Fic: Calendar. (Part 2 of ?, Doctor/Rose, totally AU, pg-13 to R.)
Calendar. Part two. Part one, here. This is an ongoing sequel to Monsters. Doctor/Rose, slayer and vampire, PG-13 to R, and oh-so-incredibly-AU.
There is a moment of fumbled wrestling; she's fast but he's faster at the moment, long limbs twisted around hers, pinning her against the carpet with his knees on either side of her hips. Rose fidgets and blows the end of the scarf out of her face and then is perfectly still. She smiles up at him. "Your librarian's reflexes are improving," she says.
"You should watch me index," he murmurs.
Rose is redecorating.
"You missed a spot," he says, and ducks the cleaning rag she's throwing at his face. "Tsk, too slow." She grins and shakes her head and goes back to the bookshelf.
She's sitting cross-legged on the floor of the crypt, on a gorgeous Persian carpet with a large and suspicious old stain in the middle. There are little half-stacks of books around her, in no order at all. Madness. He's tried to let her alphabetize them by author, or at least group them by subject, and she just smiles her cat's smile and says, I have them the way I like them. It would be infuriating on anyone else. But she's wearing a silk scarf around her hair and little curls keep tumbling out, and her lovely pale hands are tracing the spines of the books, selecting the right ones and slipping them onto the shelves with focused care. It's strangely soothing; he lies back on the duvet wrinkling beneath him, stares up at the beams and candles crossing the ceiling. His finger taps the book he's just put down, some collection of twentieth-century poetry, the pages dog-eared and the cover tattered. He drifts.
Rose's collection is impressive, despite the trashy romance novels and true-crime thrillers she accumulates on five-fingered discount from the supermarket racks. There are classics and first editions mixed in with those, surprising treasures. Once, waiting for her to finish lacing up her boots, he'd flipped through a few covers to discover a faded copy of The Tower, with to another Rose inscribed on the title page in an infamously wandering hand. "Is this- you couldn't have-" he'd muttered, stunned, and she'd just winked and told him to get moving.
"Penny for your thoughts," she says, behind him. Her shadow crosses overhead. He didn't hear her moving, but he feels her leaning in near his shoulder, resting her hand on the bedpost for balance. "Normally, you'd already be talking my ear off about some new metadata-thing, or how you invented a new catalogue structure and nobody can see how brilliant it is. Yet," she adds, tip of her tongue between her teeth. "Go on, then. Astonish me."
"Mm," he says, comfortably. "Not really so astonishing. July's quiet. No school book reports. Lots of time to catch up on projects, though. Today I re-did the sorting shelves. You know, the labels were in almost total disarray," he continues, seriously, and Rose bursts out laughing, hiding her mouth with one hand.
"Um, nothing," she says. "Nothing." Her eyes are dancing.
"What?"
"Really, it's nothing." He scowls and sits up and crosses his arms over his chest, and Rose trembles with contained hilarity. "Into every generation, a slayer is born," she intones. "He alone," and here she giggles, "will have the strength and speed to re-label the shelves."
She cracks up and he grabs her around the middle, aiming for her vulnerable sides with the tips of his fingers. Rose ducks away from him and he rolls over the bed after her, landing on his feet and springing up to catch her around the waist. She shrieks with laughter and topples down onto the books, turns them both over to push him down. Hardbacks prod into his spine and he yelps. There is a moment of fumbled wrestling; she's fast but he's faster at the moment, long limbs twisted around hers, pinning her against the carpet with his knees on either side of her hips. Rose fidgets and blows the end of the scarf out of her face and then is perfectly still. She smiles up at him. "Your librarian's reflexes are improving," she says.
