all this killing time
all this killing time. Rose/Ten, Rose/TenII. Teen. 1,652 words.
She barely notices the blood but to think of how much warmer than his hands it feels. If his fingers held her insides in, kept them where they belong instead of spilling out into the cheerful sunlight, they’d feel so blissful, so like the sack of frozen peas on a scraped knee when she was six.
Her eyelids are heavy, steadily drifting towards closed as she imprints them with the weight of history and physics. Somewhere in the eons of time is the answer, but the smell of musty paper is becoming overwhelming and it has been hours since she could recognize different shapes in the ink. Her fingers bleed where she has sleepily cut them on the unforgiving edges, but just one more page, she thinks. One more book, and she’ll remember the values of the electron’s angular momentum in its atomic orbital. Another day and she’ll know the corpuscular theory of light.
Just one more, she’ll whisper, but the sound will be absorbed by the denseness of clutter around her, terrible matter that takes away her voice but gives her no answers about the void.
The vast barrenness of the white wall has become filled with color, cacophonous to her senses and indomitable. She will never tackle all these words, all these worlds, and yet she has already seen more than she ever should have.
Her blonde hair is piled atop a volume on string theory as she uses it for a pillow, imagining the words drifting listlessly into her mind as quickly as her grasp of them drifts out.
She’ll never get anywhere like this, no food or sleep or company. But if her body stops, it won’t ever get back up again.
Her jacket creaks as she prepares to jump, torso twisting in a bullet dodging effort. She is suddenly spun; harsh momentum taking her down as metal kisses leather kisses skin.
She barely notices the blood but to think of how much warmer than his hands it feels. If his fingers held her insides in, kept them where they belong instead of spilling out into the cheerful sunlight, they’d feel so blissful, so like the sack of frozen peas on a scraped knee when she was six.
Her mum. She hadn’t thought of her mum for the last three jumps, or, if she’s honest, a handful of years.
The blood is spreading, pooling into her navel, soaking into the cups of her bra. She breathes, spine hard against the asphalt underneath her, but it doesn’t feel laborious. It feels like particles of light, drifting away in the wind, sliding away from the inside of her mouth as if the fires of regeneration were taking her.
She wants to know what he feels on his insides, so Rose Tyler dies, for three minutes and twenty-six seconds.
It is as many weeks later that she can stand, bullet hole in her abdomen a slick red scar that she caresses at night, new skin wild with sensation, a touch that is erotic and desperate and afraid. She touches her battle wounds, slides her fingers over her own wet center, threads her fingers into her memories of him, holding trembling hands of thought across the void. All of them slide against each other, and for the first time since she had sand under her feet she feels close to him.
It is as many weeks again that she steals the dimension cannon, jumping away from her new world without her doctor’s permission.
She thinks he’s not the doctor that knows best, anyway.
She finds him, touches his suit, gasping in the air around him like she is dying, because somewhere, surely, she is.
Skin to skin, and she is strong enough to defy every universe. Just his hands, with their knuckles like mountainous spires and thin, weak wrists like river bends; freckles a smattering of sage in the desert, whorls of his fingerprints the storm she will always live to taste and will one day die trying.
She has landed in the middle of his war, but she is fierce, a goddess of battle and new knowledge and the hottest burning loyalty. She loves like a raging fire, and much later, she thinks that is why he left her.
The Daleks die. But alone on that beach, sound of waves and hollow gulls echoing through the human copy next to her as if he weren’t there, so does Rose.
The couch is green suede, dark and stale. The air is untouched, a cup of tea growing mold and tinting the air with a sickly sweetness. She lets her duffel drop to the wood floor with a dull thud, and with it, all her energy leaves. She is Rose Tyler’s shadow, rib basket holding only dust and old artifacts.
She is quiet and still in a still and quiet room.
