Spring
He wakes up to the midmorning light moving in a square across his pillow, glowing against Rose's hair. Today is Sunday; they have slept in. Outside, the world moves springtime slow—the leisure of waking up to the new sun, of growing through the season. Yesterday, he sat on their afterthought of a balcony and watched the buds of the trees, though about the chronology of the leaves that he'd never had to consider before. He'd been here, with Rose, for a year. He'd watched the leaves grow, and thrive, and dry and fall. Everything happened in the right order, predictably. And now everything would happen again, the same way.
He can't tell where the squre of sunlight ends and Rose's hair begins. She is turned away from him, the sheet slipping down to reveal the curve of a bare shoulder. Even when she first came back, she'd been so different—so much older. So much more confident, so much more self-assured. It was almost as if she was a different person every minute, every day—each new age bringing on new colors and nuances to her old self. He watches her for few minutes, caught in the rise and fall of her breath, then he slips gently out of bed to pace the main hallway of their flat.
They'd joked, once, about buying a house. In the old days, on the old earth. She'd scoffed at the word "mortgage" and they'd had a proper laugh, but even then that impossible prospect had filled him with a sort of warmth, like the slow spread of heat after a sip of tea, from the pit of his stomach all the way out to his fingers. But the reality of rent checks and dishwashers and health insurance and garbage day exhausts him. He thinks of all the world there is, all the worlds there are—and he can feel his own world shrinking around him.
Their living room furniture, bought as a gift to celebrate their moving in together from Pete and Jackie, is all overstuffed and comfortable. A braided rug in sunset oranges, a brown suede couch, a plush green armchair with carved wooden feet. Rose had gotten annoyed with him in the furniture store, when he hadn't had any opinions on their new furnishings. "Nine hundred years, and you haven't developed any furniture taste?" she'd hissed in his ear, but then she'd looped her hand through her arm and squeezed, and things had been alright after all.
No matter what time of day it is, the sitting room always feels like afternoon. A good sort of afternoon—lazy, full of soft golden light. An afternoon with no responsibilities, nowhere you're expected to be. He'd experienced very few afternoons like that, before Rose. Sometimes, he is so grateful. Sometimes, he feels so trapped. There's a mirror above the couch—why had they put a mirror there, of all places? He stares at himself now, in sweatpants and a grey t-shirt (a t-shirt! Who would have ever guessed) and notes how, even after just a year, he looks older. He's always been getting older, of course, but it had never shown this way. A slight thinning of the hair. A new crease around tired eyes.
The floorboards creak, and there's Rose reflected in the mirror behind him. She pulls a purple bathrobe up higher on her shoulders, staring at him with her brows knitted close together. She feels his moods the way some people feel the weather—the smell of rain on the wind, or the humidity that precludes a hot day. "Alright?" she knots the tie, almost as if she's anchoring herself against what might come next.
He starts to say yes, but the word sticks in his throat, so he just nods. And she smiles, slow and sad, and says "No you're not." She steps up right behind him, catching the reflection of his eyes. "John."
They're still testing the name. She says it hesitantly, still, as if it tastes wrong on her tongue. Now, he flinches inwardly as she says it.
"John," he laughs. "Funny, I don't even know who that is."
He's smiling now, almost manically, holding her gaze in the mirror. He can feel his single heart speed up—a limited number of beats, he counts them sometimes, imagining them as tally marks: four lines all marked out by a diagonal fifth, marching along in straight rows until suddenly there are no more. Of all the things he ever considered, a human death has never been one of them.
She doesn't smile, though. Her eyes look smaller, wiped free of their usually thick coat of mascara. She reaches out slowly, a manicured hand on his shoulder, the way one might approach a skittish animal. He does not pull away from its weight.
She leans in, moving her arm to loop around his chest, and he leans backwards against her. When they'd first moved across the void, those first few days of re-acquaintance had been surprisingly awkward. But now he remembers what cracked the hesitation—the night she'd put her hand on his chest and muttered "New Doctor, that's all it is. It takes some getting used to." Then she'd pulled up his hand, placed it over her own heart, and said "New Rose, too. We'll adjust."
New Doctor and New Rose, standing in half-embrace now in front of that big, cruel mirror. He thinks of passageways, or vortexes, of mirrors that open up to other worlds—slip through a looking glass, break through to Versailles, narrow your eyes to see the warped edges of a perception filter that fits like a glass dome over your life.
