Warnings: Non-explicit sex involving a 17 year old, drug use
Rose Tyler fights with her Mum all the time, occasionally making the thin walls of their flat actually shake with the force of it. She knows why that is, even if she doesn't want to admit it: they're too much alike.
They've both spent all of the years since Pete Tyler's death being tough, looking out for themselves, and putting on brave faces.
Rose is thoroughly sick of it.
When her favourite teacher tells her she's not smart enough to make anything of herself, she wonders why she bothers setting her jaw and acting as if she doesn't give a stuff. When Catherine Streeler from the grade above her spreads the rumour that Rose is a slut even though she's never done more than kiss a boy, Rose wishes she could just look away instead of meeting everyone's stares defiantly. When she runs into Catherine's best friend in the ladies', who tells her that Rose must get it from her Mum, since she's heard Jackie Tyler gives it up for absolutely anyone who shows even a passing interest and has done ever since Rose's Dad died... well. She has to be strong then as well, doesn't she?
Rose punches the girl (she never does learn her name) so hard that her hand hurts for ages afterwards, and she stomps out of school three hours before it's due to let out. What she really wants to do in that moment is sit on the side of the road and just cry.
That's when Rose finally realises that she can't just keep pretending things are all right. She wants desperately to be someone other than Rose Tyler, just for a while. She wants to be someone, or something, more.
She wonders, in retrospect, whether Jimmy Stone is the first person to see that need she has to just give in and let it all fall away. He's certainly the first to take advantage of it.
He watches from across the road as she storms out of the school. It takes him a few minutes to stroll across the street, not even bothering to look both ways. He offers her a beer and then a joint right there against the front fence of the comprehensive. He doesn't seem to care that she's clearly underage and anyone could pass by and see him flouting the law twice over like that. Rose is impressed. He's like the forbidden personified, something outside the norm.
It's exactly what Rose is sure she needs.
He asks her if she wants to get out of there with him. She follows him away from the school without looking back.
Jimmy kisses her for the first time, much like he does everything, without warning. He uses way too much tongue, but Rose doesn't complain. It's still nice, in its way, because it's completely different from anything she's experienced up until then. The way he kisses never becomes any less forceful no matter how often they do it. It's just his way.
Shareen tries to tell her that Jimmy takes and takes without giving anything back. Rose tells her in return just how wrong she is. Sure, he takes her too-solid control away, takes his own pleasure from the press of lips even though it means her mouth ends up somewhat painfully bruised, and even firmly takes her arm and nearly yanks her away from the first party she ever tries to bring him along to even though Rose is far from ready to go. But it's not true that he gives her nothing. There's a reason Rose lets him do all that, after all.
Shareen keeps saying it's not like her, but that's the point. Rose wants something completely different, and Jimmy gives her that in spades. She enjoys the feeling of free-falling far more than she fears hitting the bottom, at least for now.
When Jimmy tells her that he loves her, that's exactly what it feels like: falling too fast to catch her breath. She's only known him a few weeks, but having the word 'love' flung out there makes her wonder whether that's what she's feeling as well. It's a stronger connection than she's had with any other boy, that's for sure, but other than that, she really has no idea how it feels to be in love.
Rose wishes this is the sort of thing she could ask her Mum about, but she can't help but wonder whether her Mum's forgotten what it feels like to love by now. She never seems to get close to any men. Besides, Rose isn't sure she wants her Mum to know about Jimmy. They don't need to have yet another knock-down-drag-out fight just now.
She tells Jimmy she loves him too, hoping it's the truth, or soon will be if she just gives her feelings a little more time to grow. She doesn't protest when he immediately takes that as a sign that he can pull her shirt over her head and put his hand under the cup of her bra, as if he's been waiting impatiently for her to hurry up and say those words, as if it's something she shouldn't even have hesitated over.
She supposes she shouldn't. She's told herself dozens of times already that she's been holding herself back needlessly; isn't this just the same thing?
