New fic: Five And A Half Hours
Title: Five and a half hours
Pairing: Nine/Rose (no surprises there)
Content: Graphic Sex; Drama; Humour; Angst; Romance; Everything else you can think of
Rating: Adult for later chapters
Chapters: 10/10, although read through to the end.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not even close. In fact, this one has written itself.
Summary: Life didn't have a rewind button. There wasn't any going back. Unless...
Chapter 10: The Doctor in the fireplace
The Doctor gave Rose a long, careful stare. She was nervous as she watched his hands moving slowly over the panel, and nervous as the engine started its noisy rotation. By the time it ground to a halt she was terrified and as she saw him drop heavily into the jumpseat without even looking to see where they were ‘petrified with fright’ had taken over. Stomach churning, gut clenching sickness claimed her when she nudged the doors open, took a swift, confirmatory look at the slow-roasted spaceship outside and dissolved into a small puddle of fear. With this Doctor, you always had to be prepared for the shouting, it was just that she didn’t think she’d prepared enough. And in any case, it wasn’t the shouting so much that she was worried about - the disappointment she would see in his eyes, the loss of that pride in her when he realised she’d lied to him. Those things were far worse than a bit of volume. She wasn’t even sure what his saving the world plan would consist of either, and it was possible that it wouldn’t be too pleasant. All in all, all things considered, there were more than enough reasons to be scared.
Time pulled one of its patented slow motion sequences as she closed the doors, turned back to face the looming confrontation, began the thousand year trail of footsteps that would lead her to the truth. She passed the console, her eyes on the floor, and the TARDIS gave her a ‘serves you right’ look. For an inanimate object with no expression whatsoever, the ship still managed to convey exactly what it was thinking, and it was thinking mostly ‘smug’.
Time had hunted her down, and she was cornered. Inevitable, really, when you travelled inside a box.
The Doctor wasn’t looking at her, he was biting his thumbnail, giving it the benefit of his rapt attention. She took a seat beside him, along with a very deep breath, and forced her eyes up to an approximation of where his face would be when he realised what she was saying and started in with the yelling.
He swivelled an eye towards her while she was still debating where to start. ‘Well?’
His voice fell heavy into the silence, sending ripples of tension washing across the room. He didn’t sound the slightest bit curious, she thought, just resigned, and calm, and very, very familiar. This was the voice that whispered her name in the empty stillness of the night, reassuring and warm. This was the voice that cried out to her, throaty with need, begging for release. This voice said ‘I love you’ and made the stars echo to its sound.
‘Well?’ he asked again, and this time there was a hint of impatience in his tone.
She needed another deep breath, and just enough time to consider whether there was any other possible way out she could think of that wouldn’t involve him seeing her as a bit tarnished. But she couldn’t imagine that this adventure would end any differently to any other one before it, and she had to avoid horses and mirrors at all costs.
He picked up her hand, put it in his lap, gave her another of his mind reading stares. ‘Get it over with Rose,’ he said quietly.
A third deep breath and she jumped. The words of her long ago prepared speech came tumbling out of her mouth, delighted to be free at last. ‘You can’t go outside. I’ve been here before. I went back and I changed the timeline and it was an accident I swear, so please don’t shout at me yet.’
‘I know, Rose.’
‘And then we’ve just been doing the same things I did before, like at the hospital, the cures thing was your idea, and you worked out the telescope, and I remembered what you said about the oil and now we’re back here again and this spaceship is full of time windows and there’s this French woman and you’re going to jump through a mirror on a horse and leave me behind and use the ‘unless’’. It had been a very deep breath.
‘Use the what?’ he said blankly.
She frowned. ‘What do you mean you know?’ There was a pause. ‘And why aren’t you shouting?’