"Doctor," she whispers now, pressing a kiss to his ear. "Doctor."
He laughs again, a panicked burst, and she holds him tighter. "I remember who you are. And so do you."
He's shaking just barely now, like one of the springtime leaves unfurling to the world's wind. A Sunday morning, a day for doing nothing. For sitting out on their balcony and drinking tea, for remembering things quietly. For mirrors and reflections.
"You used to take care of me, remember? Canary Wharf, New New York, remember Dickens? A whole world ago," she breaths out a hush of a laugh. "You used to guide me, and I trusted you, yeah? I was so young, and I didn't know what I was doing."
He finds himself nodding in spite of himself—she's always had the ability to get him to agree without really knowing what he's agreeing to.
"Well, you have to trust me now. It's a different life, but it's not a worse life or a better life. And it's ours." She brings her other arm around him at the last word, rests her chin over her shoulder. He stares at that reflection for another long minute, breathing in and out until the sick desire to laugh passes.
Then he turns and hugs on to her tight—too tight, he knows—squeezing her hard for a moment, her nose pressed to his collarbone. And she tightens the embrace, too, so that for an instance they seem to be trying to overpower each other. And there's a comfort in this pain, too, as his ribs constrict under her arms. Then, simultaneously, they are both slack against each other.
He'd left so many behind, in his past. When they grew older, when they got tired—or, to be more honest, when he got tired. She was the first, he thinks now, who he would have never been able to leave. And now, this version of him never has to.
But he has a new sense of empathy, now, for all the people who have shared his life only to be left behind. Because he's left himself behind, now. Left himself behind to do the bills, to buy the groceries, to sleep in on Sundays.
Maybe it's not all so bad. Maybe all those neutral moments are worth it for the shining ones, like gemstones mixed in a gravel path- the smell of her hair, the feel of her body in his arms. How many times had he wanted to hold her this way, in the TARDIS? How many times had he held himself back because of who he was, because of what he was?
Now, he is human, and he is aging, and he is in love with this fierce, funny, loyal, intelligent, belligerent, comforting woman. And, though it takes effort sometimes to let someone else take the lead, he does trust her. He trusts her wholly, with his entire being. So he says "Okay, Rose Tyler, what do we do next?"
And she says "We put on a kettle, and we read the paper maybe, and we complain about the weather."
And he sighs just barely, nodding, but she laughs and shakes him. "I'm just joking. Did you sleep off your sense of humor?" And she pulls away, grinning, sparkling, and says "Get dressed. Let's drive somewhere, anywhere. Somewhere new."
And he feels a spark in his chest—the light of a promise igniting. A new life, a different life—not better or worse. He thinks of all of the things that are his now, at the incredulous life that his entire life can fit into this box of a flat, and for the first time ever he feels comforted that after a day's adventure, he will have this familiar space to return.
Summer
He set pots out on the balcony, filled them with soil and seeds, and watched them grow. One full of tomato plants, one for basil, one for a sunflower grown round and wide as a dinner plate. He'd picked up odd things through all his years—how to ride a unicycle, for example, or make the perfect omelet—but he'd never before had the chance to help things grow.
Tonight, he picks four tomatoes and lays them out on a wooden cutting board. Cutting their red flesh feels like a betrayal; hadn't he raised them up past tomato adolescence, gauging the water level of their soil, pulling the heavy terracotta pot to the best spot of sun? They'd been raised for this inevitable doom—Pasta Bolognese.
When they first got the apartment, he'd gotten a job as a cook at the nearby diner. But he'd lost his temper with a surly waiter and thrown a bowl of scrambled eggs down on the tile, an aftershock of Time Lord rage. Then he'd worked at a book store, which had been so quiet that his thoughts loomed bigger and bigger, louder and louder until he walked out one afternoon and didn't go back.
"We don't need the money," Rose had said gamely. "But it might be good for you to have something to do."
He'd agreed with her, but knowing he needed a job and actually finding a job were two very different things.
He halves a tomato, then halves it again. Chops each tomato into squares, then adds slivers of a red onion. Tosses is in a pan with olive oil and a few ripped leaves of basil. He should feel proud, maybe, that he grew most of these things. But he doesn't feel much of anything. He stirs the contents of the pan with a spatula, watching the flakes of onion heat up and sizzle. A Thursday night dinner: such an inconsequential victory.
