FIC: The Long Night (PG) Nine & Rose
Title: The Long Night
Author: Jess
Character / Pairing: Nine & Rose... read into it what you will
Rating: PG
Word Count: ~ 2200
Disclaimer: BBC and Russell Davies blah blah blah. I'm broke, I'm making no money, and if I had the Doctor at my disposal, I would not be writing about him.
Spoilers: General series one spoilers.
Summary: After they say goodbye to Adam, the Doctor and Rose get tied up.
Author's Notes: Written for the first ficathon at time_x_space in response to mockingbird39's request for Nine's confusion over Rose's flirtation. I didn't work anyone else in, dear, so I hope it's okay. As ever, thanks to my darling beta, erin2326 who never lets me down.
O lente, lente currite noctis equi!
Run slowly, slowly, horses of the night!
Ovid, "Amore"
XxX
Hour One
Earth Time: 9:49 PM
"This isn't so bad, not really," said the Doctor, rustling the chains that bound him to a very ill-tempered looking machine that Rose had immediately diagnosed as a bomb. After all, it was ticking in a cantankerous manner and gleaming maliciously at them from the center of the dull grey room. The Doctor called it a MOAB - a Massive Ordnance Air Blast. In other words, a bomb with a fancy-dancy title.
Rose shot him the most resentful look he'd seen from her in reply.
"I've been in worse predicaments, you know," he told her, trying to keep his tone light but sounding strained.
She turned her head away.
"Come on, Rose," he cajoled. "At least they haven't eaten us! I remember this one time on Trillix Five, I - "
Rose whirled toward him once more, and he stopped talking. Her eyes were narrowed into slits, and for a startling moment, he saw Jackie Tyler. He closed his mouth and swallowed hard. Perhaps that story was best left for another day.
X
Hour Two
Earth Time: 10:07 PM
"How long they gonna keep us in here?" Rose asked, her voice small.
"Oh, we're talking now, are we?" He'd meant for it to come out bitingly harsh, but instead, he heard relief in his voice.
Rose was watching him, the malice gone from her features, and Jackie Tyler gone from the room. The Doctor breathed easier.
"I imagine they'll leave us here until the bomb goes or we do." He grinned. "But judging by the sound of that ticking inside, I'd say we'll outlast it."
"Well that's a relief, I s'pose." Rose did not sound relieved.
The Doctor opened his mouth, but Rose cut across him. "If you say one thing about us going out with a bang, I'll make sure you don't live to see it."
He would have told her that he could probably live through the blast - the bomb wasn't that big. But he didn't think it pertinent, so he said nothing.
X
Hour Three
Earth Time: 11:16 PM
Rose had shifted into and out of every position imaginable, and she now lay on her side as best as she could so as not to pull on her bound arms.
"Did someone travel with you before you met me?" she asked.
The Doctor looked down at her; she seemed to fixate on a point just above the bomb's yellow display clock - an altogether too-friendly attribute to something ticking so ominously.
"Yes." There, that wasn't a lie.
"Who?"
"Why d'you want to know?"
Rose sat up and fixed him with the full force of what she obviously considered a penetrating glare. He laughed at her.
She wrinkled her nose. "Who wouldn't want to know?"
"Me."
She didn't like that answer. Just like a human - they only ask questions because they want the opportunity to tell you their answers. Typical. He told her as much.
"Well, what else are we going to talk about?" she snapped back. "I mean, we might die in here, and I hardly know anything about you."
The Doctor folded his arms across his chest. "Fine. Who did you travel with before you met me?"
Rose was so surprised, she answered the question. "No one," she said. "I didn't go anywhere until I met you."
"Shouldn't that be all that's important, then?"
She opened her mouth and then shut it again, apparently not willing to satisfy him with an answer. He looked away, smiling.
X
Hour Four
Earth Time: 12:42 AM
"...and then," Rose interrupted herself with another cry of laughter. "And then! Mickey tried to jump in after the duck, shouting that he was going to save it!"
"Tried to?"
"He tripped over the curb!"
Both Rose and the Doctor laughed soundly at that.
