Two, two, two fics in one! (post.)
Right-o, then, seeing as how I forgot to post my latest fic to my journal along with the Doctor/Rose comm, and as I've written another since, I thought I might get it all out in one convenient ficdump. So here goes.
Title: His True Self
Author: lpmufinfiend
Pairing Ten/Rose
Rating: PG
Word Count: 661
Spoilers: Journey's End, nothin' else.
Summary: My own, very possibly entirely too one-track interpretation of what, in the shippiest of worlds, the Doctor might have been thinking during a scene of Journey's End.
Author's Note before the fact: This is my first fic in a rather long time, and my first Doctor Who fic at all. Please review if you read! Feedback's the only way I can hope to get better. That, and practice. But for all I know, I could be practicing the wrong stuff!
**********
Even now, even as they faced their deaths, the Doctor couldn't suppress his wonder to see Rose, in the flesh, standing before him. It'd been hours since he had first seen her, first felt the soft skin of her cheek beneath his hand, brushing stray hair away from her watering eyes. He had been too glad, and really, in too much pain to be shocked to see her then-- what do they say? Pain brings clarity-- but here and now, when he could do so little as guess as to whether they would live or die, and if they died, how many millions would fall after them to the threat they'd failed to stop... All he could think for more than just a moment, above and beside all the rest of it, was how unlikely all of this was.
When Donna had spoken of their impending meeting earlier, the facts had appeared too grim to allow for the Doctor's usual optimism-- when he'd thought of his Rose, all can-do attitude and foolish confidence, setting foot where scarcely a spaceship, armed to the teeth and millennia past the technology which her world contained, might travel safely-- when he thought of her passing through the Void alone and uncontained-- he couldn't think she'd make it to this earth, and to him, in her own shape, unharmed. Nine hundred years of compounded loss had taught him to expect the worst, prepare for it, and never trust the seeming of a clean and happy ending. Someone always lost, he knew. Something always went awry.
Which is why, in this moment, surrounded by Daleks and washed in the harsh, dramatic forcefield-spotlights of the Crucible, he still couldn't pull the whole of his attention to the disaster at hand. One eye, one half of his consciousness observed Rose still-- half in disbelief at her presence, and half in fear that all was not as well as it seemed. After all she'd been through, it was imposs-- well, it was highly improbable that she would be right as rain. Even as Davros and Dalek Khan screeched their condemnation, poked fun at her strife to find him, the Doctor couldn't help but worry. Did she look a little pale, or was that the effect of the white containment beam? Was she hiding any pain? And even as he argued back, baited, angered his captors, and even as Davros spoke, a grating constant note the Doctor heard, but did not process-- his eyes flitted back to Rose, stuck within a twin beam beside him, herself calm, or so seeming; so brave.
--"The fire, the rage of a Timelord who butchered millions!"
And suddenly--just there--the shame, as great as the wonder and the fear. The tonic of emotions struggling for claim of the knot in his throat bubbled into his gaze, and he cast it downward. Better Rose didn't see the guilt. He hated himself something more for wanting to be her hero, today and in this place, after all he'd made her feel.
"Why so shy? Show your companion. Show her your true self," Davros suggested, his voice frighteningly calm.
His true self. The truth of his soul. He couldn't tell her, but he hoped he had shown her-- every time his hand had slipped comfortably into hers; every time, delighted at some grand revelation to do with saving the day, he'd kissed her forehead in excitement; and every time he'd tried to save her at the last minute, tried to send her away from whatever fate threatened to take her from him by force. He hoped he'd already shown her, so she wouldn't accept whatever was to come as the truth of him. But he shouldn't doubt her, really-- there she stood, her face devoid of doubt, after the first moment's flicker; her stance as certain. She knew, didn't she? The truth of the Doctor, to Rose, all he was for her. Love only, and love abiding, through all of time.
**********
And here's the second, a post-Journey's End fic, of which I'm ashamed, because there are literally hundreds of these, and here I had to add mine to the stack, because I have no self-control.
Title:Love Is Not All (1/1?)
Author: lpmufinfiend
Pairing: Rose, AltTen
Rating: Light R?
