Synapses Burning
This is an AU written for challenge 73 at then_theres_us.
"It'll just be for a bit, Rose."
She rolls her eyes as her mother darts around the small, off-white room, running through a list of Things Young Women Need While Away. Baggy, unflattering clothing. Check. Journal with the roses Jackie just had to buy for her. Check. Shampoo, soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, comb. Check, check, check, check, check.
"Okay, you've got that phone of yours, right?" Rose nods, waving the mobile with mock enthusiasm. "Maybe you might try usin' it, once in a while."
"Yeah, mom. I'll call," she mumbles. It's the non-committal shrug accompanying her promise that gives her away. If Jackie notices (and of course she does) she doesn't say anything. "Tell Mickey I say hi."
"Sure."
"Well then."
Jackie's got a smile plastered in her smoky eyes. Rose doesn't even bother pretending. Their hug is shallow (or rather, it wears the pretense of being shallow; underneath the thin sheet of ice are depths containing words left unsaid, worry and heartbreak and the acidic taste of severed trust).
And just like that, Rose Tyler is on her own.
Rose can only describe the clinic as having the sense of a people standing still, waiting for a force to push them, to soothe them into movement. It's not quite stale, she thinks, but it is definitely stagnant. You know that nondescript mutation of jazz offices play to put their employees to sleep? Well Rose can't escape it. The Not Jazz tumbles from the speakers as her eyes wrench open at six in the morning. It's playing while she's staring at her breakfast, watching it slowly disappear from her plate (and wondering if anyone notices that it's tottering toward The Land Underneath The Table).
The damn beep-bop-boop meanders through her group therapy sessions, tails her into her physical checks and stalks her until she slams her doctor’s door in its face at the end of the day.
5:30 in the evening, every day, she gets a respite.
It’s not that she’s particularly fond of sharing her thoughts, because really, she’s not. So she talks about the easy stuff. About running away with Jimmy when she was still in school and licking tequila shots off of Shareen’s stomach that one time and spending the night in Mickey’s shit car, stoned and naked.
She doesn’t talk about her father or Jackie’s boyfriends, the ones that sometimes try to corner her when her mum isn’t around, or dropping out of school.
She’s the master of deflection, always has been a phenomenal cheat, and even though her doctor, with his kind, brown eyes and fluffy hair, doesn’t call her out on it, she knows he’s aware of her games.
His name is John Smith, but he tells her to simply call him the Doctor, because that’s how everyone knows him here. He says daft things like, “Allons-y, Rose Tyler! To the library!” and “I came first in jiggery pokery,” and she sort of loves him for it.
The Doctor, Rose finds out quite early on, is a bit obsessed with astronomy and physics.
“If you love it so much, why don’t you marry it?” she quips one day, after he tells her about the Jovian moons for the fifth time.
“Oh, if I could,” he replies with a shade of genuine disappointment in his eyes.
“Why didn’t you go into astrophysics or something, yeah?” she asks. “Psychology must be a bit dull in comparison.”
He takes a sip from his blue coffee mug and shakes his head. “There’s nothing more fascinating that the nervous system, in my humble opinion. All those synapses firing, neurons shooting back and forth through our spine and into even the most remote parts of our bodies, the brain with its gorgeously remarkable abilities,” he prattles excitedly.
“No. I’m profoundly affected by discovering what great tics and beats the human psyche possesses. What inspires in us such a glorious spectrum of emotion? Why does exquisite pleasure often accompany heart-wrenching pain? Why do some wish to stand still while others yearn to travel the stars, to quench their insatiable wanderlust?”
Rose doesn’t quite know what to say, because she’s never thought to question why she thinks the way she does. Her thoughts are her thoughts, her feelings are her feelings, and they’re as close to her core as anything, so why shouldn’t she trust them?
She says as much. “Ah, but Rose, think about this. You are angry, yes? You’re angry and frustrated and frankly, just miserable because of the things running around in your head.”
The Doctor certainly enjoys gesticulating, she notes with a smirk as he waves his hands wildly around his forehead. He stops.
“What?”
“You look-”
“What, Rose?”
