The New Doctor
Title: The New Doctor
Characters/Pairing: Ten/Rose
Rating: Teen, possible bad language.
Summary: Rose and the new Doctor have a little heart-to-heart. Timing is after Journey's End, so spoilers for this episode.
The loud whistling of the kettle snapped Rose out of her daze. She pulled it off the stove and began to fill two cups without really paying much attention to it. In the other room sat a stranger with a familiar face. She didn’t really know who this “new” Doctor was, or why he was staying here. She walked into the room with the teacups, her mind repeating the same thought over and over. “What are you doing?” she asked the man in the chair as she handed him his teacup.
“Reading Agatha Christi. I met her, you know? Brilliant woman,” he replied.
Of course. “Hm. Well, you are the expert on such things.”
“On what things?”
“Women.” You see, Rose Tyler was starting to come down from a rather exhausting experience and was just now able to process all that had happened that day, which involved scrutinizing the strangely familiar man in her sitting room.
“Oh I would hardly say that.” This man was mostly oblivious to her thoughts at this time, and ‘mostly’ in this situation is read to mean ‘entirely’.
“Really,” Rose snorted. You can’t really blame her, though. As you might soon sense, Rose Tyler had just discovered that the man-well, alien-that she loved more than anyone or anything in the world and whom she had in fact crossed several worlds to try and find seemed to hardly be as focused on her as she was on him. While there was only this one man in her world that entire time, she had been what she saw as ‘replaced’ not once but twice with other women by him. This displeased her. After all of that, he dropped a sort of clone of himself on her and then left. It was really all rather confusing, and her human emotions weren’t exactly programmed to be able to love one man/alien who went through three bodies but only two faces during the course of their relationship.
“You know I’ve been thinking and I’ve realized that you humans are truly remarkable creatures,” The alien began to say with an excitement that was eerily familiar to Rose. “Do you know what exactly makes you so remarkable? What it is that’s made you all live for so long and survive eons of danger and war?” He looked at her excitedly.
She shook her head, trying to seem as uninterested in the answer as possible.
“Adaptability! You are all so incredibly adaptable. I mean, just look at every human being brought on the TARDIS, just look at you, Rose Tyler!” Rose’s interest spiked slightly. “You grew up living on one world with one kind of species on it completely unaware of anything else out there in the universe. But then, this blasted Doctor in his blue box came down to your world, took you off of it, and showed you more than anything you could ever even imagine: an entire universe of creatures and worlds that you’d never known! And what did you do? What did you do, Rose? You adapted. No, you did more than adapt, you excelled. Incredible! To be able to not only understand and accept that amount of information in one enormous reality blow but also to adapt to it, well, there are very few species in the universe that can do half of what you can. You know what species can’t adapt like a human?”
Rose shook her head.
“Would you like to?”
She gave him a slightly more interested expression and raised an eyebrow.
“A Time Lord,” the alien said with a smile. “That is one species that is absolutely worthless when it comes to adaptation and I’ll tell you why. The purpose of a Time Lord is to what?” He looked at Rose, who shrugged. “It’s to keep everything the same. True, the Doctor travels space and time partly for the adventure and fun of it but what is he really doing all the while? He’s out there making sure nothing, and I mean nothing, changes. No mislaid footprints, no wrongful deaths-or should I say wrongful lack of death-no crushed butterflies, nothing! Just think about it! How completely immoveable must a Time Lord be? Just think about it, Rose, because you can do things that the Doctor could never dream of doing.”
This time, Rose raised both eyebrows. “Like what?” She was slightly more interested, but didn’t want the alien to know it (not that he was paying attention to that anyway).
“You can change. You can adapt. You can come to know and love a life that one month ago would have seemed completely alien to you. The Doctor can never have that. He will always be in his TARDIS up there in the dark reaches of space and time because he can know nothing else. “
“But he was able to leave his home planet after it was destroyed-“ she started, attempting to take an active part in this one-sided conversation.
“The only change between his home planet and the TARDIS is the scenery. He’s still doing the same exact job: going around the universe, fixing and watching time. That’s what he did on his home planet and after an amount of time that is nothing short of inconceivable to the human race that’s still exactly what he’s doing now. How many times have you changed jobs in your lifetime, Rose?” Rose shrugged. “Two, three, maybe more than four times in just twenty short years of life?”
“Why are you telling me all of this?”
“I want to share this with you, Rose. I want to share with you how amazing this is.”
The day’s exhaustion finally crashing down on her, Rose decided it was time to begin to say what was really on her mind. “But if all that is true then you’re telling me you can never be happy here. You’re just telling me what I knew from the beginning: that your place could never be here with me but must be out there in the TARDIS!”
