Title: Doing Domestic
Characters: TenII/Rose
Genre: One-shot angst
Word count: approx 1600
Summary: The Doctor returns to Rose.
A/N: Wrote this ages ago as my version of long-term'domestic' for TenII and Rose, and thought I might as well post it, as I quite like some of the interaction, and a bit of angst is cathartic.
~*~
The Doctor stood in front of the mirror, one hand touching it, palm pressed flat. The suit was worn at the shoulder seams, and noticeably faded. The other man, did he still see this reflection, or had fate changed his face again? If it had, would it be quite as lined, quite as tired as the one staring back now?
He was still alive, he knew that much. Despite the closed walls of reality, the Timelord consciousness still bled through a little, just a buzz in the back of his mind, but enough to tell him another Timelord existed somewhere in time and space.
He hadn't worn the suit for years now. So much time, trying to lay to rest the ghosts of nearly a thousand years of existence, an infinite consciousness squashed into a finite lifespan. So many mistakes.
He closed his eyes for a second, Rose's face swimming in front of him, accusing. All the things she had wanted that he couldn't give her. A god became a man for her, but she was still in love with the god.
It was folly, all of it. Domesticity was a game, and to be fair, they had played it through almost to the final whistle. But the mundanity, the click-clack of the passing years, the finishing line approaching, and what? What was any of it for?
She had spent her life trying to escape it, and he had come, no, he had been sent to drag her back into it. Those years had crept along with her resentment seething quietly away, eating everything from the inside out.
Ten years now, since the return to Bad Wolf Bay, and the centre was not holding. He had neutered himself for her, and ironically, it seemed he had also neutered himself literally. A baby had been the final little charade to play, but neither of them considered that it wasn't a possibility.
He wanted to believe it was something all couples that struggle with infertility have to deal with, but they both knew the cracks were in the foundation. So he left. He did what he knew how to do, he quietly packed and disappeared without fanfare.
He stared at himself again, thinking of the other man. Did she still think of him, too? He always held a faint hope that these last years with him would erase her yearning for another life, with another man who looked the same. He knew they hadn't. How could they, when he knew he yearned for that life himself?
The palm on the glass closed into a fist, hitting the mirror firmly before sweeping through his hair. Enough of this. Six months since he had left, and one phone call, it was time to bring the façade down. He walked out of the hotel room and down to where they had agreed to meet. He had something to show her.
Rose was sitting on a bench, looking out over the pond. Her blonde hair was swept up into a chignon, and she was immaculately made up. He didn't draw attention to himself straight away, watching her for a moment. She looked stiff, nervous. He walked slowly to the bench and sat down beside her, following where her gaze fell – a small group of ducks meandering through the water.
"Hello," she said, without turning to him.
"Hello," he responded, sitting forward, his elbows resting on his knees.
"Might have known you'd be wearing the suit. I bet you haven't worn anything else for months," she said, the merest hint of a laugh in her tone giving him hope.
"Didn't feel right in anything else," he lied. "Not travelling. You need something practical for the open road."
"Is that right?" she was clipped and guarded again.
They resumed their silent observation of the ducks.
"Mum called it a mid-life crisis. She said you'd be off galavantin' in a Ferrari and dyeing your hair"
"Dyeing my hair?" he was affronted. "I did not dye my hair, thank you very much, and I happen to like the grey and distinguished look. I carried it off with aplomb in my younger days. Anyway, it's only a few."
He straightened up, looking at her, searching her eyes for the dancing light that played there when she teased him.
"You waited, then?" he said, his tone more serious.
"Yeah. 'M good at that," she replied, pressing her lips together and looking down for a minute. When she looked up again, he could see tears that she refused to let fall.
"Rose," he said, trying to form his thoughts into some coherent line. He knew what he wanted to say, he could see the shape of it in his mind in Gallifreyan, but he couldn't distil it into sense. Instead, he held out his right hand. She looked at it for a long moment, before putting her left hand onto it.
"C'mon," he said, standing.
"Where we going?" she asked.
"You'll see," he said, managing a grin.
They walked in silence for a while. He enjoyed the gentle pressure of her hand, and despite everything, there was a joy in just being next to her. The last few months had been like the years he wasn't even in the same universe, and whatever else happened, he was sure he didn't want to relive that for any greater length of time.
"You gonna tell me what you were doing?" Rose said eventually.
"Yup," he replied, swinging their hands a little between them. He liked having something up his sleeve after so many years of being on the back foot. He was no more expert at being half-Timelord than he was at being human, and his ego had taken more than one beating as each new limitation had been discovered
"Well?" she actually laughed. His grin got broader, and he caught her eyes. He dared to hope they were flirting again, and it made him feel giddy.
"You first."
"Oh no you don't. You left me. Again. I get to choose who goes first," she was teasing in her tone, but the laughter didn't quite reach her eyes.
"I didn't leave you before. You were taken from me, it's different."
