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He supposes that what drew him to her in the first place is that she was smart. No, more than smart--brilliant, in fact, and for their people, "brilliant" is no small compliment. She picks up everything they lay in front of her with a voracious, insatiable appetite for the secrets of the cosmos, unraveling the mysteries faster than it took their teachers to muck the things up enough to actually be able to call them "problems." He admires her determined spirit, her competitive drive and the way she handles it all with such easy grace that it mortifies the rest of their class.
He thinks he fell in love with her the most the day he found out that she beat him in exams.
He thinks she fell in love with him when he admitted as much to her in the same breath as his plea that she not go spreading that information around. She smiled at him so, and he knew that she was flattered by his awe of her mind enough that she was willing to be tender of his pride.
They lay together now in a red sea of grass, her charts spread about them as she records the movements of the suns and names the nearest planets and the system of moons their solar system shares. She has him quiz her on every star and her ability to remember it, its name and its coordinates, for they are mere weeks from graduation and it has never mattered to her more than it does now that everything she writes is perfect.
She needn't worry, he thinks. It will be.
They've been discussing recently their plans for after they're awarded their titles, their admittance to the ranks of the Time Lords. She dreams more of time than she does of space, for as interesting as she finds the worlds outside their own, the title--as she has recently pointed out to him--is, after all, Time Lord. What else are they doing this for, if not the wonders of history and the expanding, terrifying infinite possibility of the future?
"Still, though," he ponders aloud, "might be nice to see a few of the planets on the other end of the universe. Just to see what's out there."
She doesn't ask what he's talking about, as unrelated to their present activity as this snippet of preponderance is. She has a trick of being able to keep up with his thoughts, his odd tangential shifts in conversation, that marks her as unique among their fellows. She never has to ask what he's talking about.
She looks up from her notes and smiles slightly at him. "Yes, perhaps. Nice."
"Of course," he adds, "it might...be nicer...to see 'em all with you."
"Oh?" She asks, picking up a silver-tipped leaf from the ground and tucking it behind his ear. He barely supresses a shiver at her touch.
"Well, yeah. For a bit." He looks at her sideways, bites his lip, blows a thoughtful raspberry and adds, "Well, perhaps longer than a bit."
He has her full attention now. She cocks her head and regards him curiously, with a slight edge of hesitance, as if she knows what he's going to say but doesn't dare ask if he really is going to say it.
"I was thinking of asking you to marry me." He admits.
"Oh." She says, as if this thought had not occurred to her--which it has--and now that it's before her, she'd like to give it her full, considerable concentration. "Did you change your mind?"
He shrugs his shoulders and rolls his eyes toward the heavens in mock-consideration. "Eh...not really, no." A beat passes in potent silence, and he meets her eyes, eyes so deeply green, he feels he could swim in them forever and never find his way back. "What do you say? Shall we?" It comes out with more awkwardness than he'd intended. Because marriage is a deeper, more terrifying proposition for Gallifreyans than it is for other species, because there is no such thing for them as "'til death us do part." There is only "I take you." Most of them don't even consider such a proposition at so young an age as they two, who, at three hundred years old, may as well be children.
She kisses him in answer. He breathes out steadily against her lips, rests his brow against hers, and asks, not at all in his typical self-assured way, "That a yes?"
She smiles and strokes a hand back through his hair, her fingers warmed by the atmosphere of Gallifreyan summer, and kisses him again. "All right, then." She whispers. "Of course."
"Of course." He repeats, letting his head drop against her shoulder. "Absolutely. Fantastic."
What better word is there to describe it?