Chaos Theory in Vortex Orbits in Relative Dimensions in Time and Space (11/27)
Title - Chaos Theory in Vortex Orbits in Relative Dimensions in Time and Space (11/27)
Author --
earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
Characters -- Ten, Rose, OCs
Spoilers: Through the end of 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 Brem and Athena. They're all mine.)
Summary - And then there came a day when Rose said she was having a baby. Hijinks ensue from there.
Author’s Notes - The icon was created by
punkinart , commissioned by
aibhinn , who graciously offered it to me for my use.
jlrpuck is wise in many ways. She is also one of the nicest people I know. Oh, she's also a great beta. Also thanks to Kristin-who-won't-get-an-LJ, who brainstormed this fic with me endlessly, and
bouncy_castle79 , who gave it the first major outside-eyes read-through.
Ch.1 - Ch. 2 - Ch. 3 - Ch. 4 - Ch. 5 - Ch. 6 - Ch. 7 - Ch. 8 - Ch. 9 - Ch. 10
Chapter Eleven
Rose felt better. Actually, once the Doctor said they could stay put, she found she didn’t really want to stay put. It wasn’t the travelling that bothered her. The travelling never had bothered her, and didn’t bother her now. And the Doctor, once past the initial shock of his revelation that Rose was behaving this way because she was the lonely one, went babbling on about humans being social creatures, drawn to communities, needing a support system, it taking a village to raise a child, et cetera. His solution was simple, and worked surprisingly well: They did repeat visits. Where once they never wasted a trip on the same time period of the same planet, now the Doctor indulged Rose’s desire to make friends and visit them. They went to see Muj and Kaj; they made friends in other places; they visited Jackie more often, closer together, to give Rose a chance to make contact with other people her age with children around Brem and Athena’s ages.
Brem got skilled at being vague about almost everything. He was stubborn and petulant about it at first but he stopped talking about alien species, stopped revealing that he could rattle off laws of physics as if they were nursery rhymes-the Doctor had taught them to him as if they were nursery rhymes, but that didn’t make it any better, thought Rose. He followed his mother’s lead, answering all questions about his father and their lifestyle as noncommittally as possible. He was a doctor, and they travelled a lot, to exotic places. It seemed to explain why Brem was so precocious, why the Doctor was so eccentric. And Brem had inherited his father’s talent for exuding charm even when he was trying to be belligerent, so that humans and aliens, left and right, merely found him adorable.
He had a habit of pushing his father’s buttons, which he did with an automatic ease that amused Rose. Brem could be gregarious with Athena, would ask Rose endless questions about everything until he drove her spare. He was less like that with the Doctor. He asked him questions, and, indeed, was genuinely interested in everything his father did. But he talked less around him, seemed a bit drawn in on himself, as if he suspected his father would command all of him and he needed to keep some for himself.
Rose rather loved it, the way Brem would calmly say, “You’re rambling,” when his father got off the topic of the question, as if Brem didn’t do that every time she asked him something he didn’t want to answer. “Have you brushed your teeth?” she would ask, and off Brem would go: “Dad says that enamel is the hardest substance in the body, you know. The hardest. Like, if we were all covered in enamel, it’d be a lot safer for us, you know. And the Hgirgoihwgogeiolfw-”Brem could always rattle off impossible alien names with far more ease than Rose; she wondered sometimes if he didn’t speak Gallifreyan that the TARDIS translated for her, and that the alien names were far easier in Gallifreyan-”that live on GHRWOUH-Dad says they always write the name of that planet in all caps, you know, because it’s respectful-they’re made entirely of enamel, all over, well, they don’t call it enamel, they call it something else, I can’t remember-” And Rose would eventually say, firmly, “Brem. Brush your teeth.”
But when his father answered a question that way, Brem sighed and rolled his eyes and pretended enormous annoyance. Brem did a lot of sighing and rolling his eyes at his father. “He learned that from you,” the Doctor told her, and Rose smiled.
And then Brem said, one day--watching his father thread what looked like a large needle with a tiny filament of wire, as they sat on the couch in the library and Rose sprawled on her stomach helping Athena comb the hair of a doll they’d picked up on the last planet (the doll’s hair grew, through some regenerative process that the Doctor had explained to Athena at great length on the way back to the TARDIS; Athena, the very opposite of Brem in those matters, had listened very politely)--“Can we have a puppy?”
“Can we have a what?” asked the Doctor, absently, clearly not having paid attention.
Rose rolled over so she could see his face. His tongue was out, caught between his teeth in concentration, as he worked at threading the needle, and she smiled and thought she’d have to find time to seduce him, because she wanted that tongue on her. As he sometimes did, he seemed to catch the direction of her thoughts and looked up at her.
“Stop it,” he said, before turning his attention back to the needle.
Rose grinned.
“Can we have a puppy?” insisted Brem, snuggling onto his father’s lap and jostling the needle about.
“Brem, I’m trying to thread this,” said the Doctor. “Whatever it is you want, can’t you ask your mum?”
Brem looked at her. “Can we have a puppy?”
Athena had stopped brushing the doll’s hair, interested in the outcome of this conversation.
Rose considered the question. “I don’t know,” she mused. “I never really thought about having a pet on the TARDIS. Getting your father to behave is enough work, without worrying about a dog.”
Brem and Athena giggled appreciatively at her joke, and the Doctor suddenly looked up from his needle.
“What are we talking about?” he asked.
“Getting a dog for the TARDIS,” she answered.
“Absolutely not. Out of the question.”
“Oh, but, Dad!” cajoled Brem, squirming about on his lap. “Please please please please please?”
