Chapter Text
The Doctor had taken you to visit an alien planet that hardly ever experienced temperatures above freezing. The architecture was vibrant and colorful, appearing even more so thanks to the stark contrast of the snowy landscape it was built upon. It was beautiful, you couldn't deny that—but it became hard to care about scenic views when you started losing feeling in your fingers and toes.
So, you were already miserably freezing as you started on your way back to the TARDIS. Annoyingly, the Doctor had had to park a fair distance away from the town you'd visited. There hadn't been a good spot to park it within the confines of the town, which had too much uneven, snow-piled ground—and then around the town was an extremely wide frozen moat, which you couldn't park on either.
For your comfort, the Doctor had decided to take you to one of the warmest days of the year there. Obviously, it ultimately hadn't been enough to keep you from freezing your ass off, but it had been enough to where the moat wasn't uniformly frozen over. Here and there were large cracks, with some thick sheets of ice being entirely disconnected from the greater whole. This didn't seem to bother the Doctor at all—he stepped right over the cracks, onto and off of the separated sheets, all without any hesitation—but even after you'd made it safely over it to get into the town, you were still distrustful as you crossed it to leave.
You were trailing a bit behind the Doctor, just as you had on your way in, carefully testing your weight on the ice before committing to taking full steps. He'd told you earlier that if the ice was going to break, it would've broken beneath him, but he didn't try to push you to keep up with him—if taking your time was going to ease your anxieties, he respected that.
Nearing the end of the frozen moat, you were finally feeling better about the whole thing. The TARDIS wasn't too far away now, and your sights were straight ahead on the promise of warmth that was waiting for you.
And then there was a groan beneath you, a resounding crackle, and you were slamming into the water.
It hit you like a solid wall, knocking the breath out of you—and then the cold hit. All at once, it felt like countless knives carved from ice stabbed every inch of your body. You spasmed on instinct, your mouth opening to drag in a gasp, but instead of air a shock of freezing water seared down your throat and icy pain exploded inside your chest. You were frozen inside and out, and everything was white pain and cold and panic, you couldn’t breathe, you were drowning. Your hands scraped for purchase, but there was nothing to grab, nothing to save yourself with, you were going to die—
Then—strong hands were under your arms, pulling, hauling, breaking you back into the air. You weren’t drowning anymore. The air was somehow even more frigid than the water had been, but at least you could breathe it—sort of. You collapsed against him, trembling, dragging in ragged, desperate breaths between violent coughs.
“Got you,” the Doctor murmured, voice low and steady, sounding distant and muffled like you were still underwater. “I’ve got you. You’re safe. I’ve got you.”
Slowly, he pulled you back and rearranged you in his arms. You were left staring up at his face, at his eyes staring straight ahead under a furrowed brow. The sky moved behind him as you felt a repeated, rhythmic jostling of your body, and it took you longer than it should’ve to realize it was because he was walking, carrying you away. Your mind felt like it had turned into ice right along with your body.
The next thing you knew, the sky was gone, and you were inside the moody, metal interior of the TARDIS, and he mumbled something under his breath that sounded like it included the words “almost there,” but you weren’t entirely sure. He kept walking through the TARDIS until you were somewhere brighter again. Your bedroom.
There, he rearranged you once more, leaving you standing upright, and you wanted to cry out for him to hold you again, but you couldn’t form any words. You just stared, unable to do anything at all as he started methodically peeling off your drenched clothes piece by piece. He struggled with your limbs that didn’t want to bend or move, struggled with his own hands shaking, but he didn’t stop. As he made it to your underclothes, he muttered something—something like, “Hate me later,” and he removed those from you, too.
A tiny part of your brain acknowledged that you should probably be feeling some sort of way about what was happening, but you couldn’t find it in you to care. Not when you were still frozen.
With the last of your clothes gone, he yanked your big, fluffy blanket off your bed and cocooned it around you tightly. Then your body shifted in his arms again—lifted, tilted—and the room blurred around you, and suddenly you were lower to the ground. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you registered that he’d brought you over to sit in your papasan chair.
He maneuvered you so you were sitting up more, securely on his lap, one arm cinched tight around your waist before he forced it to loosen—like he realized he’d grabbed you too hard without meaning to. Your head ended up tucked against his neck, your skin brushing his.
For a moment, nothing changed.
Then the warmth hit you.
You had no control over it—you pressed your face firmly against his neck, desperately chasing its heat, not caring if his skin burned yours or if you were nestling into him. You just needed it. Needed him.
