Two Disclaimer: Oh my giddy Aunt! You can't own Doctor Who! Only the TARDIS owns Doctor Who. Oh, I don't think I should've said that. Oh dear!

Anyway, don't forget to review. Send me all your questions, whether they're BC or AD (Before Chris or After Doomsday) or even Torchwood, if you've got 'em. Need all the pieces to get this jigsaw together right. Thanks!!

Chapter 4: Handling the Truth

The movies were available from the front desk, surprisingly enough, although Rose supposed it was a holiday place and sometimes people had to have things to do, like on rainy days and stuff. Rose popped in Star Wars itself, the first great movie, and the very first thing Thete noted was that Sir Alec Guinness was not Ewan McGregor. So that left Rose to explain that these movies supposedly happened in the future from the one they had seen and that they were made years and years before it. Different kinds of special effects, a rather different world, really, and the bad guy in this one had been the protagonist in the last one.

She paused the movie on the Tatooine sunset scene. "It's like this. Anakin, the kid we saw yesterday, is going to become the dark villain bloke, Darth Vader. Because he's wrong, about everything. He's got it wrong about love, and he doesn't understand about freedom, and no one can ever tell him he's wrong, because he's selfish and self-centered and really, really angry at everything. Remember yesterday when everyone jumped when he was telling her about killing all those sand people? That was because they played Darth Vader's music while he was telling her."

"A leitmotif. Something regular fans would recognize and find decidedly sinister, while it just sounded interesting to me. I have to remember that tune - Koschei would love it, I swear he would."

"Who's Koschei, one of your mates?"

"Yes, he and Zedric are my best friends, really. We've sort of grown up together. Koschei would adore those movies, all the cosmic angst and a fascinating villain and a whole bunch of completely deluded people." He looked back at the screen. "I have to tell you, though, whoever did this bit has got to have seen it for real."

"What? Tatooine?"

"I don't think there really is a Tatooine, I'd have to look it up. But they must have seen a double sunset somewhere, because you just can't get those right by accident. Either that or they have a really, really good imagination."

"You're having me on," she said, and laughed, and unpaused the DVD, and they watched Luke watch the sky.

Thete watched the rest of the film in curious silence, and once the credits rolled, he turned to her with a very serious expression. "I have to tell you something, Rose, and I don't know if you're going to like me anymore once I've finished."

"What is it, Thete? You can tell me anything, you know. We're friends. We're always going to be friends, I just know it." She frowned, not at all worried for some reason, but quite tense and suddenly a little suspicious. "You're not some sort of psycho, are you, because I'll kick your skinny arse if you are."

He laughed, and his laughter cut the tension in the room completely. "No, I'm not psychotic," he promised. "But I don't know if you'll believe that. Look, just let me think a minute." He ran his hand through his hair, then stood up, turned off the tele, and turned on the radio. Then he walked around the room, listening to the music, fidgeting, while Rose put up the DVD and watched him walk.

It was late night radio and they were playing some old jazz tune. She began to hum along for a moment, then stood up and put her hands on his shoulders to stop his nervous pacing. "Look. You're going to wear a hole in the carpet. Do you dance?"

"No," he said, so definitively it would have stopped the sun in the sky had it been directed there.

"Yeah, you do. C'mon, I'll show you." So she did. She drew close to him and put his hands in the right places and began a slow, comfortable waltz-like dance with him. There wasn't much room in the little sitting room of the suite, and she had to modify the steps she knew so that she could lead instead of him. But he caught on quick and it was really amazing in such a very short amount of time.

Then, as the third song they had danced to came to an end, he looked down at her with a relaxed smile, one she would have said was quite tender. "Do you feel it?" he asked. "The world turning under our feet?"

She leaned in close to him, inhaling his strange, enticing fragrance, and nodded. "Only with you," she confessed softly.

He nodded. "Don't you want to know why?"

"'Cuz you're wonderful, Theta Sigma."

He chuckled softly. "Not really, but I'm glad you think so." He sighed. "Just promise me you won't scream, or run off and alert the media or something."

"OK, whatever makes you happy."

He took her hands in his and laid them flat on his chest. She, not sure what to think, stood there, confused. Then, she felt it, the throbbing of his heartbeat underneath both hands. It took her a few minutes to register what that might mean. Then, it did and she looked up at him in undisguised wonder. "Do you have..."

"Two hearts," he finished for her. "Yes, I do."

"Oh, but... how?" Her mind was refusing to tell her what it meant, even though she knew it would have been able to do, under normal circumstances. As if anything about this was even remotely normal.

"It's natural for my people. Gallifrey isn't in Demark, Rose, it's actually rather farther away, by about 250 million light years, in the Constellation of Kasterborous."

"You're an alien," she breathed, and her voice sounded hollow in her own ears. He nodded, and stepped back from her, the look on his face lost and hopeful at once.

She grinned at him, wildly. "You're an alien!" she exclaimed, and hugged him tightly. He returned her hug, lifting her off her feet, laughing.

"This isn't anything like what they told me would happen," he said a minute or two later when they'd calmed down a bit. "They always said that being an alien would get you in trouble on most of these primitive worlds."

