#Nah I mean. Thinking of a certain past incarnation of his I know. His ability to smile absently and alienly while watching

[eye-of-leviathan]

Lev really is one of those grandpas you find out was involved in hardcore war shit and a bunch of serious high ranking jobs when he was younger and you just cannot believe it's the same person

[chocolatequeennk]

Wired to Love You

In which the Doctor gets a caffeine high and gives away more than he intended.

Ten x Rose

For @doctorroseprompts 31 Days of Ficmas. This is Day 2: Ginger.

AO3 | FF.NET

The Doctor didn’t spin around the console with his usual manic energy as he set the coordinates for their next trip. He wanted to be sure of the landing this time—Rose deserved a fun trip. They’d spent a week in London, letting the TARDIS recover from her side trip to the parallel universe, and Rose recover from losing Mickey.

Mickey Smith, defender of the Earth, he mused. Not such an idiot after all.

He’d been through this before—had one companion stay after losing a friend. It was never easy, and he wanted to give Rose something that would make her smile.

He twisted the last knob, then gave her a wide smile. “Are you ready for this, Rose Tyler?” he asked dramatically as he grabbed the dematerialisation lever.

Rose rolled her eyes, but he knew he saw a hint of a smile playing with the corners of her mouth. “Yeah, all right. Impress me, Time Lord.”

The Doctor threw the lever then put his hand on his chest in mock indignation. “Rose Tyler, it almost sounds as if you don’t think I’m impressive.”

She laughed, the musical sound echoing in the console room. “You are the same man, but so different. ‘I am impressive!’ he insisted. Three words. And here you are, spouting off a sonnet practically.”

The Doctor sniffed. “It’s not my fault this particular incarnation is a trifle more loquacious than I was in my last body.”

“Loquacious?” she asked, giggles rippling through her body.

The Doctor warmed to his subject. He was making Rose laugh, which was all he wanted out of the day. “I am a wordsmith, Rose Tyler. The wordiest of smithy wordsmiths.”

Rose mouthed the words, and he grinned at her. The TARDIS landed, and he spun around and offered her his hand. “Come on! I think we’re ready for a party.”

He tilted his head and studied her attire. “But I think you’ll need a warm coat or something,” he said, realising she was dressed for a much warmer climate.

The ship hummed around them, and the Doctor and Rose both looked at the coat rack by the door. To neither of their surprise, a Rose-sized coat was hanging there.

“The TARDIS is looking out for me,” Rose said as she jogged up the ramp.

The ship hummed again, the sensation feeling like a warm blanket. The Doctor patted a strut; he had no doubt the ship had taken him exactly where he had asked for once. They both knew Rose needed a smile.

Her giggles caught his attention. “What is this?” she asked, holding up a scarf.

A familiar scarf. A very familiar, very long, very colourful scarf.

The Doctor groaned. “That… That should have been buried in an archived version of the wardrobe room. Why’d you bring that out?”

The ship whistled, even though the question was rhetorical. It had made Rose laugh. That was exactly why she’d brought it out.

He shook his head and watched as Rose draped it around her neck three times. The purple stripes matched her coat almost perfectly.

Rose grinned at the Doctor. She hadn’t been quite sure she was ready to travel again, but the warm laughter had eliminated most of her lingering sorrow.

She held her hand out to him. “Come on,” she said. “I hear there’s something impressive outside these doors.”

The Doctor’s answering grin eased what was left of her lingering melancholy. He bounded up the ramp and pulled the door open, gesturing for her to go outside first.

Rose took a step towards the door, then tilted her head. She heard something familiar… She sniffed. And smelled something familiar.

Excitement beat in her heart and she darted past him, out onto the snow-covered street. “Oh, brilliant,” she breathed, turning in a slow circle to take it all in.

They’d parked on one side of a wide square. A Christmas tree dominated the space, with garland spanning out from the tree to the buildings lining the square.

“Where are we?”

The Doctor took her hand and they started walking towards the centre of the square. “This is Parolin in the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire.”

