Fic: The Sense to Hide
Title: The Sense to Hide
Author: meself, fid_gin
Pairing: Peter Vincent/Rose, implied Tenth Doctor/Rose
Rating: R, for sex and lots of swearing
Disclaimer: I own nothing, all hail the BBC and Dreamworks
Summary: In the course of investigating a rash of mysterious deaths in Las Vegas, Nevada, Torchwood sends Rose to interview an "expert."
Notes: I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I couldn't not write it. A post-Doomsday, pre-JE Pete's World Doctor Who / Fright Night crossover fic. Spoilers and direct dialogue from Fright Night.
“You remind me of someone,” are the first words she says to him, but on reflection that couldn't be further from the truth.
Oh, he looks like the Doctor, uncannily enough to take her breath away and make that sting of tears rise in the back of her throat when she approaches him for the first time. Even under that ridiculous wig and outfit and make-up, the nose and the chin and the eyes, dear God the eyes, are unmistakable. Over a year since she landed on the wrong side of a wall in Canary Wharf and she’d still recognize those eyes anywhere. But then he opens his mouth, and the illusion is shattered.
“That's a pretty shit pick-up line,” he slurs in a familiar accent she never expected to hear in Nevada, leering at her, looking her over all the way down and back up again. Glancing over his shoulder at the rest of the cast of his magic show, he turns back to her, doesn't even lower his voice when he speaks again. “I'm in the middle of a rehearsal right now, I've got time for a blow job and that's it.”
Rose blinks at that, looks down at herself, confirms that she's not dressed remotely like a groupie. “Peter Vincent? I'm with Torchwood. I need to ask you some questions.”
He rolls his eyes, waves his hand at her like she's a fly. “Fuck off, no interviews.” The long, black jacket twirls out when he spins to storm away from her, and he's surprisingly quick for being what looks and smells to be at least 3 out of 4 sheets to the wind. She only just manages to reach out and grab his shoulder at the last second. When he whirls back on her there it is again, that fierceness just behind the eyes and she thinks: Oncoming Storm. “Take your fucking hands off me.”
She does. “Torchwood's not a magazine, Mr. Vincent, it’s an organization researching a series of deaths by exsanguination in your area and I've been brought on as a consultant. I had a nine hour flight, my co-worker was killed in front of me and now they sent me here 'cause apparently you're s'posed to be some kind of vampire expert, yeah?” She twiddles her fingers in front of her face at the last. “Now can you take some time out of your very busy day of getting pissed and looking like a twat to help, or should I go back to my team, who work very closely with the British president by the way, and tell them Peter Vincent's a wanker who has no idea what he's talking about?”
Seconds pass as he appears to consider this, and then he shouts right in her face. “GINGER!” One of the many beautiful and surly-looking young women on the stage steps forward, crossing her arms across her impressive cleavage. “Get her upstairs.”
“You two going to need the usual five minutes alone?” the woman snarls.
“Fuck you,” he shoots back, and walks off without giving Rose another glance.
*****
She watches the sun set over the Las Vegas strip from the floor-to-ceiling windows in his ludicrously opulent penthouse. When he finally saunters in, she knows she's been kept waiting this long on purpose. “Right,” he says, slipping off the leather coat and heading, predictably, for the bar. “Torchwood, eh? Never heard of you.”
“That's sort-of the point of a secret organization,” she answers, trying not to stare at his bare torso, the dimples in the small of his back above the curve of his arse as he walks away from her and the sprinkling of hair across his chest and stomach when he turns back around. Not succeeding. Either she’s that affected by the resemblance, or it’s been that long since she got laid, she’s not sure.
“So's not walking around introducing yourself,” he retorts, pouring himself a tall glass of some awful-looking green liquid. He wiggles the bottle in her direction. “Midori. You want one?” She shakes her head no, and he shrugs, drains off his glass then pours another. “So...what can I do for you and your secret organization, Miss...?”
“Tyler,” she finishes, watching him remove his wig and ruffle his hair as he strolls to a large chair, and that's not good, because his hair is short and brown and now sticking up in several directions at once and he looks even more familiar to her.
“Miss Tyler,” he says, flopping into the chair and throwing one leg over the arm. “Shoot.” He points his fingers at her like a gun and clicks his teeth together, and it's so like the Doctor if she didn't know better she'd think that this is all an elaborate joke and it's really him in disguise.
The chair opposite him is equally oversized, and when she sits in it she feels very small. “You know the murders? The disappearances?”
