Archive of Our Own

“Bloody hell. I am a chav.”

Rose piles her damp hair on her head (going all crimpy with it yesterday–what was she thinking?) and lets it fall with a sad plop. Sighing, she adjusts the wide neck of her pale blue satin dressing gown, the one she borrowed from her mum after New Year’s because she thought it looked sexy but rather posh. Thought he would–

Once you’ve seen real satin, the old-fashioned kind, rich and shimmering and weighty enough to nearly stand on its own, you understand how poor and pitiful the modern stuff really is.

Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson. Rose looked it up in the TARDIS computer, made sure of the spelling and everything. Madame de Pompadour, known to those who loved her as Reinette, a proper nickname for the uncrowned Queen of France. Perfect blonde curls over perfect white skin, dressed up in satin and lace like a china doll. Diamonds sparkling at her swanlike neck while her rosebud lips turned down in a pout.

One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel!

She should have told Queenie that angels are easier to take when they only pop in once a decade.

She leans an elbow on her dressing table and props her head in her hand, giving her own face the once-over. Big eyes, big cheeks, big mouth–she stretches it in a snarl–scary big teeth. No mistaking Rose Tyler for an antique doll. Maybe one of those plastic Bratz things Shareen’s little girl is so wild about. Except Bratz dolls aren’t all pink and pruny, but an hour in the tub will do that.

Rose had always found a bath the perfect place to have a think. Especially the great oval one the TARDIS provides for her, huge copper taps gushing endless hot water, better than American plumbing. Not that Rose has ever been to America, unless you count miles below ground in 2012 Utah.

Floating like a crocodile, she tried to sort out the last twelve hours, let lavender-scented bubbles (another Jackie donation) wash away all the bad feelings. But it didn’t work. She stepped out of the tub more confused than when she stepped in. Coming out, she caught sight of herself in the mirror over the sink and couldn’t help remembering.

It’s like living inside a bouncy castle!

Squeezed down into a tiny corner of consciousness, numb with panic and suffocation, Rose still heard the words and was stung by them. But before today she’d never given them much thought, never taken them as anything but proof that no matter whose body she stole, Cassandra would always be ugly.

Chav. Chavtastic. Class to brass.

A bouncy castle: Cheap and tacky fun you forgot as soon as you had your fill of it.

Cassandra was a monster. But even monsters could be right.

A soft whoosh startles Rose from her maunderings in the mirror. But she doesn’t turn, used to the sound of the door. The new door, not the one to the corridor outside. The TARDIS does that, redecorating as the fancy takes it. When she first came here, Rose’s room was plain tan and brown, not the soft girly shades it is now, mauve shading to pink and purple. Her favorite color scheme, though she never said. Something else the TARDIS saw while it was in her head translating Slitheen and Sycorax and French.

The colors changed early on, before her first visit back home. This new door is very new. Appeared just after New Year’s. Just after–

“Did you miss me?”

Long, clever fingers on her neck, pushing the damp crimps away. Her room is big and comfy, but he is very quick. Took him scarcely a blink to get to her, once he came through the new door. The one that leads to his bedroom.

“Rose. Ramblin’ Rose. One perfect rose. Gather ye roses while ye may . . .”

He does that all the time now, sticking on a word like a knackered record. Sometimes it’s charming. Right now it is not.

“A rose by any other name would smell like–” an audible breath “lavender. And–” another “oranges. You and Mickey been in the marmalade again?”

He does that now, too. An hour in the bath but he could still smell breakfast. He can smell everything. It was her first clue how different this new Doctor really was, when he kept looming close, scenting her like an over-keen spaniel. Like she was food. Or–something else.

A bitch in heat, the Cassandra voice says helpfully. A mongrel bitch.

Rose jerks forward, loosening his grip. She feels his start of surprise.

“Rose?” He tries to catch her gaze in the mirror, but she keeps her eyes away. Opens a jar of lily of the valley lotion and begins rubbing it in, forcing a casual smile. More force to keep the edge from her voice.

“Feeling better?”

“I never felt bad,” he says coolly.

“Six hours in your room. Could’ve fooled me.”

“Got a bit of shut-eye. Even Time Lords have physical needs. You know that.” Hands firm and warm again, massaging her shoulders. The slippery satin gapes wider. “You know that very well.”

Rose says nothing. She closes the jar of lotion and reaches for a tiny one that holds lemon cuticle cream, but his hand closes over hers.

“Don’t. I’m half-giddy as it is.”

“Go back to bed, then.”

Fingers lacing with hers. Warm lips tickling her ear. “Had something like that in mind, yeah.”

When she doesn’t respond, he stills.

“Rose?” The little boy lost note his voice finds so easily these days, the one that grips you in the guilty mummy place. All he needs is a gas mask.

She raises her eyes, suddenly needing to see him, even reflected him. He is tousled and pale, freckles on his cheeks like sand on snow. Oh, but he is lovely, lovely, the lines of his lips, the bones of his face, big eyes full of light. Perfect and peculiar as a creature from a fairytale.

There once was a boy with two hearts. One was glass, the other stone. The more one broke, the harder the other one grew.

She gives a faint choked sound he takes for consent. His lips move down to the curve of her neck. Time lords run hotter than humans–blame the two hearts–and his breath is like the heat of an oven. The flush from her bath seems to spread, a dizzy fizzy feeling she is too familiar with, ever since the New Year.

There were fireworks the first time, shining spinning colors in the sky, in his eyes. His hands clutched her just as they do now, gentle but greedy as a boy’s. A lovely boy, this new Doctor, one who likes pop songs and cocktails and sweets. Who kissed her on a rooftop as the New Year chimed, then took her by the hand to lead her, laughing, to bed. After that the fireworks never stopped. Not till twelve hours ago.

She shivers as his mouth takes her neck, nibbling and licking, hot and hungry. “Fruits and flowers and soft young things,” he whispers. “You taste like Eden.” He spins her round and pulls her to her feet. His hands tug at cheap satin, find wet trembling flesh beneath. “So very soft,” he murmurs against her lips.

