Fic Commentary: Flowers on Air Chapter 10
This is the ffith installment of the Fic Commentary Meme, where you request 'em and I annotate 'em ( original post here). This one was requested by afraid_of_dark . The original text of this story can be found here.
Welcome, faithful readers, to Chapter 10 of Flowers on Air. As I said before, this was my first fic ever, and this is the climax of the story (heh heh I said "climax").
It was high noon, in every sense of the term.
Ah, clichés. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. I'll leave that for you to decide.
The shade in the canyon where Rose sat and the Doctor slowly disappeared was getting to be at a premium, just small slivers hugging the rocks like new moons. Rose put her straw hat on, as succumbing to heat stroke was probably not the most efficient way of getting through to the Doctor. She carefully regulated her water intake, and when the white-hot rays began to creep up the Doctor’s prone body, she popped her umbrella open and without a word placed it next to him on the ground, creating a small circle of shade around his head. She poured some water into the lid of the canteen and also placed it next to him, though she knew he probably wouldn’t drink it while she watched.
A woman with a plan. I sort of see Rose growing a bit in how she accomplishes her various missions. In Parting of the Ways she's just desperate and flailing around blindly for anything at all. Here I think she's grown a little bit since then, and from that experience, in to not letting her grief and desperation quite so much cloud her ability to formulate and carry out a plan.
“I’m a fool,” she said, settling back down on her blanket. “I’ve always been a foolish girl and I think you’ll agree that maybe I come from a long line of foolish girls.”
I've always been very clear in my head that Rose is not perfect. She can be quite foolish. But somehow that's the very quality about her that always seems to save the day. [Writing process aside: I do a lot of walking in my daily life. I take public transit to and from work, I walk to and from the bus stop, and I have dogs, so I walk them once a day usually. The only thing I can do besides walk when I'm walking is think, and I work out a lot of my stories while out walking.] I was out walking around, considering Gene's question to Rose: What do you have? What is special about her that she has to give to the Doctor that would heal him? It just sort of struck me. What she's got is her complete inability to see reason when it comes to the Doctor. For me that's the central element of her character and the axis around which both her positive and negative traits spin.
The Doctor look up briefly from his screen. She knew his soft spot for her mum, given how much he always protested that he did not have one-a sure sign, that. And now she also knew he was listening.
You know Tenth Doc totally loooooves Jackie. I mean, how could you not? But aside from the snarkiness, I always felt like they're deep down quite sympatico because they both love Rose so entirely.
“You told me to forget you and go home, d’you remember? To be wise, I would have done. It really wasn’t all that long ago. Seems like a lot longer than it’s really been, relatively. Or not relatively. I can’t keep all this time travel stuff straight. Anyway. I’m a fool, like I said. I met a bloke who told me he could feel the turning of the Earth, and that being with him would always be dangerous, and I smiled and ran to him anyway. And when you sent me away again, I did the impossible to get back. Even after you completely changed yourself, gave me permission to go, I stayed. I dunno, some people might call that loyalty. If it was one of my girlfriends though I’d tell her she was being a bleedin’ idiot. Though I’d also have to tell her that her new chap was a bit of a dish.”
Okay, I'm a little bit in love with this piece of dialogue. The "to be wise..." line is from the movie A Room with a View. I believe the line is "To be wise, one would have stayed back home at Summer Street." That was my very favourite movie when I was 12-16 years old, I've seen it so many times I can't even begin to count. Little bits of dialogue pop in to my head all the time. Anyway. Wouldn't we all tell our girlfriends that this guy was trouble, objectively? But then she'd show us a picture and we'd go "Oh, yes, I see. Carry on then."
She winked, though she wasn’t sure if the Doctor was able to see her at all.
“Quite,” the Doctor croaked, so softly Rose thought for a moment it was just a pebble falling or the wind in the scrub grass.
So he was in there, somewhere. His rather overweening vanity about this new body of his would never let a comment like that slip by unnoticed. His eyes, however, never left the video screen, his pupils shrunk to pin-pricks in the bright light.
I love Vain!Ten. I can't tell you how much I squeed at the "I didn't want to change. Why would I? Look at me." line from JE.
