"Not everyone can do this," the Doctor hisses, and the poor security officer goes scurrying. "It requires patience and a steady hand, which you don't happen to possess."
It's been a very long time since Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart has been woken by harried personnel declaring an apocalypse, only to find when he arrived at Ground Zero the Doctor and an experiment that would likely break the universe. He sends the soldier a pitying look as he backs away from the box with a lever attached over which the Doctor is bent, spectacles he doesn't need perched on the tip of his alien nose.
The weary sigh is a force of old habit; the urge to stroke a mustache he no longer has is almost unbearable.
"He does that," says a redheaded woman in a fluffy bathrobe with her head wrapped in a towel. She's folding her arms over her chest, shouting in the general direction of the Doctor without actually looking at him. "Because he's the world's biggest prawn."The Brigadier trades a look with Martha Jones. He likes Martha Jones; she's calm, she's confident, and before today he had no idea that she'd been the Doctor's companion, but it makes sense now. Martha Jones is the only reason he's still here, because even though he's…very fond of his friend, three-in-the-bloody-morning is too early for apocalypses, especially ones heralded by a Doctor who looks every bit as much younger as he feels older.
The Doctor suddenly pops up, eyes wide. "Was that rude? I was rude just now, wasn't I?"
Martha nods, Donna rolls her eyes. It's startling, this sort of conscientiousness, and it catches him off guard.
He coughs. "Quite."
"Oh," the Doctor grimaces. "Rose usually tells me when I'm being rude."
He looks lost for a moment, and then runs a hand through his hair, eyes darting about. It's only then that he notices, and a smile breaks over his face.
"Brigadier! You're just in time!"
"Doctor," says Alistair, folding his arms over his chest. "Does Sarah Jane know you're out in public?"
"Sarah?" the Doctor turned back to the lever and waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. "She'd never let me do this."
"That's my point, old friend. What, exactly, are you doing?"
Some very harried young man had given him the details as he'd lain awake trying to keep the sounds of the phone from waking Doris, but the details were fuzzy. High levels of something-or-other affecting a very important universal whatsit that if not handled carefully could…be…bad.
"Oh, it's brilliant, just brilliant," he grins. "Martha found it, she did, all tucked away in your storage facilities -"
" - I didn't think you'd get here now - """I was having a bath," Donna says unnecessarily.
"It's a dimensional stabiliser," says Martha, holding up a clipboard. "Least that's what the techs called it when they dragged it down here. They ran tests and things, it's all here-"
"It's Time Lord technology," the Doctor says, "Which is why Soldier Joe back there shouldn't be touching it. A…safety tether, of sorts, for dimension-hopping."
"A parachute?"
"Yep! You stick a bit of whatever you're looking for in here." he took a tube from his pocket, cradled it like something precious. It looked, at first squint, like a clump of hair - the sort of thing wrenched from a hairbrush. The Doctor slid the tube into a hole that had opened on the top of the box, and it made a humming sound, like a piece of technology coming online. "And prestomundo! The lost is found!"
"Have you lost something?"
Donna's mouth fell open, and Martha's eyes went wide. A little smile danced at the corners of her mouth. It wasn't a happy smile, but it wasn't, necessarily, an unhappy one.
"Not something," she said. "Someone."
It struck him, suddenly, what was different about the Doctor. The edge of conscientiousness, the bright energy so very different than the broken man who'd stumbled from a singed TARDIS into his back garden, all the life gone out of him.
He moves now like a man crazed, like his old self, but different. But…
Oh. Oh bloody hell. He's in love.
"God, he must be insufferable."
Donna tilts her toweled head and gives him a look. "You think this is bad," she gestures in the Doctor's direction. "I'm going to need a drink when she comes back.""I'll buy," he says, but the Doctor doesn't hear, because the Doctor has his hand on the lever and looks like he might be praying.
God help him survive the woman who's turned the Doctor into a praying man. She'd have to be a goddess herself.
She isn't, it turns out.
She's short, all hips and mouth and too-blonde hair. He would never have reached into a crowd and singled her out as the woman the Doctor - the Doctor of all people - would fall in love with. The reunion is tearful and messy and he's entirely too old for it, eyes darting helplessly about as he waits for them to…untangle.
He knows he's going to like her a beat afterwards.
"Rude, Doctor," she swats at his chest and sniffs wetly. "Who're your friends?"
The Doctor only makes a happy sound in the back of his throat and pulls her to his waist. He gives the Brigadier a grin.
"See?"