Big big thanks as usual to my dear beta NoPondInTheForest! This story will soon be coming to an end, but I've come to a point where I no longer know how many chapters there are left. It might be three, possibly four, or maybe five! I'm really sorry the updates are taking so long these days. Thanks for reading!
On their third night together at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, the Doctor and Rose Tyler teleported thousands of years into the past, their destination being the island of Atlantis before it disappeared underwater. On this occasion, the Doctor was extremely careful when setting the coordinates on the vortex manipulator as he just couldn't risk fortuitously teleporting to Atlantis on the fatal day it was engulfed by a tsunami. The Atlantis he wanted to show Rose was the splendorous one. He wanted to take her on a boat ride along the rivery rings encircling the mainland and walk around its many fine palaces and temples when they finally decided to set foot on dry land. By the end of their trip, there were a few shadows on Rose's face the same way there had been shadows on Donna's face when he visited Pompeii with her, but letting that aside, he knew she had inevitably fallen in love with the place.
On the fourth night, they set off for the world of Alfheimr. According to Norse mythology Alfheimr had been the home of the light elves, whereas according to the Doctor Alfheimr was still a home and it would continue to be for as long as Planet Earth orbited the Sun. It was not however the home of the light elves at all. Its inhabitants, the Doctor explained, were some peaceful luminous creatures of astonishing beauty who, being the first aliens ever to get anywhere near Planet Earth, had settled on the one thing that didn't exist on their home planet and whose beauty they had thus found unparalleled – the clouds.
On their fifth night, after they came back from visiting the Island of Avalon and witnessing the very forging of Excalibur, the Doctor made a decision. As the three places they had visited had blown Rose's mind away, the Time Lord formed the resolution that they would stick to visiting places Rose wrongly assumed to have been mythological. It was soon however when they started to make the occasional stopover in some or other of the wonders of the world past, present or future, which were soon followed by some of the wonders of the natural world and a few other places the Doctor insisted were truly unique and could only be found on Planet Earth.
This was how in the following weeks they visited the Lighthouse and the Library of Alexandria, the Amazonian Rainforest, Mount Olympus, Icelandic glacier caves, Belgian forests carpeted with blue and purple flowers and which rather seemed to belong in fairy tales, the original Porcelain Tower of Nanjing, the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Ancient City of Petra, The Colossus of Rhodes, the Northern Lights, light tunnels and flower parks in Japan, the citadel of Machu Picchu, glowing caves in New Zealand, the Grand Canyon and many other breathtaking places scattered around Planet Earth and around time itself.
Like everything else between the Doctor and Rose Tyler, the habit of setting off for a new destination every night was also born naturally. With the single exception of their trip to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the many other trips that followed required no design on the Doctor's part. He would just wait for Rose to wake up after sunset, and as soon as she did she would find him sitting on the usual armchair. They would smile at each other for a moment before the Doctor threw a piece of fruit in her direction. As they both ate their own fruit, Rose would anxiously ask him whether John and Clara had already come back, and the Doctor would smile a knowing smile before assuring her they had not. Rose would sigh with relief, then she would tell him what she had been dreaming about.
There were times when Rose would beg the Doctor to tell her about one of his many adventures, just because she loved the way his eyes shone every time he mentioned the TARDIS, and the Doctor would agree to do so just because he loved the way her eyes shone every time he told her one of his tales. The Doctor's narration would always build up their excitement, and every time his gaze suddenly got lost near the end, Rose would understand that something truly remarkable was being envisioned in his mind. Immediately afterwards he would jump up and offer her his hand, then he would wrap an arm around her and hold her tight against him. Rose would watch excitedly as he lifted up the flap of the vortex manipulator and entered the code that would lead them to a place and time of his choosing, the choice having just been made on the spur of the moment.
After a couple of days of hopping on and off different times and locations on Planet Earth, the idea crossed Rose's mind that there was absolutely no need to come back to the sixteenth century on a daily basis. Instead she suggested coming back only occasionally to check on Edward, Jack, and Their Majesties Elizabeth and Anne Boleyn. In fact it came as no surprise when the Doctor told her that that had originally been his plan, and one he had firmly held on to until Jack came to their room at Whitehall one morning.
