Chapter Text
As they headed back in the general direction of Trafalgar Square once more, the Doctor told stories of werewolves, monks, knighthoods and banishment. Energy waning, the expressive flair of his earlier tales became less theatrical, and he remained, more or less, in his seat, except for a random pounce as he relived the werewolf’s lunge at the queen.
By some miracle of the metacrisis, Rose had been saved from nightmares of hairy beasts on the Scottish moorland, and she hung on every word, making him eke out each detail.
“I can see why Old Vicky was not amused with the pair of you,” Rose admonished playfully, unconsciously dropping into the same level of familiarity with which the Doctor spoke of the country’s former matriarch. “You were incorrigible!”
“Saved her life, didn’t we?” he said, just a little too defensively.
He lounged back and picked at something hard and encrusted on the seat in front of him until Rose slapped his hand away with a disgusted look.
“That’s been in someone’s mouth,” she snapped, sounding like a mother reprimanding a defiant toddler. “Leave it alone.”
With a disgusted wrinkle of his nose, the Doctor scowled.
“Why are humans so revolting?”
“Why are Time Lords so easily distracted?” Rose countered.
He sniffed at the insult.
“It’s genetic,” he said, and then, as if to prove her right, shot up in his seat to point enthusiastically at the Thames through a gap in the leafless trees.
Rose followed the direction of his finger to the cream-painted funnel that bobbed on the ebbing tide and the boxy white bridge behind it.
“HMS Wellington!” he crowed with the remnants of a schoolboy smile. “Oh, that was an outing and a half. Well, two outings and a half, I suppose.”
“Two and a half?” She asked, intrigued.
He looked wistful for a moment.
“1936. The South Pacific. Warm seas, lovely sailors. A few too many moustached dignitaries who thought they owned the place.”
“Aren’t there always?” Rose asked with a laugh, thinking of all the old movies she had watched with her grandfather where stiff-backed generals snorted over their mustachioed lips at more sensible junior officers.
“Oh, yes. Always.” He agreed with a grin. “There was a diplomatic dinner. Ben, of course, he knew how to behave at such things, being a sailor. Polly was in her element once she found some appropriate clothes. And Jamie...”
A prominent pothole threw them both sideways, and the graunching of metal on tarmac cut the Doctor off mid-sentence. The tour guide’s apology sounded insincere as it trickled out from the under-seat speakers. Rose got the feeling the driver had hit it on purpose, out of plain boredom.
“Jamie had never been on a ship at sea before,” continued the Doctor, mildly annoyed by the interruption. “He had no sea legs at all. But that didn’t stop him dancing a reel in the middle of the dining room, while Ben helped me with a sea monster and Polly distracted the Officer of the Watch with a very convincing fainting spell."
Nostalgia made him smile. He had been very fond of Jamie.
"I was a much younger man, with tartan trousers, a terrible haircut, and a penchant for playing the recorder, which, to be honest, nobody seemed to enjoy very much.”
He reached a hand up to his jacket pocket, almost expecting to find the old wooden flute still there, and looked disappointed not to find it in place.
“Oh, please, no. Not the recorder!” Rose’s face twisted with remembered horror. “I tried learning. Mum said I sounded like Percy the Small Engine.”
The Doctor winced. “That bad?”
Rose hesitated. “Well, actually, she said I sounded like Percy the Small Engine... with asthma, going up a mountain, towing Thomas and Henry.”
“That’s... that’s bad.” The Doctor agreed, trying to keep the laughter out of his voice by biting his lip, which earned him another playful shove.
“The second time I was on the Wellington,” he said, seeking diversion and recovery. “The second time, Martha and I had to negotiate an interspecies truce.”
“Between humans and aliens?” Rose asked.
He shook his head. “No. Between the ship’s mascots. A cat and a monkey. They totally hated each other.”
“You’re making stuff up again.” Rose declared.
