Fic: In Human Hands (20/26?)
Title: In Human Hands
Author: rallalon
Beta: vyctori
Rating: PG13, AU towards the end of Season One; 9!Smith.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: She’s trying to distract him, he can tell, but oh, it is working. It’s a bit like being struck with a two-by-four or a particularly skeletal fish; the shift from irritation and avoidance to attraction is flummoxing.
Notes: Happy Birthday, In Human Hands! How are you two?
The Tourist
The Girl
The Runaway
The Puzzle
The Passenger
The Victim
The Absent
The Found
The Determined
The Unaware
The Celebrant
The Nurse
The Visitor
The Illusion
The Distraction
The Guest
The Companion
The Confidante
The Defenseless
“The lid’s loose,” Fred complains. “You didn’t close it properly.”
“So what?” he asks. “The jar’s ajar.”
She looks at him with her full face, ripe and soft and still young in the way that those who die early are always still young. “That’s not funny.”
“It is a little.”
She shrugs a bit, folding herself back into the loops of his scarf. Her fingers pull at the dropped stitches in the cloth, slip through where hasty mistakes have left holes.
“Don’t tug at it.” He reaches for her hands, her hands as cold as her bare feet in winter. He can see the memory of her cold feet pressed against his shins, can see the blankets and the duvet, but he can’t feel them. Too far gone, he supposes. Too long gone. “I like that scarf,” he adds.
“You’re not very good at knitting,” she chastises, poking through the small holes with her fingers. Everywhere the colour changes, there’s a bit of yarn sticking out, the loose threads tied together rather than woven in. They almost look like misplaced tassels, like decorations, but they’re only mistakes, and hastily corrected at that.
He shakes his head, still trying to get the scarf back. It drapes and loops over her, proves itself to be far too large to lift away from her shoulders in one attempt. “I didn’t make this.”
When she shakes her head, the movement is somehow larger than his, somehow means more. “I is relative,” she tells him.
“I am relative,” he corrects.
“Yes,” she says. She loops the scarf over his head, around his shoulders. The yarn is thick, but it stretches. “But you don’t suit you anymore.”
“Fair enough,” he says because this is a dream and he understands this dream, understands this part of this dream. “Would like to point out that all this allegory is starting to get annoying.”
“It’s only allegory if you understand it,” Fred argues. “Otherwise, it’s its own story.”
“I understand.”
“I know,” she says, and they let the scarf twine her into him, fedora and all. “That’s what’s so sad.”
.-.-.-.-.-.
He lies there with the hotel pillow soft against the side of his face. He feels odd. All confused and mellow, like thoughts are ice that his too-warm hands can’t help but melt. It trickles across his palms and falls from his curled fingers.
Eventually, he falls back asleep.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Eventually.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“You ever think this is gettin’ out of hand?” she asks him. And then she giggles because the brush of his hand across her stomach tends to have that effect. It’s one of the many important little details he’s learned in the past week.
“More in hand, really.” He flattens his palm over her navel, using the pun as an excuse.
She shoots him a look over her shoulder like she wants to swat him, but standing on the metro, she needs to hold on with both hands if she’s going to stay up. His balance is much better and he doesn’t hesitate to show it off.
“Seriously,” she says. Twists herself around and changes her grip and ends up holding onto his arm rather than the pole by the door.
He considers it and they sway with the motions of the train, the darkness of the tunnels flickering by outside the windows, the shadows filled with bits of graffiti. They sway back and forth with the sounds of movements, a slow dance at a fast speed. Her hand on his arm is somehow more relaxed than the rest of her, her thumb making little circles her eyes don’t seem to see.
“In a good way,” he murmurs, because their faces have gotten close enough for a murmur to be heard.
She swallows and the train tries to jerk them back into the world. The brakes squeal and they hold on as motion is halted. Her hand squeezes his arm as if to prove there’s nothing between their skin.
An announcement sputters unintelligibly across the metro speakers, but he doesn’t look up. Even if this was their stop, he wouldn’t’ve looked away from his girl.
“We haven’t gone a day without snogging yet,” she says, her eyes on his mouth.
“What, you want to stop?” His hand’s found its way onto her hip somehow. His thumb’s done one better, has found skin beneath her top to stroke against.
Her tongue wets her lips. She takes a breath and does it again. “Not... really.”
The doors close and they jerk into motion once more, inertia playing games with their bodies.
“’S just,” she says. “It’s- I dunno.”
“We haven’t snogged today yet,” he points out. Or maybe he’s tempting her a little, just maybe. Only a little.
“We haven’t had lunch yet,” she counters. Or flirts. Hard to tell with her eyes so dark.
He leans in and it’s a soft thing that the train is soon to bump them out of. It leaves them with their mouths half open, leaves them itching to move, to run to somewhere private.
That’s what his itch is, at the very least. She looks like she wants to run and her hand on his arm still says she won’t let go, so he assumes their inclinations are the same.
“All right,” he says. “You’ve got a point.”
“’S like....” And she just looks at him. Like she’s been winded, like gravity has gone mad between them and holding herself away from him is more impossible than flying.
He sees it in her eyes or maybe he only sees it reflected there. “It’s a bad habit worth picking up.”
She doesn’t disagree. She doesn’t reply either and they let it sit there, this irresistible, unnerving thing. Twice, they almost force the subject again, forget themselves and lean in and duck their heads away at the last minute because the last thing they’re going to be is one of those couples with obnoxious public snogs. It’s like polluting the world with domesticity, that.
Then he remembers they’ve already done that, but he tries to make himself forget. He’s good at making himself forget. Like the fact that after this Saturday, they have three more together, three more Saturdays and two days after that. He makes himself forget this. Twenty-three days.
The brakes shriek, announcing their station with a metallic scream, and her hand moves from his elbow to his fingers. The skin of his arm prickles at the stroke, at the strange combination of an unwitting caress and a persistent touch.
“C’mon,” he says.
They leave the metro and climb up out of the world, and, standing on its surface, they cling to each other. It almost brings him up short, this feeling, the way her hand fits in his while the world turns and it’s all in his head, it all has to be in his head, but by the look of her, it’s in her head too.
Even a game of haggling through a market fails to pull his mind from it, to fully distract him. She plays the thrifty shopper and he plays the translator and they walk away laughing, their hands too tight and their fingers tense.
They sit and they eat and he chews spiced sausage while trying not to laugh at the way she can’t peel an orange. The rind gets pulled to pieces, her citrus globe losing one tectonic plate after another. Each tear sends a spray over her hands, into the air. She makes an annoyed sound as half a slice comes off with the peel and he swallows his bit of pork and spices, nudging her with his elbow to tell her what a bad job she’s doing. He holds a bottle of water between his hands, doesn’t see the point of putting it down to better bother her.
She sets the half-peeled fruit on her lap, lets it roll just the once, roll onto the bare skin of her thighs. She takes the peel, pulls the fruit from it, and brings the juice and the pulp and her fingers to his mouth, into his mouth.
She must feel his surprise in the breath over her fingers, must feel it the same way he can see hers in the nervous width of her eyes.
He closes his mouth around fruit and finger, her thumb slipping out over his lips, her knuckles light against his chin. She closes her eyes, only for a moment.
“I want,” she says, and stops. Looks at him as if the sentence really cannot be finished.
“I know,” he says, tries to say around her digit, and it makes her laugh.
“No idea what that was,” she tells him, then starts to remove her hand.
It’s a gentle bite, as gentle as he can make it when he’s not thinking, but it’s enough to make her stop, to make her stay. He’ll call the press of his tongue against the pad of her finger an apology. He’ll call it that.
“Oh,” she says and her eyes go dark despite the sunlight. She looks winded. She looks like she can’t speak or wants to speak, like there’s a word trying to burst out of her and he wants to know what it is. He thinks it’s his name.
He gives her back her hand and kisses her, needing to. Her mouth is open before their lips even touch and she gives in to his tongue and it’s citrus and spice and bits of pulp and protein between teeth and tongue. It’s something that’s better than it ought to be and that should be a warning, shouldn’t it, that this is going to end horribly? She knows it just as well as he does; he’s sure of it.
He keeps holding onto that water bottle, doesn’t dare to put it down and free his hands while they’re in public. One of her hands is on his shoulder, on his shoulder near his neck, and one finger is damp and sticky on his skin.
When he finally remembers to pull back, she bites his lip. She’s gentle about it and this time, her tongue is the one to make the apology. She lets go, after, releases him, and he doesn’t quite recall why he was pulling back in the first place.
“At least we had lunch first,” he offers and then she looks down, startled. He follows her gaze, sees the half-peeled orange on the stone of the plaza, sees the small, glistening trails of juice across her thighs from where it rolled. He stops breathing.
She reaches down, pulls off the dirt-covered slices and starts to peel off the other half of the rind. “Could be worse,” she says in observation or reply, her cheeks matching her name. It’s such a cliché description, but he adores it. It’s Rose being as Rose as she can be.
He makes a noise of agreement and she sticks another orange slice in his mouth.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“You have to love Saturdays,” she idly muses, her mouth hidden behind a hand of cards. They sit on his floor, their legs beneath the coffee table and bumping from something more than accident. Technically, it’s Sunday now and it’s been Sunday for a few hours, but even after coming in after a night out, they can’t quite make themselves go to bed. He can’t, at least. Having her back has done wonders for his ability to sleep, but it’s hardly something he likes risking without exhaustion shoving him down to where dreams can’t reach.