“Well,” she begins. “Sort of mad.”
“Perhaps I am,” the Doctor murmurs thoughtfully (to her surprise). “But this isn’t about my psychological functions, Rose Tyler, so let’s talk about you.”
For the first time in a long time, she does.
Sometime later, she learns from an American man named Jack Harkness that the Doctor has a friend in the treatment center. Jack’s got PTSD, but he’s mostly quite lucid and from all appearances, doing really well.
He’s also really sexy, but she’s not about to say that.
“Anyway, yeah, his name is Harry, and he’s… well, a bit off. Been here as long as the Doctor has, to be honest with you,” Jack explains over lunch in the café. She finds it’s easier to eat without her mother poking her head into things. “Doesn’t go to group therapy, which is why you’ll probably never meet him.”
“Why not?” she says through hot asparagus.
Jack frowns. “He gets violent sometimes. And I’m not sure the Doctor wants him around the rest of us. One time he… well, there was this girl here, Lucy, and she sort of got a crush on Harry, and Harry seemed to like her enough ‘cause he’d sit with her on the verandah. But then,” he hesitates until she urges him on. “He took her to his room and did things to her.”
Rose gets the idea, but her curiosity has been piqued. “What things?”
Jack whimpers a bit at her. “I don’t know the specifics, I wasn’t there or anything, but Rose, they… they found her, all bloodied and bruised, in his bed, barely alive. Was sent to the hospital in New York, she was scared to be on the same continent, let alone in the same clinic as Harry.” He sighs. “And that was the last time any of us ever saw him in the open. Before Lucy, he’d just sit and look out over the verandah onto the lake, and just mutter to himself. Tap his fingers on the arm rest and stare. Sometimes the Doctor would come out of his office and stay with him for a bit. Now I don’t think he comes out here anymore.”
She hears other stories and brings absolutely none of it up with the Doctor. He’s taken to “forgetting” that she is paying for one hour as opposed to two hour sessions, holding her over and even rescheduling other appointments to accommodate her.
She doesn’t understand why he does this, but then there’s a lot about the Doctor that she doesn’t understand.
One day, three or so weeks into her stay, he brings her a cupcake with little ball bearings on it. She stares at it warily. She does so love cake.
“I want you to tell me why you’re looking at this cupcake, a seemingly harmless if not terribly sweet little confection,” he begins, and she sinks further into her big blue sofa.
“It’s a cupcake, Doctor. It’s on the list.”
“The list of foods you don’t eat.”
“Well, yeah.”
“But why is it on that list?”
He’s looking for something, she knows, because she told him about her third birthday yesterday and here he is, his finger on the button, and he doesn’t even want to press it.
“Rose, why don’t you like cupcakes?”
“Because…”
“Take your time,” he whispers. “Don’t force it out, but do pressure it. Lead it out of your system.”
And she’s suddenly a three-year-old girl wearing a pink princess gown, pink skin stained red with tears. She’s alone-sitting at home at her table with a golden cupcake in front of her, a single candle weeping wax over the white icing. There’s a note, and if she could read, she’d know that her mum is terribly sorry for missing the birthday dinner, and can Mummy make it up to her tomorrow night?
Yes, please. That would be lovely.
But she doesn’t, because she’s always gone, always out working and dating and putting cupcakes on the table.
They don’t have a proper birthday dinner for Rose until she is sixteen and employed. They eat chips in the shop near the Estate and share an ice cream cone.
“But it wasn’t her fault,” Rose adds after she finishes the story. “She was just trying to give me a better life. And with Dad gone… well, money was a little short, so it was hard for her to spend time with me properly. But… that’s not her fault.”
The Doctor kneels beside her, staring up at her with something akin to awe dancing around those large (and honestly, gorgeous) brown eyes of his. “Oh Rose, you brilliant girl, you’ve done it! You’ve pulled it into the open.” He wipes her tears away with a callused hand.
She blushes at the touch (much to her dismay) and turns her focus to the little cake in his other hand.
“Are you gonna make me eat that?”
The Doctor chuckles. “Nope. You can watch me eat this one. Or,” he smiles as she pouts. “We could share it.”
