Ten II x Rose fanmix - Life Among the Distant Stars [Part 1] [Series Four Spoilers]
Title: Life Among the Distant Stars
Rating: PG-13.
Characters: Rose, Ten II, Jackie, Pete, Tony.
Summary: A fic detailing the first twelve weeks of the Doctor and Rose's lives post-Journey's End, split into twenty songs with one or two songs designated to each week. Includes Nerina Pallot, Katie Melua, The Feeling and more.
A/N: Er, first attempt at a fanmix, so if I've done anything terribly wrong, please let me know! There's no cover art as I unfortunately don't even have access to Paint on this computer, but there is fic.
Warning: There are obviously massive spoilers for series 4, so if you haven't watched, please don't click!
Disclaimer: I own neither the characters nor the music.
Note - track 20, Forever by Catherine Feeny, has a hidden track tagged onto the end of it and I'm not sure how to remove it so it's still there. It's not meant to be part of the fanmix.
This is split into two parts because it has twenty songs and is, well, rather huge. The link to part two is at the end.
The End: Lucie Silvas - Forget Me Not (1) [Time Lord Doctor]
Forget me not, I ask of you
Wherever your life takes you to.
And if we never meet again,
Think of me every now and then.
Even though he knows he’s giving her everything she ever wanted, he can’t help but feel he’s taking something away from the both of them.
One day, when she’s waiting for a train and fiddling with the gold band around her fourth finger, or sitting windswept as her children splash in the sea, he hopes she’ll remember the man who gave up so much to get her there.
The Beginning: Nerina Pallot - My Last Tango (2)
My mouth will not speak,
I'm weary and weak,
And I only wanted to see you again.
If that's unfair, just let me know.
Just write it down, and then I'll go.
This is the fourteenth time she's checked her watch in the last seventeen minutes.
Both facing sternly forwards, they sit, not quite together, at the end of a tiny bed in a tiny, damp room, the first shelter they had come across in their long walk from the beach. Through paper-thin walls, they can hear Jackie bustling around in the room next door
Rose checks her watch again. Hovering between anxiety to leave this awkward room and fear of starting this new life, she can't decide whether she is more relieved or nervous that they have ticked a whole minute closer to Pete's arrival time.
A Zeppelin engine whirs overhead. Only he looks up. Neither of them say anything.
Frustrated when, at nineteen minutes in, she raises her watch to her eyes once more, the Doctor firmly grasps her wrist, stilling its progress.
“If he's on time,” he says simply, “He'll be here in... ooh, four hours, seven minutes and twenty-two seconds. Twenty-one. And a bit.”
She stares down at his fingers around her wrist for a long moment before looking up at him with blurry eyes. “You talk just like him,” she says, voice breaking slightly. She coughs awkwardly.
“I am him,” the Doctor reminds her softly.
She presses her lips together and lowers her head. It's almost a nod. When she speaks, her voice is higher than usual, cautious and barely audible.
“Yeah. Yeah, I know.”
His fingers are still tight about her wrist.
Rose stands up suddenly, tugging her wrist away and striding towards the window. Her hands clutch at the sill, fingertips whitening. She turns, shaking her hair out of her eyes, and there's a blazing, determined look on her face.
“Didn't he want me? Was that it? You've moved on, you've found better people. He didn't want some stupid, jeopardy-friendly kid tagging along anymore, and he didn't want you, so he just left us here.”
He knows Rose Tyler better than she realises, and too well to be hurt by her dismissal of his affection for her. Despite the shake of her hands and the accusation in her voice, he is encouraged by her use of you. He stands and walks over to her, holding her by the tops of her arms. “Rose - ”
The gesture is too familiar. She shakes him off, turning back to the window with her head in her hands. “I can't - I don't - ”
The Doctor takes a step back, waiting patiently. Despite her older eyes, full of stories of tragedies and mistakes in universe after universe, despite the dust of a thousand wars that has settled on her shoulders, when she turns back to him, she is a lost little girl of nineteen all over again, her voice hitching in that way he knows too well. “Didn't you want me to come back?”
He steps forward again, fingers sliding against her damp cheeks as he takes her face in his hands.
“Rose Tyler, I searched for you for over a year. Every minute I could, I fought to find a way to get back to you, even after I knew my best hope was a few sentences, nothing more than a hologram across the Void. And if I hadn't found that tiny crack between our universes, I'd still be searching today.”
