The Best-Laid Plans (2/6) Post-JE, Doctor, Dup. Doctor, Donna, Rose Rating - PG
WORDS: 4100
PICTURE: satanjewels
A sequel to The Best of Times, starting precisely where that story stopped.
SPOILERS : AU from about halfway through Journey's End, S4
CHARACTERS: Ten, 10.5, Donna, Rose
WARNINGS: Occasionally bawdy language.
DISCLAIMER: The characters are not my own. They're RTD's to torture as he sees fit, but nothing is perfect and no profit is intended.
After the Doctor's attempt to wipe her memories went a little pear-shaped, Donna dragged him back to Pete's World and made him talk to Rose properly. Everything was sorted out. The four of them would travel together, with Rose and 10.5 romantically linked and the Doctor looking on and holding back.
But affairs of the heart can be unpredictable. A post-JE romantic comedy with occasional smut.
Chapter One
Falstaff: I would it were bed-time, Hal, and all well.
(Henry IV, Part I)
Had he just made the biggest mistake of a very long life?
Sweat prickled across the Doctor’s scalp as he contemplated the perfect white sheets of the bed in front of him, where Rose lay, her golden hair fanned across the pillow and her scanty nightdress leaving little to the imagination. Her eyes, which had beckoned him teasingly at first, now began to darken with unspoken questions.
He was still fully dressed. He knew she’d taken herself off into the ensuite bathroom for several minutes, confidently expecting him to be between the sheets when she returned. He was letting her down, overcome with a need for her closeness that had remarkably little to do with sex.
There were many, many ways of longing for a person and in the months after Canary Wharf he had experienced them all. Hardly a minute of his life had passed without one of them ambushing him. When, finally, they began to subside a little, only pouncing on him once or twice a day, he’d made the mistake of recruiting Martha to stop them from returning.
It hadn’t worked; all that had happened was he’d found himself comparing the two women in a way that wasn’t fair to either, and had earned him Martha’s lasting bitterness. But he’d clung to those reminders like crumbs in his pocket, almost ready to panic when he sensed them beginning to disintegrate. They were all he’d left of Rose; the lump in the throat when he came upon her favourite mug at the back of a cupboard, the fleeting, probably imagined aroma of her shampoo. The soft sigh of memory brought by a familiar view, now experienced alone. The words tumbling out to share a new discovery with her, followed by the foolish realisation of her absence. The empty arms that longed to dance with her. The need to talk, and the greater need to be silent in her arms.
His life had been full of victories snatched from the jaws of defeat against improbable odds, but he was usually the one doing the snatching. This one had been snatched on his behalf; he was here purely because of Donna’s love and bravery, the fury he loved to watch her express and act on when something clearly wasn’t as it ought to be. This was one of the few times that he’d been on the receiving end of it, something he was still trying to process.
He’d kept his distance from the emotional fallout of all this by concentrating on his duplicate, wrapping Rose up like a present with a big bow and offering her up to him, like it or not. Damage limitation, wresting control back into his own hands. Somehow, he’d convinced himself, he’d make the two of them swap places and the longing that was pulling him apart would conveniently up sticks and move onto his human self. Every little gesture of affection he’d spotted between the two of them had nurtured that fantasy, but here in the last few moments it had completely shattered. He was right back where he’d started, the moment he’d seen her again at the far end of that street. He loved, longed for, wanted Rose in so many different ways that whatever was happening in his pants seemed like a sideshow.
On the other hand, he didn’t want to disappoint her. Because of his own stubbornness, she’d waited too long for this. Now he doubted whether he could possibly live up to her expectations, at least without scorching her mind with the full onslaught of a Time Lord’s desire. If the thought of cleansing Donna’s memories of him had been unbearable, doing that to Rose, even for her own protection, was infinitely more so. And there was more. This wasn’t something he could do once and then forget about. He wanted to be naked with her, her fingers exploring every inch of him, his face buried in her flesh. But he knew that once that happened, his need for her, again and again, would increase a hundredfold.
And he was tired, so tired. Tired of the thoughts rattling around in the cage of his mind with no solution presenting itself. Too tired to sleep, which in any case he rarely did. Tired of running, but afraid of standing still. Tired of belonging nowhere. There was someone else in the TARDIS now - him, yet not him, and with that thought he felt truly homeless. Even this universe was not his own.
He wanted to know the moves, to speak the language, to feel so grounded where he was that he no longer needed to think about it - or find ways of avoiding doing so. He wanted to belong in this bed in front of him, with this woman, for ever, but forever never came for him - yet he had no strength within him to resist the longing any more.
He wanted to be home, but he’d no idea how to go about it.
The minutes ticked by and the awkwardness between them grew. This was getting stupid and both of them knew it.
“You’re still dressed,” she said at last. And he was. Ridiculous. Laughable. Right down to the tie and the laced-up trainers. He couldn’t shake the fear that if he removed his clothes, there’d be nothing left inside them.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Sorry? What for?” She stood up and brushed her hands against his cheek, scattering feather-kisses around his lips. He realised he was shaking. Her hand rested, still now, picking up his anxiety.
