Fic: Duet For Three (Ten, 10.5, Rose)
AUTHOR: sensiblecat
WORDS: 4185
CHARACTERS: Ten, TenToo, Rose
SPOILERS: Up to "Planet of the Dead"
RATING: R this chapter, may go up later.
DISCLAIMER: The characters depicted are the intellectual property of the BBC and no personal profit is intended.
He can get everybody else home. It’s himself that’s the problem.
This is an occasional series - I honestly don't know quite where it's going to go. One year on, almost, from Journey's End, it follows on from "Home is an Old Brown Coat" as Human Ten and Rose try to deal with the continuing presence of the original Tenth Doctor in their minds and lives.
I've thought a lot about that scene in Journey's End. The things the Doctor said about his other self. "I'm a better person becuase of you," "We saved the world, but at a cost. That cost was him." Most of all, "He needs you. That's very me." Were they true at all? Or just the delusions of a character fatally divided within himself?
While they travel, they play games. They use their ionic power to literally create make-believe worlds in which to play.
ROSE
In-flight entertainment.
THE DOCTOR
Helps keep them happy. While they're happy, they can feed off each other’s love. Without it, they're lost.
(From "Fear Her")
THIS WORLD
The Tylers’ best guestroom, where he and Rose lie side by side in their neat twin beds, is a very odd place, thinks the Doctor as he lies, wide awake, on his back with his hands folded behind his neck.
Furniture, all built-in - and somehow, if it was made of chipboard instead of solid oak, it would look less odd, rather than more, because then it would match the temporary nature of the guestroom’s function. There are cupboards with glass doors in each corner, for example, but they’re more like display cabinets really. Each is gently backlit and contains three spaces defined by two glass shelves - and on the shelves sit large tropical shells and, in some cases, lumps of coral.
The Doctor can’t stop looking at the coral. He could pull out the sonic screwdriver from under his pillow (Oxford pillowcase, with swathes of pointless lace) and turn the lighting green in a moment, but that would probably intensify the sense of loss he’s already feeling.
Here he is, stuck on a different Earth in this pretentious human house. It doesn’t feel like Rose’s home and it feels even less like his. What kind of person sticks coral in a display cabinet? It shouldn’t even be there, he’s thinking. Humans really are idiots when it comes to their sensitive, irreplaceable natural environment and it makes his blood boil (metaphorically, of course - there are species that are capable of that biological state, thermophiles on the Fomox’k’thingummy Galaxy, mostly) - anyway, he hates the thought of some interior designer thinking it would be a good idea to go chipping off chunks of somebody’s home just to make an occasionally-used bedroom look inoffensively pretty.
He wishes now he’d sneaked a little bit of coral into his coat pocket before leaving. Only he hadn’t had a coat, back then, all of four days ago, not a coat to call his own (at least one good thing had happened today). He looks over to the wardrobe and struggles with the desire to get up, open the door, and make sure his new coat is still there.
It was almost as if it had been put in that shop just waiting for him and Rose to find it. Meant to be. Same smell and everything.
Ever since, he’s been trying to work out how - or if - his other self had somehow been responsible.
Probably not. He’ll be feeling far too sorry for himself.
Just like him.
He’s missing the TARDIS so much it’s like trying to live in an echo chamber. He keeps trying to put out a mental feeler across the void between the two universes, just to make a contact, no matter how fleeting, with her comforting presence. Being without her is like drifting in space. He might feel better, momentarily at least, if he could just stretch out his fingertips and make contact with Rose’s apparently sleeping body. Or he might not. He can’t help resenting the assumption his parent double has made, that Rose is adequate compensation for losing the TARDIS. He wants, so very much, for it to be the truth. But it isn’t. For one thing, he and Rose are still awkward and uncertain around each other. In theory, there’s no reason why they couldn’t move to a room with a double bed. In practice, however, neither of them feels able to bring up the subject.
Well, he doesn’t. What Rose is thinking is her own business, though he longs for it to be his, too.
He needs the TARDIS. He needs the answer when his mind reaches out. The connection to his culture and his people. The womb-like struts of her interior curling around him, suspending him protectively in a vast universe. The background hum that’s as much mental as physically manifest. The pulse of the old ship’s life when he reaches out and lays a palm on her. He’s only half himself.
He understands how the mistake was made. When he had the TARDIS and he didn’t have Rose, he thought that having Rose back would make him whole. But he’d never contemplated a life with Rose and no TARDIS. He feels rather guilty about his sense of loss, burdened by the sacrifice made by his other self. A sacrifice you aren’t consulted about is surprisingly difficult to accept gracefully, and he’s beginning to experience pangs of guilt about all the times he’s inflicted them on lesser species.
It’s no good. He’s going to have to get up and go and touch his coat, or wander over to the window and look out at the stars. He can’t just lie here. Sleep is so human. He knows he’s tired, that his body is craving rest, but his mind isn’t human and it’s banging around in there looking for…what, precisely?
He climbs out of bed, stretches, wanders over to the window and draws the curtains back. So many stars; he only wishes he could see them properly. Close up is all relative of course - even he can’t get really close to stars. Now, though, he can’t get closer than the surface of one little planet. That one, no that one, yeah, that one….They taunt him, unreachable with his present resources. His trapped consciousness bangs and batters against his skull.
