Touching 5/7 (note rating change)
TITLE: Touching Time
CHARACTERS: Ten/Rose, nothing but Ten/Rose
RATING: Adultish? I'm so bad at ratings. I'll go for an R on this chapter.
SPOILERS: Up to Idiots Lantern, but very nonspecifically
SUMMARY: You want talky, angsty, witty-banter Ten? You've got him. Now with 30% more romance and UST!
DISCLAIMER: Insert humorous note about how I don't own the characters nor make any money off them right here.
BETA: The lovely and talented jaradel, but at the end of the day any errors and all silliness are entirely my fault.
A/N: A sequel to Flowers on Air (. Not vital to have read that, but references are made to the action in that story.
This Chapter: He hadn't known then what it was, he only knew that her Time was intoxicating to him, and he wanted more. It made him do foolish things, made him mad with jealously and greedy for just one more sip.
The Doctor jammed the heels of his hands into his eyes and rubbed vigorously.
He knew she thought he was just being difficult. Since their sojourn in the desert of dreams, they were both fully apprised of the stalemate between them and there was no real point in denying it further. There were mature ways to go about dealing with the problem. Sit down, have a frank chat, draw some lines, make some rules (just as much for himself as for her), deliver some apologies. He'd done it before, more than once, and while it had never been pleasant it wasn't that difficult. If one couldn't be mature after 900 or so years, when could one? But this single human girl, among all the countless others, she was making it impossible. Not only did her very presence remove all resolve from him, but she was actively campaigning. No one before had ever had the cheek to even try. He didn't know how much longer he could hold out against the onslaught.
The Doctor was not the only being in the Universe to have the senses to perceive that there was something special about Rose Tyler. But, with a pang that was both jealous and agonizing, he knew he was the only one left of the race that had a fully-developed Time sense and would be instantly immobilized with wonder at her. The Bad Wolf, autochthonous creature of the Vortex, moving simultaneously backwards and forwards throughout all time, shadowed her ghost-like, surrounded her, made her Time delicious and terrifying. It was the coolest and most refreshing well filled with the most deadly poison. She was unaware of it herself, but it had always swirled and eddied around her, a rip-tide pulling him in from their very first meeting. He hadn't known then what it was, he only knew that her Time was intoxicating to him, and he wanted more. It made him do foolish things, made him mad with jealously and greedy for just one more sip. For it was one thing to perceive her Time from afar, her past and future, the beginning and the inevitable end, but the magnificent ache of touching it was something the Doctor was increasingly unable to resist.
He could feel her presence in the next room, mere inches away from the sweet spot in the wall he'd taken to pressing himself against. He could feel her Time, just there, but always racing round corners and dodging other timelines, running rings around his own, and always with it, the Wolf. The finite and the infinite combined in one. She could never comprehend what it would be like for him to bring his Time together with hers, and so too with the Wolf. Not just sipping, but gulping, immersing himself, giving himself completely over to it, and then being left without definition, having drunk at last from the forbidden cup of the Vortex. But even at the thought of what it could lead to, contemplating doing so gave him a thrilling surge of endorphins and he ran his hands through his hair as if to erase his mind like a chalkboard.
He had to take just another little taste. He tried this time to think of how he could describe it, when they had their inevitable talk (though steely resolve seemed to be something he'd have to acquire elsewhere). If it was a taste, it would be like what some humans call umami, round and full and glorious in his mouth, addictive and wired in to the primal part of the brain that craves the flesh of others. If it was a sound, something beautiful and terrible, like a Dies Irae, coming together from the music of the spheres and booming across all of time and space. He pressed himself closer to the wall, opened himself up towards her, just a tiny bit, a mere fraction of what the reckless part of his mind sang out for. As a physical sensation, it would be riding in the Santa Ana winds, hot and maddening, urging surrender and coursing towards the inevitable. She was sleeping, he could tell, and he felt like a thief in the night, reproachful but unable to help himself. Just a sip, just a taste, not enough to lose himself, just enough to keep going.
The wall began to feel cool as the surface of his skin prickled with heat, and his knees buckled slightly as he felt her Time wash over him. A low moan may or may not have escaped his lips, blood may or may not have been drawn from his lower lip where he bit. No more the tragedies of the past or the terror of the future, just this single point, like a camera obscura, an image of Life that was at the same time Death.
