A/N: A few days off on vacation without access to my laptop ... and I get myself out of the groove a bit, so I didn't get as much covered as I had hoped I would... I hate it when that happens.
There's a weenie bit of pushing around in this chapter. Domestic disturbance kind've thing. If this is a trigger, please tread carefully. Tentoo is flip-flopping again and he has a little further to fall yet.
Hold firm for the next chapter as there is an introduction of someone very important to Rose and her ultimate salvation. It's going to be hard to get there, but I'm sure it'll be worth it. :)
If you've made it this far I thank you ... I very much thank you...
~~oooOOOooo~~
"Rose. What are you doing in there?"
Rose's eyes shot wide at the sound of her husband's voice on the other side of the door. She took a single moment for her mind to point out the coincidence of him arriving at the bathroom door at that exact moment in time – when she had inadvertently accessed the files of Doctor Song – and then urged her fingers into action.
She made a grunt that she hoped might've sounded like a peep of embarrassment, and quickly let her fingers fly over the face of her tablet to shut down the windows of incrimination that lingered insistently in the background.
His voice called for her once again, this time with much more urgency, and Rose had to peep.
"Just a mo', John," she called back in a sheepish tone of voice. "Just finishing up."
Well. That wasn't exactly a lie. She was finishing up, but not quite in the manner that he was expecting on the other side of the door.
"Do I need to come in?" he queried with a slightly worried tone.
"Nah," she drawled back quickly. "M'good. Just a sec, yeah?"
"I can wait."
Rose slouched and dropped her forehead onto the top edge of her tablet. She could picture his stand on that other side of the door: In a side-lean, with his elbow and forearm pressed onto the white-painted wood right at his head. He'd be tapping the pads of his fingers on the door. He'd wait. Of course he would. There'd be no way he'd leave that doorway any time soon. He was curious, now. He wanted to know what she was up to. Rose wasn't typically a bathroom lingerer. She wouldn't typically spend… She looked at her watch … Thirty five minutes on the toilet.
"Really, Rose," he persisted from the door. "I'm beginning to wonder if you've fallen in."
She let out along moan of annoyance and swatted her hand on the wet wiped dispenser, which immediately tumbled to the floor with a clatter and thud. "Oh for the love of…"
"Ten seconds and I'm breaking in," he called. "One-one thousand. Two-one thousand. Three. I mean it, Rose. Four…"
Rose actually found herself smiling somewhat at his countdown as she hurriedly cleaned herself up and hauled herself to a stand. With the tablet tucked at her side, she used her free hand to tug up her knickers and then flush the toilet. She washed and dried one hand as she tapped at the tablet screen to open an app that she felt was a far more appropriate bathroom time killer.
"Seven-one thousand…"
Rose spun, adjusted her clothing, and blew out a preparatory breath as she curled her hand around the door knob to release the lock.
"What's with this persistence?" she shot in with a mock growl of annoyance. "Can't a girl get a little bit of privacy to engage in basic bodily functions without a stalking husband hovering at the door when he should be in bed sleeping?"
He shifted the lean of his forearm from the doorframe and onto the wall beside it to let her through the door. "You were in there for thirty seven minutes and fourteen seconds, Rose. That's a pretty extreme amount of time for a non-productive visit to the toilet."
Rose looked back over her shoulder with a slight grimace. Of course he'd know that it was – to use his term because it was so much more polite – non-productive.
"Candy Crush," she managed on a breath. "Soda. The Bubblegum Hill levels have changed and I have five different levels to play to get my crown." She held up her tablet to show him the image of a blob of jelly wearing a crown and waving a sceptre standing beside a two tiered cake castle. The first roundel of the five that created a pathway to castle doors flashed and pulsated at the bottom of the screen. "I want my crown, John."
His eyes shifted toward with her a slow and suspicious movement. "Vale," he corrected as he held up a mug of tea. "I don't like the name John."
