And one morning, as she was leaning against the console, idly flicking switches the Doctor turned to her and she didn't understand a word he said. In fact, the first time, she didn't realise he was speaking to her at all.
The sudden rush of mellifluous sound into her ears stilled her random movements, her hand stretched in mid air. It was haunting, beautiful, the timbre rich and dark, reminding her of underground, soft and silent things. She raised her eyebrows, looked down curiously at the dials — she had clearly hit the right button somewhere. The noise came again, crawling down her spine, making her shiver. It was possibly the most sensual thing she had ever heard, she thought. She didn't want it to stop. It did. Released from the spell, her hand fell back onto the panel. The silence was like a dash of iced water, but she jumped even more when she felt his strong fingers wrap themselves around her wrist, tugging her hand away from the controls.
She looked up at him in surprise, and then in shock as she saw his mouth moving and the glorious sound enveloped her again. Without thinking, her hand streaked out to touch him, his lips yielding but slightly rough against the tremulous pressure of her fingertips. She realised belatedly that she must be hearing him speak, in his own language, which the TARDIS, for some reason, had forgotten to translate. She hoped it would forget for a bit longer. She didn't think she had ever touched his mouth before, couldn't remember ever wanting to know the feel of his skin, and she saw his blue eyes wide with bewilderment, a hint of something else running for cover in their depths. She hesitated a bit too long, suddenly realised that she was standing right in the middle of the room with her hand over his mouth, dropped it in confusion and stepped back, a glow of embarrassment warming her cheeks.
He spoke again, but she managed to concentrate this time, shaking her head at him. 'I can't understand a word you're saying,' she said, and she saw him start slightly, narrowing his eyes in suspicion at the control panel.
He took a few steps away, pushing buttons, spinning levers and dials, typing commands and in the sudden freedom of her arm she noted that he had been holding onto her for a good few minutes. He turned, said something else beautifully incomprehensible. Smiling, she raised a hand to her ear, indicating her lack of understanding. He didn't seem to find it funny, tried another set of controls, spoke again. Her smile widening, she shook her head. He took out the sonic screwdriver, ran it over part of the console then shifted a panel out from the floor and climbed down into the hole. She put her feet up on the jumpseat, yawned, and stretched, waiting for him to make whatever minor repair was necessary. Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw him watching her, caught a blur of movement as his head whipped back round to the circuit boards as she turned for a closer look.
Eventually, he climbed out of the floor, his face like thunder, and she could read his frustration in the way he braced his arms against the engine column, tapping his foot impatiently.
He looked at her before she spoke. 'What's the matter with it?' she asked, guessing that he wouldn't be able to understand her.
He kicked the bottom of the column eloquently.
'Ah, broken,' she responded.
He glared over at her, said something that she would have bet money was sarcastic. Even without being able to understand him, she found it was easy to divine what he was thinking, the movements of his body telling a story she already knew. Consciously studying him for the first time, she wondered how long she must have spent watching him without noticing she was doing it.
She flattened one hand, and mimed writing on it with the other. He gave her a disgusted look and stomped out of the room, only to return again a couple of minutes later with a notepad and pen. He scribbled on it for a while and threw it across to her, but despite turning it over and over she couldn't tell what it said. Either his handwriting was terrible or the TARDIS had stopped translating altogether.
She had a thought, drew a picture of a stick man on the next page — maybe she couldn't read his writing, but a picture was a picture in any language. Sticking her tongue between her teeth, she gave the stick man a tiny black jacket and drew a pen shaped object with a shiny blue light on the end in its hand. Although she was concentrating, she could feel him moving across the room towards her, so attuned to his presence that she could have found him with her eyes closed. By the time she was finished he was leaning over the back of the seat behind her, his head nearly on her shoulder as he watched. She could feel him breathing against her neck and her body gave an unconscious shudder all on its own. She hoped he hadn't noticed. It was only because the silence in the room was so unusual that she noticed herself.
He reached over, tapped the picture, tapped himself, looking at her with his eyebrows raised. She shot him a grin, shook her head, deliberately adding a large pair of ears and a big nose to the drawing before handing him the pad and nodding. He screwed up his face into a mock smile, pretending to hold his sides in silent laughter. But the jewel bright look he threw her as he walked to the other side of the room showed that he was not annoyed.
