New fic: Five and a half hours later
Title: Five and a half hours later
Pairing: Nine/Rose
Rating: Adult
Content: Adventure; Romance; Graphic Sex; Angst; Ten
Disclaimer: BBC owned as usual
Chapters: 4/9
Summary: A second chance. A new beginning. A different ending?
Chapter 4: New York
The queue for the solitary ladies toilet in the Ed Sullivan TV studios, New York, was so long it had enough internal mass to bend time and space. Rose knew this because the hands on her watch had slowed to a crawl, which was still quicker than the queue was moving. After ten minutes she’d taken off her coat and sat on top of it on the floor. After another ten minutes she’d removed her shoes and shaken out her hair because all those pins were starting to dig in and the hairspray was strong enough to scratch her face. After another ten minutes she’d started to daydream. Not so much daydream as day-have-a-really-erotic-fantasy-about-a-strange-man-dream. Which was, she reflected later, the best sort of dream to have, if you couldn’t get anything else.
She was sitting up, and her eyes were closed, and for a while she thought that the hands that were moving on her shoulders belonged to some overly friendly woman in the queue behind her before she realised she was on the edge of a high bed with her feet dangling above the floor and that she was completely naked. There was a faint earthy smell of damp in the air and it was really quite cold but she was too drowsy to bother looking around for the cause. From outside she caught the faint sound of horses’ hooves and quite possibly, bagpipes. She had the impression that it was early morning. Once again, she’d not been getting a lot of sleep.
But the hands on her shoulders were telling her to forget all that, to forget anything but the way they pressed themselves into the awkward knots in her muscles, worked them loose, set her tiredness springing free and then smoothed it away. They were well educated hands these, whoever they belonged to, and they knew exactly how to touch her without being told. Strong fingers on her neck, thumbs caressing her spine as her head fell limply back and was caught on the shoulder of the man right behind her. She didn’t think she could have moved her body if she’d tried and the long, lingering sighs that drifted out of her lungs did so of their own accord.
The hands slid down, over her shoulders, continuing their studies around her collarbones, the top of her chest. The weight on the bed tipped slightly, distributed itself in a different pattern as the owner of the hands came to sit right behind her. She wasn’t as chilly anymore, not with his legs on either side of hers, not with his chest propping her up as she sagged back against him. And the hands graduated onto a new course, began to teach her what else they knew about her body. There were fingers splaying over her breasts now, cupping them, raising them high, and then two thumbs at work on her nipples. Lips, imprinting gentle kisses on her neck and she was submissive, surrendered, abandoned to the whim of whoever was surrounding her, whoever was tracing a path down her stomach. Her hands were lifted from her lap, replaced on the hard thighs enclosing hers. Absently, she noticed a ring, shining golden on her left hand and wondered when she’d got married.
Lips then, on her neck, one hand on her breast and the other stroking, stroking in the place between her legs. She was happy, in the dream she was happy, and then more than happy, clutching the legs that weren’t hers for support, arching her back and pressing against the stroking, stroking fingers that knew so much.
A mouth breathed into her ear. ‘Did I mention that I love you?’ and although the words had a familiar ring the cockney accent was unexpected, somehow not quite right.
She still couldn’t place it, but she didn’t much care because she was about to come. Those stroking fingers were stroking her softly into a hot, wet climax and she was nearly there, nearly there.
‘Get on with it sweetie.’
That wasn’t a London accent. It wasn’t even an English accent, but some sort of American drawl, punctuated by the smack of chewing gum and a foot prodding her hip.
She opened her eyes, and with not a little embarrassment realised that the entire queue was backed up behind her and that she was finally next for the bathroom. She scrambled quickly to her feet, moving with a bit more ease than usual and felt a warm flush rise on her cheeks. She hoped, as she opened the door, that she hadn’t been talking - or more probably moaning - in her sleep.
