For all the good it would do, the Doctor pushed her back into the seat with one hand while the other grabbed the wrist of the droid arm, fingers dangerously close to the teeth of the saw. He pushed it upward, lodging it directly into the ceiling just as the blade began to rotate. It easily cut a slot in the roof of the carriage, and the Doctor had to struggle to keep the arm from coming back down toward them. Peeking through the widened hole in the wall, Rose could see their driver had been replace by a droid. Still in a seating position, the droid turned it's head a hundred-eighty degrees. The lifeless eyes bore into hers, and yet it didn't stir fear like she imagined it should have.
With the Doctor trying to keep the saw away from them with both hands now, and Jack climbing out of the carriage while it was in motion, Rose reached into the Doctor's jacket pocket and pulled out the sonic. Having used it enough times herself, she flipped through the settings without much effort, found the one the Doctor used on wires, and pointed up at the saw. It stuttered, sparked, then stopped, and she caught the overly animated confusion on the droid's face before Jack knocked it off the seat. There was a loud crash outside the carriage, and she heard Jack commanding the horse to slow down and stop as the Doctor jumped out of the other door. She waited until Jack had the carriage completely still before attempting to move, finding the Doctor kneeling in the snow beside the pile of cogs, springs, and metal limbs.
Now that the adrenaline from panic was easing up, Rose stood over the Doctor, hands on her hips, glaring down at him. "Lemme guess, knew it was a droid?"
"Heard it ticking." He admitted as he picked up the head. "Thought it odd, figured it was the horse."
"Seriously?"
"Right, shoulda known better." He said more solemnly, looking up and finally meeting her gaze with apologies in his eyes. In an instant, she forgave him. He always looked so broken and lost when he gave her that look, like he was expecting to hear it was the final straw and she was leaving. He nodded, understanding the silent acceptance her letting her hands fall to her side suggested, and examined the head. "Doubt these particular droids have independent thought, not like the ones we've encountered before. They can be teleported in and out of an area, but I imagine it's only short range." He got to his feet. "Swing by the TARDIS, grab what I'd need to run a trace, and come morning we should be able to locate who's causing all this trouble, get Clara-Marie home in time for tea with a day to spare." He beamed ear to ear, looking between she and Jack as the former came up beside him.
"So if you're swinging by the TARDIS, why can't you just move it closer to the inn?" Jack asked, crossing his arms and looking a little smug. "Don't need to stay there if the TARDIS is closer."
"Already paid for the room, Jack, might as well stay in it." The Doctor countered, heading back toward the carriage.
"Yeah, but if the TARDIS was closer, you two could have the suite to yourselves." Jack suggested, raising his voice in a likely effort to make sure that the Time Lord and the locals at the outskirts of the village would have heard him clearly.
While Rose turned the shade of her namesake, the Doctor paused in his step and looked back at Jack with confused frown and a glint in his eye. "Why would I want the second room? Slept just yesterday. Good for another couple weeks, me." He smirked as Jack sighed with exasperation. As the Captain bowed his head, running a hand over his face, the Doctor flashed Rose a wink that had her giggling quietly to herself like a loon. "Here," the Doctor said as she and Jack caught up to him at the carriage. He tossed Jack the head. "Hold that."
"Why me?" Jack asked.
The Doctor arched a brow, "You wanna drive back to town, then?"
"Stopped us, didn't I? You're always the driver. Maybe it's time you take a break." He tossed the Doctor back the head before climbing up in the driver's seat. "Besides, proper footmen drive their masters and their chaste fiancees around, don't they?"
"Not gonna let that go, are you?" The Doctor asked as he helped Rose into the carriage. "How about this? Next time, you can be her brother."
She could see Jack thanks to the renovations the droid made to the carriage wall, though not well enough to see his face. "Never get to be the bride, do I?" Jack called back through the hole in the wall as the Doctor climbed in and closed the door.
"I let you steal a kiss, drink free. Now hush up and drive."
With that last tease, Jack shook his head, shoulders shaking just before he flicked the reins and the horse continued on. After a minute, the Doctor tucked the droid head against his side and draped his other arm around Rose's shoulder. Without a second thought she leaned her head against him.
"Don't tell him I said this, but it's kinda nice to be chauffeured for a change." He said to Rose. "Better than that trip to 10 Downing, this is."
"I can hear you." Jack called back with no malice.
Rose chuckled. "I think you hurt his feelings a little." She said quietly, leaning in slightly toward the Doctor.
"'Bout time he pulled his own weight anyway." The Doctor smirked.
