The Night Before Christmas (1/1)
Title - The Night Before Christmas (1/1)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - Adult
Characters - Ten, Rose
Spoilers - None
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - Some people get better gifts under the Christmas tree than other people do.
Author's Notes - Many thanks to jlrpuck, for the quickfire beta and the encouraging words.
The gorgeous icon was created by swankkatfor me, commissioned by jlrpuckfor my birthday.
wiggiemomsiwon me in the Support Stacie auction, thereby donating a lot of money to a great cause. She therefore deserves a truly wonderful fic, and I hope this fits the bill for her. Her only prompt was basically Doctor/Rose smut.
‘Twas the night before Christmas
And all through the house
Not a creature was stirring
Not even a mouse
Rose could not sleep. She laid in her bed and stared at her ceiling and listened to the silence in her TARDIS. The Doctor was not in the ship. She could tell, somehow. Something about the pitch of the ship’s hum. She wanted him to come to bed with her, to crawl next to her, under the covers, and snuggle with her.
Rose pushed the duvet off of her and rolled out of bed, grabbing the robe off the end of the bed where she’d left it when she’d gone to bed hours earlier, and ventured into the hallway outside their bedroom. The door to the nursery was next door, and Rose paused beside it. She could hear her children’s voices. Brem was telling a story. It might have been ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, the thirty-second century version.
Belting the robe around her waist, Rose walked through the console room to the door of the TARDIS, which stood ajar, and poked her head out of it. The Doctor was sitting on the floor in her mother’s living room. Behind him the Christmas tree was twinkling merrily, but he was not looking at it. He had his back to it, and was silently looking at something out of her sight. Curious, she stepped fully out of the TARDIS and glanced over her shoulder, but she could see nothing but the doorway that led to her mother’s darkened kitchen.
“Hey,” she said, softly.
He jumped, clearly startled, and focused on her, with a faint smile. “I thought you were sleeping.”
She shook her head a bit, going to sit beside him and hugging her knees up to her chest. She looked out at the view he had of the deserted living room, lit only by the Christmas tree behind them. “What are you doing?”
He shrugged.
Rose glanced at him, then decided not to push it. She sat with him in companionable silence for a moment.
“I…” he began finally. “I didn’t think I’d ever come back here. After you…I mean, when you…We could’ve come here, but I couldn’t bear to be…I really didn’t think that I’d ever…I thought even if I did get you back, your mother would stay there, with Pete, and we wouldn’t…I mean, too much has happened in this flat for us to…I was attacked by a plastic arm, right here, in this room.”
“You made a terrible pun about it, too.”
“Your mother slapped me here.”
“For the first time.”
“Not the last time,” he acknowledged.
“You deserved it.”
“Oi. Not all of them.”
“Most of them.”
“You’re terribly cheeky.”
“I was almost killed by a Christmas tree here.”
“You’re safe now,” he said.
“But I wasn’t then. I was terrified you were dying. But you helped me. D’you remember?”
“Of course I remember. It had to do with the pilot fish.”
“No. I mean I whispered in your ear. ‘Help me.’ And you woke up immediately. Do you remember that?”
She felt him look at her. “No. I don’t remember that.”
“You did. And I thought…maybe we’d be okay after all. And then we had Christmas dinner here, with my mum, and you wore your cracker crown and looked devastating in it.”
“I did not,” he said, sounding pleased that she’d thought so. There was a moment of silence. “I sat on that couch there and watched you carry Brem in, that time I went off without the two of you, d’you remember? You hadn’t seen me yet, you were talking to him, and you…I knew in that moment I could never leave you again. I knew I couldn’t.” She settled her head on his shoulder, and felt him rest his lips against her hair momentarily. “I couldn’t come back here without you. I left everything here, Rose, because I couldn’t-”
“It doesn’t matter. Of course you couldn’t. We were happy here. Of course you couldn’t come back here.” She paused, listening to him breathe. He was breathing quickly, and she realized that he was tense. She wondered if he thought she was suddenly going to disappear from beside him.
“You had Christmas, in the other universe. Didn’t you.” He stated it as a matter of fact.
“Yeah.”
