A/N: I was having a bit of a thought experiment concerning Rose's development as a character in the 9th and 10th Doctors' arcs, and my mind turned to the big moments in her relationship with the Doctor. This is the result: a short story based on the events of Bad Wolf, The Idiot's Lantern, Fear Her, The Impossible Planet, and Doomsday placed within the context of my alternate universe where Parallel Earth crosses with Wizardry.
WARNING: The following contains a little material concerning assault and abusive relationships, though nothing graphic. It definitely ends in fluff, however. Just a bit of a heads-up to those of you who are triggered by that type of content.
Disclaimer: Anything you recognize belongs to the original authors, producers, and their affiliates.
…..
To Be a Wolf
…
No one, not even a Time Lord, was ever meant to look into the heart of a TARDIS.
The Time Vortex, unfiltered and in its purest form, could not flow unimpeded through any mind, and yet it did, for a short while. For a few scarce moments, Rose Tyler held life and death, Time and Void – all the power anyone could imagine and more – to her very soul.
If ever there was a being that would understand him, understand all of him, it was Rose. Even if she could no longer recall for herself what she did or saw, he knew by the way she looked at the stars that her heart remembered.
She was just a child, the Doctor thought with no little regret – A child he essentially kidnapped to travel time and space with him on a whim after he saw her lust for adventure.
How old was she?
The Doctor couldn't remember. She'd been nineteen when he absconded with her after blowing up her job. Had it been a year? No, it must have been closer to three or four since he regenerated at the ripe old age of…
Nine hundred-something?
He groaned and rolled onto his back, where he lay on the command deck of his gorgeous TARDIS. He stared up at the orange ceiling, the pulsing recesses of light whispering soft, comforting things to him, while the subject of his anxieties swayed slightly in the periphery of his vision.
Rose's pink poodle skirt finally coaxed his gaze to settle on her listless body. That's all she was, for the moment. Her face, the face he'd become so accustomed to, was still lost to him. In its place, a horrible expanse of smooth skin. No nose. No sweet, smiling mouth. No gleaming, mischief-filled eyes. Her cheeks were still the same, though, except for the faint purple smudge of a bruise. He had yet to determine if it was from a fall after her abandonment, or whether they had battered her before that point in their crimes against her.
The tears and runs in her pantyhose spoke eloquently, as did the damaged zipper of her faux blue leather jacket. Her ruffled white petticoat hung raggedly where it peeked from underneath the pink skirt, torn in several places and dirtied in others.
The Doctor hadn't been able to bring himself to check her, yet, or ask the men who found her if they saw any other evidence of that.
Even without the confirmation of his worst fear, the same noxious bile burned in his chest. His twin hearts clenched. That someone dared to take choice from Rose Tyler – The brave, fantastic, independent, too incorrigible Rose Tyler – infuriated him.
How could they? How could anyone?
Her hands clenched and unclenched, her feet shuffled forward one step, back one step, as her neutralized brain fed the barest of impulses to the rest of her body.
Was she in pain?
The man curled in on himself and jumped to his feet. The girl turned slightly to face the sound of his shoes on the metal grate flooring, and he cringed at the blank slate that used to be her face. He smoothed his hands over the cool planes of her soft cheeks, and the tips of his last fingers curled around the nape of her slender neck.
"I'm so sorry, Rose," he whispered in her ear. "So, so sorry. I promise you this is the last time. The last time I fail to keep you safe."
"Doctor!"
A fist pounded insistently on the doors, and the light of morning peeked through the windowpanes to make yellowish squares on the threshold.
"Doctor we've got to go!"
Rose turned a half step to face the sound, and the Doctor withdrew his touch reluctantly. His gaze hardened as he spun and ran to meet the detective inspector, and whatever abomination had dared to steal Rose Tyler's essence and toss her out on the street.
"Doctor!"
His hand closed on the door handle, and he pushed hard against the wood, but it refused to budge aside from rattling beneath his desperate onslaught.
"Doctor!"
The sound of the voice changed outside, warping and rising in shrill waves.
