Collaborative Fic: What Happens in Vegas (2/3)
Title: What Happens in Vegas (2/3)
Authors: fid_gin and unfolded73
Beta: jfiliberti
Pairing: Ten/alt!Ten/Rose
Rating: NC-17
Summary: While the threesome enjoy a trip to Las Vegas, the part-human Doctor wonders how he can set himself apart from the Time Lord.
A/N: Written for catyuy, who won fid_gin in the help_haiti auction. This story is part of the Loved 'Verse, and falls a few weeks after "Feeling by Proxy" in the chronology. More specifically, fact fans, it can be placed between the first and second scenes in "Love's Not a Competition." One additional note about this fic: This may seem like it's developing in a way which some of you will probably not approve of, but we ask that you trust us.
Lastly, if you're wondering about our mental image for the character of Beth, think an American Sarah Parish.
PART 1
The dealer was alternating between eyeing him with suspicion and glancing up at the hidden camera in the ceiling, and the Doctor took that as a clear signal that it was time to go. Gathering his prodigious stack of chips, he left the table and was on his way to the cashier when he bumped into a scantily-clad cigarette girl. He grabbed her arm to steady her, and her long, dark pony tail brushed the arm of his brown suit. Even with her platform heels, she was much shorter than he was, and she peered up into his face with a world-weary expression.
"Sorry about that," he said, smiling at her.
"No problem." She started to move away.
"Hey, do you want these?" He held up the chips. "I was going to cash them out, but I'm not sure what I'd do with the money if I did. You can have them, if you want."
She gaped at him. "There's gotta be five thousand dollars there."
"Almost exactly; good eye."
"I'm not for sale," she said.
"What? Oh, did you think ...? No, no no no, I didn't think you were a prostitute, I just meant as a gift." He wondered why she didn't sound more offended, if that's what she had thought. She seemed too tired to be properly offended.
Her eyes were very wide. Finally she said, "We're not allowed. Tips are fine, but I'm not allowed to take that much money from a customer."
He held out a chip worth a hundred dollars. "Can you at least take this?"
Her hand darted out and she'd pocketed the chip before he could blink. "Thanks. Have a good night, sir," she said before moving past him.
He was debating the merits of handing the chips out one by one to everyone who looked like they needed a little extra cash when he saw Rose across the casino floor. She was looking around, but hadn't spotted him yet. She had changed into a black dress that swished around her knees as she walked, and the sight of her made him completely forget about the cigarette girl and his winnings, which he absently slipped into a pocket of his jacket. As he approached her, she turned his way and their eyes met. Rose's face split into a wide smile.
"Here comes trouble," she said, taking the arm he offered her.
The Doctor looked around, but saw no sign of his duplicate. "Where's he got to, then? I thought he'd gone to fetch you from the TARDIS."
Rose was leading them over to the bar, a fixed smile on her face. "Buy me a drink and I'll tell you."
The Doctor frowned at the video poker machines that took up every slot at the bar, making it impossible to avoid yet more holes down which one could throw money. It was all well and good for him, with his superior mind, to have a little fun gambling. "Do you know what I really want to do, Rose? I want to round up every patron in this casino, give them a thirty-minute lecture on probability, and send them on their way."
"Yeah, how about you don't do that." They sat down and Rose ordered something large and pink. She didn't say anything else until the bartender set the drink down in front of her and she took a large sip. "He's off to have sex with someone else."
"What? Who's done what now?" He was certain he'd heard her wrong, distracted as he was by pondering the best way to explain expected value calculations to the chain-smoking septagenarian at the end of the bar.
"The Doctor, he's ... I thought he needed ..." She gestured vaguely, then took another sip of her drink. "It made so much sense back in the TARDIS, but now that I'm trying to explain it, it just seems mad."
"Did you say 'have sex with someone else'?"
Rose pointed off to his left. "That rubbish bin looks like a Dalek."
He glanced at the metallic cylinder covered with gold hemispheres. It didn't look that much like a Dalek, though he saw what she meant. "You're changing the subject."
"He needs an adventure that's just ... his, you know? Such an ordinary human thing, and it was something he'd never done."
"I told you-"
"As a human. Something he'd never done as a human. And I just didn't want him to look back on his life someday and have regrets that he never did all those daft, human things. The way he's been acting lately, I thought it might be good for him."
"Daft is right, Rose." His knee was bouncing erratically under the bar.
"I made sure that he had condoms."
"That's hardly the point."
She opened her mouth, probably to ask what the point was, and he had no idea how he was going to answer her. He was angry, and he didn't know why. What difference was it to him, if Rose was okay with it? She appeared to shift gears, and said, "Let's have dinner somewhere posh."
"Just the two of us?" he asked, hearing a petulant note in his own voice and hating it.
