#now i'm laughing at 'je tragedy lemons'

[chiaroscuroverse]

Better With All of You Project 

Headcanons about their relationship

(i.e. the nature of said relationship, where it could have gone in the future, what was their downtime in the TARDIS like, relationship dynamics, inside jokes, sleeping arrangements, stock arguments, etc.)

ETA Dec 2018: So I started this post when this group project was going on, and messed and messed with it, and is often my way, I drafted and overthought and ended up not posting it. As I look now, I think it’s probably because it veered away from the original question and I thought it needed editing. But! Due to current circumstances, I’m clearing out all the old things and posting for posterity, so for anyone who wants to look, have some of my meta, meandering as it may be!  Under the cut:

Ok, *cracks knuckles*

Important initial disclaimer: since this is headcanons, I’m talking about how I think it (likely) happened in canon and none of this applies to fics. I absolutely do NOT have to have a fic match my headcanon (that would eliminate at least half the fun!). Basically my fic reading parameters are: they love each other, Rose ends up with (any one of) the Doctor, and if Tentoo exists, he has to be happy (more on that later). I read every Doctor with Rose - write Rose living with Ten forever, hell write Rose living with Nine forever, and I’ll probably love it. (Maybe I’m a bit Rose-centric too. :P)  ETA: whoops, I ended up mentioning fics a lot, but I want to emphasize that everybody should follow their muse when writing and I love that fic writers can and do take the story a million different ways.

Nine: I’ve used the word enthralled for them before, because I think this was the initial state. Enthralled, limerance, kilig - it was all of that at first sight for them! They’re rushing around being SO HAPPY. Yes, some angst and fighting because the Doctor is rediscovering his connection to humanity through Rose, and because Rose feels secure enough with her place in his affections to push back and fight with him. The Doctor doesn’t have to think about his hurt and loss all the time because he can throw all his energy into coming up with new ways to light up her face. Rose is discovering herself along with the universe. It takes her longer to realize he’s IN LOVE with her because she doesn’t put him in the category of Men Trying to Get in my Pants (”He’s better than that!”). Probably by Father’s Day she knows she’s in love with him too, and then by the time he’s resonating concrete she’s ready to hit him with the full power of the Tyler flirtation and it is GLORIOUS!  

So, obvs I LIVE AND BREATHE the idea of these two confessing their love and getting it on in a thousand different ways, but truth is I believe they weren’t shagging in canon. The main reason (assuming compatible sexuality) is that the Doctor has been around long enough to understand power differentials, and taking companions is about seeing the universe together, not taking advantage. It would take a lot to overcome that boundary. (I love to imagine/read/write about how that boundary could be overcome! Rose is an adult who can make her choice, but she’s still young and living on HIS ship, so he would tread carefully. If someone wants to make a case that they *were* canonically sleeping together, by all means, convince me! :D)

Did they love each other romantically? Absolutely. But I believe their first kiss was their last, and that the canon story is ever more powerful for that. I believe they spent their (at least) year and half or so together in that heightened joyful state of understood but unspoken mutual attraction and love. I also think it was a good long time, there are a lot more adventures in extended media. ROSE WAS NOT 19 FOREVER. She would have turned 20 soon after they took off. There was a lot of tension and oodles of handholding and touching (look at how they walk down the street!), cuddling, falling asleep on the couch, him carrying her to her bed and pretending to grouse about it. I could easily see bedsharing and nightmare comfort happening. I tend to think that as different as Nine and Ten seem to be outwardly, they still have a lot in common, especially when it comes to Rose, so general habits with her wouldn’t be so different.

Ten: Ahhh, now some complications. Rose had to grieve Nine and adjust, but (like Billie lol) she was able to see the Doctor inside him and accept him and start enjoying everything fun about this new self. Early S2 I call “regeneration honeymoon period,” because New Earth and Tooth & Claw are ridiculous! Ten is born like “mah Roes, there she is! Do you still love me? pls pls.” They survived the Daleks and Bad Wolf and regeneration still together! They’re even so busy being reinfatuated with each other that they miss how they look to others and thus plant the seeds of their own doom with Torchwood :(:(

Ten differs from Nine in that he starts taking the long view again. I think Nine lived more in the moment because of being born from the Time War, and was just happy for each day he got to spend with Rose. Ten is loving his life and loving being himself but starts to get afraid about his life after Rose. (And then it happened so quickly *cries*). Thus, the School Reunion conversation: he’s pushing back a little, trying to make her think about the big picture, but then he still says “not to you.” 

Relationship unnamed but they KNOW. That’s the running theme here through Satan Pit-Doomsday-Turn Left-JE: he thinks she knows, even though they’re never going to SAY, but because of that unspoken nature she believes but can never be SURE.  There is a different quality now to how Rose relates to him -  she’s lost a bit of that naive confidence she had with Nine. Look at the difference between the Father’s Day fight and the School Reunion fight.

GITF: pfft,headcanon it away or pretend it’s an Eleven/Amy/Rory story, because really it was Moff writing his own characters. It is so OOC and so skews Ten’s arc and the Doctor/Rose relationship enough that I just can’t make it fit without ignoring most of what happened. (That being said, it makes for truly excellent angsty fic fodder!)

