(no subject)
universe in my palm
Nine/Rose, PG13, 4,115 words, auish? i suppose
In whatever improbabilities two such people might ever have a relationship (or the skeletal structure of), they’d somehow found their lucky throw, but it wasn’t anything special.
She supposed that what she had was a feeling most people got when they used the phrase ‘just business.’ The feeling that there was a certain unnerving lack of, the feeling that despite the fact that though there probably should have been some sort of deeper meaning between the touches and the soft hitches of breath taken in the darkness of either of their rooms (or just her room, really), what they had was purely a matter of unspoken arrangements and transactions. What the other offered, the other took.
And in the dark, they were what they were, what they let themselves be, liberated by loss of sight to be selfish and ugly and withered of heart without any other judgements - a frightened girl pulled into a universe full of things that were so far beyond her, and a broken soldier who’d seen too much of it. She went to him to be reassured - he came to her to be fixed.
In whatever improbabilities two such people might ever have a relationship (or the skeletal structure of), they’d somehow found their lucky throw, but it wasn’t anything special. What they had was raw and unrefined, nothing full of hushed whispers or compliments of 'beautiful' muttered into indentations of skin like so many people had or wanted. It was definitely not anything personal.
When the sun would proverbially rise, and the atmospheric lighting of the TARDIS would brighten, they returned to what they were supposed to be, from pumpkin to carriage in moments defined by shades of morning. Under the glow of stars, she was a girl who wanted to experience everything she'd lacked in her boring, scheduled life, and he was the man who could give it to her. They never talked, mentioned, or acknowledged what happened during the darker hours and officially, there was nothing to mention. Besides, what they had in the full view of everyone else was so much better, so much more complicated, in a good way, in ways that things should be.
Rose didn’t mind. If she was trying to be painfully honest with herself, she would have to admit that she wasn’t sure what she was doing at all. She had had one-night stands before, but one-night stands were one-night stands. They weren’t several-night stands, all with the same person. Though logically there stood here an issue of convenience as the only two people living in a very large ship, who were both missing something that they tried to pull out of each other, at times, snuggled in her duvet, feeling sated, a lonely chill would crawl up her spine and she would understand, truly, the feeling of ‘just business.’
Their friendship during the day wasn’t intimate or even particularly close (he held her hand, she held his, it made getting lost more difficult), but she had a sense that it was much more substantial than anything they had at night. But what did she care? He was a great shag, and she used him just as he used her to forget that she was terrified at everything she didn’t know and horrified at some of the things she had come to know a bit too well. They weren’t in love, they were just friends, and not even that when the lights were turned off. It was just better not to think about it, to pretend that this was all perfectly normal, to pretend that it didn't happen or didn't exist.
So no, it wasn’t an especially logical relationship by any means, but they both got what they wanted from it, and it worked. In the end, that was really all that mattered.
--
Despite the fact that the activity they regularly engaged in required an absence of at least some clothing, she'd never actually seen him without his jumper, and very rarely even without his jacket. It was always too dark when he was taking it off, and he was always too missing when she woke up the next morning. She'd wondered at it a few times before, when she was bored and he was the only point of interest in the room.
But this time it was different. She knew it. She knew it from the sudden clamminess of her palms, the sudden inability to breathe though the lump that had suddenly appeared at her throat, the sudden tightness of her chest as she watched a droplet of water skim thoughtfully along his jawline before sidling its way down to his neck. And of course it was then that it suddenly occurred to her how attractive he really was, and then she had to wonder how he didn't know and how she hadn't noticed. Knowing him, he probably scoffed at the mere idea of physical attraction. How's a decent sized nose and ears going to help me uncouple these wires? he would ask in that usual tone of his that said very much don't answer, I already know because I know everything.
Perhaps his nose and ears did err on the side of too large, but thinking more about it, they defined his face as much as his cheekbones and piercing blue eyes, as much as his accent and his caustic humour. As much as his hidden timidity and ostentatious show of arrogance and pretentiousness.
She didn't really know why she was staring. Sure, the jumper was probably clinging to things she'd only ever seen with her fingertips, but she could hardly tell, because in spite of every ringing criticism she could hear her mother scream in her mind about how being soaked in water would make the leather dry out later, he'd kept it on, most likely because he had probably already jiggery-pokered it to be almost indestructible. It was just a guess, but what he called a guess she preferred to call an educated guess.
Dripping carelessly onto the jumpseat, she tried to remove her eyes from his neck from that long line of muscle that connected his jaw to his clavicle, only to have it wander off to the lines of his face, for once lacking any amusement as he concentrated on getting them safely into the Vortex.
What was wrong with her? He had always been there, to watch and to observe. Why was it now that she was noticing all these things, when they'd of course been there all along?
