Fic [Doctor Who]: Encircled (5/7)
Title: Encircled
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Ten/Rose, First Doctor, Eighth Doctor, Ninth Doctor, Other Doctors, the Children of Time
Beta: fannishliss!
Summary: All his long life, the Doctor has never really known what he's running from--or running towards. And then, on a dirty street at the end of the Earth as we know it, Rose takes a Dalek disruptor blast for him. AU from The Stolen Earth.
Antriska IV
13621
The Doctor is 901
“Run!” Rose shouts over the roar of thunder. She laughs and seizes his hand, forcing him out into the rain.
“Rose-wait-we should stop! Thunderstorm, really bad thunderstorm-it’s the Century Storm in fact-hey!” the Doctor rambles desperately as she tugs him along in her wake. There is so much water pounding into the street that it nearly is a wake. “Look! Tea! A teashop! There are really wonderful biscuits, we could eat some-”
Rose laughs again and hauls him along, not stopping for a second. Her gold hair is plastered against her cheeks; his shoes squelch with every step. In the middle of the city square she stops abruptly, using their joined hands to swing him around until he smacks straight into her with a sloppy, splashy whump.
“Hello,” he tries awkwardly. “Tea?”
“C’mon, Doctor! Didn’t you ever splash in puddles as a kid? Or do high-and-mighty Time Lords-” she rolls her eyes in good-natured mockery “-hate getting a little wet and messy?”
There is a subtext there the Doctor stubbornly refuses to think about. And he has no particular wish to remember the scoldings he received as a child for doing exactly this, coming home soaked through and gleeful while all the younger Cousins whispered about him behind their hands.
“I’ll have you know, Rose Tyler-” he begins, before his words are cut off by a tremendous sharp crack of thunder, no more than a block or two away. Rose jumps, letting out a little involuntary yelp at the closeness.
Now you see what I mean, he would say, but Rose’s startled jump has taken her just a little bit closer to him, exactly the distance to knock him off balance, and now both of them are falling in a wet disorganized tangle to the ground. He lands first, back-first in six inches of water, with her collapsing on top of him. The resulting splash drenches them even further, and the Doctor realizes regretfully that a few bits of him had still been dry.
Rose pins him to the ground, not moving, and for a horrible half-second he thinks she might be injured. Then he feels her shaking with laughter against him, giggles that reverberate in his breastbone and where her face is pressed into his shoulder. Suddenly he rather likes being soaking wet.
“Did you fancy a swim?” he asks politely. She laughs harder, and, because she is irresistible and her laugh is delicious, he joins in. Soon the street rings with it even over the rain. The Doctor is sure there are locals watching them through windows from nice, dry sitting rooms, shaking their heads at two mad offworlders tangled together in a puddle in the middle of the street. He feels like there must be one, but he cannot think of a single reason why this should worry him.
Finally their laughter trickles out and Rose speaks, her voice still muffled by his sodden jacket. “I’m a bit wet here.”
“Really,” the Doctor comments.
“And you’re not warm.”
“Neither are you,” he replies, although to him she is, in more ways than one. “There’s a fireplace in the TARDIS. And hot showers, and towels, and blankets. If you like.” The words are out of his mouth before he stops to think about the implications, but they catch up with him quickly-and pleasantly. He feels his face flame. “And soup! And tea!”
Rose rolls awkwardly off him and crawls to her feet, pulling him after her. She looks like a drowned cat. Fortunately the Doctor has the presence of mind not to say so.
“Okay,” she says, “let’s-”
She never gets to finish the sentence, because the Doctor seizes her hand and hauls her away gleefully at top speed.
“Run!”
The TARDIS is parked in an alley near the park, and they are almost on it when the Doctor sees the woman by the bench, the only person (other than the two of them) dumb enough to be out in this weather. Her hair is dark, slicked to her head, and her skin icy pale. Her silver-grey dress is shadowed by rain. There is a tattoo of a rose on her shoulder.
He stumbles, sure of her face and does a double-take. But the woman is gone.
“What?” Rose asks, skidding to a stop beside him.
“Sorry,” he manages through the shock. “I thought I saw something…strange. But I didn’t. The TARDIS is just over here-come on!”
He sends Rose off to the shower and, as he drips into the grated floor, tries to tell himself that it is nothing, just like the tattooed docker and the clear-faced coffee-seller on Barcelona and the vague memory of a child. But this face is too familiar. The woman in grey is not nothing.
Suddenly he wonders if any of them were.
