Flowers on Air 4/11
TITLE: Flowers on Air
CHARACTERS: Ten/Rose, OC (lots)
RATING: PG/Teen
SPOILERS: None past mid-series-2
SUMMARY: After being temporarily stranded in 1999, the Doctor is faced with a temptation he may not be able to turn from. Can Rose save him from himself?
DISCLAIMER: If I owned any of these characters, I'd have already released a collectors edition of Until the End of the World on region 1 DVD. BBC, RTD, Wim Wenders, full props.
A/N: This is a crossover fic between Doctor Who and the mid-90's film Until the End of the World. Knowing anything about the movie is not required (besides, I'm taking some liberties, and then the Doctor shows up and the timeline's all shot to hell anyway).
This chapter: A short and shippy interlude wherein Rose contemplates life with the Doctor at her leisure.
Laying languidly in a hammock with a cool glass of water, Rose regarded the cloudless late afternoon sky and thought about the end of the world. Of all the ends of all the worlds that she had witnessed, or almost witnessed, or stopped from happening, or allowed to happen. A date with the destruction of the Earth, followed by chips, followed by the rest of her life. The end of this world, she knew, was a non-starter. Somewhere on the other side of the planet her 13-year-old self had a sneaky snog and lived to be grounded over it. She hummed a random tune in order to drown out the intrusive thoughts of how clumsy and embarrassing it had been.
Alone. Traveling with the Doctor, she was rarely alone. In mortal peril, frequently, but idle and alone almost never. It was a strange feeling, a little like being dragged on a vacation against her will, like when she was a sullen teenager made to spend bank holidays at the seaside with her mum. Here she was, comfortably resting, relaxed, finally acclimated to the heat, and potentially enjoying this rare down time while the TARDIS rebooted and readied to whisk them off again to some dark, dangerous time or place in vital need of the Doctor’s unique talents. But she just couldn’t settle.
The feeling she was experiencing was a kind of muteness, a muffling of the world around her, of her own senses. The presence of her friend seemed to heighten her awareness such that when he left her alone, she felt deaf, mute, and wrapped in cotton wool. Her own heartbeat thrummed in her ears, her tongue felt heavy and dry in her mouth, her skin, thick and numb. She’d felt this way before, in the few occasions that they’d been apart, and she knew finally why this torpor always descended on her in such times.
She pressed a thumb in to the flesh of her arm and watched the white mark bloom again with color when she removed it. Absently, she did it again. This dullness was what she had always felt, in the time before. Getting up day after day to her normal life with her normal (or mostly normal) mum and her normal boyfriend and her normal job. Now that she’d had her senses heightened, each nerve ending quivering in anticipation, each synapse firing with excruciating clarity, she knew it would be a literal torture to never experience it again, to go back to living a muffled life, everything kept under wraps, a slow suffocation over a period of decades.
He had done this. Not through the miraculous powers of the TARDIS or frightening Time Lord technology, but simply by his existence in her life. To better hear his voice, her ears strained at the jagged peaks and valleys of every sound wave. To better see this body of his, this new, wiry body, her eyes sharpened to every shadow and color. To better experience the brush of his hair across her arm as he leaned over the console, the electric feeling of her hand wrapped in his, the cool touch of his alien body as they went about their normal everyday saving-the-world business, her skin fairly prickled with nerve endings all waiting, waiting, waiting for the next accidental nudge or bump or graze.
That he seemed completely oblivious to her newly fine-tuned awareness in his presence was not something of great concern to Rose. He could perhaps never really experience the same sorts of feelings. It seemed likely that indeed he experienced the entire world like this all the time, with or without her. And that was alright. As long as she could travel with him, until the end of her days, experiencing a life full of seeing, hearing, touching, all on the edge of a knife, almost overwhelming in its vividness.
She’d stopped even worrying about it, stopped considering ever asking him about whether a Time Lord feels love, or love for a single person rather than love for the entirety of the Universe, for all of time and space, all of life and all death. She felt sure he loved in this more noble, Universal way. Why else would he risk his own formidable life time and time again to save beings that never even knew he existed? Up against that kind of unfathomably deep feeling, romantic love for a single person was absolutely puny, almost insulting to consider. So she’d ceased considering, and just lived her life at this high volume, this knife-edge, this cliff face. Forever.
Starting from her reverie, it occurred to her quite suddenly what was so wrong about this current situation, with Dr. Farber and the camera that took pictures blind people could see. The nagging tickle in the back of her brain throbbed suddenly and moved, to lodge directly in the pit of her stomach.
