Home Is An Old Brown Coat (1/1) 10.5/Rose Rating G
AUTHOR: sensiblecat
CHARACTERS: Duplicate Doctor, Rose
SPOILERS: Up to Journeys End.
CREDITS: hex_graphics for the picture
No humans or Time Lords were harmed in the making of this tale. They don't belong to me and I'm not planning on making any money out of them.
“Do you know how wrong I feel dressed like this? This was my Dragons Den suit, the one I wore when I wanted to show people they were idiots. Red tie and Converse. And I never smiled much in it.” My mourning suit, he added silently. The one I bought to show how completely over you I was, Rose Tyler.
Shopping for clothes rarely improves a strained relationship, but then an unexpected stroke of luck brings a breakthrough.
On the third day of his new life, the Doctor and Rose went shopping.
Humans, it seemed, sweated more than Time Lords. By Day Three, therefore, his lack of a change of clothes was becoming an issue. Jackie threatened him with an appointment with Pete’s tailor. But the real problem was T-shirts. He was skinny enough to get into one or two of Rose’s, but they stopped well short of his waistband. The intervening expanse of pale, bare skin did not seem to interest Rose as much as he’d hoped. He tapped his fingers over his abdomen, winked and said “Naval patrol,” but she didn’t laugh.
Hopefully, she just needed time. A Time Lord could get his head around that, no problem at all. But Rose wasn’t a Time Lord - she was human, she was hurting and he didn’t want to make it any worse than it already was. To Rose he was him/not him at best, and that might be the best they ever had.
That first night in the new world they lay in their twin beds and when he heard her trying not to cry he reached out and took her hand across the space between them. Far across the space inside his mind - as near as himself and as far away as a parallel universe - he felt the anguish of Donna’s collapse and the loneliness of the only possible solution. To say he wanted to help was not quite right. Could you ever really help your own self, except by bringing the fragments of your identity together again and acknowledging them both?
He told Rose what had happened with Donna. It went badly; she slammed a door between them and he heard her sobbing loudly and angrily in the next room. After that he had another problem - the loneliness of his other self was so overwhelming that it felt like a scream in the back of his mind. It dwarfed his own, even though he shielded his consciousness a little. Not only for his own comfort, but also for his other self’s. The last thing he needed right now, the new Doctor suspected, was the knowledge that his sacrifice hadn’t led to immediate happiness with Rose.
He knew he’d been very fortunate to reach this point in his life without a regeneration going wrong. Every one of them put enormous stress on his mind and body, so much so that they were supposed to happen hundreds of years apart. Instead he’d hurled himself into danger, rushed through them as if they were trivial. But they weren’t. Physically alone, the last one had come close to killing him. What had happened this time around was his psyche’s way of telling him not to push his luck.
He didn’t know how to explain any of it to Rose. Already he was afraid of driving her away and losing the one point of reference he had in this world. With time, they would work something out. He believed that because he had to believe it. There was nothing else. When she looked at him he knew she was trying to understand, but the closer she came to accepting him the more her memories fought back, determined never to leave the other half of him alone. She spoke his name carefully - “Doctor” - and he thought he detected a certain lack of belief. He concentrated on the challenge of embracing his new identity as a human. For a few days he just about managed it.
Shopping, though it had to be done, did not seem to unite them as a couple. He’d never had to bother much with buying clothes before. Without the TARDIS, he was starting to realise, there would be a lot of chores like this. He didn’t say this to Rose, fearing a barbed “Welcome to the real world,” type remark. Instead, they discussed the merits of the bus, parking at the local shopping mall, or getting Pete’s driver to drop them off somewhere, and he felt more alien than he’d ever been in his life.
They started with chain stores - T-shirts, jeans, bland showerproof jackets. He rejected them all and became increasingly bad-tempered as the day wore on. She asked him if he’d like to get something made up. He knew she was trying to be constructive, but by then he felt like being unreasonable. “What did you have in mind?” he snapped. “A pinstripe suit?”
