dw/wh13 :: carbon monoxide as I take you home
Title: carbon monoxide as I take you home
Fandom: Doctor Who/Warehouse 13
Pairing: 11/Claudia
Rating: PG-13
Warning: None
Summary: An almost planet full of almost things where an almost relationship is formed.
To: Mel dhfreak
From: Olivia
They were on a beach made of crushed glass; two suns shining off the shards and casting rainbows on their skin. The water was bright acid blue, and the waves eroded the beach, smoking and snapping in time with the tide. The sea breeze stung at their skin and suffocated their lungs, if they hadn’t been wearing masks, that is. It was a beautiful planet. Inhabitable, but beautiful.
Claudia kicked bits of glass off her purple rain boots and shielded her eyes against the glare off the ground. “Planet of Glass and Skin Cancer. What was it called again?”
“It doesn’t get called,” explained the Doctor, squinting up at the sky, watching crosswinds meet and drench the sky in reds and oranges. “People don’t come here and they never will.”
“So why are we here?” asked Claudia, squatting down to watch a glass encrusted almost-could-be-a-crab-if-crabs-had-seven-eyes-and-tails thing as it erupted from the beach.
The Doctor leaned back on his heels and slipped his hands into his pockets. The sleeves he’d rolled up to his elbows fell slightly from the movement. “I’m still trying to impress you.”
Claudia looked up at him, silhouetted by the smaller of the two suns in the sky behind him and the blues and yellows of the planet. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “The TARDIS brought us here, didn’t it?” The Doctor deflated slightly, and Claudia knew she was right. “Do you have like any say in where you get to go?” He ignored her, but pulled his screwdriver out of his pocket and turned it on a few times.
“Fumes are getting lower. The planet could be almost inhabitable in a few hours. C’mon, Donovan, before the tide rolls in.”
Claudia straightened and stretched, feeling her left shoulder pop. Her fingers tingled with chemical heat that much closer to the sky and she quickly dropped them. “Can we start with the forest? I always liked petrified wood.”
“Yes, yes - ah! Don’t forget your friend.” Claudia watched him flounce off, frowning after him.
“My what….?” She trailed off, looking around her person then down, starting a bit to find the almost-crab sitting on the toe of her boot, staring at its reflection (or at least, Claudia thought it looked like that was what it was doing) in the material, his tail wrapped around her ankle for support. Claudia dropped her head back and huffed in exasperation, but let the creature stay and followed carefully after the Doctor.
“What is it?” asked Claudia when she managed to catch up. The Doctor was bent low over a splintered tree, running a purple gloved finger (Thieving thieverson! Thought Claudia in almost outrage, mentally checking her person to recall when he managed to grab her warehouse gloves out of her back pocket) over one of the larger spikes of petrified wood. It sparked on contact with the glove whenever the Doctor moved his finger over it. He ignored her, obviously, because wood that reacted with neutralizing gloves was so much cooler than Claudia. She wanted to grumble, but it sort of was cooler than she was. But not by much.
Instead she pretended to be the Doctor and answered her question for him. “Native genus of the planet, Donovan. It likes you- can’t keep it, health hazard - call him Norman - him? Odd, could be a her, could be genderless, very odd, wonderfully odd-“
“Right on all accounts, Donovan,” interrupted the Doctor, giving her an amused look when she smiled broadly back. “The planet can’t sustain offspring, so what lives here now has probably lived here always, adapting with the changing environment.”
“So there’s an immortal crab-spider-cat sitting on my shoe?” asked Claudia. She shuddered. “I feel like PETA’s going to jump out and throw paint on me.”
“This is fascinating,” said the Doctor as if she hadn’t been speaking, which he sometimes did whenever she would go off on her tangents about things only she seemed to know about - but really, compared to the Doctor she was jester of the fast talk. Claudia snapped back to reality because the Doctor was talking and stroking the petrified tree and making fireworks. “-charged, perhaps even the whole planet! Why purple?”
Claudia shrugged. “Creativity, wisdom, magic. Who knows, maybe they ran out of yellow gloves?”