"Why not?"
"I thought ... I mean, I'm not really hungry."
Rose boggled at him. "Who are you, and what have you done with the Doctor?"
"Very funny." He paid the bartender for her drink and stood up. "Can we do it tomorrow? I've got some things I wanted to do on the TARDIS tonight." Rose's face fell, and the Doctor felt even more of an arse. But he had a sudden and violent need to get away from this press of humanity - all these people with their needs and desires and weaknesses and the inability to make good decisions while under the influence of alcohol - he desperately needed to get under the console and rip into the wiring and forget about the entire bloody species for a few hours. Rose would just have to forgive him.
***
The part-human Doctor picked one of Rose's hairs off the sleeve of his blue suit, which he had changed back into before going out. He looked at his distorted reflection in the mirror behind the bar, and wondered if he had too many shirt buttons unbuttoned; he could never keep track of whether humans considered chest hair to be desirable or not.
He had felt many emotions since he was created. Confusion, elation, ecstasy and fury, certainly all of these. But what he currently felt as he sat in the dimly lit club and nursed his pint was so odd, so completely new that he struggled to give it a name. His eyebrows came together in an intense scowl of disbelief as he finally recognized it: shyness.
The pub (bar, he corrected himself) was packed with people - most of them good-looking, most of them friendly and chatty with drink. Several of them, he was not oblivious to noticing, had even given him some discreet and not-so-discreet appraising looks. Yet he found he could not quite bring himself to actually speak to anyone, knowing that he was theoretically there with the specific intent to single out someone to shag.
He still wasn't sold on the idea. While the thought of it was exciting, and while the sex with Rose when they had pretended to be strangers had been mindblowing, and while he was not just a little pleased at the idea of doing something outrageous that the other Doctor had not done first, he couldn't say with certainty that he wanted sex with anyone other than those two. They knew him and, after sharing their minds, he knew they loved him. They understood him, knew how to touch him; Rose from experience, and the other Doctor from shared knowledge and nearly-identical likes and dislikes. When he'd first arrived at the club, he'd caught himself seeking out men and women who reminded him of the other Doctor and Rose. After realising this, he instead decided to focus on those individuals who were nothing like them.
There was the waifish blonde girl queueing at the end of the bar with a group of girls whose giggling got exponentially louder the more rounds of shots they ordered. Once or twice he'd looked over and caught her eyeing him and not looking away, but smiling suggestively at him. But her hair was too short and her mates were too loud, and he gave up and looked elsewhere.
Standing next to the jukebox was a tall woman with jet-black hair cut in an almost painfully straight line of fringe falling across her forehead. He could see across the room the deep red of her lipstick and the smoky black eyeliner around her eyes. Deciding to at least go speak to her...well, shout at her, with the music as loud as it was, he started to stand, but a younger, larger man with tattoos and an impressive leather jacket approached her and they began to talk and laugh and flirt, doing that strange mating dance that apparently every human on Earth understood but him.
Sighing heavily, bored, the Doctor ordered another pint. "And one for yourself," he added, throwing a few extra dollars on the bar as the barman passed him the tall, frosty glass.
"Huh?" The man looked at him like he'd not understood a word, and the Doctor wondered if the TARDIS translation circuits were glitching and he was actually speaking Latin or Sycoraxic or something. He pushed the extra money across the counter, and the other man seemed to understand that and nodded in thanks.
Turning back to survey the room, he thought of Rose and the other Doctor, wondered if they were enjoying their evening away from him. A pang of jealousy twinged in his guts as he thought of them making love without him, just the two of them, the way it used to be and the way he wondered if they sometimes wished it still was. Smiling bitterly, he had to admit that he wasn't quite sure if he was more jealous of Rose or the other Doctor. He'd fallen for himself a little...well, a lot, over the past months. It certainly didn't make figuring the three of them out any easier. The Time Lord was the Doctor, Rose was his Companion, and the part-human Doctor still had no idea where he fit between them except in the very literal sense. He couldn't be...no, he wasn't a companion, was he? He had always felt nothing but the highest respect and, quite frequently, awe for his companions, but the TARDIS was still his ship, wasn't it? The attempts to distinguish himself physically from his duplicate had only made the alien part of him more apparent: longer hair and a beard would never change the fact that as soon as he opened his mouth, he was all Doctor. But the other Doctor had just told him yesterday how very human he was, and wasn't that what tonight was all about? Most people only had their sexual identity to worry about, not their species. And his sexual preference was a whole other can of worms he didn't feel like opening, because honestly, when it came to the other Doctor and Rose at least, he could only designate his preference as "Yes, please."
He was strongly considering going back to the TARDIS and forgetting the whole thing.
