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The surface of a wet sponge is far stranger than he remembered. The water in the Noble family’s sink is freezing as it runs over his skin. It takes focus for him to remember how to properly clean residue off a plate: sometimes just a rinse is enough, sometimes it takes a little effort with the softer side of the sponge, sometimes he has to scrub in little circular motions with the rougher side and sometimes there’s no hope other than leaving it to sit in soapy water and hoping it works miracles.
The last time the Doctor had to wash a dish was… had it been with the Ponds, maybe? In the year he’d settled down with them? Had it been sometime in his tenure as a university professor, watching over Missy in her vault? Had it even been far back on Gallifrey, before he’d run, back when his family was alive?
It didn’t matter, though. Donna had asked him to do the dishes today. If times were different, he’d refuse, he’d brush it off with barely a thought. He’s trying not to run anymore, though. That’s what he’d told himself, and every time he thinks about disobeying that simple instruction he forces himself back on track.
He’s tired. That’s the strange feeling he’d been having for years: exhaustion. All he could do was keep running, but now that he’s stopped, he barely knows what to do. He’s got a lot to process, but… he has time for that, now, doesn’t he? He’s got years, decades , on Earth with Donna and her family.
They’re your family too, now, he reminds himself. Rose is your niece, you said it yourself.
(Years ago, he’d told Wilf he’d be proud if Wilf was his dad. Now, it’s been billions of years for the Doctor and fifteen for Wilf, but they’re still here, back together. The smile on Wilf’s face as he’d wheeled back over the hill to see the Doctor sitting at the dinner table with the others had been enough. At the same time, though, the ghost of Wilf’s arms wrapping around his frame still feels warm.)
Still, though. Dishes.
The sun’s setting over the trees, promising a cold December night. It casts rays through the kitchen windows, highlighting the stack of wet dishes he had yet to dry. Someone’s watching TV in the other room, and the words may be fuzzy but they’re close enough to an episode of a reality program he’d already watched three times for the Doctor to match it up in his head. There’s always the chance that it’s new today, though, so he’s not going to be the one to walk into the other room and spoil it. He has dishes to finish.
Another plate clinks its way onto the pile, and he grabs a towel to get the feeling of wet off his hands before it’s time to dry them, out of space to set down any more. The sound of footsteps, though, makes his head turn, and he sets the towel down to see Rose rounding the corner into the kitchen. The floorboards creak softly, and that would never have happened in the TARDIS, would it? He gets another almost-new experience out of all of this.
Wordless, Rose picks up the towel he’d just set down, taking the top plate and running the fabric along the edge. The Doctor feels like he’s left fumbling for a second, not sure what to do with his hands, before giving her a nod and turning back to the sink.
“We never did talk about what happened, you know.”
There’s a particularly tough spot on this one, and he presses his thumb into the sponge to place some more pressure on it, determinedly not making eye contact. “About…”
“I saw into your mind. For a few minutes, I had your memories. Mum wasn’t the only one.”
“Ah.” He closes his eyes tight, breathes for a second, sets the half cleaned plate down on the countertop and the sponge on the back of the sink, and then opens them again. The water keeps running in between them. “That… did happen, didn’t it.”
Rose is the one to reach over and turn the water off. “She always hates it when anyone leaves it running while they aren’t using it. Says it’ll kill the planet one day if it keeps going.”
She doesn’t need to specify. They both know who she’s talking about.
“Definitely interesting to realize where I got my name from, though,” continues Rose, “and where all my inspiration came from.” The plate she’s drying gets set down in a fresh stack on the counter; she picks up another one and it leaves droplets along the surface of the linoleum as she moves it. “If things had gone differently… say, you ran into me instead of her when you came back to Earth the other day. Do you think you would have picked me up?”
Of all the questions he thought she would ask, the Doctor didn’t think it would be that one. “It’s hard to say, honestly. Even the slightest change in time could have a massive ripple effect. I want to think I would have, though.”
He turns to look at her and manages to catch her depositing the plate carefully on the counter before throwing both arms around him, a hug tight enough that he doesn’t think he’d be able to free his arms if she’d trapped them.
“I’m proud,” says Rose, “that you’d call yourself my uncle.”
( “I’d be proud,” he says, sitting on a ledge in a spaceship. “If you were my dad.” )
Slowly, gently, he lowers his arms to wrap around her back, pressing his cheek into the curls of her hair. “Rose Noble,” he says, “there is nothing I would not do for any of you.” Twisting his head, he plants a soft kiss on the edge of her forehead.
(And, of course, he means every word of it.)
~~~
It takes months for him to actually settle in.
At first, he was sneaking off to the TARDIS for trips near-daily, returning the moment he left and leaving everyone else none the wiser. Occasionally Rose would tag along, wanting to see parts of the universe she’d never seen with her own two eyes but remembered anyway. More rarely, Donna or Mel would join in, and once or twice he was able to bring Wilf along. (Sylvia still flatly refused any association with the ship.)
Then, more and more, the Doctor found himself just… living.
There was a surprising amount of upkeep required when you lived somewhere that wasn’t alive, he found. How humans handled a house that needed to be manually cleaned he didn’t know, but from time to time it was nice to lose himself in a simple repetitive task like dusting, or, less rarely, doing the dishes.
The former was also one of the reasons he found out not everyone reacted the way he did to dust on the ground of Earth. Either Time Lords had an allergy to dust the same way they did to aspirin, or he was just incredibly unlucky.
That was also when the others started entering the TARDIS less for exploration and more to just spend time inside. It hadn’t taken long for Rose to decide the interior was far too blank and empty to stand, and one day the Doctor woke up and walked out to the console room just to realize she had wrapped colorful fairy lights around some of the railings, casting light onto the ground and walls in greens and blues and pinks. It made him smile in a way where his eyes crinkled, and Rose lit up when she spotted him at the top of a ramp.
Slowly, the room populated itself. One of Rose’s plushies had a permanent position at the console, where from time to time the Doctor would pretend it was piloting. A collection of mismatched chairs were scattered about, originally spare kitchen chairs from when Sylvia wanted a replacement set for the house, but slowly replaced bit by bit as everyone claimed seats of their own.
Wilf, of course, appreciated the updated interior immensely, and the Doctor had a running theory that the old girl had changed herself just for him. Now, finally, they had time together, and Wilf got the TARDIS tour he’d always deserved. It wasn’t necessary anymore, with the Doctor standing still on Earth, but he and Rose picked out rooms of their own in the ship’s endless winding hallways regardless.
The Noble family stopped feeling like a separate entity he was intruding on and more like his family.
(He hadn’t had a proper family in a while, and he doesn’t throw around words like that lightly. There had been Graham, Ryan and Yaz, there had been Amy, Rory and River, and before them…)
The Doctor gets a job. He’s never sure what to do with a job, but it was necessary for the whole human experience, wasn’t it? It hadn’t gone quite well the first time, but teaching hadn’t gone too badly when he was doing it for real, and local schools were desperate to find competent teachers to fill in their gaps. There was a huge difference between university students and primary schoolers, and he had to be very careful to not accidentally break the continutity of time and teach them 37th century astrophysics, but the younger kids seemed to like “Mr. Smith” and it helped Donna and Shaun keep the fridge stocked, so he didn’t mind a bit.
One day, he wakes up in the TARDIS and realizes he doesn’t want to travel that day.
The other him’s doing enough traveling for the both of them, he thinks. This Doctor can rest now.