love is for children, i owe him a debt

[redonledgers]

the night of the hunter and the night of the husband

doctor/rose + MAFIA AU?

 somethingofthewolf

“Alright, one more time. Do you know where the Bad Wolf is?”

The light flickers above me. This detective’s a damn smart sonofabitch, almost as clever as I am—although I’d never tell—and he knows bringing Rose Tylerup isn’t going to get him anywhere, I mean, he’s gotta know that.

I’ve hired her for a few jobs in the past. She’s confident with a rifle, stubborn as hell, and has this way of earning respect from all who cross her path with a flash of a smile and those honey brown eyes. She’s charm and sex appeal and danger, the sort of sexy even I can understand. 

And I’m happily married to my millions.

“I’m sorry, who?” My new friend doesn’t buy my innocence, even if he’s got nothing on me but the word of a few thugs who apparently don’t value their families as much as I’d hoped.

“The Bad Wolf, New York’s most wanted. Don’t play games with me.”

“Oh, but I think you must not get enough time to play, locked up in this dusty place all day. Is that why you insist on chasing ghosts? Tell me,” I say, leaning forward. “What do you know of the Bad Wolf,maytheLordhavemercyonmysoul?” I pull out my rosary beads; after all, one can never be too careful.

He sits back in his chair and stares at me for a while. “Her name is Rose, Rose Marion Tyler. Twenty-three years old. Grew up in Harlem with her mother. Father died when she was an infant. Left school at sixteen to be with her artist boyfriend, lived with him for several months before moving back in with her mother. Disappeared on her nineteenth birthday and no one has seen her since.” 

Oh, this one is very, very good. “A myth,” I reply. “And anyway, I have no earthly idea why you are wasting your finite resources on a girl from the projects, anyway. Business is the realm of man.”

“Which is why no one would suspect a woman to be running about the city assassinating government officials.” He grins at me. “Because most folks are rather traditionalist about gender roles, aren’t they? But not you, I don’t think. I imagine you’ll use anyone to get what you want, which is power and wealth and influence. Even a woman. So I’m going to ask you again, sir, where is the Bad Wolf?”

My attorney barrels into the room.

“I thought we was here on tax evasion, Detective Smith. You want to talk about fairy tales and assassins-for-hire, you’d better get a warrant linking my client to… well, you know who.”

Obviously, even copious amounts of money can’t buy a suit with a spine.

+ + + + +

She calls me from inside Smith’s apartment the next evening. “He doesn’t like using the deadbolt lock,” she whispers. “But really, he’s got the documents linking you to the Jones assassination. I honestly can’t believe it—this guy deserves a pay raise.”

“Told you he’s a genius.”

“Harry, I can take care of this. Only ‘cause I underestimated this cop and overestimated your guys’ forging capabilities. But documents like these? Always have a backup. You’re gonna want to get a man on it. Or…”

“Or?”

I hear her smile into the phone. “You could leave the whole thing to me. For an small fee, naturally.”

“Naturally.” When it comes to Miss Tyler, small is… well, no less than a hundred grand. I don’t question why she’s being so magnanimous. She’s the best in the business, and this is why—excellent customer service.

Also, her aim is impeccable.

“Write that check, Mr. Saxon. I’ll have this sorted within the week.”

+ + + + +

Rose Tyler smiles as she hangs up the phone.

“It seems our boy’s let pride get the better of him,” she tells the shadows. “The great Master couldn’t possibly be taken for a ride by a double agent.”

“To be fair, you are very, very good,” the shadows reply. ”Have you spoken to Harriet?”

A pair of strong arms wrap around her waist. She sighs. “She’s on a yacht off the coast of Naples with seven of my very best agents, sipping fresh sangria served by half naked Italian men and no doubt getting more sex than I’ve had in a year.”

Soft, warm lips press against the skin of her neck. ”After the trial, we could go somewhere warm.” 

“I sort of imagine we’ll have no choice. Harold Saxon isn’t the sort of man you double cross. I’ve got friends in Barcelona who can give us a place to stay, if you’ve got friends in Forensics who know how to fake a murder scene.”

