Fic: Two Days (1/2)
Title: Two Days (1/2)
Characters/Pairing: Rose/Ten II, featuring Jackie and Pete
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~2300
Summary: The events that transpire two days after Rose and the newly human Doctor join hands on the beach in Journey's End
Notes: Well, I suppose everyone has their post-Journey's End fic and this is mine. It's been a bit of a struggle but I thought I'd give it a go.
Can be ready as a standalone piece or as part of the Two Lifetimes series, following Two Minutes
Two Days
Two days after the now part-human Doctor and Rose joined hands on the beach that held traces of their connection across the stars the Doctor wakes up feeling groggy and thick-headed.
The moment his eyes are fully open he sets them to work locating Rose. They find her sitting solemnly in the chair across the room. She’s already dressed in a crisp blazer and trousers, colours muted and drab.
“What time is it today?” the Doctor croaks, wishing there was a way to jump start his salivary glands through sheer mental power and fix this apparent human tendency to wake up with a mouth as dry as the deserts on Kr’tlen.
“Noon,” Rose answers, moving from the chair to perch carefully on the edge of the bed. The Doctor lays his hand on her thigh in a compulsive action he isn’t even aware of until after he’s done it.
“Have you been up long?” he asks, something about him being in bed and holding Rose’s leg making him unable to meet her in the eye.
“About an hour.” She shifts, not like she wants to get away from him, but not like she wants to get closer either. Her next words come out in the stilted, rushed way that he is unhappily aware his presence has brought between them. “I didn’t think you’d want to wake up alone.”
He can hear the pain of memory in her voice, a perfect reflection of his own. They’re both thinking of the time they’ve spent apart, and for a moment it’s all he can to rub her leg and swallow and why are human salivary glands so useless in the morning?
“Thanks,” he croaks after a moment, biting off the word as he realises how incredibly inadequate it is. He meets her eyes now, because this is about the two of them and not only saying the things they have to say but also the things they do say. “I’m glad it’s you today and not your dad again.”
He gets a smile at that, albeit a small one that’s gone far too soon for his liking. Still, it’s better than yesterday when she hardly smiled at all.
Yesterday- his and Rose’s first day together- the Doctor was shaken awake by Pete. It took his brain and his newly part-human body a moment to connect, and when they had the first thing he had done was blush. He was so startled by this new human action of stimulated vasodilators and expanded capillaries, which was rather uncomfortable and terribly inconvenient, why have a physical response that draws attention to the fact you are embarrassed rather than one that disguises it? that he stayed still and simply stared at Pete.
Fortunately, Pete didn’t seem angry to find a man who was basically a stranger curled so tightly around his daughter in her bed that even the Doctor was a little confused as to whose limbs were whose. Instead Pete gently prodded Rose awake as well, then informed them that it was two in the afternoon and they were both likely dehydrated.
Remembering his last regeneration, the Doctor received and drank two bottles of water readily, not exactly pleased with this body’s current need for so much sleep but understanding it’s necessity. After all, a metacrisis would take it’s toll on anyone. He was not as accepting of Rose’s fatigue, the dark circles under her eyes and the paleness of her skin, especially as he learned it was, to her, an expected and familiar side-effect of travelling with the dimension cannon.
His was prevented from voicing his opinion of this- which in his head was oscillating rapidly between anger, curiosity, and concern- by Pete informing them he had brought in a doctor to treat Jackie who had become violently ill following her first cross-dimensional trip. While this increased the Doctor’s discomfort, Rose was the one to speak up, half-shouting about how her mum shouldn’t have gone.
“Ah well,” Pete replied with the air of a man who had experienced enough unanswerable outbursts to develop a wisdom from them. He handed them each another bottle, watched as they took disgruntled sips in unison. “The things we do for love.”
The Doctor and Rose spent the rest of yesterday around the house, Rose giving him a dispassionate, bewildered sort of tour as though the rooms belonged to someone else and she wasn’t quite she how she knew about them. She showed him to a disused greenhouse on the grounds, becoming suddenly shy as she murmured something about a workshop. The Doctor took her hand as an answer and told her the angle of the sun and the exact number of minutes of perfect natural light the greenhouse would get during the day.
She took him to meet Tony after that. He had brown eyes just like his sister and it hurt a little to hold one of his tiny hands and listen to his babbling nonsense, but the Doctor thought some of it was the good kind of hurt, the kind that meant a wound was healing, or at least turning into scar tissue.
