The One True Free Life 19/26 (Adult--note the rating change)
Title: The One True Free Life (19/26)
Characters: Alt!Ten/Rose, and everyone else I can cram in to the Alt!Verse, plus several OCs
Rating: Adult (note the change!)
Spoilers: Everything
Disclaimer: It would be a very different, and possibly quite upsetting, world if I owned these characters. For the sake of the world's children, I don't.
Summary: When Rose and Alt!Ten return to Pete's World, after a much longer absence than planned, they find that things have begun to go a bit pear-shaped there. Can Our Heroes save the British Republic while at the same time working out their own Byzantinely complicated personal issues?
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23 | Chapter 24 | Chapter 25 | Chapter 26/ Epilogue | Whole story on Teaspoon
The cry Rose heard from the bathroom wasn't really a word necessarily, though she thought she heard "No way!" in among the rest of the nonsense. She got up from where she'd been sitting chatting with Alis while the older woman put a hamper of food together and lined up some spare wellies by the door.
"I'd better go see what his deal is," Rose laughed and excused herself. "Though I think I already know."
When she pushed the door open, the Doctor was staring at himself in the mirror, poking at the wild tangle of his hair and trying to get a good look at his profile.
"You didn't mention I looked like a troll!" he whined.
She just mocked his look of horror while she turned the water on and set the temperature. "Come on, nothing a little soap can't solve. Besides, don't you like it when your hair looks like it's been done with egg beaters?"
He remained pouting in front of the mirror, brow furrowed and looking ever so serious. "Only when I do it on purpose," he mumbled.
"All right, let's go. I don't imagine there's a whole lot of hot water to be had here, so let's make it snappy, yeah? Off with the clothes."
He didn't move, but stood in front of the fogging mirror stroking his chin again. "This feels a lot better than it looks."
"Shift it, Doctor!" Rose cried, sounding alarmingly like her mum.
He nearly jumped out of both his clothes and his skin at that and began to disrobe hastily, Rose following behind him to pick up his jeans and shirt, hanging them up over an old style jumper-drying rack in the corner. "We won't be able to wash them, but let's give everything a good airing out."
When the Doctor opened his eyes again after rinsing the shampoo out of his hair for the second time (the bottle did say rinse, repeat, after all), Rose was standing rather predictably naked in the shower with him, nibbling on her pinky nail and waiting her turn. Seeing her in the harsh fluorescent light of the bathroom, in such a normal every-day context was unexpectedly intimate and arousing despite the lack of overtly romantic trappings. There was a little mole above her right breast, and the polish was peeling off of her toenails, leaving uneven blots of pink. One of them sort of looked like a butterfly, or maybe a skull. Tiny droplets of water began to collect on her hair and eyelashes, and the Doctor momentarily forgot about everything that had happened to bring them to a small little shower in Snowdonia, which was quickly running out of hot water.
"Budge over," she said and placed a hand on his hip to move him to the side, modestly averting her eyes from the evidence of his distracted thoughts. "The water's getting cold."
By the time Rose was done washing, and explaining to the Doctor why the water running down the drain was an unflattering colour of mousy brown, they were both freezing and it took a good bit of time standing under the heat lamp rubbing themselves vigorously with towels before their teeth stopped chattering. That put an end to any romantic ardour only briefly, before the Doctor realised that there was one very warm place that would probably solve all of his thermal regulation problems in a much more pleasurable way. In his mind, he reprimanded himself for thinking such base thoughts at such a time.
When they emerged again from the bathroom, pink and scrubbed, though wearing their old unwashed clothing, Alis was standing in the kitchen in a pair of wellies, holding a food hamper in one hand and a torch in the other while her terriers yapped and ran circles around her in their excitement for a walk.
"I'm sorry but you can't stay here," she said apologetically. "This will be one of the first places Heths and his lot will look once they figure out you've left the Home Counties, if they haven't done already."
The Doctor's heart sank at the thought of getting back on the cursed bike, again with no sleep and little food, and this time with no actual destination.
"There's an old shepherd's cot, it's not far. You can stay there for the night." She handed the Doctor a torch and Rose took up their bags and other gear.
"What about our motorbike?" he asked as they exited, the dogs taking off at top speed in to the night.
"Bring it in to the barn." She threw a set of keys to him over her shoulder, which fell on to the ground so that the Doctor had to turn his torch on and search for a moment. "You'll need a new vehicle."
