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: 7/9
Summary: A second chance. A new beginning. A different ending?
Chapter 7: London
The Doctor was inclined to stare at Rose as if she’d lost her mind, but actually, he rather suspected she’d found it again, or that she’d found those memories in it that she’d lost for a while. That demon in the fog had done a devilishly good job of making his fears come true. He should have been pleased. He should have been delighted. He should have been throwing her over his shoulder, carrying her off to his bedroom and knowing that he never need be alone again. She’d remembered that she loved him and she’d kissed him, because she chose to, because it was her decision. There was a time when he’d have been singing at the top of his voice with the sheer happiness of it all.
Now things were a lot more complicated. Mostly because he didn’t seem able to stop making the same mistake, over and over again. The same mistake he’d made in changing timelines and coming back in the first place, the same mistake he’d made when he kissed her, three times now, even though he’d decided after the last occasion that he shouldn’t. The same mistake of loving her, and never being able to walk away.
He sighed, wondering how much time he had before his Consequences caught up with him, and just how much shouting she’d be able to get in between now and then.
Rose was Not Happy. Not Happy in the slightest. That was definitely a cause for a capitalised letter or two. Nor did she show any signs of falling into his arms, giving him a second chance, or picking up where they’d left off. In fact, she was tapping her foot on the floor and looking distinctly impatient. Luckily, Time Lords were genetically incapable of cowering - or he hoped so anyway.
‘No? Cat got your tongue? Or would you prefer a dog?’ she demanded.
He stayed silent, because it was safest.
‘No? Alright - how about a baby? No? Too soon? Let’s start with a wedding ring then - no, better than that - let’s start with a relationship. Except that we aren’t having one are we? All of this is only a kiss.’ She was getting quite worked up now, he noted idly, waiting for her to finish. ‘I want to know what’s going on and I’m not going anywhere else with you until you tell me.’ She pushed past him on her way out of the room.
He let out a long held breath, and then he went to visit the gallery anyway. Of course he went anyway. Rose might think she was the most important woman in his world, but right now that place was held by Mickey’s Gran. Just before Rose had sauntered in and started seducing him, he’d isolated an energy signature common to all of the planets they’d visited recently, all places he’d clearly affected in some way and the place that the signature was strongest was London. He needed to understand his consequences much better if he was going to come up with a proper saving the world plan and work out what to say to Rose. Saving the world would be the easy part.
He’d parked the TARDIS in the middle of the city, specifically, in the middle of Tate Modern, that huge shrine to the most bizarre in twenty first century art carved out of an old power station on the banks of the Thames. No sooner had he stepped out of the doors than the TARDIS was besieged by a horde of knowledgeable bohemian types, muttering about the brutal simplicity of straight lines and block colour as a metaphor for the less complex society of a bygone age. He left them to their ramblings and followed the trail of energy footprints and the tickling of his teeth through the empty white rooms.
There was a high correlation of noise around a collection of old salt and pepper pots someone had carefully arranged on a spare table, which was either art, or he’d wandered into the restaurant by mistake. The sonic screwdriver buzzed off the scale in a high white room dominated by a blank wall and two oversized levers, one on each side. They weren’t connected to anything, they didn’t move, and the name of the piece ‘Doomsday’ wasn’t very enlightening either. The whole thing made about as much sense as a pickled shark or somebody’s unmade bed. He walked carefully though the exhibition, looking for evidence of Bad things, and trying desperately not to think about beds.
On the way back, he found Rose standing in an empty room, transfixed by some child’s drawing taking up half the wall that made him wish for dentures to stop the toothache when he looked at it. Without paying him much attention she backed a few paces away and sat on the low white bench thoughtfully placed in the middle of the room to allow tired art connoisseurs leisure to enjoy the work. Either than or she’d just parked her backside on another priceless sculpture, he couldn’t tell.