He sighed, dropped her hand, and leaned against the back of the chair, his eyes scanning the ceiling. ‘I know. Of course I know. I knew from the first moment you woke up, wearing different clothes and with different hair and a sort of hunger in your eyes when you looked at me. Why do you think I ran off to check so fast? Besides, the TARDIS couldn’t wait to tell me - she’s really not best pleased with you, you know.’
‘But,’ said Rose. ‘But.’ There wasn’t any more of that sentence in her head. Single words were all she could manage.
He didn’t look at her, ploughed on. ‘And in any case you’re a terrible liar. The truth just shines out of you whether you want it to or not. I kept giving you opportunities to spill it but you wouldn’t. I could see you struggling not to tell me. And I was sure I’d never mentioned dogs with no noses before either.’
She gazed at him with her mouth open, dazed.
‘But I couldn’t work out why for a while.’
He unlocked his stare from the roof, and twisted to face her. She could see his eyes were horribly tender, vulnerable, as they took in her shocked expression. She didn’t want him vulnerable, she wanted him shouting, all fired up with save the world fury, ready to ride out and fix the mess she’d made.
‘I died, didn’t I?’
She didn’t know what to say, nodded, shook her head, nodded again.
He frowned. ‘But you wanted me back badly enough to go through all this? Worrying yourself sick every day?’
Her fingers opened and closed in her lap. ‘You left me. The new you did,’ she managed finally, past dry lips and a mouth full of ashes.
There was a deep crease between his eyes now, and he pushed himself firmly off the seat, and walked over to the doors. His footsteps clattered with a dull, dead noise against the metal of the floor and all the customary enthusiasm written into every line of his body had fled. She watched him walk outside, scan the battered flight deck, push a few buttons, peer at the cold fireplace barely visible in the next room.
He called out. ‘There’s nobody on board. Rose - what happens next?’
She couldn’t help but respond, despite herself, the same way she always did whenever he called her name. She shuffled out of the doors, her mind still groping for understanding. ‘You go through there.’ She pointed at the fireplace. ‘You meet a woman. There are clockwork robots. They want to kill her. You jump through a mirror to save her but you break the time windows and you can’t get back. You leave me behind.’
He looked at her for a long moment, and the warmth of his stare wrapped itself around her like a cocoon, soothing away the sting of the words. His heart spoke within the blue silence, a familiar something with the name of love whispering across the room. Eventually he turned away, muttering to himself. ‘Break the windows. Trap the robots. Save the girl.’ He looked up with a sudden flashing grin, put his hand on a very large, and very shiny button. ‘Ready?’ he asked.
She nodded, prepared for a complicated technological solution befitting a mechanically minded man. He pushed the button and the ship plunged into darkness.
‘What did you do?’ she shouted at him, squinting in the sudden black, the only illumination provided by the open doors to the TARDIS console room behind her.
His voice floated out of the emptiness. ‘First rule of computers. If in doubt, turn it off. I switched off the engines - no power, no time windows. Simple.’ She could hear the smile in his tone. ‘So I left you here, and you what - waited? Got bored of waiting? Tried to use emergency programme one?’
She nodded, unseen, but she was starting to feel a bit more in control, a little bit more positive about the whole thing. He’d sorted out the French connection in five seconds flat. All he had to do was come up with the solution to the whole circular timelines issue, all this repetitive torment would stop and they could go back to bed. She felt his hand brush against her in the darkness, and he led her back to the light, back inside the TARDIS, back to the jumpseat, back home. But he resumed his place beside her without meeting her eyes.
‘So what’s the plan then?’ she asked, because he was still looking at his fingers, picking stray threads off his jeans. ‘How do we make the timeline stay changed?’
‘We can’t,’ he said, his head bowed.
She waited for the unless. He didn’t say it. She had to remind him. ‘Unless….’ She trailed off expectantly.
He sighed, looked up into the middle distance. ‘Unless nothing. There is no unless. There’s nothing I can do.’
She didn’t believe him for one second - there was always a saving the world plan scurrying somewhere at the back of his mind. She tried to encourage it out. ‘Don’t you need to use the TARDIS or something? Make what I changed stay changed?’