“I am not!” he said, his pitch rising like an aggrieved teenager’s. “Stoker Mousehole was the ship’s cat, named by some pun-loving naval rating from Devon. She was there from the start. When they docked in Suva in 1937, they picked up the ‘Fiji Fury’. He was a long-tailed macaque with a mean streak longer than Donald Trump’s list of pardonable hooligans. The cat resented the monkey; the monkey loathed the cat. The fur really flew on that ship. I brokered a truce with the aid of a banana and some catnip. Mind you, I’m not sure how long it lasted.”
“Probably about as long as one of Donald Trump’s coherent thoughts,” Rose replied dryly. “And the half time? You said 2 and a half visits.”
He squirmed in his seat.
“Operation Dynamo," he said with evident reluctance. "Your mum and I had just finished saving the Navy from the Nemonites, and the TARDIS still had a little sea water in the time rotor. We landed, briefly, on the deck of the Wellington, by mistake, with half a dozen Stukas bearing down on their position. We didn’t hang about. Donna had already had a dip in the Channel that day. I was pretty sure she would never forgive me if I let it happen twice.”
“Maybe that explains why she’s always hated taking me swimming,” said Rose.
The bus passed under Waterloo Bridge, and Rose caught a glimpse of a red granite obelisk just ahead of them. Its pinnacle was visible for a moment before the angle of the tree trunks down the embankment covered it again.
“That’s Cleopatra’s Needle,” Rose said, pointing it out before the Doctor could, eager to impress. “And yeah, I know it’s got nothing to do with Cleopatra.”
“Quite right, nothing to do with Cleo,” the Doctor nodded solemnly. “But it did have everything to do with an imposter god, a mad vizier, and Thutmose III, who was a very grumpy man that day.”
Rose eyed him suspiciously.
“What did you do?”
“Me?” he placed a hand over his left heart and feigned injury. When Rose did not bite, he dropped the act and rattled off the tale with a hint of boredom. “The three obelisks would have made a triangulatory reversed polar compression wave that would have wiped out ancient Egypt and catastrophically changed the course of history. So I used the sonic to resonate the hidden power coils within the obelisk, and it crumbled to dust."
A low flying pigeon made them both duck down in their seats.
"I stayed out of Egypt for millennia, just to be on the safe side. I really wasn’t terribly popular. And when I went back... well, that’s when Cleo and I...”
Rose groaned at yet another name-drop moment.
“Don’t tell me you met her too.”
“Met her?” The Doctor grinned wolfishly. “I married her.”
Rose gave him one of her ‘are you for real’ looks.
“You married Cleopatra? The Egyptian Queen?” she shook her head, sure he had to be pulling her leg this time.
He shrugged as though marrying royalty was an everyday experience.
“Twice.”
“Twice?” Rose echoed, eyes widening more.
“Well, the second time it was River Song, but she had just convinced a Roman legion she was the real deal.”
His voice caught on her name, throat tightening in a surge of unexpected emotions and he looked away, with a sudden, intense interest in a hair loss advert on a passing bus.
The tour bus slowed for a set of traffic lights. With a deep breath and a sudden need to get away from questions about River, he popped his sonic from his pocket and fixed the traffic lights on red.
“Come on,” he said, getting to his feet. “This is our stop.”
With hands stuffed into his pockets, and with Rose holding on to his arm, the Doctor stalked down the avenue, lined with skeleton trees. There were stories he could tell about this street, stories older than the road itself, but tripping over old grief had, temporarily at least, disconnected words from his tongue.
They were headed back towards Trafalgar Square, past the Victorian-fronted buildings and their once pristine architecture, now grizzled by traffic and rain. Once creamy white facades stood grey against the grey sky, whilst grey people in grey clothes rushed on, oblivious. A cluster of neon green Lime bikes lay littered across the pavement, and the Doctor paused, lifting them back onto their wheels and lining them up against the railings.