She took a fleeting glance in the tiny square of chipped mirror and concluded that her mother had been quite right with the whole don’t touch or you’ll go blind warning. She couldn’t see her face. She could see her hair alright, and the top of her denim jacket, and the outline of her chin, but all her features just seemed to have vanished. Her eyes and her nose and her mouth had wandered off elsewhere like Mr Potato Head with only the potato. She blinked, deliberately, not unreasonably working out that if she could see her reflection, then the reflection couldn’t be accurate and must be some trick of the light, or comedy 1950s mirror, or the result of an overly realistic imaginary fingering. She wasn’t worried about it, she still was too keyed up to worry about anything and there was no way she was ever going to admit to the Doctor that she’d found the thought of him watching her strip sexy enough to trigger a near orgasmic dream and a temporary hallucination. She could already hear him laughing.
Rose had been gone for an inordinately long time. He’d occupied a pleasant half an hour in arranging transport, and then he’d allowed himself ten minutes to work out What Women Want. Human females anyway. This was a conundrum that had foxed human males for millennia, but not being a human male he was sure that ten minutes was plenty. He’d always assumed that What Women Wanted was the same thing that men wanted, only slightly more pink. That was before he realised that What Women Really Wanted was for men to stop making flippant remarks like that one and stop banging on about pink. After a quick review of the available literature he’d found out that what human females throughout the ages had wanted from their men was a full head of hair, an enormous country estate, the ability to listen, and, more lately, enough sense to stay in their test tubes. He thought he might be able to manage the hair.
More specifically, women from Rose’s particular era seemed to be impressed by holding doors open, paying for dinner, chocolate, flowers, and asking their fathers for permission. Technically, he could have asked her father, which was more than any other potential suitor would have done, but that was far more trouble than it was worth. Besides, he distinctly recalled getting a ring on her finger once before without bothering either of her parents, even if it had only been a joke. Definitely only a joke.
He was able to indulge these unusually warm and fuzzy thoughts because nothing Bad had yet happened, no Consequences had appeared or potential Danger threatened, in the couple of hours they’d spent watching Elvis. This was turning out to be a fantastic day - and he was considering putting a capital letter on that, too. Clearly, he had been unlucky enough to run into a couple of co-incidences that were completely unrelated to timeline changing, and second chances, and costly mistakes. He hoped, when the time came, that he’d be able to defeat the Cybermen, or whoever his enemy was, tidy up whatever mess was being made of life and death and save the world with a convincing flourish. That was infinitely preferable to the possibility that any of this might be his fault and might require some form of sacrifice and him leaving again to resolve.
Rose appeared from the vaults of the studio and stopped, instantly. Her face was red, and she looked a bit flustered. He attributed this solely to his choice of transport, the transport she continued to admire as he got out of the driver’s door, took the lengthy walk round the bonnet (or hood, given the location) and opened the passenger side for her to climb in. With some trepidation, he revved the engine, pulled the very long, very wide, smooth, shiny and bright pink car out into the line of traffic.
She coughed slightly. ‘So where did you get the peni…TARDIS substitute?’
He thought she sounded slightly sarcastic but he was too busy trying to find the convertible mechanism and get the top down as well as managing all the various pedals and levers in the right order to answer. Driving was a lot more difficult when you didn’t have a rubber mallet.
She was sure, by the fact that they spent the first five minutes going in reverse, that he hadn’t passed his test. But he seemed to be having such a good time that she didn’t have the heart to stop him. He’d been so worried back on the beach that to see him smile again was worth a bit of white knuckle terror. They went round the same block five times before he mastered the art of turning left.
She asked, when they were safely heading out of town. ‘I didn’t know the TARDIS came with a garage?’
He looked at her with horror for a while before he realised he should be looking at the road and had to learn the location of the brake much too quickly. ‘Pay attention,’ he had the gall to respond. ‘Why do you think I built a sonic screwdriver? The only thing that’s not much bigger on the inside is the width of the doors - or hadn’t you noticed? Everything large comes in or goes out in pieces.’
‘So what you’re saying is that the TARDIS is full of flat pack furniture and you built this car from scratch? Was that what you had in your bedroom?’
There was a brief silence as she remembered his bedroom, and the fact that it had a bed in it, as well as him. She felt her cheeks getting a bit warmer and her lips a little bit more moist as the thought of that single wonderful kiss he’d given her replayed in her mind in slow motion. Then she remembered the burn of his eyes in the mirror when she took her clothes off and she realised she was very much in danger of sleepwalking into another, far more graphic daydream.