Upon finding out about his friends' trip to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the former Time Agent realised that he would also love to take Edward out of Elizabethan England and show him some future landmarks as well as a good number of past ones. Being really keen on keeping the vortex manipulator wrapped around his own wrist, the Doctor suggested that maybe the four of them could just go on some trips together. Jack however had had a better idea. No matter where the Doctor might take her - Rose was just a human being. As such, there would always come a moment when she would feel the need to sleep. It was at those moments that the Doctor agreed to come back so that Edward and Jack could make use of the vortex manipulator and go wherever they pleased, and when the time came for Edward to take a rest Jack would teleport back with him. What the Doctor didn't tell Jack was that he was determined to cheat. Given he and Edward would never notice how long they had been gone as long as they returned early in the morning, was there any reason why he and Rose shouldn't spend a couple of days away, possibly three if they just felt like it? He certainly couldn't think of a single one.
Thus, Rose soon lost track of real time, and as the Doctor had imagined, she never even asked why. He knew that she knew he was doing the very thing she had wanted him to do. He was buying them both time.
It was the small hours of a beautiful early-September morning. Heads tilted against each other, the Doctor and Rose were looking up at the sky as they lay shoulder to shoulder inside a gondola that was being steered along the canals of eighteenth-century Venice by the gondolier's oar.
This was one of those moments when the Doctor would tell Rose all kinds of fascinating stories of his adventures in space and time, and the adventure he was telling her about this time was the one he had had the first he had visited the rings of Saturn. Then he moved on to tell her all the secrets of Saturn's and Jupiter's moons, and before he knew, he had told her all about other solar systems and galaxies, about nebulas and supernovas, about clouds of interstellar gas and dust, about black holes and wormholes.
All the while Rose kept thinking that this was what she loved best. She had undeniably enjoyed visiting every single place and time he had taken her to, but whenever the Doctor's eyes were haunted by the vastness of the night sky, she felt the urge to explore every inch of that immeasurable universe, but most of all she felt the urge to explore it with him by her side.
Luckily for her, St Mark's clock suddenly struck two, and its sound helped her wrench her thoughts from that path. From the moment the Doctor had told her the way things were going to end for them, Rose had been fighting with all her might so as not to let the thought that one day she would eventually leave him overshadow the sheer delight of just being with him, of being his friend and keeping his company. Whenever things got a little bit more complicated than they already were, the Doctor would always say or do something that would make her laugh at the right time, and in the end it she always managed to succeed.
Tonight however, being lying down so close to him and feeling his hand squeezing hers, things somehow felt different. Quite different.
The Doctor's mesmerizing tale of the origins and the reaches of the universe came to an abrupt halt when some unanticipated clouds covered the sky. Only a few seconds passed before raindrops suddenly started to fall down, and owing to the increasing sense of intimacy between them and the conviction that things simply shouldn't get any more complicated than they already were, they both found that unexpected drizzle to be most welcome.
"Oh, how I love Venice!"he said. Letting go of Rose's hand, he raised his arm and put a hand under his head. "I can't believe it's been so long since I last came to visit."
"Ya feeling better now?" Rose asked as she closed her eyes to enjoy the feeling of the cold droplets falling on her face. "No wonder you were exhausted when we left Whitehall. I don't think there's a single young woman at court that you haven't danced with tonight."
"Tell me about it," answered the Doctor. "That's precisely why I tried to persuade Queen Elizabeth not to throw a party, but she just wouldn't listen."
"Ya wanted her to cancel the ball 'cause ya don't like dancing?"
"Are you kidding? Of course I like dancing! Especially at a Renaissance ball. I love Renaissance balls!"
"Then why did ya want the ball called off?"
"Because when someone holds a ball in your honour, Miss Tyler, everyone wants to dance with you, which means you're very unlikely to ever get the chance to dance with the only person you ever intended to dance with."