With a sigh heavy enough that he heard it over the din, a brunette woman took the seat next to him at the bar and ordered a glass of white wine from the bartender. Her voice was low, what one might call smoky - like a slow drink of whiskey, if one were to use such language to describe a woman's voice. She wore a flattering, short dress, and the Doctor estimated her to be around Donna's age; older than his own human age, but not by a great deal.
"Hi," she said, giving him a small wave. She looked pleasant, and friendly, and sipped some of her wine as she crossed her legs at the knee, causing her skirt to ride up, revealing more thigh than would probably be considered decent anywhere else but a Vegas nightclub.
"Hello," he said in what he hoped was a cheerful tone. "Come here often?" he added, and winced. She fluttered her eyes back in her head and placed one hand on her heart dramatically.
"You're English," she sighed.
"Oh, I'm from...all over, really." Brilliant conversation so far, he chided himself sarcastically.
The woman held out her hand, and he took it. "Beth," she said, simply.
"The Doctor," he answered. He'd toyed with the idea of using John again as he had with Rose, but while the fantasy with Rose required him being something other than 'the Doctor', he'd decided to use his customary name this evening. If Beth thought anything odd about it, she didn't say.
"So, Doctor, what brings you to Sin City?"
"Ummm...business?" He kept his statements brief and vague, worried that after two drinks he might spontaneously start talking about neuroconverters or chromatic leeching or transcardorassic polarity distortion or any of the other huge words floating around in his brain at any given time. Or, worse, his Donna-side might kick in and he could find himself boring the woman with celebrity gossip. "What about you?"
"I live here, actually," she said. "And so you might be asking, what's a local doing mingling with all these tourists?" She rolled her eyes. "I was supposed to meet someone here, but it seems he's stood me up."
"Oh, I'm sorry." He was sure there was something else he could say, something like anyone who stood up a woman as beautiful as herself ... but he couldn't figure out how to phrase it properly before the moment was lost.
Beth waved away his regrets. "It's not a big deal. It's a hazard of the ..." She stopped and shook her head, smiling. "Never mind. You don't want to hear about that."
This time, the sexy phrase came easily. "I want to hear anything that you want to tell me." He flashed her his best half-grin, which Rose had told him more than once was a deadly weapon.
"Before you get too invested in flirting with me, I should probably mention that my husband is sitting at that table over there," Beth said, pointing. The Doctor turned and looked, and saw a very tall man with slightly greying hair give him a brief wave. Thoroughly confused, the Doctor didn't bother to wave back.
"I thought you said you were meeting someone," he said.
"I was. We were. It's a thing we do sometimes, my husband and I. Arrange online to meet a third person for sex." She smirked at him. "That's your cue to run screaming away."
"Pfft. Not much in the universe that will make me do that."
"Then I don't suppose you'd like to come home with us, would you?" The Doctor had been in the process of taking a sip of his drink, and nearly choked. As he was recovering from the unpleasant sensation of foam in his nostrils, she kept speaking. "Sorry, forward I know. I just get sick of tiptoeing around the subject when it's much easier to just come out and ask, don't you agree?"
"Quite," he wheezed, hitting his chest with one fist and still attempting to clear his windpipe. His mind was racing: this was what he'd come out for, and she was very attractive, and he was flattered and curious. And the coincidence didn't escape him, it being a man and a woman together, when that's the sort of sexual interaction he'd become accustomed to.
Could he actually do it? First of all, would he even be attracted to a man who wasn't ... himself? And perhaps more importantly, could he have sex as a human with a woman who wasn't Rose - Rose, who had essentially taken his virginity; Rose, whom he had loved as a Time Lord and loved just as much as a human; Rose, who had suggested this and had sent him out with a kiss on the cheek and a pocket full of condoms? Would she be disappointed if he didn't? Would she be relieved?
"Look, no pressure," Beth was saying. "If you want, you could just come back to our place for a drink and we can see how things go. No expectations on our part, I promise."
And he found himself meeting her smile with one of his own. "Yeah, okay."
***
Rose stared down at her cheese on toast with a scowl. Her plans for the evening blown, she'd changed out of her dress and into sweats and made herself something to eat, alone in the TARDIS galley. She tried reading a book, but her eyes passed over the same words again and again without retaining the meaning. She didn't want to admit that her brilliant suggestion might have been a terrible mistake. She couldn't help trying to picture what might be happening, and it made her feel a little bit queasy.
Eventually, she made her way back to the control room, slumping onto the jumpseat. The Doctor was quiet and tinkering, and Rose knew something was wrong when several minutes passed without him acknowledging her presence. The tinkering was normal of course, but if he were in a good mood he'd laugh and chat and ask her to hand him tools. If something was bothering him, he stayed silent except for the occasional muttered curse when something broke or bent or caught fire.
"Is he going to stay out all night?" he said suddenly, his voice in the silent room making her jump a bit.