The first time he kissed her–a real kiss, not a hero’s suicide–was two days before New Year’s. That awful night at the Ten Bells. Jimmy Stone drunk and grabby, the Doctor calm as glass till all at once he wasn’t. Jackie hissing at them to go, just go, pushing them into the wet dark. He pressed her to the brick wall outside the flats, his touch was sure but his eyes were so lost, he tasted like banana daiquiris and he smelled like rain and rage and the roar of blood in her ears drowned the echo of Jimmy’s screams.

His kisses her like he’s starved for her, though it’s not three days since they’ve done this. His hand on her breast, his thumb rubbing her nipple in slow, bewitching circles as his tongue does the same in her mouth. Round and round, the room seems to spin with him. Her knees falter but he has her firm by the waist, she hears him make a satisfied sound when she weakens, leaning all her weight on him.

His mouth leaves hers as his hand goes south, he’s tasting her throat while his fingers skate round the edge of her underwear, teasing, teasing, rubbing her through the soaking wet cotton till she thinks she’ll go mad from it, and then he’s plunging them inside her as he bites down, just the right pressure on just that spot and she muffles a scream against his shoulder as two bolts of heat flash through her, meet in the middle and explode the world to fuzzy stars.

He’s not stopping but she grabs his wrist and pulls his hand away, trying to form words through the red sparkles in her head. “D-don’t. Mickey–he’s right next door–”

“My ship, my walls. He won’t hear a thing.” A soft chuckle tickles her throat. “Unless I want him to.”

“No. I don’t want him to know till I’ve had a chance–”

Another, harsher laugh. “Too late for that.” A finger tilts her chin up, and the Doctor’s eyes are wicked. “Why do you think he was so moody at Christmas? He knew before you did.”

Rose shakes her head against the softness of his shirt. “I always knew.”

A reward, that’s how she’s thought of him. For returning when she didn’t have to, swallowing eternity to save them all. She looked into the TARDIS and the TARDIS looked into her, and when he came back he was just right. The Doctor she’d have special ordered if she’d known she could. Jimmy with better hair, minus two stone and plus 2000 IQ points. A new Doctor, dashing and nervous, sweet and vicious. Her Doctor, finally and forever. Not till Sarah Jane did Rose know he could belong to somebody else. Twelve hours ago those ranks widened: somebody was becoming everybody, which is the same as nobody at all.

That’s when she catches it, on the collar of his shirt. Perfume–heavy, expensive, French.

The bright haze turns to cold ash and she shoves him away so hard he hits the dressing table with a crash.

Jars and bottles rattle in protest as he rights himself. He runs a hand through his hair and stares at her. For the first time she’s clearheaded enough to notice what he’s wearing: no jacket or tie or shoes, just wrinkled trousers and an untucked shirt that smells like another woman. Must’ve woken up and come straight to Rose’s room, the way some men will stumble to the refrigerator in the middle of the night.

For a minute he seems too amazed to speak. When he does it’s high-pitched, provoked, his vowels skittering up and down the octaves. He sounds almost Scottish.

“Are you mad, woman?”

“I must be,” Rose says, pulling her robe tight around her. “Twelve hours ago you left me staring at a dead window. Now you’ve had a cry and a nap and you’re feeling frisky and I just give in! I’m either mad, or the biggest mug who ever set foot in Time And Relative Dimensions In Sodding Space.”

“There’s just the one S,” he says mildly.

“Stuff it. Correct my spelling on the days you don’t desert me for an overdressed tart.”

He tilts his head at her, fixing her with a superior, slightly wounded look, like a teacher who’s star pupil has wound up wearing the dunce cap. If she weren’t already furious, this alone would make her want to rake her nails across his face.

“How long have you been with me?” he says. “If we totted it all up–years, I’d wager. But you still think like a shopgirl on the slow path.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means I would have come back. What? You thought I planned to wait three thousand years to swing 'round and pick you up? You really haven’t been paying attention, have you?” He begins to pace up and down, somehow managing to keep the professor look going, even half-dressed and half-hard.

“December 30, 1758. That’s where I got stranded. November 16, 1765, Chief Pontiac surrenders to the British. August 8, 1768, Captain Cook leaves Plymouth to Voyage to the South Pacific. December 6, 1773, the Boston Tea Party. (Not that there was much partying going on, bloody colonists.) April 6, 1782, Rama I succeeds King Taksin of Thailand after a coup d’etat. (Now that was a party.) July 14, 1789, the storming of the Bastille. July 15, 1799, the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. I could go on, but I see I’m losing you,” he says, nodding at her crossed arms. “Point is, I was present at every one of those times, TARDIS in tow. Half-a-dozen chances to catch a lift in the Eighteenth Century alone.”

“Wait, what about not crossing your own timeline and all that paradox rubbish?”

“Oh, I can cross it, all right. I shouldn’t, but in cases of emergency exceptions can be made. Some of my previous selves aren’t precisely generous sorts, but neither are they gonna condemn their future self to a three-millennia layover. No chance of a paradox because, strictly speaking, we’re not the same physical being. One of the best bits about all that cell-swapping during regeneration is you can avoid the worst sort of temporal nastiness, provided you don’t play silly buggers with your current incarnation.”

“But if you could cross your timeline, wouldn’t you know if you did? I mean, now wouldn’t you know already because back then your former self had already met your future . . . ” she presses her hands to her temples. “I’ll give myself a migraine if I don’t stop.”

“So stop. It’s nothing you have to trouble yourself over. Just remember this: I would have come back. From your end, you’d have scarcely known I was gone.”

“But you? It would have been years and years.”

He shrugs. “What’s a dozen or so when you’re past nine hundred?”

“I don’t believe that,” Rose replies, after a moment. “It sounds all neat the way you tell it, but I know you better. You were climbing the walls at Christmas, and us hardly home a week. Even if you made the first date way back when, you’d’ve been stuck seven years. That would have been like a jail sentence for you. Unless . . .” she trails off.

He raises an eyebrow at her.

Unless Queenie really was that special. But Rose’s throat is suddenly too tight for her to say the words. She turns away. She feels his hand on her shoulder but she shakes it off.

“Don’t touch me. You stink of her.”

He flinches back like she burned him. For a second she feels a pang, but then she remembers her final glimpse of Madame through the fireplace, and she goes cold all over again. Now she can speak.

