Fic Commentary: To the Waters and the Wild Prologue
This commentary was requested by unfolded73 (mwah!). Would you like to request a commentary of your own? You can do so right here.
A special thank-you to ladychi for contributing her thoughts to this commentary as well. :)
Welcome to the commentary for the Prologue to To the Waters and the Wild, requested by unfolded73 -for whom we wrote it, along with
fid_gin . Since this is a collaboratively written fic, I'm going to make my commentary in boldface, and Chi can add her 2 cents in italics.
So. I wanted to do something for unfolded73 and
fid_gin , for their birthdays. And since they are so well-known for their collaborative work (and their Ten/Ten2/Rose OT3 work), I had thought to ask ladychi if she'd be interested in collaborating with me on a multichapter birthday fic. She accepted and we started talking about plotting and whatnot, which I won't get too much into because I actually can't really remember the details. Just that we somehow arrived at this notion that all was not well in OT3-land, and that something would happen that would bring the Doctors in to closer accord and deepen their relationship. And that the Master would be part of that because the Doctor has such a weak spot for him when every human in his life (including the other Doctor) clearly sees the Master for the monster that he is.
I have nothing to add here, except to say that I remember baseball bats and threats to break my kneecaps. (Actually, I may have squeed when she asked me. Just a little bit.) We had a few conversations about the fic, and then one day, what is about 95% of this prologue showed up in my inbox, and I became so excited I literally screamed. I just love that first rush of love you feel when you begin a project that you just know is going to be something different, something new, and something wonderful.
The Doctor knew he should have just left well enough alone and gone to the library instead. There were some cracking novels he was in the middle of, having suddenly found a whole new-and decidedly human-appreciation for the turgid and the melodramatic.
You see what I did thar? This entire fic is turgid and melodramatic in the extreme. But, like the Doctor, I really have no problem with that. I'll take this opportunity now to say that a lot of this chapter was written by me, and it'll become clear why in a moment.
He could have gotten comfortable on the sofa, read for a while, perhaps dozed off (another recently-discovered past-time), and waited to see if the other Doctor and Rose turned up again later. If not, there was always routine TARDIS maintenance to attend to. His counterpart had taken to making to-do lists and leaving them conspicuously about the place, supposedly so they could each keep track of what the other had done.
And here already we come to the main challenge of writing two Tens. The nomenclature issue is something that never really goes away, and it can be really brain-breaking. I have sort of a stable of stock words and phrases I use to describe whichever-Doctor-is-not-my-POV-Doctor, and I'm sure by the end of this thing they've all been overused. But I just can't come up with anything else.
I swear to you, if I never have to figure out a way to say "The metacrisis Doctor! The Doctor in Blue! The Other Doctor! The one with one heart! The human Doctor!" -- I may very well die happy. Because not only do you have to use those phrases, you have to scroll up and make sure you aren't using the same one over and over and over again.
Somewhere in the corridors between the galley and the library, however, he wandered very much off track and found himself knocking on the impressive wooden door to Rose's room.
"Come in," came Rose's muffled voice, and the Doctor entertained the possibility that she was in residence alone, perhaps reading, or tidying her room. That wouldn't seem to match the mood she and the other Doctor had left the table in at the end of dinner, but he knew better than anyone that Time Lords could be moody. Perhaps the inevitable trajectory towards tangled bedclothes they'd seemed set on had gotten blown off course between there and here.
Or perhaps not.
Here begins the authorial personal experience portion of our commentary. This scene (or a version of it), which I know several people perhaps hinted in the comments was a bit unrealistic, actually happened to me. I was, a long long time ago, in a three-way relationship. And not the good, mature kind where everyone talks about their boundaries and limits and there's lots of honesty. And right at sort of the beginning of it when I was still feeling my way around this odd happenstance, this very thing happened when I went to visit my boyfriend at his house and found that he was quite casually in flagrante delicto with his/our girlfriend.
If I could just butt in here -- I do think a lot of people found this chapter (and the couple directly following it) very hard to read emotionally. I think we can lay most of that on Tenzo's experience, but I also think that the reason that this scene resonates (if it does) with people is that we're playing on themes most people have experienced: jealousy that may or may not be warranted, feeling as though you're not quite good enough, loneliness... And yes. We did that quite deliberately.
