Living the Life Fantastic (1/?)
Title: Living the Life Fantastic (1/?)
Author: whollyuncertain
Rating: K+ (Will probably be heading up later)
Summary: It wasn't a house with mortgages or picket fences, because that wasn't how you started from scratch. (AU of Impossible Planet/Satan's Pit.)
Disclaimer: We're all in universes with things we don't want. If we didn't want them, then we wouldn't be in this universe.
Author's Notes: I meant this to be much shorter... it came to me as a oneshot, actually. But it kept growing, and growing, so I thought I should separate it into parts instead.
I've come to be aware that people think this is a done AU, but... I've only seen ... about... two or three, so maybe I was absent during the craze, I'm not sure. But here is my addition. My overly verbose addition, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless. I'm only happy to get some creative writing juices back. Any mistakes are mine. Apologies in advance.
--
They were both silent as Zach steered the rocket out of the gravitational dip of the black hole, watching as the impossible planet with their previous lives hidden somewhere near the core began to shrink into the blackness surrounding it, until it became a speck… then turned into nothing at all. He had almost expected, or perhaps had only hoped, that a flash of blue would suddenly soak into the speckled blackness as evidence that it was no longer gone permanently, that this was only a nightmare and that the humming of dimensional engines would be heard again, but it never came. The blackness remained blackness, and only the eerie glow of the long dead star gave it any personality, and that personality was, frankly, an extremely dreary one.
The Doctor sank silently back into his seat, staring straight ahead to the front of the cockpit and the area beyond, where much of the same view greeted him. Only the pressure on his left hand made him aware that other people were there with him, and he turned his head somewhat reluctantly to see said hand being clutched with Rose’s right one, who had led it unknowingly into her lap. She was gripping it firmly, not painfully or confidently or even reassuringly, as would be expected of Rose Tyler, but tight enough to tell him that she was feeling scared and lost. The unrelenting grasp belied the blank stare and facial expression she used for the porthole closer to her and opposite his, which had no view of what they were flying away from, what they were leaving behind. The fingers of her other hand were fisted at her mouth, pressed to her lips and nose while her elbow sat against the small sill of the window.
Hesitantly, he shifted his hand to thread his fingers properly through hers and gave it a squeeze in return. Startled at the movement, she looked away from the endless infinity of space and turned to him, brown eyes questioning and worried as they met his. His smile was weak at best, but so was the one she gave him in reply. And that made it all right.
Releasing her hand, he wrapped his arm around her shoulders instead, drawing her to him so that she could tuck her head under his chin.
They didn’t move much for the rest of the journey, just stared, silently but together, into the blackness, a fitting visual metaphor for the future they didn’t know.
--
Their flat was small but spacious, roomy enough to have the bare essentials and a bit extra. It had the basics of a house: a sitting room, a kitchen, and a cramped hallway with four doors, which led to two bedrooms, a small bathroom consisting of a bathtub and a shower faucet hanging over it, with a slide away door in the far back that revealed a rickety but working washing machine and drier, and a large, empty closet. The furniture already placed in the sitting room and the bedrooms was old and splintering, giving an obvious reason as to why they had been left behind in the first place. It was hardly ideal, but ideal was a time and space travelling spaceship which they had left behind in the orbit of a black hole, so it seemed they were going to have to make do.
After deciding which rooms were theirs, they retired to bed, crawling into dingy mildew ridden sheets that they both immediately decided in their own separate quarters that they were going to have to do something about in the morning.
For now, however, they tried to sleep, still dressed in the clothes they’d worn since their arrival onto the impossible planet, since the day they’d lost their escape route into adventure and excitement, forever trapping them within the confines of domestic.
The Doctor couldn’t sleep. It was true enough that he didn’t need to, not necessarily, not at the moment, anyway; he slept very little in general and was always aggravated by the thought that for so and so hours, you had to lie there, in a bed, without knowing at all where you were, while your mind wandered off to have exceedingly lucid hallucinations before it returned just in time for you to open your eyes. It was a disturbing prospect for someone who liked to know where his mind was at all times, and he’d always been bothered by it. But as much as he wished it was, it wasn’t why his eyes wouldn’t close against the ceiling that night.
He would have drummed his fingers, but he didn’t have enough energy inside himself to do even that. There was nothing to do at all, actually. His fingers itched, and he nearly got up more than once to stumble tiredly into the console room to pull up a grating and tinker the hours away… before realising that he no longer had that option anymore, no more needless upgrading, no more random calibrations on things that didn’t require calibrations, and no more irritable sparks that burned his fingers when he did something that was right out.
He would start sleeping a lot more without her, he knew. Eventually his eyes would close for seconds too long in the morning, then minutes, then hours, until he was sleeping as much as Rose, and he didn’t appreciate the idea at all. But without being in the constant presence of artron energy, he would begin taking more time to recharge during the night. Just like humans.
Being trapped in one time zone without a working TARDIS wasn’t an unfamiliar concept to him, an experience he had gone through several times in his lifetime, in his third body, in his eighth… the latter while under a severe bout of amnesia and possible insanity that lasted for the entire century as he waited there for years to pass on a little blue green planet. But now was different. There was no TARDIS, period. He would just have to wait. Wait year after year, with nothing to wait for, not until all of his regenerations were used, with every single bit of time siphoned from each one. That made this different. That made this frightening, terrifying, and dull. No more wandering, not properly, anyway. Just him and now.
