Fic: By Any Other Name, chapter 1
Title: By Any Other Name, Ch. 1/3
Author: meself, fid_gin
Beta: unfolded73
Pairing: This chapter, Ten/Rose. It's Loved 'verse, so overall it's Ten II/Ten/Rose. And, eventually, there will be Rose/Rose. Yeah, that's right, I went there.
Rating: This chapter, R for sexy tiems.
Disclaimer: I own nothing, all hail the BBC
Summary: He should have known immediately that it wasn’t her. Well, that it was her, but it wasn’t the right her.
Notes: Well, hello there! It's story time!
This fic was started nearly 3, count them, THREE years ago. It was shortly before Fright Night was about to be released (see if you can spot the sartorial homage to FN around Chapter 2...), and unfolded73 and myself decided that Rose was long overdue for some hot girl-on-girl action. After attempting and rejecting trysts with several prominent and hot historical figures (Mata Hari, I'm looking at you...), we eventually decided that, this being the Loved 'verse, really the only logical woman Rose could fool around with would be herself, and this fic was born. A bit of this first chapter was even written by unfolded73, if memory serves! But then FN came out, and I became obsessed with Peter Vincent, and then shortly after that got knocked up (coincidence?), and this fic was forgotten.
Until recently, when I suddenly got a bee in my bonnet about finishing it. I've been working for months during naptimes and in the evenings, unfolded kindly agreed to step back in as beta and...well, here we are! I confess, I'm having some panic attacks posting fic for the first time in years, but nothing ventured, right?
Falls shortly before Just Another Doctor in the chronology. I have no idea when I'll post the next two parts, but I PROMISE YOU I will not chicken out and vanish again.
Title is, of course, Shakespeare's. "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
Until she saw the Doctor, it had been just another standard jump with the dimension cannon, if there was such a thing.
As usual, Rose arrived in a new universe with very little recollection of what had happened in the last one and only her hastily scribbled notes in the pad she carried with her to give her any clue: Attempt six - no Doctor. There was more she hadn’t written down, of course, as always: vague impressions that made her feel afraid or sad, but she had decided from the beginning that he was the only thing that mattered, and that the less record she kept of what she saw and did in those other worlds, the better. Torchwood’s best and brightest scientists had explained to her back in her own universe that the dimension hopping would cause disorientation, nausea, and memory loss, and with these intangible feelings of dread and loss she sometimes got after leaving one parallel and entering another she almost counted it as a blessing. At least she wasn’t puking her guts out anymore like her notes reminded her she had the first time.
Standing in the street getting her bearings, she ran down her mental checklist: the people around her looked normal and weren’t running or screaming, London looked normal - no alien ships in the sky or burnt-out shells of buildings. A passer-by shot her a vaguely pitying glance before answering her that it was 2011… not so far from her own time, then. The sight of the TARDIS was so unexpected, her gaze passed right over it at first. It was only the Doctor, her Doctor, walking towards his ship that snapped her out of it, and then she was running, running to him like she’d imagined all these years, shouting his name. He had just enough time to turn to face her before she threw herself into his arms, registering and loving the look of shock on his face just before doing so.
He hugged her back fiercely for only a second before pushing her away and holding her at arms’ length, gripping her shoulders almost painfully. “Rose,” he breathed, sounding on the verge of tears. “How did...?” He looked around, his eyes darting in every direction as though searching for another person he expected to be with her. When he didn’t see who he was looking for, his face grew solemn as his eyes once more met hers. The Doctor looked closely at her, into her, looked her up and down with such scrutiny she began to feel uncomfortable. Wasn’t he happy to see her at all?
“It’s me,” she said, feeling foolish and trying to smile. “I came back. I...I missed you.”
His face fell as his hands dropped from her shoulders. “Oh, Rose,” he said, rubbing at his eyes and looking more miserable than ever. “I miss you, too.” She noted the present-tense.
***
He should have known immediately that it wasn’t her. Well, that it was her, but it wasn’t the right her.
Six weeks. To be more precise, 44 days. To be as precise as he was capable of (and he was capable of some fearsome precision), 44 days, 5 hours, 26 minutes, and 5.326 seconds since his two companions had wandered off and fallen through a rift into what his tireless research since pointed to being a bubble universe. He’d always been fascinated by the theory behind bubble universes, as if the universe were a great big soap bubble with one of those tiny little bubbles on the outside, except really not at all like that, but it was always useful to have simple analogies at hand when travelling with a human.
His hearts clenched. Not that he was travelling with a human now; she’d fallen again, he’d lost her. He’d lost them both, Rose and his part-human counterpart, and it was cold comfort that at least wherever they were, they had each other. That was assuming they were still alive.
