the plum blossoms are falling
the plum blossoms are falling, Ten/Rose, M
“When will you be angelic?” he breathes, poetry lacing his lips as he presses them against her overheated skin. “When will you take off your clothes?” 4,669 words
Disclaimer: All characters belong to the BBC and RTD, and I make no money off this story. The poem the Doctor quotes from is by Allen Ginsberg titled “America”.
Author’s Note: Written for Challenge 92 at the then_theres_us fic community. Much beta love goes to develish1 for Brit-picking and pointing out that I write insanely long and convoluted sentences. And also, Happy Christmas to everyone!
This is the prompt I chose for this particular story:
*
It is the summer of 1967 and the TARDIS lands them in San Francisco, just off the corner of Haight and Ashbury. The sun pounds the pavement relentlessly, and Rose can see the steam rising off the ground. She wears a sundress not too different from the pink frock that she wore to see Elvis, except it is made of cotton and doesn’t require the bloomers, petticoats and jacket. The cool white fabric is decorated with blue forget-me-nots in swirling patterns across the bodice and skirt, and the halter top ties at the nape of her neck, leaving her back exposed. The Doctor, still in his familiar pinstriped suit and beige Converse, tries to avert his gaze from following the curve of his companion’s back.
“It’s the height of the Summer of Love,” he says as they stroll down the street. They’re wearing matching tortoiseshell sunglasses and holding ice lollies -- his is bright orange, while hers is a pale lime green -- and they are walking down a street filled with tall, narrow buildings and striped awnings. People wearing tie-dyed and multi-coloured clothes are dancing in the streets. Many are congregating around a makeshift stage, where a bearded man with shoulder-length hair is playing the guitar.
“Hippies, then?” She asks, sucking her ice lolly between her lips. The cool, sweet-sticky liquid coats her tongue, and she smiles with pleasure, while she quietly watches the Doctor gulp nervously as she pushes the lolly in and out of her mouth. “Doctor?” She inquires innocently.
“Oh, ah yes.” He resumes their walk, not noticing that his own ice lolly is dripping all over his hand. “Hippies and free love and all that. But nobody really realises that what made them act this way is alien in origin.”
She raises an eyebrow. “What?”
“Oh yes.” They duck beneath the shade of a greengrocer’s awning as they watch groups of people in threes, fours and tens move in and out of the gathering crowd, like schools of fish slipping in and out of the tides. “It’s not a bad thing, as far as I’m concerned. Alien sex pollen, released accidentally a few days before by a visiting Kalipso, lowered people’s inhibitions.” At Rose’s glare, he continues hurriedly. “It’s not forcing people to act in ways they don’t want to, Rose. It just enhances what’s already there. And if you remember your history, this was the time when the youth started questioning conservative America, about the Vietnam War, the Cold War with Russia. They asked a lot of questions that the government, and those in authority, couldn’t answer.”
“Damn right, man,” said a passing young man, bedecked in daisies and wearing a thin multi-coloured vest. “You English?”
Rose nods warily. “Yes, we’re just visiting some friends.”
“Come hang out with us tonight then. Name’s Port. We just live two streets down from here, at the Jasmine. Fourth floor.” Port looks at the Doctor appraisingly. “Bring your boyfriend, but don’t forget -- we share.” With a wink and a nod, he slings his arms around the slight young woman beside him, and they wander away from the Doctor and Rose.
The Doctor guffaws as he looks at the more outlandish costumes people are wearing. “Oh, I’d forgotten how amusing this time period is. My sixth self would’ve fit right in -- he had a knack for colour.” Then he notices that his ice lolly has dripped all over his hand, coating his palm and fingers with sticky orange juice, and his expression changes from amusement to chagrin.
Rose steps forward and takes his orange-coated hand by the wrist, her fingers encircling the base of his palm loosely. She’d already finished her own iced sweet, and the Doctor can’t help but notice how pretty she looks with her lips coated with sugar, and her bright blonde hair swept back from her face with a broad swath of white cloth. He wonders what she would taste like, and feels his hearts skip a beat as Rose carefully brings his hand up to her lips, and slips his orange-covered forefinger into her mouth.
He’d thought that Time Lords couldn’t melt, but Rose is doing a pretty damned good job of trying to reduce him to a puddle. He feels his trousers tighten around his groin; he knows he should pull away from her, but somehow he feels as though time has stopped, and all he knows is the feel of Rose’s lips, and her tongue following the ridges and lines of his fingers. She finishes with his fingers, releasing his thumb with a small ‘pop!’, and continues cleaning him, her small pink tongue darting across the topography of his palm, mapping the creases and indentations of his hand.