There was a pause in the room, and the alien and Rose locked eyes. After a moment, the alien smiled. “If I were a pure Time Lord that would be true, but I’m not. I’m an entirely new life, a hybrid between breeds, a Time Lord-human-mutt thing!”
“’Thing’ worked very well in that sentence.”
“It got away from me, yeah. But that’s not the point. The point is that I, unlike the other Doctor, am part human which means that I can adapt to a new life while the other Doctor couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t adapt, or just didn’t want to,” she muttered as she stared at the dark contents of her teacup.
The alien’s face contorted into an expression of pain and confusion. “How can you say that? Do you honestly believe that if there was any chance I had to stay with you before that I wouldn’t-“
“Donna, huh?” He winced when she spoke the other woman’s name. “That was her name, wasn’t it? And what about that other chick, what was her name again?”
The Doctor closed his book and set down his tea slowly. “Martha,” he said, barely audible.
“Ah, Martha.” Rose’s voice stung with an unfamiliar sharpness. Truth be told, this wasn’t a conversation the Doctor was expecting to have on their first night together again.
His tone, then, became terse and controlled. “They were different.”
“Oh yes, different. Well in that case nevermind.”
“Donna and I were nothing beyond friends and Martha, well, it’s complicated.”
Rose let out a short and harsh laugh. “So your Facebook status says.”
“What? I mean, no. I mean…”
“You talk like you were there, Doctor,” Her eyes left her teacup and were now fixed on him with a glare.
“But I was there! The other Doctor and I were the same person and the same entity up until we were, well, separate.”
“Very eloquent. So what you’re saying is that you were also responsible for the sudden replacement of me with those two?”
“Well, they weren’t exactly there at the same time-“ Rose’s glare intensified, “by which I mean they were not replacing you!”
“Oh?”
“Of course not, Rose! No one could replace you!” The Doctor was starting to feel a desperation that he was only familiar with on the battlefield or in case of a mechanical failure.
“No, they were just keeping my place next to you warm, right?”
“You can be just as blind and stubborn as your mother sometimes, you know that?”
“Why thank you, I take that as a compliment!” Rose yelled as she slammed down her teacup and jumped to her feet.
The Doctor lowered his head and sighed. “Rose, what can I say to make this better?”
“But that’s the whole problem, isn’t it, Doctor? How long have you been traveling and showing the universe off to whatever young human girl would follow you? I bet you know all about human girls now. You probably know exactly what to say in any situation to just make it all better and make her come crawling back to you as willing as ever. And I was all ready to believe it, you know. Especially that gem on the beach. Shit, how many times have you used that one?”
The Doctor rose slowly to his feet. “Never,” he replied. Single and final, the Doctor couldn’t remember the last time he ever said one word that was as important. Wait, he could. It was ‘run’.
“Right. I’ve gotta hand it to you though, you delivered it well. I really did believe you there for a bit.”
“Rose.”
“Please, don’t. The only reason you’re here is because the real Doctor needed to dump you somewhere. Knowing how I felt about him, it must have seemed the obvious solution to give you to me. I am sorry for you, really I am, but I can’t pretend that you’re someone you aren’t or that you feel things for me that you don’t.” Rose turned and began to walk away. She knew as she was doing it that she didn’t really want to, but out of her confusion had sprung a jealousy and feeling of betrayal that was beginning to make her forget what she had sitting right in front of her.
The Doctor looked at her with disbelief. He might not have been the Doctor she expected, but this was most certainly not his Rose. “Why are you saying these things?”
“Why?” She turned back to face him. “Because I thought I was special. I thought everything that we went through together and the most important moments of my life had actually meant something to someone else.” Her body began suddenly to shake with repressed sobs and to hold them back she began to yell through them. “I spent so long and worked so hard to try and find him again and when I did, what else did I find? That he had replaced me not once but twice with other women.”
“They were not replacing you.” He hazarded a step towards her, but she recoiled.
“Then why were they there? Why did he-you-need them?”
“You have no idea how lonely it is out there.”
“Don’t feed me that bullshit, Doctor”
“But you don’t. You don’t have any idea.” He walked towards her again with more urgency. “There have always been other beings out there like you but for the longest time there has been no one like me, no other Time Lord, no other creature that saw the moving of the worlds and the clicks of time like I did. That loneliness is overbearing.” His voice reached a restrained yell. He took a breath. “So, yes, I take on passengers.”
“All women.” This statement, of all the others, had the hardest bite.
What she expected him to do was cower. What he did instead was smile. “Oh, darling, is that all? Is that what this is all about?”
Rose straightened and tried to increase her glare, which, at this point, was hard to do. “Don’t laugh! It’s true, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter what you say, I’m on to your scheme.”
