A Sky Without Zeppelins: Chapter Thirty

[amberfocus]

                                                        original banner art by theotherwillow

A/N:  Rose reasserts her independence a bit with Jonathon.  After she goes home, Jonathon has another strange dream and thinks about everything he has lost and the bits and pieces of his "past" that he can remember.  Recognizable dialog is from The End of the World.

                                                                           Chapter Thirty

Rose wakes in the snug cocoon that is a combination of Jonathon’s arms and his duvet. Warmth radiates from her body and she is more content than she can remember being at any time in her life before meeting him. She edges away from him just enough to give herself room to stretch. As her body moves against his he stirs, his big brown eyes blink slowly open.

“Rose? What time is it?” he asks.

“I don’t know. It’s dark.” She wiggles away from him a bit more and looks over his shoulder at the alarm clock. The vivid green glow from the numbers reads just past eleven. “11:03,” she tells him.

“I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” he says on a rather large yawn.

“Me, either,” she admits a bit sheepishly. “I had every intention of working on my paper more after…that.”

“I thought you were going to let me return the favor,” he says in a warm, sensual voice. Rose blushes. She’s still not secure enough in her own sexuality to prevent those blushes from rising up.

“I—I really ought to just go home,” she tells him.

“If that’s what you want,” he replies earnestly, “I’ll drive you home.”

“You can just walk me down to the bus stop,” she says.

“Rose, I don’t like you riding those buses at night,” Jonathon says.

Rose rolls her eyes. “I’ve been riding those buses alone at night since I was sixteen years old. I know how to take care of myself, Jonathon.”

“I worry about you. I can’t help it. It’s dark and there’s all manner of strange people on the buses at night,” he says.

“No more so than during the day,” Rose replies tartly. “It’s safe enough. I always sit up near the driver if I’m alone. I know them all by name. Anyway, the real danger is waiting alone at the stops in the dark. You can wait with me if you like. I’ll only have the one stop to wait at. It’s not like I’m coming from school and having to make a transfer. The stop near Temmel’s has a bus that goes straight past the estate. It’s well lit.”

“Why won’t you just let me take you home?” he asks in frustration.

“We’ve had this conversation before,” Rose begins.

“Yeah, when we were brand new, but you’ve been letting me drive you since then,” Jonathon interrupts.

“After dates, I have. This,” she gestures to the two of them and the bed, “wasn’t exactly a date.”

“Rose,” he says. “I just want--.”

“I don’t want to become dependent on you,” she bursts out. “I love you, Jonathon, I do, but I’ve been doing things like getting myself home on public transport for a long time and I’m perfectly capable of doing so. I don’t see any reason why I should stop now just because we’re shagging.”

“I’m not trying to take away your independence, Rose. I love it that you are so very much your own person. I just…I like having that extra bit of time to spend with you, and it makes me feel better to make sure you’ve actually gotten safely into your flat,” he explains.

“Tell you what. I’ll call you as soon as I get home,” she reassures. “Then you won’t have to spend the night worrying about me.”

Jonathon sighs. “All right. I can live with that.”

“Good,” she says. Rose goes in for a brief kiss to seal the deal but when she starts to pull away Jonathon pulls her back to him. His tongue sweeps against the seal of her lips and she parts them, allowing him in. The kiss is slow and leisurely, as if he has all the time in the world and this is how he wants to spend it. Rose finds she has quite lost her breath by the time he releases her.

“What time does your bus come?” he asks.

“There’s one at 11:45,” she says. He turns enough to look at the clock. It now reads 11:15.

“Not quite enough time,” he says a trifle petulantly.

“No, but there will be between the end of work tomorrow and our dinner date with Donna and Mr. Lumin,” she promises and he perks up.

Jonathon crawls out of bed and heads to the living room to fetch their clothing while Rose uses the loo, takes her birth control pill, and brushes out her hair. By the time she is done he is fully clothed. He watches her intently as she struggles into her clothes and she can tell he’s thinking about just how each piece came off earlier.

