Who fic: Message in a Bottle
Message in a Bottle
by fannishliss
for wildwinterwitch
6800 words
Rating: Teen (PG13, not too explicit)
Pairing: Nine/Rose, with Ten2/Rose and hints of Ten/Rose
warning: angst! with happy ending :)
Summary: Rose tries to find the Doctor across the Void. When the Doctor finds her, who will he be, and where will they end up?
=====
a sphere of thinnest glass,
soap bubble, iridescent ornament,
tossed out onto a midnight ocean
a jelly, pulsing, dotted with bioluminescence,
withstanding the crushing pressure of the depths,
merely by being in its element
a garden, encapsulated,
suspended, adrift,
crossing the aeons,
waiting for sunrise
his most cherished emotions, jettisoned
in the moment of his darkest despair,
bottled up by his time ship,
lobbed blindly toward their impossible recipient
the rarest, most precious flowers, emotions,
bloom in that garden, gemlike in their
radiance and color, coruscating with
fragrances that sweep through the brain,
captivating with every note of floral and musk
feelings surge in those depths,
flashing, pulsing, stinging with
the filaments that swirl about and lash
tantalizing lures, protective barbs
longing, desperation - hope - the crystalline
floating thing dewinged,
denied, exiled into
oblivion
His puniest genocide:
the excision of his dreams.
***
The dreaming human mind is a weird country.
It’s a place where the boss roams through the old flat reciting lines from last week’s rom com. Food, nakedness, and violence are served up onto Escher tables under technicolor trees in a Bosch countryside.
Rose is on the bus she rode to grammar school, but her coworkers are really the aliens she sent packing yesterday, though they seem quite human at first glance. She has this idea in the dream that singing a really loud note, loud and long, would melt their disguises, and they would steam out into the air, like the Gelth. She’d rather not dream about the Gelth, the old life, the running, the cool hand, the brilliant eyes - but this dream is only semi-lucid. She focuses on her breathing, the tightening in the abdomen, and the way her piercing tone melts the fakers on the bus, and she’s naked but she’s right to be, the clothed are the ones who are liars, and she’s the one dismantling them with resonance.
Jolted awake on a choking gasp, she’s in tears. Shake it off, get up, shower, and get to work - another day.
***
Rose’s firing range results are slightly under par in the morning. She's snappish with Pete, when all he did was drop in to say hi. The cannon still won’t lock. Everyone breaks for lunch. Johnetta is frowning: she’s noticed that something is off with Rose today.
She approaches as Rose double checks the locking mechanism.
“Loss is at 4.8%,” she says, “and accelerating.”
It’s like a punch to the gut. Rose busily runs the equipments doublecheck. The math checks run constantly and take hours to process; they won’t know what today’s failure looked like on the graphs until sometime late tomorrow.
“Soon the public will start to notice.”
Rose nods, and the scream builds inside her, the one she used in the dream to reduce a busload of threat into puddles of goo.
“You have to keep it together, Rose,” Johnetta says. She’s a mathematician and quantum physicist, not a counselor. Her gentle touch burns Rose’s arm like an accusation.
“I will, I am,” Rose states, trying to convince herself as much as her coworker.
Johnetta takes a breath, lets it out. “It’s my job to find the patterns in the math,” she says.
“Hm,” Rose says. After all these months of unremitting effort, learning like a forced march, she can see the patterns too, but she leaves it to Johnetta and the others.
“The deepest pattern is this: it starts to work when you’re okay, and when you’re not, it doesn’t. You have to be okay, Rose.”
“Yeah,” Rose thinks, nodding, lips pressed tight together. No pressure, girl - nothing much riding on your shoulders except the continued existence of this universe.
And the way back to the one she’s meant to be in.
***
There’s a fantastic domed city shimmering in the heat. The dome looks bubble fragile but Rose knows somehow it’s harder than diamonds. Every glint is doubled: starry reflections of two suns in a sherbet sky. The city inside soars skyward with spires of alabaster, glittering ruby, carnelian, diamond, opal and every gem of fire.
She blinks and the city is shattered, wreckage of saucers strewn across interminable plains. Blinks again, and all is restored, the city gleams, eternal, impervious, but now its ultimate fate can’t be unseen. The city strobes like lightning with the crackling juxtaposition of its hubris and its glory.
Rose wakes, the city burned into her retinas. Every time she closes her eyes, she sees it, sharper than any dream. It’s a memory, a terrible one, and the pain of it wears her down. She knows whose pain it is. An old folksong chases itself around in her head:
by the waters of Babylon,
we lay down and wept,
and wept, for thee, Zion.
We remember thee,
remember thee,
remember thee, Zion
the mournful melody falling, falling, aching with beauty that can never be recaptured. The city destroyed, the city whole, flipping back and forth like a nickelodeon all night long.
Rose drags herself to work.
The cannon won’t lock.
Rose can’t help but wonder if it will ever lock, or even it it does, if she’ll fall into vacuum, into a warzone, into a place half a choice away from this one with no way home. There has to be a way. There is. She can feel it, irrational and real, just like the math that drives it.
Star loss has crept past five per cent.
Rose dreams, and in her dreams, wrong and right crash and rebound in apocalyptic collisions.
***
Star loss is nearly at eight per cent before the lock finally holds. It’s a neural interface, and it’s sketchy as hell, but she remembers how, one time, he told her how it should work, and Johnetta and the rest of them have nothing better to go on.
Rose imagines it, longs for it, needs it, demands it, and the lock finally sets. Despite all that concentrated focus, she can’t be riding the wave when it finally fires. That would be foolhardy -- even for her. The test bot vanishes and a clap of air rushes in to fill the vaccum. Thirty minutes is eternity until the bot reappears, instantaneously, kicking up a wind that ruffles every tense technician. There’s a moment of stunned silence, followed by a universal whoop.
Rose stares at the bot. Where did it go? What did it see? Was he there?
She pores over the footage from the cameras, frame by frame. It’s nothing she recognizes. Fields of ice, maybe industrial buildings?
Her eyes seize onto the scrap of blue. Her hand slams the playback to freeze. There, off in the middle distance, just to the left of the bot’s field of vision. A chunky blue box.
Home. Her breath seizes up, her hand flings itself weakly to her mouth, tears spring to her eyes. Whatever the planet, whatever the universe, that blue box is home.
Home.
***
She doesn’t go back to the room in the mansion that night; she falls asleep at her desk scanning the data from the bot.
She dreams of him, and god, it hurts. She’s a lucid dreamer, has been for years, but she can’t relax into the easy bent logic of the way he shifts: leather jacket, suit; brown eyes, blue. He dances around the console and she loves him, she loves him.
It hurts so much. So much. She can’t say his name, even to herself. This is just a memory. She can’t bury her face in his sweet embrace. She’s beginning to lose the memory of his scent - it didn’t change when he changed - but now it’s fading.
His eyes, so piercing, so deep, so old, and yeah, she could always see the war in there, all the things he wanted he was so convinced he could never have.
In a dream like this, is it too much too ask: that his eyes laugh just once into hers, grin so big that it was like all the happiness in the universe? Is it too much to ask, that cool hand in hers?
An explosion of golden fire - every time. That’s how this dream always ends.
But ... she realizes... not this time.
She hears his voice, and it’s so strange, like when he was from the North, and when he was a Londoner like her, and other voices besides - but all him - all speaking at once.
She can’t quite make out the words. It’s like a poorly tuned radio, staticky and pulsing, garbled.
She tries so hard to hear.
She peels herself up out of sleep and goes back to the data.
***
The next day Rose sets the lock right away, easy as pie, and this time they’re getting telemetry from the bot.
Rose peers through the void into pure, aching horror. There he is, on some kind of train car, and everyone is attacking him and something is really wrong. She screams but of course, he can’t hear her. She’s not really there. Even the bot’s not really there. It found him, the lock caught, but the telemetry is signaling through some kind of local comm system. He doesn’t see her.
The bot shifts home, and Rose is nearly frantic with fear.
She has to trust in him, has to trust that he’ll be all right. He’s fine. He’s always fine.
But she knows what fine really means.
He’ll be fine. She’ll be fine. They’ll all be fine. Right.
***
Locked in her office, she balls up her coat and just wails. She feels like her insides are tearing loose, she cries so hard. She can’t breathe. She can’t think. Pounds her feet against the floor, smothers her face into the lining of her jacket.
