The Doctor yawned despite himself. He hadn't slept in at least a week, and he was fighting it with all the gumption of a toddler even now. She'd insisted they take a day to just rest, and now they were floating around the moon of a volcanic planet with an intense electromagnetic field that caused the most amazing light show across its surface. She'd pulled out a book of poems to keep herself company as they'd circled lazily in space, the window of the TARDIS showing them what was going on. They were on the dark side of the moon now, with not much to see.
She flipped a page and sighed. He looked up at her, half-asleep already. "Whatcha reading that's got you like that?"
"Just an old poem. In Memorium A.H.H by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Makes me sigh."
"Read it to me?" He put his arm over her shoulder and pulled her against him slightly. Her weight rested on his shoulder, and she was oddly comfortable.
"If you'd like. It's awfully long though."
"Just pick up where you left off, then." He rested his head on top of hers, his voice growing soft.
She couldn't turn him down. They hadn't been fighting much anymore, and moments like this, where they were almost normal, if not domestic, were becoming more and more common. She made him tea when she made herself coffee and let him cook her dinner that only vaguely resembled food on Earth, but that was ecstatic on the tongue. And now she was sitting on a sofa, watching an electromagnetic storm shudder the entire face of a planet, and reading him Victorian poetry.
"We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.
Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster. We are fools and slight;
We mock thee when we do not fear:
But help thy foolish ones to bear;
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.
To her surprise, he picked up where she left off, his voice rumbling in his chest and humming into her hair:
"Forgive what seem'd my sin in me;
What seem'd my worth since I began;
For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee."
Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.
Forgive these wild and wandering cries,
Confusions of a wasted youth;
Forgive them where they fail in truth,
And in thy wisdom make me wise."
He let out a long sigh as well. "You're right. Just has that effect, old Tennyson. Though I'll admit, my favorite of his has always been Charge of the Light Brigade."
She turned her head just slightly to look at him. "You never told me that you were a scholar of Victorian literature."
He yawned again. "You never asked. I know a lot of stuff, me." He gave her a sleepy grin, and she reached up to brush her knuckles against the stubble on his face. He really was endearing.
"Shall we read something happier?"
"Mmm," was all he responded, and she imagined that he'd finally gone to sleep. She closed the book and tucked her hand against his chest, letting herself drift off in the process.
Maybe an hour had gone by – enough for her to call it a nap and for him to call it a good night's sleep. She heard it first, which proved just how tired he was. She stirred him gently, then more insistently as the alarm continued to sound. "Make it stop," she mumbled into his chest.
His eyes snapped open, and he realized that Miranda was tucked against him, her fingers bunching his shirt loosely. He was loathe to move her, but the noise - that particular alarm... He shifted her off of him despite a purr of protest that made his stomach twist and warm. It was an even better reason to get out of there. He was already to the door when she spoke again. "What is it?"
"Mauve," he called back over his shoulder.
She sat there another minute, trying to adjust to the new position, disliking the aloneness of it. Her foggy brain tried to place mauve. It wasn't a signal she'd heard before, and she was fairly certain he hadn't said it in the months they'd been together. God, had it been almost a year? She stretched lazily. Mauve... universal color for distress. It popped into her head suddenly, forcefully, as though other memories were burying it and it just wouldn't have that. Memories from another life. She blinked and got up from the couch.
He was madly pushing buttons, pulling levers, and generally beating on things that otherwise looked like fragile pieces of equipment. She was used to it, and did her best to stay out of his way, leaning nonchalantly on a railing nearby. "Mauve?" she questioned, wiping the last bit of sleep from her eyes. "Universal color for distress, yeah?"
"Exactly! And it's moving at a fantastic speed - 'cept it keeps moving around us - forward, back, in a great big spiral. It's like it's leaving a message. It's fantastic!" He was grinning as he moved around, and she couldn't help but notice that his jumper was still marked where her fingers had been holding it. She sighed, not wanting to admit how hard it was getting to be not to kiss him. But she couldn't. Because Rose hadn't happened, and Rose was so stupidly important in his timeline, at least the bits she knew. And that's how she knew that someday the Doctor would drop her off and leave her. Because she wasn't Rose. Or River. Or Martha or Donna or Amy or Rory or even Clara. Most of them were just names - she'd seen them in episode summaries as she'd flipped through the cable menu, never dreaming they'd
be important to her someday. She was just a transplant here, and the only mark she should be allowed to leave on the Doctor were those imprints in his jumper.
"Fanstastic, huh?" She dragged herself back to reality. "So this distress beacon keeps circling us. Are we gonna catch it?"
