(no subject)
title: throw your arms over your eyes and greet this brand new day
author: biggrstaffbunch
rating: pg-13
pairing(s): Doctor/Rose
spoilers/warnings: Journey's End!
summary: This is the both of them, then, left to take what Fate has seen fit to spin as its final solution. Rose Tyler learns to live in a world where crossing dimensions is not a question of possibility, but of worth. Left to build a new life, she struggles to accept what has come to pass, and what will eventually be.
a/n: for mylittlepwny because she is my partner in all things SQUEE and because just...bb, spasmflutterisded! enjoy!
- - -
She probably should have seen it coming in that one alternate reality where she met all thirteen of his regenerations and the one with ginger hair wouldn't look her in the eye.
Foresight has always been a bit of trouble for her, though. Especially when it comes to him.
- - -
Watching Mickey leave is the beginning of where her happy endings all go downhill.
Her first farewell on this journey, an eerie echo of that last time so long ago. He squeezes her hand, hugs her mum, and walks away. She tries not to feel unsettled at the way he looks at her before he goes, like he'll never see her again. Like this separation is as final as the last one felt.
The Doctor looks after him with a troubled gaze. When he turns to her with those dark, foreboding eyes, she knows that something else is coming.
They land on Bad Wolf Bay (another memory of another goodbye) and he follows her out, his gait slow and awkward, lines carved around his mouth.
Donna's eyes are all soft and knowing, and Rose is gripped with a slow, certain fear.
"We saved the universe," he starts, "but at a cost."
This is her punishment for crossing universes and thinking that life could ever be the same as it once was.
She bites her lip and listens as he rips her world apart, one more time.
- - -
Two Doctors in a single reality equals two Doctors too many, and the one in the brown suit gives her the one in the blue. With a rueful smile and a few well-placed explanations, he maps her future and becomes a god. Turns a stranger into a lover and turns a girl into a jailor. Watch over him, his eyes plead. Make him better.
She stands there as he tells her that he is letting her go forever, and though she argues, he begs her with each counter-argument to accept what he cannot give. She puts them both through a trial by fire over words she's never needed, and knows with a twisted certainty that he is just waiting for her to smile, to look happy, to show him that she will continue to live a fantastic life, with this small part of him by her side.
Sick with sorrow, with despair, with a sense of overwhelming loss, she kisses the man in blue and thinks of the man in brown.
When she opens her eyes, the TARDIS is fading from view and she is left with a mouth full of all the things he didn't say.
- - -
"I love you," she whispers to the wind, and the words get swept away with the receding surf, the waves crashing over each breath, the sand sifting through each syllable. She talks to the breeze, to the shimmering horizon line where ocean meets sky, to a quiet beach of faded footprints and broken shells. She talks to ghosts.
Pressing her fingers to her face, she feels the sentence take shape.
"I love you," she repeats, only this time her voice is even softer, wavering like sunlight behind clouds. "I love you, I love you, I love you."
With her eyes blurred with warm tears and her hair lifting like a golden shroud around her face, it's as if she is standing at the edge of the world, staring out into depths unfathomable. She wears her leather jacket, her own armor that is so stylishly cut, so well-worn and well-loved. Her hands still shake from a trip across dimensions, across timelines realized and erased, people and possibilities that are tucked now in the farthest, blackest reaches of her brain.
There is a sense now of dizziness in her every blink, colors swimming under her lashes as she struggles to reorient herself to a world that is finally forever hers. Everything she left unsaid still trembles in the lush curve of her mouth, hanging in the purgatory of the space between her teeth, and she licks the dry corners of her lips, closes her eyes, says what she never could, not the first time nor the second, the last:
"Goodbye."
Long arms wind around her waist, pulling her close. Her hands pluck restlessly at blue cloth, smoothing over blue veins, hooking fingers through fingers and feeling the rise of knuckles under her palm. She leans back and there is a chest and a neck and a chin cradling her head. A strong, tall body stooped around her own, muscles shifting against her back, unsteady breath stirring the hair at her temple.
As the water gushes around their feet, soaking through her trainers and staining the red of his own a deep crimson, she sighs and listens to the loneliness of one heart beating with hers instead of two.
"Life is imperfect, Rose," he tells her. "For everything you get, something gets taken away. There are no gifts, not really."
