“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.
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.”
(set three years after the events of true love)
They’ve met before. Or rather, they’ve seen each other before. Before, with a capital B, when life was only slightly complicated and Margate was a home, when the crashing waves on the shore and the rising tides weren’t prison walls, locking them in for sins and crimes they’d rather forget.
Before, they used to stop in at the same cafe for espresso every morning at half past six. He’d read the paper, she’d bring her sketch book and (later) lesson plans, they’d sit adjacent to one another by the window, each table with a book under a leg to keep from wobbling about.
And so it went. Until she stopped showing up, and he… well, he had his divorce to pay for—no extra cash for news and coffee.
& & &
She returns to town because her mother is dying. Ovarian cancer. They never quite got on after Karen and the leave-taking, but needs must, and after all, those days are firmly in the past.
Holly is not the esteemed professor her mother wanted her to be, but she is a painter, and that’s something. At least she’s not cradle robbing anymore, a rebellious part of her mind says.
She’s just alone in her little flat with her paints and brushes and canvases littering the place, mattress on the wooden floor and view of the sea through her window (because she’ll never be able to live without the sea) and she watches the sailors walking by as she writes in a journal stories that will never be told, stories of a girl who lives on a boat and rides the waves to freedom, stories of heartache and redemption and anger and mercy, of love gone wrong and youthful indiscretions and hope. Most of all, there’s the hope.
Her mother doesn’t ask if there’s anyone in her life. Holly thinks she might be relieved if she heard the answer.
Instead, it’s all how are your commissions selling? and did you try that vegan strawberry rhubarb pie recipe I sent you?
She can do small talk. She can even watch her mother die on a hospital bed with a disappointed shadow in her eyes.
Karen sends her a text that makes her smile a wistful sort of smile, because she can’t go back to that place again, and so she just replies with a simple I miss you too, and that is the end of it.
& & &
The day her mother dies, she wants a biscotti from their old cafe. Holly’s in tears and begging her mother not to shut her eyes while she’s gone, and she’s sobbing in the cab, and she’s pulling herself together as she enters the coffeehouse, as she orders her mum’s favorite, and then it seems like too much effort to leave this place, when it’s much easier to sit in her old seat and stare out the window and let the clock run.
Of course, there’s someone in her seat.
Someone vaguely familiar.
Someone with sad brown eyes and the weight of worlds on his shoulders.
And he’s staring at her like he knows her but can’t place her (which is good, considering) and she realizes she’s staring, too, and she’s actually crying, and he pulls on her hand to guide her into the opposite seat, and that’s when she drops the biscotti onto the floor.
It breaks into pieces.
“I-I’m sorry, I just used to sit here every morning, and I’m having one of those days, and uh… sorry,” she mutters, bending down to clean her mess. He’s on his knees with her.
“I always thought this table looked a bit lonely when you were gone.”
He looks surprised as he says it, and she stops what she’s doing and remembers a time when she sat here and he sat there, when she drank a double shot and he had decaf, when she’d borrow his paper without asking ‘cause he’d leave it on her table while he ordered, and he’s talking, so she should probably listen.
“…I haven’t seen you around in years, so I figured you’d forfeited the chair, but since you’re back in town you can have it if you’d like—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says, waving him off. “I’m just visiting my mum. Getting her a treat.” The biscotti piece in her hand crumbles a bit more. “Sorta.”
“Ah, well, you’ll need another then.”
Holly frowns. “No, she really shouldn’t be eating this rubbish. Although I figured since… erm, look, I’d better be off, and uh, it was nice seein’ you again and all,” she adds, realizing that her mother is on her death bed.
She feels his eyes on her until she hails a cab.
& & &
The funeral is short and fairly boring. She’s never been a religious sort, not like her dearly departed mum—the rare English Catholic—and so the ceremony holds little meaning for her. The woman is dead; her body is cold, her heart has stopped. The cancer won.
She skips the reception because her feet lead her to the cafe and the man with the sad brown eyes.
