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The temptation to really impress her had been too strong when she’d asked to see her parents get married and when she’d still been unsettled because her tender heart knew that just a scant year or so later her father would end his life curled up on the tarmac completely alone, victim of a hit and run, he hadn’t been able to say no. One thing, one little thing, to let her be there to hold her daddy’s hand while he died, to allow the man responsible for bringing Rose into the world the comfort that he himself sought desperately from her every night, had been too hard for him to resist. He’d be the hero in her eyes for giving her that.
He should have denied her, though he finds himself wrapped so far around her little finger he isn’t sure how he’d have managed that. His desire for her smiles, to see her happy, has been his undoing. Instead of her smiles the day has been filled with her anger and her tears, her hurt and her pain, and she’s lived a loss unlike any she’s ever been through before in seeing her father die twice.
Even now her grief batters at the edges of his awareness. He refuses to look too closely for fear of just what exactly is being broadcast from her mind other than the one overriding emotion of pain. Pain he’s caused her by giving in to temptation.
She hasn’t asked him to take her back to London, not yet, but he is expecting it at any time. He shoves his hands into his pockets, fingers the TARDIS key that he’d demanded back from her in a fit of pique. He pulls it out and looks at it, and finds himself almost on the verge of tears. Why had he demanded it back? He hadn’t wanted it, never thought she’d give it to him. He’d expected her to call him on his crap like she always does, insist that he was being an idiot and refuse to give it to him.
But she had given it back to him. She’d known what it meant for him to have given it to her in the first place, known how important it was and he had seen it in her eyes and heard it in her angry, hurt words that she thought he didn’t want her anymore. She had been right when she’d yelled at him about how sad he was, how he’d have waited for her at the TARDIS or that he’d have come back. He would have done, even if there’d never been any Reapers to drive him back sooner. He would have calmed down and come for her, because of how badly he needed her in his life.
Half a year ago any companion would have done as a distraction, but it hadn’t been any human he’d stumbled upon. It had been Rose. He’d saved her life, she’d saved his, she’d challenged him and she’d been brilliant. He used the word fantastic so much with her because it was the best possible one for describing her, of describing life when she was in it.
It was only she who had brought him out of the depths of his pain following the Time War. Oh, he still spent far too much time rooting through those horrible memories, but when he stops, she gives him an anchor to living, a welcoming place in her arms each time she hugs him, a smile that lights the dark places and encourages him to go on day after day. If she takes her light away there’ll be nothing to hold him back, nothing to keep him from sinking back into that morass of survivor’s guilt.
It scares him to think of how much he needs her. The big, bad Time Lord, afraid of a little human girl and the hold she has over his hearts. He’ll do anything to keep her with him, promise anything, if only he can erase what he’s done. That is impossible, though. She’ll want to go back home and he doesn’t know what he’ll do when she asks him.
He can refuse, simply refuse, and never go back to Earth again. He is the designated driver after all. It isn’t as if she can fly the ship. She will have to stay if he wishes it. His jaw twitches. As much as he can’t let her go, he can’t force her to stay either, not if she doesn’t want to be with him. All he’d do if he did that is snuff out the very light that kept him from teetering more closely to the edge of his own darkness.
No, he won’t force her to stay against her will. Perhaps he can convince her, though. He pulls the key out of his pocket, looks at it and hopes that she’ll accept it back from him, accept him back in her life, forgive him his sins. There is only one way he’s going to find out. He sighs and rises to his feet. And if she refuses him, he can be strong before her, hide how he truly feels, keep his emotions in check.
He hovers in the hallway, pacing back and forth outside her bedroom door, trying to think of what he will say, what he will do when he opens it. He’s not exactly quiet about it as he organizes his thoughts and she must hear him for after a while she opens the door just that few inches she usually leaves it at night and retreats. He continues to pace, eyeing the opening she has left for him, summoning the courage to push open her door.
He tries, but he can’t face her if it means losing her and he walks away from her for the second time that day. Her voice stops him. “Doctor.” It is soft, filled with anxiety and pain and fear and hurt and it nearly breaks him in half.
He stills, says her name, wishes he could block out her grief as it radiates from her body. He doesn’t know what he is expecting, but it isn’t what she says next. “You died,” she tells his retreating back. “You left me.” He turns around in stunned amazement and stares at her as her body starts to shake. “You left me and you died,” she repeats.
He backtracks hastily, tries to catch her gaze that she keeps turned from him, and he raises one hand to her face, his palm cradling her cheek and jaw and forcing her gaze to his. “I won’t leave you,” he says softly, all his resolve to keep his emotions under control crumbling to nothing in the face of her shattered eyes. “I won’t. I didn’t mean it.” He keeps his voice from breaking, just, but his hearts are in his eyes.
