Doctor Who: "Five Times the Doctor's Gender Mattered (and one time it didn't)" (1/1)
Title: Five Times the Doctor's Gender Mattered (and one time it didn't)
Characters/Pairings: fem!Nine/Jack/Rose, Ten/Jack/Rose, Adam
Rating: Adult
Warnings: homophobia, misogyny
Summary: The Doctor's life as a Time Lady is just the same as if she were a Time Lord - except when it isn't.
Notes: Set in the fem!Doctor 'verse, an AU in which the Doctor is a woman all her life until she regenerates into a male Ten, and the Doctor, Jack, and Rose are in an established relationship. Beta'd by yamx.
I.
"Come in," said Principal Silveira, headmaster of the remedial primary school of Starship Portugal. "Have a seat, please."
The Doctor didn't sit. She stood in front of the principal's desk, arms akimbo. Rose was in the classrooms, collecting paint samples for the Doctor to analyze in the TARDIS. The Doctor was fairly certain she knew what Rose would find, and she wasn't going to play nice.
"Tell me, Principal Silveira. Did you know that the contractor was going to use heavy metals in the paint when you hired them to build the new classrooms? Or was it just sheer incompetence on your part?"
"Heavy metals in the paint? Don't talk nonsense. Please sit down, take off your coat - "
"Oh, there aren't any heavy metals in the paint, are there? Then tell me why the children in the new classrooms are falling ill with all the symptoms of heavy metal poisoning while the other children are unharmed."
"You'll have to take up your concerns with the head of the contracting company - "
"I already have. He referred me to you. So talk."
"Maybe," Principal Silveira snapped, "if you'd asked him quietly and politely instead of rampaging around like a rabid bitch, he would have listened to you!"
The Doctor sat. She folded her legs and tucked her hands in her lap, pasted on a huge smile, and batted her eyelashes. "Please, Principal Silveira," she said, pouring on sweetness thick as treacle, "stop cutting corners on your contracts and poisoning your students. I'd be ever so grateful."
"Take it up with the board of trustees," Principal Silveira ground out between his teeth.
The Doctor shed her prim posture like an ill-fitting set of clothes and rolled her eyes. "See how far that got me? It's true what they say about what well-behaved women get accomplished." She bared her teeth. "My friend is collecting samples of paint from your classrooms as we speak. So the two of us are going to analyze the samples and very politely submit our findings to the Department of Health and Safety."
"All right, I'll talk," said Principal Silveira, licking his lips nervously. "The funding allocated for remedial education has been decreasing dramatically these past few years…"
II.
"So, the Doctor," said Adam over dinner in the TARDIS kitchen. The Doctor was conspicuous by her absence. "Does she hate men or something?"
Rose raised her eyebrows. "What do you mean?"
"Well, I mean, she travels with you. She didn't like Van Statten. She doesn't like me. I'm not stupid, I can tell she doesn't. And she dresses like she's a lesbian, all that leather and the short hair."
"So just 'cause she doesn't like you and wears a leather jacket, that means she hates all men? Don't be ridiculous. You've got a nice face, Adam, but not every woman who doesn't like you hates all men."
"That's not all of it." Adam took a bite of pasta and chewed slowly. "When Van Statten was flirting with her, trying to touch her, she wouldn't even let him come close. I thought maybe a man had hurt her in the past, and she didn't want any man near her ever since."
She's been hurt by a lot worse than men, Rose thought, and no man who knew what she's done would ever dare touch her in a way she didn't like.
But she didn't say any of that. What she said was, "She wouldn't let Van Statten come close to her because he's a slimy git, and that's that."
The Doctor didn't let anyone come close, as far as Rose could tell, slimy git or not. But that wasn't Adam's problem.
III.
Jack came in to the library with a towel wrapped around his waist. "I had a very lonely shower this morning," he announced. "The TARDIS made it nice and roomy, just for us. It was a tragic waste."
Rose, who had been reading on the couch, blushed and hid the book she'd been reading between two pillows. If he saw it, she'd never hear the end of it.
Jack raised an eyebrow. "Whatcha reading?"
"Nothing."
He leaned over the back of the couch and caught a glimpse of the book's spine between the pillows. "'The Lover's Guide to Pleasuring Her Lady'," he read. "Ooh, does it have pictures?"
