rosa_acicularis (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rosa_acicularis) wrote2010-05-16 12:09 am
rosa_acicularis) wrote2010-05-16 12:09 am
Entry tags:
Fic: Tomorrow Is a Long Time, part one.
Title: Tomorrow Is a Long Time
Characters: Rose Tyler, the Tenth Doctor, many others.
Rating: Adult.
Warnings: None.
Betas: The wondrous![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eponymous_rose and earlgreytea68. They're pretty awesome.
Spoilers: Through The Eleventh Hour.
Summary: If today was not an endless highway, if tonight was not a crooked trail, if tomorrow wasn't such a long time, then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all. Rose Tyler, on the road to Journey's End.
++
Some universes are more comfortable than others.
It’s a summer night, cool and dry, and she’s walked for miles without any sign of civilization. There is only open space, tall grass and gently sloping hills that fill the horizon, the high painted dome of the sky and the sweet-green smell of wind in her hair. For the first time in weeks she stops and feels herself breathe. Hears her heartbeat in the silence.
There are no stars left in this universe, but the moon shines in the east, silver-white against the cloudless midnight blue. She slips out of her clothes, spreads her dark jacket over the grass and sheds the dry-sweat cling of her shirt and trousers. She lies naked in the moonlight, swallowed by wind-rustled grass and the stillness of the night sky.
She falls asleep minutes later, her fingers curled around the dark grip of her gun.
++
That night she dreams about him.
He sits beside her in the grass, watching her sleep. When she opens her eyes, he smiles. “Hello,” he says. “Having a nice nap?”
She reaches up and touches his face, the way she would in a dream. The way she never did. He feels real enough – she traces the lines around his eyes and the angles of his face with her fingers, guided by the curve of his mouth and the quiet question in his eyes.
“I am now,” she says.
He lies down on his back beside her, hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder, the fabric of his suit a gentle rasp against her skin. She lifts her bare feet and settles them over his trainers, the worn canvas damp under her arches and heels. She shivers, and he takes her hand, curling his fingers through hers. “You’ve been traveling a long time,” he says.
She smiles. “Not as long as you.”
“You must be tired.”
“Not as tired as you.”
He rolls onto his side, leaning over her. He smoothes his palm along her naked collarbone, his fingers tracing the cool metal of the TARDIS key before slipping to her throat. Her pulse. When he speaks, his voice is quiet. “Rose, what if you never find me?”
An easy question. “Then I’ll keep looking,” she says. There is no doubt in her voice.
He frowns. “The concept of never—”
“Is beyond me, thankfully.” She touches the hand at her throat, sliding her fingers over his. Looks up at his pale face, framed by a starless sky. “I can’t let this happen, Doctor. I won’t. I’ll look until I find you.”
He is silent for a long moment, watching her and their hands joined over her skin. “And after?” he says.
After. After is forbidden territory – a distraction, and a temptation. All she lets herself see is the road beneath her feet. She strokes his knuckles with her thumb and feels him shiver. “Assuming we don’t die?” she says.
“Assuming we don’t die.”
“Then I’ll take a very long nap.” She gives him a wide, false grin. “In a bed, for once.”
“Rose—”
She stretches, cracking her toes and reaching her arms over her head. The wind rises around them, sighing through the tall grass. She eases away from him, his imagined heat and the line of his body, and closes her eyes. “I’ll see you soon,” she says.
If he answers, she does not hear him.
++
The next universe is a battlefield.
The sky is blood red, the clouds stained by the setting sun. Birds circle overhead, drawn by the smell. The ground is black under her feet, dark with rock and gunpowder, and she steps carefully around the fallen. Checks each body she passes for breath, or a pulse. She finds none.
She sees a wall in the distance, tall stone topped with barbed wire. The dead still grip their rifles, unfamiliar weapons that seem to belong to centuries past, though no century her universe has ever known. She touches her own weapon, the gun hidden beneath the hem of her jacket. She has thirty minutes before the jumper is recharged; until then she is trapped here. No man’s land.
