DW Fic: Dreaming of an Orange Sky (1/1)
Dreaming of an Orange Sky
By: Anne (cookie2697)
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairing: Ten/Rose
Beta: measi and missalee
Setting: Series 2, Love and Monsters-ish.
Author’s Note: For the goin_my_way Spring Fever Ficathon. My prompt was: "Rose dreams of Gallifrey. The Doctor has to explain." Also, special thanks to sugarsicons for helping me research Gallifrey. She rocks.
Well I had a dream I
Stood beneath an Orange Sky...
Here is what I know now
My salvation lies in your love
You are my home
-Alexi Murdoch
Sometimes in her sleep, Rose Tyler found herself in the most amazing places.
She would open her eyes, look around, and let out a laugh of delight at the worlds created by her subconscious mind. Sometimes they mirrored her extraordinary day-to-day life, resembling places where she and the Doctor had traveled. Sometimes they resembled places that she and the Doctor would make up during their lively, imaginative conversations. Other nights though, like tonight, the worlds that she walked in were strange, exotic, and nothing like anything she ever thought it would be possible to imagine.
Rose lay on a hillside, covered in bright red grass, which tickled against her skin in the passing breeze, even with the Doctor’s long coat spread out beneath her. Rose smiled, closing her eyes and leaning back. She felt the breeze gently whispering through her hair, the long grass tickling at her skin. It was warm, and she felt a peace that didn’t often come on a foreign world. Something about it reminded her of the bayside of the city of New New York, only better, with no danger lurking in the shadows. Everything felt right in the world, and yet, she was completely alone. Rose suddenly felt a deep longing to be laughing with the Doctor beside her on that hillside.
Rose sat up to look for him. His coat was beneath her, so the Doctor couldn’t be far away. But her attention was pulled down to the bottom of the hill and off towards the distance. There was a massive city spread out beneath her, unlike any she had ever seen before. The towers shone with such a brightness that it put New New York to shame. And for some reason, the entire city was contained inside a massive crystal-clear glass dome, clean and crisp and utterly brilliant. In the very center of the city was a massive palace that seemed to dwarf everything else around it.
But the most amazing part of it all was the sky. It glowed a bright, brilliant orange beneath twin suns suspended in the sky, one directly above the city, while the second was low in the distant sky near the snow-capped mountains that crept full across the horizon. The sky was so bright it almost seemed as if it were sunset, but Rose knew it couldn’t be. At sunset, on any planet, the colors of the sky were tempered, shifting as the sun sunk lower and lower in the sky. On this world, though, the sky remained a deep orange across the entire length of the sky.
She traced the sky with her eyes from the distant mountains, straight up over her head, finally tilting back on her elbows to see if it stayed the same color behind her, but her attention was once again distracted along the way. The Doctor stood silently a few feet behind her, under the branches of a beautiful tree with silver leaves that seemed to reflect the orange sky above. She smiled at him, but he didn’t return the gesture. Instead he just watched her with the most solemn of gazes, his hands shoved deeply into the pockets of his trousers.
Something about his body language made Rose pause. The smile faded from her face, and she sat up, turning to face him. Her head tilted slightly to the side as she carefully regarded the expression on his face. There was wistfulness in his eyes, intermingled with that sadness that he rarely let her see in this incarnation. It reflected the deep loss that Rose knew he carried around with him all the time, deep in his heart. She reached out a hand towards him, wiggling her fingers slightly as she silently asked him to join her.
The Doctor gave her a sad smile and spoke softly. Rose was shocked to her his words in a foreign tongue, untranslated by the TARDIS. She had rarely herd him speak anything besides English over the course of their time together. Usually a lack of translation was a very bad thing, but there was something about the words he spoke, with his voice so soft and gentle. Instead of fear a shiver of pleasure slid down her spine, so she just smiled at him once again.
Her smile was apparently all he needed this time. He moved with a suddenness that took her by surprise, bounding in three long strides to close the distance between them. He took her hand, and quickly pulled her to her feet. Rose giggled and fell against him, trusting him to catch her. He did, and she soon found herself engulfed in his arms. She leaned her head into his chest, breathing in the familiar, musty scent of his suit that she was beginning to equate with that home. As she felt his nose nuzzling against her hair, she knew he was doing the same thing.
It was absolutely perfect.
The two of them stood together, wrapped up in each others’ arms in the shadow of an exotic alien city under a beautiful orange sky. No words were spoken, but the silence just added to the marvel of the moment. Rose found herself thinking about how much she loved this life, and the amazing places that she could see whilst traveling with the Doctor.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
When Rose woke up she didn’t want to open her eyes. The Doctor had an arm loosely around her, his head tucked up behind her own, and she was just so comfortable. She couldn’t resist snuggling a little closer against him. His body was cool, but the blanket over them kept her warm. She just smiled happily as she replayed her lovely dream again in her mind’s eye.
A long minute of silence passed before Rose realized that the Doctor was actually still asleep beside her. Usually he woke up long before her, often disappearing to work on TARDIS repairs, or some other project that pulled his attention away from her bedside. Sometimes he stayed in bed to cuddle with her, but the instant she gave a sign of consciousness he was like a small child, begging for her to get up so that they could start their next adventure together. She was almost never alert before him, and these were her absolute favorite of mornings. It had only happened a handful of times over the course of their time together.
