Fic: Path of Needles (6/8)
Sep. 3rd, 2008 01:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tardis_stowawayTitle: Path of Needles
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tardis_stowaway
Characters/Pairings: Chiefly Ten/Rose, but there's also a bit of Nine/Rose (I couldn't resist), and some Ten/Rose/Jack (Jack couldn't resist).
Rating: mild PG-13 for a bit of discussion about sex and one or two instances of salty language.
Spoilers: through season 3, spoiler-free AU after that!
Betas: the amazingdark_aegis and wendymr
Disclaimer: Doctor Who is not mine. I just take it out for play dates with my strange imagination.
Author's Note: Back from Dragoncon, I can finally get time to post this.
Summary: Once upon a time, she had abided in the world where lives did not begin with ‘once upon a time.’ No more. Rose walks through the woods. Meanwhile, the Doctor deals with an abundance of Bad Wolf references.
You can find previous chapters on Teaspoon or go back to Chapter 5 on LJ
Chapter 6: Awakening
Getting Rose back is not as simple as defeating a dragon, if it's possible at all.
* * *
Sometimes people leave you
Halfway through the wood.
Do not let it grieve you,
No one leaves for good.
You are not alone.
No one is alone.
- Finale, Into the Woods
That day, she was amazed to discover that when he was saying "As you wish," what he meant was, "I love you."
-The Princess Bride
* * *
It was not as straightforward as defeating a dragon–depending, of course, on the dragon. On the planet Elallio, the epic of the fabled Prince Quen tells how he defeated a dragon by challenging it to a contest of exceedingly complex calculus problems. Most scholars hold that this is a metaphor written to illustrate the Elallions’ high esteem for logic and critical thinking over emotions or brute strength. The Doctor disagreed with the scholars. After all, he had been referee for the famed contest and knew (a) it really happened and (b) the dragon let Prince Quen win because he was tired of the captive princess’s whining. The point is this: the Doctor’s quest for Rose did not involve dragons.
You could say that the Doctor used sympathetic magic to conjure the whole based on a part. You could say he journeyed into dark caves to find the amulets needed for his spell. You could say that he built himself a maiden like a fairy changeling from inanimate materials.
You could say that the Doctor used a sample of Rose’s blood, stored in the depths of the TARDIS medical freezer after some long-ago medical checkup, to extract her DNA. You could say that he visited shady planets with extremely lax bioethics laws to procure the equipment needed to grow a clone to full adult size in a mere forty days. (He knew ways to grow a human body almost instantaneously, but they all either required full transmat biodata or, designed for manufacturing expendable soldiers, created a body with substantially shortened potential lifespan.)
The second narrative is the way the Doctor would have explained his actions; it is not necessarily truer.
The stories converge on this: one body of Rose Tyler in a sleep hardly distinguishable from death. Computers taught its brain to make the body breathe, keep the heart beating, maintain its temperature (significantly below that of a conscious human), and process the nutrients that came in through tubes. Those computers also kept its brain too deeply asleep to develop further on its own. The body looked just like Rose down to the last detail (the Doctor had even dressed it in Rose’s pajamas and clumsily bleached its hair in case it proved important for the body to match Rose’s self-image), but it was not her. It was a Rose-shaped garment, entirely unworn.
Growing the clone had taken considerable technical expertise, but it was not an endpoint. The breathing meat with Rose’s face pained the Doctor far more than her complete absence. The body did not smile or shout or wander off. He could use the machines from the planets that grew clones as pleasure-slaves to program a personality into the body, but it would not be Rose. He could even awake it and raise it like a baby, allowing it to develop its own selfhood. It would have Rose’s genes, and thus would be beautiful and clever and good-natured, and he would probably like the resulting person, but it would not be his Rose.
A Rose is a Rose by any name, but not without Jackie Tyler’s upbringing, the longing for the father she never really knew, the scars left by Jimmy Stone, the camaraderie with Mickey, the gritty vibrancy of London, and the moment a man in a leather jacket grabbed her hand and said “Run!” His Rose had died ending the Time War in the Big Bang, but the Doctor still had hope of retrieving her.
