Who Fic - all that we could be
Title: All That We Could Be
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating/warnings: G
Genre: romance, AU
Character/s: Ten/Rose
Spoilers: 2x07 but also mentions a bit from the end of “The Stone Rose”
Summary: But the sensation of time is...it’s like...well a pulse I s’pose. I can’t think of any other comparable sensation really. Yeah, a pulse. But the energy of it creates this erratic, pulsing stream of possible timelines literally exploding into being and then curling back around and into themselves and nothingness all at the same time. All these opportunities that don’t come to pass, choices made, questions answered, chances that are lost before they’ve even begun... A slightly shippier twist on The Idiot’s Lantern. Written (and posted belatedly) for the “Time in Flux” ficathon.
Disclaimer: Doctor Who and all its associated characters/situations etc do not belong to me, I’m just borrowing them briefly.
Author's Note: special thanks to pacejunkie for the beta!
~*~
Right. So...this would be the part where I talk wouldn’t it? Right. Erm. Okay. I s’pose...
Well Time Lords don’t just see time. It’s more complex than that. We can feel it, literally, within ourselves. I mean if I focus on it I can feel it ebbing and flowing around me, through me. I can feel it tugging and pulling. The unstoppable march of time. And if I want, I can find out how fast somebody’s body is decaying. At a cellular level I can feel it. If I want to that is.
She looked older and younger all at once with her hair done up, pink headband settled prettily in her badly-in-need-of-a-touch-up roots. He openly admired the complicated whorl of hair at the back of her head but didn’t quite dare touch it after she explained the science behind the creation of it - the use of a selection of smaller mirrors to reflect the back of her head into the TARDIS’s approximation of a dressing table mirror, the multitude of pins and most importantly the hairspray.
He was so taken both with the hairstyle and with her cleverness in executing it using her mirror system that she boldly offered to do his hair as well and although he protested initially he soon discovered that he quite liked the sensation of having someone elses fingers pushing through his frankly rather magnificent mop of hair.
“I didn’t know you liked having your head massaged.” Rose noted with amusement as his eyes drifted blissfully shut.
“Neither did I.” he admitted distantly. “Should’ve guessed really. This body likes being touched.”
Rose’s hands stilled for an almost imperceptable moment. “It does huh?”
“Seems to yeah.” the Doctor mumbled. “Regenerative quirk I’d wager.”
“Course it’s a regeneration quirk.” Rose mumbled. “Why would it be anything else?” Perplexed, the Doctor opened his eyes just in time to see her move forward until she was standing right in between his legs. For a moment he was a little disorientated by her proximity but then he realised that she had moved closer the better to get at his hair and he relaxed fractionally.
“That’s better.” she mumbled and she leant backwards from the hips as she took to his hair with the comb. The Doctor watched her as she worked, fascinated by the concentration on her face as she fastidiously shaped the coiff, occasionally lashing it with hairspray before moving around to do the back. She finished his do off with a final, liberal spray of lacquer and then spun his chair around so that he could check out his reflection in the mirror.
“D’you like it?” Rose rested her chin on his shoulder so that they were both framed in the mirror.
“I didn’t even know my hair could do this.” he admitted, reaching up one hand to smooth an errant piece of fringe back from his face.
“Another regenerative quirk?” Rose teased.
“Nope.” the Doctor grinned cheekily at her reflection. “I’ve just got a very clever companion who also happens to be excellent with hair.”
“You’ve got great hair anyway.” Rose’s eyes darkened a little as they roved over her creation but when she caught his gaze she blushed furiously and looked away. “So you gonna take me to see Elvis or what?”
“Right!” he said loudly and nearly bowled her over during his enthusastic exit from her room. “Yes! Elvis, the 1950’s. Made sure I got the right decade this time.” he added.
“And century?” Rose slipped her small, soft hand into his as they clattered through the halls together and as he turned to glance at her he was struck with a certain amount of horror at how she had grown - and not just because she was wearing high heels.
Her hand was decaying even as he held it in his - skin cells dying and replacing themselves, hundreds of thousands of them every day. With this thought her palm felt gritty suddenly against his and he resisted the urge to let go.
