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sleep, perchance nine, rose. rated g. 1103 words.
when the doctor wakes up from an impromptu nap on the TARDIS floor, rose tyler is staring down at him with beautiful, bottomless eyes.
a/n: a seemingly insignificant moment between the doctor and rose. domesticity or deeper meaning? that is the question. for takesthewords and mylittlepwny again. but especially for kit-kat, because she asked for nine a long time ago. <3
+
When the Doctor wakes up from an impromptu nap on the TARDIS floor, Rose Tyler is staring down at him with beautiful, bottomless eyes.
He supresses a scream of "Coconuts don't have legs!" (the vestiges of a dream that he will never, ever explain), but it is a near thing. A relief, to be sure; this early in any relationship, it wouldn't do to give off airs of impending insanity.
Well. Any additional airs of impending insanity
Coming awake is a groggy process. The Doctor can smell his companion kneeling over him, all vanilla-soft and sweet, and he is just starting to smile against his own volition when her skinny finger pokes him in the nose and she says:
"You fell asleep!" Her expression is both curious and accusing as she sweeps a wing of yellow fringe from her eyes. Humans call it blonde, but the Doctor is ever skeptical; the girl has piles and piles of ridiculously bright hair, and there's no other word for it but yellow. Like a daisy, or a banana peel, or the sun at a distance. All beautiful things, actually, and the Doctor is suddenly annoyed.
He reaches up and tugs a lock, brings Rose down to her elbows with a sharp "Oi!"
"Yes," he says calmly, his other hand folded beneath his head, fingers scratching absently at his scalp. "I did fall asleep, didn't I?" His eyebrow raises as he turns his head to glare at the girl next to him, who is currently nursing her elbow with a frown. "And you rudely interrupted," he sighs. "Let me pose this question to you, Rose." He pauses dramatically. "If a Time Lord can't have a kip on his own TARDIS, then where can he?"
Rose rolls her eyes eloquently, her black lashes fluttering. "Oh, shut up with your Time Lord nonsense, lieabout!" she says crossly, and sprawls out inelegantly, flopping to the floor on her stomach, pillowing her chin on stacked hands. "All your whingeing about me havin' the temerity to sleep when there's adventures to be had, and here I am, finding out that really"--she pokes again at his nose, earning a low squawk, "--we're just the same, you and I." Her tongue peeks out from the white seam of her teeth as she smiles wolfishly, waggling her dark eyebrows at him. "In all the ways that count, anyway."
They are on the ground of the console room, green lights ebbing and glowing, the grating pressing into their clothes. It's not long after the Doctor first picked Rose up, a little bit after the ghosts of Christmas past but before the bicentennial of the Frilothrax Revolution, and he's become used to marking the progression of time by the places he has shown and has yet to show her. Things are settled into a pattern of run, relax, repeat. One might call it comfortable, even.
(With an exhilarating bite of uncertain doom, of course. He's got boots worn to their soles that can attest to that.)
Still. This is the first that he's ever felt languid enough to shut his eyes while fixing the underpanels of the console. Since the Time War, he's more privy to the ins and outs of being slightly mad, though. And after the day's earlier run-in with an overgrown timeworm on a planet stuck in permanent replay, the Doctor does feel entitled. So, here he is.
And here Rose is. The shallow rush of her breathing and the low hum of the engines and the soundless whirr of the Void stir something deep in the Doctor's stomach. Something happy, almost. So happy that it makes him queasy. He contemplates telling Rose this, then snorts in self-derision. He knows exactly how she would tease.
Ornery old man, and her eyes would light up like lamps burning from within, Are you so good at being dark and gloomy that slowing down and enjoying things, it makes your tummy hurt?
Yes. The answer is yes. Or was, until he blew up a department store and extended his hand to a young slip of a woman, barely nineteen. Now, he's rather shocked by all the ways in which his face (new, or relatively so, after 900-plus years of living) is still unused to the smiles that stretch across the craggy planes, the silly features. He feels too big for his skin, too much for his bones, and if he lets himself grow with this feeling, lets himself ride the warmth and wildness of this sea casting its waves through his body, he knows he will be larger than reality itself.