“So right now, because I’m a fool and will always be, I’m just going to come over there, okay? I’m not asking you to do anything, I’m just gonna come and sit with you, for a little bit.”
In actual fact she wanted to just storm over there and grab the video player and smash it in to a hundred tiny pieces, but if there was one thing that Rose Tyler learned from the Doctor, it was the power of choices over decrees.
The whole show is so much about choices and about how important it is that people be allowed to make choices for themselves. The Doctor always gives even the most irredeemable baddies the choice to either stop what they're doing or be dealt with harshly. Even Mr. No Second Chances always gives a first chance.
She rose and went over to sit by his feet, not wanting to seem like she was intruding in on what he was watching, which was his own private business, as much as the demons inside of her wanted to see.
“You know, the coppers back in 1953, they said you went a bit mental when they found me, or my body I guess since I wasn’t really there. Oh yeah, I did chat with them a bit later, I guess I didn’t mention. They didn’t really remember what all you said but they did get the distinct impression that you were…well, a little bit mad. Just a scootch.”
Just cluing my readers in to the time frame vis a vis series 2 here. I don't make it explicitly clear, but I'm envisioning their next stop after this series to be Krop Tor.
She was trying not to stare at the Doctor, but she saw out of the corner of her eye that he was looking at her now, though every few seconds darting his eyes back to look again at his dreams.
“I hated to see you like that,” he murmured. “You’ve no idea what that did to me.”
“When someone else hurts me, yeah.” Rose pulled her knees up and hugged them where she sat. “But you seem to have no problem doing it yourself. You know sometimes it hurts just being around you, but that’s my own fault for always coming back for more.”
Oof. Rose is treading on thin ice here, but I needed to make her still be very very angry with him, even though she still at the end of the day loves him and believes in him. It wouldn't be believable (or it would be even more unbelievable) if the Doctor was behaving in this way and Rose didn't really feel deep anger along with her desire to help him.
At this the Doctor sat up to lean against the boulder again, several of his joints creaking and cracking in the process.
“As I say,” Rose continued, “I’m a fool. It’s what I have for you, my foolishness. Before I came up here, Mr. Fitzpatrick asked me what I have to give you, and that’s it. That’s all I’ve got and it’ll have to do. I’m offering, if you’ll have it.”
I don't think I was concious of it at the time, but all the stories in this series also heavily feature Rose offering the Doctor parts of herself. And of course, he does pretty much nothing of the kind in return, until the epilogue.
She continued to stare straight ahead, ignoring every impulse she had to rip his stupid little device away from him, and then to….well, to show him the pain he caused her just by being around, and to show him how he could release her from it.
She means snogging him silly.
She rested her hands on the ground, drawing doodles in the sand to keep her feelings in check, and in a way enjoying the feel of the warm Earth, solid under her, which is a rare feeling when one lives in a time-and-space ship.
“I said that there was no power on this Earth that could stop me.”
This is of course what the Doctor says in the Idiots Lantern once he sees what the Wire has done to Rose.
The Doctor’s voice was hoarse and she hoped he would avail himself of the water she’d provided. He sounded terrible. His great gob had been stilled for nearly a day, and she reckoned it was the longest he’d been quiet in over 900 years.
“Well, Doctor, I think we’ve put the lie to that. There is a power that could stop you and he’s sitting right here next to the Universe’s Biggest Fool. Quite a pair we make. My mum would be so proud. We should take a picture to remember. She’ll put it on that dreadful sideboard.”
Rose bringin' the funny. I've been rewatching series 2 and I think in all the schmoopy love story we forget a lot of the witty banter between them and how funny Rose is.
There was a movement from the Doctor that could possibly have been a small inaudible chuckle, but she couldn’t be sure. It could have just as easily been a swallowed sob.
“When I was little and I’d have a bad dream, I’d go running in to mum’s room and she always said that if I told someone about it, I’d never have that dream again, and I wouldn’t have to be afraid of it anymore.”
Trufax from my childhood.
“Did it work?”
“I guess. I never had recurring nightmares. I always told her and they never came back.”
She felt the light brush of the Doctor’s pinky finger against her own hand, where it was resting on the ground between them. She didn’t want to make any sudden movements however, as if she was trying to coax a small forest creature to her.