His mind is slowing down. Sometimes, if he focuses, he can actually feel thoughts leaving him behind. He tried to explain it to Rose, once—how it would be like amnesia for a human, forgetting the most basic facts you'd been raised with. She'd snapped at him, then—"You are human now. You need to stop talking in terms of me and them."
She'd been right, and that was the problem. He had a single human heart, and the capacity of a single human brain. The knowledge of the Time Lords was seeping out now, into the void, or maybe just out into the air, into nothingness. Maybe, he reasons grimly, it will be easier to assimilate now. The thought brings no comfort. Every night, as he falls asleep, he wonders if he will know himself in the morning.
He's taken to writing things on scraps of paper. Sometimes single words, lists. Sontarans, Adipose, Bad Wolf Bay. Sometimes a snippet of a memory—orange sky, the curve of Gallifrey beneath young heels. Or the box, that god damned glorious box—he misses it with a constant ache, the sharp pain of a phantom limb, as if something essential has been hewn from his body. There is no comfort in the fact that the other Doctor is keeping her safe. He's taken to thinking of the other Doctor as somehow false, an imposter—though he knows, deep down, that title belongs to him. He never used to be so petty; that must be part of becoming a human, as well. The constant state of flux, the constant act of leaving things behind for good. . All the bad parts of him, coming to the surface.
He puts on a pot of water to boil, measures out dry noodles. The sound of keys in the door. "Ugh, Torchwood was hell, today." The thump of a handbag on the front hall table, the smart clack of heels against hardwood floor. "Spent all afternoon running tests on this piece of metal we pulled out of a meteorite—skinny at one end, sort of flat and round at the other. We run it through every system we have, and we consult every damn diagram and chart and book, and you know what it was?" Rose appears in the door of the kitchen. He's still not used to seeing her so professional—the black A-line skirt, the dark maroon button-up under a dark grey blazer. It used to always be t-shirts and track jackets. He blinks at her, coming back to the story and realizing she expects a response.
"What was it?"
"A spoon," she says flatly, moving forward to sniff at the contents of the skillet on the stovetop. "A bloody spoon." They're silent for a beat, and then they're laughing together. He hasn't talked to anyone all day, and certainly hasn't laughed, and it takes Rose Tyler a handful of sentences to break through his sour mood and have him chortling over the pasta sauce.
He wants to tell her she's a marvel. He wants to tell her she's his savior.
"This smells good," she nods happily, tension of her work day already gone. That's a nice thing about Rose—she doesn't dwell. She lets things stress her out, and then she lets them roll away. "Shall I get a bottle of wine?"
He nods, and watches her walk to the dining room with a certain incredulous stare. How could she take the banalities of making dinner and suddenly turn it from a nowhere evening into a good time? How can she take a moment that doesn't really matter at all and somehow make it matter so much?
She comes back with a bottle of red wine and sets it on the counter, hunting the drawers for the ever-elusive corkscrew. As she passes the radio on the counter, she flips it in, and a synthesized drum beat fills the kitchen.
"Just thought I'd set the mood," she quips as The Talking Heads fill the kitchen—a quirky, manufactured sound that already makes him laugh more. She finds the corkscrew with a little a-ha! And brandishes it as him, swaying her hips to the beat. "C'mon, Doctor John, we know you can dance," she says. "I remember a thing or two from the TARDIS days, and one big thing is your foxtrot."
He moves purposefully clumsily, twirling her in the kitchen, making her giggle. "Burning down the house," he sings along, comically low.
"Never took you for a Talking Heads fan," she challenges, moving her feet forwards and backwards to match his.
"Oh, are you kidding? I've seen them eleven times! Once I traveled across the whole Omega galaxy just to make it to their show in time."
"And did you wait back stage for an autograph?"
"Well," he grabs her hand, and she twirls. "They were too important for me."
"All the people you ran around with. Nefertiti, Vincent Van Gogh, Queen Victoria… And the Talking Heads were too important for you?" She squares herself in front of him, looping her hands over his shoulders, grinning in that way she used to when they were off running somewhere, in terrible danger but still able to fit in a quick joke.