She finally releases him, and he realises that his respiratory bypass had kicked in, and draws in a deep breath. She suddenly looks shy, as if she suddenly realises what it is she’s done. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, her cheeks flaming. “I didn’t think -- ”
He grabs her and pulls her towards him, crushing her against his chest as he bends down to taste her lips. She tastes of lime and orange and her strawberry lip-gloss, all sweet things mixed together to form the perfect taste of Rose. He presses his lips against hers, his tongue tracing the seam of her mouth, begging entrance. She allows him to kiss her, his hands splayed across her bare back, her fingers wrapped around the back of his head, as she kisses him in return.
He can taste her skin, her dreams, hopes and wishes, swirling in her mouth; he can taste her want, her need, her love, and gasps at the knowledge that she loves him; he can taste the slight acrid tang of the pollen that Rose has probably inhaled, knows that it cannot enhance something that isn’t already there anyway, and wonders how much time they’ve lost by dancing around this.
The Doctor releases her because she needs oxygen, and she stumbles backwards in her low sandaled heels, surprised and breathless. Her cheeks are tinged pink and her hair is slightly mussed, a halo of yellow strands circling her face. “Doctor,” she whispers, “was that the pollen?”
He nods, his heart hammering in his chest. He knows that Rose hates invasive things -- he remembers Platform One and her reaction when she learned that the TARDIS had given her the gift of languages by entering her mind unannounced. “Rose, I’m sorry. It doesn’t affect Time Lords, so I’m to blame for that. I’m sorry if you didn’t really want it -- I, I’ll try to make it up -- ”
She laughs, and lifts her sunglasses up and over her head to look him in the eye. Her caramel eyes are dancing with joy. “You said the pollen only enhances what’s already there, yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Doctor,” she says, affection lacing her voice as she moves back up in front of him and presses a light kiss on his lips. “I’ve wanted to do this for ages.”
It’s his turn to look surprised. “You -- you want me?”
She tilts her head, looks at him quietly. I love you, her eyes say, shining like twin stars.
He bites his bottom lip; he knows his companions love him, and once or twice he had perhaps even returned the feeling. Goodness knows he was never able to help himself when Grace was with him. Perhaps there is just something about San Francisco that turns him into a giddy schoolboy in love. He opens his mouth to try and tell her that yes, he feels the same way, and yes, he loves her too, but there is nothing but air coming out from between his lips, and he feels like a fish gasping for oxygen. She looks at him sadly, the sparkle dimming from her eyes.
So he takes her hands into his and tells her, “I know just the perfect place.” She gives him another one of her dazzling smiles as he slides his fingers between hers, and lets him lead her towards another somewhere new.
*
They hitch a ride to the outskirts of the city and find themselves in a small glade surrounded by a copse of willows. The ground is dry and sparsely populated by grass, but there is a creek running through the glade and they are sheltered from prying eyes by the drooping branches of the willows. He’s pulled out a straw hat from somewhere in the depths of his trans-dimensional pockets to protect her nose from sunburn, and now they are sitting on a patterned blanket (again liberated from his pockets) beneath the shade of a large tree. It’s an oak, she thinks, but she isn’t sure; all she knows is that it is massive and it is cool beneath its leaves. Sunlight dots the ground in wavering patterns, and she can hear the merry bubbling of the creek nearby.
The Doctor lies down beside her on the blanket and holds her hand - with his original hand, not the one that was sliced off by the Sycorax -- and if she closes her eyes, she can still feel the world turning beneath her.
“The pollen only amplifies feelings,” he says, his voice wafting towards her like a summer breeze. “It brings your desires to the forefront of your mind and brings down any barriers that you usually have for those feelings, those emotions.”
“And what about your feelings, Doctor?” she asks him. She is staring at the canopy of leaves above them, at the gently swaying branches.
“Even in my previous body, Rose, I’ve always felt the same way about you.”
“Companion, then?” she asks. There is a slight teasing tone in her voice. “Friend? Best friend?”
He squeezes her hand, trying to convey in that gesture everything he ever wanted to tell her.
“I believe in you, Rose,” he says, his voice low and sure.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that, even when the world ends, I know you’ll still be by my side.”
She turns her head and smiles gently at him. “We’ve already been to the end of the world, Doctor.”
“Then I know what I’m talking about.”
They lie there for awhile, surrounded by the afternoon sun and the low buzz of insects hopping from tree to tree and blade to blade, hands intertwined, their bodies pressed side by side against each other. They did this before, on Woman Wept, lying on the snow, Rose snuggled between the comforting bulk of her previous Doctor and the warm, solid presence of Jack. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
It was a lifetime ago.
