Cooking Lessons (1/1)
Title - Cooking Lessons (1/1)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - Adult
Characters - Ten, Rose, OCs
Spoilers - Through the end of S2
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids. They're all mine.)
Summary - It turns out cooking is almost as hard as piloting a TARDIS.
Author's Notes - Yes, jlrpuckis STILL in the UK, and yes, we hate her for it (yes, I use the royal we, what of it?), but she did beta this for me before she left, with a great deal of brilliance, for which I thank her. Thanks also to Kristin for the brainstorming and to bouncy_castle79for the read-through. The lovely icon was created by swankkatfor me, commissioned by jlrpuckfor my birthday.
It had developed into A Thing. Athena’s insistence, after the Girl Scout debacle, that she get alone time with her father had become a scheduled event on the TARDIS, and the Doctor and Rose had expanded it to the other children. It happened every Earth standard week, relatively measured, for at least an Earth standard hour, relatively measured, that each child got alone time with each of their parents, and, once a month, both at the same time while Jackie enjoyed watching the other two. Rose thought it was necessary for their kids, with their unconventional lifestyles, to be completely the centre of attention for a little while, and the kids thrived on it, guarding the time jealously.
Nothing ever happened during these hours. More often than not they sat in one of the TARDIS’s many rooms, munching on all sorts of unhealthy food and sharing stories with each other. It was a tradition in a family that necessarily had few, carrying on for years, as the children grew older.
The Doctor loved these hours with his kids. They were Time Lord kids-an entirely new developmental stage for Time Lords that delighted him. He was astonished by each of his children: Brem, who was far too bloody brilliant for his own good, quick and sarcastic and actually generous to a fault when you got right down to it; Athena, who was funny and clever and very much like her mother while being fiercely herself and having a self-possession he envied even at his age; and Fortuna, who was so sweet-tempered and easy-going that the Doctor almost couldn’t imagine where she had come from. The Doctor was completely amazed by the normality of all his children. He credited this entirely to Rose.
His children routinely caught him completely off-guard-who knew children would turn out to be more fascinating than all the wonders of the universe?-so he shouldn’t have been as surprised as he was when Athena suddenly said, during one of their hours, “I think we should take cooking lessons.”
“You think what?”
“Mary has to take piano lessons, right?”
Mary was one of Rose’s cousin’s offspring; the Doctor never could keep them straight. They saw Mary sometimes while visiting Jackie, and they had seen her on their most recent trip. She was younger than both of his girls, so the Doctor had never paid much attention to her.
“Does she?” he asked, to keep up his end of the conversation.
“I don’t know how to play the piano,” said Athena, as if Mary knowing something she didn’t was unacceptable.
The Doctor was surprised again. “You know how to re-program a teleport. What do you want to know how to do a thing like play the piano for?”
“I don’t. But I think we should do something, during our hours together, to better ourselves.”
It sounded suspiciously like Rose. The Doctor narrowed his eyes at Athena. “Did your mother tell you to do this?”
“No,” said Athena.
“You’re not nearly as good a liar as your brother,” commented the Doctor, dryly. “If you want to take lessons in something, you should take lessons in lying from him.”
“Cooking lessons,” Athena repeated, stubbornly. “I want to take cooking lessons.”
“It’s silly, Athena. Cooking? Why does a Time Lord need to learn how to cook? Why don’t I teach you how to pilot the TARDIS instead?”
Athena rolled her eyes at him. “I know how to pilot the TARDIS already.”
More surprise. “How?”
“I pay attention to you and Brem. Everyone on this TARDIS could fly it if they needed to. No one on this TARDIS can cook.”
“Don’t let your mother hear you say that,” he told her.
********
“Athena has the most curious idea,” remarked the Doctor to Rose.
Rose, leaning over the sink in the cavernous bathroom they shared so she could better rub some alien anti-wrinkle cream into her skin, looked at him. “Yeah? What’s that?”
“She thinks we should take cooking lessons.”
“Oh,” said Rose, not pausing in the application of the cream.
“Don’t you think that’s odd?” he persisted.
She glanced at him in surprise, twisting the cap onto the cream. “Odd? No. Why is that odd?” She replaced the cream in the medicine cabinet and walked past him into the bedroom.
The Doctor turned to follow her. “You didn’t put her up to this?”
