Fic: "Once Upon a Time" (1/1)
Title: Once Upon a Time
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: John Smith and Rose.
Rating: PG
Summary: A scene from an AU Human Nature involving Rose. She might be playing at Cinderella, but this is no fairytale.
Warnings: No spoilers whatsoever, aside from John's character in Human Nature. As far away from this week's monster as it is possible to be.
A/N: The third in a series of thirteen unrelated Doctor/Rose fics written after each new episode airs.
It is 11pm, around half an hour after the village dance, and John Smith decides that he has had enough of pacing about his room in indecision. He has been here three months, now, and if he doesn’t act on the hopes he has been harbouring ever since he set eyes on a certain young maid at the school, he thinks he might become certifiably insane.
Which is why he finds himself standing outside Rose Tyler’s private bedroom and knocking on, then opening, the heavy wooden door before he can persuade himself it’s a very bad idea.
"Um. Hello. Rose? I wondered if I could… have a quick word."
It is only when he looks up and actually fixes his awkward gaze upon her that he realises she has already begun to undress from the dance. Her gown has been thrown haphazardly across the tiny threadbare bed and she is standing there in nothing more than a full-bodied petticoat and her heels. His ears go bright pink and he begins to back hurriedly out of the room, but she laughs and tells him it’s okay, pulling a dressing gown from the back of the door over her shoulders to save his embarrassment. She looks like Cinderella. He’s so astonished at her lack of propriety that he can’t help but continue to stare, rude as he knows he’s being.
It’s an odd mix of an outfit, especially with the dirty old dressing gown, and he can’t help but think that here, in the candlelight, her hair loose about her shoulders, she looks more beautiful than ever before. She doesn’t apply to the conventions of the time, and they don’t apply to her.
He’s still halfway out the door.
"Are you alright?" Rose asks, her smile subsiding, and John shakes his head like a dog clearing water from its ears, forcing himself to listen rather than simply stare. "You look a bit… odd."
"Fine, fine! No, absolutely marvellous. Brilliant. In fact. I - " He looks behind him, then, finding the corridor to be clear, takes a further step into the room and shuts the door, having to duck slightly under the frame.
Well, this is it. No backing out now. He can’t hover in the doorway and indecision any longer.
"I just wanted to ask you something."
Thankfully, that came out clearer than he’d expected. Rose wiggles her toes against the cold of the tiled floor and he forces himself to look back at her face.
"Oh." If she thinks now is a strange and inappropriate time to ask a question, she doesn’t say it. "Go on, then." She smiles expectantly, picking up a brush and pulling it through her hair just as he’s seen her do so many times before, as though her life isn’t about to change forever. She obviously has no idea what he has come to ask her.
He takes another few steps forward and pulls the brush gently from her hands, lying it down on the windowsill that serves as her dressing-table, her left hand still within his right. Her look has changed from vaguely curious and amused to genuinely concerned. She knows it’s serious now.
"I - " John has to drop her hand. He should be used to her by now, but he cannot concentrate. "I wanted to ask if - if you have any idea what the weather is supposed to be like tomorrow," he blurts, and Rose looks understandably thrown. "I was planning on taking Class B out to - no, no, don’t answer that, that’s not what I wanted to ask."
"Hey." Rose takes his hand again, and a light blush rises to the tips of his ears once more. He cannot imagine how inappropriate it would seem if anyone walked in now - a teacher in a maid’s room at midnight while the rest of the school is asleep, her half undressed and he with his hand enclosed in hers - no matter how proper his question may go on to make it. "What is it? You can tell me."
"I wondered," he begins, taking a deep breath and looking at their joined hands, "If you’d possibly consider - that is, if you would - " Rose still looks utterly bemused and clearly isn’t going to fill the blanks in for him any time soon, let alone answer before he has to ask the question. John sighs and drops to one knee almost in resignation, hoping her forward attitude and lack of concern for proper behaviour will allow her to realise immediately what his intentions are.
Rose, however, simply stares at him. "Please tell me you’re tying your shoelaces," she asks, voice and countenance too shocked to betray any other kind of emotion.
John looks down at his feet, bemused, wondering if this is the usual response to a proposal. Something about being aloof and remote and adhering to a fashionable code of conduct, however unlikely Rose would be to follow it. He’s certain he’s read about that somewhere.
