Flowers on Air 8/11
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 whole planet, a whole world, a whole people, preserved forever in ones and zeros, right here. Every night I could dream them in to existence, and every day live my life with them again."
Lying on her cot, Rose heard the door to the lab open and shut. It was dusk, the sky a close match for the strange orange sky she had seen in the Doctor’s dream. Through the netting of her tent, she could see the tall, gliding figure of the Doctor, clutching something in his hand that had a small blinking green light on it. At first it looked like he might be coming to have a chat with her, and her senses snapped to full attention, but he walked right by and continued up in to the rocks behind the centre.
Rose began weighing the options. On the one hand, she’d already invaded the Doctor’s privacy once today and still felt horrible. And what if he was just taking a walk to have a think, or enjoy the night air? She fussed with her pillow and sheet and heaved a sigh. The crunching sound of his footsteps on the loose gravel of the paths faded in to the distance.
After tossing and turning for some time more, she finally decided there was nothing for it.
Rising from her cot, she put her shoes and sweatshirt on, against the cool desert night air. The path didn’t go that far off in to the rocks and she hoped that the Doctor hadn’t decided to go on a complete walk-about. She thought of the TARDIS sitting alone off on the salt flats, and blinked back the sudden, and completely irrational, notion that perhaps he had gone back there, and was leaving her behind. The chink in her trust of him that this thought signaled was far more troubling to Rose than the actual prospect of being left here, Doctorless and trapped. She quickened her pace up the path and made less of an effort to deaden her footfalls. Of all the times she’d fled, with some ravening deadly creature behind her, she’d never felt this peculiar sense of urgency before. Something was wrong, with the Doctor, with this whole place, with everyone here, and she had to find out what it was and how to stop it.
Pausing to get her bearings in the increasing darkness, she heard a stone fall off to the right, behind a large boulder. She left the path and followed the sound, coming around the boulder to find the Doctor, sitting on the ground, back resting against the far side, hunched over a portable minidisc player, clutching it with white-knuckled urgency.
“Doctor?” Rose whispered, not wanting to startle him, as it was clear he was so involved in what he was looking at that he hadn’t heard her approach.
He looked up and Rose saw by the glow of the screen that his cheeks were wet with tears and his mouth was completely flattened in to a perfectly straight line. His eyes were wide and red-rimmed, his Adams apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed sobs.
He slammed the screen of the player shut and hissed, “Rose! Go back to bed!”
His tone stopped her in her tracks. She felt that if she reached out and touched him, she would be burned. It was a completely different man sitting there. Between when he had laid down to record his dreams for the first time and this moment, something had broken inside of him. Something perhaps that had been mended with sellotape and chewing gum so many times that finally at long last it was beyond repair. Or perhaps he’d known all along, since they first arrived and met the man with the camera that records brainwaves, that this would be his ultimate fate. Maybe he had not really wanted to bring sight to the sightless or help a woman with her recurring nightmares. Perhaps those had been just happy side-effects.
“I’m not going anywhere, okay?” She sat down a few feet from him. “You know, when you were dreaming, they all wanted to watch on that dirty great telly they’ve got in there. I made them turn it off. If it was me, yeah? You’d be lecturing me about the timeline and showing these people things they shouldn’t see. I should have stopped you before, but I didn’t really understand where it was all going. I still don’t. What are you doing here?”
The Doctor remained silent, like a sulking child coming down from a tantrum. With one thumb, he stroked the top of the player. He touched the button that would open it again but pulled back.
Rose asked again, “What are you doing? We could go back to the TARDIS, I’m sure she’s done rebooting now. We could leave, could have left days ago, but we’re still here. You’re still here. Still working on this bloody experiment, but it’s gone a lot beyond that now, hasn’t it?”
Still nothing from the Doctor so she tried a different tack: “Just now as I was coming up here, I had the thought that maybe you’d gone back to the TARDIS without me, and were leaving me here.”
“I would never,” he croaked, the words all clipped short.
“So you keep insisting. But just for a second I thought you might. What’s going on here is something that made me stop trusting you, just for a second.” She looked closely in to his bloodshot eyes and saw what was there, or wasn’t there. “I think maybe you’ve already left me.”
He put the player down on the ground and tipped his head back to rest on the boulder, and stared up at the stars now coming in to focus in the night sky.
“All those worlds. All those suns and planets and galaxies. I can go anywhere, except the one place I want more than anything else.” He laid a hand on the player on the ground, “And here it is. In here. All of these other people here watching their childhood boogey monsters and dreams of flying, it’s all a bit naff, don’t you think? But a whole planet, a whole world, a whole people, preserved forever in ones and zeros, right here. Every night I could dream them in to existence, and every day live my life with them again. As if they never…as if I never….” He trailed off and Rose saw once again the man she had met in that basement, the one who told her to run, not just from the danger at hand but from him, from this damaged shell of a person. Perhaps in this new incarnation he had not healed the wounds of his soul, but was just better at hiding them from her. Better at lying, at charming her in to a false sense of security.
He took a deep shuddering breath.