He shrugged. ‘I can’t. I can’t go back and change the original timeline into this one. Things just don’t work like that. It would be… well…Bad.’ She could hear the capital letter. ‘The best I can do is go back to Satellite Five, before any of this happened, and see that it doesn’t happen again. I can use the TARDIS to put things back the way the way they were if I need to. The first timeline’s still there. I can feel it. Why do you think you’ve ended up in exactly the same place again? But just to make sure, you’re not going anywhere. If you don’t go back then today, and yesterday and all of this won’t exist anyway. And you won’t have to carry the memory either, not like last time. This isn’t a wound in time, more like an amputation.’
‘But?’ she said. ‘But?’ Back to the one word sentences again.
He looked at her at last. ‘Some things just aren’t meant to be. This - us- didn’t happen. Doesn’t matter whether you call it fate, or time, or just bad luck. The universe isn’t kind or cruel or anything else. Life doesn’t have a rewind button. You only get one chance and you have to make the most of it. Sometimes you can’t save the world.’
She thought that if she shook her head hard enough she could dislodge the words drifting into it, forget she’d ever heard them. ‘But why?’ her voice broke and she had to try again. ‘Why - if you knew, if there’s no way out and if everything’s fixed - why did you let me think it would be okay? Why not tell me? Why give me unless?’
His eyes shone with a filmy haze. ‘Hope, Rose.’
She was uncomprehending.
‘No one can live without hope. Doesn’t matter if you know what’s coming or not. Doesn’t matter if you believe in destiny or religion or whatever. Everyone needs hope. Otherwise, why bother getting up in the morning? After the werewolf your hope was dying so I gave you some of mine. Hope is the best answer I’ve got. Hope is the only real saving the world plan I ever have.’
‘But you knew, all the time. You guessed you shouldn’t be here. What was there to hope for?’
He shrugged, grazed her cheek with the back of his hand. ‘Don’t you know?’
She couldn’t see through a hot sheet of tears.
‘For another day with you. For a bit more time. I hoped for that, even if there was nothing else.’
‘No,’ she tried to shout but it came out twisted. ‘That’s not a good enough answer. This is what you did last time - you just gave up. You saw the problem and you gave up and walked away. And you left me behind. You promised.’ She choked on a sob.
She felt his arms come around her, press her so tight against his chest that she found it hard to breathe. Her tears pooled, ran down his coat in shining torrents. He stroked her hair and rocked her while she sobbed herself dry and then his grip released, and he pulled away, put his hands on her arms.
‘I won’t leave until I have to,’ he said, and he reached down to kiss her.
Her thoughts skittered to a halt again. She didn’t want to think any more. She wanted only skin, and more skin, and the solid bulk of him inside her, telling her that he was still real, still here. She kissed him back with a desperate passion, closed her eyes against the cruelty of the universe and knew herself lifted, his hands stripping away her clothes, and she was on her back on the console again. She welcomed the first long rush of his heat between her legs, sat up to hold him tight, to feel every flicker of movement in his shoulders as he stabbed into her again, calling, sighing, sobbing her name. I love you, she replied in the movement of her hips as she matched his urgent thrusts, and her body had to translate the words that grief held prisoner. He slowed with a tremble she could feel pulsing through the core of her being, and with a conscious effort, stilled the hard motion of his loins, and slid into her more gradually, carefully, deliberately.
He extended the last moments of their joining with a delicate attention, time filigreed and chased into a complicated pattern to spin it out as far as possible. She could feel every single part of the love stroking inside her against every single part of the love holding it in. When she came she didn’t notice what was happening for a while, so gradually did the ecstasy creep up on her, so gently did he move to heighten her sensations. A deep felt and spreading warmth sucked away her tension and left her resting on his chest as his body quaked in the throes of his own release. He kissed her again, and she knew it was finished.
