dw - from here to eternity
Title: from here to eternity
Author: momentmusical
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,894
Beta(s): stillxmyxheart and nylana
Characters: Ten/Rose
Summary: There is grace for him yet in her past.
Parameters are quickly set; loser buys the winner a chocolate bar from the vending machines. Turns out she’s got an amazing sleight of hand for an eight year old. Five bars of Cadbury’s Marble later, he’s her favourite schmuck ever.
A/N: for challenge 23 at then_theres_us.
A. Beginnings
“Old Maid,” the little girl replies without looking up, slapping her hand back onto the tarmac and shuffling the cards in the only way she knows how. Gathering them together, pushing them apart. There’s a scrape on her knee that is on its way to clotting and a vaguely peanut-butter-and-jelly coloured stain on the collar of her blouse. There’ll be a planet whose national anthem will be dedicated to the colour of her eyes, a statue with her face in the Tate Modern. She’s lovely, and the entire universe knows it but her.
Rose Tyler looks up peculiarly from her flyaway fringe when he settles down across from her, propping an elbow on his bent knee and flipping a Nine of Spades face down.
“Well, it’s hardly a one-person game.” He grins at her in a way she’ll find irresistibly charming in a few years time. “How do you plan on playing it all on your own?”
Rose sniffles daintily, as though he’d just uttered some personal offence against her character. “I do my best.”
His hands join hers in swirling them together, long fingers much more adept at picking up the aces and the hearts than the small ones with nails bitten down to the cuticle. Then he takes the deck from her hands and executes a perfect dovetail shuffle. He’s showing off to impress her and the feeling is all so very natural, so very second nature to him. Her small mouth drops with something possibly close to admiration, shuts it closed again, and meets his eye with an approving little nod.
Oh, human children. How quickly they’ll move from being in awe of card tricks to not settling for anything less than the anti-gravity laser parades of Vashtirani.
“Deal,” she commands.
He does. Parameters are quickly set; loser buys the winner a chocolate bar from the vending machines. Turns out she’s got an amazing sleight of hand for an eight year old. Five bars of Cadbury’s Marble later, he’s her favourite schmuck ever.
Things are as they always were.
The Doctor promenades round and round the console, a hand pressing against a lever as he watches the universe rise and bubble like sea foam beyond his doors. On a distant shore, the tide swells and crashes against blameless sand, smoothing away the prospect of long-lived memory. Somewhere closer, Rose Tyler laughs as she kicks up woodchips and twists the chains of her swing. The world becomes her oil painting, an embrace of shade and shadow and achingly vivid in colour.
Chink for chink, the engines boom and they wind up tighter and tighter until -
Oh god, not like a noose, nothing like it. Her past isn’t the gallows - it goes just as your statistically average Estate childhood might; graphs and bell curves and all that. She resides in the valley of hairspray and the stench of burnt foil curls and peroxide, birthday parties with old paper cone hats and dripping icing. Saturdays spent at the coin operated laundromat reading her horoscope, nicking a lolly from the corner store and crying herself sick for days on afterwards.
So very human, and that’s why it hurts. He watches her at her lowest and highest, committing her crimes and repenting nothing, running with her jacket unbuttoned and her soul exposed. He’d be disgusted in her fallible pulse, her susceptible flesh, her mind spiking with serotonin, if it wasn’t in some kind of weakness that she’ll agree the second time he asks. When he’ll heave his heart into his mouth without even knowing it.
It’s still depraved in theory. He knows and this isn’t just from the strange looks he gets from people when he lingers by the playground or goes into the movies alone. On paper it’s all very wrong and blasphemous, a Time Lord wrapping his time around that of a human’s, not to mention enough of a crime on several galaxies to warrant time on a prison planet.
But today - a Thursday, early May, walking to school with her mates - she’s smiling (and still she does, somewhere - just not here). And there’s enough grace in it for him.
“Have you been following me?”
He’s not really sure who is more alarmed at the present moment. Either it’s him, realizing that he really isn’t as subtle as he likes to give himself credit for, or her, staring at him wide-eyed under her jacket hood, her hands tucked into her sleeves. But she said it without any real trepidation or horror; just disbelief, as if she hadn’t even realized she could be seen. There are two sets of footsteps in the snow, and only one future left with the both of them in it.
“Um.” He scratches the back of his neck nervously. “Not really. The, my - car. It’s parked somewhere along here.”
She stops, considers this and him and the further darkness of the road ahead for a minute. Trusts his words when maybe she shouldn’t, like always. “Yeah?” Rose says with more gentleness, though still slightly wary. “And where’re you off to, mate?”
He shrugs noncommittally. “I’m not sure yet. Somewhere far, I suppose.”
