At that the Doctor presses a hard kiss to her mouth, as if he’s punishing her for her words, or maybe rewarding her for them, Rose can’t tell.
(ten/rose angsty post-gitf au/fixit; this chapter is basically nothing but smut and talking and more smut (but sfw version can be found on ff.net as soon as I figure out how to edit around the smuts :’D)
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII | Part VIII
Settling back into bed next to the Doctor, pulling the rumpled duvet around her (and trying, and failing miserably, not to think of just how and why the duvet got to be so rumpled), it occurs to Rose that things are probably going to be just a little bit, well. Awkward. To say the least.
“So,” she says, and the word suspends in the air between them, frozen like a bubble in amber. “What now?”
Flat on his back, staring at the canopy up above, the Doctor folds his hands over his stomach. “We sleep, I would imagine.”
Rose holds back a sigh. Surely he knows that’s not what she meant, but after everything they both said, after everything he said, he probably isn’t too eager to jump straight back into another Talk™; Rose imagines he needs a little bit of time to rebuild his composure, gather up all the raw viscera he spilled out and sew them back in. Which is, of course, exactly the opposite of what Rose needs (Let’s dissect those guts she thinks, and wrinkles her nose after), but she can be patient. Can’t she?
“Well, erm,” she says, turning on her side away from him, twisting the bedclothes in her hands. “Good night, Doctor.”
The never-ending storm and its accompanying darkness make it difficult to perceive what time of night it is (or day, for that matter), so Rose can’t be sure whether she has lain wide-eyed and awake for hours or just minutes. Either way, sleep has eluded her for some time now, pointing and laughing while she chases her thoughts over and over like a bloody hamster spinning in its wheel.
“Doctor?” she asks over her shoulder, quietly, on the off-chance he could be asleep.
When he doesn’t reply for a few moments, Rose wonders if he did actually manage to doze off, but soon enough, she hears a quiet, “Hmm?”
“Just wondered if you were still awake.”
Wincing at her stiffness—it certainly feels like she’s been lying on her side for hours, whether or not that’s true—Rose rolls over to face him, finds him still staring at the canopy up above. Has he moved at all since they returned to the bed, she wonders?
“Are you,” Rose starts to ask, and swallows the rest of her words. The quickest way to kill a relationship is to take its temperature, she remembers reading in a magazine once, but then how else is she supposed to know whether the blasted thing needs medical attention? “Are you all right?”
A few seconds later: “Are you?”
blakekathryn
romaincrisis
