Repercussions (22-27 of 55)
May. 13th, 2008 11:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amberfocus
Banner by Megz33
Chapter Twenty-two: Burning
I watch in a panic as time stops all around me. I can sense the coldness from the others, but I cannot feel it through the fire in my veins. My mind reaches forward towards the Dalek and sees that he spoke the truth. Somewhere, some when, some Rose who wasn’t me promised him she’d send him home.
I part my hands and the case of the Dalek opens and the mutated monster floats free of it. Somehow I know what to reach for in his twisted chromosomes and genetic structure. I unbraid millennia of mutations, yanking away the hatred and the violence that had been bred into the Dalek line.
Slowly I rebuild, block by block, piece by piece, removing, smoothing, adding back emotions, compassion, love, and most importantly hope. When I am done a tall, blond, blue-eyed humanoid stands before me. Kaled, I think. And this time the softness of the L in the name does not sound wrong.
I reroute the explosive, sending it safely forty feet away where it will explode harmlessly, away from people, away from this Doctor, me, and this new creature before us.
The doorway in my mind that I have been avoiding looms large and frightening, the burning pulling me inexorably towards it. I try to grab hold of the edges; try to keep myself from going in there, terrified of what is in that room. And I am right. Realities unfold before me and finally I see what has been done. What one Rose did. I follow her steps, see how she weaves and chases, mends and repairs, allows his death only once and why, what she did for me, for him, what happened to his Rose.
I sense her, strongly. She is aware of me in this moment. And she reaches forward, touches my forehead, draws the light out of me, draws the fire, draws the pain. Time thaws.
The Kaled falls to the ground unconscious, the explosive device detonates, my mind comprehends all and I tip over into madness. Everything goes black.
Chapter Twenty-three: Knowing
I rise to the surface but I do not wake. I am in that room in my mind; the one I was so afraid of. I am still frightened but now I see her. Me. Another version of me. She glows fiercely golden.
“Bad Wolf?” I ask.
“No,” she says somewhat amused. “I am beyond the Bad Wolf.”
“What are you?”
“I am you that is not you. I am Rose Plus.”
“Plus what?” I ask.
“Everything. All of us. Each Rose. Everything.”
“What did you do?”
And she shows me. Shows me how she rescued me from my decision to let go of the lever and die as my original Doctor did. Those half memories had been right. I had died with him. She brought me back. She did not bring him back. “That wasn’t your choice,” I say.
“It is always my choice,” she answers. “I needed you there. For him.” And then she showed me why. I watch in horror as the Doctor who had been at my side for the past three months, loses his Rose. She shows me how that Rose, the girl with the blue eyes who is and at the same time is not me, had moved on. She had loved him, but she had moved on because her need of him was not that strong. She had had a fantastic life without him.
Rose Plus shows me his reaction. This Doctor keeps trying to go back and change things. He messes with the time lines, continually saves her when he is meant to lose her. He interferes so many times, goes back each time she is torn from his grasp, until the last time when he punches a hole through a universe, killing his TARDIS in the process and causing that universe and his own original one to burn, and him to fall into utter madness.
I reel away from her and the information burns through my mind. I don’t want to know this. But she is relentless as the knowledge pours into my brain. How she has done what she could to repair the damage to that Doctor’s mind. How she has placed him safely in this universe, with my dead Doctor’s TARDIS. No wonder the TARDIS had wept and mourned.
She has done her best to repair his madness by placing him with me. “Why didn’t you save my Doctor?” I demand.
“He didn’t love you. He didn’t need you. Not like this man does.”
“He loved her! Not me!” I protest.
“She was never meant to be his. And your Doctor was never meant to be yours. But this way, you are both granted a second chance to be happy. I thought I had erased the old memories,” she told me. “Given you new ones.”
“Both sets of memories are in my mind. It didn’t work quite the way you intended,” I say.
“I am sorry. You were never meant to know.”
Chapter Twenty-four: Asking
The Rose glowing golden in my mind asks me a question then. “What did you do to bring me here?”
“I don’t understand.”
“You used my power. I felt it. It pulled my mind from my reality. What did you do?” she repeats. My mind opens before her, stripped bare. “Dalek?” she says.
“Kaled,” I answer. “I reversed his genetic evolution. I took him back to the beginning of his original race. The only way left to keep the promise of sending him home.”
“You did not promise him that.”
“One Rose did. You?” I ask.