Death had not obliterated Rose. Hers was not an ordinary death where the consciousness vanishes or passes into some undiscovered country or whatever it is that happens to most people who die. Dying at the beginning of all things, the atoms of Rose’s body were part of the matter of the new universe, and her–her what? dare he call it her soul?–was similarly spread through the universe like salt in the waters of the ocean. Strengthened by the remnants of the Bad Wolf that he hadn’t fully purged, Rose retained just enough selfhood to pass him messages. Now he merely had to disentangle her from everything else in existence without destroying either the universe or Rose. If he could manage that extraction, his real, original Rose, all memories and personality intact, could take up residence in the new body. It was as simple as a miracle.
The heart of the TARDIS was the key. The time vortex was like a spider’s web anchored to everything in spacetime or the ocean in which all things floated. That infinite connectivity was what allowed the TARDIS to travel anywhere. Rose once looked into the heart of the TARDIS and said it looked back. The TARDIS remembered what she saw. His marvelous ship could reach all through the linkages of the vortex and, he hoped, recognize and reassemble the scattered shards of Rose, even changed as she was from the nineteen year-old who first became the Bad Wolf. If there was any way to distill a purely human Rose from the rest of the universe, it was through the TARDIS.
The Doctor gently brushed the body’s eyes open. The basic brain programming he installed in the body would make them blink often enough to prevent damage, but aside from that they would not close until he closed them himself–or Rose did. He ran one final check on the TARDIS systems to make sure everything would open and, just as importantly, shut again. He lifted the body’s torso into a sitting position on the trolley and turned its head to face the console. Finally, he tied a strip of black silk across his own eyes. Rose needed to see into the Vortex, but he dared not risk the temptation of that power. Preparations complete, he pointed the sonic screwdriver at the console and pressed a button.
The TARDIS opened; he heard her song. Wind rushed through the closed room. The air fizzed with power.
In his arms, Rose’s body remained still.
Throwing caution to the winds, the Doctor took one arm away from Rose’s body to tear his blindfold off, keeping his back to the console and its bewitching light. He needed to see so he could try additional measures. The Doctor tilted the body’s head this way and that. He brought it close enough to the console to touch. He closed the body’s eyes and opened them again. The body breathed shallowly and infrequently; its skin was colder than his own. The TARDIS was alive and well, but Rose remained stubbornly inanimate.
So. Rose was lost to him except, perhaps, for cryptic messages scattered across the universe like shapes in tea leaves. It was an impossible plan from the start. He should have never got his hopes up.
The Doctor knew he needed to close the TARDIS and clean up after this mistake. He had an uninhabited body that needed disposal (or more likely storage–the thought of destroying this object that looked so like Rose turned his stomach even when he knew it was just so much meat). Instead he just stood beside the trolley, backlit by the shimmering beauty of the heart of the TARDIS that he must not look at directly, embracing Rose’s unresponsive form and rocking slowly back and forth.
Something poked into his chest. The Doctor winced and slid a hand up to check his pocket. The dimensional transcendence of the pockets of this damn blue suit had never worked properly. Things kept slipping out. In this case, a large sewing needle was sticking out of the top and stabbing him.
Needles. Symbols of domesticity, binding, pain, women, healing, sharpness, narrow passages…and of sex. “Will you take the path of needles or the path of pins?” the werewolf asked the girl. Of course the Doctor knew the story. (“Elle avoit vû le loup.” She’d seen the wolf–antiquated French slang for loss of virginity.)
Humans are quick to see innuendoes everywhere. It annoyed the Doctor sometimes. Not every story is about sex or romance. But some are.
The princess Briar Rose pricked her finger (not on a needle but on a spindle, another woman’s tool for working with thread) and slept for a century. It was not enough for the prince to win his way into her chamber and draw open the curtains. A kiss might do the trick here too, though not a kiss alone.
The vortex, he realized, would not reach outward to animate Rose by itself any more than it would animate the couch or the sonic screwdriver. Though the TARDIS was sentient and independent, she would not use her might for something so different from the normal mission of a time machine except in symbiosis with another mind. The Doctor had to look into the heart of the TARDIS, take up the power, guide it to draw forth Rose’s consciousness and place that consciousness within the waiting body, and release the power afterwards.