All of these thoughts flashed through his brain in an instant - 0.147 seconds, to be precise - while this younger Rose was looking at him with a mixture of joy and confusion and increasingly, fear. He noticed the clothes now, the blue leather jacket that she’d stopped wearing long ago. He noticed the fact that she was younger and harder, that she smelled of exhaustion and the faint ozone of travelling between universes. And of course, even without these subtle details which his sharp perception tallied one by one, there was the glaring fact that this Rose was alone, his double noticeably absent from her side.
She was telling him she’d missed him, so like the last time (first time?) she'd found him and held him in the middle of that street as his body had shook with pain from the Dalek laser. “Oh, Rose,” he sighed, “I miss you, too.” He turned and unlocked the TARDIS doors, gestured inside. “C'mon.” Rose was not stupid, not his beautiful, brilliant Rose: she hesitated, searching his face for an explanation.
“It's wrong,” she said finally. “It's you, but...this isn't the right universe, is it?”
“I'll tell you everything, just...please.” He tilted his head toward the interior of the ship again, and after one last cautious glance around her, Rose Tyler stepped into his TARDIS for what had to have been, for her, the first time in years.
He put the kettle on.
“How many tries is this for you?” he asked as she sat at the table, her back straight and tense. When she didn't answer, he tried to soften his face into something resembling a smile. “It's okay, you can tell me. You're in the right universe Rose, just...the wrong time.”
“How's that any better?” she retorted. His hearts swelled with pride. Oh no, Rose Tyler was no fool. When the smile on his face became genuine, she visibly relaxed a fraction. “Seven, I think. I can't remember, but I've got...” Her sentence trailed off as she apparently decided whatever she was about to say might be too much information this soon in the conversation.
“Seven,” he repeated, feeling dazed. “You never said. You never wanted to talk about it. Or I never asked...” His voice broke off. Shaking his head, the Doctor cleared his throat dramatically as he always did when preparing to give a lecture of a sort.
“Right. What you need to know, Rose Tyler, is that you've already found me by this time and have been with me, travelling with me again, for a very long time now.” Her eyes flew open, and she began to look all around her in panic. “It's okay,” he said what he hoped was reassuringly. “The time differential is muted from all the hopping around you've been doing...technically, this isn't even your universe anymore, so interacting with yourself doesn't perturb the timeline. Until you arrived back, the first you I mean, you ceased to exist. There won't be any Reapers. And anyway, you're, she’s...” There was that lump in his throat again. “There's more,” he continued, swallowing hard. “When you found me, I'd been hurt. I averted regeneration but caused a biological metacrisis and...” He watched her brow furrow in confusion: he was losing her. “There's another Doctor,” he finished. “Another me, travelling with you and me. There's three of us, together, and they're gone, Rose.” His words became rushed, desperate. “They're trapped, they've been gone for so long and I can't, I should send you away, but I can't...” He could feel tears burning behind his eyes, tears he’d not allowed himself to shed in 44 days because it wasn’t helpful, crying, it wasn’t productive, it wouldn’t lead to the bolt of inspiration he needed to figure out a way to get them back. Drawing in a deep, shuddering breath, he swallowed against a dry mouth and tried to school his expression.
Through the blur of the unshed tears in his eyes, he saw the hazy figure of Rose stand and approach him. She may not have fully trusted that this was the right universe, or indeed the right Doctor, but his kind Rose wouldn't stand by and watch someone wracked with pain and grief when she could offer comfort. He felt her arms encircle him once more and he was clutching at her, burying his face in her hair. “I’ve lost you again,” he finished.
Rose looked up at him. “You’ve found me now, though.”
“You can’t stay,” he said with a sharp shake of his head, temptation like a hot spike piercing his chest. “The timeline-”
“I know.” The corner of her mouth tipped up slightly. “I know I can’t stay. But right now, right here, you’ve found me and I’ve found you.” She moved against him, just a little, just enough so that his awareness was suddenly full of every point of contact between their bodies. Her hands found their way into his hair. “And I’ve missed you.”
He was kissing her then, unsure even if he’d moved to close the gap between them or if she had, kissing her the way he'd wanted to, the way he should have that first time she'd found him, His brain was shouting at him that he was weak and this was wrong, potentially damaging to the timeline and definitely delaying the inevitable when he would have to send this Rose back to her own timeline in her own universe to continue the search for him that would end on an Earth in 2008 during a Dalek invasion. But her mouth tasted so sweet and her hands in his hair, how he’d missed her hands in his hair, even if for him it had only been a matter of weeks.