“No, yellow wouldn’t be nearly as effective,” muttered the Doctor and Claudia rolled her eyes up to the now indigo-chartreuse sky and mouthed ‘why do I even bother?’, hoping maybe someone would give her a decent answer. Then something dawned on her.
“An entire planet can’t be an artifact, can it?” she asked. She snorted. “I- that’s just…extremely avoidable. I mean, a massive charge of human energy infused into the planet after something emotionally and physically devastating to wipe out the population, and everyone knows that quartz makes people see things oh my god the planet’s an artifact and the TARDIS picked up people asking for help, but they weren’t really people and brought us here to fix it, those little sneaks there is no way we have enough goo to neutralize the planet-”
“Hush,” interrupted the Doctor, smirking. He snapped off the purple glove (her purple glove) and pocketed it, straightening up and turning to her. “The planet is not an artifact. The chemicals in the air and soil that have petrified the wood to react to whatever the gloves are made of.”
Claudia looked at him warily. “So no artifact?”
“No artifact.”
“Oh thank god,” shouted Claudia, her body slumping with relief. “I made the TARDIS promise that she would lay off the warehouse crap for at least an episode (“Episode?” asked the Doctor, with a little eyebrow raise. Claudia pressed her finger against his lips briefly for silence.). So, exploring the planet, how great is that going to be?”
The Doctor held his arm out for her to take, which she did so with a small hop and a grin, and the two walked into the petrified forest with Norman clinging to Claudia’s boot like a proper accessory, every step she took shaking bits of glass from it’s body.
It really was beautiful, the forest. It was cooler as well, with every step they took the temperature seemed to drop just a bit until Claudia was shivering and tightening her arm around the Doctor’s, pressing closer to him for warmth. A totally innocent move, he had two hearts, ergo, more body heat, or so Claudia figured.
“So when the fumes decrease so does the temperature,” commented Claudia, pursing her lips together. “I feel like I knew that.”
“We could probably take off our masks,” said the Doctor, but Claudia made no move to do so until he did. The Doctor made a show of taking off his mask and breathing deeply, giving her sideways looks that clearly said ‘stop being such a baby’.
She whacked him in the shoulder, but pulled off her mask with a flourish. Her hair was sticking to her forehead in what she knew was a very attractive sweaty way. They continued on in amused silence, the air become colder as the suns faded on the horizon in wonderful electric blues and oranges until the Doctor glanced down and oh’d softly. “Your friend seems to be dead.”
Claudia looked down sharply and sure enough, Norman was crumbling away, falling apart in glitter. Against the stone of the trees, Norman’s decomposing exterior melted like ice, leaving behind metallic liquid that sizzled and ate into the stone. The Doctor held her still, both of them watching the almost-crab fall apart completely in a pile of glitter on and around Claudia’s purple rain boot.
“I guess purple is somewhat significant,” mumbled Claudia, lifting her foot and shaking off the remains of Norman, stepping closer to the Doctor to get away from the eroding ground until she was pressed against his side.
“The material in your boots is what’s special,” corrected the Doctor. “The fact that they’re purple is irrelevant-“
“Purple is always relevant,” quipped Claudia, grinning and hopping over the small hole in the ground made by the almost-crab. She straightened her shirt and turned back to him. “Can we take a moment to morn poor Norman’s death?”
“Claudia…”
“I mean,” continued Claudia as if the Doctor hadn’t spoke, opening her arms wide. “You said it was possible that Norman is as old as the planet. That’s got to be impressive, I mean it must take years to fossilize a tree-“
“Not so many, actually. But, Claudia-!“
“And now, here lies Norman, nothing more than glitter on the ground, eating away everything in its path.”
“Claudia, duck!” the Doctor leapt over the now considerably larger hole and half-tackled, half-pulled Claudia to the ground before she even had a chance to see what she was ducking from. She oofed as the wind was knocked out of her, her head banging against the ground and the Doctor landing on her chest.
