Wolf Moon: Chapter Thirty-Five

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Biological Quirks

 

The Doctor watched Rose sleep.  It was something he could get used to doing, watching the steady rise and fall of her chest as she breathed in and out and the rapid movements behind her eyelids as they fluttered in R.E.M. sleep.  Not that he felt he deserved to get used to it, not the way he’d hurt her.  Yet she still wanted him there, her hand clutching his fiercely in sleep like she thought he’d try to slip away if she wasn’t holding on.  Truth be told he probably would have, his guilt was still so strong. 

 

Despite her words of acceptance and forgiveness he knew that when she was sleeping, the truth of her fears would eventually come out as they had for the past two nights.  This night, the third since their too violent bonding would be no different.  He waited for the moment that her dreams changed from ones of happiness to panic stricken fright.  “Rose,” he said, “Wake up.”  She thrashed about as best she could with her lower body still immobilized by the spinal block.

 

“Let me go, let me go!” Rose shouted.  “Can’t move, it hurts, please let me go!”

 

“Rose, you’re having a nightmare.”  He repeated himself a few times, before rising above her and gently shaking her least injured shoulder.  She awoke with a start, saw him hovering above her and cringed away from him before coming back to herself.

 

“Doc—Doctor?” she managed as she blinked away the demons and focused on his face.

 

“Yes,” he said.  “Hello.”

 

She gave him a weak smile and took in a shuddering breath.  “Hello,” she managed, but her heart wasn’t in the simple greeting.  She was confused and upset by the bad dreams and she didn’t like the fact that she’d cringed from him.  Her face was too easy for him to read.  He sighed and lay back down beside her.  “Am I going to keep having nightmares?” she asked him hesitantly a few minutes later.

 

“For a while.  It’s your subconscious mind working out the trauma of what I did to you,” he said.

 

“But…I’m okay,” she protested.  “I mean, at the time I was too wrapped up in the pleasure of it to notice the parts that hurt.  The memories of it are so vague.  Why am I dreaming about it?  I don’t feel traumatized.”

 

“Part of you must,” he said guiltily.  “Your body has been through a shock and your mind needs the time to process it, Rose.  Something in what I did to you must have scared you at your most basic level.  And it should have done.  It’s not something you should have had to go through or even accept easily.  I wish there’d been another way.”

 

“Why wasn’t there?  Why’s it like that?  It seems counterproductive to me.  How did your people ever have any kind of reproductive success with such violent mating?” Rose asked struggling to understand.

 

“You have to understand that I wouldn’t have done this kind of damage to a Gallifreyan woman.  They aren’t nearly as fragile as humans.  There would have been some damage, yes, but not to this degree.  That particular biological quirk evolved when there were very few females and too many males on my planet.  In an effort to keep the female from leaving and seeking greener pastures with another male, both the physical debilitation and the emotional bonding worked as a deterrent.”

 

“How’s that?”

 

“A woman unable to walk away for a day or so after mating would be more likely to conceive from the first man’s sperm and not from any succeeding men she mated with,” the Doctor explained.  “The mental bonding prevented her from wanting to go to another man and would quite often make her physically ill if she did so.  Kind of hard to mate with a man you’re vomiting all over, after all.  Once the emotional bonding was in place it was no longer necessary for the mating drive to prevent the woman from leaving physically, so subsequent couplings were never violent again.  It’s fairly simple.  I’ve seen it in other species, even on your planet, except every single mating with them remains violent.  Some matings are so violent I’m surprised they ever result in successful pregnancies.”

 

“What animals?” Rose asked.

 

“The elephant seal is one of the worst.  The males are so aggressive in mating they’ll often trample the much smaller females to death, including any pups or weaning young that might be around the female.  They’ll completely prevent the female from any form of escape by lying atop her so she has no means of getting away and when they weigh around four times more, well the result is often pretty bad.  It’s very detrimental to the survival rate of their offsrping.

 

“Then there’s the one-horned rhinoceros.  The males and females battle each other aggressively before a female will allow a male to mate with her.  And with the equus asinus or true ass the female requires violent subjugation by the male.  There is much biting and kicking and quite often a lot of chasing down before the female will tolerate the male.  For both these animals the males and females don’t tend to be around each other except during mating season, so the animals are unfamiliar with each other and this may be why they act that way.  It’s hard to tell with the mating instinct sometimes.”