"Oh really? Doesn't feel any different. Well, except I didn't feel the need to jump across existence to find you again. But then, you know how that is," she said, and there was no laughter in the tone now.
He could feel that her hand was slack in his, waiting for him to let go. He didn't, he held a little tighter.
"What's that supposed to mean?" he asked, stopping and turning to face her.
"Nuffin'," she said, her head at an aggressive angle that emphatically disagreed with her.
"Oh, come on, Rose. I'm half-human, not half-witted. Spit it out," he insisted.
She was chewing the inside of her lips; words long suppressed preparing to see daylight. It had been so difficult to amble through their life, knowing things were unsaid, but not knowing how that could be changed. Now it was about to, the Doctor felt acutely nervous.
"Alright then. How come you never tried to find me? I spent all that time working on something, some way of reaching you because I couldn't bear…" she gasped in a breath, steadying the quaver in her voice. "I couldn't bear to be apart from you. But you just got on with it, even replaced me again and again, and I'll just bet you've done it since, too."
"I have not! I've been alone for the past six months!" he protested.
"I didn't mean…" she stopped short, and he realized what she meant. He let go of her hand, and ran both of his through his hair and over his face.
"Rose, I can't… I can't change what I did. I couldn't rip down reality to find you, and I let myself hope that somehow you would be ok, that it was just me who lost everything again. But I didn't choose to leave you on the beach the second time, and you didn't have to spend the last decade punishing me for the decision another man made!"
"I didn't!" she yelled. "I spent the last decade watching you pretend you weren't him!"
The Doctor opened his mouth, but the harsh truths just hung, stinging in the air between them. He snapped it shut again and ran a lean hand round the back of his neck, jamming the other into his pocket.
"What do you want from me, Rose? I've done everything I thought you always wanted. I've done domestic until my brain bled."
She made an exasperated noise, and stuck her hands on her hips.
"You really are unbelievable. When did I tell you this is what I wanted? I didn't! I made it clear what I wanted – I jumped through endless realities to find you. And when I did, you dumped me on that bloody beach again, and swanned off in the TARDIS without me. You didn't ask. You just did it. I didn't want domestic, I wanted the Doctor! I wanted you!"
"You got me!" he pulled his hand from his pocket, and thumped it against his chest. "You got me, and you never told me any of this! You think I had any more choice than you did? I'd have been quite happy to stay in the TARDIS with you forever."
"Then why didn't you?" she was sobbing now, mascara slipping down her cheeks.
"You mean why didn't he, don't you?" he said, softening despite his frustrations, unable to resist her tears.
She nodded, wordlessly, brushing at her face with her coat sleeve.
"Oh, Rose," he sighed. "Because he thought it was the only way to make you happy. He thought being without you, but knowing you had him, had me, was worth the sacrifice."
"You bloody pair of martyrs!" she sniffed. "Him with the beach, and you with ten years of Mr Semi-detached!"
He took her wrists and pulled her close, kissing her forehead.
"I'm sorry. Life just took over and once it had, I didn't know how to put the brakes on," he whispered.
She twisted one hand free to smooth down his lapel, before balling her fist around it and creasing it up again.
"We didn't have the time to waste, Doctor," she said, through gritted teeth.
He pulled her face up to him, still holding her right hand to his chest.
"I know," he said firmly, hoping his eyes were conveying everything he was feeling.
~*~
"It's… I don't understand. How did you…?" Rose was hugging her arms, her head upturned and her brow furrowed.
"Shatterfrying. Unbelievably simple and elegant, I'm frankly faintly appalled that it never occurred to me before, but that's Donna for you. Well, not simple, and um, not really elegant, but her mind, now, that was a thing of beauty," he said, skipping around the console with the glee of a kid with a free bag of penny chews.
"Is that…? You ran away to grow a TARDIS?" she laughed the words out, bringing her hands together and pressing them against her lips to hold in the laughter.
"A bit better than a Ferrari, wouldn't you say?" he grinned in the blue-green light. She bent forward with the effort of stifling giggles, but was totally ineffective, bringing her hands to her hips and gasping in a breath. She stopped abruptly.
"Hold on. Why didn't you tell me? I've been sitting at home in a depressive daze, and you've been… have you flown her yet?" she asked, and he could hear the sound of a thousand arguments in her tone. It punctured his little fantasy quite effectively; they weren't the Timelord and his young companion, they were a dysfunctional couple with serious marital problems.
"No! No, I wanted to wait for you," he said, crestfallen.
"You mean you wanted to spring it on me. Didn't occur to you that I might be interested in being a part of it, instead of wondering if you were dead or alive, or maybe just with someone else."
He felt himself beginning to pout sullenly.
"I thought you'd be pleased," he said.
"I would have been. If you'd said 'hey Rose, lets go and grow a TARDIS…' but you didn't, you just sodded off without a word."
They stood in silence. He felt all this power beneath his feet, and still he couldn't get this right.
"Can we start again? Please?"
She sighed a long, tired sigh. "OK," she said. "But I get to choose where we go first."
~*~