Left Behind 5/7
Author: wmr
Part 1: http://www.livejournal.com/community/better_with_3/52227.html
Part 2: http://www.livejournal.com/community/better_with_3/52674.html
Part 3: http://www.livejournal.com/community/better_with_3/53409.html
Part 4: http://www.livejournal.com/community/better_with_3/53543.html
5. A Kiss from a Rose
He wakes again and it’s day and Rose is there, sitting close to him, a book lying ignored in her lap. She’s watching him, and one hand is lying on the couch next to his arm, almost touching him but not quite.
“Hey.” He turns his head and smiles at her.
“Hi.” The brilliant, impish smile he remembers curves across her face. “Sleep well?”
“Think so.” He shifts slightly; he’s getting stiff and achy lying here, stuck on his back, his ankle firmly strapped so it can’t move. “Could do with being able to move around a bit, though.”
She gives him a sympathetic look, and the hand moves to squeeze his forearm. “I can imagine. But the Doctor says you have to stay here for now. If you move about too much you could tear open all the repair-work and that’d be bad.”
“Sounds like there’s a lot of it.” It’s hardly surprising, of course. He took a bullet in the heart. Internal damage, to tissue and muscle and veins and arteries, and of course the external injury. Even dermal regenerators can only do so much.
Even if he’d managed to get to a hospital, he’d have died. His injuries were too great for twenty-first century medical expertise.
“He was working on you for hours when we first got you in here.” A shadow crosses her face, and he realises that it really had been touch and go and Rose knows it. “At first he thought it was hopeless. Don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t giving up. Neither of us were. But he told me to prepare for the worst. That you might die anyway.”
Something the Doctor hadn’t mentioned...
“Well, I sure never expected to wake up again. Much less to see you two.” He moves his arm so that he can catch Rose’s hand in his. She curls her fingers around his.
She just smiles at him then, and they are silent for a while, at ease in each other’s company, two friends happy to be reunited.
“So, where’s the Doctor?” he asks, just mildly curious. It seems like the Time Lord’s been living in the infirmary lately.
“Doing stuff in the console room. His usual tinkering. You know what he’s like.” The smile remains on her face. “He says seeing as we’re not going anywhere as long as you’re recovering we might as well do a bit of shopping. Stock up on some stuff. He’s running out of his precious Earl Grey tea.” She grins then and rolls her eyes. “Ordinary Tetley’s isn’t good enough for him any more now he’s changed. Anyway, he’s going to take us somewhere there’s a Sainsbury’s and a Marks and a few other places. I’ve got a shopping list, so if there’s anything you want...”
“Can’t think of anything, but thanks.”
“Well, I’m not going for an hour or so yet, so if you change your mind...”
“You’re going on your own?” Was the Doctor really so anti-domestic that he’d send Rose to do his own grocery shopping?
She shrugs with a smile. “He’s staying to keep you company.”
“I don’t need him to do that! I can amuse myself for a few hours, honestly.” The last thing he wants is to be thought of as a burden. An obligation.
“Well, to tell the truth, he’s still fussing over you like a mother hen. Even when you’re asleep, he still has to keep checking all the indicators and drips to make sure you’re doing okay.”
He hasn’t quite realised that. Even after last night.
The sensation of being cared for is spreading. What Rose has just said about how hard the Doctor worked to save him... watching over him... what the Time Lord himself said about being willing to die to save him as well as Rose...
And that reminds him. He strokes his thumb across the back of her hand. “Thank you, Rose.”
Her eyes widen. “For what?”
“Saving me. Back on the Game Station.”
“Oh. Yeah, he said he’d told you what happened.” And she looks embarrassed.
“Sounds like you were pretty terrific.” And he smiles warmly, approvingly, at her.
She shrugs. “I only did what I had to. Couldn’t let him die. Couldn’t let either of you die.” She hesitates for a moment, then adds, “Course, he died anyway. To save me. That really bothered me for a while.”
“I can imagine.” He meets her gaze, trying to reassure her the way he knows the Doctor would want. After last night, he knows the Doctor considers his sacrifice well worth it. That he wouldn’t want Rose to feel a second’s guilt over it. “But you’re okay now?”
“Oh, yeah.” And her smile is back. “Took me a while to get used to the new body. But it’s still him. Still the Doctor. He hasn’t changed that much, and not in any way that matters.” In her words, in her tone of voice, in her eyes, he can hear her love for him. Knows that it goes deeper now than it ever has.
“Good. And, yeah, the new body is kind of a shock, and I can see he’s different in other ways too, but he’s still the same annoying, arrogant, brilliant son of a bitch he always was.” And Jack grins, knowing that’ll make her laugh.
It does. When she calms, she says, “He’s relieved you’ve accepted him so easily. Took me a lot longer.”
He shrugs. “I knew about regeneration. You didn’t.”
“Yeah.” Now she’s quiet again, her fingers moving restlessly against his hand. And, finally, just as he’s about to ask her what’s on her mind, she speaks. “I’m really sorry, Jack.”
He frowns, not understanding. “What the heck for?”
“Leaving you behind.” There’s a world of misery behind that statement. And he hates to hear it. Hates to make Rose unhappy.
