Fic commentary: The Five-Ish Stages of Grief

[nonelvis]

Requested by jigglykat.


This is the fourth story I've written in the Handy/Rose continuity that includes "Fake Palindromes," "You That Way; We This Way," and "Souvenirs," but of course it's the first one chronologically, because I can't do things the easy way.

In fairness, I never intended to write a series in the first place. I'd always quietly assumed that "Fake Palindromes" and "You That Way; We This Way" took place in the same continuity, but by the time I wrote "Souvenirs," I realized I had a series -- one that was missing the post-Bad Wolf Bay story it needed for the full arc of character evolution.

So, that rolled around in my head for a while, but never really got anywhere primarily because there are so many stories that already tread that same ground. Then a few weeks ago, with platypus's birthday coming up, I realized I had the ideal opportunity to write a birthday gift we'd both appreciate.

Of course, that meant coming up with a plot, and fast, considering I had less than ten days at the time before platypus's birthday -- and between work commitments and the MIT Mystery Hunt, I didn't have a lot of time or brainpower to write something complicated.

But then that line of Handy's about rebound sex not being a stage of grief popped into my head, and I realized I could use the five stages as a framing device. To mitigate the cliché factor, I decided it would have to either be outright comedy or at least contain some comedy elements, assuming no other Doctor/Rose author had beaten me to it. I searched Teaspoon before writing down a single word, and once I'd confirmed no one there had a similar story, I accepted the very dubious honor of writing bittersweet comedy romance fic based on the stages of grief.

Denial
It was an uncomfortable journey from Bad Wolf Bay to Bergen's zeppelin docks, and not just because the Doctor's knees were jammed against his chin in the back seat of the microscopic taxi they'd hired. Jackie was happily jabbering away to the driver, but Rose had huddled up next to the side window and was pointedly ignoring the Doctor.

Still, she hadn't quite let go of his hand. Sure, they were crammed so tight against each other in this ludicrous clown car that Rose couldn't help but grab on to the Doctor's knee for support, while he'd chivalrously covered her hand with his to stabilise her; but that still counted, didn't it?

Only hours on his own in this new world, everything he'd known ripped away except for the crumpled-up girl beside him. It had better count.

My early thoughts about the story only covered Handy observing Rose's grieving process, but given that I knew I'd be writing from Handy's POV, I worried things would feel dispassionate. It wasn't until I realized that Handy would be grieving as well that I thought I had a real story, and one that fits quite well thematically with the next couple stories in the series.

He squeezed Rose's hand, and she turned to look at him with watery eyes.

"He'll come back for us, won't he? He wouldn't just leave us here. You're the closest thing he's got to another one of his people now, yeah?"

Has anyone else explored this angle on Ten leaving Handy behind? This is an honest question, not me pointing out that I'm awesome for thinking of these lines -- because if there is a story about that, I want to read it. Handy is more than just a mirror of issues Ten thought he'd left behind; he's also the closest thing to another Time Lord that existed at the time (barring Donna, since presumably Ten knew he'd have to mindwipe her), yet Ten rejects him even after crying over the Master. There's some short and angsty introspection to be written about this, I just know it, and the next line is the only other acknowledgement of that.

"I'm not sure that's something he wants to remember just now, Rose." He ran his thumb along the side of her hand, a gesture that had often calmed her, but apparently didn't today.

Come to think of it, it wasn't working so well for him, either.

"He'll come back," she said, her voice cracking. "He has to."

* * *

It'd been years – regenerations, even – since he'd last been on a zeppelin. The R101 had been much larger and more well-appointed, but the sleek business-class model Pete had chartered for their passage across the North Sea was comfortable enough. There was a small lounge, where the Doctor had chatted with Jackie while she raided the minibar for wine and biscuits to share; there was also a cozy stateroom, where Rose had holed up the instant they'd come aboard, and where the Doctor had unexpectedly found himself in bed with her approximately one hundred and twenty-seven minutes later, give or take twelve seconds. His time-sense felt a bit off in this universe.

I realized well after the story was posted that Ten hangs off the rope ladder to a zeppelin at the end of AoS, but we never see him on that zeppelin, so I say it doesn't count. Also, it allowed me to shoehorn in a tiny Eight reference.

The stateroom's folding bed was really only big enough for one, but somehow they'd managed. What had started as an attempt to comfort Rose had turned into a lengthy hug, which had gradually descended from vertical to horizontal, which had gradually degraded into more of that lovely kissing they'd engaged in on the beach, which had significantly less gradually evolved into something even more lovely.

This is me not wanting to write out exactly how Handy and Rose end up sleeping together, because that's not the important bit of dialogue; I wanted to get to Rose's regrets instead. Also, I didn't have time to write another thousand words even if I'd wanted to.