The Doctor opened the door cautiously, and at first couldn't see anything at all. His human eyes were much slower to adjust to low light than the Time Lord's, and he stood for a moment in the doorway before entering and shutting the door again behind him.
"What's up?" he heard Rose ask casually, and he followed the sound of her voice over to her bed. A bed he himself knew well-both its location and the many erotic possibilities of its intricate headboard.
"I just-" the Doctor started, staring down at his red trainers for a moment before looking up again and feeling more emotions, more intensely than he was really prepared for.
This was part of our initial discussion about what makes the human Doctor human -- the intensity of his emotions, and how they're so much more physical and uncontrollable than he's used to/can handle. You'll see that pretty consistently throughout and it becomes a key part of making the later scenes with the two Doctors and Lucy really work.
Rose was looking towards him, naked and smiling warmly, but there was another set of eyes there as well. Very familiar bright eyes, twinkling with pleasure and looking not at him, but up at Rose. His twin, the one who had been Rose Tyler's lover for a good deal longer than he, lay back expansively on the bed, hands clasped behind his head, as Rose straddled him.
"I'm... I'm sorry," the all-too-human Doctor stammered, backing up towards the door again. "I didn't know you were..."
He heard the low chuckle of his twin and couldn't work out whether it was a mocking laugh or not.
"No, it's okay. Nothing you haven't seen," Rose said breezily.
"Nothing he hasn't done," the other Doctor drawled.
Another thing that got mentioned in the comments by a few readers was that the Doctor (the Time Lord) and Rose are being quite cruel to ole Handy here. But that's not the way I intended it to come off. They are being quite thoughtless, yes, but I don't think it's intentional. And we did want to imbue both this scene and the actual threesome scene in the next chapter with this vibe of everyone just trying a little too hard to be "cool with it." And that also comes a little bit from my personal experience, of sort of feeling like if I was jealous or felt awkward, I was being very unhip because being in a polyamorous relationship is a sign of coolness. I know, very stupid, but I've seen more than one of my friends fall into the same trap, so I know it's not just me. So, we didn't intend the Doctor or Rose to come off as cruel or intentionally torturing the other Doctor, they're just all trying too hard to be "down with it" and as a result they're all going beyond what their feelings are really telling them the limits should be.
Rose's clear laugh fell around him and his heart both ached and expanded simultaneously. "True!" she said. "Though he likes it more when I do this." She leaned over and brushed her lips against the cleft at his arm pit.
"Really?" the Time Lord asked clinically. "You like that? Fascinating. Does nothing for me at all, except tickle."
I just want to say that the previous two paragraphs are probably my favorite of this scene. It's an observation you would make, of course. And as previously mentioned, Rose is really trying o be cool with it -- but I think it's just like lemon juice in an open wound for the human Doctor. "Let me display to you all the ways you're not like the man I originally fell in love with." It's the kind of casual cruelty very common in real-life relationships: the kind that falls out of your mouth because you aren't thinking about what you're saying.
The Doctor stood motionless by the doorway, opening and closing his mouth, wanting to say something, anything to make him seem like less of a dupe and more like he'd come in to witness this scene on purpose. What that purpose might be was eluding him though. Rose lifted herself up off of the other man, then eased slowly down again, and the groans that resulted seemed to bypass the Doctor's ears and go straight to the pit of his stomach. He felt the familiar gathering heaviness in his groin, the slight downturn in the rationality of his conscious thoughts, and he didn't know whether to be ashamed of the reaction or not.
Not going to lie, I like how that passage turned out. That is because you are a woman of taste and virtue.
The two figures on the bed seemed to forget about their audience as the one slid his hands up and down Rose's body, and she rocked back and forth with subtle little motions. The Doctor stood by the door and watched, enthralled. His own cock was now well and truly straining against his blue trousers and while he meant to clear his throat in order to remind them of his presence, it just came out as a hoarse sigh.
"Doctor," Rose said, her voice choked with desire and the pleasure she was receiving from her partner's talented fingers, that stroked the valley the Doctor knew so well. He must have been finding the spots Rose loved because she gasped and moaned, biting her bottom lip and breathing heavily.
"Mmm," the Doctor on the bed replied, his head tilted back to reveal the shadow of day-old stubble.
"No, the other Doctor," Rose said, not looking at him as she twisted her hips and smirking at the helpless sound her lover made. "Could you get us a glass of water, please?"