“I wish I could take you to meet Allen Ginsberg,” he says presently. “Him and Kerouac, and the Beat poets. Too bad they did their best stuff a decade ago.”
“We do have a time machine, Doctor.”
“True, that.” He shuffles and shifts to lie on his side, head pillowed on the crook of one arm, his other resting gently on the curve of her waist. She moves closer to him so that their legs are tangled around each other, his trouser-clad and hers bare. She rests her palm against his cool cheek.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by / madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn / looking for an angry fix,” he recites, his voice low, rolling like thunder across storm clouds. “That was the beginning of Ginsberg’s famous poem, ‘Howl’.”
Rose nods, her eyes sad. “He sounds angry.”
“Not angry,” says the Doctor. “He wrote beautiful lines as well. But he believed that poetry needed to talk about the concerns of the people, that it lent a voice to those who had no voice, those nobody was listening to.” He begins to stroke her, the way one strokes a cat, from waist to hip and back again. She relaxes under his touch.
“I’d like to meet him,” she says.
“He’ll smell of smoke and marijuana,” he laughs. “Your mother might not approve.”
“My mother hasn’t approved of this since you said ‘Run!’ all that time ago.”
He laughs. “That’s true. I still remember her slap. I suspect I’ll be a couple of thousand years old and still remember that slap.”
She is silent for awhile. Then she asks, hesitant: “Will you still remember me then?”
“Oh, Rose.” His hand stills on the swell of her hips, his touch cool and comforting. “Sometimes I think you were already in my memory even before I was loomed.”
She leans forward and kisses him, her body aligning with his. He shudders at her touch, at the newness of being allowed to kiss her, of being kissed by Rose in return. She’s sun-warm and sleepy and her lips move drowsily against his, her tongue languidly stroking his.
They carefully shed their clothes until both are down to their underwear. Silently, they agree not to go any further than this -- the temptation is there though, with every caress, every gliding touch of fingers skimming skin, the way the wings of a tern would glide over the ocean waves. He pushes back the headband from her hair, releasing each golden strand from its confines.
She pushes herself up from the blanket. “Let’s go for a swim,” she says, grinning, then tears down the slope from where they are lying beneath the tree, running towards the creek. This is how he’d like to remember her: all golden skin and hair and smiles, the sun shining behind her, as she launches herself up in the air and into the water: his beautiful, fearless Rose.
He leaves their clothes by the blanket and runs after her, catapulting his lithe body (“Foxy,” he remembers, an echo of Cassandra’s voice inside his head) into the water. Rose laughs and shrieks as he splashes around, muddying the waters and feeling the soft soil between his toes. She submerges her head underwater and he follows her, swimming towards her and claiming her lips in a kiss. Bubbles surround them, and her silent laughter fills the space between them. He kisses her again, and again, and he wants to stay here underneath the water, with sunlight warming the surface above them, here in the cool half-shadows with Rose, forever kissing her.
She bobs up to the surface before him, her body arcing as she comes up for air. He follows her, keeping her within the circle of his arms. Her cotton bra is damp and he can see her nipples puckering against the cloth. Water droplets shimmer like precious stones as they hang suspended on her eyelashes. Her face is fresh and pink, and she is looking at him with such love and happiness in her eyes that he is almost frightened of the power she has over him. I am afraid to lose her, he realises, as he holds her close to him, his arms tight around her waist as she drapes her arms around his shoulders and rests her head against his chest. She is warm and real and trembling in his arms, and he wants to keep her there forever.
But he knows he can’t.
*
It is another day, another adventure wandering the streets of the city filled with music and sunflowers and poetry, and Rose is giddy with the whirlwind of people and parties and smoke-filled caverns filled with the brightest minds of the generation. The Doctor watches her happily sit and talk and listen and draw in people as a flame draws moths towards its light and warmth. But it pleases him that she always returns to his side, that she constantly seeks him out in the crowds, that she is his. He is surprised by the feeling of possessiveness he has towards her -- not that she is his possession, but simply acknowledging that she belongs to him, in the same way that he belongs to her.
She asks him, during a lull in their day, “Do you think I will stop feeling this way about you once we leave?”
“You mean the pollen?” he asks, schooling his face into a neutral expression.
“Yeah.” She takes a bite of her sandwich.
