orange_crushed | Fic: Fireworks. (SPOILERS for The End of Time, Part II)

Fireworks. Oh, Ten. You'll always be my Doctor. Ten/Rose, Ten II/Rose. (If I am over-cutting for spoilers, please let me know and I'll just put them up.) G, short, three moments in a life. I still don't know quite how to feel.

MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE END OF TIME, PART II. Please don't read if you haven't seen it yet or don't want to be spoiled.

She hopes it is a happy one.

"Fireworks, emulating heaven,
'til there are no stars anymore."
-The Tragically Hip

It's snowing.

After midnight, and it's snowing, and Shareen and Jess have called and cancelled and Mickey isn't coming unless they turn the taps off at the pub, and very probably the rest of the evening is going to involve emptying a champagne bottle by herself and falling asleep on the sofa. Even Jackie's plans are a bit more ambitious than that.

But. Tonight she doesn't really mind. The estate is always beautiful like this, tall dark buildings softened with a dusting in white. The gentle fog of falling snow and the cheap string lights on the balconies looking cozy and warm and the quiet that comes over people, watching it come down from the higher planes of heaven. It's peaceful for the moment, and that's so rare and precious that she nearly holds her breath. Rose walks and hugs her arm and doesn't notice him standing there until he makes a noise. Such a little noise, barely a sigh. Got to be a homeless person or a drunk, a tall skinny bloke in an old coat, leaning up against the fire doors and holding his head and his stomach. She can't see his face but she can see the painful way he staggers upright.

"You alright, mate ?" Rose stops in the snow and smiles at him, whoever he is, because she's had a cocktail at Maureen's already and why the hell not ? It's the new year. A time for being kind to weirdos and strangers vomiting in dumpsters, if there ever was one.

She wishes him a happy one and he says something that she'll remember later, wrapped up in one of grandma Prentice's afghans and staring blearily at a Bond movie playing in silence on their old set. It will make her happy and sad in the same instant. She believes in the new year a little. Doesn't everyone ? The thrill of your life laying out in front of you, even if it is small and dull and full of sale flyers and off-brand cereal. But she thinks he means it, that strange man in the overcoat. She thinks he really means what he tells her.

"There you are," he says. "I bet you're going to have a really great year." He says it like there's something in his throat, and Rose is sorry for him for a moment, even in his kindness. One of those people who wants so much to leave the old year behind. She tells him she'll see him. She doesn't really know why.

Up in the flat she phones Shareen, who is more than a little gone, and wishes her a happy new year. There's the rumble of the party behind her, music throbbing like tank treads through cheap speakers, the sound of all her friends making fools of themselves in the distance. Rose hangs up. She's twisting the cord around her fingers and staring out into the dim glow in the courtyard when there's a light, a bright and sudden light that flashes brilliantly and goes out. Some kid with a sparkler, maybe, though she doesn't hear banging garbage cans or arguing or any other hallmarks of the junior-high set.

She goes out into the open hall but there's nothing, only radios behind apartment doors and faint laughter, only cold air and the thin silence of the evening stars above their heads in the sky.

"Happy new year," Rose says, to nobody in particular.

It's snowing again.

There's a great glass globe over the public gardens on Triesta, and they've set it to winter. There's ice-skating and sledding and green-skinned children building snow people and happy couples wandering in and out of the artificial trees.

"Cocoa ?" he asks, and when she nods he hands over a sweet-smelling cup with steam rising from the rim. "Light show'll be up in a second. Want to get a better seat ?"

"I'm fine here," she says. He smiles and settles on the bench beside her, drawing his coat around them both.

She sips her drink and watches the crowd pile into the low bleachers, eyes trained dutifully up at the ceiling of the dome. There's the faint sound of music and then the lights, glimmering magnificently in a hundred colors, exploding in sparkles and transforming into dragons and doves and stars. It's stunningly beautiful but for a moment Rose misses the smell of weak gunpowder and burning paper, the long slow climb of a single rocket in the dark. "Happy new year," she murmurs, against his shoulder. "Which is it again ?"

"Thirty-five-ninety-apple-Bavaria-four," he says.

"You're making that up."

"I'd never." He might. "A good year for Triesta. The civil war on Colony Five ends peacefully. They discover a cure for Thraxon's Syndrome, really a nasty thing, lots of itching, a huge relief. And Melania Surange wins the pearl cup, the first female diver ever to reach the lowest point of the sea, a huge achievement." He glances down at Rose's distant expression. "You alright ?" She nods. "What I said in London, about the storm-" he stops, and smiles apologetically. "It's nothing. There's always a storm. Storms pass." He runs a hand along her shoulder, rubs her arm and squeezes her tight. "Anyway, happy new year."

Rose watches the lights swell and fade above their heads, bright as the moon, and not for the first time she wonders.

"Doctor," she begins, "did you ever-"

"Did I ever what ?"

"Never mind," she sighs, and snuggles into his side, careful not to spill the cocoa in her cup. He rests his cheek against her hat and she closes her eyes, willing the next second, the next minute and hour and day, to move a little slower. "Not important," she says.

That night, she dreams of Roman candles and Catherine wheels, fire and starlight, the burnt end of the match.

In the morning, he takes her to London.

Half-human or not, he still can't seem to find the channel with the new year's countdown on it.

"Channel five," he insists, pointing angrily at a car commercial. "It's always channel five!"

"Channel three!" Jackie hollers, from the kitchen.

"Eight," says Tony, who has finally mastered sums. "Eight plus three is five and eight plus eight is sixteen. Can I have a biscuit ?"

Rose hands the remote to Pete and tugs the Doctor away from the television set, into the den. She tips him onto the sofa and sits beside him, petting a stray hair away from the shell of his ear.

"You're doing fine," she says, because even if he isn't, he's trying. That's all she's ever asked. They sit together in almost-silence, listening to Pete and Tony gang up on Jackie over letting them eat the rest of the cake before company arrives. There's a fire behind the grate, burning steadily, and garden lights beyond the windows. "Are you happy ?" she asks him, suddenly. She can't help herself. He looks as surprised to be asked as she is to be asking, but his eyes are warm and his smile doesn't feel forced. He wraps her fingers together with his.

"Yeah," he says.

"Where were you, last new year's ?" she asks, though she believes she might already have the answer.

"Here and there," he says. "Thought about taking a cruise, and that ended badly, so- just puttered around. Checked in on Sarah Jane, but she looked busy. I got out of town, hitched on a comet and took a ride. Just," he says, and waves a hand at the fire. "Nothing, really."

"Not Earth ?"

"No," he says, idly. "Bellaris or Cellaris, I forget. They have terrific gelato." He rambles on about the forty flavors and insists that he'll find the recipe and now, finally, she understands. The pained voice and the face in the shadows.

They go to bed long after they should, after Tony and Jackie and Pete have stumbled off and the guests have retreated to their cars or the spare room, long past the time when the drinks have gone warm and the coffee cold. He falls asleep almost instantly and Rose lies awake beside him with wet eyes, one hand pressed against his stomach, listening to his steady breathing. She is grateful.

"There you are," she whispers. Here, alive, in the new year.

She hopes it is a happy one.