Work Text:
There was a low frequency noise hanging in the air like a weird change in pressure. There was, to be perfectly fair, always a white noise in the Tardis unless she was asked specifically to be perfectly quiet. However when one is constantly surrounded by a white noise it becomes a baseline for silence.The regular ambient Tardis noise would not, for instance, have woken an exhausted Rose Tyler from her deep sleep in her room. Yet here she was lying in her egregiously comfortable bed after her body had had an involuntary reaction to this noise. Something's off . Was the message that accompanied the pause in her much needed sleep. Not quite sure what . Her internal monologue seemed to say in its London accent. But something for sure is wrong .
An uncanny valley sort of feeling seemed to follow her along on adventures when something inevitably was wrong, so she had become both accustomed to and hyper aware of this feeling. Now it had woken her up. She was lying with her eyes open listening attentively to the noise, wondering if it was worth dragging herself out of bed for. Every so often there was a clink or a ratcheting noise, and after a while the noise changed. With a kachunk sound like a bone being set back into its socket, the Tardis sounded back to normal.
Very faintly she could hear the familiar voice of her resident alien insomniac, cobbling away in the middle of the night like an elf in a children’s story.
“There you are, old girl,” He said comfortingly.
The reasonable part of Rose’s brain figured she could sleep now. He’s fixed whatever it was no need to worry. But the instinctive, unreasonable part of her brain was unsatisfied. Listen, it's back .
And so it was. like an instrument falling back out of tune. Only this time it continued pitching lower, and a steady, repetitive clicking noise accompanied it.
This made the hair on the back of Rose's neck stick straight up. It was an echoing click that sounded as if it was coming from inside every wall in the ship. It started getting louder. Rose entertained the idea that this, in fact, was a reasonable thing to be concerned about and now a good enough reason to get out of bed. Partly because there was no way she would be sleeping through it anyway. She rolled herself away from her blankets and pried herself out of bed grabbing a sweater off of a chair in the room when she was met with the temperature change. She stumbled towards her door struggling to put her arms in each of the sleeves and when she finally made it to poke her head out into the hallway the noise was further amplified. Lovely.
“Rose?” called the Doctor from the control hub of the Tardis down the curved hallway. “Are those your footsteps or do I finally need to admit myself someplace?”
“Have to be someplace dangerous and off putting with aliens up to no good, you’d get bored otherwise,” Rose said.
The Doctor lit up as she came around the corner. Rose thought that was definitely one thing regeneration could never take away from him, that big goofy smile.
“Thought you were asleep it’s 3am on your cell clock?” All of Rose's things were synched to a 24 hour “Earth Time” (GMT, naturally). Her alarm clock, her phone, everything she needed to read her the time on the Tardis would tell her the time it was in London in chronological order from when they left. Keeping up with her mum.
“Yeah just thought I’d go for a trot around, you know, some good blood flow to the head,” she said, “oh and also you know there’s that bloody noise, it’s partly that as well.” She was smiling in a semi sarcastic and slightly pained way.
“Right,” he nodded. “yeah, routine maintenance, tune up so to speak, like winding a very elaborate, very accident prone clock. I think there’s a bit more I’ve got to do. I'd bet probably that banging noise is something loose from your industrial strength disassembly a while back.” He said, attributing as little blame as he could with the delivery of that sentence, “I think she’s got a bit of a grudge still, you know.”
“Didn't mean to rip you to bits,” Rose said, patting the console sarcastically. “Maybe you ought to just teach me to fly it, give me a crash course so I don’t have to rip her to bits.”
The Doctor sat up from his mechanic-like position half under the console. His glasses that indicated he was doing something that required focus (literally and figuratively) fell down his nose.
“Can’t fly it I’m afraid, Time Lord things,” he wiggled his fingers like a children’s party magician.
“You can come down here and help me fix her though, I can show you how she runs,” he suggested, “mostly, of course, if I explained it in detail your human brain would probably leak out your ears like strawberry jam.”
Rose wasn’t entirely sure how much of that was sarcasm, and decided to take the whole thing as mostly genuine.
“Alright, teach me then.”
The Doctor’s head moved up with enthusiasm and his glasses fell down his nose again.
“Are you serious?” he said smiling.
“Yeah, teach me, I know what a wrench is, I'm not completely useless, that there just looks like an odd shaped wrench.” She said plainly, “physics of using a wrench is the same across the stars I'd imagine.”
And that was music that might as well have been composed specifically for his ears.
“Yeah! Yeah, brilliant,” He stood up and he wasn’t sure if it was the bloodrush from that or something else that made his face feel all hot all of a sudden.
