Fic: Possibilities, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bananas 2/3
Title: Possibilities, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bananas
Characters: Rose Tyler, Mickey Smith, Jake Simmonds, Pete Tyler, Jackie Tyler, Original Character Tyler, a large number of bananas, and a Mystery Guest Star.
Rating: Teen.
Warnings: None.
Beta: Over the two years - yes, two years - since I started writing this piece of ridiculousness, jlrpuck,
eponymous_rose, and earlgreytea68 have all been kind enough to look it over. They are kind souls, and I do not deserve them.
Spoilers: Most of this was written before series four aired. Therefore, no spoilers past Doomsday - though Donna does get a mention.
Summary: This is, in the inestimable words of mylittlepwny, "THE FIC IN WHICH ROSE KEEPS FINDING BANANAS EVERYWHERE AND IT IS NOT A CONTINUAL PENIS JOKE FROM MICKEY AND JAKE BUT ACTUALLY A FOLLOW-THE-MAGICAL-MYSTICAL-BANANAS-HOME-AGAIN SOMETHING OR OTHER."
Author's Note: At some point this stopped being crack fic. I know - it worries me, too.
Part One
++
“Rose, dinner’s ready!” Jackie’s voice cut through the cool evening air. “That is, if you can find the time in your busy schedule to join us.” A moment later Rose heard her slam the kitchen door closed, the sound echoing across the lawn of the Tyler estate. She sighed and let her head fall back against the wooden wall of Reggie’s old tree house.
Six days since she’d learned that the bananas were falling out of the Void, and she was no closer to discovering what that meant. From the little she knew about the Void, she doubted that the fairly straightforward description of ‘absolute nothingness’ had a fine print clause of ‘aside from the occasional banana’. That left three options, each one more unlikely than the last: the Cybermen, the Daleks, or…
She bit down hard on her bottom lip. Or someone from the other side was sending them through.
The violent surge of hope that thought inspired worried her deeply. It had been years since she’d allowed herself to imagine the impossible; to begin again would be madness. She brushed her fingers over the cool planks beneath her, the wood worn smooth by years of pirate adventures and travel to the farthest reaches of space. Pete had built the tree house for Reggie the summer her brother had turned four, determined to do the work himself. After he’d nearly been knocked unconscious by a two-by-four, Jackie’d forced him to enlist the help of Mickey and Jake. Despite their boasting, it had taken the three men days to manage it, and even then it always tilted slightly to the left. Rose remembered heckling them from a lawn chair while Jackie made pitcher after pitcher of surprisingly strong lemonade and Reggie chased the cat about the garden.
It was a golden, sun-dappled memory, but at the time she’d still ached for the places she would never see, the jokes and fights and danger and all the possibilities of a life she no longer led. Four years ago, she would have given anything for the contentment she felt now.
There was a suspiciously banana-like thunk against the roof of the tree house, and she closed her eyes.
“Rose, I’m hungry!” Reggie wailed from the kitchen door. “Shift it!”
“Evil, gap-toothed little gnome,” she muttered and slipped through the hole in the floor, swinging down the rope ladder to land on the grass beneath the tree. The sun had only just fallen below the horizon, the grey evening sky deepening to a muted blue. She shoved her hands in her jeans pockets and shivered; suddenly, the warm light of the distant kitchen windows seemed incredibly appealing. She hurried across the vast lawn of the estate, her trainers squeaking in the damp grass.
Rose was nearly halfway to the house when something large, brown, and person-shaped appeared in the air just over her head and fell to the ground with a pronounced, “Umph!” Caught mid-stride, she tumbled over the sudden obstruction, arms swinging, and landed face first in the grass.
“Next time,” a muffled, impossibly familiar voice panted, “I’m definitely going to insist on travelling first class. I’m far too old to fly coach.”
She scrambled away from the voice, from the - oh god - pinstriped suit and wild hair and the flushed, narrow face that was just beaming at her.
“So what do you think?” the Doctor asked, propping himself up on his elbows and giving her a mad, feverish grin. “Better than a banana?”
Rose gaped at him, speechless and shaking. He couldn’t be here, but he was - she could still feel the impact of his bony frame against her shins, could see his pale skin shining blue in the evening light, his grin beginning to wilt at the edges as he stared at her, waiting. How could he be waiting? He wasn’t real. He wasn’t here.
Somehow, she found her voice. “Well,” she said slowly, “I don’t know. Bananas are an excellent source of potassium.”
He laughed, a short, jarring sound that seemed too loud in the hushed evening air. There was something in his eyes - nine impossibly long years since she’d seen him last and looking into his eyes she felt every second of it - something that was more than waiting, something more like need. The lines of his body were tightly drawn, his shoulders tense, and there was an unfamiliar restraint in his stillness.
In one smooth movement, she shifted closer to him; he drew in a sharp breath and she felt her own hitch in reply. Lifting her hand, she reached for his face and hesitated, her fingers hovering just above his skin. Then, ever-so-slowly, she let her thumb sweep the line of his cheekbone, her fingertips coming to rest against his temple. His skin was smooth and heated beneath her dew-damp fingers. She pressed her palm to his cheek and felt his jaw shift, tensing at her touch. He held her gaze, his eyes dark and wide.
“Oh,” she said softly. “You’re here.”
At that, his restraint broke. A hand in her hair and another at her back and he’d tackled her to the ground, the grass wet and cold beneath her, his too-warm fingers skimming the skin of her face, of her throat. She wanted to laugh but she didn’t have the air for it, because he was on top of her, chest hard against hers, grinning into her temple and hugging her with a fierceness that made the dark sky above them swim in her eyes, and if this wasn’t the maddest thing that had ever happened to her it was absolutely in the top five. He pulled up and away from her suddenly, his knees digging into the ground on either side of her hips, one forearm pressed against the grass to the left of her head. He looked down at her, his shadowed features almost painfully tender.
“Rose,” he said, lingering over the sound of her name, his fingers dancing over her lips like a breath. “You’re not smiling.”
“Sorry,” she replied, her voice thick. “Too happy to smile.”
His eyebrows arched towards his hairline. “Have you broken your face?”
Rose shook her head mutely, drinking in the sight of him. She took a moment to catalogue the details lost to time and fallible human memory - the lines around his eyes, the quirk of his lips, the slight crookedness of his nose. “You’re really here.” She reached up and mirrored his touch, letting her fingers trace his mouth. His eyes closed as he leaned into the caress, dry lips brushing her skin. “I can tell, because in my dreams you’re not usually this smug.”
His eyes flew open. “Oi!”
She smiled then, and, laughing, threw her arms around his neck, pulling his body back down to hers. “You’re so easy.” She pressed her face into his shoulder and something deep within her tightened at the rasp of his suit coat against her cheek. She dug her fingers into the fabric, her hands trembling, clutching him to her with a desperation that swelled inside her like a wave.
He made a noise low in the back of his throat, and she felt the vibration of it. “I’m not going to disappear, Rose,” he said, his voice rough.
She exhaled in a shuddering laugh. “Promise?”
He reached up and gently disentangled her fingers from his suit, pulling away just far enough to meet her eyes. “Look at me.”
She did. The whites of his eyes shone in the faint light, a hard contrast to the near obsidian of his irises, and his lips were parted, his breath coming fast and shallow. He’s here, she thought, and a part of her still did not believe it. He must have seen the doubt in her eyes, because his grip on her hands tightened.
“Suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that you’re so surprised.” He gave her a shaky half-smile and helped her sit up, one hand pressed to her lower back. “After all, I did say it couldn’t be done, and when am I ever wrong?”
She leaned forward, bending into him so they met shoulder to shoulder. The crown of her head bumped against his. “Aside from nearly all the time, you mean?”
“Yes, aside from that.” He pressed his face to her hair and she felt his fingers slip into her sleeve, stealing up the length of her forearm. “You smell like tree sap,” he murmured, running cool fingertips over the skin at the inside of her elbow.
“New perfume,” she replied, her breath quickening.
“Really?”
“No.” His clever fingers found the sensitive, puckered skin of a long-healed injury, and she gasped. “Doctor.”
“What’s this?” he asked, his mouth against her hair. “They feel like…” His thumb smoothed over the souvenir of a rather disastrous encounter with a time-slipped Deinonychus five winters before. “Claw marks?”
“They’re nothing.” She closed her eyes. “Just old scars.”
“New to me,” he said, and the low-pitched heat of his voice was intoxicating. “Memory doesn’t do you justice, Rose Tyler. Not even mine.” His hand slipped from her sleeve, a moment later settling at the column of her throat, the pad of his thumb brushing over her pulse. “Do you have many?”
His cool fingers at the swell of her jaw; she fought to keep her voice even. “Sorry, I…many what?”
“Scars.”
She opened her eyes and sat back, pulling away to look at him properly. The evening breeze blew her hair into her face, and he helped her push it behind her ear with one hand. She met his steady gaze and understood that this was not an idle question. “A few,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “But that’s life without a dermal regenerator, I suppose.”
He continued to watch her, and she read the silent request in the darkness of his eyes and the hard line of his jaw. So many things to be said, so many questions needing answers (he’d fallen from the sky like a piano in pinstripes and ‘impossible’ didn’t even begin to cover it) but this - this inventory of her life without him - was something he needed, and she’d never been one to deny him.
“Here,” she said, and reached behind her for the long-fingered hand at her back. Slipping her fingers around his narrow wrist, she moved his hand beneath the hem of her jumper, trapping it between wool and warm skin. She could feel her heartbeat in his touch.
His eyes fell closed, his breath stilling.
She paused, unsure, his palm cold against her back. “Doctor?”
He swallowed, and in his face there rose something raw, some old pain that shuddered through him like a fever. Then he opened his eyes, and it was gone.
He gave her a teasing half-grin, the shift effortless and chameleon-quick. “You were going to give me the grand tour?”
“Right this way, sir,” she said lightly, before pulling his hand up along the trail of her spine, past her bra clasp to the sharp angle of her shoulder blade. In seconds he found the scar. He traced it carefully, fingertips smoothing over the length of new, tight skin. She held his gaze and did not tremble. “Bullet graze,” she explained. “Two months ago.”
The Doctor nodded, his expression unchanged. His hand stayed on her back.
She took his free hand in her own and brought it to her face, to the underside of her chin. “The roof of an abandoned building in Cincinnati, Ohio. Nearly fell off - only just caught myself in time.” His thumb brushed over the tiny patch of rough skin. “Last Christmas.”
“Traditional Yuletide alien invasion?”