She still wishes, though, that her first time wasn't uncomfortably contorted in the tiny backseat of Jimmy's car. Unfortunately, they don't have much choice. Rose's Mum would kill her (probably literally) if she brought any guy, let alone one like Jimmy, back to the flat for sex, and Jimmy's got nowhere else to take them, since he's apparently been living out of his car for a few weeks since being kicked out of his last flat-share to make way for someone else's girlfriend to move in. It hurts, more from the way their limbs repeatedly bang against hard surfaces than in the way her more experienced friends said their first times had hurt. Rose ignores that, though, focusing on the excitement of knowing they're doing something they shouldn't. She likes that they could be caught at any moment by someone looking through the car window.
She doesn't think getting caught out is so thrilling just two days later when smoking Jimmy's pot gets the two of them arrested for public nuisance and possession. The night in the police station is cold and miserable, and Rose almost wants to ask someone to ring her Mum for her. Almost. She wants to face the responsibility even less, though, and she knows what a huge deal her Mum will make of it. The duty lawyer gets her out in the morning on bail, so she figures her Mum never has to know. She'll tell her she was around at Shareen's all night.
Jimmy treats the arrest like a badge of honour once lying through his teeth gets him out on bail as well. Rose tries to see it that way. Jimmy tells her she just needs to get away from her Mum's disapproval and all of the rules in her life to really appreciate breaking them, though Jimmy of course uses much cruder language to describe what he thinks she should do.
Leaving the life she knows behind is exactly what Rose wants most. She treats the fact that even Jimmy agrees with her as a sign that it's time to just do it.
"I'm leavin' school," Rose mumbles.
"To do what?" her Mum asks archly. "Not sit around here, I can tell you that. You're not leavin' school unless you've got a proper job lined up."
"There's no point in me stayin', and you can't make me go," Rose challenges.
"Watch me," her Mum threatens.
"What, you gonna drag me there by my hair or somethin'?" Rose asks. "I'll be out the door so fast..."
"If that's what you want, no one's stoppin' you from gettin' your own place and payin' your own way, madam," her Mum snaps.
Rose sets her jaw. "Well that's that, then," she says after a long moment.
She doesn't even tell her Mum that she's going. She figures the fact that her Mum sees Rose leave with a backpack way too large and full to be a schoolbag straight after that fight is explanation enough.
Jimmy's the one that suggests they move in together when she calls him to meet her at the pub and he sees her with her bag. It's the best suggestion Jimmy's come up with in a while, Rose thinks. She can't imagine how else she's going to be able to afford it.
She doesn't realise at the time, of course, that she's going to have to pay the full rent all by herself. She sighs and coughs up her savings and then some when Jimmy says he's got no money to throw in to pay for the bond or the rent. It's just as well that her Mum got her a credit card a year earlier, though Rose doesn't have the money to pay off anything she'll have to charge to it. She tells herself that she doesn't care that her Mum will probably have to pay for it.
She doesn't come close to believing that.
Even though they have to get a place that's way smaller than the flat she's just left behind (and that's saying something), Rose takes it as a good sign that Jimmy wants to make things more serious between them. Besides, they're just starting out. She's not going to let herself get stuck in this sort of dive, in the same rut her Mum's let the two of them fall into over the years. Rose has dreams, and unlike her Mum, she's going to make sure she actually follows them. Someday soon, she's going far away from here. This is just the first step.
"I told your Mum you're all right," Shareen admits when she comes around to help Rose set up the flat (not that she has enough money to properly kit it out, even now that she's picked up a job). "She was all upset and stuff. I heard she's been askin' round the Estate if anyone's seen you. I couldn't let her keep bein' worried like that. Sorry babe."
Rose tries to push down her feelings of guilt by reminding herself that her Mum's got her mobile number. If she'd really suspected Rose might be lying face down in the gutter somewhere she'd have at least tried to ring her. She's just trying to be controlling, obviously, following Rose's every move like a hawk instead of just letting Rose get out there and live her own life.
"You tell her where I am?" Rose asks.
Shareen quirks an eyebrow. "How long've you known me?"