In the distance, one of the dead shudders.
She runs to his side, her breath harsh and loud in the exposed silence. She kneels beside him, her hands brushing over his chest, his abdomen. Searching for injury. She touches his face, and he opens his eyes.
“If I’m dead,” the man says, “I must be in heaven.” He laughs, and the laugh turns to a wet, violent cough. He shakes under her hands.
“Don’t be stupid,” she says, her voice soft. “You’re not dead.” She pushes back his coat and sees the blood seeping through his shirt. Shot in the back, no exit wound. Not dead, but soon will be. He must see it in her eyes – he smiles, his teeth stained red.
“They say war is a woman, in the old stories. A maiden in black.” He reaches up and brushes a strand of hair from her face, smearing blood across her cheek. “Thought you’d be taller.”
He doesn’t say any more. Ten minutes later he dies, gasping for breath.
She stays with him.
++
She steps out of war and into a swimming pool.
She resurfaces a moment later, choking on chlorinated water and squinting through the burn in her eyes. Her clothes are heavy, her shoes heavier, and she dogpaddles her way to the shallow end.
She finds herself standing knee-deep in a motel swimming pool at midnight, ringed by palm trees and rusting white lounge chairs. She can hear the distant hum of a motorway; the buildings around her are silent and still, their windows dark. She sloshes out of the pool, strips off her sodden clothes and wrings them dry. She walks nude across the concrete, spreading her trousers and shirt and jacket over nearby chairs.
When she’s done, she looks down at the still surface of the pool. She can see something like her reflection in the water, in the white lights below. She still has the man’s blood on her face.
She leaps into the deep end at a run, landing with a loud splash that echoes in the night silence. The water is warm, heavy with the smell of chemicals and the day’s heat. She scrubs at her dirty hair, at the layers of dust and sand and street that settle over her skin with every new universe. She lets herself slip under and opens her eyes, stares into one of the circles of light that line the wall of the pool. An underwater moon, burning white in the clouded water. She squeezes her nose shut and holds her breath, bobbing cross-legged at the bottom until her lungs ache.
When she resurfaces, gasping, the Doctor is sitting by the side of the pool in his shirtsleeves, his bare feet dangling in the water.
She inhales some water through her nose and starts to cough.
“You’re not drowning, are you?” he asks, and she shakes her head. He smiles then, and loosens his tie. “Glad to hear it. I’d hate to have to jump in after you.”
She swims over to him, aware as she hadn’t been the night before of her nakedness. She grabs the pool edge beside him and hangs there, kicking idly. “So I’m hallucinating now, am I?”
“Maybe.” He shrugs. “Maybe this is another dream. I really couldn’t say.”
“Couldn’t say, or won’t?”
He frowns at something over her head – the palm trees. “Aren’t you meant to be looking for me in London?”
“You may not have noticed, but this thing isn’t exactly predictable.” She pulls on his bare ankle – a strange, unimagined intimacy, the rolled cuffs of his trouser legs and the hair on his calves – and grins up at him. “Come on in. The water’s fine.”
He reaches down and brushes a strand of hair from her face, his fingers cool against her cheek. “I should go.”
“Don’t.” She grips his knees and pulls herself up between them, arching out of the water. He cups her face in his hands, curls his body around her as her hands slide up his thighs, staining his trousers with pool water. “Stay a little longer,” she says, her voice rough. “If this is my dream—”
His nose bumps against hers, and she feels the heat of his breath against her mouth. “I’m the one asleep, this time.”
“Then don’t wake up.” Her lips touch his, briefly. “Not yet.”
“Rose,” he says, and he’s about to say something more when he overbalances, tipping forward into the pool with an enormous splash. He resurfaces, sputtering and rubbing his eyes.