Rose sighed heavily, fluffing at her pillow. “No. I don’t orchestrate everything, you know.”
“It’s just so human,” he sputtered.
“Some things are,” muttered Rose, getting into bed. “She’s been wanting to take lessons in something ever since she found out about Sally’s little girl Mary taking piano lessons. I didn’t know she’d settled on cooking.”
The Doctor paused. “I think she wants us to take them together.”
“As a family?”
“No. Well, maybe. But definitely as a father-daughter activity.”
Rose looked at him for a second, then burst into laughter.
“Oi,” said the Doctor, wounded. “What’s so funny about that?”
“You! Cooking! You can barely toast a piece of bread!”
“That’s not my fault,” he protested. “That’s the toaster’s fault.” He walked to the other side of the bed and laid down on top of the covers on his back, crossing his ankles and resting his hands on his stomach and contemplating the ceiling thoughtfully. “I thought you’d put her up to it. Why should she want to take cooking lessons? And she was prattling on about ‘bettering herself.’ It sounded like you.”
“I didn’t tell her she had to better herself. I would never say something like that to her. She’s perfect just as she is.” Rose paused. “I told her she should find something that challenged you.”
“Challenged me?” he shrieked. “I don’t need to be challenged, Rose.”
“Of course you do. Everyone does.”
“How are you challenged?”
“I’m married to you.”
He pouted. “That’s a mean thing to say.”
“Aw.” She grinned as she rolled on top of him. “But I’m getting very good at it, don’t you think?”
“A bit,” he said, grudgingly. “Ish.”
She laughed and kissed him. “I think the cooking lessons sound like a good idea. Better than Athena’s first idea.”
“What was her first idea?”
“Archery lessons.”
The Doctor brightened. “Archery lessons? That’d be brilliant.”
“No,” said Rose.
********
“We can’t start out with beginners,” commented Athena.
“No, that’s just insulting,” agreed the Doctor.
Rose looked over at the pair of them, where they were looking over catalogues of various continuing education facilities offering cooking lessons on Earth. The Doctor’s first idea had been alien cooking lessons. Rose had vetoed that.
“But you are beginners,” Rose pointed out.
The Doctor looked at her over the top of his specs. “We’re Time Lords. Time Lords are never ‘beginners.’”
Rose rolled her eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she muttered.
“I bet Dad’ll be an excellent cook,” remarked Fortuna, loyally.
“Thank you, Fortuna.”
“Can I take the cooking lessons, too?”
“Do you want to take the cooking lessons?” asked Rose.
“I never get to do anything fun and different,” complained Fortuna, which was decidedly not true, but Rose considered that it probably felt exactly that way when you were the baby of the family.
“You can take the cooking lessons, too,” said Rose. “D’you want to take them, too, Brem?”
Brem snorted and responded without looking up from his journal. “No.”
“We’re taking advanced classes,” remarked Athena, with the implication that these would be too complicated for Fortuna.
Fortuna glared at her. “I’m a Time Lord, too, you know.”
“A little one.”
“Mum,” began Fortuna.
“Stop it, both of you. Go and set the table for dinner.”
They grumbled a bit, but they relinquished the catalogue and marched out of the library. The Doctor got up and disappeared into the section of the library with the cookbooks.
Rose looked over at Brem. “Do you think we should take lessons in something?”
Brem tossed his journal aside and considered. “I think we should take lessons in how to survive various kinds of food poisoning.”
Rose smiled at him. “You’re a sarcastic brat most of the time, you know.”
He grinned back. “Yeah, but I’m amusing, so you keep me around.”
“For now.”
There was a moment of silence. “I was thinking photography, maybe,” he ventured.
Rose looked at him in surprise. “Really?”
“I thought…yeah. I mean, if you wanted to. If you wanted to, I thought it would be fun. But only if you wanted to. I mean, maybe not.”
There were times, when he asked her things so very stammeringly, that she could hear his father, on their first Christmas together, when his body was still new, stammering about how he didn’t think she’d want to keep travelling with him. It was very hard to deny either of them anything when they asked for things so shyly. “I think,” she assured him, “it’d be a blast.”
********
The Doctor was wearing a brown pinstriped apron he’d found in the TARDIS wardrobe. It was covered in flour. As was he. And his two daughters. Rose and Brem, matching cameras ‘round their necks, stared at the trio.