It would be possible to do so much more with that power: help others, kill the monsters, and keep safe the ones he loved. That is how it would begin. The immensity of the power could all too easily undermine all his best intentions. Appearing too precious to let go, it could turn him into a tyrant, an avenging angel. He might lose his selfhood or destroy the universe. The possibility of such temptation made him tremble with fear. Rassilon, he’d prefer Daleks over this danger to his soul.
It was for Rose. He’d done it before. (But that was only receiving power still bound by Rose’s innocence and releasing it immediately. This task would require using the power. Would it still be possible to resist? he asked himself. Right or wrong, he shushed the doubts.) He would not trade the universe for Rose, but he believed that for Rose’s sake he could keep the universe safe from himself. It might cost him a regeneration, but that was hardly worth noticing beside the other concerns.
The Doctor turned and gazed into the light at the heart of the TARDIS. The vortex rushed into him, filling him as if he opened his mouth underwater and found the liquid a richer breath than oxygen. It was intoxicating. He could see everything. He could do anything. Anything at all, but all he did was to call Rose’s name across the cosmos. The only thing he didn’t know was whether she answered. (Orpheus and Eurydice: you can’t tell for sure if she follows, and if you try too hard you shall surely lose her.)
Radiant with power, the Doctor kissed Rose’s cool lips. He kissed her gently, as if she might break. She was so still. Distantly, he realized that if this didn’t work then he would have a difficult task relinquishing the vortex without ripping the universe apart in frustration. Oh, Rose .
He thought of their first journey together. Rose had seen her planet burn, nearly died, and learned that he was the last of his kind. It should have sent her running, but all she wanted was to eat chips and hold his hand even tighter than before. He thought of his terrified marvel when he realized that she had rejected his attempt to keep her safe and instead swallowed the time vortex to keep him safe. Earthy and legendary, that was his Rose.
Almost imperceptibly, the lips under his grew warmer. The senses activated by the vortex gave him the sensation of something gathering towards him, into him, and straight through. The power of the vortex began to pour out of him and into her. For one moment more he was pressing his lips against a comatose mouth, then all of a sudden everything changed. Rose began to kiss him back. By all the stars in the heavens, Rose was kissing him back. Her kiss was needy, as if he were water and she dying of thirst. Her tongue slipped into his mouth, fever-hot and fierce. He responded in kind, kissing her as if she were rope and he dangling over a precipice.
The Doctor could see all of time and space, all that might be, and it was beautiful. He saw straight back to the beginning of the universe when his world had ended. He was kissing Rose there too, just as he was kissing her on the Game Station where she had stopped the Dalek invasion, and he was aware of it all.
The TARDIS seemed to resound with howls, horns, strings, and drums: a song of triumph, a song of creation. The vortex power crackled through Rose and the Doctor, tangling around them as their hands tangled in each others’ hair.
The singing tide of power within the Doctor surged, crested, and fell. The Doctor felt his senses narrow as the vortex passed out of him and into Rose. Terrified that the vortex would destroy her instants after it brought her back, he fought to draw some of that power out of her again. Rose clung to every tendril of power and snatched her lips away.
The Doctor opened his physical eyes. He looked at Rose’s face and saw not his precious girl but the Bad Wolf, primeval power incarnate. She fought savagely against her confinement in the Doctor’s arms and her puny mortal body, twisting and scratching. When he clung to her still, she gave voice to an eerie howl that beckoned him toward the boundless freedom of wilderness and the exhilaration of unrestrained strength. He ignored the call, whispering lullabies as he hugged her closer. Then Rose exhaled, expelling a mist of power back to the TARDIS. She changed.
In Rose’s eyes, the Doctor saw the hungry, dizzying infinity of Time itself. Phosphorescence like a will-o-the-wisp shimmered around her skin, bewitching, heartless, and deadly. His every instinct said to flee as he’d fled from the vortex when he’d looked into it as a child, but instead he embraced her, though she froze him like the cold after the last star sputtered out. At last she sighed out shimmering energy and changed again.