“You mean we finally made it?” Rose cast him a sideways grin. “Not to some satellite or something where we’ll have to figure out who’s trying to end humanity as we know it?”

The Doctor huffed, and she giggled in delight. He hip checked her, and she burst into full on laughter.

“If you’re finished,” he said after a moment, “I could tell you the rest. Or you could continue to tease me.”

Rose tapped her chin with her finger. “Hmmm… tough choice.”

The Doctor pouted, and before he could work himself up, Rose slid closer to him and hugged his hand to her. “Nah, you know I’m teasing. Tell me more. The Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire…”

He nodded. “Human festivals have almost been forgotten.”

“Doesn’t sound very great to me,” Rose muttered.

“Except for once a century, when the nostalgists are able to have their day—or days.”

“You mean, they go 99 years without celebrating anything, and then once every one hundred years, the whole empire celebrates every human holiday… ever?”

“Yep!”

Rose shook her head. “Barmy,” she muttered.

Then she realised what he was saying. “So, this is literally the Christmas festival of a century.”

He made the little happy giggling sound in the back of his throat that she loved so much. “Exactly!”

Rose sighed and leaned her head on his shoulder. She wasn’t stupid; she knew why the Doctor had brought her here. But the fact that he knew exactly what would put a smile on her face didn’t make it any less meaningful. In fact…

“Thank you, Doctor.”

He smiled down at her, all the giddiness gone, leaving only warmth in its place. “Anything for you, Rose Tyler.”

Then he tightened his hold on her hand and tugged her through the crowds. “Come on, Rose! The party awaits!”

Rose laughed helplessly and let him pull her along with him. They moved from table to table, enjoying the chocolates and biscuits and eggnog and hot buttered rum.

At one point, they joined an impromptu group of carollers and roamed the surrounding streets, singing at the top of their lungs.

When they were done, the song leader handed everyone a slice of gingerbread. “Brilliant work, everyone. I’d say we’ll do it again next year, but well…” The crowd all laughed at the joke that must be old now, at the end of the year of festivals.

The Doctor hesitated just a moment before he devoured the gingerbread. He was hungry, and as long as he didn’t have alcohol, he should be fine. Ginger on its own didn’t get a Time Lord drunk—it just lowered their ability to metabolise the alcohol, letting it actually reach their system and intoxicate them.

“Where to next?” he asked Rose, once they’d finished the dessert.

“Can we go into a shop?” Rose asked. “I’m getting cold.”

The Doctor nodded. “The main indoor shopping area is this way,” he said, leading her to the booths lining the streets.

A stand along the way caught his eye, and he slowed down and snagged two cups of coffee. “This should help you warm up, too,” he said, offering one to her.

She wrapped both her hands around the paper cup and held it up to her nose. “Mmm, perfect,” she murmured.

The Doctor sipped at his coffee, trying to ignore the way his hearts were racing. That was par for the course when he was with Rose Tyler. He needed to learn to just… get used to it. Somehow. Even though no one had ever made him feel like this and…

He shook his head quickly to stop that thought in its tracks.

Rose looked up at him oddly, and he just grinned and bounced on his toes. “Come on, Rose Tyler!” he said, sounding a little too… energetic even to his ears. “Shopping awaits.”

The longer they were inside, the more antsy the Doctor felt. He always felt a little… bouncy in this body. Like he had slightly too much energy for the amount of limbs he possessed. But right now he felt like he was literally vibrating out of his skin.

And Rose was starting to notice. After the third time he went on a ten minute ramble about the shopping centre, the town origins, and the exact placement of the planet in the galaxy, she stopped and looked at him, her hands planted on her hips.

“All right, what’s going on with you?” she said. The words were stern, but the voice was concerned and he just loved it when Rose cared about him. Rose cared about everyone but it mattered the most when she cared about him.

He blinked and held his breath, hoping he hadn’t actually said that out loud. He wouldn’t normally, but today wasn’t normal and why wasn’t it normal? Rose had asked and he was going to tell her but first he had to figure out why himself. He couldn’t really tell her something he didn’t know the answer to.

