preserved_ginger

Title: Impossible Is Just A Word
Character(s): Ten. Rose.
Pairing: Ten/Rose (as ever)
Rating: PG-13
Setting: Set during that scene in Doomsday, but it’s not what you’d expect.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Author’s Notes: No idea how to classify this one. Flangst, perhaps? Sparked from an idea

principia_coh gave me back at the beginning of May.
Summary: She’d said her good-byes, given last hugs.

“I’m still just an image. No touch.”

She heard him, knew that he meant it was impossible, but didn’t care. He had called so many things impossible before, that had ended up patently not so, that until she could prove that it really was the case this time she was choosing not to believe him.

So she continued to move her arm towards his face, hand outstretched —

And found, as she cupped his cheek with her right hand and watched his eyes flutter closed as he leant into her touch, that she had been right to disbelieve him. The next thing she knew his arms were around her waist, holding her against him in a hug fiercer and tighter than any he’d ever given her before. And then, just as quickly, he pulled away from her; his eyes were wild as he started babbling some nonsense about how he had “kissed it all out of her” in a hoarse, rough voice she had never heard him use before.

He seemed dangerously close to breaking down as his hands moved to gently caress her face; in fact, the tone he used begging her to “let go of it, Rose, please; let go. For me?” sounded choked full of tears.

“My Doctor.”

The words sounded strange, even to her; they echoed in her head and seemed to come from somewhere outside of herself. She could do nothing but watch as the Doctor’s eyes went wide with what she was uncomfortably sure was abject terror.

“Rose?”

His voice sounded very, very calm to her ears but she knew him well enough to hear the betraying waver in it that told her how scared for her he was. And then she answered him, speaking once again in that otherworldly voice:

“She said to you that she’d never leave you. I am but the means by which she’ll keep her promise.”

What the hell that was supposed to mean was anybody’s guess, she figured; but if it meant she never had to be apart from him again, meant that she could give him ‘for ever’, she’d be willing to at least give it a shot. She couldn’t stay at home with her mother all her life, after all. Nobody did that. She’d said her good-byes, given last hugs. There was nothing holding her here any more.

And he’d kept his promise, he’d not left her behind (even if he had seemed completely gobsmacked by this turn of events, he’d recovered soon enough). She thought it was more than time that she kept hers.

She held out her hand to her Doctor, and watched him take it – his worried eyes never leaving her face – and reach for her with his other hand, obviously able to see something in her face. The last thing she was aware of before losing consciousness was having him catch her as she fell.

And the first things she was aware of when she woke again were a familiar green-gold glow and her Doctor’s worried face looking down at her.

“Oh, Rose. My brilliant Rose. What have you done?”