Living the Life Fantastic (2/?)
Title: Living the Life Fantastic (2/?)
Author: whollyuncertain
Rating: T (For a baaad word. But that's about it)
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 the things we wanted, 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.
Oh yes, overly long chapter I'm a bit 'meh' about coming right up. Again, any mistakes are mine. Apologies in advance.
--
The row that culminated in took both of them by surprise, although if either of them had been paying the blindest bit of attention as to what was happening instead of wallowing inside their own heads, they would, by all accounts, have seen it a mile off. It took place about a month and a half since their entrance into this strange world, when he was still prone to silently haunting their quarters with lack of things to do, and she was still prone to talking as if absolutely nothing was wrong. She tried to ease the boredom by giving him a supply of books she’d borrow from short visits to libraries or corner bookstores, but it wasn’t enough. He was always finished with them in a few hours, leaving him waiting and watching the clock until he heard the sound of the key twisting in the door despite her best efforts to relieve his sense of loneliness, but it was hard to keep a mind like his occupied for very long.
At first Rose accepted this with as much grace and good will as she could muster, but soon she began to be thoroughly fed up with it. She was trying to be accommodating and understanding, since she knew that being away from the TARDIS was much harder on him than it was for her, and that adaptation to this life style of waking up, going to work and falling asleep wasn’t at all easy after centuries of travelling and always being on the move with any lack of real routine. She imagined that he must be going through a confusing time, where he didn’t want this and was doing his best to deny it, to try and believe that there was still an escape. But at the face of it, there was nothing to deny. They were stuck, and if she was making an effort to make this work, then she felt that he had every reason to be doing the same himself. She wanted the escape as much as he did, but she was smart enough to know that she couldn’t sulk until it showed up. She’d given him time. She’d given him space. But nothing was changing, and by now, something should have, that she was certain of, if nothing else.
He hadn’t meant to start it. He was a notorious avoider of conflict and petty domestic arguments, but it seemed that this time, the fault could clearly be laid on solely him, and he couldn’t blow up the army base of the nearest planet to make everyone forget about it.
Rose had been late again, a good deal late this time, and he had paced anxiously about the sitting room until she’d finally come back, at which point he demanded hotly where she’d been and if she knew, exactly, what time it was. Glaring at him for her less than ideal welcome home, she had been justifiably put off at being addressed as if she had reverted back to her teens and she told him as much, angrily pointing out that she wasn’t being the immature one here, he was, what with his ineffectual brooding that did anything but be helpful.
Composure cracking in the wake of an accusation that was completely accurate, he had hit back, hoping to hurt her enough that he could return to his cocoon of despair without any more complaints, no more fighting and points being made. He told her that she’d never understand, never even begin to conceive what it was like to do this, to be shut inside the confines of one, just one bit of linear time with no where else to go, with no future ahead, just this, a monotonous human life that he didn’t want to be a part of, especially when he was not here by choice.
“You didn’t have to come here, you know!” she pointed out, brow furrowing angrily. “You could have stayed behind with the TARDIS. You could have given up, died with her, but you didn’t. You made your choice. You got on the rocket with me and you turned your back.” He cringed. “Do you think you’re the only one who hurts?” she demanded at him. “Do you think this is easy or easier for me just because I’m human, going back to this life after I thought I was done with it, going back to beans on toast and the sodding tube everyday, knowing I’ll never see my Mum again, that I’m stuck. Here. With you, a Time Lord who won’t even go outside or he might get Earth germs on him and then the world will really fucking end, wouldn’t it?” Thrusting a hand into her trouser pocket before he could answer, she pulled out and angrily brandished a square piece of plastic at him, which after a moment, he realised was the mobile they’d bought together and he’d jiggery pokered after the last one had been… given away. “You tell me what I’m supposed to tell Mum, then, since you’re so clever. I haven’t called her once since we got here, because I’m such a rubbish liar and how can I put ‘hi, I’m trapped centuries into the future from where you are, Mum, and I won’t ever, ever be able to get back, but don’t worry, because it’s all right. It’s all right because I’ve got the Doctor here!’ Tell me how I can put that in a way that won’t break her heart, because the only person she has left in this entire bloody universe can never see her again!”
“Is that how you think of me? Useful until I don't have my magical spaceship anymore? Good for a few trips around the block, a whisk to see the rest of the universe, but without it I'm basically just a pet, aren't I? Do you know what this is like? Being a Time Lord without time? She was the only thing I had left, Rose! And now I'll never... She was my... You have no idea what I’m going through,” he finished through gritted teeth.
“No, you think I have no idea what you’re going through,” she shot back. “My problems might not seem that big compared to yours, because look at me I’m so human, how dare I have emotions and be just as unhappy with all of this as you, and how dare I go venture into the unknown and try to make the best of it anyway! But that’s what you used to tell me to do, that’s what you used to be about! You’re supposed to be the Doctor, but… you're not, you're just...”
She gave him time to fill in the blank space at the end of her sentence, but when he didn’t say anything, she continued on. “You’re always complaining about how we ’humans’ are too emotional, that we always get our feelings mixed up in our actions, but when it comes to something like this, we can’t ‘conceive’ the amount of emotion you’re going through, can we? I suppose you have just the right amount of feeling, yeah? Third bowl of the bloody porridge, are you? We’re stuck here!” she said, voice finally rising to a yell. “We are! Whether you like it or not, we’re stuck here. And we’re stuck with each other, and I’m sick of you sitting here, pretending the world doesn’t exist, acting like the universe just stopped because you can’t cope with the fact that you can’t run away from this anymore! I’m not exactly asking you to be happy-…”
“Good! Because what’s there to be happy about this place? Stuck, as you say, on some wretched little rock with some wretched little human and no way out. And besides, what’s the alternative? Working at a pathetically low paying job that even you, despite your vast and encompassing career involving folding shirts are barely qualified for? Perhaps that’s what you should tell your mother; that you’d fit nicely here if you weren’t a comparatively stupid ape even on a planet inhabited by stupid apes. Apples never fall very far from the tree, do they?”
He didn't regret it the words, at least not immediately. He’d wanted her to hurt, wanted her to stomp off and leave him alone. And that was exactly what she did.