“Why the fuck would I?” he replies in a bored tone suggesting that if it doesn't directly involve him, it doesn't really exist. As he speaks, he begins to peel off fake facial hair piece by piece: the moustache, the beard. She feels an overwhelming sense of relief when the sideburns go.
“Anyway,” she continues, “we've been tracking the activity for awhile and we think a...a plasmavore is here. In Las Vegas.”
“Plasmavore,” he repeats, the corner of his lips quirked in an amused smile, looking at her like she's crazy. That's okay, that's good. She's used to that.
“An alien that feeds off blood,” she clarifies as he picks a fake piercing off of his eyebrow.
“Aliens,” he says, flicking it at her. “Not my area.”
“No, it's mine, d'you mind?” she says sharply, picking it up and chucking it back at him. He flinches and gives her a highly offended look. “A creature that lives on blood is pretty much the definition of a vampire, all right? We think they’ve been here for centuries and for all we know they might be the source of the vampire legend to begin with, but after today we think this is different than what we're used to dealing with. So when you're done picking at your face do you want to give me some idea of how we can kill this thing?”
*****
His “expertise” seems to have less to do with actual knowledge and more to do with Hammer horror and rubbish he's purchased off of eBay, and she's on the verge of walking out and calling the whole trip a bust when she shows him a photograph of a symbol, and everything changes.
The drunken and blasé demeanor shifts immediately, a pause between the bravado and the bullshit as he takes the piece of paper away from her and stares intently at the winged figure printed upon it. “Where did you get that?”
Rose watches his eyes as she speaks; it seems to be the only spot in his face where any emotion shows through. The holes in his mask. “A house in the suburbs. A kid next door found us online, said his neighbour was a vampire. That's where we think it lives. Where we were just before...” She still can't quite bring herself to describe how her associate disintegrated in front of her as he stepped into the sunlight. What was his name again? Christ, she only just met him that morning.
Peter's eyes are wide, somehow more sober even though he's got the Midori bottle tucked into the pocket of the robe he slipped on awhile ago and his glass has stayed full the entire time they've been talking. The black around his eyes has smeared, and combined with this new expression of his it makes him look much younger. And tired.
“It's a species that originated in the Mediterranean,” he says. The tone of his voice is soft and deep, his words very clear, and he sounds nothing like the man she met downstairs and more like the man he first reminded her of. “They nest in the earth. And they kill slowly. They keep their victims alive for days. Snackers.” There is a bitterness behind his words that suggests a personal connection, and she should have guessed, really. You don't get eyes like the Doctor's until you've lost someone, everyone, that you love.
“Who did you lose?” she asks gently, feeling for the first time as though she's speaking to Peter Vincent the man, and not the act.
“My parents,” he says simply, his voice raw. “I told myself I made it up, I was a kid, figured it was easier to believe in monsters. And the only reason I lived is because I had the sense to hide. There’s no fighting this thing, it’s a strong breed. There will only be surviving.” What he doesn't say but she hears all the same: Run.
“So you’re just gonna hide up here now in your tower and hope you or someone you know isn’t next?”
He raises his glass in a bitter toast. “You think I’m a coward, Miss Tyler, I’m not: I’m a realist.”
“Yeah, I used to think like that,” she says. “That man you remind me of? First time I met him, he grabbed my hand and said one word: 'Run.' And we did, and we never stopped. But he also knew when to take a stand, when to fight, and the day that I lost him it was because we were fightin' for the whole world. We won but...we lost.” That sting is back in her throat, and she doesn't fight it, lets it come.
“Was it worth it?” he asks. She can feel him searching her face the way she's been searching his; maybe on some level of universal duplicity, as the Doctor might say, he recognizes her, too. She hopes not - she kind-of doesn’t want to be recognized right now.
Laughing at the same time that a tear rolls down her cheek, she answers: “No.” He makes a noise like an audible smile, a giggle that never quite makes it past his lips, and the fire he lit in the middle of the room crackles and spits sparks. She's exhausted from jet lag and the improbable day she’s had of death and vampires, and vulgar, unspeakably sexy men who look just like the Doctor, and there's really only one way this can end. “I'll take that drink, now,” she says. “Go on, then. Midori me.”
*****
They fuck on the floor by the light of the fire and the glow of the cityscape outside. Despite what “Ginger” downstairs insinuated he's actually a very attentive lover, or maybe Rose is an exception, and he's made her come once already with his tongue and his fingers tipped with you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me black nail polish before he even loses the leather trousers. She makes him wear a condom: she's not stupid, and it gives her an excuse to use the one she's carried so long in her purse, just in case.