They stumbled out of the galley and into the corridor, the bones of his left hand colliding rather painfully with a rondel as he clutched at her shoulder and backed her against the wall. Rose was already pulling his shirt out of his trousers, as if she feared that any waste of time would give him time to think and reject her. Her hands slipped to his arse and pulled and he groaned at the friction between their bodies. He was long past the point where he could have stopped this; perhaps he was past it the moment she ran into his arms outside.
Rose was pulling them through the nearest doorway, completely unaware that it was the human Doctor’s bedroom, or was back when they'd bothered with separate bedrooms, and he felt a stab of guilt at the same time that the scent of the other man that clung to the room escalated his arousal even more, if that was possible. She began to shed her clothes in a quick, no-nonsense way, still rushing, almost like she wanted to get it over with.
The firm set of her mouth, the tension in her frame - it made him wonder what exactly was going on behind those brown eyes that he knew so well. When he’d been reunited with her, he’d been thrown so topsy-turvy by the existence of his duplicate and losing Donna; had he even asked her what she’d gone through to get back to him? Had he even wondered if there were hidden scars, scars that even she might not consciously be aware of? How could he claim to love her if he’d never even asked? She was just his Rose, his constant, undaunted Rose, and he’d let her take care of him when maybe he should have been taking care of her.
“So brave,” he blurted, and she paused in removing her bra, frowning at this apparent non sequitur.
“For getting naked?” she said with a smirk.
“For everything you do,” he murmured, drawing closer and sliding fingers underneath the waistband of her knickers. Her skin was hot to his touch, her hipbones prominent, and he remembered how she’d confessed to him the sporadic nature of her meals while she’d been using the dimension cannon. He frowned again with worry for this Rose and the life she was currently leading. He wondered how he could possibly be worth what she was enduring.
He sank to his knees, pulling her knickers down her legs as he went and savouring the scent of her as she stepped out of them and stood there, completely bare and exposed to his scrutiny.
The Doctor trailed his hands over her legs, light touches, and listened to her rapid breathing as his fingers trailed up her inner thigh and gently stroked open her sex. The wetness he found there made him gasp, his desire pulsing with the beats of his hearts.
“It’s been a while, all right?” she said defensively, a reply to his unspoken thoughts. It occurred to him for the first time that she might think he was comparing her to her future self and somehow finding her lacking.
The Doctor stood and met Rose’s eyes. “It’s perfect. You’re perfect.” And then, because the words had been burning in the back of his throat for a while, “I’m sorry.”
She took his hand and retreated to the bed then, pulling him along with her. The Doctor crawled over her, still clothed, intent on her pleasure. He kissed his way down her chest and stomach, his tie trailing against her skin.
Rose’s hands slid through his hair, her nails scratching against his scalp and making him groan. As he spread her legs and buried his face between her thighs, the ghost of his Rose and the other Doctor grew fainter...fainter still. This Rose cried out when his mouth found her, stroking the bud of her clitoris with his tongue and sucking on it in quick pulses. He slid two fingers into her and she came almost immediately, bucking hard under him and nearly breaking his nose with her pubic bone...well, she had said it'd been awhile. The Doctor kept licking, drawing every last shiver from her and then, wiping her moisture from his face, moved over her while unfastening his trousers. He didn't even bother, couldn't be bothered to take them off: freeing his cock and pushing them down just so far as was necessary, he slid into her in one deep stroke that made them both moan. They moved together in the other Doctor's bed, the TARDIS humming low around them as though trying to remind the Doctor that something was missing, but he managed to tune her out. 44 days, 6 hours, 5 minutes, and 32.8 seconds: he would have his Rose, now, even if technically she wasn't the right one.
***
“Can I ask you a question?” Rose said, interrupting his current flow of babble.
“‘Can I ask you a question’ is a question,” he answered, not quite with his normal level of gleeful cheek but closer than he’d felt in weeks.
“Why should I help you do this?”
After they'd made love, the Doctor's mind had cleared for what felt like the first time in ages. Rose was here. This Rose. She'd travelled between dimensions to find him, dimensions very similar in fact to bubble universes, and for her to have done so meant...
The Doctor’s hand froze in the act of sonicing her yellow dimension-hopper, and he looked up to regard her with something like horror. “What?”
She gave a half-shrug, not quite meeting his eyes. “I mean, I’ve completed my mission: I found you. Whether or not it’s the exact you I was looking for doesn’t really matter, does it? And this other Rose and other Doctor’ve got each other, don’t they? Why’m I risking my life just to lose you again?”
