Title:
Silly Little Traditions
Author:
Angel Leviathan
Disclaimer:
Doctor Who, characters, concept, etc, aren’t mine.
Spoilers:
Nothing specific as far as I can tell.
Notes:
Written for an LJ challenge.
-
Rose’s
twenty-first birthday.
The Doctor
had known she would never pass up the opportunity for a party, nor would she
let him forget that, even if they lived outside of the normal timestream, she did get older and she did have birthdays,
even if he didn’t as such.
Perhaps it
wasn’t her birthday. Maybe she wasn’t even twenty-one yet, maybe she was nearly
twenty-two, there really was no definite way to tell
with the life they led. But when she announced to him that she had calculated
that she had spent two years with him, that was enough
of an excuse for a party. He knew she still attempted to keep track of the
days, but whether she had really got to six hundred and thirty was irrelevant.
He could take her to the actual date of her twenty-first birthday on any given
day at any given moment. But she believed she was officially twenty one. So fair play to her.
That, and
if he knew that if he deprived Jackie of seeing her daughter on her
twenty-first birthday he would never, ever, hear the end of it.
So the
Doctor took her home.
Rose had
been surprisingly awake that morning. Or whatever passed for morning on the
clock they ran inside the TARDIS. Usually he had to employ many plots and
tricks to get her out of bed (including once literally dragging her from her
room, carrying her over this shoulder whilst she was still only in her
underwear, and throwing her outside into an alien snowstorm) but it was she who
had woken him that morning, unfortunately by throwing herself at his sleeping
form and refusing to move.
She was
still surprisingly awake now. At
So, there
she was, right in the middle of a big crowd. Not quite drunk, certainly not
hammered, but certainly rather tipsy. The Doctor wasn’t amongst the group. He
had tried to insist he would be waiting for her when she left the pub, but she
had said she wasn’t going without him. He made what he hoped was polite
conversation with her friends, got on quite well with a few of them, but
stepped back and allowed her to have what he hoped was one normal evening. He
had the rest of her life to spend with her. She could spend any day, anywhere,
any when with him. The Doctor smiled when she laughed and casually watched her
for most of the evening. He found he quite enjoyed pretending to be a normal
bloke. The beer wasn’t half bad anyway.
What
amused him greatly was that they had arrived in the pub on the night a karaoke
competition was being held. He had laughed at the drunken renditions of songs
by some of her mates, not too loudly, just in case they decided to pounce on
him and make him take part. Rose was howling with laughter and trying to bat
the hands of a friend away as they sprayed her hair with glitter.
As the
girl he knew as Shireen stumbled towards the stage,
Rose managed to extract herself from the crowd and headed over to the bar. She
grinned and parked herself beside him.
“So…we
know you dance…” she started, “…do you sing?”
The
Doctor’s eyes widened, “No. No, no, no, no, no and…nope!”
“Oh, come
on!” Rose moaned.
“Nope!”
“Doctor…”
“Not a
chance!” he stated.
“Please?”
she tried again, “For me? Come on, you know you want to.”
“Rose…”
“For me,”
she repeated, “for my birthday,” big brown eyes gazed up at him, silently
pleading.
He lowered
his voice, “You may not be twenty-one yet, young Rose!”
She
continued to gaze up at him.
He was
done for.
A deep,
theatrical sigh escaped him, “…Oh, alright then… just this once…”
“Yeah!”
“Once!
Just this once!” the Doctor held up his hands, “The once!” he prodded her.
Rose tried
to nod solemnly, “Once.”
So he was
roped into doing karaoke, singing duet with her. He refused to sing on his own
– if he was going to make a prat of himself, he was
going to take her down with him. He surprised her (and ashamed himself) with
the number of songs he actually knew the lyrics to, but how they ended up
singing ‘The Time of My Life’ he didn’t know.