 

“So you’re saying Gallifreyan men are basically true asses?” Rose asked with a cheeky grin.

 

“Yes.  No.  Rose!”

 

She composed herself.  “Still, it seems like a bad survival mechanism.  I mean, with your people, wouldn’t the females just give up on sex altogether and go away from the men?  Someplace safe they couldn’t follow?”

 

“Well, when the intelligence factor evolved to a high enough level, they did.  That’s when genetic engineering came into play and children were made outside the womb.  But until that time came, the females were much smaller than the males and far too easy to control, and with a birth ratio of 1 female to every three males born, I’m afraid it was too easy for men to dominate for too long.  Once looming came into play, methods of controlling the sex drive were built into embryos, and the balance of male to female babies was tweaked to help even things out.”

 

“Why was the ratio so far off?” Rose asked.  “That doesn’t seem like a good adaptation for a species either.”

 

“Well, the female originally lived a lot longer than the male, who often died a young and rather bloody death in primitive times.  A female could easily go through three males in her lifetime, so it was actually a balanced thing for us at one time,” the Doctor told her.  “But when we got smarter that wasn’t needed anymore.”

 

“Hmm,” said Rose.  She was silent for a long time and he couldn’t tell if she was mulling over what he had said or if she had fallen back to sleep.  Finally she spoke again.  “Doctor?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“How come your, you know, was so much larger during sex then it was when we, well, did what we did the other day?” Rose asked.

 

“My you know?” he asked.  “Rose Tyler, you’re twenty-nine years old and you can’t say penis?”

 

“I can say it,” she said.  But she didn’t.

 

He relented.  “It’s another biological quirk.  It only gets like that with species we’re biologically compatible with, ones we could impregnate.  The bigger we were the more likely we were to attract a female.  It was our version of peacock feathers, I suppose.  But too big a size could obviously be detrimental to the female if we were always like that.  We can control the size a bit.  Not the first time, though.  It swells to full size so that after copulation it’s difficult for the female to dislodge the male unless he chooses to shrink enough, thus stopping the sperm from leaking out and possibly preventing a conception.”

 

“So you won’t always have the dangly bits of a rhinoceros?” Rose said.

 

The Doctor laughed.  “No.  I can keep it at about ten inches long and two inches in diameter and still have a fully functional and pleasurable erection.  That’ll make it a lot easier on you.”

 

“Good to know,” Rose said though he could tell from her tone she thought that maybe that was still plenty large enough to be difficult, thank you.

 

“Do I get the block removed today?” Rose asked him a few minutes later.  “I’m so sick of staying in bed.”

 

“I’ll take the block off in a couple of hours and if the diagnostic machine says you’ve healed we’ll leave it off.  You need to try to get some more sleep,” he told her.  “And then after breakfast we’ll see if you can walk.”

 

“All I’ve done is sleep,” she complained.

 

“It helps you heal faster, Rose,” he said.

 

“I’m not tired.”

 

“Rose.”

 

“Talk to me,” she said.  “Your voice is soothing.  It might help me drift off.”

 

“You telling me I put you to sleep?” he asked.

 

“It’s comforting,” she said.  “Tell me something about you I don’t know.”

 

“Like what?”

 

“I don’t know.  That’s the point.  Tell me about your childhood, or your school years, or your best friend growing up,” she suggested.

 

“Ah,” said the Doctor.  “My best friend growing up and at school turned out to be an evil megalomaniac.”  He settled back against the pillow and started talking.  “You wouldn’t have known it then, of course.  He was just a charming rogue, a bit prone to mischief, but by and large a good person.  All of that changed in the blink of an eye and by the time he left Gallifrey his only goal was to bring the universe to its knees.  He might have done it, too, if it hadn’t been for yours truly…”

 

 

 

“Are you ready?” the Doctor asked Rose for the third time since he’d removed the spinal block and the catheter.

 

“I’ve been ready all bloody afternoon,” she snapped at him.  “You said after breakfast and it’s nearly dinner time.  I’ve had all feeling back for hours.”