The next few events happened in the space of moments, the sudden flash of hatred in her eyes, the mobile phone she’d been holding crashing into the wall just beside his head. It missed him by mere centimetres, but it still hit with enough force to crack the miniature screen and shatter the fragile plastic casing into pieces. The splintered display still flickered for a second when it hit the floor, clinging onto that last bit of life until it finally realised that it really was broken and went black.
There was a deadly silence.
Refusing to look at him, she left the front room without another word, as if her voice and everything making it up had been in that phone and was now rendered as useless as it now was. The door to her room slammed shut with a bang that vibrated the walls, and there was a crash of what might have been a lamp being thrown.
Only a few moments of quiet passed before the sounds of broken sobbing began, muffled to almost imperceptibility by the desperate clutching of pillows and the covering of protective limbs.
There was, he thought, something odd about hearing them.
For the longest time, he couldn’t figure out what that something was.
--
But it wasn't very long.
He was angry at first, and he thought he had all the reason in the world to be.
She didn’t understand. How could she? She was a human, she wasn’t… him. She didn’t have a connection to the TARDIS like he did. She didn’t… She didn’t…
She didn’t understand. The Doctor was certain of that, if nothing else.
At times, he thought he could hear the TARDIS dying. It wasn’t impossible; his connection to his ship went much deeper than others, both literally and… literally. Nine hundred years would either endear or breed contempt with anything, and contempt for his TARDIS would get anyone thrown out of an airlock easily, by both her wishes and his. She had been his lifeline, the old friend found in a scrapheap so long ago, when he was young, white-haired and less than youthful, with a cane, a sharp grumpy wit and a young girl who wanted to see a life outside textbooks and flamboyantly ostentatious robes, who loved music, who he himself had adored. But she was gone now, along with everything else. A planet he’d hated until it had been destroyed, with people he had been constantly irritated with until they finally all died.
His TARDIS. His old girl. The only thing he’d had left in the entire universe, of the race he’d been a reluctant part of. His only constant when all others came and went.
And now she was gone as well.
Rose didn’t understand. How could she?
She was human. The things she dreamed about, wanted, hurt from… she couldn’t even imagine-…
”No, you think I have no idea what you’re going through.”
He scowled at the window he’d been staring out of, a gap in the wall that seemed to be there more by necessity rather than any real aesthetics or inclination to see the world outside.
That was the thing about humans. They thought they knew everything. His people might have been arrogant, but at least they’d known where they stood; they were an immensely powerful race and they knew it, that had been the main place the arrogance had come from. But humans, they just… blundered about the place, owning everything they set eyes on, they ‘knew’ how the universe was created, they ‘knew’ why they were there, they ‘knew’ everything, when in actuality it was nothing they ever thought it was, it was nothing they’d been taught, told to believe, anything. They didn’t know anything.
They didn’t know him.
”No, you think…”
Growling in frustration, he dug his hands into his hair and hunched forward until his elbows hit his knees, closing his eyes tight in an effort to block it out, but it was hardly any use; the words were in his head and he was still able to remember what she’d said, the facts she’d thrown at his face.
“You made a choice.”
”That’s what you used to be about!”
"You're supposed to be the Doctor."
“Do you think you’re the only one who hurts?”
She’d cried.
Head leaving his hands, he suddenly sat up straighter, a thought occurring that hadn’t occurred before.
She’d cried. And now he remembered why that was odd, why he’d been confused by it.
She hadn’t been crying. Not as far as he knew, anyway. There had been no tears in the rocket, the first night, the morning after or any time after that. He had not, during the night, ever woken up or heard the sounds of crying, weeping or sniffling. And he knew, from experience and knowing her, that that wasn’t very natural. She was a sleeve-hearted person, who had cried whenever she needed to, which, although not necessarily frequent, still hadn't been an uncommon occurrence, with a life like theirs. Surely something like this would have merited a few sobs. But instead of sitting in a corner and letting it out, she had kept a tight lid over them and had placed a fake smile on over that, shutting her emotions away for what she had considered more important. She had been trying to be strong, because he had been too broken to be, because she was Rose and she was strong.
Until last night, when he had…
He blinked.
He had made her cry.
--
The Doctor didn’t see Rose very much, if at all, in the days following. He awoke early now, having long since gotten used to waking at a pre-determined time to hear her wish him a good morning, share breakfast and be the recipient of her goodbye kiss to the cheek. But now she woke up even earlier than that and left before he even had a chance at a chance of catching her long enough to apologise. When she got home, she no longer dropped her jacket and bag onto the floor next to the door, smiled warmly at him and went to change into some more casual clothes before having dinner, but instead brought the battered and threadbare handbag into the her room with her, stoically ignoring the awkward fumblings of look, Roses and Rose, I’ms in her short journey from the front door to her bed. She no longer ate dinner with him, but rather waited until long after he’d fallen asleep before sneaking out into the kitchen in private.
He’d been startled awake one night to the noisy clatter of quickly quieted pots crashing in the kitchen, listening with longing at the audible proof that she was still there, still existed, and that he wasn’t alone in this place, not completely. He closed his eyes when he heard her mumble something that he couldn’t quite make out, but it was enough, to hear her voice, even if he didn't know what she said.
He knew she wouldn’t leave him (well, not really… hopefully), but at the way things were going, he found it was practically as if she had anyway. They appeared to live in different dimensions while occupying the same space, invisible to each other or… him invisible to her at any rate. He wanted to be angry at this, angry that she was no longer there, that he no longer received the support, that had, up until now, been taken much for granted. But the guilt of what he’d said to her, the fact that he had been the one to break her forcefully cheerful demeanour over-encompassed that anger, particularly when the little voice inside his head reminded him that all she had said to provoke him was the truth, just a truth he had been unwilling to hear. She had been hurting, and he had been too wrapped up in himself and his own injuries, obsessed in hating this world to realise she hadn’t been coping as well as he’d imagined or she put on. All right, so she had never told him, never gave him any hints that anything was off, but then, he’d hardly deigned to ask if she was all right either, which was being a rubbish friend, for a start.
In the concentrated light of his desk lamp, he squinted at the damaged, but slowly reshaping, phone in his hand. Its impact with the wall had done a real number on it; some of the circuitry had gone completely to pieces in ways he didn’t know could happen if you threw it at a wall. Even the small supposedly resilient display screen was no longer in a proper working condition, though thankfully, the sonic screwdriver was one of the few things in the universe that could both break glass and mend it, a title which was otherwise rare.
