A/N: Written for Oh She Know's Summer Lovin' Ficathon on LiveJournal, as a gift to MiladyHawke.

Phoenix

The Doctor, legendarily, had a way with words. As a matter of fact, he had his way with words, whether they liked it or not. Woo 'em and screw 'em seemed to be the Doctor's approach, with words at any rate, although Rose wasn't placing any bets with anything else, and once he'd beaten the English language into submission he moved on to the several billion others he'd mastered— five through his own merit, occasional study and massive brainpower, and the rest through the aid of the TARDIS, who didn't speak. Speaking, the TARDIS opined telepathically, was for humanoids; or, at least, for creatures with mouths.

Despite all this, Rose had caught him dumbstruck and speechless. Made him dumbstruck and speechless, supposedly, with the simple-yet-peculiar object she held in her hand. It was an oblong shape, darkish-grey and rough to the touch. If she held it carefully and closed her eyes she thought she could feel heat coming from it; but only with her eyes closed. Perhaps she was imagining it.

Perhaps she wasn't.

The Doctor certainly seemed to be having a hard time putting words to his tongue. Dark eyes wide, he stepped towards her; fingers trembling, he reached out.

"Rose," he said. "Please be very careful."

Rose tensed, immediately, and curled her fingers protectively around the object.

"I found it," she said. "On my headboard. It was sort of stuck there, I— I thought it wouldn't come off, but I only touched it a bit an' it came right off in my hand. I didn't mean it to—"

"Its alright," said the Doctor, and he wasn't trying to take it from her. Evidently it wasn't dangerous, and as long as she held it carefully it was hers to hold. She would hold it carefully, then. She didn't feel as though she wanted to give it up.

"It sticks itself on with a bit of its own bio-glue," said the Doctor, breathing lightly and speaking quietly as though the tiniest thing could cause the object to disintegrate, or perhaps to never have been. "It will dislodge with the slightest touch, the slightest warmth from a living creature. Perhaps that's why they began to die out. Perhaps—" his face darkened, saddened, deepened. "Perhaps not."

"Doctor." Rose frowned, opened her mouth for breath, looked at him and wanted. "What is it?"

He raised his eyebrows and took his eyes from her hand to hold her still. "Its a cocoon."

When no further explanation was forthcoming, she nodded slightly and said, steadily, "Right, an' there's presumably a bug in it. Some alien space bug. Is it gonna come out on my hand, Doctor? 'Coz I don't... really... think I'd like that."

"It won't. Well, it might. I don't think it will. Hold it carefully." He watched her eyes to see it, see that she knew she was holding it as carefully as she could, rather than watch her hand and judge from the tenseness in her fingers. It wasn't mind reading, not really; it was face-reading, and much easier and more accessible. Rose was a wonderful candidate for face-reading, every feeling showing up in her expression as soon as she felt it. He felt rather proud of her honesty, whether she meant to be honest or not. "Now, bring it up towards you and listen to it. Carefully, now."

Rose did as she was told, breathlessly, chewing on the inside of her cheek; the cocoon made its journey safely to her ear and she tilted her head to one side, the hair falling around her hand and its burden, and a tiny, far-away, indistinct sound bounced out of nowhere and reverberated distantly in her skull. A dim sort of boom, a rocket-life away.

"What is it?"

The Doctor smiled.

"The heartbeat of the creature inside."

He saw her listening increase in avidness, and paused to let her hear. The heartbeat of the tiny insect sounded down through her brain and into her innermost mind, tripped down her synapses and through her throat and collarbones to lodge in her own heart; irregular for a few beats more, it suddenly righted itself and matched it, pound for pound, beat for beat, distant boom for boom-more-immediate.

The Doctor took in breath, and spoke.

"I can't think how it got out. At least, I suspect it crawled. Caterpillars do, usually. Most of the time. I just can't imagine how it— unless there's more of a crack underneath the door than I remember." He looked sharply at her. "Do you want to come with me and find out?"

She glanced up at him, bringing down the cocoon from her ear.

"That a trick question?" she asked, and grinned.

He grinned back, and led her through the humming halls of the TARDIS. They took more twists and turns than she had before, further back and deeper in, rooms going by that she hadn't known existed and for which he offered no explanation. He could house an entire city in here, she thought— he could house an entire planet. Who knew what he'd got, kept back here out of sight? Who knew what he'd picked up on his travels? She eyed the cocoon in her hand, speculatively. She hoped it wasn't a stick insect. She really had a thing about stick insects.

She was going to inform him of this when he stopped in front of a doorway, bending swiftly to run his fingers along the lower threshold of it.

"Hmm," he said thoughtfully, and stood back up. Facing her, he tilted his head to look in her eyes and said, "Want to see something?"

