9.
"there is something unguided in the sky tonight." unguided by the new pornographers
The cadence of his voice is something that she can't forget.
When she speaks, she hears him in her words, his harsh accent emitting from her mouth of its own volition. When she feeds her plants, she hears him in the sound of the water hitting the petals, the tulips now fully blossomed. When she breaks a glass in the kitchen sink, she hears him in the sound of the shatter, in the sickly slide of scratching metal. When the storm rolls in through the city, there and gone as quickly as a bullet, she can hear him in the roar of thunder shaking at her windows as the sirens crawl past her building.
She thinks maybe it doesn't mean anything.
(She knows in her gut she is wrong.)
The red hot sun burns on in the sky.
She stands with her feet shoulder-width apart, her arms hanging lightly against her side, the ends of her ponytail just brushing the bottom of her neck. She closes her eyes, allowing her long lashes to brush the skin underneath. If she listens hard enough, she can hear the children screaming in the playground across the street, a car alarm that no one is turning off, the singing of the insects in the warm, June air. If she doesn't try to hear, the silence in the storage room is oppressive and heavy, pushing at her from all sides.
"Rose!" Angie calls from the front room. "We need you!"
She sighs gently, the breath fluttering warmly away from her mouth. "Coming!" she shouts back, not turning around. The room is dark, large cardboard boxes filling the space in piles, and it's colder in there, wonderfully chill compared to the heat of the day. She grabs her finished lunch from the ground, depositing it into a trashcan as she heads back into the shop, into the fray once more.
Rose sets about with the blouses, the fine silk material falling over the sides of the shelves, looking like something out of a Salvador DalĂ. Sometimes, when she's working, she likes to pretend that she's actually a customer, able to afford beautiful things like the clothing at Henrik's. But then she has to open up a dressing room full of clothes for a teenage girl who will only buy one thing anyway, and the illusion is destroyed.
"Whatever happened to that old bloke who was hanging about then?" Rose looks up from her work to see Angie smirking from across the dresser, folding trousers with pale hands topped with silvery, acrylic nails. "I mean," she continues innocently, "I haven't seen him in a while. He get tired of you?"
"Whatever happened to Jimmy?" Rose shoots back, feeling her blood boiling already. She knows that she shouldn't let Jimmy or Angie or anyone, really, rile her up, Mickey always warned her against it, it's been the same since she was seventeen. "He get tired of you?"
Her face twists in outrage and anger, a cold kind of cruelty replacing the mocking in her slate eyes. "Only after he dumped you," she replies, hissing the words through her crooked teeth. "Jimmy's a prick, but never say he doesn't know when someone's beneath him."
Rose can feel the colour draining from her face, the tears threatening to fall from her eyes, the bile rising in her throat. Angie almost looks regretful, but years of living like she does have hardened her to a fine point, defensive, sharp, and unforgiving as a snake.
She shakily finishes her section, glances around the store to make sure the floor is in good shape, and retreats, claiming a smoke break as she heads to the back exit. If anyone remembers that she's never taken a smoke break in her entire time working there, they don't mention it.
She practically falls outside, leaning onto the railing of the stair as she gasps in the outside air.
(The bedsprings creaked from behind the door, in her room, on her bed, and Jimmy and Angie were on it, and instead of even trying to hide it they smiled at her and continued.
But even after that, when Angie started working at Henrik's after Rose finally went home to Jackie, she'd sometimes come in with bruises on her thin wrists, black circles underneath her grey, grey eyes. And everyone knows Angie because Angie belongs to everyone, and so Rose can't even be angry, because even then she would have rather been someone's than anyone's, and she knows that she has a better chance of that happening than Angie does.
And it's difficult to hate someone when you understand them.)
She straightens her spine, blowing even breaths from between her teeth, and she feels better. Even so, she digs around in her jeans' pockets for her mobile, clinging to it as if it were a life preserver as she presses in a call.
The phone rings once, twice, seven times before anyone answers, and it's with a shuffling, a muffled cough, and the sounds of something falling down before the Doctor croaks back, "Hello?"
(her words, the water, the flowers, the thunder, the broken bits of glass in the kitchen sink)
"Hey," she manages as casually as she can, "just thought I'd call."
More fumbling, switching his phone from one ear to the other, another distant cough. "What about?" he asks, trying to work some excitement into his tone.
Her brow furrows as she hears him. "Are you sick?"
"No," he responds unconvincingly, "'m fine. Just taking the day off."
"You're sick."
"Maybe."
She sighs, rubs her hand along her forehead, pinches the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger (like the way Jackie did when she came home, mascara staining her pale skin, carrying half of what she took with her and less of what she had to begin with, which was nothing in the first place). "What's wrong?"
"'s just the flu. I'll be fine. Why did you call?"
She smiles then. "You're always fine. My shift ends at five. I'll be there in two hours, yeah?"
"You don't have to do-"
"Say yeah."
A melodramatic sigh on his end of the line, and the sound of him flopping back onto his bed. "Yeah."