“I have a scheme, do I?” He smiled and shook his head. “Oh, Rose. Tell me, have you ever been on an extended road trip with a human male? It’s not exactly the most pleasant experience. I mean, just think back to Mickey and Jack; even with you there as a buffer they were still hopelessly obnoxious.” Rose felt the urge to lighten her glare and smile, but resisted. She was angry, after all. No time for smiling.
The Doctor put his hands in his pockets, looked off at the wall, and assumed to the annoyingly familiar stance that he goes into whenever he’s explaining something that he finds to be especially interesting. “Whenever I bring men on board all they do is bicker and argue with me and try and show me how very clever they are. That or they try and kill me. But women, well, that’s another story entirely. Women actually appreciate the trip and, strangely enough, are never constantly trying to outdo my cleverness even though sometimes they’re far more brilliant than I am.”
He turned his head back to Rose and gave her a kind smile. “So you’re right, Rose, I am preoccupied with women, but it’s only because of how incredibly fascinating they are. They are so bloody outstanding and yet, and here’s what gets me the most, they are almost always completely oblivious to it. Donna was, Martha was, but the most tragic example is you.”
“What about me?” Rose’s posture had gone into the equally familiar position she fell into whenever she had the lucky opportunity of having something the Doctor felt was particularly interesting explained to her.
“If you had any idea how amazing you are, you wouldn’t for a second doubt that you’ve completely hooked a permanently bachelor Time Lord. “
There was a small pause before Rose took a baby step back into the sitting room. “I’m listening,” she said.
The Doctor took a deep breath and frowned. “That day on Bad Wolf Bay… Rose, I was devastated. I harnessed the power of a Super Nova just to say goodbye to you! Have you forgotten that?”
“But what you said to me today you didn’t say then. You hesitated. Why? Why did you hesitate?”
“Did you ever consider that I hesitated because I’d never said anything like it before? If I was really the smooth lady charmer you accused me of being then those words would have come out without me even needing to think about them, but they didn’t. I hesitated because I knew that I was only going to say those words once and if I only had one chance at it then I was going to get it right.”
“What happened with Martha and Donna?”
“Martha left me.”
“Why?”
He winced and looked back at the wall. “It… was complicated.”
“Yes I got that,” she responded quickly. “But why?”
He risked looking back at her. “She was in love with me.”
“And you?” Rose asked nervously, most of her dreading the answer.
The Doctor gave her a sad but reassuring smile. “If I was able to return the sentiment, do you think she would have left me?”
Rose thought about this and took few more steps towards the Doctor. “Why couldn’t you?”
“You know why.”
“Don’t do that, Doctor!” Rose replied in a restrained voice. “Don’t pretend like these things don’t need to be said because right now they do. I’ve spent so long waiting to hear them, so just tell me.”
“I couldn’t love her because…” he looked pleadingly into her eyes but knew deep down that she needed for him to say it, “because I was still in love with you.”
She processed this, then asked, “And Donna?”
“She knew she was only there as a travel companion before even setting foot in the TARDIS.”
Rose dropped her head. The jealousy was subsiding, but now another emotion was stirring. “So after all of that… after all of the places you could have gone and stayed and all the people you could have stayed with… why are you here with me?”
The Doctor took the final strides towards her and lifted her chin to look at him. “Because I love you, Rose Tyler.”
“But the TARDIS… you’re still part Time Lord and so there must still be a part of you that needs the TARDIS. How can you possibly think that I could make you happy here when you could be out there traveling like you’ve always done? It can’t be possible, and I’ve heard enough lectures on your need for the TARDIS to know that I’m right.”
He smiled and shook his head gently while his hand slowly left her chin to sit instead on her shoulder. “But that’s the magic of this situation. Yes, the TARDIS is a wonderful machine and it’s saved my life more times than anyone could count but at the same time, it’s a prison. As long as the Doctor has the TARDIS he has to uphold his position in the universe, which means he can never stop traveling through space and time to make sure everything is running smoothly. And I mean that, Rose, he can never stop. I know you’ve loved our adventures, but would you really want to have to always do them for all of your incredibly long life? And do them alone, no less?”
Rose blinked and looked away in thought. “I… I don’t really know. I guess I probably wouldn’t.” She looked back to the Doctor and frowned. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
He looked away. “Like what?”
“Like you’re terribly sad about something.”
“Because I am.”
“What about?” she asked, concerned.
He shook his head and turned back to her. “You still have no idea how incredible you are.” This earned him a small smile from Rose. “This has been bothering you all day, I know it. You’ve been sitting here quietly biting your thumbnail and thinking about how miserable I must be to be here and how happy he must be to have gotten you off his back.”
“Well are you?”
“No.”
Rose looked back at the ground and scoffed. “I bet he’s rather pleased, though.”