Today he was silent, his breathing slow and steady behind her back. She was afraid of waking him up, but at the same time, she was much too eager for a rare opportunity to observe him at peace. Carefully she slid out of his arms, and turned to sit up and watch him sleep.
She knew she didn’t have long to study the lines of his face while at rest. The Doctor slept so rarely that it was only a matter of time before he came to. So she wasn’t the least bit surprised when, within a few minutes, he tried to tighten his arms around her and blinked his eyes open, noticing that she was gone.
“Hello,” she greeted him softly.
He blinked and looked up at her. “Mmmm,” he mumbled, sitting up and rubbing at his eyes. “Sleeping, was I?”
“You probably needed it,” she reminded him. “It’s been weeks since you’ve slept through the night.”
“Time Lord,” he reminded her with a yawn. “Superior biology, you know.”
“Yeah, you’ve told me,” she teased him with a laugh. “We humans sleep so much, you just don’t know how we can spend so much of our lives unconscious.”
“Quite right too,” he grumbled. Before she could get another word out, he reached over, and looping his arms around her waist, pulled her down to him. She grinned as he pressed his lips to her, before opening her mouth and happily responding to his morning greeting.
“Good morning,” he whispered as he pulled away a moment later.
“Morning,” she replied. “You sleep well?”
“Yeah,” he murmured distantly, surprising Rose by seeming to get lost in thought so early in the day. He blinked himself back to the present and turned his attention back to her. “You?”
“Mmm hmm,” she replied, slipping her hand into his and rubbing her thumb up and down across the back of his knuckles. “Good dreams. The best kind of good dreams.”
“Dreams of what?”
“You and me. Together on a new planet. Oh, it was amazing, Doctor. There was this city, this completely amazing city. Massive towers, but all contained in this dome. I’d love to go there, see the inside of that city in person. In the dream we were just looking down at it from this hillside, like when we were on New Earth. Oh! And the most amazing part was the sky. It was this beautiful orange, like it was sunset, only somehow, even in the dream, I knew it was midday. D’you know a planet like that Doctor? Could we go there?”
Even as she asked, Rose realized that she had said something very, very wrong. The smile had completely disappeared from the Doctor’s face, leaving a closed-off, emotionless expression where he had previously been glowing. He didn’t seem to be looking at her anymore, even though his eyes were directed towards her. His mind seemed to have gone somewhere else entirely, and he was still, so very still, that she could barely even tell if he was still breathing. In a mere instant the Doctor had gone from exuding energy to being almost devoid of all life. And then, as if she couldn’t already tell that she had done something wrong, he dropped her hand.
“Doctor?” she asked him carefully, unsure of what to say or do. He didn’t react. She repeated his name a little louder, hoping to jar him out of whatever she had done to upset him. This time he blinked, and then rolled out of bed without so much of a glance at her.
“Yes, well...not just yet,” he told her in a distant voice as he tugged a leg into his trousers. “Got a thing...needs repairing. Very important.”
He grabbed his shirt and rushed from the room, pulling it on haphazardly as he went. Rose could only watch, frozen in surprise, as he ran from her, and wonder what it is that she had done distance him so suddenly.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Rose waited about an hour, lying in bed, and replaying her dream in her head. She thought back to how she had tried to describe it to him, trying desperately to figure out what it was about the beautiful scene that she had described for him that could have upset him so completely. She realized that he probably needed time to think, so she tried to give him the time he needed, until finally the waiting became too much.
Anxious to check on him, she slid out of bed, pulling a discarded fuzzy pink robe around her as she slipped her feet into her favorite pair of bunny slippers. The TARDIS floors were grating in most places, and uncomfortable to walk on barefoot. Rose didn’t quite relish the idea of getting dressed quite yet. She wanted to check on the Doctor first.
When she found him in the console room, it was even clearer that his escape from her bedroom was nothing more than an excuse to hide. The Doctor wasn’t even trying to pretend that he had repairs to do. Instead he simply sat on the jumpseat, his long legs kicked up onto the console panel as he leaned back and stared distantly into the time rotor. Rose stayed in the dooway behind him, watching him silently for a long time. Sorrow exuded from him as he sat there lifelessly brooding. It always concerned her when he got into a mood like this. This Doctor was rarely this distant with her. That was more like his previous self. In this body he was much more likely to rush them off into a new adventure to distract them both from whatever was bothering him. When he acted like this, Rose knew that whatever was bothering him affected him on a much deeper level.
Rose didn’t know what to do when she found him like this. With his previous self, she knew he preferred to be left alone. But this complete shut down, this brooding…it happened so rarely since his regeneration. Rare enough that even now, long after they had both adjusted to the change in him, she still wasn’t quite sure what to do for him. Did he prefer solitude? Or would he rather have her comfort, her touch, a distraction from the pain?
And what was even worse this time, it seemed like she was the very source of his pain. Would her presence just make it worse?
“You can come here, you know,” he suddenly spoke, interrupting her train of thought. “It’s okay.”
She shouldn’t have been surprised that he knew she was there. He always seemed to know. His slightly psychic brain could probably sense her presence a mile away. In a better mood, he’d probably blame it on how noisy her human brain was or something. Rose shook her head ruefully at the thought and crossed the room slowly, coming up behind him and sliding her hands over his shoulders in an effort to rub the tension out of them.
