Chapter Text
Rose came barreling into the TARDIS, Jack hot on her heels. She nearly crashed right into the console and whirled around just in time to see the Doctor backing into the TARDIS, sonic screwdriver up and ready. As soon as the doors were shut, the Doctor was bounding over to the console and flicking switches and pushing buttons like a madman.
Her shoulders dropped from their defensive position as soon as she heard the familiar grinding noise of the TARDIS dematerializing (once so abrasive in Rose’s ears and now so comforting). Jack’s posture relaxed at the same time and Rose leaned into him, slumped with relief. The laugh bubbling up inside of her spilled out in waves, joined by the harsher, but no less delighted, laughter of Captain Jack Harkness.
“Cutting it a bit close, I’d say, Doctor,” Rose turned her grin on the Time Lord.
“Excuse me-” the Doctor’s eyes widened, playing at offense, “which one of us thought of distracting the fish people of this unnamed moon with some very fast thinking improv?”
“Jack, if I recall,” Rose’s eyes twinkled as she tilted her head at the Doctor.
Jack laughed triumphantly. “There- I knew she was on my side.” He swept her up in his arms and she smiled into his shoulder.
When she broke away from him, she put a hand on the Doctor’s arm. “You were brilliant, of course, Doctor,” she said sympathetically.
And there was that mile wide smile the Doctor was capable of. The one he wore when he blew up the building Rose worked in, the one he wore when an alien spaceship crashed in the middle of London, the one he wore when she had agreed to travel with him in the first place. Rose’s smile faded to something smaller, something truer.
“Oh, you two were fantastic,” the Doctor’s grin was blinding. Rose thought back to the time she had watched the sun consume the Earth and wondered if this is what it had felt like. She blinked, surprised at herself, and tried to focus on Jack’s fast talking play-by-play of their most recent adventure.
There was a moment when her mind flashed to Mickey back home; Mickey working in his dead end job, all alone. Sleeping, eating chips, and watching telly. For some reason, she felt guilty. She bit her lip as she looked back at Jack and saw the way he looked at the Doctor like the Earth looked at the Sun on that day billions of years away. A year ago and days ago and billions of years ago, she had been nineteen years old, just waiting for her life to begin.
He turned that same intense gaze on her and she looked down, feeling almost as bashful as she had on the day they first met. Suddenly dead end jobs, sleeping, eating chips, and watching telly seemed lifetimes behind her. “I gotta say,” Jack said, his eyes glinting with that vulnerable side of his that he rarely allowed to emerge, “I can’t believe I almost didn’t get a chance to see all of this.”
“You really think there was ever a chance you wouldn’t?” Rose couldn’t imagine a universe in which she and the Doctor had left without saving this rogue time traveler’s life. Jack shrugged, in a bad attempt at being casual, clearing his throat awkwardly.
Instead of answering her, he swept her up in his arms once more and twirled around the console room of the TARDIS. “Jack,” Rose said in a stage whisper, giggling.
“Rose,” he returned, his eyes sparkling.
“There’s no music,” she said in the same tone.
“Oh, but there could be,” Jack said carelessly, “Isn’t that right, Doctor?”
“Dancing again, you two?” The Doctor said teasingly, but then there was Moonlight Serenade again, permeating the air of the TARDIS. The comfortable slow dance calmed the remnants of Rose’s adrenaline and she finally took her first deep breath in hours. Resting her head on Jack’s shoulder, she looked over to see the Doctor smiling at the two of them.
It wasn’t one of those blinding, Earth consuming smiles, this time. No- this time it was something smaller, something deeper, something that (Rose liked to fancy) existed just for the three of them. She held out a hand to him and he hesitated for just a fraction of a moment before coming to join them.
Rose spun out of Jack’s arms and linked hands with the Doctor, laughing at his much more enthusiastic dancing. It was nothing like Jack’s cheesily romantic slow dancing, but it was everything Rose could have ever wanted. The Doctor was smiling and Rose couldn’t help but think that this was the best she’d ever felt.
Jack was watching them both with that hungry look in his eyes that wasn’t entirely for the lewd reasons he liked to pretend it was. The Doctor winked at him and Rose nearly laughed at the expression on the captain’s face. Eventually, taking pity on him, Rose spun the Doctor into Jack and watched as their conflicting styles somehow found a way to fold into one cohesive dance. Jack led the dance to begin with, but somehow, almost between blinks, Rose realized that the Doctor had begun to lead.
This. This was why she had left the only home she had ever known to travel with the Doctor. Not exploring space stations above Earth thousands of years after her time, not walking in the streets of a London that had existed hundreds of years before she had ever been born. No. It had been for this. It had been for dancing with the two people she cared for most. It had been for watching them dance and feeling just as alive and content as if she had been dancing too.
She took a picture in her mind, wishing she could immortalize this moment forever. In a feeling that had been both creeping up on her for weeks and hitting her over the head all at once, Rose felt that she was sure there wasn’t anywhere or any when in the universe she would rather be than here, in this moment, with Captain Jack Harkness and her Doctor.