She ends the call with a movement of her finger, snapping the phone closed. She fills her lungs with as much air as possible before blowing it out through her lips, her stomach caving in as she exhales.
From the stairs behind the shop anyone could listen, hear the music of the insects littering the pavement like confetti, the sounds of cars careening through the streets.
The sun beats down on her as she walks to his building from the shop, and Rose is grateful once more for the bleach she puts in her hair. When she was little, and her hair was a darker shade, in the summer she'd put her hands to her head and burn her fingers from the heat. She began dying her hair when she was fourteen, back when the men on the street first began cat-calling at her, leering at her and Shireen as they walked home from school. First black, then red, then finally blonde. Jackie says she'll ruin her hair, but she doesn't much mind. It's only dead skin, either way.
Even still, the pavement burns her feet through her thin sandals, and she quickly ducks into the shade of the awning as she approaches the door. She presses her finger to the buzzer, impatiently waiting for him to respond.
The intercom crackles to life, and the Doctor's voice comes through from the little box with a staticky edge. "Rose," he says indignantly, "I'm fine."
"How do you know it's me?"
"Because you just told me," he replies smugly.
"Oh, just let me in, Doctor." She smiles when the buzzer sounds, opening the door with her foot as she carries her supplies with her. Despite being stubborn, he gives in to her very easily.
(She stops herself from continuing that train of thought.)
She bounces on the balls of her feet as she waits for him to come to the door, glancing around the hallway. The door swings open abruptly, and she focuses her attention on the open frame at the sound.
"Don't laugh," he sniffles, clutching the duvet closer to his body.
"You look terrible," she says carefully. He does. He has bags under his red eyes, he hasn't shaved in a few days, judging by the stubble growing on his chin, and his hair (since it's been growing out a bit) is flattened on one side, like he slept on it funny. He's wearing his pajamas, a simple flannel affair, the first time Rose has seen him wearing something other than his leather jacket.
He looks hilarious.
She laughs.
"I told you not to laugh!"
"I couldn't help it!"
"Oh," he scowls, "just come in, and give me my chicken noodle soup."
She sidesteps the massive blanket covering him and kicks off her shoes as she looks up, asks him, "How did you know I had chicken noodle?"
He closes the door with his elbow, turning to her. "Because that's what you get sick people." He gestures vaguely to the living room. "Make yourself at home."
She chuckles, walks to the kitchen to set down his food, and settles herself on the couch as the Doctor lumbers back to his bedroom like a grizzly bear just awoken from hibernation.
Rose feels like something is off in the apartment as she sits there, waiting, and she wonders what it is. New furniture? Different wall hangings? A new carpet? As he emerges from his room, she realizes that it's all of those things. Since she was last there, he has put up some prints of Van Gogh and Monet, replaced the ratty, off-white couch with a smooth, soft, grey one, and put his coffee table on top of a small, decorative rug.
"You've redecorated," she announces as he sits down next to her with his soup, and he glances at her from the corner of his eye.
"Yeah," he confirms, looking around the room himself. "Not one for home decor, me, but I was inspired by your bedroom transformation. My dad helped me out a bit."
"Figures," she murmurs, taking one final glance before standing and moving to the kitchen. "Well then, Doctor. Shall we see about making you good as new?"
"What?"
"Tip-top shape?"
"Stop."
"Fit as a fiddle and ready to go?"
"Why are you doing that? It's weird."
They eat together, Rose attempting to devour her half of the soup before he can steal it, and she swats his hand away as he tries to grab the bowl. ("I'm still hungryl!" he complains. She only chuckles and replies smugly, "I thought you said you didn't want it.")
"Did you ever read the book?" she asks once more, because for some reason it seems desperately important that he read it.
"Oh, I have it in my room," he says, pointing to his bedroom. "I was going to read it today, but then I was sick. Go figure."
He puts on the telly in the later hours of the evening, the bright light setting the room in a fluorescent glow as they sit together, his arm draped across the back of the couch. If she leans to rest against the cushions, his hand just touches her thin shoulder, the contact making something hollow in her chest, just between her lungs.
She wonders if it's her heart, beating there still.
The light coming through the window in the living room is an abnormally green-tinged shade of yellow, just like the colour of the stems of a set of stubborn tulips fully grown on a windowsill in London. It rained the whole night through, the water splattering against the glass as the thunder roamed through the city, and Rose and the Doctor are on the couch in the living room, and Rose is dreaming.
She stands in a labyrinth of some sort, like in the story of the Minotaur, the one that the Doctor told her about once at a museum, but instead of walls there are mountains of books, piles of encyclopedias and novels and memoirs and pictures stories stacking up to the sky until Rose can't even see where it ends.
"Doctor!" she calls, her voice wavering like water. "Where are you?"
No response.
She tries once again, trying to make her voice heard above the rushing of the wind, the loud gusts that echo through the maze, despite the fact that there is no air flickering through her hair, against her skin. There is no sun, no moon, no stars, no way to see, no idea of how to get out.
