Ficathon Fic: Gravity
Title: Gravity
Rating: PG (Sorry, guys, did my best)
Gift for: dark_aegis
Beta: Working on it. Mistakes are wholly my own and will gladly be paid for in blood, sweat, and tears. Well, maybe not the blood. I can promise the other two, though.
Summary: "Seriously-- in your little world, are there any dangerous planets?"
Prompt: The Doctor telling Rose about Gallifrey
Notes: Well, that's done. Off to commit seppuku now. Nice meeting you all. ;)
(-)
Rose had always figured that the whole "getting pelted by rotten tomatoes" thing was more a gag than anything else. A cliché, and an ancient one, pathetic to begin with and used so much it wasn't even funny anymore.
But now-- well, the things being thrown at them weren't tomatoes, exactly, and this wasn't exactly Earth, but the principle was the same, and she was beginning to wonder.
She got to the TARDIS door first; only a second after, the Doctor slammed it shut behind them. Rose sighed in relief and leaned back against it, listening to the soft thumps of the blue rotten round fruit things against the door as she began to catch her breath.
The Doctor did the same for a moment, then turned to look at her. "I didn't think the joke was that bad, did you?"
Rose glared at him.
"I mean, maybe a bit in poor taste, but it was hardly worth all that."
Rose glared at him.
"What, too soon?"
"Pretty sure that's the problem, yeah."
He pushed himself away from the door and headed for the controls. "Well, I still think they were overreacting," he said, and reached for a lever.
"Hang on," she said. "What's that thing?"
"Hmm?"
"That thing, that you're pushing."
"Oh, this? I thought we'd leave now. We've sort of worn out our welcome, and those rotten sirhani wreak havoc on the paint."
"But-- where're we going?"
"Not a clue!" He grinned.
"But-- I've got blue tomato in my hair." She pointed at it; in her experience, men usually needed the illustration. "We're not gonna do anything right now, are we?"
"Course not! You can wash your hair first if it's that important to you." He started pulling levers and pushing buttons again, in a way that always looked different, but was starting to seem familiar anyway.
Rose sighed and let it go; no point in staying here, after all, and no one said she had to get out next stop. Not until she was damn well ready. "But seriously, where are we going? There's not gonna be another slave uprising, is there?"
"What've you got against slave uprisings?"
"Doctor--"
"No, no, no, it'll be perfectly safe and boring, I promise. All right?"
"That's what you said last time," she reminded him.
"Well--"
"And the time before that. And the time with the giant laser cannons--"
"Silrana's dead lovely when it's not being destroyed!" he protested.
Rose almost made a reply to that, but recognised it as a diversion at the very last second and soldiered on. "Seriously-- in your little world, are there any dangerous planets?"
"Well," he said. "Maybe a few."
"Name me one, then." She crossed her arms and fixed him with her absolute best stare.
"Beta Tantaros," he said, with just a little too much confidence.
"What's wrong with it?"
"Methane atmosphere."
"That is cheating."
"How is that cheating?"
"'Course a methane planet's dangerous if you can't breathe methane!"
"So, what is it you're lookin' for, then? Planets full of madmen who've killed every stranger to set foot on their land through every century of their history?" He folded his own arms, and his stare was better than hers.
She wasn't backing down, though. "I'm looking for any planet we could land on and not have you say, 'Ah! This planet! It's harmless, you'll love it!' I'm looking for a planet where you'd open the door, say 'Oh, bloody hell', and slam it shut."
"Any planet dangerous enough to just run away from?"
"Yes!"
He turned his head away, staring at the controls. "Well..."
"You don't have any, do you?"
"Oh, a few. But they're mostly gone now."
"Doesn't matter. That still counts. Give me one."
He closed his eyes in concentration. "...Ah, the Toymaker's planet!" he said, and his eyes met hers again.
"What?"
"There was this one bloke, called the 'Celestial Toymaker'."
"Yeah, not the most terrifying name I've heard."
"Immortal and all-powerful. Had a thing for games," he explained. "He could make them all real, and he wasn't inclined to ask if you wanted to play."
"Oh." Somehow, she still wasn't impressed.
"Exactly. And did I mention the games could kill you?"
Rose winced. "No, you hadn't, actually. An' that really says something about what you think's important."