His skin, his stubble, his every feature is achingly familiar and yet so, so alien. She traces the edge of his jaw with her gaze, watches the way his fringe falls across his forehead. There is an emptiness to his eyes that speaks of his own journey through the dark. He is different, she knows, than his memories say he should be. He knows what's out there, what's up there, and he's got no way of moving across planets, no way of discovering new pasts and old futures, not now. A grounded nomad with a traveling heart, tethered by a love for her that's steeped in his cells, dangling on the tip of his tongue in a way she still cannot quite accept.
This is the both of them, then, left to take what Fate has seen fit to spin as its final solution.
"No," she agrees faintly, settling back in the crook of his neck, feeling the warmth of his throat move against her. "No, there are no gifts."
They watch the sun set on a new day, and neither of them move until the stars begin to scatter.
- - -
The blue suit, she says firmly, must go.
It is the first thing she says to him, in fact, on the car-ride home. Mum in front, chattering away to Pete, and a Mickey-shaped hole in her heart and in the seat behind her. And him, this man with brown hair and brown eyes and a smile that teeters on the wrong side of manic. He sits next to her with his hand over hers, and he lets the engine hum in between all the failed starts and stops of the speech she tries to make.
"You need new clothes," she finally says, and he ducks his head, scratches his hair. Agrees.
Mum takes him shopping later that day, and she tags along because he won't go if she doesn't. He comes out of the dressing room wearing his new uniform, black trousers and black t-shirt and black, close-fitting leather jacket. He wears boots and his hair falls rakishly over his eyes.
A bit of regeneration regression, he informs her solemnly.
Not regressed enough, she thinks, remembering blue eyes and big ears. It hurts to look at him.
She wonders if that will ever change.
- - -
His identity in this universe is all up to her, and so she registers him under the alias of John Smith. (This is the first decision in a life that is shaping up to be one decision after another, pulling pieces and parcels from the universe she used to know into this new London, this home that is hers for good, dimension cannons be damned.)
He does not fight the new ID, nor the new clothes that she dumps unceremoniously on his guest-bed in Pete Tyler's looming mansion. He does not fight anything, not even her brash manner, and instead, he sits. Watches her.
She finds she cannot yet call him the Doctor, not even in her own head, let alone out loud.
"You thought things would end differently," he says softly, breaking the quiet of her harsh breathing, left in the wake of her short, curt instructions. His legs are crossed at the ankles, his recline infinitely casual. He does not belong in so many ways she can hardly begin to count.
"Well," she answers lightly. "I didn't think things would end like this, no. I mean, I hopped across about, oh, fifty-seven versions of reality just to see his stupid face. Sorry if I didn't wager on a long-lost an' chopped-off limb wiggling into a full-grown version of his gob and Donna Noble's attitude."
"Oi," he says, but without heat. "'S not a bad attitude to have."
She smiles, half-heartedly. "Yeah, well. Still." Her hands stray to the clothes on the bed. "As much as I want to believe that--" She stops and shakes her head. "Just, you can look like him, and think like him, and have all his memories, but a person is more than what their memories say they are. I should know. Otherwise I'd still be a shopgirl with bad taste and spidery-lookin' eyes."
His smile says, I know you, Rose Tyler. Who you were, and who you are. Who you could be.
She shivers and looks away from the strange points of light in his eyes, the way he looks at her with such hunger, such finely-drawn restraint.
"In the end," she says, her voice getting lost in the shadows slanting in through the window, "You don't have a TARDIS and I don't have a clue. I'm blundering through this life half-blind, and you're all dressed up with nowhere to go--all of time behind your eyes and no way to go anywhere but the next second, the next minute, the next hour closer to the day you'll eventually die. We--" she stumbles over her words. "We're a pair, aren't we?"
Her chest constricts so tightly it feels as if it might break under the crashing force of her anger, her betrayal. "How could he do it?" she asks, sitting on the bed next to him, feeling out of sync with the seconds ticking by. "How could he leave us behind?"
He reaches for her hand, and his thumb finds the curve of the finger she broke when she was sixteen. "Everytime I close my eyes, I see your face," he answers, voice raw and reedy in a way that makes her eyes flutter shut.
There is silence for a moment and he begins again, building speed and volume until the cadence of his speech is so frenzied that he is almost tripping over his own tongue. "He thought about you constantly, Rose. Missed you. Loved you. And I--my head is full of all that. I can't breathe around it, all these thoughts and images and--look, I'll be John Smith if it helps you keep us straight, but Rose--for all that it matters, I'm him in each and every way he always wanted to be, for you. He didn't leave us behind, he'll never leave us behind, not so long as all I can think about is the way he cared for you. When all I can feel is how much I care for you, like I'm gonna explode if I don't just--"
He tugs her hand and brings her close, skims the delicate skin of her eyelids with his lips. "You and I," he says, "we could be together, really have a chance in this mad old world, if you let us. If you...wanted."