“You could…you could tell me. About your dreams. Or if that’s too hard for you maybe you could show me.”
The moment we've all been waiting for. I knew I wanted this to happen, but it took me a while to work out the series of events and the dialogue that would make it happen.
He clutched the player tighter to him with his other hand.
“No, I mean, you could show me like you do, in my mind like. That way, I wouldn’t see anything that you didn’t want me to see.”
Canon question I'm too lazy to look up: Do we ever actually see the Doctor demonstrate his little touch-telepathy skill to Rose? If not, I'm imagining it happened off screen.
The Doctor closed the screen of the player for the first time in many hours, and Rose, in spite of her luring-the-small-forest-creature stealth let out an audible sigh of relief. He didn’t say anything at all, just shifted slightly where he was sitting and placed the tips of his fingers lightly on her temples. Rose didn’t even have time to realize how much she’d missed his touch in the past 24 hours before she was flooded with sense-memories.
It wasn’t like watching a movie or looking at a picture. The images projected on to the back of the scrim of the mind’s eye, and so she can’t say she ever actually saw the burnt orange sky or the twin suns and silver forests. It was as if she had once been there and was remembering it, along with a smell, earthy like incense, and the sound of wind through strange trees. And she felt the bittersweet memories of home. His memories.
Rose gets a glimpse of Gallifrey. If I recall correctly, the Doctor never even mentions its name to her that we see in series 1-2. Though just talking about this now is giving me a powerful hankering to go and watch Gridlock for that scene at the end. God damn you, David Tennant, why are you so fucking awesome?
It was over in just a second and he removed his fingers and seemed to curl up slightly again, like a leaf drying out. Rose took a moment to catch her bearings. The Doctor’s brand of telepathy was a bit jarring and he rarely used it with her. She wondered what it was like on his end, if it was just as disorienting.
She brought her hand up to touch her temple, feeling the faint impressions of his fingers there. “I feel like that too. About home,” she said.
He looked extremely skeptical. Sad and skeptical.
“When you’re there, it seems so dull and predictable. And the people, they’re all horrible you just wish you could get away from them. But then you’re gone and it doesn’t seem so bad any more. You want to go back, you forget the bad stuff.”
My knowledge of old Who canon is extremely thin, so I had to really try hard here to not have this conversation go in to too much detail about Gallifrey and the Time Lords.
“I can never go back. It’s all gone,” sighed the Doctor.
“Yes, yes I know that. I can’t ever really either, you know. I mean, yeah, I can physically go home, or the place I used to call home, but I can’t really ever go back. Not now. Not anymore. It would be like dying, every day. And if I was back there without you, I can’t say I’d turn down someone who could offer me this.” She gestured to the player. “I’m not saying I can ever fully understand how you feel, but consider that I may sometimes, just a tiny little bit.”
The Doctor heaved another sigh and finally reached for the glass of proffered water. Rose plowed onwards.
“So while I’m being utterly foolish, is there anything else, any other dreams you want to tell me about? To help me understand? About home, or what you want or what you’re afraid of? Anything at all, I just want to understand and to share things. Our lot, humans, we do that. Share things in order to deal with them. Spread the load around I guess. There’s no shame-.”
I've always felt that emotionally the Doctor and Rose's relationship is fairly one-sided. She's female and human, he's male and not, she shares, he clams up and/or changes the subject. That's why in The One True Free Life when she asks Alt!Ten to tell her what it feels like when he has his little spells and what's causing it, and he actually does, she bursts in to tears and tells him he's so different from Proper!Doctor.
She’d gotten carried away with her talking but suddenly his fingers were on her again and she floated in eddies of sense-memory. This time it felt different. Less like history and more like fiction. A true dream, not a hazy amalgam of old memories and dreamings. As before, she saw without seeing. It was her own image, as had been on the monitor in the lab, but now enhanced with emotion, sound, sensation. It was like the most vivid memory, but of something that had never actually happened. The Doctor was placing a hand on her cheek, then under her chin and raising her face up to meet his. She felt hot tears and couldn’t be sure if they were his in the dream, or hers in her mind, or if they were actually forming in her eyes sitting there on the ground in the middle of the great desert. Sadness, bittersweet longing, desire, need, completion but also the feeling of being ripped in half again. She felt as if her heart would burst, and all the air was crushed out of her lungs at once.
