Fic: Chemical Epiphanies
Title: Chemical Epiphanies
Rating: T
Summary: Chem!Ten tries to be romantic. Based on the Word of the Day for the 29th: billet-doux.
Character: Chem!Ten and Rose.
A/N: Just a little ficlet thing that demanded it be written despite it’s sickly sweetness. Hope it’s decent. Thank you to saganamidreams for the beta.
Sometimes he wished he spent more time reading trashy romance novels, rubbish poetry, or listening to those ridiculous pop songs Rose insisted on playing. Any one would have made his current task a whole lot easier. But he had no such hobbies, all he had was a headache, a manual to the TARDIS that still had glitter on it, and chemistry.
Rose: A flower on Earth
He stared at the words scrawled across his notepad, his writing winding between the chemical equations he’d jotted down in the hour previous as he passed his time in the lab.
Pigmented red of yellow or purple
And always smelling nice.
A heavy sigh escaped his lips as his head hung forward, hair brushing over the back of his hands: utterly dreadful. What else? There had to be something else he could write, something sweet and innocent and beautiful - something to make her heart flutter and her lips dry. God, why had he never bothered to learn how to write? Nine hundred years or more and he hadn’t once traced out the perfect method for composing a sonnet.
You are my Rose, but you’re your own Rose.
Of course, his previous selves, some, at least, had been quite good with words, had managed to scribble out rather decent poetry in between adventures but not one had ever come up with the method of it all. So now he was left with nothing but instinct: instinct that was so used to dealing with facts, combining millions of subtleties and getting the right explosion, that random utterances of love were out of the question.
Roses are beautiful just like you.
Bollocks.
Casting the pen aside, he leaned back in his chair, hands raking through his hair before he stood up and paced the room. Echoing footsteps gave him enough warning to grab the notepad and cram it into one of the equipment lockers before Rose was at the door. Nonetheless, as he turned to her, there was a hint of suspicion about her - eyes narrowed, lips pursed, head tilted - but he just grinned inanely and hoped she hadn’t seen anything.
“Hi,” he managed.
“Hey.” Immediately it was clear that something had tipped her off and he could almost see her mind ticking over, searching the room for whatever it was that was giving her the feeling that something was amiss. “What are you up to?”
Opening his mouth, he was about to make some intelligent reply - tell her of the exciting new transition complex he’d just formed, of the stardust he was trying to reproduce, anything really - but he didn’t. His mouth open but without words, he looked rather stupid for a moment, then he pursed his lips, grimaced and remembered just how hard it was to lie to Rose. Both because, no matter how little, it felt wrong, and because she never would have believed him anyway.
So, instead, he just buried his hands deep in his pockets and stared at the ground.
“What?” she asked, voice tinged with worry and that made him feel a little worse.
The feeling, ever so slight and basically unfounded resulted in the truth trickling out. “I was writing a letter.”
“A letter? Who for?”
Sighing, he replied without resistance. “It was going to be to you. I saw how much you cried over that movie you watched, what was it?”
“Message in a Bottle?” she asked, recalling that she’d spent a night watching it the week before.
“That’s the one. Anyway,” his voice dropped, sheepishness tingeing his usual tone. “I wanted to write something nice for you.” His eyes finally came up to meet hers, expecting laughter or pity and seeing nothing but continued suspicion.
“Doesn’t really seem like the kind of thing you’d be doing,” she tentatively pointed out, maneuvering towards him, stalking him from the doorway and easily trapping him against the bench, hands either side of his hips. And all the while looking innocent; he marveled at that for a second, his eyes slipping down her neck, noting the curve it made as she tilted her head. “Where is it?”
“What?” he asked.
“The letter.”
“Oh.” His eyes darted around the room, searching for an escape but she’d already reached out towards him, fingers playing deftly over the cotton of his shirt as she purposely distracted him. And she was extremely good at it: fingers slipping between the buttons, brushing across his skin and making him shiver.
