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He thinks that four months after his so-called birth, he should be used to it, should be used to everything, but he isn’t and it frustrates him that his ability to easily adapt to any situation seems to have evaporated in a puff of smoke. His inability to do this very thing had nearly lost him Rose, had nearly made him break her heart all over again because he’d been stuck, failing to move forward or backwards or even sideways for so very, very long.
The prospect of losing the most important thing in his life had forced him to wake up from the cloud of confusion he had spent far too much time in, but that does not mean that he understands anything or is close to comprehending his new role in this new universe, or Rose’s heart, which is really the only part of the universe that matters to him when all is said and done.
He knows that he wants a life with her but he simply isn’t sure how to go about getting it. Kissing her, finally kissing her again, for the first time since that day on the beach, seemed like it should have reordered his world, made everything all right again, magically fixed every little thing that was wrong between them, but it hadn’t. Because there is a ghost in the room, something, someone who always will be there, someone who isn’t him, not quite, but surely is.
The Doctor knows that Rose misses this other self, though she says nothing of it, quietly accepts that he himself is the Doctor. She never says things like ‘the real Doctor’ and he is pretty sure she doesn’t even think them. He does in the privacy of his own head. On the bad days. But only because sometimes he doesn’t feel real. How can he be with only one heart in his chest and a lifespan so short it will be over before he has a chance to really live? He is trying because Rose has asked it of him and he still cannot deny her anything.
The first three and a half months Rose has taken off work, having earned a long vacation by saving the universe, well, several universes really. He has had her to himself and she slightly resents the fact that he has squandered that time in a depressive funk. She goes back to work shortly after their conversation about moving forward and she tells him that there will be a place for him there, too, if he wants it, when he is ready. He isn’t. She knows that. Not yet. Despite everything she misses him so much those first few days she can’t stand it.
She says nothing, still so careful with his emotions, but when he tells her how awful he feels going the whole day without seeing her, it makes things slightly better. She is almost ashamed of the relief that she feels that he still wants her around, still wants to be with her. Some days she’s so afraid that will change; that he’ll leave her behind despite the fact the he tells her now, daily, that he loves her. She's not sure she'll ever get over that fear.
Rose suggests he start meeting her for lunch at a park near her office. It becomes a daily ritual to eat their lunch together, to walk hand in hand down one of the paths, to duck behind trees and sneak kisses away from the prying eyes of nannies and young mothers and businessmen. Something inside her is waiting, constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. She’s at a loss when it doesn’t. Sometimes they sit and watch the clouds go by or the small children playing and when she looks at them she wonders if she and the Doctor will ever have children. At the rate they're going she thinks it unlikely. They still haven’t made love.
“There are days I hate him for leaving me,” Rose admits one day out of the blue. They are sitting on a park bench watching ducks swimming, their sarnies and canned drinks long since devoured, the packaging tossed in a nearby bin. It is springtime on this Earth and there are ducklings swimming behind their parents in long little rows. It startles him because they never talk about it. He waits quietly for her to continue, but she doesn’t. It’s as if announcing it has freed her from the burden of feeling it and that’s enough. She sighs and leans her head against his shoulder.
“I do, too,” he says slowly. “Hate him. For leaving me. Sometimes.”
“I know,” she says softly.
“Alters the definition of hating yourself a fair bit,” he mutters.
She raises her head and turns towards him, finds his gaze and holds it. “But you don’t hate this you, do you?” she asks placing her hand above his solitary heartbeat.
He looks away. “No.” He did, though, at first. Despite all the opportunities this body offers him, at the start there was a lot of self-loathing going on as he discovered his new limitations. He’s grown into it a little now, but hasn’t learned to revel in it. He expects that might come when he and Rose finally make love. If they make love. If he can find the courage. But he doesn’t hate himself. How can he hate someone that Rose loves so much?
“You know that I chose you, right?” she asks him.
“What?” He is startled from his thoughts as she turns to him. They are watching the telly, some silly science fiction show that he likes to criticize for having it all wrong, and she likes to watch because the lead actor looks like he used to look when she first met him, some man with a ridiculous last name and a first name with more letters in it than the last, though she’ll never admit that her little crush is the reason why. He still knows. He doesn’t mind that she misses that part of him even after all these years. He’s closer to that him now than to the man he currently looks like.
