teleidoplex (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
teleidoplex) wrote2006-12-12 06:32 pm
teleidoplex) wrote2006-12-12 06:32 pm
Entry tags:
Chapter 9 -- Tea and Some Kind of -Pathy
Title: The Possibility of Ways
Rating: NC17 (eventually)
Media: Doctor Who (Season 2 AU)
Characters: Nine/Rose
Summary: In an infinite Universe nothing is set and everything is possible, but in choosing an alternate route there are always repercussions.
Spoilers: Doctor Who, New Seasons 1 & 2, Old Season 16
Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, but I wouldn't mind ten minutes alone in the TARDIS
Archive: At A Teaspoon and an Open Mind. If you want it, check with me first.
Finished: Not by a long shot
I don't know why, but I had a hard time writing the next two chapters. I hope they work. Suggestions for improvement will be very appreciated. Grar.
Dedicated to sap1066 and ms sardonicus, who inspire me to slog through the rough parts.
I don't own anything except some TARDIS icons and a really cute cat named Miranda who likes to walk on my keyboard while I write my disclaimer.
Chapter 9 – Tea and Some Kind of -Pathy
wither and die
Rose was in the TARDIS’ food preparation area, cradling a mug of tea and trying to escape her thoughts. She couldn’t quite bring herself to call it a kitchen; it didn’t have the homey, warm domesticity of her mum’s kitchen. She rather doubted that cookies had ever been baked here, or boyfriends cried over, or neighbors gossiped about. There weren’t any pithy icebox magnets on the subject of dieting or dinner reservations, no cupboards filled with obscure spices used once and never again. The Doctor didn’t do domestic, and this place was proof. It was all sleek counters and streamlined dispensers. It was a food preparation area. She closed her eyes, gripped her tea, and tried to pretend it was a kitchen.
humans decay. you wither and you die
It was late, at least by the relative standards she tried to keep on the TARDIS so that she wouldn’t suffer from sleep disruption. The Doctor had disappeared into the depths of the ship shortly after taking them into the Vortex, leaving her to show Mickey to a room and get him settled. Mickey had needed a lot of settling. It had taken almost two hours for her to extract herself with increasingly large staged yawns. When she’d finally escaped to her own room and bedded down, it was to spend hours restlessly tossing and turning. Her mind had replayed the Doctor’s words from the previous evening over and over. She relived meeting Sarah Jane. She dissected every exchange of word or glance between herself and the Doctor since Zanak, and she’d come to some rather startling conclusions in her sleepless bed.
He wanted her.
He wanted her, and he would never do anything about it. He wanted her, but he was terrified of losing her. He wanted her, but he was uncomfortable with the threat of domestication she implied. He wanted her, but he didn’t know how to handle her wanting him, as he hadn’t known how to handle Sarah Jane’s wanting. And probably a long line of others, Rose thought with a grimace as she sipped her tea. He’d avoided answering that particular question, but she knew in her gut it was true.
When he’d invited Mickey to travel with them (or rather, stood by and said little while Mickey and Sarah Jane arranged it), Rose realized that having multiple traveling companions wasn’t a diversion for the Doctor, it served as a distraction from the Doctor. The Doctor could nudge the interactions of the people around him to ensure a certain distance from himself. She recalled how things had been with Jack. Easygoing, fun, less intense, less intimate. She now suspected it had been a deliberate dodge on the Doctor’s part. She also understood better why he’d let Adam come along. Given her new insight, she was rather surprised he’d been against Mickey joining them after the first Slitheen attack.
“Right,” she snorted softly into the silence of the not-kitchen, “900-year-old alien Time Lord, and I reduce his psychology to a bunch of intimacy issues. Bet there’s a quiz in Cosmo. Brilliant deduction, Rose, you git.” She took a gulp of tea, which was fast becoming lukewarm, shaking her head over the absurdity.
And yet…
You can spend the rest of your life with me, but I can’t spend the rest of my life with you.
It wasn’t such a ridiculous leap, was it?
