All That Running (1/1)
Title: All That Running
Characters/Pairings: Ten/Rose
Rating: Adult (angst, sex, more angst)
Series: Couples Therapy (not necessary to have read the others, just see the additional A/N below)
Beta: The fabulous, dungeon-raiding editrx
Summary: As Rose recovers from an injury, the Doctor is forced to face his demons.
Dedication: Written for ladychi : friend, beta, beta-ee, fantastic author, birthday girl; and for wiggiemomsi , whose birthday it also is, and after whom the standard measure for Doctor/Rose smut is named (this fic, by the way, comes in at a paltry 3 wiggiemomsis out of a possible 10).
Additional A/N: Couples Therapy is a loose 'verse with no particular internal chronology that goes AU prior to Doomsday. In addition, Rose seems to have abnormally long life as a result of the Bad Wolf. One would think that this premise would all but guarantee a happy fluffy 'verse containing nothing but smut and good times. And up until this story, one would have been correct about that. Now, however, Couples Therapy takes a rather sharp U-turn in to Angstville.
It had been a fairly epic row, and he hadn't said he was sorry. He had, in fact, been quite sure that he was not sorry in the slightest. Well, maybe a bit sorry for some of the ways that he had impugned her species, but not sorry at all about his stance on the basic issue. Which he hadn't remembered the details of, though he had remained quite sure that his correctness was vitally important to...something.
But then there is life outside the TARDIS doors, a scuffle with the insectoid life forms who were subjugating a peaceful reptilian race, and Rose succumbs to the venom so quickly. Quickly but not quietly, and he carries her, thrashing and keening in pain, back to the TARDIS, slamming the lever that sends them in to the vortex as he passes through the console room with her in his arms.
Humans and Time Lords have in common the propensity of their young towards feeling invincible. For Time Lords the phase can last a few hundred years, but after the first couple of regenerations it does eventually sink in that all things have an end. Rose Tyler, however, stopped physically ageing at twenty, has never felt the first few creaks and ailments of approaching mid-life, nor quite lost that attitude of invulnerability, even after the quick realisations that she could still be hurt, and a wound - if serious enough - could still be fatal.
The old, angry pink scar on her leg remains a testament to her normal human powers of blood coagulation and skin regeneration. Nothing the Doctor had cooked up in his lab made that ugly wound heal any faster or leave any less of a trace. Every time he brushes against it when they are together, it is a reminder of her ultimate fragility. When he sees it flush dark with blood in her arousal, it provokes urges that shame and anger him.
All the same, it has been a few decades since she's really sustained a serious injury. Being together as a team for so long has made them quite adept at looking out for one another, and Rose has never made a secret of the fact that she is quite keen to keep her Doctor in his present body for as long as possible. But, accidents happen, freak twists of fate, zigging when you should zag. There is a point where skill and enthusiasm does give way to complete random chance.
Now in the medical bay, he talks constantly to her as he works, though she seems delirious and feverish under the thumb of the poison coursing through her bloodstream. It is all just silly nonsense that he utters, not that she'd hear him or remember anyway. It is more for himself than for her, and he knows it.
Rose sedated, wounds dressed, antivenom administered, the Doctor steps back, leans against the wall and waits. He doesn't know for what. The medical particulars of the situation are quite straightforward as far as time-frames and stability of the patient are concerned. But there is something.
A wraith shares the room with them, unseen but so palpably, tangibly there. It is in the neat fold of the clean white sheets in which Rose sleeps. It pools in the shadows of the door, still flung wide open from their hasty entrance. He feels it move over his skin like a zephyr, hot and maddening. It coils and snaps and strikes, creating an acid tang in the back of his throat, impelling him to movement even as it presses him down under an immobilizing force several times greater than gravity. He feels every platelet of his own blood replaced by a poison far more terrible than that being neutralised in Rose's body.