He was so weird, which was an adjective she'd never realised the true meaning of until meeting him. On first glance he was human, with eyes, ears, a nose, no extra appendages - but the way he held himself, the way he smiled, expressed any sort of emotion, they were all a little too much. He acted like he had seen happiness, sadness, fear, worry in other people, like perhaps he'd heard about it in passing and had decided that it sounded rather nice and tried to emulate it. She was never sure if his smile was sincere, the grim line of his lips something else, the tension of his shoulders his own.
It was then she realised... she didn't know anything about him. For whatever friendship they shared, for how many midnight rendezvous they had, she'd not bothered to get to know him, not even a bit. She knew that he wasn't human, that he was the last, that he had two hearts, that he was weird, that occasionally, when he didn't notice she was there, his shoulders would be slumped and his eyes terribly vacant in ways she'd forced herself to forget until now. But what else? His favourite colour? His age?
"You alright there, then?"
Her eyes had been staring at his while her mind had drifted away, and as it returned she found herself slammed into his gaze, cold blue and so very weird. Her chest worked on an instinct to answer the question, but the vowels and consonants stumbled their way together out of her unmoving lips in only a vague imitation of the word 'yes' as she forced her head down to fiddle at the rings around her fingers, away from his stare.
She knew him enough to know that his eyebrow had twitched without her having to look up, but he didn't push (obviously not tied like her to little things like curiosity), just told her to take a warm shower before she could go and do something stupid and human, like die of hypothermia.
--
It was an entirely futile effort to try and get him to talk more about anything, and more than once her inquiries in the days passing were faced with inquiries of his own, like why she was so interested in him all of a sudden when they'd gone on fine the way they were. Considering she didn't quite know the answer to that herself, she eventually gave up, telling herself that she was just being silly and trying to ruin something that was working perfectly well and good.
Tonight was one of those nights when he would tell her to go to bed early because he wouldn't be showing up.
She wasn't feeling very tired at the moment, however, so she had instead taken to exploring the TARDIS in her jimjams, embarrassingly cotton and even more embarrassingly decorated with pink sheep, in hopes of finding either something to eat up her state of awareness, or a good cup of tea. She'd definitely not banked on finding him, especially not in a library of all places, while she was sneaking around, but she didn't know anyone else in the TARDIS who wore Doc Martens so it stood to reason that it was him, which surprised her. It wasn't that she thought he wasn't the type to read (well, that was exactly what she'd thought, actually), but he always put off a sense of activity that seemed to be in constant need of relief, so she'd never thought she'd see him out of the console room where there were plenty of things to be happily messed with to his hearts' content.
And yet, there he was. He wasn't reading at the moment, but there were obvious signs that he had been, with his precious jacket folded neatly over the armrest under his head and some nameless hard cover sitting splayed face-down on his chest with his fingers still tucked into the pages. He might've been sleeping. He might've been, but he was the Doctor, so he wasn't. He was just doing that stare she hated so much, hated because it was blank and horrifying and so very unhuman.
Her first impulse was to leave, let him sit there, sorting out his own troubles, go and try and forget about that stare at dreams instead, but what had seemed like the logical thing to do several weeks ago seemed insensitive and selfish now, and her feet wouldn't move when she told them to. Her second was to joke, to prod him about the boots digging into the fabric of the couch, or maybe how she never knew he could sit still for more than a few seconds, but that fell into the same problems the first idea had. At a loss at what else she could do without her sudden sense of altruism in the way, she very nearly simply sat down to wait herself out.
The hand that wasn't holding his place in the nameless tome was dangling over his head, looking as though they were straining to tap out a rhythm. Before she could think it over, she was leaning forward, brushing her fingertips against his palm before threading her fingers through his. He reacted almost immediately, jerking her hand so that she stumbled into his view, where he could blink at her cluelessly for a few seconds while she accidentally tripped into the hollow depths of his eyes.
it's cold.
She fell out when he scowled, thin lips pressing together to be even thinner.
"I thought I told you to go to bed."
She shrugged, letting the movement absorb her shivering. "You never said when."
"Early."
"Too late. It's later now."
It could've been a joke. But from the look on his face, she felt like she'd just reminded him that Santa wasn't real, that Peter wasn't staying.
"It's okay," she told him softly, still holding his hand while knowing it wasn't. Skimming a side of his face with her knuckles, she tried to think of something better to say, some better reassurance that didn't fall alongside the billions he must have already heard.
This would, she imagined, be the point where he would come to seek her out if she hadn't sought him already, taking because he could take. It had always been about taking, hadn't it, for both of them - to the point that it had never really been about giving, no matter what she'd told herself in whatever attempt to make herself seem less selfish. But this time. This time she could give... and maybe that would be all the difference.
She felt him swallow as she brushed her lips against his neck. "Rose, now's not the best..." His voice faltered when she nibbled the lobe of his ear, the stern confidence fading all at once in favour of things she'd never actually seen in him before. "B-but the light..."
"I'm not scared," she said with a whisper, squeezing his hand. "Are you?"
