Fic: Moving On 1/1 [SPOILERS]
Story: Moving On
Author: wmr
wendymr
Characters: Tenth Doctor, Rose Tyler
Rated: PG
Spoilers: MAJOR SPOILERS for Journey's End. DO NOT READ if you haven't seen the episode.
Disclaimer: Of course they're not mine.
Summary: It's still not going to be easy, for either of them - but she's determined to do the very best she can.
With thanks to beta-readers and cheerleaders extraordinaire,
kae_nine,
dark_aegis and
sc_angel72.
Moving On
She takes him home with her.
Not to her mum and dad’s town house, but to her place, a two-up, two-down in Islington. It’s not so posh in this universe, but she likes it because of that.
He follows her in, looks around curiously, and then grins, shaking his head from side to side.
“What?” she asks.
“You’ve got carpets!” he says, laughing in that silly way she’s never forgotten. “And doors! Next you’ll be telling me you have a mortgage too!”
She does. And, just to serve him right, she’s gonna be adding his name to it.
Once they find a name for him, that is.
***
She’s got two bedrooms. One’s hers, the other’s got her computer in it, but it’s got a bed too. Hesitantly, she shows him both, leaving the choice to him.
He raises both eyebrows. “Being banished to here, am I?”
“No!” She clings to his hand. “I just... I don’t know what you want.”
His eyes see right through to her soul. “You know what I want. What I always wanted.”
She reaches for him again, grabbing him by the lapels the way she did on the beach, and snogs the life out of him.
Even as he kisses her back, all she can see is the other him walking away from her without even saying goodbye.
***
He cries out in the night.
His dreams are full of horror and burning, fire and devastation. Of Daleks and the destruction of the universe.
She remembers. The first him, her Doctor in black leather, dreamed of fire and apocalypse, of genocide and his people screaming. She found him one night, sweating and screaming, and held him in her arms until he slept. They never mentioned it again.
She reaches for him, pressing her lips to his and her body against his. He takes her, hard and fast and almost brutal, and after he clings to her, shaking and weeping.
He tries to tell her he’s sorry, but she kisses the words away.
This is all she can do for her Doctor, the one who walked away, after all. And he’s her Doctor too, and he needs her.
“Gonna stay with you forever,” she whispers as his sobs ease.
“Me too,” he promises, and whispers three words in her ear.
Maybe one day he’ll be able to say them out loud.
***
They create an identity for him.
He’s the man with no name, no background, no paper trail. None of the trappings of humanity. Not even a driving licence.
He thinks it’s a laugh, and spends hours thinking up possible names. “Theobald Sidebotham. Or how about Angus McWhinnie? I know! Oliver Twist. Or... wait... Raxacoricofallapatorious Clom!”
She laughs, but part of her’s sad inside. “I was thinking John Smith.”
He tilts his head to one side. “Maybe.”
She’s about to ask why not, but stops herself, fearing that he’s distancing himself from the man he once was, telling her that he’s not the Doctor any more.
Then, suddenly, he grins. “Just kidding! Course I’ll be John Smith. Old habits die hard, yeah?”
She grins back, and flings her arms around him. It’s going to be okay, she thinks.
***
It’s still not going to be easy, for either of them. But she’s determined to do the very best she can, not just for him but for the other one, the one who sacrificed so much to give the two of them this.
He’s still the Doctor to her, of course. And to her mum and dad, though her little brother calls him Doctor John. He’s great with Tony, playing with him and telling him tales of distant planets and far-off universes, of the whole of time and space.
Listening, she wonders how he can stand being here, stuck in one place. Stuck on the slow path.
He might be half-human, but he still has a Time Lord’s mind, after all. He still has all his memories.
Is he going to get tired of this life one day? And what will he do when that happens?
What is the Doctor without his TARDIS?
He’s finding out, she knows, but does he like the answer?
***
Torchwood offers him a job. Scientific advisor, he says he wants his title to be. Otherwise he’s not accepting. Her dad says he can call himself the man on the moon as long as he takes the job.
He gets a lab where he can tinker to his heart’s content. He refuses to build weapons, and frowns any time he sees her with her service gun.
They travel home together at the end of the day, taking turns to drive; they eat dinner in their tiny kitchen and go to bed in their little bedroom, and never talk about a home that’s bigger on the inside.