“You have to love a good stalling tactic, too,” he replies, “but for that, you should probably find one first. Play a card.”
She does, giving him a bit of a look. “If I was stalling, you’d know it.”
“I do know it,” he counters, both verbally and within the game. “Therefore: stalling.”
A bit of a hum there, a careful card selection, and she allows herself to drop back into silence. Maybe she’s finally getting tired.
He gives it a moment before he asks. “What’s so good about Saturdays?”
“’S my non-useless day,” she explains. “I-”
“What’s that supposed to mean, useless?” he interrupts.
“I’m sleeping on your couch and eating your food. I’m your basic freeloader, just with someone else’s credit card.”
“And?” he asks. “You’re waiting for that Dr. Godot of yours.”
Her brow furrows. “Doctor what?”
“Godot,” he repeats. “As in, waiting for.”
“That’s the play, right?” she asks. “Where they wait for him the entire time and he never shows, yeah?”
Ah. Not the best choice. He shrugs a little, tries to give her a bit of a smile and makes it apologetic. “All right, it’s not a perfect metaphor. But, Rose, when your job pays you to go on holiday, you go on holiday.”
She bites her lip like she’s about to lie, but he can see when she thinks better of it. She shakes her head at him. “It’s not a holiday.”
“All right, that’s not the perfect term.”
“That’s a lot of-” she yawns, then hastily covers up any sign of tiredness “-things not being perfect.”
“Very few things are,” he replied, scanning his cards. “Still, there’s no point raising a fuss over it. UNIT’s tracking down that watch, your doctor’s on the mend, and in the meanwhile, you’re surrounded by excellent company on all one side.”
She bites her lip like she’s about to smile, but then she goes and does it anyway. She kicks his foot a little too, but he thinks that might be because he’s winning. “I guess. Just find myself doing this a lot.”
“Assaulting my feet?”
Laughing a little, she kicks him again.
“That would be a yes, then,” he concludes.
“Besides that,” she says. “I keep ending up being this house guest. When we’re traveling, that’s different - doing things, helping people - it makes sense. But here, I’m just... sitting around.” She doesn’t call herself useless again, but the implication is clear on her face.
“You want to earn your keep,” he sums up. “Nothing wrong with that. Nothing much for you to do, though.” The rent’s paid up until the end of the month, right up until it stops being her problem. “Mind you, I wouldn’t say no if you kept your hair from clogging up the shower drain.”
She grins a little bit, a little shyly, tucking her hair behind her ear, and he knows he’ll never have to ask her again. “I was thinking something a little more difficult than that.”
He shrugs, not much knowing what to say. There’s laundry and dishes and they both wash their own. If the floor ever gets too bad, he’ll ask around to borrow a vacuum. “You could try winning at cards,” he suggests, emptying his hand and beating her soundly for the third time running.
“Or we could play something else,” she suggests right back. “Okay, enough of these.” She gathers up the cards, binds them back together with a rubber band. She drops them on the table and then they don’t have much else to do but avoid going to sleep.
He pretends to yawn, just to see if he can make her copy him through the suggestion of it. He grins at her unintentional mimicry and then finds his own jaw cracking open in reply despite his best efforts.
“Guess I should get changed,” she sighs. He nods a little, content to simply watch her as she crawls over to the side of the couch, her duffle’s new, permanent home. She pulls out the top and shorts she stuffed in there this morning and stands up. He pretends to readjust the rubber band around the cards as she wanders into the bathroom.
While she’s in there, he builds houses, playing cards idly placed against each other for something to do. Here a hut, here a wall, here a triangle he’ll claim is a well; the red backs of the cards face out, the numbers facing each other. He tries to keep the suits together and it makes the construction speed vary across the coffee table. It’s almost too easy with all the ring marks on the wood, some of them providing friction, some of them sticky from something he’s not even going to try to identify.
When she comes back out, he feels her surprise more than he sees it. The pair of jokers form a final spire on a tower; his coffee table citadel isn’t too bad for just one deck. “Yeah?” he says.
“That was fast.” She moves carefully and her steps are suddenly far softer than they should be able to be. Training, he thinks. Training and practice. She dumps today’s outfit back into the duffle before coming to sit beside him on the couch. She doesn’t point out that he needs to move for her to sleep here, but she doesn’t touch him either.
“You took a while.” He sits back, lifting an arm for her to fit herself under.
She does, of course, sinking against his side and he can feel it, can almost touch her need to be doing something, to be helping. He wonders how she got to be like this. He wants to know what it is that drives her, fear or inspiration. Which one it is that drives her more, at least. Where did the fear come from and how did she find her inspiration? Where did Rose Tyler come from?
Instead of asking, he falls back on old habits.
“In the play,” he says, “it’s more than that Godot never shows up.”
It takes her a minute of looking up at him to remember their earlier conversation. “Oh?” she asks after that pause. She looks like she’d rather be talking about something else, his girl, but they can do that once the urge to show off his intellect fades.
“Mm,” he confirms. “One of the men waiting finds out at the end that Godot isn’t even real. He lies to his friend about it, though, so they’ll stay together. That’s all they’ve really got by that point, the waiting.”
She’s stopped looking at him, has her head angled away. Maybe she’s looking at the card towers or maybe her eyes are closed; he can’t tell.
“It’s a strange little play, really,” he continues.
She doesn’t say anything. Her shoulders are hard beneath his hand.
The silence is something of a bad sign, so he rubs her shoulder a little instead. She relaxes into him once more and even if it’s only in response to the touch, he doesn’t much care.
After far too long, she asks, “Tell me a different story?”
“’Course,” he says. His fingers slip across her skin to pet her hair, to stroke the false gold shine.
“Tell me a story about Fred.”
His hand pauses, returns to her shoulder. She’s still looking at the cards rather than him. “Which Fred?” he asks, glib. “Lots of Freds in this world, not to mention the next one over.”
“Fred who liked your hair curly and long,” she says and it sounds like a reference to some conversation he can’t remember. No, wait, he does remember - it was ages back, though. “In San Francisco,” she adds.
“Are you jealous?” he asks. “’Cos there’s really no point in it.” No point in dancing around it either.
She pulls his hand from her shoulder and kisses the back of it. Holds his hand in both of hers, turns it over, and kisses his palm. “Too domestic for you, yeah?” she answers and her voice breaks on a forced, brittle laugh.
“Nah,” he says even though her guess would be very close to the mark in another situation. “Just mean there’s no point in it.”
“Tell me about her?” she asks again. “You lived in San Francisco and you traveled around, right?”
“We did.”
She looks up at him then and it hits him how long it’s been since he last said that, since he had been a we. That thing with Grace hadn’t come close to a shared pronoun. His girl now, though, maybe. She watches his face and searches his eyes and he can’t help how old he feels. She’s asking after a woman he’d fallen in love with before she was even born. And at the time, he’d still been older than this girl.
She chews her lip a little and holds his hand like it’s heavy. She’s waiting for him to say and he’s waiting for her to ask and, really, he wouldn’t mind staying in this stalemate. He gets the feeling that they’ve been in it for a while now and he’s perfectly all right with that.
“So,” she says. “Why San Francisco?”
“Why Barcelona?” he returns.
She takes it as an honest question, though, puts her mind to it. “You like Spanish things?” she asks and he laughs.
“There are worse reasons, but no, not over any other culture.”
She thinks about it again. “Multilingual cities near water?” she asks.
He shakes his head, though he does love his ports. “There’s no real reason, Rose. Just places I happened to show up in, that’s all.”
It’s her turn to laugh, such a small sound now. “Okay,” she says, “that does sound like you.”
He just smiles at her a little, willing her to let this drop.
But of course she doesn’t.
“How about Fred, then?” It’s a strange sort of curiosity on her face, half morbid, and he wonders how much of his life she already knows. “How’d she get to San Francisco?” she asks and he curses himself for never wondering before if she’s run a background check on him. It’s a bizarre and abstract sort of worry, a paranoid thought he can almost bring himself to get riled over, but not quite.
“Same way I did,” he says. He shrugs. He takes his hand away from her.
“You mean, with you.” Like she already knows, she’s saying it, not asking.
“And if she was?”
She blinks at him. “Then nothing,” she answers. “Just want to know, s’all. Maybe, maybe she’d been born there, I dunno.”
“What brought on the sudden interest?” It’s generally a bad sign when he can feel his eyebrows go up but can’t manage to bring them down.
Then, without warning, she giggles.
There’s no chance of getting his eyebrows back down now. “What?” he asks.
“Not exactly a sudden interest,” she corrects, eyes shining a little. She’s trying to distract him, he can tell, but oh, it is working. There’s a quirk to her full lips that reminds him very much that there is a sweet young thing dressed for bed currently sitting on his couch. It’s a bit like being struck with a two-by-four or a particularly skeletal fish; the shift from irritation and avoidance to attraction is flummoxing.
“How not sudden?” he finds himself asking, and when she flushes, he pursues it. This is a far, far better topic and if he can get her to giggle, he’s sure he can push for a snog. A good horizontal one, even. “How not sudden can you be in two months?”