The Doctor’s weight on top of her shifted slightly so he was propped up against her side, his arms braced around her to keep from crushing her. Claudia opened her eyes to see a very brightly colored, scaled winged creature soar over them. The Doctor’s head was twisted around to he could see the almost-pterodactyl circle over them. Claudia didn’t breathe, almost every instinct in her body telling her to lie still while the other one’s were telling her to keep the Doctor for provoking it. Which she knew he was tempted to do. She reached up and grabbed him by the lapels, keeping a firm grip and tugging him down until he would meet her eyes. Above them, a glass shattering scream filled the air, and she didn’t want to know if it was emitting from the almost-pterodactyl or something it found. The Doctor raised an eyebrow at her, their noses very nearly touching.
“Do. Not. Kill us,” hissed Claudia. The Doctor stared at her, very still over her, all of the brilliant curiosity gone from his eyes, replaced by something solemn that Claudia couldn’t read. There was another scream, further away and Claudia let her head fall back against the ground in relief.
“See? It’s all fine,” said the Doctor with a bright grin that poked fun at her anxiety. She halfheartedly glared at him, but his smile was infectious and soon enough she was smiling back and giggling.
The Doctor pushed himself to his feet, reaching out to pull Claudia up as well, dusting themselves off. The Doctor hummed to himself, probably thinking of all the cool things that could inhabit the planet, but as long as he didn’t suggest going after the almost-pterodactyl she would go along with him. The Doctor stepped closer to her to pull a broken piece of stone from her hair and stopped humming. Claudia’s hands were still against her jeans; she could feel him staring and looked up at him. It was all very, very silent between them and, in a snap decision that Claudia wasn’t exactly sure either of them made, stepped into each other‘s personal spaces in the exact same moment. Claudia lifted herself up on her toes and met his mouth with hers and suddenly they were kissing and she was feeling lightheaded and it had nothing to do with the toxins in her lungs.
His hand was in her hair, around the back of her head, keeping her close while is other hand was on her shoulder, his thumb pressing against a place right above her clavicle. It was chaste as kisses go, but this was the Doctor and she was Claudia - the Doctor always had a sort of charged relationship with his companions, Claudia noticed. She noticed it when she met Amy and Martha and in the stories she’d heard about Rose, and especially when Jack was with them for that short time - and they would never work in a million years for some reason that Claudia couldn’t think of at the moment with her lips pressed against the Doctor’s.
Kissing. The Doctor.
She didn’t want to laugh at this, really, but fighting the smile on her face was god damn impossible. And then there was snickering. God, she felt like that episode of Friends where Rachel couldn’t kiss Ross without giggling! But she felt the Doctor’s lips against her quirk and he was smiling too. They broke apart, giggling like children. Claudia brought her hands up to her mouth to stifle them, while the Doctor just pursed his lips to try and look serious.
It didn’t work for either of them.
“No, no, shh,” said Claudia around giggles, pressing her pointer finger against the Doctor’s lips and doing the same to her own mouth with her other hand. “You’re not supposed to giggle, it’s a rule.”
“A rule is it?” asked the Doctor, staring cross eyed at her finger for a moment. “Seems like a silly rule, but most rules are silly aren‘t they? Are you‘re fingernails blue?”
“They glow in the dark!”
“They’re glowing now.” And indeed they were. Claudia hummed thoughtfully and pulled her hands away from the faces they were pressing against respectively. The Doctor grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her into his side, once again linking their arms. “I like this planet. It has character.”
“It’s going to kill us, Doctor,” said Claudia, steering them in the direction of the TARDIS before he tried to take them deeper into the forest. “Everything here is going to kill us. That-that caterpillar thing right there. Totally not here before, I think it spontaneously regenerated from Norman.”
“And what’s wrong with regeneration?”
“It has a scorpion tail!”
“It’s adapting, really Donovan…” the Doctor shook his head in mock reproach. She scoffed playfully at his tone and bumped into him lightly, still attached to his side. The Doctor, grinning, looked back over his shoulder to see that the almost-caterpillar was consuming the acid eroded stone with fuzzy purple feelers. “Call it Rollin.”
