Adventures Beneath Starlight

“It’s been days and I still can’t tell them,” Rose grumbled, and let her head fall to the counter.

“Sure you can! It’ll all work out.”

“Should be a lot easier after the four of us, eh Rose?”

Both Doctors’ heads whirled around and they spoke simultaneously over one another. If it hadn’t been for several weeks of practicing, Rose wouldn’t even be able to parse what they were saying. The four skinny, pinstriped hedgehogs had a penchant for nattering all at once. Worse, she almost never knew which one she was talking to unless she happened to hold the one’s hand. She was still adjusting to them not especially caring to offer a distinction.

Admittedly that was the hardest part. Rose viewed these Doctors as four distinctly different lives, with similar but not precisely the same backgrounds. One was the Doctor she’d always traveled with, and another was essentially split from him. The third they met had narrowly escaped Krop Tor’s black hole. Rose had met him on a dimension hop and knew he was the wrong one when she found out he’d had his own Rose but couldn’t save her from the black hole in time. The fourth one they met had a similar story to tell. Against all odds he too had his own Rose, but lost her to Lady Cassandra’s psychograft.

It didn’t explain how they’d wound up in their dimension. But it didn’t take them long to work out what’d happened. After they’d stopped the daleks and Davros from using the reality bomb, the walls of the universe started closing up again. Donna called it dimensional retro closure. That’s what was supposed to happen at least. Tiny cracks in between certain dimensions remained open like sores that wouldn’t heal. Finding each one proved to be a monumental task without the dimension cannon. Every waking moment between traveling and sleeping was spent trying to work out how to close up the walls for good. But in the meantime they sealed the walls of the universe one dimension at a time as each Doctor appeared.

Even though the Doctors devoted a great deal of time attempting to solve the dimensional retro closure problem they didn’t seem remotely affected by it. When they weren’t babbling over one another the TARDIS was eerily quiet. Out traveling was another story. But the collection of little moments that took up so much time in between were filled with more peace and quiet than Rose had ever experienced in the few years she’d first traveled with the Doctor.

Glimpses of Spring

Characters: Nine x Rose

Rating: Teen~ish

Summary: The Doctor’s first dream after meeting Rose is a vivid one.

Read on AO3 | Teaspoon (when approved)

He watches her saunter off in that dress (still not quite period, he doesn’t care) to her room, savors the heat welling up in his frost-chilled cheeks while unabashedly drinking in the sight of her swaying hips and deliciously bare shoulders. Oh he’s been looking. Looking, mind. Not thinking, not past the task at hand or the ever-present reminder of her youth. She saw him looking, knows that he was looking, and she still beamed up at him. 

It fuels his dreams that night. Dreams! Him! It had become all but a foreign concept lately. He was having dreams, proper ones rather than the tempestuous nightmares that infested his mind when he dared to catch a wink or two. Her smile is the sun peaking through the fog, shining brightly and melting away clouds darkness little bits at a time. The calm after the storm. He sees her eyes first not long after closing his own. They’re so warm and bright, glistening like beads of dew on spring grass. Spring! That’s what she was. He can almost smell the flowers blossoming around bare feet. Lilies, not roses. Bright, vibrant, freckly flowers swaying in the breeze like her hips. He chases her, she giggles and fills his chest with warmth. 

She runs too fast, right into a wall of fire. He screams after her as he catches up. She merely smiles at him calmly, takes his hand, and guides him through it. Despite his protesting she walks him through it, mumbling unintelligible words of encouragement as she squeezes his hand tighter. She offers him strength from the fire in her eyes. A different sort of fire, one that he wants to be overwhelmed by. 

He wants to get closer, to touch it, to let his fingers dance along her temples. He remembers her lips, full and pink; how he wants to capture them and turn them red as the fire around them gives way to calm. Even in his dreams she’s intoxicating, bringing life to long since dormant thoughts. Her sweet smile turns salacious and he can see her legs wanting to dart off again. No more games. He can’t hope to ever tame her, doesn’t want to. She’s wild and it makes his weary hearts race. But in this dream all it takes is one look. He backs her into a tree and her tongue peeks between her teeth. He’s torn. In a dream he should have all the time to do everything but just in case, he only briefly seeks permission with pleading eyes before capturing her face in his hands. Her sweet smile returns to melt away a moment of hesitation. Their hearts’ song surrounds them as he presses his forehead to hers and brings his thumbs to her temples. 

He wakes up gulping down breaths, utterly disregarding his respiratory bypass to languish in sheets sticking to his clammy skin and dizziness overtaking him after he looks himself over when sitting up. His hearts are stampeding after their siren as she fades away to wakefulness. She’s still there, grinning at him from ear to ear as he makes his way into the console room. Her excitement nearly takes him back there. He sucks in a deep breath and shuts his eyes. When he takes her hand, wrapping it in his as her warmth did his dreams he knows. Principles or not, he was gone right then and there, didn’t want to return as long as her hand was in his. 

