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Chapter Two: Enough for Two
Rose woke the next morning and made her way to the kitchen. The Doctor, who she usually found there experimenting with jams and marmalades, was nowhere to be found. She put on the kettle and opened the cupboard to retrieve the tea when she heard footsteps behind her and the slight scrape of a chair as he pulled it out and sat down.
"Good morning, Rose," he said lightly in a way that did not match the determined look of concentration that he wore as he pointed the Sonic Screwdriver at his mug.
"Morning, Doctor. You know, I just put some water on. There's enough for two. You don't have to go boilin' it with the Sonic."
"But, Rose, I can boil it with the Sonic, so why shouldn't I?" He had a slightly harassed look to him, and when she looked closer she saw that his face looked unusually haggard, which was impressive, because he didn't require that much sleep.
She momentarily forgot about his attempt at sonic tea-making.
"Doctor, what did you do last night?"
"The usual!" he exclaimed cheerily.
"Does that include losing your marbles, by any chance?"
"What makes you say that?" He looked up from his mug, whose water was showing no signs of boiling.
"I dunno. You weren't here when I came in this morning. Your hands aren't sticky with jam. And you've got a look about you that makes me think you've shotgunned one too many cups of coffee."
She realized, then, that those things weren't actually so strange, just a bit off. But "a bit off" from his normal "a-bit-off-ishness" was enough to raise questions, especially to Rose, who knew him best.
She walked over to the table and grabbed his mug of water, which she promptly dumped into the sink and refilled with the freshly boiled water from the kettle.
"There," she said, dropping a teabag into the mug. "Enough for two, didn't I tell you?"
"Yes, right. Quite."
She pulled up a chair and sat next to him. Much too close, he thought, if he was going to get a hold of himself.
He inhaled so that he could catch her scent. She smelled like sleep, but not in a stale way. She smelled sort of like restfulness, somehow, but he wasn't exactly sure what that meant. And she smelled like lilac, which clung in a lazy way to her hair, the way the smell of shampoo still lingers a day after showering. She also just smelled like herself, and he loved that smell. It was literally becoming intoxicating to him. Maybe that's why he was acting so strangely, but he also knew it was because he had no real ability to focus his thoughts, and it was starting, just a bit, to drive him mad.
He took a sip of his tea.
"You smell nice," he said, without giving his brain a chance to catch up with what his mouth was saying.
"Uh, thanks."
He looked at her, remembering the nineteen-year-old shop girl that he met in a basement and told to run. He remembered that she saved him when most people—anyone normal with an ounce of self-preservation—would have freaked out and ran away screaming. And now she was sitting next to him, pushing the sugar bowl and spoon towards him because he had forgotten for a moment that he liked his tea sweet and saving him from himself, a mad, old Time Lord, who was very clearly, at least to himself, sick in love.
Time Lords did not become sick in love, he thought to himself.
But then, most Time Lords did not meet Rose Tyler, which made all the difference in the universe.
He didn't deserve her. That he knew was perfectly true.
Her hand drifted towards his own, which was resting on the dark wooden table.
Should he take her hand? Was that what she was asking for? Maybe she was just resting her hand on the table too. He didn't want to assume. Except that he did, because he really, really wanted to hold her hand.
The truth was that he had been up for the majority of the night, as he was most nights, but instead of making repairs and reading enormous tomes (before Rose was around, he used to do fun stuff too, but now he didn't like to do that kind of stuff, like make banana splits and hours-long movie marathons, unless Rose was with him, because it really wasn't the same or fun at all without her) he thought about Rose, and what he was going to do about his realization that he loved her, most completely. But once he started thinking about Rose, he started thinking about her eyes and how profound they were and also how they twinkled; how, in that moment that she was about to give him well-deserved grief for doing something daft, they flashed with warmth that made him melt inside.
He started thinking, too, about her lips and how perfectly pink and beautiful they were. They were full and lush, and from his previous experiences, even if it hadn't really been Rose kissing him exactly, they had been really amazing to kiss. He'd kissed back both times. Did she know that?
He wondered if he would ever be able to kiss them again, if she would let him. He kept admonishing himself for thinking about silly things like lips and eyes and lovely blond hair, because, damnit, he was a Time Lord, and Time Lords spend their downtime thinking about galaxies and stars and paradoxes and other timey-wimey things, not humans.
But then he considered for a moment that none of the things he was thinking about, namely the lips, the eyes, and the lovely blond hair, was silly at all, because they belonged to Rose, and she was easily, easily the most important thing in the universe to him. And because he was the last Time Lord in existence, she was, by proxy, the most important thing in the universe to Time Lords in general.
So he reached over and grabbed her hand. She didn't twitch or pull away.
He heard her breath catch in her throat, and from the corner of his eyes, he saw her mouth jerk slightly into a smile. Her eyes beamed. So did his.
He would tell her, because this was Rose and she deserved it. And it needed saying. If he was going to let this happen, it really needed saying.
TBC
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