“Sorry for running away,” he replied, and there were tears building in his eyes as he spoke. “I-I….don’t know how to stop. How to keep still. I met you running and that’s just what we always did…”
“I know.” Her lips brushed his forehead and he felt her warm breath against his skin. “I know terrible things have happened. I know things about you I didn’t know then, but when I look at you, do you know what I see?”
He shook his head. He was afraid to imagine what the answer to that question could be.
“I see someone who needs loving,” she replied. “So much loving, so much healing. You look old, like the world has beaten you.” As she spoke, her lips traced the lines on his face, the ones that had deepened in the last few years without her. The frown lines that had condemned the Family, the sagging skin beneath the eyes that had been a legacy of his year in the Master’s thrall.
“So much comforting,” she said again. “So why don’t we start there?”
“Rose, I only know how to endure,” he told her. “It’s all I have. I’m old, and I’ve seen so much. And I know that everything ends, no matter how much you want it not to.”
“But here we are. That’s a reality, too. So, start there. Lie with me, Doctor.”
“I owe you so much more than that.”
“You don’t owe me anything. It’s not like that.” She began to undress him, with tender, reverent hands, and he still couldn’t pinpoint the line between comfort and arousal, and that bothered him because he liked to make things clear. Her hands slipped around his neck as she loosed his tie; shamed into co-operating, he slipped off his jacket and let her unbutton his shirt. It smelled of sweat and fear and the metallic dust of the Crucible, and he wanted never to wear it again. Layers of clothing slipped to the floor, yet he stood there like Pinnochio, the little wooden boy who couldn’t hide the lies he told. Then she reached for his flies, pulled the zip and slipped her hand inside, taking his balls in her fingers, and all this hesitation became rather theoretical.
He gulped a breath, then relinquished it with a groan of release, but the fear remained, for how could he let go? Memories he didn’t want anyone to share, least of all her, crowded in and he tried to control them, afraid of flooding her with sensations her mind hadn’t evolved to process. This intimate union with a human being was a new experience for him; a moment ago he’d been reluctant to risk disappointing her, but now he just didn’t want to hurt her.
She knew why he was holding back. That, too, amazed him - that he’d managed to do the impossible, to find a partner who understood so much without him having to explain or take the initiative. Everyone else who cared about him tried to get him to talk and then they backed off, unnerved by the size of the wounds they’d exposed. Rose understood that dealing with the wounds had to come first. Words were his strategy for hiding them, not healing them.
“Stop protecting me,” she told him. “You’d be surprised how much I know. You don’t have many secrets left.”
That was a pretty terrifying thing for anyone to say to him, particularly Rose, because he believed her. He had always laughed in the face of danger, jumped off the edge of a cliff right into it and soared upwards on the thermal of release. Only when you learned to leap could you trust the safety net to appear.
Her hands moved around his waist and his trousers slipped down his legs, only to land on top of his shoes. He laughed, and that made them both feel better.
“I need to take my trainers off, don’t I?”
“So you are coming to bed, then?” she asked, her eyes twinkling.
“Oh, I should think so,” he replied. “I’d look a bit daft going around like this, don’t you think?”
The snort of laughter that provoked from them both was exactly the release they needed. “Oh come here, you,” he ordered her. “This has gone on long enough.”
“You can say that again,” she agreed.
He bent his head to examine her nightie. The hairs of his fringe stuck out and brushed the smooth skin above the neckline, and he felt as if they’d turned into exquisitely sensitive nerves. “All these buttons,” he remarked. “Can’t help wondering if they’re really necessary. Now laces - bows, that would be much more interesting. What’s the use of buttons that don’t do anything up?”
“I didn’t buy the nightie,” she explained.
“Then who did? They designed an instrument of exquisite torture for the sexually aroused male.”
“With his trousers round his ankles,” she reminded him.
“A mere technicality. With one bound he was free.” He managed to remove both trainers and trousers in a single movement, rather undermined by the fact that he lost his balance because he was trying to pull the nightie over her head at the same time - showing off, as usual. He let himself fall and ended up on the bed with Rose beside him. It wasn’t the most elegant way to begin the physical consummation of their relationship, but the look in her eyes and the peal of laughter that escaped her lips showed him that he’d nothing to worry about.
And finally, he did what Time Lords, by their very nature, were absolutely rubbish at doing. He abandoned himself to the pleasures of the present moment.
“Oh!” he said, expressively. “I’m so glad Donna threw that drink at me,”
“Me too,” Rose agreed with a slow smile, and began to stroke his cock.
******
“Orifice,” said the Doctor. “Now there’s an interesting word, don’t you think? Do you suppose the adjective that describes it would be orificial? Or orifine? No, that doesn’t sound right at all. I’d go with orificial. After all, it must have a Latin derivation. Os - mouth - that’s obvious, plus Latin -ficium, a making, doing (from facere, to make).”