Now. Not then or will be. Now. And nothing else.
Noises from the kitchen jolted this piece of introspection from his mind, and he was more than happy to leave it behind so he could go and investigate.
Anything not to miss the green.
Rose couldn’t sleep, and she, on the other hand, actually needed to. Time was no longer relative, and it would no longer be a matter of waiting until she got properly tired to excuse herself into her comforters, it would be a matter of schedule and adjustment, her body clock working to find a routine in all of this as her sleeping time took on a pattern over the long drummed into habit of simply exhaustion equalling sleep. She didn’t like that. Routines and schedules were the life she’d left behind, the routine and schedule of waking up every morning, kissing her mum goodbye and working until she got home. It meant returning to repetition, and Rose Tyler had found herself thoroughly hard done by repetition and wasn’t keen on returning.
She was tired. She was exhausted, even, but thoughts of sleep or effort in such an act never came, pushed aside into other parts of her mind to make way to think about other things that were probably more important. She thought about the mother she’d never see again, all alone because Rose had left her there, waiting for her to come back… waiting for the daughter who would no longer return. Not even for Christmas. Or her fortieth (thirty-ninth?) birthday. She thought about the life that she’d lost, and the life she’d now been forced returned to, with its jobs and rent, mortgages and bills that had seemed so ridiculous and trivial when joking about it, which loomed menacingly at her now that it was real. She thought about the places she could no longer go, the people she could no longer meet. She thought about being trapped here, for the rest of her comparatively short but still long life, and didn’t like the conclusions of that.
The metal springs of her mattress creaked as she shifted onto her side, shutting her eyes to at the very least hope that some dreamless peace would claim her so that she could put all her current problems away until the morning, when she was sure she’d be better suited to deal with them. But even as she tried, her mind quickly pointed out everything that made sleeping here impossible. Her pillow smelled old; not the old of yellowing books and carefully done preservation, but the old of dank caves and damp tunnels, despite the fact that it was dry. There was no lullaby of humming coming from the walls, and the trickle of water flowing through the pipes that she could hear did little to make up for it. The ceiling was white and a horrible, uninteresting one at that. Not a gold that wrapped around her mind when she stared at it, just a white ceiling that was blank and empty, colourless and probably forever destined to be, a trait which the walls shared. Only the carpeted floor gave the room any dash of saturation, and even that was of a tedious dark brown, a colour she could easily imitate elsewhere with a clump of dirt and water.
She sat up, unable to take whatever it was lying down any longer and slipped off her trainers, discarding them for the sensation of the real floor beneath her socks. Even the feel and solidity of the plush carpeting under her feet made her chest ache with the knowledge that this wasn’t a nightmare, it was so real, and a real she would not wake up from. She shook her head firmly to try and rattle those thoughts from her skull, but it didn't work, so she headed to the small kitchen instead. She knew it was unfamiliar from the way she nearly tripped over the threshold, had to search blindingly for the light switch and got confused when what she saw wasn't what she expected. But she persevered, grabbing the kettle sitting beside the sink and filling it up with water from the tap. Then, thinking better of it, she sloshed the water around a bit, found a bit of sponge, and gave it a good clean. Never too much to be sure. It gave her something to do, her mind something to think about that didn’t make her want to crawl under a table and have a good cry.
She was waiting for the kettle to boil when he entered the room, and the lack of bleary eyes made it easily obvious that he hadn’t fared much better in the area of sleep than her. At his questioning look, she shrugged and turned her gaze to the floor, still too numb from the slowly burgeoning realisation of what was happening to emit any emotion onto her face at all. “I can’t sleep,” she whispered hoarsely with a half-shrug, though it was so much more than that.
He paused, then nodded slowly. “I know.”
Lifting her legs off from the floor, she gathered them in her arms and dropped her chin onto her knees, tracing invisible patterns on the table top as he sat down beside her, wood scraping against linoleum as he did so.
The only conversation that took place afterwards was between the quiet sipping of plain hot water because there was no tea.
--
Their funds were limited, so Rose had already decided to get herself some sort of job, which was why she was so absorbed with the day’s newspaper the next morning, her knuckles pushed into her cheek as she perused one of the few things that hadn’t changed in centuries. The rustle of newspaper was bitterly nostalgic, and she wondered at some point if she would ever stop seeing everything as a reminder of home.
A bit of jiggery pokery with the still handy sonic screwdriver had given them some records, which, if they didn’t draw too much attention to themselves, would go unnoticed if no one looked at them too hard. Suspicious movements would draw understandable suspicion, and the fact that they simply had not existed (for several centuries in Rose’s case, not at all for the Doctor) until the expedition to Krop Tor, was not a fact either the Doctor or Rose wanted to explain. Sonic-ing money out of credit machines would be much noticed, a felony with repercussions, particularly now that they would have to deal with the consequences if they were found out. The Doctor didn’t seem to mind this for once, but it was hard to tell. He had been unnaturally quiet, one syllable words being about as loquacious as he could get these days, frightening, really, for a man who seemed to talk for fear that his brain would stop working if he didn't. The sonic screwdriver’s relationship with a credit machine was only used that day for a starter’s round of groceries and a few extra clothes. She nicked even more of the latter from the charity bin; a while since she’d had to do that.