Not that she ever thought there would be a 'case', and there hasn't been since she came to this universe. But Rose believes in being prepared and now here she is, underneath, in front of and on top of a man who could be the Doctor's twin. That's not the only reason, though - he touched something in her before he actually touched her. He’s a title and the secret pain behind it: the Magician, strong but wounded, arrogant but vulnerable, and if she had a type then she has to admit that all of that would most certainly define it. The fact that he looks and acts and talks and oh God fucks just like the Doctor is just a coincidence. It has to be.
“What's your name?” he gasps as she's riding him, and it almost makes her laugh. Almost.
“Rose,” she answers, guiding his hand to her breast. He squeezes almost painfully and it feels good, so good to feel something, then he flips her onto her back again.
“Rose,” he moans, pounding into her. She doesn't say his name, not even when she comes a second time and leaves fingernail scratches down his back and shoulders. It wouldn't be fair, considering she's not sure it's actually him she's making love to.
*****
He's gone when she wakes up. She might've known.
She curses him as she gets dressed. Fucking coward. She curses herself, too, for thinking that just because he looks like the Doctor that that meant that he shared anything in common with the man she knew and loved. Loves, still.
She pulls herself together and swishes some water from a tap in the loo around in her mouth to get rid of the rancid melon-taste of Midori before she does her walk of shame, past his “collection” of vampire-killing memorabilia that's just for show, all part of his act. Rose is so focused on her anger that she doesn't see him until she runs straight into him right in front of the elevator.
“Sorry, sorry,” he says. He's in another long, leather jacket - how many does he own? - but over jeans this time, no costume, no wig or fake facial hair or piercings, just a trace of the previous day's black make-up smudged over his eyelids and ground into the tiny lines at the corners of his eyes. His hair is a sex-tousled, slept-on mess and he looks hung over, but somehow clear-headed.
“I'm tired of hiding,” he says, and opens his coat to reveal crossed straps of bullets, knives and stakes across his chest. A shotgun hangs against his hip. “Let's kill something,” he growls. She remembers telling him a shred of her story the night before, about the time to stand and fight, and she marvels that somehow, even from across universes the Doctor can still do it, can still make people better than they were. Maybe she can, too.
“Thought you'd never ask,” she says, and smiles.
Author: meself, fid_gin
Pairing: Peter Vincent/Rose, implied Tenth Doctor/Rose
Rating: R, for sex and lots of swearing
Disclaimer: I own nothing, all hail the BBC and Dreamworks
Summary: In the course of investigating a rash of mysterious deaths in Las Vegas, Nevada, Torchwood sends Rose to interview an "expert."
Notes: I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I couldn't not write it. A post-Doomsday, pre-JE Pete's World Doctor Who / Fright Night crossover fic. Spoilers and direct dialogue from Fright Night.
“You remind me of someone,” are the first words she says to him, but on reflection that couldn't be further from the truth.
Oh, he looks like the Doctor, uncannily enough to take her breath away and make that sting of tears rise in the back of her throat when she approaches him for the first time. Even under that ridiculous wig and outfit and make-up, the nose and the chin and the eyes, dear God the eyes, are unmistakable. Over a year since she landed on the wrong side of a wall in Canary Wharf and she’d still recognize those eyes anywhere. But then he opens his mouth, and the illusion is shattered.
“That's a pretty shit pick-up line,” he slurs in a familiar accent she never expected to hear in Nevada, leering at her, looking her over all the way down and back up again. Glancing over his shoulder at the rest of the cast of his magic show, he turns back to her, doesn't even lower his voice when he speaks again. “I'm in the middle of a rehearsal right now, I've got time for a blow job and that's it.”
Rose blinks at that, looks down at herself, confirms that she's not dressed remotely like a groupie. “Peter Vincent? I'm with Torchwood. I need to ask you some questions.”
He rolls his eyes, waves his hand at her like she's a fly. “Fuck off, no interviews.” The long, black jacket twirls out when he spins to storm away from her, and he's surprisingly quick for being what looks and smells to be at least 3 out of 4 sheets to the wind. She only just manages to reach out and grab his shoulder at the last second. When he whirls back on her there it is again, that fierceness just behind the eyes and she thinks: Oncoming Storm. “Take your fucking hands off me.”
