Immovable Object, Unstoppable Force (1/3)

[amberfocus]

Title:  Immovable Object, Unstoppable Force
Author:  amberfocus
Characters/Pairings:  Ninth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Genre:  Romance, angst, hurt/comfort, smut
Rating:  Adult
Betas:  amyo67, jeprdyfrndly
Summary:  After giving in to temptation months ago, the Doctor told Rose that a romantic relationship between them was a mistake.  She's starting to believe him just as he's coming to realize that holding himself away from her is really the biggest mistake of all.
A/N:  This fic is a belated birthday gift for mitashade, who has been so incredibly generous with her time and artwork this past year.

Immovable Object, Unstoppable Force

Chapter One

Rose is never sure anymore how a trip will turn out. Sometimes it’s just a regular adventure and the two of them are simply their old selves getting into and out of trouble, saving the world, contributing to chaos or putting an end to it, but more often than not the Doctor loses control, everything changes in the blink of an eye, and they are rowing so intensely it scares her. She knows he fights with her like this because it’s the only way he can stop his feelings. Feelings he doesn’t want to be having. If he doesn’t fight, this tension will have to come out another way, and he’s sworn never again.

As she showers in cool water to combat the broken thermic regulator she wonders if they’ll ever have a normal relationship again, wonders if he was right and that what happened between them was a mistake. She hates to think it was, but doubt has replaced certainty in her mind. She wishes she could stop thinking about it entirely. It would help if it wasn’t so hot in the ship. All the heat does is make her sweat and all sweating does is make her think of hot, sweaty sex. With him. Always with him.

She plunges her head under the shower, turning the water as cold as it will go with the cooling unit on the fritz. It helps to calm her down just a bit. Just a bit. She’s never calm enough these days, always teetering on the brink of what happened, of what could happen again if only the Doctor wasn’t so stubborn. With a sigh she finally shuts the faucet off and gets out, preparing herself for the day. She has a feeling it’s going to be a long one.

It’s been a long time since the night he’d given in to his need for her and frankly the lack of passion since is beginning to wear on more than just her nerves. Her skin is taut with remembered desire, with memories of his fingers gliding across it, his palms sliding firmly from shoulder to breast to stomach to thigh. His hands working their magic between them, his lips—No! She’s got to stop thinking about this. It won’t happen again. She knows that on this one thing he is immovable.

He’d finally admitted that he still wants her, can’t help wanting her, no matter that everything he’d ever been taught urged him to fight against those desires, but despite that, he isn’t going to give in again. He seems so sure that it cannot be, but she can’t help but want what she wants. She can’t help the flare of hope that hits her hard when he gets that look in his eyes that says he’s close to breaking. He can go days, sometimes weeks, under firm control, and then there will be a moment, a moment where everything hangs in the balance and if she just pushes hard enough, that flicker will catch fire and things will change again.

They never do. They never do and it hurts, hurts so much, like an open, jagged, tearing wound, salt poured in to make it worse. Whatever made him give in once is long gone. Hope flares and hope dies and it always, always leaves her worse than before she had it. She wishes she never had it if this is all she’s left with. She wishes she could find it again, whatever it was that brought him to his tipping point the first time. If she knew exactly what it was that made him lose the battle in the first place, she’d bottle it and dose him with it daily.

He is not a human man. Each day this is brought home more and more clearly. He is strong, strong enough to hold out forever. Strong enough to hurt her by dismissing everything that happened, by making it seem wrong or unimportant or unnecessary. He does not have the urgency of humans to mate consistently. Not to say he doesn’t have his own urges. He does. They just don’t seem to mesh up with her own.

Gallifreyan sex hormones cycle rather mercurially through his system. He’d explained, in excruciating detail, that they aren’t really supposed to be there at all, that they’d been all but bred out of his people, but following the decimation of his kind they had begun to arise erratically, a biological drive to repopulate his species a major contributing factor to what he called his weakness for her. Not that he actually could repopulate anything with DNA incompatible to every other life form in existence, but that didn’t stop his body from trying to make it so.

After meeting her it had gotten very difficult to keep those hormones in check, but they hadn’t burst into full blown effect until the night the Doctor had been killed by Reapers and brought back only by the sacrifice made by Rose’s father. Emotions had run high on either side, both of them desperately wishing for another chance to make things right between them. That was the night the Doctor had been unexpectedly knocked on his arse by the urge to mate brought on by such a near death experience combined with the Gallifreyan procreative cycle awakening with a savage roar. That was the night he’d finally done something about the sexual tension that had been building up between them for months.