“When you found the fireplace portal again, and you knew you could come back. You were gonna bring her along. I heard you give the invite.”

He says nothing. But silent apology–if apology is what it is–isn’t enough. She spins back, facing him.

“How were you gonna work it? A connecting door on either end? The lady on your arm and when you got tired of carrying her train, you’d come back to your bit of fluff on the side? Or would my services have no longer been required? Me made redundant, packed off with Mickey? Or maybe–maybe he’s due a door, too.” She meets the Doctor’s surprised blink with a knowing nod. “He’s a handsome boy, isn’t he? Is that why you changed your mind about bringing him along? I saw how Jack used to look at you, but I never thought–” she stops, swallows. “That bloke at B&Q on Boxing Day, the good-looking ginger one who tried to pull you in the paint chips. Weren’t exactly fighting him off, were you?”

She feels her breath speeding up, hears her voice go shrill as a fishwife’s, but she’s too wound up to stop. “Are you that kind of man now, Doctor? Is this what we’re heading for, one big happy orgy with you in the middle? Are both your hearts made of s-stone?” And she can’t continue anymore, all the unshed tears of the past twelve hours swelling to a hot tide in her chest. One more word, just one, will start a flood.

“I never meant–”

“I’M NOT YOUR BOUNCY BLOODY CASTLE, YOU SICK BASTARD.”

And then the floodgates open and she’s crying like she hasn’t for a very long time, not since she crouched in the street over Pete’s broken body. She covers her face with her hands.

But Rose has never been the sort of girl to cry for very long, especially when she put on too much lily of the valley lotion and the reek of it’s making her sick. After a minute or two she wipes her eyes, looks up.

The Doctor has shrugged off the offending shirt. He’s skinny as a teenager without his usual layers, but she knows the lie. Knows just how much unearthly power lies in that thin body.

He waves the shirt like a truce flag, then drops it to the floor. “Rose,” he says. “Come here.”

She wants to resist but he’s fixed her with his Time Lord look, his eyes glittering, magnetic. Before she knows what she’s about they’ve pulled her across the room. She’s in his arms and he doesn’t smell like a French tart now, just his normal new Doctor smell of old books and clean soap and, for some reason she’s not been able to figure out, warm buttered toast.

The feel of him is like coming home. No, so much more than that. Like being very little and waking up in the middle of the night and needing your dad, and finding him. Like seeing your true love smile at you from across the room. Taking the hand of a dear old friend you haven’t seen in ages. Catching the eye of the bad boy you know will never ring, but you also know will be the most brilliant shag you ever had. All those feelings mixed up together, without the ickiness there should be for having them at once.

Still sniffling, she clings to him, the very man who’s making her so miserable. In that moment Rose knows she’s more Jackie’s daughter than she ever would have guessed.

“I don’t want to have sex with Mickey,” he says. His lips are in her hair, she feels the words as well as hears them. “I don’t want you to have sex with him, either. Not again, I mean. I know you two used to–” she feels his mouth twitch, like he’s grimacing at a mental picture he’d rather not have conjured up.

“And Madame de Pompadour?” She bites her lip, but the words are already out.

“Reinette wouldn’t have been the sort to make a long-term companion. Too entrenched in her own world. As for the other–” he stops, sighs. “I’d have waited seven years–seven years at the very least–in the Eighteenth Century, and if you thought Victorian plumbing was bad you’ve really no idea. Begged a ride from a former me, endured all the lectures and bargaining and memory backwash, broken, at my count, seven separate Laws of Time and traversed two galaxies to find you again. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

“Not as much as you leaving in the first place.”

She feels him stiffen and she pulls back, sees how very tired he looks. Remembers what a bloody time he’s had lately–whether it’s his fault or not–and feels another pang. But she can’t lie, not about this.

“If you could do it once, you could do it again. How can I trust you? How do I know you won’t fall in love with some other historical legend and run off? What kind of commitment is that?”

He lets go of her. Actually takes a physical step away.

“Trust. Love. Commitment.” He spits the words out like pieces of rotten fruit. “You talk like a human.”

“I am human.”

“I’m not.”

Rose looks at him for a long second. “I gave up everything for you,” she says quietly. “Twice.”

“You always had a choice.” Then, after a heavy pause: “You still do.”

“That’s your answer? Deal with the tree ladies and courtesans and rogue time agents or go home?” She wraps arms around her middle. The cold sickness is spreading, she’s shivering with it. “My God, none of this has been real, has it? Just colored lights and words and–and a laugh. You never loved me at all.”

“Just what is your idea of love, Rose Tyler? A gold ring on your right hand? Semi-detached in Chiswick, Sunday roasts at Jackie’s? Is that where you thought we were heading? Did you think this–” he waves, taking in the room, the TARDIS, perhaps all space and time–“was some sort of honeymoon?”

Rose doesn’t reply. She puts a hand to her forehead. The embarrassment or the disappointment, she’s not sure which is making her sicker. She must look ghastly, but he won’t leave off.

“I’ve shown you things not six of your kind have seen. I’ve shown you me, as much as a human could bear to see.” He’s pacing again, raking fingers through his hair till he looks like a lunatic. “I’ve given you the universe and eternity besides, and it’s still not enough for you!”

Rose takes a few steps back, reaching blindly. Finds the wall by the corridor door, leans on it for support.

“Take me home.” She scarcely recognizes this choked dead voice as her own. “Set the coordinates. I’ll go find Mickey.” She turns to the door and reaches for the release. “I–never should have left him.”

Quicker than she could re-tell it, Rose is jerked away and slammed into the opposite wall. She gives a little scream, more in shock than pain.

“You. Will. Not.”

His face is scarce millimeters from her own. Its flesh seems to be drawing tighter, showing the alien skull beneath. He’s not touching her, pinning her in place through sheer force of rage. His next words are soft in that hard way which means he’s deadly serious.

“The consort of a Time Lord does not go back to the tin dog.”

“Y-you can’t stop me,” she falters.

“If you believe that, you haven’t seen me at all.” He pulls back, as if to give her a better look. He’s gone white as death, his eyes black holes pulling her down into horrifying places. But even still he’s beautiful, so beautiful. The angel of her nightmares.