But the difference is that then, he could not touch her. He could not press his mouth over hers, as he does now, savoring the soft give of her lips, the slight strawberry taste of her lip balm. He'd held himself to certain standards, in the old days. Gallifreyan standards that meant holding yourself back from the things you desired, tempering your basic instincts by always taking a step back from what you wanted most. It was a survival tactic, then—care too much about one thing and you could lose everything.
So that was the trade, in the end. The life he used to know, for the life he's learning now. An old life of traveling the ever-expanding universe, where everything grows apart from everything else because it's all so vast that the idea of really connecting with something is laughably impossible. And the life now, condensed into this kitchen, into these two bodies pressing together, hands in his hair, hands on her waist, mouths on mouths and the smell of burning pasta sauce.
Trade the whole universe for Rose Tyler. Pass it over the table like a bent-up baseball card, something you carried in your pocket for too long so that the edges were soft and the picture was faded. Right now, for the first time since coming to this new life, he can feel all of space and time circling around him, holding him directly where he's supposed to be.
Fall
He walks through the Egyptian room of the British Museum, tracing his fingers over glass cases and engraved nameplates, remembering how the tapestries and sarcophagi looked when they were new. Rose kneels to examine the shriveled hand of an unsheathed mummy, turning over her shoulder to make a disgusted look at him.
"Are you my mummy?" she says, and he laughs—that joke never gets old, and they tell it often.
"I think I know him," he comes to stand behind her, nodding to the shriveled human figure wrapped in stained bandages.
"Oh, you do not," she rolls her eyes, standing up to loop her arm through his.
"You never know. I've met a lot of people."
"Mmm," she inclines her head onto his shoulder, and he turns to breath in the shampoo scent of her scalp. Rose had the idea of coming to the museum. He'd been sinking lately, though he tried to hide it. The decay of the leaves made him feel sick—watching them shrivel and fade and fall from the tree outside the kitchen window.
The truth that kept echoing in his mind had pulled him away from her, as if they were separated by an invisible barrier. How many years did he have left, in this standard human life? Twenty? Thirty? He kept thinking, in the dark recess of his mortal brain, that for a Time Lord, a human lifespan was like a terminal illness.
How long had this poor bugger in the case made it? He leaned over to read the info card—estimated at thirty years old. Why, that was nothing. That was the blink of an eye.
"We can get shawarma for lunch, hmm?" Rose says distractedly, letting go of his arm to move along a display of twisted metal armbands and belt buckles.
"Hmm? Yeah…" He wanders away, out of the room carved with ankhs and Anubis heads. He always liked museums; he and Rose were low-level sponsors of this one, sent a check twice a year to get their name on the last page of a pamphlet. But today, everything seems too sterile. The polished cases, the roped-off statues. He's become such a bystander. What would the guards to if he pushed through the ropes and snogged that statue of Aphrodite, hands cupped round her stone breasts? He glances up at the security camera, flashes it a too-wide grin he imagines someone returning on the other side.
The Greek statues watch him somberly. Why did the Greeks carve everyone with such solemn eyes? He walks up to a statue of a nymph twisting her body around to curl a hand around her foot, and he kneels to examine the details. Fingernails, toenails, stone flesh that seems to give on contact. The longer he stares, the more he thinks that he can see her fingers just barely move. It's like no one told the stone its properties; it wasn't behaving in the proper way. A human sculptor with a chisel and an idea—what magic. That was the magic that kept him orbiting the earth all those years. The idea that someone could take a blue-veined hunk of rock and turn it into this girl with hair knotted up on her head, body twisted lithely so that each vertebrate on her back smoothed out under her stone skin.
He thinks about stone, and he thinks about skin. He thinks about being cold and unyielding. He thinks of lying naked next to Rose, the feel of bed sheets, the curve of her hip against his own.
Better to feel things, then. Marble under fingertips, a pair of lips to match his own. Better to be soft to the world, and warm, and breathing, and alive.
He stares into the statue's lifeless eyes for a moment, and there's the one thing the sculptor couldn't capture. They are blank and sightless, and they make him feel sad for this nymph, caught in the same pose all her days.
He turns, thinking of how good shawarma sounds right now, and goes to find Rose.