He had to physically remove her arms from around his neck, just to get her to let him go, and while she lay back with the world in ruins around her he smiled his customary, cheery grin. It was a smile without a shadow of pain behind it and she could easily believe that the sheer power of his hope had kept him going. He had watched her flounder with the knowledge of impending doom and she only saw now how he had tried to encourage her to tell him, had wanted to extend his hand and his hope and let her hold onto it. She felt acutely ashamed, although his eyes told her that he was still proud of her, had always been proud of her, at this moment more than ever.
He was waiting.
It took several centuries to get dressed. Time was a torturer now, an agonising tormentor, laughing in the face of her defeat. Fate hovered in the shadows, ready to sweep him away. Fragments of shattered possibilities lay scattered on the ground, and all hope was dust. Her fingers numb, her heart dead. She couldn’t believe he wasn’t going to fight, couldn’t believe he’d see this biggest of all big problems and not even attempt to fix it. She couldn’t believe he was planning to leave her behind.
He was already outside.
She shuffled to the doors, stepped into the cold darkness of the abandoned ship, and decided to shout and shout until he found another answer. But he jumped in first, forestalled her.
‘How long did you wait?’ he asked. ‘For me to come back. How long did you wait?’
‘For him,’ she replied absently, ‘five and a half hours. For you - a lifetime.’
He was so close she could have reached out and touched him, but inside, she felt he was already gone. He looked into her, the force of his gaze searing. ‘I promised to look after you. Always. Five and a half hours isn’t nearly long enough to give up hope.’ She could see that he wanted to take her in his arms, but his goodbyes had already been said. ‘I’ll be back,’ he promised.
And he turned and walked away, and he left her behind. The TARDIS door was nearly shut when he pulled it wide, poked his head out again.
‘Did I mention that I love you?’ he asked, and there was still that unbreakable optimism in his tone.
‘Couple of times, maybe.’ Her eyes blurred.
‘Good. Remember it.’
She hoped she would. She had nothing else left to hope for.
She watched the TARDIS as it faded into the darkness.
She watched the TARDIS, outlined in the dull electric glow of the strip lighting and tried not to hear Mickey whinging in the background. She felt odd. Not a great word, but the only one she could think of to make sense of the weightless heaviness of her heart. She felt….odd. Like she’d put something down and couldn’t think where she’d left it. Like there were words she needed to say on the tip of her tongue but she couldn’t recall what they were. She had a strange feeling she should be crying but she couldn’t imagine why.
And her left hand was a little universe of oddness all on its own. She examined it carefully, completely unable to understand why it felt so light. There was a dent around her ring finger, a slightly pale mark that she didn’t think had been there the last time she looked. It was all very…odd.
There were footsteps behind her. A familiar tread. Without asking, she knew he was back. The Doctor had returned. She didn’t look round.
There was something she should be remembering. Something important. Something precious and strong. She rubbed her finger. She had forgotten what it was.
The End....unless
This story is about hope, as much as anything else. The question is - who do you hope is coming back through the fireplace at the end? If you hope for Ten, then this is where the story ends for you. If you are hoping for Nine, I can always post Chapter 11 - or not, it's up to you?
Chapter 9: School re-Reunion http://sap1066.livejournal.com/11571.html
Chapter 8: Sheffield http://sap1066.livejournal.com/11277.html
Chapter 7: Claw and more claw http://sap1066.livejournal.com/11209.html
Chapter 6: A mechanically minded man http://sap1066.livejournal.com/10823.html
Chapter 5: New new Earth http://sap1066.livejournal.com/10690.html
Chapter 4: Barcelona http://sap1066.livejournal.com/10275.html
Chapter 3: The Christmas invasion http://sap1066.livejournal.com/10233.html
Chapter 2: Unparting the ways http://sap1066.livejournal.com/9740.html
Chapter 1: The girl in the TARDIS http://sap1066.livejournal.com/9627.html
Pairing: Nine/Rose (no surprises there)
Content: Graphic Sex; Drama; Humour; Angst; Romance; Everything else you can think of
Rating: Adult for later chapters
Chapters: 10/10, although read through to the end.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not even close. In fact, this one has written itself.
