for rubberbisquit
We bend and creak but never break Rose/TenII, NC-17
Gift for: rubberbisquit
Something angsty with smut thrown in somewhere. Focusing on the new found mortality of TenII. He isn’t here, not really. Physically he’s taking up the bed with his long legs and miles of plastic tubing, but Rose just can’t align this fragile looking creature with her Doctor. 4,919 words.
A/N: I really tried to just do angst. I did. But for some reason when you tell my muse to do angst she does fluff instead :P so there’s a bit of both.
They say old habits die hard, that you can’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs, a tiger can’t change its stripes to spots...
And someone who didn’t know where to draw the line even back when he was a Time Lord and capable of regeneration certainly isn’t going to shy away from danger just because of a pesky little trifle like becoming part human.
Rose knows this. On some level she even understands it. She knows how hard it’s been for the Doctor - psychologically as well as emotionally as well as physically - having to adjust to a linear life, let alone a human one.
It doesn’t make the fact that he’s barely clinging onto life in a hospital room any easier though.
~*~
He verbalised it way back in the beginning - amongst other things blurted out during the torrent of words he gushed between Bad Wolf Bay and London.
“You know I’ve just realised that I don’t actually know how to be human?” he’d said suddenly, midway through talking about something else entirely. “I mean I know I’m meant to have instincts and all of that and I s’pose I do, but then I don’t really know how to act human, do I? I don’t know the rules. Or, suppose I should say I just don’t care about them...”
Rose was dismissive at first. He’d be seen as eccentric, possibly a bit mad, but no worse than any other genius who had blessed the human race with their own peculiar breed of intellect.
“You can be the next Einstein or something,” she assured him, too tired and emotionally wrecked to really worry about the situation and its implications.
But he was absolutely right. Just because he was part human now didn’t mean he knew how to be human. All he knew, all he remembered was how to be the Doctor. An alien who at times had been decidedly not-human and (he himself admitted) not all that fun to be. And even though the Doctor might have looked human he was really anything but.
His new body, as such, takes a lot of getting used to. With his body temperature nearly doubled, one heart instead of two, the loss of his respiratory bypass system and the sudden invasion of a whole new host of glands...well it was easy to understand how he might be a little disorientated.
Well...maybe disorientated isn’t the right word. Probably frustrated would be better. Exasperated as well perhaps? After all, living on next to no sleep for over nine hundred years and then suddenly finding yourself trapped inside a body that can’t function without a bare minimum of six hours a night...
It takes him weeks to even begin getting the balance right - food for fuel, clothing to regulate a decent body temperature, enough sleep so that he doesn’t get cranky. It nearly drives everyone crackers - him included. After an initial three days of climbing the walls in Rose’s flat she had all but dragged him to her parents mansion and begged them to let the two of them move in - if nothing else than to give him more space to move.
In true Doctor fashion however, he memorised every single inch of the house and grounds within the first day. Once he had finished exploring he ate all the jam in the house and then proceeded to be spectacularly sick over the edge of the nearest balcony. After he’d finished apologising to the gardener for not seeing him tending to the flower beds below, Rose sat him down and asked him very seriously how he felt about taking a course of mild sedatives.
“I’m not that bad am I?” he asked her, genuinely bewildered. In answer, Rose merely walked him along the obvious trail of destruction he had left around the house and grounds. There was hardly a blade of grass or piece of furniture left untouched. The library was all but decimated - the shelves empty and the floor stacked with tottering piles of hardbacks ready to be resorted according the same haphazard storing system he had employed on the TARDIS with his own books.
“I suppose I am a bit restless aren’t I?” he said thoughtfully and Rose gave him an indignant shove which had him looking somewhat reproachful in return. “What?”
“You climbed up on a ladder,” she reminded him. “So you could count the number of crystal teardrops were on the chandelier in the ballroom. Then you tried to climb into the air conditioning vents only you got stuck halfway so one of the maids had to help pull you out. And then you got out a window and tried to see if you could climb down the side of the house using the drainpipes.”
The Doctor goggled at her. “Rose Tyler, have you been spying on me?”
Rose pressed her lips together and shook her head. “The housekeeper even came and had a word to me. Apparently all the staff think that you’re completely mental. Or...” she blushed deeply here and he had to prompt her to finish her sentence. “Well...possibly autistic...” she mumbled. At the aghast expression on his face she blurted out the final two. “Somebody else suggested ADHD. And the cook thinks you’re bi-polar. She even referred me to a doctor she knows who specialises in it.”
She held the little business card out to him and the Doctor took it, carefully, reading it through before meeting her gaze with a quiet sort of desperation behind his eyes. There was a moment of strained silence in which Rose sucked her lower lip behind her teeth anxiously before the Doctor said, quietly, “Ah.”
“Yeah,” Rose said cautiously, reaching out to snag the business card back again.
After that it was actually relatively easy to convince him to get a prescription for a mild sedative and for a few weeks life was almost normal. He slept better, he stopped pacing the corridors, and Rose pulled some strings to get him working on some of the alien tech they had amassed at Torchwood. The study that adjoined the room they were sharing quickly became a laboratory of sorts and it was quite normal to hear an assortment of loud bangs and crashes from within at all sorts of odd hours.
Rose didn’t care much though. She knew it was a pain for the cleaning staff and the rest of her family, but when he was tinkering in his study the human Doctor actually seemed somewhat content and that was all Rose really cared about. He was good at acting like he was coping but she knew his habits far too well to fall for it. He was still just as confused as she was about who he really was, this impossible blending of Time Lord and human.
Together they tried desperately to settle back into old rhythms and patterns. Rose would help him as best she could with what Jackie had dubbed his ‘science projects’ and when he got too involved in that she would drag him out to Torchwood and more often than not they’d end up in some ridiculous adventure or other and it was almost like before.