Her eyes open slowly, flying to his and searching the bittersweet brown of them for answers, for anything.
"We could be together," she echoes faintly, to herself. Trying the words out. "You an' me, travelin' the world. Only...by airplane."
"Yeah," he says, "Or zeppelins. Or sometimes by auto, I've always liked automobiles, had one of myself back in the seventies, did you know?" The eagerness that is so barefaced in his voice makes her almost smile. "But it'd be us, is the important thing. The Doctor and Rose."
Her fingernail slides along the plastic edging of his ID card, where in bold letters it gives him the plainest name in the world. "The Doctor," she tries, tasting the words as she looks at him, as she wonders.
When she wraps her arms around his waist, her legs tangled with his and her cheek pillowed on his chest, she allows herself the slightest chance to believe.
But she doesn't say his name again.
- - -
There is a constellation he always seems to be looking for, late at night when the clouds are thin. "Kasterborous," he answers, when she asks him which one, and she doesn't understand why he laughs so bitterly when she suggests a stronger telescope.
- - -
She gets him a job at Torchwood, as a scientific advisor, and something about that makes his eyes twinkle when she first gives him the badge, till he realizes that she outranks him. Then the smile falls off his face and he only looks thoughtful, retreating into his laboratory and sneaking her glances through the blurry glass that separates it from her office.
Tense, and tenuous, and altogether unprecedented, this added facet of their relationship. He calls her 'Ma'am' in the most saradonic tone he can muster and she spends days upon days wondering just how much of Donna is still in this man.
"You lot," he snorts, "are tragically behind. Like, tragically. Technology is barely enough to send a mote of dust across the way, let alone a fully-formed specimen across dimensions of time and space. You flippin' wish, let me tell you--"
"Oh, shut it," she interrupts, annoyed and a bit freaked out at the way his accent so deftly switches back and forth. "We can't all be Time Lords," she adds frostily, and gives him a pointed look. He goes silent and she feels wretched.
Later that day, she shows him the prototype for the dimensional cannons, and though he deduces it virtually useless, he does look terribly impressed. And heartened.
She can't say she got the better end of the deal, here. But she knows what it's like to be alone in a foreign place, to be the only one yearning for a past that is utterly out of reach. All he has ever known as home is a planet that's gone, a TARDIS that's never coming back, and her own room, the shady corners of her heart and the worn paths of the streets outside this office.
It is not in her to refuse this face anything, and so she melts, just a little. Lets him find his home in her once more.
- - -
In many ways, he's the same as she's always dreamt, and that's the scariest thing, how easily she remembers.
He touches everything, his hands flicking over every surface available, eyes searching, mind whirring. He has a pair of specs, wire-rimmed and not the big black frames he had before, but he still looks natty in them and he still takes them out when he probably doesn't strictly need them. He relishes certain words and makes faces at others, delighting in the silliest coincidences or occurences but going dark as a stormcloud at the drop of a hat. He is mercurial, like a storm, and for now at least, she is relearning how to be the calm that keeps him from breaking free, raining fury and pain on Torchwood's enemies, rewarding force with force even when she would give mercy.
In other ways, though, he's so different than she would expect, and she watches him with interest, thinking of the two years she missed and what nightmares must lurk in his mind to make him go so quiet when he hears drums. He has dreams about girls and mirrors and stone angels that steal the TARDIS away, and when one night an old rerun of Titanic comes on, he leaves the room and watches the sky for a very long time.
He also eats like someone possessed. She's almost glad to see it, the way he digs into the supper she's prepared of corned beef sandwiches and milk. Her mum is always with Tony now, muttering in low tones with Pete, giving her alone time, and here he is, this skinny twig of a man who's ripping through bread and meat like he hasn't eaten a proper meal in centuries. Maybe he hasn't.
He licks his fingers, then, widening his eyes, he licks his whole hand, laving each line crisscrossing his palm.
She has to turn away to hide her laugh, and she's almost surprised to find it's not difficult anymore, this laughing business. Doesn't feel like the end of anything, doesn't feel like quirking her lips would somehow be the punctuation mark to a very long sentence about her past and all she shared with the Doctor.
Because really, isn't that entire story still here? Locked away in the mind of this man, waiting to unfold. There's a future in the way he captures her face in the reflection of his gaze, the gears in his mind working as he inspects the toaster, wriggles under the sink and unearths loose parts.