Summary: Life didn't have a rewind button. There wasn't any going back. Unless...
Chapter 10: The Doctor in the fireplace
The Doctor gave Rose a long, careful stare. She was nervous as she watched his hands moving slowly over the panel, and nervous as the engine started its noisy rotation. By the time it ground to a halt she was terrified and as she saw him drop heavily into the jumpseat without even looking to see where they were ‘petrified with fright’ had taken over. Stomach churning, gut clenching sickness claimed her when she nudged the doors open, took a swift, confirmatory look at the slow-roasted spaceship outside and dissolved into a small puddle of fear. With this Doctor, you always had to be prepared for the shouting, it was just that she didn’t think she’d prepared enough. And in any case, it wasn’t the shouting so much that she was worried about - the disappointment she would see in his eyes, the loss of that pride in her when he realised she’d lied to him. Those things were far worse than a bit of volume. She wasn’t even sure what his saving the world plan would consist of either, and it was possible that it wouldn’t be too pleasant. All in all, all things considered, there were more than enough reasons to be scared.
Time pulled one of its patented slow motion sequences as she closed the doors, turned back to face the looming confrontation, began the thousand year trail of footsteps that would lead her to the truth. She passed the console, her eyes on the floor, and the TARDIS gave her a ‘serves you right’ look. For an inanimate object with no expression whatsoever, the ship still managed to convey exactly what it was thinking, and it was thinking mostly ‘smug’.
Time had hunted her down, and she was cornered. Inevitable, really, when you travelled inside a box.
The Doctor wasn’t looking at her, he was biting his thumbnail, giving it the benefit of his rapt attention. She took a seat beside him, along with a very deep breath, and forced her eyes up to an approximation of where his face would be when he realised what she was saying and started in with the yelling.
He swivelled an eye towards her while she was still debating where to start. ‘Well?’
His voice fell heavy into the silence, sending ripples of tension washing across the room. He didn’t sound the slightest bit curious, she thought, just resigned, and calm, and very, very familiar. This was the voice that whispered her name in the empty stillness of the night, reassuring and warm. This was the voice that cried out to her, throaty with need, begging for release. This voice said ‘I love you’ and made the stars echo to its sound.
‘Well?’ he asked again, and this time there was a hint of impatience in his tone.
She needed another deep breath, and just enough time to consider whether there was any other possible way out she could think of that wouldn’t involve him seeing her as a bit tarnished. But she couldn’t imagine that this adventure would end any differently to any other one before it, and she had to avoid horses and mirrors at all costs.
He picked up her hand, put it in his lap, gave her another of his mind reading stares. ‘Get it over with Rose,’ he said quietly.
A third deep breath and she jumped. The words of her long ago prepared speech came tumbling out of her mouth, delighted to be free at last. ‘You can’t go outside. I’ve been here before. I went back and I changed the timeline and it was an accident I swear, so please don’t shout at me yet.’
‘I know, Rose.’
‘And then we’ve just been doing the same things I did before, like at the hospital, the cures thing was your idea, and you worked out the telescope, and I remembered what you said about the oil and now we’re back here again and this spaceship is full of time windows and there’s this French woman and you’re going to jump through a mirror on a horse and leave me behind and use the ‘unless’’. It had been a very deep breath.
‘Use the what?’ he said blankly.
She frowned. ‘What do you mean you know?’ There was a pause. ‘And why aren’t you shouting?’
He sighed, dropped her hand, and leaned against the back of the chair, his eyes scanning the ceiling. ‘I know. Of course I know. I knew from the first moment you woke up, wearing different clothes and with different hair and a sort of hunger in your eyes when you looked at me. Why do you think I ran off to check so fast? Besides, the TARDIS couldn’t wait to tell me - she’s really not best pleased with you, you know.’