His mouth opened and closed as he searched for the words. “You said you understood...”
“I know what I said,” she interrupted, sounding a bit like a petulant teenager. When she finally looked up and met his eyes with hers, he could hardly believe how much younger she looked to him in that moment than the Rose he’d spent his days with since they’d been reunited. “Well?”
“Other than the universe-shattering paradox when you don’t show up to meet me in the right time and place and the other Doctor isn’t created and reality as we know it is destroyed, you mean?”
He saw a smile tug at the corner of her mouth. “Other than that, yeah.”
A response didn’t come easily, and the Doctor found himself reminded of things as they had been once upon a time between him and Rose, the way that this Rose no doubt remembered him best: unable or unwilling to give a straight answer or even tell her how desperately he loved her. If he refused to answer her now, went back to tinkering or lost her question in a stream of his own meaningless words, she would not be surprised. Would probably not even call him on it. That thought wrenched his hearts painfully, and he resolved that it made it all the more necessary to make her understand how she and his counterpart had changed him…would change him.
But that confession was too raw, and this Rose was still too hardened against him. Instead he reached for the only other universal truth he could make her understand.
“Because you know that this is the right thing to do,” he answered softly.
She winced, and he wondered if she had been expecting him to manipulate her with grandiose declarations of destiny and paradoxes. She looked down for a few moments, blinking, and when she looked back up that firm resolve was back in her eyes.
“Right. Tell me how this works again?”
He smiled gratefully at her for a moment before speaking. “Bubble universe!” It was practically a shout, and Rose jumped slightly beside him. “Not nearly as much fun as it sounds, unfortunately, but there’s masses of them out there and they’re mostly harmless. I should’ve known something was wrong when the walls were thin enough here for them to just slip through.” He didn’t like the implication behind his words that this Rose showing up was ‘wrong’, but he kept speaking as they gathered what they needed and left the TARDIS. “You see,” he continued, locking the doors, “your universe is ahead of ours, and somehow you must’ve jumped sideways instead of backwards which explains how you ended up in 2011 and not 2008 where you should be, breaking down the walls between parallels as you went - how many times have I warned you lot about doing that?”
Continuing in an affectionately patronizing tone, the Doctor walked them around the corner to the alley where his readings had indicated Rose and the other Doctor had vanished.
“This is it,” he said grimly. He felt Rose squeeze his hand and looked down, surprised: he hadn’t even realised she’d taken it.
A cat shot past them and down the alleyway, and Rose furrowed her brow in confusion. “Why didn’t the cat vanish, too?”
“Void stuff,” he said. The words felt wrong in his mouth, contaminated somehow, carrying with them memories of a white room in Canary Wharf. He knew Rose felt it, too, thought he saw her shudder slightly beside him. “The walls are thin enough, it’s like that extra little push you need to get through. Well, I say push, I mean pull.” He clicked his teeth thoughtfully. “Presumably, that cat has never been through the Void.”
“But if the other Doctor was created in this universe, then how could he have...”
“He travelled through the Void once. Briefly.” The Doctor couldn’t help but smile wistfully, remembering how Rose and his duplicate had stood their ground and refused to leave with Jackie when he’d finally returned them to Pete’s Norway. Fumbling in his pockets, he retrieved the cartoonish big yellow button and handed it to her. Rose regarded it silently for a moment.
“Can’t believe I’m doing this on purpose,” she said finally, her voice strange and choked. “I worked so hard, for so long...”
“I know. I’m sorry.” He pulled her into a hug, resting his chin against the blonde crown of her hair. She had sacrificed so much just to find him, only to be told by the Doctor she found that she was too late: another Rose had already found him, and now she had to help get her other self back for him, risking her own life in the process; he couldn’t imagine what she must be going through, but he knew what he needed to say. “And I love you, Rose, of course I do. I always did.” She pulled back in surprise and he stole the moment to bend forward and kiss her deeply, his lips devouring, his tongue tasting, exploring - as always, she tasted like some delicious, forbidden fruit. When the kiss broke, her eyes remained closed.
“Wow,” she said, blinking them open. “I think I like this goodbye a lot better than the last one.”
He grinned. “Me too.” Then, more serious: “And it’s not ‘goodbye’, Rose, it’s ‘see you soon.’ You’ll be fine, I promise.” He wished desperately that he were as sure as he hoped he sounded. What was he thinking? He’d lost her so many times, was he really sending her away voluntarily now? What if he lost all three of them forever, would he then spend eternity alone, wearing out his remaining regenerations from old age one at a time in his TARDIS parked just down the road?
Rose threw her shoulders back and stepped forward, turned. “See you soon.” Then she was gone.