So, in case you couldn't tell, a bit of an erotic dream the Doctor has about Rose. This was before I ever wrote anything even remotely resembling sex, so yes, it is very soft-focus. Very.
It was of course again over in a matter of seconds, though she couldn’t be sure if she’d lived entire lifetimes while in the Doctor’s dream. When her vision swam back in to focus, the Doctor was now standing, in the lee of a rock-face opposite her and several feet away. The minidisc player still lay on the ground where he’d been before, though Rose didn’t notice, still completely overwhelmed by the emotions the Doctor had let her feel. He stood with his hands deep in his pockets, hunched and slouching, shirt untucked, tie half-off, badly in need of a shave and his hair in a complete tangle. Both of them were by now covered in a fine layer of dust and sand.
Rose stammered, unable to form any suitable words for a long while. Looking back, she had to admit, she’d been trumped. She’d planned on talking with the Doctor and bringing him back to her through the very human practice of sharing her feelings and inviting him to open up a little. A foolish crusade if she ever heard one. She never counted on this though, never thought in a million years he’d let her get that close.
I like the idea of Rose's plan going slightly awry because it actually works better than she thought it would. Though of course he can only communicate that openly non-verbally.
“I’m sorry,” he said dully.
“But I….” Rose took a moment to try to compose herself and not come off sounding like a complete yammering idiot, or like the young girl she in fact was. “I feel that way too. About you. It’s okay. I mean, it’s good, isn’t it?”
She never thought talking with the Doctor would feel this much like being back in year seven.
ZOMG BOYS! Does he like me? Yeah, this is an awkward moment for the two of them. And it's so easy for me to forget when writing, at this time Rose is like 20 years old. To me, that's young, cuz I'm old. She has not been that long out of the ZOMG BOYS! phase.
He continued to look darkly at her, beetling his brow.
“It can’t ever be like that though. Never. And I’m so sorry. I’ve been so selfish when it comes to you. I want you with me always, but I can’t ever be what you need. It was so much easier to just crawl inside a fantasy than to let you go.”
They're both incredibly selfish when it comes to each other, at least in my personal canon. What I mean is, they are so in to one another, nothing else matters, to either of them. Rose, an only child, leaves her poor widowed single mum multiple times, over tearful protests, in order to be with the Doctor. And the Doctor? This is how his selfishness in regard to her expresses itself.
“Go?” Rose wiped her hands on her shirt and rubber her eyes, incredulous. “Haven’t you heard me at all? I’m not going. You’ll not be rid of me that easily.” She could tell a misunderstanding was brewing.
“I’m quite serious, Rose. I’ve done a monstrous thing to you. I wanted to keep you in this bell jar, no one else can ever have you, but I can’t either. I drove Mickey away, took you from your mother, and I knew what I was doing. I can barely live with myself for what I’ve done.” He’d barely moved, but his haggard red-rimmed eyes had grown wide and his lips were thin and pursed, drawn in to the same grim straight line she’d seen so many times before. It never meant good things.
“Doctor, you’re such a right old knob sometimes. I left mum and my home of my own choice. You didn’t take me or make me do anything. Don’t flatter yourself. And Mickey, well that was partly my doing as well. We’re both to blame there but I think he found the right way for himself.”
Choices again. And of course the Doctor is so arrogant, he'd blame himself even though it was she that has made the choices she has. It's a wee bit patronising, don't you think? But very Doctory, to me.
It seemed time to do something. This discussion was probably not going to wind up going anywhere good or healing for the Doctor, as much as she wanted to run over to him and grab him by his shirt collar and first demand to know why they could never be together, and then to prove him wrong, right there on the spot. But for the moment, he seemed as if he might be ready to at least make the choice to move on from this place, and that moment had to be taken advantage of. These other issues would have to wait, and Rose had a plan for that as well.
There's one more chapter after this, but by this point I'd realised that what was really needed here was a sequel. I have a hard time ending things properly, I tend to rush through the falling action, which is probably a serious flaw in Chapter 11 of this. But I do see the sequel are growing organically from this fic, and my intention was to present it as their very next adventure after leaving here.
