Play It As It Lays
She was laughing in what was, quite frankly, a worrying manner.
After the TARDIS had blustered off, she’d grabbed him again, one hand still in his, the other curled into the neck of his shirt. His free hand had skimmed its way up her back and into her hair while his paltry heart lub-dubbed inside his chest.
Their second kiss had been, he thought, going rather well. She’d made a low noise against his tongue, a low noise he wanted to hear again. Regularly. But even as a newly minted human, he was almost certain that kisses-good kisses, kisses that boded well-were not usually interrupted by one of the participants bonelessly dropping to her knees in the grips of a fairly hysterical fit of laughter.
She leaned against his shin, her fingers fiddling with the laces of one trainer.
“Rose?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I really, really am.” She wiped her eyes, looked up at him, and started laughing again. “I don’t know,” she said with a hiccup, “what’s come over me. Shit. It’s not funny. It really, really, really isn’t funny.”
He knelt down next to her. She pulled a serious face, her lips tight, pressing back another laugh.
“You,” she said, “grew from a hand.”
He held it out, flipped it over, and examined it.
“Bit like a salamander,” he said, and wiggled his fingers.
She lost it again, doubled over, her forehead nearly hitting the sand.
“You’re wearing red shoes,” she choked out, tapping the rubber toe of one. “You’ve never worn red shoes before.”
“Oh, Rose Tyler,” he said. “I like it when you laugh.”
In the Beginning:
Where the Powell Estate should have been, with its switchback staircases and beige walls that blocked out the watery sun, there was a car park.
The day Rose first worked it out, stalking south London with a map, she ended up wandering the five levels for hours. It smelled of exhaust and damp rubbish bins that needed emptying. She watched the sun set from the roof, shivering, the sleeves of her jacket pulled down over her hands.
Henrik’s was where it was supposed to be, but this version had never exploded.
She became obsessed with finding out if a Doctor existed in this universe. If he did, he wouldn’t know her, because this universe’s Rose Tyler was a Yorkshire terrier. Well, besides, she probably wouldn’t know him, either. Could be a different face, could be a different TARDIS. She listened, everywhere, for its sound. She was afraid to forget that sound.
He could be dead. Actually, permanently dead. Burned with his planet and his people. Or maybe he was a dog here, too. Were there dogs on Gallifrey?
She found Sarah Jane Smith, who was married to a lovely man named Dave, and who was very sweet to Rose, even though she clearly thought Rose was mad. “I’m sorry, but what doctor?” she asked kindly. “Forget it. Sorry,” Rose said. “Sorry.”
She walked the streets.
Even Torchwood people thought her a bit spare. The girl from another dimension, the girl who drank black coffee and didn’t sleep, who only worked, the girl with sad eyes, the girl who wanted to know if there was a place called Gallifrey, who wanted to see the Torchwood Charter for herself. The girl who wanted to fix up a giant seam-ripper and find her way back to a man called the Doctor.
“No offense,” she said.
“I’d rather die trying to get back there than stay here forever. No offense. Now will somebody get me the measurements for the refractory beam?”
Day 1
Her bed was unmade.
It was unmade because she never made her bed (“only gonna sleep in it again, yeah?”), and it immediately heartened him to find that some things, little things, didn’t change, even in another universe.
Above the bed was a map.
A straight pin with a piece of black tape flagged to the end was stuck in Cardiff. “RIFT DISTURBANCE 16/10/07” was written next to it. Apparently other things didn’t change, either.
Across the whole of Europe, there were pins and notes and drawings, things scratched out and highlighted and starred.
“Come here,” she’d said after they’d entered the flat and she clunked the lock and tossed her keys on a table next to the door. He followed the leader into her bedroom.
“Take off your shoes.”
They sat next to each other, not talking, as they unlaced and unzipped their shoes. In their stocking feet, standing on the squishy mattress, Rose read the map to him, her hand ghosting over it.
There was a virus of extraterrestrial origin that had been introduced into the roots of trees in Amsterdam. Wreckage from a Malkalbb transporter ship floating down on Moscow. Small, fuzzy insects with three heads and a taste for human flesh in Edinburgh. Just outside Paris, she’d used her gun for the first time, shooting a shapeshifter between the eyes. He’d looked like a human as he held his hands up and trembled, but his body shrunk back to its true form as its blood pooled and Rose threw up in some bushes.