“Daddy, please?” begged Athena, getting to her feet and drunkenly lurching at her father’s leg to throw her arms around it. Athena still spent most of her time off-balance. She had walked earlier than Brem, but it was taking her longer to get the hang of it. “It’s tricky,” the Doctor had assured her when she fell particularly hard against the TARDIS grating one day and burst into tears. “Lots of limbs flailing about that have got to be made to behave,” he’d said, and then tickled her back into her usual good mood.
The Doctor looked besieged, setting aside his needle. “We can’t have a dog in the TARDIS,” he said.
“Why not?” Brem demanded. “The TARDIS wouldn’t mind.”
“The TARDIS is pretending she doesn’t mind because the TARDIS spoils you,” said the Doctor, ignoring Rose’s snort at that statement. “The TARDIS doesn’t want a dog roaming about, doing…things…in the control room. It could strand us in the middle of someplace unpleasant. Someplace like-”
“My mum’s flat,” suggested Rose, still grinning.
“Exactly,” said the Doctor. “Listen to your mother. Imagine that. Grandma. Fussing all over you endlessly. All because you wouldn’t heed my advice not to have a dog in the TARDIS.”
“Grandma’s nice,” defended Athena.
“Grandma calls you Theenie,” said the Doctor. “When we gave you a perfectly beautiful name.”
“Mum calls me Theenie,” Athena pointed out.
“Yes. And she’s lucky I still talk to her.”
Rose chuckled.
“You call me Brem,” Brem pointed out, with calm logic. “And, anyway, we’re off the subject of us having a dog on the TARDIS. I think the TARDIS needs one. It’s so quiet.”
“The TARDIS,” the Doctor rejoined, dryly, “is anything but quiet, my boy.”
“That’s true,” said Athena, clambering up onto the couch. The Doctor grabbed her hand, helping her automatically. “You and Brem talk a lot.”
“She gets more like your mother every day,” the Doctor told Rose, frowning.
Rose laughed, leaning back on the floor and enjoying the interplay. Her Doctor. Her children. Who would have thought?
The Doctor removed his glasses, tossing them negligently on the table behind the couch, which was covered with the odds and ends and bits and bobs of Doctor- and Brem-tinkering. “Look, we can’t have a dog. How are your mother and I going to take care of a dog? We can barely take care of the two of you.”
“That’s not true,” Brem told him, seriously. “You and Mum do a great job.”
The Doctor burst out laughing. “Yes. Brilliant. We do. But you’re still not getting a dog.”
“But we’d take care of it, me and Theen-Athena,” he corrected himself, hastily. “Wouldn’t we?” He looked to his sister for support.
Athena nodded her head sagely, sending her pigtails flying about around her head. Athena’s hair was long and gorgeous and completely unmanageable: thick and constantly tangled and prone to doing whatever it wanted to do. Rose called it Time Lord hair. She had to admit it was devastatingly attractive on the grown men of the species, but a right pain on the young girls of the species.
“Wellllll, that is a lovely resolution, Brem, it really is, but forgive me for thinking that you are rather too young, even remarkable Time Lord-human hybrid though you are, to take care of a dog.” Brem took a deep breath in preparation for launching an assault against his father, but his father gathered his defences and beat him to it. “Let me tell you about dogs, Brem. They are descended from wolves, and wolves are decidedly not tame, now are they? Can you imagine you and Athena taking care of wolves? And anyway, you know what’s a dog? Goofy. Do you really want to let anything in your house that looks like Goofy? I know he’s supposed to be cute and amusing, but aren’t we above Goofy at this point, kids? We’d be better off reading about dogs, and then you could see how much trouble they are. Where the Red Fern Grows? Have you read that? Read that, and then see if you think it’d be worth it to get a dog. It’ll spiral you into a crying jag from which you’ll never emerge. Welllllll, until you remember that you’d just got some nice Hesperan butterballs in the fridge-taste like chocolate but a tad sweeter-and then that’ll perk you up nicely. Oh! Or Go Dog Go! What bloody snobby stuck-up creatures dogs are, aren’t they? ‘Do you like my hat? No, I do not like your hat. Good-bye. Good-bye.’”
Athena was listening to her father indulgently, but Brem had narrowed his eyes at him. As the Doctor paused for air, he interjected, “Are you quite finished?”
“Actually, not-” began the Doctor.
“You are off the topic,” Brem clipped out, adjusting himself on his father’s lap for his own lecture, tugging at the little green jumper he insisted on wearing everywhere. Rose had been waiting for the Time Lord attachment to a uniform to catch on, and Brem had settled on a green jumper for the time being. “Go Dog Go is hardly considered standard behaviour for Earth dogs, just like cats don’t wear hats. And nobody asked whether we could have wolves living in the TARDIS. Or Goofy. Just a dog. Any kind of dog you like, you can choose. But we only asked for a dog. The TARDIS has a garden for the dog to run around in, and I’m sure the TARDIS would make us a doghouse if you wanted to get really technical, but he could just sleep in the nursery with me and Athena.”
“It’s ‘with Athena and me,’” corrected the Doctor. “And you and Athena don’t sleep.”
“Fine. The dog could sleep with Mum, then. As for Where the Red Fern Grows,” continued Brem, calmly, “do we have it? I’ll read it.”
A frown flickered across the Doctor’s face. “No dog. Understood?”
Brem answered the frown with one of his own. “That’s not fair. Why can’t we have a dog? You can’t just say ‘no’ without giving any reasons.”
“Yes, I can. Do you know why? Because I’m the Doctor, and there isn’t a higher authority.”
Brem looked at him steadily for a second, then turned to Rose. “Mum? Can we have a dog?”