Winter
When he wakes up, he only opens his eyes halfway, trying to hold tight to the midmorning sleepiness that wraps around him, as solid and comforting as their heavy duvet. Outside the window, a December grey sky. The apartment is always cold—high ceilings, wood floors, large windows that let in winter drafts as easy as they let in summer sunshine—but under the blankets it is warm, and he enjoys the difference between the cool bedroom air on his face and the huddle of warmth around his body.
Rose always sleeps later than him, though they almost always wake up within a half an hour of each other. He always likes to watch her in moments of stillness—when she's balancing her checkbook with her lips pursed in concentration, or daydreaming out the window as she twirls a piece of blonde hair between her fingertips. All those centuries of running, only now is he learning to sit still.
He cannot see her face—just a mass of light hair spread out across the pillow next to him. He reaches out, pressing his fingers through her hair and up against her scalp. She stirs but does not wake. He feels a profound sense of settling, of being anchored to the spot.
Three days ago, she told him she was pregnant.
He'd been numb, at first. He'd been good at pretending—kissing her, sweeping her into a hug that turned into a ballroom dip over the kitchen floor. But he'd distanced himself from the news, needing time to figure out how this would define him. Frankly, he was frightened—because how could he be a father when he was still growing into himself, his new self, this clumsy and forgetful human body with the strength of one heart?
Sometimes he could only recognize the ugliness within himself. The anger, the jealousies, the doubts. All the bad parts of himself, dormant for all those long years, held at bay by some silent oath to the Time Lord code. How could he raise a child, when he was made up of all those sour things?
He presses his hand through Rose's hair again, fingertips on her scalp. She lets out a little moan as she comes to the surface, blinking sleepily at him as he moves the curve of his palm to her cheek.
"You always wake up before me," she complains, voice still hoarse with sleep.
"I like watching you wake up," he says. "So cute… You squint your eyes up and you scowl out at the world…" He pulled the blanket up to his chin and screwed up his eyes, feigning a magnificently grumpy yawn.
"Oh, get off it, I don't look like that…" She shoves his shoulder under the covers, then huddles up to him. "What do you think about, when you wake up before me?"
"Oh, nothing," he says. "A thousand different nothings."
"No, really," she urges, nuzzling into his sleep t-shirt.
"Well…" He stretches the word out, raising his eyebrows at the ceiling. "I think about you. I think about our old days."
"You had a lot of old days without me, too."
"Those seem to matter less and less."
She makes a humming noise, and he feels it vibrate through both of their bodies. "Well, that's a nice thing to say."
"I have selective memories, now. I know I spent a lot of my days running, and a lot of them in danger, but when I think back… All I really think about are the stars. Being out among them."
She rests a hand on his chest, over his single heart. "You miss it." A statement.
"Doesn't everyone miss something about their past?"
"It's hard for you." The words seem to clog in her throat. "Being human."
He pauses for a long time. "Yes." His arm, limp on the mattress, moves to tighten around her body—though he isn't sure if its purpose was to comfort her or reassure himself. "I think… All the bad parts of me come out with my…" He pauses for a moment, considering. "With my humanity. My temper. My impatience. I used to control them as best as I could, and now…" He trails off, thinking vaguely that he's been quite out of control ever since he came here, that he'd always felt slightly dizzy, slightly off his footing.
And here was his true worry, slipping out past the defenses now. "I worry that you love the Time Lord in me, the man who showed you the stars. And that man is slipping further away every day, now…"
She's silent, now nearly draped over the top of him, breathing slow. "Oh, you're so daft," she whispers, ghosting her lips over the stubble on his neck. "I miss the old days, too. I miss when it was me, and you, and Jack. I miss feeling so young and infinite. But…" She props herself up so that her head hovers over his, her hair falling down around his face like a curtain. "Didn't you know? I've always loved the human parts of you…" She leans down and kisses him, then, slow and sweet. Kissing is a human thing—all mouth and wet, illogical, purposeless. He gives himself up to it, now, reaching up to cradle her head, thinking about the little spark of life growing inside her. All the miracles he's witnessed in the universe, and he never expected this.
This cautious domesticity, a dawning parenthood, a happiness of settling down in one place with one person. It had never been possible, and now it was. And he thought, dimly, but hopefully, that the rest of his life would be about seeing all parts of himself the way Rose saw him—and the way he saw her. Constantly adjusting, constantly attempting, putting one foot out in front of the other slowly, slowly, until he would break into a familiar loping run.