It hurts. It hurts!
Tomorrow, let them say she can go. Let them say, enough testing. Let them say, send Rose.
She finally cries herself out. Gasping, shuddering, she falls into sleep.
Someone is waiting for her there.
“Hello,” he says. His blue eyes shine.
“Um,” she says, looking around.
It’s weird. The console room looks completely different, kind of steam punk and haphazard. What happened to the coral?
She hears the hum of the Tardis in her head, and struggles not to sob. It doesn’t feel like a dream. It feels real. Should she want to wake up? Should she want to dream forever?
“It’s real,” he says, in his beloved, simple way.
“Um,” she repeats intelligently, but her feet take a few steps forward.
“No,” he says, “you’re still asleep, yeah. But this is me. I found you.”
“Uh, uh,” she tries. She can’t. She just can’t. She can’t bring herself to believe, even to hope.
“Rose,” he says, and god, the way he says her name. It’s everything she’s been living for, that caressing, careful, rough sweet tone.
“... please...” she whispers, not know who she’s begging or what for. Even that one word chokes her throat.
His eyelids fall closed. She longs to touch the planes of his face. Her feet have moved again.
He opens his eyes. He lifts his hand.
“I got a message,” he says.
“Yeah?” she says, an improvement.
He looks down. His hand tightens into a fist, then releases. He looks up again.
“I’m not exactly the same man you remember,” he says.
“Whuh?” she says.
“The message, it was from a me I won’t have been. It slipped back and a bit sideways. Bloody difficult to explain in English,” he says. “The temporal mechanics of it - the long chances - but here we are, so...”
“Didn’t you come first in temporal mechanics?” Rose says, remembering a day when she hadn’t learned to trust him yet, so many days when she wouldn’t dream of trusting anyone else.
“Yeah,” he laughs. “I did, that. Not so bright on me homeworld, or rather, not so interested in doing what was wanted of me, but I did come first in temporal mechanics.”
“So, then, explain it,” Rose says. “I’ve been reading, a lot.”
“Right,” he says, and the wide eyes gleam at her, eager. “This is happening. But it already happened for the man you know who’s me, but isn’t me. And me, I’m not part of it. I’m parallel.”
“So how do you know me?” Rose asks.
“Parallel,” he says. “I know you, Rose. Bad Wolf - it didn’t play out for me like it did for your me.” He shoots her a look she can’t quite read.
“I... didn’t make it?”
“You ascended,” he says, and there’s a look of awe in his eyes Rose doesn’t quite know how to interpret. “Wove yourself into all of space and time - all the parts that have touched me, at least. Threaded yourself into the Vortex.”
Rose remembers, as if in a dream, feeling that imminent disintegration - or rather, that ultimate integration, the pull of the Vortex, the way all space and time had sung through her being, loving her, wanting to incorporate her. “I want you safe, my Doctor,” she had said.
“You saved me. And then, I got this message. From another universe. My counterpart. He’s had quite a string of bad luck.”
Rose shook her head, not able to bear thinking about it.
“So, here I am, and here you are, but we’re not both here now. I’m here much much later. And you’ll be here now, and later, and much much later. And then, Rose Tyler, then, I’ll be here again, that is, now.”
She takes that and unravels it. “So you’re saying, it works?”
“Yeah!” he says.
“Everybody lives?” she says, terrified.
“I can’t tell you that,” he says flatly. She loves him. That flat look, that knowing, trust me gaze.
“Yeah. Okay. But then, you’ll be here again.”
“Yeah. I come through here, and I get you then, then we come back through here - avoiding you now of course -- and we go back. Together. If you want.”
“Ha! I follow you!” she laughs.
“Brilliant, you!” he says.
“I love you,” she says, all in a rush. It tears out of her. Since that day, that horrible day, when it was almost too late for her, and too late for him.
“I know,” he says. And then, like a miracle, “I love you too,” he says.
“Oh, oh,” Rose says, and the tears are pouring out of her again. Her face aches. She’s smiling. “But... much much later?”
“Remember, okay? I will come for you, Rose. I will. For me, you’re just a day away.”
She awakens, and the promise, the truth in his sapphire eyes gets her through tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. He’ll come for her. He will. Till then, she’s got work to do.
***
It hasn’t played out like she expected. When does it ever?
Seeing him there in the street, seeing him struck down, dying. And then, everything with the Daleks. And two of him! The promise of tomorrow has kept her feet moving, her heart beating. But today, yeah. It hasn’t played out like she expected.
Ocean wind whipping her on an icy beach, she’s kissing him like there’s no tomorrow. She feels that single heart pounding against her own, and the words he whispered in her ear fill her heart a second time. They’ll have a lifetime together. When will tomorrow come? And what will she say when it does?
***
The thing about a lifetime is how it’s never enough.
The Doctor, her husband, is not exactly the same man she used to know. He’s just as brilliant, but he’s let some things go. He ages. He mellows. Of course he still laughs, and runs, and they hold hands. There will never be enough of those days, not for him.
When they finally admit to each other that she’s not aging, he smiles.
“It’s okay,” he insists. “I couldn’t bear the other way, not again, not you, Rose.” They’ve been living in this world’s Scotland so long he’s developed a bit of an accent. He says it reminds him of Gallifreyan. He spends days teaching her the old, lost language, telling her about the lost world of his youth, about adventures he’d had and old friends.
There are so many wonderful days. The day he dies, she still doesn’t look a day over twenty-five.
She takes some of the ashes from his pyre to a desert of red rocks, some to a stand of silver maples, some to their favorite beach. It’s the best she can do.
And then, at last, tomorrow comes.
She hears the grinding in the morning, just as she’s finished with her meager washing up. She wrings out the washrag, hangs it on its hook, and runs out into the garden.
The door on the blue box opens. He holds out his hand. She runs and takes it, doesn’t look back.
***
She’s lying in his arms. It still doesn’t feel quite real. She’s mourning the Doctor. And the Doctor is right here, his two hearts beating strong against her back.
“He died,” she says. It’s easier, spooning back against him, to talk about the man she had loved for a lifetime, a man who was him in so many ways and yet not in others.
“I know,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
“You shouldn’t have been so afraid,” she says, gently, remembering her husband’s regrets, confessed to her over a long life, absolved. “You should have let yourself love.”
“I did,” he says. She can’t see his face but she can see his blue eyes, so brilliant, his dear face smiling softly, fixed on her. “It was you, always you, every moment. The Bad Wolf, threaded through the Vortex, following me from the very beginning. Urging me to steal the Tardis. Bringing me back again and again, to Earth, to London. You.”
“And I’m the same me?” Rose asks. Just when she thinks she has a grasp on it, the mechanics sift like sand through her fingers.
“Yes.” She loves the calm certainty of him. Her husband never could keep a thought simple, his mind was always leaping so far ahead.
“How do you know?” She has a feeling how, but she asks anyway.
“I fell in love with you, and you remade the universe so that I’d never lose you.”
Rose feels the truth of it, certain in a part of herself that she can’t quite access consciously -- the same part that set the lock on the cannon.
“And bits of the multiverse, too, huh?”
“Yeah, it looks like.” He laughs and holds her tighter.
“I’ve never known you to be so happy,” Rose says.
“You remade the Universe, Rose. You ended the War. See?”
“No,” she says, but her heart begins to pound.
“Gallifrey is still there, Rose,” he whispers, laughing. “You undid it.”
“Genocide?” she whispers, horrified.
“No. You healed them. You made them whole. The Dalek empire never came about, because they never became that kind of people. So, my people never went to war. I remember it, all the horror, but only because I’m a Time Lord, and I lived it before you remade it. Now Gallifrey never went into the Time Lock, no Nightmare Child, no army of abominations - just a stodgy bunch of toffs maundering about over trivialities.”
“Oh.” It was too much to take in. How many things had changed? Rose feels the goddess stirring inside her, assuring her it had all been well.
“I can take you there, to Gallifrey,” he is saying. “You can meet Romana, and Leela, and Koschei...”
“I can’t wait.” She thinks about Sarah Jane, about meeting her again for the first time.
“Tomorrow is time aplenty,” he says, kissing the back of her head.
“It’s a brave new world,” Rose thinks, slipping down into dreams.