He was, of course, she could tell from the look in his eyes. But she'd known he wouldn't admit it.
"These are the stupidest pyjamas I've ever seen you wear."
She laughed.
--
A forest hadn't been what she'd been expecting when she'd asked him to take them 'somewhere interesting.' 'Somewhere interesting' usually meant star clusters so close as to shame the very Hubble out of telescopes or flowers that would raise their heads to the merest shine of light or smiles that glowed in the dark with no cats to accompany it. And though he'd been very vague about where they'd landed, refusing to answer what planet they were on, Rose couldn't help but have the greatest suspicion that they were on Earth. In some nameless forest that she wasn't finding very interesting.
He told her to stay where she was for a moment, so she went a climbed a tree instead. The rough edges of the bark cut into her palms, her painted nails unsurprisingly ill-suited for climbing trees, her feet unable find catches as well as they used to when she was eight. A branch or two snapped under her weight, but soon she found a sturdy (and high) enough bough to climb onto, just a place to see the small forest clearing from above. Judging from the sun desperately trying to squeeze its way past the leaves, she guessed the relative time to be a bit before noon as she watched the plants shudder in the quiet breeze.
"Could you stop doing your ancestors proud and come down here for a moment?"
Not comprehending the words, but comprehending plenty the sardonic tone of his voice, she jolted from her impromptu doze in indignation and dropped down slightly blearily through the branches to give him the latest update on how must of a prat she thought he was. Her intention fell short of its goal as she was immediately distracted by his hands, which were cupped around something she couldn't see with infinite care.
"What've you got?" Trying to peer futilely through the possible gaps of his fingers to see what was inside, she leaned her head in closer, only for him to tear his hands away and shake his head.
"Patience."
"That all?"
"Close your eyes."
"But I want to see what it is."
"Close your eyes," he pressed, brow furrowing in annoyance at her inability to follow even his basic instruction without making a fuss.
Sighing like it was the hardest thing to do in the world, she folded her arms and closed her eyes, only for him to tell her to hold her hands out. She did so with some trepidation, unable to not suspect that despite nine hundred years and a well-used mask of superiority, he'd pull something cruel and juvenile like drop a caterpillar down her shirt just to see how she reacted.
Something fell into her palm and immediately began to move, sending shudders up her spine so violent that he had to grab her wrists to keep her from screaming and dropping whatever he'd given her.
"It's fine," she heard him say. "It won't hurt you. Just be careful with it. You can open your eyes now, by the way."
With him still holding onto her wrists, she opened her eyes slowly, almost afraid to see what he'd handed her - probably something with lots of legs and hair that just loved the taste of her blood or something equally horrible that she would find disgusting, but he found absolutely fascinating.
It wasn't.
It was a snake - a small snake - so small that she had to blink several times so her brain could adjust to the knowledge that snakes could be this small at all, with a little white band across its neck. She didn't even look up when he let her go, too amazed by the tiny life held in her palms, inquisitively threading through the branches of her fingers as it flicked its needle-thin tongue at her with interest, absorbing and observing this new world it found itself in with only taste.
"We're on Earth," he answered finally, to a question she had asked hours ago.
She nearly laughed. There was no way this could be Earth - she knew what snakes on Earth looked like. They didn't have to be gargantuan, but they certainly didn't come as small as this. The laughter died before it even reached her throat, however, the expression on his face brokering no argument as he continued.
"You lot are always looking for something interesting, something exciting." The no-nonsense expression cracked then and he smiled, not in his usual way, not stretching his lips as far as they could go - just a smile, letting his lips curve naturally as Rose felt a universe quietly implode somewhere while kick-starting another. He didn't seem to notice, only watched the tiny little snake poke around its new, strange tasting, soft, squishy environment. "You never realise some of the most interesting stuff's right here in front of you. Just haven't been looking hard enough."
She stared up at him like she'd never seen him before, eyes wide as she tried to find the right combination of sounds and emotions for what she was thinking, for what he'd just done, for what he'd just said, for the little world he'd just deposited into her hands. But by the time she'd settled on something she thought sounded right, he'd turned around again to head back into the forest, presumably on the search for more 'interesting' things.
... She was in love with him, wasn't she.
Well, that's pretty interesting, she told her heart with shoulders shaking.
In her hands, the snake wondered when it had begun to rain.
--
Rose decided she must have eaten some curry gone awfully wrong at her last visit to her Mum's because she'd obviously died and ended up in Hell, where all the ironic torture in the world was waiting for her. It would at least explain why she was currently in an unending cycle every night of touching the man she wanted, but could never have as anything more. Now all that was missing were trees made out of chips that jumped out of her reach as soon as she got close, and the only chocolate for miles being dark, and then she'd have the full set.
It really was an absolutely spectacular mess she had created with this man. It would probably cause most couple therapists have an aneurysm, although they weren't technically a couple. Friendship on one side, sex in the other, with nothing meeting up in the middle, when that was all she wanted. Now. Not then. After she'd done the other two fairly well.
