Hello! I wanted you to have this small ficlet because I got inspired by your wonderful fanfictions (and Already gone by Sleeping at Last). Enjoy!
She heard the key in the door and didn't move. Didn't wipe her face. There wasn't much point. He'd know before he even got the door shut. He always did.
The Doctor came in with his coat still half on, Torchwood badge clipped to his belt, and stopped in the doorway. Then he set his bag down without a sound and crossed to her. Instead of asking what's wrong — which she'd have hated, which would have made her sit up and arrange her face and say nothing, m'fine — he just sat down next to her, his shoulder bumping into hers.
The song looped round again. It came from her laptop at the end of the sofa, the sound coming out thinly.
"You've had this on a while?"
"Couple hours, maybe." Her voice came out rough. "Lost count."
They listened until the track was nearly done, just that last stretch where the singer keeps saying the same thing, over and over, like saying it enough times might make it easier to believe. Rose felt her throat close up around it.
The Doctor leaned forward and closed the laptop.
The flat went quiet, except for the rain tapping against the window. She stared ahead, and so did he.
"I know why he did it," Rose said after a few minutes. "Took me long enough to understand it, but I got there. He couldn't stay. Couldn't give me all of him. So he gave me you instead." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "I'm not angry anymore. I just miss him. Is that allowed? Can I miss him and still—"
"Yes." He said it before she'd even finished. "Of course it's allowed."
She nodded, and for a moment that seemed like it might be the whole conversation.
But then the Doctor turned to her, took her hands in his, and traced the lines of her palm.
"You know the why," he said slowly. "But I don't think you know the what. What it actually felt like." He glanced at her. "I know, Rose. Every bit of what he felt, in that moment and for years before it, because I am him and I know what it was like, to love you as him. And he never said it out loud, but I can. D'you want me to?"
Rose's throat had gone tight. She nodded.
He took a breath, and when he spoke again his voice had changed slightly, slipping into something older than the body he was in.
"I had lost everything," he said. "My whole planet, everyone I'd ever known, gone, and I did it, and I lived, and I was alone. I was a man made entirely out of the shape of what wasn't there anymore. I got very good at it. Got good at being clever and quick and never, ever still."
He paused. Rose didn't say anything. She'd gone quiet and small against the cushions.
"And then there was you," he said. "And suddenly it was like I could breath again. And I want to tell you it was gradual, but it wasn't. It was almost immediate, and it terrified me. I'd built this whole me out of grief and suddenly I wasn't thinking about Gallifrey for hours at a time, and then for days. I felt happy, I felt alive again. And I'd catch myself laughing at something stupid you said, and suddenly realizing how far I had fallen for you. And the next thought, right behind it, every time: that I could lose you. That you could be taken from me. And I already knew, better than anyone, exactly what that kind of loss does to a person. I was looking at the rest of my life and seeing two roads, and one of them was loving you but never doing something about it and telling me that it would hurt less this way, and the other end of that road was me, alone again, except this time there'd be nothing left of me at all."
"So you ran," Rose said quietly.
"So I ran. Told myself it was about you — about keeping you safe, keeping things simple, all the reasons that were true but weren't the reason." He looked at her properly now. "The reason was that I loved you so much it felt like the universe had found the one thing that could actually finish me off, and it had handed it to me, and asked me to hold it. And I didn't trust myself not to drop it. Not because I didn't want it. Because I wanted it so much that the wanting itself felt dangerous. D'you know what I mean? When something's so good you go looking for the catch, because surely — surely there's a catch, surely nothing gets to be this—"
He closed his eyes, shuddering. Rose lifted a hand slowly, tracing the shell of his ear. "Were you going to tell me?" she whispered. "The first time, on Bad Wolf Bay?"
"I wanted to." His voice had gone rough now. "I had the whole sentence ready, Rose. And then the moment came and I opened my mouth and what I heard, in my own head, before I'd even said anything, was how small it was going to sound. Three words. Five, with your name. And what I felt, it didn't have an edge to it, it didn't stop anywhere, it was the only thing in me that was bigger than the hole where Gallifrey used to be, and I was supposed to just — say I love you, and have that be it? Have you listen to three words and think that was the whole of it, when it wasn't even close, when it was barely the first page of it?" He shook his head. "So I stumbled through the words and then ran out of time." A small, sad smile played around his lips. "Imagine that, a Time Lord, running out of time."
She smiled back at him, fingertips still caressing his skin.
"So I left it unsaid," he said, then shrugged. "I guess at least unsaid, it stayed as big as it actually was."
The room went quiet again. Outside, thunder rumbled. From somewhere nearby came the smell of the neighbours' cooking — chicken masala, faint through the walls. Rose let herself fall forward, her forehead resting on his shoulder, his arms pulling her to him, fingers playing with the hair at the nape of her neck.
"He wanted you to have all of it," the Doctor said, softer now. "And the only way the size of what he felt for you meant anything was if it turned into something you could actually have — mornings, and years, and someone who'd be there for every single one of them without flinching. He couldn't be that. He knew he couldn't, the same way you know you can't pour a sea into a cup. So he found a way to give you the cup instead. Filled it as full as it would hold. And he let the rest of it — the part that didn't fit — he let that go on alone, because at least then he wasn't asking you to hold something that would eventually break you too."
"And you," Rose mumbled into his shoulder, suddenly feeling very tired. "Where does that leave you?"
"Sitting here, next to you," he said, and it sounded so simple that her heart clenched. He drew her face up toward his, fingers splayed across her cheeks, eyes drinking her in. "I love you, Rose Tyler. All of it — the whole impossible size of it, the bit that used to frighten him so much he ran from a galaxy rather than feel it. I get to keep that. I get to say it, and mean it, and not be scared of it, because the cost is just — time. Ordinary time."
!!!! This is so perfect anon!! I’m so glad you shared it ♥️
Everyone, if you need a little pick me up this Saturday morning, read this!