~o0o~
She knew it was him, though his face was indistinct and hazy around the edges, a Gaussian blur of browns and blacks and golds. The little details weren't there, but they didn't need to be. It was the sure, cool feel of his hands on her skin that made the specifics of their location slide away. It could have been anywhere, everywhere, many places at once, or the profound quiet of the Vortex in the time of no time. The zephyr of his breath on her neck, on all the little bits of skin that no one ever touched, her ear lobes and ankles, the backs of her knees and the little spot between her thumb and index finger, the feeling beginning as a tickle and spreading, radiating outward from each star in the constellation of her nervous system until they converged at her center.
He said nothing but left trails of fire and ice across her neck, down her chest, to the cleft between her breasts and to her stomach, which felt as fragile as the surface of a bubble, trembling and ready to burst. Without any conscious decision, her hands were in his hair, slick and wet and smelling of a cloud forest. She was lost there, time dilating and then contracting to the point of a singularity until she knew without seeing that he was inside her and she felt one, two, three beating hearts between them all come in to sync. How he was there, how it had come to pass, what exact parts of him touched and moved with and through which particular parts of her--completely unimportant and impossible to say. Just the feelings, trust, completion, surrender, the loss of Self in to this one moment that was all moments.
Rose woke, face down in the bed, with the sheets wrapped around her in impossible ways and the duvet on the floor. Raising herself up on her elbows she swallowed hard and wondered if she'd remembered to pack her water bottle. She'd had plenty of that sort of dream before, a fair share about the Doctor in both the forms that she knew him in. She'd ceased to feel awkward about it in the morning, as one sometimes does when one has inappropriate dreams about one's friends. Sitting up in bed, this dream remained with her, long after they normally began to recede in to the tide pools of waking life. The ache was certainly physical, but behind that she felt as if she'd been cast from Eden, removed from perfect completion and forced again to walk on the ground rather than fly. She wanted to cry, and laugh, and more than anything to touch him again. Clawing through the wall presented itself as a distinct possibility for a moment. Wiping the sleep from her eyes she considered a nice shower, perhaps a bit on the cool side. When she went to turn the light on, however, she knocked the book from the side table and it fell to the floor with a thud.
"Rose," came a voice directly above her head and slightly to the left.
She squeaked in surprise. "Oi! Give me a heart attack, Doctor! Were you just sitting there all night waiting for me to wake up again?"
"No, of course not. Well, maybe. Well, yes." His voice was husky and he sounded perhaps slightly guilty.
She looked at the clock on her cell phone, still set to Greenwich Mean Time, to see she'd only been asleep for about four hours. "I'm sorry, I just had a bad dream. I'm going back to sleep, you know I like to get my full eight."
"A bad...." He coughed a little ahem. "A bad dream? Really?"
Rose still felt her pulse fluttering a bit lower than it normally did and squeezed her eyes shut at the flood of images that returned to her now. If her mother was right and if when you told someone your dreams you never had them again, then she would never breathe a word of this one to anyone.
"Just a dream," she said, and fluffed her pillow in frustration.
There was a pause of a few moments and Rose thought he was done with her until the morning, until...
"What about?" Was that feigned innocence or actual innocence in his voice? Hard to tell without seeing whether or not he was pulling on his ear or rubbing the back of his neck.
She gritted her teeth. "Nothing. I don't remember. Please let me go back to sleep."
"If it was such a bad dream, aren't you supposed to tell someone?"
There was definitely something in his voice when he said bad. As if he knew it wasn't a bad dream at all, and was just teasing, trying to get her to admit the truth.
"Alright then," she drawled. Let's see if he could handle her truth. This was so much easier when they weren't face to face. "It wasn't a particularly bad dream. Just an...an unusual one. Vivid."
"Oh yes," he said thoughtfully. Thoughtfully, but not surprised. "Was...was I there? In your dream?"
"I can barely get away from you even when we're quarantined in different rooms, you think I can get away from you in my sleep?"
"Ah," he squeaked.
A puzzle piece fell in to place. That last one that creates the outside frame, forming the boundaries of the problem. She was speechless for a long minute before her tongue stopped cleaving to the roof of her mouth.
"So," she began, slowly, "I'm not sure how to ask you this so I'll just go for it, yeah? Were you in my head, just now when I was dreaming? Did you read my mind?" She hadn't known him to ever do such a thing without touching her in some way, but there were many things she had yet to learn about his alien ways, she knew.
"What?" Legitimate surprise. "I would never, without your permission."