As Rose caught her breath, she added, "Poor Mick! He had to get stitches in his chin and he still has cinders in his knee."
The Doctor nodded. "The scar. I've seen it. He wears it like he won it on the battlefield."
"We all wear our scars that way." She held out her hand for him to inspect. Just where her little finger met the back of her left hand, there was a faint scar, a perfectly straight line that made it seem as though the finger had been separated entirely at one time and had been welded into place. "I cut myself with a hatchet in the woods up north when I was twelve." She chuckled softly, turning inward for a moment. "Mum nearly had my head for this finger."
Coming back to him, she grinned. "This one... this one is my pride n' joy." She leaned back, bent her leg at the knee, and pulled her denim skirt up a bit to bare more of her thigh. Barely visible, but quite long and jagged - impressively so, the Doctor thought - was a narrow white line, opalescent against the milk white of Rose's leg. "I had to get a tetanus shot for it. Mickey n' me snuck through a rusty fence, and I got caught. You want to see something frightening, go back and take a look at my mum when I got home after that!" She laughed again, and once more, the Doctor felt excluded. He looked away from her face to her bare thigh, then down to the concrete floor near her ankle.
"You got any scars, Doctor?" Rose asked. The timbre of her voice had dropped, and the Doctor knew instinctively that Rose's thigh would still be on display if he looked. It was. He turned away.
"No."
Her voice turned petulant. "You're joking me. Everyone's got scars. No mishaps with a slippery knife? No tragic tumbles down the stairs? No broken wrists that pop out of place at the most inopportune moment?" Her tone was light, teasing. He suspected her tongue would be poking out between her teeth, but he couldn't bear to look.
"Nothing like that." He could have added that all scars weren't worn on the flesh, hard-won prizes to pass around when conversation turned slow, but he wouldn't be unkind.
When he dared to look at her again, she was resting her chin on her knees and staring at nothing at all. She looked peaceful, but he knew she wasn't. He wanted to ask what was wrong, but he didn't.
X
Hour Five
Earth Time: 1:13 AM
"How long did that take?"
"Six days."
"Doesn't seem so bad."
"It is when you're not inside of the ship."
"Oh." She seemed to consider, then snorted. "Brilliant, you are. I don't know how you've survived this long."
"I don't either." He hated the melancholy in his voice, but the ticking had grown steadily more insistent. Rose hadn't noticed.
Rose shifted, and her head was now resting on his shoulder. He knew she had to be as uncomfortable as he was - both of their bound arms were pulled to their chain's extent to allow them to be so close. But for all his deeply ingrained mistrust of physical intimacy, he did love the feel of the little furnace of a girl so close by, radiating heat like a fired kiln. It made him feel life in a different way, made his blood boil.
"Tell me a secret, something no one knows."
"You first."
After a long moment in which the Doctor was sure she'd fallen asleep, she whispered, "When I was sixteen, I woke up in the hospital after a night out with my friends and my... Mum never found out." She took a deep breath, and the Doctor felt a stab in his chest at the hitch he heard there. "I didn't..." she began, but fell silent. After a few minutes, she prompted, "Your turn."
He didn't hesitate. "Your eyes are very green when you smile."
Rose laughed, obviously tickled. "That's not what I meant. I mean something about you."
There were so many secrets he could have shared, but he dared not. He didn't want to burden her. It wouldn't have been right. So he said, "I had a family, once. No one knows that anymore."
X
Hour Six
Earth Time: 2:25 AM
"Then there's Cygnus."
"Which one?" Rose was sleepy, he could hear it in her voice.
"From the head of Draco, it's the next brightest star in a line. The wings. Then there's a very bright star."
"A swan's wings so close to the head of a dragon? Can't be good," she murmured drowsily. "Fink of the singed feathers."
"Albireo is the beak. It's a double star, one blue and one yellow."
"Albireo," she said slowly, tasting the word. "Whassat mean?"
He smiled widely and his cheek touched hers lightly. "Nothing, not really. It was a typo... someone mistranslated the Arabic into Latin."
