Clothes
You know the deal by now: this is the seventh of thirteen completely unconnected stories I plan to write during the course of series three, all of which will be Doctor/Rose centric simply because I miss them. Took a break last week because the show did, but I'm back now!
This is for Uh.yeah, because she leaves the most goddamn wonderful reviews and I keep making her cry. So, here you are – something vaguely happy!
--
"Come off it, Rose," the Doctor says, slightly exasperated and more than a little patronising, his arms folded purposefully across his chest as he leans in the doorway to her room. "No-one in 22nd century Italy is gonna notice if you wear the same outfit as you wore twenty-four hours ago to defeat the Satinigans in 1875."
"I'll notice!" she protests, almost pouting in her insistence, her arms, too, folded across her nightdress in her stubborn determination to avoid re-putting on the clothes currently scattered across the floor between them. They're covered in an unpleasant purple slime and smoking slightly. "You'll notice!"
"Rose," the Doctor begins, with a perfected air of complete indifference, "I can honestly say that your wardrobe choices couldn't concern me less."
"Oh, thanks! That's just great, that is. I'll turn up in a binbag, then, next time we've gotta play 'Mr and Mrs Smith' at one of them fancy apology dinners with the Emperor of Bell-whatsit, and – "
"The Duke of Bellina," he corrects, automatically, but she talks over him as though he hasn't even opened his mouth.
"- see how you like that. See if they believe we're married then! And don't blame me when we get put up for execution by a crazy nine-foot alien insisting people who travel together have gotta be married before they're even allowed to hold hands!"
It's at times like these when the Doctor wonders why on Earth he ever travels with women. "You know I didn't mean it like that."
"You'll care when I get alien guts all over this, too, and we have no way of washin' it off," Rose warns, darkly.
"You're not seriously going to witness the New Roman Empire's Eleventh Wonder in a Winnie the Pooh nightie?" The derision is evident in his voice, and even Rose acknowledges how ridiculous this sounds. Nightdresses, of the Winnie the Pooh variety or otherwise, aren't really the most appropriate apparel for visits to post-World War Six Italy.
"There's nothing else I can wear!" she retorts, indicating the jacket she wore yesterday as it promptly disintegrates into a pile of ash. "Oh." Her face falls a little. "I liked that jacket."
"There's gotta be something." The Doctor refuses point-blank to believe that even Rose could have worked her way through a nine-hundred-year collection of clothes in a mere ten months.
"Yeah, well. Nothing else in the wardrobe fits me," she tells him, with all the patience of someone speaking to a particularly stupid two-year-old, "And unless you suggest I start wearin' your clothes – "
"Don't tempt me," he says darkly, and she isn't quite sure but she thinks she's supposed to be blushing at that comment.
"Just…just fix the washing machine and everything will be alright," she says, choosing not to remind him that this is the fourth time she's asked him to do this. Earlier in the week, she had plenty of clothes to choose from – and, of course, the distant cousin to the Moxx of Balhoon's decision to implode all over her last pair of jeans wasn't exactly premeditated. Now, though, the situation is rather more dire – what with the washing machine broken, all her clothes completely unfit for wear, the wardrobe room full of 12th century outfits for rail-thin men and the Doctor's reluctance to do anything as domestic as fixing a household appliance, she is reduced to wandering the corridors of the TARDIS in little more than her underwear (she suspects that this may be the real reason why the Doctor is so set against fixing the machine, despite the fact that it's leaking water all through his precious ship, and has already caused the destruction of several important circuits. They've been without heating in the aquarium for three days, though she can't say the polar bears are complaining).
"Don't you think mending the transtemporal gravity equalising neuro-extrapolator is slightly more important?"
"The transtemporal gravity equalising neuro-extrapolator wouldn't even be broken if you hadn't refused to fix the lock on the washing machine door when I first asked," Rose points out, and even he is slightly impressed at her sudden ability to regurgitate his technobabble. She's also completely right. He hates it when that happens.
"We could give the moon stuff a miss," he suggests, "come back and see it when – "
"When you've fixed the washing machine," Rose finishes, pointedly.
" – when you're having a little less wardrobe trouble. That eclipse isn't going anywhere. We could go somewhere else for a bit." He grins up at the roof of the TARDIS.
"What, like planet of the international pyjama party?" Rose raises an eyebrow, wondering exactly which place in the universe would consider it appropriate to wander around in practically see-through, thigh-length, cartoon-emblazoned bed wear. On second thoughts, she decides she's probably better off not knowing.
"I know of a planet, just on the edge of the Femmelhaut Triangle, where they insist women walk around – "
"If you say naked, I'm gonna kill you," Rose warns, and he doesn't doubt it.
The Doctor sighs. "There's a spare kimono left over in the library from Kyoto. If you're lucky, it'll pass for a very fancy toga."
--
Forty minutes later, and the Doctor is beginning to think that Rose is setting new records for dress-preparation time (how long can it really take to put on a kimono?) when she wanders back in, rather more suitably dressed for watching a Martian lunar eclipse from the highest point of Italy. They'll just have to tell everyone her dress is made of a new type of imported cotton, that's all. It's not that much of a lie. They just won't mention that it's imported from 3014 Japan.
"I'm not paying for dry-cleaning," he warns, as he opens the doors.
"You'd better hope you don't need to."
She steps out and promptly falls into a rather large, rather smelly puddle.
--
"New Roman Empire, you said!" Rose accuses, wringing swamp-water out of her hair all over the TARDIS floor. Something below the grating hisses ominously. "And that's another thing. Did you take a driving test for this ship, or what? You'd think you'd be a little better at the whole parking malarkey after nine hundred years."
He immediately goes on the defensive. "It's not like I aimed for landing in a swamp."
"In Scarborough," she reminds him.
"In Scarborough," the Doctor clarifies. "What's wrong with Scarborough?"
"Oh, I dunno. Maybe that, in 1918, it had swamps, and you landed us in the middle of one of 'em?" Rose sighs, squelching around the console room and leaving a yellow-y brown trail of swamp water behind her, more exasperated than really angry. "Now do you believe me when I say we've gotta visit my Mum? At least she admits when she can't fix something…" she adds in a teasing undertone, not quite quiet enough to escape the Doctor's hearing.
"Oi! I can mend that washing machine perfectly well, thanks. Better than any of your Earth plumbers," he adds, never able to resist a chance of passing comment on his own abilities. "Faster, too. I just…haven't got 'round to it."
"We're gonna have to go to London," Rose says with an air of finality, shaking her head as if daring him to deny it. "Unless you can find some sort of intergalactic laundrette that doesn't mind scraping gunge out of socks."
The Doctor looks around the room distractedly. "I'm gonna have to clean the outside of the TARDIS…it'll need more than rain to get that lot off."
Rose takes one glance down at her mud-covered kimono and says nothing, well-used to this sort of behaviour from him when she mentions her mother.
"Tell you what, though," he says, turning back to her and grinning. "'S a good job we didn't go to that naked planet, eh?"