Yet another tiny Nine/Rose piece… (Ish. Not really shippy, but I love writing the dynamic between those two.) Hints to all the beginning of s1. Should be the first of a row of drabbles about various characters, which I've written quite a while ago and never got around to typing before. Enjoy, hopefully!
Title is a line from the song Landscape by Florence + The Machine. (Minus the word "darling", which didn't feel quite right with the Doctor.)
Gripping someone's hand seems like a long-forgotten sensation.
She smiles, wide and genuine, talks too loud and laughs with startling openness. She is young and fresh, like a field of innocence, eager to see the universe. He tries his best not to stare too much. Maybe he fails.
The future, then the past. She looks gorgeous in Victorian dress, and merely warm, merely her as they gobble chips and he thinks about things long lost. He very nearly loses her, time and time again, risks her; such is their life—and yet protection runs through his veins even more than mere blood, when he pauses to throw her a glance. She tells him not to shoot a Dalek one day, and for a second he wants her gone, craves to be alone again with the searing memories, the hollow carved into his gut, between his maddened hearts. Then he doesn't, and as she walks away by his side, it feels easier to draw air into his old, weary lungs. It tastes whole somehow, laced with a tinge of sweetness from her hair as she moves—close to him, near enough to brush against, almost.
He talks too fast, with words harsh as blows sometimes, the rage still lurking beneath his skin, throbbing in his temples, a painful eternal reminder that nothing is quite right—because home is gone, Gallifrey's dead, he watched it burn. Humans seem less amazing if they are all he has left and he still feels like he's fallen out of gravity, just hovering from one end of the universe to the next, relative and small and a survivor of everything, relentlessly. She doesn't understand that, cannot. She is there anyway, tiny, ephemeral, wonderful Rose Tyler.
Very gradually, it begins to be enough.