* * * * *
The Medusa Cascade
2008
The Doctor is 904
“Who-” the Doctor croaks, “who the hell are you?”
There is a tiny silence, before the cavernous room echoes with the sharp squawk of angry Daleks.
“EXTER-”
“-minate, yes, I know,” the strange woman finishes casually over the sound of weapons fire, safe inside the bounds of the TARDIS’ renewed extrapolator shielding. “Haven’t you tried that before? But here we are.”
“We are victorious!” Davros cries, but his voice is already climbing with uncertainty. “Your identity is irrelevant. You will stand and watch your world burn!”
“Haven’t any choice, have I?” she asks, leaning against the TARDIS with her hands in the Doctor’s coat pockets. “Nothing could stop you?”
“We are legion,” Dalek Caan interjects with a mad cackle. “No human can wipe the Daleks from the sky! It is foretold! Only-”
“Only the Abomination,” the woman finishes. “But that’s all right, then. I don’t repeat my effects.”
The Crucible is suddenly, utterly silent, except for the giggling of Dalek Caan.
“No,” the Doctor says at last. “No.”
Green eyes meet his. “Always.” They move away, long enough for her to smile reassuringly at Jackie, and then she returns her attention to the Daleks.
“Try this instead,” she offers, raising a small silver object and flicking its switch.
“EXTER-”
The Daleks simply stop, weapons unfired, eyestalks slowly fading to black.
“Wow. It really works,” the woman says wonderingly, staring at the device cradled in her palm. “That-I can’t count how many times that might’ve come in handy.” She slips the device back into the brown coat’s bottomless pocket and selects a button from the nearest panel. The prison-lights disappear. “Doctor, I-oh. Hello.”
He is already in front of her, right in front of her, staring, as she turns back to address him. And suddenly silence and shock give way to fury: of all the illusions, why this?
“On New Earth,” he demands through gritted teeth, “the sister with the Face of Boe-”
“Novice Hame,” she answers placidly. “You want to know who I am. You want me to prove it, yeah?”
He ignores the unspoken invitation. “Woman Wept, where-”
“In the constellation Virgo, ‘as you humans think of it’, that’s what you said.” She rolls her eyes. “We hiked the waves at the Bay of Tears, and I lost my left crampon. You had to drag me home over the ice, ‘cos I couldn’t walk. I never told anyone that bit-ask Mickey.”
Without meaning to, he turns to catch Mickey’s incredulous eye. “She didn’t. Rose, I know what the doctors said, but this is…this is weird.”
“And you are gorgeous, by the way,” Jack interjects, wiping away a tear surreptitiously. “Welcome back, Rosie. We all thought…”
“I was,” she answers quietly. “I’ll tell you the story, but I think we should finish up with this-” she gestures at the frozen Daleks “-first. Can anyone fly this thing?”
The Doctor turns away abruptly. “Simple!” he crows with forced cheer, and begins to investigate the nearest control bank. “Shut down the bomb, check. Transmit the nano-wave signal-brilliant, that-across the fleet, check. Gravitational fields, hull lockdowns, buh-bye power cores-one great lump of Dalek fleet, stuck together for all time, out of sync with the universe. Perfect! Which just leaves the planets. All those ejected cores-plenty of power for one giant shockwave, and home they go! Earth, safely back in the Sol System by teatime.” He presses one last button with a flourish.
“You do think you’re brilliant, don’t you, spaceman?” Donna drawls, with more than her usual sarcasm. Jackie’s lip twitches in spite of the uncertainty in her eyes.
“Now,” he carries on, voice climbing maniacally, “back to the TARDIS for us. The universe, saved again!” He whirls back to them and glances from face to face, looking for encouragement, praise, anything to keep up the act.
He finds six expressions full of confusion, belonging to six people who have taken a step back, forming a half-circle around him and…her.
“Is it really so hard…” she chokes on her own voice. Taking a deep breath, she forces herself to continue. “Is it so hard to believe it’s me?”
“It’s impossible,” he replies, turning to unlock the TARDIS. “Rose was human. Come on, all of you. Inside.”
No one moves, not even a twitch. She sniffs once, quietly, and it nearly breaks him. Whoever she is, whatever she is, she truly believes she is human. That she is Rose. It does break Jackie, who shatters the shocked tableau by running to her side and seizing her shoulder. She stares up at the new face, fingering the ginger hair, wiping away the tears.
“Told you not to come, Mum,” she sniffs. “Told you it would be hard, whatever happened. Didn’t even think about this.”
