Fic - Postcards to Gallifrey (4/5)
Sorry this took so long. But, to make up for that: TARDIS fix! We're nearing the end, but I think there's going to be one last part.
Thanks to mynxii for the location suggestion. It worked really well.
Oh, and all of the chapter have cool little headers now. :D
Title: Postcards to Gallifrey (4/5)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Doctor/Rose, various
Summary: AU. The TARDIS is broken; no more time travel, and no off-planet travel until he can get the parts he needs. And so the Doctor and Rose live out their bohemian lifestyle in a whole new way.
Spoilers: References to Doomsday, and maybe various other bits.
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, nor the associated characters, and am not making any money off of this. Darn.
Other parts:
Part One: Zakynthos, Greece
Part Two: Bray, Ireland
Part Three: New York City, USA
Part Five: Arcadia
The little house belonged to an old eccentric he once knew, he tells her. He doesn’t tell her that the reason he was so eccentric was that he was, in fact, a Time lord who had retired to Earth. He doesn’t tell her that he saw the old man die in the wars; of his part in the man’s death. The house is small, and old, and hasn’t been kept, except by an old neighbour lady once a month, since he left. In this timeline, apparently, that’s somewhere between six and thirteen years. No one remembers exactly how long it’s been, mostly because time is skewed because of his presence and subsequent absence.
It’s in that strange place between two of the towns that make up Perth. The city is a bit like every other large city in the world-it sort of grew up around itself, the crush of people compressing and then expanding once again to fill the space. But with so few people in this part of the world, in such a large area, that space isn’t entirely filled. Halfway down the road to Rockingham is the cottage.
Rose finds a couple of old bikes in the potting shed, and convinces him to fix them up so that they can ride to town and down to the beach. The sound of waves permeates that house, like it’s crept into the very woodwork, getting itself down into the crevices. Making it into a house of waves.
Maria, the care taker of the house, mentions that the day-care is looking for another volunteer, as they don’t have the money to hire someone else. Over tea, Rose mentions it to the Doctor. He thinks that this is a great idea, and clearly expresses his enthusiasm for it by spinning her about the tiny kitchen, singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ (for no apparent reason other than they’re in Australia and he’s happy) at the top of his lungs. He makes up ridiculous verses until she can’t breathe for laughing.
That night, she mulls it over in her mind and considers something that she hadn’t before now. She doesn’t need to ask if he’s awake; he almost always is. “Why’re you so enthusiastic about me taking this job?”
“Oh, you know, doing a good thing, giving back to the community, helping out the world…” he trails off, not wanting to lie when she knows he is. Not that the things he’s named aren’t good reasons. They’re just not the only ones, or the most important.
Rose sighs into the darkness, tired. “Is it because you’d know I’d be alright? If I chose to stay?”
In the breathing darkness, he doesn’t answer for a long time. When he does, it’s with a sigh, echoing hers. “It’s because you would be alright no matter what happens to me.” He doesn’t tell her that he thinks that it’s beautiful, and amazing, what she does: leading this double life in a way that doesn’t break her in two.
*
She throws her hands down in exasperation. “You represent nothing. You’ve no planet, no people, no proper name even. Your machine doesn’t work. All you have are two meaningless titles: Doctor, and Time Lord.”
There are things half-unsaid here, that want to come out in mean ways when they’re mad. They don’t outweigh the beautiful, unsayable things. The shadows cast by the unsaid things only make the unsayable ones heavier, gives them shadows. Until, like now, something snaps, and things that were unsaid are spoken, for a big reason, or no reason at all.
“Well we can’t all be named after bushes, can we? And, Lord of Time? That’s pretty impressive, given I’m the only one.”
“That’s exactly it: you’re the only one. You can’t rule a domain all by yourself. And there are others that have taken it over, aren’t there? Time Agents and stuff, like Jack was.” He flinches at the mention of his name. “And besides that-,” Stopping in mid-sentence, she wrings the empty air with clenched hands, not coming up with the words to express her frustrations with him. “You! You aggravate me, and frustrate me, and I love you,” she tells him, the words falling in the thick summer air. Outside, the wind sighs into the waves.