The Doctor turned and took a few steps away from Rose, as if he were wandering along the path of a new thought. Rose watched him in silence until he finally spoke back up.
“Rose, I didn’t want to say anything before but one of the side-effects of this whole situation is that myself and, well, the original copy have a bit of a connection for some time after my creation. A bit of an ESP thing, but not as literal. More metaphoric, really, except not as abstract.”
“What do you mean?” she interrupted in an attempt to keep him focused.
The Doctor turned sharply to face her again. “I mean I can’t read his thoughts but I can still feel him. I know his emotions right now and since we think the same way, by feeling what he feels I can know exactly what he’s thinking at this moment.”
Rose took an excited step forward. “What is it? What is he thinking?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“Yes, please, tell me. I have to know,” she said as she bounced slightly for emphasis.
“He’s lonelier than he’s ever been, and he’s miserable.” Rose visibly deflated and stopped all of her excited twitching. “Tonight, the TARDIS is his prison. He needs it to survive in the only way he can, but he desperately wishes he could have left more than just his half-human clone with you today. It’s like the death of the Time Lords all over again because, aside from destroying another race of Daleks, he has once again lost the only person in the universe who understood him, who really saw everything the way that he did.”
It was a few moments before Rose’s response came, and when it did, it was breathless. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s you, Rose. Do you remember the first time we fought the Daleks together? It was on Satellite Five. Jack was there.”
“He died there,” she retorted.
“Well, kind of. I would have died, too, but I didn’t. Do you remember why?”
“No, and you know that I don’t. All I remember is being sent home and then trying to get back,“ she replied, annoyed.
“But there was something after that.”
“Yea, a bright light but I don’t-“
“Exactly!” The Doctor exclaimed. He was beginning to get the restlessness he always got when he was on the edge of a major explanation. “Do you remember what you were thinking before you saw that light?”
“Something about how to use the TARDIS to find you…”
“Yes!” The Doctor practically jumped with the word and was now pacing like a caged puppy in the small space in front of Rose. “You know what you did, Rose? You absorbed the TARDIS. All of the information on time and space that was stored in that living ship went straight into your brain. It could have killed you, no it should have killed you, but you’re wonderful and you’re beautiful and it didn’t kill you because you’re wonderful and you’re beautiful and you’re the most amazing anyone I’ve ever met. You’ve survived more than I’ve ever seen, more than Martha or Donna ever could. And when that happened, when the entirety of space and time was running amuck in your mind, you…” He stopped his excited parade and found Rose’s confused eyes, “…you stood there and you looked me in the eyes and you…”
There was a long pause, during which the Doctor did nothing but stand and stare at Rose. “Doctor?” she ventured, growing nervous.
In one short stride the Doctor had his arms around Rose as he kissed her unexpectedly and passionately. She jerked in surprise and just before she could relax into enjoying it, he broke away.
“You know what, Rose?” he said in her ear with a smile. “You’re right. The Doctor needs the TARDIS. And for an entire minute you were, and from now on you will always be, my TARDIS.”
Rose backed away to look him in the eye. “But… I don’t remember any of it. None of it, nothing at all.”
He nodded. “I had to reabsorb most of it before it killed you, but even after all of that it’s still there, Rose. I don’t want you to remember it because if you did, it could kill you. Well, in theory it could. But then again, it didn’t kill you when it should’ve had the first time so who knows? Maybe you’re immune.” He gave her a wicked grin and quickly added, “That was our first kiss, by the way. You probably don’t remember it but I sure do.”
“Doctor!”
“Right, sorry, just a tirade.” Rose began to giggle in his ear and he smiled. “What? What did I say?”
She shook her head and smiled at him. “Nothing. Maybe you really aren’t so different.”
He nodded with a stupid grin. “I’m really not, I promise. No new tricks here. Well, maybe a few tricks. Well, not so much tricks as human insecurities. Well, not so much insecurities as rising feeling of neediness. But most of that is just the overwhelming urge I have to kiss you.”
Rose caught his stupid grin as she pulled him in by his tie. “Come here, you sad excuse for a Time Lord.”
“Am I always going to feel this needy for attention from you?” he murmured into her lips.
“I sure hope so,” she murmured back. In the touch of his lips on hers, she thought that for a minute she could see that flash of light from before….
She pulled away. “Doctor?”
“Mm?” He opened his eyes slowly.
“Do you love me?”
The Doctor frowned. “Have you learned nothing from this conversation? Honestly, Rose, you’re smarter than that.”
She smiled at him sweetly. “Please, Doctor?”
He softened and smiled back. “Well, I guess this is one of the many times I’m going to be able to say this, so…” he leaned down until his lips touched her ear, “Rose Tyler, I…”
End.
