Language Lessons fic commentary part 2/4: Precious
Again, commentary from my fic commentary meme. glory_jean wanted commentary on the Language Lessons series, so here's part 2: Precious.
This isn't actually meant to follow straight on from "Always"-I pictured it a couple of weeks later. However, having gone back later and read the two one after the other, I realised that it does sound like they're basically parts 1 and 2 of the same evening/night. I suppose it doesn't much matter which way you look at it, be honest.
They lay in bed, entwined in afterglow, sweat cooling on their bodies. Under Rose's ear, the Doctor's hearts had slowed down to their usual steady pace. It was a sound that usually comforted her, often lulling her straight to sleep, but not now. She wanted to ask him something-wanted badly, but wasn't exactly sure how to go about it. (Nothing more awkward than wanting to ask your lover something that you know is likely to hurt or be uncomfortable, but you have to ask. Seems to me that afterglow is often a logical place to ask-the intimacy of the moment makes such questions and answers somewhat easier to deal with.) Just come out with it, she thought at last, and tentatively said, "Doctor?"
"Hmm?" He opened his eyes and craned his neck, looking down at her where she pillowed her head on his shoulder.
She traced an abstract pattern on his chest with a finger, unaccountably nervous. "You said n'hilla is Gallifreyan, yeah?"
"Yes."
"So I just…I was wondering…." Why was she so worried about this? She looked away from his sleepy, but still oddly intense, gaze.
His fingers gently slipped beneath her chin, tilting her head up to look at her. "What's wrong?" he asked, frowning.
Never try to convince the Doctor nothing's wrong when it is. He Knows Better, and he's not going to just let it go.
"Nothing," she said. She sounded unconvincing, even to herself.
He shifted, turning onto his side so he could look at her. "You're not nervous about asking me questions, are you?" he asked. "You know you can ask me anything."
"I know," she said uncomfortably, felt herself blushing, and looked away again. "It's…I was wondering something about Gallifreyan, but I wasn't sure if I should ask. I mean," she added, "it's…it's your language, and your memories, and I didn't want to accidentally hurt you with something I said…."
He tilted her head back up with a finger under her chin. "You won't," he said gently. "You're right, there was a long time when it would have hurt too much, but not now. You can ask me anything you like."
And he means this, too. Now he's decided to let her in, he's going to let her as far in as she wants to go. Any hanging back that he's doing at this point is out of respect for her; he is alien, and he doesn't want to pile all that on top of her all at once. And he really doesn't want her to understand the mountain of guilt that lives on his shoulders, either; he wouldn't wish that on anyone, let alone Rose. However, he's decided that he will answer any questions she chooses to ask about him or his past. He's done too much holding back, and too much unhappiness-his and other peoples'-has come of it.
All right, then. She took a deep breath. "When you-when you speak Gallifreyan, there's another word you use a lot," she said. "It's-I think it's nish'ala." She swallowed. "What's it mean?"
Several people had asked me what Nish'ala meant, after I posted "Always". I'd planned to write this anyway, so I was very pleased that folks picked up on that and were interested in it.
He blinked, then his tender smile brightened into a broad grin. "Rose Tyler," he said, "you're brilliant. Really brilliant. There aren't many people who can pick individual words out of foreign languages, and even fewer who can pick up Gallifreyan like that. It's not an easy language to learn to speak-tonal, you know, and it's got fifty-six different tenses so we can be specific about the time in which the action took place, is currently taking place, is continuing to take place, will continue to take place, will begin taking place and last for a while, or will take place in a specific, finite time in the future, and who precisely will be doing the action. There are even tenses for the actions of previous regenerations. 'My companion,' for example, when referring to you, would be tr'eailln, but when referring to Martha or Donna, I'd have to say tr'eaillin, because they're no longer my companion. And if I want to talk about someone who travelled with an earlier me, like Sarah Jane, it would be cra'eillin, because she travelled with me in my fourth incarnation. Well, and my third as well, so if I were talking about something that happened then, she would be pra'eillin…."
Geek confession: I LOVED writing this paragraph.
"Doctor," Rose said, a bit impatiently.
"What? Oh. Yes. You asked me a question." He opened his mouth, then closed it. "What was it again?"
She laughed. She couldn't help it. "You're a nutter, you know that."
He raised an eyebrow and grinned at her. "But you're not nervous any more, are you?"
"No," she conceded, letting him draw her closer so their bodies pressed together from chest to toes.
