Title: This is Your Life
Pairing: Nine/Rose
Rating: PG-13
Note: The result of looping a Switchfoot playlist while making Nine/Rose icons. I'm a loser, I know.
Summary: The Doctor reflects on what he stands to lose.
"This is your life and today is all you've got now
Yeah, and today is all you'll ever have"
-Switchfoot
Someday she would leave him. It was a foregone conclusion. Companions came and went. Into the TARDIS, into his life, sometimes into his affection. Never into his bed, until her.
She gave herself to him without reservation, with the recklessness he'd come to expect from youth, and the selflessness he'd come to expect from her. She'd pursued him with bullheaded determination, listening to every one of his frankly brilliant arguments on why her romantic pursuit of a 900 year old alien was an appalling idea. She'd listened calmly, receptively, nodding in all the right places. Then she'd told him to sod his frankly brilliant arguments and kissed him anyway. It was an artless kiss. All lips and enthusiasm. But the sheer amount of emotion poured into it acted on him like a drug. She was waving a chip in front of a starving man. So he did what any starving man would do. He devoured her.
She'd broken him. Totally and deliciously. And by the time he was buried inside her, he decided that his arguments hadn't been that frankly brilliant after all.
Except for one. The only one he hadn't used on her, and the only one that mattered. The one that came to him in unguarded moments, quiet moments, moments like these when he watched her sleep. Listened to the sound of her breathing beside him. Knowing each breath was the tick of a clock. The marker on a short and finite highway that led away from him.
How much longer will you be here? Days? Weeks? Years? Decades? When will you leave me? Tomorrow? A year after tomorrow? Seventy years from tomorrow? When your voice and your touch and the weight of your body beside me have become so natural that I won't know what to do without it?
He would lose her eventually. Perhaps to herself, when she decided that a life of vagabonding across time and space had worn thin. Perhaps to another man. One who could offer her all the things he couldn't. Or perhaps simply to time, which robbed him of so much by its nature.
Oh, it would be painful, of course. Bloody painful. But he would survive, because that was what he did. Survive, outlive, outrun. All of them. Even her.
And when she stirred and stretched against him, making the soft snuffling noises that heralded her return to the land of the waking, some part of him held its breath. Eyelids fluttered and opened. Eyes searching, finding, focusing. A slow, lazy smile. A morning greeting that felt like a benediction.
Good morning. Don't leave me. Please.
Tomorrow became today, and she was still here. And he loved her for it.