“Not really what I had in mind, but Barcelona is nice. We could get a dog.”

“I like dogs,” she murmurs, turning around in his embrace, and catches his lips in a kiss.

[redonledgers]

Some Idiot's Lantern fic because I watched it last night.

He can't stop staring at her face. The glorious curves of her cheeks, the way her honey eyes darken as they sway together to the dulcet tones of a clunky piano in the middle of Florizel St., that sliver of tongue peeking out from behind her teeth while she grins that gorgeous lazy grin of hers, and oh, those sugar plum lips, soft and begging to be kissed, but he just tightens his grip on her waist, pulls her closer to him, and presses his nose into her loosely coiffed updo, and he just breathes her in 'cause the very sight of her leaves him in a prickling sort of awe, the sort that catches his breath in his chest, that hurts so very nicely, and then she ghosts her lips across his neck.

"Rose," he gasps, the weight of this love he feels is all but suffocating him; he's lucky he has his respiratory bypass. He feels her smile against his skin.

"Doctor." And she pulls back, gazes at him knowingly, and well, he's done for. 

All of the pushing, all of his defenses, and they crumble with a word. 

(There is power in words, after all.)

"I'll never let anything happen to you again," he whispers desperately, releasing her waist to grasp her face in his trembling hands. "I can't--I won't lose--"

Their lips meet and it's just like he's never imagined it--real and nose bump-y and warm and orange juice-y, but he can't shut his eyes, 'cause then he sees what the Wire did to her, his golden girl with her face stolen, her very essence ripped from him, and fuck, that's her tongue, and he needs to get them to the TARDIS now or he'll take her in this street, and Great Britain in 1953 is a shade too conservative for the kind of public indecency he's got in mind--

she sighs and leans into him

--and he loves her, and he's always known it, it's like that Billie Holiday song, he sees her pink-and-yellow face in every flower, and her eyes in every damned star in the universe, and he's a bit determined to show her some stars of his making.

She pulls back an inch and giggles against his lips. "I should have gotten my face lost a long time ago, I guess." 

He flinches. "I'd be perfectly happy if you never lost any part of you again."

[goldcaught]

[redonledgers]

She’s something new. Something fresh, a fawn working her legs for the first time, and he’s absolutely twitterpated.

God, it’s been so long, since Serena fell into (and out of) the world and Ruth packed her bags and wished him the best, and he’s sworn off of love and endorphins and sex because, in the end, he is a man who cheated on his wife and perhaps a life lived alone is his penance.

It only works because Holly is fucked up, too. Or at least, she has a rap sheet, and now she’s done her time and rehabilitated. She’s got a smile for him, a twinkle in her eyes when he says her name, and when they (finally) make love, she’s a giggling, breathy, beaming thing like a star or a home. 

Yes, she’s a home. And she’s holding up a key to her flat, and she’s winking as she flings her towel off of her glorious little body and the key lands on her bed beneath them, and he’s laughing a full, hearty sort of laugh, and she’s got tears on her cheeks and oh, this is a new sort of love, a truer sort of love than he’s ever known.

It’s an honest love.

[redonledgers]

30 days of drabbles - haze

For the first time in such a very long time, she feels warm. Content. Lashes brush dusty pink cheeks, but the little trickling lights on her skin persist. Her nose wrinkles. She burrows her face into a pillow; the scent of him overwhelms her senses when the rising sun cannot.

Images flash behind her closed eyelids. Clean yellow linens. Skin on skin. Tear tracks on a stubbly chin. Red trainers, white laces, hands fumbling on clasps and trembling over cotton knickers.

Chapped lips. A hand in hers. Sand. Blue. Two by two--

Amber eyes fly open. 

He's sleeping beside her. His bare chest rises and falls to the steady beat of a lonely heart. 

She keeps it company when he wakes. 

(With tongue).

[redonledgers]

30 days of drabbles - snowflake

snowflake

She is hidden in plain sight. She is the stark wanderer, the woman with the words, the final hope for humanity. She stands alone deep within the freezing crevices of Mt. Hotaka while blood runs into the rivers of Japan, while the headless bodies of children turn the Pacific brown.