“What’d you make?” Rose asked, finally.
“We made,” said the Doctor, stiffly, “a pineapple rum tartlet with crystallized plum sauce.”
“Other people did,” said Fortuna, sunnily. “Not us. We got flour everywhere.”
“Thank you, Fortuna,” said her father, dourly.
“The teacher made us sit in the corner and said we weren’t to touch any more ingredients after Dad accidentally exploded the pineapple.”
“I thought the sonic was on a different setting,” the Doctor defended himself.
“We have homework,” reported Fortuna. “We have to make our own pineapple rum tartlets.”
“Excellent,” said Rose. “Brem and I have homework, too.”
“What’s your homework?” asked Fortuna.
“I think it’s going to be taking pictures of the three of you trying to make pineapple tartlets,” answered Brem.
********
Fortuna’s pineapple rum tartlet was a masterpiece. Next to the Doctor’s and Athena’s, it would have triumphed just if it looked like food, but it was a gorgeous, delicate, round and golden treat. Rose and Brem, enlisted to taste the homework, were astonished by it.
This did not please the Doctor and Athena.
Week after week it went this way. The teacher apparently praised Fortuna endlessly for her natural flair with food. Fortuna loved everything about it. She mastered recipes with the ease that her father and siblings performed math. Veal osso buco and beef Wellington, perfectly pan-seared scallops, homemade sorbets: she waltzed through each of them.
The Doctor and Athena, on the other hand, hated cooking. It required a blend of discipline and creativity they couldn’t strike. Athena gave up and let Fortuna do her homework for her. She seemed to accept she was never going to be the family’s cook, and took to the role of taster instead with enthusiasm.
The Doctor, meanwhile, resorted to science. He was convinced the right equation would brown his crème brulee perfectly. “The sonic has a crème brulee setting?” Brem asked in disbelief.
“It does now,” the Doctor responded, grimly.
Rose came upon him with the kitchen looking like a disaster area, frowning at a brown mixture in a bowl. “What’s this?” she asked.
“It’s supposed to be chocolate ganache,” he answered. “I followed the recipe perfectly. To the letter. Bloody recipe.”
Rose dipped her finger in. “Well. Tastes like chocolate at least.”
He looked at her hopefully. “Does it?”
“And dishwater.”
Hs face fell.
“Why do you care so much? So you can’t cook. It makes no difference to me, you know that.”
“I hate…” He made a face. “I hate failing. I’d decided to learn how to cook, I should learn how to cook, I shouldn’t learn that I can’t cook.”
Rose sighed. “You’re not supposed to be good at everything. The idea that you think otherwise is dangerous. And the fact that you’ve got Brem following in your footsteps that way terrifies me.”
The Doctor took a deep breath and looked at his failed ganache. “The thing is,” he began. “When I fail…It’s a luxury, Rose. It’s a luxury that we can’t usually afford.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe. But maybe there are times when we can just depend on Fortuna to make us a chocolate ganache, huh?” She dipped her finger into the ganache again, smeared it playfully on the top of his nose, then leaned over and licked it off. “Mmm,” she said, pulling back.
“What?”
“Tastes better like that.”
“Does it?” He reached for a fingerful of ganache and brushed it over her bottom lip, before licking it slowly off with delicate strokes. She sighed, opening her mouth, and he swept his tongue in longer strokes, until he had abandoned pretence of licking at ganache and was instead concentrating just on licking her, on the sort of deep, proper kiss that still made him light-headed.
He moved, ducking his head so his lips could find that hollow underneath her jaw that she loved.
“Better like that?” she asked, softly.
“Mmm,” he murmured into her skin. “Much, much…”
She reached blindly for more ganache, dipping her hand in and bringing it up to brush it against his throat and then nibbling it up. He tipped his head to give her as much access as she needed, her tongue swiping against his skin, and he made an unsteady sound.
The kitchen door slammed abruptly, and he blinked his eyes open and looked at it.
“Brilliant,” she breathed, and pulled herself up onto the kitchen counter, grabbing his tie to bring his mouth down onto hers again.
