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The first thing Helen saw that morning when she exited bleary-eyed from her bedroom in search of coffee was the Doctor sitting at the kitchen table, resting his elbows on its surface and his head in his hands.
She bit back a groan.
It seemed the Doctor was in one of his moods again. He'd been having these moods a lot since they'd become stranded on Earth, and though she understood why, she really didn't want to deal with it first thing in the morning.
"Morning," she mumbled as she sidled by on her way to the flat's tiny kitchen counter.
"Mhmm," he grunted in reply.
Maybe if she just ignore it, it would go away. It seemed unlikely, but she could hope, couldn't she?
She filled the kettle from the sink and turned it on.
"Would you like some tea?" she asked, automatically pulling out a package of darjeeling along with her jar of instant coffee.
Sharing a small, two bedroom flat with the Doctor had turned out to be an adventure unto itself, and not at all like living in the infinite, ever-changing space of the Tardis as their numerous conflicts had proven. The Time Lord currently shared their meals and slept on the sofa, at least in theory. Even when she visited the bathroom in the middle of the night, he was seldom sleeping, often not even in the flat, and he missed meals as much as he attended them. Helen was pretty sure he'd starve if Liv didn't keep harassing him to eat.
Tea, though, the Doctor never turned down.
"No," he said in response to her question, "thank you."
Helen froze leaving the pair of mugs she'd just pulled out of the cupboard hanging in the air.
Okay. Now things were getting serious. So much for ignoring it and hoping it would go away.
Putting down the mugs, she turned around to look at the Doctor, eyes narrowing as she studied him. Something definitely wasn't right. The Doctor's moods were usually a lot louder and a lot more active than this. Usually he'd start taking apart one of the kitchen appliances or complain loudly about some random human thing or rush off on a long sulky walk through Regent's park. Not sit at the kitchen table and mope.
"Are you feeling alright?" she asked.
He looked up meeting her eyes for the first time. "What?" he said, sounding even blearier than she was. "Oh, yes. I'm fine. I'm fine. Just a bit of a headache."
Helen's eyebrows drew together. "Since when do you get headaches?"
She could see it now that she knew what to look for, the pain in the pinched lines around his eyes.
"There's not another Voord spaceship nearby, is there? Or something terribly wrong with time or some alien telepathic influence effecting you?"
He let out a huff. "It's just a normal headache. I'm not magically invulnerable you know."
Definitely in one of his moods.
"Yes but..." She bit her tongue as she felt her irritation rise.
She knew the Doctor wasn't some invincible superhero. She'd seen him get hurt before, on a number of occasions, but he always bounced back so quickly and seemed above such small human ills like headaches and stomach upsets and sore joints.
"Well," she said, "maybe if you ate more regularly and slept more than once every blue moon, you wouldn't have one."
The only reply was another huff as the Doctor let his head fall back into his hands.
He did look rather miserable sitting there like that. Helen supposed she couldn't really blame him for being surly, not when he was dealing with a headache on top of everything else.
Taking a quick trip to the bathroom, she grabbed a bottle of aspirin, then diverted back to the kitchen for a glass of water and placed both in front of the Doctor.
"Here. Take one of these and you'll soon be feeling much better."
And hopefully also in a much better mood, she added to herself.
The Doctor's face scrunched up as he gazed at the bottle of pills, looking at it as if she'd just dropped something particularly nasty in front of him. "You want me to take that?"
Apparently this was what Helen got for trying to help.
She scowled, patience running out. She really wasn't in the mood to deal with another of the Doctor's little tantrums, especially so early. She hadn't even had her coffee yet.
"Or you could just keep sitting there feeling miserable," she snapped and turned away to finish making her drink.
She set about it with a certain ferocity, getting her irritation out in the process. Perhaps too much ferocity as she ended up spilling coffee all over the counter. Sighing, she used a rag to clean it up, then went to the fridge to fetch the milk.
