Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1/1)
Title: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Characters/Pairings: Ten II/Rose, OCs
Rating: Teen
Genre: Fluff!
Beta: jaradel
Summary: In which Rose sorts out Torchwood's American branch, the Hierarchy of Beverages is challenged, and the Doctor thinks he might be the tin dog.
A/N: Written for principia_coh , who won me through a generous bid at the help_haiti auction. She wanted a Ten II/Rose romp in the same universe as The Wild Christmas Goose, but there's no need whatsoever to have read that one before reading this.
Manuel Ramirez pushed off from his desk and rolled across the floor on his lab stool. He could have just gotten up and walked, but it was much more fun to roll. If he couldn't take advantage of all the perks Torchwood gave him-fancy rolling chairs and sophisticated, smooth, radiant-heat floors, perfect for rolling-what would have been the point of leaving his old position at Stanford? It certainly wasn't for the spectacular Washington, DC weather, that was for darn sure.
"Did you hear that?" His research assistant looked suspiciously up from a stack of spreadsheets and graphs, rubbing her eyes underneath her reading glasses.
"You should take a vacation day, Nicola," Ramirez said, picking up a clipboard full of observations and rolling back to his own desk. "People come in and out all the time-it's why we have a receptionist."
"But ever since Showalter..."
"What happened to Showalter was his own fault. I'm sorry, but that's the truth." He gave Nicola a sympathetic look, wanting to tell her something that was both honest and reassuring simultaneously, but coming up empty. He took a deep breath. "I've heard we're getting sent some hotshot agent from London to straighten out the whole mess."
Nicola winced, and he realised too late that he'd chosen his words poorly.
"I mean, to get us all back on track, restructure the team and all that managerial type of baloney. I suspect that they'll mostly leave us out of it, as usual."
"I hope we don't have to do more self-evaluations. I hate those-I never know what to say!" Nicola pushed her hair behind her ears and moved the steel specimen tray she'd been poking some tweezers around in to the back of the table.
Ramirez turned just in time to see two unfamiliar silhouettes move swiftly past their door. He had a vague impression of a tall man in a suit and a blond woman in black trousers, but that was enough data to surmise that one of them must be this new arrival from headquarters. He lifted an eyebrow towards his research assistant, and without further words between them, they stood, brushed off their lab-coats, and exited. One can't be an effective scientist without possessing a certain amount of morbid curiosity, and Ramirez had long since stopped trying to hide his love of watching shit hit fans.
They heard the man speaking even before they got to conference room. His voice was ebullient, with clipped syllables and a pretty admirable volume.
"Right, I love this bit," the man said with almost childlike enthusiasm. "You look like a... no, don't tell me... Trevor?"
There was an uncomfortable silence and as Ramirez entered the room, he was greeted by the sight of all of his colleagues standing around looking at one another in abject confusion. Who the hell was this Trevor person, and why did the tall man in the blue suit think that their computer guy, William Nokes, looked like him?
"Not a Trevor then, I see," the man continued in an affable English accent. "A Sean, maybe? Am I getting warmer?"
William finally just stuck his hand out and introduced himself: "William Nokes, senior tech specialist."
The man took William's hand and shook it vigorously. "Good to meet you, William Nokes. I'm John Smith, good to meet you all indeed." He smiled genuinely, the corners of his mouth turning downwards, as if he was repressing a desire to full-on grin.
A murmur made the circuit of the room among the other bystanders, and Marcus Jancey stepped forward. He'd been acting in Showalter's stead since the incident, and it had been clear to everyone that he'd be gunning for a promotion once the dust settled.
Jancey now took his turn, sticking a hand out towards this John Smith fellow from London. "Nice to meet you, sir," Jancey intoned, smiling broadly with his impossibly white teeth.
Ramirez saw out of the corner of his eye that Rodney the Intern had tentatively approached the blonde woman with the black slacks, and they spoke together in hushed voices while John Smith did another round of the name game with an increasingly-impatient Jancey.