Rose tried not to smile, standing up. “Truth be told, kids, it’s your father’s ship. He’s just so kind as to let the rest of us inhabit it with him. If he says no dog, it probably ought to be no dog. C’mon, let’s wash up for supper.”
She leaned down and picked Athena up. “But I don’t want to wash up for supper,” Athena told her, seriously. “I want a puppy.”
Brem’s eyes lit up and Rose could tell he had a Brilliant Plan. God save us all from Time Lords and Brilliant Plans, she thought. “That’s right! Theenie and I are on a hunger strike until we get a puppy!” he announced, triumphantly, and shot his father a challenging look.
“Fine,” said the Doctor, mildly. “Don’t eat. I’ll be interested to see how long it takes human-Time Lord hybrids to die of starvation.”
Athena’s eyes widened in alarm, but Brem’s tiny-Doctor features scrunched up in irritation, and he stomped out of the room, huffing.
Rose smiled and kissed Athena’s fair, chubby cheek. “’s okay, Theenie. We’ll eat and nobody needs to tell Brem.”
She had been going to ask the Doctor if they couldn’t go somewhere for supper, as there wasn’t much food in the house, but she fell back instead on her safety net of cereal and carried a bowl to Brem, who she found in the nursery, using his sonic screwdriver to lock
and unlock the door to Athena’s dollhouse. She set the cereal bowl down beside him. “If you don’t tell Dad, I won’t,” she said, and winked at him.
He looked at her for a second then pulled the cereal bowl over to him. Rose balanced herself precariously on one of the tiny chairs Athena used when she played tea party, set Athena on the other one with her own bowl of cereal in front of her.
“So where’d this dog thing come from?” Rose asked Brem, conversationally.
“Why can’t we have a dog?” asked Brem, sulkily. “All little human boys have dogs. Just because I’m a human-Time Lord hybrid doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have a dog.”
She still worried about Brem, happy and well-adjusted as he seemed to be. He was a little boy with no steady playmates, no real fixed point that was Home other than a spaceship that bounced its way through space and time and sometimes put all of them in terrifying danger that she and the Doctor kept trying to hide from them. Maybe he needed a dog, she thought. Someone who was always there. Someone who wasn’t a sister, or a mother, or a father, or a spaceship, or an alien. Just a normal everyday dog, like billions of little human boys before and after him. “Well,” mused Rose. “You’ve got me there. That’s foolproof logic.”
Brem looked at her suspiciously, as if he thought she was joking. Then he grinned in delight. “Really? D’you really think so?”
“I do.”
“So you’ll tell Dad we’ll get a dog?”
“Your dad and I don’t really just tell each other to do things, Brem. We make joint decisions.”
“So you’ll make a joint decision to get a dog. You’ll decision the dog. Decision the dog,” Brem repeated, rolling the phrase around his mouth with relish.
He was so like his father sometimes that it hurt her, she thought, watching him as he hummed happily and shoved cereal into his mouth. “Watch your sister,” she said, standing up. “And stay here.” She walked out of the nursery, shutting the door and asking the TARDIS, silently, to lock it for her and watch the kids for a second. Then she headed back to the library.
The Doctor was back to trying to thread his needle, specs on, tongue out. Rose crossed her arms and leaned against the doorjamb.
“You know, when you stick your tongue out like that, it makes me want to shag you mindless.”
The Doctor dropped the needle and wire. “And there went all my concentration,” he said, looking over at her. He hooked a finger around the knot of his tie and began to loosen it. “Tie? Specs? On? Off?”
She smiled, pushing herself off the doorjamb and walking over to him. “Down, boy,” she said, cheekily.
He made a face and dropped his hand from his tie and flopped against the back of the sofa. “Oh, no. Don’t you go and start talking about dogs, too.”
She sat next to him on the sofa, tucking her legs under her and twirling a lock of his hair around her finger. “You look just like Brem when you sulk.”
“Of course I’m sulking,” he pouted, tossing his glasses aside. “You said you wanted to shag me mindless. This?” He gestured between the two of them. “Not shagging me mindless. Me? Very much in possession of my mind.”
“For now. Give it a second, would you? I want to talk to you first.” She walked her fingers across his shoulder, followed them and breathed into the hollow behind his ear.
“No, you’ve ruined the mood.” He took an unsteady breath and folded his arms with a resolve she knew he was faking. “You’re trying to seduce me into getting a dog.”
“What would be so wrong about getting a dog?”
“I had a dog once, when I was young and foolish. It was a disaster.”
“Aw,” she said, smiling against his neck, scraping her teeth against his skin gently. He flinched. “Aren’t you still young? And foolish?” she breathed, against the corner of his jaw.
He tried to move his head away, half-heartedly, an act of token resistance.
“Tell me what happened with your dog,” she whispered against his ear.
“He…” The Doctor sighed as she nuzzled her way along the base of his hairline, on the nape of his neck, and moved his head forward a bit to give her access.
“Your dog,” she reminded him, when he didn’t seem inclined to continue.
“Oh!” he remembered. “He chewed my sonic screwdriver.” He groaned as she sucked on his earlobe and lifted his hands to her waist.
She resisted their tug. “You just made yourself a new one, didn’t you?” she asked, combing her hands through his hair as she planted a line of kisses up along his cheek.
“Yes, but-” He seemed to wake up abruptly from the haze of arousal she’d been trying to keep him in, and jerked away from her lips. Her hands stayed in his hair, holding him in place. “It was traumatic, Rose! It was irritating. He chewed everything. And he was forever running away and exploring. Rule number one: Don’t wander off. Not even my dog could follow that one. Stop smiling. It’s not funny, Rose.”