They developed into some kind of assumed, if still unacknowledged, relationship through the end of the season. “We were together” means just that. Sexual relationship? I could go either way. There is a lot of evidence that it was, especially the “you’re not?” which is either RTD really fucking with people’s heads or it means something. The Doctor not being human, and the show being a family show (ie Watsonian/Doylist), makes it ambiguous. He doesn’t pursue sexual partners in the (stereo)typical human way, even in incarnations that seem open to romance. But the body language in Fear Her and Army of Ghosts is very intimate, even considering how touchy-feely they’ve always been.

And then follows two seasons of grieving!Doctor to really hammer home what they were to each other. Including grief that he never just said it? And  not saying it didn’t protect him from the pain at all? There is just so much almost and longing and anguish in the first two parts of their story that I believe that is why we ship it hard enough to do all THIS all the time! The resolution didn’t come until the very end and after the end of their story. Thus:

It’s true that the reason I lean toward Not on the “were they doing it?” question is because of Tentoo, and because of how long the Tentoo endgame was foreshadowed. See @chocolatequeennk​‘s meta on this question. From the beginning of fic reading, I’ve always felt that the Tentoo resolution makes the most sense if they were not sleeping together, mainly because it is nigh impossible to imagine him sending her away if they were. (He still could have, but daaaamn that EXTRA hurts.) 

The point of Tentoo is he is the Doctor who becomes human, and stays–to live a human life WITH her, in every sense. Either way, it’s utter tragedy for the Doctor who goes on without them. But I believe it’s Ten’s deep, deep love for her, as well as his hundreds of years of experience with humans, that makes the decision. (And of course, his thinking he knows what’s best for everyone, that never changes *sideeye*.) As a Time Lord, his identity is experienced differently from ours. He knows that one of him gets to live the happy ending, that “streetcorner 2am” “all I’m after is a quiet life” kind of ending with the love of his lives, and that would be it’s own kind of satisfaction. He himself has no choice but to go on for something like forever, for the sake of the universe. And he’s been through it enough to know that regeneration and new companions will ease the ache, though his Tenth regeneration will be defined by loving and losing and grieving her (now I’ve made myself cry). 

IMO, the Tentoo question is impossible without reckoning with the Doylist/Watsonian issue. If this story were not a TV show with actors who were leaving and a showrunner bringing his era to a close, would Tentoo have existed? 

Maybe not! But then maybe so! The lifespan tension has to be resolved - to stay together, one of them must change to match the other or the result is tragedy (see all the fics that dive straight into the tragedy in sweet and bitter ways.)  If there is no Tentoo, a great resolution to the lifespan tension is a Bad Wolf!Rose who gets to live a very long time as the Doctor’s mate. (Thus the thousands of fics that do it this way and God bless them for it! ) But (Watsonian) a Bad Wolf!Rose is not necessarily an ideal outcome - in most mythology, immortality is a curse as much as a superpower. This includes DW, see: Jack Harkness, and the Doctor himself: “I’m old enough to know that a longer life isn’t always a better one.” 

So canon options being what they were, the Doctor changed to match her life, instead of them staying separated forever (or one of them dying!). The immortal becomes mortal, it’s iconic, it’s mythological, and it’s ours -  a gift from RTD, considering that a tragic ending is what most writers would do with this tension!! (I spent most of JE expecting Rose to die, because I know TV 😒.) 

Oh, Tentoo; I love him SO MUCH. I love that he’s the Doctor, plus an extra heap of vulnerability. I love that he’s mostly a fandom-created character, that he’s the delightful lemonade made fic-by-fic from JE tragedy lemons. I feel protective and am very cautious about him, more so than any other Doctor. I love a good angst and drama journey post JE, but the endgame is crucial. (True, a lot of really great fics use the trope of Tentoo dying for reunion purposes, and yeah it hurts, but if he and the relationship are respected and I trust the author, I’ll go with it.)

All that to say, I believe right now in Pete’s World Tentoo and Rose are growing old together, happy and shagging six ways from Sunday!! Oh, here’s my controversial-for-Tentoo-fandom opinion: I don’t think the TARDIS coral makes sense for a limited human life. (And I have too much experience with attempted legacies to trust that something that powerful could be passed down to part-human successors perfectly.) But again, for fic purposes, rock on! Grow the baby TARDIS and give them adventures with it! I wrote one myself, so I love playing with the idea too. :) [ETA: haha, that headcanon has now been jossed by Big Finish! And you know what, I’m happy to be wrong. :P]

My main headcanon for Tentoo, though, is that he’s like John Lennon’s Watching the Wheels - “no longer riding on the merry-go-round, I just had to let it go.” Retired, basically, from the crushing weight of responsibility for the universe that the other Doctor can never escape. Maybe he’s a professor (having lots of desksex, ahem), maybe he consults at Torchwood so they’re coworkers. They’re the Doctor & Rose Tyler, so they travel a lot and probably get into trouble and have to save the day regardless. I think they would have a family of their own eventually, but that could go either way. I love the idea of them living in an old house that they remodel. Tentoo has a Time Lord mind, and thus enough telepathy to form some kind of link or bond with Rose. I think they live an extra long healthy life, like Ian & Barbara (it’s canon!). But I think that ultimately they live a human life, legacy in their descendants, some Time Lord TNA becoming part of the web of humanity, and that’s the beauty of it.

[And that’s where this left off…I could ramble about these things forever and ever. I see a lot of these things have it made into other documents like the author profile and such, so probably nothing surprising here!]