***
around her
a universe
moves, orderly,
a garden of delight,
a ship in a bottle,
kept arights
on tumultuous seas
by a loving hand,
its song a golden
howl across the waves
***
She remembers, back across the decades (those diamond-real decades her second husband would never remember) how easy it was the first time, how strange it is now.
The first time, presented with a version of the man she loved not quite the exact version she had hoped for, she had peered deeply into passionate brown eyes, and seen a truth revealed that had been her deepest longing for years, years.
Fighting for him, fighting so hard, hope against hope, daring the void again and again, reaching through catastrophic entropy and decay to find the one man who could hope to turn it around - and finding instead two men - one just as careful and enigmatic and unobtainable as ever, the other, whispering easily into her ear, “I love you with all my heart and soul, Rose Tyler,” so that she had reeled back, drunk on the eddies of truth shaking reality around them, snogging him with every bit of the strength she had honed in those hopeless days, until he had pulled back, gasping something about needing that respiratory bypass.
Then the shocking, wrenching grinding, and the other was gone. Gone! Torn in two, and one went on without her.
She’d spent years like that, feeling the phantom sting rise up like hives whenever she thought of the other, the one that had left her behind with her husband. She loved him of course, loved him still, even as she and her husband grew closer and closer, one flesh, one mind. She loved him, wherever, whoever he was, and she worried about him. And she silently waited for a tomorrow that eventually came.
It’s harder this time.
It comes to a head one morning over breakfast.
Rose has been finding her way in the galley and the Tardis has been cooperating very nicely. Rose very purposefully thinks for a moment of the old, drafty kitchen in her old Highland cottage, the stone floor, the ancient hearth, the yellow sunlight through the curtains, the hand pump in the yard that the Doctor insisted upon using. The Tardis is nothing like it. The desktop, as he calls it now, has changed from coral to steampunk, so it’s nothing like she remembers. The galley has a penchant for lab benches and supplies cupboards now. But it produces gadgets and ingredients pretty reliably, if she asks clearly and politely.
She’s assembed yogurt, bananas (several), some tart blue berries (she doesn’t know what they are) and a mango, in a reasonably familiar looking blender, and she presses go.
The smoothie grinds and whips and spins, letting out a delicious tropical odor when she opens the lid.
The Doctor comes in just as she’s pouring two tall glasses and popping in straws and long spoons.
She grins broadly, thinking how much he’s always loved a smoothie in the morning. “Hiya,” she says.
“Just a cuppa for me, Rose,” he says, snagging a packet of hobnobs out of a cupboard.
Rose sinks back onto a stool, sipping at her smoothie. It’s hard to suck through a straw when your breath is coming in gasps. Tears track her face. Silent, hot tears. He’s gone, and he’s never coming back.
Suddenly the Doctor is right there. His jumper, the green one, sleeves pushed up to his elbows.
“You’re crying!” he says, shocked.
“Nah,” she denies, wiping futilely at the tears which refuse to stop falling. Her lungs hurt. Her heart hurts. Gone.
“Did I...” he says. His eyes are so wide. He looks at the smoothie on the counter, intended for him. A pool of condensation has gathered around the bottom of the glass. He hastily snatches it up and slips onto the stool next to hers, pulling at the straw.
“This is good. Where’d you get the recipe?” he asks.
Without warning, the tears go haywire. Blindly she fumbles the smoothie back onto the counter, covers her face with her hands, and tries to get a grip.
“Just like Copa,” he’d say, “the planet, not the beach, definitely not the disco. They make the most delicious smoothies there, remind me to take you there when the Tardis is grown, their bananas - their mangoes - they put Earth ones to shame! The little blue berries, you can’t pronounce them in Engish, but they’re so amazing, so antioxidental! hmmm, well, your 'huckleberries' are still pretty good though, eh, huckleberry friend?” He’d poke her with the straw and laugh as she tried to squirm away. “Huckleberry Hound? Keep feeding me these and I’ll be...”
“Wider than a mile!” they’d finish together, grinning and kissing like honeymooners. It never got old. Even when he had, and she hadn’t.
“It’s something of his, isn’t it,” the Doctor says softly.
She can’t bear to peep out between her fingers to see those luminous blue eyes, worshiping her. At least she won’t be a raccoon face like she’d been in the old days. Around scientists all the time, she’d finally toned down her makeup habit.
Choking, she nods.
She feels his strong hands gentle on her shoulders, pulling her off the stool and into his arms.
“It’s okay, Rose,” he says. “I know. I know.”
She cries and cries and feels like dirt, weeping over the loss of her husband while the man she had always loved holds her sweetly in his tender arms, trying to soothe, trying to be enough.
***
She watches old movies in the library, wrapped in a blanket. Her new old Doctor’s universe is only recently divergent. All the movies made before 2005 are the same as she remembers from her childhood. The ones from the world she shared with her husband are gone. She remembers the Marx Brothers movies they used to watch - Harpo, Chico and Sunny. She’ll never see Sunny’s crazy walk again, the way he used to puff on a soap bubble pipe and lob jokes at Margaret Dumont until the stodgy highclass lady bent over double with laughter,
This world’s version of A Day at the Races makes her ache. The Doctor is drawn toward the sofa with a smile, but she can’t watch it. She wanders off just as he sits down.
***
It gets better.
Those moments when the memories break her down are growing farther and farther between. The rapport between her and this new old Doctor grows deeper.
She works with him in the console room. She knows all the tools now and hands them to him before he asks. She helps him calibrate the resonator matrix and his eyebrows rise, impressed.
“You have a gift for this, Rose,” he says lightly.
“I can hear it,” she says.
He stares at her, appraising. “The Tardis hasn’t sung so tunefully in a long time,” he says.
“I know what she likes,” Rose whispers. The Tardis isn’t a voice, more like a song, a push, a dance in the back of her mind. Still, when she follows it, the song leads her hands unerringly.
He stares, a banked fire behind the icy sapphire. Rose looks down, feels a flush heating her cheeks.
He’s been so good to her - keeping her company, letting her hide - letting her lie in his bed, in his arms, never taking what she hasn’t been able to offer.
She wants to give him more. She wants to be ready. But she’s still mourning the version of him who grew old and died in her arms.
The Doctor doesn’t push, but he seems so strangely content, smiling at a job well done as they finish up the calibration, that Rose wonders at herself. She’s still waiting for the return of that soldier, broken by the War - and for all that he remembers it, lived through it, it was undone. The restoration of so much he’d thought lost forever, the lifting of the curse of genocide from his head - it’s changed him.
She’ll get used to it: her new old Doctor and his carefree, laughing face.
***
They burst into the Tardis, hyped up and laughing.
They’d identified a series of escalating glitches, tracking the problem to a crazed and dangerous AI; they’d managed to disguise themselves as theotocrats, managing to feed the thing a dismantling virus of the Doctor’s devising, just before their disguises were seen through and they had to make a run for it out of the Intellitemple.
Rose hit the button that locked the Tardis doors and the Doctor sent them off into the Vortex.
Rose catches her breath. She must look a state, if she’s anywhere near as red-faced and glowing as the Doctor.
“You’re so beautiful,” he says, meeting her eye. He clearly remembers the time, not so long ago for him, when he first said those words to her.
“For a human,” she quotes.
“For anyone,” he says, certain.
She smiles at him, feeling strangely shy. “So are you.”
“This old face?”
“You’re bloody gorgeous,” Rose states, unequivocally.
“I’ve been better,” he demurs.
“You’re always gorgeous,” she says. “It’s the eyes.”
He stares at her, smiling happily, then stands and holds out his hand.
“Let’s have a picnic,” he says, and they find a basket in the galley and materialize in New Arles. For once, they manage to purchase grapes and cheese and a baguette without aiding and abetting an insurrection.
They walk through a sunny summer field to the crest of a low hill, with a lovely view of the bucolic countryside. The Doctor spreads the cloth and they recline, nibbling, chatting.
Finally, Rose clears her throat. “It’s funny, isn’t it - I’ve been on so many picnics with you, so many wonderful times -but not with you, you.”
“Paradox,” he says carelessly. “Drive you mad if you’re not careful.”
“I’m careful.”
“I know.”
Their eyes meet.
“I’m not trying to be.... careful.... I just....”
“I’m the luckiest man in several universes, Rose. No other me gets this chance. I can wait, as long as you need. I love you, and I know you love me, and we’ll get there.”
“To love, Doctor,” Rose says, lifting a plump red grape.