“Not come? I’ll have you know I saved her life!” Jackie fires back, waving a hand vaguely at Sarah Jane. “Me! An’ what would’ve happened if I hadn’t? You and him, you always think I’m not good enough-are you laughing at me? Am I so funny? Am I always-” She stops abruptly, staring up at the taller woman. “Oh m’god. You’re really…you’re really Rose.”
“Told ya.” And her smile is pure, unadulterated Rose Tyler. Jackie flings her arms around her daughter and bursts into noisy tears.
The Doctor is still facing away from them, staring aimlessly through the open door of the TARDIS. “Not possible,” he repeats quietly.
“I think we-” Jack begins in a mediating tone, but Rose interrupts over Jackie’s shoulder, addressing the Doctor’s back.
“Do you know, Doctor, I think I can guess why you never took me to Barcelona. Barcelona, where the dogs have no noses, you said.”
The statement is so absurd that he turns back to them in spite of his determination to ignore her. “What?”
“I wondered sometimes.” She scrubs at her nose with the back of her hand and gently disentangles herself from Jackie’s arms. “Why we never went. But I get it now, yeah?”
She closes her eyes for a moment and takes a deep breath, her face settling into an almost-familiar look of compassion and insight that comes far too close to home. With two quiet steps, she is in front of him, her hand coming to rest gently on his chest. The Doctor manages not to flinch. Barely.
“You didn’t want to go anymore,” she continues gently. “You didn’t want to go because it was the first thing you said to me with your new…you, and I, I didn’t believe you. I was so scared, Doctor, and so angry, and so sad. I said give him back. I said you weren’t him…weren’t you.
“Barcelona,” Rose says forcefully, and this time the Doctor does flinch. “See? Even now. It’s what you couldn’t be, for me.”
Rose’s eyes were soft and brown, comforting and familiar, but with enough behind them that he never wanted to stop searching. The hint of gold at the edge of his vision when he looked into them never failed to tantalize. These eyes, vivid green, with a faceted emerald fierceness behind the brimming tears, are uncharted territory, prisms that refract him in unfamiliar light.
And at the back of them, at the edge of his gaze, scattered like stars through the iris: bright living gold.
The Doctor realizes abruptly that her palm is still laying against his sternum, but now his is wrapped around it, fingers curled tightly against hers, pulling both their hands painfully between his hearts. And that is the answer.
In the background, he half-registers Jack breaking the silence, turning up his irresistible charm as he herds the others into the TARDIS. The door falls closed, and the Doctor lets his forehead come to rest against Rose’s.
“I’m scared,” he whispers hoarsely, helplessly.
“Me too,” she replies. “I’ve never done this before. Traveling with you and working at Torchwood, I’ve seen things I couldn’t believe, lots of things. But this…”
He chokes out what was meant to be a chuckle but feels suspiciously close to a sob. “Could be worse. You could…” have stayed dead, he thinks, and pushes it away. “You could have woken up with the worst hair of your life and a permanently annoyed face, wearing plaid.”
Rose giggles tearily. “Please tell me it’s not that bad?”
“Well, it was for me. Took me over a century to get rid of that haircut. But you…” The Doctor lifts his head and studies Rose critically. “Ginger-why do I never get to be ginger? You’re rather tall. Gangly, a bit.”
“A giraffe, then,” she sighs. “That’s why I feel all…wobbly. An Irish giraffe.”
“Nah,” he scoffs. “Let me be the first to say it: you…” The Doctor takes a deep breath. “Rose Tyler. You look beautiful.”
At the sound of her name, she seems to shake an immense burden from her shoulders. “For a human,” she laughs, and leans into him, wrapping her free arm firmly around him while leaving their joined hands trapped beneath her shoulder.
He buries his face in the curve of her neck, his coat under his cheek and her scorched hair trailing delicately across his closed eyes. Neither does much to hide the sudden harshness of his breathing or his desperate-and largely unsuccessful-attempts to hold back tears.
It takes him a good three tries to get the words around the lump in his throat, but eventually he manages it. “No, not for a human. Or not just for a human. For whatever miracle you are. For you. Rose.”
He does cry then, but so does she: tears and miracles in a sea of silent Daleks. And eventually, for the second time that day, they go home to the TARDIS.
Notes:
SHE LIVES!!!
Ahem.
"...the worst hair of your life and a permanently annoyed face, wearing plaid": I can't see Two being Ten's favorite version of himself; Mr. Hair Gel and Tailored Suit probably wouldn't even want to think about the almost-bowl-cut and plaid... :)
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Ten/Rose, First Doctor, Eighth Doctor, Ninth Doctor, Other Doctors, the Children of Time
Beta: fannishliss!