Xposted in time_and_chips and dwfiction
Characters/Pairing: Ten/Rose
Rating: Teen, possible bad language.
Summary: Rose and the new Doctor have a little heart-to-heart. Timing is after Journey's End, so spoilers for this episode.
The loud whistling of the kettle snapped Rose out of her daze. She pulled it off the stove and began to fill two cups without really paying much attention to it. In the other room sat a stranger with a familiar face. She didn’t really know who this “new” Doctor was, or why he was staying here. She walked into the room with the teacups, her mind repeating the same thought over and over. “What are you doing?” she asked the man in the chair as she handed him his teacup.
“Reading Agatha Christi. I met her, you know? Brilliant woman,” he replied.
Of course. “Hm. Well, you are the expert on such things.”
“On what things?”
“Women.” You see, Rose Tyler was starting to come down from a rather exhausting experience and was just now able to process all that had happened that day, which involved scrutinizing the strangely familiar man in her sitting room.
“Oh I would hardly say that.” This man was mostly oblivious to her thoughts at this time, and ‘mostly’ in this situation is read to mean ‘entirely’.
“Really,” Rose snorted. You can’t really blame her, though. As you might soon sense, Rose Tyler had just discovered that the man-well, alien-that she loved more than anyone or anything in the world and whom she had in fact crossed several worlds to try and find seemed to hardly be as focused on her as she was on him. While there was only this one man in her world that entire time, she had been what she saw as ‘replaced’ not once but twice with other women by him. This displeased her. After all of that, he dropped a sort of clone of himself on her and then left. It was really all rather confusing, and her human emotions weren’t exactly programmed to be able to love one man/alien who went through three bodies but only two faces during the course of their relationship.
“You know I’ve been thinking and I’ve realized that you humans are truly remarkable creatures,” The alien began to say with an excitement that was eerily familiar to Rose. “Do you know what exactly makes you so remarkable? What it is that’s made you all live for so long and survive eons of danger and war?” He looked at her excitedly.
She shook her head, trying to seem as uninterested in the answer as possible.
“Adaptability! You are all so incredibly adaptable. I mean, just look at every human being brought on the TARDIS, just look at you, Rose Tyler!” Rose’s interest spiked slightly. “You grew up living on one world with one kind of species on it completely unaware of anything else out there in the universe. But then, this blasted Doctor in his blue box came down to your world, took you off of it, and showed you more than anything you could ever even imagine: an entire universe of creatures and worlds that you’d never known! And what did you do? What did you do, Rose? You adapted. No, you did more than adapt, you excelled. Incredible! To be able to not only understand and accept that amount of information in one enormous reality blow but also to adapt to it, well, there are very few species in the universe that can do half of what you can. You know what species can’t adapt like a human?”
Rose shook her head.
“Would you like to?”
She gave him a slightly more interested expression and raised an eyebrow.
“A Time Lord,” the alien said with a smile. “That is one species that is absolutely worthless when it comes to adaptation and I’ll tell you why. The purpose of a Time Lord is to what?” He looked at Rose, who shrugged. “It’s to keep everything the same. True, the Doctor travels space and time partly for the adventure and fun of it but what is he really doing all the while? He’s out there making sure nothing, and I mean nothing, changes. No mislaid footprints, no wrongful deaths-or should I say wrongful lack of death-no crushed butterflies, nothing! Just think about it! How completely immoveable must a Time Lord be? Just think about it, Rose, because you can do things that the Doctor could never dream of doing.”
This time, Rose raised both eyebrows. “Like what?” She was slightly more interested, but didn’t want the alien to know it (not that he was paying attention to that anyway).
“You can change. You can adapt. You can come to know and love a life that one month ago would have seemed completely alien to you. The Doctor can never have that. He will always be in his TARDIS up there in the dark reaches of space and time because he can know nothing else. “
“But he was able to leave his home planet after it was destroyed-“ she started, attempting to take an active part in this one-sided conversation.
“The only change between his home planet and the TARDIS is the scenery. He’s still doing the same exact job: going around the universe, fixing and watching time. That’s what he did on his home planet and after an amount of time that is nothing short of inconceivable to the human race that’s still exactly what he’s doing now. How many times have you changed jobs in your lifetime, Rose?” Rose shrugged. “Two, three, maybe more than four times in just twenty short years of life?”
“Why are you telling me all of this?”
“I want to share this with you, Rose. I want to share with you how amazing this is.”
The day’s exhaustion finally crashing down on her, Rose decided it was time to begin to say what was really on her mind. “But if all that is true then you’re telling me you can never be happy here. You’re just telling me what I knew from the beginning: that your place could never be here with me but must be out there in the TARDIS!”