And.
Her finger landed on Darlig Ulv Stranden and paused, rubbing across the paper where the land met the sea. BAD WOLF BAY was written next to it in capital letters.
Day 1
That first night, he woke on the couch to find her sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at him.
“Hello,” he said, his voice cracking with sleep in an unfamiliar way.
She scrunched her fingers up in a wave, then burst into tears.
“Oh,” he said, bewildered. “Sorry. Sorry.”
She crawled up onto the couch and wormed her arms around him.
He’d come to this universe as she had, with nothing but the clothes on his back. Well, no: he had a hand to hold. He was still wearing his t-shirt and his trousers and his bare feet were dangling over the end of the couch.
His grasp of non-verbal Earth human was fair to middling on his best day. But he thought what she probably meant was something like: I love you, I missed you, I hate you, and I can’t look at your face right now because this, well, this is sorta fucked up.
She used her toes to pull the quilt down over his bare feet and cried herself to sleep as he rubbed her back.
Day 2
Jackie, bless her, had done practical things. Came bearing clothes and pants and socks. Several toothbrushes. “Wasn’t sure if you’d want soft or medium or what,” she said. “So I got ‘em all. Easier to face all this with clean teeth.”
She told him Pete was taking care of everything else.
“What everything else?” he said, rubbing his neck.
“Oh, you know,” she said, waving her hand around, “IDs, papers, bank accounts, that sort of thing.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Course you hadn’t.”
People who died within reasonable time frames were required to fill out an outrageous amount of paperwork. They were required to carry cards, certificates, proof. The whole world, apparently, must be continually convinced. A human who went around announcing, “I’m the Doctor! No, just ‘the Doctor’,” would, at best, be subjected to shifty sideways glances and rolled eyes.
And it’s not that he would’ve nicked it, exactly, but he found himself wishing that the psychic paper had somehow found its way into a pocket.
“I’ll tell you what, though,” said Jackie, putting the kettle on, “strange as it all is, and I know, believe me, I know, it’s strange, but there are perks.”
She dug into her purse and fished out a driving license, holding it up to him.
“Look at that photo,” she said. “Best one I ever had. Look at that! Only took six tries. And no waiting, either! Pete doesn’t do queues.”
She admired it for a moment and slipped it back in her purse. She slung the bag onto the counter, took the whistling kettle off, and poured them each a cup.
“Sit,” she said. The Doctor did.
Much as Jackie Tyler had always driven him up a wall, he listened to her now. He reasoned that perhaps his defenses were down, a combination of the human stuff bouncing around inside him and the fact that she’d brought him clean things to wear. She was, she told him, something of an expert on this sort of thing, “this sort of thing” apparently being relationships involving doppelgangers. She had a future as a very specific sort of advice columnist.
“Oh, it’s all a bit mental, but I don’t see what the fuss is about, honestly!” she said. “And really, you two shouldn’t be complaining. You got all the same memories as that one,” she jabbed her thumb, as if the alternate universe were just behind the microwave, “so what’s the problem? I got a Pete Tyler with the same name and the same hairline. Love him to death, mind, but let me tell you, that’s about where the similarities end.”
When she’d finished, she rinsed their mugs, told him he needed to meet Tony, asked if he’d be wearing a ridiculous coat this time around, and left.
Day 4
Rose handed him a beat-up journal with “Property of Torchwood” stamped on the front. “Rose Tyler” was written hastily inside the cover. She sat down across from him.
The first six pages were filled with her account of what happened at Canary Wharf. A chunk was torn out in the middle, the shredded ends hanging on at the binding. He didn’t ask what was missing.
Next came notes and observations about Bad Wolf Bay.
“They wanted me to tell them all about the TARDIS,” she said.
“What did you tell them?”
“What do you think I told them?” Her tongue peeked out at the corner of her mouth.