Help! He howls silently to the star-filled sky. I want to be happy. Really, I do. It’s just, right now, I can’t…
****
“Can’t sleep?”
She’s there, beside him, and her voice is losing that edge of poshness it has when she’s around other people. There’s still a Powell Estate girl inside her, the one he fell in love with who’d never wear warm enough clothes, maybe didn’t even have them. Who’d stand in a snowstorm in a little pink jacket and think a scarf would make her stop shivering.
“Nope.”
He wonders if she expects him to make the first move. After all, he’s human now. But there’s all kinds of reasons not to. He’s not even sure whether she’d be having sex with a human or a Time Lord. He’s sort of dreading having to explain the complications.
Maybe she’s just getting up to comfort him. After all, they were together for two years and she could have left him any time if sex was all she’d wanted.
“Missed you,” she says, simply.
“Well,” he answers. “Been a bit busy, you know.”
There’s a lot of stories he could tell her about those missing years. He’s not sure if he wants to. She probably feels the same.
“And now you’re not,” she says. “You’re stuck.”
“Well, stuck with you, that’s not so bad.” It almost comes out automatically.
“We can’t go on saying those old lines,” she points out. A sentiment he shares, as it happens. Sooner or later they’ll have to acknowledge the fact that they had a life apart, a life that contained things on both sides that they’d prefer not to talk about that often. After all, she never used to carry a gun and the expression that went with it.
He looks at her. “Got any better ideas?”
He’s parted the curtains and she studies his face in the moonlight. “You look just like him,” she observes.
“I am just like him.” But as he says it he turns from her, lays his hand on the catch of the window and opens it, steps onto the balcony. And he’s remembering another balcony, far away, concrete and graffiti and fruit in the pocket of his cheap towelling robe.
Some time the memories will have to stop. Then can’t go round and round just nibbling at the edges of them without making any new ones.
She follows him out. There’s a little round table and they sit, restrained, one on either side of it, and they’re both avoiding looking up because it hurts too much.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she says. He admires her honesty.
“Me, neither.”
“If you were him, you’d never say that,” she tells him. “You’d make up some ‘Allonz-y’ type remark and rush off and…”
The sentence hangs unfinished in the air. He’d always had that option, hadn’t he? Going somewhere, rather than finishing things.
“I’m stuck in the middle with you,” he says. “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.”
“Except it’s not funny.”
And then she stands up and turns away, and she’s looking at the stars after all. Her shoulders shake a little and he wonders if she’s trying not to cry.
He gets up, moves nearer, wraps his arm around her back. “Come here,” he orders her, gently. She sags against him.
“There is another way,” he says. “You might not like it, but then you don’t seem to be liking this.”
“Don’t know what you mean,” she says.
“You’re not happy,” he says. “Not really. And that’s okay. No, really, it is. What’s just happened to you is beyond human comprehension.”
She doesn’t quite believe he understands, and that awareness hurts him a little.
“You’re thinking that every step closer to me takes you further away from him. And I’m thinking that if I ever admit I need anything apart from you, I’ve let him down.”
“Do you?” she asks. “Need anything else, I mean?”
Should he lie to her? No, what good would that do - she’d know. She always knows.
“Yeah, course I do,” he confesses. “I’m still a Time Lord in here.” He taps a finger on his skull. “I need the TARDIS. I’m lost without her. It’s more than having no home. It’s like only being half a person. And Donna. I miss her too, even though I am her, a bit. I wish she was here so I could ask her which bits are her and which are me.”
She sort of laughs. “He could never have put it as well as that.”
“Donna was very good at understanding these things,” he reminds her. “Somehow, she could be analytical and empathetic at the same time. And all while she was calling me a space prawn and a long streak of alien nothing.”
“So what does it feel like?” she asks. “Being a bit of Donna and a bit of Doctor and a bit of human too?”
“Weird,” he says, rubbing his hair. “I feel like I was thrown together from the bits he didn’t want.”
She frowns. “Don’t take any notice of that blood and war rubbish. He just said that to make himself feel better.”
“And to manipulate you.”
“Since you said so, yeah. And it worked,” she adds, in disgust.
“Anyway,” he finishes, since he’s hardly eager to linger over those few moments at Bad Wolf Bay. “That’s enough about me.” He lifts a hair from her cheek and stares into the beautiful brown eyes that have never really left him. “There is another way,” he says. “I haven’t been human enough for long enough to know if you’d hate it or not.”
Oh, she’s brave, his Rose. She looks right at him and says, “Try me.”
A little flash of jealousy rears its head, then fizzles away like water spitting on a hot griddle. He must make her bigger, not try to shrink himself to fit. Nothing else would honour her.
“I’m not complete,” he explains. “And he isn’t complete either. He doesn’t have you. I don’t…”
She says it for him. “The TARDIS.”
He wants to crush her into a hug for being so ready to understand him.