Once upon a time, there was a dark tempest. It rolled over her and tore away her family, broke down her walls, soaked her clothes through to her skin and ripped the sky apart in front of her with its might and rage. The squall broke her down to nothing, bared her insides, and she knew unabashed ecstasy. As she fell to the wet earth, silent but open-mouthed, the storm quieted, its waters warmed, golden light shining through.
Spring. Together, they grew.
The storm stands beside her now, uncertain and dirty in old blue clothes that no longer fit, regardless of size.
There is no spring here.
Rose sets about washing the dishes.
“D’you think penguins have knees?”
“What?” Rose blinks up at him from her paper. They are reading quietly in the lounge, twelve point five feet separating them. They have work in the morning, and Tony the day after, and groceries on Saturday.
“Nothing,” he says.
Four years. All this killing time.
His car is a rich blue. She walks, toned calves defiant yet leaden in weight, even in the sunlight and freedom of summer. They brush their teeth methodically. He forgets to open the shower curtain after he’s done so it won’t mold. She takes forks from the dishwasher one at a time instead of putting them all away.
Their couch has a distinct depression for each of them, on opposite sides.
Sometimes, they seek each other out, desperately riding each other in the dark as if it will lighten their hearts, cast away the anchors that tie them down to unmoving floors and a solitary Earth. They sweat, and bleed, and love, but chest to chest their heartbeats fall just shy of touching.
Sunday, they see a science fiction film, umbrella and wellies slick in the pouring London sky. She turns to him over the rich butter smell of their popcorn and cups his shoulder with a trembling hand.
The weight of years is all over them.
“Prove it,” she whispers. His half Time Lord blood hears her, the song of the vortex rising into a full chorus in the back of his mind. “Prove that you’re him.”
He presses his forehead to hers, and for a moment they share the same life giving oxygen, love spilling from their skin. For just a moment, they are open to each other.
A space ship explodes on the theater screen.
“I’m not,” he says, simply. “We can die together, now.”
Gingerly, she sets the bag of popcorn into his lap, and his long fingered hands take it, crinkling the red corners as she leans forward. Her lips meet his, and he swears he hears the universe singing for them, as the universe does when great beings end. He can’t speak, finds it to be a common problem these days, his psycho and techno babble reduced to long strings of quiet pulled from his mouth like sticky threads of bubble gum.
“We already have.”
She leaves.
He starts when the lights rise an hour later, sweaty and shaking palms still clutching the ruined bag, little golden kernels spread around his body like a halo.
She comes home nine days later, stride lengthened with purpose as she goes directly to the loo where he is showering. The door is thrust open in her wake, curtain shoved aside, and he is blinking there, a naked, wet, shining and surprised thing.
She climbs into the warm water in her clothes.
Roughly taking his hand, she presses his middle finger into the scar of her bullet wound, hard, digging it in and savoring the sensation through sodden layers of cotton.
“I got shot,” she says simply, “because I carried a gun. Because I was a weapon, this blade that he cut out of what used to be me, and because I did everything to save him he left us. He left us!” and she is yelling now, pounding her free hand onto his chest and sending droplets splattering to the white walls and open room. Steam curls into her eyelashes and her vision blurs, her body sinking fast to the floor of the tub.
He falls with her, like he always has.
“You said us, Rose,” and he is crying, holding her face and kissing her everywhere he can reach. “You said us. Not you, us. Oh, my Rose. My goddess of time. It has always been us.”
It is there, as he is peeling her heavy shirt from her skin and mapping her body with his mouth, that they make love for the first time. That when she comes it is pleasure and not buried pain, when he bites her collarbone it is to make her gasp his name and not to feverishly mark her.
"My Doctor. Oh!"
This isn’t sex. This is them.
They stay in the other’s body until the water runs cold, then turn it off, and stay some more.
In the morning, they leave. Their flat remains unlocked, keys on the oak table by the front door.
They don’t come back.
He wears purple Chucks because she teases that he can’t pull them off, and she carries the TARDIS key at her neck for the first time in four years and seven months, because she said he was her Doctor, and because he well and truly is.