It takes her a moment to decide. She’s sure there’s some sort of point about cupcakes and forgiveness that he’s trying to make, but all she knows is that he’s proud of her and smiling and so very close to her.
“Okay.”
During one visit, he takes her to the clinic’s star lab. It looks like a cross between an igloo and one of those moon bounces everyone always had for birthdays when they were younger (she didn’t ever get to play in one, so she didn’t appreciate how not-bouncy the star lab was in comparison to a moon bounce.)
It’s pitch black except for the small dots circling the small dome. He teaches her about Libra and Hercules and Cassiopeia, and she finds the only constellation she knows anything about (Ursa Major) and she thinks she sees him beaming from beside her.
“What about that one, there? The two stars,” she asks, pointing up above their heads. He follows her arm with his eyes and smiles.
“Ah, Gemini! Lovely constellation with lovely mythos behind it. Those two stars are Castor and Pollux, named after the mythological sons of Leda, lover of Tyndareus and Zeus respectively. Pollux, being the son of a god, was immortal while his brother was not, so he asked Zeus if he could share his immortality with Castor in the stars. And this is how Hellenic legend explains the twin stars.”
Rose likes hearing his voice. It’s warm and lush and excitedly jumpy in her ears. And somehow, she finds it more soothing than her mother’s tea.
It’s not until she wakes up in her bed sometime later, when the stars shine through her window in the dark English sky that she realizes she fell asleep with his soft words rolling over her skin like rain.
For weeks, Rose stays in treatment. She eats much of her daily meals, and goes through seven of the Doctor’s favorite books. She spends her lunches with Jack and Donna, a woman with severe short-term memory loss, and occasionally Martha, a medical student who volunteers at the hospital. She lets the Doctor teach her about nebulae and black holes and sun spots.
And gradually, the sadness buried inside of her begins to subside. Gradually, the clinic begins to feel like a home instead of a cold, off-white place with needles and pills.
Sometimes, she sees a man sitting on a bench at the edge of the lake. And towards the end of her stay, she ventures out into the grounds of the lodge and sits beside him.
He’s got blond hair and a bit of a scruffy beard and tired blue eyes. There’s a bird on his knee. A little canary.
Rose asks him if she’s his pet. He nods after a moment.
“What’s her name?”
“Angel.” His voice is rough, and she almost bristles.
“She’s lovely, she is.”
“She’s an experiment, Rose Tyler.”
Her shoulders tense. “W-what do you mean?”
His lips curl into a grin. “The doctors give me a bird to see how long it takes me to crush it beneath my fingers.” And with that, he gently knocks the little bird off of his knee. It squeaks its complaint and hops off, feathers fluffing in the wind.
“At least, when I kill these birds, he knows it’s coming. But dear Rose, it’s the anticipation, the denial of what one wishes to have-to touch-to know, that makes our blood rush. And I do love giving him pleasure.”
She feels like she should get out fast and hard, away from him, so she runs.
At night, she wonders how he knows her name and pulls the curtains across her window.
She tells no one.
And then, one day, she finds the body of a canary lying on her pillow.
The Doctor promises to have words with various people about letting cats hunt around the clinic.
They both know he’s lying when he tells her, with a smile that doesn’t quite meet his eyes, that she has completely recovered and should return home as soon as possible.
She asks him why he didn’t go into astrophysics. He tells her that he wasn’t good enough in university.
“That’s crap,” she laughs.
“Perhaps,” he sighs.
“I don’t want to leave.”
He raises his brow. “How long do you want to stay with me? With uh, us, I mean, of course-”
Without thinking, she blurts out forever.
She doesn’t see him before her mother peppers her face with kisses and helps her carry her things to the car. He’s not there while she hugs Jack and Donna while telling them to say goodbye to Martha for her. And when she’s piling up in her car, he’s not waving in the doorway with the small gathering there.
She’s surprised at how much it hurts to leave him.
When she gets home, she finds a textbook on astrophysics in her suitcase. He's left annotations on the yellowing pages.
A paper falls from the front and flutters to her floor.
Have a fantastic life, it reads. Do that for me.