Word Count: 2115
Spoilers: through Journey's End
Summary:I might be driven to sell your love for peace,// Or trade the memory of this night for food.// It may well be. I do not think I would. -- Edna St. Vincent Millay, Love Is Not All.
A/N: Drop me a line if you care 'nuff to want me to go ahead and write the smut. Something in me wouldn't do it. Must be the tease. Or the apathetic wife-of-25-years that lives in all of us, just waiting to withhold when the opportunity arises.
**********
They hadn't spoken much-- to each other, or Jackie, or Pete--since they'd gotten in. It had been late. Energetic disturbances as a result of the final, great closing of one universe to another-- like the echo of a slammed door, for all the Doctor and Donna had gone quietly-- had prevented teleport directly from the Bay, or from anyplace within five miles of it. The already-weary Tylers and the Doctor's newborn proxy had trudged, in shell-shocked silence, to the nearest town, from where Torchwood had been able to lock Pete's and Rose's signals, and extrapolate that the two nearest persons to them were Jackie and the new Doctor.
The teleport was over before anyone had noticed it'd begun, but the rounds of debriefing and slow processing through the medical center for standard checks and a battery of complex energy scans had detained them for an additional and excruciatingly long five hours. The drive home had been almost as quiet as the walk, which itself seemed years away, floating on the newly clipped horizon of what composed this version of their existence, and thus, what they were permitted to raise in conversation. The new 'them' was tense, scrambled, hardly pliant-- but this new Doctor's words, and the kiss they had shared, hung on the air between them like a lead sinker. What must have been the line, then, the distance between them, now stretched the length of the Tylers' kitchen, from one dark corner to its diagonal opposite.
The Doctor studied some black, greasy scuffs on the rubber toe-tips of his Chucks, grimacing with disappointment and trained interest at their marred surface. Rose, for her part, was silently frantic, stuck between her desperate attempt not to look at him, and her other-- equally strong-- to avoid looking away. She bit her lip, she bit her tongue, and, neither sufficing as replacement for the scream that ached to launch itself from her lungs, she bit her thumb, hard. The Doctor had, sometime in between, given up on the view of his feet, and quirked an eyebrow. She held his face in her peripheral vision and didn't miss it. Out of nowhere came his voice:
"Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?"
Rose started, but recovered; almost laughed, but contained herself. She looked directly at him, minimized the outward appearance of the flinch she hadn't been able to help upon seeing the depth of, the love in the eyes of the man who'd given her himself. What did she have for him?
"I bite my thumb, sir," she replied, "but not at you, sir."
The smiles thrust to their lips by the inexplicable thrill of speaking in quote died, as, unexpectedly, the Doctor refused to relinquish her gaze. He stood, clearly terrified, but bravely refusing all the instincts that implored him to run from this. To crack another joke. To let them both go, and box away whatever future they'd been left to. Mates, just mates. He'd always said so, anyway. Right?
But he couldn't do mates, not now, not with the taste of her a distracting ghost on his lips, and all of her this close, at long last in the same room, when the man he'd been a day ago had... handled himself to sleep, the nights he slept, to thoughts of this. Well, rather more than this, and not the man he'd been. He had to remind himself of this constantly-- it hadn't been a divergence, but a genesis. He was new, no half of someone else, but less to the side of independence; he wasn't the man Rose had come looking for. The thought burned. He hadn't been anyone's goal, not hers, nor his own, his old own. Not Donna's. But he was Rose's charge, what she'd been given, even forced to take. And had no idea how to be enough for her.
Rose's eyes began to sting from the strain of the long look, and she had to break contact. It felt like cheating, though, so she knew she had to offer something else. A smile, some words-- but all the ones she could think of were too difficult to say.
"It's odd, you know," she began, then paused. "...Really odd, because all these weeks and months since I left you, I've been thinking about you, here with me in this house on this Earth, somehow, and what we'd do once I got you back. And I had all these ideas. But now you're here, and I can't even think of what to say..." she trailed off, kicking herself on the inside for the multitude of ways he could take that wrong. Or think she'd stopped talking on purpose, to make him say something. Or that she was disappointed, or that she'd built him up in her head, and had never really felt for him. But that wasn't it, not at all, because what sealed her feet to this spot on the floor, sealed her brain off from her mouth, and her hands in her pockets-- it was all feeling. Crushing, deafening, sweet and aching feeling. She couldn't think over it, couldn't trust herself to talk over it, lest she hurt him with something offhand, dangerously unspecific. She was relieved, and a little frightened, when he opened his own mouth to speak.