"Jack!" Rose blushed even more. "That's not why I was - I mean, I - "
Jack folded his arms on the back of the couch and rested his head on his arms to bring his eye level closer to hers. "Why were you reading it, then?"
"I, um…" Rose looked down at her hands for a moment, then looked back up. "Well, last night."
"Mmmhmm," said Jack, a little dreamily. "What about last night?"
"It was great. I mean, even better than I thought it'd be. But I've never done anything like that before, and I don't think I… I mean, the Doctor, she did that thing - " Rose crooked her fingers. "Y'know?"
The Doctor's hand sliding up Rose's thigh, her tongue running along the shell of Rose's ear, Rose arching into the Doctor's hand, her fingers curling just there -
"Yeah," said Jack, voice a little husky.
"And then you, you got her about as close to losing control as I've ever seen her. Blimey, it was…"
Jack's face between the Doctor's thighs, noisily licking and sucking without a hint of self-consciousness, giving off contented hums and groans as if he'd never tasted anything so marvelous in all his life -
"Yeah. It was." Jack gave a wolfish grin. "I've made it my personal goal to make sure she does lose control, next time."
"And what you did to me! I was seeing stars by the end of that."
Rose kissing Jack ferociously, her teeth catching on his lip every time he thrusts into her, snarling and pulling him closer when he even thinks of slowing the pace -
"Mmmm," was all Jack could say to that.
Rose looked down at the towel around Jack's waist. "Not now!"
"I know," said Jack. "But I can't help it when you remind me of something like that."
"All right. So I did, y'know, please you, right?"
Rose's hand curling around him, his eyelashes fluttering against his cheeks as she strokes him, gently, gently -
"Oh yeah. You and the Doctor both."
Sleepy, sated after the seeing-to Jack gave her, watching as he lays back on the cushions, exhausted, still hard but not quite there. The Doctor straddling him, pinning him to the cushions by his shoulders when he tries to move for her. "I'll take care of that, lad." Her knees bending, her hips settling over his, enveloping him with almost painful slowness -
"Yeah, she did," said Rose. "But that's just it. I didn't do anything for her. I've never been with a woman. I want to give her what she needs, but I don't know how."
Jack laid his hand on Rose's shoulder and looked her in the eye. "Listen, Rose. The secret to pleasuring a woman is the same as pleasuring a man, androgyne, or small furry creature from Alpha Centauri. You're not psychic, Rose, and there's no magic formula for getting someone off. You have to watch her body language, figure out what makes her respond, and if you still don't know what to do, just ask."
"I can't just ask," said Rose. "When I go to get takeaway and ask her what she wants, she just says, 'I'll eat whatever you order.' She doesn't even like it when I try to help her patch herself up when she's hurt. She doesn't think she deserves pleasure, so she never lets me give her what she wants."
Jack thought about this for a moment. "You have a point there. But I think I have an idea that might help with that. Hang on a sec." He disappeared into the maze of bookshelves for a moment, came back with a book, and opened it to a page that looked like some kind of list.
"A Yes-No-Maybe list," said Jack proudly. "I read you the items on this list, you tell me yes, no, or maybe. Then I go to the Doctor and do the same thing. Then you'll both know what the other wants."
"How are you going to get the Doctor to sit down long enough to fill out the list?" said Rose skeptically.
"I'll steal her sonic screwdriver and only give it back when she's finished."
"I s'pose it couldn't hurt to try it."
"OK." Jack settled the book on the back of the couch. "Getting your earlobe sucked."
Rose blushed. "Yeah. Yeah, that's good."
"Alien abduction fantasy."
"Jack!"
Going through the list with Rose had been fun. It had been all Jack could do not to jump her bones right there and then, by the time they were done, but he decided it would be best not to try anything until all three of them were together. Still, he had plenty of ideas for next time. Her interest in sex against different surfaces opened up all kinds of possibilities. He wondered, idly, how much strain the refrigerator door could take.
The Doctor was in the kitchen, as it happened, making tea. Jack firmly resolved not to give the counter more than a briefly speculative glance. She had just stirred a little milk into her tea and raised the cup to her lips when Jack said, "So, Doc, what's your take on wall sex?"
Tea sprayed from the Doctor's lips.