"Getting together a sonic screwdriver," he says thoughtfully when she asks what he's doing. "Less sonic, more screwdriver. But still--it'll be good to have something to get us out of jams."
"And what about that big honkin' brain of yours?" she asks dryly, without even thinking of it. "Isn't that supposed to be the thing that does the heavy lifting?"
His imperious sniff is so mind-blowingly similar to the way he used to tilt his chin at her, peering over his specs to say something in that lofty manner of his. She turns around again, hides another smile.
She's almost afraid of how easy it could be, slipping into old habits, forgetting new truths. Her dreams are still rife with bazoolium and cats in wimples and the silhouette of a wolf baying at the moon. But somewhere in the mix, there's a godawful blue suit and sun-warmed days in the sitting room watching a botched-up version of EastEnders, and it's not a bad life, this thing she's building with him.
Not fantastic, not quite yet. But. Not bad, and that's something.
- - -
Small victories mark the path he is taking towards the center of her heart, burrowing a place among all the debris so carefully that she savors each moment for all its significance.
The clasp of his hand in hers. The way he looks over his shoulder every five minutes just to make sure she's there. The moments in her kitchen, poring over the police blotter and debating which bits are alien and which ones aren't. The entire periods when neither of them stare into the sky.
The time he smiles at her and she smiles back, and they're both standing there smiling like loons, and she doesn't cry, not even a little.
Small victories, but the biggest victory of all is the day she stops even keeping track.
- - -
Their first real night together, it's as if she's a teenager again, limbs askew in the back of Jimmy Stone's convertible and her heart beating with the knowledge that tonight, everything changes.
The moon streams in through the curtains, makes his skin glow like fireflies in the sky, pinpoints of light at his cheekbones, his forehead, his chin, the gleaming arch of his neck. She moves her hand over the silkiness at his nape, the hair of which she is so fond. Her fingers tangle in the thick strands and she leans her face closer, lets the tip of her nose brush his own.
"Tell me about Donna," she whispers. "What d'you think is happening with one and a half Time Lords flitting about the place?"
His eyes open slowly, and she runs her lips across the winged edge of one eyebrow. "Not a happy ending," he says, his voice ragged. "A human with all that Time Lord consciousness running through her mind? It's alright for me, I might as well have been Loomed, if it weren't for the one heart and the lack of a respiratory bypass and possibly, I think, some differences in sexual processes. My brain was made to fit around all those possibilities and outcomes and planets and names. But Donna..."
She thinks about the time the TARDIS nestled in her veins, gold bleeding from her pores. She thinks she knows how it is to be human, skin stretched tight around the vast reaches of all of reality. "Will he be alone?" she asks, and her voice is thin. His fingers grasp her wrists and he lays a kiss on her pulse.
"With two hearts and a spaceship full of memories of all the old times and laughs and the brilliant things he's done with the help of so many brilliant people?" he asks, eyes illuminated. "He'll never be alone."
She doesn't fail to notice that he doesn't strictly answer her question, but the wall between worlds is somehow more solid with his presence here, and she knows that nothing she asks further will make anything better. She closes her eyes and says a prayer instead, gives benediction to the phantom in her heart with a swinging coat and a voice of shadows, smoke, and apple-scented breezes.
"Now," she whispers, opens her eyes, and bravery seizes hold of her, runs through her body like a river across rocks. "Let's talk some more about these differences in sexual processes."
There is no more speaking after that, only the opening of doors that were once firmly shut, and a feeling of coming home.
- - -
"Doctor," she calls, and pokes the suspicious-looking bundle on the ground. "You should probably look at this."
He looks over to her in surprise, wanders over with a jaunty smile on his face. "You called me Doctor," he says, delighted.
She pokes the bundle again, watches as something writhes. "So I did," she says. "But no really, just take a look--"
"You called me Doctor," he repeats, awe in his eyes. "On your very own. First time since we've got here that I can be sure you're talking to me and not some bloke called 'you' or 'him over there' or 'that guy with the nice hair.'"
"Doctor, please--"
"Oh, I see what you mean, that's, erm, that's not just a pile of junk is it, that's a proper alien, and--oh, erm, well, okay, no, this is not good at all--"
His hand grabs hers. "Rose?" he says and there is a wild joy in his eyes.
She looks at him, and the years don't fall away. Instead, they accelerate, until all she can see is everything laid out in front of them, a world of their own making, possibility upon possibility. "Yeah?" she asks, and even though she already knows what he's going to say, it matters that she hears him say it.
