Work Text:
It's just his stunned face, right off, right there in front of her.
And what's worse, he's got his credit stick halfway out of his wallet, his same old leather jacket hanging around his shoulders—still broad, but lankier, hungrier. The bars and medals on his lapel are so grimy with solar dust and engine grease they barely catch the light. Except one, cleaner than the rest.
He looks so perfectly in place here in the Last Call, so much like any other spacer, that Rose almost forgets to be shocked.
But she's always taken her cues from him, whether she wants to or not—so she feels her own mouth fall open, her hand freezing in a claw around a damp bar mop.
He gathers himself visibly: a straightening in his spine, a set in his shoulders like he's rebuilding his body out of metal before he opens his mouth. And he's usually quicker on his feet—Rose knows this—but she's had eight months to catch up, so she beats him to it for once. With relish.
She says, "Hello, Doctor."
"'Lo, Rose," the Doctor replies, so even and low. Not quite even enough to sand away the rough edges, or the frown lines that mar his lips when he says her name. There's something almost reassuring about that—good, she thinks, he ought to frown—but then she feels bad for being comforted by someone else's misery.
And then she remembers she's got no reason to feel badly about anything. Not to do with him.
He's the one who left her, after all. Just up and fucked off, after all their years of flying together.
He must see her conflicting emotions, because his jaw does that thing it does when he's getting defensive: it juts out and goes tight, and it makes his neck look about an infinity long before it retreats into his uniform shirt.
It's gorgeous. He's still gorgeous. Of course he's still gorgeous. And an ass. And alive.
Which is really the thing she should have noticed first.
When it clicks, it just about brings her to her knees.
But before she can speak or think or react, Bill—the other bartender, and pretty much her only close friend on the port—steps out from the kitchen and into her periphery, a tray of battered something-or-others balanced in her hands. The sight of the Doctor, with his face set and body sharpened, stops the woman in her tracks.
"It's fine," Rose tosses over her shoulder. Icily, she adds, "I used to know him."
"All right." She feels the air move as Bill slips behind her and walks toward the end of the bar, tray now shifted into one hand. Rose watches her wipe her free hand across her apron, touch lingering over her left pocket where they both know a blaster is tucked. Rose has a similar one, of course. They're basically standard on the port. She nods.
Bill, hand dropping, nods back. "Well, then. Enjoy your..." She looks between Rose and the Doctor with evident curiosity. "…reunion."
"Thanks, B."
"Anytime." Both hands back on the tray, Bill departs for one of the booths, leaving the pair alone again. Or, as alone as they can be in an open pub.
The momentary interruption only makes the reality of looking back at the Doctor more surreal: he hasn't disappeared in a puff of smoke, for whatever reason. He remains strangely solid, those same old sad blue eyes pinned on her.
A tiny eternity passes before he speaks. "It's good to see you."
And Rose actually laughs, because—
"Really? All right, sure. Yeah. You too, mate."
One of the other patrons—not a regular, and she doesn't recognise the uniform, so she can't really be arsed to care—belatedly becomes aware of the change in the air and shuffles off of his barstool, heading for the relative safety of the loos. Which reminds her that she's technically on the clock, and the clock may be running down for all of reality, but she's still got a shift to finish.
She bends back over her bar mop and starts polishing the plexisteel surface that separates her from the man she used to think was the love of her life.
"So, welcome to the Last Call, what can I get you?" He's still standing there—not saying anything, not really moving. In the corner of her eye, she can see his fingers lurching into motion, tucking his wallet back into the shadowed interior pocket of his jacket. She recognises the flying gloves he's wearing: fingerless, bare-knuckled, old, but the leather meticulously cared for. His head ducks, and a little haze of dust puffs off of his close-cropped hair. "Looks like you've just grounded, so… ginger and lime?"
It's just a tiny hit, that intimate knowledge, but she sees him stiffen at it. Yeah, you fucker, she thinks with a pleasant spitefulness. I remember everything. I was your emergency contact for seven years.
"Rose," he says quietly, "what are you doing here?"
She looks around at here: the pub at the end of the universe, named for its location at the last port of call before the Breach. All beyond that Breach is darkness, they're told—a darkness that's coming for them. Day by day, the Breach opens wider, a yawning mouth that will one day swallow what's left of the universe. Unless, of course, some very brave or very stupid pilot sweeps in and saves them all by getting a very good look at the inside of it.
And yet. The end inches closer while she pours drinks and counts credits.