"I'd say coffee, but I guess you guys like tea, huh?" Rodney whispered to the woman. "I can show you our little kitchen-is he really picky about it? I've heard that about English people and tea."
"No coffee for him," the blonde woman replied with a slight smile animating the corners of her eyes. "Never coffee, even if he begs for it."
"Well," Rodney the Intern whispered back, "I think we have some tea bags."
The two ducked out of the room without being noticed by anyone else, and Ramirez focused his attention back on this supposed hotshot agent, who really didn't seem like such a hotshot at all. Or maybe that was just his Englishness throwing them all off. He had finally driven Jancey to volunteer his full name, which was clearly disappointing for someone whose greatest hope was that his superiors would already know who he was.
***
Rose dunked the tea bag into a tiny paper cup and then loaded it with sugar. "Milk?" she asked the young man who'd rifled through the cupboards to find these items.
"Oh," he said, his face falling. "We might have some cream around here somewhere."
"Cream?" Rose couldn't imagine it, but the Doctor did like his tea so sweet and milky as to be hardly recognisable. Or maybe cream meant something else to Americans. Rodney was already rifling through the refrigerator, pulling empty crisper drawers out and searching behind cans of Coca-Cola.
"Aha!" He produced a pint carton and sniffed it suspiciously. "Should be okay."
Rose took it and looked inside. It just seemed to be milk anyway, no matter what they called it. She poured it in and watched it swirl around and form the shapes of cosmic gas clouds and spiral galaxies.
"Ta," she said, giving the cup one last stir and taking a sip to test for sweetness. It made her teeth ache, and was therefore just right for the Doctor. "Shall we?" she gestured towards the conference room doors.
When they re-entered, the Doctor was in mid-babble. Something about the hub-and-spokes layout of the District of Columbia, and Lafayette and the French revolution, and also coq-au-vin and where one might be able to get this, most perfect of all chicken dishes, in the city.
She tapped him on his shoulder and handed him the cup. "A spot of tea guv'ner?" she said, stifling a laugh.
"Tea!" the Doctor shouted, making a few of the more nervous Torchwood employees jump. "Brilliant!" He turned back to the group of gaping-mouthed Americans, who at this point had all gone utterly silent and simply stared at him blankly. "I saved the world with tea!"
It was nice to see him finally with a new audience, wholly unused to his quirks. He was rapidly running out of Londoners in this regard, making friends (and enemies), as he did, on every tube train, cafe and park bench. He positively was sparkling with delight, but they wouldn't be able to keep this up for too much longer. There was work to do. She made a polite little coughing sound and waited for him to finish his monologue.
"All right, I think it's time we get down to business."
Every head in the room snapped around, brows furrowed. The young bloke who'd helped her with the tea took a step away from her, to get outside of the circle of disapproving attention she now stood in the centre of.
"I'll need to see-" she pulled a palmtop out of her pocket and ran the stylus over the screen, "Jancey, Brown, and Li first, just to go over your statements. Is there somewhere private we can go?"
Silence.
The Doctor put his cup down on a nearby bookshelf and jammed his hands in his pockets, his eyes twinkling away behind his glasses. "Smashing cuppa," he said at length. "Thanks."
"Yeah, and about that," Rose said, addressing the still-speechless Americans, "I'm not having this business with assistants making coffee and doing the washing up and all that. You want a cup, you make it yourself, yeah? No one is above washing out a manky old mug. Not on my team."
Like they were watching a tennis match, everyone looked back to the Doctor, as if they were expecting him to say, "Just kidding!"
He stared at them all right back, unblinking. "What, you thought I was your new boss?" He barked out a loud ha! "Not bloody likely, not me. I don't even work for Torchwood. She just brings me along on account of my gob. It's not half useful sometimes. "
"Jancey, Brown and Li, please. I haven't got all day."
The Doctor beamed smugly. "Too right you haven't. You've got a dinner date, for which I'll pick you up at eight. And I'll show myself the way out, thanks."