Rose made some sounds of protest, while all the Doctor could do was look up and thank any and all lucky stars that may still have been shining above for this unforeseen gift.
"Do shut up, Miss Tyler. Of course you will take it. I've got no use for two cars anyway."
They rounded to the rear of the house and approached an old wooden barn that doubled as a garage. A Range Rover was parked in front of it, and the Doctor doubled back to get the bike and walk it in as Alis opened the barn doors to reveal a car covered by a large canvass sheet.
Rose tentative began to pull the sheet off. "A...Morris Minor?" Her face fell.
"Take it or leave it," huffed Alis, removing the rest of the cover and tossing it over the bike instead. "It was Ianto's car to take to uni. He fixed it up himself."
The Doctor peered in to the windows and blew some dust off the bonnet. "Not going to be winning any drag races, I see. Still, could be worse! I think it will do quite nicely, thank you Alis Jones."
In the dirt-floored old cottage they found a random assortment of old furniture, which Alis explained as being left over from summer holidays, when it was the teenaged Ianto's favourite place to go and have a sulk. She was sternly efficient at putting up a coal fire in the shallow hearth, which filled the single room with an eerie red glow. As she did so, she spoke at length of her lost son, while the Doctor and Rose exchanged sympathetic looks.
After she left it was Rose who finally spoke first. "Ianto Jones, wasn't that one of Jack's mates in Cardiff?"
The Doctor nodded. "There's probably about five thousand Ianto Joneses in Wales, though. I hate to see a mother in mourning like that. Parents shouldn't outlive their children. What do you suppose happened?"
Rose moved over to the hamper and began to root through it, handing various food stuffs to the Doctor as she spoke. "Upgraded, I imagine. It wasn't even two years since the Cybermen when I first got here, and you've no idea the kind of trauma people were still suffering from. No one talks about it very much any more, I think people are trying so hard to forget, but nearly everyone lost someone they loved. Some people lost their whole families."
"I know," muttered the Doctor, feeling pangs of loss over the wife and children who were not his.
"It affected everything. The way people talk and think, the way they vote, most definitely. No one will really admit it--we're British after all--but everyone is still terrified, deep down." She handed him some grapes and a bit of cucumber sandwich. "That's something that we never saw, when we traveled; what happens after we leave, how people have to pick up the pieces. We just swanned off and figured everyone would be all right. But everyone is not all right here. Not by a long shot. There are a lot of Alis Joneses walking around out there. I think that's why Pete and my mum got on with it so quickly. It was a way out of the grief."
"Is that what I am, for you?" The Doctor surprised himself with his own question, the words falling dead in to the space between them before he could stop himself or even think about it.
Rose, however, seemed completely unfazed. "Yeah, a bit."
"Oh."
She caught the look on the Doctor's face by the glow of the fire--that kicked-puppy face she'd seen once or twice before. "It's not a bad thing. You make me forget. You've always made me forget."
"That's not necessarily a good thing either."
"No, maybe not. But all the same, when I'm with you, I forget that I was ever not with you. And this version of you seems to be just as good at that as the other one." She leaned over the small plank table and kissed him on his nose.
After they cleaned up the wreckage of their meal, the Doctor excused himself to get some air (though Rose suspected that might be code for "use the loo"), and didn't come back for a long while. Her annoyance turned to alarm very quickly, and then back to annoyance again when she found him outside sitting on a rock, tracing the craggy mountain tops in the distance with his nine hundred year old gaze.
"Probably not the best of times for you to go disappearing on me," she said quietly as she sat down next to him. "I'm sorry if what I said upset you. It is the truth, though."
"It's not that. Well, not entirely that."
"Well, go on then." She nestled up to him a bit, found a more comfortable spot on the rock and braced herself to hear from him all of the ways that he'd been disappointed with his new life. No TARDIS, no time and space, too much in the domestics arena, and then of course the people trying to capture and do him bodily harm. She'd run over each of these scenarios in her mind multiple times as she clung to the back of the motorbike for all of those hours--all of the ways he'd be inevitably disappointed by things and situations that she herself could do nothing to remedy.
"I'm scared," he said at last, and defied Rose's expectations yet again.
"Me too."
"No, I mean really." He drew his knees up to his chest and rested his cheek on them, looking over at Rose, sitting placidly next to him.