“Not I,” she says. “Her.” And I realize she means the me with blue eyes. That Rose had promised him. That Rose was dead and did not have the means or the method of fulfilling that promise. So I had because I could. I had drawn on her power and used it to reorder the Kaled's DNA.
Although I sense fear from her, underneath it I see that she believes I made a good choice. The only choice under the circumstances. She turns her thoughts back to me. “Shall I try and heal you again?” she asks.
“No,” I tell her. “I want my memories intact.”
“Very well,” she says. “It is time for me to go, then.”
“Wait,” I say. “What about you? How did it turn out for you?” And she shows me in a rush of little glimpses. I see her lost from him, finding a way back to him, their reunion, their wedding, their bonding and…their baby.
“All that could be,” I whisper.
“All that is,” she replies. And just like that she is gone from my mind.
I awake to the Doctor hovering inches above me, sitting on the ground by my side. “Rose? Rose, are you all right?” I try to nod my head but it is pounding fiercely. His eyes look over at the body lying close to me, covered in the Doctor’s big brown coat. “What did you do, Rose? What did you do?”
“Is he alive?” I ask forcing the pain away and sitting up.
The Doctor nods. “He shouldn’t be, but he is.”
“Just like me,” I say. “I shouldn’t be, but I am.”
“What are you talking about?” he asks.
I am unable to tell him, unable to find the words to show him of his insanity before the other Rose healed him. I never want him to know about the other TARDIS. But he has other ideas. He put his hands to my temples.
I force them away. “You can’t do that without asking!” I scramble to my feet and run away from him.
“Rose!” he yells. “Rose!” But I just keep running.
Chapter Twenty-five: Running from the Truth
My feet fly over the ground, my eyes darting ahead, picking a path that will lead me safely through. He can’t see what I saw. He can’t see what he did. It will kill him and I can’t lose him. Any him. Not with the second chance I was given. This glimpse of his reality, this window into who he really is, explains so much.
I can hear him behind me calling out. I think he might be giving chase and this adds impetus to my flight. I dare to toss a look over my left shoulder and he is in fact pursuing me. That one look away from my path is one too many. I trip on a piece of rubble and go sprawling face down onto the ground, pavement ripping my skin as I slide forward.
The wind is knocked out of me and I stay there for a moment, lying against the asphalt and dirt. “Rose!” And he’s caught up with me. He kneels by my side and gently turns me over, pulling me upright.
“You all right?” he asks gently, his face a mask of worry. I nod, fear in my throat telling me to back away from him before he sees my knowledge of what he did. “I’m sorry,” he says softly. “I was worried about you. I should have asked.”
I look into his face and it occurs to me that my horror in finding out that he killed his original TARDIS has nothing to do with the fact that it happened and everything to do with my fear of how he’ll blame himself if he finds out. It hasn’t even crossed my mind not to forgive this of him because I understand the enormity of what he did. After all, I chose to kill myself rather than be without a different version of him. How can I judge him for doing something along those lines? I can’t.
He pulls me upright, his eyes locked onto mine. I throw my arms around him, my raw palms scraping against his back. I hug him fiercely; feel his arms tighten convulsively around me. When he lets go I pull away to look in his eyes. “Don’t leave me,” I say.
“I’m not the one who was running away,” he answers softly. His eyes never leave my face. Slowly he moves his head closer to me, careful not to move too fast for fear I might skitter away from him. When his lips meet mine I kiss back in desperation. I want him to know how much I need him, how much I depend on his presence in my life.
When he pulls away from me I can see his love burning in his eyes. “We have to go back, take care of this mess,” he says. “But after that we need to talk.”
I nod without meeting his eyes. I can tell him some of it. I can tell him what I did, I can tell him about Rose Plus. I can even tell him of the happy ending for that other pair. But I know I can never tell him what he’s done. That that secret will be between us from now until the day I die.
He scrambles to his feet and holds out his hands. I hiss as I put mine in his and he raises me up. He stops to look at my hands then pulls out his sonic screw driver and does a quick dermal repair. When he is done, we walk together, me limping, back to the still form of the Kaled.
Chapter Twenty-six: Kaled
He is perfect, as if a newborn. No scars or imperfections. It’s odd that he looks so very human. The Doctor is always telling me that when life finds a good pattern it will repeat itself. The humanoid one is the most common I’ve seen in all of my travels with him.
I watch as the unresponsive body is loaded into a rescue vehicle to be taken to U.N.I.T. headquarters. “What will they do with him?” I ask.
