Characters: Nine/Rose, TARDIS
Disclaimer:Doctor Who and affiliated characters, objects and ideas are property of the BBC. This piece of fanfiction was created for and intended for entertainment purposes only. No infringements of any copyrights are intended, and are used here without permission.
A/N: A take on one of those "The Doctor attempts to write love poetry for Rose" fics. Concrit appreciated (esp. on characterisation); fic subject to structural (formatting, wording, etc) change. Thanks to Cessations and various other friends for objective structural betaing.
If it helps explain anything, I'm a fan of Debussy, Kabalevsky, Shostakovich and Carnival of the Animals. And incidentally, Coldplay and Great Big Sea. But that last bit isn't exactly relevant.
The Universe in Gallifreyan
She almost wished she hadn't asked. He had that look about him again: the pain, the sorrow, the bittersweet wistfulness. It clouded his steel blue eyes and turned them almost hazel. The Doctor averted his gaze to the console in front of him, the blue gold light washing over his face and spilling his shadow into the dim depths of the floor grating. Rose scrambled off the strut she had collapsed against, grimacing as caked mud on her hoodie rasped against her elbows and wrists.
"Just…never mind. Forget I asked." She took a breath, crumpled the sticky note in her palm. The strange geometric writing smeared back into unstructured chaos. "Look. I- I'm-" She shook her head, tucked an errant blond strand behind her ear. "Do you want some tea?" Knowing the most vocal answer she'd receive was a grunt, Rose turned to the main corridor. In the distance the corridor glowed with the telltale white glow of the kitchen.
An odd muffled feeling blossomed in the back of her brain, and Rose paused with a frown. For a second the TARDIS hum was strange and exotic again, a warm melodic grating that quickly settled back into her mind. She spun back toward the Doctor, mouth opening- but he was already staring at her. He stood tall, arms by his side, framed by the console, crowned by the light from the central column, and he said,
"Listen, Rose."
His next words weren't words at all, not by Rose's reckoning, though she admitted to herself that her reckoning wasn't much to go by. If a muted bell could speak, if a regal church bell still wrapped in foam kernels recited fifth degree polynomials, that would be what Rose heard. Or thought she heard. Although the Doctor's lips moved, the resonating clicks and sighs that resulted were elusive to the ear and rather disconcerting. He repeated the sequence, softer and slower but no less strange.
I wish to speak of my universe
The sentences- paragraphs- no, phrases were morphing in quality now, sweeping up into the dome of the console room like a lone Gregorian chant in a cathedral- a single line where there were once many voices. The solo held a riveting power and displayed a technical perfection so acute it was almost a flaw. But there was a shift in the TARDIS's chordal hum and the line was part of an undulating harmony, alien in style and aeolian in nature.
In as few words as possible
Each progression was unpredictable, randomly leaping the range of the Doctor's voice and riffling through all the notes in between. The TARDIS's accompaniment was only barely recognisable as such; she seemed intent on expressing as many harmonic themes in as few notes as possible, yet her rhythms were under no such restraint.
and not drown you in a shallow ocean of words too small
And there was, bizarrely, a typewriter. Startled, Rose glanced behind her shoulder out of instinct; no probing of the burnished bronze shadows yielded a lurking typing machine. Her scan brought her field of view back to where the Doctor was smirking at her, leaning on the console with the air of an actor waiting backstage. The atonal harmony dipped and swirled around the purposeful clacking: now chirping in a painfully high register, now plunging into a base line not heard but felt, now collapsing into tangible silence before sweeping back into hearing. It had the feeling of an extravagant musical interlude.
"So you rehearse this with the TARDIS when I'm at Mum's then?" asked Rose, partly as a way to ground herself. The Doctor did a good impression of a deer in oncoming headlights before shaking his head and indicating silence. She grinned.
At some internal cue, the Doctor straightened and the cacophony died down with a flourish. The ensuing quiet pressed against Rose's ears in time with her heartbeat.
What I have discovered cannot be contained in such a primitive mortal language.
Softly, he was singing. His voice had a rough plaintive quality, half muted by the rhythmic thrumming the TARDIS had resumed. It was not unlike listening to a cello, the bow scraping low and gently across the strings. Each resonant note hung in the silence between each pulse of the time rotor.
I do not understand.
The last note faded away and he spoke once more in clicks and sighs. Impressions of numbers and equations tumbled through Rose's mind, seeking and searching. They slowed to a trickle, evaporated.
The Doctor was staring at her again.
Suffice to say…
"Rose," he said quietly. His accent deepened the 'O' and sharpened the 's' and he was still staring, eyes dark. Rose returned his stare, questioning, careful not to drown in the intensity of his gaze.
"Well!" he said with a clap of his hands, jolting Rose out of her trance. "Glad no one's around trying to correct my grammar anymore. Always going on about being 'fair as a self-similar fractal'. Pretentious, the lot of them." The Doctor had his sonic screwdriver out, holding it up into a beam of light and squinting at it. "Poetry was always an overdone affair on Gallifrey. If they'd got out more, they'd have more to write about and less," here he made an extravagant flourish with his hands, "in their poems."
"Hang on," said Rose with a frown. "That's- all that alien music and stuff you did, that was poetry? I mean, your people's…the Gal- Gallifrayens- that was their poetry?"
"Sort of, yeah. The style was." He paused. "I wrote it, actually. While we were in Xenith Zen. You like it?"
Rose looked down and picked at her cuff, the dirt drifting to the floor while she pondered her answer. The Doctor was making it rather hard to concentrate; she could feel his eyes betraying his casual stance, piercing and very, very blue.
"Yeah. It was…interesting," she mused, remembering being caught between exhilaration, incomprehension and slight amusement. "What was it about? I mean, in English."
"The universe."
"What, all of it?"
He shrugged, ducked away from her teasing tone and resumed moving his hands along the controls.
"It wasn't that hard."
Suffice to say…Rose.