Act III, Final Scene (7/7)
Rose had a nagging feeling like something was wrong, but she couldn’t place it anywhere significant. She held the latest letter from Christian like a lifeline, as if it could put an end to her self-embattlement and fix everything. Getting an even stranger notion in her head, Rose went to her bookshelf where a decorated box concealed the other loves notes, and then she spread them out on her comforter.
Each letter was like a puzzle piece, and Rose wondered if she could combine them into a tangible whole. It was during her rereading that she caught the irregular loop of the ‘T’ on Christian’s note from that morning. She discerned the trait skeptically before holding it up in comparison to an earlier letter and gasped aloud. Not only did the ‘T’ overtly clash, but all of the handwriting was entirely different. Rose shook her head in amazement as she scrutinized and contrasted the letters. What could this mean?
But then she understood.
This last letter was the only one given to her by Christian in person, thus claiming its owner legitimately. The writer of the others could only be the Doctor, who had given each one to her in the privacy of the TARDIS where Christian had never been.
Rose curled her arms around bent knees. Her stomach lurched as memories of the last few days played out like a movie in her head.
When she’d overheard the Doctor reciting the first letter, she had said, “Those words were like…exactly what I’d want to hear. I thought maybe…I’d hoped they were for me.” When the Doctor insisted Christian had written them, she objected. “But I’ve only just met him! How can he write this to me like he sees into my soul?”
She remembered the Doctor’s thrilled expression, as if he was proud of making her feel that way.
“Oh my god!” Rose grimaced as comprehension dawned on her. When Christian had spoken to her from below the balcony, his tone had sounded so strained at first, but then he began to speak more naturally…in a deeper, more familiar voice. The Doctor’s.
“I would speak one million words if you would hold them dear, if I deserved to say them to you,” he had averred.
And then Christian, not the Doctor, had run upstairs to claim her lips. Rose blushed angrily when she realized that the Doctor must have known and been conspiring with Christian all along! And for what purpose? To make her feel like a fool?
Rose threw the letters off of her bed in disgust. She seethed until she began to recall their conversation after the ball, when she’d asked the Doctor about soul mates.
“It’s nice to know there’s someone out there who might be destined for you, who sees everything you are without question, who knows you better than you know yourself,” she had mused innocently. If that was how she felt about Christian, then did that mean she really felt all of that for the Doctor? Her head began to spin.
But that last letter from the Doctor…that was what really got her. She fished it out of the messy pile on the floor and held it tenderly.
“I never look at you,” it said, “but there’s some new virtue born in me, some new courage.”
Her heart beat faster as she read it with new understanding. Is this what the Doctor had been trying to tell her when she’d…rubbed it completely in his face that she essentially loved Christian and might stay with him in France? Had the Doctor been about to confess his part in all this, and maybe, just maybe that he meant what he had put to paper?
Rose felt a tear fall down her cheek, and then another. She couldn’t just sit here and wait to find out. She jumped up and ran from her room like the TARDIS had caught on fire, practically screaming the Doctor’s name.
“Doctor!” she cried, sticking her head inside the abandoned library, and then the empty lab. “Doctor!” she tried again as she ran through the deserted den and kitchen. “Doctor!” she gasped out, finding him at last only as he ran in the front door, his own expression as flushed and wild as hers.
“Rose,” he whispered, closing the distance between them in a heartbeat. His eyes were smoldering and his hair was wild.
He pulled her to him, and wrapping his hand around the back of her neck, pressed his burning lips to hers. At first she was too shocked to move, but then she kissed him back and he whimpered in the back of his throat, causing her to tighten her hold on him. They kissed recklessly, lips and teeth and tongues in a mad, exquisite whirl of contact. Their hearts beat a mad cacophony in their ears.
The Doctor broke away but held his forehead to hers, unable to break totally from her touch.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I’ve done something so stupid and I never meant to hurt you, oh Rose!” the Doctor gasped out as his words ran together.
Rose perceived his emotions as they overlapped like waves on his face, regret and anxiety followed by fear and adoration. Her heart tore as the tears began to spill over from his watering eyes.
“Please forgive me,” he begged her. His fingers were so tightly enlaced in her dress that when he began to crumble, she went with him to the floor in a heap. “I can’t lose you.”
He thought she was going to leave him, and it was only now that she understood what that would do to him.
Rose steeled her gaze as she regarded him unwaveringly and looked from one eye to the other. “I will never leave you,” she promised, and her voice cracked with emotion. “I am never away from you, even now I shall not leave you.”
“I lied to you!” the Doctor threw back as if he hadn’t heard her, burning her cheeks with his sinful hands. “I betrayed your trust…because I was too scared to admit how I really felt about you. And I let you believe it all!”
Rose closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, inhaling the scent of her Doctor like warm, clean laundry. She felt the heaviness of his limbs over hers and the double beat of his hearts against her chest, and very easily, she saw how little anything else mattered. The Doctor stopped crying and allowed himself to be cradled in Rose’s arms like a child. For just a moment, he let himself be taken care of. He let go of everything that had prevented this feeling for so long, and lived the moment that he had loved so well from afar: his Rose Tyler. No chaotic chase scene, no crashing from one adventure into the next, and absolutely no Baron Christian de Neuvillette to wall the space between them.
“I know what you did and I know why you did it,” Rose explained steadily. “But you once said you'd harken to my command and here it is."