"Good." He kissed her forehead. "Now-you wanted to know about nish'ala?"
"Yeah."
"All right." He kissed her again, (just because I love having the Doctor kiss her forehead-it's one of my favourite things for a lover to do) then, to her utter confusion, bounced out of bed and started pulling on his clothes. "Come on, then," he said, balancing on one foot as he pulled on a sock.
She sat up slowly, watching him pull on the other sock, then reach for his pants. (And yes, I meant pants, not trousers-I write as British as I can manage, so whenever one of my fics says 'pants', it always means 'underwear'.) "What are you doing?"
"Getting dressed," he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "You can't go wandering about the TARDIS naked. Well, you could, but it'd probably be cold. And you won't want to be in the conservatory without any clothes on. There are plants with spines. And stickers. You'll want shoes, too; ever step on blackberry canes barefoot? Not fun."
That's from experience, too. Blackberries grow wild in the Pacific Northwest, where I grew up, and it wasn't a real summer unless you'd gone blackberry picking and ended up stepping on the canes barefoot at some point. Ow. I wrote this before I discovered that blackberries also grow wild in the UK, so it actually fit! I was assuming that there would be blackberries in the conservatory, but this was even better.
Okay, he was in one of those moods. She'd have to be specific about what she was asking. (Can't you just see the Doctor doing that? Assuming she knows why they're going in the first place, so she must be asking about specifics. He's not trying to be obnoxious; he just thinks she's asking a different question.) "Why," she said slowly and distinctly, with an air of patience, "are we getting dressed and going to the conservatory at-" She looked at the clock. "-two o'clock in the morning, ship's time?"
"You wanted to learn about nish'ala. So we're going. Come on!"
He bounced on the balls of his feet, impatient, as she dragged herself out of bed and dressed, slipping her bare feet into trainers without bothering with socks. When she was finally ready, he took her by the hand and led her down the hallway, talking all the while.
"There are actually two forms of Gallifreyan. The first is for the ordinary people who don't regenerate. They have-had-significantly longer lifespans than humans, but they couldn't regenerate, so they didn't need all those tenses for different regenerations. Old Low Gallifreyan, theirs was called. We Time Lords called ours Old High Gallifreyan. It was all pure pretentiousness on our part, of course; ours was no higher or lower than any other, just more complicated. Much more complicated than it needed to be, actually; speaking Old High Gallifreyan is kind of like trying to talk in mathematical equations. Everything had to be just so, say what you mean and mean what you say. Old Low Gallifreyan was a bit looser, a bit more easygoing."
"Like South London instead of Received Pronunciation?" Rose hazarded, trying to keep up both mentally and physically.
"Exactly!" He beamed at her. "And then there's Formal High Gallifreyan, which is multi-tonal. You actually speak in harmony with yourself. Only possible if you have a respiratory bypass system, of course. I'm not even sure I can still do it; it took loads of training, and I'm out of practise (I stole this unrepentently from dameruth's writing. Both her "Finders"verse and her "Flowers"verse have a Doctor who can speak in harmony with himself, and does, usually when he's wrapped up in deep emotions, though her story about the Doctor at the Master's funeral pyre kills me every time. Still, "choral" speaking is Ruth's idea, and used with permission.)….Aha!" He stopped abruptly in front of a door, and Rose nearly bumped right into him. "Here we are: the conservatory. Got your shoes on? Good-don't want any thorns going into your feet."
He opened the door and stepped inside. Rose followed right on his heels. She'd been in the conservatory before once or twice, but it never failed to amaze her: long tables, arranged in rows with special lights above them, each covered with plants. The room was divided into sections by what appeared to be force fields of some sort, and within a few of them, Rose saw small shapes flitting about.
"Bees," the Doctor said, apparently noticing the way she cocked her head, trying to identify them. "Well, what passed for bees on each particular planet. Pollination and such, you know; bees are much more efficient at it than we are. That section's from Nepthron 2, about three hundred thousand years before you were born. A series of volcanic eruptions wiped an island half the size of Australia clean of all its plant life, but I managed to salvage a few dozen species. They're here."
Written before the whole "the bees are disappearing" thing in s4. Though I have to admit, in "The Stolen Earth," I squeed loudly at the name 'Melissa majoris'. Aside from being my name, 'Melissa' means honeybee-which is why they used it, of course.