‘Nah,’ he said, shifting a bit on the seat. ‘Transmission was broken so I showed the owner how to fix it and he let me borrow it to take you to ….Ah, here we are.’
He negotiated the turn into a fairly large, open space with a white washed brick wall on one side. Some tortuous reversing, some bumping and a few scrapes followed as he made a hash of parking, as usual. She went to get out of the car, but he beat her to it, and she watched him walk across to a row of smartly uniformed people standing to one side. When he returned he was carrying hot dogs. For which he’d actually paid, although given his vagueness with money the vendor would have been lucky not to get peanuts. He looked extraordinarily pleased with himself.
‘There you go,’ he said. ‘Dinner and a movie.’
She noticed that all the cars were facing in the same direction, and still had passengers in them. Two passengers. Sitting very close together. With a shaking start and a reel of numbers that counted down, switched off and then restarted again, a film did indeed begin, projected onto the wall about ten feet high. Her hot dog was forgotten on the seat. It appeared, unless she was very much mistaken, that she was on a date. With the Doctor. At a drive-in movie.
Since when did he do dating anyway? Not since pre-revolutionary France, came the little voice of women’s intuition at the back of her mind. Maybe he wants to get you into a corset. The thought was as uncomfortable as the corset would have been. And a date with the Doctor? The thought of that, and what he might mean by it made her heart all fluttery again, in a way she hadn’t felt for some time. She wouldn’t have been more amazed if he’d turned out to be acting in the film as well.
Abruptly, he leaned over her lap and she nearly shot off the seat at the shock of his chest against her knee.
‘Dessert,’ he said, and popped open the glovebox in front of her.
A cascade of chocolate bars poured like very heavy rain onto her pink shoes. She fished out a packet and held it up in the dim light. ‘Where did you get umm…Hershey’s Kisses with a sell by date of 2015?’ she asked curiously.
‘That was a really long queue you were in. I got bored,’ he said.
She noticed that she didn’t have to turn her head as much to see him across the broad expanse of front seat, because he seemed to be sitting a lot lot closer. And he was looking at her. He looked at her a lot, and she was fine with that, but on this particular occasion he wasn’t so much looking at her, as into her, and there was a peculiar intensity to his gaze, a different little something in his eyes she didn’t remember seeing before. Flustered, she focused on the screen, trying not to get too excited by the little voice in her mind that said, yes, he is looking at you like that.
The couple in the car in front of them started kissing. That did not help. She turned her head away and pretended not to notice, although since the couples in the cars to both sides of them also had their tongues down each others’ throats not noticing was very difficult. She looked down at the seat between them for her hot dog, and found that his hand, his large, callused, slightly hairy hand with its bitten fingernails and ability to find and fix the smallest things was only millimetres from hers. She had only to move, even slightly, and they would be holding hands, in a Holding Hands sort of way, and not in just your average running away from something nasty and trying not to trip over routine. She found she was a little bit totally fascinated by the strength of his fingers, their skill and dexterity, the way they could be so gentle and so hard at the same time.
His fingers moved. Step by tiny, infinitesimal step they closed the gap between her hand and his hand, crept up her little finger, her ring finger, her middle finger and curled themselves into the space between her forefinger and thumb. The Doctor was holding her hand. She snatched her gaze away from the seat and tried to concentrate on the film, although her heart was racing so fast she couldn’t hear a word of it and her lungs burned with the attempt to suck in more air. Her body appeared to be reacting to him independently of her mind, like it recognised him in some way. Or maybe it just knew what she wanted better than she did.
She glanced up at him again, and wished she hadn’t. He was looking at her, into her, through her, and the look in his eyes expanded and expanded, and took over the whole world. And he was so close, a whisper, a hairsbreadth, a heartbeat away. Closer still, and closer, with the grip he had on her fingers tightening and his mouth ever so slightly open. She thought, he’s going to kiss me. Electricity crackled in the air. She closed her eyes. And then his lips were on hers, and nothing else mattered. A light push, a touch of firmness as his mouth descended once, pressing against hers and then away. He came in again and she could feel that his lips were open this time, and that he left something of his taste behind when they separated. The third time, she opened her mouth and kissed him back.