Chapter 2
Author: meself, fid_gin
Beta: unfolded73
Pairing: This chapter, Ten/Rose. It's Loved 'verse, so overall it's Ten II/Ten/Rose. And, eventually, there will be Rose/Rose. Yeah, that's right, I went there.
Rating: This chapter, R for sexy tiems.
Disclaimer: I own nothing, all hail the BBC
Summary: He should have known immediately that it wasn’t her. Well, that it was her, but it wasn’t the right her.
Notes: Well, hello there! It's story time!
This fic was started nearly 3, count them, THREE years ago. It was shortly before Fright Night was about to be released (see if you can spot the sartorial homage to FN around Chapter 2...), and unfolded73 and myself decided that Rose was long overdue for some hot girl-on-girl action. After attempting and rejecting trysts with several prominent and hot historical figures (Mata Hari, I'm looking at you...), we eventually decided that, this being the Loved 'verse, really the only logical woman Rose could fool around with would be herself, and this fic was born. A bit of this first chapter was even written by unfolded73, if memory serves! But then FN came out, and I became obsessed with Peter Vincent, and then shortly after that got knocked up (coincidence?), and this fic was forgotten.
Until recently, when I suddenly got a bee in my bonnet about finishing it. I've been working for months during naptimes and in the evenings, unfolded kindly agreed to step back in as beta and...well, here we are! I confess, I'm having some panic attacks posting fic for the first time in years, but nothing ventured, right?
Falls shortly before Just Another Doctor in the chronology. I have no idea when I'll post the next two parts, but I PROMISE YOU I will not chicken out and vanish again.
Title is, of course, Shakespeare's. "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
Until she saw the Doctor, it had been just another standard jump with the dimension cannon, if there was such a thing.
As usual, Rose arrived in a new universe with very little recollection of what had happened in the last one and only her hastily scribbled notes in the pad she carried with her to give her any clue: Attempt six - no Doctor. There was more she hadn’t written down, of course, as always: vague impressions that made her feel afraid or sad, but she had decided from the beginning that he was the only thing that mattered, and that the less record she kept of what she saw and did in those other worlds, the better. Torchwood’s best and brightest scientists had explained to her back in her own universe that the dimension hopping would cause disorientation, nausea, and memory loss, and with these intangible feelings of dread and loss she sometimes got after leaving one parallel and entering another she almost counted it as a blessing. At least she wasn’t puking her guts out anymore like her notes reminded her she had the first time.
Standing in the street getting her bearings, she ran down her mental checklist: the people around her looked normal and weren’t running or screaming, London looked normal - no alien ships in the sky or burnt-out shells of buildings. A passer-by shot her a vaguely pitying glance before answering her that it was 2011… not so far from her own time, then. The sight of the TARDIS was so unexpected, her gaze passed right over it at first. It was only the Doctor, her Doctor, walking towards his ship that snapped her out of it, and then she was running, running to him like she’d imagined all these years, shouting his name. He had just enough time to turn to face her before she threw herself into his arms, registering and loving the look of shock on his face just before doing so.
He hugged her back fiercely for only a second before pushing her away and holding her at arms’ length, gripping her shoulders almost painfully. “Rose,” he breathed, sounding on the verge of tears. “How did...?” He looked around, his eyes darting in every direction as though searching for another person he expected to be with her. When he didn’t see who he was looking for, his face grew solemn as his eyes once more met hers. The Doctor looked closely at her, into her, looked her up and down with such scrutiny she began to feel uncomfortable. Wasn’t he happy to see her at all?
“It’s me,” she said, feeling foolish and trying to smile. “I came back. I...I missed you.”
His face fell as his hands dropped from her shoulders. “Oh, Rose,” he said, rubbing at his eyes and looking more miserable than ever. “I miss you, too.” She noted the present-tense.
***
He should have known immediately that it wasn’t her. Well, that it was her, but it wasn’t the right her.
Six weeks. To be more precise, 44 days. To be as precise as he was capable of (and he was capable of some fearsome precision), 44 days, 5 hours, 26 minutes, and 5.326 seconds since his two companions had wandered off and fallen through a rift into what his tireless research since pointed to being a bubble universe. He’d always been fascinated by the theory behind bubble universes, as if the universe were a great big soap bubble with one of those tiny little bubbles on the outside, except really not at all like that, but it was always useful to have simple analogies at hand when travelling with a human.
His hearts clenched. Not that he was travelling with a human now; she’d fallen again, he’d lost her. He’d lost them both, Rose and his part-human counterpart, and it was cold comfort that at least wherever they were, they had each other. That was assuming they were still alive.