“To love,” he repeats. They tap their grapes together, and fall back to name the clouds.
***
She catches him staring. She remembers the old days: as soon as they locked eyes, he would break the spell with some innocuous comment. Not any more. Now, he’s getting to be more and more like her husband. There are some aspects of him that will never be the same - the mouth on her husband, the sheer gob! She remembers the peaceful feel of falling asleep on the next pillow over while, warm and contented together under the blankets, her husband would rattle off theories to the ceiling, while she zoned out and dozed off, smiling at his unrelenting enthusiasm.
This new classic him isn’t so verbose. Still a genius, still happy to rattle off an explanation - now she has some hopes of following him, she even catches him up sometimes.
Like today. They’ve been thrown off course by a brush with a gravito-temporal anomaly. Time is going backwards, and space is trying to suck them in. It’s very exciting.
He’s dancing around the console. She’s in charge of three controls on the typewriter panel and a level two panels over and up above her head.
He’s prevaricating like mad as he attempts to convince her he knows what he’s doing.
“Stabilize the provocillator,” he spouts. There’s no such thing! The Tardis laughs and Rose tries to keep a straight face.
The Tardis is sputtering in Rose’s head, a queer hiccuping spirally color shaped series of light pops that lets Rose know she’s highly amused. The Tardis keeps showing Rose what to do, very plainly, steps one through six. It’s not even hard. It’s probably too easy for him to take notice.
Finally Rose calls him on it.
“Doctor,” she interrupts.
He’s frantically winding a hand crank that has absolutely no effect on their trajectory.
“Doctor!” she shouts.
He moves to the bicycle pump and starts pumping.
“Doctor!” she insists.
He drops under the console.
As soon as he’s out of sight, Rose activates step number one by pulling the overhead lever. Good, he’d already put her in charge of that. The Tardis gives a mighty roar. The Doctor pops back out from under the console, mouth agape as Rose takes over.
Step two, the crank - but seven times in the opposite direction.
Step three, the bicycle pump, three good pumps. Then under the console. The Tardis guides her hand and Rose lets her. She quickly locates four switches and flips them in a certain sequence, off and then back on.
Step four, she springs back out and zigs the zagger, three times for good measure.
Step five, she sets the coordinates to the image the Tardis has put in her mind.
Step six, she types ENGAGE on the typewriter and hits return.
The Tardis powers down smooth as silk. The warning klaxons fall silent. The sense of something pulling on them vanishes. They are free.
Slowly the Doctor emerges from his braced crouch under the console. His eyes are like points of sapphire flame.
He advances on her.
She holds her ground.
He’s right there.
She smirks.
He lunges and catches her in his arms, kissing her like his life depends on it. She melts, opening to him and letting him overpower her. His two hearts pounding against her chest - it feels strange again - but she remembers when she’d first fallen in love with him, the way he would catch her in his arms and swing her around, then pretend like she was just a friend. He’s not pretending any more.
“Rose,” he breaks away to whisper, “ah, Rose,” and then he latches on again, holding her tight against him, feasting on her mouth. She blinks, and he’s her husband - the same - even though this is a different mouth, different teeth, a different set of lips. The adoration she feels pouring off of him in waves is the same, but if possible, stronger.
He trails his kisses to her ear, bites gently at her neck, just like her husband: the memory, the now, phasing between juxtapositions.
“Ah, Doctor!” she cries, and she is crying out for the man she married, the man she lost, the man in her arms, all at once. There’s a golden glow in her head, a song, a vibration that feels a little bit like the Tardis, but bigger, and she recognizes it, like a twisted truth mirrored in a dream: she is Rose, and he is the Doctor, and they must be one, ever, always.
“Did he,” he whispers into her ear, the rush of his cool breath making her shiver, “did he touch your mind?”
Rose starts and pulls back, seeking the soul behind his blue, blue eyes. “Sometimes our minds would brush; it made him so happy. But he was human. We did it the human way.”
“I’m not human,” her Doctor says. His two hearts are pounding, the coolness of his body pressing tight against her, the wiry power in his slender body she remembers from so long ago.
“I know,” she says.
“Rose, I want you,” he says. “I want all of you.”
She shivers at the passion roughening his voice. His embrace is perfect: strong, gentle, possessive, reverent, adoring, lustful. It’s everything she’s always loved about him. She’s finally ready for this.
“I want you too,” she says, “I’ve wanted you forever.”
Forever.
The words chimes into the golden suspension of her thoughts, ringing like a gong of truth. How long would they have sought each other? How many universes have played out and collapsed leaving this one only, precious and singular, to encapsulate the shining gem of their union?
He stares so hard that she blushes, even as he breaks away and pulls her by the hand. She knows the way to his room and the corridors flash past until they alight at the white wood door. He throws it wide - there’s the old four poster, the orange and crimson Gallifreyan coverlet, the deep plush carpet, the homely old bedroom suite topped with the clutter out of his pockets. It’s home now, but it sears into her mind with the weight of the moment.
He doesn’t carry her across the threshold, but he does enfold her hand in the lovely clasp of his long, sweet fingers, and he leads her to his bed.
“Say yes, Rose,” he asks her solemnly.
It’s a perfect echo of perfect moments, secreted from time, sealed in her memory:
-The afternoon after the beach, at the hotel, when he’d knelt to her: “Say yes, Rose.”
--The afternoon at a chapel, a year later, with Jackie and Pete and baby Tony in the front row, when he’d turned to her, brown eyes aglow, smiling: “Say yes, Rose.”
She’s always had just the one answer.
“Yes!” she exclaims, smiling widely.
“Fantastic!” he says, and it’s like the sun breaks over his face as he grins from ear to ear.
He turns back the comforter and she sits down, feeling just a little awkward. She’s slept in this bed for weeks now, and he’s held her, chaste and tender, as she makes her adjustment. She knows the scent of the room, the weight of the pillow, the rustle of Gallifreyan silk as the coverlet shifts on the sheets.
She knows how it’s felt, to have him holding her while she falls asleep, a comforting presence against her back. The Doctor.
“May I?” he says, but the brazen look in his eyes is all brash confidence now, his hands are already moving to pull off her clothes.
Rose laughs and helps him till both of them are bare, and he lies down beside her. She stretches out a hand to stroke him, and his eyelids flutter in pleasure.
His body is beautiful, long and lean like her husband’s, just slightly wider about the shoulder, a bit more densely muscled. He’s been growing out his hair, and it’s longer than she remembers from the first time around, blonder than she might have expected, silky and baby fine.
She runs her fingers along the strong planes of his face, the bones of his brow. She feels the tingle of his thoughts, reaching out to her. She smiles at him.
Like a dream, his hands float up and toward her face.
“Rose,” she hears, though his smiling lips haven’t moved.
Like the sweetest breeze of summer, a breath of warmth and coolness through a white curtained window, his consciousness brushes against hers. The same mind, the same soul: her Doctor.
A surge of love courses through her, taking hold of her mind, warming her body, and leaping in her spirit. She knows him through and through, this Doctor - he would have been her husband - he’d been spared her loss - and now, eternity lies spread before them, tranquil under the smoothing touch of Pax Gallifreya.
They lean toward each other, mirrors, in tandem now, and their breath mingles as their lips touch, their thoughts and limbs entwine.
Bodily, she feels the silken caress of his member seeking entrance as she grows hot and slickens in readiness. She feels his talented hands awakening her body, firing shockwaves along her nerves, enveloping her in bliss.
In her thoughts, all this is doubled, as she feels him feeling himself enter her, the heat and the tightness of her as she opens, taking him in. She feels him feeling her strength, her tenderness as she lies back and wraps her legs around his waist, digging in her heels and holding him in place as he rocks against her.
She hears the song of his thoughts soaring through her consciousness, she sees the magnificent lightshow of his explosive emotions, shooting purple and gold in a supernova of rightness. Her own song soars alongside, the golden song that’s always been a part of her, rising up into volume in perfect counterpoint: Time Lord and the Avatar of Time she's become.
She sees into the core of him - the storm of fire and ice that has overawed so many - and she loves him, all of him, in his mysterious synthesis of flawed perfection. She learns at last the secret of his name and realizes: she’s known it all along.
If not him, who?
And they laugh in their bliss, brightening and entwining: fully one.