"Something good, or something bad? Doctor— this isn't a stick insect, is it?"

"No, no no. Something much better. You'll like it— I think—" He frowned. "You'll like it."

Without waiting for a further rejoinder from her, he pushed open the door.

It was a large room, and fairly plain. There were plants in it, which took her by surprise— she'd never seen foliage in the TARDIS before. She'd never seen anything alive in it, although she'd been constantly reassured by the Doctor that the TARDIS itself was alive and sentient in her own right. Well, here now was a virtual forest, and each plant was attached not to dirt or to any sort of soil, but grew out of the TARDIS itself. Rose marveled.

The next thing that struck her was that the room was moving. Not large movements, not spinning or anything— little twitchy movements out of the corner of her eye, that if she turned to see full-on would suddenly still. It made her feel a mite twitchy herself, and she turned towards the Doctor for an explanation only to find him very very close, leaning just there over her shoulder, chin and mouth next to hers but eyes fixed forward on the room. She endeavored to do the same. She didn't quite succeed.

"They're all here," he said, and as an indication of how little she succeeded in watching the room instead of watching him, she was able to lip-read this statement quite clearly. She turned away from him decisively. Or rather, not decisively, but a bit waveringly and, in fact, turning back immediately after she had glanced at the room.

"What— what's all here?"

He raised a hand, slowly, and pointed.

"All the rest of them."

Another bit of movement out of the corner of her eye, there in her peripheral vision, taunting her, and she tore her gaze from the Doctor's lower lip and how that dip below his mouth curved into his chin and his throat curved into his neck, and she realized that there were cocoons. Everywhere.

"Oh," she said, and took a step forward.

Evidently, this was where it went. Where it belonged. She set it down carefully, and stepped back; the Doctor had moved forward in the wake of her movements and she backed into him, against his chest, and his arm came around to hold her hand in front of her and he spoke carefully into her ear.

"Butterflies," he said, he whispered, he intimated, he possibly implanted directly into her mind, except for the cautious breath that lingered foglike just around the shell of her ear. "The beginning of butterflies, tiny little former larvae, just waking up."

"All at once?" she said.

"All at once. All together. Waking up."

"Some sort of cosmic alarm—" she ventured, and he grinned against her neck, hugged her tight for a moment, then stepped a tiny bit away. "I like butterflies," she offered to him. "They're not— well, they're not stick insects, for one."

He said something strange, and she thought at first she just didn't hear him right; but he saw her frown in concentration and he said it again, told her again the name of the butterfly, and it was a sort of shh and a sort of boom and a sort of shhhaa and there, implicated, implacably, was the connotation of the English word free . And not only free once, but free many times over: free again. Free, imprisoned, and free again.

"You'd call it a phoenix. A creature of Gallifrey," he said. "One of the few left."

She didn't comment on that, only drew his hand tighter in her own.

"They're marvelous. They're spectacular in their own quiet way. They absolutely defy all explanation, which I think is my favourite thing about them. Rose—" He turned to face her. "These tiny butterflies are impossible. Every hundred years they emerge, these creatures, these caterpillars, and spin their cocoons and sleep and grow for two hundred more years, and then they come out. They all come out, all at once, and they have the most glorious five days of a life span and die, without mating, without reproducing, without anything: just five days of life. Five . And they're all gone. Kaput. Extinct."

"I don't think that's very marvelous," said Rose, who didn't think that was very marvelous.

"Except," the Doctor went on, and he wasn't looking at her now, but was watching the cocoon that she had set down a few feet away from them. " Except — two hundred years later, there they are again. No one knows where they come from. They seem to spawn spontaneously, to appear out of nowhere. There is no logical explanation for them, and even illogical ones seem to be increasingly hard to find. They just— exist. They exist because they want to exist, because they must exist, and I had forgotten that they were here—"

He lapsed into the sort of worried silent reminiscent mode that she recognized as meaning that he meant he wished he had forgotten they were here. He hadn't expected them to emerge. He hadn't expected them to wake up. He thought they would just be cocoons, larvae, potential, possible, forever.

Quite suddenly a gleaming smile appeared on his face, and he swung to look at her.

"Of course," he said rapidly, "there's the school of thought that the butterflies come from our own regeneration cycles. And certainly there's the Observation of their birth that would lend credence to the idea."

"Observation?" she prompted him, in case he just kept talking without bothering to explain.

"Observation, yes," he said, frowning in concentration. "Its a sort of ritual, which is arcane and difficult and a bugger to explain, but the quickest way from you not understanding to you understanding is, as they say, a straight line, which is this: its the only time you'll ever see yourself without a mirror. Rather, the only time I'll ever see myself without a mirror. And— oh dear— there's such a lot of me this time around. Listen— Rose—"

He laughed, and gasped, and reached to grasp her shoulders suddenly, speaking urgently and looking directly into her eyes.