"You should watch me index," he murmurs, and Rose lets go of another hysterical chuckle. She reaches up and strokes the soft, fine hair at his temples. He leans forward and brushes his mouth against hers; a whisper of air between them, barely a kiss. She leans up into it, parting her lips, and it's wonderful and then it's suddenly too much, too much, Rose beneath him and all around him, Rose roseroserose-
-he pulls back and his pulse beats terrified and fierce, remembering a hand over his heart and Rose wreathed in flames, those horrible dreams. He watches her, wide-eyed. Nothing happens for a long minute, and then Rose says,
"Are you alright?"
He doesn't have an answer for that.
On patrol that night there is a broken grave smeared with fresh blood; he stakes the first vampire that charges him and then he stares at the red for a long time, the rivulets and latticework where it spilled out and stained, the veined paths it took in the grain of marble. He reads and wonders, recognizing something. He divines. Rose is somewhere chasing down the second vampire. After a minute, he hears her growl of triumph and the sound of flesh exploding into dust. He kneels down and puts his hand in the blood, tests it with a finger.
Still warm.
"Something's coming," he tells Yana, the next morning. Yana is still in his dressing gown, fingers wrapped around a mug of tea. The slayer's own mug is cooling, ignored, on the counter. He looks down at his hands, knotted together in his lap. "You said, when all this started, that there are things I'm just going to know, and I'm not going to know why."
"Premonitions. A slayer's gift." His watcher stares at him. "The dreams again?"
"Not really," he lies. He thinks about it. He dreamed of blood, and stone, and for a strange second in the graveyard it all seemed to fit. He still doesn't understand, not yet. "Sort of. I don't know. I don't know what, I just- everything feels wrong, off somehow. I just know something's coming." He lifts his head and meets the old man's eyes; they're tired but warm, somehow comforting. Adult. They make this bit a little easier. A little. "It's like, before the lightning hits- before the clouds even roll in. The taste of the air, the way the hair stands up on the back of your neck."
"The oncoming storm," Yana suggests. The slayer nods.
"Yeah," he agrees, and reaches for his mug. There's a trace of warmth still lingering, or else his hands are just unbearably cold. "Exactly." He blows across the top of his tea, exhaling almost like a sigh. "What happens next?" he asks, and Yana's mouth quirks up in a half-smile.
"I don't know," says Yana, "that I'm the one you should be asking that question."
"What's that supposed to mean?" he asks, but Yana doesn't answer.
His fist connects with bone, and the bone gives way.
"Holy fuck," the vampire slurs, and staggers backwards. "Who the fuck are you?" It comes out like who um fuh ur yoo. He doesn't seem to be pleased at the distraction; seconds ago, they were prying him off the throat of a struggling pizza delivery man. Who has in turn already high-tailed it in the direction of town center without so much as a mumbled thanks. The vampire paws at his own face, screeches with fury when he presses against the shattered jaw. "You are a real asshole," he hollers, incomprehensibly.
Behind him, unhelpfully, Rose is laughing.
"Are you new in town?" she asks, circling the fence. She turns and smirks, ignoring the vampire. "It's been a while, hasn't it? Since we met anyone who didn't recognize you." The slayer folds his arms across his chest. "You should get a nametag," she adds. "Public defender, ask me how."
"Ha ha." He frowns. "Shall we get on with it?" Rose's eyes light up.
"After you," she smiles, predatory.
"Ladies first."
"Get on with what?" garbles the vampire, and Rose jumps the curb to launch herself at its throat. The vampire swings at her clumsily and then lands a solid punch to her stomach; she falls backwards but scissors her legs out, knocking him down and rolling on top of him. She breaks his neck with a vicious twist and dusts him a second later. She stands, feline, still trailed by a cloud of bone ash, smiling like a loon.
He really does love to watch her fight.
They circle the graveyard again, talking about nothing important. Rose has gotten herself a second-hand television, though the reception below-ground is probably going to prove impossible. He suggests a dvd player.
"Sure," she smirks. "Though it'll have to wait for fall. I don't think I can fit any major electronics under this t-shirt."
