Fic: Kalendae. (3/4, Doctor/Rose, AU, PG)
Kalendae. Doctor/Rose, Susan, TARDIS, Sarah Jane, Martha, everyone, PG-ish, AU. Oh God, it's just getting longer, isn't it.
It's everything, really. Plums taste brighter and sweeter, spring rain permeates his very soul. Jam is a revelation. He lies down in flowerbeds and buries his face affectionately in the scruffy coats of alien dogs and scratches every itch until pleasurable agony shoots through him, scalp to fingertips. He's on overload. He finally knows how candles feel, rockets, yule logs. Everything that burns and burns and becomes something else when the burning's done.
Rose Tyler swallows Time, and so becomes time's god. At least for a little while. His own people called themselves timelords, but the truth is, they served it, not the other way around. They fetched and carried it, tended and guarded it, and occasionally coaxed it into various shapes for their own amusement. But not Rose Tyler. Rose Tyler stretches out her fingers and time leaps forward to do her bidding. It eats the daleks and gnashes its teeth for a sweeter meal. It grinds the fleet into dust and devours the emperor. But for every altered strand of time there is a price. For knowing everything, seeing everything, you will lose all. Especially yourself. He gathers Rose Tyler, god of time, into his arms. There are tear stains on her cheeks. He kisses her and for a second, he wonders if they'll just burn together, right here. If they'll vanish, consumed by flame, into the universe. Everything must come to dust, she said.
Even him.
But he's not so afraid. Not this time. It's strange, the sense of lightness that comes over him. He's had his miracle, miracles plural, so much for one man. So he tries to remember, as he goes: an old prayer, the only one that made sense. The first lesson of awe. Everything-
X.
-is a beginning.
"Hello," he says. He licks his teeth. They taste new. Rose gapes at him. "Is it weird?" he asks. He points up at his own face and realizes he's slightly in the wrong spot. Well, adjustment period. Totally to be expected. He leans forward and spins the accelerator, punches in a few coordinates. Probably best they lie low for a bit. There will always be Barcelona, Praaccis, the five moons of Ursulon. Unless, you know. He ends up destroying those as well one day. He turns around and Rose is still looking at him like a cornered cat. "You'd tell me if it was weird, wouldn't you? Three eyes, spare nose, hair everywhere but on top?" He spins in a circle, trying to see his own knees. "Maybe an enormous beauty mark? Come on then, out with it."
"You're-"
"I'm," he agrees, pleasantly. "Oh Rose, you've got to tell me. Take a good look." He swoops close to her and she recoils, but not fast enough. He puts his hands on her shoulders, holds her firmly. "This is very important. Am I. Ginger." He blinks. "Am I ginger?"
"Bring him back," says Rose. Her voice shakes, but her eyes are level. "Bring him back this minute." He lets her go and she retreats to the column.
"Is that what you want?"
"Yes."
"Can't," he says. He feels a sudden surge of frustration. He's not sure why. He also can't remember which foot is left and which is right, and so he stumbles on his way to the console. Rose reaches forward reflexively to steady him, but pulls her hand back at the last second. They stare at each other, inches apart. "Rose," he says, mournfully. Is his brain moving faster, or his mouth? He's not sure. "You were never like this before. Thought you liked the novelty. New man," he says, and gestures vaguely up and down his own torso. "I've been lots of new men." His face feels flushed, his limbs rubbery. "Remember? I was pretty for you, once." He snorts. "Fat lot of good it did me. Did you know-" he starts, and then falls face first onto the grating. Rose kneels over him with a little cry of surprise, rolls him onto his side, and sweeps the hair- hair again, blimey, lovely- out of his face. Her eyes look hurt and confused and sparkly and out of focus all at once. Has he said something? He's probably said something. He'll apologize. But he finds he can't see clearly, and so she becomes a lovely warm-colored blur above him.
"Doctor?" she asks. So very softly. He shuts his eyes and smiles.
"That's the one," he says, and passes resolutely into unconsciousness. When he wakes up- much, much later- there's tea spilled all over his pajamas, and Rose is busy saving earth from intergalactic slavers.
Rose Tyler smells amazing. Like clean woman, fresh bare skin and laundered clothes, a hint of drugstore shampoo, a touch of grass, sweat, excitement. Did he ever notice it before? He's sure he did. But never quite with this intensity, this commitment to cataloging every atom that rolls off of her in waves. The file is full to bursting now, now that he's hoarding everything all at once, all the time. How has this happened? His senses are typically sharper than the average tack's, but this is something else. When he holds her close, he inhales like he's diving. He drowns. It's everything, really. Plums taste brighter and sweeter, spring rain permeates his very soul. Jam is a revelation. He lies down in flowerbeds and buries his face affectionately in the scruffy coats of alien dogs and scratches every itch until pleasurable agony shoots through him, scalp to fingertips. He's on overload. He finally knows how candles feel, rockets, yule logs. Everything that burns and burns and becomes something else when the burning's done.
"You're so different," she says to him, when they are lying under the stars on Mela Lura. They are especially fine stars, and an especially fine night for admiring them. He's spread his coat out for her on the pale blue, fern-soft grass. Far away, there's the sound of music, a summer festival, and also a celebration in gratitude of not having been crushed by their own satellite. They've named a dessert after Rose and nothing after him. Yet. All in a day's work, he supposes. Now they are shoulder to shoulder on their backs. Not that he'd like to admit it, but he's spent the last fifteen minutes edging slowly closer to her side, where her hip becomes the softer skin of her stomach, where her arm nests. He has told himself firmly that it's a casual gesture. It's merely gravitational pull. Orbit. Thermal conservation, really. He's an environmentalist. He wonders if she's noticed. "But certain things are the same," she says, finally. He lifts up on one elbow and looks down at her. Her hair's undone again, pooling around her head. One strand is stuck to her cheek.