Except that it wasn’t. Torchwood had done some fairly thorough tests and examinations when he’d first come to this world but it seemed that this simply wasn’t enough for him. Seemingly unable to quite comprehend his own existence, the Doctor started on a variety of bizarre experiments on himself in order to see just how far the combination of Time Lord and human could actually go.
And it was this, more than anything else that secured his downfall.
Within a month he ended up in the emergency room more than twenty times with a variety of ailments. Pulled muscles, frostbite, bruised bones, burns of all three degrees, and most memorably what they thought was an asthma attack. It turned out to be nothing more than a panic attack brought on when he somehow managed to convince his brain that his lungs weren’t getting enough air.
The day that he tried to test how many stairs he could jump at a time and ended up tumbling right down to the bottom of the main staircase in the mansion and broke his wrist (the right one always had been slightly weaker) Rose finally snapped and told him to start taking better care of himself before he killed himself.
“You’re human now.” she snapped at him on the ride home from the hospital, his arm encased in a crisp plaster cast that he kept on probing with intrigued fingers - he’d never had one before. “You’ve gotta take care of this body or you’re gonna end up in an early grave.” When she realised that he was still inspecting his cast, oblivious, Rose deliberately swerved the car across two lanes of traffic and pulled it up on the side of the road.
His head snapped up instantly at the cacophony of honks and other abuse but despite a startled yelp, he didn’t really seem all that perturbed by her dangerous driving. No doubt due to his own dreadful piloting of the TARDIS.
“Sorry. Sorry. I was listening, promise. Honest though, I am taking care of myself. I was just walking down the stairs and I started wondering whether I could make the jump from one landing to the other but my toe got caught on the edge of one of the stairs...”
Rose stayed deadly silent until his babbling faded into silence and he began to shift uncomfortably in his seat. One leg began to bounce nervously under her scrutiny and then finally he dropped his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said and then looked up at her beseechingly. “I just...I forget sometimes. You know - that I’m not...him.” Rose softened a little at that and the Doctor leapt in quickly, “I promise I won’t do it again.”
“You’d better mean that,” Rose grumbled but she still pulled him to her in a tight hug which he awkwardly returned, his cast burdening his movement. “I don’t want to have to get mum to slap some sense into you.”
“Oh she won’t have to,” he said quickly, then shuddered. “Ugh. I still have nightmares about that first slap.”
He shuddered again and Rose laughed but the Doctor had already moved on. “Is this the sort of cast you can write on I wonder? Ooh I hope it is - I always wanted to do that. Do you want to sign my cast when we get home? I bet Tony would like to - he could draw something on it for me...”
Despite his promises, the next day Rose caught him poking himself in the eye repeatedly before the bathroom mirror. Before he could even try to convince her that he was trying to get rid of a piece of grit however she had dragged him halfway across her parents mansion to the library and she dug through the encyclopaedias and dictionaries until she found what she was looking for.
“Oh honestly!” he said when she gave it to him. “‘A Comprehensive Guide to Human Anatomy’? I probably know more about this stuff than you do!”
“Probably the science-y stuff yeah.” she admitted. “But I grew up in my body. You just kind of got...chucked into yours. Maybe this’ll help you stop trying to kill yourself.”
“How many...why would...I’m not trying to kill myself!” the Doctor spluttered. “I’m trying to figure out what my limitations are so I don’t kill myself.”
“What, by locking yourself inside an industrial freezer wearing nothing but a t-shirt and shorts?” Rose demanded.
“Well. Now. That actually was an accident,” the Doctor admitted humbly. “I was trying to...”
“Can you please just read the book?” Rose pleaded. “You make me worry Doctor. All these experiments...what if you really hurt yourself one day? What would I do then?”
He paused at the teary, pinched look on her face, struck by how upset she really was by his actions. He knew that his recklessness upset her sometimes, but her insistent worrying was a new trait that Rose had never seemed to carry when they had been travelling together.
But then she’d never had to worry about him like this before had she?
“Do I really have to read it?” he wheedled but Rose gave him a watery glare and he wavered. “I promise I won’t fall down any more stairs,” he said beseechingly. “I won’t poke myself in the eye, I won’t play with matches or try to make your mums kitchen appliances work better. And I definitely won’t lock myself inside the freezer again. Welll...I might do that accidently but definitely not on purpose...”
Rose rolled her eyes but there was the hint of a smile on her lips and so the Doctor smiled winningly at her until she finally smiled back - charmed despite herself. For one glorious moment he thought he might’ve gotten out of reading the book after all but then she stepped right up close to him and clasped his good hand in hers.
“Doctor?” she said softly gazing up at him. Her breath whooshed softly against his skin with every exhale and he found himself swallowing nervously at the tension between their bodies, so very close but not quite touching.
“Rose?” he managed to strangle out.
“Please read the book?” she pleaded simply, squeezing his hand. “Please?”
And really what could he say to that except for, “Well I honestly don’t think that it’s going to help me much but if you insist...”
To Rose’s bemusement he read the entire book from cover to cover in little more than an hour. Afterwards he ambushed the first person he bumped into (which just so happened to be Pete) and proceeded to babble for a good twenty minutes about how amazing human bodies were and how much he’d forgotten about their biology since he’d last studied them...
Eventually Rose found the two of them and Pete gladly fled, leaving her to deal with another five minutes worth of rambling. When the Doctor finally paused to take a breath she took the opportunity to ask him (quite smugly) if he’d enjoyed the book after all.
“Oh yes,” he agreed. “Very informative. Best idea I’ve had in a long while - reading that book.”
“Your idea?” Rose’s eyebrows shot up but the Doctor grinned at her and reached his good hand out to her, wiggling his fingers invitingly. She whacked him one first, then took his hand and he squeezed gently, his palm warm against hers.