“Oh, keep him in the medical wing until he regains consciousness. Then determine if he’s a threat to Earth,” says the Doctor, his hands shoved into his pockets.
“He’s not,” I say. “He’s not a Dalek anymore. He’s something new.”
“You can’t know that,” he says.
“I made him. I know. He is reborn. Like the Slitheen you turned back into an egg and took home to Raxacoricofallipatorius so she could start her life over and maybe make better choices. But not even that really. He is tabula rasa, a blank slate,” I tell him.
The Doctor looks at me, his expression unreadable. “U.N.I.T. will call us when he wakes up. Let’s go home.” He holds his hand out to me and I take it and we walk over to the military jeep waiting to drive us back to my parents' flat.
We are quiet on the return journey, both lost in our own thoughts. I am still reeling from what happened with my mind linking into another Rose’s thoughts. She had so much and yet she still gave to the others of us to try to make us all happy.
My mind doesn’t want to look too deeply at the golden link. It shimmers in the background and in a time of desperation I know I can activate it again. But the awesomeness of that power makes me want to run away and hide from it. Coward, me.
I lean against the Doctor and he puts his arm around my shoulders pulling me into him. I could pretend, put on a brave face and simply go forward. But I have spent too much time pretending with my original Doctor. I don’t want to do it anymore. I will have to find some level of the truth to tell him.
“They won’t experiment on him, will they?” I ask.
“Who?” asks the Doctor startled out of his own thoughts.
“The Kaled. They won’t hurt him?” I want to know.
“It’s U.N.I.T., not Torchwood. They don’t do that there.” His arm around me tightens into a reassuring half hug for a moment.
We finally arrive back at the flat. The driver gives us a large duffel bag full of supplies for the recovery effort, which the Doctor heaves onto his back. He drops it in the kitchen and goes in search of my mum to let her know we’re back and that she needs to sort through what U.N.I.T. sent.
I suddenly feel completely exhausted. I go to my room, enter the TARDIS and go to my bedroom there. I am asleep before my head is fully resting on the pillow.
Chapter Twenty-seven: Dream State
My dreams are unsettling and more than once I wake with a start. My heart is pounding so fast as I dream of Daleks and Cybermen in some kind of ultimate war, that I can hear it beating like drums in my head. I am still exhausted as I lie there, unable to return to sleep for fear of what comes next.
I stumble out of bed and go in search of the Doctor. He’s not in the console room and he’s not in the flat. I look at the clock in the living room and notice it is 3:00 a.m. I suppose it is possible he is sleeping. He doesn’t need much, but it’s been a long week. I return to the TARDIS and make my way to his bedroom.
Slowly I open the door and I see him lying there, blanket pulled to his waist, his torso bare. He’s beautiful, the wiry strength of his muscles exposed under flesh that calls to my fingers, begging me to touch him. I have never been here before, never would have invaded my old Doctor’s privacy this way. But with this man, I don’t fear offending him.
I must make some small sound because he sits up, blinking in the light coming from the hallway behind me. “Rose?” he says. “Is something wrong?”
“Nightmares,” I say quietly.
“Come here,” he says patting the bed next to him and pulling back the blankets. I walk to him, slide into the bed and he throws the blankets across me. There is enough space between us to fit two other people. I am suddenly shy and unsure, remembering the intensity between us when we kissed in the console room.
He reaches out and pulls me to him, turning me on my side and snuggling up against my back, one arm around my waist. “Do you want to talk?” he asks.
“About the nightmares?” I feel him nod against my shoulder. “No,” I tell him. “Just being here with you makes me feel safe.”
His arm tightens for a moment in a kind of hug. “If you want to, I can sleep with you every night.”
“You don’t need to sleep that much,” I protest.
“But I can hold you while you sleep,” he says seriously. “Keep the nightmares away.”
“You’d do that for me?” I am surprised.
“Don’t you know by now, Rose, that I would do anything for you?”
“Even though I’m not…her?”
The Doctor is quiet for a long time and I think maybe I’ve messed up. But then I feel his hand move from my waist and push the strap of my nightgown off my shoulder. His lips kiss the skin there. “Yes.”
I turn to face him. “We have to talk about this, you know,” I say quietly.
“I know. I know you’re not her, Rose. But I…I really don’t care. You’re different. But I see you for who you are. And I have been happier with you than I ever was with her. She’s like a shadow of a memory now. She never needed me. Not like you do.”
I think about that and realize maybe I won’t have to tell him what I discovered if that is how he feels. If he wants me for me like I want him for him, maybe it’s going to work out okay.