“It’s not that difficult,” she goes on, reading his thoughts. “I can’t imagine you without her, either. It’s just not right. You’re the Doctor. You ought to be in the TARDIS.” And her words speed up. She’s upset. “Please don’t think I don’t love you - that it was just the travelling and stuff - it’s not about me. It’s about you. About you being complete. ‘Cause right now, you’re not.” She stops talking with a sigh. “But I don’t see what we can do about it.”
“We could let him in,” he says. “Don’t try to avoid him. He’s here, standing here right in front of you. All the time I’m having to shut him out. I don’t want you to have to share me.”
“It’s not like that.” Then she hesitates and looks up at him, open and vulnerable. “Is it?”
She’s looking for answers. He hopes the only ones he has to offer are the ones she wants.
“Rose,” he says gently, “what if I told you that every time we came together you were doing it with him as well as me?”
Her mouth falls open. He realises what a shock that must be to hear, coming from the lips of him, of all people, Mr Cock-tease in a pinstripe suit.
“Um…”
“I’m sorry,” he says, experiencing the unfamiliar sensation of burning cheeks - a very human, physical betrayal of embarrassment. “Forget I said that. It’s too soon.”
“I think I might like it,” she says carefully, and he realises afresh how often he’s underestimated her.
“At least he wouldn’t be lonely,” she adds.
They look at each other, smiling, and he crosses the space between their faces, their open lips. He draws her into a good old hug, but this time with the obvious bits not missing. No longer alien, he’s no excuses left. He kisses her, delicately at first because he’s afraid of his hunger for her and what it might reveal. They’re picking their way through a fractured landscape full of rocky pits and gullies, where the hidden crevices might contain anything from fearsome monsters to beautiful blooms.
It’s been there between them constantly for the last few days - now that he’s human, what’s holding him back? It’s not all about waiting for Rose to accept him. They haven’t had the conversation yet, and he doesn’t know how he’ll make himself understood when they do. Yes, his body’s human. He feels a human’s desire for her - or at least, he assumes that’s what it is. But really, it’s not dissimilar to the way he felt about her before. His mind isn’t human. He still associates the act of copulation with reproduction, and he’s not sure he’s even capable of it otherwise.
How’s he going to tell her? She’s already waited so long - too long. He’s becoming cautious of drawing too close to her physically, in case it raises expectations he can’t fulfil. “I love you,” he’d whispered in her ear on the beach. Indeed he does, just as his original self does. It’s the assumption of a natural progression from a declaration of love to its consummation in the bedroom that bothers him.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“I just don’t want to let you down,” he replies.
She looks at him, seems about to speak, and he wishes he could touch her mind, somehow pouring all this complicated dilemma into it and working alongside her towards a solution.
“You’ve gone through so much to be with me,” he adds. “I don’t want things to go on being…difficult. You know. Between us. You deserve better.”
Her face registers her irritation. He’s doing it again, isn’t he - deciding what she can handle and making choices for her. “You’re an alien. It was never going to be straightforward. Even when there was only you - him - oh, I don’t know!”
And for a minute he thinks she’s going to cry.
“I hate him!” she declares. “He doesn’t know what anything’s like! He doesn’t stay around for long enough to know! I hate the way he called you “the cost” as if you aren’t a real person with feelings…how would he like it?”
“He was trying to make it better for you. Trying to make you feel responsible for me.” He’d tried to be neutral about it, but there’s bitterness creeping into his voice for a number of reasons. First, she’s right - who could feel good about the way he’d been referred to, there on the beach, almost as if he wasn’t there, just a formless lump waiting to be brought to life. And also because he saw so clearly what was going on. How his other self was trying to distance himself, to deny the deepest desires of his hearts, and to manipulate Rose by appealing to her sympathy and sense of duty.
"But how can I hate him when I love you?" she goes on. "Or love you when I love him? There’s always things you hate, things you love - they’re all mixed up together and he didn’t seem to get that. He said I’d made him a better person, but if that had been true he’d never have said those things, would he?”
“Unless he was lying.”
She sits down, rubs her eyes and flops back against the chair, impatient and resigned.
“Well,” he goes on. “You know he does lie. Or at least, he lies to himself.”
“And me. He lied about Jack.”
His mouth twists uneasily. “I was so afraid of losing you.”
“Were you jealous of him?”
He shakes his head without conviction. “Maybe, a bit. Threatened. After all, Jack was the human one.”
“Oh, and I’d so shown I’d go for humans!”
“Let’s stop all this,” he says. “It isn’t leading anywhere.”
There’s a tense silence. She looks at him so intently that he wonders if she shares his desire to peel away the physical barriers separating them and move directly to the union of minds. Rose’s ability to grasp a complicated situation constantly amazes him. He suspects that his tendency to run from her is based on the knowledge that she already knows him too well.
“Do you want us both?” he asks.
“I want the whole of you,” she says, after a moment’s hard thinking. “If that means both of you…well, yeah. I guess that is what I want.” Looking at him now with her eyes filled with a pleading hope, she says, “I never asked for this to be a normal relationship.” Her voice breaks. “I just want you.”
She’s in his arms again, crying on his shoulder, and this time feels real, not a step towards a place he may never be able to reach.