Yes, this too is part of my true!life! Though I can't remember if I was asked for water or a beer from the fridge but the effect is the same. At the time I felt like a handmaid and it wasn't a good feeling, but at the same time I felt like I shouldn't mind. That minding was wrong. I'd sort of agreed to the situation, so I felt like any complaint on my part would be churlish. I believe my initial reaction to this passage was "Oh, Rose. Ouch."
The Doctor not currently enjoying the warm, soft pleasures of Rose Tyler had to take a moment to compose himself. He'd been toying with the possibility of perhaps exploring the front of his trousers-quietly, just to maybe try to relieve a bit of discomfort and shift things around a bit. But Rose had spoken just as his hand was about to move from hovering to actual touching, and he pulled back as if he'd been burned. "A glass of... water. Yes, of course. Ice?"
Aaaand here I manage to work in a little bit of my voyeurism kink. I think we did want the overall effect of this chapter and the next one to be simultaneously hot and really awkward and sad. Just awkward and sad would probably be off-putting to a lot of readers, and let's face it, if you were a fly on the wall of this scene, it'd be super hot. It's only because we're in human!Doctor's POV that it takes on this whole ookie awkward thing.
....Actually, it being in the human Doctor's POV didn't really affect the hawtness factor for me. But then, I think I can demonstrate pretty effectively that I am a perv. See my MasterList.
"No ice," the other Doctor said in between long, hoarse breaths. The fact that Rose continued to move over him as they conversed struck the Doctor as improbably arousing.
"There's a glass here," Rose added, glancing briefly at her bedside table, before focusing all of her attention back on to the man in her bed and their slow, leisurely coupling.
The state that he was in, it took the Doctor a moment to realise that in order to retrieve said glass, he'd have to get very close to Rose's bed. A matter of a couple of feet, really. He tried to avert his eyes as he approached, but found he couldn't. The sight of her pleasuring-quite frankly, happily fucking-his exact duplicate was impossible to look away from and it took almost no imagination at all (another dubious gift of being human) to put himself in the other man's place, especially as he'd been in precisely that place several times in the past few weeks of his new life.
Here I wanted to make it clear that it's not that the Time Lord and Rose are lovers and the human is left out. He's in a physical relationship with her as well, and they sort of trade off. It's just... not all at once. Yet.
*snorts* I think the word we used in our initial discussion was "time share".
The pair made uninhibited sounds of pleasure, such that even if he'd had the strength to business-like retrieve the glass and pay no mind, it would have done him no good. He grabbed the tumbler off the bedside table quickly, the glass cool in his hand, and forced himself to turn away and enter Rose's bathroom. The lights were on low there and he caught a good look at himself in the mirror. His face was flushed, his eyes holding a wild look. His hand trembled as he turned the tap and the water splashed over his fingers as he let the glass overflow.
He had to get a hold of himself, he thought, and then winced at his turn of phrase. This was the arrangement, and they'd all agreed to it. Would it have been better if the Time Lord had kept Rose all to himself, forbidden his duplicate access to the woman he was born already having so many memories of making love to?
Attention readers: Ten and Rose were totally doing it before Doomsday OK. I just thought, setting this so soon after JE, it would be even more emotionally complicated if the Doctor and Rose were not only having to deal with the three-way thing but also that they'd never actually had a physical relationship before. So, shagging on the TARDIS in series 2: so say we all.
They were totally doing it all during Fear Her. It's canon, people! There is sex hair! There is strategic fade-to-blacking! Oh, I'm sorry. Are we supposed to be talking about fic? *cough* Okay, then. Moving on.
It was a kindness, really. And Rose was so giving, consciously making an effort to not favor either of them, probably keeping a diary of their time together so as not to grant more to one than the other. He knew that the nights he was not spending with her, the other man likely was. Perhaps not doing what they were doing now, but enjoying some time alone together. "Bonding" Rose called it, and she did the same with the human version as well.
I tried to sneak a couple lines in there about spending time together but not actually sexing. Because I think in OT3 fic, there's a tendency to basically just write them having sex all the time, or at least only talking about the sex bits so the reader gets that impression. So I wanted to add in there that they divide their time with Rose and that goes just as much for just couples bonding time (foot rubs and reading to each other out of trashy novels? it could happen) as for the fucking.
This commentary will resume just as soon as I can get the image of David Tennant reading smut to me out of my head.