"Well, there, you see? An unambiguously dangerous planet." He beamed. "Not strictly a planet, but you're not going to fuss about that, are you?"
"All right, then, one," she said. "In the entire universe?"
"Oh, come on, who's cheating now?!"
"Come on," Rose dared. "Is that seriously the only one?"
"Home planet of the Daleks," he said, and she started to wonder if he'd been smiling at all, because there was certainly no trace of it in his eyes now.
"Oh. Well." She'd forgotten that one might come up. Too late now, though; she had to see this one through. "'Course, that's gone now, right?"
"You said that counted!"
"All right, all right! It counts! That's two!"
He rolled his eyes to the ceiling in ostentatious frustration. "Why does this matter so much to you?"
Good question. She wasn't entirely sure, until her mouth opened and words came out. "Well-- you're always saying things are perfectly safe when they aren't. Either you think everything's safe, you're a god-awful judge, or you never actually have any idea of when and where the hell we are."
"Oi!"
"I'm just trying to sort out which it is!"
"There's such a thing as unanticipated circumstances, you know!"
"So that great slave revolt that 'revolutionized Cygnus IV', that didn't make the history books?"
He glared at her. "It temporarily slipped my mind!"
"Riiight. Says Mr. Time Lord. But really, there's only two planets that are dangerous?"
"What, not counting yours?"
"Mine?"
"You wouldn't believe the trouble you humans cause me!"
"Don't mind returning the favour, now, do you?"
"Well--"
"Besides, you've never called Earth dangerous either. Doesn't count."
He stared at his hands for a moment, an odd expression in his eyes that caught her attention at once-- then seemed to come to some sort of decision. "There was one other, that I can think of."
"Yeah?" Her voice had gone a little softer, a bit more nervous.
"Very peaceful planet, actually. Provided you stayed in the main city-- they'd walled all of the messy bits out. Story of their lives. Completely civilized, utterly refined. The most advanced species, probably, in all the universe-- oh, and they knew it." A grim smile crossed his face. "They worked so hard to keep themselves pure-- they refused to get involved in the trivial affairs of the universe at large. Or, most of them did. The few who didn't were generally trying to twist the rest of the universe to their will."
Oh, yes, there were currents here; there was a charge in the room, now. Something was happening. Rose took a step forward, pulled as she always was by that slow gravity of his.
"Think about it. An entire race that knows it's superior-- and, in a lot of ways, is probably right. They did a lot of good, but they also did a lot of damage, by inaction especially. The crises they could have solved, if they hadn't assumed they were too powerful to be allowed to interfere with the rest of the world... So insular, so self-preoccupied. And crap taste in politicians to boot. But they did some amazing things, on the rare occasions when they could be bothered..."
There was something beautiful in his mind, judging by the look on his face; she was entranced by it. What could she say? He was entrancing. That intensity of his, that gravity she could always feel tugging at her heart...
...Like anything around the sun... He wanted her in orbit, didn't he? Wanted her at some safe, stable distance, for both their sakes. But there was no such thing. The cold was just as dangerous at the heat, and she wanted to change her trajectory.
(Even if his eyes were turning toward that dark place again, that look that always made her wonder if maybe it wasn't a wise precaution-- if things that got too close to the sun burned...)
"More than a little mad, really..." he said. Rose couldn't help wondering for a moment if he was referring to the planet, himself, or her.
"What was it called?" she asked, softly.
"Gallifrey," he answered.
"You said that was your planet."
He nodded.
"But... what was dangerous about it?"
He rolled his eyes. "Let me try to count! They had a habit of greeting my arrival with armed guards... They had no problem whatsoever with erasing my companions' memories and putting them 'back where they belonged'... They never could quite figure out whether they wanted me President or dead... Though they did elect me President more often than they quasi-executed me, that might be a clue..."
"Hang on-- they made you President? You? Did it mean the same thing?"
"I said they had crap taste in politicians, didn't I? I only ran for office in the first place because I didn't have a choice... And once they'd got the idea in their heads, well, it proved diabolically pernicious..."
"So, they're dangerous because they kept making you President?" Rose grinned.
"And putting me on trial for capital offences. Generally in close temporal proximity. Or else sending me out on missions they didn't want to dirty their hands with. Actually being out, mucking about in the universe-- it was inconceivable to them." He shook his head. "I didn't even like them, Rose. Most of the time, too many of the people-- I ran away from that place every chance I got. Never stopped running. Rose, I didn't even like them very much. And now they're gone."