While she was in the midst of adding it to her coffee, she heard the rattle of pills behind her and the sound the bottle's top being unscrewed.
Turning back around, she found the Doctor staring into the aspirin bottle, an odd expression on his face.
She leaned against the kitchen counter and watched him as she sipped her coffee.
"It does help to actually take the pills out and swallow them," she said when the Doctor didn't show any signs of doing so.
The Doctor let out a laugh, or at least, something that resembled a laugh. It seemed much too dark and much too bitter to be called one.
"And then I'll be a whole new person," he said, a cynical edge to his voice.
Helen cleared her throat. "Yes, well, I wouldn't go that far," she said, trying not to show just how much the laugh had disturbed her.
The Doctor stared at the pills a moment longer, then shook his head and put the cap back on the bottle.
"I guess miserable it is then," Helen said tiredly and took another sip of coffee.
She really hoped he wasn't going to be like this all day.
"Who's miserable?" asked Liv as she emerged from her bedroom.
"The Doctor," replied Helen. "He's got a headache."
Liv frowned. "Since when does he get headaches?"
Helen flung a hand into the air. "That's what I said."
"Maybe I was bored," the Doctor said, turning the aspirin bottle over in his hand, rattling the pills inside, "and felt like trying one out."
He rubbed his forehead wincing slightly.
Helen gave a sigh of frustration. "I've given him some aspirin but he won't take any."
Hopefully with Liv there, they might actually be able to convince him to listen and take some. He'd always been more inclined to listen to Liv. She was the only one who could out-stubborn him.
"You gave him what?" said Liv, eyeing the bottle still clutched in the Doctor's hand.
"Aspirin."
Liv looked blank.
"It's a painkiller," Helen elaborated.
"A nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory to be precise," explained the Doctor, still playing absently with the bottle. "Acetylsalicylic acid."
"Oh." Liv glanced uncertainly from Helen to the Doctor. "Is that even compatible with—"
"Not in the slightest," the Doctor said, the cynical bitterness returning to his voice.
Helen's forehead furrowed. "Compatible?"
She was hit by the worrying feeling she'd just missed something, like she'd accidentally skipped over a page in a book.
"Doctor," said Liv, world-weary but with a touch of gentleness. "She didn't know."
The Doctor raised his eyes to the ceiling. "I know. I know. I'm just..." He waved a hand vaguely in the air for once amazingly at a loss for words.
The worrying feeling only increased sinking coldly in Helen's gut.
She gazed from one to the other. "I didn't know what?"
"Gallifreyan metabolism," explained Liv, "the biochemistry, it's different than human."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning," said the Doctor, "taking just one of these"—he rattled the bottle of aspirin—"would kill me."
Helen stared dumbfounded, brain jamming as she tried to comprehend what she'd just heard. "What?"
"Maybe you should stop playing with them then," said Liv, snatching the bottle away and holding it aloft as if playing keep-away with a misbehaving toddler. "Honestly, you're giving me the creeps."
Liv wasn't the only one feeling creeped out.
Aspirin, plain old simple aspirin was poison to the Doctor?
Helen starred at the bottle, her mind replaying their recent interactions. She'd literally spent the past few minutes trying to convince the Doctor to take poison. Various emotions fought for dominance: guilt, embarrassment, concern.
It was anger that finally won out.
"Why the hell didn't you tell me?!" she cried, then immediately regretted it when the Doctor visibly flinched and clutched his head.
The anger vanished as quickly as it had come.
"Sorry," she said, shoulders slumping.
She placed her coffee back down on the counter. It no longer seemed as important as it had only moments ago.
"It's not your fault," said Liv. "Right, Doctor?"
"Yes, yes," he muttered, not looking up.
Liv's eyes narrowed as she gazed at him. "You're really in pain, aren't you?"
The Time Lord didn't reply remaining hunched over, head in his hands
She sat down at the table beside him. "Doctor, look at me a sec."