He’s sitting in her seat (again) and she’s irritated enough by the whole ordeal that she steps right up to the opposite chair and sinks into it without so much as a cheers.
And besides, he’s got a second espresso sitting on the window sill. “Do you wanna talk about it?” he asks from behind his paper.
America’s kicking off with Russia again. Unemployment is at record highs across Europe. The conservative Prime Minister has been caught shtupping his male receptionist.
“My mum died,” she replies quietly. “There’s nothing really to say.”
He breaks off a piece of a chocolate biscotti and passes it to her. “‘m sorry for your loss.”
She shrugs. “We didn’t really get on, me an’ her. And anyway, she was sick and in pain, so I suppose this is better for her.”
“Do you see anyone?”
“Excuse me?” That’s hardly relevant to her rotting mother.
He pulls out a card from his breast pocket. “A therapist. Sometimes there’s nothing better than having someone to listen,” he explains, a glint of something (regret, bitterness, loss?) in his eyes. But it’s gone as soon as it appeared.
“I don’t need a therapist.” And she doesn’t. She’s been fine on her own for two-and-a-half years. If anything, she’s stronger now. Less… prone to accidents. Or falling in love.
There’s been sex—loads and loads of it, if she’s honest; with men and women, because she’s a fair bit freer to be herself in a place where she’s got no history. Good sex, mediocre sex, solo sex, threesomes, even a one-off with Karen a year before. Because she’ll never not love her precious girl.
But she’s more careful now, more guarded. And she’s harder, too; rougher and wittier and colder. She survived a downfall of her own making, after all.
“Everyone needs someone,” he murmurs, and she bites her lip. Holly does not want to need someone. She wants to tell this man who thinks he knows so much about her—and he probably does, if he’s a parent or hasn’t been living under a rock for the past three years—to shove off, to turn his eyes to his wife (he’s got a ring on his finger) and perhaps he sees what she’s thinking in her hazel eyes because he fingers his ring.
“The divorce was finalized a month ago. Haven’t had the time to get rid of this old thing.”
“I’m sorry.” She’s not. He doesn’t seem the type to relish being a married man. And she knows married men. Intimately.
“Yeah.” He smiles sadly. “But it was a long time coming. And… well, never mind that now.”
She grins. “Maybe you need someone to talk to.”
He sips his espresso thoughtfully. “That’s what I pay my therapist for.”
& & &
They meet for coffee and conversation every morning.
She’s staying in her mum’s old house, dealing with the reams of useless stuff the batty woman kept around—doilies and antique china coated with inches of dust, relics from the Vatican and a huge (tacky) portrait of Pope John Paul II. Everything goes to Holly, the wayward daughter, and as such, everything needs sorting.
He’s Scottish (and Catholic) so she offers him a look around the place, because in her experience, all Catholic people like the same trinkets and such. He doesn’t seem particularly interested in her mum’s collection of rosaries (pink and green and plastic and oh, there’s a honking great blinking cross in there, too) but he helps her box things up nonetheless, and they laugh at the old photos of people they both knew as children, and they eat pizza from the parlor down the street, and they share a bottle of her mother’s favorite wine (a vintage Rosé) as the sun sets over the shore.
She falls asleep with her head on his shoulder and misses the way he gazes at her as he lifts her into his arms and carries her into the house.
& & &
Nick does know about her history at the school, seeing as his daughter was the one who spread the story around the student population. Holly yells at him, angry tears spilling down her cheeks, asking why why why would he try to be her friend if he knows that horrible thing about her? And she walks away from him, locks herself in the bedroom and he just makes her a cup of cocoa (the way she likes it, with that awful almond milk and a heaping pile of vegan marshmellows), sets it on the floor outside her door and leaves.
He knows what she did. And she can’t understand how he can even look at her.
Until one day, he invites her over to his flat, a bottle of Merlot in one hand and a plate of chips in the other as she walks through the door.
