Precipitation

Author's Note: This story is an expansion of a couple of tiny things mentioned in my earlier piece, First Steps.

pre·cip·i·ta·tion (prĭ-sĭp'ĭ-tā'sh'n) n.

1. A headlong fall or rush.
2. A hastening or acceleration of movement, procedure, or action.
3. (meteorology) Any form of water, such as rain, snow, sleet, or hail, that falls to the earth's surface.

She stepped out of the TARDIS onto grass that was tall and yellowish-brown. It brushed gently against her ankles, moved by the slight breeze. Nearby was a neatly ploughed field. Rose didn't recognise any of the crops, but she could tell at a glance they didn't look quite right – just a bit underdeveloped, not quite green enough.

It was a hot day, but the Doctor was pulling on his coat as he locked the TARDIS door behind them. He gazed around interestedly at their surroundings, and muttered something about "pioneers on the lone prairie" that sounded rather like he was quoting something.

"And those would be log cabins, then?" she teased, pointing towards a grouping of elongated metal buildings with rounded tops.

The Doctor answered seriously, "Of a sort, yeah. Standard colonist dwellings. Come on, let's go see if there's anyone about."

He took her hand as they headed off in the direction of the huts, but he didn't walk as close to her as he used to. While they walked, the Doctor delivered a lecture on space colonies of the 27th century and how similar the problems were to those of settlers in Earth colonies. Inclement surroundings, corrupt companies, violent natives, the whole deal. He liked colonists, apparently. Admired the kind of fortitude it took to abandon the lives they'd always known to risk everything on one great adventurous gamble that might or might not pay off.

Rose only half-listened as she strolled along beside him. She shared his enthusiastic anticipation, his keen desire to leap headfirst into whatever situation they were going to find on this planet, but unlike him she acknowledged that there might be another reason he was rushing to meet the neighbours.

They never knew what they were getting into on their travels. At this moment the two of them could be heading for a deadly adventure, or the kind of routine problem-solving that the Doctor relished and Rose secretly dreaded because she felt so useless and left out. Alternatively, they might simply be invited to share a pleasant meal with some new acquaintances. That sort of thing actually did happen fairly often, in spite of her mother's steadfast refusal to believe it.

Either way, there would be people, and that was good.

There would be other people to put a bit of space between her and the Doctor, people to distract them from one another and from the … weirdness that had crept into their relationship since they'd left the parallel universe behind.

There were two or three hundred colonists altogether, divided into groups of forty to each dwelling. On the whole, they seemed to be nice, pleasant people, if a bit severe.

The leaders of the expedition, a couple called Jackson, explained in great detail about how overcrowded conditions on their homeworld had led all these people to sign up for the chance to make a new life for themselves and their families on a nameless little planet that was said to have lush rainfall and fertile soil.

"Thing is," Jackson told them halfway through a rather skimpy meal, "G-883 has weather cycles, so it rains nice for a few years, then there's a dry year or two, then sometimes it floods. The commission were upfront about that, but they said it was all fairly predictable. They said we were sure to have at least three years to get the crops going and the colony established before it went into a dry cycle again."

"Only this is a dry year," the Doctor said thoughtfully, and Rose suddenly remembered the crops that she'd thought looked a bit bad.

One of the women nodded. "Too early. This is barely our second year here. We're using the lake to irrigate the crops, but it's barely enough now. If next year is dry as well…"

This was going to be one of those problem-solving situations, then. She could tell from the Doctor's abstracted expression that he was pondering the problem, wondering if there was any way he could be of assistance. No one could control the weather, of course, but a little thing like that never deterred him.

He spent quite a long time that evening asking in-depth questions about the climate of the planet, its size, whether or not there was any indigenous population. Eventually, someone showed him to a computer terminal so he could look over every piece of information the colonists were in possession of.

One of the younger women sidled over to Rose. She tilted her head to indicate the Doctor, who was staring intently at the screen through his glasses.

"He acts like he knows how to fix things," she said wonderingly.

Rose smiled. "He always acts like that," she told her.

"But does he? I mean, can he?"

"No idea," admitted Rose. "I doubt he knows himself, yet."

The Jacksons' teenage daughter showed them to the room they were to sleep in that night. Actually, Rose thought, 'room' might have been overstating the case quite a bit. It was more like a cubicle: small, spartan, and temporary. The walls – also a bit of an overstatement – were made of a slightly thinner version of the metal that formed the outside of the buildings. They began about six inches above the dirt floor, rising to a height of less than ten feet. Just to the left of the suspended tarp that served as the only door stood a tall metal cupboard that reached nearly to the top of the enclosure. For a second she wondered how anyone in this camp was ever supposed to have enough possessions to fill something that large. Then she caught sight of the bed, almost the only other piece of furniture in the room, and all thought of the colonists and their belongings completely left her head.

One bed. One double bed that they were apparently expected to share.

With a quick, nervous glance in the Doctor's direction, she sat down and bounced lightly, testing the mattress with an air of nonchalance she certainly didn't feel.