"I have no idea," she answered honestly. When she looked back over at the Doctor, she saw he'd given up tinkering and taken up glowering, at her.
"You didn't think to discuss that while the two of you were hatching this brilliant plan, or was he just so anxious to get off with a complete stranger..."
"It wasn't like that," she interrupted, trying to keep her voice calm. She stood and walked over to the console where he was crouched with two handfuls of wire, and bent down to comb her fingers through his hair. The worried crease in his brow did not disappear but he closed his eyes and leaned into her touch. "You should've said," she remarked softly. "Didn't realise it bothered you so much."
Immediately he twisted his head away and was up and moving around the console in a flurry of agitated motion. "I'm not bothered, I'm fine! Better than fine, brilliant, outstanding, molto bene! Are you joking, 'bothered?' This is great: the Doctor and Rose, just like old times, who needs him, eh?"
"Doctor." He froze, snapping his mouth shut and regarding her silently. "What's wrong?"
His mouth opened again and she thought he was about to speak when the TARDIS doors opened and the other Doctor stepped inside.
Her first Doctor turned rapidly and walked toward the back of the ship, but he stopped short of leaving the room entirely. The Doctor in blue watched him warily, and Rose could feel the tension in the room like a palpable force.
"Where'd you end up going?" Rose asked him. She found herself unable to ask him a more direct question about his encounter.
"A nightclub," he answered, looking uncomfortable.
The Doctor in the brown suit seemed to be pretending that they weren't in the room at all now. He'd gone back to his wiring.
Rose decided the only way to get past the awkwardness was just to talk it all out, so she swallowed her discomfort and walked over to pull the part-human Doctor into a hug. She inhaled, both afraid of and terribly curious if she would be able to smell another person's perfume on him or worse, that latexy smell that she used to associate with sex when she was a teenager. But all she smelled, over the Doctor's own musk and soap and antiperspirant, was cigarette smoke and beer.
"So, tell us!" she said a little too loudly, "Did you pick up a woman or a man?"
"Well, both, actually." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I met a couple who were looking for a third. Spice up the marriage, that sort of thing."
"Oh, well that's just perfect," the Time Lord said, slamming his sonic screwdriver down onto the grated floor. Rose jumped at the sharp noise, even though she knew he'd been listening and a part of her had been braced for something to happen. "It's good that you were able to go out there and just replace us so easily."
"Actually-"
"I mean, it's just sex, so it doesn't really matter which bodies you slot into place, does it? Anyone will do, as long as it's a new and exciting conquest." His words dripped with sarcasm and anger, and Rose had no idea what to say. She hadn't expected him to be so ... jealous.
The Doctors stared each other down for a long, silent moment. Then her second Doctor cleared his throat and said, "I was going to say, actually, I didn't go through with it."
The other Doctor's anger seemed to deflate, leaving a sort-of embarrassed confusion. "You what?"
The part-human Doctor shrugged. "I didn't have sex with them. Went to their flat and decided I just wasn't into it. We all talked for awhile, and then they gave me a lift back. Lovely couple, actually. The thing is ..." He turned and began to pace, the way either of the Doctors did when they were thinking through a problem, "Beth and Mark...Mark was the bloke's name, nice guy, hell of a Trivial Pursuit player. Anyway, they've been together a long time, and they've learned that this is what works for them, bringing a third person into their bed. Strengthens their relationship, they said. Keeps it exciting. And fair play to them, they're still happily married after twenty years. But I just thought, well, what am I doing this for? It's not to strengthen what we have," he said, stopping his pacing to gesture among the three of them. "It was to set myself apart. And actually, when it comes to sex, setting myself apart from the two of you is the last thing I want to do right now."
"I'm sorry," Rose said, feeling a mixture of guilt and elation. "I was trying to give you something I thought you might need, but I guess I screwed it up."
"No, you didn't. You absolutely didn't." He kept speaking as he stepped around the Doctor in brown and walked back toward Rose. "Because I needed to really think about this, about us. I spent an hour just sitting in that bar, watching people, lonely people trying to find someone to make them feel a little less lonely, and I realised how unaccountably lucky I am to have you." He turned to glance at his duplicate, to make it clear he was including both of them in his statement.
"Beth and Mark have a relationship that works for them," he continued. "Including someone else, I guess it makes them more than what they were." His eyes bored into hers, never ceased that seductive stare that was all smouldering brown eyes, penetrating her, making her knees weak. "And it just hit me like a bolt from the sky. That's what this relationship is - it makes me more than what I am." The Doctor was very much in her personal space now; his hands slid down to her hips, roaming over her ass then pulling her roughly against him, and she gasped both at the sudden motion and at the feeling of his erection where it strained against the front of his trousers. "There's only two people I want to have sex with. And they're not strangers in a club."