Rose hesitated. She had often wanted to do the same thing, but standing out in the crowd rarely did her any favours. But as the Doctor moved, and London stolidly ignored his efforts, Rose joined in. Pedestrians moved around them as though they were almost invisible, dodging the moving bikes, but willfully oblivious to the Doctor and Rose as they worked.
“I may never understand 21st-century humans,” said the Doctor as he put the last bike upright against the fence. “Beautiful planet, so many possibilities, and yet they’ll take the easiest option every time.”
“Do we ever learn?” Rose asked as she took a tissue from her pocket and wiped dirt from her hands. “In the future. How long does it take us to get it right?”
He thought of the future. Of the 22nd century, the 95th, the year Apple dot Saturn. Considered the humans, and the human-ish, the proto-humans, the gangers and the cyber-hums that would spread out from Earth in the eons to come.
“I’m not sure being human is about getting things right,” he replied thoughtfully. “I think it might be about doing the best you can, while you can."
Disappointment registered on Rose's face, and the Doctor hurried to restore the youthful hope he had inadvertently soured with his ancient miseries.
"Are you ever perfect? No, of course not. Do you get better at things? You get better every day, in small ways, that no one notices.”
He nodded to his left where a cyclist was dismounting another neon Lime bike, and parking it up neatly with the others.
“See? Sometimes humans just need a little nudge.”
“And Time Lords?” Rose asked, linking her arm with his again. “How big a nudge do they need?”
The Doctor laughed.
“In my experience, one of your grandmother’s slaps usually does the trick.”
Two ice creams, one tube ride and a rickshaw later, the pair tumbled through Sylvia Noble’s front door. The Doctor, mid-story, plunged into the living room, a pencil held to each nostril, as he demonstrated the fury of a Walrus King from a planet whose name Rose had already forgotten. With a grunting roar loud enough to fill the Royal Albert Hall, he turned to see two pairs of eyes glaring at him.
Rose fell through the open doorway behind him, tears of laughter pouring down her cheeks, and came face to face with the pencils, frozen in mid-air as the Doctor stared across the room. She followed his paralysed gaze to the spot where Donna and Sylvia stood, bent over a box, Sylvia’s much-prized china in their hands. They shared a look of unreserved menace that could have stopped Genghis Khan in his tracks.
The Doctor, pencils still protruding like tusks from his nostrils, turned slowly to look at Rose, and Rose, biting her lip, turned slowly to look at the Doctor. The collapse into another fit of hysterics was eminently predictable. Rose snorted. The Doctor guffawed. Rose clamped a hand over her mouth, and the Doctor, forgetting the pencils in his fingers, attempted to do the same and promptly stabbed himself in the lip.
Donna and Sylvia shared a look too, a look of bewildered frustration. Great-grandma’s serving dish was carefully lowered into the bubble wrap below before Donna pursed her lips and turned back to the pair of teenagers she was now, apparently, responsible for.
“Are you drunk?” Donna demanded. “Have you got my sixteen-year-old daughter drunk? On a Friday afternoon? In town?”
The more Donna blustered, the more the pair fell about laughing. They stumbled backwards, Rose holding her aching ribs, and collided with a box that had been balancing on the arm of the sofa.
Sylvia cursed them both as she lunged forward, her attempt to grab the toppling box futile, and a cascade of polystyrene packing chips fell across the floor like snow.
“Would you both just stop!” Donna bellowed, furious with the pair of them.
For a second, it worked. The Doctor, pencils now dropped, held one hand over his mouth, nursing his bruised lip, while pinching his nose between his thumb and first finger at the same time.
“There are peanuts all over my floor!” Sylvia snapped, just at the wrong moment, which set them both off laughing again.
Donna had never raised a hand to her daughter, but in that moment she was sorely tempted to grab them both by the ears and drag them outside.
“What the hell?” she demanded, crossing her arms and using the tone she reserved for threats of intergalactic proportions.