“I’ll help take care of the dog.”
“You sleep eight hours a day!” he exclaimed. “You’re hardly ever awake. I’ll have to watch the bloody dog! And the kids! And if you think they aren’t handfuls, if you think they calm down just because Mummy’s asleep-”
“Are they difficult?” The thought had never occurred to her before. He had really never complained to her about the time he spent alone with the kids. She had always been jealous of that time, to be honest.
“No.” He sighed and closed his eyes. “No, they’re not difficult. They’re kids. They’re my kids, which I will admit for the first and only time and will deny fervently if you ever mention this again, perhaps makes them a tad more difficult than other people’s kids are.”
Rose bit back her smile. “Maybe just a smidge,” she agreed.
“Right,” he said, and opened his eyes and looked at her and leaned his head back against the sofa.
She kept combing her fingers through his hair. “What do you have against a dog? Really. Tell me the truth, or I won’t shag you mindless in a few minutes.”
“I don’t have anything against dogs. Not specifically. Not per se. I have things against…” He trailed off, dropped his eyes.
She was suddenly alarmed, shifted beside him uncomfortably. “Doctor…”
“I dream,” he said, and he squeezed his eyes shut. “Whenever I sleep, no matter when or how little, I dream, and you’re…you’re falling away from me. I can’t catch you. You’re screaming my name, you’re begging me to stop you, and I…don’t. I can’t. I try to but I’m frozen, and you’re sobbing, I can hear you, so clearly, it-”
“How long?” she asked.
“What?”
“How long have you been dreaming this?”
He took a deep breath. “I don’t know. It feels like forever. I think it’s only been a few weeks. A month? Maybe two?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What was there to tell? I-”
“That’s why you’re there,” she realized.
He opened his eyes and looked at her. “What?”
“That’s why you’re there, when I wake up in the morning, you’re almost always there, just looking at me.” He had shrugged that off, with jokes, and honestly, she was so happy to wake up with him and be able to cuddle with him, even if only for a few minutes, that she hadn’t really questioned it. She had thought, really, that it had been connected to her uncharacteristic crying fit, that she had worried him more than either one of them would say.
He hesitated, then admitted, “Sometimes I just have to make sure you’re still there, that you haven’t…vanished. Time Lord dreams aren’t-”
“I don’t give a damn about Time Lord dreams,” she said, sharply, cupping her hands around his face. “Look at me. Listen to me. I’m not going anywhere, I’m not falling anywhere, I’m here. I’m not going to vanish.” He said nothing. “You don’t believe me.”
He lifted up his hand, drew it along her cheek, took a shaky breath. “I believe…that you will never leave me, no matter how much I think sometimes that you ought to. And I believe…that I will never not save you. Never. I will never be frozen while I watch you fall. Which means the dream isn’t going to happen. I will not let it happen.”
“Right. Exactly.”
“It’s just that sometimes I feel like I’m…balancing. I’m balancing all of you-you, Brem, Athena, this entire impossibly good life-and that if I lose my concentration, for just a second, it’ll all…”
“It won’t.”
“And I know it seems innocuous, a dog, in the TARDIS, but Brem asks and suddenly I’m thinking, It’s all so bloody perfect. What if I say, ‘Yes, darling, let’s get a dog, let’s get five dozen dogs and fill the TARDIS with joy,’ and it’s like Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.”
“Like who?”
“Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, tipped over a lantern and started the Great Chicago Fire and destroyed the city.”
“If you feel that way, we won’t get a dog.”
“What will we tell Brem?”
“We’ll tell him anything. You’ve already said no, for perfectly valid reasons. Brem will forget about the dog.”
“Brem’s on a hunger strike.”
“Brem’s eating cereal in the nursery right now.”
“Little cheater,” said the Doctor, hollowly, as if he thought a jest were called for. “I hate to disappoint him.”
“You have never disappointed him. He worships you. He isn’t going to stop because of a dog. He’s never going to stop. He will adore you until the day he runs out of regenerations.” The thought suddenly occurred to her; they’d never discussed it. “He will regenerate, won’t he?”
“Yes,” he said. “They both will. And then we’ll be a family of people who look nothing like each other.”
“But it doesn’t matter. We’ll still be a family.” She leaned her forehead against his and closed her eyes and breathed with him.
“We could get him a Barcelonan dog,” he said, after a second. “He’d like that.”
“Doctor, you don’t have to get him a dog.”
“I know. I want to. I feel better now. I feel like the dog is…Like it was silly to be worried.”
“You should have told me about the dreams long ago.”
“I am sometimes still very young and foolish.”
“Indeed,” she agreed, and kissed him. “Do you want to go tell Brem?”
“In a bit. Didn’t you promise to shag me mindless?”
She grinned at him. “Tie off, specs on, take off your trousers,” she said, pulling her top over her head.
“Excellent,” said the Doctor, reaching behind him for his glasses as he pulled his tie off.
And after they’d made love, after they’d stumbled to their bedroom, shedding clothing, pausing for kisses and groping and caresses, after he’d collapsed, mindless, into a vulnerable, shattered heap, she gathered him up and whispered at him, over and over, hoping to invade whatever part of his subconscious sent those dreams to him, “I won’t fall. I won’t leave. I’m here. Always here.” And he held her so tight she worried he would suffocate her. But she let him, until he gathered himself with an effort she could feel, rolled away from her and reached for her hand.
“Let’s go tell Brem about the Barcelonan puppy,” he said.
“Let’s get dressed first,” she suggested.
“Ah. Yes. Good point.”