"Too long," Rose shoots back jokingly, and they grin as they try to shuffle into place the tiny fridge she's bought about fifteenth-hand for so cheap that Rose can't believe it still works.
When Jimmy arrives at the flat just in time to miss all the heavy lifting, Shareen rolls her eyes and mutters, "It figures."
Rose sticks up for him with heated whispers, too low for Jimmy himself to heat. It's wasted breath. Shareen's never going to like him. And anyway, Rose is running out of things to say on his behalf.
It turns out that it's hard to defend a guy who has never dished out a single dollar for rent or electricity or any groceries other than alcohol, but can, a few months into their shared habitation, apparently afford the pair of handcuffs he dangles suggestively from the tip of his finger, accompanied by a sly smirk.
Rose sighs, but doesn't protest.
It's not that the sex isn't good, at least sometimes, but she feels like there should be more to the two of them than this. Jimmy wants it all the time, preferring it to anything else she might want to do with him. And whatever Rose gets out of it seems to be completely secondary to Jimmy getting himself off. Worse, she finds that she lets it be, just like she's been letting things happen for about half a year now.
Rose can't help but agree with Shareen that it's not like her at all. But neither is this strange new person she glimpses sometimes in the mirror the person she left home and school to make sure she could become.
She's always been outspoken, demanding, her own person, even if she doesn't always like the reasons behind why she had to be those things. Now she lets Jimmy tie her up more because he wants to than because she does, though she does have some unspoken hope that taking the control completely away might be somehow more freeing than just partly letting go, putting her on the path she only thought she was walking. When the cuffs come off, however, she feels just as trapped as when they'd been still fastened. The only difference from before is that her wrists are sore.
It's taken her a long time – too long – to realise that she's been lying to herself. Even though she gives more and more of herself away every day for Jimmy to do with as he pleases, Shareen's been right after all in saying she's getting next to nothing back. She doesn't know a lot about this sort of relationship, whatever she boastfully pretended when Jimmy asked her about her history with boys, but she's still pretty sure it isn't meant to be like this.
"D'you really love me?" Rose asks.
"Huh?" Jimmy says. His mind is more on the football than whatever she's saying. "Oh. Yeah, sure."
It's hardly the response Rose wants, and it annoys her. It's been a long time since she's let herself get properly annoyed. She finds that she's sort of missed the welling heat within her as her anger grows.
"What if I don't really love you?" she asks.
Jimmy glances over at her. "What're you on about? I dunno. Does it matter?"
Rose stares at him for a few seconds and then abruptly tears out of the pub as fast and clumsily as if someone was chasing after her. That person certainly isn't Jimmy. He doesn't even try to follow her. It makes the decision to go to the flat and pick up the most important of her things so easy. She'll come back for the rest later, she decides, though she'll have to make sure she does so in the next few days. It's unlikely Jimmy's about to pay the next week's rent, after all, and she doesn't know that she could take losing what few possessions she has on top of everything else.
When her Mum opens the door and just steps aside silently, letting Rose back into her flat and her life without question, Rose knows she'll inevitably hear all about how stupid she's been later. She'll even deserve it. But she also realises something else.
That strength that she senses right then in Jackie Tyler, and that unyielding love for her daughter, isn't just an act to cover up what's her Mum has given up or lost over the years. It's never been about where they live or the low-paying jobs for her Mum at all. Those are just the background things. Inside, Jackie Tyler has never been less than extraordinary, which is what Rose thinks she's really been striving for.
She's been running from the wrong thing all along. She doesn't need to look very far to find what she wants. Maybe she does want to be like her Mum after all.
Her Mum makes her a cup of tea, and Rose buries her worries about the hundreds of pounds she's in debt and what her Mum's going to do as she takes a sip and looks around the flat.
This still isn't where she plans to stay for the rest of her life (or even for the next few years, if another option that's not just a case of grasping at straws like she has been with Jimmy comes up). It is, however, still home. For now, she's definitely glad to be back.
~FIN~