She shakes her head a little, pulling her chin in as she does. He looks at the top of her head, at the very brown roots of a mostly blond head. She mumbles something and he grins at what he thinks he’s heard.
“Sorry, didn’t catch that.” Just to be sure, he tells himself, though really, he simply wants to hear it again.
He expects her to mumble it, but instead she meets his eyes, bold. “Feels like I’ve known you longer,” she answers. “For ages. I know it sounds like a line, but it’s not.” She bites her lip again, then shifts on the couch, pressing her body against his and burying both hands in his hair. It’s long enough for her to do that now and the position she takes brings her face close to his. “Sometimes, it’s like this is the only change.”
“Snogging a man over twice your age?” he asks, his eyes on hers. Her gaze is on his forehead, though, which confuses him no small amount.
“Your hair’s longer,” she says. “Makes you look different.”
“You liked it shorter?” He asks it without thinking, but there’s a part of his brain that’s already considering a trip to the barber. It’s not like he’s growing it out intentionally, more that he’s never bothered to get it cut and lacks the tools to do it himself.
So very close, she shrugs a little. It makes her hair fall across rising shoulders. “Trust me,” she says, her gaze back on his face, “I can deal with bigger changes.”
“I know you can,” he says and he’s not sure why it comes out as seriously as it does. It drops his voice and stills her, quiets her into something not simply receptive but waiting. He turns his head a little between her hands, liking the feel, and she pulls him to her, just a little.
They’re soft, these kisses, unhesitant but restrained. His mouth tries to catch hers just as hers does with his; it’s a slow half-absent dance that takes up far less of his focus than it should. She’s almost harshly minty from her toothpaste and it makes him crave the taste behind the artificial flavour. All he can hear is the way it sounds when her arm slides against his couch as they slowly lean and fall and find their bodies fitting together.
She’s soft and lovely and as her mouth gradually grows languid against his, he can’t imagine feeling more protective of anyone. Maybe of himself, but the way they’ve been shuttling between moods and topics tonight, that’s probably true for each of them. Right now, though, in this instant, he’d swear he’d put her first, that he’d tell her everything and forgive her anything.
She seems small when she’s beneath him, smaller than she ever could be, his girl. He feels like he must be crushing her. He feels like he’s done this before, crushed her beneath him before, but not like this, not with the act as something good, more than good. Fantastic, even. He pushes the nagging feeling away, embraces the rest of it entirely.
They dare to shift now, to move their legs and align their hearts. She’s pounding against the right side of his chest and it’s as it should be. He doesn’t know how or why and that’s the beauty of it, that’s where the wonder comes from. It’s two hearts and for all they beat differently, it’s right. It should be stupid, a sappy cliché, but it’s not the emotion that gets him: it’s the biology.
“You all right?” she asks, her lips moving against his, and that’s when he realizes he’s stopped. He’s just lying on her now, breathing in and out of her mouth.
“Yeah,” he whispers. He pulls back a little, props himself up a little using his elbows. “How far are we taking this?”
She takes a deep breath, the air into her lungs pushing her up against him just a small amount, just enough to tempt. “This far.” It’s something of a shy mumble that makes her sound like she’s lying.
He wants to think she’s lying. A dangerous path, that. “You sure?” He can’t help the asking.
“Still can’t,” she says.
“When could you?”
It’s meant as a reasonable question, but nothing’s reasonable, not in this position. It would take so little for them to do so much. He sure of it, just as he’s sure she feels the same. The way she looks away under his gaze, under his body, that’s proof.
“You’d know,” she tells him and he wants so badly to see a promise in it.
“It’d be obvious?”
She nods, the movement spreading her hair over her pillow.
“Unavoidably obvious?”
She nods a little more but doesn’t give so much as a smile at his playful tone.
“You sitting on my bed with a box of condoms, that kind of obvious?”
A little bit of a smile now and it’s enough to make every cold shower worth it. “That level of obvious, maybe.” Then the smile’s gone and she’s just worried. He’d climb off her, try to ease up on the pressure that way, but her arms are tight around him. Sometimes, she’s a pile of mixed signals somehow set into human shape and this time is worse than most.
“...I’ll stop asking,” he says. He promises.
“I’m sorry,” she starts to say, but he shushes her.
He shushes her and he shakes his head and he leans back down to kiss her softly. “I’ve had a bit of a dry spell, but there’s still no sense in taking it out on you.” One ill-advised fling over New Year’s doesn’t wipe away half a dozen years of nothing, after all.
She tries to give him a grin or something else bright and brave; it doesn’t quite work, but she doesn’t seem too unhappy when it makes him kiss her again. “You’re fantastic,” she tells him and it’s a backhanded insult, that’s what it is, regardless of whether or not that’s a real term. She doesn’t mean it, of course she doesn’t. Still, knowing she wants him, thinking she might love him, it hurts when she refuses to take him.
With the mood gone and tiredness settling back in, he presses his cheek against hers, his face against her pillow and her hair tickling his nose. It’s lovely even if it’s not what he’s craving. He’d forgotten what it was like to sprawl over a soft, warm woman. They stay like that until he thinks she might be asleep despite the pressure he’s putting on her lungs. Her arms are more relaxed now, her grip loose. It’s getting hot between her shoulder and the couch; little space for breathing here.
“Human blanket,” he murmurs, testing for a reply.
“Human pillow,” she corrects in tired confusion, a sleepy little sound as she mistakes who he was referring to. “’M under you.”
“Not anymore.” He frees himself of her gently. Puts a real blanket over her for an excuse to tuck her in, to hold on a little longer. “Go to sleep, you little ape. It’s almost morning.”
She makes a curious sound, amused and pleased and sleepy, and it greatly interferes with his desire to leave her.
“Good night, Rose,” he says.
She mumbles something, but that’s good enough. It ought to be.
“Good night,” he says again.
She only breathes, the rhythm steady, and she seems to him a defenseless, oblivious creature. She sleeps through his small stint in the bathroom, hasn’t so much as rolled over when he comes back out. He turns off the lights for her, shuts himself inside his bedroom as quietly as he can, and closes his eyes against a few more hours of sleep.
It’s Sunday morning and they have twenty-two days.
.-.-.-.-.-.
It’s Sunday morning, they have twenty-two days, and she’s making one hell of a racket.
He wakes from a dream of an old man in an old bed, wakes with a vague sense of knowing something important that he doesn’t actually know. There’s something far and something close and something yet to come that’s already happened; maybe it is and maybe it has, but he can’t pin it down. It’s a feeling that’s soon to leave him, the distractions of sound too much for uncertain snatches of fantasy to stand against. There’s a sort of clanging through the wall and then the faucet runs in the kitchenette. He’s just awake enough to identify it all; he’s had a good, deep sleep, the kind that dreams get lost in. He rolls over, almost luxuriating in a kind of warmth and calm he hadn’t realized he could have. It was an oddly satisfied sort of exhaustion that had taken him down and though he’s not sure why it was so satisfying, he knows it was.
He feels it in his stretching muscles as he reaches for his watch and reads it in the more than sufficient light of his room. It’s just past noon - that can’t be right.
It can’t be right, but he can’t bring himself to get up either. Instead, he listens to the noises from the other room, registering her voice with a strange sort of surprise. He lies still; any sort of shifting rustles the sheets too much for him to hear.
“It’s less weird than you’d think,” she’s saying, but he has no idea who to. Is she defensive or is that just the wall muffling her? “Mum,” she says, sounding immensely like a teenager, a young one, and he realizes she must be on the phone. He thinks of Susan, of a sharp “Grandfather” of embarrassment; he recalls, for an instant, an old man with a laugh like an owl’s, and has to conclude that that particular tone is universally aimed at nosy, uncomprehending adults.
“Really, I mean it,” she insists and it sounds like she’s doing something else out there, but he’s not sure. “Think you’d like him better now.” She laughs and it all sounds a bit like gossip taken too seriously. “I mean it!”
There’s a series of “yeah”s and “no”s as her mum goes on about something or other, and he lets his eyes close once more, not much interested. He’s about to drop off again when a clang sounds out, something getting dropped into the sink. It jars him.
“...don’t know,” she’s saying, volume rising. “If Mickey can track it down, I’ll be back in three weeks.” Then, as a quieter aside: “God, he’d hate that, Mickey rescuing him.”
Suddenly, he’s paying a lot more attention. How long if Mickey doesn’t find it? What then, Rose Tyler?
Another spot of noise. She’s making lunch and, based on what he knows is in his fridge, it’s bound to be pretty unusual. “Yeah, I know, Mum, I know. But have you tried going in person? There’s always a man outside - just give him a note for her with my number and tell him you’re my mum.”
There’s the smallest pause before she protests against something her mum’s said. “I’m not! It’s not being full of it, it’s calling in a favour. I saved her life, she’ll save his and he’s already saved mine: it’s the circle of life-saving, yeah? All we really need is one good announcement on the BBC or something. Y’know, once it’s clear.”
How much danger in there in this girl’s life? How much is there really?
There’s a high pitched noise starting up now and it takes him a minute to remember that he does actually own a kettle. Gives him some incentive to get up, the thought that there’s tea now, or about to be. He’s about to get up and interrupt, really he is, but then she goes and says the magic words.