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
She smiles at him. “I’ve always felt like this about you -- even when you were wearing leather and trying to resonate concrete. It’s just that now, the pollen’s made me unafraid of expressing my feelings for you.” She leans over and kisses him tenderly on the cheek, and he knows he’s turned a slight shade of red.
“And do you think you’ll be afraid again once we’re back in the TARDIS?”
She cocks an eyebrow at him. “I’m afraid that you’ll stop.”
He takes her hand, the one that isn’t holding her lunch, and twines it in his. “I promise I won’t stop.”
“Good.” She graces him with one of her bright, heart-stopping grins. “I’m glad.”
That night, they finally take up Port’s invitation and stumble into the disreputable-looking building. Port, and his company of equally disreputable-looking folks, are camping out on the entire fourth floor, and they welcome Rose and the Doctor with open arms. There is more singing and dancing, and in the dimly lit room Rose listens to a recording of Ginsberg and Kerouac and Cassidy, and she is awash in words and words and words. The Doctor is an anchoring presence beside her as she feels herself sinking into the haze of sweet-smelling smoke, poetry and music. She watches as Port and his girlfriend start kissing in the corner of the room, and feels a twinge low in her stomach that she identifies as desire.
Beside her, the Doctor twitches.
She can feel him becoming tense, like a wound spring, as the evening wears on. She takes his hand and leads him out of the room, down the narrow hallways with peeling wallpaper, and towards the back of the building, where she hopes there is an empty room.
The door opens at the touch of her hand and they step inside. Outside, the traffic blares, mingling with the distant sound of guitar strings and chanting. Inside, the room smells of patchouli and air freshener. There is nothing inside but a mattress, two pillows, and an empty wardrobe in the corner. She thinks, we are in a small, barely furnished room somewhere in downtown San Francisco.
They are in a small, barely furnished room somewhere in downtown San Francisco, and the Doctor is currently using his fingers to slip open the buttons of her cardigan, his lips following the line of the cloth as it slowly splits in two. Rose leans her head against the wall, her fingers threaded through the unruly mop of his dark brown hair, holding him in place as he parts the plush pink cloth of her cardigan, exposing her lace-clad chest and the slope of her stomach to his gaze.
“When will you be angelic?” he breathes, poetry lacing his lips as he presses them against her overheated skin. “When will you take off your clothes?”
“Quoting again,” she says, as she feels heat pool low in her belly, feeling the slickness between her legs as she rubs them together.
“I’m inspired,” he retorts, hands spanning her waist as he lifts her up against the wall so that his face is pressed against her stomach. He scatters his kisses across her skin, like stars across the night sky, and she trembles in his grip. With one hand holding her in place, he slides the other around towards the dip of her back, where the zipper rests, waiting for him. His fingers travel downwards, guiding the zip as it releases Rose from the confines of her pencil-cut skirt. The silken sheath slips downwards, puddling to the floor, and she wobbles as he lowers her to the ground, standing in the center of her clothes, in her three-inch heels and her pale underwear. He looks at her with wonder. “It is you and I who are perfect, not the next world,” he tells her solemnly, as she grabs the lapels of his pinstripe suit and kisses him.
They refuse air for seconds, minutes, an eternity. His lips are chapped and cool, his tongue a marvel as it slips between her teeth and tangles with her own. He tastes of the raspberry soda they had earlier at the club, the lingering smoke of cigarettes that hung in the air like a curtain, and something indefinable -- the taste of the universe, perhaps, or of something beyond. His touch is cool but his skin is warm, and his hands glide, glide across the ravines and rivulets of her body, the cloth of his suit reminding her of one final barrier between them.
He kisses his way across her jawline, down the swan-like curve of her pale throat, his tongue lapping up the beads of sweat decorating her collarbone. “Your body is too much for me,” he whispers, bending the words to suit the moment. “You make me want to be a saint.”
“I don’t want you to be a saint tonight, Doctor,” she whispers, her arms draped across his shoulders, fingers mapping the contours of his back. She slips beneath the suit jacket and loosens his shirt from his trousers, seeking the bare skin he’s kept hidden from her.
He grins against the swell of her breast, tongue laving the scalloped edges of her bra. “You need to get this off,” he mutters.
“You’re wearing far too many clothes yourself.”
Together, they shed his suit jacket and loosen his tie. Both items find themselves on the floor. She unbuttons his shirt hungrily, fingers carving out little pockets of pleasure as they roam across his chest, his stomach, tweak the pinprick points of his nipples. Soon, they are clad in nothing but their underwear, all roaming hands and fingers, lips and tongues. He nibbles at the juncture of her throat and collarbone and she moans, the sound vibrating through every bone of her body.