Summary: All his long life, the Doctor has never really known what he's running from--or running towards. And then, on a dirty street at the end of the Earth as we know it, Rose takes a Dalek disruptor blast for him. AU from The Stolen Earth.
Antriska IV
13621
The Doctor is 901
“Run!” Rose shouts over the roar of thunder. She laughs and seizes his hand, forcing him out into the rain.
“Rose-wait-we should stop! Thunderstorm, really bad thunderstorm-it’s the Century Storm in fact-hey!” the Doctor rambles desperately as she tugs him along in her wake. There is so much water pounding into the street that it nearly is a wake. “Look! Tea! A teashop! There are really wonderful biscuits, we could eat some-”
Rose laughs again and hauls him along, not stopping for a second. Her gold hair is plastered against her cheeks; his shoes squelch with every step. In the middle of the city square she stops abruptly, using their joined hands to swing him around until he smacks straight into her with a sloppy, splashy whump.
“Hello,” he tries awkwardly. “Tea?”
“C’mon, Doctor! Didn’t you ever splash in puddles as a kid? Or do high-and-mighty Time Lords-” she rolls her eyes in good-natured mockery “-hate getting a little wet and messy?”
There is a subtext there the Doctor stubbornly refuses to think about. And he has no particular wish to remember the scoldings he received as a child for doing exactly this, coming home soaked through and gleeful while all the younger Cousins whispered about him behind their hands.
“I’ll have you know, Rose Tyler-” he begins, before his words are cut off by a tremendous sharp crack of thunder, no more than a block or two away. Rose jumps, letting out a little involuntary yelp at the closeness.
Now you see what I mean, he would say, but Rose’s startled jump has taken her just a little bit closer to him, exactly the distance to knock him off balance, and now both of them are falling in a wet disorganized tangle to the ground. He lands first, back-first in six inches of water, with her collapsing on top of him. The resulting splash drenches them even further, and the Doctor realizes regretfully that a few bits of him had still been dry.
Rose pins him to the ground, not moving, and for a horrible half-second he thinks she might be injured. Then he feels her shaking with laughter against him, giggles that reverberate in his breastbone and where her face is pressed into his shoulder. Suddenly he rather likes being soaking wet.
“Did you fancy a swim?” he asks politely. She laughs harder, and, because she is irresistible and her laugh is delicious, he joins in. Soon the street rings with it even over the rain. The Doctor is sure there are locals watching them through windows from nice, dry sitting rooms, shaking their heads at two mad offworlders tangled together in a puddle in the middle of the street. He feels like there must be one, but he cannot think of a single reason why this should worry him.
Finally their laughter trickles out and Rose speaks, her voice still muffled by his sodden jacket. “I’m a bit wet here.”
“Really,” the Doctor comments.
“And you’re not warm.”
“Neither are you,” he replies, although to him she is, in more ways than one. “There’s a fireplace in the TARDIS. And hot showers, and towels, and blankets. If you like.” The words are out of his mouth before he stops to think about the implications, but they catch up with him quickly-and pleasantly. He feels his face flame. “And soup! And tea!”
Rose rolls awkwardly off him and crawls to her feet, pulling him after her. She looks like a drowned cat. Fortunately the Doctor has the presence of mind not to say so.
“Okay,” she says, “let’s-”
She never gets to finish the sentence, because the Doctor seizes her hand and hauls her away gleefully at top speed.
“Run!”
The TARDIS is parked in an alley near the park, and they are almost on it when the Doctor sees the woman by the bench, the only person (other than the two of them) dumb enough to be out in this weather. Her hair is dark, slicked to her head, and her skin icy pale. Her silver-grey dress is shadowed by rain. There is a tattoo of a rose on her shoulder.
He stumbles, sure of her face and does a double-take. But the woman is gone.
“What?” Rose asks, skidding to a stop beside him.
“Sorry,” he manages through the shock. “I thought I saw something…strange. But I didn’t. The TARDIS is just over here-come on!”
He sends Rose off to the shower and, as he drips into the grated floor, tries to tell himself that it is nothing, just like the tattooed docker and the clear-faced coffee-seller on Barcelona and the vague memory of a child. But this face is too familiar. The woman in grey is not nothing.
Suddenly he wonders if any of them were.