That hurt her. He saw the sting of recollection in her eyes and he wanted to shout, “But it’s still me - I’m stuck in here!” That risked being rejected as second-best, so he resisted.
“If that’s what you want…” she said, uneasily.
“Of course it’s what I want!” he retorted. “I’m him!”
“I know,” she said, in a voice that was full of anything other than knowing.
“Do you?” he asked. “Do you know how wrong I feel dressed like this? This was my Dragons Den suit, the one I wore when I wanted to show people they were idiots. Red tie and Converse. And I never smiled much in it.” My mourning suit, he added silently. The one I bought to show how completely over you I was, Rose Tyler.
He was missing a loose tie around his neck. The grating of the TARDIS interior under his feet. All the stuff that used to be knocking around in his pockets. Most of all, even more than the TARDIS, he was missing his coat. It wouldn’t have killed him to have let him keep the coat, he couldn’t help thinking. He hadn’t even been wearing it at the time. And he’d already handed over the most precious thing he had, so what difference would a few clothes have made?
He realised he’d just thought of Rose as a thing. If that was how it was, no wonder she wasn’t looking terribly happy. The insight, once completely beyond his understanding, seemed quite obvious now.
“So what do you want?” she demanded, losing patience. It had been a long day and they’d bought next to nothing.
“Right now, I want a cup of tea. And scones. Or cake. Big piece of cake, with jam on top. Might settle for cream, if there’s chocolate involved.”
“Some things don’t change,” she said, smiling at last.
They went for afternoon tea in a slightly bohemian side street lined with a mixture of small boutiques and second-hand clothes shops. Away from the sanitised shopping malls, he relaxed a little. To him, shopping had always meant poking around, rummaging, haggling, human contact. It was an inexact activity with a huge dose of chance and serendipity involved.
They were both trying so terribly hard. He watched Rose across the small wooden table, pushing cake around her plate. It was a funny little place; he rather liked it. They seemed to have come up with the crockery by rummaging through cast-offs from grannies’ attics at jumble sales. Much the same with the furniture; every table was a different shape and size. There was even a sofa in a corner - not the designed casualness of a Starbucks browsing nook, but one that looked like it had once - a long time ago - been in someone’s living room and had jelly babies lost down the cracks between the cushions.
He loved her so much, this girl sitting opposite him, who’d once stood in a moonlit street and produced a little fairy cake just for him. Amazing, the difference it made to have somebody in your life who’d do that. He wanted to remind her of that night right now. It was all still there in his head - the emotions, the giddiness, the sense of looming catastrophe threaded through the snatched happiness. Most of all, the desire, barely resisted, to throw caution to the winds and start a conversation that would inevitably have ended with them going to bed together.
If he talked about it - not that this was the right time, or place - would she finally believe he was the same man as the one she’d loved? Would she stop being polite to him - a façade pierced by the occasional barbed remark as her frustration and confusion peeped through?
She’d changed, too. She’d lost that simplicity she’d once had. He’d a feeling that she’d be embarrassed now by the thought of returning the Isolus to their pod with the words, “Feel the love,” or calming a terrified child with something as straightforward as a silly song. He supposed she’d grown up. Suffered. Become a rich man’s daughter, conscious of the need to play a role in public. It was a role that suited her about as much as that of self-appointed guardian of the universe had suited him. Okay if you’d someone back home to have a laugh about it at the end of the day, to cut you down to size and stop you being impossible about it. But pants if you happened to be alone, and he could imagine how alone she must have felt at times.
“Penny for them,” he said, and reached across the table for her hand.
******
She looked at his long fingers, a little freckled, reaching out to her over the grooved oak surface of the table. No TARDIS to strip down and tinker with in this world - hence the unusual cleanliness of the nails. It must be horrible for him, she thought, to be deprived of his beloved ship. He must feel like a tortoise without his shell.
And she wasn’t helping. He must realise, no matter how hard she tried, that she still didn’t think of him as the real deal. No, that wasn’t quite right. Of course he was the Doctor, but so was the other one. He was out there on his own, his hearts aching for her. You didn’t just stop loving a person because they duplicated themselves and said, “Here, you have that one.” Human emotions were more perverse and complicated that that. She wondered if this new, blue man understood that, now.