"I'm not listening to your criminal boasts," he says, hands over his ears. But against his better judgment he glances down at the fabric stretched across her front, faded in the blues and still triumphant in the reds. "No," he agrees. "I think this particular Union Jack's got its hands full already." Rose grins, her eyes liquid and dark again, inviting. He glances away, embarrassed, but the blood's already at the tops of his ears, flushing his face. There's more left over from the fight than he cares to admit, sometimes. The rush. He wants her cool skin under his palms. He's about to speak, to ask her something he's never asked her before, when she stops and stills, her hand on top of his forearm. She tilts her head up, slightly, as if she's breathing the night air. Another impossibility, but then, that's all she is.
"Run," she says. He doesn't react. "Run," she says again, urgently, her eyes wide and white at the rims. She shoves him backwards, looking around towards the road, the streetlights in the distance, the flicker of lights in the town beyond. "Go, slayer."
"What-"
"Go," she hisses, and he backs up. Her fangs are out, her eyes shifting wildly from one color to the next. He reaches out for her, to pull her along with him, but it's as if she's looking past him entirely. There is a sound from the brush, a soft noise like the footsteps of a cat. Rose actually trembles, and not for the first time the slayer thinks, what in God's name is going on?
There is something smiling in the leaves.
He can see it through a gap; there is enough light to catch a glint of white, a flash of brightness in the shadow. Shark's teeth, a row of them. They part and click and the vampire emerges from the shade. It is the tallest one he's ever seen, soaring past six feet, knotted and muscular like a stunted branch. Rose hisses again, a horrible sound she's never made before. The demon, or the woman, enraged beyond reason. The vampire smiles wider, too widely. It seems to split his face in half. There is a stain around his mouth, faint red and rust, memento mori in heart's blood.
He doesn't feel ready.
"Hello, boy," it says.
The slayer's heart pounds in his ears.
He doesn't remember the rest of the fight. He remembers the beginning, the awkward first steps of the dance, ducking around, stake in hand, getting picked up in that massive grip and tossed into the air. He remembers Rose's horrible shriek, the spray of blood when she wrenched off a chunk of the vampire's arm; remembers Rose shaken off, flung against the side of a mausoleum with a sickening crunch. He remembers that creature over him, hands reaching down, the slayer's feet kicking out, connecting, the hands around his throat, the stake slicing at the vampire's face, splinters and snarls, growing weaker, those hands so tight, and the air rushing-
-he remembers the second his head hit stone, hard, the hollow thud of his skull and the instant darkness, the end of everything.
He thinks about Rose in that darkness, her startled eyes and her mouth paused in a cry; he thinks about the ends of her curls brushing between his fingers, the champagne bubbles in her laugh, the warmth and longing in her eyes when she's sure he's not looking. He's always looking, and never speaking, what a fool; and now it's all over, he'll never get to say it. He's gone and died and missed his chance, and now she'll never know.
It's that thought that switches him back on.
"Oh," he says. He opens his eyes, with effort. Rose is kneeling above him with her hands wrapped around his, both pairs pressed to her heart. "I'm not-"
"I love you," she says. It's so raw. There is a gash across her forehead, blood smeared down her shirt. He stares at her and the world seems to spin around and around above them, below them. He's not even afraid. He wants to swallow those words up, eat them and breathe them and keep them, until he understands.
"Oh," he says. "I know."
She half-drags him to Yana's house, and before he can even process that information, Yana is shining a flashlight in his eyes and putting a compress on his throbbing skull and insisting he change into a clean pair of pajamas. Rose isn't answering his questions, won't tell him what happened. He's too tired and sore to care. He ends up in the spare bedroom, in a pair of borrowed drawstring pants three inches too short and a plain undershirt. He is tucked in and given a glass of water and told to rest. He shuts his eyes for only a second.
That second probably lasts the night.
After a while there are muted sounds, tuning in and out of the dial in his head. Listening closely makes him dizzy, but he does it anyway, fighting off the duller edge of sleep, straining to hear words and voices. One low and one lower, both soft and tense.