All of these thoughts flashed through his brain in an instant - 0.147 seconds, to be precise - while this younger Rose was looking at him with a mixture of joy and confusion and increasingly, fear. He noticed the clothes now, the blue leather jacket that she’d stopped wearing long ago. He noticed the fact that she was younger and harder, that she smelled of exhaustion and the faint ozone of travelling between universes. And of course, even without these subtle details which his sharp perception tallied one by one, there was the glaring fact that this Rose was alone, his double noticeably absent from her side.
She was telling him she’d missed him, so like the last time (first time?) she'd found him and held him in the middle of that street as his body had shook with pain from the Dalek laser. “Oh, Rose,” he sighed, “I miss you, too.” He turned and unlocked the TARDIS doors, gestured inside. “C'mon.” Rose was not stupid, not his beautiful, brilliant Rose: she hesitated, searching his face for an explanation.
“It's wrong,” she said finally. “It's you, but...this isn't the right universe, is it?”
“I'll tell you everything, just...please.” He tilted his head toward the interior of the ship again, and after one last cautious glance around her, Rose Tyler stepped into his TARDIS for what had to have been, for her, the first time in years.
He put the kettle on.
“How many tries is this for you?” he asked as she sat at the table, her back straight and tense. When she didn't answer, he tried to soften his face into something resembling a smile. “It's okay, you can tell me. You're in the right universe Rose, just...the wrong time.”
“How's that any better?” she retorted. His hearts swelled with pride. Oh no, Rose Tyler was no fool. When the smile on his face became genuine, she visibly relaxed a fraction. “Seven, I think. I can't remember, but I've got...” Her sentence trailed off as she apparently decided whatever she was about to say might be too much information this soon in the conversation.
“Seven,” he repeated, feeling dazed. “You never said. You never wanted to talk about it. Or I never asked...” His voice broke off. Shaking his head, the Doctor cleared his throat dramatically as he always did when preparing to give a lecture of a sort.
“Right. What you need to know, Rose Tyler, is that you've already found me by this time and have been with me, travelling with me again, for a very long time now.” Her eyes flew open, and she began to look all around her in panic. “It's okay,” he said what he hoped was reassuringly. “The time differential is muted from all the hopping around you've been doing...technically, this isn't even your universe anymore, so interacting with yourself doesn't perturb the timeline. Until you arrived back, the first you I mean, you ceased to exist. There won't be any Reapers. And anyway, you're, she’s...” There was that lump in his throat again. “There's more,” he continued, swallowing hard. “When you found me, I'd been hurt. I averted regeneration but caused a biological metacrisis and...” He watched her brow furrow in confusion: he was losing her. “There's another Doctor,” he finished. “Another me, travelling with you and me. There's three of us, together, and they're gone, Rose.” His words became rushed, desperate. “They're trapped, they've been gone for so long and I can't, I should send you away, but I can't...” He could feel tears burning behind his eyes, tears he’d not allowed himself to shed in 44 days because it wasn’t helpful, crying, it wasn’t productive, it wouldn’t lead to the bolt of inspiration he needed to figure out a way to get them back. Drawing in a deep, shuddering breath, he swallowed against a dry mouth and tried to school his expression.
Through the blur of the unshed tears in his eyes, he saw the hazy figure of Rose stand and approach him. She may not have fully trusted that this was the right universe, or indeed the right Doctor, but his kind Rose wouldn't stand by and watch someone wracked with pain and grief when she could offer comfort. He felt her arms encircle him once more and he was clutching at her, burying his face in her hair. “I’ve lost you again,” he finished.
Rose looked up at him. “You’ve found me now, though.”
“You can’t stay,” he said with a sharp shake of his head, temptation like a hot spike piercing his chest. “The timeline-”
“I know.” The corner of her mouth tipped up slightly. “I know I can’t stay. But right now, right here, you’ve found me and I’ve found you.” She moved against him, just a little, just enough so that his awareness was suddenly full of every point of contact between their bodies. Her hands found their way into his hair. “And I’ve missed you.”
He was kissing her then, unsure even if he’d moved to close the gap between them or if she had, kissing her the way he'd wanted to, the way he should have that first time she'd found him, His brain was shouting at him that he was weak and this was wrong, potentially damaging to the timeline and definitely delaying the inevitable when he would have to send this Rose back to her own timeline in her own universe to continue the search for him that would end on an Earth in 2008 during a Dalek invasion. But her mouth tasted so sweet and her hands in his hair, how he’d missed her hands in his hair, even if for him it had only been a matter of weeks.