“And you want me to walk away from that?” He brought his hands up to run them through his hair. “I’m sorry, Rose.”
“You’re going to pick a fantasy over me? Doctor? Look at me. Look me in the eye and tell me that you’re going to pick a fantasy over me.” Rose got on her hands and knees and crawled closer to where the Doctor was sitting. “Tell me that you’re going to pick a fantasy over everything that you believe in.” She kneeled before him and waited, barely daring to breath, terrified of what the answer was going to be.
A tiny corner of the Doctor’s mouth lifted and for a moment Rose was sure he was going to laugh and tell her it had all been a joke. But the corner fell again and he did look her square in the eye.
“Who’s to say you’re not in here too? And everything I believe. These are my dreams, this is the world as I’d most want it, so what if you’re in here too? In ones and zeros, forever.”
It was like a knife to the heart.
“No,” she said. “Oh no you do not. I may be in there, but I’m right here too, and I need you to stay with me.” She grabbed his hand and held it to her chest, let him feel her heart beating. “I’m real, Doctor. I’m right here and I’m real. No ones, no zeros. Just me, being alive.”
He pulled his hand away.
“That’s just the problem, isn’t it? You’re alive, living your human life, aging, growing old…dying. In the end that’s always how it goes. If I could just….” He trailed off and touched the player again. “I’m so tired.”
Rose felt like she was at a dead end. Leaning forward, she did the one last thing she could think of, opened her hand and smacked him square across the mouth. His stubble left a bit of a burn on her palm.
“I trusted you to never leave me.” She stood up and brushed the dirt off of her jeans, feeling floodgates of a sort open. “I trusted you and I loved you. And you’ll just go on sitting here gazing at your own bloody navel, feeling sorry for yourself. Nine hundred years old and you’ve never learned a single lesson anyone has ever tried teaching you.”
He sat, gaping at her.
“This is your last chance,” she hissed, “before I walk out of this place and take my chances out there and go live my life in 1999 without you. I can’t stay here anymore.” She turned her back so the Doctor wouldn’t see the tears welling in her eyes and started to walk away.
She made it about four steps before she heard him stand up behind her. “Before you go,” he said, “tell me. Didn’t you feel tempted? To record your dreams?”
Before you go. She closed her eyes and let the tears fall freely.
“You were my dream.” She felt naked, raw, suddenly losing her will to fight this. It was all going wrong, and not at the hands of some super-villain on a far off planet, but inside the Doctor’s own mind. Every step as she walked away she expected to hear him behind her, but no sound ever came.
(To Chapter 9)
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 whole planet, a whole world, a whole people, preserved forever in ones and zeros, right here. Every night I could dream them in to existence, and every day live my life with them again."
Lying on her cot, Rose heard the door to the lab open and shut. It was dusk, the sky a close match for the strange orange sky she had seen in the Doctor’s dream. Through the netting of her tent, she could see the tall, gliding figure of the Doctor, clutching something in his hand that had a small blinking green light on it. At first it looked like he might be coming to have a chat with her, and her senses snapped to full attention, but he walked right by and continued up in to the rocks behind the centre.
Rose began weighing the options. On the one hand, she’d already invaded the Doctor’s privacy once today and still felt horrible. And what if he was just taking a walk to have a think, or enjoy the night air? She fussed with her pillow and sheet and heaved a sigh. The crunching sound of his footsteps on the loose gravel of the paths faded in to the distance.
After tossing and turning for some time more, she finally decided there was nothing for it.
Rising from her cot, she put her shoes and sweatshirt on, against the cool desert night air. The path didn’t go that far off in to the rocks and she hoped that the Doctor hadn’t decided to go on a complete walk-about. She thought of the TARDIS sitting alone off on the salt flats, and blinked back the sudden, and completely irrational, notion that perhaps he had gone back there, and was leaving her behind. The chink in her trust of him that this thought signaled was far more troubling to Rose than the actual prospect of being left here, Doctorless and trapped. She quickened her pace up the path and made less of an effort to deaden her footfalls. Of all the times she’d fled, with some ravening deadly creature behind her, she’d never felt this peculiar sense of urgency before. Something was wrong, with the Doctor, with this whole place, with everyone here, and she had to find out what it was and how to stop it.
Pausing to get her bearings in the increasing darkness, she heard a stone fall off to the right, behind a large boulder. She left the path and followed the sound, coming around the boulder to find the Doctor, sitting on the ground, back resting against the far side, hunched over a portable minidisc player, clutching it with white-knuckled urgency.
“Doctor?” Rose whispered, not wanting to startle him, as it was clear he was so involved in what he was looking at that he hadn’t heard her approach.
He looked up and Rose saw by the glow of the screen that his cheeks were wet with tears and his mouth was completely flattened in to a perfectly straight line. His eyes were wide and red-rimmed, his Adams apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed sobs.
He slammed the screen of the player shut and hissed, “Rose! Go back to bed!”
