Fic: Ariadne Quits
Tilte: Ariadne Quits
Rating: K+
Spoilers: None
Characters: Nine, Rose
Summary: The roundabout reason why Rose isn’t allowed to cook anymore.
Disclaimer: The characters, places, and so on within the following work of fiction do not belong to me and if anyone thinks this is protecting me from highly trained attack lawyers, they’re kidding themselves.
Author’s Note: I’m looking for a beta and/or someone who can correct all my American slang. On shorter things like this I’m fairly okay, but I tend to have mild freak outs over terms like “Post-It Note” or what time coffee shops open and close. And I’m working on several longer pieces that I’d like a beta for. Thanks.
It would be surprising to anyone that asked, not that anyone did, to find that it was a much longer time before Rose was allowed to cook on the TARDIS than it was before she was allowed to press buttons on the console. Even the buttons that actually did something.
There had been a Problem. It wasn’t really a “Problem with a capital P” sort of Problem, but lower-case wouldn’t do it, and English still lacked the middle-case when Rose learned it.
So.
She had had a Problem. It took the Doctor a while to catch on that something was wrong. In hindsight, he probably should have noticed sooner, but you know what they say about hindsight:
Pretend you had it to begin with.
If asked in the future, and again nobody ever did, (which made plausible deniability that much easier), the Doctor would claim that he’d noticed after the time Rose had entered the console room, looked around in confusion and then ducked out.
And then did it again three more times.
Of course he hadn’t noticed, because he’d been far too busy trying to triangulate the coordinates of a shifting solar field near the Asteracean galaxy. So if he was a little pre-occupied to notice one turned about young woman entering and exiting the room, he had a good reason thank you very much.
This was still a day after the actual Problem started, but Rose decided that she would save this faux pas for a time when she was really angry at the Doctor. A time when he complained loudly and at great length about how unperceptive a species humans were. Then she would remind him about the time she’d been eaten by a giant plant and he hadn’t noticed. Because the start of the Problem had been far, far more obvious than a few slammed doors.
The Problem really started like this:
“You know you’ve got a giant plant that eats people,” Rose announced on her fourth day in the TARDIS.
“Yeah, George!” the Doctor beamed, beneath the grill of the console. “How’s he doing?”
“Hungry,” Rose replied. “Incidentally, you don’t have a first aid kit anywhere do you?”
The Doctor gestured with the sonic screwdriver, rattled off a complex set of directions, and went back to work.
The Problem continued at dinner time, after Rose had offered to cook. All was well for about an hour, but soon enough the sound of pounding footsteps could be heard above the console room, and the sound of Rose’s voice could be heard yelling from the same direction.
“FIRE EXTINGUISHER! FIRE EXTINGUISHER! Why do you have to be this big on the inside, you blasted ship?!”
The Doctor barely glanced up, offering only an admonition for insulting the TARDIS, and went back to work on inner computer systems. A few minutes later he completely forgot about dinner all together.
The Doctor didn’t really notice something was wrong until Rose went missing. That sounds dire, but it was truthfully only about ten hours later. At first he had simply assumed she’d slept in. Then he’d assumed she was just getting ready. It took her one hour, fifteen minutes and thirty-five seconds to get ready. On average. It depended on if she had to re-do her makeup. So of course he’d given her the extra hour just in case she had had to re-do her makeup.
Of course by that time, the Doctor was rather anxious to get on and be doing something, and the lack of Rose to be doing it with was inconvenient. Of course, he could just visit the Duchy of South Actinaria on Aquarius Prime by himself, take in the sites, say hello the Duchess, possibly dismantle a plot to overthrow the governing body that would send the city into three hundred years of political strife. And then he could tell her all about it. Rose would be angry, but the Doctor was sure it would be an unforgettable lesson in punctuality.
Of course, if it was a choice between seeing Rose get angry, and seeing Rose’s awestruck face during the annual Aquatic Dance of the Royal Hydra, he’d choose awestruck.
Clearly he’d just have to drag her out of her room. It occurred to the Doctor at this point that he wasn’t actually sure where her room was, and that he hadn’t seen Rose since dinner time the previous day. Come to think of that, he couldn’t remember dinner ever actually occurring. Pieces started falling into place.
“Oh, not again.” The Doctor muttered, as he patted down his pockets.
Two diaries, a yo-yo, a several melted toffee’s, a Christmas cracker, a dead cell phone battery and a rubber duck later, he finally found the ball of string he’d been searching for. It was time to find Rose Tyler’s room. And hopefully Rose Tyler.
