The World Shifts Between Us. Young!First Doctor/Rose. Lightly adult. 1,544 words.
Follows
This World I Think I Know. These are those drabbles I jabbered about, written for
mylittlepwny for the stunning header she made me, and well timed to write around quotes.
He huffs as indignantly as his elders while he shucks his trousers and his losing poker hand.
She’s still got her bra, knickers, and purple left sock, but he’s only got his pants left to his (new) name. And a TARDIS key, which he will insist counts as an article of clothing when the time comes.
Let no one say Rose Tyler is not ferocious with her two queens high.
"I didn't want you to think Earth girls were easy."
"What is 'easy'?"
"This is 'easy'."
-Earth Girls are Easy
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and take a look around once in awhile, you’ll miss it.”
-Ferris Bueller
Three hearts drum together in the dark while impossibly sapphire eyes follow her butter-soaked fingers. Something inside him is pulled taut when he is with her, shining like a copper wire in the sun, restless, searching.
She looks at him, curling mischievous fingers around a kernel of golden movie popcorn. Warm enough to make a star supernova, she smiles.
Ah.
It’s not just about the girl, he tells himself.
It’s the air of earth, that white cotton blossom smell of spring smudged only by bits of London smog and her perfume. It’s the verdancy of people, the delight of love and Christmas and jam. And marmalade. And berry preserves. And--
When she leaves the candy shop to find him lounging against a nearby street lamp, she presents him her open hands. Inside them is a myriad of colored little things that are startlingly vibrant and rich in the sun. He delicately plucks a yellow one, popping it eagerly into his mouth with his long fingers while her eyes dance.
“Jelly babies,” she says.
Maybe it’s not the girl. But in his bones, he knows nothing would taste like this if she didn’t look at him like that.
“Life moves pretty fast,” she tells him one night, finger lazily circling his belly button while they lie in the fort they have made of her bed. For the last six nights, he has snuck in her bedroom window. Some nights they sneak back out, together; some nights he pointedly corrects her biology homework, and all nights they are never more than a quick breath away from each other.
“Not for me,” is his sad return. His dark blue eyes are twinkling like the stars that promise he hasn’t seen anything yet.
“No?”
“No,” and he hides his face in her neck, because her smell makes him feel safe.
“How do I know it won’t be so fast I’ll miss it?” she whispers, with all the uncertainty of one barely sixteen.
He kisses the fragile fluttering of her pulse instead of answering.
The mad sprint has set fire in their lungs and legs, powerful muscle fibers jubilant in the summer night air. There are maybe a dozen feet pounding in pursuit, the asphalt singing the thundering song to their retreating bodies.
“I don’t think,” and her breath is heaving while she runs, “your people like you very much.”
“Disapproving, dusty, boring, undersexed old men,” he huffs indignantly. “I might steal from them, just a little, to see you,” and he isn’t out of breath at all. “They just don’t know what love is.”
She grabs his wrist and tucks them quickly behind an antique shop, pressing him into the brick with her flushed body. He unconsciously presses his pelvis into her at the contact, twining his fingers into her welcoming belt loops.
“Love?” she whispers into his mouth as thirteen shouting Time Lords run past.
“Let me show you,” he says, and does.
He’d only borrowed it. Hadn’t meant to keep it so long, really. It’s not like he thought the others would miss it, broken chameleon circuit and all.
Wouldn’t miss it like he’d miss it, anyway. Her daffodil hair thrust against the blue wooden panels while he tastes her neck is a view unmatched by the heights of the Citadel and the rising of the suns.
He’ll never know how he stayed away so long, and yet he is already feeling the call and whispering how soon he’ll be back.
He’s been away six weeks, and before his wild raven hair crests her bedroom window, he hears her: sultry, low, husky. Rassilon, she’s singing and it sets his hearts ablaze. Among other things.
“Elvis was a coola shaker
Marley Ziggy melody maker
She’s a Bond babe kick some ass-“
And then he’s in her room, staring at her, agape.
“Doctor!” she squeaks in surprise. He pauses, alarmed, as Spice World continues along without her. She’s wearing only a vest and knickers, and she clearly had been brushing her hair. And singing. And dancing. In her knickers.
