Improvise (1/1)
Title - Improvise (1/1)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
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.
Summary - How do you explain the impossible to your mum?
Author's Notes - For twenty buck during the last Support Stacie auction, you won a fic all your own. This is
azriona's. She wanted the fic where Rose tells Jackie about her unusually long lifespan.
Thank you to jlrpuck, who puts up with so much. And thank you to Kristin, who adores ANGST.
In the first flush of the realization that the TARDIS had linked her and the Doctor, would keep them together through an indefinitely long period of time, Rose was giddy. She lay awake in the darkness of her bedroom, staring at the ceiling, and thought of the years ahead of her, with him and their kids and their grandkids and their great-grandkids and their great-great-grandkids… Who knew? Maybe even more kids. If she wasn’t going to get older, why not? Rose’s lips curved into a smile, measuring the possibilities, feeling far too excited to sleep. It was daunting, of course, shifting one’s expectations this radically. But it hadn’t occurred to her how much she had regretted, in the back of her mind, everything about her children and her Doctor that she was going to miss once she died, how desperately she had wanted to be there for every moment, and now, without her husband or her son having to do anything drastic or inappropriate, she had somehow been gifted all this time.
And then, abruptly, she thought of the people who hadn’t been given a gift like this, of all the people she loved who she was going to end up, inevitably, living without most of her life.
She thought of her mother.
The darkness suddenly seemed harsh and close as it pressed in around her. She rolled to her side. What was she going to tell her mother?
The bedroom door opened and closed. She did not move, feeling the weight of the Doctor as he dropped inelegantly into the bed next to her. She could have snuggled against him, but she didn’t want him to think she was awake. She did not want to talk to him, at just that moment. Not about what had happened, and she knew that would be the topic of conversation. He was still as excited about it as she was.
She felt him roll toward her, pressing himself against her back with a happy little sigh, wriggling a bit so that they fit together comfortably, and her heart ached with love for him. She got to spend the rest of his life with him. How lucky was she? She could have cried, she thought.
After a second, the Doctor snored in her ear, and she found herself giggling instead of crying. She put her hand to her mouth, trying to stifle her giggles so she wouldn’t wake him, but he woke anyway, cutting off his snoring with a snort that made her laugh even louder.
“What?” he whined.
She turned to face him, still laughing. “You were snoring.”
“I wasn’t!” he protested.
“You were.”
“But I don’t snore,” he reminded her.
“Yes,” she corrected him, trying to sound solemn, “you really do.”
“When did I start that?” he asked, sounding distressed.
She nuzzled against his neck contentedly. “I love you,” she mumbled, against his skin.
He didn’t reply, but held her more tightly and brushed a kiss over her hair.
“You’re not trying to seduce me,” she pointed out.
“No,” he agreed. “Not yet.”
“I hope you’re not growing tired of me. You’re stuck with me for another few hundred years.” She tried to say it lightly. She feared she didn’t succeed.
He nudged her, until he could tip her face up to look down at her. The room was very dim;she doubted he could see much at all. “Do you really think that’s a possibility? My growing tired of you?”
“I don’t know.” She buried her head back against his chest. “Who knows anything about possibilities? Who thought it would be possible I would spend the rest of your life with you?”
He was silent for a long time, before venturing, “Rose, if you’re not happy about this, we could…”
“We could what? It was my heart’s desire, and the TARDIS gave it to me, and now I’m going to decide I don’t want it?”
“It was your heart’s desire during a terrible time, when you were still very young-”
“How would I undo it?”
He hesitated. “We’d figure it out.”
It was her turn to be silent. “I don’t…I don’t think I want to undo it. My emotions feel like they’re on a roller coaster right now, I was really very happy about all this just a few minutes ago, but…what’s my mum going to say?”
The Doctor’s hand rubbed a soothing circle on her back. “I’m not the TARDIS. I’m not sure I can grant you another heart’s desire wish. If I could give your mother our life spans, I-”
“We can’t keep everyone we love with us all the time. I understand that. I just…I think I need some time, to process this, before we tell my mum.”
“Time, love, is something you and I suddenly have a great deal more of.”
And it flashed upon her again, how giddily happy she was about this, at the same time as being terribly confused. “Seduce me now,” she requested.
And he complied.
***
In the end, Rose could not decide what to tell her mother about the whole thing. The Doctor kept suggesting the truth would be fine, and Rose knew that the truth was really her only option, but this final admission of how irrevocably she had broken ties with the human being she had started out as seemed like a harsh blow to deliver to her mother. Her mother who had been so kind and understanding about all the alienness Rose had dragged into their lives.
What Rose did was procrastinate, in a way that made her feel very young, certainly not old enough to have children of her own who she was constantly admonishing not to procrastinate. She exacted promises from the rest of her family that she would be the one to tell Jackie, and then she put off telling her. When next they visited her, Rose didn’t say a word about the matter, telling herself she wanted one last visit with her mother before she broke the news.
