maybe it’s his cologne, she thinks. He wears cologne now.

Some mornings she wakes up and forgets they’re not in the TARDIS anymore. His voice in the air should mean TARDIS. But it’s gone. And theirs is just a piece of coral.  She’d almost rather the birds’ chirps outside their window be the cloisterbell.

Some mornings she wakes up and he’s not there beside her and she panics. But then she walks out into the living area of their tiny apartment and spies him fussing over their steadily growing TARDIS. She watches him tinker and pull his hair in faux-frustration. Because she knows he quite likes his hair like that anyways.

She watches him silently, a grin tugging on the edge of her lips.

When their TARDIS gets big enough, he wanders inside. He doesn’t leave it for a day. She knows it’s hard for him, because it’s hard for her too.

He breaks the Chameleon Circuit on purpose. She’s glad.

They spend the last few nights in Pete’s World with her family, but they sleep in the TARDIS.

On the night it’s ready to fly he whispers to her with a manic smile, “Crimson, chartreuse, azure. All of them. Every star and every planet and every color. All yours.” His thumb rubs her hand sweetly.

Empires and kingdoms await them. Enemies and strangers and friends. Fallen civilizations. Oceans and valleys made of glass or perhaps ice. Running and wandering. The whole of time and space.

Home.