She’d eventually drifted off into a fitful doze, but sleep wasn’t any safer a refuge for her mind. She’d dreamed. She’d dreamed of the black abyss she’d seen in the Hollow. It had been a horrible emptiness, like a void in her head devouring the universe around it. She’d dreamed of it filling with golden light that expanded like a thousand suns. She’d dreamed of all reality dissolved into motes dancing in the light of those suns, like the dust she’d brushed from the Doctor’s jacket and hair. In her dream, the superphone didn’t ring. He kissed her and the world was flooded with light. She heard him say you wither and you die, and she felt it happening. She saw the water-snake balanced gently in her hand and heard a voice, her own yet not, respond everything dies. She saw legions of Daleks flooding the world, she heard their rallying cry Exterminate, and then, strangely, a reply in an echo of electronic voices– Jack’s, the Doctor’s, her own – Delete.
She’d woken in a cold sweat, gulping down terror.
So now she was seated in the not-kitchen, drinking lukewarm tea, failing in her attempts to avoid both waking and sleeping thoughts, and wondering how big a wobbly the Doctor would throw if she brought in one of Great Aunt Marion’s hand-knitted tea cozies.
***********************
wither and die
The Doctor stretched out beneath the secondary console of the TARDIS, long face illuminated by the dim service lights and the blue glow of his sonic screwdriver. There were always repairs to make; a classic like the Type 40 needed regular attention to keep her in prime condition. It was a good thing given his love for puttering. He sometimes fancied that she fried her connections or misrouted the odd circuit just to give him something to do – like a lady dropping a handkerchief. It was a comfortable old game of flirtation that they played. But tonight he’d run a full diagnostic and found nothing wrong. Carefully closing the casing for the secondary console power dampeners, he finally conceded that his TARDIS was miffed with him. He clicked the sonic screwdriver off with a sigh as the memory of the words he’d spoken to Rose the previous evening intruded…again.
humans decay. you wither and you die
It was late. He’d escaped from the company of the two humans hours before, on the pretext of having to make repairs. Rose had rolled her eyes in disbelief at the excuse as he’d exited, but he tamped down on any guilt he might have felt abandoning her with Mickey. She was the one who insisted on stringing her pseudo-ex-boyfriend along, and he’d only agreed to let Mickey come because of that; let her deal with getting him settled.
Obviously, she had gotten him settled. The TARDIS was quiet. The Doctor wondered if…but he knew it wasn’t really his business to wonder any such if.
It could have been. He’d been so relieved to see her safe after the disaster in the Hollow of Zanak that he’d almost closed the distance he maintained between them. He had been so shaken by seeing Sarah Jane again and learning how disgruntled she felt that he’d nearly revealed the depths of his feelings to Rose. But he’d held back, withdrawn on both occasions, because he already knew she wouldn’t understand. She would want promises that he could never make, loyalty that he could never offer. He could never plight her his troth; he had long ago given himself to the universe. Just the Doctor, and his TARDIS, and whoever happened to join him, for as long as they would stay.
He sat up, closing his eyes and dropping his head to his knees at that thought. However long she would stay, it wouldn’t be long enough. He had suffered so many losses, so many friends gone, and now he was confronted with all the things that threatened to tear them apart. It was more than just the everyday danger they faced. It was Mickey and Jackie; it was Rose’s insistence on keeping one foot firmly planted at home even as she traveled with him. It was the threat of the ripples, and of Time snapping back in such a way that they would be permanently separated, as they had been when he was on the Game Station and she was back home. And it was the inevitable organic clock of her body, counting down to doomsday.
I have to live on. Alone. That’s the curse of the Time Lords.
He needed to stop, set boundaries, move them back to the footing they’d enjoyed before. In the morning – or, rather, the time he’d scheduled as morning so that Rose could follow a healthy sleep cycle – he’d set the coordinates for Cornwall and the third piece of the Key to Time. Now that he knew what the Key was he could slip into Vivian Fey’s cottage and get the readings on the seal before she ever encountered his previous regeneration. In the meantime, he would set aside brooding and concentrate on acting normally around Rose.
Feeling his dour mood lift slightly in the face of a plan, the Doctor left the secondary console room in search of tea.
****************************
Rose heard a scuffling at the doorway and looked up to see the Doctor leaning against the frame. His posture was casual, but she could see a tension about his shoulders, eyes and mouth. He was in his usual jacket and jumper. She tugged at her rumpled sleeping attire – t-shirt and drawstring cotton trousers – feeling suddenly self-conscious.
“Hello,” he offered.