“How did you…How could you…I was so terrified that we would have to celebrate Christmas without you. And I knew the kids wouldn’t let us. They wouldn’t let me celebrate Brem’s birthday. They wouldn’t acknowledge time passing. What was I going to do about Christmas?”
She shifted, cupped her hands around his face. “But you didn’t have to celebrate Christmas without me. See? I’m right here.” She dropped her hands to his, squeezed them. “I’m right here.” He lifted his arms up to crush her to him. “I’m here,” she whispered.
“I still don’t know how,” he mumbled against her.
“Something tells me you were just very, very good this year. Most years, probably.”
He barked laughter. “A lot of beings in this universe would beg to differ about that one.”
“None I care about.” She kissed his throat, and felt him shudder a bit. She pulled back, looking at him, his eyes dark and serious, and then she pulled back a bit more, untying the belt of her robe while holding his gaze.
He lifted an eyebrow and glanced down as she parted the robe. She was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants. Hardly lingerie, and hardly going to make a difference when it came to the Doctor and this moment. “Are you seducing me under your mother’s Christmas tree while your mother sleeps in the other room?”
Rose smiled at him, sliding her robe off her shoulders. “Yes. Aren’t you lucky?”
“Mmm.” He leaned back, resting on his hands and crossing his ankles casually, his face in shadow, back-lit by the Christmas tree. “It’s been far too long since I’ve been slapped for something.”
Rose pulled the T-shirt up over her head. Even in the dim glow of the Christmas tree, she could tell the Doctor pouted a bit. She glanced down. “What?”
“I thought you’d have…bows on your nipples or something.”
“Bows on my nipples?”
“Yes.” He lifted his eyebrows at her, as he caught her expression. “No?”
“No.”
“Ah.”
“Be quiet.”
“Absolutely.”
Rose stood up and stepped out of her sweatpants and knickers in one smooth motion, then knelt beside him.
“Aren’t you worried about pine needles?” he asked, looking up at her.
“What?”
“Pine needles. Prick your skin.”
Rose looked over at the Christmas tree. “Well. Now I am.” She looked back at him. “See? This is a problem you have. Pine needles should not be the type of prick you’re worrying about right now.”
“I talk too much, don’t I?”
“You talk too much, and you think too much, and I’m going to unwrap you like a Christmas gift.” Her hand went to his tie. “But if you keep talking and thinking and stuff, I’m going to go back to bed. Where there are no pine needles.”
“No pricks,” he remarked.
“But a very good vibrator.”
He looked alarmed. “What?” he asked, sounding strangled.
She smiled sweetly at him and slid his tie from his collar, draping it over the nearest bough of the Christmas tree, from which she retrieved some tinsel and dropped it in his hair.
“Have you really got a vibrator in our bedroom?” he asked, anxiously.
Rose decided the thing to do in this circumstance to get her Doctor to re-focus, was to get straight for the zipper on his trousers, rasping it down and cupping him through his pants.
His eyes fluttered closed. “D’you think you’re distracting me?” he murmured.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“You’re not.”
“Mm-hmm.” She lifted her hands to unfasten the lone button he’d closed of his suit coat, sliding it undone and pushing it slowly off his shoulders, sliding her hands entirely down his arms, along the fabric of his shirt, until she reached the floor. She lifted her hands back up, reaching for the highest buttoned button on his shirt. His eyes were still closed, and the only sound in the room was his breathing. She realized her hands were shaking as she tried to keep unbuttoning his shirt, and she took a deep breath, steadying herself. She had made love to him oh-so-many times since she had been back, but it was somehow hitting her all over again, how close she’d come to never doing this again. That horrible Christmas without him in the other universe, she had sat up all night and stared at the Christmas tree, and now she had exactly what she’d wished for then: a Christmas tree with him underneath it.
She leaned forward, brushing kisses over the skin she revealed as she slowly unbuttoned his shirt. His hearts beat thunderously underneath her lips. His abdomen quivered as she moved down his body. She felt his hands lift, tangle into her hair. He must have tipped backward a bit, as she dimly heard the ornaments on the tree jangle as he jostled into them. She paused, pulling back, and he pulled her up for a bruising kiss. She moaned into his mouth, pushing at the shirt now to try to get it fully off him. He took his hands out of her hair to try to help, tugging the sleeves off, and then nudging until she was sprawled under him, his form covering her, familiar, slender, cool.