PART 3
Authors: fid_gin and unfolded73
Beta: jfiliberti
Pairing: Ten/alt!Ten/Rose
Rating: NC-17
Summary: While the threesome enjoy a trip to Las Vegas, the part-human Doctor wonders how he can set himself apart from the Time Lord.
A/N: Written for catyuy, who won fid_gin in the help_haiti auction. This story is part of the Loved 'Verse, and falls a few weeks after "Feeling by Proxy" in the chronology. More specifically, fact fans, it can be placed between the first and second scenes in "Love's Not a Competition." One additional note about this fic: This may seem like it's developing in a way which some of you will probably not approve of, but we ask that you trust us.
Lastly, if you're wondering about our mental image for the character of Beth, think an American Sarah Parish.
PART 1
The dealer was alternating between eyeing him with suspicion and glancing up at the hidden camera in the ceiling, and the Doctor took that as a clear signal that it was time to go. Gathering his prodigious stack of chips, he left the table and was on his way to the cashier when he bumped into a scantily-clad cigarette girl. He grabbed her arm to steady her, and her long, dark pony tail brushed the arm of his brown suit. Even with her platform heels, she was much shorter than he was, and she peered up into his face with a world-weary expression.
"Sorry about that," he said, smiling at her.
"No problem." She started to move away.
"Hey, do you want these?" He held up the chips. "I was going to cash them out, but I'm not sure what I'd do with the money if I did. You can have them, if you want."
She gaped at him. "There's gotta be five thousand dollars there."
"Almost exactly; good eye."
"I'm not for sale," she said.
"What? Oh, did you think ...? No, no no no, I didn't think you were a prostitute, I just meant as a gift." He wondered why she didn't sound more offended, if that's what she had thought. She seemed too tired to be properly offended.
Her eyes were very wide. Finally she said, "We're not allowed. Tips are fine, but I'm not allowed to take that much money from a customer."
He held out a chip worth a hundred dollars. "Can you at least take this?"
Her hand darted out and she'd pocketed the chip before he could blink. "Thanks. Have a good night, sir," she said before moving past him.
He was debating the merits of handing the chips out one by one to everyone who looked like they needed a little extra cash when he saw Rose across the casino floor. She was looking around, but hadn't spotted him yet. She had changed into a black dress that swished around her knees as she walked, and the sight of her made him completely forget about the cigarette girl and his winnings, which he absently slipped into a pocket of his jacket. As he approached her, she turned his way and their eyes met. Rose's face split into a wide smile.
"Here comes trouble," she said, taking the arm he offered her.
The Doctor looked around, but saw no sign of his duplicate. "Where's he got to, then? I thought he'd gone to fetch you from the TARDIS."
Rose was leading them over to the bar, a fixed smile on her face. "Buy me a drink and I'll tell you."
The Doctor frowned at the video poker machines that took up every slot at the bar, making it impossible to avoid yet more holes down which one could throw money. It was all well and good for him, with his superior mind, to have a little fun gambling. "Do you know what I really want to do, Rose? I want to round up every patron in this casino, give them a thirty-minute lecture on probability, and send them on their way."
"Yeah, how about you don't do that." They sat down and Rose ordered something large and pink. She didn't say anything else until the bartender set the drink down in front of her and she took a large sip. "He's off to have sex with someone else."
"What? Who's done what now?" He was certain he'd heard her wrong, distracted as he was by pondering the best way to explain expected value calculations to the chain-smoking septagenarian at the end of the bar.
"The Doctor, he's ... I thought he needed ..." She gestured vaguely, then took another sip of her drink. "It made so much sense back in the TARDIS, but now that I'm trying to explain it, it just seems mad."
"Did you say 'have sex with someone else'?"
Rose pointed off to his left. "That rubbish bin looks like a Dalek."
He glanced at the metallic cylinder covered with gold hemispheres. It didn't look that much like a Dalek, though he saw what she meant. "You're changing the subject."
"He needs an adventure that's just ... his, you know? Such an ordinary human thing, and it was something he'd never done."
"I told you-"
"As a human. Something he'd never done as a human. And I just didn't want him to look back on his life someday and have regrets that he never did all those daft, human things. The way he's been acting lately, I thought it might be good for him."
"Daft is right, Rose." His knee was bouncing erratically under the bar.
"I made sure that he had condoms."
"That's hardly the point."
She opened her mouth, probably to ask what the point was, and he had no idea how he was going to answer her. He was angry, and he didn't know why. What difference was it to him, if Rose was okay with it? She appeared to shift gears, and said, "Let's have dinner somewhere posh."
"Just the two of us?" he asked, hearing a petulant note in his own voice and hating it.
"Why not?"
"I thought ... I mean, I'm not really hungry."