It wasn’t even that she was worried about what they’d do with the knowledge. TARDISes were grown, he’d told her that, it wasn’t something the engineers could mock up with wires and circuits, just siphon off some Time Vortex and start swirling around this universe. She wasn’t sure how, exactly, one went about growing a TARDIS. Had there been groves of baby TARDISes on his planet, rows and rows of little saplings? How did you know when they were ripe? Doctor, Doctor, quite contrary, how does your TARDIS grow?
And anyway, it was private. It was his. It would’ve been like writing down your best mate’s biggest secret and handing it over, just because someone had asked. She tucked it away, its sound, the spindly golden glow of the console room, the sheer impossibility of its very existence.
There’d been a whiteboard in one of the labs with T-A-R-D-I-S written vertically. It was a running challenge: decipher the acronym.
After Bad Wolf Bay, there were dated entries for Torchwood missions, starting out small and simple, but as the months wore on, getting complex, sprawling, dangerous. There were strange stains on a few pages, and he sincerely hoped they weren’t blood.
Then the Dimension Cannon appeared.
Day 6
She cried the first time he wore a tie.
“This is getting ridiculous,” she said, blowing her nose loudly.
Day 7
When Rose sat down in the living room, the Doctor was carefully peeling a green apple, its shiny skin bouncing down in a single swirl.
“And what are those, then?”
“What?”
“Those.” He pointed with his paring knife.
“They’re glasses.” She pushed them up on her nose and looked back down at the thick report on her lap self-consciously.
“We match!” he crowed, positively delighted.
“We do not.”
“Oh, yes! We most certainly do.”
“It’s just so I don’t squint when I’m reading, okay? It’s no big deal.”
“You can tell yourself that if it helps you sleep at night, but we most certainly match, Rose.”
He’d gotten his new pair the day before, finally deciding on a frame after standing in front of a mirror for thirty minutes and experimentally taking each pair out of his pocket and slipping them on, and then checking to see how they stood up to being whipped off for dramatic effect.
Rose had resisted (vanity, she knew) when the Torchwood doctor suggested glasses, stubbornly telling him to let her rattle off the string of shrinking letters on the chart just one more time.
But apart from the fact that she was now able to read even the smallest footnotes without pulling the page closer to her face, she found that she quite liked them. Traveling with the Doctor had made her more confident, and she’d always been a bit bossy, but it still hadn’t quite prepared her for Torchwood. Pulling out her glasses, slipping them on-it was a security blanket. She didn’t wear them all the time, but especially at first, they made her feel Doctor-ish. In charge. Less worried that someone was going to demand a CV. References available on request, she thought. Don’t forget the appropriate universe code when dialing.
“Well, I like them. I told Dorothy Parker she was wrong, plenty of men are happy to make passes at girls who wear glasses, but she wouldn’t listen.” He made a drinky-drinky motion with his hand.
She bit back a smile, reading the same sentence a fourth time.
Day 11
“This is good. Oh, Rose, this is really good.”
She’d brought the blueprints for the Dimension Cannon home from work, at his request, and the Doctor had spread them across the living room floor, shoving the coffee table to the side. He crouched over them, muttering calculations to himself.
He leaned back on his heels and looked up at her.
“I mean, I knew it would be good, because it worked, but this, this-Rose Tyler, you’ve outdone yourself.”
She was sitting on the couch, her arms crossed, her eyes down.
“Yeah. Well. I mean, I had help.” She felt suddenly embarrassed, because there it was, bald proof: this was how much she’d missed him. Him. Him, me, us, them. Him. Her Doctor. She hated that he knew it, regretted bringing it to him, regretted letting him know exactly how gutted and desperate she’d been.
“I want you to see something,” he said.
“What?” She was instantly suspicious as he rolled up the paper and joined her on the couch.
“I want to show you want it was like. For me. And for him,” he added, as insurance.
She started to ask what he meant, when he slipped his hand into hers. Oh.
“Is that still going to work, you think?”
“Far as I know.” He seemed vaguely offended. “Well, unless the human bits get in the way. Don’t think they will, though. All right?”
She swallowed and nodded. As he brought his hands up to her head, she closed her eyes. Her heart jumped against her ribs.