“Sorry,” she murmured. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted to be left alone.”
“Nah,” he drawled. “What’s the fun in being alone?”
“You okay?” she asked carefully. “I didn’t mean to upset you. It was just a beautiful dream and I wanted to share it with you. I didn’t know it would bother you so much.”
He tilted his head back and looked up at her, meeting her eyes for the first time since she entered the room. His eyes seemed to bore into her, studying her carefully, like he was looking for something in her eyes. Rose hoped that he saw whatever it was that he wanted from her.
“And why wouldn’t you?” he finally replied. “That beautiful orange sky, and the city skyline...not to mention the way the silver trees shined in the morning sun. Who wouldn’t want to share that with someone...special.”
“Mmmm...” Rose murmured in agreement as she moved around the jumpseat to sit beside the Doctor. She leaned into him, resting her head on his shoulder before closing her eyes and envisioning the beautiful setting of her dream once more. “The most extraordinary part was the color of the sky. It was just so beautiful, Doctor. Like a sunset that never fades. The color...”
She trailed off as a thought occurred to her. It was the color of the sky that captivated her so completely. The bright, brilliant orange sky in her dreams - only she was a typical human. She didn’t normally dream in color. Most of her dreams remained a lifeless, disconnected black and white and grey. And as that occurred to her, she suddenly sat up and furrowed her brow at the Doctor while another thought crossed her might.
“Doctor...I never told you about the trees.”
He didn’t respond.
Instead, the Doctor leaped to his feet so suddenly that it took Rose by surprise. A mere moment before he had been still, contained in brooding silence, and now all of a sudden, he was moving around the console with frantic speed. The speed of his actions didn’t surprise her - usually when the Doctor piloted the TARDIS he was exploding with his excitement for whatever exciting new place he was planning to take her to. But this? It was a completely different kind of energy. It was jerky, nervous, almost mechanical. Wherever it was that the Doctor was taking her, it was somewhere he did not want to go.
The TARDIS seemed to obey his directions for once, jerking and bouncing them into a landing of sorts while the Doctor tugged on the handbreak. Suddenly the frantic energy disappeared as quickly as it had come. The Doctor slowly turned the monitor towards himself to check their location, and nodded, muttering something unintelligible to Rose’s hearing, before turning his attention back to her.
“There are things,” he blurted out awkwardly, before falling silent, and shaking his head at himself. He took a deep break and started again. “There are things I still haven’t shared with you. Even after all this time.”
He paused again, and Rose found herself simply astonished at how much he seemed to be struggling. The Doctor never had trouble finding words. Usually he could just babble away about anything and everything. But this, whatever it was, seemed way too important to him to risk ruining it with the wrong words.
“Go look outside,” the Doctor directed softly. “Stay inside the TARDIS. Just open the doors and look outside.”
Rose nodded silently, not wanting to make this any harder for him, and followed his instructions. She made her way down the ramp to the doors of the TARDIS and carefully pushed the doors open. Immediately she gasped at the sight before her eyes.
The TARDIS was floating in the middle of what looked like an asteroid field. All around them were rocks and dust, aimlessly moving in a cluster in what appeared to be otherwise empty space. She squeaked as a rock hit the force shield surrounding the TARDIS and exploded into a ball of flame. She felt the warmth of the fire on her face, but the otherwise the TARDIS protected her from the destruction around her. Rose found herself thinking of death and loss, of catastrophe, but she wasn’t really sure why. All she knew for certain was that this was not an example of the beauty of the universe that the Doctor usually tried to show her. It was the remnants of tragedy. She sensed that the Doctor had moved to stand behind her, looking out over her head to the emptiness around them. Suddenly, she began to get the slightest inkling of where they might be.
“Gallifrey,” he explained in a soft, distant voice. “The planet you saw in your dreams was Gallifrey. This is all that’s left of it…what was once my home.”
Rose stared out at the fragments that remained from the destruction of the Doctor’s home, fighting the tears that were threatening to fall.
“But...how?” She finally choked out. “How did I see it in my dream?”
“It was my fault, Rose. I must have pulled you into my dream. Mine. Not yours. It was a mistake. You never should have seen it. I’m so sorry.”
The cold air swept in through the force field, chilling her as she stared out into the ruins around them. She shivered, unable to contain the sensation. The Doctor slipped a stray hand over her shoulder and lightly rubbed his hands over the goosebumps forming in her skin. She turned to look at him, but he was staring past her, out into the destruction.
“You should go,” he murmured. “Get dressed, put on something warmer. It’s cold out here with the doors open.”
“Are you going to be okay on your own?”
“Sure,” he nodded with an unconvincing smile. “It’s my first time coming back here since…well, since they died. I should say some goodbyes.”
“Do you want me to stay?”
“No. I’m okay. This...it’s long overdue.”
“I’ll be back,” she promised him, pressing a light kiss to his throat before leaving him alone in the doorway of the TARDIS. When she reached the other side of the console room, Rose turned and glanced back to him. Her heart leapt at the sight of him, sitting on the edge of the doorway, his legs tangling out of the TARDIS, yet safely inside the force field. He leaned his head against the site of the doorframe, and stared out into the rubble around them.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
A half-hour later, Rose returned to the console room. Regardless of the fact that this experience was long overdue for the Doctor, she was still afraid to leave him alone for too long. Plus, she still had questions about their dream. She was somewhat relieved to find the TARDIS doors closed and the Doctor navigating them back into the Vortex.
