amberfocus | Fragile (1/2)

A/N: Second in the Ten branch of the Moments in Darkness series, the story takes place before and after New Earth and is a direct sequel to Guilt found here: (ch. 1) http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/151012.html and (ch. 2) http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/152209.html. And of course there is the whole earlier part of the series of Moments in Darkness that is with Nine that takes place before this which begins here with the story Need: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/?skip=20&tag=moments+in+darkness and then scroll down to the bottom of the page. It isn't necessary to read the Nine stories first (I know there are a lot of them) as long as you know that Rose got pregnant by Nine shortly before Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways and hasn't told him yet. Okay, and you may need a tissue or two. Serious angst as usual with most of this series.

Chapter One: Porcelain Heart

The Doctor’s uncertainty is very strong as he waits for Rose to join him in the TARDIS. She’s already two hours and twenty-two minutes and thirty-three seconds late. He’s not used to this, not used to his stomach churning or of feeling afraid that despite their words of the night before, she simply won’t show up. She’ll change her mind and she won’t tell him. She’ll just expect him to know that she’s leaving him, that she’s never coming back, that she doesn’t want him anymore because he’s changed and that things will truly never be the same again.

He’s never deserved her, he knows that, yet he aches for her, for every moment that she isn’t in his presence, isn’t in his arms. His Rose, she has always been his Rose even before they both knew it, and yet now he’s not sure she will ever be his Rose again. His hands clench hard at his sides, his fingernails digging into his palms. He won’t go looking for her. He won’t. He has his pride. Maybe it’s the only thing he has left.

He adjusts a few things on the console, reaches up and rubs the time rotor gently, feels the reassurances from his ship that she will never leave him, that she will always love him, and that Rose will, too, just give her time. He smiles faintly hoping with everything in him that the ship is right, but she is late, so late and he finds his hand reaching out for the phone, his fingers brushing it’s surface before he snatches them back. He wants her here now desperately but he will not beg.

His eyes fall on the monitor and relief washes through him as he sees her appear lugging a bag nearly as big as she is. Mickey is trailing behind her with a scowl on his face and he grabs the bag out of her hands and carries it himself. It looks like he’s scolding her. Mickey can’t still be upset that she’s leaving? He knows that there is nothing left between them, doesn’t he?

At the TARDIS doors she hugs her mum good-bye while Mickey opens the doors and pitches her bag into the ship. His stomach turns over and he slams his fist into the console when Mickey kisses Rose good-bye on the mouth, but at least she has the grace to push him away from her with a stern warning to behave himself.

She enters the ship then and he can’t help but smile at her despite his roiling emotions because she is here and his again. His hands are desperate to start the dematerialization sequence, to whisk her away from London before she has more time to think, to change her mind, to leave him. She responds to his smile with the truest one he has seen on her face since he changed. It lights her up from the very inside.

“So where are we going?” she asks him.

“Further than we’ve ever gone before.”

Rose watches sadly from beside the Doctor as the Chip/Cassandra clone sinks to the floor and dies in the arms of the fully human Cassandra. She is usually compassionate enough to feel some small bit of sympathy for others but after everything that woman did to her today, the horror of what has happened to her mind, Rose cannot. Still it has left her with an odd melancholy that is difficult to shake off as they enter the TARDIS.

“Think I’m going to get a bit of sleep,” she says. “It was a long day and I’m tired.”

“I should scan you, make sure Cassandra’s possession didn’t give you brain damage,” the Doctor says.

“I’m fine!” Rose snaps recoiling at the idea of the Doctor scanning her for anything. She’s not ready to tell him about the baby yet and she doesn’t know if his scans might be harmful to a fetus. Or if what he does might not identify the fact that she’s pregnant. She needs time, time to adjust to the changes, time to find the right words to say to him, time to be sure that he still loves her. After some of his words today and some of his actions, she isn’t entirely sure.

“You may not be fine. There’s the very real possibility that you’re hurt!” he snaps back.

“Like you care,” she bites back angrily.

“What?” he asks in pure astonishment.

“You abandoned me today!”

“What?”

“You made your snarky remark about me looking bad to the cat people and then walked off and left me.”

“I never said you looked bad!” he defends himself. “I said all pink and yellow. And you are all pink and yellow!”

“It’s the way you said it, though. Looking down on me again, like you used to before we became—.” She cuts herself off before she can say the word lovers.

“I never looked down on you!”

“Beautiful, considering you're a human. Not bad, for a stupid ape!” she throws out.

His mouth falls open. “I haven’t…Rose, I haven’t…not for ages. How can you still think I feel that way? After everything?”

“I don’t know how you feel! You left me alone. He never would have! And if you hadn’t done I wouldn’t have gotten stuck in that basement with Cassandra, she wouldn’t have…have raped my mind! She wouldn’t have forced me to kiss you!”

Rose’s hand flies up over her mouth. She hadn’t meant to say that. Her eyes grow huge as she looks at him. “Oh,” he says very quietly. The light in his eyes goes out and they fill with bitterness. He doesn’t say another word to her. He simply turns his back on her and sends the ship hurtling into the Vortex and then he turns and walks away, leaving her alone for the second time that day.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she whispers brokenly into the empty console room. Tears escape her eyes and she hangs her head. There is no way that she had meant to equate the horror of what Cassandra had done to her mind with kissing the Doctor. It is true that she hadn’t been ready to kiss the Doctor, to resume that part of their relationship yet, but she hadn’t found it abhorrent.

When he had managed to get over his shock at Cassandra’s sneak attack, she’d felt him responding to her aggression. As trapped as she’d been in her own mind, she’d still been aware of the adrenaline coursing through her body and infusing the schoolgirl infatuation that had appeared after their lovely picnic earlier with new life. She had felt her body responding to the way his tongue and teeth had moved against her own, felt its betrayal at kissing a man who isn’t quite the man she wants to be with and yet is.