Under any other circumstances he’d be perfect for her. Even, possibly, a better fit than the original, because he was human. Really human, not just trying to pass as one and then then hiding the jam pot when you caught him out, sucking guiltily on his sticky fingers. God, what must that woman have thought at that moment?
“Is that allowed?” he asked. “Asking what someone’s thinking?”
She melted inwardly. That touch of shyness about him had always captivated her. Such a contrast to the boldness of the way he usually operated, the way he marched into a situation, his coat swishing around his ankles, and assumed control. He needed her. The moments of intimacy when he showed it were very precious.
“You could probably get right into my head and see everything,” she pointed out.
“Oh, but that would be rude,” he protested.
“And that’s not the sort of man you are now?”
“Not with you, Rose.” And there was a hesitancy in his eyes that pulled at her heart.
She played with her fork for a moment and looked at the crumbs of sticky sponge cake on his plate. She wondered if he’d like to pick it up and lick them off.
“You’re not really allowed to lick the plate,” she told him, “but I won’t let on if you do.”
His face creased into a chuckle. “And you think I’m the mind-reader,” he laughed.
“Just have a good memory,” she said.
“Tell me what I’m thinking, then.”
Flipping heck. What a question that was. For a start, right now he wasn’t sitting there thinking he was gorgeous, and that it was only a matter of time before she fell for him. Because of that, she was drawn to him in a way he probably didn’t quite realise - and she didn’t want him to realise, because it might break the spell.
Slipping her hands in between her knees, she sat back and took a breath. “You’re thinking if you do lick the plate I might laugh because that reminds me of - you know - or on the other hand, I might look like I was going to cry because it reminds me of him. And you don’t know what to do, so you just sit there and wonder if you’ll ever get it right.”
He glanced downwards and picked up the teaspoon lying in the saucer of his angular, early 1960’s teacup, rolling it between his fingertips in an unconscious echo of her own gesture. His cheeks swelled with a silent laugh and she noticed a little draft of air ruffle his fringe.
“It’s rude to lick plates, as well. I’ve learned that much,” he said.
“It never stopped you before. You used to lick bloody walls just to find out what they were made of. Right in front of Queen Victoria.”
“That’s a long time ago.”
“Have you really changed all that much?”
All that was a bit too much for him to answer, and in a familiar gesture he got up, pushed the chair backwards with a scrape that suddenly made his body seem to big for the little shop and said, “Come on - if we don’t go home with something for me to wear that mother of yours will kill us.”
“I still don’t know what you’d like,” she said. “I know you, but I don’t know you. It’s so weird.”
“Maybe we’ll know the right thing once we see it,” he suggested. “Ooh, is that a bookshop I see in the back?”
“Never been in here before. Want to take a look?” she offered.
“Yeah, why not?” He took her hand unnecessarily and she thought how warm his skin seemed to the touch. Something else occurred to her, a memory she hadn’t know she’d had that there’d been a groove on one of the other Doctor’s fingers where a ring must once had been. There’d been something strangely self-centred about the way she’d loved him, despite the absolute sincerity of the moment when she’d told her mother, “He does it all on his own, but not any more, ‘cause now he’s got me.” It seemed appropriate that “me” had been the last word of that sentence.
She didn’t need his support to get her down the three little steps into the converted garage behind the teashop, but she liked the way he offered it. He found something that took his fancy almost at once, of course, and her heart lurched as he automatically reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and found no glasses there.
Without her, he was so very homeless.
“Think I’ll just go over there and look at the clothes,” she said. “You never know your luck.”
He grunted, already absorbed in an obscure history of the New British Republic, screwing up his eyes to decipher the spidery Victorian print. She wondered if he could read as fast as he used to be able to…as his other self could.
She began to comb through a rail laden with cast-offs. Floating gauze scarves, musty tweeds, little bits of jewellery. The debris of other people’s lives - the kind of place where you might come across a 1950’s bell petticoat or a cute little pair of peep-toe shoes. Every garment had a story to tell.