He’s being ridiculous again - she’s just entering her prime, twenty years of age and beautiful. Her life stretches out before her, long and golden and wonderful and thrumming in tune and time with the syncopated time step his hearts beat out when their eyes meet.
“And century.” he affirms and silently dreads the day that she grows old.
~*~
But the sensation of time is...it’s like...well a pulse I s’pose. I can’t think of any other comparable sensation really. Yeah, a pulse. But the energy of it creates this erratic, pulsing stream of possible timelines literally exploding into being and then curling back around and into themselves and nothingness all at the same time. All these opportunities that don’t come to pass, choices made, questions answered, chances that are lost before they’ve even begun...
Florizel Street might have looked innocent enough at first glance but even the orderly symmetry of the houses couldn’t dull the tense overlying atmosphere. As the sky darkened Rose held tighter and tighter to the Doctor’s waist as he drove his little blue scooter from one house to the next. If he noticed he didn’t say anything, but when the sound of a car backfiring two streets away made her jump into his side he reached down automatically and Rose gratefully took his hand in hers.
Clearly a little surprised by the tightness of her grasp, he glanced at her. “Alright?” he asked.
She smiled, a little weakly, in affirmation. “How many houses left?”
“Few more yet.” The Doctor grinned and swung her hand reassuringly even as he led her to the next house. “Once more unto the breach dear friend!”
Rose smiled properly then and they mounted the steps hand in hand, the Doctor eagerly reaching for the bell and then taking to rocking up onto the balls of his feet and back onto his heels as they waited for it to be answered.
It had taken them the better part of the afternoon to ingratiate themselves with the neighbours but even then they had gleaned very little useful information. The knots of people gossiping on each others doorsteps all seemed to finish their conversations as the Doctor and Rose drew within earshot and those who had let them into their homes were either totally clueless or totally terrified.
Drawing herself back into the present, Rose startled when she realised that the Doctor had idly started stroking the back of her hand with his thumb. She glanced at him in surprise and he looked back at her uncomprehendingly.
“What?” he demanded.
“What you doing?” she glanced down at their joined hands.
(The Doctor stilled in his ministrations but didn’t take his hand away. A moment of soundless gaping gave way to stutters and splurts of words but then the door opened and they dropped their hands very suddenly, as though they’d been caught out at something indecent. Much later she would take his hand and smooth her thumb experimentally over the back of it and that tiny geture accompanied by a soft look from her would be enough to prompt him to make a decision that would lead to...)
“Nothing.” he said quickly, taking his hand from hers and linking them behind his back. The lock clicked, heralding the arrival of someone on the other side opening it for them and Rose twisted her hands together in front of her and rested them against her skirt while they waited.
It didn’t mean anything. They held hands all the time after all. It didn’t mean a blessed thing.
The Doctor felt a whisper-soft sigh as another timeline curled into darkness and idly he wondered how many more he would see burn out before he dared to explore further where some of them led.
~*~
Probably the worst thing about time though is that it can be misread. Oh! Oh! It’s like those optical illusion pictures that makes a humans eyes play tricks on their brains. Even when you think you can see the picture properly you can still get tripped up by your own imagination and start seeing something different again. My imagination has...welll a rather bad habit of taking hold of a timeline and running with it. So to speak.
The wind was ferocious so high above the ground and now that the initial surge of adrenalin had begun to wear off, the elements were starting to take their toll on the Doctor - tearing him away and against the aerial even as he was eletrocuted again and again by the Wire.
It hadn’t worked. Why hadn’t it worked? It should’ve worked!
“Oh dear!” the Wire simpered up at him even as he stared in horror. “Has our little plan gone horribly wrong, Doctor?”
In that moment his mind caught hold of one of many timelines and held it against his will - moving forward so fast that he became dizzy with the blur of what could be and more importantly, what would be if he couldn’t think of a way to fix this now.
(The Wire had won. England had become little more than a never ending parade of faceless zombies and the world was in shock. The Wire continued to feed, aided by more witless idiots. She regained her body but she was always hungry and she was always one step ahead of him. Earth began to fall - one country after another and without Rose the Doctor began to despair.
She would have known how to fix this - she had such a knack for saying the right thing at the right...but the best part of her was gone - trapped inside a television set. The future spiralled endlessly down, down, down...