He rolled the words around his teeth, popping the final monosyllable out with pleasure. Donna’s lay beside him, failing to respond with a determination that suggested she was still awake, but would much prefer not to be.
The Doctor felt awkwardly semi-welcome, tolerated rather than accepted despite the fact that they’d recently had a lot of fun in the bed where he now lay and this was, in some respect at least, his home - though, admittedly, he was not in the habit of looking at it from a recumbent state. At least, if he was recumbent, it was usually in the much less erotic context of the engine room and the only orifices involved were the destinations of spark plugs. Frowning, he stared up at the ceiling, his arms folded behind his neck. “Those struts are a bit dusty,” he remarked. “Been letting things go a bit, hasn’t he? Donna, did you like it when we did that finger thing? How about we try it with a toe? I mean, one of my toes, obviously….”
“Don’t you ever shut up?” grumbled Donna, without turning towards him. “I’m trying to sleep.”
“Sleep!” he repeated incredulously. “Donna, sleep is for tortoises! Complete waste of a third of your time. The Time Lords didn’t develop a highly advanced civilisation by sleeping.”
“Tough,” she muttered into the pillow. “Me - Donna - human. You really wouldn’t like me after less than eight hours. Now get out of my room.”
“Couldn’t we just try the toe thing, just for a minute?”
“Bloody hell, you’re insatiable!” she grumbled. “Wanna borrow my Rampant Rabbit?”
“I'd rather be your rampant rabbit,” he said, with a forlorn expression that was completely lost on her defiantly turned back.
“Is it always like this?” he asked, after a moment. “Human sex, I mean? So sort of - shallow and uncontrollable and yet deep at the same time - it’s all about bodies and sticky stuff and - Donna, are you listening? I was just thinking, maybe tomorrow they’ll sleep in and we could nip off somewhere for a bit before you have to go home. You could do the navigation…”
Silence. And she wasn’t asleep. “You’re pretending,” he said, reaching to tickle her. “I know you are, I’m inside your head. Come on, Donna, I’m only human and I need someone to talk to. Remember that song, those miserable gits who came from Manchester - well, anybody would be miserable if they lived there, it’s always raining isn’t it? Look at ‘Coronation Street’ - did you ever hear such a wailing willie of a theme tune?”
“What song?” she asked, grudgingly intrigued.
“Oh, you must’ve heard it. ‘How Soon is Now’. You know, it kind of starts off all wawawawa… wawaWAWawawa…” He made an attempt, not entirely successful, to reproduce Johnny Marr’s vibrato riff. The human voice box seemed to be considerably less versatile than four Fender Twins, however. Which was a pity, really.
“They had to do the whole thing in ten second bursts, over and over, you know,” he informed her. “Timing was everything. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Bit like sex, really, isn’t it? Except that’s only with two - thingies. Not four. Usually,” he qualified, after a pause for thought. “But the ten-second bursts - that stands.”
After another silent moment or two, he tried again, this time as Morrissey.
“ ‘I am human and I need to be loved…’”
“Yeah, and I’m human and I need to be asleep,” came the reply.
“‘I am the son and the heir of nothing in particular…’” he warbled mournfully. “I know that’s really an anthem of gay alienation and excruciating self-consciousness but I can really relate to that, you know. I don’t know who I really am. It’s the metacrisis - I have these memories in my head, but it’s like they don’t belong there.”
Goaded beyond endurance, Donna finally snapped. “The only bloody thing you are is a toddler with ADHD crossed with a Border Collie that needs obedience lessons!” she yelled, and slapped his face. “Go off into the kitchen and lick something.”
He sighed. “I get the feeling you don’t feel very sociable…” he began, and was silenced by the soft thud of a pillow in his face.
Human he might be - bodily at least, but there was no way he was going to get to sleep. Not after a day like this. So he swung his long legs out of bed, pulled a towelling robe around him and padded off to the control room. He needed, desperately, to talk to some one and try to untangle the stubborn knots of feeling in his mind. Only talking, about anything, everything, that came into his brain, could push away his fear.
Yes, fear. Fear of sliding between the cracks of other people’s fantasies. Fear of being tied to one planet - he remembered that as a very frustrating experience, one that had stayed with him for many years. Fear of coming to regard Rose not as a gift, but as a burden. She deserved better; he did, indeed, love her. But the precise form of that love eluded him. It all seemed very tied up with the way they’d once run around the universe together, adventuring among the stars and trying to ignore tomorrow, when the true nature of his thankless task would crash over him again. Being Rose’s human lover, part of her family and her way of life, was a very different proposition.
Donna, on the other hand, had fizzed into his life and managed to feel both exciting and familiar at the same time. It was as if he’d always known her. With her around, or her and the TARDIS at any rate, the Time Lord part of him wasn’t gone for ever. He had connection to his planet and his people, but the raw pain and guilt of their loss seemed to have receded into the background, replaced by a tingling desire to start afresh and carve out some kind of role for them both. The DoctorDonna - how he loved the sound of that.