“Hello,” she smiled slightly. Intimacy issues. Right. “Would you like a cuppa?” she asked, rising to put on the kettle as if he’d already agreed.
He hesitated a moment, then moved into the room, sitting next to the chair she’d just vacated, “well, if you’re making. Four minutes, milk, two su—”
“I know,” she puttered until the water heated, then fixed their teas to order and placed his mug before him. Settling in her seat, she cradled her own mug before her like a shield. He had watched her silently through the whole process.
“You’re up late,” he ventured, which caused her to smile again slightly. As safe introductory statements went, it was up there with “Nice night for it” and “Cold, innit?”.
She cocked her head, considering him. It was little moments like these that she held back, shied away, second-guessed herself, kept things light and non-intrusive. And he let her. Back before London, the 1940’s London, she’d been oblivious to it, blundering through the barriers he tried to erect. He’d become more subtle and she’d become more tentative. Well, not any more.
“Bad dream. After I showed Mickey to a room,” she shot him a significant glance, letting him know in no uncertain terms that the room was not hers, “I couldn’t sleep. And then when I did, I had this dream. Nightmare, really.”
A look, part concern and part interested curiosity, flitted across his features, “Had any other nightmares recently?”
“Naw. I don’t get nightmares, not since I was a kid. I thought I would, especially after…well, what happened with my dad. But this one, I think it was cause of something that happened on Zanak, when I was down in the mines. I think I remembered something – something about Satellite Five. There was this moment when I was in the Hollow and everything was just dark and I felt, I dunno, like something horrible was out there. But then I remembered seeing this golden light and I didn’t feel so…empty and alone anymore. Is that weird?”
Now he definitely looked interested, “No, it’s not. You heard the guards talking about the Mentiads?” At her nod, he continued, “they’re telepaths. Their psychic abilities were catalyzed by the deaths of all those planets, all those people. They were literally bombarded with the dying life-forces of billions of people over generations, and it awakened their latent telepathic abilities.”
“Life forces?” Rose raised one skeptical eyebrow, “sounds a bit odd.” The Doctor raised his brow even further.
“Oh, is it so hard to believe? You lot think your science can explain anything, but you’ve only just begun to scratch the surface. Haven’t even begun to connect the dots. What’s life except a bunch of bioelectrical impulses animating an organic matrix? Your sense organs take in data, your brain processes it, and then sends signals to your muscles to do something about it. Get enough of that bioelectric energy released in one place…well, it’s bound to build up a charge.
“So, what?” her brow furrowed, “you’re saying I’m a telepath now?”
His hand lifted towards her face, almost as if by reflex, but he quickly pulled it back, “No, I wouldn’t think so. But maybe you picked up a little on the residual bioelectricity. You felt the aftermath of all those people dying. You said you dreamed about it?”
“Yeah. It’s silly, actually. I just…dreamed about this golden light, and all these…particles I guess, drifting on it. I dreamed that we were on Satellite Five and you,” she paused, decided she wasn’t that daring, and glossed over the dream-kiss, “you said ‘you wither and you die’, and I said ‘everything dies’, and then there were Daleks everywhere and they said…well, you know. And then I heard these other voices, like yours and mine but more…electronic, right? And they all said ‘delete’. And I woke up.” Repeating the dream made her feel even more foolish. There was nothing in it that should have been so upsetting. Even so, the Doctor looked suddenly arrested. And worried.
“What is it, Doctor?”
He shook his head as if to dispel her concerned tone, but the look didn’t leave his face, “It’s nothing. It’s nothing,” at her arched brow, he amended, “alright, probably nothing. You’re right, it sounds like you’re remembering a bit, maybe something got shaken loose by your being around all that residual energy. It all sounds familiar, except that last part. I just wonder…” He trailed off, his eyes unfocused. She waited, but he didn’t continue.
“Wonder what, Doctor?” she goaded.
“I wonder if you might be remembering the future.”
“That’s bad, is it?”
She saw in his eyes he was about to comfort her with a blanket denial, saw the moment he changed his mind and decided to tell her the truth, “Could be. Depends on what’s causing it. If it’s linked to your time as Bad Wolf, then yeah, it’s bad. It’ll mean that the ripple energy is getting worse and that you’re a central focus for—”
“Is there any way to find out what’s causing it? See if it’s Bad Wolf or something else?” she interrupted before he could get into another explanation she’d only sort of understand.