The Doctor slowly raised his head, glassy, blue eyes meeting Liv's.
She studied them for a while, then placed a hand on his forehead, the other at the pulse point on his neck. "Any other symptoms?"
Liv had entered what Helen liked to call full med-tech mode. It was something Helen secretly loved, not that she would ever tell Liv that. There was just something about the way the cynical sarcasm dropped away to reveal the deep caring side beneath.
The Doctor gave Liv a halfhearted scowl. "It's just a headache."
"Uh huh and I've secretly been a robot this entire time," Liv replied. "I know you, Doctor. You don't just get headaches." Her hands fell away releasing him. "Temperature's normal, at least for you, but your hearts are going a bit fast."
Helen bit her lip.
Could the Doctor really be sick? What on Earth were they supposed to do if he was? They couldn't take him to a hospital, and with the Tardis dead, there was no convenient infirmary available in which to treat him.
The Doctor pursed his lips. "I don't suppose you'd stop asking questions if I promised you it was nothing to worry about."
"Nope," was Liv's immediate response.
"Not in the slightest," added Helen.
They'd both heard the Doctor make that promise far too many times. Though he usually meant well, holding things back had never done any of them any good.
"Thought not," he said.
He massaged his forehead again, jaw tightening as he rode another wave of pain.
"Hey." Liv reached out and pulled his hands away from his face. "Talk to us. What's going on?"
The Time Lord gazed at her unhappily.
For a moment, Helen thought he was going to remain reticent but then he spoke.
"It's my symbiotic nuclei," he said. "They're just... acting up a bit."
It was a typical Doctor explanation, one that only succeeded in leaving them with more questions.
"Symbiotic nuclei?" Liv raised an eyebrow, giving the Time Lord an exasperated look. "Doctor, that book you gave me on Gallifreyan physiology was rubbish, remember? It barely covered anything. The only thing it said about symbiotic nuclei was that Time Lords have them and they are somehow involved in regeneration. It wouldn't even say what the hell they are."
The Doctor's face twisted into a grimace. "Symbiotic nuclei are part of our cells," he said, strained and slow, the pain clearly taking its toll. "They play a part in regeneration, yes, but they do other things too. They allow us to be sensitive to the shifts and flow of time. They protect us from the energies of the Time Vortex, connect our minds to our Tardises."
At that last statement a horrible understanding started to well up in Helen.
"But the Tardis is dead," she said, then quickly added when she saw the look on the Doctor's face, "or at least, dormant."
"Exactly."
The lines on Liv's forehead deepened. "Is this like when the Ravenous attacked the Tardis? When the Tardis shut down, did it injure you in some way?"
"It's not as straight forward as that. It's like..." His eyes drifted as he struggled to find the right words. "It's like part of my mind has been ripped away and the rest keeps trying to reach out to the part that's missing."
"Kind of like phantom limb pain?" Liv suggested.
"I suppose, in a way. The bond between a Time Lord and their Tardis is mostly subconscious but it's strong. And I've been with my Tardis for a long long time."
Even with her brief brush with psychic powers, Helen found it hard to imagine what it must be like to have something or someone permanently connected to you like that, but the thought of having a part of yourself violently torn away made her shudder.
"But we've been separated from the Tardis before," she said, still trying to make sense of the situation.
"Not like this," said the Doctor with a careful shake of his head. "Before she was still there. Even if we were in different times and places, she was still there, still part of the universe, still part of the vortex. Now she's gone, or at least, that's what it feels like."
A broken anguish slipped into his last few words and Helen felt her heart twist in sympathy.
Liv's head tilted to the side as she gazed at the Doctor. "Has it been like this the whole time we've been stranded here?"
That was a horrible thought. Had the Doctor been suffering like this the entire time? All those moods he'd had, how much had been his frustration at being trapped there and how much had been the pain of the gaping hole left in his head?