He sighed and put his hand on the control column, looking far up into the mighty power that propelled this ship - his ship, surely, no matter what the reality was. For he was the Doctor, after all, and how could he be fully himself without the TARDIS, without two hearts and the prospect of regeneration and eternal life? Worst of all was the pressure he felt to be what other people expected of him - to tell Rose he loved her and let her make her own assumptions about what that love entailed, to let Jackie Tyler lecture him about settling down and having children, to slot into a world run by other people, and become part of their story rather than having the freedom to invent his own.
“You remember, don’t you, old girl?” he sighed. “It’s Gallifrey all over again. Everything mapped out, and I’m looking on from the sidelines. That’s not me.”
So, what did he want?
He wanted to take the TARDIS and run, and never stop. After all, he was the Doctor. Was that really so surprising?
He circled the console, hands plunged into his pockets, remembering bravado and hidden Satsumas. One by one, he touched the controls; the gravitic anomaliser, the automatic tempero-spatial co-ordinator, the arton frequency controller. He longed to try them all out, see how they performed in this alien universe, what adventures and dangers awaited the Time Lord who travelled with a faithful companion and a heart for the journey. Look how far Arthur Dent had gone in his PJ’s and a dressing-gown. Why not him?
And, after all, what could possibly be the harm in just one little trip? They’d be back before the lovebirds noticed they’d even gone.
“He is so gonna kill you,” said Donna’s warning voice inside his head.
She was right, of course. And being killed was altogether more serious when regeneration didn’t automatically follow it.
On second thoughts, strike out the “automatically.” He stopped, hand on the Vortex manipulator, looking up at the central column with its shifting pulses of light. He felt as if he’d been relegated to the role of sideshow, and there was enough Time Lord left in him for that to sit very badly. In fact, nothing was more likely to make him misbehave.
Wasn’t his fault, of course. Well, not in any moral sense. Look at the terrible role model he’d had.
He’d already told Rose several things he didn’t quite believe himself, some to spare her feelings, some because of the way the other Doctor was looking at him (he’d never realised before how scary he could be in this incarnation, probably because the experience of looking at him from the position of a non-Time Lord was new to him), and some because he had the vague idea that if he said them enough times some strange, alchemical process would make them true.
“I’m the same man. Same memories, same everything,” he’d told her. But he couldn’t be, or he would be in Rose’s bed by now, not hanging around the TARDIS wanting to be off. Having the same memories wasn’t quite enough. He’d need to have the same set of feelings about those memories, to feel that he’d lived through the experiences they recorded. But he didn’t. He’d sprung into being with them ready-made, and now he wanted the chance to make his own. It all felt a bit like your father telling you what life was all about; even if you loved your dad to bits and he was likely to be right, you’d prefer to discover those things yourself through a process of trial and error. Because it wasn’t just following good advice that made you the person you were. It was making mistakes. False starts. Regrets.
Here he was, not so much a cloned brother as a moody, adolescent heir apparent who couldn’t wait to prove himself in the big wide world. He didn’t want to settle down, even with Rose - he’d rather hang out with Falstaff and Poins. “I’ll so offend to make offence a skill,” he announced, to nobody in particular. “By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap to pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon….”
Now, was that Hal or his arch-rival Harry Percy? He was feeling rather Hal-ish, so he hoped not. Liked the “methinks”, though. And the “easy leap” had a sort of quantum feel to it. Nice word, quantum.
Shakespeare would have understood, he thought. He didn’t hang around with his wife and children, did he? Soon as the players came to Stratford, he was off like a shot to the bright lights and big city. Sometime, he must go back and find out where the Bard ended up in his lost years. Then he remembered that over here there might never have been a Shakespeare in the first place. It didn’t help. Now he’d another reason to start exploring.
If he did find Shakespeare, he’d tell him that “Henry IV Part I” was hardly the sexiest title for a play. How about, say, “Henry and the Spirits of the Vasty Deep?”, or “Henry and the Parmaceti for an Inward Bruise?”
There was a whole new universe out there, waiting for the intrepid traveller to take off without even the TARDIS data banks to guide him. You could get lost for years and come back with a whole new astral map and set of temporal co-ordinates. He’d everything he needed - even the perfect travelling partner, if she’d only wake up.
Why did humans need to do all this sleeping, anyway? Was it a body thing, or a brain thing? Maybe he was feeling this way because he still had a Time Lord’s brain.
Or maybe he was just as wired as hell, and bored with it.
He started to flip through the TARDIS manual for something to occupy his mind, thinking of a few minor adjustments he could make. Nothing too obvious, of course.
He decided he’d start with the handbrake. After all, if the TARDIS didn’t want to go anywhere, she wouldn’t. She was in the driving seat, as usual. What could possibly go wrong?
“Second star to the right and straight on till morning, old girl!” he announced. Then he pushed the lever down, just to see if it needed adjusting. He could have sworn that was all he intended to do - just get the feel of it.
