The Happiest Place on Earth (1/1)
Title - The Happiest Place on Earth (1/1)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
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 - Of all the terrifying places in the universe, how has the Doctor never been to Disney World?
Author's Notes - Many thanks to jlrpuck, who so kindly betas for me every time I send her an annoying e-mail being like, "I NEED THIS." jlrpuck has the patience of a saint. Thanks also to Kristin and bouncy_castle79, who both, well, bounced with enthusiasm when I suggested a story about Disney World. (Also, apologies to Kristin, who wanted me to write a Halloween-themed story for Halloween posting. I blame her for this, because she left and I had no ideas!) The lovely icon was created by swankkatfor me, commissioned by jlrpuckfor my birthday. (Oh, and yes, the sequel's done, but, you know, it's got to go through beta and all that. So here's a ficlet to distract you.)
Sometimes he read to his daughters. The Doctor had read to Brem when he had been younger as well, before Brem had gotten too independent to want something so silly as to be read to when he was perfectly capable of reading to himself. But when the Doctor had read to Brem, it had been things that made sense: tomes on history or science. The Doctor was not against a good page-turning work of fiction-who, after all, had introduced his daughters to the saga of A Fish Out of Water?-but he was bored with the tales his daughters wanted read to them. They liked to read silly things. They were always Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, stories with princesses and faeries and knights in shining armor. His girls never got tired of them. Sometimes, as Rose slept and Brem amused himself with tinkering, the TARDIS would light a fire in the fireplace in the library, and the Doctor would make them hot cocoa, and the girls would snuggle under blankets, eyes wide as they listened raptly as he read to them their preferred stories. He tried to read them other things, attempting to sneak in a work on calculus, but the girls whined until he acquiesced and launched again into Cinderella.
One day, they toddled into the control room, where he wasn’t doing much of anything but was pretending to be very busy.
“Daddy,” said Athena, solemnly. She was six at this time, had skin that was far less freckled than his and a long ponytail that she always wore with a pink ribbon, and had a curiously pragmatic way about her. The Doctor thought she’d inherited that exasperation with him from her mother.
“Is Mummy sleeping?” he asked, wondering if they were bored, if they wanted to play a board game, or choose a story to read.
“Daddy, did you know that there is this place on Earth in the twenty-first century and it has princesses? Brem told us all about it.”
The Doctor was surprised. “Lots of places on Earth have princesses, Theenie. Lots of planets have princesses. Princesses, and a North, actually.”
Both Athena and Fortuna shook their heads passionately. “No, Daddy, this place has Snow White and Cinderella,” said Athena.
“It’s called Disney World,” said Fortuna.
“It’s in a place called Florida.”
“We’ve never been there.”
“Why haven’t we been there?”
The Doctor blinked, feeling bewildered. “I, er, I…dunno, I guess-“
“Can we go?” begged Athena.
“Yes, can we go?”
They danced around him. “Please? Please?”
“I…I don’t think this place really has Snow White, kids. Snow White is fictional. She doesn’t exist. Welllllll, I mean, I once met someone who-Never mind. Snow White is not real.”
“She is there,” Fortuna insisted, stubbornly.
“Brem showed us pictures.”
Brem. “Where is your brother?” he asked.
“He’s in the nursery,” Athena answered.
“He’s reading all about Disney World. Daddy, we have to go there.”
The Doctor didn’t respond, going grimly in search of Brem. Of all people to persist in putting silly thoughts of fairy tale princesses into the girls’ fanciful heads…
Brem was indeed in the nursery, poring over a book. A travel book, as far as the Doctor could tell. “Where did you get that?” he asked.
Brem looked up at him. “The library. Dad, look! I think we should go here!”
“Show him the picture with Snow White, Brem,” said Fortuna.
The Doctor lifted his eyebrows, as Brem came skipping over to him. “You want to go to a place with princesses?”
“It says it’s the happiest place on Earth, Dad. The happiest place on Earth.”
“That’s just…I mean, that’s just…advertising.”
“Why are you so cynical?” Brem asked him, earnestly.
“Because I’ve lived nine hundred years. Give me that book.” He took it from Brem, looking curiously at the pictures.
“915, isn’t it, to be exact?” said Brem, but the Doctor ignored him.
Athena reached up on tiptoe to try to see into the book her father was holding. “Do you see the castle, Daddy? A castle.”