For seconds she leans into his hand and then she pulls away from him and retreats to the bed, crawling into it and wrapping the blankets tightly around herself. She does not ask him to leave, turns off the light. “Should I go?” he asks hesitantly.
“Do what you want,” she replies tension thick in her voice. He wonders just exactly what she means by that, knows in that instant what he wants, what he’s always wanted, but has been too afraid to take. Or to give.
He undresses and slides gingerly into place. He reaches for her, but her body is stiff and she does not let herself be moved, does not let him pull her to him. She allows his presence beside her, but she does not allow his touch and a painful knot of anxiety forms slowly in his stomach as he realizes just how desperately he needs to touch her.
“Rose. Please…” He is not a man who begs and yet he thinks that at this moment he would fall upon his knees before her if only she would forgive him. He cannot stand what he has done, not just because it has caused her to deny him, but because he has hurt her so deeply with it. She remains still, does not answer, does not bend and he thinks that he might break, but he can hear the change in her respiration, the telltale signs that she is crying and he cannot bear it.
Her thoughts are louder up close and he cannot block them now. It surprises him that her grief for her father is overwhelmed in her mind by her grief that he left her and the devastation that one simple choice has wreaked upon her psyche. She still does not believe he will not do it again. She is grieving for him. Her overriding feeling is that she lost the man she loves today and that man is him. Hope rises up in his heart.
He turns her bodily towards him despite her effort to stay still, yanks the blankets out from between them and clasps her to him. For once he hopes that comfort is his to give. The softness of her body presses into the hardness of his own and he is very much aware of why he almost never allows this type of contact in the bed and marvels at his own stupidity in pulling her to him like this as his body responds to hers emphatically. She gasps at his reaction, not just his erection, but the fierceness with which he brings her towards him, the way he lets his hands roam across her body as he never has before.
His fingers seek out her skin, slide under her pajama top and up towards her breasts. He feels her tense up, her sudden intake of breath, her confusion. He pulls her even closer, wants to kiss her, thinks to do so but her body is not compliant. She does not melt into him as he expects, does not offer herself the way he thought she would now that he’s seen she loves him and is finally willing to offer her himself.
He slows the franticness of his touches then stills them completely at her lack of response. He realizes that tonight she does not exude the scent of arousal, that she does not want this from him right now, that her heart is racing, but that it is because she is…afraid. Of him?
He smells the fear on her as it strengthens, sending out flares from her mind that are deafening. The very thought horrifies him, that he has reduced Rose to fear, his brilliant, bold, magnificent, fearless Rose. That not only has he reduced her to it, but he has made her feel it in regards to him.
It isn’t that she doesn’t love him. It isn’t even that she doesn’t want him, because he can hear in her thoughts that she longs for him, even if she does not at this moment want him. It’s because she doesn’t trust him with her heart and has become afraid to trust him with her body. She’s too afraid he’ll leave her after she does and that she’ll never recover if he does.
He winces at her fears because his actions today have made her feelings all too justified. He left her today, left her alone because she did something horrible and yet so very, very human and loving. She reached out to save a life, a life that shouldn’t have been saved, but a life worth saving nonetheless; a life that she felt so much for. Her thoughts are all too clear in the darkness. She is afraid to keep loving him; afraid to give him this because her heart says he will leave her and if he does, it will hurt her even more than this pain right here, right now.
He’s blamed her, called her stupid, and yet he never should have because it was he who’d been stupid, he who’d put the temptation in front of her, he who’d delivered her to the point in time where she would not think, only act, and then he that walked away from her in a time not her own, abandoned her. Abandoned her to Reapers. He could have lost her, did lose her in a way.
It cannot be about what he is suddenly willing to give; it cannot be about what he has realized he wants. Gently he pushes at her shoulder, waits until she turns away from him and carefully eases up behind her. The tension finally leaves her body and she relaxes against him at last and as her tears begin to calm she falls finally into a deep, exhausted sleep.
“I won’t leave you, Rose,” he whispers into the darkness. He leans back, reaches into his jacket and takes out the key, manages to loop it around her head and shift her, put it in place round her neck without waking her, pull her hair from the chain and lightly kiss the back of her neck. He nestles the key over her heart, where it belongs. Where he hopes one day he’ll truly belong. “I could never leave you.” He wishes he could prove it to her. He knows one way, only one way that might convince her that he won’t leave her behind ever again. In the morning when she wakes up he is there.
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