She smiles.
"It'll just be for a bit, Rose."
She rolls her eyes as her mother darts around the small, off-white room, running through a list of Things Young Women Need While Away. Baggy, unflattering clothing. Check. Journal with the roses Jackie just had to buy for her. Check. Shampoo, soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, comb. Check, check, check, check, check.
"Okay, you've got that phone of yours, right?" Rose nods, waving the mobile with mock enthusiasm. "Maybe you might try usin' it, once in a while."
"Yeah, mom. I'll call," she mumbles. It's the non-committal shrug accompanying her promise that gives her away. If Jackie notices (and of course she does) she doesn't say anything. "Tell Mickey I say hi."
"Sure."
"Well then."
Jackie's got a smile plastered in her smoky eyes. Rose doesn't even bother pretending. Their hug is shallow (or rather, it wears the pretense of being shallow; underneath the thin sheet of ice are depths containing words left unsaid, worry and heartbreak and the acidic taste of severed trust).
And just like that, Rose Tyler is on her own.
Rose can only describe the clinic as having the sense of a people standing still, waiting for a force to push them, to soothe them into movement. It's not quite stale, she thinks, but it is definitely stagnant. You know that nondescript mutation of jazz offices play to put their employees to sleep? Well Rose can't escape it. The Not Jazz tumbles from the speakers as her eyes wrench open at six in the morning. It's playing while she's staring at her breakfast, watching it slowly disappear from her plate (and wondering if anyone notices that it's tottering toward The Land Underneath The Table).
The damn beep-bop-boop meanders through her group therapy sessions, tails her into her physical checks and stalks her until she slams her doctor’s door in its face at the end of the day.
5:30 in the evening, every day, she gets a respite.
It’s not that she’s particularly fond of sharing her thoughts, because really, she’s not. So she talks about the easy stuff. About running away with Jimmy when she was still in school and licking tequila shots off of Shareen’s stomach that one time and spending the night in Mickey’s shit car, stoned and naked.
She doesn’t talk about her father or Jackie’s boyfriends, the ones that sometimes try to corner her when her mum isn’t around, or dropping out of school.
She’s the master of deflection, always has been a phenomenal cheat, and even though her doctor, with his kind, brown eyes and fluffy hair, doesn’t call her out on it, she knows he’s aware of her games.
His name is John Smith, but he tells her to simply call him the Doctor, because that’s how everyone knows him here. He says daft things like, “Allons-y, Rose Tyler! To the library!” and “I came first in jiggery pokery,” and she sort of loves him for it.
The Doctor, Rose finds out quite early on, is a bit obsessed with astronomy and physics.
“If you love it so much, why don’t you marry it?” she quips one day, after he tells her about the Jovian moons for the fifth time.
“Oh, if I could,” he replies with a shade of genuine disappointment in his eyes.
“Why didn’t you go into astrophysics or something, yeah?” she asks. “Psychology must be a bit dull in comparison.”
He takes a sip from his blue coffee mug and shakes his head. “There’s nothing more fascinating that the nervous system, in my humble opinion. All those synapses firing, neurons shooting back and forth through our spine and into even the most remote parts of our bodies, the brain with its gorgeously remarkable abilities,” he prattles excitedly.
“No. I’m profoundly affected by discovering what great tics and beats the human psyche possesses. What inspires in us such a glorious spectrum of emotion? Why does exquisite pleasure often accompany heart-wrenching pain? Why do some wish to stand still while others yearn to travel the stars, to quench their insatiable wanderlust?”
Rose doesn’t quite know what to say, because she’s never thought to question why she thinks the way she does. Her thoughts are her thoughts, her feelings are her feelings, and they’re as close to her core as anything, so why shouldn’t she trust them?
She says as much. “Ah, but Rose, think about this. You are angry, yes? You’re angry and frustrated and frankly, just miserable because of the things running around in your head.”
The Doctor certainly enjoys gesticulating, she notes with a smirk as he waves his hands wildly around his forehead. He stops.
“What?”
“You look-”
“What, Rose?”
“Well,” she begins. “Sort of mad.”
