Echoes of Summer - Chapter Thirty-Eight: Whispers
Disclaimer: Neither Doctor Who nor any characters, items or materials of any kind pertaining to Doctor Who or the Whoniverse belong to me. I’m just looking for a good time. Hee. Trying them out for a bit, see how they fit.
Plot Summary: He was left with his lips against her jaw, her figure pressed to him as if she belonged there. One of many moments between the Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler after he breaks his own rules to retrieve her from Bad Wolf Bay. The walls between worlds begin to fall, two different realities merging. And on the horizon a threat rises that threatens to destroy everything the Doctor holds dear.
Pairing: Ten/Rose
Beta: bratflorida
Rating: Starts at PG. Runs the gamut straight through to NC-17.
Spoilers: Oh yes. Series One through Series 4 Specials.
Timeline: AU after the end of Series 2. Spoilers up to, including and going past Series 4 though. I’ve seen all of Series 1 through 4, including the series 4 specials but am not very familiar with the Classic Who much. As such, if I happen to include anything that really touches upon Classic Who, other than it being unintentional, I’ll be surprised out of my head. Really. You’ll probably see a lot of familiar things in the fic that play into the series of DW. Bear with me, it all ties in together.
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Whispers
She gasped quietly as he connected with her, as his mind touched hers with the smallest airy tendrils of thought. And she was held in awe, her parted lips rounding into a soft ‘o’ as she felt him inside. He felt the same inside as he did out; ever present, ever emotional, not quite sitting still even mentally. But he was dark in her head, like a somber shadow beneath the jubilance that was the tenth incarnation of the Doctor. Beneath the manic energy, he was still the darkness of his past self.
“Don’t be frightened,” he soothed her and she shook her head slightly, not pulling out of his grasp. As he went to say it again he realized he didn’t have to because he saw, in the light that was her mind, that she was not afraid. That she had never been afraid, either of him or around him. He gave her strength, he saw. With him by her side she was afraid of nothing. Invincible, even.
And she was in love with him.
He swallowed as he felt that emotion float and surround him, as he felt his mind become bathed in it. His eyes snapped open but he saw nothing except her golden mind, her aura hovering against her flushed skin, and she was resonating. The golden glow of her made a small thrum of sound, reverberating. Almost the way the TARDIS hummed. Just as comforting.
I…didn’t know…
But deep inside, he suddenly realized that he had known. He had always known because she had never been against letting him know. She had shown her love for him through everything she had ever done. Even this, allowing him to see everything that she was. This was love. Digging further, seeing more, he realized it was painful for her, what she felt for him. This emotion, for her, was the last step, almost a violation. It was the only way she would ever have let anyone know anything she felt, if they were to know her mind. He knew her mind now the way he knew his own, inside and out, from the deepest recesses to the lightest corners. He knew everything she thought, everything she was. And she was in love with him in such a way that to think of him gone from her was physically painful.
“I’m still here,” he said to her softly, his mouth close enough that his lips brushed hers involuntarily, her breath stolen from her by him. His fingers has slipped as he had searched her mind, as he had bathed in her thoughts and he held her now tightly, his palms pressed to her jaw, her face upturned to his. And she wanted. She needed. The same way he did, the way he needed her breath, her thoughts, her very self. He dragged her forward thoughtlessly and she went without a word, her bandaged hands gingerly coming down at her sides on the jump seat, following him wherever he needed her. Even as he mindlessly held himself before her, hovering in her golden thoughts and emotions, he realized that he did indeed need her. Physically, mentally. He needed all of her, every thought she had, every emotion she felt, he needed to feel it, needed to see with his own mental eyes. He needed to know the way humans saw, how they viewed love and anger, the world outside and inside. He needed to see it all.
“Doctor,” she whispered as he pulled her ever closer, her frame now almost on top of him.
He didn’t ignore her but he couldn’t think to pay their physical form any sort of attention. He was hovering in her golden glow, bathed in her thoughts and her love and it was perfect. It was something he had never encountered of anyone and for it to be her was right. Just right. Her hands came down on either side of him, his breath coming rapidly now, her head turning in his grip to rest her forehead against his wordlessly.
