Archive of Our Own

You tried.

The Titanic.

Krakatoa.

A bomb in a department store in London.

Each time: hoping to be just a little too late making your escape. Waiting for the survival instinct that’s kept you bound to time’s arrow to be just a little too slow.

Your dreams are of death: Gallifrey’s, your own, Earth’s, and always a voice shouting coward! The voice changes, but is always yours.

Cowardice is irony, really: it kept you from killing until there was no choice but to kill everyone, and now it keeps you alive when you’ve no wish to be. The knowledge hums through your mind like a burning wire, because you should have gone down fighting, or at least gone down with them, with—

people who hated you, people who threw you out of your home, off your whole planet, over and over, until they had some dirty work that would’ve soiled their pretty clothes and soft hands

—with the rest of your people. You, the one they scorned, the one who saved them, the one who killed them, shouldn’t be the last. But you are, and last is not yet an ending.

Irony is what holds you up. It goes on and on.

Then there’s pink and yellow and the word run.

*

Even with Rose, you keep running into things where most people, most sane people anyway, would run away. But with a companion it’s beginning to feel like your nature rather than a death wish you can’t fulfill on your own, because your hand isn’t empty, because the wrist your fingers wrap around beats with the simple constancy of a one-two pulse, steady and alive.

And she laughs, oh how she laughs.

You couldn’t bear to see her hurt. And so that’s how it happens: just when you’re furious with her and terrified for her—because she knows how sad you are—and you don’t know whether you love her or hate her or which is worse. She makes a little mistake, touching her infant self, the kind of mistake that Time Lord children were taught to fear from their earliest Academy days, and—

Well, it’s you or her. Just when you’d decided to live, you give yourself to the Reaper. And death isn’t the relief you once expected.

Then Pete Tyler, stupid ape, does that thing stupid apes do that evolved species have forgotten: he gives his life for something he barely understands, not out of desperation or even love, but because he can help, and Rose’s open heart and stubborn courage come from somewhere.

And you are alive again, just in time to watch a simple brave man die what looks like a simple human death, wept over in an ordinary tragedy.

It’s not the first time you’ve felt it, the world almost coming undone around you, and then miraculously pulling itself back together with a vertigo-inducing snap. It happens all the time, distantly, and you’ve long since learned to ignore the twinges. But it doesn’t often happen to you. Not like this. Even Rose feels it. You can tell.

You stumble back to the TARDIS with your arm around her and your jumper damp with her silent tears, fighting back nausea all the while. This isn’t how cheating death usually works, but it’s still not a pleasant experience.

In the control room you fumble one-handed with the inside lock and deposit Rose on the seat. Out of the corner of your eye, you see her draw her knees up and rest her head on them, but you let her be. You’ve no wish but to get as far from here as you can, as fast as you can. But as you pump up the rotor and adjust the vectors, you realize you can’t think. You could just as easily fly into a black hole as land somewhere safe.

The nausea and pain are overwhelming. Suddenly it’s all you can do to cling to the edge of the console and try not to heave.

You were—

“Doctor?”

Oh Rassilon, you were—

“You were…were you dead?” she asks, peering over her knees, her voice barely over a whisper.

You jerk your head up and down briefly, unable to trust your stomach if you open your mouth. Yes. You were dead.

But there was something else.

“Oh, God, I’m—”

But just then you can’t bear to hear it, and your stomach turns over, and you run from the room.

*

You want her to follow you and you really don’t. She knocks at the door as you’re rinsing your mouth and wishing this bathroom had some kind of toothpaste.

“Doctor? Are you alright?”

No, but you say nothing. You open the door. Rose has her arms wrapped around herself protectively, and as soon as she sees you emerge, her eyes drop to her shoes.

You step around her to head down the corridor, but something makes you take her hand as you pass. You don’t want to think about why as her pulse beats louder than ever against your fingertips. You walk just a little too fast so she has to trot to keep up.