He looked down at his hands, silently contemplating them for several heartbeats. He took a deep breath, as if steeling himself for something unpleasant, “there is a way. But I’d have to…that is, you’d be—”
“Do it.”
“You don’t even know what it is.”
“I trust you,” she said simply. He searched her eyes, and she met his gaze steadily.
“Alright,” he said, lifting his hand to the side of her face, “close your eyes.”
Her lids lowered and for a moment the vista behind them was a pale emptiness, lightened by the illumination of the not-kitchen. Then she felt something, like a wind through her mind, and everything was plunged into a velvet darkness.
She sensed the Doctor, standing in the darkness with her. He took her hand in his.
I’m here. I’m just going to look at the dream, and then I’ll leave.
He moved away through the darkness, and she could feel him rifling through her dream. She felt him pause briefly as he came to their kiss, and for a moment the darkness grew warm and red, and there was a rushing sound like water or blood. She felt him calm and cool around her, It’s alright, Rose. Just a moment longer. Even so, she pulled away from him a little. She was too exposed in this place.
She looked around, hoping to find something to focus on that wasn’t herself, so that she wouldn’t become any more exposed. She spied a glimmer in her mind’s eye and cautiously approached it. It resolved into a door, limned in golden light, just a little ajar. Somehow she knew it was the entry into him. She started forward eagerly, but then hesitated. There was overcoming intimacy issues, and then there was stomping all over where you weren’t invited. Intrusion. Invasion. She had let him in, but he hadn’t reciprocated. Resolutely, she turned away from the door. Someday. Someday he’d invite her through. She could wait.
As she turned away, she realized the door was already closing, the darkness lessening. She was seated at the table again, her knees bumping the Doctors as he leaned close to her. He slipped his hand from her face as the briefest wisp of apology brushed her mind. She opened her eyes. A gaggle of comments intended to defuse the awkwardness of the situation jockeyed for her attention, but in the end she just leaned into him. His arms folded around her in a tight embrace.
“Is it bad?” she whispered into the warmth of his jumper.
“Yeah,” he sighed over her head, “it’s bad.”
Notes: A few snippets of dialogue from School Reunion and The Parting of Ways. Cause I'm a citation-psycho.
Rating: NC17 (eventually)
Media: Doctor Who (Season 2 AU)
Characters: Nine/Rose
Summary: In an infinite Universe nothing is set and everything is possible, but in choosing an alternate route there are always repercussions.
Spoilers: Doctor Who, New Seasons 1 & 2, Old Season 16
Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, but I wouldn't mind ten minutes alone in the TARDIS
Archive: At A Teaspoon and an Open Mind. If you want it, check with me first.
Finished: Not by a long shot
I don't know why, but I had a hard time writing the next two chapters. I hope they work. Suggestions for improvement will be very appreciated. Grar.
Dedicated to sap1066 and ms sardonicus, who inspire me to slog through the rough parts.
I don't own anything except some TARDIS icons and a really cute cat named Miranda who likes to walk on my keyboard while I write my disclaimer.
Chapter 9 – Tea and Some Kind of -Pathy
wither and die
Rose was in the TARDIS’ food preparation area, cradling a mug of tea and trying to escape her thoughts. She couldn’t quite bring herself to call it a kitchen; it didn’t have the homey, warm domesticity of her mum’s kitchen. She rather doubted that cookies had ever been baked here, or boyfriends cried over, or neighbors gossiped about. There weren’t any pithy icebox magnets on the subject of dieting or dinner reservations, no cupboards filled with obscure spices used once and never again. The Doctor didn’t do domestic, and this place was proof. It was all sleek counters and streamlined dispensers. It was a food preparation area. She closed her eyes, gripped her tea, and tried to pretend it was a kitchen.
humans decay. you wither and you die
It was late, at least by the relative standards she tried to keep on the TARDIS so that she wouldn’t suffer from sleep disruption. The Doctor had disappeared into the depths of the ship shortly after taking them into the Vortex, leaving her to show Mickey to a room and get him settled. Mickey had needed a lot of settling. It had taken almost two hours for her to extract herself with increasingly large staged yawns. When she’d finally escaped to her own room and bedded down, it was to spend hours restlessly tossing and turning. Her mind had replayed the Doctor’s words from the previous evening over and over. She relived meeting Sarah Jane. She dissected every exchange of word or glance between herself and the Doctor since Zanak, and she’d come to some rather startling conclusions in her sleepless bed.