“And can we have dinner in Barcelona?” she asked, pulling on the knickers he handed her. “There kind of isn’t any food on this ship.”
Next Chapter
Author --
earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
Characters -- Ten, Rose, OCs
Spoilers: Through the end of 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 Brem and Athena. They're all mine.)
Summary - And then there came a day when Rose said she was having a baby. Hijinks ensue from there.
Author’s Notes - The icon was created by
punkinart , commissioned by
aibhinn , who graciously offered it to me for my use.
jlrpuck is wise in many ways. She is also one of the nicest people I know. Oh, she's also a great beta. Also thanks to Kristin-who-won't-get-an-LJ, who brainstormed this fic with me endlessly, and
bouncy_castle79 , who gave it the first major outside-eyes read-through.
Ch.1 - Ch. 2 - Ch. 3 - Ch. 4 - Ch. 5 - Ch. 6 - Ch. 7 - Ch. 8 - Ch. 9 - Ch. 10
Chapter Eleven
Rose felt better. Actually, once the Doctor said they could stay put, she found she didn’t really want to stay put. It wasn’t the travelling that bothered her. The travelling never had bothered her, and didn’t bother her now. And the Doctor, once past the initial shock of his revelation that Rose was behaving this way because she was the lonely one, went babbling on about humans being social creatures, drawn to communities, needing a support system, it taking a village to raise a child, et cetera. His solution was simple, and worked surprisingly well: They did repeat visits. Where once they never wasted a trip on the same time period of the same planet, now the Doctor indulged Rose’s desire to make friends and visit them. They went to see Muj and Kaj; they made friends in other places; they visited Jackie more often, closer together, to give Rose a chance to make contact with other people her age with children around Brem and Athena’s ages.
Brem got skilled at being vague about almost everything. He was stubborn and petulant about it at first but he stopped talking about alien species, stopped revealing that he could rattle off laws of physics as if they were nursery rhymes-the Doctor had taught them to him as if they were nursery rhymes, but that didn’t make it any better, thought Rose. He followed his mother’s lead, answering all questions about his father and their lifestyle as noncommittally as possible. He was a doctor, and they travelled a lot, to exotic places. It seemed to explain why Brem was so precocious, why the Doctor was so eccentric. And Brem had inherited his father’s talent for exuding charm even when he was trying to be belligerent, so that humans and aliens, left and right, merely found him adorable.
He had a habit of pushing his father’s buttons, which he did with an automatic ease that amused Rose. Brem could be gregarious with Athena, would ask Rose endless questions about everything until he drove her spare. He was less like that with the Doctor. He asked him questions, and, indeed, was genuinely interested in everything his father did. But he talked less around him, seemed a bit drawn in on himself, as if he suspected his father would command all of him and he needed to keep some for himself.
Rose rather loved it, the way Brem would calmly say, “You’re rambling,” when his father got off the topic of the question, as if Brem didn’t do that every time she asked him something he didn’t want to answer. “Have you brushed your teeth?” she would ask, and off Brem would go: “Dad says that enamel is the hardest substance in the body, you know. The hardest. Like, if we were all covered in enamel, it’d be a lot safer for us, you know. And the Hgirgoihwgogeiolfw-”Brem could always rattle off impossible alien names with far more ease than Rose; she wondered sometimes if he didn’t speak Gallifreyan that the TARDIS translated for her, and that the alien names were far easier in Gallifreyan-”that live on GHRWOUH-Dad says they always write the name of that planet in all caps, you know, because it’s respectful-they’re made entirely of enamel, all over, well, they don’t call it enamel, they call it something else, I can’t remember-” And Rose would eventually say, firmly, “Brem. Brush your teeth.”
But when his father answered a question that way, Brem sighed and rolled his eyes and pretended enormous annoyance. Brem did a lot of sighing and rolling his eyes at his father. “He learned that from you,” the Doctor told her, and Rose smiled.
And then Brem said, one day--watching his father thread what looked like a large needle with a tiny filament of wire, as they sat on the couch in the library and Rose sprawled on her stomach helping Athena comb the hair of a doll they’d picked up on the last planet (the doll’s hair grew, through some regenerative process that the Doctor had explained to Athena at great length on the way back to the TARDIS; Athena, the very opposite of Brem in those matters, had listened very politely)--“Can we have a puppy?”
“Can we have a what?” asked the Doctor, absently, clearly not having paid attention.
Rose rolled over so she could see his face. His tongue was out, caught between his teeth in concentration, as he worked at threading the needle, and she smiled and thought she’d have to find time to seduce him, because she wanted that tongue on her. As he sometimes did, he seemed to catch the direction of her thoughts and looked up at her.
“Stop it,” he said, before turning his attention back to the needle.
Rose grinned.
“Can we have a puppy?” insisted Brem, snuggling onto his father’s lap and jostling the needle about.
“Brem, I’m trying to thread this,” said the Doctor. “Whatever it is you want, can’t you ask your mum?”
Brem looked at her. “Can we have a puppy?”
Athena had stopped brushing the doll’s hair, interested in the outcome of this conversation.
Rose considered the question. “I don’t know,” she mused. “I never really thought about having a pet on the TARDIS. Getting your father to behave is enough work, without worrying about a dog.”
Brem and Athena giggled appreciatively at her joke, and the Doctor suddenly looked up from his needle.
“What are we talking about?” he asked.
“Getting a dog for the TARDIS,” she answered.
“Absolutely not. Out of the question.”
“Oh, but, Dad!” cajoled Brem, squirming about on his lap. “Please please please please please?”