The light from Rose was slightly less uncanny, but it shone all the brighter. Rose burned with the fire of a sun. A passionate tangle of wordless emotions flared against his mental shields. She singed his skin and mind, but the Doctor held fast and burned with her.
At last Rose exhaled a final flame of power. The remaining glow settled into her skin and vanished. The TARDIS console closed. Rose’s eyes sparkled only with the liveliness of human intelligence (and perhaps a faint dusting of gold in their depths, but it was not too much more than the gold he’d pretended not to see there since the Game Station.) Her body and mind were just as they should be, not bound to a terrible immortality. The Bad Wolf slept.
Rose Tyler was alive, awake, and smiling at him. It was just too much for even a phenomenally advanced brain like his to fully process, so he acted on instinct and kissed her again. This was just a kiss, not a spark of vortex to be seen. However, it was just a kiss in the same way that the Doctor was just another traveler; it was extraordinary. Overwhelming. Fantastic. Rose pressed her wonderfully alive body against him and kissed him until the Doctor was no longer sure where he ended and she began. At last, worried about Rose’s lack of respiratory bypass system, the Doctor drew back far enough to look at her properly.
Since she was first lost the Doctor had thought of a thousand things to say if he ever saw her again: words to make her laugh, words to tell her how he had missed her, wise words, powerful words. All those words rose up in his throat and got stuck there. His jaw worked up and down, but no sound emerged.
“Hello, Doctor. As ways to wake up go, that just may have beaten breakfast in bed,” Rose declared, saving him from speechlessness.
“What if I made you some breakfast too? Anything you like.” He suddenly grinned wildly. “Even ice cream. Ice cream for breakfast, how about that?”
“Ice cream later today, maybe, but right now I want waffles.” Rose said, looking bemused.
“Waffles! Brilliant choice. Waffles it is, then. Waffles, syrup, a good hot cup of tea, some orange juice, and I love you,” the Doctor blurted out.
“Pardon?” Rose clearly thought her ears were misleading her. The Doctor could have backpedaled, but once his throat became unstuck the words were not about to stop.
“I was never able to say it before, though I must have tried hundreds of times. It just kept coming out as ‘fantastic’ or ‘run’ or ‘pass the salt.’ I kept telling myself that saying it wasn’t important, because you knew, but words matter. Words tell stories, and stories make the world. So listen now to the truest story I’ll ever tell: Rose Marion Tyler, I love you.” A second of silence hung between them as an invisible weight seemed to lift from the entire world.
“I like that story. You can tell it again any time you like,” Rose said, her tender expression giving depth to her joking words. She swung her legs over the edge of the edge of the trolley and tried to stand, but immediately wobbled. Her leg muscles, never before used, balked at supporting her weight. The Doctor steadied her before she could fall. He made a mental note to make sure Rose got some exercise to strengthen those new legs, preferably before they visited anywhere dangerous.
“You couldn’t stop me if you tried, my dear, sweet, fantastic, splendiferous, beloved Rose. Now, since you don’t seem ready for any running for your life just yet, may I carry you to breakfast?” He bent and swept her into his arms, giddy with her presence and the freedom of finally saying what he’d held in for so long.
Rose laughed, and the Doctor couldn’t recall any more glorious sound in all of time and space.
“As you wish,” she proclaimed.
* * *
Onwards to Chapter 7
Author:
tardis_stowaway Characters/Pairings: Chiefly Ten/Rose, but there's also a bit of Nine/Rose (I couldn't resist), and some Ten/Rose/Jack (Jack couldn't resist).
Rating: mild PG-13 for a bit of discussion about sex and one or two instances of salty language.
Spoilers: through season 3, spoiler-free AU after that!
Betas: the amazing
dark_aegis and wendymr Disclaimer: Doctor Who is not mine. I just take it out for play dates with my strange imagination.
Author's Note: Back from Dragoncon, I can finally get time to post this.
