As The World Falls Down - Chapter 5/6 "The Blessing Bell"

[timelord1]

Behold, the first story in a new series! This was inspired by then_theres_uss Challenge #91: AU., and this photo prompt( Photo prompt ) This will not be the last. This story has eaten my brain, and I have many, many ideas for it, so I hope you read it and enjoy.
Title: As The World Falls Down
Genre: Romance, Adventure, Mystery
Pairing: 9/Rose, other special guests
Rating: Teen
Summary: Rose Tyler rarely speaks. She is invisible. One day, she decides to take a walk down a tree-lined road to meet the madman that lives at the other end.
Author's notes: Yes, this messes with canon a bit. It is an AU. If you don't want canon tinkering, don't read AU.

This story would never have come to be without the help of the greatest betas in the world: kelkat9onabearskinrug and who_in_whoville

The sun was past its prime hour and the shadows were just starting to lengthen. The Conveyance was stopped in the grass at the edge of a clear lake with a wooden swimming platform moored at its center. John grabbed the picnic basket K-9 had packed for them and took Rose’s hand, leading her to the water’s edge.
 
“This is beautiful,” she said, holding up the edge of her skirt to keep it from getting muck on it. Her mother had given her the skirt that morning, and a light blue sweater to go with it. When Rose had asked where it had come from, Jackie had looked at the ceiling and shrugged, explaining that every once in a while garments get lost in the laundry, and after all, the woman that had owned it previously had far too many clothes for her own good anyway. Already this week her mother had done both the nastiest and the kindest things she had ever done for her, and it was only Thursday.
 
John led her to a little rowboat tied to a tree whose trunk arced lazily towards the water and helped her inside. The boat swayed on the water and Rose tried not to show her hesitation, or to let on that this was the first time she’d ever been on a boat before.
 
“Do you own all of this?” she asked, trying to appear casual as she got used to the unsettling rocking of her seat.
 
John shrugged, hopping in after her to push them on their way. Rose’s stomach lurched into her throat when the boat was jostled by his entrance. “As much as anyone can own anything, I suppose,” he said. “I put the boat here; I’m the only one I know comes out here. If that’s ownership, then yes. This is my lake.”
 
He unhooked the oars and began rowing towards the platform. Once they got moving, Rose found that she enjoyed the smooth way the boat cut through the water. When it was paired with gentle forward motion, the rocking of the boat became a soothing and almost pleasant feeling. She took great pleasure watching John’s arm muscles tense and relax with the rhythm of his rowing, as well as the feeling of the breeze caused by their movement through the water.
 
“Your dream,” Rose said once they were halfway to the platform and she’d become comfortable enough in the boat to lean back and relax a little. “You promised to tell me your dream from night before last.”
 
“I did,” John said, smiling at her. “You do pay attention when I’m running me mouth, don’t you?” He sighed and looked out at the water. “Right, best just tell you so if you get scared I can start rowing back for shore. All my life, long as I can remember, I’ve had very vivid dreams. Almost like I live a second life when I go to sleep. Most nights I don’t get proper rest because I’m always wakin’ up from ‘em.”
 
He studied her face. “Not sounding too daft yet, then?” He asked.
 
Rose shook her head. “No, it’s fascinatin’.”
 
He chuckled. “You should try sleepin’ through one. Fantastic stuff happens in my dreams, but they’re not what you’d call restful. Monsters and runnin’ and things from other worlds, with me always at the centre, saving the day.”
 
“Sounds like you,” Rose said. She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and rested her chin on her hands. “So if you’ve always had them, what’s got you thinking about them now?”
 
John stopped rowing, letting them glide along the water. “The last few nights, I’ve dreamt that I wasn’t myself at all. I mean, I’m still me, but I’m somebody else. You know what I mean?”
 
“I think so,” Rose began.
 
“The last two nights I’ve dreamt that I was the Doctor.” He tilted his head to one side, giving her a wide-eyed, questioning look. Rose looked right back into his eyes, her expression mild as she could make it, to reassure him that she wasn’t afraid, only waiting to hear what he had to say next. It wasn’t every day that the man you found yourself falling entirely too fast for told you that he regularly dreamt that he was the most notorious, mass-murdering psychopath in the history of the world.
 
