"… so then Jo said, what about the monster? Of course, the monster! Mind you, Aggador was really a lovely sort of chap once you got to know him. More like a big puppy, really. And besides, it turned out it was Hepesh we had to worry about all along, the scoundrel," said the Doctor.
The Brigadier had no idea what he was on about by this point in his meandering anecdote, but nodded as though he understood perfectly. Somewhere between have-I-told-you-about-the-time-Jo-and-I-blah-blah-blah and so-then-Jo-said, the Brigadier had allowed his attention to stray entirely to their surroundings: the suns were now obscured by a patch of thick trees, whose wide and heavy leaves swayed and fanned out just above them in shades of vibrant purple and green. The faint sound of melodic birdsong followed them through the little wood, though he could not see where they were nesting. They stepped carefully over masses of solid, twisted roots, which wound their way across the narrow path.
The Doctor seemed to take no notice of the Brigadier's absent reverie, beaming at him as he held a low-hanging branch out of their way.
"Oh I see," said the Brigadier, after what was probably an uncomfortably long pause following the end of the Doctor's story. "Well, glad to hear it all worked out in the end, what?"
"Quite," agreed the Doctor, though the Brigadier sensed something of a bemused tone in his voice. Oh well.
The task had fallen to the Brigadier to sit Kate down with a plate of Swedish pancakes - her favourite - and explain why she and Mum were moving to a new home without him. She accepted the news with the all bravery and stoicism of her Lethbridge-Stewart forebears, asked him if he was going to go live with Army, and if they would still have Swedish pancakes. It was then that he realized that he had been so absent that it made little difference to her where he lived after all.
The divorce had followed swiftly, and without argument. The Brigadier may have dusted slightly less often than Fiona had, but the adjustment had otherwise been minimal. He had to admit that his house felt slightly too large for just one person, however, and altogether too quiet.
"Doctor, surely you don't expect us to swim across, do you?" asked the Brigadier, squinting at the small, pale blue lake in front of him.
"Well, it is the fastest way from point A to point B," reasoned the Doctor, unbuttoning his jacket, "and by far the most pleasant."
The Brigadier shook his head.
"My dear Lethbridge-Stewart," chuckled the Doctor, "you're not afraid of getting your moustache wet, are you?"
"Certainly not," huffed the Brigadier, self-consciously adjusting his facial hair. "But if you think I'm spending the rest of my day off stomping about in soaking wet blue jeans, you're even more mad than I thought."
"My rucksack's waterproof, and your clothes will fit," explained the Doctor, unbuckling the clasp of his worryingly small bag.
"I hardly think so," blinked the Brigadier, suspiciously eyeing the Doctor.
"Simple physics, my dear. It's dimensionally transcendental," said the Doctor, improbably stuffing his jacket into the bag with perfect ease. "Just like the TARDIS. Haven't you ever wondered how it's bigger on the inside than the outside?"
"I try not to," grinned the Brigadier. Sometimes, and in absence of an actual emergency, he had learned that the best way to respond to the Doctor's scientific mumbo-jumbo was to nod mutely, inviting no further discourse. "You could have warned me to bring trunks, you know."
"Slipped my mind," replied the Doctor, shrugging out of his ludicrously frilly shirt. "Besides, there's no need to be shy all of a sudden, it's not like you've got anything I haven't seen before."
"Granted," the Brigadier acquiesced, shimmying grudgingly out of his snug trousers. It was, after all, not an excessive and sudden attack of modesty that had lent him misgivings in the first place; rather, the idea of swimming nude and unarmed across an alien lake on a planet goodness knows how far from England, on his day off, with nothing but the Doctor's assurances of safety, seemed far from prudent. And while risk came firmly with the territory of being the commanding officer of his branch of UNIT, there was necessary risk, and there was reckless, unnecessary idiocy. The Brigadier was not typically one to indulge in the latter.
He also sincerely hoped that the Doctor was not under the mistaken impression that he was blushing.
"Don't worry, my dear chap, I promise not to circulate any compromising polaroids to anyone at UNIT HQ," added the Doctor, with a playful smile.
"I should certainly hope not," replied the Brigadier, raising an eyebrow. "Of course, if you did, I could not be held responsible for anything that may happen to, oh, let's say, that mysterious experiment you've been tinkering with for the last month."
"You wouldn't," gasped the Doctor.
"You wouldn't," smirked the Brigadier.
"No, I wouldn't," laughed the Doctor.
"Me neither," smiled the Brigadier.
The water was warm, and far more buoyant than he had expected. It seemed to him now that he had accumulated so much tension in recent memory that he had forgotten how it felt to be completely and totally relaxed. Relaxation was not something his position easily allowed for, nor did he easily allow himself. It was good to be reminded.
"By a waterfallllllll, I'm calling you-hoo-hoo-hooooo," the Doctor sang to himself, swimming in playful circles around the Brigadier. "We could share it allllll, beneath a ceiling of bluuuuuue."
The Brigadier rolled his eyes. "Oh we could, could we, Doctor?" he said, with no small amount of sarcasm.
"We'll spend a heavenly daaaaaay," the Doctor continued undaunted, "here where the whispering waters play."
The Doctor finished his song with a boop on the Brigadier's nose, and smiled.
The Brigadier was sure that it was something about the properties of the lake that left him feeling suddenly lightheaded, and not how near to him the Doctor was floating. He felt his breath hitch as the Doctor's hand - quite by accident, of course - brushed against his shoulder beneath the water. As he closed his eyes, he could hear his heartbeat ringing in his ears with the ferocity of a waterfall.
A splash hit him quite rudely in the face as the Doctor turned round, resuming his swim. The Brigadier shook his head, and began, reluctantly, to follow him.
"Come along, Brigadier," he admonished, bringing the Brigadier's awareness fully back into the present, "we do want to get there some time today."
"Quite right, Doctor," the Brigadier agreed, allowing the water to carry him almost effortlessly across the lake.