Then it happened. The miracle, if you could call it that. She found a coat, and it was perfect in every detail. Mud-brown, Ridiculously long. Huge pockets. Even a pleat down the back and a button-belt trim. Her heart began thumping and her mouth went dry.
She took it off the hanger and rubbed her chin against the lining. That contrast between rough, heavy fabric and silk lining brought memories of after-danger hugs flooding back. Moments on windswept plains and beaches when, wordlessly, he’d taken her hand and slipped it into a pocket beside his own for warmth. Waking up on the jump seat with a crick in her back to find it draped over her; looking over to him with his specs on and his lips sucked inward, lost in some technical adjustment or other. And the smile in his eyes when he looked up and saw her watching him, her hair mussed from her nap.
Oh God, she was going to cry. She’d been all right until now. How was it possible for a garment in another world to have the same smell of stardust, sweat and chips that the Doctor’s coat had carried with him? It was almost a kind of message - a challenge if you liked.
She looked over to the corner where he’d already settled himself on the bottom one of the three steps down from the teashop, characteristically oblivious to the fact that he was blocking the way for anybody else. God, that was so typical of him. Even the stab of irritation was familiar to her. He’s got nothing in the world except the clothes on his back, she thought - entirely due to his own stubbornness, but still it touched her and made her feel sorry for him.
All those memories in her head as she held the collar of the coat - were they really in his mind, too? Did he remember every late night session when he’d sensed her sleeping presence in the control room with him, and he’d wandered across and tucked it around her? Had he stroked her cheek or her hair? Had he imagined a deeper intimacy with her, or dared to contemplate the future? Which contained the core of his being - the fingers he had left behind or the mind he’d brought with him?
It was funny, but they’d never been able to observe one another for very long without the other one becoming aware of it and looking up to meet the other’s gaze. They seemed to be uniquely sensitive to one another. Put out a hand and the other one was there already, regardless of whether a look had passed between them.
He looked up now, and she fancied that she saw all those memories in his eyes. It was one of those moments when she knew her next action would define their relationship for a long time to come.
Once she’d known him - or thought she had - but now she knew how much she’d assumed. The ring gone from his finger, the dead planet never named, the children he’d once had - was the man she’d spent those two years of her life with any less of a mystery than the one before her now?
Maybe he didn’t want a strange, shabby brown coat that swept the floor any more. Maybe he didn’t want to go around in Converse, wearing ties he never fastened properly, affecting geekery with spectacles when he must have had a lab full of laser surgery equipment that would have fixed his eyesight in minutes.
And then she remembered the way he’d felt for those glasses in his pocket and the fleeting look of loss, quickly repressed, when they weren’t there.
“Doctor!” she mouthed, and gestured urgently to him. “Come over here!”
He was there in seconds and his face lit up with pleasure. “Oh, that’s brilliant!” he gasped, hardly able to contain his glee. “It’s just perfect.”
“Try it on!” Eagerly, she held it out towards him.
He paused and looked searchingly at her. “Is this what you want?” he asked. “Because you don’t have to, you know. You get to choose.”
She almost said, “I want you to be happy.” But she already had that in her power to give. The way to proceed wasn’t to talk about the possibility, but to grasp it.
“Of course I want it, you dope. You’re the Doctor. Put it on.”
He slipped into it like it was an old friend and, the moment the coat touched his shoulders, he seemed to let go of a long sigh of tension and relax into the person he really was. “Oh yes!” he declared, dropping his book into one of the pockets. “I think it’s rather me - don’t you?”
She bounced and clapped her hands. She didn’t care what it cost - that coat had his name on it, and he was having it.
“You’re supposed to pay for the book as well,” she pointed out. “You can get into trouble doing that.”
“The pockets are very small,” he said, with a little frustrated frown.
“Can’t you fix them?”
“Per….ob-ably,” he said. “It all depends on the spatio-dimensional refluxive configuration matrix over in this universe.” Then he looked at her with a grin. “But so long as your hand fits in there as well as mine, we should be able to manage.”