“Doctor…I-“
He shushed her gently, needing to see more, feel more. Needing that golden glow, needing to hear her thoughts sound around him. Everything that she was, it was all open to him even as she cringed faintly at everything she had ever thought. All his words and everything she had ever thought inside even though she had answered politely, answered only after a moment's thought.
“I literally do not know who I am. It's all untested. Am I funny? Am I sarcastic? Sexy?”
His voice, is that what he sounded like to her ears? Higher pitched than his previous incarnation, and a rambler. Seemingly thoughtless in everything he said. Yet she loved him
Her voice came mentally, that chiding little voice that was all her own, in response to the loud questions he had asked upon first stepping out of his TARDIS after his regeneration. All the images that came as she had answered him only in her mind, as she had allowed her eyes to sweep over his new form in appreciation, they were all present as well. The moment he had winked at her that day, that gesture from him had brought her up in embarrassment. But her response still echoed in their joined minds.
“Yes.”
He’d been that and more.
As the memory from the Sycorax ship closed, his voice came once more . “So, the year five billion, the sun expands, the earth gets roasted.”
“That was our first date,” she had responded to him and her face had been jubilant in the breeze, blond hair flying all about wonderfully. She had been beautiful, so very alive and so very happy in his presence, happy to be a part of something more than she had ever thought herself capable of being.
“Ooh, slim...and a little bit foxy. You thought so too. I've been inside your head. You've been looking. You like it.”
Yes, she had liked it. She had loved it. She’d had moments of unadulterated human lust and moments of pure human love. Everything she was, all of it was just so human, in the moment, carefree. She laughed freely, smiled carelessly, and loved as if there would be no day to follow. She was Rose. His Rose.
“Now, this is really seeing the future. You just leave us behind. Is that what you're gonna do to me?” Her voice came, pained. As if he had physically hurt her, caused her to bleed.
“No. Not to you.”
He bent his head against hers, his brow furrowing as he frowned achingly. “Not to you,” he whispered against her mouth, his shoulders stiffening even as she heaved against him, her form almost straddling him now. “Never.”
“What do I do? Do I stay with him?” Her mental voice, the voice of a memory, was ghostly, hovering between them, questioning.
Then Sarah Jane’s voice, older, wiser, and just as pained. As if she also had once loved-
“Yes. Some things are worth getting your heart broken for.”
The human heart. How fragile. Yet he found himself understanding it and not quite believing that someone would place their heart so trustingly before him the way she would. She offered it to him without a word. She offered him her heart and everything she was without a glance back.
“But you and I both know, don't we, Rose? The Doctor is worth the monsters.”
And Rose’s voice in her head at Reinette’s words. “Yes…Yes.” Even as he had left her behind, as he had crashed into Madame de Pompadour’s world of French aristocracy and clockwork droids atop a horse he had aptly named Arthur. How thoughtless of him and how heartbroken he had left her.
“Hurry though, my love: my days grow shorter now, and I am so very weak. Godspeed, my lonely angel.” Her words. Reinette’s last words to him in a letter. But as he remembered them, as he thought them, it was Rose’s tears he felt between his fingers as they slipped from her clenched eyes, her breath catching against his mouth as he held her. He realized then, rather suddenly, that Reinette had been correct. “A door once opened may be stepped through in either direction."
“You…can’t-“ he uttered aloud helplessly, wishing to push her away but unwilling to break their link, unwilling to turn from her memories, her thoughts, her golden love for him. But with that panic came the realization of just how much stronger than him Rose Tyler was. Waking the slightest bit from the glow, he understood that for once in his immeasurably long life, a human had shown herself to be so much more than a Time Lord. In showing all of herself and not demanding the same from him, she had shown herself to be better even if she didn’t believe it of herself. Because he could never allow her to see everything he was. He could never give himself in that way.
His voice in her head now slowly became familiar to him, dragged him away from his own wretched thoughts. “I've trapped you here.” Stranded beneath the black hole, without the TARDIS, in the presence of a creature that had claimed to be the devil. His voice, soft and broken, and her warmth as he had pulled her to him. His apology and his comfort to her for somehow ending up in yet another doomed scenario.
“Yeah, well stuck with you, that’s not so bad.” Her voice came off nonchalantly and he had responded in surprise at her words. But now, seeing her words for what they were, she had been afraid, although at his side she had known that together they could face anything. With him by her side she was stronger, just so much stronger and that much more unafraid.