He pulled back suddenly, staring down at her, his fingers just barely tracing the contours of her features, her cheekbones and her mouth, wet and swollen from being kissed, hard. He was not, he thought, being especially gentle, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to be. He kissed her again fiercely, then shifted, drawing his mouth down the length of her neck.
“Want you,” Rose gasped at him, closing her hands in his hair.
“Oh, yes,” he mumbled, before swirling a tongue around her nipple.
She arched against him, and he closed his eyes for a moment at the rush of sensation.
She took advantage of his moment’s hesitation, stealing the upper hand and rolling him over so she could straddle him. “I was supposed to be unwrapping you like a present,” she reminded him.
“Didn’t you?”
“Parts of you seem to be very covered still.” She grinned suddenly. “And they’re the best parts.” Still grinning, she drew her nose playfully down his chest, dipped her tongue into his navel, and then sat up to shift and carefully untie his trainers and pull them off, followed by his socks. She looked back at him.
He’d propped himself up on his elbows and was watching her. “Are you quite done?”
“Yes,” she responded, primly. “Lift your hips so I can get these off of you.” She indicated his trousers and pants, and he obeyed, wriggling so she could work them down him. Then she paused. “This is probably the point when my mum is going to walk in.”
“D’you think you could avoid putting a damper on things?”
“And then she’d be disappointed that you don’t have two penises.”
He frowned. “Why would I have two penises?”
“You have two hearts.”
“Huh. I never thought about that before.” He looked down briefly at his one penis. “Were you disappointed that I didn’t have two?”
“What the hell would I have done with two? It would have been double the work for me.”
He looked indignant. “Work?” he said.
“Oh, it’s a very hard job,” she told him, with mock seriousness. “But somebody’s got to do it.”
“How’d you like to get around to that then, before your mother does walk in on us?”
That taunting tongue poked out of the side of her mouth. “Only,” she murmured, “if you stay very, very quiet.” She leaned down, drawing him into her mouth, and his world narrowed into the pinpoint that was Rose, and her clever mouth. Her tongue, he thought, in particular, was very, very, very clever, when it did…just…that…
His hips bucked helplessly, and he hissed a swear, swallowing the sharp edge of the pleasure that was looming. “Rose,” he groaned, and her mouth disappeared suddenly, entirely, which was both good and bad, because it left him hovering frustratingly on the edge of a climax he could taste.
He fell back, panting, his hands clenched into fists and his eyes squeezed shut as his tried to tip his world back into equilibrium.
“Quiet,” she mumbled. He felt her lips brush his earlobe. “We have to be so-” Her lips brushed over his. “So-”Her tongue slid against his, tasting of him. He whimpered, closing his hands into her hair, holding into her place. “So quiet oh God,” she gasped, as she sank onto the length of him.
He shifted his hands to her hips, holding her in place, as he thrust sharply into her. Rose sobbed with pleasure.
“Oh, please,” she begged, swiveling her hips against him in a way guaranteed to make him lose his mind.
“Bloody-” he began to bite out.
“Quiet,” she panted at him.
“You’re not being quiet,” he pointed out, and groaned as she shifted their angle.
“I am,” she denied, moving against him in the most fantastic rhythm. “I’m being so, so, so quiet please-keep-a little-yes-yes-”
He moved his hands, finding a breast, plucking at a nipple, and Rose’s breath caught on another yes and he thrust into her a little more sharply, finding himself deeper inside of her. He suddenly wanted her to climax around him, to pull him into it after her. He needed her desperately to come first, to exclaim for him, to unravel with pleasure and tell him she loved him and-and-
He became aware suddenly that he was talking, Rose said he talked constantly during sex, and the words pouring out of him, as he met her desperate rhythm, were, “Tell me you love me, tell me.”
“I love you,” she told him. “I’ve loved for you so long. So much, for so long, and, Doctor, oh God, please, just like that, just like, oh, quiet, we should be quiet.”
“Why?” he bit out.
“I don’t know, I don’t remember, I just, I-”
“Tell me-”
“I love you,” she managed, and then he felt her climax rip through her, and he found himself tumbling over the edge with her, dimly and dazedly, and when he came back to himself she was collapsed against him in exhaustion, panting, and he was murmuring, “Love you love you love you love you.”
