A Song He'd Heard Before (1/1)
Title - A Song He'd Heard Before (1/1)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - Ten, Rose, OCs
Spoilers - Through S2
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 - Bad Wolf, from the Doctor's point of view.
Author's Notes - I owed many people many incentive ficlets from the Support Stacie auction months ago. Here is the first of them, won by tzikeh , who was also the winner of the main Support Stacie fic. For her prompt, she pointed me to her comments on my fic request post, one of which was Rose's Bad Wolf scene in "College" from the Doctor's point of view.
Because it's only a brief ficlet, this is unbeta'd.
The icon was created by swankkat, commissioned by jlrpuck for my birthday.
Maybe the sonic screwdriver was broken.
It was the only thing he could think, because clearly Rose was not dead, and the fact that the sonic was not able to pick up a single life sign from her meant only that the bloody thing had chosen the worst possible moment to break.
He tossed it away in disgust. “Rose. Darling. Dammit, open your eyes.” He reached out and shook her, and surely she would sit up and slap him across the face for that, but she did nothing. Nothing. Everything was broken, everything was…
He caught his hands up in his hair, absently clutching it into fistfuls. He thought he might be crying, and that was ridiculous, because there were things he could try, of course there were things, there had to be, he could do anything, and he could do something here, something, something, do something, he shouted at himself.
He put his head on Rose’s chest. Her heart did not beat in his ear. Her breasts did not rise and fall with breath. He could not comprehend this. He had never gotten around to showing her the setting of the seven suns on U. He had been planning that.
“Dad,” said Brem, a hand on his shoulder.
The Doctor took a deep breath. He wished Brem would leave him alone. He did not want to be comforted.
“Dad,” Brem said again.
The Doctor tried to explain to him, tried to explain that he had to go away and stop comforting him because this was not how it was going to end, it was not, so there was nothing to comfort him for, it was silly to be comforting him. “Not like this,” he mumbled. “It wasn’t supposed to end like this. Now. There was supposed to be…I was supposed to be…I was supposed to be ready, I was supposed to be-“
Suddenly, at that moment, it burst on him how very not ready he was, how very much he did need comforting. He sat up, abruptly, reaching for Brem, clutching him as closely as he could. He felt Brem’s consciousness blanket over him, and he grabbed at it, desperate for something, something, because an inky cavern seemed to be spreading through him, and it needed to be stopped, warmed, brightened.
“We’ll-“ He heard Brem say, and stop, and the Doctor knew it was because he couldn’t think of the end of the sentence. “We’ll-“
It happened then, a light so bright, bursting along the inside of his closed eyelids, and he flinched with the brightness of it, sat back in confusion, as it pounded through his head. The TARDIS was reverberating in him, like a string that had just been plucked, and when the song burst forth, he heard Brem say, “Dad,” in confusion, but he had heard that song before, he had heard it in a satellite, centuries in the future and thousands of miles away, in a different body. It had come once before and astonished him with hope and love and joy, and he found himself wiping at tears he hadn’t realized he was crying, staring at the gold as it whipped through Rose’s body, and it wasn’t killing her, not the way it was before, it was-
She sat up abruptly, gasping for breath, and looked at him. For a moment they stared at each other, and the words flitted across his consciousness, scattered through time and space. Bad Wolf.
“Hello,” she said.
He flung himself to her with such force that he knocked her over, kissing her harder than he’d ever kissed her before in his life, and he thought that he had kissed her hard before, he really had. She made a muffled exclamation into his mouth, startled to find herself sprawled underneath him on the grass at Harvard, while he snogged her senseless in a thoroughly inappropriate fashion. She pushed him away. “What are you-“
He ignored her, capturing her mouth again, feeling now down the muscles of her arms, the skin of her abdomen, warm under the fabric of her shirt, just checking, just checking…
She kissed him back for a second, sensing, probably, that he needed the soothing, and then pushed him away again. “Doctor,” she said, “what-“
“Never do that to me again. Never,” he commanded her, fiercely, and suddenly found himself dissolved into sobs, face buried in the curve of her neck. It was ridiculous, because she was there now, and he didn’t quite understand it, but he was either having the world’s most vivid hallucination or she was there, and he couldn’t stop crying, the sobs coming so quickly that was shuddering with them.
“Shhhh,” she said, sounding totally bewildered, holding him to her in comfort. “Shhhhhhh.”
“How do you feel, Mum?” he heard Brem ask, and he had never been so grateful to have Brem around, to ask important questions while he was busy sobbing manically for no very good reason.
“My head is killing me,” she murmured. “What’s wrong with him? What just happened?”
“I don’t know,” Brem answered. His voice sounded shaky but also capable. The Doctor realized suddenly that Brem was doing what he always did, pulling the pieces together while his father had one of his breakdowns.
He forced himself to catch his breath and sit up. “Alright,” he said, briskly, rubbing at his face and trying to pretend that he hadn’t just been a complete wreck. “We need to get you back to the TARDIS,” he continued, to Rose. “Tell me about your head, how bad is it?”
She stared at him. “Are you okay?” she asked him, quizzically.
His chest ached with love. He suddenly thought he might start crying again. “I am so very okay, Rose. Let’s worry about you for a tick, hmm?”
“You don’t seem okay,” she told him, dubiously. “You seem-“ She winced suddenly, eyes closing. “Oh, my head.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Fortuna asked, fearfully, and he realized all the kids were clustered near them. “Is she going to…? Again?”
“No.” The Doctor was busy zapping her with the sonic screwdriver that Brem handed him, reading her. “No. It’s almost as if she regenerated. It’s a byproduct. It’s a slight case of regeneration sickness but really her readings are…are…gorgeous. Rose.” He leaned over her. “Rose, you did such a beautiful job.”
“Did I? With what? Can you do something for my head? Can you…?” She went limp suddenly, silent.
“Mum!” Fortuna shrieked at her.
“It’s fine,” the Doctor assured her. “Better even. She’ll sleep it off and be right as rain. She…” He buried his face in his hands, abruptly in favor of being overcome again. “Bloody hell,” he mumbled.
He felt Brem extract the sonic from his hands and zap it for himself, as if not trusting his father’s readings at the moment. “He’s right,” Brem said, sounding shocked. “She’s…she’s perfect. Except for an excess of energy.”
The Doctor dropped his hands. “Welllll, she needed it, didn’t she?” And then he laughed, feeling giddy, and leaned over and kissed Rose’s cheek. He laid his head briefly on her chest. Her heart beat in his ear, her breasts rose and fell with breath. He closed his eyes and breathed with her. Inhale, exhale. Then he sat up.
“We’ll get her back to the TARDIS and she’ll sleep it off.” He stood, pulling her carefully into his arms. Her head lolled against his shoulder.
“But what just happened?” asked Athena, wide-eyed. “I don’t understand what just happened.”
“I think,” he told her, “the technical term is ‘miracle.’”