Rose tries to tear her gaze away but she can’t, caught fast in his fatal magnetism.

He closes in again. The breath on her cheek is scalding.

“You smell like fear,” he whispers. “Primal, skin-shivering fear. Under all those fruits and flowers. But under that there’s something more . . . ”

Closer, and he’s bending his head, breaking eye contact. But she still can’t seem to move. More heat, and wetness. He’s licking her neck, drawing his tongue down her throat, lining her collarbone. Stopping just below, like he’s savoring the hammer of her heart. His mouth leaves streams of heat that grow and grow, becoming a river flowing down, down to the center of her.

“Lust,” he says, raising his head. “A whole secret garden of it. You smelled just the same that night at the Ten Bells. You heard his bones crack and you knew what sort of man I was.”

He leans in, whispering against her ear. “And you loved it.”

Satin sliding back, back, puddling to the floor. The world narrows to the feel of his touch all over her, searing, possessive. His voice in her head, gentle, ruthless.

“I could have taken you right there against the bricks. You wanted me then, just like you want me now. Not Adam or Jimmy or bloody Mickey. Despite the fear. Because of it. That’s the sort of girl you are.”

He presses her into to the wall until it hurts. He’s frighteningly, what must be painfully, hard.

“And stars help me, I still want you.” For a second the mask of rage and arrogance slips, and there is something desperate in his face. “I’ve killed myself once for you. Will you be the death of me again?”

Burning spots of color have appeared on his pale cheeks. The heat from him is almost unbearable now. He’s shaking all over, like he is barely holding back. His hand is on her belly, burning and trembling. She feels him pulsing against her through two layers of cloth.

“Rose–”

“Do it,” she gasps. “Do it now.”

His fingers rake across her skin, a whip-sharp sting of tearing cotton and then he’s scrabbling at his own zipper. Rose makes a keening needy sound in her throat, it seems to be taking him an age and then oh God he’s in, the thick slick heat of him; the feel of him, always, something scary and amazing and other.

She was so nervous the first time, visions of tentacles or worse wavering in her head, but what’s in his trousers is just perfect, like everything else about him. He keeps all his strangeness under the skin, where you won’t know it till it’s much too late. Not till he’s been inside you, and you won’t ever be the same.

Rose digs fingernails into the cool woody wall of the TARDIS as he thrusts into her. Melting, melting, that’s what it feels like, as if his heat is undoing all her cells. Boiling through her blood, flowing into the most secret parts of her. It should hurt but it doesn’t, it’s better than anything, harder closer deeper. It makes what she’s done with all the others seem about as serious as shaking hands–Jimmy, Mickey, Adam, that boy in the ladies’ at Vertigo when she was seventeen, high enough on Ecstasy to do it and green enough to think it was the wildest thing she’d ever do.

His face is buried in her neck. He’s speaking but she can’t understand him, a rush of alien syllables, secrets the TARDIS won’t translate. He lifts his head and sees straight through her, he is glowing and terrifying and the wonder of him then, in her eyes, inside her, it’s enough to send her over the edge, a spiraling ribbon of fire that burns on and on and on–

She can’t have him, Rose thinks frantically. She can’t she can’t she can’t I need him–

She doesn’t know who she’s thinking of but the fear is as deep as the pleasure and she hangs on to him, nails digging in hard and desperate, the taste of his flesh like sun and Ecstasy and that must be what he needs because he shudders, groans, stiffens, and the heat of his climax is enough to bring her one more time, a time that must surely be the end of her, she’s exploding into fire and water and the last thing she sees is light, light, in the sky, in his eyes . . .

Then, merciful greyness. For a long time, the world goes cool and dim and quiet.

When she comes around, she’s lying on the bed. He must have carried her there, tucked her in and all, though she has no memory of moving.

It was the first thing he warned her about, after they began this. He babbled on about secretions and protein receptors and RNA, but the bottom line is that, for a human, sex with a Time Lord is a lot like several shots of vodka with a hashish chaser. Blush-worthy levels of exposure to his body fluids had seemed, just recently, to be building up a measure of tolerance in Rose’s system. But often as not, she still suffered through blackouts and hallucinations, headaches and muscle aches and other symptoms of what amounts to the ultimate love hangover.

She doesn’t mind. The ride is worth the price of admission and besides, the side effects are not much worse than the migraines and mood swings from birth control pills. No need of anything like that now; this was something else he explained. The parts might fit just fine, but the basic blueprint is too different. Without a loom (whatever that is) and a supercomputer the size of Cardiff, there won’t be any little Tyler-Time Lord hybrids running about.

When he told her, Rose was relieved. Most of her chums back home might have toddlers already, but she is nowhere near ready for that kind of responsibility. Anyway, grief of outliving his people or no, he has never seemed thrilled at the idea of playing Adam, so it’s fine that he doesn’t see her as Eve. Who wants the pressure of repopulating an ancient, super-powerful species? No, (she’s said it to herself more than once) she isn’t bothered that she can’t have his baby. Not ever. No matter how long they stay together.

Really–it’s a weight off her shoulders.

“Feeling better?”

He’s lying next to her, elbow on his pillow and head in his hand. The angry angel of death face is gone. Take a picture of them right now, and he’d look like the professor who pulled the local barmaid.

Rose looks up at the lights on the ceiling. They are dancing a little, her vision still dazzled with psychedelic afterglow. She rubs an absent hand over her belly.

“Not really.”

She glances over, sees the look on his face, and sighs. “I mean, the sex was brilliant. Mindblowing. It always is. But it doesn’t change what happened. It doesn’t change who we are.”

“Fires of Perdition, woman.” He runs both hands through his hair, drops his head back in a defeated way. “Haven’t I changed enough?”

“Maybe that’s the problem.” She sits up and pulls the sheet with her, suddenly needing to feel fully covered. “The man you were . . . he wouldn’t have done a runner with Madame de Pompadour.”

He pulls at the corner of her sheet. It could be a playful gesture, but his expression makes it serious. “He–I–wouldn’t have done this, either.”

Rose needs a moment to process. “What–not ever?”