It's easier to keep arguing than to try and believe this all-new, too-honest version of the man she had loved for so very long. “Then why - ” The Doctor goes to interrupt her, but she cuts back across him, changing tack and losing all her fight as she processes what he's said. “I thought... if he left me here, if he left us here, then he didn't want me. And if he didn't, then you...”
It's in that moment that the Doctor knows, however human he might be now, he will never be good with words. Actions have always been more his thing.
When Jackie walks in seconds later, they spring guiltily apart and she laughs. “Nothing I haven't seen before. Your dad just rang,” she tells a blushing Rose, nodding to the wall that joins their rooms. The Doctor scratches his neck awkwardly. “Says he got a lift in some fancy new Zeppelin thing. Sonic or something, I don't know. Anyway, he'll be in here in an hour, so mind you're both ready.” She stares at them significantly, making eyes at their joined hands, and backs out of the room, shutting the door behind her. “And no funny business, I can hear everything through these walls!”
The door rattles as the sound of Jackie's own door shutting reverberates through the whole hotel. It's Rose who starts laughing first.
You skate around my human skin,
Your name is where my heart begins.
Just tell the stars to give a sign...
Put it in a bottle, say you're mine.
Week Two: Catherine Feeny - Touch Back Down (3)
You can't tell the truth,
Not even to yourself.
It hurts too much to admit that it’s in there.
You can lie and dissemble with anyone else,
But I know you like I know myself.
“Does it need saying?”
Sometimes, when she sits curled up on the large windowsill of her room and stares out at the night sky, the oh-so-familiar stranger tangled in the sheets of her bed, she can’t help but wonder if that was a dismissal. There are moments in the early days, more frequent than she’d like to admit, when she wishes she hadn’t asked at all. She should have known he’d never say it.
Week Two: OneRepublic - Stop and Stare (4)
You start to wonder why you're here not there
And you’d do anything to get what’s fair,
But fair ain’t what you really need.
She doesn’t understand. He hid the truth away, wrapped it up as a task and a mission and an exile he’d entrusted to her, but one day she’ll see what he’s given her - what he’s given up. This is no punishment or excuse, this ending isn’t because he wanted to get rid of her and didn’t quite know how else to do it. This is because he loves her more than he will ever be able to say, because he knows what’s best for her - and she will never admit it, but she needs someone to love her as much as he needs someone to fix him.
This is his gift to her. A second chance, for both of them, because that’s the sort of man he is. The life and the love she has always wanted and he has never before been able to give.
He took away their history and left her his heart.
Week Three: Delta Goodrem - Fragile (5)
Six thoughts at once,
I can't focus on one.
Sometimes I feel like I'm alone,
Sometimes I feel like I’m not that strong,
And as I'm falling down, I come undone.
It shouldn’t be so hard to let herself love him. It's like he said - he thinks like the Doctor, he looks like the Doctor. Same memories, same thoughts, same everything. Why, then, does she have to look away whenever he meets her eyes for too long? Why is she scared of finding something there that's just a little too familiar? Why does she drop his fingers in burning guilt every other time he takes her hand? The questions keep coming, the doubts keep rising, and every time he thinks they've taken a step forward, she falls even further back.
He can't understand her fear, greater than it ever was before, that one day he'll just up and leave. Thinking she's pre-empting the inevitable, she keeps telling him to go, telling him that it's alright if he wants to. That he doesn't, shouldn't want to be stuck here, that the only thing he's ever belonged to is the stars. She's got the Doctor back, sort of, but it's not the way she thought it would be and she's never felt so alone.
He rapidly finds that kissing her and walking out on her are his two best methods of shutting her up.
Week Three: Snow Patrol - It’s Beginning To Get To Me (6)
And it’s beginning to get to me
That I know more of the stars and sea
Than I do of what’s in your head,
Barely touching in our cold bed.
He doesn't understand why she finds it so hard.
She's treating him like he's the Doctor, like he still wants to be out there, alone. He's remotely grateful for that, most days. Afterall, he is the Doctor. What she can't seem to grasp is that he's a Doctor with more chances and opportunities than have ever befallen him before. For him, this is a life a part of him has always longed to taste. To her, this is his exile, and she has never wanted to be his jailer.
I chose this, he tells her, again and again, so much conviction in his voice that even if he hadn't been sure of his choice, he would be by now.
She doesn't believe him.
Week Four: Savage Garden - Hold Me (7)
If we can't find a way out of these problems,
Then maybe we don't need this.
I might need you to hold me tonight,
I might need you to say it's alright.
I might need you to take the first stand
Because tonight I'm finding it hard to be your man.
