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The straw that finally breaks Rose’s aching back happens that night, when she tries using the loo adjacent to their room, and the lid simply refuses to be lifted.
No matter how much she pulls, huffs or puffs (with an increasing amount of loud cursing), the bloody thing will not budge, for reasons unknown to her. From what she can see, there is no obvious mechanism that she can snap off, and no Doctor around to tell her what he’s done – and more importantly, how to undo what he’s done.
The thing about being thirty-five weeks pregnant is that she needs to pee.
Often.
It also means that if she doesn’t get to do it in the proper place in the appropriate amount of time, there will come a point when her body will go ‘tough!’ and pretty much make her pee no matter what.
Which is why Rose waddles away from their bedroom, making her way to the next available bathroom as swiftly as she can manage in her state…only to find the toilet just as inaccessible.
Now, the other thing about being thirty-five weeks pregnant is that if she gets remotely upset (and the prospect of peeing herself in the next two minutes is definitely upsetting) she will respond in one of two ways: wrath, or tears.
That night, she does both.
The way she hollers his name is quite terrifying, even to her own irrational ears. For one thing, she sounds exactly like her Mum does on a bad day. She also sounds like someone about to commit a murder.
Wherever he’s been, the Doctor hears her call well enough. Unfortunately, she’s too livid and desperate by then to be impressed in any way by how quickly he reappears, nothing short of tripping over his own feet as he staggers into the small room.
His panicked expression only worsens when he takes her in, tearstained face and all.
“What is it? Contractions? Spotting? Vitamin deficiency?”
“I need to pee!” she barks at him, pointing at the closed lid. “Open that bloody thing up!”
“Oh,” he says, having the nerves to just stand there and blink for a moment, until her nostrils flare and she fixes him with a glare so intense that he startles back into action at once. “Oh! Of course, just a tick!”
“I don’t have a tick,” she snaps back, miserable, as big, fat tears stream down her face, along with an impressive amount of mucus from her nose.
His screwdriver is already out and buzzing away at the lid, soon leading to an audible CLICK.
“There you go!” he exclaims, bravely beaming at her, although there is unmistakable terror in his eyes, well aware that he’s mucked this up.
She points at the door, sniffling and swallowing down more gunk in the process. “Out,” she whispers, and that soft, furious word seems to terrify him more than any shouting.
He does not argue, swiftly leaving the room, having the decency to close the door behind him, allowing Rose to do her business in time – and in the right place.
“I’m sorry.”
His voice comes muffled through the door, and she has no problem whatsoever picturing him as he must be, pretty much splayed all over the wood, already self-flagellating for upsetting her.
Now that her desperate urge to urinate has been dealt with, she feels immensely better, and a lot more rational – as well as a tad embarrassed. How much crying, snotting and peeing can someone manage in a day, exactly?
“We’ve talked about this,” Rose reminds him thickly, blowing her nose with toilet paper.
“I know.”
“It’ll be months before she’s big enough to move around on her own, let alone find herself near a loo.”
“I know.”
Rose sighs, finishing cleaning herself up. She takes some time at the sink to splash cold water on her blotchy face, looking as blotted and uncomfortable as she feels.
When she opens the door, he’s moved, leaning back against the opposite wall. He looks like a puppy who’s just been kicked.
“Is that really what you’ve been up to all night?” she asks him, more softly. “Baby proofing the TARDIS?”
The Doctor doesn’t answer, but the way he ruffles the hair at the back of his head is telling enough.
To be fair, he’s been good for a long time. Months, even.
He’s been protective of her, obviously, and the way he’s been insisting on doting on her from the moment they found out she was pregnant has been both endearing and frustrating. She regularly gets annoyed with the way he seems to think she cannot perform simple task by herself anymore (including wrapping a towel around her own body after showering), but she cannot stay mad at him for long when he keeps on looking at her as if she was the most mesmerising being in the universe.
Unfortunately, he’s become more than protective and attentive, these past few days.
He’s become paranoid.
She’s partly to blame for it, as she’s the one who suggested they tried out one of those Lamaze classes her Mum kept badgering her about…which had not been a success.