"Where else would I be?" She shrugs. "Not like there's anyplace left to go."
It's a little flip, but it's mostly true. Most of humanity's colony planets have been gone a long, long time. And anyway, nearly everything she'd owned had been aboard their ship; he'd left her with the contents in her pockets and a kiss on the cheek, and neither of those things kept bills paid long.
She knows just how much those medals of his sell for on the black market. How it feels to watch them melt into slag.
"Needed a job, so I got one. And the port's not too bad. Rent's cheap this close to the Breach."
Both of their eyes are drawn to the pulsating crack in reality visible outside the porthole window. It's just one corner of it, barely legible: the edge navy blue against the velvet dark of space. The whole thing lightens toward the middle into a brighter cerulean. She can still recollect exactly what the Breach looks like when viewed without the interruptions of buildings and walls.
(The end of everything's the same colour as your eyes, she told the Doctor once, laughing as they passed a bottle back and forth and stared past that pale horizon—beyond the blue into deepest black—nothing but the atmo-shields protecting them from bare space.
That's the discontinuity field, he'd said, as if she didn't know. Back then, they'd both liked to pretend he had things left to teach her. He was leaning back, head resting against the cockpit window, easy and smiling. Our intel suggests it breaks any craft entirely apart when it hits and dissolves it into itself. But some pilots say it really reincorporates the ships somewhere else. Somewhen else. And when you wake up—if you wake up—you're someone else entirely.
She'd just laughed. That's not how it happens.
Oh, and how do you know?
I know, she'd told him, because firstly, everything in and around the Breach just kills you. No frills, no fuss. We've seen it. And secondly, she'd gone on, moving to straddle his waist with a loose smile, there's no version of reality where I'm not me, and you're not you, and we're not flying this hunk of junk around together.
Her knuckles had only gotten to rap twice on the bulky hull of their ship before he tugged her hand to his lips and kissed her palm.)
Rose shoves away the memory.
"Of course," she clears her throat, "I couldn't fly anymore, since my record's too 'spotty' for re-entry in the co-pilot program. Guess that's just what happens when your partner shows up on assignment solo, with no explanation or notice."
Venom soaks her voice, but he doesn't flinch at it. He stands taller, in fact. The defensive jut of his chin only gets higher and more defensive.
"It was a suicide mission."
"You're looking pretty good for a dead man, Doctor."
"I wasn't willing to put you at risk," he shoots back, volume rising. "At least tell me you understand that!"
"Sure, I understand it, you knob, I'm not an idiot!"
Somewhere nearby, Bill clears her throat. Loudly. A smattering of people tucked into booths and huddled around tables are staring at them, even though most patrons have the good manners to at least act like they're not. But Rose becomes aware that both she and the Doctor are leaning over the bar, teeth bared at one another like warnings between wolves.
"Hey, Cap, move it to the back, maybe?" Bill suggests. "Away from the glass bottles and… you know, volatile compounds?"
Rose carefully doesn't react to the nickname, but she knows the Doctor clocks it anyway. She can see it in his eyes, in the little easing of his mouth. Shit.
"Great idea, B." She gestures expansively behind her at the back office door, eyes never leaving the Doctor's. "After you, Commodore."
He flinches, but goes and doesn't wait for her to follow. For a flickering instant, it feels strange to walk behind him, instead of at his side. But she lets it pass, and lets the door swing shut behind them with a final-sounding thunk.
She gives him exactly three seconds to get the ball rolling. But he just stands there, not facing her, not speaking. He used to talk a mile a minute—questions and stupid jokes and tedious lectures, and she loved it all—but it's like he's forgotten how. So, once again, she speaks up first.
"So. Eight months." Rose strides toward his stationary body. "You drop me, and you don't call, you don't write." Slowly, slowly, she circles him before hopping up onto the edge of the unkempt desk normally occupied by her manager, Van Statten. (He's a lout and he steals her and Bill's tips, so she doesn't much care if she squashes his paperwork.) "I'm assuming you've been doing something really important, yeah, Doctor? Some real galaxy-saving, time-sensitive, highly classified stuff?"
Arms crossed, she stares at him. Waiting.
There goes that chin again. "As a matter of fact, it was, yeah."
"Good," she nods. "That's good. And I can see by that extra pin on your chest that you got that promotion they promised us—"
She waits for the flinch, but it doesn't come a second time. Fair enough. He's adaptable, her Doctor.
"—if we survived the mission, so that's good, too. Good for you."
"Rose," he starts.