Claudia threw her head back and laughed, “So it’s an almost-planet full of almost creatures with almost-awkward names.”
“Precisely. And that’s what we’ll call it.”
Claudia gave him a funny look. “That seems like a very long confusing name for a planet, el Doctor.”
“What? No! Not the almost-planet full of…stuff - just The Almost-Planet. Much easier to remember, much more mysterious, and a bit sexy.”
“It’s all a bit sexy for you isn’t it? Do you ever get tired of being attracted to everything all at once?”
“Not even a bit, Donovan.” The Doctor was smirking and the TARDIS was in sight, radioactively blue against the setting suns reflecting behind it and off the similarly colored ocean water. The Doctor steered her around something that looked almost-dead and snapped his fingers. The TARDIS door swung open, her insides glowing orange and warmth. Claudia turned her head, walking awkwardly with the Doctor until they reached the door. He let her linger outside, looking out at the brilliantly colored planet they were leaving behind for brighter stars and livable atmosphere.
“I think we should go to the 60‘s,” said Claudia thoughtfully, her fingers brushing against the TARDIS door. “I feel very into colors at the moment.”
The Doctor reappeared behind her and hummed thoughtfully, fiddling with something in his hands and not looking at her. “Brilliant, the 60’s. You’re Farnsworth is making that TARDIS sound again.” Claudia looked around and the Doctor held out her Farnsworth for her. She frowned.
“But…we’re not on Earth. How is it working - we‘re not on Earth.”
“Philo did say he made his own two-way with a bit extra, didn’t he?” said the Doctor, referring to their visit to Philo Farnsworth a few weeks ago just after they’d left Jack in Cardiff. Claudia nodded, but still didn’t feel convinced, she was chewing her bottom lip worriedly. The Doctor just smirked and wrapped his hand around her elbow, pulling her sideways into the TARDIS and shutting the door behind them.
“Answer it, Donovan.”
“Yeah, alright, but if it sucks me into an alternate dimensional portal you’re coming after me.” The Doctor pressed a quick kiss to her cheek and smirked against her ear.
“Always, Claudia.”
Fandom: Doctor Who/Warehouse 13
Pairing: 11/Claudia
Rating: PG-13
Warning: None
Summary: An almost planet full of almost things where an almost relationship is formed.
To: Mel dhfreak
From: Olivia
They were on a beach made of crushed glass; two suns shining off the shards and casting rainbows on their skin. The water was bright acid blue, and the waves eroded the beach, smoking and snapping in time with the tide. The sea breeze stung at their skin and suffocated their lungs, if they hadn’t been wearing masks, that is. It was a beautiful planet. Inhabitable, but beautiful.
Claudia kicked bits of glass off her purple rain boots and shielded her eyes against the glare off the ground. “Planet of Glass and Skin Cancer. What was it called again?”
“It doesn’t get called,” explained the Doctor, squinting up at the sky, watching crosswinds meet and drench the sky in reds and oranges. “People don’t come here and they never will.”
“So why are we here?” asked Claudia, squatting down to watch a glass encrusted almost-could-be-a-crab-if-crabs-had-seven-eyes-and-tails thing as it erupted from the beach.
The Doctor leaned back on his heels and slipped his hands into his pockets. The sleeves he’d rolled up to his elbows fell slightly from the movement. “I’m still trying to impress you.”
Claudia looked up at him, silhouetted by the smaller of the two suns in the sky behind him and the blues and yellows of the planet. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “The TARDIS brought us here, didn’t it?” The Doctor deflated slightly, and Claudia knew she was right. “Do you have like any say in where you get to go?” He ignored her, but pulled his screwdriver out of his pocket and turned it on a few times.
“Fumes are getting lower. The planet could be almost inhabitable in a few hours. C’mon, Donovan, before the tide rolls in.”
Claudia straightened and stretched, feeling her left shoulder pop. Her fingers tingled with chemical heat that much closer to the sky and she quickly dropped them. “Can we start with the forest? I always liked petrified wood.”
“Yes, yes - ah! Don’t forget your friend.” Claudia watched him flounce off, frowning after him.