He stared for a while before chuckling nervously and continuing. “I mean, not exactly a destroyer of worlds, me. And yet, I keep on dreaming it, and it feels as real as the two of us sitting here on the water now. What d’you think it means, Rose?”
 
Rose puffed out her cheeks and blew out a sigh. “I don’t think it means anything,” she said, choosing her words as she would choose the steps she’d take across a crumbling bridge. “Maybe it means that you are such a good person that you can see the good in anyone, including the Doctor. If he had any good in what passed for his soul, you’d be the man to find it in him.”
 
“That’s the thing,” John said, taking up the oars again. “In my dreams, he’s – I’m – not evil. Every time I dream I’m the Doctor, I’m trying to save the Earth, not destroy it. But I can’t see who I’m trying to save it from. Never ends well, sadly. I always lose. I lose everything, all over again. I’m devastated. There’s so much pain. And then I wake up.” He gazed into the distance, squinting into the sunlight gleaming off the surface of the water. Neither of them spoke until they’d reached the swimming platform. John held the boat firmly against the side of the platform so Rose could climb out. She did so, a bit more shakily than she’d wanted to, and then John tied the boat to one of the cleats at the edge of the platform, handed Rose their picnic basket, and hopped out to join her. K-9 had packed a blanket, a bottle of wine, and an assortment of sweets for them to enjoy.
 
“Oh, good doggie – he even remembered a corkscrew.” John popped open the wine and after letting it breathe a moment, took a swig off the bottle. He screwed up his face in thought for a moment, and then nodded and set the bottle down. “Perfect. Much better than the last batch – sent me honking after one sip.”
 
“What is it?” Rose asked, sniffing the bottle.
 
John beamed. “Dandelion wine. Make it meself.”
 
“You know how to do everything, don’t you?” Rose said as he poured her a glass.
 
“Well, in nine hundred years you learn a few things,” he answered.
 
Rose sputtered on the sip she was taking. “Nine hundred years?”
 
John laughed with her, but she saw confusion in his eyes. “Feels like that some days, doesn’t it? Like you’ve been knocking around this old planet for too long.”
 
“Where are you from?” Rose asked. John closed his eyes and rubbed his brow for a moment before he answered. When he did, his eyes looked almost glassy and there was a strange cadence to his voice. He spoke just a bit louder, a bit faster, as if he were reciting something he’d memorised for a class.
 
“I was born in the North, came to London a few years ago to find my fortune. I’ve got a great big family back home; mother, father, three brothers and two sisters. I’ll take you to meet them one day.” The glassiness slipped away from his eyes and he looked at her again, his expression softening back into one of his comfortable smiles. “They’re just going to love you. Almost as much as me.”
 
Rose’s cheeks went hot. “Almost as much as they love you?” she asked. Her heart had begun pattering in her chest and no matter how she tried to get a breath there seemed to be no breathable air on the entire swimming platform.
 
John shook his head. “Almost as much as I’ll love you,” he said. “Because it’s too early to say it yet, not if we want it to mean anything, but I can tell you that I am very much falling in love with you, Miss Tyler. And by the time you and I take a trip together to visit my family, I am going to be so deeply in love with you that I might not be able to stand it. What’s the matter? Have I said something wrong? I should’ve brought K-9 with me, I was too forward.”
 
“No, that’s not it,” Rose said, sniffling like a ninny. “I’ve waited my whole life for somebody to say something like that to me.”
 
John set his wine glass down and took her hands in his. “I haven’t said anything yet. Oh, not yet. I’m not even going to tell you I love you until I ask you if you’ll marry me. Because I want that day to be the best day of your life, so you can’t say no. I’ve got it all planned out, me.”
 
Rose laughed at his broad, mad grin and the utterly ludicrous turn her life had taken in the last few days. She’d gone from a silent, hopeless spinster to the kind of person someone like John Gatesmith could be falling in love with, all because she’d had the courage to walk down that silly path by herself. Chucking all pretense of propriety, threw her arms around him and snuggled a kiss into his shoulder. “I wouldn’t care if you were the Doctor,” she whispered. “I’d still fall in love with you.”
 
