A Good Tradition
The Doctor gave a sharp yelp as Tegan pressed the peroxide against his bloodied knuckles, and his legs squirmed at the hiss against his skin. She wrangled his hand and elbow into an armlock to hold him still, rolling her eyes.
"Stop wiggling around," she demanded. "You're just making it worse you know!"
"It's awful!" The Doctor replied, gritting his teeth. "What sort of antibiotic is this?"
"It's just hydrogen peroxide," she replied, wiping the blood off his knuckles with a full-lung sigh. "You're a smart-aleck time-traveling alien and you've never used peroxide?"
"Never saw a reason," he sniffed back, his nose held high. "Honestly, Tegan, if we could have just gone back to the TARDIS, I have a room full of antibiotics and we'd avoid this whole unpleasantness."
"You're such a baby," she breathed, moving onto the long cut that had congealed on his elbow. He jerked away from her, scampering back across the sofa. She threw up her arms and stood from the ground beside the couch, pursuing with soaked, bloodied washcloth.
"Hell's teeth, Doctor!" She jabbed at his elbow with the peroxide cloth and he jerked away again. "Sit still, why dontcha?!"
"This is barbaric," the Doctor pleaded.
She finally gave up, sitting heavily on the other side of the sofa. "What do you want me to do, Doc?" She asked, frustrated, worn out.
"There's got to be something less painful," he offered, strained, eyeing the peroxide rag as if it were about to explode.
There was a horrible, empty paused, and Tegan growled as she set the cloth aside. "It's gone now, Doctor."
He sighed in relief, all the tension falling out of him and making him a cloth doll across the far arm of the couch. A cloth soaked in hydrogen peroxide, Tegan thought with the smallest of chuckles, the Doctor's greatest enemy.
"Come here, you big baby," she grunted, grabbing at his wounded arm. He flopped across the couch at her strong tug, able to keep himself from falling across her.
She stared sternly across at him, holding up his previously bloody knuckles between them, then pecked a kiss lightly against his knuckles.
Tegan ducked back up to find the Doctor staring confusedly back across at her in the oddest way. "What was that supposed to do?" he asked, incredulous. Curious. Interested.
She shrugged. "Some silly old tradition. When I was little, scraped up my elbow or something, I'd get a kiss wherever it hurt. It's supposed to make you feel better."
He pondered. She knew that pondering face. When his lips screwed up, his eyebrows titled up almost like he was worried. He then retrieved his hand and pointed quite suddenly at the cut on his elbow with his opposite hand.
"This still hurts," he told her plainly.
Her brows squared down on her eyes, incredulous, but he raised his in reply, as if to say You started this.
She rolled her eyes and leaned down to kiss again at his elbow, and a listless, wistful, hopeless smile wriggled slowly across the Doctor's face.
AN: Hello, Whodom! I haven't written seriously for this fandom yet, so here's my first (fluffy) try! This Valentine's Day, I have literally nothing to do, so I've decided to pick my 14 favorite pairings and write some sappy vignettes for them! Not all of them will be from one fandom, so if you're interested, check out my profile! I love Five/Tegan, I can't help it. I seriously wonder how many of y'all on the front page give a hoot about 'em, but I hope that you guys like it! Thanks for reading, leave us some love, and stay awesome!!