Summary: Once upon a time, she had abided in the world where lives did not begin with ‘once upon a time.’ No more. Rose walks through the woods. Meanwhile, the Doctor deals with an abundance of Bad Wolf references.
You can find previous chapters on Teaspoon or go back to Chapter 5 on LJ
Chapter 6: Awakening
Getting Rose back is not as simple as defeating a dragon, if it's possible at all.
* * *
Sometimes people leave you
Halfway through the wood.
Do not let it grieve you,
No one leaves for good.
You are not alone.
No one is alone.
- Finale, Into the Woods
That day, she was amazed to discover that when he was saying "As you wish," what he meant was, "I love you."
-The Princess Bride
* * *
It was not as straightforward as defeating a dragon–depending, of course, on the dragon. On the planet Elallio, the epic of the fabled Prince Quen tells how he defeated a dragon by challenging it to a contest of exceedingly complex calculus problems. Most scholars hold that this is a metaphor written to illustrate the Elallions’ high esteem for logic and critical thinking over emotions or brute strength. The Doctor disagreed with the scholars. After all, he had been referee for the famed contest and knew (a) it really happened and (b) the dragon let Prince Quen win because he was tired of the captive princess’s whining. The point is this: the Doctor’s quest for Rose did not involve dragons.
You could say that the Doctor used sympathetic magic to conjure the whole based on a part. You could say he journeyed into dark caves to find the amulets needed for his spell. You could say that he built himself a maiden like a fairy changeling from inanimate materials.
You could say that the Doctor used a sample of Rose’s blood, stored in the depths of the TARDIS medical freezer after some long-ago medical checkup, to extract her DNA. You could say that he visited shady planets with extremely lax bioethics laws to procure the equipment needed to grow a clone to full adult size in a mere forty days. (He knew ways to grow a human body almost instantaneously, but they all either required full transmat biodata or, designed for manufacturing expendable soldiers, created a body with substantially shortened potential lifespan.)
The second narrative is the way the Doctor would have explained his actions; it is not necessarily truer.
The stories converge on this: one body of Rose Tyler in a sleep hardly distinguishable from death. Computers taught its brain to make the body breathe, keep the heart beating, maintain its temperature (significantly below that of a conscious human), and process the nutrients that came in through tubes. Those computers also kept its brain too deeply asleep to develop further on its own. The body looked just like Rose down to the last detail (the Doctor had even dressed it in Rose’s pajamas and clumsily bleached its hair in case it proved important for the body to match Rose’s self-image), but it was not her. It was a Rose-shaped garment, entirely unworn.
Growing the clone had taken considerable technical expertise, but it was not an endpoint. The breathing meat with Rose’s face pained the Doctor far more than her complete absence. The body did not smile or shout or wander off. He could use the machines from the planets that grew clones as pleasure-slaves to program a personality into the body, but it would not be Rose. He could even awake it and raise it like a baby, allowing it to develop its own selfhood. It would have Rose’s genes, and thus would be beautiful and clever and good-natured, and he would probably like the resulting person, but it would not be his Rose.
A Rose is a Rose by any name, but not without Jackie Tyler’s upbringing, the longing for the father she never really knew, the scars left by Jimmy Stone, the camaraderie with Mickey, the gritty vibrancy of London, and the moment a man in a leather jacket grabbed her hand and said “Run!” His Rose had died ending the Time War in the Big Bang, but the Doctor still had hope of retrieving her.
Death had not obliterated Rose. Hers was not an ordinary death where the consciousness vanishes or passes into some undiscovered country or whatever it is that happens to most people who die. Dying at the beginning of all things, the atoms of Rose’s body were part of the matter of the new universe, and her–her what? dare he call it her soul?–was similarly spread through the universe like salt in the waters of the ocean. Strengthened by the remnants of the Bad Wolf that he hadn’t fully purged, Rose retained just enough selfhood to pass him messages. Now he merely had to disentangle her from everything else in existence without destroying either the universe or Rose. If he could manage that extraction, his real, original Rose, all memories and personality intact, could take up residence in the new body. It was as simple as a miracle.
