bluesuit_handy

Who: Handy and Rose
Where: Hallway/Banquet Hall
When: Evening, after Handy's chat with Jack, and after he meets Temperance Brennan; also after Rose's conversation with Jack.
Summary: Troubled by what Jack said about Rose avoiding the Doctor and about her being from "after" Handy, said Handy decides to seek her out.

Handy left the library sometime in the late afternoon to take up wandering through the hallways of the hotel. He wasn't entirely sure whether or not he was looking for Rose - he both desperately wanted to talk to her after what Jack had told him and, at the same time (though he would never admit it to himself) he was at least a little bit afraid at what her reaction might be to seeing him again (not to mention that, as obvious as it was from what Jack had said, he didn't want to confirm the fact of his own death). He couldn't remember a time as the Doctor when he'd been so shy about anything, but then he wasn't really the Doctor. Not completely. A few speech patterns hadn't been the only thing he had inherited from Donna. For all that she was so brash and loud and brave on the outside, she (and thus Handy) didn't have that old self-assurance that had gotten the Doctor through so much of his life. They were both good at pretending, though, even to themselves, so Handy told himself that he hadn't immediately sought Rose out when he discovered her presence because he'd wanted to spend some time exploring by himself, not because he was afraid that the person on whom he'd come to rely for stability in his thus far very short life would turn him away.

It was good that he'd managed to convince himself of that, or else he might have turned right back around and gone back to hide in his room when he turned a corner and spotted her.

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A laugh bubbled up out of her, full of warring emotions as she clung to him. Only he would ever notice something like that. It had been one of the many reasons she'd loved him, and it made her heart ache in more ways than she could count.

"'s been a while for me," she explained, not even able to remember what kind she'd used back then. It had been some brand only found in that universe, an odd name with a fruity smell. The stuff the hotel had given her was more vanilla and almonds and she'd never even thought twice about it.

He opened his mouth to ask her how long it had been, but the words never came out. It struck him, suddenly, how young she had looked to him before his face was in her hair and any guesses at her age were rendered impossible. She was different than when he had seen her the day before - the look in her eyes when she had first seen him was proof enough of that, but she held herself differently, held him just a little bit differently. He didn't doubt that time had passed for her, but he realized that he had hoped she would look much older. What had happened to him? How long, in her timeline, before he was gone?

He shut his eyes and forced himself away from that question, suppressing the smallest shudder. "I just saw you yesterday."

She stepped back from him fully then, needing the lack of contact to be able to really think. Still, it didn't stop her from reaching out to smooth her fingers along the edge of his lapel, fixing the way it had been mussed by their embrace. "I figured as much," she said gently. "How long's it been? Since we saved all of reality." She needed to know exactly how much he would know, what he'd lived through and what would just be a story to him.

He kept his eyes on her as she straightened his lapel. His first impression had been right - she was older than when he had last seen her, but not by anywhere near as much as he would have wanted her to be when he knew that she came from a time when he was somehow no longer with her.

"Two weeks," he replied. "And I think I've seen more of your mum than I have of you."

Two weeks? That was a tiny fraction of the time they'd spent together, two short weeks out of the hundreds they'd had. And... Oh, those had been a hard two weeks. She'd avoided him during those first days together, letting Jackie mother him and Pete fill him in on technical things while she hid herself away at work, helping to fix the aftereffects of Davros' insanity. She learned much later how hard it had all been for him, but at the time she'd mostly been able to see only her own pain.

"Two weeks," she repeated softly, even the words themselves leaving a bad taste in her mouth. "'s been five years for me."

He looked away, one hand reaching up to rub at the wallpaper. Only five years? He'd been struggling with the concept of his own mortality already - nine hundred years of memories, and he knew that he would make only a few more decades more of them before his human body gave out - but five years? The thought that he, as an being independent of the Doctor, would exist for less than a decade (assuming Rose's timeline stayed intact - and how could it not, if he was meeting her here now?) made bile rise in his throat.

"Jack said you were from after me," he blurted out, still not looking at her.

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