Once, she stays with a family in Nagasaki, before the purge. There is no escaping this fate, they say as she wraps her wounded knee. The grandmother, a determined little woman with skin like leather and a smile like Christmas, holds out a knife to her and nods. 

I found this the day the sky burned with the rage of a thousand suns, she croaks. We were a proud people then. Proud, but human. We are still human. We are still proud. They will break us, but we will live on in the survivors, in you. In our blood as it marks this Earth.

They sing the lament of a nightingale as they march to the sea, and she hears their cries in her sleep.

She does not bathe in Japan. The snow dries her dark skin and her hair curls for the first time in years. She looks to be a wild thing, fearsome with a flame in her breast. 

The snow falls each night. The hypothermia sets in. Still, they sing. 

Still, she rises.

[redonledgers]

please please more river/autonomy fic it gave me angry feeeeeeeels

:D

it's my favorite river ship, so I will obviously write more.

[redonledgers]

30 days of drabbles - restless

restless

These legs need to move. There's a beat rushing through his veins, fast and sure and alive. All golden, clinging on from a touch that brought him to life--after all, the only death for a man living to die is rebirth--and he's got urges unlike any he's ever known, such aching needs, to run, to spiral out of control, to fuck and rut and drive this body to its limits. This body that decays with each breath; each nanosecond he feels in his bones.

He's bursting at the proverbial seams, raging at the dying of a very particular light, a little candle burning inside a girl, and his blood howls for her, for the wolf, and there is something of the wolf that lingers still to her very atoms, and oh, he wants to split them with his teeth and watch her explode.

A door opens from behind him.

She takes his hand. Fingerprints line up.

His pulse slows. Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum.

"Come back inside now," she whispers. Come back to me, she doesn't have to say.

He always will.

[redonledgers]

30 days of drabbles - accusation

accusation

She's angry and bitter, and right now is not the time for confrontation. Though it sort of does need saying, she needs to be alone lest she scream and rage about all of the reasons she's better off leading an Earthbound life, and Mickey just knows her so well.

So he gives her an out in the form of the TARDIS gaming room (room is really an understatement, of course) and she takes it. 

The TARDIS moves her room near the kitchen--and yes, she could use a cuppa, thanks! But as she heats the kettle, she starts thinking.

You abandoned me.

Just like that, with barely a glance in her direction, he hopped on his steed and went off to save the French aristocracy. And there were a million better solutions to the problem--taking the TARDIS, for instance, or at least letting her jump on Arthur to tell the pesky robots that their game was up--but simply solving it wasn't his aim, was it?

No. He wanted to show off. He wanted to run away.

You lied to me.

Run away after he said he'd never leave her! Not even a bloody day before his cowardice kicked in and kicked his bum into action. She's not a fool, she's not a stupid ape (she's quite a brilliant ape, thank you very much, even without the diamonds and education). 

You're pushing me away.

She has no claim to him, just the golden song that howls through her veins for him, just the scars of Time and ash on her psyche. But it still hurts.

Because she's seen his need for her, his desire. He stares at her like she's something new, something precious. And yes, he loves her. 

And you're so very scared.

Rose lies on her bed and refuses to weep.

She's not that easily broken.

[redonledgers]

30 days of drabbles - beginning

The day she leaves prison, she's almost immediately cuffed (with deadlocks). Still, she's out and she's free(ish) and this must be what life is like for the Other people, for the ones with conventional work and two-point-four kids, who holiday on Barcelona by air shuttle, who haven't taken the fall for a great(ish) man and learned first-hand that gods are vastly overrated. 

River Song would be lying if she said she wasn't bitter. She wears an invisible ring on her finger and it keeps her in her place, tamed and domesticated like a good dog. (She remembers a story about a bad wolf and wonders why he never married her).

"Do as you're told," he said in a world that never existed, before a ceremony that never happened. 

Well, he isn't even here to invite her home. Wherever that may be. A beep from her wrist reminds her that she can be free, if she so chooses.

She can go anywhere.