Rose leaned forward to inhale the liquid that steamed inside the cup. She didn't need to look at the little white tag that hung from a thin white string down along the side of the mug to know what was inside. Her nose turned up and her eyes lifted with obvious disgust.
"Peppermint?"
He thrust it toward her. "You told me that you had a stomach ache, Rose. Peppermint tea is not only a good source of powerful antioxidants, but the volatile oils that are extracted from the leaves of the peppermint plant are renowned for their ability to unwind stomach cramps, alleviate gas and promote digestion. I read somewhere that the oils taken from the Mentha piperita plant has been shown to be a rather effective antispasmodic…"
"Wikipedia," she interrupted with a shake in her head as she took the mug from his hand and inhaled a deep breath of the steam. She lifted her eyes to the questioning arch of his brow. "We've had this discussion before," she clarified with a shrug.
He looked quite baffled. "We have?"
Rose nodded. "Several times, in fact. " She kissed at the very edge of the mug to draw in a small sip of the hot tea. She didn't shield her grimace of disgust from him as she turned on her heel to walk toward through to corridor toward the kitchen. "And each time I remind you that I absolutely hate the stuff, but you insist that I must drink it all, Rose Tyler. Peppermint tea will settle that belly of yours in a jiffy!"
He didn't seem to quite know whether or not to be offended by her very poorly imitating his voice and accent, or to giggle at it, and only managed a half grimace/half smirk. That expression quickly shifted to a frown of question. "Huhm."
Rose twisted her head to look down her shoulder at him. "What? Well I can't be expected to like everything, now, can I?"
He shook his head, with his frown still firmly in place, and thrust his hands into the pockets of his pyjama bottoms. "No. It's not that, Rose. I don't expect you to like everything. Life would be boring if you liked everything, wouldn't it?" He inhaled deeply and spoke as though trying to hold in his breath as he spoke. "Half the fun of living is to see what is good, bad, pretty, ugly, fun … no fun." He finally exhaled his entire breath. "And there's plenty out there that's not to like, let me tell you."
"Then what's with the huhm?" she queried as they stepped into the dining room that led toward their kitchen. She gestured toward the breakfast counter with a tip of her mug. "You only ever huhm when something's prodded your curiosity button."
He was quiet for a moment, his eyes largely focused on the tiled floor at his feet. The silence was enough to have Rose prompt him again with a call of his name.
He shook himself and inhaled deep. "Oh. It's nothing."
"I don't believe you," she intoned blandly as she poured the tea down the sink and drew the teabag from the cup with a grasp between her thumb and finger that quite adequately displayed her loathe of the green tinged tea.
"That's the last time I do something nice for you," he remarked dryly with a flick of his hand toward the mug. "I slaved over a boiling kettle to make that for you."
"It's a bag of tea in a mug of water," she corrected him. "And I bet you used the Keurig for your hot water and not the kettle." She let her eyes flick to the Keurig machine and the used pod that was carelessly discarded beside the machine. "Evidence does suggest…"
"Yes. Yes," he drolled with a shake in his head. "Busted. I used the Keruig instead of using the kettle that would heat the water to the ideal temperature in which to steep your tea – which, I may add, is an absolute waste of time because you hate it and will just throw it out anyway."
She grinned widely at him. "Then why bother?"
"Because I am a loving, caring husband who will do anything for his beloved wife…"
"Except use a kettle instead of a Keurig to heat water."
He playfully punched his fist into his palm "Time was of the essence, Rose Tyler. You were in gastric peril. There was no time to boil the kettle to the absolute perfect temperature …"
"You had thirty-seven minutes, apparently," she argued with a smile as she lifted the lever for the tap to dispense water into her mug.
He replied with a hum through an open mouth. "Thirty seven minutes and fourteen seconds," he corrected cheekily.
"I stand corrected."