"I…don’t believe I have any shoelaces," he concludes, forcing himself to look back up at her. Despite the last three wonderful months he’s spent with her, he has the strangest feeling that he should never have begun to attempt this, and his legs are itching as though telling him to just run, run, run and don’t look back.
Rose looks as though she wants to do the same thing. One of her hands is raised to her mouth, the other is trembling slightly within his.
"I wanted to ask you to marry me," he confesses finally, as if she needed any more explanation now, and lets go of her hand. He reaches into his pocket to pull out a loose, unboxed ring.
"Oh my God," she says, and he wonders if he could possibly have elicited a more unromantic reaction.
"Rose?" He’s pretty sure this isn’t the way it’s supposed to go. He’d imagined it to involve rather more smiling. Perhaps even kissing. He’s been wanting to ask for so long now, had made the decision after sneaking in to watch her sleep the previous night. It was harder than it should have been, but then perhaps he should have expected that when she inspired emotions in him he had never expected to feel, fully intending, before he met her, to marry a nice, practical woman he barely knew and perhaps grow to love her if he was lucky and she was a good wife.
To be honest, he had been nervous about her response - nevermind the fact that most maids would jump at the chance to be elevated to even the low social standing of a teacher’s wife. Rose doesn’t seem to care for that sort of thing. He didn’t think he’d be asking if she did. However, he hadn’t expected it to go quite this badly.
"Doc - John, I…" She kneels down with him, sitting before him and taking both of his hands in hers, carefully closing them over the ring in his fingers.
"Oh."
"We can’t," she tells him gently, something in her eyes he can’t quite identify. Why does she look so much like she wants to agree and accept when everything she’s doing and saying is a refusal? He has kissed her, walked with her, held her hand, talked of all his hopes and dreams with her, even sat up in the night and read to her when she has come to him unable to sleep. He cannot understand her reasons for saying no now. We can’t, she says, but he’s just not grasping the argument. Not after everything. Her actions have not been those of a woman intending to refuse the question her very presence made inevitable.
"Why?"
"We…" Rose finds the first excuse she can think of. "I’m your maid. People’ll talk. They’ll say I’ve forgotten my station or stepped out of my - something. They won’t like it."
She knows as soon as she’s said it that it’s a feeble argument and will have little to no effect upon him. "I don’t care for people’s opinions. I never have."
"You can say that again," she smiles, sadly. "Look, if you really mean this - "
He knows he has been awkward, perhaps even appeared reluctant in his shyness, but he has thought of nothing else for three months. Surely he has made that clear enough? "I do," he tells her emphatically, trying to take her hands within his, but her fingers remain soft yet immutable over his own, denying him the chance.
"That comes later," Rose quips, sadness still around her eyes, but his face doesn’t change. He doesn’t seem to get the joke. She sighs and tries again. "If you really mean it," she begins, silencing his protests with a look, "Then put that ring back where it belongs." When he doesn’t move, she does so herself, placing it in his inner jacket pocket and making him wonder how she can be touching him like this when she has just refused the proposal that would have given her the right to do so always. "And ask me again in a month. Just one month, yeah? You got that?" she checks, not unkindly.
"Why a month?" John frowns. What could possibly have changed by then? Nothing but the weather in this humdrum world, surely.
The candle, burnt to the end of its wick, flickers out and still Rose gives no answer. How can she tell him that in a mere four weeks he will be a different man, one who would never even begin to dream of marriage? "If you still mean it, if it’s what you really want," she says, knowing he won’t, "Ask me again in a month."
He’s confused, more than a little stung by her apparent lack of faith in his affection, but he agrees, taking a moment for his eyes to adjust to the moonlight streaming through the tiny attic-style window now the candle has gone out. At least it’s not a straight-out no. There’s something in her eyes, even in the near darkness, that wants to say yes, he knows it. Perhaps in a month…
"Is that a yes?" he asks, hopeful. "A…delayed yes?"
She laughs, and he wonders briefly what it would be like to be free to watch her laugh in the moonlight every night. "No." At his crestfallen expression, her smile fails slightly and she places a hand on his face, tracing her fingers across the lines of his features in the gloom. "Almost. I’m not the one who has to mean it."
"I do mean it, Rose. Today, tomorrow, a month down the line, a hundred years from now. What do I have to do to convince you?" He tries to kiss her, but their lips have barely touched before she pulls away, hurting. Will he even remember any of this? More importantly, why does he have an engagement ring to hand? She didn’t see him go out to get it, and it would certainly have been the talk of the village if he had.