Her other hand moved into his field of vision, tracing the bench top next to his hip and he felt his lips transform into a grin, watched as her fingers moved away, dipping to the drawer.
Bollocks.
She deftly opened the locker he’d closed only minutes before and then darted out of reach, his notepad clutched to her chest. Somehow, she managed to put the central set of equipment and bench tops between them and then he could do naught but watch as she held it up in front of her, eyes scanning down the page quickly and then again slower.
Her expression passed from mischievous to amused to something that his mind labeled, after careful scientific reasoning, pity border-lining on abhorrence. But then that might have been a slight exaggeration.
Carefully, she turned the pages of the notebook to a neatly set out chemical equation and, biting her lip, looked up at him. “Well…” she let the single word hang in the air, the look of pure agony on his face making her pause as she was torn between laughing and giving him a hug for trying his best.
“Well what?’ he snapped. “I know, it’s ridiculous. And I’m very sorry for not being able to write you sappy love letters and sonnets and poems.” The fierce anger was only momentary and doubtlessly directed at himself, then it dissolved away into a pout and she felt her heart skip a beat at the fact that he had tried to do this for her.
Moving closer still, the notebook lying forgotten on the bench, she stopped just as she began to feel the heat of his body clashing with hers, his hands moving of their own accord to her hips. “Thank you for trying,” she whispered and she meant it, though his embarrassed expression said he wasn’t sure.
And that was fine, because a plan was unfurling in her head, meandering across old ideas and tricks until it fitted the situation, and a knowing smile graced her lips. She arched an eyebrow. “You know what you should try instead?”
“What?” Now he was half way out of sulking and at the look on her face, half way to being curious.
“Try it from a chemistry angle.” She paused, to give the effect that this was spur of the moment and she hadn’t made the parallel a thousand times before. “You know after those big long chases where everyone thinks the universe is going to explode and the bad guys are going to win and we’ll both die or worse?”
A raised eyebrow.
“Well, we pretend we think it’s that dire, because it makes it more fun. But you know the feeling? Running down some hallway, racing time and only just managing to save everyone and everything at the last second. And then we race back here?”
Images flashed into his mind, synapses aligning with perfect ease because he’d recalled this one before, brought the image up before his eyes to replay for the simple pleasure of it: falling into her arms, almost collapsing onto the very floor of the TARDIS as soon as they’d entered as her lips locked blindly with his and everything else lost all importance. Her hands and lips, demanding he make up for the possibility of them never having this chance again.
Another knowing smirk from Rose and he was brought back to reality. She continued: “And we fall into each other’s arms and you know and feel how desperately I need you?” Her hips brushed against his as she moved in closer, both hands now on his tie, her eyes refusing to meet his.
Holding his breath, he waited for her to finish, his mind insisting she bring this back to chemistry.
“At that moment, you’re like oxygen to me: completely essential and instinctual. When you kiss me,” and now, of all times she chose to look at him, “I can feel you coursing through me.” A pause, letting him breathe and her smile, “Just like oxygen.”
Okay, so it was pretty basic chemistry. But at this rate, teaching her anything more complicated would result in his immediate death assuming she used it like she used her primitive knowledge now. Everything from before was gone: the embarrassment, the frustration, the tentativeness and he would have pulled her lips to his except she spoke again.
“See? Just put a bit of chemistry into it. Write what you know.”
Leaning in, closing the few short inches between their lips, wanting nothing more than to feel her pulled tight against him, she stopped him with a hand to his chest. “Wait. Haven’t you got something lovely and poetic to say?”
Brow creasing, he considered. He knew thousands upon thousands of chemical reactions, knew their mechanisms, their shapes. Knew why chemicals do what they do, knew what they were. So what was adequate?
The explosiveness of cesium in water: the tiniest grain touching the tiniest droplet and all creating the most terrific expressions of fire and heat.
The symmetry of so many acidic anhydrides: perfectly aligned and yet still separate.