[redonledgers]

puerto rico - tony/rose, implied tony/pepper and rose/tentoo; pg-13

somethingofthewolf:

that rendition of "hips don't lie" on my tony/rose mix makes me think of nothing but tony maybe taking a spontaneous trip to puerto rico and stumbling into a bar at 3am to find a local band covering this and everyone dancing and the drinks are delicious and it's hot but not stifling and he knows this was the smartest thing he's ever stolen the jet for a midnight joyride for the second he sees her laughing at some guy's attempt to tell the truth with his hips at a table across the way.

and she’s flushed from the heat and there’s a light sheen of sweat across her brow, but he’s never seen her look so gorgeous, she’s wearing a pair of denim shorts and a loose blouse that dips far too low for her intentions to be anything other than sensual, and he’s got his eyes on her as he licks the condensation off of his glass of rum and ginger, imagining she’s laid out before him, drops of sweet daquiri coating her taut stomach, and he feels himself reacting to the fantasy even as she pulls the man with her to the hazy dance floor, even as she slips one of her strong warrior’s hand over his ass and coaxes him into a slow grind—tony wonders for a moment the how her partner isn’t drenched in sweat, dressed as he is in that slim blue suit and pressed so closely to this unbearably beautiful woman—and when she nuzzles the man’s neck with her nose and runs her other hand up through his (frankly magnificent) brown hair, tony’s had about all he can take.

he’s never seen her so happy. he grins, finishes his drink and calls pepper—surely there’s things she needs signed before he heads off to afghanistan, after all.

he’s not in love with rose tyler—no, he knows that his heart belongs to someone else entirely. but when he gets to vegas to do some award thing for rhodey and ends up taking home the first blonde who challenges him like they always have, the two women in his life who actually give a fuck, he has to bite his lips to keep from crying out her name.

[redonledgers]

some shit i wrote for melissa and now it's in a text post so um here

They run.

They run from the things that hurt, from the darker pieces of their lives that smudge clouds over sunlight, from feelings and angry bitter snapping words, they run with kisses and hot bodies writhing wrestling winding around roads in beds, all while devils and television sets and horizons warn of storms and battles and white walls with worlds behind them. She rages against the dying of the light with honey eyes and laughter. 

She runs and holds his hand tightly, the only hint of her fear are her fingernails digging holes into his skin. It's trench pore-fare, if you will.

But he draws blood when they make love. When they fuck, he bites into her shoulder and claws at her breasts and ruts into her core, and it hurts a bit but it's a good sort of wet push pull pain, and he always says he's sorry.

He's so sorry.

1967. They're lying on a picnic blanket in the middle of San Francisco. He blows smoke rings into the sky. She blows something else entirely, right there in the park, because it's the Summer of Love and if you can't do public sex during the Summer of Love, you can't do it anywhere. Later, they stare up at the Californian sky and watch the stars burn out above them. Places they've been, places they'll go, places that'll be left untouched.

"I'm scared," he whispers into the crook of her neck, damp with sweat and flushed from his kisses. She stares up at him, tears in her eyes and runs slender fingers through his mangy hair. "There's something in the air and it's thick and I'm gonna--you're not gonna--I can't lose you," he gasps.

She wants to tell him, that she's sorry for leaving him, because she doesn't know when it's coming, when this storm will hit; instead, she catches his hand in hers and pulls it up between her breasts.

"You have this, Doctor. No, look at me. You have this forever. You could cut it out of me and lock it away somewhere if you wanted. It's yours."

He nearly weeps.

[redonledgers]

if i could feel it all for you; ten II/rose (R)

Written for Angie's birthday. It's a bit late, but who is to decide what late is anyway?

His kisses linger, but then, her hands wander. 

To the Doctor, the whole world could be plunged back into the Darkness and he'd barely notice, what with Rose and her lips. Oh, he's missed this. But then he's missed so many things about his golden girl, like her hazel eyes and her hand in his and her breasts so pert and her laughter like the slow burn of that fine scotch her father's got decanting in his office, like her humanity and how she saves him with the air in her lungs. 

And now he knows that she knows how desperately he loves her. How completely he is hers. 

She looks up at him through hot tears. "I'm scared this is a dream. I don't want to wake up and find you universes away again."