They stayed on the lake until well after the sun had gone down and the aurorae had begun painting streaks of color across the sky. By the time he brought her home that night and by the time he’d given her his seventh goodnight kiss, Rose Tyler knew that it would not be long before she could call herself Mrs. Rose Marion Gatesmith, wife of a gentle, brilliant, wonderful madman. She wouldn’t let anything take her happiness away; not her mother, not all of London. If the Master himself came to the village and said they couldn’t be together, she would tell him to shove off.
 
*****
 
Rose was sitting on one of the tables in the newly rebuilt laboratory, watching as John poured some syrupy brown fluid into a wine bottle through a rusty funnel. She scrunched her nose at the smell and finally had to put her goggles on to stop the fumes from stinging her eyes. It had been four weeks since the day on the platform and John had not only fashioned her a pair of goggles with all manner of mad attachments like his own, but had also added so many labor-saving improvements to her mother’s laundry operations that Jackie had finally admitted that she no longer needed Rose’s help, leaving Rose free to spend every possible moment with John. Currently, they were experimenting with the contents of a barrel of ancient petrol John had found one day when out driving around in the Conveyance.
 
“It stinks,” Rose said at last, covering her mouth and nose with her hand.
 
“Yeah,” John said, shaking his head. “Not sure what the old world saw in this stuff. The book says that if it sits long enough it turns to something they called ‘shellac,’ so maybe this is less petrol and more shellac now.”
 
“Call it any name you want; it’s nasty.”
 
He grinned. “All in the interest of science, love.” He turned his attention back to the book he was using to guide their experiment. “Hand me that rag.”
 
Rose did as he instructed and he stuffed the rag into the bottle so it was touching the fluid and still hanging out the top. John looked at the book again and nodded his satisfaction.
 
“Done,” he said, setting the bottle down. “What d’you think?”
 
Rose lifted her goggles so she could give him a proper look. “I think it’s a bottle with a rag and some stuff in it.”
 
“You would,” he said with a wink. “This is called a ‘Molotov Cocktail.’ They used it as some sort of weapon.”
 
Rose nodded. “Yeah, real intimidatin’, that. Oh, look out; I’ve got a bottle with a wet, smelly rag in it.”
 
“Well, hold on,” he said, picking up the book. Rose picked up the bottle and turned it over in her hands.
 
“Waste of a bottle if you ask me,” she said. “Could’a put some more wine in this.”
 
“Light the rag!” John cried, slapping his forehead as he read further along in the book. “Light the rag and throw the bottle. Should always read the experiment all the way through before you start.”
 
“All right,” Rose said. There was a burner lit under another bubbling experiment nearby, so Rose put the end of the rag in the flame and it lit. John had time to turn, eyes wide with horror, before Rose flung the bottle against the far wall. Flames spread out from the broken glass and the eastern wall of the lab was immediately consumed.
 
“It worked!” he shouted with a laugh, snatching her hand and running out the door with her. The flames spread back to the barrel of petrol and it blew the roof off in a gorgeous red burst of flame and smoke. She was so used to running after weeks of being with John that they had sprinted almost all the way to the garden before the blast threw them to the ground, laughing.
 
“You have exploded the lab again, mistress,” K-9 said from one of the open kitchen windows.
 
“I’m sorry, K-9!” Rose called back. “It’s John’s fault – he told me to do it.”
 
“Oi! I was readin’, not givin’ instructions,” he protested, grabbing her and rolling her, screeching with giggles, onto her back. He stayed on top of her, smiling down at her.
 
“I love you,” he said, with such suddenness Rose’s laughter slowed but didn’t stop entirely.
 
“What’s that?” she asked. She couldn’t possibly have heard him right.
 
“I love you.” John’s expression was earnest, his beautiful eyes wide and tearing.
 
A particularly long blade of grass was tickling her earlobe; a stupid thing to notice at a time like this. She could hear a bird warbling a gentle song somewhere near the creek bridge, barely audible over the sound of the burning laboratory. K-9 was just coming out of the house to work on putting out the fire. She wanted to remember every detail of this moment.
 
“I love you,” she said.
 
John turned his head slightly to the side. “Are you repeating what I said for clarification?”
 
She bit her lip and grinned at him. “No, thick-head. I’m telling you that I love you back.”
 
He got the most deliciously besotted grin on his face. “You do?”
 