The universe sparkling around them is only one of many. But in this moment, it has reached its apotheosis.
save it up
a message in a bottle
a dream to come
a hope for a darker day
by fannishliss
for wildwinterwitch
6800 words
Rating: Teen (PG13, not too explicit)
Pairing: Nine/Rose, with Ten2/Rose and hints of Ten/Rose
warning: angst! with happy ending :)
Summary: Rose tries to find the Doctor across the Void. When the Doctor finds her, who will he be, and where will they end up?
=====
a sphere of thinnest glass,
soap bubble, iridescent ornament,
tossed out onto a midnight ocean
a jelly, pulsing, dotted with bioluminescence,
withstanding the crushing pressure of the depths,
merely by being in its element
a garden, encapsulated,
suspended, adrift,
crossing the aeons,
waiting for sunrise
his most cherished emotions, jettisoned
in the moment of his darkest despair,
bottled up by his time ship,
lobbed blindly toward their impossible recipient
the rarest, most precious flowers, emotions,
bloom in that garden, gemlike in their
radiance and color, coruscating with
fragrances that sweep through the brain,
captivating with every note of floral and musk
feelings surge in those depths,
flashing, pulsing, stinging with
the filaments that swirl about and lash
tantalizing lures, protective barbs
longing, desperation - hope - the crystalline
floating thing dewinged,
denied, exiled into
oblivion
His puniest genocide:
the excision of his dreams.
***
The dreaming human mind is a weird country.
It’s a place where the boss roams through the old flat reciting lines from last week’s rom com. Food, nakedness, and violence are served up onto Escher tables under technicolor trees in a Bosch countryside.
Rose is on the bus she rode to grammar school, but her coworkers are really the aliens she sent packing yesterday, though they seem quite human at first glance. She has this idea in the dream that singing a really loud note, loud and long, would melt their disguises, and they would steam out into the air, like the Gelth. She’d rather not dream about the Gelth, the old life, the running, the cool hand, the brilliant eyes - but this dream is only semi-lucid. She focuses on her breathing, the tightening in the abdomen, and the way her piercing tone melts the fakers on the bus, and she’s naked but she’s right to be, the clothed are the ones who are liars, and she’s the one dismantling them with resonance.
Jolted awake on a choking gasp, she’s in tears. Shake it off, get up, shower, and get to work - another day.
***
Rose’s firing range results are slightly under par in the morning. She's snappish with Pete, when all he did was drop in to say hi. The cannon still won’t lock. Everyone breaks for lunch. Johnetta is frowning: she’s noticed that something is off with Rose today.
She approaches as Rose double checks the locking mechanism.
“Loss is at 4.8%,” she says, “and accelerating.”
It’s like a punch to the gut. Rose busily runs the equipments doublecheck. The math checks run constantly and take hours to process; they won’t know what today’s failure looked like on the graphs until sometime late tomorrow.
“Soon the public will start to notice.”
Rose nods, and the scream builds inside her, the one she used in the dream to reduce a busload of threat into puddles of goo.
“You have to keep it together, Rose,” Johnetta says. She’s a mathematician and quantum physicist, not a counselor. Her gentle touch burns Rose’s arm like an accusation.
“I will, I am,” Rose states, trying to convince herself as much as her coworker.
Johnetta takes a breath, lets it out. “It’s my job to find the patterns in the math,” she says.
“Hm,” Rose says. After all these months of unremitting effort, learning like a forced march, she can see the patterns too, but she leaves it to Johnetta and the others.
“The deepest pattern is this: it starts to work when you’re okay, and when you’re not, it doesn’t. You have to be okay, Rose.”
“Yeah,” Rose thinks, nodding, lips pressed tight together. No pressure, girl - nothing much riding on your shoulders except the continued existence of this universe.
And the way back to the one she’s meant to be in.
***
There’s a fantastic domed city shimmering in the heat. The dome looks bubble fragile but Rose knows somehow it’s harder than diamonds. Every glint is doubled: starry reflections of two suns in a sherbet sky. The city inside soars skyward with spires of alabaster, glittering ruby, carnelian, diamond, opal and every gem of fire.
She blinks and the city is shattered, wreckage of saucers strewn across interminable plains. Blinks again, and all is restored, the city gleams, eternal, impervious, but now its ultimate fate can’t be unseen. The city strobes like lightning with the crackling juxtaposition of its hubris and its glory.
Rose wakes, the city burned into her retinas. Every time she closes her eyes, she sees it, sharper than any dream. It’s a memory, a terrible one, and the pain of it wears her down. She knows whose pain it is. An old folksong chases itself around in her head:
by the waters of Babylon,
we lay down and wept,
and wept, for thee, Zion.
We remember thee,
remember thee,
remember thee, Zion
the mournful melody falling, falling, aching with beauty that can never be recaptured. The city destroyed, the city whole, flipping back and forth like a nickelodeon all night long.
Rose drags herself to work.
The cannon won’t lock.
Rose can’t help but wonder if it will ever lock, or even it it does, if she’ll fall into vacuum, into a warzone, into a place half a choice away from this one with no way home. There has to be a way. There is. She can feel it, irrational and real, just like the math that drives it.
Star loss has crept past five per cent.
Rose dreams, and in her dreams, wrong and right crash and rebound in apocalyptic collisions.
***
Star loss is nearly at eight per cent before the lock finally holds. It’s a neural interface, and it’s sketchy as hell, but she remembers how, one time, he told her how it should work, and Johnetta and the rest of them have nothing better to go on.
Rose imagines it, longs for it, needs it, demands it, and the lock finally sets. Despite all that concentrated focus, she can’t be riding the wave when it finally fires. That would be foolhardy -- even for her. The test bot vanishes and a clap of air rushes in to fill the vaccum. Thirty minutes is eternity until the bot reappears, instantaneously, kicking up a wind that ruffles every tense technician. There’s a moment of stunned silence, followed by a universal whoop.
Rose stares at the bot. Where did it go? What did it see? Was he there?
She pores over the footage from the cameras, frame by frame. It’s nothing she recognizes. Fields of ice, maybe industrial buildings?
Her eyes seize onto the scrap of blue. Her hand slams the playback to freeze. There, off in the middle distance, just to the left of the bot’s field of vision. A chunky blue box.
Home. Her breath seizes up, her hand flings itself weakly to her mouth, tears spring to her eyes. Whatever the planet, whatever the universe, that blue box is home.
Home.
***
She doesn’t go back to the room in the mansion that night; she falls asleep at her desk scanning the data from the bot.
She dreams of him, and god, it hurts. She’s a lucid dreamer, has been for years, but she can’t relax into the easy bent logic of the way he shifts: leather jacket, suit; brown eyes, blue. He dances around the console and she loves him, she loves him.
It hurts so much. So much. She can’t say his name, even to herself. This is just a memory. She can’t bury her face in his sweet embrace. She’s beginning to lose the memory of his scent - it didn’t change when he changed - but now it’s fading.
His eyes, so piercing, so deep, so old, and yeah, she could always see the war in there, all the things he wanted he was so convinced he could never have.
In a dream like this, is it too much too ask: that his eyes laugh just once into hers, grin so big that it was like all the happiness in the universe? Is it too much to ask, that cool hand in hers?
An explosion of golden fire - every time. That’s how this dream always ends.
But ... she realizes... not this time.
She hears his voice, and it’s so strange, like when he was from the North, and when he was a Londoner like her, and other voices besides - but all him - all speaking at once.
She can’t quite make out the words. It’s like a poorly tuned radio, staticky and pulsing, garbled.
She tries so hard to hear.
She peels herself up out of sleep and goes back to the data.
***
The next day Rose sets the lock right away, easy as pie, and this time they’re getting telemetry from the bot.
Rose peers through the void into pure, aching horror. There he is, on some kind of train car, and everyone is attacking him and something is really wrong. She screams but of course, he can’t hear her. She’s not really there. Even the bot’s not really there. It found him, the lock caught, but the telemetry is signaling through some kind of local comm system. He doesn’t see her.
The bot shifts home, and Rose is nearly frantic with fear.
She has to trust in him, has to trust that he’ll be all right. He’s fine. He’s always fine.
But she knows what fine really means.
He’ll be fine. She’ll be fine. They’ll all be fine. Right.
***
Locked in her office, she balls up her coat and just wails. She feels like her insides are tearing loose, she cries so hard. She can’t breathe. She can’t think. Pounds her feet against the floor, smothers her face into the lining of her jacket.