"I'm the Doctor, Rose," he said, voice soft and somewhat deadly. "But I am not your friend. I don't want to be your friend, and I don't want to try to want to be your friend. Because that's not it with us. That was never it. And I'm sorry I pretended, but we're here now, alone, and you can run as far as you'd like, so I think it's fair to say."
Rose's insides shifted into her throat, and pain rocked her, twisted her face. She hung her head to hide it.
"Look at me, Rose."
She wouldn't.
"God, Rose, look at me. Please."
A sound of grief tore out of her, and was sucked back in on her sharp intake of air, as she turned her eyes up into his.
"Oh, Rose," he breathed, clearing in three steps that distance which had seemed so formidable a moment ago. He grasped her by the shoulder and trailed the fingertips of his free hand across her cheek, where trails of mascara had broken free from her dark, wet eyes, borne by the tears he'd pulled from her, the tears he longed to kiss from her pale face and taste. She'd taken his words in the cruelest way. She thought he hated her, wanted away from all of this. It would have made him laugh, if it hadn't made him miserable. He stroked the tears off her cheeks with both hands now, breath catching in his human lungs as his own eyes threatened to spill their unshed emotion.
"No, no, no," he muttered, brushing back her hair once he'd done the tears, searching her eyes, which struggled to find someplace to look besides into his. "Rose Tyler. I mean to say... Well, yes, I mean to say that I meant what I said on that beach, and I'm so, so sorry, and it's terrible, but I'm very sure I love you, and that furthermore-- and I do acknowledge the difference-- Rose, I'm rather in love with you, and there's nothing to be done for that but proximity to the object, and it's frightening, I know. I can promise you I'm as scared as you, and probably tenfold, because Rose, if you won't have me--"
But he never got to finish, because her lips covered his, and he reacted before he knew it. And it was Rose Tyler that teased his mouth open with her tongue, and ran hers along his, and woke up all the fire that lived in his chest, sending his only heart into a terrifyingly loud overdrive. It was Rose Tyler that grabbed a fistful of his shirt and used it to draw him closer, she that slid her hand into his jacket and over his shoulder, shoving it halfway to the floor, and letting it fall the rest. It was even Rose that stood on her toes as she sought to deepen their kiss, grinding against his arousal on her way-- But it was definitely the Doctor who pinned her with his hips to the island at her back, rolling into her so she could feel his consequential growth, grinning as he watched her shining eyes flicker like a candle's flame in the darkness of the room. It was the Doctor who broke the kiss to graze her neck with his swollen lips, to bite her, and suck hard at the skin there. To be clear, it was the Doctor who, groaning at the sudden sensation of her hand atop the bulge below his belt, lifted her to the countertop-- But it was Rose who suddenly decided to help him out of his pants.
"Rose!" he groaned, half in pleasure and half in warning.
"Well, what the hell else am I up here for?"
"I... but Rose, the kitchen. Your mother's kitchen."
"You've never felt reverently toward my mother before, or the sanctity of her home. You figure now's the time to start?" she asked, cocking her head in the adorable, for-all-you're-a-Timelord-you're-really-daft way she had of doing, but still failing to melt the Doctor entirely. Horror stood its ground upon his face.
"Jackie Tyler's kitchen, where Jackie Tyler will stand tomorrow morning, drinking coffee. Where I will have to watch Jackie Tyler stand tomorrow morning, drinking coffee! Rose, I'll burst into flames."
They exchanged a long and stubborn look. She fidgeted against him, eliciting a hiccup of renewed arousal, but he steeled himself.
"Oh, alright," she relented, pushing him gently away from her. She hopped down and leant to gather his pants from where they'd pooled by his ankles, deftly refastening his belt on its well-worn, second-tightest hole. The only old thing about him, she mused silently, and barely darkly, as she slid her hand into his.
"Come along," she said, pulling him behind her as she made for her room.