“Corporate espionage gone awry, actually.” She smiled. “Though the corporations involved weren’t exactly local.”
Then to her forearm, and the long, thin scar that stretched from her elbow down to the outside of her wrist. He whistled, impressed, but she could feel his grip on her tighten. He squinted at the scar, a pale line in the blue twilight, and almost unconsciously his fingers settled at her pulse.
“This is a knife wound,” he said, his voice deceptively mild.
“Close.” Her smile bloomed into a wry, lopsided grin. “I fought a broken dishwasher, and the dishwasher won.”
The Doctor watched her, his eyes shuttered, and for a moment Rose imagined he could see through wool and denim to the scars he couldn’t see, the stories she would never share. Nine years apart and she’d done stupid, terrifying things without him - fantastic things - and she’d learnt that, sometimes, you just couldn’t run fast enough.
She knew she wasn’t immortal. She didn’t want to be.
He released her arm, his face like stone. “Reckless.”
She paused. “Sorry?”
“You’ve always-” He stopped himself. “You should be more careful, Rose. You need to be.”
Her grin sharpened. “I see you haven’t quite moved past that ‘do as I say, not as I do’ phase,” she said pleasantly, through her teeth.
For the first time since he’d appeared, he refused to meet her eyes. “I do fine.”
“Oh, I’m sure.” She sat back on her heels and his hand fell away from the skin of her back. “Is that why you dropped in for a visit? To give me a quick pat on the head and tell me to be careful?”
He stared at her, agitation and exhaustion writ clear in the tightness around his eyes and the sharp line of his mouth. “That,” he said, “was a very stupid thing to say.”
She bristled. “Don’t call me stupid.”
“I didn’t call you stupid. I’ve never called you stupid.” One hand raked violently through his hair, leaving disaster in its wake. “Except, yes, you are a bit stupid. Because you’d have to be, wouldn’t you, not to see what is apparently completely obvious to half the sentient beings in the universe - that is, the fairly well-known fact that I am, for lack of a better term, apparently completely stupidly in love with you.”
She stared at him, open-mouthed.
He frowned to himself, looking rumpled and a little off-balance. “Hadn’t meant to say that, actually. I forgot how irritating you could be.”
She closed her mouth, and then opened it again. “Did you just-”
“I did.” He squirmed, his hand moving to the back of his neck. “Let’s not make a big thing of it, yeah? It’s just something I said.”
“Just something you said,” she repeated, trying not to sound entirely stunned. “All right.”
“I’m not taking it back or anything, mind you, but it’s not something we need to talk about. We can just move on to something else now.”
She pressed the heel of her palm to her temple and closed her eyes. “Move on from the fact that you-”
“That I’m in love with you, yes.” She opened her eyes just in time to catch his horrified expression. “Listen to me - I’ve said it again. I’m in love with you.” His eyes widened. “It’s like some sort of compulsion. I can’t stop myself.”
There really was only one response to that - she laughed. It started as a slightly hysterical giggle, which she tried to muffle by pressing her fingers over her mouth, but it soon grew from a giggle to an outright guffaw. He watched in shock as she fell back onto the damp grass, clutching her stomach and shaking with laughter. “Blimey,” she gasped, wiping tears from her eyes, “that has got to be the rudest declaration of love ever made.”
He lay down beside her, propping his head up on his hand and fitting himself to her side. She could feel the swell of his ribs as he breathed. “The rudest, really? Of all the terribly rude declarations that one rude person has made to another, in the whole rude history of this or any other relatively impolite universe, you think mine puts all the rest to shame?” He thought about this for a moment, and then he grinned. “I think I might be sort of flattered.”
She tugged slightly on the knot of his tie and watched him swallow. “I think you might be sort of mad.”
“Rose,” he said, and though the tone of his voice suggested that there were more words to follow, her finger chose that moment to begin an exploration of the smooth shell of his ear. This path led, quite naturally, to the outline of the nearest sideburn, and tiny hairs tickled her fingertips as she followed curve of his face, brushing along his hairline like a breath until she reached the arch of his forehead. Her hand hovered there for a moment, her fingers light against his skin, and then she let her arm fall back to her side.
His eyes stayed closed, his mouth open and slightly wet. She wasn’t entirely sure he was breathing.
“I don’t…” he began, his voice low. He licked his lips. “I don’t know how to say what I want to say to you.”
Rose smiled and moved her mouth ever-so-slightly closer to his. “Would a quick game of charades help? Three words, first word has one syllable, sounds like-”
He frowned slightly, his eyes still closed. “Rose, I’m serious.”
“So am I,” she said, resting the pad of her thumb against his chin. “More or less.” She smoothed her fingers along the line of his jaw and around to the nape of his neck. She traced the tendons there with the barest touch of her fingernails, and he shuddered. “You’ve never needed to say anything at all.” His eyes opened, and she gave him a small smile. “You’re actually sort of obvious about it.”
His eyebrows drew together and he sputtered indignantly. “Oi, I most certainly am not! I am alien and inscrutable and-”
She threw one leg over his hip and rolled. His back hit the grass with a thud and he blinked up at her, wide-eyed. “Hello,” he said, sounding rather strangled.
She grinned. “Hello.”
“Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you seem to be, well…” His voice faded.
“Straddling you?”
His jaw clenched. “Yes. That.”
She wriggled. “Problem?”
“No,” he breathed. “No, just keeping the lines of communication open.”
“That,” she said, placing a palm over each of his hearts, “is an excellent idea. But then, you’re always full of excellent ideas, aren’t you?” She moved against him; his mouth fell open. “Speaking of excellent ideas…”
He watched her face, his eyes half-lidded and unfocused. “I’m open to suggestions,” he said, his voice low.
“Your hands.”
He frowned. “What about them?”
She glanced down at his side, and he followed her gaze. “You’re pulling up my mum’s lawn.”
His fist immediately relaxed its grip, and a clump of dirt and grass fell from between his fingers. “Oops. I’ll…I can fix that. Well, no, I can’t, but I’ll apologise very nicely.”
“Doctor, a hint?” She leaned over him, her hands sliding to his shoulders, her breasts brushing briefly against his chest. “I don’t care about the lawn.”
“Oh,” he said. He gulped. “Oh. You want me to-”
She gave him a shaky smile. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”
“Oh no,” he said, his face illuminated by a sudden, fierce grin. “No trouble at all.” He raised a hand toward her face, but it paused in mid-air. “Then again, with you trouble is pretty much inevitable.”
She sat up, pulling away from him. Over his noise of protest, she said, “Sorry, I don’t seduce hypocrites. Maybe the next skinny bloke who falls from the sky will be more my type.”
She was surprised by how quickly he moved - one moment he was flat on his back and the next his arm was wrapped around her waist, pulling her flush against him. Which is how she found herself straddling the Doctor’s lap as he cupped her face with one hand and said, quite firmly, “I am your type.”
For once fully able to appreciate the angles and edges of his body against hers, she found she couldn’t disagree. She closed her eyes and focused on breathing, on inhale and exhale. On the tiny swells of breath between them.
“You know,” he said, his thumb traveling the length of her lower lip, “as far as I can recall - and, as you know, I recall rather well - I still have yet to say this.” His hand slipped down to the curve of her throat, and he let his mouth linger just above hers. “I missed you, Rose Tyler.”
She swallowed. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said, and she could feel his smile against her own.
Oh, she thought. So this is how it happens.
Then she felt him jerk back, the arm around her tightening, and a nanosecond later light burned against her closed eyelids. She squinted, his face a blur as her eyes adjusted to the sudden, blinding brightness that illuminated the vast lawn of the Tyler estate.
“Crap,” Rose said. “Floodlights.”
“Floodlights?” He froze. “You mean-”
There was a crackle of static, and an even, mild voice echoed around them: “Everything all right out there, Rose?”
She let out a choked laugh and waved in the direction of the security cameras. “Oh my god,” she said, smiling and entirely mortified. “That’s my dad. I’m sitting in your lap, and that’s my dad.”
The Doctor didn’t move a muscle; he hardly seemed to breathe. “This sort of thing,” he said through his teeth, “is not supposed to happen to me.”
Pete Tyler cleared his throat, and the sound reverberated across the lawn. “Jackie was getting a bit worried, so I thought I’d check up on you. Didn’t realise we had company.” He didn’t bother to hide his amusement. “It’s good to see you again, Doctor. I’m sure Jacks will want you to stay for dinner.”
The Doctor gave the cameras a thumbs-up. “Dinner,” he said around a large, strained grin. “Dinner with your mum.” He laughed without moving his lips. “Save me. Save me or kill me now.”
Rose rolled her eyes. “Shut up. You know you missed her.”
His grin turned genuine and he gave her a small squeeze. “Maybe. But I’ll never admit it.”
The speakers crackled again. “Oh, and Doctor?” Pete’s disembodied voice was stern. “Watch your hands.”
The hand that had settled rather low on her hip twitched like a hunted animal and jerked away. A moment later, the lights blinked out, and the lawn was dark again.
Rose rested her forehead against his shoulder and sighed. “We’ve got to go in now. There’s no escape.”
He snorted. “Oh, so it’s all right for you to complain, but I-” He stopped. “Rose, what is that?”
She twisted, trying to follow his gaze. Her brother’s freckled face was pressed against the kitchen window, his nose turning up like a pig’s snout. “That,” she said, “is Reggie.”
“Reggie?”
“Reginald Prentice Tyler. My brother.” Reggie opened his mouth against the glass and exhaled until his cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk’s. Rose turned back to the Doctor. “He’s eight,” she said, as if that explained everything.
“You have a brother.” The Doctor ran a hand through his hair, a little stunned. “A brother named Reginald.” He shook his head. “Honestly, your mother is a mad woman. Didn’t anyone try to stop her?”
“My mum, after seven hours of labour and no drugs?” She eased off him and stood, brushing grass from her trousers. “Would you have argued?”
He rose to his feet. “I see your point,” he said, and they grinned at each other. After a moment she stuck her hands in her pockets, feeling strangely shy.
“You’re tall,” she said. “I’d forgotten.”
“Your hair is different.” He brushed it out of her eyes, off her forehead. “It doesn’t really suit you.”
“I know.” She shrugged. “It’ll grow out.”
“It was nice long.”
She gave him a small smile. “That was more than a decade ago.”
“It was still nice.”