That night she was amused to note that he’d brought the book to bed with him and was poring over it again with his specs on. They were sharing a bed, but only to sleep in so far and she was already settled down when she heard him close the book and snuggle in behind her.
“Rose.” He whispered, his good arm snaking around her waist.
“Mmmn. What?”
“I’ve been brushing up on my human biology...” He murmured, voice hushed and a little breathless against her neck.
Nonplussed, Rose made an affirmative noise to show she was listening, then jumped when she felt his hand slip beneath her shirt to the soft skin beneath.
“...Doctor?” she said uncertainly, but then his previous statement clicked and she actually laughed out loud. “Oh my god. You...”
She stopped abruptly then, consumed by giggles and the Doctor recoiled as if he’d just realised he was sharing the bed with a Slitheen, babbling a mile a minute and apologising his head off.
“You...you...” Rose tried hard to suppress her breathless giggles. “M’sorry but...you seriously just tried to seduce me with some line about human biology?”
In the near-darkness the Doctor looked and sounded somewhere between startled, terrified and hopeful. “Well,” he said. “Yes.”
Still huffing with stifled laughter, Rose shuffled in closer to him on the bed and put a hand on his cheek.
“You really don’t know how to be human, do you?” she said fondly.
The Doctor spluttered out with an, “I, er, well...” before Rose leant up to touch her lips to his.
They had kissed of course, since they had returned from Bad Wolf Bay. But it had taken a long time for them to grow truly comfortable with each other in a physical capacity again. There had been a few hefty snogs along the way but mostly they had shared shyer, chaster moments of affection. The kind of thing they had deferred to back in the TARDIS days - lingering embraces or extended periods of cuddling.
This was the first time though that he had openly and forwardly expressed a desire for anything further and it was clear from the way he wrapped his arms around her and pressed his body into hers that even if he hadn’t consciously been thinking about sex, his hormones certainly had.
Rose hummed against his lips, wondering if he hadn’t been doing other, more covert experiments on his new body that she hadn’t heard about. If he had they must have at least ended well because she had yet to drive him to the hospital with any complaints from around the groin area. The thought warmed her whole body as she too wriggled her arms around him and crushed him even closer.
The Doctor had just gasped into her mouth at the feel of her hand gripping his hip bone when Rose’s phone blared to life.
The two of them froze, chests heaving against each other and legs gloriously tangled for the briefest moment before Rose groaned and rolled towards her bedside table.
“This’ll be Torchwood.” She grumbled, and sure enough it was. With a Category One incident and all.
They dressed hastily, the Doctor bemoaning the fact that his jacket wouldn’t fit over his cast, and Rose sped all the way to Canary Wharf.
It all happened too quickly, Rose thought later. Her training kicking in as she joined the operatives already swarming towards the basement level via the stairs, she barely even noticed that the Doctor was beside her until she was led through to where the alien in question was wreaking havoc.
Three agents were already lying dead as well as a lab tech and Rose automatically brought her tranquiliser gun up in a defensive stance before yelling out to the thing.
“Oi!”
It swerved around at her voice, twice as tall as a human and reptilian, its scales glittering in a fetching diamond pattern reminiscent of an Earth python. It would have almost been pretty if it weren’t for its bloodied fangs and the powerful spiked tail that helped it balance upright.
“Oh,” she vaguely heard the Doctor murmur beside her. “Gorgeous.”
She ignored him, focusing instead on the creature. “Can you speak?” Rose asked it in a steady, calm voice. “Do you have a translation chip? Do we have a translation program running yet?” she added over her shoulder and she received a non committal yell from somewhere behind her.
The creature cocked its head at her and then abruptly fell onto all fours, a forked tongue flickered out to taste the air between them. Rose stayed very still as the creature got its bearings, taste-smelling her. It was still carefully studying her when the Doctor stepped forward confidently, hissing and spitting in some alien language. The creature however recoiled at the sound and the whole room tensed as it swung towards the Doctor with an almost pained cry.
It gave no warning other than that before it was rushing the Doctor, bellowing its head off as it sideswiped him into the nearest wall with one powerful arm.
His head thunked horribly against the concrete and then he crumbled to the floor, lifeless.
Rose’s heart stopped.
The creature bellowed again, a clearly defined sound of pain now and it clawed gouges into the concrete floor as it was surrounded by operatives, yelling and peppering it with tranquiliser darts.
She didn’t remember going to the Doctor, only the way that his head lolled, unnaturally loose on his neck when she lifted his face towards her.
Then one of the med team were there beside her and snapping at her to leave him be, there might be spinal injuries and all she could do was stare at him as they wrapped him up in neck braces and blankets and carried him away.
~*~
Out of all the times he’d wound up in hospital over the past months, Rose had never seen the Doctor hooked up to so many machines before. The nurses that had all been past knew him from previous visits but there was a certain terseness to them this time, a pinch of worry between their eyes that had Rose twice as worried as she had been previously.
The doctors rattling off a list as long as her arm of all of his injuries hadn’t helped much either, and she fruitlessly wishes he was here so he could explain them all to her in layman’s terms.
Because he isn’t here, not really. Physically he’s taking up the bed with his long legs and miles of plastic tubing, but Rose just can’t align this fragile looking creature with her Doctor.
It had been easy enough, seeing him in here with all of his broken bones, or frostbite, or cuts, or a collection scrapes and bruises. She’s seen enough of that in her line of work and it’s not like they never escaped an adventure unscathed back in the day. She’d patched him up more times than she could count - even roughly bandaging his ankle once when they had to escape in a hurry, to his great Time Lordly embarrassment.
But this...this silent, broken thing lying unconscious for a week whilst she sits in numb silence beside him? The idea of a prognosis like “lifelong coma” or “brain damage” being applied to him? This can’t possibly be her Doctor, the man she loves more than anything in two universes.