She can barely breathe for laughing. “Your hair—” she gasps, but the rest is bubbles; he dunks her, his hands sliding down her slick shoulders. She kicks free, swims beneath him and grabs at his toes. Tickles the bottoms of his feet and grins as he squirms.
“—Going to get you for that,” she hears as she comes up for air. His arms twine around her, pushing her into shallower water, against the wall of the pool. Her hands slide up his chest, to the wet knot of his tie. They grin at each other, breathless.
“Oh no,” she says, deadpan. “Now you’ve got me.”
He laughs. “It seems I have.” She traces one finger along the line of his throat, following a bead of water as it slips under his collar. He swallows and his grin disappears, leaving an unreadable expression in its place. Under the water his fingers skim her ribs, the curve of her waist and the rise of her hips; she looks down and watches as he touches her, their skin strange and pale in the rippling light.
She looks up and meets his eyes.
There is something like wonder in his face, an innocence at odds with the centuries she’s seen in his eyes and the sad twist at the corner of his mouth. She kisses him there, a light touch of lips, and feels his hesitation.
“It’s all right,” she whispers. “I know you’re not real.”
He smiles, his eyes dark. “Well,” he says, “at least one of us does.” His hand slips between her legs and holds her there, an even pressure of bone and muscle and skin that makes her arch into him, her fingernails catching in the sodden fabric of his shirt. She gasps, and he kisses her carefully, his lips cold and slightly parted.
He tastes like chlorine, like sweet-green grass and open plains. She forces the kiss into something harder, something bruising, and with a low sound he pulls her closer, pushes her against the wall. He slips one finger inside her, and the callus on the pad of his thumb finds her clit.
“Jesus Christ,” she says, and then they both start to laugh, snickering into each other’s mouths. She rocks hard down into his hand, still laughing, and he kisses her jaw, the tendons of her neck. She feels his teeth, the slow touch of his tongue, and she shudders.
Then a car backfires in the distance and she’s on the edge of the pool, her arm outstretched as she reaches for the gun hidden under her jacket.
There’s a silence; she stays crouched on the concrete, dripping and naked. She doesn’t let herself look at his face.
“It was only a car,” he says.
She stands, rubbing the water away from her mouth and nose. Her eyes are still fixed on her gun. “Yeah,” she says. “I know.”
She hears him climb out of the water, the soft squelch of his trousers and the wet sound as his tie falls to the concrete. Hears his footsteps, the rustle of his dry suit jacket as he holds it out to her. “You think I don’t understand,” he says. “I do.”
He’s too thin; when she pulls the coat around her it covers her breasts and her stomach and not much else. She sits on a lounge chair, her knees tucked together and her arms held close inside the spare warmth of the jacket. She looks up at him. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
He nods. His hair is slicked to his head, his shirt and trousers dark with water. He sits beside her, his shoulder not quite touching hers. “Okay,” he says. “We won’t.”
They sit like that for a long time.
This universe has few stars left, and she watches them closely. They’re paled by the harsh lights of the city, dim with distance, but she finds comfort in them nonetheless. Comfort, and purpose.
“I watched a man die today,” she says.
The Doctor looks down, his mouth a thin line. “I’m sorry.”
She smiles at the stars. “You’re always apologising for things that aren’t your fault, but you never say a word about the things that are.” She stands, slipping his jacket from her shoulders and dropping it into his hands. Her drying hair curls into her eyes, and she brushes it back. “You fought in a war, once.”
He looks away. “I did.”
“You were a soldier.” She touches his chin, turning his face back to hers. “Did you carry a gun?”
He weighs the question carefully, and she can see in his eyes the brief moment when he considers the obvious lie. The moment passes. “Yes,” he says. “And worse things.”
She nods, bends and touches her forehead to his. Together, their eyes close. “You were right,” she says. “I am tired.”
When she opens her eyes, he’s gone.