There was a pause in the room, and the alien and Rose locked eyes. After a moment, the alien smiled. “If I were a pure Time Lord that would be true, but I’m not. I’m an entirely new life, a hybrid between breeds, a Time Lord-human-mutt thing!”
“’Thing’ worked very well in that sentence.”
“It got away from me, yeah. But that’s not the point. The point is that I, unlike the other Doctor, am part human which means that I can adapt to a new life while the other Doctor couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t adapt, or just didn’t want to,” she muttered as she stared at the dark contents of her teacup.
The alien’s face contorted into an expression of pain and confusion. “How can you say that? Do you honestly believe that if there was any chance I had to stay with you before that I wouldn’t-“
“Donna, huh?” He winced when she spoke the other woman’s name. “That was her name, wasn’t it? And what about that other chick, what was her name again?”
The Doctor closed his book and set down his tea slowly. “Martha,” he said, barely audible.
“Ah, Martha.” Rose’s voice stung with an unfamiliar sharpness. Truth be told, this wasn’t a conversation the Doctor was expecting to have on their first night together again.
His tone, then, became terse and controlled. “They were different.”
“Oh yes, different. Well in that case nevermind.”
“Donna and I were nothing beyond friends and Martha, well, it’s complicated.”
Rose let out a short and harsh laugh. “So your Facebook status says.”
“What? I mean, no. I mean…”
“You talk like you were there, Doctor,” Her eyes left her teacup and were now fixed on him with a glare.
“But I was there! The other Doctor and I were the same person and the same entity up until we were, well, separate.”
“Very eloquent. So what you’re saying is that you were also responsible for the sudden replacement of me with those two?”
“Well, they weren’t exactly there at the same time-“ Rose’s glare intensified, “by which I mean they were not replacing you!”
“Oh?”
“Of course not, Rose! No one could replace you!” The Doctor was starting to feel a desperation that he was only familiar with on the battlefield or in case of a mechanical failure.
“No, they were just keeping my place next to you warm, right?”
“You can be just as blind and stubborn as your mother sometimes, you know that?”
“Why thank you, I take that as a compliment!” Rose yelled as she slammed down her teacup and jumped to her feet.
The Doctor lowered his head and sighed. “Rose, what can I say to make this better?”
“But that’s the whole problem, isn’t it, Doctor? How long have you been traveling and showing the universe off to whatever young human girl would follow you? I bet you know all about human girls now. You probably know exactly what to say in any situation to just make it all better and make her come crawling back to you as willing as ever. And I was all ready to believe it, you know. Especially that gem on the beach. Shit, how many times have you used that one?”
The Doctor rose slowly to his feet. “Never,” he replied. Single and final, the Doctor couldn’t remember the last time he ever said one word that was as important. Wait, he could. It was ‘run’.
“Right. I’ve gotta hand it to you though, you delivered it well. I really did believe you there for a bit.”
“Rose.”
“Please, don’t. The only reason you’re here is because the real Doctor needed to dump you somewhere. Knowing how I felt about him, it must have seemed the obvious solution to give you to me. I am sorry for you, really I am, but I can’t pretend that you’re someone you aren’t or that you feel things for me that you don’t.” Rose turned and began to walk away. She knew as she was doing it that she didn’t really want to, but out of her confusion had sprung a jealousy and feeling of betrayal that was beginning to make her forget what she had sitting right in front of her.
The Doctor looked at her with disbelief. He might not have been the Doctor she expected, but this was most certainly not his Rose. “Why are you saying these things?”
“Why?” She turned back to face him. “Because I thought I was special. I thought everything that we went through together and the most important moments of my life had actually meant something to someone else.” Her body began suddenly to shake with repressed sobs and to hold them back she began to yell through them. “I spent so long and worked so hard to try and find him again and when I did, what else did I find? That he had replaced me not once but twice with other women.”
“They were not replacing you.” He hazarded a step towards her, but she recoiled.
“Then why were they there? Why did he-you-need them?”
“You have no idea how lonely it is out there.”
“Don’t feed me that bullshit, Doctor”
“But you don’t. You don’t have any idea.” He walked towards her again with more urgency. “There have always been other beings out there like you but for the longest time there has been no one like me, no other Time Lord, no other creature that saw the moving of the worlds and the clicks of time like I did. That loneliness is overbearing.” His voice reached a restrained yell. He took a breath. “So, yes, I take on passengers.”
“All women.” This statement, of all the others, had the hardest bite.
What she expected him to do was cower. What he did instead was smile. “Oh, darling, is that all? Is that what this is all about?”
Rose straightened and tried to increase her glare, which, at this point, was hard to do. “Don’t laugh! It’s true, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter what you say, I’m on to your scheme.”