They move towards the mattress shoved against the far wall, covered with a pattern of tiger lilies in bloom. She falls, and he is falling with her, against her, around her. She does not know how, but her underwear is now on the floor, and he is between her legs, hips aligned with hers, rutting against her core with nothing but his pants on. She gasps as his rigid erection presses against her, whining in need as he props himself up on his palms, bends down, and wraps his tongue around a perfect dusk-pink nipple.
She arches off the mattress, her body defying gravity as she seeks her pleasure in his touch. With one hand supporting him, he buries the other one between her legs, his thumb seeking out her slick, swollen clit. He flicks it once, twice, and she is mewling, wrapping her arms around his neck and her ankles locking at the small of his back as he drives one, two, three fingers into her. Her body is awash in a sea of need and want and lust and love, and she is drowning and he is her only anchor.
“Doctor,” she gasps, as he hits a particularly sensitive spot inside her.
“Rose,” he pants, as he slides off her, shimmying hurriedly out of his damn pants. She misses him immediately, the curve of her body the space where his should fit perfectly. He returns to her, his wiry strength evident in every movement. She runs her hands down his body, feeling for the double-beat thumping rhythmically in his ribcage, playing with the sparse hair across his chest, following the dark line towards his groin. He gasps as her fingers encircle his cock, her thumb sliding across the head to spread the moisture already leaking from him. “God,” he gasps as she strokes him once, twice. “Goddess, oh mercy, Rose, please -- ”
She tilts her hips in invitation and watches as the tip of his cock glides inside her. Her eyes are wide as she watches them join at the most primal of places, the center where all things begin and end. He begins the rhythm, thrusting into her, pushing her against the mattress, burying himself inside her body. She shifts, accommodating his strengths and his weaknesses, mapping the faint scars decorating his back, finding that mole beneath his left shoulder blade.
His lips are kissing her, and she is swept up by his heat and his passion, the storm that surrounds her as he fucks her in this dank apartment, with the stained ceiling and the peeling green walls, and sandpaper floorboards. He fucks her the way she dreams of being fucked -- with poetry and passion and power and he is all this and more.
“Oh, Rose,” he sighs in her ear. “I’m trying to come to the point,” he whispers, his voice ragged as they both spiral upwards towards their pleasure. “I refuse to give up my obsession.”
She comes first, clawing at his back as she shudders her way through her orgasm, mouth open in a perfect O. He is licking her neck, his arms around her shoulders, fingers splayed across the line of her spine, pressing her to his hearts as he comes inside her. She is slick and sweaty and so is he, and they both descend from their orgasms slowly, carefully. He stays inside her and she keeps her ankles locked around him, the perfect Gordian knot.
“Doctor,” she starts, her brown eyes staring into his. She feels as though she is looking through a hole in the universe whenever she looks into his eyes, as though he is the vast empty space of the galaxy, and she is merely a star falling across his firmament.
He presses a finger to her lips, and kisses her gently on her forehead. “It’s all right. We’ll talk in the morning.”
She closes her eyes and feels him slip from her body. She curves away from him, still sticky and sweaty, but sated. She hears him move around the room, his footsteps sure as he paces towards the door and sonics the lock. She hears the flick of a switch and the light from above disappears. The space beside her sinks as he returns to their makeshift bed still naked, his arms slipping around her waist as he pulls her towards him. She is the moon to his planet, refusing to resist his pull. She settles into the crook of his arms, the scent of skin and sex (and perhaps love?) surround her, and she drifts off to sleep.
*
It is one of the warmest summers she’s ever experienced, and for a London girl, that isn’t saying much. She wakes up to sunlight streaming through the wide windows that line two walls of the room. The Doctor is snoring quietly beside her, arm flung over her belly, hands gripping her hips. His hair is tousled in wild abandon, and his lips are slightly parted. She watches him dream -- what do Time Lords dream of? -- and presses a palm against his chest, feeling the familiar double-rhythm beneath her touch.
“Rose,” he whispers, his breath stirring her hair, stroking her cheek. “Rose, is it morning?”
“Yes, Doctor.” She feels as though they are the last two creatures left in the sunlit world.
He cracks open one eye and looks at her, his lips breaking into a small, almost shy, smile. “Sleep well?”
“Yeah.”
He tightens his hold on her, and she feels his entire body thrumming with latent energy, can smell the hint of ozone in the air that signals a storm. “I had the most marvelous dream, Rose -- ”
“What was it about?”
“That you never let me go.”
And she promises him, with all her heart, with all the power of the universe inside her small human body, “I will never let you go.”