who fic: "A Stitch in Time" (Rose/Nine, R, part 1/2)
title: A Stitch in Time
author: fannishliss
pairing: Nine/Rose
warnings: none
rating: R
Spoilers: pre-s1 through Boom Town.
length: 11,000 words
A/N: A Rose/Nine Epic for the lovely emraldeyedauter on the occasion of her Birthday: her request had to do with CE as a bad boy, and also Bonnie Tyler's song "Holding Out for a Hero" - so in my head that translated into all the dark heroes I loved as a teenager in the 80s - soundtrack at the end. Happy Birthday Em -- hope you like it!
=========
The Time Lord who told people to call him the Doctor huddled, folded small into a secret corner, shivering, rocking.
Breath after shuddering breath howled implacably into his lungs, and he howled them out again. Agony, madness, horror - why couldn't he just let go? why couldn't he fade quietly away? why couldn't the hearts stop beating, the breath cease at last?
"Doctor," came a voice, intruding into his agony.
"Go away!" he shrieked, scrabbling deeper into his corner.
"Doctor," it said again, calm, patient.
"Leave me be!" he wailed.
"I can't leave you," it said. "I am you, or, I will be. You're going to get through this. It's going to be okay," the voice soothed.
"Liar! Liar liar liar!" he shrieked through his sobs. Nothing would ever, ever be okay ever again.
"Doctor, I know it hurts, but you have to trust me, it's going to be okay," the voice said.
"It can't! It can't ever get better! How can it?" he howled. His arms ached, so tightly was he holding himself in, fingers clawing into his own sides.
"There's someone dreaming of you, Doctor," the voice gently teased. He could almost see wide eyes, a boyish smile.
"What?" he said, momentarily taken by surprise. Could it be true? Could someone be dreaming of him, someone left alive, spared from the carnage he'd made in this universal void?
"Dreaming of you, her true love," the voice whispered.
The Doctor's clenched and weary body relented, just a little, as the tiny seed of curiosity planted in his mind by the voice began to take root, reaching out tiny leaves, searching for a ray of hope. "What?" he said again.
"Rose," the voice breathed, reverently, in adoration. Rolling out of the name like the tides were compassion, love and hope, washing over him, a balm to his wounded soul.
"Rose," the Doctor echoed, and in that round and beautiful vocalized breath, that magnificent and perfect name, he began to open up to the possibility of his salvation.
===
It was illegal according to the eternal codices of a vanished planet, unorthodox at the very least, and if Rassilon had deigned to believe in heresy, probably heretical. But Rassilon was gone, the Time Lords were gone, all of Gallifrey was gone, and the Doctor's last chance at sanity would be gone too if he didn't at least try. The Time Lords had always said he was bad, so bad he would be.
With her name in his mind, swathed in the golden-rose glow of love and compassion the voice of his future self had somehow sent him, the Doctor tried to center himself enough to visualize his own time stream, to peer forward to the time when her life resonated alongside his. It was always chancy, always so much easier to trace the streams of simple linear beings, or even other Time Lords, the ones who stayed put in their nice hierarchical hive instead of jaunting around the universe getting themselves killed like mayflies while others of his generation were still playing at being rebellious teenagers. No, not any more, they weren't-all gone. But someone, someone remained, and the silky phrase "true love" rang in his head like a fairy story.
His time stream had always been a tangle, no clear beginning, no definite ending, divergences spinning out unexplained, but it was a cobweb now, battered and ragged, whole swathes of his life erased by the war and the Time Lock. It hurt to look at, even if it hadn't been folded and crumpled in on itself with paradox. He was so torn.
Still he looked, hoping against hope to see that glow, some hint of sunrise, life-giving warmth returning over an ocean's tumultuous gray roar.
And then, miraculous, he saw it, a simple flower blooming in the midst of the devastation his lives had become. What a glorious thing it was - the convergence of their two lives - radiating with miracle and wonder. He'd never dreamed such a thing were possible, not for him, loner, outcast - but there it was.
The sweetness of it, the innocence, the rightness of it took his breath away. His sorrow and horror threatened to pull him down again, as he thought of how his touch would sully that blossom, his desperate grip fastening around her wrists like manacles, his crimes blackening the creamy blank page her short life would have been. But how could he help himself? Love called to him. The miracle of his own living thoughts, hopeful despite all the evidence around him, all the things he'd had to do, and the voice had said love, "true love," Rose. He had to look. And there she was.
====
She was just a girl, a silly young girl, painting over the freshness of her youth with false colors, blackening the warmth of her brown eyes with the soot of assumed ennui, twisting her body to the thump of cheap music, artificially high from something she'd trustingly accepted, dancing in the arms of a pretty boy with a lump of coal for a heart, dead steel behind glittering eyes.
He'd found her in a dream, a dream of a memory, and around her dreaming mind he sensed the silken cocoon his Tardis spun around those she loved. This was a future, a girl's dreaming mind, and she trusted him, or she wouldn't have been wound up inside his Tardis, and he was the bad boy, rulebreaker, invading her inmost privacy. But he couldn't help himself. The warmth of her spirit was too much for him to resist, pulling him in, thawing the ice of his isolation, and it hurt like a thousand knives, as he started to come back to life.
"Rose, Rose, come home with me," the boy entreated, one thing on his mind. The Doctor hated him on sight.
"Ah, Jimmy Stone, you're full of yourself," she drawled.
He is! the Doctor shouted, full of his own shit, he wanted to scream, but she couldn't hear him through the haze of bass and chemicals.
"Come on, baby, it'll be fun," he cajoled, and the Doctor wanted to rip his hands off her. How dare he touch her! How dare he carelessly lay hands on something so very precious! He already loved her, his mind gratefully clinging to her dream. She was perfect - or she would be.
"Kiss me, and if I like it, I'll think about it," Rose shouted over the tumult, and the Doctor wanted to die. One taste of those perfect lips, just one, and he could die content.
The boy leaned in and took Rose's mouth, pulling her against him, grinding, licking into her. Once he had her breathless, he let her go. She stared up at him, entranced by the smooth, handsome features, the thick wave of his black hair, the sparkle of his eyes, her own moisture glistening on his bruised red lips.
"Okay, yeah," she breathed. "Let's go!"
"No!" the Doctor screamed. It was just another teenage girl's poor decision, but to him it was a catastrophe, how carelessly she trusted this handsome young brute to do right by her, to honor and protect her. He was already planning on using her up and throwing her away, and Rose didn't have a clue. But of course, it was a memory as well as a dream - so they all knew what was coming next. Still, it played out.
She stumbled, frowned, like she'd heard the Doctor's scream in her head - but she hadn't. She stumbled on, and the bad boy hauled her back to his place, into his bed, and through the next six months of her unravelling life. One minute the boy would be all smiles and they'd laugh and it was brilliant, drinking and dancing and getting high sometimes and sex, yeah.
But the instant she didn't go along, the cloud would descend, and he'd begin to wheedle and argue and threaten, always wily, never threatening her with his fists, only with his words, his wheedling favor. He was a clever one, that Jimmy Stone, till her credit ran out, and she came home to find a new girl naked in their bed.