She wonders what he thinks about when he walks inside the door, on the carpet, in the house that’s theirs according to the mortgage paperwork. But he only ever smiles in response when she asks if he’s happy.
And, in bed, he whispers his love to her and tells her that he gave up the universe to have her.
She vows never to make him regret it.
***
He’s alone now, the other Doctor. The Time Lord.
She thinks of him, the human Doctor, as the Doctor now. Her Doctor. Not a copy, but as much the real thing as the one left travelling the universe in the TARDIS.
The other one’s alone. Her Doctor tells her that, a few weeks after they arrived. He had to leave Donna behind, and worse; he had to remove from her mind everything that she became, and everything she knew of him. He knows, her Doctor, because it’s what he would have done. The human mind’s not built to contain a Time Lord’s intelligence.
It shocks her when she realises that her first worry is for her human Doctor, and not for the other Doctor, travelling on his own again.
He’ll find someone else, her Doctor tells her. He always did.
All the same, tonight it’s his turn to hold her when she cries.
***
He starts spending a couple of evenings a week away from home. He gets home around eleven, but doesn’t tell her where he’s been.
She tries not to mind. He is like her first Doctor in some ways, after all. There were times when he needed to be alone. Many times, too, when he didn’t want to talk. She learned with that Doctor to be patient, bide her time and be there when he needed her.
It’s hard, though. He shares her bed, makes love to her, still whispers those three words every time as he comes, but he doesn’t share all of his life with her.
He’s the Doctor, Time Lord intelligence and dreams of time- and space-travel trapped inside a human body. Why should she expect him to be satisfied with her?
Why should this human life be enough for him?
***
“We’ve got something in common,” he tells her one night after dinner.
“Yeah? Think we got a lot in common,” she replies, but she’s thinking of all the things they don’t. All the things he’s had, and seen, and done, before her, with her and after her. Everything he’s had to leave behind.
“One thing in particular,” he counters, his voice low, leaning in towards her. “One thing I wish neither of us’d had to do.”
She reaches for his hand. He grips it tightly, and she knows what he means. “We both wiped out the Daleks, right? Killed them all?”
He nods. “We committed genocide, Rose Tyler. Both of us.”
But she never killed her own people. Maybe the saving grace for this Doctor is that he never did either. He still has the memories of it, but that’s not the same.
She hopes, anyway.
***
He builds himself a sonic screwdriver.
Another day, she comes into the living-room to find that he’s wired their satellite receiver to get broadcasts from the other side of the galaxy. Once he’s built a better receiver, he tells her, they’ll be able to get television from halfway across the universe.
It’s not the same as travelling in space, but it amuses him, even if he doesn’t understand all the languages any more. He’ll just have to learn, he tells her.
She understands a few herself now, she tells him, and his eyes tell her he’s proud of her.
***
One evening, he asks her to come with him when he goes out.
He drives them across the river to a place she recognises. In her old universe, it’s where the Powell Estates was. He leads her into a pub, up the stairs and into a meeting-room. About two dozen people, of varied skin-colours and nationalities, even a few aliens among them, are already there.
They sit at the back, the two of them, while a woman in a hijab and a man with a strong Hispanic accent take chairs at the front.
“Thanks for coming,” the woman says. “Welcome to tonight’s meeting of the Donna Noble Society.”
She shoots the Doctor a quick look, but he says nothing, just looks straight ahead.
“My name’s Mahassen, and I’m a survivor of genocide.”
A lump builds in her throat, and she grips the Doctor’s hand. He grips back, and a slow, genuine smile lights up his face.
They’re all survivors, aren’t they?
***
When he proposes, it’s just as ridiculous as she could ever have imagined.
They’re in Sainsbury’s and he’s insisting on feeling every banana in the place, babbling about the importance of proper texture and ripeness and the precise shade of yellow.
The next minute, he says, “This is all wrong, you know. Shouldn’t be sharing my bananas with you without making it all proper, should I?”
She looks at him blankly, and he continues. “It’s what you humans do, right? So, what d’you think?”
“Maybe I’m just thick, Doctor, but I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.”
“Oh!” He drops the bananas into the trolley and grins at her. “You know? Making it legal. Us. You an’ me? As long as you promise not to look like a meringue. You won’t, will you?”
