title: touch of fire
author:
fannishlisspairing: Nine/Rose
rating: G
words: 292
summary: The Doctor reaches out despite himself.
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Time Lords didn't touch. The linkage of bodily energies, the impatient merging of thought into thought, the insatiable desire to know and be known - Rassilon ruled it all out. Time Lords certainly didn't hold hands - not unless it were life or death.
A proper Time Lord would let a girl's hand fall. He would know without a doubt that her puny brain and animal instincts were only to be scorned, nothing more than a hindrance.
He shouldn't be so moved by the life in that hand, the beautiful, wondrous whisper of another mind so near his own, its distant echoes soothing his torn and fragmented soul like the sweetest balm.
He shouldn't be so heated by the fire in her touch, the stars in her eyes pulling his gaze into hers with all the mysterious power of the dark forces that hold the universe together.
The strength in that hand, the courage - and somehow, she admires him. Somehow, she believes in him.
He reaches out despite himself.
"We'll go down fighting - together, yeah?" she whispers.
Her hand in his is everything, everything. "I am so glad I met you," he beams.
The Time Lords have gone, their rules and aspirations burnt to dust. His shattered life could have dwindled into an empty chain of regenerations, stretching dry and purposeless into eternity, but this new companion has become his nest of cinnamon and roses. He is trembling, a phoenix shaking off the ash of his own resurrection.
She looks back at him, a promise of forever burning in her eyes, singing through her psyche as it brushes his with a kiss of wings - a promise he knows, with a Time Lord's certainty, she will somehow manage to keep.