"What about the animals?" Rose asked, looking up at the enormous, smooth-barked trees that towered above her, their green hue tinted slightly yellow by the force field she looked through.
"Oh, there weren't any on that island," he said lightly. "Or, rather, there were, but they were all either seagoing or flying creatures, so they were able to survive. As species, at least; maybe not as individuals. But there are still descendents of those creatures alive on Nepthron 2, so some of them must have made it."
Rose nodded, following him along the corridor between the tables, trying not to stumble into the force fields. She was reasonably sure they wouldn't hurt her, but she didn't want to hurt them, either, or unwittingly damage some plant that maybe didn't exist anywhere else in the universe.
I should mention that my concept of the TARDIS conservatory goes right back to my very first fic in the Who-niverse: The One Adventure He'll Never Have. I've used it in several fics since, though I must admit it's grown in my imagination since that first fic. Fairly significantly, in fact.
The Doctor stopped at last, in front of the biggest force-field section they'd seen so far. The field appeared to be thicker here, more powerful; it was nearly opaque, wavering gently in place like a curtain caught by a breeze. "This is it," he said, and squeezed her hand. She squeezed back, feeling all her nervousness descending on her again. "Let's go."
He stepped forward through the curtain of light, and she followed him, shivering a bit as it skimmed over her body. It felt like that odd feeling her mum had always called 'someone walking on your grave'. She blinked, then stared at the sight that greeted her.
It was a garden, stretching out before her into the distance (bigger on the inside, a little voice in her mind reminded her): silvery trees and deep red grass and multicoloured flowers. A breeze drifted through, riffling her hair and setting the leaves on the trees in motion, and she startled at the sudden, unexpected sound they made. "Are they chiming?" she asked, astonished.
"Yeah." He'd stopped, surveying the garden with an expression of mixed satisfaction and wistfulness. "You should've seen them at sunset; they looked like a forest of candle flames as they reflected the light. Storms on Gallifrey were magnificent anyway, but add in the sounds of the trees and it was absolutely amazing-it could overwhelm every one of your senses with the sheer beauty of it." He sighed softly, looking at the vista before them, and she squeezed his hand gently. He squeezed back, and the two of them stood there for a moment, quiet, lost in their own thoughts.
This paragraph has got a new bunny in my head, btw, though I'm not sure when I'll be able to get to it; I've got a couple WIPs waiting for me. Don't be surprised if another Language Lessons fic comes your way, though.
Predictably, though, he couldn't stay quiet for long, and turned to her, grinning. "But!" he said brightly. "We're forgetting what we're here for! Come on, they're over this way."
"What does this have to do with that word?" Rose asked, somewhat plaintively, as he tugged her towards the left, breaking into a half-jog to keep up with his long-legged stride.
"You'll see," he told her. "Wouldn't want to ruin the surprise. Really, you humans, you're so impatient! Ask me a question, and you expect an immediate answer, when the best answer may take a bit of searching. Nothing wrong with that, you know. Sometimes the quest itself is better than what lies at the end."
"I'll remind you of that the next time you try to lecture me," she said breathlessly, but teasing. He flashed a grin at her over his shoulder, but didn't slow in the least.
Right, left, and then right again between rows of plants, and he stopped at last, a look of pride and expectation on his face-the same expression as when he introduced her to something new in their travels. "Rose," he said, drawing her in and indicating a bed full of blossoms, "meet rose. Or, in Gallifreyan, nish'a."
Surprised, Rose sank to a knee to examine the flowers more closely. They didn't bear an enormously close resemblance to Earth roses, but there was something familiar-ish about them nonetheless. They were beautiful, definitely: their colours ranged from crimson to a blue so deep it was nearly purple. She reached out to touch a bright yellow petal and was startled at the texture; it was like petting the thickest, softest, richest velvet she could imagine.
She was incredibly touched by his willingness to bring her here to see the last remnants of Gallifrey left in the universe, but some part of her couldn't help but feel a little disappointed by the word itself. "So you're calling me by my name in Gallifreyan, then," she said, trying to keep the disappointment out of her voice. Somehow, she'd sort of hoped it meant something a bit more romantic.
But that was silly. This was the Doctor; sharing his past with her was the most romantic thing he could possibly do. He'd been so hurt, so broken, that for him to share this with her was an act of trust and love that should be blindsiding her. How could she possibly be disappointed?