After everything...this can’t be the way that she loses him. Not when they’re finally starting to...not when...it’s just all so stupid.
Overwhelmed once again, she lets her head sink onto the bed beside his arm and let’s herself go to the click-whirr-hum and beeping of the machines that are keeping him alive and with her.
For how long yet she doesn’t know.
~*~
She’s in the loo when he wakes up properly for the first time.
He’s only had rare moments of lucidity and awareness so far, short stretches where he seems to respond to her (and who cares about automatic muscular response? These doctors don’t know him. They don’t know how strong he is, how hard he’ll fight for her.) After close to three weeks in hospital though, she’s more than ready for him to wake up.
She isn’t expecting to hear him calling out for her in a voice cracked with misuse when she’s washing her face in the tiny bathroom hidden in the corner of his room.
She’s out of the door in an instant, hope flaring in her chest. His look of desperation quickly melts into one of pure joy at the sight of her closing the door behind her and then she’s moving, almost running to the bed and clambering on top of him, completely heedless of all of his injuries.
Straddling him, her face already damp from the basin, she presses her cheek against his and sobs her relief into his pillow, her hands gripping his shoulders and her body pressed against every inch of him.
The cold water on her cheeks is soon replaced by hot tears as she pulls back enough to kiss him over and over until his face too is wet. She’s certain she’s gotten snot all over him too but she can’t bring herself to care when she sees the tears running down his temples and feels his hands, fluttering weakly against her back in a delicate embrace.
She gives a watery laugh and then kisses him again and even though she’s vaguely afraid that she’s probably hurting him he’s smiling so hard his face looks like it might break from the strain and she can’t quite bring herself to care.
“Rose,” he sighs reverently and she’s kissing him again, deeper this time, with her hands on his face. Before long though he’s repeating her name and shrinking back from her kisses, his voice very high and cracked. She pulls back to see him flushed in the face and it’s only when she sinks her weight back onto her haunches so she can stop crushing whatever part of him that’s hurting...
“Oh!” she says, abruptly rising onto her knees at the feel of him beneath her. “Sorry. I-sorry. Didn’t realise...”
He looks anywhere but at her as she clambers off him hastily, his erection even more prominent now beneath the thin hospital blankets.
“Sorry,” he tells her, hands fluttering uselessly. “I can’t really...I can’t help it. You were just...”
He waves a hand weakly and Rose bites her lip and takes a seat on the bed beside him.
“S’alright.” She tells him, trying to catch his gaze but incapable of noticing the telltale lump in the covers out of the corner of her eye. “Rotten timing though.”
He rolls his eyes weakly. “Figures.”
Now that her initial joy is abating, Rose takes a moment to just drink him in but quickly returns yet again to the same part of him. She knows he’s hurt, badly, and she’ll probably only hurt him more if she...but she can’t help but place a hand against his hip anyway, watching him gasp soundlessly and his whole body twitch and it’s nothing like what she’d hoped it would be but she’d nearly lost him dammit.
Once his tremors have calmed he looks down at her, exhausted, and shakes his head. “Rose I can’t.”
She shakes her head right back at him, her hand steady against his hip. “You don’t have to,” she tells him, her hand sliding across the covers to cup him and she closes her eyes briefly at his slightly more audible gasp, the gentle buck of his hips. “I’ll be real careful okay?”
He says nothing, watches her with concern as she shimmies out of her knickers and then climbs carefully back onto the bed, hitching her skirt up around her hips. As an afterthought she reaches for the button that will bring the bed up a little higher, so that he can see and he stares down at her for a moment before raising his gaze to her eyes.
“Lots of nurses.” He manages as she leans forward onto her hands, both of them breathing shallowly. “Doctors. Your mum could...”
Rose doesn’t even miss a beat, taking his Sonic from where it’s been sitting on the bedside table and pointing it towards the door.
There is a satisfying click and then she lowers her face to his, her hand sneaking beneath blankets, sliding under pyjama bottoms to touch him for the very first time.
And oh.
He’s already so firm - and warm - beneath her hand. She strokes gently, her lips hovering against his as they share each other’s breath and it isn’t long before he’s panting and she’s moving faster and faster...
He heaves a breath when she removes her hand and she places a gentle, restraining hand on his chest to calm his breathing, worried he’ll re-crack his damaged ribs. With her other hand she takes charge of the blankets, his pyjamas and despite her best efforts she has to shush him and use her other hand to hold his gently bucking hips down.
Pinned beneath her, breathing shallowly, almost painfully, he lets out a small cry as she presses him inside her and she immediately takes her weight off him, rising gently and sliding her body against his.
“Tell me,” she breathes, already shuddering with the sensation of surrounding him like this. “If it hurts.”
The Doctor doesn’t seem capable of speech however, his mouth agape as she slowly works herself to a crest. Within half a minute she’s over and done and she is still tingling as she disentangles their bodies and moves backwards so that she can crouch over him, holding his hips down again with one hand and working him with the other and her mouth at the same time.
He keens at her ministrations, at the ache of his damaged body, at the sight of her bent over him with her lips wrapped just so around...
He comes with a choked, gulping sort of sound, his hips giving the tiniest of jumps before his whole body relaxes into exhaustion.
“If you ever step up to an alien like that again,” Rose tells him as she moves him over far enough for her to lie beside him underneath the blankets and hold him. “I’ll throw you into a wall myself. Understand?”
“Sorry,” he manages, voice almost lost in his exhaustion. Eyelids already flickering shut. “Wasn’t thinki-...normally works when I...”
He fell abruptly under and Rose pressed herself a little tighter against him, knowing she’d have to tell him all over again when he woke up anyway.
She was just going to have to take better care of him she thought, fiercely kissing his shoulder in promise. She was going to make sure that he never had cause to end up like this again.