He shut the tap and quietly tiptoed back in to the bedroom. He would feel bad if he disturbed them-indeed felt bad already for intruding. This had been his mistake, and they'd already been so gracious about it.
As he set the glass back down on the table, he saw that both of their eyes were closed now, and Rose had dropped down to put her hands on either side of the other man's shoulders. How well he knew what this felt like, when she knelt over him and slowly drew herself up and off of his length and then just as slowly plunged back down again. If it were him instead of the carefully guarded and controlled Time Lord, he'd probably take this moment to roll Rose over on to her back, spread her legs wide and-
I tend to subscribe to unfolded's theory about Time Lord sexuality (and how it differs for human!Doctor), and this whole fic is pretty much an homage to her and fid_gin, so I wanted to toss it in.
"Thank you," Rose whispered, not looking over to him or ceasing her agonisingly slow movements.
The Doctor turned away and quietly exited, closing the door shut behind him with a click.
And I believe this is where LadyChi took over in the writing originally. What she's done is brilliant and also once again taps into my own voyeurism/wanking kink thing. But she keeps it so real, his physical arousal mixed in with his emotional pain and the awkwardness and uncertainty of the entire situation.
Ta, dear! My little section does indeed start here.
For a moment he stood, unsure of what to do. They hadn't been entirely clear on a few points when this arrangement had first been made. Was it okay for him to listen at the door? He could easily picture what was going on from the sounds-the Time Lord's reluctant groans and Rose's easy gasps and sighs. He was throbbing-so aroused and stiff it was almost painful to go without relief.
One of the challenges of writing in a collaboration fic is matching your style to the author previous to you. Because Tenzo began the fic, she pretty well set the style of the fic -- thus there is a great deal more description than there would be if I had set out to write this particular scene without what had happened above. Just as a meta point -- it's not usually hard for me to collaborate with people, since I'm not so great with the original ideas but can elaborate extremely well. Tenzo's actually easier than most people, even, because we're on the same page, canonically, and our styles are not that different, aside from when we write one-shot porn.
The back of his head fell against the doorway and his hand went to his zipper. He had the button undone before he really realized what he was doing. Still, it was hard to stop himself from rubbing the front of his pants with an open palm, shuddering from the sensation. But it was nothing like being inside Rose-it was nothing like what he wanted.
As a side note? Writing male masturbation has always been like this -- really weird problem of mine. It's hard to write.
Through the door he could hear his double's shout of ecstasy as he came, and instead of exciting him further, it was like being doused in cold water. He shivered, hunching forward and nearly dropping to the floor.
He'd never thought that he could be together with Rose and be this profoundly lonely. He knew it wasn't rational to want to be with her every night-they'd done the best they could, but he wondered sometimes that men weren't meant to share, and Time Lords even less so. Rose... Rose was brilliant. It was hard to stop himself from being jealous, resentful. Nasty human emotions he knew he wasn't above feeling, even as what he'd been before-they were just so much more more powerful in this human form, with all of these feelings crammed in to such a short lifespan.
This is an undiscovered theme of mine in writing. There's a line, from the second part of Evolution of Rose that's almost the same as the first line in this paragraph. But it's true -- it was an awkward discovery of mine earlier in life that you could be with someone you love very, very much -- and still have deep, welling places of loneliness inside of you. It's a truism that I don't think gets acknowledged very often.
Sounds of movement from the room spurred him to action. He pushed himself off the door, did his trousers back up quickly, and stuck his hands in his pockets. There had been a time, in his very long life, when he had become very proficient at solitaire. Perhaps his talent for the game would come back easily.
Waaaw! So sad! I hope we achieved our aim here of making everyone feel mightily conflicted between being turned on and being sadpanda for the Doctor. Though perhaps we overshot the mark because I think people also wound up being angry at the Doctor and Rose. That's the fire you play with when you do a deep POV though. Your POV character isn't always a totally reliable narrator. His perspective is one of profound loneliness and rejection, but has he actually been rejected? No. He just feels in this moment as if he has been.
At the same time, the audience's resentment of the Doctor and Rose worked well for us in later chapters, especially when he takes off into the night, because then his emotions make sense. As another side point in defense of your writing or -- to fangirl your writing, the deep POV served the purpose of immersing the reader in the situation, and the reality of what's going on without us having to exposite a whole lot because emotionally, the readers are already there. All in all, I'm pretty much in love with this prologue, which I think we can attribute to the fact that I didn't write much of it. LOL!