“I have for a while now,” she said. “Sort of been waiting for you to say it first.”
 
“Then marry me,” he said. He rolled off her and knelt in the grass, helping her up to her knees. She felt almost faint, and had to put her hands down on the ground to steady herself.
 
“Master, the structural integrity has been too weakened by the flames for the laboratory to be saved,” K-9 said from his spot the fire. He was ejecting a stream of water from the port that served as his nose, waving it back and forth at the flames.
 
“Let it burn,” he said without looking away from Rose. “Marry me. I know these days people just kind of throw in together if they can tolerate each other without any sort of ceremony, but you and me are different. What we’ve got deserves more than that. I want you to wear a beautiful gown with flowers in your hair and I’ll wear a smart suit with a proper hat. We’ll trade bits of jewelry and promise to love each other for the rest of our lives in front of your mother and K-9 and that daft cow that keeps eating all my vegetables and anyone else who cares to watch.”
 
“Yes!” Rose cried, tackling him back to the ground with a hug. It was several minutes before they stopped kissing and got up again, and then reluctantly and mostly because the fire from the explosion was threatening to spread to the wide shed and possibly the main house.
 
*****
 
“Mum!” Rose cried as she and John burst into the cottage, holding hands. “Mum, we’ve got news!”
 
“I’ve got better news,” Jackie said by way of greeting them. She was in her dressing gown, a mug of tea in her hand. Rose couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her mother so relaxed; John’s improvements had made it so she could do twice the amount of laundry in half the time, which meant more money and therefore less need to take the custom of desperate men every night. “It’s confirmed!”
 
“What is?” Rose asked. She looked to John, but he could only offer a commiserate shrug.
 
Jackie made a face. “You mean you don’t know? What do the two of you do out in the wild all day? Don’t tell me. And, anyway, why do you stink?”
 
“Small fire,” John said, waving her question away. “What’s confirmed?”
 
Jackie leaned forward to impart her great treasure of news. “Three days from the Tithe and word is the Master is going to be in London for this year’s Tithe!”
 
John and Rose burst into identical shocked smiles. “No!” Rose cried. “Honestly?”
 
Jackie nodded. “There’s gonna be a few lucky Londoners going to give their tributes directly to the man himself this year.”
 
Rose beamed at John. “Maybe we can ask for his blessing directly.”
 
“Blessing?” Jackie asked. “What do you have for the Master to bless?”
 
John took Rose’s hand. “Jackie, I’ve asked Rose if she would marry me, and she said yes.”
 
The mug fell out of Jackie’s hand and broke on the floor. She looked with wide eyes from Rose to John and back again. “Married? My daughter? My Rose? Married. To you?”
 
“Yes. You’re keeping up quite well,” John said.
 
“I can’t believe it!” she cried, grabbing Rose into a hug. “My Rose, married! I never thought you’d shack up, let alone get proper married to someone.” She turned to John. “I don’t know if it’s cos you’re mad or you’ve just got odd taste, but I’m glad for whatever it is. Come ‘ere, son! Give us a hug!”
 
She dragged him into an embrace and kissed him on the mouth.  He pulled his head away as quickly as he could and wrenched himself out of her arms to go back to Rose.
 
“The Master is sure to give you his blessing,” Jackie said. “I can’t believe it! I can’t remember the last time there was a wedding in London, and it’s gonna be my Rose. So you’re a little old for it – who cares? You’re gonna be a bride! I’m going to get a proper dowry. When are you moving out?”
 
Rose’s mouth opened, partly out of shock and partly in an attempt to form some sort of answer, but John spoke first.
 
“I wouldn’t have her burdening you another second, Miss Tyler,” he said. “She’ll be coming to live with me tonight. We’ve just come to collect her things.”
 
“Hasn’t got much,” Jackie said with a shrug. John looked Rose in the eye and nodded his head in the direction of her bedroom. She gave him a slight nod and walked away, careful to hide her tears at her mother’s behavior until she was out of sight. As she packed what little she counted in the world as her own, she listened to John and Jackie talking.
 
“When’s the wedding going to be?” Jackie asked. “And where?”
 
“We’ll let you know,” John answered. “If we remember to.”
 
