Pre-Coital Chips (1/1)
Title - Pre-Coital Chips (1/1)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
Characters - Ten, Rose
Spoilers - I don't think there are any, really, but let's say through "A Good Man Goes to War," just to be safe.
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - A special anniversary.
Author's Notes - Look, everyone! It's a fic! I almost don't remember how to post these!
A long, long, long time ago, principia_coh won this fic. She has been very patient, and here it finally is, which she has graciously agreed to share with all of you. Her prompt was "The Doctor and Rose's hundredth anniversary."
Thank you, as usual, to my peerless betas, jlrpuck and chicklet73.
Rose woke up one morning, opened her bedroom door, and stepped out into a hallway that was sloshing with several inches of lukewarm water.
She stood for a second, looking at her bare foot under the water, at the now-sodden edge of the comfy sweats she’d worn to bed.
Then her husband came dashing around the corner, brandishing an entirely inadequate mop.
“Rose!” he gasped at her. “Sorry! But I’ve got it under control! I was going to clean it all up before you woke up.”
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, Rose would probably have laughed at him. Just another morning on the TARDIS, she would have chuckled to herself, and she would have shaken her head and kissed him. This hundredth time, she was unamused. She would have asked him what he’d done, but she decided she didn’t want to know. She retreated wordlessly to the sanctity of her bedroom, which the TARDIS was keeping dry for her, and decided to take a shower.
When she was done with her shower, she cautiously opened her bedroom door. The hallway was dry. Whatever the crisis had been, the Doctor seemed to have averted it for the time being.
She walked down the hallway to the control room, where the only evidence of the Doctor was the two Chuck-clad feet protruding from underneath the console. She nudged one of them with the toe of her boot as she walked by him to sit on the captain’s chair. “What did you do to the TARDIS?” she asked.
“Nothing.” His voice was muffled from underneath the console, but his indignation was still clear.
“Is something wrong with her?” She pulled her knees up to her chest, settling into the well-worn chair, into creases she’d established in the leather from decades of use.
“No.” He wriggled out from underneath the console. He had a monocle on, which made him look ridiculous as he gazed at her. “We had a…disagreement.”
Rose lifted her eyebrows at him. “A disagreement?”
“Over the kitchen.”
Rose sighed. “Never mind, I don’t need to know the details of your domestics.”
The Doctor slowly straightened up into sitting position, his back against the console, and took the monocle out of his eye. “You okay?” he asked, confused.
“Yes.”
“It’s just that you seem…or don’t seem…”
“Yes?” Rose prompted, curious as to how he would finish.
“Maybe we should go somewhere,” the Doctor suggested.
Which was always his solution to everything. “You have no idea what today is,” she remarked, sadly.
He hesitated, then proclaimed, heartily, “Oh! Of course I do! Happy birthday!” He leaped up and kissed her cheek. “I was just, you know, letting you think I didn’t-”
“It’s not my birthday.”
He faltered, studying her face as if he thought this might be some kind of test. “It’s not?”
“It’s our anniversary.”
“Our anniversary of what?”
She rolled her eyes. “Our wedding.”
“Our…Oh. The human wedding?”
“Yes. The human wedding. And it’s okay, I never actually expect you to remember our anniversary, or my birthday for that matter-”
He fidgeted, looking uncomfortable, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Rose-”
“I long ago learned that you don’t keep time that way, and that’s fine, but I still kept thinking that you might remember this time.”
“Rose.” He looked slightly helpless, and she knew it was a bit unfair of her to bring it up, because they’d had this conversation many times before, and he was simply terrible with dates, because he didn’t view time in a linear enough fashion to keep track of them. Rose’s mind, even after all these years, still stubbornly worked in a forward human track, counting off days on calendars that she kept in their bedroom. It actually said on the calendar Our Anniversary, but he never looked at the calendar, just viewing it, she knew, as an adorable thing she did that he took no actual notice of. “Every day of our lives is an anniversary. I mean, that was a lovely day, of course it was, but I was married to you long before that, and for every day after-”
“I know,” she interrupted him. “It’s lovely, the way you think. Very romantic, in a certain light. But I have this lingering attachment to milestones. And this is one for us.”
“Alright,” he allowed. “So we’ll go out-”
She took his hand and brought it to her lips, kissing his knuckles and then saying, “It’s our hundredth anniversary.”
“It’s our what?”
“We’ve been married one hundred years today.”
He stood looking down at her, his hair askew all over his head, and she could see the calculations going on behind his eyes. “Has it really been that long?” There was amazement in his voice.
“Says the Lord of Time,” she chided him gently.
“Time for me doesn’t…” He sat beside her on the chair, as she automatically shifted to make room for him. “A century. That’s what you’re saying? It’s been a century of us.”
“It’s been longer than that, but yes, a century since the day that I gave you this pin.” She fingered it, nestled in the silk of the tie he was wearing that day, one of his more recent acquisitions and so forcefully whimsical that she still wasn’t sure what she thought of it, a blue whale leaping along a brown background.
“Welllllll.” He stretched his arm along the chair behind her back, a familiar gesture of casual possession that, in the very earliest of days, when Mickey was still half in the picture and she didn’t quite know where the thing with the Doctor was going, she had been keenly aware of. She wondered how often he made gestures like that these days without her noticing. She marveled at it, really. “That is a milestone. What would you like to do to celebrate?” He sent her a sideways glance.
