Rose has never cared anything about the game of cricket, before today.
It isn't the sort of day she thought she'd be picking up a new hobby, either, what with the almost dying and the massive temporal paradoxes and slamming her fist down on a button that shut down the temporal field keeping this town out of sync with the rest of the universe and (inadvertently) summoning every time traveller who'd ever set foot on this planet or in this decade to her precise location.
Busy, that was the word for this day. Busy.
After reassuring half a dozen disgruntled Time Agents that she did, in fact, know what she was doing, Rose had turned her attention to the big, blue box she normally called home. So tired was she that she failed to notice that She was not her TARDIS, and nearly ran full tilt into a frankly delicious young man in a full set of cricket whites with so curious a taste in broaches that he could only be one person in all of time and space.
She'd laughed, and he'd blinked and told her she was curious, and just like that they were The Doctor and Rose, and she knew, she knew he'd been lying when he said none of the others had ever been attractive.
Jealous git.
Finding herself rather unoccupied with her current Time Lord, who, five regenerations from now is searching for her frantically on the other side of the planet, Rose decides in the interest of science and other vital knowledges to chat for a while with this old, old Doctor. She's fifteen minutes into her very first cricket lesson, with the Doctor's arms around hers and his mouth bent low to her ear as he explains the rules, when she hears the tell-tale whirring and scraping noise of the new, new TARDIS landing squarely on top of the spot where the wickets ought to have been.
The Doctor - the cricket-whites Doctor - stands up straight and Rose immediately frowns at the loss of his warmth. "That's rather rude, isn't it?"
"S'what he does. Rude's sort of his thing," Rose nods to the leafy accessory on the Doctor's chest. "Like your celery."
The Doctor looks slightly offended on behalf of his celery, and crosses his arms over his chest. "That's disappointing. I do hope -"
The TARDIS doors swing open, and out he pops - Rose makes a mental reminder not to tell him how attractive he looks, his face breaking into a beaming smile when he sees her. He'd be entirely too smug if he knew.
"Rose! where have you - oh."
The other Doctor gives a jaunty little wave, cricket bat in hand. Rose can count the seconds until the Doctor's expression changes - it's one, two, three beats, and then it's the little line between his eyebrows for confusion, and then four, five -
annnd there's the look that says whatever he's just ate has got pears in.
"I'm having cricket lessons!" Rose says brightly, noting the way her Doctor's nostrils flare when he notices how close she's standing to his counterpart. She lays her hand on his forearm for effect.
"Cricket's a delicate game, Rose," says the Doctor, his eyes pinned on Rose's hand laying across the tan sleeve of the not-other-man's jacket. "Are you sure you should be learning from an amateur? You need quality."
"Quality?" the other man gasps, and oh there it is, she'll be deflating his/their ego for days. "This girl has never played cricket in her life -she certainly didn't get it from you!"
The grinding of the Doctor's teeth is almost audible, and Rose barely has time to flash a grin and a wink at the celery'd Doctor before he's grabbed her hand and is dragging her back to the TARDIS.
"Rose," he bites out at himself. "Gets plenty of things from me."
Promises, promises, she thinks, and after she's had her way with him, she thinks she'd better have a look at them all, just to be safe.