A special thank-you to ladychi for contributing her thoughts to this commentary as well. :)
Welcome to the commentary for the Prologue to To the Waters and the Wild, requested by unfolded73 -for whom we wrote it, along with
fid_gin . Since this is a collaboratively written fic, I'm going to make my commentary in boldface, and Chi can add her 2 cents in italics.
So. I wanted to do something for unfolded73 and
fid_gin , for their birthdays. And since they are so well-known for their collaborative work (and their Ten/Ten2/Rose OT3 work), I had thought to ask ladychi if she'd be interested in collaborating with me on a multichapter birthday fic. She accepted and we started talking about plotting and whatnot, which I won't get too much into because I actually can't really remember the details. Just that we somehow arrived at this notion that all was not well in OT3-land, and that something would happen that would bring the Doctors in to closer accord and deepen their relationship. And that the Master would be part of that because the Doctor has such a weak spot for him when every human in his life (including the other Doctor) clearly sees the Master for the monster that he is.
I have nothing to add here, except to say that I remember baseball bats and threats to break my kneecaps. (Actually, I may have squeed when she asked me. Just a little bit.) We had a few conversations about the fic, and then one day, what is about 95% of this prologue showed up in my inbox, and I became so excited I literally screamed. I just love that first rush of love you feel when you begin a project that you just know is going to be something different, something new, and something wonderful.
The Doctor knew he should have just left well enough alone and gone to the library instead. There were some cracking novels he was in the middle of, having suddenly found a whole new-and decidedly human-appreciation for the turgid and the melodramatic.
You see what I did thar? This entire fic is turgid and melodramatic in the extreme. But, like the Doctor, I really have no problem with that. I'll take this opportunity now to say that a lot of this chapter was written by me, and it'll become clear why in a moment.
He could have gotten comfortable on the sofa, read for a while, perhaps dozed off (another recently-discovered past-time), and waited to see if the other Doctor and Rose turned up again later. If not, there was always routine TARDIS maintenance to attend to. His counterpart had taken to making to-do lists and leaving them conspicuously about the place, supposedly so they could each keep track of what the other had done.
And here already we come to the main challenge of writing two Tens. The nomenclature issue is something that never really goes away, and it can be really brain-breaking. I have sort of a stable of stock words and phrases I use to describe whichever-Doctor-is-not-my-POV-Doctor, and I'm sure by the end of this thing they've all been overused. But I just can't come up with anything else.
I swear to you, if I never have to figure out a way to say "The metacrisis Doctor! The Doctor in Blue! The Other Doctor! The one with one heart! The human Doctor!" -- I may very well die happy. Because not only do you have to use those phrases, you have to scroll up and make sure you aren't using the same one over and over and over again.
Somewhere in the corridors between the galley and the library, however, he wandered very much off track and found himself knocking on the impressive wooden door to Rose's room.
"Come in," came Rose's muffled voice, and the Doctor entertained the possibility that she was in residence alone, perhaps reading, or tidying her room. That wouldn't seem to match the mood she and the other Doctor had left the table in at the end of dinner, but he knew better than anyone that Time Lords could be moody. Perhaps the inevitable trajectory towards tangled bedclothes they'd seemed set on had gotten blown off course between there and here.
Or perhaps not.
Here begins the authorial personal experience portion of our commentary. This scene (or a version of it), which I know several people perhaps hinted in the comments was a bit unrealistic, actually happened to me. I was, a long long time ago, in a three-way relationship. And not the good, mature kind where everyone talks about their boundaries and limits and there's lots of honesty. And right at sort of the beginning of it when I was still feeling my way around this odd happenstance, this very thing happened when I went to visit my boyfriend at his house and found that he was quite casually in flagrante delicto with his/our girlfriend.
If I could just butt in here -- I do think a lot of people found this chapter (and the couple directly following it) very hard to read emotionally. I think we can lay most of that on Tenzo's experience, but I also think that the reason that this scene resonates (if it does) with people is that we're playing on themes most people have experienced: jealousy that may or may not be warranted, feeling as though you're not quite good enough, loneliness... And yes. We did that quite deliberately.
The Doctor opened the door cautiously, and at first couldn't see anything at all. His human eyes were much slower to adjust to low light than the Time Lord's, and he stood for a moment in the doorway before entering and shutting the door again behind him.
