remember when I wrote some massive AU for dwsanta?
so once upon a time for dwsanta I got a prompt and I was like 'Christ almighty I don't know if I can do this' but then I said 'be a fucking man, Nicole, because cloudydaise is expecting a fic for Christmas and goddammit, you are NOT going to pussy out on her' and this was born. But this was born a week late and as such I named it something lame and so I'm changing the name of the title because when I originally sent it I was kind of just like, 'JFC I just want this off my computer' (so to speak) and named it something lame from Winnie the Pooh, because I'm lame and like Winnie the Pooh.
so here is my Doctor Who fic. oh and also I'm gonna start posting fic here so if that bothers you for some reason you are free to go. I'll cry in the shower later.
Title: Forever Isn't Long At All
Pairings/Characters: Doctor/Rose (John/Doctor)
Rating: G
Warnings: No warnings
Summary: AU, Rose is the Time Lord. "She tells him that he can have anything in the universe. How greedy of him that he wants the one thing he isn't allowed to have."
Word Count: 5000 ish.
Notes: This story works so much better if it is read in the respective voices of Rose and Ten. Trust me on this.
will get around to x-posting this eventually.
*hey! listen!: idk what's up with lj and i'm getting the feeling i can't do jack shit about it so it will be much easier to read this if you click the title or the comments bc then it will bring you to that lovely white screen where everything is formatted the way i wanted it to be kbye*
He has this thing where he falls in love at first sight.
It’s happened to him often, since the time he was six years old. Julianne Jade was the first one, a girl as pretty as her name. She had huge green eyes and pigtails and wouldn’t give him the time of day. The latter would soon become a pattern.
Along the way, he would meet girls who liked him. He would date these girls but he never felt the burning in his heart, the feeling that she held all the secrets of the world. He would never look at them with a type of reverence typically reserved for religious worship. And eventually, some beautiful, snotty girl would walk by him and he would leave those nice girls behind. It isn’t as though he meant to hurt anybody, but lying to them wasn’t going to get anybody anywhere.
Occasionally, he would get these girls, and they would make his life a living hell for the few weeks they put up with him. He was sarcastic and slightly arrogant and too intelligent for his own good but he would give them everything he had, and girls like that like being loved. But they would get bored eventually, and he would be thrown aside, left to nurse his wounds until the next girl walked by.
He is ‘dating’ Michelle Nairne when he sees her for the first time (‘dating’ because she would let him hold her hand, and she would let him buy her things, and occasionally she would let him kiss her, but she wouldn’t let him see her without her clothes on, and he wasn’t allowed to touch her any other way). He’s coming home from work when she runs past him. Her roots are showing and her clothes are not the posh, designer labels he’s so used to seeing but clothes that actually look comfortable, clothes that you could run in. She skids to a halt a few feet in front of him, looking frantically in every direction. She looks like she could be twenty and one hundred all at the same time. Her eyes are worried and old. Like she’s seen the sun die.
She’s also gorgeous. And as she looks around, her eyes pass over him without a second glance. Just his type.
“Excuse me?”
She doesn’t seem to hear him. Her eyes keep dashing about. She looks like she’s calculating.
“Miss? Do you need some help?”
She finally looks at him. “You!”
“Er, me?”
“Yeah, you. I’d get away from here very fast if I were you.”
“Away?”
“Yeah. Least 5.73 kilometres, but that might be pushing it, so I’d aim for more.”
“Why?”
She looks at him with a face that lets him know that she isn’t used to not being listened to. Yes, definitely his type.
“Wos your name?”
“John. John, er, Smith.” He hates his name. So boring. It’s a name that can fit a thousand faces. She probably has an exotic, beautiful name like no one else on the planet.
“Look, John Smith, just... get away from this store. Least for tonight. Although after tonight there’ll be no... well, it’ll make me feel better.”
He stands his ground. He’s learned a few things over the years, and one of them is that to keep their attention, they have to know you’re interested.
“Wait a second! What’s your name?”
And then- she smiles. And he’s done, really. Past the point of no return. That smile can stop traffic, he’s sure of it.
“You don’t need to worry about that, John Smith. Just get away from here.”
“5.73 kilometres, right?” He says it sarcastically, in that tone that he’s mastered after years of repeated use, but she just smiles even more.
Oh god, what he would do to keep that smile forever on her face.
“Right.”
---
Henrik’s blows up.
He hears on the news and he stares open mouthed at the screen. 5.73 kilometres away. She blew up his job. She blew up his job.
He isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do. He calls up his boss but there’s no answer so he just walks out the door and into London, upset and pissed off and soon to be broke. He walks until he finally gets to where the building used to stand. There’s a crowd loitering around and reporters reporting with grim faces, and then, a little ways away, there’s a flash of blonde.
Determinedly, he stalks over to where she’s leaning against a wall and frowning at the crowd. Beautiful or not, he’s out of a job because of her.
“They say criminals like to come back to the scene of the crime.”
“Actually they normally say that about sociopaths who like to relive the crime scene. And as far as I can tell I’m not a sociopath.”
“You blew up a building!”
“You’re just assuming it was me.”
“Who else could it be?”
“I never said it wasn’t me, I just said it’s wrong to assume.”
“Who are you?!”
“S’not important.”
“I’m out of a job because of you, and you won’t even tell me your name!”
“You- well, if you insist, you can call me the Doctor.”
“That isn’t a name.”
“Look, John Smith, ‘m really very sorry I blew up your job, but it was for your own good. Everyone’s own good, really.”
“Are you a criminal? Are you on the run from the law? Is that what it is? Is that why you died your hair blonde? Am I going to see you on the news tonight?”
Another smile- she finds him quite amusing. She reaches for his hand and looks straight into his eyes. “If you’re lucky- if you’re really, really lucky- you’ll never see me again.”
---
Michelle calls him that night.
“I’ve been wondering where you’ve been,” he says warmly into the phone. She sighs loudly, like she’s already sick of him.
“Look John, I’m really sorry about your job and everything, but this won’t work out. I mean, it wasn’t really going to work out anyway, but now that you’re unemployed it really won’t work out. I can’t support two people on my own, you know.”
He understands. This is how they all end. His cat jumps up next to him and buts his head against John’s arm, who then runs his hand through the cats fur.
“Just me and you again, Mick,” he tells the cat, who hisses and then scratches John’s forearm. Mickey had never liked Michelle.