He smiles, though there’s not really any humor in it. “You’ve read too many of Jackie’s romance novels. I admit it’s a pretty idea, the stunning young blonde shagging the doomed man back to life. But it’s not how it works. Can’t feel much in the way of sex drive when your death drive has you by the manly bits.”

“So I didn’t kill you.” Her voice is flat.

His mouth turns down in a guilty frown. “That was unfair, and I’m sorry for it. Heat of the moment and all. Truth is, I’d been looking for a way out since the War. Since–Arcadia.” A shadow passes over his face. Then he blinks, and his face is coolly cheerful as ever. “Regeneration would help, I knew that. But Time Lords don’t top themselves. Not for those reasons, anyway. You gave me very good reason, and I’ll always be grateful for it.”

She raises her chin at him. “That’s what this has been about for you? Gratitude?”

The smile he gives her now is genuine. Randy, but genuine. “Stunning. Young. Blonde. Remember? With heart and smarts and buckets of charisma, besides.” He reaches out, tucks a lock of still-damp hair behind her ear. The casual sweetness of the gesture pulls at Rose in deep places. “I’d have had to be loony not to want you. Any of the other me’s–the non-clinically depressed me’s–would’ve felt the same.” He purses his lips thoughtfully. “Well, maybe not the seventh me. He–I–was an odd duck.”

His words don’t have their intended effect. Rose has quite a lot to do to keep the tears from coming again.

“I’m not the first, am I?” she says sadly. “All the others, they had companions that they–I mean, you, when you were the other ones–” She stops, sighing. The hard part of talking about a Time Lord’s sex life isn’t the sex, she’s finding. It’s the pronouns. She tries again. “You had relationships with them. Romances, affairs, whatever.” Then, when he won’t even nod to that: “You had sex with them.”

“Some of them. Some were just good friends. Some I felt well shut of, frankly.” He shrugs. “There were never any hard and fast rules. Except the one I’d already broken by having you lot along to start with.”

“I never understood–why was that a rule?”

“It wasn’t a rule. It was the rule. ‘Observe and catalog. Aid if you feel it’s right and necessary. But never become personally involved with inferior species.’” He catches her look, holds up a hand. “I’m quoting. I could, and did, get in quite a lot of trouble over my ‘unnatural habits,’ as they called ‘em. My people were strict about that sort of thing.” Something in the way he says this sounds wistful.

“Why would your own people want to hurt you like that?”

“They weren’t trying to hurt me. They were trying to keep me from being hurt.”

“I don’t get it.”

He shoots her an unreadable glance. “You wouldn’t.”

His gaze drifts down. One finger traces strange patterns on the pillow, like he’s writing messages in an alphabet she’ll never learn to read. His face has a sad, closed look that’s familiar and unfamiliar. It takes her a little while to place it: his previous self’s default expression. Seeing it gives her a sinking feeling.

An uneasy silence falls. Rose takes him in, her new Doctor. Slender and dark-eyed and so devastatingly attractive: all tangled up in bed clothes, the flush of what they’d just done still on his face. Bloody false advertising is what it is, him looking like he does, when beneath that soft skin is solid flint.

There once was a boy with two hearts. One was glass, the other–

Rose shakes her head violently.

“I’d like to hurt you,” she says.

He looks up, startled.

Rose blinks, a little startled herself. “I mean, I don’t want to, not really. But . . . ” She stops, trying to find a way to say it that won’t make her sound like a complete bunny boiler. “I’d like to know I could. That–I could leave a mark. Something that would–stay,” she finishes lamely.

He looks at her a second longer. Then, without a word, he turns over on his stomach.

On his back, ten long, deep scratches. Extending from just past his shoulder blades all the way to his waist. All of them fresh, a couple of them still wet. And above, right below his left shoulder, is worse: a livid red circle she doesn’t recognize right away. Mostly because her sickened senses don’t want to.

“Are those . . . teeth?” Rose whispers.

“Something of the Wolf still with you, after all,” the Doctor says. He doesn’t seem perturbed, but he’s watching her closely.

“I-I’ve got a bottle of Dettol somewhere, I remember specifically my mum giving it to me. ‘Keep away those nasty alien germs,’ Jackie said. You know how she is about these things–” Rose throws the sheet off, ready to spring up and look for it when a firm grip closes around her wrist.

“Leave it.”

Rose wilts back on the bed beside him. She should feel strange, sitting there all naked, but she has so many other things to feel strange about that nakedness doesn’t even make the top ten.

“I’m sorry,” she sighs. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I know,” he says. “Wouldn’t even have brought it up, but you did.” He glances back over his shoulder. “I heal fast. Be a blank canvas by tomorrow. Except this one.” He reaches back, gingerly brushing the bite mark. “This one will scar.” He looks at her stricken face and grins. “I’ll wear it proudly. Not every day I can say I turned a nice girl from the Powell Estate into a Maenad.”

Rose shrugs away the unfamiliar reference. She stares at his back a moment longer. Then she reaches out, not quite touching the bite.

“Not really permanent though, is it?” she says. “Next time you change, it’ll be gone. Like it was never there to begin with.”

“Oh bloody hell, Rose–” She hears the frustration in his voice and throws up her hands.

“I know! You’re sick of hearing me whinge about it. I’m sick of hearing myself. But it’s the truth, isn’t it? You changed, and your feelings for me were different. So different you’re not even sure what they are yet, I don’t think. Change again and what’ll they be? You might be glad to be shut of me.”

His fingers find her wrist again. But the touch is comforting instead of confining.

“I can show you a million different futures,” he says softly. “Any and every future. Except one: my own. All I can do is tell you–” he stops, and when he continues his voice is rougher. “I hope you’ll be in it. I want you in it.” His face works, like the admission is costing him.

“I don’t want you to go home. I don’t want you to leave me for–someone else. That has to mean something. It does mean something. It’s more of a something than you could possibly–”

She cuts him off with a kiss.

She doesn’t know why this is her answer. Maybe because it’s the only answer she knows that isn’t tears.

