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He loves her. He’ll age like a human and die like a human and he wants to spend that fleeting time with her.
And he loves her.
He kissed her— or rather she kissed him but he definitely, undeniably, kissed her back.
He followed as she ran after the disappearing TARDIS, unable to fight the muscle memory, that instinct that tells her to find him and hold on to him and return to the life she once lived at any cost. Because for so long, until just minutes ago really, she’d been under the impression that that was her only way to ever be happy again.
He grabbed up her hand, head facing hers before she’d even came back to herself enough to think about looking at him. But she did have the sense to cling to his hand back like the life raft it was, to run her thumb along his. Next thing, she was crying against his chest, right above the singular, steady beat inside of it. He had her wrapped up in his arms, concealed from the harsh, sand-grit air.
They reach the hotel, and she barely remembers how. There’s just the faint memory of tires spinning on soft soil and the click of doors closing and opening and her head on his shoulder in what must have been the backseat of a car.
Inside, her mum makes the arrangements. She goes up to a desk, made of oak or pine or something, then returns back towards the double doors where the pair of them stand, still linked but now it’s by his hand on the small of her back. The same hand that she once saw be chopped off.
She gives a set of keys to him, to the hand that didn’t spend time in a jar, and then she’s leaning forward and kissing Rose’s cheek. She’s talking too, she’s always taking, but Rose doesn’t make out a word of it.
As she dwells on the fact that all the words just fly by her ears like they’re not even in English, which she knows they are because her mother doesn’t know any other languages, she’s walking again, led by that gentle hand that rests against her jacket.
They make it to the door of the room, a room her mother apparently didn’t give any mind to the two of them sharing, and he severs their physical connection for the first time. She watches him stumble with the key in the lock with both hands before it opens with a soft clink.
She follows him inside, because what else is she supposed to do, and then they are alone for the first time ever or maybe in four years.
He turns around once they are both through the doorway and the door swings shut behind her. He smiles and lifts a hand to the back of his neck when she doesn’t immediately return the expression. He’s nervous, even in her strange present state she can see that, and he’s feeling that way because of her, for her really if his gaze settling back on her face means what she knows it does.
“Hi,” she throws at him like you would bread at a pigeon in the park, a peace offering, the only thing she can figure to give him in this torturously foreign moment.
“Hi,” he gives her back, only he’s better at it, warmth escapes through his voice, somehow, even with only one short syllable to work with. It’s a talent really. A gift. It’s a gift to her and her overwhelmed, confused mind.
“I’m gonna shower,” she tells him, and walks to the other door in the room, hoping she’s correct in her assumption about what’s behind it.
She is, and she turns on the water, hot, hot as the shitty motel water tank allows. She sheds her clothes and steps under the stream. The water hits her face, but she barely flinches. She imagines herself from an outside perspective, can so clearly picture the mascara greying her cheeks and her hair sinking against her scalp.
Somehow the image, holding onto it, brings her back down to Earth, this Earth, and helps her remember exactly where she is and why she’s there.
Once the handle is turned to off and the water is replaced by freezing cold air, she steps one wet foot onto the title floor at a time. Finding the towels, she dries off the best she can before putting some of her dirty clothes back on.
Adrenaline still courses through her blood in shockwaves, and she’s not sure what the hell she’s supposed to say to him when she walks back through that door, but she does know the feel of his warm hand in hers and the sound of his new heart beating under her cheek. And with that, she knows they’ll figure it out.