He has his moments of doubt, far more frequently than he'd like to admit. He wonders, too often, if they're doing the right thing. Who is he kidding? He's a Time Lord, albeit only half now, living a normal life day by day with washing and working and watching the television. He lives in a house - a big house, certainly, but a house all the same, with walls and carpets and a garden. And windows.
“Why didn't he say goodbye?”
Sometimes he thinks he's not cut out for this. This is one of those times.
“Rose,” he begins, forcing down his bitter amusement and impatience, “I'd've thought that was obvious.” Afterall, the two of them were rather busy at the time. What was the other Doctor supposed to do, stand around on that beach waiting for them to finish just to deliver a word he has never really been able to say?
The same thought is clearly crossing her mind. “He's gonna be so lonely, out there all on his own. I should never've - ”
Kissed you. Chosen you. Let him go. He knows what's coming next and he doesn't want to hear it. He pushes up out of his armchair and heads swiftly for the door.
Rose beats him to it, standing in the doorway, fearful as ever of him leaving. “Look, I didn't mean it like that, I don't mean I don't want you here, I just - ” He's still trying to edge around her, out of the room, staring her down with a face full of thunder. She stands her ground, immediately pulling her defences up at the look on his face. Her arms fold across her chest. “Just once, can we have this conversation without you runnin' away?!”
The Doctor takes a few steps backwards. “Do you think you're the only one who's felt lost these past weeks?” His voice is too calm, too quiet, betrayed by his fingers twitching into fists and the constant step-stepping of his feet, back and forth, back and forth, never moving more than a full step ahead or behind. “Do you think you're the only who's finding this difficult?”
Rose opens her mouth to protest, but he cuts across her.
“No, Rose. You don't understand, you can't see. You lost a man who ... who cared for you so much that he gave you up so I could make you happier than he believed he ever could. I've lost my whole life, Rose. The TARDIS, travelling, the chance to run away when everything became too much - even the stars are different here. Everything I've ever known is gone - apart from you.”
And you've changed hangs in the air between them. Sometimes, it feels like he's in constant competition with the man from which he came, barely allowed to touch her without sparking off memories of him or filling her with guilt. It's unfair of him to imply that she is only concerned with her own misery and losses - after all, she's sat with him night after night, holding him, listening, watching their TARDIS grow. She knows what it's like to land here and for everything to feel wrong. She's not forgotten. But ninety-nine percent of the time, it feels as though all the effort between them is going towards her accepting him when he still hasn't accepted this universe. One day she'll only spare him two words, the next she'll drag him, laughing, out of work for a picnic or a sunset or no real reason at all, the next she'll be back to confused distance, and it's driving him mad. He doesn't know what she wants or what to offer her, and some days he just isn't quite enough of the Doctor to even give her comfort or reassurance. He doesn't have to be here, and some days he wonders exactly why he is. It's a long way from the domestic bliss he naively thought it would be.
His Torchwood colleagues make lewd jokes about shagging the boss' daughter but they have no idea. In the month they have been here, the Doctor and Rose have shared a bed every single night. Everyone assumes that they're a couple in every sense of the word, handily forgetting - or not knowing - that it took the two of them a year to even kiss when they first met. Here, he is afraid and she is distant, and neither of them want to push it. Five days was enough to fall in love in their old life, but now? Now he's not sure that five months would be enough, and he has so much less time than before. He finds this sense of urgency hanging over everything hard to handle, by turns pushing him into action and shying him away from danger. And still, even with the clock ticking away in the background, they are yet to fully embark on the kind of the life the other Doctor had intended for them when he left this universe behind. Talk of families, children, growing old together - even mortgages - is a long way off.
He doesn't realise that he's been shouting the worst of this until the sudden, ringing silence lets him know he's stopped. Donna's influence has clearly rubbed off on him. Rose stands before him, red-faced and closed-off, her own voice carefully controlled as she steps sideways out of the door and into the room, leaving his path free.
“Yeah?” she says, backing further away from the open door. “Well if you hate being here that much then maybe you should just go.”
Through the space she has left, he can see the kitchen staff gathered in the dining room doorway, staring.
“Go on!” she tells him, bordering on hysterical, pointing at the door as he pulls at his hair in utter frustration. “Leave! We both know you want to.”
To her complete bewilderment, the Doctor shakes his head and laughs, albeit hollowly, staring down at the carpet. “Nothing changes,” he says, looking back up.
Rose folds her arms again, defensive. “What's that s'posed to mean?”
“I've never had arguments like this with anyone else in my whole life.”