She could feel how close he was, leaning into her, heat grazing the back of her knuckles where he’d pulled their intertwined hands into his lap, his other hand on her waist, his thumb dancing circles against the fabric of her top. His tongue in her mouth. His tongue in her mouth doing wonderful things that made her too dizzy to do more than tilt her head back and moan quietly to herself in the back of her throat. He kissed her like he’d been training for it all his life. Hot sweeping rushes against her tongue, deep stabbing strokes that hit parts of her palate she didn’t even know could feel pleasure, slight, teasing flicks that taunted her to respond. He kissed her like he’d kissed her before, like he knew exactly what would make her shiver and exactly how to build those shivers into shakes. He disengaged his fingers, left her hand lying in his lap and she felt him touching her face, resting against the open and close action of her jaw as she kissed him. His fingers moved down from her waist, and there was a pressure against her thigh as she walked her other hand blindly up his arm, curled it around his neck and pulled him closer. She had no intention of stopping. The urgency in his kiss, the way he devoured her mouth, filled her up with passion and desire as well as his tongue told her that he wasn’t stopping either. Electricity crackled in the air.
It took her a moment to realise that electricity was, in fact, crackling in the air, and that she could smell burning. With a wrench, she pulled away, broke the kiss, casting around for the source of the fire and noticing great silver arcs of power reflected in the hot glitter of his eyes. It was extremely difficult to look away. But the film seemed to have stopped playing, and she swivelled her head to see that the unconvincing giant monsters had been replaced by a close-up shot of a woman with dark hair and thin lips, who seemed to be shouting the same word over and over again. It looked like ‘hungry’.
She shot another glance at the Doctor, who was now completely absorbed in wiping non existent smears of mustard and ketchup off his hands, and had returned to the driver’s side, as far away from her as possible. She frowned, sensing the change of mood but not quite sure what it meant. When she tuned into the screen again, the woman was gone, to be replaced by a growing chorus of booing and a minor explosion of popcorn throwing.
‘Hadn’t you better go,’ she started, and he was out of the car without another word, ‘and fix the projector?’
It took the entire journey to the source of the burning smell to convince himself not to run back to the car, break the speed limit all the way home and then set a new record for taking all her clothes off and getting her into bed. Rational thought appeared to desert him completely as soon as she came within touching distance, despite his best intentions. That was probably because his intentions became distinctly less than best whenever he found himself lost in her eyes. More like morally reprehensible. He realised he was rushing, thinking more about what he wanted than about her needs. That was just as much of a Bad thing as blithely mucking about with your own timeline - it was the same sort of selfishness. He didn’t really need any more terrible things to be his fault, and his list of mistakes was quite long enough already.
The projector was fried, but he wasn’t even tempted to fix it. In fact, he could barely remember what had broken it in the first place except that it had been something strange. There was definitely power involved though, because his teeth were doing that annoying tingling thing again. Strange things happening had become a lot less strange since he walked back through that fireplace and there was obviously something going on. He hadn’t escaped. Consequences were still tracking him down. Something was coming, and fast.
Rose didn’t need to know that. She didn’t need to know anything at all, in fact, because if Bad things were going to happen, he wanted to make sure they happened to him, and only to him. He wasn’t going to tell her that. He didn’t really, when it came right down to it, trust her with the truth. What could she do with it, apart from shout, or worry, or try to help? Until he worked out how to save the world, he didn’t need any help, he was worried enough for both of them, and he’d had it with the shouting.
He’d kissed her. He wanted nothing more than to kiss her again, and hold onto her until the very last second of the very last hour of the very last day they might be able to spend together. He loved her, beyond all time and space, after hope was ashes and dust. But it was better that she never loved him. It was better that he was the one to face the consequences on his own. He couldn’t bear to think how he might feel if he lost her. It was worse to think how she might feel if she loved him and lost him again.
There was not going to be enough time.
Chapter 3: The Idiot:http://sap1066.livejournal.com/15356.html
Chapter 2: The Rise of Steel: http://sap1066.livejournal.com/15097.html
Chapter 1: Consequences: http://sap1066.livejournal.com/14430.html
Five and a half hours Chapters 1-10: http://sap1066.livejournal.com/11963.html
Pairing: Nine/Rose
Rating: Adult
Content: Adventure; Romance; Graphic Sex; Angst; Ten
Disclaimer: BBC owned as usual
Chapters: 4/9
Summary: A second chance. A new beginning. A different ending?