The heart of the TARDIS was the key. The time vortex was like a spider’s web anchored to everything in spacetime or the ocean in which all things floated. That infinite connectivity was what allowed the TARDIS to travel anywhere. Rose once looked into the heart of the TARDIS and said it looked back. The TARDIS remembered what she saw. His marvelous ship could reach all through the linkages of the vortex and, he hoped, recognize and reassemble the scattered shards of Rose, even changed as she was from the nineteen year-old who first became the Bad Wolf. If there was any way to distill a purely human Rose from the rest of the universe, it was through the TARDIS.
The Doctor gently brushed the body’s eyes open. The basic brain programming he installed in the body would make them blink often enough to prevent damage, but aside from that they would not close until he closed them himself–or Rose did. He ran one final check on the TARDIS systems to make sure everything would open and, just as importantly, shut again. He lifted the body’s torso into a sitting position on the trolley and turned its head to face the console. Finally, he tied a strip of black silk across his own eyes. Rose needed to see into the Vortex, but he dared not risk the temptation of that power. Preparations complete, he pointed the sonic screwdriver at the console and pressed a button.
The TARDIS opened; he heard her song. Wind rushed through the closed room. The air fizzed with power.
In his arms, Rose’s body remained still.
Throwing caution to the winds, the Doctor took one arm away from Rose’s body to tear his blindfold off, keeping his back to the console and its bewitching light. He needed to see so he could try additional measures. The Doctor tilted the body’s head this way and that. He brought it close enough to the console to touch. He closed the body’s eyes and opened them again. The body breathed shallowly and infrequently; its skin was colder than his own. The TARDIS was alive and well, but Rose remained stubbornly inanimate.
So. Rose was lost to him except, perhaps, for cryptic messages scattered across the universe like shapes in tea leaves. It was an impossible plan from the start. He should have never got his hopes up.
The Doctor knew he needed to close the TARDIS and clean up after this mistake. He had an uninhabited body that needed disposal (or more likely storage–the thought of destroying this object that looked so like Rose turned his stomach even when he knew it was just so much meat). Instead he just stood beside the trolley, backlit by the shimmering beauty of the heart of the TARDIS that he must not look at directly, embracing Rose’s unresponsive form and rocking slowly back and forth.
Something poked into his chest. The Doctor winced and slid a hand up to check his pocket. The dimensional transcendence of the pockets of this damn blue suit had never worked properly. Things kept slipping out. In this case, a large sewing needle was sticking out of the top and stabbing him.
Needles. Symbols of domesticity, binding, pain, women, healing, sharpness, narrow passages…and of sex. “Will you take the path of needles or the path of pins?” the werewolf asked the girl. Of course the Doctor knew the story. (“Elle avoit vû le loup.” She’d seen the wolf–antiquated French slang for loss of virginity.)
Humans are quick to see innuendoes everywhere. It annoyed the Doctor sometimes. Not every story is about sex or romance. But some are.
The princess Briar Rose pricked her finger (not on a needle but on a spindle, another woman’s tool for working with thread) and slept for a century. It was not enough for the prince to win his way into her chamber and draw open the curtains. A kiss might do the trick here too, though not a kiss alone.
The vortex, he realized, would not reach outward to animate Rose by itself any more than it would animate the couch or the sonic screwdriver. Though the TARDIS was sentient and independent, she would not use her might for something so different from the normal mission of a time machine except in symbiosis with another mind. The Doctor had to look into the heart of the TARDIS, take up the power, guide it to draw forth Rose’s consciousness and place that consciousness within the waiting body, and release the power afterwards.
It would be possible to do so much more with that power: help others, kill the monsters, and keep safe the ones he loved. That is how it would begin. The immensity of the power could all too easily undermine all his best intentions. Appearing too precious to let go, it could turn him into a tyrant, an avenging angel. He might lose his selfhood or destroy the universe. The possibility of such temptation made him tremble with fear. Rassilon, he’d prefer Daleks over this danger to his soul.
It was for Rose. He’d done it before. (But that was only receiving power still bound by Rose’s innocence and releasing it immediately. This task would require using the power. Would it still be possible to resist? he asked himself. Right or wrong, he shushed the doubts.) He would not trade the universe for Rose, but he believed that for Rose’s sake he could keep the universe safe from himself. It might cost him a regeneration, but that was hardly worth noticing beside the other concerns.