He shakes his head, seeking clarity, paces the room, begs to feel any other feeling than what is currently welling inside of him. He'll gladly take sorrow, or fear, or even physical pain--anything but this overwhelming, numbing anger. His hands grip the edge of the counter with white knuckles and when he pushes off from it, he is propelled without thinking from the room and down dimly-lit corridors, and just anywhere to be away from the grotesque evidence his foolishness.
***
When Rose wakes, it is as if from a restful nap and she's surprised to find herself alone in the medical bay with a plaster on her shoulder. The evidence that she'd been injured is all around in the form of cast-off ampules of antivenom , and the shreds of the clothes she'd been wearing piled in a heap in a corner. She is ravenously hungry and grabs a lab coat to serve as a dressing gown as she leaves to find a meal, and her Doctor.
When she does locate him, he is distant. The words of relief on his lips are hollow and his voice falls flat to the floor like a lead weight. He plays at happiness and joviality, but it is a mask, and not a terribly secure one. His eyes are dead, devoid of their usual shine, and Rose leaves him alone again, claiming fatigue and a desire for her own bed. It is not the first time he has retreated in to a protective carapace of his own making following a close call. But, she decides, it will be the last.
If there are two things not at all lacking on board the TARDIS, they are time and space, and she gives him both. If he wants to drift around in the vortex for a month, claiming some vital and complicated repair, she won't complain, even if it means eating boring tinned food from the depths of the pantry. If he is so deep in the labyrinth of the ship that she can't find him even if she were to look for a week, that is also fine. There's no point in having a TARDIS if you can't avail yourself of these luxuries when necessary. It is her first salvo across his bow, to fade into the background, perhaps make him come to her, or at least give him enough time inside his own head for him to work through the complicated calculus of their relationship.
When they pass one another in the corridors or find themselves in the same room at the same time, he is awkward and mercurial. When she goes to kiss him, he turns his head and offers his cheek instead. The few meals they share together are in near silence and joyless, and after a period of some weeks passes, she begins to wonder if her Doctor has been perhaps replaced with one from centuries prior. Stranger things have certainly happened on board the TARDIS , and she examines him carefully for any sign of a possible dimensional/temporal situation that needs sorting out, but there are no such indications.
She catches him in the midst of a rare nap on an overstuffed sofa in the library and creeps quietly over to stand above him. For the first time in weeks, he looks peaceful, his brow untroubled by the lines and wrinkles that had lately taken up permanent residence there. There is a book open on his lap and his lips are parted slightly as his chest rises and falls steadily.
Rose kneels next to the sofa, carefully removes the book and he stirs a little, but does not wake. She continues, laying a hand on his stomach, palm flat, her touch light. He makes a little noise of approval and she inches her hand downwards, keeping her eyes on his face. He closes his mouth as she begins to undo the clasp of his trousers, and his eyelids flutter. She smiles warmly, relieved that in this he is his same old self, and his moods lately have just been a bump in the road.
When he opens his eyes to her, though, they are not the full, twinkling eyes of a man who knows he's about to have a very enjoyable time. His brow beetles again and his mouth sinks in to a scowl. Rose removes her hand as if she's been burned, and he rolls over to face the back of the sofa, ridiculously pretending to be asleep again. Rose looks at her hand, looks at his back, looks around the room, and comes up utterly empty. She retreats from the library all the way to her bedroom, and vows not to leave it until he makes some sort of demonstration that he even remembers or cares that she shares this ship, and this life, with him. She fervently hopes that this will happen before breakfast time the next day, as the supply of snacks that she keeps in her room for easy access is limited.
***
Like many retreats, hers is tactical and when it does not yield the appropriate results, she begins to improvise. Leaving her room (this time vowing not to return until she has had it out with him once and for all) she can see that something is amiss. Lights flicker on and off, never managing anything above a sickly, wan glow, and the corridors seem to stretch out at impossible, non-euclidean angles. Foggy apparitions flit in the corners of her eyes but then disappear when she looks properly. The constant humming tremolo of the TARDIS is punctuated by the occasional wheeze or clank, the sounds rising up from the floor like ghosts but then falling dead as if all of the air has been sucked out of the place. She hears the soft sound of wing-beats behind her, but when she turns, there is nothing.