She does. “Torchwood's not a magazine, Mr. Vincent, it’s an organization researching a series of deaths by exsanguination in your area and I've been brought on as a consultant. I had a nine hour flight, my co-worker was killed in front of me and now they sent me here 'cause apparently you're s'posed to be some kind of vampire expert, yeah?” She twiddles her fingers in front of her face at the last. “Now can you take some time out of your very busy day of getting pissed and looking like a twat to help, or should I go back to my team, who work very closely with the British president by the way, and tell them Peter Vincent's a wanker who has no idea what he's talking about?”
Seconds pass as he appears to consider this, and then he shouts right in her face. “GINGER!” One of the many beautiful and surly-looking young women on the stage steps forward, crossing her arms across her impressive cleavage. “Get her upstairs.”
“You two going to need the usual five minutes alone?” the woman snarls.
“Fuck you,” he shoots back, and walks off without giving Rose another glance.
*****
She watches the sun set over the Las Vegas strip from the floor-to-ceiling windows in his ludicrously opulent penthouse. When he finally saunters in, she knows she's been kept waiting this long on purpose. “Right,” he says, slipping off the leather coat and heading, predictably, for the bar. “Torchwood, eh? Never heard of you.”
“That's sort-of the point of a secret organization,” she answers, trying not to stare at his bare torso, the dimples in the small of his back above the curve of his arse as he walks away from her and the sprinkling of hair across his chest and stomach when he turns back around. Not succeeding. Either she’s that affected by the resemblance, or it’s been that long since she got laid, she’s not sure.
“So's not walking around introducing yourself,” he retorts, pouring himself a tall glass of some awful-looking green liquid. He wiggles the bottle in her direction. “Midori. You want one?” She shakes her head no, and he shrugs, drains off his glass then pours another. “So...what can I do for you and your secret organization, Miss...?”
“Tyler,” she finishes, watching him remove his wig and ruffle his hair as he strolls to a large chair, and that's not good, because his hair is short and brown and now sticking up in several directions at once and he looks even more familiar to her.
“Miss Tyler,” he says, flopping into the chair and throwing one leg over the arm. “Shoot.” He points his fingers at her like a gun and clicks his teeth together, and it's so like the Doctor if she didn't know better she'd think that this is all an elaborate joke and it's really him in disguise.
The chair opposite him is equally oversized, and when she sits in it she feels very small. “You know the murders? The disappearances?”
“Why the fuck would I?” he replies in a bored tone suggesting that if it doesn't directly involve him, it doesn't really exist. As he speaks, he begins to peel off fake facial hair piece by piece: the moustache, the beard. She feels an overwhelming sense of relief when the sideburns go.
“Anyway,” she continues, “we've been tracking the activity for awhile and we think a...a plasmavore is here. In Las Vegas.”
“Plasmavore,” he repeats, the corner of his lips quirked in an amused smile, looking at her like she's crazy. That's okay, that's good. She's used to that.
“An alien that feeds off blood,” she clarifies as he picks a fake piercing off of his eyebrow.
“Aliens,” he says, flicking it at her. “Not my area.”
“No, it's mine, d'you mind?” she says sharply, picking it up and chucking it back at him. He flinches and gives her a highly offended look. “A creature that lives on blood is pretty much the definition of a vampire, all right? We think they’ve been here for centuries and for all we know they might be the source of the vampire legend to begin with, but after today we think this is different than what we're used to dealing with. So when you're done picking at your face do you want to give me some idea of how we can kill this thing?”
*****
His “expertise” seems to have less to do with actual knowledge and more to do with Hammer horror and rubbish he's purchased off of eBay, and she's on the verge of walking out and calling the whole trip a bust when she shows him a photograph of a symbol, and everything changes.
The drunken and blasé demeanor shifts immediately, a pause between the bravado and the bullshit as he takes the piece of paper away from her and stares intently at the winged figure printed upon it. “Where did you get that?”
Rose watches his eyes as she speaks; it seems to be the only spot in his face where any emotion shows through. The holes in his mask. “A house in the suburbs. A kid next door found us online, said his neighbour was a vampire. That's where we think it lives. Where we were just before...” She still can't quite bring herself to describe how her associate disintegrated in front of her as he stepped into the sunlight. What was his name again? Christ, she only just met him that morning.
Peter's eyes are wide, somehow more sober even though he's got the Midori bottle tucked into the pocket of the robe he slipped on awhile ago and his glass has stayed full the entire time they've been talking. The black around his eyes has smeared, and combined with this new expression of his it makes him look much younger. And tired.