He kissed sweat off her shoulder. “I love you,” he said, and then became aware that she was crying against his chest. He struggled to sit up in alarm, cradling her. “Rose,” he said, bewildered. “What…?”
“I missed you,” she sobbed. “I missed you so much. There were all those days without you, but then there was Christmas without you, and I wanted you so much. I wanted you so much, and you weren’t there, you didn’t come, and oh, God, I missed you so much.”
There had been, he realized, suddenly, so many times that she had comforted him, so many times that she had realized how traumatic it had been for him and had focused on getting him through it. It was how this had all begun under the Christmas tree, he knew, her trying to distract him from how terrifying the prospect of a Christmas without her had been. How many times had he acknowledged how much it must have damaged her? The great luxury of life with Rose was that she didn’t expect him to be as strong as he thought he should be, and somehow he’d fallen into that and stopped being as strong as she might need him to be.
He held her to him tighter and whispered in her ear. “I’m here. I’m right here. And I’ll never leave you again. Do you hear me, Rose? I will never…For as long as you…I will never leave you again. You will always have me. Always. Always.”
Rose eventually calmed against him, soothed by his voice in her ear and the feel of him around her, clasping her to him. She lifted her head, to look up at him, and they gazed at each other for a very long moment, until she decided against saying any of the myriad other things she thought they needed to say to each other. They had so much time for that, she thought. So instead she wiped at her tears and smiled at him. “Merry Christmas, yeah?” she said to him.
And he grinned. “Yes. Merry Christmas.”
“Let’s get dressed and get the kids now.”
“Won’t your mother be upset at being woken this early?”
“Oh, I’m sure my mother’s already awake,” Rose grinned at him. “You weren’t very quiet.”
“And you were quiet as a mouse?” he drawled.
“A very happy little mouse,” she said, and kissed him briefly before going in search of their clothing. They gave up on locating his tie, and it was Brem who eventually found it, draped over a branch and covered in tinsel, and when he asked how it got there, his grandmother told him that he asked too many questions.
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - Adult
Characters - Ten, Rose
Spoilers - None
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - Some people get better gifts under the Christmas tree than other people do.
Author's Notes - Many thanks to jlrpuck, for the quickfire beta and the encouraging words.
The gorgeous icon was created by swankkatfor me, commissioned by jlrpuckfor my birthday.
wiggiemomsiwon me in the Support Stacie auction, thereby donating a lot of money to a great cause. She therefore deserves a truly wonderful fic, and I hope this fits the bill for her. Her only prompt was basically Doctor/Rose smut.
‘Twas the night before Christmas
And all through the house
Not a creature was stirring
Not even a mouse
Rose could not sleep. She laid in her bed and stared at her ceiling and listened to the silence in her TARDIS. The Doctor was not in the ship. She could tell, somehow. Something about the pitch of the ship’s hum. She wanted him to come to bed with her, to crawl next to her, under the covers, and snuggle with her.
Rose pushed the duvet off of her and rolled out of bed, grabbing the robe off the end of the bed where she’d left it when she’d gone to bed hours earlier, and ventured into the hallway outside their bedroom. The door to the nursery was next door, and Rose paused beside it. She could hear her children’s voices. Brem was telling a story. It might have been ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, the thirty-second century version.
Belting the robe around her waist, Rose walked through the console room to the door of the TARDIS, which stood ajar, and poked her head out of it. The Doctor was sitting on the floor in her mother’s living room. Behind him the Christmas tree was twinkling merrily, but he was not looking at it. He had his back to it, and was silently looking at something out of her sight. Curious, she stepped fully out of the TARDIS and glanced over her shoulder, but she could see nothing but the doorway that led to her mother’s darkened kitchen.
“Hey,” she said, softly.
He jumped, clearly startled, and focused on her, with a faint smile. “I thought you were sleeping.”
She shook her head a bit, going to sit beside him and hugging her knees up to her chest. She looked out at the view he had of the deserted living room, lit only by the Christmas tree behind them. “What are you doing?”
He shrugged.
Rose glanced at him, then decided not to push it. She sat with him in companionable silence for a moment.