***
"I know you said you didn't want to talk about it, but really, that was way too easy." The Doctor licked the last molecules of crème brulee off his spoon and set it down with a clatter. "I've never met a more gullible group of people in my life, and that is saying something."
"Don't sell yourself short," Rose said ironically, feeling that this was the one thing the Doctor could never be accused of doing. "You are very good at what you do."
"Centuries of practise. Still, though, it's dangerous for them to be so credulous, and to listen to some nutter just because he's talking. I'm not the only alien that'll take advantage of that."
"You played to their expectations. They assumed it was a man coming to oversee the transition and there you were," she poked her fork at him, "being all manly. But you're right, and what happened with their last section leader is proof."
"Whad'ya reckon about that Jancey chap? He was there when it happened, wasn't he?"
Rose nodded and drained the last of her wine. "He's too power-hungry by half. But I really don't want to talk about it. I'll do what I have to do with that lot and get us back home as soon as possible. Or, you know, you don't have to stay here with me. We can change your return ticket. If you'd like."
The Doctor looked mortally offended and let the server stand there with the receipt on a tray for far too long before noticing and taking it.
"Do you realise, you just used the words home and soon in the same sentence, and expected me to be on board with that?"
"Well, America's not exactly Raxacoricofallapatorius, is it? I mean, it'll never be as interesting." She tried to say this like it was just a thing, a trivial fact, but the weight of what it implied made her throat constrict.
The Doctor helped her on with her coat but said nothing, held the door for her in silence, and remained quiet as they walked through damp, deserted streets, taxis going by at regular intervals.
"Did you know," he finally said, "that no building in the District of Columbia is allowed to be built taller than the Washington Monument? Look at all these ugly office blocks, though. They can't build tall buildings, but you'd think they could at least make a little bit of an effort."
"Doctor," Rose said quietly, trying to say more words than those two syllables would allow.
"How'd you find that last bottle of wine? I felt a bit of a traitor, having American wine in a French restaurant, but I guess I'm British now, officially, so I can give 'em both the two-finger salute with impunity."
"Doctor."
"Because I know you say you like to have me along on these things because I'm clever and I get people talking, but really are you sure I'm not the tin dog? I feel like I might be the tin dog."
"You loved your tin dog," Rose protested.
"That I did," he sighed.
"He was important."
"That he was."
"And you know Mickey only ever said that because I was horrid to him and his feelings were hurt."
The Doctor stopped walking. "I don't know why I said it. I'm all right." He reached out, took her hand, gave it a squeeze, but she noticed that he didn't look at her as he did so. "I'm always all right."
She knew that once he'd declared himself all right, there could be no further discussion on the matter. She even dared to hope that just this once, he'd meant what he said and he really was all right.
***
Rose crouched behind a rubbish skip, not caring about the filthy alleyway, the pavement covered with half-eaten sandwiches, spilled alcohol, and probably no small amount of human urine. She held her mobile phone to her ear with one hand, not wanting to risk using speaker-phone or the two-way.
"Just a few more feet," she whispered, both into her phone and to Marcus Jancey, crouched behind her and unable to see the action. "Are you ready?"
"Ready and waiting," the voice of the Doctor crackled down the line.
"On my mark..."
"I love it when you talk technical."
Rose smiled in spite of herself. "Work now, flirt later. Right... three, two, one... Now!"
She heard the Doctor giving orders and whooping back at headquarters, while in front of her a hovering ball of plasma and biological soup spun faster and faster as a set of tiny cones set in a circle on the ground hummed and discharged a dome of radiation and energy.
"It's working!" Rose shouted into her phone, as a hot wind picked up and old newspapers blew against her legs. "It's dematerialising!"
Behind her, Jancey stood in awe, periodically taking readings from a hand-held monitor.
The disconcertingly flesh-coloured ball vibrated and spun on its axis as it faded slowly from view. Within the circle of cones, bolts of energy shot from one to another. Rose's phone signal was temporarily interrupted, crackling and whining in her ear. She knew that back at headquarters, the Doctor and Rodney were watching the numbers from Jancey's monitor carefully, waiting until it was their moment to high-five and slap one another on the back.
