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Life with the Doctor was unlike anything Rose could have possibly imagined.
There was danger, of course — that was only to be expected whilst traveling with a man who had been in the process of blowing up a building when they first met. Besides, with the danger came the adventure — the adrenaline coursing through her veins, the shared thrill in her and the Doctor’s eyes as they clasped hands and ran, her heart pounding wildly in her chest, reminding her with each emphatic beat: you’re alive, you’re alive. finally, after nineteen years, you’re alive.
As for the Doctor himself, Rose was so fascinated by him. A human-looking alien with a lots-of-planets-have-a-north accent, a penchant for terrible puns, and seemingly endless knowledge of all of creation. ”Including next week’s lottery numbers,” he’d informed her with a cheeky smile. But beneath the surface of his manic grins and showing-off, Rose could sense the heartache of a soldier. In those moments when the facade cracks, Rose looks into his eyes and sees the unfathomable pain of one man carrying the weight of an entire universe on his shoulders. Nine hundred years old, he’d told her, and sometimes he looks it.
My planet’s gone. It’s dead. It burned like the Earth.
I’m left traveling on my own ‘cos there’s no one else.
And Rose wishes nothing more but to be able to take that pain away, at least some of it. So in those moments, she takes his hand and they run.
There’s me.
When they aren’t running for their lives or strolling through foreign future streets, Rose finds herself enjoying the down-time on the TARDIS. She feels a bit awkward, the first time she walks into the console room and sits down on the jump seat with a magazine on her lap, but the Doctor just looks up from working under the console and smiles softly at her. After that, they sort of start to develop a routine, she thinks. Following each trip, the Doctor will send them into the vortex, and he tinkers while she keeps him company, reading under the dim light of the TARDIS console.
Then there’s the TARDIS herself, who is… magnificent. Rose was amazed by her from the start. Well, maybe not from the absolute start. But once she got used to the whole his-ship-is-telepathic thing, and the TARDIS stopped playing tricks on her and moving her bedroom around every night, Rose found herself becoming very fond of the sentient time machine.
Of course, it was easy to warm up to the machine, seeing how much it had begun to spoil her.
For starters, there was her bedroom. The Doctor was momentarily shocked into silence when he led her to a bedroom on her first night in and opened the door to find an expansive, well-decorated, inviting, and very pink bedroom with Rose written all over it. “Guess the Old Girl likes you,” he’d murmured, his ears turning red as he told her to her to make herself at home.
Next it was her clothes. The Doctor had told her where the wardrobe room was, but that was about it. Rose had no clue how to dress appropriately for different planets or time periods, and she still felt a bit shy to bother the Doctor and ask for more help. The TARDIS had been kind enough, right off the bat, to guide Rose in the right direction by flickering the lights throughout the wardrobe room.
The ship had insisted on her wearing that one evening gown in Cardiff, and seemed to know that Rose had always loved playing dress-up. When Rose wasn’t in the console room or library with the Doctor, she was by herself in the wardrobe room, allowing the TARDIS to playfully guide her through the racks of thousands of years of fashion and show her different things to try on.
Then it was all of Rose’s favorite foods in the galley —which wasn’t necessarily the TARDIS spoiling her, but Rose nonetheless appreciated that the ship provided her with human foods like beans and bread and butter instead of alien things like kronkburgers or —as her mum had suggested— grass and safety pins.
Rose had been shocked that the TARDIS was somehow able to re-stock the pantry and refrigerator on her own —something that she still didn’t understand was possible. The Doctor had tried to explain the workings of the trans-dimensional spaceship to her once, but Rose had zoned out after he brought out a pen and paper and tried drawing a diagram. It had something to do with the ship being able to make food disappear from one place and reappear in another.
(”So the TARDIS’s pantry pretty much just robs grocery stores at random whenever it’s missing something?”
“Pretty much, yeah!” The Doctor grinned proudly and patted a coral strut.)
Rose began to feel really spoiled when she started waking up every morning to a hot cup of tea on her nightstand, made just the way she liked.
Taking a page out of the Doctor’s book, Rose had begun to stroke the wall of the TARDIS in gratitude before enjoying her morning cuppa. The ship would respond with a flicker of the lights and a soft hum, which sounded almost amused to Rose’s ears.
It wasn’t until Rose woke up this morning that she realized why the TARDIS had sounded so amused whenever Rose would thank her for the morning tea.
________
”OW, MOTHER OF—“ the intruder’s voice rang out in Rose’s dark bedroom, continuing in a tirade of syllables in a foreign language.
Her body instinctively jerked awake, each of her muscles going painfully rigid and her eyes darting open to search for the dark shadow in her room. “Whasshappened?” Rose slurs blindly in her hardly-awake state, her voice being drowned out by the continued swearing of the other person. “Whossere?”
Her bedroom lights turn on after a moment, and Rose squints at the sudden brightness. When she refocuses her eyes, she can make out the figure of the now silent Doctor, standing in the middle of the room, looking vulnerable in just his red jumper.
A red jumper with a large, dark stain on the front.
“Doctor? What’re you—?” Rose wakes up more as she shifts to sit up in bed. She takes a closer look at the Doctor, from top to bottom. His face and ears are completely red, and his expression is one of abject horror. She can only imagine that something so terrible has happened that he’s had to run into her room and wake her up in the middle of the night for help. He’s never even been in her room before right now. For a moment she’s worried that he’s hurt, and that the large dark patch covering the entire front of his jumper is blood, but then she notices the cup dangling from his limp fingers, dripping tea onto her floor.
She looks back up to meet the Doctor’s wide eyes. “Are you oka—?”
“Sorry,” he says at the same time. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”
Rose shakes her head. “What’re you even doing in here? What time is it?”
