Wolf Moon: Chapter Twenty-Eight
Mar. 1st, 2008 02:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amberfocus
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Quick to Anger
“I said…the last thing you needed was for me to lie to you,” he answered. He looked sheepishly down at the ground.
“That’s not what you said,” Rose said sternly.
“Is too,” he replied stubbornly crossing his arms.
“Doctor!” He suddenly realized that Rose could be quite intimidating when she looked at him like that, her own arms folding across her chest and her eyes shooting sparks. Not literally, mind. At least, not this time. He moved first and picked up his leather jacket and folded it up, placing it in his backpack and then went about rinsing the breakfast bowls in the stream before packing them away. Rose continued to glare at him. When her foot started tapping he sighed, knowing there was no way out of this for him but to barrel straight ahead.
“Maybe I’m assuming too much again here, Rose,” he tried. “It’s just the way you are with me and the way you look at me, I thought maybe…” He trailed off as she began to look angrier. “Fine. I’m sorry. I saw it when I was poking around where I don’t belong!” He was defensive now but he couldn’t help it. “I saw how you feel about me. I saw a lot of things.”
“That’s not fair, Doctor. This is exactly why I didn’t want you in my mind. There are things that I’m not ready for you to see. Can you get that through that enormous Time Lord brain of yours?” she demanded.
“Rose, I--.”
“It’s called boundaries and you have a way of crossing them without regard to how other people feel.”
“Now that’s not fair. You don’t have any idea how I am with other people! You’ve never seen me with other people. You’ve only seen him and how he was. And I’m not him! Not really, not anymore. You can’t keep thinking I am,” he said trying to deflect the conversation away by seizing on a subject that had been bothering him.
“Oh, now that’s just rich, isn’t it?” she said. “You’re trying to make me feel guilty for the things that you saw when you were invading my mind? How dare you, Doctor! Shame on you.”
“Do you have any idea how it makes me feel to think I’m second best to the memory of some other man?” he shot back at her, refusing to feel any guilt on that particular subject. “How am I supposed to believe your feelings for me are true when you were so desperately in love with him? I’m a substitute for what you can’t have!” he snapped.
“Oh, yeah, because I’d just roll over for a substitute, wouldn’t I? I’d just say go at it because you look like he did when I met him? Because that’s the kind of girl, I am, is it, Doctor? You really think I’m that easy of a tumble?” she shot back.
“The way you were acting last night, yeah, I do,” he said hurtfully.
“That’s not fair! The reason my whole system is out of control is because of what you and Romana did. You cannot even try to blame that on me! You made me like this. And I won’t take the blame for just being some randy woman in need of a shag when you turned my life upside down for some stupid prophecy!” she hollered.
“So you say. After all, it’s not like you haven’t been sleeping with some man you aren’t in love with for the past five years.”
Rose’s eyes narrowed. “Not that it’s any of your business but I’ll tell you something about me and Davin. We dated for three years before I’d even sleep with him. He was not a man I just tumbled into bed with. I made a decision with my head because I didn’t have a future with the man I really loved. There was no reason to make a decision with my heart.”
She stalked across the clearing and started shoving things into her pack. “My heart just gets me into trouble anyway. I followed it when I met you and look where it’s gotten me. I’m stuck in a miniature universe, on some stupid ancient Quest to restore I don’t even know the hell what, with a smug, arrogant, alien who obviously doesn’t have any respect for me and thinks the only reason I’m here is because he has a face I’m familiar with and a body I’m desperate to shag.”
She walked back up to him, fists clenched at her hips, and glared into his eyes. “I thought I was in love with you, yeah. Just goes to show how stupid I can be.” Rose shoved her arms into her backpack and yanked it into place, fastening the support belt around her waist. “Let’s get this stupid Quest over with and then you can bloody well take me home and be done with someone you think so little of,” she snarled.
Rose bent down and grabbed the map out of the Doctor’s backpack and unfolded it, glancing carefully between it and the clearing they were in. Her eyes found the proper landmarks and she shoved the map back into his bag before standing up and striding off towards their destination without a backward glance. He closed his eyes, clenched his fists, took a deep breath and followed her.
Rose felt like she was going to hyperventilate as she strode ahead. She took deep gulps of the stifling hot air and tried desperately to calm the racing of her heartbeat. Damn the man, why did he have to be so mean? She’d forgotten that little vindictive, nasty streak her old Doctor had had when he was angry, jealous, or on the defensive, or as in this case all three, and she was not at all pleased to see it showing up in the version of the man she had just given her heart to.