"-progress? Rose? Rose are you there? What's happening?" The Doctor was back on Rose's phone, his voice gone up an octave with concern.
"It's okay; we're okay. It's gone now, I think. What do those numbers say, Jancey?"
Jancey nodded and punched a few buttons on his monitor. "Looks good, ma'am."
"Rose," Rose corrected.
"Looks good, Rose, ma'am."
Rose sighed. "You can shut it down now. Confirmed return of subject to point of origin. I'll see everyone in one hour for a debrief. And put the kettle on, yeah? It's bloody cold out here."
***
The ambient light from the city came through the edges of the heavy drapes of the hotel room. The forced-air heating register created a blanket of white noise, punctuated periodically by the sound of a door opening and closing somewhere down the hall, and the sounds of the Doctor in a shower that was just too small for two people to occupy at once.
Rose kicked her feet against the smooth, cold, slightly starchy sheets and listened to the familiar sounds of a bloke getting cleaned up and ready for bed. Just a bloke, who brushes his teeth and leaves the seat up and his pants sitting around on the floor. She liked to tick off in her head all of the tell-tale sounds-the cap of the toothpaste hitting the counter-top, the lid of the toilet against the tank, the woosh of a towel being used to dry hair, then the metallic creak of a towel rack.
He emerged in a cloud of steam, a towel wrapped tightly around his waist and his hair standing on end. It seemed to Rose that she was experiencing a kind of double-vision, where one moment he was just a guy standing in a hotel room, and the next, occupying that same space, there was the improbable, impossible man, completely out-of-place in this scenario. The truth of it, she suspected, was that he was both at once.
"You're not the tin dog," she said as he pulled on some pyjama trousers.
"Come again?" He folded the sheet down slid into bed next to her.
"What you did today, it was so you. It was so... Doctor."
He waved a hand around over his head dismissively. "Just the same stuff I do back home, wire this together with that, flirt with you over the phone, put the kettle on. But I said I was all right. I'm fine, really. French food always makes me melodramatic. It's all the glutamic acid, I think."
"But really, though, nothing that happened today could have happened without you, and I never thought in a million years I'd have to be so persistent in trying to convince you of your own brilliance."
"Well..." he drawled, but half-heartedly.
She rolled over onto her side to face him. His eyes were still wide open and he was staring at the shadows made by the stucco ceiling.
"Because it's not just that you're good at maths or you can play about with the tech, that's not what makes you you. It was how you listened to what Rodney had to say, even though he's only an intern. I saw how you encouraged him to try and do the calculations on his own, and then he figured out how to get around the power fluctuation limits by doubling the cycles. That boy's whole life is going to change now that he knows what he's capable of. And I can't believe I actually have to tell you this!"
The Doctor rolled over and draped a heavy arm across her hip. "Disappointing, isn't it?"
"Surprising's more like. You make people better, Doctor. You can't help it; you don't even know you're doing it. A tin dog can't do that, as wonderful as tin dogs are."
"They are pretty wonderful," the Doctor said, drowsily. "Did you see that cybernetic cerebral cortex that Dr. Ramirez has in his lab? I think I'll be having that, yeah?"
"Yeah, okay," Rose said, knowing that even if she said no, he'd still nick it when no one was looking. She yawned, then he yawned in response, and the people in the room next door started making love, loudly.
"Blimey, you could set your watch to them," the Doctor said. "How many night's this been now?"
Rose giggled, embarrassed to be so familiar with the intimate details of the sex lives of strangers. "The last five, I'm sure."
"Well, there's nothing for it," he huffed, then grabbed her by the hips and hoisted her up on top of him, apparently less embarrassed and more inspired by the chorus next door. "There's a saying, on the planet Sundown: While it's mating season, get out there and mate! Er, it rather loses something in translation."
"Sort of like... when in Rome, screw as the Romans screw?"
He grinned, the shadows in the room making the lines around his eyes seem deeper. "Precisely."