Chapter 4: New York
The queue for the solitary ladies toilet in the Ed Sullivan TV studios, New York, was so long it had enough internal mass to bend time and space. Rose knew this because the hands on her watch had slowed to a crawl, which was still quicker than the queue was moving. After ten minutes she’d taken off her coat and sat on top of it on the floor. After another ten minutes she’d removed her shoes and shaken out her hair because all those pins were starting to dig in and the hairspray was strong enough to scratch her face. After another ten minutes she’d started to daydream. Not so much daydream as day-have-a-really-erotic-fantasy-about-a-strange-man-dream. Which was, she reflected later, the best sort of dream to have, if you couldn’t get anything else.
She was sitting up, and her eyes were closed, and for a while she thought that the hands that were moving on her shoulders belonged to some overly friendly woman in the queue behind her before she realised she was on the edge of a high bed with her feet dangling above the floor and that she was completely naked. There was a faint earthy smell of damp in the air and it was really quite cold but she was too drowsy to bother looking around for the cause. From outside she caught the faint sound of horses’ hooves and quite possibly, bagpipes. She had the impression that it was early morning. Once again, she’d not been getting a lot of sleep.
But the hands on her shoulders were telling her to forget all that, to forget anything but the way they pressed themselves into the awkward knots in her muscles, worked them loose, set her tiredness springing free and then smoothed it away. They were well educated hands these, whoever they belonged to, and they knew exactly how to touch her without being told. Strong fingers on her neck, thumbs caressing her spine as her head fell limply back and was caught on the shoulder of the man right behind her. She didn’t think she could have moved her body if she’d tried and the long, lingering sighs that drifted out of her lungs did so of their own accord.
The hands slid down, over her shoulders, continuing their studies around her collarbones, the top of her chest. The weight on the bed tipped slightly, distributed itself in a different pattern as the owner of the hands came to sit right behind her. She wasn’t as chilly anymore, not with his legs on either side of hers, not with his chest propping her up as she sagged back against him. And the hands graduated onto a new course, began to teach her what else they knew about her body. There were fingers splaying over her breasts now, cupping them, raising them high, and then two thumbs at work on her nipples. Lips, imprinting gentle kisses on her neck and she was submissive, surrendered, abandoned to the whim of whoever was surrounding her, whoever was tracing a path down her stomach. Her hands were lifted from her lap, replaced on the hard thighs enclosing hers. Absently, she noticed a ring, shining golden on her left hand and wondered when she’d got married.
Lips then, on her neck, one hand on her breast and the other stroking, stroking in the place between her legs. She was happy, in the dream she was happy, and then more than happy, clutching the legs that weren’t hers for support, arching her back and pressing against the stroking, stroking fingers that knew so much.
A mouth breathed into her ear. ‘Did I mention that I love you?’ and although the words had a familiar ring the cockney accent was unexpected, somehow not quite right.
She still couldn’t place it, but she didn’t much care because she was about to come. Those stroking fingers were stroking her softly into a hot, wet climax and she was nearly there, nearly there.
‘Get on with it sweetie.’
That wasn’t a London accent. It wasn’t even an English accent, but some sort of American drawl, punctuated by the smack of chewing gum and a foot prodding her hip.
She opened her eyes, and with not a little embarrassment realised that the entire queue was backed up behind her and that she was finally next for the bathroom. She scrambled quickly to her feet, moving with a bit more ease than usual and felt a warm flush rise on her cheeks. She hoped, as she opened the door, that she hadn’t been talking - or more probably moaning - in her sleep.
