A/N: Written for the anonymous kinkmeme at sizeofthatthing on LiveJournal, but not graphic. Prompt was: "Three/Jo, the Doctor dreams about Jo after The Green Death". Love to Livii and rhia_starsong for being betas of great love and wonder.
They are falling through time and space —
No, time and space are falling — moving — around them, and they are lying still.
Dreams, he knows, are deceptive. The images and sensations are no more than the brain's distorted feedback, the aftereffects of processing and filing experience away into memory. Even in a human brain, the disconnected signals can be disconcertingly lifelike; a Time Lord's brain is exponentially more complex, handling tremendous amounts of data by human standards and spending a much longer time between sleep cycles. The resultant feedback is far more...thorough.
What it all amounts to is that Jo isn't lying next to him as he wakes (he isn't waking, not really), running one playful hand through his hair. Her fingertips don't graze his forehead and his temple, and he has no cause to remember how peculiarly warm human skin is to the touch.
"I think I've made up my mind, Doctor," she doesn't say.
"Oh?" he asks, because while dream images bear no more resemblance to life than a chalk drawing they can, and have, yielded unexpected observations. And so one plays along with the illusion. "What for?"
"Where I'd like to go," she says, and giggles at his blank response. "You said we could go anywhere, remember? Anywhere in time and space. One more trip."
"So I did."
She edges closer, close enough to whisper, and it isn't her, even if her voice and body and silhouette in timespace are as vivid as life.
"Everywhere, Doctor. All of time. All of space. Show me." One tiny hand rests on his shoulder, its slender gravity beguilingly real.
She wouldn't have wanted that — the real Jo. She never did, really. But, he thinks as she doesn't curl up against him, where lies the harm in following a simple train of thought?
"In that case, my dear," he replies, cupping her chin in one hand, "we have quite a long way to go."
They are not falling. They are not moving at all. The illusion of movement is created by the flow of space and time around them — relative motion.
And yet the sensation remains that he is slipping and falling and is never going to stop.
He draws her closer and doesn't follow her gaze as she stares out into the space beyond space — how strange it must look to her, who cannot perceive the temporal topography. Perhaps it appears to her in color and light, sound and vibration, signals she can understand.
And as she watches he watches her, and wonders if Jo would have wanted to see it. Would it have fascinated her as it does the figment of his imagination that looks like her? There had been moments, certainly, when she looked out the doors and he'd seen — almost felt — the awe in her eyes, but she did not crave the next planet and the farther star as he did.
But the girl in his arms is rapt and staring and clinging to him, and her single pulse with its strange half-rhythm repeats faster than before. She laughs, breathless, and holds on tighter.
"Doctor, it's beautiful," she whispers, and against the scattered signals around them her breath in his ear, her heat playing across every inch of him, are deliriously simple.
Jo doesn't kiss him. Not on the cheek, not on the mouth, not faintly in the hollow of his throat. She doesn't trace her way down his skin, slow enough to tempt; no shiver steals through his body in answer.
Her body doesn't arch into his own, shifting to the tempo of her fevered breathing. Her slim legs don't wrap around his waist and pull him in closer, tighter. They don't begin to settle into each other's rhythm, deliberate and heady as freefall.
Every muscle doesn't tense until the ache of it crowds out thought. There's no sigh on his lips, no cry on hers.
He wakes, and it's a relief, of sorts, to look around him and know that this at least is real.