"Rose likes having sex on surfaces. Like walls." Jack rapped his knuckles on the kitchen counter. "Or countertops. Would you be game?"
"Anything she wants," said the Doctor, once she'd wiped tea droplets from her mouth and the counter.
Jack gave her a level look. "What if she told you she wanted you to hold a knife to her throat during sex?"
The Doctor flinched. "I wouldn't - did she want that?"
"No. But what if she did?"
"I can't do that," said the Doctor. "Not to her. You know what it is to be a soldier, Jack. I've killed humans not much older than her. I know she'd trust me to do that, if it's what she wanted, but I wouldn't trust myself. And I'd remember all the human children who've died at my hand."
"I understand. I wouldn't like doing it either." Jack drummed his fingers on the countertop. "So it isn't anything she wants. You have preferences, but she doesn't know what they are. Rose loves you, Doctor, and she wants to make you happy."
"She does make me happy."
"Of course she does. But I'm talking about sex."
"Careful, Jack. Soon I'll start thinking that you talk about anything else."
"Doctor, just because it's sex doesn't mean it isn't serious. She's had only two lovers, and neither of them a woman. That might not seem important to you or me, but it matters to her. You can help her." Jack showed her his clipboard with the Yes-No-Maybe list. "Tell me what you want."
The Doctor raised her eyebrows at the list. "This is your grand plan to work around Rose's 21st century insecurities about sex?"
"Humans love a good list, Doctor. She filled out every single item."
The Doctor pointed at the clipboard. "Even that? That hasn't even been invented on Earth yet, in her time."
"I explained. In detail." Jack grinned. "You should have seen her face. She blushed so hard she was practically glowing."
"But she kept going."
"Yeah." Jack's face went serious again. "It wasn't easy for her. I don't think she's ever talked openly about her sexuality with anyone, not even her lovers. She said things to me she'd never spoken aloud. All because she thought it'd be good for us. What we're trying to make together."
The Doctor sat down at the kitchen table with her teacup and saucer. She drained half the cup in one gulp. "All right, but with one condition."
"What?"
"Don't ask me anything when I've got tea in my mouth."
"Funny you should say that - you've reminded me of item 86 on the third page…"
IV.
Rose wanted to see a musical on Broadway, so the Doctor took them all to New York City in 1980 to see West Side Story. They came out of the theater and strolled down Broadway, the night lit like another shade of day by the city lights. Jack bought a fedora from a street vendor and broke out into a little dance on the street, singing,
"I feel pretty, oh so pretty,
I feel pretty and witty and gay!
And I pity anyone who isn't me today."
The Doctor grinned, and Rose doubled over in a fit of giggles. "Thanks for taking us, Doctor. It was lovely," she said, standing up on tiptoes to give her a kiss.
Across the street, someone let out a wolf-whistle. A man smoking a cigarette on the corner growled, "Goddamn leather dykes ought to go back to the Village with all the other perverts and leave the rest of us alone."
Rose turned bright red and jumped away from the Doctor. The Doctor stood her ground and retorted, "If you don't like it, no one's forcing you to watch."
The young man across the street who'd wolf-whistled paused to shout, "You can force me to watch you any time you like, sweetheart!" The young man was lean, handsome, smiling, but his words didn't sound like a compliment, as they would have if Jack had said them. He looked at them as if they weren't really people at all, just blow-up dolls acting out fantasies for his amusement.
Jack's face was flushed with anger. Rose had heard comments like this before - never directed at her before, but she'd heard them - but Jack never had. He'd read about it in history class, and he'd taken care to avoid it in his affair with Algy, or else he'd have been in jail by the time Rose and the Doctor showed up. But he'd never heard it directed toward himself or someone he loved. His body tensed into what was clearly a fighting stance.
The man on the corner sneered at Jack. "Got a problem? It's a free country, punk. If they're allowed to be pervs on a public sidewalk, then I'm allowed to say what I think of 'em."
Jack bared his teeth. "And I'm allowed to say that anyone who talks that way about them is worse scum than one of your subway rats."
The man stubbed out his cigarette and began to reach inside his trenchcoat. The Doctor's arm, quicker than Rose would have believed possible, lashed out and grabbed his elbow with crushing force. A knife fell to the sidewalk, its edge glittering green in the glow of a neon sign. The Doctor kicked it away from him. "Both of us are going to walk away," she said, her voice low and silky with fury. "Understood?"