They stumbled out of the galley and into the corridor, the bones of his left hand colliding rather painfully with a rondel as he clutched at her shoulder and backed her against the wall. Rose was already pulling his shirt out of his trousers, as if she feared that any waste of time would give him time to think and reject her. Her hands slipped to his arse and pulled and he groaned at the friction between their bodies. He was long past the point where he could have stopped this; perhaps he was past it the moment she ran into his arms outside.
Rose was pulling them through the nearest doorway, completely unaware that it was the human Doctor’s bedroom, or was back when they'd bothered with separate bedrooms, and he felt a stab of guilt at the same time that the scent of the other man that clung to the room escalated his arousal even more, if that was possible. She began to shed her clothes in a quick, no-nonsense way, still rushing, almost like she wanted to get it over with.
The firm set of her mouth, the tension in her frame - it made him wonder what exactly was going on behind those brown eyes that he knew so well. When he’d been reunited with her, he’d been thrown so topsy-turvy by the existence of his duplicate and losing Donna; had he even asked her what she’d gone through to get back to him? Had he even wondered if there were hidden scars, scars that even she might not consciously be aware of? How could he claim to love her if he’d never even asked? She was just his Rose, his constant, undaunted Rose, and he’d let her take care of him when maybe he should have been taking care of her.
“So brave,” he blurted, and she paused in removing her bra, frowning at this apparent non sequitur.
“For getting naked?” she said with a smirk.
“For everything you do,” he murmured, drawing closer and sliding fingers underneath the waistband of her knickers. Her skin was hot to his touch, her hipbones prominent, and he remembered how she’d confessed to him the sporadic nature of her meals while she’d been using the dimension cannon. He frowned again with worry for this Rose and the life she was currently leading. He wondered how he could possibly be worth what she was enduring.
He sank to his knees, pulling her knickers down her legs as he went and savouring the scent of her as she stepped out of them and stood there, completely bare and exposed to his scrutiny.
The Doctor trailed his hands over her legs, light touches, and listened to her rapid breathing as his fingers trailed up her inner thigh and gently stroked open her sex. The wetness he found there made him gasp, his desire pulsing with the beats of his hearts.
“It’s been a while, all right?” she said defensively, a reply to his unspoken thoughts. It occurred to him for the first time that she might think he was comparing her to her future self and somehow finding her lacking.
The Doctor stood and met Rose’s eyes. “It’s perfect. You’re perfect.” And then, because the words had been burning in the back of his throat for a while, “I’m sorry.”
She took his hand and retreated to the bed then, pulling him along with her. The Doctor crawled over her, still clothed, intent on her pleasure. He kissed his way down her chest and stomach, his tie trailing against her skin.
Rose’s hands slid through his hair, her nails scratching against his scalp and making him groan. As he spread her legs and buried his face between her thighs, the ghost of his Rose and the other Doctor grew fainter...fainter still. This Rose cried out when his mouth found her, stroking the bud of her clitoris with his tongue and sucking on it in quick pulses. He slid two fingers into her and she came almost immediately, bucking hard under him and nearly breaking his nose with her pubic bone...well, she had said it'd been awhile. The Doctor kept licking, drawing every last shiver from her and then, wiping her moisture from his face, moved over her while unfastening his trousers. He didn't even bother, couldn't be bothered to take them off: freeing his cock and pushing them down just so far as was necessary, he slid into her in one deep stroke that made them both moan. They moved together in the other Doctor's bed, the TARDIS humming low around them as though trying to remind the Doctor that something was missing, but he managed to tune her out. 44 days, 6 hours, 5 minutes, and 32.8 seconds: he would have his Rose, now, even if technically she wasn't the right one.
***
“Can I ask you a question?” Rose said, interrupting his current flow of babble.
“‘Can I ask you a question’ is a question,” he answered, not quite with his normal level of gleeful cheek but closer than he’d felt in weeks.
“Why should I help you do this?”
After they'd made love, the Doctor's mind had cleared for what felt like the first time in ages. Rose was here. This Rose. She'd travelled between dimensions to find him, dimensions very similar in fact to bubble universes, and for her to have done so meant...
The Doctor’s hand froze in the act of sonicing her yellow dimension-hopper, and he looked up to regard her with something like horror. “What?”
She gave a half-shrug, not quite meeting his eyes. “I mean, I’ve completed my mission: I found you. Whether or not it’s the exact you I was looking for doesn’t really matter, does it? And this other Rose and other Doctor’ve got each other, don’t they? Why’m I risking my life just to lose you again?”
His mouth opened and closed as he searched for the words. “You said you understood...”
