Archive of Our Own ^beta

Song

The Doctor clutches tightly to Rose’s hand to stop them from being pulled apart in the press of bodies. It hasn’t been long since the Beast and the pit, and they’ve both been holding on to each other a little more. Even in the TARDIS, they’ve been sticking close, Rose reading in the console room while the Doctor tinkers.

The lights flash on the stage, and the crowd surges forward in anticipation. Rose stumbles, but the Doctor catches her, his cool hand slipping under the vintage leather jacket that she picked from the wardrobe room to lie firm against her stomach.

Just one simple night. Maybe they’ll get away with it this time. To relax seems too much like tempting fate, and she can’t help but think, when are the monsters going to show up?

The band takes the stage, greeted by yells and whistles, and the Doctor lets go quickly. She can feel him behind her, though, the tiny gap between their bodies as charged as the moment between the guitarist picking up his instrument and the first note of the song.

Morrissey grabs the microphone, stares intensely out, and begins to sing, his voice incongruously sweet.

"Sweetness,
Sweetness, I was only joking when I said,
you should be bludgeoned in the head"

"Rose, why exactly do you love this band so much?" The Doctor shouts into her ear. She could try to tell him about finding Jackie's old cassettes when she was fourteen. She could say how, when the next year she fell in love with a rock musician, and six months later, cried her eyes out over him, she felt every moaned word like it came from her own heart. But its too loud to talk, and, really, he should be able to guess a little of that himself.

"He's got great hair," she mouths, and winks. The Doctor distractedly touches his own wild spikes, as if to make sure they are still properly gravity-defying.

She swings her own big 80s do over her shoulder and shouts, "Dance!" And wonder of wonders, he follows her, as loose-limbed and awkward in his suit and tie as Morrissey himself. The spot lights from the stage paint his grinning face in flashes of blue, green and pink. Rose grins back, and lets the music fill her, for as long as the universe will let this moment last.

At the set break, she needs a drink, and coming back with her beer and her change, she sees the Doctor beckon her over to a ledge at the back of the club. He takes the glass so she can climb up, and they sit, legs dangling, with a perfect view over the heads of the crowd.

“He does have a certain sense of style,” the Doctor says loftily, and back here he can speak at something approaching normal volume. “But I’ll have you know, I don’t need a liter of gel for my hair.”

“Bed head is a special Time Lord gift then?” Even in the shadows, he can probably hear her raise her eyebrows.

“Yep! Superior genetics. Feel it if you don’t believe me!” He leans down and she rubs her hand through his hair, which does seem to be naturally springy. He leans into her touch, practically purring.

“All right, I admit it! Morrissey is a pale comparison of your good looks!” She laughs. “For a 900-year-old alien, you are awfully vain.”

She takes a sip of her beer and almost chokes as the thought suddenly strikes: The Doctor claims his London accent is the result of imprinting on Rose’s voice like a baby duckling. What if the new new Doctor’s style is somehow an imprint of Rose’s teenage obsession? If that’s the case, she should probably be thankful that he doesn’t resemble a Backstreet Boy.

Fortunately the second set begins before she can contemplate that bizarre image for too long. Morrissey drapes himself across an amp, holding the mic like an afterthought, and sings,

“Take me out tonight
Where there’s music and there’s people who are young and alive”

This was the song that she had played over and over in the days after things ended with Jimmy. The words are sad, but she found that if she listened long enough, somehow, it wasn’t actually depressing at all. She glances up at the Doctor next to her, who is seemingly absorbed in the performance. She gets so few chances to observe him when he is sitting still, even though now all she can see is a silhouette.

They have never talked about her decision not to leave him behind in the pit. She isn’t sure if he even knows about the desperate struggle she had fought to avoid being put on the shuttle. Maybe he would assume that she was only too afraid to be abandoned alone out of her time. She can’t put into words that he has become so woven into her life that even on Earth she would be broken without him.

He is here, and for now he is hers, and they look like any other couple going to a gig. When they danced, she almost felt that way herself, but now, though they are sitting close, thighs and arms touching, she is a stranger to the thoughts in his head. He turns toward her, and she looks away, afraid to be caught staring. She isn’t going to break this fragile equilibrium between them. It scares her, to be so in love, and to know, since meeting Sarah Jane, just how little that will matter in the end.

She looks back at the Doctor, ready to break this silence between them, to make an offhand comment about Morrissey’s gyrating hips.

He must have been looking at her, to have to turn away like he was embarrassed. But then like he was being drawn some how, he slowly turned back. She couldn’t see his face at all. She suddenly feels so young and foolish, because what do the ghosts of her teenage pain mean in comparison to the suffering he has witnessed?

But in her own way, she understands loneliness, and she wants so desperately to do something, she’s not sure what, but she wishes the depth of her love was enough to keep that pain away from him forever. It doesn’t work that way, she knows, and a familiar ache settles deep into her chest.

She is never going to say anything.

The Doctor’s eyes are still on her, and she wonders if, as the song goes on, he can literally see the passing of the moment, the paths that have lead them here, and the ones that will sooner or later lead them away from each other.

“And in the darkened underpass
I thought my time had come at last
But a strange fear gripped me and I just couldn’t ask”

Maybe in all those infinite other possible futures, nothing happens next. They go back to the TARDIS, a little happy and a little sad, and the universe continues on its way.

But Rose has learned a thing or two about time, and she knows: even the most improbable thing happens sometime. And of all the inflinite branching futures, she must have found the right one, because at the moment she looks away, the Doctor grabs her shoulders and pulls her close, so that his mouth is right next to her ear as the words tumble from him,

“I’m asking, Rose, I am asking, please” and she can’t react, she can only clutch at him and nod, but surely he can feel that, because he is kissing her, sweet and insistent, and just a little desperate.

And all those other futures spin into dust, because they decree it.