"Did you do it, then? Save us all, close the Breach, and leave a hundred good officers to burn in the fallout?"
"Rose."
"Did the Bad Wolf survive, or did you chuck her, too?" she asks vengefully, driven by this urge that feels alien and cold. "Did you sell the ship for scrap, Doctor?"
He moves in an instant, fast as ever, and when his hands hit the table—it's not loud, but with a kind of inexorable force. It sets them nose-to-nose. "Rose," he repeats, slow and deliberate. She tries not to watch his lips, but his voice hollows out her name like a fist in the chest. Her mouth feels dry. "Say whatever you like, goodness knows I deserve it. But you have to know I would never—never—scrap our ship. Not for anything in the universe."
Something breaks (our ship) inside her (our ship) and she feels herself lurching forward in this graceless (our ship) rush.
The kiss lands askew, heavy on his bottom lip. She pulls the pink flesh between her teeth and bites down—just a bit, quietly chiding. It's less punishment than he deserves.
But the Doctor seems to welcome it. A keening sound winds up his throat and can't be contained by his teeth. His hands abandon the table and rise to cup her jaw. And it's like eight months just melt away—every shift at the Last Call; every frigid night spent on her matchbox-sized balcony, looking at what stars still remain; every dream that turned into a nightmare of the Bad Wolf, veiled in blue light, dissolving into atoms. It's all gone in an instant.
The Doctor tastes like metal. Like recycled air. He's got grease under his nails. But she's never cared about that before, and she doesn't now. Rose just tugs him closer, her fingers making smears in the dust on his jacket.
"Wait," he mumbles, though his lips still seek hers, and it makes her smile. "I came here to ask you something."
"Liar. You came here for a drink. You were shocked to see me, I could tell."
He nods. "I was surprised. I asked around and one of the officers told me where you were, but I didn't believe it. 'Not my Rose,' I said. 'She'd never settle down.' That's what I told them."
"Shows what you know," she says, feeling warmly enough towards him to start teasing. To accept the ease with which he says things like my Rose as he moves to drop little kisses all over her face. "All right, then, what did you come to ask me?"
"To come with me, of course."
"But come where? Back aboard the Bad Wolf? I told you, the agency booted me. I'm not anybody's Captain anymore."
"Back to the Breach."
The Doctor's words stop her short, her lips, poised to receive another kiss, sinking into a frown. "What d'you mean 'back'? Nobody comes back from the Breach. It's… it's nothing, it's nowhere. It's a void."
Fear grips her as she realises, all of the sudden, that the man she loves has come back from a suicide mission, but that's not to say he's come back unscathed.
She's heard whispers of pilots—excellent, top notch pilots—who have returned from near-Breach assignment addled, uncertain of the boundary between the real and the illusory.
"Oh, but we've been wrong about that, Rose. All of us, so wrong, and for years!" The words trip out quickly, almost laughingly, pushed along by his evident eagerness. "The discontinuity field—that's everything. Limitless possibility packed into so small a space that it appears to vaporise anything that passes through it. But it doesn't! It disperses it along an infinity of divergent pathways. Which… doesn't really sound any better, I know, but it is. It's not destructive—at all. It's… regenerative."
Trying to take in this new information makes Rose feel unbalanced, unmoored. Because it seems unreal—delusional, even. But while there's a familiar mania in the Doctor's eyes, it's just that: familiar. There is no hint of the dazedness or stuttering panic that's said to exist in others who've suffered prolonged Breach exposure. His hands do not shake.
He's just smiling at her, running warm palms over her shoulders, and telling her something utterly impossible.
"But, listen, there's more to it." His voice is urgent, pleading. "More than the discontinuity field and the no man's land we've been flying around all these years. Of course, UNIT's had satellites gathering data for decades, and I've read papers—just postulations, mostly, nothing concrete—but now there's hard evidence! There's confirmation. Rose. The Breach isn't the end of everything."
"Doctor," she chokes out, dread creeping in again. "What are you saying?"
"It's a door. And we can go through it."
Just then, Bill offers what has to be the most poorly-timed knock in all the universe. Her muffled voice filters through the door. "Er, Rose? It's shift change in ten and Van Statten's gonna be here in a minute."
"Shit. Hang on. Bill, can you—?" Raising her voice, she calls out, "You can come in, B. We're all good here," as she disentangles herself from the Doctor's grasp and slides off the office desk, scrambling for a blank, or at least unimportant-looking, sheaf of paper. The door creaks open, and she sees Bill smiling sheepishly and exchanging a wave with the Doctor. For his part, his shoulders look looser, lighter, like he's shed a weight he was never meant to carry alone.