She keeps one hand on the wall to steady herself as she pads through the darkened corridors on bare, tentative feet. Some of the door handles that she tries are too hot to touch without using the hem of her dress, and others are so cold that her fingers stick for a moment after she turns them. Neither extreme, nor anything in between, is an indication of there being an agitated Time Lord within, however, and when she does find him, it is in a room with no door at all.
It is in an empty space, high-ceilinged and completely white, with a harsh fluorescent light that comes from nowhere in particular. He stands, back to the entranceway and within touching distance of the far wall. If Rose notes that he is alone, it is not in the sense that he is without company, but rather that he has clearly drawn a mantle of solitude around himself quite purposefully. It stands like a cage, keeping others out, or perhaps keeping him in. He would have been just as alone in a room full of people and he remains just as alone as she approaches, undaunted, as always.
He does not turn to look when she presses herself up against his back and folds her arms across his chest. He doesn't move a muscle when she stands on tip-toes and kisses the back of his neck lightly. Even the little hairs there don't register the tickling of her breath.
"Interesting room," Rose says matter-of-factly. "A custom job is it?"
"This is where it should have ended," he answers in a monotone, his voice resonating through her skin more than heard by her ears.
"Not this again," she sighs and loosens her embrace, moving back a half step.
"I saw it, Rose. Your timeline ended at Canary Wharf. I saw that in your future and I changed it. You shouldn't be in this universe." His hands are at his sides in fists, and he clenches them tighter as he speaks, causing the muscles of his forearms to go taut where his shirtsleeves are rolled up.
"So, you'd have had me live my whole long life in that other universe without the one person who can share that with me. You're a selfish bastard, do you know that?"
"Oh I know," he laughs mirthlessly. "But not for that reason. Without the TARDIS, and the energy of this universe, you would have aged normally, your...condition would have resolved itself."
"You talk about my life as if it's a sickness. Is living a disease?"
He remains silent and she pulls him back towards her, running her hands up and down his arms, his tense, sinewy back against her cheek.
"There is a cure, you know. You're a Doctor, figure it out." She feels these bitter words rise within her and chooses not to stop their escape.
He turns on her, pushes her away, and she can see the vortex in his eyes, better than the deadness of recent weeks, but terrible nonetheless. She meets his gaze directly, without flinching. She's known him too long now to be afraid of the Time Lord. Everyone else in the universe might be, and by rights should be, but not her.
"You could have let me die. You could have let me die ten times over by now."
"No," he answers her darkly, finally.
"Well why the hell not?" She advances on him and he moves away, stopping when his back hits the wall. "If life--if my life--is so terrible, why not just drop me off somewhere and never return, deprive me of the TARDIS, let me wither and die? Or just do it your own self? I've lived long enough, I've had a good run. Why not correct this mistake of yours?"
Grabbing his hand, she brings it to her throat and places it there forcefully. He can feel her pulse easily, almost hear it, or perhaps that is his own that's thrumming in his ears. He tries to look away from her, even turns his head, and she drops his hand again. She's so close, he can clearly smell the impersonal scent of the salve she's been rubbing on the wound left by the sting, and it sickens him.
"It's been so long," he sighs, shutting his eyes and seeing behind his lids the girl that Rose had once been.
"And you can't tell when it will end, or how much it will hurt, and that drives you mad."
He says nothing, setting his jaw in an attempt to not acknowledge her words, though they are the truth. She takes his hand again at the wrist, but this time draws it to her bare thigh, places it directly on the ruined skin there. He visibly flinches at the first touch but does not attempt to draw away. The anger rises within him, and the shame of it, how the evidence of her mortality simultaneously thrills and repulses him.