It doesn’t weigh as much as it used to.
She barely notices the blood but to think of how much warmer than his hands it feels. If his fingers held her insides in, kept them where they belong instead of spilling out into the cheerful sunlight, they’d feel so blissful, so like the sack of frozen peas on a scraped knee when she was six.
Her eyelids are heavy, steadily drifting towards closed as she imprints them with the weight of history and physics. Somewhere in the eons of time is the answer, but the smell of musty paper is becoming overwhelming and it has been hours since she could recognize different shapes in the ink. Her fingers bleed where she has sleepily cut them on the unforgiving edges, but just one more page, she thinks. One more book, and she’ll remember the values of the electron’s angular momentum in its atomic orbital. Another day and she’ll know the corpuscular theory of light.
Just one more, she’ll whisper, but the sound will be absorbed by the denseness of clutter around her, terrible matter that takes away her voice but gives her no answers about the void.
The vast barrenness of the white wall has become filled with color, cacophonous to her senses and indomitable. She will never tackle all these words, all these worlds, and yet she has already seen more than she ever should have.
Her blonde hair is piled atop a volume on string theory as she uses it for a pillow, imagining the words drifting listlessly into her mind as quickly as her grasp of them drifts out.
She’ll never get anywhere like this, no food or sleep or company. But if her body stops, it won’t ever get back up again.
Her jacket creaks as she prepares to jump, torso twisting in a bullet dodging effort. She is suddenly spun; harsh momentum taking her down as metal kisses leather kisses skin.
She barely notices the blood but to think of how much warmer than his hands it feels. If his fingers held her insides in, kept them where they belong instead of spilling out into the cheerful sunlight, they’d feel so blissful, so like the sack of frozen peas on a scraped knee when she was six.
Her mum. She hadn’t thought of her mum for the last three jumps, or, if she’s honest, a handful of years.
The blood is spreading, pooling into her navel, soaking into the cups of her bra. She breathes, spine hard against the asphalt underneath her, but it doesn’t feel laborious. It feels like particles of light, drifting away in the wind, sliding away from the inside of her mouth as if the fires of regeneration were taking her.
She wants to know what he feels on his insides, so Rose Tyler dies, for three minutes and twenty-six seconds.
It is as many weeks later that she can stand, bullet hole in her abdomen a slick red scar that she caresses at night, new skin wild with sensation, a touch that is erotic and desperate and afraid. She touches her battle wounds, slides her fingers over her own wet center, threads her fingers into her memories of him, holding trembling hands of thought across the void. All of them slide against each other, and for the first time since she had sand under her feet she feels close to him.
It is as many weeks again that she steals the dimension cannon, jumping away from her new world without her doctor’s permission.
She thinks he’s not the doctor that knows best, anyway.
She finds him, touches his suit, gasping in the air around him like she is dying, because somewhere, surely, she is.
Skin to skin, and she is strong enough to defy every universe. Just his hands, with their knuckles like mountainous spires and thin, weak wrists like river bends; freckles a smattering of sage in the desert, whorls of his fingerprints the storm she will always live to taste and will one day die trying.
She has landed in the middle of his war, but she is fierce, a goddess of battle and new knowledge and the hottest burning loyalty. She loves like a raging fire, and much later, she thinks that is why he left her.
The Daleks die. But alone on that beach, sound of waves and hollow gulls echoing through the human copy next to her as if he weren’t there, so does Rose.
The couch is green suede, dark and stale. The air is untouched, a cup of tea growing mold and tinting the air with a sickly sweetness. She lets her duffel drop to the wood floor with a dull thud, and with it, all her energy leaves. She is Rose Tyler’s shadow, rib basket holding only dust and old artifacts.
She is quiet and still in a still and quiet room.
Once upon a time, there was a dark tempest. It rolled over her and tore away her family, broke down her walls, soaked her clothes through to her skin and ripped the sky apart in front of her with its might and rage. The squall broke her down to nothing, bared her insides, and she knew unabashed ecstasy. As she fell to the wet earth, silent but open-mouthed, the storm quieted, its waters warmed, golden light shining through.