Rose laughed softly. The Doctor feared she was teetering on the edge of sleep. He'd be alone without her shortly.
"A famous typo. Like Oprah."
And with that, she was lost to him. He thought it would be selfish to wake her, so he closed his eyes and tried to join her.
X
Hour Seven
Earth Time: 3:16 AM
The Doctor watched Rose. Every now and again, she shifted or snuffled or snored in sleep, and sometimes, she murmured things in her quiet, thoughtless, human way.
"Cannons," she whispered. "Horsefish."
The Doctor smiled. That must have been some battle in her brain.
"No. The mirror foxes."
Her pupils chased an invisible film playing on the insides of her eyelids. Rose, asleep. Rose, at rest. Rose, dreaming. Rose, peaceful.
She sighed in sleep. The Doctor sighed too.
X
Hour Eight
Earth Time: 4:45 AM
The Doctor dreamed.
He was alone, naturally. The world around him was blank. Was it a chance to begin again? Or was it the end?
He felt hot all over... he was sweating, burning up from within, the way he imagined a fever might feel. He even reached up to touch his forehead. He dropped it just as quickly - it was such a silly, human thing to do. He'd obviously been spending too much time with the stupid apes.
Just as quickly as it had begun, it stopped. His body temperature dropped, regulated. He felt the double beat inside his chest as he always did. He breathed deep. But the smell of sulfur burned his nostrils, then his lungs, filling them. The blankness turned grey - smoke. Where there was smoke there was -
Fire.
The grey went orange, red. Hot. He felt the blood vessels on his cheeks expand, trying to cool him. It was no use - this was it. He was through.
He welcomed it, closed his eyes, exhilarated.
But then a voice. "I bring life."
He opened his eyes. There stood Rose, resplendent in gold. She was saving him.
The Doctor woke up.
X
Hour Nine
Earth Time: 5:02 AM
Rose was watching him. "You were mumbling in your sleep before. I heard you."
He grinned. "Yeah, well, so were you. You said 'horsefish.'"
She was thrown for a moment. "I what?" She shook her head. "What did you dream?"
The Doctor took a deep breath. What could he possibly say?
"I dreamt we were going to be all right." That wasn't necessarily a lie. It might even have been the truth.
"Will we, Doctor? Will we be all right?"
"Yes."
X
Hour Ten
Earth Time 6:18
"The sun will be up soon," the Doctor said.
"Will it? How will we know?"
"I'll know."
"Oh, right, turn of the Earth and all that." She was teasing him again. They were bound to a bomb which was slowly counting down to nothing, and she was still teasing him.
He grinned. "You just watch, Rose Tyler. There's more to me than just words."
"Oh? Well prove it. And quick. I'd like to watch the sun rise in the year... what was it?"
"1969. Don't you remember? We were going to watch the moon landing. From the moon."
"Oh, yes. But you overshot."
"I didn't! The TARDIS... oh, never mind." He leaned back against the sleek orange bomb, turned to his left, and shook his shoulders.
"You all right, Doctor. I shouldn't grab hold of your tongue, should I?"
"Why would you do that?" he asked, alarmed.
Rose laughed. "In case you swallow it."
He lifted an eyebrow, then smiled at her. He lifted the sonic screwdriver in his free hand. "We're saved."
As he unlocked the cuff from her wrist, Rose watched his face closely. "You could have done that at any time?"
"Well, of course. Who do'you think you're travellin' with? An amateur?"
Rose looked pointedly at him.
He stood and offered her a hand up. "Come on, Rose. Let's watch the sun come up."
X
Hour Eleven
Earth Time 7:01 AM
As the sun lit upon them, turning Rose's cheeks from grey to pink, the Doctor tried no to remember what it had been like to worry for her as he had back in Downing Street, or even worse, the way everything inside of him had gone cold when he thought she was dead. What was more, he tried to forget what he'd seen of her in his mind, gold and glowing and... had she been... would she be...
But when he looked at her, her eyes closed in the morning light, a small smile playing on her lips, he knew all the forgetting in the world would do him no good.
He turned his head, smiling. That wasn't so bad. Not so bad at all.
