Easter
Rose stretches out her limbs as she notes the morning sun filtering through the blinds while she slowly comes to wakefulness. When she turns her head to check the time, she emits a groan of disappointment as she spies the other side of the bed empty. She had so wanted to surprise the Master with an Easter basket before he woke up.
Oh well, nothing for it I guess, she concludes as she heads into the ensuite for a nice hot shower to begin her day. I'm sure he'll enjoy it anyway.
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The Master is sitting at the breakfast table when Rose enters the room and while bending down to wrap one arm around his neck to pull him towards her for a kiss, she uses her other arm to drop off a basket on the table in front of him. "Happy Easter, love!"
He glances down at the basket before him with idle curiosity and removes an egg from the basket. "Usually, I prefer them scrambled or at least boiled in an egg cup."
Rose rolls her eyes in slight annoyance as she plucks the egg from between his fingers. "They're not for eating, well, at least not yet. They're part of the theme, Master, the fun and spirit of the day!"
He stares back at her in concern. "And how exactly, do you perceive an egg to have spirit?"
"It's not the eggs themselves, it's what they represent." She trails her fingers down from his shoulder down to his hand to intertwine her fingers with his own. "They're symbols of spring and new life." She gazes at him softly. "I wanted us to celebrate our new life together."
His returning gaze and tone have lost all traces of cynicism as he lifts their hands up and brushes a kiss across the back of her hand. "That's something that I celebrate every day, Rose Tyler. I hardly need edible provisions to remind me."
Her lips quirk upwards in amusement at his statement, he may never be the greatest romantic of all time but he's honest with her and sincere and willing to share all of himself with her, and that's more than she's ever been able to experience with any man before now. All in all, she wouldn't change a thing about him.
"Speaking of celebrations though," she inquires, "shouldn't you have known that today was Easter? I thought Mum told you to go out and buy a calendar so that you could keep track of our holidays."
"She did," he remarks as he returns to his newspaper, "and I did buy a calendar, it's over on the desk under that stack of magazines."
Rose squints at the graphics on the cover and walks over to investigate it further to ensure that she's actually seeing what she's seeing. "This is a Wiccan calendar, Master," she notes as she indicates the various drawings of cartoon witches that decorate the cover and pages listing the various Wiccan holidays throughout the calendar. "Didn't you notice all of the witches?"
"Of course I did, Rose, it reminds me of your mother." He grins at his own jest before setting down the paper and turning to face her. "What?" he asks as he takes in her crossed arms and disapproving glare. "You said that I should accept that I'm a member of your family now. The calendar simply represents that fact; it's basically akin to the tradition of keeping a photograph of my mother-in-law on my desk."
"Oh, I would love to hear you explain that to her sometime," she responds drily.
The Master tosses her a huge grin as he simultaneously reaches under the table and ceremoniously drops his own Easter basket for her back on top of it. "Happy Easter, Rose Tyler!"
The basket is large, wrapped with cellophane, filled with large chocolate eggs and boiled eggs that are painted with, not mere colors or designs as the typical Easter basket would suggest, but with breathtaking bits of artwork, some she even recognizes from the Louvre.
She immediately dashes over to him and throws herself into his arms. "Master, I love it, it's gorgeous!" she declares breathlessly. "Thank you so much!"
He draws her into his lap and pulls her tighter against him. "You're very welcome. Now you have your very own Masterpieces!"
Rose rolls her eyes and reminds, "I thought that you were never going to lower yourself to our small-minded primitive humor?"
"Sorry, it couldn't be helped." His smile becomes almost sinister as he suggests, "So, go ahead," he gestures at the basket, "why don't you open it?"
"Why? What did you do to it?" she asks suspiciously. "I've heard the stories about your time at the Academy and I don't much fancy being on the receiving end of one of your practical jokes."
"That was a long time ago, Rose; I don't need to play tricks on you to amuse myself." He flashes a devious smile and adds, "That's what the Torchwood staff is for." Before she can muster a response, he holds up his hand and states, "That was a joke." He taps the cellophane on the basket. "This is a gift and one that I worked on especially for you as well as one for your brother."