--
Rose sighed. This was the fourth swimming pool. What did the Doctor need with four swimming pools, anyway? Of course, this could have been the second swimming pool. Two of them had looked an awful lot alike. She sighed and ducked out of the room.
“Maybe you could direct me to a room with food, next?” she asked the ceiling.
Rose turned right and walked into something that could only be described as an American 50’s diner. Right down to the sunlight streaming in through pane glass windows. That was by far the oddest thing she'd encountered yet, and she'd just left a room that was made up of nothing but used tissue. She spent a moment ducking out the door way, then back in looking at one side of the wall where there was glass, and the other that was simple dark corridor.
A bird flew past the window.
"So odd," Rose muttered, as she tapped the glass.
Worried that take the room away before she'd had a better look around, Rose dived behind the counter to see if the diner was actually stocked with food as well. A quick produced snack food and Coke, plus a few things that would have to be cooked, hamburger patties and frozen chips. However, a try of the stove showed that someone (someone whose name began with a T, she’d reckon) had put out the pilot light.
“All right, all right. Are you still on me about that? I apologized. And you know, maybe I shouldn’t have been cooking with an open flame, but the least you could do is keep a fire extinguisher handy, you know?”
Rose shoved another packet of crisps into her pocket and left the diner, walked back out into the never-ending halls of the TARDIS. She let her fingers trail along the wall for a moment before dropping her hand back to her side.
“And maybe you could direct me back to the console room next?” she asked the walls hopefully.
Rose turned left and almost walked into another swimming pool.
“Was worth a shot.”
--
Finding Rose’s room had been easy. It wasn’t actually very far from the console room (well, it was, relatively, but the Doctor hadn’t bothered with relative distance on his ship for several centuries). The door was pastel pink and had a little plaque with the words “Rose’s Room” written on it in glitter, surrounded by tiny flowers. The Doctor was almost sure that Rose hadn’t made the plaque.
He would have asked her, but she wasn’t in her room.
“Right then.” The Doctor tied one end of the string to the handle of Rose’s door, and headed off down the corridors.
--
“Is this like hazing? Or some warped tour?”
Rose was still walking about the TARDIS. She’d taken a break one of the rather large gardens, saying hello to George while she was there. She liked to think that they had moved on from yesterday. He’d forgiven her for pulling out three of his leaves, and she’d forgiven him for eating her favorite shirt.
At this point she was pretty sure the TARDIS didn’t mean any harm. She’d turned up in various places with food and water, several rooms with very comfortable couches, some rather brilliant rooms she wouldn’t have thought were scientifically possible. She especially liked the one where the walls changed color and size with sound and movement. She’d spent two minutes laughing and spinning around before she tripped over the shifting tiles on the floor. She’d named it the Lemonade Disco, and then put a sticky note on the door declaring it so.
She’d found the sticky notes in a study early on. After falling down the same hole in the floor twice, she’d decided that labeling might be a good way to go.
--
He really wasn’t sure what to make of the Post-It notes. Sure, they worked better than his string idea, which had sort of fizzled and died when he ran into several bits of it lying on the floor (he hadn't even noticed it go slack. His ship really was brillian). And sure, “This Way” and “That Way” for the divergent corridors made sense, but he really couldn’t work out the one below those two that read “WRONG WAY” with underlines and several more exclamation points than might have been necessary.
At least he couldn’t figure it out until he took a step forward and fell down the chute.
On his way down to the third sub-basement (he remembered now, this was the emergency secret passage between the third hallway near the reading room to the incomplete art gallery) he wondered if this was Rose playing a joke, or the TARDIS. His TARDIS would never mark anything with sticky notes. But it occurred to him that Rose would have had to have inadvertently stumbled onto the hole in the floor more than once to be able to mark it as dangerous. He could practically hear his ship humming in amusement.
Clearly, it was going to be one of those days.
--
“You know, this has been fun, really, but my feet are starting to hurt.” Rose was talking to ceiling again (it seemed only natural that she should be talking up to the TARDIS), and therefore didn’t notice that once again the floor had disappeared.
She landed on another patch of metal grating with a thud, and muttered something rude that she hoped the TARDIS didn’t hear, because she was sure it would mean another five days of being lost.
And there really wasn’t anything interesting about this hallway, either. It was just a hall, the corridor leading off into murky directions. The only thing that made this different from the solid, dark wood door directly in front of her. There wasn’t another door like it on the ship, not that she’d seen. This was…
“This is his room, isn’t it?” Rose whispered.