The man sat bolt upright, and sharp pain burst across his forehead as it cracked hard against something.
"Ow!"
"Rose?" the Doctor gasped, rubbing his head and blinking his watering eyes. "Rose!"
The blonde groaned as his long arms wrapped around the soft dip of her waist. Her familiar weight settled warmly against him as he pulled her closer, and her hands, previously occupied with rubbing her own forehead, went to stroking his thick hair.
"You were thrashing about like mad," she said softly. "Was it a nightmare?"
Her lover shook his head and clung tighter to her so she had to squirm to settle more comfortably in the crook of his shoulder.
"Only a little. Well, some of it was, anyway. The rest was a memory, or most of one," he rambled into her hair.
"You a'right now?" she yawned, pressing a kiss to his stubbly jaw.
He didn't answer. Instead, he chose to tuck her head under his chin and rub his hands up and down her bare arms. She let him, as if understanding his need to reassure himself both physically as well as mentally. She had done it, too, after all, when he came home with her from Bad Wolf Bay.
"Rose…" he said after a long while, pulling the woman from near-sleep again.
"Mmm?"
"Do you remember when we were on Krop Tor, you know, the planet orbiting that black hole-"
"With the demonic alien thing?" she clarified, shifting to look at his shadowed face.
"Yeah, that's the one."
He paused, and his needy, trembling touch paused at her elbow.
"When you were there, you spoke to the Ood, and you asked them if they were really alright with being slaves-"
"And they said they had nothing else to live for," she said a little sadly. "Yeah, I remember."
The Doctor held the smaller woman a little tighter, and when he spoke again, his words were barely a rumbling whisper.
"But you answered that you used to think that of yourself, too."
Rose's soft breathing cut off for a moment, and her body went impossibly still in his arms. Her pulse, still so obvious to him under the soft expanse of flesh at his fingertips, sped erratically before evening out.
"Yeah," she admitted slowly. "I did. But I didn't know you were eavesdroppin' on me, neither."
He grinned wryly and stretched to yank the pull of the lamp beside their bed. The light blinked on, exposing his laughing eyes and her wary, confused face, still unlined in her impossible youth.
"If it makes you feel any better," he chuckled, "I can't do that quite as well anymore. My hearing isn't quite to full-blooded Time Lord standards."
Her full lips curled, and she rolled her eyes.
"So what brought all that up?" she said a little too casually.
The Doctor met her inquisitive glance and his smile slipped just a little.
"I wondered why. Why did you say what you did? When did you feel that way?"
"Oh."
Rose sat up and ran a hand through her tangled hair while the Doctor looked on, his face a mix of adoration and worry. The young woman pulled the pale blue coverlet up over her chest and wiggled backward to rest against the headboard, then leaned into his shoulder once he'd mimicked her repositioning
"You know, for someone so brilliant, you're really, really thick, sometimes," she said in amusement.
He frowned and looked at her blankly.
"What?"
"You 'eard me," she laughed, her smile taking on a somewhat bitter slant. "Do you think just any sort of nutter would follow you into Time and Space, into all that danger, after what I saw happen?"
"No?" he pouted. "I just thought I was that charming."
"Well, yeah," she smirked. "But still, anybody with any sense would have run away from you after what I saw."
"So why didn't you?" the Doctor asked with a sad smile.
"Because I saw the chance to run. I didn't always want to be a shopgirl, you know. I hated school, but I wasn't rubbish at everything," she said softly. "I told you I won a bronze when I was in under-sevens gymnastics, right?"
"Yeah?"
The more she spoke, the more the Doctor felt that same horrible worry from his dream clench his gut.
"Yeah, well, you see I kept at it. I was bollocks at school, and Mum knew that wasn't going to change, so she didn't discourage me, neither," she admitted with a dismissive sort of shrug. "When I was sixteen, they recruited me to the Olympic training camp."
"I don't understand," he said as she took a breath. "Where is this going, Rose?"
"Just shut up," she sighed, the exasperation clear on her face. "This is hard enough for me as is, without you interrupting every minute."
