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“ROSE!” he yells into the ceiling, breathing heavily.
He’s answered with silence. Waits ten seconds, thirty, a minute ... still just silence, soft and cooing wordless invites to simply close his eyes.
Cursing in the misleadingly mellifluous syllables of his mother tongue, he stuffs the spanner in his mouth, rolls up his shirtsleeves and yanks himself out of his cosy, if increasingly more stuffy, burrow under the console. Muscles strain under his dubious weight as he hovers above the grating, panting. His vision is unpleasantly sharp and his eyes ache. All at once, everything feels ... too much.
He lies heavily on the grating, running a hand through his hair. Damp and tussled, shirt dishevelled, skin slick and moist. Fingers smeared in soot. Rassilon, he’s tired.
This overwhelming restlessness that has followed him persistently every since a dreary lack of light swallowed him up whole, licking the colour greedily off his fiery spacesuit –– it makes him jerkier and quicker to flinch, even more afraid of sleeping than he’s ever been. He’s annoyed by the absurdity of this: he has faced much worse. Lived through, suffered, sustained, whatever to dub it. Survived. So why the difference? Why now?
He does not need much sleep, for that matter. He can, technically, go on days and weeks without it.
But it makes him so restless and tempts the anxiety to come back and attack when he’s not paying enough attention.
“Rose!” he shouts again after a while of staring at the ceiling and counting his breaths. He’s picking himself up and trudging to one of the doors now –– the corridor bathed in semi-darkness, noiseless and still.
“Rose, I need your help!” Leaning heavily on his elbow, he peers into the corridor. “The chameleon circuit. I’ve worked it out, I know how to repair it. Almost have it done, actually, but I ... seems like I need a third hand for his, which I obviously don’t have and ... Oh, would you come here?”
After another while, he grows impatient. “Please?” he grinds out.
This time, the reply does come: muffled, utterly incoherent, accompanied by a sound he can’t label. Seconds tick by and she’s still nowhere to be seen, the subtle unidentified noise simmering out of the corridor and merging with the TARDIS’s ceaseless hum.
He closes his eyes, again, wavering between irritation and uneasiness. And the image returns.
(Too much.)
(He can’t quite place the moment in which he’s become so ridiculously, blasphemously annoyed with the stubborn memory of her that day: the electric pink of her zippy jacket, wide dark eyes, slightly ducked head. Swaying wisps of blonde hair. Rose: offendingly bright against this consuming blackness.
Maybe it’s not annoyance, after all. Maybe it’s the same sickening anxiety that keeps him from letting his eyes fall shut each night and urges to count milliseconds when he blinks.)
“ –– so you come here!”
Her voice calls out again, slightly more discernible, still mysteriously muffled.
For a moment, he feels oddly numb. He would have gone back to work if she didn’t reply at all, he would have crept back under the console if she came to help. Would have stayed there, cocooned, until he could no longer shake off the drowsiness, and fallen into a shallow, dreamless sleep.
But this half-reply and half-beckoning has him eerily inert. The weariness creeps up from tense shoulders up his spine and neck. He blinks and, blissfully thoughtless in this fleeting moment, lets his legs carry him in the direction of her voice.
Perhaps the stray puff of steam should have been a warning enough.
(But then again, so should the crippling clutches of fear at the image behind his closed lids: her scared eyes and tucked chin. A glaring hole of darkness. A voice. So should his fingers trembling with longing for rest. So should the sweet muteness she induces in the voice of his reason.)
And he approaches the bathroom door unthinking. He doesn’t even register it’s the bathroom: there’s no fixed location on the TARDIS, no pattern or promise or order. It’s all in constant motion and he would never care enough to pay attention to those small rearrangements anyway.
“I almost fixed the chameleon circuit,” he announces, leaning against the frame of the door and staring at the complementary frame ahead. His voice is dry and dispassionate. “Why have I never thought of this before, Rose Tyler? In order to fix the chameleon circuit, you have to stop looking at it like it’s a circuit and start looking at it like it’s chameleon. All wired up and rather motionless, but still. I’ve been looking at it from the wrong way all along. Why is that?”