"Run."
And so they do.
finis
author: biggrstaffbunch
rating: pg-13
pairing(s): Doctor/Rose
spoilers/warnings: Journey's End!
summary: This is the both of them, then, left to take what Fate has seen fit to spin as its final solution. Rose Tyler learns to live in a world where crossing dimensions is not a question of possibility, but of worth. Left to build a new life, she struggles to accept what has come to pass, and what will eventually be.
a/n: for mylittlepwny because she is my partner in all things SQUEE and because just...bb, spasmflutterisded! enjoy!
- - -
She probably should have seen it coming in that one alternate reality where she met all thirteen of his regenerations and the one with ginger hair wouldn't look her in the eye.
Foresight has always been a bit of trouble for her, though. Especially when it comes to him.
- - -
Watching Mickey leave is the beginning of where her happy endings all go downhill.
Her first farewell on this journey, an eerie echo of that last time so long ago. He squeezes her hand, hugs her mum, and walks away. She tries not to feel unsettled at the way he looks at her before he goes, like he'll never see her again. Like this separation is as final as the last one felt.
The Doctor looks after him with a troubled gaze. When he turns to her with those dark, foreboding eyes, she knows that something else is coming.
They land on Bad Wolf Bay (another memory of another goodbye) and he follows her out, his gait slow and awkward, lines carved around his mouth.
Donna's eyes are all soft and knowing, and Rose is gripped with a slow, certain fear.
"We saved the universe," he starts, "but at a cost."
This is her punishment for crossing universes and thinking that life could ever be the same as it once was.
She bites her lip and listens as he rips her world apart, one more time.
- - -
Two Doctors in a single reality equals two Doctors too many, and the one in the brown suit gives her the one in the blue. With a rueful smile and a few well-placed explanations, he maps her future and becomes a god. Turns a stranger into a lover and turns a girl into a jailor. Watch over him, his eyes plead. Make him better.
She stands there as he tells her that he is letting her go forever, and though she argues, he begs her with each counter-argument to accept what he cannot give. She puts them both through a trial by fire over words she's never needed, and knows with a twisted certainty that he is just waiting for her to smile, to look happy, to show him that she will continue to live a fantastic life, with this small part of him by her side.
Sick with sorrow, with despair, with a sense of overwhelming loss, she kisses the man in blue and thinks of the man in brown.
When she opens her eyes, the TARDIS is fading from view and she is left with a mouth full of all the things he didn't say.
- - -
"I love you," she whispers to the wind, and the words get swept away with the receding surf, the waves crashing over each breath, the sand sifting through each syllable. She talks to the breeze, to the shimmering horizon line where ocean meets sky, to a quiet beach of faded footprints and broken shells. She talks to ghosts.
Pressing her fingers to her face, she feels the sentence take shape.
"I love you," she repeats, only this time her voice is even softer, wavering like sunlight behind clouds. "I love you, I love you, I love you."
With her eyes blurred with warm tears and her hair lifting like a golden shroud around her face, it's as if she is standing at the edge of the world, staring out into depths unfathomable. She wears her leather jacket, her own armor that is so stylishly cut, so well-worn and well-loved. Her hands still shake from a trip across dimensions, across timelines realized and erased, people and possibilities that are tucked now in the farthest, blackest reaches of her brain.
There is a sense now of dizziness in her every blink, colors swimming under her lashes as she struggles to reorient herself to a world that is finally forever hers. Everything she left unsaid still trembles in the lush curve of her mouth, hanging in the purgatory of the space between her teeth, and she licks the dry corners of her lips, closes her eyes, says what she never could, not the first time nor the second, the last:
"Goodbye."
Long arms wind around her waist, pulling her close. Her hands pluck restlessly at blue cloth, smoothing over blue veins, hooking fingers through fingers and feeling the rise of knuckles under her palm. She leans back and there is a chest and a neck and a chin cradling her head. A strong, tall body stooped around her own, muscles shifting against her back, unsteady breath stirring the hair at her temple.
As the water gushes around their feet, soaking through her trainers and staining the red of his own a deep crimson, she sighs and listens to the loneliness of one heart beating with hers instead of two.
"Life is imperfect, Rose," he tells her. "For everything you get, something gets taken away. There are no gifts, not really."
His skin, his stubble, his every feature is achingly familiar and yet so, so alien. She traces the edge of his jaw with her gaze, watches the way his fringe falls across his forehead. There is an emptiness to his eyes that speaks of his own journey through the dark. He is different, she knows, than his memories say he should be. He knows what's out there, what's up there, and he's got no way of moving across planets, no way of discovering new pasts and old futures, not now. A grounded nomad with a traveling heart, tethered by a love for her that's steeped in his cells, dangling on the tip of his tongue in a way she still cannot quite accept.
