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“Can you be happy here?” Rose’s hand is warm against his chest. His hands are warm, too. (He’ll have to get used to that.)
Her palm is flat over his sternum and she must be able to feel his single heart beating against her skin—he wonders if it bothers her. He wonders if she heard what he didn’t say, the silent: with me, after can you be happy?
“Can you?” She asks, her lips like a feather against his forehead as she speaks. There’s a long moment where all that exists is right here: the rain on the window and the warm hand on his chest and the soft breath on his forehead. She’s curled as close to him as two people can be, and it’s been a long time since he’s been vulnerable where someone could see him.
I love you, he wants to say. He said it earlier and he wants to say it again now, but the words don’t form easy. They even fall from his lips, but they make no sound.
I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you, he wants to say. But he doesn’t know if he’s allowed to now, when the dust of the day has settled, the heat of the moment faded, and she never said it back. Maybe she doesn’t want him to say it. In the dark hotel room, with the light off and the sky navy-grey and overcast out the window, he wishes he knew how to ask. He wishes he could see her face but thinks it might be easier if he can’t.
“I’ll be happy wherever you’re happy,” he says, his voice soft. “I always have been.”
Her answering exhale is shaky and her fingers twitch against his chest like she might curl her hand into a fist, clutching the fabric of his shirt that he got in the gift shop when they’d arrived, tired and weary and a little bit lost. When she speaks, her voice is so low he wouldn’t hear it if she weren’t so close, if her words weren’t murmured like a secret in his ear.
“Doctor,” she breathes. “Look at me.”
He says nothing in response but tilts his head to meet her eyes. They glisten in the darkness of the hotel room, warm and deep and longing, like she’s reaching for something she can’t quite grab hold of.
She shifts her body to better meet his gaze and her silhouette falls into the soft light from the moon that peeks through the clouds, and for the first time, he’s close enough to measure the impact of the time they’ve been apart in her eyes. Perhaps Rose has been dragging her grief around as much as he has, the absence of her next to him like a weight around his hearts heart that dragged heavier with each passing day. He wonders if it’s possible to hold her close enough to chase that grief away; there’s no room inside this new body for that sorrow.
She’s glowing in the silver light. With the movement of every inhale, exhale, the moon catches a little differently on her hair and it shimmers like liquid gold. She’s directly in line with the window, framed in the center where the light shines and lands on her, making her look like something made of magic. Finally, she says, carefully like each word must be exactly the right one—
“I knew I was making a choice when I kissed you at Bad Wolf Bay, and I knew my choice was you. I wouldn’t have done that if it wasn’t what I wanted.”
Her hand over his heart slides up to his jaw, curling around his cheek. She holds his face in her palm and strokes her thumb across the apple of his cheek and the salt-stained skin under his eye.
“So yes,” she says, her words delicate and soft, flowing into each other. “I’ll be happy here.”
“I love you.” It tears out of his mouth and he exhales sharp, from deep in his chest like the words had built up and kept him from breathing. There’s something so endless in the way her eyes glimmer as she holds his gaze, and he recognizes the look from gentle moments they’ve shared before: draped against each other on the couch in the library, sitting around the table at Christmas after he’d regenerated, trapped in a dungeon in Cardiff, I’m so glad I met you—
Rose had looked at him like that just hours ago, when a harsh breeze was chopping the waves that broke against the shore of the bay, her quivering hand flat over his one heart as he offered her the rest of his life, desperate for her to want it. Now, she looks at him like that in the midnight of a dark hotel room in a coastal town in Norway. They’ll leave for London in the morning, where his one life will begin to take shape. He hopes there’ll be a house with doors and carpets and a mortgage, and that someday he’ll stand on a street corner with her at 2 a.m. and wait for a taxi.
The desire to love Rose until he dies has been a fist around his throat and a rock between his lungs for nearly as long as he’s known her, amplified after his regeneration until it consumed him. Humanity was something he craved and could not have. She wasn’t someone he was allowed to hold forever.