XxX
Author: Jess
Character / Pairing: Nine & Rose... read into it what you will
Rating: PG
Word Count: ~ 2200
Disclaimer: BBC and Russell Davies blah blah blah. I'm broke, I'm making no money, and if I had the Doctor at my disposal, I would not be writing about him.
Spoilers: General series one spoilers.
Summary: After they say goodbye to Adam, the Doctor and Rose get tied up.
Author's Notes: Written for the first ficathon at time_x_space in response to mockingbird39's request for Nine's confusion over Rose's flirtation. I didn't work anyone else in, dear, so I hope it's okay. As ever, thanks to my darling beta, erin2326 who never lets me down.
O lente, lente currite noctis equi!
Run slowly, slowly, horses of the night!
Ovid, "Amore"
XxX
Hour One
Earth Time: 9:49 PM
"This isn't so bad, not really," said the Doctor, rustling the chains that bound him to a very ill-tempered looking machine that Rose had immediately diagnosed as a bomb. After all, it was ticking in a cantankerous manner and gleaming maliciously at them from the center of the dull grey room. The Doctor called it a MOAB - a Massive Ordnance Air Blast. In other words, a bomb with a fancy-dancy title.
Rose shot him the most resentful look he'd seen from her in reply.
"I've been in worse predicaments, you know," he told her, trying to keep his tone light but sounding strained.
She turned her head away.
"Come on, Rose," he cajoled. "At least they haven't eaten us! I remember this one time on Trillix Five, I - "
Rose whirled toward him once more, and he stopped talking. Her eyes were narrowed into slits, and for a startling moment, he saw Jackie Tyler. He closed his mouth and swallowed hard. Perhaps that story was best left for another day.
X
Hour Two
Earth Time: 10:07 PM
"How long they gonna keep us in here?" Rose asked, her voice small.
"Oh, we're talking now, are we?" He'd meant for it to come out bitingly harsh, but instead, he heard relief in his voice.
Rose was watching him, the malice gone from her features, and Jackie Tyler gone from the room. The Doctor breathed easier.
"I imagine they'll leave us here until the bomb goes or we do." He grinned. "But judging by the sound of that ticking inside, I'd say we'll outlast it."
"Well that's a relief, I s'pose." Rose did not sound relieved.
The Doctor opened his mouth, but Rose cut across him. "If you say one thing about us going out with a bang, I'll make sure you don't live to see it."
He would have told her that he could probably live through the blast - the bomb wasn't that big. But he didn't think it pertinent, so he said nothing.
X
Hour Three
Earth Time: 11:16 PM
Rose had shifted into and out of every position imaginable, and she now lay on her side as best as she could so as not to pull on her bound arms.
"Did someone travel with you before you met me?" she asked.
The Doctor looked down at her; she seemed to fixate on a point just above the bomb's yellow display clock - an altogether too-friendly attribute to something ticking so ominously.
"Yes." There, that wasn't a lie.
"Who?"
"Why d'you want to know?"
Rose sat up and fixed him with the full force of what she obviously considered a penetrating glare. He laughed at her.
She wrinkled her nose. "Who wouldn't want to know?"
"Me."
She didn't like that answer. Just like a human - they only ask questions because they want the opportunity to tell you their answers. Typical. He told her as much.
"Well, what else are we going to talk about?" she snapped back. "I mean, we might die in here, and I hardly know anything about you."
The Doctor folded his arms across his chest. "Fine. Who did you travel with before you met me?"
Rose was so surprised, she answered the question. "No one," she said. "I didn't go anywhere until I met you."
"Shouldn't that be all that's important, then?"
She opened her mouth and then shut it again, apparently not willing to satisfy him with an answer. He looked away, smiling.
X
Hour Four
Earth Time: 12:42 AM
"...and then," Rose interrupted herself with another cry of laughter. "And then! Mickey tried to jump in after the duck, shouting that he was going to save it!"
"Tried to?"
"He tripped over the curb!"
Both Rose and the Doctor laughed soundly at that.