Gift for: rubberbisquit
Something angsty with smut thrown in somewhere. Focusing on the new found mortality of TenII. He isn’t here, not really. Physically he’s taking up the bed with his long legs and miles of plastic tubing, but Rose just can’t align this fragile looking creature with her Doctor. 4,919 words.
A/N: I really tried to just do angst. I did. But for some reason when you tell my muse to do angst she does fluff instead :P so there’s a bit of both.
They say old habits die hard, that you can’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs, a tiger can’t change its stripes to spots...
And someone who didn’t know where to draw the line even back when he was a Time Lord and capable of regeneration certainly isn’t going to shy away from danger just because of a pesky little trifle like becoming part human.
Rose knows this. On some level she even understands it. She knows how hard it’s been for the Doctor - psychologically as well as emotionally as well as physically - having to adjust to a linear life, let alone a human one.
It doesn’t make the fact that he’s barely clinging onto life in a hospital room any easier though.
~*~
He verbalised it way back in the beginning - amongst other things blurted out during the torrent of words he gushed between Bad Wolf Bay and London.
“You know I’ve just realised that I don’t actually know how to be human?” he’d said suddenly, midway through talking about something else entirely. “I mean I know I’m meant to have instincts and all of that and I s’pose I do, but then I don’t really know how to act human, do I? I don’t know the rules. Or, suppose I should say I just don’t care about them...”
Rose was dismissive at first. He’d be seen as eccentric, possibly a bit mad, but no worse than any other genius who had blessed the human race with their own peculiar breed of intellect.
“You can be the next Einstein or something,” she assured him, too tired and emotionally wrecked to really worry about the situation and its implications.
But he was absolutely right. Just because he was part human now didn’t mean he knew how to be human. All he knew, all he remembered was how to be the Doctor. An alien who at times had been decidedly not-human and (he himself admitted) not all that fun to be. And even though the Doctor might have looked human he was really anything but.
His new body, as such, takes a lot of getting used to. With his body temperature nearly doubled, one heart instead of two, the loss of his respiratory bypass system and the sudden invasion of a whole new host of glands...well it was easy to understand how he might be a little disorientated.
Well...maybe disorientated isn’t the right word. Probably frustrated would be better. Exasperated as well perhaps? After all, living on next to no sleep for over nine hundred years and then suddenly finding yourself trapped inside a body that can’t function without a bare minimum of six hours a night...
It takes him weeks to even begin getting the balance right - food for fuel, clothing to regulate a decent body temperature, enough sleep so that he doesn’t get cranky. It nearly drives everyone crackers - him included. After an initial three days of climbing the walls in Rose’s flat she had all but dragged him to her parents mansion and begged them to let the two of them move in - if nothing else than to give him more space to move.
In true Doctor fashion however, he memorised every single inch of the house and grounds within the first day. Once he had finished exploring he ate all the jam in the house and then proceeded to be spectacularly sick over the edge of the nearest balcony. After he’d finished apologising to the gardener for not seeing him tending to the flower beds below, Rose sat him down and asked him very seriously how he felt about taking a course of mild sedatives.
“I’m not that bad am I?” he asked her, genuinely bewildered. In answer, Rose merely walked him along the obvious trail of destruction he had left around the house and grounds. There was hardly a blade of grass or piece of furniture left untouched. The library was all but decimated - the shelves empty and the floor stacked with tottering piles of hardbacks ready to be resorted according the same haphazard storing system he had employed on the TARDIS with his own books.
“I suppose I am a bit restless aren’t I?” he said thoughtfully and Rose gave him an indignant shove which had him looking somewhat reproachful in return. “What?”
“You climbed up on a ladder,” she reminded him. “So you could count the number of crystal teardrops were on the chandelier in the ballroom. Then you tried to climb into the air conditioning vents only you got stuck halfway so one of the maids had to help pull you out. And then you got out a window and tried to see if you could climb down the side of the house using the drainpipes.”
The Doctor goggled at her. “Rose Tyler, have you been spying on me?”
Rose pressed her lips together and shook her head. “The housekeeper even came and had a word to me. Apparently all the staff think that you’re completely mental. Or...” she blushed deeply here and he had to prompt her to finish her sentence. “Well...possibly autistic...” she mumbled. At the aghast expression on his face she blurted out the final two. “Somebody else suggested ADHD. And the cook thinks you’re bi-polar. She even referred me to a doctor she knows who specialises in it.”
She held the little business card out to him and the Doctor took it, carefully, reading it through before meeting her gaze with a quiet sort of desperation behind his eyes. There was a moment of strained silence in which Rose sucked her lower lip behind her teeth anxiously before the Doctor said, quietly, “Ah.”
“Yeah,” Rose said cautiously, reaching out to snag the business card back again.
After that it was actually relatively easy to convince him to get a prescription for a mild sedative and for a few weeks life was almost normal. He slept better, he stopped pacing the corridors, and Rose pulled some strings to get him working on some of the alien tech they had amassed at Torchwood. The study that adjoined the room they were sharing quickly became a laboratory of sorts and it was quite normal to hear an assortment of loud bangs and crashes from within at all sorts of odd hours.
Rose didn’t care much though. She knew it was a pain for the cleaning staff and the rest of her family, but when he was tinkering in his study the human Doctor actually seemed somewhat content and that was all Rose really cared about. He was good at acting like he was coping but she knew his habits far too well to fall for it. He was still just as confused as she was about who he really was, this impossible blending of Time Lord and human.
Together they tried desperately to settle back into old rhythms and patterns. Rose would help him as best she could with what Jackie had dubbed his ‘science projects’ and when he got too involved in that she would drag him out to Torchwood and more often than not they’d end up in some ridiculous adventure or other and it was almost like before.