Rose boggled at him. "Who are you, and what have you done with the Doctor?"
"Very funny." He paid the bartender for her drink and stood up. "Can we do it tomorrow? I've got some things I wanted to do on the TARDIS tonight." Rose's face fell, and the Doctor felt even more of an arse. But he had a sudden and violent need to get away from this press of humanity - all these people with their needs and desires and weaknesses and the inability to make good decisions while under the influence of alcohol - he desperately needed to get under the console and rip into the wiring and forget about the entire bloody species for a few hours. Rose would just have to forgive him.
***
The part-human Doctor picked one of Rose's hairs off the sleeve of his blue suit, which he had changed back into before going out. He looked at his distorted reflection in the mirror behind the bar, and wondered if he had too many shirt buttons unbuttoned; he could never keep track of whether humans considered chest hair to be desirable or not.
He had felt many emotions since he was created. Confusion, elation, ecstasy and fury, certainly all of these. But what he currently felt as he sat in the dimly lit club and nursed his pint was so odd, so completely new that he struggled to give it a name. His eyebrows came together in an intense scowl of disbelief as he finally recognized it: shyness.
The pub (bar, he corrected himself) was packed with people - most of them good-looking, most of them friendly and chatty with drink. Several of them, he was not oblivious to noticing, had even given him some discreet and not-so-discreet appraising looks. Yet he found he could not quite bring himself to actually speak to anyone, knowing that he was theoretically there with the specific intent to single out someone to shag.
He still wasn't sold on the idea. While the thought of it was exciting, and while the sex with Rose when they had pretended to be strangers had been mindblowing, and while he was not just a little pleased at the idea of doing something outrageous that the other Doctor had not done first, he couldn't say with certainty that he wanted sex with anyone other than those two. They knew him and, after sharing their minds, he knew they loved him. They understood him, knew how to touch him; Rose from experience, and the other Doctor from shared knowledge and nearly-identical likes and dislikes. When he'd first arrived at the club, he'd caught himself seeking out men and women who reminded him of the other Doctor and Rose. After realising this, he instead decided to focus on those individuals who were nothing like them.
There was the waifish blonde girl queueing at the end of the bar with a group of girls whose giggling got exponentially louder the more rounds of shots they ordered. Once or twice he'd looked over and caught her eyeing him and not looking away, but smiling suggestively at him. But her hair was too short and her mates were too loud, and he gave up and looked elsewhere.
Standing next to the jukebox was a tall woman with jet-black hair cut in an almost painfully straight line of fringe falling across her forehead. He could see across the room the deep red of her lipstick and the smoky black eyeliner around her eyes. Deciding to at least go speak to her...well, shout at her, with the music as loud as it was, he started to stand, but a younger, larger man with tattoos and an impressive leather jacket approached her and they began to talk and laugh and flirt, doing that strange mating dance that apparently every human on Earth understood but him.
Sighing heavily, bored, the Doctor ordered another pint. "And one for yourself," he added, throwing a few extra dollars on the bar as the barman passed him the tall, frosty glass.
"Huh?" The man looked at him like he'd not understood a word, and the Doctor wondered if the TARDIS translation circuits were glitching and he was actually speaking Latin or Sycoraxic or something. He pushed the extra money across the counter, and the other man seemed to understand that and nodded in thanks.
Turning back to survey the room, he thought of Rose and the other Doctor, wondered if they were enjoying their evening away from him. A pang of jealousy twinged in his guts as he thought of them making love without him, just the two of them, the way it used to be and the way he wondered if they sometimes wished it still was. Smiling bitterly, he had to admit that he wasn't quite sure if he was more jealous of Rose or the other Doctor. He'd fallen for himself a little...well, a lot, over the past months. It certainly didn't make figuring the three of them out any easier. The Time Lord was the Doctor, Rose was his Companion, and the part-human Doctor still had no idea where he fit between them except in the very literal sense. He couldn't be...no, he wasn't a companion, was he? He had always felt nothing but the highest respect and, quite frequently, awe for his companions, but the TARDIS was still his ship, wasn't it? The attempts to distinguish himself physically from his duplicate had only made the alien part of him more apparent: longer hair and a beard would never change the fact that as soon as he opened his mouth, he was all Doctor. But the other Doctor had just told him yesterday how very human he was, and wasn't that what tonight was all about? Most people only had their sexual identity to worry about, not their species. And his sexual preference was a whole other can of worms he didn't feel like opening, because honestly, when it came to the other Doctor and Rose at least, he could only designate his preference as "Yes, please."
He was strongly considering going back to the TARDIS and forgetting the whole thing.