Her mother used to call her out on her singular inability to hold any stable relationship without having it all go to the dogs, and the Doctor liked to say she was jeopardy friendly. This was probably some unique hybrid of the two that only Rose Tyler, with her special Rose Tyler Relationship Powers, could have created. Because only she would've changed it so that shagging in places that weren't completely dark wasn't off limits, only to find that it made the situation a whole lot worse, having to see him all the time, the complete sod.
He noticed. Of course he did. She was snappy and mean and rude and made comments about his ears and nose more often than usual like she was trying to convince herself she didn't like them at all, as if convincing herself that his nose and ears being suddenly extremely unattractive would change much at this point. But he would only raise an eyebrow and shut up when she told him to shut up, talk when it seemed safe enough to talk, then talked some more even after she told him to shut up because he quite enjoyed the talking.
Her tongue hurt from the amount she'd been chewing on it.
It wasn't funny. She knew it wasn't funny because sometimes she would end up in bed, crying for no reason but wanting him so badly her heart felt like it would explode. She knew it wasn't funny because for every reason she came up with to say "no" when he came to her, she would immediately supply herself with several more reasons why she should go up to him and say "yes". It wasn't funny because it was just so very wrong and stupid and oh so human and hadn't she gone and proved how very not-human he was ages ago?
She knew it wasn't funny because every mistake she made in front of him felt a million times worse than what it actually was, even the really, really bad ones.
Her head gave up its effort in attempting to keep the situation light as she sunk deeper into every reason why it wasn't funny.
--
She couldn't let him go, because even this intimacy, as pathetically shallow as it was, felt like the only one she could have, and wasn't that so very sad of her.
Things had changed. They'd been subtle at the time of their making, but by now they had become pronounced enough to be labelled as 'different.'
They didn't hide away in the dark all the time. They sometimes used his room instead of hers. They practised more frequently the give side of give and take (and it did make all the difference, just like she had predicted all those nights ago, to be offered comfort instead of simply taking it). They talked. They didn't talk about what they did, of course, but they talked. She would tell him of the stories Mum used to tell her about her dad (he had a cape in one) and he would tell her of silver leaves reflecting orange skies onto the red grass. Sometimes, increasingly even, the talking wasn't immediately preceding or proceeding any sex at all. There were quite a few times where he just showed up in her room to talk.
They'd even kissed.
Once or twice. Once or both by accident.
(She'd felt like she was hiccuping happiness a bit after anyway.)
But it still wasn't anything... anything. There were still so many lines drawn in the sand, pushing far in some areas and close in others. At the bottom of it, they were still just friends who shagged. Occasionally.
She was going crazy with the need of change, of needing to know where the boundaries lay and not having to keep back a foot just in case. She wasn't even sure she didn't want to break it off entirely (though she'd given that up for loss) just to get out of this ambiguous rut 'something' that wasn't 'this' or 'that' that they seemed to be perpetually stuck in. As long as they were on one side or the other. As long as she knew what she was supposed to be doing.
Tonight hadn't been about giving or taking. The talking had stopped; that was to say, any talking had ceased a while ago in favour of the Doctor saying things about whatever fascinating topic he had stumbled into on his train of thought (currently the Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919) while she curled up her on her side, her hands under her pillow as she listened to him say things about one of the odder events in history. Her eyes drooped heavily at the soothing lull of his voice, registered in her mind under labels of comfort and security. She loved to hear him talk (and say things), particularly when something was exciting him, usually because the things that excited him most were typically things everyone else took for granted. But him, he could see the intricacies and amazement in everything, he knew that everything was amazing if looked at hard enough.
She felt her heart press upon her that familiar ache that she had grown so used to by now, and then the words, burned on her tongue since that day in the woods when he had dropped a whole universe into her hands and called it 'interesting', slipped out of her mouth like so much word vomit.
The silence was immediate, his monologue tapering off on some ingenuity in the word 'molassacre' as she froze completely, her hands fisting under her pillow reflexively to the abrupt tension in her shoulders. Her bones had gone stiff, her body snapping loudly into what was obviously pre-death rigor-mortis in terror of his reaction, knowing it was just behind her. "D-d-doctor?" Her teeth chattered with her anxiety as she forced the syllables out of her mouth.
"I'm thinking."
She would have nodded, but her neck creaked at even the thought of it, tightening even more at the shortness in his voice. "About what?" she croaked.
There was a shift in covers behind her, and in her heart there were frantic Morses being sent to her brain to the affect of "he's leaving" until she felt his hand comfortably slide in around her waist, thumbing idly at the cotton fabric of her vest.
"What took you so long." He buried his face into her shoulder, rather unexpectedly unaffected by her confession. "Go to sleep, Rose."
It took her a long, long while to relax enough to drift into the edges of sleep, but when she did, she heard the Doctor chuckle breathlessly behind her.