“He needs me,” she weeps. “He shouldn’t be on his own. I remember how he looked the time he came through. Awful. Like he hadn’t slept or eaten - he just needed me so much. And he still does. And he’s still out there, doin’ all that stuff, all those stupid planets to save and I promised…I want to be there for him, but I don’t want to hurt you either. I can’t just stop thinking about him. It’s all just a horrible mess…”
“Yeah,” he sighs, stroking her hair as she cries against him. “But there is a way to help him, you know.”
She breaks the embrace, wipes her eyes and is immediately composed. “Tell me.”
He puts his hands on the sides of her head. “The two of us - him and me - we could never be completely parted,” he explains. “We’re the same person. Even across the void, standing against that white wall, I could feel you. And you were human. He’s a Time Lord, and he’s me. You can’t hide from yourself.”
“Isn’t that what he always did?”
“He tried. I tried. He tried to hide me here. I’m all the things he can’t say, won’t even let himself feel. The emotional pressure that built up, that’s what made the regeneration go wrong the way it did.”
“I thought he made it happen,” she says, puzzled and a little disappointed. She believed, and he’d wanted her to believe, that he’d chosen not to change.
“Nah,” he says. “Master of improvisation, that’s me. He pushed all those difficult, un-Time Lordy bits away into that hand in a jar and said, ‘Right, Rose can have those, they’re the bits she wants anyway. And I can go on being the Lonely God and doing that stuff I do to make myself feel better.’”
“And does he feel better?” she sighs.
He sighs too. “What do you think?”
“So can we help him?”
He nods and kisses her again, and her mouth and her body respond as she relaxes against him, for the first time in this new world where they are both strangers, without reserve or guilt.
“How?” she asks.
“By loving each other,” he replies. “Love me, and you’ll be loving him.”
“Is it really that easy?” she asks. She’s right to be suspicious.
“It could be. If he doesn’t shut us out.”
“If?” she repeats.
“He does have some form with that,” he acknowledges. “But we could try.”
THIS WORLD
and all i do is miss you and the way we used to be
all i do is keep the beat and bad company
all i do is kiss you through the bars of a rhyme
julie i'd do the stars with you any time
(Mark Knopfler, "Romeo and Juliet")
Four knocks, that woman just said. Carmen, that was her name. Not Chloe. Chloe was…oh, never mind.
He thinks about that bloke Malcolm, completely unashamed, shouting the words he’s never been able to bring himself to say out loud, or ever think, to be honest. They’d almost had to drag him off. “I love him!” He wonders what the Brigadier would have had to say about an outburst like that, back in the day. Times have changed. He’s changed.
Time was, he’d have seen Christina as a challenge. A daring, intelligent, potential-filled human being in all her glory, with her talents being drawn in the wrong direction. Someone to make better, to change, to inspire.
Now he can’t even inspire himself. His life is as flat as a piece of paper, as stale as the water in a child’s painting cup abandoned days ago. He can put on a show of bravado but it only works because he gets rid of people before they find out what a shallow thing it is. That’s why he never goes back to see his friends any more. He’s a hollow man, much smaller on the inside than he looks. Shrivelled up inside. Going through the motions.
And it wasn’t always like this. He tries not to think of the way it could have been. The way it was, for such a brief and lovely interlude in his very long life. Fireworks lighting up the sky. A young girl waiting, smiling, holding out a fairy cake to him. In the vast, uncharted reaches of the lonely universe, one person remembering the trivial things he appreciated, and that one made all the difference.
Oh, he can go on to other people about it - the importance of chops and gravy, a home to go to. He can get everybody else home. It’s himself that’s the problem. He wonders if she ever thinks of him and the man he used to be. No, she won’t. She’s got a better man than him now.
When did he stop believing his own stories? Can’t beat a good story - oldest human invention, probably. Well, maybe after fire; can’t imaging a good storytelling session without a campfire to huddle around, can you? ‘Cause it’s a dark, big, lonely place, this old universe. Full of fear, and loneliness - and you need someone to hold up a light and make it a bit less scary.
That’s his job. Been doing it so long now, he can’t remember whether it’s the stuff he does that makes all the difference, or the tales that get told about it. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Just the energy of the stories, that’s what makes the world feel better. Out there, they’re all doing it. He knows Captain Magambo lied - she did salute. Of course she would - he’s the Doctor, the one they all long to meet, dream of, worship, love, base their myths and fantasies around. There’s probably even a TV show about him on somewhere these days. But nobody ever waits for him any more with a fairy cake on the palm of their hand and a twinkle in their eyes.
Still, no use hanging around thinking like that. There’s always somewhere to be going. Something to be doing. He doesn’t need to go looking for trouble - it finds him. Blimey, he only has to get on a ruddy bus and it’s off through a wormhole into another adventure.
He let her go. No, it was worse than that - he freed her. Perverted the course of justice. That DI (are you deducting, Lewis?) had probably spent half his life trying to catch her, trying to make the world a safer place, like he was supposed to be doing. But what could they do about it? He was the Doctor, he could do what he blinking well liked. There had to be some perks, or who’d want the job? He certainly didn’t.
I am the Doctor. You will obey me.