Welcome, faithful readers, to Chapter 10 of Flowers on Air. As I said before, this was my first fic ever, and this is the climax of the story (heh heh I said "climax").
It was high noon, in every sense of the term.
Ah, clichés. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. I'll leave that for you to decide.
The shade in the canyon where Rose sat and the Doctor slowly disappeared was getting to be at a premium, just small slivers hugging the rocks like new moons. Rose put her straw hat on, as succumbing to heat stroke was probably not the most efficient way of getting through to the Doctor. She carefully regulated her water intake, and when the white-hot rays began to creep up the Doctor’s prone body, she popped her umbrella open and without a word placed it next to him on the ground, creating a small circle of shade around his head. She poured some water into the lid of the canteen and also placed it next to him, though she knew he probably wouldn’t drink it while she watched.
A woman with a plan. I sort of see Rose growing a bit in how she accomplishes her various missions. In Parting of the Ways she's just desperate and flailing around blindly for anything at all. Here I think she's grown a little bit since then, and from that experience, in to not letting her grief and desperation quite so much cloud her ability to formulate and carry out a plan.
“I’m a fool,” she said, settling back down on her blanket. “I’ve always been a foolish girl and I think you’ll agree that maybe I come from a long line of foolish girls.”
I've always been very clear in my head that Rose is not perfect. She can be quite foolish. But somehow that's the very quality about her that always seems to save the day. [Writing process aside: I do a lot of walking in my daily life. I take public transit to and from work, I walk to and from the bus stop, and I have dogs, so I walk them once a day usually. The only thing I can do besides walk when I'm walking is think, and I work out a lot of my stories while out walking.] I was out walking around, considering Gene's question to Rose: What do you have? What is special about her that she has to give to the Doctor that would heal him? It just sort of struck me. What she's got is her complete inability to see reason when it comes to the Doctor. For me that's the central element of her character and the axis around which both her positive and negative traits spin.
The Doctor look up briefly from his screen. She knew his soft spot for her mum, given how much he always protested that he did not have one-a sure sign, that. And now she also knew he was listening.
You know Tenth Doc totally loooooves Jackie. I mean, how could you not? But aside from the snarkiness, I always felt like they're deep down quite sympatico because they both love Rose so entirely.
“You told me to forget you and go home, d’you remember? To be wise, I would have done. It really wasn’t all that long ago. Seems like a lot longer than it’s really been, relatively. Or not relatively. I can’t keep all this time travel stuff straight. Anyway. I’m a fool, like I said. I met a bloke who told me he could feel the turning of the Earth, and that being with him would always be dangerous, and I smiled and ran to him anyway. And when you sent me away again, I did the impossible to get back. Even after you completely changed yourself, gave me permission to go, I stayed. I dunno, some people might call that loyalty. If it was one of my girlfriends though I’d tell her she was being a bleedin’ idiot. Though I’d also have to tell her that her new chap was a bit of a dish.”
Okay, I'm a little bit in love with this piece of dialogue. The "to be wise..." line is from the movie A Room with a View. I believe the line is "To be wise, one would have stayed back home at Summer Street." That was my very favourite movie when I was 12-16 years old, I've seen it so many times I can't even begin to count. Little bits of dialogue pop in to my head all the time. Anyway. Wouldn't we all tell our girlfriends that this guy was trouble, objectively? But then she'd show us a picture and we'd go "Oh, yes, I see. Carry on then."
She winked, though she wasn’t sure if the Doctor was able to see her at all.
“Quite,” the Doctor croaked, so softly Rose thought for a moment it was just a pebble falling or the wind in the scrub grass.
So he was in there, somewhere. His rather overweening vanity about this new body of his would never let a comment like that slip by unnoticed. His eyes, however, never left the video screen, his pupils shrunk to pin-pricks in the bright light.
I love Vain!Ten. I can't tell you how much I squeed at the "I didn't want to change. Why would I? Look at me." line from JE.
“So right now, because I’m a fool and will always be, I’m just going to come over there, okay? I’m not asking you to do anything, I’m just gonna come and sit with you, for a little bit.”