*

As you brush your teeth behind your closed bathroom door, you can hear her in your bedroom. You know she’s trying not to invade—she’s touching nothing—but she can’t help looking. You wonder what she thinks of the black and dark blue, the silver High Gallifreyan calligraphy, the bare walls, bare desk and shelves.

When you open the door she has her back to you, the pale gold light of her hair shining in the deep-space dark of the room. She is studying the large wall hanging, the focal point of this space, beautiful silver asymmetry on midnight blue. It’s the first thing you see every time you wake, every time you enter, a stark and mesmerizing beacon.

She turns as you enter and you can see the question in her eyes, curious and fearful and exhausted: why am I here? But she doesn’t voice it any more than you do.

“What’s this mean? It’s beautiful.”

You step between her and the hanging. Silver in the dark; gold and Rose and a steady one-two. Gently you lift her right wrist and wrap your fingers across the pulse point.

She beats through you.

Before you realized you’ve moved, you have her against the wall, your hand still wrapped around her wrist. She gasps the first time your lips meet hers, but then she rises up, nearly ferocious. Desperate.

“You—were—dead,” she gasps between kisses. Her tears bead on your cheek. The hand that’s not pinned between you fists in the back of your jacket.

You draw back just long enough to thread your free fingers into her hair and pull her head forward against your shoulder. She sniffles and clutches harder at the leather.

“Yeah, I was. But—” and this is that other thing “—I didn’t want to be.”

She looks up at you, and you can see the words forming in her mind—what do you mean, of course you didn’t—and then she sees, and simply nods and kisses you again, softly this time.

“That’s what it means,” you say, dropping your gaze and nodding in the direction of the wall hanging. You didn’t mean to explain, but it spills out of you. “It means life when life should’ve been impossible. Not survival but being alive when there shouldn’t be a way. It means the moment when life wins.”

Before you brought Rose onto the TARDIS you would have said life when life should have ended, and cursed the irony. Now you caress her wrist again. “It means this.” One-two.

She watches your fingers on her skin, and you wonder what she feels, the skin contact, the gentle pressure on all the tiny bones. Life. What is life to a human—such a fragile creature, rocketing through a too-short existence along a knife’s edge between mortal danger and possibility?

She regards your fingers on her wrist seriously, and then dips her head to kiss your hand. Her breath dances across the tiny hairs, and suddenly you know: this thing in you, the rush of heat in your nerves, this is human. This is alive: fleeting and reckless, the intense jolt of mortality that your people feared and the wildness they banned.

“May I?” She looks from your fingers up to your face, and you nod wordlessly, hoping she isn’t too shocked by what she’ll find along your wrist.

But she doesn’t go for your wrist. She slides her free hand gently to the center of your chest, then slightly to the left, where she would find a human heart. Her brow furrows, and she moves her hand, searching along your sternum and ribs, and you struggle to keep your thoughts on circulation as the soft wool between your skin and hers warms enticingly.

“But you’ve—” she draws back in astonishment, wide-eyed, then presses her ear to your chest.

“Got two hearts, yeah.”

You don’t know quite what you were expecting: laughter or amazement or discomfort or even fear. (But not disgust, never disgust, not from her.) You weren’t expecting her to cry again.

“Sorry,” she chokes out. “Sorry, sorry, it’s like—twice as many hearts. Twice as dead, it’s silly—”

For a moment the rush of her pulse and yours seems twice as heady. But then it’s settling, slipping down between the twinned bones in your arms, into the web of tendons that govern your fingers, into every motion, every nerve impulse and every muscle fiber that lets you reach gently for her face, draw her head back up, and kiss her again. Slowly, not desperately. Gently, like alive isn’t going to disappear as soon as her lips no longer touch yours.

**

The next time you draw Rose into your bedroom, the shelves are not bare: Dostoyevsky and Rushdie, Atwood and Butler and Whitman. There are mechanical odds and ends on the desk. There’s a new comfortable chair with a blanket thrown over the back, more silver-grey than bottomless midnight blue, and a novel open on the armrest. Your pulse beats hard and hot, and in between the beats, you can feel the one-two of alive.