There was a moment of almost awkward silence, and she was thinking about all the fuss that went into long hair (and wouldn’t it be a bit impractical, given her penchant for tight scrapes and travel without a hair dryer?) when she looked into the Doctor’s eyes and suddenly realised that she was a thirty-year-old woman with a life, he was a restless alien commitment-phobe in the wrong universe, and, despite the impossible joy still fizzing through her, she still had no earthly idea what came next.
She broke the silence with the first coherent question that popped into her head. “Where’s the TARDIS?”
He tucked his hands into his pockets. “Oh, she’ll be along shortly. There was an…” he cleared his throat, “incident of sorts, so we had to take separate flights. As it were.”
She arched one eyebrow. “An incident?”
He rocked back onto his heels and nodded. “Apparently the Villengard military police is still a bit steamed over that nonsense with their munitions division - not that they haven’t since made a tidy little fortune in the daiquiri business, mind you. And, honestly, a simple thanks for vaporising our big nasty weapons factory would have sufficed, but I can’t say I was exactly surprised when my welcome back party was all laser blasters and ‘You there, unhand that banana-’”
There was a distinctly unTARDIS-like crash from a distant grove of trees, and the Doctor grinned. “That’ll be the old girl now.” He offered her his arm. “Want to go say hello?”
Rose looked behind her. Her family’s house was large and solid and familiar, the kitchen windows warm with light. For a moment, she hesitated. She turned back to him.
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I do.”
She slipped her arm through his, and they walked away from the house.
“So,” she said, leaning into his side a little more with each step. “Bananas?”
He blinked down at her. “Oh, you noticed those, did you?”
She smacked his arm. “Noticed them? You maniac, I’ve been drowning in them. Everywhere I go, everywhere I’ve been-” She gave him a stern look. “Mickey had theories, you know. He’s going to be awfully disappointed.”
“Mickey!” he crowed suddenly, making her jump. “How is the old Mr. Mickey, then?”
“Gay,” Rose said.
The Doctor beamed. “Brilliant! Always was a cheerful bloke, when he wasn’t glaring at me and muttering under his breath about girlfriend-snatching alie-” He paused. “That’s not what you meant.”
She smiled into his shoulder. “Nope.”
He thought this over for a moment. “Jake?”
She made an impressed sound in the back of her throat. “Well done. Wouldn’t have thought you’d pick up on that.”
He shrugged. “What can I say? I have a keen understanding of the human mind.”
She patted his arm. “Of course you do, dear.”
His nose wrinkled. “Is that what you’re going to call me from now on? Dear?” He sniffed. “‘What exciting adventures will we have today, dear?’ ‘My, what a spiffy tie you’re wearing, dear.’ ‘No, dear, you have the last biscuit - you satisfy me so completely that I have no need of chocolate.’” He nudged her with his elbow and gave her a suggestive grin. “I like it.”
To her horror, she began to blush. “You,” she said, “are a nutter.”
“And you,” he replied, “are not a little bit odd yourself.” He bent down and brushed his lips against her temple. “Dear.”
She slid her hand down to his and watched as their fingers linked together. “Doctor, when you say from now on, what do you-”
He jumped ahead of her, tugging her along by their joined hands and walking backwards as he spoke. “For shame, Rose Tyler. Aren’t you even the least bit curious about what I was doing with all those bananas?”
She gave him an ‘aw shucks’ sort of look and said, “Gee, I don’t know. Trans-voidal target practice with basic organic matter?”
He stopped walking mid-step; she bumped into him, dropping his hand. “Yes,” he said, staring at her. “That’s exactly what I was doing.”
She nodded. “I figured.” She stepped around him and continued in the direction of the TARDIS. “Theoretically speaking, the boundaries between parallel universes are, in their natural state, porous. There’s the Void in between, of course, but if you could predict an alignment of these naturally occurring gaps it would simply be a matter of slipping through from one side to the other.” She chuckled darkly. “But the Daleks’ Void Ship punched a hole through those boundaries, and the Cybermen nearly fractured them beyond repair. When you sealed the breach, you sealed everything - you had to. No more gaps, no way through.” She felt his stare and smiled thinly at him. “What, you think you say ‘impossible’ and I just take your word for it?”
He took her hand again and squeezed it. “Rose, I-”
She resumed her lecture, ignoring the cold damp seeping through her trainers and socks as she walked. “But eventually things would go back to the way they should be. Time heals all wounds, and so on. The gaps would appear again, and, theoretically speaking, travel between universes would be possible.” She shook her head. “I say ‘theoretically’ because every expert I bullied into talking to me insisted that gap alignments were and would always be impossible to predict, and that even if you could make it through to the other side without getting stranded in the Void for the rest of eternity, there’d be no way to control where or when you’d end up.” She looked up at him. “But you did.”
The Doctor’s hand went to the back of his neck, and his expression turned rueful. “It was,” he said, “a bit like playing darts.”
She watched his profile, blue and shadowed in the fading twilight. “Darts.”
“Yes. Like playing darts while blindfolded in an infinitely large room, with both hands tied behind my back and a rather impatient squadron of 51st century police officers at the door.” He paused. “Also, there was an almost sickening amount of immensely complex mathematics involved.”
She considered this. “And I was the bullseye?”
He smiled. “Quite.”
They passed into a copse of birch trees, white bark shining silver in the moonlight and the glow of the city. They walked in silence for a long moment, hand in hand. Then she said, “I should punch you in the mouth.”
“All right,” he said. “Are you going to tell me why first?”
She stepped in front of him, forcing him to face her. “You could have died.”
He frowned. “But I didn’t.”
“But you could have.” She felt sick to her stomach and suddenly, horribly angry. Her grip on his hand tightened. “I don’t care how clever you are - every time you sent a banana through from your universe to mine you had no idea where it would end up. Maybe a thousand made it here to me - how many more are trapped in the Void? How many missed me entirely and fell into oceans or volcanoes or, I don’t know, poorly supervised vats of acid-”
“Blimey. Rough universe.”
“This isn’t funny,” she said, and it sounded less like words than like a sound someone makes just before they burst into tears. “What if you’d died? What if you’d died and it wasn’t because you were out in the universe being you but because I stood there on that stupid beach crying like some heartsick little fool, and you thought-” She stopped, turned away from him. Dragged the sleeve of her jumper over her eyes, and when she looked up the trees were a pale blur against the night sky. “You stupid idiot,” she said. “You could’ve been liquefied by my office copier.”
He touched her shoulder, his fingers curling over her collarbone. Gently, he pulled her to him, turning her until her cheek rested against the rough fabric of his suit jacket. “I didn’t come here because I thought you needed me, Rose.” He smoothed a hand over her hair. “I knew you didn’t.”
“I did.” She wrapped her fingers around his tie, almost clinging. “I do.”
“Nah. You haven’t needed me for ages. Maybe in the beginning, when every time you went missing I’d find you locked in some room full of zombies or Autons or deadly solar radiation-”
“Yeah,” she said, her voice as dry as paper, “because that sort of thing never happens to you.”
“Exactly my point. Well, not exactly. In the right neighborhood, though.” He held her closer, and his chin bumped against her forehead. “I didn’t come because you needed me.”
It was the perfect opening, and she took it. “Then why?”
The question seemed to take him by surprise. There was a moment of stunned silence. “Well, because I could, I suppose. I never stopped to think-” He paused, and she could feel the tension in the hands on her back, in his chest against hers. “Do you wish I’d stayed away?”
She wanted to laugh, wanted to say no, of course not, have you lost your mind? But she didn’t. She didn’t say anything at all for a long moment, and his hands twitched and fell back to his sides. He stepped away.
“The TARDIS isn’t far,” he said, not meeting her eyes. “Just past those trees.” She watched his back as he walked away. She didn’t follow.
“I have a life here,” she said, and he stopped, a dark silhouette among the pale trees. “I have Mum and Pete and Reggie and Mickey and Jake. I have a job that I’m good at, a job that matters.” She paused. “I matter.”
He made a low, strangled noise and turned back to her. “You’ve always-”
“It’s not the same.” She stepped toward him. “I’ve been in love with you since I was nineteen. But I’m not nineteen anymore, and I’m not twenty. I’m a daughter and a sister and a best friend, and I understand now, I really do. I had the life I wanted and I lost it, so I learned to live for them instead. I pull pranks with Reggie and have tea every Sunday with Mum, and sometimes my best mates and I blow up a spaceship and save the world.” She watched his face for a long moment. “I’m happy.”
His expression was shuttered, impossible to read. “Yes. Well, I’d hoped you would be.”
She shoved her hands in her pockets, hunching her shoulders. “Did you?”
He flinched, his head jerking up, and he finally met her eyes. “Of course. Of course I did. How could you-” He took a step closer, then stopped. “Rose, I-”
She shook her head, stepping back. “I know. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that.” She looked down at her soggy trainers. “I missed you for so long, and all that time I never really thought…” Her voice trailed off. “I don’t know how to feel.”
He exhaled a long breath. “Funny. I know exactly what you mean.” The stiffness of his posture eased, and he offered her his arm. “Cup of tea?”
She gave him a weak smile and slid her hand into the crook of his elbow. “You’re a genius.”
He chuckled, and the sound was only a little strained. “That’s what they tell me.”
The TARDIS had landed on a tree. The birch’s trunk had splintered on impact, and the blue box stood in the middle of the wreckage, tipped at a precarious angle. At the sight Rose’s hand fell from the Doctor’s arm, and she jerked forward into a run. She tripped forward, stumbling over fallen branches, and when she reached the door the wood was warm beneath her hands, almost feverish. She reached for the chain around her neck, and then her hands stilled. She turned and met his eyes, something cold and sharp expanding in the pit of her stomach.
“I lost it,” she said. “The key. I lost it, years ago.”
The chain had slipped from her neck one day, and it’d been nearly a week before she’d noticed it was gone. It had been a small loss, easy to forget amidst the ever-widening sea of things missing. Now her neck felt naked, and she was glad she couldn’t read his expression. For once, she didn’t want to know.
The Doctor nodded. “I thought that might happen,” he said. He walked toward her, stepping carefully around the splintered remains of the birch. When he stood in front of her, he reached into the inside breast pocket of his suit coat. He took her hand and poured the chain into her open palm. The key fell last, warm against her skin where the links of the chain were cool, and she swallowed around the relief in her throat.
“Thank you,” she said.
“It’s your spare,” he said. “I was just carrying it for you.”
Rose fit the key into the lock and opened the door.