His hands groped at the jumper she was wearing, and he pulled back briefly to pull it over her head. Her hand, still sticky with ganache, entered his vision, and he paused to rasp his tongue across her palm, to suck on her index finger. Rose moaned, as he turned his attentions to her ring finger, sucking carefully around the wedding ring.
She was pushing his tie out of the way, working on the buttons on his shirt, as he pulled back and unclasped her bra and then, almost curiously, placed a dollop of ganache on one puckered nipple. Her hands paused in unbuttoning his shirt, and she glanced down. “Well?” she queried. “Aren’t you going to get that?”
His lips quirked into a smile, right before he ducked down to lave the ganache off and follow it with a teasing nip.
“This ganache,” he said, straightening, “is really rather brilliant.”
“Uh-huh,” she responded, as she unbuttoned his trousers.
“In a rush?”
“So are you,” she informed him, and cut off his denial by dipping a hand into his pants as he decided perhaps he was in a bit of a rush.
Hands at her hips, he pulled her off the kitchen counter, made short work of the fastenings of her trousers and the barrier of her knickers, even as she was busy divesting him of his pants. He was up and inside of her in one quick, almost unexpected thrust. She gasped, adjusting her angle against the counter and his angle inside of her, and he muttered something in Gallifreyan into her ear.
“Better…than ganache?” she panted, as he drew almost completely out before thrusting into her again.
“Oh, yes,” he growled at her.
She reached for more ganache, even as he found a rhythm that caused her to tighten and hum in anticipation, and spread it on his chin before licking it off him. He turned his head to capture hers in a kiss. His pace was growing more frantic and less rhythmic, and he moved just so, hand snaking down cleverly between them, and she exclaimed, “Oh!,” ripping her mouth away from his so she could breathe as the orgasm tore through her. He followed her in short order, murmuring her name into her ear over and over.
She collapsed bonelessly against him. He slumped forward, sliding his hands to distribute his weight more evenly and sending the bowl of ganache clattering to the floor.
“I’m never going to think of chocolate ganache the same way again,” he mumbled into the skin of her neck.
“We’ve got to make sure we never allow Fort to make it. We’ll never be able to explain our reactions.”
He chuckled, and was silent for a moment, then licked behind her ear. “A bit of ganache,” he said, and then paused. “You’re right: It does taste like dishwater.”
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - Adult
Characters - Ten, Rose, OCs
Spoilers - Through the end of S2
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids. They're all mine.)
Summary - It turns out cooking is almost as hard as piloting a TARDIS.
Author's Notes - Yes, jlrpuckis STILL in the UK, and yes, we hate her for it (yes, I use the royal we, what of it?), but she did beta this for me before she left, with a great deal of brilliance, for which I thank her. Thanks also to Kristin for the brainstorming and to bouncy_castle79for the read-through. The lovely icon was created by swankkatfor me, commissioned by jlrpuckfor my birthday.
It had developed into A Thing. Athena’s insistence, after the Girl Scout debacle, that she get alone time with her father had become a scheduled event on the TARDIS, and the Doctor and Rose had expanded it to the other children. It happened every Earth standard week, relatively measured, for at least an Earth standard hour, relatively measured, that each child got alone time with each of their parents, and, once a month, both at the same time while Jackie enjoyed watching the other two. Rose thought it was necessary for their kids, with their unconventional lifestyles, to be completely the centre of attention for a little while, and the kids thrived on it, guarding the time jealously.
Nothing ever happened during these hours. More often than not they sat in one of the TARDIS’s many rooms, munching on all sorts of unhealthy food and sharing stories with each other. It was a tradition in a family that necessarily had few, carrying on for years, as the children grew older.
The Doctor loved these hours with his kids. They were Time Lord kids-an entirely new developmental stage for Time Lords that delighted him. He was astonished by each of his children: Brem, who was far too bloody brilliant for his own good, quick and sarcastic and actually generous to a fault when you got right down to it; Athena, who was funny and clever and very much like her mother while being fiercely herself and having a self-possession he envied even at his age; and Fortuna, who was so sweet-tempered and easy-going that the Doctor almost couldn’t imagine where she had come from. The Doctor was completely amazed by the normality of all his children. He credited this entirely to Rose.
His children routinely caught him completely off-guard-who knew children would turn out to be more fascinating than all the wonders of the universe?-so he shouldn’t have been as surprised as he was when Athena suddenly said, during one of their hours, “I think we should take cooking lessons.”
