Fic - A Life Well Lived - (7/?) - Ten/Rose - T
Date Published: July 6th, 2008
Title: A Life Well Lived
Rating: T
Characters: Ten/Rose, Jackie, Pete, various others
WARNING: Spoilers, there are spoilers in this story, as in, if you haven't seen season four, particularly the last episode, you really don't want to be reading this.
Genre(s): Romance, angst
Word Count: This part: 3,335
Summary: The life he never had.
Disclaimer: The names, images and logos identifying the BBC and their products and services are subject to copyright, design rights and trade marks of the BBC. Used without permission for non-profit, non-commercial personal use.
Fic Type: Multi-Chaptered. WIP.
Beta(s): sherarara, hippiebanana132, clinicallybored, rosie_not_rose and jlrpuck. Thanks everyone, absolutely, for helping me out, you guys are great! *squish*
Author's Note: Okay. So it took me a month. No, I didn't lose my muse, I lost my laptop, and all the time in the world :P But I still wrote, in short bursts, and here's the next chapter. Hooray!
Excerpt: Note after note drifts through the air and envelopes her, until she’s almost crying with its beauty.
A Life Well Lived
Seven
Rose sleeps fitfully. She’s too hot, too cold, feels too suffocated even in her own room. Minutes pass like hours as she dozes in and out of sleep, feeling steadily uncomfortable as the night goes on. She shouldn’t have kissed him, she keeps telling herself, not like that. She should have given it more time, should have remembered that they’re on a long and lonely path together. But somehow kissing him had seemed the right thing to do, no matter which Doctor he is. The fact of the matter is the Doctor would be acting like this, in all the same ways, even if he had decided to stop off for sixty years while she was still travelling with him.
He’s been through more since she saw him last, but he’s the same man, and he always will be. She knows that - it’s why she kissed him.
And yet, despite that, he keeps telling her (and she keeps telling herself) that they’re part of a completely different life now, that they have to start again. The trouble is, it’s hard to start again when you both know each other so well.
Rose lies awake in the middle of the night thinking these thoughts. She dreams of different faces of the Doctor, of multiple versions of his tenth form as well as multiple versions of his ninth, and each one is telling her something different about him.
Her sleep is so light, she can’t tell where one dream ends and the other begins.
She finds herself lying awake at about half past three in the morning and listening to the breeze outside her window. It’s making the branches of the trees scrape against the glass like a whisper, and the wind howling almost sounds like a melancholy tune from the moon.
Rose sits up in bed, blinking and rousing her body into wakefulness. She frowns, listening hard, and after a few minutes, she’s sure that it’s not the wind making those haunting melodies. It’s coming from the house, downstairs, in a distant room in the mansion.
She slips quietly out of bed and takes the dressing gown hanging from the back of her door. Feeling slightly nervous, she takes a breath to steady herself, then pulls open the door to her room. It creaks loudly on its hinges and she hushes it, before realising quite how silly that is. She has a sudden pang for the doors on the TARDIS, always silent unless wanted otherwise. She still misses that ship.
She tiptoes quietly down the staircase, reminded suddenly of being sixteen and sneaking out of her mum’s flat to visit Jimmy. It always used to have a sense of daring romance about it and, somehow, this does too.
Rose follows the sounds of the music, recognising the notes as the piano from the drawing room at the back of the house, and as she goes through door after door she feels almost hypnotised by the way the music is speaking to her. It’s coaxing her into a calm state, but she hurts, like she’s just had her heart broken. Eventually, she stands in the doorway of the drawing room, eyes falling to the piano and the Doctor sat as its commander, his fingers stroking the keys like a lover, and the piano reacting to his touch.
Note after note drifts through the air and envelopes her, until she’s almost crying with its beauty. The song comes to an end, finally, and the Doctor sighs, sitting back and letting his hands fall away from the keys.
Rose swallows down the lump in her throat, finding her voice. “I didn’t know you could play,” she says quietly, and the Doctor turns with a jump.
He looks at her for a second or two before dropping his gaze to his hands. “Took some lessons a few centuries ago. That piece was always one of my favourites.”
Pulling the dressing gown tighter around herself, Rose shuffles into the room and takes a seat on the other side of the piano.
“I recognise it,” she muses thoughtfully, gazing up the bookshelf at the rows and rows of music books.
