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More Joy Day! Doctor Who WIP Fic: Orphans of Time
I was thinking, I don't have anything to post for More Joy Day, but I guess I should at least post and say Yay! More Joy Day! with my happy shiny Rose icon.
Then I thought, hey, what about that WIP about Rose and Metacrisis!Ten that's been sitting around for... a while...? That's relatively happy (for Rose and Metacrisis!Ten) and has a reasonable stopping point, and it's ... 8,000 words long.
So! Here! Have the first two scenes of what could eventually be a long and schmangsty and profoundly ridiculous kidfic: Orphans of Time.
Rose/Metacrisis!Ten. post-"Journey's End". 8,000 words. Explicit.
"Well, he's the same old Doctor so far," Jackie remarked.
Orphans of Time: Scenes 1-2
In the instant after the TARDIS disappeared, taking the Doctor away from her for the last time, Rose turned and looked at the man looking back at her. The man who was also the Doctor, and was human, and had told her that he loved her.
She couldn't think of a thing to say, and she was terribly afraid that she might have just accidentally married him or something--a choice, a kiss, witnesses, and a distinct sense that she'd just been given away. She should probably ask, but she couldn't think how. He'd make a joke of it, anyway, if he was the Doctor--but he was, wasn't he? He'd said he was. That was the promise he'd made.
He shook his head a little--not like no but like there was a fly buzzing at his ear. He wasn't looking at anything she could see. He smacked his open palm against the back of his head a couple of times, just the same as she'd seen him--seen the Doctor, the original Doctor, the Time Lord Doctor--slap the viewscreen in the TARDIS when a picture wasn't coming through clearly.
"Oh, that's not good," he said, meeting Rose's eyes and frowning.
His eyes rolled back and the color drained from his face, going from pink-cheeked to sickly pale in seconds. Rose caught him as he crumpled and then her mother was at her side, helping her ease him down to the sand.
"Well, he's the same old Doctor so far," Jackie remarked. "This is just how I met him that first Christmas, falling down in a faint."
Rose pressed her fingers to his throat and found his pulse, which felt human as far as Rose could tell, though that wasn't very far. Only one heart now, he'd said. He seemed colder than he should be--hugging the Doctor had always felt like stepping into a summer day--but that could be the wind here, or the fact that he was human. It could be anything.
Torchwood emergency checklists came to mind. He was breathing and his heart was beating and he had no obvious wounds, fair enough. But the next thing to determine was what alien technology he'd had contact with that might have caused injury or an alteration to his physiology, and the only person who knew had just left for another dimension.
"Sweetheart?"
Rose looked up to find her mum giving her a worried look, and realized the worry was probably as much for herself as for the Doctor. Her mum hadn't been worried when he fell down.
"This is normal, isn't it, Rose? He did this the last time, but he woke up when you needed him."
Rose looked back down at him, resisting the urge to shake him or scream at him. He'd come round if he was going to come round; in the meantime there wasn't a lot of use trying to drag him up to consciousness. She wasn't the one in danger.
Still, the urge to do something--or scream--was nearly overwhelming. Rose shoved her hands into her pockets and answered her mother as calmly as she could.
"Last time he was regenerating. Last time he wasn't even him, he was a Time Lord. The Doctor--the other Doctor--said he won't regenerate. He's human. So I don't know what this is. If something's gone wrong with him...."
Rose couldn't even finish the sentence.
"How's he know, though?" Jackie demanded. "Calls himself a Doctor, but he didn't have time to run any tests or anything, did he? Not so much as an x-ray. This one's got one heart and that's all anyone really knows, isn't it?"
It was, Rose realized, but she couldn't believe the Doctor had just left without knowing for sure that they were safe. He hadn't seemed to like this version of himself much, but he wouldn't have just abandoned him to die, would he?
Rose shook her head. The Doctor might have done that to his twin-or-whatever, but he wouldn't have done it to her.
"He's a Time Lord, he doesn't need x-rays. He knows things. He senses the whole universe, I'm pretty sure he could tell what species his--metacrisis, twin, whatever--he could tell, Mum. I'm sure he could tell."
"Well, what's going on, then?" Jackie demanded. "Proper humans don't fall down like puppets with their strings cut as soon as the sound of the TARDIS dies away. Do you suppose he needs tea?"
"I don't know," Rose snapped, and had to stare fixedly at the sand so she wouldn't look at him or her mother as she blinked back tears. She'd crossed universes to find him. She wasn't going to cry now, and she wasn't going to lose him like this, on a beach in Norway, because of some stupid ordinary malfunction of a human body.
That's not good, he'd said, and he'd touched his head, like his brain wasn't working, like....
She squeezed her eyes shut and told herself she hadn't already lost him. He was here, he was right here, and he was the Doctor, mostly, and he was going to come around any second.
Her mum squeezed her shoulder and murmured, "Don't worry, Rose, sweetheart. I'll call your dad, he'll know what to do."
"Course," Rose muttered, though she had no idea what her dad would do from a thousand miles away that could possibly help.
She shifted down to sit in the wet sand beside the Doctor and gave in to the silly impulse to run her fingers through his hair. He didn't move, didn't respond at all, but he did at least keep breathing. She wondered what would happen if she whispered in his ear, Doctor, I need you, but she couldn't bear to find out. What if he didn't wake up?
"What's all this then?"
Rose's head whipped around and her jaw dropped as she stared at her dad, suddenly standing there on the beach with her mum. "Dad, what..."
"Came to help," he said simply, waving one of the little yellow teleport discs at her. They'd stopped working after the last time the Doctor sealed the dimensions, and started working again along with the dimension-cannon. Clearly they were still working to at least some extent, because here he was. A corner of Rose's mind calculated what she could do with one or two of those discs, if....
"Jacks said you were nearly crying," her dad added, frowning down toward the Doctor. "I think I told you last time we were out here how I felt about the Doctor making my Rose cry."
"It's not his fault," Rose said automatically, looking back at him. "Something's wrong, I don't know...."
"Well go on and find out, then," Pete said, and Rose shuddered at the sensation she'd felt once before, the chain dropped around her neck from behind and the teleport disc falling against her chest. She looked up at her dad, but he didn't meet her eyes as he moved to kneel at the Doctor's other side. As gently as if it were Tony's head he lifted up, getting him dressed, her dad slipped the chain of another disc around the Doctor's neck.
"Take him home, Rose," her dad said, meeting her eyes in a quick glance as he stood up. "They're programmed for the house, you can get doctors faster from there, or whatever he needs. Torchwood."
"Tea," Rose said, feeling half-numb.
If her dad had set the discs already to take them home, she couldn't reprogram them for trans-dimensional transport with just what she had in her pockets. If only the Doctor had a sonic screwdriver in his... but if he did, and was awake to operate it, they wouldn't be in this mess. With the tools she had at the house, it would still take time--time she would have to leave his side, ignore him--time while the dimensions would be sealing up.
They were sealing up now, while she knelt here thinking about what she couldn't do.
"Thank you," Rose said, reaching for her dad's hand. He squeezed it and then quickly let go, and hit the button on the Doctor's disc just as Rose hit her own.
Her next breath smelled of familiar floor-wax and something cooking. She was home, and the Doctor was lying on the floor beside her, at the foot of the stairs in the front hall.
"Rose?" The voice from the top of the stairs still put an unspoken Miss in front of her name, but for once Rose was thankful for her father's servants.
"Sophie," Rose said. "We need to move him--we can put him in my bed for now."
"I'll just get the clamps," Sophie said, and hurried down the stairs and past them toward the kitchen.
Rose had made a set of miniature gravity clamps, a year or so ago. She'd brought them home when her mum was heavily pregnant and all her nesting instincts were going into rearranging enormously heavily furniture--but then the clamps had turned out to be handy for all sorts of things. Groceries. Shopping in general. Giving Tony airplane rides. Moving unconscious men around the house, apparently.
Sophie came back with the clamps and a blanket to attach them to. They rolled the Doctor into it and were on their way to Rose's room in no time. Almost just like before, Rose thought, except Sophie was a lot less hysterical than her mum and Mickey had been, that Christmas, and they hadn't nearly as far to go, and no stairs to climb at all. The clamps made it quite a lot easier, too. They laid him down on Rose's bed, which was all neatly made up, and Sophie said, "Do you need anything else, Rose? Does he need a doctor?"
Rose couldn't help a half-hysterical laugh, but she shook her head. "I'll take it from here. Thanks."
"Of course," Sophie said, and refrained from curtseying as she left the room with the clamps swinging from one hand.
Rose flipped the edges of the blanket back, checked his pulse and breathing--both were still thumping along, which was better than the alternative--and then started undressing him. His clothes were sandy from falling down on the beach, and it was practically tradition, anyway, though she wouldn't be dressing him up in her dad's pajamas.
He looked exactly like he had the last time, every inch like the Doctor--he even had that mole--but when she pressed her ear to his bare chest, there was just one ordinary human heart beating. She picked her head up and wiped hard at her eyes before she could drip tears on him. She wasn't going to cry. She wasn't crying. He would be fine, he was right here, she hadn't lost him. She pulled the duvet out from under him and tucked him in, and then she leaned over and whispered, "Doctor, it's me, it's Rose, I need you. Help me. Wake up."
He didn't move a muscle.
Rose straightened up and turned away, sitting on the edge of the bed with her back to him, staring blindly through the doorway and looking at nothing.
Halfway across the house, upstairs, Tony suddenly started to wail.