“What would you like to do?” she countered, looking up at him from where she was now curled at his side.
He looked suddenly very young to her, young in a way he hadn’t in a long time. Which wasn’t to say that he looked exactly old these days, just that the look he gave her reminded her of when they had both been young together, when everything had been a new and exciting discovery and just the exchange of a grin could be the most thrilling event of a day that might include running for one’s life. It was a shade of astonished vulnerability, she realized, which she seldom saw on his face these days but brought back a pang of happy memory. “Chips?” he suggested, with a twinkle in his eye and a smile that, like the smiles he used to tease her with back before he had started fulfilling their promise, was pure sex.
She heard herself giggle at him. She couldn’t help it. She nodded and leaned forward and kissed him.
He kissed her back, his arm shifting along the back of the chair to fold her closer to him, firm on the back of her head. “How soon do you want your chips?” he mumbled against her lips.
She laughed and pulled away from him. “Soon. I’m starving. Besides, I think I’d like to recall something of what it was like to have chips with you before I realized you wanted to shag me as much as I wanted to shag you.”
“Pre-coital chips?” He rolled the phrase around in his mouth.
“Pre-coital chips,” she confirmed.
“Fine.” He leaped up, all energy and purpose. “Pre-coital chips. Then hundredth anniversary sex. This is turning out to be a good day.”
“Now you’re a big fan of the human tradition of anniversaries, aren’t you?” remarked Rose dryly, watching him dance around the console.
“I’ve always been a huge fan of them, Rose!” he chided her, with what was obviously a blatant lie, as he flipped a few levers up.
She shook her head fondly and didn’t correct him. This was a part of what she loved about him: his manic penchant for historic revisionism of their own lives.
“Here we are.” The Doctor brought the mallet down on the console, and the TARDIS jerked into a landing, throwing the Doctor off his feet.
Rose, who had braced against the console, leaned down to offer him a hand. “Let’s go.”
“I really am getting too old for that,” he said to the TARDIS, with a frown, as he collected himself, and then, hand-in-hand with Rose, they stepped outside.
“Aww,” she said, taking in the bright, busy day around them, Big Ben in front of them. “It’s London.” She looked at him, shading her eyes against the sun. “Early twentieth century?” she guessed.
“Seemed appropriate.” He checked that the door was locked before sticking his free hand into his pocket and commencing to stroll with her.
“Where are we?”
“Henriks?” he ventured, after a second.
“Henriks was at night,” she reminded him.
“Ah. Then maybe, I am telling you how I can feel the turning of the Earth beneath our feet.”
“You know, I think that was just a line.”
“It wasn’t just a line.”
She smiled at him, catching her tongue between her teeth, noting the flicker of his smile as he peered up and down the street.
“There should be a chips shop somewhere around here,” the Doctor remarked.
“Why?”
“Why? Because we’re in London.”
She laughed. “I thought you had a specific one in mind.”
“Not a specific one. Just, you know, a London one.”
He was watching where they were going. She let him lead them, watching him instead. “You don’t mean it, do you?” she asked, suddenly, anxiously.
He glanced at her quizzically. “Mean what? I really don’t have a chips shop in mind.”
“What you said to the TARDIS. That you’re getting too old.”
His pace slowed for a split second that made fear squeeze at her heart. “I didn’t mean it, Rose.”
She looked at the gray that had begun threading through his hair, that she had never really paid much attention to before. “You did mean it.”
“Rose.” He drew to a stop, facing her. “Don’t worry about it. Really. There’s so much time-”
“I never really thought about it before. I’ve been so worried something terrible would happen to you, some awful accident, but you can regenerate from old age, can’t you?”
“Rose, it will take centuries and centuries and centuries. I’ll have you know I am still extremely young in this body. Younger than you, you’ll remember, by a good twenty years.” He waggled his eyebrows at her. “Why? Are you saying that I’m showing my age?”
“I’m sorry I was upset about the flood this morning,” she rushed out at him.
“I’m sorry there was a flood this morning.”
“I know. Buy us chips?”
“I’m trying to find us a shop.”
“You love a little shop.”
“I do.”
He resumed walking, and she leaned her head against his shoulder.
And, ahead of her in the crowd, she watched a much younger blonde in jeans and a maroon hoodie mirror her action, leaning her head against the shoulder of a man in a black leather jacket.
Rose slowed, watching their much younger selves ahead of them. “Doctor…”
“Look at that, Rose,” he remarked. “We’ve been walking like that for a hundred years.”
“Longer,” she reminded him, not taking her eyes off of the pair in front of them.
She felt the Doctor brush a kiss over the top of her head. “Happy anniversary, Rose,” he said.
“This was a risky gift,” she replied, around the lump in her throat.
“I was confident of my flying abilities.” He paused. “And the TARDIS’s fondness for you.”
She chuckled. “Happy anniversary, Doctor,” she said.
“Don’t look behind us,” he murmured.
“Why?”
“Because you’ll see us on our two-hundredth anniversary.”
“Really?”
He kissed her hard. A hundred years of distraction techniques. He had them perfected.