As Rose caught her breath, she added, "Poor Mick! He had to get stitches in his chin and he still has cinders in his knee."
The Doctor nodded. "The scar. I've seen it. He wears it like he won it on the battlefield."
"We all wear our scars that way." She held out her hand for him to inspect. Just where her little finger met the back of her left hand, there was a faint scar, a perfectly straight line that made it seem as though the finger had been separated entirely at one time and had been welded into place. "I cut myself with a hatchet in the woods up north when I was twelve." She chuckled softly, turning inward for a moment. "Mum nearly had my head for this finger."
Coming back to him, she grinned. "This one... this one is my pride n' joy." She leaned back, bent her leg at the knee, and pulled her denim skirt up a bit to bare more of her thigh. Barely visible, but quite long and jagged - impressively so, the Doctor thought - was a narrow white line, opalescent against the milk white of Rose's leg. "I had to get a tetanus shot for it. Mickey n' me snuck through a rusty fence, and I got caught. You want to see something frightening, go back and take a look at my mum when I got home after that!" She laughed again, and once more, the Doctor felt excluded. He looked away from her face to her bare thigh, then down to the concrete floor near her ankle.
"You got any scars, Doctor?" Rose asked. The timbre of her voice had dropped, and the Doctor knew instinctively that Rose's thigh would still be on display if he looked. It was. He turned away.
"No."
Her voice turned petulant. "You're joking me. Everyone's got scars. No mishaps with a slippery knife? No tragic tumbles down the stairs? No broken wrists that pop out of place at the most inopportune moment?" Her tone was light, teasing. He suspected her tongue would be poking out between her teeth, but he couldn't bear to look.
"Nothing like that." He could have added that all scars weren't worn on the flesh, hard-won prizes to pass around when conversation turned slow, but he wouldn't be unkind.
When he dared to look at her again, she was resting her chin on her knees and staring at nothing at all. She looked peaceful, but he knew she wasn't. He wanted to ask what was wrong, but he didn't.
X
Hour Five
Earth Time: 1:13 AM
"How long did that take?"
"Six days."
"Doesn't seem so bad."
"It is when you're not inside of the ship."
"Oh." She seemed to consider, then snorted. "Brilliant, you are. I don't know how you've survived this long."
"I don't either." He hated the melancholy in his voice, but the ticking had grown steadily more insistent. Rose hadn't noticed.
Rose shifted, and her head was now resting on his shoulder. He knew she had to be as uncomfortable as he was - both of their bound arms were pulled to their chain's extent to allow them to be so close. But for all his deeply ingrained mistrust of physical intimacy, he did love the feel of the little furnace of a girl so close by, radiating heat like a fired kiln. It made him feel life in a different way, made his blood boil.
"Tell me a secret, something no one knows."
"You first."
After a long moment in which the Doctor was sure she'd fallen asleep, she whispered, "When I was sixteen, I woke up in the hospital after a night out with my friends and my... Mum never found out." She took a deep breath, and the Doctor felt a stab in his chest at the hitch he heard there. "I didn't..." she began, but fell silent. After a few minutes, she prompted, "Your turn."
He didn't hesitate. "Your eyes are very green when you smile."
Rose laughed, obviously tickled. "That's not what I meant. I mean something about you."
There were so many secrets he could have shared, but he dared not. He didn't want to burden her. It wouldn't have been right. So he said, "I had a family, once. No one knows that anymore."
X
Hour Six
Earth Time: 2:25 AM
"Then there's Cygnus."
"Which one?" Rose was sleepy, he could hear it in her voice.
"From the head of Draco, it's the next brightest star in a line. The wings. Then there's a very bright star."
"A swan's wings so close to the head of a dragon? Can't be good," she murmured drowsily. "Fink of the singed feathers."
"Albireo is the beak. It's a double star, one blue and one yellow."
"Albireo," she said slowly, tasting the word. "Whassat mean?"
He smiled widely and his cheek touched hers lightly. "Nothing, not really. It was a typo... someone mistranslated the Arabic into Latin."
Rose laughed softly. The Doctor feared she was teetering on the edge of sleep. He'd be alone without her shortly.