The TARDIS began to dematerialize. He had no idea where they were going, but that was half the fun.
PICTURE: satanjewels
A sequel to The Best of Times, starting precisely where that story stopped.
SPOILERS : AU from about halfway through Journey's End, S4
CHARACTERS: Ten, 10.5, Donna, Rose
WARNINGS: Occasionally bawdy language.
DISCLAIMER: The characters are not my own. They're RTD's to torture as he sees fit, but nothing is perfect and no profit is intended.
After the Doctor's attempt to wipe her memories went a little pear-shaped, Donna dragged him back to Pete's World and made him talk to Rose properly. Everything was sorted out. The four of them would travel together, with Rose and 10.5 romantically linked and the Doctor looking on and holding back.
But affairs of the heart can be unpredictable. A post-JE romantic comedy with occasional smut.
Chapter One
Falstaff: I would it were bed-time, Hal, and all well.
(Henry IV, Part I)
Had he just made the biggest mistake of a very long life?
Sweat prickled across the Doctor’s scalp as he contemplated the perfect white sheets of the bed in front of him, where Rose lay, her golden hair fanned across the pillow and her scanty nightdress leaving little to the imagination. Her eyes, which had beckoned him teasingly at first, now began to darken with unspoken questions.
He was still fully dressed. He knew she’d taken herself off into the ensuite bathroom for several minutes, confidently expecting him to be between the sheets when she returned. He was letting her down, overcome with a need for her closeness that had remarkably little to do with sex.
There were many, many ways of longing for a person and in the months after Canary Wharf he had experienced them all. Hardly a minute of his life had passed without one of them ambushing him. When, finally, they began to subside a little, only pouncing on him once or twice a day, he’d made the mistake of recruiting Martha to stop them from returning.
It hadn’t worked; all that had happened was he’d found himself comparing the two women in a way that wasn’t fair to either, and had earned him Martha’s lasting bitterness. But he’d clung to those reminders like crumbs in his pocket, almost ready to panic when he sensed them beginning to disintegrate. They were all he’d left of Rose; the lump in the throat when he came upon her favourite mug at the back of a cupboard, the fleeting, probably imagined aroma of her shampoo. The soft sigh of memory brought by a familiar view, now experienced alone. The words tumbling out to share a new discovery with her, followed by the foolish realisation of her absence. The empty arms that longed to dance with her. The need to talk, and the greater need to be silent in her arms.
His life had been full of victories snatched from the jaws of defeat against improbable odds, but he was usually the one doing the snatching. This one had been snatched on his behalf; he was here purely because of Donna’s love and bravery, the fury he loved to watch her express and act on when something clearly wasn’t as it ought to be. This was one of the few times that he’d been on the receiving end of it, something he was still trying to process.
He’d kept his distance from the emotional fallout of all this by concentrating on his duplicate, wrapping Rose up like a present with a big bow and offering her up to him, like it or not. Damage limitation, wresting control back into his own hands. Somehow, he’d convinced himself, he’d make the two of them swap places and the longing that was pulling him apart would conveniently up sticks and move onto his human self. Every little gesture of affection he’d spotted between the two of them had nurtured that fantasy, but here in the last few moments it had completely shattered. He was right back where he’d started, the moment he’d seen her again at the far end of that street. He loved, longed for, wanted Rose in so many different ways that whatever was happening in his pants seemed like a sideshow.
On the other hand, he didn’t want to disappoint her. Because of his own stubbornness, she’d waited too long for this. Now he doubted whether he could possibly live up to her expectations, at least without scorching her mind with the full onslaught of a Time Lord’s desire. If the thought of cleansing Donna’s memories of him had been unbearable, doing that to Rose, even for her own protection, was infinitely more so. And there was more. This wasn’t something he could do once and then forget about. He wanted to be naked with her, her fingers exploring every inch of him, his face buried in her flesh. But he knew that once that happened, his need for her, again and again, would increase a hundredfold.
And he was tired, so tired. Tired of the thoughts rattling around in the cage of his mind with no solution presenting itself. Too tired to sleep, which in any case he rarely did. Tired of running, but afraid of standing still. Tired of belonging nowhere. There was someone else in the TARDIS now - him, yet not him, and with that thought he felt truly homeless. Even this universe was not his own.
He wanted to know the moves, to speak the language, to feel so grounded where he was that he no longer needed to think about it - or find ways of avoiding doing so. He wanted to belong in this bed in front of him, with this woman, for ever, but forever never came for him - yet he had no strength within him to resist the longing any more.
He wanted to be home, but he’d no idea how to go about it.
The minutes ticked by and the awkwardness between them grew. This was getting stupid and both of them knew it.
“You’re still dressed,” she said at last. And he was. Ridiculous. Laughable. Right down to the tie and the laced-up trainers. He couldn’t shake the fear that if he removed his clothes, there’d be nothing left inside them.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Sorry? What for?” She stood up and brushed her hands against his cheek, scattering feather-kisses around his lips. He realised he was shaking. Her hand rested, still now, picking up his anxiety.