It wasn't that they'd never been forced to share close quarters before, of course; quite the reverse. They'd been locked up in cells almost from the moment they met, often with only one bunk. Once or twice they'd even been in situations like this, where their hosts had kindly offered to put them up in the only guest room. On occasion, there had been a certain amount of tension present, even though the Doctor had quickly dispelled it the first time with his complaints about humans and their inability to separate anything as basically innocuous as a simple piece of furniture from their own overactive sex drives.

Admittedly, at that time Rose had been under the mistaken impression that he himself had no sex drive to control, which had helped considerably. Once a they'd been in a similar situation while Captain Jack had been with them, and his constant innuendo had taken the edge off any sort of actual sexual tension. Now, though…

Now, the whole situation was a good deal more complicated than it ever had been before. These days, Rose was aware of the Doctor not only as a sexual being, but as a man she was utterly in love with. More to the point, his interest in her was patently obvious, as well. She suspected that the only thing keeping the two of them from ravishing one another was the Doctor's stubborn determination to keep their relationship on a safely platonic footing.

Still, she had to admit that that determination seemed to be losing ground more and more quickly, especially since their return from the parallel Earth. Those friendly comforting hugs they'd always shared were growing longer and closer. They'd progressed to holding one another, and gazing into each other's eyes. More than once, Rose at least had felt that amazing sensation of having the world – or even the entire universe – disappear while she was in the Doctor's arms.

Sometimes there were even kisses, too. Not proper snogs or anything, but still… A kiss on the forehead here, a friendly smack on the lips there. Once in awhile a soft, gentle pressing of the lips to celebrate the fact that they'd come out of a situation alive and triumphant, although lately those had become more frequent and taken on a "just for the hell of it" connotation. On the whole, just a series of tiny, possibly meaningless kisses. None of them ever matched up to the strange dream she had sometimes, the one where the Doctor – always looking the way she'd first known him, interestingly enough – was holding her and kissing her, and everything around them was glowing with golden light.

Rose sighed and lay down. She turned her head to find the Doctor watching her with a half-amused smile on his face.

"What?" she said, trying not to look guilty. She devoutly hoped that whatever telepathic powers he might possess weren't enough to let him tell what she'd been thinking.

He said that she'd looked "dreamy", an accusation which Rose denied just a touch too vehemently. However, he took her words at face value, and started talking about his prior experiences with space colonists.

They lay side by side, shoulders touching. The Doctor spoke softly, his voice pitched slightly lower than normal, and the rhythmic sound nearly lulled her to sleep after awhile. Most likely that was his intention. Eventually, he rolled over to face her, his mouth near her ear. His hand found hers, and he caressed her palm gently with his thumb.

He stopped speaking just as she was about to drop off, and the sudden silence jolted her back to wakefulness. She opened her eyes just in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of the Doctor watching her with a particularly tender expression on his face, an expression that disappeared the instant he realised she was awake. His face was so close to hers that she couldn't resist impulsively bringing her hand up and caressing his rough, stubbly cheek. He reached up and covered her hand with his own, closing his eyes tightly for a moment, as if trying desperately to maintain that rigid control over himself and the situation. Then he sighed, a harsh expulsion of breath that told her unmistakably that his resolve was on shaky ground. His eyes opened and he angled his face toward hers.

Oh, now that wasn't fair. He was going to kiss her right now. In bed. In surroundings that absolutely precluded taking it any further at all. But that didn't stop her from cupping the back of his head, trying to deepen the kiss when it came.

Abruptly, he jerked away from her and sat up. "Cloud seeding!" he said, snapping his fingers.

Rose lay back with a sigh of resignation. She had completely lost his attention, so she might as well find out what he was going on about. "What's that?"

Cloud seeding, explained the Doctor, was an primitive method of weather control designed to bring rain to an area that needed it by impregnating clouds with salt crystals or silver iodide. It was still in use in her time, though not for much longer, considering the humans had got it wrong from the start.

"Will it work here?"

"Should do," he said, springing out of bed. "Depends on the clouds. I think I need to ask just a few more questions." He pulled the tarp aside and headed off for the living area, leaving Rose to eventually fall asleep on her own as always.

The next morning Rose woke to the sound of what she soon learned was the "breakfast bell", an electronic cacophony intended to summon the early-rising colonists from their chores for the first meal of the day. Either that, or wake the dead, she added mentally.

She eyed the unappetising mess on the table with some distaste, and decided she wasn't as hungry as she'd thought. Besides, the recollection of the people's situation made her feel a bit guilty for even considering taking food from them.

No one seemed to know exactly where the Doctor had got off to, so she looked for him in the most obvious place. Sure enough, both the TARDIS doors were open, and when she peered inside she could see tangles of heavy cable stretched across the floor from the console to just inside the doorway. The Doctor stood on a step-ladder, fiddling with something on the ledge below the Police Public Call Box sign.

"That should do it," he said in lieu of greeting. He hopped down from his perch in one energetic motion, then went outside and looked up at the sky with an impatient scowl. "Not cloudy enough."