He could do this one thing for Rose; give her back the only remaining link to her mother.
Holding a tiny bit of plastic in place with a pair of eyebrow tweezers, he began sonicing it to the frame.
He’d been creating a gap. Even before the emergence of the monster born before time, since his regeneration, actually, he’d been working to create a gap between himself and Rose, a gap that firmly divided the two of them with the lines that defined the area between ‘Doctor’ and ‘companion’. He’d erased the comfort and equality of friendship that his previous incarnation had had with her and turned it into something that wasn’t friendship, but instead something that involved him being closed off and unreceptive and her unable to do anything about it. His previous self had treated her with care and respect, if a bit obsessive care and respect, but still a care and respect that he had hardly jumped to emulate after his regeneration, the one who had so far been treating her with dismissal and coldness, even if on the outside he tried to make it seem like teasing.
Perhaps he had deserved the phone in his face. He winced at the thought, the evidence of what she had done to the phone right there in his hands. Well, he was putting this to a stop. Rose deserved more than what he’d been giving her, and although his own pain hadn’t just vanished, he was not here alone.
And… stuck with her, it wasn’t... as bad as it could be. But that was enough.
And it was about time he started being 'enough' for her as well.
--
Rose awoke the next morning, confused at why there she had not shifted out of unconsciousness to the ringing of the alarm clock. She reached out a arm to search blindly for the object but couldn't find it, fingers only meeting something strange in the place of where she had thought she'd left the clock the night before. More fruitless battering of her hand against the bedside table didn't turn up any results, and she quickly gave up and retreated the now chilled limb back into the warmth of her curled body.
Shifting to her side, she buried her nose into the pillow that, after the weeks and several wash cycles, finally smelt like comfort and… her breath hitched suddenly at the thought of ‘home’ and she had to soak the tears that had been coming so readily as of late into the fabric she was pressing her face into. Quickly discarding the sentence, she switched to a different topic altogether. Maybe she had woken up extra early on her own? The light behind her eyelids suggested otherwise, but it seemed to be the only possible conclusion. Well then. She stretched languidly in her bed, trying to savour every last bit of extra time curled up in warmth and drowsiness until she had to move, ducking her head under the covers to stave off that blinding golden light pouring through her window which would chase it away all the sooner.
Golden light. She had dreamt of golden light last night. Rose pulled a face into her mattress at this. Why had she dreamt of golden light? And singing? The details were already slipping away, and the more she thought about them, the faster they seemed to fade, until all that was left was a distant memory she couldn't expand, a memory she felt slowly comfortable in forgetting. Her mind soon passed it off as unimportant and moved on.
Air flowed slowly through her lungs as she took a deep, content breath, hearing her joints crack in the best way as she took another languorous stretch. Her routine was simple. Get up, get dressed, sneak out the front door and head to the small and cosy café on the other side of the flat building for a few hours, maybe catch a few more minutes of shut eye until she had to go to work.
It was a cowardly thing to do, she knew that, but she felt she couldn’t handle it - ‘it’ being her not being able to be in the same room as him for extended periods of time without breaking down - any other way. She hadn’t looked at him properly in days, always avoiding his eyes or cooping herself up in her room because she had a feeling she knew exactly how it would go if confrontations were indeed made, and they mostly involved her falling to pieces again. Primary had drummed into Rose Tyler that the silent treatment was not the best way to solve problems, unless ‘solving problems’ meant ‘making them worse’, but those lessons had apparently not bore the test of time very well.
Morning light beckoned at her, warming her bed sheets with the reminder that the sun was rising. Turning to the small bedside table, she blew at her hair until it stopped blocking her line of vision and glanced blearily at the small portable alarm clock that was propped there, noticing the thing on top of it, but unable to comprehend what it was quite yet.
She could comprehend the numbers under it, however, and they said that she was late. Very.
Cursing under her breath, she threw herself out of bed quite literally, grabbing at any clothing that didn't seem too wrinkled, heart beating in mild panic that her employer would severely disapprove of her being so exquisitely tardy, and in real panic that she might bump into him today.
The flurry of getting dressed suddenly came to a halt as she caught a proper glimpse of the object that had thwarted her attempts to locate her timepiece that morning. It was a package, simply wrapped and calmly innocent, but she approached it with the caution of a security guard finding a suspicious looking bag in the middle of a crowded train carriage. Still dressed in a strange amalgamation of pyjama tops and blouse, she picked it up warily from where it was lying on top of her clock, covering the confusing configuration of buttons which operated it, which she had only gotten to work through extensive use of trial and error. It was obvious enough who it was from, unless she had a bunch of elves living in the mouse holes that didn't exist, but she didn't like the idea of accepting anything from him, even if it hadn't really been offered as an option. The item in her hands was small, fitting neatly and snugly into her palm, and she had no idea what to do with it. She was sure, however, that she’d locked her door, and the fact that he’d waved his sonic screwdriver around to invade her privacy was more than a little jarring.
It was her phone, she discovered quickly when the thin brown packaging paper hit the carpet. The black one, the one she’d thrown at him, the one they’d bought together when the first one had been left behind in the parallel universe where Mickey was now, the one she’d been too afraid of using, carrying it around like a dead weight in her pocket because she couldn't throw it away. It brought back memories, times of running and laughing and vinegar and game stations and singing and sword-fighting and waiting for five and a half hours.
A tentative thumb slid the top half of the phone up, the number pad flashing as the device turned on. Nothing on it had been changed, the background still the same pixellated photo of them in their Christmas cracker hats, heads pressed together to fit into the small scope that was a mobile phone's camera. It was a snapshot had been taken after Christmas dinner, the day he'd regenerated, so her smile was still shy and timid, his untested and a little strained, manic in an uncertain way, as if it didn’t know if to imitate the one of the man he’d been less than twenty-four hours ago or to somehow be its own. It had actually been her mother's photo, taken by unarguable insistence on her phone because the only other camera they’d had in the house dated into the eighties and for all the world looked like it would turn into a puff of dust if handled too vigorously. Bev had borrowed the digital one and the video camera didn’t work for some reason even the sonic screwdriver couldn’t figure out so the phone had been the best and only option.