His hands were shaking; she caught her breath. This was his great secret, wasn't it? This was one of those weights you could almost see sometimes on his back.
"Yeah..." said Rose. "I think maybe everyone feels like that."
"What?"
"I mean, you've met my mum, yeah? She can drive me absolutely mad sometimes, worse than maybe anyone else in the world. But I still love her. But, that doesn't mean I want to go home." She grimaced. "Or, answer her calls. I love her though, really."
"Yeah," he said, quietly. "That's the way of things, isn't it?"
She nodded, just a little, trying to coax him out of it and knowing it was a delicate operation.
"Earth survived. Earth didn't get a scratch. Isn't it strange... just a little bit ironic… In the Alanis Morrisette sense, mind you, not the pedantic literary version... Isn't it quite a coincidence that I could save the planet I cared about, while the one I'd always hated burned?"
"So, the whole War thing revolved around you, did it? You certainly don't think much of yourself."
"I pulled the trigger, Rose," he said. "I was the one who was supposed to come up with some clever way around it, but I failed. That doesn't happen to me often."
Rose had crashed a few pity-parties in her time, and had learned logic didn't usually figure in. If you tried it, it'd just bounce off some invisible shield and on the misery would go, in its impenetrable little spiral, unless you could find something jarring enough to throw it entirely off track. There were a few proven methods; the one that came to mind wasn't exactly subtle, but faced with a nine-hundred-year-old alien brooding over interplanetary war, Rose figured drastic measures were necessary.
So she took three steps forward, lifted his chin so he'd stop staring into the engine, and as soon as he shot a startled look her way, pressed her lips to his.
She wouldn't've been surprised if he'd jumped away, but he didn't; he stood there, frozen, for a good three breaths-- a golden opportunity and she took it, willing to press her luck. When would she get another chance?
So she pressed forward one more time and the walls came tumbling down; an arm wrapped around her waist and a hand came to stroke through her hair, and apparently he had been doing something all those years besides running from aliens and inventing inscrutable screwdrivers, who'd've guessed? Though, god, yeah, passion would make up for almost anything, and the desperation she thought she tasted at the root of it...
And then he pulled back; she'd half been expecting to have to convince him, to have to back-pedal, make excuses, listen to the old litany of "this was a mistake" and "it's a bad idea" and maybe even (though she wouldn't expect such a cliché from him, people did stranger things under stress) "it's not you, it's me". That last one would be true, actually, but he wasn't doing any of those things. His arms were still warm around her and she could hear his breaths, deep, slightly ragged, but even.
"The things I love..." he said, in a voice so quiet she wasn't sure she'd have heard it if she'd been an inch further away. “Don't really tend to..."
The word "love" nearly robbed Rose of coherent thought; she barely remembered that there'd been something she'd wanted to say, and it took her several moments to begin to remember what it had been. "Don't," she said.
"Rose--"
"It's not your fault and you know it. I don't know why you want it to be so much, but it wasn't. You couldn't. I believe in you."
That didn't seem to help much at first; she could feel how his hands had clenched, but she just kept looking at him, as even and sober as she could, because she meant this. She knew him. Well, that might be going a little far, but she knew that much about him, and she knew it for a fact. She knew he was a good person, was beginning to suspect that didn't make him any less dangerous, but she trusted him: she couldn't not trust him, she was pretty sure, even if she tried. And maybe he trusted her a little too, because, ever so slowly, she could feel him relax.
There wasn't anything in his past she could fix, she knew, as she pulled him close to kiss him again. Might be precious little in his past she could even expect to ever know about; all that time, and given what his life seemed to be like day-to-day, she wasn't sure a full biography of him would take less than her lifetime.
She couldn't fix his past, but she could brighten up his present, and who knew? Maybe she could fix his future, too.
And if he tried to push her away again, into some respectable orbit, come some colder morning when he "came back to his senses", he'd find she wasn't so easy to dislodge: she wouldn't stand for being told that this was dangerous, too much for her, too little for her. If she did get burned by it, it was only because he was on fire himself, and she had no intention of letting him burn alone.