"You never touch it," she sighs against the shell of his ear, pressing her body to his, pressing his hand to her leg.
She sees his throat constrict as he swallows hard despite a dry mouth. She raises her knee to his hip and his fingers on her thigh begin to tighten and press in to the flesh. He's grasping at it now, leaving marks, and she's humming encouragement, begging him to feel it. It is the source of his fear and his anger and his cowardice all at once and he is drunk, plunging head-first into cold, dark, churning waters. At the same time, there is the thrill, the morbid fascination, and he feels himself hardening and he knows she can feel it too.
She covers his hand where it grasps her thigh with her own, and with the other takes hold of him right through his trousers, roughly. "This is life, yeah?" she says and undoes his zip. "Is it a sickness?"
Now the clasp is undone, now she draws him out, her hand warm and tight. Now he pounds the wall behind him with his free hand, wanting to have her and run from her all at once.
"Is it a sickness?" she pleads again, no longer a question but a challenge. One handed, she undoes the top buttons of her dress and exposes her breasts, a pink blush rising across her chest. Her scar mirrors the flush of her bosom. He watches the blood rise there, pooling around the white indents where his fingers still grip, and he is unable to look away. She dares him again to answer, her mouth moving against his throat, in between sucking and biting and forcing him to action.
He is without words to answer. She continues to goad him and he continues to buck against the oppressive swirl of love and rage and terror aroused by the feel of her living flesh, the walls of his cage dematerialising from the force of Rose's insistence that he, just for a moment, stop running.
He feels as if it is the inertia caused by a sudden halt that hoists Rose up, turns her about and pins her against that obscene white wall. He pushes her dress up around her hips, feels the smooth skin of her bum in such marked contrast to the rough puckering of that scar and pulls her knickers down with one rough tug, like they've done so many times before. She wraps her legs around his hips, his hands grasping the flesh of her thighs, like they've done up against walls and corridors and in the warm ocean waters of more than one planet.
There are no words of endearment on his lips this time, however. No skillful fingers, no laughter at what a pair they make, coupling like this in broom closets and behind screens. This is a union that has been wrung out of him by sheer need to be inside her, in defiance of every screaming fibre of his being urging him to run from her questions. It is his only answer.
She laces her hands behind his neck and closes her eyes, an invitation, a challenge, a dare. He lifts her a few inches and brings her down again to subsume him. The instant that he becomes lost in the velvet of her around him, he feels exposed as a coward.
She squeezes his hip bones between her thighs as he takes quick, frenzied strokes, completely silent except for the occasional hiss of breath. The muscles of his neck stand out, taut and flushed. His eyes are closed and behind the lids he sees the terrifying mystery of Rose's life and death, and drives towards it. Her fingers dig into his shoulder blades, right through his shirt, and she makes little mewling sounds, her breath passing hot by his ear as she does.
"What is life...." she sighs, so quietly he thinks he perhaps has imagined her little noises of pleasure forming words, but when he opens his eyes, hers are full and questioning and on him, and he knows. Clutching her to him, feeling all of her weight in his arms, he sheathes himself in her fully one last time, with silent words forming on his lips.
"Just this," he whispers, almost inaudibly. "It's just this."
He releases her down to stand on her tiptoes and leans heavily on her, panting and repeating both question and answer to himself again. She wraps her arms around his waist and smiles against his chest, his heart beats slowing again, the low vibrations of his words like a lullaby. They sink down to the floor together and rearrange their clothing, sitting backs to the wall, her head on his shoulder.
"I've been meaning to ask you," he says after several minutes have passed, "how's that sting doing?"
Rose lifts her head from his shoulder and bares her upper arm, removing a small plaster that covers a light purple bruise. "What do you think, Doctor? How does it look?"
He smiles, stretches and extends an arm to wrap around her shoulders. "I think you'll live."
