Rose heaves a heavy sigh, examining her reflection from first this angle, then that. Turning to the side and then back to the front again, for good measure. The image doesn't change, of course; the mirror still shows her exactly the same thing it did before, first and foremost her body, clad in naught but a tee shirt and pants, and behind her, the rest of the bedroom, rumpled bed and fresh coral walls and two sets of clothes strewn about the floor. But their bedroom isn't the problem.

Maybe the mirror's warped?

She tilts her head. Nope, mirror's not warped. It's all her.

The sight of the Doctor approaching from behind does not deter Rose, nor does his body brushing hers. He bumps past Rose on his way to the wardrobe without so much as a how-do-you-do.

"Am I in your way?" she grumbles.

"Only in the literal sense," he says cheerfully.

Pulling a face, Rose steps away while he looks over all of his ties, ultimately settling on a little maroon number (which is in no way a special detail, considering that most of his ties are some shade of maroon or burgundy or red-brown and really why does he need so many neckties anyway?). She resumes her position as soon as he's done, re-planting herself with a grump.

"Are you expecting it to change?" the Doctor asks from behind her.

"Huh?"

"The mirror," the Doctor says. Rose shifts her gaze from her reflection to his, finds him sitting on the bed while he buttons up his shirt. "You keep staring at it. Are you expecting it to do something different?"

"No," she says, and she knows she sounds petulant and she doesn't care.

In the mirror, she watches as his mouth turns down in a frown. "Is...something wrong?" he asks, warily, like he's afraid that question will be enough to set her off. (Which is irritating in and of itself; it's not like she's some wild animal prone to hissing fits.)

"No," she says again. "Just—I think I've gained a little weight, is all."

"About a full stone, yeah."

Her heart sinks. "A full sto—? The scale said—"

"It's off," the Doctor says, staring at the wall while he knots his tie. "Been off for ages; ignore the scale."

"God, is it really that noticeable?"

"Well, it is to me, but that doesn't mean anything. I notice everything. Everything about you, anyway."

Groaning, Rose buries her face in her hands. Of course he noticed. Because of course he did.

"Rose?" she hears him say, confused. "It's just a bit of subcutaneous fat."

"Gee, thanks," Rose replies, hands dropping heavily. Her shoulders slump with the force of it and she drags herself over to the bed so she can flop across, burying her face in the duvet.

She can feel his eyes on her. Probably he's surveying the landscape of her body, determining the exact percentage of body fat to muscle in this place and that and the other and god knows what else. Her hands fist in the duvet and her legs go rigid. Rose hates it when he looks at her like some kind of specimen.

The mattress dips beside her, pulling her just the slightest bit lopsided, and she peeks out enough to see that the Doctor has laid across the bed as well. His body is parallel with hers, crosswise on the bed, and he has to tuck up his legs a little to keep them from dangling over. (In any other situation, Rose might tease him a bit for that, for his skinny gangly spider limbs that aren't actually any of those things, that they both know she fancies.) He turns over to face her, arms crossed and the tail of his necktie trailing along the bedclothes.

"I feel like I should be comforting you about something right now, but in the spirit of full disclosure...I haven't got a clue what that something might be," the Doctor admits. "Help a fellow out?"

Rose sighs again, and when she speaks, her voice is muffled, covered in a cottony sound. "It's nothing. It's stupid."

"Would you prefer to be left alone?"

"I would prefer not to be fat."

"Why, what's wrong with being fat?"

She shifts so that she can glare at him, ask him if he's being funny, but the Doctor looks genuinely perplexed.

"It's...a whole thing," she says, at a loss for any other way to describe it. "People get really judgy about it, and—really? How do you not know?"

"I guess it occurred to me on some level, but really, you lot are constantly changing your definition of what is and isn't acceptable as far as bodies go," the Doctor muses. "It's a little ridiculous, actually. One century, it's all voluptuous hips and voluminous bosoms and the bigger the better; the next, it's all slim lines and no curves to be seen. Sometimes 'athletic' means a Greek statue and sometimes 'athletic' means Henry VIII. And you've got people deciding that that isn't enough, you need corsets and vertingales and codpieces and girdles. You bind your feet and you stretch your neck and you paint your face with lead and you wear muslin gowns dipped in water and you catch pneumonia. Whatever the wealthy happen to look like in any given period, that's what everyone else needs to be, too. But that's stupid. What does beauty have to do with wealth?"

Rose reaches out to his face, pats his cheek with a pitying touch. "Oh, you beautiful, precious unicorn of an idealist," she says. "Traveled to how many decades, how many places, and you still haven't figured out that people are just arseholes?"

"I'm plenty aware of all the arseholes, thanks." He grimaces. "I mean, I'm aware of all the people who are arseholes, figurative arseholes, not actual, literal arseholes."

"Oh my god," Rose laughs. "Stop saying 'arsehole'!"

"Why? Is 'arsehole' starting to sound funny?"