* * * * *
The Medusa Cascade
2008
The Doctor is 904
“Who-” the Doctor croaks, “who the hell are you?”
There is a tiny silence, before the cavernous room echoes with the sharp squawk of angry Daleks.
“EXTER-”
“-minate, yes, I know,” the strange woman finishes casually over the sound of weapons fire, safe inside the bounds of the TARDIS’ renewed extrapolator shielding. “Haven’t you tried that before? But here we are.”
“We are victorious!” Davros cries, but his voice is already climbing with uncertainty. “Your identity is irrelevant. You will stand and watch your world burn!”
“Haven’t any choice, have I?” she asks, leaning against the TARDIS with her hands in the Doctor’s coat pockets. “Nothing could stop you?”
“We are legion,” Dalek Caan interjects with a mad cackle. “No human can wipe the Daleks from the sky! It is foretold! Only-”
“Only the Abomination,” the woman finishes. “But that’s all right, then. I don’t repeat my effects.”
The Crucible is suddenly, utterly silent, except for the giggling of Dalek Caan.
“No,” the Doctor says at last. “No.”
Green eyes meet his. “Always.” They move away, long enough for her to smile reassuringly at Jackie, and then she returns her attention to the Daleks.
“Try this instead,” she offers, raising a small silver object and flicking its switch.
“EXTER-”
The Daleks simply stop, weapons unfired, eyestalks slowly fading to black.
“Wow. It really works,” the woman says wonderingly, staring at the device cradled in her palm. “That-I can’t count how many times that might’ve come in handy.” She slips the device back into the brown coat’s bottomless pocket and selects a button from the nearest panel. The prison-lights disappear. “Doctor, I-oh. Hello.”
He is already in front of her, right in front of her, staring, as she turns back to address him. And suddenly silence and shock give way to fury: of all the illusions, why this?
“On New Earth,” he demands through gritted teeth, “the sister with the Face of Boe-”
“Novice Hame,” she answers placidly. “You want to know who I am. You want me to prove it, yeah?”
He ignores the unspoken invitation. “Woman Wept, where-”
“In the constellation Virgo, ‘as you humans think of it’, that’s what you said.” She rolls her eyes. “We hiked the waves at the Bay of Tears, and I lost my left crampon. You had to drag me home over the ice, ‘cos I couldn’t walk. I never told anyone that bit-ask Mickey.”
Without meaning to, he turns to catch Mickey’s incredulous eye. “She didn’t. Rose, I know what the doctors said, but this is…this is weird.”
“And you are gorgeous, by the way,” Jack interjects, wiping away a tear surreptitiously. “Welcome back, Rosie. We all thought…”
“I was,” she answers quietly. “I’ll tell you the story, but I think we should finish up with this-” she gestures at the frozen Daleks “-first. Can anyone fly this thing?”
The Doctor turns away abruptly. “Simple!” he crows with forced cheer, and begins to investigate the nearest control bank. “Shut down the bomb, check. Transmit the nano-wave signal-brilliant, that-across the fleet, check. Gravitational fields, hull lockdowns, buh-bye power cores-one great lump of Dalek fleet, stuck together for all time, out of sync with the universe. Perfect! Which just leaves the planets. All those ejected cores-plenty of power for one giant shockwave, and home they go! Earth, safely back in the Sol System by teatime.” He presses one last button with a flourish.
“You do think you’re brilliant, don’t you, spaceman?” Donna drawls, with more than her usual sarcasm. Jackie’s lip twitches in spite of the uncertainty in her eyes.
“Now,” he carries on, voice climbing maniacally, “back to the TARDIS for us. The universe, saved again!” He whirls back to them and glances from face to face, looking for encouragement, praise, anything to keep up the act.
He finds six expressions full of confusion, belonging to six people who have taken a step back, forming a half-circle around him and…her.
“Is it really so hard…” she chokes on her own voice. Taking a deep breath, she forces herself to continue. “Is it so hard to believe it’s me?”
“It’s impossible,” he replies, turning to unlock the TARDIS. “Rose was human. Come on, all of you. Inside.”
No one moves, not even a twitch. She sniffs once, quietly, and it nearly breaks him. Whoever she is, whatever she is, she truly believes she is human. That she is Rose. It does break Jackie, who shatters the shocked tableau by running to her side and seizing her shoulder. She stares up at the new face, fingering the ginger hair, wiping away the tears.
“Told you not to come, Mum,” she sniffs. “Told you it would be hard, whatever happened. Didn’t even think about this.”