The Doctor tired annoyingly quickly yesterday, and after eating a warm and comforting dinner cooked by some of the mansion’s discrete staff during which the Doctor asked about Vitex because he was fairly positive flavoured health drinks were a neutral topic in any universe, he and Rose returned to bed. There was so much he wanted to discuss with her, but holding her in his arms and feeling her breath against his cheek in the dark felt like a conversation of its own, and it was enough to content him into sleep.
He feels less lethargic today, and judging by Rose’s apparel and the return of some colour to her cheeks she is feeling better as well. He asks about her mum, resists making any sort of joke when Rose says she’s on the mend and the doctor treating her has already left, then he asks about them.
It’s a simple question, one of the simplest he can think of in this new reality they’re just starting to build with its millions of unknowns buzzing inside of him like a swarm of bees.
“What are we doing today?”
“I thought we’d go down to the shops.” Rose’s answer is just as light as his question, both so wary of being stung. “Get a bit of lunch, and then buy you some clothes.”
What’s wrong with blue?
The Doctor hopes she doesn’t notice his slight pause, even though he knows she of course does. “Okay,” he says.
The air outside is cold but the sunlight is blindingly bright. It seems to be a day of contrasts as the Doctor and Rose walk from the Tyler mansion into town. He’s the one inappropriately dressed for the weather in a t-shirt and trousers, while Rose is austere and formal in her sombre suit. She walks with purpose rather than eager curiosity, and his lack of local knowledge feels more formidable than exciting. They don’t hold hands, the Doctor says little, and Rose doesn’t smile.
Once they get lunch, however, from a place with brightly coloured napkins and smoothies that come in several flavours the Doctor remarks are illegal on the planet Belthor, they begin to lose some of the stiffness prickling at them both like sunburn.
It feels similar to throwing off an illness that has kept you bed-ridden, the Doctor imagines, and learning to walk again. He and Rose have to learn how to have an adventure together again, how to let go and enjoy themselves like they used to do so effortlessly. The memories are there, though hard to reach behind layers of pain and the sparking uncertainty of this new life, and while falling short hurts they both keep reaching. For today, the second day of the rest of their lives, the effort is just as good as the desired end.
Three and half hours later the day has grown warm around them and they stop at an outdoor café, laden with shopping bags and ignoring the ungainliness of their tightly linked arms. Rose orders tea and rolls her eyes when the Doctor orders three different cakes, which he protests are to share but that they both know he’ll eat the majority of himself. They choose a table where they can sit next to each other, and when their knees touch under the wrought iron neither moves away.
“I could get used to this,” the Doctor says cheerfully, polishing off a last forkful of cheesecake and reaching for the double chocolate. Rose goes very still next to him, her eyes suddenly fixed on her tea.
“Well,” she says in a voice that is horribly small and flat. “You’ll have to.”
He looks at her, wondering if it’s a human thing to feel as though you’re about to vomit cheesecake everywhere in response to four little words. He makes a concentrated effort not to, and manages to get out four words of his own. “What do you mean?”
“No TARDIS, no spaceships, no dimension cannon,” Rose tells her tea in a horribly practical voice that sounds nothing like her. “You’re stuck here. Nine hundred years of time and space, and now you’re stuck here for the rest of your life.” She doesn’t add with me but they both hear it anyway.
The Doctor takes a moment to answer, swallowing a mouthful of double chocolate before remembering his stomach is currently leading a revolt. He doesn’t think telling her that he’s already thinking of ways to synthetically manufacture an exponential rotary circuit to further increase the growth rate of a new TARDIS is what Rose wants to hear right now. He doesn’t think laughing at the absurdity of her worrying about him not wanting to be with her is the way to go either, partially because he has a strange feeling that his laughter would manifest itself as tears.
“I was human once,” he says at last. It gets Rose to look at him at least, albeit confused and possibly even a little scared. “It was while I was travelling with Martha. There were these aliens after me, and I needed to hide. So I used this chameleon device that rewrites Time Lord DNA into human.”
Rose still looks confused, but she’s listening intently as she always has to his explanations, and he can see her wonderful mind working to understand what he’s saying.