It was, for a moment, like stepping into the impossible ship for the first time. She’d forgotten the size of it, the graceful curve of the walls and the hum from beneath her feet. She pressed her palm against a nearby coral strut, steadying herself against a sudden wave of vertigo. She nearly stepped back again, back to the damp grass and steady earth waiting outside. Instead, she leaned her shoulder into the curve of the strut and grinned. Hello, she thought. Bet you didn’t think you’d be seeing me again.
Telepathic or not, the TARDIS wasn’t a person. It didn’t think like a person or feel like a person, and it certainly didn’t answer her with a self-satisfied little hum when she gave it a pat. That would be impossible, and quite silly besides.
“She’s happy to see you,” the Doctor said from behind her, sounding the slightest bit surprised. Rose thought that after the centuries he’d spent shamelessly anthropomorphizing the old girl, it was only natural that the ship should pick up a few ideas of its own.
Rose climbed the stairs. “Maybe she thinks I’m here to do a little spring cleaning,” she said. The console room was wrecked. Wires and emergency masks dangled from the ceiling, and one of the monitors had fallen from the console and lay shattered on the floor. The frayed jump seat was nowhere to be seen, but a striped armchair had been overturned and its upholstery ripped. Scattered across the floor were bits of white china that had probably once been a tea set.
The console itself was almost unrecognizable; while Rose had only learned to use the most basic TARDIS controls, she knew the rest by sight, if not by function. But now nothing looked familiar, and the levers and knobs and dials seemed even more makeshift and haphazard than before. She frowned and pointed. “Is that part of a blender?”
“No.” He gave the console a second, considering look. “Yes.”
She bent down and picked up a piece of broken china. The pattern wasn’t one she remembered. “Doctor, how long-”
He plucked the china out of her hand. “Rose Tyler, I’m ashamed of you. The TARDIS braves the hordes of Villengard, crosses the screaming emptiness of the Void, and somehow lands right here in your back garden, and what do you do? You - heartless, shallow thing - you criticise her housekeeping.”
Rose bit down on a smile. “You’re right. I’m terribly sorry.”
“Apology accepted.” He tossed the shard of china tea set over his shoulder. “Anyway, a little mess is to be expected when one does the impossible.”
She leaned back against the console. “Speaking of.”
“Yes?”
She looked up, tipping her head in the direction of the vaulted ceiling. “The lights are still on.”
He grinned. “You noticed that, did you?”
“I notice all sorts of things. It’s kind of what I do.” She gave him a severe look. “Last time the TARDIS was in this universe, it nearly killed her.”
“Ah, but that was before I invented this.” He reached behind her and pulled a piece of equipment from the console. It was shaped rather like a sea anemone, if sea anemones were made from a Jell-O mold and half a battered transistor radio. “It’s a Vortextual translator circuit. Translation unit.” He paused. “Translating thingy.”
She raised an eyebrow, and he tossed it back onto the console.
“Well,” he said, “I’m still working on the name.”
She nodded, slowly. “It lets the TARDIS draw energy from this universe’s Vortex.”
“That’s a gross oversimplification, but yes. It does pretty much exactly that.” His grin turned rakish. “Impressive, yeah?”
“Very.” She looked at him again, at the deepened lines around his eyes and the touches of grey at his temples. “Nine years is a long time,” she said. She touched his cheek. “It’s been longer for you.”
His smile faded. “Yes,” he said. “Much longer.”
She waited for him to say more; she should have known he wouldn’t. After a moment’s silence he slipped his hand into hers, pulling it away from his face. “You know,” he said, “I forgot to ask.” The calloused pad of his thumb brushed her palm. “Are you married?”
Rose paused, very carefully. “Are you?”
“No! Of course not!” He sputtered for a moment, taking a step back. “Why would you even-”
“You do all sorts of mad things. Don’t see why you couldn’t do that as well.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m not married.”
“Oh.” A look of deep and uncomfortable concentration passed over his face. “Are you currently or have you recently been in some other sort of exclusive, committed relationship?”
She blinked at him. “Are you deranged?”
“It’s a perfectly legitimate question!”
“It’s a perfectly idiotic question. Don’t you think I would’ve mentioned it if I-” She stopped, her eyes narrowing. “And since when do you know words like committed, and relationship?”
He took another few steps closer, and she found herself trapped between his body and the console. “I know a lot of words, Rose.”
“I don’t doubt it.” She leaned forward, smirking. “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus wasn’t about what you thought it would be, huh?”
He frowned. “That title is misleading.”
“You should stop reading. It might give you Ideas.”
“It wasn’t the books,” he said. He turned away, his hand moving to the back of his neck. “Well, it was, but I had this friend - you would’ve liked her, I think, or possibly hated her, I can never tell with those sorts of things - I met her just after Canary Wharf, so she knew about-” He made a complicated hand gesture, which Rose translated as you and parallel universes and these inconvenient human emotions. “And this friend, she said - and by said I mean shouted - that I was a bloody alien idiot if just I showed up at your door expecting you to still-” He made another awkward hand gesture, “you know. Particularly given that we’d never actually…” The hand continued to flap, somewhat desperately.
Rose took pity on him. “Had sex?”
The Doctor blushed. Fiercely. “Talked. We’d never talked about anything.” He dragged a hand over his face, looking wretched. “I knew I’d be terrible at this, but I was rather hoping that you might help the conversation along a little.”
She frowned at him. “I’d help the conversation along a bit more if I knew what the hell we were having a conversation about.”
The Doctor rolled his eyes to the ceiling in exasperation. “Stubborn bloody humans,” he said, and kissed her.
It wasn’t a very long kiss, or a particularly good one. Rose barely had time to register the press of his fingers against her face and his hair eclipsing the green-gold light of the time rotor before he was pulling away again, his lips leaving hers with a soft sort of smacking sound. He didn’t move his hands from her face; his fingers were cool against her skin.
“I didn’t come here because I thought you needed me,” he said, his voice low. “I knew you didn’t. I didn’t come because I missed you, though I did. I didn’t come because I love you, though I think I must, given the evidence.” His thumb traced the curve of her cheek. “I came back because I’m old and tired and selfish, Rose, and I wanted to see you again. Because I finally could, and I didn’t think of the consequences.”
Rose closed her eyes. There was a sour taste in her mouth, like metal and blood and heartbreak, and she almost didn’t have the breath to say what needed to be said. “I can’t go with you.” She turned her face away, and his hands fell to his sides. “I’m sorry. I can’t leave them again.”
There was a silence. “If you can’t come with me,” he said, “can I come with you?”
Her eyes snapped open. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” he said, his expression wary. “What do you want it to mean?”
Her fingers curled into fists. “Doctor-”
“It means that I would stay.” He seemed to warm to the idea, and he took her hand, twining their fingers together. “That we would stay. Here. In this universe. On this planet, if you want. Just-” He winced. “Not in your mother’s house.”
She shook her head. “No. You can’t stop travelling.”
“Who says?”
She stepped to the side, away from the console and the clearly mad alien man beside it. “It’s not that simple.”
He grinned, arms spread wide. “Why not?”
Rose tripped over the wrecked armchair, and a bit of stuffing clung to her leg. “You’re insane. I once saw you have a mild nervous breakdown over the very thought of being stuck with a mortgage and a job and a normal sort of life. You can’t possibly think-”
The Doctor followed her, stepping around the armchair with ease. “Do you have a mortgage?”
“Of course not,” she said. “I rent a flat.”
His grin widened. “Spend a lot of time in this flat, do you?”
Rose’s flat wasn’t much more than a convenient place to keep her luggage between trips; she glared at him, backing away until she hit the metal railing. “I work a lot.”
He leaned in close, his hands gripping the railing on either side of her, caging her in. “And what sort of work do you do, again?”
“Oh, you know,” she said blithely. “Save the planet. Negotiate intergalactic treaties. Fill out paperwork. Your typical 9 to 5.”
“I’m very good with paperwork.”
It was a struggle not to laugh at the very idea of the Doctor filling out expense reports. “Are you saying that you want to stay in this universe so you can be my personal assistant?”
“Is that a job offer?” he asked. She’d meant it as a joke, of course, but he wasn’t laughing. Wasn’t even smiling, and the serious set of his jaw made her stomach clench in anxiety, or excitement, or some other emotion entirely, and suddenly the narrow procession of day after day after day seemed to expand before her, unfurling into a world of possibilities.
“You’re mad,” she said. He didn’t contradict her.
“We’re a good team,” he said. “A great one, even. And we’ll have the TARDIS for the occasional off-planet holiday.”
She closed her eyes and gripped the metal railing behind her, a little overwhelmed. She loved her job, she did, but the thought of travelling in the TARDIS again, of living that life again, the life she’d thought she lost forever - “You know you’ll have to put out,” she said. “If you’re going to be my secretary.”
He chuckled then, his breath cool against her cheek, and she felt his fingers skim the nape of her neck, curling into her too-short hair. “I believe you’ll find,” he said, “that the correct term is executive assistant.”
Eyes still closed, she leaned into him until their noses bumped. Her lips brushed his chin and she smiled against the rasp of his stubble. “How about sidekick? Does sidekick work for you?”
His fingers found the curve of her skull, the soft skin behind her ears. She shivered into the touch, and could almost hear him grin. “Whatever you say, Ms. Tyler,” he said silkily, and she was about to laugh when he dipped his head and touched his mouth to hers, hands in her hair, lips still and slightly open. They stood for an airless moment, poised between a kiss and something less, and then she let herself fall into him, let her fingers clutch at the familiar fabric of his suit coat and pull him desperately closer, and when she finally opened her mouth under his she was glad of every moment they’d spent apart.
“Absence makes the heart grow fonder?” he asked, lips at the corner of her mouth, at the delicate skin over her pulse.
“No,” she said, breathless. “A watched pot never boils.”
She staggered backwards, his hands at her waist, all hunger and hard edges and sudden heat as the metal railing groaned under their weight. “Isn’t that,” he murmured, “the pot calling the kettle black?”
“I am not the pot in this scenario,” she said, and then bit down on a particularly undignified noise when his teeth scraped her collarbone and the world flared white around the edges.
His hands slipped beneath her jumper, long fingers tracing her ribs. “I think,” he said, “that we’ve reached the limits of this particular metaphor,” and then there was a horrible screeching sound and a lurch and the railing collapsed out from under them. Rose landed hard on the grated floor below; the Doctor landed on Rose.
Rose took a moment to assess her injuries, then blinked the stars from her eyes. “Cool,” she said, hooking her leg around his hips. “Horizontal surface.”
“I love you,” the Doctor said, and kissed her, open-mouthed and somewhat messily.
“Oh, gross,” Reggie said from the broken railing. “That’s just wrong.”