“Only you people,” he’d mock-pouted at the time, in the face of her relentless teasing, “Would have something even I can’t fix.”
She slid the top half quickly down again and dropped it onto her bed as if it had just turned red hot. She reached now for the folded up note that had been hidden under it, pressed into a neat rectangle with the words 'I’m sorry' written on the top in bolded capital letters with two thick underlines… in case the point hadn’t been made.
It was written in forcibly legible print, most likely so he knew she’d be able to read it, instead of spending the next month deciphering the bit of squiggly line as a ‘j’ instead of what he would claim was clearly a ‘g’. She pursed her lips together to try and stop the smile, but the corner of her mouth lifted anyway.
She hated him for that too. Making her smile when she was supposed to be angry, hurt, and... angry. He wasn’t even here.
The unfolded message was more cryptic than the folded introduction, even to her, which was saying a lot for a man who wrote riddles for grocery lists because scribbling ‘eggs, milk, bread’ was simply too tedious a way to remember not to starve. Her lips quirked again and she nearly smacked herself to try and stop.
The note, as much as she could tell, told her to take the day off, and that if she was thinking of going to work anyway, he’d already called her office to inform them she’d come down with something, so it’d be a waste of good credibility if she suddenly showed up there perfectly healthy. It continued on to say that he’d be gone for a while and would probably return relatively late, so she would have the flat to herself, time it suggested she use to relax.
'You don’t have to wait for me', it said, the difference in font size indicating that this had been scribbled in on second thoughts. The ‘but’ that followed it had been jotted out.
It was possibly the only straightforward thing written other than its postscript, which was a simple 'Call her' written much the way his apology was, with bold letters and underlines to emphasise the point. She stared at the two words for a moment, her hand suddenly gripping the paper so tightly that it began to crease. She flicked her eyes to the sleek black piece of twenty-first century technology on the bed, teeth worrying over her bottom lip as she ran through the possibilities, the pros and cons, and whether she would even have the nerve to do it in the end, if she chose to at all. She wasn't exactly known for being brave, was she? She might joke about it, but she knew just as well as anyone else that Jackie Tyler was a formidable woman. She was also her mother, and that sometimes made it worse. This would definitely without a doubt be one of those times.
Sighing, she looked away, deciding that she would fret about whether she would call her mother or not later.
For now, she needed a bath. One that was tirelessly drawn out with steaming, soothing water that made her fingers prune until the water turned cold. The dragging hours and elongated schedule of working life always left her exhausted when she came home, with nearly no time between walking through the front door and wanting to fall asleep on the spot. Life on the TARDIS had been restless and with its own type of exhaustion, but it had been easily balanced with the excitement and adrenaline, unlike here, where it seemed working and sleeping was as active as she was allowed to get in the confines of this life. The appearance of the distorted woman looking at her out of the metal handle of the tap was unfamiliar and worrying, but she shrugged it off, instead thrusting a hand under the stream that was now flowing into the bathtub, hitting the white porcelain with thick splatters as it began to fill up.
The water she was soon sinking into with a slow exhale of relief was just bordering on too hot, enough to sting, but not burn. She liked it that way. It was a relieving reassurance to know that her nerves could still react after thinking that she had almost probably gone completely numb, going through the same cycle of tedium and un-change until she forgot what anything felt like.
The tub was about a foot too small and her knees jutted out the centre of the pool, but it was more than enough to ease her muscles, to ease her eyes shut to properly feel all the tenseness in her body be slowly lapped away with the sloshing against her skin. The grievances that had been pressing on her head melted into distant dots on her conscience, present but nulled by the calming atmosphere of non-judgemental steam.
Arms wrapping around her chest, she sank slowly down until her upper body was completely submerged, ears listening for that curious ambiance that was under the surface; a mixture of someone blowing into the mouthpiece of a microphone while someone else stepped slowly onto a plastic bottle. Bubbles escaped from her nose and staggered their way upwards, effortlessly dodging the weightless strands of blonde in the way.
She felt weightless. And otherwise free. She could be... where ever she wanted to be.
But not really. Even in the peaceful and tranquil isolation of the water, it was impossible to entertain the smallest notion that she was in the TARDIS again. Her shoulders kept bumping into the sides of the tub and her knees were dry and cold, something that never would have happened in the giant of a pool that had been the bathtub of the TARDIS.
Furthermore, it was quiet. Not a natural one you'd find in an abandoned space of meadow, but a terrifying one that she had until now been trying to ignore, one that she could hear despite the constant lulling rush of water in her ears. She missed the clicks and whirrs, the mothering comfort that the TARDIS bestowed on her passengers and she shuddered at its loss, suddenly feeling so desperately alone now that she was focusing on it.
She wondered if this had been how he had felt, sitting in the small (smaller than the outside) flat, with his only constant in the centuries he’d been living now gone. For good. Squeezing her eyes, her arms tightened around themselves, as if she would forget herself and drown if she didn't. Even she didn’t want to believe that the TARDIS was gone for good, not completely, and it wasn’t fair that she had made it out to be such a bad thing, when she spent every night staring at the ceiling doing the same thing. He certainly had more time to think about it, to go over the events over and over again, seeing all the solutions in hindsight, the options that hadn’t been taken that might have fared better. At least she had the vapid but mind-consuming activity of work to distract her, to make her misery a background noise. Sitting here day after day with nothing but your thoughts as company would have been consuming in an entirely different way. The same thoughts were already consuming her now and … it wasn’t even noon yet.
Her face broke the water with a gasp when she finally rose up for air, and she quickly wiped her eyes with her arm, sniffing pathetically as trying to swipe the droplets away with an already wet limb only made the problem worse. God, she hated crying, although with the amount she did it, it was probably hard to guess. But she did, and not because crying usually meant extremely distressing situations, which this was, but it made her feel useless and immature, bawling until someone else solved the problem to make her stop. And despite the fact that she hated doing it, she always ended up sitting curled up in some small corner, snivelling away anyway.
Maybe he was right. Maybe she was too emotional.
Her mind flashed back to what she had thought that morning, of when she had almost acknowledged the smell of her bed as... home. She shrunk away from the thought, but her hair was too heavy from water to fist properly in agonised frustration.
The water was still warm and steaming, but her shivers were almost violent as she dropped her forehead onto her arms, wondering if she would ever get used to this life, and deathly afraid that she was already.