‘But,’ said Rose. ‘But.’ There wasn’t any more of that sentence in her head. Single words were all she could manage.
He didn’t look at her, ploughed on. ‘And in any case you’re a terrible liar. The truth just shines out of you whether you want it to or not. I kept giving you opportunities to spill it but you wouldn’t. I could see you struggling not to tell me. And I was sure I’d never mentioned dogs with no noses before either.’
She gazed at him with her mouth open, dazed.
‘But I couldn’t work out why for a while.’
He unlocked his stare from the roof, and twisted to face her. She could see his eyes were horribly tender, vulnerable, as they took in her shocked expression. She didn’t want him vulnerable, she wanted him shouting, all fired up with save the world fury, ready to ride out and fix the mess she’d made.
‘I died, didn’t I?’
She didn’t know what to say, nodded, shook her head, nodded again.
He frowned. ‘But you wanted me back badly enough to go through all this? Worrying yourself sick every day?’
Her fingers opened and closed in her lap. ‘You left me. The new you did,’ she managed finally, past dry lips and a mouth full of ashes.
There was a deep crease between his eyes now, and he pushed himself firmly off the seat, and walked over to the doors. His footsteps clattered with a dull, dead noise against the metal of the floor and all the customary enthusiasm written into every line of his body had fled. She watched him walk outside, scan the battered flight deck, push a few buttons, peer at the cold fireplace barely visible in the next room.
He called out. ‘There’s nobody on board. Rose - what happens next?’
She couldn’t help but respond, despite herself, the same way she always did whenever he called her name. She shuffled out of the doors, her mind still groping for understanding. ‘You go through there.’ She pointed at the fireplace. ‘You meet a woman. There are clockwork robots. They want to kill her. You jump through a mirror to save her but you break the time windows and you can’t get back. You leave me behind.’
He looked at her for a long moment, and the warmth of his stare wrapped itself around her like a cocoon, soothing away the sting of the words. His heart spoke within the blue silence, a familiar something with the name of love whispering across the room. Eventually he turned away, muttering to himself. ‘Break the windows. Trap the robots. Save the girl.’ He looked up with a sudden flashing grin, put his hand on a very large, and very shiny button. ‘Ready?’ he asked.
She nodded, prepared for a complicated technological solution befitting a mechanically minded man. He pushed the button and the ship plunged into darkness.
‘What did you do?’ she shouted at him, squinting in the sudden black, the only illumination provided by the open doors to the TARDIS console room behind her.
His voice floated out of the emptiness. ‘First rule of computers. If in doubt, turn it off. I switched off the engines - no power, no time windows. Simple.’ She could hear the smile in his tone. ‘So I left you here, and you what - waited? Got bored of waiting? Tried to use emergency programme one?’
She nodded, unseen, but she was starting to feel a bit more in control, a little bit more positive about the whole thing. He’d sorted out the French connection in five seconds flat. All he had to do was come up with the solution to the whole circular timelines issue, all this repetitive torment would stop and they could go back to bed. She felt his hand brush against her in the darkness, and he led her back to the light, back inside the TARDIS, back to the jumpseat, back home. But he resumed his place beside her without meeting her eyes.
‘So what’s the plan then?’ she asked, because he was still looking at his fingers, picking stray threads off his jeans. ‘How do we make the timeline stay changed?’
‘We can’t,’ he said, his head bowed.
She waited for the unless. He didn’t say it. She had to remind him. ‘Unless….’ She trailed off expectantly.
He sighed, looked up into the middle distance. ‘Unless nothing. There is no unless. There’s nothing I can do.’
She didn’t believe him for one second - there was always a saving the world plan scurrying somewhere at the back of his mind. She tried to encourage it out. ‘Don’t you need to use the TARDIS or something? Make what I changed stay changed?’
