Chapter Text
Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ~Elizabeth Stone
The Doctor's head went up expectantly, giving Jed a few seconds' warning before the throb of a courier zeppelin's engines became audible to human ears.
"That'll be them," Jed said, breaking their meditative silence. They'd been sitting at a corner table in the pub, nursing their drinks and lost in their own thoughts.
"Yep," the Doctor said, popping the "p" as he so often did. "Time to face the music." He downed the last of his pint in one gulp before rising from his chair, wincing at the reaction of his probably-cracked ribs, and Jed followed suit.
Kilellan was small enough, the old town square had been opened out on one side and expanded to serve as a docking point for the mail blimps that serviced more isolated communities. As Jed and the Doctor exited the pub, the Torchwood zeppelin was already settling into place, ignoring the stubby mooring tower; couriers might need to land anywhere, and were designed for that eventuality.
The pub was emptying out as the rest of its patrons--a mix of locals and the hikers and cyclists who sought out the scenic locale on holiday--gaped and murmured at the unexpected sight. In the evening gloom, the zeppelin's bright running lights picked out the sleek outline of its hull, and spotlights illuminated the neatly-trimmed grass.
Crew members leapt the short distance to the ground and set about securing the ship with cables. Even before the task was finished, though, a small, slender figure exited the craft, making only cursory use of the short length of dangling rope ladder. Blonde hair flashed pale in the glare of the spotlights as Rose tossed her head in a familiar I-mean-business gesture before she scanned the small crowd, caught sight of Jed and the Doctor, and began to stride in their direction.
She made a daunting sight, still in her trim, professional Vitex suit from the board meeting she'd attended that morning (though it felt like a million years ago now), moving with purpose and a hint of tightly controlled anger. Jed could hear the Doctor swallow, and while they held their ground shoulder-to-shoulder, they didn't move to meet Rose's advance.
She stopped an arm's length away, her eyes all but shooting sparks as she glared back and forth between her two men, and said in a tight, controlled voice, "You could have called me."
"Um. Well, we were borrowing the phone, y'see, since the EMP took out all our communications devices, so we didn't want to run up a bill and we knew you'd be at Torchwood and get the message," the Doctor began, just a hairsbreadth away from babbling.
"We work for Torchwood and my dad owns Vitex. We can afford to pay someone back for a phone call," Rose told him, her voice still tight, but with cracks running through it. She shifted her weight towards the Doctor, and Jed, moving mostly on instinct, held out a warning hand.
"He's hurt," he warned. "He took a bad hit to the ribs." Rose looked in Jed's direction, still glaring, but the cracks were propagating there, too, her angry expression hovering on the edge of collapse. Jed hurried on, adding, "He's okay, though, we both are."
The reassurance was the last straw, and Rose's face crumpled. A second later, all three of them were wrapped in a three-way embrace (very lightly, in the case of the Doctor), with Rose's face buried against Jed's shoulder.
"When your zeppelin vanished, I thought . . ." she started, but her voice failed her. Jed kissed the top of her head and hugged her as close as he could one-armed.
"S'okay, sweetheart," he told her. "You know us, we always come back." But, deep down, he knew how close this one had been. Luck, sheer blind luck . . . He suppressed a shudder.
"I can't keep doing this," she said when she found her voice again. She sniffed and rubbed her damp cheeks on Jed's shirt. "I just can't. Especially if –" she broke off with another smothered sob.
"If?" the Doctor prompted gently.
"If we're ever going to start a family," Rose finished. "I'm not raising children alone." Jed felt the Doctor tense, ever so slightly, and his stomach dropped. Nothing like bringing up the increasingly more insistent elephant in the metaphorical room to send things from bad to worse.
"Sh," the Doctor said, his voice low and warm, betraying none of his body's tension. "Of course we will, one of these days."
Rose sniffed again and looked up at him, a hint of her earlier glare returning. "And when's that gonna be? Have you even run those tests yet? We're none of us getting any younger, and neither of you two are immortal."
"I know," the Doctor said, "but we're okay now, yeah?" He smiled, the smile that could melt stone and hearts alike. Rose wavered in the face of his blatant deflection, but for once didn't let it go.
"When?" she asked. This time there was a pleading tone to the question that made Jed's heart clench, but there was nothing he could do or say: this was between them.
"It's late," the Doctor said, calm and kindly and rational, the way he always was when this discussion came up. "We're all knackered and standing in the middle of nowhere. Well, Scotland, which isn't exactly nowhere, but . . . anyway, we can talk about it tomorrow. For now, let's just go home. Okay?"
"Promise?" Rose asked, "tomorrow?" It sounded almost like capitulation, on the surface – but not quite.
"Yeah," the Doctor said, sounding perfectly sincere, and Jed felt a twinge of foreboding. Doc, I don't know that she's gonna let it go this time, he thought, but held his peace, hoping he was wrong about what he was reading.
Rose smiled and shifted, tugging the Doctor down for a kiss, followed by a kiss for Jed. The touch of her lips sent a jolt of reaction through Jed, the last of the day's fight-of-flight adrenaline shunting into an entirely different instinctive pathway, burning away any superficial worries.
When they pulled apart, the Doctor was still smiling, but now with a flirtatious edge to it. "Does this mean we're forgiven?" he asked Rose.
"Yes," Rose said, falling into the familiar game. "Provisionally. Depending on how well you make it up to me later."
"That's good because, um . . ." the Doctor's smile went sheepish. "Well, Jed and I decided to have a couple pints while we were waiting for you, and it turns out the magnetic strips on all my credit cards got wiped, too. I sort of promised we'd take care of it when you got here."
Rose's head dropped for a moment, then bounced back up. Fortunately, she was laughing. "Why do I always seem to end up paying?"
"Vitex heiress?" the Doctor suggested with raised eyebrows. Rose laughed again.
"All right, let's go settle up. Then home. You owe me twice now," she said.
"Good thing there's two of us, then," the Doctor said, cocking an eyebrow in Jed's direction as he moved, gingerly, to disentangle himself from the others.
"Teamwork," Jed said, taking his cue. "It's what we do best."
"Don't I know it," murmured Rose, and from there on it was the same as always after an adventure, laughter and flirtation skating over the surface of deeper anticipation, the three of them together and everything made right again. Deep down, though, Jed's unease remained. He ignored it. This was now, the past was over and done with, and tomorrow was a full night away.
tbc