"What things?"
"Important things," she says. She smiles at him. It's one part sweet and several parts sly. "You still get so offended when anybody criticizes your driving."
"A mallet is a perfectly acceptable-"
"Hmm," she says, and he shuts his mouth with a snap. "Oh, and you still won't admit that Ethelred was right about that bridge." He scowls. "I remember you, neck-deep in muddy water, telling him he was an-"
"-unready ape?" He sighs. "Point taken." He pretends to study his own fingernails. "Anything else?"
"You still love this," she says. She gestures up at the astonishing stars, and his gaze follows her there, and beyond. "All of this." There is a staggering distance between them and the sky, and yet he knows it's nothing compared to the distance between them and those minute pinpricks of light. All crossed in an instant, all within their reach if they choose. The night is limitless and infinite, and also as small as the space around them, the dark that hides them here. They could be the universe's only audience. That thought should sting and scrape at him, needle him with losses and debts, but for the first time, it feels also like a reminder that he is here, with her, alive and close enough to feel her warmth through his sleeve. What was left of him, of the world, wasn't nothing. He feels an old hurt sliding away from him a little, a smaller ache finally unknotting, releasing an inch, leaving him boneless and strangely raw. He can feel her staring at him. When their eyes meet, a shock goes through his spine, not unlike the first time he saw her. He can't pull away, can't look anywhere else. He feels recognized, seen, like a pond of clear water. Her eyes go all the way to the bottom, and find him there. If she could, she'd be reading his mind. There'd be no barriers left between them. He wonders if she sees him as he is, or as he was, or even before that. Or after. She saw it all, didn't she, for a second? What could be, what might be. He wonders what he looks like, to her.
"Anything else?" he whispers, again. This time, when she smiles at him, it's so kind it breaks every heart he has. He couldn't deserve it.
"Just the big one," she says. She puts her hand up to his face, and rubs the skin of his cheek with her thumb, very gently. "You're still the best man I've ever known." He leans down or she leans up, it doesn't matter. What matters is, they meet halfway. What matters is that he kisses her and kisses her and doesn't burn, and he goes on kissing her while the stars go wheeling by.
Afterwards- long afterwards, when she's had a bath and a long nap and he's been lying curled up on his side watching the air go in and out of her- she wakes up slowly with a question already on her lips. "Doctor," she says. She doesn't need to get his attention, she has it by existing. But he appreciates the attempt. "When you-" she pauses. "When you changed. You said something about being a new man. Being a lot of new men." She looks him in the eye. "You said I'd always liked that, before. That I never minded when you changed. You said you were pretty for me, once."
"Am I not pretty enough now?" he says. He bats his lashes. She looks like she wants very much to laugh, but doesn't allow herself.
"Don't dance away from it."
"I could skip."
"You knew me before," she says. He freezes. He underestimates that mental agility of hers, sometimes. So have a lot of other people, to their peril. "You knew me, somehow. And I knew you." He doesn't answer. She waits, and then puts her hand over his. "I don't want you to pretend like you never said that stuff, because I won't pretend that I didn't hear it."
Oh, Rose.
"You're right," he says. "I knew- there was someone very much like you. Not you. But very like. And I lost her. I lost my friend." He swallows against the lump in his throat. "When I met you, I thought, for a second it might- but it wasn't possible. It wasn't, because you're not her. You're so much like her, but you're," he shuts his eyes for a second. "More. You're more. More alive, more everything. I'm sorry," he says, "I'm so sorry, I-"
"Is that why you took me with you?"
"No," he says, quickly. "No. I invited you because I wanted to." He curls his hand around hers. "I wanted this."
"My hand?" She's teasing. But she doesn't know how close she is to the unflattering truth. However much things have changed. He leans down and kisses the back of her knuckles. "Are you starving?" she asks, suddenly. "Or is that only me?"
"On Ferra they make a French toast out of moon cakes. With actual moon flour. They don't call it French, mind you. But the concept's the same."
"Is there syrup?"
"Buckets."
"Hurry, then," she says.
"Rose," says Sarah Jane. She rushes past him, pressing him into a bank of lockers as she goes, and grabs Rose by both hands. Her face is beaming. "Oh, Rose, how wonderful! I never thought I'd see you again. Do you remember, after Tauros, when I said-" she starts, and then trails off, as if a second train of thought has overtaken the first. And then Sarah Jane looks down at their joined hands, which are still holding firmly onto one another, as human hands are wont to do. "Oh dear," she says.
"Hello," says Rose.
"How?" says Sarah Jane, to him. "How did you-"
"Haven't the foggiest."
"Did you stabilize the projection? She feels entirely solid!"
"Well," he scratches the back of his neck. "She is entirely solid."
"Too many chips," Mickey adds, and looks very pleased with himself. Rose coughs loudly into her closed fist, and they all snap back to reality.
"I am in the room," Rose says, with deceptive calm.
"I don't know what you did or how you did it," Sarah Jane says. She suddenly wraps her arms around Rose and Rose hugs her back with a kind of giddy come-what-may. Over Sarah Jane's shoulder, she shrugs at the Doctor and smiles. Free hugs, her eyes are saying. "But I am so glad to see you two again! So very glad."
