Work Text:
I want to be forever lost
In the foreign cities at night
(Un)fortunately, Paris
Upon meeting the Doctor, people usually divide in two groups, one of which adores him, while the other half regards him with a hatred that is almost blood-thirsty. But there is one thing both of them have in common.
They are completely, hopelessly obsessed with him.
Rose knows his weaknesses, and the more time they spend together, the more she accepts them: he is flighty and even flaky sometimes, jumping from one idea to the next and struggling to follow through. His fear of missing out makes it hard for him to commit to one idea or one path; he wants to keep exploring and evaluating. But what else did she expect? The Doctor is a genius.
She knows, and it's fine. Brilliant, even.
But when he suggests they go to Paris, all of this common sense flies out the window in a blink of an eye.
"It's cold there this time of year,” Rose attempts to dodge, but he’s faster.
“I'll warm you up,” the Doctor winks. “Just imagine this, Rose. We’ll pull the curtains shut and nest like little sparrows.”
She's perched on top of the stairs in her London flat, grinning down at him; him, with his huge, unfathomable dark eyes and stormy hair, his long graceful fingers on the bannisters. Her heartbeat accelerates at the pulsating memory of what those fingers did to her in the bath they had shared yesterday.
"Doctor, I don't even speak French."
He's ascending the stairs now; a tentative step up, and in the half-light Rose sees the dark shadows the sleepless night has left under his eyes.
"The French are much more English-friendly in Pete's World, Rose. English is their second state language!"
The staircase creaks in protest.
“We’ve already been there,”she mutters, lowering her gaze.
One more step; she can count the freckles on his skin now.
“Nah, that was Versailles. A commune, not the same as Paris.”
Rose shrugs. "I don't care, it's the same to me."
“Wel, the distinction is rather simple. A commune is basically a small unincorporated group of dwellings, and…”
Something undecipherable flashes in his eyes and he sinks onto the landing next to her, leaning against the railing.
“ Oh .”
He’s silent for a minute, and when he speaks again, his voice is soft.
“Rose, I want you to know something very important."
She nods, eyes on fire. There's no turning back now.
"I am immune to no one."
She inhales sharply and he hastens to continue. "And before you say anything, let me explain.”
His words make her stomach twist in knots.
“We haven’t really talked about it, because… I couldn’t afford it back then. I can, now. I have been fighting a villain inside my head for the longest time, Rose. It wants the crown, it wants the title to my soul."
She draws another shaky breath, leaning in ever so slightly, ready to amend him, forgive, grant him absolution.
His gaze arrests her.
"The only time his greedy voice gets quieter is when there's someone I can help, something I can change,"he grinds out. "The problem is, I get carried away. I get carried away in the most embarrassing way possible, but then again, you already know that. And if I’m meant to understand my own head by taking it off my neck and deflating it, well then. Here it is, you can have it.”
It's a splinter she needs to get out, once and for all.
“But you loved her.” Her voice is quiet, and the silence that follows is so unbearably long that Rose thinks he didn’t hear her and glances up at his face. "You were miserable when she died. You didn't come out for days. You loved her."
The look she finds there sends a shiver down her spine, paralysing her with its intensity.
“What on earth makes you think that?" His hand rests on her knee. "Rose, I have never loved another person more than I love you. Never.”
His answer isn’t a dissuasion, not really. It simply states that he loved them all, but somehow Rose, by some divine miracle, won the grand prix, without so much as knowing who exactly she was rivalling against.
She shakes her head in resentment. “That’s impossible.”
The Doctor raises a brow. “Why? Because I'm centuries old?"
He notices her trembling fingers and takes her cold hands in his, breathing on her palms to keep her warm.
"Rose, if you had been an old fellow with a soft spot for disorderly conduct and funny outfits, you would know that quantity doesn’t necessarily mean quality. When your life is a kaleidoscope of people and places, it’s hard to catch sight of something real. It’s all moving too fast.”
“I thought you liked fast.”
The Doctor flashes her a wicked grin.
“Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness. We’ve had enough collapses lately, don’t you think?”
****
And just like that they go to Paris.
