Chapter Text
“This one’s ours.” Rose finished their tour by leading the new-yet-not-new Doctor into her bedroom at the Tyler mansion and closing the door behind him. Well, that was one question solved. Or two. He not only had a pre-assigned room, but it was exactly the one he wanted.
They had gotten little sleep on the zeppelin ride back from Bad Wolf Bay. Physically and emotionally, they were at their limits. Not that he knew what his limits were quite yet with this new body. Not to mention a new genetic makeup. Rose appeared to understand he was the same man, which is all that really mattered on the zeppelin trip, but now that the adrenaline was wearing off, he realized he had a lot of learning to do about being part-human. Exhaustion seemed to be his first lesson.
She tugged his hand to enter further into the feminine bedroom.
“Mum and I had a deal. I could have my own place however I want it but she got her way here.” She gestured to the flowery duvet. “Exhibit A.”
Her smile at her mother’s expense loosened his apprehension as she continued to explain the backstories behind the Jackie-esque decorations. She was not unaffected by their situation, of course, but was accepting it with exceptional grace and optimism. He had sympathized with her confusion and hurt on the beach, which was certainly understandable given what an arse the other him was being, but this light, sunny Rose was an anachronism from the past in the given circumstances. There had to be something she wasn’t telling him.
His anxiety eased as she wrapped him in a hug on impulse. She held him tightly for a second before pulling away, too fast for his surprised reflexes to reciprocate.
“Sorry, I just…” She turned away, focusing on anything but him. “Anyway, here’s the closet. Obviously. I don’t have much over here ‘cause most of it’s at my flat. Again, obviously. Through the door over there’s loo, and the shower, and…”
Babbling. Just like him. He wondered how many of his habits she had kept up over the years. Goodness knows he had catalogues of hers. Even this body was originally chosen specifically for her. It was frightful how much he loved her. Truly scandalous. He wondered if kissing her again would be too soon.
She noticed his silence and turned back to question him. She noticed his preoccupation with her lips and squeezed his hand. His resolve gave way. The beach felt like an eon ago to him, but what if it was moving too fast for her? Or was it too slow? No time like the present to find out.
He caught her other arm and pulled her close to face him. She opened her lips to say something, but he filled them with his. In a moment he would be eternally grateful for, she melted into him. Just as they were approaching the point of hands wandering, a swift knock and opening door made them jump apart.
“Mum!”
“Just wanted to see what time you two will be up for breakfast in the morning.”
“I don’t know!” Rose answered with a little more force than necessary. “We can take care of ourselves, you know. Make our own decisions.”
Piecing together evidence from the last 24 hours, the Doctor suspected there was more to this mother-daughter exchange that he had missed during his cat naps on the zeppelin.
“Rose,” Jackie sighed. “I’m just trying to be-”
“It’s alright, Jackie,” the Doctor interjected. “Don’t worry about us. I don’t want to be any trouble.”
That last bit got the two women smiling together again despite the tension between them.
“You? Trouble?” Rose teased. “Never.”
“Alright then,” Jackie surrendered. “I’ll leave you to it.” With a suggestive wink at the Doctor, she left the room, making sure to close the door behind her.
“Yup, definitely sonicking that,” the Doctor mumbled as he locked the door with his favorite tool.
“But, how?” Rose stared confused at the sonic.
“Had one destroyed a while back. On your moon, actually. Ever since then, I’ve carried spares in all my suits.”
Rose nodded, but still looked uncertain.
“I really am me, you know,” he tested, wondering if it was disconcerting to her to see this him doing something so familiar.
“Oh! Yeah, I know.” She smiled a little to reassure him. “It’s just, I found… well. Anyway. Probably time I showed you this.” She dropped to her knees by the bed and dug underneath for a moment. She emerged with a shoebox. She sat on the bed and beckoned him over. He was hardly conscious of anything else but the magnetic pull of those fingers, that unreadable smile, those sad whiskey-amber eyes.
“It’s silly,” she began, “but when I was really little, my cousin had this shoebox under her bed. It was for all the memories of the good times with her ex. She moved on, but she still kept the good pieces alive in there so she would remember more than how it hurt. For some mad reason, the idea just came back to me when I landed here. I didn’t have much, and I needed to use some of what I did have, but here’s the rest.”
He waited for her to open the box, but first a thought occurred to him and he covered her hand with his.