++
Part Three
Characters: Rose Tyler, Mickey Smith, Jake Simmonds, Pete Tyler, Jackie Tyler, Original Character Tyler, a large number of bananas, and a Mystery Guest Star.
Rating: Teen.
Warnings: None.
Beta: Over the two years - yes, two years - since I started writing this piece of ridiculousness, jlrpuck,
eponymous_rose, and earlgreytea68 have all been kind enough to look it over. They are kind souls, and I do not deserve them.
Spoilers: Most of this was written before series four aired. Therefore, no spoilers past Doomsday - though Donna does get a mention.
Summary: This is, in the inestimable words of mylittlepwny, "THE FIC IN WHICH ROSE KEEPS FINDING BANANAS EVERYWHERE AND IT IS NOT A CONTINUAL PENIS JOKE FROM MICKEY AND JAKE BUT ACTUALLY A FOLLOW-THE-MAGICAL-MYSTICAL-BANANAS-HOME-AGAIN SOMETHING OR OTHER."
Author's Note: At some point this stopped being crack fic. I know - it worries me, too.
Part One
++
“Rose, dinner’s ready!” Jackie’s voice cut through the cool evening air. “That is, if you can find the time in your busy schedule to join us.” A moment later Rose heard her slam the kitchen door closed, the sound echoing across the lawn of the Tyler estate. She sighed and let her head fall back against the wooden wall of Reggie’s old tree house.
Six days since she’d learned that the bananas were falling out of the Void, and she was no closer to discovering what that meant. From the little she knew about the Void, she doubted that the fairly straightforward description of ‘absolute nothingness’ had a fine print clause of ‘aside from the occasional banana’. That left three options, each one more unlikely than the last: the Cybermen, the Daleks, or…
She bit down hard on her bottom lip. Or someone from the other side was sending them through.
The violent surge of hope that thought inspired worried her deeply. It had been years since she’d allowed herself to imagine the impossible; to begin again would be madness. She brushed her fingers over the cool planks beneath her, the wood worn smooth by years of pirate adventures and travel to the farthest reaches of space. Pete had built the tree house for Reggie the summer her brother had turned four, determined to do the work himself. After he’d nearly been knocked unconscious by a two-by-four, Jackie’d forced him to enlist the help of Mickey and Jake. Despite their boasting, it had taken the three men days to manage it, and even then it always tilted slightly to the left. Rose remembered heckling them from a lawn chair while Jackie made pitcher after pitcher of surprisingly strong lemonade and Reggie chased the cat about the garden.
It was a golden, sun-dappled memory, but at the time she’d still ached for the places she would never see, the jokes and fights and danger and all the possibilities of a life she no longer led. Four years ago, she would have given anything for the contentment she felt now.
There was a suspiciously banana-like thunk against the roof of the tree house, and she closed her eyes.
“Rose, I’m hungry!” Reggie wailed from the kitchen door. “Shift it!”
“Evil, gap-toothed little gnome,” she muttered and slipped through the hole in the floor, swinging down the rope ladder to land on the grass beneath the tree. The sun had only just fallen below the horizon, the grey evening sky deepening to a muted blue. She shoved her hands in her jeans pockets and shivered; suddenly, the warm light of the distant kitchen windows seemed incredibly appealing. She hurried across the vast lawn of the estate, her trainers squeaking in the damp grass.
Rose was nearly halfway to the house when something large, brown, and person-shaped appeared in the air just over her head and fell to the ground with a pronounced, “Umph!” Caught mid-stride, she tumbled over the sudden obstruction, arms swinging, and landed face first in the grass.
“Next time,” a muffled, impossibly familiar voice panted, “I’m definitely going to insist on travelling first class. I’m far too old to fly coach.”
She scrambled away from the voice, from the - oh god - pinstriped suit and wild hair and the flushed, narrow face that was just beaming at her.
“So what do you think?” the Doctor asked, propping himself up on his elbows and giving her a mad, feverish grin. “Better than a banana?”
Rose gaped at him, speechless and shaking. He couldn’t be here, but he was - she could still feel the impact of his bony frame against her shins, could see his pale skin shining blue in the evening light, his grin beginning to wilt at the edges as he stared at her, waiting. How could he be waiting? He wasn’t real. He wasn’t here.
Somehow, she found her voice. “Well,” she said slowly, “I don’t know. Bananas are an excellent source of potassium.”
He laughed, a short, jarring sound that seemed too loud in the hushed evening air. There was something in his eyes - nine impossibly long years since she’d seen him last and looking into his eyes she felt every second of it - something that was more than waiting, something more like need. The lines of his body were tightly drawn, his shoulders tense, and there was an unfamiliar restraint in his stillness.
In one smooth movement, she shifted closer to him; he drew in a sharp breath and she felt her own hitch in reply. Lifting her hand, she reached for his face and hesitated, her fingers hovering just above his skin. Then, ever-so-slowly, she let her thumb sweep the line of his cheekbone, her fingertips coming to rest against his temple. His skin was smooth and heated beneath her dew-damp fingers. She pressed her palm to his cheek and felt his jaw shift, tensing at her touch. He held her gaze, his eyes dark and wide.
“Oh,” she said softly. “You’re here.”
At that, his restraint broke. A hand in her hair and another at her back and he’d tackled her to the ground, the grass wet and cold beneath her, his too-warm fingers skimming the skin of her face, of her throat. She wanted to laugh but she didn’t have the air for it, because he was on top of her, chest hard against hers, grinning into her temple and hugging her with a fierceness that made the dark sky above them swim in her eyes, and if this wasn’t the maddest thing that had ever happened to her it was absolutely in the top five. He pulled up and away from her suddenly, his knees digging into the ground on either side of her hips, one forearm pressed against the grass to the left of her head. He looked down at her, his shadowed features almost painfully tender.
“Rose,” he said, lingering over the sound of her name, his fingers dancing over her lips like a breath. “You’re not smiling.”
“Sorry,” she replied, her voice thick. “Too happy to smile.”
His eyebrows arched towards his hairline. “Have you broken your face?”
Rose shook her head mutely, drinking in the sight of him. She took a moment to catalogue the details lost to time and fallible human memory - the lines around his eyes, the quirk of his lips, the slight crookedness of his nose. “You’re really here.” She reached up and mirrored his touch, letting her fingers trace his mouth. His eyes closed as he leaned into the caress, dry lips brushing her skin. “I can tell, because in my dreams you’re not usually this smug.”
His eyes flew open. “Oi!”
She smiled then, and, laughing, threw her arms around his neck, pulling his body back down to hers. “You’re so easy.” She pressed her face into his shoulder and something deep within her tightened at the rasp of his suit coat against her cheek. She dug her fingers into the fabric, her hands trembling, clutching him to her with a desperation that swelled inside her like a wave.
He made a noise low in the back of his throat, and she felt the vibration of it. “I’m not going to disappear, Rose,” he said, his voice rough.
She exhaled in a shuddering laugh. “Promise?”
He reached up and gently disentangled her fingers from his suit, pulling away just far enough to meet her eyes. “Look at me.”
She did. The whites of his eyes shone in the faint light, a hard contrast to the near obsidian of his irises, and his lips were parted, his breath coming fast and shallow. He’s here, she thought, and a part of her still did not believe it. He must have seen the doubt in her eyes, because his grip on her hands tightened.
“Suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that you’re so surprised.” He gave her a shaky half-smile and helped her sit up, one hand pressed to her lower back. “After all, I did say it couldn’t be done, and when am I ever wrong?”
She leaned forward, bending into him so they met shoulder to shoulder. The crown of her head bumped against his. “Aside from nearly all the time, you mean?”
“Yes, aside from that.” He pressed his face to her hair and she felt his fingers slip into her sleeve, stealing up the length of her forearm. “You smell like tree sap,” he murmured, running cool fingertips over the skin at the inside of her elbow.
“New perfume,” she replied, her breath quickening.
“Really?”
“No.” His clever fingers found the sensitive, puckered skin of a long-healed injury, and she gasped. “Doctor.”
“What’s this?” he asked, his mouth against her hair. “They feel like…” His thumb smoothed over the souvenir of a rather disastrous encounter with a time-slipped Deinonychus five winters before. “Claw marks?”
“They’re nothing.” She closed her eyes. “Just old scars.”
“New to me,” he said, and the low-pitched heat of his voice was intoxicating. “Memory doesn’t do you justice, Rose Tyler. Not even mine.” His hand slipped from her sleeve, a moment later settling at the column of her throat, the pad of his thumb brushing over her pulse. “Do you have many?”
His cool fingers at the swell of her jaw; she fought to keep her voice even. “Sorry, I…many what?”
“Scars.”
She opened her eyes and sat back, pulling away to look at him properly. The evening breeze blew her hair into her face, and he helped her push it behind her ear with one hand. She met his steady gaze and understood that this was not an idle question. “A few,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “But that’s life without a dermal regenerator, I suppose.”
He continued to watch her, and she read the silent request in the darkness of his eyes and the hard line of his jaw. So many things to be said, so many questions needing answers (he’d fallen from the sky like a piano in pinstripes and ‘impossible’ didn’t even begin to cover it) but this - this inventory of her life without him - was something he needed, and she’d never been one to deny him.
“Here,” she said, and reached behind her for the long-fingered hand at her back. Slipping her fingers around his narrow wrist, she moved his hand beneath the hem of her jumper, trapping it between wool and warm skin. She could feel her heartbeat in his touch.
His eyes fell closed, his breath stilling.
She paused, unsure, his palm cold against her back. “Doctor?”
He swallowed, and in his face there rose something raw, some old pain that shuddered through him like a fever. Then he opened his eyes, and it was gone.
He gave her a teasing half-grin, the shift effortless and chameleon-quick. “You were going to give me the grand tour?”
“Right this way, sir,” she said lightly, before pulling his hand up along the trail of her spine, past her bra clasp to the sharp angle of her shoulder blade. In seconds he found the scar. He traced it carefully, fingertips smoothing over the length of new, tight skin. She held his gaze and did not tremble. “Bullet graze,” she explained. “Two months ago.”
The Doctor nodded, his expression unchanged. His hand stayed on her back.
She took his free hand in her own and brought it to her face, to the underside of her chin. “The roof of an abandoned building in Cincinnati, Ohio. Nearly fell off - only just caught myself in time.” His thumb brushed over the tiny patch of rough skin. “Last Christmas.”
“Traditional Yuletide alien invasion?”