Especially because up until now he had been so very kind and patient with her. Hot tears pricked at her eyes and she swallowed down her heartache. It had been years since she’d been made to feel this way and she hated what it brought up in her. She didn’t want to go home. Why had she said that? Why had she let him hurt her feelings so badly that she’d lashed out by saying he could take her home?
This was his fault. He didn’t want to accept that she didn’t want him in her head. But to have him there, poking about worried her to no end. What if he triggered the memories of what the Teroc’manu had done to her when she’d been in her third year at Torchwood? She’d done everything humanly possible to bury those memories as deeply as she could. It had taken a year of hypnotherapy for her to be able to live without fear of her mind being ripped open every time she met an alien species with telepathy. But she should just lay her brain open for him to tinker with because he wanted her to? She didn’t think so.
She dug her fingers into her palms so deeply she broke the skin and her hands began to bleed though she wasn’t aware of this. Even now, in a universe the Teroc’manu didn’t even inhabit, the memory of them caused her pulse to quicken and a cold sweat to break on her skin despite what should have been a hot sweat as they emerged from the sheltering shade of the rainforest into the blistering sun.
Rose stopped for a moment, shrugged her pack off and took out a canteen. She wiped her brow and then took a deep drink, before capping it off and sticking it back in the bag. She pulled out the wide-brimmed hat the Doctor had given her before they’d left the TARDIS and planted it firmly on her head before turning to look at the Doctor.
He was drinking from one of his own canteens, his head back, and his long, lithe body tense with control. As he began to lower his head she turned back hastily. She was not going to give him even the vaguest hint that she’d been looking. If it hadn’t been for the occasional sound of rocks sliding under his boots she wouldn’t have even been sure he’d been behind her.
Her heart twinged in her chest. She hated this. Hated being angry with him, hated him being angry with her even more. If he had just been able to keep his nosy self out of her mind last night, they’d still be happy. Fate was evil, she decided. It had to be after all that had been heaped upon her life. To take this, to take him away from her, too. She couldn’t stand it, but how could she fix this? She couldn’t back down. Not on this one thing.
And how was she going to get through the next couple of days without touching him? The skin hunger would make them both crazy, but right now she wasn’t sure she could cope with that kind of contact. Not when she was this upset. And she had to get used to not touching him anyway if he was going to take her home. She’d have to get used to living without any of the things she’d just gotten used to thinking were going to be her life from now on.
Her heart keened silently in her head at the idea of that. She couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t. There had to be a way to work this out. She didn’t want to lose him, couldn’t bear that. She swallowed hard, gathered her courage to turn and face him and felt a hand on her shoulder.
Home? She wanted him to take her home? His mind railed at the very possibility. He wasn’t about to do that. She might think he would but she was his. He’d claimed her in every way possible short of full physical bonding and he was not letting her out of his life.
He’d entered into her mind twice now despite her repeated warnings and found things he’d gone and used against her. No wonder she hadn’t wanted him in there. He’d just proven that with his outburst. He wasn’t trustworthy enough to be free to roam amongst her thoughts. What kind of a man was he to deliberately hurt her like he had? And doing it knowing she loved him and knowing how he…felt about her.
Jealous, petty, stupid, spiteful man that he was, he had taken her burgeoning trust in him and spat on it. She was so right about boundaries; he’d forgotten them really, living on his own for the last forty years. But that didn’t excuse him because she’d let him know, set the boundary and he’d skated right over it.
So what if he’d only been meaning to help her; was sure in the fact that he had helped her? That didn’t make it right when she’d specifically told him no. He could have tried harder to wake her, but he’d craved that contact with her mind and he’d rode roughshod over any objections that might have even thought about coming to the surface in his rush to soothe her emotions. Then today he’d trounced on them.
He had to figure out a way to make things right between them again. Admitting he was wrong would be a good first step, but would Rose even listen to him? She hadn’t looked back at him once since she’d stalked off ahead and her entire posture was still so furious. She was not going to forgive him for this, was she?
The Doctor wondered again at what had made Rose so determined to protect her mind from him. He’d noted vague signs of relatively well-healed trauma but he hadn’t searched down those paths. It hadn’t been what he had gone into her mind for in the first place. All he’d meant to do was to reassure her, not to seriously trespass.
The faintest whiff of iron wafted to him on the breeze and he could smell it mixing with Rose’s sweat. Had she cut herself? It smelled like blood. Rose stopped and drank from her canteen and he took a few swigs from his own. He thought he caught her turn to glance at him from the corner of her eye but when he lowered his head she was staring rigidly in front of her, her hands rubbing against her cargo pants.