Characters/Pairings: Ten II/Rose, OCs
Rating: Teen
Genre: Fluff!
Beta: jaradel
Summary: In which Rose sorts out Torchwood's American branch, the Hierarchy of Beverages is challenged, and the Doctor thinks he might be the tin dog.
A/N: Written for principia_coh , who won me through a generous bid at the help_haiti auction. She wanted a Ten II/Rose romp in the same universe as The Wild Christmas Goose, but there's no need whatsoever to have read that one before reading this.
Manuel Ramirez pushed off from his desk and rolled across the floor on his lab stool. He could have just gotten up and walked, but it was much more fun to roll. If he couldn't take advantage of all the perks Torchwood gave him-fancy rolling chairs and sophisticated, smooth, radiant-heat floors, perfect for rolling-what would have been the point of leaving his old position at Stanford? It certainly wasn't for the spectacular Washington, DC weather, that was for darn sure.
"Did you hear that?" His research assistant looked suspiciously up from a stack of spreadsheets and graphs, rubbing her eyes underneath her reading glasses.
"You should take a vacation day, Nicola," Ramirez said, picking up a clipboard full of observations and rolling back to his own desk. "People come in and out all the time-it's why we have a receptionist."
"But ever since Showalter..."
"What happened to Showalter was his own fault. I'm sorry, but that's the truth." He gave Nicola a sympathetic look, wanting to tell her something that was both honest and reassuring simultaneously, but coming up empty. He took a deep breath. "I've heard we're getting sent some hotshot agent from London to straighten out the whole mess."
Nicola winced, and he realised too late that he'd chosen his words poorly.
"I mean, to get us all back on track, restructure the team and all that managerial type of baloney. I suspect that they'll mostly leave us out of it, as usual."
"I hope we don't have to do more self-evaluations. I hate those-I never know what to say!" Nicola pushed her hair behind her ears and moved the steel specimen tray she'd been poking some tweezers around in to the back of the table.
Ramirez turned just in time to see two unfamiliar silhouettes move swiftly past their door. He had a vague impression of a tall man in a suit and a blond woman in black trousers, but that was enough data to surmise that one of them must be this new arrival from headquarters. He lifted an eyebrow towards his research assistant, and without further words between them, they stood, brushed off their lab-coats, and exited. One can't be an effective scientist without possessing a certain amount of morbid curiosity, and Ramirez had long since stopped trying to hide his love of watching shit hit fans.
They heard the man speaking even before they got to conference room. His voice was ebullient, with clipped syllables and a pretty admirable volume.
"Right, I love this bit," the man said with almost childlike enthusiasm. "You look like a... no, don't tell me... Trevor?"
There was an uncomfortable silence and as Ramirez entered the room, he was greeted by the sight of all of his colleagues standing around looking at one another in abject confusion. Who the hell was this Trevor person, and why did the tall man in the blue suit think that their computer guy, William Nokes, looked like him?
"Not a Trevor then, I see," the man continued in an affable English accent. "A Sean, maybe? Am I getting warmer?"
William finally just stuck his hand out and introduced himself: "William Nokes, senior tech specialist."
The man took William's hand and shook it vigorously. "Good to meet you, William Nokes. I'm John Smith, good to meet you all indeed." He smiled genuinely, the corners of his mouth turning downwards, as if he was repressing a desire to full-on grin.
A murmur made the circuit of the room among the other bystanders, and Marcus Jancey stepped forward. He'd been acting in Showalter's stead since the incident, and it had been clear to everyone that he'd be gunning for a promotion once the dust settled.
Jancey now took his turn, sticking a hand out towards this John Smith fellow from London. "Nice to meet you, sir," Jancey intoned, smiling broadly with his impossibly white teeth.
Ramirez saw out of the corner of his eye that Rodney the Intern had tentatively approached the blonde woman with the black slacks, and they spoke together in hushed voices while John Smith did another round of the name game with an increasingly-impatient Jancey.