It had shocked Rose when the Doctor had shown up in her room that night and asked her flat out to make love with him. She hadn’t seen any reason to turn him down. The last time she’d seen Mickey he’d been a jerk to her and their relationship had imploded. As far as she was concerned she was a free woman. She’d wanted the Doctor from the day they’d survived the missile on Downing Street, had been half in love with him from that day in a Cardiff basement when she’d thought they’d both die at the hands of the Gelth. If this was the one chance she might get to make love with the man, she’d told herself she better take it. She’d have been better off saying no.

It had been explosive, the best sex she’d ever had, and they’d spent the entire weekend in bed before the Doctor had been hit with a fit of regret. Or as he’d put it, realized he was taking advantage of her youth and inexperience. He’d apologized profusely for doing it and promised it would never happen again. She’d told him exactly where he could stick his promise and had spent the next few weeks furious with him for thinking she wasn’t old enough or smart enough to know her own mind about how she felt about him. Eventually she’d let it go and tried to move backwards, but inside it hadn’t worked. They weren’t the same. They could never be the same. Frustration turns to anger now so often for both of them.

Rose sighs. It’s not like she can’t take care of herself, but it can be damn frustrating when he’s just so much better at it than she is. If she didn’t know what she was missing dealing with her own feelings would have been so much easier, but once temptation had been sated it became impossible to just go back. She’s tried everything she can think of to make herself not want him, not love him, but it just doesn’t work. Once out of the bottle the genie simply will not fit back inside.

She doesn’t know if it’s because he is an alien or if it’s simply that he’s steeled himself against her, that he’s able to just turn away from what they could have together. The Doctor isn’t the sort for a weekend fling, but sometimes she doubts herself and thinks that that’s all it ever was for him. Those are the days when the arguments are the worst, because she’s hurting and she wants him to hurt, too. Right or wrong, it’s how she feels.

Other days she is simply resigned to the long, lingering hugs, chaste forehead kisses, and snuggling on the sofa whenever there’s time. She pretends like it’s all okay again and that they can be just mates, that they can be only friends. It’s a lie of course. They’ve never been just friends. She knows that from the start she was his savior. It just hurts to know she isn’t anymore.

She has to think of it as a business relationship. They are partners in saving worlds, in saving lives. Or maybe it’s more like he’s her boss and she’s his employee, her wages food and board and travel. Yes, that’s the best way to look at it. She’d never shag her boss. It would be unprofessional. She twists her hair up into a tidy bun on top of her head and thinks about what to wear. She’s got some strictly no-nonsense clothing but none of it will be comfortable. It’s too damn hot.

That’s got to be the first thing on the agenda, finding a way to get the thermic regulator fixed. She steps into the clothes the TARDIS has provided for her because of the temperature extremes. Then she goes in search of the one man who can do something about it. And he damn well better do it soon.




“Doctor? Doctor, where are you?” Rose calls out.

The Doctor sighs. He knows Rose will find him eventually and he knows precisely what she is going to say the minute that she does. Really, hiding from her like this is rather ridiculous. He can say that he is attempting to fix the thermostat, but the truth of the matter is that until he can get the desperately needed part from the planet Altacarna, which is currently under quarantine because of a disease he doesn’t dare expose Rose to, there is nothing he can do.

Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t know how long the quarantine lasts or even if it’s ever lifted. They’ve been trying for days, trying in a heat that’s become downright oppressive, even for him. He’s jumped forward 300 years at ten year intervals so far and it’s still firmly in place. He can’t go back any further than he already has because he’s already been there during that time period too often and he’d risk time thinning and Reapers coming. Further back than that and it’s before they’d invented the necessary technology. The TARDIS insists that it can be found only here. Why does it have to be the last existing planet to still have what he needs?

“Doctor!” Rose repeats sharply. She is getting grouchy now. He knows only part of it is the heat. She’s frustrated with him, sexually frustrated, and truth be told he’s been avoiding her because of it. It’s not like he doesn’t want to make love to her again. Every time he sees her he wants to throw her down and shag her senseless, but after that one glorious weekend it was only a matter of time before the guilt set in. He knows he’s too old for her, knows he’s taking advantage. He knows he should send her away because all he’s doing is hurting her, hurting her every time he turns her away, but he’s too damn selfish.

He wants to keep Rose with him, keep her with him always. He wants her to be happy and she’d never been happier than when they made love and in the afterglow that followed. It was wrong, so wrong of him to use her like that. He loves her, loves her so much, but she’s human and he worries that he’s not enough for her. He can never be the man who stays in one place who settles down, who wants human things. She reassures him that he’s all she wants, but he can never quite believe. It’s a source of endless frustration for both of them. He needs to hold himself away from her, to not let this happen, never let it happen again no matter how much he craves her now. He’s ruining her and it’s only a matter of time before she realizes it and asks to leave.