---
He searches everywhere for a job.
He had been saving up to go to school- he had been out of high school for two years now and he was in the same spot he’d been in, only this time he was alone. He didn’t blame his mother for not leaving him anything, because there was nothing that she could have given him. The only thing she had given him was a tiny apartment with an understanding landlord who would let him pay the rent late if John didn’t say anything about the grow op.
It was nothing close to ideal, and that why he dated the Michelle’s. He could pretend, for the short weeks that they put up with him, that he was living the good life.
He’s out dropping off resumes to any store accepting them, praying to every god he’s ever heard of that someone calls him, when it happens. He’s walking by a department store when all of a sudden- CRASH. He whirls around just in time to see the mannequin’s walk out of the display window.
“Is this a publicity stunt, d’you think?” He asks the man beside him. A scream erupts to his left and when he turns around again, the man is lying on the floor.
“Sir?” He doesn’t get a chance to check if the man is alright because a mannequin comes at him and he finally understands that he should run.
He’s weaving his way through frantic crowds of screaming people when he sees her. He skids to a halt and grabs her arm, perhaps a little more roughly than he had intended.
“Fancy seeing you here.”
“Don’ suppose you’ll believe ’m just out for a stroll?”
“Listen doctor, I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I know you have something to do with it, so you had better fix it!”
“It’s Doctor.”
“What?”
“Doctor. With a capital. Capital D octor.”
He gestures around him at the chaos.
“Don’ give me that look, I was on m’way ‘fore you grabbed me.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“Tha’s not such a good idea.”
“Don’t you start with me, you blow up my job, and then people pretending to be mannequins are attacking innocent bystanders! I’m coming with you.”
“Fine. But you have to keep up.”
And she’s off, manoeuvring her way through the crowd and he runs after her, bumping and knocking people over. There’s screaming everywhere- he can’t quite believe that it’s real.
“They’re not people dressed as mannequins.”
“What?”
“They’re mannequins.”
“What, like robots?” It’s very hard to speak, running so hard.
“No, like mannequins.”
“You’re trying to tell me those are real mannequins?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re off your rocker.”
She grins. They’re running through London with crazy mannequins trying to kill people, and she’s grinning like a fool.
“So, er, where are we going?”
“London Eye.”
“That’s across the city!”
“Better run fast, then.”
---
When they finally stop running, he feels like he’s going to keel over and die, but she doesn’t stop.
When she finally does stop, he’s looking at... well, he doesn’t really know what he’s looking at. It almost looks like a huge vat of Jell-O.
“What is that?” He whispers. His voice only quavers a little bit.
“What you doin’?”
It takes him a while to realize she’s talking to the Jell-O. It grumbles back at her, but she seems to be able to understand.
“I’m here peacefully- you’re the one attackin’ humans.”
Grumble.
“This is an invasion! The planet has so much potential and you’re invading it, jus’ ‘cause you heard somethin’ about me?”
More grumbling. Her face tightens.
“That wasn’t- no! No, I couldn’t! I tried, I couldn’t save them, don’t you understand?”
Grumble grumble grumble.
“Is that what this is about? Is that why you’re doing this?”
John stares in horror at the scene unfolding in front of him. He thinks he may throw up. Above the Doctor’s head, a blue box suddenly appears.
“What’re you doin’ with that?” Her voice is choked. Almost panicked. “It’s my ship, what’re you doin’ with my ship?”
He’s moving before he even knows it. He sees the two mannequins come up behind her, watches as they grab her, but he can tell from the way she shifts her body that she knows he’s coming. As the mannequin’s push her forward she angles herself ever so slightly, and he moves in, shoving one of them into the pile of Jell-O as she grabs the other one, flipping him into the big glob, before reaching into her pocket, pulling out a tiny vial, and throwing it in after them.
He thinks it might be screaming. He doesn’t have time to dwell on it before she’s shoving him in the direction of the box, and he can’t help but wonder what hiding in a little blue box is going to do before she opens the door.
If he didn’t know what was on the other side of the door, he would have ran.
She pulls some levers, presses some buttons, and then looks at him expectantly.
“Should I give you a minute?”
His knees give out and he collapses. He closes his eyes and tries to pretend that he’s back at home in his flat. It smells like pot and sweat and it’s as big on the inside as it is on the outside.
“Okay.” He breathes deeply. “Okay. Okay. So... the Jell-O.”
“Jell-O? Oh, the nestene consciousness.”
“Right. It’s... I mean, we’re safe?”
“Oh yeah. Well, for now. Somethin’s always tryin’ to... never mind. Safe. You’re safe. Yeah.”
“Okay. And those, things, were...”
“Autons. Controlled by the nestene consciousness. The Jell-O.”
“Okay. Next thing. This... this.” He pounds the floor of the box with his hand.
“My ship.”
“Ship. So it... what, flies? Does it fly?”
“Not exactly.”
“So what is it?”
“S’called a TARDIS. Time and Relative Dimensions in Space.”
Space. “You... you have a rocket ship.”
“You could call it that, I s’pose.”
“And it’s... it’s bigger. On the... the..”
“The inside.”
“Oh god I’m going to be sick.”
“Please don’t, she gets awfully moody when people are sick in her.”
“She.”
“Of course.”
He opens his eyes. She’s leaning on the console. She’s still beautiful, but now she seems more... dangerous. More alien.
“Who are you?”
“I told you. I’m the Doctor.”
“What are you?” His voice is very tired. He must be going mental.
When she speaks, her voice is even more tired. Like she hasn’t slept in a thousand years. “I’m a Time Lord.”
There are so many things he doesn’t understand, so he settles on the simplest one. “You’re a girl.”
“Yeah, well, this time.”
“You mean... oh god.”
“Look, just... just breathe, or something. Breathe.”
“Breathe! I just fought living mannequins and a giant bowl of Jell-O and now I’m sitting in your space ship which is bigger on the inside and you’re telling me you’re an alien who may or may not always be a woman and you’re telling me to breathe.”
“Culture shock.”
“This is a little bit more than culture shock! How old are you, even?”
“Do you want the real answer or do you want me to lie to you for the benefit of your health?”
He drops his head onto his knees. “How old are you?”
“Nine hundred, roughly.”
He laughs. “Nine hundred, is that it?”
He tries to process it all and fails. Instead he says (and is thoroughly embarrassed when his voice cracks in the middle of it) “can you just take me home, please?”