Rose felt her cheeks burning and a chilling sensation going up her spine. Once again, the thought that things had recently gotten infinitely harder came to her head. When John and Clara left back in the month of May she had assumed they wouldn't be away for too long. Taking it for granted that she and the Doctor would stay in Elizabethan England just for a couple of days, the truth and its consequences, though shocking, would've been infinitely much easier to bear. Now however, when it was utterly impossible to figure out how long their impossibly long summer together had really been, or keep track of the many times the Doctor had let her know how much she meant to him, or of the many times she had had to refrain herself from doing what she most longed to do, all she knew was she was wavering. The Doctor had never acted on his feelings, that much was true, and what she was terrified of was the possibility that she might just ruin everything they had by acting on hers. She knew she had made him suffer, although the reason why she might one day just decide to leave him she would never understand. The only thought that brought her restless mind some clarity was that thought that she would never let herself hurt that again.
Hence, she blinked her eyes open, and then, without hesitation, she changed the subject at hand.
"So, what are we gonna do tonight?" she asked, turning her head to face him matter-of-factly.
"What are we gonna do tonight?" asked the Doctor, his eyebrows shooting up in surprise. "Have you really just asked that or am I just hearing voices?"
"I'd assumed ya hear voices," she teased him. "Nothing else can explain why ya do the things ya do."
"Well," answered the Doctor pensively as he looked up, "you might not be so wrong about that after all..."
"Ya don't feel like going out there somewhere?" Rose asked as she started to bite her thumb.
"Well, you may not have noticed, with me going on about the universe for so long and all, but we've already gone out there somewhere tonight. As it happens,we're in Venice, we're having a ride in a gondola, and that straw-hatted chap over there is taking us to hear the boatmen singing."
"Then what are we gonna do after we hear the boatmen singing?" she asked, turning around and giving him one of her most overpowering smiles.
"Oh, I dunno…," answered the Doctor, narrowing his eyes slightly. "I thought you were too tired after the ball to do anything other than lazing around, that's why I brought you here. I guess the question is, what would you like to do?"
"I'm up for anything. Surprise me!" she answered, propping herself up on her right elbow.
"Okay, fine... Just… Just let me think!" The Doctor got lost in his thoughts for a moment until a wide grin lit up his face. Propping himself up on his elbow as well, he made a suggestion. "Why don't we go back to sixteenth-century London? We might just pop by The Globe! Y'see, I've heard there's a new play by this bloke everyone calls William Shakespeare…"
"Boring," Rose teased.
"Boring?" the Doctor exclaimed in feigned surprise. "Rose Tyler! How can you say boring? That's everything but boring. He's the greatest impostor of all times!"
"Ya can't lie to me, Doctor!" Rose teased again in between laughs. "Ya just wanna go meet 'im 'cause you're pissed he pulled your leg once and you never saw it coming, don't ya?"
"I probably do, yeah," he confessed. "But given that now we're in Venice, it would be a bit silly to come back, wouldn't it?"
"Reckoned ya were gonna say now we're in Venice we might just jump into a canal," Rose teased again.
The Doctor didn't say a word at first, but when he suddenly gave her a smile she had not expected to see in the slightest she understood that her words, which she had intended to be nothing more than a silly joke, hadn't been taken lightly.
Thus, before she knew, the Doctor was crouching down in front of her. His enthusiastic smile, however, vanished from his lips the moment his eyes travelled the length of her legs.
"Oh, what a shame!" he suddenly exclaimed with disappointment. "It was such a fantastic idea!"
"What? What is it?" she asked as she sat up straight. "Aren't we jumping into the canal anymore?"
"Not unless you want to go straight to the bottom. I mean, look at you! That costume of yours must weigh tons!"
"It does," Rose answered as her eyes darted to the beautiful dark red and gold costume Queen Elizabeth had had specially made for her with the occasion of the ball, "but I reckon I might just… You know. Take it off."
"What did you just say?" the Doctor asked, his eyes wide as they gazed into hers in astonishment.
"I mean it! Ya 'ave any idea how many layers of clothing and underwear I'm wearing, Doctor? Trust me, I could take off lots of it and still be decent enough for eighteenth-century Venice."
