Title: Sleepless
Author: Gillian Taylor
Character/Pairing: Ten/Rose
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Fear Her
Summary: It's going to be a long night.
Disclaimer: Don't own them. I just like playing with them...a lot.

A/N: This is a response to the Fear Her Missing Scene challenge on the LJ community Time And Chips. Thanks, as always, to my absolutely fantastic betas WMR, Aibhinn and Dave7 for the encouragement (and for wording help :)).

Sleepless
by Gillian Taylor

She starts to count the seconds between each movement, each rustle of the blanket, each sigh he makes. Just because there was only the one bed didn't mean he couldn't be comfortable. She'd offered at least once to let him have the bed while she took the couch. He wouldn't hear of it. Said that humans needed the sleep and he wasn't about to leave her alone.

So somehow they ended up in the same room, only she's on the bed and he's on the floor between it and the door. But he won't settle. He just shifts and sighs and shifts some more, each movement and noise sounding more forlorn than the last.

"What?" she finally asks.

"This floor is lumpy," he tells her with the seriousness he generally uses for something terribly important.

"You don't have to sleep on the floor," she points out.

Instead of replying, there's a lot more rustling and suddenly the bed creaks as he sits down beside her. "Budge over, Rose."

She can think of two possible responses. There's only one that she's willing to make. She moves over enough on the full sized bed so that he can lie down beside her. "All right?" she asks after he's finally settled.

"Yup," he replies.

Smiling to herself, she turns onto her side, reaching out a hand to hold his as she lets herself drift off to sleep. That's when she hears it again. Another sigh, another shift, another pull of blankets away from her.

"What?" she snaps.

"The bed is lumpy."

She's about to reply, say something brilliant and witty, but those words are stolen from her lips along with her breath the instant that he moves to lie on top of her. Though the room is dark, she thinks she can see his gaze as it rests upon her.

"Rose?" he asks, his breath whispering over her lips like a kiss.

"What, Doctor?" she manages to ask, telling herself that the squeak in her voice is only because his weight has stolen some of her air rather than anything else.

"You're lumpy!"

"Stop complaining, or you'll lose a few of your own lumps," she snaps.

The rest of the night is blessedly quiet.

END