amberfocus | Guilt (1/2) (Reply)

A/N: Well, the angst bunnies hit and would not let me work on Zeppelins at all today. So here we have, for your reading pleasure, the first of the Ten line in the Moments in Darkness series. If you haven't read the rest of the series (click on the moments in darkness tag if you'd like to read), we left off with a "just finding out she was pregnant" Rose making her way back to Nine during Parting of the Ways and him giving up his life for her and regenerating into Ten, so obviously a Ten/Rose fic. He does not know she's pregnant, and we do not know what effect taking in the Vortex energy may have had on the baby. More or less follows canon but with the obvious differences. Takes place at the end of the Christmas Invasion.

Chapter One: Different

He says he is the same man, still the Doctor, but every time Rose looks at him she isn’t seeing her Doctor. She sees a stranger standing in his place. Gone are the steel blue eyes that seem to look right through her and see everything she is thinking, convey every bit of emotion and love that he feels for her in one heated glance. Gone are the wrinkles that crinkle so fully at the sides of those same eyes when he smiles.

Even his smile is different and she misses it. It had been sexy and bold and had lips that had brought her hours of pleasure. The first time he’d kissed her was forever burned in her memories. It had only been a mere brushing of lips before they’d been interrupted by that git Adam, but it had thrilled all the way through her, firing nerve endings she didn’t know she’d had. And the first time he’d fully kissed her, it had been so overwhelming, so powerful, and so right all at the same time. Fire had met ice and the resultant steam had short-circuited her brain.

No, these lips are different. Thinner for one, and they are far more prone to smiling. She had gotten used to having to pull smiles out of the Doctor, but now they leap too easily to his face. That shouldn’t bother her. The way he so freely looks at her in public now, in front of her mum, in front of Mickey, it shouldn’t bother her, either. But those looks have always been confined to private, to just them and now he is willing to share them with the world at large.

And it does bother her because she wants to keep them to herself, that specialness that was reserved only for the bedroom and not for everyone to see. Maybe if they’d been on his old face, she quite possibly wouldn’t have minded, would have thought of it as taking a step forward in their relationship, an announcement of what they were. But this new face, well, it isn’t the face she’d fallen in love with, is it? Even if…even if it’s a lovely face in and of it’s own right.

She tries not to think about it when she sees him purse his lips and look at her, sees him run his tongue out in little flicks after each bite of food as he searches out gravy that missed its destination, sees him grin at her when he catches her looking. She tries not to react at all, thinking it disloyal to be even the least bit attracted to this new form, to wonder, when he sticks his tongue out at Mickey for something the other man says, if there is any kind of skill attached to what is obviously a far longer tongue. She is ashamed of herself for thinking such things about a man who is not, though he technically is, her lover.

The ears she’d liked to stroke after making love no longer stand prominently out from the sides of his head. They are nice ears, pretty ears, and she wonders if the tips will still turn red when he blushes at something naughty she whispers in his ear. She wonders if she’ll still feel the urge to whisper naughty things in his very different ear, if he’ll still want to hear them or whisper them back. She doesn’t know if he’ll still like it if she nibbles on his lobes or runs her tongue around the shell. She wants him to like it, is afraid he won’t even care to find out.

Rose doesn’t know if he’ll still even want her sexually. She is too confused to know if she should allow herself to want him. And what if it is worse than that? What if he doesn’t want her along for the ride, as even just a travelling companion anymore? She thinks, maybe, she could live with it if he rejects her as his love, if she can’t accept him as hers, isn’t even sure they can remain lovers after such a huge change, but what if he wants to leave her behind before she’s even had a chance to settle into these changes? What if he doesn’t give her time to let her mind adjust? If he is the same man…if he is…how can she ever let him go? If he’s the Doctor, she loves the Doctor, of that she is certain. And she needs him.

He smiles at her from his place at the table and she smiles back despite herself. The smile is infectious and not responding to it is impossible. That doesn’t mean she is happy, though. She misses him, the old him, and what she thinks she’s lost. He scoots his chair over to sit closer to her and she isn’t sure if she wants him to be closer or to move back away. It's harder to think the closer he is. She can’t stop staring at him. Will she ever get used to the changes?

His eyes are beautiful despite the fact that they are not twinkling and possessive and blue. There is still something in them that is dark and knowing and almost—almost—the same. But there is a light in them that has changed, a pain that has lifted, a brokenness that has vanished and that makes him fundamentally different. How is the question? Does it mean he won’t love her if he’s…happy? That’s too hard to think about so she switches back to the shallow, picks at the differences in his appearance some more.