They wind up in a chip shop after dark, sitting in a cozy circle around K-9 while he takes out old circuit boards and blows on them and bangs things back into place with the bottom of his shoe. K-9 is stoically uncomplaining about it. Sarah Jane tells stories to Rose and Mickey about old adventures, daring escapes. He feels a surprisingly great sense of well-being, a strange familiar comfort coming over him. Another little piece of evidence. A tally in the threadbare plus column of his own personal accounting. A sign of his old life, times gone by, and still going. Things that went on after him, crops he didn't wither, ground he didn't blight. Sarah Jane's really a remarkable woman. They order a second round of chips, and shortly afterwards they are all politely asked to leave by the owner of the place when coolant starts spraying out of K-9's nose.
"EXCUSE ME," says K-9.
"Allergies, eh?" says Mickey. "Tough luck." He holds a chip out to the dog on a fork, and then glances up at Sarah Jane. "Can he eat people food?"
But Rose is quiet, uncharacteristically so. He leaves Sarah Jane and Mickey talking over the finer points of canine computer maintenance and follows her across the road. She sits down on a bench, on the far end, and doesn't say anything for a long while. He sits next to her, leaving a little space. There are vibes coming off her in waves, from the set of her shoulders and her jaw, but he can't read them. She's like a little beetle in a shell. Mickey and Sarah Jane burst out laughing at something, and Rose turns to face him.
"Is that what you meant?" she asks. She nods back in the direction of the car. "You said you lost her."
"I told Sarah Jane I'd drop her in Croydon, but back then-"
"Your aim was just as rubbish?" He grins. "That's not what I meant. You said you lost her. Me. The- the other me. Her." Her face tightens, and she rubs it with one hand and sighs. Finally, she says, "Did you really mean that you misplaced her?" Respiratory bypass or no respiratory bypass, his chest constricts. "Is that what this is? Is this how it happens? One day we're, whatever we are," she gestures between them, "and then-" her hands go wide. "Aberdeen."
"No," he says.
"Are you sure?" she asks.
"Yes." He takes her hand in his. "It's different. I- sometimes it's just," he trails off. Tragically, words fail him. "Different." Idiotic, but utterly true. It's the only word that fits. He folds their fingers together. "I told you I lost her. I lied." Rose's pulse jumps in her wrist. "She was taken from me. By the war."
"Oh," says Rose. "So-"
"No Aberdeen," he tells her. "Not ever." She looks at him with something bright and sharp in her eyes, a light that threatens to spill over, and all he can think is, that is the most selfish thing I've ever said. A better man wouldn't make that promise, knowing what he knows about human lives. But he doesn't care. He doesn't want to be good, he doesn't need to be righteous. He only wants to keep her as long as he possibly can.
"Good," says Rose at last. She's smiling again. "Because I've got big plans for you."
"Oh, really?"
"Yeah," she says. "First off, I don't want to be a dinner lady. I think I'm more of an administrative liaison, don't you?" She tilts her head. "I'll need a twin set and a clipboard."
"You're going to let that lovely hairnet go to waste?"
"It's not going to go to waste," says Rose, mysteriously. And that is how he ends up serving chips and mushy peas to Dr. Rose Marion.
When they come back from that dead planet forever circling its own doom, when the beast in the pit has gone, when the rocket is free and everything is as it was, she takes him down the hall and into her room and undresses him slowly, peels his suit off his back and his shirt away from his skin. He sits on the edge of the bed and pulls his socks off with shaking hands, and then she's in his arms, smooth and naked and hot-blooded, pulling him over her and into her. She laughs and arches under him, meets him halfway and pushes back hard. He puts his face in the hollow of her neck and shoulder and kisses her throat. He sinks into her and dissolves. There's nothing in the universe except this bed, this body that used to be two bodies, and is now only her, only her, the most real thing he has ever touched. He wants to be taken into her, completely, at least for this moment. He will be the projection from now on, an image of life, when really he is just a beat in Rose Tyler's heart, a electrical flicker of her memories.
"You got away from me for a minute there," she says, afterwards. She is lying tangled in his arms and legs, with her chin resting on his chest. It's sweaty and boiling hot everywhere they touch. Wonderful. "Where did you go?"
"Hither and yon," he says. "Now. Have I ever taken you to the Olympics?"
He hasn't.
"It's not Aberdeen," he says, looking around at the beach. "Where are we, exactly?"
"Dårlig Ulv-Stranden."
"What's that when it's at home?"
"Bad wolf bay," she says. "Surprise." He tries to think of something funny to say about that, something to make her laugh or even smile, but there is nothing funny about that at all.
"Are you alright?" he says instead. She nods, mutely. "Is everyone alright?" More nodding. "So you're all- fine. Good."
"You really can't come through?" says Rose.
"I really can't."
"And I can't go through, either."
"No."
"Then what good is this universe?"
"Not much good at all," he says. Rose smiles finally, faintly, and puts her hand up to where his face ought to be. He's gotten his wish in the worst possible sense. He is a hologram, and the irony doesn't escape him. He has made himself as concrete as he can, stuffed as much as himself as he could into that one last crack of space-time, and still it isn't enough. He's just a projection, one that will fade in a minute. He is filing her away like mad, but he knows it won't be enough. He could replay her in his head a million times a day, and it will never be enough again. But of course now he will finally understand where hard-light projections go when they disappear. They go nowhere. They go to a place very much like the void.