“Perhaps I am,” the Doctor murmurs thoughtfully (to her surprise). “But this isn’t about my psychological functions, Rose Tyler, so let’s talk about you.”
For the first time in a long time, she does.
Sometime later, she learns from an American man named Jack Harkness that the Doctor has a friend in the treatment center. Jack’s got PTSD, but he’s mostly quite lucid and from all appearances, doing really well.
He’s also really sexy, but she’s not about to say that.
“Anyway, yeah, his name is Harry, and he’s… well, a bit off. Been here as long as the Doctor has, to be honest with you,” Jack explains over lunch in the café. She finds it’s easier to eat without her mother poking her head into things. “Doesn’t go to group therapy, which is why you’ll probably never meet him.”
“Why not?” she says through hot asparagus.
Jack frowns. “He gets violent sometimes. And I’m not sure the Doctor wants him around the rest of us. One time he… well, there was this girl here, Lucy, and she sort of got a crush on Harry, and Harry seemed to like her enough ‘cause he’d sit with her on the verandah. But then,” he hesitates until she urges him on. “He took her to his room and did things to her.”
Rose gets the idea, but her curiosity has been piqued. “What things?”
Jack whimpers a bit at her. “I don’t know the specifics, I wasn’t there or anything, but Rose, they… they found her, all bloodied and bruised, in his bed, barely alive. Was sent to the hospital in New York, she was scared to be on the same continent, let alone in the same clinic as Harry.” He sighs. “And that was the last time any of us ever saw him in the open. Before Lucy, he’d just sit and look out over the verandah onto the lake, and just mutter to himself. Tap his fingers on the arm rest and stare. Sometimes the Doctor would come out of his office and stay with him for a bit. Now I don’t think he comes out here anymore.”
She hears other stories and brings absolutely none of it up with the Doctor. He’s taken to “forgetting” that she is paying for one hour as opposed to two hour sessions, holding her over and even rescheduling other appointments to accommodate her.
She doesn’t understand why he does this, but then there’s a lot about the Doctor that she doesn’t understand.
One day, three or so weeks into her stay, he brings her a cupcake with little ball bearings on it. She stares at it warily. She does so love cake.
“I want you to tell me why you’re looking at this cupcake, a seemingly harmless if not terribly sweet little confection,” he begins, and she sinks further into her big blue sofa.
“It’s a cupcake, Doctor. It’s on the list.”
“The list of foods you don’t eat.”
“Well, yeah.”
“But why is it on that list?”
He’s looking for something, she knows, because she told him about her third birthday yesterday and here he is, his finger on the button, and he doesn’t even want to press it.
“Rose, why don’t you like cupcakes?”
“Because…”
“Take your time,” he whispers. “Don’t force it out, but do pressure it. Lead it out of your system.”
And she’s suddenly a three-year-old girl wearing a pink princess gown, pink skin stained red with tears. She’s alone-sitting at home at her table with a golden cupcake in front of her, a single candle weeping wax over the white icing. There’s a note, and if she could read, she’d know that her mum is terribly sorry for missing the birthday dinner, and can Mummy make it up to her tomorrow night?
Yes, please. That would be lovely.
But she doesn’t, because she’s always gone, always out working and dating and putting cupcakes on the table.
They don’t have a proper birthday dinner for Rose until she is sixteen and employed. They eat chips in the shop near the Estate and share an ice cream cone.
“But it wasn’t her fault,” Rose adds after she finishes the story. “She was just trying to give me a better life. And with Dad gone… well, money was a little short, so it was hard for her to spend time with me properly. But… that’s not her fault.”
The Doctor kneels beside her, staring up at her with something akin to awe dancing around those large (and honestly, gorgeous) brown eyes of his. “Oh Rose, you brilliant girl, you’ve done it! You’ve pulled it into the open.” He wipes her tears away with a callused hand.
She blushes at the touch (much to her dismay) and turns her focus to the little cake in his other hand.
“Are you gonna make me eat that?”
The Doctor chuckles. “Nope. You can watch me eat this one. Or,” he smiles as she pouts. “We could share it.”