"Tony too, hmmm?" She knows how much he loves Tony so it must be safe. She hopes.
"Yes," he declares a smugly. "Those aren't just ordinary chocolate Easter eggs, they contain a bit of Time Lord technology that makes them any child's dream come true."
"You don't mean," she questions laughingly in disbelief, "that they're bigger on the inside?"
The Master's nod in the affirmative is all the answer that Rose requires to send her scurrying off of his lap to open the basket. "Oh, this is amazing!" she chirps as she struggles with the wrapping, eager to view the hollowed eggs filled with sweets. "Tony will love you forever! Mum and Dad won't, but Tony will."
"I've had that basket ready for weeks now!" he declares proudly. "I learned my lesson from Valentine's Day; nothing's been left to chance."
Her stomach seems to drop at the same time as the proverbial penny when the cellophane gives way with a final tear and Rose is forced to jump back when the power of the basket's odor hits her.
She quickly turns her head and takes a deep breath before pouncing on the basket and tries to repair the gaping hole that she has made. He watches in bemusement as she repeatedly puffs up her cheeks while clutching the basket and scrambling for the First Aid kit that they had last used on Tony when he scraped his knee.
"Is there a problem?" he inquires while watching her use the entire roll of bandages to seal the hole.
A loud gasp permeates the air as Rose releases the breath that she's been holding and turns a furious gaze on the Master. He has no idea what she thinks he's done but he is most definitely sure that her lack of oxygen is the only thing saving him from another regeneration.
"You jerk!" she cries as she advances on him and he hastily leaps out of his chair. "You swore to me that you hadn't booby trapped it!"
"What are you talking about, Rose?" he asks in irritable confusion. "I didn't do anything to that basket other than put a lot of effort into it!"
"You're not kidding, are you?" she murmurs as her anger instantly dissipates at the affronted look that crosses his features. She considers binning the basket right away or at least in the kitchen, but she worries that without an explanation that his irritation will soon turn to outright fury and end with him storming out the door.
"Master," she quizzes with a sigh, "when you mentioned this basket being ready for weeks now, you didn't just mean the idea of it, did you? You actually meant that the entire basket was ready for weeks, right?"
"That's what I said, Rose," he huffs in impatience. "Please don't ask me to repeat myself; you know how much that I hate to be redundant."
Her short-lived patience swiftly morphs into frustration. "Didn't you notice the incredible overwhelming stench coming from the eggs after a few days?"
"Now you're the one who's joking, right?" he asks defensively. "You have a six foot white rabbit with anthromorphic characteristics hiding painted eggs in Easter gardens all over the country and I'm supposed to be suspicious of a few overripe eggs?"
"You were supposed to refrigerate them after you boiled and painted them, Master!" she clarifies in exasperation. "And you do that days before Easter, not weeks!"
Momentarily gazing off into space as he collects his thoughts, he rapidly searches his memories until he arrives at one in particular. "No, no there was absolutely no mention of doing any such thing in my calendar's mention of Ostara." When her brow wrinkles in confusion, he expounds, "That's the Wiccan holiday for Easter."
"So what do we do now?" he inquires casually, the thrill of his gift giving long gone.
"Throwing it away will be a start, I'm pretty sure that those bandages won't last forever." She stares at the basket in disgust before turning back to face him. "By the way, why aren't you affected by the smell?"
"Simple, extra respiratory bypass, Rose." His gaze is as heated and sinful as his smile. "You should know, you're rather intimately familiar with its uses from time to time."
"Yes," she returns completely unfazed while her tongue in teeth grin makes an appearance, "but I'm usually still left gasping for air then too."
When he moves forward to take her into his arms, she halts his progress by grabbing the basket off of the table and thrusting it into his arms. "And since you happen to have such superior alien physiology, you can throw it out."
He drops it back down onto the table with a grimace and states, "Fine, we'll throw it away on the way out to the car when we go to your mother's house. In the meantime, you can try my hot cross buns."