CHARACTERS: Duplicate Doctor, Rose
SPOILERS: Up to Journeys End.
CREDITS: hex_graphics for the picture
No humans or Time Lords were harmed in the making of this tale. They don't belong to me and I'm not planning on making any money out of them.
“Do you know how wrong I feel dressed like this? This was my Dragons Den suit, the one I wore when I wanted to show people they were idiots. Red tie and Converse. And I never smiled much in it.” My mourning suit, he added silently. The one I bought to show how completely over you I was, Rose Tyler.
Shopping for clothes rarely improves a strained relationship, but then an unexpected stroke of luck brings a breakthrough.
On the third day of his new life, the Doctor and Rose went shopping.
Humans, it seemed, sweated more than Time Lords. By Day Three, therefore, his lack of a change of clothes was becoming an issue. Jackie threatened him with an appointment with Pete’s tailor. But the real problem was T-shirts. He was skinny enough to get into one or two of Rose’s, but they stopped well short of his waistband. The intervening expanse of pale, bare skin did not seem to interest Rose as much as he’d hoped. He tapped his fingers over his abdomen, winked and said “Naval patrol,” but she didn’t laugh.
Hopefully, she just needed time. A Time Lord could get his head around that, no problem at all. But Rose wasn’t a Time Lord - she was human, she was hurting and he didn’t want to make it any worse than it already was. To Rose he was him/not him at best, and that might be the best they ever had.
That first night in the new world they lay in their twin beds and when he heard her trying not to cry he reached out and took her hand across the space between them. Far across the space inside his mind - as near as himself and as far away as a parallel universe - he felt the anguish of Donna’s collapse and the loneliness of the only possible solution. To say he wanted to help was not quite right. Could you ever really help your own self, except by bringing the fragments of your identity together again and acknowledging them both?
He told Rose what had happened with Donna. It went badly; she slammed a door between them and he heard her sobbing loudly and angrily in the next room. After that he had another problem - the loneliness of his other self was so overwhelming that it felt like a scream in the back of his mind. It dwarfed his own, even though he shielded his consciousness a little. Not only for his own comfort, but also for his other self’s. The last thing he needed right now, the new Doctor suspected, was the knowledge that his sacrifice hadn’t led to immediate happiness with Rose.
He knew he’d been very fortunate to reach this point in his life without a regeneration going wrong. Every one of them put enormous stress on his mind and body, so much so that they were supposed to happen hundreds of years apart. Instead he’d hurled himself into danger, rushed through them as if they were trivial. But they weren’t. Physically alone, the last one had come close to killing him. What had happened this time around was his psyche’s way of telling him not to push his luck.
He didn’t know how to explain any of it to Rose. Already he was afraid of driving her away and losing the one point of reference he had in this world. With time, they would work something out. He believed that because he had to believe it. There was nothing else. When she looked at him he knew she was trying to understand, but the closer she came to accepting him the more her memories fought back, determined never to leave the other half of him alone. She spoke his name carefully - “Doctor” - and he thought he detected a certain lack of belief. He concentrated on the challenge of embracing his new identity as a human. For a few days he just about managed it.
Shopping, though it had to be done, did not seem to unite them as a couple. He’d never had to bother much with buying clothes before. Without the TARDIS, he was starting to realise, there would be a lot of chores like this. He didn’t say this to Rose, fearing a barbed “Welcome to the real world,” type remark. Instead, they discussed the merits of the bus, parking at the local shopping mall, or getting Pete’s driver to drop them off somewhere, and he felt more alien than he’d ever been in his life.
They started with chain stores - T-shirts, jeans, bland showerproof jackets. He rejected them all and became increasingly bad-tempered as the day wore on. She asked him if he’d like to get something made up. He knew she was trying to be constructive, but by then he felt like being unreasonable. “What did you have in mind?” he snapped. “A pinstripe suit?”
That hurt her. He saw the sting of recollection in her eyes and he wanted to shout, “But it’s still me - I’m stuck in here!” That risked being rejected as second-best, so he resisted.