"What's up?" he heard Rose ask casually, and he followed the sound of her voice over to her bed. A bed he himself knew well-both its location and the many erotic possibilities of its intricate headboard.
"I just-" the Doctor started, staring down at his red trainers for a moment before looking up again and feeling more emotions, more intensely than he was really prepared for.
This was part of our initial discussion about what makes the human Doctor human -- the intensity of his emotions, and how they're so much more physical and uncontrollable than he's used to/can handle. You'll see that pretty consistently throughout and it becomes a key part of making the later scenes with the two Doctors and Lucy really work.
Rose was looking towards him, naked and smiling warmly, but there was another set of eyes there as well. Very familiar bright eyes, twinkling with pleasure and looking not at him, but up at Rose. His twin, the one who had been Rose Tyler's lover for a good deal longer than he, lay back expansively on the bed, hands clasped behind his head, as Rose straddled him.
"I'm... I'm sorry," the all-too-human Doctor stammered, backing up towards the door again. "I didn't know you were..."
He heard the low chuckle of his twin and couldn't work out whether it was a mocking laugh or not.
"No, it's okay. Nothing you haven't seen," Rose said breezily.
"Nothing he hasn't done," the other Doctor drawled.
Another thing that got mentioned in the comments by a few readers was that the Doctor (the Time Lord) and Rose are being quite cruel to ole Handy here. But that's not the way I intended it to come off. They are being quite thoughtless, yes, but I don't think it's intentional. And we did want to imbue both this scene and the actual threesome scene in the next chapter with this vibe of everyone just trying a little too hard to be "cool with it." And that also comes a little bit from my personal experience, of sort of feeling like if I was jealous or felt awkward, I was being very unhip because being in a polyamorous relationship is a sign of coolness. I know, very stupid, but I've seen more than one of my friends fall into the same trap, so I know it's not just me. So, we didn't intend the Doctor or Rose to come off as cruel or intentionally torturing the other Doctor, they're just all trying too hard to be "down with it" and as a result they're all going beyond what their feelings are really telling them the limits should be.
Rose's clear laugh fell around him and his heart both ached and expanded simultaneously. "True!" she said. "Though he likes it more when I do this." She leaned over and brushed her lips against the cleft at his arm pit.
"Really?" the Time Lord asked clinically. "You like that? Fascinating. Does nothing for me at all, except tickle."
I just want to say that the previous two paragraphs are probably my favorite of this scene. It's an observation you would make, of course. And as previously mentioned, Rose is really trying o be cool with it -- but I think it's just like lemon juice in an open wound for the human Doctor. "Let me display to you all the ways you're not like the man I originally fell in love with." It's the kind of casual cruelty very common in real-life relationships: the kind that falls out of your mouth because you aren't thinking about what you're saying.
The Doctor stood motionless by the doorway, opening and closing his mouth, wanting to say something, anything to make him seem like less of a dupe and more like he'd come in to witness this scene on purpose. What that purpose might be was eluding him though. Rose lifted herself up off of the other man, then eased slowly down again, and the groans that resulted seemed to bypass the Doctor's ears and go straight to the pit of his stomach. He felt the familiar gathering heaviness in his groin, the slight downturn in the rationality of his conscious thoughts, and he didn't know whether to be ashamed of the reaction or not.
Not going to lie, I like how that passage turned out. That is because you are a woman of taste and virtue.
The two figures on the bed seemed to forget about their audience as the one slid his hands up and down Rose's body, and she rocked back and forth with subtle little motions. The Doctor stood by the door and watched, enthralled. His own cock was now well and truly straining against his blue trousers and while he meant to clear his throat in order to remind them of his presence, it just came out as a hoarse sigh.
"Doctor," Rose said, her voice choked with desire and the pleasure she was receiving from her partner's talented fingers, that stroked the valley the Doctor knew so well. He must have been finding the spots Rose loved because she gasped and moaned, biting her bottom lip and breathing heavily.
"Mmm," the Doctor on the bed replied, his head tilted back to reveal the shadow of day-old stubble.
"No, the other Doctor," Rose said, not looking at him as she twisted her hips and smirking at the helpless sound her lover made. "Could you get us a glass of water, please?"