Characters/Pairings: Ten/Rose
Rating: Adult (angst, sex, more angst)
Series: Couples Therapy (not necessary to have read the others, just see the additional A/N below)
Beta: The fabulous, dungeon-raiding editrx
Summary: As Rose recovers from an injury, the Doctor is forced to face his demons.
Dedication: Written for ladychi : friend, beta, beta-ee, fantastic author, birthday girl; and for wiggiemomsi , whose birthday it also is, and after whom the standard measure for Doctor/Rose smut is named (this fic, by the way, comes in at a paltry 3 wiggiemomsis out of a possible 10).
Additional A/N: Couples Therapy is a loose 'verse with no particular internal chronology that goes AU prior to Doomsday. In addition, Rose seems to have abnormally long life as a result of the Bad Wolf. One would think that this premise would all but guarantee a happy fluffy 'verse containing nothing but smut and good times. And up until this story, one would have been correct about that. Now, however, Couples Therapy takes a rather sharp U-turn in to Angstville.
It had been a fairly epic row, and he hadn't said he was sorry. He had, in fact, been quite sure that he was not sorry in the slightest. Well, maybe a bit sorry for some of the ways that he had impugned her species, but not sorry at all about his stance on the basic issue. Which he hadn't remembered the details of, though he had remained quite sure that his correctness was vitally important to...something.
But then there is life outside the TARDIS doors, a scuffle with the insectoid life forms who were subjugating a peaceful reptilian race, and Rose succumbs to the venom so quickly. Quickly but not quietly, and he carries her, thrashing and keening in pain, back to the TARDIS, slamming the lever that sends them in to the vortex as he passes through the console room with her in his arms.
Humans and Time Lords have in common the propensity of their young towards feeling invincible. For Time Lords the phase can last a few hundred years, but after the first couple of regenerations it does eventually sink in that all things have an end. Rose Tyler, however, stopped physically ageing at twenty, has never felt the first few creaks and ailments of approaching mid-life, nor quite lost that attitude of invulnerability, even after the quick realisations that she could still be hurt, and a wound - if serious enough - could still be fatal.
The old, angry pink scar on her leg remains a testament to her normal human powers of blood coagulation and skin regeneration. Nothing the Doctor had cooked up in his lab made that ugly wound heal any faster or leave any less of a trace. Every time he brushes against it when they are together, it is a reminder of her ultimate fragility. When he sees it flush dark with blood in her arousal, it provokes urges that shame and anger him.
All the same, it has been a few decades since she's really sustained a serious injury. Being together as a team for so long has made them quite adept at looking out for one another, and Rose has never made a secret of the fact that she is quite keen to keep her Doctor in his present body for as long as possible. But, accidents happen, freak twists of fate, zigging when you should zag. There is a point where skill and enthusiasm does give way to complete random chance.
Now in the medical bay, he talks constantly to her as he works, though she seems delirious and feverish under the thumb of the poison coursing through her bloodstream. It is all just silly nonsense that he utters, not that she'd hear him or remember anyway. It is more for himself than for her, and he knows it.
Rose sedated, wounds dressed, antivenom administered, the Doctor steps back, leans against the wall and waits. He doesn't know for what. The medical particulars of the situation are quite straightforward as far as time-frames and stability of the patient are concerned. But there is something.
A wraith shares the room with them, unseen but so palpably, tangibly there. It is in the neat fold of the clean white sheets in which Rose sleeps. It pools in the shadows of the door, still flung wide open from their hasty entrance. He feels it move over his skin like a zephyr, hot and maddening. It coils and snaps and strikes, creating an acid tang in the back of his throat, impelling him to movement even as it presses him down under an immobilizing force several times greater than gravity. He feels every platelet of his own blood replaced by a poison far more terrible than that being neutralised in Rose's body.