“If that’s what you want…” she said, uneasily.
“Of course it’s what I want!” he retorted. “I’m him!”
“I know,” she said, in a voice that was full of anything other than knowing.
“Do you?” he asked. “Do you know how wrong I feel dressed like this? This was my Dragons Den suit, the one I wore when I wanted to show people they were idiots. Red tie and Converse. And I never smiled much in it.” My mourning suit, he added silently. The one I bought to show how completely over you I was, Rose Tyler.
He was missing a loose tie around his neck. The grating of the TARDIS interior under his feet. All the stuff that used to be knocking around in his pockets. Most of all, even more than the TARDIS, he was missing his coat. It wouldn’t have killed him to have let him keep the coat, he couldn’t help thinking. He hadn’t even been wearing it at the time. And he’d already handed over the most precious thing he had, so what difference would a few clothes have made?
He realised he’d just thought of Rose as a thing. If that was how it was, no wonder she wasn’t looking terribly happy. The insight, once completely beyond his understanding, seemed quite obvious now.
“So what do you want?” she demanded, losing patience. It had been a long day and they’d bought next to nothing.
“Right now, I want a cup of tea. And scones. Or cake. Big piece of cake, with jam on top. Might settle for cream, if there’s chocolate involved.”
“Some things don’t change,” she said, smiling at last.
They went for afternoon tea in a slightly bohemian side street lined with a mixture of small boutiques and second-hand clothes shops. Away from the sanitised shopping malls, he relaxed a little. To him, shopping had always meant poking around, rummaging, haggling, human contact. It was an inexact activity with a huge dose of chance and serendipity involved.
They were both trying so terribly hard. He watched Rose across the small wooden table, pushing cake around her plate. It was a funny little place; he rather liked it. They seemed to have come up with the crockery by rummaging through cast-offs from grannies’ attics at jumble sales. Much the same with the furniture; every table was a different shape and size. There was even a sofa in a corner - not the designed casualness of a Starbucks browsing nook, but one that looked like it had once - a long time ago - been in someone’s living room and had jelly babies lost down the cracks between the cushions.
He loved her so much, this girl sitting opposite him, who’d once stood in a moonlit street and produced a little fairy cake just for him. Amazing, the difference it made to have somebody in your life who’d do that. He wanted to remind her of that night right now. It was all still there in his head - the emotions, the giddiness, the sense of looming catastrophe threaded through the snatched happiness. Most of all, the desire, barely resisted, to throw caution to the winds and start a conversation that would inevitably have ended with them going to bed together.
If he talked about it - not that this was the right time, or place - would she finally believe he was the same man as the one she’d loved? Would she stop being polite to him - a façade pierced by the occasional barbed remark as her frustration and confusion peeped through?
She’d changed, too. She’d lost that simplicity she’d once had. He’d a feeling that she’d be embarrassed now by the thought of returning the Isolus to their pod with the words, “Feel the love,” or calming a terrified child with something as straightforward as a silly song. He supposed she’d grown up. Suffered. Become a rich man’s daughter, conscious of the need to play a role in public. It was a role that suited her about as much as that of self-appointed guardian of the universe had suited him. Okay if you’d someone back home to have a laugh about it at the end of the day, to cut you down to size and stop you being impossible about it. But pants if you happened to be alone, and he could imagine how alone she must have felt at times.
“Penny for them,” he said, and reached across the table for her hand.
******
She looked at his long fingers, a little freckled, reaching out to her over the grooved oak surface of the table. No TARDIS to strip down and tinker with in this world - hence the unusual cleanliness of the nails. It must be horrible for him, she thought, to be deprived of his beloved ship. He must feel like a tortoise without his shell.
And she wasn’t helping. He must realise, no matter how hard she tried, that she still didn’t think of him as the real deal. No, that wasn’t quite right. Of course he was the Doctor, but so was the other one. He was out there on his own, his hearts aching for her. You didn’t just stop loving a person because they duplicated themselves and said, “Here, you have that one.” Human emotions were more perverse and complicated that that. She wondered if this new, blue man understood that, now.