(Contrary to her opinions, he did not actually just make up stories about the planets and people they visited. If he told her something, it was because he knew it—or at least, he believed he did. Sometimes he was wrong, and he was Time Lord enough to admit that.)

The Doctor stopped and put his fingers to his temples. His normally rapid thought process was out of control. What was he supposed to be doing? Oh right, figuring out why he was like this.

He took a deep breath, holding it for ten seconds, then letting it out slowly. That centred him just enough to focus on his body. Clearly, something was affecting…

The Doctor groaned and buried his hands in his face.

Rose blinked in concern when the Doctor groaned and buried his hands in his face. “Doctor?” she asked, feeling more worried by the minute. “Is something wrong?”

“Wrong?” he said, his voice muffled by his hands. He sighed and straightened up. “No, nothing is wrong, unless by wrong you mean embarrassing and too revealing, in which case yes something is wrong and you are about to learn more about Time Lord physiology than I had intended for today.”

Rose sucked in a breath and hoped she wasn’t blushing. She was almost certain that wasn’t what he’d meant—if he meant that kind of physiology lesson, he surely wouldn’t be talking about it in public.

“I never should have eaten that gingerbread. But it smelled delicious and I was hungry and I knew I wasn’t going to drink any alcohol, so I thought, ‘What’s the harm?’ How was I supposed to know that ginger would make caffeine affect me, just like alcohol.”

Rose blinked, trying to keep up with that rapid-fire speech. “What’s ginger got to do with anything?”

“Oh, everything. Well, not everything, just everything that is related to this particular conversation, in which case I suppose I really could just say everything because we were talking about this conversation, weren’t we?”

Rose blinked at him, and the Doctor groaned again. “It’s getting worse.”

“What is?”

She watched him take another deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Ginger,” he said, enunciating the two syllables in a way she knew meant he was trying to control his rambling again. “Time Lords are able to metabolise substances faster. It’s why I don’t get drunk. But ginger impairs our ability to metabolise the alcohol.”

Rose frowned; what did that have to do with anything? Like he’d said, they hadn’t had any alcohol.

Then she remembered the coffee, and it clicked. “Caffeine,” she said. “You can’t metabolise the caffeine, and now you’re completely wired.”

He pressed his lips in a thin line and nodded. Rose could see how hard it was for him to stay silent, and she could only imagine what their life would be like if the Doctor talked more than he already did.

“All right,” she said slowly. “Do you want to go back to the TARDIS?”

His shoulders slumped. “No, I don’t want to ruin this for you. This trip is supposed to be for you, to make you smile. You should always smile, Rose—your smile is so pretty.”

This time, Rose knew she was blushing. “Well, thanks,” she stammered. “But we can always come back to the party later, yeah? Like, we can go back to the TARDIS for a bit, or even overnight, without leaving the planet?”

The Doctor blinked so rapidly Rose swore she could feel a breeze from his eyelashes.

“I guess we don’t,” he said. “Do you know, I’ve never really though about that before. It’s always one day, one city. Unless we’re arrested or made guests of the king or something. Then we stay longer. But usually, I just do what I came to do and then leave. I never thought about just… staying.”

Rose took his hand and led him out of the shop, hoping he couldn’t see her rolling her eyes. “It’s not like you’re playing domestics,” she muttered. “I’m not saying we could set up house here. I’m just saying we could rest for a bit before coming back to the party.”

“Oh, I completely agree!” he said breezily. “I wasn’t arguing, I was just saying it wasn’t something I’d ever considered. Do you know, after over a thousand years in the TARDIS, I really thought I was done being surprised. Not by other planets, of course, because I’m always surprised. Day I know everything, that’s the day I quit travelling. But I’m not very often given just… a different way to live. It’s a paradigm shift! That’s you, Rose Tyler, a paradigm shifter.”

Rose breathed out a sigh of relief when she saw the TARDIS. She loved listening to the Doctor ramble, she really did, but his constant talking was hard to keep up with, especially as he jumped from topic to topic without warning or explanation.

“Here we are,” she said, pulling out her key. “Home again home again.”