“It’s a fake castle, Athena. There are real castles all over the place. Everywhere. I take you to them all the time.”
Fortuna suddenly began to cry. The Doctor looked at her in alarm. He knew the TARDIS piped all the children’s noises into the bedroom--and Rose had a sixth sense. She would wake immediately, as soon as a child cried, and demand to know what he was doing to make her cry.
“What are you doing?” the Doctor asked, anxiously. “Don’t do that. Shh.”
“But it’s Cinderella’s castle,” sobbed Fortuna. “Cinderella’s. And you won’t take us!”
“There is no Cinderella!” exclaimed the Doctor.
Fortuna cried harder.
“Mum’s going to yell at you for making her cry,” remarked Brem, frankly, and then took the book back and retreated to the corner to pore over it again.
“Thanks, Brem, that’s helpful,” said the Doctor, and crouched to be on level with Fortuna. “Fortuna,” he began.
“I want to go to Disney World,” she said, pathetically, her mother’s brown eyes filled with tears. “Why can’t we go?”
The Doctor hated when his children cried. He had never been able to bear it, not even when they were babies. Every time they cried, he felt their sorrow descending heavily upon him. He had promised himself his children would be the happiest beings in the universe. The happiest beings in the universe probably ought to go to the happiest place on Earth, he admitted. He glanced at Athena, who looked at him knowingly, and then looked back at Fortuna, who sniffled sadly.
“I’ll take you to Disney World,” he heard himself say.
Fortuna lit up. “Will you? Will you, really?”
“If you really want to go, then yes, I will take you.”
Both Fortuna and Athena threw their arms around his neck in exultation, while the Doctor wondered exactly what he’d gotten himself into.
********
The Doctor, in all his years of traveling, had never been to Disney World. He had avoided it, to be quite frank. Welllll, not entirely accurate. He had just never had any reason to go there. And then, well, it was so very…domestic. It was a place for families, and that was the kind of place he’d avoided for many years. He supposed he could no longer go on avoiding it, now that he was a man with a family. But it was still odd to think himself as having a family, of doing things like going to Disney World. For a moment, he had to brace himself, looking at his two excited daughters, to remind himself that this was all actually really happening, and he had two kids who really wanted to go to Disney World. Three kids, actually, because Brem was anxious to see if he could develop a way of measuring whether it really was the happiest place on Earth.
The Doctor, dancing around the console, pulled the levers and pounded the buttons that would bring them to Disney World, and the TARDIS materialized with a heavy thump.
“Are we there?” asked Athena, eagerly.
He grinned at her. “Go and check.”
The girls ran to pull the doors open, and then stood, awestruck, at their view of Cinderella’s castle.
“Oh, well done, you,” Rose murmured in his ear, hand curling into his.
“Well,” he said, looking at the girls silhouetted in the open door of his TARDIS. “Every once in a while, I do get things right.”
“It’s her castle,” breathed Fortuna, reverently. “Cinderella’s castle.”
“I want to go on Space Mountain,” said Brem, evidently having had enough of the castle.
“We’re not splitting up,” Rose warned him. “We’re staying all together. I won’t cart all of you through all of time and space only to lose track of you in Disney World, yeah?”
“But,Mum-“ Brem sulked, cut off when his mother lifted her eyebrows at him. He silenced himself, although he was clearly not happy.
“What’s Rule Number One?” she asked.
“No wandering off,” her children chorused, with various levels of enthusiasm.
“Exactly. Let’s go.”
The Doctor eschewed the idea of a map-“A map? We’re Time Lords, we don’t need maps”-which meant that they were pretty much condemned to aimless wandering. But that was fine, because Disney World was very close to sensory overload, even for three children as worldly as her children were. The girls were terribly enchanted by everything. Before they’d even finished walking down Main Street to Cinderella’s Castle, they’d managed to con their father into buying them princess outfits and into being allowed to change into them immediately, so that they were dressed as Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella as they bounced up to the castle. “Not Sleeping Beauty. Aurora,” Athena had corrected her. Brem was not interested in any of the princess folderol, but he nonetheless enjoyed the rest of it, browsing through the merchandise, and he was very delighted when the girls insisted they all get mouse ears with their names embroidered on them, mostly because he got to irritate the poor embroiderer by insisting that his entire name be squeezed onto the hat. Mouse ears donned over unruly Time Lord hair, they wandered up Main Street, Brem discussing which historical period he thought the storefronts were intending to approximate, musing about the architecture of the castle. This was good as it distracted the Doctor, who engaged in a debate with him about the purpose of turrets and whether or not turrets had originally been built by visiting G’ditg and whether or not Walt Disney himself might not have been an alien.
