Something About Stars (12/20)
Title - Something About Stars (12/20)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - Ten, Rose, OCs
Spoilers - Through the specials.
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids, they're all mine.)
Summary - Four Time Lords and a Bad Wolf human, gallivanting through time and space. What could possibly go wrong?
Author's Notes - Huge thanks to Kristin and chicklet73 , who talked through plot points. Special thanks to Kristin for coming up with the title. And even more thanks to jlrpuck and c73, who so graciously beta'd.
The icon was created by swankkat , commissioned by jlrpuck for my birthday.
Prologue - Ch 1 - Ch 2 - Ch 3 - Ch 4 - Ch 5 - Ch 6 - Ch 7 - Ch 8 - Ch 9 - Ch 10
Chapter Eleven
Once they’d exhausted the distraction of making Matt and the Doctor tea, Fortuna, not knowing what else to do, commenced making a complicated soufflé, and Rose and Athena acted as sous chefs and helped, grateful to have something to occupy them. Time seemed frozen, even to Rose who did not have a sense of time the way her children did. But it seemed to her that time was not functioning properly, as she watched Fortuna slide the soufflé into the oven and tried to think what else she could do so that they wouldn’t sit in the kitchen and fret about whatever was going on in the infirmary.
And then Matt and the Doctor trailed in, both looking exhausted. Rose hated when the Doctor looked exhausted. She could always see then the weight of the nine hundred years that she could do nothing about.
“It’s fine,” he said, wearily. “He’s going to be fine. I’ve got him sleeping now, it’ll help him recover.” As if to punctuate the point of his exhaustion, the Doctor poured himself a cup of coffee, which he seldom drank.
“Oh, thank God,” said Rose, and closed her eyes in a brief prayer in case there were higher authorities out there looking out for her Doctor and her family.
“What have you been doing?” asked the Doctor, in an abrupt change of subject that Rose knew meant he didn’t want to dwell on Brem at that particular moment. “Something smells delicious.”
“Oh,” said Fortuna, her voice sounding rusty over the innocence of the topic. “I made a soufflé. Not much of one, there weren’t many ingredients to work with.”
“Welllllllll,” remarked the Doctor, “that’s because we don’t have a cook living on this TARDIS any longer.”
It was not a particularly funny joke, but it worked to lighten the mood. They laughed much harder than the joke deserved, and the tension dissolved in the kitchen. Brem was going to be fine-the Doctor had pronounced it so, and then he had even made a joke.
“You’re a terrible man,” said Rose, lightly, into the contentment on the other end of the laughter. “See if I ever cook for you again.”
“I’ll take my chances,” he said, and sipped at his coffee.
“So.” Rose turned and flickered a glance between Athena, seated on the other side of the table, and Matt, who was leaning against the kitchen counter next to the Doctor. “I won the pool, then.”
“Oh, bloody hell,” complained Fortuna.
“You did not!” protested the Doctor. “Wait, did you have this year? What year it is, Earth standard time?”
“What pool?” asked Athena, looking at them in confusion.
“The pool for what year the two of you would finally get together,” replied Rose, taking a first sip of the now-tepid tea she’d made before knowing Brem would be alright.
Athena’s eyes widened. “You had a pool about that?” She glanced at Matt, then back to her mother. “What makes you think we’re together?”
“You’re wearing his shirt, Theenie. Believe it or not, I am well aware under what circumstances one ends up wearing a man’s shirt,” answered Rose.
“This is straying into territory I don’t want to know about,” remarked Fortuna, getting up from the table to re-fill her own mug with coffee. “And, anyway, I don’t think it’s a valid win.”
“What makes it invalid?” asked Rose.
“I told Athena she was in love with Matt, I should win.”
“You told her?” interjected Matt. “I assumed it was Brem, interfering when I’d told him not to.”
Fortuna shook her head and sipped her coffee. “Nope, it was me.”
“Well, thanks, Fort,” said Matt, and grinned at her and ruffled her hair.
“Yeah, no problem,” she replied, winking as she walked back to her seat next to Athena.