“...then I guess I’ll stay until then. ‘M not leaving without him. Even if I can’t bring him the watch, I can at least stay for him.”
...He’s pretty sure that he’s heard more than a few expressions about eavesdroppers getting what they deserve. He’s pretty sure they’re true, too.
He swings his legs over the side of the bed, pulls on his jeans from yesterday and a t-shirt from last week. Not bothering to be quiet about it gives her some warning and by the time he opens the door, she’s saying a rushed goodbye to her mum.
“Thanks,” she’s saying, phone wedged between her ear and shoulder as she pours water from the kettle into a pair of mugs. “Love ya.” The kettle goes back on the stove and she beeps her mobile off as she turns to face him. She pulls on a smile. “Thought you weren’t going to wake up today.”
“Looks like I did anyway,” he answers with a bit of a shrug, fighting off the urge to be awkward. “That your mum?”
“Yeah,” she says, putting the two mugs on the counter, a teabag in each.
Looking around her, he can see a frying pan in the sink, of all things. Has he always had that? “You tell her about us?”
“Hell no.”
“Good girl.”
As if to prove his point, she sets two plates down on the counter and then hops on up herself, sitting with her legs on the kitchenette side. It’s nothing special what she’s made, only some toast and scrambled eggs, but he never bought eggs. He wonders if she got some milk while she was out. He can already see the new bananas in their spot on top of the fridge, the fruit still a bit green.
“Someone’s been busy,” he says rather than say thank-you.
“Someone’s ungrateful.” She hands him a fork anyway.
The eggs are a touch cold, but at least they aren’t runny. Toast is toast. All the same, he makes sure to give a hum of appreciation when he bites into the bread.
He’d like to say she brightens up at that, something of a lie with her starting at a glow. They eat and drink for a short while, for a silent, comfortable while. He finishes first and when her plate’s empty, he takes it and does the washing up. She moves to sit on the counter next to the sink, watching him and sipping her tea. It feels like the definition of companionship.
“You’re not much for mums, are you?” she asks after a bit, and he catches a teasing glimpse of tongue out of the corner of his eye.
“How old’s your mum again?” he counters. “Couple of years younger than me? Can’t imagine that would go over well.”
She pretends to consider it, then swings her leg around to tap his bum with her heel. “No, I think you just don’t like mums.”
“Depends on the mum,” he answers, rolling his eyes at her tap.
“Whose?” she demands to know, her grin only increasing. “And your own doesn’t count.”
“Fred was a mum.”
Her feet stop swinging. Not all at once, no, not so quick. They hit against the cabinet under the counter, thud and thump and then finally hold still and quiet.
“She was good at it,” he continues, eyes on the dishes. He’s scrubbing at the pan more than he really needs to for eggs. “Susan, that was her daughter, Susan, she was a bit of a screamer when she got scared but she was a sweet little thing despite it.”
She doesn’t say anything, not to tell him to stop or continue, and he doesn’t look at her. Maybe there’s some signal in her eyes, but he doesn’t want to see it.
“Never did meet the dad,” he adds because that’s something that should be made clear. “Some hairy bloke, by the sounds of it. Couldn’t tell, though: Susan was good about taking after her mother.” He breathes out in something like a laugh, just a touch rueful and looking down. “Whether you wanted her to or not.”
He drains the sink of its suds. Rinses off the plates. She takes one out of his hand and he looks up to find she’s got the drying cloth. Her expression unreadable, she sets herself to the small piece of work as if it were a mighty task.
“Suppose that was fortunate, looking back.”
She sets the first plate down.
He hands her the second.
She dries that one as well. Holds onto it with the cloth bunched in one hand.
He keeps talking. “She was a good kid, Susan Foreman. Bright as anything.”
He’ll keep talking until she stops him. He’s not sure he wants her to.
“Drove her teachers half mad sometimes,” he adds and the thought of it alone is enough to pull a smile out of him, albeit a small one. “This little kid going around correcting everyone.” Not in a malicious way, no, never that. She always wanted to make sure everyone knew everything.
“She sounds like you.”
He looks up at her, this woman sitting high on his counter with a dish and a damp cloth in her hands. “She was, a bit.”
She looks hesitant to go on, something he can’t blame her for. He can’t blame her except for how he can: she asked for this last night. If she doesn’t want to hear it now, it’s far too late.
“Kids do that, y’know,” he adds. “Mimicking’s big.”
“Did she call you her dad?” She swallows after she asks it and her eyes try to flicker away from his.
He nods.
“Oh,” she says. He thinks she might have finally gotten the age gap.
“Yeah.”
She doesn’t look alarmed or nervous; she doesn’t get up and go, either. She looks sort of lost instead, kind of heartsbroken. “Go on,” she says, the encouraging tone not matching her expression.
He looks down at the sink, rinses the remaining bubbles off his hands. “Still not sure how Fred felt about it. She was planning on getting used to it, so... don’t think she minded too much.”
“You loved her.” She’s realized what had happened, almost happened, but she substitutes the emotion for the situation. She says it before he’s really finished, but then, he never really finishes, not really.
He shrugs a bit, takes the cloth from her hands and dries his own. “I was going to marry her,” he replies. Confirms. “I’d better have loved her.”
They stay like that for a little while, he with the cloth and she with the plate, he standing and she sitting, two people who are far from strangers and further still from knowing each other.
“What happened to her?” Rose asks softly. “To them, I mean.”
He gives her a look, some unnamed emotion behind it. It’s a bit like the surprise at being found out, though he’s not sure how this could be. The way she speaks, it’s as if she already has the facts. He thinks again of UNIT, of background searches. Then he thinks of tenses and realizes the obvious answer. “What makes you say that?” he asks all the same.
“Well,” she says, sounding like she’s reasoning this out, “something must’ve happened to them.”
“Instead of something just happening? That happens, you know. Doesn’t need to be a huge, life-ending disaster for a relationship to end.” It comes out sharp and pointed, but he’s bare and defensive. It only makes sense that way.
It doesn’t make sense to her, though. He’s not sure he’s ever seen her so confused, not even after the first time they kissed.
“How else would anyone leave you?” she asks.
He drops the cloth onto the counter, cups the back of her head with one damp hand and pulls her close. He presses his lips to her forehead, hard. It bends her awkwardly, but she doesn’t complain. He hears the plate against the counter, a hasty rattle, and she wraps her arms around his neck, holding him tightly. She pulls herself to him or he pulls her off the counter or they both work to move her, to get closer and stay that way.
“Don’t say that,” he tells her.
“I’m sorry-”
“If something happened to you-”
“I’m sorr-” She cuts herself off this time, pulls back the tiny amount she needs to look at him. “...I didn’t mean it like- I don’t know how I meant it.”
“You’re gonna leave me just fine,” he tells her flatly, letting her go, willing her to take her hands off his shoulders, willing her to stay. Three more weeks and then she’s off to that fantastic life of hers without him.
“You’re such an idiot,” she replies, nearly copying his tone. Her hands stay where they are. “I love living with you. Always have.”
He scoffs. “‘Always’?” he repeats. A few weeks are hardly “always”.
“Except when you’re a complete git,” she answers. “Then I’m kinda indifferent.”
“Not what I meant, Rose.” He shakes his head at her for good measure.
With a frustrated look, she pushes at him a little, rocking him back. When he rocks forward, his hands find her hips, his body needing hers to be steady. It makes him feel at once balanced and ridiculously out of control. She doesn’t seem to have the same problem. “What happened to ‘here and now’?” she asks. “Thought we agreed on that.”
He shrugs as if the motion could dislodge that blame from his shoulders. “If you can wonder about my past, I can wonder about your future.”
“Okay, yeah,” she says. “I guess that’s sorta fair. But there’s a difference between thinking a certain way and living it.”
“You don’t make it half difficult.”
She blushes as if that were some sort of compliment. “Sorry, but are you the pot or the kettle?”
He ducks his head down a little, lets a smile try to play with his lips. “Pot, I think.”
“So you’re boiling and I’m full of steam?”
“Looks like.”
She tucks her hair behind her ear, gives him a bit of a smile. Their moods keep building off each other that way, be they irritation or affection. “Are we going to stop, then?” she asks. “I stop asking, you stop worrying?” She raises her eyebrows, proving that even she knows how unlikely that is.
“Think we’re just going to be a pair of idiots,” he surmises.
“Think we are, too,” she agrees, looking more than a touch rueful, more than a little wistful. “Think I can live with that, though.”
He shrugs, lifting his shoulders under her hands. “S’pose so.”
“Right, well.” She pauses, then taps his chest with her palms. “Think I’ll go get showered now.”
“Right,” he says and letting her go takes conscious effort. He makes himself fill his mug back up with water from the kettle, still hot. He very nearly forgets it entirely, but an important little detail resurfaces in his mind right as she’s about to disappear into the bathroom for the better part of an hour, for what will feel like the better part of an hour.
“Oh, and Rose?” he calls across the counter, across the room, the mug warm between his hands as she’s shutting the door.
She pops her head back out, not looking all too certain of what he’s about to say. Which is understandable after starting a day the way they’ve started this one. Still, there are some things worth saying. “Yeah?” she asks.
“Thanks for lunch,” he says, and even if it’s not entirely what he means, it doesn’t stop her from understanding.
“You’re welcome,” she says, and he understands her too.