He might have been angry when her faceless body had been found wandering about in the street but he was simply devastated at his inability to return her face to her. When he went to retrieve her body the Doctor wept - one of the few times he had done so since meeting her - angry tears at his own incompetence. He couldn’t bear losing her like this - to have her with him but incomplete.
Hoping to find another way to restore her face he took her on board the TARDIS but was suitably horrified when he realised that the ghostly image of her face he had seen trapped inside the television set at Magpie’s shop seemed to be haunting the monitor of the TARDIS console. She screamed his name soundlessly, never knowing that it was too late, that she would never be restored to her own body.
No matter how hard he wracked his brains, how far he travelled or how much he desperately wanted to fix her he still didn’t know how to save her.)
He was still half caught up in the horrific images of would-be could-be when the Wire began to writhe and scream in pain and he began to realise that - amazingly - somehow he had done it. He tried for nonchalance when he went to collect the video tape and found Tommy flushed with his own small act of heroism. But no amount of nonchalance would fully take away the image of Rose’s faceless body standing in the corner of the console room.
The image was like an accusation, a taunt. But even though he knew that timeline was dead and gone, the memory of it would still haunt him - a terrifying prospect of what might have been.
~*~
The worst though is when there’s a big change in my own timeline. It’s almost like an explosion - light so bright that it fills my whole head as all these tiny threads of possibility weave themselves together and then they start threading into the pre-existing timeline and it becomes this great big complicated tangle that’s impossible to unravel again. When that happens you just...well I just sort of have to go with it. Or, prepare myself for a massive migraine.
After his earlier fears the Doctor surreptitiously kept his fingers crossed in his pockets all the way back to the compound where the police had been keeping the victims of the Wire. He needn’t have worried. They were all there with their faces firmly back in place, milling about and wondering amongst themselves about how they might have gotten there. Tommy ran on ahead to his grandmother but it took the Doctor a moment longer to find Rose amongst the crowd.
It was the pink of her skirt that caught his eye first and the split second where he saw her in profile was enough to make him giddy. Forehead, brow, eyelashes, nose, philtrum, lips and chin - brilliant! A fraction of a second later she must have caught a flash of his pinstripes in her peripheral vision because she turned and smiled broadly when she caught his eye. The apples of her cheeks were high and round for a moment and then she flat out beamed at him and the Doctor quickened his pace until he was practically running to her.
[He swept her into his arms and spun her in a joyous circle, both of them beaming. Rose’s feet lifted momentarily off the floor before she burrowed into his shoulder, her arms tightening around his shoulders. He held her back just as tightly, beaming wordlessly and snugging his head just a little closer to hers...]
Rose held her arms out to him as they met but as the Doctor took her into his arms and spun her around it took him a good few seconds before he realised that he was actually kissing her and not just hugging her as he had initially intended. Somewhere in the back of his brain he registered a sudden explosion of possible new timelines - golden-bright and pulsing intensely like a newly formed sun.
They had kissed before - the soft, searing kiss that had saved her life and ended his on the Game Station; Cassandra’s lip-smashing snog on New Earth; the joyful press of lips he had instigated after a jaunt back to Ancient Rome saw him turned into a statue - but never before had such an action had such a huge effect not just on his own timeline but on hers as well.
“Happy to see me are you?” Rose laughed a little shakily after he’d set her back on her feet.
The Doctor touched a hand to his carefully coiffed hair feeling rather dazed. “I kissed you.” he said stupidly. His brain fizzled uselessly in his skull, rendering him close to incoherent.
“I spotted that yeah.” Rose grinned shyly at him but it soon disappeared when she saw the Doctor sway slightly on his feet. “Doctor? You alright?”
“Bit dizzy.” he admitted, still entranced by the fireworks still going on at the back of his head. There were literally hundreds of timelines now - unfolding like flowers and eagerly twisting together just like their fingers were as Rose tried to steady him with her touch.
What he could see - no, feel - was beautiful. It was overwhelming as well, but in a completely different way to the future that had plagued him not twenty minutes earlier. He could see the two of them together so clearly, could see love and hope and wonder in her eyes, feel the warmth of her burrowing under his skin and into his hearts - as if she hadn’t been there already! But he could also see the potential for pain; for loss and hurt and even complete seperation if he tried to run from what he had now set into motion.