"Mostly it's been more of a... fuzziness in my brain, an occasional mild ache," he said, his explanation doing little to dispel Helen's concerns. "It just seems to be particularly bad today for some reason."
"You should have told us," said Helen.
The Doctor pinched the bridge of his nose. "Yes, well, we had... other... concerns." He let out a hiss, leaning forward, fingers practically digging into his skull.
"Doctor?" said Liv, leaning closer.
He waved her off. "I'm fine," he said breathlessly, sounding anything but. "I'm fine. I'm fine."
Helen's hands fluttered anxiously. She hated this, hated seeing her friend in pain like this.
"There's got to be something we can do," she said. "If you can't take aspirin, what about paracetamol? I don't have any but the Akhtar sisters probably have some. Paracetamol won't kill you, will it?"
The Doctor raised his head just enough to give her a twisted half-smile. "No, it won't kill me. It'll just make me wish I was dead for the next twenty-four hours."
Helen gave a muttered curse. "Are there any human painkillers that would help?"
"Opiates would probably work," he mused. "But they also might make me pass out and repress my respiratory system."
"Okay, no," said Liv, throwing her hands up for emphasis. "We are not testing medications out on the Doctor to see if any of them work. Way too risky."
"That's probably for the best," said the Doctor with a calm resignation. Folding his arms, he leaned forward and rested his head upon them.
Helen felt nowhere near as calm. "But what if it gets worse? You said it's not usually this bad. What if this is a sign of things to come? What if—"
A hand on her arm stopped her from going any further down the rabbit hole of worry she had begun spiralling into.
Liv gazed at her reassuringly. "It's probably just a flare up brought on by stress or something. Let's not start panicking until we need to."
Helen bit her lip. "Are you sure?"
"Considering I've never dealt with this before, no," Liv admitted. "But if it's anything like phantom limb pain then they'll good days and they'll be bad days, and today just happens to be one of the bad ones." She leaned towards the Time Lord directing the next part pointedly at him. "Something that probably wouldn't happen so often if someone took better care of themselves and actually ate and slept properly."
The Doctor didn't bother looking up, only said, his voice slightly muffled, "You know Helen said nearly the exact same thing."
"Well, she's a smart woman," said Liv and Helen couldn't help smiling in response. "Between the two of us, you'd think you'd actually listen."
Lifting his head, the Doctor peered at her over his folded arms. "I'm a Time Lord," he said. "I can get by with a lot less than you can. I'll rest when the Tardis is fixed."
Liv rolled her eyes. "Less doesn't mean zero. Anyway just because you can doesn't mean it's actually healthy to do so."
"Debatable."
"When you get the Tardis working again, you are so giving me a better book on Gallifreyan physiology. One that has the exact details of your dietary and sleep requirements."
The Doctor groaned letting his head fall back onto his arms.
It was an old argument, one that had become such a tradition during their stay in Baker Street it was almost reassuring to hear it again, especially in the midst of all this.
"So there's really nothing we can do?" Helen said. "I hate to just stand by while he's suffering like this."
Liv gazed down at the Doctor and Helen could tell from the look in her eyes that she didn't like it anymore than Helen did.
"There are some non-pharmacological methods of pain management we can try," she said. "Hopefully one of them will help. Mostly we need to make sure he takes it easy for awhile."
She patted the Time Lord on the shoulder. "Doctor?"
A disgruntled mutter was the only response.
"Come on," said Liv. "Let's get you to the couch. You'll be more comfortable there."
The Doctor's head slowly rose, a hand rising too to comb through his short curls. "As nice as that sounds," he said, "I really should get back to working on the Tardis."
Helen stared at him astonishment. "You can barely keep your head up and you want to get back to work?"
"If we are to have any hope of getting out of here—" he began.
"If we are to have any hope of getting out of here," Liv echoed, "then you need to take better care of yourself. This whole thing could very well be your body's way of telling you you need a break."
"Then my body and I shall be having strict words on the matter. There's work to be done."