With a sigh heavy enough that he heard it over the din, a brunette woman took the seat next to him at the bar and ordered a glass of white wine from the bartender. Her voice was low, what one might call smoky - like a slow drink of whiskey, if one were to use such language to describe a woman's voice. She wore a flattering, short dress, and the Doctor estimated her to be around Donna's age; older than his own human age, but not by a great deal.
"Hi," she said, giving him a small wave. She looked pleasant, and friendly, and sipped some of her wine as she crossed her legs at the knee, causing her skirt to ride up, revealing more thigh than would probably be considered decent anywhere else but a Vegas nightclub.
"Hello," he said in what he hoped was a cheerful tone. "Come here often?" he added, and winced. She fluttered her eyes back in her head and placed one hand on her heart dramatically.
"You're English," she sighed.
"Oh, I'm from...all over, really." Brilliant conversation so far, he chided himself sarcastically.
The woman held out her hand, and he took it. "Beth," she said, simply.
"The Doctor," he answered. He'd toyed with the idea of using John again as he had with Rose, but while the fantasy with Rose required him being something other than 'the Doctor', he'd decided to use his customary name this evening. If Beth thought anything odd about it, she didn't say.
"So, Doctor, what brings you to Sin City?"
"Ummm...business?" He kept his statements brief and vague, worried that after two drinks he might spontaneously start talking about neuroconverters or chromatic leeching or transcardorassic polarity distortion or any of the other huge words floating around in his brain at any given time. Or, worse, his Donna-side might kick in and he could find himself boring the woman with celebrity gossip. "What about you?"
"I live here, actually," she said. "And so you might be asking, what's a local doing mingling with all these tourists?" She rolled her eyes. "I was supposed to meet someone here, but it seems he's stood me up."
"Oh, I'm sorry." He was sure there was something else he could say, something like anyone who stood up a woman as beautiful as herself ... but he couldn't figure out how to phrase it properly before the moment was lost.
Beth waved away his regrets. "It's not a big deal. It's a hazard of the ..." She stopped and shook her head, smiling. "Never mind. You don't want to hear about that."
This time, the sexy phrase came easily. "I want to hear anything that you want to tell me." He flashed her his best half-grin, which Rose had told him more than once was a deadly weapon.
"Before you get too invested in flirting with me, I should probably mention that my husband is sitting at that table over there," Beth said, pointing. The Doctor turned and looked, and saw a very tall man with slightly greying hair give him a brief wave. Thoroughly confused, the Doctor didn't bother to wave back.
"I thought you said you were meeting someone," he said.
"I was. We were. It's a thing we do sometimes, my husband and I. Arrange online to meet a third person for sex." She smirked at him. "That's your cue to run screaming away."
"Pfft. Not much in the universe that will make me do that."
"Then I don't suppose you'd like to come home with us, would you?" The Doctor had been in the process of taking a sip of his drink, and nearly choked. As he was recovering from the unpleasant sensation of foam in his nostrils, she kept speaking. "Sorry, forward I know. I just get sick of tiptoeing around the subject when it's much easier to just come out and ask, don't you agree?"
"Quite," he wheezed, hitting his chest with one fist and still attempting to clear his windpipe. His mind was racing: this was what he'd come out for, and she was very attractive, and he was flattered and curious. And the coincidence didn't escape him, it being a man and a woman together, when that's the sort of sexual interaction he'd become accustomed to.
Could he actually do it? First of all, would he even be attracted to a man who wasn't ... himself? And perhaps more importantly, could he have sex as a human with a woman who wasn't Rose - Rose, who had essentially taken his virginity; Rose, whom he had loved as a Time Lord and loved just as much as a human; Rose, who had suggested this and had sent him out with a kiss on the cheek and a pocket full of condoms? Would she be disappointed if he didn't? Would she be relieved?
"Look, no pressure," Beth was saying. "If you want, you could just come back to our place for a drink and we can see how things go. No expectations on our part, I promise."
And he found himself meeting her smile with one of his own. "Yeah, okay."
***
Rose stared down at her cheese on toast with a scowl. Her plans for the evening blown, she'd changed out of her dress and into sweats and made herself something to eat, alone in the TARDIS galley. She tried reading a book, but her eyes passed over the same words again and again without retaining the meaning. She didn't want to admit that her brilliant suggestion might have been a terrible mistake. She couldn't help trying to picture what might be happening, and it made her feel a little bit queasy.
Eventually, she made her way back to the control room, slumping onto the jumpseat. The Doctor was quiet and tinkering, and Rose knew something was wrong when several minutes passed without him acknowledging her presence. The tinkering was normal of course, but if he were in a good mood he'd laugh and chat and ask her to hand him tools. If something was bothering him, he stayed silent except for the occasional muttered curse when something broke or bent or caught fire.
"Is he going to stay out all night?" he said suddenly, his voice in the silent room making her jump a bit.