There was a voice in her head yelling, see, see, see what he's done, what he is, how little he thinks of you, and she thought the rage was her own anger, she thought the scorn was her own scorn for herself, but it was the Doctor, feeling it on her behalf, her own other half she hadn't yet met.
She packed her things in a couple of bags and moved back home to her little pink room, eight hundred pounds in debt and her mum's sad eyes accusing, the voice in her head saying, Rose, you'll do better, someday it'll be better. Someday you will be loved. And somehow, she knew to believe.
The Doctor left one dream, only to dive into another. Once he'd found her dreaming mind, he rested there again and again. Sometimes she was only a child. Sometimes, she was nested safe within his Tardis. Always, she was perfect, and already, he loved her so.
In dreams, Jimmy Stone was a lout. His beauty was slackening, sallow. He'd had one too many of something, but Rose was wide awake. Clubs were too loud, too smoky, too dark or dazzling by turns, but the club in the dream was magic, and out of the midnight magic came a tall man in a black coat, loping like a lion. His beauty was not like Jimmy's, he was no facile surface, this was a man whose eyes said everything, whose mouth was pure sensuality, whose bone structure was elegance, brilliance. He was shorn, a fighting man, streetwise, strong and larger than life, and at a glance from him Jimmy crumbled and then he was reaching out to Rose, and the beat was pounding, and he was saying, you're everything, everything to me, my Rose, and he swept her off her feet; his touch was silken pleasure all over, inside and out, and he brought her shuddering awake-
-and he was still rocking in his corner, grasping at this tenuous link, a dream of a girl he'd someday meet.
In and out of her dreams he dipped, learning her, tasting her, devouring her - feeding on the sustenance he needed to survive the hell of his people's destruction. Without Rose, he would've died there in the corner, died again and again until nothing was left to regenerate. But in dreams, Rose lifted him up. These glimpses of a beautiful, laughing young girl, illicit though they were, tempted him back to life. Someday, the voice had promised, she would love him. Somewhere, somewhen, there was Rose.
Trembling, he unfolded. On legs kitten weak, he stood, propping himself against the wall. He was filthy, hair matted in tangles around his eyes, emaciated, throat swollen shut with thirst. Somehow, he made it to the pool, and fell in, sipping, floating, shredding off the rags, letting them drift away, till face up, he opened his eyes, and he looked around, and he was alive. Alive.
====
His Tardis had regrown herself while he was dreaming. Her walls were coral now, struts in the console room reaching up toward a ceiling that had once been like a chapel. Roaming her corridors, he found doorways here and there of twisted pale wood, and he knew she was trying to comfort him, in her way, for the loss of their home. Cut off from the Eye of Harmony, he had not even been sure they would survive, but the vortex sang in her heart as strongly as ever, pulling on his consciousness with twinges of possibility from behind her shields. He wished, not for the first time, that the Time Lords had allowed their Tardises the ability to speak, these amazing cybernetic organisms who translated every language in the universe into their Time Lords' minds except their own mathematical flights of fancy. That precious gift was denied them, for they were slaves, forever denied direct speech with their bonded masters.
He'd grown to trust his wily machine; her grace had delivered him into the heart of darkness and out of it again more times than he could count. She took him to the quirky little planet where he'd been so many times, and that was no surprise, for Rose was human, and she had to feel how he longed for the girl whose dreams he'd spied upon. The Tardis took him on strange little excursions, detours into history: the sinking of a ship, the explosion of an island, the killing of a leader. He wondered what she was thinking, tying him to these fixed points in time, but he dutifully observed, and then came a day when it wasn't a fixed point - at last she'd taken him once again to an opportunity to intervene.
With legs grown strong again at last, fit and fleshed out, a new sonic in his pocket and brains keen, he went up against the Nestene Consciousness and met a girl named Rose in the nick of time.
Can a Time Lord be taken by surprise? Is there anything new under the suns for a man who'd used up eight lives, lived out a millennium, fought his enemies and his own people right out of existence?
He thought there was something new in the feel of his hand around hers. In all his lives, when had a simple touch meant so much? When had he ached so badly to get that hand back into his own? Why couldn't he even stop talking? Why couldn't he just walk away? How dare he step into this innocent girl's life with the trouble he knew would follow wherever he went like a cursed black dog?
He dared to take her hand in his again - he told himself it was for the last time. He tried to put the turmoil of his existence into words: the vastness of the universe, the breakneck speed, the dizzying whirl - the enormity of the task assigned to his Time Lord brain: somehow, against hope, to sort it out, to find the pattern of it all and pull the thread that put things to right - when the only thing he really felt steadying him was that warm, soft, human hand - the hand of a well-meaning, bright and curious girl. He had to drop the hand and walk away now. Drop it- drop her- and with a wrench, he'd done it.
Somehow, he'd managed it: he was walking away, but it was like he had eyes on the back of his head, watching her, watching her as they parted, watching her whirl as the Tardis dematerialized and he knew he'd be back. It was no accident, that trip to her flat, that chance meeting with her mum, the glimpse into her average, domestic life. He might claim he didn't do that sort of thing, but oh, how he ached for it: tea, telly, a sofa, laughing eyes looking into his over a basket of chips, all the precious things he'd never had. She had invited him in, but he wouldn't have waited. He'd have broken in just to stand outside her bedroom, cool his forehead on the door in case she might be just on the other side.
In dreams, he'd never waited - he'd simply slipped through.
He'd left her, but he couldn't stop thinking about her. Had she gone home and shrugged it all off? Had she sat up, pondering plastic arms and aliens late into the night? He wondered if she was asleep right now, as he sat staring into the artificial brightness of the Tardis at 3 am, a chessplayer in a game without a timekeeper, waiting for the Consciousness to make another move. His willpower failed him. If he reached out, if he found her in a dream, wouldn't that mean it was meant to be?
He reached out, and there she was. Rose! Just on the other side of the city from where he sat: they were practically breathing the same air, and every part of him called out for her.
He was in her dream again, in the now, immediate. So close!
He couldn't believe she was dreaming of a club again. Then when he caught sight of her across the room, he felt his hearts speed up and he had an inkling what these unfamiliar rituals of courtship must involve. He remembered, untold years and lives ago, stretched out long across the console room floor, losing at chess against a robot dog, in hopes a beautiful and brave young Gallifreyan woman might see him, and what? Take note of him. Admire him. Approve. They'd become great friends. Now she was gone, gone with the rest.
Nigh-immortality wasn't what it was cracked up to be. And now this girl, Rose Tyler, just barely nineteen years old-- he was in her dream, and she was dreaming of clubbing, so that was how it would be.
"Oi," said a flat and washed out copy of Jimmy Stone. "That's my girl you're looking at."
The Doctor felt his blood heat and thought he might enjoy this imaginary clubbing in more ways than one.
"No, she isn't your girl," said the Doctor coolly. "That's Rose Tyler, she's one of the most remarkable women on this planet, and you're not worth the carpet you soiled last night."
"What?" the boy said stupidly.