The Doctor nods.”Moonlight Sonata, yes. Bit of a cliché, but there we go. To this day it remains one of my favourite piano movements.”
Rose smiles. “You’re good at it. Good at playing, I mean.”
“Thank you.”
Silence gathers over them like the beginning of rainclouds, but Rose has so many more questions she wants to ask this man. The only light in the room is coming from the window, from the bright moonlight outside, and the ghost of the Doctor’s playing still hangs in the air around them. Rose feels like she’s been transported to a magical place, somewhere far away from everything and everyone, where she and the Doctor can just be. She’s reminded painfully of the TARDIS.
“Did you...? Um, could the old you - ” She motions towards the piano.
The Doctor chuckles softly. “Regeneration isn’t like being reborn with a whole new range of skills. I learn as I go. If I learn it once, I’ve learned it for life. Well. Unless I forget, which is always possible, I suppose.”
“Oh.”
Their gazes meet across the top of the piano, their shadowed faces reflected in the surface of the wood.
Rose can see the Doctor hesitating, notices the way his shoulders tense ever so slightly.
“That wasn’t what you meant, was it?” he asks. “You meant... the other me, the me I split apart from.”
Slowly, Rose nods, and licks her lip in her nervousness.
“The same point stands,” he clarifies, looking down to the carpet with a sigh on the edge of his voice. “I could play just as well then as I do now.”
Rose glances down to her nails, fiddling with them as she tries to keep persistent questions out of her mind. It’s strange being with the Doctor on her ground rather than his. In the TARDIS she could ask him anything she liked, they could do anything they liked, because a small part of her always knew the Doctor was in control and that they would remain safe. Now it’s her turn to be that figure for him, but she’s not so sure she can manage it.
In a weird form of role-reversal, Rose tries to imagine what the Doctor might say if he found her playing the piano in the TARDIS in the middle of the night (never minding the fact that she can’t even play the piano). She imagines him appearing in the doorway and watching her with a kind of pensive quietness, and awe in his eyes. Then she realises that for her to be doing what the Doctor did tonight would mean that there was something wrong.
Which means there’s something wrong for the Doctor.
“Have you slept?” she asks, trying to be casual and knowing that it sounds anything but.
“Um...” He pauses, and Rose gets the distinct impression he’s trying to figure out whether he should lie or not. “A bit,” he seems to settle on.
“How long is a bit?”
The Doctor shrugs off her question. “An hour or so. I don’t need much sleep,” he jokes, but Rose doesn’t smile
Her gaze drifts across his face, from the hollows of his eyes to the sunken structure of his cheekbones. Coarse stubble peeks out all over his jawline and, as her eyes meet his again, she notices just how weary and tired they really are.
“You look like you do,” she comments quietly, and the Doctor sighs.
“I’m fine,” he persists, rubbing a hand over his eyes. “Really, Rose. I am.”
“So I s’pose you always sit up in the middle of the night playing sad music, yeah?”
“It’s... what I wanted to do!” he argues, but she can tell from the frustration in his voice that he’s trying to hide something from her. “Can we not talk about this now?”
“Doctor,” Rose says gently, but firmly, “We’re not going to get anywhere if you don’t tell me anything. It’s all very well trying out this new life, but if... if we start hiding stuff from each other, we may as well not bother.”
She knows that if there’s really nothing wrong, this is the point where he will insist that he’s fine. But he hesitates, and it’s that whicb gives him away. Rose waits patiently, gazing at him until he looks up at her, his barriers crumbled.
“I can’t even close my eyes,” he hisses into the quiet darkness. “Every time I do, they’re - ” He breaks off from his sentence, swallowing, and he sighs heavily through his nose. A kind of sympathy she hasn’t felt in years begins to creep over Rose, and she has to stop herself from getting up and enveloping him in a hug. Somehow, hugging does not feel like the right thing to do.
“Who?” she asks instead.
He meets her gaze, and for the first time since he’s been here, there’s a strange, cold glare in his eyes. “Who do you think?” he challenges. Rose pauses, having her suspicions but hoping that she’s wrong. “Daleks.”
She bites her bottom lip, not quite sure what to say. She can’t even act surprised, because it’s something she’s suspected ever since the other him pointed out he’d committed genocide.