Rose, however, despite what the Doctor was sure had been some very enthusiastic participation only moments before, seemed much less enthusiastic afterwards. She'd flipped over and scrunched up next to the wall, muscles tensed in her back, and said, "I shouldn't have done that."

"Unless I missed something – quite a lot of things, really – I don't think you were the only one involved, Rose."

"Look, let's just call this a mistake and move on, okay? It's not going to happen again."

"This didn't feel like a mistake," he said, trailing his finger along the nape of Rose's neck. "Well, I could have done without the bit with your mother pounding on the door to tell us we were overwhelming the zeppelin stabilisers."

I rewrote this whole section a good five or six times, maybe more, but it always had the joke about Jackie in it.

A chuckle, muffled by the wall. Rose tilted her head towards the Doctor. "Mum's never going to let us forget that, is she?"

"Well, at least we didn't crash. Then we really would never hear the end of it, assuming we survived."

"God, I can see the headstone now. 'Here lies Rose Tyler, dead from shagging the wrong bloke.'"

"Rose ... I'm him. Honestly, I'm the same man. Barring an extra heart, but I assure you" – he nuzzled her shoulder – "everything else is exactly the same."

He thought her back had been tense before. Now it was like steel, and Rose again turned to face the wall. "We shouldn't have done this. I'm not ready – I'm, I don't know, grieving."

"I could be wrong," the Doctor said, "but I'm fairly certain 'rebound sex' is not one of the five stages of grief."

"Right," Rose said. "This is definitely not happening again."


Anger
Days dragged by one painfully ordinary minute after another, each one precisely in temporal order. It was maddening. Even randomly whirling the hands on Pete's antique grandfather clock to give himself an artificial sense of time passing in much more pleasant skips and hops wasn't enough to soothe him.

Hopefully that first line doesn't sound too much like the similar one from VatD; I did check while editing the fic, but I always worry about such things.

I also liked the image of Handy getting so desperate to feel like things were moving out of order that he started messing with the house clocks.

He had two new suits, and falsified identification papers Torchwood's boffins had produced with cheerless efficiency, and a tasteful but personality-free bedroom next door to Rose's, which was as close as she was allowing him to get to her bed for now. Rose was still her bubbly self, at least in front of others. Occasionally, even alone with him.

But in the smallest hours of the morning, when the mansion was silent save for the mysterious creaks and groans all houses seemed to have in the dark, sometimes he could hear Rose crying. Three times he'd found himself outside her door, palm pressed to the wood, his whole body vibrating with the need to fix whatever was making her so unhappy.

Three times he'd walked back to his own room, vibrating with anger that he – well, both of him – was responsible for that unhappiness.

Tonight would be different. Tonight, if he heard her, he'd knock gently on her door, kneel at her feet, let her drip tears all over his pyjamas until she was fixed. Until she was happy, however long it took.

Until all he could hear in his head was her, and not the vast silence where the trill of a love song had once been.

Handy/TARDIS ;_;

Instead, when Rose told him he could come in, she was standing by her bed, her fists balled at her side.

"You wanker! You just left us here! You left me here, after all I did to get back to you!"

"Rose, do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds with me standing right here?"

"You know what I mean."

"I do, but I didn't strand us here; he did. So there's no point in yelling at me about it."

"Can't you make him come back for us? Or we could, I don't know, rebuild the cannon or something."

"That cannon could have destroyed both our universes, Rose. It only worked because Davros had already weakened things. We can't risk it. We have to make the best of it here together." He ran his fingers through his hair. "Or ... not together, I suppose. If that's what you want."

A separation. Of course. How had he not seen it before? Stupid rubbish human emotions getting the better of him, letting him believe that if he loved her enough, surely she'd come round. But his mouth, always half a second ahead of his brain, had the truth of it this time.

"Not together? Seriously?" Rose blinked, and wiped her eyes.

I still wonder if this scene moves too quickly. Oh well.

"Well, obviously I remind you of him, and while nominally that's a good thing – we're both handsome devils, smart as a whip, charming ..."

"Modest, too."

... just as I still wonder whether I've written this same joke in another story, but if I did, I've yet to find it.

"I'm just saying maybe having me around right now isn't helping ... and I can leave if you want. Give you time to sort things out until you know whether you want me back."

She moved closer to him, peered up at his face through red-rimmed eyes. "You're a wanker and an idiot."

He tried not to notice that from this angle, he could see straight down her pyjama top. It only made things hard, in multiple senses.

I nearly cut these lines on the grounds that the pun was too terrible, but finally decided that they fit the tone of the story, if barely.

"Rose," he said slowly, "you're going to have to forgive me, but I think I'm a bit confused."

"Look," she replied, "just because I want to punch him in the face, doesn't mean I want you to leave."

"It doesn't?"