"Rose Tyler!" roared the Doctor, spreading his arms wide, and now he had taken her dream center stage. "Rose Tyler is brave and brilliant and worth a thousand of you! eh?" He knew it was all true, even though he'd hardly met her - in her dreams he'd known the truth of her.
The Doctor widened his eyes dramatically, leaning back, every inch of him daring the boy to take a swing. It was only a dream, and Jimmy was only a faded memory, but he obligingly took a clumsy swing, which the Doctor gracefully dodged. He grabbed the boy by the shoulders and looked him right in the eye.
"You should never have touched her, never even should've looked at her," the Doctor seethed through clenched teeth, and then like lightning, he struck, his forehead slamming into Jimmy's face, and the boy went down.
"Who asked you!" Rose shouted.
The Doctor whirled, confused.
"What?"
"Who asked you, I said!" Rose repeated. "He's just a stupid kid and you a grown man! You should be ashamed!"
The Doctor blanched, his triumph quickly fading back, his blood chilling to ice. Rose was glowering at him, disappointed.
"I... I ..." he stammered. "He hurt you," he said quietly.
"Got over it, didn't I," Rose stated, proud and strong.
The Doctor stood agape. "Yeah. Yeah, course you did."
"Why are you looking for boys to fight anyway? I know, you're hard and all, but aren't you meant to be a hero? You've got bigger fish to fry, yeah?" Rose stared at him. He was impressed by the intensity of her stare through the mists of the dream.
"This is not how I thought this dream would go," the Doctor muttered.
"What?" Rose said.
"Don't you want to dance?" the Doctor asked, at a loss.
"This place is dead," Rose said. "I want chips."
With that, the Doctor woke up and burst out laughing.
He soon caught up with her again, in the pizza shop with the fake plastic Mickey, and maybe he enjoyed it a little too much when he took its head off, but she kept bringing him around. She was right to call him out. Why didn't he care if Mickey was alive or dead? It was painful to care. They were so fragile, their lives so short. Rose made him care. She was shaking him back to life, the pins and needles in the dead leg he'd need if he wanted to walk, to run - and before he knew it, her hand was in his again, and they were running, and she was saving him and the Consciousness was defeated. Time to say goodbye - or?
"Right then - I'll be off! Unless, uh, I dunno, you could come with me?"
"Is it always this dangerous?" she said.
"Yeah," he said immediately. He owed her that at least.
The yearning in her eyes matched his. Say yes, he pleaded with her. Mickey was ranting about how he was alien, grabbing her around the legs.
With a pang, he saw her give in to the voice of reason, reminding her of responsibilities, her mum and Mickey.
"Okay," he said. "See you around?" The despair seemed to swell inside him like a geyser, boiling, bursting, drowning him. She was still standing there, but there was already a haze of tears veiling her from his sight. He wondered if she could see them from so far away.
As the Tardis reluctantly dematerialized from the alley behind the estate, the Doctor felt his empty life stretching out ahead of him. Without the Time Lords keeping track of him, he would be at loose ends for the rest of his unnaturally long existence. He doubted that he'd even come to a natural end after his thirteenth regeneration- his Tardis had rebuilt herself and continued to function without any contact with Gallifrey, and he guessed that he would too, regenerating endlessly without any reason to live. Without a touchstone, he saw no point to his continued existence. Rose was that touchstone. He needed her.
Flying from her was lunacy. Worse than eccentricity or a fit of pique, it was madness. He had to have her. Whatever he needed to say, he'd say it.
His hands flew over the controls, quickly reversing, rematerializing. He opened the door and no time had passed; his old girl had brought him back to the very moment. His gaze drank in Rose's glad surprise and he knew he'd made the right decision.
"It also travels in time!" he said, and beamed at her as she ran to him, everything right about her snapping back into place around him as he stood back, Tardis door open, and let her run to him.
====
The Doctor had traveled with many different companions over the years. He remembered his grand-daughter Susan, and her teachers Barbara and Ian - his very first companions on the Tardis. He remembered how difficult it had been understanding the human way of looking at things - something that had come naturally for Susan, who ending up marrying a human herself. He'd tried to go and visit her, after he'd gotten back on his feet, but the Tardis couldn't get to her. The Time Lock, it seemed, had sealed her away from him, if she even still existed at all.
Honestly, most of his companions had been beautiful young women. The Doctor liked women: their openness, their friendliness, their cooperative attitudes. By and large, men were set up to compete, and the Doctor didn't like competition; he knew his own brilliance, but he didn't like the feelings that rose up in him when he was forced to prove himself. He liked saving the day, and he liked the smile on the face of a beautiful woman when he saved her, the planet, or the universe.
Meeting Jabe at the End of the World was just one of those things. He was charming and graceful, and she returned his interest. It was natural for the two of them to get along, worldly beings that they were. The Doctor had never involved himself too deeply with the women who traveled with him; he loved them of course, but as friends, or even as daughters. He preferred to dally with strangers, pleasantries and momentary closeness exchanged in mutually beneficial circumstances - no overly complicated emotional entanglement, just civilized interaction.
Jabe had known him for a Time Lord - almost a mythical being to her- and she had sympathized the destruction of Gallifrey. She had no way of knowing that she was the first being ever to speak to him of the war and the destruction of his people, bringing tears to his eyes that he couldn't control. And then she had burned too, and he had barely saved Rose, and everything inside him had turned once again to ice and fire.
Rose had been so brave, running into the Tardis without a second thought, and he'd shown her her world being destroyed in a conflagration of fire. What a demon he was! How could he lure a young girl into traveling with him, and then convince her she'd put her trust in the hands of a madman?
"Where are you from?" she asked, innocently enough. She'd couldn't know how the question burned in the hollowed-out spaces of his mind.
"All over the place," he returned. The name of his homeworld rang in his head like chimes. He couldn't speak it out loud, through the ashes that clogged his throat.
"They all speak English," she noted.
He could deal with that at least- in fact, it was something he was quite proud of. "No, you just hear English. It's the gift of the Tardis- telepathic field, gets inside your brain, translates." He leaned back, opening himself up to her.
Her eyes turned challenging. "It's inside my brain?"
"Well, in a good way," he said, the swell of shame rising again. She didn't realize he'd been inside her head himself - that a desperate alien had latched onto her subconscious world as a lifeline and in fact, still clung there.
"Your machine gets inside my head. It gets inside and it changes my mind and you didn't even ask," she accused.
"I didn't think about it like that," he responded feebly. He tried not to think how many times he'd ridden into the romantic dreams of a young girl, in the guise of any white knight on fiery steed, to gallop her away in good symbolic fashion from a mountaintop or a cliffside overlooking stormy seas.
"Tell me who you are!" she was shouting.
"This is who I am, right here, right now. All right?" he raged. He could feel emotion seizing control of his countenance, his faculties- he wasn't like this, he'd never been like this before. "All that counts is here and now and this is me!"
She wasn't having it. "Yeah, and I'm here too cause you brought me here, so just tell me!"
He'd thrown himself across the room to get away from her then. He couldn't bear for her to see the rage and desperation contorting his face into a demon's.