The kiss was like fire, and she threw herself in.
-
Rating: PG (Sorry, guys, did my best)
Gift for: dark_aegis
Beta: Working on it. Mistakes are wholly my own and will gladly be paid for in blood, sweat, and tears. Well, maybe not the blood. I can promise the other two, though.
Summary: "Seriously-- in your little world, are there any dangerous planets?"
Prompt: The Doctor telling Rose about Gallifrey
Notes: Well, that's done. Off to commit seppuku now. Nice meeting you all. ;)
(-)
Rose had always figured that the whole "getting pelted by rotten tomatoes" thing was more a gag than anything else. A cliché, and an ancient one, pathetic to begin with and used so much it wasn't even funny anymore.
But now-- well, the things being thrown at them weren't tomatoes, exactly, and this wasn't exactly Earth, but the principle was the same, and she was beginning to wonder.
She got to the TARDIS door first; only a second after, the Doctor slammed it shut behind them. Rose sighed in relief and leaned back against it, listening to the soft thumps of the blue rotten round fruit things against the door as she began to catch her breath.
The Doctor did the same for a moment, then turned to look at her. "I didn't think the joke was that bad, did you?"
Rose glared at him.
"I mean, maybe a bit in poor taste, but it was hardly worth all that."
Rose glared at him.
"What, too soon?"
"Pretty sure that's the problem, yeah."
He pushed himself away from the door and headed for the controls. "Well, I still think they were overreacting," he said, and reached for a lever.
"Hang on," she said. "What's that thing?"
"Hmm?"
"That thing, that you're pushing."
"Oh, this? I thought we'd leave now. We've sort of worn out our welcome, and those rotten sirhani wreak havoc on the paint."
"But-- where're we going?"
"Not a clue!" He grinned.
"But-- I've got blue tomato in my hair." She pointed at it; in her experience, men usually needed the illustration. "We're not gonna do anything right now, are we?"
"Course not! You can wash your hair first if it's that important to you." He started pulling levers and pushing buttons again, in a way that always looked different, but was starting to seem familiar anyway.
Rose sighed and let it go; no point in staying here, after all, and no one said she had to get out next stop. Not until she was damn well ready. "But seriously, where are we going? There's not gonna be another slave uprising, is there?"
"What've you got against slave uprisings?"
"Doctor--"
"No, no, no, it'll be perfectly safe and boring, I promise. All right?"
"That's what you said last time," she reminded him.
"Well--"
"And the time before that. And the time with the giant laser cannons--"
"Silrana's dead lovely when it's not being destroyed!" he protested.
Rose almost made a reply to that, but recognised it as a diversion at the very last second and soldiered on. "Seriously-- in your little world, are there any dangerous planets?"
"Well," he said. "Maybe a few."
"Name me one, then." She crossed her arms and fixed him with her absolute best stare.
"Beta Tantaros," he said, with just a little too much confidence.
"What's wrong with it?"
"Methane atmosphere."
"That is cheating."
"How is that cheating?"
"'Course a methane planet's dangerous if you can't breathe methane!"
"So, what is it you're lookin' for, then? Planets full of madmen who've killed every stranger to set foot on their land through every century of their history?" He folded his own arms, and his stare was better than hers.
She wasn't backing down, though. "I'm looking for any planet we could land on and not have you say, 'Ah! This planet! It's harmless, you'll love it!' I'm looking for a planet where you'd open the door, say 'Oh, bloody hell', and slam it shut."
"Any planet dangerous enough to just run away from?"
"Yes!"
He turned his head away, staring at the controls. "Well..."
"You don't have any, do you?"
"Oh, a few. But they're mostly gone now."
"Doesn't matter. That still counts. Give me one."
He closed his eyes in concentration. "...Ah, the Toymaker's planet!" he said, and his eyes met hers again.
"What?"
"There was this one bloke, called the 'Celestial Toymaker'."
"Yeah, not the most terrifying name I've heard."
"Immortal and all-powerful. Had a thing for games," he explained. "He could make them all real, and he wasn't inclined to ask if you wanted to play."
"Oh." Somehow, she still wasn't impressed.
"Exactly. And did I mention the games could kill you?"
Rose winced. "No, you hadn't, actually. An' that really says something about what you think's important."