“And the lost girl, so far away from home. The valiant child, who will die in battle so very soon.”
She shivered in his hands suddenly, her heart beating double time as the demon’s voice echoed in both their minds together. He didn’t know who had remembered the beast, if it had been himself or her, but even now he pushed it away. Rose had not died, no matter how valiant. Far from home, oh yes. But she would not die. Not if he had anything to say about it.
“Planet Earth. This is where I was born. And this is where I died. The first nineteen years of my life, nothing happened. Nothing at all, not ever. And then I met a man called the Doctor. A man who could change his face. And he took me away from home in his magical machine. He showed me the whole of time and space. I thought it would never end.”
He recoiled from her, her warm breath cooling as it mingled with the air surrounding him. When had she thought that? Even as he whispered it internally he was seeing when she had thought those words, where she had been. Bad Wolf Bay, before he had come for her.
His next words mirrored the words of her memories precisely as they opened up before him. “How long are you going to stay with me?”
And her voice, so gentle. So loving as she, at that same moment, echoed aloud the words she had spoken that wonderful day on that alien planet. “Forever.”
Forever. Yes. He wanted that forever more than he had ever wanted anything else then.
But even as they hovered in the golden warmth of their words, her voice came gently, softly. Came up from behind, almost sneakily and forced open a door of golden memories. “That’s easy for you to say! You don’t have children!” Her tone had been smug for a moment.
His came in an absentminded response. “I was a dad once.”
And suddenly he was up against a hard wall even as her voice echoed dimly all about in the molten recesses of her mind. “What did you say?” As her voice sounded eerily all about him he realized there was something there, that mental block the blond girl had told him about. He saw it, sensed it with his mind, his fingers gently clasping her face. He went for it, opening that door in her mind without even asking. A moment later he was assaulted, completely and disturbingly overwhelmed by images that shot forth, running over his mind’s eye even as he reached for them, reached to understand them. And just as he felt the image, the presence, of another person in that room, he threw himself in and barred the mental door behind himself. He was willing to face whatever it was that was coming toward him alone. He would protect Rose’s mind from it.
“This message is for you, Father.”
His head jerked sideways, eyes shut tightly as a girl’s light voice reached his ears, that blond girl’s voice, as if she stood before him in the TARDIS console room. Father?
“You love her. I can see why.”
Lips parting, head lifting a bit, he reached out for the owner of that lilting voice, his fingers tightening on Rose’s face. She made a small sound, her own head wrenching a bit at the strength behind his grasp, her weight pressing down on him.
“She loves you as well. But…she’s wrong. She doesn’t let us see, neither you nor me. But her presence here, now. In this timeline. It’s wrong, not her time. Since the beach, you said. She hasn’t been right since the beach. She’s dismantling the world, the walls, bit by bit. She’s destroying us, one by one.”
“No,” he whispered in refusal and under his fingers Rose bowed her head, eyes still shut tightly, a frown furrowing her brow.
“What is it? What do you see?” she asked him, worry causing an edge in her tone. “Doctor?”
He shushed her softly, one hand leaving her cheek to brush gentle fingers across her mouth and she exhaled against those fingers, somehow caught one between her lips. The gesture was faint at first as his fingers halted, hesitated there. Even as he searched that blocked memory he was very aware of her lips pressing against his index finger, her breath against it for a tender moment.
“Believe me when I say that everyone that has been sent back is dead. Gone. All of them. As are you, now. Martha Jones. Donna Noble. Jack Harkness. Even Jack Harkness. The might of the Bad Wolf. She can give and she can strip away. As I leave this message, I fear you also have perished. I don’t know what will happen from here. I only hope that I made the right decision to leave this message inside her rather than chance giving it directly to you. I wouldn’t even know what to say had I been forced to give the message to you directly.”
There was a flash streaking behind his closed eyelids. Rose seemed to feel it as well, a gasp breaking from her, her knees on either side of him and her bandaged hands gripping his wrists tightly.
“She’ll go insane. And she’s so powerful. So absolutely powerful. If you thought the sight of a paradox machine, the sound of the cloister bell was enough…you haven’t seen anything. Not when she becomes the Bad Wolf again. But she is not complete. And I don’t have long. She’s coming. After me, now.”