She grazed her fingers against the handle, pressed her palm flat against it.
“I can’t,” she leaned against the door. “He’ll show me if he wants to. But thanks.”
Rose trailed her fingers away from the door and against the wall as she picked another direction and headed off again.
“Thanks for offering.”
Rose stopped walking, as if she'd thought better of it, and plopped down in the middle of the hallway.
"Besides, he'd get a bit huffy about it, don't you think?"
--
The Doctor, coincidentally, was also getting a bit tired of walking. While he'd found evidence that Rose had been wandering through several of the rooms (what on Earth had posessed her to toss so much soap into the North-East swimming pool), Rose herself remained cheerfully elusive. The string hadn't worked, the sticky notes hadn't worked, and wandering blind never worked, even though it was his favorite method of trying to sort things out.
It wasn't long before he'd been able to devise a new strategy, though: follow the voices.
"Can be utterly clueless sometimes, have you noticed?" He found Rose stitting on the floor of a hallway, waving her hands animatedly, and staring up at the ceiling. "I'd say 'What do I have to do, burn the house down?' but I sorta did that already, didn't I? Bet you a quid he never notices. I don't what you'd do with it, though.
"Rose?"
“Doctor! Oh, thank God!” Rose was up off the ground and rushing for him, grabbing him around the middle.
“What’re you doing down here?”
“Oh, just girl talk.” She smiled, then started giggling, covering her mouth with both hands. The Doctor looked at her like she'd half lost her mind. She waved him off.
“Sorry, I was just rememering what my mum used to tell me about getting lost in stores.”
“Well come on then,” The Doctor rolled his eyes, but offered his arm. “There’s a sea dragon out there with your name on it?”
“Seriously?” She looped her arm through his as he steered her down the opposite corridor than the one she’d chosen. “Oh, I can’t wait.”
As they reached the console room Rose stopped short.
“Ah, right. Doctor? If you ever find the burnt out shell of a once rather posh kitchen? It’s not my fault. Also, you should really keep a fire extinguisher under the sink and not three floors up and two doors to the left.”
The Doctor did find the kitchen. And this, of course, is why Rose is no longer allowed to cook in the TARDIS. On the plus side, Rose’s door had not been decorated with glitter for quite some time.
--
Rating: K+
Spoilers: None
Characters: Nine, Rose
Summary: The roundabout reason why Rose isn’t allowed to cook anymore.
Disclaimer: The characters, places, and so on within the following work of fiction do not belong to me and if anyone thinks this is protecting me from highly trained attack lawyers, they’re kidding themselves.
Author’s Note: I’m looking for a beta and/or someone who can correct all my American slang. On shorter things like this I’m fairly okay, but I tend to have mild freak outs over terms like “Post-It Note” or what time coffee shops open and close. And I’m working on several longer pieces that I’d like a beta for. Thanks.
It would be surprising to anyone that asked, not that anyone did, to find that it was a much longer time before Rose was allowed to cook on the TARDIS than it was before she was allowed to press buttons on the console. Even the buttons that actually did something.
There had been a Problem. It wasn’t really a “Problem with a capital P” sort of Problem, but lower-case wouldn’t do it, and English still lacked the middle-case when Rose learned it.
So.
She had had a Problem. It took the Doctor a while to catch on that something was wrong. In hindsight, he probably should have noticed sooner, but you know what they say about hindsight:
Pretend you had it to begin with.
If asked in the future, and again nobody ever did, (which made plausible deniability that much easier), the Doctor would claim that he’d noticed after the time Rose had entered the console room, looked around in confusion and then ducked out.
And then did it again three more times.
Of course he hadn’t noticed, because he’d been far too busy trying to triangulate the coordinates of a shifting solar field near the Asteracean galaxy. So if he was a little pre-occupied to notice one turned about young woman entering and exiting the room, he had a good reason thank you very much.
This was still a day after the actual Problem started, but Rose decided that she would save this faux pas for a time when she was really angry at the Doctor. A time when he complained loudly and at great length about how unperceptive a species humans were. Then she would remind him about the time she’d been eaten by a giant plant and he hadn’t noticed. Because the start of the Problem had been far, far more obvious than a few slammed doors.
The Problem really started like this:
“You know you’ve got a giant plant that eats people,” Rose announced on her fourth day in the TARDIS.
“Yeah, George!” the Doctor beamed, beneath the grill of the console. “How’s he doing?”