It was clear that the Doctor desperately wanted to distract himself from his grief. The TARDIS bumped its way through the Vortex and soon landed in London. They met a particularly nasty alien that the Doctor called a Hoix, and managed to eliminate it with only the slightest mixup of the buckets. Some bloke was mad enough to wander right into the middle of the whole incident, but they still managed to all escape in one piece. Overall, Rose figured it was as smooth as could be expected, all things considered.
Seeing as they were in present-day London, Rose was only half surprised when the Doctor suggested that they stop by to see her mum. Neither of them were expecting to walk into the flat to find her mum crying over some prat who had been using her to try to find the Doctor. Rose insisted on sorting him out, which somehow resulted in them saving the prat from a large, disgusting human-absorbing alien. Before she knew it, Rose found herself falling into bed with the Doctor, exhausted, after a long day filled with quite the variety of distractions.
As they lay there silently in bed, Rose was eager to sleep away the complicated, emotional day. But as she felt the Doctor’s arm tightening around her, his fingers toying lightly with the tips of her hair, Rose found herself thinking of their dream once again. There were still questions that needed to be answered.
Rose hesitated to bring the dream up again. She had spent the entire day trying to distract the Doctor from the raw grief that had resurfaced that morning, and she hated to see him in pain. The loss of his people and his planet was always going to be a fresh wound for him. Sometimes she liked to think that maybe her companionship eased the pain a little bit, and she hated to do change that. But her curiosity got the better of her, so she rolled over to face him.
“Doctor,” she started carefully. “There’s something I’ve been wondering about all day.”
“What’s that?”
“In our dream last night…your dream…” she shook her head at herself with a frustrated grimace and continued. “Whatever. When I first saw you under that tree, you said something to me, in your native language, I suppose. That makes sense now. The TARDIS didn’t translate it. What did you say?”
The Doctor narrowed his eyes a bit, like he was looking deep into her eyes for something specific. She met his piercing stare head on, waiting, while he seemed to consider his response.
“It was Gallifreyan,” he finally told her. “And it wasn’t because we were dreaming that you couldn’t understand me. The TARDIS doesn’t translate Gallifreyan anymore. With my planet completely wiped out of space and time, it also wiped everything else about the planet, the culture, and what have you. It’s a dead language now. May as well not exist. Well, except for me, that is.”
“I’m sorry,” Rose whispered, reaching up to pull his hand from her hair and hold it in her own. She squeezed his hand and brought it up to her lips, kissing his knuckles.
“I’ve always wanted to take you to Gallifrey,” he explained. “Ever since I took you to Platform One for the first time and saw the way you reacted to the death of your own planet. I always knew that you were empathetic enough, that you cared enough to understand. But it’s gone. I never thought I’d ever be able to see what you’d look like under the burnt orange skies of my home. But in that dream I finally got that wish.”
“You did?”
“I did. I saw the way the light shined in your hair, and the way your face just lit up at the sight of the citadel in the center of the capital city...and it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. That was all I said to you, Rose. How beautiful you looked under the orange sky.”
“Really?”
“Well, strictly speaking it was more complicated than that. The Gallifreyan language represented time in a multitude of states of existence, and light can’t simply be referred to as light. It has to be regarded as the full spectrum of light as it truly exists, not just as the naked eye sees it...”
Rose rolled her eyes at him playfully with a smile, both amused and relieved by the return of his rambling nature. It was the first sign that he was doing better than this morning. Now Rose knew for certain that everything was going to be okay. He grinned back at her expression.
“...but anyway, yes, to simplify the translation, that’s approximately what I said.”
“Shut up!” She said with a laugh, reaching over to pull his head down for a kiss. They lay there for a bit, enjoying the physical sensation of simply being together. Rose threaded her fingers through the Doctor’s unnaturally messy bed-hair as they exchanged a few long, languid kisses. After a bit though, he pulled away from her, narrowing his eyes as he studied her expression once again.
“This doesn’t bother you, does it?”
“I think it’s a little late for that, Doctor. I’ve been a fairly active participant.”
“No, no, no,” he insisted, fixing a serious gaze on her that sobered any laughter right out of her. “Not that. This whole dream-sharing thing. I subconsciously pulled you into my head without your permission. I’d think, after the way you reacted to the TARDIS getting inside your head, that you might see it as an invasion of privacy, or something like that.”
“That was a long time ago,” she reminded him. “I barely knew you back then.”
“And now?” he pressed.
“I trust you,” she told him simply.
He let out a deep sigh of relief. Rose wanted to snuggle closer to him and erase any remaining doubt that was lingering in that overactive brain of his.
“So if I pulled you into my dream tonight by mistake?” he asked. “What then?”
“Then we’d share another lovely dream,” Rose answered. “And maybe, when you feel ready, you could show me more of Gallifrey. I may not be able to step foot on the planet, but everything you wanted to share with me…you still can. It’ll just be a little different than you would have liked.”
“Yeah?” he asked, quirking an eyebrow at her.
“Yes,” she responded with certainty as she settled herself more comfortably against him. She closed her eyes, ready to sleep away their tumultuous day.
“Hmmm...” the Doctor answered softly, as she began to drift off into sleep. “I think I’d like that.”