"Its not like last time. I am not leaving you. I will be here and you need not be afraid."

"Doctor!" she said, alarmed, but there was the slightest slick little sound from the direction of the cocoon, and she turned to look at it. A crack had appeared in the dusty grey hull, and there was something definitely moving on the inside. Something seeking to get out. Something seeking to find. Air and space. Life and movement. Some sheer, pure joy of living that she had only sensed in the perhaps-five truly content moments she'd experienced in her life (all but one of them with the Doctor).

The butterflies were being born. Emerging birth-wet and shining and sleek from their wombs, their shells, clambering and crawling with only natural grace, nothing learned. A few too many legs reaching to gain footholds. Level surfaces, level playing fields, even keel: they all started life the same way, at the same time, with the same everything. Antennae twitched. The room was warm. Their wings extended, slowly, a bit at a time, uncrumpled themselves and, with concentration, began to beat.

It was absolutely and utterly and without the slightest tinge or blush or faintest bit of doubt the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.

There were hundreds of them; thousands; millions. Myriads. A million myriad points of light, their color shimmering somewhere near blue but hovering also in the vicinity of red, with undertones of green and yellow and orange and purple and the tiniest, thinnest little black stripes. A strange marking on the left wing. She didn't understand it and she didn't expect to. There were so many of them: one, she thought, for every regeneration of every Time Lord who ever lived. And enough for so much more.

There was a breath of air from the open door, from the TARDIS, and the butterflies shivered and avoided flight just a bit longer. Rose turned to look from them to the Doctor, and he wasn't there.

He'd wandered, complex and thoughtful, into the middle of the room, and as she watched, began to divide and fall.

Shapes loomed.

Brightness changed.

The butterfly she'd found attached to her headboard walked a few careful steps over its leaf, and with a suddenness that took her breath away even as she tried to draw it in to scream, leapt.

And it was crumbling up the dust of its former existence and eating it and living off it and breathing life into itself and its wings and unfolding to its proper length breadth width depth, and it was the Doctor and it wasn't the Doctor and they were all the Doctor— except he hadn't changed. He'd never changed. He was himself, just as hard as he could be.

And there were ten of him.

It happened quite suddenly, and, for a miracle, apparently painlessly. They stood around in a circle, some with arms akimbo (startled), some with arms folded (bored), some with hands on their hips (take-charge) and some laughing, arms spread wide, faces turned towards what would be the sky if it weren't inside the TARDIS.

"Well, I never—"

"If it isn't—"

"And here I thought—"

"Are we—"

"Once again!" said one with curly hair and too many teeth. "Once again!" He was the one who laughed, and spread his arms, and looked up.

The Doctor, legendarily, was good with words. All of him was. Now there was a conglomeration, an agglomeration, a great big sticky ball of words that wasn't really a conversation because, after all, only crazy people talked to themselves. The Doctor spoke around and above and below himself, to each his own. If this was a ritual, it wasn't a very ritualized one.

"Easiest way to get us together, short of a time-scoop," said someone to Rose, and she turned, and she couldn't believe that she hadn't seen him there among the others; but here he was now, and her heart broke a little and at the same time healed whole.

"Doctor," she said, and he grinned that bright grin, blinked those blue eyes, spread his arms and welcomed her home once again. She went into his arms, already crying, overwhelmed at the feeling that welled up inside. It'd been a good six months, by any linear reckoning, since he'd regenerated, and she'd got to the point where she wouldn't have traded for the skinny pale freckled Doctor for anything. Not even her first Doctor. Not even this one, standing here with his arms so familiar around her.

Really.

She said, "I never thought."

He said, "I know. I know." He hugged her tighter, and she closed her eyes for the slightest moment, then opened them and pushed away to look at him, to prove himself again.

"You're here," she said.

"For a bit. Just until the phoenix flies. All of them; oh, its fantastic, Rose. All of them together." She wasn't sure if he meant the butterflies all together, then, or perhaps himself, all together. Certainly, seeing them all like this, she had a hard time comprehending that they were one and the same; that, at some point, they would again all be there in her own, in the Tenth. She looked away from the Ninth for a moment, to look at them all, enjoying the light and the air and the freedom.

When she looked back, he was staring at her, his eyes intense, gaze narrow on her and so wonderfully improbably, so fantastically impossible. So much darker and more meaningful than— she thought, and didn't quite have the chance to finish the idea before he'd tugged her gently towards him and bent down and kissed her, warm and improbable and unlikely and possibly real.

The others didn't notice.

Most of them, anyway.

When he let her go (as if he didn't want to) she turned to gather herself and the Tenth was back, for a moment, his eyes weighty on hers, and all the knowledge in all the world. He cast a brief glance at the rest of himself, and came forward, and took her hand.