“I’m not going to look inside you,” he said quietly. “Okay? It’s going to be from me to you, not from you to me.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded.
His fingers were cool and her pulse thumped.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” Her stomach heaved.
Her mouth went dry. She felt a barbed wire prick inside her veins; the ache at the base of her sternum felt like she’d had the wind knocked out of her, like she couldn’t catch her breath. It was hot behind her eyes, darkness with a bright edge, like looking directly at the sun.
She could still feel his thumbs, his real thumbs, rubbing circles on her temples.
She pushed his hands away, feeling their minds snap apart, and stumbled to the bathroom.
“Rose?”
She heard his cheek slide against the door.
“Rose?”
She slipped the lock and his head peeked around the corner.
“Are you okay? Maybe it was a mistake, maybe I shouldn’t have. I mean, I suppose it works, we know that now…”
He trailed off as she stared at him, blinking.
“What?”
“You missed me,” she said. It sounded like an accusation.
“What?”
“You missed me. I knew, I guess. I thought probably you did. I hoped.” She chewed at her thumbnail, worrying the edge of the rug with her foot. “Some days, bad days, I’d think that I’d find my way back to you and you’d look at me and say, ‘Rose who?’”
She smiled wanly and looked at the floor.
“You didn’t really think that.”
“I really did,” she said conspiratorially, tears edging her words.
She waited a moment, considering, then spoke. “Would it be okay-? I mean, if you wanted- I could show you. I could show you, too.”
She took his hands and lifted them, slowly.
“Rose.” His voice was serious, a warning.
“Doctor,” she echoed.
He held his arms stiff, resisting, floating their hands midair. She tugged gently, twice, and he let her take his fingers and place them, again, at her head.
“Please let me show you. I want to.”
“Okay,” he said.
She looped her hands around his wrists and said, “Whenever you’re ready,” before closing her eyes.
Human brains were messy places, as he was already finding out, first hand. It was a sort of total cultural immersion, this whole “being part-human” thing. He had to concentrate harder to keep everything he knew filed properly.
Rose’s brain, as she thought about her time without him, felt simultaneously like being chased through the dark by the worst thing that had ever chased him (and he’d been chased by a lot of things), twigs snapping and lashing his shins raw, and like being trapped in a windowless, door-less room. Moving and never getting anywhere, reaching out, only to have your arms drop like rocks through thin air.
He pulled his hands away.
“I missed you, too,” she said.
Day 15
“What about Donna?” Rose said.
She’d immediately liked Donna Noble, from the very first time she dropped into her life. She’d been working up the courage to ask him this since that day on the beach.
“Cause I was thinking,” she forged ahead bravely, “I mean, you’re a Time Lord, mostly, at the bottom. Your brain. So you could handle it, yeah, laying human over that. But…a human brain, Doctor, the thing is…it couldn’t do that, could it? Not for very long. A human brain. It would just…burn. Wouldn’t it.”
“Yes,” was all he said.
She stepped forward and hugged him, tightly. “I’m sorry.” She hoped that there was a link, a tiny link, that the Doctor, the other Doctor, could feel this too, could feel this just for a minute. That he could forgive himself.
“Everything has a cost, Rose,” he said into the top of her head.
“I’m so, so sorry,” she murmured into his chest.
He pulled back and looked at her, his eyes dark and soft and sad.
“She’s alive, I think, and I used to believe that was enough. Maybe he still does. He’s lying to himself. I lied to myself. When you were gone, I smiled and I told people you were alive, happy, fine. Of course, it’s no small thing, being alive, but-”
He shrugged, palms upward.
“Donna Noble,” she said, her voice unsteady, “is going to manage to be brilliant, no matter what.”
“You really believe that?”
“The thing is, Doctor,” she said as she straightened his tie, “you seem to have a knack for picking up women who manage to do the impossible.”
The lashes of his downcast eyes were dark against his pale skin.
“Picking up? You make it sound so sordid.”
She gave his tie a pull.
“Well, you say impossible. Martha Jones walked the Earth,” he said. “And I seem to recall you doing a thing or two that might be construed as slightly impressive by some.”
“See? And Donna’s already saved all of creation. So this? Minor setback.”