"Worry wart."
Nine/Rose, PG13, 4,115 words, auish? i suppose
In whatever improbabilities two such people might ever have a relationship (or the skeletal structure of), they’d somehow found their lucky throw, but it wasn’t anything special.
She supposed that what she had was a feeling most people got when they used the phrase ‘just business.’ The feeling that there was a certain unnerving lack of, the feeling that despite the fact that though there probably should have been some sort of deeper meaning between the touches and the soft hitches of breath taken in the darkness of either of their rooms (or just her room, really), what they had was purely a matter of unspoken arrangements and transactions. What the other offered, the other took.
And in the dark, they were what they were, what they let themselves be, liberated by loss of sight to be selfish and ugly and withered of heart without any other judgements - a frightened girl pulled into a universe full of things that were so far beyond her, and a broken soldier who’d seen too much of it. She went to him to be reassured - he came to her to be fixed.
In whatever improbabilities two such people might ever have a relationship (or the skeletal structure of), they’d somehow found their lucky throw, but it wasn’t anything special. What they had was raw and unrefined, nothing full of hushed whispers or compliments of 'beautiful' muttered into indentations of skin like so many people had or wanted. It was definitely not anything personal.
When the sun would proverbially rise, and the atmospheric lighting of the TARDIS would brighten, they returned to what they were supposed to be, from pumpkin to carriage in moments defined by shades of morning. Under the glow of stars, she was a girl who wanted to experience everything she'd lacked in her boring, scheduled life, and he was the man who could give it to her. They never talked, mentioned, or acknowledged what happened during the darker hours and officially, there was nothing to mention. Besides, what they had in the full view of everyone else was so much better, so much more complicated, in a good way, in ways that things should be.
Rose didn’t mind. If she was trying to be painfully honest with herself, she would have to admit that she wasn’t sure what she was doing at all. She had had one-night stands before, but one-night stands were one-night stands. They weren’t several-night stands, all with the same person. Though logically there stood here an issue of convenience as the only two people living in a very large ship, who were both missing something that they tried to pull out of each other, at times, snuggled in her duvet, feeling sated, a lonely chill would crawl up her spine and she would understand, truly, the feeling of ‘just business.’
Their friendship during the day wasn’t intimate or even particularly close (he held her hand, she held his, it made getting lost more difficult), but she had a sense that it was much more substantial than anything they had at night. But what did she care? He was a great shag, and she used him just as he used her to forget that she was terrified at everything she didn’t know and horrified at some of the things she had come to know a bit too well. They weren’t in love, they were just friends, and not even that when the lights were turned off. It was just better not to think about it, to pretend that this was all perfectly normal, to pretend that it didn't happen or didn't exist.
So no, it wasn’t an especially logical relationship by any means, but they both got what they wanted from it, and it worked. In the end, that was really all that mattered.
--
Despite the fact that the activity they regularly engaged in required an absence of at least some clothing, she'd never actually seen him without his jumper, and very rarely even without his jacket. It was always too dark when he was taking it off, and he was always too missing when she woke up the next morning. She'd wondered at it a few times before, when she was bored and he was the only point of interest in the room.
But this time it was different. She knew it. She knew it from the sudden clamminess of her palms, the sudden inability to breathe though the lump that had suddenly appeared at her throat, the sudden tightness of her chest as she watched a droplet of water skim thoughtfully along his jawline before sidling its way down to his neck. And of course it was then that it suddenly occurred to her how attractive he really was, and then she had to wonder how he didn't know and how she hadn't noticed. Knowing him, he probably scoffed at the mere idea of physical attraction. How's a decent sized nose and ears going to help me uncouple these wires? he would ask in that usual tone of his that said very much don't answer, I already know because I know everything.
Perhaps his nose and ears did err on the side of too large, but thinking more about it, they defined his face as much as his cheekbones and piercing blue eyes, as much as his accent and his caustic humour. As much as his hidden timidity and ostentatious show of arrogance and pretentiousness.
She didn't really know why she was staring. Sure, the jumper was probably clinging to things she'd only ever seen with her fingertips, but she could hardly tell, because in spite of every ringing criticism she could hear her mother scream in her mind about how being soaked in water would make the leather dry out later, he'd kept it on, most likely because he had probably already jiggery-pokered it to be almost indestructible. It was just a guess, but what he called a guess she preferred to call an educated guess.
Dripping carelessly onto the jumpseat, she tried to remove her eyes from his neck from that long line of muscle that connected his jaw to his clavicle, only to have it wander off to the lines of his face, for once lacking any amusement as he concentrated on getting them safely into the Vortex.
What was wrong with her? He had always been there, to watch and to observe. Why was it now that she was noticing all these things, when they'd of course been there all along?
