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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Rose was feeling good after her conversation with Jack. It had been emotional, of course, it seemed like everything was with her these days, but it had been nice to talk with someone who understood, both what she was experiencing (at least to some extent) and what had happened to her before this place. He had been a part of her life as no one else in the hotel had been, and spending time with a friend had been something she'd desperately needed. She'd left the lounge feeling relaxed and... content, perhaps. It was like a form of therapy, giving her the reassuring personal contact she'd lacked so completely for the past year of her life.

So of course it made sense that the cosmos would choose this particular moment, as she resumed her wandering through the halls with a much happier outlook on life, to be the moment when she ran into him. He'd come around a corner ahead of her and just... been there. Right there, living and breathing. With those eyes and that hair and those same trainers and...

The blue suit. The blue suit with the t-shirt. She knew without a hint of doubt which Doctor she was looking at, knew when he was from and what he thought of her. Knew that he was the one she had loved, but this was before he loved her, before he'd died and left her all alone with their Little Girl. Rose wanted to rage and scream at the walls around her that had brought him here, but all she could do was stare with unbelieving eyes as she had to reach out to support herself against the wall.

"Rose."

It was all so utterly bizarre. He'd just seen Rose the day before, waved goodbye at her with Tony as she left the house in the morning, expecting to see her again in a few hours. Expecting, then, to be glad to see her and for her to be glad to see him in return, even if under the surface there was still that uncertainty of what they could ever be to each other, of whether he would measure up to the man (the Time Lord) he knew she really wanted.

Now she was staring at him with unreadable eyes, and he shrank back unconsciously, almost imperceptibly, and wished he had stayed in his room.

He said her name and she was lost. She took a step forward as he moved back in a motion that barely existed but nevertheless screamed at her. She remembered very clearly what he had been like when he'd worn that suit, uncertain about everything in his new life and... He'd needed her, just like he'd said he would. The other him.

Rose wasn't even thinking as she suddenly rushed forward, flinging her arms around him as soon as she was in reach, hugging him tightly the way they always had before. As much as part of her was dying inside all over again, another part was dancing with the joy of seeing him alive again. Alive and in her arms.

Handy was startled when Rose hugged him, but hardly had a second passed before he was wrapping his arms around her in return. He didn't pick her up, as he might have the day before - he just held onto her, achingly glad for the contact. He had a face full of her hair, but he didn't care in the least.

"You changed your shampoo," he said, still holding her.

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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