And would it even touch the enormity of what Rose Tyler is? What she could be? Who she will become?
Something distantly rings in his head, a howl, a cadence like marching, an anguished scream. The Doctor shivers; his future-sense, the familiar foreboding that always tells him what is even now unfolding in his own chronology, warns him that the question is dangerous.
So he stops thinking of it. Forcibly wrenches himself into the here and the now, lets the moment skim over his nerves like pins. He inhales around the fullness of this minute that is unwinding into more minutes, into hours, into days. Passes a hand over his belly as he distracts himself, turns his head to look at Rose, who is looking happily at him. The same nameless feeling from before, that mix of elation and trepidation and bone-deep relaxation, is reflected completely in the guileless, bold features of her face. For a single, sharp instant, the Doctor can't catch his breath. It hurts, how glad he is. Squeezes between his hearts, twines around his ribs, ingratiates itself into the hollows of his chest.
And then she is turning over onto her back, mirroring his pose, letting her free hand drift down to his own. Fingers loosely linking, thumb sweeping the indent of his palm. He can feel the steady beat of her pulse, can almost hear the song her blood is singing.
All at once, the Doctor relaxes into the ache. It transforms into something gentle, forgiving. And Rose smiles.
"You fell asleep," she says again, her gaze soft and playful, wonder making her voice throaty and rough.
The Doctor shakes his head, closes his eyes. Lets the dark behind his lids fill with yellow and pink and black brows, black lashes, an endless laugh, powerful legs pumping, hoodie flapping in the wind.
Finally, finally, the smile breaks free, wild and untamed, every revealed tooth and every ingrained groove just another centimeter she has given him back of a life he thought he had lost.
"No, Rose," he says, and it's like he's shouting his soul after centuries of whispering in the dark, "I woke up."
finis
when the doctor wakes up from an impromptu nap on the TARDIS floor, rose tyler is staring down at him with beautiful, bottomless eyes.
a/n: a seemingly insignificant moment between the doctor and rose. domesticity or deeper meaning? that is the question. for takesthewords and mylittlepwny again. but especially for kit-kat, because she asked for nine a long time ago. <3
+
When the Doctor wakes up from an impromptu nap on the TARDIS floor, Rose Tyler is staring down at him with beautiful, bottomless eyes.
He supresses a scream of "Coconuts don't have legs!" (the vestiges of a dream that he will never, ever explain), but it is a near thing. A relief, to be sure; this early in any relationship, it wouldn't do to give off airs of impending insanity.
Well. Any additional airs of impending insanity
Coming awake is a groggy process. The Doctor can smell his companion kneeling over him, all vanilla-soft and sweet, and he is just starting to smile against his own volition when her skinny finger pokes him in the nose and she says:
"You fell asleep!" Her expression is both curious and accusing as she sweeps a wing of yellow fringe from her eyes. Humans call it blonde, but the Doctor is ever skeptical; the girl has piles and piles of ridiculously bright hair, and there's no other word for it but yellow. Like a daisy, or a banana peel, or the sun at a distance. All beautiful things, actually, and the Doctor is suddenly annoyed.
He reaches up and tugs a lock, brings Rose down to her elbows with a sharp "Oi!"
"Yes," he says calmly, his other hand folded beneath his head, fingers scratching absently at his scalp. "I did fall asleep, didn't I?" His eyebrow raises as he turns his head to glare at the girl next to him, who is currently nursing her elbow with a frown. "And you rudely interrupted," he sighs. "Let me pose this question to you, Rose." He pauses dramatically. "If a Time Lord can't have a kip on his own TARDIS, then where can he?"