“Hungry,” Rose replied. “Incidentally, you don’t have a first aid kit anywhere do you?”
The Doctor gestured with the sonic screwdriver, rattled off a complex set of directions, and went back to work.
The Problem continued at dinner time, after Rose had offered to cook. All was well for about an hour, but soon enough the sound of pounding footsteps could be heard above the console room, and the sound of Rose’s voice could be heard yelling from the same direction.
“FIRE EXTINGUISHER! FIRE EXTINGUISHER! Why do you have to be this big on the inside, you blasted ship?!”
The Doctor barely glanced up, offering only an admonition for insulting the TARDIS, and went back to work on inner computer systems. A few minutes later he completely forgot about dinner all together.
The Doctor didn’t really notice something was wrong until Rose went missing. That sounds dire, but it was truthfully only about ten hours later. At first he had simply assumed she’d slept in. Then he’d assumed she was just getting ready. It took her one hour, fifteen minutes and thirty-five seconds to get ready. On average. It depended on if she had to re-do her makeup. So of course he’d given her the extra hour just in case she had had to re-do her makeup.
Of course by that time, the Doctor was rather anxious to get on and be doing something, and the lack of Rose to be doing it with was inconvenient. Of course, he could just visit the Duchy of South Actinaria on Aquarius Prime by himself, take in the sites, say hello the Duchess, possibly dismantle a plot to overthrow the governing body that would send the city into three hundred years of political strife. And then he could tell her all about it. Rose would be angry, but the Doctor was sure it would be an unforgettable lesson in punctuality.
Of course, if it was a choice between seeing Rose get angry, and seeing Rose’s awestruck face during the annual Aquatic Dance of the Royal Hydra, he’d choose awestruck.
Clearly he’d just have to drag her out of her room. It occurred to the Doctor at this point that he wasn’t actually sure where her room was, and that he hadn’t seen Rose since dinner time the previous day. Come to think of that, he couldn’t remember dinner ever actually occurring. Pieces started falling into place.
“Oh, not again.” The Doctor muttered, as he patted down his pockets.
Two diaries, a yo-yo, a several melted toffee’s, a Christmas cracker, a dead cell phone battery and a rubber duck later, he finally found the ball of string he’d been searching for. It was time to find Rose Tyler’s room. And hopefully Rose Tyler.
--
Rose sighed. This was the fourth swimming pool. What did the Doctor need with four swimming pools, anyway? Of course, this could have been the second swimming pool. Two of them had looked an awful lot alike. She sighed and ducked out of the room.
“Maybe you could direct me to a room with food, next?” she asked the ceiling.
Rose turned right and walked into something that could only be described as an American 50’s diner. Right down to the sunlight streaming in through pane glass windows. That was by far the oddest thing she'd encountered yet, and she'd just left a room that was made up of nothing but used tissue. She spent a moment ducking out the door way, then back in looking at one side of the wall where there was glass, and the other that was simple dark corridor.
A bird flew past the window.
"So odd," Rose muttered, as she tapped the glass.
Worried that take the room away before she'd had a better look around, Rose dived behind the counter to see if the diner was actually stocked with food as well. A quick produced snack food and Coke, plus a few things that would have to be cooked, hamburger patties and frozen chips. However, a try of the stove showed that someone (someone whose name began with a T, she’d reckon) had put out the pilot light.
“All right, all right. Are you still on me about that? I apologized. And you know, maybe I shouldn’t have been cooking with an open flame, but the least you could do is keep a fire extinguisher handy, you know?”
Rose shoved another packet of crisps into her pocket and left the diner, walked back out into the never-ending halls of the TARDIS. She let her fingers trail along the wall for a moment before dropping her hand back to her side.
“And maybe you could direct me back to the console room next?” she asked the walls hopefully.
Rose turned left and almost walked into another swimming pool.
“Was worth a shot.”
--
Finding Rose’s room had been easy. It wasn’t actually very far from the console room (well, it was, relatively, but the Doctor hadn’t bothered with relative distance on his ship for several centuries). The door was pastel pink and had a little plaque with the words “Rose’s Room” written on it in glitter, surrounded by tiny flowers. The Doctor was almost sure that Rose hadn’t made the plaque.
He would have asked her, but she wasn’t in her room.
“Right then.” The Doctor tied one end of the string to the handle of Rose’s door, and headed off down the corridors.
--
“Is this like hazing? Or some warped tour?”
Rose was still walking about the TARDIS. She’d taken a break one of the rather large gardens, saying hello to George while she was there. She liked to think that they had moved on from yesterday. He’d forgiven her for pulling out three of his leaves, and she’d forgiven him for eating her favorite shirt.
