@tentoorosemicrofics 700 words
tentoo/rose for the prompt 'duel'
read on ao3
“Did you ever?”
Rose starts slightly, having almost forgotten that she wasn’t in bed already, her mind slow and hazy. Shifting against the headrest, she yawns. “Did I ever…what?”
The Doctor looks at her, as if to say you know. When she doesn't catch on, he huffs. “With someone else. While I was,” he swallows, “…away.”
“Oh. Well,” Rose says, considering.
“I told you about Martha. And Joan.” He smiles, tight and sheepish. “And Astrid.”
Rose grins. “Feeling jealous?”
“No,” he says, albeit a little stiffly. “Just curious.”
She hums noncommittally, even as an odd flush of happiness goes through her. “You know Michael, yeah? In HR?” She waits for him to nod impatiently. “Well…we went on a couple of dates. Wouldn’t even call them dates, actually. Didn’t really go past that. “ Her cheeks tinge pink. “I’m pretty sure I spent them talking his ears off about you.”
She meets the Doctor’s gaze then, expecting him to say something cheeky. Instead, his eyes darken, and he swears loudly, before moving so suddenly that Rose jumps.
“Sorry, hello, Anderson—was it?” the Doctor demands, leaning forward to tap the cabbie’s shoulder. “Yes, right—mind taking us back? I’ve forgotten to do something.”
“Doctor,” Rose sits up, bewildered. “Wha—”
“I knew it,” he says. “Knew that slimy bastard had eyes on you. He still fancies you, did you know that? Couldn’t keep his eyes off you tonight. It’s indecent, it is, Rose—it’s not right. He knows you’re with me now.”
Rose tries to ignore the shiver of delight that travels up her spine at that. With him. “So he fancies me—so what?”
“So what?” the Doctor snaps. “So…what? So I’m going to show him that, that’s what.” He straightens his collar, pulls back his sleeves, muttering furiously. “...does he think he is? Hovering all day…all those reports…touching your shoulder…And tonight. Bringing you that drink?”
“You’ve been watching him closely, then, have you?”
“It’s not funny, Rose.”
“Going to duel him to win my hand?”
“I just might,” he says, and Rose realises the cab’s pulled up outside the pub they’d left minutes ago. The Doctor yanks the door open, stepping onto the pavement before she can yank him back inside.
“Doctor, wait! “ she laughs incredulously, stumbling as she makes to follow him. She grabs his arm. “What’re you doing?
“Nothing,” he says pleasantly, plastering a wide grin across his face. “Just going to give the gentleman a piece of my mind.” With that he turns to march back into the pub, only for Rose to pull on his arm again, anchoring him to her.
“Doctor, stop!” she says, quite unable to keep the amusement out of her voice. “You can’t just–look. What does it matter? It’s not like he has a chance.” She lifts his wrist, waving it between them. “I’ve won the hand already.”
The Doctor groans, but his lips twitch. “Awful.”
“You love it.”
They stand like that for several seconds, Rose grinning, until he shakes his head in defeat, allowing himself to smile. “I know he hasn’t got a chance,” he admits somewhat gruffly. “Doesn’t mean I’ve got to let him try.”
“Doesn’t mean you can walk in there and deck him either,” Rose reminds him. “You’re in enough trouble with Pete as it is.”
The Doctor makes a noise of irritation. Carefully, Rose tugs him in the direction of the cab again, as if to not spook him. “I like this look on you,” she tells him conversationally, her tongue poking out of her mouth of its own accord. “Green.”
“You would,” he says grumpily, but there’s no real venom in his words.
She remembers suddenly, her first Doctor, and the way he would sulk when she so much as glanced at a “pretty boy”. An unbearable fondness suffuses her chest. “Hey,” she says, slowing to a stop. She leans in, pressing her lips to his jaw, to the slight stubble he’s got going nowadays, lingering for a few seconds before pulling away. “I love you.”
His cheek is warm, his gaze even more so.
