A/N: This chapter contains things that happen around the events in the book Deviant Strain.
It's been a little over nine days now since we left Illupodifettoso, the shopping planet and I know the Doctor has made some real progress physically. It's his mind now I worry about. I have tried to get him to talk to me further about what happened but it's like he doesn't want to even admit it happened. I know I will never get him to tell me most of what they did to him, and to be honest I am not sure I really want to know that much detail as the memories of the injuries I helped Jack repair still haunt me. I get small glimpses from him when I catch him off guard and it is obvious it is bothering him more then he is letting on and it worries me that he is pushing me away. Even as I had initially feared he might, he has again grown distant in the last couple of days and that distance is killing me. Twice now I have found him in the library just sitting there pretending he is reading but I can sense just enough from him these days that I know he is galaxies away. I sometimes wonder in what war zone his mind goes to when he sits quietly like this.
"Doctor?" I try not to startle him, but I see him jerk slightly anyway as he returns to the here and now.
"Rose."
"Where did you go?"
"Nowhere," he states a bit too quickly "Been right here reading." He says lifting the book he has been using as a prop.
"You may be here, but you weren't reading. I have seen you read, zooming through pages so fast as to risk pulling them out"
"Was too." he states in a petulant tone. "You never heard of reading slow for pleasure? Oh wait, no, you're the one that asked what the point of having a library was." He comments sarcastically as I feel him strengthening his shields, insuring I can get no sense of his true feelings. With that he grabs his leather jacket and pulls it on over his black jumper heading for the door.
"Well you didn't have to be nasty." I reply knowing he is striking out at me because of his own hurt, not that it makes his words any less painful.
As he reaches the door with his back toward me he says, "You want something Rose?"
"Yes I want you to quit avoiding me!"
"Not."
"Yes you are." Even as he turns and opens his mouth to reply Verity interrupts.
'I'm getting a distress signal.'
At which point, he snaps his mouth shut and I watch as he turns and heads for the control room without another word.
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Jack just had to answer that distress signal didn't he? Nearly lost Rose and him both this time, Rose nearly ending up like the young girl Valeria at the Russian base, or worse. When they had said Valeria was nineteen and that she had gone missing I remembered all too clearly how angry Jackie had been when I brought Rose home a year late. Valeria had run off to meet a lover, and found her life sucked away in a few short instants, leaving the nineteen year old an old woman. That's the way it will seem to Jackie too, the longer Rose travels with me. She will be seeing Rose aging at an accelerated rate as she spends the moments of her all too brief human life traveling in time.
Do I have any right to do this? Yet what choice do I have? I can now no more leave her behind then I could leave Verity. Verity, I feel a pang of guilt at how I have neglected my best friend in favor of this young human, but there is something about Rose that makes getting up worthwhile. As much as Verity wants to comfort and be there for me, I know she will never understand how important it is to have someone to hold and touch; even more so now that our people are gone, and all there is left of them is an aching black hole in the back of my mind, just waiting to suck me in. Much as I try not to think about it I know every moment Rose travels with me she is aging, wasting her life, by keeping me going. Some days I think it would be better to just take Rose back and let that blackness in my mind suck me under. But then I see another Valeria who has had her life cruelly stolen and know I don't have the luxury of letting go.
I so don't deserve Rose, yet I can't let her go either. It is so typical of my cowardice, of me taking the easy way out letting her believe she loves me, and taking comfort in her presence. I will never be able to give her the kind of life she deserves. The debt I owe the universe is too great for the destruction of Gallifrey and the Time Lords for me to walk away. I can't sit by and watch it come apart as I 'entertain' myself living a linier life, and at the same time watch her grow ever older and feebler. The alternate of her continuing to travel with me is only insuring that she will die far before her brief allotment of years and that thought too is abhorrent to me. Either way I would only be postponing the inevitable to try to quit traveling. At least, unlike the creature that stole Valeria's life, I give Rose a choice. I hope that at least by the time she figures out how she has wasted her time she isn't too old to have a proper life.
