Chapter Text
Rose entered the Tardis and her eyes met the Doctor's. They ran into each other's arms and he lifted Rose into the air, swaying from side to side. They buried their faces in the other's neck, relieved to see their (friend? beloved? lover?) soulmate alive and well. After a quick and definitely necessary snog, they got the Doctor out of the space suit and called the ship.
"Zach? We'll be off, now. Have a good trip home," the Doctor called.
"And the next time you get curious about something ... Oh, what's the point. You'll just go blundering in. The human race." He smiled at Rose next to him and she grinned back.
"But Doctor, what did you find down there?" Ida wanted to know. "That creature, what was it?"
"I don't know. Never did decipher that writing." He looked up from the Tardis' buttons. "But that's good, day I know everything? Might as well stop."
"What do you think it was, really?" Rose asked, recognizing this particular tone of voice.
He looked down again. "I think we beat it. That's good enough for me. "
Rose reminded him quietly, "It said I was going to die in battle."
The Doctor had long since learned to listen to things like this, nothing happened without a reason in the universe, everything knitted together by time lines that powerful beings were able to read. So the Doctor did the only right thing, something he had only done once before: He didn't tell her the truth: "Then it lied."
She smiled at him weakly, not convinced. Of course she knew when he was faking, of course she did.
"Right, onwards, upwards. Ida? See you again, maybe."
"I hope so."
"And thanks, boys!" Rose added.
"Hang on though, Doctor," Ida stopped them, "you never really said. You two, who are you?"
The pair grinned at each other. "Oh, the stuff of legend."
He pushed the lever.
Once in the Vortex, Rose immediately cuddled into the Doctor's side, which he then turned into another bone-crushing hug.
He kissed her head. "I love you."
And although the day had ended on such a high note, this phrase, this promise, had her in tears.
"They told me you were dead, I told them that it wasn't true, but for a moment ..." She let out a sob.
The Doctor soothed her. "It's alright, I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere, I'm not leaving. Not leaving you."
"I'm not either." She looked up at him and saw the slight shock in his eyes. "Doctor, not ever. I'm never going ta leave you."
"Rose," he protested weakly.
"No, Doctor, I love you. And I'm goin'a be here as long as possible. I love you, you daft alien."
The kiss started out softly. Lips on lips, worshipping each other. But when Rose gasped and the Doctor took advantage of that, it turned heated. Soon, they were grasping at each other like they were drowning and stumbling through the corridors as if drunk.
Later that night, when they were lying in bed, clothes all across Rose's room, their room, the Doctor said, "You know, on ... Gallifrey ... this was frowned upon."
She lifted her head off his chest to look at him. "What, shaggin'?"
His face turned a deep red. "I would prefer 'making love', but yes."
"So before today, I mean you said you danced, but ..."
"No, yes, I mean ... I did, before today, have sex, that is. I just ..." He sighed. "It just popped into my head, that it was forbidden, back home. Well, not entirely, like I said, frowned upon, any kind of affections. But sex was forbidden for unbonded couples."
"Unbonded?" Rose asked.
"Unmarried. Well, a bit different customs, but it's still marriage."
"So like the middle ages, yeah?"
He snorted. "Yeah."
"You said 'different customs'. What were they?"
"There were two types of marriages, really. One was, well, like you said, middle ages. It was all political. Weddings weren't really celebrated like on earth, it just ... happened and everyone got on with their lives. But the general concept was the same. Both parents of both parties are supposed to be there, to give their children away, similar to a Christian wedding, yeah? And then you perform a hand-fastening ceremony. Buddhists do it similarly. You bind your hands together with a special cloth and then speak your vows. And then, well, and then you tell the other person your name."
"You've been married before." It wasn't a question.
He met her eyes. "Yes."
"You told me you were a father once too." She noticed the Doctor stiffening under her and immediately wanted to backtrack. "You don't have to te-"
"A grandfather, actually," he surprised her.
"Really?"
"Yeah. Had a daughter, very much like her mother, very unlike me, we were never particularly close." He trailed off, then said, "Not that that was a thing on Gallifrey, close family relationships, but even for Timelord standard, we were not ... well, I loved her of course, she was my daughter, after all, but ... yeah. And she had twins. Like mother like son, one of them was more stuck up like the rest of Gallifrey, but Susan, my granddaughter," he smiled, "she was brilliant, curious and a bit eccentric, and we really got along. And one day we had an idea. We stole a Tardis and just ran away, off to see the universe."
It seemed like he had desperately wanted to get that off his chest.
"She sounds great."
"She was."
"When I was younger, I always wondered if I would have had a sibling if Dad hadn't died."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah, because my mate Shareen, she had an older brother and they just got along so well. And I like kids, always have, and I thought I would be this really cool older sister."
"I think you would have been." An image formed in the Doctor's head: Rose with a young brown haired boy, but decidedly not as an older sister. He forced the image down as quickly as he could.
"Was she nice, your wife?" Rose asked him.
The Doctor didn't hear any jealousy in her voice. "Yes, she was, but ... like I said, my people didn't marry out of love. They were so appalled by affection that they even found a way to not have to reproduce sexually and practically never ... married the other way."
"What was that, then?"
"It practically never happened. It's ... intimate. It was called bonding. A merging of the minds, no real privacy anymore. It makes you able to sense the other person's emotions and when you're touching you can project thoughts to your mate. It's supposed to be beautiful, in theory anyway."
"Why only in theory?"
"Affections. Like, I said, not widely accepted. It came with disadvantages. When your bondmate died, the council would take away your remaining regenerations, a bonded couple wasn't allowed to have children or to get a position in the government or as a teacher."
"What? Why?"
The Doctor shrugged. "To stop people from doing it. Gallyfrey's goal was to always get better, wiser, more advanced. To them, love seemed like a distraction from that."
"But not to you?"
She was smiling at him and he reassured her, "No, not to me."
Rose kissed him fiercely, and needless to say, they didn't make it out of bed for a while.