He shrugged. ‘I can’t. I can’t go back and change the original timeline into this one. Things just don’t work like that. It would be… well…Bad.’ She could hear the capital letter. ‘The best I can do is go back to Satellite Five, before any of this happened, and see that it doesn’t happen again. I can use the TARDIS to put things back the way the way they were if I need to. The first timeline’s still there. I can feel it. Why do you think you’ve ended up in exactly the same place again? But just to make sure, you’re not going anywhere. If you don’t go back then today, and yesterday and all of this won’t exist anyway. And you won’t have to carry the memory either, not like last time. This isn’t a wound in time, more like an amputation.’
‘But?’ she said. ‘But?’ Back to the one word sentences again.
He looked at her at last. ‘Some things just aren’t meant to be. This - us- didn’t happen. Doesn’t matter whether you call it fate, or time, or just bad luck. The universe isn’t kind or cruel or anything else. Life doesn’t have a rewind button. You only get one chance and you have to make the most of it. Sometimes you can’t save the world.’
She thought that if she shook her head hard enough she could dislodge the words drifting into it, forget she’d ever heard them. ‘But why?’ her voice broke and she had to try again. ‘Why - if you knew, if there’s no way out and if everything’s fixed - why did you let me think it would be okay? Why not tell me? Why give me unless?’
His eyes shone with a filmy haze. ‘Hope, Rose.’
She was uncomprehending.
‘No one can live without hope. Doesn’t matter if you know what’s coming or not. Doesn’t matter if you believe in destiny or religion or whatever. Everyone needs hope. Otherwise, why bother getting up in the morning? After the werewolf your hope was dying so I gave you some of mine. Hope is the best answer I’ve got. Hope is the only real saving the world plan I ever have.’
‘But you knew, all the time. You guessed you shouldn’t be here. What was there to hope for?’
He shrugged, grazed her cheek with the back of his hand. ‘Don’t you know?’
She couldn’t see through a hot sheet of tears.
‘For another day with you. For a bit more time. I hoped for that, even if there was nothing else.’
‘No,’ she tried to shout but it came out twisted. ‘That’s not a good enough answer. This is what you did last time - you just gave up. You saw the problem and you gave up and walked away. And you left me behind. You promised.’ She choked on a sob.
She felt his arms come around her, press her so tight against his chest that she found it hard to breathe. Her tears pooled, ran down his coat in shining torrents. He stroked her hair and rocked her while she sobbed herself dry and then his grip released, and he pulled away, put his hands on her arms.
‘I won’t leave until I have to,’ he said, and he reached down to kiss her.
Her thoughts skittered to a halt again. She didn’t want to think any more. She wanted only skin, and more skin, and the solid bulk of him inside her, telling her that he was still real, still here. She kissed him back with a desperate passion, closed her eyes against the cruelty of the universe and knew herself lifted, his hands stripping away her clothes, and she was on her back on the console again. She welcomed the first long rush of his heat between her legs, sat up to hold him tight, to feel every flicker of movement in his shoulders as he stabbed into her again, calling, sighing, sobbing her name. I love you, she replied in the movement of her hips as she matched his urgent thrusts, and her body had to translate the words that grief held prisoner. He slowed with a tremble she could feel pulsing through the core of her being, and with a conscious effort, stilled the hard motion of his loins, and slid into her more gradually, carefully, deliberately.
He extended the last moments of their joining with a delicate attention, time filigreed and chased into a complicated pattern to spin it out as far as possible. She could feel every single part of the love stroking inside her against every single part of the love holding it in. When she came she didn’t notice what was happening for a while, so gradually did the ecstasy creep up on her, so gently did he move to heighten her sensations. A deep felt and spreading warmth sucked away her tension and left her resting on his chest as his body quaked in the throes of his own release. He kissed her again, and she knew it was finished.