Rose shifted in his embrace so that their two bodies felt like one. “Hold me closer,” she whispered.
**
Rose felt herself go weightless as the Doctor lifted her into his arms. He stared down into her eyes, his burning like a wildfire and threatening to consume hers. She didn’t speak as he carried her past the console and the hallway, walked into his bedroom or laid her on the soft expanse of his bed. The Doctor leaned over her and whispered his melodic language as he outlined the delicate lobe of her ear. Rose flushed and turned her face away, panting when he moved his lips down her neck to speak into the soft skin there.
His left hand came up and cradled her cheek, drawing her lips back under his and settling his body over her own. Rose inhaled sharply when she felt the heat of his erection through the folds fabric between her legs. The Doctor's words sped up when she moaned and pushed up against him while pulling at his shirt tails tucked in at the waist. She slowly exposed the skin up his sides and scratched her nails along as he let his tongue play over her clavicle and groaned intimately.
His lips worked over the thin cloth of her dress, and when he closed his mouth over her breast through the fabric, her arms fell limply at her sides. A heavy moan escaped her throat and his hands joined his mouth to outline her breasts. He worked down to her midriff before letting his fingers float down to the hem of her dress. He bowed his head and shut his eyes as his hands moved back up, letting his fingers stroke over the warm skin of her ankles, calves and thighs as he pushed the skirt of her dress up and out of the way.
Rose stared at his angelic face as he opened his eyes and she arrested him with the intensity of her gaze.
“I love you,” she said, perhaps understanding it herself for the first time.
The Doctor leaned back on his heels and peeled off his shirt, baring himself to her while keeping his eyes on her. When he slid back down, Rose raised one leg up to the level of his hip and flipped him over onto his back. He blew out a breath as her fingers lingered over the sparse hair of his chest and then traced down his torso to the swell of his stomach muscles.
“I love you,” she said again, and this time, the Doctor said it back. He pulled her down to him and spoke the words, first in English and then in Gallifreyan, and then in countless languages, some of which she’d never heard. Rose gasped when his hand slid between them and pressed against her center, making her jerk against his index finger and yearn for his continued touch. With his other hand, he unclasped the ties at the back of her dress and then slid it slowly from her shoulders, tickling at her exposed skin.
He licked his lips hungrily at the sight of her and she kissed him again, pushing her tongue to his delicately. They slowed down and kissed lazily for a while, trying to savor the moment and breathe each other in like a drug. Then Rose ran her hand over the hard outline of him in his trousers and the Doctor stuttered, trying not to release the pent up desire he’d been holding in check for so long.
Rose untied the waist of his pants and helped the Doctor slide them off before letting her half-disrobed dress fall to the floor. They both sighed at the sight of each other stripped of their last barriers. The Doctor pulled Rose back to him and she settled herself on top of him, aching for the feeling of him inside her. When he bucked against her, he slid in easily and caught his breath in a low moan of pleasure.
“Please,” he begged in quiet concentration.
Rose rocked forward and felt his eyes on her body like a caress to follow where his hands had been. She felt the strength of his thigh muscles beneath her as he pushed up into her center and rode the sensation of erotic completion. The Doctor rested his hand, fingers spread out against her chest as he savored the beat of her heart and the heat of her vitality.
He growled like an animal and pushed forward sharply before flipping Rose beneath him so that he could feel his weight on top of her, claiming her possessively. Rose squeezed him in reply and felt him deeper inside of her than she could bear. She shouted his name when he let his hands cradle under her bum and pushed further, strained harder and rubbed relentlessly against the spot that she craved the most. In just a few short thrusts, Rose climaxed and went limp beneath him.
The Doctor didn’t hold out long after that, and collapsed onto her chest without a sound, only panting and mumbling in his native tongue like a prayer. When he was able to look up again, Rose was biting her lip seductively. He nipped at her lip and pushed into her once more, causing her to shudder with pleasure.
“You’re amazing,” Rose whispered. “I’m such a fool not to have known.”
The Doctor shook his head as he withdrew from her warm embrace. He rolled on one side and looked down at her worshipfully.
“I love you Rose Tyler,” he told her, and then he cracked a smile. “You’re so…nice smelling.”
Rose snorted and pretended to hit him. “See, now I’m not so sure you wrote those words at all,” she teased. “Say you just copied them out of some great alien love sonnet?”
The Doctor laughed and gave her his most Doctor-ish grin, complete with dimples and shining teeth. “I would never!” he avowed, and then his face became more serious. He picked up her delicate hand and kissed the ends of each digit. “Every word I wrote, I wrote in earnest,” he told her.
“And now you are going to be happy,” Rose promised him.
“Happy?” the Doctor remarked. “I’m going to be a storm! Or a flame! I’ll fight whole armies all alone!” He jumped from the bed and shook his fist as Rose laughed joyfully and shook her head. “I have ten hearts! I have a hundred arms! Too strong to war with mortals…bring me giants!”
The Doctor shouted out this last line and then rolled back on the bed as Rose took him in his arms.
“Take my happiness Rose,” the Doctor whispered into her hair. “Take it and make you happier.”
He inhaled against the light sweat of her skin and snuggled into her warmth, wanting only this moment for the rest of his existence.
Rose whispered down to him. “I’ll take it and give it back, and we’ll share it like a breath between two bodies. Not mine or yours, but ours.”