“Using this device changes everything about a Time Lord, even their memories.” The Doctor reaches out and takes Rose’s hand without thinking, and she doesn’t pull away. The soft warmth of her skin under his is like a drink of soothing tea, coating his throat and allow the words to continue. “I thought I was John Smith, a school teacher in nineteen-thirteen, who just occasionally had strange dreams about blue boxes and planets with orange skies.”
He traces the pad of his thumb over the back of her hand, his voice dropping to that deeper, quieter place that’s just for her. “And you,” he continues. “Even as John Smith living a human life day after day I never forgot about you.”
Rose’s eyes look distinctly wet and she opens her mouth, but the Doctor presses on. He doesn’t want her to cry anymore because of him, and he rushes to make his point in the hopes that she won’t.
“But as John Smith I had a future,” he says without letting her break eye contact. “A future where I fell in love and got married and had children and aged and… and died. And I wanted it Rose.” He leans in and maybe it’s a little strange for them to be sitting close enough to feel each other’s breath in public outside a café but at that moment neither of them care. “I wanted that life and then when I changed back it was lost to me, it died…”
Rose is clutching his hand now as she stares back into his own suspiciously wet eyes, and the Doctor wishes he was kissing her rather than just staring at her like he’s about to, but he needs to finish so she knows, so she never doubts this again.
“I meant what I said on the beach, two days ago.” It feels like years. “I have only this one life and I want to spend it with you, in every way. It doesn’t matter what we do or where we go-”
“I love you,” Rose gasps, and the awful voice in the back of the Doctor’s mind that was hissing maybe she only brought this up because she doesn’t want him is silenced as he does kiss her, and it’s another contrast because it starts out deep and desperate and ends slow and sweet.
Eventually Rose slides back into her own chair and finishes her tea with dry eyes and a glow that only partially comes from her smile. The Doctor eats his way through the rest of the double chocolate and two-thirds of the Victoria sponge before remembering his promise to share. He tells Rose about the exponential rotary circuit and kisses her again when she nods and tells him she’s pretty sure they have sonic technology at Torchwood, and if he’s looking for a change maybe this time they should try a hammer.
They walk back to the house like an entry in a three-legged race, arms tight around each other as they fumble with their shopping bags and their laughter rings out against the cloudless sky.
Part 2
Characters/Pairing: Rose/Ten II, featuring Jackie and Pete
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~2300
Summary: The events that transpire two days after Rose and the newly human Doctor join hands on the beach in Journey's End
Notes: Well, I suppose everyone has their post-Journey's End fic and this is mine. It's been a bit of a struggle but I thought I'd give it a go.
Can be ready as a standalone piece or as part of the Two Lifetimes series, following Two Minutes
Two Days
Two days after the now part-human Doctor and Rose joined hands on the beach that held traces of their connection across the stars the Doctor wakes up feeling groggy and thick-headed.
The moment his eyes are fully open he sets them to work locating Rose. They find her sitting solemnly in the chair across the room. She’s already dressed in a crisp blazer and trousers, colours muted and drab.
“What time is it today?” the Doctor croaks, wishing there was a way to jump start his salivary glands through sheer mental power and fix this apparent human tendency to wake up with a mouth as dry as the deserts on Kr’tlen.
“Noon,” Rose answers, moving from the chair to perch carefully on the edge of the bed. The Doctor lays his hand on her thigh in a compulsive action he isn’t even aware of until after he’s done it.
“Have you been up long?” he asks, something about him being in bed and holding Rose’s leg making him unable to meet her in the eye.
“About an hour.” She shifts, not like she wants to get away from him, but not like she wants to get closer either. Her next words come out in the stilted, rushed way that he is unhappily aware his presence has brought between them. “I didn’t think you’d want to wake up alone.”
He can hear the pain of memory in her voice, a perfect reflection of his own. They’re both thinking of the time they’ve spent apart, and for a moment it’s all he can to rub her leg and swallow and why are human salivary glands so useless in the morning?
“Thanks,” he croaks after a moment, biting off the word as he realises how incredibly inadequate it is. He meets her eyes now, because this is about the two of them and not only saying the things they have to say but also the things they do say. “I’m glad it’s you today and not your dad again.”
He gets a smile at that, albeit a small one that’s gone far too soon for his liking. Still, it’s better than yesterday when she hardly smiled at all.