She’s half-crying as she assures him that she’s always hated meringues.
***
They’re on their honeymoon, walking hand-in-hand across an Irish beach, when he stops and turns to her.
“Do you still miss him?”
“Do you?” she counters.
He doesn’t answer, but his eyes tell her that he needs her answer.
She has to be honest, because he’ll know if she lies. “I’ll always miss him. Just like you’ll always miss Donna. And Martha, and Jack and Sarah and everyone else, yeah?”
Slowly, he nods. “But I’ve got you.”
“And I’ve got you.”
She just hopes that the other Doctor’s found someone now. And that he remembers how many friends he still has, even if he doesn’t have her any more.
Her Doctor squeezes her hand. “He does. I promise.”
Whether he knows, or whether he’s just trying to make her happy, she decides to believe him.
***
He bounces into her office one afternoon while she’s doing paperwork, babbling about how he’s been waiting all day for her to come back from her field mission. He should come out in the field with her, she counters. Maybe, he says, but his grin’s threatening to split his face.
He drags her down to his lab and rips the cover off a tall, squarish shape.
It’s not a blue police-box. It looks more like a garden shed.
He throws the door open. It’s not bigger on the inside.
“Did I mention,” he tells her, dragging her in by the hand, “it also travels in time?”
***
They’re off travelling the universe again, the Doctor and Rose Tyler.
Not all the time. Just, as he tells her mum, the bits in between.
He jokes that maybe they’ll go to the fifty-first century and see if this universe has a Jack Harkness. If it does, she silently promises that she won’t do to him what she did to her other Jack. She still regrets that she never got the chance to tell him she’s sorry.
He’s fine, her Doctor assures her. Saving the world in his own flamboyant way, being a hero over and over and loving every minute of it.
Just to prove he can, the Doctor takes her to an alien planet a thousand years in the future. As they pilot their ship together, she’s every bit as excited as the very first time she stood in the TARDIS and he asked her where she wanted to go.
They step outside together, hand in hand onto alien soil, red grass and silver skies. He smiles and holds her gaze, his eyes sparkling.
He doesn’t whisper. He says it out loud. “Rose Tyler, I love you.”
- end
Author: wmr
wendymr
Characters: Tenth Doctor, Rose Tyler
Rated: PG
Spoilers: MAJOR SPOILERS for Journey's End. DO NOT READ if you haven't seen the episode.
Disclaimer: Of course they're not mine.
Summary: It's still not going to be easy, for either of them - but she's determined to do the very best she can.
With thanks to beta-readers and cheerleaders extraordinaire,
kae_nine,
dark_aegis and
sc_angel72.
Moving On
She takes him home with her.
Not to her mum and dad’s town house, but to her place, a two-up, two-down in Islington. It’s not so posh in this universe, but she likes it because of that.
He follows her in, looks around curiously, and then grins, shaking his head from side to side.
“What?” she asks.
“You’ve got carpets!” he says, laughing in that silly way she’s never forgotten. “And doors! Next you’ll be telling me you have a mortgage too!”
She does. And, just to serve him right, she’s gonna be adding his name to it.
Once they find a name for him, that is.
***
She’s got two bedrooms. One’s hers, the other’s got her computer in it, but it’s got a bed too. Hesitantly, she shows him both, leaving the choice to him.
He raises both eyebrows. “Being banished to here, am I?”
“No!” She clings to his hand. “I just... I don’t know what you want.”
His eyes see right through to her soul. “You know what I want. What I always wanted.”
She reaches for him again, grabbing him by the lapels the way she did on the beach, and snogs the life out of him.
Even as he kisses her back, all she can see is the other him walking away from her without even saying goodbye.
***
He cries out in the night.
His dreams are full of horror and burning, fire and devastation. Of Daleks and the destruction of the universe.
She remembers. The first him, her Doctor in black leather, dreamed of fire and apocalypse, of genocide and his people screaming. She found him one night, sweating and screaming, and held him in her arms until he slept. They never mentioned it again.
She reaches for him, pressing her lips to his and her body against his. He takes her, hard and fast and almost brutal, and after he clings to her, shaking and weeping.
He tries to tell her he’s sorry, but she kisses the words away.
This is all she can do for her Doctor, the one who walked away, after all. And he’s her Doctor too, and he needs her.