The Doctor let go of his arm and pushed him toward a side street. The man spat on the ground and walked away.
"How could he say that about you?" said Jack, once he was gone. "What does it matter to him if you want to kiss each other? He doesn't even know you."
"It's not us in particular, Jack," said the Doctor. "It's what us kissing means in general. It means that what he believes about women and men and how they love is wrong. No one likes to find out that the way they see the world is wrong."
"I never knew what it was like," said Rose. "I didn't like it when I heard people make those sorts of comments, but I never knew how much it really hurt."
The Doctor stopped, fixed Rose with an intense gaze, and held the side of her face in a caress. "Don't let scum like him get under your skin, Rose. The way you love is perfect how it is."
"But he could have hurt you or Jack. If you hadn't been in time - "
"If she hadn't been in time, he would have been in for an even nastier surprise," Jack assured her.
"If I think we could be put in real danger by being affectionate, Rose, I'll tell you. There are places where Jack snogging you or me could put us in danger, and I'll warn you about that too. But that doesn't mean we're wrong. They are."
The Doctor bent down to kiss Rose, the lights of passing cars making their faces flicker red and yellow. Jack watched them, warmth kindling in his chest, and grinned his defiance at any passersby who saw them and thought them anything but beautiful.
V.
The Doctor didn't sleep often, but he'd got used to sleeping with company. Here, alone in his new skin, he found that he couldn't sleep at all. Why weren't Rose and Jack here with him? Come to think of it, Rose hadn't so much as flirted with him since his regeneration. The thought made him feel bereft. He'd spent most of his life without anything of the sort from his human companions - surely it couldn't be that bad to go back to the way it was before?
He gave up sleep as a lost cause and went to the kitchen to make chamomile tea. That always used to be soothing, though maybe it wouldn't be anymore. When he entered the kitchen, though, he found he wasn't alone. Jack was there with a handful of pastries that the Doctor recognized as desserts from the Boeshane Peninsula.
"Sweet tooth?" said the Doctor, arching an eyebrow.
Jack shrugged. "When I was a kid, when I woke up from a nightmare, I'd always go and sneak a few of these from the larder."
"Jack," the Doctor said gently, "you could've told me." So strange, to be a couple of inches taller than him, now. They used to be at perfect eye level.
"Rose has been going to bed alone. Didn't seem right to go to your room without her. Unless… are you still interested in human women, in this body?"
"What? Of course I am! She's Rose! Though, if you've seen the way she's been, I wouldn't be surprised if she weren't interested in me anymore. You're clearly still attracted to me, but you'd still have me if I regenerated into a Sontaran, and they haven't got erogenous zones. Though you could probably create erogenous zones out of sheer determination if you - "
"Doctor." Jack looked at him levelly. "Changing sex may not be such a big deal for you or me, but it is for her. She doesn't know you still want her. She's probably scared - she thinks it'll change what he have."
"It might change, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't give it another go. Rose is still Rose, you're still you, and when it comes right down to it, I'm still me."
Jack chewed and swallowed a pastry, then smiled. "Ask the TARDIS if Rose is asleep. Unless I miss my guess, she's having just as much trouble as we are. Then you can go tell her how ravishingly sexy you still think she is."
(I.)
The Doctor asked Rose and Jack to strip and sit side by side on the edge of the bed. He knelt between them, his suit and trainers still on. He rested his head in the hollow of Jack's hip and his hand on the inside of Rose's thigh. He could feel the soft skin of Jack's erection against his right cheek, and smell the heady scent of Rose's arousal.
This is what the Doctor didn't know: if everything would be different now, if the shape of his body or the universe-bending power Rose had unknowingly held or the fires of immortality burning under Jack's skin that he couldn't even feel would strain what they had beyond its ability to bear it.
This is what the Doctor did know: if he turned his face to the right and hummed, the sensation would make Jack's breath come short and his head tilt back. If he feathered his fingertips up and down Rose's thigh, never touching her where she wanted him to, it would be fifteen seconds before she started whimpering his name, and thirty-five seconds before she was reduced to begging.
This was the cartography of the skin, written beneath his fingers and his tongue. This was the landscape of pleasure, mapped out in nerve endings and contented sighs, that the fires of regeneration could not purge.
