Hair, Ties, and Other Topics of Utmost Importance (1/1)
Title - Hair, Ties, and Other Topics of Utmost Importance (1/1)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - Ten, Rose, 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 learn how to let their children grow up.
Author's Notes - This is yanks02 's Support Stacie fic. Her prompt was that she wanted Brem in an act of rebellion involving his hair.
Thank you to jlrpuck , off being Disneyfied, for the fabulous beta!
The icon was created by swankkat , commissioned by jlrpuck for my birthday.
Brem was very vain. It was a genetic trait he’d inherited from his father. Rose was not sure if all incarnations of the Doctor had been vain. Her first Doctor had had a streak of vanity-defined by his particularity in the battered leather jacket he had chosen-but it was nothing next to the vanity of her second Doctor. The fact that his ceaseless fussing over the exact state of his hair might possibly be justified by the results he got did not excuse the fact that he was very vain. He liked looking at himself in the mirror. He selected his ties carefully, according to a system based on mood and planet and weather conditions and star positions that he claimed Rose would never be able to comprehend. He fiddled with the knots in them until they were just the right stage of casual looseness. On days when he went tieless, he spent ridiculous heaps of time achieving the sexiest look to his layers. Whenever his precious coat got damaged-which happened frequently, given their lifestyles-he pouted mightily over it, washing it himself by hand, coaxing out every smudge of dirt. When the kids had been small, her Doctor had been wont to give them haphazard baths, telling her, when she complained, that they were just going to get dirty again, so what was the point? She noticed this philosophy did not apply to his coat.
So he was vain.
Brem and Athena had both inherited this vanity, to some extent, and she blamed his triggering of his dominant Time Lord genes for this. Fortuna could take pride in her appearance, but both Brem and Athena were rigidly demanding, and, as with their father, most of their self-satisfied conceit centered around their hair. They did have lovely hair, but their preoccupation with it was a bit overboard. Rose sometimes wondered what they would do when they regenerated. She secretly hoped she’d still be alive to see it.
When Brem was a teenager, and going through his teenaged rebellions, the one thing he had never really done was change his hair. He may have lashed out against the formalness of his father’s style by settling on a permanent uniform of jeans and T-shirts, but his hair was a point of pride for him. Rose suggested, once or twice, that he might try combing it flat, but Brem had looked askance at that. In the odd tug-of-war between Brem and his father, where Brem wanted to be nothing and exactly like him all at once, the hair was untouchable. Time Lords might wage battles about everything from the brewing of tea to the status of the Hindenburg as a fixed point in time, but they would never argue about hair.
One day they went to the city of Capillus, on the planet of Foh. It was a medium-sized metropolis, bustling without feeling crowded, and the Doctor had some idea about a specific store he wanted to go to with a wide selection of new ties that he wanted to contemplate. Brem, who at sixteen sometimes retreated into a semi-permanent sulk, was annoyed.
“I don’t understand,” he complained, as they walked down the street, “why I have to go tie-shopping. I don’t wear ties. I could wander by myself for an hour and not get into trouble.”
The Doctor snorted. He was intent on finding the right shop, and paying very little attention to Brem. “When have any of us done anything for any period of time and not gotten into trouble?”
Brem sighed deeply and kicked at a pebble on the road.
Rose looked at him thoughtfully. Brem was a sixteen-year-old with little independence, when you got right down to it. He was fairly confined to the TARDIS. When they were off the TARDIS, he was forced to stay close to his family. He had friends, because she’d insisted that they make friends when they visited places, but he had no close friends, really. Rose thought of the way she and Shireen had been at sixteen, and thought of how much her son was missing in not getting to experience it. She thought of the things that she had been up to at sixteen. And she shuddered a bit, but she also thought how it was unfair how much Brem was being deprived of.
“Maybe an hour,” she said.
The Doctor looked at her abruptly. So did the kids.
“What?” said the Doctor.
“Maybe an hour,” she repeated. “I’m sure Brem could survive for an hour. He’s sixteen.”
Every member of her family gaped at her.
“On his own?” asked Fortuna, finally.
“He is sixteen,” Rose told her. “When you are sixteen, you can also spend an hour on your own on Capillus.”
There was some more astonished silence.
“But-” sputtered the Doctor, finally.