He shakes his head, seeking clarity, paces the room, begs to feel any other feeling than what is currently welling inside of him. He'll gladly take sorrow, or fear, or even physical pain--anything but this overwhelming, numbing anger. His hands grip the edge of the counter with white knuckles and when he pushes off from it, he is propelled without thinking from the room and down dimly-lit corridors, and just anywhere to be away from the grotesque evidence his foolishness.
***
When Rose wakes, it is as if from a restful nap and she's surprised to find herself alone in the medical bay with a plaster on her shoulder. The evidence that she'd been injured is all around in the form of cast-off ampules of antivenom , and the shreds of the clothes she'd been wearing piled in a heap in a corner. She is ravenously hungry and grabs a lab coat to serve as a dressing gown as she leaves to find a meal, and her Doctor.
When she does locate him, he is distant. The words of relief on his lips are hollow and his voice falls flat to the floor like a lead weight. He plays at happiness and joviality, but it is a mask, and not a terribly secure one. His eyes are dead, devoid of their usual shine, and Rose leaves him alone again, claiming fatigue and a desire for her own bed. It is not the first time he has retreated in to a protective carapace of his own making following a close call. But, she decides, it will be the last.
If there are two things not at all lacking on board the TARDIS, they are time and space, and she gives him both. If he wants to drift around in the vortex for a month, claiming some vital and complicated repair, she won't complain, even if it means eating boring tinned food from the depths of the pantry. If he is so deep in the labyrinth of the ship that she can't find him even if she were to look for a week, that is also fine. There's no point in having a TARDIS if you can't avail yourself of these luxuries when necessary. It is her first salvo across his bow, to fade into the background, perhaps make him come to her, or at least give him enough time inside his own head for him to work through the complicated calculus of their relationship.
When they pass one another in the corridors or find themselves in the same room at the same time, he is awkward and mercurial. When she goes to kiss him, he turns his head and offers his cheek instead. The few meals they share together are in near silence and joyless, and after a period of some weeks passes, she begins to wonder if her Doctor has been perhaps replaced with one from centuries prior. Stranger things have certainly happened on board the TARDIS , and she examines him carefully for any sign of a possible dimensional/temporal situation that needs sorting out, but there are no such indications.
She catches him in the midst of a rare nap on an overstuffed sofa in the library and creeps quietly over to stand above him. For the first time in weeks, he looks peaceful, his brow untroubled by the lines and wrinkles that had lately taken up permanent residence there. There is a book open on his lap and his lips are parted slightly as his chest rises and falls steadily.
Rose kneels next to the sofa, carefully removes the book and he stirs a little, but does not wake. She continues, laying a hand on his stomach, palm flat, her touch light. He makes a little noise of approval and she inches her hand downwards, keeping her eyes on his face. He closes his mouth as she begins to undo the clasp of his trousers, and his eyelids flutter. She smiles warmly, relieved that in this he is his same old self, and his moods lately have just been a bump in the road.
When he opens his eyes to her, though, they are not the full, twinkling eyes of a man who knows he's about to have a very enjoyable time. His brow beetles again and his mouth sinks in to a scowl. Rose removes her hand as if she's been burned, and he rolls over to face the back of the sofa, ridiculously pretending to be asleep again. Rose looks at her hand, looks at his back, looks around the room, and comes up utterly empty. She retreats from the library all the way to her bedroom, and vows not to leave it until he makes some sort of demonstration that he even remembers or cares that she shares this ship, and this life, with him. She fervently hopes that this will happen before breakfast time the next day, as the supply of snacks that she keeps in her room for easy access is limited.
***
Like many retreats, hers is tactical and when it does not yield the appropriate results, she begins to improvise. Leaving her room (this time vowing not to return until she has had it out with him once and for all) she can see that something is amiss. Lights flicker on and off, never managing anything above a sickly, wan glow, and the corridors seem to stretch out at impossible, non-euclidean angles. Foggy apparitions flit in the corners of her eyes but then disappear when she looks properly. The constant humming tremolo of the TARDIS is punctuated by the occasional wheeze or clank, the sounds rising up from the floor like ghosts but then falling dead as if all of the air has been sucked out of the place. She hears the soft sound of wing-beats behind her, but when she turns, there is nothing.