“And what are they... doing?” she asks carefully, not wanting to ask or say the wrong thing. She remembers the old him, the leather jacket clad figure of icy fire, the man who never shied away from anything except anything personal.
The Doctor seems to fall into a state of empty thought, and his voice is hollow when he speaks. “Nothing,” he says blankly. “They’re just there. Looking at me. And then... then they’re screaming, and then...”
“Then?” Rose prompts quietly after a moment or two.
He looks up at her wearily. “I dreamt I became one, Rose, that I was one. And that I murdered them all because - because I had to.”
She frowns in sympathy, wondering just how vivid his dreams are. Not long after she was trapped here, Rose continued to have dreams of the Doctor. She dreamt he was in trouble and that she couldn’t save him in time, that he was calling to her and she couldn’t get to him, that every moment of his life was spent in one form of misery or another and she had to sit back and watch it happen.
There had been better dreams, too, where he approached her and they talked for hours, or he comforted her when she was feeling particularly low.
But Rose had never slaughtered an entire race before, much less two, so now she can only imagine what it must be like to have the faces of the people and creatures you kill staring back coldly at you out of an abyss of darkness.
“That’s horrible,” she breathes, trying and failing to imagine an accusatory Cyberman in her mind’s eye.
“Yes. It is.”
“And that’s - ” Her gaze darts to him. “That’s why you haven’t been sleeping?”
The Doctor reaches his hands up, burying his face in his palms. “I haven’t been tired until recently, but... yes, it’s why. I just, I can’t. I can’t possibly get any restful sleep when I’ve got their voices in my head, telling me about the man I am, the man I really am. When I’ve got their voices pleading for mercy from me.”
Rose folds her hands between her knees, looking down to the shadows on the floor. “I guess... this is what you were going through before. When we first met.”
“Something like.” The Doctor laughs darkly, and leans forward onto the piano. “It was easier then. I didn’t need to sleep. And, well... I had you.” He smiles at her. “I still have you. Always have, I suppose.”
Rose smiles with him. Then, without quite knowing why, she gets to her feet and moves around to the Doctor’s side of the piano, holding out her hand. He stays reminas seated a moment, looking up at her with an almost painfully open expression on his face. Taking her hand, he admits defeatedly , “It’s too much.”
Rose nods sagely, feeling suddenly like she’s the one who’s lived nine hundred years. “Doctor, I’m gonna tell you something.” She motions for him to move over on the piano stool, and he does, allowing her space to sit next to him. There isn’t much room and when she looks at him, she’s only inches away from his face and their clasped hands are pressed into her lap. “When I lived in the TARDIS we saw a lot of time and space. Some nice stuff, some not so nice stuff, and some of it was just plain nasty. I used to think it was too much for me, too.”
She expects him to say something, but he doesn’t. He just sits there blinking patiently back at her.
“But then... I’d walk in on you fiddling with something in the console room, and you’d start babbling away like nothing could bring you down. Or I’d find you in the library and you’d make me a cup of tea, and we’d have a nice chat about nothing very much. Even just having a meal with you was nice sometimes.” Even after these couple of years, Rose can feel her cheeks warm up from the blush that’s burning them. She remembers how she used to feel, how a part of her still feels, the girlish naivety of stealing a few stolen moments with a man you love.
“Anyway,” she continues hurriedly, not wanting to go into the details of the past, “the thing is, all those times I ever felt I couldn’t do it, that I was leaving too much behind and wasn’t good enough for the life we led, or for you even... I just forgot it all when you took care of me. And I know, you’re gonna say you weren’t really taking care of me, but you were. You were giving me exactly what I needed.” She takes a breath, steadying her nerves. “And now I can do the same for you. I think. What I mean is - ”
The rest of her sentence is swallowed up by the Doctor’s kiss. It’s strange, and completely out of the blue, but one second she’s trying to tell him she’ll be there for him when he needs her, and the next he’s leaning towards her and stealing her mouth in an open kiss. The hand that’s not held in hers drifts up to her jaw, angling her head closer towards him and deepening their kiss. Rose doesn’t hesitate in kissing him back, or in teasing his tongue into her mouth. When she lets go of his hand it moves to her waist, pulling her closer to him while his other starts to tangle in her hair.