Rose looked at Brem. “If anything happens-anything at all-you are to use that psychic link of yours before you even breathe, do you understand me?”
Brem nodded dazedly. “Really? I can really just…?” He gestured around.
Rose frowned again, and wondered if fear had made her keep her kids too sheltered. Granted, theirs was not a typical lifestyle, but she had to learn to cut her apron strings a bit more. “Yes. Absolutely. One hour, then meet us back here.”
Brem lit up. It was an expression she knew all too well, the one she had seen for the first time on a Christmas so very long ago, when a new, new Doctor had appeared in a suit and she had smiled her approval at him. He swooped in for a rare hug-Brem, she knew, loved her fiercely, but was less demonstrative about it than the rest of the family.
“Thank you,” he said. “I won’t get into any trouble, I promise.” And then, as if he was worried she might change her mind, he went striding away very quickly, glancing over his shoulder once and sending them a little wave.
“You…You…You let him wander off,” accused the Doctor.
Rose looked back at him. He looked thunderstruck, the girls looked gob-smacked. “He will be fine,” she said, firmly. “He’s sixteen years old, and he’s one of the cleverest beings in the universe.”
“Yes, and he’s your son, which makes him jeopardy-friendly,” the Doctor retorted.
Rose snorted. “Oh, you think I’m where that gene originates in this family? Come on, where’s your tie shop?”
The Doctor was no longer in the mood to shop for ties, she could tell. He led them to the shop, and it was indeed a wondrous shop, and just the brown-and-blue selection alone took up a whole room and was extensive, but the Doctor’s heart was not in it. Athena and Fortuna, buoyed by their mother’s promise that they could someday wander freely around as well, were having a grand time making outrageous selections for him.
“How about this one?” asked Athena, bringing him a bright green tie dotted over with pink flamingos.
The Doctor looked at it, and shrugged.
Rose bumped her shoulder against his, as Athena walked away from them. “Cheer up, would you? Isn’t he just fine in your head?”
“He’s…Yes, he’s happy, if you must know,” the Doctor replied, shortly. “Very, very happy. You’ve made him very happy.” He turned away from her, with a sniff of disapproval, and began energetically sorting through a pile of ties in front of him.
“Nothing’s going to happen to him, you know,” she told him, watching him.
He did not look at her. She walked around, to the direction he was now facing, although he still did not look up.
“Doctor-” she began.
“Everything. Is going. To happen to him, Rose,” he told her, speaking in clipped tones as he sorted through the ties. “Everything.”
“Well, that’s good,” she said, stubbornly. “I hope everything does happen to him. It’s called ‘living a life,’ Doctor.”
The Doctor dropped the ties and looked at her. “Do not make it sound as if I’m trying to keep him from living a life. I’m doing the same thing as you. The foremost thought in my brain every moment is how to keep all of you alive until the next moment. You have no idea how much energy I expend keeping all of us safe, all the time, how much time I spend gazing at things out of the corner of my eye, in case the plant in the corner over there-” He gestured, at a plant she honestly hadn’t even noticed-“comes complete with an evil botanist, or looking over my shoulder to make sure there’s no Weeping Angel hovering behind us. I can do it, you know, when we’re all in a contained area and I can see everything, but you took Brem out of my sight and I can’t-”
“Do you really do this?” she interrupted, softly.
“What?”
“You can’t do this,” she continued, tenderly. “You have to stop. You’re going to make yourself mad. You have to…You have to learn how to take a breath, yeah?” She cupped his cheek with her hand, gently.
“Rose-” he started.
“Shhhhh. Close your eyes.”
He exhaled in irritation but he obeyed.
“He’s sixteen years old,” she said. “And in Time Lord years, I…don’t know what that is, but he’s, you know, old enough.”
“It’s not like dog years,” said the Doctor, keeping his eyes closed. “There’s no exact equation.”
“The point is that he can take care of himself, yeah? He’s bright and he’s clever and he had the best teacher in the universe when it comes to looking over his shoulder and out of the corner of his eye, yeah? He’s quick on his feet and he’s got a good head on his shoulders and he’s you, he’s so much you, he’s curious and exuberant and he wants to see everything there is to see, you know this because you know how you are, and we-you and I-we have to learn how to let all of them do it while still being able to take a deep breath every once in a while.”