Except that it wasn’t. Torchwood had done some fairly thorough tests and examinations when he’d first come to this world but it seemed that this simply wasn’t enough for him. Seemingly unable to quite comprehend his own existence, the Doctor started on a variety of bizarre experiments on himself in order to see just how far the combination of Time Lord and human could actually go.
And it was this, more than anything else that secured his downfall.
Within a month he ended up in the emergency room more than twenty times with a variety of ailments. Pulled muscles, frostbite, bruised bones, burns of all three degrees, and most memorably what they thought was an asthma attack. It turned out to be nothing more than a panic attack brought on when he somehow managed to convince his brain that his lungs weren’t getting enough air.
The day that he tried to test how many stairs he could jump at a time and ended up tumbling right down to the bottom of the main staircase in the mansion and broke his wrist (the right one always had been slightly weaker) Rose finally snapped and told him to start taking better care of himself before he killed himself.
“You’re human now.” she snapped at him on the ride home from the hospital, his arm encased in a crisp plaster cast that he kept on probing with intrigued fingers - he’d never had one before. “You’ve gotta take care of this body or you’re gonna end up in an early grave.” When she realised that he was still inspecting his cast, oblivious, Rose deliberately swerved the car across two lanes of traffic and pulled it up on the side of the road.
His head snapped up instantly at the cacophony of honks and other abuse but despite a startled yelp, he didn’t really seem all that perturbed by her dangerous driving. No doubt due to his own dreadful piloting of the TARDIS.
“Sorry. Sorry. I was listening, promise. Honest though, I am taking care of myself. I was just walking down the stairs and I started wondering whether I could make the jump from one landing to the other but my toe got caught on the edge of one of the stairs...”
Rose stayed deadly silent until his babbling faded into silence and he began to shift uncomfortably in his seat. One leg began to bounce nervously under her scrutiny and then finally he dropped his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said and then looked up at her beseechingly. “I just...I forget sometimes. You know - that I’m not...him.” Rose softened a little at that and the Doctor leapt in quickly, “I promise I won’t do it again.”
“You’d better mean that,” Rose grumbled but she still pulled him to her in a tight hug which he awkwardly returned, his cast burdening his movement. “I don’t want to have to get mum to slap some sense into you.”
“Oh she won’t have to,” he said quickly, then shuddered. “Ugh. I still have nightmares about that first slap.”
He shuddered again and Rose laughed but the Doctor had already moved on. “Is this the sort of cast you can write on I wonder? Ooh I hope it is - I always wanted to do that. Do you want to sign my cast when we get home? I bet Tony would like to - he could draw something on it for me...”
Despite his promises, the next day Rose caught him poking himself in the eye repeatedly before the bathroom mirror. Before he could even try to convince her that he was trying to get rid of a piece of grit however she had dragged him halfway across her parents mansion to the library and she dug through the encyclopaedias and dictionaries until she found what she was looking for.
“Oh honestly!” he said when she gave it to him. “‘A Comprehensive Guide to Human Anatomy’? I probably know more about this stuff than you do!”
“Probably the science-y stuff yeah.” she admitted. “But I grew up in my body. You just kind of got...chucked into yours. Maybe this’ll help you stop trying to kill yourself.”
“How many...why would...I’m not trying to kill myself!” the Doctor spluttered. “I’m trying to figure out what my limitations are so I don’t kill myself.”
“What, by locking yourself inside an industrial freezer wearing nothing but a t-shirt and shorts?” Rose demanded.
“Well. Now. That actually was an accident,” the Doctor admitted humbly. “I was trying to...”
“Can you please just read the book?” Rose pleaded. “You make me worry Doctor. All these experiments...what if you really hurt yourself one day? What would I do then?”
He paused at the teary, pinched look on her face, struck by how upset she really was by his actions. He knew that his recklessness upset her sometimes, but her insistent worrying was a new trait that Rose had never seemed to carry when they had been travelling together.
But then she’d never had to worry about him like this before had she?
“Do I really have to read it?” he wheedled but Rose gave him a watery glare and he wavered. “I promise I won’t fall down any more stairs,” he said beseechingly. “I won’t poke myself in the eye, I won’t play with matches or try to make your mums kitchen appliances work better. And I definitely won’t lock myself inside the freezer again. Welll...I might do that accidently but definitely not on purpose...”
Rose rolled her eyes but there was the hint of a smile on her lips and so the Doctor smiled winningly at her until she finally smiled back - charmed despite herself. For one glorious moment he thought he might’ve gotten out of reading the book after all but then she stepped right up close to him and clasped his good hand in hers.
“Doctor?” she said softly gazing up at him. Her breath whooshed softly against his skin with every exhale and he found himself swallowing nervously at the tension between their bodies, so very close but not quite touching.
“Rose?” he managed to strangle out.
“Please read the book?” she pleaded simply, squeezing his hand. “Please?”
And really what could he say to that except for, “Well I honestly don’t think that it’s going to help me much but if you insist...”
To Rose’s bemusement he read the entire book from cover to cover in little more than an hour. Afterwards he ambushed the first person he bumped into (which just so happened to be Pete) and proceeded to babble for a good twenty minutes about how amazing human bodies were and how much he’d forgotten about their biology since he’d last studied them...
Eventually Rose found the two of them and Pete gladly fled, leaving her to deal with another five minutes worth of rambling. When the Doctor finally paused to take a breath she took the opportunity to ask him (quite smugly) if he’d enjoyed the book after all.
“Oh yes,” he agreed. “Very informative. Best idea I’ve had in a long while - reading that book.”
“Your idea?” Rose’s eyebrows shot up but the Doctor grinned at her and reached his good hand out to her, wiggling his fingers invitingly. She whacked him one first, then took his hand and he squeezed gently, his palm warm against hers.