"I love you," she says. "I have forever." Oh, old gods. He doesn't have enough hearts to hold this. How can she manage? She's stronger than him. "Take that through with you."
"Rose," he says. "I'm sorry."
"For what?"
"For not saying it sooner. For not saying it every day. Every minute." Her eyes nearly swell shut with tears, but she's really smiling now, broadly, bravely. "Rose Tyler, I-"
He dies on the beach. It only looks like vanishing.
Last time, it made him cold. It froze a part of him and sealed it away, kept the pieces in a block of ice, where they could be seen but not felt. Lying next to Martha on a narrow, rickety sixteenth-century bed, he thinks to himself, this time it's made me cruel. He vows to do better. He saw the hurt on her face, the embarrassment, at Rose would know. He wasn't wrong. Rose would have felt it by now, sensed it. She always found the odd ones out in the world, discovered the wrong-fitting edges of things. She probably considered herself one of those, if he cared to dig into the psychology of it. But Rose also would have told him not to be such a tremendous ass to a clever and kindhearted woman who'd done nothing but save his life and fill his ship with conversation again.
"I'm sorry," he says, to the ceiling. To her, perhaps. Or a more general plea, to the great absence. He has the feeling he's going to be saying it quite a lot. But he is saved from wallowing in that thought by a sudden burst of screaming from the room down the hall. Thank goodness, he thinks to himself, and then again, guiltily: cruel.
Of course it isn't him who finds her. Of course. He's busy being rolled into walls and fed out of a dog dish, when the Master goes digging in his paradox machine and finds the files and brings everyone downstairs in a great show of pomp and glee to view them together. He pushes the Doctor's wheelchair up the ramp and parks him in front of the console while Francine, Clive and Tish stand to one side, eyeing the door and the jacketed guards on either side of it. The Master hammers the controls and babbles to himself about lost bird and cages, but the Doctor can't help looking elsewhere, up and around, through the abused framework of his captured ship, strung with scaffolding and wires. Pulsing with that terrible, world-rending light. But still alive, he thinks to himself. Like Martha. Alive and fighting, somewhere. He feels close to them both, as if he can sense them just over the next hill, and yet they are still so unbearably far away.
"Ta da!" the Master cries. And Rose Tyler appears. It's only a projection, a rendered image in hard light, but the Doctor can't help himself- he pitches forward in his chair and grips the handles with shock. Not possible. Just not possible. Everything was erased. The files were stripped, scorched. The memory cortex was barren. How, then? "Marvelous," he continues. "Just marvelous. Look at the detail!" The Master walks a circle around her. She's frozen in place, paused, as if from a video feed. Or a photograph. Who's recorded these, why? When? His mind reels with the logistics. Was the ship taking notes? "What wonderful memories I have of this one. Your pet pilot."
"You can't hurt her," the Doctor says, forcing himself to relax his shoulders, unclench his jaw. It's the truth. He could swing an axe at her image for a hundred years and dent only air. She's untouchable. He knows from experience all the limitations of that form. "You never could."
"I don't need to hurt her," the Master says. He smiles like a schoolboy, pure delight and selfishness and the pulling-off of fly's wings. "I'm going to hurt you with her." His hand hovers over a button. "What do you think?" he asks Francine, suddenly. "Erase all? Or one at a time?" The Doctor stares at them both in dawning horror. "Pick," says the Master. "Pick one!" he screams at her.
"One at a time," Francine says.
"A mother's wisdom," the Master says. "Leave room for hope," he grins, "and it hurts so much longer." He makes a great show of pressing the controls and Rose Tyler- just after the Olympics, twenty-twelve, jean jacket and windswept hair, trainers, luminous eyes reflecting torchlight- vanishes into thin air. "One down!" he cries. He summons up another one- Rose Tyler in a pink top crossed with zippers, hair loose, eyes haunted- and actually gives himself a dramatic drumroll on the edge of the console before he slaps the button down and sends the projection to oblivion. "Another one bites the dust!"
"Stop it," the Doctor manages.
"You'd like that, wouldn't you." The Master pulls up another- Rose Tyler in a jean jacket again, braids to her shoulders- and contemplates it. "You'd like me to save this one. To let you keep it and stare at it in the long lonely nights." He crouches down to the Doctor's level. "Did you really fall in love with a hologram? Do you have any sense of how deranged that is?"
"Some," says the Doctor. That actually gets him a laugh and then a hearty push that sends him rolling down the ramp to collide with the door.
"Tell you what," he says. "This can be our little ritual. If you're very good, I'll let you press the button yourself a few times. How does that sound?" The Doctor doesn't answer. "I'll take that as a resounding yes." He looks over at Francine, Clive and Tish. "Now, they've got work to do. It's awfully hard to get the Harkness out of the carpets. So we'll meet after breakfast for deletions. Is tomorrow morning good for everyone?" It is supposed to be a flippant statement, but perhaps he ends up regretting it after all, because the following morning is the best morning on record for all the rest of them. Because Martha Jones saves the world. People go back to grocery shopping and driving their cars and complaining about the stock market, all because Martha was willing to walk the soles off her boots and witness countless horrors and finally laugh in a mad dictator's face.
"The year that never was," he calls it, later. Martha very carefully does not look at him, but at the door. She can probably see past it, or through it. Her life is on the other side. Brave Martha. Braver than him. She is being very kind to him, but they both know. "It'll be as if it never happened."
"No," says Martha. "It happened." And then he is alone again. For all his hoping, all his begging, he couldn't manage even to be the penultimate timelord, one of a mismatched pair. There is nobody left. He is alone with his ship and his shame and the year that never was.