They’d both felt terribly out of place amongst those cooing couples, especially after the Doctor told one of them that their birth plans involved taking Rose to the soothing waters of Lusthion III in the Tresush Cluster, known for their naturally numbing properties, at which point they all started looking at them the way most regular people did.
Awkward social interactions aside, the instructor made the mistake of reminding everybody that it was never too early to start making a checklist of their home, in order to determine what could be a possible hazard for their child.
The Doctor obviously took it as a challenge.
“Did you know there are three-thousand-six-hundred-and-forty-nine ways for a child to get harmed on this TARDIS?” he’d asked her a couple of days ago, once he was done with his thorough inventory.
He’d looked slightly crazed by then, having obviously imagined in great details how their offspring could get hurt in every single one of these ways.
“Is at all?” she’d antagonised him instead of thinking up something sensible to say that would have calmed him down. “Thought it would be more, to be honest, seeing how children can literally hurt themselves just by walking from one end of a room to the other.”
That stupid remark had put a fire under his arse, for lack of better word.
They both know from his constant blabbering of facts that Rose should have entered the nesting phase of her pregnancy by now. And yet, while she sometimes feels compelled to work on the nursery some more, the Doctor is the one who’s been reorganising the entire TARDIS for the last two days.
It hasn’t been all bad, as he did get rid or fixed some implements that had been a danger to them both for years – including loose wires and other exposed mechanical hazards.
Rose began losing patience a few hours ago, when he started putting carpet all over the floors.
“Carpet?” she’d asked. “Carpet?”
“It’ll be softer on her little hands and knees when she starts to crawl.”
How he could be so endearing and infuriating at the same time was beyond her.
“She’s still getting oxygen through an umbilical cord,” Rose pointlessly reminded him. “It’ll be a while before she crawls.”
“Well it’ll be softer on your toes, then. You’re the one who’s always complaining about having sore feet.”
That’s when Rose had gone to bed, too achy and uncomfortable to attempt to reason with him again, aware that there was nothing much she could do or say when he was in that mood.
She’s drawing the line at toilet lids, though.
She walks to him, now, reaching up to cup his face. “Doctor,” she tells him calmly, her own bout of hysteria having receded for the time being. “I need you to get it together. You can’t expect me to be the only sane person on this ship. ‘m way too hormonal to pull it off.”
He scowls at her. “I am fine.”
“Yeah?” she asks with a scoff. “How did you lock all those toilet lids, exactly?”
“Magnetism,” he explains at once. “I gave both the lid and the seat strong magnetic properties by tinkering with the spin of their electrons.”
She blinks at him.
“Ah,” he concedes, tilting his head. “I get how that could be seen as me being somewhat irrational.”
“Somewhat?”
“Fine. Unreasonably irrational, then.”
She trails her fingers from his cheek to his hair, shaking her head a little. “Look, ‘m not against you being protective and taking precautions. I love that you’re thinking about all that stuff, when all I can think about lately is how many fried pickles I can eat before it makes me wanna spew. But I almost peed my pants tonight.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeats, swallowing hard.
She caresses his hair. “I know,” she says, before giving him a soft kiss, her protuberant belly pressing against his chest. “Can we wait until she’s born and mobile before we turn every toilet into giant magnets, though?”
“Sounds fair,” he says, briefly nuzzling her nose with his.
“You can make it up to me by feeding me,” she informs him.
“Ah,” he says again, tugging at his ear, before he starts wriggling out of her embrace. “Why don’t you…get changed first, eh? It’s a tad chilly tonight, I’d say you need another layer.”
As he spoke, he managed to escape her hold, slowly moving away from her.
“What have you done to the kitchen?” she asks.
Surely he knows better than to mess with her food.
“Nothing!” he splutters. “Much.”
She glares at him.
“Five minutes,” he tells her. “That’s all I need.”
“Fine,” she says. “But if I find out you’ve done anything to my pickles, ‘m moving out.”
She’s barely done talking that he’s dashing out of the corridor.
Rose follows with a waddle.