"It's seven in the morning." It's Rose's voice, irritated. "Not exactly my favorite hour. And anyway, I'm not leaving him. If it bothers you, me being in your house-"
"That's not what I said." Yana now. He sounds- strange. "You did the right thing, bringing him here."
"Gosh, thanks." Pacing, the click of Rose's boots. "You're too kind."
"Rose," says Yana. The pacing stops, and there is a long silence. The slayer lies on his back and tries to focus his eyes, tries to hear the conversation, but everything's stopped. How wonders if he's gone deaf, retroactively, if the blow to his head knocked the sense literally out of him; but he can hear the clock ticking steadily and his own breath, harsh and flat in his ears. The curtains are pulled tight, but there's a leak of daylight on the ceiling. He's been sleeping for hours. He grits his teeth and leans up, tries to reach a sitting position. It hurts and the room spins around him; he seems to tip forward and back like a bowl of soup sloshing heavily from side to side. He pulls himself up by his knees, but it's too much. He groans out loud, little more than a sigh, and suddenly he hears the tap of Rose's boots again, the thump of the door opening too fast. Preternatural hearing, he sometimes forgets. She's framed by light from the hall, her face sharp with worry. The cut on her head is clean.
"Lie down," she says. She sits beside him, eases him back onto the pillow. "Give it another hour or so, you were seriously out."
"Weren't you supposed to keep me awake?"
"It's a myth," she says. "Relax. We'll be here when you feel like getting up." He glances at the door, at Yana, who is still standing awkwardly outside the frame. The old man nods, barely, at her words. "Go to sleep, slayer. Dream about the Bodleian Library," she says, and strokes his arm. "You're locked in overnight. With rollerskates." He makes a token protest, but it really is too comfortable to resist- the pillows under him, the circular press of her hand on his arm. There's only a thin screen between him and unconsciousness, and he's passing through it like a breeze. The last thing he hears is Yana's voice, rolling and steady, tidal waves rushing against the shore of all his dreams.
If you won't tell him, Yana says, I will.
Part three.
There is a moment of fumbled wrestling; she's fast but he's faster at the moment, long limbs twisted around hers, pinning her against the carpet with his knees on either side of her hips. Rose fidgets and blows the end of the scarf out of her face and then is perfectly still. She smiles up at him. "Your librarian's reflexes are improving," she says.
"You should watch me index," he murmurs.
Rose is redecorating.
"You missed a spot," he says, and ducks the cleaning rag she's throwing at his face. "Tsk, too slow." She grins and shakes her head and goes back to the bookshelf.
She's sitting cross-legged on the floor of the crypt, on a gorgeous Persian carpet with a large and suspicious old stain in the middle. There are little half-stacks of books around her, in no order at all. Madness. He's tried to let her alphabetize them by author, or at least group them by subject, and she just smiles her cat's smile and says, I have them the way I like them. It would be infuriating on anyone else. But she's wearing a silk scarf around her hair and little curls keep tumbling out, and her lovely pale hands are tracing the spines of the books, selecting the right ones and slipping them onto the shelves with focused care. It's strangely soothing; he lies back on the duvet wrinkling beneath him, stares up at the beams and candles crossing the ceiling. His finger taps the book he's just put down, some collection of twentieth-century poetry, the pages dog-eared and the cover tattered. He drifts.
Rose's collection is impressive, despite the trashy romance novels and true-crime thrillers she accumulates on five-fingered discount from the supermarket racks. There are classics and first editions mixed in with those, surprising treasures. Once, waiting for her to finish lacing up her boots, he'd flipped through a few covers to discover a faded copy of The Tower, with to another Rose inscribed on the title page in an infamously wandering hand. "Is this- you couldn't have-" he'd muttered, stunned, and she'd just winked and told him to get moving.
