Adventuring (1/5)
Title - Adventuring (1/5)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
Characters - Ten, Rose, Jackie, OCs
Spoilers - Through 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 - The Doctor and Rose take a mini-break.
Author's Notes - Back to a traditional Chaosverse fic!
Thank you to jlrpuck for the fantastic beta. She gets a thank you even though she *is* trotting off to the UK tomorrow and so we hate her. Thanks also to Kristin for all the help.
Rose stood in the doorway to the library, watching the Doctor. He was reading to the girls, one small creature pressed on either side of him while he read aloud from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with appropriate voices. Brem was sprawled on the floor working on some kind of device, tongue out in concentration, offering commentary on the action in the story. “That Edmund is pretty thick,” he would interject. “Shhh,” Athena and Fortuna would hiss in response. The Doctor never missed a beat, just kept reading.
Rose leaned against the doorjamb. She had been sleeping, and had woken up and gone in search of her family, and had found them like this. And it was adorable, of course. She loved her family, she loved everything about them, and she loved her Doctor as a father. But suddenly, watching him, she wondered when they had become so thoroughly domesticated. It had been the Doctor who had had domestication issues, but she was the one who was standing there abruptly wishing that there were no kids around so she could have just gone over to him, dropped to her knees, and unzipped his trousers. It seemed to her that they had had so little time to do things like that, before Brem had come along.
The entire idea made her feel guilty. Here she was, with three beautiful, miraculous children. What sort of awful person would wish for some time without them? Especially when she knew what it was like without them, how much she missed them.
“Oh, you’re awake,” the Doctor said, and she realized he’d stopped reading to the girls.
“Yeah,” she affirmed, and managed a smile.
“Fantastic.” He closed the book. “We’re starving, and we were waiting for you.”
And just like that the day turned into a recognizable outline of breakfast and lunch and dinner and times in between, a visit to a planet, a bit of running for their lives, and she fell into bed exhausted and without the Doctor, and the same thing happened again the next day and again the day after that.
She finally woke up one morning to the sound of the shower running in the en-suite, and it took her less than a second to make up her mind. She was pulling her T-shirt up and over her head as she walked toward the en-suite, stepped out of her pyjama pants as she walked into the room, tossed her knickers after them, and was just about to step into the shower when he shut it off. He turned toward her, catching sight of her.
“Oh,” he said, in surprise.
She pouted a bit. “I was going to join you.”
“Oh, that can be arranged,” he said, hastily turning the shower back on.
She grinned at him as she stepped into the shower.
And almost immediately Fortuna’s voice shouted, “Mum! Mum!”
Rose groaned, resting her head against his shoulder. “How much trouble could they have possibly gotten into?”
“A lot,” he replied. She felt him brush a kiss over the top of her head before moving past her and out of the shower.
She sighed and leaned over and shut the shower off, accepting the towel he handed her and dressing quickly to find that Madrid and Seville had “somehow” “accidentally” been bathed in egg yolks, along with half of the control room, and there was quite a bit of yelling, and even the TARDIS was upset, and that was the end of it.
She felt rather like she and the Doctor were ships passing in the night, and it was only after the kids had disappeared one night after dinner to watch telly, and she was stacking dishes in the dishwasher, that she got a second alone with him.
“Where are you going?” she asked him, as he looked ready to head out of the room.
“I…” He gestured, but she didn’t need a gesture to know that he expected to disappear to go tinkering.
“No way,” she said. “You’re going to help me clear the table, and we’re going to talk. Without children present.”
He looked appropriately wary. “About…what?”
“When’s the last time we had sex?”
“I…I…When…What?”
“Can you remember?”
“Yes!” he answered, indignantly. “Of course I can! It was…Well, it was…Time is relative on the TARDIS, Rose.”
“Uh-huh,” she agreed, dryly, stacking a few more dishes. Then she turned to him. “Why can’t you remember?” She was surprised to find she was close to tears.
He looked surprised as well. “What?”
“Why can’t you remember the last time you…I mean, we used to be…All the time…And now…”
“Rose,” he said. “It’s not…There isn’t a reason.”
She sniffed, trying to hold herself together. “Can you take me somewhere? Just for a weekend? Just you and me? Can we do that?”