She took a fleeting glance in the tiny square of chipped mirror and concluded that her mother had been quite right with the whole don’t touch or you’ll go blind warning. She couldn’t see her face. She could see her hair alright, and the top of her denim jacket, and the outline of her chin, but all her features just seemed to have vanished. Her eyes and her nose and her mouth had wandered off elsewhere like Mr Potato Head with only the potato. She blinked, deliberately, not unreasonably working out that if she could see her reflection, then the reflection couldn’t be accurate and must be some trick of the light, or comedy 1950s mirror, or the result of an overly realistic imaginary fingering. She wasn’t worried about it, she still was too keyed up to worry about anything and there was no way she was ever going to admit to the Doctor that she’d found the thought of him watching her strip sexy enough to trigger a near orgasmic dream and a temporary hallucination. She could already hear him laughing.
Rose had been gone for an inordinately long time. He’d occupied a pleasant half an hour in arranging transport, and then he’d allowed himself ten minutes to work out What Women Want. Human females anyway. This was a conundrum that had foxed human males for millennia, but not being a human male he was sure that ten minutes was plenty. He’d always assumed that What Women Wanted was the same thing that men wanted, only slightly more pink. That was before he realised that What Women Really Wanted was for men to stop making flippant remarks like that one and stop banging on about pink. After a quick review of the available literature he’d found out that what human females throughout the ages had wanted from their men was a full head of hair, an enormous country estate, the ability to listen, and, more lately, enough sense to stay in their test tubes. He thought he might be able to manage the hair.
More specifically, women from Rose’s particular era seemed to be impressed by holding doors open, paying for dinner, chocolate, flowers, and asking their fathers for permission. Technically, he could have asked her father, which was more than any other potential suitor would have done, but that was far more trouble than it was worth. Besides, he distinctly recalled getting a ring on her finger once before without bothering either of her parents, even if it had only been a joke. Definitely only a joke.
He was able to indulge these unusually warm and fuzzy thoughts because nothing Bad had yet happened, no Consequences had appeared or potential Danger threatened, in the couple of hours they’d spent watching Elvis. This was turning out to be a fantastic day - and he was considering putting a capital letter on that, too. Clearly, he had been unlucky enough to run into a couple of co-incidences that were completely unrelated to timeline changing, and second chances, and costly mistakes. He hoped, when the time came, that he’d be able to defeat the Cybermen, or whoever his enemy was, tidy up whatever mess was being made of life and death and save the world with a convincing flourish. That was infinitely preferable to the possibility that any of this might be his fault and might require some form of sacrifice and him leaving again to resolve.
Rose appeared from the vaults of the studio and stopped, instantly. Her face was red, and she looked a bit flustered. He attributed this solely to his choice of transport, the transport she continued to admire as he got out of the driver’s door, took the lengthy walk round the bonnet (or hood, given the location) and opened the passenger side for her to climb in. With some trepidation, he revved the engine, pulled the very long, very wide, smooth, shiny and bright pink car out into the line of traffic.
She coughed slightly. ‘So where did you get the peni…TARDIS substitute?’
He thought she sounded slightly sarcastic but he was too busy trying to find the convertible mechanism and get the top down as well as managing all the various pedals and levers in the right order to answer. Driving was a lot more difficult when you didn’t have a rubber mallet.
She was sure, by the fact that they spent the first five minutes going in reverse, that he hadn’t passed his test. But he seemed to be having such a good time that she didn’t have the heart to stop him. He’d been so worried back on the beach that to see him smile again was worth a bit of white knuckle terror. They went round the same block five times before he mastered the art of turning left.
She asked, when they were safely heading out of town. ‘I didn’t know the TARDIS came with a garage?’
He looked at her with horror for a while before he realised he should be looking at the road and had to learn the location of the brake much too quickly. ‘Pay attention,’ he had the gall to respond. ‘Why do you think I built a sonic screwdriver? The only thing that’s not much bigger on the inside is the width of the doors - or hadn’t you noticed? Everything large comes in or goes out in pieces.’
‘So what you’re saying is that the TARDIS is full of flat pack furniture and you built this car from scratch? Was that what you had in your bedroom?’
There was a brief silence as she remembered his bedroom, and the fact that it had a bed in it, as well as him. She felt her cheeks getting a bit warmer and her lips a little bit more moist as the thought of that single wonderful kiss he’d given her replayed in her mind in slow motion. Then she remembered the burn of his eyes in the mirror when she took her clothes off and she realised she was very much in danger of sleepwalking into another, far more graphic daydream.