“Me too!” All the sudden she beams at him like they’d just decided on Oviedo or El-Mahalla El-Kubra or Disneyworld or Jupiter. Oh wait, they had. Once. Soon. They’ll be leaving their legacies in the snow and the sulphur dust and the waste of churro wrappers. “Or at least, eventually, now that I’ve finally managed to break things off with my boyfriend. Twat pushed me out of the car by the side of the road. See?” Rose yanks back her sleeve and shows him the deepening mark with pride. “It’s not so bad. ‘Cause now that I’ve shook him off, I can get a proper job and start saving up money. Then I’ll buy a ticket, go somewhere warm and stay there.”
The lights of the bus depot shine over them, the only brightness for miles, in the night that is nearly as dark as the unfurling bloom of a bruise on Rose Tyler’s forearm.
“Anyways, I’ve,” He jerks his head in a general direction that’ll take him anywhere but closer to here, with this girl who will one day be so right about the Gelth and those televisions and him. “I’m a bit further on, so.”
For a moment, she lets herself look frightened and not a little cold. He - superior physiology and all - won’t feel the winter chill as acutely as her. Or maybe it’s because he’s the one in possession of this most excellent coat that Janice Joplin gave him; draped it over his shoulders as she’d crooned low into the shell of his ear, hey! have another piece of my heart now, baby, yeah.
But at this moment she’s coursing on a strange high; blood and revenge coursing through her, a veneer of invincibility shielding her from sense. She’s always been impossibly young that way, and yet now she’s younger still, too frightened to bud in the winter. As far as she can see, that’s all there is for her; miles and miles of dark streets, unseen by heavenly bodies.
“You know you could, you could give me a ride.” She bites her lip and wraps her arms around her body, shivering. “You could take me with you.”
And he wonders; how long were you waiting for me? No, that’s not right. At this point in her time, she’d jump into the back of any shadowy cab. She only sees as far as the next stretch of asphalt; she hasn’t learned to look to the stars instead.
He smiles and let’s himself lose the hand. “Sorry, I can’t. I haven’t got the space.” He’d heard himself say that thousands and thousands of times before; there’s too much ash and age in these hearts for this girl, even if she does listen when everyone else has stopped and knows to hit the fire alarm when her boyfriend turns into rubber and starts chopping dinner tables in half. “Besides, I’m awful company, so people say.”
Rose laughs, only a little hurt but brought back down to Earth, which is the important thing. “Alright. I’ll be seeing you then.”
He agrees. “Somewhere far and warm.”
They smile as they say their goodbyes and he leaves her under the streetlights of the bus depot, shivering. He could tell her, if he thought it’d give her the courage he never had enough of himself. Tell her how it all comes true. 1927, the dust and the sun beating off the terracotta earth, a clunking Volkswagen and the air conditioner that even the sonic couldn’t fix. The sweat of her skin sticking to the backs of the vinyl seat and her heels on the dash, that boundless horizon that never grew closer or farther. Jackrabbits, frosted Coke bottles with the metal caps. A blanket near the cliff’s edge of Chaco Canyon, sprawled out in laughter as he pushes up the hem of her dress to kiss her bare knees and moves up from there.
But it’s far, far off; in more ways than just one.
“See you later,” he calls over his shoulder, one last time.
“Yeah.”
The end comes, and she’s still smiling, in the snow that isn’t ash or forcibly shaken out of the sky, for once. Hurrah for small triumphs, for the victorious dead, then.
The last rites are unspoken and there will be no marker, no earthy tomb. But the universe sings on, at least. As it always shall, no matter how many times he’ll muck things up to impress human girls and to say goodbye. For that he won’t ever ask for absolution, not from any prophet or god or demon.
Besides, he never believed in much other than her anyways.
Somewhere, a new man stands in front of a playground by the Powell Estates. He sings the theme to Ghostbusters under his breath, and remembers a bag of dirty laundry, meteorological trinkets as gifts to mothers and orange plastic traffic cones.
He watches the little girl on the swing, her short legs kicking themselves up into the air, propelling her motion. Her plaits thump against her slight shoulders as she rocks forward and back, forth and beyond, into the open and the good and the wild. Not yet, but one day soon.
Today she jumps. Her small body flies, unsupported in the air for a moment in time. He knew a pair of arms that once held her like that, a body as a memory as a soul. It had lifted her off the ground, carried the weight of her humanity for as long as it could, only to find the heaviest part was letting her go. She lands with both her feet on the ground, wood chips flying, right in front of him.
She blinks upwards into the light.
“Do you know,” he asks, reaching into those endless pockets and pulling out a deck of cards, “How to play Old Maid?”
He wins the first round with a pair of Fours. Rose Tyler accuses him of cheating. She sees right through him, and she’s only six years old. So he laughs, and teaches her every trick in the book.
Time passes slowly, and there’s grace enough in it yet for both of them.