His brows furrowed beneath his mussed fringe, and Rose smoothed away the little wrinkle between them with her thumb.
"So I went, and I started training, and I met all these wonderful people. There was this bloke, Greg–"
By the way she said the name, the Doctor knew he wasn't going to like him.
"He'd been there for a while, was slated to be on the next Olympic team UK. He sort of took me under his wing, you know? Offered to help me train outside of my normal sessions with the trainer I got with the sponsorship.
"Everything was going great. I really thought I was going to grow up and be this world-famous gymnast. Sponsors were lookin' at me, and Greg and my trainers made me feel like I was the queen of the world."
She stopped, and her cold hands flitted across the Doctor's hair-dusted chest.
"Greg and I got… Really close, you know?"
"You were a kid," he whispered. "How old was this guy?"
"Twenty. He wasn't that much older than me," she said defensively. "Anyway, I flirted, and he started taking me out, and I started to think we really had something. We'd snog and all that, but, um…"
She flicked her gaze to him and away again.
"I didn't want to have sex. Just wasn't ready yet," she explained. "I knew how having me so young affected Mum, and I didn't want to risk that even a little, not to mention I just never felt quite right about it."
"Completely understandable," the Doctor said gently. "You hadn't even taken your a-levels yet."
Rose's shy smile twisted into a grimace.
"Yeah, well, Greg didn't want to wait. And I guess I was stupid to spend so much time alone with him, letting him feel me up and stuff when we were snogging, but anyway…"
She took a deep breath and curled a little closer to her lover.
"He started treating me differently. I didn't notice it, not really, and I didn't understand it 'till much later. He made me feel guilty, and he'd say these horrible things about how I must not really care about him if I wouldn't do it. We fought about it a lot, and I didn't change my mind, but I just felt worse and worse," she sighed. "It got to be so bad that I started slipping at the centre. I was seventeen when my sponsor finally gave up on me."
The Doctor started rubbing slow circles into her smooth, soft back despite the lump he felt catching in his throat every time he inhaled.
"But even that wasn't so bad because I still had him. Thing is, he was all I had, or so I figured. I tied up everything I thought about myself in my bloody relationship with him, even if I wasn't really happy anymore, just pretending and trying to get back to that same feeling I had when I got recruited in the first place.
"Of course it didn't work," she muttered a little ruefully. "It just got worse. I was just so stubborn, though, and I moved out of Mum's flat thinking it was her interference that was causing all our problems. For a little while, it was fun again. Him and me, going out for takeaway late at night when he was supposed to be sticking to protein shakes, or eating chips and walking together. I was even starting to consider going further with him…"
"You don't have to tell me," the Doctor whispered into her yellow hair after placing a soft kiss on her cool forehead. "I think I understand."
She looked up at him appreciatively and pressed a kiss to his pursed, worry-curled mouth.
"No," Rose assured him with a light squeeze to his arm. "I've never really talked about it, least of all to Mum. It's sort of a relief, actually. I felt like I was hiding something from you all this time. You've been my best friend for so long, and now we're–"
The blonde grinned and shrugged. They hadn't really found a good way of describing their relationship beyond the 'we're a couple' phrasing. It felt like the words 'girlfriend' or 'boyfriend' weren't quite permanent enough, and both disliked the term 'partner' because it felt almost as inadequate, and not a little impersonal, just like 'lover' felt too shallow sometimes.
Neither dismissed the power of words, so they generally just rolled what they meant into their tone since neither wanted to cheapen those little moments like then, in which they gently peeled back the casual intimacy they shared to delve a little deeper towards the true closeness they felt together.
"So…" the Doctor said softly, "I take it the brief reprieve wasn't all it was cut out to be?"
"No," she said flatly. "I still wouldn't do it, yet, and he started bringing me down again. I felt like it's all he wanted me for, and I blamed myself for not being more interesting or successful that he'd still like me without that. One night he got pissed – I mean, really, really blind drunk – and came home after I'd already gone to bed. I woke up to him groping me, I didn't say anything at first, but he was being so rough he scared me."