“Rose. Of course we can do that.” He stepped over to her and pulled her against him, kissing the top of her head. “Of course we can.”
“It’s just that I…” She rubbed her cheek against the lapel of his coat, breathing the comforting scent of him. “I feel selfish and ungrateful but I miss you. I’m living here in the same space with you and I miss you. And I shouldn’t feel this way, it’s ridiculous, I see you all the time, but the kids are always-And I love the kids, oh, God, I’m saying ridiculous things-“
“Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it,” he whooshed out over her hair. “We’ll go away for a couple of days, just you and me and some gorgeous place, anywhere in the universe you want, yeah?”
She nodded against him.
“We’ll ask your mum to watch the kids and we’ll take a genuine couple of days and we’ll even avoid having to run for our lives, how’s that sound?”
“It sounds heavenly,” she sighed, because it did.
“Good. Do you feel better?”
“Yes,” she murmured. “Could we just stand here for a second?”
“We can stand here for as long as you like.”
“Dad!” Brem shouted, dashing into the kitchen. “I think I accidentally broke the chrono stabilizer.”
The Doctor sighed. “I have to go look into that one.”
“And I’m going to call my mum,” said Rose.
********
The TARDIS was jerking a bit as the Doctor and Brem fixed the chrono stabilizer, and their voices were loud, their babbles overlapping with each other. Rose never understood how they could even hear what the other was saying, and yet they seemed to answer each other. Rose sat at the kitchen table with her superphone and rang her mum, listening to the sound of the phone ringing in her ear. It seemed to her that she was grounded in two different realities at that moment, her alien husband and half-alien son in the other room, and the completely human mother she was trying to reach.
“Hello, luv,” her mother answered the phone, warmly.
“Mum,” said Rose, and she was so relieved to hear her voice. Everything seemed eminently bearable suddenly. “How are you?”
“I’m fine. How are you?”
“We’re good. We were thinking of coming for a visit.”
“That’d be lovely!” exclaimed her mother. “It’s been a bit of time.”
“I know. I actually thought, this time around, maybe you could watch the kids? Just for a weekend or so?”
There was a pause. “Well, of course I can, but…why a whole weekend? Normally when you drop them off, it’s only for ten minutes or so.”
“I know, but the Doctor proposed a genuine weekend away, and I think it’s worthwhile. A break. For all of us.”
“Everything alright, Rose?” Her mother’s voice sharpened with concern.
“Yes, everything’s…Everything’s…I’m being silly, it’s stupid,” said Rose, trying to hold herself together. “I’m just being so…I mean, how ungrateful can I be? But I need a break. Just a short break. Just a little one. I think that-”
“Rose,” her mother cut in, matter-of-factly. “Stop trying to justify it. Are you worried…what? That this makes you a bad mother? You’re an excellent mother. You spend all day every day being their mother. It’s perfectly alright to need a bit of a break.”
“You never got a break from me,” Rose pointed out.
“Darling, you were one kid, and it was just you and me against the world. It was a bit different. You’re outnumbered. It’s got to be exhausting. I can hardly imagine. I could just about keep up with having just you to take care of. And even then sometimes I would drop you off at Alice’s or Cathy’s or one of the other neighbors’ just to get some time to myself.”
Rose remembered that now, random afternoons spent in other flats. They had made little impact on her, she realized. She had certainly never gotten a message from them that her mother didn’t love her. Maybe her kids would be just fine.
“Come,” her mother continued. “Drop the kids off. We’re going to have a great time.”
********
Far from being abandoned, her children thought the idea of a weekend on Earth was the most exciting adventure they’d ever heard of. As soon as she told them it was going to happen, they wanted it to happen immediately. They bounced around her, begging to be taken there right away.
“Will we have to pretend to be human?” Brem wanted to know. “And sleep and everything?”
Rose, packing bigger-on-the-inside bags for them so they would have everything they needed, paused and looked at him. “Yes. You are going to need to be very, very good while Grandma’s sleeping. If I hear about any adventures while Grandma is sleeping-”
Brem made a face.
“If I hear about any adventures,” Rose told him, more firmly, “there will be no traveling for you, young man, for a month.”
“A Hyplotian month?” he asked, hopefully.
“An Earth month,” Rose answered.