Caught off guard, he tenses. Rose flashes on a memory, that horrid moment after seeing off Mr. Dickens. Stopped at the TARDIS console, mind ablaze with gas fires and zombies, she needed something to take the edge off. Her only excuse, not being accustomed yet to the rush of cheating doom. Heaving in her corset, she leaned into him with the mad confidence of a girl who had never been turned down. He–the other he–went just this way, muscles of his arms like rocks under the worn leather of his jacket. She didn’t have to touch anything else of his to know it was no good. Red-faced and stammering, she escaped to her room. She never tried again–not till much later, when he did. And all he wanted from her lips was death.

But this isn’t the old Doctor. It’s the new one, and after a second every part of him relaxes except his grip, pulling her closer. He draws her into his lap, her legs straddling him while his mouth devours her.

His hands bracelet her thighs, thumbs caressing the tender ticklish flesh just below her bikini line. Up up up and down down down and then up again, around and over but never quite where she needs him to be.

“Evil tease,” Rose breathes. She grabs his face and kisses him harder, his fine dark hair feathering through her fingers. He’s hard and ready again, she can feel it through the thin soft sheet that barely separates them, and she wiggles against him but he won’t give. She pulls back, sees the wicked laughter in his eyes, and gives a little growl deep in her throat. Using all the force of motion she learned in junior girls’ gymnastics, she topples them over, traps his hips between her knees and pushes him into the mattress, ripping the sheet away.

She sees his grin turn to a wince of pain and she remembers–the marks. The marks she made.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I forgot–” Rose loosens her death grip on his hips and shoulders and in that instant he gives a triumphant laugh and, with a slippery blur of speed, manages to wriggle out from under. The world goes topsy-turvy as he tumbles her over on her back, pinning her beneath his weight.

She scowls. “Bastard.”

He smirks. “Time Lord.”

She tries to keep up the angry eyes but he shifts his hips and suddenly she is having trouble focusing. Another nasty trick they taught him on Gallifrey, no doubt.

“Well,” he says, still smirking. “Now I’ve got you. Whatever will I do with you?”

Rose stares up at him. “That’s the real question, isn’t it?”

He stills at the unexpected seriousness of her answer. Then, without replying, he begins moving down. His hands slide from her arms to her waist as his mouth descends, leaving a trail of burning hot kisses in its wake. Rose wonders if this is the only answer he could think of.

She catches his shoulders. “Wait.”

It’s not that he isn’t good at it. Really, he could write the master work on it. Cross nine hundred years of experience with one right bastard of an oral fixation and the results are . . . astonishing. But it isn’t what she needs right now. She wonders how she can tell him what she needs without sounding like she fell out of one of Jackie’s much-mocked romance novels.

He’s shifted to one side, his chin resting on her hipbone. His expression is blank, but his wide dark eyes are fixed on her face.

Then she feels it. The lightest of touches, not on her forehead but somehow under it. The brush of wings against her brain.

“D-doctor?”

But he’s already crawling up her body, slow and sure. Doesn’t stop until they are face to face, his eyes staring into her own. Another of those feathery non-touches. And then he kisses her.

He’s good at this, too. So good that kissing could almost do, if the two of them never went any further: long, wet, eager kisses that catch her breath and curl her toes. The only thing that’s ever been anything like this, being sixteen and sneaking out to Jimmy’s house. Those early but not too-early days, when the pain and the shame were over and falling into bed was as easy as laughing. Jimmy above her, sweaty and salty-sweet, kissing her till she thought her head would pop right off from the rush of it. Needing him so badly, she missed him even as she was having him. Perhaps knowing even then, down deep in her half-addled brain, that it was all too sweet to last.

She would have done anything to keep him, at least some part of him. Something real to remain with her. Something that would stay.

One day Jackie took a long hard look at her and, ignoring all Rose’s blushes and denials, marched her straight down to the nearest clinic and put her on the Pill.

I can keep you from ruining your life, whether you like it or not. That boy’s not one to hang a future on. He may’ve filled your head with magpies and moonbeams but trust me, love: he’s not who he says he is.

“Rose?” The Doctor’s voice is worried.

“I don’t even know your name,” she whispers.

His fingers brush her face gently, and come away wet. It isn’t till then that Rose knows she’s crying.

“Whoever I am, I’ll never hurt you.” His lips brush her cheek, tasting her tears. “I swear it.”

Rose nods slowly. He seems to take it as a general agreement, because he enters her then, slow and sure. She’s just sore enough that it does hurt, but in the best possible way.

Oh–yes–this is what she needed. Smooth, easy thrusts that seem to fill up all the emptiness inside her, his long, warm body covering her completely. Like sinking down into a bath filled with hot champagne, woozy and wonderful. Her nerves pop and fizz from the gorgeous shock of the intoxicant in his system; it’s strong as ever. She should have realized–there’s no real immunity to him.

Rose closes her eyes as the fireworks begin. Burning jewels in the dark: ruby-sapphire-topaz-diamond-emerald–amethyst–aquamarine–

“Rose.” The Doctor sounds very far away.

“Rose.” She wonders hazily if he says her name so much because he doesn’t have one of his own.

“Rose Marion Tyler, look at me.”

Her eyelids flutter open.

Amber-brown, that’s his eye color usually. Whiskey and topazes. But now it’s changing, irises swirling at dizzying speed. Grey, black, hazel, light blue, grey blue–and, finally, bright blue, blue like a gas-fire, a color she knows at once. The color his eyes were Before. His eyes all colors now, every one they have ever been. Maybe every one they will be. She doesn’t think the toxin’s responsible for what she’s seeing.

“See–what you need to see–” His words are nearly frantic.

Feathers, feathers in her head, a touch like being suffocated by angel’s wings. He’s in her head or she’s in his, she’s not sure there’s a difference now. His features seem to melt like wax–he’s young and old and light and dark and beautiful and ugly and the truth of him, all the hims, plunging into her is too much. But it’s not enough. Her hands pull him closer as her mind pushes him away but it’s too late.

She comes, but it’s more like coming apart: gold-white light streaking through her vision like lightning, heat flooding over her like boiling rain. Falling into his kaleidoscope eyes, she screams a name, the only one she knows for him. Then she knows nothing.

“Really, I couldn’t eat another bite.” Rose pushes the chips away.

Sarah Jane pushes them back. “Oh, go on. You need to keep up your strength.”