“Wait a second,” said Athena, staring at Matt. “Why did you think somebody had told me I was in love with you? How do you know I didn’t just, you know, figure it out myself?”
He looked at her and smiled warmly. “Theenie,” he said, as if the answer to the question were obvious, and she should have been furious, but he looked so adorable with the corners of his mouth tipped up like that that she barely managed to feign a frown and turn back to her own tea.
“I would just like one question answered,” inserted the Doctor. “Athena, please tell me you’re at least wearing knickers.”
There was a moment of silence, then Athena stood up. “Excuse me,” she said, primly, and then left the kitchen.
The Doctor looked at Matt. “You just saved my son, so I’m going to give you this one.”
“I appreciate that,” said Matt, and cleared his throat. “Is there a bed here I could use, possibly? I know technically I’m still in my apartment, and I know you could handle anything with Brem, but he’s still my patient and I’d rather sleep somewhere-”
“I’m sure there’s a bed,” said Rose, standing up. “The TARDIS has probably made a room for you by now, I’ll help you find it.”
“Thank you,” Matt said to her, following her out of the kitchen and into the hallway.
“I should be thanking you,” she reminded him.
“You really shouldn’t. The Doctor could have handled it on his own.”
Rose turned to him abruptly. “The Doctor,” she said, more fiercely than she intended, “has had to handle far too much on his own for far too long. So thank you.” Then she closed her eyes for a moment. “Sorry, that’s a sore spot for me, I didn’t mean…” She took a deep breath. “Thank you, Matt. Really.”
“I think it’s all my fault,” Matt confessed, suddenly.
She stared at him in amazement. “Your fault? How?”
“He wanted me to go with him. He showed up and asked me to go with him, and I told him no, I didn’t feel like it, I wasn’t in the mood, but if I’d gone-”
“You don’t know that was this trip. It could have been another trip.”
“I know. But you go on one trip and then another and before you know it none of this ever happens, maybe.”
“And maybe you would have been shot instead. You, without twelve regenerations and with my daughter’s heart. This wasn’t your fault. Now, look me in the eye and tell me you believe me.”
“I do,” said Matt, unconvincingly.
“Undeserved guilt,” commented Rose, rolling her eyes. She turned away from Matt and pushed open the door they were standing next to, muttering, “Talk about girls falling in love with their fathers. Anyway,” she said, more loudly. “Look! A room for you. A pleasant one, too.” Rose turned back from surveying the room to smile at Matt. “She thanks you for saving Brem, too.”
Matt did manage to smile in reaction.
“Sleep,” Rose told him, because he did look exhausted. He opened his mouth to say something, and she said, “We’ll come and get you if there’s any change in Brem at all.”
Matt nodded, and Rose closed the bedroom door and stood for a second in the hallway. Maybe she needed to sleep, too. Maybe she could sleep, now that Brem was safe and sleeping as well. The TARDIS had placed her bedroom just across the hall, and Rose walked into it and kicked off her shoes and crawled into bed, feeling both very tired and not at all like sleeping.
She’d draped Brem’s coat across the chair that sat in front of the fireplace in their bedroom, and she looked over at it, flickering in the light of the fire the TARDIS had set for her, remembering the day he had first shown up in it, flush with the success of his first solo trip, during which he’d scoured space and time for, of all things, a coat he’d been satisfied with. The Doctor had analyzed it as if it had been a complicated biological specimen, judging it, in the end, to be quite a worthy coat, and Brem had beamed with pride, the way he did whenever his father praised him, and the Doctor had pretended that he wasn’t touched beyond belief that his son had gone out and followed in his footsteps by buying a fabulous coat.
She heard the door open and then close, and then the Doctor dropped heavily onto the bed next to her, reaching for her. He snuggled against her back, snaking his arms around her, burying his nose against the back of her neck, under her hair. He was trembling, and she placed her hands over his on her abdomen in alarm.
“He’s okay, right?”
He nodded wordlessly against her, and she understood then that he just needed a moment. She lifted one of his hands and kissed his knuckles systematically, until he stopped shaking.
“He’s going to be okay until he wakes up, and then I’m going to kill him for getting himself shot,” said the Doctor.