The above paragraph was my own reaction to the paragraph previous to it. I wrote about Rose being disappointed, then thought, "Well, dummy, what have you got to be disappointed about?" and tried to rewrite it. But it didn't want to be re-written; that was the way Rose felt, damn it. It took me several tries before I decided that feelings don't have to be logical, but I should at least have Rose (who is, of course, much older and more mature than the Rose in the show, by this point) realise just how illogical her feelings are.
"Well…." He crouched beside her and touched a blossom as well, with the lightest of fingers. "Sort of. See, this flower was incredibly rare. There were several times in our history that we thought they'd gone extinct, only to have some explorer find a small bed of them in some remote mountain valley. And because they were so rare, they were immensely valuable-hothouse versions never quite looked the same. So their very name came to have a second meaning." His hand left the flower and moved to her, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear tenderly. "Nish'a also means precious."
Rose stared at him, struck, a lump forming in her throat. All traces of disappointment were long gone, and she felt vaguely foolish for having felt that way at all.
He smiled, almost as though he were reading her mind, though she knew he wouldn't without permission. "But that's not what I call you. I call you Nish'ala, not nish'a."
He paused, waiting, and Rose swallowed around the lump. "What's that mean, then?" she managed.
"The suffix -la is a possessive. So Nish'ala means my Rose,, or my precious, or even my precious Rose." (This was what I always intended Nish'ala to mean, way back when I wrote it in "Always".) Unaccountably he flushed, glanced away, then looked back at her with an adorably hopeful expression. "Do you mind? I mean, it's a bit arrogant of me to claim possession like that, I know, and-"
She placed a finger over his lips, shushing him. He shushed, but his eyes were still wide and filled with entreaty. "I've always been your Rose," she said quietly.
He smiled, and she let her hand drop. "Good," he said. Standing, he tugged her to her feet as well and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close. She rested her cheek against his shoulder and they just stood there, holding each other and listening to the chiming of the silver trees.
If you've been reading my fic at all, you've probably got the feeling that I'm all about the fluff. I really am, though I'm not above writing horrifically painful, gut-wrenching stuff when I'm in the mood for it, or when the bunny hits. However, many of those end up fluffy as well-witness the "I Ching" series. When it comes down to it, I really am a romantic at heart, and David Tennant's portrayal of broken!lonely!Doctor is heartbreaking enough that I can't help trying to fix it.
Next up: "Teach Me More," parts 1 and 2.
This isn't actually meant to follow straight on from "Always"-I pictured it a couple of weeks later. However, having gone back later and read the two one after the other, I realised that it does sound like they're basically parts 1 and 2 of the same evening/night. I suppose it doesn't much matter which way you look at it, be honest.
They lay in bed, entwined in afterglow, sweat cooling on their bodies. Under Rose's ear, the Doctor's hearts had slowed down to their usual steady pace. It was a sound that usually comforted her, often lulling her straight to sleep, but not now. She wanted to ask him something-wanted badly, but wasn't exactly sure how to go about it. (Nothing more awkward than wanting to ask your lover something that you know is likely to hurt or be uncomfortable, but you have to ask. Seems to me that afterglow is often a logical place to ask-the intimacy of the moment makes such questions and answers somewhat easier to deal with.) Just come out with it, she thought at last, and tentatively said, "Doctor?"
"Hmm?" He opened his eyes and craned his neck, looking down at her where she pillowed her head on his shoulder.
She traced an abstract pattern on his chest with a finger, unaccountably nervous. "You said n'hilla is Gallifreyan, yeah?"
"Yes."
"So I just…I was wondering…." Why was she so worried about this? She looked away from his sleepy, but still oddly intense, gaze.
His fingers gently slipped beneath her chin, tilting her head up to look at her. "What's wrong?" he asked, frowning.
Never try to convince the Doctor nothing's wrong when it is. He Knows Better, and he's not going to just let it go.
"Nothing," she said. She sounded unconvincing, even to herself.
He shifted, turning onto his side so he could look at her. "You're not nervous about asking me questions, are you?" he asked. "You know you can ask me anything."
"I know," she said uncomfortably, felt herself blushing, and looked away again. "It's…I was wondering something about Gallifreyan, but I wasn't sure if I should ask. I mean," she added, "it's…it's your language, and your memories, and I didn't want to accidentally hurt you with something I said…."
He tilted her head back up with a finger under her chin. "You won't," he said gently. "You're right, there was a long time when it would have hurt too much, but not now. You can ask me anything you like."
