3. Dead and Gray and Perfect Blue

He sleeps like the dead. It's fascinating in all the ways that it's not just slightly alarming. When he wakes to a dove gray sort of daylight peeking through the drapes and Rose nestled close by-no shoes, no jackets, that was the agreement-he's fairly certain he hasn't shifted even a centimeter. With his eyes open, flicking around the room, he records the specifics of the enclosure, the grumble of a violent-sounding rain on the windowglass, the robotic sigh of the hotel ventilation system, the soft, damp human respiration just to his right.

Any sense of the exact time, queerly, escapes him.

When Rose rolls over, she smiles, just slightly with her hooded eyes and voice soft when she speaks, preserving the fragility of this surreal moment where they've woken up together in the early morning quiet. "Hello."

Vaguely out of focus, she looks like something he's dreamed up. He has had dreams like this. When he speaks, it comes out thin; a little rough. "Hi."

"Did you sleep?" She does a slow double-blink, watching him for his reply. How he's ever managed to find himself in this moment, he's not sure he'll ever quite put it together-trace all the branching seconds over the last years that have linked together to bring him here. He doesn't, has never, believed in luck outside of its relation to chance probability and statistics, but this morning he feels immeasurably lucky.

"Actually, I think I did."

"Unusual?"

"Well," he begins, but doesn't finish, thinking of the sounds he's accustomed to that are now absent: the subliminal thrum of the TARDIS, the periodic grunt of the tetchy circumlocational date rotor he could hear corridors away. The last time he'd properly slept outside of the ship must have been the days following his last (full) regeneration, at Jackie's old flat in the Powell Estate. That particular instance had been completely outside of the usual, and his control.

He looks at her, her eyes still half-mast, watching him from under her eyelashes with a gaze softer than he's seen on her since their reunion. For a moment she's young and fragile with her playful eyes and burning heart, not a distant, gun toting doppelganger of himself. He's thinking about how he's switched out a hotel bar in Norway for a street corner and grabbing a taxi home at two a.m. for Rose Tyler towing him up a staircase around the same time, but indeed, this is the life he's never had and this is the breathless stasis that is the usual for them, this moment on the edge of waiting for something to happen. And perhaps they'll live the rest of their lives on this narrow cliff because he'll take whatever she wants to give him. It won't stop him from wanting. It hasn't yet.

She blinks against the daylight looking sleepy and small and sinfully beautiful before her brows draw together on her forehead and she rolls back, hugging her arms to her chest and talking to the ceiling. "It's cold."

Is it? He can't tell. He's been dreaming of snow and cybermen and hot air balloons. Ridiculous. The bourbon is to blame. It's also to blame for the headache.

("Jackson, you've got your son. You've got a reason to live."

"And you haven't?")

"Doctor?"

He turns his head toward her, watching across the pale hillscape of the pillows, wanting to touch but he is, as ever, the absolute model of restraint.

"It must be killing you," she says, her face gone carefully impassive once more, perhaps because she's caught him looking introspective. "Being stuck on one planet. One time. You'll go mental, I know it, in a week you'll be building a ladder to the moon."

"You know it, do you? I've spent loads of time in one spot without losing even a marble. Two hundred years on Gallifrey alone, doing...what anybody does, I suppose. Years on Earth, in exile, if you want to know. Nineteen-seventies. Great cars, horrible music. And has it never occurred to you, out of all of time and space, how inordinately many times I end up in London, England? There are entire years I can't visit again in that city for fear of crossing my personal timeline. That alone-"

Rose reaches out, bridges the gap between them with her hand on his face, the soft pad of her thumb against his bottom lip. Amazing, that, it shuts him up like an off switch. "You'll resent it. How could you possibly be happy...?"

What she means is, you'll resent me. She just doesn't say it; doesn't have to. "I'd just like to hear you try and tell me why I won't be."

She thinks a moment, the frill of her undone hair backlit by the cresting daylight. If someone could catch sunshine in a bottle, they could put her picture on the label. He would buy every shop out of stock.