By: Anne (cookie2697)
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairing: Ten/Rose
Beta: measi and missalee
Setting: Series 2, Love and Monsters-ish.
Author’s Note: For the goin_my_way Spring Fever Ficathon. My prompt was: "Rose dreams of Gallifrey. The Doctor has to explain." Also, special thanks to sugarsicons for helping me research Gallifrey. She rocks.
Well I had a dream I
Stood beneath an Orange Sky...
Here is what I know now
My salvation lies in your love
You are my home
-Alexi Murdoch
Sometimes in her sleep, Rose Tyler found herself in the most amazing places.
She would open her eyes, look around, and let out a laugh of delight at the worlds created by her subconscious mind. Sometimes they mirrored her extraordinary day-to-day life, resembling places where she and the Doctor had traveled. Sometimes they resembled places that she and the Doctor would make up during their lively, imaginative conversations. Other nights though, like tonight, the worlds that she walked in were strange, exotic, and nothing like anything she ever thought it would be possible to imagine.
Rose lay on a hillside, covered in bright red grass, which tickled against her skin in the passing breeze, even with the Doctor’s long coat spread out beneath her. Rose smiled, closing her eyes and leaning back. She felt the breeze gently whispering through her hair, the long grass tickling at her skin. It was warm, and she felt a peace that didn’t often come on a foreign world. Something about it reminded her of the bayside of the city of New New York, only better, with no danger lurking in the shadows. Everything felt right in the world, and yet, she was completely alone. Rose suddenly felt a deep longing to be laughing with the Doctor beside her on that hillside.
Rose sat up to look for him. His coat was beneath her, so the Doctor couldn’t be far away. But her attention was pulled down to the bottom of the hill and off towards the distance. There was a massive city spread out beneath her, unlike any she had ever seen before. The towers shone with such a brightness that it put New New York to shame. And for some reason, the entire city was contained inside a massive crystal-clear glass dome, clean and crisp and utterly brilliant. In the very center of the city was a massive palace that seemed to dwarf everything else around it.
But the most amazing part of it all was the sky. It glowed a bright, brilliant orange beneath twin suns suspended in the sky, one directly above the city, while the second was low in the distant sky near the snow-capped mountains that crept full across the horizon. The sky was so bright it almost seemed as if it were sunset, but Rose knew it couldn’t be. At sunset, on any planet, the colors of the sky were tempered, shifting as the sun sunk lower and lower in the sky. On this world, though, the sky remained a deep orange across the entire length of the sky.
She traced the sky with her eyes from the distant mountains, straight up over her head, finally tilting back on her elbows to see if it stayed the same color behind her, but her attention was once again distracted along the way. The Doctor stood silently a few feet behind her, under the branches of a beautiful tree with silver leaves that seemed to reflect the orange sky above. She smiled at him, but he didn’t return the gesture. Instead he just watched her with the most solemn of gazes, his hands shoved deeply into the pockets of his trousers.
Something about his body language made Rose pause. The smile faded from her face, and she sat up, turning to face him. Her head tilted slightly to the side as she carefully regarded the expression on his face. There was wistfulness in his eyes, intermingled with that sadness that he rarely let her see in this incarnation. It reflected the deep loss that Rose knew he carried around with him all the time, deep in his heart. She reached out a hand towards him, wiggling her fingers slightly as she silently asked him to join her.
The Doctor gave her a sad smile and spoke softly. Rose was shocked to her his words in a foreign tongue, untranslated by the TARDIS. She had rarely herd him speak anything besides English over the course of their time together. Usually a lack of translation was a very bad thing, but there was something about the words he spoke, with his voice so soft and gentle. Instead of fear a shiver of pleasure slid down her spine, so she just smiled at him once again.
Her smile was apparently all he needed this time. He moved with a suddenness that took her by surprise, bounding in three long strides to close the distance between them. He took her hand, and quickly pulled her to her feet. Rose giggled and fell against him, trusting him to catch her. He did, and she soon found herself engulfed in his arms. She leaned her head into his chest, breathing in the familiar, musty scent of his suit that she was beginning to equate with that home. As she felt his nose nuzzling against her hair, she knew he was doing the same thing.
It was absolutely perfect.
The two of them stood together, wrapped up in each others’ arms in the shadow of an exotic alien city under a beautiful orange sky. No words were spoken, but the silence just added to the marvel of the moment. Rose found herself thinking about how much she loved this life, and the amazing places that she could see whilst traveling with the Doctor.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
When Rose woke up she didn’t want to open her eyes. The Doctor had an arm loosely around her, his head tucked up behind her own, and she was just so comfortable. She couldn’t resist snuggling a little closer against him. His body was cool, but the blanket over them kept her warm. She just smiled happily as she replayed her lovely dream again in her mind’s eye.
A long minute of silence passed before Rose realized that the Doctor was actually still asleep beside her. Usually he woke up long before her, often disappearing to work on TARDIS repairs, or some other project that pulled his attention away from her bedside. Sometimes he stayed in bed to cuddle with her, but the instant she gave a sign of consciousness he was like a small child, begging for her to get up so that they could start their next adventure together. She was almost never alert before him, and these were her absolute favorite of mornings. It had only happened a handful of times over the course of their time together.