Yesterday- his and Rose’s first day together- the Doctor was shaken awake by Pete. It took his brain and his newly part-human body a moment to connect, and when they had the first thing he had done was blush. He was so startled by this new human action of stimulated vasodilators and expanded capillaries, which was rather uncomfortable and terribly inconvenient, why have a physical response that draws attention to the fact you are embarrassed rather than one that disguises it? that he stayed still and simply stared at Pete.
Fortunately, Pete didn’t seem angry to find a man who was basically a stranger curled so tightly around his daughter in her bed that even the Doctor was a little confused as to whose limbs were whose. Instead Pete gently prodded Rose awake as well, then informed them that it was two in the afternoon and they were both likely dehydrated.
Remembering his last regeneration, the Doctor received and drank two bottles of water readily, not exactly pleased with this body’s current need for so much sleep but understanding it’s necessity. After all, a metacrisis would take it’s toll on anyone. He was not as accepting of Rose’s fatigue, the dark circles under her eyes and the paleness of her skin, especially as he learned it was, to her, an expected and familiar side-effect of travelling with the dimension cannon.
His was prevented from voicing his opinion of this- which in his head was oscillating rapidly between anger, curiosity, and concern- by Pete informing them he had brought in a doctor to treat Jackie who had become violently ill following her first cross-dimensional trip. While this increased the Doctor’s discomfort, Rose was the one to speak up, half-shouting about how her mum shouldn’t have gone.
“Ah well,” Pete replied with the air of a man who had experienced enough unanswerable outbursts to develop a wisdom from them. He handed them each another bottle, watched as they took disgruntled sips in unison. “The things we do for love.”
The Doctor and Rose spent the rest of yesterday around the house, Rose giving him a dispassionate, bewildered sort of tour as though the rooms belonged to someone else and she wasn’t quite she how she knew about them. She showed him to a disused greenhouse on the grounds, becoming suddenly shy as she murmured something about a workshop. The Doctor took her hand as an answer and told her the angle of the sun and the exact number of minutes of perfect natural light the greenhouse would get during the day.
She took him to meet Tony after that. He had brown eyes just like his sister and it hurt a little to hold one of his tiny hands and listen to his babbling nonsense, but the Doctor thought some of it was the good kind of hurt, the kind that meant a wound was healing, or at least turning into scar tissue.
The Doctor tired annoyingly quickly yesterday, and after eating a warm and comforting dinner cooked by some of the mansion’s discrete staff during which the Doctor asked about Vitex because he was fairly positive flavoured health drinks were a neutral topic in any universe, he and Rose returned to bed. There was so much he wanted to discuss with her, but holding her in his arms and feeling her breath against his cheek in the dark felt like a conversation of its own, and it was enough to content him into sleep.
He feels less lethargic today, and judging by Rose’s apparel and the return of some colour to her cheeks she is feeling better as well. He asks about her mum, resists making any sort of joke when Rose says she’s on the mend and the doctor treating her has already left, then he asks about them.
It’s a simple question, one of the simplest he can think of in this new reality they’re just starting to build with its millions of unknowns buzzing inside of him like a swarm of bees.
“What are we doing today?”
“I thought we’d go down to the shops.” Rose’s answer is just as light as his question, both so wary of being stung. “Get a bit of lunch, and then buy you some clothes.”
What’s wrong with blue?
The Doctor hopes she doesn’t notice his slight pause, even though he knows she of course does. “Okay,” he says.
The air outside is cold but the sunlight is blindingly bright. It seems to be a day of contrasts as the Doctor and Rose walk from the Tyler mansion into town. He’s the one inappropriately dressed for the weather in a t-shirt and trousers, while Rose is austere and formal in her sombre suit. She walks with purpose rather than eager curiosity, and his lack of local knowledge feels more formidable than exciting. They don’t hold hands, the Doctor says little, and Rose doesn’t smile.
Once they get lunch, however, from a place with brightly coloured napkins and smoothies that come in several flavours the Doctor remarks are illegal on the planet Belthor, they begin to lose some of the stiffness prickling at them both like sunburn.
It feels similar to throwing off an illness that has kept you bed-ridden, the Doctor imagines, and learning to walk again. He and Rose have to learn how to have an adventure together again, how to let go and enjoy themselves like they used to do so effortlessly. The memories are there, though hard to reach behind layers of pain and the sparking uncertainty of this new life, and while falling short hurts they both keep reaching. For today, the second day of the rest of their lives, the effort is just as good as the desired end.
