Who Fic - The Art of Being Human - Epilogue
Prologue, Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six, Chapter Seven, Chapter Eight, Chapter Nine, Chapter Ten, Chapter Eleven, Epilogue
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On January 12th 2010 I started posting a WIP fan fiction tentatively titled “The Art of Being Human”. I got nineteen or so reviews for it. The final chapter, posted a couple of weeks back has had at least thirty-six commenter’s and I have absolutely no clue how many this epilogue will get.
Not many of you know this, but AoBH has actually been in the works since before February of 2009. No I am not even kidding. I don’t actually even remember when I first thought up the idea but I wrote the majority of it during 2009. Due to various craziness at university and with life I refused to post it until I was happy with it so I posted a bunch of chapters in quick succession, then decided to do some major rewrites and basically went on hiatus. Posted a bunch more chapters, went on hiatus. Posted a bunch of chapters and went on hiatus again...some of you may remember those days :P but!
More than two years from that first posting it’s finished. It’s done. All 80,000+ odd words of it. And I am forever indebted to those who have read, reviewed, recced, lurked, given me concrit, flailed, cried, laughed, offered meta, didn’t hate me after I didn’t tell anyone there would be an epilogue after the evil cliff-hanger of doom in Chapter Eleven, forgave me for my April Fools prank the other day, had gigantic comment debates with me, poked me whenever I went on hiatus, got me to write memes about the characters...everything. A huge, amazing thank you to all of you whether you’ve been there from the initial brainstorming days or you’ve read the whole thing in a matter of hours two days ago.
I set out to write a Human Nature/Family of Blood AU that was different to all the others I had read. Something that had depth to it and that had Rose out of her element as John’s wife and equal, not his maid. I hoped people would enjoy it, that I’d get a few laughs and a few tears along the way. What I got was so much more incredible and so much of it is thanks to you guys. Thank you for making this story amazing.
A special thank you to pacejunkie who was there from the very, very beginning of this story’s inception and indeed, my advent into writing for Who - you are the amazingest.
And now before you read, please to be checking out my playlists for this verse! They are here and here at my icon journal. There is now also fyeahartofbeinghuman on tumblr on which there will be random graphics at random intervals. Feel free to go there and request your favourite scenes and I will try to graphic them for you :3
There will also (hopefully) be follow up fics. At some point. I hope. Lord help me you guys...
Thank you, again to all of you, and I hope you enjoy.
Much love, sapph
~*~
Rose had imagined all sorts of horrible scenarios during her time apart from the Doctor. That he’d get himself hurt and regenerate. Or come back after years and years had passed for him and hardly any time at all for her. Or that no time had passed for him and loads had for her. Or worst of all - that he’d’ve picked up a new companion and would just pop in to steal his coat before moving on again.
Regardless, the Janis Joplin coat was the first thing she took - cramming it hastily into her bag even as she barged out of the flat and threw herself up against the edge of the balcony. Somehow, miraculously, there was the TARDIS - big and blue and wonderful - the light still flashing as she finished materialising.
A loud, “Hey!” exploded from her before she could stop herself and then she was bolting down the stairwell on concrete frozen feet, her breath coming in pants as she ran out into the courtyard at full pelt... She stopped dead at the sight of the Doctor.
For all the ways she’d imagined this moment playing out she’d never thought that she would find him leaning innocuously against the TARDIS, hands in his pockets, looking exactly the same as he had when she had left him.
For a moment she faltered, uncertainty making her feet and heart heavy. But then he smiled, a little crookedly. As though he’d really been waiting here all these weeks for her to come find him and she’d just somehow managed to miss him.
“Hello,” his voice was warm as treacle and Rose eagerly returned the greeting before suddenly frowning.
“M’not dreaming am I?” she wondered and when the Doctor’s face twisted into a silent question mark she helpfully added, “Only you’re not really a second chances sort of bloke...”
“Well,” he said, and Rose was delighted by the way his hand leapt up to his hair in something akin to embarrassment. “Luckily for you there’s only one person in the whole universe I just can’t say no to.”
They stood there for a long moment, silent and still, chests full to bursting. But then his eyes began to sparkle in earnest and his smile grew wider and she just couldn’t help but grin back at him. They stood there, metres and whole universes apart, and then the Doctor shifted his weight off the TARDIS and onto his feet and Rose ran forward, scattering bags in her wake and they were colliding in the most fantastic hug...
“Oooh...I thought you weren’t coming!” she wrapped her arms python-tight around his neck as he lifted her right off her feet. His arms felt amazingly strong across her lower back, wiry and wonderfully familiar. “I thought-I thought you weren’t getting my messages...”