“Corporate espionage gone awry, actually.” She smiled. “Though the corporations involved weren’t exactly local.”
Then to her forearm, and the long, thin scar that stretched from her elbow down to the outside of her wrist. He whistled, impressed, but she could feel his grip on her tighten. He squinted at the scar, a pale line in the blue twilight, and almost unconsciously his fingers settled at her pulse.
“This is a knife wound,” he said, his voice deceptively mild.
“Close.” Her smile bloomed into a wry, lopsided grin. “I fought a broken dishwasher, and the dishwasher won.”
The Doctor watched her, his eyes shuttered, and for a moment Rose imagined he could see through wool and denim to the scars he couldn’t see, the stories she would never share. Nine years apart and she’d done stupid, terrifying things without him - fantastic things - and she’d learnt that, sometimes, you just couldn’t run fast enough.
She knew she wasn’t immortal. She didn’t want to be.
He released her arm, his face like stone. “Reckless.”
She paused. “Sorry?”
“You’ve always-” He stopped himself. “You should be more careful, Rose. You need to be.”
Her grin sharpened. “I see you haven’t quite moved past that ‘do as I say, not as I do’ phase,” she said pleasantly, through her teeth.
For the first time since he’d appeared, he refused to meet her eyes. “I do fine.”
“Oh, I’m sure.” She sat back on her heels and his hand fell away from the skin of her back. “Is that why you dropped in for a visit? To give me a quick pat on the head and tell me to be careful?”
He stared at her, agitation and exhaustion writ clear in the tightness around his eyes and the sharp line of his mouth. “That,” he said, “was a very stupid thing to say.”
She bristled. “Don’t call me stupid.”
“I didn’t call you stupid. I’ve never called you stupid.” One hand raked violently through his hair, leaving disaster in its wake. “Except, yes, you are a bit stupid. Because you’d have to be, wouldn’t you, not to see what is apparently completely obvious to half the sentient beings in the universe - that is, the fairly well-known fact that I am, for lack of a better term, apparently completely stupidly in love with you.”
She stared at him, open-mouthed.
He frowned to himself, looking rumpled and a little off-balance. “Hadn’t meant to say that, actually. I forgot how irritating you could be.”
She closed her mouth, and then opened it again. “Did you just-”
“I did.” He squirmed, his hand moving to the back of his neck. “Let’s not make a big thing of it, yeah? It’s just something I said.”
“Just something you said,” she repeated, trying not to sound entirely stunned. “All right.”
“I’m not taking it back or anything, mind you, but it’s not something we need to talk about. We can just move on to something else now.”
She pressed the heel of her palm to her temple and closed her eyes. “Move on from the fact that you-”
“That I’m in love with you, yes.” She opened her eyes just in time to catch his horrified expression. “Listen to me - I’ve said it again. I’m in love with you.” His eyes widened. “It’s like some sort of compulsion. I can’t stop myself.”
There really was only one response to that - she laughed. It started as a slightly hysterical giggle, which she tried to muffle by pressing her fingers over her mouth, but it soon grew from a giggle to an outright guffaw. He watched in shock as she fell back onto the damp grass, clutching her stomach and shaking with laughter. “Blimey,” she gasped, wiping tears from her eyes, “that has got to be the rudest declaration of love ever made.”
He lay down beside her, propping his head up on his hand and fitting himself to her side. She could feel the swell of his ribs as he breathed. “The rudest, really? Of all the terribly rude declarations that one rude person has made to another, in the whole rude history of this or any other relatively impolite universe, you think mine puts all the rest to shame?” He thought about this for a moment, and then he grinned. “I think I might be sort of flattered.”
She tugged slightly on the knot of his tie and watched him swallow. “I think you might be sort of mad.”
“Rose,” he said, and though the tone of his voice suggested that there were more words to follow, her finger chose that moment to begin an exploration of the smooth shell of his ear. This path led, quite naturally, to the outline of the nearest sideburn, and tiny hairs tickled her fingertips as she followed curve of his face, brushing along his hairline like a breath until she reached the arch of his forehead. Her hand hovered there for a moment, her fingers light against his skin, and then she let her arm fall back to her side.
His eyes stayed closed, his mouth open and slightly wet. She wasn’t entirely sure he was breathing.
“I don’t…” he began, his voice low. He licked his lips. “I don’t know how to say what I want to say to you.”
Rose smiled and moved her mouth ever-so-slightly closer to his. “Would a quick game of charades help? Three words, first word has one syllable, sounds like-”
He frowned slightly, his eyes still closed. “Rose, I’m serious.”
“So am I,” she said, resting the pad of her thumb against his chin. “More or less.” She smoothed her fingers along the line of his jaw and around to the nape of his neck. She traced the tendons there with the barest touch of her fingernails, and he shuddered. “You’ve never needed to say anything at all.” His eyes opened, and she gave him a small smile. “You’re actually sort of obvious about it.”
His eyebrows drew together and he sputtered indignantly. “Oi, I most certainly am not! I am alien and inscrutable and-”
She threw one leg over his hip and rolled. His back hit the grass with a thud and he blinked up at her, wide-eyed. “Hello,” he said, sounding rather strangled.
She grinned. “Hello.”
“Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you seem to be, well…” His voice faded.
“Straddling you?”
His jaw clenched. “Yes. That.”
She wriggled. “Problem?”
“No,” he breathed. “No, just keeping the lines of communication open.”
“That,” she said, placing a palm over each of his hearts, “is an excellent idea. But then, you’re always full of excellent ideas, aren’t you?” She moved against him; his mouth fell open. “Speaking of excellent ideas…”
He watched her face, his eyes half-lidded and unfocused. “I’m open to suggestions,” he said, his voice low.
“Your hands.”
He frowned. “What about them?”
She glanced down at his side, and he followed her gaze. “You’re pulling up my mum’s lawn.”
His fist immediately relaxed its grip, and a clump of dirt and grass fell from between his fingers. “Oops. I’ll…I can fix that. Well, no, I can’t, but I’ll apologise very nicely.”
“Doctor, a hint?” She leaned over him, her hands sliding to his shoulders, her breasts brushing briefly against his chest. “I don’t care about the lawn.”
“Oh,” he said. He gulped. “Oh. You want me to-”
She gave him a shaky smile. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”
“Oh no,” he said, his face illuminated by a sudden, fierce grin. “No trouble at all.” He raised a hand toward her face, but it paused in mid-air. “Then again, with you trouble is pretty much inevitable.”
She sat up, pulling away from him. Over his noise of protest, she said, “Sorry, I don’t seduce hypocrites. Maybe the next skinny bloke who falls from the sky will be more my type.”
She was surprised by how quickly he moved - one moment he was flat on his back and the next his arm was wrapped around her waist, pulling her flush against him. Which is how she found herself straddling the Doctor’s lap as he cupped her face with one hand and said, quite firmly, “I am your type.”
For once fully able to appreciate the angles and edges of his body against hers, she found she couldn’t disagree. She closed her eyes and focused on breathing, on inhale and exhale. On the tiny swells of breath between them.
“You know,” he said, his thumb traveling the length of her lower lip, “as far as I can recall - and, as you know, I recall rather well - I still have yet to say this.” His hand slipped down to the curve of her throat, and he let his mouth linger just above hers. “I missed you, Rose Tyler.”
She swallowed. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said, and she could feel his smile against her own.
Oh, she thought. So this is how it happens.
Then she felt him jerk back, the arm around her tightening, and a nanosecond later light burned against her closed eyelids. She squinted, his face a blur as her eyes adjusted to the sudden, blinding brightness that illuminated the vast lawn of the Tyler estate.
“Crap,” Rose said. “Floodlights.”
“Floodlights?” He froze. “You mean-”
There was a crackle of static, and an even, mild voice echoed around them: “Everything all right out there, Rose?”
She let out a choked laugh and waved in the direction of the security cameras. “Oh my god,” she said, smiling and entirely mortified. “That’s my dad. I’m sitting in your lap, and that’s my dad.”
The Doctor didn’t move a muscle; he hardly seemed to breathe. “This sort of thing,” he said through his teeth, “is not supposed to happen to me.”
Pete Tyler cleared his throat, and the sound reverberated across the lawn. “Jackie was getting a bit worried, so I thought I’d check up on you. Didn’t realise we had company.” He didn’t bother to hide his amusement. “It’s good to see you again, Doctor. I’m sure Jacks will want you to stay for dinner.”
The Doctor gave the cameras a thumbs-up. “Dinner,” he said around a large, strained grin. “Dinner with your mum.” He laughed without moving his lips. “Save me. Save me or kill me now.”
Rose rolled her eyes. “Shut up. You know you missed her.”
His grin turned genuine and he gave her a small squeeze. “Maybe. But I’ll never admit it.”
The speakers crackled again. “Oh, and Doctor?” Pete’s disembodied voice was stern. “Watch your hands.”
The hand that had settled rather low on her hip twitched like a hunted animal and jerked away. A moment later, the lights blinked out, and the lawn was dark again.
Rose rested her forehead against his shoulder and sighed. “We’ve got to go in now. There’s no escape.”
He snorted. “Oh, so it’s all right for you to complain, but I-” He stopped. “Rose, what is that?”
She twisted, trying to follow his gaze. Her brother’s freckled face was pressed against the kitchen window, his nose turning up like a pig’s snout. “That,” she said, “is Reggie.”
“Reggie?”
“Reginald Prentice Tyler. My brother.” Reggie opened his mouth against the glass and exhaled until his cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk’s. Rose turned back to the Doctor. “He’s eight,” she said, as if that explained everything.
“You have a brother.” The Doctor ran a hand through his hair, a little stunned. “A brother named Reginald.” He shook his head. “Honestly, your mother is a mad woman. Didn’t anyone try to stop her?”
“My mum, after seven hours of labour and no drugs?” She eased off him and stood, brushing grass from her trousers. “Would you have argued?”
He rose to his feet. “I see your point,” he said, and they grinned at each other. After a moment she stuck her hands in her pockets, feeling strangely shy.
“You’re tall,” she said. “I’d forgotten.”
“Your hair is different.” He brushed it out of her eyes, off her forehead. “It doesn’t really suit you.”
“I know.” She shrugged. “It’ll grow out.”
“It was nice long.”
She gave him a small smile. “That was more than a decade ago.”
“It was still nice.”
There was a moment of almost awkward silence, and she was thinking about all the fuss that went into long hair (and wouldn’t it be a bit impractical, given her penchant for tight scrapes and travel without a hair dryer?) when she looked into the Doctor’s eyes and suddenly realised that she was a thirty-year-old woman with a life, he was a restless alien commitment-phobe in the wrong universe, and, despite the impossible joy still fizzing through her, she still had no earthly idea what came next.