"If you really think so," whispered the Doctor after a brief pause.
As Rose stood up with the intention of removing nearly every single one of the garments she was wearing, the Doctor remained lying down for a bit longer, not because he didn't want to stand up as well, but because he suddenly found himself too nervous to do so. Knowing that the worst thing he could do was just stay there and watch while Rose took off her clothes, he spent the next few seconds frantically trying to come up with a very good reason to get up and walk away from that edge of the gondola immediately. Fortunately for him, the happy thought that there was in fact someone else on the other edge soon came to his mind.
"Scusi, signor gondoliere," he said with lots of hesitation as he jumped up and strode towards the gondolier, "questa é la… Oh dear, where's the TARDIS when I need it? Okay sir, so… Questa é la fine della... La fine della nostra passeggiata, right? Capito? At least for the time being… Oh, I really hope that made sense! I mean.. Per il momento! Questa é la fine ma della nostra passeggiata per il momento! Y'see, mia amica Rose over there ed io vogliamo nuotare sui canali, so… Do you think Lei potrebbe aspettarci un attimo da qualche parte qui intorno? Oh wow! Did I really say that? That was brilliant!"
The Doctor was so much in ecstasy regarding his Italian speaking skills that he didn't notice the gondolier had hardly heard a single word he had said. The man's eye had long been caught by the sight of the beautiful young woman who was unashamedly taking off her clothes at the other end of the gondola and who by that time had already managed to take off her gown, her sleeves, her partlet, her kirtle, her forepart, and had just started to take off her bumroll.
"Is something wrong, old chap?" the Doctor asked waving a hand in front of the man's face - a hand the gondolier didn't even notice. Neither the insolent look in his eyes nor the smirk on his lips seemed to shed any light that would help the Doctor find out what was actually happening to him. Therefore, the Time Lord being one who had never really known how to let mysteries just be, he did what he had once used to do when he couldn't solve a puzzle by himself - he asked Rose for her opinion.
"Rose?" he called, his eyes still fixed on the man. "You have any idea what might be wrong with the gondolier? He's been numb for a while now, and he seems to be in shock."
"Well, I think I have a pretty good idea, yeah," he heard Rose say quite rudely right behind him. "Oi! You! Turn around!"
"What!? But Rose, I'm not even looking!" he answered turning around. "Look, I've been observing this man for a while now and I just can't see w…" Lips pursed together, the Doctor never finished that sentence. The words he had intended to say next suddenly vanished from his mind together with the image of the gondolier as a new image took over - the image of Rose Tyler's farthingale falling down to her feet.
At long last, the Doctor finally understood.
"What?!" he exclaimed turning back to the gondolier. Reaching out for the man's straw hat, he covered his face with it entirely. Immediately afterwards he strode towards Rose, who had been observing him and trying to repress a laugh. "Rose, we need to leave right now!"
"I'm almost done 'ere," Rose said. "I'm gonna need your help with this thing though."
A few seconds of silence and immobility went by before the Doctor nodded and muttered the word 'okay'. Rose was talking about her corset which was laced at the back and which was utterly impossible for her to unlace without help. Feeling how his lungs had just started to fight for air, the Doctor slowly stepped towards her as Rose turned around. When he found himself standing behind her, his eyes spent a moment studying every detail of her soft golden hair, which had been beautifully arranged for the ball. Two long braids decorated with white pearls encircled her head, and out of the shortest one sprang a bun made of curls. Rose had been careful not to remove a single strand of hair from its place while undoing the closures in the neck ruff of her exquisite dark red and gold dress, and for such a little thing, the Doctor was extremely grateful. It meant that his trembling hands wouldn't have to go anywhere too close to the back of her neck.
The Doctor's long fingers worked slowly and delicately as they unfastened the lace-up. When the corset was finally unfastened, he sighed with relief. However his sense of relief was short-lived, as he suddenly found himself face to face with all the bits of her back that her smock wouldn't cover. It wasn't only the back of Rose's bare neck that his eyes could feast upon now, it was also her shoulders and the trace of her spine between her shoulder blades. Should he spend much longer staring at the bare smooth back of the woman he would gladly chain himself to forever, the Doctor knew he would irrevocably end up doing the very thing he had been trying so very hard to not do for the past few months. And yet, his chances of finding a way out of it, which had never been too many, now seemed to be none at all.