He wishes, not for the first time, that he hadn’t had to drain the swimming pool and use the water to keep the most sensitive inner workings of the TARDIS cool. Then he could suggest Rose take a dunk in it. If it gets much hotter, he might even consider joining her. Even as he thinks it, the temperature seems to rise another five degrees. Whether it truly has or it is the idea of Rose in the pool in those scraps of red material she claims is a bikini, he doesn’t know.

Damn. How is he going to stay away from her if he can’t get her out of his mind? Can’t get the image of her, beautiful, naked, spread open before him on his bed, ready to give him every part of her; body, mind, soul wanting him as much as he wants her. How can he stay strong when every fiber of his being demands he give in, give in to his weakness and lay her down, make love to her, never let her go again?

“Doctor?” This time her voice is annoyed and he gives in. He can’t handle another row. That sort of passion right now would spark out of control, would turn to another type of passion that he has been so good about resisting. He’s too close to the breaking point to take that chance. He’ll answer.

“I’m in here,” he calls out. Rose pokes her head into the room that holds all of the most vital environmental control equipment, then comes all the way in. Her hair is knotted into a bun on top of her head and her blouse is sticking to her skin with sweat. He can see the outline of her bra where the shirt clings to her. Her midriff is bare as she’s tied the bottom of the blouse up under her breasts. She is wearing a pair of low rise, cut-off denim shorts that live up to their name. He’s never seen any shorts so short. They reveal both navel and just a hint of the ending curve of her bum. His eyes skitter to her feet, the only safe place to look until he remembers just what she can do with her toes. Somewhere she’s found some flip flops. He focuses on the little flowers along the thong there, and not the memories that will undo him.

He’s so close to putting her down on the TARDIS grating that he has to clutch frantically at the equipment in front of him to keep from doing so. She’s beautiful, just so damn beautiful, how can any male be expected to resist her? How can he, so used to being above everything, everyone, be so nearly brought to his knees by Rose Tyler over and over again?

Her voice, when she speaks, is no-nonsense, practical. No hint of seduction, no wariness. Just plain discomfort, no agenda behind any of it other than to fix the problem. No huskiness in her words to tempt him, no tongue between her teeth smile to distract him. “I’m sorry, Doctor, I don’t mean to keep complaining about the heat, but it’s been days. How much longer is it gonna be? I’m dying here.”

A bead of sweat rolls down her face and neck and then disappears into the opening of her blouse. He watches, thinks about how he’d like to be chasing that droplet along its course with his tongue. It’s incredibly frustrating that not even the memories of how good that would be can comfort him. He can’t have that, he’s told her over and over again they can’t be like that, but he wants it. He wants her. He wants the real thing, not just the memory of it. Now. No. He forces his mind back onto the subject at hand.

“I don’t know, Rose. I’m doing the best I can, but without that part there’s not much else I can do,” he tells her.

“If you don’t get it cooler in here soon I’m going to have to insist on a visit home. During the winter.”

“Well, there’s that,” he says dreading the idea of seeing Jackie, because she’ll take one look at them and know, know what he’s done with her daughter, know that the two of them have been lovers. It won’t matter to her that it won’t ever happen again. She’ll know and that’s enough to send him running in the opposite direction. He comes to a quick decision. “Or we could land somewhere and go swimming. There’s a planet two over from this one, lovely lakes, no native intelligent species. We could go for a swim, get cooled off for a while and try again with the time jumps,” he says.

Rose blinks. It’s obvious she hadn’t expected him to suggest something fun. Fun has been sorely lacking for the last little while for either of them. “Okay. Swimming sounds awfully good,” she agrees. “I’ll go and get changed.”

“Wear the red one,” he calls after her before he can stop himself.

“What?” She turns around, giving him an even stare.

“The red one. The bikini. Wear the red one,” he repeats. “I like the red one.”

Sudden hope flares to life on her face. “You’ve changed your mind?”

“No.” He doesn’t even pretend not to know what she’s talking about.

It’s like the last hope she has for them dies right before his eyes. “Then why should I wear the red one?” she asks reasonably. Without waiting for an answer she walks away and he frowns.

“Because it’s pretty,” he hollers after her. “And you look gorgeous in it,” he adds softly under his breath. And if she wears it, it means only a few quick tugs and it’s off her. No. No, no, no. There’s got to be something he can do. Something to make himself stop lusting after his companion. But as he watches her long, bare legs walk away from him, he knows further resistance is futile. He’s already lost. Rose just doesn’t know it yet.

Ch. 2:  http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/318163.html