It was glaringly hot, and she thought the Doctor could have picked a better time to visit. Of course, the Gallifreyan members of her family barely felt the heat. The Doctor wasn’t wearing his overcoat, but was still walking around in full suit, hands casually tucked in his pockets. Brem was still dressed in his jumper, and neither one of them broke into a sweat, while Rose enthusiastically kept ducking into areas with air conditioning.
They leaped about the Swiss Family Robinson tree house.
“Why did they have to live in a tree?” asked Fortuna. “Couldn’t they find a TARDIS somewhere, and have a roof?”
They rode Pirates of the Caribbean.
“Not like any pirates I’ve ever met,” said the Doctor.
“Have you met pirates?” asked Brem. “Like Bluebeard? Can we meet Bluebeard?”
“We’re not meeting any pirates,” said Rose.
The girls were too small to ride Splash Mountain, but Brem was so keen to go on the ride that the Doctor consented to ride with him while Rose stayed behind with the girls. They sat in the very front, and the girls shrieked with delighted laughter as they watched their father and brother’s log plummet down the drop. The Doctor emerged absolutely soaked and whining about the state of his hair, but he also almost immediately agreed to accompany Brem on the ride again another time.
They rode the Haunted Mansion but her kids were jaded enough not to entirely get it. Rose supposed when you spent most of your time genuinely running for your life, you really didn’t get the point of some fake ghosts swirling around you.
They rode It’s a Small World.
“Not terribly accurate, this,” sniffed the Doctor. “They don’t have a single off-world species in here.”
“What d’you think they’d put to represent Time Lords?” asked Rose, grinning at him, tongue between her teeth.
“A wildly sexy man with great hair,” he suggested, primly, which made her laugh and kiss him, which had been the point of the statement.
It seemed to Rose that they went on every ride in the Magic Kingdom, some of them more than once if Brem had been particularly fond of one, which he was of both Splash Mountain and Space Mountain (Big Thunder Mountain Railroad being closed, and the Doctor attempting to ignore Brem’s comments that they would have to come back again when it was open). At the end of the day, they found a seat on a patch of grass from which they could view the electrical parade. If the kids had been normal, Rose thought they would have been sound asleep by this point. As it was, they were quieter than usual as they sat and watched the parade. Rose snuggled against the Doctor and watched their children, and thought how to anyone passing by they would have looked like a completely normal little family. The fireworks burst over their heads, and she remembered another fireworks display, so many years earlier, when she had thought everything had been perfect and always would be, when she had gotten back Brem and the Doctor had been like a delighted child with his edible ball bearings. She turned in his arms suddenly, startling him, she could tell, and kissed him fervently enough to daze him.
“What was that for?” he murmured, when she drew back.
“No reason,” she lied. Or maybe she was telling the truth.
“Time to go home,” said the Doctor, as the fireworks finale faded in the sky above them.
The kids did not protest, which was evidence that they were actually exhausted. Fortuna rubbed at her eyes and the Doctor picked her up to carry her.
And then, halfway back to the TARDIS, it happened. Athena, whose hand the Doctor had been holding, stopped short with a gasp, and the rest of the family, following her gaze, saw her.
“It’s Cinderella,” whispered Athena.
Fortuna, sleepy in her father’s arms, suddenly seemed wide awake, lifting her head from his shoulder. The girls stared silently at the princess dressed in blue, smiling as she posed for photographs with children.
“I told you she lived here, Daddy,” whispered Fortuna, as if speaking in a louder tone would chase Cinderella away.
“D’you want to go meet her?” the Doctor asked her, and both girls looked at him in amazement at the idea. “Let’s go,” he said, still carrying Fortuna, hand firmly ensconced in Athena’s.
Rose stood with Brem and watched as Cinderella greeted Fortuna and Athena, who gaped up at her in astonished respect. “What do you think, Brem?” Rose turned to him with a smile. “Want to meet Cinderella?”
Brem laughed.
“Is it the happiest place on Earth?” she asked him.
“I think if you like princesses it is,” he answered, truthfully.
