Rose reaches up and hooks the piece of paper in her fingers. It's an ordinary sticky-note, and she twists it to face her. It's covered in intricate swirls and dots, starting in the middle and splaying out towards the edge of the paper in complex patterns.
"What's this, then?" she asks, turning to the Doctor. He's currently fiddling with the TARDIS, but stops to look up at her questioningly. "You're a doodler, aren't you? I knew it! My mum does it all the time," she continues, brandishing the paper out in front of him.
"Ah, no," the Doctor says, after he realises what it is. "It's not just scribbles." She frowns at him, turning it upside down as if that will reveal some great secret. "It's Gallifrean," he admits, surprising himself. Rose looks up from the paper, wide-eyed.
"You mean, like-"
"Yeah," he confirms. Rose thinks he'll want it back now, but he doesn't move.
"What's it say?" he asks, after a moment of tentative silence.
"It's a shopping list," the Doctor admits, feeling like she was expecting something ancient and mystical.
"Seriously?" Rose asks, disbelieving. She traces fingers over the spirals. "But it's so… pretty," she breathes. "How can something so normal and-" she pauses, struggling to find the right word, "and domestic end up so pretty?" The Doctor doesn't answer, so she asks another. "Where do you even start?" She tips the paper on it's side. "Left to right, up and down…" she trails off, trying to make the intersecting circles resemble a language.
"You don't start anywhere," the Doctor explains after a moment. "Our entire civilisation was structured around time travel. Our lives were rarely linear, so why should our language be?" He moves closer to her, looking at the language of his people. He'd written this note to himself such a long time ago - he recognised it as his sixth self's handwriting. "See, it's… pictorial," he continues. "Closer to Chinese, I suppose, if we're comparing. The circles don't mean anything by themselves; the language is in where they connect and overlap. The dots just accentuate certain parts. Very mathematical, really: tangents and points of intersection and circle theorems. Which is part of the brilliance; it can be translated into numbers so easily." He stares at the paper thoughtfully.
"What'd my name look like?" Rose asks shyly, hesitantly, unsure on whether to continue.
"Names are tricky," he says, without hesitation. "It doesn't represent sounds - again, like Chinese - but a meaning. 'Course, your name's easy, 'cause it's a real thing. A rose." Rose smiles at this, and the Doctor smiles back. He fishes around in his pockets for a moment, before pulling out a pad of sticky-notes and a pen. He pauses, looking at the paper, pen in hand, before quickly and smoothly drawing a set of overlapping circles, scattering a few dots at key points. He stops writing - or is it drawing? - and looks at the word thoughtfully before adding another, smaller circle at a point where two overlap. He grins, pulling the sticky-note from the pad.
"There we are." He sticks it on her forehead. "Rose." Rose pulls her name from her forehead to have a proper look.
"Much prettier than your shopping list," she remarks, and it's true. The word (or symbol, she's not sure which) is perfectly balanced, circles crossing circles gracefully and elegantly, reminiscent in some odd way of the rose itself.
"You like it?" the Doctor asks hopefully, beaming.
"Very much so," she confirms.
"It's not just the word 'rose', though." He points to the small circle he added on at the end. "That's not part of the word 'rose'. If you translated it literally, it means 'my' - oi, let me finish explaining!" he says in response to her raised eyebrows. "Literally it means 'my', but in context, if you translated it properly, it doesn't really mean anything specific. It just makes it more… name-ish. Like, the word belongs to a person. Or, the rose belongs to itself." He grins again, and Rose blushes before speaking.
"When you said 'my' I thought you literally meant yours," she admits.
"No, no, that would look quite different," he murmurs.
"What would it look like?" she asks, before she can stop herself. He frowns then, but at the blank sticky-note in front of him rather than at her.
"I'd have to work my name in there somehow," the Doctor says thoughtfully, bringing his glasses from his pocket and placing them on his nose. He looks at the paper, motionless apart from a contemplative nibbling of the lip, for so long that Rose begins to worry. Then, he moves, starting with an intricate criss-crossing of circles that, she realises with a jolt, must be his name. He then moves on to something slightly more familiar, her name, weaving it in with his, interlocking the circles carefully. He finishes, then wrinkles his nose in distaste.
"Ugh," he says, looking at what he's written. The word is unbalanced, awkward, the two names not quite fitting together. It looks messy, something that neither of them thought Gallifrean could ever be. "Your name looks better on it's own, I think," the Doctor observes. Rose agrees.
And yet…
"Is it alright if I keep it?" Rose asks.
"Sure," the Doctor agrees easily. He goes to hand her her name, but she stops him.
"Can I… have the other one instead?" She reaches for the awkward symbol that is his and her names combined. He shrugs, letting her take it.
"You do realise that that kinda says that you're mine?" he reminds her. "And it's not very pretty."
"I know," she says.
She leaves him smiling softly, her name in his hands.
Something I wrote because I really like Gallifrey and it's culture and language and all that - mainly because there's very little about it in canon (not counting all the books and audio productions) so I can pretty much make up whatever the hell I want. Ended up being fairly Ten/Rose, particularly the ending, which I didn't set out to do, but it's what seems to happen with most of my stories anyway. Unless I set out for it to be the opposite.
For the Gallifrean, just picture it like the engraving on the fob watch. Or the stuff on that piece of paper the creepy prophet Timelady had in The End of Time. You know the one.
Is the Doctor out of character? I've been having... problems, with my characters. It's hard when you put them in situations you don't normally see in the show.