“You think what?”
“Mary has to take piano lessons, right?”
Mary was one of Rose’s cousin’s offspring; the Doctor never could keep them straight. They saw Mary sometimes while visiting Jackie, and they had seen her on their most recent trip. She was younger than both of his girls, so the Doctor had never paid much attention to her.
“Does she?” he asked, to keep up his end of the conversation.
“I don’t know how to play the piano,” said Athena, as if Mary knowing something she didn’t was unacceptable.
The Doctor was surprised again. “You know how to re-program a teleport. What do you want to know how to do a thing like play the piano for?”
“I don’t. But I think we should do something, during our hours together, to better ourselves.”
It sounded suspiciously like Rose. The Doctor narrowed his eyes at Athena. “Did your mother tell you to do this?”
“No,” said Athena.
“You’re not nearly as good a liar as your brother,” commented the Doctor, dryly. “If you want to take lessons in something, you should take lessons in lying from him.”
“Cooking lessons,” Athena repeated, stubbornly. “I want to take cooking lessons.”
“It’s silly, Athena. Cooking? Why does a Time Lord need to learn how to cook? Why don’t I teach you how to pilot the TARDIS instead?”
Athena rolled her eyes at him. “I know how to pilot the TARDIS already.”
More surprise. “How?”
“I pay attention to you and Brem. Everyone on this TARDIS could fly it if they needed to. No one on this TARDIS can cook.”
“Don’t let your mother hear you say that,” he told her.
********
“Athena has the most curious idea,” remarked the Doctor to Rose.
Rose, leaning over the sink in the cavernous bathroom they shared so she could better rub some alien anti-wrinkle cream into her skin, looked at him. “Yeah? What’s that?”
“She thinks we should take cooking lessons.”
“Oh,” said Rose, not pausing in the application of the cream.
“Don’t you think that’s odd?” he persisted.
She glanced at him in surprise, twisting the cap onto the cream. “Odd? No. Why is that odd?” She replaced the cream in the medicine cabinet and walked past him into the bedroom.
The Doctor turned to follow her. “You didn’t put her up to this?”
Rose sighed heavily, fluffing at her pillow. “No. I don’t orchestrate everything, you know.”
“It’s just so human,” he sputtered.
“Some things are,” muttered Rose, getting into bed. “She’s been wanting to take lessons in something ever since she found out about Sally’s little girl Mary taking piano lessons. I didn’t know she’d settled on cooking.”
The Doctor paused. “I think she wants us to take them together.”
“As a family?”
“No. Well, maybe. But definitely as a father-daughter activity.”
Rose looked at him for a second, then burst into laughter.
“Oi,” said the Doctor, wounded. “What’s so funny about that?”
“You! Cooking! You can barely toast a piece of bread!”
“That’s not my fault,” he protested. “That’s the toaster’s fault.” He walked to the other side of the bed and laid down on top of the covers on his back, crossing his ankles and resting his hands on his stomach and contemplating the ceiling thoughtfully. “I thought you’d put her up to it. Why should she want to take cooking lessons? And she was prattling on about ‘bettering herself.’ It sounded like you.”
“I didn’t tell her she had to better herself. I would never say something like that to her. She’s perfect just as she is.” Rose paused. “I told her she should find something that challenged you.”
“Challenged me?” he shrieked. “I don’t need to be challenged, Rose.”
“Of course you do. Everyone does.”
“How are you challenged?”
“I’m married to you.”
He pouted. “That’s a mean thing to say.”
“Aw.” She grinned as she rolled on top of him. “But I’m getting very good at it, don’t you think?”
“A bit,” he said, grudgingly. “Ish.”
She laughed and kissed him. “I think the cooking lessons sound like a good idea. Better than Athena’s first idea.”
“What was her first idea?”
“Archery lessons.”
The Doctor brightened. “Archery lessons? That’d be brilliant.”
“No,” said Rose.
********
“We can’t start out with beginners,” commented Athena.
“No, that’s just insulting,” agreed the Doctor.
Rose looked over at the pair of them, where they were looking over catalogues of various continuing education facilities offering cooking lessons on Earth. The Doctor’s first idea had been alien cooking lessons. Rose had vetoed that.
“But you are beginners,” Rose pointed out.