She carefully circled a small paragraph on the business page of the newspaper and tapped the pencil thoughtfully against her lips when she was done. There wasn’t much she could do; at the base of it, records said she was at least properly educated, but properly educated in this time probably meant something completely different than properly educated in her time, and she hadn’t even been that. There weren’t many job opportunities for someone like her, here or... anywhere.
Setting the pencil aside, she lifted the mug of hot, newly-bought tea to her lips and took a contemplative sip as the Doctor prised open the back of the broken television they had in their sitting room. Neither of them planned on using it and he was completely aware of this, but it filled up time, if only for a few minutes. Longer, without his screwdriver.
Ida and Danny had visited that morning to check on how the two of them were doing and had even accompanied Rose to the shops as a friendly way of showing her around. They had nothing else to do, they said, since their efforts on their expedition had been graciously remunerated, leaving them jobless for the time being as well. Their reward had had a large cut for all the Ood they’d lost, but it was still a tidy sum and they were feeling, or trying to feel, upbeat about it, a good thing, particularly after the death of Scooti and the unfortunate disposal of Toby after he went, as Danny put it, ‘batshit insane’. When they offered to give her a small tour of the city, she’d hesitated at first, uneasy about leaving the Doctor behind, but when she’d turned to look at him, he’d only smiled in a distant, but genial way and told her to have a good time, and that he’d of course still be here when she got back. She couldn’t help but think the last bit was a reminder for himself as much as it was for her.
And he had been still there, although she doubted he really had anywhere to go. But in an unexpected move, he’d also helped her unload the groceries, and thanked her with a hug when she presented him with a freshly bought set of pyjamas and a new suit.
“Blue,” she’d said, by way of explanation at the colour of the latter. “Like her.”
He never wore it, though, and she thought that the choice in colour might have been a bad idea. Too soon. And it probably always be too soon.
Dressed in an over-sized T-shirt whose short sleeves fell down to her elbows, with an emblem she didn’t understand emblazoned on the front, she propped her chin onto her palm and bit down on her pinkie finger. She needed decent pay, at least, if she was going to have to support them both (at the moment she didn’t think it was wise to bring up the prospect of jobs for the Doctor), and all of the things she had thought qualified enough to circle seemed exceedingly similar to the dead end occupation she’d had before she’d started travelling. Always the shop girl, she thought bitterly, turning the page and frowning to concentrate as the noises of the Doctor cursing fruitlessly at the dismantled device in front of him mingled with the rumbles of the washing machine in the background.
She sighed, leaning her head on the back of her chair, careful not to disrupt the half-minded bun she’d swept her hair into. She could get a low paying job and hopefully build up from that, but that would mean several days of skipped meals to make sure they didn’t run out of money too quickly, for a while at least… forever at most. Her shoulders slumped at the reminder and she closed her eyes tightly against her surroundings, as if that was all it took to be on the TARDIS again. But the humming she thought she might have heard was only temporary.
Resisting the urge to curl up in a ball until she faded away, Rose dropped her head onto her hands, digging the heels into her eyes. This felt too much like the days of Jimmy Stone, when she’d had to do this in a completely different circumstance, admittedly without the whole ‘being centuries in the future with an alien’ bit. But worrying over budget, whether she could earn enough money enough for them to get by… it gave her flashbacks, and they weren’t pleasant ones and mostly involved being yelled at despite working for most of the day for a laughable wage and a pay check that could have opened its own comedy circuit. This life she had taken years ago in that basement had seemed like such an easy break away from the circle she couldn’t get out of at the time, and yet here she was, doing it all over again. Shop girl, dinner lady, she might as well write ‘can fold clothes, make chips’ into her applications and be done with it. The world never smiled on people who only had the qualifications of some well done GCSEs. She wished she would have known that before…
Before. Before she met the Doctor, who she wouldn’t have met at all, had she not been working at Hendricks. She didn’t regret that, at least. And if she was going to be sticking around anywhere, she was happy that it was with him and not… well… no one. She was glad he was here, comforted by his presence more than anything else - he had been very quiet as of late, with good reason. It wasn’t as if she was faring much better.
The fading of distant rumbles told her that the wash cycle was over, and therefore, so was her brief moment of reflection.
Finishing off her tea, she headed to the bathroom to transfer the newly washed beddings to the drier, hoping that the fresh smell of laundry would help to make the situation seem like what it should be. A fresh start. Clean beddings, clean slates.
If she only believed it.
--
The clock hands weren’t moving any faster.
The Doctor knew the clock hands weren’t moving any faster because he had checked it several times, forty specifically, in the past half hour. It wasn’t as if the conclusion had changed from the other thirty-nine times he’d checked; the conclusion being that Rose wasn’t here and it didn’t seem like she was going to not not-be-here any time soon. A conclusion which made him worried and fretful, but that was hardly his fault; Rose was late and he had every right to be worried and fretful, since worry was a completely normal reaction to people being late, especially when said person came home at a certain time… usually. Clearly not all the time, considering she was late.