Nice move, Time Lord, he thought to himself- persuade a young girl to go traveling with you, and next, demonstrate to her that you're unhinged.
Rose had turned it all around with her smile. She wanted to know him - really wanted to know - and she wasn't frightened when she caught a glimpse of the truth. She was something new to him, something different. He wanted her to feel with him what he felt, even though it was terrible sometimes. He'd never wanted that before. As young as she was, somehow she understood him.
He sought an hour's sleep that night, weary from the adventure at the End of the World. Before he woke, he heard the voice again.
"She loves you already," it said. "She doesn't know why. And you love her too. Tell her, tell her as soon as you possibly can."
The Doctor opened his eyes and wondered what it would feel like to make that claim, to profess to love, after a lifetime of running away had culminated in desolation.
====
The Doctor wanted to make amends for taking Rose into the heartless future - so he took her into the past. How badly could that turn out?
She'd knocked him back with her shy beauty in Victorian fancy dress, and yet he couldn't give her a decent compliment without undercutting it with a smirk. Still, he'd made her smile despite his awkwardness.
Finally the moment came when it was almost too late. Surrounded by the horrible zombie-like Gelth, he had finally been able to reach out to her. Or rather, once again, she'd reached out to him.
"We'll go down fighting, yeah?" she said.
"Yeah," he answered, amazed at her bravery in this impossible situation.
"Together?" she asked.
"Yeah," he answered, and their hands entwined. As ever, the most amazing feeling of completeness washed over him at her touch. He could almost hear the words from the future - somehow, broken as he was, he was Rose's "true love." He couldn't really understand how a Time Lord could be so blessed, especially someone like him who'd done such terrible things. But here they were, hands entwined. Could she feel, as he did, the way their lives rang pure whenever they touched? the way their time streams harmonized so effortlessly, as though meeting in a broad valley to flow out into eternity?
"I'm so glad I met you," he said, his heart in his throat.
Then it was time again for running, and soon they were back in London.
The Tardis skipped them forward in Rose's timeline by one whole year. Materializing before Jackie's disbelieving eyes was all part of the Tardis's cunning scheme. He would have avoided Rose's mum and lied to her at every opportunity if he'd had the chance. Now he'd felt first hand Jackie's rage at being kept in the dark about her daughter.
He tried again to let Rose know just how much she meant to him. Trapped in the safe room of number ten Downing Street, surrounded by aliens, he'd opened up to her about his quandary: "I could save the world but lose you."
He'd been in awe of her bravery when she responded with complete trust in him to do the right thing - a faith he'd lost in himself during the horrors of the Time War, a faith he still wasn't certain wasn't misplaced.
He promised himself that if they got out of there alive he'd tell her what he really felt, but events always seemed to move so quickly. Before he had a chance to collect himself, he was face to face with the last, terrible, pitiful Dalek.
Facing down the chained creature threw the Doctor's already troubled emotions into turmoil. The Time War churned painfully in his all too recent memory, and though he was mostly able to keep his thoughts away from the horrors of those days, he had no idea how long he'd curled into a corner of his Tardis, nearly comatose from guilt and grief, his mind seared and raw where his telepathic link with other Gallifreyans had been ripped away. His bloody rage and determined efforts to kill the creature startled him - he would have electrocuted it without hesitation if the soldiers hadn't pulled him off the switch. Then Rose, with her pity and her compassion, had saved the Dalek, transforming it into something new. The Doctor was continually horrified at the Dalek's ability to kill hundreds of people so effortlessly, without qualm- just as he was horrified at the killer inside himself, so willing and ready to send the Dalek screaming into oblivion.
Only Rose could've stopped him from murdering the confused creature as it brought its own life to an end. The Tardis stood waiting for them.
"A little piece of home," he said, quietly. "Better than nothing."
"Is that the end of it, the Time War?" Rose asked gently.
"I'm the only one left. I win! How about that," the Doctor said.
"The Dalek survived. Maybe some of your people did too," she tried to comfort him.
"I'd know - in here. Feels like there's no one." He was amazed at how it finally fell from his lips- the gaping loss of his people had subsided to a dull ache with Rose around.
"Well then, good thing I'm not going anywhere," Rose promised.
"Yeah," he said. But was it as good a thing for her as it was for him?
====
Adam came along for the ride to Satellite Five. Dropping him off at home with a door in his forehead satisfied the Doctor more than he could say.
Traveling with Rose, meeting Daleks, seeing the march of history thrown out of joint by something as simple as one greedy Jagrafess- it made the Doctor uneasy. He began to wonder how different things were, now that the Time Lords were no longer there to monitor the integrity of time. Put it simply - the Doctor began to wonder if he now had the freedom he'd never had before to change things.
He took Rose to see her father. He hadn't known what she'd ask for, but when she asked to comfort her dad at his death, he reckoned that would be as good a test as any.
He stood with her on the edge of the street as her dad was struck down, but she was too paralyzed by the shock of it to run to him. He shouldn't have taken her around for a second chance - he knew very well that he was playing with paradox. It was his own stupidity, his own hubris to blame for Rose's mistake, but he'd angrily taken his guilt out on her.
"My entire planet died, my whole family - do you think it never occurred to me to go back and save them?" he'd said bitterly. He didn't even know who he was referring to - no one in the House of Lungbarrow had deigned to speak his given name for hundreds of years. But he knew very well he would have taken almost any risk to get back to Gallifrey, just to experience and savor for one last moment the maddening itch of Gallifreyan minds bickering in the background of his thoughts - filling up one last time the hall of phantoms that echoed emptily in the back of his mind.
He'd never thought of himself as cruel, but this trip to see her dad was the cruellest cut of all - and he'd made her out to be stupid because of her very best qualities - her compassion, her bravery, her selflessness, her quickness to act. He was the lout, the brute. And still, he made her apologize. She leaned into his arms for forgiveness, but it was her forgiveness he sought.
====
In a way it was a relief to see Rose with Jack Harkness, or whatever the ex-Time Agent wanted to call himself. He was staggeringly handsome, undeniably sexual, and Rose's pupils dilated whenever he looked into her eyes. The Doctor wanted to feel that it was a relief. He'd had companions go off together before, hadn't he? What luck, for them, to meet another person who'd gone on adventures with the Doctor- another human being to reminisce with after he'd left them behind. But just as he'd bristled at Mickey, Rose's rightful boyfriend, and Adam, a stray bother, he found himself bristling at Jack, a fifty-first century human, who, if nothing else, was slightly psychic and could read body language like a book.