"Penny for your thoughts," she says, behind him. Her shadow crosses overhead. He didn't hear her moving, but he feels her leaning in near his shoulder, resting her hand on the bedpost for balance. "Normally, you'd already be talking my ear off about some new metadata-thing, or how you invented a new catalogue structure and nobody can see how brilliant it is. Yet," she adds, tip of her tongue between her teeth. "Go on, then. Astonish me."
"Mm," he says, comfortably. "Not really so astonishing. July's quiet. No school book reports. Lots of time to catch up on projects, though. Today I re-did the sorting shelves. You know, the labels were in almost total disarray," he continues, seriously, and Rose bursts out laughing, hiding her mouth with one hand.
"Um, nothing," she says. "Nothing." Her eyes are dancing.
"What?"
"Really, it's nothing." He scowls and sits up and crosses his arms over his chest, and Rose trembles with contained hilarity. "Into every generation, a slayer is born," she intones. "He alone," and here she giggles, "will have the strength and speed to re-label the shelves."
She cracks up and he grabs her around the middle, aiming for her vulnerable sides with the tips of his fingers. Rose ducks away from him and he rolls over the bed after her, landing on his feet and springing up to catch her around the waist. She shrieks with laughter and topples down onto the books, turns them both over to push him down. Hardbacks prod into his spine and he yelps. There is a moment of fumbled wrestling; she's fast but he's faster at the moment, long limbs twisted around hers, pinning her against the carpet with his knees on either side of her hips. Rose fidgets and blows the end of the scarf out of her face and then is perfectly still. She smiles up at him. "Your librarian's reflexes are improving," she says.
"You should watch me index," he murmurs, and Rose lets go of another hysterical chuckle. She reaches up and strokes the soft, fine hair at his temples. He leans forward and brushes his mouth against hers; a whisper of air between them, barely a kiss. She leans up into it, parting her lips, and it's wonderful and then it's suddenly too much, too much, Rose beneath him and all around him, Rose roseroserose-
-he pulls back and his pulse beats terrified and fierce, remembering a hand over his heart and Rose wreathed in flames, those horrible dreams. He watches her, wide-eyed. Nothing happens for a long minute, and then Rose says,
"Are you alright?"
He doesn't have an answer for that.
On patrol that night there is a broken grave smeared with fresh blood; he stakes the first vampire that charges him and then he stares at the red for a long time, the rivulets and latticework where it spilled out and stained, the veined paths it took in the grain of marble. He reads and wonders, recognizing something. He divines. Rose is somewhere chasing down the second vampire. After a minute, he hears her growl of triumph and the sound of flesh exploding into dust. He kneels down and puts his hand in the blood, tests it with a finger.
Still warm.
"Something's coming," he tells Yana, the next morning. Yana is still in his dressing gown, fingers wrapped around a mug of tea. The slayer's own mug is cooling, ignored, on the counter. He looks down at his hands, knotted together in his lap. "You said, when all this started, that there are things I'm just going to know, and I'm not going to know why."
"Premonitions. A slayer's gift." His watcher stares at him. "The dreams again?"
"Not really," he lies. He thinks about it. He dreamed of blood, and stone, and for a strange second in the graveyard it all seemed to fit. He still doesn't understand, not yet. "Sort of. I don't know. I don't know what, I just- everything feels wrong, off somehow. I just know something's coming." He lifts his head and meets the old man's eyes; they're tired but warm, somehow comforting. Adult. They make this bit a little easier. A little. "It's like, before the lightning hits- before the clouds even roll in. The taste of the air, the way the hair stands up on the back of your neck."
"The oncoming storm," Yana suggests. The slayer nods.
"Yeah," he agrees, and reaches for his mug. There's a trace of warmth still lingering, or else his hands are just unbearably cold. "Exactly." He blows across the top of his tea, exhaling almost like a sigh. "What happens next?" he asks, and Yana's mouth quirks up in a half-smile.
"I don't know," says Yana, "that I'm the one you should be asking that question."
