"What are you?"
She turns to look at him and leans forward, traces a slim hand across the curve of his jaw. His eyes gleam in the dark of the room, green glass shimmering like the sea after a storm.
"I'm just a girl living a tiny life," she replies, leaning down to trace the words into his skin with her mouth, letting the impossible truth catch against his flesh silently, marking her history with pearly teeth and whorls of her tongue against his smooth skin.
"You are much more interesting than that," he states. "You have something of the supernatural about you."
Rose lifts her head to look to him, and hears the howl of the wolf in her mind, watching from the shadows with gleaming golden eyes.
"Do you know," she muses, "it's not every day I get that from someone a thousand years older than me."
He grins and reaches up a hand whip fast, pulling her mouth down to his. Their hair tangles together, gleaming like the sun he ran from and the stars she's still looking for, and she remembers another man with ancient eyes and sighs into his mouth.
--
He doesn't introduce himself, of course.
She wasn't exactly expecting him to.
--
Somewhere in the sticky gloom of a Louisiana night, Rose Tyler grins and says, "I've never met a vampire before."
The woman at the door eyes her with cool disdain, perfectly rouged lip curling up into a smirk that clearly says well, aren't you young and foolish? She hands Rose her ID and tilts her chin down briefly, motioning Rose past her.
The bass thump of music beckons to her, and Rose follows, disappearing into the reddish light of the bar. In the middle of the room an olive-skinned woman with blood red hair gyrates to the song's beat, a blur of long limbs and oil-slick pleather. A man in a Tulane sweatshirt stumbles past Rose, turning to leer at her outfit; cropped leather jacket, pencil skirt and chiffon top, fuck me heels. She grins back, feeling entirely herself and entirely new, pretending to be a starstruck girl pretending to be an adult.
She orders a whiskey sour and sinks into an empty table near the stage at the back of the room. The giant seated on the stage glances toward her briefly, a barely noticeable flicker of eyes in her direction.
She watches him out of heavy-lidded eyes, alcohol burning comfortably and spreading like fire down to her stomach, curling her toes.
This time, she thinks, she will be ready.
--
Years later, the Doctor (the other Doctor, the one she wasn't waiting for) asks her what was your most interesting adventure without me.
And she looks up at him, the familiar tilt of his grin, his weight heavy and real beneath her in their bed, and tells him about a lark across half of Brazil with Mickey in search of what turned out to be a extremely realistic movie prop.
He has his secrets, and she has hers, and neither of them particularly enjoy talking about the way she looks at him some times, like she is seeing someone older, someone indifferent and terrifying and horribly beautiful.
--
She tells him, "I've met men who were ancient when you were young."
He laughs, amused, at this slip of a girl with history trapped in her smile.
--
"You need a break." Pete tells her, weary in his rumpled suit, watching her over the lip of his World's Best Boss mug. "Your mum is starting to think you're going to move into your office."
Rose rolled her eyes half-heartedly, secretly pleased that Jackie will always be Jackie, worrying about inane things.
"Always wanted to go to the U.S." She muses, imagines herself breaking away free and unfettered.
--
Sometimes she closes her eyes, remembering the feel of a callused hand against her skin, the tickle of wild hair snagging around her outstretched fingers.
Other nights she opens her eyes, running away from memories, so tired of her history, of ghosts, and presses a trembling finger against a gleaming fang, pushing until she can feel her heart pounding in just that spot.
He always keeps his eyes open, waiting for the moment when she shatters and screams and is just her, and he can bring her back again.
--
"The stars are disappearing." She tells him, excited, hair a golden nimbus around her pale face, illuminated by a flash of lightning outside. Her eyes glisten, sadness and hope and fear tangled up within them, and she grabs him and squeezes her fingers into his shoulders hard enough to draw pinpricks of blood
"They tend to do that before storms, I've noticed." He replies, dead pan, and thinks of how silly humans are, with their goodbyes and emotions.
--
She tastes wrong, her blood slick and heavy like oil in his mouth, like she has been turned inside and out and back again, until her own body doesn't know how to recognize its components anymore.
It is new, and intoxicating, and he leaves her with lines of bite marks sprinkled like constellations across the milky white of her thighs.
--
A young girl with shining hair and hope in her smile walks into his bar.
Sookie, he learns. He remembers another blonde with a wide smile, unfolding against him, heart beating against her ribs like a bird's wings against its cage.
He hopes this one will be as interesting as the last.
--
Rose dreams.
This is only the beginning.
And the Doctor takes her hand and leads her into the sunlight, and they burn together while a vampire watches, slouching in his chair like one of the ancient kings.
Run, the vampire says, and Rose wakes.