He nearly breaks. How many times has he dreamt of making love to Rose, only to wake up and find himself very much without her? The thought of never... of never having this life with her makes his blood runs cold.

"It doesn't feel like a dream." He pauses for a moment and grins. "After all, you weren't wearing red lace underneath all of that Defender of the Earth garb."

"And you came first," she shoots back, tongue between her teeth. "That's hardly the way it went in my dreams."

His single heart lurches in his chest. "So... you've dreamt about this, then."

"I suppose my subconscious needed to exercise some of that sexual frustration, Doctor."

He runs a hand through her soft hair. She presses soft kisses against his chest. "I did too--dreamed of you, I mean to say." Rose frowns, glancing up at him with questions dancing in those eyes. "I was human. With Martha. I had to change to keep us hidden from these rather nasty creatures, and so I changed my biology--"

"Like regeneration?"

The Doctor shakes his head. "Sorta the opposite, really--I kept my physical form, except I lost my binary vascular system and the ol' Time Lord noggin, including memories and knowledge and... well."

"That sounds awful," she murmurs. 

"Well, the changing wasn't too fun. But... for a time, I--John Smith, I mean--was quite content. Until the end of it all."

Her eyes betray her interest, but that's one story he'll save for a time in which they're not high on the aftershocks of their lovemaking. He certainly doesn't want her to start going on about how she fell in love with someone else while they're all sweaty and gloriously naked.

That tact must be Donna piping up, he thinks with a twinge in his chest.

Perhaps his expression shutters a bit, because she changes the subject. "So, what did we do in those dreams of yours?" she asks, grinning cheekily at him. The Doctor presses his lips to her neck and jaw. 

"The darkest of deeds," he murmurs. "It was altogether too much and never, ever enough. I had you in so many places, Rose," he adds and watches her pupils dilate. Her chest flushes. "And in so many ways. Then I'd wake up, images of this beautiful blonde girl running through my mind, and I'd ache for you, even if I didn't remember you."

She swallows. "Did you touch yourself afterwards?" Her nimble fingers scratch geometry lessons over his lower back.

"With John Smith's puritanical views of sex?" She sketches isosceles triangles on his spine and smirks. "Of course I did. But it was such a struggle, though. Humans and your sexual hangups."

"Oi, mister. You're kinda one of us now."

The Doctor chuckles and kisses her left breast. "Quite right. Anyway, even when I was me again, you were always there, in my dreams, when I got around to sleeping. In my waking hours, I'd think of you and oh, Rose, it hurt." She slips her fingers up his spine and draws her big toe up to the back of his knee. He shudders. 

"Someone offered to take my memories of you," Rose whispers into his hair. "This Rumosian woman was visiting Earth on an academic trip, and apparently the Rumosians are pretty good with telepathy and neurology." 

He snorts. "'Pretty good' doesn't cover it--after the Time Lords, they are pretty much the greatest experts on multispecies brain science around. And, well, the Time Lords are dead, so--"

"My story." She runs her palms down to his arse and squeezes. Never one to be outdone, he licks around a nipple and is awarded a gasp for his efforts. "Her name was Li'an. She said she could dull th--the pain, move it to the back of my mind, or she could put a lock on my memories altogether, to keep me from accessing them at all." He stiffens, knowing full well what he'd have done to keep Rose from hurting. What his other self must have already done to Donna, to save her from the metacrisis.

And there's a topic he doesn't want to touch with a ten-foot pole.

"What happened?" he asks, mentally shaking thoughts of Donna Noble from his head. 

She smiles down at him and pulls his head up by his hair to look at her. "Well, obviously I said no thanks, yeah? I don't let just anyone play around with my brain. And besides, memories of those days, runnin' with you in the TARDIS, they kept me strong. Kept me fightin'." The Doctor gazes up at her in awe. "What?"

"I'm just so in love with you," he says simply. Rose's breath hitches. "All that time, I just wanted to forget. So I did--with the Chameleon Arch, the device that turned my biology human." He takes a breath. "And I... John Smith met someone." He watches her carefully before continuing. "And in the end, she asked me if I could change back, and I could... but I wouldn't."

