fic: little mistakes (doctor who)
Title: Little Mistakes
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Theta/Koschei, Two/Jamie, Three/Liz Shaw, Four/Romana II, Eleven/River
Summary: Four times the Doctor avoided a first kiss - thanks to a sonic screwdriver, more or less - and one time he didn’t.
AN: Yeah, this is the fault of that line in the Christmas Special which I went and took literally, because that's surely what you're meant to do with jokes. Tralala. Ahem.
Little Mistakes
Theta realises he’s been staring, and Koschei’s noticed; his eyes are dark and smiling in a way that his mouth almost never is. Theta looks away, looks at his hands, his fingers playing with a tiny gear that’s supposed to be somewhere in the middle of this fascinating old clock.
They’re meant to be repairing it, together and with proper respect for its temporal origins, though Theta’s almost certain that the miniature fusion power piece is an addition of Koschei’s and somewhat outside the realm of contemporary Sol III technology.
That’s not a problem, not a real problem anyway. The real problem is that Koschei’s sitting far too close to him on the lab bench, and that Theta can’t watch him wire the simplest circuit without having to resist the urge to smile. The problem is that there is something insidiously strange and wonderful swelling up through Theta’s chest and that he finds himself unable to be distracted from the thought of how easy it would be to kiss Koschei. Something chaste and simple, easily dismissed as a fraternal gesture, as a thank you, an accident even.
(He doesn’t want to, he wants something full of passion and heat and conflict, he wants him to know how angry he can make him, how much that can taste like love.)
“Screwdriver,” Theta says suddenly, as though it’s important.
Koschei stares at him as though he’s gone mad. Perhaps he has. He can’t help but notice he’s moving very quickly towards the door and out into the corridor. Koschei calls out, but he isn’t listening: he’s running.
He doesn’t stop until he’s back in his own room, his closed door shielding him from the rest of the universe. All he can hear is his heartsbeat and a plethora of thoughts that he really doesn’t want to listen to right now, or ever.
He sits, his back to the door, and draws circuit diagrams in his mind. Creativity, slaved to efficiency and function. Engineering, he thinks, is an art of solvable truths.
-
They’re snuggling.
It’s not a word the Doctor wants to use but it’s the only one that’s entirely accurate, and that’s fine, snuggling is fine. He likes snuggling. And it’s not as though he hasn’t noticed that Jamie’s first response to practically everything - deadly or dull, the trivial or the extraordinary - is to grab hold of him in some fashion. It’s not as though he objects or doesn’t reciprocate more often than not.
It’s just that those are the touches of a moment, a few seconds of comfort or communication, and now they’re trapped and they’re cold and their bodies and arms and legs are connected and staying connected. It’s a very practical way to conserve body heat, obviously, and it may also be very comfortable and, one could argue, rather intimate, and Jamie is looking at him in a very particular way that the Doctor is sure could mean any number of things other than -
“Sonic,” says the Doctor.
Jamie blinks. “What?”
“The sonic screwdriver, it’s broken. I’ve just had an idea about fixing it though. It’s a very good idea too. Would you like to hear it?”
Jamie stares at him for several very long seconds. “Aye,” he says finally, barely concealing a sigh, “go on then.”
The Doctor starts talking, and keeps talking. He’s good at talking about this sort of thing, after all. He’s had a lot of practice. And Jamie does his best. He nods occasionally and he asks questions where he can.
Eventually, the Doctor shuts up. He feels rather foolish.
“Well,” says Jamie, “you certainly seem to know what you’re about.”
“I usually do,” says the Doctor, not quite able to keep a hint of smugness from his tone.
Jamie rolls his eyes, edges a little closer and the Doctor doesn’t object when he tucks his head under the Doctor’s chin. “You cold, Doctor?”
“Not terribly.” His hand brushes over Jamie’s and he squeezes his fingers. Even through the gloves, they feel stiff and awkward.
“Wriggle your fingers, Jamie.”
He does so. That’s something then.
The Doctor looks down and sees that Jamie’s closed his eyes. He nudges him with his shoulder. “You mustn’t go to sleep.” Jamie makes an unintelligible noise, but doesn’t move. “Jamie!” A hard poke in the ribs this time, and he’s awake.
“What was that for?” he asks, all indignant and flustered, and the Doctor tries very hard not to smile too much.
“If you fall asleep, you might...” He stops, looks up. The ice is getting brighter, it’s melting. Great fat drops of water begin to fall. “Look! Look, Jamie, sunlight!”
It is indeed sunlight, and as soon as the ice breaks a familiar face bobs into view. “Doctor!” calls Zoe. “Are you two all right?”
The Doctor scrambles to his feet, pulls Jamie up after him, both grinning and waving and, yes, hugging. Of course they are.
