Work Text:
They’re just little pieces of white nylon.
(Well, in fairness, they might be a poly-cotton blend. He’s not gotten around to reading the tag).
Anyways, they’re just tiny bits of white fabric, with little green and yellow dots on. Stretchy, with a bit of elastic round the top, and not even eight centimeters long.
He’s been to planets where these could be sleeping bags for full-grown adults, can rattle off half a dozen species diminutive enough to use these as shelter for a family of four. A shift of perspective can change the way you look at anything, but when he looks at them, sitting there in the palm of his hand–
They’re so small.
She’s going to be so small.
He’s just got the one heart, steadily plodding along in a chest that’s still not quite used to a single set of beats. He has scars (scrapes and falls and one too many close calls with the stove) and grey hairs (five years along and it’s just rubbish, this whole aging thing) and aches and pains he won’t admit to (except when Rose is in the mood to help relieve them). He’s got to sleep at least five hours a night unless he fancies collapsing from exhaustion the next day. Sometimes he gets sick, and sometimes he gets headaches, and sometimes he actually gives in and eats beans on toast because it’s been one of those weeks and it’s really the only thing they’ve got in.
In any event, it’s been five months since Rose sat him down and told him he was going to be a father.
The whole human thing ought to have settled in already.
But standing there in the shop aisle, holding a pair of newborn-sized socks, the thump-thump of his single heart feels just as startling as it did five years ago – just as alien, as simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. The muted, dull music being piped in through the shop’s overhead speakers twists into the rush of sound as he bolts upright from the floor of the TARDIS, the crash of metal and rash of sparks going up from the console as he realizes there’s something different about this body, the howl of the wind on the beach as he waits for Rose to see that it’s him, it’s him, it’s really him.
The Doctor is so fixated on the green-and-yellow dots ringed around the ankles of the socks, so wrapped up in how small they are, so small and so big all at the same time, that he doesn’t immediately hear Rose saying his name.
When he looks up, Rose is standing next to him in the aisle, one hand resting on the swell of her growing abdomen, the other holding a basket full of baby clothes.
There’s a pair of booties on top of the pile of onesies and tiny jumpers – yellow and green, just like the socks, and just as small.
“You okay?” Rose’s voice is concern layered over with curiosity, just as willing to hear no as she is to hear yes, and it makes his heart do something funny inside his chest.
It’s not quite the right word (brilliant fantastic amazing terrified) but it’s not the wrong one, either.
He closes his palm around the socks and says, “Yeah.”