He wanted her.
He wanted her, and he would never do anything about it. He wanted her, but he was terrified of losing her. He wanted her, but he was uncomfortable with the threat of domestication she implied. He wanted her, but he didn’t know how to handle her wanting him, as he hadn’t known how to handle Sarah Jane’s wanting. And probably a long line of others, Rose thought with a grimace as she sipped her tea. He’d avoided answering that particular question, but she knew in her gut it was true.
When he’d invited Mickey to travel with them (or rather, stood by and said little while Mickey and Sarah Jane arranged it), Rose realized that having multiple traveling companions wasn’t a diversion for the Doctor, it served as a distraction from the Doctor. The Doctor could nudge the interactions of the people around him to ensure a certain distance from himself. She recalled how things had been with Jack. Easygoing, fun, less intense, less intimate. She now suspected it had been a deliberate dodge on the Doctor’s part. She also understood better why he’d let Adam come along. Given her new insight, she was rather surprised he’d been against Mickey joining them after the first Slitheen attack.
“Right,” she snorted softly into the silence of the not-kitchen, “900-year-old alien Time Lord, and I reduce his psychology to a bunch of intimacy issues. Bet there’s a quiz in Cosmo. Brilliant deduction, Rose, you git.” She took a gulp of tea, which was fast becoming lukewarm, shaking her head over the absurdity.
And yet…
You can spend the rest of your life with me, but I can’t spend the rest of my life with you.
It wasn’t such a ridiculous leap, was it?
She’d eventually drifted off into a fitful doze, but sleep wasn’t any safer a refuge for her mind. She’d dreamed. She’d dreamed of the black abyss she’d seen in the Hollow. It had been a horrible emptiness, like a void in her head devouring the universe around it. She’d dreamed of it filling with golden light that expanded like a thousand suns. She’d dreamed of all reality dissolved into motes dancing in the light of those suns, like the dust she’d brushed from the Doctor’s jacket and hair. In her dream, the superphone didn’t ring. He kissed her and the world was flooded with light. She heard him say you wither and you die, and she felt it happening. She saw the water-snake balanced gently in her hand and heard a voice, her own yet not, respond everything dies. She saw legions of Daleks flooding the world, she heard their rallying cry Exterminate, and then, strangely, a reply in an echo of electronic voices– Jack’s, the Doctor’s, her own – Delete.
She’d woken in a cold sweat, gulping down terror.
So now she was seated in the not-kitchen, drinking lukewarm tea, failing in her attempts to avoid both waking and sleeping thoughts, and wondering how big a wobbly the Doctor would throw if she brought in one of Great Aunt Marion’s hand-knitted tea cozies.
***********************
wither and die
The Doctor stretched out beneath the secondary console of the TARDIS, long face illuminated by the dim service lights and the blue glow of his sonic screwdriver. There were always repairs to make; a classic like the Type 40 needed regular attention to keep her in prime condition. It was a good thing given his love for puttering. He sometimes fancied that she fried her connections or misrouted the odd circuit just to give him something to do – like a lady dropping a handkerchief. It was a comfortable old game of flirtation that they played. But tonight he’d run a full diagnostic and found nothing wrong. Carefully closing the casing for the secondary console power dampeners, he finally conceded that his TARDIS was miffed with him. He clicked the sonic screwdriver off with a sigh as the memory of the words he’d spoken to Rose the previous evening intruded…again.
humans decay. you wither and you die
It was late. He’d escaped from the company of the two humans hours before, on the pretext of having to make repairs. Rose had rolled her eyes in disbelief at the excuse as he’d exited, but he tamped down on any guilt he might have felt abandoning her with Mickey. She was the one who insisted on stringing her pseudo-ex-boyfriend along, and he’d only agreed to let Mickey come because of that; let her deal with getting him settled.
Obviously, she had gotten him settled. The TARDIS was quiet. The Doctor wondered if…but he knew it wasn’t really his business to wonder any such if.