Rose kissed his fingertips, then said, “All I could think was that the Ood had said songs would be ending around you. They said-”
“They were wrong,” he cut her off, flatly. “They were wrong, do you hear me?”
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak at the moment.
They were silent for a very long time, and then the Doctor said, abruptly, “I thought you were going to clean it.”
She looked across at the coat she knew he was referring to. “It’s torn, Doctor,” she said, and thought she was going to burst into tears, and took a second to collect herself before continuing. “It’s torn, from where the shots must have…”
There was a beat before he responded. “The sonic can repair fabric, you know that. It’ll be good as new, Rose, I promise you. You’ll never even know.”
“I know. I know. I was going to bring it to the laundry room so the TARDIS could clean it, but then I realized that, well, you always empty your own pockets. I don’t know how to empty multi-dimensional pockets.”
“Oh,” he said. “Of course. I’ll do it for you.” He brushed a kiss over the top of her head before rolling out of bed and walking over to the coat. He took a moment, staring down at it, thinking of all the personal, private things Brem could be keeping in his pockets, including, it occurred to him, whichever volume of his journal he was currently working on. Well, thought the Doctor. He’d empty it into a huge pile and pretend he hadn’t rifled through his pockets and Brem would let him and it would all be forgiven.
The Doctor reached into the first pocket, his hand brushing against something small and hard and suddenly his brain was full, the way it had been when other Time Lords had existed and their thoughts were so constantly in your head that you could barely clear space to be yourself. The Doctor, reacting in shock to feeling that way again after so many years of only the comforting presence of his children in his mind, recoiled quickly, with a sharp intake of breath.
He heard Rose sit up in bed in alarm. “Doctor?” she ventured.
He took a deep breath, reaching back into Brem’s pocket and closing his hand firmly around the object, pulling it out. He tipped his hand toward the firelight, and stared in amazement as it glinted off the perfect diamond he was holding.
“Doctor? What is it?”
And he heard himself say something he’d thought he’d never have reason to say again. “It’s a white-point star.”
Next Chapter
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - Ten, Rose, OCs
Spoilers - Through the specials.
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids, they're all mine.)
Summary - Four Time Lords and a Bad Wolf human, gallivanting through time and space. What could possibly go wrong?
Author's Notes - Huge thanks to Kristin and chicklet73 , who talked through plot points. Special thanks to Kristin for coming up with the title. And even more thanks to jlrpuck and c73, who so graciously beta'd.
The icon was created by swankkat , commissioned by jlrpuck for my birthday.
Prologue - Ch 1 - Ch 2 - Ch 3 - Ch 4 - Ch 5 - Ch 6 - Ch 7 - Ch 8 - Ch 9 - Ch 10
Chapter Eleven
Once they’d exhausted the distraction of making Matt and the Doctor tea, Fortuna, not knowing what else to do, commenced making a complicated soufflé, and Rose and Athena acted as sous chefs and helped, grateful to have something to occupy them. Time seemed frozen, even to Rose who did not have a sense of time the way her children did. But it seemed to her that time was not functioning properly, as she watched Fortuna slide the soufflé into the oven and tried to think what else she could do so that they wouldn’t sit in the kitchen and fret about whatever was going on in the infirmary.
And then Matt and the Doctor trailed in, both looking exhausted. Rose hated when the Doctor looked exhausted. She could always see then the weight of the nine hundred years that she could do nothing about.
“It’s fine,” he said, wearily. “He’s going to be fine. I’ve got him sleeping now, it’ll help him recover.” As if to punctuate the point of his exhaustion, the Doctor poured himself a cup of coffee, which he seldom drank.
“Oh, thank God,” said Rose, and closed her eyes in a brief prayer in case there were higher authorities out there looking out for her Doctor and her family.
“What have you been doing?” asked the Doctor, in an abrupt change of subject that Rose knew meant he didn’t want to dwell on Brem at that particular moment. “Something smells delicious.”
“Oh,” said Fortuna, her voice sounding rusty over the innocence of the topic. “I made a soufflé. Not much of one, there weren’t many ingredients to work with.”