“Quit looking at me like that or I’m never gonna leave,” she says reproachfully.

“Who wants you to leave?” he asks.

Rose shakes her head. “I can’t stay over every night. You know that.” She bends down and retrieves her school books and notebooks from the floor and packs them into her bag.

“Doesn’t stop me from wanting it,” he says.

“I know. Me, either.” She hugs him tightly to her and she can feel him hardening against her stomach. She pretends not to notice. A quick glance at the clock tells her it’s already 11:25. “Come on. I don’t want to miss my bus.”

They spend the time riding down in the lift kissing and don’t notice when they reach the lobby and the doors open. An admonishing cough from the receptionist brings them back to themselves and with an embarrassed blush at being caught Jonathon says, “Evening, Gretchen.”

“Hello, Dr. Smith,” she says in return. Her eyes move to Rose and she smiles.

“This is my girlfriend Rose Tyler,” he says. “She’ll be about quite often.”

Gretchen nods. “Good evening, Miss Tyler.”

“Rose, please,” Rose says. “Lovely to meet you.”

“Likewise.”

They make quick, polite good-byes and then leave the building. The walk to Rose’s stop takes ten minutes and they arrive with five to spare. No one else is waiting and they have the little shelter to themselves. Without a word they resume their lift activity, Jonathon kissing her so deeply that she isn’t sure her legs are going to be able to function by the time he lets her go.

The squealing of brakes alerts them to the presence of the bus and they break apart. “See you tomorrow, Rose,” he tells her.

“Good-bye. Love you,” Rose says.

“Love you, too,” he returns as she climbs up onto the steps.

“Hello, Helen,” Rose says flashing her bus pass to the driver.

“Hello, Rose,” Helen returns. “New boyfriend?” she asks with casual interest.

“Oh. You saw that?”

“You were snogging him in plain sight,” she reminds Rose.

“Yeah. We’re together,” Rose admits. She collapses into the foremost seat.

“He’s quite the looker,” Helen says.

Rose laughs and pulls out her notebook and pen. “I suppose he is rather pretty. But his mind…he’s the smartest man I’ve ever met.”

“Well, but he’d have to be to keep up with you,” Helen replies.

“I suppose,” Rose agrees with a laugh.

“Homework?” Helen asks.

“Yeah, I’m working on a paper for comp tech,” she says.

“I’ll leave you to it then.”

Rose sinks back in her seat and before long her pen is scratching across the paper laying out her thoughts in a clear and concise manner. She is so absorbed in what she is doing that she is surprised when Helen interrupts her.

“Your stop, Rose,” she says.

Rose hastily gathers her stuff together and says thank you and good-night. She hurries across the estate and up several flights of stairs. Despite her reassurances to Jonathon that she was fine getting herself home, she has no intention of dawdling in the area in the middle of the night.

Once inside the flat she goes straight to the phone and calls Jonathon. “Hey, it’s me. I made it home safe,” she tells him.

“I know you think I’m being silly…”

“No, I don’t,” she tells him.  "What I think is that you care about me."

“Now I know you're home safe I can sleep,” he says. “Night, Rose.”

“Night.”

She hangs up the phone and heads to her room. She knocks lightly on her mother’s door. “Mum, I’m home.”

“Okay,” comes the muffled response.

Rose dumps her school bag at her desk and then gets ready for bed. She’s too exhausted to do much more than take off her makeup and wash her face before she collapses into bed. She double checks that her alarm clock is set properly and drifts off to sleep with thoughts of making love to Jonathon carrying her into dreamland.



Jonathon cries out in his sleep as strange images dance through his mind. His dreams have become bizarre since meeting Rose and this night is no different. All he can see is the image of a planet that has exploded and he and Rose are standing on a platform looking out an enormous window watching even larger pieces of rock as they spin off into space. He hears her words as they are seared into his heart. They are spoken in a voice so tiny, so overwhelmed, so very young, that she doesn’t feel quite like the woman he has come to know. Yet it is clearly his lover standing there beside him.