"Sorry," she apologized cheekily, "we're fresh out of peasants with torches. S'pose I could get you some black ops and a field dissection threat, but why don't we keep it to ourselves, instead."

"I like the way you think," he said. "They kept saying, 'Humans are primitive, they don't think things out, they're still ruled by biology and instinct, mostly.'"

"First of all, whoever these 'they' people are, I'm gonna give them such a smack if I ever catch them. Second, you kissed me, so don't go telling me 'bout biology, yeah?"

"You were thinking about it," he confessed. "I was curious."

She frowned. Him being an alien was one thing. Him being an alien who could read minds... "Hey, that's not on, Thete."

"What?"

"You can't go digging around in other people's skulls, it isn't fair." She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him, stern and unmoving on this point.

He blinked in surprise, his face now both startled and chagrinned. "I didn't mean to, I swear it. Rose, I'd never hurt you, do you believe me?"

She considered him, how sincere his face shone, how kind he was, how beautiful he looked, how much she trusted him. He was so easy to read, she couldn't help but know that his apology was heart-felt and his concern genuine. "Yeah, all right," she agreed grudgingly.

"It just popped in there. You're easy to read, in a way, and harder than anyone, too. Tough to explain, but let me try. There's something very special about you, called time traces, they're all wreathed around you. That makes you hard to read, hard to find, hard to anything. But you're still a human, so your mind is open, so when you're close to me, I can catch things you think really strongly. Or things you try not to think about really strongly."

"So you didn't want to kiss me?" was all she took away from that lecture, except his vague assessment that she was special.

He snorted. "Not only did I want to kiss you, but I want to kiss you again. I think I'd like to kiss you a lot, if I'm honest. Maybe even whenever I can get away with it."

"Go on, then," she invited, breathlessly.

So he leaned in close and gave her a small, chaste kiss on her lips. As he pulled back, she grinned at him. "Tell you what, Thete, that's not really a proper kiss."

"Define proper. Certainly, it's not totally inappropriate in public. I've seen senior Time Lords trade kisses like that some times with their partners."

"I guess then," she teased, "that I mean 'improper.'" And she pulled him close and their lips met again. She gave him a second to adjust, then opened her mouth a little, allowing her tongue to trace the soft line of his thin lips. They parted for her and he tentatively brushed her tongue with his own. His hands shot into her hair, and she tilted her head to meet them, and she was lost.

They tasted each other's mouths thoroughly, learning, exploring, delighting in the experience. He made a soft moan and his hands moved down to her shoulders, then down her back, resting there in the curve just above her bottom. She threaded one hand through the curls at the back of his neck, and the other sought to trace up and down his spine.

When they broke the kiss, a second was irresistible, and then a third. Rose felt as if her lips were practically bruised and she could feel him breathing heavily where she leaned into him, her head on his shoulder, listening to one heart beneath her ear, enjoying the echoing throb beneath her hand.

"You are wonderful," he said softly. "I can't tell you... I'm so alone, like you wouldn't believe, and I meet a person who wants me to touch her, lets me stay close to her. I was starting to think I'd never meet anyone who made sense to me again, and here you are." He chuckled. "An alien."

"Is there anything I should know about?" she asked, wondering if there were reasons why these poor people never touched each other. "Anything I should tell you?"

He frowned, nervousness and curiosity plain in his tilted head and his pursed lips. "I couldn't say. We should be... but Rose, I mean..."

She smiled tenderly, and brushed her hair out of her face. "S'okay, I was just curious. I don't have to find out right this minute."

He grinned. "I'm nervous. I guess you should know about that. And I really am one hundred and seventeen, but we obviously mature much more slowly than you do, because..." He tilted his head to the side, watching her carefully. "We just feel right, you know?"

She nodded. "Definitely. You know what, though? I think we should sit down, try to watch the second movie. Maybe get in our jim-jams, more comfortable."

He agreed to that plan easily enough. "I'm going to need to buy more clothes or something tomorrow," he told her as he reentered the room in a t-shirt and shorts. "I only had time to grab an overnight bag. The capsule liked me, though, so I have all the right clothes. Funny, isn't it?"

"What, the capsule liking you? Nah, that's just you. Is the capsule your ship or whatever, like the Millennium Falcon?"

"It's a Time And Relative Dimensions In Space vehicle. We call them capsules, but they're more than that, a lot more. This one is an old Type-40 TT, and the chameleon circuit went on the fritz as soon as we landed here, so Borusa was too distracted to notice me leaving. He's got to fix it with just Lady Thalia and my classmates. There's Koschei, Ushas, Drax, and Zedric. They're the only ones who've really even seen a capsule in operation before. Also, there's half a dozen others, and me, but I've scarpered."

"What'll they do when you get back?"

"Well, if Zedric's House gets wind of it, Borusa will get in trouble, so I should be safe enough. He'll probably make me organize his library. I'll only be at that a decade or so, nothing to worry about."

She nodded, bit her lip over her suggestion that he not go back, then, and turned on the next movie.