The Doctor looked at her over the top of his specs. “We’re Time Lords. Time Lords are never ‘beginners.’”
Rose rolled her eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she muttered.
“I bet Dad’ll be an excellent cook,” remarked Fortuna, loyally.
“Thank you, Fortuna.”
“Can I take the cooking lessons, too?”
“Do you want to take the cooking lessons?” asked Rose.
“I never get to do anything fun and different,” complained Fortuna, which was decidedly not true, but Rose considered that it probably felt exactly that way when you were the baby of the family.
“You can take the cooking lessons, too,” said Rose. “D’you want to take them, too, Brem?”
Brem snorted and responded without looking up from his journal. “No.”
“We’re taking advanced classes,” remarked Athena, with the implication that these would be too complicated for Fortuna.
Fortuna glared at her. “I’m a Time Lord, too, you know.”
“A little one.”
“Mum,” began Fortuna.
“Stop it, both of you. Go and set the table for dinner.”
They grumbled a bit, but they relinquished the catalogue and marched out of the library. The Doctor got up and disappeared into the section of the library with the cookbooks.
Rose looked over at Brem. “Do you think we should take lessons in something?”
Brem tossed his journal aside and considered. “I think we should take lessons in how to survive various kinds of food poisoning.”
Rose smiled at him. “You’re a sarcastic brat most of the time, you know.”
He grinned back. “Yeah, but I’m amusing, so you keep me around.”
“For now.”
There was a moment of silence. “I was thinking photography, maybe,” he ventured.
Rose looked at him in surprise. “Really?”
“I thought…yeah. I mean, if you wanted to. If you wanted to, I thought it would be fun. But only if you wanted to. I mean, maybe not.”
There were times, when he asked her things so very stammeringly, that she could hear his father, on their first Christmas together, when his body was still new, stammering about how he didn’t think she’d want to keep travelling with him. It was very hard to deny either of them anything when they asked for things so shyly. “I think,” she assured him, “it’d be a blast.”
********
The Doctor was wearing a brown pinstriped apron he’d found in the TARDIS wardrobe. It was covered in flour. As was he. And his two daughters. Rose and Brem, matching cameras ‘round their necks, stared at the trio.
“What’d you make?” Rose asked, finally.
“We made,” said the Doctor, stiffly, “a pineapple rum tartlet with crystallized plum sauce.”
“Other people did,” said Fortuna, sunnily. “Not us. We got flour everywhere.”
“Thank you, Fortuna,” said her father, dourly.
“The teacher made us sit in the corner and said we weren’t to touch any more ingredients after Dad accidentally exploded the pineapple.”
“I thought the sonic was on a different setting,” the Doctor defended himself.
“We have homework,” reported Fortuna. “We have to make our own pineapple rum tartlets.”
“Excellent,” said Rose. “Brem and I have homework, too.”
“What’s your homework?” asked Fortuna.
“I think it’s going to be taking pictures of the three of you trying to make pineapple tartlets,” answered Brem.
********
Fortuna’s pineapple rum tartlet was a masterpiece. Next to the Doctor’s and Athena’s, it would have triumphed just if it looked like food, but it was a gorgeous, delicate, round and golden treat. Rose and Brem, enlisted to taste the homework, were astonished by it.
This did not please the Doctor and Athena.
Week after week it went this way. The teacher apparently praised Fortuna endlessly for her natural flair with food. Fortuna loved everything about it. She mastered recipes with the ease that her father and siblings performed math. Veal osso buco and beef Wellington, perfectly pan-seared scallops, homemade sorbets: she waltzed through each of them.
The Doctor and Athena, on the other hand, hated cooking. It required a blend of discipline and creativity they couldn’t strike. Athena gave up and let Fortuna do her homework for her. She seemed to accept she was never going to be the family’s cook, and took to the role of taster instead with enthusiasm.
The Doctor, meanwhile, resorted to science. He was convinced the right equation would brown his crème brulee perfectly. “The sonic has a crème brulee setting?” Brem asked in disbelief.
“It does now,” the Doctor responded, grimly.
Rose came upon him with the kitchen looking like a disaster area, frowning at a brown mixture in a bowl. “What’s this?” she asked.
“It’s supposed to be chocolate ganache,” he answered. “I followed the recipe perfectly. To the letter. Bloody recipe.”