"Because...all this. I dunno. Sleeping in a hotel, even. It's just not you."

She shifts, blinks at him and oh, how he wants to touch. He grips a handful of the bedcover in his fist, made restless by his ever-tiresome temperance, his cage of imagined propriety turned overnight to one of boundaries. "There is more to me than just getting into trouble on every planet I walk onto, Rose Tyler. Besides," he sniffs, crossing his arms and his ankles. "I can get into trouble here just as easily."

That squeezes a breathy laugh from her. With resolve, she presses her lips together in a line. Because this is a time to be serious, she must think.

"Even if you're trying to talk me out of it, not much I can do about it now. I've split off. Ended up in a new body after that aborted regeneration, and here I am, dumped myself off, trusting myself to make due." He hesitates, rolling the next word off his tongue distastefully, one eyebrow raising of its own volition. "He took the burden of the Time Lords with him, when he left. Back to the TARDIS because what else is there? Just another goodbye, as if it wasn't hard enough the first time."

For all the progress they've made in the minutes since waking, and the thirty or so they'd spent talking in the dark the night before until Rose had grown quiet beside him, now she looks sad for the mention of the other Doctor, across the void, and maybe it's a mistake to give her the idea that he's alone. He doesn't want to explain how he knows.

"There's Donna," she says softly. Mostly for herself. She seems to miss the shadow that passes over him at the thought of her, the Doctor-Donna, the closest he's had to a relative in lifetimes, unquestionably gone now in every sense of the word that matters. Just another farewell that he hadn't the privilege of making.

("Donna Noble has been saved.")

"I'm here," he says, by way of distraction; his forte. "I'm going to be here. Unless you tell me otherwise...I was hoping I could be here with you..." Now he's stooped back to this passive aggressive not-begging. His nonchalant discussion of his recent and massive reality-shift and his casual offer of ambiguous togetherness as though his knees hadn't been ready to give out from under him with the weight of the possibility that she might turn away and leave him here alone.

"If I want?"

When the affirmation sticks in his throat, dies on his tongue, he only gives a vague nod. It's humid, he can feel his clothes clinging to him in a kind of off putting way that feels uncomfortably like being strangled in extreme slow motion.

"What do you want?"

He doesn't know why the question knocks him quite so off-balance, but all he can do is mimic her; parrot the word back as though he's never heard it in his life. "...want?"

"Yeah, want. All this time, don't think I've ever heard you say anything about what you want."

Maybe it wasn't sadness he'd seen there after all; it sounded more like anger. And probably there was something a bit off about him that he was happy to hear it, anger directed at him for behavior not exclusive to this version of himself, if that's even what she intends. Regardless, his mouth hangs on the beginning pronoun, framed around his unformed response.

Only then does he recall the sound of the rain hammering on the windows, the static hiss of a downpour only minutes before, dwindled now to nothing.

The room is shadow punctured with pink, a sunrise the color of candy floss slipping under the edges of the heavy red brocade drapery, ribbons of light spooling out over the low pile carpet, one stretching long and thin over the foot of the bed, sliding over Rose's bare ankles. He's only just noticed it when it's suddenly gone. All of it. Blinked out into dimness as though none of it was ever there.

Maybe it wasn't. He's still tired. Exhausted. Rose's eyes are closed again and when she speaks, it's decidedly with the sadness she'd lacked before. "Would he have left you? If I wasn't there..."

"We didn't draw lots if that's what you're asking. Staying was not an option, not for me."

"Right then. He just made the decision for all of us." It's far too early in the morning for anyone to sound so bitter, but he doesn't say so.

"Taste of my own medicine, I suppose. The politics of splitting yourself into two isn't exactly discriminating. And either way, I wouldn't fancy the idea of keeping company with myself for that long. I'd say I got the better deal of the two of me."

She says nothing for a long moment, thinking so loudly he can practically hear it. She shifts on the mattress, rolling to face him fully. "Must be odd, for you. Do you feel different? Like you told me once. The turn of the earth. Falling through space?"