“Of course we are!” he shouts back.
-
Liz Shaw doesn’t just look Time Lord, sometimes she sounds Time Lord, and the Doctor isn’t sure whether he’s grateful or horrified.
It’s not as though he hasn’t met clever humans before, not as though he hasn’t travelled with them even, but this is different. Here, he’s trapped, and he’s alone, and he looks at her and suddenly feels like that’s not quite true.
But it is. It is. And she has one heart and one life and he doesn’t care that he can listen to her and have his illusion for a little while because he doesn’t want an anaesthetic (and that’s not fair to her anyway), he wants his freedom: all the universe, all of space and time to dance through, and nothing less.
He can be patronising and short-tempered, selfish and distant, and so he is. He knows how to push people away (he tries not to be cruel). He forgets himself often, allows himself to be charmed and to be charming.
He sits on the other side of the lab bench, watching her as she adroitly handles lab equipment cobbled together from the TARDIS’s storerooms, working on principles that aren’t supposed to be discovered on this planet for another two centuries.
He wants to kiss her, but she’ll taste human.
“How many settings does a sonic screwdriver have?” he asks himself later, alone and unable to sleep. It’s a joke, he supposes. It must be, but he’s forgotten the punch line.
-
This time, at least, the Doctor is convinced he has a perfectly good reason for thinking about his sonic screwdriver every time Romana slips, ever so elegantly, inside his personal space. If she wants her own sonic screwdriver, that’s fine, but having one better than his just isn’t on.
She’s wearing something pink today, and hidden somewhere about her person is that pretentious excuse for a quasi-cylindrical gadget. She twirls as she enters the console room, gives the smallest shrug that’s self-consciously nonchalant, and he pretends not to notice her rather charming, if not wholly practical, shoes and her very fetching hat.
“Well, these can’t be right,” she says after running a critical eye over the co-ordinates he’s set.
“Excuse me?” The co-ordinates are, of course, excellent. He programmed them in, after all.
“You’re three decades too late. I thought we were going to see the meteor storms on Calandris VI. The ones that didn’t start a mass extinction event.”
The Doctor sniffs. “It was deliberate, you know.” He joins her at the console. She’s right, he supposes, but only in the purely technical sense. Undoubtedly his co-ordinates are correct according to certain niche philosophers who interpret time, space and what exactly constitutes a meteor in a rather more liberal sense. He’s always liked niche philosophers. Nice chaps. Good hair.
“Of course it was,” she agrees, and slaps his wandering fingers casually away from her pocket. The Doctor pulls a face. He really must practice his sleight-of-hand.
“If you want to borrow my screwdriver,” she says, “all you have to do is ask.”
Her face is very close to his. It would be nice to kiss her, even nicer to see the look of surprise on her face. Would she be surprised? He really does want to get a better look at that blasted screwdriver of hers, and perhaps a kiss would be just the distraction he needs.
Too late, they’ve landed, and she’s moved to the other side of the console to open the door.
When she looks at him again, there’s a smile hidden in the corner of her mouth. He meets her gaze with wide-eyed innocence. She sticks out her tongue and throws him her screwdriver.
“I didn’t ask,” the Doctor says, trying not to admire how cleanly she’s fitted the protean couplers into the outer casing.
“Of course not,” Romana says, not agreeing at all.
-
“River,” asks the Doctor, “what’s your opinion on sonic screwdrivers?”
“I think they’re very poor excuses for not kissing people you love.” She pauses, then adds, “And I suspect they might be a euphemism for something else.”
“Ah,” says the Doctor. “I don’t suppose you’d believe the Zeus plugs are on the blink? If I don’t repair them something very unfortunate’s going to happen to, um, somewhere.”
“No.”
“Or that I really need to see to the chameleon circuit? It’s been centuries, you know.”
“You like it broken.”
“Well, the imprint in the briode nebuliser has definitely been looking a bit hazy these days so...”
Her lips curve into a smile, a smile so close he only needs to incline his head the barest fraction to press his mouth against it.
“More,” says River.
He raises his eyebrows, but that doesn’t hide the satisfaction that’s settled around his expression. His face is youthful and his eyes sparkling and centuries old. “More,” he repeats.
He kisses them all, eventually. Most of them. Some. Or they kiss him. Instigation doesn’t matter (he likes to think, because he’s so very good at making excuses.) He likes kissing, it’s the something else he’s afraid of. It’s the something else that he thinks of as he pulls River against him and threads his fingers through her hair. His thoughts tangle like silver thread. What’s your real name? I know how I say goodbye to you. Do you dance, River? Do you know how to dance? And forget? And create, and pretend?
He kisses River, and he doesn’t know why (is he supposed to know?), and he doesn’t want to think to think about how easy that makes it. Puzzles, he believes, should always be harder to set than to solve.