He shivers a little, remembering the sound of drums.
WORDS: 4185
CHARACTERS: Ten, TenToo, Rose
SPOILERS: Up to "Planet of the Dead"
RATING: R this chapter, may go up later.
DISCLAIMER: The characters depicted are the intellectual property of the BBC and no personal profit is intended.
He can get everybody else home. It’s himself that’s the problem.
This is an occasional series - I honestly don't know quite where it's going to go. One year on, almost, from Journey's End, it follows on from "Home is an Old Brown Coat" as Human Ten and Rose try to deal with the continuing presence of the original Tenth Doctor in their minds and lives.
I've thought a lot about that scene in Journey's End. The things the Doctor said about his other self. "I'm a better person becuase of you," "We saved the world, but at a cost. That cost was him." Most of all, "He needs you. That's very me." Were they true at all? Or just the delusions of a character fatally divided within himself?
While they travel, they play games. They use their ionic power to literally create make-believe worlds in which to play.
ROSE
In-flight entertainment.
THE DOCTOR
Helps keep them happy. While they're happy, they can feed off each other’s love. Without it, they're lost.
(From "Fear Her")
THIS WORLD
The Tylers’ best guestroom, where he and Rose lie side by side in their neat twin beds, is a very odd place, thinks the Doctor as he lies, wide awake, on his back with his hands folded behind his neck.
Furniture, all built-in - and somehow, if it was made of chipboard instead of solid oak, it would look less odd, rather than more, because then it would match the temporary nature of the guestroom’s function. There are cupboards with glass doors in each corner, for example, but they’re more like display cabinets really. Each is gently backlit and contains three spaces defined by two glass shelves - and on the shelves sit large tropical shells and, in some cases, lumps of coral.
The Doctor can’t stop looking at the coral. He could pull out the sonic screwdriver from under his pillow (Oxford pillowcase, with swathes of pointless lace) and turn the lighting green in a moment, but that would probably intensify the sense of loss he’s already feeling.
Here he is, stuck on a different Earth in this pretentious human house. It doesn’t feel like Rose’s home and it feels even less like his. What kind of person sticks coral in a display cabinet? It shouldn’t even be there, he’s thinking. Humans really are idiots when it comes to their sensitive, irreplaceable natural environment and it makes his blood boil (metaphorically, of course - there are species that are capable of that biological state, thermophiles on the Fomox’k’thingummy Galaxy, mostly) - anyway, he hates the thought of some interior designer thinking it would be a good idea to go chipping off chunks of somebody’s home just to make an occasionally-used bedroom look inoffensively pretty.
He wishes now he’d sneaked a little bit of coral into his coat pocket before leaving. Only he hadn’t had a coat, back then, all of four days ago, not a coat to call his own (at least one good thing had happened today). He looks over to the wardrobe and struggles with the desire to get up, open the door, and make sure his new coat is still there.
It was almost as if it had been put in that shop just waiting for him and Rose to find it. Meant to be. Same smell and everything.
Ever since, he’s been trying to work out how - or if - his other self had somehow been responsible.
Probably not. He’ll be feeling far too sorry for himself.
Just like him.
He’s missing the TARDIS so much it’s like trying to live in an echo chamber. He keeps trying to put out a mental feeler across the void between the two universes, just to make a contact, no matter how fleeting, with her comforting presence. Being without her is like drifting in space. He might feel better, momentarily at least, if he could just stretch out his fingertips and make contact with Rose’s apparently sleeping body. Or he might not. He can’t help resenting the assumption his parent double has made, that Rose is adequate compensation for losing the TARDIS. He wants, so very much, for it to be the truth. But it isn’t. For one thing, he and Rose are still awkward and uncertain around each other. In theory, there’s no reason why they couldn’t move to a room with a double bed. In practice, however, neither of them feels able to bring up the subject.
Well, he doesn’t. What Rose is thinking is her own business, though he longs for it to be his, too.
He needs the TARDIS. He needs the answer when his mind reaches out. The connection to his culture and his people. The womb-like struts of her interior curling around him, suspending him protectively in a vast universe. The background hum that’s as much mental as physically manifest. The pulse of the old ship’s life when he reaches out and lays a palm on her. He’s only half himself.
He understands how the mistake was made. When he had the TARDIS and he didn’t have Rose, he thought that having Rose back would make him whole. But he’d never contemplated a life with Rose and no TARDIS. He feels rather guilty about his sense of loss, burdened by the sacrifice made by his other self. A sacrifice you aren’t consulted about is surprisingly difficult to accept gracefully, and he’s beginning to experience pangs of guilt about all the times he’s inflicted them on lesser species.
It’s no good. He’s going to have to get up and go and touch his coat, or wander over to the window and look out at the stars. He can’t just lie here. Sleep is so human. He knows he’s tired, that his body is craving rest, but his mind isn’t human and it’s banging around in there looking for…what, precisely?
He climbs out of bed, stretches, wanders over to the window and draws the curtains back. So many stars; he only wishes he could see them properly. Close up is all relative of course - even he can’t get really close to stars. Now, though, he can’t get closer than the surface of one little planet. That one, no that one, yeah, that one….They taunt him, unreachable with his present resources. His trapped consciousness bangs and batters against his skull.