Even his nose is different. It’s still prominent, but in a more classical way. He probably thinks that is a good thing, as sensitive as he was about it, but all she can think of is the way he’d take in her scent after she’d bathed or after a particularly vigorous round of lovemaking. It had been something it had taken her a while to adapt to, the way he relied so heavily on scent, the way it aroused him, the way his nostrils flared at the scent of her own arousal, when he wanted to take her to bed or up against the wall.

Will they still flare? Will this finer, more delicate nose seek out unexpected ways to cause her pleasure? She hopes so. She wants…she wants to find her Doctor still in this skinny, taller, different man. Because he can’t change back. He’s made it clear. So she has to find a way to get past the superficial, to find the same man their underneath it all. She has to. It’s too important to lose this after all they’ve been through, after all they’ve fought for, after she determined that he was her everything and he couldn’t push her away just to keep her safe when she wanted him.

And she can learn to want him physically if he’s still him inside, can’t she? She wouldn’t turn her back on him if he’d been scarred or burned. Is this really so different? It isn’t that this new body is ugly, either. Quite the contrary, it is attractive and in another life, a life before she met the Doctor, she would have considered it her type. Has her type been forever altered by the lithe ranginess, the rugged, rough sexiness of the man who had taken her to his bed and made her completely his own? Can she find that old attraction to pretty boys again? Or at least to one pretty boy when her heart keeps telling her that what she wants is steel blue eyes, and big ears and leather, and quick to anger, and quicker still to passion.

She’s afraid to want this searching, soulful, lost, lonely man in a pinstripe suit in his stead. She doesn’t know how she should feel at seeing these warm brown eyes looking at her so hopefully, like she hangs the moon and the stars. She is afraid she might actually prefer the crazy, floppy, admittedly great, hair that has replaced the close-cropped fuzziness that she had loved running her hands over, loved feeling against her breasts when he nuzzled her, or the rough whiskers between her thighs when he sought to bring her pleasure. He’s so smooth-faced she wonders if he’ll even sprout whiskers.

She isn’t sure it’s right to want these soft, gentle hands that reach for her instead of the rough, calloused ones. She doesn’t want him sitting here at the table with a stupid paper crown on his head, looking at her mum with a grin and eating Christmas dinner like he is more than happy to do domestic every day of the week and laughing—laughing!—at Mickey’s stupid jokes and not once calling him Rickey or The Idiot. How can he have changed that much?

Rose wants him grumpy with her mum, dismissive of her ex, insisting that they leave right now, not happily sharing a meal at the same table. She wants her Doctor back, the one who won’t share her with anyone, begrudgingly tolerates that there are other people in her life that mean something to her, and jealously keeps her to himself as much as he possibly can. He’s willing to share now. How can he be the Doctor? And yet when he looks at her, when he catches her gaze straight on and holds it, she can see that hint of him in the shadows, that emotion that begs her to believe that he is the most important man in her universe. She wants to believe he still is, but she can’t quite convince herself that he isn’t a stranger.

Stranger or not, it is his baby that is growing in her womb, and she has no idea how she is ever going to tell him. It would have been okay if he was still himself, but now…now she has no idea how this new man will react. Yes, he seems happy with domestic now, but a baby, a baby is far more domestic and even though she thinks, thinks, that he would have wanted this child, how sad he was when he thought they couldn’t have them, she has no idea how he will feel now. The personality has changed so much and she can’t be sure of him anymore.

Still, the cat is out of the bag with both Mickey and her mum knowing the truth. And sooner rather than later, her physical condition will become apparent. Hiding it from him for long is not an option. He knows her too well for her to be able to lie to him, or keep something so important from him for long. But how can she tell him when she isn’t even sure where they stand anymore? Or who he is? Or what they’ve become?

When it comes right down to it Rose is still just nineteen years old and very human. Sure she’s seen and done more things than probably any other human standing on planet Earth today, but that doesn’t mean that when it comes to having a baby with this man she isn’t still young and scared and unsure about what possible future she can have now that her own personal world has literally blown up in a big ball of light and everything she thought she believed about life, love, and reality has turned itself rather messily on its head.