And seventeen remaining files on Rose Tyler.
Part Four.
...
It's everything, really. Plums taste brighter and sweeter, spring rain permeates his very soul. Jam is a revelation. He lies down in flowerbeds and buries his face affectionately in the scruffy coats of alien dogs and scratches every itch until pleasurable agony shoots through him, scalp to fingertips. He's on overload. He finally knows how candles feel, rockets, yule logs. Everything that burns and burns and becomes something else when the burning's done.
Rose Tyler swallows Time, and so becomes time's god. At least for a little while. His own people called themselves timelords, but the truth is, they served it, not the other way around. They fetched and carried it, tended and guarded it, and occasionally coaxed it into various shapes for their own amusement. But not Rose Tyler. Rose Tyler stretches out her fingers and time leaps forward to do her bidding. It eats the daleks and gnashes its teeth for a sweeter meal. It grinds the fleet into dust and devours the emperor. But for every altered strand of time there is a price. For knowing everything, seeing everything, you will lose all. Especially yourself. He gathers Rose Tyler, god of time, into his arms. There are tear stains on her cheeks. He kisses her and for a second, he wonders if they'll just burn together, right here. If they'll vanish, consumed by flame, into the universe. Everything must come to dust, she said.
Even him.
But he's not so afraid. Not this time. It's strange, the sense of lightness that comes over him. He's had his miracle, miracles plural, so much for one man. So he tries to remember, as he goes: an old prayer, the only one that made sense. The first lesson of awe. Everything-
X.
-is a beginning.
"Hello," he says. He licks his teeth. They taste new. Rose gapes at him. "Is it weird?" he asks. He points up at his own face and realizes he's slightly in the wrong spot. Well, adjustment period. Totally to be expected. He leans forward and spins the accelerator, punches in a few coordinates. Probably best they lie low for a bit. There will always be Barcelona, Praaccis, the five moons of Ursulon. Unless, you know. He ends up destroying those as well one day. He turns around and Rose is still looking at him like a cornered cat. "You'd tell me if it was weird, wouldn't you? Three eyes, spare nose, hair everywhere but on top?" He spins in a circle, trying to see his own knees. "Maybe an enormous beauty mark? Come on then, out with it."
"You're-"
"I'm," he agrees, pleasantly. "Oh Rose, you've got to tell me. Take a good look." He swoops close to her and she recoils, but not fast enough. He puts his hands on her shoulders, holds her firmly. "This is very important. Am I. Ginger." He blinks. "Am I ginger?"
"Bring him back," says Rose. Her voice shakes, but her eyes are level. "Bring him back this minute." He lets her go and she retreats to the column.
"Is that what you want?"
"Yes."
"Can't," he says. He feels a sudden surge of frustration. He's not sure why. He also can't remember which foot is left and which is right, and so he stumbles on his way to the console. Rose reaches forward reflexively to steady him, but pulls her hand back at the last second. They stare at each other, inches apart. "Rose," he says, mournfully. Is his brain moving faster, or his mouth? He's not sure. "You were never like this before. Thought you liked the novelty. New man," he says, and gestures vaguely up and down his own torso. "I've been lots of new men." His face feels flushed, his limbs rubbery. "Remember? I was pretty for you, once." He snorts. "Fat lot of good it did me. Did you know-" he starts, and then falls face first onto the grating. Rose kneels over him with a little cry of surprise, rolls him onto his side, and sweeps the hair- hair again, blimey, lovely- out of his face. Her eyes look hurt and confused and sparkly and out of focus all at once. Has he said something? He's probably said something. He'll apologize. But he finds he can't see clearly, and so she becomes a lovely warm-colored blur above him.
"Doctor?" she asks. So very softly. He shuts his eyes and smiles.
"That's the one," he says, and passes resolutely into unconsciousness. When he wakes up- much, much later- there's tea spilled all over his pajamas, and Rose is busy saving earth from intergalactic slavers.
Rose Tyler smells amazing. Like clean woman, fresh bare skin and laundered clothes, a hint of drugstore shampoo, a touch of grass, sweat, excitement. Did he ever notice it before? He's sure he did. But never quite with this intensity, this commitment to cataloging every atom that rolls off of her in waves. The file is full to bursting now, now that he's hoarding everything all at once, all the time. How has this happened? His senses are typically sharper than the average tack's, but this is something else. When he holds her close, he inhales like he's diving. He drowns. It's everything, really. Plums taste brighter and sweeter, spring rain permeates his very soul. Jam is a revelation. He lies down in flowerbeds and buries his face affectionately in the scruffy coats of alien dogs and scratches every itch until pleasurable agony shoots through him, scalp to fingertips. He's on overload. He finally knows how candles feel, rockets, yule logs. Everything that burns and burns and becomes something else when the burning's done.
"You're so different," she says to him, when they are lying under the stars on Mela Lura. They are especially fine stars, and an especially fine night for admiring them. He's spread his coat out for her on the pale blue, fern-soft grass. Far away, there's the sound of music, a summer festival, and also a celebration in gratitude of not having been crushed by their own satellite. They've named a dessert after Rose and nothing after him. Yet. All in a day's work, he supposes. Now they are shoulder to shoulder on their backs. Not that he'd like to admit it, but he's spent the last fifteen minutes edging slowly closer to her side, where her hip becomes the softer skin of her stomach, where her arm nests. He has told himself firmly that it's a casual gesture. It's merely gravitational pull. Orbit. Thermal conservation, really. He's an environmentalist. He wonders if she's noticed. "But certain things are the same," she says, finally. He lifts up on one elbow and looks down at her. Her hair's undone again, pooling around her head. One strand is stuck to her cheek.