The Doctor would've sworn Jack was doing it on purpose, testing him somehow, measuring him. Jack was flirting with Rose in good faith - he'd take her just as far as she was ready to go - but he was watching the Doctor out of the corner of his eye all the while, and flirting with the Doctor too, if he wasn't mistaken. It made the Doctor edgy. He wanted to put himself between Jack and Rose, he wanted to bare his teeth and watch Jack back down. The very least he could do was argue to Rose that he knew how to dance, that he wanted to cut in, that it wasn't Jack she wanted to dance with. Had he waited too long after all?
go on to part two!
author: fannishliss
pairing: Nine/Rose
warnings: none
rating: R
Spoilers: pre-s1 through Boom Town.
length: 11,000 words
A/N: A Rose/Nine Epic for the lovely emraldeyedauter on the occasion of her Birthday: her request had to do with CE as a bad boy, and also Bonnie Tyler's song "Holding Out for a Hero" - so in my head that translated into all the dark heroes I loved as a teenager in the 80s - soundtrack at the end. Happy Birthday Em -- hope you like it!
=========
The Time Lord who told people to call him the Doctor huddled, folded small into a secret corner, shivering, rocking.
Breath after shuddering breath howled implacably into his lungs, and he howled them out again. Agony, madness, horror - why couldn't he just let go? why couldn't he fade quietly away? why couldn't the hearts stop beating, the breath cease at last?
"Doctor," came a voice, intruding into his agony.
"Go away!" he shrieked, scrabbling deeper into his corner.
"Doctor," it said again, calm, patient.
"Leave me be!" he wailed.
"I can't leave you," it said. "I am you, or, I will be. You're going to get through this. It's going to be okay," the voice soothed.
"Liar! Liar liar liar!" he shrieked through his sobs. Nothing would ever, ever be okay ever again.
"Doctor, I know it hurts, but you have to trust me, it's going to be okay," the voice said.
"It can't! It can't ever get better! How can it?" he howled. His arms ached, so tightly was he holding himself in, fingers clawing into his own sides.
"There's someone dreaming of you, Doctor," the voice gently teased. He could almost see wide eyes, a boyish smile.
"What?" he said, momentarily taken by surprise. Could it be true? Could someone be dreaming of him, someone left alive, spared from the carnage he'd made in this universal void?
"Dreaming of you, her true love," the voice whispered.
The Doctor's clenched and weary body relented, just a little, as the tiny seed of curiosity planted in his mind by the voice began to take root, reaching out tiny leaves, searching for a ray of hope. "What?" he said again.
"Rose," the voice breathed, reverently, in adoration. Rolling out of the name like the tides were compassion, love and hope, washing over him, a balm to his wounded soul.
"Rose," the Doctor echoed, and in that round and beautiful vocalized breath, that magnificent and perfect name, he began to open up to the possibility of his salvation.
===
It was illegal according to the eternal codices of a vanished planet, unorthodox at the very least, and if Rassilon had deigned to believe in heresy, probably heretical. But Rassilon was gone, the Time Lords were gone, all of Gallifrey was gone, and the Doctor's last chance at sanity would be gone too if he didn't at least try. The Time Lords had always said he was bad, so bad he would be.
With her name in his mind, swathed in the golden-rose glow of love and compassion the voice of his future self had somehow sent him, the Doctor tried to center himself enough to visualize his own time stream, to peer forward to the time when her life resonated alongside his. It was always chancy, always so much easier to trace the streams of simple linear beings, or even other Time Lords, the ones who stayed put in their nice hierarchical hive instead of jaunting around the universe getting themselves killed like mayflies while others of his generation were still playing at being rebellious teenagers. No, not any more, they weren't-all gone. But someone, someone remained, and the silky phrase "true love" rang in his head like a fairy story.
His time stream had always been a tangle, no clear beginning, no definite ending, divergences spinning out unexplained, but it was a cobweb now, battered and ragged, whole swathes of his life erased by the war and the Time Lock. It hurt to look at, even if it hadn't been folded and crumpled in on itself with paradox. He was so torn.
Still he looked, hoping against hope to see that glow, some hint of sunrise, life-giving warmth returning over an ocean's tumultuous gray roar.
And then, miraculous, he saw it, a simple flower blooming in the midst of the devastation his lives had become. What a glorious thing it was - the convergence of their two lives - radiating with miracle and wonder. He'd never dreamed such a thing were possible, not for him, loner, outcast - but there it was.
The sweetness of it, the innocence, the rightness of it took his breath away. His sorrow and horror threatened to pull him down again, as he thought of how his touch would sully that blossom, his desperate grip fastening around her wrists like manacles, his crimes blackening the creamy blank page her short life would have been. But how could he help himself? Love called to him. The miracle of his own living thoughts, hopeful despite all the evidence around him, all the things he'd had to do, and the voice had said love, "true love," Rose. He had to look. And there she was.
====
She was just a girl, a silly young girl, painting over the freshness of her youth with false colors, blackening the warmth of her brown eyes with the soot of assumed ennui, twisting her body to the thump of cheap music, artificially high from something she'd trustingly accepted, dancing in the arms of a pretty boy with a lump of coal for a heart, dead steel behind glittering eyes.
He'd found her in a dream, a dream of a memory, and around her dreaming mind he sensed the silken cocoon his Tardis spun around those she loved. This was a future, a girl's dreaming mind, and she trusted him, or she wouldn't have been wound up inside his Tardis, and he was the bad boy, rulebreaker, invading her inmost privacy. But he couldn't help himself. The warmth of her spirit was too much for him to resist, pulling him in, thawing the ice of his isolation, and it hurt like a thousand knives, as he started to come back to life.
"Rose, Rose, come home with me," the boy entreated, one thing on his mind. The Doctor hated him on sight.
"Ah, Jimmy Stone, you're full of yourself," she drawled.
He is! the Doctor shouted, full of his own shit, he wanted to scream, but she couldn't hear him through the haze of bass and chemicals.
"Come on, baby, it'll be fun," he cajoled, and the Doctor wanted to rip his hands off her. How dare he touch her! How dare he carelessly lay hands on something so very precious! He already loved her, his mind gratefully clinging to her dream. She was perfect - or she would be.
"Kiss me, and if I like it, I'll think about it," Rose shouted over the tumult, and the Doctor wanted to die. One taste of those perfect lips, just one, and he could die content.
The boy leaned in and took Rose's mouth, pulling her against him, grinding, licking into her. Once he had her breathless, he let her go. She stared up at him, entranced by the smooth, handsome features, the thick wave of his black hair, the sparkle of his eyes, her own moisture glistening on his bruised red lips.
"Okay, yeah," she breathed. "Let's go!"
"No!" the Doctor screamed. It was just another teenage girl's poor decision, but to him it was a catastrophe, how carelessly she trusted this handsome young brute to do right by her, to honor and protect her. He was already planning on using her up and throwing her away, and Rose didn't have a clue. But of course, it was a memory as well as a dream - so they all knew what was coming next. Still, it played out.
She stumbled, frowned, like she'd heard the Doctor's scream in her head - but she hadn't. She stumbled on, and the bad boy hauled her back to his place, into his bed, and through the next six months of her unravelling life. One minute the boy would be all smiles and they'd laugh and it was brilliant, drinking and dancing and getting high sometimes and sex, yeah.
But the instant she didn't go along, the cloud would descend, and he'd begin to wheedle and argue and threaten, always wily, never threatening her with his fists, only with his words, his wheedling favor. He was a clever one, that Jimmy Stone, till her credit ran out, and she came home to find a new girl naked in their bed.