“Oh, I dunno,” she says a little breathlessly. “Always thought you wanted it broken anyway. The police box’s sort of a classic now, innit?”
He looks over at her with a weak, fond smile and is instantly frozen in a startling fit of suffocation.
Because it is a bathroom after all; a bathroom sinking in humid, milky steam, sweet flowery scent in the air and a matted mirror that reflects only the impression of shape.
There’s skin, in a colour that travels somewhere between pink and peach and there’s a fluffy white towel. There are droplets of water clinging to hair and tumbling down the line of a neck. There are lips curved into a completely unaware smile, there are honey-coloured eyes focused on the mirror.
There’s Rose Tyler drying her hair with a small towel, wrapped in all this damp eeriness that steals the will of breathing from his lungs; wrapped in this and hardly anything more. The fluffy towel about her seems all but a laughably cheap diversion when there’s the slope of her shoulders so blatantly on display.
And this insanely lucky droplet of water, stunning him with its audacity as it trickles down her skin and sneaks underneath the fabric.
Something in his blood screams panic. Something in his skin keens to follow suit.
(Of the droplet, or maybe of the towel, he’s not sure.)
“What are you doing, Rose?” is what tumbles off his lips in a clumsy bundle of words, not quite synchronized with his brain. He sounds almost astounded.
(Because that’s not obvious at all.)
She chuckles, shooting him an amused, fleeting look. “What d’ya think I’m doing? Drying my hair. Quite a trivial thing to do, I guess, for a Time Lord. Your hair’s probably self-manageable or something, huh? Cleans and dries and coiffs itself up like this on its own.”
And she grants him with another smile.
He probably ought to reply but he is too mortified.
That he is tired and restless and scared –– he has established long before stepping into this glorious Underworld: the lankiest, freckliest and probably oldest Persephone to date, yet still helplessly fixated on the given passion fruit.
Now, however, he discovers that he is not quite tired enough. His fingers clutch at the precariously thin air along with a rush of suspicious hormones in the bloodstream. And he is not restless enough. He doesn’t hastily retreat, but merely stills, to observe and process. Not scared enough –– or perhaps, scared too much anyway –– as he can’t help the involuntary thought that a chance has never before felt so much like the last one.
“What are you, dumbstruck?” Rose sends him another perfectly clueless glance, biting her lip. “Look, I’m sorry you had to see me like ... this, but you sounded pretty urgent from the console room.”
She resumes the ministrations of the small towel over her hair. It does wonders for the skin that peeks out from beneath the larger one: sliding out by tiny splits of inches, having his eyes practically glued to it.
It does not do wonders to his self-control.
“Thought something was off but didn’t want to waddle up all the way and get cold.” She shivers lightly, as though cold at the very thought of such a trip. Or perhaps just from the air he’s letting into the bathroom via his very presence at the open door.
His ... presence. Here.
“Oh, yes,” he says suddenly, voice hoarse and no connection between the lips and mind whatsoever, “Yes. I mean, no. No. It’s just right in here. Warm enough.”
He’s never before seen Rose Tyler quite this ... inappropriate, he notes with despair. Not so warm and flushed and wondrously disheveled. He’s drowning in this scene: the fumes of a hot shower, the pleasantly white towel, a damp and very lovely Rose. Drying her hair with this unnerving oblivion of what she’s doing to him, peaceful, distinctly not in danger of falling into any dark abyss or staying above while he does.
For a precious second, he still thinks he might still be able to keep his hands at bay and just admire.
And then she turns her head, flicking her hair to one side, and gives him a broad grin –– tongue teasing teeth, teeth teasing lips. “Besides, s’not the first time you’ve seen me wet, now, is it?” she asks coyly, almost winking but not quite. There’s some subtle lip biting going on and her eyes are narrowed slightly.
