Title - The Day After You Kiss Rose Tyler (1/1)
Author -
earlgreytea68 Rating - General
Characters - Ten, Rose, Jackie
Spoilers - None
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids. They're all mine.)
Summary - Sometimes you just need a cuppa with your mum.
Author's Notes - In response to
this meme,
cjk1701requested a day after their second kiss in "If You Were a Tree, What Kind of Tree Would You Be?" The original story can be found
here.
Thank you to
jlrpuckfor the beta. And spare a thought for her poor back!
The gorgeous icon was created by
swankkatfor me, commissioned by
jlrpuckfor my birthday.
What did you do the day after you kissed Rose Tyler?
Kissed her like you meant it, that is. No question in your mind that what you were doing was about to change everything, in the most terrifyingly unpredictable way, and that was okay with you because what you wanted was her, and all of the rest of it could disappear around you if you could just have her.
And the day after she, even more astonishingly, kissed you back. Quite determinedly kissed you back. A kiss that began in a quick and early twilight on an alien planet and ended in what could only be described as a slightly undignified make-out session on a captain’s chair that wasn’t quite roomy enough for such hijinks. And ended only because you didn’t quite know, well, what to do once you’d begun kissing Rose Tyler. How did you stop kissing Rose Tyler?
On the day after he’d kissed Rose Tyler, the Doctor still wasn’t sure he quite knew the answer to the question, just that he’d managed to make himself stop by babbling something about…something, and that had been the end of it, but now he was trying to figure out how one started after one had stopped, and whether one might be able to figure out how to stop again if one started again, and it was all most confusing, right up until the moment when Rose said, “Can we visit my mum?”
Apparently, the day after you kissed Rose Tyler, you went to visit her mother.
A visit to Jackie Tyler did not seem like the most romantic trip to him, and he had been thinking that maybe he owed her some kind of romantic trip, but he was powerless to resist any request she might make, even a visit to her mother. He complained, because he had to; he didn’t want her to know that he’d find himself practically living with her mother if she asked it of him.
“Not for long,” she said, while he walked around the console setting coordinates and pretending to sulk about this whole thing. “I promise. Maybe just enough time for me to have a cuppa with her. You could take the TARDIS to a bazaar somewhere, if you wanted, pick up some parts for her, yeah?”
He was never taking the TARDIS anywhere ever again without Rose in it, he thought, but did not say out loud. Instead he said, “Or I could pick up some parts on Earth.”
“You could do that, too.”
He materialized in the Powell Estates, and he and Rose walked outside of the TARDIS together and stood for a moment outside it and looked at each. What did you do when you parted ways with Rose Tyler after you’d begun kissing Rose Tyler? The Doctor hesitated, then kissed her cheek. “Well, then. I’ll be back soon. Shouldn’t take me long.” As if he had requested this particular trip.
Rose stood and watched him stride purposefully off, hands deep in the pockets of his enormous coat, Converses scuffling at pebbles as he walked with the trademark bounce in his step, that bounce that was there even when he was terrified, even when he was tired and didn’t want to admit. It had been there when the figure walking away from her had lacked the spiky hair and wore leather instead of silk ties. No matter what happened to him, something deep inside her Doctor drifted toward bounciness, and the fact that that part of him was still so insistent touched her heart in a way that she knew it only could if she was in love with him.
Rose turned and walked up the steps to the second level, knocked on her mother’s door before letting herself in and calling, “Hello? Mum?”
Her mother came barreling down the hallway and tackled her in a hug. “Oh, I thought I heard that daft machine!” she exclaimed. “Let me look at you. You still all in one piece?” Jackie tipped her head at her critically, as if trying to figure out what terrible alien ailments her daughter could have picked up while she’d been away.
“Still all in one piece. How long’s it been?”
“Not very. Only a couple of weeks. Didn’t expect you back so soon. Where’s himself?”
Jackie asked the question almost hopefully, as if maybe the reason for an unprecedentedly short time away, for her showing up without her other half, meant that maybe this new Doctor had been unbearable to her, that she needed a break from him.
“He’s buying parts,” Rose answered. “I thought we might have a cuppa. While he’s fiddling around doing, you know, boy things.”
“It isn’t ‘boy things,’” remarked Jackie, with a sniff of disapproval. “It’s alien things.”
Rose sighed and followed her mother into the kitchen. “I suppose,” she said, and sat down at the kitchen table while her mother filled the kettle with water. The problem was that he seemed very much like a boy to her at the moment. A man. He certainly snogged like a man.