"I have no idea," she answered honestly. When she looked back over at the Doctor, she saw he'd given up tinkering and taken up glowering, at her.
"You didn't think to discuss that while the two of you were hatching this brilliant plan, or was he just so anxious to get off with a complete stranger..."
"It wasn't like that," she interrupted, trying to keep her voice calm. She stood and walked over to the console where he was crouched with two handfuls of wire, and bent down to comb her fingers through his hair. The worried crease in his brow did not disappear but he closed his eyes and leaned into her touch. "You should've said," she remarked softly. "Didn't realise it bothered you so much."
Immediately he twisted his head away and was up and moving around the console in a flurry of agitated motion. "I'm not bothered, I'm fine! Better than fine, brilliant, outstanding, molto bene! Are you joking, 'bothered?' This is great: the Doctor and Rose, just like old times, who needs him, eh?"
"Doctor." He froze, snapping his mouth shut and regarding her silently. "What's wrong?"
His mouth opened again and she thought he was about to speak when the TARDIS doors opened and the other Doctor stepped inside.
Her first Doctor turned rapidly and walked toward the back of the ship, but he stopped short of leaving the room entirely. The Doctor in blue watched him warily, and Rose could feel the tension in the room like a palpable force.
"Where'd you end up going?" Rose asked him. She found herself unable to ask him a more direct question about his encounter.
"A nightclub," he answered, looking uncomfortable.
The Doctor in the brown suit seemed to be pretending that they weren't in the room at all now. He'd gone back to his wiring.
Rose decided the only way to get past the awkwardness was just to talk it all out, so she swallowed her discomfort and walked over to pull the part-human Doctor into a hug. She inhaled, both afraid of and terribly curious if she would be able to smell another person's perfume on him or worse, that latexy smell that she used to associate with sex when she was a teenager. But all she smelled, over the Doctor's own musk and soap and antiperspirant, was cigarette smoke and beer.
"So, tell us!" she said a little too loudly, "Did you pick up a woman or a man?"
"Well, both, actually." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I met a couple who were looking for a third. Spice up the marriage, that sort of thing."
"Oh, well that's just perfect," the Time Lord said, slamming his sonic screwdriver down onto the grated floor. Rose jumped at the sharp noise, even though she knew he'd been listening and a part of her had been braced for something to happen. "It's good that you were able to go out there and just replace us so easily."
"Actually-"
"I mean, it's just sex, so it doesn't really matter which bodies you slot into place, does it? Anyone will do, as long as it's a new and exciting conquest." His words dripped with sarcasm and anger, and Rose had no idea what to say. She hadn't expected him to be so ... jealous.
The Doctors stared each other down for a long, silent moment. Then her second Doctor cleared his throat and said, "I was going to say, actually, I didn't go through with it."
The other Doctor's anger seemed to deflate, leaving a sort-of embarrassed confusion. "You what?"
The part-human Doctor shrugged. "I didn't have sex with them. Went to their flat and decided I just wasn't into it. We all talked for awhile, and then they gave me a lift back. Lovely couple, actually. The thing is ..." He turned and began to pace, the way either of the Doctors did when they were thinking through a problem, "Beth and Mark...Mark was the bloke's name, nice guy, hell of a Trivial Pursuit player. Anyway, they've been together a long time, and they've learned that this is what works for them, bringing a third person into their bed. Strengthens their relationship, they said. Keeps it exciting. And fair play to them, they're still happily married after twenty years. But I just thought, well, what am I doing this for? It's not to strengthen what we have," he said, stopping his pacing to gesture among the three of them. "It was to set myself apart. And actually, when it comes to sex, setting myself apart from the two of you is the last thing I want to do right now."
"I'm sorry," Rose said, feeling a mixture of guilt and elation. "I was trying to give you something I thought you might need, but I guess I screwed it up."
"No, you didn't. You absolutely didn't." He kept speaking as he stepped around the Doctor in brown and walked back toward Rose. "Because I needed to really think about this, about us. I spent an hour just sitting in that bar, watching people, lonely people trying to find someone to make them feel a little less lonely, and I realised how unaccountably lucky I am to have you." He turned to glance at his duplicate, to make it clear he was including both of them in his statement.
"Beth and Mark have a relationship that works for them," he continued. "Including someone else, I guess it makes them more than what they were." His eyes bored into hers, never ceased that seductive stare that was all smouldering brown eyes, penetrating her, making her knees weak. "And it just hit me like a bolt from the sky. That's what this relationship is - it makes me more than what I am." The Doctor was very much in her personal space now; his hands slid down to her hips, roaming over her ass then pulling her roughly against him, and she gasped both at the sudden motion and at the feeling of his erection where it strained against the front of his trousers. "There's only two people I want to have sex with. And they're not strangers in a club."
PART 3