(no subject)
It’s sweet and sticky and hard to eat without looking a little bit undignified, but she delves into her treat with gusto.
Her mouth becomes red with it like she’d bought a kiss - he can smell its tart over the salt-sea taffy in his pocket and the vendors hawking butter popcorn. And even though they’d arrived not half an hour ago, she’s already got tendrils of hair sticking to the sweat on the back of her neck and a small reel of raffle tickets in her skirt pocket (free of charge - she and her lashes had seen to that. The boy at the concession was probably still hyperventilating in the back. For the first time in nine hundred years, the Doctor wished that he carried spare change in his dimensionally transcendent pockets).
She watches the roller coasters in rapture as she licks the sweetness off her finger one by one. Despite his superior Time Lord physiology, his mouth goes a little dry.
Rose looks up at him and grins. Which one shall we go on first?
Coney Island, high June of 1927. She’s wearing the sundress she’d set aside for special occasions; he foregoes the suit jacket and rolls his sleeves to his elbows. She’s desperate for thrills and like he’d ever say no. America is roaring and he’s decided he’s going to make her happier than ever, today. He holds out his hand and she takes it (and leaves a trace of the sticky sweetness on his hands. He tastes it when she goes off to the ladies, and there’s the saccharine tang of apple still there) Your pick, Miss Tyler. Her smile soars and she points in the direction of the screams, like always.
Hours later, when she’s clutching his arm and threatening to throw up over his shoes, they stroll it off on the boardwalk that extends along the entire beach, speaking quietly under the chatter of families and the sizzle of oil and the snapping of burnt out camera bulbs. They pass the seashell amphitheatre where a four piece band attempts the blues and she whistles louder than anyone else at the end. When she’s recovered, their feet hit the wood walk gloriously loud, laughing as they run, frightening the seagulls in their wake and leaping onto the sand. Here Rose lets go of his hand, submerges her ankles in the shoreline and spreads her arms wide as though she could gather it all in; atmosphere and asthenosphere, water and sand alike.
She breathes and the horizon expands and contracts with the blades of her shoulders. A bead of sweat runs down into the small of her back and he wonders if it would taste like the metal of her zipper or candied apples or has the salt of the sea traced its design onto her skin and refused to let go?
Now night and day diverges; before the sun completely sinks down the horizon and after the lamps along the boardwalk have been lit, the sky is streaked with all the golds and violets and scarlets of a universe with a growing palette. She counts the ticket stubs between them, and says in the rising dusk, your pick, Doctor.
For once, he points towards the silence.
We’re so high up, she giggles nervously as they swing back and forth, clutching his hand tightly between them. She’s now ridden every coaster in Steeplechase Park at least three times, but she had squeezed her eyes tightly shut when their gondola lifted up into the air. You’ve been travelling in the vortex for nearly two years now, he teases, and since it’s basically nowhere, that’s as high as you can get. Well, and low, I suppose. At the same time.
But look at them, Doctor. Tentatively, she sticks her head out the window. All those people; they look like little walking hats. They don’t notice, but she waves to them.
He cranes his neck and watches them too; knows in a few years most of them would be found without homes and riding the rails in search for the remains of a great American dream, with only the promises of men over radios to sustain them. And that should they survive such disappointment there’d be another war to fight soon, that wouldn’t be the bank holiday they are told it is. That this park will burn once, twice in the next decade; the way all things do, reduced to ashes on the sea breeze. The beaches will fill but the rides will become derelicts of the modern age (he’ll walk among them regenerations later, monuments of giants and innocents, and he’ll dream of her again).
The bandstand grows quiet but for the smattering of applause and the crash of waves against rocks. He looks at her and she at him, the lights at her back wreathing her in a blur of gold. I think, he touches the side of her face, brushes his fingers against it lightly. You’ve got caramel on your cheek.
Her eyes are bright; the moonlight ripples off the saltwater that is bound to it. Get it off for me then, will you? And she turns it towards him, a graceful twist of the neck, brushing her hair away from the offending spot that may or may not exist. Cables suspend them in space, cradles them along the summer breeze, thick with the grease of engines and the smoke of burnt-out filaments. She holds him in this moment; now and in memories years from then, in the brilliant, blurred edges of her profile against the evening and the lights of the pier that never go out in his mind’s eye.
Obligingly, he leans over and touches her cheek with his lips. He stays a breath away from her skin, because the taste of shop girl is as glorious as he’d imagined. Hold on, he says, grasping her arm and shifting over to face her, peering into the inconsistent lighting. I think I see - wait a sec. I’ll get it. He ghosts over her mouth with his own, tasting the sweetness that lingers there.
She laughs and pulls at his tie; teaches him how to kiss her properly.
Two revolutions later and the taste of apples and Rose Tyler thoroughly analyzed, she’s curled up against his shoulder and he draws her closer, watching the stars they’ve yet to visit wink into existence. Her hand focuses on other travels, up his chest and presses gently against the space between his hearts.
Her red, red lips form the words: You don’t have to talk about me when I’m gone.
Those who don’t know better might think his girl is being contrary - promising forever in one century and an entirely different thing in another. But he knows what kind of finite she means when she says it, and he’s already nearly losing her twenty times in a relative day, no matter how fast they run. She thinks she’ll never leave him on her own volition but he knows different. They rise to heaven and fall to earth once again.
Alright, he says, pressing his lips to her hair and breathing in the salt of her skin. There are some things you ruin with the telling.