.-.-.-.-.-.
<-- | -->
Author: rallalon
Beta: vyctori
Rating: PG13, AU towards the end of Season One; 9!Smith.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: She’s trying to distract him, he can tell, but oh, it is working. It’s a bit like being struck with a two-by-four or a particularly skeletal fish; the shift from irritation and avoidance to attraction is flummoxing.
Notes: Happy Birthday, In Human Hands! How are you two?
The Tourist
The Girl
The Runaway
The Puzzle
The Passenger
The Victim
The Absent
The Found
The Determined
The Unaware
The Celebrant
The Nurse
The Visitor
The Illusion
The Distraction
The Guest
The Companion
The Confidante
The Defenseless
“The lid’s loose,” Fred complains. “You didn’t close it properly.”
“So what?” he asks. “The jar’s ajar.”
She looks at him with her full face, ripe and soft and still young in the way that those who die early are always still young. “That’s not funny.”
“It is a little.”
She shrugs a bit, folding herself back into the loops of his scarf. Her fingers pull at the dropped stitches in the cloth, slip through where hasty mistakes have left holes.
“Don’t tug at it.” He reaches for her hands, her hands as cold as her bare feet in winter. He can see the memory of her cold feet pressed against his shins, can see the blankets and the duvet, but he can’t feel them. Too far gone, he supposes. Too long gone. “I like that scarf,” he adds.
“You’re not very good at knitting,” she chastises, poking through the small holes with her fingers. Everywhere the colour changes, there’s a bit of yarn sticking out, the loose threads tied together rather than woven in. They almost look like misplaced tassels, like decorations, but they’re only mistakes, and hastily corrected at that.
He shakes his head, still trying to get the scarf back. It drapes and loops over her, proves itself to be far too large to lift away from her shoulders in one attempt. “I didn’t make this.”
When she shakes her head, the movement is somehow larger than his, somehow means more. “I is relative,” she tells him.
“I am relative,” he corrects.
“Yes,” she says. She loops the scarf over his head, around his shoulders. The yarn is thick, but it stretches. “But you don’t suit you anymore.”
“Fair enough,” he says because this is a dream and he understands this dream, understands this part of this dream. “Would like to point out that all this allegory is starting to get annoying.”
“It’s only allegory if you understand it,” Fred argues. “Otherwise, it’s its own story.”
“I understand.”
“I know,” she says, and they let the scarf twine her into him, fedora and all. “That’s what’s so sad.”
.-.-.-.-.-.
He lies there with the hotel pillow soft against the side of his face. He feels odd. All confused and mellow, like thoughts are ice that his too-warm hands can’t help but melt. It trickles across his palms and falls from his curled fingers.
Eventually, he falls back asleep.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Eventually.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“You ever think this is gettin’ out of hand?” she asks him. And then she giggles because the brush of his hand across her stomach tends to have that effect. It’s one of the many important little details he’s learned in the past week.
“More in hand, really.” He flattens his palm over her navel, using the pun as an excuse.
She shoots him a look over her shoulder like she wants to swat him, but standing on the metro, she needs to hold on with both hands if she’s going to stay up. His balance is much better and he doesn’t hesitate to show it off.
“Seriously,” she says. Twists herself around and changes her grip and ends up holding onto his arm rather than the pole by the door.
He considers it and they sway with the motions of the train, the darkness of the tunnels flickering by outside the windows, the shadows filled with bits of graffiti. They sway back and forth with the sounds of movements, a slow dance at a fast speed. Her hand on his arm is somehow more relaxed than the rest of her, her thumb making little circles her eyes don’t seem to see.
“In a good way,” he murmurs, because their faces have gotten close enough for a murmur to be heard.
She swallows and the train tries to jerk them back into the world. The brakes squeal and they hold on as motion is halted. Her hand squeezes his arm as if to prove there’s nothing between their skin.
An announcement sputters unintelligibly across the metro speakers, but he doesn’t look up. Even if this was their stop, he wouldn’t’ve looked away from his girl.
“We haven’t gone a day without snogging yet,” she says, her eyes on his mouth.
“What, you want to stop?” His hand’s found its way onto her hip somehow. His thumb’s done one better, has found skin beneath her top to stroke against.
Her tongue wets her lips. She takes a breath and does it again. “Not... really.”
The doors close and they jerk into motion once more, inertia playing games with their bodies.
“’S just,” she says. “It’s- I dunno.”
“We haven’t snogged today yet,” he points out. Or maybe he’s tempting her a little, just maybe. Only a little.
“We haven’t had lunch yet,” she counters. Or flirts. Hard to tell with her eyes so dark.
He leans in and it’s a soft thing that the train is soon to bump them out of. It leaves them with their mouths half open, leaves them itching to move, to run to somewhere private.
That’s what his itch is, at the very least. She looks like she wants to run and her hand on his arm still says she won’t let go, so he assumes their inclinations are the same.
“All right,” he says. “You’ve got a point.”
“’S like....” And she just looks at him. Like she’s been winded, like gravity has gone mad between them and holding herself away from him is more impossible than flying.
He sees it in her eyes or maybe he only sees it reflected there. “It’s a bad habit worth picking up.”
She doesn’t disagree. She doesn’t reply either and they let it sit there, this irresistible, unnerving thing. Twice, they almost force the subject again, forget themselves and lean in and duck their heads away at the last minute because the last thing they’re going to be is one of those couples with obnoxious public snogs. It’s like polluting the world with domesticity, that.
Then he remembers they’ve already done that, but he tries to make himself forget. He’s good at making himself forget. Like the fact that after this Saturday, they have three more together, three more Saturdays and two days after that. He makes himself forget this. Twenty-three days.
The brakes shriek, announcing their station with a metallic scream, and her hand moves from his elbow to his fingers. The skin of his arm prickles at the stroke, at the strange combination of an unwitting caress and a persistent touch.
“C’mon,” he says.
They leave the metro and climb up out of the world, and, standing on its surface, they cling to each other. It almost brings him up short, this feeling, the way her hand fits in his while the world turns and it’s all in his head, it all has to be in his head, but by the look of her, it’s in her head too.
Even a game of haggling through a market fails to pull his mind from it, to fully distract him. She plays the thrifty shopper and he plays the translator and they walk away laughing, their hands too tight and their fingers tense.
They sit and they eat and he chews spiced sausage while trying not to laugh at the way she can’t peel an orange. The rind gets pulled to pieces, her citrus globe losing one tectonic plate after another. Each tear sends a spray over her hands, into the air. She makes an annoyed sound as half a slice comes off with the peel and he swallows his bit of pork and spices, nudging her with his elbow to tell her what a bad job she’s doing. He holds a bottle of water between his hands, doesn’t see the point of putting it down to better bother her.
She sets the half-peeled fruit on her lap, lets it roll just the once, roll onto the bare skin of her thighs. She takes the peel, pulls the fruit from it, and brings the juice and the pulp and her fingers to his mouth, into his mouth.
She must feel his surprise in the breath over her fingers, must feel it the same way he can see hers in the nervous width of her eyes.
He closes his mouth around fruit and finger, her thumb slipping out over his lips, her knuckles light against his chin. She closes her eyes, only for a moment.
“I want,” she says, and stops. Looks at him as if the sentence really cannot be finished.
“I know,” he says, tries to say around her digit, and it makes her laugh.
“No idea what that was,” she tells him, then starts to remove her hand.
It’s a gentle bite, as gentle as he can make it when he’s not thinking, but it’s enough to make her stop, to make her stay. He’ll call the press of his tongue against the pad of her finger an apology. He’ll call it that.
“Oh,” she says and her eyes go dark despite the sunlight. She looks winded. She looks like she can’t speak or wants to speak, like there’s a word trying to burst out of her and he wants to know what it is. He thinks it’s his name.
He gives her back her hand and kisses her, needing to. Her mouth is open before their lips even touch and she gives in to his tongue and it’s citrus and spice and bits of pulp and protein between teeth and tongue. It’s something that’s better than it ought to be and that should be a warning, shouldn’t it, that this is going to end horribly? She knows it just as well as he does; he’s sure of it.
He keeps holding onto that water bottle, doesn’t dare to put it down and free his hands while they’re in public. One of her hands is on his shoulder, on his shoulder near his neck, and one finger is damp and sticky on his skin.
When he finally remembers to pull back, she bites his lip. She’s gentle about it and this time, her tongue is the one to make the apology. She lets go, after, releases him, and he doesn’t quite recall why he was pulling back in the first place.
“At least we had lunch first,” he offers and then she looks down, startled. He follows her gaze, sees the half-peeled orange on the stone of the plaza, sees the small, glistening trails of juice across her thighs from where it rolled. He stops breathing.
She reaches down, pulls off the dirt-covered slices and starts to peel off the other half of the rind. “Could be worse,” she says in observation or reply, her cheeks matching her name. It’s such a cliché description, but he adores it. It’s Rose being as Rose as she can be.
He makes a noise of agreement and she sticks another orange slice in his mouth.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“You have to love Saturdays,” she idly muses, her mouth hidden behind a hand of cards. They sit on his floor, their legs beneath the coffee table and bumping from something more than accident. Technically, it’s Sunday now and it’s been Sunday for a few hours, but even after coming in after a night out, they can’t quite make themselves go to bed. He can’t, at least. Having her back has done wonders for his ability to sleep, but it’s hardly something he likes risking without exhaustion shoving him down to where dreams can’t reach.