His hands rose to your head, and you barely registered what he was doing—until a shocking stripe of extra cold dragged up your spine as he lifted your wet hair away from your back. You jerked involuntarily, a weak half-hiss slipping out.
“Sorry,” he murmured, almost pained. Despite his apology, his fingers kept working, carefully peeling the clinging strands free.
Only when the last of your hair was lifted away and your back wasn’t smothered in its icy strands anymore did you realize how much it helped. Your back was still freezing, like every part of you, but the bite was lessened.
You shivered once.
You shivered again, with more force.
And it kept happening, again and again, each shiver being stronger than the last, until it felt like your bones could jump out of your skin. You didn’t understand why—why it was getting worse. You hadn’t been shivering before, so why were you now, when you were out of the cold and all bundled up?
“It means you’re getting better,” the Doctor murmured. “You quickly reached a point you were too cold to shiver at all, before—your body was shutting down. But it’s working again, helping you warm up more.”
He had to be wrong, a small part of you thought—because you didn’t feel anything close to being warmed up. Your nose and cheek were warmer where they were pressed against his neck, but the rest of you was still freezing.
...Maybe you were a bit warmer, though, another part of you thought. Just a bit. Not enough that it really mattered. More like your temperature was a single degree above freezing—technically not frozen anymore, but close enough.
The shivers continued, rocking your body violently. You couldn’t care about what the Doctor had said about them. You wanted them to stop. You wanted to feel like you were in control of yourself, like your body was yours.
You weren’t sure how much time passed until then, but eventually, something else new crept up on you. A tingling in the tips of your fingers and toes. They gradually stretched up more of your hands and feet, growing in intensity like your shivers, until it all of a sudden was no longer tingles but sparks. You gasped at the sharp sting. One after another, more came, rolling through your hands and feet in slow, painful waves, drawing a whimper out of you.
The Doctor tightened his arms around you, just slightly. “I know,” he murmured, voice rough with sympathy. “It stings, I’m sorry. Your circulation’s returning.”
Make it stop, you wanted to tell him. Make the stinging stop, make the shivers stop, make the cold stop.
You tried to swallow down the panic clawing up your throat, but you couldn’t get your body to listen. Every breath was a ragged drag of air, every exhale shuddering out of you. You squeezed your eyes tight and drew in a breath that stuttered hard at the end.
Something warm slid down the side of your face.
Your brain couldn’t compute it, or the reasoning behind its presence. The only warmth you'd had was the warmth of the Doctor's skin where it pressed against yours, but neither of you had moved, and everywhere else on you was still ice-cold. More like it followed, bubbling out of your eyes and rolling over the curves of your cheeks, leaving weirdly warm trails in their wake.
Then a broken sound, high-pitched and helpless, escaped you.
Oh.
You were crying.
The Doctor tightened his arms around you further. His voice dropped low, a murmur right by your ear. “Hey... Hey, it’s all right. You’re safe.”
Safe. You wanted to believe that. You wanted your body to believe that.
But another warm tear slipped free, and another, and another. Your breath hitched, and the next violent shiver dragged an equally violent sob out of you.
“I know,” he whispered again. “You’re all right. Just let it out.”
It wasn’t like you had a choice. You’d lost all control of yourself the second the ice had shattered beneath you.
Sobs continued to rack you alongside shivers, worsening as the stinging pain in your hands and feet trickled even further up your arms and legs. One of the Doctor’s arms around you loosened, and he started to rub soothing circles on your back. It helped. Barely at all, but still—it helped. The rhythm of his hand through the blanket was something for your body to focus on.
Some time passed, and the pain in your limbs was still there, but the waves weren't hitting you as hard. The sparks dulled from sharp stabs to prickles. Your fingers twitched helplessly, curling into the blanket, though the jolts that ran through them now weren't agonizing as much as they were just uncomfortable. It was manageable.
Your sobs were much the same. Your breath still hitched when you pulled it in, but it didn't collapse on itself like before. Further breaths were still shuddering, but steadier.
Somewhere beneath all that, awareness of something else flickered to you.
Warmth.
In truth, it was less warmth, and more ... less-cold, but it was growing there all the same. Things were easing up.
Your tears thinned out, falling with less frequency and causing fewer and lighter hiccuping sobs. You violent shivers gradually softened into smaller trembles.
"There you go," the Doctor murmured, his voice low and warm, relief leaking into its edges. "You're doing brilliantly."
Nothing about you felt brilliant. You felt exhausted and weak and small.
But at least you weren’t as painfully cold as before.
As more time passed, the less-cold threading its way through you became even lesser-cold. You were still cold, to be sure, not yet warm by any stretch of the imagination, but the thought of actually achieving warmth at some point no longer felt like an outright impossibility.