The Doctor and the girls emerged from their meeting with Cinderella, the girls bubbling over with enthusiasm. Cinderella had said hello to them! She’d asked for their names! She’d asked where they were from, and they’d said TARDIS, and she hadn’t known what that was! Rose listened to them indulgently, as she changed them into pyjamas.
“Mum,” Athena reminded her, yawning. “We’re Time Lords. We don’t sleep.”
“Oh, I know,” Rose said, tucking Athena into her bed and smoothing the rumpled curls around her face. “You might sleep for a few minutes tonight, though. Did you have a good time at Disney World?”
“It was so great,” Athena answered, smiling. “Can you tell Dad we loved it?”
“Yeah,” said Rose, and kissed her cheek before moving onto Fortuna. Fortuna was already asleep, curled under her blanket, and Rose kissed the blonde hair that was the only thing about Fortuna that was visible. She checked on Brem, who was in his bedroom steadily journaling , which could have been predicted.
Rose went to her bedroom, where the Doctor had kicked off his Chucks and was sprawled on his back on their bed.
“That was exhausting,” he said.
Rose’s mouth quirked in amusement. “Yeah? Think you’ll sleep a bit tonight?”
“Possibly.”
She kicked off her own trainers gratefully before stretching out beside him on the bed, resting her head against his shoulder. He automatically shifted to accommodate her, bringing his hand up to smooth over her hair. “The girls had the time of their lives. All of the kids did.”
“I’m glad,” he said.
“Did you have fun?”
“Wellllll. I didn’t not have fun. It’s just a bit…silly. We have the most intelligent kids in the universe, and they went all to pieces over some girl in a pretty dress.”
“They’re young girls. A pretty dress means a lot to them.” She was silent for a second. “We should keep them this young always.”
“I wish we could,” the Doctor replied, wistfully, then she sensed him shake himself out of it. “Anyway. Glad that’s over with. No more Disney.”
“What are you talking about?” She lifted her head up so she could see him. “We haven’t done EPCOT yet!”
The Doctor looked stricken. “What?”
She laughed as she rolled on top of him. “You know what you are?”
“What?”
“You’re my knight in shining pinstripes, in a blue box instead of a white steed. Sir Doctor.”
“Ah,” he said. “And from the positions of your hands right now, I take it that’s a good thing.”
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
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 - Of all the terrifying places in the universe, how has the Doctor never been to Disney World?
Author's Notes - Many thanks to jlrpuck, who so kindly betas for me every time I send her an annoying e-mail being like, "I NEED THIS." jlrpuck has the patience of a saint. Thanks also to Kristin and bouncy_castle79, who both, well, bounced with enthusiasm when I suggested a story about Disney World. (Also, apologies to Kristin, who wanted me to write a Halloween-themed story for Halloween posting. I blame her for this, because she left and I had no ideas!) The lovely icon was created by swankkatfor me, commissioned by jlrpuckfor my birthday. (Oh, and yes, the sequel's done, but, you know, it's got to go through beta and all that. So here's a ficlet to distract you.)
Sometimes he read to his daughters. The Doctor had read to Brem when he had been younger as well, before Brem had gotten too independent to want something so silly as to be read to when he was perfectly capable of reading to himself. But when the Doctor had read to Brem, it had been things that made sense: tomes on history or science. The Doctor was not against a good page-turning work of fiction-who, after all, had introduced his daughters to the saga of A Fish Out of Water?-but he was bored with the tales his daughters wanted read to them. They liked to read silly things. They were always Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, stories with princesses and faeries and knights in shining armor. His girls never got tired of them. Sometimes, as Rose slept and Brem amused himself with tinkering, the TARDIS would light a fire in the fireplace in the library, and the Doctor would make them hot cocoa, and the girls would snuggle under blankets, eyes wide as they listened raptly as he read to them their preferred stories. He tried to read them other things, attempting to sneak in a work on calculus, but the girls whined until he acquiesced and launched again into Cinderella.
One day, they toddled into the control room, where he wasn’t doing much of anything but was pretending to be very busy.
“Daddy,” said Athena, solemnly. She was six at this time, had skin that was far less freckled than his and a long ponytail that she always wore with a pink ribbon, and had a curiously pragmatic way about her. The Doctor thought she’d inherited that exasperation with him from her mother.
“Is Mummy sleeping?” he asked, wondering if they were bored, if they wanted to play a board game, or choose a story to read.