“You have to love a good stalling tactic, too,” he replies, “but for that, you should probably find one first. Play a card.”
She does, giving him a bit of a look. “If I was stalling, you’d know it.”
“I do know it,” he counters, both verbally and within the game. “Therefore: stalling.”
A bit of a hum there, a careful card selection, and she allows herself to drop back into silence. Maybe she’s finally getting tired.
He gives it a moment before he asks. “What’s so good about Saturdays?”
“’S my non-useless day,” she explains. “I-”
“What’s that supposed to mean, useless?” he interrupts.
“I’m sleeping on your couch and eating your food. I’m your basic freeloader, just with someone else’s credit card.”
“And?” he asks. “You’re waiting for that Dr. Godot of yours.”
Her brow furrows. “Doctor what?”
“Godot,” he repeats. “As in, waiting for.”
“That’s the play, right?” she asks. “Where they wait for him the entire time and he never shows, yeah?”
Ah. Not the best choice. He shrugs a little, tries to give her a bit of a smile and makes it apologetic. “All right, it’s not a perfect metaphor. But, Rose, when your job pays you to go on holiday, you go on holiday.”
She bites her lip like she’s about to lie, but he can see when she thinks better of it. She shakes her head at him. “It’s not a holiday.”
“All right, that’s not the perfect term.”
“That’s a lot of-” she yawns, then hastily covers up any sign of tiredness “-things not being perfect.”
“Very few things are,” he replied, scanning his cards. “Still, there’s no point raising a fuss over it. UNIT’s tracking down that watch, your doctor’s on the mend, and in the meanwhile, you’re surrounded by excellent company on all one side.”
She bites her lip like she’s about to smile, but then she goes and does it anyway. She kicks his foot a little too, but he thinks that might be because he’s winning. “I guess. Just find myself doing this a lot.”
“Assaulting my feet?”
Laughing a little, she kicks him again.
“That would be a yes, then,” he concludes.
“Besides that,” she says. “I keep ending up being this house guest. When we’re traveling, that’s different - doing things, helping people - it makes sense. But here, I’m just... sitting around.” She doesn’t call herself useless again, but the implication is clear on her face.
“You want to earn your keep,” he sums up. “Nothing wrong with that. Nothing much for you to do, though.” The rent’s paid up until the end of the month, right up until it stops being her problem. “Mind you, I wouldn’t say no if you kept your hair from clogging up the shower drain.”
She grins a little bit, a little shyly, tucking her hair behind her ear, and he knows he’ll never have to ask her again. “I was thinking something a little more difficult than that.”
He shrugs, not much knowing what to say. There’s laundry and dishes and they both wash their own. If the floor ever gets too bad, he’ll ask around to borrow a vacuum. “You could try winning at cards,” he suggests, emptying his hand and beating her soundly for the third time running.
“Or we could play something else,” she suggests right back. “Okay, enough of these.” She gathers up the cards, binds them back together with a rubber band. She drops them on the table and then they don’t have much else to do but avoid going to sleep.
He pretends to yawn, just to see if he can make her copy him through the suggestion of it. He grins at her unintentional mimicry and then finds his own jaw cracking open in reply despite his best efforts.
“Guess I should get changed,” she sighs. He nods a little, content to simply watch her as she crawls over to the side of the couch, her duffle’s new, permanent home. She pulls out the top and shorts she stuffed in there this morning and stands up. He pretends to readjust the rubber band around the cards as she wanders into the bathroom.
While she’s in there, he builds houses, playing cards idly placed against each other for something to do. Here a hut, here a wall, here a triangle he’ll claim is a well; the red backs of the cards face out, the numbers facing each other. He tries to keep the suits together and it makes the construction speed vary across the coffee table. It’s almost too easy with all the ring marks on the wood, some of them providing friction, some of them sticky from something he’s not even going to try to identify.
When she comes back out, he feels her surprise more than he sees it. The pair of jokers form a final spire on a tower; his coffee table citadel isn’t too bad for just one deck. “Yeah?” he says.
“That was fast.” She moves carefully and her steps are suddenly far softer than they should be able to be. Training, he thinks. Training and practice. She dumps today’s outfit back into the duffle before coming to sit beside him on the couch. She doesn’t point out that he needs to move for her to sleep here, but she doesn’t touch him either.
“You took a while.” He sits back, lifting an arm for her to fit herself under.
She does, of course, sinking against his side and he can feel it, can almost touch her need to be doing something, to be helping. He wonders how she got to be like this. He wants to know what it is that drives her, fear or inspiration. Which one it is that drives her more, at least. Where did the fear come from and how did she find her inspiration? Where did Rose Tyler come from?
Instead of asking, he falls back on old habits.
“In the play,” he says, “it’s more than that Godot never shows up.”
It takes her a minute of looking up at him to remember their earlier conversation. “Oh?” she asks after that pause. She looks like she’d rather be talking about something else, his girl, but they can do that once the urge to show off his intellect fades.
“Mm,” he confirms. “One of the men waiting finds out at the end that Godot isn’t even real. He lies to his friend about it, though, so they’ll stay together. That’s all they’ve really got by that point, the waiting.”
She’s stopped looking at him, has her head angled away. Maybe she’s looking at the card towers or maybe her eyes are closed; he can’t tell.
“It’s a strange little play, really,” he continues.
She doesn’t say anything. Her shoulders are hard beneath his hand.
The silence is something of a bad sign, so he rubs her shoulder a little instead. She relaxes into him once more and even if it’s only in response to the touch, he doesn’t much care.
After far too long, she asks, “Tell me a different story?”
“’Course,” he says. His fingers slip across her skin to pet her hair, to stroke the false gold shine.
“Tell me a story about Fred.”
His hand pauses, returns to her shoulder. She’s still looking at the cards rather than him. “Which Fred?” he asks, glib. “Lots of Freds in this world, not to mention the next one over.”
“Fred who liked your hair curly and long,” she says and it sounds like a reference to some conversation he can’t remember. No, wait, he does remember - it was ages back, though. “In San Francisco,” she adds.
“Are you jealous?” he asks. “’Cos there’s really no point in it.” No point in dancing around it either.
She pulls his hand from her shoulder and kisses the back of it. Holds his hand in both of hers, turns it over, and kisses his palm. “Too domestic for you, yeah?” she answers and her voice breaks on a forced, brittle laugh.
“Nah,” he says even though her guess would be very close to the mark in another situation. “Just mean there’s no point in it.”
“Tell me about her?” she asks again. “You lived in San Francisco and you traveled around, right?”
“We did.”
She looks up at him then and it hits him how long it’s been since he last said that, since he had been a we. That thing with Grace hadn’t come close to a shared pronoun. His girl now, though, maybe. She watches his face and searches his eyes and he can’t help how old he feels. She’s asking after a woman he’d fallen in love with before she was even born. And at the time, he’d still been older than this girl.
She chews her lip a little and holds his hand like it’s heavy. She’s waiting for him to say and he’s waiting for her to ask and, really, he wouldn’t mind staying in this stalemate. He gets the feeling that they’ve been in it for a while now and he’s perfectly all right with that.
“So,” she says. “Why San Francisco?”
“Why Barcelona?” he returns.
She takes it as an honest question, though, puts her mind to it. “You like Spanish things?” she asks and he laughs.
“There are worse reasons, but no, not over any other culture.”
She thinks about it again. “Multilingual cities near water?” she asks.
He shakes his head, though he does love his ports. “There’s no real reason, Rose. Just places I happened to show up in, that’s all.”
It’s her turn to laugh, such a small sound now. “Okay,” she says, “that does sound like you.”
He just smiles at her a little, willing her to let this drop.
But of course she doesn’t.
“How about Fred, then?” It’s a strange sort of curiosity on her face, half morbid, and he wonders how much of his life she already knows. “How’d she get to San Francisco?” she asks and he curses himself for never wondering before if she’s run a background check on him. It’s a bizarre and abstract sort of worry, a paranoid thought he can almost bring himself to get riled over, but not quite.
“Same way I did,” he says. He shrugs. He takes his hand away from her.
“You mean, with you.” Like she already knows, she’s saying it, not asking.
“And if she was?”
She blinks at him. “Then nothing,” she answers. “Just want to know, s’all. Maybe, maybe she’d been born there, I dunno.”
“What brought on the sudden interest?” It’s generally a bad sign when he can feel his eyebrows go up but can’t manage to bring them down.
Then, without warning, she giggles.
There’s no chance of getting his eyebrows back down now. “What?” he asks.
“Not exactly a sudden interest,” she corrects, eyes shining a little. She’s trying to distract him, he can tell, but oh, it is working. There’s a quirk to her full lips that reminds him very much that there is a sweet young thing dressed for bed currently sitting on his couch. It’s a bit like being struck with a two-by-four or a particularly skeletal fish; the shift from irritation and avoidance to attraction is flummoxing.
“How not sudden?” he finds himself asking, and when she flushes, he pursues it. This is a far, far better topic and if he can get her to giggle, he’s sure he can push for a snog. A good horizontal one, even. “How not sudden can you be in two months?”