He was so weird, which was an adjective she'd never realised the true meaning of until meeting him. On first glance he was human, with eyes, ears, a nose, no extra appendages - but the way he held himself, the way he smiled, expressed any sort of emotion, they were all a little too much. He acted like he had seen happiness, sadness, fear, worry in other people, like perhaps he'd heard about it in passing and had decided that it sounded rather nice and tried to emulate it. She was never sure if his smile was sincere, the grim line of his lips something else, the tension of his shoulders his own.
It was then she realised... she didn't know anything about him. For whatever friendship they shared, for how many midnight rendezvous they had, she'd not bothered to get to know him, not even a bit. She knew that he wasn't human, that he was the last, that he had two hearts, that he was weird, that occasionally, when he didn't notice she was there, his shoulders would be slumped and his eyes terribly vacant in ways she'd forced herself to forget until now. But what else? His favourite colour? His age?
"You alright there, then?"
Her eyes had been staring at his while her mind had drifted away, and as it returned she found herself slammed into his gaze, cold blue and so very weird. Her chest worked on an instinct to answer the question, but the vowels and consonants stumbled their way together out of her unmoving lips in only a vague imitation of the word 'yes' as she forced her head down to fiddle at the rings around her fingers, away from his stare.
She knew him enough to know that his eyebrow had twitched without her having to look up, but he didn't push (obviously not tied like her to little things like curiosity), just told her to take a warm shower before she could go and do something stupid and human, like die of hypothermia.
--
It was an entirely futile effort to try and get him to talk more about anything, and more than once her inquiries in the days passing were faced with inquiries of his own, like why she was so interested in him all of a sudden when they'd gone on fine the way they were. Considering she didn't quite know the answer to that herself, she eventually gave up, telling herself that she was just being silly and trying to ruin something that was working perfectly well and good.
Tonight was one of those nights when he would tell her to go to bed early because he wouldn't be showing up.
She wasn't feeling very tired at the moment, however, so she had instead taken to exploring the TARDIS in her jimjams, embarrassingly cotton and even more embarrassingly decorated with pink sheep, in hopes of finding either something to eat up her state of awareness, or a good cup of tea. She'd definitely not banked on finding him, especially not in a library of all places, while she was sneaking around, but she didn't know anyone else in the TARDIS who wore Doc Martens so it stood to reason that it was him, which surprised her. It wasn't that she thought he wasn't the type to read (well, that was exactly what she'd thought, actually), but he always put off a sense of activity that seemed to be in constant need of relief, so she'd never thought she'd see him out of the console room where there were plenty of things to be happily messed with to his hearts' content.
And yet, there he was. He wasn't reading at the moment, but there were obvious signs that he had been, with his precious jacket folded neatly over the armrest under his head and some nameless hard cover sitting splayed face-down on his chest with his fingers still tucked into the pages. He might've been sleeping. He might've been, but he was the Doctor, so he wasn't. He was just doing that stare she hated so much, hated because it was blank and horrifying and so very unhuman.
Her first impulse was to leave, let him sit there, sorting out his own troubles, go and try and forget about that stare at dreams instead, but what had seemed like the logical thing to do several weeks ago seemed insensitive and selfish now, and her feet wouldn't move when she told them to. Her second was to joke, to prod him about the boots digging into the fabric of the couch, or maybe how she never knew he could sit still for more than a few seconds, but that fell into the same problems the first idea had. At a loss at what else she could do without her sudden sense of altruism in the way, she very nearly simply sat down to wait herself out.
The hand that wasn't holding his place in the nameless tome was dangling over his head, looking as though they were straining to tap out a rhythm. Before she could think it over, she was leaning forward, brushing her fingertips against his palm before threading her fingers through his. He reacted almost immediately, jerking her hand so that she stumbled into his view, where he could blink at her cluelessly for a few seconds while she accidentally tripped into the hollow depths of his eyes.
it's cold.
She fell out when he scowled, thin lips pressing together to be even thinner.
"I thought I told you to go to bed."
She shrugged, letting the movement absorb her shivering. "You never said when."
"Early."
"Too late. It's later now."
It could've been a joke. But from the look on his face, she felt like she'd just reminded him that Santa wasn't real, that Peter wasn't staying.
"It's okay," she told him softly, still holding his hand while knowing it wasn't. Skimming a side of his face with her knuckles, she tried to think of something better to say, some better reassurance that didn't fall alongside the billions he must have already heard.
This would, she imagined, be the point where he would come to seek her out if she hadn't sought him already, taking because he could take. It had always been about taking, hadn't it, for both of them - to the point that it had never really been about giving, no matter what she'd told herself in whatever attempt to make herself seem less selfish. But this time. This time she could give... and maybe that would be all the difference.
She felt him swallow as she brushed her lips against his neck. "Rose, now's not the best..." His voice faltered when she nibbled the lobe of his ear, the stern confidence fading all at once in favour of things she'd never actually seen in him before. "B-but the light..."
"I'm not scared," she said with a whisper, squeezing his hand. "Are you?"
He was, of course, she could tell from the look in his eyes. But she'd known he wouldn't admit it.