 

“You’re sure you’re not in pain?” he pressed.

 

“Doctor!  Can we please just do this?” Rose demanded.  The truth was she still felt achy in several places but nothing hurt so badly that she thought walking would be detrimental.

 

“All right.  We’ll try walking to the infirmary so we can take the cast off your wrist.”  He helped her to sit up.  “Sitting feel okay?  Yes?” he asked and she nodded.  “Okay, next step,” he told her and then got her to her feet.  “Lean on me,” he encouraged.

 

Rose used him for balance and took a hesitant step forward.  A slight twinge went through her hip and she bit back a gasp and took another step.  “You okay?” the Doctor wanted to know.

 

“I think so,” she said.  “It’s uncomfortable but not that painful.”  It was slow going as they moved to the infirmary and when Rose stepped up on the little stool she cried out and swayed.  The Doctor caught her and laid her down on the examining table.

 

“Okay, no steps or stairs for you, yet,” he said.  He lowered the equipment over her pelvis and started the machine scanning while he watched the results come up on the screen.

 

“Hmm, there’s still some fluid around your hip muscles and some of the ligaments there, but the fracture has healed good as new.  You can’t tell your cervix was ever damaged.  No more contusions or abrasions inside.”  He moved the device over her hand.  “Bones in your hand and wrist have healed as well, so the cast can definitely come off.”

 

He retrieved a little cast saw and carefully cut the dried plaster away from her.  When he removed it, he gently manipulated her wrist, rotating it in various directions.  “How’s that feel?” he asked.

 

“Like normal,” she responded wiggling her fingers and then scratching the itchy skin in relief.  That at least seemed to be completely healed.  “So when can I resume normal activities?”

 

“Well, I’d say at least give it until week’s end.  We’ll go out and do some swimming in the pond tomorrow.  The TARDIS moved us nearby.  Swimming should help to strengthen your lower body again, and in a few days maybe we can go and watch the drayguins flying.  I’d like to see how they’re doing now that the egg’s no longer functioning and make sure they’re returning to normal,” he said.

 

“Okay.  Swimming sounds good,” she told him, her eyes going slightly out of focus as she recalled the last time they went swimming.  She smiled at him a moment later.  “When can we…?”

 

“When can we what?” he asked.  She didn’t know if he was being oblivious on purpose or not but she decided to spell it out for him.

 

“When can we make love?” she asked him.

 

“It’ll be a while still,” he said gruffly.

 

“Doctor.”

 

He wouldn’t meet her eyes.  “You need to be fully healed, Rose.”

 

“I thought you said I was.”

 

“Better safe then sorry.”

 

“Are you afraid you’re going to hurt me again?” she asked.

 

“Aren’t you?” he demanded.

 

“You explained what happened and why.  Why should I be afraid?” she asked.

 

“You obviously are or you wouldn’t keep having nightmares,” he told her.

 

“How long’s it going to be before you’ll make love to me, then?” she wanted to know, completely ignoring his comment.  “Because you said you’d be able to go slow and be tender, and I think it’ll help erase any fears I might have if you treat me that way.”

 

“So you do have fears!  I knew it!”

 

“Doctor.”  Rose puffed her bangs up out of her face.  “Just give me an answer.”

 

“I don’t know.  Week’s end there, too, I guess.  We’ll have to play it by ear.”

 

He sounded so reluctant that Rose had a sudden fear.  “Don’t you want me anymore?” she asked.

 

“Of course, I do!  Don’t ever think that.  I might not be all crazy but the TARDIS is still piping medication into the air.  Enough to blunt our desire while you heal.  Though that crazy out of control need isn’t going to come back now we’re bondmates,” he reassured her.

 

“What exactly does being bondmates mean?” Rose asked him.  “I mean, I know we’re linked.  I feel your presence all the time, but…what’s it mean?”

 

The Doctor looked at her rather awkwardly.  “Well, in human terms, I guess it would mean that you’re…well…my erm…wife?”

Ch. 36:  http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/21178.html

A/N:  The infromation the Doctor imparts to Rose on animal reproduction was gleaned from two sources, the Encyclopeida Britannica online and  

http://essp.csumb.edu/eseal/reproduction/module01.html