She keeps one hand on the wall to steady herself as she pads through the darkened corridors on bare, tentative feet. Some of the door handles that she tries are too hot to touch without using the hem of her dress, and others are so cold that her fingers stick for a moment after she turns them. Neither extreme, nor anything in between, is an indication of there being an agitated Time Lord within, however, and when she does find him, it is in a room with no door at all.
It is in an empty space, high-ceilinged and completely white, with a harsh fluorescent light that comes from nowhere in particular. He stands, back to the entranceway and within touching distance of the far wall. If Rose notes that he is alone, it is not in the sense that he is without company, but rather that he has clearly drawn a mantle of solitude around himself quite purposefully. It stands like a cage, keeping others out, or perhaps keeping him in. He would have been just as alone in a room full of people and he remains just as alone as she approaches, undaunted, as always.
He does not turn to look when she presses herself up against his back and folds her arms across his chest. He doesn't move a muscle when she stands on tip-toes and kisses the back of his neck lightly. Even the little hairs there don't register the tickling of her breath.
"Interesting room," Rose says matter-of-factly. "A custom job is it?"
"This is where it should have ended," he answers in a monotone, his voice resonating through her skin more than heard by her ears.
"Not this again," she sighs and loosens her embrace, moving back a half step.
"I saw it, Rose. Your timeline ended at Canary Wharf. I saw that in your future and I changed it. You shouldn't be in this universe." His hands are at his sides in fists, and he clenches them tighter as he speaks, causing the muscles of his forearms to go taut where his shirtsleeves are rolled up.
"So, you'd have had me live my whole long life in that other universe without the one person who can share that with me. You're a selfish bastard, do you know that?"
"Oh I know," he laughs mirthlessly. "But not for that reason. Without the TARDIS, and the energy of this universe, you would have aged normally, your...condition would have resolved itself."
"You talk about my life as if it's a sickness. Is living a disease?"
He remains silent and she pulls him back towards her, running her hands up and down his arms, his tense, sinewy back against her cheek.
"There is a cure, you know. You're a Doctor, figure it out." She feels these bitter words rise within her and chooses not to stop their escape.
He turns on her, pushes her away, and she can see the vortex in his eyes, better than the deadness of recent weeks, but terrible nonetheless. She meets his gaze directly, without flinching. She's known him too long now to be afraid of the Time Lord. Everyone else in the universe might be, and by rights should be, but not her.
"You could have let me die. You could have let me die ten times over by now."
"No," he answers her darkly, finally.
"Well why the hell not?" She advances on him and he moves away, stopping when his back hits the wall. "If life--if my life--is so terrible, why not just drop me off somewhere and never return, deprive me of the TARDIS, let me wither and die? Or just do it your own self? I've lived long enough, I've had a good run. Why not correct this mistake of yours?"
Grabbing his hand, she brings it to her throat and places it there forcefully. He can feel her pulse easily, almost hear it, or perhaps that is his own that's thrumming in his ears. He tries to look away from her, even turns his head, and she drops his hand again. She's so close, he can clearly smell the impersonal scent of the salve she's been rubbing on the wound left by the sting, and it sickens him.
"It's been so long," he sighs, shutting his eyes and seeing behind his lids the girl that Rose had once been.
"And you can't tell when it will end, or how much it will hurt, and that drives you mad."
He says nothing, setting his jaw in an attempt to not acknowledge her words, though they are the truth. She takes his hand again at the wrist, but this time draws it to her bare thigh, places it directly on the ruined skin there. He visibly flinches at the first touch but does not attempt to draw away. The anger rises within him, and the shame of it, how the evidence of her mortality simultaneously thrills and repulses him.
