Fic - "Fate" (1/1)
Title: Fate
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Ten, Rose, TenII
Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me
Summary: Fate takes us to the strangest places.
Helping is his instinct, his nature. An automatic reaction.
It's not until after he's pulled her from the burning car wreckage, then, that he pauses long enough to realise who she is.
And by then it's too late.
--
Shouldn't be here shouldn't be here should be here he thinks as they load her onto the ambulance. He hangs reluctantly back, shifting his weight from foot to foot, not wanting to be seen, unsure of the protocol here - aren't only close relatives allowed to travel alongside the patient?
He leans forward, tries to tell them her name, tries to tell them a quicker way to save her life. He doesn't get very far. “She's - ”
A paramedic smiles at him kindly, awkwardly fitting an oxygen mask to her blood-streaked face with one hand while his other fiddles with something on the roof. “It's OK, sir. We know who you are.”
Spared repeating her name, he hops up beside her and exhales shakily. He's not sure he could have said it like it's normal, not after all this time.
--
“Said the car 'sploded,” she mumbles fitfully, eyes not quite open, fingers clutching his (they are too cold, but she does not notice) at once too hard, then too loose, as she flits closer to and further away from this world. “New. Sorry - Dad's, new. Tell him, yeah?”
“Yeah,” he replies softly when her fingers curl around his, tugging his hand for a response.
“Sorry, sorry...”
For a moment, he thinks she is lost again - perhaps for longer, this time. But she's a fighter, he's always known that, and he underestimates her.
Her eyes flicker open again, clear just for a moment below the matted red streaks in her golden hair.
“Stay.”
Shouldn't be here shouldn't be here shouldn't.
She doesn't have to ask twice.
--
Once they've cleaned her up, his frantic hearts slow a little. Without the blood smears and smoke marks, he can look at her and promise himself she'll be alright.
He's never trusted his own promises much. They don't have a great track record.
Shouldn't be here shouldn't be here.
But what if he wasn't?
--
“Sir, can we have a word?”
The words are stable and sleeping and quickly regained consciousness. There is a lot of blood. One very lucky. Another if. He doesn't tell the nurse that he cauterised the worst of her wounds with his sonic screwdriver in the ambulance when the paramedic wasn't looking.
He spends the entire conversation peering at her through the gaps in the blinds, one ear carefully trained on her room, the other taking in what the nurse says (even though he knows it all by now already - what does she think he's been doing there, ignoring their backwards little monitors and beeps and gages? He's no amateur). And why not? This woman only need half his attention.
“...more and we'd have been worried about potential brain damage, but we've run a couple of scans and the baby's going to be just fine. We'll be monitoring them both carefully, though, of course, and - ”
If she says anything else, it's drowned out by the buzzing in his ears. Almost like moments in films when all but the background sound dies out - except he's not hearing carefully arranged piano music, he's hearing alarm bells.
Biting her lip, the nurse turns her head slightly and raises an eyebrow. “You... did know she was pregnant, didn't you, sir? Sir?”
The sounds, when they come, feel as remote and unconnected to him as words from another person. “What? Yes. Yes, of course."
Did he say that?
She smiles at him, a little coyly. “We'll keep it quiet until she's ready to tell the public, of course, but there's obviously a lot of press interest. It's not every day you get a Tyler choosing public healthcare. Nothing we can do about the cameras, I'm afraid. You understand.”
He finds himself rubbing his chin. Living someone else's life, just for a second. A brief memory of flashbulbs going off as he pulled her from that car, not understanding until now.
There's a moment of silence. He thinks he nods. Seconds click by. Elsewhere in the hospital, a baby is born. A man stops breathing.
Inside the room, she sleeps on, undisturbed.
The one adventure I can never have.
And, looking at her through the slats in the blind, his front falling as the nurse steps away, he finally feels like he's back in his own skin.
Her family - his, once? - has been contacted. He can't stay. Any minute now...
It's been so long since he held her hand.
--
Perhaps twenty seconds after he has left her room, coat snapping round the door frame behind him, he hears the unmistakable sound of Converse hurrying down a corridor that echoes.
There are no words in any of the languages he knows (and he knows a lot) to sum up how it feels to watch a worthier, angrier, differently broken version of himself brush his fingertips over the sleeping girl's stomach - to be able to see every possible happy future between them even without using his Time Lord brain.
Was this what he'd meant when he'd told her she'd made him better, that now she could do the same for him? What Donna had been referring to when she'd asked if they knew what they were being given?
He's not sure.
The other man takes a seat on the edge of the bed and leans down to kiss her - not shy, not urgent, but a kiss of lovers long-practised. They are both used to this, and he doesn't think he can watch it a second time.
He's getting wrinkles.
Shouldn't be here.
--
On his way out, he catches sight of a newspaper - March, 2013. Almost five years since he left her here.
Is he glad (or bitter, or jealous, or disappointed) that it took them (only, a whole) five years to move on, to carve a life of their own?
A nurse tugs him aside and lets him out the work entrance, telling him with a knowing wink that the papers are out front and won't expect to find him leaving this way. He wonders briefly how his other self deals with the lack of anonymity - wonders if it matters, if he is no longer saving the world every day.
Or is he?
“...always liked you,” the nurse is saying, as her friend comes along and helps usher him down the corridor away from the sound of clicking cameras and jostling notebooks by the front door. “Haven't we, Lisa?”
Lisa is a redhead. He's surprised there's room for that to sting, too, but it does.
“Oh yeah,” she says - thankfully, in a Liverpudlian accent. “She deserves some happiness, that girl. Funny childhood. Works too hard. But you'll know that.” Lisa-the-Liverpudlian-nurse beams up at him and points a stern finger at him, mockingly. “You keep looking after her, mister. Er, sir.”
Strange, how everyone's politer here.
“Are you two gettin' married, like the paper said?” the one who is not Lisa asks.
Politer, and nosier.
No ring, he remembers. No ring. And if a human's life with Rose Tyler is anything like a Time Lord's life with her, there never will be.
They don't need rings.
The nurse looks up at his stony face with something like guilt masking her curiosity. “...Sorry, that was inappropriate.”
“Yes, it bloody was,” Lisa chimes in. “Are you, though?”
He thanks them for their kindness, he thinks, and disappears into the night before they can realise he's already at their patient's bedside.
Her blood lies in the creases of his fingertips
Should never have been here.
But he's glad he was.
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