It hurts. It hurts!
Tomorrow, let them say she can go. Let them say, enough testing. Let them say, send Rose.
She finally cries herself out. Gasping, shuddering, she falls into sleep.
Someone is waiting for her there.
“Hello,” he says. His blue eyes shine.
“Um,” she says, looking around.
It’s weird. The console room looks completely different, kind of steam punk and haphazard. What happened to the coral?
She hears the hum of the Tardis in her head, and struggles not to sob. It doesn’t feel like a dream. It feels real. Should she want to wake up? Should she want to dream forever?
“It’s real,” he says, in his beloved, simple way.
“Um,” she repeats intelligently, but her feet take a few steps forward.
“No,” he says, “you’re still asleep, yeah. But this is me. I found you.”
“Uh, uh,” she tries. She can’t. She just can’t. She can’t bring herself to believe, even to hope.
“Rose,” he says, and god, the way he says her name. It’s everything she’s been living for, that caressing, careful, rough sweet tone.
“... please...” she whispers, not know who she’s begging or what for. Even that one word chokes her throat.
His eyelids fall closed. She longs to touch the planes of his face. Her feet have moved again.
He opens his eyes. He lifts his hand.
“I got a message,” he says.
“Yeah?” she says, an improvement.
He looks down. His hand tightens into a fist, then releases. He looks up again.
“I’m not exactly the same man you remember,” he says.
“Whuh?” she says.
“The message, it was from a me I won’t have been. It slipped back and a bit sideways. Bloody difficult to explain in English,” he says. “The temporal mechanics of it - the long chances - but here we are, so...”
“Didn’t you come first in temporal mechanics?” Rose says, remembering a day when she hadn’t learned to trust him yet, so many days when she wouldn’t dream of trusting anyone else.
“Yeah,” he laughs. “I did, that. Not so bright on me homeworld, or rather, not so interested in doing what was wanted of me, but I did come first in temporal mechanics.”
“So, then, explain it,” Rose says. “I’ve been reading, a lot.”
“Right,” he says, and the wide eyes gleam at her, eager. “This is happening. But it already happened for the man you know who’s me, but isn’t me. And me, I’m not part of it. I’m parallel.”
“So how do you know me?” Rose asks.
“Parallel,” he says. “I know you, Rose. Bad Wolf - it didn’t play out for me like it did for your me.” He shoots her a look she can’t quite read.
“I... didn’t make it?”
“You ascended,” he says, and there’s a look of awe in his eyes Rose doesn’t quite know how to interpret. “Wove yourself into all of space and time - all the parts that have touched me, at least. Threaded yourself into the Vortex.”
Rose remembers, as if in a dream, feeling that imminent disintegration - or rather, that ultimate integration, the pull of the Vortex, the way all space and time had sung through her being, loving her, wanting to incorporate her. “I want you safe, my Doctor,” she had said.
“You saved me. And then, I got this message. From another universe. My counterpart. He’s had quite a string of bad luck.”
Rose shook her head, not able to bear thinking about it.
“So, here I am, and here you are, but we’re not both here now. I’m here much much later. And you’ll be here now, and later, and much much later. And then, Rose Tyler, then, I’ll be here again, that is, now.”
She takes that and unravels it. “So you’re saying, it works?”
“Yeah!” he says.
“Everybody lives?” she says, terrified.
“I can’t tell you that,” he says flatly. She loves him. That flat look, that knowing, trust me gaze.
“Yeah. Okay. But then, you’ll be here again.”
“Yeah. I come through here, and I get you then, then we come back through here - avoiding you now of course -- and we go back. Together. If you want.”
“Ha! I follow you!” she laughs.
“Brilliant, you!” he says.
“I love you,” she says, all in a rush. It tears out of her. Since that day, that horrible day, when it was almost too late for her, and too late for him.
“I know,” he says. And then, like a miracle, “I love you too,” he says.
“Oh, oh,” Rose says, and the tears are pouring out of her again. Her face aches. She’s smiling. “But... much much later?”
“Remember, okay? I will come for you, Rose. I will. For me, you’re just a day away.”
She awakens, and the promise, the truth in his sapphire eyes gets her through tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. He’ll come for her. He will. Till then, she’s got work to do.
***
It hasn’t played out like she expected. When does it ever?
Seeing him there in the street, seeing him struck down, dying. And then, everything with the Daleks. And two of him! The promise of tomorrow has kept her feet moving, her heart beating. But today, yeah. It hasn’t played out like she expected.
Ocean wind whipping her on an icy beach, she’s kissing him like there’s no tomorrow. She feels that single heart pounding against her own, and the words he whispered in her ear fill her heart a second time. They’ll have a lifetime together. When will tomorrow come? And what will she say when it does?
***
The thing about a lifetime is how it’s never enough.
The Doctor, her husband, is not exactly the same man she used to know. He’s just as brilliant, but he’s let some things go. He ages. He mellows. Of course he still laughs, and runs, and they hold hands. There will never be enough of those days, not for him.
When they finally admit to each other that she’s not aging, he smiles.
“It’s okay,” he insists. “I couldn’t bear the other way, not again, not you, Rose.” They’ve been living in this world’s Scotland so long he’s developed a bit of an accent. He says it reminds him of Gallifreyan. He spends days teaching her the old, lost language, telling her about the lost world of his youth, about adventures he’d had and old friends.
There are so many wonderful days. The day he dies, she still doesn’t look a day over twenty-five.
She takes some of the ashes from his pyre to a desert of red rocks, some to a stand of silver maples, some to their favorite beach. It’s the best she can do.
And then, at last, tomorrow comes.
She hears the grinding in the morning, just as she’s finished with her meager washing up. She wrings out the washrag, hangs it on its hook, and runs out into the garden.
The door on the blue box opens. He holds out his hand. She runs and takes it, doesn’t look back.
***
She’s lying in his arms. It still doesn’t feel quite real. She’s mourning the Doctor. And the Doctor is right here, his two hearts beating strong against her back.
“He died,” she says. It’s easier, spooning back against him, to talk about the man she had loved for a lifetime, a man who was him in so many ways and yet not in others.
“I know,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
“You shouldn’t have been so afraid,” she says, gently, remembering her husband’s regrets, confessed to her over a long life, absolved. “You should have let yourself love.”
“I did,” he says. She can’t see his face but she can see his blue eyes, so brilliant, his dear face smiling softly, fixed on her. “It was you, always you, every moment. The Bad Wolf, threaded through the Vortex, following me from the very beginning. Urging me to steal the Tardis. Bringing me back again and again, to Earth, to London. You.”
“And I’m the same me?” Rose asks. Just when she thinks she has a grasp on it, the mechanics sift like sand through her fingers.
“Yes.” She loves the calm certainty of him. Her husband never could keep a thought simple, his mind was always leaping so far ahead.
“How do you know?” She has a feeling how, but she asks anyway.
“I fell in love with you, and you remade the universe so that I’d never lose you.”
Rose feels the truth of it, certain in a part of herself that she can’t quite access consciously -- the same part that set the lock on the cannon.
“And bits of the multiverse, too, huh?”
“Yeah, it looks like.” He laughs and holds her tighter.
“I’ve never known you to be so happy,” Rose says.
“You remade the Universe, Rose. You ended the War. See?”
“No,” she says, but her heart begins to pound.
“Gallifrey is still there, Rose,” he whispers, laughing. “You undid it.”
“Genocide?” she whispers, horrified.
“No. You healed them. You made them whole. The Dalek empire never came about, because they never became that kind of people. So, my people never went to war. I remember it, all the horror, but only because I’m a Time Lord, and I lived it before you remade it. Now Gallifrey never went into the Time Lock, no Nightmare Child, no army of abominations - just a stodgy bunch of toffs maundering about over trivialities.”
“Oh.” It was too much to take in. How many things had changed? Rose feels the goddess stirring inside her, assuring her it had all been well.
“I can take you there, to Gallifrey,” he is saying. “You can meet Romana, and Leela, and Koschei...”
“I can’t wait.” She thinks about Sarah Jane, about meeting her again for the first time.
“Tomorrow is time aplenty,” he says, kissing the back of her head.
“It’s a brave new world,” Rose thinks, slipping down into dreams.
***
around her
a universe
moves, orderly,
a garden of delight,
a ship in a bottle,
kept arights
on tumultuous seas
by a loving hand,
its song a golden
howl across the waves
***
She remembers, back across the decades (those diamond-real decades her second husband would never remember) how easy it was the first time, how strange it is now.