In actual fact she wanted to just storm over there and grab the video player and smash it in to a hundred tiny pieces, but if there was one thing that Rose Tyler learned from the Doctor, it was the power of choices over decrees.
The whole show is so much about choices and about how important it is that people be allowed to make choices for themselves. The Doctor always gives even the most irredeemable baddies the choice to either stop what they're doing or be dealt with harshly. Even Mr. No Second Chances always gives a first chance.
She rose and went over to sit by his feet, not wanting to seem like she was intruding in on what he was watching, which was his own private business, as much as the demons inside of her wanted to see.
“You know, the coppers back in 1953, they said you went a bit mental when they found me, or my body I guess since I wasn’t really there. Oh yeah, I did chat with them a bit later, I guess I didn’t mention. They didn’t really remember what all you said but they did get the distinct impression that you were…well, a little bit mad. Just a scootch.”
Just cluing my readers in to the time frame vis a vis series 2 here. I don't make it explicitly clear, but I'm envisioning their next stop after this series to be Krop Tor.
She was trying not to stare at the Doctor, but she saw out of the corner of her eye that he was looking at her now, though every few seconds darting his eyes back to look again at his dreams.
“I hated to see you like that,” he murmured. “You’ve no idea what that did to me.”
“When someone else hurts me, yeah.” Rose pulled her knees up and hugged them where she sat. “But you seem to have no problem doing it yourself. You know sometimes it hurts just being around you, but that’s my own fault for always coming back for more.”
Oof. Rose is treading on thin ice here, but I needed to make her still be very very angry with him, even though she still at the end of the day loves him and believes in him. It wouldn't be believable (or it would be even more unbelievable) if the Doctor was behaving in this way and Rose didn't really feel deep anger along with her desire to help him.
At this the Doctor sat up to lean against the boulder again, several of his joints creaking and cracking in the process.
“As I say,” Rose continued, “I’m a fool. It’s what I have for you, my foolishness. Before I came up here, Mr. Fitzpatrick asked me what I have to give you, and that’s it. That’s all I’ve got and it’ll have to do. I’m offering, if you’ll have it.”
I don't think I was concious of it at the time, but all the stories in this series also heavily feature Rose offering the Doctor parts of herself. And of course, he does pretty much nothing of the kind in return, until the epilogue.
She continued to stare straight ahead, ignoring every impulse she had to rip his stupid little device away from him, and then to….well, to show him the pain he caused her just by being around, and to show him how he could release her from it.
She means snogging him silly.
She rested her hands on the ground, drawing doodles in the sand to keep her feelings in check, and in a way enjoying the feel of the warm Earth, solid under her, which is a rare feeling when one lives in a time-and-space ship.
“I said that there was no power on this Earth that could stop me.”
This is of course what the Doctor says in the Idiots Lantern once he sees what the Wire has done to Rose.
The Doctor’s voice was hoarse and she hoped he would avail himself of the water she’d provided. He sounded terrible. His great gob had been stilled for nearly a day, and she reckoned it was the longest he’d been quiet in over 900 years.
“Well, Doctor, I think we’ve put the lie to that. There is a power that could stop you and he’s sitting right here next to the Universe’s Biggest Fool. Quite a pair we make. My mum would be so proud. We should take a picture to remember. She’ll put it on that dreadful sideboard.”
Rose bringin' the funny. I've been rewatching series 2 and I think in all the schmoopy love story we forget a lot of the witty banter between them and how funny Rose is.
There was a movement from the Doctor that could possibly have been a small inaudible chuckle, but she couldn’t be sure. It could have just as easily been a swallowed sob.
“When I was little and I’d have a bad dream, I’d go running in to mum’s room and she always said that if I told someone about it, I’d never have that dream again, and I wouldn’t have to be afraid of it anymore.”
Trufax from my childhood.
“Did it work?”
“I guess. I never had recurring nightmares. I always told her and they never came back.”
She felt the light brush of the Doctor’s pinky finger against her own hand, where it was resting on the ground between them. She didn’t want to make any sudden movements however, as if she was trying to coax a small forest creature to her.
“You could…you could tell me. About your dreams. Or if that’s too hard for you maybe you could show me.”