Rose was on her feet before she thought of what she was doing, but at the doorway she hesitated. That was what Sophie had been doing upstairs, obviously--of course her dad hadn't left Tony alone--but Tony was properly her responsibility with their parents in Norway, and....
She'd thought when she left, when she went to find the Doctor, that she would never see Tony again. Nor her parents, of course. She'd said her goodbyes to them and they'd understood and given her their blessing. But she couldn't have explained it to Tony, and he was screaming, and she'd thought she would never see him again.
Rose glanced back at the Doctor, who hadn't moved at all, and then jogged out of her room and up the stairs to the nursery, where Sophie was holding a red-faced, shrieking Tony. Rose didn't speak, just held out her arms, and Tony all but threw himself into the intervening space before Sophie could hand him over.
"Okay, okay," Rose murmured, as Tony flailed around, fighting and snuggling against her all at once.
"Okay, I know I'm only fourth-best, but Mum and Dad are in Norway and Mickey's...." Rose couldn't finish the sentence.
"Let's go visit Mickey's replacement, all right?" Rose bounced Tony as his wails died down to whimpers, walking carefully down the stairs. "If you hate him, I'll tell him you liked Mickey better, that'll probably be good for him, don't you think? Build character?"
But when she got back into her bedroom and looked at him, lying there, she thought he probably had plenty of character to go on. Tony quieted down, at least, leaning against Rose's shoulder with one fist crammed into his mouth. She couldn't quite see his face from this angle, but she suspected he was giving the Doctor the same curious-wary look he usually gave strangers when he'd just woken up in a bad mood. This stranger wasn't trying to cuddle him or making silly faces, at least. That usually set him off.
"Tony, this is the Doctor. Doctor, my baby brother Tony."
Neither of them made a sound. Rose sat down on the edge of the bed again, settling Tony in her lap.
"I don't even know if he likes babies," she informed Tony. Tony grabbed her hand and started tugging on the cuff of her jacket's sleeve. He loved anything blue. "I never saw him with any, I don't think. Except me, I guess, when I was six months old, but that's ... that's a really long story."
Tony didn't seem to be concerned with that one way or another. He gave up on trying to pull Rose's wrist up and started squirming and folding down to try to chew on it.
"He's a dad, though," Rose added slowly, tilting Tony backwards and remembering that one off-hand comment, never repeated or referred to again. "Or he was--but you never really stop being a parent, Mum says. Even when your children are gone, you're still a parent."
Rose thought of it, thought of the way even she, only a big sister at that, had moved automatically when she heard Tony crying. She picked Tony up and held him up, facing her. He looked back curiously, and tried to grab her hair.
"We're going to do a little experiment," Rose informed her brother. "And I promise I won't let you get hurt, and if you get scared I'm sure you'll have stopped crying before Mum and Dad get back from Norway, so it'll be our secret, yeah?"
Tony squirmed a little, looking like he was thinking of yelling again.
"Right," Rose said, stood up, dangled Tony about a foot above the Doctor's chest, and dropped him.
The Doctor's breath went out of him in a hollow whoof. Before Tony could scream, the Doctor sort of jackknifed, his whole body folding up around Tony, head and arms and knees all coming up around the baby, shielding and cradling him. He blinked at Tony, who just stared at him, seeming startled right past crying.
"Hallo," the Doctor said softly, raising one hand and settling it flat over the crown of Tony's head, while the other arm stayed firmly around him in the middle of a pile of duvet. "Hallo, who's this, then?"
Rose sat down again on the edge of the bed, and the Doctor's eyes darted to her, then back to Tony. "You must be Tony, hm? Hello, Tony Tyler."
Tony babbled back a bit, and Rose sat still and watched them. The Doctor did a bit of one-handed pat-a-cake with Tony, and made little encouraging noises back to all the noises Tony made, and showed no inclination to say anything to Rose. That, she understood. She still didn't know what to say to him, either.
Eventually she had to ask, though. "Are you all right?"
"Buh, buh, buh," he said, probably to Tony but there was no knowing, really. "Try that. Buh. I think so. Sorry about falling down like that--was I gone long? This doesn't look like a Norwegian beach."
"Not even a Norwegian bedroom," Rose agreed. "Dad brought us some teleports so I could bring you home."
Rose glanced back at them, crowning the pile of his clothes on the floor. When she looked back to the Doctor he was looking past her, at the little yellow circles.
Tony babbled a bit, and smacked the Doctor squarely in the chest, jerking his attention back. "Yes," he said, "well done. Dip dap dop. Try that. Dip. Dap. Dop."
Tony made a lot of noises that didn't sound anything like that, and the Doctor smiled at him and nodded.
"Doctor," Rose said, "what happened to you?"
"I, ah." The Doctor rubbed his own head with his free hand, then mussed Tony's hair again. "Well, it's a bit... I fainted, actually. Went into shock, a bit, but mostly I fainted."
Rose stared at him. "You fainted."
"Got the vapors," he agreed. "Swooned. Into your arms, I think, because I don't seem to have hit my head."
"You did not swoon," Rose said, fighting the impulse to laugh.
"Did," he said. "And then you got me all naked and dropped a baby on me, which is a bit of a mixed message, frankly. He's not even ours."
"I didn't have any other clothes for you, and you're covered up, and he might as well be ours, until Mum and Dad get home from Norway," Rose said firmly. "Why'd you faint? Mum said you went down as soon as the sound of the TARDIS died away--I thought it'd been gone a moment by then, but she and Mickey could always hear it better than I could, further away."
"Because you never had to," the Doctor said, his eyes still firmly on Tony. "Bib, gig, mim, did. You didn't need to hear the TARDIS because you were inside the TARDIS. And so was I. Nearly my entire life, Rose, I'd been inside the TARDIS, in it or right beside it. I was born in the TARDIS."
"You..." He had been. Not the Doctor, but this man with her, in her bed, playing with her baby brother. "You were."
"I'm younger than Tony here," he agreed, still not looking up. "I just know more. Well, and I'm taller. Bibbity, flibberty, boo."
Tony giggled, and the Doctor--the new--whoever he was, he smiled at her brother. When he looked up at her, the smile faded.
"And it wasn't just the TARDIS, it was them. My--the Doctor. And Donna. All my life until that minute, I'd never been out of arm's reach of Donna and the Doctor, and I didn't even realize--Time Lords are telepathic, you know. You do know, right, I--he--you knew that, didn't you?"
"Sort of," Rose said, thinking back through offhand remarks and casual touches, things he'd known and things he'd found out, things that went beyond cleverness. The things he'd said when they first met, when he was still trying to scare her away. "Sort of. And you're sort of a Time Lord."
"Half," he said. "Half Time Lord. So I'm half of sort of telepathic, whatever that works out to. But for all the time I existed, there was a TARDIS near me and another Time Lord or two, and they all stayed in contact with me, with my mind, telepathically. Even though I have his memories of being alone, I didn't feel it for myself until he was gone, and it was a shock. I fainted."
"But he's... he's got the TARDIS, at least, right?" Rose thought of the first time they'd come to this world, when the TARDIS had nearly died. She hadn't understood half of what that meant to him then. "And he's got Donna, Donna's a Time Lord like him, now. So he's not alone."
"Pip, pop, pup," the Doctor said, and waited for Tony to babble something back before he said, "No, Donna's a Time Lord like something else entirely. And she won't be that for long, because a human brain can't contain what Donna's got, and then he'll be alone again. And he's at least twice as telepathic as I am, and his Time Lord brain.... that's why Time Lords are so clever, Rose, because they have to be. You need a lot of processing capacity to listen all the time to the rushing of the universe and the whispering minds of your entire species, and now he's just ... shouting in the silence and no one talks back. He's more like Donna than he knows."
"But he had you," Rose said softly. He'd had her, too. He'd had both of them, but he'd dumped them here, and apparently he wouldn't even have Donna for long. He'd be all alone again, after all Rose had done to reach him.
"Yes he did," the Doctor said, and stuck his tongue out at Tony, smiling when Tony stuck his out in return. He brushed his hand gently over the top of Tony's head again and didn't look up at Rose. "He had me. But then I'm a murderous abomination."
Rose opened her mouth to say you are not, but she couldn't just turn this into another round of bickering. She couldn't bear to hear him insist he was, stopping halfway through to talk nonsense to Tony.
"Would I let a murderous abomination hold my baby brother?" He looked up sharply at that. Rose leaned closer and caught his chin, so he had to hold her gaze. "Would the Doctor leave Rose Tyler alone with a murderous abomination?"
He shook his head so minutely she could only feel the motion through her fingers. "He did say--"
"He talks too much," Rose said firmly, and let go and sat back. "You're half human. You're a whole new thing, aren't you? He doesn't know what you are. And he's never going to know, because he left us here and went off by himself."
And that was all there was to it. That was the Doctor, leaving people behind because he had to, or at least because he said he had to. He'd left her once before, and he'd left her again, and whoever this one was, Rose didn't think he was going to strike off alone anytime soon. Not naked and with Tony sitting on top of the duvet, anyway. This one would stay around, so maybe it was just as well if he wasn't exactly like the Doctor.
No sooner had Rose thought it, than the Doctor opened his mouth and let out a stream of gibberish that wasn't anything like the ordinary nonsense he'd been saying to Tony. Rose stared, but Tony cheerfully squeaked and smacked his lips back, and the Doctor said, "I have all his memories, Rose, but I'm not really--I'm not quite, exactly...."
"I know," Rose said. "It's all right. Clearly me and him were never going to work out if he kept leaving me in other universes."