"I'd say coffee, but I guess you guys like tea, huh?" Rodney whispered to the woman. "I can show you our little kitchen-is he really picky about it? I've heard that about English people and tea."
"No coffee for him," the blonde woman replied with a slight smile animating the corners of her eyes. "Never coffee, even if he begs for it."
"Well," Rodney the Intern whispered back, "I think we have some tea bags."
The two ducked out of the room without being noticed by anyone else, and Ramirez focused his attention back on this supposed hotshot agent, who really didn't seem like such a hotshot at all. Or maybe that was just his Englishness throwing them all off. He had finally driven Jancey to volunteer his full name, which was clearly disappointing for someone whose greatest hope was that his superiors would already know who he was.
***
Rose dunked the tea bag into a tiny paper cup and then loaded it with sugar. "Milk?" she asked the young man who'd rifled through the cupboards to find these items.
"Oh," he said, his face falling. "We might have some cream around here somewhere."
"Cream?" Rose couldn't imagine it, but the Doctor did like his tea so sweet and milky as to be hardly recognisable. Or maybe cream meant something else to Americans. Rodney was already rifling through the refrigerator, pulling empty crisper drawers out and searching behind cans of Coca-Cola.
"Aha!" He produced a pint carton and sniffed it suspiciously. "Should be okay."
Rose took it and looked inside. It just seemed to be milk anyway, no matter what they called it. She poured it in and watched it swirl around and form the shapes of cosmic gas clouds and spiral galaxies.
"Ta," she said, giving the cup one last stir and taking a sip to test for sweetness. It made her teeth ache, and was therefore just right for the Doctor. "Shall we?" she gestured towards the conference room doors.
When they re-entered, the Doctor was in mid-babble. Something about the hub-and-spokes layout of the District of Columbia, and Lafayette and the French revolution, and also coq-au-vin and where one might be able to get this, most perfect of all chicken dishes, in the city.
She tapped him on his shoulder and handed him the cup. "A spot of tea guv'ner?" she said, stifling a laugh.
"Tea!" the Doctor shouted, making a few of the more nervous Torchwood employees jump. "Brilliant!" He turned back to the group of gaping-mouthed Americans, who at this point had all gone utterly silent and simply stared at him blankly. "I saved the world with tea!"
It was nice to see him finally with a new audience, wholly unused to his quirks. He was rapidly running out of Londoners in this regard, making friends (and enemies), as he did, on every tube train, cafe and park bench. He positively was sparkling with delight, but they wouldn't be able to keep this up for too much longer. There was work to do. She made a polite little coughing sound and waited for him to finish his monologue.
"All right, I think it's time we get down to business."
Every head in the room snapped around, brows furrowed. The young bloke who'd helped her with the tea took a step away from her, to get outside of the circle of disapproving attention she now stood in the centre of.
"I'll need to see-" she pulled a palmtop out of her pocket and ran the stylus over the screen, "Jancey, Brown, and Li first, just to go over your statements. Is there somewhere private we can go?"
Silence.
The Doctor put his cup down on a nearby bookshelf and jammed his hands in his pockets, his eyes twinkling away behind his glasses. "Smashing cuppa," he said at length. "Thanks."
"Yeah, and about that," Rose said, addressing the still-speechless Americans, "I'm not having this business with assistants making coffee and doing the washing up and all that. You want a cup, you make it yourself, yeah? No one is above washing out a manky old mug. Not on my team."
Like they were watching a tennis match, everyone looked back to the Doctor, as if they were expecting him to say, "Just kidding!"
He stared at them all right back, unblinking. "What, you thought I was your new boss?" He barked out a loud ha! "Not bloody likely, not me. I don't even work for Torchwood. She just brings me along on account of my gob. It's not half useful sometimes. "
"Jancey, Brown and Li, please. I haven't got all day."
The Doctor beamed smugly. "Too right you haven't. You've got a dinner date, for which I'll pick you up at eight. And I'll show myself the way out, thanks."