“Daddy, please?” begged Athena, getting to her feet and drunkenly lurching at her father’s leg to throw her arms around it. Athena still spent most of her time off-balance. She had walked earlier than Brem, but it was taking her longer to get the hang of it. “It’s tricky,” the Doctor had assured her when she fell particularly hard against the TARDIS grating one day and burst into tears. “Lots of limbs flailing about that have got to be made to behave,” he’d said, and then tickled her back into her usual good mood.
The Doctor looked besieged, setting aside his needle. “We can’t have a dog in the TARDIS,” he said.
“Why not?” Brem demanded. “The TARDIS wouldn’t mind.”
“The TARDIS is pretending she doesn’t mind because the TARDIS spoils you,” said the Doctor, ignoring Rose’s snort at that statement. “The TARDIS doesn’t want a dog roaming about, doing…things…in the control room. It could strand us in the middle of someplace unpleasant. Someplace like-”
“My mum’s flat,” suggested Rose, still grinning.
“Exactly,” said the Doctor. “Listen to your mother. Imagine that. Grandma. Fussing all over you endlessly. All because you wouldn’t heed my advice not to have a dog in the TARDIS.”
“Grandma’s nice,” defended Athena.
“Grandma calls you Theenie,” said the Doctor. “When we gave you a perfectly beautiful name.”
“Mum calls me Theenie,” Athena pointed out.
“Yes. And she’s lucky I still talk to her.”
Rose chuckled.
“You call me Brem,” Brem pointed out, with calm logic. “And, anyway, we’re off the subject of us having a dog on the TARDIS. I think the TARDIS needs one. It’s so quiet.”
“The TARDIS,” the Doctor rejoined, dryly, “is anything but quiet, my boy.”
“That’s true,” said Athena, clambering up onto the couch. The Doctor grabbed her hand, helping her automatically. “You and Brem talk a lot.”
“She gets more like your mother every day,” the Doctor told Rose, frowning.
Rose laughed, leaning back on the floor and enjoying the interplay. Her Doctor. Her children. Who would have thought?
The Doctor removed his glasses, tossing them negligently on the table behind the couch, which was covered with the odds and ends and bits and bobs of Doctor- and Brem-tinkering. “Look, we can’t have a dog. How are your mother and I going to take care of a dog? We can barely take care of the two of you.”
“That’s not true,” Brem told him, seriously. “You and Mum do a great job.”
The Doctor burst out laughing. “Yes. Brilliant. We do. But you’re still not getting a dog.”
“But we’d take care of it, me and Theen-Athena,” he corrected himself, hastily. “Wouldn’t we?” He looked to his sister for support.
Athena nodded her head sagely, sending her pigtails flying about around her head. Athena’s hair was long and gorgeous and completely unmanageable: thick and constantly tangled and prone to doing whatever it wanted to do. Rose called it Time Lord hair. She had to admit it was devastatingly attractive on the grown men of the species, but a right pain on the young girls of the species.
“Wellllll, that is a lovely resolution, Brem, it really is, but forgive me for thinking that you are rather too young, even remarkable Time Lord-human hybrid though you are, to take care of a dog.” Brem took a deep breath in preparation for launching an assault against his father, but his father gathered his defences and beat him to it. “Let me tell you about dogs, Brem. They are descended from wolves, and wolves are decidedly not tame, now are they? Can you imagine you and Athena taking care of wolves? And anyway, you know what’s a dog? Goofy. Do you really want to let anything in your house that looks like Goofy? I know he’s supposed to be cute and amusing, but aren’t we above Goofy at this point, kids? We’d be better off reading about dogs, and then you could see how much trouble they are. Where the Red Fern Grows? Have you read that? Read that, and then see if you think it’d be worth it to get a dog. It’ll spiral you into a crying jag from which you’ll never emerge. Welllllll, until you remember that you’d just got some nice Hesperan butterballs in the fridge-taste like chocolate but a tad sweeter-and then that’ll perk you up nicely. Oh! Or Go Dog Go! What bloody snobby stuck-up creatures dogs are, aren’t they? ‘Do you like my hat? No, I do not like your hat. Good-bye. Good-bye.’”
Athena was listening to her father indulgently, but Brem had narrowed his eyes at him. As the Doctor paused for air, he interjected, “Are you quite finished?”
“Actually, not-” began the Doctor.
“You are off the topic,” Brem clipped out, adjusting himself on his father’s lap for his own lecture, tugging at the little green jumper he insisted on wearing everywhere. Rose had been waiting for the Time Lord attachment to a uniform to catch on, and Brem had settled on a green jumper for the time being. “Go Dog Go is hardly considered standard behaviour for Earth dogs, just like cats don’t wear hats. And nobody asked whether we could have wolves living in the TARDIS. Or Goofy. Just a dog. Any kind of dog you like, you can choose. But we only asked for a dog. The TARDIS has a garden for the dog to run around in, and I’m sure the TARDIS would make us a doghouse if you wanted to get really technical, but he could just sleep in the nursery with me and Athena.”
“It’s ‘with Athena and me,’” corrected the Doctor. “And you and Athena don’t sleep.”
“Fine. The dog could sleep with Mum, then. As for Where the Red Fern Grows,” continued Brem, calmly, “do we have it? I’ll read it.”
A frown flickered across the Doctor’s face. “No dog. Understood?”
Brem answered the frown with one of his own. “That’s not fair. Why can’t we have a dog? You can’t just say ‘no’ without giving any reasons.”
“Yes, I can. Do you know why? Because I’m the Doctor, and there isn’t a higher authority.”
Brem looked at him steadily for a second, then turned to Rose. “Mum? Can we have a dog?”