He gives her his address and tries to think stable, normal thoughts. Thirty seconds later, she opens the door.
“Already?”
She nods. He gets up, but it’s like walking on jelly. He strongly resists the urge to hug the pavement when he steps outside. He’s walking quickly away from her and her weird ship when she says, “John?”
He stops, and she continues. “You don’t- I mean... well- you could... you could come with me.”
“Come with you?” His voice is filled with so much incredulity that she flinches.
“If you wanted. I mean- it’s a space ship. It can go everywhere. Anywhere. Places
you’ve never even heard of. Beautiful, amazing places. An’ it’s a time machine, too. You can go visit Queen Victoria, or we could go meet Queen Elizabeth VIII.
“This ship, my TARDIS... she can give you, literally, everything.”
“You’re being serious.”
“You don’t have to come, John. But the option’s there.”
“And everything- I mean, is it all like that? All strange technology, bigger on the inside, scary alien stuff?”
“There’s a planet that’s almost identical to yours except the male and female reproductive organs are switched. And then there’s a planet where the dogs have no noses. There are places just like your home, and places you can’t even imagine. And many species would think that you humans have weird, scary alien stuff.”
“Alien.” The word seems strange in his mouth.
“Yeah. Alien. To you, anyway.”
He’s silent, looking at the box. The TARDIS.
“Look, I know it’s scary. But there are a lot of things that are scary. Asking someone out. Becoming a parent. Walking to school for the first time. Making public speeches. Drinking milk for the first time after you drank a glass of sour milk. This is just one really long walk to school. Or a long speech. Or a really attractive girl. Or a really big glass of milk.”
“I think I get it.”
“There a million million things I could show you.”
“What if I want to come home?”
“Then I bring you home. I could make it so you were gone for 5 minutes. No time for anyone to even miss you.”
And he knows, then. Because no one will miss him. If he was gone for 5 minutes or 5 years, the only thing he would be leaving behind is a blown up department store and string of snotty, beautiful girls who probably can’t even remember his name.
“Can we just... start off slow, or something? Like a quick zip to 2030? Or 1997? That was a good year for me, ’97.”
The slightest of smiles appears on her face.
“So you’ll come with me?”
He shrugs, throwing his hands up. “I suppose. Running off in some weird flying contraption with a girl who is probably mad. People have done stranger things.”
She grins fully now and he smiles back. He can’t help it.
“That they have.”
---
He is absolutely fascinated by her. He can’t help but hang onto her every word, and the beautiful, amazing, terrifying things that she says. Time Lord. Gallifrey. 900 years old. Time machine. It all seems too bizarre to be real.
“This is a lot of information.”
“I know.”
“So there are... others? I mean... are you... do you normally travel with other Time Lords?”
She looks away. “Not anymore.”
Clearly she doesn’t want to talk about it. He tries to lighten the mood.
“So where are we going?”
She looks up, eyes shining once again. “Anywhere you want. Anywhere. Anytime.”
“So... I could go back to my 7th birthday party and stop myself from falling off the slide and breaking my arm?”
“Well- no. Can’t meddle in your past like that. We’re observers. But your 7th birthday? Think bigger than that!”
“Uhm, the moon?”
“Boring! Even bigger!”
“The Death Star?”
She grins. “Now you’re gettin’ it.” She pulls some levers and the TARDIS lurches under his feet.
“Uhm, we’re not actually going to the Death Star, are we?”
---
She doesn’t take him to the Death Star.
“Go on then.”
“Where are we?”
“Go and see.”
He stares at the door, scared out of his mind. But he steps forward and opens the door anyway.
And immediately takes two steps back.
“Do you believe me now?”
“We’re... we’re in space.”
“Well, she is a space ship.”
“Space. Like... space. The final frontier.”
“Oh, I picked up a nerd. Lovely.”
“Space.”
“John. Your brain is smoking. Stop over thinking.”
“But we’re in space.”
She steps forward and grabs a hold of his hand. He grips her fingers tightly.
“So what do you think?”
“’Bout what?”
“This is just the tip of the iceberg, John. There’s so much more I could show you. If you want.”
He looks at her. He thinks about his life in London and then he looks out at the stars and then he looks down at their fingers. This is real. He hadn’t truly believed it until now.
“Yeah. I want to.”
He squeezes her fingers.
---
“Run!”
“I am running!”
“Run faster!”
They’re running from King Henry VIII, who apparently is not very fond of the Doctor.
“What did you do to him?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t done it yet.”
There is barking from behind them. He groans. She pulls him along even faster. His hand must be sweating like crazy, but she doesn’t let go.
“Come on, John, almost there!”
They fall into the TARDIS, panting. She pulls and presses and then he falls onto the floor, pulling her down with him. They lay beside each other, breathing hard.
“Well. Guess he’s not a fan of yours.”
She laughs and sits up. He throws an arm over his face and says, “Can we go somewhere calm? Where people don’t want to kill us, for once?”
“Any place in mind?”
“Surprise me.”
He evens out his breathing as she mucks about. The TARDIS lurches beneath them.
“John.”
Her voice is quiet, but she’s smiling at him. He gets to his feet and takes her hand. She opens the door.
The floor of what looks like a forest is littered with leaves, but they are all different colours, blue and pink and orange and grey and yellow. The sky is the pinky-orange of sunset, although it feels like the middle of the day. The sun is a shade of bright orange. The clouds are fluffy and perfectly white. It looks like someone spilled different cans of paint all over the world. And yet...
“It’s beautiful.”
“You know when you’re a child, and you colour in a picture but you don’t colour it correctly? You colour everythin’ wrong. Purple sky, orange sun. You colour the cows green and the horses pink.
“This is the world that you draw.”
He has no words to properly explain the feeling in his heart. He stares at the colourful world around him and everything stops. He ceases to think.
She slips her hand in his. “I know you think the life I live is always danger and running and scary, alien things but there is always beauty in the world.”
He tears his eyes away from the forest and looks down at her. If his life were normal, if they were back home at earth, he would say something like, yeah, there is, and she would look up and realize he was talking about her and they would kiss and it would be beautiful. But his life is not normal, and he is not allowed to kiss her. She is a thousand miles away from him. She is more unattainable than any of his old girlfriends were, and he wants her more than he’s ever wanted any of them.
She smiles at him. “What d’you wanna do now?”
She tells him that he can have anything in the universe. How greedy of him that he wants the one thing he isn’t allowed to have.