“My what….?” She trailed off, looking around her person then down, starting a bit to find the almost-crab sitting on the toe of her boot, staring at its reflection (or at least, Claudia thought it looked like that was what it was doing) in the material, his tail wrapped around her ankle for support. Claudia dropped her head back and huffed in exasperation, but let the creature stay and followed carefully after the Doctor.
“What is it?” asked Claudia when she managed to catch up. The Doctor was bent low over a splintered tree, running a purple gloved finger (Thieving thieverson! Thought Claudia in almost outrage, mentally checking her person to recall when he managed to grab her warehouse gloves out of her back pocket) over one of the larger spikes of petrified wood. It sparked on contact with the glove whenever the Doctor moved his finger over it. He ignored her, obviously, because wood that reacted with neutralizing gloves was so much cooler than Claudia. She wanted to grumble, but it sort of was cooler than she was. But not by much.
Instead she pretended to be the Doctor and answered her question for him. “Native genus of the planet, Donovan. It likes you- can’t keep it, health hazard - call him Norman - him? Odd, could be a her, could be genderless, very odd, wonderfully odd-“
“Right on all accounts, Donovan,” interrupted the Doctor, giving her an amused look when she smiled broadly back. “The planet can’t sustain offspring, so what lives here now has probably lived here always, adapting with the changing environment.”
“So there’s an immortal crab-spider-cat sitting on my shoe?” asked Claudia. She shuddered. “I feel like PETA’s going to jump out and throw paint on me.”
“This is fascinating,” said the Doctor as if she hadn’t been speaking, which he sometimes did whenever she would go off on her tangents about things only she seemed to know about - but really, compared to the Doctor she was jester of the fast talk. Claudia snapped back to reality because the Doctor was talking and stroking the petrified tree and making fireworks. “-charged, perhaps even the whole planet! Why purple?”
Claudia shrugged. “Creativity, wisdom, magic. Who knows, maybe they ran out of yellow gloves?”
“No, yellow wouldn’t be nearly as effective,” muttered the Doctor and Claudia rolled her eyes up to the now indigo-chartreuse sky and mouthed ‘why do I even bother?’, hoping maybe someone would give her a decent answer. Then something dawned on her.
“An entire planet can’t be an artifact, can it?” she asked. She snorted. “I- that’s just…extremely avoidable. I mean, a massive charge of human energy infused into the planet after something emotionally and physically devastating to wipe out the population, and everyone knows that quartz makes people see things oh my god the planet’s an artifact and the TARDIS picked up people asking for help, but they weren’t really people and brought us here to fix it, those little sneaks there is no way we have enough goo to neutralize the planet-”
“Hush,” interrupted the Doctor, smirking. He snapped off the purple glove (her purple glove) and pocketed it, straightening up and turning to her. “The planet is not an artifact. The chemicals in the air and soil that have petrified the wood to react to whatever the gloves are made of.”
Claudia looked at him warily. “So no artifact?”
“No artifact.”
“Oh thank god,” shouted Claudia, her body slumping with relief. “I made the TARDIS promise that she would lay off the warehouse crap for at least an episode (“Episode?” asked the Doctor, with a little eyebrow raise. Claudia pressed her finger against his lips briefly for silence.). So, exploring the planet, how great is that going to be?”
The Doctor held his arm out for her to take, which she did so with a small hop and a grin, and the two walked into the petrified forest with Norman clinging to Claudia’s boot like a proper accessory, every step she took shaking bits of glass from it’s body.
It really was beautiful, the forest. It was cooler as well, with every step they took the temperature seemed to drop just a bit until Claudia was shivering and tightening her arm around the Doctor’s, pressing closer to him for warmth. A totally innocent move, he had two hearts, ergo, more body heat, or so Claudia figured.
“So when the fumes decrease so does the temperature,” commented Claudia, pursing her lips together. “I feel like I knew that.”
“We could probably take off our masks,” said the Doctor, but Claudia made no move to do so until he did. The Doctor made a show of taking off his mask and breathing deeply, giving her sideways looks that clearly said ‘stop being such a baby’.