He glanced up at Rose, and gave her a small, crooked smile, almost shy. "He feels really bad about it every time, though. He can't say it, you know, but he does love you."
"Yeah," Rose said, making the words as easy as they might actually feel, someday. "But he can't say it, that's the thing. He's never going to change, is he?"
He looked down at Tony again and said, "He'll change, but not into someone who could say it, I don't think. He never has been before. Not with humans."
All Rose could think was that he'd never have told her that, even though he had, sort of, once. She hadn't understood, or hadn't wanted to understand. It'd been a long time ago, in another universe.
The Doctor let out another series of weird noises, and Tony giggled and clapped and gibbered back at him.
"Anyway," he said. "I really just meant to say--I'm not him, and I probably shouldn't call myself the Doctor. I'm not, quite."
"Oh," Rose said, because she couldn't bring herself to agree with him or argue with him, and couldn't imagine what else she would call him. "You'll have to choose a name, then."
He shrugged stiffly. "I thought John would do. I'll think of more when I need it."
"Not John Smith, then," Rose said. The Doctor had been John Smith when he needed a human name, but... this wasn't the Doctor.
"Not John Smith," he agreed. "That's a disposable name, and I really do mean to stay around this time."
He smiled at her, and then Tony--who had been entirely focused on him all this time, as if he were Mickey and their mum all rolled into one--Tony looked over at her and smiled too.
Rose stared for a second, and then said, "John."
His smile brightened at the sound of his name, and then faltered. He looked down at Tony, who looked back at him. "Oh."
"John," Rose repeated. "What did you do to my baby brother?"
"Well," John said, and touched the top of Tony's head again for just an instant, jerking his fingers back as if they'd been burned. "I may have made him just a tiny bit psychic."
Rose grabbed Tony out of his arms--too late, obviously, but it was automatic. Tony yelled and then cut off abruptly and then giggled.
Rose stared from him to John and back. "Did you just do that?"
John spread his hands. "Really, Rose, just the tiniest little bit. No one will ever notice."
"My mum's going to notice if you can stop him crying by looking at him."
"But will she mind?" Rose stood up, shifting Tony to her left arm and raising her right hand to threaten a smack. "Okay--sorry! Sorry!"
Tony squirmed, and Rose sat down and moved him so he could see John.
"If I never touch him again it'll probably go away," John added, almost meekly. Sadly. "On Gallifrey babies are in constant touch with their families, to help teach them to interpret what they're picking up telepathically. Human babies aren't anything like as prone to it--Tony's not going to be able to read minds, Rose, he just--he recognizes my mind when it touches his, that's all."
Rose relaxed her grip on Tony, and he promptly fell onto all fours and clambered toward John again. "Is that why you woke up? You'd lost the TARDIS and the Doctor and Donna but I brought you Tony."
"Too young to close off his mind, still young enough to learn," John said quietly, reaching out just one finger to tap Tony's nose. "Well, that and he was dropped on me."
Rose smiled a little. They'd be all right if she could keep smiling. "So only babies can learn?"
John kept his eyes down, on Tony. "The critical period for telepathy in humans is six hundred days plus or minus five. Tony's halfway through that and not extraordinarily inclined to it, so he could pick up a basic awareness. When you--when the Doctor met you when you were six months old--you could have learned a lot more than that from someone like him, but he only met you for a moment. It would have been like someone saying hello to you once, when you were six months old, and other than that no one ever spoke to you again. You wouldn't have learned to talk. You just might have been lonelier for a while, afterward."
Rose remembered her baby self, remembered the Doctor talking to her. John looked up and held her gaze for a few seconds, then reached out and tapped her on the nose. He remembered, too. That was the day her dad had died, and there was someone in this world with her who remembered it like she did.
"You're explaining it to my mum if he does start reading minds," Rose said firmly.
"He won't, I swear," John said. John's stomach made an audible noise, and he looked down at it sharply, startled, and then looked over at Tony. "I thought that was you."
Tony babbled something back and patted his own stomach. Rose put her face in her hands. Just a tiny bit psychic, sure.
"Rose?" John said hesitantly. "I think I need... something to eat."
"I think you need clothes, if we don't want to scare Sophie off," Rose said, getting to her feet. "I'll go see what Mickey left around, but if I come back and Tony can fly, you're getting nothing but pears to eat."
"Pears are disgusting," John said to Tony as Rose headed out of the room. "And your sister is joking. Probably."
***
John kept his mind pressed firmly against Tony's as he laid Tony in the crib, distracting him from the loss of physical contact. Tony stayed asleep, and John clasped his hands behind his back and looked down at him for a moment, easing his mind away as well.
When he glanced toward the door Rose was standing there, silhouetted in the light from the hallway. He had a sudden memory of a memory, the visions that had come to John Smith before he had given up his humanity and become the Doctor again. The life he might have had. A kiss--a wedding--the weight of a sleeping child in his arms. This day with Rose had been a bit like that, a kiss on the beach and the next thing he knew a baby in his arms, life lived on fast forward.
John glanced back toward the baby and saw him sleeping peacefully, then slipped out of the room, brushing by Rose in the doorway. She caught his hand as he passed, keeping him at her side as she gently pulled the door shut.
"You are amazing," she whispered. "No one gets him to go to sleep when my mum's not around, not ever. He's not yet a year old and he's been through six nannies and the only daycare that will take him is the Communist Nursery that has to take everyone. Mum's not going to care if he speaks in tongues, if you can do that."
John smiled automatically. He suspected Rose thought that was more or less a joke, so he didn't mention what he had been teaching Tony to speak today. Time enough for that later. For now, he and Rose were alone together for the first time. It was strange--the Doctor and Rose had been alone together all the time, give or take the TARDIS, but--well, give or take the TARDIS, that was the whole thing in a nutshell. This was different. John and Rose were alone together for the first time.
Rose looked into his eyes until he let the smile drop, and then she leaned against him, squeezing tightly on his hand, and kissed him.
John flung his free arm around Rose, clutching her to himself as he kissed back. He hadn't realized he needed this until her lips touched his, and now he was kissing her like a drowning man taking in his first deep breath. He had Rose. If he had nothing else in this universe, he had Rose.
Rose broke the kiss and leaned her cheek against his shoulder, letting go of his hand to wrap both of her arms around him. He hugged her back as fiercely as he'd kissed her, pressing his face into her hair. Half-muffled, he heard Rose murmur, "Same hugs. I missed the hugs."
John grinned for real this time and tightened his arms around Rose, pivoting on his heels to whirl her around. She clutched him tighter and laughed out loud, heedless of the sleeping baby--John tapped his mind against Tony's, but Tony was still asleep--and when he set her on her feet she looked up at him with her eyes shining.
He could do this. He could be--not the Doctor, but close enough, maybe even better as far as Rose was concerned. He could kiss her and hug her and not leave her, and he could be clever enough, he could do enough. He could keep her.
"Come on," Rose said, and took his hand again, leading him away from Tony's room, down the stairs. She hesitated at the bottom, long enough to glance back and meet his eyes, then led him toward her bedroom.
His single heart started to beat faster, and that kiss a moment ago was abruptly recognizable as a promise of something else entirely, now that they were alone. He squeezed Rose's hand, and she looked back again and smiled this time.
Once inside the room, he couldn't help eyeing the rumpled bed. He knew he'd been the only one naked in it before, but the mere sight of it was strangely suggestive. His half-human brain got a bit stuck on what was about to happen, what had been about to happen ever since they'd kissed on the beach.
Rose let go of his hand and moved toward the en suite.
"I'm just going to freshen up," she said, so carefully casually that he thought she might be suffering a similar attack of nerves. "It's been a long day. You--don't disappear or pass out or anything, all right?"
"I'll do my best," John assured her solemnly. She gave him a firm little nod and turned away, shutting the door softly but definitely behind her.
He glanced around the room and realized his clothes and shoes were still in a sandy heap on the floor, along with the teleport discs. He went and knelt on the carpet, carefully setting the discs aside and picking up the blue suit jacket and trousers. The sand had dried and brushed off easily--practically everything did, from these clothes.
He laid the suit out neatly, leaving the t-shirt and socks and shoes in a pile, and began the process of emptying the suit's pockets.
He tried the inside breast pocket first. It yielded a broken sonic screwdriver he'd been meaning to fix, and a coat check ticket from--he squinted at it briefly--someplace in 1958, which was odd. He could have sworn he'd never worn this suit in 1958. He tried again and got a couple of scraps of paper--a shopping list in Donna's handwriting, and a torn page he'd found on Kolaios and meant to send to the Library, as he strongly suspected it was the only record of the language it was written in.
He set those items together on the carpet, and moved on to the trouser pockets. The left yielded small change from eight different planets--metal discs and loops and cubes, plastic bits and bobs, ceramic wafers, and a colloidal goo like melted jelly babies that was legal tender across three galaxies. He used the bit of paper from Kolaios to fold it up in, then reached back into the same pocket to pull out three pencils (two wood, one mechanical) and six pens (three blue, one green, one red, one black; variously ball-point, fountain, cybernetic ink-producing, and molecular-magnetic) plus a stylus, a pair of sunglasses with purple lenses, and a sealed glass jar that only looked empty.
The right pocket held yet another broken screwdriver--he'd wondered where that had gone--and a spare pair of shoelaces, a comb, six safety pins, an eye pencil he was pretty sure didn't belong to him, a snail's shell sans snail, a pair of nine-sided dice, fourteen different power cells ranging from a nickel-cadmium battery to a crystallized fusion reaction, a handkerchief monogrammed JS, and a banana.
