Title: Meet Me Anywhere.
Author: Iby.
Rating: G.
Genre: Angst, romance, fluff, hurt/comfort.
Characters and Pairings: The Tenth Doctor, Rose; Rose/Ten.
Spoilers: Based around a theme at the end of The Stolen Earth. Nothing terribly explicit, but I borrowed an idea and it is there.
Author's Note: My flist and I (and I suspect a lot of you good folks) have been going spare since the airing of The Stolen Earth, so this was written as a cheer!up and a fix!it.

Summary: They're close, they're almost there, but then memory takes her and she freezes, stops still. It's up to the Doctor to run the extra few feet, to reach her, to touch her, just as she did for him so many years ago.



Dodging and weaving his way through the haphazardly surging crowd, the Doctor frantically searched for any sign of Rose. He had three words, and three words only, on his frankly magnificent mind.

Pink; And; Yellow. Pink and Yellow, Pink and Yellow, Pink and Yellow, Pink and Yellow, Pink and Yellow, Pink and Yellow, Pink and Yellow, Pink and Yellow.

The natives were an interesting shade of purple and green, but there were so very many of them, and the panic and chaos that had taken over the city square hampered his search drastically.

There! There! Hope zinged through his body and pooled in his belly. Yellow, Yellow, Yellow, blessed Yellow! Given the chance, he’d paint the TARDIS that very colour in honour of it. “Rose!” he shouted, jumping up and down over the thinning crowd of locals and waving his arms about wildly to catch her attention, “Rose! Rose! Over here!”

She span around, searching for the person calling her name, and when her eyes met his he felt gravity pack up and go home for a spot of brunch.

His feet were moving entirely of their own volition, which was lucky as he was fairly certain he’d have stumbled like a newly born foal from nerves.

She was pelting, bless her short legs, across the ruined square and the locals that were left were jumping out of her way with grumpy tuts and shakes of their rectangular heads. Suddenly, she stopped. She stopped dead. For a second, her gaze lingered over his shoulder and then it fell to the ground as she started to cry.

He risked but a second to look behind him to check for a dastardly foe, before launching himself as if propelled by a rocket towards her.

In the few seconds that it took him to reach her, she’d started trembling and her crying had escalated to something near hysterical.

He wrapped his arms around her and scooped her up, tucking all her Curves and Softness and Pink and Yellow into all his Angles and Five o'clock Shadow and Brown and Blue. “What’s wrong? Rose? Tell me what’s wrong, please?” he whispered against her hair.

She clung more tightly to him, as if trying to mesh her atoms into his and he could feel her tears smudge against his neck and trickle between his skin and his collar.

. . . .

He carried her back to the TARDIS and straight to their room, where he gently placed her on their bed. He shucked off his shoes with surprising ease, as if the Mighty Power of the Converse had decided to, for once, bend to his will. They certainly never did when he was busy tearing off other articles of clothing as well.

With little fuss, he knelt on the bed and crawled over her trembling form, draping his body over hers like a warm blanket.

It was, perhaps, an odd practice, and one that only the vulnerabilities of being separated had inspired. His arms wrapped around her, squished between her back and the mattress with his weight on his elbows, his lips ghosted over her ear and his hips rested between her spread legs.

It never led to intercourse, oddly enough. Whenever they had that on their minds (which, admittedly was quite a lot of the time) there were touches and strokes and sighs and gasps and they only ever arrived in this position very much sans clothing.

No, this was something more than sex, something that had transcended being cheeky, transcended being naughty, transcended being salacious and transcended being mother and father to a baby girl staying at her gran's. It was something that had even transcended being lovers. This was a pure and simple hug, carried out on their bed; a squishing of skin against skin. It wasn't designed to entice, nor to arouse, not even to feel; but just to make physically clear that they were together. Just to say I’m here and you’re here and neither of us is going anywhere, thankyouverymuch...oh I love you so.

Eventually, Rose stopped trembling and crying and her silence almost made him think that she’d drifted off, if not for the still slightly frantic pitter-patter thuppathuppa of her heart against his chest. “M’sorry,” she mumbled thickly, her crying having done an absolute number on her sinuses. “Tissue?”

Reluctantly, he slipped a hand out from beneath her, where it had been happily resting between her shoulder blades. He wasn’t willing to take his lips away from her ear so one, two, three quick misguided grabs in the general direction of his dressing table finally resulted in his fingers alighting on a packet of tissues. He plucked a few from the box and then handed them to the Pink and Yellow One.

She wiped at her eyes with one, rubbed at her nose with a few others. “Got you all wet,” she apologised, before stilling, her attention caught by something.

Even though he couldn't see it, he knew intuitively that she was flushing and sure enough with the last tissue she dabbed at his shirt collar. “Bit…erm…sticky, too.”

The Doctor pressed a distracted, affectionate kiss to her ear. “Ah, what’s a bit of a runny nose between friends, eh? Besides, I always catch your colds these days, so we’ve obviously shared everything that there is to be shared.”

She smiled somewhat bashfully and dropped the tissues into the bin beside the bed, before resuming snuggling back against him.

Silence fell over the room, and whilst the moments that often led them to this very position were ones that didn’t bear going over and demanded quiet, the Doctor couldn’t contain his confusion as to what had upset Rose so very suddenly.

He’d barely opened his mouth when she spoke.

“I was there again,” she whispered against his neck. “I was back on that street, all those years ago, with the cars and that ridiculous gun, when you…” she clung to him more tightly, and when he realized what it was that she was talking about, he found that he wanted her to wrap her arms around him even more securely.

“There was a flash of red, behind you, and it suddenly looked so much like Donna’s hair. I don’t know what it was, probably nothing. Nothing Donna would appreciate me getting her confused with, that’s for sure.”

A shared affection for Donna’s fire and flare made them both smile and chuckle warmly at the thought of their friend, before Rose’s blocked nose made her softly snort whilst breathing in a way that was entirely unattractive. But it was her nose, her oddly endearing though less than lovely snort, her sniffles, her blocked sinuses, and he wouldn’t have traded even that for all the world.

“Then…god, I don’t know if I imagined it or not, but there was gold, or metal, or that very shade of blue, just in the corner of my eye and I thought…” she started to cry again, but shook her head resolutely and stopped. “No more tears. Being daft, that’s what. You’re here, you’re alive. This time we made it. This time we reached each other. Well, you reached me.”

The Doctor slipped his recently freed hand back beneath her body, splaying his fingers over the small of her back. He traced the slight inward curve of her spine, gained from carrying the weight of a baby. “Yes, this time I reached you. This time you stopped and I kept going. But the last time, the last time, that time, I stopped and you kept going. You reached me. One way or the other Rose, we’ll always get there, even if there isn’t in the middle.”

Rose chuckled softly and kissed what she could of his neck. "Well, your legs are much longer than mine, Mr. Long Limbs, so you’ve an unfair advantage.”

He scoffed indignantly. “Oh, you love my legs, admit it.” He shifted against her as if in demonstration.

“Yeah,” she allowed, “they’re a bit of alright, I suppose.”

He kissed her ear again for good measure and even though she couldn’t see it, waggled his eyebrows suggestively. “Mr. Long Limbs? Really?”

. . . .

Hope you liked it! It was written very spontaneously in the wee hours by a sleepy!author who is currenlty having a bit of a meltdown.