Today he was silent, his breathing slow and steady behind her back. She was afraid of waking him up, but at the same time, she was much too eager for a rare opportunity to observe him at peace. Carefully she slid out of his arms, and turned to sit up and watch him sleep.
She knew she didn’t have long to study the lines of his face while at rest. The Doctor slept so rarely that it was only a matter of time before he came to. So she wasn’t the least bit surprised when, within a few minutes, he tried to tighten his arms around her and blinked his eyes open, noticing that she was gone.
“Hello,” she greeted him softly.
He blinked and looked up at her. “Mmmm,” he mumbled, sitting up and rubbing at his eyes. “Sleeping, was I?”
“You probably needed it,” she reminded him. “It’s been weeks since you’ve slept through the night.”
“Time Lord,” he reminded her with a yawn. “Superior biology, you know.”
“Yeah, you’ve told me,” she teased him with a laugh. “We humans sleep so much, you just don’t know how we can spend so much of our lives unconscious.”
“Quite right too,” he grumbled. Before she could get another word out, he reached over, and looping his arms around her waist, pulled her down to him. She grinned as he pressed his lips to her, before opening her mouth and happily responding to his morning greeting.
“Good morning,” he whispered as he pulled away a moment later.
“Morning,” she replied. “You sleep well?”
“Yeah,” he murmured distantly, surprising Rose by seeming to get lost in thought so early in the day. He blinked himself back to the present and turned his attention back to her. “You?”
“Mmm hmm,” she replied, slipping her hand into his and rubbing her thumb up and down across the back of his knuckles. “Good dreams. The best kind of good dreams.”
“Dreams of what?”
“You and me. Together on a new planet. Oh, it was amazing, Doctor. There was this city, this completely amazing city. Massive towers, but all contained in this dome. I’d love to go there, see the inside of that city in person. In the dream we were just looking down at it from this hillside, like when we were on New Earth. Oh! And the most amazing part was the sky. It was this beautiful orange, like it was sunset, only somehow, even in the dream, I knew it was midday. D’you know a planet like that Doctor? Could we go there?”
Even as she asked, Rose realized that she had said something very, very wrong. The smile had completely disappeared from the Doctor’s face, leaving a closed-off, emotionless expression where he had previously been glowing. He didn’t seem to be looking at her anymore, even though his eyes were directed towards her. His mind seemed to have gone somewhere else entirely, and he was still, so very still, that she could barely even tell if he was still breathing. In a mere instant the Doctor had gone from exuding energy to being almost devoid of all life. And then, as if she couldn’t already tell that she had done something wrong, he dropped her hand.
“Doctor?” she asked him carefully, unsure of what to say or do. He didn’t react. She repeated his name a little louder, hoping to jar him out of whatever she had done to upset him. This time he blinked, and then rolled out of bed without so much of a glance at her.
“Yes, well...not just yet,” he told her in a distant voice as he tugged a leg into his trousers. “Got a thing...needs repairing. Very important.”
He grabbed his shirt and rushed from the room, pulling it on haphazardly as he went. Rose could only watch, frozen in surprise, as he ran from her, and wonder what it is that she had done distance him so suddenly.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Rose waited about an hour, lying in bed, and replaying her dream in her head. She thought back to how she had tried to describe it to him, trying desperately to figure out what it was about the beautiful scene that she had described for him that could have upset him so completely. She realized that he probably needed time to think, so she tried to give him the time he needed, until finally the waiting became too much.
Anxious to check on him, she slid out of bed, pulling a discarded fuzzy pink robe around her as she slipped her feet into her favorite pair of bunny slippers. The TARDIS floors were grating in most places, and uncomfortable to walk on barefoot. Rose didn’t quite relish the idea of getting dressed quite yet. She wanted to check on the Doctor first.
When she found him in the console room, it was even clearer that his escape from her bedroom was nothing more than an excuse to hide. The Doctor wasn’t even trying to pretend that he had repairs to do. Instead he simply sat on the jumpseat, his long legs kicked up onto the console panel as he leaned back and stared distantly into the time rotor. Rose stayed in the dooway behind him, watching him silently for a long time. Sorrow exuded from him as he sat there lifelessly brooding. It always concerned her when he got into a mood like this. This Doctor was rarely this distant with her. That was more like his previous self. In this body he was much more likely to rush them off into a new adventure to distract them both from whatever was bothering him. When he acted like this, Rose knew that whatever was bothering him affected him on a much deeper level.
Rose didn’t know what to do when she found him like this. With his previous self, she knew he preferred to be left alone. But this complete shut down, this brooding…it happened so rarely since his regeneration. Rare enough that even now, long after they had both adjusted to the change in him, she still wasn’t quite sure what to do for him. Did he prefer solitude? Or would he rather have her comfort, her touch, a distraction from the pain?
And what was even worse this time, it seemed like she was the very source of his pain. Would her presence just make it worse?
“You can come here, you know,” he suddenly spoke, interrupting her train of thought. “It’s okay.”
She shouldn’t have been surprised that he knew she was there. He always seemed to know. His slightly psychic brain could probably sense her presence a mile away. In a better mood, he’d probably blame it on how noisy her human brain was or something. Rose shook her head ruefully at the thought and crossed the room slowly, coming up behind him and sliding her hands over his shoulders in an effort to rub the tension out of them.
“Sorry,” she murmured. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted to be left alone.”