Rose looks down at the paper basket. Little golden half-moons of potato, piping hot and weeping oil. Her mouth waters, but she throws her napkin over them. “Someone told me I’d better lay off the chips.”

Sarah Jane adjusts the white plastic spectacles on her face, peering at Rose from behind filmy lenses, one red, one blue. “Your ex is a jealous little prat.” Then she laughs. “Not to worry, though. Ricky will find his own stunning blond soon enough.” She twitches off the napkin. “Eat up. Best chips in London.”

“His name isn’t Ricky.” Rose looks around. “And this isn’t London.”

The chip shop is bright and busy, just as she remembers it from a thousand tea breaks and hurried dinners. But that’s all it is, a memory: The other customers faceless blobs, the world outside the front windows a blur of colors and shapes. No more real than the backdrop in a Christmas pantomime.

“There are many Rickys, and many Londons,” Sarah Jane replies. “Who are you to say which is real?”

“I’m me.” Rose raises her chin. “But you’re not Sarah Jane.”

“Clever girl.” Sarah Jane removes the spectacles. Bare of their 3-D camouflage, her eyes crackle and spark, golden-white energy leaking from their corners like cosmic tears. “Tell me who I am, then.”

“The other woman I really have to worry about,” Rose says. “You’re the TARDIS.”

The TARDIS-as-Sarah Jane smiles, her perfect teeth sharp and white as a wolf’s. “Perhaps not so clever, after all. Or you’d know–I’m on your side.”

“What is this?” Rose waves a quickly cooling chip at the shop. “Why have you brought me here?”

“The setting was your choice,” the TARDIS says. “The place you feel most safe and comfortable. A chip shop just ‘round the corner from your mum’s! How very British that is. All we need is a cuppa.” She flicks a hand, and in front of them appear two cups and a tea pot, bone-white with tiny blue flowers. Rose’s gran’s Staffordshire set: Jackie sold it years ago to make rent one month. She cried for two days.

“Stop it!” Rose says. “Stop mucking about it my head. Tell me why you’ve stolen Sarah Jane’s face.”

“Borrowed,” The TARDIS says, looking peevish. “She wouldn’t mind. Anyway, I can’t help it there’s a shortage of female mentor-types in your memory. It was this or Jackie, and cheap velour makes me itch.”

Rose clucks her tongue. “Sod off.”

“You should be nicer,” The TARDIS replies. “I’m going to be so good to you. Change never was into always been, give you everything you ever dreamed of, lying in your pink bed at Mummy’s house.”

“I’m not a little girl anymore. I don’t want dollies and ponies and–and chips.” Rose shoves away the paper basket one more time. “I want him. You won’t take him from me, not if you care for me at all.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking for. You don’t even know who he is.”

“You do, though. You’re the one who’s been with him, right from the beginning. You could tell me.” Rose can’t keep the tremble from her voice. “Please–just tell me his name.”

“Apollyon.”

Rose blinks. “Really?”

“Suriel. Sammael. Azrael. Abaddon. Exterminans.” The TARDIS flashes her wolf smile. “Lucifer.”

Rose stares at her.

“Choose the one that pleases you best, and remember him by it. They are all the same: doom and destruction. That’s what you’ve brought into your bed. Death, with the face of an angel.”

Rose traces a shaking finger around the rim of her tea cup. “I was right, then. He doesn’t love me.”

“Death loves. Death loves very well. He loved Jack and Reinette and Sarah Jane. He loved Peri and Tegan, Jamie and Grace and Romana. He loved the ones he didn’t make love to–Susan, Adric, Ace. He loved the rest as well, even the ones he didn’t like very much. And he adores you.”

Rose clasps the thin china hard enough to crack it. “Why won’t he say?”

“He brought down a government with six words. What would three of his do to one small human girl?”

“I don’t understand.”

The TARDIS runs an impatient hand through Sarah Jane’s dark hair. “No, you don’t. You never have.” She sighs. “Death consumes. It transforms. At basis, it chews up and spits out reality. The Doctor does these things not from rage or malice, but because it’s in his nature to do them.

“His own people knew this. He gutted himself, loving and devouring lesser species. He did it again and again, no matter what pains he suffered. He couldn’t be broken from it. They thought they banished him for it, this abnormal appetite. But Time Lords have a feeling for the future. Those on Gallifrey could not see their fate, but they could feel it. They sensed the Oncoming Storm.”

The TARDIS takes Rose’s wrist with a cool, crackly touch. “He loved his world, even as he rained down annihilation upon it. To be loved by him, to be destroyed by him: there is no difference. He understands this better than anyone. So he will never say it to you. Not while you stand within the echo of his voice.”

“Will I die?” Rose asks quietly.

“Of course. Everything dies, except Death himself.”

“But–but soon . . . whether or not he says–will he k-kill–” she can’t continue.

“Yes,” the TARDIS says. “And no. Neither one, and both at once.”

“Quit playing with me!” Tea cups rattle as Rose bangs her fist on the table. “Just tell me the truth.”

“If there were an easy answer, I’d tell it to you. But your question–it rings across universes. He will do his best–and his best is quite something, you know that. You are precious to him. The one bright spark he can’t bear to see dimmed. He threw himself on the pyre rather than watch it happen.”

Rose looks down, the chip basket blurring in front of her.

“He’s trying very hard to make you happy,” the TARDIS says. “But he can’t be other than what he is. Don’t spend what days you have fighting his nature. There will come a time you’ll curse every wasted second.” Her pale, veined hands reach for the tea pot. “That’s what I brought you here to tell you.”

Rose is quiet a minute. Then she wipes her eyes, looks up.

“You–Sarah Jane–told me some things are worth breaking for.”

Over the rim of her cup, the TARDIS looks pleased. “Dear Sarah. In another life, she is a poet.”

“Was she right?”

“It hardly matters now. You sealed your fate when you split me open and stole my fires to keep him.” The suggestion of an angry spark in her eyes. “So have him, Promethea. And all that comes with him.”

But she sounds more sad than angry. Rose has to look away from that bright, pitying gaze.

A cool touch, turning her face back.

The radioactive lights in Sarah Jane’s eyes have gone out. Now it’s just a woman sitting across from her, fiftyish and graying and tired. She smiles wanly.