Until a lightbulb flickers to life just above her head.
She cheers, running along the track as more light and dim in front of her, leading her to the exit, or the entrance, or to something entirely different.
A man with pale blue eyes and a leather jacket and large, rough hands stands at the end of the track, his head turned to the side as she approaches.
"You're here," she says softly, reaching out her hands for him, the tips of her fingers just brushing his clothes, and then-
He steps back, just out of her reach.
She tries once more, but he keeps retreating, never looking at her, never allowing his icy eyes to see her, and she attempts to catch him but to no avail.
He begins to run, his heavy boots clomping on the ground like something monstrous, and she tries to stop herself from crying.
"Wait," she calls to his back, his shoulders hunched forward like he is an animal in pain. "Don't go! I love-"
She wakes up with a start, pushing up from her stomach with her knuckles until she falls over the side of the sofa. She glances up to see where she is, only to see the Doctor just behind her, still fast asleep, his hands reaching out as if for her. There is an empty space on the couch that is just her size, an empty space in his arms that where she would fit perfectly, and Rose can't even think about what that means.
She leaves, grabbing her shoes and heading out the door, away from the still-sleeping Doctor, his fingers beginning to curl from the absence of heat.
The air outside is suffocating, the water from the storm still crackling through the city like a flood.
She enters her flat as quietly as possible, shutting the door behind her carefully, twisting the knob so that it makes no noise. The last time she stayed away the whole night without calling was back when she was still going with Jimmy. She flinches at the sound of a lamp clicking on from the kitchen, her hands moving to cover her ears on an old reflex.
"Well then," Jackie intones as Rose walks up to her, "where've you been?"
"I was with the Doctor, an' I guess we just lost track of the time-"
She holds up a hand to cut Rose off. "Rose, I know you told me you two are okay, but things like this make me worried. Sweetheart, don't you see it? Don't you understand what's happening?"
Rose nods, blinking back something in her eyes, swallowing the lump in her throat. "I have to go. I have work in twenty."
"Just." Jackie pauses, looks at her daughter straight on. "Be careful."
Rose gazes back at her large, worried eyes, as bright and blue and cautious as the sea.
"I will," she lies through her marble-white teeth.
The night sky is dark, the stars all crystal clear, and from her position right by the windows she can see everything, name every single one. She lathers paint onto the canvas, dark blue and black and purple and little pinpricks of white in the background, her wrists moving by themselves, automatically.
It's almost done, the painting of her and her wings. Weeks of the summer sun, weeks of stargazing, weeks of studying feathers and feet until her eyes watered with overexertion, and she is almost done with her first real painting. Smith told her after the last class that he was going to try to help her get some of her work into an art gallery, or maybe even figure out a way to get other freelance work.
"And if any of you are interested," he calls from the front of the room, "I have a few pamphlets for an art symposium that will be in Edinburgh in September. I'll leave them here, and whoever wants to take them can." He sets the papers on the desk with a flourish as Rose and the other students begin packing up their things to leave.
He calls for her to stay back as she passes by his easel, waving her over enthusiastically as K-9 pants breathlessly next to him. "Rose! Weren't you going to take a pamphlet?" He looks at her expectantly, excitement tensing all of his muscles so that he looks like a coiled spring, ready to snap at the slightest provocation.
She shakes her head, her hair falling out of its perfect ponytail around her face in golden wisps. "Can't. Too much money. And I don't have anyone to travel with anyway. My mum and I can't both take three days off of work. But thank you."
Smith scoffs, rolling his eyes in disbelief. Below him, K-9 does a similar gesture, stretching his tiny body before settling on the ground and looking up at his master with doe eyes. "In here is all the information you need on how to get discount train tickets. And Johnny will go with you. I'll talk to him."
She shifts on her feet uncomfortably, clicking her tongue a little as he nods happily, totally satisfied with his thinking. "Are you sure that's a good idea?" she asks, looking up at him from under dark, thick lashes.
He smiles, wide and manic. "Oh, Miss Tyler, I'm always sure."
And that is it. Arrangements are made, the train is booked, the Doctor is excited, and Rose feels an overwhelming sense of dread as she marks off days on the calendar until the weekend is there, a smudge of red ink on a sheet of paper signaling the end of something desperately important.
She thinks maybe it doesn't mean anything.
(She knows in her gut she is wrong.)
A/N:What would you guys think of getting just a few more chapters? My school is starting up in like 3 weeks so I'll have less time to update. I was thinking of capping it off at 13 or 14 chapters and an epilogue, but I wanted to see if you guys thought that that was moving things too fast. Let me know. Also I don't think there is actually an art conference in Edinburgh, but we're pretending. I know they exist, but I can't find out where. Thank you so so so much to everyone who reviewed last chapter! I got such lovely responses, I was reading them with a big dumb smile on my face. So keep reading and reviewing and all those lovely things.