That night she was amused to note that he’d brought the book to bed with him and was poring over it again with his specs on. They were sharing a bed, but only to sleep in so far and she was already settled down when she heard him close the book and snuggle in behind her.
“Rose.” He whispered, his good arm snaking around her waist.
“Mmmn. What?”
“I’ve been brushing up on my human biology...” He murmured, voice hushed and a little breathless against her neck.
Nonplussed, Rose made an affirmative noise to show she was listening, then jumped when she felt his hand slip beneath her shirt to the soft skin beneath.
“...Doctor?” she said uncertainly, but then his previous statement clicked and she actually laughed out loud. “Oh my god. You...”
She stopped abruptly then, consumed by giggles and the Doctor recoiled as if he’d just realised he was sharing the bed with a Slitheen, babbling a mile a minute and apologising his head off.
“You...you...” Rose tried hard to suppress her breathless giggles. “M’sorry but...you seriously just tried to seduce me with some line about human biology?”
In the near-darkness the Doctor looked and sounded somewhere between startled, terrified and hopeful. “Well,” he said. “Yes.”
Still huffing with stifled laughter, Rose shuffled in closer to him on the bed and put a hand on his cheek.
“You really don’t know how to be human, do you?” she said fondly.
The Doctor spluttered out with an, “I, er, well...” before Rose leant up to touch her lips to his.
They had kissed of course, since they had returned from Bad Wolf Bay. But it had taken a long time for them to grow truly comfortable with each other in a physical capacity again. There had been a few hefty snogs along the way but mostly they had shared shyer, chaster moments of affection. The kind of thing they had deferred to back in the TARDIS days - lingering embraces or extended periods of cuddling.
This was the first time though that he had openly and forwardly expressed a desire for anything further and it was clear from the way he wrapped his arms around her and pressed his body into hers that even if he hadn’t consciously been thinking about sex, his hormones certainly had.
Rose hummed against his lips, wondering if he hadn’t been doing other, more covert experiments on his new body that she hadn’t heard about. If he had they must have at least ended well because she had yet to drive him to the hospital with any complaints from around the groin area. The thought warmed her whole body as she too wriggled her arms around him and crushed him even closer.
The Doctor had just gasped into her mouth at the feel of her hand gripping his hip bone when Rose’s phone blared to life.
The two of them froze, chests heaving against each other and legs gloriously tangled for the briefest moment before Rose groaned and rolled towards her bedside table.
“This’ll be Torchwood.” She grumbled, and sure enough it was. With a Category One incident and all.
They dressed hastily, the Doctor bemoaning the fact that his jacket wouldn’t fit over his cast, and Rose sped all the way to Canary Wharf.
It all happened too quickly, Rose thought later. Her training kicking in as she joined the operatives already swarming towards the basement level via the stairs, she barely even noticed that the Doctor was beside her until she was led through to where the alien in question was wreaking havoc.
Three agents were already lying dead as well as a lab tech and Rose automatically brought her tranquiliser gun up in a defensive stance before yelling out to the thing.
“Oi!”
It swerved around at her voice, twice as tall as a human and reptilian, its scales glittering in a fetching diamond pattern reminiscent of an Earth python. It would have almost been pretty if it weren’t for its bloodied fangs and the powerful spiked tail that helped it balance upright.
“Oh,” she vaguely heard the Doctor murmur beside her. “Gorgeous.”
She ignored him, focusing instead on the creature. “Can you speak?” Rose asked it in a steady, calm voice. “Do you have a translation chip? Do we have a translation program running yet?” she added over her shoulder and she received a non committal yell from somewhere behind her.
The creature cocked its head at her and then abruptly fell onto all fours, a forked tongue flickered out to taste the air between them. Rose stayed very still as the creature got its bearings, taste-smelling her. It was still carefully studying her when the Doctor stepped forward confidently, hissing and spitting in some alien language. The creature however recoiled at the sound and the whole room tensed as it swung towards the Doctor with an almost pained cry.
It gave no warning other than that before it was rushing the Doctor, bellowing its head off as it sideswiped him into the nearest wall with one powerful arm.
His head thunked horribly against the concrete and then he crumbled to the floor, lifeless.
Rose’s heart stopped.
The creature bellowed again, a clearly defined sound of pain now and it clawed gouges into the concrete floor as it was surrounded by operatives, yelling and peppering it with tranquiliser darts.
She didn’t remember going to the Doctor, only the way that his head lolled, unnaturally loose on his neck when she lifted his face towards her.
Then one of the med team were there beside her and snapping at her to leave him be, there might be spinal injuries and all she could do was stare at him as they wrapped him up in neck braces and blankets and carried him away.
~*~
Out of all the times he’d wound up in hospital over the past months, Rose had never seen the Doctor hooked up to so many machines before. The nurses that had all been past knew him from previous visits but there was a certain terseness to them this time, a pinch of worry between their eyes that had Rose twice as worried as she had been previously.
The doctors rattling off a list as long as her arm of all of his injuries hadn’t helped much either, and she fruitlessly wishes he was here so he could explain them all to her in layman’s terms.
Because he isn’t here, not really. Physically he’s taking up the bed with his long legs and miles of plastic tubing, but Rose just can’t align this fragile looking creature with her Doctor.
It had been easy enough, seeing him in here with all of his broken bones, or frostbite, or cuts, or a collection scrapes and bruises. She’s seen enough of that in her line of work and it’s not like they never escaped an adventure unscathed back in the day. She’d patched him up more times than she could count - even roughly bandaging his ankle once when they had to escape in a hurry, to his great Time Lordly embarrassment.
But this...this silent, broken thing lying unconscious for a week whilst she sits in numb silence beside him? The idea of a prognosis like “lifelong coma” or “brain damage” being applied to him? This can’t possibly be her Doctor, the man she loves more than anything in two universes.