It could have been. He’d been so relieved to see her safe after the disaster in the Hollow of Zanak that he’d almost closed the distance he maintained between them. He had been so shaken by seeing Sarah Jane again and learning how disgruntled she felt that he’d nearly revealed the depths of his feelings to Rose. But he’d held back, withdrawn on both occasions, because he already knew she wouldn’t understand. She would want promises that he could never make, loyalty that he could never offer. He could never plight her his troth; he had long ago given himself to the universe. Just the Doctor, and his TARDIS, and whoever happened to join him, for as long as they would stay.
He sat up, closing his eyes and dropping his head to his knees at that thought. However long she would stay, it wouldn’t be long enough. He had suffered so many losses, so many friends gone, and now he was confronted with all the things that threatened to tear them apart. It was more than just the everyday danger they faced. It was Mickey and Jackie; it was Rose’s insistence on keeping one foot firmly planted at home even as she traveled with him. It was the threat of the ripples, and of Time snapping back in such a way that they would be permanently separated, as they had been when he was on the Game Station and she was back home. And it was the inevitable organic clock of her body, counting down to doomsday.
I have to live on. Alone. That’s the curse of the Time Lords.
He needed to stop, set boundaries, move them back to the footing they’d enjoyed before. In the morning – or, rather, the time he’d scheduled as morning so that Rose could follow a healthy sleep cycle – he’d set the coordinates for Cornwall and the third piece of the Key to Time. Now that he knew what the Key was he could slip into Vivian Fey’s cottage and get the readings on the seal before she ever encountered his previous regeneration. In the meantime, he would set aside brooding and concentrate on acting normally around Rose.
Feeling his dour mood lift slightly in the face of a plan, the Doctor left the secondary console room in search of tea.
****************************
Rose heard a scuffling at the doorway and looked up to see the Doctor leaning against the frame. His posture was casual, but she could see a tension about his shoulders, eyes and mouth. He was in his usual jacket and jumper. She tugged at her rumpled sleeping attire – t-shirt and drawstring cotton trousers – feeling suddenly self-conscious.
“Hello,” he offered.
“Hello,” she smiled slightly. Intimacy issues. Right. “Would you like a cuppa?” she asked, rising to put on the kettle as if he’d already agreed.
He hesitated a moment, then moved into the room, sitting next to the chair she’d just vacated, “well, if you’re making. Four minutes, milk, two su—”
“I know,” she puttered until the water heated, then fixed their teas to order and placed his mug before him. Settling in her seat, she cradled her own mug before her like a shield. He had watched her silently through the whole process.
“You’re up late,” he ventured, which caused her to smile again slightly. As safe introductory statements went, it was up there with “Nice night for it” and “Cold, innit?”.
She cocked her head, considering him. It was little moments like these that she held back, shied away, second-guessed herself, kept things light and non-intrusive. And he let her. Back before London, the 1940’s London, she’d been oblivious to it, blundering through the barriers he tried to erect. He’d become more subtle and she’d become more tentative. Well, not any more.
“Bad dream. After I showed Mickey to a room,” she shot him a significant glance, letting him know in no uncertain terms that the room was not hers, “I couldn’t sleep. And then when I did, I had this dream. Nightmare, really.”
A look, part concern and part interested curiosity, flitted across his features, “Had any other nightmares recently?”
“Naw. I don’t get nightmares, not since I was a kid. I thought I would, especially after…well, what happened with my dad. But this one, I think it was cause of something that happened on Zanak, when I was down in the mines. I think I remembered something – something about Satellite Five. There was this moment when I was in the Hollow and everything was just dark and I felt, I dunno, like something horrible was out there. But then I remembered seeing this golden light and I didn’t feel so…empty and alone anymore. Is that weird?”
Now he definitely looked interested, “No, it’s not. You heard the guards talking about the Mentiads?” At her nod, he continued, “they’re telepaths. Their psychic abilities were catalyzed by the deaths of all those planets, all those people. They were literally bombarded with the dying life-forces of billions of people over generations, and it awakened their latent telepathic abilities.”
“Life forces?” Rose raised one skeptical eyebrow, “sounds a bit odd.” The Doctor raised his brow even further.
“Oh, is it so hard to believe? You lot think your science can explain anything, but you’ve only just begun to scratch the surface. Haven’t even begun to connect the dots. What’s life except a bunch of bioelectrical impulses animating an organic matrix? Your sense organs take in data, your brain processes it, and then sends signals to your muscles to do something about it. Get enough of that bioelectric energy released in one place…well, it’s bound to build up a charge.
