First Telephone Call

This time he doesn't say, "where next? " or "where now? ", he says, "sit down", and then he says, "drink up", and she laughs, because her normality is the thrum of the console, not the mug of hot tea he's pressed into her hands with an odd tenderness.

Alien, even. Maybe not so odd.

Don't you dare make this place domestic, he said, once upon a time, but the world has been round a few times and back since then.

"I'm OK," she says.

He says nothing, and when she thinks about it, it strikes her that he doesn't know what to say. Something about that catches the breath in the back of her throat, so that she gulps her tea. She's watched him do things with words: unravel the impossible and knit worlds back together. After nine hundred years you'd think you'd have an answer for pretty much everything.

They sit in the silence, the familiar flickering and whirring elevated by the stillness. It's fullness where it ought to be emptiness.

"You could call your mum if you wanted."

Rose shakes her head, wrapping her fingers closer around the mug warming her hands. "I dunno. Maybe later."

Grief has hung gathering dust in a back room somewhere. Sometimes she'd take it out and try it on for size, but it never felt like hers. That was OK. Borrowed grief had its use: a name, sometimes, for a longing she couldn't place, that strange sense of lostness she'd feel. And now it's painted on her skin, and she can't wash it off, but that's OK too.

Of course, she has a name for a lot of things now, except, it isn't a name exactly.

"Come here. I want you."

He looks up so sharply that for a moment the world stops.

"What?"

She answers less steadily than she means to. "Was that...was it really the first telephone call?"

For a moment he says nothing and then without warning he grins at her. "Technically speaking, the first telephone call was you calling your mum to tell her you'd just seen the fall of Troy."

Rose giggles back. "And she said, well help him up then."

She made that part up, and it's not like it's even funny, really, but the Doctor's laughing as he sets himself down beside her. When she dips her head towards him it's almost involuntary, a tiny nod of thank you that might be for saving her life today, and might be for the tea, and might be just because he's there, two hearts beating not very far from her own.

Everything he does is on such a grand scale, and everything he does for her is somehow huge in its smallness.

What happened today?

He's there, fixing things, like he always is, and then suddenly in the middle of it all everything changes and it's her that has to fix it. Sorry. One word and it doesn't put anything right. One silly word and it doesn't matter to anyone but him.

She felt it too, today. The universe spinning out of control and neither of them can stop it.

Rose sets her tea down on the floor in front of her and looks up at him, because if he won't say it, she will, and there's still that catch in her throat, for all the brightness in her eyes.

"Where now?"