He sorted the sum total of his possessions into tidy piles, wondering what to make of them--he could probably make one complete sonic screwdriver out of the two he had, plus some of the change and a safety pin. But the Tylers didn't seem to need any shelves put up, nor doors unlocked. Tony hadn't reached the locking-himself-in-the-loo age just yet.
"Didn't think I'd see one of those again," Rose said. John looked up, startled, to find her smiling crookedly at him, wearing nothing but a silky dressing gown that ended well above the knee. She'd done something to her hair, and she smelled really nice.
"I--um--"
Rose sat down across from him--flashing him quite a lot of inner thigh in the process, which entirely derailed his thoughts--and said, "I wouldn't have thought anybody'd trained you to clean out your pockets before putting your things in the laundry. You might manage as a human after all."
"It doesn't really need washing," he said blankly, and then, "see anything you like?"
She glanced up at him, raising an eyebrow and not deigning to follow up on that straight line. She reached for the pile of odd currency instead, attracted to small shiny objects as automatically as any human.
Rose started sorting the change into piles, plastic separate from silicon, metal closest to herself. She divided the metal bits into groups, too, the ones she recognized as coins into stacks and the loops nested in each other. Then she picked those up--there were just two of them, both a gold-copper mix that created elaborate swirling patterns across the plain circles of metal.
John opened his mouth to explain the Zanarians' methods of counterfeit-detection with a quick digression into the cultural significance of drains on their home planet that led them to use pipe-sections as currency in the first place. Rose separated the two circles and slid the smaller over the first joint of her index finger.
"This is pretty," she said distantly, and he suddenly saw it as Rose saw it: a patterned gold band, just about the right size for a human woman's finger, one of a matched set.
He thought about telling her it was a future-alien pound coin, dismissing what she was thinking, breaking the moment. His instincts screamed for it; it was what the proper Doctor would have done, without hesitation.
The bed was right behind him. He'd kissed her and told her he loved her and started working to fit himself into her household.
He said, "You can have it if you like."
Rose looked up at him sharply and then down at her hands. Neither of them said anything, and he didn't reach across the space between them to take her hand, take the ring, place it on her finger. With this ring I thee bio-damp. He wouldn't joke about it, not in this frozen moment, and he didn't dare offer the words in seriousness so soon.
Rose said, "You should keep this one, though," and offered him the slightly larger hoop. He held out his open hand, and she dropped it into his palm.
"They belong together," he observed, not bothering to mention that there were millions more where they came from, in another universe's 63rd century. "They shouldn't be separated."
"We'll both have to look after them, then," Rose said, and with a sudden, decisive motion she slid the loop--the coin--the pipe-segment--the plain gold ring onto the third finger of her left hand.
She looked up at him, and her expression was neutral, patient. She'd made her move.
"I suppose we will," he said, and slid his own ring onto the corresponding finger. It was a little loose, but he didn't think it would fall off.
"They fit," Rose said. "That's like a sign, isn't it?"
He thought of explaining the logic of currency sizes in proportion to the sizes of manipulating limbs, the evolutionary biomechanics which dictated the sizes of most sentient species, the really only very slight coincidence of a Zanarian coin being similar in circumference to a human or Time Lord digit.
He looked at Rose, smiling and asking him about causality, and he thought, Bad Wolf. Shining and golden and powerful, there was no limit to what she might have done--she could easily have assured that he would have these two coins. She could have known who would be wearing the blue suit and how it would come to this; perhaps Rose Tyler, as much as Donna Noble, had been the author of his existence. Perhaps she had seen the way to keep the Doctor for herself and yet set him free. Perhaps he was what she'd wanted after all, when she knew everything and could change everything. Perhaps she'd left the rings for herself and him. Perhaps it was a sign, no less true--no less hers--because it was not written out in plain letters.
"Something like," he said, and lowered his eyes to her hand, to keep from letting her see what he was thinking. He couldn't think of what the Bad Wolf had done, and what the Doctor had done about it, and what it had meant. Not now.
"Hey," she said, reaching for his left hand, touching her fingers tentatively to the ring on his hand. "You're thinking awfully loudly over there."
He looked up to find her smiling, beaming, bright and golden in an entirely human way. Whether she'd chosen him years ago or not, whatever she had foreseen or set into motion--she'd chosen him now, knowing what she knew. He had Rose. He could do anything so long as he had Rose.
He smiled back, and then looked down at the pile of odds and ends between them. He opened his hands over it, in a gesture of offering, and said, "With all my worldly goods I thee endow."
Rose's hand darted out immediately to grab the sonic screwdrivers, but her fingers had barely closed over them when she leaned across to kiss him, so he didn't feel too terribly much like he'd just been married for his money, as well as with it.
"Those are broken," he murmured against her mouth, when she let him get a little air. She was holding the screwdrivers in a clenched fist, her knuckles pressed against his shoulder. "They really won't do anything exciting."
"Shows what you know," Rose murmured back. "Which reminds me, you skipped the bit about bodies. And worshiping."
Rose shifted to press her body against his as she spoke, a little awkwardly as he was sitting and she was kneeling, but in the next moment she solved that problem by straddling his lap and lowering herself against him, nothing but the silky dressing gown covering her, and not even that in some places. He looped his arms around her hips automatically, and his hands flattened against the curves of her arse, the silk under his palms as warm as skin.
"Worshiping," he said against her lips. "Yes. I'm feeling very rev--"
"I can tell," Rose murmured, rocking against him, and he found very quickly that he hadn't any leverage in this position. He couldn't push up into the press of her body, though his own body was doing its best to rise to the occasion. He'd done this plenty of times, in nine hundred years, with plenty of people, but--but he hadn't, John hadn't, and apparently it was all a bit different for humans, even half-humans. He very sensibly told himself to pay close attention, to find what Rose liked and provide it thoroughly. He tilted his face up to kiss her.
And the next thing he knew, beyond a wordless stream of overwhelming sensation, was Rose saying, "You'd better take those clothes off, or you'll make a mess of them."
He stared at her for a moment, panting--she was panting a little, too, and her eyes were dark, pupils dilated, and her cheeks were flushed and her lips were wet and swollen--and she was talking to him.
Clothes. Take off clothes, because--because he was about to make a mess of them. He blushed as he realized, an added degree of heat rolling across his skin. Rose laughed and grabbed his shoulders to push herself up to her feet.
"It's your first time, it's all right. I'll be gentle." Rose punctuated the statement by dropping the dressing gown to the floor around her feet, and there she was, naked and human and beautiful and fearless. "Come here, John."
John nodded, still staring for a moment. When he remembered about moving, and pushed up to his feet, hurriedly stripping off Mickey's old clothes and tossing them on top of his own.
"Much better," Rose said, looking him up and down. "It's much more fun seeing you naked like this."
"I should hope so," he said, and that had been an entire sentence, there, which seemed like an accomplishment. He rewarded himself by stepping forward and wrapping his arms around Rose again--skin to skin, his cock pressed against her belly. Rose kissed him briefly and pushed on his shoulders again, driving him back toward the bed. He fell back when he reached it, and Rose didn't waste a second before climbing on top of him.
"So," Rose said, holding herself above him, her hair falling around his face. "When I said I'd be gentle--I've been waiting for this. I've been waiting a long time."
John just nodded, barely able to think at all. His hands found her hips again, tugging her down, his human body eager to follow a script that was evidently written right into it, heedless of technique and consideration for partners' individual tastes. Luckily Rose's body seemed to be on the same page.
She knelt up, letting him gaze at her as she wrapped a hand around his cock--dragging a rattle of words from his throat, which made Rose pause for a second, eyebrows raised. He tugged down on her hips, mumbling softer apologies and pleas, and she sank onto him, wet and hot and Rose, Rose, Rose.
She moved over him quickly, nearly quickly enough, and his body worked out the leverage problem without input from his brain. His heels dug into the mattress and hips curled up, driving him into her, closer, harder, faster. His hands slid down her thighs and up, thumbs pressing into the dark curls of her crotch and seeking cautiously until he found the spot, the stroke, that made her cry out and shudder around him.
He let go himself, then, because it had to be all right if Rose had gotten hers. And it was his first time, after all. Rose folded down over him, pressing her breasts against him and kissing him through the last of his orgasm, her hips still working against his.
She shifted a little lower, when he'd gone still, and lay with her lips pressed against his throat. They were both wet and sticky and messy, but he didn't want to move and Rose didn't seem inclined to either. He raised his hand to her hair and closed his eyes, and then realized which name she'd called out. He kept his eyes closed, and his hand still. It didn't matter so much, he thought. Not really. It was an honest mistake.
If he'd really been the Doctor, though, he'd have known at once. He'd have known she gave him that look because he'd lapsed into Gallifreyan, too, although he'd have had the TARDIS to translate for him so she wouldn't have given him that look in the first place. She wouldn't have known what language he was speaking. She hadn't, ever.
If he'd really been the Doctor, at least twice as clever, he'd have had plenty of brain cells to spare from mere sensory input. He'd never have gotten caught up in this. He'd have made love to Rose expertly, cleverly, and been aware every minute of what he was doing and how he owed her all that and more.
"Rose," John said quietly. "I think I like being half human."
Rose laughed against his skin, which tickled and made him smile. She raised one hand and snapped her fingers--he tensed for half a second, thinking of the TARDIS doors--but all that happened was that the lights went out.