“Sorry for running away,” he replied, and there were tears building in his eyes as he spoke. “I-I….don’t know how to stop. How to keep still. I met you running and that’s just what we always did…”
“I know.” Her lips brushed his forehead and he felt her warm breath against his skin. “I know terrible things have happened. I know things about you I didn’t know then, but when I look at you, do you know what I see?”
He shook his head. He was afraid to imagine what the answer to that question could be.
“I see someone who needs loving,” she replied. “So much loving, so much healing. You look old, like the world has beaten you.” As she spoke, her lips traced the lines on his face, the ones that had deepened in the last few years without her. The frown lines that had condemned the Family, the sagging skin beneath the eyes that had been a legacy of his year in the Master’s thrall.
“So much comforting,” she said again. “So why don’t we start there?”
“Rose, I only know how to endure,” he told her. “It’s all I have. I’m old, and I’ve seen so much. And I know that everything ends, no matter how much you want it not to.”
“But here we are. That’s a reality, too. So, start there. Lie with me, Doctor.”
“I owe you so much more than that.”
“You don’t owe me anything. It’s not like that.” She began to undress him, with tender, reverent hands, and he still couldn’t pinpoint the line between comfort and arousal, and that bothered him because he liked to make things clear. Her hands slipped around his neck as she loosed his tie; shamed into co-operating, he slipped off his jacket and let her unbutton his shirt. It smelled of sweat and fear and the metallic dust of the Crucible, and he wanted never to wear it again. Layers of clothing slipped to the floor, yet he stood there like Pinnochio, the little wooden boy who couldn’t hide the lies he told. Then she reached for his flies, pulled the zip and slipped her hand inside, taking his balls in her fingers, and all this hesitation became rather theoretical.
He gulped a breath, then relinquished it with a groan of release, but the fear remained, for how could he let go? Memories he didn’t want anyone to share, least of all her, crowded in and he tried to control them, afraid of flooding her with sensations her mind hadn’t evolved to process. This intimate union with a human being was a new experience for him; a moment ago he’d been reluctant to risk disappointing her, but now he just didn’t want to hurt her.
She knew why he was holding back. That, too, amazed him - that he’d managed to do the impossible, to find a partner who understood so much without him having to explain or take the initiative. Everyone else who cared about him tried to get him to talk and then they backed off, unnerved by the size of the wounds they’d exposed. Rose understood that dealing with the wounds had to come first. Words were his strategy for hiding them, not healing them.
“Stop protecting me,” she told him. “You’d be surprised how much I know. You don’t have many secrets left.”
That was a pretty terrifying thing for anyone to say to him, particularly Rose, because he believed her. He had always laughed in the face of danger, jumped off the edge of a cliff right into it and soared upwards on the thermal of release. Only when you learned to leap could you trust the safety net to appear.
Her hands moved around his waist and his trousers slipped down his legs, only to land on top of his shoes. He laughed, and that made them both feel better.
“I need to take my trainers off, don’t I?”
“So you are coming to bed, then?” she asked, her eyes twinkling.
“Oh, I should think so,” he replied. “I’d look a bit daft going around like this, don’t you think?”
The snort of laughter that provoked from them both was exactly the release they needed. “Oh come here, you,” he ordered her. “This has gone on long enough.”
“You can say that again,” she agreed.
He bent his head to examine her nightie. The hairs of his fringe stuck out and brushed the smooth skin above the neckline, and he felt as if they’d turned into exquisitely sensitive nerves. “All these buttons,” he remarked. “Can’t help wondering if they’re really necessary. Now laces - bows, that would be much more interesting. What’s the use of buttons that don’t do anything up?”
“I didn’t buy the nightie,” she explained.
“Then who did? They designed an instrument of exquisite torture for the sexually aroused male.”
“With his trousers round his ankles,” she reminded him.
“A mere technicality. With one bound he was free.” He managed to remove both trainers and trousers in a single movement, rather undermined by the fact that he lost his balance because he was trying to pull the nightie over her head at the same time - showing off, as usual. He let himself fall and ended up on the bed with Rose beside him. It wasn’t the most elegant way to begin the physical consummation of their relationship, but the look in her eyes and the peal of laughter that escaped her lips showed him that he’d nothing to worry about.
And finally, he did what Time Lords, by their very nature, were absolutely rubbish at doing. He abandoned himself to the pleasures of the present moment.
“Oh!” he said, expressively. “I’m so glad Donna threw that drink at me,”
“Me too,” Rose agreed with a slow smile, and began to stroke his cock.
******
“Orifice,” said the Doctor. “Now there’s an interesting word, don’t you think? Do you suppose the adjective that describes it would be orificial? Or orifine? No, that doesn’t sound right at all. I’d go with orificial. After all, it must have a Latin derivation. Os - mouth - that’s obvious, plus Latin -ficium, a making, doing (from facere, to make).”