She broke the silence with the first coherent question that popped into her head. “Where’s the TARDIS?”
He tucked his hands into his pockets. “Oh, she’ll be along shortly. There was an…” he cleared his throat, “incident of sorts, so we had to take separate flights. As it were.”
She arched one eyebrow. “An incident?”
He rocked back onto his heels and nodded. “Apparently the Villengard military police is still a bit steamed over that nonsense with their munitions division - not that they haven’t since made a tidy little fortune in the daiquiri business, mind you. And, honestly, a simple thanks for vaporising our big nasty weapons factory would have sufficed, but I can’t say I was exactly surprised when my welcome back party was all laser blasters and ‘You there, unhand that banana-’”
There was a distinctly unTARDIS-like crash from a distant grove of trees, and the Doctor grinned. “That’ll be the old girl now.” He offered her his arm. “Want to go say hello?”
Rose looked behind her. Her family’s house was large and solid and familiar, the kitchen windows warm with light. For a moment, she hesitated. She turned back to him.
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I do.”
She slipped her arm through his, and they walked away from the house.
“So,” she said, leaning into his side a little more with each step. “Bananas?”
He blinked down at her. “Oh, you noticed those, did you?”
She smacked his arm. “Noticed them? You maniac, I’ve been drowning in them. Everywhere I go, everywhere I’ve been-” She gave him a stern look. “Mickey had theories, you know. He’s going to be awfully disappointed.”
“Mickey!” he crowed suddenly, making her jump. “How is the old Mr. Mickey, then?”
“Gay,” Rose said.
The Doctor beamed. “Brilliant! Always was a cheerful bloke, when he wasn’t glaring at me and muttering under his breath about girlfriend-snatching alie-” He paused. “That’s not what you meant.”
She smiled into his shoulder. “Nope.”
He thought this over for a moment. “Jake?”
She made an impressed sound in the back of her throat. “Well done. Wouldn’t have thought you’d pick up on that.”
He shrugged. “What can I say? I have a keen understanding of the human mind.”
She patted his arm. “Of course you do, dear.”
His nose wrinkled. “Is that what you’re going to call me from now on? Dear?” He sniffed. “‘What exciting adventures will we have today, dear?’ ‘My, what a spiffy tie you’re wearing, dear.’ ‘No, dear, you have the last biscuit - you satisfy me so completely that I have no need of chocolate.’” He nudged her with his elbow and gave her a suggestive grin. “I like it.”
To her horror, she began to blush. “You,” she said, “are a nutter.”
“And you,” he replied, “are not a little bit odd yourself.” He bent down and brushed his lips against her temple. “Dear.”
She slid her hand down to his and watched as their fingers linked together. “Doctor, when you say from now on, what do you-”
He jumped ahead of her, tugging her along by their joined hands and walking backwards as he spoke. “For shame, Rose Tyler. Aren’t you even the least bit curious about what I was doing with all those bananas?”
She gave him an ‘aw shucks’ sort of look and said, “Gee, I don’t know. Trans-voidal target practice with basic organic matter?”
He stopped walking mid-step; she bumped into him, dropping his hand. “Yes,” he said, staring at her. “That’s exactly what I was doing.”
She nodded. “I figured.” She stepped around him and continued in the direction of the TARDIS. “Theoretically speaking, the boundaries between parallel universes are, in their natural state, porous. There’s the Void in between, of course, but if you could predict an alignment of these naturally occurring gaps it would simply be a matter of slipping through from one side to the other.” She chuckled darkly. “But the Daleks’ Void Ship punched a hole through those boundaries, and the Cybermen nearly fractured them beyond repair. When you sealed the breach, you sealed everything - you had to. No more gaps, no way through.” She felt his stare and smiled thinly at him. “What, you think you say ‘impossible’ and I just take your word for it?”
He took her hand again and squeezed it. “Rose, I-”
She resumed her lecture, ignoring the cold damp seeping through her trainers and socks as she walked. “But eventually things would go back to the way they should be. Time heals all wounds, and so on. The gaps would appear again, and, theoretically speaking, travel between universes would be possible.” She shook her head. “I say ‘theoretically’ because every expert I bullied into talking to me insisted that gap alignments were and would always be impossible to predict, and that even if you could make it through to the other side without getting stranded in the Void for the rest of eternity, there’d be no way to control where or when you’d end up.” She looked up at him. “But you did.”
The Doctor’s hand went to the back of his neck, and his expression turned rueful. “It was,” he said, “a bit like playing darts.”
She watched his profile, blue and shadowed in the fading twilight. “Darts.”
“Yes. Like playing darts while blindfolded in an infinitely large room, with both hands tied behind my back and a rather impatient squadron of 51st century police officers at the door.” He paused. “Also, there was an almost sickening amount of immensely complex mathematics involved.”
She considered this. “And I was the bullseye?”
He smiled. “Quite.”
They passed into a copse of birch trees, white bark shining silver in the moonlight and the glow of the city. They walked in silence for a long moment, hand in hand. Then she said, “I should punch you in the mouth.”
“All right,” he said. “Are you going to tell me why first?”
She stepped in front of him, forcing him to face her. “You could have died.”
He frowned. “But I didn’t.”
“But you could have.” She felt sick to her stomach and suddenly, horribly angry. Her grip on his hand tightened. “I don’t care how clever you are - every time you sent a banana through from your universe to mine you had no idea where it would end up. Maybe a thousand made it here to me - how many more are trapped in the Void? How many missed me entirely and fell into oceans or volcanoes or, I don’t know, poorly supervised vats of acid-”
“Blimey. Rough universe.”
“This isn’t funny,” she said, and it sounded less like words than like a sound someone makes just before they burst into tears. “What if you’d died? What if you’d died and it wasn’t because you were out in the universe being you but because I stood there on that stupid beach crying like some heartsick little fool, and you thought-” She stopped, turned away from him. Dragged the sleeve of her jumper over her eyes, and when she looked up the trees were a pale blur against the night sky. “You stupid idiot,” she said. “You could’ve been liquefied by my office copier.”
He touched her shoulder, his fingers curling over her collarbone. Gently, he pulled her to him, turning her until her cheek rested against the rough fabric of his suit jacket. “I didn’t come here because I thought you needed me, Rose.” He smoothed a hand over her hair. “I knew you didn’t.”
“I did.” She wrapped her fingers around his tie, almost clinging. “I do.”
“Nah. You haven’t needed me for ages. Maybe in the beginning, when every time you went missing I’d find you locked in some room full of zombies or Autons or deadly solar radiation-”
“Yeah,” she said, her voice as dry as paper, “because that sort of thing never happens to you.”
“Exactly my point. Well, not exactly. In the right neighborhood, though.” He held her closer, and his chin bumped against her forehead. “I didn’t come because you needed me.”
It was the perfect opening, and she took it. “Then why?”
The question seemed to take him by surprise. There was a moment of stunned silence. “Well, because I could, I suppose. I never stopped to think-” He paused, and she could feel the tension in the hands on her back, in his chest against hers. “Do you wish I’d stayed away?”
She wanted to laugh, wanted to say no, of course not, have you lost your mind? But she didn’t. She didn’t say anything at all for a long moment, and his hands twitched and fell back to his sides. He stepped away.
“The TARDIS isn’t far,” he said, not meeting her eyes. “Just past those trees.” She watched his back as he walked away. She didn’t follow.
“I have a life here,” she said, and he stopped, a dark silhouette among the pale trees. “I have Mum and Pete and Reggie and Mickey and Jake. I have a job that I’m good at, a job that matters.” She paused. “I matter.”
He made a low, strangled noise and turned back to her. “You’ve always-”
“It’s not the same.” She stepped toward him. “I’ve been in love with you since I was nineteen. But I’m not nineteen anymore, and I’m not twenty. I’m a daughter and a sister and a best friend, and I understand now, I really do. I had the life I wanted and I lost it, so I learned to live for them instead. I pull pranks with Reggie and have tea every Sunday with Mum, and sometimes my best mates and I blow up a spaceship and save the world.” She watched his face for a long moment. “I’m happy.”
His expression was shuttered, impossible to read. “Yes. Well, I’d hoped you would be.”
She shoved her hands in her pockets, hunching her shoulders. “Did you?”
He flinched, his head jerking up, and he finally met her eyes. “Of course. Of course I did. How could you-” He took a step closer, then stopped. “Rose, I-”
She shook her head, stepping back. “I know. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that.” She looked down at her soggy trainers. “I missed you for so long, and all that time I never really thought…” Her voice trailed off. “I don’t know how to feel.”
He exhaled a long breath. “Funny. I know exactly what you mean.” The stiffness of his posture eased, and he offered her his arm. “Cup of tea?”
She gave him a weak smile and slid her hand into the crook of his elbow. “You’re a genius.”
He chuckled, and the sound was only a little strained. “That’s what they tell me.”
The TARDIS had landed on a tree. The birch’s trunk had splintered on impact, and the blue box stood in the middle of the wreckage, tipped at a precarious angle. At the sight Rose’s hand fell from the Doctor’s arm, and she jerked forward into a run. She tripped forward, stumbling over fallen branches, and when she reached the door the wood was warm beneath her hands, almost feverish. She reached for the chain around her neck, and then her hands stilled. She turned and met his eyes, something cold and sharp expanding in the pit of her stomach.
“I lost it,” she said. “The key. I lost it, years ago.”
The chain had slipped from her neck one day, and it’d been nearly a week before she’d noticed it was gone. It had been a small loss, easy to forget amidst the ever-widening sea of things missing. Now her neck felt naked, and she was glad she couldn’t read his expression. For once, she didn’t want to know.
The Doctor nodded. “I thought that might happen,” he said. He walked toward her, stepping carefully around the splintered remains of the birch. When he stood in front of her, he reached into the inside breast pocket of his suit coat. He took her hand and poured the chain into her open palm. The key fell last, warm against her skin where the links of the chain were cool, and she swallowed around the relief in her throat.
“Thank you,” she said.
“It’s your spare,” he said. “I was just carrying it for you.”
Rose fit the key into the lock and opened the door.
It was, for a moment, like stepping into the impossible ship for the first time. She’d forgotten the size of it, the graceful curve of the walls and the hum from beneath her feet. She pressed her palm against a nearby coral strut, steadying herself against a sudden wave of vertigo. She nearly stepped back again, back to the damp grass and steady earth waiting outside. Instead, she leaned her shoulder into the curve of the strut and grinned. Hello, she thought. Bet you didn’t think you’d be seeing me again.