Three and half hours later the day has grown warm around them and they stop at an outdoor café, laden with shopping bags and ignoring the ungainliness of their tightly linked arms. Rose orders tea and rolls her eyes when the Doctor orders three different cakes, which he protests are to share but that they both know he’ll eat the majority of himself. They choose a table where they can sit next to each other, and when their knees touch under the wrought iron neither moves away.
“I could get used to this,” the Doctor says cheerfully, polishing off a last forkful of cheesecake and reaching for the double chocolate. Rose goes very still next to him, her eyes suddenly fixed on her tea.
“Well,” she says in a voice that is horribly small and flat. “You’ll have to.”
He looks at her, wondering if it’s a human thing to feel as though you’re about to vomit cheesecake everywhere in response to four little words. He makes a concentrated effort not to, and manages to get out four words of his own. “What do you mean?”
“No TARDIS, no spaceships, no dimension cannon,” Rose tells her tea in a horribly practical voice that sounds nothing like her. “You’re stuck here. Nine hundred years of time and space, and now you’re stuck here for the rest of your life.” She doesn’t add with me but they both hear it anyway.
The Doctor takes a moment to answer, swallowing a mouthful of double chocolate before remembering his stomach is currently leading a revolt. He doesn’t think telling her that he’s already thinking of ways to synthetically manufacture an exponential rotary circuit to further increase the growth rate of a new TARDIS is what Rose wants to hear right now. He doesn’t think laughing at the absurdity of her worrying about him not wanting to be with her is the way to go either, partially because he has a strange feeling that his laughter would manifest itself as tears.
“I was human once,” he says at last. It gets Rose to look at him at least, albeit confused and possibly even a little scared. “It was while I was travelling with Martha. There were these aliens after me, and I needed to hide. So I used this chameleon device that rewrites Time Lord DNA into human.”
Rose still looks confused, but she’s listening intently as she always has to his explanations, and he can see her wonderful mind working to understand what he’s saying.
“Using this device changes everything about a Time Lord, even their memories.” The Doctor reaches out and takes Rose’s hand without thinking, and she doesn’t pull away. The soft warmth of her skin under his is like a drink of soothing tea, coating his throat and allow the words to continue. “I thought I was John Smith, a school teacher in nineteen-thirteen, who just occasionally had strange dreams about blue boxes and planets with orange skies.”
He traces the pad of his thumb over the back of her hand, his voice dropping to that deeper, quieter place that’s just for her. “And you,” he continues. “Even as John Smith living a human life day after day I never forgot about you.”
Rose’s eyes look distinctly wet and she opens her mouth, but the Doctor presses on. He doesn’t want her to cry anymore because of him, and he rushes to make his point in the hopes that she won’t.
“But as John Smith I had a future,” he says without letting her break eye contact. “A future where I fell in love and got married and had children and aged and… and died. And I wanted it Rose.” He leans in and maybe it’s a little strange for them to be sitting close enough to feel each other’s breath in public outside a café but at that moment neither of them care. “I wanted that life and then when I changed back it was lost to me, it died…”
Rose is clutching his hand now as she stares back into his own suspiciously wet eyes, and the Doctor wishes he was kissing her rather than just staring at her like he’s about to, but he needs to finish so she knows, so she never doubts this again.
“I meant what I said on the beach, two days ago.” It feels like years. “I have only this one life and I want to spend it with you, in every way. It doesn’t matter what we do or where we go-”
“I love you,” Rose gasps, and the awful voice in the back of the Doctor’s mind that was hissing maybe she only brought this up because she doesn’t want him is silenced as he does kiss her, and it’s another contrast because it starts out deep and desperate and ends slow and sweet.
Eventually Rose slides back into her own chair and finishes her tea with dry eyes and a glow that only partially comes from her smile. The Doctor eats his way through the rest of the double chocolate and two-thirds of the Victoria sponge before remembering his promise to share. He tells Rose about the exponential rotary circuit and kisses her again when she nods and tells him she’s pretty sure they have sonic technology at Torchwood, and if he’s looking for a change maybe this time they should try a hammer.
They walk back to the house like an entry in a three-legged race, arms tight around each other as they fumble with their shopping bags and their laughter rings out against the cloudless sky.
Part 2