"What are you on about? Jack does more than I do." She turned to face him, not realizing that he hadn't retreated back from his earlier incline toward her. His breath was on her lips, and she had hard time keeping eye contact with his mouth so temptingly close. It was entirely unfair that Jack could be so bold and she couldn't even steady her heart beat with this sort of proximity. She'd never admit how jealous she'd been that he just grabbed the Doctor and pressed his lips to his even if it was meant to be a goodbye.
What did they feel like? Soft, something told her, and cool like the rest of him.
She didn't know when he suddenly became guarded, body stiff and eyes revealing some kind of inner battle. She noticed his gaze flicker to her lips quite briefly, and Rose placed a hand over his left heart to feel the vibrations of it through his jumper.
A bump had the Doctor's head hit the roof, her half stumbling back in the seat, and Jack cursing quietly in the front.
"Sorry," Jack called back, but neither she nor the Doctor said anything. He was too busy rubbing the top of his head, and Rose was too eager to not have to look the Time Lord in the eye when she realized how foolish she almost made herself out to be.
Rose resettled in her seat and turned away from the Doctor, Rose took in the scene outside her window. The change in the color of the sky was breath taking, morphing from gold to deep purple with a spectrum of blue-ish green to bridge the color shift. Only one of the suns could be spotted in the sky, and it was hanging quite low. They wouldn't be getting back to the inn until late, it would seem. The first day gone, and the passing of time made her heart ache for the poor girl who was probably scared without a clue where she was or why she was taken. But soon they'd get her back. The Doctor had said so, and if there was one thing all these new discoveries about the man hadn't changed it was her unrelenting faith in the Time Lord absently pulling her closer.
~DWDWDW~
The droid head was the best part he could have picked up, but who ever was controlling them had made sure the second a droid was broken that the short range teleport would burn out. As much as the Doctor wanted to rage against Jack for being the one to cause the damage, he knew it was pointless. He'd have done the same, the Doctor knew, and it did no one any good for him to get pointlessly angry. Rose was the one placed in the worst amount of danger simply because he was so uncomfortable around Jack. He should have known it wasn't the horse, what could the horse have done? Even if it tried to pull them into a river, or a building, or anything they could have escaped it far more easily than have thing droid in the driver's seat.
He roughly dragged his fingers over his hair in frustration, allowing the luke warm water to run down his back in an attempt to sooth him. They'd been back in the inn for a while, and after having tea and making stilted conversation, both his companions turned in for the night. Rose looked exhausted, likely crashing from the earlier adrenaline, and Jack looked as though he just knew the Doctor didn't care to spend much one on one time with him.
The Doctor didn't need the shower, not really, but it was a minor comfort he could use.
It was an adventure, trying to find Clara-Marie, and that in itself was a bit of normal. While they were looking around he could pretend that everything was the way it always had been. But that wasn't ever going to happen, was it? Jack was immortal, and in such a way that he irritated his time senses. May not be as sharp as they had been, but they still knew to avoid fixed points like Jack. Yet he was likely the reason he and Rose made such a quick recovery, and while he could sense the TARDIS's occasional desire to be rid of the Captain he also knew the old girl was too fond of him and too grateful to do so.
The Doctor didn't dare think of what Rose might've done to herself. She'd been a goddess, who knew what she might have altered. Yet nothing was off with his precious girl, not that he could tell. Only change pertaining to her was his own problem of keeping his lips off hers and his hands mostly to himself. He'd known kissing her once would undo him, which is why he only did it when he thought he was about to die. He didn't expect he'd come out on the other side unchanged except for wanting what he shouldn't have more than ever.
There was a slight influx of heat from the water, and his magnificently stupid Time Lord brain instantly turn it to Rose's hands trailing down his back. He shut off the taps before that thought turned into something more than it should. He didn't trust that a certain Captain wouldn't innocently walk into the washroom.
Toweled off and redressed, he returned to the sitting room and plopped down on the sofa in the middle, stretching out over its length. He stared into the flames of the indoor fire pit that crackled comfortingly. Debating what he could do to pass the time until Rose and Jack were awake, he considered everything from simply staying where he was and waiting them out to going back to the TARDIS and hope neither caught him.
That consideration for leaving the suite disappeared the second he heard the door to the right unlatch. Her footsteps were nearly inaudible as she came toward him, and without a word Rose laid down on top of him, her head resting on his chest between his hearts. Her slender arms wrapped around his torso, giving him a quick squeeze before relaxing a bit. She was in her modern jimjams, part of the package the Captain put together for Rose inside the trans dimensional clutch. The TARDIS must have provided it for her, because the Doctor certainly hadn't own anything like that that he knew of. And he had to say that he was at least grateful that Jack packed Rose's most modest sleep clothes. That, or the TARDIS hid the others.
"Perfectly good bed in your room." He reminded her, though he didn't really want her to leave. She was warm in a way the fire could never be, penetrating his layers down to his soul.