There was a voice in her head yelling, see, see, see what he's done, what he is, how little he thinks of you, and she thought the rage was her own anger, she thought the scorn was her own scorn for herself, but it was the Doctor, feeling it on her behalf, her own other half she hadn't yet met.
She packed her things in a couple of bags and moved back home to her little pink room, eight hundred pounds in debt and her mum's sad eyes accusing, the voice in her head saying, Rose, you'll do better, someday it'll be better. Someday you will be loved. And somehow, she knew to believe.
The Doctor left one dream, only to dive into another. Once he'd found her dreaming mind, he rested there again and again. Sometimes she was only a child. Sometimes, she was nested safe within his Tardis. Always, she was perfect, and already, he loved her so.
In dreams, Jimmy Stone was a lout. His beauty was slackening, sallow. He'd had one too many of something, but Rose was wide awake. Clubs were too loud, too smoky, too dark or dazzling by turns, but the club in the dream was magic, and out of the midnight magic came a tall man in a black coat, loping like a lion. His beauty was not like Jimmy's, he was no facile surface, this was a man whose eyes said everything, whose mouth was pure sensuality, whose bone structure was elegance, brilliance. He was shorn, a fighting man, streetwise, strong and larger than life, and at a glance from him Jimmy crumbled and then he was reaching out to Rose, and the beat was pounding, and he was saying, you're everything, everything to me, my Rose, and he swept her off her feet; his touch was silken pleasure all over, inside and out, and he brought her shuddering awake-
-and he was still rocking in his corner, grasping at this tenuous link, a dream of a girl he'd someday meet.
In and out of her dreams he dipped, learning her, tasting her, devouring her - feeding on the sustenance he needed to survive the hell of his people's destruction. Without Rose, he would've died there in the corner, died again and again until nothing was left to regenerate. But in dreams, Rose lifted him up. These glimpses of a beautiful, laughing young girl, illicit though they were, tempted him back to life. Someday, the voice had promised, she would love him. Somewhere, somewhen, there was Rose.
Trembling, he unfolded. On legs kitten weak, he stood, propping himself against the wall. He was filthy, hair matted in tangles around his eyes, emaciated, throat swollen shut with thirst. Somehow, he made it to the pool, and fell in, sipping, floating, shredding off the rags, letting them drift away, till face up, he opened his eyes, and he looked around, and he was alive. Alive.
====
His Tardis had regrown herself while he was dreaming. Her walls were coral now, struts in the console room reaching up toward a ceiling that had once been like a chapel. Roaming her corridors, he found doorways here and there of twisted pale wood, and he knew she was trying to comfort him, in her way, for the loss of their home. Cut off from the Eye of Harmony, he had not even been sure they would survive, but the vortex sang in her heart as strongly as ever, pulling on his consciousness with twinges of possibility from behind her shields. He wished, not for the first time, that the Time Lords had allowed their Tardises the ability to speak, these amazing cybernetic organisms who translated every language in the universe into their Time Lords' minds except their own mathematical flights of fancy. That precious gift was denied them, for they were slaves, forever denied direct speech with their bonded masters.
He'd grown to trust his wily machine; her grace had delivered him into the heart of darkness and out of it again more times than he could count. She took him to the quirky little planet where he'd been so many times, and that was no surprise, for Rose was human, and she had to feel how he longed for the girl whose dreams he'd spied upon. The Tardis took him on strange little excursions, detours into history: the sinking of a ship, the explosion of an island, the killing of a leader. He wondered what she was thinking, tying him to these fixed points in time, but he dutifully observed, and then came a day when it wasn't a fixed point - at last she'd taken him once again to an opportunity to intervene.
With legs grown strong again at last, fit and fleshed out, a new sonic in his pocket and brains keen, he went up against the Nestene Consciousness and met a girl named Rose in the nick of time.
Can a Time Lord be taken by surprise? Is there anything new under the suns for a man who'd used up eight lives, lived out a millennium, fought his enemies and his own people right out of existence?
He thought there was something new in the feel of his hand around hers. In all his lives, when had a simple touch meant so much? When had he ached so badly to get that hand back into his own? Why couldn't he even stop talking? Why couldn't he just walk away? How dare he step into this innocent girl's life with the trouble he knew would follow wherever he went like a cursed black dog?
He dared to take her hand in his again - he told himself it was for the last time. He tried to put the turmoil of his existence into words: the vastness of the universe, the breakneck speed, the dizzying whirl - the enormity of the task assigned to his Time Lord brain: somehow, against hope, to sort it out, to find the pattern of it all and pull the thread that put things to right - when the only thing he really felt steadying him was that warm, soft, human hand - the hand of a well-meaning, bright and curious girl. He had to drop the hand and walk away now. Drop it- drop her- and with a wrench, he'd done it.
Somehow, he'd managed it: he was walking away, but it was like he had eyes on the back of his head, watching her, watching her as they parted, watching her whirl as the Tardis dematerialized and he knew he'd be back. It was no accident, that trip to her flat, that chance meeting with her mum, the glimpse into her average, domestic life. He might claim he didn't do that sort of thing, but oh, how he ached for it: tea, telly, a sofa, laughing eyes looking into his over a basket of chips, all the precious things he'd never had. She had invited him in, but he wouldn't have waited. He'd have broken in just to stand outside her bedroom, cool his forehead on the door in case she might be just on the other side.
In dreams, he'd never waited - he'd simply slipped through.
He'd left her, but he couldn't stop thinking about her. Had she gone home and shrugged it all off? Had she sat up, pondering plastic arms and aliens late into the night? He wondered if she was asleep right now, as he sat staring into the artificial brightness of the Tardis at 3 am, a chessplayer in a game without a timekeeper, waiting for the Consciousness to make another move. His willpower failed him. If he reached out, if he found her in a dream, wouldn't that mean it was meant to be?
He reached out, and there she was. Rose! Just on the other side of the city from where he sat: they were practically breathing the same air, and every part of him called out for her.
He was in her dream again, in the now, immediate. So close!
He couldn't believe she was dreaming of a club again. Then when he caught sight of her across the room, he felt his hearts speed up and he had an inkling what these unfamiliar rituals of courtship must involve. He remembered, untold years and lives ago, stretched out long across the console room floor, losing at chess against a robot dog, in hopes a beautiful and brave young Gallifreyan woman might see him, and what? Take note of him. Admire him. Approve. They'd become great friends. Now she was gone, gone with the rest.
Nigh-immortality wasn't what it was cracked up to be. And now this girl, Rose Tyler, just barely nineteen years old-- he was in her dream, and she was dreaming of clubbing, so that was how it would be.
"Oi," said a flat and washed out copy of Jimmy Stone. "That's my girl you're looking at."
The Doctor felt his blood heat and thought he might enjoy this imaginary clubbing in more ways than one.
"No, she isn't your girl," said the Doctor coolly. "That's Rose Tyler, she's one of the most remarkable women on this planet, and you're not worth the carpet you soiled last night."
"What?" the boy said stupidly.