"I'm not going near your hot cross buns until that basket has left this flat," declares Rose with an unwavering stance.
"No, not mine, though they are delectable, aren't they?" he notes cheekily before gesturing to the plate on the kitchen counter. "I made them this morning; I followed the recipe in the cook book so they should be fine. Cooking reminds me a bit of chemistry actually, might even try it again some time."
She heads into the kitchen and takes a deep breath at the fresh baked scent and considers it carefully before raising a bun to her lips. Well, it smells good. How bad could it be?
Her answer comes instantly as she finds herself running across the kitchen and spitting out the bite of food into the sink. She rinses the crumbs down the drain at the same time as she rinses her mouth out trying to rid herself of the taste. "What the hell was in that bun?"
"Oh, lots of things," he procrastinates as he realizes that his few additions to the recipe might have made things a bit too…flavorful.
"Like what exactly?" demands Rose as she pours herself a glass of milk to cool the burn.
"Well, there was everything that you would find in the regular recipe, which was incredibly bland by the way, even for Earth standards, and so I added a few items to it to enhance the flavor and truthfully render it 'hot' cross buns." She continues to stare at him silently as she awaits his answer. "I used pepper, curry and barbecue sauce, just to give it some extra zest."
She stares at him for a few more moments before throwing her head back and breaking into laughter. He's starting to worry that perhaps it's an allergic reaction to one of the ingredients that he added to the mix and is about to approach her when she walks over and gently kisses him and then utters, "Thank you."
"For what?" he inquires beyond mystified. "Apparently everything that I tried to do was a huge failure."
"Well yeah," Rose teases as he states the obvious, "but the point is that you tried and that means a lot to me." She reaches up and gives him another kiss. "However in the interest of more peaceful holidays, let's forget anything homemade and do all of our shopping from Tesco's, yeah?"
"And we'll never speak of this again, to anyone right?" he requests as they both know full well that Jackie's Christmases would come all at once if she knew what a fool he had been.
"We will never speak of it again," she vows fervently, "and possibly never celebrate it again either. Now we better head out to Mum's, I don't want to be late and I want to stop Tony from taking a peek at his basket before we get there."
She picks up her purse and keys from the table as the Master grabs Rose's basket to throw out and clears his throat to draw her attention to him. "Rose, we might need to do a bit of reconnaissance inside and around the mansion before we go after Tony's basket."
"Why?" she asks, his shifting gaze filling her with dread.
"The basket that the Easter bunny was holding on those television commercials didn't look very big so I thought I would offer my assistance to make Tony's Easter truly spectacular." Her mouth drops open in dismay before he even finishes his next statement. "So I hid six dozen eggs throughout the mansion and the surrounding gardens. Nobody would notice them as yet because I created a sort of olfactory perception filter to cover the smell. However, it's about to disperse anytime now."
Eyes widen as Rose grabs his hand and drags him to the door. "Well, what are we waiting for? Let's go!"
"Wait, you're forgetting your Easter bonnet!" He tugs loose of her grip and waves a hand towards the hatbox on the couch. "Everything that I looked at seemed too ordinary for you so I cultivated the flowers myself."
Her gaze softens for just a moment before the hatbox starts inching its way across the cushions as a tapping sound comes from inside the box. "That's strange," murmurs the Master, "I was positive that strain wasn't mobile in this environment. No worries, it's one hundred percent contained until you're ready to open it."
Which will be never, concludes Rose silently."I think it would be best if I just skip a bonnet this year and we head straight over to Mum's, yeah?" she inquires urgently as she begins to usher him through the open door.
"Yes, alright," he agrees dismally as he ponders something while Rose scans the flat for any other hidden Easter surprises. "I probably shouldn't have used the excess flowers to make and send a bonnet over to your mother." He offers an apologetic smile and wonders aloud, "So would this be a bad time to tell them that we've decided to move in together?"
With a firm shove that sends him through the door and one last cautious glance at the hatbox on the go, she hurries him outside as she growls, "Gee, you think?"