Rose tried not to smile, standing up. “Truth be told, kids, it’s your father’s ship. He’s just so kind as to let the rest of us inhabit it with him. If he says no dog, it probably ought to be no dog. C’mon, let’s wash up for supper.”
She leaned down and picked Athena up. “But I don’t want to wash up for supper,” Athena told her, seriously. “I want a puppy.”
Brem’s eyes lit up and Rose could tell he had a Brilliant Plan. God save us all from Time Lords and Brilliant Plans, she thought. “That’s right! Theenie and I are on a hunger strike until we get a puppy!” he announced, triumphantly, and shot his father a challenging look.
“Fine,” said the Doctor, mildly. “Don’t eat. I’ll be interested to see how long it takes human-Time Lord hybrids to die of starvation.”
Athena’s eyes widened in alarm, but Brem’s tiny-Doctor features scrunched up in irritation, and he stomped out of the room, huffing.
Rose smiled and kissed Athena’s fair, chubby cheek. “’s okay, Theenie. We’ll eat and nobody needs to tell Brem.”
She had been going to ask the Doctor if they couldn’t go somewhere for supper, as there wasn’t much food in the house, but she fell back instead on her safety net of cereal and carried a bowl to Brem, who she found in the nursery, using his sonic screwdriver to lock
and unlock the door to Athena’s dollhouse. She set the cereal bowl down beside him. “If you don’t tell Dad, I won’t,” she said, and winked at him.
He looked at her for a second then pulled the cereal bowl over to him. Rose balanced herself precariously on one of the tiny chairs Athena used when she played tea party, set Athena on the other one with her own bowl of cereal in front of her.
“So where’d this dog thing come from?” Rose asked Brem, conversationally.
“Why can’t we have a dog?” asked Brem, sulkily. “All little human boys have dogs. Just because I’m a human-Time Lord hybrid doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have a dog.”
She still worried about Brem, happy and well-adjusted as he seemed to be. He was a little boy with no steady playmates, no real fixed point that was Home other than a spaceship that bounced its way through space and time and sometimes put all of them in terrifying danger that she and the Doctor kept trying to hide from them. Maybe he needed a dog, she thought. Someone who was always there. Someone who wasn’t a sister, or a mother, or a father, or a spaceship, or an alien. Just a normal everyday dog, like billions of little human boys before and after him. “Well,” mused Rose. “You’ve got me there. That’s foolproof logic.”
Brem looked at her suspiciously, as if he thought she was joking. Then he grinned in delight. “Really? D’you really think so?”
“I do.”
“So you’ll tell Dad we’ll get a dog?”
“Your dad and I don’t really just tell each other to do things, Brem. We make joint decisions.”
“So you’ll make a joint decision to get a dog. You’ll decision the dog. Decision the dog,” Brem repeated, rolling the phrase around his mouth with relish.
He was so like his father sometimes that it hurt her, she thought, watching him as he hummed happily and shoved cereal into his mouth. “Watch your sister,” she said, standing up. “And stay here.” She walked out of the nursery, shutting the door and asking the TARDIS, silently, to lock it for her and watch the kids for a second. Then she headed back to the library.
The Doctor was back to trying to thread his needle, specs on, tongue out. Rose crossed her arms and leaned against the doorjamb.
“You know, when you stick your tongue out like that, it makes me want to shag you mindless.”
The Doctor dropped the needle and wire. “And there went all my concentration,” he said, looking over at her. He hooked a finger around the knot of his tie and began to loosen it. “Tie? Specs? On? Off?”
She smiled, pushing herself off the doorjamb and walking over to him. “Down, boy,” she said, cheekily.
He made a face and dropped his hand from his tie and flopped against the back of the sofa. “Oh, no. Don’t you go and start talking about dogs, too.”
She sat next to him on the sofa, tucking her legs under her and twirling a lock of his hair around her finger. “You look just like Brem when you sulk.”
“Of course I’m sulking,” he pouted, tossing his glasses aside. “You said you wanted to shag me mindless. This?” He gestured between the two of them. “Not shagging me mindless. Me? Very much in possession of my mind.”
“For now. Give it a second, would you? I want to talk to you first.” She walked her fingers across his shoulder, followed them and breathed into the hollow behind his ear.
“No, you’ve ruined the mood.” He took an unsteady breath and folded his arms with a resolve she knew he was faking. “You’re trying to seduce me into getting a dog.”
“What would be so wrong about getting a dog?”
“I had a dog once, when I was young and foolish. It was a disaster.”
“Aw,” she said, smiling against his neck, scraping her teeth against his skin gently. He flinched. “Aren’t you still young? And foolish?” she breathed, against the corner of his jaw.
He tried to move his head away, half-heartedly, an act of token resistance.
“Tell me what happened with your dog,” she whispered against his ear.
“He…” The Doctor sighed as she nuzzled her way along the base of his hairline, on the nape of his neck, and moved his head forward a bit to give her access.
“Your dog,” she reminded him, when he didn’t seem inclined to continue.
“Oh!” he remembered. “He chewed my sonic screwdriver.” He groaned as she sucked on his earlobe and lifted his hands to her waist.
She resisted their tug. “You just made yourself a new one, didn’t you?” she asked, combing her hands through his hair as she planted a line of kisses up along his cheek.
“Yes, but-” He seemed to wake up abruptly from the haze of arousal she’d been trying to keep him in, and jerked away from her lips. Her hands stayed in his hair, holding him in place. “It was traumatic, Rose! It was irritating. He chewed everything. And he was forever running away and exploring. Rule number one: Don’t wander off. Not even my dog could follow that one. Stop smiling. It’s not funny, Rose.”
“I’ll help take care of the dog.”