Rose stared at the table and listened to the sound of the water starting to boil in the kettle and thought of the way the Doctor snogged, the way his tongue was just a shade cooler than she would have expected, as it slid against her, the way he kissed as if he’d kissed before but had never had any clue that it was really supposed to be like this.
Her mother set the cup of tea down in front of her, interrupting her reverie. “You’re awfully quiet,” she said, sitting down opposite her.
“So’re you,” Rose pointed out.
“I’ve been asking you questions for the past five minutes, and you haven’t heard a single one of them.”
Rose looked alarmed. “Have you really?”
Jackie smiled knowingly. “No. But I could have been. You were a million miles away.”
Which is where she’d been when he’d kissed her for the first time. A million miles away, under a googly- eyed fygtymut tree. “He kissed me,” she said, abruptly.
“You didn’t think he was going to?” her mother asked, sipping her tea and looking not the least bit surprised.
Rose was surprised that she wasn’t surprised. “Well, he’s never kissed me before.”
That succeeded in surprising her mother, she saw. “He hasn’t?”
Rose shook her head.
“Really?” Jackie looked incredulous. “Then what is it the two of you spend all your time doin’ in that box of his, if it isn’t shagging?”
Rose was displeased. “Mum. Really. It isn’t like that. It’s never been like that.”
“I don’t see why not,” muttered Jackie. “He was always a looker.”
“He told me you flirted with him when you first met him, and I didn’t believe him! I told him it was his bloody ego! But he was right, wasn’t he?”
“Rose, any female with half a brain cell flirts with a bloke who looks the way he did. The way he does. Don’t tell me you don’t have women through time and space fluttering their eyelashes at him.”
“We do,” Rose admitted, tearing a napkin on the table to tiny shreds.
“And how many does he kiss?” her mother asked her.
“Me,” Rose said. “Just me.”
“Really?”
Rose thought of the way the Doctor kissed. Rose thought of the way the Doctor looked at her. Rose thought of the way the Doctor had always looked at her. Bloody hell, why hadn’t she realized this long ago. “Yes,” she said, as it all dawned on her. “Yes. Just me. Just…” It was as if, all of a sudden, she had tripped and fallen and the ground had turned out to be miles and miles below her. The rushing speed of everything swept over her. “Oh, God, what am I going to do?” she asked, suddenly terrified.
“About what, sweetheart?” her mother asked, tenderly.
“I think I love him. I think I…”
“Oh, Rose.” Her mother reached over the table, took her hand and squeezed it. “I know you do.”
“I mean, not like…I think I’m in love with him. Like, really, honestly, in love with him.”
“Rose. There is no power in the universe that seems able to keep you away from his side. What did you think this was?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t think it was…What am I going to do?”
“Now that you’ve gone and fallen in love with an alien? Sorry, luv, I’ve no advice to offer on that.” Jackie sat back, picked up her cup of tea.
“Oh, it isn’t that.” Rose waved her hand impatiently, dismissing that idea. “It’s just-Oh, of course I’m in love with him. He’s the most amazing thing in the universe. And I’m…a shop girl, Mum.”
“You’re not that, Rose,” Jackie said, firmly. “You never were. And if I made you think that’s what you were…I’m sorry. You’re not a shop girl. You’re Rose Tyler. And that’s something incredibly special. And that might be something I had to have the Doctor remind me of.”
Rose managed a smile and took a calming sip of her tea. “He’s going to break my heart, isn’t he?”
Jackie sighed. “Sweetheart, I’ll be honest with you. Yes. He probably will. But it isn’t going to be because he’s not in love with you right back.”
“Do you think he really is in love with me?”
“How can the two of you be so daft about this? He’s so in love with you he can barely tell up from down when you smile at him. It’s bloody sickening,” she grumbled into her tea.
“I’ve got to tell Mickey,” Rose realized.
“Oh, Rose, Mickey knows. Apparently everyone knew but the two of you.”
********
He was back on the TARDIS when Rose finished her tea, tinkering. “You could have come up to my mum’s,” Rose told him, as she entered.
He shrugged and scratched the back of his neck. “I had these parts to install, y’see.”
“Of course you did.” She walked over to him solemnly and said, “Kiss me again.”
And he did. Because the day after you kissed Rose Tyler, and every day after that, you just had to kiss her more and more.