“Daddy, did you know that there is this place on Earth in the twenty-first century and it has princesses? Brem told us all about it.”
The Doctor was surprised. “Lots of places on Earth have princesses, Theenie. Lots of planets have princesses. Princesses, and a North, actually.”
Both Athena and Fortuna shook their heads passionately. “No, Daddy, this place has Snow White and Cinderella,” said Athena.
“It’s called Disney World,” said Fortuna.
“It’s in a place called Florida.”
“We’ve never been there.”
“Why haven’t we been there?”
The Doctor blinked, feeling bewildered. “I, er, I…dunno, I guess-“
“Can we go?” begged Athena.
“Yes, can we go?”
They danced around him. “Please? Please?”
“I…I don’t think this place really has Snow White, kids. Snow White is fictional. She doesn’t exist. Welllllll, I mean, I once met someone who-Never mind. Snow White is not real.”
“She is there,” Fortuna insisted, stubbornly.
“Brem showed us pictures.”
Brem. “Where is your brother?” he asked.
“He’s in the nursery,” Athena answered.
“He’s reading all about Disney World. Daddy, we have to go there.”
The Doctor didn’t respond, going grimly in search of Brem. Of all people to persist in putting silly thoughts of fairy tale princesses into the girls’ fanciful heads…
Brem was indeed in the nursery, poring over a book. A travel book, as far as the Doctor could tell. “Where did you get that?” he asked.
Brem looked up at him. “The library. Dad, look! I think we should go here!”
“Show him the picture with Snow White, Brem,” said Fortuna.
The Doctor lifted his eyebrows, as Brem came skipping over to him. “You want to go to a place with princesses?”
“It says it’s the happiest place on Earth, Dad. The happiest place on Earth.”
“That’s just…I mean, that’s just…advertising.”
“Why are you so cynical?” Brem asked him, earnestly.
“Because I’ve lived nine hundred years. Give me that book.” He took it from Brem, looking curiously at the pictures.
“915, isn’t it, to be exact?” said Brem, but the Doctor ignored him.
Athena reached up on tiptoe to try to see into the book her father was holding. “Do you see the castle, Daddy? A castle.”
“It’s a fake castle, Athena. There are real castles all over the place. Everywhere. I take you to them all the time.”
Fortuna suddenly began to cry. The Doctor looked at her in alarm. He knew the TARDIS piped all the children’s noises into the bedroom--and Rose had a sixth sense. She would wake immediately, as soon as a child cried, and demand to know what he was doing to make her cry.
“What are you doing?” the Doctor asked, anxiously. “Don’t do that. Shh.”
“But it’s Cinderella’s castle,” sobbed Fortuna. “Cinderella’s. And you won’t take us!”
“There is no Cinderella!” exclaimed the Doctor.
Fortuna cried harder.
“Mum’s going to yell at you for making her cry,” remarked Brem, frankly, and then took the book back and retreated to the corner to pore over it again.
“Thanks, Brem, that’s helpful,” said the Doctor, and crouched to be on level with Fortuna. “Fortuna,” he began.
“I want to go to Disney World,” she said, pathetically, her mother’s brown eyes filled with tears. “Why can’t we go?”
The Doctor hated when his children cried. He had never been able to bear it, not even when they were babies. Every time they cried, he felt their sorrow descending heavily upon him. He had promised himself his children would be the happiest beings in the universe. The happiest beings in the universe probably ought to go to the happiest place on Earth, he admitted. He glanced at Athena, who looked at him knowingly, and then looked back at Fortuna, who sniffled sadly.
“I’ll take you to Disney World,” he heard himself say.
Fortuna lit up. “Will you? Will you, really?”
“If you really want to go, then yes, I will take you.”
Both Fortuna and Athena threw their arms around his neck in exultation, while the Doctor wondered exactly what he’d gotten himself into.
********
The Doctor, in all his years of traveling, had never been to Disney World. He had avoided it, to be quite frank. Welllll, not entirely accurate. He had just never had any reason to go there. And then, well, it was so very…domestic. It was a place for families, and that was the kind of place he’d avoided for many years. He supposed he could no longer go on avoiding it, now that he was a man with a family. But it was still odd to think himself as having a family, of doing things like going to Disney World. For a moment, he had to brace himself, looking at his two excited daughters, to remind himself that this was all actually really happening, and he had two kids who really wanted to go to Disney World. Three kids, actually, because Brem was anxious to see if he could develop a way of measuring whether it really was the happiest place on Earth.