Help! He howls silently to the star-filled sky. I want to be happy. Really, I do. It’s just, right now, I can’t…
****
“Can’t sleep?”
She’s there, beside him, and her voice is losing that edge of poshness it has when she’s around other people. There’s still a Powell Estate girl inside her, the one he fell in love with who’d never wear warm enough clothes, maybe didn’t even have them. Who’d stand in a snowstorm in a little pink jacket and think a scarf would make her stop shivering.
“Nope.”
He wonders if she expects him to make the first move. After all, he’s human now. But there’s all kinds of reasons not to. He’s not even sure whether she’d be having sex with a human or a Time Lord. He’s sort of dreading having to explain the complications.
Maybe she’s just getting up to comfort him. After all, they were together for two years and she could have left him any time if sex was all she’d wanted.
“Missed you,” she says, simply.
“Well,” he answers. “Been a bit busy, you know.”
There’s a lot of stories he could tell her about those missing years. He’s not sure if he wants to. She probably feels the same.
“And now you’re not,” she says. “You’re stuck.”
“Well, stuck with you, that’s not so bad.” It almost comes out automatically.
“We can’t go on saying those old lines,” she points out. A sentiment he shares, as it happens. Sooner or later they’ll have to acknowledge the fact that they had a life apart, a life that contained things on both sides that they’d prefer not to talk about that often. After all, she never used to carry a gun and the expression that went with it.
He looks at her. “Got any better ideas?”
He’s parted the curtains and she studies his face in the moonlight. “You look just like him,” she observes.
“I am just like him.” But as he says it he turns from her, lays his hand on the catch of the window and opens it, steps onto the balcony. And he’s remembering another balcony, far away, concrete and graffiti and fruit in the pocket of his cheap towelling robe.
Some time the memories will have to stop. Then can’t go round and round just nibbling at the edges of them without making any new ones.
She follows him out. There’s a little round table and they sit, restrained, one on either side of it, and they’re both avoiding looking up because it hurts too much.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she says. He admires her honesty.
“Me, neither.”
“If you were him, you’d never say that,” she tells him. “You’d make up some ‘Allonz-y’ type remark and rush off and…”
The sentence hangs unfinished in the air. He’d always had that option, hadn’t he? Going somewhere, rather than finishing things.
“I’m stuck in the middle with you,” he says. “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.”
“Except it’s not funny.”
And then she stands up and turns away, and she’s looking at the stars after all. Her shoulders shake a little and he wonders if she’s trying not to cry.
He gets up, moves nearer, wraps his arm around her back. “Come here,” he orders her, gently. She sags against him.
“There is another way,” he says. “You might not like it, but then you don’t seem to be liking this.”
“Don’t know what you mean,” she says.
“You’re not happy,” he says. “Not really. And that’s okay. No, really, it is. What’s just happened to you is beyond human comprehension.”
She doesn’t quite believe he understands, and that awareness hurts him a little.
“You’re thinking that every step closer to me takes you further away from him. And I’m thinking that if I ever admit I need anything apart from you, I’ve let him down.”
“Do you?” she asks. “Need anything else, I mean?”
Should he lie to her? No, what good would that do - she’d know. She always knows.
“Yeah, course I do,” he confesses. “I’m still a Time Lord in here.” He taps a finger on his skull. “I need the TARDIS. I’m lost without her. It’s more than having no home. It’s like only being half a person. And Donna. I miss her too, even though I am her, a bit. I wish she was here so I could ask her which bits are her and which are me.”
She sort of laughs. “He could never have put it as well as that.”
“Donna was very good at understanding these things,” he reminds her. “Somehow, she could be analytical and empathetic at the same time. And all while she was calling me a space prawn and a long streak of alien nothing.”
“So what does it feel like?” she asks. “Being a bit of Donna and a bit of Doctor and a bit of human too?”
“Weird,” he says, rubbing his hair. “I feel like I was thrown together from the bits he didn’t want.”
She frowns. “Don’t take any notice of that blood and war rubbish. He just said that to make himself feel better.”
“And to manipulate you.”
“Since you said so, yeah. And it worked,” she adds, in disgust.
“Anyway,” he finishes, since he’s hardly eager to linger over those few moments at Bad Wolf Bay. “That’s enough about me.” He lifts a hair from her cheek and stares into the beautiful brown eyes that have never really left him. “There is another way,” he says. “I haven’t been human enough for long enough to know if you’d hate it or not.”
Oh, she’s brave, his Rose. She looks right at him and says, “Try me.”
A little flash of jealousy rears its head, then fizzles away like water spitting on a hot griddle. He must make her bigger, not try to shrink himself to fit. Nothing else would honour her.
“I’m not complete,” he explains. “And he isn’t complete either. He doesn’t have you. I don’t…”
She says it for him. “The TARDIS.”
He wants to crush her into a hug for being so ready to understand him.