He rolled the words around his teeth, popping the final monosyllable out with pleasure. Donna’s lay beside him, failing to respond with a determination that suggested she was still awake, but would much prefer not to be.
The Doctor felt awkwardly semi-welcome, tolerated rather than accepted despite the fact that they’d recently had a lot of fun in the bed where he now lay and this was, in some respect at least, his home - though, admittedly, he was not in the habit of looking at it from a recumbent state. At least, if he was recumbent, it was usually in the much less erotic context of the engine room and the only orifices involved were the destinations of spark plugs. Frowning, he stared up at the ceiling, his arms folded behind his neck. “Those struts are a bit dusty,” he remarked. “Been letting things go a bit, hasn’t he? Donna, did you like it when we did that finger thing? How about we try it with a toe? I mean, one of my toes, obviously….”
“Don’t you ever shut up?” grumbled Donna, without turning towards him. “I’m trying to sleep.”
“Sleep!” he repeated incredulously. “Donna, sleep is for tortoises! Complete waste of a third of your time. The Time Lords didn’t develop a highly advanced civilisation by sleeping.”
“Tough,” she muttered into the pillow. “Me - Donna - human. You really wouldn’t like me after less than eight hours. Now get out of my room.”
“Couldn’t we just try the toe thing, just for a minute?”
“Bloody hell, you’re insatiable!” she grumbled. “Wanna borrow my Rampant Rabbit?”
“I'd rather be your rampant rabbit,” he said, with a forlorn expression that was completely lost on her defiantly turned back.
“Is it always like this?” he asked, after a moment. “Human sex, I mean? So sort of - shallow and uncontrollable and yet deep at the same time - it’s all about bodies and sticky stuff and - Donna, are you listening? I was just thinking, maybe tomorrow they’ll sleep in and we could nip off somewhere for a bit before you have to go home. You could do the navigation…”
Silence. And she wasn’t asleep. “You’re pretending,” he said, reaching to tickle her. “I know you are, I’m inside your head. Come on, Donna, I’m only human and I need someone to talk to. Remember that song, those miserable gits who came from Manchester - well, anybody would be miserable if they lived there, it’s always raining isn’t it? Look at ‘Coronation Street’ - did you ever hear such a wailing willie of a theme tune?”
“What song?” she asked, grudgingly intrigued.
“Oh, you must’ve heard it. ‘How Soon is Now’. You know, it kind of starts off all wawawawa… wawaWAWawawa…” He made an attempt, not entirely successful, to reproduce Johnny Marr’s vibrato riff. The human voice box seemed to be considerably less versatile than four Fender Twins, however. Which was a pity, really.
“They had to do the whole thing in ten second bursts, over and over, you know,” he informed her. “Timing was everything. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Bit like sex, really, isn’t it? Except that’s only with two - thingies. Not four. Usually,” he qualified, after a pause for thought. “But the ten-second bursts - that stands.”
After another silent moment or two, he tried again, this time as Morrissey.
“ ‘I am human and I need to be loved…’”
“Yeah, and I’m human and I need to be asleep,” came the reply.
“‘I am the son and the heir of nothing in particular…’” he warbled mournfully. “I know that’s really an anthem of gay alienation and excruciating self-consciousness but I can really relate to that, you know. I don’t know who I really am. It’s the metacrisis - I have these memories in my head, but it’s like they don’t belong there.”
Goaded beyond endurance, Donna finally snapped. “The only bloody thing you are is a toddler with ADHD crossed with a Border Collie that needs obedience lessons!” she yelled, and slapped his face. “Go off into the kitchen and lick something.”
He sighed. “I get the feeling you don’t feel very sociable…” he began, and was silenced by the soft thud of a pillow in his face.
Human he might be - bodily at least, but there was no way he was going to get to sleep. Not after a day like this. So he swung his long legs out of bed, pulled a towelling robe around him and padded off to the control room. He needed, desperately, to talk to some one and try to untangle the stubborn knots of feeling in his mind. Only talking, about anything, everything, that came into his brain, could push away his fear.
Yes, fear. Fear of sliding between the cracks of other people’s fantasies. Fear of being tied to one planet - he remembered that as a very frustrating experience, one that had stayed with him for many years. Fear of coming to regard Rose not as a gift, but as a burden. She deserved better; he did, indeed, love her. But the precise form of that love eluded him. It all seemed very tied up with the way they’d once run around the universe together, adventuring among the stars and trying to ignore tomorrow, when the true nature of his thankless task would crash over him again. Being Rose’s human lover, part of her family and her way of life, was a very different proposition.
Donna, on the other hand, had fizzed into his life and managed to feel both exciting and familiar at the same time. It was as if he’d always known her. With her around, or her and the TARDIS at any rate, the Time Lord part of him wasn’t gone for ever. He had connection to his planet and his people, but the raw pain and guilt of their loss seemed to have receded into the background, replaced by a tingling desire to start afresh and carve out some kind of role for them both. The DoctorDonna - how he loved the sound of that.