“You know that I chose you? That day on the beach; I chose you.” There’s conviction in her voice and it seems important to her that she gets this across. “It isn’t that I was left with you. It isn’t that he gave you to me, that he left you here. When you told me you loved me and he didn’t, when I kissed you, I was making my choice. He knew it and I knew it. It occurs to me that you might not have.”
“I didn’t.” There are tears in his eyes at her confession. He gathers her tightly into his arms.
“Well, now you do.”
On another day they are back at the park, studying those same ducklings, grown bigger and stronger now, and she realizes how quickly time is passing and how soon they will be grown, and he suddenly blurts out, “Do you want a baby with me?”
The look she turns on him is long and appraising and her expression has no small amount of surprise in it. There have been kisses, long and lingering, and he has held her tightly to him often and well into the night, but never overnight, never in his bed, never in hers. He has never taken it beyond that and she is wondering how they can ever even consider children when they haven’t yet moved to the point where it would be possible to conceive one together.
Rose doesn’t want to push the issue, is almost afraid to. The Doctor has always been afraid of physical intimacy. Not hugs or affection, but true intimacy. He has grown comfortable with their frequent kissing, initiates it quite often, but his hands do not stray to places that were off limits for years and she’s not wanted to start anything that might make him back off from what she’s so far managed to draw out of him so her own hands remain out of the danger zone. She knows the attraction is there, has felt his arousal between them often enough. As hard as it’s been, she waits on him to be ready. She hopes he is before she runs out of patience.
She blinks and looks away from him, runs the fingers of her free hand through her hair and focuses on the young ducks. “Yes,” she says and he squeezes her hand. She squeezes back and they sit in silence for the rest of her lunch hour, but when they say good-bye to each other the kiss she gives him is just a little different, holds a bit more promise in it than it ever did before.
That night he touches her more intimately, his fingers sliding up beneath her blouse, exploring territory so long forbidden, so far out of bounds in another lifetime. She makes noises of desire and bares her neck to him and his lips take full advantage, his teeth scrape her pulse point and the things he does with his tongue along her collarbone make her squirm and cry out. She touches him, too, with warm human hands. His are like that now. She slides hers up and under his jumper, learning the planes and angles of his stomach and chest, the musculature of his back.
She sighs happily against his touch. She is ready to move forward, go further, deepen their relationship yet again. Still, they don’t make love. His hands do not stray below her waist. He does not try to remove her blouse. Something continues to hold him back. Rose is afraid that something always will.
When he complains of being bored, but is not yet ready to work in a place that will remind him too much of what he has lost and what he used to be, Rose enrolls him in a cooking class. He balks at first, says he should be taking classes that challenge him, but she tells him cooking will challenge him, he can barely make toast or macaroni and cheese from a box without burning it. Besides, he could teach all of the other classes available in the community education program, so what would be the point in taking any of those?
He gives in with bad grace but finds himself rather liking the experience even if it does mean he gets on the instructor’s nerves by breaking down the molecular structure of every recipe they try and rewiring the stovetop of his oven to produce more even and consistent heat. He plagues the local library until he’s read every book on cooking, and mastered recipes well beyond the class he takes. Rose laughs and says that all it took was him learning how to pay attention.
Lunch time sarnies are soon replaced by gourmet meals and when the Doctor takes over all of the cooking Rose simply smiles and says nothing about it, but thanks him sweetly for every meal he makes and seals it with a kiss. She teaches him to do laundry, work the dishwasher, and how to operate the vacuum and he doesn’t even complain, though he does wake up in a cold sweat one night realizing that for all intents and purposes he has become a house husband without the benefit of sharing the marriage bed or being Rose’s actual husband. It scares him even more when he realizes that for the time being he doesn’t mind it quite as much as he should.
Six months in he starts tutoring at risk youth in mathematics and computers, using his facility with Earth languages, something that has stayed with him despite the lack of his TARDIS to translate, to help children who otherwise might get lost in the system, to understand concepts in their native tongues and then again in English. He decides he likes helping children to become more than anyone else expects they can be. He likes seeing their potential, likes it even more when they strive to reach it.