She dresses slowly – bra and knickers, watch, trousers, shirt and shoes. Her gun in its holster and the smooth sleeves of her jacket, shining like armour in the pool light. The gate swings open under her hand and she walks east, out of the motel parking lot and into the sunrise.
++
part two
Characters: Rose Tyler, the Tenth Doctor, many others.
Rating: Adult.
Warnings: None.
Betas: The wondrous
eponymous_rose and earlgreytea68. They're pretty awesome. Spoilers: Through The Eleventh Hour.
Summary: If today was not an endless highway, if tonight was not a crooked trail, if tomorrow wasn't such a long time, then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all. Rose Tyler, on the road to Journey's End.
++
Some universes are more comfortable than others.
It’s a summer night, cool and dry, and she’s walked for miles without any sign of civilization. There is only open space, tall grass and gently sloping hills that fill the horizon, the high painted dome of the sky and the sweet-green smell of wind in her hair. For the first time in weeks she stops and feels herself breathe. Hears her heartbeat in the silence.
There are no stars left in this universe, but the moon shines in the east, silver-white against the cloudless midnight blue. She slips out of her clothes, spreads her dark jacket over the grass and sheds the dry-sweat cling of her shirt and trousers. She lies naked in the moonlight, swallowed by wind-rustled grass and the stillness of the night sky.
She falls asleep minutes later, her fingers curled around the dark grip of her gun.
++
That night she dreams about him.
He sits beside her in the grass, watching her sleep. When she opens her eyes, he smiles. “Hello,” he says. “Having a nice nap?”
She reaches up and touches his face, the way she would in a dream. The way she never did. He feels real enough – she traces the lines around his eyes and the angles of his face with her fingers, guided by the curve of his mouth and the quiet question in his eyes.
“I am now,” she says.
He lies down on his back beside her, hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder, the fabric of his suit a gentle rasp against her skin. She lifts her bare feet and settles them over his trainers, the worn canvas damp under her arches and heels. She shivers, and he takes her hand, curling his fingers through hers. “You’ve been traveling a long time,” he says.
She smiles. “Not as long as you.”
“You must be tired.”
“Not as tired as you.”
He rolls onto his side, leaning over her. He smoothes his palm along her naked collarbone, his fingers tracing the cool metal of the TARDIS key before slipping to her throat. Her pulse. When he speaks, his voice is quiet. “Rose, what if you never find me?”
An easy question. “Then I’ll keep looking,” she says. There is no doubt in her voice.
He frowns. “The concept of never—”
“Is beyond me, thankfully.” She touches the hand at her throat, sliding her fingers over his. Looks up at his pale face, framed by a starless sky. “I can’t let this happen, Doctor. I won’t. I’ll look until I find you.”
He is silent for a long moment, watching her and their hands joined over her skin. “And after?” he says.
After. After is forbidden territory – a distraction, and a temptation. All she lets herself see is the road beneath her feet. She strokes his knuckles with her thumb and feels him shiver. “Assuming we don’t die?” she says.
“Assuming we don’t die.”
“Then I’ll take a very long nap.” She gives him a wide, false grin. “In a bed, for once.”
“Rose—”
She stretches, cracking her toes and reaching her arms over her head. The wind rises around them, sighing through the tall grass. She eases away from him, his imagined heat and the line of his body, and closes her eyes. “I’ll see you soon,” she says.
If he answers, she does not hear him.
++
The next universe is a battlefield.
The sky is blood red, the clouds stained by the setting sun. Birds circle overhead, drawn by the smell. The ground is black under her feet, dark with rock and gunpowder, and she steps carefully around the fallen. Checks each body she passes for breath, or a pulse. She finds none.
She sees a wall in the distance, tall stone topped with barbed wire. The dead still grip their rifles, unfamiliar weapons that seem to belong to centuries past, though no century her universe has ever known. She touches her own weapon, the gun hidden beneath the hem of her jacket. She has thirty minutes before the jumper is recharged; until then she is trapped here. No man’s land.
In the distance, one of the dead shudders.