They weren’t sure if this were true. But they wanted it to be, desperately, and so they smiled firmly and the Doctor took her head in his hands and they kissed. Everything has a cost.
Day 20
Their lips were red wine-stained and the clock ticked later into the night and Rose was waving her glass around dangerously, bare feet stretching across the sofa, poking at his legs.
“All I’m saying is it’s a little odd. Maybe a tiny bit self-obsessed. Flying around with your own hand in a jar and all.”
“Well, Jack’s the one who put it in a jar. And it wasn’t really a jar. It was more of a preservative hydro-container. You make it sound like he finished the jam, rinsed it out, and stuck a hand in there.”
He took her glass out of her hand before she could spill anything and finished it in a gulp.
“Oh my God.”
“Sorry, was that rude? There’s more in the kitchen.”
“No! Not the-I didn’t mean-” She hopped up on her knees. “It’s just, is that supposed to sound less mental or what? That’s even worse! Jack had your hand! I mean, how did he even-?”
She covered her face.
“Okay, I’ve got this picture in my head now, and it’s never gonna leave, thank you very much, of Captain Jack Harkness, like, running around under the Sycorax ship, like a baseball player or something, catching your hand. And putting it in a jar. In a jar. Can I say that again? He saved your hand in a jar.”
“Oi, lucky he did, too!”
“Yep. Lucky he did.”
Day 27
In a hallway at Torchwood, after another meeting in which the Doctor patiently answered questions from a seemingly never-ending list that they were slowly making their way through, Rose dragged him into a dim corner. She breathed into his ear, her fingers finding the hollow of his spine, “You know, Doctor, if it’s alien, it’s ours.” He slid a warm hand under her jumper and she stood on her toes to carefully lick the side of his neck. But they heard voices approaching and they quickly untangled themselves, straightening clothing and wiping lipstick from where it shouldn’t have been. Namely, the Doctor.
At the flat, their kisses were less ravenous, less eager, because it was, paradoxically, less safe. Groping in the back garden at Pete and Jackie’s, or behind a pyramid of canned green beans at the supermarket, things couldn’t get easily out of hand. At least not without drawing the ire of security personnel. Or Jackie. But the flat was silent and still. The door was locked and it was just them. There was a bed, and a couch, and any number of other flat surfaces that managed to be both terrifying and irresistible.
After dinner, Rose was washing dishes. The Doctor ambled in, turned off the tap and took a plate out of her hands, setting it aside.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“A dangerous activity.” She flicked water from her fingers at him. “About?”
He ran his hands up her sides, his fingers fitting the grooves of her ribs and his thumbs brushing her breasts. She gripped his arms as he kissed her into an unsteady daze.
“That. I’ve been thinking about that. Well, I say that, but in truth, that might have only been a fraction of what I’ve been thinking about, but it’s a fairly decent preview of what I’ve been thinking about, if I do say so myself.”
“Really,” she said, leaning against the sink.
“Oh, really, most definitely.”
Her hands dripped dishwater on his shirt as they nervously splayed across his chest.
“My eyes are up here,” he said.
“Yep, getting there,” she replied.
He unfastened her earrings, one after the other, his finger and thumb rubbing her earlobes gently. She closed her eyes and felt his heart beat. He set the gold hoops on the counter, next to a soapy scrub brush and the half-washed plate.
She walked him backwards through the flat as they mostly succeeded in disregarding their height difference. It was getting dark, the sun was going down, and everything was in gray shadow. The horizon was a marmalade crust out the window, dirigibles propelling lazily westward. Their kisses were maddeningly slow.
As they bumped into the arm of the sofa, she yanked at the hem of his shirt, getting nowhere with an awkward angle.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to take your shirt off.”
“Oh, well. Who am I to stand in the way of such a thing?”
He pulled it off, threw it on the floor and grinned, his hands buzzing at her hips.
“That was quite wanton of me, wasn’t it, then? Right on the floor. Nothing to it.”
He wrapped his arms around her again, radiating skin warmth.
“It’s you,” she said, laughing. “It’s really, really you.”