Yes, this too is part of my true!life! Though I can't remember if I was asked for water or a beer from the fridge but the effect is the same. At the time I felt like a handmaid and it wasn't a good feeling, but at the same time I felt like I shouldn't mind. That minding was wrong. I'd sort of agreed to the situation, so I felt like any complaint on my part would be churlish. I believe my initial reaction to this passage was "Oh, Rose. Ouch."
The Doctor not currently enjoying the warm, soft pleasures of Rose Tyler had to take a moment to compose himself. He'd been toying with the possibility of perhaps exploring the front of his trousers-quietly, just to maybe try to relieve a bit of discomfort and shift things around a bit. But Rose had spoken just as his hand was about to move from hovering to actual touching, and he pulled back as if he'd been burned. "A glass of... water. Yes, of course. Ice?"
Aaaand here I manage to work in a little bit of my voyeurism kink. I think we did want the overall effect of this chapter and the next one to be simultaneously hot and really awkward and sad. Just awkward and sad would probably be off-putting to a lot of readers, and let's face it, if you were a fly on the wall of this scene, it'd be super hot. It's only because we're in human!Doctor's POV that it takes on this whole ookie awkward thing.
....Actually, it being in the human Doctor's POV didn't really affect the hawtness factor for me. But then, I think I can demonstrate pretty effectively that I am a perv. See my MasterList.
"No ice," the other Doctor said in between long, hoarse breaths. The fact that Rose continued to move over him as they conversed struck the Doctor as improbably arousing.
"There's a glass here," Rose added, glancing briefly at her bedside table, before focusing all of her attention back on to the man in her bed and their slow, leisurely coupling.
The state that he was in, it took the Doctor a moment to realise that in order to retrieve said glass, he'd have to get very close to Rose's bed. A matter of a couple of feet, really. He tried to avert his eyes as he approached, but found he couldn't. The sight of her pleasuring-quite frankly, happily fucking-his exact duplicate was impossible to look away from and it took almost no imagination at all (another dubious gift of being human) to put himself in the other man's place, especially as he'd been in precisely that place several times in the past few weeks of his new life.
Here I wanted to make it clear that it's not that the Time Lord and Rose are lovers and the human is left out. He's in a physical relationship with her as well, and they sort of trade off. It's just... not all at once. Yet.
*snorts* I think the word we used in our initial discussion was "time share".
The pair made uninhibited sounds of pleasure, such that even if he'd had the strength to business-like retrieve the glass and pay no mind, it would have done him no good. He grabbed the tumbler off the bedside table quickly, the glass cool in his hand, and forced himself to turn away and enter Rose's bathroom. The lights were on low there and he caught a good look at himself in the mirror. His face was flushed, his eyes holding a wild look. His hand trembled as he turned the tap and the water splashed over his fingers as he let the glass overflow.
He had to get a hold of himself, he thought, and then winced at his turn of phrase. This was the arrangement, and they'd all agreed to it. Would it have been better if the Time Lord had kept Rose all to himself, forbidden his duplicate access to the woman he was born already having so many memories of making love to?
Attention readers: Ten and Rose were totally doing it before Doomsday OK. I just thought, setting this so soon after JE, it would be even more emotionally complicated if the Doctor and Rose were not only having to deal with the three-way thing but also that they'd never actually had a physical relationship before. So, shagging on the TARDIS in series 2: so say we all.
They were totally doing it all during Fear Her. It's canon, people! There is sex hair! There is strategic fade-to-blacking! Oh, I'm sorry. Are we supposed to be talking about fic? *cough* Okay, then. Moving on.
It was a kindness, really. And Rose was so giving, consciously making an effort to not favor either of them, probably keeping a diary of their time together so as not to grant more to one than the other. He knew that the nights he was not spending with her, the other man likely was. Perhaps not doing what they were doing now, but enjoying some time alone together. "Bonding" Rose called it, and she did the same with the human version as well.
I tried to sneak a couple lines in there about spending time together but not actually sexing. Because I think in OT3 fic, there's a tendency to basically just write them having sex all the time, or at least only talking about the sex bits so the reader gets that impression. So I wanted to add in there that they divide their time with Rose and that goes just as much for just couples bonding time (foot rubs and reading to each other out of trashy novels? it could happen) as for the fucking.
This commentary will resume just as soon as I can get the image of David Tennant reading smut to me out of my head.
He shut the tap and quietly tiptoed back in to the bedroom. He would feel bad if he disturbed them-indeed felt bad already for intruding. This had been his mistake, and they'd already been so gracious about it.