"These are the stupidest pyjamas I've ever seen you wear."
She laughed.
--
A forest hadn't been what she'd been expecting when she'd asked him to take them 'somewhere interesting.' 'Somewhere interesting' usually meant star clusters so close as to shame the very Hubble out of telescopes or flowers that would raise their heads to the merest shine of light or smiles that glowed in the dark with no cats to accompany it. And though he'd been very vague about where they'd landed, refusing to answer what planet they were on, Rose couldn't help but have the greatest suspicion that they were on Earth. In some nameless forest that she wasn't finding very interesting.
He told her to stay where she was for a moment, so she went a climbed a tree instead. The rough edges of the bark cut into her palms, her painted nails unsurprisingly ill-suited for climbing trees, her feet unable find catches as well as they used to when she was eight. A branch or two snapped under her weight, but soon she found a sturdy (and high) enough bough to climb onto, just a place to see the small forest clearing from above. Judging from the sun desperately trying to squeeze its way past the leaves, she guessed the relative time to be a bit before noon as she watched the plants shudder in the quiet breeze.
"Could you stop doing your ancestors proud and come down here for a moment?"
Not comprehending the words, but comprehending plenty the sardonic tone of his voice, she jolted from her impromptu doze in indignation and dropped down slightly blearily through the branches to give him the latest update on how must of a prat she thought he was. Her intention fell short of its goal as she was immediately distracted by his hands, which were cupped around something she couldn't see with infinite care.
"What've you got?" Trying to peer futilely through the possible gaps of his fingers to see what was inside, she leaned her head in closer, only for him to tear his hands away and shake his head.
"Patience."
"That all?"
"Close your eyes."
"But I want to see what it is."
"Close your eyes," he pressed, brow furrowing in annoyance at her inability to follow even his basic instruction without making a fuss.
Sighing like it was the hardest thing to do in the world, she folded her arms and closed her eyes, only for him to tell her to hold her hands out. She did so with some trepidation, unable to not suspect that despite nine hundred years and a well-used mask of superiority, he'd pull something cruel and juvenile like drop a caterpillar down her shirt just to see how she reacted.
Something fell into her palm and immediately began to move, sending shudders up her spine so violent that he had to grab her wrists to keep her from screaming and dropping whatever he'd given her.
"It's fine," she heard him say. "It won't hurt you. Just be careful with it. You can open your eyes now, by the way."
With him still holding onto her wrists, she opened her eyes slowly, almost afraid to see what he'd handed her - probably something with lots of legs and hair that just loved the taste of her blood or something equally horrible that she would find disgusting, but he found absolutely fascinating.
It wasn't.
It was a snake - a small snake - so small that she had to blink several times so her brain could adjust to the knowledge that snakes could be this small at all, with a little white band across its neck. She didn't even look up when he let her go, too amazed by the tiny life held in her palms, inquisitively threading through the branches of her fingers as it flicked its needle-thin tongue at her with interest, absorbing and observing this new world it found itself in with only taste.
"We're on Earth," he answered finally, to a question she had asked hours ago.
She nearly laughed. There was no way this could be Earth - she knew what snakes on Earth looked like. They didn't have to be gargantuan, but they certainly didn't come as small as this. The laughter died before it even reached her throat, however, the expression on his face brokering no argument as he continued.
"You lot are always looking for something interesting, something exciting." The no-nonsense expression cracked then and he smiled, not in his usual way, not stretching his lips as far as they could go - just a smile, letting his lips curve naturally as Rose felt a universe quietly implode somewhere while kick-starting another. He didn't seem to notice, only watched the tiny little snake poke around its new, strange tasting, soft, squishy environment. "You never realise some of the most interesting stuff's right here in front of you. Just haven't been looking hard enough."
She stared up at him like she'd never seen him before, eyes wide as she tried to find the right combination of sounds and emotions for what she was thinking, for what he'd just done, for what he'd just said, for the little world he'd just deposited into her hands. But by the time she'd settled on something she thought sounded right, he'd turned around again to head back into the forest, presumably on the search for more 'interesting' things.
... She was in love with him, wasn't she.
Well, that's pretty interesting, she told her heart with shoulders shaking.
In her hands, the snake wondered when it had begun to rain.
--
Rose decided she must have eaten some curry gone awfully wrong at her last visit to her Mum's because she'd obviously died and ended up in Hell, where all the ironic torture in the world was waiting for her. It would at least explain why she was currently in an unending cycle every night of touching the man she wanted, but could never have as anything more. Now all that was missing were trees made out of chips that jumped out of her reach as soon as she got close, and the only chocolate for miles being dark, and then she'd have the full set.
It really was an absolutely spectacular mess she had created with this man. It would probably cause most couple therapists have an aneurysm, although they weren't technically a couple. Friendship on one side, sex in the other, with nothing meeting up in the middle, when that was all she wanted. Now. Not then. After she'd done the other two fairly well.