“What - all fifteen hundred of them?” the Doctor laughed against her ear and then squeezed her with renewed vigour, making an appreciative noise that warmed Rose right down to her frozen toes. “Oh...of course I got them...”
“Why didn’t you come back then?” Rose asked, smile fading as she left his arms abruptly. The Doctor’s hands lingered on her waist a moment but at her impatient squirming they scuttled back to his pockets. “I must’ve asked you a hundred times...”
“Well,” he began, his hand leaping back up to ruffle his hair again. “Yes. About that. Erm. You see, I wanted to come back earlier but...thing is...well, trying to leave voicemail on a time machine...turns out to be easier in theory than in practice...” If he was stammering before, at Rose’s incredulous look he only became worse. “I mean,” he continued. “Well. Well first you’ve got to wait until the TARDIS stops long enough to intercept them, and then I couldn’t figure out how to listen to them anyway so I had to find the manual for it - turns out I’d actually thrown it in a supernova with the TARDIS manual about a hundred years ago...actually, maybe, it was closer to two hundred...? Anyway, so I had to go back to the place I got the machine from and borrow a manual only they wouldn’t let me so I had to get this bloke - Gerald his name was, Gerald! That’s right. And he showed me how to use it so then I had to go back to the TARDIS...what’s so funny?”
“Doctor,” Rose managed to gasp out between bursts of laughter. “You’re tellin’ me you couldn’t figure out an answering machine? Even my mum knows how to use one!”
“I got it eventually!” he bleated and Rose couldn’t help but start laughing all over again at the absurdity of it. She’d been torturing herself for weeks, wondering why he hadn’t come back. And all because he couldn’t work a flipping answering machine... “Oi! It just took a bit of time that’s all. And by then you’d already left all of your messages and I couldn’t very well just jump back in your timeline before you’d even finished leaving them...”
Rose’s laughter died very suddenly.
“Paradox,” she realised and she felt stupid for not realising it sooner. “You couldn’t go back to before I’d left them. You’d’ve messed up my timeline.”
“Big time,” the Doctor agreed, obviously relieved that she’d put two and two together. “Big, big, big time. Going back on personal timelines is a very big no-no. Very, very bad. And I didn’t really want to make a bigger mess of this than I already - R-Rose are you wearing pyjamas?”
It took her a moment to process his final comment but when the penny dropped Rose glanced down, only just realising that in her haste to get downstairs she hadn’t even bothered to put on a pair of slippers or anything. She looked sheepishly up at him.
“Erm...yeah?” she admitted, and suddenly they were both giggling like a pair of right proper idiots.
“Well I suppose we’d better get you into some proper clothes then,” the Doctor decided, moving to retrieve one of the bags she had flung aside previously. “Not exactly appropriate attire for saving the universe, pyjamas. That said, first adventure I ever had in this body I was wearing Howards. You remember? Very dashing in stripes, this regeneration.” he paused by the door of the TARDIS to preen and Rose laughed at him. “What?”
“You’re so...” she shook her head at him fondly. “You. S’like nothings even changed.”
The Doctor paused where he stood holding the door to the TARDIS open for her - an obvious invitation. And Rose, having retrieved her other bag suddenly felt a cold wash of fear overtake her excitement and the initial happiness she had felt at seeing him again.
He had listened to her messages. All of them. And he had come back for her, was offering her a place on the TARDIS without any hesitation whatsoever after all the things she’d said and done to hurt their friendship and it was what she wanted. More than anything it was what she wanted. But she couldn’t just go running back into the TARDIS after everything that had happened between them without acknowledging it first.
She was tired of pretending that things didn’t matter to her.
“Before we go anywhere...” Rose began and then hesitated, waiting for the Doctor’s reaction before she continued. His eyebrows lifted a little in surprise but he looked expectant rather than alarmed and so he quickly pressed on before she lost her nerve. “I told you about how I went back to Farringham and met Mr. Gregory an’...well he said something that really stuck with me, about how it’s good to look back an’ remember. Cos it’s important to know where you’ve come from. Say goodbye to your old life when it changes...”
The Doctor was inscrutable but remarkably intent when she paused once again to gauge how he was taking it all. Rose bit her lip, honestly a bit humbled by his attention, before pressing on.
“Look,” she continued. “Point is, I don’t reckon you gave me much of a chance to say goodbye to John. And Farringham too I guess. S’not your fault, I know it’s not how you do things. But...I kind of needed to say goodbye properly you know? I mean, I’ve figured out I’m not gonna stop missing him overnight. I’ll never really forget him, but...”
She chanced another searching look at the Doctor as she desperately tried to figure out where she was going with this. He looked a little uncertain but he was still nodding along. More to the point, he was listening. He wasn’t running into the TARDIS or babbling or trying to cover up the awkwardness of the conversation.