Rose rolls her eyes eloquently, her black lashes fluttering. "Oh, shut up with your Time Lord nonsense, lieabout!" she says crossly, and sprawls out inelegantly, flopping to the floor on her stomach, pillowing her chin on stacked hands. "All your whingeing about me havin' the temerity to sleep when there's adventures to be had, and here I am, finding out that really"--she pokes again at his nose, earning a low squawk, "--we're just the same, you and I." Her tongue peeks out from the white seam of her teeth as she smiles wolfishly, waggling her dark eyebrows at him. "In all the ways that count, anyway."
They are on the ground of the console room, green lights ebbing and glowing, the grating pressing into their clothes. It's not long after the Doctor first picked Rose up, a little bit after the ghosts of Christmas past but before the bicentennial of the Frilothrax Revolution, and he's become used to marking the progression of time by the places he has shown and has yet to show her. Things are settled into a pattern of run, relax, repeat. One might call it comfortable, even.
(With an exhilarating bite of uncertain doom, of course. He's got boots worn to their soles that can attest to that.)
Still. This is the first that he's ever felt languid enough to shut his eyes while fixing the underpanels of the console. Since the Time War, he's more privy to the ins and outs of being slightly mad, though. And after the day's earlier run-in with an overgrown timeworm on a planet stuck in permanent replay, the Doctor does feel entitled. So, here he is.
And here Rose is. The shallow rush of her breathing and the low hum of the engines and the soundless whirr of the Void stir something deep in the Doctor's stomach. Something happy, almost. So happy that it makes him queasy. He contemplates telling Rose this, then snorts in self-derision. He knows exactly how she would tease.
Ornery old man, and her eyes would light up like lamps burning from within, Are you so good at being dark and gloomy that slowing down and enjoying things, it makes your tummy hurt?
Yes. The answer is yes. Or was, until he blew up a department store and extended his hand to a young slip of a woman, barely nineteen. Now, he's rather shocked by all the ways in which his face (new, or relatively so, after 900-plus years of living) is still unused to the smiles that stretch across the craggy planes, the silly features. He feels too big for his skin, too much for his bones, and if he lets himself grow with this feeling, lets himself ride the warmth and wildness of this sea casting its waves through his body, he knows he will be larger than reality itself.
And would it even touch the enormity of what Rose Tyler is? What she could be? Who she will become?
Something distantly rings in his head, a howl, a cadence like marching, an anguished scream. The Doctor shivers; his future-sense, the familiar foreboding that always tells him what is even now unfolding in his own chronology, warns him that the question is dangerous.
So he stops thinking of it. Forcibly wrenches himself into the here and the now, lets the moment skim over his nerves like pins. He inhales around the fullness of this minute that is unwinding into more minutes, into hours, into days. Passes a hand over his belly as he distracts himself, turns his head to look at Rose, who is looking happily at him. The same nameless feeling from before, that mix of elation and trepidation and bone-deep relaxation, is reflected completely in the guileless, bold features of her face. For a single, sharp instant, the Doctor can't catch his breath. It hurts, how glad he is. Squeezes between his hearts, twines around his ribs, ingratiates itself into the hollows of his chest.
And then she is turning over onto her back, mirroring his pose, letting her free hand drift down to his own. Fingers loosely linking, thumb sweeping the indent of his palm. He can feel the steady beat of her pulse, can almost hear the song her blood is singing.
All at once, the Doctor relaxes into the ache. It transforms into something gentle, forgiving. And Rose smiles.
"You fell asleep," she says again, her gaze soft and playful, wonder making her voice throaty and rough.
The Doctor shakes his head, closes his eyes. Lets the dark behind his lids fill with yellow and pink and black brows, black lashes, an endless laugh, powerful legs pumping, hoodie flapping in the wind.
Finally, finally, the smile breaks free, wild and untamed, every revealed tooth and every ingrained groove just another centimeter she has given him back of a life he thought he had lost.
"No, Rose," he says, and it's like he's shouting his soul after centuries of whispering in the dark, "I woke up."
finis