“Wait, you said you needed to use what you did have… You had the psychic paper. Could you use it without me or the TARDIS helping you?”
“I had to.” She bit her lip, expecting a reprimand.
“Rose,” he exhaled in wonder and stroked her cheek with his thumb. “You’re telepathic.”
“A little. Mostly empathic, though. I think, maybe, it was the Bad Wolf thing. I didn’t know about it until I started training here at Torchwood. I was good.” The corner of her lip turned up at the memory. “Too good. I told them you taught me, but it was more than that. It was like she was there, the TARDIS. Like she was helping me. But she can’t have. I think it was whatever happened to me on the Game Station. What else could it be? I’ve gone over everything else and it just makes sense. We… I dunno… became part of each other.”
He blinked, too awed to form words, and kissed her deeply. He always had been the spontaneous type, after all. It followed that showing romantic affection wouldn’t be any different.
“We need to talk more about this later,” he said, breathing heavily from lack of respiratory bypass. “But I believe you were about to show me a box that is symbolically and metaphorically bigger on the inside?”
She giggled and pecked a light kiss on his shoulder, hiding her face from him for a minute.
“You’re so different. And before you ask, definitely good-different.”
If he had a tail, he would have been wagging it at that declaration, the lovesick puppy that he was.
The giddy mood deflated as soon as she opened the box, however. Years of heartache screamed from its tearstained Post-its (“I wrote down every memory I could think of. I didn’t want to forget a second.”) to its relics from an era that was now over for both of them. Photos from her phone taken in places that were too obviously alien for public display, the gum they both liked best from Kappa 6b, the banana chapstick he bought her, her change in alien coins from the damn bazoolium. Next to all of these, by far the biggest item in the box, was a black leather case. She slid an impossible metal tube out of one end.
“Is…? No. That can’t. Rose?”
His heart pounded as he waited for her answer. If she had a version of his sonic, where had she been with that cannon of hers? What horrors had she witnessed?
“You died,” she squeaked. She took in a shaking breath and tried again. “Donna wasn’t there to save you and you drowned. The Thames. You didn’t regenerate! You just…” Her face crumpled in a way horribly reminiscent of the first time on that bloody beach. Finally, her shield of positivity was cracking to match the anger and sadness he had expected. But instead of this him, it was directed toward a version of him in a pocket universe she had erased from existence.
“It’s alright,” he soothed, draping an arm around her shoulder. “It didn’t happen. I’m here now.”
“It did though,” she defended, pulling away and holding up the sonic. “Because this is here. I saw them carry you away. Doctor, how soon was that after…?”
“Immediately. I met Donna right after the last crack in the void closed and our goodbye was cut short. I’ll tell you the whole story later, but know that I thought I had just lost you forever,” he confessed, unable to look away from the very real sonic in her hands. “You might have figured out by now that before we met, I never intended to survive Henriks.”
“I wondered,” she admitted so softly it was almost a whisper. “Even that night. Then when you told me about your people…”
He nodded and swallowed. “As much as the other me was a bastard yesterday, he was right. You made me better. I just didn’t want to live without that.” It sounded so simple, so selfish, so inadequate to describe the storm in his soul. As always, Rose’s reaction surprised him.
“Me either.”
The pit dropped out of his stomach as he realized what she meant.
“I mean, not always. Just for a little while there, a few nights after you told me we could never see each other again, I sat out there on the balcony.” She tilted her head toward the French doors leading outside. “And saw the stars. I knew you weren’t there. You weren’t anywhere in this universe. And the walls were closed. I saw the three story drop and just wanted to jump so badly. I couldn’t do it, of course, not to Mum and Pete and knowing Tony was on the way. And maybe I was too scared. But I do know what it is to want that, just so you know.” She shrugged, as if that would cushion the darkness she was revealing.
“What changed?” His gentle question was complemented by the way he traced his fingers along her back.
“Could probably figure that one out yourself. One night as I sat out there feeling sorry for myself, I noticed some of the stars were missing. Bloody things, not where they belonged. Like me, I thought. At first I figured I was just imagining things. ‘Sides, what do I know? Maybe that’s normal here. But then Dad mentioned the scientists at Torchwood were working on it and I was reassigned from field work to the cannon.”
“And by reassigned, you mean you insisted?”
Rose blushed and he delighted in how well he knew her even still.
“Maybe, possibly, I headed up the project?”