This was the language none of his bodies would ever forget.
Characters/Pairings: fem!Nine/Jack/Rose, Ten/Jack/Rose, Adam
Rating: Adult
Warnings: homophobia, misogyny
Summary: The Doctor's life as a Time Lady is just the same as if she were a Time Lord - except when it isn't.
Notes: Set in the fem!Doctor 'verse, an AU in which the Doctor is a woman all her life until she regenerates into a male Ten, and the Doctor, Jack, and Rose are in an established relationship. Beta'd by yamx.
I.
"Come in," said Principal Silveira, headmaster of the remedial primary school of Starship Portugal. "Have a seat, please."
The Doctor didn't sit. She stood in front of the principal's desk, arms akimbo. Rose was in the classrooms, collecting paint samples for the Doctor to analyze in the TARDIS. The Doctor was fairly certain she knew what Rose would find, and she wasn't going to play nice.
"Tell me, Principal Silveira. Did you know that the contractor was going to use heavy metals in the paint when you hired them to build the new classrooms? Or was it just sheer incompetence on your part?"
"Heavy metals in the paint? Don't talk nonsense. Please sit down, take off your coat - "
"Oh, there aren't any heavy metals in the paint, are there? Then tell me why the children in the new classrooms are falling ill with all the symptoms of heavy metal poisoning while the other children are unharmed."
"You'll have to take up your concerns with the head of the contracting company - "
"I already have. He referred me to you. So talk."
"Maybe," Principal Silveira snapped, "if you'd asked him quietly and politely instead of rampaging around like a rabid bitch, he would have listened to you!"
The Doctor sat. She folded her legs and tucked her hands in her lap, pasted on a huge smile, and batted her eyelashes. "Please, Principal Silveira," she said, pouring on sweetness thick as treacle, "stop cutting corners on your contracts and poisoning your students. I'd be ever so grateful."
"Take it up with the board of trustees," Principal Silveira ground out between his teeth.
The Doctor shed her prim posture like an ill-fitting set of clothes and rolled her eyes. "See how far that got me? It's true what they say about what well-behaved women get accomplished." She bared her teeth. "My friend is collecting samples of paint from your classrooms as we speak. So the two of us are going to analyze the samples and very politely submit our findings to the Department of Health and Safety."
"All right, I'll talk," said Principal Silveira, licking his lips nervously. "The funding allocated for remedial education has been decreasing dramatically these past few years…"
II.
"So, the Doctor," said Adam over dinner in the TARDIS kitchen. The Doctor was conspicuous by her absence. "Does she hate men or something?"
Rose raised her eyebrows. "What do you mean?"
"Well, I mean, she travels with you. She didn't like Van Statten. She doesn't like me. I'm not stupid, I can tell she doesn't. And she dresses like she's a lesbian, all that leather and the short hair."
"So just 'cause she doesn't like you and wears a leather jacket, that means she hates all men? Don't be ridiculous. You've got a nice face, Adam, but not every woman who doesn't like you hates all men."
"That's not all of it." Adam took a bite of pasta and chewed slowly. "When Van Statten was flirting with her, trying to touch her, she wouldn't even let him come close. I thought maybe a man had hurt her in the past, and she didn't want any man near her ever since."
She's been hurt by a lot worse than men, Rose thought, and no man who knew what she's done would ever dare touch her in a way she didn't like.
But she didn't say any of that. What she said was, "She wouldn't let Van Statten come close to her because he's a slimy git, and that's that."
The Doctor didn't let anyone come close, as far as Rose could tell, slimy git or not. But that wasn't Adam's problem.
III.
Jack came in to the library with a towel wrapped around his waist. "I had a very lonely shower this morning," he announced. "The TARDIS made it nice and roomy, just for us. It was a tragic waste."
Rose, who had been reading on the couch, blushed and hid the book she'd been reading between two pillows. If he saw it, she'd never hear the end of it.
Jack raised an eyebrow. "Whatcha reading?"
"Nothing."
He leaned over the back of the couch and caught a glimpse of the book's spine between the pillows. "'The Lover's Guide to Pleasuring Her Lady'," he read. "Ooh, does it have pictures?"