“What is it?” Rose asked him frantically, lifting her face to the hand suspended over her mouth, the other hand leaving his slender wrists to press against one of his hearts. “Doctor, what is it? I can’t-“
“I have a daughter,” he whispered in wonder, head tilted up toward her, his hearts breaking at the girl’s frantic voice bouncing around his head.
“What?” Rose recoiled slightly from him in disbelief, head twitching away from him.
“I will be the last one he will send. That you will send. There’s no one else after me. Please, Dad. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But she’s going insane. I can hear it, all the whispers in her head, all the visions she sees. Too many voices in there, so much confusion. She’s broken now and you can’t fix her anymore. I can’t even reach her anymore. Please. Fix this. Fix it. For all of us.”
There was another flash, this one golden, and then the girl’s voice was gone and he was left holding Rose’s face in his palm, his other hand hovering over her lips as she shuddered breathlessly.
“What is-“ she whispered hoarsely against his hand, her frame trembling above him. “What did you see?”
Opening his eyes at last, his throat dry, he was thankful he had the jump seat under him and that Rose was holding him steady even as he balanced her above him. But as the TARDIS console room came into focus before him he held himself still, his hands hovering over Rose’s face.
“What?” she asked him fearfully, her eyes coming open and gazing down at him. Needing to know.
He looked up at her, at his hand hovering over her lips, feeling dampness on the tips of his fingers and her lips were parted. He didn’t know if the dampness came from her tears or her lips. Her face was horror-stricken even though he knew she had not been witness to the visions he had been presented with. She knew nothing of what he had seen. It was the function of the mind lock and he had never seen reason to use one.
“What did you see?” she asked him tremulously.
He didn’t quite know how to answer her question.
“You said…you had a daughter,” she said to him, her eyes shining with hurt. “And you’ve said before, how you’d had a family once. Had been a Dad once. And I don’t know anything about it. But I’m…” she whispered, a gentle frown crossing her face under his fingers. “I don’t-“
“She had blond hair,” he said to her then, his voice seeming distant, very aware suddenly of her weight on him, of her figure straddling him. “Another child. One I never had before. Only in your memories did I have her. A girl with blond hair.” Even as she lifted her head to him he had shifted his hand from her cheek, fingers curling around a lock of her hair as he looked toward it. “Blond hair.”
Rose gazed at him silently, her lips parting before his other hand as his fingers hesitated over her mouth. And in that moment he knew she understood what he was driving at, what he suspected. “No,” she murmured to him, shaking her head.
His eyes darted up to meet hers and then held, intense in their gaze.
“She’s not…mine,” Rose said to him, her face seemingly confused. She gazed at him, her head tilting mournfully. “Why would you think-“ But she cut herself off, her eyes caught by his mouth
“Why couldn’t it be you, Rose Tyler?” he asked her gently, his fingers hovering over her lips. His eyes drifted down to her mouth as well, his own opening as he attempted to explain his words foolishly for he was still locked with her mentally. She could see his thoughts even if his words stated something entirely different. “Not that I would assume anything. For all I know everything leading up to her could be pure circumstance, could be something outside of our control, my control. My control. Or your control-“ And as she met his gaze once more, as she stilled before him he found himself breaking off, waiting for her. Just as she knew he would wait for her.
He would always wait for her.
She bowed her head to his hand, allowing his palm to brush against her lips, fingertips trailing along her face. She smelled of that floral scent once more, her own scent hovering below it and he reached for it achingly, that fragrance that was pure Rose. They stared at each other and he knew they were both aware of the moment, of the electricity that seemed to hover between them, sparking. Could he forgive himself for what he wanted to do? For what he was about to do? Because no matter how unbearably long the wide expanse of time felt, in the next moment if nothing was done there was about to be an irrevocable change between them. He gazed at her as he thought it, understood that she thought the same because they were completely open to each other. Tendrils of thought floating around each other, his tinted blue and hers gold if they had been visible, tangible.
And then he pulled her down to him completely, his breath caught between them, and their lips met, suddenly and desperately.
Next Chapter - Chapter Thirty-Nine: On the Console
Of all his oral fixations this was the one that drove him mad at times, mostly when he was alone with his own thoughts. As he thought it, as he dwelled on that small fact, he suddenly understood that she could hear everything he was thinking, everything he had just thought.