The first time, presented with a version of the man she loved not quite the exact version she had hoped for, she had peered deeply into passionate brown eyes, and seen a truth revealed that had been her deepest longing for years, years.
Fighting for him, fighting so hard, hope against hope, daring the void again and again, reaching through catastrophic entropy and decay to find the one man who could hope to turn it around - and finding instead two men - one just as careful and enigmatic and unobtainable as ever, the other, whispering easily into her ear, “I love you with all my heart and soul, Rose Tyler,” so that she had reeled back, drunk on the eddies of truth shaking reality around them, snogging him with every bit of the strength she had honed in those hopeless days, until he had pulled back, gasping something about needing that respiratory bypass.
Then the shocking, wrenching grinding, and the other was gone. Gone! Torn in two, and one went on without her.
She’d spent years like that, feeling the phantom sting rise up like hives whenever she thought of the other, the one that had left her behind with her husband. She loved him of course, loved him still, even as she and her husband grew closer and closer, one flesh, one mind. She loved him, wherever, whoever he was, and she worried about him. And she silently waited for a tomorrow that eventually came.
It’s harder this time.
It comes to a head one morning over breakfast.
Rose has been finding her way in the galley and the Tardis has been cooperating very nicely. Rose very purposefully thinks for a moment of the old, drafty kitchen in her old Highland cottage, the stone floor, the ancient hearth, the yellow sunlight through the curtains, the hand pump in the yard that the Doctor insisted upon using. The Tardis is nothing like it. The desktop, as he calls it now, has changed from coral to steampunk, so it’s nothing like she remembers. The galley has a penchant for lab benches and supplies cupboards now. But it produces gadgets and ingredients pretty reliably, if she asks clearly and politely.
She’s assembed yogurt, bananas (several), some tart blue berries (she doesn’t know what they are) and a mango, in a reasonably familiar looking blender, and she presses go.
The smoothie grinds and whips and spins, letting out a delicious tropical odor when she opens the lid.
The Doctor comes in just as she’s pouring two tall glasses and popping in straws and long spoons.
She grins broadly, thinking how much he’s always loved a smoothie in the morning. “Hiya,” she says.
“Just a cuppa for me, Rose,” he says, snagging a packet of hobnobs out of a cupboard.
Rose sinks back onto a stool, sipping at her smoothie. It’s hard to suck through a straw when your breath is coming in gasps. Tears track her face. Silent, hot tears. He’s gone, and he’s never coming back.
Suddenly the Doctor is right there. His jumper, the green one, sleeves pushed up to his elbows.
“You’re crying!” he says, shocked.
“Nah,” she denies, wiping futilely at the tears which refuse to stop falling. Her lungs hurt. Her heart hurts. Gone.
“Did I...” he says. His eyes are so wide. He looks at the smoothie on the counter, intended for him. A pool of condensation has gathered around the bottom of the glass. He hastily snatches it up and slips onto the stool next to hers, pulling at the straw.
“This is good. Where’d you get the recipe?” he asks.
Without warning, the tears go haywire. Blindly she fumbles the smoothie back onto the counter, covers her face with her hands, and tries to get a grip.
“Just like Copa,” he’d say, “the planet, not the beach, definitely not the disco. They make the most delicious smoothies there, remind me to take you there when the Tardis is grown, their bananas - their mangoes - they put Earth ones to shame! The little blue berries, you can’t pronounce them in Engish, but they’re so amazing, so antioxidental! hmmm, well, your 'huckleberries' are still pretty good though, eh, huckleberry friend?” He’d poke her with the straw and laugh as she tried to squirm away. “Huckleberry Hound? Keep feeding me these and I’ll be...”
“Wider than a mile!” they’d finish together, grinning and kissing like honeymooners. It never got old. Even when he had, and she hadn’t.
“It’s something of his, isn’t it,” the Doctor says softly.
She can’t bear to peep out between her fingers to see those luminous blue eyes, worshiping her. At least she won’t be a raccoon face like she’d been in the old days. Around scientists all the time, she’d finally toned down her makeup habit.
Choking, she nods.
She feels his strong hands gentle on her shoulders, pulling her off the stool and into his arms.
“It’s okay, Rose,” he says. “I know. I know.”
She cries and cries and feels like dirt, weeping over the loss of her husband while the man she had always loved holds her sweetly in his tender arms, trying to soothe, trying to be enough.
***
She watches old movies in the library, wrapped in a blanket. Her new old Doctor’s universe is only recently divergent. All the movies made before 2005 are the same as she remembers from her childhood. The ones from the world she shared with her husband are gone. She remembers the Marx Brothers movies they used to watch - Harpo, Chico and Sunny. She’ll never see Sunny’s crazy walk again, the way he used to puff on a soap bubble pipe and lob jokes at Margaret Dumont until the stodgy highclass lady bent over double with laughter,
This world’s version of A Day at the Races makes her ache. The Doctor is drawn toward the sofa with a smile, but she can’t watch it. She wanders off just as he sits down.
***
It gets better.
Those moments when the memories break her down are growing farther and farther between. The rapport between her and this new old Doctor grows deeper.
She works with him in the console room. She knows all the tools now and hands them to him before he asks. She helps him calibrate the resonator matrix and his eyebrows rise, impressed.
“You have a gift for this, Rose,” he says lightly.
“I can hear it,” she says.
He stares at her, appraising. “The Tardis hasn’t sung so tunefully in a long time,” he says.
“I know what she likes,” Rose whispers. The Tardis isn’t a voice, more like a song, a push, a dance in the back of her mind. Still, when she follows it, the song leads her hands unerringly.
He stares, a banked fire behind the icy sapphire. Rose looks down, feels a flush heating her cheeks.
He’s been so good to her - keeping her company, letting her hide - letting her lie in his bed, in his arms, never taking what she hasn’t been able to offer.
She wants to give him more. She wants to be ready. But she’s still mourning the version of him who grew old and died in her arms.
The Doctor doesn’t push, but he seems so strangely content, smiling at a job well done as they finish up the calibration, that Rose wonders at herself. She’s still waiting for the return of that soldier, broken by the War - and for all that he remembers it, lived through it, it was undone. The restoration of so much he’d thought lost forever, the lifting of the curse of genocide from his head - it’s changed him.
She’ll get used to it: her new old Doctor and his carefree, laughing face.
***
They burst into the Tardis, hyped up and laughing.
They’d identified a series of escalating glitches, tracking the problem to a crazed and dangerous AI; they’d managed to disguise themselves as theotocrats, managing to feed the thing a dismantling virus of the Doctor’s devising, just before their disguises were seen through and they had to make a run for it out of the Intellitemple.
Rose hit the button that locked the Tardis doors and the Doctor sent them off into the Vortex.
Rose catches her breath. She must look a state, if she’s anywhere near as red-faced and glowing as the Doctor.
“You’re so beautiful,” he says, meeting her eye. He clearly remembers the time, not so long ago for him, when he first said those words to her.
“For a human,” she quotes.
“For anyone,” he says, certain.
She smiles at him, feeling strangely shy. “So are you.”
“This old face?”
“You’re bloody gorgeous,” Rose states, unequivocally.
“I’ve been better,” he demurs.
“You’re always gorgeous,” she says. “It’s the eyes.”
He stares at her, smiling happily, then stands and holds out his hand.
“Let’s have a picnic,” he says, and they find a basket in the galley and materialize in New Arles. For once, they manage to purchase grapes and cheese and a baguette without aiding and abetting an insurrection.
They walk through a sunny summer field to the crest of a low hill, with a lovely view of the bucolic countryside. The Doctor spreads the cloth and they recline, nibbling, chatting.
Finally, Rose clears her throat. “It’s funny, isn’t it - I’ve been on so many picnics with you, so many wonderful times -but not with you, you.”
“Paradox,” he says carelessly. “Drive you mad if you’re not careful.”
“I’m careful.”
“I know.”
Their eyes meet.
“I’m not trying to be.... careful.... I just....”
“I’m the luckiest man in several universes, Rose. No other me gets this chance. I can wait, as long as you need. I love you, and I know you love me, and we’ll get there.”
“To love, Doctor,” Rose says, lifting a plump red grape.
“To love,” he repeats. They tap their grapes together, and fall back to name the clouds.