---
Curiosity killed the cat. He knows this. And he knows that if she had wanted him to know, she would have told him. But she is such a mystery to him. Everything he feels is written on his face for her to see, but he knows hardly anything about her and he’s so damn curious. So he asks. One day. It just comes out.
“You said you don’t travel with them anymore.”
“Hmm?”
“Other... Time Lords. Ladies. Time Ladies? Time People. Like you.”
She stares at the ground. Her hand is clenched, her knuckles white. He’s beginning to regret asking.
“No,” she finally says, her voice curt and distant. “Well. Not anymore. No.”
He doesn’t say anything, although his head is bursting with questions. She must realize this, because she continues, her voice quiet, so he has to move closer to her to hear.
“There was a war, John. The Time War. And I had to, really. There was no other choice.
“If you knew- if you knew some of the things I’ve done, you wouldn’t be here. You would leave. You would run. Just like me. Always running.”
He can hear it in her voice. Nine hundred years of pain and loneliness, and a war on her shoulders. And he knows that he will never understand her, and he will never be enough. He is only human. Just a single human heart, fragile and breakable, beating it’s way until he won’t be with her anymore. What can he possibly do for her?
He walks to her and pulls her towards him, hugs her, puts his face in her hair. “I won’t run. I won’t leave.” He puts himself in those words, wills her to believe it, because they are true. He has never spoken truer words, and he never will.
She thaws in his arms.
---
They face terrifying things. Great green farting aliens. He meets Harriet Jones and the Doctor informs him that she will become Britain’s greatest Prime Minister. The leader of the Golden Age. They meet terrible monsters called the Daleks and he sees her fall apart in front of him. And slowly, she becomes more real to him. She isn’t the mysterious alien who was so far off from him. She becomes real. Not quite human. Just real.
“What are you thinking about?” Her lips curl up at the edges and her tongue peeks out of her teeth.
“Nothing.”
You. Always you.
---
“Do you ever just stay in?”
“What?”
“I mean, do you ever just stay in the TARDIS and watch movies, or something.”
She smirks. “Am I boring you?”
“Not at all. It’s just, well, it’d be good to just stay in for a night. Watch movies. Eat popcorn. That kind of stuff.”
“Hmm.” She nods. “What movie?”
“What?”
“Well it all depends on what movie you wanna watch, really.”
“What movies do you have?”
She grins.
---
The Doctor, it turns out, has a lot of movies. Movies made in the 1950’s, movies made in 3056, movies from different planets, movies that he recognizes, like Snow White, but which have been made on different planets and as such are altered slightly. Like, in one version of Snow White she eats the apple and just stays unconscious forever. And in another, the seven dwarves brutally beat the witch to a pulp, and then Prince Charming, as well, just for extra measure.
There are so many movies he’s completely overwhelmed.
“Uhm... well, what’s your favourite movie?” He asks her desperately.
“My favourite movie? In the 900 years I’ve been alive, all the planets I’ve visited, out of all the movies here, you’re asking me what my favourite is?”
“Er... yeah.”
“Bambi.” She says this automatically, not even thinking about it.
“Bambi.”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
“Have you ever seen Bambi?”
“Of course I’ve seen Bambi.”
“Then you should be asking why not.”
He shakes his head in absolute incredulity. Sometimes she seems like this scary alien whom he will never be able to understand. And sometimes, she seems so incredibly human.
“Alright Doctor, let’s watch Bambi.”
---
He cries.
He hasn’t seen Bambi since he was 12, give or take, and he can distinctly remember leaving half way through saying that he was too manly to watch a stupid Disney movie and going into the loo to sob hysterically. Now they’re sitting on the couch together and she is leaning against him and he is trying so hard not to drip snot into her hair.
“John.”
“Mhm?”
“You crying?”
“No.” He wipes his face on his sleeve and tries to compose himself, but she turns around and sees him blubbering like an idiot. A sly grin creeps across her face and he glares at her.
“Oh, shut up.”
“Poor John. S’okay y’know, he becomes the prince.”
He gives her his best ‘if looks could kill’ stares but she just laughs. He smiles at her and takes her hand.
“Just because the ending is happy doesn’t mean what leads up to it is.”
He may be imagining it, but he thinks she cuddles a little closer to him.
“Don’t I know it, John.”
---
Some days, she is a million miles away. Not just from him, but from everything. Her hand is in his but her head is somewhere else, and no matter what he does he can’t seem to bring her back.
It’s one of those days today. They’re walking through Venice in 1237 and she’s talking, but her mouth seems to be moving on its accord, her brain not into it. He keeps shooting glances at her but she doesn’t notice.
“Doctor.”
“Yeah?”
“Let’s go back to the TARDIS.”
He’s a little glum that she doesn’t even protest, just tugs his hand and leads him towards the TARDIS, and he can’t help but sulk. He knows he’s being a baby but sometimes he can’t help it.
When they get back to the TARDIS, he leans against the wall and watches her as she pulls levers and pushes buttons on the TARDIS fondly. He tells himself there is no reason to be afraid of her.
“What’s wrong?” She looks at him and there is a storm in her eyes.
“Can’t you feel it?”
“No.”
She shakes her head and rolls her eyes at the ceiling, as if this was painfully obvious and she couldn’t believe she had even asked. “No, right, of course you don’t. You’re human.”
The way the word rolls off her tongue, he can tell it isn’t meant to be a compliment. He doesn’t answer her, just continues to stare, not sure whether to be angry or scared.
“Something big is coming. Something bad. Some big and bad. Something that even I can’t fix, an’ I can fix almost everything.”
She twines her fingers in her hair, looking almost panicked. He doesn’t understand what’s happening. He gently pries her hands out of her hair and holds them in his, trying to be calm.
“Doctor... whatever it is, it’ll be fine. And well, if it isn’t, that’s alright. Because... well.” He wants to say something corny and cheesy like because we’ll always be together. He never had a problem saying that to his other girlfriends. Maybe because he knew it was a lie. It was just something to say.
But this is real. He truly wants to be here forever. With her. He doesn’t need all of space, doesn’t need time travel, he just needs her. Everything else is just a bonus.
“I mean, we’ve faced... we’ve faced everything! Slitheens and werewolves and big bowls of Jell-O! What can be so big that we can’t face it?”