"You never touch it," she sighs against the shell of his ear, pressing her body to his, pressing his hand to her leg.
She sees his throat constrict as he swallows hard despite a dry mouth. She raises her knee to his hip and his fingers on her thigh begin to tighten and press in to the flesh. He's grasping at it now, leaving marks, and she's humming encouragement, begging him to feel it. It is the source of his fear and his anger and his cowardice all at once and he is drunk, plunging head-first into cold, dark, churning waters. At the same time, there is the thrill, the morbid fascination, and he feels himself hardening and he knows she can feel it too.
She covers his hand where it grasps her thigh with her own, and with the other takes hold of him right through his trousers, roughly. "This is life, yeah?" she says and undoes his zip. "Is it a sickness?"
Now the clasp is undone, now she draws him out, her hand warm and tight. Now he pounds the wall behind him with his free hand, wanting to have her and run from her all at once.
"Is it a sickness?" she pleads again, no longer a question but a challenge. One handed, she undoes the top buttons of her dress and exposes her breasts, a pink blush rising across her chest. Her scar mirrors the flush of her bosom. He watches the blood rise there, pooling around the white indents where his fingers still grip, and he is unable to look away. She dares him again to answer, her mouth moving against his throat, in between sucking and biting and forcing him to action.
He is without words to answer. She continues to goad him and he continues to buck against the oppressive swirl of love and rage and terror aroused by the feel of her living flesh, the walls of his cage dematerialising from the force of Rose's insistence that he, just for a moment, stop running.
He feels as if it is the inertia caused by a sudden halt that hoists Rose up, turns her about and pins her against that obscene white wall. He pushes her dress up around her hips, feels the smooth skin of her bum in such marked contrast to the rough puckering of that scar and pulls her knickers down with one rough tug, like they've done so many times before. She wraps her legs around his hips, his hands grasping the flesh of her thighs, like they've done up against walls and corridors and in the warm ocean waters of more than one planet.
There are no words of endearment on his lips this time, however. No skillful fingers, no laughter at what a pair they make, coupling like this in broom closets and behind screens. This is a union that has been wrung out of him by sheer need to be inside her, in defiance of every screaming fibre of his being urging him to run from her questions. It is his only answer.
She laces her hands behind his neck and closes her eyes, an invitation, a challenge, a dare. He lifts her a few inches and brings her down again to subsume him. The instant that he becomes lost in the velvet of her around him, he feels exposed as a coward.
She squeezes his hip bones between her thighs as he takes quick, frenzied strokes, completely silent except for the occasional hiss of breath. The muscles of his neck stand out, taut and flushed. His eyes are closed and behind the lids he sees the terrifying mystery of Rose's life and death, and drives towards it. Her fingers dig into his shoulder blades, right through his shirt, and she makes little mewling sounds, her breath passing hot by his ear as she does.
"What is life...." she sighs, so quietly he thinks he perhaps has imagined her little noises of pleasure forming words, but when he opens his eyes, hers are full and questioning and on him, and he knows. Clutching her to him, feeling all of her weight in his arms, he sheathes himself in her fully one last time, with silent words forming on his lips.
"Just this," he whispers, almost inaudibly. "It's just this."
He releases her down to stand on her tiptoes and leans heavily on her, panting and repeating both question and answer to himself again. She wraps her arms around his waist and smiles against his chest, his heart beats slowing again, the low vibrations of his words like a lullaby. They sink down to the floor together and rearrange their clothing, sitting backs to the wall, her head on his shoulder.
"I've been meaning to ask you," he says after several minutes have passed, "how's that sting doing?"
Rose lifts her head from his shoulder and bares her upper arm, removing a small plaster that covers a light purple bruise. "What do you think, Doctor? How does it look?"
He smiles, stretches and extends an arm to wrap around her shoulders. "I think you'll live."