The painting was moving, and it moved faster as he approached. It was executed in crayon, or possibly felt tip pen, an enormous brownish piece of paper tacked to the wall with great slabs of blu-tack. There were two stick figures in the centre of the canvas, a woman, with blonde hair and bright red lipstick wearing jeans and a white top standing facing a man, taller, kitted out head to toe in black. He thought the man looked quite dashing, and he glanced at Rose to see if she agreed but her white top and jeans clad body was turned away from his line of sight.
The man and the woman in the drawing walked up to each other in a jerky, stop motion type action and, although they had no mouths to move, he had the impression they were arguing. That was probably about right, he noted dryly - art imitating life with uncanny accuracy. Then the two figures on the canvas proved that they did have mouths, because their round circle faces came together as if they were kissing. That grabbed his attention by the short and curlies. After a couple of seconds the stick couple broke the kiss, turned away holding hands and freeze framed their way like a flicker book back into the blue rectangle that had materialised in the background of the painting.
The blue box now dominating the whole of the foreground began to shake from side to side, before its spasming movement subsided and the sequence of shots started all over again with the silently rowing couple.
He watched it though a second time with amazement, leavened with a good dollop of happiness, some hope and finally mild annoyance when he timed the final box trembling encounter at a mere three minutes. Art was clearly not all that good at imitating life. The sonic screwdriver, set to vibrate, was trying to escape from his pocket.
‘Well, that’s never happening again,’ Rose remarked without turning round.
He crossed the echoing room, came to sit next to her on the vacant side of the bench, close, but not close enough. He sighed. ‘No, probably not.’
‘Probably?’ she queried, in that ever so slightly dangerous tone that usually meant she was building up to shouting. With Rose, you always had to be prepared for the shouting.
There was a loud ‘Ahem’ at this and over his shoulder the Doctor noticed a man in a blue uniform sitting in a chair beside the door with a large sign reading ‘Quiet Please’ above his head. This was the sort of paid flunkey whose entire job it was to sit around in rooms all day listening to other people’s conversations and coughing loudly at significant intervals.
He looked at his hands, decided to gamble. ‘Well, there’s always hope.’
She let out a breath slowly and he thought it carried the weight of several hours of steady contemplation and the authority of a gospel, or a very large rock. ‘Hope isn’t enough to build a relationship on,’ she said softly.
‘Are we having a relationship?’ he asked in a stage whisper, while he tried to understand what she meant. There were reasons beyond reasons for him not to get out of bed in the morning, memories and decisions that made him want to run away and hide rather than stand up to all the dangers he faced and try to make a difference. He used hope to lash his determination together and it was always enough, it always had to be.
‘No,’ she answered, definitively and he could tell by the air of finality in her tone and the way she still wouldn’t look at him that he’d made too many mistakes and he wasn’t going to get a second chance.
A chair scraped pointedly behind them.
She continued, in a hushed voice meant for his ears alone: ‘I can’t go to sleep at night and just hope you’ll be there in the morning. I can’t live every day just hoping we’ll get another one, hoping today isn’t the day when you leave me behind. I want more than that. I want to know that I come first. I want to be able to trust you. I want you to trust me too. ‘
‘I do trust you,’ he protested, wondering if she had sufficient faith in him left to take him at his word.
His exclamation caused an outbreak of pretend coughing.
‘Alright.’ Her words tumbled out her mouth with the continual murmur of leaves on leaves. ‘I’ll ask you again. When you left - and I don’t mean for France either, because I remember Barcelona now…’
He remembered Barcelona too. That was the night that the entire planet had sparkled with possibility, when he hadn’t heard the carnival around him because he’d been so wrapped up in the woman wrapped up in his arms. That was the night he’d realised there was a danger he couldn’t let her go.
‘- and I remember Sheffield -‘
He remembered Sheffield, and the sense he’d had that she could make the drabbest of places radiant again. She’d sought answers, and he’d thought hard about telling her he knew he’d have to leave her, and probably soon, before deciding he couldn’t really trust her with the truth, so he’d offered her hope instead.
‘- so what I want to know is: when you left, were you ever coming back?’ It was the second time she’d asked him.