"I bet you're gonna like me best in a high-speed train, sleeping the length of the English Channel," he mumbles, eating a candy necklace through plastic vampire teeth, as the carriage begins to move.
"I like you anywhere, Doctor."
He points at his new teeth.
"Even…like this?"
He doesn't sleep, of course.
Old habits die hard, old Time Lord habits - even harder, because when he suggests they sneak into the Louvre at night, Rose reminds him he decided to leave his sonic screwdriver at home to embrace the full human experience.
They don't need a guide, because the Doctor knows everything. Literally.
But before he banishes yet another museum curator, a bespeckled middle-aged woman with a grey afro, Rose runs after her, leaving him frozen on the spot: standing before a frightening statue of Death.
Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there's the trick.
Rose thinks that maybe he needs to face such things alone, make peace with them in solitude.
It gives her an opportunity to wander off and ask the guide a scary question that has been bothering her for hours on end.
“Louis XV didn’t have… mistresses , mademoiselle,” the woman replies, looking at Rose pointedly.
"Oh."
"Yes."
“And what about Madame de Pompadour?”
The curator frowns in confusion.
“Excuse me, who?”
“Well, you know, the King’s favourite.”
“I don’t know her, mademoiselle. There was no Madame de…what was it?”
“Pompadour.”
“There was no Madame de Pompadour in the history of France.” The guide says succinctly, before excusing herself, turning on her heels and walking away.
The Doctor comes up to Rose and takes her by the hand, leading her to one of the paintings in the dark hall.
"Rose, did you know that Leonardo da Vinci was also a time traveller? There was a cave that he used as, yes, a stargate or time machine or close encounters of the third kind, who knows, but it is no doubt a perfect explanation for his futuristic engineering projects!"
Rose is carefully searching his face for any cracks of pain or dismay beneath the jovial façade.
"I met him, of course. Showed him the TARDIS. Zero reaction! He'd said, 'oh, so it's bigger on the inside? How trivial!' I could've introduced him to your mother's tracksuit collection, it would've impressed him more.”
The Doctor leads her to the next installation: medical drawings made in black and red chalk with some pen and ink wash on paper.
"Look at that, Rose. Leonardo's foetus illustrations. Beautiful. They reveal his advanced understanding of human development. His role in the vanguard of embryology during the Renaissance was incredibly important. He depicted the uterus with one chamber, see?" He takes her hand, and her fingers in his follow the lines of the drawing like eyes upon an atlas.
"Right there. The common folk thought the uterus had multiple chambers which many believed divided foetuses into separate compartments in the case of twins."
The Doctor turns to her then, his expression serious.
"So. What do you think?"
The sudden change in his demeanour makes her uneasy for some reason.
"About what?"
His gaze is dark and unwavering.
"Twins."
"Twins?" Rose echoes, dumbfounded.
"Oh, you know, siblings carried together in the womb and born at the same time…"
"I know what it means, Doctor," she laughs. "Identical or non-identical?"
"Doesn't matter."
"It's a shot in the dark though, isn't it? You can't really program your body to conceive twins."
The Doctor tugs at his ear, deep in thought.
"You can, actually."
"How?"
"I'll show you in the hotel later," he gives her a conspiratorial smile. "Come on!"
Berlin
“Why are you on the pavement, Doctor?”
“I feel the need to endanger myself every so often.”
“You know, putting your ear on the track is a much better way to listen to the sound of an approaching train.”
“Now that would be rather unwise, wouldn't it?”
It feels like a different life, a separate story.
He doesn't remember much about loneliness anymore: to him it had long ago turned into a vague, almost foreign concept. Ever since he had met her, he's been unheeded, happy, unaware of anything else. This new life has somehow erased any remnants of the terrible chasm in his chest caused by their temporary separation at Canary Wharf.
Their next stop is Berlin.
It's a perfectly normal Saturday morning in the U-Bahn. They are on Friedrichstraße, and everyone in the train is either nodding off or quietly staring out of the windows. There's an old lady reading a book, a Turkish man falling asleep, and a 60-something man staring into the distance, dressed from head to toe in latex and leather, with a ball gag hanging from his neck on a thick chain.