"Jack!" Rose blushed even more. "That's not why I was - I mean, I - "
Jack folded his arms on the back of the couch and rested his head on his arms to bring his eye level closer to hers. "Why were you reading it, then?"
"I, um…" Rose looked down at her hands for a moment, then looked back up. "Well, last night."
"Mmmhmm," said Jack, a little dreamily. "What about last night?"
"It was great. I mean, even better than I thought it'd be. But I've never done anything like that before, and I don't think I… I mean, the Doctor, she did that thing - " Rose crooked her fingers. "Y'know?"
The Doctor's hand sliding up Rose's thigh, her tongue running along the shell of Rose's ear, Rose arching into the Doctor's hand, her fingers curling just there -
"Yeah," said Jack, voice a little husky.
"And then you, you got her about as close to losing control as I've ever seen her. Blimey, it was…"
Jack's face between the Doctor's thighs, noisily licking and sucking without a hint of self-consciousness, giving off contented hums and groans as if he'd never tasted anything so marvelous in all his life -
"Yeah. It was." Jack gave a wolfish grin. "I've made it my personal goal to make sure she does lose control, next time."
"And what you did to me! I was seeing stars by the end of that."
Rose kissing Jack ferociously, her teeth catching on his lip every time he thrusts into her, snarling and pulling him closer when he even thinks of slowing the pace -
"Mmmm," was all Jack could say to that.
Rose looked down at the towel around Jack's waist. "Not now!"
"I know," said Jack. "But I can't help it when you remind me of something like that."
"All right. So I did, y'know, please you, right?"
Rose's hand curling around him, his eyelashes fluttering against his cheeks as she strokes him, gently, gently -
"Oh yeah. You and the Doctor both."
Sleepy, sated after the seeing-to Jack gave her, watching as he lays back on the cushions, exhausted, still hard but not quite there. The Doctor straddling him, pinning him to the cushions by his shoulders when he tries to move for her. "I'll take care of that, lad." Her knees bending, her hips settling over his, enveloping him with almost painful slowness -
"Yeah, she did," said Rose. "But that's just it. I didn't do anything for her. I've never been with a woman. I want to give her what she needs, but I don't know how."
Jack laid his hand on Rose's shoulder and looked her in the eye. "Listen, Rose. The secret to pleasuring a woman is the same as pleasuring a man, androgyne, or small furry creature from Alpha Centauri. You're not psychic, Rose, and there's no magic formula for getting someone off. You have to watch her body language, figure out what makes her respond, and if you still don't know what to do, just ask."
"I can't just ask," said Rose. "When I go to get takeaway and ask her what she wants, she just says, 'I'll eat whatever you order.' She doesn't even like it when I try to help her patch herself up when she's hurt. She doesn't think she deserves pleasure, so she never lets me give her what she wants."
Jack thought about this for a moment. "You have a point there. But I think I have an idea that might help with that. Hang on a sec." He disappeared into the maze of bookshelves for a moment, came back with a book, and opened it to a page that looked like some kind of list.
"A Yes-No-Maybe list," said Jack proudly. "I read you the items on this list, you tell me yes, no, or maybe. Then I go to the Doctor and do the same thing. Then you'll both know what the other wants."
"How are you going to get the Doctor to sit down long enough to fill out the list?" said Rose skeptically.
"I'll steal her sonic screwdriver and only give it back when she's finished."
"I s'pose it couldn't hurt to try it."
"OK." Jack settled the book on the back of the couch. "Getting your earlobe sucked."
Rose blushed. "Yeah. Yeah, that's good."
"Alien abduction fantasy."
"Jack!"
Going through the list with Rose had been fun. It had been all Jack could do not to jump her bones right there and then, by the time they were done, but he decided it would be best not to try anything until all three of them were together. Still, he had plenty of ideas for next time. Her interest in sex against different surfaces opened up all kinds of possibilities. He wondered, idly, how much strain the refrigerator door could take.
The Doctor was in the kitchen, as it happened, making tea. Jack firmly resolved not to give the counter more than a briefly speculative glance. She had just stirred a little milk into her tea and raised the cup to her lips when Jack said, "So, Doc, what's your take on wall sex?"
Tea sprayed from the Doctor's lips.
"Rose likes having sex on surfaces. Like walls." Jack rapped his knuckles on the kitchen counter. "Or countertops. Would you be game?"