The amount of hurt in his voice made hot tears sting in the corners of her eyes. She sat up and placed a hand on the wall that separated them. "Oh, I'm sorry! I didn't mean to imply.... It's just that, well, you seemed to know what I was dreaming about."
"I didn't do it on purpose," he said forlornly.
"So you did.... What did you do? I don't understand." She placed her cheek on the cool wall and listened hard for clues to his feelings.
"I was just here, waiting for you to wake up, thinking. Thinking about you. My mind was sort of.... It's hard to explain. Sort of reaching out to you, just to feel you, you understand, just to feel your presence. I can't really enter your mind from over here, but really there's only a matter of inches between us. I've got a very low level telepathic field, good for influencing people's thoughts but not changing them or tinkering with them, not unless I can touch. D'you see?" She could hear him breathing through the wall, just barely but definitely there. Perhaps he too had his cheek to the wall, listening for her.
"No," Rose answered, not wanting to play Twenty Questions With the Doctor at this hour and over this topic.
"Right," he sighed. "Right, well, if I'm not mistaken, your not-bad and unusually vivid dream was based on my thoughts. Just based on them, mind you," he continued defensively.
Rose took a moment to process this new information, which was thrilling and unsettling and sad all at once. It had been the most splendid dream she'd had in her life and she wanted more of them, every night until the end of time. But even more than that she wanted the real thing, not the dumb show behind the scrim of her dream, as much of a revelation as that had been. She felt that either the Doctor was torturing himself over her and that is what lead to this alarming slip-up in his mental defenses, or he was reaching out to her in this way in order to circumvent the roadblocks he himself had placed between them. Either way, she couldn't allow it to continue, as much as she ached for more. She chose her next words carefully.
"That was quite naughty of you, Doctor."
"Oi!" He knocked softly on the wall with a knuckle. "Look you, laying over there with your human sleep cycles and your books and your girl-things that I absolutely know nothing at all about, I'm bored over here. A bloke gets to thinking. And mentally projecting. It's perfectly natural."
Rose tried hard to sound stern. "I'll thank you to keep your thoughts as pure as the driven snow until the morning. Or...whatever it is. Until I wake up. I'm serious now, I'll be quite cross."
"Yes, of course. Total fluke, that."
"Good."
"Good."
She rolled over and was unable to sleep a wink for the next four hours.
(To Chapter 6)
CHARACTERS: Ten/Rose, nothing but Ten/Rose
RATING: Adultish? I'm so bad at ratings. I'll go for an R on this chapter.
SPOILERS: Up to Idiots Lantern, but very nonspecifically
SUMMARY: You want talky, angsty, witty-banter Ten? You've got him. Now with 30% more romance and UST!
DISCLAIMER: Insert humorous note about how I don't own the characters nor make any money off them right here.
BETA: The lovely and talented jaradel, but at the end of the day any errors and all silliness are entirely my fault.
A/N: A sequel to Flowers on Air (. Not vital to have read that, but references are made to the action in that story.
This Chapter: He hadn't known then what it was, he only knew that her Time was intoxicating to him, and he wanted more. It made him do foolish things, made him mad with jealously and greedy for just one more sip.
The Doctor jammed the heels of his hands into his eyes and rubbed vigorously.
He knew she thought he was just being difficult. Since their sojourn in the desert of dreams, they were both fully apprised of the stalemate between them and there was no real point in denying it further. There were mature ways to go about dealing with the problem. Sit down, have a frank chat, draw some lines, make some rules (just as much for himself as for her), deliver some apologies. He'd done it before, more than once, and while it had never been pleasant it wasn't that difficult. If one couldn't be mature after 900 or so years, when could one? But this single human girl, among all the countless others, she was making it impossible. Not only did her very presence remove all resolve from him, but she was actively campaigning. No one before had ever had the cheek to even try. He didn't know how much longer he could hold out against the onslaught.
The Doctor was not the only being in the Universe to have the senses to perceive that there was something special about Rose Tyler. But, with a pang that was both jealous and agonizing, he knew he was the only one left of the race that had a fully-developed Time sense and would be instantly immobilized with wonder at her. The Bad Wolf, autochthonous creature of the Vortex, moving simultaneously backwards and forwards throughout all time, shadowed her ghost-like, surrounded her, made her Time delicious and terrifying. It was the coolest and most refreshing well filled with the most deadly poison. She was unaware of it herself, but it had always swirled and eddied around her, a rip-tide pulling him in from their very first meeting. He hadn't known then what it was, he only knew that her Time was intoxicating to him, and he wanted more. It made him do foolish things, made him mad with jealously and greedy for just one more sip. For it was one thing to perceive her Time from afar, her past and future, the beginning and the inevitable end, but the magnificent ache of touching it was something the Doctor was increasingly unable to resist.