The Doctor, dancing around the console, pulled the levers and pounded the buttons that would bring them to Disney World, and the TARDIS materialized with a heavy thump.
“Are we there?” asked Athena, eagerly.
He grinned at her. “Go and check.”
The girls ran to pull the doors open, and then stood, awestruck, at their view of Cinderella’s castle.
“Oh, well done, you,” Rose murmured in his ear, hand curling into his.
“Well,” he said, looking at the girls silhouetted in the open door of his TARDIS. “Every once in a while, I do get things right.”
“It’s her castle,” breathed Fortuna, reverently. “Cinderella’s castle.”
“I want to go on Space Mountain,” said Brem, evidently having had enough of the castle.
“We’re not splitting up,” Rose warned him. “We’re staying all together. I won’t cart all of you through all of time and space only to lose track of you in Disney World, yeah?”
“But,Mum-“ Brem sulked, cut off when his mother lifted her eyebrows at him. He silenced himself, although he was clearly not happy.
“What’s Rule Number One?” she asked.
“No wandering off,” her children chorused, with various levels of enthusiasm.
“Exactly. Let’s go.”
The Doctor eschewed the idea of a map-“A map? We’re Time Lords, we don’t need maps”-which meant that they were pretty much condemned to aimless wandering. But that was fine, because Disney World was very close to sensory overload, even for three children as worldly as her children were. The girls were terribly enchanted by everything. Before they’d even finished walking down Main Street to Cinderella’s Castle, they’d managed to con their father into buying them princess outfits and into being allowed to change into them immediately, so that they were dressed as Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella as they bounced up to the castle. “Not Sleeping Beauty. Aurora,” Athena had corrected her. Brem was not interested in any of the princess folderol, but he nonetheless enjoyed the rest of it, browsing through the merchandise, and he was very delighted when the girls insisted they all get mouse ears with their names embroidered on them, mostly because he got to irritate the poor embroiderer by insisting that his entire name be squeezed onto the hat. Mouse ears donned over unruly Time Lord hair, they wandered up Main Street, Brem discussing which historical period he thought the storefronts were intending to approximate, musing about the architecture of the castle. This was good as it distracted the Doctor, who engaged in a debate with him about the purpose of turrets and whether or not turrets had originally been built by visiting G’ditg and whether or not Walt Disney himself might not have been an alien.
It was glaringly hot, and she thought the Doctor could have picked a better time to visit. Of course, the Gallifreyan members of her family barely felt the heat. The Doctor wasn’t wearing his overcoat, but was still walking around in full suit, hands casually tucked in his pockets. Brem was still dressed in his jumper, and neither one of them broke into a sweat, while Rose enthusiastically kept ducking into areas with air conditioning.
They leaped about the Swiss Family Robinson tree house.
“Why did they have to live in a tree?” asked Fortuna. “Couldn’t they find a TARDIS somewhere, and have a roof?”
They rode Pirates of the Caribbean.
“Not like any pirates I’ve ever met,” said the Doctor.
“Have you met pirates?” asked Brem. “Like Bluebeard? Can we meet Bluebeard?”
“We’re not meeting any pirates,” said Rose.
The girls were too small to ride Splash Mountain, but Brem was so keen to go on the ride that the Doctor consented to ride with him while Rose stayed behind with the girls. They sat in the very front, and the girls shrieked with delighted laughter as they watched their father and brother’s log plummet down the drop. The Doctor emerged absolutely soaked and whining about the state of his hair, but he also almost immediately agreed to accompany Brem on the ride again another time.
They rode the Haunted Mansion but her kids were jaded enough not to entirely get it. Rose supposed when you spent most of your time genuinely running for your life, you really didn’t get the point of some fake ghosts swirling around you.
They rode It’s a Small World.
“Not terribly accurate, this,” sniffed the Doctor. “They don’t have a single off-world species in here.”
“What d’you think they’d put to represent Time Lords?” asked Rose, grinning at him, tongue between her teeth.
“A wildly sexy man with great hair,” he suggested, primly, which made her laugh and kiss him, which had been the point of the statement.