Rose hurriedly packed the rest of her bag, making a point to grab the bamboo scroll from the wall over her bed advertising the delicious taste of Tsingtao Beer combined with General Tso’s chicken. After one last glance at the dingy little red-tiled room, she ran out to join her mother and John in the living room.
 
“You ready?” John asked, glancing at her for a moment before resuming aiming his scowl in Jackie’s direction.
 
“Been ready for a while,” Rose answered. “Bye, mum.”
 
They turned and started out the door. Rose paused at the sound of the blessing bell. “I’m gonna miss that,” Rose said.
 
John reached up and ripped the bell down from the ceiling with a quick jerk. “No, you won’t.” He turned back to Jackie one last time. “By the way, the dowry is traditionally paid to the husband for taking the bride off the family’s hands. This bell does the trick for me, thanks.”
 
They walked out to the Conveyance together and Rose only let her tears fall once the car had chugged out of sight of her mother’s cottage.
 
“That’s an end to that,” John said, pulling a lever on the controls harder than he needed to. “That is the last time in your life that you are ever going to be sad again, I promise you.”
 
He was able to keep that promise for nearly seventy-two hours.
 
*****
 
They ate a late supper in the kitchen, when they actually remembered to stop talking and eat their food, and K-9 turned the lamps down low so they could fully appreciate the colorful aurorae on what was a particularly active night. When they were finished, they went to the living room and camped out on the sofa where they spent the rest of the night talking. Eventually Rose began to droop with exhaustion and stretched out on the sofa, resting her head on John’s lap. He stroked her hair and massaged her forehead, planting kisses all along her brow until even her slow, drowsy replies to his theories on external atmospheric agitation causing the aurorae stopped and her breathing became steady and rhythmic.
 
Rose stirred again when she felt cold metal under her right hand.
 
“Mistress,” K-9 said softly. “Entreat, mistress. Wake up. For your own safety.”
 
“What?” she murmured, yawning. “K-9, what’s the matter?”
 
“Please remove yourself from the sofa,” the copper dog said, steam jetting nervously from his vent. “Quick as you can.”
 
“What’s the matter?” she asked again, sliding off the sofa and getting to her feet.
 
“Master has entered REM sleep,” K-9 said. “Step away from the couch.”
 
“What’s wrong with him?” she asked. Before K-9 could answer, John twitched and groaned, his hand jerking wildly into the air. If she had been lying on the couch, he would have slapped her. He twisted, clenching his teeth and grinding his face into the cushions.
 
“Oh, John,” Rose cried, reaching for him. K-9 put himself between her and John’s thrashing form.
 
“Beware of stray limbs and do not attempt to awaken him. You might trigger a somnolent seizure.”
 
“A what?” Rose asked, her heart clenching. John yelped and muttered a stream of words she couldn’t understand.
 
“Get to the TARDIS,” he hissed angrily, his eyelids fluttering open enough so Rose caught a glimpse of his eyes rolling spastically around. “Find Jack. Jack! Martha!” His head went backwards and he screamed, fingers digging into the cushions so tightly the knuckles went white. Rose clapped a hand over her mouth to stop the pitying whimper that jumped out of her, unbidden.
 
Rose would have given anything for it to have stopped then, but the nightmare raged for several more moments as he practically convulsed on the sofa, arms flailing, shouting for Martha and Jack to save themselves, to find the tardis, whatever that was. The muscles in his jaw fluttered as he ground down on his teeth, spitting garbled syllables that couldn’t be classified as words. He screamed several more times until Rose wanted to cry for sympathy. Finally he drew a long, horrible gasp and sat up, choking and reaching blindly ahead of himself. Rose stepped over K-9 and clasped his hands, kneeling beside him on the sofa so he could curl up against her. He wrapped his arms around her and slumped against her chest as he heaved in deep breaths. He sighed, the last of his tensed muscles relaxing, and he opened his eyes to look to K-9.
 
“Glass of water?” he asked, the hard, cruel edge that had been on his nightmare voice gone once again. He stayed still but turned his head so he was gazing up into Rose’s face. He smiled at her. “Hello.”
 
“John,” she sighed, putting her hand on his cheek. He rested his face on her palm and closed his eyes.
 