“Alright I'll uh, well how about we sort the noise out first then, that should be easy enough.” He was smiling with his teeth again like he was so full of energy and it went directly into his face.
“Okay, first thing’s first, if you’re up in the inner working of it you need safety glasses, there's nine hundred years worth of dust on some of that equipment and avoiding blindness via alien brake dust to the cornea is more important than pride.” He was rummaging through a closet-like thing that Rose thought appeared solely upon him deciding he needed something from it.
“Lucky me, I've got these,” he tapped his glasses back up his nose. “Not to mention disposable eyes.”
“No more regenerating, not for stupid things anyway, I like this one,” Rose protested.
“Can always just find someone in spacetime that’ll get me some new ones anyway, don't have to throw the whole thing away.” He always spoke fast and strung his words together and the last bit of his sentence was strung on with more purposeful stitching than the first half. “Good to know you like this one though, haven't heard that yet, I was starting to feel all self conscious.”
“Don't get a big head about it,” She said, making her way towards the closet to offer a hand.
“You like the brown eyes then? If I do mess them all up because of my cavalier, bad boy, approach to my own safety goggles I'll be sure to get another set of brown ones. Maybe without the damned farsightedness these ones ‘ve got”
“I like the glasses, and the eyes, the brown suits you.”
“Here we are,” Rose wondered if he heard any of what she’d just said. He emerged from the closet with a handful of mismatched safety goggles for various activities and after holding them up in front of her face opted for a pair of flip-down lens welding glasses that were a light translucent yellow with a flip down almost opaque green welding lens. There were round, classic, steampunk shaped goggles but upon seeing the other options rose figured there were the lesser of all of the evils strictly aesthetic and practically speaking. He pulled them over her eyes and tightened the elastic strap so they fit her.
“There we are Rose, safe and sound.” He jokingly flicked the welding lens down and dodged her hand as she swatted blindly at him. She stumbled a few steps ahead trying to grab him as they laughed in a comically unfair fight.
“Behind you,” He said tapping her shoulder, “Nope, I'm a horrible liar, I’m the other way behind you, yep, that's the one, no no a little to the left.” He giggled. “Yeah yeah right-”
She flipped up her lenses and saw him across the room on the other side of the console and made a break for him.
“Ooh cheater!” He swung himself under the railing around the console and sidestepped left, then right, then left again in a mirrored dance she did across the console attempting to predict which way he was going to run. She picked up a blue rag off the ground and made a goofy threatening face.
“Oh no, god, mercy!” He waved a previously white rag around as she followed him around the console like horses attached to a merry go round. He tripped on his own loosely tied, half falling apart shoe and caught himself on the console railing. This means however that Rose had caught up to him and covered his eyes with the blue rag.
“How’s blindness doctor? Don't even need 900 year old space dust.” They both sat down on the floor in a pile of laughter.
“This is why I do any kind of important work at night you’re horribly distracting.” He said waving both of the rags at her, smacking her lenses down again with them.
“Ah yes that must be awful sitting here all by yourself risking death by space dust without anyone to chase around and mess with, truly awful.”
“It is!” He argued, “horrible! Miserable! But things get done.”
“And if you had actually shown me how to do them they would be getting done twice as fast right this moment.”
“Right open the hatch then, it’s all a big circle. Any hatch on this console will lead you the same place.”
“Where's the handle?”
“You see the half circle on the left there it’s got the instructions on it,” He reached over her shoulder to polish the surface with his thumb showing off the intricate circles within it around a flip-up style handle on the side.
“The Tardis isn’t translating it. I can't read that.”
“It’s in Gallifreyan, that’d be like an English dictionary that translates English.”
“Right then, that's incredibly helpful,” Rose said putting her hand on it, “don't suppose it's Gallifreyan for pull?” She pulled and answered her own question as the hatch hissed open to reveal moving parts and a sort of maintenance level below the main deck of the Tardis.
“So why the sudden interest in this stuff, you never want to help out when I’m fixing the Tardis?” He said clambering through the hatch and offering Rose a hand behind him. “Not that I’m complaining at all. I could go on about this stuff for decades, if I’d known you were interested, I would have.”
The maintenance level of the Tardis had a low ceiling, not enough standing room for the Doctor but enough for Rose, more of a crawl-space than another floor.
“‘Dunno, you never asked,” she said simply. “You do all this stuff when I sleep.”
“Well when you’re awake isn’t it more fun to actually go places and see things? I figured you’d rather do that during your day than this and your days are so short, a third of it you’re sleeping, ridiculous if you ask me.” He grabbed one of his tools from the other open hatch he was in earlier.
