Wrote this a while ago, posting now for......no reason at all, no recent events in the fandom that make this feel relevant or anything
Rogue was taking notes on all the ways that John Smith was different from the Doctor.
First of all, John Smith snored. Rogue’s tiny servant’s room was just off to the side of John’s, and he could hear the man’s thunderously loud snores even through the heavy oak door that divided them. Rogue wondered what quirk of the chameleon arc had caused the doctor’s human lungs to be capable of that type of noise when his Time Lord lungs did no such thing, but ultimately had to shrug it off as a biological complication he’d probably never understand
The second thing, which went hand in hand with the snoring, was how much John Smith slept. It has been a while since they’d had a human traveling with them, and Rogue had forgotten just how much sleep their fragile little bodies needed to function - an entire third of every earth day? It was absurd. Granted, some of his frustration with this schedule may have been related to the fact that he was relegated to his own tiny, cramped bed rather than John’s large, plush, comfortable one. He could imagine much, much worse things than spending a third of the day tucked away with his arms around his sleeping husband…but given his current role was as John’s loyal manservant, such fantasies were currently, unfortunately, out of the question.
The third thing was the way he looked at Rogue. The Doctor made no secret of how he felt about his husband’s appearance - he was wont to stare unabashedly at Rogue with that soft, wide grin of his whenever Rogue did something he found attractive. John Smith was all furtive, secret glances and downcast eyes when it came to his manservant Roger. Earlier that day, John had asked Rogue to pull down a book from the high shelf for his studies; the action of reaching up had caused Rogue’s shirt to hike up an inch, revealing a glimpse of the skin around his midriff. When he’d turned to hand John the book, the other man wouldn’t meet his gaze, and Rogue thought he’d detected the barest hint of a blush in his dark cheeks.
It was very sweet, in a way, even if it made Rogue’s heart ache a bit to see his usually-confident husband so at war with his feelings. The chameleon arc was able to instill a period-appropriate set of base memories and social conventions in the Time Lord it transformed, but unfortunately that meant that an 1810-based John Smith had no understanding of any type of physical attraction outside a strict heterosexual binary. If they’d had more time, the Doctor could have tweaked the base settings to allow his human self to better understand his own preferences - and his feelings for his husband - but they simply had needed to work too fast.