Author: momentmusical
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,894
Beta(s): stillxmyxheart and nylana
Characters: Ten/Rose
Summary: There is grace for him yet in her past.
Parameters are quickly set; loser buys the winner a chocolate bar from the vending machines. Turns out she’s got an amazing sleight of hand for an eight year old. Five bars of Cadbury’s Marble later, he’s her favourite schmuck ever.
A/N: for challenge 23 at then_theres_us.
A. Beginnings
“Old Maid,” the little girl replies without looking up, slapping her hand back onto the tarmac and shuffling the cards in the only way she knows how. Gathering them together, pushing them apart. There’s a scrape on her knee that is on its way to clotting and a vaguely peanut-butter-and-jelly coloured stain on the collar of her blouse. There’ll be a planet whose national anthem will be dedicated to the colour of her eyes, a statue with her face in the Tate Modern. She’s lovely, and the entire universe knows it but her.
Rose Tyler looks up peculiarly from her flyaway fringe when he settles down across from her, propping an elbow on his bent knee and flipping a Nine of Spades face down.
“Well, it’s hardly a one-person game.” He grins at her in a way she’ll find irresistibly charming in a few years time. “How do you plan on playing it all on your own?”
Rose sniffles daintily, as though he’d just uttered some personal offence against her character. “I do my best.”
His hands join hers in swirling them together, long fingers much more adept at picking up the aces and the hearts than the small ones with nails bitten down to the cuticle. Then he takes the deck from her hands and executes a perfect dovetail shuffle. He’s showing off to impress her and the feeling is all so very natural, so very second nature to him. Her small mouth drops with something possibly close to admiration, shuts it closed again, and meets his eye with an approving little nod.
Oh, human children. How quickly they’ll move from being in awe of card tricks to not settling for anything less than the anti-gravity laser parades of Vashtirani.
“Deal,” she commands.
He does. Parameters are quickly set; loser buys the winner a chocolate bar from the vending machines. Turns out she’s got an amazing sleight of hand for an eight year old. Five bars of Cadbury’s Marble later, he’s her favourite schmuck ever.
Things are as they always were.
The Doctor promenades round and round the console, a hand pressing against a lever as he watches the universe rise and bubble like sea foam beyond his doors. On a distant shore, the tide swells and crashes against blameless sand, smoothing away the prospect of long-lived memory. Somewhere closer, Rose Tyler laughs as she kicks up woodchips and twists the chains of her swing. The world becomes her oil painting, an embrace of shade and shadow and achingly vivid in colour.
Chink for chink, the engines boom and they wind up tighter and tighter until -
Oh god, not like a noose, nothing like it. Her past isn’t the gallows - it goes just as your statistically average Estate childhood might; graphs and bell curves and all that. She resides in the valley of hairspray and the stench of burnt foil curls and peroxide, birthday parties with old paper cone hats and dripping icing. Saturdays spent at the coin operated laundromat reading her horoscope, nicking a lolly from the corner store and crying herself sick for days on afterwards.
So very human, and that’s why it hurts. He watches her at her lowest and highest, committing her crimes and repenting nothing, running with her jacket unbuttoned and her soul exposed. He’d be disgusted in her fallible pulse, her susceptible flesh, her mind spiking with serotonin, if it wasn’t in some kind of weakness that she’ll agree the second time he asks. When he’ll heave his heart into his mouth without even knowing it.
It’s still depraved in theory. He knows and this isn’t just from the strange looks he gets from people when he lingers by the playground or goes into the movies alone. On paper it’s all very wrong and blasphemous, a Time Lord wrapping his time around that of a human’s, not to mention enough of a crime on several galaxies to warrant time on a prison planet.
But today - a Thursday, early May, walking to school with her mates - she’s smiling (and still she does, somewhere - just not here). And there’s enough grace in it for him.
“Have you been following me?”
He’s not really sure who is more alarmed at the present moment. Either it’s him, realizing that he really isn’t as subtle as he likes to give himself credit for, or her, staring at him wide-eyed under her jacket hood, her hands tucked into her sleeves. But she said it without any real trepidation or horror; just disbelief, as if she hadn’t even realized she could be seen. There are two sets of footsteps in the snow, and only one future left with the both of them in it.
“Um.” He scratches the back of his neck nervously. “Not really. The, my - car. It’s parked somewhere along here.”
She stops, considers this and him and the further darkness of the road ahead for a minute. Trusts his words when maybe she shouldn’t, like always. “Yeah?” Rose says with more gentleness, though still slightly wary. “And where’re you off to, mate?”
He shrugs noncommittally. “I’m not sure yet. Somewhere far, I suppose.”
