Follow This Burning Path
Written for then_theres_us challenge 75. Sequel to Synapses Burning.
"Rose! You've got a press briefing in five," her assistant says over the celebratory tittering filling the bullpen. Always something, she thinks. And she's almost gotten away, too.
"Marie, Jake's off duty. Make him do it," she replies distractedly as a passing intern hands her a glass of champagne. "Besides, I've got orders to lock myself in my office tonight."
Marie raises a brow. "By whom?"
Rose Tyler grips the doorknob to her office. Throwing a grin over her shoulder, she says simply, "a doctor."
And slips inside.
One could say: "The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary." The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.
He liked to lend her books. Specifically books on astronomy and theoretical physics, books that made her head spin and her heart pound because they were that exciting, that honest and hopeful. And the pages, worn and weathered by years, smelled like him, all cinnamon and overwhelming wisdom and the fleeting touch of rose water.
She wondered if he'd been to India. She wondered if he'd take her there.
That night (or rather, three in the morning, but it was dark outside of her dingy flat's window, so for all intents and purposes, let's call it night) it was A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. She'd been hesitant, but the Doctor had promised her that actually, it held in its depths such dizzying pleasure, and besides, it's Stephen Hawking, and she simply couldn't not read Stephen Hawking.
The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.
He'd had that gleam in his eyes again. He'd practically been vibrating in his seat, feet propped up on his messy blue desk (he wore white Chucks, even with that blue suit he'd taken to wearing since he joined the University staff.)
Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe.
It wasn't until Rose reached the twelfth chapter that she realized she had that damn thesis to work on, but couldn't she finish this page first?
Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
She bet he knew the answer. Perhaps she'd ask him in the morning.
The lock clicks. He hesitates. She doesn't.
"Why did you follow me here?" The question lilts over her curved lips.
She's been meaning to ask for a long, long time.
"I reject the premise that I followed you here."
The clock ticks steadily behind them, engulfing them, seducing them.
"What, so we're just destined to keep on meetin' in cluttered offices with blue sofas, yeah? The clinic, all those years ago, and then the University, and then Arizona, Cambridge and now this?"
A moment of silence, punctured only by his shallow breathing and her roaring blood. She steps closer to him, reaching out a hand to caress those gorgeous freckles lining his jaw. She wants to trace them with her tongue.
"Is that truly so hard to believe, Rose?" he whispers, his voice catching as if he is in pain, and for a second, she thinks he might be.
No, her mind replies as he stiffens beneath her touch when she moves to grasp his face with her pleading fingertips. "Tell me why you left the clinic."
He smiles sadly. "He freed all my birds."
"Oh." She nearly cries.
They arrived at Kitt Peak in Arizona within days of one another. She raised a brow upon seeing him dressed in his brown pinstripes and a white coat, but when he grinned at her with what must have been genuine surprise, she couldn't help but giggle and jump into his outstretched arms.
"What're you doin' here, Doctor?" she'd asked, tongue peeking from behind her teeth.
He winked. "Apparently, keeping an eye on the skies with my new assistant."
Once, when she was tired and hungry, he showed her the stars and named them for her, lips warm against her young ears. At the Observatory, Rose captured the stars in his eyes and pasted them across the sky, and when they settled and dried above her, she saw them, all raw and imperfect and devastatingly handsome.
She thought she might have fallen in love with them before she caught herself gasping his name while she touched herself one night in her bath.
It burns, she told herself as she came. And then his face, in her mind's eye, in the bursting bubbles popping over her slippery knees, later, in the telescope when she studied Orion, in her dreams. Everywhere.
Oh, how it burns.
His eyes darken as she weaves her fingers over the shells of his ears and into his messy hair. She thinks she catches the spark of a star in them, maybe Polaris. Yes, of course it's Polaris. Her guiding star.
He's been leading her to safety for years. To her glory days. "Tell me something magnificent, Doctor."
"But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive, and, constant stars, in them I read such art," he murmurs into her blonde waves as they tumble toward his cheeks. Her brow jumps into her forehead.
"What, do you have a doctorate in Shakespearean literature, too?"
His lips quirk. "Just a hobby."
"Like astrophysics?"
She feels his hot breath on her neck as he chuckles. "With less schooling, perhaps."
"I see," she replies, glancing at the ceiling as if in deep thought, and he runs a callused hand down the length of her arm. Hairs twitch into life beneath his touch. "You were the bloke in high school who never got laid, weren't you?" she teases as he swallows, and she licks her lips while eying his Adam's apple.