"So glad you didn't insist," he chuckled, walking quickly to keep with her determined pace.
"Is that so?" Rose said, stopping short, her hand falling slack in his. He bumped into her accidentally, but held her to him on purpose.
"No, I mean-- ah, Rose, you know what I mean!" Frustration was evident on his face, but it was all too fun for Rose to give up. She took advantage of their proximity, and shifted against him. His hands flew to her backside, forcing her closer, as he loosed a small, needy sigh. "Please."
Rose's hand crept out and turned the doorknob behind her. She spun around and entered her room, leaving the door to swing part-way shut, and yanking her shoes off beside her bed. The Doctor's field of vision shrunk to a yellow sliver of light that swept across the carpet and up the wall, capturing Rose in its middle distance-- light-washed, all angles and curves and shadows-- as she unwrapped herself single-mindedly. She set to work on the outermost of two shirts, fingers making short work of the buttons, bottom-most on up. The Doctor stopped on the threshold and blinked twice, amazed when the scene before him did not disappear. It was sometime after the shirt came all the way off, as he watched her move to unfasten her pants, then snake out of them with the candid grace of the unobserved, that he realized fully. She was twice the Rose Tyler, the essence of courage and goodness and calm mirth, than he'd ever perceived. Her eyes were a vaster landscape than twenty universes stacked on a shared open axis, and the things she'd done to return to him-- freestanding proofs of loyalty and promises kept-- were more than he needed in the way of convincing. Embers of hope cracked alive inside of him, benevolent and sure.
Love flowed within him, gossiping around his insides, meek and unsure of its own mass; now, however, time had sequence, had increment and effect, had meaning. It was simpler to give away when it feld back, returned to itself without a whisper or a care. A gift of time from the Doctor had always been laundered currency-- until today. A mortal Doctor was a Doctor held time's captive, unable to look into it like he'd done when he had resided without. And his time, he'd promised before, was Rose's, along with all his love.
She glanced up then, and into his face, want and glee and bewilderment struggling for dominance in her stare. He swore he had never regretted a thing less than that promise.
"Doctor, you coming?" she asked.
He stepped toward her, eyes locking with hers determinedly.
"Oh, yes."
**********
Title: His True Self
Author: lpmufinfiend
Pairing Ten/Rose
Rating: PG
Word Count: 661
Spoilers: Journey's End, nothin' else.
Summary: My own, very possibly entirely too one-track interpretation of what, in the shippiest of worlds, the Doctor might have been thinking during a scene of Journey's End.
Author's Note before the fact: This is my first fic in a rather long time, and my first Doctor Who fic at all. Please review if you read! Feedback's the only way I can hope to get better. That, and practice. But for all I know, I could be practicing the wrong stuff!
**********
Even now, even as they faced their deaths, the Doctor couldn't suppress his wonder to see Rose, in the flesh, standing before him. It'd been hours since he had first seen her, first felt the soft skin of her cheek beneath his hand, brushing stray hair away from her watering eyes. He had been too glad, and really, in too much pain to be shocked to see her then-- what do they say? Pain brings clarity-- but here and now, when he could do so little as guess as to whether they would live or die, and if they died, how many millions would fall after them to the threat they'd failed to stop... All he could think for more than just a moment, above and beside all the rest of it, was how unlikely all of this was.
When Donna had spoken of their impending meeting earlier, the facts had appeared too grim to allow for the Doctor's usual optimism-- when he'd thought of his Rose, all can-do attitude and foolish confidence, setting foot where scarcely a spaceship, armed to the teeth and millennia past the technology which her world contained, might travel safely-- when he thought of her passing through the Void alone and uncontained-- he couldn't think she'd make it to this earth, and to him, in her own shape, unharmed. Nine hundred years of compounded loss had taught him to expect the worst, prepare for it, and never trust the seeming of a clean and happy ending. Someone always lost, he knew. Something always went awry.