He could feel her presence in the next room, mere inches away from the sweet spot in the wall he'd taken to pressing himself against. He could feel her Time, just there, but always racing round corners and dodging other timelines, running rings around his own, and always with it, the Wolf. The finite and the infinite combined in one. She could never comprehend what it would be like for him to bring his Time together with hers, and so too with the Wolf. Not just sipping, but gulping, immersing himself, giving himself completely over to it, and then being left without definition, having drunk at last from the forbidden cup of the Vortex. But even at the thought of what it could lead to, contemplating doing so gave him a thrilling surge of endorphins and he ran his hands through his hair as if to erase his mind like a chalkboard.
He had to take just another little taste. He tried this time to think of how he could describe it, when they had their inevitable talk (though steely resolve seemed to be something he'd have to acquire elsewhere). If it was a taste, it would be like what some humans call umami, round and full and glorious in his mouth, addictive and wired in to the primal part of the brain that craves the flesh of others. If it was a sound, something beautiful and terrible, like a Dies Irae, coming together from the music of the spheres and booming across all of time and space. He pressed himself closer to the wall, opened himself up towards her, just a tiny bit, a mere fraction of what the reckless part of his mind sang out for. As a physical sensation, it would be riding in the Santa Ana winds, hot and maddening, urging surrender and coursing towards the inevitable. She was sleeping, he could tell, and he felt like a thief in the night, reproachful but unable to help himself. Just a sip, just a taste, not enough to lose himself, just enough to keep going.
The wall began to feel cool as the surface of his skin prickled with heat, and his knees buckled slightly as he felt her Time wash over him. A low moan may or may not have escaped his lips, blood may or may not have been drawn from his lower lip where he bit. No more the tragedies of the past or the terror of the future, just this single point, like a camera obscura, an image of Life that was at the same time Death.
~o0o~
She knew it was him, though his face was indistinct and hazy around the edges, a Gaussian blur of browns and blacks and golds. The little details weren't there, but they didn't need to be. It was the sure, cool feel of his hands on her skin that made the specifics of their location slide away. It could have been anywhere, everywhere, many places at once, or the profound quiet of the Vortex in the time of no time. The zephyr of his breath on her neck, on all the little bits of skin that no one ever touched, her ear lobes and ankles, the backs of her knees and the little spot between her thumb and index finger, the feeling beginning as a tickle and spreading, radiating outward from each star in the constellation of her nervous system until they converged at her center.
He said nothing but left trails of fire and ice across her neck, down her chest, to the cleft between her breasts and to her stomach, which felt as fragile as the surface of a bubble, trembling and ready to burst. Without any conscious decision, her hands were in his hair, slick and wet and smelling of a cloud forest. She was lost there, time dilating and then contracting to the point of a singularity until she knew without seeing that he was inside her and she felt one, two, three beating hearts between them all come in to sync. How he was there, how it had come to pass, what exact parts of him touched and moved with and through which particular parts of her--completely unimportant and impossible to say. Just the feelings, trust, completion, surrender, the loss of Self in to this one moment that was all moments.
Rose woke, face down in the bed, with the sheets wrapped around her in impossible ways and the duvet on the floor. Raising herself up on her elbows she swallowed hard and wondered if she'd remembered to pack her water bottle. She'd had plenty of that sort of dream before, a fair share about the Doctor in both the forms that she knew him in. She'd ceased to feel awkward about it in the morning, as one sometimes does when one has inappropriate dreams about one's friends. Sitting up in bed, this dream remained with her, long after they normally began to recede in to the tide pools of waking life. The ache was certainly physical, but behind that she felt as if she'd been cast from Eden, removed from perfect completion and forced again to walk on the ground rather than fly. She wanted to cry, and laugh, and more than anything to touch him again. Clawing through the wall presented itself as a distinct possibility for a moment. Wiping the sleep from her eyes she considered a nice shower, perhaps a bit on the cool side. When she went to turn the light on, however, she knocked the book from the side table and it fell to the floor with a thud.
"Rose," came a voice directly above her head and slightly to the left.
She squeaked in surprise. "Oi! Give me a heart attack, Doctor! Were you just sitting there all night waiting for me to wake up again?"