“Doctor?” Rose said again and he felt his head clear slightly, the warm pressure of one of her hands in his and the other palm flat against his middle back grounding him in physical reality instead of in the tangled threads of time that were even now demanding his attention.
“I think.” he said carefully, trying very hard to stop himself from babbling hysterically and frightening her. “I might have just tipped the balance.”
“You’ve done what now?” Rose said, confused.
His tongue darted about in his mouth as he considered his options. What he did next was so very important - would be the shape of all things to come. To fight? Or to let this thread of time run its course.
Oh to hell with it all.
“I’m going to kiss you again.” he blurted decisively and Rose frowned.
“What’s got into you?” she wanted to know but when he put his hand on her cheek, her face softened from confusion into flickering uncertainty. “Doctor?”
“Rose Tyler.” he murmured.
And he dipped his head to meet her lips, their timelines tangling together golden-bright.
~*~
But the point is, when I told you that I’d tipped the balance today...well what I meant is that if I don’t let this happen, if I fight this, then I’m going to lose you. Maybe not straight away, maybe not even for years yet but...
The Doctor took in his first breath in almost a minute and Rose stared at him a moment longer from her perch up on the jump seat. Her voluminous pink skirts were arranged carefully around her and with her head tilted just-so she looked like she’d stepped straight out of a movie still and onto the TARDIS.
“So...you can see the future?” her eyebrows drew together as she spoke. “You can see...our future?”
“Eh...something like that.” the Doctor pulled a face, disliking the phrase but unable to think of a better way to explain it that would actually make any form of sense. “I mean, nothing’s set in stone of course. Every single second whole new timelines are being created and-”
“Doctor?” Rose jumped down off the jump seat and came to stand right in front of him. Placing her hands on his shoulders for emphasis she tried her hardest to look serious but couldn’t quite hide her smile. “Shut. Up.”
For once, he actually did so.
“You know you could’ve just told me that you can see into the future.” Rose shook her head at him and he was reminded forcibly of the day she’d first taken him out for chips. “’Stead of, you know, spending half an hour explainin’ that you kissed me cos of some fireworks display out the back of your head.”
The Doctor mouthed soundlessly for a moment. “It’s an...apt enough description.” he said faintly.
“Fireworks in your brain?” Rose laughed and smoothed his lapels down fondly. “Explains a lot about the way your brain works.”
“Did it make sense though?” the Doctor wondered, beginning to pace the console without even thinking about it. “I was trying to make it make sense...”
“Think the real question,” Rose interrupted as she followed behind him slowly. “Is are you gonna make this kissing thing a regular event or what?”
“Welll...” the Doctor smoothed his hair back nervously. “I s’pose...well what I mean is...”
“You know I’d still stay without the kissing right?” Rose told him seriously, but then her tongue crept in between her teeth. “Be a nice extra though.”
The Doctor considered her a moment and then held out his hand. She took it without any questions asked and squeezed gently. After a long moment under his scrutiny however, she blushed and lowered her eyes. He swung her hand gently and eventually she looked up again although she still didn’t quite meet his eye.
“Never thought you’d pick me.” she admitted.
“Rose,” he countered. “The life I saw without you was no life that I want to live.”
They shared an awkward, tentative smile. And then the Doctor abruptly launched himself at the console.
“So! Shall we try for Elvis again?”
Rose sidled up to him and bumped him with her shoulder. “Right city this time yeah?”
“Absolutely,” the Doctor confirmed, growing only momentarily distracted by the press of Rose Tyler’s lips against his cheek as he worked.
Five minutes later they stepped out of the TARDIS and were met by a rather fantastic view of the Eiffel Tower. The Doctor rubbed the back of his neck in confusion. “Paris? I wasn’t even aiming for Paris!”
“You know,” Rose commented. “For a bloke who can see the future you really have a bad habit of landing us in the wrong places.”
He opened his mouth to protest but then she laughed and her hand was in his and they were running. Her hand was decaying even as he held it in his - skin cells dying and replacing themselves, hundreds of thousands of them every day but the Doctor ignored it.
She had finite time - he’d always known that - but he wasn’t going to waste any more of it. He had seen their potential and he had squandered it for long enough, now it was time to let go and see all that they could be.