"He didn't stop when you did say something."
It wasn't a question. Her Doctor's face had gone blank, and his hands stilled in their soothing path over her back.
"No."
"He abused you, manipulated you, and raped you."
Her hazel eyes scanned the man's taught face, in which his furious eyes burning holes into the wall opposite their bed, and she slumped a little to cuddle a little closer to his chest. He wrapped an arm around her a little stiffly.
"I'm not mad about it anymore, or depressed, but I was when I met you," she explained. "Like I said, I tied up all my self worth in that stupid bloody relationship after I failed so spectacularly at being someone. That's what I was thinking about when I talked to that Ood."
The man's bushy brows finally relaxed to leave just a bit of sadness around the corners of his eyes and mouth.
"And now?" he murmured. "What changed?"
Her full lips pulled into a broad smile.
"I saw the stars and fought aliens. I saved people with you, and I saved you a couple of times, too. I ran. I just lived for a while. I don't know when I started feeling like myself again, but eventually, it was like secondary school never happened, and I'd not lost my confidence to begin with."
They sat in silence for a long while, he simply holding her and she curled against his warm side with one arm thrown carelessly over his middle. The black night outside had slowly turned to grayish blue while they talked, and now the horizon bled just a little lighter toward true morning.
"What was your dream about?" she whispered once the birds had begun chirping outside. "You never told me."
"Oh," the Doctor huffed. "Right. You bared your soul, so I may as well do the same."
She smiled at him and pressed another kiss to his lips, which he gladly returned just as tenderly as it was given.
"The worst day of my life, nearly as bad as when I let Gallifrey burn, was when those bobbies in 1953 London brought you into their base after the Wire wiped your mind and face," he said in a low grumble. "I thought I lost you, and I knew it was my fault you'd been hurt in the first place. My nightmare sort of played on all the little fears and worries I had about that time you'd spent alone, out there, on the streets and at the tender mercies of that hag."
Rose frowned, her lips puckering as she examined his face.
"But what's that got to do with Krop Tor?"
"My brain does odd things. You know that," he said self deprecatingly. "But in the dream I thought you'd been hurt that way."
He couldn't bring himself to say the word. It was the worst crime he could imagine anyone enduring, and to know it had happened, even out of the context his subconscious conjured up, was torment in its purest form.
"So your mind did some convoluted figuring trying to calculate why you even dreamed it, and landed on that conversation with the Ood," she concluded. "Well, you weren't wrong. Not really. But how I felt had more to do with before that than after. It just sort of exacerbated the problem."
He grimaced.
"I love you," she said softly. "Even when you're daft and feeling guilty over things you have absolutely no control over."
"Yeah?"
Rose laughed and kissed him again.
"Yeah," she confirmed. "It's not your responsibility to save me. I'm not some bloody damsel."
"Doesn't mean I wouldn't do everything in my power to stop something from hurting you," the Doctor responded very seriously, his wide brown eyes examining her face.
"Me, too. Just like I've done for you," she smiled.
"Good thing we've decided to be more careful," he deadpanned.
They looked at one another for a moment before bursting into laughter. The racousness of their mirth quickly transformed into exuberance of a different sort, however, upon which they acted even more enthusiastically than their shared humour.
Next door, their neighbour grumbled and pulled his pillow over his head.
"Bloody hooligans, fuckin' at such a bleedin', God-forsaken hour!"
Fortunately, neither Rose nor the Doctor were aware of the old man's discomfort.
If they had been, of course, nothing would have changed. There was no better way than to spend a morning, after all.
….
A/N: Let me know what you think about this little drabble. Since NNH focuses a bit more on Harry's adventures rather than his parents' romance, I thought this would be a nice little standalone placed in the alternate universe I've constructed around the melding of Parallel Earth and Wizardry.
I've not decided whether this is going to be a common occurrence, but as I do research for NNH, I may be inspired again. Who knows.
I hope you enjoyed, and can't wait to present next month's chapter of All Hail the Time Lord's Son. Hope to see you there.
Love,
Forensica X