Under any other circumstances he’d be perfect for her. Even, possibly, a better fit than the original, because he was human. Really human, not just trying to pass as one and then then hiding the jam pot when you caught him out, sucking guiltily on his sticky fingers. God, what must that woman have thought at that moment?
“Is that allowed?” he asked. “Asking what someone’s thinking?”
She melted inwardly. That touch of shyness about him had always captivated her. Such a contrast to the boldness of the way he usually operated, the way he marched into a situation, his coat swishing around his ankles, and assumed control. He needed her. The moments of intimacy when he showed it were very precious.
“You could probably get right into my head and see everything,” she pointed out.
“Oh, but that would be rude,” he protested.
“And that’s not the sort of man you are now?”
“Not with you, Rose.” And there was a hesitancy in his eyes that pulled at her heart.
She played with her fork for a moment and looked at the crumbs of sticky sponge cake on his plate. She wondered if he’d like to pick it up and lick them off.
“You’re not really allowed to lick the plate,” she told him, “but I won’t let on if you do.”
His face creased into a chuckle. “And you think I’m the mind-reader,” he laughed.
“Just have a good memory,” she said.
“Tell me what I’m thinking, then.”
Flipping heck. What a question that was. For a start, right now he wasn’t sitting there thinking he was gorgeous, and that it was only a matter of time before she fell for him. Because of that, she was drawn to him in a way he probably didn’t quite realise - and she didn’t want him to realise, because it might break the spell.
Slipping her hands in between her knees, she sat back and took a breath. “You’re thinking if you do lick the plate I might laugh because that reminds me of - you know - or on the other hand, I might look like I was going to cry because it reminds me of him. And you don’t know what to do, so you just sit there and wonder if you’ll ever get it right.”
He glanced downwards and picked up the teaspoon lying in the saucer of his angular, early 1960’s teacup, rolling it between his fingertips in an unconscious echo of her own gesture. His cheeks swelled with a silent laugh and she noticed a little draft of air ruffle his fringe.
“It’s rude to lick plates, as well. I’ve learned that much,” he said.
“It never stopped you before. You used to lick bloody walls just to find out what they were made of. Right in front of Queen Victoria.”
“That’s a long time ago.”
“Have you really changed all that much?”
All that was a bit too much for him to answer, and in a familiar gesture he got up, pushed the chair backwards with a scrape that suddenly made his body seem to big for the little shop and said, “Come on - if we don’t go home with something for me to wear that mother of yours will kill us.”
“I still don’t know what you’d like,” she said. “I know you, but I don’t know you. It’s so weird.”
“Maybe we’ll know the right thing once we see it,” he suggested. “Ooh, is that a bookshop I see in the back?”
“Never been in here before. Want to take a look?” she offered.
“Yeah, why not?” He took her hand unnecessarily and she thought how warm his skin seemed to the touch. Something else occurred to her, a memory she hadn’t know she’d had that there’d been a groove on one of the other Doctor’s fingers where a ring must once had been. There’d been something strangely self-centred about the way she’d loved him, despite the absolute sincerity of the moment when she’d told her mother, “He does it all on his own, but not any more, ‘cause now he’s got me.” It seemed appropriate that “me” had been the last word of that sentence.
She didn’t need his support to get her down the three little steps into the converted garage behind the teashop, but she liked the way he offered it. He found something that took his fancy almost at once, of course, and her heart lurched as he automatically reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and found no glasses there.
Without her, he was so very homeless.
“Think I’ll just go over there and look at the clothes,” she said. “You never know your luck.”
He grunted, already absorbed in an obscure history of the New British Republic, screwing up his eyes to decipher the spidery Victorian print. She wondered if he could read as fast as he used to be able to…as his other self could.
She began to comb through a rail laden with cast-offs. Floating gauze scarves, musty tweeds, little bits of jewellery. The debris of other people’s lives - the kind of place where you might come across a 1950’s bell petticoat or a cute little pair of peep-toe shoes. Every garment had a story to tell.