"Well, there, you see? An unambiguously dangerous planet." He beamed. "Not strictly a planet, but you're not going to fuss about that, are you?"
"All right, then, one," she said. "In the entire universe?"
"Oh, come on, who's cheating now?!"
"Come on," Rose dared. "Is that seriously the only one?"
"Home planet of the Daleks," he said, and she started to wonder if he'd been smiling at all, because there was certainly no trace of it in his eyes now.
"Oh. Well." She'd forgotten that one might come up. Too late now, though; she had to see this one through. "'Course, that's gone now, right?"
"You said that counted!"
"All right, all right! It counts! That's two!"
He rolled his eyes to the ceiling in ostentatious frustration. "Why does this matter so much to you?"
Good question. She wasn't entirely sure, until her mouth opened and words came out. "Well-- you're always saying things are perfectly safe when they aren't. Either you think everything's safe, you're a god-awful judge, or you never actually have any idea of when and where the hell we are."
"Oi!"
"I'm just trying to sort out which it is!"
"There's such a thing as unanticipated circumstances, you know!"
"So that great slave revolt that 'revolutionized Cygnus IV', that didn't make the history books?"
He glared at her. "It temporarily slipped my mind!"
"Riiight. Says Mr. Time Lord. But really, there's only two planets that are dangerous?"
"What, not counting yours?"
"Mine?"
"You wouldn't believe the trouble you humans cause me!"
"Don't mind returning the favour, now, do you?"
"Well--"
"Besides, you've never called Earth dangerous either. Doesn't count."
He stared at his hands for a moment, an odd expression in his eyes that caught her attention at once-- then seemed to come to some sort of decision. "There was one other, that I can think of."
"Yeah?" Her voice had gone a little softer, a bit more nervous.
"Very peaceful planet, actually. Provided you stayed in the main city-- they'd walled all of the messy bits out. Story of their lives. Completely civilized, utterly refined. The most advanced species, probably, in all the universe-- oh, and they knew it." A grim smile crossed his face. "They worked so hard to keep themselves pure-- they refused to get involved in the trivial affairs of the universe at large. Or, most of them did. The few who didn't were generally trying to twist the rest of the universe to their will."
Oh, yes, there were currents here; there was a charge in the room, now. Something was happening. Rose took a step forward, pulled as she always was by that slow gravity of his.
"Think about it. An entire race that knows it's superior-- and, in a lot of ways, is probably right. They did a lot of good, but they also did a lot of damage, by inaction especially. The crises they could have solved, if they hadn't assumed they were too powerful to be allowed to interfere with the rest of the world... So insular, so self-preoccupied. And crap taste in politicians to boot. But they did some amazing things, on the rare occasions when they could be bothered..."
There was something beautiful in his mind, judging by the look on his face; she was entranced by it. What could she say? He was entrancing. That intensity of his, that gravity she could always feel tugging at her heart...
...Like anything around the sun... He wanted her in orbit, didn't he? Wanted her at some safe, stable distance, for both their sakes. But there was no such thing. The cold was just as dangerous at the heat, and she wanted to change her trajectory.
(Even if his eyes were turning toward that dark place again, that look that always made her wonder if maybe it wasn't a wise precaution-- if things that got too close to the sun burned...)
"More than a little mad, really..." he said. Rose couldn't help wondering for a moment if he was referring to the planet, himself, or her.
"What was it called?" she asked, softly.
"Gallifrey," he answered.
"You said that was your planet."
He nodded.
"But... what was dangerous about it?"
He rolled his eyes. "Let me try to count! They had a habit of greeting my arrival with armed guards... They had no problem whatsoever with erasing my companions' memories and putting them 'back where they belonged'... They never could quite figure out whether they wanted me President or dead... Though they did elect me President more often than they quasi-executed me, that might be a clue..."
"Hang on-- they made you President? You? Did it mean the same thing?"
"I said they had crap taste in politicians, didn't I? I only ran for office in the first place because I didn't have a choice... And once they'd got the idea in their heads, well, it proved diabolically pernicious..."
"So, they're dangerous because they kept making you President?" Rose grinned.
"And putting me on trial for capital offences. Generally in close temporal proximity. Or else sending me out on missions they didn't want to dirty their hands with. Actually being out, mucking about in the universe-- it was inconceivable to them." He shook his head. "I didn't even like them, Rose. Most of the time, too many of the people-- I ran away from that place every chance I got. Never stopped running. Rose, I didn't even like them very much. And now they're gone."