“It's a species that originated in the Mediterranean,” he says. The tone of his voice is soft and deep, his words very clear, and he sounds nothing like the man she met downstairs and more like the man he first reminded her of. “They nest in the earth. And they kill slowly. They keep their victims alive for days. Snackers.” There is a bitterness behind his words that suggests a personal connection, and she should have guessed, really. You don't get eyes like the Doctor's until you've lost someone, everyone, that you love.
“Who did you lose?” she asks gently, feeling for the first time as though she's speaking to Peter Vincent the man, and not the act.
“My parents,” he says simply, his voice raw. “I told myself I made it up, I was a kid, figured it was easier to believe in monsters. And the only reason I lived is because I had the sense to hide. There’s no fighting this thing, it’s a strong breed. There will only be surviving.” What he doesn't say but she hears all the same: Run.
“So you’re just gonna hide up here now in your tower and hope you or someone you know isn’t next?”
He raises his glass in a bitter toast. “You think I’m a coward, Miss Tyler, I’m not: I’m a realist.”
“Yeah, I used to think like that,” she says. “That man you remind me of? First time I met him, he grabbed my hand and said one word: 'Run.' And we did, and we never stopped. But he also knew when to take a stand, when to fight, and the day that I lost him it was because we were fightin' for the whole world. We won but...we lost.” That sting is back in her throat, and she doesn't fight it, lets it come.
“Was it worth it?” he asks. She can feel him searching her face the way she's been searching his; maybe on some level of universal duplicity, as the Doctor might say, he recognizes her, too. She hopes not - she kind-of doesn’t want to be recognized right now.
Laughing at the same time that a tear rolls down her cheek, she answers: “No.” He makes a noise like an audible smile, a giggle that never quite makes it past his lips, and the fire he lit in the middle of the room crackles and spits sparks. She's exhausted from jet lag and the improbable day she’s had of death and vampires, and vulgar, unspeakably sexy men who look just like the Doctor, and there's really only one way this can end. “I'll take that drink, now,” she says. “Go on, then. Midori me.”
*****
They fuck on the floor by the light of the fire and the glow of the cityscape outside. Despite what “Ginger” downstairs insinuated he's actually a very attentive lover, or maybe Rose is an exception, and he's made her come once already with his tongue and his fingers tipped with you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me black nail polish before he even loses the leather trousers. She makes him wear a condom: she's not stupid, and it gives her an excuse to use the one she's carried so long in her purse, just in case.
Not that she ever thought there would be a 'case', and there hasn't been since she came to this universe. But Rose believes in being prepared and now here she is, underneath, in front of and on top of a man who could be the Doctor's twin. That's not the only reason, though - he touched something in her before he actually touched her. He’s a title and the secret pain behind it: the Magician, strong but wounded, arrogant but vulnerable, and if she had a type then she has to admit that all of that would most certainly define it. The fact that he looks and acts and talks and oh God fucks just like the Doctor is just a coincidence. It has to be.
“What's your name?” he gasps as she's riding him, and it almost makes her laugh. Almost.
“Rose,” she answers, guiding his hand to her breast. He squeezes almost painfully and it feels good, so good to feel something, then he flips her onto her back again.
“Rose,” he moans, pounding into her. She doesn't say his name, not even when she comes a second time and leaves fingernail scratches down his back and shoulders. It wouldn't be fair, considering she's not sure it's actually him she's making love to.
*****
He's gone when she wakes up. She might've known.
She curses him as she gets dressed. Fucking coward. She curses herself, too, for thinking that just because he looks like the Doctor that that meant that he shared anything in common with the man she knew and loved. Loves, still.
She pulls herself together and swishes some water from a tap in the loo around in her mouth to get rid of the rancid melon-taste of Midori before she does her walk of shame, past his “collection” of vampire-killing memorabilia that's just for show, all part of his act. Rose is so focused on her anger that she doesn't see him until she runs straight into him right in front of the elevator.
“Sorry, sorry,” he says. He's in another long, leather jacket - how many does he own? - but over jeans this time, no costume, no wig or fake facial hair or piercings, just a trace of the previous day's black make-up smudged over his eyelids and ground into the tiny lines at the corners of his eyes. His hair is a sex-tousled, slept-on mess and he looks hung over, but somehow clear-headed.
“I'm tired of hiding,” he says, and opens his coat to reveal crossed straps of bullets, knives and stakes across his chest. A shotgun hangs against his hip. “Let's kill something,” he growls. She remembers telling him a shred of her story the night before, about the time to stand and fight, and she marvels that somehow, even from across universes the Doctor can still do it, can still make people better than they were. Maybe she can, too.
“Thought you'd never ask,” she says, and smiles.