They walked in silence back to TARDIS, her glove-less hand encased deeply in his jacket pocket and surrounded by his long, calloused fingers. He seemed to be lost in thought and she didn't want to disturb him. Instead, she turned her head subtly to the side to watch him as she always had. His jaw was set, as if he'd decided on something that particularly pained him but would have to happen. His beautiful blue eyes were focused and far-reaching, as though he was contemplating heavy thoughts on the future and their place within it. His grip on her hand was tight and unforgiving as it used to be after they'd had a particularly close call, when he thought he'd lost her or she him.

So, a decision that pained him, thoughts of their future and the desperation of losing her...oh.

It was time, then.

When they reached the top of the ramp in the TARDIS, he turned to her and reluctantly disengaged his fingers from hers. He opened his mouth to say something and then abruptly turned away.

"You'll be wanting t'get out of those clothes, I reckon," he said, moving quickly from her side toward the console. "Have to be a bit warm now that we're inside. I've got to make some recalibrations to the TARDIS so don't mind me. Just goin' under the console to work," he said, brusquely, disappearing under the console quickly without a look back. And there he was, legs and boots sticking haphazardly out of the hole in the floor, screwdriver buzzing, painfully familiar and already the man Rose knew he would become.

Not knowing what to do or say to him at the moment and, in fact, feeling a bit warm, she left the room to put on some different clothes. She settled on jeans and a tshirt from her red pack and then set about stashing away all the belongings that had managed to crawl out from there during her time with this him.

A very large part of her didn't want to let him go. How could he possibly be ready when she didn't feel ready herself? Never mind that he was the same man...she knew that, accepted it, loved him, all of him. But this him...

Broken and wounded and oh so vulnerable. Tears came to her eyes as she thought about him when they'd first met, gruff and argumentative and perfectly baffling. She'd been entranced, had known he was something deep and special, unlike anyone she'd ever met or would ever meet and yet so familiar. She'd started falling in love with him then, she'd decided later, when he'd taken her hand and spoken to her of planets and rotations and things she couldn't possibly understand, fallen harder when she'd seen the utterly daft grin on his face as she pointed out to him that he wasn'talways the most clever being in the universe, fallen even more at the utterly lonely look on his face when she'd said no the first time, held back by her fears and perceived responsibilities.

And when he'd returned for her and...well, she'd be a goner already.

She quietly walked back out to the console room, trailing her pack behind her, setting it on the floor and settling above it on her customary jumpseat perch. She watched him work in silence, a familiar pastime for her if not for him, listening to the soothing buzz of the screwdriver and the ultimately familiar sound of his soft, Northern, musical cursing. She then closed her eyes and let her immense love for him wash over her and around them. Love for this body, his last and his next one, love for his faults and shortcomings, an all encompassing simply for him. After a few moments, she realized that both the buzzing and the cursing had stopped and she opened her eyes to see him standing right in front of her, tears in his utterly beautiful, piercing blue eyes.

"How can you possibly love me like that?" he asked softly, reaching out and almost but not quite touching her face, as if he was afraid if he did she would melt away.

"Because you're you," she said, simply, reaching out to run a hand over his strong jawline.

He closed his eyes at her touch. "I have to take you back," he said, the words pulled from him with great pain.

"I know," she said, quietly because she did know. As much as she knew his pain. "But not yet," she said, leaning forward to tenderly capture his lips with her own.

Pulling back from her lips just enough that his words and soft breath fell on them, he agreed, "But not yet," sweeping her up in his strong arms and carrying her toward his room. It wasn't their room, not yet...wouldn't be for at least a lifetime and a half, but it would be. Eventually. He would make sure of it.

Rose's arms clutched him around his neck, sliding against the smooth leather as she pressed kisses along his jaw. When they finally arrived at his bed, he sat her down gently and stepped away, admiring her there, burning the image as brightly as his Eighth body had burned the one of her coming down the staircase in her beautiful dress. He started to shrug the jacket off his shoulders but a small warm hand stopped him, pulling the lapels back together.

"Let me?" she asked, rising up on her knees on the bed and he nodded because, really, he could deny her nothing.

Her eyes darkened as she slowly helped the jacket off his shoulders and down his arms, following its descent with hungry fingers. When it finally hit the ground heavily behind him, he was nearly overpowered by the wave of arousal that swept through Rose.