***
She catches him staring. She remembers the old days: as soon as they locked eyes, he would break the spell with some innocuous comment. Not any more. Now, he’s getting to be more and more like her husband. There are some aspects of him that will never be the same - the mouth on her husband, the sheer gob! She remembers the peaceful feel of falling asleep on the next pillow over while, warm and contented together under the blankets, her husband would rattle off theories to the ceiling, while she zoned out and dozed off, smiling at his unrelenting enthusiasm.
This new classic him isn’t so verbose. Still a genius, still happy to rattle off an explanation - now she has some hopes of following him, she even catches him up sometimes.
Like today. They’ve been thrown off course by a brush with a gravito-temporal anomaly. Time is going backwards, and space is trying to suck them in. It’s very exciting.
He’s dancing around the console. She’s in charge of three controls on the typewriter panel and a level two panels over and up above her head.
He’s prevaricating like mad as he attempts to convince her he knows what he’s doing.
“Stabilize the provocillator,” he spouts. There’s no such thing! The Tardis laughs and Rose tries to keep a straight face.
The Tardis is sputtering in Rose’s head, a queer hiccuping spirally color shaped series of light pops that lets Rose know she’s highly amused. The Tardis keeps showing Rose what to do, very plainly, steps one through six. It’s not even hard. It’s probably too easy for him to take notice.
Finally Rose calls him on it.
“Doctor,” she interrupts.
He’s frantically winding a hand crank that has absolutely no effect on their trajectory.
“Doctor!” she shouts.
He moves to the bicycle pump and starts pumping.
“Doctor!” she insists.
He drops under the console.
As soon as he’s out of sight, Rose activates step number one by pulling the overhead lever. Good, he’d already put her in charge of that. The Tardis gives a mighty roar. The Doctor pops back out from under the console, mouth agape as Rose takes over.
Step two, the crank - but seven times in the opposite direction.
Step three, the bicycle pump, three good pumps. Then under the console. The Tardis guides her hand and Rose lets her. She quickly locates four switches and flips them in a certain sequence, off and then back on.
Step four, she springs back out and zigs the zagger, three times for good measure.
Step five, she sets the coordinates to the image the Tardis has put in her mind.
Step six, she types ENGAGE on the typewriter and hits return.
The Tardis powers down smooth as silk. The warning klaxons fall silent. The sense of something pulling on them vanishes. They are free.
Slowly the Doctor emerges from his braced crouch under the console. His eyes are like points of sapphire flame.
He advances on her.
She holds her ground.
He’s right there.
She smirks.
He lunges and catches her in his arms, kissing her like his life depends on it. She melts, opening to him and letting him overpower her. His two hearts pounding against her chest - it feels strange again - but she remembers when she’d first fallen in love with him, the way he would catch her in his arms and swing her around, then pretend like she was just a friend. He’s not pretending any more.
“Rose,” he breaks away to whisper, “ah, Rose,” and then he latches on again, holding her tight against him, feasting on her mouth. She blinks, and he’s her husband - the same - even though this is a different mouth, different teeth, a different set of lips. The adoration she feels pouring off of him in waves is the same, but if possible, stronger.
He trails his kisses to her ear, bites gently at her neck, just like her husband: the memory, the now, phasing between juxtapositions.
“Ah, Doctor!” she cries, and she is crying out for the man she married, the man she lost, the man in her arms, all at once. There’s a golden glow in her head, a song, a vibration that feels a little bit like the Tardis, but bigger, and she recognizes it, like a twisted truth mirrored in a dream: she is Rose, and he is the Doctor, and they must be one, ever, always.
“Did he,” he whispers into her ear, the rush of his cool breath making her shiver, “did he touch your mind?”
Rose starts and pulls back, seeking the soul behind his blue, blue eyes. “Sometimes our minds would brush; it made him so happy. But he was human. We did it the human way.”
“I’m not human,” her Doctor says. His two hearts are pounding, the coolness of his body pressing tight against her, the wiry power in his slender body she remembers from so long ago.
“I know,” she says.
“Rose, I want you,” he says. “I want all of you.”
She shivers at the passion roughening his voice. His embrace is perfect: strong, gentle, possessive, reverent, adoring, lustful. It’s everything she’s always loved about him. She’s finally ready for this.
“I want you too,” she says, “I’ve wanted you forever.”
Forever.
The words chimes into the golden suspension of her thoughts, ringing like a gong of truth. How long would they have sought each other? How many universes have played out and collapsed leaving this one only, precious and singular, to encapsulate the shining gem of their union?
He stares so hard that she blushes, even as he breaks away and pulls her by the hand. She knows the way to his room and the corridors flash past until they alight at the white wood door. He throws it wide - there’s the old four poster, the orange and crimson Gallifreyan coverlet, the deep plush carpet, the homely old bedroom suite topped with the clutter out of his pockets. It’s home now, but it sears into her mind with the weight of the moment.
He doesn’t carry her across the threshold, but he does enfold her hand in the lovely clasp of his long, sweet fingers, and he leads her to his bed.
“Say yes, Rose,” he asks her solemnly.
It’s a perfect echo of perfect moments, secreted from time, sealed in her memory:
-The afternoon after the beach, at the hotel, when he’d knelt to her: “Say yes, Rose.”
--The afternoon at a chapel, a year later, with Jackie and Pete and baby Tony in the front row, when he’d turned to her, brown eyes aglow, smiling: “Say yes, Rose.”
She’s always had just the one answer.
“Yes!” she exclaims, smiling widely.
“Fantastic!” he says, and it’s like the sun breaks over his face as he grins from ear to ear.
He turns back the comforter and she sits down, feeling just a little awkward. She’s slept in this bed for weeks now, and he’s held her, chaste and tender, as she makes her adjustment. She knows the scent of the room, the weight of the pillow, the rustle of Gallifreyan silk as the coverlet shifts on the sheets.
She knows how it’s felt, to have him holding her while she falls asleep, a comforting presence against her back. The Doctor.
“May I?” he says, but the brazen look in his eyes is all brash confidence now, his hands are already moving to pull off her clothes.
Rose laughs and helps him till both of them are bare, and he lies down beside her. She stretches out a hand to stroke him, and his eyelids flutter in pleasure.
His body is beautiful, long and lean like her husband’s, just slightly wider about the shoulder, a bit more densely muscled. He’s been growing out his hair, and it’s longer than she remembers from the first time around, blonder than she might have expected, silky and baby fine.
She runs her fingers along the strong planes of his face, the bones of his brow. She feels the tingle of his thoughts, reaching out to her. She smiles at him.
Like a dream, his hands float up and toward her face.
“Rose,” she hears, though his smiling lips haven’t moved.
Like the sweetest breeze of summer, a breath of warmth and coolness through a white curtained window, his consciousness brushes against hers. The same mind, the same soul: her Doctor.
A surge of love courses through her, taking hold of her mind, warming her body, and leaping in her spirit. She knows him through and through, this Doctor - he would have been her husband - he’d been spared her loss - and now, eternity lies spread before them, tranquil under the smoothing touch of Pax Gallifreya.
They lean toward each other, mirrors, in tandem now, and their breath mingles as their lips touch, their thoughts and limbs entwine.
Bodily, she feels the silken caress of his member seeking entrance as she grows hot and slickens in readiness. She feels his talented hands awakening her body, firing shockwaves along her nerves, enveloping her in bliss.
In her thoughts, all this is doubled, as she feels him feeling himself enter her, the heat and the tightness of her as she opens, taking him in. She feels him feeling her strength, her tenderness as she lies back and wraps her legs around his waist, digging in her heels and holding him in place as he rocks against her.
She hears the song of his thoughts soaring through her consciousness, she sees the magnificent lightshow of his explosive emotions, shooting purple and gold in a supernova of rightness. Her own song soars alongside, the golden song that’s always been a part of her, rising up into volume in perfect counterpoint: Time Lord and the Avatar of Time she's become.
She sees into the core of him - the storm of fire and ice that has overawed so many - and she loves him, all of him, in his mysterious synthesis of flawed perfection. She learns at last the secret of his name and realizes: she’s known it all along.
If not him, who?
And they laugh in their bliss, brightening and entwining: fully one.
The universe sparkling around them is only one of many. But in this moment, it has reached its apotheosis.
save it up
a message in a bottle
a dream to come
a hope for a darker day