"This," Rose intones dramatically, from her position behind the screen door, "is going to end in tragedy."
The Doctor twists around to look at her from where he's crouched by the old charcoal grill. He's a glorious mess. His hair is far beyond its usual state of untidiness, a twisted brown mess flecked with ash, and his face is smudged with grease. Rose knows that if she buried her face in the crook of his neck and shoulder, in that place that feels like it's meant just for her, she'd be able to smell charcoal and smoke – pressed into his skin, saturating the fabric of his t-shirt.
"Oh ye of little faith," he says, voice thick with mock disappointment.
"My faith in you is not the issue here. It's your track record with fire."
He tsks and scowls, turning back to his work. "It's practically a controlled environment! Back garden, tiny little charcoal grill. There isn't even any lighter fluid involved. Really, Rose, it's not as though it's – " he struggles for a moment, looking for a proper bit of hyperbole, something that will really make his point. "–four-dimensional mechanics, or Triskellian geometry, or the proper way to make toast."
Rose just shakes her head and smiles at him, taking a moment to admire the rare sight that is the Doctor in shorts and a t-shirt, bending away from her and back over the grill.
He'd woken up this morning and declared – muffled, into her hair, as his face had been pressed against it at the time – today, I am going to learn how to barbecue.
It's not even close to the oddest thing he's ever said, in or out of bed, and Rose really hadn't paid it any mind. At the time, she'd been far more interested in the way his hands were beginning to drift lazily over her body, blunt nails scraping across her bare back and lightly callused fingers running over the flat of her stomach.
After all, every once in a while he just – does this. Decides there's some uniquely human skill he needs to master, some obscure part of this mortal experience that he hasn't got to try yet, and the urge to do so seizes him with unprecedented urgency.
He's been doing it ever since the beach, ever since that first desperate kiss, when he'd clutched at her like a drowning man to driftwood and they'd started learning the inside of each other's mouths, began to acquaint themselves with the feel of her lips on his. He'd thrown himself into the whole 'half-human' idea with gusto right from the start, with so much infectious enthusiasm and inappropriate curiosity – vinyl and tarmac and other people's hands are not things which can yield useful information, when licked with a human tongue – that Rose had almost forgotten that there was anything she could possibly be sad or angry or hurt about. It was difficult to be preoccupied when he was making those utterly disgusted faces, hard to do anything but giggle while he moaned it's just so different, Rose, this human thing, stop laughing, there's so much to try.
She remembers – very clearly, even years later – sitting across from the Doctor on the zeppelin ride home, staring at him as he peered out the round little window at Norway, fading into the mist below them. He'd looked incongruous, strikingly out-of-place in this world she'd defined for so long as wrong, as the one without the Doctor.
Then he'd turned from the window to smile at her, and Rose had felt her breath catch, felt the weight of don't you see what he's trying to give you knock the wind out of her in a way it hadn't on the beach, when the wind had been howling and she'd been crying and there'd been two of the man she loved, standing on either side of her like mismatched bookends.
He'd rapped on the doorframe of her bedroom that first night they were back in London, while she got ready for bed, and said there's something else I'd like to try – if you want, low and soft and a little bit nervous, an amalgamation of tones that she'd never heard coloring his voice before. He'd buried his hands in her hair and pressed his mouth to her forehead, to the round of her shoulder, to her throat, and finally to her lips, had twisted his fingers in her hair while she pushed his jacket off his shoulders and onto the floor.
His skin is warmer now, his blood hotter, and there's only one heart beating in his chest, but his mind is still all Doctor, even if Donna's speech patterns bleed through sometimes – and that mind is a Time Lord mind, brilliant and alien and so, so old. It runs a million miles a minute, even faster than his mouth, and Rose worries, sometimes, that this day-after-day, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other life is just too slow for him.
He's always thrown himself into things, as long as Rose has known him, but she thinks that now it might be edged with something like panic, with a keen awareness that the single heart he has will stop beating one day, that this new body has an expiration date.
Once upon a time, she thinks it might have eaten away at her – the worry that he's settling, slowing down, giving up more than she wants to ask of him.
It doesn't, though, because for every desperate, slightly manic attempt he makes at being human – at learning to cook, or to use a lawnmower, or get a job, at signing John Smith next to Rose Tyler on mortgage papers – there is an I love you. He says it once, twice, three and four and five and six times a day, and it's not fast at all, not rushed or frantic (except, of course, when they want it that way).
He breathes the words into her skin with something like wonder every time, as if he can't quite believe that he gets to say them.
Rose leaves the Doctor to his barbecue, caught between amusement and honest concern as she hears the electronic whirring of his slap-dash sonic screwdriver being brought into the project.
Barely five minutes go by before the smell of smoke begins to drift inside the house. It floats in through the open back windows, trailed by the sound of muffled yelps and curses and the Doctor's voice, sheepishly calling her name, and Rose just laughs.