She runs to his side, her breath harsh and loud in the exposed silence. She kneels beside him, her hands brushing over his chest, his abdomen. Searching for injury. She touches his face, and he opens his eyes.
“If I’m dead,” the man says, “I must be in heaven.” He laughs, and the laugh turns to a wet, violent cough. He shakes under her hands.
“Don’t be stupid,” she says, her voice soft. “You’re not dead.” She pushes back his coat and sees the blood seeping through his shirt. Shot in the back, no exit wound. Not dead, but soon will be. He must see it in her eyes – he smiles, his teeth stained red.
“They say war is a woman, in the old stories. A maiden in black.” He reaches up and brushes a strand of hair from her face, smearing blood across her cheek. “Thought you’d be taller.”
He doesn’t say any more. Ten minutes later he dies, gasping for breath.
She stays with him.
++
She steps out of war and into a swimming pool.
She resurfaces a moment later, choking on chlorinated water and squinting through the burn in her eyes. Her clothes are heavy, her shoes heavier, and she dogpaddles her way to the shallow end.
She finds herself standing knee-deep in a motel swimming pool at midnight, ringed by palm trees and rusting white lounge chairs. She can hear the distant hum of a motorway; the buildings around her are silent and still, their windows dark. She sloshes out of the pool, strips off her sodden clothes and wrings them dry. She walks nude across the concrete, spreading her trousers and shirt and jacket over nearby chairs.
When she’s done, she looks down at the still surface of the pool. She can see something like her reflection in the water, in the white lights below. She still has the man’s blood on her face.
She leaps into the deep end at a run, landing with a loud splash that echoes in the night silence. The water is warm, heavy with the smell of chemicals and the day’s heat. She scrubs at her dirty hair, at the layers of dust and sand and street that settle over her skin with every new universe. She lets herself slip under and opens her eyes, stares into one of the circles of light that line the wall of the pool. An underwater moon, burning white in the clouded water. She squeezes her nose shut and holds her breath, bobbing cross-legged at the bottom until her lungs ache.
When she resurfaces, gasping, the Doctor is sitting by the side of the pool in his shirtsleeves, his bare feet dangling in the water.
She inhales some water through her nose and starts to cough.
“You’re not drowning, are you?” he asks, and she shakes her head. He smiles then, and loosens his tie. “Glad to hear it. I’d hate to have to jump in after you.”
She swims over to him, aware as she hadn’t been the night before of her nakedness. She grabs the pool edge beside him and hangs there, kicking idly. “So I’m hallucinating now, am I?”
“Maybe.” He shrugs. “Maybe this is another dream. I really couldn’t say.”
“Couldn’t say, or won’t?”
He frowns at something over her head – the palm trees. “Aren’t you meant to be looking for me in London?”
“You may not have noticed, but this thing isn’t exactly predictable.” She pulls on his bare ankle – a strange, unimagined intimacy, the rolled cuffs of his trouser legs and the hair on his calves – and grins up at him. “Come on in. The water’s fine.”
He reaches down and brushes a strand of hair from her face, his fingers cool against her cheek. “I should go.”
“Don’t.” She grips his knees and pulls herself up between them, arching out of the water. He cups her face in his hands, curls his body around her as her hands slide up his thighs, staining his trousers with pool water. “Stay a little longer,” she says, her voice rough. “If this is my dream—”
His nose bumps against hers, and she feels the heat of his breath against her mouth. “I’m the one asleep, this time.”
“Then don’t wake up.” Her lips touch his, briefly. “Not yet.”
“Rose,” he says, and he’s about to say something more when he overbalances, tipping forward into the pool with an enormous splash. He resurfaces, sputtering and rubbing his eyes.
She can barely breathe for laughing. “Your hair—” she gasps, but the rest is bubbles; he dunks her, his hands sliding down her slick shoulders. She kicks free, swims beneath him and grabs at his toes. Tickles the bottoms of his feet and grins as he squirms.