As he set the glass back down on the table, he saw that both of their eyes were closed now, and Rose had dropped down to put her hands on either side of the other man's shoulders. How well he knew what this felt like, when she knelt over him and slowly drew herself up and off of his length and then just as slowly plunged back down again. If it were him instead of the carefully guarded and controlled Time Lord, he'd probably take this moment to roll Rose over on to her back, spread her legs wide and-
I tend to subscribe to unfolded's theory about Time Lord sexuality (and how it differs for human!Doctor), and this whole fic is pretty much an homage to her and fid_gin, so I wanted to toss it in.
"Thank you," Rose whispered, not looking over to him or ceasing her agonisingly slow movements.
The Doctor turned away and quietly exited, closing the door shut behind him with a click.
And I believe this is where LadyChi took over in the writing originally. What she's done is brilliant and also once again taps into my own voyeurism/wanking kink thing. But she keeps it so real, his physical arousal mixed in with his emotional pain and the awkwardness and uncertainty of the entire situation.
Ta, dear! My little section does indeed start here.
For a moment he stood, unsure of what to do. They hadn't been entirely clear on a few points when this arrangement had first been made. Was it okay for him to listen at the door? He could easily picture what was going on from the sounds-the Time Lord's reluctant groans and Rose's easy gasps and sighs. He was throbbing-so aroused and stiff it was almost painful to go without relief.
One of the challenges of writing in a collaboration fic is matching your style to the author previous to you. Because Tenzo began the fic, she pretty well set the style of the fic -- thus there is a great deal more description than there would be if I had set out to write this particular scene without what had happened above. Just as a meta point -- it's not usually hard for me to collaborate with people, since I'm not so great with the original ideas but can elaborate extremely well. Tenzo's actually easier than most people, even, because we're on the same page, canonically, and our styles are not that different, aside from when we write one-shot porn.
The back of his head fell against the doorway and his hand went to his zipper. He had the button undone before he really realized what he was doing. Still, it was hard to stop himself from rubbing the front of his pants with an open palm, shuddering from the sensation. But it was nothing like being inside Rose-it was nothing like what he wanted.
As a side note? Writing male masturbation has always been like this -- really weird problem of mine. It's hard to write.
Through the door he could hear his double's shout of ecstasy as he came, and instead of exciting him further, it was like being doused in cold water. He shivered, hunching forward and nearly dropping to the floor.
He'd never thought that he could be together with Rose and be this profoundly lonely. He knew it wasn't rational to want to be with her every night-they'd done the best they could, but he wondered sometimes that men weren't meant to share, and Time Lords even less so. Rose... Rose was brilliant. It was hard to stop himself from being jealous, resentful. Nasty human emotions he knew he wasn't above feeling, even as what he'd been before-they were just so much more more powerful in this human form, with all of these feelings crammed in to such a short lifespan.
This is an undiscovered theme of mine in writing. There's a line, from the second part of Evolution of Rose that's almost the same as the first line in this paragraph. But it's true -- it was an awkward discovery of mine earlier in life that you could be with someone you love very, very much -- and still have deep, welling places of loneliness inside of you. It's a truism that I don't think gets acknowledged very often.
Sounds of movement from the room spurred him to action. He pushed himself off the door, did his trousers back up quickly, and stuck his hands in his pockets. There had been a time, in his very long life, when he had become very proficient at solitaire. Perhaps his talent for the game would come back easily.
Waaaw! So sad! I hope we achieved our aim here of making everyone feel mightily conflicted between being turned on and being sadpanda for the Doctor. Though perhaps we overshot the mark because I think people also wound up being angry at the Doctor and Rose. That's the fire you play with when you do a deep POV though. Your POV character isn't always a totally reliable narrator. His perspective is one of profound loneliness and rejection, but has he actually been rejected? No. He just feels in this moment as if he has been.
At the same time, the audience's resentment of the Doctor and Rose worked well for us in later chapters, especially when he takes off into the night, because then his emotions make sense. As another side point in defense of your writing or -- to fangirl your writing, the deep POV served the purpose of immersing the reader in the situation, and the reality of what's going on without us having to exposite a whole lot because emotionally, the readers are already there. All in all, I'm pretty much in love with this prologue, which I think we can attribute to the fact that I didn't write much of it. LOL!