"You're not in it." She said bluntly, honestly, and he wrapped his arms around her.
"Could be," He said without hesitation. They hadn't shared a bed much before Game Station. It was always the couch of the library, where they'd pretend she simply wanted to be read to and would fall asleep in the process. And he, of course, would humor her and find reasons to continue holding her long after she drifted off. But a bed was sacred, it was reserved for close calls with Daleks, for hold off nightmares of being used as a avatar in a video game, or terrifying aliens in Russia. Beds meant acknowledging that in that moment they needed one another more than anything. And after Game Station that need was becoming permanent.
"Didn't think you'd want to. 'Cause of Jack." She said softly. "Not the TARDIS, no way to hide from him."
"Don't think we're doing much hiding out here." He smirked against her hair as he titled his head forward and breathed in that lovely scent of Rose. Her humanity mixed with vanilla and subtle banana of her shampoo. A real banana smell, too, not the strong artificial kind found in 21st century products. He'd noticed that change, after the Blitz, when it replaced citrus. He couldn't remember where they'd stopped for a quick spell, but he did recall her cheeky grin as she returned with a decent sized paper bag and promising the credits were well spent.
They were.
She hummed a laugh, making him smile just a touch more. "May not be. But's easier to jump to what mighta happened if we stay behind closed doors." She craned her head up at him, smirking as she rested her chin on his chest.
"Closed door already," He gestured to Jack's room behind him.
"Not so private though." She countered.
"Propositioning me?" He teased. He almost wished he hadn't when she shifted up his body a bit, gazing into his eyes in the low light.
She did that thing where she studied every bit of his face with her eyes, his hearts swelling and his chest tightening at the gentle affection within them. She reached up with one hand, running her fingers along every bit of his face in slow, deliberate motions. He closed his eyes at the sensation, her caress too adoring for him to feel he had a right to see what was in her eyes as her touch lingered. As her fingers raked through his close-clipped hair, she pressed her forehead to his. The length of his nose meant hers was automatically touching his, but he still not dare open his eyes.
"What would you have looked like if you changed?" She asked him.
"I dunno." He replied. "No control over it. Sometimes … sometimes what's happening around me just before I do can influence it. Look like a soldier, 'cause that's what I became. Last survivor of the Time War."
"So facing all those Daleks, would that mean you'd have looked about the same?" She asked, and he had to pull back a touch and peek to see if she really looked as scared as she sounded. Her eyes begged to be reassured, and she worried her bottom lip with her teeth as she nervously awaited his response.
"Last thing I thought I'd do before my death was save you," He admitted that much, causing her brow to furrow. "Wouldn't have been a bad way to go."
"Would have been a good death, then." She said with a touch of playfulness to her shaky voice.
"A fantastic death," He reassured, his hand reaching up and cupping her cheek of it's own accord. "But, suppose, probably would have changed into someone you'd like. So you'd stay."
Rose smiled, small at first before it grew into the one he loved so much, and he couldn't help the grin he gave in return.
"Then I guess we'd have had nothing to worry about then." She said. "'Cause you wouldn't have changed."
"Stay the same, would I?" He asked, and she nodded. "This daft ol' face?"
She pressed her forehead to his again, "Not daft, 's beautiful." She breathed, eyes falling shut the second after she'd said it. Her fingers on his head, which had stopped their ministrations so early on, resumed their carding through the short strands. His own large, calloused fingers found their way into Rose's hair, keeping them pressed together from both sides. "Doctor," She sighed, and he shivered at the way it sounded.
"Rose." She opened her eyes, and he wanted to fall into those orbs, expand the intimacy of the moment into something physical.
A key scrapped against the lock of the door, and both snapped out of the moment as he slid out from beneath her, standing in front of the sofa. He heard Rose pad around behind him followed by the tell-tale sound of the fire poker being lifted off the stand.
The door to the suite opened.
"Where the hell did you go?" The Doctor asked an extremely disheveled Jack Harkness as he came through the door. If it weren't for the blood stained tear of his waist coat and shirt, the Doctor was pretty certain he wouldn't want to know the answer.
"Making progress" Jack stated. "Turns out we need to be looking at the theater."
A/N: Early? Yeah. But it's getting a bit more brisk out, and sometimes we could all use a good Fluff piece to warm us. And, let's face it, there's hardly any plot progress here.
Thank you to the readers, favoriters, followers, and reviewers.
annabethfan15, a country mouse, Sommerlee (we're a little under half-through at this point, so not long), BennAddict Holmes, TiaKisu, Loca8892 (How different S2 would be? That a hint? ;)), and TheKitchenMistress (I agree about Moffat.)
Thanks for leaving word, as always.
Likely closer to the end of the week for the next update so long as I don't get too eager like I did with this one.