It takes her a moment to decide. She’s sure there’s some sort of point about cupcakes and forgiveness that he’s trying to make, but all she knows is that he’s proud of her and smiling and so very close to her.
“Okay.”
During one visit, he takes her to the clinic’s star lab. It looks like a cross between an igloo and one of those moon bounces everyone always had for birthdays when they were younger (she didn’t ever get to play in one, so she didn’t appreciate how not-bouncy the star lab was in comparison to a moon bounce.)
It’s pitch black except for the small dots circling the small dome. He teaches her about Libra and Hercules and Cassiopeia, and she finds the only constellation she knows anything about (Ursa Major) and she thinks she sees him beaming from beside her.
“What about that one, there? The two stars,” she asks, pointing up above their heads. He follows her arm with his eyes and smiles.
“Ah, Gemini! Lovely constellation with lovely mythos behind it. Those two stars are Castor and Pollux, named after the mythological sons of Leda, lover of Tyndareus and Zeus respectively. Pollux, being the son of a god, was immortal while his brother was not, so he asked Zeus if he could share his immortality with Castor in the stars. And this is how Hellenic legend explains the twin stars.”
Rose likes hearing his voice. It’s warm and lush and excitedly jumpy in her ears. And somehow, she finds it more soothing than her mother’s tea.
It’s not until she wakes up in her bed sometime later, when the stars shine through her window in the dark English sky that she realizes she fell asleep with his soft words rolling over her skin like rain.
For weeks, Rose stays in treatment. She eats much of her daily meals, and goes through seven of the Doctor’s favorite books. She spends her lunches with Jack and Donna, a woman with severe short-term memory loss, and occasionally Martha, a medical student who volunteers at the hospital. She lets the Doctor teach her about nebulae and black holes and sun spots.
And gradually, the sadness buried inside of her begins to subside. Gradually, the clinic begins to feel like a home instead of a cold, off-white place with needles and pills.
Sometimes, she sees a man sitting on a bench at the edge of the lake. And towards the end of her stay, she ventures out into the grounds of the lodge and sits beside him.
He’s got blond hair and a bit of a scruffy beard and tired blue eyes. There’s a bird on his knee. A little canary.
Rose asks him if she’s his pet. He nods after a moment.
“What’s her name?”
“Angel.” His voice is rough, and she almost bristles.
“She’s lovely, she is.”
“She’s an experiment, Rose Tyler.”
Her shoulders tense. “W-what do you mean?”
His lips curl into a grin. “The doctors give me a bird to see how long it takes me to crush it beneath my fingers.” And with that, he gently knocks the little bird off of his knee. It squeaks its complaint and hops off, feathers fluffing in the wind.
“At least, when I kill these birds, he knows it’s coming. But dear Rose, it’s the anticipation, the denial of what one wishes to have-to touch-to know, that makes our blood rush. And I do love giving him pleasure.”
She feels like she should get out fast and hard, away from him, so she runs.
At night, she wonders how he knows her name and pulls the curtains across her window.
She tells no one.
And then, one day, she finds the body of a canary lying on her pillow.
The Doctor promises to have words with various people about letting cats hunt around the clinic.
They both know he’s lying when he tells her, with a smile that doesn’t quite meet his eyes, that she has completely recovered and should return home as soon as possible.
She asks him why he didn’t go into astrophysics. He tells her that he wasn’t good enough in university.
“That’s crap,” she laughs.
“Perhaps,” he sighs.
“I don’t want to leave.”
He raises his brow. “How long do you want to stay with me? With uh, us, I mean, of course-”
Without thinking, she blurts out forever.
She doesn’t see him before her mother peppers her face with kisses and helps her carry her things to the car. He’s not there while she hugs Jack and Donna while telling them to say goodbye to Martha for her. And when she’s piling up in her car, he’s not waving in the doorway with the small gathering there.
She’s surprised at how much it hurts to leave him.
When she gets home, she finds a textbook on astrophysics in her suitcase. He's left annotations on the yellowing pages.
A paper falls from the front and flutters to her floor.
Have a fantastic life, it reads. Do that for me.
She smiles.