As Rose looked down at their reflection in the canal, her whole body shivered. The Doctor was standing so close behind her that she could feel his breath upon her neck and her hair standing on end. Oh, stop it Rose, she thought to herself as she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Ya gotta stop this now. Say something or walk away... Ya just can't 'urt 'im. Ya can't do this to 'im again. But no matter how much she wanted to, she just couldn't stop it. In fact the truth was that she didn't want to run away. She had been fighting her feelings for so long that now suddenly it felt all that was left for her to do was just surrender.
Frantically looking for answers the way he always did, the Doctor soon decided to take a leap of faith regardless of what the consequences might be. Thus, he stepped closer to Rose, took her hands in his and wrapped his arms around her waist and held her tight against his chest.
"At the count of three?" he whispered in her ear as he let his head rest on her shoulder.
"Okay," Rose answered, caressing the soft leather of the strap in the vortex manipulator for fear of what might actually happen if she dared caress the skin of the Doctor's own hand.
"Here we go then," said the Doctor, feeling slightly intoxicated now that her scent had just got into his nostrils. "One, two, three!"
And so, the Doctor and Rose Tyler jumped into the canal. The water was really cold, but not cold enough to prevent any of them from noticing the warmth of the body pressed against their own.
Rose was feeling terribly confused. Only seconds before she and the Doctor had been caught in a mess of such proportions her mind had not been able to find a single way of it. If jumping into the canal had been the Doctor's best shot at shutting what their recent physical proximity had unleashed back inside this sort of Pandora's box they had accidentally opened, the fact that his arms were now wrapped even more tightly around her wasn't helping in the slightest, as neither did the fact that his hearts kept beating faster against her back.
All Rose wanted to do now was get rid of his arms, turn to him, and ask him what was happening between them. What was really happening between them.
Even through her closed eyelids, Rose felt a blinding flash of light shining even if they were still submerged in the canal. Then, all at once, the water felt incredibly warmer. When their bodies finally made it to the surface, Rose began to understand. First she noticed the noise around them, thunderous like the waters of a thousand mighty rivers seething with the fury of a thousand wild horses. Then she noticed the light shining down upon her still shut eyes, and finally the rather warm sprinkle falling upon her face.
As she opened her eyes, it dawned on Rose that the Doctor must have pressed some button on the vortex manipulator at some point after they jumped off the gondola. Not only wasn't it night anymore, they were no longer in Venice either. The evidence provided by her own eyes told her that the Doctor must have decided to take her to another planet. And yet, she knew that just couldn't be. Many had been the times when the Doctor had told her that such thing wouldn't be possible without TARDIS, otherwise the alien gravity would crush them even before the alien atmosphere had a chance to choke them. Still, she couldn't possibly fathom why a thick curtain of mist was rising up from the ground towards the sky. What she had thought to be raindrops had turned out to be mist droplets on their way back down.
After a few seconds, the fog and the mist dissipated only slightly, but enough for Rose to be able to look through them. Upon doing so, she discovered a far-reaching cliff behind it. The fact that it was covered by trees made it look very much like Planet Earth. Taking a look around, not only did she realise that the impressive cliff stretched for as far as the eye could see, she also noticed that an unfathomable abyss separated the Doctor and her from it, that the waters on their side of the abyss were ruthless and unruly, and that the Doctor was now paddling towards the edge and carrying her with him.
"Doctor what on earth are you doing!?" she shouted nearly at the top of her voice as her eyes widened in terror. "Doctor, this is a waterfall! We're gonna fall down!"
But the Doctor hadn't listened, and if he did, he didn't seem to care. As he kept paddling forward Rose realised that, impossible as it might have seemed at first, the current wasn't dragging them onwards. Despite the impossibly vast and infuriated river around them, they happened to be immersed in a small naturally formed pool of much calmer waters was inside it. When they reached the edge, Rose realised that a rocky wall contained most of its waters, preventing them from cascading downwards.