The moment we've all been waiting for. I knew I wanted this to happen, but it took me a while to work out the series of events and the dialogue that would make it happen.
He clutched the player tighter to him with his other hand.
“No, I mean, you could show me like you do, in my mind like. That way, I wouldn’t see anything that you didn’t want me to see.”
Canon question I'm too lazy to look up: Do we ever actually see the Doctor demonstrate his little touch-telepathy skill to Rose? If not, I'm imagining it happened off screen.
The Doctor closed the screen of the player for the first time in many hours, and Rose, in spite of her luring-the-small-forest-creature stealth let out an audible sigh of relief. He didn’t say anything at all, just shifted slightly where he was sitting and placed the tips of his fingers lightly on her temples. Rose didn’t even have time to realize how much she’d missed his touch in the past 24 hours before she was flooded with sense-memories.
It wasn’t like watching a movie or looking at a picture. The images projected on to the back of the scrim of the mind’s eye, and so she can’t say she ever actually saw the burnt orange sky or the twin suns and silver forests. It was as if she had once been there and was remembering it, along with a smell, earthy like incense, and the sound of wind through strange trees. And she felt the bittersweet memories of home. His memories.
Rose gets a glimpse of Gallifrey. If I recall correctly, the Doctor never even mentions its name to her that we see in series 1-2. Though just talking about this now is giving me a powerful hankering to go and watch Gridlock for that scene at the end. God damn you, David Tennant, why are you so fucking awesome?
It was over in just a second and he removed his fingers and seemed to curl up slightly again, like a leaf drying out. Rose took a moment to catch her bearings. The Doctor’s brand of telepathy was a bit jarring and he rarely used it with her. She wondered what it was like on his end, if it was just as disorienting.
She brought her hand up to touch her temple, feeling the faint impressions of his fingers there. “I feel like that too. About home,” she said.
He looked extremely skeptical. Sad and skeptical.
“When you’re there, it seems so dull and predictable. And the people, they’re all horrible you just wish you could get away from them. But then you’re gone and it doesn’t seem so bad any more. You want to go back, you forget the bad stuff.”
My knowledge of old Who canon is extremely thin, so I had to really try hard here to not have this conversation go in to too much detail about Gallifrey and the Time Lords.
“I can never go back. It’s all gone,” sighed the Doctor.
“Yes, yes I know that. I can’t ever really either, you know. I mean, yeah, I can physically go home, or the place I used to call home, but I can’t really ever go back. Not now. Not anymore. It would be like dying, every day. And if I was back there without you, I can’t say I’d turn down someone who could offer me this.” She gestured to the player. “I’m not saying I can ever fully understand how you feel, but consider that I may sometimes, just a tiny little bit.”
The Doctor heaved another sigh and finally reached for the glass of proffered water. Rose plowed onwards.
“So while I’m being utterly foolish, is there anything else, any other dreams you want to tell me about? To help me understand? About home, or what you want or what you’re afraid of? Anything at all, I just want to understand and to share things. Our lot, humans, we do that. Share things in order to deal with them. Spread the load around I guess. There’s no shame-.”
I've always felt that emotionally the Doctor and Rose's relationship is fairly one-sided. She's female and human, he's male and not, she shares, he clams up and/or changes the subject. That's why in The One True Free Life when she asks Alt!Ten to tell her what it feels like when he has his little spells and what's causing it, and he actually does, she bursts in to tears and tells him he's so different from Proper!Doctor.
She’d gotten carried away with her talking but suddenly his fingers were on her again and she floated in eddies of sense-memory. This time it felt different. Less like history and more like fiction. A true dream, not a hazy amalgam of old memories and dreamings. As before, she saw without seeing. It was her own image, as had been on the monitor in the lab, but now enhanced with emotion, sound, sensation. It was like the most vivid memory, but of something that had never actually happened. The Doctor was placing a hand on her cheek, then under her chin and raising her face up to meet his. She felt hot tears and couldn’t be sure if they were his in the dream, or hers in her mind, or if they were actually forming in her eyes sitting there on the ground in the middle of the great desert. Sadness, bittersweet longing, desire, need, completion but also the feeling of being ripped in half again. She felt as if her heart would burst, and all the air was crushed out of her lungs at once.