“I have a scheme, do I?” He smiled and shook his head. “Oh, Rose. Tell me, have you ever been on an extended road trip with a human male? It’s not exactly the most pleasant experience. I mean, just think back to Mickey and Jack; even with you there as a buffer they were still hopelessly obnoxious.” Rose felt the urge to lighten her glare and smile, but resisted. She was angry, after all. No time for smiling.
The Doctor put his hands in his pockets, looked off at the wall, and assumed to the annoyingly familiar stance that he goes into whenever he’s explaining something that he finds to be especially interesting. “Whenever I bring men on board all they do is bicker and argue with me and try and show me how very clever they are. That or they try and kill me. But women, well, that’s another story entirely. Women actually appreciate the trip and, strangely enough, are never constantly trying to outdo my cleverness even though sometimes they’re far more brilliant than I am.”
He turned his head back to Rose and gave her a kind smile. “So you’re right, Rose, I am preoccupied with women, but it’s only because of how incredibly fascinating they are. They are so bloody outstanding and yet, and here’s what gets me the most, they are almost always completely oblivious to it. Donna was, Martha was, but the most tragic example is you.”
“What about me?” Rose’s posture had gone into the equally familiar position she fell into whenever she had the lucky opportunity of having something the Doctor felt was particularly interesting explained to her.
“If you had any idea how amazing you are, you wouldn’t for a second doubt that you’ve completely hooked a permanently bachelor Time Lord. “
There was a small pause before Rose took a baby step back into the sitting room. “I’m listening,” she said.
The Doctor took a deep breath and frowned. “That day on Bad Wolf Bay… Rose, I was devastated. I harnessed the power of a Super Nova just to say goodbye to you! Have you forgotten that?”
“But what you said to me today you didn’t say then. You hesitated. Why? Why did you hesitate?”
“Did you ever consider that I hesitated because I’d never said anything like it before? If I was really the smooth lady charmer you accused me of being then those words would have come out without me even needing to think about them, but they didn’t. I hesitated because I knew that I was only going to say those words once and if I only had one chance at it then I was going to get it right.”
“What happened with Martha and Donna?”
“Martha left me.”
“Why?”
He winced and looked back at the wall. “It… was complicated.”
“Yes I got that,” she responded quickly. “But why?”
He risked looking back at her. “She was in love with me.”
“And you?” Rose asked nervously, most of her dreading the answer.
The Doctor gave her a sad but reassuring smile. “If I was able to return the sentiment, do you think she would have left me?”
Rose thought about this and took few more steps towards the Doctor. “Why couldn’t you?”
“You know why.”
“Don’t do that, Doctor!” Rose replied in a restrained voice. “Don’t pretend like these things don’t need to be said because right now they do. I’ve spent so long waiting to hear them, so just tell me.”
“I couldn’t love her because…” he looked pleadingly into her eyes but knew deep down that she needed for him to say it, “because I was still in love with you.”
She processed this, then asked, “And Donna?”
“She knew she was only there as a travel companion before even setting foot in the TARDIS.”
Rose dropped her head. The jealousy was subsiding, but now another emotion was stirring. “So after all of that… after all of the places you could have gone and stayed and all the people you could have stayed with… why are you here with me?”
The Doctor took the final strides towards her and lifted her chin to look at him. “Because I love you, Rose Tyler.”
“But the TARDIS… you’re still part Time Lord and so there must still be a part of you that needs the TARDIS. How can you possibly think that I could make you happy here when you could be out there traveling like you’ve always done? It can’t be possible, and I’ve heard enough lectures on your need for the TARDIS to know that I’m right.”
He smiled and shook his head gently while his hand slowly left her chin to sit instead on her shoulder. “But that’s the magic of this situation. Yes, the TARDIS is a wonderful machine and it’s saved my life more times than anyone could count but at the same time, it’s a prison. As long as the Doctor has the TARDIS he has to uphold his position in the universe, which means he can never stop traveling through space and time to make sure everything is running smoothly. And I mean that, Rose, he can never stop. I know you’ve loved our adventures, but would you really want to have to always do them for all of your incredibly long life? And do them alone, no less?”
Rose blinked and looked away in thought. “I… I don’t really know. I guess I probably wouldn’t.” She looked back to the Doctor and frowned. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
He looked away. “Like what?”
“Like you’re terribly sad about something.”
“Because I am.”
“What about?” she asked, concerned.
He shook his head and turned back to her. “You still have no idea how incredible you are.” This earned him a small smile from Rose. “This has been bothering you all day, I know it. You’ve been sitting here quietly biting your thumbnail and thinking about how miserable I must be to be here and how happy he must be to have gotten you off his back.”
“Well are you?”
“No.”
Rose looked back at the ground and scoffed. “I bet he’s rather pleased, though.”