He had to physically remove her arms from around his neck, just to get her to let him go, and while she lay back with the world in ruins around her he smiled his customary, cheery grin. It was a smile without a shadow of pain behind it and she could easily believe that the sheer power of his hope had kept him going. He had watched her flounder with the knowledge of impending doom and she only saw now how he had tried to encourage her to tell him, had wanted to extend his hand and his hope and let her hold onto it. She felt acutely ashamed, although his eyes told her that he was still proud of her, had always been proud of her, at this moment more than ever.
He was waiting.
It took several centuries to get dressed. Time was a torturer now, an agonising tormentor, laughing in the face of her defeat. Fate hovered in the shadows, ready to sweep him away. Fragments of shattered possibilities lay scattered on the ground, and all hope was dust. Her fingers numb, her heart dead. She couldn’t believe he wasn’t going to fight, couldn’t believe he’d see this biggest of all big problems and not even attempt to fix it. She couldn’t believe he was planning to leave her behind.
He was already outside.
She shuffled to the doors, stepped into the cold darkness of the abandoned ship, and decided to shout and shout until he found another answer. But he jumped in first, forestalled her.
‘How long did you wait?’ he asked. ‘For me to come back. How long did you wait?’
‘For him,’ she replied absently, ‘five and a half hours. For you - a lifetime.’
He was so close she could have reached out and touched him, but inside, she felt he was already gone. He looked into her, the force of his gaze searing. ‘I promised to look after you. Always. Five and a half hours isn’t nearly long enough to give up hope.’ She could see that he wanted to take her in his arms, but his goodbyes had already been said. ‘I’ll be back,’ he promised.
And he turned and walked away, and he left her behind. The TARDIS door was nearly shut when he pulled it wide, poked his head out again.
‘Did I mention that I love you?’ he asked, and there was still that unbreakable optimism in his tone.
‘Couple of times, maybe.’ Her eyes blurred.
‘Good. Remember it.’
She hoped she would. She had nothing else left to hope for.
She watched the TARDIS as it faded into the darkness.
She watched the TARDIS, outlined in the dull electric glow of the strip lighting and tried not to hear Mickey whinging in the background. She felt odd. Not a great word, but the only one she could think of to make sense of the weightless heaviness of her heart. She felt….odd. Like she’d put something down and couldn’t think where she’d left it. Like there were words she needed to say on the tip of her tongue but she couldn’t recall what they were. She had a strange feeling she should be crying but she couldn’t imagine why.
And her left hand was a little universe of oddness all on its own. She examined it carefully, completely unable to understand why it felt so light. There was a dent around her ring finger, a slightly pale mark that she didn’t think had been there the last time she looked. It was all very…odd.
There were footsteps behind her. A familiar tread. Without asking, she knew he was back. The Doctor had returned. She didn’t look round.
There was something she should be remembering. Something important. Something precious and strong. She rubbed her finger. She had forgotten what it was.
The End....unless
This story is about hope, as much as anything else. The question is - who do you hope is coming back through the fireplace at the end? If you hope for Ten, then this is where the story ends for you. If you are hoping for Nine, I can always post Chapter 11 - or not, it's up to you?
Chapter 9: School re-Reunion http://sap1066.livejournal.com/11571.html
Chapter 8: Sheffield http://sap1066.livejournal.com/11277.html
Chapter 7: Claw and more claw http://sap1066.livejournal.com/11209.html
Chapter 6: A mechanically minded man http://sap1066.livejournal.com/10823.html
Chapter 5: New new Earth http://sap1066.livejournal.com/10690.html
Chapter 4: Barcelona http://sap1066.livejournal.com/10275.html
Chapter 3: The Christmas invasion http://sap1066.livejournal.com/10233.html
Chapter 2: Unparting the ways http://sap1066.livejournal.com/9740.html
Chapter 1: The girl in the TARDIS http://sap1066.livejournal.com/9627.html