Brem frowned, but she was confident he’d got the message. She left Brem to add the accoutrements of tinkering to his bag, so he would have something to occupy him during his weekend of pretend-humanness, and then crossed over to the bedroom the girls shared. The TARDIS would have made them two separate bedrooms, but they enjoyed being together. The Doctor had once mentioned, off-handedly, that Fortuna preferred to have someone with her. Rose had never explored that sentiment any further, because she thought it was rooted in the intense loneliness she knew Fortuna had been through as an infant, and she preferred not to dwell too heavily on that.
The girls had their own bags out-pink, of course-and seemed to be packing every doll in the TARDIS into them.
Rose watched them for a second. “Is it necessary to bring every single doll?”
“Mum,” said Athena, in a voice that asked why her mother was so thick, “how will we know which ones we want to play with ahead of time?”
The problem with Time Lord technology, thought Rose, was that her kids had never learned how to make decisions like that, preferring to just carry everything with them all the time. It was their father’s trait, she realized: a man who loved traveling and yet took his entire house with him everywhere he went.
Rose shook her head a bit and went in search of the Doctor, finding him in the control room, setting coordinates.
“Are the kids ready?” he asked, looking up at her. “Now that we’ve alerted your mum and all that, we may as well get going.”
“They are busy packing everything they own.”
“Wellllllll, they don’t know what they might need, do they?”
Rose shook her head and sighed, and then said, “Take us to my mum’s. It might get the kids to pack a bit faster.”
“Aye, aye,” he said, and she watched him move around the console in his typical dance, before landing them with a thud.
The kids came dashing into the control room, with their bags slung over their shoulders.
“Are we at Grandma’s?” Brem asked, excitedly.
“Hopefully,” said Rose.
The Doctor ignored her doubt. She knew he was so used to it now that he barely heard her anymore. He leaned over and opened the door. “Yes. Right on target. Hello, Jackie.” He waved a bit.
The kids went rushing out of the TARDIS.
“I think it’s possible they want a break from me as much as I want a break from them,” commented Rose.
The Doctor smiled at her and held the door open for her to walk out.
The kids had already made themselves at home, were sitting on the floor emptying their bags.
“They’ve brought practically everything in the TARDIS,” Rose warned her mother.
“Those bloody magical bags,” complained Jackie.
“It’s not magic, it’s science,” protested the Doctor.
“And they’ve been told to behave. No adventures, right?” she reminded her children, sternly.
“No what?” echoed the Doctor. “No adventures?” He sounded as if he thought that was an unreasonable thing for her to say.
“Don’t you start,” she told him, and turned back to the kids. “Come give me a hug,” she commanded.
They obediently picked themselves up and walked over to where she’d crouched waiting for them, and took turns giving her hugs. She hugged them back fiercely, kissing the tops of their heads. Now that she’d made the decision to spend a little time without them, she suddenly wanted never to leave them. “Behave,” she told all of them. “Seriously. No adventures.”
They nodded in impatient agreement before going back to their toys. Rose straightened and looked at her mother.
“We’ll be fine,” she said, lightly. “You two go off and have a great time.”
“Good-bye,” the Doctor told his children, stepping past Rose to drop a kiss on the top of each of their heads. “And I suppose you ought to listen to your mother’s no-adventure nonsense.”
“Thanks for the support,” Rose remarked, drily.
The Doctor gave her an innocent look, then walked past her into the TARDIS. Rose waved once more at her kids and her mother, then followed him into the control room.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked her. “What catches your fancy?”
“Mmmm, someplace wonderful,” she said. “Surprise me.” She walked over to sit on the captain’s chair, and he paused in his movements over the console and looked at her. “What?” she asked.
He walked over to her, leaned over her, and snogged her thoroughly. He pulled back the merest hint. “I’ve missed you, too.”
“Maybe we don’t need to go anywhere at all,” she suggested, breathlessly.
He smiled. A bit smugly, he thought. “Now where’s the adventure in that, Rose Tyler?”
********
Brem Tyler was bored out of his mind. What was the good of pretending to be a full-blooded human if you just did the same things you did when you were a human-Time Lord hybrid? He had been sitting on his grandmother’s carpet, frowning at his latest project, for a long time now, and he was bored.
He sat back and looked speculatively toward the kitchen. He hated to think it, but…he wondered what the girls were doing. Brem contemplated for a few minutes, then sighed in resignation and got to his feet and walked into the kitchen.