"I like you being half human, too," Rose said. "Come on, under the covers."
***
Then I thought, hey, what about that WIP about Rose and Metacrisis!Ten that's been sitting around for... a while...? That's relatively happy (for Rose and Metacrisis!Ten) and has a reasonable stopping point, and it's ... 8,000 words long.
So! Here! Have the first two scenes of what could eventually be a long and schmangsty and profoundly ridiculous kidfic: Orphans of Time.
Rose/Metacrisis!Ten. post-"Journey's End". 8,000 words. Explicit.
"Well, he's the same old Doctor so far," Jackie remarked.
Orphans of Time: Scenes 1-2
In the instant after the TARDIS disappeared, taking the Doctor away from her for the last time, Rose turned and looked at the man looking back at her. The man who was also the Doctor, and was human, and had told her that he loved her.
She couldn't think of a thing to say, and she was terribly afraid that she might have just accidentally married him or something--a choice, a kiss, witnesses, and a distinct sense that she'd just been given away. She should probably ask, but she couldn't think how. He'd make a joke of it, anyway, if he was the Doctor--but he was, wasn't he? He'd said he was. That was the promise he'd made.
He shook his head a little--not like no but like there was a fly buzzing at his ear. He wasn't looking at anything she could see. He smacked his open palm against the back of his head a couple of times, just the same as she'd seen him--seen the Doctor, the original Doctor, the Time Lord Doctor--slap the viewscreen in the TARDIS when a picture wasn't coming through clearly.
"Oh, that's not good," he said, meeting Rose's eyes and frowning.
His eyes rolled back and the color drained from his face, going from pink-cheeked to sickly pale in seconds. Rose caught him as he crumpled and then her mother was at her side, helping her ease him down to the sand.
"Well, he's the same old Doctor so far," Jackie remarked. "This is just how I met him that first Christmas, falling down in a faint."
Rose pressed her fingers to his throat and found his pulse, which felt human as far as Rose could tell, though that wasn't very far. Only one heart now, he'd said. He seemed colder than he should be--hugging the Doctor had always felt like stepping into a summer day--but that could be the wind here, or the fact that he was human. It could be anything.
Torchwood emergency checklists came to mind. He was breathing and his heart was beating and he had no obvious wounds, fair enough. But the next thing to determine was what alien technology he'd had contact with that might have caused injury or an alteration to his physiology, and the only person who knew had just left for another dimension.
"Sweetheart?"
Rose looked up to find her mum giving her a worried look, and realized the worry was probably as much for herself as for the Doctor. Her mum hadn't been worried when he fell down.
"This is normal, isn't it, Rose? He did this the last time, but he woke up when you needed him."
Rose looked back down at him, resisting the urge to shake him or scream at him. He'd come round if he was going to come round; in the meantime there wasn't a lot of use trying to drag him up to consciousness. She wasn't the one in danger.
Still, the urge to do something--or scream--was nearly overwhelming. Rose shoved her hands into her pockets and answered her mother as calmly as she could.
"Last time he was regenerating. Last time he wasn't even him, he was a Time Lord. The Doctor--the other Doctor--said he won't regenerate. He's human. So I don't know what this is. If something's gone wrong with him...."
Rose couldn't even finish the sentence.
"How's he know, though?" Jackie demanded. "Calls himself a Doctor, but he didn't have time to run any tests or anything, did he? Not so much as an x-ray. This one's got one heart and that's all anyone really knows, isn't it?"
It was, Rose realized, but she couldn't believe the Doctor had just left without knowing for sure that they were safe. He hadn't seemed to like this version of himself much, but he wouldn't have just abandoned him to die, would he?
Rose shook her head. The Doctor might have done that to his twin-or-whatever, but he wouldn't have done it to her.
"He's a Time Lord, he doesn't need x-rays. He knows things. He senses the whole universe, I'm pretty sure he could tell what species his--metacrisis, twin, whatever--he could tell, Mum. I'm sure he could tell."
"Well, what's going on, then?" Jackie demanded. "Proper humans don't fall down like puppets with their strings cut as soon as the sound of the TARDIS dies away. Do you suppose he needs tea?"
"I don't know," Rose snapped, and had to stare fixedly at the sand so she wouldn't look at him or her mother as she blinked back tears. She'd crossed universes to find him. She wasn't going to cry now, and she wasn't going to lose him like this, on a beach in Norway, because of some stupid ordinary malfunction of a human body.
That's not good, he'd said, and he'd touched his head, like his brain wasn't working, like....
She squeezed her eyes shut and told herself she hadn't already lost him. He was here, he was right here, and he was the Doctor, mostly, and he was going to come around any second.
Her mum squeezed her shoulder and murmured, "Don't worry, Rose, sweetheart. I'll call your dad, he'll know what to do."
"Course," Rose muttered, though she had no idea what her dad would do from a thousand miles away that could possibly help.
She shifted down to sit in the wet sand beside the Doctor and gave in to the silly impulse to run her fingers through his hair. He didn't move, didn't respond at all, but he did at least keep breathing. She wondered what would happen if she whispered in his ear, Doctor, I need you, but she couldn't bear to find out. What if he didn't wake up?
"What's all this then?"
Rose's head whipped around and her jaw dropped as she stared at her dad, suddenly standing there on the beach with her mum. "Dad, what..."
"Came to help," he said simply, waving one of the little yellow teleport discs at her. They'd stopped working after the last time the Doctor sealed the dimensions, and started working again along with the dimension-cannon. Clearly they were still working to at least some extent, because here he was. A corner of Rose's mind calculated what she could do with one or two of those discs, if....
"Jacks said you were nearly crying," her dad added, frowning down toward the Doctor. "I think I told you last time we were out here how I felt about the Doctor making my Rose cry."
"It's not his fault," Rose said automatically, looking back at him. "Something's wrong, I don't know...."
"Well go on and find out, then," Pete said, and Rose shuddered at the sensation she'd felt once before, the chain dropped around her neck from behind and the teleport disc falling against her chest. She looked up at her dad, but he didn't meet her eyes as he moved to kneel at the Doctor's other side. As gently as if it were Tony's head he lifted up, getting him dressed, her dad slipped the chain of another disc around the Doctor's neck.
"Take him home, Rose," her dad said, meeting her eyes in a quick glance as he stood up. "They're programmed for the house, you can get doctors faster from there, or whatever he needs. Torchwood."
"Tea," Rose said, feeling half-numb.
If her dad had set the discs already to take them home, she couldn't reprogram them for trans-dimensional transport with just what she had in her pockets. If only the Doctor had a sonic screwdriver in his... but if he did, and was awake to operate it, they wouldn't be in this mess. With the tools she had at the house, it would still take time--time she would have to leave his side, ignore him--time while the dimensions would be sealing up.
They were sealing up now, while she knelt here thinking about what she couldn't do.
"Thank you," Rose said, reaching for her dad's hand. He squeezed it and then quickly let go, and hit the button on the Doctor's disc just as Rose hit her own.
Her next breath smelled of familiar floor-wax and something cooking. She was home, and the Doctor was lying on the floor beside her, at the foot of the stairs in the front hall.
"Rose?" The voice from the top of the stairs still put an unspoken Miss in front of her name, but for once Rose was thankful for her father's servants.
"Sophie," Rose said. "We need to move him--we can put him in my bed for now."
"I'll just get the clamps," Sophie said, and hurried down the stairs and past them toward the kitchen.
Rose had made a set of miniature gravity clamps, a year or so ago. She'd brought them home when her mum was heavily pregnant and all her nesting instincts were going into rearranging enormously heavily furniture--but then the clamps had turned out to be handy for all sorts of things. Groceries. Shopping in general. Giving Tony airplane rides. Moving unconscious men around the house, apparently.
Sophie came back with the clamps and a blanket to attach them to. They rolled the Doctor into it and were on their way to Rose's room in no time. Almost just like before, Rose thought, except Sophie was a lot less hysterical than her mum and Mickey had been, that Christmas, and they hadn't nearly as far to go, and no stairs to climb at all. The clamps made it quite a lot easier, too. They laid him down on Rose's bed, which was all neatly made up, and Sophie said, "Do you need anything else, Rose? Does he need a doctor?"
Rose couldn't help a half-hysterical laugh, but she shook her head. "I'll take it from here. Thanks."
"Of course," Sophie said, and refrained from curtseying as she left the room with the clamps swinging from one hand.
Rose flipped the edges of the blanket back, checked his pulse and breathing--both were still thumping along, which was better than the alternative--and then started undressing him. His clothes were sandy from falling down on the beach, and it was practically tradition, anyway, though she wouldn't be dressing him up in her dad's pajamas.
He looked exactly like he had the last time, every inch like the Doctor--he even had that mole--but when she pressed her ear to his bare chest, there was just one ordinary human heart beating. She picked her head up and wiped hard at her eyes before she could drip tears on him. She wasn't going to cry. She wasn't crying. He would be fine, he was right here, she hadn't lost him. She pulled the duvet out from under him and tucked him in, and then she leaned over and whispered, "Doctor, it's me, it's Rose, I need you. Help me. Wake up."
He didn't move a muscle.
Rose straightened up and turned away, sitting on the edge of the bed with her back to him, staring blindly through the doorway and looking at nothing.
Halfway across the house, upstairs, Tony suddenly started to wail.
Rose was on her feet before she thought of what she was doing, but at the doorway she hesitated. That was what Sophie had been doing upstairs, obviously--of course her dad hadn't left Tony alone--but Tony was properly her responsibility with their parents in Norway, and....