At this point she was pretty sure the TARDIS didn’t mean any harm. She’d turned up in various places with food and water, several rooms with very comfortable couches, some rather brilliant rooms she wouldn’t have thought were scientifically possible. She especially liked the one where the walls changed color and size with sound and movement. She’d spent two minutes laughing and spinning around before she tripped over the shifting tiles on the floor. She’d named it the Lemonade Disco, and then put a sticky note on the door declaring it so.
She’d found the sticky notes in a study early on. After falling down the same hole in the floor twice, she’d decided that labeling might be a good way to go.
--
He really wasn’t sure what to make of the Post-It notes. Sure, they worked better than his string idea, which had sort of fizzled and died when he ran into several bits of it lying on the floor (he hadn't even noticed it go slack. His ship really was brillian). And sure, “This Way” and “That Way” for the divergent corridors made sense, but he really couldn’t work out the one below those two that read “WRONG WAY” with underlines and several more exclamation points than might have been necessary.
At least he couldn’t figure it out until he took a step forward and fell down the chute.
On his way down to the third sub-basement (he remembered now, this was the emergency secret passage between the third hallway near the reading room to the incomplete art gallery) he wondered if this was Rose playing a joke, or the TARDIS. His TARDIS would never mark anything with sticky notes. But it occurred to him that Rose would have had to have inadvertently stumbled onto the hole in the floor more than once to be able to mark it as dangerous. He could practically hear his ship humming in amusement.
Clearly, it was going to be one of those days.
--
“You know, this has been fun, really, but my feet are starting to hurt.” Rose was talking to ceiling again (it seemed only natural that she should be talking up to the TARDIS), and therefore didn’t notice that once again the floor had disappeared.
She landed on another patch of metal grating with a thud, and muttered something rude that she hoped the TARDIS didn’t hear, because she was sure it would mean another five days of being lost.
And there really wasn’t anything interesting about this hallway, either. It was just a hall, the corridor leading off into murky directions. The only thing that made this different from the solid, dark wood door directly in front of her. There wasn’t another door like it on the ship, not that she’d seen. This was…
“This is his room, isn’t it?” Rose whispered.
She grazed her fingers against the handle, pressed her palm flat against it.
“I can’t,” she leaned against the door. “He’ll show me if he wants to. But thanks.”
Rose trailed her fingers away from the door and against the wall as she picked another direction and headed off again.
“Thanks for offering.”
Rose stopped walking, as if she'd thought better of it, and plopped down in the middle of the hallway.
"Besides, he'd get a bit huffy about it, don't you think?"
--
The Doctor, coincidentally, was also getting a bit tired of walking. While he'd found evidence that Rose had been wandering through several of the rooms (what on Earth had posessed her to toss so much soap into the North-East swimming pool), Rose herself remained cheerfully elusive. The string hadn't worked, the sticky notes hadn't worked, and wandering blind never worked, even though it was his favorite method of trying to sort things out.
It wasn't long before he'd been able to devise a new strategy, though: follow the voices.
"Can be utterly clueless sometimes, have you noticed?" He found Rose stitting on the floor of a hallway, waving her hands animatedly, and staring up at the ceiling. "I'd say 'What do I have to do, burn the house down?' but I sorta did that already, didn't I? Bet you a quid he never notices. I don't what you'd do with it, though.
"Rose?"
“Doctor! Oh, thank God!” Rose was up off the ground and rushing for him, grabbing him around the middle.
“What’re you doing down here?”
“Oh, just girl talk.” She smiled, then started giggling, covering her mouth with both hands. The Doctor looked at her like she'd half lost her mind. She waved him off.
“Sorry, I was just rememering what my mum used to tell me about getting lost in stores.”
“Well come on then,” The Doctor rolled his eyes, but offered his arm. “There’s a sea dragon out there with your name on it?”
“Seriously?” She looped her arm through his as he steered her down the opposite corridor than the one she’d chosen. “Oh, I can’t wait.”
As they reached the console room Rose stopped short.
“Ah, right. Doctor? If you ever find the burnt out shell of a once rather posh kitchen? It’s not my fault. Also, you should really keep a fire extinguisher under the sink and not three floors up and two doors to the left.”
The Doctor did find the kitchen. And this, of course, is why Rose is no longer allowed to cook in the TARDIS. On the plus side, Rose’s door had not been decorated with glitter for quite some time.
--