Still refusing to let go of Rose, the Doctor put one hand on the wet rock and propelled them both up on top of it.
"There," he whispered in her ear the moment they both sat on the rock. "We've just had a swim inside the Devil's Pool. Rose Tyler, welcome to Victoria Falls."
By the time the Doctor finally let go of her, Rose didn't even notice. The opulent display that nature itself was offering to her bewildered eyes was so sumptuous that she couldn't look anywhere else. Countless times did her gaze travel from one side of the cliff to the other, then to the Zambezi river behind her as it flew towards the edge of the precipice, and finally downwards to see the waters of that very pool as they cascaded down towards the river below.
Rose felt exhilarated as she had never felt before, and when she suddenly turned around and her eyes accidentally met the Doctor's, the same eyes that had just been taking great delight in the wonders of such a lavish wonder of the natural world soon found themselves taking even greater delight in the wonders within the immenseness of his brown iris. At that moment, she seemed to forget where she was or where she had come from, and even what she was headed for.
At that moment, it finally hit her. There was no going back at all.
She had been worrying about what might happen if she lowered her guard for much too long, but now she was done with that. All she knew was that right there, at the edge of her own precipice and irrevocably destined to fall, the rest of the world might just go to hell since his was the only company she wanted to keep at all.
For the first time in her life, Rose Tyler had been able to understand what it truly felt like to be on top of the world.
"Rose," the Doctor whispered, his eyes locked with hers and his mouth dangerously moving in the direction of her mouth.
Rose obviously hadn't heard him. The uproar of the waterfalls had prevented her from doing so. And yet, she had understood him. They way she didn't pull back was proof enough.
"Doctor," she whispered back. Of course he knew, she thought. He had known all the time. It was just that now she was finally ready to hold absolutely nothing back.
Soon she felt his breath caressing her face. When his mouth was just merely an inch from hers, and she didn't pull back, the Doctor took a hand to her face. As he stroked the line of her jaw with his knuckles, Rose took a hand to his hand and started to draw circles near his wrist with her fingertips.
The next thing they both knew was a blinding flash of white light. Immediately afterwards, their bodies lost their support and fell down. When their backs hit the ground, they noticed it was still quite wet but also soft and cold. The sky had changed as it looked much darker, and the freezing air was chilling their drenched bodies to the bone. The roaring of the waterfalls was there no more. Instead, there were birds singing, and they definitely sounded like morning birds, the Doctor thought, and very familiar ones for that matter.
"What's happened?" Rose asked, looking up at the sky as she remained lying on the ground. "Where are we now?"
"Well," the Doctor started, "I guess you must accidentally have lifted the flap of the vortex manipulator just enough to press the very button that would take us home."
"Home?" she asked, anxiety written all over her face. "What do ya mean home?"
"I mean that, if you sit up and look to your left, you'll see Whitehall Palace right behind me."
"Really?" Rose asked. In the blink of an eye she sat up and looked, and when she spoke again, her anxiety had turned into disappointed. "I guess that's Whitehall, yeah, but the timing's pretty rubbish."
For a split-second, the Doctor didn't quite grasp the reasons why Rose should be so upset to be back in Elizabethan England, but no sooner had he turned his face to her than the image of his hand caressing her soft skin and her lips so very close to his own came back to his mind. With a smile on his face, his hand travelled through the wet grass until it found hers, and when it did, he jumped up and sat up with easiness.
The Doctor had been determined to put an end to what they both had started at Victoria Falls until the moment he turned his head in her direction and saw what had been hiding behind her. From then on, everything became hazy and confusing. As his thoughts went down the darkest road he could ever have imagined at breakneck speed, he would have sworn he had actually heard Rose's voice calling out for him at some point and asking whether he was okay, but by then he had been so lost in his thoughts that he wasn't even sure whether he had answered. Maybe he had or maybe he hadn't. In any case, now it just didn't matter.
The moment Rose turned her head around and saw the blue box that was parked in front of the entrance to St James's Park, she would surely understand.