He’s got a to-do list in his mind, things he wants to make sure he crams into this new, finite existence.
It’s divided into little sections, or that’s what he tells her. Human experiences, non-Time Lord experiences, experiences he’d always meant to have but never got around to — he adds new sections constantly, announcing with a leer that “public indecency experiences” have just topped the charts.
He’s never written it down, but he’ll pause sometimes, right in the thick of things, and his eyes will go all unfocused and she fancies he’s just marked an item off.
They’re easy to miss, those moments, and she’s taken to checking often, trying to see what’s made the cut.
There are simple ones, quiet and unassuming things, crossing the finish line at a charity race, running out to pick up milk, planting a tree and watching it grow.
There are ones she’d rather skip, screaming rows in the kitchen, sleeping on the sofa, cleaning up broken glass from when the cup had hit the wall.
There are affectionate ones, forehead kisses before bed, waking up curled around each other as the sun peeks through the blinds.
And sexual ones, snogging in the back row of a movie theater, trousers around their ankles in a bathroom at a party, his hand skating under her skirt to find she’s not wearing knickers. Black stockings and blindfolds and so much trust — there are a lot of sexual ones.
There are ones she can’t know until he tells her, the first time he dreams in English, the ache in his bones when he gets up in the morning, forgetting for just a moment that this hasn’t always been his life.
There are ones on her list, too, a wailing baby in the delivery room, vows through grins and kisses to seal them, a passport full of stamps, and a place to come back to.
She watches him through all of them, lives them beside him, and one day, a day when they’ve done so much and have so little time left, he asks for a pen, and he writes.
To Do With My Life, it says, and underneath that:
Spend it with Rose Tyler.
He crosses it out and tells her to run.
OH MY GOD WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO DO TO ME.