He was standing still. For her.
“I sort of started saying goodbye already,” she continued, voice cracking a little under the strain. She’d never really been this honest with the Doctor, and despite his calm front she still felt like she was treading on eggshells. “Going back to Farringham and everything. But there’s some other stuff I-I wanted to...to...”
She broke off abruptly, all of her previous nerve suddenly gone and she found herself frozen in a prolonged moment of absolute terror. She was pushing too far, too fast. She was going to scare him off. He was going to get back inside the TARDIS any second and leave her behind for good...
And then...
“Rose?” the Doctor pressed gently. “You wanted to...?”
“I want...” she paused to contemplate it properly for the first time, the possibilities opening like so many flowers in her mind. When she finally spoke, it was with decisiveness and strength. “Okay first I wanna say sorry for all the things I said when...no, just shh!” she all but jumped on him when he looked like he might interrupt. “Just for a minute yeah? I need to get this said - alright?”
The Doctor held his hands up in mock surrender before pretending to zip his mouth shut. Relieved, Rose took a deep mental breath before plunging back in.
“I get it you know,” she began, studiously not looking him in the eye. “Why you can’t...why you won’t...oh you know. I mean, it’s not like you don’t care, s’just...you don’t feel things the same way I do. And that’s fine. Really. I mean - you’re alien! You’re an alien from outer space and I honestly just forget sometimes, so...sorry for that. It’s funny. I spent all that time with John wishing he was more like you...and now I want you to be like him...god, I’d go mental if you did that to me. It wasn’t fair. Expecting you to be human. And knowing why I was upset when I wouldn’t even talk to you. I’m not gonna do that anymore. Look...
“We need to stop pretending things don’t matter to us when they actually do. Cos otherwise what’s the point? We can pretend things are fine but if they’re not we might as well not be together at all. And I wanna be with you - I wanna travel. But not cos I want to forget. Cos I wanna remember.”
The Doctor gazed at her for a long time as Rose shivered in her daggy old flannel pyjamas in the courtyard of the Powell Estate. And then he nodded.
“You’ve grown up.” He observed softly and Rose’s first reaction was to flinch, unsure what he was implying.
“Had to happen sooner or later,” she said weakly.
“No but look at you,” the Doctor said, and he sounded so damned proud. “You’re brilliant.”
Rose glowed with a mixture of embarrassment and pleasure but stood her ground regardless. She hadn’t just blurted all of that out for it to get swept under the rug again. “No more pretending.” she requested firmly.
“No more,” the Doctor agreed, holding out a long, thin hand towards her. “Promise.”
Rose hesitated only a moment longer before she stepped forward. As she came to the door she took his outstretched hand and his fingers tightened immediately around hers. Stepping through the door to the TARDIS hand in hand with her Doctor, she suddenly felt so light that she didn’t even feel the grating digging into her bare feet.
“Where to first then?” he asked, dumping her bags casually on the jump seat as he circled the console. “The singing fields of Elysium Six? The Intergalactic Zoo of Non-Sentient Reptiles? Paris in 1323? Or...”
“Actually,” Rose said, gingerly catching his wrist as he passed her. “I’ve got a request.”
“Really?” the Doctor paused in his mad dash around the console and turned to face her. “Well. Request away.”
Rose took a deep breath and looked down, taking hold of his other wrist as well and rubbing nervous circles over the inside of them both as she spoke. With his double pulse thudding coolly against her fingertips it was arguably the most intimate way she had touched him since he had come back and she was beyond relieved that it didn’t feel awkward.
“I wanna do Christmas.” She said finally. “For John.”
The Doctor’s face immediately scrunched up and Rose’s heart dropped until he responded with a somewhat aghast, “What, jump ahead and do next Christmas with your mother?”
He looked horrified at the idea and Rose shook her head, laughing out her relief. “He didn’t want to spend Christmas with mum. Just me. I figure, you’re the closest thing I’ve got to John...”
At the look on his face Rose’s heart briefly seized up again and she was terrified that she had said the completely wrong thing and hurt him again. But then the Doctor nodded his acquiescence and began piloting.
He chatted to her as he flew the TARDIS to their destination, Rose pawing through her bags to find something appropriate to wear. It was almost like old times, she thought wryly as he bounded towards the door, glancing back only once to ensure that she was following. As he passed the coral strut by the ramp he absently reached out for his coat. Following so close behind him, Rose couldn’t help but smile at the familiarity of the habit and the dejected slant of his shoulders once he realised it wasn’t there.
“Rose...” he began, turning to her but his eyes lit up when he saw that she was already one step ahead of him. “My coat!”