"Forgot to tell you," the Doctor says, towering over her, his pinstriped arm on the railing. "I destroyed those dimension cannons."
Rose blanches.
"You did what ?"
"They were dangerous!" He retorts, offended.
"You just want me to stay with you forever," her smile is sad, as if it had finally sunk in, the promise she had made back then, now that the heat of the moment is gone. Before he knows it, she turns away from him, eyes fixed on the black window of the carriage.
"What if I do?"
And when he bends down to touch his lips to her forehead, Rose thinks she's closer to understanding why she wants it, too.
There's a guy riding a bike, on the back streets, on the pavement, smoking a spliff in the process, the wires of his walkman tied around his torso like the sleeves of a strait jacket, his dog running next to him; but as soon as he gets to the crossing, he stops and patiently waits for the green light, because crossing on red would be "wrong", and the personal subset of "the rules" that Berliners follow is incredibly amusing to her.
There, beneath the golden arch, the Doctor kisses her cheek, and before she has time to react, they have to run: the green light is about to turn red.
In Tempelhof park they move through the pastel pink fields of wheat hand in hand, laughing so hard it stings, until he falls, either on purpose or not, dragging her down, and as she lands on top of him, their ribs finally meet, and that's when she thinks she might finally understand the meaning behind all this.
Sometimes she thinks he's finally about to cave in and tell her something very important, like that last time when she was peeling an orange and a bit of rough zest got under her nails and started burning intensely, making her wince, he took it from her hands and peeled it all off for her; and she knows it stung, because the tips of his fingers were red. But when he glanced up at her at that moment, she couldn't look away.
They make out in the woods behind Brandenburg Gate, while the sirens fade, and she wants to tell him that she knows; she wants it, too. She wants him and she wants to leave something behind. Someone. A person whose very presence says that once two people loved each other.
Florence
They make out in cathedrals.
Not because they’re insensible rascals, eager to provoke the wrath of God and old Italian ladies, but simply because they can’t help it.
Rose has never been religious, and the Doctor… Well, his religion is Rose.
"It is speculated that in Roman times a temple on this spot was dedicated to the worship of Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility," he drawls mysteriously, as they stand outside an ancient Florentine church on a warm night in October.
"She was worshipped by the Greeks and the Romans who believed her to be the supreme deity who created the world."
The building is a mix of simple walls in grey stone, intricate Gothic arches and an outdoor nichè with various sculptures. He leads her to one of them.
"Rose Tyler, may I present to you Signor Verrocchio."
"One of your old friends?" She quips, nudging his shoulder.
The Doctor frowns. "Actually, no. Always wanted to meet him, though. Only a genius like him could create this masterpiece."
Rose follows his eyes and sees a bronze man, reaching out to touch the ribs of God the Son, his crucifixion wound.
"This is Jesus and Saint Thomas," the Doctor whispers.
"Thomas longs to touch the wound because he doubted the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. See how his fingers reach out but never quite touch? I've always thought this was us, Rose."
She looks at him, taken aback.
"What do you mean?"
He clears his throat, gaze fixed on his converse-clad feet.
"That day on the beach, your palm on my chest. Remember? As if trying to make sure I was real."
"So, you're… Jesus?" she asks, a smile playing on their lips.
He hums in agreement. "Well, in this scenario, maybe."
"And I'm a doubting saint?"
He beams.
"Doubting Rose!"
"I don't like the sound of that, Doctor."
"Me neither."
They thread their fingers together.
"Do you still…"he pauses, studying her face. "Doubt?"
Rose wraps her arm around his waist."No."
"Or maybe it's the other way around." He whispers in her ear.
It starts raining and Rose wants nothing more than to grab his hand and go home. Straight back down the hallway and up the stairs back to that bed.
"I was rebuilt when you spoke, Rose."
The Doctor traces a raindrop on her cheek, leaning in to place a kiss down her chin."I awoke when I heard your voice for the first time."
He is caressing the side of her neck now. "I was reborn."
And as his lips meet hers, she's struck with an understanding that nothing can last forever. There isn't any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn't fade out at last. But those saturated rains could never flood the imprint of her hands on his skin.