And he means this, too. Now he's decided to let her in, he's going to let her as far in as she wants to go. Any hanging back that he's doing at this point is out of respect for her; he is alien, and he doesn't want to pile all that on top of her all at once. And he really doesn't want her to understand the mountain of guilt that lives on his shoulders, either; he wouldn't wish that on anyone, let alone Rose. However, he's decided that he will answer any questions she chooses to ask about him or his past. He's done too much holding back, and too much unhappiness-his and other peoples'-has come of it.
All right, then. She took a deep breath. "When you-when you speak Gallifreyan, there's another word you use a lot," she said. "It's-I think it's nish'ala." She swallowed. "What's it mean?"
Several people had asked me what Nish'ala meant, after I posted "Always". I'd planned to write this anyway, so I was very pleased that folks picked up on that and were interested in it.
He blinked, then his tender smile brightened into a broad grin. "Rose Tyler," he said, "you're brilliant. Really brilliant. There aren't many people who can pick individual words out of foreign languages, and even fewer who can pick up Gallifreyan like that. It's not an easy language to learn to speak-tonal, you know, and it's got fifty-six different tenses so we can be specific about the time in which the action took place, is currently taking place, is continuing to take place, will continue to take place, will begin taking place and last for a while, or will take place in a specific, finite time in the future, and who precisely will be doing the action. There are even tenses for the actions of previous regenerations. 'My companion,' for example, when referring to you, would be tr'eailln, but when referring to Martha or Donna, I'd have to say tr'eaillin, because they're no longer my companion. And if I want to talk about someone who travelled with an earlier me, like Sarah Jane, it would be cra'eillin, because she travelled with me in my fourth incarnation. Well, and my third as well, so if I were talking about something that happened then, she would be pra'eillin…."
Geek confession: I LOVED writing this paragraph.
"Doctor," Rose said, a bit impatiently.
"What? Oh. Yes. You asked me a question." He opened his mouth, then closed it. "What was it again?"
She laughed. She couldn't help it. "You're a nutter, you know that."
He raised an eyebrow and grinned at her. "But you're not nervous any more, are you?"
"No," she conceded, letting him draw her closer so their bodies pressed together from chest to toes.
"Good." He kissed her forehead. "Now-you wanted to know about nish'ala?"
"Yeah."
"All right." He kissed her again, (just because I love having the Doctor kiss her forehead-it's one of my favourite things for a lover to do) then, to her utter confusion, bounced out of bed and started pulling on his clothes. "Come on, then," he said, balancing on one foot as he pulled on a sock.
She sat up slowly, watching him pull on the other sock, then reach for his pants. (And yes, I meant pants, not trousers-I write as British as I can manage, so whenever one of my fics says 'pants', it always means 'underwear'.) "What are you doing?"
"Getting dressed," he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "You can't go wandering about the TARDIS naked. Well, you could, but it'd probably be cold. And you won't want to be in the conservatory without any clothes on. There are plants with spines. And stickers. You'll want shoes, too; ever step on blackberry canes barefoot? Not fun."
That's from experience, too. Blackberries grow wild in the Pacific Northwest, where I grew up, and it wasn't a real summer unless you'd gone blackberry picking and ended up stepping on the canes barefoot at some point. Ow. I wrote this before I discovered that blackberries also grow wild in the UK, so it actually fit! I was assuming that there would be blackberries in the conservatory, but this was even better.
Okay, he was in one of those moods. She'd have to be specific about what she was asking. (Can't you just see the Doctor doing that? Assuming she knows why they're going in the first place, so she must be asking about specifics. He's not trying to be obnoxious; he just thinks she's asking a different question.) "Why," she said slowly and distinctly, with an air of patience, "are we getting dressed and going to the conservatory at-" She looked at the clock. "-two o'clock in the morning, ship's time?"
"You wanted to learn about nish'ala. So we're going. Come on!"
He bounced on the balls of his feet, impatient, as she dragged herself out of bed and dressed, slipping her bare feet into trainers without bothering with socks. When she was finally ready, he took her by the hand and led her down the hallway, talking all the while.
"There are actually two forms of Gallifreyan. The first is for the ordinary people who don't regenerate. They have-had-significantly longer lifespans than humans, but they couldn't regenerate, so they didn't need all those tenses for different regenerations. Old Low Gallifreyan, theirs was called. We Time Lords called ours Old High Gallifreyan. It was all pure pretentiousness on our part, of course; ours was no higher or lower than any other, just more complicated. Much more complicated than it needed to be, actually; speaking Old High Gallifreyan is kind of like trying to talk in mathematical equations. Everything had to be just so, say what you mean and mean what you say. Old Low Gallifreyan was a bit looser, a bit more easygoing."