And you felt like you had a clue what few things were holding you back from that achievement, besides the passage of more time—and both had to do with wetness. For one, the Doctor hadn’t dried your body off before he’d wrapped the blanket around you, and so all the cold water that had been dripping on your skin had soaked into the fibers of the blanket. For two, your hair was still drenched with the cold water, and even though its length was separated from your skin by the blanket, the remainder of it was clinging to your head.
Every tiny improvement only made those things and the remaining cold they caused more obvious. Your skin felt clammy where the blanket hugged it, the damp fabric leeching away any potential added warmth. Your hair was worse. The longer it clung to your scalp, heavy and icy, the more it felt like it was anchoring you to the lake.
You shifted in the blanket, hoping that you could maybe move it to get some hopefully non-wet parts of it against your skin, but it was no use. When that didn't work, you angled your head downwards so its wet peak was against the Doctor's neck and jaw, hoping to take some of his warmth.
That seemed to tip him off. His hand paused on your back, and then he drew in a slow breath through his nose.
“All right,” he murmured. “Time for the next bit.”
Before you could even wonder what he meant, he slowly moved you both and adjusted his grip on you, one arm going under your knees and the other around your back. He stood, holding you in a protective cradle like before.
“We're not finished yet,” he said softly, looking down at you with an expression you could only read as apologetic. “You need the cold water off you. All of it.”
He started to walk, going for your en-suite, and you wondered what he had in mind. Was he going to blowdry your hair for you?
The door was cracked open just a touch, and he nudged it enough to allow the two of you through. Inside the bathroom, he kicked the door shut and brought you right over to the toilet. He maneuvered you so you were sitting on its closed lid and drew back from you, and you could’ve whimpered at the sudden lack of him against you—you hadn’t realized just how much his body heat had been helping, even through the wettened thick blanket, until then.
Going to the bathtub, he turned the tap on and tested the water with his fingers.
Oh. He wanted you to take a bath.
“Nothing too warm,” he murmured, half to himself, half to you. “You’re on the mend ... but you’re still in a fragile state. We don’t want to send you right back into shock.”
Once he was satisfied with the temperature of the water, he plugged the drain and straightened himself back up, turning to face you. The tiniest grimace crossed his face, but he swallowed it and refocused.
“...I’m going to help you.”
You just gave a tiny nod. You couldn’t manage any more than that.
His gaze drifted back over to the tub to watch as it filled. Soon, he was leaning over again to turn the tap off. The silence from the lack of running water felt louder than it had before he’d turned it on in the first place.
The Doctor took a small step closer to you then, hesitating as his eyes examined your face. Whatever he found there must’ve reassured him, because his shoulders eased—only a fraction, but enough to notice.
“Let’s get you out of the blanket first,” he murmured. “Nice and slow.”
He crouched in front of you, hands gentle as he reached for the corners of the blanket and started peeling it back. The air in the bathroom wasn’t cold by any normal measure, but compared to the cocoon you’d been wrapped in, it felt sharp. Even with the blanket hardly pulled back, your shivers began to worsen again.
“I know,” he said quickly, almost wincing on your behalf. “I know. Just a moment.”
His hands worked steadily, careful not to tug or jostle you more than necessary. He kept one hand braced on your shoulder, grounding you, making sure you didn’t tip or slump sideways as the blanket slipped away from your back and arms. Another violent shiver racked you as the length of your hair fell against your back once more. By the time the last of the blanket fell around you in a heavy, sodden heap, you were already curling in on yourself instinctively, trying to keep yourself from getting any colder again. A flicker of awareness prickled through you, stronger than it had been before—you knew you should be feeling something more than just coldness, but nothing else fully registered. Your heartbeat only picked up a touch in your chest.
The Doctor didn’t give the cold a chance to settle further over you. He straightened and eased his hands under your arms.
“Up you come,” he said gently.
Your legs didn’t exactly cooperate, and he supported most of your weight as you stood up. Even knowing he was trying to guide you toward the tub, you couldn’t stop yourself—you leaned forward against him, pressing yourself into his warmth, wishing you had it in you to reach your arms up around him and pull him even closer to you. He sighed, wrapping his arms around you, gingerly rubbing your back.
“I’ll hug you all you want later,” he murmured. “It’s bathtime, now.”
He slowly pulled you back from him and started guiding you toward the tub with the same deliberate gentleness he’d used for everything else. Standing before it, you tried to lift a leg up to step in, but you couldn't quite get it over the side of the tub. Carefully grabbing your thigh, he helped you raise your leg enough to do so, and then you began to lower it.