He was sick of thinking. Unfortunately, since Rose had gotten employed as a secretary in a nearby office building, he was left alone in a small accommodation where there was little else to do but think. He was getting bored, overwhelmingly so, and the rooms were starting to feel claustrophobic and cramped (as if they weren’t already) particularly after having pacing around it several dozen times. He’d fixed everything in their small flat that needed fixing: the television that no one used, the washing machine that had looked like it was about to fall apart at any unseemly provocation; he’d even gone through every door, cupboards included, to see if there were any creaks to quiet, but eventually he had soon ran out of those too. There was nothing to occupy his time but to think, and as previously stated, he was getting more than tired of that.
There was, of course, always the option of going outside and looking around, but he found himself extremely adverse to the suggestion, as though leaving the confines of this not-home would just confirm that he was truly stuck here forever, for the long (very, very long) haul. He was in no way prepared to accept that bit of information just yet. He wasn’t sure he was ever going to be, even if he knew Rose was hoping that wouldn’t be the case. But he wanted, needed even, to believe that they were going to get out of this somehow, that soon they would be on another adventure, either thwarting or causing another rebellion, with their hands grasped and their feet running. Making contact with this world, adapting to it and its environment would be the ultimate surrender, an acquisition that would mean he was giving everything up, accepting that his life wouldn’t come back.
He wanted his TARDIS, and he wanted it now, in an admittedly childish way. He yearned to get off this planet and go to the furthest place away from here, galaxies and eons away where dingy old apartments didn’t exist in the faces of Maltecs or Agrajags. He longed for his life back, his entire method of living for what now had to have been at least eighty percent of his life. He wanted to run. But there wasn’t enough room before hitting walls, here. He didn’t want to adjust or make plans that meant he was even thinking about staying, that would even imply this predicament was permanent. Permanent for him was damn permanent, more so now that he had no ship. Not a broken, tampered with or damaged one, one that… simply no longer existed to him. He didn’t want permanent. He wanted easily washable and all the wax on wax off business. He wasn’t a man about… permanence.
Shifting in his position on the fraying couch, he thumped the armrest a little with his head to soften it, but only succeeded in giving himself a headache. He was beginning to sleep a lot more now too, a clear sign that a Time Lord was separated from his ship. No more artron energy. Just his own body, generating the necessary amount to survive, but he was no longer surrounded and kept energised by it, as he’d had in the TARDIS. Instead, he was only surrounded by the empty air of oxygen, nitrogen, mixed in with various pollutant atoms that came from both the flat and the world outside. Although he was still up long after Rose had gone to bed, his hours of sleep had increased to the point where he wasn’t awake when she left in the morning. Nowadays he felt sapped and exhausted and drained, and understood now why interruptions of slumber in their old days aboard the TARDIS had been greeted with grumbling and resentful looks for most of the morning at least.
He missed that too, come to think of it. The sight of bed hair hovering over a steaming mug of tea as it slowly retrieved and rebuilt its sentience. Perhaps he should alter his sleeping schedule a bit… just to see her when she left, to have something other than a cold breakfast to assure him that Rose was still here. It was selfish of him, to cling to Rose like a lifeline and really doing nothing in return, but only a distant part of his brain acknowledged this. Most of the other parts were too busy being dismal and childish to expand much on the thought and he decided that that was best and quite fitting, since he was and had been feeling extremely dismal and childish for the fortnight they’d been here.
A jingle and clink of keys against a lock drew him out of his thoughts, and he shot up from where he’d been lying down to run nearly headfirst into the door, pulling it open before she had a chance to and wrapping his arms around her before she even opened her mouth say hello.
“I’m sorry I was late,” she said, laughing softly. “I got a little caught up.” She tapped his arm until he reluctantly let her go, smiling knowingly when he couldn’t release her arm, not yet. She was solid and alive and breathing, bundles more than he could say about a colourless few walls. “Have you had dinner? Because I went out and got some Chinese. Or… the closest thing they have to Chinese.” She indicated the plastic bag hanging from her right elbow.
He wanted to hate her, just a little, for having adjusted so quickly, to blame her for leaving him behind every morning and acting like everything was going to be all right, which he of course knew wasn’t true. He hated her for his dependence on her, and her acknowledgement and warm reception of that dependence, when the truth of the matter was that what he really did was sit there, on a couch, moping and lost until she came back, like a dog waiting for its owner. An analogy he didn't like coming from himself. His mouth opened to say something to the effect, though what it really was he wanted to say, he wasn’t sure. An apology perhaps. Or a reprimand. But by now Rose had extracted her arm from his and gone into the kitchen, unpacking the maybe-Chinese onto the table and announcing to him that she’d also taken a visit to the local library to get him something to occupy himself with while she was gone.
Clamping his mouth shut, he entered the small, plainly lit kitchen, watching silently as she puttered about with utensils and turned to put the kettle on, pushing the sleeves of her blouse up her arms. As they sat down for a dinner of not-really-Chinese, he listened, unable to say a word as she went on about her day, the fascinating subjects of filing and typing, knowing that she wasn’t rambling because she thought it was interesting or valuable for him to hear, but because talking filled up the silence that reminded her where they were and what they’d lost, a tactic he remembered using frequently himself when on board the TARDIS. Well, he supposed someone had to have a game go at being him, since he was in no fit condition to do so himself.
He went to bed at the same time she did, hoping to catch enough of her to say goodbye the next morning. But he overslept again and the place was silent by the time he woke up, with only a stack of books and morning leftovers in her place, leaving him to another day inside the small flat, alone.
The white and grey was going to drive him colour-blind at this rate.