She looks at him, all of time and space flashing in her eyes. He doesn’t look away. She laughs. It is a desperate sort of laugh, like she’s holding on to something that is slipping away. Then she stands on tiptoe and pushes her face into the space between his neck and shoulder. He thinks she might press her lips against his neck, but he’s probably just imagining that.
“How long are you gonna stay with me?”
“Forever.”
so here is my Doctor Who fic. oh and also I'm gonna start posting fic here so if that bothers you for some reason you are free to go. I'll cry in the shower later.
Title: Forever Isn't Long At All
Pairings/Characters: Doctor/Rose (John/Doctor)
Rating: G
Warnings: No warnings
Summary: AU, Rose is the Time Lord. "She tells him that he can have anything in the universe. How greedy of him that he wants the one thing he isn't allowed to have."
Word Count: 5000 ish.
Notes: This story works so much better if it is read in the respective voices of Rose and Ten. Trust me on this.
will get around to x-posting this eventually.
*hey! listen!: idk what's up with lj and i'm getting the feeling i can't do jack shit about it so it will be much easier to read this if you click the title or the comments bc then it will bring you to that lovely white screen where everything is formatted the way i wanted it to be kbye*
He has this thing where he falls in love at first sight.
It’s happened to him often, since the time he was six years old. Julianne Jade was the first one, a girl as pretty as her name. She had huge green eyes and pigtails and wouldn’t give him the time of day. The latter would soon become a pattern.
Along the way, he would meet girls who liked him. He would date these girls but he never felt the burning in his heart, the feeling that she held all the secrets of the world. He would never look at them with a type of reverence typically reserved for religious worship. And eventually, some beautiful, snotty girl would walk by him and he would leave those nice girls behind. It isn’t as though he meant to hurt anybody, but lying to them wasn’t going to get anybody anywhere.
Occasionally, he would get these girls, and they would make his life a living hell for the few weeks they put up with him. He was sarcastic and slightly arrogant and too intelligent for his own good but he would give them everything he had, and girls like that like being loved. But they would get bored eventually, and he would be thrown aside, left to nurse his wounds until the next girl walked by.
He is ‘dating’ Michelle Nairne when he sees her for the first time (‘dating’ because she would let him hold her hand, and she would let him buy her things, and occasionally she would let him kiss her, but she wouldn’t let him see her without her clothes on, and he wasn’t allowed to touch her any other way). He’s coming home from work when she runs past him. Her roots are showing and her clothes are not the posh, designer labels he’s so used to seeing but clothes that actually look comfortable, clothes that you could run in. She skids to a halt a few feet in front of him, looking frantically in every direction. She looks like she could be twenty and one hundred all at the same time. Her eyes are worried and old. Like she’s seen the sun die.
She’s also gorgeous. And as she looks around, her eyes pass over him without a second glance. Just his type.
“Excuse me?”
She doesn’t seem to hear him. Her eyes keep dashing about. She looks like she’s calculating.
“Miss? Do you need some help?”
She finally looks at him. “You!”
“Er, me?”
“Yeah, you. I’d get away from here very fast if I were you.”
“Away?”
“Yeah. Least 5.73 kilometres, but that might be pushing it, so I’d aim for more.”
“Why?”
She looks at him with a face that lets him know that she isn’t used to not being listened to. Yes, definitely his type.
“Wos your name?”
“John. John, er, Smith.” He hates his name. So boring. It’s a name that can fit a thousand faces. She probably has an exotic, beautiful name like no one else on the planet.
“Look, John Smith, just... get away from this store. Least for tonight. Although after tonight there’ll be no... well, it’ll make me feel better.”
He stands his ground. He’s learned a few things over the years, and one of them is that to keep their attention, they have to know you’re interested.
“Wait a second! What’s your name?”
And then- she smiles. And he’s done, really. Past the point of no return. That smile can stop traffic, he’s sure of it.
“You don’t need to worry about that, John Smith. Just get away from here.”
“5.73 kilometres, right?” He says it sarcastically, in that tone that he’s mastered after years of repeated use, but she just smiles even more.
Oh god, what he would do to keep that smile forever on her face.
“Right.”
---
Henrik’s blows up.
He hears on the news and he stares open mouthed at the screen. 5.73 kilometres away. She blew up his job. She blew up his job.
He isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do. He calls up his boss but there’s no answer so he just walks out the door and into London, upset and pissed off and soon to be broke. He walks until he finally gets to where the building used to stand. There’s a crowd loitering around and reporters reporting with grim faces, and then, a little ways away, there’s a flash of blonde.
Determinedly, he stalks over to where she’s leaning against a wall and frowning at the crowd. Beautiful or not, he’s out of a job because of her.
“They say criminals like to come back to the scene of the crime.”
“Actually they normally say that about sociopaths who like to relive the crime scene. And as far as I can tell I’m not a sociopath.”
“You blew up a building!”
“You’re just assuming it was me.”
“Who else could it be?”
“I never said it wasn’t me, I just said it’s wrong to assume.”
“Who are you?!”
“S’not important.”
“I’m out of a job because of you, and you won’t even tell me your name!”
“You- well, if you insist, you can call me the Doctor.”
“That isn’t a name.”
“Look, John Smith, ‘m really very sorry I blew up your job, but it was for your own good. Everyone’s own good, really.”
“Are you a criminal? Are you on the run from the law? Is that what it is? Is that why you died your hair blonde? Am I going to see you on the news tonight?”
Another smile- she finds him quite amusing. She reaches for his hand and looks straight into his eyes. “If you’re lucky- if you’re really, really lucky- you’ll never see me again.”
---
Michelle calls him that night.
“I’ve been wondering where you’ve been,” he says warmly into the phone. She sighs loudly, like she’s already sick of him.
“Look John, I’m really sorry about your job and everything, but this won’t work out. I mean, it wasn’t really going to work out anyway, but now that you’re unemployed it really won’t work out. I can’t support two people on my own, you know.”
He understands. This is how they all end. His cat jumps up next to him and buts his head against John’s arm, who then runs his hand through the cats fur.
“Just me and you again, Mick,” he tells the cat, who hisses and then scratches John’s forearm. Mickey had never liked Michelle.
---
He searches everywhere for a job.
He had been saving up to go to school- he had been out of high school for two years now and he was in the same spot he’d been in, only this time he was alone. He didn’t blame his mother for not leaving him anything, because there was nothing that she could have given him. The only thing she had given him was a tiny apartment with an understanding landlord who would let him pay the rent late if John didn’t say anything about the grow op.