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He's brooding again, and if it wasn't bad enough with just him, so is Jack. Something about the young woman we met in Russia badly upset both of them. It was obvious with Jack in his uncharacteristic assault on the sergeant. Jack has struck me much more as a lover rather than a fighter, though I have no doubt that he like the Doctor is more than capable of doing both, but when I heard what he said to the sergeant I wanted to cry. It was then I really realized how badly he has been hurt; not just by the Time Agency taking his memories but there is obviously something, probably multiple things that have left him too with emotional scars. It is so easy to for me to see how badly the Doctor has been hurt that I sometimes forget that he isn't the only one who has lived through some serious bad things. It's funny how these two totally different men can be so alike. I know the Doctor was angry when I had said Jack was like him, but it's true and how he has taken care of the Doctor after the disaster at Illupodifettoso and again today when he showed such deep compassion toward a young woman, who was so very helpless, just prove it all the more to me.
'I agree, he's a good man.' comes Verity's quiet thought.
'Do you know what's bothering them? Can you tell me?'
'The Doctor is still healing you know that. Jack, well that's his business. I'll not say more. If you want to know you will have to ask them. I will not speak to you of their thoughts and past any more then I would speak to either of them regarding what happened between you and Jimmy Stone.'
At Verity's mention of Jimmy I go cold. I realize how very much she knows about me, if she knows what happened in that relationship. Suddenly I am very glad Verity knows how to be discreet and I resolve never to ask again for her to tell me something I can't learn by asking myself. If the Doctor ever is to know about that disgraceful chapter of my life I want it to be me who tells him, and no one else. I wonder now though what ever did happen to Jimmy. Shortly after we broke up he just disappeared. At the time I was glad he was gone after the threats he had made, but now I am traveling with a Time Lord and a time machine I know how easy it would be for something to have changed and I never even know. I don't think I want to know for sure where he went.
I feel someone's gaze and I look up to find the Doctor watching me. Something about his eyes is so incredibly sad that it makes me want to cry, and as if sensing that he looks away.
"I'm going to get a shower." I hear Jack say and look over to see him striding rapidly away. I stand and walk to the Doctor and I feel his muscles tense as I touch his shoulder.
"Doctor, are you okay?"
"Me? I'm always fine. Why do you ask?" is his lighthearted sounding reply as he gives me a big fake grin, which I don't believe for a minute.
"Doctor." I give him fair warning with the way I say his name that I don't intend to just accept that.
His response is surprising. He turns lightning quick and crushes me to him as his lips come down hard on mine. I gasp as he knocks the wind from me and devours my mouth, nipping, and sucking my bottom lip in then caressing it with his tongue tip. Before I can even properly grasp what has happened and meet his urgent actions, he has released me and has grabbed my hand pulling me from the console room.
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I watch the way she is staring at Jack and I feel an irrational wave of jealousy rise. Rose is mine, and no other's. I know, well hope, that she is not looking at him like that, but the rush of need for her that flows through me leaves me feeling raw; when she touches me, my skin lights up beneath her fingers. I try to bluff that everything is alright but the thought of her aging practically before my very eyes fills my senses with how short is the time I will have to be with her. As she challenges me I feel the overwhelming need to possess her again fully before she is stolen forever from my grasp by the passage of time. The irony of me, a Time Lord, running out of time is not lost on me any more now then it was when I lost the battle to the Daleks' and paid with the lives of my people. An eternity of time at my disposal and yet still never enough. I shove away the pain as I drown myself in the sensations of touching her, kissing her, taking what she is offering.
All she feels is the pleasure right now, but I know I am being too rough with her and she will ache from my attentions tomorrow. In spite of this I am drowning in the need of her comfort that she gives me so freely and hold on even tighter.
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As I watch her sleep, I come face to face with the fact that if she weren't human I would gladly spend the rest of my lives with this woman and delight in watching our children grow first in her body then in our arms. The realization at first stuns then nearly breaks me, and I hold her I cry for all the things lost and that which will never happen.