"No, of course not. Well, maybe. Well, yes." His voice was husky and he sounded perhaps slightly guilty.
She looked at the clock on her cell phone, still set to Greenwich Mean Time, to see she'd only been asleep for about four hours. "I'm sorry, I just had a bad dream. I'm going back to sleep, you know I like to get my full eight."
"A bad...." He coughed a little ahem. "A bad dream? Really?"
Rose still felt her pulse fluttering a bit lower than it normally did and squeezed her eyes shut at the flood of images that returned to her now. If her mother was right and if when you told someone your dreams you never had them again, then she would never breathe a word of this one to anyone.
"Just a dream," she said, and fluffed her pillow in frustration.
There was a pause of a few moments and Rose thought he was done with her until the morning, until...
"What about?" Was that feigned innocence or actual innocence in his voice? Hard to tell without seeing whether or not he was pulling on his ear or rubbing the back of his neck.
She gritted her teeth. "Nothing. I don't remember. Please let me go back to sleep."
"If it was such a bad dream, aren't you supposed to tell someone?"
There was definitely something in his voice when he said bad. As if he knew it wasn't a bad dream at all, and was just teasing, trying to get her to admit the truth.
"Alright then," she drawled. Let's see if he could handle her truth. This was so much easier when they weren't face to face. "It wasn't a particularly bad dream. Just an...an unusual one. Vivid."
"Oh yes," he said thoughtfully. Thoughtfully, but not surprised. "Was...was I there? In your dream?"
"I can barely get away from you even when we're quarantined in different rooms, you think I can get away from you in my sleep?"
"Ah," he squeaked.
A puzzle piece fell in to place. That last one that creates the outside frame, forming the boundaries of the problem. She was speechless for a long minute before her tongue stopped cleaving to the roof of her mouth.
"So," she began, slowly, "I'm not sure how to ask you this so I'll just go for it, yeah? Were you in my head, just now when I was dreaming? Did you read my mind?" She hadn't known him to ever do such a thing without touching her in some way, but there were many things she had yet to learn about his alien ways, she knew.
"What?" Legitimate surprise. "I would never, without your permission."
The amount of hurt in his voice made hot tears sting in the corners of her eyes. She sat up and placed a hand on the wall that separated them. "Oh, I'm sorry! I didn't mean to imply.... It's just that, well, you seemed to know what I was dreaming about."
"I didn't do it on purpose," he said forlornly.
"So you did.... What did you do? I don't understand." She placed her cheek on the cool wall and listened hard for clues to his feelings.
"I was just here, waiting for you to wake up, thinking. Thinking about you. My mind was sort of.... It's hard to explain. Sort of reaching out to you, just to feel you, you understand, just to feel your presence. I can't really enter your mind from over here, but really there's only a matter of inches between us. I've got a very low level telepathic field, good for influencing people's thoughts but not changing them or tinkering with them, not unless I can touch. D'you see?" She could hear him breathing through the wall, just barely but definitely there. Perhaps he too had his cheek to the wall, listening for her.
"No," Rose answered, not wanting to play Twenty Questions With the Doctor at this hour and over this topic.
"Right," he sighed. "Right, well, if I'm not mistaken, your not-bad and unusually vivid dream was based on my thoughts. Just based on them, mind you," he continued defensively.
Rose took a moment to process this new information, which was thrilling and unsettling and sad all at once. It had been the most splendid dream she'd had in her life and she wanted more of them, every night until the end of time. But even more than that she wanted the real thing, not the dumb show behind the scrim of her dream, as much of a revelation as that had been. She felt that either the Doctor was torturing himself over her and that is what lead to this alarming slip-up in his mental defenses, or he was reaching out to her in this way in order to circumvent the roadblocks he himself had placed between them. Either way, she couldn't allow it to continue, as much as she ached for more. She chose her next words carefully.
"That was quite naughty of you, Doctor."
"Oi!" He knocked softly on the wall with a knuckle. "Look you, laying over there with your human sleep cycles and your books and your girl-things that I absolutely know nothing at all about, I'm bored over here. A bloke gets to thinking. And mentally projecting. It's perfectly natural."
Rose tried hard to sound stern. "I'll thank you to keep your thoughts as pure as the driven snow until the morning. Or...whatever it is. Until I wake up. I'm serious now, I'll be quite cross."
"Yes, of course. Total fluke, that."
"Good."
"Good."
She rolled over and was unable to sleep a wink for the next four hours.
(To Chapter 6)