amberfocus | Pride: Chapter Two

Title: Pride (2/?)
Series: Moments in Darkness
Author:

amberfocus
Characters/Pairings: Ten/Rose, Mickey Smith, Jackie Tyler
Genre: Romance, Angst, Baby!fic
Rating: Teen
Beta:

amyo67
Summary: Things still aren't right between the Doctor and Rose after his betrayal with Reinette and he fears they never will be. Rose wants to trust him again for the sake of the baby, but she's not sure she can. Tired of being a helpless observer in their love life, Mickey decides it's time to move on. Thirteenth in the Moments in Darkness series and follows on from Forgotten. Set after Girl in the Fireplace. Here's a link to the first story in the series: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/36302.html. All stories are now linked to the following story in the series.

Ch. 1: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/358910.html

Chapter Two: A Little More Conversation

“I’ve cocked things up,” the Doctor says finally. He’s holding Rose’s superphone and he’s actually dialed Jackie Tyler who is waiting impatiently for him to say something more than, “Hello, this is the Doctor,” and, “No, she’s fine…well, healthy and alive, anyway.”

“And what do you expect me to do about it?” Jackie asks. Her voice is gentler than he could have dreamed when he’d first made the decision to call Rose’s mother after hemming and hawing about it for, well, ironically, five and a half hours. It could have been worse though, it could have been five and a half days, the true amount of time Rose had waited for him. He closes his eyes and swallows hard.

“I don’t expect you to do anything…I just…I needed…I needed to talk to someone, Jackie.”

“And you don’t think that someone should be Rose?”

“Of course it should be Rose!” he snaps. Jackie makes a disagreeable noise on the other end of the line at his show of temper. “Sorry,” he says running his hand through his hair and shifting from foot to foot. Talking to Jackie like this isn’t as hard as it should be, as it would have been before, but it’s still hard enough. “But Rose…I don’t think she’s ever going to forgive me for not being the man she fell in love with anymore.”

“She forgave you for that last time you were home,” Jackie points out. “I was there.”

“Yeah, well, that was before.”

“Before what?”

“There was this woman,” he began.

“If you’ve cheated on my pregnant daughter, time and space will not be big enough for you to get away from me, Time Lord!” Jackie Tyler growls.

“I didn’t. I mean, it wasn’t like that!” he protests. “I mean—.”

“Just what was it like?” Jackie demands in a tone of voice that makes him drop one hand to cover his genitals as if she could reach through the space waves and knee him in the groin.

“This woman threw herself at me and I didn’t manage to stop it in time and Rose found out that she’d kissed me and I—.”

“And you being male and not thinking things through kissed her back, didn’t you?” Jackie asks.

“Only for a few seconds,” he admits sheepishly.

“So you kissed some random woman and now Rose won’t forgive you, is that the gist of it?” Jackie asks.

“Was kissed by,” he stresses. “Only she wasn’t random. I mean, she was…well, she was a courtesan at King Louis the XV’s court.”

“You made out with a French hooker?” Jackie asks, as usual boiling everything down to its base elements.

“No, that’s not what she was! She was the king’s mistress, highly educated, and part of high society. And at the time the kiss happened she wasn’t even his mistress yet. She was a young lady, barely grown, and—.”

“So, Rose’s age, only rich and refined and beautiful if she could turn the king’s head,” Jackie replies. “And I’m assuming very intelligent for her time period.”

“Well, yes.”

“Doctor, Rose is very insecure about where she comes from. We’re doing all right now, but she grew up poor and some people looked down on her because of it. She didn’t have beautiful clothes and some upper crust education. She doesn’t speak with refinement and proper elocution. She didn’t even get her A-levels. She didn’t learn about the arts of pleasing a man from French courtesans, she learned about sex in the back seat of a car with a wannabe rock star who took her for granted and knocked her around a bit and then cheated and left her holding eight hundred pounds of debt. If you took up with a woman who’s all the things she thinks she’s not—.”

“What are you talking about? Rose is beautiful and so smart and I don’t care if she grew up poor! Money means nothing to a Time Lord, Jackie. And speaking of nothing, that kiss meant nothing. It was impulsive and stupid and it can’t even compare to the way things are when I kiss Rose. Believe me, that woman knew nothing about pleasing this man compared to Rose. Rose can bring me to—.”

“Don’t even go there!” snaps Jackie.