Which is why, in this moment, surrounded by Daleks and washed in the harsh, dramatic forcefield-spotlights of the Crucible, he still couldn't pull the whole of his attention to the disaster at hand. One eye, one half of his consciousness observed Rose still-- half in disbelief at her presence, and half in fear that all was not as well as it seemed. After all she'd been through, it was imposs-- well, it was highly improbable that she would be right as rain. Even as Davros and Dalek Khan screeched their condemnation, poked fun at her strife to find him, the Doctor couldn't help but worry. Did she look a little pale, or was that the effect of the white containment beam? Was she hiding any pain? And even as he argued back, baited, angered his captors, and even as Davros spoke, a grating constant note the Doctor heard, but did not process-- his eyes flitted back to Rose, stuck within a twin beam beside him, herself calm, or so seeming; so brave.
--"The fire, the rage of a Timelord who butchered millions!"
And suddenly--just there--the shame, as great as the wonder and the fear. The tonic of emotions struggling for claim of the knot in his throat bubbled into his gaze, and he cast it downward. Better Rose didn't see the guilt. He hated himself something more for wanting to be her hero, today and in this place, after all he'd made her feel.
"Why so shy? Show your companion. Show her your true self," Davros suggested, his voice frighteningly calm.
His true self. The truth of his soul. He couldn't tell her, but he hoped he had shown her-- every time his hand had slipped comfortably into hers; every time, delighted at some grand revelation to do with saving the day, he'd kissed her forehead in excitement; and every time he'd tried to save her at the last minute, tried to send her away from whatever fate threatened to take her from him by force. He hoped he'd already shown her, so she wouldn't accept whatever was to come as the truth of him. But he shouldn't doubt her, really-- there she stood, her face devoid of doubt, after the first moment's flicker; her stance as certain. She knew, didn't she? The truth of the Doctor, to Rose, all he was for her. Love only, and love abiding, through all of time.
**********
And here's the second, a post-Journey's End fic, of which I'm ashamed, because there are literally hundreds of these, and here I had to add mine to the stack, because I have no self-control.
Title:Love Is Not All (1/1?)
Author: lpmufinfiend
Pairing: Rose, AltTen
Rating: Light R?
Word Count: 2115
Spoilers: through Journey's End
Summary:I might be driven to sell your love for peace,// Or trade the memory of this night for food.// It may well be. I do not think I would. -- Edna St. Vincent Millay, Love Is Not All.
A/N: Drop me a line if you care 'nuff to want me to go ahead and write the smut. Something in me wouldn't do it. Must be the tease. Or the apathetic wife-of-25-years that lives in all of us, just waiting to withhold when the opportunity arises.
**********
They hadn't spoken much-- to each other, or Jackie, or Pete--since they'd gotten in. It had been late. Energetic disturbances as a result of the final, great closing of one universe to another-- like the echo of a slammed door, for all the Doctor and Donna had gone quietly-- had prevented teleport directly from the Bay, or from anyplace within five miles of it. The already-weary Tylers and the Doctor's newborn proxy had trudged, in shell-shocked silence, to the nearest town, from where Torchwood had been able to lock Pete's and Rose's signals, and extrapolate that the two nearest persons to them were Jackie and the new Doctor.
The teleport was over before anyone had noticed it'd begun, but the rounds of debriefing and slow processing through the medical center for standard checks and a battery of complex energy scans had detained them for an additional and excruciatingly long five hours. The drive home had been almost as quiet as the walk, which itself seemed years away, floating on the newly clipped horizon of what composed this version of their existence, and thus, what they were permitted to raise in conversation. The new 'them' was tense, scrambled, hardly pliant-- but this new Doctor's words, and the kiss they had shared, hung on the air between them like a lead sinker. What must have been the line, then, the distance between them, now stretched the length of the Tylers' kitchen, from one dark corner to its diagonal opposite.
The Doctor studied some black, greasy scuffs on the rubber toe-tips of his Chucks, grimacing with disappointment and trained interest at their marred surface. Rose, for her part, was silently frantic, stuck between her desperate attempt not to look at him, and her other-- equally strong-- to avoid looking away. She bit her lip, she bit her tongue, and, neither sufficing as replacement for the scream that ached to launch itself from her lungs, she bit her thumb, hard. The Doctor had, sometime in between, given up on the view of his feet, and quirked an eyebrow. She held his face in her peripheral vision and didn't miss it. Out of nowhere came his voice:
"Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?"