Once she works out exactly what the hell is going on, she plans to kick his ass into next Sunday for that.
But that's a consideration for another time.
"Bill, remember the doomsday clock?" Rose asks, glancing up again with a half-smothered grin.
Leaning in the doorway, her friend smirks back. "Let me guess: we just hit midnight."
"On… the… dot," she pronounces, putting the punctuation on her hurried note. It's not exactly a formal two-weeks' notice, but for all anybody knows, the universe hasn't got two weeks. And Henry Van Statten can fuck himself, Rose thinks with a giggle.
Bill's laugh is slightly less deranged, but no less enthusiastic. "Damn. Okay. Congratulations, Cap."
"Thanks, B."
"Should I be following this?" chimes the Doctor.
"Nope."
"'Fraid not, mate."
"All right. Just checking."
Heart pounding, Rose counts out the credits she's due—plus about a month of stolen tips—and tosses half of it across the room to Bill, who nearly fumbles the stack before clasping them close to her chest.
"For the shifts you covered," she explains. "And the ones you'll be covering 'til I get back."
"The hell would you come back here for?" teases Bill, and the Doctor tries—and fails—to contain a snort. "Get out of here. Captain Tyler."
Surveying the room one last time, she can think of nothing else she needs, nothing else she wants, beyond grabbing the Doctor's hand and dragging him to the docks. And for a moment, she feels as if this is all too good to be true—too much for real life. A dream, maybe? She's dreamed a hundred times of him coming back. Maybe this is just another idle fantasy.
But if it is, it feels real.
When the Doctor follows her to the doorway and takes her hand, that's real.
When Bill grips her in a tight hug, it's real.
And when Rose leaves the Last Call for the last time, it's viscerally real. She absorbs the first smack of cold night air that's always rushing through the port, carrying with it the distant sounds of warp engines and lowered landing gears. The Doctor gives her fingers a squeeze.
"Anything you need to take c—?"
"Nothing," Rose rushes out, realising she's actually trembling with excitement. She feels as if she'll burst if she doesn't get back in the sky, right now, right this moment. "I'm paid up for the month. After that, Ianto'll just get a new roommate."
The Doctor frowns. "Who's Ianto?"
Snorting, she drags him away from the pub, toward the docks. "Tell you later," she promises, and then she's careening into a run. The air whips at her bare arms—she forgot her coat, and she's still wearing her grubby work apron with a blaster pistol bouncing against her knee—but she doesn't care. She feels weightless.
When they burst out onto the docks, it doesn't take her long to spot it: that bright blue hull, with the shape of a howling wolf in profile laser-painted in gold on the port side. She looks better than ever, Rose is shocked to realise. Unlike the Doctor, their craft's spent the last several hours becoming spotless, her lettering gleaming clear in the murky evening. The glass window of the cockpit is sleek and dark.
There's no controlling it now, the racing of her heart.
In a second, she's beside the ship, pressing an open palm against the metal, nearly forgetting the Doctor entirely. Greeting the ship is like greeting another dear old friend—but one she's only ever thought of fondly, even longingly, in the time they've been apart. The Bad Wolf is warm, like she remembers, her inner workings pulsating with potential energy—with the urge to go, go, run, and never stop running.
"Hello, you," Rose whispers, stroking the smooth metal. "I'm sure we've got a lot to catch up on, don't we?"
The Doctor calling her name pulls Rose from her reverie, his smile fond. "I know you'd rather sit there and gossip about my driving, but you should really look inside. I've made a few upgrades."
Her jaw goes slack. "You upgraded my ship?" she cries. "Without running it past me first?"
"Apologies, Captain." He answers her shocked accusation with a broad smile and a laugh. "It really had to be done. She was in rough shape when we first re-emerged. The Breach is hell on a vessel's internals, y'know."
"Hang on, you've actually gone into the Breach? Yourself?" Nervously, she finds herself stroking the surface of the ship, as if she can somehow soothe away whatever invisible damage was done while performing that impossible feat.
"We'll get to that, I promise. But, here," and he extends an arm, gesturing, "see for yourself."
In front of him, the cabin door swings wide, and a familiar golden light spills out.
Taking a last breath of frigid portside air, Rose pushes off the hull and rushes—actually, she runs—into the waiting embrace of the Bad Wolf.