They stopped off again just before Brem was going to go back to school. Athena was making noises about wanting to go off to university the following “year” in TARDIS time. Rose was feeling old and young all at once. It was not entirely pleasant. So she suggested a spa day.
And it was after the massage and facials, during the pedicure, whilst sipping iced teas, that Mum said, “I told myself, ‘She can afford the best hair care in the universe, can Rose. And the best plastic surgeons. And that’s why she looks so good.’” Mum turned her head to look at her. “But I’m wrong about that, aren’t I?”
Rose watched the woman kneading lotion into her feet and swallowed thickly. “We can’t talk about this here,” she said.
Which meant that, as soon as they were alone, her mother turned to her swiftly. “What’s he done to you?” she demanded.
“He hasn’t,” Rose answered, honestly. “He didn’t have anything to do with it. I did it myself.”
“What did you do?”
“I made a wish,” said Rose, and then laughed a little hysterically, because it was all so absurd. “Oh, God, I made a wish, years ago. I wished for us to be together always. And my wish got granted. It’s the only explanation we have for the fact that I can’t die.”
Mum went white. “How do you know you can’t die?”
“Because something happened and I…I should be dead. He didn’t have anything to do with it, Mum. He was as shocked as I was. It’s just the way things are. I can’t die.”
Her mother stared at her. “You can’t die?” she echoed, finally. “You’re just going to live forever?”
“Or as long as the Doctor. That’s Brem’s theory. Brem’s the one who remembered the wish in the first place-”
“What wish? Why do you keep talking about a wish?”
“When I ripped open the TARDIS, Mum, long ago, when I still had my first Doctor, that was the wish I made, that we would never be separated. It was a silly, impulsive wish. As the Doctor’s pointed out, I was still so young, just a girl, and I was so in love with him, and you think that way. It’s what I wished for, and I thought that…Well, I thought it couldn’t literally come true. How could it? The TARDIS brought me back to the Doctor, and I saved him, and we were together after that, and I thought I got my wish. I had no idea…I just had no idea this would happen. Neither did the Doctor. None of us realized…”
There was a very long moment of silence. Rose sat in the empty spa therapy room, picking at a thread on her terrycloth robe and waiting for her mother to speak. “Say something,” she begged, finally, meekly, looking up. “Anything.”
The corner of her mum’s mouth tipped up into a half-smile. “When you told me you were pregnant with Brem, all I could think of was the million and one reasons it was a bad idea for you to have an alien baby. I mean, an alien baby, Rose. What was I supposed to think? But what that came down to is what this comes down to: Are you happy?”
Rose looked away. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “There are times I’m ecstatic. When I realize that the Doctor will never have to be alone again, when I look at the kids and think how I’m going to be lucky enough to be there for them, for all these centuries to come…And then there are other times when I think…I’m Rose Tyler, and here I’m talking about the next few centuries, when I’ve spent the entirety of my life thinking I only had the next few decades. I spent the entirety of my married life preparing my husband for a time when I wouldn’t be there, and now that time’s never going to come, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to act. And eventually I’m going to lose you.” Rose’s voice broke, and she paused a second, taking a deep breath. “I’m going to lose you, I’m going to have so much time without I you, and I’m scared that I’ll…forget you.”
“I think your Doctor would tell you that’s not how it works.”
Rose, sniffling, nodded in half-hearted acknowledgment. “I know. It’s just…He thinks this is a happy ending. And it’s not really that I don’t agree, certainly most of the time I’m amazed how well things turned out, but sometimes I just…I wonder how I’m supposed to live the rest of my life. Because I’m not sure I understand who I am anymore.”
“Oh, love.” Her mother reached over and squeezed her hand. “Whatever you are, you are always my daughter. You will always be my daughter. You will always be the best thing I’ve ever done.”
And Rose, feeling abruptly the weight of all the years to come when she wouldn’t be able to anymore, crushed her mother in a tight hug.
***
Rose found the Doctor tinkering, days later, after they’d dropped Brem off at school, and she watched him for a second before moving into the room and sitting cross-legged on the floor opposite him. “So,” she said. “We’ve got all these centuries together.”
He looked at her and grinned. “Yup,” he said, popping the “p,” and turned back to his tinkering.
“I need you,” she said, shakily.
He focused on her, catching the earnestness in her tone. “For what?”
“To tell me it will be alright.”
He reached across, to tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear. “It will be. Rose Tyler. So much better than ‘alright.’”
“I don’t know what to do with all the time in front of me,” she admitted, desperately. “How does it not overwhelm you? What do I do with all this time?”
He smiled faintly, and said, “Improvise.”