The complexity of deoxyribonucleic acid: twisting and turning and determining everything about everything that had ever lived.
No, nothing even remotely close and as his mind sped past the chemistry nothing shouted his Rose. Water, oxygen, carbon. Radioactivity, electronegativity, electricity. Quarks, nucleuses, electrons.
Nothing.
Bollocks.
He let his eyes settle back on Rose, watching her watch him as she waited, a little baffled that a Chemistry genius couldn’t come up with a single decent analogy when it was needed. “Well?” she prompted.
Realizing as he spoke that this was the truth, he answered. “You’re like nothing I’ve ever seen in the lab. Not any chemistry I’ve ever read about or stumbled upon. Somehow, inexplicably, you’re better than that. Amazingly, you’re more intrinsically perfect than anything in the world of chemistry. More explosive and dynamic and complicated and real.”
Thumbs slipping beneath her shirt to caress her sides, he stopped and watched the shock play out, the compliment he was paying her obviously as big a realization to her as it was to him.
Better than chemistry? She really was corrupting his way of life.
“It’s like,” he searched for the words, “Like there’s so much more to you than chemistry, like there’s something else, something beyond it.” Anyone who didn’t know him would have been outraged at such a statement but Rose, Rose who had never heard him talk of anything that wasn’t simply chemicals reacting, couldn’t look away. He grinned, that one with the edge of intense naughtiness that she planned on dragging out of him, that whispered conspiratorially of the way he planned on kissing her any second.
“You, Rose, are a million little subtleties that not even I can explain.”
Smiling, and blushing ever so slightly, she stared at him. Was he being serious? Hands tightening on her hips before slipping around to her back, he kissed her, lips teasing hers for several seconds before they both gave in and succumbed, mouths opened, hot and wet and tongues meeting somewhere in between.
And she knew: he meant it.
A/N Okay, so almost sweet and fluffy to the point of sickness but meh. Hope you still enjoyed it, please comment whether you did or didn’t.
Rating: T
Summary: Chem!Ten tries to be romantic. Based on the Word of the Day for the 29th: billet-doux.
Character: Chem!Ten and Rose.
A/N: Just a little ficlet thing that demanded it be written despite it’s sickly sweetness. Hope it’s decent. Thank you to saganamidreams for the beta.
Sometimes he wished he spent more time reading trashy romance novels, rubbish poetry, or listening to those ridiculous pop songs Rose insisted on playing. Any one would have made his current task a whole lot easier. But he had no such hobbies, all he had was a headache, a manual to the TARDIS that still had glitter on it, and chemistry.
Rose: A flower on Earth
He stared at the words scrawled across his notepad, his writing winding between the chemical equations he’d jotted down in the hour previous as he passed his time in the lab.
Pigmented red of yellow or purple
And always smelling nice.
A heavy sigh escaped his lips as his head hung forward, hair brushing over the back of his hands: utterly dreadful. What else? There had to be something else he could write, something sweet and innocent and beautiful - something to make her heart flutter and her lips dry. God, why had he never bothered to learn how to write? Nine hundred years or more and he hadn’t once traced out the perfect method for composing a sonnet.
You are my Rose, but you’re your own Rose.
Of course, his previous selves, some, at least, had been quite good with words, had managed to scribble out rather decent poetry in between adventures but not one had ever come up with the method of it all. So now he was left with nothing but instinct: instinct that was so used to dealing with facts, combining millions of subtleties and getting the right explosion, that random utterances of love were out of the question.
Roses are beautiful just like you.
Bollocks.
Casting the pen aside, he leaned back in his chair, hands raking through his hair before he stood up and paced the room. Echoing footsteps gave him enough warning to grab the notepad and cram it into one of the equipment lockers before Rose was at the door. Nonetheless, as he turned to her, there was a hint of suspicion about her - eyes narrowed, lips pursed, head tilted - but he just grinned inanely and hoped she hadn’t seen anything.