Rose started, but recovered; almost laughed, but contained herself. She looked directly at him, minimized the outward appearance of the flinch she hadn't been able to help upon seeing the depth of, the love in the eyes of the man who'd given her himself. What did she have for him?
"I bite my thumb, sir," she replied, "but not at you, sir."
The smiles thrust to their lips by the inexplicable thrill of speaking in quote died, as, unexpectedly, the Doctor refused to relinquish her gaze. He stood, clearly terrified, but bravely refusing all the instincts that implored him to run from this. To crack another joke. To let them both go, and box away whatever future they'd been left to. Mates, just mates. He'd always said so, anyway. Right?
But he couldn't do mates, not now, not with the taste of her a distracting ghost on his lips, and all of her this close, at long last in the same room, when the man he'd been a day ago had... handled himself to sleep, the nights he slept, to thoughts of this. Well, rather more than this, and not the man he'd been. He had to remind himself of this constantly-- it hadn't been a divergence, but a genesis. He was new, no half of someone else, but less to the side of independence; he wasn't the man Rose had come looking for. The thought burned. He hadn't been anyone's goal, not hers, nor his own, his old own. Not Donna's. But he was Rose's charge, what she'd been given, even forced to take. And had no idea how to be enough for her.
Rose's eyes began to sting from the strain of the long look, and she had to break contact. It felt like cheating, though, so she knew she had to offer something else. A smile, some words-- but all the ones she could think of were too difficult to say.
"It's odd, you know," she began, then paused. "...Really odd, because all these weeks and months since I left you, I've been thinking about you, here with me in this house on this Earth, somehow, and what we'd do once I got you back. And I had all these ideas. But now you're here, and I can't even think of what to say..." she trailed off, kicking herself on the inside for the multitude of ways he could take that wrong. Or think she'd stopped talking on purpose, to make him say something. Or that she was disappointed, or that she'd built him up in her head, and had never really felt for him. But that wasn't it, not at all, because what sealed her feet to this spot on the floor, sealed her brain off from her mouth, and her hands in her pockets-- it was all feeling. Crushing, deafening, sweet and aching feeling. She couldn't think over it, couldn't trust herself to talk over it, lest she hurt him with something offhand, dangerously unspecific. She was relieved, and a little frightened, when he opened his own mouth to speak.
"I'm the Doctor, Rose," he said, voice soft and somewhat deadly. "But I am not your friend. I don't want to be your friend, and I don't want to try to want to be your friend. Because that's not it with us. That was never it. And I'm sorry I pretended, but we're here now, alone, and you can run as far as you'd like, so I think it's fair to say."
Rose's insides shifted into her throat, and pain rocked her, twisted her face. She hung her head to hide it.
"Look at me, Rose."
She wouldn't.
"God, Rose, look at me. Please."
A sound of grief tore out of her, and was sucked back in on her sharp intake of air, as she turned her eyes up into his.
"Oh, Rose," he breathed, clearing in three steps that distance which had seemed so formidable a moment ago. He grasped her by the shoulder and trailed the fingertips of his free hand across her cheek, where trails of mascara had broken free from her dark, wet eyes, borne by the tears he'd pulled from her, the tears he longed to kiss from her pale face and taste. She'd taken his words in the cruelest way. She thought he hated her, wanted away from all of this. It would have made him laugh, if it hadn't made him miserable. He stroked the tears off her cheeks with both hands now, breath catching in his human lungs as his own eyes threatened to spill their unshed emotion.