“Not come? I’ll have you know I saved her life!” Jackie fires back, waving a hand vaguely at Sarah Jane. “Me! An’ what would’ve happened if I hadn’t? You and him, you always think I’m not good enough-are you laughing at me? Am I so funny? Am I always-” She stops abruptly, staring up at the taller woman. “Oh m’god. You’re really…you’re really Rose.”
“Told ya.” And her smile is pure, unadulterated Rose Tyler. Jackie flings her arms around her daughter and bursts into noisy tears.
The Doctor is still facing away from them, staring aimlessly through the open door of the TARDIS. “Not possible,” he repeats quietly.
“I think we-” Jack begins in a mediating tone, but Rose interrupts over Jackie’s shoulder, addressing the Doctor’s back.
“Do you know, Doctor, I think I can guess why you never took me to Barcelona. Barcelona, where the dogs have no noses, you said.”
The statement is so absurd that he turns back to them in spite of his determination to ignore her. “What?”
“I wondered sometimes.” She scrubs at her nose with the back of her hand and gently disentangles herself from Jackie’s arms. “Why we never went. But I get it now, yeah?”
She closes her eyes for a moment and takes a deep breath, her face settling into an almost-familiar look of compassion and insight that comes far too close to home. With two quiet steps, she is in front of him, her hand coming to rest gently on his chest. The Doctor manages not to flinch. Barely.
“You didn’t want to go anymore,” she continues gently. “You didn’t want to go because it was the first thing you said to me with your new…you, and I, I didn’t believe you. I was so scared, Doctor, and so angry, and so sad. I said give him back. I said you weren’t him…weren’t you.
“Barcelona,” Rose says forcefully, and this time the Doctor does flinch. “See? Even now. It’s what you couldn’t be, for me.”
Rose’s eyes were soft and brown, comforting and familiar, but with enough behind them that he never wanted to stop searching. The hint of gold at the edge of his vision when he looked into them never failed to tantalize. These eyes, vivid green, with a faceted emerald fierceness behind the brimming tears, are uncharted territory, prisms that refract him in unfamiliar light.
And at the back of them, at the edge of his gaze, scattered like stars through the iris: bright living gold.
The Doctor realizes abruptly that her palm is still laying against his sternum, but now his is wrapped around it, fingers curled tightly against hers, pulling both their hands painfully between his hearts. And that is the answer.
In the background, he half-registers Jack breaking the silence, turning up his irresistible charm as he herds the others into the TARDIS. The door falls closed, and the Doctor lets his forehead come to rest against Rose’s.
“I’m scared,” he whispers hoarsely, helplessly.
“Me too,” she replies. “I’ve never done this before. Traveling with you and working at Torchwood, I’ve seen things I couldn’t believe, lots of things. But this…”
He chokes out what was meant to be a chuckle but feels suspiciously close to a sob. “Could be worse. You could…” have stayed dead, he thinks, and pushes it away. “You could have woken up with the worst hair of your life and a permanently annoyed face, wearing plaid.”
Rose giggles tearily. “Please tell me it’s not that bad?”
“Well, it was for me. Took me over a century to get rid of that haircut. But you…” The Doctor lifts his head and studies Rose critically. “Ginger-why do I never get to be ginger? You’re rather tall. Gangly, a bit.”
“A giraffe, then,” she sighs. “That’s why I feel all…wobbly. An Irish giraffe.”
“Nah,” he scoffs. “Let me be the first to say it: you…” The Doctor takes a deep breath. “Rose Tyler. You look beautiful.”
At the sound of her name, she seems to shake an immense burden from her shoulders. “For a human,” she laughs, and leans into him, wrapping her free arm firmly around him while leaving their joined hands trapped beneath her shoulder.
He buries his face in the curve of her neck, his coat under his cheek and her scorched hair trailing delicately across his closed eyes. Neither does much to hide the sudden harshness of his breathing or his desperate-and largely unsuccessful-attempts to hold back tears.
It takes him a good three tries to get the words around the lump in his throat, but eventually he manages it. “No, not for a human. Or not just for a human. For whatever miracle you are. For you. Rose.”
He does cry then, but so does she: tears and miracles in a sea of silent Daleks. And eventually, for the second time that day, they go home to the TARDIS.
Notes:
SHE LIVES!!!
Ahem.
"...the worst hair of your life and a permanently annoyed face, wearing plaid": I can't see Two being Ten's favorite version of himself; Mr. Hair Gel and Tailored Suit probably wouldn't even want to think about the almost-bowl-cut and plaid... :)