“I love you,” she repeats. And it’s not dignified, with her nose running, and her eyes red. It’s beautiful enough to nearly crack his hearts, as if she hadn’t broken them long ago.
He stares at her, not bothering after all of these years, to veil the sadness he knows he should hide. “Quite right too.”
He knows she’s waiting. For the reciprocation and echo of the sentiments, expressed in words. He cannot give to her what he longs to. She looks away, at the wall, anywhere but the gaze telling her what she cannot hear. Finally, he feels he must explain, or lose her, like sand slipping from his grasp. “I can’t, Rose.”
She looks back up at him, eyes hinting of hardness. “Can’t what?”
Stepping closer to her, tempting the beast, he answers. “I can’t say what you want me to.”
There, the flash of flint as she tightens her mouth. “Why not?” Before he speaks, she wrenches herself away from him. “Because I’m the same as the rest. You can’t say it because it wouldn’t be true.”
She’s about to sweep out of here, and the desperation reflects in his voice, just for a syllable. “No.”
Rose stops. Doesn’t, won’t turn around. Letting him speak his piece, with no guarantee that she’ll stay if she doesn’t like it. He steps, once, twice, getting his voice back under his control and finding that it’s slipping, just when he fears it the most. “I can’t say what you want me to,’ he repeats, softly, “not because it wouldn’t be true, but because it would.”
She turns, a frown on her lips. “I don’t-.”
“Men promise so many things in the pursuit of women. That they would save the world for them, that they would save the universe, or destroy it, all for them, if only she said the word. But the thing is, for me, it could be true. To say that, and mean it? Would be to say that I would do anything for you. And that can’t happen, because I would have the ability to.” He’s trying so hard to explain all of this, the one rule that made sense to him, and the strain is showing in his voice, cracking it. “Do you understand?”
She doesn’t like it, but she accepts it, he sees briefly as she looks towards the door again. “Anything?” She murmurs.
His breath catches, because he’s told her the truth of it, and he very well can’t take it all back now. She nods, turns to him, and gives him a little smile as she slips into his arms. Trying to reassure him that she isn’t going. Part of him feels she’s already gone. “I wouldn’t ask you to,” she murmurs.
He thinks, one day, she will.
*
She teaches him the old songs of her childhood, remembering them. Pulling them from the depths at the back of her mind and into the light, so that she can give them to the children at the day-care. He doesn’t teach her his songs, because she knows them already, somehow, singing them in her mind as she sleeps. She tries teaching him hand games, and counting games, and he never seems to quite get it right, but that’s okay.
They don’t know how it happens, but she’s found that she has a life without him. That, if he left, she would be able to bear it. Yes, it would break her heart, and she would want him back desperately. But her life would go on. She would go out, and she would teach the children, and laugh with them, and sing the nursery rhymes, and come back home. Well, not home, just the house (because he wouldn’t be there).
Instead of finding a harmony to him, she’s finding a melody. Two separate melodies would only get tangled and confused jangled. The melody needs to become a harmony, one or the other of them. Perhaps they both need to change.
They realize that if they change too much, they’ll leave each other behind, or the separate lives they hold will cease to intersect. To adapt, to converge, is so hard, and it’s always about so much more than it seems to be.
*
“What happens next?” she wonders aloud, still scared, but he doesn’t know what of. “When the TARDIS is fixed and can leave this planet and this time.” She hesitates. “Is there going to be an ‘us’?”
He takes her hand, twining their fingers together like past days, when they would run. “As long as you want to be by my side, I will be with you.”
Rose shakes her head. “But I’m gonna get old, and weak. And one day you won’t want me anymore.”
“Never,” he says in mock outrage, before humming a bar or two from ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’.
*
She speaks, and he listens, the storm outside rumbling underneath her words. “You know, when I was little, I was never afraid of thunderstorms.”