It was nothing close to ideal, and that why he dated the Michelle’s. He could pretend, for the short weeks that they put up with him, that he was living the good life.
He’s out dropping off resumes to any store accepting them, praying to every god he’s ever heard of that someone calls him, when it happens. He’s walking by a department store when all of a sudden- CRASH. He whirls around just in time to see the mannequin’s walk out of the display window.
“Is this a publicity stunt, d’you think?” He asks the man beside him. A scream erupts to his left and when he turns around again, the man is lying on the floor.
“Sir?” He doesn’t get a chance to check if the man is alright because a mannequin comes at him and he finally understands that he should run.
He’s weaving his way through frantic crowds of screaming people when he sees her. He skids to a halt and grabs her arm, perhaps a little more roughly than he had intended.
“Fancy seeing you here.”
“Don’ suppose you’ll believe ’m just out for a stroll?”
“Listen doctor, I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I know you have something to do with it, so you had better fix it!”
“It’s Doctor.”
“What?”
“Doctor. With a capital. Capital D octor.”
He gestures around him at the chaos.
“Don’ give me that look, I was on m’way ‘fore you grabbed me.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“Tha’s not such a good idea.”
“Don’t you start with me, you blow up my job, and then people pretending to be mannequins are attacking innocent bystanders! I’m coming with you.”
“Fine. But you have to keep up.”
And she’s off, manoeuvring her way through the crowd and he runs after her, bumping and knocking people over. There’s screaming everywhere- he can’t quite believe that it’s real.
“They’re not people dressed as mannequins.”
“What?”
“They’re mannequins.”
“What, like robots?” It’s very hard to speak, running so hard.
“No, like mannequins.”
“You’re trying to tell me those are real mannequins?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re off your rocker.”
She grins. They’re running through London with crazy mannequins trying to kill people, and she’s grinning like a fool.
“So, er, where are we going?”
“London Eye.”
“That’s across the city!”
“Better run fast, then.”
---
When they finally stop running, he feels like he’s going to keel over and die, but she doesn’t stop.
When she finally does stop, he’s looking at... well, he doesn’t really know what he’s looking at. It almost looks like a huge vat of Jell-O.
“What is that?” He whispers. His voice only quavers a little bit.
“What you doin’?”
It takes him a while to realize she’s talking to the Jell-O. It grumbles back at her, but she seems to be able to understand.
“I’m here peacefully- you’re the one attackin’ humans.”
Grumble.
“This is an invasion! The planet has so much potential and you’re invading it, jus’ ‘cause you heard somethin’ about me?”
More grumbling. Her face tightens.
“That wasn’t- no! No, I couldn’t! I tried, I couldn’t save them, don’t you understand?”
Grumble grumble grumble.
“Is that what this is about? Is that why you’re doing this?”
John stares in horror at the scene unfolding in front of him. He thinks he may throw up. Above the Doctor’s head, a blue box suddenly appears.
“What’re you doin’ with that?” Her voice is choked. Almost panicked. “It’s my ship, what’re you doin’ with my ship?”
He’s moving before he even knows it. He sees the two mannequins come up behind her, watches as they grab her, but he can tell from the way she shifts her body that she knows he’s coming. As the mannequin’s push her forward she angles herself ever so slightly, and he moves in, shoving one of them into the pile of Jell-O as she grabs the other one, flipping him into the big glob, before reaching into her pocket, pulling out a tiny vial, and throwing it in after them.
He thinks it might be screaming. He doesn’t have time to dwell on it before she’s shoving him in the direction of the box, and he can’t help but wonder what hiding in a little blue box is going to do before she opens the door.
If he didn’t know what was on the other side of the door, he would have ran.
She pulls some levers, presses some buttons, and then looks at him expectantly.
“Should I give you a minute?”
His knees give out and he collapses. He closes his eyes and tries to pretend that he’s back at home in his flat. It smells like pot and sweat and it’s as big on the inside as it is on the outside.
“Okay.” He breathes deeply. “Okay. Okay. So... the Jell-O.”
“Jell-O? Oh, the nestene consciousness.”
“Right. It’s... I mean, we’re safe?”
“Oh yeah. Well, for now. Somethin’s always tryin’ to... never mind. Safe. You’re safe. Yeah.”
“Okay. And those, things, were...”
“Autons. Controlled by the nestene consciousness. The Jell-O.”
“Okay. Next thing. This... this.” He pounds the floor of the box with his hand.
“My ship.”
“Ship. So it... what, flies? Does it fly?”
“Not exactly.”
“So what is it?”
“S’called a TARDIS. Time and Relative Dimensions in Space.”
Space. “You... you have a rocket ship.”
“You could call it that, I s’pose.”
“And it’s... it’s bigger. On the... the..”
“The inside.”
“Oh god I’m going to be sick.”
“Please don’t, she gets awfully moody when people are sick in her.”
“She.”
“Of course.”
He opens his eyes. She’s leaning on the console. She’s still beautiful, but now she seems more... dangerous. More alien.
“Who are you?”
“I told you. I’m the Doctor.”
“What are you?” His voice is very tired. He must be going mental.
When she speaks, her voice is even more tired. Like she hasn’t slept in a thousand years. “I’m a Time Lord.”
There are so many things he doesn’t understand, so he settles on the simplest one. “You’re a girl.”
“Yeah, well, this time.”
“You mean... oh god.”
“Look, just... just breathe, or something. Breathe.”
“Breathe! I just fought living mannequins and a giant bowl of Jell-O and now I’m sitting in your space ship which is bigger on the inside and you’re telling me you’re an alien who may or may not always be a woman and you’re telling me to breathe.”
“Culture shock.”
“This is a little bit more than culture shock! How old are you, even?”
“Do you want the real answer or do you want me to lie to you for the benefit of your health?”
He drops his head onto his knees. “How old are you?”
“Nine hundred, roughly.”
He laughs. “Nine hundred, is that it?”
He tries to process it all and fails. Instead he says (and is thoroughly embarrassed when his voice cracks in the middle of it) “can you just take me home, please?”
He gives her his address and tries to think stable, normal thoughts. Thirty seconds later, she opens the door.
“Already?”
She nods. He gets up, but it’s like walking on jelly. He strongly resists the urge to hug the pavement when he steps outside. He’s walking quickly away from her and her weird ship when she says, “John?”