He is, she’d noted, as good a kisser now as he’d been before, if quite a bit gentler. Yet at the time she’d been too angry with him for not noticing she wasn’t herself to allow herself to fully enjoy it. She didn’t want to enjoy it. She isn’t ready to have enjoyed it, damn it! And Cassandra had gloried in forcing the issue, all delighted in her newfound theft of Rose’s body to do it in, of finding yet another way to punish Rose. Rose is only relieved that she had kept the secret of her pregnancy firmly guarded from that monster.

It hadn’t been easy. She’d tormented her mentally worse than she had done out loud when she’d switched to the Doctor’s body. There had been truth in the other woman’s words, though. Rose had been looking. And she does like the way he looks now. It was true. It is true. His smile appeals to her more than she wants to admit and his soft brown eyes are capable of making her start to melt, but it is very much a surface thing. It isn’t…well, it isn’t quite how Cassandra had made it seem. He is attractive, yes, in a dorky, quirky sort of way, and filled with schoolboy charm, but it is not in the deeply sexual way he’d been before. When he looks at her it is no longer predatory. It doesn’t cause the near immediate arousal those steely blue eyes had. And that is what she craves.

She will get used to it. He is pretty and she knows the luck of the draw could have made him look ridiculous or old or stodgy. She’s seen old images of him preserved in the TARDIS library. He'd shown her on the way to New Earth when he'd explained to her more fully about regeneration. She definitely can’t complain about how he’s turned out. Only…her heart is complaining. He is alive and that should be the only thing that matters to her. And she hates that she is too damn shallow to let it be.

“I just want him back,” she whispers. “I want my baby’s father back.” And that is a stupid thing for her to be feeling when he’s already here.

With a sigh of frustration she heads towards her old bedroom and finds that the Doctor has placed her giant duffle bag onto her bed. Not their bed together. Not that she’s ready to be lovers again but even before then they were sleeping in the same bed. And she’s not sure she knows how to sleep without his arms around her. She doesn’t even know how to ask him if he’ll be okay with that much when it’s so clear he wants everything.

She unpacks it quietly, being careful to hide the bottle of prenatal vitamins under her jeans. She’d picked them up at the chemist, had it only been this morning? It had made her late getting back to the ship and she’d thought the Doctor would be grumpy with her for not showing up on time like his old self would have been, but he’d just given her that smile. He’d been so happy to see her, so hopeful. And she’d thought maybe it would be a good thing; that the misunderstandings between them might lessen now. That thought is shot to hell after their latest exchange of words.

Rose makes her way into her bathroom and turns on the shower, quickly stripping off her clothes and stepping into the hot water. She cries for everything she has lost and every dream that has disappeared. At last she gets herself under control and tells herself firmly that her Doctor is still alive and she needs to buck up and stop grieving for what can never be again and start accepting what is. And she needs to apologize to him for hurting him the way she did. She only hopes he’s willing to accept it.

Every instinct inside the Doctor is telling him to run. Run as far and as fast away from Rose as he can possibly get. Run before he gets hurt any worse than he already is. He fights it hard because it’s Rose and he needs her even if she can no longer admit that she needs him. His fingers ache to touch her; his body needs to hold her. His mind is in more turmoil than it was right after he regenerated. He paces the corridors trying to walk off some of his nervous energy.

He had thought things were going to be okay. They’d been so happy when they’d first landed on New Earth. She’d been ecstatic about travelling again. When she’d said she loved travelling with him, he had been pretty sure that what she had been trying to say was that she still loved him. She’d been so giddy with delight as they’d run across the bluff and while they’d had their little picnic, talking about where they wanted to go next, where he wanted to take her. He’d told her he still wanted to take her to the planet Barcelona and she’d smiled at him so freely as they’d lain in the soft grass on his coat, ostensibly watching the cars fly overhead, but in reality sneaking peaks at each other. It had felt, almost, like the flush of new love.

But it has all come to naught. She thinks…how could she even think he’d abandon her on purpose? He’d thought she was right behind him and true he could have opened the lift doors back up again as soon as they closed, but he’d figured she knew where they were going and could get herself up to Ward 26 in the other lift. Rose is independent and smart and fully capable. He hadn’t counted on her being kidnapped by Cassandra, who was supposed to be dead. How could he have known? He isn’t one to look ahead into his own personal time line. But Cassandra had been alive and she’d used that life to hurt his Rose.

The name feels bitter in his mind. He hadn’t liked it when she’d gone into his own mind. He’d fought her tooth and nail in a way Rose obviously hadn’t been able to do. Rose had called it rape, what Cassandra had done to her mind, and just like so many victims of that crime she is refusing to allow him to check for damages, is just trying to sweep it under the grating as if by pretending it had never happened she can make it go away.

He knows he’ll have to get her to talk, try to get her to allow an examination of her brain, and maybe find a counselor to help her through this if she can’t talk to him. She is already lashing out, trying to hurt the person she loves most. Or does she still love him? Had that died with his last body? He had been figuring that she still loved him underneath her confusion, was just needing time, but her abject horror at being forced to kiss him has him feeling sick inside. She hadn’t wanted that kiss, hadn’t wanted to have to kiss him and had felt as violated by it as by what Cassandra had done to her mind.

He’d had to walk away from her words in the console room, because he couldn’t dare risk making her any worse by allowing his hurt to show. And he does hurt. Oh, how it hurts him that his precious girl no longer feels the same way about him when his need for her is stronger than it has ever been before. He never should have allowed himself to open his hearts up this way. He always loses everything. Rose will be no different.

Ch. 2: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/164725.html