If it didn't drive him mad first.
End Part I
Author: whollyuncertain
Rating: K+ (Will probably be heading up later)
Summary: It wasn't a house with mortgages or picket fences, because that wasn't how you started from scratch. (AU of Impossible Planet/Satan's Pit.)
Disclaimer: We're all in universes with things we don't want. If we didn't want them, then we wouldn't be in this universe.
Author's Notes: I meant this to be much shorter... it came to me as a oneshot, actually. But it kept growing, and growing, so I thought I should separate it into parts instead.
I've come to be aware that people think this is a done AU, but... I've only seen ... about... two or three, so maybe I was absent during the craze, I'm not sure. But here is my addition. My overly verbose addition, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless. I'm only happy to get some creative writing juices back. Any mistakes are mine. Apologies in advance.
--
They were both silent as Zach steered the rocket out of the gravitational dip of the black hole, watching as the impossible planet with their previous lives hidden somewhere near the core began to shrink into the blackness surrounding it, until it became a speck… then turned into nothing at all. He had almost expected, or perhaps had only hoped, that a flash of blue would suddenly soak into the speckled blackness as evidence that it was no longer gone permanently, that this was only a nightmare and that the humming of dimensional engines would be heard again, but it never came. The blackness remained blackness, and only the eerie glow of the long dead star gave it any personality, and that personality was, frankly, an extremely dreary one.
The Doctor sank silently back into his seat, staring straight ahead to the front of the cockpit and the area beyond, where much of the same view greeted him. Only the pressure on his left hand made him aware that other people were there with him, and he turned his head somewhat reluctantly to see said hand being clutched with Rose’s right one, who had led it unknowingly into her lap. She was gripping it firmly, not painfully or confidently or even reassuringly, as would be expected of Rose Tyler, but tight enough to tell him that she was feeling scared and lost. The unrelenting grasp belied the blank stare and facial expression she used for the porthole closer to her and opposite his, which had no view of what they were flying away from, what they were leaving behind. The fingers of her other hand were fisted at her mouth, pressed to her lips and nose while her elbow sat against the small sill of the window.
Hesitantly, he shifted his hand to thread his fingers properly through hers and gave it a squeeze in return. Startled at the movement, she looked away from the endless infinity of space and turned to him, brown eyes questioning and worried as they met his. His smile was weak at best, but so was the one she gave him in reply. And that made it all right.
Releasing her hand, he wrapped his arm around her shoulders instead, drawing her to him so that she could tuck her head under his chin.
They didn’t move much for the rest of the journey, just stared, silently but together, into the blackness, a fitting visual metaphor for the future they didn’t know.
--
Their flat was small but spacious, roomy enough to have the bare essentials and a bit extra. It had the basics of a house: a sitting room, a kitchen, and a cramped hallway with four doors, which led to two bedrooms, a small bathroom consisting of a bathtub and a shower faucet hanging over it, with a slide away door in the far back that revealed a rickety but working washing machine and drier, and a large, empty closet. The furniture already placed in the sitting room and the bedrooms was old and splintering, giving an obvious reason as to why they had been left behind in the first place. It was hardly ideal, but ideal was a time and space travelling spaceship which they had left behind in the orbit of a black hole, so it seemed they were going to have to make do.
After deciding which rooms were theirs, they retired to bed, crawling into dingy mildew ridden sheets that they both immediately decided in their own separate quarters that they were going to have to do something about in the morning.
For now, however, they tried to sleep, still dressed in the clothes they’d worn since their arrival onto the impossible planet, since the day they’d lost their escape route into adventure and excitement, forever trapping them within the confines of domestic.
The Doctor couldn’t sleep. It was true enough that he didn’t need to, not necessarily, not at the moment, anyway; he slept very little in general and was always aggravated by the thought that for so and so hours, you had to lie there, in a bed, without knowing at all where you were, while your mind wandered off to have exceedingly lucid hallucinations before it returned just in time for you to open your eyes. It was a disturbing prospect for someone who liked to know where his mind was at all times, and he’d always been bothered by it. But as much as he wished it was, it wasn’t why his eyes wouldn’t close against the ceiling that night.
He would have drummed his fingers, but he didn’t have enough energy inside himself to do even that. There was nothing to do at all, actually. His fingers itched, and he nearly got up more than once to stumble tiredly into the console room to pull up a grating and tinker the hours away… before realising that he no longer had that option anymore, no more needless upgrading, no more random calibrations on things that didn’t require calibrations, and no more irritable sparks that burned his fingers when he did something that was right out.
He would start sleeping a lot more without her, he knew. Eventually his eyes would close for seconds too long in the morning, then minutes, then hours, until he was sleeping as much as Rose, and he didn’t appreciate the idea at all. But without being in the constant presence of artron energy, he would begin taking more time to recharge during the night. Just like humans.
Being trapped in one time zone without a working TARDIS wasn’t an unfamiliar concept to him, an experience he had gone through several times in his lifetime, in his third body, in his eighth… the latter while under a severe bout of amnesia and possible insanity that lasted for the entire century as he waited there for years to pass on a little blue green planet. But now was different. There was no TARDIS, period. He would just have to wait. Wait year after year, with nothing to wait for, not until all of his regenerations were used, with every single bit of time siphoned from each one. That made this different. That made this frightening, terrifying, and dull. No more wandering, not properly, anyway. Just him and now.