End Part II
Author: whollyuncertain
Rating: T (For a baaad word. But that's about it)
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 the things we wanted, 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.
Oh yes, overly long chapter I'm a bit 'meh' about coming right up. Again, any mistakes are mine. Apologies in advance.
--
The row that culminated in took both of them by surprise, although if either of them had been paying the blindest bit of attention as to what was happening instead of wallowing inside their own heads, they would, by all accounts, have seen it a mile off. It took place about a month and a half since their entrance into this strange world, when he was still prone to silently haunting their quarters with lack of things to do, and she was still prone to talking as if absolutely nothing was wrong. She tried to ease the boredom by giving him a supply of books she’d borrow from short visits to libraries or corner bookstores, but it wasn’t enough. He was always finished with them in a few hours, leaving him waiting and watching the clock until he heard the sound of the key twisting in the door despite her best efforts to relieve his sense of loneliness, but it was hard to keep a mind like his occupied for very long.
At first Rose accepted this with as much grace and good will as she could muster, but soon she began to be thoroughly fed up with it. She was trying to be accommodating and understanding, since she knew that being away from the TARDIS was much harder on him than it was for her, and that adaptation to this life style of waking up, going to work and falling asleep wasn’t at all easy after centuries of travelling and always being on the move with any lack of real routine. She imagined that he must be going through a confusing time, where he didn’t want this and was doing his best to deny it, to try and believe that there was still an escape. But at the face of it, there was nothing to deny. They were stuck, and if she was making an effort to make this work, then she felt that he had every reason to be doing the same himself. She wanted the escape as much as he did, but she was smart enough to know that she couldn’t sulk until it showed up. She’d given him time. She’d given him space. But nothing was changing, and by now, something should have, that she was certain of, if nothing else.
He hadn’t meant to start it. He was a notorious avoider of conflict and petty domestic arguments, but it seemed that this time, the fault could clearly be laid on solely him, and he couldn’t blow up the army base of the nearest planet to make everyone forget about it.
Rose had been late again, a good deal late this time, and he had paced anxiously about the sitting room until she’d finally come back, at which point he demanded hotly where she’d been and if she knew, exactly, what time it was. Glaring at him for her less than ideal welcome home, she had been justifiably put off at being addressed as if she had reverted back to her teens and she told him as much, angrily pointing out that she wasn’t being the immature one here, he was, what with his ineffectual brooding that did anything but be helpful.
Composure cracking in the wake of an accusation that was completely accurate, he had hit back, hoping to hurt her enough that he could return to his cocoon of despair without any more complaints, no more fighting and points being made. He told her that she’d never understand, never even begin to conceive what it was like to do this, to be shut inside the confines of one, just one bit of linear time with no where else to go, with no future ahead, just this, a monotonous human life that he didn’t want to be a part of, especially when he was not here by choice.
“You didn’t have to come here, you know!” she pointed out, brow furrowing angrily. “You could have stayed behind with the TARDIS. You could have given up, died with her, but you didn’t. You made your choice. You got on the rocket with me and you turned your back.” He cringed. “Do you think you’re the only one who hurts?” she demanded at him. “Do you think this is easy or easier for me just because I’m human, going back to this life after I thought I was done with it, going back to beans on toast and the sodding tube everyday, knowing I’ll never see my Mum again, that I’m stuck. Here. With you, a Time Lord who won’t even go outside or he might get Earth germs on him and then the world will really fucking end, wouldn’t it?” Thrusting a hand into her trouser pocket before he could answer, she pulled out and angrily brandished a square piece of plastic at him, which after a moment, he realised was the mobile they’d bought together and he’d jiggery pokered after the last one had been… given away. “You tell me what I’m supposed to tell Mum, then, since you’re so clever. I haven’t called her once since we got here, because I’m such a rubbish liar and how can I put ‘hi, I’m trapped centuries into the future from where you are, Mum, and I won’t ever, ever be able to get back, but don’t worry, because it’s all right. It’s all right because I’ve got the Doctor here!’ Tell me how I can put that in a way that won’t break her heart, because the only person she has left in this entire bloody universe can never see her again!”
“Is that how you think of me? Useful until I don't have my magical spaceship anymore? Good for a few trips around the block, a whisk to see the rest of the universe, but without it I'm basically just a pet, aren't I? Do you know what this is like? Being a Time Lord without time? She was the only thing I had left, Rose! And now I'll never... She was my... You have no idea what I’m going through,” he finished through gritted teeth.
“No, you think I have no idea what you’re going through,” she shot back. “My problems might not seem that big compared to yours, because look at me I’m so human, how dare I have emotions and be just as unhappy with all of this as you, and how dare I go venture into the unknown and try to make the best of it anyway! But that’s what you used to tell me to do, that’s what you used to be about! You’re supposed to be the Doctor, but… you're not, you're just...”
She gave him time to fill in the blank space at the end of her sentence, but when he didn’t say anything, she continued on. “You’re always complaining about how we ’humans’ are too emotional, that we always get our feelings mixed up in our actions, but when it comes to something like this, we can’t ‘conceive’ the amount of emotion you’re going through, can we? I suppose you have just the right amount of feeling, yeah? Third bowl of the bloody porridge, are you? We’re stuck here!” she said, voice finally rising to a yell. “We are! Whether you like it or not, we’re stuck here. And we’re stuck with each other, and I’m sick of you sitting here, pretending the world doesn’t exist, acting like the universe just stopped because you can’t cope with the fact that you can’t run away from this anymore! I’m not exactly asking you to be happy-…”
“Good! Because what’s there to be happy about this place? Stuck, as you say, on some wretched little rock with some wretched little human and no way out. And besides, what’s the alternative? Working at a pathetically low paying job that even you, despite your vast and encompassing career involving folding shirts are barely qualified for? Perhaps that’s what you should tell your mother; that you’d fit nicely here if you weren’t a comparatively stupid ape even on a planet inhabited by stupid apes. Apples never fall very far from the tree, do they?”
He didn't regret it the words, at least not immediately. He’d wanted her to hurt, wanted her to stomp off and leave him alone. And that was exactly what she did.