This is the both of them, then, left to take what Fate has seen fit to spin as its final solution.
"No," she agrees faintly, settling back in the crook of his neck, feeling the warmth of his throat move against her. "No, there are no gifts."
They watch the sun set on a new day, and neither of them move until the stars begin to scatter.
- - -
The blue suit, she says firmly, must go.
It is the first thing she says to him, in fact, on the car-ride home. Mum in front, chattering away to Pete, and a Mickey-shaped hole in her heart and in the seat behind her. And him, this man with brown hair and brown eyes and a smile that teeters on the wrong side of manic. He sits next to her with his hand over hers, and he lets the engine hum in between all the failed starts and stops of the speech she tries to make.
"You need new clothes," she finally says, and he ducks his head, scratches his hair. Agrees.
Mum takes him shopping later that day, and she tags along because he won't go if she doesn't. He comes out of the dressing room wearing his new uniform, black trousers and black t-shirt and black, close-fitting leather jacket. He wears boots and his hair falls rakishly over his eyes.
A bit of regeneration regression, he informs her solemnly.
Not regressed enough, she thinks, remembering blue eyes and big ears. It hurts to look at him.
She wonders if that will ever change.
- - -
His identity in this universe is all up to her, and so she registers him under the alias of John Smith. (This is the first decision in a life that is shaping up to be one decision after another, pulling pieces and parcels from the universe she used to know into this new London, this home that is hers for good, dimension cannons be damned.)
He does not fight the new ID, nor the new clothes that she dumps unceremoniously on his guest-bed in Pete Tyler's looming mansion. He does not fight anything, not even her brash manner, and instead, he sits. Watches her.
She finds she cannot yet call him the Doctor, not even in her own head, let alone out loud.
"You thought things would end differently," he says softly, breaking the quiet of her harsh breathing, left in the wake of her short, curt instructions. His legs are crossed at the ankles, his recline infinitely casual. He does not belong in so many ways she can hardly begin to count.
"Well," she answers lightly. "I didn't think things would end like this, no. I mean, I hopped across about, oh, fifty-seven versions of reality just to see his stupid face. Sorry if I didn't wager on a long-lost an' chopped-off limb wiggling into a full-grown version of his gob and Donna Noble's attitude."
"Oi," he says, but without heat. "'S not a bad attitude to have."
She smiles, half-heartedly. "Yeah, well. Still." Her hands stray to the clothes on the bed. "As much as I want to believe that--" She stops and shakes her head. "Just, you can look like him, and think like him, and have all his memories, but a person is more than what their memories say they are. I should know. Otherwise I'd still be a shopgirl with bad taste and spidery-lookin' eyes."
His smile says, I know you, Rose Tyler. Who you were, and who you are. Who you could be.
She shivers and looks away from the strange points of light in his eyes, the way he looks at her with such hunger, such finely-drawn restraint.
"In the end," she says, her voice getting lost in the shadows slanting in through the window, "You don't have a TARDIS and I don't have a clue. I'm blundering through this life half-blind, and you're all dressed up with nowhere to go--all of time behind your eyes and no way to go anywhere but the next second, the next minute, the next hour closer to the day you'll eventually die. We--" she stumbles over her words. "We're a pair, aren't we?"
Her chest constricts so tightly it feels as if it might break under the crashing force of her anger, her betrayal. "How could he do it?" she asks, sitting on the bed next to him, feeling out of sync with the seconds ticking by. "How could he leave us behind?"
He reaches for her hand, and his thumb finds the curve of the finger she broke when she was sixteen. "Everytime I close my eyes, I see your face," he answers, voice raw and reedy in a way that makes her eyes flutter shut.
There is silence for a moment and he begins again, building speed and volume until the cadence of his speech is so frenzied that he is almost tripping over his own tongue. "He thought about you constantly, Rose. Missed you. Loved you. And I--my head is full of all that. I can't breathe around it, all these thoughts and images and--look, I'll be John Smith if it helps you keep us straight, but Rose--for all that it matters, I'm him in each and every way he always wanted to be, for you. He didn't leave us behind, he'll never leave us behind, not so long as all I can think about is the way he cared for you. When all I can feel is how much I care for you, like I'm gonna explode if I don't just--"
He tugs her hand and brings her close, skims the delicate skin of her eyelids with his lips. "You and I," he says, "we could be together, really have a chance in this mad old world, if you let us. If you...wanted."