"A famous typo. Like Oprah."
And with that, she was lost to him. He thought it would be selfish to wake her, so he closed his eyes and tried to join her.
X
Hour Seven
Earth Time: 3:16 AM
The Doctor watched Rose. Every now and again, she shifted or snuffled or snored in sleep, and sometimes, she murmured things in her quiet, thoughtless, human way.
"Cannons," she whispered. "Horsefish."
The Doctor smiled. That must have been some battle in her brain.
"No. The mirror foxes."
Her pupils chased an invisible film playing on the insides of her eyelids. Rose, asleep. Rose, at rest. Rose, dreaming. Rose, peaceful.
She sighed in sleep. The Doctor sighed too.
X
Hour Eight
Earth Time: 4:45 AM
The Doctor dreamed.
He was alone, naturally. The world around him was blank. Was it a chance to begin again? Or was it the end?
He felt hot all over... he was sweating, burning up from within, the way he imagined a fever might feel. He even reached up to touch his forehead. He dropped it just as quickly - it was such a silly, human thing to do. He'd obviously been spending too much time with the stupid apes.
Just as quickly as it had begun, it stopped. His body temperature dropped, regulated. He felt the double beat inside his chest as he always did. He breathed deep. But the smell of sulfur burned his nostrils, then his lungs, filling them. The blankness turned grey - smoke. Where there was smoke there was -
Fire.
The grey went orange, red. Hot. He felt the blood vessels on his cheeks expand, trying to cool him. It was no use - this was it. He was through.
He welcomed it, closed his eyes, exhilarated.
But then a voice. "I bring life."
He opened his eyes. There stood Rose, resplendent in gold. She was saving him.
The Doctor woke up.
X
Hour Nine
Earth Time: 5:02 AM
Rose was watching him. "You were mumbling in your sleep before. I heard you."
He grinned. "Yeah, well, so were you. You said 'horsefish.'"
She was thrown for a moment. "I what?" She shook her head. "What did you dream?"
The Doctor took a deep breath. What could he possibly say?
"I dreamt we were going to be all right." That wasn't necessarily a lie. It might even have been the truth.
"Will we, Doctor? Will we be all right?"
"Yes."
X
Hour Ten
Earth Time 6:18
"The sun will be up soon," the Doctor said.
"Will it? How will we know?"
"I'll know."
"Oh, right, turn of the Earth and all that." She was teasing him again. They were bound to a bomb which was slowly counting down to nothing, and she was still teasing him.
He grinned. "You just watch, Rose Tyler. There's more to me than just words."
"Oh? Well prove it. And quick. I'd like to watch the sun rise in the year... what was it?"
"1969. Don't you remember? We were going to watch the moon landing. From the moon."
"Oh, yes. But you overshot."
"I didn't! The TARDIS... oh, never mind." He leaned back against the sleek orange bomb, turned to his left, and shook his shoulders.
"You all right, Doctor. I shouldn't grab hold of your tongue, should I?"
"Why would you do that?" he asked, alarmed.
Rose laughed. "In case you swallow it."
He lifted an eyebrow, then smiled at her. He lifted the sonic screwdriver in his free hand. "We're saved."
As he unlocked the cuff from her wrist, Rose watched his face closely. "You could have done that at any time?"
"Well, of course. Who do'you think you're travellin' with? An amateur?"
Rose looked pointedly at him.
He stood and offered her a hand up. "Come on, Rose. Let's watch the sun come up."
X
Hour Eleven
Earth Time 7:01 AM
As the sun lit upon them, turning Rose's cheeks from grey to pink, the Doctor tried no to remember what it had been like to worry for her as he had back in Downing Street, or even worse, the way everything inside of him had gone cold when he thought she was dead. What was more, he tried to forget what he'd seen of her in his mind, gold and glowing and... had she been... would she be...
But when he looked at her, her eyes closed in the morning light, a small smile playing on her lips, he knew all the forgetting in the world would do him no good.
He turned his head, smiling. That wasn't so bad. Not so bad at all.
XxX