He sighed and put his hand on the control column, looking far up into the mighty power that propelled this ship - his ship, surely, no matter what the reality was. For he was the Doctor, after all, and how could he be fully himself without the TARDIS, without two hearts and the prospect of regeneration and eternal life? Worst of all was the pressure he felt to be what other people expected of him - to tell Rose he loved her and let her make her own assumptions about what that love entailed, to let Jackie Tyler lecture him about settling down and having children, to slot into a world run by other people, and become part of their story rather than having the freedom to invent his own.
“You remember, don’t you, old girl?” he sighed. “It’s Gallifrey all over again. Everything mapped out, and I’m looking on from the sidelines. That’s not me.”
So, what did he want?
He wanted to take the TARDIS and run, and never stop. After all, he was the Doctor. Was that really so surprising?
He circled the console, hands plunged into his pockets, remembering bravado and hidden Satsumas. One by one, he touched the controls; the gravitic anomaliser, the automatic tempero-spatial co-ordinator, the arton frequency controller. He longed to try them all out, see how they performed in this alien universe, what adventures and dangers awaited the Time Lord who travelled with a faithful companion and a heart for the journey. Look how far Arthur Dent had gone in his PJ’s and a dressing-gown. Why not him?
And, after all, what could possibly be the harm in just one little trip? They’d be back before the lovebirds noticed they’d even gone.
“He is so gonna kill you,” said Donna’s warning voice inside his head.
She was right, of course. And being killed was altogether more serious when regeneration didn’t automatically follow it.
On second thoughts, strike out the “automatically.” He stopped, hand on the Vortex manipulator, looking up at the central column with its shifting pulses of light. He felt as if he’d been relegated to the role of sideshow, and there was enough Time Lord left in him for that to sit very badly. In fact, nothing was more likely to make him misbehave.
Wasn’t his fault, of course. Well, not in any moral sense. Look at the terrible role model he’d had.
He’d already told Rose several things he didn’t quite believe himself, some to spare her feelings, some because of the way the other Doctor was looking at him (he’d never realised before how scary he could be in this incarnation, probably because the experience of looking at him from the position of a non-Time Lord was new to him), and some because he had the vague idea that if he said them enough times some strange, alchemical process would make them true.
“I’m the same man. Same memories, same everything,” he’d told her. But he couldn’t be, or he would be in Rose’s bed by now, not hanging around the TARDIS wanting to be off. Having the same memories wasn’t quite enough. He’d need to have the same set of feelings about those memories, to feel that he’d lived through the experiences they recorded. But he didn’t. He’d sprung into being with them ready-made, and now he wanted the chance to make his own. It all felt a bit like your father telling you what life was all about; even if you loved your dad to bits and he was likely to be right, you’d prefer to discover those things yourself through a process of trial and error. Because it wasn’t just following good advice that made you the person you were. It was making mistakes. False starts. Regrets.
Here he was, not so much a cloned brother as a moody, adolescent heir apparent who couldn’t wait to prove himself in the big wide world. He didn’t want to settle down, even with Rose - he’d rather hang out with Falstaff and Poins. “I’ll so offend to make offence a skill,” he announced, to nobody in particular. “By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap to pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon….”
Now, was that Hal or his arch-rival Harry Percy? He was feeling rather Hal-ish, so he hoped not. Liked the “methinks”, though. And the “easy leap” had a sort of quantum feel to it. Nice word, quantum.
Shakespeare would have understood, he thought. He didn’t hang around with his wife and children, did he? Soon as the players came to Stratford, he was off like a shot to the bright lights and big city. Sometime, he must go back and find out where the Bard ended up in his lost years. Then he remembered that over here there might never have been a Shakespeare in the first place. It didn’t help. Now he’d another reason to start exploring.
If he did find Shakespeare, he’d tell him that “Henry IV Part I” was hardly the sexiest title for a play. How about, say, “Henry and the Spirits of the Vasty Deep?”, or “Henry and the Parmaceti for an Inward Bruise?”
There was a whole new universe out there, waiting for the intrepid traveller to take off without even the TARDIS data banks to guide him. You could get lost for years and come back with a whole new astral map and set of temporal co-ordinates. He’d everything he needed - even the perfect travelling partner, if she’d only wake up.
Why did humans need to do all this sleeping, anyway? Was it a body thing, or a brain thing? Maybe he was feeling this way because he still had a Time Lord’s brain.
Or maybe he was just as wired as hell, and bored with it.
He started to flip through the TARDIS manual for something to occupy his mind, thinking of a few minor adjustments he could make. Nothing too obvious, of course.
He decided he’d start with the handbrake. After all, if the TARDIS didn’t want to go anywhere, she wouldn’t. She was in the driving seat, as usual. What could possibly go wrong?
“Second star to the right and straight on till morning, old girl!” he announced. Then he pushed the lever down, just to see if it needed adjusting. He could have sworn that was all he intended to do - just get the feel of it.
The TARDIS began to dematerialize. He had no idea where they were going, but that was half the fun.