"Its still me, you know," he told her.

She leaned towards him. "I know."

And there's a little curve of a smile, just there, at the edge of his lips. He hauled her towards him and embraced her, there in the middle of the flora (plants) and fauna (phoenix butterflies and phoenix Doctors). He was still holding her tight, and there was a solid, extra pressure on her shoulder, as the Ninth passed her by for the last time and rejoined his fellow ghosts.

The Tenth grinned, bent. Followed the warmth on her lips with something realler.

"Gallifreyan ritual rebirth regeneration et cetera et cetera," he said.

"Two hearts," she said dizzily, swayed by the pounding of the drums. "Two hearts per body, that's— twenty hearts! All at once."

"All the same rhythm. You could dance to it," said the Ninth, and he grinned, and they all grinned, and the Fourth waltzed a little three-step of his own devising.

"And you're all here. You're all you."

"I'm all me," and all she could see then was the Doctor, her Doctor— because they were all him and he was all them and they were all hers, whether they were willing to admit it or not.

"Two hearts," she faltered, faintly.

He smiled.

"As long as you hold them carefully, they're yours to hold."

She asked him for the experience, once again.

He regarded her narrowly for a few moments, and then tilted his head.

"Rose," he said. "You like me, don't you?"

"I do like you," she said honestly and a bit understatingly. "I like you an awful lot."

"All of me?"

"All of you."

He smiled a thoughtful, preoccupied smile. "You understand that it would be a tricky operation involving lots of time-stuff and deep thought and showing off?"

She grinned at him. "I can only hope."

It took him a moment, but he sobered. "And— listen. Rose. It won't be the same. He won't be there. There can only be so much living in the past. I get sick of my other selves very soon, and I rather expect you will too, but just in case that doesn't happen—"

"One more time?" she asked him, eyes on the floor. "Not for him."

"No?"

She looked up then.

"For you."

He set the controls very carefully; it did indeed involve trickery, and time-stuff, and showing off, and the fulfillment of a promise. They emerged in a bustling and ugly little city somewhere in Northern California, he found the cocoon where it had been hidden so very carefully, two hundred years ago. The heartbeat was strong. There was a steady skritchy scratching, and a beginning of the beat of wings.

"And now we hurry," said the Doctor, beginning to run.

"Figures, dunnit," gasped Rose at his side. "Time machine, Lord of Time you are, and still you're late."

It was of course more complicated than that. There was evil in the city, everyday, garden-variety evil, but evil nonetheless. The Doctor gave the twitching and ready cocoon to Rose for safe-keeping and waded in waist-deep into the indifferent miasma: body-snatchers and elemental ghosts and eldritch creatures and alien, so very alien, but nothing he couldn't handle. It was the humans who had to clean up afterwards that had the problem, but by that time he was pulling Rose along with his sheer effervescence, towards the sanctuary-park in the middle of the city. There was a bridge like a sundial which told them the incorrect time, and winding pathways, and there in the corner of nowhere and everywhere was a structure with a sign on it that said Butterfly Sanctuary in large friendly letters.

They went in, carefully.

The Doctor set the cocoon down on a handy leaf, a bit behind and out of sight. They stood next to each other, not touching, and watched.

It was a marvelously subtle birth.

Rose watched the phoenix arise from less than its own ashes, arise from nothing, and she felt the presence of the Doctor next to her, and did not miss him.

The butterfly arose and alighted on the leaf, fanning its wings in great slow beats, the stripes to bedazzle and the Gallifreyan letter for the sh sound to completely bewilder all human onlookers. The other, more tame and normal butterflies paid it no mind. It was there to fly, like all of them. It was there to live, and in that, it was no different.

They watched it for some time.

Afterwards, they joked and played and laughed and walked back to the TARDIS, the Doctor regaling her with the more complicated details of their adventure that day, the bits she'd missed while playing nursemaid to the phoenix.

"And before I knew it, its in me— took over my actions, everything. Was all I could do to stay in my right mind!"

Rose laughed. "You got two of those as well?"

"One is quite enough," said the Doctor, with false dignity. "At any rate, I don't think I've ever been quite that demoralized. Think of it, trying to write your own name and putting down 'Curtis Whittaker' instead. Who on earth is Curtis Whittaker? Why has he taken over my body? That's what I wanted to know. Well, it all evens out in the end. Feel a bit sorry for the chap, anyway. I'm very glad my name isn't Curtis," he ended sincerely.

"And now that its gone, your hand—" She pointed at it questioningly.

"All yours," said the Doctor gleefully, and he wriggled his fingers.

Evidently it wasn't dangerous, and as long as she held it carefully, it was hers to hold.