“Welllllllll,” remarked the Doctor, “that’s because we don’t have a cook living on this TARDIS any longer.”
It was not a particularly funny joke, but it worked to lighten the mood. They laughed much harder than the joke deserved, and the tension dissolved in the kitchen. Brem was going to be fine-the Doctor had pronounced it so, and then he had even made a joke.
“You’re a terrible man,” said Rose, lightly, into the contentment on the other end of the laughter. “See if I ever cook for you again.”
“I’ll take my chances,” he said, and sipped at his coffee.
“So.” Rose turned and flickered a glance between Athena, seated on the other side of the table, and Matt, who was leaning against the kitchen counter next to the Doctor. “I won the pool, then.”
“Oh, bloody hell,” complained Fortuna.
“You did not!” protested the Doctor. “Wait, did you have this year? What year it is, Earth standard time?”
“What pool?” asked Athena, looking at them in confusion.
“The pool for what year the two of you would finally get together,” replied Rose, taking a first sip of the now-tepid tea she’d made before knowing Brem would be alright.
Athena’s eyes widened. “You had a pool about that?” She glanced at Matt, then back to her mother. “What makes you think we’re together?”
“You’re wearing his shirt, Theenie. Believe it or not, I am well aware under what circumstances one ends up wearing a man’s shirt,” answered Rose.
“This is straying into territory I don’t want to know about,” remarked Fortuna, getting up from the table to re-fill her own mug with coffee. “And, anyway, I don’t think it’s a valid win.”
“What makes it invalid?” asked Rose.
“I told Athena she was in love with Matt, I should win.”
“You told her?” interjected Matt. “I assumed it was Brem, interfering when I’d told him not to.”
Fortuna shook her head and sipped her coffee. “Nope, it was me.”
“Well, thanks, Fort,” said Matt, and grinned at her and ruffled her hair.
“Yeah, no problem,” she replied, winking as she walked back to her seat next to Athena.
“Wait a second,” said Athena, staring at Matt. “Why did you think somebody had told me I was in love with you? How do you know I didn’t just, you know, figure it out myself?”
He looked at her and smiled warmly. “Theenie,” he said, as if the answer to the question were obvious, and she should have been furious, but he looked so adorable with the corners of his mouth tipped up like that that she barely managed to feign a frown and turn back to her own tea.
“I would just like one question answered,” inserted the Doctor. “Athena, please tell me you’re at least wearing knickers.”
There was a moment of silence, then Athena stood up. “Excuse me,” she said, primly, and then left the kitchen.
The Doctor looked at Matt. “You just saved my son, so I’m going to give you this one.”
“I appreciate that,” said Matt, and cleared his throat. “Is there a bed here I could use, possibly? I know technically I’m still in my apartment, and I know you could handle anything with Brem, but he’s still my patient and I’d rather sleep somewhere-”
“I’m sure there’s a bed,” said Rose, standing up. “The TARDIS has probably made a room for you by now, I’ll help you find it.”
“Thank you,” Matt said to her, following her out of the kitchen and into the hallway.
“I should be thanking you,” she reminded him.
“You really shouldn’t. The Doctor could have handled it on his own.”
Rose turned to him abruptly. “The Doctor,” she said, more fiercely than she intended, “has had to handle far too much on his own for far too long. So thank you.” Then she closed her eyes for a moment. “Sorry, that’s a sore spot for me, I didn’t mean…” She took a deep breath. “Thank you, Matt. Really.”
“I think it’s all my fault,” Matt confessed, suddenly.
She stared at him in amazement. “Your fault? How?”
“He wanted me to go with him. He showed up and asked me to go with him, and I told him no, I didn’t feel like it, I wasn’t in the mood, but if I’d gone-”
“You don’t know that was this trip. It could have been another trip.”
“I know. But you go on one trip and then another and before you know it none of this ever happens, maybe.”
“And maybe you would have been shot instead. You, without twelve regenerations and with my daughter’s heart. This wasn’t your fault. Now, look me in the eye and tell me you believe me.”