“Mum! Relax!” Rose replied as she held on to the Doctor’s arm, trying not to laugh again. “It’s just packing peanuts... it’s not... it’s not like we drained the Thames!”
The Doctor pinched the bridge of his nose hard and bit the inside of his cheek.
Donna stared at her daughter, lips pursed, furious. She looked from Rose to the Doctor, and as she caught his eye, the Doctor managed to look contrite, innocent even.
“It was just a couple of stories...”
“I am so going to kill you,” Donna glowered, her resolve faltering.
“Not until he’s cleaned up this mess!” Sylvia interjected from the floor where she knelt, surrounded by enough polystyrene nuggets to build a snowman. “Donna! Static cling peanuts! All over my carpet! Make him clean them up!”
Donna pressed her mouth against her palm, but it was no good. Between the Doctor’s innocent yet leading expression, Rose’s imploring eyes and Sylvia’s packing peanuts, all hope of sanity was lost. Her shoulders shook, and a suppressed grunt of laughter reverberated between her lips and hand.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Sylvia chastised, getting up from her knees to castigate them all properly, a look of scathing exasperation firing first at the Doctor and then Donna in turn.
“You’ve got... you’ve got...you’ve...” Rose gave up trying to speak and gesticulated wildly at her grandmother’s legs.
Everyone looked.
The Doctor and Donna snorted in unison, and Rose held on to the door frame, barely able to breathe for laughter.
With every available centimetre of her leggings smothered in white polystyrene blobs, and everyone else in the room now insensible, Sylvia was incandescent. Like barnacles on an old ship, no matter how she shook her legs or swatted at the peanuts with her hands, the packing fodder refused to budge. The more she swiped at the little white menaces, the more static they became, and within moments her shirt was half covered with puffy little pockets of compressed air and her face was turning purple with rage.
“It’s not funny!” Sylvia barked between her futile attempts to shed the puff balls from hell.
The Doctor reached out to help and received a prompt slap for his efforts, the updraft of which sent a waft of polystyrene into the air. In seconds the Doctor’s coat and trousers looked like a stalk in a cotton field, white tufts clinging all around his body.
For a second there was a pause in the laughter, and Sylvia stopped, looking from the Doctor and his cotton picking trousers, to Donna wiping tears from her face, and on to Rose who clung to the sofa laughing harder than she had done in years. Sylvia’s tight lips twitched into a smile, and the smile cracked into a rare burst of laughter of her own.
“You’re all bloody mad!” said Sylvia with a shake of her head and another pointless shake of her legs.
As the laughter slowly died, Donna took a deep breath and pulled herself back together.
“Right then, you two idiots. I want this all cleared up by dinnertime, or there’s no ice-cream for pudding,” she looked from Rose to the Doctor, pinning him with an especially hard stare. “You got that, Doctor?”
He gave a little nod, and a mock, three fingered, salute.
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied with a quirk of a smile.
“Don’t you get cocky with me, Spaceman. After dinner you and me, we’re having a conversation,” she said, face stern and straight again.
“Me?! What did I do?” The Doctor cried and exchanged a guilty look with Rose.
Donna handed him a dustpan from amongst the packing boxes, which he took begrudgingly in both hands.
“You know exactly what you did,” said Donna. “And after dinner, you and I will be having a little chat about traveller’s tales and the appropriateness of sharing them. Molto bene?”
“Molto bene,” he agreed.
“Good,” said Donna, satisfied, and turned back to Sylvia. “Right, come on Mum, let’s get you de-peanuted.”
Rose and the Doctor exchanged a look as Donna and her mother left the room.
“You are in so much trouble,” Rose told him, getting down on her knees to deal with the mess they had made.
The Doctor joined her on the floor.
“Oh, I know," he said with a grin. "But it was so worth it.”
And with that settled, and the ghosts of London put to rest for the night, the Doctor and Rose turned their attention to their work.