“I know what I said,” she interrupted, sounding a bit like a petulant teenager. When she finally looked up and met his eyes with hers, he could hardly believe how much younger she looked to him in that moment than the Rose he’d spent his days with since they’d been reunited. “Well?”
“Other than the universe-shattering paradox when you don’t show up to meet me in the right time and place and the other Doctor isn’t created and reality as we know it is destroyed, you mean?”
He saw a smile tug at the corner of her mouth. “Other than that, yeah.”
A response didn’t come easily, and the Doctor found himself reminded of things as they had been once upon a time between him and Rose, the way that this Rose no doubt remembered him best: unable or unwilling to give a straight answer or even tell her how desperately he loved her. If he refused to answer her now, went back to tinkering or lost her question in a stream of his own meaningless words, she would not be surprised. Would probably not even call him on it. That thought wrenched his hearts painfully, and he resolved that it made it all the more necessary to make her understand how she and his counterpart had changed him…would change him.
But that confession was too raw, and this Rose was still too hardened against him. Instead he reached for the only other universal truth he could make her understand.
“Because you know that this is the right thing to do,” he answered softly.
She winced, and he wondered if she had been expecting him to manipulate her with grandiose declarations of destiny and paradoxes. She looked down for a few moments, blinking, and when she looked back up that firm resolve was back in her eyes.
“Right. Tell me how this works again?”
He smiled gratefully at her for a moment before speaking. “Bubble universe!” It was practically a shout, and Rose jumped slightly beside him. “Not nearly as much fun as it sounds, unfortunately, but there’s masses of them out there and they’re mostly harmless. I should’ve known something was wrong when the walls were thin enough here for them to just slip through.” He didn’t like the implication behind his words that this Rose showing up was ‘wrong’, but he kept speaking as they gathered what they needed and left the TARDIS. “You see,” he continued, locking the doors, “your universe is ahead of ours, and somehow you must’ve jumped sideways instead of backwards which explains how you ended up in 2011 and not 2008 where you should be, breaking down the walls between parallels as you went - how many times have I warned you lot about doing that?”
Continuing in an affectionately patronizing tone, the Doctor walked them around the corner to the alley where his readings had indicated Rose and the other Doctor had vanished.
“This is it,” he said grimly. He felt Rose squeeze his hand and looked down, surprised: he hadn’t even realised she’d taken it.
A cat shot past them and down the alleyway, and Rose furrowed her brow in confusion. “Why didn’t the cat vanish, too?”
“Void stuff,” he said. The words felt wrong in his mouth, contaminated somehow, carrying with them memories of a white room in Canary Wharf. He knew Rose felt it, too, thought he saw her shudder slightly beside him. “The walls are thin enough, it’s like that extra little push you need to get through. Well, I say push, I mean pull.” He clicked his teeth thoughtfully. “Presumably, that cat has never been through the Void.”
“But if the other Doctor was created in this universe, then how could he have...”
“He travelled through the Void once. Briefly.” The Doctor couldn’t help but smile wistfully, remembering how Rose and his duplicate had stood their ground and refused to leave with Jackie when he’d finally returned them to Pete’s Norway. Fumbling in his pockets, he retrieved the cartoonish big yellow button and handed it to her. Rose regarded it silently for a moment.
“Can’t believe I’m doing this on purpose,” she said finally, her voice strange and choked. “I worked so hard, for so long...”
“I know. I’m sorry.” He pulled her into a hug, resting his chin against the blonde crown of her hair. She had sacrificed so much just to find him, only to be told by the Doctor she found that she was too late: another Rose had already found him, and now she had to help get her other self back for him, risking her own life in the process; he couldn’t imagine what she must be going through, but he knew what he needed to say. “And I love you, Rose, of course I do. I always did.” She pulled back in surprise and he stole the moment to bend forward and kiss her deeply, his lips devouring, his tongue tasting, exploring - as always, she tasted like some delicious, forbidden fruit. When the kiss broke, her eyes remained closed.
“Wow,” she said, blinking them open. “I think I like this goodbye a lot better than the last one.”
He grinned. “Me too.” Then, more serious: “And it’s not ‘goodbye’, Rose, it’s ‘see you soon.’ You’ll be fine, I promise.” He wished desperately that he were as sure as he hoped he sounded. What was he thinking? He’d lost her so many times, was he really sending her away voluntarily now? What if he lost all three of them forever, would he then spend eternity alone, wearing out his remaining regenerations from old age one at a time in his TARDIS parked just down the road?
Rose threw her shoulders back and stepped forward, turned. “See you soon.” Then she was gone.
Chapter 2