She'd thought when she left, when she went to find the Doctor, that she would never see Tony again. Nor her parents, of course. She'd said her goodbyes to them and they'd understood and given her their blessing. But she couldn't have explained it to Tony, and he was screaming, and she'd thought she would never see him again.
Rose glanced back at the Doctor, who hadn't moved at all, and then jogged out of her room and up the stairs to the nursery, where Sophie was holding a red-faced, shrieking Tony. Rose didn't speak, just held out her arms, and Tony all but threw himself into the intervening space before Sophie could hand him over.
"Okay, okay," Rose murmured, as Tony flailed around, fighting and snuggling against her all at once.
"Okay, I know I'm only fourth-best, but Mum and Dad are in Norway and Mickey's...." Rose couldn't finish the sentence.
"Let's go visit Mickey's replacement, all right?" Rose bounced Tony as his wails died down to whimpers, walking carefully down the stairs. "If you hate him, I'll tell him you liked Mickey better, that'll probably be good for him, don't you think? Build character?"
But when she got back into her bedroom and looked at him, lying there, she thought he probably had plenty of character to go on. Tony quieted down, at least, leaning against Rose's shoulder with one fist crammed into his mouth. She couldn't quite see his face from this angle, but she suspected he was giving the Doctor the same curious-wary look he usually gave strangers when he'd just woken up in a bad mood. This stranger wasn't trying to cuddle him or making silly faces, at least. That usually set him off.
"Tony, this is the Doctor. Doctor, my baby brother Tony."
Neither of them made a sound. Rose sat down on the edge of the bed again, settling Tony in her lap.
"I don't even know if he likes babies," she informed Tony. Tony grabbed her hand and started tugging on the cuff of her jacket's sleeve. He loved anything blue. "I never saw him with any, I don't think. Except me, I guess, when I was six months old, but that's ... that's a really long story."
Tony didn't seem to be concerned with that one way or another. He gave up on trying to pull Rose's wrist up and started squirming and folding down to try to chew on it.
"He's a dad, though," Rose added slowly, tilting Tony backwards and remembering that one off-hand comment, never repeated or referred to again. "Or he was--but you never really stop being a parent, Mum says. Even when your children are gone, you're still a parent."
Rose thought of it, thought of the way even she, only a big sister at that, had moved automatically when she heard Tony crying. She picked Tony up and held him up, facing her. He looked back curiously, and tried to grab her hair.
"We're going to do a little experiment," Rose informed her brother. "And I promise I won't let you get hurt, and if you get scared I'm sure you'll have stopped crying before Mum and Dad get back from Norway, so it'll be our secret, yeah?"
Tony squirmed a little, looking like he was thinking of yelling again.
"Right," Rose said, stood up, dangled Tony about a foot above the Doctor's chest, and dropped him.
The Doctor's breath went out of him in a hollow whoof. Before Tony could scream, the Doctor sort of jackknifed, his whole body folding up around Tony, head and arms and knees all coming up around the baby, shielding and cradling him. He blinked at Tony, who just stared at him, seeming startled right past crying.
"Hallo," the Doctor said softly, raising one hand and settling it flat over the crown of Tony's head, while the other arm stayed firmly around him in the middle of a pile of duvet. "Hallo, who's this, then?"
Rose sat down again on the edge of the bed, and the Doctor's eyes darted to her, then back to Tony. "You must be Tony, hm? Hello, Tony Tyler."
Tony babbled back a bit, and Rose sat still and watched them. The Doctor did a bit of one-handed pat-a-cake with Tony, and made little encouraging noises back to all the noises Tony made, and showed no inclination to say anything to Rose. That, she understood. She still didn't know what to say to him, either.
Eventually she had to ask, though. "Are you all right?"
"Buh, buh, buh," he said, probably to Tony but there was no knowing, really. "Try that. Buh. I think so. Sorry about falling down like that--was I gone long? This doesn't look like a Norwegian beach."
"Not even a Norwegian bedroom," Rose agreed. "Dad brought us some teleports so I could bring you home."
Rose glanced back at them, crowning the pile of his clothes on the floor. When she looked back to the Doctor he was looking past her, at the little yellow circles.
Tony babbled a bit, and smacked the Doctor squarely in the chest, jerking his attention back. "Yes," he said, "well done. Dip dap dop. Try that. Dip. Dap. Dop."
Tony made a lot of noises that didn't sound anything like that, and the Doctor smiled at him and nodded.
"Doctor," Rose said, "what happened to you?"
"I, ah." The Doctor rubbed his own head with his free hand, then mussed Tony's hair again. "Well, it's a bit... I fainted, actually. Went into shock, a bit, but mostly I fainted."
Rose stared at him. "You fainted."
"Got the vapors," he agreed. "Swooned. Into your arms, I think, because I don't seem to have hit my head."
"You did not swoon," Rose said, fighting the impulse to laugh.
"Did," he said. "And then you got me all naked and dropped a baby on me, which is a bit of a mixed message, frankly. He's not even ours."
"I didn't have any other clothes for you, and you're covered up, and he might as well be ours, until Mum and Dad get home from Norway," Rose said firmly. "Why'd you faint? Mum said you went down as soon as the sound of the TARDIS died away--I thought it'd been gone a moment by then, but she and Mickey could always hear it better than I could, further away."
"Because you never had to," the Doctor said, his eyes still firmly on Tony. "Bib, gig, mim, did. You didn't need to hear the TARDIS because you were inside the TARDIS. And so was I. Nearly my entire life, Rose, I'd been inside the TARDIS, in it or right beside it. I was born in the TARDIS."
"You..." He had been. Not the Doctor, but this man with her, in her bed, playing with her baby brother. "You were."
"I'm younger than Tony here," he agreed, still not looking up. "I just know more. Well, and I'm taller. Bibbity, flibberty, boo."
Tony giggled, and the Doctor--the new--whoever he was, he smiled at her brother. When he looked up at her, the smile faded.
"And it wasn't just the TARDIS, it was them. My--the Doctor. And Donna. All my life until that minute, I'd never been out of arm's reach of Donna and the Doctor, and I didn't even realize--Time Lords are telepathic, you know. You do know, right, I--he--you knew that, didn't you?"
"Sort of," Rose said, thinking back through offhand remarks and casual touches, things he'd known and things he'd found out, things that went beyond cleverness. The things he'd said when they first met, when he was still trying to scare her away. "Sort of. And you're sort of a Time Lord."
"Half," he said. "Half Time Lord. So I'm half of sort of telepathic, whatever that works out to. But for all the time I existed, there was a TARDIS near me and another Time Lord or two, and they all stayed in contact with me, with my mind, telepathically. Even though I have his memories of being alone, I didn't feel it for myself until he was gone, and it was a shock. I fainted."
"But he's... he's got the TARDIS, at least, right?" Rose thought of the first time they'd come to this world, when the TARDIS had nearly died. She hadn't understood half of what that meant to him then. "And he's got Donna, Donna's a Time Lord like him, now. So he's not alone."
"Pip, pop, pup," the Doctor said, and waited for Tony to babble something back before he said, "No, Donna's a Time Lord like something else entirely. And she won't be that for long, because a human brain can't contain what Donna's got, and then he'll be alone again. And he's at least twice as telepathic as I am, and his Time Lord brain.... that's why Time Lords are so clever, Rose, because they have to be. You need a lot of processing capacity to listen all the time to the rushing of the universe and the whispering minds of your entire species, and now he's just ... shouting in the silence and no one talks back. He's more like Donna than he knows."
"But he had you," Rose said softly. He'd had her, too. He'd had both of them, but he'd dumped them here, and apparently he wouldn't even have Donna for long. He'd be all alone again, after all Rose had done to reach him.
"Yes he did," the Doctor said, and stuck his tongue out at Tony, smiling when Tony stuck his out in return. He brushed his hand gently over the top of Tony's head again and didn't look up at Rose. "He had me. But then I'm a murderous abomination."
Rose opened her mouth to say you are not, but she couldn't just turn this into another round of bickering. She couldn't bear to hear him insist he was, stopping halfway through to talk nonsense to Tony.
"Would I let a murderous abomination hold my baby brother?" He looked up sharply at that. Rose leaned closer and caught his chin, so he had to hold her gaze. "Would the Doctor leave Rose Tyler alone with a murderous abomination?"
He shook his head so minutely she could only feel the motion through her fingers. "He did say--"
"He talks too much," Rose said firmly, and let go and sat back. "You're half human. You're a whole new thing, aren't you? He doesn't know what you are. And he's never going to know, because he left us here and went off by himself."
And that was all there was to it. That was the Doctor, leaving people behind because he had to, or at least because he said he had to. He'd left her once before, and he'd left her again, and whoever this one was, Rose didn't think he was going to strike off alone anytime soon. Not naked and with Tony sitting on top of the duvet, anyway. This one would stay around, so maybe it was just as well if he wasn't exactly like the Doctor.
No sooner had Rose thought it, than the Doctor opened his mouth and let out a stream of gibberish that wasn't anything like the ordinary nonsense he'd been saying to Tony. Rose stared, but Tony cheerfully squeaked and smacked his lips back, and the Doctor said, "I have all his memories, Rose, but I'm not really--I'm not quite, exactly...."
"I know," Rose said. "It's all right. Clearly me and him were never going to work out if he kept leaving me in other universes."
He glanced up at Rose, and gave her a small, crooked smile, almost shy. "He feels really bad about it every time, though. He can't say it, you know, but he does love you."