John is kind and gentle and sweet, and she doesn’t want to hurt him, but it would be taking utter advantage of the situation to marry him when he’s in this state. Marry him! She can’t believe a situation’s come up where she even has to think about it. He may wake up to be another man, but she won’t. She knows what she’s doing. Even if the Doctor was perfectly happy to go along with it when he became himself once more, she’s not sure she’d want to. Marriage is so human, so binding, that it’d take away everything they are. She doesn’t need a piece of paper from 1912 to prove that she loves him.
"Please," she whispers, as he tries again. "Don’t do that." Rose pulls her hands back to herself, hiding her face.
"Rose… I thought we were - " There is nothing else left to say, and for a brief moment John wonders why he has not admitted this before. "I love you."
Rose looks up.
"Did you just - " Somehow, even a marriage proposal couldn’t bring it home as effectively as those words, and nothing could convince Rose more that John is not and never can be the man whose body he has taken over. Rose knows she could love the Doctor even without the stars he has given her, but it’s not just that. John has lost more than that. "Tell me you didn’t just say that."
"I don’t know what you want me to say to you," John admits, almost pleading, as Rose stares at him in quiet desperation. "If… if these last few months have meant nothing to you, if we… Why give me reason to hope if all along you would have refused me?" He straightens up a little, obviously finding a source of annoyance in this point. "You cannot have misunderstood my intentions."
There’s a long silence in which she cannot look at him. Outside, he can hear some misplaced bird singing out of time, the rustle of wind through the trees. In here, there is nothing but her stilted breathing as she tries not to cry. The sight of her, so young and regretful on the floor before him, her hair glowing pale in the moonlight and tumbling down to her unsteady shoulders, mellows his growing anger - but not for long.
"It’s complicated," she eventually tells him, voice a little higher than before. She shifts awkwardly - the floor is cold and hard, and she has been kneeling before him in a petticoat for a long time - and meets his eye, but still he fails to understand. He interrupts before she can make further excuses, frustrated once more, wishing she would just tell him the truth if she really cannot stand to be his wife.
"How? You have no family to interfere and as long as we are happy I can’t find it within me to care what anyone else will think of us. What is there to - "
But this time it is Rose’s turn to interrupt. She puts a finger to his lips, silencing him immediately, and they simply sit there in the middle of her floor together as he wonders exactly why she is so distressed, let alone so insistent upon refusing him when he has been so sure her affections could not lie elsewhere. Why is a yes so difficult for her to muster when she clearly wants to accept his offer? What is it about his presence here tonight that seems to be hurting her so? She has never shown signs of wanting to reject him before, and she’s certainly never pushed him away when he’s kissed her.
"I’m sorry. I wish…" But she presses her lips together - it’s dangerous to finish that sentence - and the tears don’t come.
"Thank you," she goes on softly, moving her hand to the side of his face, and somehow those two tiny words seem to mean more than anything else she’s said all night. John doesn’t know how she can doubt him and refuse if it means so much to her.
Her right hand is still on his face, thumb tucked under his chin. She brings the left to the other side and, with a feather-light kiss, she stands and opens the door expectantly. He has no choice but to leave.
--
Leaning back against the door she has just closed, Rose lets out an incredulous noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Maybe in years they’ll laugh about this; under any other circumstances it might have been funny. Right now, though, she just wants the Doctor back, to hold him and love him without misleading him, to lose the memory of tonight along with all the others they have swept under the carpet. Somehow, the knowledge that she has got through more time with John Smith than is left to go no longer seems as comforting as it once had.
Outside, John drops his outstretched hand from the door with a sigh. He pulls the ring from his pocket, turning it this way and that in the light of the gas-lamps. Rose Tyler is everything a respectable teacher should avoid; yet here he is, not two steps from her room, holding the ring she’d rejected in his outstretched palm. She was infuriating and confusing and nothing like the type of wife he’d once envisioned for himself, but he’d been telling the truth when he said that he loves her. She feels like home, somehow, like he’s done this before no matter how strange it sometimes seems.
A month, she’d said, seeming to doubt his feelings more than she knew her own. A month in which to prove himself.
He puts the ring back in his pocket and begins to walk resolutely away. If that’s what it takes, a month it will be.
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