bluesuit_handy

Entry tags:

hotel california

Unsure

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.

Rose felt like her world had just been tipped upside down, the furniture on the ceiling glaring down at her in a mocking fashion as she struggled to grasp the words in her mind. "You've talked to Jack?" she managed, knowing she looked as lost and confused as she felt, if not more so. "Jack... Jack told you..." The words died and she had to close her eyes to stop everything from spinning. "I just saw him... he never mentioned you," she finished quietly, pressing a hand over her mouth for a moment as she regained her balance.

So this was what it felt like to be betrayed.

She pressed on quickly, not giving him the chance to respond to her confused babbles. "Yeah, definitely after you," she confirmed, her expression turning into a neutral mask that she'd learned from him. "'ve been on my own now... Well, you, uhm," she swallowed thickly and looked away, "you left. Bout a year ago."

Handy looked back at her sharply, eyes narrowing. "I left?" he repeated coldly. Part of him wanted to believe that he was somehow still alive when Rose was from, that he had simply struck out on his own, but he knew better. She was lying to him, and suddenly his fear was becoming anger.

"He said you'd been avoiding the Doctor," he said, his voice still cold. "Were you going to avoid me, too? Pretend I wasn't here?"

Rose closed her eyes tight and took a deep breath. Remember, she thought to herself, how he used to be. He was always angry, always lonely, and she'd had to work even harder than before to make him better again. That's what was talking now, that innate anger, and not... She couldn't even begin to finish the argument, it sounded so poorly patched together, even to herself.

"You are my Doctor," she told him quietly, her voice full of tension and pain held together by a thread of her own anger. "He left me in that universe just like he left you." She'd never admitted even to Jack how much it had hurt that he'd left her there, and now it seemed she never would. Looking back at him, that anger was in her eyes now, the pain etched into her face. "And yeah, you left me. Why is that so hard to believe? He could do it, so why couldn't you?" She wouldn't admit to the tears in her eyes even if he asked. And she would do everything she could to avoid telling him the truth.

"He left us because he could tell himself that we had each other," said Handy. "But now I'm not so sure we do, if I'm just going to leave in four years. Is that it? Are we done with each other by then?"

He knew he was going too far - if he was right about his fate, Rose was determined not to tell him about it. Being angry was safe, though - as long as he was angry, he could pretend that he wasn't really scared. The part of him that still had some grasp of the situation told him that he would regret what he was saying very quickly (in the two weeks they'd been living together, there had already been several nights when he had driven Rose away), but for the moment he was swept up in the emotion.

His words were like a knife in her chest, twisting itself deep into the truth behind the words, the truth she refused to reveal to him. What good would it do? He'd worry about it and apologize and it would be of no benefit to anyone. It was so much better to lie... Perhaps she'd learned that from him as well.

"What does it matter to you?" she asked him with vehemence, nearly demanding an answer of him. "That person that leaves me isn't this you, it's the you you become. You can't change it, and it probably won't even happen to you now that you're here, and even if it does, you won't know any differently if you ever leave this place." She was rambling, more emotion seeping into her voice as the words spouted from her mouth. She was in pain and all he was doing was making it worse.

"It matters because I'm dead to you, and you won't even tell me the truth about it!" he snapped. Then, more softly, "It matters because I can't imagine doing that to you. I can't imagine doing that to myself."

Yep, here was that regret. The problem with giving in to his anger was that he always seemed to run out of it so quickly, left to deal with the aftermath of what he had said and done while he was still in the middle of saying and doing it.

"Don't we have a future together?" he asked, trying but not quite managing to make the question another angry demand.

His words really were killing her. How had she ever hoped to avoid this? She'd thought about it, too, had a plan for when she met the other him... but she'd never counted on her him ending up here. And suddenly everything in the past long year of her life was pressing in on her and it was all she could do to not fall over right then and there.

"Why are you doing this to me?" she whispered, her face crumbling before she could turn away. "You're so sure you know what's gonna happen, so why are you ASKING ME for the BLOODY DETAILS?!" Her voice had risen steadily until she was nearly screaming at him. Was he still so very dense that he couldn't see past himself? She'd remembered how self-centered they'd both been at the beginning, but had it really been this bad?

"I..." he stopped, looking away again, unable to meet her eyes. Because I don't want it to be my fault, he realized. She was hurting because of his future self (because of his current self, too), and he didn't want it to be because he had chosen to leave her. He didn't want to think that for all the hopes he'd had about starting a new life with her, it would come to nothing in four years because he chose to walk out. But then, neither did he want to die - and at the moment, it seemed that those were his only two options.

"It scares me," he said softly, though whether it was in reference to his death or to the idea that he had hurt her voluntarily, he couldn't have said.

Rose covered her face with her hands and took long, deep breaths, trying to calm down enough to help him. Because despite the agonizing emotional pain she was, all she really wanted was to make everything okay for him again. It was what she had always done, cared more about him than herself. It was the only way she knew how to live.

"Four years is a long time for humans," she told him quietly as her hands fell and she wrapped her arms around her stomach. "'s even longer when you have a TARDIS."

"It works?" he asked, still not looking at her. "We grow our own TARDIS?"

He hadn't been sure that something like an infant TARDIS could survive in the alternate universe without any of its own kind, without even a proper Time Lord to link with. But if it had, at least what life he'd had in Rose's timeline wasn't just four years of normal human life on Earth. He turned to look at her, eyes wet.

"Is it a good four years?"

Her own eyes were flooded with tears as she stepped forward to frame his face with her hands. "They're good, brilliant, and fantastic, all rolled into one," she told him in a voice that shook ever so slightly. She had to stop herself from kissing him; he was still a year and a half away from being that man to her. "They're the best of my life."

"Oh, Rose." He brought his arms up to hold her again, pulling her close and angling his face down to bump foreheads with her.. "I'm sorry." He shut his eyes and felt tears fall from them, and pulled out of her hands to bury his face in her hair again. "I won't ask. You don't have to tell me."

It hadn't been why she'd said it, but she'd still hoped that eventually he would come to that decision. If only he hadn't been crying when he'd said it, maybe it wouldn't have hurt so much. "Thank you," she said quietly, curling her arms around him and hiding her face against his shoulder. They were like two lost children, clinging to each other as they fought to find their place in a strange new world.

Handy sniffled and reached up to wipe his eyes, working to regain his composure but not letting go of her. "I'm here now," he said, as much to reassure himself as for Rose's sake. He was still terrified by the thought of what was to come, but he forced himself to try to let go of it. He couldn't change what had happened in Rose's past, but he could change how he was right now - and right now, he desperately didn't want to hurt her any more.

Rose held onto him a few moments longer, then pulled back slightly so she could look at him, her cheeks covered in shimming streaks from the tears that had fallen. "When was the last time you ate?" she asked suddenly with a concerned and knowing look. "When Mum last put food in front of you?" He'd had trouble taking care of himself at first, being so used to the Time Lord way of life, and she remembered more than one occasion when he'd gone a full day without eating simply because he hadn't thought of it.

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