***
"I know you said you didn't want to talk about it, but really, that was way too easy." The Doctor licked the last molecules of crème brulee off his spoon and set it down with a clatter. "I've never met a more gullible group of people in my life, and that is saying something."
"Don't sell yourself short," Rose said ironically, feeling that this was the one thing the Doctor could never be accused of doing. "You are very good at what you do."
"Centuries of practise. Still, though, it's dangerous for them to be so credulous, and to listen to some nutter just because he's talking. I'm not the only alien that'll take advantage of that."
"You played to their expectations. They assumed it was a man coming to oversee the transition and there you were," she poked her fork at him, "being all manly. But you're right, and what happened with their last section leader is proof."
"Whad'ya reckon about that Jancey chap? He was there when it happened, wasn't he?"
Rose nodded and drained the last of her wine. "He's too power-hungry by half. But I really don't want to talk about it. I'll do what I have to do with that lot and get us back home as soon as possible. Or, you know, you don't have to stay here with me. We can change your return ticket. If you'd like."
The Doctor looked mortally offended and let the server stand there with the receipt on a tray for far too long before noticing and taking it.
"Do you realise, you just used the words home and soon in the same sentence, and expected me to be on board with that?"
"Well, America's not exactly Raxacoricofallapatorius, is it? I mean, it'll never be as interesting." She tried to say this like it was just a thing, a trivial fact, but the weight of what it implied made her throat constrict.
The Doctor helped her on with her coat but said nothing, held the door for her in silence, and remained quiet as they walked through damp, deserted streets, taxis going by at regular intervals.
"Did you know," he finally said, "that no building in the District of Columbia is allowed to be built taller than the Washington Monument? Look at all these ugly office blocks, though. They can't build tall buildings, but you'd think they could at least make a little bit of an effort."
"Doctor," Rose said quietly, trying to say more words than those two syllables would allow.
"How'd you find that last bottle of wine? I felt a bit of a traitor, having American wine in a French restaurant, but I guess I'm British now, officially, so I can give 'em both the two-finger salute with impunity."
"Doctor."
"Because I know you say you like to have me along on these things because I'm clever and I get people talking, but really are you sure I'm not the tin dog? I feel like I might be the tin dog."
"You loved your tin dog," Rose protested.
"That I did," he sighed.
"He was important."
"That he was."
"And you know Mickey only ever said that because I was horrid to him and his feelings were hurt."
The Doctor stopped walking. "I don't know why I said it. I'm all right." He reached out, took her hand, gave it a squeeze, but she noticed that he didn't look at her as he did so. "I'm always all right."
She knew that once he'd declared himself all right, there could be no further discussion on the matter. She even dared to hope that just this once, he'd meant what he said and he really was all right.
***
Rose crouched behind a rubbish skip, not caring about the filthy alleyway, the pavement covered with half-eaten sandwiches, spilled alcohol, and probably no small amount of human urine. She held her mobile phone to her ear with one hand, not wanting to risk using speaker-phone or the two-way.
"Just a few more feet," she whispered, both into her phone and to Marcus Jancey, crouched behind her and unable to see the action. "Are you ready?"
"Ready and waiting," the voice of the Doctor crackled down the line.
"On my mark..."
"I love it when you talk technical."
Rose smiled in spite of herself. "Work now, flirt later. Right... three, two, one... Now!"
She heard the Doctor giving orders and whooping back at headquarters, while in front of her a hovering ball of plasma and biological soup spun faster and faster as a set of tiny cones set in a circle on the ground hummed and discharged a dome of radiation and energy.
"It's working!" Rose shouted into her phone, as a hot wind picked up and old newspapers blew against her legs. "It's dematerialising!"
Behind her, Jancey stood in awe, periodically taking readings from a hand-held monitor.
The disconcertingly flesh-coloured ball vibrated and spun on its axis as it faded slowly from view. Within the circle of cones, bolts of energy shot from one to another. Rose's phone signal was temporarily interrupted, crackling and whining in her ear. She knew that back at headquarters, the Doctor and Rodney were watching the numbers from Jancey's monitor carefully, waiting until it was their moment to high-five and slap one another on the back.