For a moment the pair fell into silence. Rose lifted the mug to her lips to draw back the water she'd pulled from the tap. She wondered just how long it would take for him to suggest that they return to bed so that he could go back to sleep. It would come soon enough. That wasn't to say that he was a particularly ardent sleeper – quite the opposite in fact - just that he refused to ever do it alone. She could see the circle underneath his eyes that suggested he was in need of a long night's rest.
Instead of making the offer, however, John walked toward the cabinet, drew out a mug, and then padded toward the water cooler at the opposite end of the counter. "We have to talk, you know."
With a sigh, she put her mug on the countertop. "about what, exactly?"
He quietly filled his mug without answering her for a moment. He maintained not answering her question as he walked to the fridge and pulled down a small cylindrical container and popped off the lid. He continued to be silent as he dropped a pair of pills into his hand and then threw them into his mouth by cupping his hand over his mouth.
Rose watched the display with a curved brow and a look of slight annoyance. A heavy breath through a nose that was ready to be blown into a tissue escaped her finally and she shook her head as she spun on her toe to walk the opposite direction to him.
"Fine, then. Don't answer," she growled. "I'm goin' back to bed. You can stay down here."
"Is that you kicking me out of our bed, Rose?"
She stopped walking away from him and twisted around to look down her shoulder at him. After a moment she stepped around her foot to face him directly – albeit from about ten feet away.
"I'm not kicking you out of anything," she clarified. "But if you want to open a line of dialogue and then go all deliberately quiet when I ask for a simple clarification of the dialogue topic so you can fill a mug and pop some pills," She inhaled a breath with the intent to continue with her run on sentence.
"About yesterday," he cut in before he took a swig from his water. "And your visit to the other side."
She had zero desire to talk about that topic and three in the morning when she was inadequately caffeinated. "Yeah. Well. It was dealt with, yeah? You sent me along to have play time with Doctor Song as punishment for my little misadventure."
His eyes darkened and he let out a long and hard breath through his nose. With a shake in his head and a muttering of words she didn't immediately understand, he roughly spun a dial on the stove and set a metal kettle on top of the element.
"I forgot just how unreasonable you can be when you wake when you haven't got a good English Breakfast between your palms."
Rose replied only with an indignant look of utter annoyance.
"It's all for your own good," he continued dryly as he moved about the kitchen in search of the small ceramic teapot and the tea bags. "Me sending you to River, that is."
"My good," she answered back. "Or yours?"
He pondered that question for a long moment with his eyes raised to the ceiling. "Well. That is the question, isn't it?" He let his gaze fall back to the task at hand and focused his eyes on the motion of putting tea bags into an empty pot. "Anything that is good for you, in turn is good for me. Rassilon only knows what it would do for me to have something happen to you." His eyes shifted to look toward her with a gaze full of accusation. "To lose you across dimensional walls. I've been there once before and have very little desire for it to happen again, ta."
Rose folded her arms across her chest and moved her mouth as though she wanted to retort. John actually waited to see if any actual words would leave her mouth. His eyes were wide and expectant as he waited, but all he received were small sounds of indecision.
He finally nodded and looked back down to the pot. "I have River working with you to make sure that you're safe."
"So you're in full awareness of the experimental treatments and analysis that she's doing on me…" she inhaled. "On you?"
He laughed without looking at her and shook his head. "River's not doing anything that could be termed experimental on me." He grinned and kept his eyes on the pot. "Well. Unless you consider continuing rehabilitation and pain management as experimental."
"Are you sure that's all?" she queried hotly.
His eyes lifted up finally. "Say what's on your mind, Rose." His voice was tinged with obvious annoyance.
"You're spending a lot of time with her."
He pursed his lips and nodded. "I see."
"You see what?"
The kettle whistled its readiness and he turned to pull it from the element. "You're jealous," he stated firmly as he twisted the dial to turn off the stove.
Her head tipped to one side and she watched him pour the boiled water into the ceramic pot. "Is that what you think?"