“It’s not that difficult,” she goes on, reading his thoughts. “I can’t imagine you without her, either. It’s just not right. You’re the Doctor. You ought to be in the TARDIS.” And her words speed up. She’s upset. “Please don’t think I don’t love you - that it was just the travelling and stuff - it’s not about me. It’s about you. About you being complete. ‘Cause right now, you’re not.” She stops talking with a sigh. “But I don’t see what we can do about it.”
“We could let him in,” he says. “Don’t try to avoid him. He’s here, standing here right in front of you. All the time I’m having to shut him out. I don’t want you to have to share me.”
“It’s not like that.” Then she hesitates and looks up at him, open and vulnerable. “Is it?”
She’s looking for answers. He hopes the only ones he has to offer are the ones she wants.
“Rose,” he says gently, “what if I told you that every time we came together you were doing it with him as well as me?”
Her mouth falls open. He realises what a shock that must be to hear, coming from the lips of him, of all people, Mr Cock-tease in a pinstripe suit.
“Um…”
“I’m sorry,” he says, experiencing the unfamiliar sensation of burning cheeks - a very human, physical betrayal of embarrassment. “Forget I said that. It’s too soon.”
“I think I might like it,” she says carefully, and he realises afresh how often he’s underestimated her.
“At least he wouldn’t be lonely,” she adds.
They look at each other, smiling, and he crosses the space between their faces, their open lips. He draws her into a good old hug, but this time with the obvious bits not missing. No longer alien, he’s no excuses left. He kisses her, delicately at first because he’s afraid of his hunger for her and what it might reveal. They’re picking their way through a fractured landscape full of rocky pits and gullies, where the hidden crevices might contain anything from fearsome monsters to beautiful blooms.
It’s been there between them constantly for the last few days - now that he’s human, what’s holding him back? It’s not all about waiting for Rose to accept him. They haven’t had the conversation yet, and he doesn’t know how he’ll make himself understood when they do. Yes, his body’s human. He feels a human’s desire for her - or at least, he assumes that’s what it is. But really, it’s not dissimilar to the way he felt about her before. His mind isn’t human. He still associates the act of copulation with reproduction, and he’s not sure he’s even capable of it otherwise.
How’s he going to tell her? She’s already waited so long - too long. He’s becoming cautious of drawing too close to her physically, in case it raises expectations he can’t fulfil. “I love you,” he’d whispered in her ear on the beach. Indeed he does, just as his original self does. It’s the assumption of a natural progression from a declaration of love to its consummation in the bedroom that bothers him.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“I just don’t want to let you down,” he replies.
She looks at him, seems about to speak, and he wishes he could touch her mind, somehow pouring all this complicated dilemma into it and working alongside her towards a solution.
“You’ve gone through so much to be with me,” he adds. “I don’t want things to go on being…difficult. You know. Between us. You deserve better.”
Her face registers her irritation. He’s doing it again, isn’t he - deciding what she can handle and making choices for her. “You’re an alien. It was never going to be straightforward. Even when there was only you - him - oh, I don’t know!”
And for a minute he thinks she’s going to cry.
“I hate him!” she declares. “He doesn’t know what anything’s like! He doesn’t stay around for long enough to know! I hate the way he called you “the cost” as if you aren’t a real person with feelings…how would he like it?”
“He was trying to make it better for you. Trying to make you feel responsible for me.” He’d tried to be neutral about it, but there’s bitterness creeping into his voice for a number of reasons. First, she’s right - who could feel good about the way he’d been referred to, there on the beach, almost as if he wasn’t there, just a formless lump waiting to be brought to life. And also because he saw so clearly what was going on. How his other self was trying to distance himself, to deny the deepest desires of his hearts, and to manipulate Rose by appealing to her sympathy and sense of duty.
"But how can I hate him when I love you?" she goes on. "Or love you when I love him? There’s always things you hate, things you love - they’re all mixed up together and he didn’t seem to get that. He said I’d made him a better person, but if that had been true he’d never have said those things, would he?”
“Unless he was lying.”
She sits down, rubs her eyes and flops back against the chair, impatient and resigned.
“Well,” he goes on. “You know he does lie. Or at least, he lies to himself.”
“And me. He lied about Jack.”
His mouth twists uneasily. “I was so afraid of losing you.”
“Were you jealous of him?”
He shakes his head without conviction. “Maybe, a bit. Threatened. After all, Jack was the human one.”
“Oh, and I’d so shown I’d go for humans!”
“Let’s stop all this,” he says. “It isn’t leading anywhere.”
There’s a tense silence. She looks at him so intently that he wonders if she shares his desire to peel away the physical barriers separating them and move directly to the union of minds. Rose’s ability to grasp a complicated situation constantly amazes him. He suspects that his tendency to run from her is based on the knowledge that she already knows him too well.
“Do you want us both?” he asks.
“I want the whole of you,” she says, after a moment’s hard thinking. “If that means both of you…well, yeah. I guess that is what I want.” Looking at him now with her eyes filled with a pleading hope, she says, “I never asked for this to be a normal relationship.” Her voice breaks. “I just want you.”
She’s in his arms again, crying on his shoulder, and this time feels real, not a step towards a place he may never be able to reach.
