Chapter Text
Rose only ever finds the Doctor when she’s not really looking.
It’s not just that the TARDIS has so many rooms, or that Rose hasn’t really any idea why the Doctor would be hanging around in any given one of them – she’d found him in an empty room that’d been completely encrusted with diamonds, once, and it’d taken her breath away but also mostly left her wondering as to what he could possibly have been doing in there – or that he’s been using his Amazing Telepathic Abilities of Doom to purposely avoid her.
(She does think it may be that last one, some nights, but it’s not something she really likes thinking about.)
If asked to give her best guess, Rose would say that it’s probably because he’s the Doctor, and so he’s infinitely smarter and dafter and more alien than anything she could possibly imagine, and trying to predict his movements would be like trying to catch a hurricane in a pop bottle – pointless, a bit stupid, and ultimately very messy.
When she’s not really looking, though, that’s different. Like tonight, for instance, when she’d reckoned he’d be in the console room tinkering like he liked to do after a particularly taxing near-death experience and instead found him in the middle of kitchen number two, making tea.
“Where’s Adam?” he asks, not even turning from the counter. Rose flops down at the kitchen table, a gorgeous round thing made of some glossy blue-grey wood, and rolls her eyes.
“Hiya, Rose,” she says, mimicking the Doctor’s rough burr. It’s a terrible facsimile, she knows, but she doesn't really care. “Real nice to see you, been missing you, let me make you a cup of tea and maybe a nice plate of crumpets to go alongside.”
The Doctor snorts. “Yeah, nice try, princess,” he says, taking his mug and settling into a chair across from her. Rose is winning, though of course he’ll never admit it, she can see it in the smile in those bright blue eyes, making them wink and sparkle like sunlight on ice.
They’re tired tonight, though, and the sparkle just catches on something a bit darker. Rose scoots her chair closer to his.
“Your boy’s in bed, then?” asks the Doctor, bright eyes fixed on hers. “You should be too, you know. Been a long day.”
“Yeah,” says Rose, and doesn’t point out that Adam isn’t her boy. Talking to the Doctor’s like talking to her mother sometimes, honestly. “But I’m a big girl, Doctor. ‘S not like I have a bedtime.”
“Well, you should,” the Doctor says, with a stern look. Rose bites back a laugh. “It’s the middle of the night. You’ll want to get some rest before you go falling headfirst into someone’s sacred ceremonial pool. Again.”
“There’s no such thing as the middle of the night in the Vortex,” she says, drawing air quotes, “and anyway, weren’t you the one who nearly fell over and pushed me right into that pool because you’d forgotten you were allergic to coconut water? I don’t see your mighty Time Lord head on a pillow.”
Sometimes, Rose thinks, she really hates talking to the Doctor. He’s the most fantastic man she’s ever met, and he’s always got something amazing or mind-bending or hilarious or important to say, true, but talking to him on bad days is like dancing the waltz over a minefield. Right now, she’s not thinking about the amazing things the Doctor might say. She just wishes she knew what it was that she had said to make his face fall like that.
“My ship, my rules, Rose Tyler,” says the Doctor, eyes open but closing. “My insomnia has nothing to do with you.”
Rose shoots him a look. Sometimes, she decides, the best thing to do when someone is hurting is to give them something to fight.
“What’re you gonna do, carry me to bed?” she asks, raising a challenging eyebrow and pairing it with her best smug grin. “You’ve met my mother, Doctor. You don’t scare me.”
The Doctor drops her gaze, fingers tightening around his mug. Aha, thinks Rose, and watches his knuckles turn white.
“I should,” he says, and his voice is light and joking and underneath it’s all inward-pointing knives. It makes Rose’s stomach hurt. “I’m a fairly terrifying figure, I’ll have you know. Picked up a couple pretty impressive titles, over the years. The Warrior, the Bringer of Darkness.” He looks up, then, fixes her with a look that chills her right through to the marrow, and the smile on his face is so sharp it hurts to look at. “The Oncoming Storm.”
Rose looks down; the Doctor’s hands are shaking. She slides one of her own over the one gripping the mug, casual as she can, and tries not to flinch when he pulls back instead of holding on tight.
“Yeah, well,” says Rose, and swallows hard to keep her voice from shaking, “’S a bit hard to take you seriously, now I’ve seen you up close. Ears like that, no one’ll really be focussing on your reputation.”
Silence. Rose crosses her fingers under the table, but does not look away.
The Doctor laughs, and it’s raw and ragged, but Rose takes it as a win anyway. She grins, catching her tongue between her teeth just because she knows it’ll make him smile back, and watches as his fingers unclench from around the mug and settle on top of hers, cool and dry, barely shivering.
“I’m sorry,” says Rose, abruptly, “about earlier. What I said – I was scared, yeah, but just ‘cause I’d never seen you that angry, and I was just – you could never,” and her voice is vehement, rising in pitch till it cracks and she really, really doesn't care, “you could never become anything I wouldn’t trust completely, Doctor.”
“I pointed a gun at you, Rose,” the Doctor says, soft and rough, “I nearly let you die twenty feet underground in a concrete tomb. Don’t go telling me what I could and couldn’t do.”
He pushes his chair back, scraping it loud and violent against the floor, and stands to go. Rose watches him for a long moment, this scarecrow of a man with his long limbs and harsh face and black-clad sorrow, and launches herself at him in a hug.
The Doctor’s not a small man, and Rose comes up about as high as his broad shoulders under normal circumstances, but she’s hopped up on adrenaline and high aching emotion and also twisting and leaping awkwardly out of a kitchen chair, and her arms tangle artlessly but sturdily around his shoulders and across the back of his neck, and she buries her head in his chest right between his hearts and stands up on her tiptoes and holds on.
After a moment, she feels a pair of wiry green-jumpered arms wrap tight around her waist and pull her closer, feels a sharp chin tuck itself down over her left shoulder, feels the double heartbeat pattering against her cheek stutter and then slow, and she pretends she doesn’t feel the dampness growing at the back of her shirt. She can hear the Doctor breathing, a sharp gasp and then slow and deep, and presses her face against his jumper and doesn’t open her eyes.
Slowly, gently, the Doctor untangles himself from her grasp, setting her down with her feet flat on the floor. “Go to sleep, Rose Tyler,” he says, and his voice is warm, and his eyes are still shadowed but not as much as they were, and his touch on her shoulder is tender and light.
Rose smiles. “Goodnight, Doctor,” she says, and goes.