“Nah,” he drawled. “What’s the fun in being alone?”
“You okay?” she asked carefully. “I didn’t mean to upset you. It was just a beautiful dream and I wanted to share it with you. I didn’t know it would bother you so much.”
He tilted his head back and looked up at her, meeting her eyes for the first time since she entered the room. His eyes seemed to bore into her, studying her carefully, like he was looking for something in her eyes. Rose hoped that he saw whatever it was that he wanted from her.
“And why wouldn’t you?” he finally replied. “That beautiful orange sky, and the city skyline...not to mention the way the silver trees shined in the morning sun. Who wouldn’t want to share that with someone...special.”
“Mmmm...” Rose murmured in agreement as she moved around the jumpseat to sit beside the Doctor. She leaned into him, resting her head on his shoulder before closing her eyes and envisioning the beautiful setting of her dream once more. “The most extraordinary part was the color of the sky. It was just so beautiful, Doctor. Like a sunset that never fades. The color...”
She trailed off as a thought occurred to her. It was the color of the sky that captivated her so completely. The bright, brilliant orange sky in her dreams - only she was a typical human. She didn’t normally dream in color. Most of her dreams remained a lifeless, disconnected black and white and grey. And as that occurred to her, she suddenly sat up and furrowed her brow at the Doctor while another thought crossed her might.
“Doctor...I never told you about the trees.”
He didn’t respond.
Instead, the Doctor leaped to his feet so suddenly that it took Rose by surprise. A mere moment before he had been still, contained in brooding silence, and now all of a sudden, he was moving around the console with frantic speed. The speed of his actions didn’t surprise her - usually when the Doctor piloted the TARDIS he was exploding with his excitement for whatever exciting new place he was planning to take her to. But this? It was a completely different kind of energy. It was jerky, nervous, almost mechanical. Wherever it was that the Doctor was taking her, it was somewhere he did not want to go.
The TARDIS seemed to obey his directions for once, jerking and bouncing them into a landing of sorts while the Doctor tugged on the handbreak. Suddenly the frantic energy disappeared as quickly as it had come. The Doctor slowly turned the monitor towards himself to check their location, and nodded, muttering something unintelligible to Rose’s hearing, before turning his attention back to her.
“There are things,” he blurted out awkwardly, before falling silent, and shaking his head at himself. He took a deep break and started again. “There are things I still haven’t shared with you. Even after all this time.”
He paused again, and Rose found herself simply astonished at how much he seemed to be struggling. The Doctor never had trouble finding words. Usually he could just babble away about anything and everything. But this, whatever it was, seemed way too important to him to risk ruining it with the wrong words.
“Go look outside,” the Doctor directed softly. “Stay inside the TARDIS. Just open the doors and look outside.”
Rose nodded silently, not wanting to make this any harder for him, and followed his instructions. She made her way down the ramp to the doors of the TARDIS and carefully pushed the doors open. Immediately she gasped at the sight before her eyes.
The TARDIS was floating in the middle of what looked like an asteroid field. All around them were rocks and dust, aimlessly moving in a cluster in what appeared to be otherwise empty space. She squeaked as a rock hit the force shield surrounding the TARDIS and exploded into a ball of flame. She felt the warmth of the fire on her face, but the otherwise the TARDIS protected her from the destruction around her. Rose found herself thinking of death and loss, of catastrophe, but she wasn’t really sure why. All she knew for certain was that this was not an example of the beauty of the universe that the Doctor usually tried to show her. It was the remnants of tragedy. She sensed that the Doctor had moved to stand behind her, looking out over her head to the emptiness around them. Suddenly, she began to get the slightest inkling of where they might be.
“Gallifrey,” he explained in a soft, distant voice. “The planet you saw in your dreams was Gallifrey. This is all that’s left of it…what was once my home.”
Rose stared out at the fragments that remained from the destruction of the Doctor’s home, fighting the tears that were threatening to fall.
“But...how?” She finally choked out. “How did I see it in my dream?”
“It was my fault, Rose. I must have pulled you into my dream. Mine. Not yours. It was a mistake. You never should have seen it. I’m so sorry.”
The cold air swept in through the force field, chilling her as she stared out into the ruins around them. She shivered, unable to contain the sensation. The Doctor slipped a stray hand over her shoulder and lightly rubbed his hands over the goosebumps forming in her skin. She turned to look at him, but he was staring past her, out into the destruction.
“You should go,” he murmured. “Get dressed, put on something warmer. It’s cold out here with the doors open.”
“Are you going to be okay on your own?”
“Sure,” he nodded with an unconvincing smile. “It’s my first time coming back here since…well, since they died. I should say some goodbyes.”
“Do you want me to stay?”
“No. I’m okay. This...it’s long overdue.”
“I’ll be back,” she promised him, pressing a light kiss to his throat before leaving him alone in the doorway of the TARDIS. When she reached the other side of the console room, Rose turned and glanced back to him. Her heart leapt at the sight of him, sitting on the edge of the doorway, his legs tangling out of the TARDIS, yet safely inside the force field. He leaned his head against the site of the doorframe, and stared out into the rubble around them.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
A half-hour later, Rose returned to the console room. Regardless of the fact that this experience was long overdue for the Doctor, she was still afraid to leave him alone for too long. Plus, she still had questions about their dream. She was somewhat relieved to find the TARDIS doors closed and the Doctor navigating them back into the Vortex.