"I know," she whispered, and she thought she did know.
"Is that okay?" he finally asked.
"Why wouldn't it be?"
"It's not how I'm supposed to be," he sighed and took in the vista of the mountains in the scant moonlight again. He felt stabilised by their presence, held on to the Earth despite spinning around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour.
"Well, that's the silliest thing I've ever heard," she said as she playfully smacked his knee. "Go ahead and be scared. But there is one thing that I learned, travelling with you: don't let the fear rule you. You taught me that. Don't let the fear make your choices for you. So, learn from yourself, yeah?"
He didn't know quite what to say to that and let her words slip off in to the night, to be met by the cries of foxes lower down in the valley.
"Well," she said, standing, "I'm trying to be sensitive to your mood here, but come morning we will need to face our fears and, what's the saying? Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die? We've taken care of the eating and drinking, and I'd sort of like to be merry for a while. Just to tick that off the list."
She held out a hand to him and when he took it, he felt like he'd not necissarily found another answer to the human mystery, but had at least the inkling of a clue. "Well, if we're all going to die anyway, might as well," he said.
"We're all dying, Doctor. Some just slower than others."
He opened the door to the cottage for her and drank in the sight of her outlined with the orange glow of the fire. "Did you learn that from me as well?"
She turned around to face him in the centre of the room. "You should have guessed by now, I nick all my best bits from you."
When he laid her down on the threadbare blanket in front of the fire, it was to seek completion rather than release. He wanted to remember the feel of every part of her, should they be separated again, perhaps by the veil that can't be crossed even by the Time Lords. To that end he undressed her slowly and carefully, pausing just to look and to touch, and she let him take his time. If this was a comfort for him, that is what she wanted to provide, the look in her eye telling him what he needed to know about how to understand this moment.
The glow from the fire reminded him of how she'd looked when she risked her own life to save his, her skin a matte golden, her eyes shining in the light, all the little soft hairs of her body forming a ghost image around her. Humans did this, didn't they? They remembered these things, these moments, and used them as a way out of fear and grief.
When she responded to his touch, it was as one surprised rather than expectant, and when she sat up and helped him undress as well, it was with a reverence that had been absent in their previous times together. The experience felt wholly new to him yet again, as if there was no end point to their story, just a circle, an orbit. Her kisses were sweet, even tangibly rather than metaphorically so, and when she giggled at how his new beard felt against her skin, he laughed along with her. Eat, drink and be merry, for we're all dying. Some just faster than others.
Entering her, he let go of desire and felt the still point of the turning world. They remained joined and unmoving for a time that stretched on forever and then returned to the beginning again. What they could do together was greater than the sum of their individual lives, and moving as one just proved that. He could be scared and give that to her, and she would return to him courage. She could feel grief and give that to him and he would return to her comfort.
He pressed in to her and she wrapped her arms around his back, drawing him close, connecting as much skin as possible, as if where they were already one was not enough. They both shuddered with mutual pleasure, and she whispered his name to herself, eyes closed, head thrown back, dark hair spread across the blanket. She moved her hands down to guide his hips, gently encouraging him to just take the moment as given and enjoy himself, moaning words of approval and incitement. She was smiling and happy as she shifted under him and found satisfaction in his increased pace, and she laughed with her release.
It surprised him and he stopped, looking down at her as she was racked with giggles that made her inner muscles continue to grip him. "Oh, don't stop now!" she grinned up at him. "Don't you laugh when you're happy?"
"I suppose I do." He felt a smile break out on his own face, and she gave him a playful little smack on the rear.
"Be happy," she sighed as her giggles subsided in to a sensual smile of pleasure again as he quickened his pace and drove in to her unapologetically for his own sake. It's like that too, sometimes, he thought.
And he was happy. He came with her name on his smiling lips, and at long last not a single other thought in his head. They collapsed in to a panting, sweaty heap of giggles, poking and smacking one another like children, before growing quiescent and falling asleep entwined together in front of the fire.
When Rose woke to a drizzly grey dawn, she felt around for her bag and drew out some key items. Prodding the Doctor on his bare, freckled shoulder, she waited for him to open his eyes and held the sudoku book open in front of him. He mumbled out a number and she entered it in to her mobile, pressing "send" on a message reading:
STILL ALIVE. STILL FREE. NEWS?