He considers becoming a teacher. Pete offers to pay for him to challenge as many Uni courses as he wants to, or to put him through the full human education if he’d rather go that route. Rose tells him that he can do whatever he wants, but she really wishes he would come give Torchwood a try and work beside her, before he makes any other decisions.
He acquiesces to her desire eight months in as long as he can continue to work with the kids in his free time, unwilling to leave them behind. He feels too keenly still what it is to be abandoned. He realizes on his first day what has been holding him back from working with her for so long. He is afraid that she will compare their past saving of the universes and world after world with whatever comes next. He was a Time Lord then. Now he’s only human. Brilliant, but only human.
She doesn’t. She holds his hand as they right wrongs, put down alien takeovers, negotiate treaties, and identify strange, dangerous and sometimes silly alien devices. He likes it. That doesn’t keep his hand from shaking, his blasted left hand, as he signs his first employment contract.
He takes her out to dinner using money from his first paycheck and books them on a weekend getaway via zeppelin flight to Snowdonia, Wales, with money from his second. They are supposed to share a two-bedroom suite but when the hotel they are meant to stay in is struck by lightning and burnt to the ground the day before their visit, they end up instead in a little bed and breakfast a stone’s throw from the reconstruction of the ruined Dolwyddelan Castle.
They sleep in the same bed for the first time and they talk long into the night about their future. They talk about how many children they want to have. He wants four. Rose agrees to two and says they can decide from there about any more. The next morning the Doctor suggests a tour of the ruins and the reconstruction sight. Rose suggests he take a tour of her body instead and that he let her return the favor. He’s a bit stunned by her offer and loses his ability to speak.
Losing all patience with him because what she thought was going to finally be a romantic weekend with him, a consummation of their relationship, has turned out not to be and she comments rather sharply that if he ever does want to have those babies with her some day, they’re going to have to have actual sex first and she’d really rather not wait until they want to conceive to try for the first time.
It is then that he admits to her that he doesn’t know what to do. She stares at him in complete and utter shock then splutters, “You told me long ago that you could dance, that it was safe to assume that you’d danced before!”
“No, I know what to do; I just don’t…know what to do. With you.” He huffs out air and runs his hand through his hair.
“Well, let me know when you get it figured out,” she says. She scoops up her clothes and slams into the bathroom and uses up all of the hot water and refuses to look at him when she comes out fully dressed.
“Rose,” he begins.
“Just don’t.” She grabs her purse and walks out.
He sits there for a long time on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. Then he heads downstairs, asks the owner of the B&B where the nearest bookstore is and follows her directions to get there. He finds Rose in the health and human sexuality section.
“Guess we had the same idea,” he says sheepishly.
“I thought that since you can’t seem to ask me what you need to know, maybe you could figure it out from these.” She still sounds a little angry but looks at him, shoves a pile of books in his arms and leads him to the cash register. He blushes to the tips of his ears as the cashier looks over their choice in reading material but he makes no comment other than to give them a total. The Doctor hands over the money and accepts his change without meeting the other man’s eyes.
He spends the rest of the day reading, with breaks for meals. Rose works on Torchwood paperwork, which she had thought only to do on the zeppelin ride to Snowdonia and back, never dreamed she’d be doing on their actual holiday. It’s ten p.m. when he closes the last book and looks over at her to find her staring at him.
“Hello,” he says quietly.
“Hello,” she answers back. “Figure out what you needed to know?”
He takes off his glasses and sets them on the nightstand, then sets the final book there as well. He stands up and moves over to her side and shakes his head regretfully. “I think…” He swallows hard then starts again. “I think you’re just going to have to…show me how to dance with you.”
She feels her mouth curve into a gentle smile and she stands up and wraps her arms around him. She wraps one arm around his waist, guides one of his hands to her shoulder before taking his free hand. “You’ll find your feet at the end of your legs. You may want to move them.”
He smiles and then he is laughing at the memory and then his laugh is lost in her kiss and she is backing him over to the bed and he falls backwards onto it, bringing her down on top of him in a tangled heap. And so the dance begins.
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