After everything...this can’t be the way that she loses him. Not when they’re finally starting to...not when...it’s just all so stupid.
Overwhelmed once again, she lets her head sink onto the bed beside his arm and let’s herself go to the click-whirr-hum and beeping of the machines that are keeping him alive and with her.
For how long yet she doesn’t know.
~*~
She’s in the loo when he wakes up properly for the first time.
He’s only had rare moments of lucidity and awareness so far, short stretches where he seems to respond to her (and who cares about automatic muscular response? These doctors don’t know him. They don’t know how strong he is, how hard he’ll fight for her.) After close to three weeks in hospital though, she’s more than ready for him to wake up.
She isn’t expecting to hear him calling out for her in a voice cracked with misuse when she’s washing her face in the tiny bathroom hidden in the corner of his room.
She’s out of the door in an instant, hope flaring in her chest. His look of desperation quickly melts into one of pure joy at the sight of her closing the door behind her and then she’s moving, almost running to the bed and clambering on top of him, completely heedless of all of his injuries.
Straddling him, her face already damp from the basin, she presses her cheek against his and sobs her relief into his pillow, her hands gripping his shoulders and her body pressed against every inch of him.
The cold water on her cheeks is soon replaced by hot tears as she pulls back enough to kiss him over and over until his face too is wet. She’s certain she’s gotten snot all over him too but she can’t bring herself to care when she sees the tears running down his temples and feels his hands, fluttering weakly against her back in a delicate embrace.
She gives a watery laugh and then kisses him again and even though she’s vaguely afraid that she’s probably hurting him he’s smiling so hard his face looks like it might break from the strain and she can’t quite bring herself to care.
“Rose,” he sighs reverently and she’s kissing him again, deeper this time, with her hands on his face. Before long though he’s repeating her name and shrinking back from her kisses, his voice very high and cracked. She pulls back to see him flushed in the face and it’s only when she sinks her weight back onto her haunches so she can stop crushing whatever part of him that’s hurting...
“Oh!” she says, abruptly rising onto her knees at the feel of him beneath her. “Sorry. I-sorry. Didn’t realise...”
He looks anywhere but at her as she clambers off him hastily, his erection even more prominent now beneath the thin hospital blankets.
“Sorry,” he tells her, hands fluttering uselessly. “I can’t really...I can’t help it. You were just...”
He waves a hand weakly and Rose bites her lip and takes a seat on the bed beside him.
“S’alright.” She tells him, trying to catch his gaze but incapable of noticing the telltale lump in the covers out of the corner of her eye. “Rotten timing though.”
He rolls his eyes weakly. “Figures.”
Now that her initial joy is abating, Rose takes a moment to just drink him in but quickly returns yet again to the same part of him. She knows he’s hurt, badly, and she’ll probably only hurt him more if she...but she can’t help but place a hand against his hip anyway, watching him gasp soundlessly and his whole body twitch and it’s nothing like what she’d hoped it would be but she’d nearly lost him dammit.
Once his tremors have calmed he looks down at her, exhausted, and shakes his head. “Rose I can’t.”
She shakes her head right back at him, her hand steady against his hip. “You don’t have to,” she tells him, her hand sliding across the covers to cup him and she closes her eyes briefly at his slightly more audible gasp, the gentle buck of his hips. “I’ll be real careful okay?”
He says nothing, watches her with concern as she shimmies out of her knickers and then climbs carefully back onto the bed, hitching her skirt up around her hips. As an afterthought she reaches for the button that will bring the bed up a little higher, so that he can see and he stares down at her for a moment before raising his gaze to her eyes.
“Lots of nurses.” He manages as she leans forward onto her hands, both of them breathing shallowly. “Doctors. Your mum could...”
Rose doesn’t even miss a beat, taking his Sonic from where it’s been sitting on the bedside table and pointing it towards the door.
There is a satisfying click and then she lowers her face to his, her hand sneaking beneath blankets, sliding under pyjama bottoms to touch him for the very first time.
And oh.
He’s already so firm - and warm - beneath her hand. She strokes gently, her lips hovering against his as they share each other’s breath and it isn’t long before he’s panting and she’s moving faster and faster...
He heaves a breath when she removes her hand and she places a gentle, restraining hand on his chest to calm his breathing, worried he’ll re-crack his damaged ribs. With her other hand she takes charge of the blankets, his pyjamas and despite her best efforts she has to shush him and use her other hand to hold his gently bucking hips down.
Pinned beneath her, breathing shallowly, almost painfully, he lets out a small cry as she presses him inside her and she immediately takes her weight off him, rising gently and sliding her body against his.
“Tell me,” she breathes, already shuddering with the sensation of surrounding him like this. “If it hurts.”
The Doctor doesn’t seem capable of speech however, his mouth agape as she slowly works herself to a crest. Within half a minute she’s over and done and she is still tingling as she disentangles their bodies and moves backwards so that she can crouch over him, holding his hips down again with one hand and working him with the other and her mouth at the same time.
He keens at her ministrations, at the ache of his damaged body, at the sight of her bent over him with her lips wrapped just so around...
He comes with a choked, gulping sort of sound, his hips giving the tiniest of jumps before his whole body relaxes into exhaustion.
“If you ever step up to an alien like that again,” Rose tells him as she moves him over far enough for her to lie beside him underneath the blankets and hold him. “I’ll throw you into a wall myself. Understand?”
“Sorry,” he manages, voice almost lost in his exhaustion. Eyelids already flickering shut. “Wasn’t thinki-...normally works when I...”
He fell abruptly under and Rose pressed herself a little tighter against him, knowing she’d have to tell him all over again when he woke up anyway.
She was just going to have to take better care of him she thought, fiercely kissing his shoulder in promise. She was going to make sure that he never had cause to end up like this again.