The next few events happened in the space of moments, the sudden flash of hatred in her eyes, the mobile phone she’d been holding crashing into the wall just beside his head. It missed him by mere centimetres, but it still hit with enough force to crack the miniature screen and shatter the fragile plastic casing into pieces. The splintered display still flickered for a second when it hit the floor, clinging onto that last bit of life until it finally realised that it really was broken and went black.
There was a deadly silence.
Refusing to look at him, she left the front room without another word, as if her voice and everything making it up had been in that phone and was now rendered as useless as it now was. The door to her room slammed shut with a bang that vibrated the walls, and there was a crash of what might have been a lamp being thrown.
Only a few moments of quiet passed before the sounds of broken sobbing began, muffled to almost imperceptibility by the desperate clutching of pillows and the covering of protective limbs.
There was, he thought, something odd about hearing them.
For the longest time, he couldn’t figure out what that something was.
--
But it wasn't very long.
He was angry at first, and he thought he had all the reason in the world to be.
She didn’t understand. How could she? She was a human, she wasn’t… him. She didn’t have a connection to the TARDIS like he did. She didn’t… She didn’t…
She didn’t understand. The Doctor was certain of that, if nothing else.
At times, he thought he could hear the TARDIS dying. It wasn’t impossible; his connection to his ship went much deeper than others, both literally and… literally. Nine hundred years would either endear or breed contempt with anything, and contempt for his TARDIS would get anyone thrown out of an airlock easily, by both her wishes and his. She had been his lifeline, the old friend found in a scrapheap so long ago, when he was young, white-haired and less than youthful, with a cane, a sharp grumpy wit and a young girl who wanted to see a life outside textbooks and flamboyantly ostentatious robes, who loved music, who he himself had adored. But she was gone now, along with everything else. A planet he’d hated until it had been destroyed, with people he had been constantly irritated with until they finally all died.
His TARDIS. His old girl. The only thing he’d had left in the entire universe, of the race he’d been a reluctant part of. His only constant when all others came and went.
And now she was gone as well.
Rose didn’t understand. How could she?
She was human. The things she dreamed about, wanted, hurt from… she couldn’t even imagine-…
”No, you think I have no idea what you’re going through.”
He scowled at the window he’d been staring out of, a gap in the wall that seemed to be there more by necessity rather than any real aesthetics or inclination to see the world outside.
That was the thing about humans. They thought they knew everything. His people might have been arrogant, but at least they’d known where they stood; they were an immensely powerful race and they knew it, that had been the main place the arrogance had come from. But humans, they just… blundered about the place, owning everything they set eyes on, they ‘knew’ how the universe was created, they ‘knew’ why they were there, they ‘knew’ everything, when in actuality it was nothing they ever thought it was, it was nothing they’d been taught, told to believe, anything. They didn’t know anything.
They didn’t know him.
”No, you think…”
Growling in frustration, he dug his hands into his hair and hunched forward until his elbows hit his knees, closing his eyes tight in an effort to block it out, but it was hardly any use; the words were in his head and he was still able to remember what she’d said, the facts she’d thrown at his face.
“You made a choice.”
”That’s what you used to be about!”
"You're supposed to be the Doctor."
“Do you think you’re the only one who hurts?”
She’d cried.
Head leaving his hands, he suddenly sat up straighter, a thought occurring that hadn’t occurred before.
She’d cried. And now he remembered why that was odd, why he’d been confused by it.
She hadn’t been crying. Not as far as he knew, anyway. There had been no tears in the rocket, the first night, the morning after or any time after that. He had not, during the night, ever woken up or heard the sounds of crying, weeping or sniffling. And he knew, from experience and knowing her, that that wasn’t very natural. She was a sleeve-hearted person, who had cried whenever she needed to, which, although not necessarily frequent, still hadn't been an uncommon occurrence, with a life like theirs. Surely something like this would have merited a few sobs. But instead of sitting in a corner and letting it out, she had kept a tight lid over them and had placed a fake smile on over that, shutting her emotions away for what she had considered more important. She had been trying to be strong, because he had been too broken to be, because she was Rose and she was strong.
Until last night, when he had…
He blinked.
He had made her cry.
--
The Doctor didn’t see Rose very much, if at all, in the days following. He awoke early now, having long since gotten used to waking at a pre-determined time to hear her wish him a good morning, share breakfast and be the recipient of her goodbye kiss to the cheek. But now she woke up even earlier than that and left before he even had a chance at a chance of catching her long enough to apologise. When she got home, she no longer dropped her jacket and bag onto the floor next to the door, smiled warmly at him and went to change into some more casual clothes before having dinner, but instead brought the battered and threadbare handbag into the her room with her, stoically ignoring the awkward fumblings of look, Roses and Rose, I’ms in her short journey from the front door to her bed. She no longer ate dinner with him, but rather waited until long after he’d fallen asleep before sneaking out into the kitchen in private.
He’d been startled awake one night to the noisy clatter of quickly quieted pots crashing in the kitchen, listening with longing at the audible proof that she was still there, still existed, and that he wasn’t alone in this place, not completely. He closed his eyes when he heard her mumble something that he couldn’t quite make out, but it was enough, to hear her voice, even if he didn't know what she said.
He knew she wouldn’t leave him (well, not really… hopefully), but at the way things were going, he found it was practically as if she had anyway. They appeared to live in different dimensions while occupying the same space, invisible to each other or… him invisible to her at any rate. He wanted to be angry at this, angry that she was no longer there, that he no longer received the support, that had, up until now, been taken much for granted. But the guilt of what he’d said to her, the fact that he had been the one to break her forcefully cheerful demeanour over-encompassed that anger, particularly when the little voice inside his head reminded him that all she had said to provoke him was the truth, just a truth he had been unwilling to hear. She had been hurting, and he had been too wrapped up in himself and his own injuries, obsessed in hating this world to realise she hadn’t been coping as well as he’d imagined or she put on. All right, so she had never told him, never gave him any hints that anything was off, but then, he’d hardly deigned to ask if she was all right either, which was being a rubbish friend, for a start.
In the concentrated light of his desk lamp, he squinted at the damaged, but slowly reshaping, phone in his hand. Its impact with the wall had done a real number on it; some of the circuitry had gone completely to pieces in ways he didn’t know could happen if you threw it at a wall. Even the small supposedly resilient display screen was no longer in a proper working condition, though thankfully, the sonic screwdriver was one of the few things in the universe that could both break glass and mend it, a title which was otherwise rare.