And he’s gone, far gone. The moody mixture of fear and guilt that has been plaguing him for days –– it all gives way to a desperate urgency, a dizzying rush of blood and yearning, triggered by, Rassilon, by months of suppressing.
(Words stumble into his head on their own accord; he does not remember when and where he’s read them, but in that moment he might as well have written them himself, in some devious, forgotten incarnation: I was thinking how I could betray you, but I can’t. I want you. I want to undress you, vulgarize you a bit – ah, I don’t know what I am saying.)
“No, not quite,” he breathes out, eyes transfixed on her.
Rose’s smile falters a little. Her eyes skim briefly over his entire figure before she turns away, inexplicably sheepish. Flustered? Does he dare hope she’s flustered?
Her cheeks are flushed, for sure, and there’s a new vigour in the rubbing of her hair. Voice trembles vaguely when she speaks.
“Uh, anyway, Doctor, has something happened? Or was it just the chameleon thingy that you wanted me to help you wi –– what are you doing?”
Her breath hitches as he draws closer, mind blissfuly clear and gloriously successful in muffling out the reason’s cries, and hovers above her.
There’s a burning sensation in his veins that can only be heightened when her lids flutter up and she looks at him. There’s, again, a sweet lack of air in his lungs –– he leans in close, far closer than it would be possible to ever justify or dismiss were he to back out later –– and her pupils are dilated, her lips are parted, her breathing is uneven. He revels in this tension. Licks his lower lip.
“What’s that?” he responds with a question, touching a a tiny scar on her neck, just at the juncture where her still moist hair is gathered to one side.
She smoothes it absently, aiming rapid blinks at the floor as she shakily responds, “I ... um. I fell from my bike, when I was nine. T’was a bit too small fo me at the time.”
And then, in an even breathier, quiet voice, “The red one. Bike, I mean. The red bike.”
She purses her lips, visibly unsure, and he thinks he’s inebriated now, definitely, absolutely high. So close he can smell her skin, almost catch the taste from the air’s particles. His hand reaches out again, fingers drawing a tentative line across the scar.
Treacherous fingers, as they’re trembling, too. Betraying his amazement; hinting at the urgency.
There’s a small, pink swelling on her neck, right by the pulsepoint.
“And this?” he whispers. He’s both paralysed and thrilled by his own audacity. Rose’s breathing turns even more shallow, her eyes fall closed.
“That’s ...” she begins and pauses. Swallows. “Uh, a mosquito bite, I think. From this planet we’ve recently been to. The tropical one. Doesn’t hurt, though. Just sort of ... “
“Itches?” his breath resonates against her skin, lips almost brushing skin, and her chin trembles. Breaths speeding up, tiny movements of her chest, audible now lilt of air leaving her mouth.
“Yeah.” And then, in a slightly more high-pitched, cheeky and Rose-ish, infinitely more lethal half-whisper, “Can you think of something that’d help, Doctor?”
At that, he chucks the remnants of sanity away and gives in entirely, pressing his lips to her pulse point in an open-mouthed kiss.
She sucks in a breath with a whine. He can lick the erratic heartbeats off her neck. Fall further down into this sweet intoxication, overwhelming, inviting tranquility for his troubled mind.
(Or he can think of dark pits and pick jackets, of terrified eyes and unbearable phonecalls. Broken promises. He can think of fear that is already too much, that will become a gun he is going to aim at his own temple. He can.)
His hands still at her waist, lips skimming across her neck as she arches into him.
“Rose, tell me to stop,” he pleads.
(Last chance, last allowance for sanity and age and wisdom. He’s resonable, he can be reasonable, he can –– )
She tilts her head back, granting him better access, lets out a low chuckle and a drawn out breath. She’s smiling now, lips spelling out ––
(I don’t know what I expect of you, but it is something in the way of a miracle. I am going to demand everything of you – even the impossible, because you encourage it …)
“Like hell I will.”
(No, he can’t.)