When your toes brushed the bathwater, you sucked in a breath. You thought he’d said the water wasn’t supposed to be too warm, but it was.
Regardless of the temperature, the Doctor steadied you as you eased that leg the rest of the way in. Getting the other in was a process much the same, where you couldn’t quite lift it the whole way and he had to help you get it the rest of the way up and over the side of the tub. Both feet firmly on the floor of the tub, you were left shivering with only your calves in the water.
“That’s it,” he said softly. “You're all right. Let's get you down.”
He began to help you lower yourself the rest of the way into the water. You shivered as the bath rose to meet your thighs, then your hips, then your waist. Once you were sitting fully in the tub, working on catching your breath, he took off his coat and rolled his sleeves up. Then he slid his hand behind your head, cupping your neck and the base of your skull, and you leaned back into his touch instinctively.
“Keep leaning back,” he murmured. “I’ve got you.”
You let him guide you, easing further into the water as he supported your weight. Slowly, carefully, he tilted you back until only your face from the ears up and the top of your chest remained above the bath, your hair fanning out into the water behind you. The temperature of the water covering most of your skin was a peculiar contrast to the cold that still clung to you.
From there, he had you tilt your head back just a bit further to submerge as much of your hair in the water as possible. Where some hair remained above the surface, he scooped water from the tub with his free hand and let it trickle over it, fingers brushing lightly through your roots to make sure the liquid reached every part. The sensation was strangely tingly at first, but quickly transformed into something soothing. The biting cold that had seemed glued to your hair, to your head, began to melt away with it.
He repeated the motion, careful, methodical, until every last strand of your hair was wet with the lukewarm bathwater and the icy sting was gone. Your scalp was still cold, but it was more in line with the cold the rest of your body felt.
Suddenly, you realized that you'd been staring up at him the entire time. His face was calm, focused, gentle, with something else there you couldn't quite pinpoint. You hadn't meant to stare—but even aware that you were, you couldn't make yourself look away.
He seemed to sense your awareness. For a brief moment, his lips curved, just barely, like he was trying not to smile. Your heart lurched, and your cheeks tingled.
But your cheeks weren’t just tingling, not like your scalp was where he was still massaging it. They were tingling with warmth—not just less-cold like before, but actual warmth. And your sudden realization of that made you realize, too, that warmth was starting to spread through all of you. It was faint and fragile, not enough to completely rid you of the cold, but it was there.
Your muscles loosened, the tenseness that had remained in your limbs becoming drowned out by a deep heaviness. Your eyelids became heavy as well, turning the act of blinking into a slow chore—one you couldn't put up with for long. When your eyes drooped closed in another blink, they didn't reopen.
Drifting in the lukewarm water, one of the Doctor's hands still holding you steady at the back of your head while the other worked through your hair, the world quiet and fuzzy around the edges...
You might not quite have fallen asleep ... but you weren’t exactly awake, either.
A tiny sliver of consciousness crept back to you at some point, and it took you a few moments to realize it came from something having changed. The hand that had been combing through your hair had come to rest on the side of your face, the thumb slowly rubbing your cheek... You leaned your face further into the touch without thinking about it.
Then you heard your name.
The sound of it in his voice was another gentle nudge into further consciousness. You slowly opened your eyes. Even though your sight was bleary and unfocused, you could make out the concern on his face, and the way it morphed into something almost relieved.
“There you are,” he said softly, thumb still swiping your cheek. “I hate to wake you ... but the bath's starting to cool. We should get you out before you start losing heat again. You can go to sleep after.”
You hadn’t noticed that the water was cooler until he said as much, and a shiver ended up rolling through you. You tried to give an affirmative hum, only for the sound to come out as a tiny croak.
“Don’t worry,” he murmured. “I’ve still got you.”
He slowly, gently sat you upright, then kept one hand steady on your shoulder as he reached over to pull the plug. As the water started draining, he stood up and leaned over, grabbing under your arms and lifting you. You tried your hardest to help, folding your legs to plant your feet on the floor of the tub and then working to straighten yourself up. Once you were fully standing, shivering in the air, he guided you to face him, and you began to step out. It was easier than getting in had been, with your legs being less stiff now.
Pulling a large, fluffy towel off a rack, the Doctor began drying you off with it, starting with your arms. As he made it to your chest, you were again hit with the feeling that you should be feeling something about this, but all that happened again was an increase in your heartrate. He crouched as he worked his way down and around, only standing back up again when he’d dried you to your feet, and then he wrapped the towel around your shoulders. You slowly reached your hands up from underneath the towel to grab it and pull it tighter around yourself, letting out a sigh when you felt thoroughly embraced by it.