“Take heart, my dear. He will put out a sun to see your pretty face. I didn’t even get a ticket back from Aberdeen.”

Rose opens her eyes and looks around. The room seems the same, but to her it feels like ages have passed.

The Doctor is next to her. Propped against the headboard, bed sheets puddled in his lap. But he must have been up at some point because his hair is damp, and he’s wearing his favorite ratty green dressing gown. On his nose are his reading glasses and before him, a book the size of a cathedral Bible. Leather-bound and worm-eaten, it smells as old as Westminster Abbey. There are symbols on the spine, dots and squiggles Rose knows from the news. Arabic, or something like it.

“The Book of One Thousand and One Nights in the original Persian,” the Doctor translates before the TARDIS can. “Cracking good read–do you know it?”

Rose thinks a second. “Disney made a film–Aladdin and such, yeah?”

“No.” The Doctor’s grimace is so violent it nearly dislodges his glasses. “Play Mozart on a kazoo and it’s not really Mozart anymore.”

Rose shrugs. “What is it, then?”

“The King of Persia discovers that his wife is plotting against him with her lovers. He has her executed, and instructs his Grand Vizier to find him a new wife. He marries the girl, and the next day he has her executed too, before she can be unfaithful. This goes on: every night a wedding, every day a beheading. Until finally, the Grand Vizier’s own daughter, the beautiful and clever Scheherazade, marries the King. But she is a woman with a plan. She keeps the King bewitched with her beauty and wit for one thousand and one nights. Mostly by telling him elaborate stories–these stories,” he explains, indicating the book.

“She tells them all night, every night, cloaking herself in mythical lands and magical adventures, holding back the unbearable passage of time. At last the King is so taken by her many virtues, he can’t stand to part with her. He cancels her execution and makes her his queen. Everybody lives happily ever after.”

“Except the other wives.”

“No,” he says, after a pause. “I suppose it was rather hard luck for them.”

“Why would any girl want to marry that king? They’d have to be loonier than he is.”

“Well, he’s king, isn’t he?” Then, when Rose doesn’t look convinced: “Anyway, it’s just a fairy story.”

“I like The Blue Fairy Book better.”

The Doctor closes his book and sets it on the table by the bed. “So you would, Rose Red.” He smiles at her fondly. “What mythical lands have you been traveling to? You’ve been gone for hours and hours.”

Rose considers. “I don’t know. Never do remember my dreams–Jackie tells me epics about her and Clive Owen in Ibiza but me? Always a jumble.” She stretches lazily. “Somewhere with chips, I think.”

“Still–you look better.”

“I feel better.” It’s true: all light and bright and sparkling, like some cosmic charwoman has been in her head and scrubbed everything out with seltzer and lemon soap.

“All’s forgiven, then?” His tone is light, but his eyes are dark and serious.

Rose looks at him a moment. “Take off your robe.”

His brows draw together in a puzzlement, but he shrugs out of the worn flannel. He has to lean forward to do so, and Rose puts a hand on his arm before he can sit back. Her fingertips trace the soft skin below his shoulder blades. As predicted, it’s completely blameless except for a few freckles. She finds the bite. Still visible, but barely: nothing but a faint ring of white dashes. You’d have to look very close to know he was ever marked.

“You can’t help it, can you?” she says softly. “What you are. Wanting to run after the latest shining light, hold it in your hands before it burns out. It’s what you do, what you have always done. And Reinette was very bright.” Rose gives the faintest smile. “All that satin and diamonds, she could hardly help it.”

“Diamonds are just one way of shining. Not even the most interesting way.” His fingers cup her neck, rubbing gently over the pale flesh there. Like she’s something precious and terribly fragile.

There once was a boy with two hearts. One was glass, the other stone. The more one broke, the harder the other one grew. But the rest of us have only one. We know this, and break it anyway. That is what makes us his equals, whether queen or poet or shopgirl.

“I love you.”

Rose sees the look on his face, feels his hand start back. She captures it, lacing his fingers with her own.

“I know you can’t say it,” she says. “I don’t know why I know, but–” She stops, blinking hard. “But I thought it needed to be said. By one of us, at least.”

She feels her eyes sting and she starts to look away, but quick as thought he has her face in his free hand. From the look on his own, she thinks he’s going to kiss her. But he doesn’t.

“Rose.” And the way he says her name is better than a kiss. “A Rose is a rose is a rose. Except when it’s . . . so much more.” His eyes are brighter than diamonds.

He does move in for a kiss then, but she pulls away, laughing.

“Not a chance, laddie. Not till I’ve had personal time with a tub and a toothbrush.”

“Twenty-first Century humans.” He makes the last word a sigh. “You’re hygiene obsessed. Maybe the Eighteenth Century wasn’t so bad, after all.” He peers at her over his glasses, all disapproving professor. “Well, you’ll have to wait. Somebody already used up all the hot water supply for the next few hours–as I found not long ago, thank you very much.”

“So amuse me,” Rose says in her best Cassandra. “Read one of your stories. No beheadings, please.”

He rolls his eyes but obeys, hauling back the gigantic book. “Right.” He leafs through the musty pages, brow wrinkling in concentration. Then he begins.

“A good man had a beautiful wife, whom he loved passionately, and never left if possible. One day, when he was obliged by important business to go away from her, he went to a place where all kinds of birds are sold and bought a parrot. This parrot not only spoke well, but it had the gift of telling all that had been done before it.”

“This isn’t gonna turn into a Monty Python sketch, is it?”

“Hush. Or I’m cueing up the Disney video and leaving you to it.”

She smirks, cuddling next to him. Sleep and lavender soap–he smells like her. Her Doctor, brighter and stranger than anything in any story.

“He brought it home in a cage, and asked his wife to put it in her room, and take great care of it while he was away. Then he departed. On his return he asked the parrot what had happened during his absence, and the parrot told him some things which made him scold his wife. She thought that one of her slaves must have been telling tales of her, but they told her it was the parrot, and she resolved to revenge herself upon it . . .”

They remain that way as long as they can, cloaking themselves in mythical lands and magical adventures. Holding back the unbearable passage of time.