“I can’t find it in myself to judge you since, in my opinion, I did something far worse.” Holly frowns around a chip. “Three years ago, there was this woman. I’d been with her a long time before then, but things didn’t work out and… well, anyway, she came back. And I just… I lost control and felt things I hadn’t felt in years and I… was gonna run away with her.”
His eyes flash with something harsh. “I ruined my marriage, devastated my children and in the end, she wasn’t ever gonna stay with me, anyway. And I knew that, ‘course I did, but I was so fucking selfish, Holl. And that’s what love can do to people, sometimes. Turn ‘em into sorry bastards.”
Holly flinches, thinking of taking a hand and running away, damn the consequences, damn the critics, damn the bloody ethics. Of a girl and a woman making a home together. Of course, girls grow up and leave home, in the end.
“My wife and I tried to make it work for a while, but I mean, she never quite trusted me again.”
“I didn’t know.”
He smiles softly. “You never asked. I don’t wear the ring anymore, you know. I lost it in your mum’s house. Never felt like looking for it.”
She feels the wine hot in her veins. “You can come over and we’ll search, if you want.”
His hand is so warm as he takes hers. But his eyes are hotter. “I don’t want to need an excuse for a visit.”
There are implications in his words. Implications that coil nicely in her abdomen.
“What do you want then, Nick?” she asks on a low hum.
Setting his glass of wine down on the floor beside them, he raises his now free hand to her cheek and stares at her lips.
“A new start.” He pulls back and sighs.
& & &
They lie together on the beach as the stars populate the heavens. He’s a bit of an astronomy aficionado, and so he points out constellations and tells her their stories and mythos, and she watches his tongue form the shapes of words and shifts closer to him, her hand barely touching his, and it’s erotic in its innocence, in its abstinence. She presses her thighs together as discreetly as she can.
He notices.
And her little gasp keeps him company that night, when he lies in his bed with his hand around his cock and he whispers her name like a prayer.
& & &
It all comes to a head when she remembers that she doesn’t want to live in Margate anymore. That she hasn’t for a lifetime. But Margate is where Nick lives, and that makes things… complicated.
Of course, what she wants right now is a bed. And for Nick to keep doing what he’s doing with his lips and tongue and fingers. Oh, but she loves this man, and she loves him even more when he carries her into his bedroom and drapes her over his bed and she loves him so much that she helps him with his belt and tugs on his hair to bring his mouth to hers, and she reaches for him gently to line him up with herself and then he pulls her legs up to wrap around his slender hips and he stops.
Just watches her as he pushes inside. And she tries to keep her eyes open, but it’s been so long since she’s felt like this—and she’s never felt exactly like this, close but dissimilar, and this is what it is to love and be loved in return, she thinks, because he’s babbling in her ear about how he can’t believe he gets another chance, about how he wants her to be his last, his until he dies and his ashes are spread around the Highlands, his every morning and every afternoon and every night, and if she wants to run then he’ll run too, and he’ll go this time because he’s got nothing left here, and he needs her, and everything goes silent and her focus narrows to the point at which their bodies connect.
Flesh pushing against flesh.
Wet and tight and clenching and oh—
nicknicknicholas
He groans lowly as he follows her into blessed release.
& & &
She feels herself easing into sleep when he tells her he loves her.
In return, he gets a snore.
& & &
The next morning, they pack up their lives and drive away.
To a little flat with paint all over the walls and a town where they have no names.
To a place where Nick and Holly can be alive.
au meme - the doctor and john smith (doctor/rose swap inspired by allison’s fic eos in orbit)
happy birthday jamie!
I felt like writing ficlet scenes to go with this, because my vision is obviously quite disparate from Eos (which is so fucking good go read it now).& & &
She’s a bit pretty in this body. And she loves it. Of course, it might have been her mind’s way of avoiding the pain and grief of losing her home and her people in one fell swoop, of packaging all of this heartache into something seemingly innocuous. Because that’s all the Doctor needs to be doing—attracting people to her.