The Doctor's stubborn side clearly hadn't been effected by the headache.
"It can wait," said Helen. She might not show it as much but she could be as stubborn as the Doctor when she needed too.
"But—" The Doctor's protest was cut off, his breath catching as he winced. "Okay," he admitted once he'd gotten his breath back, "maybe you're right."
"We usually are," said Liv. "Come on then."
With tired reluctance, the Doctor pushed his chair back and got up, his movements slow and careful.
Liv took a hold of his elbow and guided him towards the couch.
The morning sun was streaming through a large window into the sitting room section of the flat's main room.
The Doctor looked away as the light hit him, eyes squeezing shut.
Helen rushed ahead and closed the curtains.
"Thanks," he said as he dropped heavily onto the couch. He sat there only a moment before slowly listing to the side to rest his head on the armrest.
Liv leaned over and heaved his legs up so he was lying down properly.
"Now, I expect you to stay there for the rest of the day," she said. "Med-tech's orders."
"Lovely," he grumbled into the armrest, "and I thought it was bad being confined to a single planet. Now I'm going to be confined to a couch."
"Don't worry," said Helen. "I'll stay with you, keep you company."
Liv squeezed her arm gratefully. "Just make sure he doesn't decide to get up and start trying to turn the dishwasher into a temporal vortex or something. You know what he's like."
"Very funny," muttered the Doctor.
Helen gave an amused smile. "I'll keep my eye on him."
"Good," said Liv. "I'm just going to run down and see if Tania has a heating pad. Placing one on the back of his neck might help with the pain."
"Alright," said Helen. "See you in a bit."
The Doctor just grunted.
Bright light from the hall shone through briefly as Liv opened and shut the flat door going out into the rest of the building.
The Doctor grimaced as the light hit him and threw an arm over his face.
The blanket he usually used hung over the back of the couch. Helen fetched it and lay it over him before going over to a nearby armchair to sit down.
"Comfortable?"
"Mmm," was the only reply and Helen hoped that meant yes.
Silence fell over the pair of them for a while in the dimmed room. It might have lasted longer but something was nagging at Helen, something she couldn't put aside.
"Doctor, about earlier..." She hesitated, biting her lip.
The Time Lord let out a deep breath and removed the arm from his face, craning his neck slightly to meet her eyes. "It's not your fault," he said. "You were right. I should have told you about the aspirin. I'm sorry."
"Oh, um..." She hadn't really been expecting an apology and wasn't sure how to react. "Thank you." Her fingers twisted and untwisted in her lap. "I should really have figured it out though. It seems obvious in retrospect. I guess sometimes I just forget that you're..." She trailed off, suddenly concerned her words might be taken as an insult.
"Not human," he finished for her with a wry smile.
"Well, yes."
Sometimes it was obvious the Doctor wasn't human. He'd react in ways you'd never expect a human to, do things that should be impossible. Sometimes the light would hit his eyes at a certain angle and you'd catch a glimpse of something ancient and incomprehensible. But most of the time he seemed nothing more than a slightly eccentric human being.
Then again, maybe Helen took certain things for granted having lived most of her life surrounded by nothing else.
"You know," she said, "I never realized it before but it must be hard for you being the only one of your kind around here, having to constantly fit yourself into the human way of doing things, into human culture, even having to eat nothing but human foods."
"I've spent a large portion of my life among humans," he said. "Trust me. I'm quite used to it by now."
"Still, it must be lonely with no other Time Lords around."
He turned away shifting so he was lying on his back, gaze going up to the ceiling. "Well," he said quietly, "it's not as if I fit in much on Gallifrey either."
The only place he'd probably ever fit had been inside the Tardis living his life as a traveller through time.
Helen's heart twisted painfully at the thought.
"It's just earlier..." She hesitated again but quickly rallied knowing she wouldn't be able to rest if she didn't ask. "Earlier you were looking at those aspirin as if you were actually considering taking one. I mean... You weren't, were you? You wouldn't actually..."