Now. Not then or will be. Now. And nothing else.
Noises from the kitchen jolted this piece of introspection from his mind, and he was more than happy to leave it behind so he could go and investigate.
Anything not to miss the green.
Rose couldn’t sleep, and she, on the other hand, actually needed to. Time was no longer relative, and it would no longer be a matter of waiting until she got properly tired to excuse herself into her comforters, it would be a matter of schedule and adjustment, her body clock working to find a routine in all of this as her sleeping time took on a pattern over the long drummed into habit of simply exhaustion equalling sleep. She didn’t like that. Routines and schedules were the life she’d left behind, the routine and schedule of waking up every morning, kissing her mum goodbye and working until she got home. It meant returning to repetition, and Rose Tyler had found herself thoroughly hard done by repetition and wasn’t keen on returning.
She was tired. She was exhausted, even, but thoughts of sleep or effort in such an act never came, pushed aside into other parts of her mind to make way to think about other things that were probably more important. She thought about the mother she’d never see again, all alone because Rose had left her there, waiting for her to come back… waiting for the daughter who would no longer return. Not even for Christmas. Or her fortieth (thirty-ninth?) birthday. She thought about the life that she’d lost, and the life she’d now been forced returned to, with its jobs and rent, mortgages and bills that had seemed so ridiculous and trivial when joking about it, which loomed menacingly at her now that it was real. She thought about the places she could no longer go, the people she could no longer meet. She thought about being trapped here, for the rest of her comparatively short but still long life, and didn’t like the conclusions of that.
The metal springs of her mattress creaked as she shifted onto her side, shutting her eyes to at the very least hope that some dreamless peace would claim her so that she could put all her current problems away until the morning, when she was sure she’d be better suited to deal with them. But even as she tried, her mind quickly pointed out everything that made sleeping here impossible. Her pillow smelled old; not the old of yellowing books and carefully done preservation, but the old of dank caves and damp tunnels, despite the fact that it was dry. There was no lullaby of humming coming from the walls, and the trickle of water flowing through the pipes that she could hear did little to make up for it. The ceiling was white and a horrible, uninteresting one at that. Not a gold that wrapped around her mind when she stared at it, just a white ceiling that was blank and empty, colourless and probably forever destined to be, a trait which the walls shared. Only the carpeted floor gave the room any dash of saturation, and even that was of a tedious dark brown, a colour she could easily imitate elsewhere with a clump of dirt and water.
She sat up, unable to take whatever it was lying down any longer and slipped off her trainers, discarding them for the sensation of the real floor beneath her socks. Even the feel and solidity of the plush carpeting under her feet made her chest ache with the knowledge that this wasn’t a nightmare, it was so real, and a real she would not wake up from. She shook her head firmly to try and rattle those thoughts from her skull, but it didn't work, so she headed to the small kitchen instead. She knew it was unfamiliar from the way she nearly tripped over the threshold, had to search blindingly for the light switch and got confused when what she saw wasn't what she expected. But she persevered, grabbing the kettle sitting beside the sink and filling it up with water from the tap. Then, thinking better of it, she sloshed the water around a bit, found a bit of sponge, and gave it a good clean. Never too much to be sure. It gave her something to do, her mind something to think about that didn’t make her want to crawl under a table and have a good cry.
She was waiting for the kettle to boil when he entered the room, and the lack of bleary eyes made it easily obvious that he hadn’t fared much better in the area of sleep than her. At his questioning look, she shrugged and turned her gaze to the floor, still too numb from the slowly burgeoning realisation of what was happening to emit any emotion onto her face at all. “I can’t sleep,” she whispered hoarsely with a half-shrug, though it was so much more than that.
He paused, then nodded slowly. “I know.”
Lifting her legs off from the floor, she gathered them in her arms and dropped her chin onto her knees, tracing invisible patterns on the table top as he sat down beside her, wood scraping against linoleum as he did so.
The only conversation that took place afterwards was between the quiet sipping of plain hot water because there was no tea.
--
Their funds were limited, so Rose had already decided to get herself some sort of job, which was why she was so absorbed with the day’s newspaper the next morning, her knuckles pushed into her cheek as she perused one of the few things that hadn’t changed in centuries. The rustle of newspaper was bitterly nostalgic, and she wondered at some point if she would ever stop seeing everything as a reminder of home.
A bit of jiggery pokery with the still handy sonic screwdriver had given them some records, which, if they didn’t draw too much attention to themselves, would go unnoticed if no one looked at them too hard. Suspicious movements would draw understandable suspicion, and the fact that they simply had not existed (for several centuries in Rose’s case, not at all for the Doctor) until the expedition to Krop Tor, was not a fact either the Doctor or Rose wanted to explain. Sonic-ing money out of credit machines would be much noticed, a felony with repercussions, particularly now that they would have to deal with the consequences if they were found out. The Doctor didn’t seem to mind this for once, but it was hard to tell. He had been unnaturally quiet, one syllable words being about as loquacious as he could get these days, frightening, really, for a man who seemed to talk for fear that his brain would stop working if he didn't. The sonic screwdriver’s relationship with a credit machine was only used that day for a starter’s round of groceries and a few extra clothes. She nicked even more of the latter from the charity bin; a while since she’d had to do that.