It was clear that the Doctor desperately wanted to distract himself from his grief. The TARDIS bumped its way through the Vortex and soon landed in London. They met a particularly nasty alien that the Doctor called a Hoix, and managed to eliminate it with only the slightest mixup of the buckets. Some bloke was mad enough to wander right into the middle of the whole incident, but they still managed to all escape in one piece. Overall, Rose figured it was as smooth as could be expected, all things considered.
Seeing as they were in present-day London, Rose was only half surprised when the Doctor suggested that they stop by to see her mum. Neither of them were expecting to walk into the flat to find her mum crying over some prat who had been using her to try to find the Doctor. Rose insisted on sorting him out, which somehow resulted in them saving the prat from a large, disgusting human-absorbing alien. Before she knew it, Rose found herself falling into bed with the Doctor, exhausted, after a long day filled with quite the variety of distractions.
As they lay there silently in bed, Rose was eager to sleep away the complicated, emotional day. But as she felt the Doctor’s arm tightening around her, his fingers toying lightly with the tips of her hair, Rose found herself thinking of their dream once again. There were still questions that needed to be answered.
Rose hesitated to bring the dream up again. She had spent the entire day trying to distract the Doctor from the raw grief that had resurfaced that morning, and she hated to see him in pain. The loss of his people and his planet was always going to be a fresh wound for him. Sometimes she liked to think that maybe her companionship eased the pain a little bit, and she hated to do change that. But her curiosity got the better of her, so she rolled over to face him.
“Doctor,” she started carefully. “There’s something I’ve been wondering about all day.”
“What’s that?”
“In our dream last night…your dream…” she shook her head at herself with a frustrated grimace and continued. “Whatever. When I first saw you under that tree, you said something to me, in your native language, I suppose. That makes sense now. The TARDIS didn’t translate it. What did you say?”
The Doctor narrowed his eyes a bit, like he was looking deep into her eyes for something specific. She met his piercing stare head on, waiting, while he seemed to consider his response.
“It was Gallifreyan,” he finally told her. “And it wasn’t because we were dreaming that you couldn’t understand me. The TARDIS doesn’t translate Gallifreyan anymore. With my planet completely wiped out of space and time, it also wiped everything else about the planet, the culture, and what have you. It’s a dead language now. May as well not exist. Well, except for me, that is.”
“I’m sorry,” Rose whispered, reaching up to pull his hand from her hair and hold it in her own. She squeezed his hand and brought it up to her lips, kissing his knuckles.
“I’ve always wanted to take you to Gallifrey,” he explained. “Ever since I took you to Platform One for the first time and saw the way you reacted to the death of your own planet. I always knew that you were empathetic enough, that you cared enough to understand. But it’s gone. I never thought I’d ever be able to see what you’d look like under the burnt orange skies of my home. But in that dream I finally got that wish.”
“You did?”
“I did. I saw the way the light shined in your hair, and the way your face just lit up at the sight of the citadel in the center of the capital city...and it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. That was all I said to you, Rose. How beautiful you looked under the orange sky.”
“Really?”
“Well, strictly speaking it was more complicated than that. The Gallifreyan language represented time in a multitude of states of existence, and light can’t simply be referred to as light. It has to be regarded as the full spectrum of light as it truly exists, not just as the naked eye sees it...”
Rose rolled her eyes at him playfully with a smile, both amused and relieved by the return of his rambling nature. It was the first sign that he was doing better than this morning. Now Rose knew for certain that everything was going to be okay. He grinned back at her expression.
“...but anyway, yes, to simplify the translation, that’s approximately what I said.”
“Shut up!” She said with a laugh, reaching over to pull his head down for a kiss. They lay there for a bit, enjoying the physical sensation of simply being together. Rose threaded her fingers through the Doctor’s unnaturally messy bed-hair as they exchanged a few long, languid kisses. After a bit though, he pulled away from her, narrowing his eyes as he studied her expression once again.
“This doesn’t bother you, does it?”
“I think it’s a little late for that, Doctor. I’ve been a fairly active participant.”
“No, no, no,” he insisted, fixing a serious gaze on her that sobered any laughter right out of her. “Not that. This whole dream-sharing thing. I subconsciously pulled you into my head without your permission. I’d think, after the way you reacted to the TARDIS getting inside your head, that you might see it as an invasion of privacy, or something like that.”
“That was a long time ago,” she reminded him. “I barely knew you back then.”
“And now?” he pressed.
“I trust you,” she told him simply.
He let out a deep sigh of relief. Rose wanted to snuggle closer to him and erase any remaining doubt that was lingering in that overactive brain of his.
“So if I pulled you into my dream tonight by mistake?” he asked. “What then?”
“Then we’d share another lovely dream,” Rose answered. “And maybe, when you feel ready, you could show me more of Gallifrey. I may not be able to step foot on the planet, but everything you wanted to share with me…you still can. It’ll just be a little different than you would have liked.”
“Yeah?” he asked, quirking an eyebrow at her.
“Yes,” she responded with certainty as she settled herself more comfortably against him. She closed her eyes, ready to sleep away their tumultuous day.
“Hmmm...” the Doctor answered softly, as she began to drift off into sleep. “I think I’d like that.”