I press my fingers to his lips, and then allow my hand to wander over his face. “I love you,” I whisper.
“I love you, too, Rose.”
He pulls me closer, kisses me lightly on the lips and then tucks my head under his chin, gently stroking my hair. Slowly I slip off into a dreamless sleep.
Slowly I rebuild, block by block, piece by piece, removing, smoothing, adding back emotions, compassion, love, and most importantly hope. When I am done a tall, blond, blue-eyed humanoid stands before me. Kaled, I think. And this time the softness of the L in the name does not sound wrong.
I reroute the explosive, sending it safely forty feet away where it will explode harmlessly, away from people, away from this Doctor, me, and this new creature before us.
The doorway in my mind that I have been avoiding looms large and frightening, the burning pulling me inexorably towards it. I try to grab hold of the edges; try to keep myself from going in there, terrified of what is in that room. And I am right. Realities unfold before me and finally I see what has been done. What one Rose did. I follow her steps, see how she weaves and chases, mends and repairs, allows his death only once and why, what she did for me, for him, what happened to his Rose.
I sense her, strongly. She is aware of me in this moment. And she reaches forward, touches my forehead, draws the light out of me, draws the fire, draws the pain. Time thaws.
The Kaled falls to the ground unconscious, the explosive device detonates, my mind comprehends all and I tip over into madness. Everything goes black.
Chapter Twenty-three: Knowing
I rise to the surface but I do not wake. I am in that room in my mind; the one I was so afraid of. I am still frightened but now I see her. Me. Another version of me. She glows fiercely golden.
“Bad Wolf?” I ask.
“No,” she says somewhat amused. “I am beyond the Bad Wolf.”
“What are you?”
“I am you that is not you. I am Rose Plus.”
“Plus what?” I ask.
“Everything. All of us. Each Rose. Everything.”
“What did you do?”
And she shows me. Shows me how she rescued me from my decision to let go of the lever and die as my original Doctor did. Those half memories had been right. I had died with him. She brought me back. She did not bring him back. “That wasn’t your choice,” I say.
“It is always my choice,” she answers. “I needed you there. For him.” And then she showed me why. I watch in horror as the Doctor who had been at my side for the past three months, loses his Rose. She shows me how that Rose, the girl with the blue eyes who is and at the same time is not me, had moved on. She had loved him, but she had moved on because her need of him was not that strong. She had had a fantastic life without him.
Rose Plus shows me his reaction. This Doctor keeps trying to go back and change things. He messes with the time lines, continually saves her when he is meant to lose her. He interferes so many times, goes back each time she is torn from his grasp, until the last time when he punches a hole through a universe, killing his TARDIS in the process and causing that universe and his own original one to burn, and him to fall into utter madness.
I reel away from her and the information burns through my mind. I don’t want to know this. But she is relentless as the knowledge pours into my brain. How she has done what she could to repair the damage to that Doctor’s mind. How she has placed him safely in this universe, with my dead Doctor’s TARDIS. No wonder the TARDIS had wept and mourned.
She has done her best to repair his madness by placing him with me. “Why didn’t you save my Doctor?” I demand.
“He didn’t love you. He didn’t need you. Not like this man does.”
“He loved her! Not me!” I protest.
“She was never meant to be his. And your Doctor was never meant to be yours. But this way, you are both granted a second chance to be happy. I thought I had erased the old memories,” she told me. “Given you new ones.”
“Both sets of memories are in my mind. It didn’t work quite the way you intended,” I say.
“I am sorry. You were never meant to know.”
Chapter Twenty-four: Asking
The Rose glowing golden in my mind asks me a question then. “What did you do to bring me here?”
“I don’t understand.”
“You used my power. I felt it. It pulled my mind from my reality. What did you do?” she repeats. My mind opens before her, stripped bare. “Dalek?” she says.
“Kaled,” I answer. “I reversed his genetic evolution. I took him back to the beginning of his original race. The only way left to keep the promise of sending him home.”
“You did not promise him that.”
“One Rose did. You?” I ask.
“Not I,” she says. “Her.” And I realize she means the me with blue eyes. That Rose had promised him. That Rose was dead and did not have the means or the method of fulfilling that promise. So I had because I could. I had drawn on her power and used it to reorder the Kaled's DNA.
Although I sense fear from her, underneath it I see that she believes I made a good choice. The only choice under the circumstances. She turns her thoughts back to me. “Shall I try and heal you again?” she asks.
