preserved_ginger

Title: Storm Front Rising
Character(s): Ten. Rose. Mentions of Nine and the Bad Wolf
Pairing(s): Ten/Rose
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I am not the BBC!
A/N: This is unbeta-ed, so if it's terrible you can all blame me ;)
Setting: Season 2, sometime before Doomsday
Summary: He'll say anything, do anything, go anywhere.

And it's all I can do
To be with you
Tonight as the sun goes down

Runrig: The Only Rose

For all he's the New New Doctor, at heart he's still very much the same man he's always been. Terrified to commit to anyone or anything because he knows he'll always out-last it. He's learned – through bitter, painful experience – that there's nothing worth having that doesn't hurt in the losing.

He fails, miserably, at trying to get that across coherently. And it isn't until he's tried more than once that he realises why this is.

His hearts aren't in it.

For once, he thinks, he wants to know what it is like to let himself love somebody. Love somebody properly.

And who better to let himself love than the pink and yellow girl he more than suspects he's already half in love with anyway? The girl – that golden goddess – who brought him the peace, the absolution, he thought he'd never know. It had been an honour, a privilege, he didn't deserve.

The words are simple, in the end, even for him. He promises that he'll never leave her, will never up and disappear without her (or not without a bloody good reason, at least), swears that he'll never leave her behind. He'll say anything, do anything, go anywhere. Whatever he needs to do to keep her with him, he'll do it.

And as the two of them listen to her promise of "for ever", he knows – now it's too late, now he's fallen – that this, this, is why he's never committed himself before.

There's a storm front rising; he can feel it.

He's sworn to keep her with him always, yet he lives in fear that this time he won't be able to deliver. He'll do anything. Go anywhere. But he refuses, while there's strength in his bones and life in his body, to even think of ever giving her up.