"Because it's gross!" she says, laughing again. When he opens his mouth and Rose can just see the beginnings of the word starting to form, her hand shoots behind her back and returns with a pillow that mysteriously ends up smacking him in the face.

"Oi! You said it first!" he protests around a mouth full of pillowcase.

"Yep. I started it, and then I ended it!"

The Doctor replies by ripping the pillow away, tossing it over his shoulder. Rose barely registers the pillow hitting the far wall with a soft poof before he dives at her with a growl, hands attacking her ribcage and pulling her body into his. His fingers dance along her sides and she squirms. Shrieking, Rose makes a show of pushing him away when he buries his face in the join of her shoulder and her neck, tickling her with his nose and his lips and damn him.

"Do you surrender?" he asks, his mouth warm on her skin and voice reverberating in her chest. Fingers tangled in her shirt, one thumb ghosts over the bare flesh of her hip, just above the waistband of her pants, and Rose shivers deliciously. "Or do I need to convince you?" the Doctor continues.

"Convince me of what?"

"That bodies are value-neutral and standards of beauty are completely arbitrary and physical appearance is a silly thing to judge someone by," the Doctor says, matter-of-factly, like it's obvious. He pulls back to look at her, props his head in his hand. "Don't mistake me: your facial symmetry and arrangement of features does make you aesthetically pleasing—"

"...thanks?" Rose interrupts with an unsure grin.

"—but you're lovely because you're you. And a stone, or two, or three, are not going to change that."

He considers. "Also, you're still, you know. Fairly slender and conventionally attractive for your place and period. Aren't you? So your sudden insecurity is a little baffling, to be honest."

Rose glances away from his face, fixes on his shirt collar instead. "It isn't really all that sudden," she confesses. "It's something every girl worries about, no matter how pretty people say she is. There's always something wrong with you. Too short, too tall, too thick, too thin, too pale, not pale enough. And then there's the hair—better be long, shiny, and something that looks like it didn't take any time at all, but actually probably took a good half-hour or more. Same with makeup. And no matter what you do, how much you accomplish, how you look is still more important somehow. It's stupid, but it's there. All the time. Kind of hard to ignore, you know?"

She looks up to find him watching her with something like pity on his face. Well—no. That's not fair. "Worry" or "concern" would be more accurate. The Doctor can be a little condescending sometimes (usually when it comes to discussing science or maths, because old habits die hard), but when he sits still long enough to actually properly talk about anything, if and when Rose lets slip something important, he's surprisingly sympathetic. Still, Rose can't shake the feeling that she needs to break the tension with a joke, or something.

"Don't suppose Time Lords have to put up with anything silly like that," she says.

The Doctor shrugs. "Not really. Physical attraction was part and parcel, but it was different. For those of us who indulged in such things, we were drawn to a physical presence because of its psychological essence, not the other way around."

"So you really do love me for my mind," Rose teases.

"I do, very much," the Doctor replies with a grin, leaning down to press a quick kiss to her lips. "But your body is quite nice, too."

He rolls off the bed and leaps to his feet. "Right! Time to finish getting dressed," he announces, snagging a pair of Rose's trousers off the floor and holding them out to her. "We've got a new world to explore, new people to meet, new things to see. Shall we?"

Impatient to go, he shakes the trousers in her direction, but Rose just eyes them while she chews on a thumbnail. "They don't fit right now," she admits quietly.

"All right," the Doctor says, unfazed. He tosses the trousers on the bed on his way to the wardrobe, rummages around between his clothes and hers. "By the way," he says over his shoulder, "it's perfectly natural for you to be gaining weight right now."

"Why?" Rose asks. Then, blood draining from her face, "Oh god, am I pregnant?"

"What? No! It's because you're happy."

He glances back at her. "You are happy, right?"

"Yeah," Rose says, confused. "Of course I am. But—"

"You're not working yourself to the bone anymore, or living strictly on coffee and takeaway, and if the most recent samples are anything to go by, your stress and anxiety have significantly decreased over the last year—"

"'Most recent samples'? Please tell me you're talking about saliva."

"—and besides, that's just what a lot of human bodies do when their owners are in happy relationships."

"You haven't put anything on, though," Rose points out.

The Doctor shakes his head. "Naturally higher metabolism," he says apologetically. Fishing around in the wardrobe one last time, he finds a skirt—a bit short, a bit flouncy, but it's cute enough and it's got a stretchy waist—and he turns around, throws it her way.

"Is this even remotely practical for where we're going?" Rose asks, holding it up.

"Nope," the Doctor says happily. "But if I'm lucky, I'll catch a little glimpse of something now and then."

His cheeks instantly flush, like he's only just realizing he spoke out loud. "I mean, I respect you," he quickly amends. "As a woman and a person."

"How progressive of you," Rose laughs, and she rolls over on her back so she can pull the skirt on, shimmying it up past her ankles and knees and hips. "But I suppose you can ogle my bum if I can ogle yours."

Grinning, the Doctor holds out his hand to help Rose up, and she takes it.

"Deal," he says with a wink.