“No,” I tell her. “I want my memories intact.”
“Very well,” she says. “It is time for me to go, then.”
“Wait,” I say. “What about you? How did it turn out for you?” And she shows me in a rush of little glimpses. I see her lost from him, finding a way back to him, their reunion, their wedding, their bonding and…their baby.
“All that could be,” I whisper.
“All that is,” she replies. And just like that she is gone from my mind.
I awake to the Doctor hovering inches above me, sitting on the ground by my side. “Rose? Rose, are you all right?” I try to nod my head but it is pounding fiercely. His eyes look over at the body lying close to me, covered in the Doctor’s big brown coat. “What did you do, Rose? What did you do?”
“Is he alive?” I ask forcing the pain away and sitting up.
The Doctor nods. “He shouldn’t be, but he is.”
“Just like me,” I say. “I shouldn’t be, but I am.”
“What are you talking about?” he asks.
I am unable to tell him, unable to find the words to show him of his insanity before the other Rose healed him. I never want him to know about the other TARDIS. But he has other ideas. He put his hands to my temples.
I force them away. “You can’t do that without asking!” I scramble to my feet and run away from him.
“Rose!” he yells. “Rose!” But I just keep running.
Chapter Twenty-five: Running from the Truth
My feet fly over the ground, my eyes darting ahead, picking a path that will lead me safely through. He can’t see what I saw. He can’t see what he did. It will kill him and I can’t lose him. Any him. Not with the second chance I was given. This glimpse of his reality, this window into who he really is, explains so much.
I can hear him behind me calling out. I think he might be giving chase and this adds impetus to my flight. I dare to toss a look over my left shoulder and he is in fact pursuing me. That one look away from my path is one too many. I trip on a piece of rubble and go sprawling face down onto the ground, pavement ripping my skin as I slide forward.
The wind is knocked out of me and I stay there for a moment, lying against the asphalt and dirt. “Rose!” And he’s caught up with me. He kneels by my side and gently turns me over, pulling me upright.
“You all right?” he asks gently, his face a mask of worry. I nod, fear in my throat telling me to back away from him before he sees my knowledge of what he did. “I’m sorry,” he says softly. “I was worried about you. I should have asked.”
I look into his face and it occurs to me that my horror in finding out that he killed his original TARDIS has nothing to do with the fact that it happened and everything to do with my fear of how he’ll blame himself if he finds out. It hasn’t even crossed my mind not to forgive this of him because I understand the enormity of what he did. After all, I chose to kill myself rather than be without a different version of him. How can I judge him for doing something along those lines? I can’t.
He pulls me upright, his eyes locked onto mine. I throw my arms around him, my raw palms scraping against his back. I hug him fiercely; feel his arms tighten convulsively around me. When he lets go I pull away to look in his eyes. “Don’t leave me,” I say.
“I’m not the one who was running away,” he answers softly. His eyes never leave my face. Slowly he moves his head closer to me, careful not to move too fast for fear I might skitter away from him. When his lips meet mine I kiss back in desperation. I want him to know how much I need him, how much I depend on his presence in my life.
When he pulls away from me I can see his love burning in his eyes. “We have to go back, take care of this mess,” he says. “But after that we need to talk.”
I nod without meeting his eyes. I can tell him some of it. I can tell him what I did, I can tell him about Rose Plus. I can even tell him of the happy ending for that other pair. But I know I can never tell him what he’s done. That that secret will be between us from now until the day I die.
He scrambles to his feet and holds out his hands. I hiss as I put mine in his and he raises me up. He stops to look at my hands then pulls out his sonic screw driver and does a quick dermal repair. When he is done, we walk together, me limping, back to the still form of the Kaled.
Chapter Twenty-six: Kaled
He is perfect, as if a newborn. No scars or imperfections. It’s odd that he looks so very human. The Doctor is always telling me that when life finds a good pattern it will repeat itself. The humanoid one is the most common I’ve seen in all of my travels with him.
I watch as the unresponsive body is loaded into a rescue vehicle to be taken to U.N.I.T. headquarters. “What will they do with him?” I ask.
“Oh, keep him in the medical wing until he regains consciousness. Then determine if he’s a threat to Earth,” says the Doctor, his hands shoved into his pockets.
“He’s not,” I say. “He’s not a Dalek anymore. He’s something new.”
“You can’t know that,” he says.