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Theta/Koschei, Two/Jamie, Three/Liz Shaw, Four/Romana II, Eleven/River
Summary: Four times the Doctor avoided a first kiss - thanks to a sonic screwdriver, more or less - and one time he didn’t.
AN: Yeah, this is the fault of that line in the Christmas Special which I went and took literally, because that's surely what you're meant to do with jokes. Tralala. Ahem.
Little Mistakes
Theta realises he’s been staring, and Koschei’s noticed; his eyes are dark and smiling in a way that his mouth almost never is. Theta looks away, looks at his hands, his fingers playing with a tiny gear that’s supposed to be somewhere in the middle of this fascinating old clock.
They’re meant to be repairing it, together and with proper respect for its temporal origins, though Theta’s almost certain that the miniature fusion power piece is an addition of Koschei’s and somewhat outside the realm of contemporary Sol III technology.
That’s not a problem, not a real problem anyway. The real problem is that Koschei’s sitting far too close to him on the lab bench, and that Theta can’t watch him wire the simplest circuit without having to resist the urge to smile. The problem is that there is something insidiously strange and wonderful swelling up through Theta’s chest and that he finds himself unable to be distracted from the thought of how easy it would be to kiss Koschei. Something chaste and simple, easily dismissed as a fraternal gesture, as a thank you, an accident even.
(He doesn’t want to, he wants something full of passion and heat and conflict, he wants him to know how angry he can make him, how much that can taste like love.)
“Screwdriver,” Theta says suddenly, as though it’s important.
Koschei stares at him as though he’s gone mad. Perhaps he has. He can’t help but notice he’s moving very quickly towards the door and out into the corridor. Koschei calls out, but he isn’t listening: he’s running.
He doesn’t stop until he’s back in his own room, his closed door shielding him from the rest of the universe. All he can hear is his heartsbeat and a plethora of thoughts that he really doesn’t want to listen to right now, or ever.
He sits, his back to the door, and draws circuit diagrams in his mind. Creativity, slaved to efficiency and function. Engineering, he thinks, is an art of solvable truths.
-
They’re snuggling.
It’s not a word the Doctor wants to use but it’s the only one that’s entirely accurate, and that’s fine, snuggling is fine. He likes snuggling. And it’s not as though he hasn’t noticed that Jamie’s first response to practically everything - deadly or dull, the trivial or the extraordinary - is to grab hold of him in some fashion. It’s not as though he objects or doesn’t reciprocate more often than not.
It’s just that those are the touches of a moment, a few seconds of comfort or communication, and now they’re trapped and they’re cold and their bodies and arms and legs are connected and staying connected. It’s a very practical way to conserve body heat, obviously, and it may also be very comfortable and, one could argue, rather intimate, and Jamie is looking at him in a very particular way that the Doctor is sure could mean any number of things other than -
“Sonic,” says the Doctor.
Jamie blinks. “What?”
“The sonic screwdriver, it’s broken. I’ve just had an idea about fixing it though. It’s a very good idea too. Would you like to hear it?”
Jamie stares at him for several very long seconds. “Aye,” he says finally, barely concealing a sigh, “go on then.”
The Doctor starts talking, and keeps talking. He’s good at talking about this sort of thing, after all. He’s had a lot of practice. And Jamie does his best. He nods occasionally and he asks questions where he can.
Eventually, the Doctor shuts up. He feels rather foolish.
“Well,” says Jamie, “you certainly seem to know what you’re about.”
“I usually do,” says the Doctor, not quite able to keep a hint of smugness from his tone.
Jamie rolls his eyes, edges a little closer and the Doctor doesn’t object when he tucks his head under the Doctor’s chin. “You cold, Doctor?”
“Not terribly.” His hand brushes over Jamie’s and he squeezes his fingers. Even through the gloves, they feel stiff and awkward.
“Wriggle your fingers, Jamie.”
He does so. That’s something then.
The Doctor looks down and sees that Jamie’s closed his eyes. He nudges him with his shoulder. “You mustn’t go to sleep.” Jamie makes an unintelligible noise, but doesn’t move. “Jamie!” A hard poke in the ribs this time, and he’s awake.
“What was that for?” he asks, all indignant and flustered, and the Doctor tries very hard not to smile too much.
“If you fall asleep, you might...” He stops, looks up. The ice is getting brighter, it’s melting. Great fat drops of water begin to fall. “Look! Look, Jamie, sunlight!”
It is indeed sunlight, and as soon as the ice breaks a familiar face bobs into view. “Doctor!” calls Zoe. “Are you two all right?”
The Doctor scrambles to his feet, pulls Jamie up after him, both grinning and waving and, yes, hugging. Of course they are.
“Of course we are!” he shouts back.
