Christmas was going wonderfully. After he had dried off from Amy's aquatic assault, the three of them had settled right back into the pattern they had developed during the TARDIS days- the Doctor poking minutely at Amy, her retorting snappishly and Rory ultimately siding with her. Secretly he was thrilled to see they hadn't changed much. He was expecting to surprise them a bit more than he did, but it seemed that River had already beaten him to revealing the secret of the Tesselecta. For being all about "Spoilers!" she sure did spoil it royally. A strange little thought tugged at the back of his mind that River wasn't present; he would've assumed that once the timey-wimey cat was out of the wibbly-wobbly bag that his wife would be spending quite a bit of time with her parents. Then again, maybe she did. Maybe they both did. He might in the future. Blegh. Sexy had been right, tenses were hard.

"So," Amy drawled slowly, "Space Gandalf. You sure didn't notice that they were hot." She gave him a pointed look that made Rory become stoic.

The Doctor blushed a fiery shade of crimson. "Well... er... That's different. We saved the universe. Now, if she hadn't been so stubborn in the first place we wouldn't have needed to do that, but-"

"Are you saying you regret marrying my daughter?"

"No!" He started panicking a bit. "Not at all! I've actually proposed to her twice, you know... The first time for me was by accident after your wedding, and then that impromptu one in Berlin. You know, when she died and surprised us all that hey, the crazy lady with the gun is trying to kill me but she's also in love with me!"

Rory mumbled, "That's not making it any better," as he walked past to turn the stereo down.

The Doctor gulped. "Space Gandalf. That's me. Or Yoda. He's the little green one in Star Wars, I finally rewatched those movies. Great movies, I love them."

"Stop avoiding the subject! You're my son-in-law, yet you're eleven hundred years old, my daughter is who knows how old-"

"Well when was the last time you saw her?"

"She said we'd just done the Byzantium."

"That's when she earns her pardon, so she's about thirty... six? Seven? I don't remember, she doesn't visibly age anyway."

Amy cocked her head to the side. "Yes, she does."

"What? No she doesn't."

"Of course she does! She was a baby, a normal baby, if a bit on the small side. Then she grew up to the girl we saw in Florida. She said she'd regenerated into a toddler... and I grew up with her. She was twenty-four that day in Berlin. Although I suppose if you add on the years from her first regeneration she'd be a bit older. But she does age."

"Well..." He ran a hand through his hair and looked to the living room, trying to find Rory. He was flopped on the couch with a dejected look, and it was very clear that he didn't miss the Doctor and Amy bickering. "Full-blooded Time Lords, like yours truly, age on our first regenerations up until a certain point... The equivalent of forty in human years. Most of us. I ended up looking about seventy for the longest time... Then a little younger... Then really old again. But anyway. River isn't full-blooded Time Lord. So I suppose we can't know." He tried to hide his heavy sigh when he lied. Of course he knew. He always knew.

Amy still looked suspicious. "I don't think I'm ever going to be able to touch the console again."

He snapped out of his depressing thoughts. "What?! It's not as if I don't regularly clean it!"

A look of horror passed over the redhead's face. "Gross! Now I'm definitely not going to be able to touch it ever again! Ugh!"