"Anything she wants," said the Doctor, once she'd wiped tea droplets from her mouth and the counter.
Jack gave her a level look. "What if she told you she wanted you to hold a knife to her throat during sex?"
The Doctor flinched. "I wouldn't - did she want that?"
"No. But what if she did?"
"I can't do that," said the Doctor. "Not to her. You know what it is to be a soldier, Jack. I've killed humans not much older than her. I know she'd trust me to do that, if it's what she wanted, but I wouldn't trust myself. And I'd remember all the human children who've died at my hand."
"I understand. I wouldn't like doing it either." Jack drummed his fingers on the countertop. "So it isn't anything she wants. You have preferences, but she doesn't know what they are. Rose loves you, Doctor, and she wants to make you happy."
"She does make me happy."
"Of course she does. But I'm talking about sex."
"Careful, Jack. Soon I'll start thinking that you talk about anything else."
"Doctor, just because it's sex doesn't mean it isn't serious. She's had only two lovers, and neither of them a woman. That might not seem important to you or me, but it matters to her. You can help her." Jack showed her his clipboard with the Yes-No-Maybe list. "Tell me what you want."
The Doctor raised her eyebrows at the list. "This is your grand plan to work around Rose's 21st century insecurities about sex?"
"Humans love a good list, Doctor. She filled out every single item."
The Doctor pointed at the clipboard. "Even that? That hasn't even been invented on Earth yet, in her time."
"I explained. In detail." Jack grinned. "You should have seen her face. She blushed so hard she was practically glowing."
"But she kept going."
"Yeah." Jack's face went serious again. "It wasn't easy for her. I don't think she's ever talked openly about her sexuality with anyone, not even her lovers. She said things to me she'd never spoken aloud. All because she thought it'd be good for us. What we're trying to make together."
The Doctor sat down at the kitchen table with her teacup and saucer. She drained half the cup in one gulp. "All right, but with one condition."
"What?"
"Don't ask me anything when I've got tea in my mouth."
"Funny you should say that - you've reminded me of item 86 on the third page…"
IV.
Rose wanted to see a musical on Broadway, so the Doctor took them all to New York City in 1980 to see West Side Story. They came out of the theater and strolled down Broadway, the night lit like another shade of day by the city lights. Jack bought a fedora from a street vendor and broke out into a little dance on the street, singing,
"I feel pretty, oh so pretty,
I feel pretty and witty and gay!
And I pity anyone who isn't me today."
The Doctor grinned, and Rose doubled over in a fit of giggles. "Thanks for taking us, Doctor. It was lovely," she said, standing up on tiptoes to give her a kiss.
Across the street, someone let out a wolf-whistle. A man smoking a cigarette on the corner growled, "Goddamn leather dykes ought to go back to the Village with all the other perverts and leave the rest of us alone."
Rose turned bright red and jumped away from the Doctor. The Doctor stood her ground and retorted, "If you don't like it, no one's forcing you to watch."
The young man across the street who'd wolf-whistled paused to shout, "You can force me to watch you any time you like, sweetheart!" The young man was lean, handsome, smiling, but his words didn't sound like a compliment, as they would have if Jack had said them. He looked at them as if they weren't really people at all, just blow-up dolls acting out fantasies for his amusement.
Jack's face was flushed with anger. Rose had heard comments like this before - never directed at her before, but she'd heard them - but Jack never had. He'd read about it in history class, and he'd taken care to avoid it in his affair with Algy, or else he'd have been in jail by the time Rose and the Doctor showed up. But he'd never heard it directed toward himself or someone he loved. His body tensed into what was clearly a fighting stance.
The man on the corner sneered at Jack. "Got a problem? It's a free country, punk. If they're allowed to be pervs on a public sidewalk, then I'm allowed to say what I think of 'em."
Jack bared his teeth. "And I'm allowed to say that anyone who talks that way about them is worse scum than one of your subway rats."
The man stubbed out his cigarette and began to reach inside his trenchcoat. The Doctor's arm, quicker than Rose would have believed possible, lashed out and grabbed his elbow with crushing force. A knife fell to the sidewalk, its edge glittering green in the glow of a neon sign. The Doctor kicked it away from him. "Both of us are going to walk away," she said, her voice low and silky with fury. "Understood?"