“Me too!” All the sudden she beams at him like they’d just decided on Oviedo or El-Mahalla El-Kubra or Disneyworld or Jupiter. Oh wait, they had. Once. Soon. They’ll be leaving their legacies in the snow and the sulphur dust and the waste of churro wrappers. “Or at least, eventually, now that I’ve finally managed to break things off with my boyfriend. Twat pushed me out of the car by the side of the road. See?” Rose yanks back her sleeve and shows him the deepening mark with pride. “It’s not so bad. ‘Cause now that I’ve shook him off, I can get a proper job and start saving up money. Then I’ll buy a ticket, go somewhere warm and stay there.”
The lights of the bus depot shine over them, the only brightness for miles, in the night that is nearly as dark as the unfurling bloom of a bruise on Rose Tyler’s forearm.
“Anyways, I’ve,” He jerks his head in a general direction that’ll take him anywhere but closer to here, with this girl who will one day be so right about the Gelth and those televisions and him. “I’m a bit further on, so.”
For a moment, she lets herself look frightened and not a little cold. He - superior physiology and all - won’t feel the winter chill as acutely as her. Or maybe it’s because he’s the one in possession of this most excellent coat that Janice Joplin gave him; draped it over his shoulders as she’d crooned low into the shell of his ear, hey! have another piece of my heart now, baby, yeah.
But at this moment she’s coursing on a strange high; blood and revenge coursing through her, a veneer of invincibility shielding her from sense. She’s always been impossibly young that way, and yet now she’s younger still, too frightened to bud in the winter. As far as she can see, that’s all there is for her; miles and miles of dark streets, unseen by heavenly bodies.
“You know you could, you could give me a ride.” She bites her lip and wraps her arms around her body, shivering. “You could take me with you.”
And he wonders; how long were you waiting for me? No, that’s not right. At this point in her time, she’d jump into the back of any shadowy cab. She only sees as far as the next stretch of asphalt; she hasn’t learned to look to the stars instead.
He smiles and let’s himself lose the hand. “Sorry, I can’t. I haven’t got the space.” He’d heard himself say that thousands and thousands of times before; there’s too much ash and age in these hearts for this girl, even if she does listen when everyone else has stopped and knows to hit the fire alarm when her boyfriend turns into rubber and starts chopping dinner tables in half. “Besides, I’m awful company, so people say.”
Rose laughs, only a little hurt but brought back down to Earth, which is the important thing. “Alright. I’ll be seeing you then.”
He agrees. “Somewhere far and warm.”
They smile as they say their goodbyes and he leaves her under the streetlights of the bus depot, shivering. He could tell her, if he thought it’d give her the courage he never had enough of himself. Tell her how it all comes true. 1927, the dust and the sun beating off the terracotta earth, a clunking Volkswagen and the air conditioner that even the sonic couldn’t fix. The sweat of her skin sticking to the backs of the vinyl seat and her heels on the dash, that boundless horizon that never grew closer or farther. Jackrabbits, frosted Coke bottles with the metal caps. A blanket near the cliff’s edge of Chaco Canyon, sprawled out in laughter as he pushes up the hem of her dress to kiss her bare knees and moves up from there.
But it’s far, far off; in more ways than just one.
“See you later,” he calls over his shoulder, one last time.
“Yeah.”
The end comes, and she’s still smiling, in the snow that isn’t ash or forcibly shaken out of the sky, for once. Hurrah for small triumphs, for the victorious dead, then.
The last rites are unspoken and there will be no marker, no earthy tomb. But the universe sings on, at least. As it always shall, no matter how many times he’ll muck things up to impress human girls and to say goodbye. For that he won’t ever ask for absolution, not from any prophet or god or demon.
Besides, he never believed in much other than her anyways.
Somewhere, a new man stands in front of a playground by the Powell Estates. He sings the theme to Ghostbusters under his breath, and remembers a bag of dirty laundry, meteorological trinkets as gifts to mothers and orange plastic traffic cones.
He watches the little girl on the swing, her short legs kicking themselves up into the air, propelling her motion. Her plaits thump against her slight shoulders as she rocks forward and back, forth and beyond, into the open and the good and the wild. Not yet, but one day soon.
Today she jumps. Her small body flies, unsupported in the air for a moment in time. He knew a pair of arms that once held her like that, a body as a memory as a soul. It had lifted her off the ground, carried the weight of her humanity for as long as it could, only to find the heaviest part was letting her go. She lands with both her feet on the ground, wood chips flying, right in front of him.
She blinks upwards into the light.
“Do you know,” he asks, reaching into those endless pockets and pulling out a deck of cards, “How to play Old Maid?”
He wins the first round with a pair of Fours. Rose Tyler accuses him of cheating. She sees right through him, and she’s only six years old. So he laughs, and teaches her every trick in the book.
Time passes slowly, and there’s grace enough in it yet for both of them.