Watching the large, heavy droplets slapping heavily into the hot dirt outside in the garden, lush and green in the summer heat, he doesn’t respond. Rose speaks over the booms of thunder. “Just the opposite really. I would wait all summer for one of the big ones, which are pretty rare in London,” she reminds him.
He shifts, skin cool to the touch even in this oppressive heat. “But when they happen, they’re impressive,” he says quietly.
But this is her story, and she accepts his statement with only a dip of her chin. “When they would forecast for one, I’d go outside. Watch it coming towards us. Mum always thought I was gonna get frazzled.” There’s a smile in her voice. She’s remembering, not grieving. Not after all these years.
Rose tells him, while they lie together, sheltered from the storm outside as it breaks, of coming inside, all blue lips and shivering limbs. Freezing cold and soaking wet, but alive, so alive, because she’s ridden the storm. She’s survived.
*
They stand there at the edge, watching the endless dance of the ocean and feeling the earth turn below their feet, pulling at them. Except she knows how this dance ends, because she’s seen it. They know how it began, and saw that too. But what matters, here and now, is that the dance is still going on, not caring and not thinking about how this ends.
She sees the world as if it is laid out before her, on the sand. She knows, for all the great things they’ve done together, that this is what it boils down to in the end: taking what you’re given and making a life, not just an existence, out of it. Someday things may be different, but here and now, things simply are.
Slowly, he reaches out a hand to her, staring out at the water. He doesn’t need to look at her to ask the silent question. As the rain comes hissing across the water towards them, Rose takes his hand, laces her fingers with his, and smiles as the rain falls down on their upturned faces.
*
He watches her as she sleeps. Pink skin and gold hair stand out against the dark blue of the sheets. She’s taking up more than half of the bed, and hogging the covers as well. Her belly, just beginning to round out, swells the sea of the covers, and he thinks he can catch the sound of the new little life if he holds his breath and is very, very still.
It’s enough to keep him tied to the spot for a little longer than he might otherwise. Until she moves, stirs from the spot. He finds he’s no longer afraid of staying too long.
*
“Rose?”
She sighs, closes the book but keeping a finger at her page, waiting for the second time. Because if he says her name twice it means he hasn’t changed his mind. When he calls for her again she levers herself off the ratty corduroy couch with a sigh, tossing the book to the couch with a thump and the grumble of tired furniture springs. “I’m coming, hold on.”
Even before she steps through the door, she knows why he’s called her. She can feel it in the air, almost like electricity in water. As she breathes in a gasp of air, she can even feel it in her lungs, filling her up again. The TARDIS is better.
He looks up at her as she wanders inside finally, and smiles. “I did it. Well, there’s a few more repairs that’ll have to happen before she’s well and truly better. But…” He trails off at the look on her face.
“It’s been so long. I’d- I’d almost forgotten.” She says, breathing in.
He looks at her curiously. “Forgotten what?” He asks, softly.
“What I felt like to be…” But she doesn’t know how to describe it, closing her eyes. “To be so surrounded by…time? Is that all this is?” She asks, opening her eyes.
Taking a hand, he lifts it up, pressing their palms together. “You know what they told you when you were a child? When you believed it could all be true. That everything was possible.” He’s calling for the fabric of what surrounds them, entwining them. “Maybe, just maybe, the world can be all that you believed it was. And the world is stranger than you ever dreamed it. Here in this place, where time doesn't follow any rules but mine.” He reminds her, weaving them with words back into the spell it always was, disguised and hidden by jokes and poor driving and long coats.
They stand there, and she can’t breathe, and doesn’t and doesn’t feel like she needs to, until, all at once, it comes out as a gasp of laughter, bringing tears hard on the edge of it. “You did it!”
“Yes I did.”
And there it is again: That feeling of teetering on the edge of some precipice. A familiar one, but it still manages to set her heart racing at the thought of flying off on wings of time and light rather than feathers and wax. He steps back from her, leaving a space as big as themselves between them, smiles at her. “Do you want to come with me?”