Nails. They were panting their nails.
Brem groaned. “So that’s what you’re doing.”
“Yes.” Fortuna waved her hands at him. Each nail had a different color on it.
Athena was watching Grandma apply nail varnish to her nails. “Grandma has way more colors than TARDIS.”
“Maybe you’ll find one you like, Brem,” Fortuna told him.
“I don’t think so,” said Brem, and sat in a chair, propped his elbow on his table and his chin on his fist, and frowned at the unsatisfactory tableau in front of him.
Grandma looked at him. “And what’s the matter with you?” she asked him.
“Nothing.” He paused. “I’m bored.”
“You can watch the telly.”
“I can watch the telly anywhere.”
“You can tinker.”
“I can tinker anywhere.”
“Then I guess your only option is to sit there and be bored.” Grandma shrugged.
Brem’s frown deepened. “Can we do something human?”
“We are doing something human,” she answered him.
Brem drummed his fingers on the table, which he’d seen his father do in an impressive fashion when he was bored. Athena glared at him.
Fortuna said, “Oh! We’re going to do our hair! Do you want to do your hair, too?”
Brem did not want to look as if he was at all interested in the possibility of doing his hair. “Maybe,” he allowed.
“Come help me get the stuff,” said Fortuna, hopping off the chair.
Brem followed Fortuna into the bathroom, obviously only because this was the only thing to do in Grandma’s house.
“Look how much hair stuff Grandma has,” Fortuna told him, reverently.
“It’s because she’s a hairdresser,” he answered, and frowned at her gel collection. “But she doesn’t have umlut gel, and you know that Dad says umlut gel is the only gel we should put in our hair.”
“Here.” Fortuna, clearly ignoring him, thrust a selection of hair accoutrements into his arms.
Brem sighed and dutifully carried them back into the kitchen, spreading them out on the table. Grandma had finished with Athena’s nails and Athena was now waving her hands through the air in order to dry the varnish more quickly. She studied what Brem had brought and then gasped, “Grandma! Can we dye our hair?”
“Don’t think your mum would like that idea,” Grandma answered.
“You don’t have any umlut gel,” Brem told her.
“What’s that, luv?”
“It’s the best gel in the universe, and I cannot do my hair without umlut gel.”
“There’s all sorts of regular gel in there, sweetheart, I’m sure that one of those will be just as good.”
“Sit down, Brem,” said Fortuna, as she dumped her own armful of stuff onto the kitchen table, “and I’ll do your hair.”
Brem sat reluctantly. “I’m not sure how good it’s going to come out,” he said, doubtfully. “We can’t take any photos.”
“Promise,” Grandma assured him, as Fortuna happily covered her hands in gel and set to working it through her brother’s hair.
“I want to put my hair up,” Athena told Grandma, and Grandma commenced to coiling it into complicated ringlets.
Brem, bored while Fortuna, humming, kept tugging at his hair, leaned over and picked up the nearest bottle. Hairspray. He tipped it to read its ingredients, curious, and yelped in surprise.
Grandma looked over at him, even as she sprayed hairspray on his sister’s hair. “What?”
“Don’ t do that!” he exclaimed. “This stuff is flammable!”
“It’s what?” Grandma sprayed even more hairspray on Athena’s hair.
“Flammable. It means it’ll catch on fire.”
“Oh, Brem, don’t be silly. It isn’t going to catch on fire.”
“It could. What if there is a flame and-”
“There’s not going to be any flame. Come here, Fort, honey, and I’ll do your hair.”
Brem, frowning and finally released from having his hair done, scurried into the other room and came back with his sonic screwdriver, going to stand directly by his sisters, holding it aloft.
Grandma looked at him. “What are you doing?”
“There’s a fire extinguisher setting,” he told her. “If your hair catches on fire, I can put it out.”
“Our hair’s not going to catch on fire, Brem.”
“You don’t know that. It’s flammable. Look.” Brem grabbed the hairspray and sprayed it in the air, away from his family, and then zapped it with the flame setting of the sonic screwdriver, which caused a ball of flame to ignite in the air, his grandmother and sisters to break out in screams, and the smoke detector to begin beeping. “Oops,” he said.
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