Be blew the rising steam from swirling into his face and set the hot kettle back onto the stovetop. "Don't get me wrong, Rose," he began with a smile. "It does give me a bit of a rush to know that you still experience jealousy when another woman makes her presence in our lives." His eyes lifted to hers. "Shows you still love me."
"Because that's in doubt?"
His head tipped off to one side. "Well," he drawled along an entire breath. "When you take off across dimensional walls in search of a man that I've repeatedly told you has no interest at all in picking up where the two of you left off." He cut himself off sharply and levered a darkened glare toward her. "I've warned you repeatedly about him, Rose. Warned you that once you left he'd move on and even marry another woman, yet you still decided to risk everything that you and I are together to chase off after him."
"Now who's jealous?" she snarled in reply.
"I've got every right to feel that way, don't I?"
She let out a laugh through her nose and looked away from him. "Hardly."
That made both brows shoot high. He abandoned the making of tea to stride quickly toward her. "What's that supposed to mean?"
She inhaled a deep breath with the full intention of finally bringing forth the accusation of his infidelity with Doctor Song. It was there, oh it was. She was a breath away from finally calling that affair out in the open.
He spoke first in a breath full of aggression born of frustration and insecurity. "It took me two years, Rose. Two years to finally convince you that I was worthy of your love. That I was more than just a booby prize handed to you by a man … a … a Time Lord that was raised by a society that expressly forbid endeavours like love and marriage and fidelity and honour to one glorious creature for the rest of our lives."
And you want to throw it all away – thirty years of marriage – by messin' about with another woman, her mind supplied cruelly.
"I was born," he continued hotly. "Born in love with you. Everything he couldn't give you I'm able to." He cupped her cheek in his hand and softened his tone of voice. His eyes lifted wide and his brows furrowed in pleading. "And I do, Rose. Oh, I so do."
"I know."
"But do you?" He challenged her softly with a pinch in his eyes. "Do you really know just how much I love you; how much I need you; how my life means absolutely nothing if you're not here to share it with me?"
She cupped her hand over his and offered him a smile of assurance. "I know, John. I know."
His hand stiffened underneath hers. "No you don't," he stated darkly. His hand twitched once underneath hers and then he roughly pulled it away from her. "And my name's Valeyard, Rose. I've already told you."
"Twenty five years of calling you John," she supplied indignantly. "Sorry if I fall into habit…"
"Tell me why you did it," he demanded with a growl, completely ignoring her words. "Why did you cross over? Do you want to leave me?"
She shook her head with only a minute shift of her head. "Of course I don't. You're my husband," she affirmed. "All I want to do is help you."
His voice fell to a harsh whisper. "I don't need help."
"Don't you?" Her eyes pinched in tight. "You spend almost every day in a Doctor's office supposedly doing rehabilitation and pain management. But for what, Vale?" She looked him up and down. "You weren't hurt in the accident. Not like me. Not like Jamie…"
"Don't mention that name."
"He was your son," she yelled with obvious frustration. "Our child. How can you just choose to forget him and everything he meant to the two of us? What kind of insensitive monster wants to forget about the single most important thing in his entire life?"
One side of his mouth twisted into a smile. "And you're telling me that I didn't suffer at all, Rose? You're calling me a monster because I can't bear the thought of losing my son in the way we did so I want to forget."
She lifted a finger to point into his chest. "That's not healthy. You're not letting yourself grieve, and therefore you're not letting me do it, either."
He looked away from her and lifted his nose to the ceiling.
"Is this all on the advice of your physician, Vale? Is this part of the rehabilitation and pain management regime set out by your Doctor Song?" She walked around to his side in an attempt to draw his focus back down to her. "Is agreeing for them to experiment on the two of us part of that rehab as well?"
"You really don't know what you're talking about," he said with an annoyed sniff and a refusal to look down at her. "Our sessions are…"
"Does she really fuck that well that you'll blindly agree to whatever nonsense that woman asks of you?"
His eyes flashed open and shot furiously toward her. "Just what are you accusing me of?"