He wrestled with his instincts, dragged the response out of his mouth because it seemed he’d already lost her and he didn’t have a lot else left to lose. ‘No,’ he said, quietly. ‘I took the TARDIS and I went back to put the timeline right. Some things aren’t meant to be and I had to make sure of it.’
She was silent for a long while.
He felt he had to go a step further and the words rushed straight from his heart and out of his mouth without stopping. ‘But I couldn’t just leave you behind. I couldn’t stay away. I…’ He opened his mouth to tell her that he loved her, to shout, in this silent, clinical, emotionless place that he loved her, to make the walls ring with it. But he remembered that she already knew and probably didn’t want to hear it again.
‘And are you sorry you came back?’ she asked, barely audible, too far away to touch, too distant to be more than an echo of pain.
He ran a hand across his hair, shifted a bit on the bench and felt like his hearts were breaking because it hurt twice as much. ‘Yes.’
Her mouth twisted slightly as she digested this before she nodded, as if she understood. ‘It’s because there’s something coming isn’t there? All those dead Cybermen, the woman at the drive-in, the white ball things? They’re all part of it.’ She nodded again and in the silence he could feel her temper ignite. There was a short pause before the explosion. ‘Why won’t you tell me what it is? Why didn’t you tell me before? Why don’t you trust me?’ She hissed the words, and he could hear the pain and the accusation in them. By the shuffling sounds behind him, the guard could hear it too.
‘Because I don’t know,’ he answered honestly, lowering his volume to match hers. ‘I didn’t tell you because I don’t know what’s going to happen, and I don’t know if I can stop it. I didn’t want to hurt you again.’
She flicked her hair back over one shoulder and regarded him imperiously, with an ice cold fire in her eyes that was scorching. ‘How do I know that’s the truth either? You lied to me about us, about our relationship.’ He could tell that if she hadn’t been remembering to keep her voice down he’d have needed to put his hands over his ears.
‘We aren’t having a relationship,’ he snapped, forgetting his own mute button. ‘According to you.’
Footsteps tapping on the floor and then a finger tapping on his shoulder. In an unctuous, self satisfied and above all quiet voice, the guard said, ‘Excuse me sir, but would you and your girlfriend mind keeping the noise down?’
‘Girlfriend’ was not a good choice of word as it turned out. Rose half screamed, ‘We are not having a relationship,’ and he was glad to see someone else bearing the brunt of the shouting for a change. The guard retreated swiftly, at a pace that could happily have been described as a run.
‘According to you.’ She continued, in a vicious undertone, turning back with her eyes blazing. ‘I loved you. All I wanted was for you to come back. And you did, and you never mentioned a ‘relationship’ once.’
He rose to his feet smoothly to tower above her and responded as gently as a lullaby and with all the muscles in his neck corded with the effort to keep from yelling. ‘I was trying to do the right thing. I wanted you to have a choice.’
‘No, she demurred, standing herself and correcting him with her lips barely moving. ‘What you were doing is showing me you don’t trust me enough to tell me the truth and let me make up my own mind.’
He breathed so hard she swayed with the force of it: ‘So when you forgot to tell me you’d stolen the TARDIS and used emergency programme one again that wasn’t lying either?’
She frowned at him, and her words were as soft as snowfall and as devastating as an avalanche. ‘You knew anyway. And you forgot to tell me that too.’
He refused to start shouting. There had been quite enough shouting recently. He opted for dead calm instead, and the cold, hard truth, with a volume he knew would carry and an attitude that didn’t care. ‘I love you. Before, during and after any relationship you want to have. But if you love me, it has to be for the right reasons.’
As soon as the words had left his mouth he regretted not saying them before.
She straightened and he almost needed to lip-read her answer. ‘I do love you. I never stopped loving you. But I don’t know how to trust you.’
He nodded. ‘Fine,’ without exhaling.
‘Fine.’ She didn’t speak the word, but he understood it anyway.