Rose dipped her finger in. “Well. Tastes like chocolate at least.”
He looked at her hopefully. “Does it?”
“And dishwater.”
Hs face fell.
“Why do you care so much? So you can’t cook. It makes no difference to me, you know that.”
“I hate…” He made a face. “I hate failing. I’d decided to learn how to cook, I should learn how to cook, I shouldn’t learn that I can’t cook.”
Rose sighed. “You’re not supposed to be good at everything. The idea that you think otherwise is dangerous. And the fact that you’ve got Brem following in your footsteps that way terrifies me.”
The Doctor took a deep breath and looked at his failed ganache. “The thing is,” he began. “When I fail…It’s a luxury, Rose. It’s a luxury that we can’t usually afford.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe. But maybe there are times when we can just depend on Fortuna to make us a chocolate ganache, huh?” She dipped her finger into the ganache again, smeared it playfully on the top of his nose, then leaned over and licked it off. “Mmm,” she said, pulling back.
“What?”
“Tastes better like that.”
“Does it?” He reached for a fingerful of ganache and brushed it over her bottom lip, before licking it slowly off with delicate strokes. She sighed, opening her mouth, and he swept his tongue in longer strokes, until he had abandoned pretence of licking at ganache and was instead concentrating just on licking her, on the sort of deep, proper kiss that still made him light-headed.
He moved, ducking his head so his lips could find that hollow underneath her jaw that she loved.
“Better like that?” she asked, softly.
“Mmm,” he murmured into her skin. “Much, much…”
She reached blindly for more ganache, dipping her hand in and bringing it up to brush it against his throat and then nibbling it up. He tipped his head to give her as much access as she needed, her tongue swiping against his skin, and he made an unsteady sound.
The kitchen door slammed abruptly, and he blinked his eyes open and looked at it.
“Brilliant,” she breathed, and pulled herself up onto the kitchen counter, grabbing his tie to bring his mouth down onto hers again.
His hands groped at the jumper she was wearing, and he pulled back briefly to pull it over her head. Her hand, still sticky with ganache, entered his vision, and he paused to rasp his tongue across her palm, to suck on her index finger. Rose moaned, as he turned his attentions to her ring finger, sucking carefully around the wedding ring.
She was pushing his tie out of the way, working on the buttons on his shirt, as he pulled back and unclasped her bra and then, almost curiously, placed a dollop of ganache on one puckered nipple. Her hands paused in unbuttoning his shirt, and she glanced down. “Well?” she queried. “Aren’t you going to get that?”
His lips quirked into a smile, right before he ducked down to lave the ganache off and follow it with a teasing nip.
“This ganache,” he said, straightening, “is really rather brilliant.”
“Uh-huh,” she responded, as she unbuttoned his trousers.
“In a rush?”
“So are you,” she informed him, and cut off his denial by dipping a hand into his pants as he decided perhaps he was in a bit of a rush.
Hands at her hips, he pulled her off the kitchen counter, made short work of the fastenings of her trousers and the barrier of her knickers, even as she was busy divesting him of his pants. He was up and inside of her in one quick, almost unexpected thrust. She gasped, adjusting her angle against the counter and his angle inside of her, and he muttered something in Gallifreyan into her ear.
“Better…than ganache?” she panted, as he drew almost completely out before thrusting into her again.
“Oh, yes,” he growled at her.
She reached for more ganache, even as he found a rhythm that caused her to tighten and hum in anticipation, and spread it on his chin before licking it off him. He turned his head to capture hers in a kiss. His pace was growing more frantic and less rhythmic, and he moved just so, hand snaking down cleverly between them, and she exclaimed, “Oh!,” ripping her mouth away from his so she could breathe as the orgasm tore through her. He followed her in short order, murmuring her name into her ear over and over.
She collapsed bonelessly against him. He slumped forward, sliding his hands to distribute his weight more evenly and sending the bowl of ganache clattering to the floor.
“I’m never going to think of chocolate ganache the same way again,” he mumbled into the skin of her neck.
“We’ve got to make sure we never allow Fort to make it. We’ll never be able to explain our reactions.”
He chuckled, and was silent for a moment, then licked behind her ear. “A bit of ganache,” he said, and then paused. “You’re right: It does taste like dishwater.”