It seemed to Rose that they went on every ride in the Magic Kingdom, some of them more than once if Brem had been particularly fond of one, which he was of both Splash Mountain and Space Mountain (Big Thunder Mountain Railroad being closed, and the Doctor attempting to ignore Brem’s comments that they would have to come back again when it was open). At the end of the day, they found a seat on a patch of grass from which they could view the electrical parade. If the kids had been normal, Rose thought they would have been sound asleep by this point. As it was, they were quieter than usual as they sat and watched the parade. Rose snuggled against the Doctor and watched their children, and thought how to anyone passing by they would have looked like a completely normal little family. The fireworks burst over their heads, and she remembered another fireworks display, so many years earlier, when she had thought everything had been perfect and always would be, when she had gotten back Brem and the Doctor had been like a delighted child with his edible ball bearings. She turned in his arms suddenly, startling him, she could tell, and kissed him fervently enough to daze him.
“What was that for?” he murmured, when she drew back.
“No reason,” she lied. Or maybe she was telling the truth.
“Time to go home,” said the Doctor, as the fireworks finale faded in the sky above them.
The kids did not protest, which was evidence that they were actually exhausted. Fortuna rubbed at her eyes and the Doctor picked her up to carry her.
And then, halfway back to the TARDIS, it happened. Athena, whose hand the Doctor had been holding, stopped short with a gasp, and the rest of the family, following her gaze, saw her.
“It’s Cinderella,” whispered Athena.
Fortuna, sleepy in her father’s arms, suddenly seemed wide awake, lifting her head from his shoulder. The girls stared silently at the princess dressed in blue, smiling as she posed for photographs with children.
“I told you she lived here, Daddy,” whispered Fortuna, as if speaking in a louder tone would chase Cinderella away.
“D’you want to go meet her?” the Doctor asked her, and both girls looked at him in amazement at the idea. “Let’s go,” he said, still carrying Fortuna, hand firmly ensconced in Athena’s.
Rose stood with Brem and watched as Cinderella greeted Fortuna and Athena, who gaped up at her in astonished respect. “What do you think, Brem?” Rose turned to him with a smile. “Want to meet Cinderella?”
Brem laughed.
“Is it the happiest place on Earth?” she asked him.
“I think if you like princesses it is,” he answered, truthfully.
The Doctor and the girls emerged from their meeting with Cinderella, the girls bubbling over with enthusiasm. Cinderella had said hello to them! She’d asked for their names! She’d asked where they were from, and they’d said TARDIS, and she hadn’t known what that was! Rose listened to them indulgently, as she changed them into pyjamas.
“Mum,” Athena reminded her, yawning. “We’re Time Lords. We don’t sleep.”
“Oh, I know,” Rose said, tucking Athena into her bed and smoothing the rumpled curls around her face. “You might sleep for a few minutes tonight, though. Did you have a good time at Disney World?”
“It was so great,” Athena answered, smiling. “Can you tell Dad we loved it?”
“Yeah,” said Rose, and kissed her cheek before moving onto Fortuna. Fortuna was already asleep, curled under her blanket, and Rose kissed the blonde hair that was the only thing about Fortuna that was visible. She checked on Brem, who was in his bedroom steadily journaling , which could have been predicted.
Rose went to her bedroom, where the Doctor had kicked off his Chucks and was sprawled on his back on their bed.
“That was exhausting,” he said.
Rose’s mouth quirked in amusement. “Yeah? Think you’ll sleep a bit tonight?”
“Possibly.”
She kicked off her own trainers gratefully before stretching out beside him on the bed, resting her head against his shoulder. He automatically shifted to accommodate her, bringing his hand up to smooth over her hair. “The girls had the time of their lives. All of the kids did.”
“I’m glad,” he said.
“Did you have fun?”
“Wellllll. I didn’t not have fun. It’s just a bit…silly. We have the most intelligent kids in the universe, and they went all to pieces over some girl in a pretty dress.”
“They’re young girls. A pretty dress means a lot to them.” She was silent for a second. “We should keep them this young always.”
“I wish we could,” the Doctor replied, wistfully, then she sensed him shake himself out of it. “Anyway. Glad that’s over with. No more Disney.”
“What are you talking about?” She lifted her head up so she could see him. “We haven’t done EPCOT yet!”
The Doctor looked stricken. “What?”
She laughed as she rolled on top of him. “You know what you are?”
“What?”
“You’re my knight in shining pinstripes, in a blue box instead of a white steed. Sir Doctor.”
“Ah,” he said. “And from the positions of your hands right now, I take it that’s a good thing.”