Author’s Note: Thanks to Noelle and Merlin’s Sister for the betas. This was my first Doctor Who fic and it’s always a nerve-wracking thing to dip that first toe in the waters of a new fandom, especially one with so much history. I couldn’t have done it without you!

“That’s why, darling, it’s incredible that someone so unforgettable thinks that I am unforgettable too.”
–Nat King Cole

December 24, 1869: that was the day that the Doctor changed my life.

No, that’s not true. He changed my life lots of times–the day we met, the day he invited me to go with him, the day I watched him die and be reborn right in front of my eyes…

December 24, 1869 was the day he changed me. And all with six little words: “I’m so glad I met you.”

There were a million things I could have said to that. Things like, what, are you daft? You, the alien bloke with the time machine, who saves the universe every day, and you’re glad you met me? Have you gone completely round the bend?

All I did say was, “Me too.” I never have told him what those words meant to me, but then how do you explain something like that to someone who lives the kind of life he does? How do you make a nine-hundred-year old time traveler who sacrificed his world to save the universe understand what it’s like to be ordinary?

I had nothing going for me before I met him, except a bronze medal in gymnastics from school and my mum’s temper. I’d never been to University, didn’t even have my A-levels. If you were to have asked me then what my life would be like, I’d probably have seen myself marrying Mickey and rotting away in a shop. We’d be lucky to keep two quid in the bank between us for more than a week, especially once we had kids. Maybe, if I worked hard, I’d move up to management one day, but that was it. Nothing special. Just another Londoner who’d be lucky if I ever ventured farther from home than Cardiff.

And that’s all it was, meeting the Doctor, or so I thought. Luck. Good or bad, it was just luck. Nothing to do with me: I was in the right place at the wrong time, and if it’d been Shireen he would’ve taken her instead.

I believed that until that night.

“I’m so glad I met you.” See, what those words meant was that it wasn’t just luck, just chance that I got to go. He wanted me along. Not just anyone: me.

I was a nobody but he thought I was special. And if the Doctor–if someone like him–thought I was special, then maybe I was. Maybe I was worth more than being just a shop girl, because I was worth something more to him.

I think maybe more than anything else, that’s why I’ve stayed with him. More than the seeing the universe, seeing history, seeing Dad, I wanted to see me through his eyes. I wanted to know what he saw in me that no one else did: not even Mum or Mickey. That’s what’s kept me around, even when his smile and his face and his hands were suddenly nothing I remembered. I knew it was still him because he still needed me like no one had ever needed me. He needs me. How’s a girl supposed to say no?

I still don’t know why. Sometimes think I never will, but it doesn’t really matter now, does it? Because this much I do know: I’m Rose Tyler, and I’m somebody. I’m important to the most important person in the universe, and that’s enough.

Can’t go back to being ordinary after that now, can you?