He stared at her for a long, long time, with his words and everything that made them true on display in his eyes. He held out his hand, palm up, open, waiting. It was the best way he could think of to ask for a second chance, to ask for a new beginning, to hope for a different end. Her gaze flicked down to his apology and back up to his face again. Tentatively, she reached out, locked her fingers through his securely. A faint smile tickled the corners of his mouth and he held out his other hand for her to cling onto. She was smiling back at him now, beaming at him and that old half forgotten refrain that meant happiness surged back into his heart, built to a crescendo in his ears as he pulled her into his arms.
Life imitated art. There was fire and hunger and need in the kisses with which she attacked his mouth, want in the grip of her arms around his neck, desire in the way her leg raised, clamped itself around his thigh. He held her face steady with both hands, invaded her mouth with his tongue, gasping in the air from her lungs as if he was drowning. There was kissing, and then there was this - two people trying to become one as soon as possible without bothering with the niceties of getting a room or taking their clothes off first. His fingers tangled in her hair, pulling her head back, her nails raking his skin under his jumper.
As soon as the hand settled firmly on his shoulder he remembered that they weren’t alone. The guard, obviously enjoying his moment of self importance said, ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave, sir. You and your girlfriend.’
The Doctor’s attention focused again on Rose and specifically on the much missed sensation of her hand beginning to slide down the back of his trousers. He reflected that although he still had no idea What Women Wanted, he was fairly sure this one didn’t want to be any kind of just a friend.
She broke the embrace, took a step back and reached for his hand. ‘Run,’ she said.
And they ran, through the twisting corridors, the bare high rooms, they ran, never looking back, racing for the TARDIS. Someone had cordoned it off with a rope barrier and put a neat little label on a placard that stated ‘Police Box. Name of Artist: Unknown.’
She had her top off before he kicked the door closed.
Chapter 6: Her fear: http://sap1066.livejournal.com/15944.html
Chapter 5: Impossible planets:http://sap1066.livejournal.com/15848.html
Chapter 4: New York:http://sap1066.livejournal.com/15364.html
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: 7/9
Summary: A second chance. A new beginning. A different ending?
Chapter 7: London
The Doctor was inclined to stare at Rose as if she’d lost her mind, but actually, he rather suspected she’d found it again, or that she’d found those memories in it that she’d lost for a while. That demon in the fog had done a devilishly good job of making his fears come true. He should have been pleased. He should have been delighted. He should have been throwing her over his shoulder, carrying her off to his bedroom and knowing that he never need be alone again. She’d remembered that she loved him and she’d kissed him, because she chose to, because it was her decision. There was a time when he’d have been singing at the top of his voice with the sheer happiness of it all.
Now things were a lot more complicated. Mostly because he didn’t seem able to stop making the same mistake, over and over again. The same mistake he’d made in changing timelines and coming back in the first place, the same mistake he’d made when he kissed her, three times now, even though he’d decided after the last occasion that he shouldn’t. The same mistake of loving her, and never being able to walk away.
He sighed, wondering how much time he had before his Consequences caught up with him, and just how much shouting she’d be able to get in between now and then.
Rose was Not Happy. Not Happy in the slightest. That was definitely a cause for a capitalised letter or two. Nor did she show any signs of falling into his arms, giving him a second chance, or picking up where they’d left off. In fact, she was tapping her foot on the floor and looking distinctly impatient. Luckily, Time Lords were genetically incapable of cowering - or he hoped so anyway.
‘No? Cat got your tongue? Or would you prefer a dog?’ she demanded.
He stayed silent, because it was safest.
‘No? Alright - how about a baby? No? Too soon? Let’s start with a wedding ring then - no, better than that - let’s start with a relationship. Except that we aren’t having one are we? All of this is only a kiss.’ She was getting quite worked up now, he noted idly, waiting for her to finish. ‘I want to know what’s going on and I’m not going anywhere else with you until you tell me.’ She pushed past him on her way out of the room.