He stops, and she continues. “You don’t- I mean... well- you could... you could come with me.”
“Come with you?” His voice is filled with so much incredulity that she flinches.
“If you wanted. I mean- it’s a space ship. It can go everywhere. Anywhere. Places
you’ve never even heard of. Beautiful, amazing places. An’ it’s a time machine, too. You can go visit Queen Victoria, or we could go meet Queen Elizabeth VIII.
“This ship, my TARDIS... she can give you, literally, everything.”
“You’re being serious.”
“You don’t have to come, John. But the option’s there.”
“And everything- I mean, is it all like that? All strange technology, bigger on the inside, scary alien stuff?”
“There’s a planet that’s almost identical to yours except the male and female reproductive organs are switched. And then there’s a planet where the dogs have no noses. There are places just like your home, and places you can’t even imagine. And many species would think that you humans have weird, scary alien stuff.”
“Alien.” The word seems strange in his mouth.
“Yeah. Alien. To you, anyway.”
He’s silent, looking at the box. The TARDIS.
“Look, I know it’s scary. But there are a lot of things that are scary. Asking someone out. Becoming a parent. Walking to school for the first time. Making public speeches. Drinking milk for the first time after you drank a glass of sour milk. This is just one really long walk to school. Or a long speech. Or a really attractive girl. Or a really big glass of milk.”
“I think I get it.”
“There a million million things I could show you.”
“What if I want to come home?”
“Then I bring you home. I could make it so you were gone for 5 minutes. No time for anyone to even miss you.”
And he knows, then. Because no one will miss him. If he was gone for 5 minutes or 5 years, the only thing he would be leaving behind is a blown up department store and string of snotty, beautiful girls who probably can’t even remember his name.
“Can we just... start off slow, or something? Like a quick zip to 2030? Or 1997? That was a good year for me, ’97.”
The slightest of smiles appears on her face.
“So you’ll come with me?”
He shrugs, throwing his hands up. “I suppose. Running off in some weird flying contraption with a girl who is probably mad. People have done stranger things.”
She grins fully now and he smiles back. He can’t help it.
“That they have.”
---
He is absolutely fascinated by her. He can’t help but hang onto her every word, and the beautiful, amazing, terrifying things that she says. Time Lord. Gallifrey. 900 years old. Time machine. It all seems too bizarre to be real.
“This is a lot of information.”
“I know.”
“So there are... others? I mean... are you... do you normally travel with other Time Lords?”
She looks away. “Not anymore.”
Clearly she doesn’t want to talk about it. He tries to lighten the mood.
“So where are we going?”
She looks up, eyes shining once again. “Anywhere you want. Anywhere. Anytime.”
“So... I could go back to my 7th birthday party and stop myself from falling off the slide and breaking my arm?”
“Well- no. Can’t meddle in your past like that. We’re observers. But your 7th birthday? Think bigger than that!”
“Uhm, the moon?”
“Boring! Even bigger!”
“The Death Star?”
She grins. “Now you’re gettin’ it.” She pulls some levers and the TARDIS lurches under his feet.
“Uhm, we’re not actually going to the Death Star, are we?”
---
She doesn’t take him to the Death Star.
“Go on then.”
“Where are we?”
“Go and see.”
He stares at the door, scared out of his mind. But he steps forward and opens the door anyway.
And immediately takes two steps back.
“Do you believe me now?”
“We’re... we’re in space.”
“Well, she is a space ship.”
“Space. Like... space. The final frontier.”
“Oh, I picked up a nerd. Lovely.”
“Space.”
“John. Your brain is smoking. Stop over thinking.”
“But we’re in space.”
She steps forward and grabs a hold of his hand. He grips her fingers tightly.
“So what do you think?”
“’Bout what?”
“This is just the tip of the iceberg, John. There’s so much more I could show you. If you want.”
He looks at her. He thinks about his life in London and then he looks out at the stars and then he looks down at their fingers. This is real. He hadn’t truly believed it until now.
“Yeah. I want to.”
He squeezes her fingers.
---
“Run!”
“I am running!”
“Run faster!”
They’re running from King Henry VIII, who apparently is not very fond of the Doctor.
“What did you do to him?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t done it yet.”
There is barking from behind them. He groans. She pulls him along even faster. His hand must be sweating like crazy, but she doesn’t let go.
“Come on, John, almost there!”
They fall into the TARDIS, panting. She pulls and presses and then he falls onto the floor, pulling her down with him. They lay beside each other, breathing hard.
“Well. Guess he’s not a fan of yours.”
She laughs and sits up. He throws an arm over his face and says, “Can we go somewhere calm? Where people don’t want to kill us, for once?”
“Any place in mind?”
“Surprise me.”
He evens out his breathing as she mucks about. The TARDIS lurches beneath them.
“John.”
Her voice is quiet, but she’s smiling at him. He gets to his feet and takes her hand. She opens the door.
The floor of what looks like a forest is littered with leaves, but they are all different colours, blue and pink and orange and grey and yellow. The sky is the pinky-orange of sunset, although it feels like the middle of the day. The sun is a shade of bright orange. The clouds are fluffy and perfectly white. It looks like someone spilled different cans of paint all over the world. And yet...
“It’s beautiful.”
“You know when you’re a child, and you colour in a picture but you don’t colour it correctly? You colour everythin’ wrong. Purple sky, orange sun. You colour the cows green and the horses pink.
“This is the world that you draw.”
He has no words to properly explain the feeling in his heart. He stares at the colourful world around him and everything stops. He ceases to think.
She slips her hand in his. “I know you think the life I live is always danger and running and scary, alien things but there is always beauty in the world.”
He tears his eyes away from the forest and looks down at her. If his life were normal, if they were back home at earth, he would say something like, yeah, there is, and she would look up and realize he was talking about her and they would kiss and it would be beautiful. But his life is not normal, and he is not allowed to kiss her. She is a thousand miles away from him. She is more unattainable than any of his old girlfriends were, and he wants her more than he’s ever wanted any of them.
She smiles at him. “What d’you wanna do now?”
She tells him that he can have anything in the universe. How greedy of him that he wants the one thing he isn’t allowed to have.
---
Curiosity killed the cat. He knows this. And he knows that if she had wanted him to know, she would have told him. But she is such a mystery to him. Everything he feels is written on his face for her to see, but he knows hardly anything about her and he’s so damn curious. So he asks. One day. It just comes out.