With quick movements of his hands he produced a blank space on one wall, retrieved some sort of a pen and handed it her, his fingers brushing hers lightly, as she stopped next to him. He drew on the space and sparkling lines of colour appeared under his hand. A blue rectangle, and two stick figures, the second with squiggles of blonde hair. He added a dotted line between the head of the first figure to the box, and then another line between the box and the head of the blonde. He crossed out the last line with scribbles of his pen. It wasn't hard to tell what he meant, whatever was wrong with the translation circuit was affecting her connection with the TARDIS.
Her skin was still unaccountably alive with the trace of his fingers, gentle and fleeting though it had been. She stepped up to the board, drew four round circles - faces with open mouths. Following his lead, she put a line between them, crossed it out, looking at him questioningly. Could they talk to each other at all?
He shook his head.
She drew another face with a smile turned downwards. He sneaked a look at her, approached the board, drew a sad face of his own. He wanted to speak to her too. Opening his arms he closed the few paces between them to embrace her, a companionable hug they had shared many times. And if she felt he was holding her a bit more tightly, and for just a bit longer than necessary she put it down to his need to communicate something that he couldn't say.
Letting her go at last, he cleared the board, hiding his face as he began a far more intricate diagram, some sort of structural chart or wiring design, complete with arrows to other parts of the drawing and the suspicion of labels. She pressed her hand against the small of his back and felt him give a tiny jump, a sharp movement quickly silenced. She probably wouldn't have spotted it if she hadn't been giving him all her attention. She couldn't remember if he always moved that way when she touched him, the same way that she seemed to be reacting when he touched her. She gestured at the board and shook her head wordlessly. It was too complicated for her. She took the pen from his hand — and there was a definite flinch there - and drew a banana. She was only a stupid ape after all. He stared at the drawing, frowned down into her eyes, put out his hand, and ran it down her arm from her shoulder to her elbow, an apology, before he turned away. She was a bit disturbed to find that the side of her breast was tingling where his hand had slid past and that there was a definite throb starting somewhere she didn't even want to think about.
Unless she was very careful, she thought, she was going to start seeing him in an entirely different light. Her body appeared to be reacting spontaneously, outside her control, or maybe she was just concentrating on its reactions a bit more, now that she wasn't so focused on what she wanted to say. Maybe, she thought, this sort of silent communion had been going on between them for some time but she had been listening too hard to see it.
He was drawing again, more little pictures, the TARDIS was in one, and the two of them, and something that might have been water, but the drawings were too disjointed and she couldn't see how they would fit together into a story. He spent a few minutes pointing in turn at the images as she got more confused. Abruptly, he clicked his fingers as though a light had come on inside him and gave her a great, glowing smile. With a cheery wave, he headed out of the room.
She couldn't ask him where he was off to so she did the only useful thing she could think of, going to fetch a book on sign language from the library, the most dull, dispassionate place she could imagine to hide. Sometime later, when she had her knees up against the desk, cleaning out her fingernails with the pages of another useless tome she couldn't read, the gentle pressure of a finger tracing swiftly down her neck and coming to rest as part of a hand on her shoulder nearly jolted her out of her seat. The delicate intimacy of the touch sent a jolt somewhere else as well. Her shiver was unmissable this time.
He had to have done that on purpose, she thought, glancing up at him swiftly, but his expression was wide eyed, innocent. Perhaps he had just slipped. He was so pleased with himself he was positively shining at her. Bowing formally, he extended his arm, grinning with a boyish enthusiasm. Sighing, and kicking herself for imagining things that weren't there, she took his arm and let him lead her from the room. Stopping a couple of doors down, he bowed again, motioning for her to precede him. He didn't have to speak for her to realise how excited he was, practically hopping from foot to foot with his own cleverness.
When she opened the door it was dark. She saw a huge chair, plush in red velvet dominating the centre of the small chamber, ringed with drapes and curtains in similar shades. In front of the chair was a screen. It would have reminded her of a cinema, if cinemas had ever been built for two. And had ever been graced with seats so large they were practically beds. Uncertainly, she looked at him, but he waved her on, bouncing around the opposite wall and throwing himself onto the chair. She took a seat as far away from him as she could, trying to put back a bit of the distance her body seemed determined to remove.
He called out something in that lilting tongue and the lights dimmed even further and there was a clicking sound as the screen shuddered into life. Up came a picture of more curtains, and a hand entered the middle of the screen, pushing them aside to reveal a black piece of paper with something unintelligible written on it. A soundtrack started up, all tinkling piano and the crackle of distance. She looked at him, saw he was already watching her, the glint of his eyes intent in the darkness, the flash of his teeth. He had made her a silent movie.
Intermission