She shakes her head a little, pulling her chin in as she does. He looks at the top of her head, at the very brown roots of a mostly blond head. She mumbles something and he grins at what he thinks he’s heard.
“Sorry, didn’t catch that.” Just to be sure, he tells himself, though really, he simply wants to hear it again.
He expects her to mumble it, but instead she meets his eyes, bold. “Feels like I’ve known you longer,” she answers. “For ages. I know it sounds like a line, but it’s not.” She bites her lip again, then shifts on the couch, pressing her body against his and burying both hands in his hair. It’s long enough for her to do that now and the position she takes brings her face close to his. “Sometimes, it’s like this is the only change.”
“Snogging a man over twice your age?” he asks, his eyes on hers. Her gaze is on his forehead, though, which confuses him no small amount.
“Your hair’s longer,” she says. “Makes you look different.”
“You liked it shorter?” He asks it without thinking, but there’s a part of his brain that’s already considering a trip to the barber. It’s not like he’s growing it out intentionally, more that he’s never bothered to get it cut and lacks the tools to do it himself.
So very close, she shrugs a little. It makes her hair fall across rising shoulders. “Trust me,” she says, her gaze back on his face, “I can deal with bigger changes.”
“I know you can,” he says and he’s not sure why it comes out as seriously as it does. It drops his voice and stills her, quiets her into something not simply receptive but waiting. He turns his head a little between her hands, liking the feel, and she pulls him to her, just a little.
They’re soft, these kisses, unhesitant but restrained. His mouth tries to catch hers just as hers does with his; it’s a slow half-absent dance that takes up far less of his focus than it should. She’s almost harshly minty from her toothpaste and it makes him crave the taste behind the artificial flavour. All he can hear is the way it sounds when her arm slides against his couch as they slowly lean and fall and find their bodies fitting together.
She’s soft and lovely and as her mouth gradually grows languid against his, he can’t imagine feeling more protective of anyone. Maybe of himself, but the way they’ve been shuttling between moods and topics tonight, that’s probably true for each of them. Right now, though, in this instant, he’d swear he’d put her first, that he’d tell her everything and forgive her anything.
She seems small when she’s beneath him, smaller than she ever could be, his girl. He feels like he must be crushing her. He feels like he’s done this before, crushed her beneath him before, but not like this, not with the act as something good, more than good. Fantastic, even. He pushes the nagging feeling away, embraces the rest of it entirely.
They dare to shift now, to move their legs and align their hearts. She’s pounding against the right side of his chest and it’s as it should be. He doesn’t know how or why and that’s the beauty of it, that’s where the wonder comes from. It’s two hearts and for all they beat differently, it’s right. It should be stupid, a sappy cliché, but it’s not the emotion that gets him: it’s the biology.
“You all right?” she asks, her lips moving against his, and that’s when he realizes he’s stopped. He’s just lying on her now, breathing in and out of her mouth.
“Yeah,” he whispers. He pulls back a little, props himself up a little using his elbows. “How far are we taking this?”
She takes a deep breath, the air into her lungs pushing her up against him just a small amount, just enough to tempt. “This far.” It’s something of a shy mumble that makes her sound like she’s lying.
He wants to think she’s lying. A dangerous path, that. “You sure?” He can’t help the asking.
“Still can’t,” she says.
“When could you?”
It’s meant as a reasonable question, but nothing’s reasonable, not in this position. It would take so little for them to do so much. He sure of it, just as he’s sure she feels the same. The way she looks away under his gaze, under his body, that’s proof.
“You’d know,” she tells him and he wants so badly to see a promise in it.
“It’d be obvious?”
She nods, the movement spreading her hair over her pillow.
“Unavoidably obvious?”
She nods a little more but doesn’t give so much as a smile at his playful tone.
“You sitting on my bed with a box of condoms, that kind of obvious?”
A little bit of a smile now and it’s enough to make every cold shower worth it. “That level of obvious, maybe.” Then the smile’s gone and she’s just worried. He’d climb off her, try to ease up on the pressure that way, but her arms are tight around him. Sometimes, she’s a pile of mixed signals somehow set into human shape and this time is worse than most.
“...I’ll stop asking,” he says. He promises.
“I’m sorry,” she starts to say, but he shushes her.
He shushes her and he shakes his head and he leans back down to kiss her softly. “I’ve had a bit of a dry spell, but there’s still no sense in taking it out on you.” One ill-advised fling over New Year’s doesn’t wipe away half a dozen years of nothing, after all.
She tries to give him a grin or something else bright and brave; it doesn’t quite work, but she doesn’t seem too unhappy when it makes him kiss her again. “You’re fantastic,” she tells him and it’s a backhanded insult, that’s what it is, regardless of whether or not that’s a real term. She doesn’t mean it, of course she doesn’t. Still, knowing she wants him, thinking she might love him, it hurts when she refuses to take him.
With the mood gone and tiredness settling back in, he presses his cheek against hers, his face against her pillow and her hair tickling his nose. It’s lovely even if it’s not what he’s craving. He’d forgotten what it was like to sprawl over a soft, warm woman. They stay like that until he thinks she might be asleep despite the pressure he’s putting on her lungs. Her arms are more relaxed now, her grip loose. It’s getting hot between her shoulder and the couch; little space for breathing here.
“Human blanket,” he murmurs, testing for a reply.
“Human pillow,” she corrects in tired confusion, a sleepy little sound as she mistakes who he was referring to. “’M under you.”
“Not anymore.” He frees himself of her gently. Puts a real blanket over her for an excuse to tuck her in, to hold on a little longer. “Go to sleep, you little ape. It’s almost morning.”
She makes a curious sound, amused and pleased and sleepy, and it greatly interferes with his desire to leave her.
“Good night, Rose,” he says.
She mumbles something, but that’s good enough. It ought to be.
“Good night,” he says again.
She only breathes, the rhythm steady, and she seems to him a defenseless, oblivious creature. She sleeps through his small stint in the bathroom, hasn’t so much as rolled over when he comes back out. He turns off the lights for her, shuts himself inside his bedroom as quietly as he can, and closes his eyes against a few more hours of sleep.
It’s Sunday morning and they have twenty-two days.
.-.-.-.-.-.
It’s Sunday morning, they have twenty-two days, and she’s making one hell of a racket.
He wakes from a dream of an old man in an old bed, wakes with a vague sense of knowing something important that he doesn’t actually know. There’s something far and something close and something yet to come that’s already happened; maybe it is and maybe it has, but he can’t pin it down. It’s a feeling that’s soon to leave him, the distractions of sound too much for uncertain snatches of fantasy to stand against. There’s a sort of clanging through the wall and then the faucet runs in the kitchenette. He’s just awake enough to identify it all; he’s had a good, deep sleep, the kind that dreams get lost in. He rolls over, almost luxuriating in a kind of warmth and calm he hadn’t realized he could have. It was an oddly satisfied sort of exhaustion that had taken him down and though he’s not sure why it was so satisfying, he knows it was.
He feels it in his stretching muscles as he reaches for his watch and reads it in the more than sufficient light of his room. It’s just past noon - that can’t be right.
It can’t be right, but he can’t bring himself to get up either. Instead, he listens to the noises from the other room, registering her voice with a strange sort of surprise. He lies still; any sort of shifting rustles the sheets too much for him to hear.
“It’s less weird than you’d think,” she’s saying, but he has no idea who to. Is she defensive or is that just the wall muffling her? “Mum,” she says, sounding immensely like a teenager, a young one, and he realizes she must be on the phone. He thinks of Susan, of a sharp “Grandfather” of embarrassment; he recalls, for an instant, an old man with a laugh like an owl’s, and has to conclude that that particular tone is universally aimed at nosy, uncomprehending adults.
“Really, I mean it,” she insists and it sounds like she’s doing something else out there, but he’s not sure. “Think you’d like him better now.” She laughs and it all sounds a bit like gossip taken too seriously. “I mean it!”
There’s a series of “yeah”s and “no”s as her mum goes on about something or other, and he lets his eyes close once more, not much interested. He’s about to drop off again when a clang sounds out, something getting dropped into the sink. It jars him.
“...don’t know,” she’s saying, volume rising. “If Mickey can track it down, I’ll be back in three weeks.” Then, as a quieter aside: “God, he’d hate that, Mickey rescuing him.”
Suddenly, he’s paying a lot more attention. How long if Mickey doesn’t find it? What then, Rose Tyler?
Another spot of noise. She’s making lunch and, based on what he knows is in his fridge, it’s bound to be pretty unusual. “Yeah, I know, Mum, I know. But have you tried going in person? There’s always a man outside - just give him a note for her with my number and tell him you’re my mum.”
There’s the smallest pause before she protests against something her mum’s said. “I’m not! It’s not being full of it, it’s calling in a favour. I saved her life, she’ll save his and he’s already saved mine: it’s the circle of life-saving, yeah? All we really need is one good announcement on the BBC or something. Y’know, once it’s clear.”
How much danger in there in this girl’s life? How much is there really?
There’s a high pitched noise starting up now and it takes him a minute to remember that he does actually own a kettle. Gives him some incentive to get up, the thought that there’s tea now, or about to be. He’s about to get up and interrupt, really he is, but then she goes and says the magic words.
“...then I guess I’ll stay until then. ‘M not leaving without him. Even if I can’t bring him the watch, I can at least stay for him.”