The Doctor's face remained obscurely blank. "Just a passing thought."
His words sent a chill through Helen. That really wasn't the answer she'd been hoping for.
"Oh..." She swallowed. "I... uh..."
Something must have sounded in her voice because the Doctor immediately turned back towards her, eyes shinning with regret. "Sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean..."
He reached out a hand and she took it, finding comfort in his rough fingers as they gently squeezed hers.
"I'm not going to do anything of the sort," he said. "I promise."
"Well, good." Helen let out a shaky breath in releif. "I don't want to imagine what Liv would do to you if you did."
The corners of the Doctor's lips turned upward in a small smile. "Me neither."
She smiled back though it wavered slightly.
The Time Lord squeezed her hand once more before letting go.
They were nice words, good words. The Doctor could be very reassuring on occasion, especially if the entire universe were at stake, but though most of her worry and alarm had been quelled, Helen wasn't a hundred percent appeased.
"Still," she said, slow and tentative, "such thoughts aren't exactly a good thing."
The Doctor's eyes flickered away from hers, gaze returning to the ceiling.
She supposed it was a touch cruel to confront him like this while he was stuck there on the couch feeling miserable. Usually when you brought up something the Doctor didn't like to talk about, he'd find a way to dance around it then escape out the door before you even realized what was going on. This was a rare opportunity. She had him at her mercy, as it were, but though cruel it might be, this really wasn't something she could ignore or put off.
"Doctor?"
He didn't reply. He just grimaced and ran his hands over his face though it was hard to tell whether it was his head or the topic that was bothering him.
"I know it's been hard for you," she continued, "being stuck here and losing the Tardis and all that, but I'd hope if it were getting that bad, you'd at least talk to us about it. You know we're here for you, right?"
"I know," the Doctor said. "I know. I just..." He took a deep breath and slowly let it out. "It really was just a stray thought, but then that's the problem I suppose. Too much time to think, too many thoughts and nothing to distract me from them."
"What sort of thoughts?" asked Helen, part of her wondering just how much she really wanted to know.
Instead of answering, the Doctor squeezed his eyes shut, his hands combing through his hair, fingers digging into his scalp.
Not again.
"Easy," said Helen, wishing Liv would hurry back. "You're okay. Just breath through it."
After a few moments, the pain seemed to relent and the Doctor sank wearily into the couch once more.
"Memories," he said, his voice rough and faint.
Helen frowned, lost for a second. "What?"
"Memories," the Doctor repeated. "That's what's been going through my head these days." He turned to look at her, that unfathomable depth in his eyes. "I'm old, Helen, so old I'm not even sure what my age is anymore."
"Yes, I know that," she said, shifting uncomfortably under the gaze. She did know, though being able to comprehend such a thing was another matter entirely.
"That means I've got a lot of memories, including a lot of bad ones, some of them very recent."
He didn't elaborate but he didn't have to. Liv had told Helen the story of Molly one lonely evening when it was just the two of them. She passed on another name too, a name she'd gotten from Molly herself. Lucie. Though Helen didn't know the details, she knew it had been bad.
"The bad memories have a tendency to pile up," the Doctor continued, "and when one rears its ugly head, it brings all the rest of its friends along for tea."
"You must also have a lot of good memories though," said Helen, encouragingly.
"That's true. I've seen such amazing things." For a moment, his voice and eyes grew distant, but only a moment, then he sighed, returning to the reality of their tiny flat. "There's just some days when the bad ones speak louder and the good ones get lost."
"Days like today."
The Doctor nodded.
Tilting her head to the side, Helen gazed at him thoughtfully.
This whole situation had left her feeling pretty useless. She wasn't a doctor or a med-tech. She didn't know how to make the Doctor's headache go away, her only attempt having gone embarrassingly wrong, but if there was one thing she could do, it was be there for him, be a good friend.