“He needs me,” she weeps. “He shouldn’t be on his own. I remember how he looked the time he came through. Awful. Like he hadn’t slept or eaten - he just needed me so much. And he still does. And he’s still out there, doin’ all that stuff, all those stupid planets to save and I promised…I want to be there for him, but I don’t want to hurt you either. I can’t just stop thinking about him. It’s all just a horrible mess…”
“Yeah,” he sighs, stroking her hair as she cries against him. “But there is a way to help him, you know.”
She breaks the embrace, wipes her eyes and is immediately composed. “Tell me.”
He puts his hands on the sides of her head. “The two of us - him and me - we could never be completely parted,” he explains. “We’re the same person. Even across the void, standing against that white wall, I could feel you. And you were human. He’s a Time Lord, and he’s me. You can’t hide from yourself.”
“Isn’t that what he always did?”
“He tried. I tried. He tried to hide me here. I’m all the things he can’t say, won’t even let himself feel. The emotional pressure that built up, that’s what made the regeneration go wrong the way it did.”
“I thought he made it happen,” she says, puzzled and a little disappointed. She believed, and he’d wanted her to believe, that he’d chosen not to change.
“Nah,” he says. “Master of improvisation, that’s me. He pushed all those difficult, un-Time Lordy bits away into that hand in a jar and said, ‘Right, Rose can have those, they’re the bits she wants anyway. And I can go on being the Lonely God and doing that stuff I do to make myself feel better.’”
“And does he feel better?” she sighs.
He sighs too. “What do you think?”
“So can we help him?”
He nods and kisses her again, and her mouth and her body respond as she relaxes against him, for the first time in this new world where they are both strangers, without reserve or guilt.
“How?” she asks.
“By loving each other,” he replies. “Love me, and you’ll be loving him.”
“Is it really that easy?” she asks. She’s right to be suspicious.
“It could be. If he doesn’t shut us out.”
“If?” she repeats.
“He does have some form with that,” he acknowledges. “But we could try.”
THIS WORLD
and all i do is miss you and the way we used to be
all i do is keep the beat and bad company
all i do is kiss you through the bars of a rhyme
julie i'd do the stars with you any time
(Mark Knopfler, "Romeo and Juliet")
Four knocks, that woman just said. Carmen, that was her name. Not Chloe. Chloe was…oh, never mind.
He thinks about that bloke Malcolm, completely unashamed, shouting the words he’s never been able to bring himself to say out loud, or ever think, to be honest. They’d almost had to drag him off. “I love him!” He wonders what the Brigadier would have had to say about an outburst like that, back in the day. Times have changed. He’s changed.
Time was, he’d have seen Christina as a challenge. A daring, intelligent, potential-filled human being in all her glory, with her talents being drawn in the wrong direction. Someone to make better, to change, to inspire.
Now he can’t even inspire himself. His life is as flat as a piece of paper, as stale as the water in a child’s painting cup abandoned days ago. He can put on a show of bravado but it only works because he gets rid of people before they find out what a shallow thing it is. That’s why he never goes back to see his friends any more. He’s a hollow man, much smaller on the inside than he looks. Shrivelled up inside. Going through the motions.
And it wasn’t always like this. He tries not to think of the way it could have been. The way it was, for such a brief and lovely interlude in his very long life. Fireworks lighting up the sky. A young girl waiting, smiling, holding out a fairy cake to him. In the vast, uncharted reaches of the lonely universe, one person remembering the trivial things he appreciated, and that one made all the difference.
Oh, he can go on to other people about it - the importance of chops and gravy, a home to go to. He can get everybody else home. It’s himself that’s the problem. He wonders if she ever thinks of him and the man he used to be. No, she won’t. She’s got a better man than him now.
When did he stop believing his own stories? Can’t beat a good story - oldest human invention, probably. Well, maybe after fire; can’t imaging a good storytelling session without a campfire to huddle around, can you? ‘Cause it’s a dark, big, lonely place, this old universe. Full of fear, and loneliness - and you need someone to hold up a light and make it a bit less scary.
That’s his job. Been doing it so long now, he can’t remember whether it’s the stuff he does that makes all the difference, or the tales that get told about it. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Just the energy of the stories, that’s what makes the world feel better. Out there, they’re all doing it. He knows Captain Magambo lied - she did salute. Of course she would - he’s the Doctor, the one they all long to meet, dream of, worship, love, base their myths and fantasies around. There’s probably even a TV show about him on somewhere these days. But nobody ever waits for him any more with a fairy cake on the palm of their hand and a twinkle in their eyes.
Still, no use hanging around thinking like that. There’s always somewhere to be going. Something to be doing. He doesn’t need to go looking for trouble - it finds him. Blimey, he only has to get on a ruddy bus and it’s off through a wormhole into another adventure.
He let her go. No, it was worse than that - he freed her. Perverted the course of justice. That DI (are you deducting, Lewis?) had probably spent half his life trying to catch her, trying to make the world a safer place, like he was supposed to be doing. But what could they do about it? He was the Doctor, he could do what he blinking well liked. There had to be some perks, or who’d want the job? He certainly didn’t.
I am the Doctor. You will obey me.
He shivers a little, remembering the sound of drums.