“I do,” said Matt, unconvincingly.
“Undeserved guilt,” commented Rose, rolling her eyes. She turned away from Matt and pushed open the door they were standing next to, muttering, “Talk about girls falling in love with their fathers. Anyway,” she said, more loudly. “Look! A room for you. A pleasant one, too.” Rose turned back from surveying the room to smile at Matt. “She thanks you for saving Brem, too.”
Matt did manage to smile in reaction.
“Sleep,” Rose told him, because he did look exhausted. He opened his mouth to say something, and she said, “We’ll come and get you if there’s any change in Brem at all.”
Matt nodded, and Rose closed the bedroom door and stood for a second in the hallway. Maybe she needed to sleep, too. Maybe she could sleep, now that Brem was safe and sleeping as well. The TARDIS had placed her bedroom just across the hall, and Rose walked into it and kicked off her shoes and crawled into bed, feeling both very tired and not at all like sleeping.
She’d draped Brem’s coat across the chair that sat in front of the fireplace in their bedroom, and she looked over at it, flickering in the light of the fire the TARDIS had set for her, remembering the day he had first shown up in it, flush with the success of his first solo trip, during which he’d scoured space and time for, of all things, a coat he’d been satisfied with. The Doctor had analyzed it as if it had been a complicated biological specimen, judging it, in the end, to be quite a worthy coat, and Brem had beamed with pride, the way he did whenever his father praised him, and the Doctor had pretended that he wasn’t touched beyond belief that his son had gone out and followed in his footsteps by buying a fabulous coat.
She heard the door open and then close, and then the Doctor dropped heavily onto the bed next to her, reaching for her. He snuggled against her back, snaking his arms around her, burying his nose against the back of her neck, under her hair. He was trembling, and she placed her hands over his on her abdomen in alarm.
“He’s okay, right?”
He nodded wordlessly against her, and she understood then that he just needed a moment. She lifted one of his hands and kissed his knuckles systematically, until he stopped shaking.
“He’s going to be okay until he wakes up, and then I’m going to kill him for getting himself shot,” said the Doctor.
Rose kissed his fingertips, then said, “All I could think was that the Ood had said songs would be ending around you. They said-”
“They were wrong,” he cut her off, flatly. “They were wrong, do you hear me?”
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak at the moment.
They were silent for a very long time, and then the Doctor said, abruptly, “I thought you were going to clean it.”
She looked across at the coat she knew he was referring to. “It’s torn, Doctor,” she said, and thought she was going to burst into tears, and took a second to collect herself before continuing. “It’s torn, from where the shots must have…”
There was a beat before he responded. “The sonic can repair fabric, you know that. It’ll be good as new, Rose, I promise you. You’ll never even know.”
“I know. I know. I was going to bring it to the laundry room so the TARDIS could clean it, but then I realized that, well, you always empty your own pockets. I don’t know how to empty multi-dimensional pockets.”
“Oh,” he said. “Of course. I’ll do it for you.” He brushed a kiss over the top of her head before rolling out of bed and walking over to the coat. He took a moment, staring down at it, thinking of all the personal, private things Brem could be keeping in his pockets, including, it occurred to him, whichever volume of his journal he was currently working on. Well, thought the Doctor. He’d empty it into a huge pile and pretend he hadn’t rifled through his pockets and Brem would let him and it would all be forgiven.
The Doctor reached into the first pocket, his hand brushing against something small and hard and suddenly his brain was full, the way it had been when other Time Lords had existed and their thoughts were so constantly in your head that you could barely clear space to be yourself. The Doctor, reacting in shock to feeling that way again after so many years of only the comforting presence of his children in his mind, recoiled quickly, with a sharp intake of breath.
He heard Rose sit up in bed in alarm. “Doctor?” she ventured.
He took a deep breath, reaching back into Brem’s pocket and closing his hand firmly around the object, pulling it out. He tipped his hand toward the firelight, and stared in amazement as it glinted off the perfect diamond he was holding.
“Doctor? What is it?”
And he heard himself say something he’d thought he’d never have reason to say again. “It’s a white-point star.”
Next Chapter