"Sounds a bit familiar," Rose whispers. 

"Yeah. But I realized, all of those experiences with people I'd lost, all of my feelings for you... I couldn't let any of it go. That pain was a part of the man I'd become, and Rassilon smite me where I stand, but I was useless as a human."

He feels her smile trail over his forehead. "Not anymore." 

"Yeah?"

Rose pulls his lips up to hers by his (frankly magnificent) head of hair. "Yes," she says, honey eyes dark and warm, and snogs him blind.

[redonledgers]

I think you should try Tony and Hannah(SDOACG) :) Love all your stuff by the way,please, keep going!

I HAVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THISIT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE

At least pre-end-of-IM2. 

[redonledgers]

are you gonna continue heaven inc.?? i LOVE IT!!

Absolutely!

[redonledgers]

in which tony stark and rose tyler are friends, part 1

A/N: This part takes place prior to Journey's End and Tony's adventures in Afghanistan. This is crack.

&&

They meet in downtown Manhattan over pizza and red wine. She's on a mission from Torchwood, to successfully create a means of trans-dimensional travel that does not rip holes in the fabric of reality. He's on a mission assigned by his dick, because the mysterious Vitex heiress is smoking hot and wears a lot of leather. 

Of course, she's also got twenty-seven firearms, knives and electro-grenades strapped to her body, twelve of which he could see on the inside of her jacket alone, and so his dick is not planning on making a showing tonight.

Never let it be said that Tony Stark has no sense of cock-preservation.

Unfortunately, she's got this habit where her tongue sort of does whatever the fuck it wants, and oh yes, those lips most definitely need a good moisturizing. 

"Eyes up here, soldier," she drawls with a smirk, and there's a glint in her eyes and huh. She's got sauce on her chin.

"You've um... got a little--uh," he starts, pointing at her chin but brushing over her mouth with his thumb. She raises a brow and licks the pad of his thumb before it rubs her chin clean. "Sauce."

She laughs, and it's a hearty, head-thrown-back-in-delight laugh. He almost--almost--feels proud that he's entertained this glorious woman, with her tired honey eyes and cheeks that match her namesake, and if he doesn't get to share a bed with her, he's going to have Pepper call for any blonde escort who can fake a British accent (if she isn't actually English) and do that thing with her tongue.

"So what brings you to New York, Miss Tyler?" he asks eventually, gazing unabashedly at her mouth.

She doesn't miss a beat. "I felt like bein' ogled over by some middle-aged self-loathing playboy with a hero complex. You?"

"The pizza, of course."

His companion-type-person grins. "Well, you've got good taste. I only ever order pizza from Lombardi's, myself. Get it flown in."

"Perks of being the daughter of the richest man in the UK," he says and folds his next slice, prepping for the ever-important First Bite.

"Perks of being the woman who saved the owner and his wife from a pair of nasty Weeping Angels."

Ah yes. Apart from being breathtakingly gorgeous, she's also supremely competent. Not that he knows what a Weeping Angel is, and to be frank, he's not got time for fundamentalist evangelicals, so he hopes she's not one of them. But the way she says it, and the way the owner comes out and shuts the entire restaurant for "Signorina Rosa and that crazy Stark man from the papers," well, he doesn't get the vibe that they're a friendly bunch.

"So, Torchwood finally ready to invest in good ol' Stark tech?"

She smiles all too politely. "Stark Industries ready to tap into temporal physics?"

He laughs. "Temporal physics is entirely theoretical, Miss Tyler. Stark Industries prefers to deal in the existential."

There's something frightfully knowing about her eyes when she speaks next. "Oh, well then I suppose you wouldn't want to help us construct a means of trans-dimensional travel that doesn't rip holes in the fabric of reality."

"Well, now that you put it like that..."

He might have agreed to meet Rose Tyler in accordance with his penis, but he ends up signing a contract with Torchwood when his brain starts calculating the odds that Rose Tyler is onto something.

Something mind-numbingly big.