“I…” he began finally. “I didn’t think I’d ever come back here. After you…I mean, when you…We could’ve come here, but I couldn’t bear to be…I really didn’t think that I’d ever…I thought even if I did get you back, your mother would stay there, with Pete, and we wouldn’t…I mean, too much has happened in this flat for us to…I was attacked by a plastic arm, right here, in this room.”
“You made a terrible pun about it, too.”
“Your mother slapped me here.”
“For the first time.”
“Not the last time,” he acknowledged.
“You deserved it.”
“Oi. Not all of them.”
“Most of them.”
“You’re terribly cheeky.”
“I was almost killed by a Christmas tree here.”
“You’re safe now,” he said.
“But I wasn’t then. I was terrified you were dying. But you helped me. D’you remember?”
“Of course I remember. It had to do with the pilot fish.”
“No. I mean I whispered in your ear. ‘Help me.’ And you woke up immediately. Do you remember that?”
She felt him look at her. “No. I don’t remember that.”
“You did. And I thought…maybe we’d be okay after all. And then we had Christmas dinner here, with my mum, and you wore your cracker crown and looked devastating in it.”
“I did not,” he said, sounding pleased that she’d thought so. There was a moment of silence. “I sat on that couch there and watched you carry Brem in, that time I went off without the two of you, d’you remember? You hadn’t seen me yet, you were talking to him, and you…I knew in that moment I could never leave you again. I knew I couldn’t.” She settled her head on his shoulder, and felt him rest his lips against her hair momentarily. “I couldn’t come back here without you. I left everything here, Rose, because I couldn’t-”
“It doesn’t matter. Of course you couldn’t. We were happy here. Of course you couldn’t come back here.” She paused, listening to him breathe. He was breathing quickly, and she realized that he was tense. She wondered if he thought she was suddenly going to disappear from beside him.
“You had Christmas, in the other universe. Didn’t you.” He stated it as a matter of fact.
“Yeah.”
“How did you…How could you…I was so terrified that we would have to celebrate Christmas without you. And I knew the kids wouldn’t let us. They wouldn’t let me celebrate Brem’s birthday. They wouldn’t acknowledge time passing. What was I going to do about Christmas?”
She shifted, cupped her hands around his face. “But you didn’t have to celebrate Christmas without me. See? I’m right here.” She dropped her hands to his, squeezed them. “I’m right here.” He lifted his arms up to crush her to him. “I’m here,” she whispered.
“I still don’t know how,” he mumbled against her.
“Something tells me you were just very, very good this year. Most years, probably.”
He barked laughter. “A lot of beings in this universe would beg to differ about that one.”
“None I care about.” She kissed his throat, and felt him shudder a bit. She pulled back, looking at him, his eyes dark and serious, and then she pulled back a bit more, untying the belt of her robe while holding his gaze.
He lifted an eyebrow and glanced down as she parted the robe. She was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants. Hardly lingerie, and hardly going to make a difference when it came to the Doctor and this moment. “Are you seducing me under your mother’s Christmas tree while your mother sleeps in the other room?”
Rose smiled at him, sliding her robe off her shoulders. “Yes. Aren’t you lucky?”
“Mmm.” He leaned back, resting on his hands and crossing his ankles casually, his face in shadow, back-lit by the Christmas tree. “It’s been far too long since I’ve been slapped for something.”
Rose pulled the T-shirt up over her head. Even in the dim glow of the Christmas tree, she could tell the Doctor pouted a bit. She glanced down. “What?”
“I thought you’d have…bows on your nipples or something.”
“Bows on my nipples?”
“Yes.” He lifted his eyebrows at her, as he caught her expression. “No?”
“No.”
“Ah.”
“Be quiet.”
“Absolutely.”
Rose stood up and stepped out of her sweatpants and knickers in one smooth motion, then knelt beside him.
“Aren’t you worried about pine needles?” he asked, looking up at her.
“What?”
“Pine needles. Prick your skin.”
Rose looked over at the Christmas tree. “Well. Now I am.” She looked back at him. “See? This is a problem you have. Pine needles should not be the type of prick you’re worrying about right now.”
“I talk too much, don’t I?”
