* * *
He knows they ought to be moving—but his heart is beating, and she's right here, and despite the wires digging into his back he doesn't push her away. Her breath smells faintly of damp forest corners. It reminds him of living on a planet instead of in a box which travels through time; it reminds him of playing in the woods as a child; it reminds him of too many things, and he kisses her harder, shoving his body against hers in an effort to melt back into that childhood home.
"Yes, yes," Jabe whispers. The coupling is blind, certain to be unproductive, probably unsafe.
He shrugs (what's the worst I can get—Dutch Elm Disease?) and lets his jacket float to the floor.
* * *
Sprawled on the wooden and graffiti'd park bench, Rose licked the vinegar and salt from her fingers, and remarked, "You killed Cassandra."
"Umm." He nodded, sucking his own fingers clean. "Shall we not talk about that?"
"Okay," Rose said, but she raised a gently questioning eyebrow nonetheless. "How did you hurt your finger?"
He looked down at his recently saliva-coated hand, at the cut Rose had spotted on the tip of his left ring finger. It was small—perhaps half a centimetre long—and at the top, buried deep in reddened flesh, was a splinter of wood.
Rose was watching him, monitoring his reactions. As if she expects me to shout, he thought, and then remembered that he had yelled, earlier that subjective day.
* * *
A planet blowing up.
The image—of what will be, of what is—comes a little too close to home for comfort, literally, but he has to show this to Rose, has to be sure that she can cope with it.
Gallifrey is in his mind when she asks, and his feelings swirl: loss, guilt, fear, monstrous things whose names should not be uttered in the clean places of the world. When Rose asks, the beasts gape their lusting jaws, yellow teeth and rotten-meat breath.
"I'm just me!" he snaps, suspecting even as he does so that Rose would accept the truth.
* * *
Well, now she knows. "Sorry I yelled earlier," he muttered.
Rose frowned. "Don't you mean later?"
"Subjectively earlier," he explained, grinning at her confusion. "Somewhere I've got a grammar book, but it's easier to use three tenses and just be adaptable."
"Okay," Rose said. "Your finger?"
He held it up so she could see it, briefly. "Still there. It'll heal in a day or so."
"Not if it's got dirt in," Rose told him firmly. "let me have a proper look—don't worry, I won't kill you, I have a basic first aid certificate."
"It's fine," he insisted.
Rose reached out and grasped his chin, forcing him to look into her eyes. "Listen," she said, seriously. "If k equals two and pi equals three point one, how many pies can Kay eat before it's washed to the ground?"
"Huh?"—but while her nonsense question (and her clear blue eyes) distracted him, she'd grabbed his hand and begun to examine the cut.
* * *
"I ought to stay, look after Mickey," Rose said.
It was her choice, and so he lets her begin to walk away. He wonders, as he powers up the TARDIS, how many children she'd have, and whether he'd ever get to meet them.
He can't remember meeting them in the future, though: so he goes back to check that he mentioned the time-travel.
* * *
"There is a splinter in there," she said. "We'd better get that out—I bet even aliens can't heal round splinters. Got a pair of tweezers?"
He has a little gadget that would do just as well, as a matter of fact; but he likes the feel of his hand in hers, of her being a little in control, so he hands her a twisted metal thing which turns itself into tweezers when she grips it.
"Hold still," she says. Her breath brushes softly past his wrist, as, tongue between her teeth in concentration, she does what has to be done.
* * *
White-hot rage fills him, burning out the demons he has been grappling with. The pain is a spur: he summons Cassandra, loving as he does it the feeling of power, and lets her suffer the drying heat of flame.
Cassandra's beauty was artificial, so it seems less like sacrilege to destroy it. She murdered Jabe—more flames, and he blames himself and the heat of his passion for Jabe, but Cassandra is the one who arranged this all.
"Moisturise me, moisturise me!" she screams, a swan-song, her own psalm of passing.
He thinks of Jabe, clinging to the handle in her last moments; of his mother, dying in a planet's inferno; and of Rose, who is both these women and neither, who was nearly killed—twice—by the merciless sun.
Cassandra splits and somehow explodes, draping them all in a delicate veil of pale skin.
* * *
"There," she declares, "all done."
He looked at his hand—grazed in the woods, cut by a forest's representative—and then into her blue eyes. "Good," he says. "Can we go now?"
"To the zoo again?" she grinned; "Yeah—where to?" she smiles.
He grabs her hand and leads her off, hoping that adventure will be just around the corner.
* * *
"Don't go anywhere with a stranger!" his mother warns as he scampers out the door.
"Is it always this dangerous?" Rose asks, hesitant.
"Perhaps danger is all there is left," Jabe suggests.
Danger, the Doctor thinks, is the bride, and Death the wife. He's still looking for the mother.