“I wouldn't mind having days where we do nothing, Tardis house-chore days where nothing interesting happens,” Rose said, backed against a wall to give the doctor lots of room to gather his things. “Like filler episodes in a sitcom.”
He turned towards her and smiled again, “alright, from now on I’ll offer, how’s that?” He smiled and cerimoniously handed her one of the alien wrenches, it was an odd curved shape like a shallow rainbow and the ends looked like they fit over the large bolts on the Tardis’s clockwork interior.
“What do you call this?” She asked, holding it up.
“T-bar,” He said, looking up and squinting.
She looked back and forth from him to the curved wrench.
“Sure.”
“Okay so the interior bar that should have swung that hatch open --there, see?-- broke off when you forced it open.”
“Okay,” her eyes followed his hand as he tapped each thing he was talking about.
“So I replaced it, see? And I had to cut off the broken bar, but I think when it broke it also took the bracket--there--off with it. So I think the bracket fell somewhere, and it's stuck in the gears that's what the clunking sound is.”
Rose was nodding.
“I think.”
Rose nodded harder.
“Okay, so we need to take this panel here off, that's those bolts.”
“Well I can do that,” She said, she went up to the panel and figured out how to fit the wrench around it after a couple different angles and a bit of a jiggle.
“Is it still, you know, righty tighty, lefty loosey on a spaceship?”
“Oh yeah, that's actually a galactic standard.”
“Brilliant, of course it is.”
. . .
Rose woke up on a couch, she was covered in a heavy, colourful patchwork blanket in a corner of the Tardis near the console. The living room-like area was one of the things that tended to materialize in the same place whenever they were settled and landed on the ground. She blinked her eyes heavily and wondered if she was still dreaming when she saw the Doctor draped sideways across the arm on the other side of the couch. He was asleep, first of all, which was unheard of. And he was in an awkward lanky pile with his legs draped the wrong way over the arm of the couch. And he was snoring? The Doctor, alien Time Lord, The Oncoming Storm, feared or relied upon, he was known by seemingly everyone, he was like a folk hero, and he snored .
Why was Rose asleep on the couch? She backtracked events: woke up, noise, went to help, ran around the Tardis for a bit and then we fished that bracket out of the gears, helped him adjust everything so it was running smoothly, he showed me how some of the systems worked and then we cleaned all the tools up. Sat down, made tea… oh and then he was talking. That was nice. He was talking about the stars and the ship and how they’re alike and he said something about every curve on the ship being a letter or a phrase--what did he say??--
Every line and curve on the ship is on purpose, the console would tell you how to fly it if you looked close enough, the gears are lines in an adventure story and every cog in the ship sings together in harmony.
That was what it was, but Rose didn't remember all of it, she remembered the way he sounded when he said it, under a spell. He lit up like he was an inordinately complicated wind up toy playing out what each gear in his assembly was put there to do. Now this beautifully complicated vessel for all that is wonderful and strange in the universe was asleep in a pile in front of her. He was cute too, he was wearing a grease covered off-white shirt and the pinstripe pants, only the base layer of his protective shell of a suit. His hair was a mess, in a less intentional way than usual, and he had a dust line around his eyes where Rose had made him put on actual safety glasses. Even the little goggles shaped dirt ring made him look cute. Rose did like this new regeneration. For purely selfish reasons.
She pulled the other half of the blanket she was under over him, he had selflessly tucked her under it without regard for himself when Rose had fallen asleep. But she saw the ease in tension in his body when she fixed it over him just now and knew just how cold he actually was. He did not run hot, he ran very cold, three layers of suit cold. Rose, however, was a little of the opposite and when she put the blanket over him he unconsciously inched towards her.
When the two of them finally woke up properly in the morning they were piled against each other under the single blanket on the single couch. As she faded into consciousness a little alarm blared in her brain. Do I move?? Is this fine? He seemed to notice she woke up.
“S’cold,” he mumbled half asleep, but really it was confirmation for Rose that it was perfectly fine. “Why’s it so cold in here?”
“It's your spaceship.” she said groggily in the way couples say it’s your dog when both are trying to sleep and the dog needs to go out.
“Rose?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.” He said quietly, “for your help, I liked the work much better with you.”
“I liked it too, it’s cool,” she said smiling, “if I had the smarts for college maybe I’d have been an engineer.”
“you’re brilliant,” he said, believing in it like it was gospel truth. “You'd be a fantastic engineer.”
“Wouldn’t have met you though, if I hadn’t been working in that shop.” she said, “I wouldn’t change a thing. Any life where we get to see the stars together, that’s a life I did right.”
“Yeah, I think so too.”