A slight bloodstain was left in the wake of one of her hands and he strode over to her quickly and put his hand on her shoulder. “Rose?” She turned rapidly and her eyes flashed at him, a briefly hopeful look that she immediately shuttered. Swiftly he withdrew his hand.
“What?” she asked keeping her voice carefully neutral.
“Your hand is bleeding,” he said gently. Dumbly she looked down at her hand and saw the palm was stained with blood. She raised her other hand to look at it and saw that it was in similar condition.
He pulled out the sonic screwdriver. “Can I?” he asked softly. She nodded at him and he cradled her left hand in his, directing the little blue light at the wound and depressing the proper sequence of buttons to reach the proper setting for dermal repair. With great care he lowered her hand to her side and lifted up the other one, healing it as well.
He held onto her hand for a moment then made himself look up from it and meet her steady gaze. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Don’t leave me.”
Rose bit her lip but her gaze did not waver. “I don’t want to leave you,” she said finally.
“What happened?” he asked. He wasn’t asking about her hands and she knew it.
She sighed and said, “Let’s walk.” He shifted his grip on her hand so that he was loosely holding it properly now. As they resumed their trek she said, “Seven years ago a race of beings called the Teroc’manu landed in Islington. My field team leader Jake and my teammate Mickey and I were sent to suss out the situation. They were a telepathic race and they had no other method of communication. Since I was good at languages, left over from the TARDIS fiddling with my brain so many years ago, I was the one sent in to try to make contact.”
She shuddered and he squeezed her hand reassuringly. “They had no idea how to deal with a non-telepath but they were desperate to communicate. In their frustration they pretty much…hollowed out my mind and rebuilt it from the memory engrams. It hurt like nothing I’ve ever felt before. It was like someone had put a searing brand directly into my brain and held it there for hours. I thought I was going to die.”
She gasped then tamped down hard on the memory. “They put everything back where it belonged but they also…downloaded their racial memories into my head. It was too much for a human brain. I nearly died from it. I wanted to die from it the pain was that bad. They realized in time that they were killing me and they’d learned enough from what they’d done to me to communicate effectively with other humans, and they managed to safely remove most of the organic damage they caused me, but…I suffered a psychotic break.”
Rose sighed and her hand tightened on the Doctor’s. “It took me a year of psychiatric counseling and hypnotherapy to stop having hallucinations and little moments when reality would shift around me and I’d be aware of things outside the realm of normal people. It was hard. I literally lost my mind and had to find it again. Their racial memories were horrific. So much damage inflicted in their history. They’d been persecuted for most of their remembered history and only come to peace a few decades previously. I still have nightmares when those memories rise to the surface.”
She looked over at him. “That’s why I’ve been so protective of my mind, Doctor. Telepathy terrifies me. Even though it shouldn’t hurt anymore it’s like a conditioned reflex, it causes pain. It’s not that I didn’t trust you. It’s that I never want to go back to how I was before.”
“Oh, Rose.” He turned and pulled her into his arms and though she rested stiffly against him at first she gradually softened. “I am so sorry. And I’m sorrier still for what I’ve done and how I used your emotions against you. I’m not a good man sometimes, Rose. I’m vindictive and easily angered and jealous and I don’t like to think of you ever loving anyone else or being with anyone else and I want you to myself. All of you. Your mind, heart, and body. But I won’t push anymore for your mind. I promise you.”
She started to hiccup softly against him and then he realized she was crying with the relief of finally letting out her pain. “I’ve never told anyone,” she said. “Not anyone outside who was there when it happened and the doctor that put me back together again. My mum always thought it was a delayed reaction to losing the other Doctor and holding the Time Vortex within my body and I never disabused her of that.”
She wiped her eyes against his shirt. “I’m sorry, Doctor. I didn’t mean to lose my temper with you. I didn’t mean it when I asked you to take me home.”
He was stroking her hair with one hand and holding her tightly against him with the other. “I know,” he whispered soothingly. “I know. I’m sorry, Rose. I’m so sorry. Can you forgive me?”
She nodded. “Yes,” she told him her heart in her eyes. She pulled back and looked him in the eyes. “I still want forever with you.”
Ch. 29: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/17520.html
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no subject
Date: 2008-03-01 06:04 pm (UTC)Oh Rose! I wasn't expecting her to tell him this quickly, but I'm very glad she did.
Oh man did their fight hurt! Gave me flashbacks of Father's Day. I hate that fight, but at the same time I love it, because it is so real.
The whole chapter was fantastic, and beautiful. Especially the end.
*hugs them both*
no subject
Date: 2008-03-01 10:55 pm (UTC)