After that, as far as Rose could figure, most of the rest of the day was nothing but busy-work to keep them both occupied till conditions were just right to implement his plan, whatever it was. They put the cables away ("Nah, it's powered up now," he said cryptically, when she asked if they weren't still needed), ate breakfast together, checked the weather again, and played a board game which Rose won because the Doctor kept distractedly getting up to check the cloud formation. Finally, they went outside to explore, and took a long walk around the lake and through the yellow grass which was practically all that existed in every direction, as far as the eye could see.

Once again, they were at ease in each other's company, and yet somehow not. Every once in awhile, the Doctor gave Rose a curious sort of glance when he thought she wasn't looking. Rose, unsure how to interpret that behaviour, looked down at her feet uncomfortably whenever she caught him at it. Somehow, after that, she wasn't terribly surprised when he made an excuse to send her back to the settlement.

Eventually, grey clouds began to form overhead. According to the colonist who was teaching her more about weeding gardens than she'd ever wanted to know, this happened practically every day. They looked exactly like rain clouds and yet, for some reason, they yielded nothing.

One of the workers gave a sudden shout as he pointed toward the horizon, where a narrow, white column of energy was being beamed straight into the heart of the cloud mass.

Rose, who had been expecting something of the sort, was the only person not taken totally by surprise. She got up and started to run in the direction of the TARDIS, the focal point of the occurrence.

The clouds began to darken and swell even as she ran. Thirty feet from the TARDIS, she stopped abruptly, with the first raindrops just starting to plink down on her head. Behind her, she could hear the colonists cheering in celebration, but Rose's attention was focussed on the beam emitted from the light on top of the police box, and on the sight of the Doctor rushing out to meet her.

"It worked!" she yelled.

"'Course it did!" he shouted back.

As soon as he reached her, he grabbed her into a hug, picking her up and twirling her around. He set her back down on her feet, turned her loose, then suddenly hugged her again, grinning at her madly while the rain poured down on them.

Rose reached up to smooth his wet, spiky hair. It was an innocent, spontaneous gesture, but it had a remarkable effect on the Doctor. The grin faded off his face and he gazed into her eyes with an expression that made Rose go weak in the knees.

And all of a sudden they were kissing, in a way they never had before. This was a real lovers' kiss, just the sort she'd been dreaming of for ages, with lips and tongues colliding, hands groping, and bodies straining against each other. For the length of that kiss, it felt like nothing else in the universe existed. Not the colonists, not the rain that was soaking through her clothing … not even the need to breathe, as Rose discovered when they broke apart and she was left gasping for air.

The Doctor smiled at her, amused by her reaction, but there was real worry behind his eyes. He was losing control of the situation, and he clearly didn't like that in the least. Rose only wished that he would lose control just a little faster.

Still, it was a start. Even if for some reason of his own he wanted to deny it ever happened, they both knew it had. Going backwards wasn't going to be a viable option, and she suspected he knew that as well as she did. With a sigh, the Doctor opened his coat and pulled Rose inside, holding her close for a few minutes. She wrapped her arms around his back and held on for dear life, revelling in the feel of his cheek resting against the top of her ear.

It felt like a victory.

Many hours later, warm and dry, they were in a cozy, seldom-used room inside the TARDIS, which contained a fireplace complete with roaring fire, a pair of comfy armchairs, and not much else.

Rose leaned over the back of the Doctor's chair. "Never had a whole planet named after me before," she mused.

He finished reading the last part of his book – which took about forty-five seconds – and closed it before he answered. "After both of us remember? It's Tylor, not Tyler. Never forget the 'us'."

"Could say the same to you," she said into his ear, lowering her voice to a husky pitch.

He cleared his throat awkwardly. "Needed a name, anyway," he said, pointedly ignoring her flirting. "Hard to make a real home on a planet if you're just callin' it G-883. Too formal, that is. Not homey at all."

The fact that the colonists had named the place at all was a sign of faith in him. They'd been sceptical at first about how much permanent good one conjured rainstorm would do, but by the time he got through with his pep talk, the Doctor had them thoroughly convinced that all the weather patterns really needed was one good jolt to the old molecules, and everything would sort itself out for the rest of the season at the very least. That should give them enough time to settle in, and after that, they'd be right as rain.

Naturally, he hadn't even tried to resist the pun. But after all, thought Rose, that corny sense of humour was part of the reason she loved him.

"Good night kiss?" she suggested, her face still close to his.

The Doctor stiffened for a moment, then turned his head and gave her a very chaste peck on the cheek. "Go to bed."

"Alone?" she grinned.

"Got plenty of rooms on the TARDIS," he said, with a slight frown of disapproval. "No need for anybody to double up."

"'F you say so, Doctor." She hesitated at the door, glancing back just in time to see him lean his head back against the chair and close his eyes. The strain of resisting was written clearly on his face, and she felt momentarily sorry for him. Just … not sorry enough to let him keep from giving in to what they both wanted so much. Oh, no. Not at all.

As she walked through the corridors to her bedroom, Rose ran her tongue around the outside of her lips and hugged herself in anticipation. She rather thought they both had quite a lot to look forward to.