She whacked him in the shoulder, but pulled off her mask with a flourish. Her hair was sticking to her forehead in what she knew was a very attractive sweaty way. They continued on in amused silence, the air become colder as the suns faded on the horizon in wonderful electric blues and oranges until the Doctor glanced down and oh’d softly. “Your friend seems to be dead.”
Claudia looked down sharply and sure enough, Norman was crumbling away, falling apart in glitter. Against the stone of the trees, Norman’s decomposing exterior melted like ice, leaving behind metallic liquid that sizzled and ate into the stone. The Doctor held her still, both of them watching the almost-crab fall apart completely in a pile of glitter on and around Claudia’s purple rain boot.
“I guess purple is somewhat significant,” mumbled Claudia, lifting her foot and shaking off the remains of Norman, stepping closer to the Doctor to get away from the eroding ground until she was pressed against his side.
“The material in your boots is what’s special,” corrected the Doctor. “The fact that they’re purple is irrelevant-“
“Purple is always relevant,” quipped Claudia, grinning and hopping over the small hole in the ground made by the almost-crab. She straightened her shirt and turned back to him. “Can we take a moment to morn poor Norman’s death?”
“Claudia…”
“I mean,” continued Claudia as if the Doctor hadn’t spoke, opening her arms wide. “You said it was possible that Norman is as old as the planet. That’s got to be impressive, I mean it must take years to fossilize a tree-“
“Not so many, actually. But, Claudia-!“
“And now, here lies Norman, nothing more than glitter on the ground, eating away everything in its path.”
“Claudia, duck!” the Doctor leapt over the now considerably larger hole and half-tackled, half-pulled Claudia to the ground before she even had a chance to see what she was ducking from. She oofed as the wind was knocked out of her, her head banging against the ground and the Doctor landing on her chest.
The Doctor’s weight on top of her shifted slightly so he was propped up against her side, his arms braced around her to keep from crushing her. Claudia opened her eyes to see a very brightly colored, scaled winged creature soar over them. The Doctor’s head was twisted around to he could see the almost-pterodactyl circle over them. Claudia didn’t breathe, almost every instinct in her body telling her to lie still while the other one’s were telling her to keep the Doctor for provoking it. Which she knew he was tempted to do. She reached up and grabbed him by the lapels, keeping a firm grip and tugging him down until he would meet her eyes. Above them, a glass shattering scream filled the air, and she didn’t want to know if it was emitting from the almost-pterodactyl or something it found. The Doctor raised an eyebrow at her, their noses very nearly touching.
“Do. Not. Kill us,” hissed Claudia. The Doctor stared at her, very still over her, all of the brilliant curiosity gone from his eyes, replaced by something solemn that Claudia couldn’t read. There was another scream, further away and Claudia let her head fall back against the ground in relief.
“See? It’s all fine,” said the Doctor with a bright grin that poked fun at her anxiety. She halfheartedly glared at him, but his smile was infectious and soon enough she was smiling back and giggling.
The Doctor pushed himself to his feet, reaching out to pull Claudia up as well, dusting themselves off. The Doctor hummed to himself, probably thinking of all the cool things that could inhabit the planet, but as long as he didn’t suggest going after the almost-pterodactyl she would go along with him. The Doctor stepped closer to her to pull a broken piece of stone from her hair and stopped humming. Claudia’s hands were still against her jeans; she could feel him staring and looked up at him. It was all very, very silent between them and, in a snap decision that Claudia wasn’t exactly sure either of them made, stepped into each other‘s personal spaces in the exact same moment. Claudia lifted herself up on her toes and met his mouth with hers and suddenly they were kissing and she was feeling lightheaded and it had nothing to do with the toxins in her lungs.
His hand was in her hair, around the back of her head, keeping her close while is other hand was on her shoulder, his thumb pressing against a place right above her clavicle. It was chaste as kisses go, but this was the Doctor and she was Claudia - the Doctor always had a sort of charged relationship with his companions, Claudia noticed. She noticed it when she met Amy and Martha and in the stories she’d heard about Rose, and especially when Jack was with them for that short time - and they would never work in a million years for some reason that Claudia couldn’t think of at the moment with her lips pressed against the Doctor’s.