‘Nah,’ he said, shifting a bit on the seat. ‘Transmission was broken so I showed the owner how to fix it and he let me borrow it to take you to ….Ah, here we are.’
He negotiated the turn into a fairly large, open space with a white washed brick wall on one side. Some tortuous reversing, some bumping and a few scrapes followed as he made a hash of parking, as usual. She went to get out of the car, but he beat her to it, and she watched him walk across to a row of smartly uniformed people standing to one side. When he returned he was carrying hot dogs. For which he’d actually paid, although given his vagueness with money the vendor would have been lucky not to get peanuts. He looked extraordinarily pleased with himself.
‘There you go,’ he said. ‘Dinner and a movie.’
She noticed that all the cars were facing in the same direction, and still had passengers in them. Two passengers. Sitting very close together. With a shaking start and a reel of numbers that counted down, switched off and then restarted again, a film did indeed begin, projected onto the wall about ten feet high. Her hot dog was forgotten on the seat. It appeared, unless she was very much mistaken, that she was on a date. With the Doctor. At a drive-in movie.
Since when did he do dating anyway? Not since pre-revolutionary France, came the little voice of women’s intuition at the back of her mind. Maybe he wants to get you into a corset. The thought was as uncomfortable as the corset would have been. And a date with the Doctor? The thought of that, and what he might mean by it made her heart all fluttery again, in a way she hadn’t felt for some time. She wouldn’t have been more amazed if he’d turned out to be acting in the film as well.
Abruptly, he leaned over her lap and she nearly shot off the seat at the shock of his chest against her knee.
‘Dessert,’ he said, and popped open the glovebox in front of her.
A cascade of chocolate bars poured like very heavy rain onto her pink shoes. She fished out a packet and held it up in the dim light. ‘Where did you get umm…Hershey’s Kisses with a sell by date of 2015?’ she asked curiously.
‘That was a really long queue you were in. I got bored,’ he said.
She noticed that she didn’t have to turn her head as much to see him across the broad expanse of front seat, because he seemed to be sitting a lot lot closer. And he was looking at her. He looked at her a lot, and she was fine with that, but on this particular occasion he wasn’t so much looking at her, as into her, and there was a peculiar intensity to his gaze, a different little something in his eyes she didn’t remember seeing before. Flustered, she focused on the screen, trying not to get too excited by the little voice in her mind that said, yes, he is looking at you like that.
The couple in the car in front of them started kissing. That did not help. She turned her head away and pretended not to notice, although since the couples in the cars to both sides of them also had their tongues down each others’ throats not noticing was very difficult. She looked down at the seat between them for her hot dog, and found that his hand, his large, callused, slightly hairy hand with its bitten fingernails and ability to find and fix the smallest things was only millimetres from hers. She had only to move, even slightly, and they would be holding hands, in a Holding Hands sort of way, and not in just your average running away from something nasty and trying not to trip over routine. She found she was a little bit totally fascinated by the strength of his fingers, their skill and dexterity, the way they could be so gentle and so hard at the same time.
His fingers moved. Step by tiny, infinitesimal step they closed the gap between her hand and his hand, crept up her little finger, her ring finger, her middle finger and curled themselves into the space between her forefinger and thumb. The Doctor was holding her hand. She snatched her gaze away from the seat and tried to concentrate on the film, although her heart was racing so fast she couldn’t hear a word of it and her lungs burned with the attempt to suck in more air. Her body appeared to be reacting to him independently of her mind, like it recognised him in some way. Or maybe it just knew what she wanted better than she did.
She glanced up at him again, and wished she hadn’t. He was looking at her, into her, through her, and the look in his eyes expanded and expanded, and took over the whole world. And he was so close, a whisper, a hairsbreadth, a heartbeat away. Closer still, and closer, with the grip he had on her fingers tightening and his mouth ever so slightly open. She thought, he’s going to kiss me. Electricity crackled in the air. She closed her eyes. And then his lips were on hers, and nothing else mattered. A light push, a touch of firmness as his mouth descended once, pressing against hers and then away. He came in again and she could feel that his lips were open this time, and that he left something of his taste behind when they separated. The third time, she opened her mouth and kissed him back.