“You said you don’t travel with them anymore.”
“Hmm?”
“Other... Time Lords. Ladies. Time Ladies? Time People. Like you.”
She stares at the ground. Her hand is clenched, her knuckles white. He’s beginning to regret asking.
“No,” she finally says, her voice curt and distant. “Well. Not anymore. No.”
He doesn’t say anything, although his head is bursting with questions. She must realize this, because she continues, her voice quiet, so he has to move closer to her to hear.
“There was a war, John. The Time War. And I had to, really. There was no other choice.
“If you knew- if you knew some of the things I’ve done, you wouldn’t be here. You would leave. You would run. Just like me. Always running.”
He can hear it in her voice. Nine hundred years of pain and loneliness, and a war on her shoulders. And he knows that he will never understand her, and he will never be enough. He is only human. Just a single human heart, fragile and breakable, beating it’s way until he won’t be with her anymore. What can he possibly do for her?
He walks to her and pulls her towards him, hugs her, puts his face in her hair. “I won’t run. I won’t leave.” He puts himself in those words, wills her to believe it, because they are true. He has never spoken truer words, and he never will.
She thaws in his arms.
---
They face terrifying things. Great green farting aliens. He meets Harriet Jones and the Doctor informs him that she will become Britain’s greatest Prime Minister. The leader of the Golden Age. They meet terrible monsters called the Daleks and he sees her fall apart in front of him. And slowly, she becomes more real to him. She isn’t the mysterious alien who was so far off from him. She becomes real. Not quite human. Just real.
“What are you thinking about?” Her lips curl up at the edges and her tongue peeks out of her teeth.
“Nothing.”
You. Always you.
---
“Do you ever just stay in?”
“What?”
“I mean, do you ever just stay in the TARDIS and watch movies, or something.”
She smirks. “Am I boring you?”
“Not at all. It’s just, well, it’d be good to just stay in for a night. Watch movies. Eat popcorn. That kind of stuff.”
“Hmm.” She nods. “What movie?”
“What?”
“Well it all depends on what movie you wanna watch, really.”
“What movies do you have?”
She grins.
---
The Doctor, it turns out, has a lot of movies. Movies made in the 1950’s, movies made in 3056, movies from different planets, movies that he recognizes, like Snow White, but which have been made on different planets and as such are altered slightly. Like, in one version of Snow White she eats the apple and just stays unconscious forever. And in another, the seven dwarves brutally beat the witch to a pulp, and then Prince Charming, as well, just for extra measure.
There are so many movies he’s completely overwhelmed.
“Uhm... well, what’s your favourite movie?” He asks her desperately.
“My favourite movie? In the 900 years I’ve been alive, all the planets I’ve visited, out of all the movies here, you’re asking me what my favourite is?”
“Er... yeah.”
“Bambi.” She says this automatically, not even thinking about it.
“Bambi.”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
“Have you ever seen Bambi?”
“Of course I’ve seen Bambi.”
“Then you should be asking why not.”
He shakes his head in absolute incredulity. Sometimes she seems like this scary alien whom he will never be able to understand. And sometimes, she seems so incredibly human.
“Alright Doctor, let’s watch Bambi.”
---
He cries.
He hasn’t seen Bambi since he was 12, give or take, and he can distinctly remember leaving half way through saying that he was too manly to watch a stupid Disney movie and going into the loo to sob hysterically. Now they’re sitting on the couch together and she is leaning against him and he is trying so hard not to drip snot into her hair.
“John.”
“Mhm?”
“You crying?”
“No.” He wipes his face on his sleeve and tries to compose himself, but she turns around and sees him blubbering like an idiot. A sly grin creeps across her face and he glares at her.
“Oh, shut up.”
“Poor John. S’okay y’know, he becomes the prince.”
He gives her his best ‘if looks could kill’ stares but she just laughs. He smiles at her and takes her hand.
“Just because the ending is happy doesn’t mean what leads up to it is.”
He may be imagining it, but he thinks she cuddles a little closer to him.
“Don’t I know it, John.”
---
Some days, she is a million miles away. Not just from him, but from everything. Her hand is in his but her head is somewhere else, and no matter what he does he can’t seem to bring her back.
It’s one of those days today. They’re walking through Venice in 1237 and she’s talking, but her mouth seems to be moving on its accord, her brain not into it. He keeps shooting glances at her but she doesn’t notice.
“Doctor.”
“Yeah?”
“Let’s go back to the TARDIS.”
He’s a little glum that she doesn’t even protest, just tugs his hand and leads him towards the TARDIS, and he can’t help but sulk. He knows he’s being a baby but sometimes he can’t help it.
When they get back to the TARDIS, he leans against the wall and watches her as she pulls levers and pushes buttons on the TARDIS fondly. He tells himself there is no reason to be afraid of her.
“What’s wrong?” She looks at him and there is a storm in her eyes.
“Can’t you feel it?”
“No.”
She shakes her head and rolls her eyes at the ceiling, as if this was painfully obvious and she couldn’t believe she had even asked. “No, right, of course you don’t. You’re human.”
The way the word rolls off her tongue, he can tell it isn’t meant to be a compliment. He doesn’t answer her, just continues to stare, not sure whether to be angry or scared.
“Something big is coming. Something bad. Some big and bad. Something that even I can’t fix, an’ I can fix almost everything.”
She twines her fingers in her hair, looking almost panicked. He doesn’t understand what’s happening. He gently pries her hands out of her hair and holds them in his, trying to be calm.
“Doctor... whatever it is, it’ll be fine. And well, if it isn’t, that’s alright. Because... well.” He wants to say something corny and cheesy like because we’ll always be together. He never had a problem saying that to his other girlfriends. Maybe because he knew it was a lie. It was just something to say.
But this is real. He truly wants to be here forever. With her. He doesn’t need all of space, doesn’t need time travel, he just needs her. Everything else is just a bonus.
“I mean, we’ve faced... we’ve faced everything! Slitheens and werewolves and big bowls of Jell-O! What can be so big that we can’t face it?”
She looks at him, all of time and space flashing in her eyes. He doesn’t look away. She laughs. It is a desperate sort of laugh, like she’s holding on to something that is slipping away. Then she stands on tiptoe and pushes her face into the space between his neck and shoulder. He thinks she might press her lips against his neck, but he’s probably just imagining that.
“How long are you gonna stay with me?”
“Forever.”