His tone stopped her in her tracks. She felt that if she reached out and touched him, she would be burned. It was a completely different man sitting there. Between when he had laid down to record his dreams for the first time and this moment, something had broken inside of him. Something perhaps that had been mended with sellotape and chewing gum so many times that finally at long last it was beyond repair. Or perhaps he’d known all along, since they first arrived and met the man with the camera that records brainwaves, that this would be his ultimate fate. Maybe he had not really wanted to bring sight to the sightless or help a woman with her recurring nightmares. Perhaps those had been just happy side-effects.
“I’m not going anywhere, okay?” She sat down a few feet from him. “You know, when you were dreaming, they all wanted to watch on that dirty great telly they’ve got in there. I made them turn it off. If it was me, yeah? You’d be lecturing me about the timeline and showing these people things they shouldn’t see. I should have stopped you before, but I didn’t really understand where it was all going. I still don’t. What are you doing here?”
The Doctor remained silent, like a sulking child coming down from a tantrum. With one thumb, he stroked the top of the player. He touched the button that would open it again but pulled back.
Rose asked again, “What are you doing? We could go back to the TARDIS, I’m sure she’s done rebooting now. We could leave, could have left days ago, but we’re still here. You’re still here. Still working on this bloody experiment, but it’s gone a lot beyond that now, hasn’t it?”
Still nothing from the Doctor so she tried a different tack: “Just now as I was coming up here, I had the thought that maybe you’d gone back to the TARDIS without me, and were leaving me here.”
“I would never,” he croaked, the words all clipped short.
“So you keep insisting. But just for a second I thought you might. What’s going on here is something that made me stop trusting you, just for a second.” She looked closely in to his bloodshot eyes and saw what was there, or wasn’t there. “I think maybe you’ve already left me.”
He put the player down on the ground and tipped his head back to rest on the boulder, and stared up at the stars now coming in to focus in the night sky.
“All those worlds. All those suns and planets and galaxies. I can go anywhere, except the one place I want more than anything else.” He laid a hand on the player on the ground, “And here it is. In here. All of these other people here watching their childhood boogey monsters and dreams of flying, it’s all a bit naff, don’t you think? But a whole planet, a whole world, a whole people, preserved forever in ones and zeros, right here. Every night I could dream them in to existence, and every day live my life with them again. As if they never…as if I never….” He trailed off and Rose saw once again the man she had met in that basement, the one who told her to run, not just from the danger at hand but from him, from this damaged shell of a person. Perhaps in this new incarnation he had not healed the wounds of his soul, but was just better at hiding them from her. Better at lying, at charming her in to a false sense of security.
He took a deep shuddering breath.
“And you want me to walk away from that?” He brought his hands up to run them through his hair. “I’m sorry, Rose.”
“You’re going to pick a fantasy over me? Doctor? Look at me. Look me in the eye and tell me that you’re going to pick a fantasy over me.” Rose got on her hands and knees and crawled closer to where the Doctor was sitting. “Tell me that you’re going to pick a fantasy over everything that you believe in.” She kneeled before him and waited, barely daring to breath, terrified of what the answer was going to be.
A tiny corner of the Doctor’s mouth lifted and for a moment Rose was sure he was going to laugh and tell her it had all been a joke. But the corner fell again and he did look her square in the eye.
“Who’s to say you’re not in here too? And everything I believe. These are my dreams, this is the world as I’d most want it, so what if you’re in here too? In ones and zeros, forever.”
It was like a knife to the heart.
“No,” she said. “Oh no you do not. I may be in there, but I’m right here too, and I need you to stay with me.” She grabbed his hand and held it to her chest, let him feel her heart beating. “I’m real, Doctor. I’m right here and I’m real. No ones, no zeros. Just me, being alive.”
He pulled his hand away.
“That’s just the problem, isn’t it? You’re alive, living your human life, aging, growing old…dying. In the end that’s always how it goes. If I could just….” He trailed off and touched the player again. “I’m so tired.”
Rose felt like she was at a dead end. Leaning forward, she did the one last thing she could think of, opened her hand and smacked him square across the mouth. His stubble left a bit of a burn on her palm.
“I trusted you to never leave me.” She stood up and brushed the dirt off of her jeans, feeling floodgates of a sort open. “I trusted you and I loved you. And you’ll just go on sitting here gazing at your own bloody navel, feeling sorry for yourself. Nine hundred years old and you’ve never learned a single lesson anyone has ever tried teaching you.”
He sat, gaping at her.
“This is your last chance,” she hissed, “before I walk out of this place and take my chances out there and go live my life in 1999 without you. I can’t stay here anymore.” She turned her back so the Doctor wouldn’t see the tears welling in her eyes and started to walk away.
She made it about four steps before she heard him stand up behind her. “Before you go,” he said, “tell me. Didn’t you feel tempted? To record your dreams?”
Before you go. She closed her eyes and let the tears fall freely.
“You were my dream.” She felt naked, raw, suddenly losing her will to fight this. It was all going wrong, and not at the hands of some super-villain on a far off planet, but inside the Doctor’s own mind. Every step as she walked away she expected to hear him behind her, but no sound ever came.
(To Chapter 9)