"Been wanting to do that for a while?" he asked huskily, pulling her against him to feel the brilliant friction of her body on his, clothed as they still were.

"You have no idea," she said, tugging him down by his ears for a fierce kiss. Her tongue invaded his mouth, trying to prove to him just that. She had always wanted him. She would always want him. He barely had time to react to the sudden onslaught of her lips on his when she tore her mouth away to trace down his neck, nipping at his Adam's apple and sucking on his double pulse point. It was a slightly more vicious nip to the tender flesh between his shoulder and neck that broke him, making him growl just as viciously at her and pinning her to the bed beneath him, his long, lean body pressing into hers at every point he could possibly make it. He returned the torture, his hands and mouth seeking every bit of her they could reach, questing up under her shirt for her breasts, pinching and pulling as she writhed beneath him, moaning in frustration at the garments she wore.

Her hands were under his jumper and undershirt just as quickly, nails dragging down his spine and causing him to grind his hips down into hers. One swift movement later she had his jeans unclasped and was tugging his steel erection free before he'd even managed to gasp her name. Her hand around him was sure and tight, circling and squeezing him like a woman who knew her property. He moaned and pressed forward into her grip, a quick punishing stroke he imagined he would be using a lot into his own hand in this life, frustrated by the temptation of her but never fated to give in.

She moved the wrist again, this time in a brilliant circular motion he didn't know he liked until her hot hand had done it and he cried out again, rippling harsly, cursing her, praising her, wanting her. "Rose," he moaned, somehow striving for control even as his rippling penis sought completion without his mind. "Slow," he panted. "You said you wanted slow -"

"Fuck what I said, Doctor," she growled, reaching her other hand up to drag her fingernails over his scalp and then wickedly adding his filthy Gallifreyan curse. He cried out, long and loud and then drug her jeans and knickers as far down as he needed to drive into her, the heady rush of this hurried connection driving him mad.

Her hand still encircling him positioned him at her already dripping entrance and he needed no further invitation to surge forward to meet her upward thrusted hips. He pounded into her again and again, gripping the headboard behind her for leverage and she met him each time with a thrust of her own. He was rippling almost constantly already and he brought his free hand between them to help her when she fiercely said, "No," shifting her hips so his throbbing, pulsing shaft was rubbing against her clit with every push.

She was crying out, alternating between breathy pants and high pitched screams and he was desperately trying to hold back the torrent of his release as his own sounds, grunts and growls of pleasure and words of claim in a language she would never speak spilled forth from his lips even as he tried to keep from spilling forth into her. "Look at me," she commanded, meshing their fingers together, his right and her left, and he did, looking deep into her eyes, seeing her immense love and reflecting it with his own and together they crashed violently over the edge, gasping each other's names.

Several minutes later, he raised his head from her neck, pushing up onto his forearms to look her in the eyes.

"Rose, I - that was, I mean, it was bloody -"

"Fantastic," she said, with a secret smile on her face.

"Yeah,' he breathed, lowering his mouth to her neck to lick some of the sweat there off. "Bloody fantastic," he repeated, liking the way that felt in his mouth almost as much as he liked the taste of her on his tongue.

"I could do this all day, you know," he said, reaching down to pull her shirt over her head and her bra off so they wouldn't be in the way of his wandering tongue. "I could taste and lick and suck everything in the whole universe and I'd never find what I wanted until I could taste you again," he murmured against the curve of her breast and, to his surprise, Rose giggled.

"Wha'?" he asked petulantly, raising his head to look up at her and looking so deliciously disheveled from their impetuous coupling, his clothes still almost entirely on and his only slightly softened shaft still deep inside her.

"Nothing," she said, running her fingers through his hair and massaging behind his ears, smirking again as he immediately hardened the rest of the way inside her.

"Kit off?" he murmured to her, nudging her hand with his head so she would keep massaging that spot. Much as he didn't want to leave her body, the oppressing cling of his clothes and the dangerous teeth of his zip weren't very comfortable for him and, he couldn't imagine, for her.

"Mmm...fine," she mumbled, sleepily, reluctantly removing her hands from his head and groaning with him as he slipped free from her. Rose lifted her hips from the bed to help him remove her jeans and knickers the rest of the way and then propped her head up to appreciatively watch him remove the rest of his clothing. It was the sight of him, proudly and unabashedly standing in front of her, naked and magnificently aroused once again that lit another fire in her and caused her to slide off the bed onto her knees in front of him.