...He’s pretty sure that he’s heard more than a few expressions about eavesdroppers getting what they deserve. He’s pretty sure they’re true, too.
He swings his legs over the side of the bed, pulls on his jeans from yesterday and a t-shirt from last week. Not bothering to be quiet about it gives her some warning and by the time he opens the door, she’s saying a rushed goodbye to her mum.
“Thanks,” she’s saying, phone wedged between her ear and shoulder as she pours water from the kettle into a pair of mugs. “Love ya.” The kettle goes back on the stove and she beeps her mobile off as she turns to face him. She pulls on a smile. “Thought you weren’t going to wake up today.”
“Looks like I did anyway,” he answers with a bit of a shrug, fighting off the urge to be awkward. “That your mum?”
“Yeah,” she says, putting the two mugs on the counter, a teabag in each.
Looking around her, he can see a frying pan in the sink, of all things. Has he always had that? “You tell her about us?”
“Hell no.”
“Good girl.”
As if to prove his point, she sets two plates down on the counter and then hops on up herself, sitting with her legs on the kitchenette side. It’s nothing special what she’s made, only some toast and scrambled eggs, but he never bought eggs. He wonders if she got some milk while she was out. He can already see the new bananas in their spot on top of the fridge, the fruit still a bit green.
“Someone’s been busy,” he says rather than say thank-you.
“Someone’s ungrateful.” She hands him a fork anyway.
The eggs are a touch cold, but at least they aren’t runny. Toast is toast. All the same, he makes sure to give a hum of appreciation when he bites into the bread.
He’d like to say she brightens up at that, something of a lie with her starting at a glow. They eat and drink for a short while, for a silent, comfortable while. He finishes first and when her plate’s empty, he takes it and does the washing up. She moves to sit on the counter next to the sink, watching him and sipping her tea. It feels like the definition of companionship.
“You’re not much for mums, are you?” she asks after a bit, and he catches a teasing glimpse of tongue out of the corner of his eye.
“How old’s your mum again?” he counters. “Couple of years younger than me? Can’t imagine that would go over well.”
She pretends to consider it, then swings her leg around to tap his bum with her heel. “No, I think you just don’t like mums.”
“Depends on the mum,” he answers, rolling his eyes at her tap.
“Whose?” she demands to know, her grin only increasing. “And your own doesn’t count.”
“Fred was a mum.”
Her feet stop swinging. Not all at once, no, not so quick. They hit against the cabinet under the counter, thud and thump and then finally hold still and quiet.
“She was good at it,” he continues, eyes on the dishes. He’s scrubbing at the pan more than he really needs to for eggs. “Susan, that was her daughter, Susan, she was a bit of a screamer when she got scared but she was a sweet little thing despite it.”
She doesn’t say anything, not to tell him to stop or continue, and he doesn’t look at her. Maybe there’s some signal in her eyes, but he doesn’t want to see it.
“Never did meet the dad,” he adds because that’s something that should be made clear. “Some hairy bloke, by the sounds of it. Couldn’t tell, though: Susan was good about taking after her mother.” He breathes out in something like a laugh, just a touch rueful and looking down. “Whether you wanted her to or not.”
He drains the sink of its suds. Rinses off the plates. She takes one out of his hand and he looks up to find she’s got the drying cloth. Her expression unreadable, she sets herself to the small piece of work as if it were a mighty task.
“Suppose that was fortunate, looking back.”
She sets the first plate down.
He hands her the second.
She dries that one as well. Holds onto it with the cloth bunched in one hand.
He keeps talking. “She was a good kid, Susan Foreman. Bright as anything.”
He’ll keep talking until she stops him. He’s not sure he wants her to.
“Drove her teachers half mad sometimes,” he adds and the thought of it alone is enough to pull a smile out of him, albeit a small one. “This little kid going around correcting everyone.” Not in a malicious way, no, never that. She always wanted to make sure everyone knew everything.
“She sounds like you.”
He looks up at her, this woman sitting high on his counter with a dish and a damp cloth in her hands. “She was, a bit.”
She looks hesitant to go on, something he can’t blame her for. He can’t blame her except for how he can: she asked for this last night. If she doesn’t want to hear it now, it’s far too late.
“Kids do that, y’know,” he adds. “Mimicking’s big.”
“Did she call you her dad?” She swallows after she asks it and her eyes try to flicker away from his.
He nods.
“Oh,” she says. He thinks she might have finally gotten the age gap.
“Yeah.”
She doesn’t look alarmed or nervous; she doesn’t get up and go, either. She looks sort of lost instead, kind of heartsbroken. “Go on,” she says, the encouraging tone not matching her expression.
He looks down at the sink, rinses the remaining bubbles off his hands. “Still not sure how Fred felt about it. She was planning on getting used to it, so... don’t think she minded too much.”
“You loved her.” She’s realized what had happened, almost happened, but she substitutes the emotion for the situation. She says it before he’s really finished, but then, he never really finishes, not really.
He shrugs a bit, takes the cloth from her hands and dries his own. “I was going to marry her,” he replies. Confirms. “I’d better have loved her.”
They stay like that for a little while, he with the cloth and she with the plate, he standing and she sitting, two people who are far from strangers and further still from knowing each other.
“What happened to her?” Rose asks softly. “To them, I mean.”
He gives her a look, some unnamed emotion behind it. It’s a bit like the surprise at being found out, though he’s not sure how this could be. The way she speaks, it’s as if she already has the facts. He thinks again of UNIT, of background searches. Then he thinks of tenses and realizes the obvious answer. “What makes you say that?” he asks all the same.
“Well,” she says, sounding like she’s reasoning this out, “something must’ve happened to them.”
“Instead of something just happening? That happens, you know. Doesn’t need to be a huge, life-ending disaster for a relationship to end.” It comes out sharp and pointed, but he’s bare and defensive. It only makes sense that way.
It doesn’t make sense to her, though. He’s not sure he’s ever seen her so confused, not even after the first time they kissed.
“How else would anyone leave you?” she asks.
He drops the cloth onto the counter, cups the back of her head with one damp hand and pulls her close. He presses his lips to her forehead, hard. It bends her awkwardly, but she doesn’t complain. He hears the plate against the counter, a hasty rattle, and she wraps her arms around his neck, holding him tightly. She pulls herself to him or he pulls her off the counter or they both work to move her, to get closer and stay that way.
“Don’t say that,” he tells her.
“I’m sorry-”
“If something happened to you-”
“I’m sorr-” She cuts herself off this time, pulls back the tiny amount she needs to look at him. “...I didn’t mean it like- I don’t know how I meant it.”
“You’re gonna leave me just fine,” he tells her flatly, letting her go, willing her to take her hands off his shoulders, willing her to stay. Three more weeks and then she’s off to that fantastic life of hers without him.
“You’re such an idiot,” she replies, nearly copying his tone. Her hands stay where they are. “I love living with you. Always have.”
He scoffs. “‘Always’?” he repeats. A few weeks are hardly “always”.
“Except when you’re a complete git,” she answers. “Then I’m kinda indifferent.”
“Not what I meant, Rose.” He shakes his head at her for good measure.
With a frustrated look, she pushes at him a little, rocking him back. When he rocks forward, his hands find her hips, his body needing hers to be steady. It makes him feel at once balanced and ridiculously out of control. She doesn’t seem to have the same problem. “What happened to ‘here and now’?” she asks. “Thought we agreed on that.”
He shrugs as if the motion could dislodge that blame from his shoulders. “If you can wonder about my past, I can wonder about your future.”
“Okay, yeah,” she says. “I guess that’s sorta fair. But there’s a difference between thinking a certain way and living it.”
“You don’t make it half difficult.”
She blushes as if that were some sort of compliment. “Sorry, but are you the pot or the kettle?”
He ducks his head down a little, lets a smile try to play with his lips. “Pot, I think.”
“So you’re boiling and I’m full of steam?”
“Looks like.”
She tucks her hair behind her ear, gives him a bit of a smile. Their moods keep building off each other that way, be they irritation or affection. “Are we going to stop, then?” she asks. “I stop asking, you stop worrying?” She raises her eyebrows, proving that even she knows how unlikely that is.
“Think we’re just going to be a pair of idiots,” he surmises.
“Think we are, too,” she agrees, looking more than a touch rueful, more than a little wistful. “Think I can live with that, though.”
He shrugs, lifting his shoulders under her hands. “S’pose so.”
“Right, well.” She pauses, then taps his chest with her palms. “Think I’ll go get showered now.”
“Right,” he says and letting her go takes conscious effort. He makes himself fill his mug back up with water from the kettle, still hot. He very nearly forgets it entirely, but an important little detail resurfaces in his mind right as she’s about to disappear into the bathroom for the better part of an hour, for what will feel like the better part of an hour.
“Oh, and Rose?” he calls across the counter, across the room, the mug warm between his hands as she’s shutting the door.
She pops her head back out, not looking all too certain of what he’s about to say. Which is understandable after starting a day the way they’ve started this one. Still, there are some things worth saying. “Yeah?” she asks.
“Thanks for lunch,” he says, and even if it’s not entirely what he means, it doesn’t stop her from understanding.
“You’re welcome,” she says, and he understands her too.
.-.-.-.-.-.
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