“I made him. I know. He is reborn. Like the Slitheen you turned back into an egg and took home to Raxacoricofallipatorius so she could start her life over and maybe make better choices. But not even that really. He is tabula rasa, a blank slate,” I tell him.
The Doctor looks at me, his expression unreadable. “U.N.I.T. will call us when he wakes up. Let’s go home.” He holds his hand out to me and I take it and we walk over to the military jeep waiting to drive us back to my parents' flat.
We are quiet on the return journey, both lost in our own thoughts. I am still reeling from what happened with my mind linking into another Rose’s thoughts. She had so much and yet she still gave to the others of us to try to make us all happy.
My mind doesn’t want to look too deeply at the golden link. It shimmers in the background and in a time of desperation I know I can activate it again. But the awesomeness of that power makes me want to run away and hide from it. Coward, me.
I lean against the Doctor and he puts his arm around my shoulders pulling me into him. I could pretend, put on a brave face and simply go forward. But I have spent too much time pretending with my original Doctor. I don’t want to do it anymore. I will have to find some level of the truth to tell him.
“They won’t experiment on him, will they?” I ask.
“Who?” asks the Doctor startled out of his own thoughts.
“The Kaled. They won’t hurt him?” I want to know.
“It’s U.N.I.T., not Torchwood. They don’t do that there.” His arm around me tightens into a reassuring half hug for a moment.
We finally arrive back at the flat. The driver gives us a large duffel bag full of supplies for the recovery effort, which the Doctor heaves onto his back. He drops it in the kitchen and goes in search of my mum to let her know we’re back and that she needs to sort through what U.N.I.T. sent.
I suddenly feel completely exhausted. I go to my room, enter the TARDIS and go to my bedroom there. I am asleep before my head is fully resting on the pillow.
Chapter Twenty-seven: Dream State
My dreams are unsettling and more than once I wake with a start. My heart is pounding so fast as I dream of Daleks and Cybermen in some kind of ultimate war, that I can hear it beating like drums in my head. I am still exhausted as I lie there, unable to return to sleep for fear of what comes next.
I stumble out of bed and go in search of the Doctor. He’s not in the console room and he’s not in the flat. I look at the clock in the living room and notice it is 3:00 a.m. I suppose it is possible he is sleeping. He doesn’t need much, but it’s been a long week. I return to the TARDIS and make my way to his bedroom.
Slowly I open the door and I see him lying there, blanket pulled to his waist, his torso bare. He’s beautiful, the wiry strength of his muscles exposed under flesh that calls to my fingers, begging me to touch him. I have never been here before, never would have invaded my old Doctor’s privacy this way. But with this man, I don’t fear offending him.
I must make some small sound because he sits up, blinking in the light coming from the hallway behind me. “Rose?” he says. “Is something wrong?”
“Nightmares,” I say quietly.
“Come here,” he says patting the bed next to him and pulling back the blankets. I walk to him, slide into the bed and he throws the blankets across me. There is enough space between us to fit two other people. I am suddenly shy and unsure, remembering the intensity between us when we kissed in the console room.
He reaches out and pulls me to him, turning me on my side and snuggling up against my back, one arm around my waist. “Do you want to talk?” he asks.
“About the nightmares?” I feel him nod against my shoulder. “No,” I tell him. “Just being here with you makes me feel safe.”
His arm tightens for a moment in a kind of hug. “If you want to, I can sleep with you every night.”
“You don’t need to sleep that much,” I protest.
“But I can hold you while you sleep,” he says seriously. “Keep the nightmares away.”
“You’d do that for me?” I am surprised.
“Don’t you know by now, Rose, that I would do anything for you?”
“Even though I’m not…her?”
The Doctor is quiet for a long time and I think maybe I’ve messed up. But then I feel his hand move from my waist and push the strap of my nightgown off my shoulder. His lips kiss the skin there. “Yes.”
I turn to face him. “We have to talk about this, you know,” I say quietly.
“I know. I know you’re not her, Rose. But I…I really don’t care. You’re different. But I see you for who you are. And I have been happier with you than I ever was with her. She’s like a shadow of a memory now. She never needed me. Not like you do.”
I think about that and realize maybe I won’t have to tell him what I discovered if that is how he feels. If he wants me for me like I want him for him, maybe it’s going to work out okay.
I press my fingers to his lips, and then allow my hand to wander over his face. “I love you,” I whisper.
“I love you, too, Rose.”
He pulls me closer, kisses me lightly on the lips and then tucks my head under his chin, gently stroking my hair. Slowly I slip off into a dreamless sleep.