She looks at him again, trying to keep the anxiousness from her expression. For a moment she feels guilt because she needs him whether he is the same man or not. Somehow, some way, they’ll have to make the best of this. If he still wants her. Please, she thinks, please let him still be my Doctor. I need him. Let him still be in there somewhere. I don’t think I can survive the loss. I need him. We need him. Her hand creeps down to cover her belly. Please.

The Doctor is scared. He is more frightened now than when Rose was in the middle of the Dalek fleet. He is more frightened than he was when he thought Rose was going to die and he’d sacrificed himself to take the Vortex out of her. He is losing her. She can’t accept the change. He can see it in every look she gives him, every hesitation she now has around him.

She isn’t so eager for his touch now, seems almost repulsed by it. He should have told her, should have prepared her a long time ago for this possibility. But he’d been drunk on love and so sure that he was invincible until it had all come crashing down in one horrifying moment where she’d offered up her life in place of his.

And now she is different. He almost laughs bitterly at that thought. He’s the one who regenerated but Rose is the one who has changed. In a heartbeat her feelings for him seem to have shut down, shut off, and she’s pushing him away with every glance, every movement away from his touch, every bit of space she puts between them. He hadn’t expected her to want to jump directly into his bed again, but when she can’t even quite meet his eyes he can’t figure out what he can do to make it better. He’s always been able to read her eyes. Now she won’t meet his gaze for more than a second before flitting away again.

His feelings for her have changed. And not in a way he was expecting. Usually attachments lessen after a regeneration and he had feared this so intently that he kept his love for her firmly in the forefront of his mind during the change. And it had stayed, but oh, how it had deepened. Deepened to the point that if she left him he wasn’t sure he could survive. Him, last of the Time Lords, dependant on this scrap of a human girl.

Of course he has been for a while, if he cares to look closely enough at his own emotions. And not just since he took her into his bed, but long before that, probably from the day he told her, “It also travels in time,” and she changed her mind and came with him. Maybe even from the moment she swung on that chain to save him from the Autons and smiled that smile and started worming her way into his broken hearts.

She has filled that lonely, aching, painful place inside him for so long and now if she pulls away from him, what will he have left to fill that gap? What if she doesn’t want him, doesn’t even want to travel with him anymore? It’s happened before with companions who had been with him for some time, they couldn’t handle the change, the personality differences, the fact that the man they had known had become so different.

Really the only people who had ever reacted to the changes with total acceptance had been the Brigadier and Sarah Jane and that had been so, so many lifetimes ago. Other companions had stayed with him after a change, but these were ones that had only just joined him, were still enamored with time and space travel, or ones, like Tegan, who simply couldn’t manage to escape him.

He shuts down his thoughts abruptly. What is he doing thinking about old companions? He doesn’t do that. Once they are gone from his life that is that. He moves on. He doesn’t think, doesn’t ever think, about what they are doing with their lives now, or if they are even still alive. To him they are always alive if he only just doesn’t think…He stops himself. That way lays madness and pain he doesn’t want to deal with.

He has to face facts, though. Rose is far from an assistant, and she isn’t just any companion. She had passed best friends months ago, had passed simple lover, if she ever was that, to beloved weeks ago. She is his…well, yes, that is it exactly. She is his. Or she was. He gulps at the thought that she might not be anymore, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down erratically in his throat. He loosens his tie, still somewhat shocked that he’d ever chosen to wear one again, despite how smart it made him look.

The truth is he needs her. He needs Rose Tyler. Not just physically, though there is that as well, but like water, like air, like…like time travel. She is part of him now. And she cannot, he will not let her, make the decision to leave him.

He closes his eyes. He can’t force her to stay, not if she wants to go. He knows that. But there has to be a way to work around it, to make her think she wants to stay with him, still wants him, still needs him, still…loves him. She has to. She just has to, because he needs her. He’s lost everything else and she’s all that he has, a blessed respite in a storm of rage and pain and loss. She is his quiet strength, his faith, his hope for a better future. With her he is not alone. With her there is peace, if only for a few moments, within his head.

He opens his eyes and finds her staring at him. She’s biting her lip and her eyes finally meet his and hold them. “Are you all right?” she asks him.

He meets her gaze evenly and for the first time since he’s met her, even though it fills him with guilt, he lies to her. “I’m always all right.” She doesn’t look like she believes him and her eyes drop down to her lap. Her hand reaches out underneath the table and finds his, wrapping her fingers over his. They feel so small, so different, so fragile in what they are offering him in this moment. Her next words surprise him, because he has almost lost hope that it even matters to her.

“Are we?”

Ch. 2: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/152209.html