"What things?"
"Important things," she says. She smiles at him. It's one part sweet and several parts sly. "You still get so offended when anybody criticizes your driving."
"A mallet is a perfectly acceptable-"
"Hmm," she says, and he shuts his mouth with a snap. "Oh, and you still won't admit that Ethelred was right about that bridge." He scowls. "I remember you, neck-deep in muddy water, telling him he was an-"
"-unready ape?" He sighs. "Point taken." He pretends to study his own fingernails. "Anything else?"
"You still love this," she says. She gestures up at the astonishing stars, and his gaze follows her there, and beyond. "All of this." There is a staggering distance between them and the sky, and yet he knows it's nothing compared to the distance between them and those minute pinpricks of light. All crossed in an instant, all within their reach if they choose. The night is limitless and infinite, and also as small as the space around them, the dark that hides them here. They could be the universe's only audience. That thought should sting and scrape at him, needle him with losses and debts, but for the first time, it feels also like a reminder that he is here, with her, alive and close enough to feel her warmth through his sleeve. What was left of him, of the world, wasn't nothing. He feels an old hurt sliding away from him a little, a smaller ache finally unknotting, releasing an inch, leaving him boneless and strangely raw. He can feel her staring at him. When their eyes meet, a shock goes through his spine, not unlike the first time he saw her. He can't pull away, can't look anywhere else. He feels recognized, seen, like a pond of clear water. Her eyes go all the way to the bottom, and find him there. If she could, she'd be reading his mind. There'd be no barriers left between them. He wonders if she sees him as he is, or as he was, or even before that. Or after. She saw it all, didn't she, for a second? What could be, what might be. He wonders what he looks like, to her.
"Anything else?" he whispers, again. This time, when she smiles at him, it's so kind it breaks every heart he has. He couldn't deserve it.
"Just the big one," she says. She puts her hand up to his face, and rubs the skin of his cheek with her thumb, very gently. "You're still the best man I've ever known." He leans down or she leans up, it doesn't matter. What matters is, they meet halfway. What matters is that he kisses her and kisses her and doesn't burn, and he goes on kissing her while the stars go wheeling by.
Afterwards- long afterwards, when she's had a bath and a long nap and he's been lying curled up on his side watching the air go in and out of her- she wakes up slowly with a question already on her lips. "Doctor," she says. She doesn't need to get his attention, she has it by existing. But he appreciates the attempt. "When you-" she pauses. "When you changed. You said something about being a new man. Being a lot of new men." She looks him in the eye. "You said I'd always liked that, before. That I never minded when you changed. You said you were pretty for me, once."
"Am I not pretty enough now?" he says. He bats his lashes. She looks like she wants very much to laugh, but doesn't allow herself.
"Don't dance away from it."
"I could skip."
"You knew me before," she says. He freezes. He underestimates that mental agility of hers, sometimes. So have a lot of other people, to their peril. "You knew me, somehow. And I knew you." He doesn't answer. She waits, and then puts her hand over his. "I don't want you to pretend like you never said that stuff, because I won't pretend that I didn't hear it."
Oh, Rose.
"You're right," he says. "I knew- there was someone very much like you. Not you. But very like. And I lost her. I lost my friend." He swallows against the lump in his throat. "When I met you, I thought, for a second it might- but it wasn't possible. It wasn't, because you're not her. You're so much like her, but you're," he shuts his eyes for a second. "More. You're more. More alive, more everything. I'm sorry," he says, "I'm so sorry, I-"
"Is that why you took me with you?"
"No," he says, quickly. "No. I invited you because I wanted to." He curls his hand around hers. "I wanted this."
"My hand?" She's teasing. But she doesn't know how close she is to the unflattering truth. However much things have changed. He leans down and kisses the back of her knuckles. "Are you starving?" she asks, suddenly. "Or is that only me?"
"On Ferra they make a French toast out of moon cakes. With actual moon flour. They don't call it French, mind you. But the concept's the same."
"Is there syrup?"
"Buckets."
"Hurry, then," she says.
"Rose," says Sarah Jane. She rushes past him, pressing him into a bank of lockers as she goes, and grabs Rose by both hands. Her face is beaming. "Oh, Rose, how wonderful! I never thought I'd see you again. Do you remember, after Tauros, when I said-" she starts, and then trails off, as if a second train of thought has overtaken the first. And then Sarah Jane looks down at their joined hands, which are still holding firmly onto one another, as human hands are wont to do. "Oh dear," she says.
"Hello," says Rose.
"How?" says Sarah Jane, to him. "How did you-"
"Haven't the foggiest."
"Did you stabilize the projection? She feels entirely solid!"
"Well," he scratches the back of his neck. "She is entirely solid."
"Too many chips," Mickey adds, and looks very pleased with himself. Rose coughs loudly into her closed fist, and they all snap back to reality.
"I am in the room," Rose says, with deceptive calm.
"I don't know what you did or how you did it," Sarah Jane says. She suddenly wraps her arms around Rose and Rose hugs her back with a kind of giddy come-what-may. Over Sarah Jane's shoulder, she shrugs at the Doctor and smiles. Free hugs, her eyes are saying. "But I am so glad to see you two again! So very glad."