“Gonna stay with you forever,” she whispers as his sobs ease.
“Me too,” he promises, and whispers three words in her ear.
Maybe one day he’ll be able to say them out loud.
***
They create an identity for him.
He’s the man with no name, no background, no paper trail. None of the trappings of humanity. Not even a driving licence.
He thinks it’s a laugh, and spends hours thinking up possible names. “Theobald Sidebotham. Or how about Angus McWhinnie? I know! Oliver Twist. Or... wait... Raxacoricofallapatorious Clom!”
She laughs, but part of her’s sad inside. “I was thinking John Smith.”
He tilts his head to one side. “Maybe.”
She’s about to ask why not, but stops herself, fearing that he’s distancing himself from the man he once was, telling her that he’s not the Doctor any more.
Then, suddenly, he grins. “Just kidding! Course I’ll be John Smith. Old habits die hard, yeah?”
She grins back, and flings her arms around him. It’s going to be okay, she thinks.
***
It’s still not going to be easy, for either of them. But she’s determined to do the very best she can, not just for him but for the other one, the one who sacrificed so much to give the two of them this.
He’s still the Doctor to her, of course. And to her mum and dad, though her little brother calls him Doctor John. He’s great with Tony, playing with him and telling him tales of distant planets and far-off universes, of the whole of time and space.
Listening, she wonders how he can stand being here, stuck in one place. Stuck on the slow path.
He might be half-human, but he still has a Time Lord’s mind, after all. He still has all his memories.
Is he going to get tired of this life one day? And what will he do when that happens?
What is the Doctor without his TARDIS?
He’s finding out, she knows, but does he like the answer?
***
Torchwood offers him a job. Scientific advisor, he says he wants his title to be. Otherwise he’s not accepting. Her dad says he can call himself the man on the moon as long as he takes the job.
He gets a lab where he can tinker to his heart’s content. He refuses to build weapons, and frowns any time he sees her with her service gun.
They travel home together at the end of the day, taking turns to drive; they eat dinner in their tiny kitchen and go to bed in their little bedroom, and never talk about a home that’s bigger on the inside.
She wonders what he thinks about when he walks inside the door, on the carpet, in the house that’s theirs according to the mortgage paperwork. But he only ever smiles in response when she asks if he’s happy.
And, in bed, he whispers his love to her and tells her that he gave up the universe to have her.
She vows never to make him regret it.
***
He’s alone now, the other Doctor. The Time Lord.
She thinks of him, the human Doctor, as the Doctor now. Her Doctor. Not a copy, but as much the real thing as the one left travelling the universe in the TARDIS.
The other one’s alone. Her Doctor tells her that, a few weeks after they arrived. He had to leave Donna behind, and worse; he had to remove from her mind everything that she became, and everything she knew of him. He knows, her Doctor, because it’s what he would have done. The human mind’s not built to contain a Time Lord’s intelligence.
It shocks her when she realises that her first worry is for her human Doctor, and not for the other Doctor, travelling on his own again.
He’ll find someone else, her Doctor tells her. He always did.
All the same, tonight it’s his turn to hold her when she cries.
***
He starts spending a couple of evenings a week away from home. He gets home around eleven, but doesn’t tell her where he’s been.
She tries not to mind. He is like her first Doctor in some ways, after all. There were times when he needed to be alone. Many times, too, when he didn’t want to talk. She learned with that Doctor to be patient, bide her time and be there when he needed her.
It’s hard, though. He shares her bed, makes love to her, still whispers those three words every time as he comes, but he doesn’t share all of his life with her.
He’s the Doctor, Time Lord intelligence and dreams of time- and space-travel trapped inside a human body. Why should she expect him to be satisfied with her?
Why should this human life be enough for him?
***
“We’ve got something in common,” he tells her one night after dinner.
“Yeah? Think we got a lot in common,” she replies, but she’s thinking of all the things they don’t. All the things he’s had, and seen, and done, before her, with her and after her. Everything he’s had to leave behind.
“One thing in particular,” he counters, his voice low, leaning in towards her. “One thing I wish neither of us’d had to do.”
She reaches for his hand. He grips it tightly, and she knows what he means. “We both wiped out the Daleks, right? Killed them all?”