"What's that supposed to mean?" he asks, but Yana doesn't answer.
His fist connects with bone, and the bone gives way.
"Holy fuck," the vampire slurs, and staggers backwards. "Who the fuck are you?" It comes out like who um fuh ur yoo. He doesn't seem to be pleased at the distraction; seconds ago, they were prying him off the throat of a struggling pizza delivery man. Who has in turn already high-tailed it in the direction of town center without so much as a mumbled thanks. The vampire paws at his own face, screeches with fury when he presses against the shattered jaw. "You are a real asshole," he hollers, incomprehensibly.
Behind him, unhelpfully, Rose is laughing.
"Are you new in town?" she asks, circling the fence. She turns and smirks, ignoring the vampire. "It's been a while, hasn't it? Since we met anyone who didn't recognize you." The slayer folds his arms across his chest. "You should get a nametag," she adds. "Public defender, ask me how."
"Ha ha." He frowns. "Shall we get on with it?" Rose's eyes light up.
"After you," she smiles, predatory.
"Ladies first."
"Get on with what?" garbles the vampire, and Rose jumps the curb to launch herself at its throat. The vampire swings at her clumsily and then lands a solid punch to her stomach; she falls backwards but scissors her legs out, knocking him down and rolling on top of him. She breaks his neck with a vicious twist and dusts him a second later. She stands, feline, still trailed by a cloud of bone ash, smiling like a loon.
He really does love to watch her fight.
They circle the graveyard again, talking about nothing important. Rose has gotten herself a second-hand television, though the reception below-ground is probably going to prove impossible. He suggests a dvd player.
"Sure," she smirks. "Though it'll have to wait for fall. I don't think I can fit any major electronics under this t-shirt."
"I'm not listening to your criminal boasts," he says, hands over his ears. But against his better judgment he glances down at the fabric stretched across her front, faded in the blues and still triumphant in the reds. "No," he agrees. "I think this particular Union Jack's got its hands full already." Rose grins, her eyes liquid and dark again, inviting. He glances away, embarrassed, but the blood's already at the tops of his ears, flushing his face. There's more left over from the fight than he cares to admit, sometimes. The rush. He wants her cool skin under his palms. He's about to speak, to ask her something he's never asked her before, when she stops and stills, her hand on top of his forearm. She tilts her head up, slightly, as if she's breathing the night air. Another impossibility, but then, that's all she is.
"Run," she says. He doesn't react. "Run," she says again, urgently, her eyes wide and white at the rims. She shoves him backwards, looking around towards the road, the streetlights in the distance, the flicker of lights in the town beyond. "Go, slayer."
"What-"
"Go," she hisses, and he backs up. Her fangs are out, her eyes shifting wildly from one color to the next. He reaches out for her, to pull her along with him, but it's as if she's looking past him entirely. There is a sound from the brush, a soft noise like the footsteps of a cat. Rose actually trembles, and not for the first time the slayer thinks, what in God's name is going on?
There is something smiling in the leaves.
He can see it through a gap; there is enough light to catch a glint of white, a flash of brightness in the shadow. Shark's teeth, a row of them. They part and click and the vampire emerges from the shade. It is the tallest one he's ever seen, soaring past six feet, knotted and muscular like a stunted branch. Rose hisses again, a horrible sound she's never made before. The demon, or the woman, enraged beyond reason. The vampire smiles wider, too widely. It seems to split his face in half. There is a stain around his mouth, faint red and rust, memento mori in heart's blood.
He doesn't feel ready.
"Hello, boy," it says.
The slayer's heart pounds in his ears.