“The end of the Earth. It’s gone. And we were too busy saving ourselves no one saw it go. All those years, all that history, and no one was even looking…”

He reaches for her hand then and he thinks, I shouldn’t have shocked her this way, not the first time out. I just wanted her to realize what it means to lose everything, give her a taste of what it is to feel what I feel, so she'll know, so she'll understand a bit better who I am. Out loud he says, “Come with me,” and leads her away down some featureless corridor and suddenly they’re in a room the color of his chunk of coral, in a place that says home to him in a way nothing else ever has. His hearts race as Rose clutches tightly to his hand and he wonders if it’s all too much, if he’s going to lose her when he’s only just found her.

He wakes in a cold sweat, his definitely single heart beating faster than the strange double beat he had felt in his dream. The images, so shockingly vivid a moment ago, are fading away into nothingness, but he doesn’t think he will ever forget her words or the way she said them.

He flips on the light, opens the drawer in his nightstand, and pulls out a journal. He’d started keeping it soon after he met Rose and the strange dreams had begun. It only has two entries in it so far. It’s not much of a dream journal or any kind of a journal yet. It isn’t like the full one still sitting in his suitcase that holds pieces of a mostly forgotten past. He doesn’t even know if writing them down serves any real purpose, but he scratches pen over paper just the same and records what he can remember. He makes a little sketch of the platform they had been standing on but when he tries to remember the room he’d led Rose into, the room that felt like home, he can’t recall a single detail other than the color. He gives up trying.

Every dream so far has bordered on the fantastic and each one Rose has been present in. He supposes that has to do with how important she has become to him in such a short amount of time. He’s never had one of these odd dreams when she’s stayed over and this is the first one that’s come to him since they became lovers. It’s probably nothing, though, just his subconscious trying to work out the weird things that have happened to him since finding Rose and having Lumin reveal his secrets.

When he’s done putting down the little he does recall he sticks the journal back in the drawer and shuts it with enough force to make the stack of magazines slip and the piece of coral tumble off onto the carpet. He looks at it for a moment remembering the last time he touched it and how it had shocked him then goes into the bathroom to retrieve a cloth. He puts it over the coral and uses it to pick it up then sits back down on the bed.

Jonathon turns the cloth over in his hands and studies the chunk of dead sea-life. He has never looked at it in great detail even though it’s something he’s had for most of his adult life. He’s touched it a lot, used it as a worry stone and considered it a good luck charm, but he’s never really paid attention to how it looks. He can’t be entirely sure that its appearance is changing. It’s always been a sort of orangey pink color, but he’s not sure it’s always been quite that shade of orangey pink.

He is almost one hundred percent certain that it feels heavier than it used to. It doesn’t appear to be larger at first glance but when he looks away from it, it feels like it takes up more space in his hands than it should. He puts it back down on the stack of magazines. He knows this is utter nonsense, that it’s just a piece of coral from the Inner Australasian Reef, a souvenir from a dive he did there. It can’t be more than that. Obviously his dream has disturbed him far more than he thought.

But as he lays back down and pulls the covers back around him he tries to remember that particular dive. He knows that it happened after the accident that took most of his memories and all of his family away because two years had passed before he was willing to go out in the water again. It was his first solo dive and the coral had always represented him conquering his greatest fear and defeating the very thing that took away his parents and wife and—he closes his eyes tightly—his son.

It has been so long since he’s allowed himself to think about his son. Somehow losing his parents, even losing his wife, didn’t have the same impact on him as the death of little Adam Richard Smith. In the beginning he’d missed his boy, missed him so much some days the grief about tore him in half. Now, it still hurts to think of him, but time and distance have made the grief tolerable. He still has hope a day will come when he can remember the happiness the boy had given him and forget about the pain of losing him, but even that may be too much because he can’t remember much more than shadows of that time.