"Like South London instead of Received Pronunciation?" Rose hazarded, trying to keep up both mentally and physically.
"Exactly!" He beamed at her. "And then there's Formal High Gallifreyan, which is multi-tonal. You actually speak in harmony with yourself. Only possible if you have a respiratory bypass system, of course. I'm not even sure I can still do it; it took loads of training, and I'm out of practise (I stole this unrepentently from dameruth's writing. Both her "Finders"verse and her "Flowers"verse have a Doctor who can speak in harmony with himself, and does, usually when he's wrapped up in deep emotions, though her story about the Doctor at the Master's funeral pyre kills me every time. Still, "choral" speaking is Ruth's idea, and used with permission.)….Aha!" He stopped abruptly in front of a door, and Rose nearly bumped right into him. "Here we are: the conservatory. Got your shoes on? Good-don't want any thorns going into your feet."
He opened the door and stepped inside. Rose followed right on his heels. She'd been in the conservatory before once or twice, but it never failed to amaze her: long tables, arranged in rows with special lights above them, each covered with plants. The room was divided into sections by what appeared to be force fields of some sort, and within a few of them, Rose saw small shapes flitting about.
"Bees," the Doctor said, apparently noticing the way she cocked her head, trying to identify them. "Well, what passed for bees on each particular planet. Pollination and such, you know; bees are much more efficient at it than we are. That section's from Nepthron 2, about three hundred thousand years before you were born. A series of volcanic eruptions wiped an island half the size of Australia clean of all its plant life, but I managed to salvage a few dozen species. They're here."
Written before the whole "the bees are disappearing" thing in s4. Though I have to admit, in "The Stolen Earth," I squeed loudly at the name 'Melissa majoris'. Aside from being my name, 'Melissa' means honeybee-which is why they used it, of course.
"What about the animals?" Rose asked, looking up at the enormous, smooth-barked trees that towered above her, their green hue tinted slightly yellow by the force field she looked through.
"Oh, there weren't any on that island," he said lightly. "Or, rather, there were, but they were all either seagoing or flying creatures, so they were able to survive. As species, at least; maybe not as individuals. But there are still descendents of those creatures alive on Nepthron 2, so some of them must have made it."
Rose nodded, following him along the corridor between the tables, trying not to stumble into the force fields. She was reasonably sure they wouldn't hurt her, but she didn't want to hurt them, either, or unwittingly damage some plant that maybe didn't exist anywhere else in the universe.
I should mention that my concept of the TARDIS conservatory goes right back to my very first fic in the Who-niverse: The One Adventure He'll Never Have. I've used it in several fics since, though I must admit it's grown in my imagination since that first fic. Fairly significantly, in fact.
The Doctor stopped at last, in front of the biggest force-field section they'd seen so far. The field appeared to be thicker here, more powerful; it was nearly opaque, wavering gently in place like a curtain caught by a breeze. "This is it," he said, and squeezed her hand. She squeezed back, feeling all her nervousness descending on her again. "Let's go."
He stepped forward through the curtain of light, and she followed him, shivering a bit as it skimmed over her body. It felt like that odd feeling her mum had always called 'someone walking on your grave'. She blinked, then stared at the sight that greeted her.
It was a garden, stretching out before her into the distance (bigger on the inside, a little voice in her mind reminded her): silvery trees and deep red grass and multicoloured flowers. A breeze drifted through, riffling her hair and setting the leaves on the trees in motion, and she startled at the sudden, unexpected sound they made. "Are they chiming?" she asked, astonished.
"Yeah." He'd stopped, surveying the garden with an expression of mixed satisfaction and wistfulness. "You should've seen them at sunset; they looked like a forest of candle flames as they reflected the light. Storms on Gallifrey were magnificent anyway, but add in the sounds of the trees and it was absolutely amazing-it could overwhelm every one of your senses with the sheer beauty of it." He sighed softly, looking at the vista before them, and she squeezed his hand gently. He squeezed back, and the two of them stood there for a moment, quiet, lost in their own thoughts.
This paragraph has got a new bunny in my head, btw, though I'm not sure when I'll be able to get to it; I've got a couple WIPs waiting for me. Don't be surprised if another Language Lessons fic comes your way, though.