"We might. We just might!" She saw his muscles tense a moment before they hit the ground, just enough time for her to grab hold of the bar behind her. She'd fallen a few times - a few dozen times - before she recognized that unconscious signal that still came through even when his conscious mind was busy blabbing. "And there we are. Let's see where we've gotten to!" He checked the monitor. "Year 1987, Antartica. Well, nothing much happening here. Let's check it out, shall we?"
She pursed her lips. "Can we check it out after I put on a parka? This thin human skin isn't meant to go out there by itself."
He ran his hands down her arms quickly. "Gotta keep you warm!" He put his hand on her back, a familiar move, but considering how deep she'd gotten herself into the thoughts of his attractiveness, it made her warm in an entirely different way. He guided her back to the wardrobe, where he pulled a puffy black jacket with fur lining from a rack. She selected a dark blue one with a drawstring in the hood, pulling it down so it seemed to squish her face. She also found a pair of gloves, fighting the urge to rant at him about superior Time Lord physiology just being a way to make her feel breakable. "Ready!" she squeaked, almost everything obscured by her new outfit, and he laughed. A deep, rolling laugh filled the room. It might have filled the whole TARDIS. She couldn't do anything in the face of that laugh except join in.
When they were done, his hands clasped around her wrist, because her hands were lost in the insulated gloves, he grinned. "Shall we?"
"We shall!" His excitement was catching, and she opened the TARDIS door. Everything was white.
"Should be right here! Right here! We can't even be more than a week behind it. How could it have disappeared?" He was walking to and fro in the icy landscape, scanning for a sign of it. "There should be mauve!"
Her nose was already frozen. This wasn't exactly fun right now, and he could probably have scurried out here in his damn jumper and jacket and been honky dory. She scowled and kicked the snow. He was still narrating, though there didn't seem to be much to narrate in Antarctica in 1987. She dug the tip of her boot into the snow again. It clinked. She did it again, sliding her foot forward across the snow. Clink and swoosh this time. She knelt down and dug around it. Sure enough, Mauve. She couldn't get her fingers around the metal container to clear it off. "Doctor!" She was getting excited. Whatever it was, she'd found it. This was clearly mauve, which wasn't supposed to be in Antarctica in 1987 and she was going to get this stupid piece of mauve out of the snow. She peeled off her gloves, hissing as the cold air swirled around her digits. Too cold. But it would only last a minute.
She plunged her hands into the snow around the mauve object. It was metal - maybe not an earth metal, but metal - and mauve and super ridiculously cold. It had clearly landed before the last batch of snow or wind had covered it over, and it had had plenty of time to drop to temperatures that hurt her fingers as she dug around it. She slipped a hand underneath it to pull it up. "Doctor! I've found it!" She was shouting, but he was pretty far away by this point, trying to use his superior vision to sort out the mauve. She'd found it with her dumb foot. She pulled on it, willing it to move upwards. Instead, her hands slipped, a fact she felt more in her shoulders than her fingers, which were really far too numb already, and saw with the glimpse of blood that spurted .
"Hey now, you shouldn't be taking your gloves off out here. You'll freeze those pretty little fingers off." He looked down and plucked the container from the snow in one deft movement. She pouted beside him, watching her fingers move slowly as they curled around the gloves to take them back inside the TARDIS. At least this had been a short excursion, unlike the heat on Iriapidon 5. She'd nearly had a heat stroke there before the Doctor rectified the gravitational field that was pulling them too close to their sun. Awful stuff. At least you could cover up from the cold. The heat would drain you dry before you realized there was a problem.
The Doctor got inside ahead of her, and she turned away to go warm herself up while he poked and prodded the mauve. She'd begun to just think of it as that, in her head. Not the mauve metal thing or the flying hunk of junk, just the mauve. She was pondering this when she felt him beside her. "Hey now, where do you think you're sneaking off to?" He had already shed his coat and tossed it haphazardly across a pipe and was now coming at her with a concerned look on his face. "You must be half froze, if your fingers are even still attached at all, and don't think I didn't see the line of blood in the snow." He unzipped her coat gently, and she shivered. Not just a small shiver of discomfort, but a full-body tremor that loosened his hand from the zipper pull. "Oh, now that won't do at all."
"I'll be fine Doctor! Always am. You can go tend to your mauve." She started to brush past him, tenatively stretching and bending her fingers within her field of vision. She could still see them moving, so theoretically they still worked fine. She was just going to test them on her zipper when she shrieked and found herself about three feet in the air, looking up at the Doctor's frowning face.
"I'll tend to you first, if you don't mind."
There was no way she was saying she minded at that point. None at all.
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A/N: This is part one of this chapter. Part two is on the way! Thoughts? Love? Hate? WHAT IS THE MAUVE? WHAT DOES IT MEAN?! (Ok, I know, but hang tight, you'll get there.)