The Doctor let go of his arm and pushed him toward a side street. The man spat on the ground and walked away.
"How could he say that about you?" said Jack, once he was gone. "What does it matter to him if you want to kiss each other? He doesn't even know you."
"It's not us in particular, Jack," said the Doctor. "It's what us kissing means in general. It means that what he believes about women and men and how they love is wrong. No one likes to find out that the way they see the world is wrong."
"I never knew what it was like," said Rose. "I didn't like it when I heard people make those sorts of comments, but I never knew how much it really hurt."
The Doctor stopped, fixed Rose with an intense gaze, and held the side of her face in a caress. "Don't let scum like him get under your skin, Rose. The way you love is perfect how it is."
"But he could have hurt you or Jack. If you hadn't been in time - "
"If she hadn't been in time, he would have been in for an even nastier surprise," Jack assured her.
"If I think we could be put in real danger by being affectionate, Rose, I'll tell you. There are places where Jack snogging you or me could put us in danger, and I'll warn you about that too. But that doesn't mean we're wrong. They are."
The Doctor bent down to kiss Rose, the lights of passing cars making their faces flicker red and yellow. Jack watched them, warmth kindling in his chest, and grinned his defiance at any passersby who saw them and thought them anything but beautiful.
V.
The Doctor didn't sleep often, but he'd got used to sleeping with company. Here, alone in his new skin, he found that he couldn't sleep at all. Why weren't Rose and Jack here with him? Come to think of it, Rose hadn't so much as flirted with him since his regeneration. The thought made him feel bereft. He'd spent most of his life without anything of the sort from his human companions - surely it couldn't be that bad to go back to the way it was before?
He gave up sleep as a lost cause and went to the kitchen to make chamomile tea. That always used to be soothing, though maybe it wouldn't be anymore. When he entered the kitchen, though, he found he wasn't alone. Jack was there with a handful of pastries that the Doctor recognized as desserts from the Boeshane Peninsula.
"Sweet tooth?" said the Doctor, arching an eyebrow.
Jack shrugged. "When I was a kid, when I woke up from a nightmare, I'd always go and sneak a few of these from the larder."
"Jack," the Doctor said gently, "you could've told me." So strange, to be a couple of inches taller than him, now. They used to be at perfect eye level.
"Rose has been going to bed alone. Didn't seem right to go to your room without her. Unless… are you still interested in human women, in this body?"
"What? Of course I am! She's Rose! Though, if you've seen the way she's been, I wouldn't be surprised if she weren't interested in me anymore. You're clearly still attracted to me, but you'd still have me if I regenerated into a Sontaran, and they haven't got erogenous zones. Though you could probably create erogenous zones out of sheer determination if you - "
"Doctor." Jack looked at him levelly. "Changing sex may not be such a big deal for you or me, but it is for her. She doesn't know you still want her. She's probably scared - she thinks it'll change what he have."
"It might change, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't give it another go. Rose is still Rose, you're still you, and when it comes right down to it, I'm still me."
Jack chewed and swallowed a pastry, then smiled. "Ask the TARDIS if Rose is asleep. Unless I miss my guess, she's having just as much trouble as we are. Then you can go tell her how ravishingly sexy you still think she is."
(I.)
The Doctor asked Rose and Jack to strip and sit side by side on the edge of the bed. He knelt between them, his suit and trainers still on. He rested his head in the hollow of Jack's hip and his hand on the inside of Rose's thigh. He could feel the soft skin of Jack's erection against his right cheek, and smell the heady scent of Rose's arousal.
This is what the Doctor didn't know: if everything would be different now, if the shape of his body or the universe-bending power Rose had unknowingly held or the fires of immortality burning under Jack's skin that he couldn't even feel would strain what they had beyond its ability to bear it.
This is what the Doctor did know: if he turned his face to the right and hummed, the sensation would make Jack's breath come short and his head tilt back. If he feathered his fingertips up and down Rose's thigh, never touching her where she wanted him to, it would be fifteen seconds before she started whimpering his name, and thirty-five seconds before she was reduced to begging.
This was the cartography of the skin, written beneath his fingers and his tongue. This was the landscape of pleasure, mapped out in nerve endings and contented sighs, that the fires of regeneration could not purge.
This was the language none of his bodies would ever forget.