“You talk too much, and you think too much, and I’m going to unwrap you like a Christmas gift.” Her hand went to his tie. “But if you keep talking and thinking and stuff, I’m going to go back to bed. Where there are no pine needles.”
“No pricks,” he remarked.
“But a very good vibrator.”
He looked alarmed. “What?” he asked, sounding strangled.
She smiled sweetly at him and slid his tie from his collar, draping it over the nearest bough of the Christmas tree, from which she retrieved some tinsel and dropped it in his hair.
“Have you really got a vibrator in our bedroom?” he asked, anxiously.
Rose decided the thing to do in this circumstance to get her Doctor to re-focus, was to get straight for the zipper on his trousers, rasping it down and cupping him through his pants.
His eyes fluttered closed. “D’you think you’re distracting me?” he murmured.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“You’re not.”
“Mm-hmm.” She lifted her hands to unfasten the lone button he’d closed of his suit coat, sliding it undone and pushing it slowly off his shoulders, sliding her hands entirely down his arms, along the fabric of his shirt, until she reached the floor. She lifted her hands back up, reaching for the highest buttoned button on his shirt. His eyes were still closed, and the only sound in the room was his breathing. She realized her hands were shaking as she tried to keep unbuttoning his shirt, and she took a deep breath, steadying herself. She had made love to him oh-so-many times since she had been back, but it was somehow hitting her all over again, how close she’d come to never doing this again. That horrible Christmas without him in the other universe, she had sat up all night and stared at the Christmas tree, and now she had exactly what she’d wished for then: a Christmas tree with him underneath it.
She leaned forward, brushing kisses over the skin she revealed as she slowly unbuttoned his shirt. His hearts beat thunderously underneath her lips. His abdomen quivered as she moved down his body. She felt his hands lift, tangle into her hair. He must have tipped backward a bit, as she dimly heard the ornaments on the tree jangle as he jostled into them. She paused, pulling back, and he pulled her up for a bruising kiss. She moaned into his mouth, pushing at the shirt now to try to get it fully off him. He took his hands out of her hair to try to help, tugging the sleeves off, and then nudging until she was sprawled under him, his form covering her, familiar, slender, cool.
He pulled back suddenly, staring down at her, his fingers just barely tracing the contours of her features, her cheekbones and her mouth, wet and swollen from being kissed, hard. He was not, he thought, being especially gentle, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to be. He kissed her again fiercely, then shifted, drawing his mouth down the length of her neck.
“Want you,” Rose gasped at him, closing her hands in his hair.
“Oh, yes,” he mumbled, before swirling a tongue around her nipple.
She arched against him, and he closed his eyes for a moment at the rush of sensation.
She took advantage of his moment’s hesitation, stealing the upper hand and rolling him over so she could straddle him. “I was supposed to be unwrapping you like a present,” she reminded him.
“Didn’t you?”
“Parts of you seem to be very covered still.” She grinned suddenly. “And they’re the best parts.” Still grinning, she drew her nose playfully down his chest, dipped her tongue into his navel, and then sat up to shift and carefully untie his trainers and pull them off, followed by his socks. She looked back at him.
He’d propped himself up on his elbows and was watching her. “Are you quite done?”
“Yes,” she responded, primly. “Lift your hips so I can get these off of you.” She indicated his trousers and pants, and he obeyed, wriggling so she could work them down him. Then she paused. “This is probably the point when my mum is going to walk in.”
“D’you think you could avoid putting a damper on things?”
“And then she’d be disappointed that you don’t have two penises.”
He frowned. “Why would I have two penises?”
“You have two hearts.”
“Huh. I never thought about that before.” He looked down briefly at his one penis. “Were you disappointed that I didn’t have two?”
“What the hell would I have done with two? It would have been double the work for me.”
He looked indignant. “Work?” he said.
“Oh, it’s a very hard job,” she told him, with mock seriousness. “But somebody’s got to do it.”
“How’d you like to get around to that then, before your mother does walk in on us?”