He thinks, closes his eyes, grateful for reprieve from her earlier line of interrogation, though he's reluctant to reply. Instead he deflects. "It's not something I'd notice constantly-more like...if you pay close attention, you can feel your heartbeat. Or how something involuntary can turn voluntary, like breathing, if you think about it you can take control of it."

At the mention of a heartbeat, her hand reaches, lies flat on his chest to feel the soft pulse there twitching under her palm. It's just her hand on his chest, nothing special, nothing she hasn't done before-but given the setting, it feels intimate enough he can feel heat creeping up from under his shirt collar. He elaborates, "That just...feels a bit...lopsided."

"It must," she says and it's an almost whisper. Again, she sounds sad. He hates it. "And...time?"

"Bit different, the flow rate here, feels...kind of jumpy." He shakes his head, flicking his eyes at her and shifting tone. "But even the human brain perceives time, at least in its primary linear dimensional constructs the way most living things do, so you've likely already noticed that. Biochemistry can speed up that perceived flow, slow it down to sort through a surplus of stimulus."

It's not quite what she was asking, he knows that. Answering a question without answering it is an art form he's spent the better part of a millennium perfecting but it's difficult to think about it with her hand reaching for his face. The pad of her thumb presses his bottom lip and slides away to be replaced with her mouth, soft and pressing, dry and hesitant and barely-there in little more than a shared breath, paper meeting paper before she's already drawn back against her pillow, face flushed like she's been out in the cold. His single heart rattles in its bone cage like it wants out.

It was little more than a touch of lips, but his thoughts are scattered like leaves hit with a sharp gust of wind. This is just the sort of stimulus that can slow time down, even for him.

There's a familiar, instinctive panic rising in him and he swallows it back while she watches him expectantly. He's inundated by a memory of waking from attempted sleep—years back— soaked in frigid sweat, from another obscure fantasy involving Rose, of tangled limbs and a blissful sensation of heat and sliding.

It's a memory of finding Rose sitting alone in the ship galley, staring into a cold cup of English breakfast with her eyes as red and vacant as they'd looked just the night before at the lobby bar. It's a memory of desperation: his heartsick drive to bring back her smile following the unexpected stop in a world where her father was a billionaire and zeppelins filled the sky and where Mickey had chosen to stay. She'd been less than happy since the debacle on the spaceship with the time windows and France, and that was his own doing; his still-new impetuousness and his laser sharp focus shrunk down to a single point: repairing a timeline in furious disarray from its original and proper form. And maybe he'd done it, just a little, because of Sarah Jane, who had lived a lonely life, ruined on a banal human existence and human relationships, so entrenched in his lifestyle that she'd struggled with bitterness and resentment for years. Maybe he'd done it, just a little, to show Rose he wasn't worth that. To save her from it. From him. Before he ruined her too.

(Before he admitted that maybe he wanted to ruin her.)

When it came to France-he'd known he'd find a way back. One way or the other. He always did, eventually; he had the utmost confidence in that. But the instant the option had become available, he'd run off to seal a path back to Rose so quickly he'd barely spared a thought for Reinette or the inconsistently differing time flow. He'd left her with the rest of her short lifetime waiting for him to come back to show her that star. He'd fought so hard to save her from an altered timeline and a gruesome death, endangering Rose (and Mickey) in the process, then swanned off and left her to die waiting and lonely-a fate of which he harbored an unequivocal terror. The reality of it, admittedly, it had hit him a bit hard in the afterward, his new tendency to abandon others in an enthusiastic rush. Reinette's letter, cementing her as dead in his own timestream, had only made it worse in that he couldn't even rectify the mistake at his leisure. Perhaps he'd been a bit distant afterward, humbled by the unwanted reminder of the tragically brief lifespan of a human and all that implied for him. As though the visit with Sarah Jane hadn't been enough. The universe conspiring to flog him with what he already knew: that he was playing at something impossible.