They’d called him Adric; that much he remembers clearly. It was the first bits of his first and middle names, because Jonathon’s father was named Adam and Elisabeth’s father had been where Richard came from. It had been less confusing that way even if the nickname was somewhat odd. He thought about the way his child had looked. Elisabeth’s blue eyes, his own crazy brown hair, Richard’s nose, his own mother’s cheekbones and smile and his father’s rather large ears. Everyone had said he’d grow into them. Elisabeth said if he didn’t his hair would be long enough to hide them.

Thinking of Adric often led to thinking of his former father-in-law. Elisabeth’s mum had died when she was just a little girl, she’d been raised by her dad, and Jonathon had been like the son Richard had never had until the accident. He usually tried not to think about Elisabeth’s father at all these days, but thinking of his son inevitably brought his mind around to thoughts of the man. Adric had been his only grandchild and they’d lived nearby. They had been so close once, close enough that his son’s name was almost Richard Adam and not Adam Richard, but all that had changed when Elisabeth and Adric died.

It had never occurred to him that Richard wouldn’t want to see him, that there wouldn’t be one other person to share his grief with. Once he’d been well enough, the first thing he’d done was to go and see Richard and it had been awful. The man had blamed Jonathon for the death of his daughter and grandchild, even though Jonathon had been in no way responsible for it.

None of it had mattered, though. Richard Yana had lost his only living relatives, practically his whole world, and he had focused on Jonathon as the reason for that loss. Jonathon had tried once or twice over the years to see the man again, but it had been five years after the accident that he’d made the decision to let it go forever. He had finally come to the conclusion that it wasn’t that Richard blamed him so much for what they had both lost, but that he was a too painful reminder of it.

Then nearly two years ago he’d gotten the news that the old man had died. He had still been down as next of kin, and he’d been contacted to make funeral arrangements. Richard had driven so many people away since Elisabeth’s death that Jonathon was the only one to attend the man’s funeral, the only one to grieve for the loss of what once was and would never be again.

It had been a strange coincidence that Richard had died on the anniversary of his family’s death. Jonathon thinks maybe the old man had finally grieved himself to death as there had been no apparent cause of death other then old age. He is buried in the same graveyard, a stone’s throw from the rest of Jonathon’s family. Jonathon hasn’t been back there since that day.

Jonathon sighs and pushes the memories away. He finds it ironic that the ones he wants to remember, the ones before the accident, are always so shrouded in fog and the ones he wishes he could forget, the painful ones of living on after everything he knew and loved was gone are the ones he wishes he could forget. Really, he hadn’t even come back to life until this year. The grief has held him down for so long. Moving from Cardiff, getting the job at Illuminate, meeting Rose…it has all combined into some kind of powerful hope for his future that is making the pain from his past begin to heal.

He hasn’t told Rose much about his past. She knows about his wife, knows his parents are dead, too, but he’s never brought up his son. He wonders if she’ll go with him to Scotland on the rapidly approaching anniversary of their deaths. Maybe he can tell her then. Or maybe he can just show her, explain it to her while they stand over the graves. He hopes that facing his past with Rose by his side will make it somehow easier. Along with hope, she gives him strength. 

Ch. 31:  http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/187248.html 

Comments

[madeelly.livejournal.com]

I love all the references to Doctor Who (I mean, of course, it's a Doctor Who fic, but I just loved that his son was named Adric. That made me very, very happy). I also love that Rose isn't becoming totally dependent on Jonathan (I hate it when a girl does that, especially in stories), and I still love them together. I love that he's having dreams, and I love that it's from that moment in "End of the World," because that was a great moment.

I almost forgot how much I loved this fic, and I'm so glad I've caught up. I've been writing a little too, which has made me happy. But I love this fic more. <3 Thanks for posting! Wonderful work, and Happy New Year!!

[amberfocus.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I have so much fun slipping those references in there and I am so glad you are enjoying the story so much. I'm glad you're doing some writing again. I've missed your stuff!