The Doctor turned and gazed into the light at the heart of the TARDIS. The vortex rushed into him, filling him as if he opened his mouth underwater and found the liquid a richer breath than oxygen. It was intoxicating. He could see everything. He could do anything. Anything at all, but all he did was to call Rose’s name across the cosmos. The only thing he didn’t know was whether she answered. (Orpheus and Eurydice: you can’t tell for sure if she follows, and if you try too hard you shall surely lose her.)
Radiant with power, the Doctor kissed Rose’s cool lips. He kissed her gently, as if she might break. She was so still. Distantly, he realized that if this didn’t work then he would have a difficult task relinquishing the vortex without ripping the universe apart in frustration. Oh, Rose .
He thought of their first journey together. Rose had seen her planet burn, nearly died, and learned that he was the last of his kind. It should have sent her running, but all she wanted was to eat chips and hold his hand even tighter than before. He thought of his terrified marvel when he realized that she had rejected his attempt to keep her safe and instead swallowed the time vortex to keep him safe. Earthy and legendary, that was his Rose.
Almost imperceptibly, the lips under his grew warmer. The senses activated by the vortex gave him the sensation of something gathering towards him, into him, and straight through. The power of the vortex began to pour out of him and into her. For one moment more he was pressing his lips against a comatose mouth, then all of a sudden everything changed. Rose began to kiss him back. By all the stars in the heavens, Rose was kissing him back. Her kiss was needy, as if he were water and she dying of thirst. Her tongue slipped into his mouth, fever-hot and fierce. He responded in kind, kissing her as if she were rope and he dangling over a precipice.
The Doctor could see all of time and space, all that might be, and it was beautiful. He saw straight back to the beginning of the universe when his world had ended. He was kissing Rose there too, just as he was kissing her on the Game Station where she had stopped the Dalek invasion, and he was aware of it all.
The TARDIS seemed to resound with howls, horns, strings, and drums: a song of triumph, a song of creation. The vortex power crackled through Rose and the Doctor, tangling around them as their hands tangled in each others’ hair.
The singing tide of power within the Doctor surged, crested, and fell. The Doctor felt his senses narrow as the vortex passed out of him and into Rose. Terrified that the vortex would destroy her instants after it brought her back, he fought to draw some of that power out of her again. Rose clung to every tendril of power and snatched her lips away.
The Doctor opened his physical eyes. He looked at Rose’s face and saw not his precious girl but the Bad Wolf, primeval power incarnate. She fought savagely against her confinement in the Doctor’s arms and her puny mortal body, twisting and scratching. When he clung to her still, she gave voice to an eerie howl that beckoned him toward the boundless freedom of wilderness and the exhilaration of unrestrained strength. He ignored the call, whispering lullabies as he hugged her closer. Then Rose exhaled, expelling a mist of power back to the TARDIS. She changed.
In Rose’s eyes, the Doctor saw the hungry, dizzying infinity of Time itself. Phosphorescence like a will-o-the-wisp shimmered around her skin, bewitching, heartless, and deadly. His every instinct said to flee as he’d fled from the vortex when he’d looked into it as a child, but instead he embraced her, though she froze him like the cold after the last star sputtered out. At last she sighed out shimmering energy and changed again.
The light from Rose was slightly less uncanny, but it shone all the brighter. Rose burned with the fire of a sun. A passionate tangle of wordless emotions flared against his mental shields. She singed his skin and mind, but the Doctor held fast and burned with her.
At last Rose exhaled a final flame of power. The remaining glow settled into her skin and vanished. The TARDIS console closed. Rose’s eyes sparkled only with the liveliness of human intelligence (and perhaps a faint dusting of gold in their depths, but it was not too much more than the gold he’d pretended not to see there since the Game Station.) Her body and mind were just as they should be, not bound to a terrible immortality. The Bad Wolf slept.