She carefully circled a small paragraph on the business page of the newspaper and tapped the pencil thoughtfully against her lips when she was done. There wasn’t much she could do; at the base of it, records said she was at least properly educated, but properly educated in this time probably meant something completely different than properly educated in her time, and she hadn’t even been that. There weren’t many job opportunities for someone like her, here or... anywhere.
Setting the pencil aside, she lifted the mug of hot, newly-bought tea to her lips and took a contemplative sip as the Doctor prised open the back of the broken television they had in their sitting room. Neither of them planned on using it and he was completely aware of this, but it filled up time, if only for a few minutes. Longer, without his screwdriver.
Ida and Danny had visited that morning to check on how the two of them were doing and had even accompanied Rose to the shops as a friendly way of showing her around. They had nothing else to do, they said, since their efforts on their expedition had been graciously remunerated, leaving them jobless for the time being as well. Their reward had had a large cut for all the Ood they’d lost, but it was still a tidy sum and they were feeling, or trying to feel, upbeat about it, a good thing, particularly after the death of Scooti and the unfortunate disposal of Toby after he went, as Danny put it, ‘batshit insane’. When they offered to give her a small tour of the city, she’d hesitated at first, uneasy about leaving the Doctor behind, but when she’d turned to look at him, he’d only smiled in a distant, but genial way and told her to have a good time, and that he’d of course still be here when she got back. She couldn’t help but think the last bit was a reminder for himself as much as it was for her.
And he had been still there, although she doubted he really had anywhere to go. But in an unexpected move, he’d also helped her unload the groceries, and thanked her with a hug when she presented him with a freshly bought set of pyjamas and a new suit.
“Blue,” she’d said, by way of explanation at the colour of the latter. “Like her.”
He never wore it, though, and she thought that the choice in colour might have been a bad idea. Too soon. And it probably always be too soon.
Dressed in an over-sized T-shirt whose short sleeves fell down to her elbows, with an emblem she didn’t understand emblazoned on the front, she propped her chin onto her palm and bit down on her pinkie finger. She needed decent pay, at least, if she was going to have to support them both (at the moment she didn’t think it was wise to bring up the prospect of jobs for the Doctor), and all of the things she had thought qualified enough to circle seemed exceedingly similar to the dead end occupation she’d had before she’d started travelling. Always the shop girl, she thought bitterly, turning the page and frowning to concentrate as the noises of the Doctor cursing fruitlessly at the dismantled device in front of him mingled with the rumbles of the washing machine in the background.
She sighed, leaning her head on the back of her chair, careful not to disrupt the half-minded bun she’d swept her hair into. She could get a low paying job and hopefully build up from that, but that would mean several days of skipped meals to make sure they didn’t run out of money too quickly, for a while at least… forever at most. Her shoulders slumped at the reminder and she closed her eyes tightly against her surroundings, as if that was all it took to be on the TARDIS again. But the humming she thought she might have heard was only temporary.
Resisting the urge to curl up in a ball until she faded away, Rose dropped her head onto her hands, digging the heels into her eyes. This felt too much like the days of Jimmy Stone, when she’d had to do this in a completely different circumstance, admittedly without the whole ‘being centuries in the future with an alien’ bit. But worrying over budget, whether she could earn enough money enough for them to get by… it gave her flashbacks, and they weren’t pleasant ones and mostly involved being yelled at despite working for most of the day for a laughable wage and a pay check that could have opened its own comedy circuit. This life she had taken years ago in that basement had seemed like such an easy break away from the circle she couldn’t get out of at the time, and yet here she was, doing it all over again. Shop girl, dinner lady, she might as well write ‘can fold clothes, make chips’ into her applications and be done with it. The world never smiled on people who only had the qualifications of some well done GCSEs. She wished she would have known that before…
Before. Before she met the Doctor, who she wouldn’t have met at all, had she not been working at Hendricks. She didn’t regret that, at least. And if she was going to be sticking around anywhere, she was happy that it was with him and not… well… no one. She was glad he was here, comforted by his presence more than anything else - he had been very quiet as of late, with good reason. It wasn’t as if she was faring much better.
The fading of distant rumbles told her that the wash cycle was over, and therefore, so was her brief moment of reflection.
Finishing off her tea, she headed to the bathroom to transfer the newly washed beddings to the drier, hoping that the fresh smell of laundry would help to make the situation seem like what it should be. A fresh start. Clean beddings, clean slates.
If she only believed it.
--
The clock hands weren’t moving any faster.
The Doctor knew the clock hands weren’t moving any faster because he had checked it several times, forty specifically, in the past half hour. It wasn’t as if the conclusion had changed from the other thirty-nine times he’d checked; the conclusion being that Rose wasn’t here and it didn’t seem like she was going to not not-be-here any time soon. A conclusion which made him worried and fretful, but that was hardly his fault; Rose was late and he had every right to be worried and fretful, since worry was a completely normal reaction to people being late, especially when said person came home at a certain time… usually. Clearly not all the time, considering she was late.
He was sick of thinking. Unfortunately, since Rose had gotten employed as a secretary in a nearby office building, he was left alone in a small accommodation where there was little else to do but think. He was getting bored, overwhelmingly so, and the rooms were starting to feel claustrophobic and cramped (as if they weren’t already) particularly after having pacing around it several dozen times. He’d fixed everything in their small flat that needed fixing: the television that no one used, the washing machine that had looked like it was about to fall apart at any unseemly provocation; he’d even gone through every door, cupboards included, to see if there were any creaks to quiet, but eventually he had soon ran out of those too. There was nothing to occupy his time but to think, and as previously stated, he was getting more than tired of that.