“Sorry you had to see that,” he said. “I’d meant to take a sleeping draught so I could get through the night undisturbed, but we got to talking and I forgot.”
 
“You cannot take a draught every night for the remainder of your life,” K-9 admonished as he came back from the kitchen with the water. “You will damage your physiology.”
 
“I’ll be fine,” John said, taking the water and draining the glass as fast as he could before turning back to Rose. “So, there’s them, my nightmares. Have ‘em every night I don’t drug meself into oblivion. Still want to get married?” He gave her a wink but she could see the uncertainty in his eyes as he waited for her to answer.
 
“Of course I do,” she said, pulling him down so he could rest his head in her lap. “I’ll just get a nice sleeping helmet to match my nightdress.”
 
“That’s my girl,” he said, closing his eyes as she trailed her fingers through his close-cropped hair. “That’s nice. Maybe if you do that every night, I won’t need a sleeping draught.”
 
“Who’re Jack and Martha?” Rose asked.
 
John opened his eyes. “I don’t know. Did I mention those names?”
 
“Screamed ‘em is more like. You said a lot of things. What’s the tardiss?”
 
“I don’t know. I’m always looking for it in my dreams, but I can never see it.” His eyes went distant for a moment, and when he finally looked at Rose again, there was something like disgust on his face. “D’you want to know what I dreamt?”
 
“Do you want to tell me?”
 
He chuckled without humor. “Well, if anything is going to drive you away, this’ll be it. Best to get it out of the way from the start. In these dreams I’ve been havin’, where I’m the Doctor and I’m tryin’ to save the world, there’s always somebody out there trying to destroy it, and he always wins. Well, I’ve never been able to see who it is until tonight. Now I wish I hadn’t seen it.”
 
“Who was it,” Rose asked. “Me? K-9? That man Jack?”
 
John shook his head. “It was the Master. But he didn’t look the way he does now. He was different; shorter, older, with white hair and a fuller face. Before he killed me or did whatever he did to me, I must’ve hurt him badly enough that he had to regenerate.”
 
“Regenerate – what’s that?” Rose asked.
 
“I don’t know,” John cried, getting off the couch to pace the room. “Objects and concepts from my dreams keep bleeding into my waking state, like there’s some sort of hole in my mind. The other night I woke up and looked on my bedside table for my sonic screwdriver. Have you ever heard of anything as daft as a sonic screwdriver? What does that even mean? I’ve got a journal full of things written down from my dreams. Mad words like Cyber-men and Nestene Consciousness and Raxacoricofallapatorius. It’s all nonsense!”
 
“Raxacoricofallapatorius?” Rose asked.
 
John beamed at her. “Oh, you’re good. Anyway, it’s all daft, mad nonsense, and it’s what my dreams are every night. Except tonight. No green-skinned monsters from another world tonight, no. The night I ask the woman I love to marry me and she says yes, I dream that the Master, the beloved, wonderful Master is the violent psychopath. Meanwhile me – the Doctor – everyone’s favorite world-destroying maniac, is the bloody hero.”
 
“You’re not the Doctor,” Rose said, pulling him back to the sofa to sit with her. “You’re John Gatesmith, the kindest man I’ve ever met, and the man I’m going to marry. You’re probably just nervous about the Master coming to London. I’ll bet once you’ve seen him and given your tribute at the Tithe, I bet the dreams stop for good. Three more days is all. I’ll bet your physiology can handle three nights of sleeping draughts so you’re well rested.”
 
John’s expression softened and he leaned his head on Rose’s shoulder. “You’re going to be so good for me. You’re right. And as soon as we get our blessing from the Master, you and I will come home and be married the same night. And then, no more nightmares. No more monsters from other worlds, no more Tardis, no more daft sonic screwdrivers. Just Mr. and Mrs. John A. Gatesmith, their talking metal dog and their occasionally exploding laboratory. And I’ll never trade a bit of it for the whole of the universe.”

Comments

[timelord1.livejournal.com]

Thank you - Yes, Rose in this 'verse is a bit more reckless than even our Rose...which I think will only add to the fun hee hee hee. :) She's going to be no better than he is!

And yes, this story is MASSIVELY AU...I just took a look at canon, picked the bits I wanted and threw the rest out...very naughty of me. :)