Rose snorted out of her nose and shook her head. She turned from him with a dismissive wave of her hand. "And you dare get upset because I had a navigational issue with a Dimension Canon." She looked down her shoulder at him with an expression of absolute disgust. "You're hardly in a position to get all jealous because I almost bumped into someone I used to know."
Her breath escaped her with a violent exhale as Rose Tyler found herself suddenly shoved up against the wall by her irate husband. His breaths fierce as he bored into her with furious eyes.
"The man you loved," he corrected with horrific darkness in his tone. "The Doctor was a man you practically tore the universe apart for." He panted a couple of hot breaths against her face. "I have every right in the universe to get jealous because you took the very first opportunity you had to leap across walls to get to him."
She winced at the harsh grip he had on her shoulders. "Vale…"
"I have more than jealousy rights," he continued on a gravelly voice. "I have apocalyptic rights of utter fury."
She shuddered inside his grasp and battled not to whimper. "And what about my rights, Vale? What rights do I have when you're bedding another woman?"
His eye twitched. His lip curled. His voice dropped equal amounts octaves and decibels. "You are second best to no one else in my life," he said darkly. "You are the single most important creature in all creation in any life I've ever had. The love I have for you kills me with absolution if your eyes so much as look in the direction of another man." His exhale blew wetly through his nose. "And yet. In your eyes I'm still second to him, aren't I?"
"You're wrong," she corrected hotly. "I don't love him. Not anymore."
He relaxed his hold on her for a moment, only to tighten his grip and shove her against the wall again when he heard her voice of relief. "Then why did you run to him? Tell me, Rose. Why did you run straight to him the first moment you got?"
"I didn't," she managed in a strangled voice. "It was an accident. I didn't mean to materialize anywhere near him or the TARDIS."
He let out a laugh into her face. "I don't believe in coincidences."
She whimpered finally, the pain of each one of his long fingers digging into her skin becoming too much to bear. "Vale. Please. You're hurting me."
"You'll heal," he growled. "It's just a contusion."
Her eyes snapped open wide and her breath drew in hard. "What?"
"Your body's already in action to repair the blood flow under my fingers." He moved his face close to hers and closed his eyes as he inhaled deeply. "Lindos energy." He hummed appreciatively. "Time's little gift to her travellers. The hormone of repair and regeneration. Oh, but it curses through your veins, doesn't it?"
Rose's eyes were locked wide and her breaths came in shorts pants that heaved her chest up and down in time with her frantic heartbeat. "So you know…"
"That you're producing Lindos?" he asked in a slightly nonchalant manner. "Yeah. River might've mentioned that you produced a hormone that was rather a-typical of a human being." He dragged the flat of his tongue up along her neck, from collarbone to ear. He then slapped his tongue against the roof of his mouth and smiled as though he tasted a particularly amazing flavour on his tongue. "I told her it was nothing to concern herself with. It's just a throwback to time travelling by TARDIS." He kissed at her earlobe. "It's why you look so incredibly good for an old girl."
"And why you're looking more like fourty than seventy," she ventured carefully.
He pulled back sharply and tipped his head to one side to give her a wary look. "What're you suggesting?"
"Well…" The words were on her tongue. She slapped her tongue on the dried roof of her mouth ready to open the can of worms and see just how much he knew about the experimentation. Her breath drew in hard and deep and she brought her head forward to finally admit everything that Doctor Song was doing in her experiments. The time was now. She parted her lips and let a small breath of air ghost through her lips.
"Vale. I love you."
Both his and her brows knotted together in surprise at that. He pinched his eyes closed just slightly in suspicion. "Oh-Kay."
Rose tightened her grimace of surprise further and shook her head. That had not been her intention at all. What she wanted to say was that she was being horrifically abused and experimented on in some of the most painful methods known to mankind. She shook herself and tried to explain it again.
"Vale," she began again in a slow and measured pace. "You have to believe me." So far so good. "I love you more than anything else in this entire universe and beyond. And I will. Forever."