He nods. “We committed genocide, Rose Tyler. Both of us.”
But she never killed her own people. Maybe the saving grace for this Doctor is that he never did either. He still has the memories of it, but that’s not the same.
She hopes, anyway.
***
He builds himself a sonic screwdriver.
Another day, she comes into the living-room to find that he’s wired their satellite receiver to get broadcasts from the other side of the galaxy. Once he’s built a better receiver, he tells her, they’ll be able to get television from halfway across the universe.
It’s not the same as travelling in space, but it amuses him, even if he doesn’t understand all the languages any more. He’ll just have to learn, he tells her.
She understands a few herself now, she tells him, and his eyes tell her he’s proud of her.
***
One evening, he asks her to come with him when he goes out.
He drives them across the river to a place she recognises. In her old universe, it’s where the Powell Estates was. He leads her into a pub, up the stairs and into a meeting-room. About two dozen people, of varied skin-colours and nationalities, even a few aliens among them, are already there.
They sit at the back, the two of them, while a woman in a hijab and a man with a strong Hispanic accent take chairs at the front.
“Thanks for coming,” the woman says. “Welcome to tonight’s meeting of the Donna Noble Society.”
She shoots the Doctor a quick look, but he says nothing, just looks straight ahead.
“My name’s Mahassen, and I’m a survivor of genocide.”
A lump builds in her throat, and she grips the Doctor’s hand. He grips back, and a slow, genuine smile lights up his face.
They’re all survivors, aren’t they?
***
When he proposes, it’s just as ridiculous as she could ever have imagined.
They’re in Sainsbury’s and he’s insisting on feeling every banana in the place, babbling about the importance of proper texture and ripeness and the precise shade of yellow.
The next minute, he says, “This is all wrong, you know. Shouldn’t be sharing my bananas with you without making it all proper, should I?”
She looks at him blankly, and he continues. “It’s what you humans do, right? So, what d’you think?”
“Maybe I’m just thick, Doctor, but I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.”
“Oh!” He drops the bananas into the trolley and grins at her. “You know? Making it legal. Us. You an’ me? As long as you promise not to look like a meringue. You won’t, will you?”
She’s half-crying as she assures him that she’s always hated meringues.
***
They’re on their honeymoon, walking hand-in-hand across an Irish beach, when he stops and turns to her.
“Do you still miss him?”
“Do you?” she counters.
He doesn’t answer, but his eyes tell her that he needs her answer.
She has to be honest, because he’ll know if she lies. “I’ll always miss him. Just like you’ll always miss Donna. And Martha, and Jack and Sarah and everyone else, yeah?”
Slowly, he nods. “But I’ve got you.”
“And I’ve got you.”
She just hopes that the other Doctor’s found someone now. And that he remembers how many friends he still has, even if he doesn’t have her any more.
Her Doctor squeezes her hand. “He does. I promise.”
Whether he knows, or whether he’s just trying to make her happy, she decides to believe him.
***
He bounces into her office one afternoon while she’s doing paperwork, babbling about how he’s been waiting all day for her to come back from her field mission. He should come out in the field with her, she counters. Maybe, he says, but his grin’s threatening to split his face.
He drags her down to his lab and rips the cover off a tall, squarish shape.
It’s not a blue police-box. It looks more like a garden shed.
He throws the door open. It’s not bigger on the inside.
“Did I mention,” he tells her, dragging her in by the hand, “it also travels in time?”
***
They’re off travelling the universe again, the Doctor and Rose Tyler.
Not all the time. Just, as he tells her mum, the bits in between.
He jokes that maybe they’ll go to the fifty-first century and see if this universe has a Jack Harkness. If it does, she silently promises that she won’t do to him what she did to her other Jack. She still regrets that she never got the chance to tell him she’s sorry.
He’s fine, her Doctor assures her. Saving the world in his own flamboyant way, being a hero over and over and loving every minute of it.
Just to prove he can, the Doctor takes her to an alien planet a thousand years in the future. As they pilot their ship together, she’s every bit as excited as the very first time she stood in the TARDIS and he asked her where she wanted to go.
They step outside together, hand in hand onto alien soil, red grass and silver skies. He smiles and holds her gaze, his eyes sparkling.
He doesn’t whisper. He says it out loud. “Rose Tyler, I love you.”
- end