Thanks to mynxii for the location suggestion. It worked really well.
Oh, and all of the chapter have cool little headers now. :D
Title: Postcards to Gallifrey (4/5)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Doctor/Rose, various
Summary: AU. The TARDIS is broken; no more time travel, and no off-planet travel until he can get the parts he needs. And so the Doctor and Rose live out their bohemian lifestyle in a whole new way.
Spoilers: References to Doomsday, and maybe various other bits.
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, nor the associated characters, and am not making any money off of this. Darn.
Other parts:
Part One: Zakynthos, Greece
Part Two: Bray, Ireland
Part Three: New York City, USA
Part Five: Arcadia
The little house belonged to an old eccentric he once knew, he tells her. He doesn’t tell her that the reason he was so eccentric was that he was, in fact, a Time lord who had retired to Earth. He doesn’t tell her that he saw the old man die in the wars; of his part in the man’s death. The house is small, and old, and hasn’t been kept, except by an old neighbour lady once a month, since he left. In this timeline, apparently, that’s somewhere between six and thirteen years. No one remembers exactly how long it’s been, mostly because time is skewed because of his presence and subsequent absence.
It’s in that strange place between two of the towns that make up Perth. The city is a bit like every other large city in the world-it sort of grew up around itself, the crush of people compressing and then expanding once again to fill the space. But with so few people in this part of the world, in such a large area, that space isn’t entirely filled. Halfway down the road to Rockingham is the cottage.
Rose finds a couple of old bikes in the potting shed, and convinces him to fix them up so that they can ride to town and down to the beach. The sound of waves permeates that house, like it’s crept into the very woodwork, getting itself down into the crevices. Making it into a house of waves.
Maria, the care taker of the house, mentions that the day-care is looking for another volunteer, as they don’t have the money to hire someone else. Over tea, Rose mentions it to the Doctor. He thinks that this is a great idea, and clearly expresses his enthusiasm for it by spinning her about the tiny kitchen, singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ (for no apparent reason other than they’re in Australia and he’s happy) at the top of his lungs. He makes up ridiculous verses until she can’t breathe for laughing.
That night, she mulls it over in her mind and considers something that she hadn’t before now. She doesn’t need to ask if he’s awake; he almost always is. “Why’re you so enthusiastic about me taking this job?”
“Oh, you know, doing a good thing, giving back to the community, helping out the world…” he trails off, not wanting to lie when she knows he is. Not that the things he’s named aren’t good reasons. They’re just not the only ones, or the most important.
Rose sighs into the darkness, tired. “Is it because you’d know I’d be alright? If I chose to stay?”
In the breathing darkness, he doesn’t answer for a long time. When he does, it’s with a sigh, echoing hers. “It’s because you would be alright no matter what happens to me.” He doesn’t tell her that he thinks that it’s beautiful, and amazing, what she does: leading this double life in a way that doesn’t break her in two.
*
She throws her hands down in exasperation. “You represent nothing. You’ve no planet, no people, no proper name even. Your machine doesn’t work. All you have are two meaningless titles: Doctor, and Time Lord.”
There are things half-unsaid here, that want to come out in mean ways when they’re mad. They don’t outweigh the beautiful, unsayable things. The shadows cast by the unsaid things only make the unsayable ones heavier, gives them shadows. Until, like now, something snaps, and things that were unsaid are spoken, for a big reason, or no reason at all.
“Well we can’t all be named after bushes, can we? And, Lord of Time? That’s pretty impressive, given I’m the only one.”
“That’s exactly it: you’re the only one. You can’t rule a domain all by yourself. And there are others that have taken it over, aren’t there? Time Agents and stuff, like Jack was.” He flinches at the mention of his name. “And besides that-,” Stopping in mid-sentence, she wrings the empty air with clenched hands, not coming up with the words to express her frustrations with him. “You! You aggravate me, and frustrate me, and I love you,” she tells him, the words falling in the thick summer air. Outside, the wind sighs into the waves.