“Great,” she mutters, but the corners of her mouth twitch and he can tell she's mellowed. There's a very long silence before she swallows her pride and speaks again. “Look at us.” She makes a noise somewhere between a laugh, a sniff and a snort. “Can't even fight properly."
He looks at her then, really looks at her, standing there a metre away from the doorway with her hands hanging loosely at her sides, mascara a mess, cheeks still red, and he remembers all that she's done for him, all the gentle words and patient looks, night after night after night, and he realises how she can feel so alone - how one-sided she probably feels this relationship is, too. This woman, it occurs to him, travelled across universes to find him, seeing things so horrific she can't even voice them to a man who murdered his entire race. He gave up everything to be here and live this ideal, both of his selves making an enormous sacrifice - his life and her love - and still they stand here shouting for all the house to hear, unable to see each other's point of view.
So much has been said. Too much, perhaps. But maybe, if they go about this the right way, if he doesn't walk out and she stops asking what if, maybe they can turn a corner here tonight.
“I'm sorry,” Rose says, quietly ashamed. “I never think, I just... keep goin' on about him and you're right there and - ”
He chose this life. He wanted it, and he will try bloody hard to keep it, especially while part of him is still out there longing for it.
He grins. “Has anyone ever told you that you sound like Jackie when you shout?”
Week Five: The Corrs - Hurt Before (8)
Take it in stride,
You’re just twenty-five,
And you know we’ve all been hurt before.
Days go by and things get better. He wants to tell her he's coping, that their TARDIS is growing and one day soon it'll be just like old times (or maybe even better, perhaps, if they're lucky). He wants to tell her that all he wants now is for her to accept him, but saying I love you was one giant leap on a path of many steps. He still finds it difficult to voice things sometimes and he can't lie. He aches for their old life, right through to his bones.
For her part, she feels like she's only just beginning to acknowledge how out of place he is here - how much he has left behind. For a man who has travelled for more than five hundred years to tie himself to one place, one person - she can't imagine how that must feel.
They lie cocooned in her bed, the aftermath of their argument still hanging over them, and she's desperately trying to find the words to make amends for her selfishness.
“I'm so sorry,” she whispers, so choked and quiet that he deciphers the words more through the air pressure on his cheek than the sound in his ear. “I really am.”
He turns his head towards her, preparing to struggle with his words, but her lips are on his before he has the chance. She is gentle and undemanding, too shy and wary to let it continue for long - afterall, despite their shared sheets this is the first time since Bad Wolf Bay that she has moved first and too much time has elapsed for this to be easy.
Week Six: Delta Goodrem - Will You Fall For Me? (9)
I'm not acting like myself
And I’m playing the role of someone else.
Am I wrong to think that something could happen?
She sits over him, tracing invisible lines down his arms with her fingertips. His skin is newer, softer, but not as alien as she expected. “You've still got the same scars,” she frowns, rolling off to lie next to him and scatter gentle kisses along the stitch-marks blemishing his collarbone.
He wriggles. “That tickles,” he protests - so, naturally, she continues with increased vigour until he's forced to bat her off with a pillow and pin her down. All this is so new to him. She is often wary as though it's new for her, too, but he knows that is only because of who he is. For him, every display of affection is a long-forgotten dance, and he's not sure if he remembers the steps.
It's funny, he thinks, watching her drift off with pillow-feathers in her hair and smile on her face, but he thinks he's fallen in love all over again.
They've certainly turned that corner, but whether or not she can love him like she loved, still loves, her original Doctor - especially with a relationship so different - is yet to be seen.
Week Seven: Katie Melua - It’s All In My Head (10)
Every night you whisper to me,
“This always will be.”
Every night you smooth down my hair,
But you’re not really there.
Once those first few difficult weeks had passed, she thought it would be easy, but his touch burns in a way it never used to.
Most days she thinks she's found her feet. Most days she knows they'll be alright. But sometimes, just sometimes when she's half asleep, his skin is rougher, covered in original lines and scars and marks containing the universe. Sometimes he smells different, and the suit jacket hanging on the back of the door is brown.
When she wakes up and looks at him like he's a stranger, he knows. He always knows.
Week Seven: Goo Goo Dolls - Iris (11)
When everything’s made to be broken,
I just want you to know who I am.
She turns over and cuddles into him absently, running a hand up his arm. He puts a hand out to grab hers, stop her wandering fingers before they reach his singular heart.
She frowns sleepily, eyes still closed, and curls her fingers around his. “Doctor?”
He only hesitates for a second. “I’m here.”
Rose is the only one who returns to sleep that night.
Download all tracks, from part one and two, here.
Part two here.
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