Readers’ Choice Special MasterPost

To celebrate a milestone I drew up this nutty idea of having my darling readers shape a fic. I wanted to know what YOU ALL wanted to read! Ten randomly selected winners got the chance to shape this special fic! Below is the resulting fic, a work in progress. 

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO   nsfw

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

Through the Curtain of the Void | Part 2/?

They left the bedroom window open for one another when they were apart. It was Rose's idea, of course. No matter where they were in the world, her window would always remain open to him, and his to her. It never closed, not until they were together and safe. Of course it was foolish in the winter, particularly if it snowed. The Doctor urged Rose to close the window if it the weather wasn't for it. But she'd hear none of it. He thought she was being foolhardy until one night, on a clear night, he looked up at the starry sky and swore his other half was looking at that same bit of sky on the other side. He could never explain those little moments to Rose. He just knew. He felt his eyes on him for a moment, a brief moment. It crept up the nape of his neck and made its hairs stand on end. Rose returned home from a Torchwood assignment with a cast on her leg that night. Only then did the Doctor understand. It became a necessary comfort, having that window open. Sometimes snow and rain came in. Those nights they left the window open only a crack. But it was still open as long as one half of them was still on the other side.

They lived in a cottage next to a farm outside the city where Rose wouldn't be hounded by the paparazzi and journalists. The Doctor admittedly hated the peace and quiet at first. He certainly didn't appreciate perfume of eu du sheep that hovered around the house. But the first few months in the Tyler mansion upon his arrival was a good reminder to be tolerant. Rose didn't buy the house for him, mind. Well, that's what she told him. Every day she reminded him they weren't doing domestic, that this was just the best way for them to be together. And every day the Doctor spent at least a moment telling Rose it didn't matter. None of it mattered. He would live in a beaten down shanty as long as she shared it with him, shared a life with him.

Through the Curtain of the Void | Part 1/?

The Doctor was yanked out of sleep by a stabbing ache threatening to tear his skull asunder. He fell out of bed onto his knees and held in his stomach. It wasn't enough to keep its contents in place. He rushed to the ensuite, bumping his already throbbing head as his belly lurched. His stomach cramped up and his throat burned by the time he flopped over onto his back, staring up at the soft amber domed ceiling. There was a light aura framing the roundels, at least the ones he could see clearly. A migraine. A migraine the likes of which he hadn't felt in centuries. At first he suppressed the thought of why now, because at least he was feeling something.

He did eventually surrender to the pain and dragged himself to the infirmary. He took at least one too many of the little green painkillers made for his species. But they helped him crash onto the gurney to seek out a few more hours of sleep that he didn't need. He'd never slept so much in his life as he did in the past few years. Yes, it did help. Maybe the TARDIS didn't agree with this assessment. And for a minute or two, the Doctor considered the notion that it was her giving him a migraine just to get him onto his feet so they could go somewhere. She got anxious after a while, probably on his behalf. She did yearn to warm her engines, sure. But she was just fine sitting for a while, whether she liked it or not.

Foundations | Part 8/10

“That song you sang for her, you were singing it in your head, Doctor, along with our heartbeats. It’s beautiful. Would you sing it for us again?”

“I was hoping you might tell me what it all means, Doctor,” Rose sighed into the Doctor’s bare shoulder. Her urge to taste the freckles on this little patch of skin was growing stronger than her need to keep her distance. (Being honest, she’d already let that slip anyway). His open gasp against her neck in response to her giving in was enough for a shiver to rocket down to her core.

“I plan to. It doesn’t.. it doesn’t translate well. But I will, Rose,” the Doctor pulled back and told her. His eyes widened and fixed on hers, completely still with sincerity that gave her just a bit of a chill.

He never said he had anything planned. He never planned anything. It wasn’t his style. Fly to some far off destination in the TARDIS by the seat of his pants, that was the Doctor’s way. Then again, he hadn’t really been her conventional Doctor for months. Was the potential of being a daddy really changing him? Rose Tyler, you know better than that, she told herself. She’d seen better than that, in his mind.

All Rose had wanted was to hear her baby girl’s heartbeat. But she got so much more than she could have ever thought up late at night in her private TARDIS bedroom. The Doctor’s mind felt like a bonfire, entrancing to look at but would burn you if you got too close. Except, the deeper she delved, it didn’t get darker or scarier, just busier. It was as though there was a gate in his mind separating her from the parts of him that he didn’t want her to see, the parts of him that he worried would scare her away. There were thoughts of her beyond that mind gate, unbidden images of her that she caught a brief glimpse of before he threw up the block. At least they seemed innocent enough compared to the thoughts of hers that she didn’t share with him.