Grinning, Rose held it out for him and laughed out loud at the barely suppressed delight with which he took it from her - immediately slipping his narrow shoulders into it and preening like a cat being petted. “Oh...I missed this coat!”
“I missed you.” Rose told him as she drew level with him. The Doctor stilled, gazing down at her with the tiniest, proudest smile.
“Quite right too,” he returned and she whacked him on the shoulder out of principle (but she was still smiling because his voice had been so gentle that she couldn’t help but think that it was the closest thing she was going to get to an, I missed you too).
The place they had landed looked like any old street on Earth and Rose couldn’t help but feel puzzled at the lack of Christmas decorations. Poking through the wares of the tiny corner shop the Doctor dragged her into and waiting for the penny to drop, she discovered a display of paper poppies and felt a wave of disappointment.
“Definitely not Christmas,” she muttered, knowing that she should have expected him to get it wrong. “Oi,” she said, bounding up to where the Doctor was busily donating a few scraps of obviously alien change in exchange for two of the brooches. “What are we doing in November?” she demanded. “Doctor? It’s Remembrance Day.”
“Just a pit stop,” the Doctor said smoothly as he herded her out of the shop. “It’s on the way to Christmas. Linearly speaking anyway.”
“Whatever,” Rose grumbled. “After this we’re doing Christmas.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, flapping a hand impatiently at her. “Don’t panic. I meant to land us here.”
“Yeah sure you did,” Rose sighed but she followed him anyway, down the road and then a left turn, then another left until they were stopping at a rather unremarkable stretch of residential housing, interrupted only by a small park. The Doctor produced the pins from a coat pocket and held them out to her. Rose rolled her eyes as she took them, carefully attaching one to the lapel of his coat.
“So,” she said, pinning the second one onto her own jacket. “You ready to tell me why we’re here? N’why we’re wearing poppies?”
“So you can remember,” the Doctor nodded his head at the grassy square in front of them - it was a war memorial she realised. He’d brought her to a war memorial on Remembrance Day. Wondering if this was just the Doctor’s idea of a clever pun, Rose turned to ask but was distracted by the ceremony that they had wandered into.
At the very front of a bunch of military personnel in uniform were three old men - war vets. Two of them were standing but the third was huddled in a wheelchair, an impressive row of service medals across his chest and - Rose was surprised to note, his dark gaze fixed on her and the Doctor. For a moment her heart leapt before realising that the old man didn’t look remotely like John. But when she caught the bright brown eyes, sad and hopeful and gentle all at once she suddenly understood.
Through a haze of tears, Rose smiled and waved to Timothy Lattimer.
“He survived the war,” the Doctor informed her quietly. “Got married. Had children. Grandchildren. Even a few great grandkids on the way now. And he still carries his old fob watch with him everywhere he goes - a gift from a long, long time ago.”
And sure enough, there it was. A flash of silver - tarnished now but distinctive even from so far away. Rose’s tears doubled as she stared at the watch, held reverently in Tim’s gloved hand. The last connection she had to John apart from a hastily folded photocopy and her own memories.
“Funny thing, that watch,” the Doctor continued and she realised that somehow, while he’d been speaking, he had slipped his hand into hers natural as anything. “It never needs winding up. Never breaks. Just keeps ticking on. Bit like me really.”
Rose looked from the watch to the Doctor, but he wasn’t looking back at her, nor at Timothy. Instead, he was looking at his own feet.
“I’m sorry.”
He all but blurted it out and Rose baulked at this unexpected turn of events. The Doctor? Apologising? “What for?”
“You’re normally so good at dealing with change,” the Doctor admitted, brow creasing as he stared down at his trainers. “I never even thought you might need...I mean you got through my regeneration alright, hardly even batted an eyelid at all of that...” Rose squeezed his hand and his babbling stopped abruptly. He paused and then leant his shoulder against hers. “I’m sorry Rose. For being too thick to realise that all you needed was a little bit of time. Especially when it’s the one thing I’ve got in spades, me being a Time Lord and all...”
Rose abruptly leant up on tiptoe and pressed a kiss to his cheek, effectively silencing him. The Doctor blinked at her touch, emerging slowly from his stupor to gaze at her.
“S’alright,” Rose conceded, squeezing his hand again. “I know Doctor. You don’t need to say it.”
She had rarely seen the Doctor look so grateful in all the time they had travelled together. All of the worry in his face seemed to fall away and he rushed into the kind of impromptu embrace they hadn’t shared in a long, long time. Squeezing him back just as hard, Rose felt content for the first time in months.
And somewhere, amongst the trinkets and rubber bands filling the Doctor’s bigger-on-the-inside pockets rested an innocuous brown book filled to the brim with the scrawl of a man who loved her.