"-progress? Rose? Rose are you there? What's happening?" The Doctor was back on Rose's phone, his voice gone up an octave with concern.
"It's okay; we're okay. It's gone now, I think. What do those numbers say, Jancey?"
Jancey nodded and punched a few buttons on his monitor. "Looks good, ma'am."
"Rose," Rose corrected.
"Looks good, Rose, ma'am."
Rose sighed. "You can shut it down now. Confirmed return of subject to point of origin. I'll see everyone in one hour for a debrief. And put the kettle on, yeah? It's bloody cold out here."
***
The ambient light from the city came through the edges of the heavy drapes of the hotel room. The forced-air heating register created a blanket of white noise, punctuated periodically by the sound of a door opening and closing somewhere down the hall, and the sounds of the Doctor in a shower that was just too small for two people to occupy at once.
Rose kicked her feet against the smooth, cold, slightly starchy sheets and listened to the familiar sounds of a bloke getting cleaned up and ready for bed. Just a bloke, who brushes his teeth and leaves the seat up and his pants sitting around on the floor. She liked to tick off in her head all of the tell-tale sounds-the cap of the toothpaste hitting the counter-top, the lid of the toilet against the tank, the woosh of a towel being used to dry hair, then the metallic creak of a towel rack.
He emerged in a cloud of steam, a towel wrapped tightly around his waist and his hair standing on end. It seemed to Rose that she was experiencing a kind of double-vision, where one moment he was just a guy standing in a hotel room, and the next, occupying that same space, there was the improbable, impossible man, completely out-of-place in this scenario. The truth of it, she suspected, was that he was both at once.
"You're not the tin dog," she said as he pulled on some pyjama trousers.
"Come again?" He folded the sheet down slid into bed next to her.
"What you did today, it was so you. It was so... Doctor."
He waved a hand around over his head dismissively. "Just the same stuff I do back home, wire this together with that, flirt with you over the phone, put the kettle on. But I said I was all right. I'm fine, really. French food always makes me melodramatic. It's all the glutamic acid, I think."
"But really, though, nothing that happened today could have happened without you, and I never thought in a million years I'd have to be so persistent in trying to convince you of your own brilliance."
"Well..." he drawled, but half-heartedly.
She rolled over onto her side to face him. His eyes were still wide open and he was staring at the shadows made by the stucco ceiling.
"Because it's not just that you're good at maths or you can play about with the tech, that's not what makes you you. It was how you listened to what Rodney had to say, even though he's only an intern. I saw how you encouraged him to try and do the calculations on his own, and then he figured out how to get around the power fluctuation limits by doubling the cycles. That boy's whole life is going to change now that he knows what he's capable of. And I can't believe I actually have to tell you this!"
The Doctor rolled over and draped a heavy arm across her hip. "Disappointing, isn't it?"
"Surprising's more like. You make people better, Doctor. You can't help it; you don't even know you're doing it. A tin dog can't do that, as wonderful as tin dogs are."
"They are pretty wonderful," the Doctor said, drowsily. "Did you see that cybernetic cerebral cortex that Dr. Ramirez has in his lab? I think I'll be having that, yeah?"
"Yeah, okay," Rose said, knowing that even if she said no, he'd still nick it when no one was looking. She yawned, then he yawned in response, and the people in the room next door started making love, loudly.
"Blimey, you could set your watch to them," the Doctor said. "How many night's this been now?"
Rose giggled, embarrassed to be so familiar with the intimate details of the sex lives of strangers. "The last five, I'm sure."
"Well, there's nothing for it," he huffed, then grabbed her by the hips and hoisted her up on top of him, apparently less embarrassed and more inspired by the chorus next door. "There's a saying, on the planet Sundown: While it's mating season, get out there and mate! Er, it rather loses something in translation."
"Sort of like... when in Rome, screw as the Romans screw?"
He grinned, the shadows in the room making the lines around his eyes seem deeper. "Precisely."