He pulls back from her, looking breathless and youthful, and like he’s not sure he meant to do what he just did.
Rose licks her lips slightly, smiling nervously. “We’ve gotta stop doing that,” she laughs, and the Doctor ‘mmm’s in agreement. Then he frowns.
“Actually, no,” he counters. “I think - I think it’s very good. Kissing. I mean, it’s certainly...”
“Hot?” Rose suggests coyly.
“Well, I was going to say therapeutic, but, yes... Hot will - hot will do.”
She giggles, the nervousness getting a hold of her, and when she looks up at the Doctor she can tell he’s trying very hard not to giggle with her.
“It’s just, it’s so hard,” Rose complains through a laugh after a few moments have passed.
The Doctor raises an eyebrow. “Speak for yourself,” he says, and she hits him.
“No, I mean... this. What we’re doing, or trying to do. We can try and pretend there’s a right way to do this, but at the end of the day I’m pretty sure we’re the only people who’re gonna go through this. And that means there is no right way, we’re just guessing.”
“Yes...” the Doctor agrees thoughtfully. “It’s hard to know. It’s been a few years since... well, since we travelled together. But I haven’t - my feelings haven’t changed for you, Rose. I thought they would, and part of me even hoped they would, but... they haven’t. I still - I’m still just as in love with you now as I ever was.”
He looks down shyly, like he’s just let a lot of words come tumbling from his mouth that he couldn’t control.
“So yes,” he finishes with a cough. “It’s difficult.”
Rose considers him, fondness for him blossoming her heart. “I know we’re taking things slow. But, I guess we’ve gotta just go with what feels right. Otherwise we’ll be stuck forever.”
The Doctor looks up again, meeting her eye, and moonlight falls across his face, making his eyes sparkle.
“I know what feels right,” he says, and his hand finds hers.
She nods, accepting and agreeing, and before she knows it she’s getting to her feet again, leading the Doctor out of the room.
The grandfather clock in the next room reads an ungodly time in the morning, and Rose prays she won’t be woken early by her younger brother, or worse still, her mother. Perhaps she’ll slide the lock along on the bedroom door.
They creep back upstairs together, hand in hand, and after Rose locks her door she turns to find the Doctor unbuttoning his shirt. She slips out of her dressing gown, thankful that she decided to wear pyjamas while she stays here, and pulls back the covers of the double bed. She slides easily between the warm covers and, shortly afterwards, the bed sinks slightly as the Doctor climbs in beside her.
Nothing’s been said, nothing’s been agreed, but somehow Rose knows that after tonight, things will be different. Part of her almost wishes the Doctor hadn’t got undressed, even if it’s only to his underwear - she’s never seen him in anything less than his shirt, but she can’t expect him to sleep comfortably in restricting clothes. Perhaps, she thinks, she’ll try and convince him into pyjamas.
She lies on her side, facing him, and he does the same to her. His eyes are open and the covers move around him while he breathes. Rose suddenly realises it’s been a few long years since she’s shared a bed with anyone else.
Without words, the Doctor moves his hand to her waist, resting it just on the dip of her hipbone. Rose tries to ignore the feel of his hand, the way his fingers are all but burning through the fabric of her pyjamas, and thankfully she realises how tired she is.
The Doctor’s other hand rests on the pillow in front of him, and Rose reaches for it, enjoying the way his fingers toy with hers.
“Think you’ll be able to sleep?” she asks through a persistent yawn, her eyes so tired they’re beginning to ache.
The Doctor nods. “I should think so. You look like you’ll have no trouble.”
Rose smiles lazily. “Been quite a day.”
“Been quite a week. Give or take.”
Suddenly Rose has a thought, and her fingers tighten around the Doctor’s. “You know I’m here, yeah? If you need to, I dunno, talk or something, or even sit and do nothing. I know it can’t be easy in your head right now, but if you know there’s someone here to - ”
“If you don’t shut up, I’m going to kiss you again,” the Doctor growls good-naturedly, his eyes closed. He opens one and looks at her, then smiles. “And yes, I know. Thank you.”
After a few moments Rose feels her eyes drooping, and she snuggles further into the sheets, closer to the Doctor, and drifts quietly off to sleep: but not before the Doctor, who - for the first time since he can properly remember - sleeps without wanton dreams to disturb him.
End this Part
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