"Rose?" he started to ask, but she pushed him gently back until he was sitting on the very edge of the bed. His hands fell to her shoulders, running up and down her arms and into her hair and then back down. "You don't have to -"

"Hush," she said, lightly skimming her fingertips over his thighs and watching as his eyes fell shut. She had him, this him, for now and she was damn well going to live out all her nineteen year-old fantasies on him before moving on to relive the twenty through twenty-five year old ones on the next him.

She heard him chuckle darkly and felt him move his hands lightly to the back of her head. Good. She hoped he'd heard that. Just for good measure, she thought up a few of those next fantasies and pushed them his direction, enjoying his gasp although it may have been helped along by her running a thumbnail along the wide vein that ran up his length. He rippled and shuddered in her hand as that thumb traced across the tip, gathering the moisture there and using it to help the descent of her hand down his shaft. He muttered something she didn't understand and then repeated it again as her other hand came up to cup his testicles, massaging lightly as she remembered his last body liking.

She leaned in closer and chanced a look up at him, finding him watching her with huge, dark eyes. Keeping his eye contact she reached just the tip of her tongue out to swipe over the head and held the contact as she swirled that tongue around, taking more and more of him into her mouth until he finally squeezed his eyes shut and groaned her name. She rewarded his groan by relaxing her throat and pushing forward suddenly until he hit the back. He sputtered more incoherent words of encouragement and she felt his thighs tense under her hands, trying his hardest not to thrust into her mouth even as his rippling began in earnest. She pulled back almost all the way, keeping just the tip of him in her mouth and using her tongue to circle him more until he writhed under her touch. "Rose," he panted once.

She began to take him into her mouth and work him in earnest then. He didn't need to beg her. She'd give this freely. It was, after all, her fantasy. She loved the taste of him in her mouth, the alien rippling feeling, the thrumming of his pleasure against her mind even behind his tight shields. He couldn't believe that she would do this for him, that she had ever fantasized about it, especially with this body. It felt so primitive and, if he was honest with himself, so fucking good to claim her mouth like this, to know that she would never again touch any man except him like this. He wanted to let go. He wanted to fill her mouth with him. Then he wanted to pull her up his body and kiss her, taste himself on her and then drive into her heat and fill her with his seed again.

Rose could feel him getting closer, the fight to keep his hips still growing more desperate, the rippling in her mouth growing more constant but he wasn't there yet. She had tried nearly every trick she knew and he hadn't come yet, just strained against her, offering his melodious words of praise. Her hands on his thighs tightened and she felt him almost break. And so, with one last full plunge down his steel shaft, she raked her fingernails across his bare thighs and with that his hands in her hair tightened and he exploded in her mouth, sending his cool seed down her throat again and again. She took everything he had to offer and then licked him clean, amazed to see him growing half-hard again at her ministrations.

"Insatiable, you are," she murmured, pressing a kiss against his inner thigh. He groaned once more and pulled her up his body, rolling them so she was pressed into his side, kissing her and reveling in their mixed tastes. He released her only when Rose turned her head slightly from his to yawn and he chuckled slightly. Raising a hand to the side of her face, he caressed her cheek bone.

"Sleep, Rose," he said, kissing her lightly and then firmly tucking her head into the hollow of his shoulder.

"But - " she started to complain.

"Later," he said and she drifted off to sleep against his chest. "Later, my love," he whispered once he was sure she was asleep and couldn't hear him. He didn't leave her at all that night, but kept her pressed into his side, memorizing the warmth of her body, the comforting jangle of her thoughts against his own and the smell of them together on his sheets.

When she woke up six hours, fifty-two minutes and thirty-eight seconds later, he made love to her again, slow and languorous, with all the speed of a man with all the time in the world.

For now, he did his best to show her of all the things she meant to him, all the things she had done for him and all the things he was sure she would do for him. With every push, every gasp, he endeavored to show her how she had saved him, how she would save him.

When she came it was with words of love on her lips and when he did, it was not, not yet. Her shining hazel eyes searched his own and saw the truth behind them.

She knew.

Those words weren't his to give to her, not yet anyway. His next body, the one who had loved and lost her, who had abandoned her and later paid the price, would tell her, would say the words he wished he could.

For now, all he could say was goodbye.