She unlocked the door and turned around to look at the Doctor. To her surprise, he swept her up in a hug.

“What’s this for?” she asked, her words muffled by his coat.

“You called the TARDIS home,” he said. “I was worried… Well, it doesn’t matter. But you called the TARDIS home and now I know that I don’t need to worry.”

Rose was pretty sure she knew what he’d been worrying about, and he definitely did not need to worry.

“Yeah, she’s my home… as long as that’s okay?”

The Doctor pushed open the door and let Rose enter the ship first. “Of course it’s okay!” he replied, sounding almost indignant. “If it wasn’t okay, I’d say it wasn’t, would’t I? And I wouldn’t give you a key. Bit stupid of me to give someone a key if I didn’t want to them to feel at home.”

Rose shook her head. “Yeah, all right. Listen, Doctor. I’m going to go take a bath and go to bed. I’ll be up at eight for breakfast, and then we can explore the second half of the market.”

“Molto bene!” The Doctor bounced on his toes, then danced around the console. He just could not contain the excess energy that was building up in his body. Was this what humans felt like when they had caffeine? If it was, then why did they ever do it?

“Or maybe this is just special because of the ginger. Just like I’ll get totally sloshed on a single glass of wine if I’ve had ginger.”

The Doctor spun around to talk to Rose, and he blinked a few times when he realised she wasn’t there. But then he remembered that she’d told him she was leaving the room.

He pouted. Well, how was he going to stay busy if his busy partner had left him all on his own?

Without any real thought, he dug around under the console and started building with the pieces he found there. It was good to have something to do with his hands, but that project only took ten minutes.

Next, he walked a lap of the TARDIS. Or at least as much as could be ran in a lap. Several of the corridors weren’t really connected to the rest, unless either he or the TARDIS felt like they needed to be.

He blinked when he spotted a familiar door. It wasn’t really a surprise that he’d gotten himself to Rose’s room, he figured. After all, he would much rather be with her than alone, although he thought maybe she’d been getting a little tired of his rambling and he really didn’t want to annoy her.

He caught his lower lip between his teeth and thought for all of 30 seconds before he knocked at the door. “Rose? It’s me. Well, who else would it be? We are the only two people on the TARDIS after all.”

He snapped his mouth shut with a click. He wasn’t going to annoy Rose.

“Sorry,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’m trying not to ramble. If I don’t ramble, can I come in?”

Rose bit her lip. She was really pretty comfy in her jim jams, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear all about the Mongol invasion or who Merlin really was or anything else the Doctor happened to latch onto.

But on the other hand, she didn’t want to turn him away, either. It was really so sweet that he wanted to be with her while he felt a little out of sorts.

“Yeah, gimme a mo,” she called back. The cami top was enough, but she grabbed a pair of pyjama bottoms and pulled them on over her knickers. “Okay, come on in, Doctor.”

The door swung open, and the Doctor hesitated on the other side for a moment, his hands in his pockets. “Are you sure?” he asked. “I might talk your ear off.”

Rose tugged on her ears. “Nah, they’re attached.”

The Doctor giggled and bounded into the room. He flopped down on the big armchair Rose kept by her vanity. “Your room is nicer than mine,” he said, scanning the room quickly.

“Maybe because she knows I’ll actually use my room, unlike you.” Rose giggled when the ship whistled her agreement. “See? What’s the point in spending her energy giving you a nice room if you’re never in it?”

The Doctor hummed noncommittally. Rose had a suspicion that he’d just managed to hold something back just then, but she couldn’t fathom what it might have been. Still, if he wasn’t just blurting out every thought that came to mind, that was at least some improvement.

“I suppose,” the Doctor said, and it took Rose a moment to remember they were talking about their respective bedrooms.

He bit his lip again, and Rose turned to face him fully. “What is it?” she asked.

“Well… I don’t know how long this is going to last and I’m trying to not say every single thought in my head because despite what you might think, I do actually appreciate my privacy.

“But I’m just sitting here and I can’t stop thinking… did you always have that cute mole on your shoulder, Rose Tyler?”

