gallifreyburning:

stoprobbers submitted:

When they get back to London the first thing she asks him to do is draw a map of the stars.

When she first Fell, when she lost just about every single thing that defined who she was and how she came to be, all she’d had left was the contents of her pockets. He’d made all her pockets bigger on the inside of course, did that practially the first night she came on board, telling her in no uncertain terms (and with that unwielding norther burr) that his precious leather coat was *not* to double as her purse. In those cold, grey, half-remembered days after The Fall she’d unpacked her pockets piece by piece. Receipts from an Earth mall in the 66th century, printed on wafer-thin plastic. A snapshot of Urus, taken with whatever passed for a disposable camera there. Her passport, unstamped. A few tokens sharper, more painful – a dirty broken shoelace, a spare pair of glasses, a crumpled, handwritten note – of the Doctor and the TARDIS but mostly useless ephemera, the debris of her life, not the tokens of it. After The Beach she’d forced herself out of numbness and into action but that only made it brighter, blooming like the dazzling stars a blow to the head flashes behind your eyelids. She threw herself into Torchwood, into the Dimension Canon, into missions that were an odd blend of her old life and made for television political thrillers. Everywhere she traveled she left pieces of herself in her wake. Soon she floundered. When she looked around her nothing felt the same.

He is wary around her. Hopeful and terrified and on top of that just reeling. She’s not the only one that’s had one hell of a time. If you think about it, he’s only a couple weeks old. They fall into a rhythm not unlike the first weeks after his regeneration, tip-toeing and talking around, still with that sharp tension between them but a hundred fold. She still remembers the way he tasted and she knows he remembers the same. They’ve been sleeping apart and not quite talking; their closest moments are when she leans over his shoulder, watching as he carefully inks constellations of white dwarves and red giants, a spray of distant galaxies like freckles across the page. He didn’t ask which stars she wanted. When he finished it she’s at work and he rolls it up and ties it with a ribbon. 

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