She’s dangerous and bitter and reckless (‘cause she’s got nothing to lose) and she loves the finer things in life, but she’ll never say because she’s a soldier and a soldier makes sacrifices. A soldier doesn’t lie down on puffy white linens covered in rose petals.
Needless to say, she’s in the department store and it’s Valentine’s Day and she’s always loved a bit of irony—roses, how fitting—and he’s in his dapper pinstriped suit, trying to make commission, but he doesn’t know that she’s already sold.
Oh, he’ll do brilliantly, her traitorous mind says.
And when he jumps off of a honking great swan boat to fetch her TARDIS key so that her vintage Yves Saint Laurent piece doesn’t get all waterlogged—she may or may not have had her hands tied with shop window dummies on the other side of the pond—she hesitantly agrees.
& & &
He’s the sort of man who should wear tuxes all of the time, she thinks. Granted, he’s always in these tight trousers and suits and it’s ever so distracting, especially when she’s supposed to be thinking up an escape plan for this prison-cum-corporate-hotel, and oh, he stretched a bit there.
Meanwhile, John can’t stop thinking about just how fantastic her (alien) breasts look in that slinky purple dress. And those legs.
Stupid ape and his stupid ape hormones. And his stupid ape increasingly-tight-trousers situation.
And yes, the threat of zombies with sleeping masks over their eyes is quite enough to spoil a burgeoning stupid ape erection, thank you kindly.
& & &
Slender legs, cool to the touch and spread open like a particularly erotic book, draw him in. He drags his body over hers, hips bare and sliding together like puzzle pieces or holding hands, and he enters her with such agonized babbling, and she’s just silent—for once—and she’s gazing at him with those honey eyes and—
and—
Stupid ape wet dreams, he thinks when he wakes.
& & &
They spend so much time pushing and pulling and following and leading and being happy but not happy enough, being lovers but without the sex or emotional completion or acknowledgment of their being lovers outside their own separate minds, and he has this smile and it lights up her world, a world that was once so cold and broken and dark, and he is a revelation, and she loves him.
Yes. Oh yes.
And she is scared and so she pushes him away but he’s smarter than that and he’s braver than she wishes he was, and so he confronts her at Jackie’s house, and his mother sort of loves the Doctor even if she’s a crazy psycho alien (she’s got great tits and loves EastEnders, after all).
And they are truly happy.
For a time.
& & &
First they take his face. His gorgeous, freshly shaven, beaming face. And then there’s Satan. The prophecy of the lost boy, of the valiant son with a fate sown into the heavens, of a death in battle and a lonely goddess—and there is a topic the Doctor doesn’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole; oh, Reinette and the spaceship and her John waiting for hours.
And then, after they’ve made love and embraced their feelings for one another, he’s torn from her and tossed into another universe, and even though they’re not really parallel (more perpendicular), there’s no bringing him back.
& & &
There’s the beach.
“Am I ever going to see you again?”
A beat. ”You can’t.”
Liar. He’ll prove her wrong.
& & &
First she meets Donna. They fight robot Santas armed with AK-47s, they drain the Thames, and the Doctor manages to get herself slapped not once, but twice, in a matter of hours. Unknowingly and without agenda, she lights a flame within Donna that fuels the redhead for a long, lonely year.
And then she goes to the Moon, kisses Martha Jones (it’s a DNA transfer, but since when do humans make things easy?) and flirts her way into the heart of another companion.
Except there is pain, there is the loss of a love so strong it burns her, and she yearns to forget. To escape, to end it all.
Damn the consequences.
She pushes Martha away until the dark-skinned woman gets out and saves her heart from fracture. Like the Doctor should have done.
& & &
The walls are closed. But somewhere, in some parallel(ish), they’re running on and on.
And maybe he finds a way back to her. Maybe some mad scientist weirdo decides to help them out a bit.
But there is also always a beach. And always the loss.
Perhaps it’s better this way.
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.
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).
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.
ziggythevampireslayer inquired: "please please more river/autonomy fic it gave me angry feeeeeeeels":D
it’s my favorite river ship, so I will obviously write more.
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.
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.