“It’s morning,” he answers, his mouth small and hardly moving. He ignores her other question. “I’ll just be— I’ll go now—“ he stutters out, raising the hand with the tea cup in it to gesture towards the hallway.
Rose remembers the puddle of tea on her floor and looks down to see her trainers near the Doctor’s feet. Only she remembers placing them neatly in a pair next to her bed, and now they’re about 2 feet apart and one of them is tipped over on its side. Her eyebrows furrow.
“Did you trip over my trainers?” She asks in confusion. The Doctor scoffs.
“I’m a Time Lord, Rose. I think I have a bit more grace than to trip over a…”
Rose raises an eyebrow. The Doctor coughs.
“Alright, fine. Yes, I tripped over your shoes. Now, goodnight!” The Doctor declares before turning around and walking towards the door.
“You said it was morning,” Rose teases. “Oh, you poor little Time Lord, tripping over the human’s trainers and spilling hot tea all over yourself. Why were you even in here in the first place?”
The Doctor stops at her door and his free hand comes up to rub the back of his neck. Rose has spent enough time with him to know that he’s trying to appear casual. “No reason. Just checking up on you, sleeping half your life away as usual.”
His eyes dance over her room, but she notices them lingering somewhere to her right. She follows his line of vision to her nightstand.
She looks at the nightstand. Then at the Doctor and the mug in his hand. Then back at the nightstand. Her mouth falls open.
“Did you seriously come in here just so you could steal my tea?”
“What? Er— yep,” the Doctor stutters. “Caught me, Rose Tyler,” he nods with a resigned look on his face. “Sorry.”
“You couldn’t just have the TARDIS make you some?” Rose rolls her eyes. “I thought you took yours black, anyways?”
“I—uh...”
“Whatever, the TARDIS can probably just... summon me another cup. Can ya, girl?” Rose pats her wall a bit, looking towards the ceiling.
“Hmm,” Rose frowns when a new cup of tea doesn’t appear.
The Doctor is still standing awkwardly in the doorway. “I’ll go make you a cuppa,” he squeaks out, and jerks away before she can even tell him how she takes it.
When he comes back in, not only does he have a cup of tea in his hand, but he’s also changed into his green jumper and has brought some paper towels to clean up the spilled tea on her floor.
“Here,” he mumbles to her as he hands her the cup before kneeling down to focus on cleaning up the mess he made.
“Won’t be as good as the one the TARDIS makes for me,” she sighs.
She takes her first sip of the tea, and nearly moans in both delight and surprise. “How did you—? This tea is gorgeous. I’ve never even told you how I take it...?”
Funny, the Doctor’s ears are still tinged red.
“Well,” he mutters quietly from the floor, “I’ve seen you make yourself a cuppa before.”
Rose’s eyebrows furrow. “I can’t make a cuppa this good. ‘Sides, this tastes exactly like how the TARDIS—“
Oh. Oh. Oh he’s adorable.
Rose feels something stirring in her heart when she imagines the Doctor every morning, carefully making her a cuppa and setting it on her nightstand just before she wakes up. She takes a moment to accept the fact that this alien has officially ruined all men for her. Probably about 10 times over.
The Doctor looks up at her when she suddenly stops. ”Your tea tastes like the TARDIS?” He snorts. “Next time jus’ tell me I need to put in more sugar, thanks.”
“Doctor,” Rose starts slowly, “have you been making me tea every morning, and coming into my room and putting it on my nightstand before I wake up?”
The Doctor blinks at her like a deer caught in headlights.
“Doctor?” She prompts.
“Yes,” he says timidly.
“Why?”
“Is that— I can stop, if you want. Sorry. I shouldn’t—“
“No!” Rose interrupts him quickly. “I mean, thank you. Really, nothing better than waking up to a nice cuppa, and yours are bloody brilliant. I thought it was the TARDIS this whole time!”
The Doctor lets out a short laugh, some of the tension leaving his body. “She probably would make you one if she could. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her warm up to one of her passengers as quickly as you, and that’s includin’ me.”
Rose giggles, remembering the day last week when the TARDIS shocked the Doctor’s hand and then locked him out of his workshop for 6 hours for threatening to repair the chameleon circuit.
“Look,” she says kindly, “you don’t have to keep makin’ me a cuppa every morning. Especially if you’re gonna end up spilling it everywhere and burnin’ yourself.”
The Doctor stands up fully to look at her. “Rose, if I don’t make you that cuppa, you won’t get out of bed ‘til noon,” he gives her a knowing look before averting his eyes. “‘Sides, it’s a way for me to... repay you.”
Rose gapes at him. ”You think you have to repay me?”
“Rose—“
“Mate, I should be making you a cuppa every day! What the hell do you need to repay me for?”
The Doctor’s hand comes up to rub his neck, and he looks like he’d rather be anywhere else in the universe, but he still answers her.
“I’m not a particularly easy person to be around sometimes,” he says reluctantly. “Alright, lots of the time. And this life is dangerous, and you get hurt far too much. Consider the tea my repayment for you... staying.”
Rose shakes her head before tossing her legs over the side of her bed and standing up.
“You don’t need to make me a cuppa everyday to make me want to stay here, Doctor,” she reassures him.
He looks embarrassed, then, so she puts on a considering look. “I definitely won’t turn it away, though. You make a mean cuppa.”
The embarrassment disappears in favor of a smug smile on the Time Lord’s face. “Nine hundred years old, me. I know how to make tea.” Then his face softens. “Thank you, Rose. Thanks for staying.”
He looks so vulnerable, standing in her room without his leather jacket on, paper towels still in one hand, and Rose can’t help but come over and wrap her arms around him in a hesitant hug.
“Don’t worry, Doctor, I’m not gonna leave just yet,” she mumbles, her cheek against his jumper.
Maybe not ever, she thinks as his arms come around her.