"Rose Tyler!" roared the Doctor, spreading his arms wide, and now he had taken her dream center stage. "Rose Tyler is brave and brilliant and worth a thousand of you! eh?" He knew it was all true, even though he'd hardly met her - in her dreams he'd known the truth of her.
The Doctor widened his eyes dramatically, leaning back, every inch of him daring the boy to take a swing. It was only a dream, and Jimmy was only a faded memory, but he obligingly took a clumsy swing, which the Doctor gracefully dodged. He grabbed the boy by the shoulders and looked him right in the eye.
"You should never have touched her, never even should've looked at her," the Doctor seethed through clenched teeth, and then like lightning, he struck, his forehead slamming into Jimmy's face, and the boy went down.
"Who asked you!" Rose shouted.
The Doctor whirled, confused.
"What?"
"Who asked you, I said!" Rose repeated. "He's just a stupid kid and you a grown man! You should be ashamed!"
The Doctor blanched, his triumph quickly fading back, his blood chilling to ice. Rose was glowering at him, disappointed.
"I... I ..." he stammered. "He hurt you," he said quietly.
"Got over it, didn't I," Rose stated, proud and strong.
The Doctor stood agape. "Yeah. Yeah, course you did."
"Why are you looking for boys to fight anyway? I know, you're hard and all, but aren't you meant to be a hero? You've got bigger fish to fry, yeah?" Rose stared at him. He was impressed by the intensity of her stare through the mists of the dream.
"This is not how I thought this dream would go," the Doctor muttered.
"What?" Rose said.
"Don't you want to dance?" the Doctor asked, at a loss.
"This place is dead," Rose said. "I want chips."
With that, the Doctor woke up and burst out laughing.
He soon caught up with her again, in the pizza shop with the fake plastic Mickey, and maybe he enjoyed it a little too much when he took its head off, but she kept bringing him around. She was right to call him out. Why didn't he care if Mickey was alive or dead? It was painful to care. They were so fragile, their lives so short. Rose made him care. She was shaking him back to life, the pins and needles in the dead leg he'd need if he wanted to walk, to run - and before he knew it, her hand was in his again, and they were running, and she was saving him and the Consciousness was defeated. Time to say goodbye - or?
"Right then - I'll be off! Unless, uh, I dunno, you could come with me?"
"Is it always this dangerous?" she said.
"Yeah," he said immediately. He owed her that at least.
The yearning in her eyes matched his. Say yes, he pleaded with her. Mickey was ranting about how he was alien, grabbing her around the legs.
With a pang, he saw her give in to the voice of reason, reminding her of responsibilities, her mum and Mickey.
"Okay," he said. "See you around?" The despair seemed to swell inside him like a geyser, boiling, bursting, drowning him. She was still standing there, but there was already a haze of tears veiling her from his sight. He wondered if she could see them from so far away.
As the Tardis reluctantly dematerialized from the alley behind the estate, the Doctor felt his empty life stretching out ahead of him. Without the Time Lords keeping track of him, he would be at loose ends for the rest of his unnaturally long existence. He doubted that he'd even come to a natural end after his thirteenth regeneration- his Tardis had rebuilt herself and continued to function without any contact with Gallifrey, and he guessed that he would too, regenerating endlessly without any reason to live. Without a touchstone, he saw no point to his continued existence. Rose was that touchstone. He needed her.
Flying from her was lunacy. Worse than eccentricity or a fit of pique, it was madness. He had to have her. Whatever he needed to say, he'd say it.
His hands flew over the controls, quickly reversing, rematerializing. He opened the door and no time had passed; his old girl had brought him back to the very moment. His gaze drank in Rose's glad surprise and he knew he'd made the right decision.
"It also travels in time!" he said, and beamed at her as she ran to him, everything right about her snapping back into place around him as he stood back, Tardis door open, and let her run to him.
====
The Doctor had traveled with many different companions over the years. He remembered his grand-daughter Susan, and her teachers Barbara and Ian - his very first companions on the Tardis. He remembered how difficult it had been understanding the human way of looking at things - something that had come naturally for Susan, who ending up marrying a human herself. He'd tried to go and visit her, after he'd gotten back on his feet, but the Tardis couldn't get to her. The Time Lock, it seemed, had sealed her away from him, if she even still existed at all.
Honestly, most of his companions had been beautiful young women. The Doctor liked women: their openness, their friendliness, their cooperative attitudes. By and large, men were set up to compete, and the Doctor didn't like competition; he knew his own brilliance, but he didn't like the feelings that rose up in him when he was forced to prove himself. He liked saving the day, and he liked the smile on the face of a beautiful woman when he saved her, the planet, or the universe.
Meeting Jabe at the End of the World was just one of those things. He was charming and graceful, and she returned his interest. It was natural for the two of them to get along, worldly beings that they were. The Doctor had never involved himself too deeply with the women who traveled with him; he loved them of course, but as friends, or even as daughters. He preferred to dally with strangers, pleasantries and momentary closeness exchanged in mutually beneficial circumstances - no overly complicated emotional entanglement, just civilized interaction.
Jabe had known him for a Time Lord - almost a mythical being to her- and she had sympathized the destruction of Gallifrey. She had no way of knowing that she was the first being ever to speak to him of the war and the destruction of his people, bringing tears to his eyes that he couldn't control. And then she had burned too, and he had barely saved Rose, and everything inside him had turned once again to ice and fire.
Rose had been so brave, running into the Tardis without a second thought, and he'd shown her her world being destroyed in a conflagration of fire. What a demon he was! How could he lure a young girl into traveling with him, and then convince her she'd put her trust in the hands of a madman?
"Where are you from?" she asked, innocently enough. She'd couldn't know how the question burned in the hollowed-out spaces of his mind.
"All over the place," he returned. The name of his homeworld rang in his head like chimes. He couldn't speak it out loud, through the ashes that clogged his throat.
"They all speak English," she noted.
He could deal with that at least- in fact, it was something he was quite proud of. "No, you just hear English. It's the gift of the Tardis- telepathic field, gets inside your brain, translates." He leaned back, opening himself up to her.
Her eyes turned challenging. "It's inside my brain?"
"Well, in a good way," he said, the swell of shame rising again. She didn't realize he'd been inside her head himself - that a desperate alien had latched onto her subconscious world as a lifeline and in fact, still clung there.
"Your machine gets inside my head. It gets inside and it changes my mind and you didn't even ask," she accused.
"I didn't think about it like that," he responded feebly. He tried not to think how many times he'd ridden into the romantic dreams of a young girl, in the guise of any white knight on fiery steed, to gallop her away in good symbolic fashion from a mountaintop or a cliffside overlooking stormy seas.
"Tell me who you are!" she was shouting.
"This is who I am, right here, right now. All right?" he raged. He could feel emotion seizing control of his countenance, his faculties- he wasn't like this, he'd never been like this before. "All that counts is here and now and this is me!"
She wasn't having it. "Yeah, and I'm here too cause you brought me here, so just tell me!"
He'd thrown himself across the room to get away from her then. He couldn't bear for her to see the rage and desperation contorting his face into a demon's.