“Hi,” he managed.
“Hey.” Immediately it was clear that something had tipped her off and he could almost see her mind ticking over, searching the room for whatever it was that was giving her the feeling that something was amiss. “What are you up to?”
Opening his mouth, he was about to make some intelligent reply - tell her of the exciting new transition complex he’d just formed, of the stardust he was trying to reproduce, anything really - but he didn’t. His mouth open but without words, he looked rather stupid for a moment, then he pursed his lips, grimaced and remembered just how hard it was to lie to Rose. Both because, no matter how little, it felt wrong, and because she never would have believed him anyway.
So, instead, he just buried his hands deep in his pockets and stared at the ground.
“What?” she asked, voice tinged with worry and that made him feel a little worse.
The feeling, ever so slight and basically unfounded resulted in the truth trickling out. “I was writing a letter.”
“A letter? Who for?”
Sighing, he replied without resistance. “It was going to be to you. I saw how much you cried over that movie you watched, what was it?”
“Message in a Bottle?” she asked, recalling that she’d spent a night watching it the week before.
“That’s the one. Anyway,” his voice dropped, sheepishness tingeing his usual tone. “I wanted to write something nice for you.” His eyes finally came up to meet hers, expecting laughter or pity and seeing nothing but continued suspicion.
“Doesn’t really seem like the kind of thing you’d be doing,” she tentatively pointed out, maneuvering towards him, stalking him from the doorway and easily trapping him against the bench, hands either side of his hips. And all the while looking innocent; he marveled at that for a second, his eyes slipping down her neck, noting the curve it made as she tilted her head. “Where is it?”
“What?” he asked.
“The letter.”
“Oh.” His eyes darted around the room, searching for an escape but she’d already reached out towards him, fingers playing deftly over the cotton of his shirt as she purposely distracted him. And she was extremely good at it: fingers slipping between the buttons, brushing across his skin and making him shiver.
Her other hand moved into his field of vision, tracing the bench top next to his hip and he felt his lips transform into a grin, watched as her fingers moved away, dipping to the drawer.
Bollocks.
She deftly opened the locker he’d closed only minutes before and then darted out of reach, his notepad clutched to her chest. Somehow, she managed to put the central set of equipment and bench tops between them and then he could do naught but watch as she held it up in front of her, eyes scanning down the page quickly and then again slower.
Her expression passed from mischievous to amused to something that his mind labeled, after careful scientific reasoning, pity border-lining on abhorrence. But then that might have been a slight exaggeration.
Carefully, she turned the pages of the notebook to a neatly set out chemical equation and, biting her lip, looked up at him. “Well…” she let the single word hang in the air, the look of pure agony on his face making her pause as she was torn between laughing and giving him a hug for trying his best.
“Well what?’ he snapped. “I know, it’s ridiculous. And I’m very sorry for not being able to write you sappy love letters and sonnets and poems.” The fierce anger was only momentary and doubtlessly directed at himself, then it dissolved away into a pout and she felt her heart skip a beat at the fact that he had tried to do this for her.
Moving closer still, the notebook lying forgotten on the bench, she stopped just as she began to feel the heat of his body clashing with hers, his hands moving of their own accord to her hips. “Thank you for trying,” she whispered and she meant it, though his embarrassed expression said he wasn’t sure.
And that was fine, because a plan was unfurling in her head, meandering across old ideas and tricks until it fitted the situation, and a knowing smile graced her lips. She arched an eyebrow. “You know what you should try instead?”
“What?” Now he was half way out of sulking and at the look on her face, half way to being curious.
“Try it from a chemistry angle.” She paused, to give the effect that this was spur of the moment and she hadn’t made the parallel a thousand times before. “You know after those big long chases where everyone thinks the universe is going to explode and the bad guys are going to win and we’ll both die or worse?”
A raised eyebrow.