“So, what?” her brow furrowed, “you’re saying I’m a telepath now?”
His hand lifted towards her face, almost as if by reflex, but he quickly pulled it back, “No, I wouldn’t think so. But maybe you picked up a little on the residual bioelectricity. You felt the aftermath of all those people dying. You said you dreamed about it?”
“Yeah. It’s silly, actually. I just…dreamed about this golden light, and all these…particles I guess, drifting on it. I dreamed that we were on Satellite Five and you,” she paused, decided she wasn’t that daring, and glossed over the dream-kiss, “you said ‘you wither and you die’, and I said ‘everything dies’, and then there were Daleks everywhere and they said…well, you know. And then I heard these other voices, like yours and mine but more…electronic, right? And they all said ‘delete’. And I woke up.” Repeating the dream made her feel even more foolish. There was nothing in it that should have been so upsetting. Even so, the Doctor looked suddenly arrested. And worried.
“What is it, Doctor?”
He shook his head as if to dispel her concerned tone, but the look didn’t leave his face, “It’s nothing. It’s nothing,” at her arched brow, he amended, “alright, probably nothing. You’re right, it sounds like you’re remembering a bit, maybe something got shaken loose by your being around all that residual energy. It all sounds familiar, except that last part. I just wonder…” He trailed off, his eyes unfocused. She waited, but he didn’t continue.
“Wonder what, Doctor?” she goaded.
“I wonder if you might be remembering the future.”
“That’s bad, is it?”
She saw in his eyes he was about to comfort her with a blanket denial, saw the moment he changed his mind and decided to tell her the truth, “Could be. Depends on what’s causing it. If it’s linked to your time as Bad Wolf, then yeah, it’s bad. It’ll mean that the ripple energy is getting worse and that you’re a central focus for—”
“Is there any way to find out what’s causing it? See if it’s Bad Wolf or something else?” she interrupted before he could get into another explanation she’d only sort of understand.
He looked down at his hands, silently contemplating them for several heartbeats. He took a deep breath, as if steeling himself for something unpleasant, “there is a way. But I’d have to…that is, you’d be—”
“Do it.”
“You don’t even know what it is.”
“I trust you,” she said simply. He searched her eyes, and she met his gaze steadily.
“Alright,” he said, lifting his hand to the side of her face, “close your eyes.”
Her lids lowered and for a moment the vista behind them was a pale emptiness, lightened by the illumination of the not-kitchen. Then she felt something, like a wind through her mind, and everything was plunged into a velvet darkness.
She sensed the Doctor, standing in the darkness with her. He took her hand in his.
I’m here. I’m just going to look at the dream, and then I’ll leave.
He moved away through the darkness, and she could feel him rifling through her dream. She felt him pause briefly as he came to their kiss, and for a moment the darkness grew warm and red, and there was a rushing sound like water or blood. She felt him calm and cool around her, It’s alright, Rose. Just a moment longer. Even so, she pulled away from him a little. She was too exposed in this place.
She looked around, hoping to find something to focus on that wasn’t herself, so that she wouldn’t become any more exposed. She spied a glimmer in her mind’s eye and cautiously approached it. It resolved into a door, limned in golden light, just a little ajar. Somehow she knew it was the entry into him. She started forward eagerly, but then hesitated. There was overcoming intimacy issues, and then there was stomping all over where you weren’t invited. Intrusion. Invasion. She had let him in, but he hadn’t reciprocated. Resolutely, she turned away from the door. Someday. Someday he’d invite her through. She could wait.
As she turned away, she realized the door was already closing, the darkness lessening. She was seated at the table again, her knees bumping the Doctors as he leaned close to her. He slipped his hand from her face as the briefest wisp of apology brushed her mind. She opened her eyes. A gaggle of comments intended to defuse the awkwardness of the situation jockeyed for her attention, but in the end she just leaned into him. His arms folded around her in a tight embrace.
“Is it bad?” she whispered into the warmth of his jumper.
“Yeah,” he sighed over her head, “it’s bad.”
Notes: A few snippets of dialogue from School Reunion and The Parting of Ways. Cause I'm a citation-psycho.