Then it happened. The miracle, if you could call it that. She found a coat, and it was perfect in every detail. Mud-brown, Ridiculously long. Huge pockets. Even a pleat down the back and a button-belt trim. Her heart began thumping and her mouth went dry.
She took it off the hanger and rubbed her chin against the lining. That contrast between rough, heavy fabric and silk lining brought memories of after-danger hugs flooding back. Moments on windswept plains and beaches when, wordlessly, he’d taken her hand and slipped it into a pocket beside his own for warmth. Waking up on the jump seat with a crick in her back to find it draped over her; looking over to him with his specs on and his lips sucked inward, lost in some technical adjustment or other. And the smile in his eyes when he looked up and saw her watching him, her hair mussed from her nap.
Oh God, she was going to cry. She’d been all right until now. How was it possible for a garment in another world to have the same smell of stardust, sweat and chips that the Doctor’s coat had carried with him? It was almost a kind of message - a challenge if you liked.
She looked over to the corner where he’d already settled himself on the bottom one of the three steps down from the teashop, characteristically oblivious to the fact that he was blocking the way for anybody else. God, that was so typical of him. Even the stab of irritation was familiar to her. He’s got nothing in the world except the clothes on his back, she thought - entirely due to his own stubbornness, but still it touched her and made her feel sorry for him.
All those memories in her head as she held the collar of the coat - were they really in his mind, too? Did he remember every late night session when he’d sensed her sleeping presence in the control room with him, and he’d wandered across and tucked it around her? Had he stroked her cheek or her hair? Had he imagined a deeper intimacy with her, or dared to contemplate the future? Which contained the core of his being - the fingers he had left behind or the mind he’d brought with him?
It was funny, but they’d never been able to observe one another for very long without the other one becoming aware of it and looking up to meet the other’s gaze. They seemed to be uniquely sensitive to one another. Put out a hand and the other one was there already, regardless of whether a look had passed between them.
He looked up now, and she fancied that she saw all those memories in his eyes. It was one of those moments when she knew her next action would define their relationship for a long time to come.
Once she’d known him - or thought she had - but now she knew how much she’d assumed. The ring gone from his finger, the dead planet never named, the children he’d once had - was the man she’d spent those two years of her life with any less of a mystery than the one before her now?
Maybe he didn’t want a strange, shabby brown coat that swept the floor any more. Maybe he didn’t want to go around in Converse, wearing ties he never fastened properly, affecting geekery with spectacles when he must have had a lab full of laser surgery equipment that would have fixed his eyesight in minutes.
And then she remembered the way he’d felt for those glasses in his pocket and the fleeting look of loss, quickly repressed, when they weren’t there.
“Doctor!” she mouthed, and gestured urgently to him. “Come over here!”
He was there in seconds and his face lit up with pleasure. “Oh, that’s brilliant!” he gasped, hardly able to contain his glee. “It’s just perfect.”
“Try it on!” Eagerly, she held it out towards him.
He paused and looked searchingly at her. “Is this what you want?” he asked. “Because you don’t have to, you know. You get to choose.”
She almost said, “I want you to be happy.” But she already had that in her power to give. The way to proceed wasn’t to talk about the possibility, but to grasp it.
“Of course I want it, you dope. You’re the Doctor. Put it on.”
He slipped into it like it was an old friend and, the moment the coat touched his shoulders, he seemed to let go of a long sigh of tension and relax into the person he really was. “Oh yes!” he declared, dropping his book into one of the pockets. “I think it’s rather me - don’t you?”
She bounced and clapped her hands. She didn’t care what it cost - that coat had his name on it, and he was having it.
“You’re supposed to pay for the book as well,” she pointed out. “You can get into trouble doing that.”
“The pockets are very small,” he said, with a little frustrated frown.
“Can’t you fix them?”
“Per….ob-ably,” he said. “It all depends on the spatio-dimensional refluxive configuration matrix over in this universe.” Then he looked at her with a grin. “But so long as your hand fits in there as well as mine, we should be able to manage.”