“—Going to get you for that,” she hears as she comes up for air. His arms twine around her, pushing her into shallower water, against the wall of the pool. Her hands slide up his chest, to the wet knot of his tie. They grin at each other, breathless.
“Oh no,” she says, deadpan. “Now you’ve got me.”
He laughs. “It seems I have.” She traces one finger along the line of his throat, following a bead of water as it slips under his collar. He swallows and his grin disappears, leaving an unreadable expression in its place. Under the water his fingers skim her ribs, the curve of her waist and the rise of her hips; she looks down and watches as he touches her, their skin strange and pale in the rippling light.
She looks up and meets his eyes.
There is something like wonder in his face, an innocence at odds with the centuries she’s seen in his eyes and the sad twist at the corner of his mouth. She kisses him there, a light touch of lips, and feels his hesitation.
“It’s all right,” she whispers. “I know you’re not real.”
He smiles, his eyes dark. “Well,” he says, “at least one of us does.” His hand slips between her legs and holds her there, an even pressure of bone and muscle and skin that makes her arch into him, her fingernails catching in the sodden fabric of his shirt. She gasps, and he kisses her carefully, his lips cold and slightly parted.
He tastes like chlorine, like sweet-green grass and open plains. She forces the kiss into something harder, something bruising, and with a low sound he pulls her closer, pushes her against the wall. He slips one finger inside her, and the callus on the pad of his thumb finds her clit.
“Jesus Christ,” she says, and then they both start to laugh, snickering into each other’s mouths. She rocks hard down into his hand, still laughing, and he kisses her jaw, the tendons of her neck. She feels his teeth, the slow touch of his tongue, and she shudders.
Then a car backfires in the distance and she’s on the edge of the pool, her arm outstretched as she reaches for the gun hidden under her jacket.
There’s a silence; she stays crouched on the concrete, dripping and naked. She doesn’t let herself look at his face.
“It was only a car,” he says.
She stands, rubbing the water away from her mouth and nose. Her eyes are still fixed on her gun. “Yeah,” she says. “I know.”
She hears him climb out of the water, the soft squelch of his trousers and the wet sound as his tie falls to the concrete. Hears his footsteps, the rustle of his dry suit jacket as he holds it out to her. “You think I don’t understand,” he says. “I do.”
He’s too thin; when she pulls the coat around her it covers her breasts and her stomach and not much else. She sits on a lounge chair, her knees tucked together and her arms held close inside the spare warmth of the jacket. She looks up at him. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
He nods. His hair is slicked to his head, his shirt and trousers dark with water. He sits beside her, his shoulder not quite touching hers. “Okay,” he says. “We won’t.”
They sit like that for a long time.
This universe has few stars left, and she watches them closely. They’re paled by the harsh lights of the city, dim with distance, but she finds comfort in them nonetheless. Comfort, and purpose.
“I watched a man die today,” she says.
The Doctor looks down, his mouth a thin line. “I’m sorry.”
She smiles at the stars. “You’re always apologising for things that aren’t your fault, but you never say a word about the things that are.” She stands, slipping his jacket from her shoulders and dropping it into his hands. Her drying hair curls into her eyes, and she brushes it back. “You fought in a war, once.”
He looks away. “I did.”
“You were a soldier.” She touches his chin, turning his face back to hers. “Did you carry a gun?”
He weighs the question carefully, and she can see in his eyes the brief moment when he considers the obvious lie. The moment passes. “Yes,” he says. “And worse things.”
She nods, bends and touches her forehead to his. Together, their eyes close. “You were right,” she says. “I am tired.”
When she opens her eyes, he’s gone.
She dresses slowly – bra and knickers, watch, trousers, shirt and shoes. Her gun in its holster and the smooth sleeves of her jacket, shining like armour in the pool light. The gate swings open under her hand and she walks east, out of the motel parking lot and into the sunrise.
++
part two