&&

He never actually ends up sleeping with Rose Tyler. It's not because he's not completely into her, or even that she's not into him (he caught that hitch of her breath that time in the lab, the lingering touch of her fingers against his as she stares at the newly updated dimensional hopper, her eyes warm and soft as she bids him a safe trip back to California) but rather that they both find the sexual tension to be almost bearable. Helpful, even. 

He asks her why she does what she does one day after a test drive failed pretty miserably. 

"I have nothing else in this world," she murmurs before turning her gaze on him. "Why do you develop weapons?"

Tony frowns. "Because someone's got to do it."

Rose turns her attention back to her computer for a moment. "I had this friend, a long time ago, who aimed a missile at my head because I told him to. I thought, well I'm obviously gonna die here, but we'd save the world from a nuclear shitstorm, and so I realized that someone had to do it. Take the fall." 

"How'd you live?"

Her lips curve. "10 Downing Street has some fucking sturdy walls."

&&

Tony Stark is a certified genius. The brightest scientific mind in the world. But even he can't make the walls of the universe open up for him.

Until the bees disappear. Until the stars start going out.

Until Rose Tyler calls him and tells him that she's made a successful jump, and that she's been gone for two weeks--her time; she'd only been gone twenty-seven minutes Earth time--and does he have any ideas on boosting the power quotient so that she doesn't need to let the damned thing recharge each time she jumps?

He pilots his zeppelin to Canary Wharf, Pepper in tow as always, and sweeps Rose up into a hug when she greets him on the tarmac. 

She doesn't look well. There are cuts and bruises and lacerations all over her face and arms, and she's pale. Really pale. 

"Have your doctors run any tests?" he asks as she serves up some of her father's cognac.

Rose stills. "I'm fine, Tony."

"You look like a murder victim, were you to have been reanimated or propped up behind your desk by some really fucked up ventriloquist."

Pepper lets out an exasperated "Tony!" from behind him. 

"'M just tired, is all. Surprisingly, traveling between universes is actually a bit exhausting. And I haven't slept since I left here the other day."

"Well it's good you're getting nice and sloshed, then."

Two sets of eyes glare at him. It's slightly unnerving.

And by slightly, he means completely.

"Anyway, I need you to look at the multilinear fluctuation monitor, because it's sort of way inaccurate. I needed to get to Alexandria, Virginia in 1983, and it took me to the Library of Alexandria."

"Ah."

She nods. "Yeah."

&&

[orbitingasupernova]

worstwolf asked: RIVER/ROSE. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN STYLE LAW ENFORCEMENT SEEKING WANTED CRIMINAL AU. 8D

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG

&&&

It’s warm and sticky in Barcelona, much to River’s chagrin—worn leather and wild curls aren’t meant for this type of climate, and her caramel skin shines with perspiration. She wipes her drenched forehead with the back of her left arm as the other trains the pistol in her hand on her slender blonde captive with the honey eyes and liquid cherry lips.

The Bad Wolf grins and shakes her shackles. “You, me, handcuffs—must it always end this way?”

[orbitingasupernova]

somethingofthewolf replied to your post: I SWEAR HE AGREES CATE I SWEAR IT. OR SOMEONE DOES AT LEAST I KNOW ITTTTTTTTTTTT. or else maybe it was me but whatever we all know they were thinking it vehemently.

JEALOUSY IT IS THEN

“She’s just lovely, isn’t she?” Shaun murmurs as the Billie on the screen stares up at what is more likely to be ham and cheese falling from the walls of the set than the metal ceiling of Sanctuary Base 6. 

When is she not? David thinks, not trusting himself to open his mouth without gushing over his friend, without going into so much detail about just how exquisite she looks that the fans start speculating more than they have already, because he’s got Sophia and he loves Sophia but he loves Billie and he just can’t help himself.

So he gives a curt nod and says nothing, all the while shouting in his mind about how oh, she’s more than just lovely, oh she’s the sun and he’s the moon and he’ll reflect her bright gaze until she’s out of his life, until she’s a solitary regret instead of a burning ache in his chest and a fantasy in his head.

Until her voice stops lingering in his ears, until her smile begins to fade from his mind’s eye, until he can’t quite remember just how much he needs her.