So, in case you couldn't tell, a bit of an erotic dream the Doctor has about Rose. This was before I ever wrote anything even remotely resembling sex, so yes, it is very soft-focus. Very.
It was of course again over in a matter of seconds, though she couldn’t be sure if she’d lived entire lifetimes while in the Doctor’s dream. When her vision swam back in to focus, the Doctor was now standing, in the lee of a rock-face opposite her and several feet away. The minidisc player still lay on the ground where he’d been before, though Rose didn’t notice, still completely overwhelmed by the emotions the Doctor had let her feel. He stood with his hands deep in his pockets, hunched and slouching, shirt untucked, tie half-off, badly in need of a shave and his hair in a complete tangle. Both of them were by now covered in a fine layer of dust and sand.
Rose stammered, unable to form any suitable words for a long while. Looking back, she had to admit, she’d been trumped. She’d planned on talking with the Doctor and bringing him back to her through the very human practice of sharing her feelings and inviting him to open up a little. A foolish crusade if she ever heard one. She never counted on this though, never thought in a million years he’d let her get that close.
I like the idea of Rose's plan going slightly awry because it actually works better than she thought it would. Though of course he can only communicate that openly non-verbally.
“I’m sorry,” he said dully.
“But I….” Rose took a moment to try to compose herself and not come off sounding like a complete yammering idiot, or like the young girl she in fact was. “I feel that way too. About you. It’s okay. I mean, it’s good, isn’t it?”
She never thought talking with the Doctor would feel this much like being back in year seven.
ZOMG BOYS! Does he like me? Yeah, this is an awkward moment for the two of them. And it's so easy for me to forget when writing, at this time Rose is like 20 years old. To me, that's young, cuz I'm old. She has not been that long out of the ZOMG BOYS! phase.
He continued to look darkly at her, beetling his brow.
“It can’t ever be like that though. Never. And I’m so sorry. I’ve been so selfish when it comes to you. I want you with me always, but I can’t ever be what you need. It was so much easier to just crawl inside a fantasy than to let you go.”
They're both incredibly selfish when it comes to each other, at least in my personal canon. What I mean is, they are so in to one another, nothing else matters, to either of them. Rose, an only child, leaves her poor widowed single mum multiple times, over tearful protests, in order to be with the Doctor. And the Doctor? This is how his selfishness in regard to her expresses itself.
“Go?” Rose wiped her hands on her shirt and rubber her eyes, incredulous. “Haven’t you heard me at all? I’m not going. You’ll not be rid of me that easily.” She could tell a misunderstanding was brewing.
“I’m quite serious, Rose. I’ve done a monstrous thing to you. I wanted to keep you in this bell jar, no one else can ever have you, but I can’t either. I drove Mickey away, took you from your mother, and I knew what I was doing. I can barely live with myself for what I’ve done.” He’d barely moved, but his haggard red-rimmed eyes had grown wide and his lips were thin and pursed, drawn in to the same grim straight line she’d seen so many times before. It never meant good things.
“Doctor, you’re such a right old knob sometimes. I left mum and my home of my own choice. You didn’t take me or make me do anything. Don’t flatter yourself. And Mickey, well that was partly my doing as well. We’re both to blame there but I think he found the right way for himself.”
Choices again. And of course the Doctor is so arrogant, he'd blame himself even though it was she that has made the choices she has. It's a wee bit patronising, don't you think? But very Doctory, to me.
It seemed time to do something. This discussion was probably not going to wind up going anywhere good or healing for the Doctor, as much as she wanted to run over to him and grab him by his shirt collar and first demand to know why they could never be together, and then to prove him wrong, right there on the spot. But for the moment, he seemed as if he might be ready to at least make the choice to move on from this place, and that moment had to be taken advantage of. These other issues would have to wait, and Rose had a plan for that as well.
There's one more chapter after this, but by this point I'd realised that what was really needed here was a sequel. I have a hard time ending things properly, I tend to rush through the falling action, which is probably a serious flaw in Chapter 11 of this. But I do see the sequel are growing organically from this fic, and my intention was to present it as their very next adventure after leaving here.