(To Chapter 20)
Characters: Alt!Ten/Rose, and everyone else I can cram in to the Alt!Verse, plus several OCs
Rating: Adult (note the change!)
Spoilers: Everything
Disclaimer: It would be a very different, and possibly quite upsetting, world if I owned these characters. For the sake of the world's children, I don't.
Summary: When Rose and Alt!Ten return to Pete's World, after a much longer absence than planned, they find that things have begun to go a bit pear-shaped there. Can Our Heroes save the British Republic while at the same time working out their own Byzantinely complicated personal issues?
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23 | Chapter 24 | Chapter 25 | Chapter 26/ Epilogue | Whole story on Teaspoon
The cry Rose heard from the bathroom wasn't really a word necessarily, though she thought she heard "No way!" in among the rest of the nonsense. She got up from where she'd been sitting chatting with Alis while the older woman put a hamper of food together and lined up some spare wellies by the door.
"I'd better go see what his deal is," Rose laughed and excused herself. "Though I think I already know."
When she pushed the door open, the Doctor was staring at himself in the mirror, poking at the wild tangle of his hair and trying to get a good look at his profile.
"You didn't mention I looked like a troll!" he whined.
She just mocked his look of horror while she turned the water on and set the temperature. "Come on, nothing a little soap can't solve. Besides, don't you like it when your hair looks like it's been done with egg beaters?"
He remained pouting in front of the mirror, brow furrowed and looking ever so serious. "Only when I do it on purpose," he mumbled.
"All right, let's go. I don't imagine there's a whole lot of hot water to be had here, so let's make it snappy, yeah? Off with the clothes."
He didn't move, but stood in front of the fogging mirror stroking his chin again. "This feels a lot better than it looks."
"Shift it, Doctor!" Rose cried, sounding alarmingly like her mum.
He nearly jumped out of both his clothes and his skin at that and began to disrobe hastily, Rose following behind him to pick up his jeans and shirt, hanging them up over an old style jumper-drying rack in the corner. "We won't be able to wash them, but let's give everything a good airing out."
When the Doctor opened his eyes again after rinsing the shampoo out of his hair for the second time (the bottle did say rinse, repeat, after all), Rose was standing rather predictably naked in the shower with him, nibbling on her pinky nail and waiting her turn. Seeing her in the harsh fluorescent light of the bathroom, in such a normal every-day context was unexpectedly intimate and arousing despite the lack of overtly romantic trappings. There was a little mole above her right breast, and the polish was peeling off of her toenails, leaving uneven blots of pink. One of them sort of looked like a butterfly, or maybe a skull. Tiny droplets of water began to collect on her hair and eyelashes, and the Doctor momentarily forgot about everything that had happened to bring them to a small little shower in Snowdonia, which was quickly running out of hot water.
"Budge over," she said and placed a hand on his hip to move him to the side, modestly averting her eyes from the evidence of his distracted thoughts. "The water's getting cold."
By the time Rose was done washing, and explaining to the Doctor why the water running down the drain was an unflattering colour of mousy brown, they were both freezing and it took a good bit of time standing under the heat lamp rubbing themselves vigorously with towels before their teeth stopped chattering. That put an end to any romantic ardour only briefly, before the Doctor realised that there was one very warm place that would probably solve all of his thermal regulation problems in a much more pleasurable way. In his mind, he reprimanded himself for thinking such base thoughts at such a time.
When they emerged again from the bathroom, pink and scrubbed, though wearing their old unwashed clothing, Alis was standing in the kitchen in a pair of wellies, holding a food hamper in one hand and a torch in the other while her terriers yapped and ran circles around her in their excitement for a walk.
"I'm sorry but you can't stay here," she said apologetically. "This will be one of the first places Heths and his lot will look once they figure out you've left the Home Counties, if they haven't done already."
The Doctor's heart sank at the thought of getting back on the cursed bike, again with no sleep and little food, and this time with no actual destination.
"There's an old shepherd's cot, it's not far. You can stay there for the night." She handed the Doctor a torch and Rose took up their bags and other gear.
"What about our motorbike?" he asked as they exited, the dogs taking off at top speed in to the night.
"Bring it in to the barn." She threw a set of keys to him over her shoulder, which fell on to the ground so that the Doctor had to turn his torch on and search for a moment. "You'll need a new vehicle."