"Well," she said, "why don't I help remind you of some of them? It might prove a good distraction."
"I suppose it couldn't hurt," he said though he didn't sound very hopeful.
"Do you remember..." Helen began, casting her memory back. "Do you remember those glowing birds we saw on, what was it called, Tatta... Tattaranta? I think they were the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, those shinning feathers, the flock of them flickering against the lilac sky as the sun set." It had been such a moment of perfect peace and beauty just remembering it sent a wave of warmth through Helen. "And what about that amazing temple, the one with the shifting walls and those incredible acoustics. I swear all the echoes sounded like songs."
She kept a careful eye on the Doctor as she talked, hoping for some sort of shift in his demeanour or lightening of his features, but there was nothing. She tried a different memory.
"Oh, what about the trip we took in that gondola contraption over those blue magma flows on that volcano planet? That was quite something, wasn't it? I mean until we found out the gondola had been sabotaged and we almost got burnt to a crisp."
Perhaps that one hadn't been the best choice.
"How about when you introduced us to Hedy Lamarr? You kept trying to talk to her about that invention she was working on but she wouldn't talk about it, so somehow we ended up spending the entire night eating various types of cheese and playing dominoes."
A flicker of something passed over the Doctor's features but it was soon gone.
Wracking her brain, Helen tried to think of something else. There had to be more times when things hadn't ended disastrously and their lives hadn't been in mortal peril, times the Doctor would look on with fondness.
One memory, somewhat wickedly, sprang to mind.
Helen pursed her lips. She knew she shouldn't. She'd promised Liv she'd never mention it again but desperate times and all that.
"Remember," she began once more, "when we went to that festival on that weird space station, the one with those giant cyborg trees. Remember that women who came up to Liv and asked if she'd like a satori, and Liv said yes thinking it was some sort of drink. Only it wasn't. It was this whole... Well, I'm not sure what it was actually."
"It's a type of cleansing ritual," supplied the Doctor.
Was that a hint of amusement in his voice?
Spurred on with hope, Helen continued, "Whatever it was, Liv was too embarrassed to admit she hadn't known what she'd agreed to, so she just sat there and went through with the whole thing. It wouldn't have been so bad if there'd only been the chanting and the scarf waving, but then they brought out the face paint."
"I thought she looked good," the Doctor said.
Helen broke into a laugh. "Doctor, she had giant purple flowers painted all over her face."
"So?"
"She couldn't wash them off. She was stuck like that for days."
"Yes, she was rather annoyed by that as I recall."
Annoyed was putting it mildly. The glower hadn't left Liv's painted face the entire time. Helen had almost pulled something in her efforts not to laugh each time she saw her.
"Oh, I wish we'd taken a photo," she said.
A hint of the old sparkle glimmered in the Doctor's eyes. "Actually," he confessed, "I may have had the Tardis record an image or two, for posterity's sake you understand."
Helen's eyes widened. "You didn't."
"You never know when such a thing might come in handy," he said innocently.
"Alright, the moment the Tardis is fixed," she said, and the Tardis would be fixed, she had to believe it for the Doctor's sake if nothing else, "we are printing out copies of those pictures and showing them to Tania. Agreed?"
The corners of the Doctor's eyes crinkled and his lips twitched. "Agreed."
The door to the flat creaked open as he said the last.
"What's agreed?" asked Liv from the doorway, heating pad held in her hand.
Helen couldn't help it. Laughter bubbled out of her at the sight of Liv, the image of her painted face still fresh in her mind.
"What?" Liv demanded.
Helen tried to reply but only found herself gasping for air.
"Nothing," the Doctor replied for her. "Just making plans for the future."
Liv gazed suspiciously at the two of them.
This only made Helen laugh harder.
They would get in so much trouble. Liv would kill them both if she found out what they'd been discussing, let alone if they actually went through with it, but it was worth it to see the smile, a real one this time, brightening the Doctor's face.