She could feel how close he was, leaning into her, heat grazing the back of her knuckles where he’d pulled their intertwined hands into his lap, his other hand on her waist, his thumb dancing circles against the fabric of her top. His tongue in her mouth. His tongue in her mouth doing wonderful things that made her too dizzy to do more than tilt her head back and moan quietly to herself in the back of her throat. He kissed her like he’d been training for it all his life. Hot sweeping rushes against her tongue, deep stabbing strokes that hit parts of her palate she didn’t even know could feel pleasure, slight, teasing flicks that taunted her to respond. He kissed her like he’d kissed her before, like he knew exactly what would make her shiver and exactly how to build those shivers into shakes. He disengaged his fingers, left her hand lying in his lap and she felt him touching her face, resting against the open and close action of her jaw as she kissed him. His fingers moved down from her waist, and there was a pressure against her thigh as she walked her other hand blindly up his arm, curled it around his neck and pulled him closer. She had no intention of stopping. The urgency in his kiss, the way he devoured her mouth, filled her up with passion and desire as well as his tongue told her that he wasn’t stopping either. Electricity crackled in the air.
It took her a moment to realise that electricity was, in fact, crackling in the air, and that she could smell burning. With a wrench, she pulled away, broke the kiss, casting around for the source of the fire and noticing great silver arcs of power reflected in the hot glitter of his eyes. It was extremely difficult to look away. But the film seemed to have stopped playing, and she swivelled her head to see that the unconvincing giant monsters had been replaced by a close-up shot of a woman with dark hair and thin lips, who seemed to be shouting the same word over and over again. It looked like ‘hungry’.
She shot another glance at the Doctor, who was now completely absorbed in wiping non existent smears of mustard and ketchup off his hands, and had returned to the driver’s side, as far away from her as possible. She frowned, sensing the change of mood but not quite sure what it meant. When she tuned into the screen again, the woman was gone, to be replaced by a growing chorus of booing and a minor explosion of popcorn throwing.
‘Hadn’t you better go,’ she started, and he was out of the car without another word, ‘and fix the projector?’
It took the entire journey to the source of the burning smell to convince himself not to run back to the car, break the speed limit all the way home and then set a new record for taking all her clothes off and getting her into bed. Rational thought appeared to desert him completely as soon as she came within touching distance, despite his best intentions. That was probably because his intentions became distinctly less than best whenever he found himself lost in her eyes. More like morally reprehensible. He realised he was rushing, thinking more about what he wanted than about her needs. That was just as much of a Bad thing as blithely mucking about with your own timeline - it was the same sort of selfishness. He didn’t really need any more terrible things to be his fault, and his list of mistakes was quite long enough already.
The projector was fried, but he wasn’t even tempted to fix it. In fact, he could barely remember what had broken it in the first place except that it had been something strange. There was definitely power involved though, because his teeth were doing that annoying tingling thing again. Strange things happening had become a lot less strange since he walked back through that fireplace and there was obviously something going on. He hadn’t escaped. Consequences were still tracking him down. Something was coming, and fast.
Rose didn’t need to know that. She didn’t need to know anything at all, in fact, because if Bad things were going to happen, he wanted to make sure they happened to him, and only to him. He wasn’t going to tell her that. He didn’t really, when it came right down to it, trust her with the truth. What could she do with it, apart from shout, or worry, or try to help? Until he worked out how to save the world, he didn’t need any help, he was worried enough for both of them, and he’d had it with the shouting.
He’d kissed her. He wanted nothing more than to kiss her again, and hold onto her until the very last second of the very last hour of the very last day they might be able to spend together. He loved her, beyond all time and space, after hope was ashes and dust. But it was better that she never loved him. It was better that he was the one to face the consequences on his own. He couldn’t bear to think how he might feel if he lost her. It was worse to think how she might feel if she loved him and lost him again.
There was not going to be enough time.
Chapter 3: The Idiot:http://sap1066.livejournal.com/15356.html
Chapter 2: The Rise of Steel: http://sap1066.livejournal.com/15097.html
Chapter 1: Consequences: http://sap1066.livejournal.com/14430.html
Five and a half hours Chapters 1-10: http://sap1066.livejournal.com/11963.html