The Doctor turned and took a few steps away from Rose, as if he were wandering along the path of a new thought. Rose watched him in silence until he finally spoke back up.
“Rose, I didn’t want to say anything before but one of the side-effects of this whole situation is that myself and, well, the original copy have a bit of a connection for some time after my creation. A bit of an ESP thing, but not as literal. More metaphoric, really, except not as abstract.”
“What do you mean?” she interrupted in an attempt to keep him focused.
The Doctor turned sharply to face her again. “I mean I can’t read his thoughts but I can still feel him. I know his emotions right now and since we think the same way, by feeling what he feels I can know exactly what he’s thinking at this moment.”
Rose took an excited step forward. “What is it? What is he thinking?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“Yes, please, tell me. I have to know,” she said as she bounced slightly for emphasis.
“He’s lonelier than he’s ever been, and he’s miserable.” Rose visibly deflated and stopped all of her excited twitching. “Tonight, the TARDIS is his prison. He needs it to survive in the only way he can, but he desperately wishes he could have left more than just his half-human clone with you today. It’s like the death of the Time Lords all over again because, aside from destroying another race of Daleks, he has once again lost the only person in the universe who understood him, who really saw everything the way that he did.”
It was a few moments before Rose’s response came, and when it did, it was breathless. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s you, Rose. Do you remember the first time we fought the Daleks together? It was on Satellite Five. Jack was there.”
“He died there,” she retorted.
“Well, kind of. I would have died, too, but I didn’t. Do you remember why?”
“No, and you know that I don’t. All I remember is being sent home and then trying to get back,“ she replied, annoyed.
“But there was something after that.”
“Yea, a bright light but I don’t-“
“Exactly!” The Doctor exclaimed. He was beginning to get the restlessness he always got when he was on the edge of a major explanation. “Do you remember what you were thinking before you saw that light?”
“Something about how to use the TARDIS to find you…”
“Yes!” The Doctor practically jumped with the word and was now pacing like a caged puppy in the small space in front of Rose. “You know what you did, Rose? You absorbed the TARDIS. All of the information on time and space that was stored in that living ship went straight into your brain. It could have killed you, no it should have killed you, but you’re wonderful and you’re beautiful and it didn’t kill you because you’re wonderful and you’re beautiful and you’re the most amazing anyone I’ve ever met. You’ve survived more than I’ve ever seen, more than Martha or Donna ever could. And when that happened, when the entirety of space and time was running amuck in your mind, you…” He stopped his excited parade and found Rose’s confused eyes, “…you stood there and you looked me in the eyes and you…”
There was a long pause, during which the Doctor did nothing but stand and stare at Rose. “Doctor?” she ventured, growing nervous.
In one short stride the Doctor had his arms around Rose as he kissed her unexpectedly and passionately. She jerked in surprise and just before she could relax into enjoying it, he broke away.
“You know what, Rose?” he said in her ear with a smile. “You’re right. The Doctor needs the TARDIS. And for an entire minute you were, and from now on you will always be, my TARDIS.”
Rose backed away to look him in the eye. “But… I don’t remember any of it. None of it, nothing at all.”
He nodded. “I had to reabsorb most of it before it killed you, but even after all of that it’s still there, Rose. I don’t want you to remember it because if you did, it could kill you. Well, in theory it could. But then again, it didn’t kill you when it should’ve had the first time so who knows? Maybe you’re immune.” He gave her a wicked grin and quickly added, “That was our first kiss, by the way. You probably don’t remember it but I sure do.”
“Doctor!”
“Right, sorry, just a tirade.” Rose began to giggle in his ear and he smiled. “What? What did I say?”
She shook her head and smiled at him. “Nothing. Maybe you really aren’t so different.”
He nodded with a stupid grin. “I’m really not, I promise. No new tricks here. Well, maybe a few tricks. Well, not so much tricks as human insecurities. Well, not so much insecurities as rising feeling of neediness. But most of that is just the overwhelming urge I have to kiss you.”
Rose caught his stupid grin as she pulled him in by his tie. “Come here, you sad excuse for a Time Lord.”
“Am I always going to feel this needy for attention from you?” he murmured into her lips.
“I sure hope so,” she murmured back. In the touch of his lips on hers, she thought that for a minute she could see that flash of light from before….
She pulled away. “Doctor?”
“Mm?” He opened his eyes slowly.
“Do you love me?”
The Doctor frowned. “Have you learned nothing from this conversation? Honestly, Rose, you’re smarter than that.”
She smiled at him sweetly. “Please, Doctor?”
He softened and smiled back. “Well, I guess this is one of the many times I’m going to be able to say this, so…” he leaned down until his lips touched her ear, “Rose Tyler, I…”
End.
Xposted in time_and_chips and dwfiction