Predictably, though, he couldn't stay quiet for long, and turned to her, grinning. "But!" he said brightly. "We're forgetting what we're here for! Come on, they're over this way."
"What does this have to do with that word?" Rose asked, somewhat plaintively, as he tugged her towards the left, breaking into a half-jog to keep up with his long-legged stride.
"You'll see," he told her. "Wouldn't want to ruin the surprise. Really, you humans, you're so impatient! Ask me a question, and you expect an immediate answer, when the best answer may take a bit of searching. Nothing wrong with that, you know. Sometimes the quest itself is better than what lies at the end."
"I'll remind you of that the next time you try to lecture me," she said breathlessly, but teasing. He flashed a grin at her over his shoulder, but didn't slow in the least.
Right, left, and then right again between rows of plants, and he stopped at last, a look of pride and expectation on his face-the same expression as when he introduced her to something new in their travels. "Rose," he said, drawing her in and indicating a bed full of blossoms, "meet rose. Or, in Gallifreyan, nish'a."
Surprised, Rose sank to a knee to examine the flowers more closely. They didn't bear an enormously close resemblance to Earth roses, but there was something familiar-ish about them nonetheless. They were beautiful, definitely: their colours ranged from crimson to a blue so deep it was nearly purple. She reached out to touch a bright yellow petal and was startled at the texture; it was like petting the thickest, softest, richest velvet she could imagine.
She was incredibly touched by his willingness to bring her here to see the last remnants of Gallifrey left in the universe, but some part of her couldn't help but feel a little disappointed by the word itself. "So you're calling me by my name in Gallifreyan, then," she said, trying to keep the disappointment out of her voice. Somehow, she'd sort of hoped it meant something a bit more romantic.
But that was silly. This was the Doctor; sharing his past with her was the most romantic thing he could possibly do. He'd been so hurt, so broken, that for him to share this with her was an act of trust and love that should be blindsiding her. How could she possibly be disappointed?
The above paragraph was my own reaction to the paragraph previous to it. I wrote about Rose being disappointed, then thought, "Well, dummy, what have you got to be disappointed about?" and tried to rewrite it. But it didn't want to be re-written; that was the way Rose felt, damn it. It took me several tries before I decided that feelings don't have to be logical, but I should at least have Rose (who is, of course, much older and more mature than the Rose in the show, by this point) realise just how illogical her feelings are.
"Well…." He crouched beside her and touched a blossom as well, with the lightest of fingers. "Sort of. See, this flower was incredibly rare. There were several times in our history that we thought they'd gone extinct, only to have some explorer find a small bed of them in some remote mountain valley. And because they were so rare, they were immensely valuable-hothouse versions never quite looked the same. So their very name came to have a second meaning." His hand left the flower and moved to her, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear tenderly. "Nish'a also means precious."
Rose stared at him, struck, a lump forming in her throat. All traces of disappointment were long gone, and she felt vaguely foolish for having felt that way at all.
He smiled, almost as though he were reading her mind, though she knew he wouldn't without permission. "But that's not what I call you. I call you Nish'ala, not nish'a."
He paused, waiting, and Rose swallowed around the lump. "What's that mean, then?" she managed.
"The suffix -la is a possessive. So Nish'ala means my Rose,, or my precious, or even my precious Rose." (This was what I always intended Nish'ala to mean, way back when I wrote it in "Always".) Unaccountably he flushed, glanced away, then looked back at her with an adorably hopeful expression. "Do you mind? I mean, it's a bit arrogant of me to claim possession like that, I know, and-"
She placed a finger over his lips, shushing him. He shushed, but his eyes were still wide and filled with entreaty. "I've always been your Rose," she said quietly.
He smiled, and she let her hand drop. "Good," he said. Standing, he tugged her to her feet as well and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close. She rested her cheek against his shoulder and they just stood there, holding each other and listening to the chiming of the silver trees.
If you've been reading my fic at all, you've probably got the feeling that I'm all about the fluff. I really am, though I'm not above writing horrifically painful, gut-wrenching stuff when I'm in the mood for it, or when the bunny hits. However, many of those end up fluffy as well-witness the "I Ching" series. When it comes down to it, I really am a romantic at heart, and David Tennant's portrayal of broken!lonely!Doctor is heartbreaking enough that I can't help trying to fix it.
Next up: "Teach Me More," parts 1 and 2.