"No, no, no," he muttered, brushing back her hair once he'd done the tears, searching her eyes, which struggled to find someplace to look besides into his. "Rose Tyler. I mean to say... Well, yes, I mean to say that I meant what I said on that beach, and I'm so, so sorry, and it's terrible, but I'm very sure I love you, and that furthermore-- and I do acknowledge the difference-- Rose, I'm rather in love with you, and there's nothing to be done for that but proximity to the object, and it's frightening, I know. I can promise you I'm as scared as you, and probably tenfold, because Rose, if you won't have me--"
But he never got to finish, because her lips covered his, and he reacted before he knew it. And it was Rose Tyler that teased his mouth open with her tongue, and ran hers along his, and woke up all the fire that lived in his chest, sending his only heart into a terrifyingly loud overdrive. It was Rose Tyler that grabbed a fistful of his shirt and used it to draw him closer, she that slid her hand into his jacket and over his shoulder, shoving it halfway to the floor, and letting it fall the rest. It was even Rose that stood on her toes as she sought to deepen their kiss, grinding against his arousal on her way-- But it was definitely the Doctor who pinned her with his hips to the island at her back, rolling into her so she could feel his consequential growth, grinning as he watched her shining eyes flicker like a candle's flame in the darkness of the room. It was the Doctor who broke the kiss to graze her neck with his swollen lips, to bite her, and suck hard at the skin there. To be clear, it was the Doctor who, groaning at the sudden sensation of her hand atop the bulge below his belt, lifted her to the countertop-- But it was Rose who suddenly decided to help him out of his pants.
"Rose!" he groaned, half in pleasure and half in warning.
"Well, what the hell else am I up here for?"
"I... but Rose, the kitchen. Your mother's kitchen."
"You've never felt reverently toward my mother before, or the sanctity of her home. You figure now's the time to start?" she asked, cocking her head in the adorable, for-all-you're-a-Timelord-you're-really-daft way she had of doing, but still failing to melt the Doctor entirely. Horror stood its ground upon his face.
"Jackie Tyler's kitchen, where Jackie Tyler will stand tomorrow morning, drinking coffee. Where I will have to watch Jackie Tyler stand tomorrow morning, drinking coffee! Rose, I'll burst into flames."
They exchanged a long and stubborn look. She fidgeted against him, eliciting a hiccup of renewed arousal, but he steeled himself.
"Oh, alright," she relented, pushing him gently away from her. She hopped down and leant to gather his pants from where they'd pooled by his ankles, deftly refastening his belt on its well-worn, second-tightest hole. The only old thing about him, she mused silently, and barely darkly, as she slid her hand into his.
"Come along," she said, pulling him behind her as she made for her room.
"So glad you didn't insist," he chuckled, walking quickly to keep with her determined pace.
"Is that so?" Rose said, stopping short, her hand falling slack in his. He bumped into her accidentally, but held her to him on purpose.
"No, I mean-- ah, Rose, you know what I mean!" Frustration was evident on his face, but it was all too fun for Rose to give up. She took advantage of their proximity, and shifted against him. His hands flew to her backside, forcing her closer, as he loosed a small, needy sigh. "Please."
Rose's hand crept out and turned the doorknob behind her. She spun around and entered her room, leaving the door to swing part-way shut, and yanking her shoes off beside her bed. The Doctor's field of vision shrunk to a yellow sliver of light that swept across the carpet and up the wall, capturing Rose in its middle distance-- light-washed, all angles and curves and shadows-- as she unwrapped herself single-mindedly. She set to work on the outermost of two shirts, fingers making short work of the buttons, bottom-most on up. The Doctor stopped on the threshold and blinked twice, amazed when the scene before him did not disappear. It was sometime after the shirt came all the way off, as he watched her move to unfasten her pants, then snake out of them with the candid grace of the unobserved, that he realized fully. She was twice the Rose Tyler, the essence of courage and goodness and calm mirth, than he'd ever perceived. Her eyes were a vaster landscape than twenty universes stacked on a shared open axis, and the things she'd done to return to him-- freestanding proofs of loyalty and promises kept-- were more than he needed in the way of convincing. Embers of hope cracked alive inside of him, benevolent and sure.
Love flowed within him, gossiping around his insides, meek and unsure of its own mass; now, however, time had sequence, had increment and effect, had meaning. It was simpler to give away when it feld back, returned to itself without a whisper or a care. A gift of time from the Doctor had always been laundered currency-- until today. A mortal Doctor was a Doctor held time's captive, unable to look into it like he'd done when he had resided without. And his time, he'd promised before, was Rose's, along with all his love.
She glanced up then, and into his face, want and glee and bewilderment struggling for dominance in her stare. He swore he had never regretted a thing less than that promise.
"Doctor, you coming?" she asked.
He stepped toward her, eyes locking with hers determinedly.
"Oh, yes."
**********