“It’s really-” He kissed her, hands in her hair, tongue in her mouth. “Really-” And again. “Me.”
“Only naked,” she said solemnly.
“Wellll, almost naked.”
“For now.”
He whispered Gallifreyan into her mouth without the TARDIS to translate, that circular, scribbled language of his. It was better, she decided, than rendering him speechless, to hear his incoherent, frantic, lovely voice. And then, then to hear him pant “Rose,” as he caught his breath and regained his capacity to speak English. “Rose,” his single heart beating fast against her skin.
Day 35
The power was out. Rain lashed the windows, which were closed, after a spirited debate over which was worse, wet rugs or a stuffy room.
They’d planted three torches on the floor, sending beams of light up to the ceiling, and they were in various states of undress, whinging. It was, they agreed, hot. And it needed to be reiterated as frequently as possible. The Doctor had folded a discarded Torchwood memo into a makeshift fan.
“I would have stayed with you,” she said, drawing loops on his bare stomach with her finger, her head propped on her elbow. “At Canary Wharf. I would have stayed with you forever.”
“Forever meant different things for us then.”
She shrugged.
“I would have, though. Whatever forever meant.”
“I know.”
“But do you, Doctor?”
He pressed a hand over hers, holding it still.
“It scared me sometimes, Rose Tyler, the things I knew I’d do for you.”
Love made people stupid. It made them make bad choices, selfish choices. All over the world, every day, love made people do stupid, bad, selfish things. Always had, always would. Once, she’d found it slightly romantic, being his Achilles’ heel: “Rose Tyler or the world.”
“I like it when you say my name,” she said. “It sounds different than when anybody else says it.”
He leaned over her, his leg slipping between hers, sliding slowly against her. “Rose Tyler,” he said. “Rose Tyler.”
“It’s too hot in here for that,” she said unconvincingly, her breath quick.
“Well, maybe somebody should open a window,” he said to her temple.
“Is this how you’re planning to get your way for the rest of your life? You and your...” She exhaled as his fingers found the edge of her knickers. “You and your so-called charm?”
He leaned up on his elbow, a grin on his face.
“Oh, I was planning on it! That all right with you?”
She looked at him the way she did sometimes, like she was seeing him for the first time.
“How long you gonna stay with me, Doctor?”
“Forever.”
Day 42
He was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, watching her rub lotion onto her face.
“I think I’m having a midlife crisis,” she said, knitting her brows together briefly, then pressing them out.
“Oh, me, too,” he said.
“Shouldn’t that have happened about 500 years ago?”
“Or…” he calculated. “About three weeks ago. Although that would imply that this is the end of my life, which is disconcerting, to say the least.”
“Don’t say that.”
“You started it. This better not be the mid of your life, either, you know. Anyway! Maybe I should start moisturizing,” he said. “Keep that youthful glow.”
She squeezed a dot of lotion onto her finger and bent over him, drawing smooth lines across his forehead, his cheeks, a line down his nose.
“You don’t look a day over 625, Doctor.”
His hands rested on her hips and he pretended he wasn’t looking down her shirt.
“So,” he said.
“So.”
She capped the bottle and put it back in the medicine cabinet.
“I think I’m going to quit.”
He nodded.
“Then what?”
She hopped up on the counter, swinging her legs.
“Don’t know.”
He smiled, slowly, that grin of his. She bit her lip in response.
"‘Don’t know.’ I like ‘don’t know.’ I seem to remember ‘don’t know’ working quite well for the two of us. Still…”
He trailed off.
“Maybe,” she said, scratching the back of one leg with a pointed toe, “maybe it’ll be okay. A new adventure, yeah? Sort of, you know, taking the scenic route. No shortcuts.”
“I’m rather fond of shortcuts. Still. Think of what I might’ve missed! Of course, if I had missed anything, I could’ve gone back to see it. Except I wouldn’t have noticed I’d missed it in the first place. Except, well, I probably would have because-”
“Sorry, am I interrupting you two?”
He stood up, walked over to her, and put his hands on the sink, bracketing her legs. He saw his reflection behind her.
“No shortcuts,” he said. “The long way home.”
[series4, journey's end, ten ii/rose, pg-13]