RPF > Matt/Karen > All We Are
Title: All We Are
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1346
Summary: It's just a moment of change.
Disclaimer: No money, no truth, no problem. Title and summary come from the OneRepublic song of the same name (which is AMAZEBALLS, in case you were wondering.)
There is little afterglow in the morning haze after her last night. Confusion, exhilaration, disappointment and pride come together in a murky, indecipherable cauldron.
Everything moves around her but she is still, assessing her surroundings and situation. In the grey morning, she stares at black-and-white truths in the distance, a past slowly fading into nothing but memory.
She’s ill-defined now, which rocks her more than receiving the news months ago that Amy and Rory were to leave the TARDIS at the end of the series. She’d thought she knew who she was far before Doctor Who; wore her identity proudly and boldly, like her hair.
But she’d lost herself in a world of magic and possibilities, expanded infinite horizons; been branded a seeker of adventure. She’d been on a journey that was just as important as the destination, but now that she’s reached the end of the road, she feels more lost than ever - not because she can’t accept the detours of life, but because she’d never anticipating arriving here of all places, famous in so many eyes but concentrating on being important to only one person.
Just the thought of him slows the pendulum of her varied emotions; evens out the roadblocks on which she stumbled. He’s in the shower now, humming something unintelligibly, and she has to smile; it is completely and utterly impossible for him to stay quiet longer than thirty seconds. It doesn’t annoy her, though; instead she feels grateful to get to see this side of him, and realizes not for the first time that she’d run in circles as long as she got to keep chasing him. They’d fallen into each other so naturally that it feels like this is how it was always supposed to be; it’s as close to inevitability as she’ll ever come.
She slides out of bed, grabs a grey t-shirt she stole from him ages ago (and has no intention of returning) and knocks gently on the bathroom door so as not to startle him. She smiles through the steam (whether it’s coming from the hot water or the undeniable combustion that happens when they’re together, she doesn’t know) and leans her right hip against the edge of the vanity, watching him as he dries off.
She loves observing him - looking when he’s not paying attention. At first, she’d done it out of mere curiosity, but now she does it for memorization, because there are only a few things in the world she’s sure of, and her Matt is one of them.
He brushes a light kiss against her cheek as he reaches for his toothbrush. “Did I wake you?”
She shrugs non-commitally, even as tension rolls knots in her stomach. “It’s fine. I didn’t sleep well anyway.”
He looks crestfallen at her reply, but the hurt, the disappointment, the longing is thinned out by his puppy-dog eyes and a small glob of toothpaste dangling on the edge of his lip. She knows his mind is whirring at a hundred miles an hour, trying to find something to say that will make it better.
But she doesn’t really need words right now. The fact that he wants to fix everything for her is a comfort; it soothes the flickering flame of doubt in her heart - the one that, in the wee small hours, asks if she’ll continue to be good enough for him off-screen as she was on - enough to let her breathe again.
He’s studying her intently, hair spiked every which way and the towel hanging low across his hips. It’s a kind of intimacy she’d honestly thought didn’t exist until he’d invaded her personal space as he kissed her one late one summer evening and never left.
She smiles and places her hand on top of his, which has come to rest on the countertop. “It’s okay,” she says reassuringly, “You’ve got to go.” There’s an echo in her head - another time, place and context - of the first time she said those words. The sting of regret that this part of her journey is over is mostly nullified by the contact; for all his energetic wackiness, he’s settled her - calmed and centered her. Introduced her to things she never knew she needed but will now hold onto as some of her most prized possessions.
Their synchronicity is boundless and he answers in kind: “I’m not leaving you. Never.”
The snaked, tense coils in her stomach begin to unravel - just like her excuses as to why this relationship couldn’t or wouldn’t ever be did - and he pulls her tightly to him. She wraps her arms around his still-damp torso and lays her head on his shoulder. This is her haven when the black pressures of reality try to dull her colorful vivacity; the one place she can set aside a boisterous personality and bleed fragility, because now she knows he’ll be there to patch her up.
His hand traces soothing patterns along her shoulder blades, and it quiets her apprehension. Amy Pond will always be a part of her - part of a legacy - and will probably be the thing for which she’s most remembered professionally. But as he presses a kiss to the top of her head, she realizes the defining role in her life is playing out right here, in an off-white bathroom that has a lingering mixture of her scented body wash and his shaving foam. She kisses the side of his neck and says softly, “I love you, you know.”
They rarely say it, partly because, contrary to popular opinion, three words do not encompass what they are to each other - what they and this mean. They say it silently with his hand always at the small of her back, and in the way their limbs tangle with passion and possession so it’s impossible to see where one begins and the other ends. They say it in grocery lists with mixed handwriting and in placing her feet in his lap, his fingers massaging the arches of her feet as he reads a new script and she watches telly.
They say it in raucous games of darts at the one pub in all of the UK where the owner has ordered both staff and patrons to leave them be; in goofy self-portraits hung on the refrigerator where he’s sticking his tongue out at the camera and she’s laughing uncontrollably, head tilted back in freeing lightness. (She also says it in silence when he comes back from a thrift shop with some god-awful jumper that she wouldn’t wish on her worst enemy. He says it with a tiny yelp every time he trips over her trainers trying to get out the front door.)
They say it in how he always reaches for her hand as they drive, and in the way they not-so-surreptitiously glance at jewelry store displays when they’re out shopping.
They’ll say it in how she’ll attempt to have dinner ready for him when he gets back from shooting today, and how she’ll be genuinely interested in how he likes the new companion. They’ll say it in how he’ll slide into bed with her, running his fingers through her hair as he warms her toes between his calves and says, “Only you, Kaz.”
This is her new adventure; her new exhilaration. She looks around at the existence they’ve carved out together, his toothbrush in her ceramic holder and her heart in his hand. While it’s not completely soothingly rounded, it’s still as sturdy as the rock of Gibraltar; resolute in a way few things are. There is sanctity in the sturdiness of their relationship, and she wouldn’t trade it for all the stars in the heavens.
She presses a light kiss to his lips and hops up on the counter to allow him to finish getting ready for his first day back at work. Heels tapping a beat against the cupboards that sounds something like the retooled theme song, she smiles at the thought that her end on Doctor Who is the beginning of the rest of her life with him.
fin