He could do this one thing for Rose; give her back the only remaining link to her mother.
Holding a tiny bit of plastic in place with a pair of eyebrow tweezers, he began sonicing it to the frame.
He’d been creating a gap. Even before the emergence of the monster born before time, since his regeneration, actually, he’d been working to create a gap between himself and Rose, a gap that firmly divided the two of them with the lines that defined the area between ‘Doctor’ and ‘companion’. He’d erased the comfort and equality of friendship that his previous incarnation had had with her and turned it into something that wasn’t friendship, but instead something that involved him being closed off and unreceptive and her unable to do anything about it. His previous self had treated her with care and respect, if a bit obsessive care and respect, but still a care and respect that he had hardly jumped to emulate after his regeneration, the one who had so far been treating her with dismissal and coldness, even if on the outside he tried to make it seem like teasing.
Perhaps he had deserved the phone in his face. He winced at the thought, the evidence of what she had done to the phone right there in his hands. Well, he was putting this to a stop. Rose deserved more than what he’d been giving her, and although his own pain hadn’t just vanished, he was not here alone.
And… stuck with her, it wasn’t... as bad as it could be. But that was enough.
And it was about time he started being 'enough' for her as well.
--
Rose awoke the next morning, confused at why there she had not shifted out of unconsciousness to the ringing of the alarm clock. She reached out a arm to search blindly for the object but couldn't find it, fingers only meeting something strange in the place of where she had thought she'd left the clock the night before. More fruitless battering of her hand against the bedside table didn't turn up any results, and she quickly gave up and retreated the now chilled limb back into the warmth of her curled body.
Shifting to her side, she buried her nose into the pillow that, after the weeks and several wash cycles, finally smelt like comfort and… her breath hitched suddenly at the thought of ‘home’ and she had to soak the tears that had been coming so readily as of late into the fabric she was pressing her face into. Quickly discarding the sentence, she switched to a different topic altogether. Maybe she had woken up extra early on her own? The light behind her eyelids suggested otherwise, but it seemed to be the only possible conclusion. Well then. She stretched languidly in her bed, trying to savour every last bit of extra time curled up in warmth and drowsiness until she had to move, ducking her head under the covers to stave off that blinding golden light pouring through her window which would chase it away all the sooner.
Golden light. She had dreamt of golden light last night. Rose pulled a face into her mattress at this. Why had she dreamt of golden light? And singing? The details were already slipping away, and the more she thought about them, the faster they seemed to fade, until all that was left was a distant memory she couldn't expand, a memory she felt slowly comfortable in forgetting. Her mind soon passed it off as unimportant and moved on.
Air flowed slowly through her lungs as she took a deep, content breath, hearing her joints crack in the best way as she took another languorous stretch. Her routine was simple. Get up, get dressed, sneak out the front door and head to the small and cosy café on the other side of the flat building for a few hours, maybe catch a few more minutes of shut eye until she had to go to work.
It was a cowardly thing to do, she knew that, but she felt she couldn’t handle it - ‘it’ being her not being able to be in the same room as him for extended periods of time without breaking down - any other way. She hadn’t looked at him properly in days, always avoiding his eyes or cooping herself up in her room because she had a feeling she knew exactly how it would go if confrontations were indeed made, and they mostly involved her falling to pieces again. Primary had drummed into Rose Tyler that the silent treatment was not the best way to solve problems, unless ‘solving problems’ meant ‘making them worse’, but those lessons had apparently not bore the test of time very well.
Morning light beckoned at her, warming her bed sheets with the reminder that the sun was rising. Turning to the small bedside table, she blew at her hair until it stopped blocking her line of vision and glanced blearily at the small portable alarm clock that was propped there, noticing the thing on top of it, but unable to comprehend what it was quite yet.
She could comprehend the numbers under it, however, and they said that she was late. Very.
Cursing under her breath, she threw herself out of bed quite literally, grabbing at any clothing that didn't seem too wrinkled, heart beating in mild panic that her employer would severely disapprove of her being so exquisitely tardy, and in real panic that she might bump into him today.
The flurry of getting dressed suddenly came to a halt as she caught a proper glimpse of the object that had thwarted her attempts to locate her timepiece that morning. It was a package, simply wrapped and calmly innocent, but she approached it with the caution of a security guard finding a suspicious looking bag in the middle of a crowded train carriage. Still dressed in a strange amalgamation of pyjama tops and blouse, she picked it up warily from where it was lying on top of her clock, covering the confusing configuration of buttons which operated it, which she had only gotten to work through extensive use of trial and error. It was obvious enough who it was from, unless she had a bunch of elves living in the mouse holes that didn't exist, but she didn't like the idea of accepting anything from him, even if it hadn't really been offered as an option. The item in her hands was small, fitting neatly and snugly into her palm, and she had no idea what to do with it. She was sure, however, that she’d locked her door, and the fact that he’d waved his sonic screwdriver around to invade her privacy was more than a little jarring.
It was her phone, she discovered quickly when the thin brown packaging paper hit the carpet. The black one, the one she’d thrown at him, the one they’d bought together when the first one had been left behind in the parallel universe where Mickey was now, the one she’d been too afraid of using, carrying it around like a dead weight in her pocket because she couldn't throw it away. It brought back memories, times of running and laughing and vinegar and game stations and singing and sword-fighting and waiting for five and a half hours.
A tentative thumb slid the top half of the phone up, the number pad flashing as the device turned on. Nothing on it had been changed, the background still the same pixellated photo of them in their Christmas cracker hats, heads pressed together to fit into the small scope that was a mobile phone's camera. It was a snapshot had been taken after Christmas dinner, the day he'd regenerated, so her smile was still shy and timid, his untested and a little strained, manic in an uncertain way, as if it didn’t know if to imitate the one of the man he’d been less than twenty-four hours ago or to somehow be its own. It had actually been her mother's photo, taken by unarguable insistence on her phone because the only other camera they’d had in the house dated into the eighties and for all the world looked like it would turn into a puff of dust if handled too vigorously. Bev had borrowed the digital one and the video camera didn’t work for some reason even the sonic screwdriver couldn’t figure out so the phone had been the best and only option.
“Only you people,” he’d mock-pouted at the time, in the face of her relentless teasing, “Would have something even I can’t fix.”