That taunting tongue poked out of the side of her mouth. “Only,” she murmured, “if you stay very, very quiet.” She leaned down, drawing him into her mouth, and his world narrowed into the pinpoint that was Rose, and her clever mouth. Her tongue, he thought, in particular, was very, very, very clever, when it did…just…that…
His hips bucked helplessly, and he hissed a swear, swallowing the sharp edge of the pleasure that was looming. “Rose,” he groaned, and her mouth disappeared suddenly, entirely, which was both good and bad, because it left him hovering frustratingly on the edge of a climax he could taste.
He fell back, panting, his hands clenched into fists and his eyes squeezed shut as his tried to tip his world back into equilibrium.
“Quiet,” she mumbled. He felt her lips brush his earlobe. “We have to be so-” Her lips brushed over his. “So-”Her tongue slid against his, tasting of him. He whimpered, closing his hands into her hair, holding into her place. “So quiet oh God,” she gasped, as she sank onto the length of him.
He shifted his hands to her hips, holding her in place, as he thrust sharply into her. Rose sobbed with pleasure.
“Oh, please,” she begged, swiveling her hips against him in a way guaranteed to make him lose his mind.
“Bloody-” he began to bite out.
“Quiet,” she panted at him.
“You’re not being quiet,” he pointed out, and groaned as she shifted their angle.
“I am,” she denied, moving against him in the most fantastic rhythm. “I’m being so, so, so quiet please-keep-a little-yes-yes-”
He moved his hands, finding a breast, plucking at a nipple, and Rose’s breath caught on another yes and he thrust into her a little more sharply, finding himself deeper inside of her. He suddenly wanted her to climax around him, to pull him into it after her. He needed her desperately to come first, to exclaim for him, to unravel with pleasure and tell him she loved him and-and-
He became aware suddenly that he was talking, Rose said he talked constantly during sex, and the words pouring out of him, as he met her desperate rhythm, were, “Tell me you love me, tell me.”
“I love you,” she told him. “I’ve loved for you so long. So much, for so long, and, Doctor, oh God, please, just like that, just like, oh, quiet, we should be quiet.”
“Why?” he bit out.
“I don’t know, I don’t remember, I just, I-”
“Tell me-”
“I love you,” she managed, and then he felt her climax rip through her, and he found himself tumbling over the edge with her, dimly and dazedly, and when he came back to himself she was collapsed against him in exhaustion, panting, and he was murmuring, “Love you love you love you love you.”
He kissed sweat off her shoulder. “I love you,” he said, and then became aware that she was crying against his chest. He struggled to sit up in alarm, cradling her. “Rose,” he said, bewildered. “What…?”
“I missed you,” she sobbed. “I missed you so much. There were all those days without you, but then there was Christmas without you, and I wanted you so much. I wanted you so much, and you weren’t there, you didn’t come, and oh, God, I missed you so much.”
There had been, he realized, suddenly, so many times that she had comforted him, so many times that she had realized how traumatic it had been for him and had focused on getting him through it. It was how this had all begun under the Christmas tree, he knew, her trying to distract him from how terrifying the prospect of a Christmas without her had been. How many times had he acknowledged how much it must have damaged her? The great luxury of life with Rose was that she didn’t expect him to be as strong as he thought he should be, and somehow he’d fallen into that and stopped being as strong as she might need him to be.
He held her to him tighter and whispered in her ear. “I’m here. I’m right here. And I’ll never leave you again. Do you hear me, Rose? I will never…For as long as you…I will never leave you again. You will always have me. Always. Always.”
Rose eventually calmed against him, soothed by his voice in her ear and the feel of him around her, clasping her to him. She lifted her head, to look up at him, and they gazed at each other for a very long moment, until she decided against saying any of the myriad other things she thought they needed to say to each other. They had so much time for that, she thought. So instead she wiped at her tears and smiled at him. “Merry Christmas, yeah?” she said to him.
And he grinned. “Yes. Merry Christmas.”
“Let’s get dressed and get the kids now.”
“Won’t your mother be upset at being woken this early?”
“Oh, I’m sure my mother’s already awake,” Rose grinned at him. “You weren’t very quiet.”
“And you were quiet as a mouse?” he drawled.
“A very happy little mouse,” she said, and kissed him briefly before going in search of their clothing. They gave up on locating his tie, and it was Brem who eventually found it, draped over a branch and covered in tinsel, and when he asked how it got there, his grandmother told him that he asked too many questions.