Emma hears about the planet in the market on Aurelia, how the rain will stain your skin and clothes a sepia colour. She spends the next four days formulating the best way to ask if they can go. When she finally does ask the Doctor spends a few moments trying to decide whether he is more insulted by the fact that Emma thought that four days was necessary or horrified at the thought of Emma stained a sepia tone like an old memory.
He must hesitate a second too long because Emma smiles sadly before shrugging her shoulders and sweeping her hair away like she does whenever she's disappointed and trying not to show it. The Doctor bounces forward immediately and hugs her from behind before whispering in her ear about a different planet. A planet whose raindrops were all the colours of the rainbow that would stain your skin and clothes and hair for days. A planet he'd been saving for her birthday.
Emma changes into a lovely white dress and unwinds her hair from her braid, offhandedly babbling about how she hopes they don't miss the rain and how she's always wanted to wander around Paris for her birthday while the Doctor flies them there. He smiles as he parks and decides he'll take her to 1920's Paris and give her an evening she deserves.
The TARDIS opens and Emma pauses in the door before hesitantly holding her hand out. As if on cue the rain starts and Emma draws her hand back with a gasp of delight before she darts out of the TARDIS while shrieking with glee. The Doctor wanders over and leans against the door jamb, watching as Emma skips and leaps and twirls, her hair flying behind her and she's never looked more beautiful. She stops suddenly, to catch her breath the Doctor thinks, before he realizes that she's waiting for him. He shucks his coat and dashes out beside her, scooping her up in his arms before whirling her around.
The next thing he knows music is spilling out of the still open doors of the TARDIS and he is leading Emma through the steps of Gallifrey's only social dance which melts into a jitterbug which melts into another complicated alien dance and the cycle continues until Emma flops down on the ground gasping. The Doctor settles down next to her and chuckles. She leans on him and tilts her head back before blinking and rubbing her eye. He cups her face worriedly and watches the blue raindrop stain spread through her right eye. She giggles at the fact that the world goes a tiny bit blue. The Doctor smiles.
Emma falls asleep on his shoulder half an hour later mid way through the fifth Gallifreyan fairy tale the Doctor tells her. He finishes the story, just to make sure she's asleep, before he leans over and presses a butterfly kiss to her right eyelid. Emma's best feature, in his increasingly biased opinion, are her beautiful emerald eyes and he can't stomach the idea of having one of them be the wrong colour. Then he reaches over with his finger and applies the slightest of pressures to her tear gland so that all the stain leaks out. She shifts slightly and her eyelashes flutter as she opens her eyes.
"Hey," she whispers and smiles at him.
"Sorry did I wake you?" She shakes her head on his shoulder. The Doctor presses a kiss to the crown of her head.
"It's nice that the rain is warm," Emma mutters and the Doctor grins into her hair.
"You don't think I'd let you get a cold do you?" He asks warmly. Emma nuzzles his shoulder again.
"Good point. Can you tell me another story?" The Doctor concedes her request immediately though Emma only makes it through two this time before she falls back asleep.
hr
The rainbow stain in her hair last for a week.
The rainbow stain on her dress lasts for months, until the stain is replaced with her blood, when Emma Bradley looks up at him with the life fading from her eyes and tells him to turn her into a good story.