He let out a long held breath, and then he went to visit the gallery anyway. Of course he went anyway. Rose might think she was the most important woman in his world, but right now that place was held by Mickey’s Gran. Just before Rose had sauntered in and started seducing him, he’d isolated an energy signature common to all of the planets they’d visited recently, all places he’d clearly affected in some way and the place that the signature was strongest was London. He needed to understand his consequences much better if he was going to come up with a proper saving the world plan and work out what to say to Rose. Saving the world would be the easy part.
He’d parked the TARDIS in the middle of the city, specifically, in the middle of Tate Modern, that huge shrine to the most bizarre in twenty first century art carved out of an old power station on the banks of the Thames. No sooner had he stepped out of the doors than the TARDIS was besieged by a horde of knowledgeable bohemian types, muttering about the brutal simplicity of straight lines and block colour as a metaphor for the less complex society of a bygone age. He left them to their ramblings and followed the trail of energy footprints and the tickling of his teeth through the empty white rooms.
There was a high correlation of noise around a collection of old salt and pepper pots someone had carefully arranged on a spare table, which was either art, or he’d wandered into the restaurant by mistake. The sonic screwdriver buzzed off the scale in a high white room dominated by a blank wall and two oversized levers, one on each side. They weren’t connected to anything, they didn’t move, and the name of the piece ‘Doomsday’ wasn’t very enlightening either. The whole thing made about as much sense as a pickled shark or somebody’s unmade bed. He walked carefully though the exhibition, looking for evidence of Bad things, and trying desperately not to think about beds.
On the way back, he found Rose standing in an empty room, transfixed by some child’s drawing taking up half the wall that made him wish for dentures to stop the toothache when he looked at it. Without paying him much attention she backed a few paces away and sat on the low white bench thoughtfully placed in the middle of the room to allow tired art connoisseurs leisure to enjoy the work. Either than or she’d just parked her backside on another priceless sculpture, he couldn’t tell.
The painting was moving, and it moved faster as he approached. It was executed in crayon, or possibly felt tip pen, an enormous brownish piece of paper tacked to the wall with great slabs of blu-tack. There were two stick figures in the centre of the canvas, a woman, with blonde hair and bright red lipstick wearing jeans and a white top standing facing a man, taller, kitted out head to toe in black. He thought the man looked quite dashing, and he glanced at Rose to see if she agreed but her white top and jeans clad body was turned away from his line of sight.
The man and the woman in the drawing walked up to each other in a jerky, stop motion type action and, although they had no mouths to move, he had the impression they were arguing. That was probably about right, he noted dryly - art imitating life with uncanny accuracy. Then the two figures on the canvas proved that they did have mouths, because their round circle faces came together as if they were kissing. That grabbed his attention by the short and curlies. After a couple of seconds the stick couple broke the kiss, turned away holding hands and freeze framed their way like a flicker book back into the blue rectangle that had materialised in the background of the painting.
The blue box now dominating the whole of the foreground began to shake from side to side, before its spasming movement subsided and the sequence of shots started all over again with the silently rowing couple.
He watched it though a second time with amazement, leavened with a good dollop of happiness, some hope and finally mild annoyance when he timed the final box trembling encounter at a mere three minutes. Art was clearly not all that good at imitating life. The sonic screwdriver, set to vibrate, was trying to escape from his pocket.
‘Well, that’s never happening again,’ Rose remarked without turning round.
He crossed the echoing room, came to sit next to her on the vacant side of the bench, close, but not close enough. He sighed. ‘No, probably not.’
‘Probably?’ she queried, in that ever so slightly dangerous tone that usually meant she was building up to shouting. With Rose, you always had to be prepared for the shouting.
There was a loud ‘Ahem’ at this and over his shoulder the Doctor noticed a man in a blue uniform sitting in a chair beside the door with a large sign reading ‘Quiet Please’ above his head. This was the sort of paid flunkey whose entire job it was to sit around in rooms all day listening to other people’s conversations and coughing loudly at significant intervals.
He looked at his hands, decided to gamble. ‘Well, there’s always hope.’