"No, you idiot, it doesn't. Of course it doesn't."

Scratch what the mouth had said. Stupid mouth, as stupid and rubbish as those human emotions, except for the ones telling him he had to do something stupid himself on the off chance it led to something significantly less rubbish.

This paragraph was also a late addition, but I knew I needed something to get at Handy's thoughts, and ideally, it had to be something that referenced something earlier for continuity. Thank god I finally came up with something I liked.

"In that case," he said, "any chance I'm ever going to get to kiss you again?"

Rose grabbed the lapels of his pyjama top and whispered in his ear, "Lock the door first."

* * *

Some time later, long after Jackie had stopped pounding on the door yelling about waking the neighbours down the road if they kept at it like that, the Doctor turned to Rose and said, "I'm still fairly certain rebound sex isn't part of the grieving process."

"Maybe it's not rebound sex anymore." She curled tighter against his side, tapped her fingers on his chest. "You might need to help me sort that out." The fingers carefully marched their way down his ribcage, pausing at his hipbone, then making a sharp turn down and inwards.

Whatever part of the grieving process this was, he approved.


Bargaining
It wasn't rebound sex, but it wasn't a relationship, either. Or if it was, it was one of those uniquely complicated modern relationships in which both parties were friendly with one another right up to the point where one dropped into a pitch-black snit about being parted from other things they loved, after which there was a great deal of accusatory yelling, occasionally followed by a vigorous shag.

I love this paragraph. That is all.

No doubt Donna would have had some clever turn of phrase for it: "frenemies with benefits," perhaps, or "that git Dennis I was shagging for about three weeks there." From the Doctor's perspective, it was simply frustrating not knowing where he stood at any given moment, much less whether there was anything he could do to avoid a pitch-black snit, his or Rose's.

Most frustrating was not being able to employ his favourite avoidance technique, but that was another universe away right now. He felt a snit coming on, not quite pitch-black yet, but rapidly slipping down the spectrum.

Look! That second sentence contains a real, live metaphor! Hooray for me.

He was sitting by the koi pond, tossing stale baguette to a writhing frenzy of fish and contemplating whether his snit had reached ultraviolet levels, when Rose dropped down beside him.

"Do you think there's anything we could have done that'd have got him to stay?"

"Not unless I clamped the TARDIS." He sighed. "Look, Rose, this isn't about you, and honestly, it's not about me, either. It's about him not being able to accept the mistakes he's made. I should know."

"All I need is fifteen minutes with him. Fifteen minutes! He needs a good slap and a lecture he'll never forget."

A deliberate callback to dialogue from "You That Way; We This Way" -- or the other way around chronologically, I suppose. I AM TIMEY-WIMEY.

"Only fifteen minutes? So, he's getting the abridged version, then?"

"Oh, shut up."

"Do you really want to go back to him now?"

"I don't know. I really don't." She paused. "A few months ago, yeah. But now ..."

The Doctor ripped off another chunk of bread and flung it far into the pond, watched the fish splash over each other in their haste to reach it. "Now you're accustomed to this sad, old face?"

"Yeah, kind of." Rose leaned her head against his shoulder so briefly he almost thought it was an accident, but there was no mistaking the smile on her face.

"You could have come, too, you know," she continued. "Mmm, two of you to deal with. All sorts of possibilities there."

Also a reference to dialogue from "You That Way; We This Way."

His arm froze mid-throw. "Just what kind of possibilities did you have in mind, Rose?"

She pushed herself up off the ground, patted grass clippings off her jeans. "Come back up to the house when you're done, and maybe we can have a demonstration."

I had the idea for Rose and her little demonstration well before I wrote this scene, so someday I may write that down, too.


Depression
Insomnia had been the Doctor's status quo for so many years that he was shocked to discover it could happen to him by accident. Nights when he actually wanted to be asleep – which was weird enough in and of itself – he might instead find himself lying awake, restlessness jittering down to his toes, his brain whirling in futile frustration.

I have insomniac tendencies myself, and "brain whirling in futile frustration" pretty much covers it. Plus, how weird and annoying would it be for a man who barely slept in the first place to suddenly discover that he couldn't even sleep when he wanted to?

You let him make this trade for you, one girl for another. You'll never see the other one again. She'll always be a hole in your heart, your one pathetic, ordinary, human heart. People die from holes in their heart. You'll die, too, someday, and maybe you won't even have been good enough to hold on to Rose, because maybe you're as hopelessly unfixable as Davros himself.

Maybe Rose will never, ever love you back. Maybe she's right not to.

He huffed, threw back the covers, and sat on the edge of the bed, brooding. How had he spent all his sleepless nights before this? Ah, yes: tinkering with the TARDIS, whispering sweet nothings to her wiring. Travelling with her, even if they didn't always wind up where he'd planned. Getting into trouble, relying on her to whisk him away to the next adventure.