Rose made some sounds of protest, while all the Doctor could do was look up and thank any and all lucky stars that may still have been shining above for this unforeseen gift.
"Do shut up, Miss Tyler. Of course you will take it. I've got no use for two cars anyway."
They rounded to the rear of the house and approached an old wooden barn that doubled as a garage. A Range Rover was parked in front of it, and the Doctor doubled back to get the bike and walk it in as Alis opened the barn doors to reveal a car covered by a large canvass sheet.
Rose tentative began to pull the sheet off. "A...Morris Minor?" Her face fell.
"Take it or leave it," huffed Alis, removing the rest of the cover and tossing it over the bike instead. "It was Ianto's car to take to uni. He fixed it up himself."
The Doctor peered in to the windows and blew some dust off the bonnet. "Not going to be winning any drag races, I see. Still, could be worse! I think it will do quite nicely, thank you Alis Jones."
In the dirt-floored old cottage they found a random assortment of old furniture, which Alis explained as being left over from summer holidays, when it was the teenaged Ianto's favourite place to go and have a sulk. She was sternly efficient at putting up a coal fire in the shallow hearth, which filled the single room with an eerie red glow. As she did so, she spoke at length of her lost son, while the Doctor and Rose exchanged sympathetic looks.
After she left it was Rose who finally spoke first. "Ianto Jones, wasn't that one of Jack's mates in Cardiff?"
The Doctor nodded. "There's probably about five thousand Ianto Joneses in Wales, though. I hate to see a mother in mourning like that. Parents shouldn't outlive their children. What do you suppose happened?"
Rose moved over to the hamper and began to root through it, handing various food stuffs to the Doctor as she spoke. "Upgraded, I imagine. It wasn't even two years since the Cybermen when I first got here, and you've no idea the kind of trauma people were still suffering from. No one talks about it very much any more, I think people are trying so hard to forget, but nearly everyone lost someone they loved. Some people lost their whole families."
"I know," muttered the Doctor, feeling pangs of loss over the wife and children who were not his.
"It affected everything. The way people talk and think, the way they vote, most definitely. No one will really admit it--we're British after all--but everyone is still terrified, deep down." She handed him some grapes and a bit of cucumber sandwich. "That's something that we never saw, when we traveled; what happens after we leave, how people have to pick up the pieces. We just swanned off and figured everyone would be all right. But everyone is not all right here. Not by a long shot. There are a lot of Alis Joneses walking around out there. I think that's why Pete and my mum got on with it so quickly. It was a way out of the grief."
"Is that what I am, for you?" The Doctor surprised himself with his own question, the words falling dead in to the space between them before he could stop himself or even think about it.
Rose, however, seemed completely unfazed. "Yeah, a bit."
"Oh."
She caught the look on the Doctor's face by the glow of the fire--that kicked-puppy face she'd seen once or twice before. "It's not a bad thing. You make me forget. You've always made me forget."
"That's not necessarily a good thing either."
"No, maybe not. But all the same, when I'm with you, I forget that I was ever not with you. And this version of you seems to be just as good at that as the other one." She leaned over the small plank table and kissed him on his nose.
After they cleaned up the wreckage of their meal, the Doctor excused himself to get some air (though Rose suspected that might be code for "use the loo"), and didn't come back for a long while. Her annoyance turned to alarm very quickly, and then back to annoyance again when she found him outside sitting on a rock, tracing the craggy mountain tops in the distance with his nine hundred year old gaze.
"Probably not the best of times for you to go disappearing on me," she said quietly as she sat down next to him. "I'm sorry if what I said upset you. It is the truth, though."
"It's not that. Well, not entirely that."
"Well, go on then." She nestled up to him a bit, found a more comfortable spot on the rock and braced herself to hear from him all of the ways that he'd been disappointed with his new life. No TARDIS, no time and space, too much in the domestics arena, and then of course the people trying to capture and do him bodily harm. She'd run over each of these scenarios in her mind multiple times as she clung to the back of the motorbike for all of those hours--all of the ways he'd be inevitably disappointed by things and situations that she herself could do nothing to remedy.
"I'm scared," he said at last, and defied Rose's expectations yet again.
"Me too."
"No, I mean really." He drew his knees up to his chest and rested his cheek on them, looking over at Rose, sitting placidly next to him.