To Spice World.
“’Doctor, no, this girl’s got class,’” she recites. “S’the next line.”
“Really, Rose? Spice World?”
She saunters up to him, tugging on the front of his shirt. “Really, Doctor, this girl’s got class,” she murmurs, smirking into his mouth.
“Mmm,” he hums, and his fingers curl above the waistband of her knickers. She hisses in a breath and thinks, finally, this is when he’s going to be a real bloke and shag her rotten until she can’t even walk as far as the bed.
The first time, and her heart trembles for it.
“Get your trousers,” he says huskily into her ear instead. “We’re going on an adventure I will deny vehemently for the rest of my life.”
If he misses her pout, its only because he was distracted by hips sashaying their way into denim.
“You know, it’s smaller on the outside,” she states, still sulking at being asked to put her trousers on instead of having them ripped off.
He is staring at her like she’s dribbled on herself.
“That’s all you can say? I show you my magnificent ship-“
“S’not yours, you stole it, remember?”
“My magnificent ship,” he continues firmly. “Who brings me to see your lovely self-“
“With six week gaps.”
“Cheeky girl!” he admonishes. “I’ve not even told you what she can do!”
Rose bounces on the balls of her feet, nearly skipping over to him at the console. His raw joy is infectious. “Then show me, if you’re so impressive.”
He puffs his chest and grins like the Cheshire. “Oh, I am,” and the heat in his voice makes her squeeze her legs together and dream of everything that means.
They land at the London premiere of Spice World. Rose is beside herself, jumping up and down too much to realize she’s in 1997, but she still manages to get the autograph of every girl except Posh, who was a little too busy ogling her ride for Rose to not go up and plant a possessive kiss on that gob of his.
“I love you, too,” she breathes against him, and he crushes her to him so hard she sees spots and doesn’t care.
“Time!” she marvels.
“As much of it as you want.”
And oh, she wants.
They’ve always told him this kind of thing is risky. Reapers, they threatened, could tear your body to pieces and fracture the world before you, leaving you helpless and on your knees.
Which was ridiculous, because he is clearly too incredible for that sort of thing.
And so he and Rose hold hands while they watch the under-sevens, a much, much younger version of his love flourishing on her dismount with only a tiny wobble.
“I rather liked it when you called me Doctor,” he muses, watching Jackie Tyler spin her daughter around, laughing and happy even with a smudge of purple still healing on the high arch of her cheek.
Rose laughs, caught in the warm air of him and in the mixed feelings of her past. “I’m going to tell the whole universe forever you got your name from Lady is a Vamp.”
She doesn’t see his horrified face because he’s trying desperately to tickle her smugness away, but she knows its there anyway.
“This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“You know the rules. Take them off.”
“I’ve never liked rules.”
“Off.”
“Oi!”
“Off!”
He huffs as indignantly as his elders while he shucks his trousers and his losing poker hand.
She’s still got her bra, knickers, and purple left sock, but he’s only got his pants left to his (new) name. And a TARDIS key, which he will insist counts as an article of clothing when the time comes.
Let no one say Rose Tyler is not ferocious with her two queens high.
When she walks to him, fingers curling into his waistband, he grips her hips and bumps her nose with his in his haste to kiss her. They are awkward, all boney angles and breathless sighs and blood set afire with the need for each other.
She is a little shy when she says, “I didn’t want you to think Earth girls were easy.”
He chuckles, a purely pleased and masculine sound. “And what is ‘easy’?”
She cups him. “This is easy.”
They tumble to the floor and only manage to remove her remaining sock and shove his pants down just enough before they are pressing together, wet and thick and electric in the feeling of newness. He pushes her knickers to the side and there is no foreplay, only this clumsy touch and moment in space and time, and it is perfect. She jabs him with an elbow while learning to steer, and he comes a little too soon but still makes it up to her, and in the end they are laughing breathlessly into each other, still partly clothed, still inside, and a mess of cards litters the floor around them.
For all the universe that waits for them, neither can see beyond the private darkness of the bedroom, of every sigh and sound, of the Doctor and his Rose striking together like hammer and anvil, forging their endless new world.
Later, of course, he demands a rematch.