They'd never discussed it, hardly at all. Not Pete Tyler or Sarah Jane or Reinette, and it would be the same with Mickey. Instead, with Rose despondent at the galley counter with her cold tea and red eyes, he'd practically tap-danced around her, promised her the moon and Elvis and old New York-and instead given her the Wire and half a day without a face because he'd gotten caught up in the whirlwind of events and left her. Again.

With his arms around her that evening in the corridor, bidding her a nice rest with her still dressed in pink heels that made her taller than usual, he'd held her too tight and too long. The gentle bump of her lips on his throat when she'd turned her head had made his blood feel too thick for even two hearts to pump properly. And the feeling was of absolute, numbing panic. He'd retreated like an abused dog, plowing a hand painfully through his carefully coiffed hair because he was a half-moment away from doing something inexcusable and he'd been increasingly certain she would let him.

Despite how clear it was becoming that in every sense, he couldn't be trusted with her.

It's that same panic he'd gotten almost accustomed to after that, it welled up and receded in her presence like ocean tide, and it's the same panic he's forcing back now. The tip of her tongue runs over her top lip and it raises the hair on the back of his neck. "Doctor," she says, sounding uncertain and throaty. "What do you want?"

She's handed him an invitation, one with red ink and exclamation points and he's short of breath, cataloging every soul-twisting daydream his mind has ever conjured in place of acting out, remembering every lonely mournful hour of her absence, the painful yearning for the most simple things: the sound of her voice, the warmth of her fingers braided with his, the feeling of her eyes on him after he'd looked away.

His hands find her, possessed of their own agenda, towing her forward and into him. She says nothing, only waits, and he whispers his reply into the hollow of her mouth, "Well. I've just come around on that ladder to the moon."

The moments seem to lose their continuity, time moving too fast and standing still with the gentle push of her lips against his, whispering dry kisses melting progressively into another and another, less tentative each time until it's all dropped into heart-pounding, open-mouthed slow motion all with hands clutching clothes convulsively in white knuckled fists. He reaches to catch the back of her head, finding his fingers fascinated by the slip of her hair and the curve of her skull in his palm, her hands crawling over his shoulder blades and down the slope of his back, touching freely and he drinks it in because his body is a desert and her fingertips are rain.

Rain. It's raining again, he can hear it, blasting against the windows. It rumbles low in the spaces between their breaths, the wet sound of their connected mouths, the hush of fabric moving against fabric. She insinuates a thigh between his, tilts her hips. The bare sole of her foot slides, toes hooking the cuff of his trouser leg and dragging upward along the back of his calf in a move so blithely erotic it makes him feel in an instant more stupefied than he had after hours of drinking. Her tongue curls at the ridge of his teeth and he swallows a shuddering sigh at the buried animal instinct that moves his body against hers with every wrong, bad, beautiful perversion his suffering filthy mind has ever harbored about her body and her mouth and the sound of her imagined outcries ringing through the dark empty canyons of his intellect.

And something is going to happen. His muscles are tensing up. His muscles always tense up before something happens. They are folded around each other on top of the duvet (no jackets, no shoes, that was the agreement), flesh and blood origami and her skin is burning hot, a tiny sound made at the back of her throat drowned out by a peal of thunder so earsplitting that Rose starts violently, gasps against his mouth, shock driving a wedge between them; cold water on melting ferocity, and his head throbs in response.

Looking down on her flushed face, the pinched and shadowed expression on it, there is a irresistible urge to apologize profusely. Maybe there's no call for it, but it rushes out anyway, a flood of remorse because she's been so undecided on him and he's so confoundedly sorry that he's somehow found himself in this hell where he's not quite what she wants.

"I'm sorry," he tells her in a rush of breath. "Rose, I'm sorry-really."

Her head has twisted toward the drapery on the far wall, her face and attention diverted long enough he can draw back and will away the reflexive shame that's boiling up, louder in his ears than the storm whipping in off the sea and slamming into Bergen.