Spring. Together, they grew.
The storm stands beside her now, uncertain and dirty in old blue clothes that no longer fit, regardless of size.
There is no spring here.
Rose sets about washing the dishes.
“D’you think penguins have knees?”
“What?” Rose blinks up at him from her paper. They are reading quietly in the lounge, twelve point five feet separating them. They have work in the morning, and Tony the day after, and groceries on Saturday.
“Nothing,” he says.
Four years. All this killing time.
His car is a rich blue. She walks, toned calves defiant yet leaden in weight, even in the sunlight and freedom of summer. They brush their teeth methodically. He forgets to open the shower curtain after he’s done so it won’t mold. She takes forks from the dishwasher one at a time instead of putting them all away.
Their couch has a distinct depression for each of them, on opposite sides.
Sometimes, they seek each other out, desperately riding each other in the dark as if it will lighten their hearts, cast away the anchors that tie them down to unmoving floors and a solitary Earth. They sweat, and bleed, and love, but chest to chest their heartbeats fall just shy of touching.
Sunday, they see a science fiction film, umbrella and wellies slick in the pouring London sky. She turns to him over the rich butter smell of their popcorn and cups his shoulder with a trembling hand.
The weight of years is all over them.
“Prove it,” she whispers. His half Time Lord blood hears her, the song of the vortex rising into a full chorus in the back of his mind. “Prove that you’re him.”
He presses his forehead to hers, and for a moment they share the same life giving oxygen, love spilling from their skin. For just a moment, they are open to each other.
A space ship explodes on the theater screen.
“I’m not,” he says, simply. “We can die together, now.”
Gingerly, she sets the bag of popcorn into his lap, and his long fingered hands take it, crinkling the red corners as she leans forward. Her lips meet his, and he swears he hears the universe singing for them, as the universe does when great beings end. He can’t speak, finds it to be a common problem these days, his psycho and techno babble reduced to long strings of quiet pulled from his mouth like sticky threads of bubble gum.
“We already have.”
She leaves.
He starts when the lights rise an hour later, sweaty and shaking palms still clutching the ruined bag, little golden kernels spread around his body like a halo.
She comes home nine days later, stride lengthened with purpose as she goes directly to the loo where he is showering. The door is thrust open in her wake, curtain shoved aside, and he is blinking there, a naked, wet, shining and surprised thing.
She climbs into the warm water in her clothes.
Roughly taking his hand, she presses his middle finger into the scar of her bullet wound, hard, digging it in and savoring the sensation through sodden layers of cotton.
“I got shot,” she says simply, “because I carried a gun. Because I was a weapon, this blade that he cut out of what used to be me, and because I did everything to save him he left us. He left us!” and she is yelling now, pounding her free hand onto his chest and sending droplets splattering to the white walls and open room. Steam curls into her eyelashes and her vision blurs, her body sinking fast to the floor of the tub.
He falls with her, like he always has.
“You said us, Rose,” and he is crying, holding her face and kissing her everywhere he can reach. “You said us. Not you, us. Oh, my Rose. My goddess of time. It has always been us.”
It is there, as he is peeling her heavy shirt from her skin and mapping her body with his mouth, that they make love for the first time. That when she comes it is pleasure and not buried pain, when he bites her collarbone it is to make her gasp his name and not to feverishly mark her.
"My Doctor. Oh!"
This isn’t sex. This is them.
They stay in the other’s body until the water runs cold, then turn it off, and stay some more.
In the morning, they leave. Their flat remains unlocked, keys on the oak table by the front door.
They don’t come back.
He wears purple Chucks because she teases that he can’t pull them off, and she carries the TARDIS key at her neck for the first time in four years and seven months, because she said he was her Doctor, and because he well and truly is.
It doesn’t weigh as much as it used to.