Sweet as Sugar

Sweet as Sugar Chapter Twenty Seven

Disclaimers Apply

A/N Goddess Foxfeather is a wondermous beta, truly the BUSIEST WOMAN ALIVE ™ and deserving of a heap of muse kibble and glomps. ;) Thanks to everyone for reading and reviewing as you can! The links to the other chapters are included below.

“So this is a tomb,” Rose said carefully, willing ages of human conditioning to stop sending chills down her spine. “A huge…tomb.”

The Doctor nodded curtly, his eyes roving over every surface of the space, lips pressed into a thin line of anger, his entire body so tense that he was fairly vibrating. “This is the tomb of Rassilon… remind me to tell you about it sometime when our lives aren’t in danger…” He paused and slid her a glance that sparkled with his old amusement. “Never, then,” they said as one and for a flashing second, they both shared a smile. Expression slipping from his face, the Doctor once again surveyed the room. The Rani had left them alone, retreating into her TARDIS and vanishing from their presence in a grinding whirr of noise and shift of reality. “Sometimes,” he said suddenly, returning his gaze to Rose, “I wish I had told you more about the Gallifrey that was, about the history of my people, of the Time Lords and the common Gallifreyans, of everything that led up to the Time War…”

Looking on him, Rose had the disturbing realization that he reminded her of a little boy in that moment. She had often thought him boyish before, even felt motherishly protective over him, but this naked, raw sense of loss skating over his features, the look of a child who had become separated from his mother in the shops and was realizing, for the first time, that she could be removed from his life forever, disconcerted Rose greatly. “Doctor…” she trailed off, unsure of what to say. She was scared, angry, and not a little uncomfortable, but something in her tugged hard, pulling her towards the Doctor. Her feet padded across the smooth, cool floor, no trace of dust or dirt littering the long unused space; she did not realize that she was reaching for him until her arms went around his neck, her breasts and stomach pressing against his back. He stiffened in her arms, inhaling sharply, and she expected him to push her away, tell her to stop or even just wait it out. She knew how he could get when he was upset. She rested her cheek against his back, feeling the double beat of his hearts through the fabric of his shirt and the thickness of skin and bone between his shoulder blades. An odd thought skittered across her mind, something about the composition of his skeleton, but was shoved aside as the Doctor turned in her arms, his own moving about her waist and tightening, lengthening the embrace as he exhaled roughly into her hair, ruffling the dirty, lank strands. “I’m getting you all over with my sweat and filth,” she sighed, moving as if to pull away and finding that he would not let her go.

“I’m so sorry, Rose,” he murmured, not minding the smell of her sweat and filth, as she put it, in the least. If she only had any idea how complex the scent of her skin was, of how he could construct a whole imaginary day from just the briefest whiff of her scent in the TARDIS control room, of how it lingered on his coat and shirt after she gave him one of her impulsive hugs.

“Don’t be,” she said firmly, tilting her face up to meet his gaze. “This isn’t your fault—and if you getting maudlin on me now, I’ll… I’ll… I’ll do something quite rude with your sonic screwdriver!” She slapped his upper arm lightly and gave him a bright, albeit false, smile. “So how badly are we stuck?”

The Doctor sighed and released his hold on her, feeling a spark of amused comfort when Rose took his hand, lacing her fingers tightly with his. “The Rani will likely be back; she is not one to abandon her experiments. It gives her great joy to watch them unfold. My own TARDIS, the poor girl, is back in the Venusian domes. Jack and Bara might be able to figure it out well enough to operate but the old girl is tetchy and even if they COULD get her to cooperate, they don’t know where to find us…” He frowned and reached into his pocket, withdrawing the now-familiar key on it’s string. He stared at it consideringly, lips pursing into a near-pout. Rose chewed her lower lip gently, bouncing on her toes as a glimmer of hope began to blossom in her chest. She breathed his name but he shook his head, negating her nascent excitement. “We’re too far,” he said with a trace of bitterness. “I can try but I don’t want to risk getting it lost between here and there, falling through space and time without us along for the ride.” He pocketed the key but did not seem too disappointed. Still grasping Rose’s hand, he began to walk the perimeter of the tomb, murmuring under his breath as they moved. “Our new Eve. She called you our new Eve. Ours. Gallifreyan lore does not have an Eve,” he continued, pausing before a particularly graphic and gory frieze depicting some ancient battle. In the foreground, a man held a disembodied hand aloft, all eyes in the image turned upwards in something akin to awe as they gazed upon the hand. The Doctor spared the frieze a bare glance before turning to Rose, his eyes bright and intense in the way that made her fearfully excited, heat pooling in her belly and knees trembling a bit.

“What is it?” Her tongue flicked out to moisten her suddenly too-dry lips and she could not help but note the Doctor’s gaze sharpening, following the motion. Color bloomed in her cheeks but she did not look away.

“She’s not recreating Gallifrey. She’s recreating it in her image. The goddess, the Eve… It makes sense now!” He moved quickly, dropping her hand but grabbing her by the upper arms and pulling her in close. She gasped but he was too fast, kissing her soundly on her parted lips. It was not a bittersweet kiss like their first had been nor was it a possessed kiss like their second. It was a purely joyful kiss, the kiss of a man who had seen a light at the end of the tunnel and it was spilling over into the world around him. “This is fantastic, Rose!” he crowed, spinning her around like they were children, gripping her hands so tightly that her fingers ached from it, but she did not care. She giggled at his sudden explosion of mirth, not caring that the tattered clothes she wore twisted about her hips or that the tomb of some long dead Gallifreyan dominated the room. He swept her up into his arms and kissed her again, this time so hard her lips hurt.

“Doctor,” Rose gasped as he set her back on her feet, “explain it to me before I think you’ve gone even more mad than before!” Not that she minded this bit of madness, she thought distantly. The glowing energy she had harbored since the Daleks was humming to life again, straightening her spine and making her feel like she could do anything, so long as the Doctor was there. Goddess, the voice whispered. You could be the goddess here…

“She recreated Gallifrey from the shards, like trying to glue a vase back together after you drop it, yeah?” He was moving then, hurrying around the tomb, looking for something Rose could not see. “No matter how well you glue it, it’s not the same vase. The cracks are still there, there’s bits missing and your mum is going to yell at you when she finds it stuffed in the back of the china cabinet at Christmas.” He stopped at a paneled frieze opposite Rose, behind where the Rani’s TARDIS had stood. “Come on then,” he smiled broadly, something of his old good humor lighting his eyes. “Time waits for no one. Well, except me,” he grinned, winking at her.

Rose could not help it; she laughed. Raking her fingers through her messy hair and tugging her clothes so that they covered her a bit better, she crossed the tomb to join the Doctor. “Where are we going?” she asked, eyes widening as the frieze slid open at his touch, revealing a long, dark hall, something that seemed to be a running theme for them of late.

“We’re going to find the cracks.”