She let out a breath slowly and he thought it carried the weight of several hours of steady contemplation and the authority of a gospel, or a very large rock. ‘Hope isn’t enough to build a relationship on,’ she said softly.
‘Are we having a relationship?’ he asked in a stage whisper, while he tried to understand what she meant. There were reasons beyond reasons for him not to get out of bed in the morning, memories and decisions that made him want to run away and hide rather than stand up to all the dangers he faced and try to make a difference. He used hope to lash his determination together and it was always enough, it always had to be.
‘No,’ she answered, definitively and he could tell by the air of finality in her tone and the way she still wouldn’t look at him that he’d made too many mistakes and he wasn’t going to get a second chance.
A chair scraped pointedly behind them.
She continued, in a hushed voice meant for his ears alone: ‘I can’t go to sleep at night and just hope you’ll be there in the morning. I can’t live every day just hoping we’ll get another one, hoping today isn’t the day when you leave me behind. I want more than that. I want to know that I come first. I want to be able to trust you. I want you to trust me too. ‘
‘I do trust you,’ he protested, wondering if she had sufficient faith in him left to take him at his word.
His exclamation caused an outbreak of pretend coughing.
‘Alright.’ Her words tumbled out her mouth with the continual murmur of leaves on leaves. ‘I’ll ask you again. When you left - and I don’t mean for France either, because I remember Barcelona now…’
He remembered Barcelona too. That was the night that the entire planet had sparkled with possibility, when he hadn’t heard the carnival around him because he’d been so wrapped up in the woman wrapped up in his arms. That was the night he’d realised there was a danger he couldn’t let her go.
‘- and I remember Sheffield -‘
He remembered Sheffield, and the sense he’d had that she could make the drabbest of places radiant again. She’d sought answers, and he’d thought hard about telling her he knew he’d have to leave her, and probably soon, before deciding he couldn’t really trust her with the truth, so he’d offered her hope instead.
‘- so what I want to know is: when you left, were you ever coming back?’ It was the second time she’d asked him.
He wrestled with his instincts, dragged the response out of his mouth because it seemed he’d already lost her and he didn’t have a lot else left to lose. ‘No,’ he said, quietly. ‘I took the TARDIS and I went back to put the timeline right. Some things aren’t meant to be and I had to make sure of it.’
She was silent for a long while.
He felt he had to go a step further and the words rushed straight from his heart and out of his mouth without stopping. ‘But I couldn’t just leave you behind. I couldn’t stay away. I…’ He opened his mouth to tell her that he loved her, to shout, in this silent, clinical, emotionless place that he loved her, to make the walls ring with it. But he remembered that she already knew and probably didn’t want to hear it again.
‘And are you sorry you came back?’ she asked, barely audible, too far away to touch, too distant to be more than an echo of pain.
He ran a hand across his hair, shifted a bit on the bench and felt like his hearts were breaking because it hurt twice as much. ‘Yes.’
Her mouth twisted slightly as she digested this before she nodded, as if she understood. ‘It’s because there’s something coming isn’t there? All those dead Cybermen, the woman at the drive-in, the white ball things? They’re all part of it.’ She nodded again and in the silence he could feel her temper ignite. There was a short pause before the explosion. ‘Why won’t you tell me what it is? Why didn’t you tell me before? Why don’t you trust me?’ She hissed the words, and he could hear the pain and the accusation in them. By the shuffling sounds behind him, the guard could hear it too.
‘Because I don’t know,’ he answered honestly, lowering his volume to match hers. ‘I didn’t tell you because I don’t know what’s going to happen, and I don’t know if I can stop it. I didn’t want to hurt you again.’
She flicked her hair back over one shoulder and regarded him imperiously, with an ice cold fire in her eyes that was scorching. ‘How do I know that’s the truth either? You lied to me about us, about our relationship.’ He could tell that if she hadn’t been remembering to keep her voice down he’d have needed to put his hands over his ears.
‘We aren’t having a relationship,’ he snapped, forgetting his own mute button. ‘According to you.’