“Hey.” He slips his hand free from hers and reaches for her face, stroking her cheek with gentle fingers, brushing her chin, tracing her lips. Even now, he can’t resist touching. Rose was made for caresses, even though she’s someone else’s and he shouldn’t. “You didn’t know I was alive. I know that. You have nothing to be sorry for.”
She catches his hand in hers, pressing it against her face, his fingertips over her lips where she can kiss them briefly. “I brought you back to life. I knew I was doing it. I should have remembered. But I didn’t, and we left, and it’s been two years for you, Jack - two years! And all this time you thought we left you.”
“No. Rose, no!” he insists, freeing his hand to reach for her, to tug him down to him, to give her the nearest approximation he can to a hug. “I know what happened. You had the Vortex in you. You didn’t remember what you did. And, honestly - ” He strokes her hair as she lays her head on his shoulder, carefully avoiding his wound. “ - it hasn’t been a bad two years. Running Torchwood’s been fun. Almost as good as running for my life with you two every other day.”
She raises her head to look at him. “But you missed us, right?” She missed him. It’s loud and clear in her eyes, her face.
“You bet I did. Every day, Rose. But I found you again, and that’s all that matters.” Even if, soon, they’ll say goodbye again. Because he can’t stay. Not when the Doctor loves Rose and Rose loves the Doctor and he’ll be the gooseberry in the corner.
“Yeah. It is.” She sits up then. “Better move. If he comes in and sees me sprawled all over you like this, he’ll throw a fit!”
“You didn’t hurt me. Really, I’m feeling a lot better.” And he is - psychologically as well as physically. Because this time, when he leaves, he’ll know that he is cared for. Not abandoned like an unwanted parcel - or an unwanted companion.
She studies him for a moment, then bends and kisses him. It’s like the kiss she gave him yesterday, warm and caring and sweet and almost lover-like, with parted lips and just a hint of heat, which affects him in ways he hopes she can’t see. He can’t resist reaching up and threading his hand through her hair.
As she draws back, and he has to let her go, he says, “What was that for?”
She shrugs, and there’s a Rose-smile he remembers well. Happy and laughing and glad to be alive and just slightly, faintly embarrassed. “Not complaining, are you? The Captain Jack I knew wouldn’t have cared why he got kissed.”
The Captain Jack she used to know would have laughed and agreed with her. But this is two years later and he is two years on from having fallen in love, completely and irrevocably. With this bright, fascinating, adventuring and courageous young woman, and with the darker, enigmatic, manic, all-knowing Time Lord who’d offered him a home.
If anyone had asked him to choose between the two, the sun and the moon, day and night as they sometimes seemed in contrast with each other, he couldn’t ever have done it. Settle for either Rose or the Doctor? Impossible. He’d fallen hard for both of them, inseparable, indivisible, together, a unit.
“I changed,” he told her. “You changed me. You and him. And, anyway, you always neatly avoided kissing me before. No matter how many times I pleaded.” And he grins, to show that he’s teasing, to avoid her seeing how much this matters to him.
She grins. “That was then, too. I wasn’t going to lock lips with a guy who’d just as soon kiss a Slitheen as me.”
“Rose!” He presses a hand to his heart. “I’m wounded! I do have some standards, you know! Margaret never did anything for me - not even in her borrowed body.”
She’s laughing now. “I think she fancied the Doctor, really. I’d have loved to be a fly on the wall when he took her out to dinner.”
He has to laugh too. “Yeah, I know. I wasn’t asked to join them, and the less time I spent in her company the happier I was - all that crap about how we were just going to let her be killed so we were no better than her kind - ” He pulls a face in memory. “But it would almost have been worth it to watch him with her. Especially as he said later she had a few tricks up her sleeve but he was too fast for her.”
Reminiscing. It brings back all the happy times, the fun and the laughter and the danger and the excitement, even the gut-wrenching fear when he - when they - thought they wouldn’t escape with their lives. They were together. They were a team. And life was better than it ever had been before. Or since.
And it reminds him that nothing will ever be the same again. That this is just a temporary return to that sense of belonging. To being in their orbit, part of the team of RoseandJackandtheDoctor.
Reminiscing. Like meeting up with an old friend, or a former colleague, years down the road. Excited at first to see each other, eager to catch up, spending time swapping stories about times past, finding out what’s happened since.
And then, gradually, the reminder that this is the past sinking in. That times have changed. That they’ve moved on - from each other, from the people they were then, from the lives they had then.
Rose and the Doctor have moved on. Together. He’s moved on. Alone.
And it hurts.
Even being with her now hurts. The memory of what they once were. What they once did. The knowledge that it’ll never be the same again.
So he schools his features into a sleepy look. Shifts a little uncomfortably, as if he’s in pain. And, immediately, she’s looking concerned. Wanting to know if he’s okay, if he needs any medication. He’s fine, he assures her. All he needs is rest. Sleep.
And so, as he’d hoped, she says she’ll leave him in peace.
Before she goes, she lays her palm against his cheek and says, “I’m so happy you’re here.”
And he closes his eyes and doesn’t answer, because he’s afraid he’ll say the wrong thing if he does.
*********
tbc