She slid the top half quickly down again and dropped it onto her bed as if it had just turned red hot. She reached now for the folded up note that had been hidden under it, pressed into a neat rectangle with the words 'I’m sorry' written on the top in bolded capital letters with two thick underlines… in case the point hadn’t been made.
It was written in forcibly legible print, most likely so he knew she’d be able to read it, instead of spending the next month deciphering the bit of squiggly line as a ‘j’ instead of what he would claim was clearly a ‘g’. She pursed her lips together to try and stop the smile, but the corner of her mouth lifted anyway.
She hated him for that too. Making her smile when she was supposed to be angry, hurt, and... angry. He wasn’t even here.
The unfolded message was more cryptic than the folded introduction, even to her, which was saying a lot for a man who wrote riddles for grocery lists because scribbling ‘eggs, milk, bread’ was simply too tedious a way to remember not to starve. Her lips quirked again and she nearly smacked herself to try and stop.
The note, as much as she could tell, told her to take the day off, and that if she was thinking of going to work anyway, he’d already called her office to inform them she’d come down with something, so it’d be a waste of good credibility if she suddenly showed up there perfectly healthy. It continued on to say that he’d be gone for a while and would probably return relatively late, so she would have the flat to herself, time it suggested she use to relax.
'You don’t have to wait for me', it said, the difference in font size indicating that this had been scribbled in on second thoughts. The ‘but’ that followed it had been jotted out.
It was possibly the only straightforward thing written other than its postscript, which was a simple 'Call her' written much the way his apology was, with bold letters and underlines to emphasise the point. She stared at the two words for a moment, her hand suddenly gripping the paper so tightly that it began to crease. She flicked her eyes to the sleek black piece of twenty-first century technology on the bed, teeth worrying over her bottom lip as she ran through the possibilities, the pros and cons, and whether she would even have the nerve to do it in the end, if she chose to at all. She wasn't exactly known for being brave, was she? She might joke about it, but she knew just as well as anyone else that Jackie Tyler was a formidable woman. She was also her mother, and that sometimes made it worse. This would definitely without a doubt be one of those times.
Sighing, she looked away, deciding that she would fret about whether she would call her mother or not later.
For now, she needed a bath. One that was tirelessly drawn out with steaming, soothing water that made her fingers prune until the water turned cold. The dragging hours and elongated schedule of working life always left her exhausted when she came home, with nearly no time between walking through the front door and wanting to fall asleep on the spot. Life on the TARDIS had been restless and with its own type of exhaustion, but it had been easily balanced with the excitement and adrenaline, unlike here, where it seemed working and sleeping was as active as she was allowed to get in the confines of this life. The appearance of the distorted woman looking at her out of the metal handle of the tap was unfamiliar and worrying, but she shrugged it off, instead thrusting a hand under the stream that was now flowing into the bathtub, hitting the white porcelain with thick splatters as it began to fill up.
The water she was soon sinking into with a slow exhale of relief was just bordering on too hot, enough to sting, but not burn. She liked it that way. It was a relieving reassurance to know that her nerves could still react after thinking that she had almost probably gone completely numb, going through the same cycle of tedium and un-change until she forgot what anything felt like.
The tub was about a foot too small and her knees jutted out the centre of the pool, but it was more than enough to ease her muscles, to ease her eyes shut to properly feel all the tenseness in her body be slowly lapped away with the sloshing against her skin. The grievances that had been pressing on her head melted into distant dots on her conscience, present but nulled by the calming atmosphere of non-judgemental steam.
Arms wrapping around her chest, she sank slowly down until her upper body was completely submerged, ears listening for that curious ambiance that was under the surface; a mixture of someone blowing into the mouthpiece of a microphone while someone else stepped slowly onto a plastic bottle. Bubbles escaped from her nose and staggered their way upwards, effortlessly dodging the weightless strands of blonde in the way.
She felt weightless. And otherwise free. She could be... where ever she wanted to be.
But not really. Even in the peaceful and tranquil isolation of the water, it was impossible to entertain the smallest notion that she was in the TARDIS again. Her shoulders kept bumping into the sides of the tub and her knees were dry and cold, something that never would have happened in the giant of a pool that had been the bathtub of the TARDIS.
Furthermore, it was quiet. Not a natural one you'd find in an abandoned space of meadow, but a terrifying one that she had until now been trying to ignore, one that she could hear despite the constant lulling rush of water in her ears. She missed the clicks and whirrs, the mothering comfort that the TARDIS bestowed on her passengers and she shuddered at its loss, suddenly feeling so desperately alone now that she was focusing on it.
She wondered if this had been how he had felt, sitting in the small (smaller than the outside) flat, with his only constant in the centuries he’d been living now gone. For good. Squeezing her eyes, her arms tightened around themselves, as if she would forget herself and drown if she didn't. Even she didn’t want to believe that the TARDIS was gone for good, not completely, and it wasn’t fair that she had made it out to be such a bad thing, when she spent every night staring at the ceiling doing the same thing. He certainly had more time to think about it, to go over the events over and over again, seeing all the solutions in hindsight, the options that hadn’t been taken that might have fared better. At least she had the vapid but mind-consuming activity of work to distract her, to make her misery a background noise. Sitting here day after day with nothing but your thoughts as company would have been consuming in an entirely different way. The same thoughts were already consuming her now and … it wasn’t even noon yet.
Her face broke the water with a gasp when she finally rose up for air, and she quickly wiped her eyes with her arm, sniffing pathetically as trying to swipe the droplets away with an already wet limb only made the problem worse. God, she hated crying, although with the amount she did it, it was probably hard to guess. But she did, and not because crying usually meant extremely distressing situations, which this was, but it made her feel useless and immature, bawling until someone else solved the problem to make her stop. And despite the fact that she hated doing it, she always ended up sitting curled up in some small corner, snivelling away anyway.
Maybe he was right. Maybe she was too emotional.
Her mind flashed back to what she had thought that morning, of when she had almost acknowledged the smell of her bed as... home. She shrunk away from the thought, but her hair was too heavy from water to fist properly in agonised frustration.
The water was still warm and steaming, but her shivers were almost violent as she dropped her forehead onto her arms, wondering if she would ever get used to this life, and deathly afraid that she was already.
End Part II