Kissing. The Doctor.
She didn’t want to laugh at this, really, but fighting the smile on her face was god damn impossible. And then there was snickering. God, she felt like that episode of Friends where Rachel couldn’t kiss Ross without giggling! But she felt the Doctor’s lips against her quirk and he was smiling too. They broke apart, giggling like children. Claudia brought her hands up to her mouth to stifle them, while the Doctor just pursed his lips to try and look serious.
It didn’t work for either of them.
“No, no, shh,” said Claudia around giggles, pressing her pointer finger against the Doctor’s lips and doing the same to her own mouth with her other hand. “You’re not supposed to giggle, it’s a rule.”
“A rule is it?” asked the Doctor, staring cross eyed at her finger for a moment. “Seems like a silly rule, but most rules are silly aren‘t they? Are you‘re fingernails blue?”
“They glow in the dark!”
“They’re glowing now.” And indeed they were. Claudia hummed thoughtfully and pulled her hands away from the faces they were pressing against respectively. The Doctor grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her into his side, once again linking their arms. “I like this planet. It has character.”
“It’s going to kill us, Doctor,” said Claudia, steering them in the direction of the TARDIS before he tried to take them deeper into the forest. “Everything here is going to kill us. That-that caterpillar thing right there. Totally not here before, I think it spontaneously regenerated from Norman.”
“And what’s wrong with regeneration?”
“It has a scorpion tail!”
“It’s adapting, really Donovan…” the Doctor shook his head in mock reproach. She scoffed playfully at his tone and bumped into him lightly, still attached to his side. The Doctor, grinning, looked back over his shoulder to see that the almost-caterpillar was consuming the acid eroded stone with fuzzy purple feelers. “Call it Rollin.”
Claudia threw her head back and laughed, “So it’s an almost-planet full of almost creatures with almost-awkward names.”
“Precisely. And that’s what we’ll call it.”
Claudia gave him a funny look. “That seems like a very long confusing name for a planet, el Doctor.”
“What? No! Not the almost-planet full of…stuff - just The Almost-Planet. Much easier to remember, much more mysterious, and a bit sexy.”
“It’s all a bit sexy for you isn’t it? Do you ever get tired of being attracted to everything all at once?”
“Not even a bit, Donovan.” The Doctor was smirking and the TARDIS was in sight, radioactively blue against the setting suns reflecting behind it and off the similarly colored ocean water. The Doctor steered her around something that looked almost-dead and snapped his fingers. The TARDIS door swung open, her insides glowing orange and warmth. Claudia turned her head, walking awkwardly with the Doctor until they reached the door. He let her linger outside, looking out at the brilliantly colored planet they were leaving behind for brighter stars and livable atmosphere.
“I think we should go to the 60‘s,” said Claudia thoughtfully, her fingers brushing against the TARDIS door. “I feel very into colors at the moment.”
The Doctor reappeared behind her and hummed thoughtfully, fiddling with something in his hands and not looking at her. “Brilliant, the 60’s. You’re Farnsworth is making that TARDIS sound again.” Claudia looked around and the Doctor held out her Farnsworth for her. She frowned.
“But…we’re not on Earth. How is it working - we‘re not on Earth.”
“Philo did say he made his own two-way with a bit extra, didn’t he?” said the Doctor, referring to their visit to Philo Farnsworth a few weeks ago just after they’d left Jack in Cardiff. Claudia nodded, but still didn’t feel convinced, she was chewing her bottom lip worriedly. The Doctor just smirked and wrapped his hand around her elbow, pulling her sideways into the TARDIS and shutting the door behind them.
“Answer it, Donovan.”
“Yeah, alright, but if it sucks me into an alternate dimensional portal you’re coming after me.” The Doctor pressed a quick kiss to her cheek and smirked against her ear.
“Always, Claudia.”