“Erm…sorry. Forgot who I was talking to. But the point, the point is, Jackie, that Rose is…Rose is everything to me and I’ve gone and thrown it all away in a moment of idiocy. I can’t take it back. I want to take it back. I want…all I want is Rose and this baby. I love her…and I can’t lose her. I won’t. I’ll move heaven and Earth and any other planet in the universe to keep her!”

“Then hang up the phone, you big lemon, and tell her so. Talking to me isn’t going to fix a thing,” she says.

“I don’t know how to start.”

“Start by telling her what you just told me. Now hang up the phone and go fix things with the mother of your child.”

“All right, Jackie. I’ll try,” he says. He clicks off the phone and turns around to find Rose standing in the doorway staring at him in shock.

“You called my mum,” Rose says.

The Doctor rubs at the back of his neck. “Didn’t know what else to do. You won’t talk to me about this.”

“It’s hard,” Rose says. “It hurts to think about, let alone talk about.”

“We’ve got to, Rose. I can’t bear this space between us much longer,” he says looking at her with his heart in his eyes. “I miss you so much, every single day. You’re right here, but at the same time, you’re not and I…I just miss you. I miss us. The way we used to be. The way we were starting to be again.”

“I miss you, too, Doctor.”

“Then why can’t we just—.”

“You shattered my trust,” Rose says. “We just can’t go back to how it was before, pretend it all never happened. It doesn’t work like that. I wish it could. I wish I didn’t have to remember this; that I could wake up tomorrow and there would be no Reinette. There would be no other woman.”

“There was never another woman, Rose. Just…really bad judgment.” He sighs. “I could, you know.”

“Could what?”

“Make it so you didn’t have to remember. Erase it from your memory.”

For a moment she is tempted. “Mickey would still know. So would you.”

“I can make myself forget. Mickey, too.”

She is quiet for a long time. Finally she says, “No. As tempting as it is to take the easy way out, you and I, we need to figure out how to work through this, not hide from it, not forget it ever happened. We’ve got a child to raise together and life isn’t going to always be easy for her. If we can’t work through our problems and fix them, how are we ever going to teach our daughter to do it?”

“You mean you still want to raise this baby with me? You’re not leaving me?” he asks.

Rose’s eyes get very large. “Leaving you?” she asks in surprise.

“I messed up, Rose. I…I ch-cheated. How can you stay with me?” he asks. He feels so open and vulnerable and it’s scaring the life out of him.

“If I was going to leave you, I would have done it after that,” she says quietly.

“But we haven’t been back to Earth.”

“I would have asked to go back if I wanted to end it for good,” she tells him.

“And you don’t?” Rose lets one hand drift across her belly and silence settles over them as she thinks about her answer.

“You didn’t sleep with her,” Rose says after a while. “And you didn’t love her.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“And it’ll never happen again.” It’s a flat statement. She’s not asking him to agree with her, she’s stating it as a fact.

“Never,” he says anyway.

“Then I’m staying,” she says. “This baby needs both of us.”

“Not for us, then,” he says sadly. “Just for her?”

Rose is quiet again, shifting a bit from foot to foot. She finally meets his gaze again and she swallows hard. “No,” she says. “Not just for her. F-for—.” Her voice shakes and she breaks off and takes a deep breath. “For us. I still…I still…” She can’t seem to finish her sentence, but he understands. She still loves him.

“I love you, too,” he says. She closes her eyes and he can see the impact of the words washing all over her. He’s only ever said the words once to her, that day outside the chips shop with the Krillitane circling overhead. He never said it in his old body and the last time he did, the words were so hard to say. This time they are easy. This time he knows they are worth saying out loud, worth letting her know how much he feels.

She opens her eyes and the tears come, slowly falling down her face. “I love you,” he repeats. “And I always will.” She closes the distance between them then, her arms going around his waist as she buries her face in his suit jacket. He holds her close, holds her tighter than in a long while, and for the first time since Reinette, that aching gap he’d felt between them is gone. He knows they still have a lot of work to do. He knows he has not mended the tear he’s put into Rose’s heart, but maybe he’s stitched it up. She’s willing to try and she’s in his arms and not somehow infinitesimally holding herself away from him.

She doesn’t say I love you. He doesn’t expect her to. He’s not sure he deserves to hear those words fall from her lips even if he can make her love him again somehow.

Ch. 3: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/360681.html