Rose Tyler was alive, awake, and smiling at him. It was just too much for even a phenomenally advanced brain like his to fully process, so he acted on instinct and kissed her again. This was just a kiss, not a spark of vortex to be seen. However, it was just a kiss in the same way that the Doctor was just another traveler; it was extraordinary. Overwhelming. Fantastic. Rose pressed her wonderfully alive body against him and kissed him until the Doctor was no longer sure where he ended and she began. At last, worried about Rose’s lack of respiratory bypass system, the Doctor drew back far enough to look at her properly.
Since she was first lost the Doctor had thought of a thousand things to say if he ever saw her again: words to make her laugh, words to tell her how he had missed her, wise words, powerful words. All those words rose up in his throat and got stuck there. His jaw worked up and down, but no sound emerged.
“Hello, Doctor. As ways to wake up go, that just may have beaten breakfast in bed,” Rose declared, saving him from speechlessness.
“What if I made you some breakfast too? Anything you like.” He suddenly grinned wildly. “Even ice cream. Ice cream for breakfast, how about that?”
“Ice cream later today, maybe, but right now I want waffles.” Rose said, looking bemused.
“Waffles! Brilliant choice. Waffles it is, then. Waffles, syrup, a good hot cup of tea, some orange juice, and I love you,” the Doctor blurted out.
“Pardon?” Rose clearly thought her ears were misleading her. The Doctor could have backpedaled, but once his throat became unstuck the words were not about to stop.
“I was never able to say it before, though I must have tried hundreds of times. It just kept coming out as ‘fantastic’ or ‘run’ or ‘pass the salt.’ I kept telling myself that saying it wasn’t important, because you knew, but words matter. Words tell stories, and stories make the world. So listen now to the truest story I’ll ever tell: Rose Marion Tyler, I love you.” A second of silence hung between them as an invisible weight seemed to lift from the entire world.
“I like that story. You can tell it again any time you like,” Rose said, her tender expression giving depth to her joking words. She swung her legs over the edge of the edge of the trolley and tried to stand, but immediately wobbled. Her leg muscles, never before used, balked at supporting her weight. The Doctor steadied her before she could fall. He made a mental note to make sure Rose got some exercise to strengthen those new legs, preferably before they visited anywhere dangerous.
“You couldn’t stop me if you tried, my dear, sweet, fantastic, splendiferous, beloved Rose. Now, since you don’t seem ready for any running for your life just yet, may I carry you to breakfast?” He bent and swept her into his arms, giddy with her presence and the freedom of finally saying what he’d held in for so long.
Rose laughed, and the Doctor couldn’t recall any more glorious sound in all of time and space.
“As you wish,” she proclaimed.
* * *
Onwards to Chapter 7
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-03 11:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-03 09:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-03 12:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-03 09:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-03 02:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-03 09:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-03 02:29 pm (UTC)The whole ending is wonderful, but these lines:
“I was never able to say it before, though I must have tried hundreds of times. It just kept coming out as ‘fantastic’ or ‘run’ or ‘pass the salt.’ I kept telling myself that saying it wasn’t important, because you knew, but words matter.
are absolutely perfect.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-03 09:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-03 02:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-03 09:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-03 11:48 pm (UTC)The way you turn a phrase is just wonderful. This paragraph is one I'm completely enamored of.
You could say that the Doctor used sympathetic magic to conjure the whole based on a part. You could say he journeyed into dark caves to find the amulets needed for his spell. You could say that he built himself a maiden like a fairy changeling from inanimate materials.
It's almost as brilliant as the dialogue towards the end, when the Doctor confesses his love for Rose.
“Waffles! Brilliant choice. Waffles it is, then. Waffles, syrup, a good hot cup of tea, some orange juice, and I love you,” the Doctor blurted out.
I was squeeing at the same time that my heart was twinging.
Wonderful job! I can't wait to reread the whole thing when you're finished.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-04 01:37 am (UTC)I liked the idea of the Doctor's first confession of love for Rose being somewhat accidental. Saying the words under direct pressure would still have been hard, but the tendency for his feelings to just pop out that makes him rude can sometimes be a good thing.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-04 07:35 am (UTC)