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It had started out innocently enough, really. Gliese, first human colony, seemed like a safe location, he’d even chosen a time with a hundred and fifty year buffer between the big recorded
incidents
just to be on the safe side. He was taking Rory and Amy there for the sun and the sand and the interesting colors, and that was that - no adventuring, no screaming, no running. If he popped off to see the first long-distance neurological probe’s invention just a few streets up the block, now where was the harm?
They’d gotten there just fine. Funny-colored sunlight, funny-colored sand, nice and quiet, quick pop up to Doctor Tynsaid’s office... and then the running and the screaming and the dying had started, because it turns out that not every scientific tragedy makes into the histories, even the unwritten ones.
The Doctor glared mournfully at the blood still staining his bow-tie and ran some more hot water, because he was definitely not going to wear Doctor Tynsaid a minute longer than he had to.
“You have about a dozen of those. Just throw it away, why don’t you?”
He gave Amelia Pond a soundly injured look and waved the tie, dripping water-spots all over his jacket in the process. “I like this one. I like all of them. I don’t want to.” She folded her arms and looked down at him, arching an eyebrow, and his eyes shied away from hers. “Shut up. No. Go away.”
“No.” She crouched down next to him and jabbed him with one of her slender, jabby fingers and gave him the look that gave him uncomfortable squirmy feelings. “If you aren’t going to throw it out, then let me wash it later. Stop brooding, and no, I won’t.”
He frowned and opened his mouth as if he was going to be petulant, but Amy’s eyebrows lifted in warning and he turned around without saying that he really was fine, thank you very much, because even if he wasn’t it was no business of hers to bully him about it. He fidgeted with the bow tie in the sink.
“I’m almost done.” He tried to make the tension in his shoulders look like concentration. Sometimes that worked. “Go check on Mr. Pond, why don’t you?”
“Rory,” she informed him emphatically, “sent me to check on you.” Her hand hooked in his jacket, digging in not entirely gently, and she hauled him bodily away from the sink. “Come along, Doctor, no more brooding in the bathroom for you.”
“Not brooding,” he attempted to argue (while squirming, which perhaps removed some of the dignity from the protest); it earned him a single disbelieving scoff in reply, and he tried giving the wall of the TARDIS an expression of mute appeal. No help there either. Drat.
He had successfully half-disentangled himself from the jacket and was still industriously working on the other half when they stopped moving, which resulted in a rather emphatic forward stumble as his legs tried to go one way and his jacket tried to go the other. He did a little unstable spin, noticing in the process that Amy and Rory actually had gotten rid of the bunk beds - boring humans, he’d never understand them - which took up about enough distance for him to land firmly in somebody’s lap.
He looked over at Amy, who was the most likely suspect, but her lap was busy being unhelpfully vertical over by the door. Which really only left one possible lap for him to be laying across, and now that he thought about it the legs did seem to be rather long and bony, and the shoulder behind his head did seem to be rather high up. Someone cleared their throat above him, a bit awkwardly, and he remembered that on entering someone’s lap, he was supposed to say something. Not that he could remember what at the moment, but the effort was the important thing.
“Um. Right. Hello, Rory.”
Rory sighed.
A steady, lean hand rested on the Doctor’s shoulder, and another reached around to gently but firmly pry the soaked bow tie from his right hand - where, sneaky thing, it had held on the whole time. “Here. We’ll put some peroxide on it. Good as new.”
“Oh,” the Doctor said again - intelligently, of course.
Rory looked down at him with an expression that, on anyone else, would have been concealing amusement at his sorry state. But it wasn’t anyone else, it was Rory, who might have met mockery once or twice in his life but had since decided to end the acquaintance.
“Nurse,” he said shortly.
“Ah,” the Doctor replied eloquently, trying very hard not to notice that Rory was really very pleasant-smelling up close and quite warm, too. Which was completely irrelevant and in no way causing his muscles to go wibbly or his head to go wobbly.
Over said head he felt an unspoken exchange between the Ponds. For all he knew they got telepathy as a by-product of human mating.
“Doctor,” Amy said from quite close to his ear - and how had she snuck up on him, anyway? - “you are fondling my husband.”
“Am not.” He looked down, noticed his hands were planted somewhere between Rory’s very comfortable chest and surprisingly pleasantly bony hips, and tried to crank his neck around far enough to see her without falling out of Rory’s lap. “Well, not much, and not on purpose.”
Rory’s hand tightened on his shoulder in a pleasant squeeze. “It’s all right,” he said gently.
Another look was exchanged. Amy rolled her eyes at her boys. “Right. Like you’re not both enjoying it.”
Rory made a sound that was not quite so gentle somewhere in his chest and bit his lip.
The Doctor, who was beginning to have a bad - or at least very unusual and not at all dignified - feeling about all this, opted for trying to sit up.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Amy growled, and pounced on them both.
Somewhere in the ensuing tangle of limbs, the Doctor found himself muttering into Rory’s neck. “Right, so, this isn’t going to be big on dignity?”
“Don’t even hope,” Rory mumbled back into his hair.