Nice move, Time Lord, he thought to himself- persuade a young girl to go traveling with you, and next, demonstrate to her that you're unhinged.
Rose had turned it all around with her smile. She wanted to know him - really wanted to know - and she wasn't frightened when she caught a glimpse of the truth. She was something new to him, something different. He wanted her to feel with him what he felt, even though it was terrible sometimes. He'd never wanted that before. As young as she was, somehow she understood him.
He sought an hour's sleep that night, weary from the adventure at the End of the World. Before he woke, he heard the voice again.
"She loves you already," it said. "She doesn't know why. And you love her too. Tell her, tell her as soon as you possibly can."
The Doctor opened his eyes and wondered what it would feel like to make that claim, to profess to love, after a lifetime of running away had culminated in desolation.
====
The Doctor wanted to make amends for taking Rose into the heartless future - so he took her into the past. How badly could that turn out?
She'd knocked him back with her shy beauty in Victorian fancy dress, and yet he couldn't give her a decent compliment without undercutting it with a smirk. Still, he'd made her smile despite his awkwardness.
Finally the moment came when it was almost too late. Surrounded by the horrible zombie-like Gelth, he had finally been able to reach out to her. Or rather, once again, she'd reached out to him.
"We'll go down fighting, yeah?" she said.
"Yeah," he answered, amazed at her bravery in this impossible situation.
"Together?" she asked.
"Yeah," he answered, and their hands entwined. As ever, the most amazing feeling of completeness washed over him at her touch. He could almost hear the words from the future - somehow, broken as he was, he was Rose's "true love." He couldn't really understand how a Time Lord could be so blessed, especially someone like him who'd done such terrible things. But here they were, hands entwined. Could she feel, as he did, the way their lives rang pure whenever they touched? the way their time streams harmonized so effortlessly, as though meeting in a broad valley to flow out into eternity?
"I'm so glad I met you," he said, his heart in his throat.
Then it was time again for running, and soon they were back in London.
The Tardis skipped them forward in Rose's timeline by one whole year. Materializing before Jackie's disbelieving eyes was all part of the Tardis's cunning scheme. He would have avoided Rose's mum and lied to her at every opportunity if he'd had the chance. Now he'd felt first hand Jackie's rage at being kept in the dark about her daughter.
He tried again to let Rose know just how much she meant to him. Trapped in the safe room of number ten Downing Street, surrounded by aliens, he'd opened up to her about his quandary: "I could save the world but lose you."
He'd been in awe of her bravery when she responded with complete trust in him to do the right thing - a faith he'd lost in himself during the horrors of the Time War, a faith he still wasn't certain wasn't misplaced.
He promised himself that if they got out of there alive he'd tell her what he really felt, but events always seemed to move so quickly. Before he had a chance to collect himself, he was face to face with the last, terrible, pitiful Dalek.
Facing down the chained creature threw the Doctor's already troubled emotions into turmoil. The Time War churned painfully in his all too recent memory, and though he was mostly able to keep his thoughts away from the horrors of those days, he had no idea how long he'd curled into a corner of his Tardis, nearly comatose from guilt and grief, his mind seared and raw where his telepathic link with other Gallifreyans had been ripped away. His bloody rage and determined efforts to kill the creature startled him - he would have electrocuted it without hesitation if the soldiers hadn't pulled him off the switch. Then Rose, with her pity and her compassion, had saved the Dalek, transforming it into something new. The Doctor was continually horrified at the Dalek's ability to kill hundreds of people so effortlessly, without qualm- just as he was horrified at the killer inside himself, so willing and ready to send the Dalek screaming into oblivion.
Only Rose could've stopped him from murdering the confused creature as it brought its own life to an end. The Tardis stood waiting for them.
"A little piece of home," he said, quietly. "Better than nothing."
"Is that the end of it, the Time War?" Rose asked gently.
"I'm the only one left. I win! How about that," the Doctor said.
"The Dalek survived. Maybe some of your people did too," she tried to comfort him.
"I'd know - in here. Feels like there's no one." He was amazed at how it finally fell from his lips- the gaping loss of his people had subsided to a dull ache with Rose around.
"Well then, good thing I'm not going anywhere," Rose promised.
"Yeah," he said. But was it as good a thing for her as it was for him?
====
Adam came along for the ride to Satellite Five. Dropping him off at home with a door in his forehead satisfied the Doctor more than he could say.
Traveling with Rose, meeting Daleks, seeing the march of history thrown out of joint by something as simple as one greedy Jagrafess- it made the Doctor uneasy. He began to wonder how different things were, now that the Time Lords were no longer there to monitor the integrity of time. Put it simply - the Doctor began to wonder if he now had the freedom he'd never had before to change things.
He took Rose to see her father. He hadn't known what she'd ask for, but when she asked to comfort her dad at his death, he reckoned that would be as good a test as any.
He stood with her on the edge of the street as her dad was struck down, but she was too paralyzed by the shock of it to run to him. He shouldn't have taken her around for a second chance - he knew very well that he was playing with paradox. It was his own stupidity, his own hubris to blame for Rose's mistake, but he'd angrily taken his guilt out on her.
"My entire planet died, my whole family - do you think it never occurred to me to go back and save them?" he'd said bitterly. He didn't even know who he was referring to - no one in the House of Lungbarrow had deigned to speak his given name for hundreds of years. But he knew very well he would have taken almost any risk to get back to Gallifrey, just to experience and savor for one last moment the maddening itch of Gallifreyan minds bickering in the background of his thoughts - filling up one last time the hall of phantoms that echoed emptily in the back of his mind.
He'd never thought of himself as cruel, but this trip to see her dad was the cruellest cut of all - and he'd made her out to be stupid because of her very best qualities - her compassion, her bravery, her selflessness, her quickness to act. He was the lout, the brute. And still, he made her apologize. She leaned into his arms for forgiveness, but it was her forgiveness he sought.
====
In a way it was a relief to see Rose with Jack Harkness, or whatever the ex-Time Agent wanted to call himself. He was staggeringly handsome, undeniably sexual, and Rose's pupils dilated whenever he looked into her eyes. The Doctor wanted to feel that it was a relief. He'd had companions go off together before, hadn't he? What luck, for them, to meet another person who'd gone on adventures with the Doctor- another human being to reminisce with after he'd left them behind. But just as he'd bristled at Mickey, Rose's rightful boyfriend, and Adam, a stray bother, he found himself bristling at Jack, a fifty-first century human, who, if nothing else, was slightly psychic and could read body language like a book.
The Doctor would've sworn Jack was doing it on purpose, testing him somehow, measuring him. Jack was flirting with Rose in good faith - he'd take her just as far as she was ready to go - but he was watching the Doctor out of the corner of his eye all the while, and flirting with the Doctor too, if he wasn't mistaken. It made the Doctor edgy. He wanted to put himself between Jack and Rose, he wanted to bare his teeth and watch Jack back down. The very least he could do was argue to Rose that he knew how to dance, that he wanted to cut in, that it wasn't Jack she wanted to dance with. Had he waited too long after all?
go on to part two!