He snorts. "Hardly. I had a car."
"If it was the one you drove when we were in Cambridge, that's not saying much."
"I told you, it needed servicing that night!" he argues with a defensive frown.
Rolling her eyes, she sighs. "Someday, you'll need to let it go, Doctor."
But what she doesn't say is that she loves his quirky little shit of a car, even with its rusting blue paint and squeaky brakes.
When he accepted a job at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, she almost expected him to ask her to join him. But he didn't, and as he said his goodbyes to the crew, she had to work a little harder to hide her tears.
He took her aside afterwards and pulled her into a rough embrace. "Rose Tyler, you've been brilliant. You're flourishing here. And we work so very well together, you and me, and it's difficult to leave you behind after everything because I feel like we're just getting started on all of the things we could possibly do. And I feel so unbelievably selfish for asking, but will you come--"
"Yes."
They both laughed at her eagerness.
"Do you remember that night at that club when we almost--"
"Of course I do," he sighs. "You were pissed out of your mind, I had just broken up with Reinette, it was only natural for us to... well, you know. Dance."
Rose smirks when he reaches out a tentative hand to stroke her collarbone. "Dancing in a club. That is only natural. So what stopped us?" she asks softly as she rests her cheek against the crook of his neck.
His breath hitches. "I-I think it was reason. Reason, and uh... discipline." He lets out a nervous sort of giggle. "Can't have inter-faculty affairs, can we? It'd be wrong, yes, very wrong and honestly unfair to you, considering that you could hardly keep your eyes open and--ah, Rose?"
"Mmmyes?" She lifts her head from his shoulder, where she had been pressing soft kisses, and grins.
"You were..."
"Yeah."
"Well."
She drops a hand down past his chest and lazily pops a button out of its hole. "Whoops," she mumbles up at him.
"Rose," he gasps as she crawls her fingers up his abdomen.
Another button comes undone. Pop. Pop. Pop.
"Oh, you have to stop," he groans when Rose nips his jaw.
She stills. "Why?"
"Because it-it's just not right!"
Something snaps inside of her, and her eyes sting. Reaching back up for his face, she stares with wet eyes into his own, imploring, searching. And she finds his need, his aching miserable need, and all of the pain, so much pain for a man in his thirties, simply too much. "How is this anything but right?" she pleads.
And there it is, the walls beginning to crumble. A pink tongue darting out the side of his mouth. The resolve in his irises. The arousal.
A lotus blossoming, opening to the heavens.
An ending.
"I see you're getting lots of offers."
"Yes, I am."
A half-hearted smile. "So, what are you thinking, then? NASA? I know the IAU showed interest, and didn't Harvard call you?"
"Do you think I should go?"
Silence, and then--
"Do you want to go?"
"I don't know."
"I mean, the Mars Institute, Rose."
"I know."
Tension coiled inside their chests. A phone rang.
"Do you want me to leave, Doctor?"
"I want you to be brilliant, with or without me."
"...Yeah."
A beginning.
He captures her lips with his, and (looking back, she's not quite sure how or when, but sod the details) she ends up on her desk, stockings ripped unceremoniously from her thighs and those expensive heels she bought yesterday tossed across the room and her dress hiked up and lacy knickers shoved out of the way and legs tangled around his waist. One finger, then two, then three, and oh, she whimpers for him, only for him, and his lips drift down to her breasts, covered still by that blasted dress, and she wishes he'd make it disappear, because he's a magician and in his hands, she's a white rabbit.
Manicured hands struggle with his trousers' zipper and he laughs against her mouth while helping her free him from his cotton/polyester-blend prison.
They exchange a glance, a gaze that says everything they don't know the words for, and then it all slows to a halt as she guides him into her, and it's all warm and new and somehow so timeless, and her mouth falls open as she wraps her arms around his shoulders, and she's tight around him and fuck, she loves this man with the stars in his eyes.
He moans into her chest as their rhythm quickens and hits a spot that sends her spiraling into another dimension, whirling through a universe that tastes and smells different than she's ever known. She shudders and tightens around him, and he follows her, like he always has, like he always will, and well, this must be what home feels like.
There is clarity so bright that it blinds them. Two hearts beat out a wild, feral dance in unison.
"Stay with me," he begs as he brushes his lips against her trembling temple.
"Forever."