Her eyes open slowly, flying to his and searching the bittersweet brown of them for answers, for anything.
"We could be together," she echoes faintly, to herself. Trying the words out. "You an' me, travelin' the world. Only...by airplane."
"Yeah," he says, "Or zeppelins. Or sometimes by auto, I've always liked automobiles, had one of myself back in the seventies, did you know?" The eagerness that is so barefaced in his voice makes her almost smile. "But it'd be us, is the important thing. The Doctor and Rose."
Her fingernail slides along the plastic edging of his ID card, where in bold letters it gives him the plainest name in the world. "The Doctor," she tries, tasting the words as she looks at him, as she wonders.
When she wraps her arms around his waist, her legs tangled with his and her cheek pillowed on his chest, she allows herself the slightest chance to believe.
But she doesn't say his name again.
- - -
There is a constellation he always seems to be looking for, late at night when the clouds are thin. "Kasterborous," he answers, when she asks him which one, and she doesn't understand why he laughs so bitterly when she suggests a stronger telescope.
- - -
She gets him a job at Torchwood, as a scientific advisor, and something about that makes his eyes twinkle when she first gives him the badge, till he realizes that she outranks him. Then the smile falls off his face and he only looks thoughtful, retreating into his laboratory and sneaking her glances through the blurry glass that separates it from her office.
Tense, and tenuous, and altogether unprecedented, this added facet of their relationship. He calls her 'Ma'am' in the most saradonic tone he can muster and she spends days upon days wondering just how much of Donna is still in this man.
"You lot," he snorts, "are tragically behind. Like, tragically. Technology is barely enough to send a mote of dust across the way, let alone a fully-formed specimen across dimensions of time and space. You flippin' wish, let me tell you--"
"Oh, shut it," she interrupts, annoyed and a bit freaked out at the way his accent so deftly switches back and forth. "We can't all be Time Lords," she adds frostily, and gives him a pointed look. He goes silent and she feels wretched.
Later that day, she shows him the prototype for the dimensional cannons, and though he deduces it virtually useless, he does look terribly impressed. And heartened.
She can't say she got the better end of the deal, here. But she knows what it's like to be alone in a foreign place, to be the only one yearning for a past that is utterly out of reach. All he has ever known as home is a planet that's gone, a TARDIS that's never coming back, and her own room, the shady corners of her heart and the worn paths of the streets outside this office.
It is not in her to refuse this face anything, and so she melts, just a little. Lets him find his home in her once more.
- - -
In many ways, he's the same as she's always dreamt, and that's the scariest thing, how easily she remembers.
He touches everything, his hands flicking over every surface available, eyes searching, mind whirring. He has a pair of specs, wire-rimmed and not the big black frames he had before, but he still looks natty in them and he still takes them out when he probably doesn't strictly need them. He relishes certain words and makes faces at others, delighting in the silliest coincidences or occurences but going dark as a stormcloud at the drop of a hat. He is mercurial, like a storm, and for now at least, she is relearning how to be the calm that keeps him from breaking free, raining fury and pain on Torchwood's enemies, rewarding force with force even when she would give mercy.
In other ways, though, he's so different than she would expect, and she watches him with interest, thinking of the two years she missed and what nightmares must lurk in his mind to make him go so quiet when he hears drums. He has dreams about girls and mirrors and stone angels that steal the TARDIS away, and when one night an old rerun of Titanic comes on, he leaves the room and watches the sky for a very long time.
He also eats like someone possessed. She's almost glad to see it, the way he digs into the supper she's prepared of corned beef sandwiches and milk. Her mum is always with Tony now, muttering in low tones with Pete, giving her alone time, and here he is, this skinny twig of a man who's ripping through bread and meat like he hasn't eaten a proper meal in centuries. Maybe he hasn't.
He licks his fingers, then, widening his eyes, he licks his whole hand, laving each line crisscrossing his palm.
She has to turn away to hide her laugh, and she's almost surprised to find it's not difficult anymore, this laughing business. Doesn't feel like the end of anything, doesn't feel like quirking her lips would somehow be the punctuation mark to a very long sentence about her past and all she shared with the Doctor.
Because really, isn't that entire story still here? Locked away in the mind of this man, waiting to unfold. There's a future in the way he captures her face in the reflection of his gaze, the gears in his mind working as he inspects the toaster, wriggles under the sink and unearths loose parts.