He doesn't remember the rest of the fight. He remembers the beginning, the awkward first steps of the dance, ducking around, stake in hand, getting picked up in that massive grip and tossed into the air. He remembers Rose's horrible shriek, the spray of blood when she wrenched off a chunk of the vampire's arm; remembers Rose shaken off, flung against the side of a mausoleum with a sickening crunch. He remembers that creature over him, hands reaching down, the slayer's feet kicking out, connecting, the hands around his throat, the stake slicing at the vampire's face, splinters and snarls, growing weaker, those hands so tight, and the air rushing-
-he remembers the second his head hit stone, hard, the hollow thud of his skull and the instant darkness, the end of everything.
He thinks about Rose in that darkness, her startled eyes and her mouth paused in a cry; he thinks about the ends of her curls brushing between his fingers, the champagne bubbles in her laugh, the warmth and longing in her eyes when she's sure he's not looking. He's always looking, and never speaking, what a fool; and now it's all over, he'll never get to say it. He's gone and died and missed his chance, and now she'll never know.
It's that thought that switches him back on.
"Oh," he says. He opens his eyes, with effort. Rose is kneeling above him with her hands wrapped around his, both pairs pressed to her heart. "I'm not-"
"I love you," she says. It's so raw. There is a gash across her forehead, blood smeared down her shirt. He stares at her and the world seems to spin around and around above them, below them. He's not even afraid. He wants to swallow those words up, eat them and breathe them and keep them, until he understands.
"Oh," he says. "I know."
She half-drags him to Yana's house, and before he can even process that information, Yana is shining a flashlight in his eyes and putting a compress on his throbbing skull and insisting he change into a clean pair of pajamas. Rose isn't answering his questions, won't tell him what happened. He's too tired and sore to care. He ends up in the spare bedroom, in a pair of borrowed drawstring pants three inches too short and a plain undershirt. He is tucked in and given a glass of water and told to rest. He shuts his eyes for only a second.
That second probably lasts the night.
After a while there are muted sounds, tuning in and out of the dial in his head. Listening closely makes him dizzy, but he does it anyway, fighting off the duller edge of sleep, straining to hear words and voices. One low and one lower, both soft and tense.
"It's seven in the morning." It's Rose's voice, irritated. "Not exactly my favorite hour. And anyway, I'm not leaving him. If it bothers you, me being in your house-"
"That's not what I said." Yana now. He sounds- strange. "You did the right thing, bringing him here."
"Gosh, thanks." Pacing, the click of Rose's boots. "You're too kind."
"Rose," says Yana. The pacing stops, and there is a long silence. The slayer lies on his back and tries to focus his eyes, tries to hear the conversation, but everything's stopped. How wonders if he's gone deaf, retroactively, if the blow to his head knocked the sense literally out of him; but he can hear the clock ticking steadily and his own breath, harsh and flat in his ears. The curtains are pulled tight, but there's a leak of daylight on the ceiling. He's been sleeping for hours. He grits his teeth and leans up, tries to reach a sitting position. It hurts and the room spins around him; he seems to tip forward and back like a bowl of soup sloshing heavily from side to side. He pulls himself up by his knees, but it's too much. He groans out loud, little more than a sigh, and suddenly he hears the tap of Rose's boots again, the thump of the door opening too fast. Preternatural hearing, he sometimes forgets. She's framed by light from the hall, her face sharp with worry. The cut on her head is clean.
"Lie down," she says. She sits beside him, eases him back onto the pillow. "Give it another hour or so, you were seriously out."
"Weren't you supposed to keep me awake?"
"It's a myth," she says. "Relax. We'll be here when you feel like getting up." He glances at the door, at Yana, who is still standing awkwardly outside the frame. The old man nods, barely, at her words. "Go to sleep, slayer. Dream about the Bodleian Library," she says, and strokes his arm. "You're locked in overnight. With rollerskates." He makes a token protest, but it really is too comfortable to resist- the pillows under him, the circular press of her hand on his arm. There's only a thin screen between him and unconsciousness, and he's passing through it like a breeze. The last thing he hears is Yana's voice, rolling and steady, tidal waves rushing against the shore of all his dreams.
If you won't tell him, Yana says, I will.
Part three.