Handy/TARDIS ;_;

Now, the best he could hope for was a cup of chamomile tea and a supremely boring book. Pete's study had a small business theory collection the Doctor had found invaluable the last time he'd been stuck awake in the middle of the night; nothing sent him right back to dreamland like lovingly detailed analyses of productivity maximisation techniques.

I actually had a hard time coming up with a topic that the Doctor might find boring. He likes recreational math! He's interested in history! Even the delightfully trashy awfulness of a Jackie Collins novel might entertain him!

Halfway to the study, flickering light and shadow along the corridor drew him to the living room, where he found Rose curled up on the sofa with a tub of ice cream and the telly tuned to a shopping channel. Even muted, the hosts looked far too excited given the merchandise they were pushing, which unless the Doctor was mistaken, was a matched set of Tiffany-style lamps shaped like hedgehogs.

It also took me a little while to figure out what Rose would be watching in the middle of the night, but home shopping seemed perfect. Yes, those lamps really exist.

"A two-for-one offer," the Doctor said. "How many hedgehog lamps does the average home need?"

"Ask Mum," Rose replied, doggedly excavating a walnut from the ice cream. "She's got one on her makeup table. Bought it last week."

He stared at her. "Please tell me you're making that up."

"Nope. All the money in the world, but sometimes she's got to have a tatty hedgehog lamp."

He shook his head and sat beside her, carefully wedging himself in next to her feet. "Pass the ice cream, will you? I can't be expected to shop for insectivore-shaped lighting on an empty stomach."

Rose drew the tub back to her chest. "Don't even look at it, or I'll cut that hand right back off." She nodded towards the kitchen. "Two more in there, if you want them."

The line about cutting his hand off was the first part of this scene I wrote. Considering everything else was built around that one line, I'm really pleased with how the scene turned out.

"Maybe later, if I'm still awake."

"If you're having the same night I am, that'll be a while."

"Can't sleep either?"

"I don't know what's wrong lately. Sometimes, I'm fine, yeah? And then some nights I wake up and it's like I can't stop thinking about ..."

"Thinking about what?"

"What I did wrong. How if I'd just held on to that lever a little longer, I'd still be with him. You know how many nightmares I had about that room after I got here? Hundreds. Maybe more. And then we started working on the cannon and they were gone, until you got here."

He stiffened. "So this is my fault then. As usual."

"No. Stop. It's not like that. I've worked it out."

"Have you, now."

"Yeah, I have," she said. "Or I'm trying to, anyway. I think they're just ... leftovers. Little bits of me trying to come to terms with him really being gone. Because you know what else keeps me up sometimes?"

"What?"

"Thinking you might leave me for being such a cow."

"... oh."

"Yeah."

"Rose, does this mean ..." He leaned closer to her, fixing her eyes with his. The television light glimmered across her face like rippling water. "Does this mean I can have some of your ice cream?"

"God, you're useless."

"But yours," he said, reaching for the spoon.

How much do I love the way this scene ends? SOOOOO MUCH. Yeah, it's my story, I can like whatever bits of it I want.

Also, "you're useless" is yet another reference to dialogue in "You This Way; We That Way." For once, this isn't because I'm lazy; it's a deliberate choice to provide consistency in Rose's voice.


Acceptance
"The light's beautiful in here," Rose said. "But that paint's got to go. What'd the estate agent call it? 'Tangerine' or something? It'd be like living inside a giant orange."

"Still," the Doctor said, peering inside the bedroom's walk-in closet that, while large, stubbornly continued not being dimensionally transcendental, "good location, bit of a yard, should have a nice view of the stars from the rooftop."

I usually toss a private joke into my stories to keep myself amused. Here it's that giving Handy and Rose that giant closet means I can include Trapped in a Closet in my series continuity if I feel like it.

Rose walked into the closet and twirled in a circle. "Oh, this closet. Look at the shelving! And built-in drawers! Never mind you, I'm moving in here."

The Doctor caught her at the waist and spun her to face him. Her face glowed with happiness. Either that, or it was light bouncing off the tangerine walls.

"You really want this?" he said softly.

Rose slid her arms round his neck and scratched the back of his scalp affectionately. "We're probably not supposed to christen it until we've signed the papers, have we?"

"No," he said, though he had to admit, it was tempting. "Besides, it just won't be the same without your mum here to bang on the door."

Had to throw in one more reference to the running gag.

"We'll live."

"Yeah," he said. "I suppose we will."

The end is a little abrupt, but I can live with it. I always knew that "Acceptance" would be about Handy and Rose moving in together, and it felt like that was the only point that needed to be made; the last major conflict had been resolved at the end of the previous section, so this bit is really more of an epilogue.