Footsteps tapping on the floor and then a finger tapping on his shoulder. In an unctuous, self satisfied and above all quiet voice, the guard said, ‘Excuse me sir, but would you and your girlfriend mind keeping the noise down?’
‘Girlfriend’ was not a good choice of word as it turned out. Rose half screamed, ‘We are not having a relationship,’ and he was glad to see someone else bearing the brunt of the shouting for a change. The guard retreated swiftly, at a pace that could happily have been described as a run.
‘According to you.’ She continued, in a vicious undertone, turning back with her eyes blazing. ‘I loved you. All I wanted was for you to come back. And you did, and you never mentioned a ‘relationship’ once.’
He rose to his feet smoothly to tower above her and responded as gently as a lullaby and with all the muscles in his neck corded with the effort to keep from yelling. ‘I was trying to do the right thing. I wanted you to have a choice.’
‘No, she demurred, standing herself and correcting him with her lips barely moving. ‘What you were doing is showing me you don’t trust me enough to tell me the truth and let me make up my own mind.’
He breathed so hard she swayed with the force of it: ‘So when you forgot to tell me you’d stolen the TARDIS and used emergency programme one again that wasn’t lying either?’
She frowned at him, and her words were as soft as snowfall and as devastating as an avalanche. ‘You knew anyway. And you forgot to tell me that too.’
He refused to start shouting. There had been quite enough shouting recently. He opted for dead calm instead, and the cold, hard truth, with a volume he knew would carry and an attitude that didn’t care. ‘I love you. Before, during and after any relationship you want to have. But if you love me, it has to be for the right reasons.’
As soon as the words had left his mouth he regretted not saying them before.
She straightened and he almost needed to lip-read her answer. ‘I do love you. I never stopped loving you. But I don’t know how to trust you.’
He nodded. ‘Fine,’ without exhaling.
‘Fine.’ She didn’t speak the word, but he understood it anyway.
He stared at her for a long, long time, with his words and everything that made them true on display in his eyes. He held out his hand, palm up, open, waiting. It was the best way he could think of to ask for a second chance, to ask for a new beginning, to hope for a different end. Her gaze flicked down to his apology and back up to his face again. Tentatively, she reached out, locked her fingers through his securely. A faint smile tickled the corners of his mouth and he held out his other hand for her to cling onto. She was smiling back at him now, beaming at him and that old half forgotten refrain that meant happiness surged back into his heart, built to a crescendo in his ears as he pulled her into his arms.
Life imitated art. There was fire and hunger and need in the kisses with which she attacked his mouth, want in the grip of her arms around his neck, desire in the way her leg raised, clamped itself around his thigh. He held her face steady with both hands, invaded her mouth with his tongue, gasping in the air from her lungs as if he was drowning. There was kissing, and then there was this - two people trying to become one as soon as possible without bothering with the niceties of getting a room or taking their clothes off first. His fingers tangled in her hair, pulling her head back, her nails raking his skin under his jumper.
As soon as the hand settled firmly on his shoulder he remembered that they weren’t alone. The guard, obviously enjoying his moment of self importance said, ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave, sir. You and your girlfriend.’
The Doctor’s attention focused again on Rose and specifically on the much missed sensation of her hand beginning to slide down the back of his trousers. He reflected that although he still had no idea What Women Wanted, he was fairly sure this one didn’t want to be any kind of just a friend.
She broke the embrace, took a step back and reached for his hand. ‘Run,’ she said.
And they ran, through the twisting corridors, the bare high rooms, they ran, never looking back, racing for the TARDIS. Someone had cordoned it off with a rope barrier and put a neat little label on a placard that stated ‘Police Box. Name of Artist: Unknown.’
She had her top off before he kicked the door closed.
Chapter 6: Her fear: http://sap1066.livejournal.com/15944.html
Chapter 5: Impossible planets:http://sap1066.livejournal.com/15848.html
Chapter 4: New York:http://sap1066.livejournal.com/15364.html
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