They wind up in a chip shop after dark, sitting in a cozy circle around K-9 while he takes out old circuit boards and blows on them and bangs things back into place with the bottom of his shoe. K-9 is stoically uncomplaining about it. Sarah Jane tells stories to Rose and Mickey about old adventures, daring escapes. He feels a surprisingly great sense of well-being, a strange familiar comfort coming over him. Another little piece of evidence. A tally in the threadbare plus column of his own personal accounting. A sign of his old life, times gone by, and still going. Things that went on after him, crops he didn't wither, ground he didn't blight. Sarah Jane's really a remarkable woman. They order a second round of chips, and shortly afterwards they are all politely asked to leave by the owner of the place when coolant starts spraying out of K-9's nose.
"EXCUSE ME," says K-9.
"Allergies, eh?" says Mickey. "Tough luck." He holds a chip out to the dog on a fork, and then glances up at Sarah Jane. "Can he eat people food?"
But Rose is quiet, uncharacteristically so. He leaves Sarah Jane and Mickey talking over the finer points of canine computer maintenance and follows her across the road. She sits down on a bench, on the far end, and doesn't say anything for a long while. He sits next to her, leaving a little space. There are vibes coming off her in waves, from the set of her shoulders and her jaw, but he can't read them. She's like a little beetle in a shell. Mickey and Sarah Jane burst out laughing at something, and Rose turns to face him.
"Is that what you meant?" she asks. She nods back in the direction of the car. "You said you lost her."
"I told Sarah Jane I'd drop her in Croydon, but back then-"
"Your aim was just as rubbish?" He grins. "That's not what I meant. You said you lost her. Me. The- the other me. Her." Her face tightens, and she rubs it with one hand and sighs. Finally, she says, "Did you really mean that you misplaced her?" Respiratory bypass or no respiratory bypass, his chest constricts. "Is that what this is? Is this how it happens? One day we're, whatever we are," she gestures between them, "and then-" her hands go wide. "Aberdeen."
"No," he says.
"Are you sure?" she asks.
"Yes." He takes her hand in his. "It's different. I- sometimes it's just," he trails off. Tragically, words fail him. "Different." Idiotic, but utterly true. It's the only word that fits. He folds their fingers together. "I told you I lost her. I lied." Rose's pulse jumps in her wrist. "She was taken from me. By the war."
"Oh," says Rose. "So-"
"No Aberdeen," he tells her. "Not ever." She looks at him with something bright and sharp in her eyes, a light that threatens to spill over, and all he can think is, that is the most selfish thing I've ever said. A better man wouldn't make that promise, knowing what he knows about human lives. But he doesn't care. He doesn't want to be good, he doesn't need to be righteous. He only wants to keep her as long as he possibly can.
"Good," says Rose at last. She's smiling again. "Because I've got big plans for you."
"Oh, really?"
"Yeah," she says. "First off, I don't want to be a dinner lady. I think I'm more of an administrative liaison, don't you?" She tilts her head. "I'll need a twin set and a clipboard."
"You're going to let that lovely hairnet go to waste?"
"It's not going to go to waste," says Rose, mysteriously. And that is how he ends up serving chips and mushy peas to Dr. Rose Marion.
When they come back from that dead planet forever circling its own doom, when the beast in the pit has gone, when the rocket is free and everything is as it was, she takes him down the hall and into her room and undresses him slowly, peels his suit off his back and his shirt away from his skin. He sits on the edge of the bed and pulls his socks off with shaking hands, and then she's in his arms, smooth and naked and hot-blooded, pulling him over her and into her. She laughs and arches under him, meets him halfway and pushes back hard. He puts his face in the hollow of her neck and shoulder and kisses her throat. He sinks into her and dissolves. There's nothing in the universe except this bed, this body that used to be two bodies, and is now only her, only her, the most real thing he has ever touched. He wants to be taken into her, completely, at least for this moment. He will be the projection from now on, an image of life, when really he is just a beat in Rose Tyler's heart, a electrical flicker of her memories.
"You got away from me for a minute there," she says, afterwards. She is lying tangled in his arms and legs, with her chin resting on his chest. It's sweaty and boiling hot everywhere they touch. Wonderful. "Where did you go?"
"Hither and yon," he says. "Now. Have I ever taken you to the Olympics?"
He hasn't.
"It's not Aberdeen," he says, looking around at the beach. "Where are we, exactly?"
"Dårlig Ulv-Stranden."
"What's that when it's at home?"
"Bad wolf bay," she says. "Surprise." He tries to think of something funny to say about that, something to make her laugh or even smile, but there is nothing funny about that at all.
"Are you alright?" he says instead. She nods, mutely. "Is everyone alright?" More nodding. "So you're all- fine. Good."
"You really can't come through?" says Rose.
"I really can't."
"And I can't go through, either."
"No."
"Then what good is this universe?"
"Not much good at all," he says. Rose smiles finally, faintly, and puts her hand up to where his face ought to be. He's gotten his wish in the worst possible sense. He is a hologram, and the irony doesn't escape him. He has made himself as concrete as he can, stuffed as much as himself as he could into that one last crack of space-time, and still it isn't enough. He's just a projection, one that will fade in a minute. He is filing her away like mad, but he knows it won't be enough. He could replay her in his head a million times a day, and it will never be enough again. But of course now he will finally understand where hard-light projections go when they disappear. They go nowhere. They go to a place very much like the void.
"I love you," she says. "I have forever." Oh, old gods. He doesn't have enough hearts to hold this. How can she manage? She's stronger than him. "Take that through with you."
"Rose," he says. "I'm sorry."