“I love you,” she repeats. And it’s not dignified, with her nose running, and her eyes red. It’s beautiful enough to nearly crack his hearts, as if she hadn’t broken them long ago.
He stares at her, not bothering after all of these years, to veil the sadness he knows he should hide. “Quite right too.”
He knows she’s waiting. For the reciprocation and echo of the sentiments, expressed in words. He cannot give to her what he longs to. She looks away, at the wall, anywhere but the gaze telling her what she cannot hear. Finally, he feels he must explain, or lose her, like sand slipping from his grasp. “I can’t, Rose.”
She looks back up at him, eyes hinting of hardness. “Can’t what?”
Stepping closer to her, tempting the beast, he answers. “I can’t say what you want me to.”
There, the flash of flint as she tightens her mouth. “Why not?” Before he speaks, she wrenches herself away from him. “Because I’m the same as the rest. You can’t say it because it wouldn’t be true.”
She’s about to sweep out of here, and the desperation reflects in his voice, just for a syllable. “No.”
Rose stops. Doesn’t, won’t turn around. Letting him speak his piece, with no guarantee that she’ll stay if she doesn’t like it. He steps, once, twice, getting his voice back under his control and finding that it’s slipping, just when he fears it the most. “I can’t say what you want me to,’ he repeats, softly, “not because it wouldn’t be true, but because it would.”
She turns, a frown on her lips. “I don’t-.”
“Men promise so many things in the pursuit of women. That they would save the world for them, that they would save the universe, or destroy it, all for them, if only she said the word. But the thing is, for me, it could be true. To say that, and mean it? Would be to say that I would do anything for you. And that can’t happen, because I would have the ability to.” He’s trying so hard to explain all of this, the one rule that made sense to him, and the strain is showing in his voice, cracking it. “Do you understand?”
She doesn’t like it, but she accepts it, he sees briefly as she looks towards the door again. “Anything?” She murmurs.
His breath catches, because he’s told her the truth of it, and he very well can’t take it all back now. She nods, turns to him, and gives him a little smile as she slips into his arms. Trying to reassure him that she isn’t going. Part of him feels she’s already gone. “I wouldn’t ask you to,” she murmurs.
He thinks, one day, she will.
*
She teaches him the old songs of her childhood, remembering them. Pulling them from the depths at the back of her mind and into the light, so that she can give them to the children at the day-care. He doesn’t teach her his songs, because she knows them already, somehow, singing them in her mind as she sleeps. She tries teaching him hand games, and counting games, and he never seems to quite get it right, but that’s okay.
They don’t know how it happens, but she’s found that she has a life without him. That, if he left, she would be able to bear it. Yes, it would break her heart, and she would want him back desperately. But her life would go on. She would go out, and she would teach the children, and laugh with them, and sing the nursery rhymes, and come back home. Well, not home, just the house (because he wouldn’t be there).
Instead of finding a harmony to him, she’s finding a melody. Two separate melodies would only get tangled and confused jangled. The melody needs to become a harmony, one or the other of them. Perhaps they both need to change.
They realize that if they change too much, they’ll leave each other behind, or the separate lives they hold will cease to intersect. To adapt, to converge, is so hard, and it’s always about so much more than it seems to be.
*
“What happens next?” she wonders aloud, still scared, but he doesn’t know what of. “When the TARDIS is fixed and can leave this planet and this time.” She hesitates. “Is there going to be an ‘us’?”
He takes her hand, twining their fingers together like past days, when they would run. “As long as you want to be by my side, I will be with you.”
Rose shakes her head. “But I’m gonna get old, and weak. And one day you won’t want me anymore.”
“Never,” he says in mock outrage, before humming a bar or two from ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’.
*
She speaks, and he listens, the storm outside rumbling underneath her words. “You know, when I was little, I was never afraid of thunderstorms.”