With another towel in hand, he disappeared behind you, pulling your hair out from where it was trapped under the towel you were wrapped in. You shivered again, not quite from the cold, as he started working on getting out the excess water, massaging your scalp and unintentionally but gently pulling at the length of your hair.
“...All right,” he said softly after some time. “Let’s go get you dressed and in bed.”
You gave a little nod, barely aware of the words.
Fingers gently grabbed your chin, and he said your name again.
You struggled to open your eyes, not having noticed they’d fallen shut in the first place. The Doctor was standing in front of you again. You were eye-level with his chest, as usual, but unlike usual you didn’t have it in you to raise your gaze to see his face. You didn’t even particularly want to. All you wanted was just...
You almost fell forward into his chest, closing your eyes again and turning your head to better rest it against him. His hearts drummed in your ear as he wrapped his arms around your back. Slowly, you snaked your arms out of your towel to wrap them around him, not caring that the motion made your towel start to slip. His hands pressed down firmer on your back, holding the towel in place there so it couldn’t fall all the way off.
“...Suppose I did promise you I'd hug you all you want later,” he breathed out quietly.
He let you stay like that, tucked against the rhythmic thrum of his hearts, for longer than you thought either of you planned. Long enough that your knees wobbled. That was when he shifted, just slightly, and dipped his head so his cheek brushed the top of your hair.
“Come on,” he murmured, the words warm and unbearably gentle. “You can sleep in just a minute, but let me get you into something dry first.”
You made a noise that wasn’t quite a protest, more like a sleepy groan of reluctance. He huffed a soft laugh against you—just a breath of sound—before pulling back from you, readjusting your towel around you and moving to your side. With an arm around your shoulder, he guided you out of the bathroom and to your dresser. He mumbled a comment about you staying up before he let go of you and started rifling through your drawers. After placing all but one of the items of clothing he’d pulled out on top of your dresser, he faced you again.
“Arms up,” he said.
You obeyed slowly but automatically, letting the towel fall off your shoulders, and he slipped the long-sleeved top onto you. When it settled against you, you let your arms fall back to your sides, and he removed the length of your hair from the inside of your shirt. He crouched down then, steadying you by the hip as he helped you step into your underwear next. A pair of fluffy pajama bottoms followed, and finally he pulled a pair of socks onto your feet.
“There we go,” he murmured when he finished, standing up. “All ready for bed... But I’m taking you to a different one. It won’t be a long walk, I promise.”
He put his arm back around your shoulder and began guiding you to the door. You wanted to ask why you couldn’t sleep in your bed, but you hardly had the energy to shuffle alongside him, much less to form words. After opening up your door, he brought you out into the corridor and right over to another door straight across from your room. There’d never been a door across from your room before, you were pretty sure. Either way, you didn’t spare it any more thought as he brought you inside the dim bedroom.
The Doctor led you over to the bed and helped you onto it. As you curled up on your side, he pulled the thick duvet up and over you, and he tucked it around you.
“Your comforter is soaked,” he reminded you gently. “I hope you can sleep well in here.”
He lingered a second, smoothing the duvet over your shoulder with one last careful pass of his hand. ...And then he straightened up. He stayed there, standing beside the bed looking at you, like he was the one waiting for something.
You blinked at him. Slow. Heavy. You didn’t have the energy to lift your hand and reach for him. Didn’t have the words ready. So you just ... stared. Willing him to understand.
He didn’t.
“You can rest now,” he said softly. “Just let yourself sleep.”
That wasn’t...
A little spark of frustration pushed up through your exhaustion—tiny, but enough to scrape a sound up past vocal cords that hadn’t done anything worthwhile since they were flooded with ice water.
“...Hold me.”
The words were barely there—more exhale than speech—but they made him freeze. His eyes widened just a fraction. For a heartbeat, he looked like he wanted to argue... But then his face softened. The tension in his shoulders eased.
And he nodded.
“Of course.”
His legs shuffled as he stepped out of his shoes, and then he lifted the duvet and slid in beside you with slow, cautious movements. The bed dipped under his weight, and the warmth radiating from his body seeped straight into yours.
The moment he was close enough, you gravitated toward him without thinking—laying your head on his chest, curling into his side like you belonged there. His arms wrapped around you automatically, fingers spreading over your back.
Your breath eased out in a long sigh as everything in you unwound.
“You’re safe,” he murmured, voice barely above a whisper. “Sleep.”
And with him there, solid and warm against you, you did.