"Oh," she says, and her lips are so pink. She swallows hard, shifts backward from him. A moment passes before the strange silence that has grown over his mind, like a kind of moss or cobweb, clears away and thoughts shiver back into focus. His first thought is if the other could see through the weak remaining telepathic window, even across the void, he would want him to have caught a glimpse of the last two minutes. It's a spiteful thing, but he's lived more than nine hundred years and can't recall a single moment in all that time that had felt quite like that. So out of control and gorgeous.

He's not sure if he wants to share it or wave it in the other's face like a victory flag. Which of the two will likely depend on how upset she is about it. Is she upset? He thinks she might be upset.

His second thought, more vaguely, is the rain. It's barreling into the building, the wind a mechanical groan like bending metal that sounds nearly as frustrated as he's found himself. One of them is trembling; he's embarrassingly certain it's him. She's turned back and opened her mouth to reply, before another bellow of thunder shakes the walls and the teeth in their skulls, then shrinks to silence so abruptly that glass in the mounted picture frames is still shivering audibly in the sudden vacuum of sound, almost as though it hadn't a chance to finish. There's no echo.

The downpour, as well, has stopped. Blinking, he remembers the pink sunrise strung translucent and glowing over Rose's bare feet, creeping in through a gap in the drapes. It had been there. Then it hadn't.

The Doctor watches her watching his face carefully, the question taking slow form on his features.

Eyes pried wide enough he can see the whites all around her irises, she draws herself up on her elbows while he climbs up, taking a moment sitting on the bedside to pull a hand through his sleep flattened hair. He breathes slowly, in and out. Cooling off. Willing away a strange vertigo that reaches up through the floor and pulls.

"You...alright?"

He hauls himself to his feet and closes the distance to the slider in a few strides, not pausing before throwing back the drapery hard and clenching his fist against an the withering nausea that grips him at what is waiting for his eyes behind that barrier of heavy embroidered brocade. He forgets to answer her, because he'd been utterly brilliant a minute before and now that he's seen outside, he's drifting rather quickly toward not okay and is forced to reconsider exactly how lucky he is-they are-to be here.

The sky is a tangled riot of motion and surreal stillness; frayed wires of frozen lightning stretch across dark swells of cloud that flicker to clear blue, distorted shapes of zeppelins extend from themselves in spiderwebs of jerking motion in every direction. It's daybreak, storming violently and clear as a bell and buried in snow. The sky is filled with vehicles and all their flightpaths and also abandoned in the weather, black as midnight, burning with stars, a sunrise tangerine and salmon pink, dead and gray and perfect blue. All of it shifting, twitching in time, trembling on the edges of his vision like a camera winking out of focus, a reel of film slipping off its track.

He's seeing all of it at once, everything that can be in relation to this moment, everything that is; all available realities in superposition. Potentiality. Visibly, with his eyes, which is not how he's ever perceived timelines, and all of this without even trying. He wants to blame his ill-advised binge drinking the night before or some kind of strange metacrisis-hangover or maybe even the dizzy arousal he's still cycling out. But it's not, it can't be, but for the life of him, he has no other ideas of why he can see tangible potentials like a Meanwhile; why this branch universe now looks like a world in the thrall of macroscopic quantum phenomena. A locked state of material absurdity.

What did that metacrisis do? (Why hadn't he seen it the day before?)

He breathes in slowly, fighting a tremor that wants to take over at the unsettling familiarity. He thinks of Arcadia, of Elysium, the insurrection of the Skaro Degradations. He thinks of things that happened and never happened and turns his eyes to Rose as she's coming up behind him, one hand on his bare arm with her eyebrows pushing together on her forehead. She squeezes her eyes shut and reopens them, squints before closing them again, presses the pads of her fingers against the lids before trying again. Her breath has grown short and fast, and he can't blame her because it means she can see it all the same as he does; the way no one should see. It wrings his stomach like a wet towel inside him, throat burning with either bile or some kind of nervous, sick laugh accumulating at the back of his tongue like dew gathering on a leaf.

("That's what I see," he remembers saying to her once in a douse of gold light and fear and overwhelming affection that is nothing when viewed in the light of what he feels now, looking down at her face as it tries to decide on an expression. "All the time.")

(And doesn't it drive you mad?)