(To Chapter 5)
CHARACTERS: Ten/Rose, OC (lots)
RATING: PG/Teen
SPOILERS: None past mid-series-2
SUMMARY: After being temporarily stranded in 1999, the Doctor is faced with a temptation he may not be able to turn from. Can Rose save him from himself?
DISCLAIMER: If I owned any of these characters, I'd have already released a collectors edition of Until the End of the World on region 1 DVD. BBC, RTD, Wim Wenders, full props.
A/N: This is a crossover fic between Doctor Who and the mid-90's film Until the End of the World. Knowing anything about the movie is not required (besides, I'm taking some liberties, and then the Doctor shows up and the timeline's all shot to hell anyway).
This chapter: A short and shippy interlude wherein Rose contemplates life with the Doctor at her leisure.
Laying languidly in a hammock with a cool glass of water, Rose regarded the cloudless late afternoon sky and thought about the end of the world. Of all the ends of all the worlds that she had witnessed, or almost witnessed, or stopped from happening, or allowed to happen. A date with the destruction of the Earth, followed by chips, followed by the rest of her life. The end of this world, she knew, was a non-starter. Somewhere on the other side of the planet her 13-year-old self had a sneaky snog and lived to be grounded over it. She hummed a random tune in order to drown out the intrusive thoughts of how clumsy and embarrassing it had been.
Alone. Traveling with the Doctor, she was rarely alone. In mortal peril, frequently, but idle and alone almost never. It was a strange feeling, a little like being dragged on a vacation against her will, like when she was a sullen teenager made to spend bank holidays at the seaside with her mum. Here she was, comfortably resting, relaxed, finally acclimated to the heat, and potentially enjoying this rare down time while the TARDIS rebooted and readied to whisk them off again to some dark, dangerous time or place in vital need of the Doctor’s unique talents. But she just couldn’t settle.
The feeling she was experiencing was a kind of muteness, a muffling of the world around her, of her own senses. The presence of her friend seemed to heighten her awareness such that when he left her alone, she felt deaf, mute, and wrapped in cotton wool. Her own heartbeat thrummed in her ears, her tongue felt heavy and dry in her mouth, her skin, thick and numb. She’d felt this way before, in the few occasions that they’d been apart, and she knew finally why this torpor always descended on her in such times.
She pressed a thumb in to the flesh of her arm and watched the white mark bloom again with color when she removed it. Absently, she did it again. This dullness was what she had always felt, in the time before. Getting up day after day to her normal life with her normal (or mostly normal) mum and her normal boyfriend and her normal job. Now that she’d had her senses heightened, each nerve ending quivering in anticipation, each synapse firing with excruciating clarity, she knew it would be a literal torture to never experience it again, to go back to living a muffled life, everything kept under wraps, a slow suffocation over a period of decades.
He had done this. Not through the miraculous powers of the TARDIS or frightening Time Lord technology, but simply by his existence in her life. To better hear his voice, her ears strained at the jagged peaks and valleys of every sound wave. To better see this body of his, this new, wiry body, her eyes sharpened to every shadow and color. To better experience the brush of his hair across her arm as he leaned over the console, the electric feeling of her hand wrapped in his, the cool touch of his alien body as they went about their normal everyday saving-the-world business, her skin fairly prickled with nerve endings all waiting, waiting, waiting for the next accidental nudge or bump or graze.
That he seemed completely oblivious to her newly fine-tuned awareness in his presence was not something of great concern to Rose. He could perhaps never really experience the same sorts of feelings. It seemed likely that indeed he experienced the entire world like this all the time, with or without her. And that was alright. As long as she could travel with him, until the end of her days, experiencing a life full of seeing, hearing, touching, all on the edge of a knife, almost overwhelming in its vividness.
She’d stopped even worrying about it, stopped considering ever asking him about whether a Time Lord feels love, or love for a single person rather than love for the entirety of the Universe, for all of time and space, all of life and all death. She felt sure he loved in this more noble, Universal way. Why else would he risk his own formidable life time and time again to save beings that never even knew he existed? Up against that kind of unfathomably deep feeling, romantic love for a single person was absolutely puny, almost insulting to consider. So she’d ceased considering, and just lived her life at this high volume, this knife-edge, this cliff face. Forever.
Starting from her reverie, it occurred to her quite suddenly what was so wrong about this current situation, with Dr. Farber and the camera that took pictures blind people could see. The nagging tickle in the back of her brain throbbed suddenly and moved, to lodge directly in the pit of her stomach.
(To Chapter 5)