“You sleep eight hours a day!” he exclaimed. “You’re hardly ever awake. I’ll have to watch the bloody dog! And the kids! And if you think they aren’t handfuls, if you think they calm down just because Mummy’s asleep-”
“Are they difficult?” The thought had never occurred to her before. He had really never complained to her about the time he spent alone with the kids. She had always been jealous of that time, to be honest.
“No.” He sighed and closed his eyes. “No, they’re not difficult. They’re kids. They’re my kids, which I will admit for the first and only time and will deny fervently if you ever mention this again, perhaps makes them a tad more difficult than other people’s kids are.”
Rose bit back her smile. “Maybe just a smidge,” she agreed.
“Right,” he said, and opened his eyes and looked at her and leaned his head back against the sofa.
She kept combing her fingers through his hair. “What do you have against a dog? Really. Tell me the truth, or I won’t shag you mindless in a few minutes.”
“I don’t have anything against dogs. Not specifically. Not per se. I have things against…” He trailed off, dropped his eyes.
She was suddenly alarmed, shifted beside him uncomfortably. “Doctor…”
“I dream,” he said, and he squeezed his eyes shut. “Whenever I sleep, no matter when or how little, I dream, and you’re…you’re falling away from me. I can’t catch you. You’re screaming my name, you’re begging me to stop you, and I…don’t. I can’t. I try to but I’m frozen, and you’re sobbing, I can hear you, so clearly, it-”
“How long?” she asked.
“What?”
“How long have you been dreaming this?”
He took a deep breath. “I don’t know. It feels like forever. I think it’s only been a few weeks. A month? Maybe two?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What was there to tell? I-”
“That’s why you’re there,” she realized.
He opened his eyes and looked at her. “What?”
“That’s why you’re there, when I wake up in the morning, you’re almost always there, just looking at me.” He had shrugged that off, with jokes, and honestly, she was so happy to wake up with him and be able to cuddle with him, even if only for a few minutes, that she hadn’t really questioned it. She had thought, really, that it had been connected to her uncharacteristic crying fit, that she had worried him more than either one of them would say.
He hesitated, then admitted, “Sometimes I just have to make sure you’re still there, that you haven’t…vanished. Time Lord dreams aren’t-”
“I don’t give a damn about Time Lord dreams,” she said, sharply, cupping her hands around his face. “Look at me. Listen to me. I’m not going anywhere, I’m not falling anywhere, I’m here. I’m not going to vanish.” He said nothing. “You don’t believe me.”
He lifted up his hand, drew it along her cheek, took a shaky breath. “I believe…that you will never leave me, no matter how much I think sometimes that you ought to. And I believe…that I will never not save you. Never. I will never be frozen while I watch you fall. Which means the dream isn’t going to happen. I will not let it happen.”
“Right. Exactly.”
“It’s just that sometimes I feel like I’m…balancing. I’m balancing all of you-you, Brem, Athena, this entire impossibly good life-and that if I lose my concentration, for just a second, it’ll all…”
“It won’t.”
“And I know it seems innocuous, a dog, in the TARDIS, but Brem asks and suddenly I’m thinking, It’s all so bloody perfect. What if I say, ‘Yes, darling, let’s get a dog, let’s get five dozen dogs and fill the TARDIS with joy,’ and it’s like Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.”
“Like who?”
“Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, tipped over a lantern and started the Great Chicago Fire and destroyed the city.”
“If you feel that way, we won’t get a dog.”
“What will we tell Brem?”
“We’ll tell him anything. You’ve already said no, for perfectly valid reasons. Brem will forget about the dog.”
“Brem’s on a hunger strike.”
“Brem’s eating cereal in the nursery right now.”
“Little cheater,” said the Doctor, hollowly, as if he thought a jest were called for. “I hate to disappoint him.”
“You have never disappointed him. He worships you. He isn’t going to stop because of a dog. He’s never going to stop. He will adore you until the day he runs out of regenerations.” The thought suddenly occurred to her; they’d never discussed it. “He will regenerate, won’t he?”
“Yes,” he said. “They both will. And then we’ll be a family of people who look nothing like each other.”
“But it doesn’t matter. We’ll still be a family.” She leaned her forehead against his and closed her eyes and breathed with him.
“We could get him a Barcelonan dog,” he said, after a second. “He’d like that.”
“Doctor, you don’t have to get him a dog.”
“I know. I want to. I feel better now. I feel like the dog is…Like it was silly to be worried.”
“You should have told me about the dreams long ago.”
“I am sometimes still very young and foolish.”
“Indeed,” she agreed, and kissed him. “Do you want to go tell Brem?”
“In a bit. Didn’t you promise to shag me mindless?”
She grinned at him. “Tie off, specs on, take off your trousers,” she said, pulling her top over her head.
“Excellent,” said the Doctor, reaching behind him for his glasses as he pulled his tie off.
And after they’d made love, after they’d stumbled to their bedroom, shedding clothing, pausing for kisses and groping and caresses, after he’d collapsed, mindless, into a vulnerable, shattered heap, she gathered him up and whispered at him, over and over, hoping to invade whatever part of his subconscious sent those dreams to him, “I won’t fall. I won’t leave. I’m here. Always here.” And he held her so tight she worried he would suffocate her. But she let him, until he gathered himself with an effort she could feel, rolled away from her and reached for her hand.
“Let’s go tell Brem about the Barcelonan puppy,” he said.
“Let’s get dressed first,” she suggested.
“Ah. Yes. Good point.”
“And can we have dinner in Barcelona?” she asked, pulling on the knickers he handed her. “There kind of isn’t any food on this ship.”
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