Who Fic - Day at a time
Title: Day at a time
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating/warnings: PG-13 for severe angst
Genre: angst, hurt/comfort
Character/s: Rose/10.5
Spoilers: up to JE
Summary: There’s never been a human Time Lord metacrisis before him and Rose soon discovers why in the harshest way imaginable.
Disclaimer: Doctor Who and all it’s associated characters/situations etc do not belong to me, I’m just borrowing them.
Author’s Note: dedicated to lessien_c who bunnied me for this during our mad MSN conversation last night
~*~
She visits him every day, comes in after work, swings her handbag onto the table and adjusts his blankets as - “Hello there,” she kisses his forehead. “How’re you today?”
He doesn’t answer her but she likes to imagine that his eyelashes flutter or that his hand twitches sometimes with the want to hold hers when she speaks.
It’s enough.
She tells him about her day, even if there’s nothing to tell. The doctor’s told her that it might help.
She’s certain that it won’t but she comes anyway. She talks anyway. Maybe for her piece of mind, maybe just for her sanity.
“We could’ve been…”
She wonders if He knew when He left them here, if He knew this was going to happen. She can’t believe it of Him but some days she just wants to tear her way through the void just so she can scream and rage.
He’s given her a second chance with a false start that she can’t forget.
She can’t forget collapsing to the sand with her hand still caught in his. A bloodied suit jacket and him screaming. Dried blood in his sideburns. Beating his own head against…to stop it from…
They tried to wake him up, to keep him awake but it burned him so, burned until they thought he would go mad with it.
Burned until he finally screamed out the only thing he knew could hold it at bay.
Burned until she finally screamed at them to end it, just end it because even losing him had to be better than seeing him like this.
In a while she runs out of things to say and time to stay and she has to leave, tell him “I’ve got to go,” and she repeats her movements in reverse. Kisses his forehead, adjusts the blankets, sweeps her handbag off the table and then lingers at the foot of the bed for a long moment.
The machines hum and click softly around him like insects, the tubes and wires are the feelers, the antennae searching and holding his body, keeping him safe.
“How’re we going to do this?”
It’s the first thing that she thinks of to say after…she blurts it out really and he considers his answer for a long time. There are too many answers, too many threads, if’s, but’s, what about’s.
“I s’pose…” he pauses, drawls. “We’ll just have to take it one day at a time.”
The last thing he said to her and that’s what she’s doing - taking it one day at a time. Because…well what else can she do?
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” she promises and her hand against the handle of the door shuts her out of his room.
She visits him the next day. She visits him every day. She comes in after work, swings her handbag onto the table and adjusts his blankets as - “Hello there,” she kisses his forehead. “How’re you today?”
He never answers and she never really expects him to but she comes in and she holds his hand and she sits with him and talks to him and she does exactly what he said they would do - together.