The Doctor’s eyes opened. He looked at her solemnly. They were deep in the way they could be sometimes, that way that reminded her that she’d married an alien and she would never be sure that she completely knew him. “Rose,” he said, his voice low. “You’re so very…so very…”
“What?” she asked.
“Young,” he sighed, and closed his eyes again.
“Do you know what I was doing when I was sixteen?”
“What?”
She paused. “Never mind, I don’t think you want to know.”
His eyes opened and then narrowed. “This is you making me feel better, is it?”
“I’m better at this when we’re both naked, aren’t I?”
“If you think you’re going to distract me…” he grumbled. Then, grudgingly and hopefully, “Yes. You are.”
She smiled and kissed him, sweetly and lovingly, and he kissed her back the same way, and then leaned his forehead against hers.
“I am so very bad at all this,” he said.
“No, you’re not. You’re very, very good at it. That’s why it’s so hard. That’s how you know you’re doing it right.”
“He’s very happy, Rose. He’s having a fabulous time. He’s keeping the link strong, in our heads, and he’s very happy.”
“Good.” She gave him another quick kiss. “We did a good job today, you and I. Now pick a tie, I don’t want to have to go tie-shopping again with you for a while.”
“Can you two stop that for a second?” Athena complained, coming around the aisle to find her parents embracing. “I wanted to show you this tie.”
She held up a loud orange tie covered with images of yellow chickens.
“Oh, Theenie,” half-whined the Doctor. “You are not taking the choice of tie seriously.”
Athena grinned at her father, and Rose, relieved that he seemed in a better mood, listened as he launched into a ridiculous speech about the process of choosing a tie.
They obediently went to the rendezvous point to meet Brem, laden with ties, including one Rose had bought because it was the softest fabric she’d ever felt. “It doesn’t match my suit,” the Doctor had said, dubiously, when she’d brought it over to him. “Ah,” she’d replied, “but I thought we could use it for activities involving, you know, our bed.” “Oh, in that case,” he’d said, and immediately added it to the pile.
Brem was late.
“He’s late,” complained the Doctor, bouncing a bit in place.
“He’s a whole minute late,” commented Rose.
“We’re Time Lords,” the Doctor reminded her. “Time Lords are-”
“Always late,” she finished for him.
He gave an indignant gasp. “We are never-“
“Doctor, what time did you show up for our wedding?” She looked at him.
He closed his mouth.
“I thought so,” she commented, and looked back out over the crowd, searching for Brem’s telltale messy mop of hair, and-
“Hello,” he said, cheerfully.
The family stared at him, silent.
“Did you buy a lot of ties?” he asked, looking at the bags. “Blimey, how many can you possibly wear?”
“Your hair,” managed Athena, hoarsely, the only one of them who could speak.
“Oh,” said Brem, and ran his hand over the top of his very smooth head. “D’you like it?”
“You…You…You shaved it,” she continued, voice hushed in shock.
“Yup,” he responded, happily.
The family stared.
“One hour,” the Doctor said, finally, looking at Rose. “You let him leave for one hour, and look at what he did!” He gestured.
Rose swallowed thickly. Okay, so she thought her family was far too vain when it came to their hair, she thought they could all be taught a lesson, she thought they could all learn to realize it was just hair. But still. It was beautiful hair. His beautiful hair. And he’d shaved it. All off. At that moment, every ridiculous thing she’d done at sixteen seemed to pale in comparison, since she had never shaved off her head hair as beautiful as Brem’s. “It’s…It’s…It looks…” she struggled.
“It’s a joke. You silly people,” said Brem, and appeared to pull the top of his head off. His hair sprang forth, mussed and tousled and messy and all of it intact.
She heard her family around her breathe a collective sigh of relief.
And then Athena said, “That was evil, freaking us out like that.”
“It’s just hair,” Brem defended himself.
“Evil,” said Athena again, and then reached her hand out for the odd piece of plastic-some sort of very advanced wig-that Brem had been using. “Let me see that.”
The kids started walking back to the TARDIS, discussing Brem’s purchase. Rose took the Doctor’s hand and tugged him into movement.
“Come on,” she said.
“If he had really shaved his hair off,” the Doctor informed her, “we were not going to let him go off on his own again until he was 325 years old. I would never have been able to trust his judgment again. Can you imagine, shaving our hair off?”
Rose shook her head. “It’s just that you’re all so vain,” she said.