“Well, we pretend we think it’s that dire, because it makes it more fun. But you know the feeling? Running down some hallway, racing time and only just managing to save everyone and everything at the last second. And then we race back here?”
Images flashed into his mind, synapses aligning with perfect ease because he’d recalled this one before, brought the image up before his eyes to replay for the simple pleasure of it: falling into her arms, almost collapsing onto the very floor of the TARDIS as soon as they’d entered as her lips locked blindly with his and everything else lost all importance. Her hands and lips, demanding he make up for the possibility of them never having this chance again.
Another knowing smirk from Rose and he was brought back to reality. She continued: “And we fall into each other’s arms and you know and feel how desperately I need you?” Her hips brushed against his as she moved in closer, both hands now on his tie, her eyes refusing to meet his.
Holding his breath, he waited for her to finish, his mind insisting she bring this back to chemistry.
“At that moment, you’re like oxygen to me: completely essential and instinctual. When you kiss me,” and now, of all times she chose to look at him, “I can feel you coursing through me.” A pause, letting him breathe and her smile, “Just like oxygen.”
Okay, so it was pretty basic chemistry. But at this rate, teaching her anything more complicated would result in his immediate death assuming she used it like she used her primitive knowledge now. Everything from before was gone: the embarrassment, the frustration, the tentativeness and he would have pulled her lips to his except she spoke again.
“See? Just put a bit of chemistry into it. Write what you know.”
Leaning in, closing the few short inches between their lips, wanting nothing more than to feel her pulled tight against him, she stopped him with a hand to his chest. “Wait. Haven’t you got something lovely and poetic to say?”
Brow creasing, he considered. He knew thousands upon thousands of chemical reactions, knew their mechanisms, their shapes. Knew why chemicals do what they do, knew what they were. So what was adequate?
The explosiveness of cesium in water: the tiniest grain touching the tiniest droplet and all creating the most terrific expressions of fire and heat.
The symmetry of so many acidic anhydrides: perfectly aligned and yet still separate.
The complexity of deoxyribonucleic acid: twisting and turning and determining everything about everything that had ever lived.
No, nothing even remotely close and as his mind sped past the chemistry nothing shouted his Rose. Water, oxygen, carbon. Radioactivity, electronegativity, electricity. Quarks, nucleuses, electrons.
Nothing.
Bollocks.
He let his eyes settle back on Rose, watching her watch him as she waited, a little baffled that a Chemistry genius couldn’t come up with a single decent analogy when it was needed. “Well?” she prompted.
Realizing as he spoke that this was the truth, he answered. “You’re like nothing I’ve ever seen in the lab. Not any chemistry I’ve ever read about or stumbled upon. Somehow, inexplicably, you’re better than that. Amazingly, you’re more intrinsically perfect than anything in the world of chemistry. More explosive and dynamic and complicated and real.”
Thumbs slipping beneath her shirt to caress her sides, he stopped and watched the shock play out, the compliment he was paying her obviously as big a realization to her as it was to him.
Better than chemistry? She really was corrupting his way of life.
“It’s like,” he searched for the words, “Like there’s so much more to you than chemistry, like there’s something else, something beyond it.” Anyone who didn’t know him would have been outraged at such a statement but Rose, Rose who had never heard him talk of anything that wasn’t simply chemicals reacting, couldn’t look away. He grinned, that one with the edge of intense naughtiness that she planned on dragging out of him, that whispered conspiratorially of the way he planned on kissing her any second.
“You, Rose, are a million little subtleties that not even I can explain.”
Smiling, and blushing ever so slightly, she stared at him. Was he being serious? Hands tightening on her hips before slipping around to her back, he kissed her, lips teasing hers for several seconds before they both gave in and succumbed, mouths opened, hot and wet and tongues meeting somewhere in between.
And she knew: he meant it.
A/N Okay, so almost sweet and fluffy to the point of sickness but meh. Hope you still enjoyed it, please comment whether you did or didn’t.