"Yeah," Rose said, making the words as easy as they might actually feel, someday. "But he can't say it, that's the thing. He's never going to change, is he?"
He looked down at Tony again and said, "He'll change, but not into someone who could say it, I don't think. He never has been before. Not with humans."
All Rose could think was that he'd never have told her that, even though he had, sort of, once. She hadn't understood, or hadn't wanted to understand. It'd been a long time ago, in another universe.
The Doctor let out another series of weird noises, and Tony giggled and clapped and gibbered back at him.
"Anyway," he said. "I really just meant to say--I'm not him, and I probably shouldn't call myself the Doctor. I'm not, quite."
"Oh," Rose said, because she couldn't bring herself to agree with him or argue with him, and couldn't imagine what else she would call him. "You'll have to choose a name, then."
He shrugged stiffly. "I thought John would do. I'll think of more when I need it."
"Not John Smith, then," Rose said. The Doctor had been John Smith when he needed a human name, but... this wasn't the Doctor.
"Not John Smith," he agreed. "That's a disposable name, and I really do mean to stay around this time."
He smiled at her, and then Tony--who had been entirely focused on him all this time, as if he were Mickey and their mum all rolled into one--Tony looked over at her and smiled too.
Rose stared for a second, and then said, "John."
His smile brightened at the sound of his name, and then faltered. He looked down at Tony, who looked back at him. "Oh."
"John," Rose repeated. "What did you do to my baby brother?"
"Well," John said, and touched the top of Tony's head again for just an instant, jerking his fingers back as if they'd been burned. "I may have made him just a tiny bit psychic."
Rose grabbed Tony out of his arms--too late, obviously, but it was automatic. Tony yelled and then cut off abruptly and then giggled.
Rose stared from him to John and back. "Did you just do that?"
John spread his hands. "Really, Rose, just the tiniest little bit. No one will ever notice."
"My mum's going to notice if you can stop him crying by looking at him."
"But will she mind?" Rose stood up, shifting Tony to her left arm and raising her right hand to threaten a smack. "Okay--sorry! Sorry!"
Tony squirmed, and Rose sat down and moved him so he could see John.
"If I never touch him again it'll probably go away," John added, almost meekly. Sadly. "On Gallifrey babies are in constant touch with their families, to help teach them to interpret what they're picking up telepathically. Human babies aren't anything like as prone to it--Tony's not going to be able to read minds, Rose, he just--he recognizes my mind when it touches his, that's all."
Rose relaxed her grip on Tony, and he promptly fell onto all fours and clambered toward John again. "Is that why you woke up? You'd lost the TARDIS and the Doctor and Donna but I brought you Tony."
"Too young to close off his mind, still young enough to learn," John said quietly, reaching out just one finger to tap Tony's nose. "Well, that and he was dropped on me."
Rose smiled a little. They'd be all right if she could keep smiling. "So only babies can learn?"
John kept his eyes down, on Tony. "The critical period for telepathy in humans is six hundred days plus or minus five. Tony's halfway through that and not extraordinarily inclined to it, so he could pick up a basic awareness. When you--when the Doctor met you when you were six months old--you could have learned a lot more than that from someone like him, but he only met you for a moment. It would have been like someone saying hello to you once, when you were six months old, and other than that no one ever spoke to you again. You wouldn't have learned to talk. You just might have been lonelier for a while, afterward."
Rose remembered her baby self, remembered the Doctor talking to her. John looked up and held her gaze for a few seconds, then reached out and tapped her on the nose. He remembered, too. That was the day her dad had died, and there was someone in this world with her who remembered it like she did.
"You're explaining it to my mum if he does start reading minds," Rose said firmly.
"He won't, I swear," John said. John's stomach made an audible noise, and he looked down at it sharply, startled, and then looked over at Tony. "I thought that was you."
Tony babbled something back and patted his own stomach. Rose put her face in her hands. Just a tiny bit psychic, sure.
"Rose?" John said hesitantly. "I think I need... something to eat."
"I think you need clothes, if we don't want to scare Sophie off," Rose said, getting to her feet. "I'll go see what Mickey left around, but if I come back and Tony can fly, you're getting nothing but pears to eat."
"Pears are disgusting," John said to Tony as Rose headed out of the room. "And your sister is joking. Probably."
***
John kept his mind pressed firmly against Tony's as he laid Tony in the crib, distracting him from the loss of physical contact. Tony stayed asleep, and John clasped his hands behind his back and looked down at him for a moment, easing his mind away as well.
When he glanced toward the door Rose was standing there, silhouetted in the light from the hallway. He had a sudden memory of a memory, the visions that had come to John Smith before he had given up his humanity and become the Doctor again. The life he might have had. A kiss--a wedding--the weight of a sleeping child in his arms. This day with Rose had been a bit like that, a kiss on the beach and the next thing he knew a baby in his arms, life lived on fast forward.
John glanced back toward the baby and saw him sleeping peacefully, then slipped out of the room, brushing by Rose in the doorway. She caught his hand as he passed, keeping him at her side as she gently pulled the door shut.
"You are amazing," she whispered. "No one gets him to go to sleep when my mum's not around, not ever. He's not yet a year old and he's been through six nannies and the only daycare that will take him is the Communist Nursery that has to take everyone. Mum's not going to care if he speaks in tongues, if you can do that."
John smiled automatically. He suspected Rose thought that was more or less a joke, so he didn't mention what he had been teaching Tony to speak today. Time enough for that later. For now, he and Rose were alone together for the first time. It was strange--the Doctor and Rose had been alone together all the time, give or take the TARDIS, but--well, give or take the TARDIS, that was the whole thing in a nutshell. This was different. John and Rose were alone together for the first time.
Rose looked into his eyes until he let the smile drop, and then she leaned against him, squeezing tightly on his hand, and kissed him.
John flung his free arm around Rose, clutching her to himself as he kissed back. He hadn't realized he needed this until her lips touched his, and now he was kissing her like a drowning man taking in his first deep breath. He had Rose. If he had nothing else in this universe, he had Rose.
Rose broke the kiss and leaned her cheek against his shoulder, letting go of his hand to wrap both of her arms around him. He hugged her back as fiercely as he'd kissed her, pressing his face into her hair. Half-muffled, he heard Rose murmur, "Same hugs. I missed the hugs."
John grinned for real this time and tightened his arms around Rose, pivoting on his heels to whirl her around. She clutched him tighter and laughed out loud, heedless of the sleeping baby--John tapped his mind against Tony's, but Tony was still asleep--and when he set her on her feet she looked up at him with her eyes shining.
He could do this. He could be--not the Doctor, but close enough, maybe even better as far as Rose was concerned. He could kiss her and hug her and not leave her, and he could be clever enough, he could do enough. He could keep her.
"Come on," Rose said, and took his hand again, leading him away from Tony's room, down the stairs. She hesitated at the bottom, long enough to glance back and meet his eyes, then led him toward her bedroom.
His single heart started to beat faster, and that kiss a moment ago was abruptly recognizable as a promise of something else entirely, now that they were alone. He squeezed Rose's hand, and she looked back again and smiled this time.
Once inside the room, he couldn't help eyeing the rumpled bed. He knew he'd been the only one naked in it before, but the mere sight of it was strangely suggestive. His half-human brain got a bit stuck on what was about to happen, what had been about to happen ever since they'd kissed on the beach.
Rose let go of his hand and moved toward the en suite.
"I'm just going to freshen up," she said, so carefully casually that he thought she might be suffering a similar attack of nerves. "It's been a long day. You--don't disappear or pass out or anything, all right?"
"I'll do my best," John assured her solemnly. She gave him a firm little nod and turned away, shutting the door softly but definitely behind her.
He glanced around the room and realized his clothes and shoes were still in a sandy heap on the floor, along with the teleport discs. He went and knelt on the carpet, carefully setting the discs aside and picking up the blue suit jacket and trousers. The sand had dried and brushed off easily--practically everything did, from these clothes.
He laid the suit out neatly, leaving the t-shirt and socks and shoes in a pile, and began the process of emptying the suit's pockets.
He tried the inside breast pocket first. It yielded a broken sonic screwdriver he'd been meaning to fix, and a coat check ticket from--he squinted at it briefly--someplace in 1958, which was odd. He could have sworn he'd never worn this suit in 1958. He tried again and got a couple of scraps of paper--a shopping list in Donna's handwriting, and a torn page he'd found on Kolaios and meant to send to the Library, as he strongly suspected it was the only record of the language it was written in.
He set those items together on the carpet, and moved on to the trouser pockets. The left yielded small change from eight different planets--metal discs and loops and cubes, plastic bits and bobs, ceramic wafers, and a colloidal goo like melted jelly babies that was legal tender across three galaxies. He used the bit of paper from Kolaios to fold it up in, then reached back into the same pocket to pull out three pencils (two wood, one mechanical) and six pens (three blue, one green, one red, one black; variously ball-point, fountain, cybernetic ink-producing, and molecular-magnetic) plus a stylus, a pair of sunglasses with purple lenses, and a sealed glass jar that only looked empty.
The right pocket held yet another broken screwdriver--he'd wondered where that had gone--and a spare pair of shoelaces, a comb, six safety pins, an eye pencil he was pretty sure didn't belong to him, a snail's shell sans snail, a pair of nine-sided dice, fourteen different power cells ranging from a nickel-cadmium battery to a crystallized fusion reaction, a handkerchief monogrammed JS, and a banana.