His hands were shaking; she caught her breath. This was his great secret, wasn't it? This was one of those weights you could almost see sometimes on his back.
"Yeah..." said Rose. "I think maybe everyone feels like that."
"What?"
"I mean, you've met my mum, yeah? She can drive me absolutely mad sometimes, worse than maybe anyone else in the world. But I still love her. But, that doesn't mean I want to go home." She grimaced. "Or, answer her calls. I love her though, really."
"Yeah," he said, quietly. "That's the way of things, isn't it?"
She nodded, just a little, trying to coax him out of it and knowing it was a delicate operation.
"Earth survived. Earth didn't get a scratch. Isn't it strange... just a little bit ironic… In the Alanis Morrisette sense, mind you, not the pedantic literary version... Isn't it quite a coincidence that I could save the planet I cared about, while the one I'd always hated burned?"
"So, the whole War thing revolved around you, did it? You certainly don't think much of yourself."
"I pulled the trigger, Rose," he said. "I was the one who was supposed to come up with some clever way around it, but I failed. That doesn't happen to me often."
Rose had crashed a few pity-parties in her time, and had learned logic didn't usually figure in. If you tried it, it'd just bounce off some invisible shield and on the misery would go, in its impenetrable little spiral, unless you could find something jarring enough to throw it entirely off track. There were a few proven methods; the one that came to mind wasn't exactly subtle, but faced with a nine-hundred-year-old alien brooding over interplanetary war, Rose figured drastic measures were necessary.
So she took three steps forward, lifted his chin so he'd stop staring into the engine, and as soon as he shot a startled look her way, pressed her lips to his.
She wouldn't've been surprised if he'd jumped away, but he didn't; he stood there, frozen, for a good three breaths-- a golden opportunity and she took it, willing to press her luck. When would she get another chance?
So she pressed forward one more time and the walls came tumbling down; an arm wrapped around her waist and a hand came to stroke through her hair, and apparently he had been doing something all those years besides running from aliens and inventing inscrutable screwdrivers, who'd've guessed? Though, god, yeah, passion would make up for almost anything, and the desperation she thought she tasted at the root of it...
And then he pulled back; she'd half been expecting to have to convince him, to have to back-pedal, make excuses, listen to the old litany of "this was a mistake" and "it's a bad idea" and maybe even (though she wouldn't expect such a cliché from him, people did stranger things under stress) "it's not you, it's me". That last one would be true, actually, but he wasn't doing any of those things. His arms were still warm around her and she could hear his breaths, deep, slightly ragged, but even.
"The things I love..." he said, in a voice so quiet she wasn't sure she'd have heard it if she'd been an inch further away. “Don't really tend to..."
The word "love" nearly robbed Rose of coherent thought; she barely remembered that there'd been something she'd wanted to say, and it took her several moments to begin to remember what it had been. "Don't," she said.
"Rose--"
"It's not your fault and you know it. I don't know why you want it to be so much, but it wasn't. You couldn't. I believe in you."
That didn't seem to help much at first; she could feel how his hands had clenched, but she just kept looking at him, as even and sober as she could, because she meant this. She knew him. Well, that might be going a little far, but she knew that much about him, and she knew it for a fact. She knew he was a good person, was beginning to suspect that didn't make him any less dangerous, but she trusted him: she couldn't not trust him, she was pretty sure, even if she tried. And maybe he trusted her a little too, because, ever so slowly, she could feel him relax.
There wasn't anything in his past she could fix, she knew, as she pulled him close to kiss him again. Might be precious little in his past she could even expect to ever know about; all that time, and given what his life seemed to be like day-to-day, she wasn't sure a full biography of him would take less than her lifetime.
She couldn't fix his past, but she could brighten up his present, and who knew? Maybe she could fix his future, too.
And if he tried to push her away again, into some respectable orbit, come some colder morning when he "came back to his senses", he'd find she wasn't so easy to dislodge: she wouldn't stand for being told that this was dangerous, too much for her, too little for her. If she did get burned by it, it was only because he was on fire himself, and she had no intention of letting him burn alone.
The kiss was like fire, and she threw herself in.
-