Rose blinked several times and felt her face turn hot. There was something about the matter of fact way he said it made it feel like he’d made a far more intimate discovery than the small mole on her left shoulder.

“So tell me more about Parolin,” she requested. “You said Fourth Great and Bountiful, yeah?”

The Doctor nodded absently. “Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire.”

He was still staring at her. “How did I not know you have a perfect little mole on your left shoulder?” he said, almost petulantly. “I have catalogued every aspect of your appearance and personality, and yet here is this mole that has taken me completely by surprise. What other surprises do you have for me? Do I want to know, or should I just be… I don’t know, surprised.”

Rose blinked at him. “What all do you know about me?” she asked, thinking to call him on his bluff.

The Doctor leaned forward, his eyes lit up. “Rose Tyler Facts,” he said dramatically. “Tea: hot with milk and a little sugar. Chocolate: the darker the better. Movies: eclectic tastes. Rom com, and historical fiction, and especially in places where they blend.”

Rose felt her face grow warm as he continued rattling off everything from her favourite colour to the classmate in primary school who had pissed her off by ratting the whole class out to the teacher.

“How do you know even know so much about me?” she asked, when there was finally a moment of silence.

The Doctor blinked at her owlishly. She knew what had happened; she’d interrupted his train of thought and he was going to have to find a new one, or a boat or a car or something.

“Well, I love you. Why wouldn’t I know all of those things?”

In the silence that settled in the room, some of the Doctor’s caffeine daze lifted. He reviewed the last five minutes, and felt his face turn hot.

Rose was staring at him, her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open. The Doctor’s hearts stopped. He hadn’t really ever planned to tell her that, but in the times he’d let himself imagine it, he’d always thought she would… well, feel the same way.

Wasn’t that what she’d been trying to say outside the cafe? That she thought their relationship was something more than just friendship?

Apparently not, he thought glumly.

“And I think I’ve outstayed my welcome,” he mumbled. He got up and walked to the door, anxious to be alone with his embarrassment.

To his surprise, Rose reached the door before he did, sliding in just before he could grab the door knob.

“Rose?”

She poked him in the chest. “Don’t you dare leave this room,” she ordered. “You can’t say something like that, and then just… just… walk away!”

The Doctor looked down at her, trying to understand what she was saying. “Well… I hadn’t really meant to say that,” he said hesitantly.

Rose’s face fell. “Oh. You didn’t mean it, then?”

The Doctor paused, trying to think through the lingering caffeine fog. Something important was happening here, and if he could just focus instead of letting his brain go in forty-five directions at once, he might be able to figure out what it was.

“Doctor.” Rose’s voice gave him a point of focus. “Did you mean it?”

And finally, the important thing clicked. The only reason she would be so set on knowing if he meant it was if she wanted him to mean it.

The hearts that had stopped only a few moments ago were racing now. “Yes.”

He held his breath, watching her intently. When a smile spread across her face, the breath whooshed out of him.

Rose rolled her eyes as she stepped closer to him. “Were you really that nervous?” she asked.

“Wellllll…” The Doctor cautiously rested his hands on her waist, waiting for her to tell him that wasn’t what she wanted. “You haven’t really said much, except to demand an answer from me.”

She blinked up at him, and he had to hold back his delight that she’d gotten that wrapped up in the conversation.

“I mean… I might ask you how you feel,” he said casually.

“Oh! Oh my god, I can’t believe…”

Rose closed her eyes and shook her head, and when she opened her eyes, the warmth in them spread all through the Doctor.

“I love you, too,” she told him quietly.

The Doctor giggled then—he couldn’t help it. Rose shook her head and stepped closer to him, sliding her hands over his shoulders. “Is that funny?” she asked.

“Nope.” He bent closer and bumped his nose against hers, getting her to giggle this time. “Not funny, just happy.”

Rose tilted her head, and for a long moment, they hovered there, almost kissing but not quite. The intimacy of their breath mixing made the Doctor’s hearts race.

Air from my lungs, he thought, remembering a long-ago adventure.

And then Rose’s lips were on his, and he decided this was the only adventure he wanted to think about.