There was, of course, always the option of going outside and looking around, but he found himself extremely adverse to the suggestion, as though leaving the confines of this not-home would just confirm that he was truly stuck here forever, for the long (very, very long) haul. He was in no way prepared to accept that bit of information just yet. He wasn’t sure he was ever going to be, even if he knew Rose was hoping that wouldn’t be the case. But he wanted, needed even, to believe that they were going to get out of this somehow, that soon they would be on another adventure, either thwarting or causing another rebellion, with their hands grasped and their feet running. Making contact with this world, adapting to it and its environment would be the ultimate surrender, an acquisition that would mean he was giving everything up, accepting that his life wouldn’t come back.
He wanted his TARDIS, and he wanted it now, in an admittedly childish way. He yearned to get off this planet and go to the furthest place away from here, galaxies and eons away where dingy old apartments didn’t exist in the faces of Maltecs or Agrajags. He longed for his life back, his entire method of living for what now had to have been at least eighty percent of his life. He wanted to run. But there wasn’t enough room before hitting walls, here. He didn’t want to adjust or make plans that meant he was even thinking about staying, that would even imply this predicament was permanent. Permanent for him was damn permanent, more so now that he had no ship. Not a broken, tampered with or damaged one, one that… simply no longer existed to him. He didn’t want permanent. He wanted easily washable and all the wax on wax off business. He wasn’t a man about… permanence.
Shifting in his position on the fraying couch, he thumped the armrest a little with his head to soften it, but only succeeded in giving himself a headache. He was beginning to sleep a lot more now too, a clear sign that a Time Lord was separated from his ship. No more artron energy. Just his own body, generating the necessary amount to survive, but he was no longer surrounded and kept energised by it, as he’d had in the TARDIS. Instead, he was only surrounded by the empty air of oxygen, nitrogen, mixed in with various pollutant atoms that came from both the flat and the world outside. Although he was still up long after Rose had gone to bed, his hours of sleep had increased to the point where he wasn’t awake when she left in the morning. Nowadays he felt sapped and exhausted and drained, and understood now why interruptions of slumber in their old days aboard the TARDIS had been greeted with grumbling and resentful looks for most of the morning at least.
He missed that too, come to think of it. The sight of bed hair hovering over a steaming mug of tea as it slowly retrieved and rebuilt its sentience. Perhaps he should alter his sleeping schedule a bit… just to see her when she left, to have something other than a cold breakfast to assure him that Rose was still here. It was selfish of him, to cling to Rose like a lifeline and really doing nothing in return, but only a distant part of his brain acknowledged this. Most of the other parts were too busy being dismal and childish to expand much on the thought and he decided that that was best and quite fitting, since he was and had been feeling extremely dismal and childish for the fortnight they’d been here.
A jingle and clink of keys against a lock drew him out of his thoughts, and he shot up from where he’d been lying down to run nearly headfirst into the door, pulling it open before she had a chance to and wrapping his arms around her before she even opened her mouth say hello.
“I’m sorry I was late,” she said, laughing softly. “I got a little caught up.” She tapped his arm until he reluctantly let her go, smiling knowingly when he couldn’t release her arm, not yet. She was solid and alive and breathing, bundles more than he could say about a colourless few walls. “Have you had dinner? Because I went out and got some Chinese. Or… the closest thing they have to Chinese.” She indicated the plastic bag hanging from her right elbow.
He wanted to hate her, just a little, for having adjusted so quickly, to blame her for leaving him behind every morning and acting like everything was going to be all right, which he of course knew wasn’t true. He hated her for his dependence on her, and her acknowledgement and warm reception of that dependence, when the truth of the matter was that what he really did was sit there, on a couch, moping and lost until she came back, like a dog waiting for its owner. An analogy he didn't like coming from himself. His mouth opened to say something to the effect, though what it really was he wanted to say, he wasn’t sure. An apology perhaps. Or a reprimand. But by now Rose had extracted her arm from his and gone into the kitchen, unpacking the maybe-Chinese onto the table and announcing to him that she’d also taken a visit to the local library to get him something to occupy himself with while she was gone.
Clamping his mouth shut, he entered the small, plainly lit kitchen, watching silently as she puttered about with utensils and turned to put the kettle on, pushing the sleeves of her blouse up her arms. As they sat down for a dinner of not-really-Chinese, he listened, unable to say a word as she went on about her day, the fascinating subjects of filing and typing, knowing that she wasn’t rambling because she thought it was interesting or valuable for him to hear, but because talking filled up the silence that reminded her where they were and what they’d lost, a tactic he remembered using frequently himself when on board the TARDIS. Well, he supposed someone had to have a game go at being him, since he was in no fit condition to do so himself.
He went to bed at the same time she did, hoping to catch enough of her to say goodbye the next morning. But he overslept again and the place was silent by the time he woke up, with only a stack of books and morning leftovers in her place, leaving him to another day inside the small flat, alone.
The white and grey was going to drive him colour-blind at this rate.
If it didn't drive him mad first.
End Part I