-
Liz Shaw doesn’t just look Time Lord, sometimes she sounds Time Lord, and the Doctor isn’t sure whether he’s grateful or horrified.
It’s not as though he hasn’t met clever humans before, not as though he hasn’t travelled with them even, but this is different. Here, he’s trapped, and he’s alone, and he looks at her and suddenly feels like that’s not quite true.
But it is. It is. And she has one heart and one life and he doesn’t care that he can listen to her and have his illusion for a little while because he doesn’t want an anaesthetic (and that’s not fair to her anyway), he wants his freedom: all the universe, all of space and time to dance through, and nothing less.
He can be patronising and short-tempered, selfish and distant, and so he is. He knows how to push people away (he tries not to be cruel). He forgets himself often, allows himself to be charmed and to be charming.
He sits on the other side of the lab bench, watching her as she adroitly handles lab equipment cobbled together from the TARDIS’s storerooms, working on principles that aren’t supposed to be discovered on this planet for another two centuries.
He wants to kiss her, but she’ll taste human.
“How many settings does a sonic screwdriver have?” he asks himself later, alone and unable to sleep. It’s a joke, he supposes. It must be, but he’s forgotten the punch line.
-
This time, at least, the Doctor is convinced he has a perfectly good reason for thinking about his sonic screwdriver every time Romana slips, ever so elegantly, inside his personal space. If she wants her own sonic screwdriver, that’s fine, but having one better than his just isn’t on.
She’s wearing something pink today, and hidden somewhere about her person is that pretentious excuse for a quasi-cylindrical gadget. She twirls as she enters the console room, gives the smallest shrug that’s self-consciously nonchalant, and he pretends not to notice her rather charming, if not wholly practical, shoes and her very fetching hat.
“Well, these can’t be right,” she says after running a critical eye over the co-ordinates he’s set.
“Excuse me?” The co-ordinates are, of course, excellent. He programmed them in, after all.
“You’re three decades too late. I thought we were going to see the meteor storms on Calandris VI. The ones that didn’t start a mass extinction event.”
The Doctor sniffs. “It was deliberate, you know.” He joins her at the console. She’s right, he supposes, but only in the purely technical sense. Undoubtedly his co-ordinates are correct according to certain niche philosophers who interpret time, space and what exactly constitutes a meteor in a rather more liberal sense. He’s always liked niche philosophers. Nice chaps. Good hair.
“Of course it was,” she agrees, and slaps his wandering fingers casually away from her pocket. The Doctor pulls a face. He really must practice his sleight-of-hand.
“If you want to borrow my screwdriver,” she says, “all you have to do is ask.”
Her face is very close to his. It would be nice to kiss her, even nicer to see the look of surprise on her face. Would she be surprised? He really does want to get a better look at that blasted screwdriver of hers, and perhaps a kiss would be just the distraction he needs.
Too late, they’ve landed, and she’s moved to the other side of the console to open the door.
When she looks at him again, there’s a smile hidden in the corner of her mouth. He meets her gaze with wide-eyed innocence. She sticks out her tongue and throws him her screwdriver.
“I didn’t ask,” the Doctor says, trying not to admire how cleanly she’s fitted the protean couplers into the outer casing.
“Of course not,” Romana says, not agreeing at all.
-
“River,” asks the Doctor, “what’s your opinion on sonic screwdrivers?”
“I think they’re very poor excuses for not kissing people you love.” She pauses, then adds, “And I suspect they might be a euphemism for something else.”
“Ah,” says the Doctor. “I don’t suppose you’d believe the Zeus plugs are on the blink? If I don’t repair them something very unfortunate’s going to happen to, um, somewhere.”
“No.”
“Or that I really need to see to the chameleon circuit? It’s been centuries, you know.”
“You like it broken.”
“Well, the imprint in the briode nebuliser has definitely been looking a bit hazy these days so...”
Her lips curve into a smile, a smile so close he only needs to incline his head the barest fraction to press his mouth against it.
“More,” says River.
He raises his eyebrows, but that doesn’t hide the satisfaction that’s settled around his expression. His face is youthful and his eyes sparkling and centuries old. “More,” he repeats.
He kisses them all, eventually. Most of them. Some. Or they kiss him. Instigation doesn’t matter (he likes to think, because he’s so very good at making excuses.) He likes kissing, it’s the something else he’s afraid of. It’s the something else that he thinks of as he pulls River against him and threads his fingers through her hair. His thoughts tangle like silver thread. What’s your real name? I know how I say goodbye to you. Do you dance, River? Do you know how to dance? And forget? And create, and pretend?
He kisses River, and he doesn’t know why (is he supposed to know?), and he doesn’t want to think to think about how easy that makes it. Puzzles, he believes, should always be harder to set than to solve.