"I know," she whispered, and she thought she did know.
"Is that okay?" he finally asked.
"Why wouldn't it be?"
"It's not how I'm supposed to be," he sighed and took in the vista of the mountains in the scant moonlight again. He felt stabilised by their presence, held on to the Earth despite spinning around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour.
"Well, that's the silliest thing I've ever heard," she said as she playfully smacked his knee. "Go ahead and be scared. But there is one thing that I learned, travelling with you: don't let the fear rule you. You taught me that. Don't let the fear make your choices for you. So, learn from yourself, yeah?"
He didn't know quite what to say to that and let her words slip off in to the night, to be met by the cries of foxes lower down in the valley.
"Well," she said, standing, "I'm trying to be sensitive to your mood here, but come morning we will need to face our fears and, what's the saying? Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die? We've taken care of the eating and drinking, and I'd sort of like to be merry for a while. Just to tick that off the list."
She held out a hand to him and when he took it, he felt like he'd not necissarily found another answer to the human mystery, but had at least the inkling of a clue. "Well, if we're all going to die anyway, might as well," he said.
"We're all dying, Doctor. Some just slower than others."
He opened the door to the cottage for her and drank in the sight of her outlined with the orange glow of the fire. "Did you learn that from me as well?"
She turned around to face him in the centre of the room. "You should have guessed by now, I nick all my best bits from you."
When he laid her down on the threadbare blanket in front of the fire, it was to seek completion rather than release. He wanted to remember the feel of every part of her, should they be separated again, perhaps by the veil that can't be crossed even by the Time Lords. To that end he undressed her slowly and carefully, pausing just to look and to touch, and she let him take his time. If this was a comfort for him, that is what she wanted to provide, the look in her eye telling him what he needed to know about how to understand this moment.
The glow from the fire reminded him of how she'd looked when she risked her own life to save his, her skin a matte golden, her eyes shining in the light, all the little soft hairs of her body forming a ghost image around her. Humans did this, didn't they? They remembered these things, these moments, and used them as a way out of fear and grief.
When she responded to his touch, it was as one surprised rather than expectant, and when she sat up and helped him undress as well, it was with a reverence that had been absent in their previous times together. The experience felt wholly new to him yet again, as if there was no end point to their story, just a circle, an orbit. Her kisses were sweet, even tangibly rather than metaphorically so, and when she giggled at how his new beard felt against her skin, he laughed along with her. Eat, drink and be merry, for we're all dying. Some just faster than others.
Entering her, he let go of desire and felt the still point of the turning world. They remained joined and unmoving for a time that stretched on forever and then returned to the beginning again. What they could do together was greater than the sum of their individual lives, and moving as one just proved that. He could be scared and give that to her, and she would return to him courage. She could feel grief and give that to him and he would return to her comfort.
He pressed in to her and she wrapped her arms around his back, drawing him close, connecting as much skin as possible, as if where they were already one was not enough. They both shuddered with mutual pleasure, and she whispered his name to herself, eyes closed, head thrown back, dark hair spread across the blanket. She moved her hands down to guide his hips, gently encouraging him to just take the moment as given and enjoy himself, moaning words of approval and incitement. She was smiling and happy as she shifted under him and found satisfaction in his increased pace, and she laughed with her release.
It surprised him and he stopped, looking down at her as she was racked with giggles that made her inner muscles continue to grip him. "Oh, don't stop now!" she grinned up at him. "Don't you laugh when you're happy?"
"I suppose I do." He felt a smile break out on his own face, and she gave him a playful little smack on the rear.
"Be happy," she sighed as her giggles subsided in to a sensual smile of pleasure again as he quickened his pace and drove in to her unapologetically for his own sake. It's like that too, sometimes, he thought.
And he was happy. He came with her name on his smiling lips, and at long last not a single other thought in his head. They collapsed in to a panting, sweaty heap of giggles, poking and smacking one another like children, before growing quiescent and falling asleep entwined together in front of the fire.
When Rose woke to a drizzly grey dawn, she felt around for her bag and drew out some key items. Prodding the Doctor on his bare, freckled shoulder, she waited for him to open his eyes and held the sudoku book open in front of him. He mumbled out a number and she entered it in to her mobile, pressing "send" on a message reading:
STILL ALIVE. STILL FREE. NEWS?
(To Chapter 20)