He sorted the sum total of his possessions into tidy piles, wondering what to make of them--he could probably make one complete sonic screwdriver out of the two he had, plus some of the change and a safety pin. But the Tylers didn't seem to need any shelves put up, nor doors unlocked. Tony hadn't reached the locking-himself-in-the-loo age just yet.
"Didn't think I'd see one of those again," Rose said. John looked up, startled, to find her smiling crookedly at him, wearing nothing but a silky dressing gown that ended well above the knee. She'd done something to her hair, and she smelled really nice.
"I--um--"
Rose sat down across from him--flashing him quite a lot of inner thigh in the process, which entirely derailed his thoughts--and said, "I wouldn't have thought anybody'd trained you to clean out your pockets before putting your things in the laundry. You might manage as a human after all."
"It doesn't really need washing," he said blankly, and then, "see anything you like?"
She glanced up at him, raising an eyebrow and not deigning to follow up on that straight line. She reached for the pile of odd currency instead, attracted to small shiny objects as automatically as any human.
Rose started sorting the change into piles, plastic separate from silicon, metal closest to herself. She divided the metal bits into groups, too, the ones she recognized as coins into stacks and the loops nested in each other. Then she picked those up--there were just two of them, both a gold-copper mix that created elaborate swirling patterns across the plain circles of metal.
John opened his mouth to explain the Zanarians' methods of counterfeit-detection with a quick digression into the cultural significance of drains on their home planet that led them to use pipe-sections as currency in the first place. Rose separated the two circles and slid the smaller over the first joint of her index finger.
"This is pretty," she said distantly, and he suddenly saw it as Rose saw it: a patterned gold band, just about the right size for a human woman's finger, one of a matched set.
He thought about telling her it was a future-alien pound coin, dismissing what she was thinking, breaking the moment. His instincts screamed for it; it was what the proper Doctor would have done, without hesitation.
The bed was right behind him. He'd kissed her and told her he loved her and started working to fit himself into her household.
He said, "You can have it if you like."
Rose looked up at him sharply and then down at her hands. Neither of them said anything, and he didn't reach across the space between them to take her hand, take the ring, place it on her finger. With this ring I thee bio-damp. He wouldn't joke about it, not in this frozen moment, and he didn't dare offer the words in seriousness so soon.
Rose said, "You should keep this one, though," and offered him the slightly larger hoop. He held out his open hand, and she dropped it into his palm.
"They belong together," he observed, not bothering to mention that there were millions more where they came from, in another universe's 63rd century. "They shouldn't be separated."
"We'll both have to look after them, then," Rose said, and with a sudden, decisive motion she slid the loop--the coin--the pipe-segment--the plain gold ring onto the third finger of her left hand.
She looked up at him, and her expression was neutral, patient. She'd made her move.
"I suppose we will," he said, and slid his own ring onto the corresponding finger. It was a little loose, but he didn't think it would fall off.
"They fit," Rose said. "That's like a sign, isn't it?"
He thought of explaining the logic of currency sizes in proportion to the sizes of manipulating limbs, the evolutionary biomechanics which dictated the sizes of most sentient species, the really only very slight coincidence of a Zanarian coin being similar in circumference to a human or Time Lord digit.
He looked at Rose, smiling and asking him about causality, and he thought, Bad Wolf. Shining and golden and powerful, there was no limit to what she might have done--she could easily have assured that he would have these two coins. She could have known who would be wearing the blue suit and how it would come to this; perhaps Rose Tyler, as much as Donna Noble, had been the author of his existence. Perhaps she had seen the way to keep the Doctor for herself and yet set him free. Perhaps he was what she'd wanted after all, when she knew everything and could change everything. Perhaps she'd left the rings for herself and him. Perhaps it was a sign, no less true--no less hers--because it was not written out in plain letters.
"Something like," he said, and lowered his eyes to her hand, to keep from letting her see what he was thinking. He couldn't think of what the Bad Wolf had done, and what the Doctor had done about it, and what it had meant. Not now.
"Hey," she said, reaching for his left hand, touching her fingers tentatively to the ring on his hand. "You're thinking awfully loudly over there."
He looked up to find her smiling, beaming, bright and golden in an entirely human way. Whether she'd chosen him years ago or not, whatever she had foreseen or set into motion--she'd chosen him now, knowing what she knew. He had Rose. He could do anything so long as he had Rose.
He smiled back, and then looked down at the pile of odds and ends between them. He opened his hands over it, in a gesture of offering, and said, "With all my worldly goods I thee endow."
Rose's hand darted out immediately to grab the sonic screwdrivers, but her fingers had barely closed over them when she leaned across to kiss him, so he didn't feel too terribly much like he'd just been married for his money, as well as with it.
"Those are broken," he murmured against her mouth, when she let him get a little air. She was holding the screwdrivers in a clenched fist, her knuckles pressed against his shoulder. "They really won't do anything exciting."
"Shows what you know," Rose murmured back. "Which reminds me, you skipped the bit about bodies. And worshiping."
Rose shifted to press her body against his as she spoke, a little awkwardly as he was sitting and she was kneeling, but in the next moment she solved that problem by straddling his lap and lowering herself against him, nothing but the silky dressing gown covering her, and not even that in some places. He looped his arms around her hips automatically, and his hands flattened against the curves of her arse, the silk under his palms as warm as skin.
"Worshiping," he said against her lips. "Yes. I'm feeling very rev--"
"I can tell," Rose murmured, rocking against him, and he found very quickly that he hadn't any leverage in this position. He couldn't push up into the press of her body, though his own body was doing its best to rise to the occasion. He'd done this plenty of times, in nine hundred years, with plenty of people, but--but he hadn't, John hadn't, and apparently it was all a bit different for humans, even half-humans. He very sensibly told himself to pay close attention, to find what Rose liked and provide it thoroughly. He tilted his face up to kiss her.
And the next thing he knew, beyond a wordless stream of overwhelming sensation, was Rose saying, "You'd better take those clothes off, or you'll make a mess of them."
He stared at her for a moment, panting--she was panting a little, too, and her eyes were dark, pupils dilated, and her cheeks were flushed and her lips were wet and swollen--and she was talking to him.
Clothes. Take off clothes, because--because he was about to make a mess of them. He blushed as he realized, an added degree of heat rolling across his skin. Rose laughed and grabbed his shoulders to push herself up to her feet.
"It's your first time, it's all right. I'll be gentle." Rose punctuated the statement by dropping the dressing gown to the floor around her feet, and there she was, naked and human and beautiful and fearless. "Come here, John."
John nodded, still staring for a moment. When he remembered about moving, and pushed up to his feet, hurriedly stripping off Mickey's old clothes and tossing them on top of his own.
"Much better," Rose said, looking him up and down. "It's much more fun seeing you naked like this."
"I should hope so," he said, and that had been an entire sentence, there, which seemed like an accomplishment. He rewarded himself by stepping forward and wrapping his arms around Rose again--skin to skin, his cock pressed against her belly. Rose kissed him briefly and pushed on his shoulders again, driving him back toward the bed. He fell back when he reached it, and Rose didn't waste a second before climbing on top of him.
"So," Rose said, holding herself above him, her hair falling around his face. "When I said I'd be gentle--I've been waiting for this. I've been waiting a long time."
John just nodded, barely able to think at all. His hands found her hips again, tugging her down, his human body eager to follow a script that was evidently written right into it, heedless of technique and consideration for partners' individual tastes. Luckily Rose's body seemed to be on the same page.
She knelt up, letting him gaze at her as she wrapped a hand around his cock--dragging a rattle of words from his throat, which made Rose pause for a second, eyebrows raised. He tugged down on her hips, mumbling softer apologies and pleas, and she sank onto him, wet and hot and Rose, Rose, Rose.
She moved over him quickly, nearly quickly enough, and his body worked out the leverage problem without input from his brain. His heels dug into the mattress and hips curled up, driving him into her, closer, harder, faster. His hands slid down her thighs and up, thumbs pressing into the dark curls of her crotch and seeking cautiously until he found the spot, the stroke, that made her cry out and shudder around him.
He let go himself, then, because it had to be all right if Rose had gotten hers. And it was his first time, after all. Rose folded down over him, pressing her breasts against him and kissing him through the last of his orgasm, her hips still working against his.
She shifted a little lower, when he'd gone still, and lay with her lips pressed against his throat. They were both wet and sticky and messy, but he didn't want to move and Rose didn't seem inclined to either. He raised his hand to her hair and closed his eyes, and then realized which name she'd called out. He kept his eyes closed, and his hand still. It didn't matter so much, he thought. Not really. It was an honest mistake.
If he'd really been the Doctor, though, he'd have known at once. He'd have known she gave him that look because he'd lapsed into Gallifreyan, too, although he'd have had the TARDIS to translate for him so she wouldn't have given him that look in the first place. She wouldn't have known what language he was speaking. She hadn't, ever.
If he'd really been the Doctor, at least twice as clever, he'd have had plenty of brain cells to spare from mere sensory input. He'd never have gotten caught up in this. He'd have made love to Rose expertly, cleverly, and been aware every minute of what he was doing and how he owed her all that and more.
"Rose," John said quietly. "I think I like being half human."
Rose laughed against his skin, which tickled and made him smile. She raised one hand and snapped her fingers--he tensed for half a second, thinking of the TARDIS doors--but all that happened was that the lights went out.
"I like you being half human, too," Rose said. "Come on, under the covers."
***
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Please, tell me there's going to be more? :)
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