"For what?"
"For not saying it sooner. For not saying it every day. Every minute." Her eyes nearly swell shut with tears, but she's really smiling now, broadly, bravely. "Rose Tyler, I-"
He dies on the beach. It only looks like vanishing.
Last time, it made him cold. It froze a part of him and sealed it away, kept the pieces in a block of ice, where they could be seen but not felt. Lying next to Martha on a narrow, rickety sixteenth-century bed, he thinks to himself, this time it's made me cruel. He vows to do better. He saw the hurt on her face, the embarrassment, at Rose would know. He wasn't wrong. Rose would have felt it by now, sensed it. She always found the odd ones out in the world, discovered the wrong-fitting edges of things. She probably considered herself one of those, if he cared to dig into the psychology of it. But Rose also would have told him not to be such a tremendous ass to a clever and kindhearted woman who'd done nothing but save his life and fill his ship with conversation again.
"I'm sorry," he says, to the ceiling. To her, perhaps. Or a more general plea, to the great absence. He has the feeling he's going to be saying it quite a lot. But he is saved from wallowing in that thought by a sudden burst of screaming from the room down the hall. Thank goodness, he thinks to himself, and then again, guiltily: cruel.
Of course it isn't him who finds her. Of course. He's busy being rolled into walls and fed out of a dog dish, when the Master goes digging in his paradox machine and finds the files and brings everyone downstairs in a great show of pomp and glee to view them together. He pushes the Doctor's wheelchair up the ramp and parks him in front of the console while Francine, Clive and Tish stand to one side, eyeing the door and the jacketed guards on either side of it. The Master hammers the controls and babbles to himself about lost bird and cages, but the Doctor can't help looking elsewhere, up and around, through the abused framework of his captured ship, strung with scaffolding and wires. Pulsing with that terrible, world-rending light. But still alive, he thinks to himself. Like Martha. Alive and fighting, somewhere. He feels close to them both, as if he can sense them just over the next hill, and yet they are still so unbearably far away.
"Ta da!" the Master cries. And Rose Tyler appears. It's only a projection, a rendered image in hard light, but the Doctor can't help himself- he pitches forward in his chair and grips the handles with shock. Not possible. Just not possible. Everything was erased. The files were stripped, scorched. The memory cortex was barren. How, then? "Marvelous," he continues. "Just marvelous. Look at the detail!" The Master walks a circle around her. She's frozen in place, paused, as if from a video feed. Or a photograph. Who's recorded these, why? When? His mind reels with the logistics. Was the ship taking notes? "What wonderful memories I have of this one. Your pet pilot."
"You can't hurt her," the Doctor says, forcing himself to relax his shoulders, unclench his jaw. It's the truth. He could swing an axe at her image for a hundred years and dent only air. She's untouchable. He knows from experience all the limitations of that form. "You never could."
"I don't need to hurt her," the Master says. He smiles like a schoolboy, pure delight and selfishness and the pulling-off of fly's wings. "I'm going to hurt you with her." His hand hovers over a button. "What do you think?" he asks Francine, suddenly. "Erase all? Or one at a time?" The Doctor stares at them both in dawning horror. "Pick," says the Master. "Pick one!" he screams at her.
"One at a time," Francine says.
"A mother's wisdom," the Master says. "Leave room for hope," he grins, "and it hurts so much longer." He makes a great show of pressing the controls and Rose Tyler- just after the Olympics, twenty-twelve, jean jacket and windswept hair, trainers, luminous eyes reflecting torchlight- vanishes into thin air. "One down!" he cries. He summons up another one- Rose Tyler in a pink top crossed with zippers, hair loose, eyes haunted- and actually gives himself a dramatic drumroll on the edge of the console before he slaps the button down and sends the projection to oblivion. "Another one bites the dust!"
"Stop it," the Doctor manages.
"You'd like that, wouldn't you." The Master pulls up another- Rose Tyler in a jean jacket again, braids to her shoulders- and contemplates it. "You'd like me to save this one. To let you keep it and stare at it in the long lonely nights." He crouches down to the Doctor's level. "Did you really fall in love with a hologram? Do you have any sense of how deranged that is?"
"Some," says the Doctor. That actually gets him a laugh and then a hearty push that sends him rolling down the ramp to collide with the door.
"Tell you what," he says. "This can be our little ritual. If you're very good, I'll let you press the button yourself a few times. How does that sound?" The Doctor doesn't answer. "I'll take that as a resounding yes." He looks over at Francine, Clive and Tish. "Now, they've got work to do. It's awfully hard to get the Harkness out of the carpets. So we'll meet after breakfast for deletions. Is tomorrow morning good for everyone?" It is supposed to be a flippant statement, but perhaps he ends up regretting it after all, because the following morning is the best morning on record for all the rest of them. Because Martha Jones saves the world. People go back to grocery shopping and driving their cars and complaining about the stock market, all because Martha was willing to walk the soles off her boots and witness countless horrors and finally laugh in a mad dictator's face.
"The year that never was," he calls it, later. Martha very carefully does not look at him, but at the door. She can probably see past it, or through it. Her life is on the other side. Brave Martha. Braver than him. She is being very kind to him, but they both know. "It'll be as if it never happened."
"No," says Martha. "It happened." And then he is alone again. For all his hoping, all his begging, he couldn't manage even to be the penultimate timelord, one of a mismatched pair. There is nobody left. He is alone with his ship and his shame and the year that never was.
And seventeen remaining files on Rose Tyler.
Part Four.
...