"Getting together a sonic screwdriver," he says thoughtfully when she asks what he's doing. "Less sonic, more screwdriver. But still--it'll be good to have something to get us out of jams."
"And what about that big honkin' brain of yours?" she asks dryly, without even thinking of it. "Isn't that supposed to be the thing that does the heavy lifting?"
His imperious sniff is so mind-blowingly similar to the way he used to tilt his chin at her, peering over his specs to say something in that lofty manner of his. She turns around again, hides another smile.
She's almost afraid of how easy it could be, slipping into old habits, forgetting new truths. Her dreams are still rife with bazoolium and cats in wimples and the silhouette of a wolf baying at the moon. But somewhere in the mix, there's a godawful blue suit and sun-warmed days in the sitting room watching a botched-up version of EastEnders, and it's not a bad life, this thing she's building with him.
Not fantastic, not quite yet. But. Not bad, and that's something.
- - -
Small victories mark the path he is taking towards the center of her heart, burrowing a place among all the debris so carefully that she savors each moment for all its significance.
The clasp of his hand in hers. The way he looks over his shoulder every five minutes just to make sure she's there. The moments in her kitchen, poring over the police blotter and debating which bits are alien and which ones aren't. The entire periods when neither of them stare into the sky.
The time he smiles at her and she smiles back, and they're both standing there smiling like loons, and she doesn't cry, not even a little.
Small victories, but the biggest victory of all is the day she stops even keeping track.
- - -
Their first real night together, it's as if she's a teenager again, limbs askew in the back of Jimmy Stone's convertible and her heart beating with the knowledge that tonight, everything changes.
The moon streams in through the curtains, makes his skin glow like fireflies in the sky, pinpoints of light at his cheekbones, his forehead, his chin, the gleaming arch of his neck. She moves her hand over the silkiness at his nape, the hair of which she is so fond. Her fingers tangle in the thick strands and she leans her face closer, lets the tip of her nose brush his own.
"Tell me about Donna," she whispers. "What d'you think is happening with one and a half Time Lords flitting about the place?"
His eyes open slowly, and she runs her lips across the winged edge of one eyebrow. "Not a happy ending," he says, his voice ragged. "A human with all that Time Lord consciousness running through her mind? It's alright for me, I might as well have been Loomed, if it weren't for the one heart and the lack of a respiratory bypass and possibly, I think, some differences in sexual processes. My brain was made to fit around all those possibilities and outcomes and planets and names. But Donna..."
She thinks about the time the TARDIS nestled in her veins, gold bleeding from her pores. She thinks she knows how it is to be human, skin stretched tight around the vast reaches of all of reality. "Will he be alone?" she asks, and her voice is thin. His fingers grasp her wrists and he lays a kiss on her pulse.
"With two hearts and a spaceship full of memories of all the old times and laughs and the brilliant things he's done with the help of so many brilliant people?" he asks, eyes illuminated. "He'll never be alone."
She doesn't fail to notice that he doesn't strictly answer her question, but the wall between worlds is somehow more solid with his presence here, and she knows that nothing she asks further will make anything better. She closes her eyes and says a prayer instead, gives benediction to the phantom in her heart with a swinging coat and a voice of shadows, smoke, and apple-scented breezes.
"Now," she whispers, opens her eyes, and bravery seizes hold of her, runs through her body like a river across rocks. "Let's talk some more about these differences in sexual processes."
There is no more speaking after that, only the opening of doors that were once firmly shut, and a feeling of coming home.
- - -
"Doctor," she calls, and pokes the suspicious-looking bundle on the ground. "You should probably look at this."
He looks over to her in surprise, wanders over with a jaunty smile on his face. "You called me Doctor," he says, delighted.
She pokes the bundle again, watches as something writhes. "So I did," she says. "But no really, just take a look--"
"You called me Doctor," he repeats, awe in his eyes. "On your very own. First time since we've got here that I can be sure you're talking to me and not some bloke called 'you' or 'him over there' or 'that guy with the nice hair.'"
"Doctor, please--"
"Oh, I see what you mean, that's, erm, that's not just a pile of junk is it, that's a proper alien, and--oh, erm, well, okay, no, this is not good at all--"
His hand grabs hers. "Rose?" he says and there is a wild joy in his eyes.
She looks at him, and the years don't fall away. Instead, they accelerate, until all she can see is everything laid out in front of them, a world of their own making, possibility upon possibility. "Yeah?" she asks, and even though she already knows what he's going to say, it matters that she hears him say it.
"Run."
And so they do.
finis