Her mother used to call her out on her singular inability to hold any stable relationship without having it all go to the dogs, and the Doctor liked to say she was jeopardy friendly. This was probably some unique hybrid of the two that only Rose Tyler, with her special Rose Tyler Relationship Powers, could have created. Because only she would've changed it so that shagging in places that weren't completely dark wasn't off limits, only to find that it made the situation a whole lot worse, having to see him all the time, the complete sod.
He noticed. Of course he did. She was snappy and mean and rude and made comments about his ears and nose more often than usual like she was trying to convince herself she didn't like them at all, as if convincing herself that his nose and ears being suddenly extremely unattractive would change much at this point. But he would only raise an eyebrow and shut up when she told him to shut up, talk when it seemed safe enough to talk, then talked some more even after she told him to shut up because he quite enjoyed the talking.
Her tongue hurt from the amount she'd been chewing on it.
It wasn't funny. She knew it wasn't funny because sometimes she would end up in bed, crying for no reason but wanting him so badly her heart felt like it would explode. She knew it wasn't funny because for every reason she came up with to say "no" when he came to her, she would immediately supply herself with several more reasons why she should go up to him and say "yes". It wasn't funny because it was just so very wrong and stupid and oh so human and hadn't she gone and proved how very not-human he was ages ago?
She knew it wasn't funny because every mistake she made in front of him felt a million times worse than what it actually was, even the really, really bad ones.
Her head gave up its effort in attempting to keep the situation light as she sunk deeper into every reason why it wasn't funny.
--
She couldn't let him go, because even this intimacy, as pathetically shallow as it was, felt like the only one she could have, and wasn't that so very sad of her.
Things had changed. They'd been subtle at the time of their making, but by now they had become pronounced enough to be labelled as 'different.'
They didn't hide away in the dark all the time. They sometimes used his room instead of hers. They practised more frequently the give side of give and take (and it did make all the difference, just like she had predicted all those nights ago, to be offered comfort instead of simply taking it). They talked. They didn't talk about what they did, of course, but they talked. She would tell him of the stories Mum used to tell her about her dad (he had a cape in one) and he would tell her of silver leaves reflecting orange skies onto the red grass. Sometimes, increasingly even, the talking wasn't immediately preceding or proceeding any sex at all. There were quite a few times where he just showed up in her room to talk.
They'd even kissed.
Once or twice. Once or both by accident.
(She'd felt like she was hiccuping happiness a bit after anyway.)
But it still wasn't anything... anything. There were still so many lines drawn in the sand, pushing far in some areas and close in others. At the bottom of it, they were still just friends who shagged. Occasionally.
She was going crazy with the need of change, of needing to know where the boundaries lay and not having to keep back a foot just in case. She wasn't even sure she didn't want to break it off entirely (though she'd given that up for loss) just to get out of this ambiguous rut 'something' that wasn't 'this' or 'that' that they seemed to be perpetually stuck in. As long as they were on one side or the other. As long as she knew what she was supposed to be doing.
Tonight hadn't been about giving or taking. The talking had stopped; that was to say, any talking had ceased a while ago in favour of the Doctor saying things about whatever fascinating topic he had stumbled into on his train of thought (currently the Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919) while she curled up her on her side, her hands under her pillow as she listened to him say things about one of the odder events in history. Her eyes drooped heavily at the soothing lull of his voice, registered in her mind under labels of comfort and security. She loved to hear him talk (and say things), particularly when something was exciting him, usually because the things that excited him most were typically things everyone else took for granted. But him, he could see the intricacies and amazement in everything, he knew that everything was amazing if looked at hard enough.
She felt her heart press upon her that familiar ache that she had grown so used to by now, and then the words, burned on her tongue since that day in the woods when he had dropped a whole universe into her hands and called it 'interesting', slipped out of her mouth like so much word vomit.
The silence was immediate, his monologue tapering off on some ingenuity in the word 'molassacre' as she froze completely, her hands fisting under her pillow reflexively to the abrupt tension in her shoulders. Her bones had gone stiff, her body snapping loudly into what was obviously pre-death rigor-mortis in terror of his reaction, knowing it was just behind her. "D-d-doctor?" Her teeth chattered with her anxiety as she forced the syllables out of her mouth.
"I'm thinking."
She would have nodded, but her neck creaked at even the thought of it, tightening even more at the shortness in his voice. "About what?" she croaked.
There was a shift in covers behind her, and in her heart there were frantic Morses being sent to her brain to the affect of "he's leaving" until she felt his hand comfortably slide in around her waist, thumbing idly at the cotton fabric of her vest.
"What took you so long." He buried his face into her shoulder, rather unexpectedly unaffected by her confession. "Go to sleep, Rose."
It took her a long, long while to relax enough to drift into the edges of sleep, but when she did, she heard the Doctor chuckle breathlessly behind her.
"Worry wart."