He has to breathe more often now, and the single heartbeat in his chest will take getting used to. His body runs warmer and the need for sleep has already pulled at him in a way it has never done before. It doesn’t matter. These things make him human; they make him someone who can tell Rose he loves her without the fear that time is not on their side.
“I love you.” The silver-white of the near-full moon is a halo behind her as she speaks. The soft edges of her silhouette are framed by light and she is the only familiar thing in this universe. “I didn’t say it back earlier; I should’ve. I wanted to.”
“It’s okay,” he tells her. “We have time.”
A small smile pulls at the corners of her mouth, and his fingers itch to pull her back against his body, into his arms. It’s nice to be able to see her eyes as they lie facing each other, close enough that he can catch glimpses of her features in the dark, but he needs to still be holding on, so he clutches her hand and her knee knocks against his as she presses their bodies closer until they breathe the same air and he can see the exhaustion in her eyes. She exhales and he inhales. His chest rises and hers falls. In the hours since they’ve left the bay, he’s barely gone a moment without her hand in his. These hands were made to hold hers, he thinks.
This whole body was made to be with hers.
“I don’t feel like I’m running out of time with you anymore.”
“You aren’t,” she says. “You won’t. ”
Her voice is a fierce whisper that catches and cracks. It’s like she’s defending him from something he can’t see. Maybe she’s trying to warn the universe away from them, as if to say: we have suffered enough. Let us have this.
“You won’t lose me again,” Rose says, her palm soft against the curve of his cheek. Her hands are gentle as she touches him, desperate to reassure them both that this is real, and it makes his throat swell and his eyes burn and flutter. His one heart expands until it is big enough to take the space of two. “You said we could grow old together. I’m holding you to that.”
She’s soft soft soft: the cadence of her words and the affection in her eyes. Her skin on his skin. The desperation in her love. He can feel her heartbeat through her wrist where he’s clutching her hand—her pulse pressed against his. The promise to grow old together is an easy one to make. He thinks he would promise her anything right now, her eyes shining in the light of the moon in the universe that will become his home more intimately than the first ever could.
“I want nothing else,” he says, clear and honest, vulnerable in a way he couldn’t allow himself to be before he was given this human body. (Suddenly, a lifetime-ago memory jolts in his chest and he can nearly hear the echo of it ringing in his ears—
“Then what?”
“I dunno. Find a planet, get a job, live a life.”
He’s talking about houses; doors and things; “You’d have to get a mortgage!” She’s laughing, singing the words like she’s teasing, but there’s something in her eyes that he hadn’t noticed at the time. Something like longing.
“What about me?” )
“Do you have a mortgage?” He asks, breaking the comfortable silence that had settled over them. There’s a beat of nothing in which anxiety crawls into his chest, but then she laughs, bright and happy and a little bit desperate.
“No,” she says, dropping her face into the crook of his shoulder. “I rent a flat on the estate—bit like the old one.”
He swallows. There are words in his mouth that taste like longing. “I’d like one, someday,” he murmurs. “A mortgage—a proper house. Doors, windows. That sort of thing.”
“Yeah?” Her voice is muffled by the cotton of his shirt, but still soft and gentle. Patient. Like she’s willing to wait for him to be ready. (Truth is, he’s been ready for a while, just not human enough for that to matter.)
“Maybe we could . . . we could share?”
He can’t see her smile but he can feel it against his shoulder and squeezes her hand even tighter; holds her a little closer to his chest.
“I’d like that,” she says, and after a short pause, presses a feather-light kiss to his shoulder. The heart he’s still getting used to stutters in his chest. She flips their joined hands and curls them against her sternum, pressing his palm against her heart, where he can feel two beats—calm and steady—pulsing together within him.
For the first time in the Doctor’s life, he can’t feel time and space twisting and spinning around him. He can’t see all that is, all that was, all that ever could be. For the first time, all that exists is right here.