A vampire has no reflection. That matters. It can be what it is because it cannot see what it is. When Spike falls for Buffy, he finds himself face-to-face with his reflection: who he is, in her eyes. And he has to change. Of course he does. Here's another thing. Being a superhero you're limited more than anything, I think, by time. Even if you travel in time. You can't save people beyond the moment it most matters; you jump in, just in time, and then you turn away and you don't look back. And yes, it's how you survive, but more than that, it's how they survive: if you stayed, someone else's time would be up. We talk about sacrifice as something noble, but it's rooted in something brutal. And actually, the two aren't as far apart as they pretend to be; sacrifice is brutal, often enough, even at its most noble. It costs. Being a hero means walking away; means playing with people's lives; means cutting across people's despair rather than meeting them in the midst of it. It's love at its most abstract: love that chooses, love that convicts, love that moves on. How do you live with yourself? The answer is, you don't. You leave that to someone else. It's always my favourite story. It's the story that says, you walk away from every person but one. That you are redeemed from playing life as a numbers game by the one person you can love without reservation. Count the mirrors, this series of Doctor Who. Cassandra, taking in her 3-D technicolour self; the moon, a mirror in itself; Sarah-Jane, the face of Rose's future; Rose, waiting for the Doctor by the broken mirror, the world she thought she knew shattered in pieces at her feet. And then the Age of Steel. That heartbreaking image of one Cyberman, human sensibility restored, staring incredulously, brokenly at its own reflection. The realisation of what they have become killing each and every one of them. They see what they are and they cannot be what they are. But that isn't the whole story; there's a beautiful parallel. Rose is stood looking into the broken mirror again, and this time it's Mickey. Mickey who walks away from everything he knows to find a purpose in a world that isn't his, and Rose asks, how can you do this, but what she actually means is, how could I? Because this is Rose's choice, one she never stops having to make: to walk away from people who love to her to save people who may never know her name. To not look back, whatever the cost. She turns to the Doctor and the unspoken question is, how do we live with what we are? Do we survive the way the Cybermen do, emotion inhibited, doubt suppressed? The answer is, no. We survive because we are not in this alone. I think we've seen it played out in every episode since, one way or another. Mirror me. Back me up. Tell me when I'm wrong, but for my sake, not yours. Be you, never stop being you, but need me. Hold my hands and don't let go, so that even with a thousand fingerprints pressed into a thousand lives I can still be whole. Touch me, keep the boundaries of me within your grasp, so that even spanning time and space I may still be real. It's two people looking at each other through an empty mirror frame. You don't see yourself, but who you allow someone else to be. "You even look like him," says Jackie in the Army of Ghosts. And it's a hard kind of love, in many ways: an exclusive, selfish, demanding kind of love. It isn't a model for what a relationship should be, but when your job is saving the world, you don't work in shoulds, only in musts. Jackie says something else, too. The marketplace, forty years from now: that lost woman, so far from home, and she's not Rose Tyler, not any more. She will look into the mirror, and it will not be her reflection, not the way she remembers it. Who she is, in his eyes. Home. Is that where we end up? I guess if that's the question we're asking we haven't been listening this series. It isn't about endings. It never is. It's about the point you look in the mirror and don't see your reflection. The point where what matters is not what you are, but the difference you can make. The point where it doesn't matter that it won't be enough, because you know you don't do it alone. It's the diamond in Tooth and Claw: light, not just reflected back at you, but refracted; love, through a prism.
Back to Rose/Doctor fic Feedback