“That’s my girl!” he praised. “That said, very dangerous. I should be cross with you for even thinking of attempting such a thing, not to mention using yourself as a missile to punch through the void. I should be terribly angry.”
He was still beaming, contradicting his words. She wasn’t watching, however, so she missed it, instead caressing the sonic like the last unbroken piece of her heart.
“We weren’t. The walls were open by the time we got it up,” she recited as if expecting this argument. “Just needed the modified hoppers to make it work. I know what you’re going to say. It wasn’t exactly safe, of course, but not like you’re thinking.”
As fiercely protective as he felt for her, he refused to make their first real night back together the row she thought was coming.
“So, here we are,” he abruptly changed the subject, and she lifted her attention to him in surprise. “Alone in your bedroom, Rose Tyler.” He waggled his eyebrows and cuddled her closer. “Why, anything could happen.”
Her melancholy fell to his masterful deflection.
“With an extra sonic,” she reminded him. “But if you’ve already got one, what do we do with this one?”
“Well, it’s always handy to have a backup,” he mused. “Ooooor… you could have it. Finder’s keepers, after all.”
“Really?” A sliver of excitement shone through her guarded exterior.
“Yep. Could even fix it up especially for you, settings you’d use, make the most frequent ones easy to remember, add some updates…”
She threw her arms around him and kissed him. They were getting rather good at this, if he did say so himself. She was leaning into him. In his intoxicating Rose-high he slid his hand up the back of her jeans-clad thigh and tugged, willing her to read the signal correctly and straddle him. When she didn’t, but did thread her fingers through his hair, his daring hands moved higher to previously forbidden territory. She pulled back slowly from their kiss as if willing herself inch by inch.
“Doctor, stop,” she whispered, leaning her forehead against his as she caught her breath. “We can’t.”
“Sorry! Oh Rose, I’m so sorry.” Horrified at himself and his new human hormones, he retreated back and tried to tamp down the building problem in his pants. “I thought… I didn’t… It’s too soon. Or maybe you don’t want-”
She pecked his lips and cupped his cheek with her hand.
“Oh, I do want. Just not tonight. Tony’s next door.” She winked and her smile bloomed once more. “Tomorrow night we’ll be home in our flat and then. Then I’ll show you just how much I missed you. Alright?”
Her words were confident enough, but he could sense her apprehension. They were not simply crossing lines, but smashing barriers they had spent all their previous time together constructing.
“Our flat,” he echoed, choosing to focus on something else besides her promise in an attempt to control his arousal.
“Home for now. Curtains and carpets and doors. I know it’s not your favorite, but it won’t be long, right? Donna made it sound like it all you have to do is shutterfly the something or other and you’ll be back up there with the stars in no time.”
“Only if you want to be.” He didn’t correct her terminology on the scientific process. Only on her pronoun use. That’s what was important in the moment. The gratitude on her face told him it was a good choice. Perhaps the little piece of Donna in him wouldn’t be a bad thing after all.
“I’d go anywhere with you,” she admitted. “You should know that by now.”
He hugged her again, because he could and because he loved her and because no words in any language could express it well enough.
The mood was interrupted by two yawns, first from her, unsuccessfully hidden, then from him, a victim of their contagious nature.
“Even to sleep?” he asked.
“Hm?”
“You said you’d go with me anywhere, but I think sleeping might be the best option at the moment.”
She happily took his hand and pulled him off the bed with her. Dropping it, she walked to the wardrobe and picked out two T-shirts, a tiny pair of shorts and a pair of plaid soft cotton trousers.
“Mum left some of Dad’s pajamas for you in the drawer while I was showing you around.” She tossed the larger shirt and the jimjam trousers in the air for him to catch, which he did reflexively. “I’m just going to change in here and I’ll be right out.”
She ducked into the en suite. The closing door woke him from his entrancement with the tiny shorts and her words about being “right out” registered. He raced to undress from his suit and into the jimjams before she emerged. He made it in plenty of time. He folded his clothes (something he rarely did under normal circumstances) and fidgeted to hide his nerves.
“It’s just sleep,” he chastised himself internally. “Just a nightlong cuddle. Not as if you two haven’t done this before a thousand times.”
This was different, he had to admit to himself. This was the first night of their forever.
Later, he kept this lack of urgency in mind, along with her little brother’s proximity, as they climbed beneath the sheets and she lie facing him inches away.