Telepathic or not, the TARDIS wasn’t a person. It didn’t think like a person or feel like a person, and it certainly didn’t answer her with a self-satisfied little hum when she gave it a pat. That would be impossible, and quite silly besides.
“She’s happy to see you,” the Doctor said from behind her, sounding the slightest bit surprised. Rose thought that after the centuries he’d spent shamelessly anthropomorphizing the old girl, it was only natural that the ship should pick up a few ideas of its own.
Rose climbed the stairs. “Maybe she thinks I’m here to do a little spring cleaning,” she said. The console room was wrecked. Wires and emergency masks dangled from the ceiling, and one of the monitors had fallen from the console and lay shattered on the floor. The frayed jump seat was nowhere to be seen, but a striped armchair had been overturned and its upholstery ripped. Scattered across the floor were bits of white china that had probably once been a tea set.
The console itself was almost unrecognizable; while Rose had only learned to use the most basic TARDIS controls, she knew the rest by sight, if not by function. But now nothing looked familiar, and the levers and knobs and dials seemed even more makeshift and haphazard than before. She frowned and pointed. “Is that part of a blender?”
“No.” He gave the console a second, considering look. “Yes.”
She bent down and picked up a piece of broken china. The pattern wasn’t one she remembered. “Doctor, how long-”
He plucked the china out of her hand. “Rose Tyler, I’m ashamed of you. The TARDIS braves the hordes of Villengard, crosses the screaming emptiness of the Void, and somehow lands right here in your back garden, and what do you do? You - heartless, shallow thing - you criticise her housekeeping.”
Rose bit down on a smile. “You’re right. I’m terribly sorry.”
“Apology accepted.” He tossed the shard of china tea set over his shoulder. “Anyway, a little mess is to be expected when one does the impossible.”
She leaned back against the console. “Speaking of.”
“Yes?”
She looked up, tipping her head in the direction of the vaulted ceiling. “The lights are still on.”
He grinned. “You noticed that, did you?”
“I notice all sorts of things. It’s kind of what I do.” She gave him a severe look. “Last time the TARDIS was in this universe, it nearly killed her.”
“Ah, but that was before I invented this.” He reached behind her and pulled a piece of equipment from the console. It was shaped rather like a sea anemone, if sea anemones were made from a Jell-O mold and half a battered transistor radio. “It’s a Vortextual translator circuit. Translation unit.” He paused. “Translating thingy.”
She raised an eyebrow, and he tossed it back onto the console.
“Well,” he said, “I’m still working on the name.”
She nodded, slowly. “It lets the TARDIS draw energy from this universe’s Vortex.”
“That’s a gross oversimplification, but yes. It does pretty much exactly that.” His grin turned rakish. “Impressive, yeah?”
“Very.” She looked at him again, at the deepened lines around his eyes and the touches of grey at his temples. “Nine years is a long time,” she said. She touched his cheek. “It’s been longer for you.”
His smile faded. “Yes,” he said. “Much longer.”
She waited for him to say more; she should have known he wouldn’t. After a moment’s silence he slipped his hand into hers, pulling it away from his face. “You know,” he said, “I forgot to ask.” The calloused pad of his thumb brushed her palm. “Are you married?”
Rose paused, very carefully. “Are you?”
“No! Of course not!” He sputtered for a moment, taking a step back. “Why would you even-”
“You do all sorts of mad things. Don’t see why you couldn’t do that as well.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m not married.”
“Oh.” A look of deep and uncomfortable concentration passed over his face. “Are you currently or have you recently been in some other sort of exclusive, committed relationship?”
She blinked at him. “Are you deranged?”
“It’s a perfectly legitimate question!”
“It’s a perfectly idiotic question. Don’t you think I would’ve mentioned it if I-” She stopped, her eyes narrowing. “And since when do you know words like committed, and relationship?”
He took another few steps closer, and she found herself trapped between his body and the console. “I know a lot of words, Rose.”
“I don’t doubt it.” She leaned forward, smirking. “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus wasn’t about what you thought it would be, huh?”
He frowned. “That title is misleading.”
“You should stop reading. It might give you Ideas.”
“It wasn’t the books,” he said. He turned away, his hand moving to the back of his neck. “Well, it was, but I had this friend - you would’ve liked her, I think, or possibly hated her, I can never tell with those sorts of things - I met her just after Canary Wharf, so she knew about-” He made a complicated hand gesture, which Rose translated as you and parallel universes and these inconvenient human emotions. “And this friend, she said - and by said I mean shouted - that I was a bloody alien idiot if just I showed up at your door expecting you to still-” He made another awkward hand gesture, “you know. Particularly given that we’d never actually…” The hand continued to flap, somewhat desperately.
Rose took pity on him. “Had sex?”
The Doctor blushed. Fiercely. “Talked. We’d never talked about anything.” He dragged a hand over his face, looking wretched. “I knew I’d be terrible at this, but I was rather hoping that you might help the conversation along a little.”
She frowned at him. “I’d help the conversation along a bit more if I knew what the hell we were having a conversation about.”
The Doctor rolled his eyes to the ceiling in exasperation. “Stubborn bloody humans,” he said, and kissed her.
It wasn’t a very long kiss, or a particularly good one. Rose barely had time to register the press of his fingers against her face and his hair eclipsing the green-gold light of the time rotor before he was pulling away again, his lips leaving hers with a soft sort of smacking sound. He didn’t move his hands from her face; his fingers were cool against her skin.
“I didn’t come here because I thought you needed me,” he said, his voice low. “I knew you didn’t. I didn’t come because I missed you, though I did. I didn’t come because I love you, though I think I must, given the evidence.” His thumb traced the curve of her cheek. “I came back because I’m old and tired and selfish, Rose, and I wanted to see you again. Because I finally could, and I didn’t think of the consequences.”
Rose closed her eyes. There was a sour taste in her mouth, like metal and blood and heartbreak, and she almost didn’t have the breath to say what needed to be said. “I can’t go with you.” She turned her face away, and his hands fell to his sides. “I’m sorry. I can’t leave them again.”
There was a silence. “If you can’t come with me,” he said, “can I come with you?”
Her eyes snapped open. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” he said, his expression wary. “What do you want it to mean?”
Her fingers curled into fists. “Doctor-”
“It means that I would stay.” He seemed to warm to the idea, and he took her hand, twining their fingers together. “That we would stay. Here. In this universe. On this planet, if you want. Just-” He winced. “Not in your mother’s house.”
She shook her head. “No. You can’t stop travelling.”
“Who says?”
She stepped to the side, away from the console and the clearly mad alien man beside it. “It’s not that simple.”
He grinned, arms spread wide. “Why not?”
Rose tripped over the wrecked armchair, and a bit of stuffing clung to her leg. “You’re insane. I once saw you have a mild nervous breakdown over the very thought of being stuck with a mortgage and a job and a normal sort of life. You can’t possibly think-”
The Doctor followed her, stepping around the armchair with ease. “Do you have a mortgage?”
“Of course not,” she said. “I rent a flat.”
His grin widened. “Spend a lot of time in this flat, do you?”
Rose’s flat wasn’t much more than a convenient place to keep her luggage between trips; she glared at him, backing away until she hit the metal railing. “I work a lot.”
He leaned in close, his hands gripping the railing on either side of her, caging her in. “And what sort of work do you do, again?”
“Oh, you know,” she said blithely. “Save the planet. Negotiate intergalactic treaties. Fill out paperwork. Your typical 9 to 5.”
“I’m very good with paperwork.”
It was a struggle not to laugh at the very idea of the Doctor filling out expense reports. “Are you saying that you want to stay in this universe so you can be my personal assistant?”
“Is that a job offer?” he asked. She’d meant it as a joke, of course, but he wasn’t laughing. Wasn’t even smiling, and the serious set of his jaw made her stomach clench in anxiety, or excitement, or some other emotion entirely, and suddenly the narrow procession of day after day after day seemed to expand before her, unfurling into a world of possibilities.
“You’re mad,” she said. He didn’t contradict her.
“We’re a good team,” he said. “A great one, even. And we’ll have the TARDIS for the occasional off-planet holiday.”
She closed her eyes and gripped the metal railing behind her, a little overwhelmed. She loved her job, she did, but the thought of travelling in the TARDIS again, of living that life again, the life she’d thought she lost forever - “You know you’ll have to put out,” she said. “If you’re going to be my secretary.”
He chuckled then, his breath cool against her cheek, and she felt his fingers skim the nape of her neck, curling into her too-short hair. “I believe you’ll find,” he said, “that the correct term is executive assistant.”
Eyes still closed, she leaned into him until their noses bumped. Her lips brushed his chin and she smiled against the rasp of his stubble. “How about sidekick? Does sidekick work for you?”
His fingers found the curve of her skull, the soft skin behind her ears. She shivered into the touch, and could almost hear him grin. “Whatever you say, Ms. Tyler,” he said silkily, and she was about to laugh when he dipped his head and touched his mouth to hers, hands in her hair, lips still and slightly open. They stood for an airless moment, poised between a kiss and something less, and then she let herself fall into him, let her fingers clutch at the familiar fabric of his suit coat and pull him desperately closer, and when she finally opened her mouth under his she was glad of every moment they’d spent apart.
“Absence makes the heart grow fonder?” he asked, lips at the corner of her mouth, at the delicate skin over her pulse.
“No,” she said, breathless. “A watched pot never boils.”
She staggered backwards, his hands at her waist, all hunger and hard edges and sudden heat as the metal railing groaned under their weight. “Isn’t that,” he murmured, “the pot calling the kettle black?”
“I am not the pot in this scenario,” she said, and then bit down on a particularly undignified noise when his teeth scraped her collarbone and the world flared white around the edges.
His hands slipped beneath her jumper, long fingers tracing her ribs. “I think,” he said, “that we’ve reached the limits of this particular metaphor,” and then there was a horrible screeching sound and a lurch and the railing collapsed out from under them. Rose landed hard on the grated floor below; the Doctor landed on Rose.
Rose took a moment to assess her injuries, then blinked the stars from her eyes. “Cool,” she said, hooking her leg around his hips. “Horizontal surface.”
“I love you,” the Doctor said, and kissed her, open-mouthed and somewhat messily.
“Oh, gross,” Reggie said from the broken railing. “That’s just wrong.”
++
Part Three