In all
honesty, he thought they sounded pretty awful, but the crowd seemed to enjoy
it. And his Rose could sing. Really, properly sing. She would have been better
off singing alone, he decided. He faked being unable to hold a tune for the
first few lines of the song, until she glared at him and nudged him, and he
decided to actually put some effort into it. Jackie would mock him forever, for
a start. So he sang with her and actually had some fun doing it, though he
would never admit it. He had rarely sung in his life, and whilst he could hold
a tune, he felt as if he was letting her down. But from the look in her eyes,
and her smile as she looked up at him, the fact that he was singing with her
was enough.
Still, he
was ninety-nine point nine percent certain he looked like a complete prat.
As she
returned to her friends, to their applause, and he decided to hover on the outskirts
of the group, the Doctor heard the few whispered comments that went between the
young people on the subject of himself and Rose. Were they a couple? Were they
shagging at any given minute? Hadn’t her mum said that she was travelling with
an older man? This Doctor guy didn’t seem to be as old as her mum had
described? New man? The Doctor sighed. New, new Doctor.
“I see our
Rose has finally found herself someone she can trust,” one of her uncles came
to stand beside him, keeping his voice low.
“I like to
think so,” the Doctor replied.
“Good
man,” he clapped him on the back, “Haven’t seen this side of her since she left
school. Never seen her smile like that though.”
At that
moment, Rose caught his gaze and frowned slightly when she noticed he was gazing
right at her. She smiled, winked, and looked away.
The uncle
(was it John? Jack? No, John) gave him an approving nod before heading back to
the bar to order another pint.
It was
He
realised she sobered up rather quickly once they were a few paces away from the
pub and wondered if she had just been playing drunk for the last couple of
hours. They had, after all, had some rather horrific nights of drinking lethal
alien booze, enough to put any Earth brew to shame. It was really a wonder that
all those alco-pops she had drunk had touched her at
all.
Rose
smiled up at him, “Thank you.”
He
grinned, “Anytime,” he paused, “Literally.”
She nudged
him, laughing.
They made
their way back to the estate mostly in silence, until he stopped her just
before they reached the TARDIS.
She
frowned up at him, concerned, “Doctor?”
He thrust
a small box into her free hand, “Happy birthday, Rose Tyler.”
Rose’s
mouth fell open, “I thought…I thought coming here was my present?”
He shook
his head, “I’m not that clueless about your planet’s silly little traditions.”
She
pretended to glare at him, “Quiet, you’re ruining it.”
The Doctor
sighed, “Go on then, open it.”
She set
her bag of presents down on the floor, needing both hands to get the tiny box
open. Her mouth fell open again as she caught sight of what was inside and it
took several glances between the Doctor and the box for her to manage to get
together anything coherent to say, “Oh my god…where did you get this? Wait,
when did you get this?”
He
shrugged and tried to hide a smile, “Here, Earth. Not any whacky alien metal
there.”
Rose
pulled on the silver chain inside the box so she could raise
what had caught her attention to the dim light of the street lamp above them,
“This must’ve cost a fortune…”
He just
smiled.
A single
band of gold, a ring, hung between them on the chain.
“I know
how important twenty-first’s are to you people.”
She stared
at the ring, then focused on the chain. The ring
couldn’t have come with the chain, and it had been in a plain ring box. Then it
hit her. There was a clear reason for the silver chain. Without it, the ring
looked like a wedding band. Just like the Doctor to say something, not quite
say it, and never say it all at the same instant.
“…Can I…do
I…wear it on the chain or can I-“
“Wear them
both, wear either, anywhere, why ever,” the Doctor responded, not quite looking
directly at her.
Rose
smiled slightly, “Thank you…”
He
suddenly beamed, “You’re welcome,” he rooted around in his pocket for the key
to the TARDIS, fitting it into the lock and pushing the door open, “Now, come
here and help me figure out where to hide this thing…” he produced a plastic,
fake gold, tacky item from the other pocket of his suit jacket.
She
laughed and followed him inside, “Come on. You know life wouldn’t be complete
without time, space and a karaoke trophy!”
Fin