Watching the large, heavy droplets slapping heavily into the hot dirt outside in the garden, lush and green in the summer heat, he doesn’t respond. Rose speaks over the booms of thunder. “Just the opposite really. I would wait all summer for one of the big ones, which are pretty rare in London,” she reminds him.
He shifts, skin cool to the touch even in this oppressive heat. “But when they happen, they’re impressive,” he says quietly.
But this is her story, and she accepts his statement with only a dip of her chin. “When they would forecast for one, I’d go outside. Watch it coming towards us. Mum always thought I was gonna get frazzled.” There’s a smile in her voice. She’s remembering, not grieving. Not after all these years.
Rose tells him, while they lie together, sheltered from the storm outside as it breaks, of coming inside, all blue lips and shivering limbs. Freezing cold and soaking wet, but alive, so alive, because she’s ridden the storm. She’s survived.
*
They stand there at the edge, watching the endless dance of the ocean and feeling the earth turn below their feet, pulling at them. Except she knows how this dance ends, because she’s seen it. They know how it began, and saw that too. But what matters, here and now, is that the dance is still going on, not caring and not thinking about how this ends.
She sees the world as if it is laid out before her, on the sand. She knows, for all the great things they’ve done together, that this is what it boils down to in the end: taking what you’re given and making a life, not just an existence, out of it. Someday things may be different, but here and now, things simply are.
Slowly, he reaches out a hand to her, staring out at the water. He doesn’t need to look at her to ask the silent question. As the rain comes hissing across the water towards them, Rose takes his hand, laces her fingers with his, and smiles as the rain falls down on their upturned faces.
*
He watches her as she sleeps. Pink skin and gold hair stand out against the dark blue of the sheets. She’s taking up more than half of the bed, and hogging the covers as well. Her belly, just beginning to round out, swells the sea of the covers, and he thinks he can catch the sound of the new little life if he holds his breath and is very, very still.
It’s enough to keep him tied to the spot for a little longer than he might otherwise. Until she moves, stirs from the spot. He finds he’s no longer afraid of staying too long.
*
“Rose?”
She sighs, closes the book but keeping a finger at her page, waiting for the second time. Because if he says her name twice it means he hasn’t changed his mind. When he calls for her again she levers herself off the ratty corduroy couch with a sigh, tossing the book to the couch with a thump and the grumble of tired furniture springs. “I’m coming, hold on.”
Even before she steps through the door, she knows why he’s called her. She can feel it in the air, almost like electricity in water. As she breathes in a gasp of air, she can even feel it in her lungs, filling her up again. The TARDIS is better.
He looks up at her as she wanders inside finally, and smiles. “I did it. Well, there’s a few more repairs that’ll have to happen before she’s well and truly better. But…” He trails off at the look on her face.
“It’s been so long. I’d- I’d almost forgotten.” She says, breathing in.
He looks at her curiously. “Forgotten what?” He asks, softly.
“What I felt like to be…” But she doesn’t know how to describe it, closing her eyes. “To be so surrounded by…time? Is that all this is?” She asks, opening her eyes.
Taking a hand, he lifts it up, pressing their palms together. “You know what they told you when you were a child? When you believed it could all be true. That everything was possible.” He’s calling for the fabric of what surrounds them, entwining them. “Maybe, just maybe, the world can be all that you believed it was. And the world is stranger than you ever dreamed it. Here in this place, where time doesn't follow any rules but mine.” He reminds her, weaving them with words back into the spell it always was, disguised and hidden by jokes and poor driving and long coats.
They stand there, and she can’t breathe, and doesn’t and doesn’t feel like she needs to, until, all at once, it comes out as a gasp of laughter, bringing tears hard on the edge of it. “You did it!”
“Yes I did.”
And there it is again: That feeling of teetering on the edge of some precipice. A familiar one, but it still manages to set her heart racing at the thought of flying off on wings of time and light rather than feathers and wax. He steps back from her, leaving a space as big as themselves between them, smiles at her. “Do you want to come with me?”