“Rose Tyler,” he says quietly. He glances away then, to a street lamp at the corner of the building, and then to the cabbie and then her watch, strangely, before finally flitting back to her.
“What?” she asks him.
“Nothing,” he says, squeezing her palm ever-so-slightly. “Winning hands, indeed.”
a little one shot slice of life based piece on a panel of empite of the wolf. just tooth rotting fluff. 🌸
1.5k. rated g. kidfic, canon compliant, domestic fluff.
Sometimes he's still perplexed by things he's once said. For one, he knows that he had said he didn't land on Sundays because they were boring, but for the life of him he cannot relate to the version of himself that felt that way. Not anymore. Sundays, he has come to realise, are brilliant.
(Or maybe, he had known then, that Sundays were for familes. And he didn't have one of those.)
Not ever had he felt the order time and brevity of a life until he became part of the human race. There had been worries Rose had, early on, that he would get bored of this life. And of course, he had told her, in that Norway hotel room, that one life with her was all he had ever wanted since that Christmas day- even longer if he were to be honest with himself.
And while he had meant every one of those words, he still hadn't grasped the reality of them yet. Ten years ago, on the first day of their life long adventure, he had still not understood how quickly it would all begin go. And in a cruel twist of fate, the happier he was, the faster the time seemed to move.
grabbing new writers by the shoulders. it is important to write what you love and to love what you write. if you spend all your time trying to make something other people will approve of you will hate yourself and everything around you. learn at your own pace. you have time. i’m proud of you
Okay, I’m having trouble finding this Tentoo and Rose fic. I’m blanking on the name and the author. It’s set pretty much immediately post bwb and takes place mainly on the zeppelin ride. They have to share a bed and talk about babies. Definitely on the steamier side. Ringing any bells? Thought you might know.
honestly, it doesn't ring a bell for me but i asked arounr and i got a few options for ya!
“Hey, have you seen the…? Oh.” (tentoo x rose) for the lighthearted prompts? 💕
love love love your writing and I hope you’re having a great day!
hey, dear, thanks for your patience on this one! i had my housewarming this past weekend and hosted some out-of-town visitors, so i had to put down my pen for a little bit. but i'm back with a spot of domestic fluff! hope you don't mind that this story is kind of baby-centric. i couldn't really have a pete's world fic without at least the *implication* of mia...
.✫*ﾟ･ﾟ｡.★.*｡･ﾟ✫*.
They'd agreed the place in London was only temporary—a stepping-stone on the path to a more permanent home, or possibly on the path to the TARDIS 2.0. Actually, she wasn't super clear what path they were specifically on, but it didn't matter, did it?
Because they were on it together. And together, they tended to find their way.
Anyway, they had agreed.
Their landlord was a bit laissez-faire about things, but that didn't mean they ought to put in their own time and energy fixing the flat up only to have to move out once their lease ended. And Rose was fine with that. She felt no need to repaint or restain and make her mark. Interior design was hardly her passion, and the Doctor seemed to feel more or less the same.
So, when the accident happened—"Good accident!" the Doctor had cried—and it became clear they needed more space, she'd not been terribly invested in redoing the office from the ground-up. They just needed to make it habitable, and most of all, safe.
"It's only temporary," she'd reminded him. "I'll keep checking the papers and asking 'round." With a smile, she'd added, "We'll be somewhere with more space in no time, promise."
No time, however, had turned into four months. And then six.
And the dramatic change that was coming seemed to eat up every spare moment of their lives. There weren't enough hours in the day for all the doctor's appointments and Torchwood check-ups and birthing classes, on top of full work days and date nights and Sunday suppers with her mum and Pete and Tony. And Rose was tired; frequently, comprehensively tired—"Good tired," she would tell the Doctor, pushing their house search further and further to the wayside.
All the while, the Doctor chipped away at what had ultimately become his office-cum-workshop-cum-private laboratory. Boxes were packed and boxes were shuffled away into nebulous storage, and Rose rarely had the energy to do more than marvel that he was capable of being so organised. He'd got a label-maker.
That wasn't to say she wasn't excited.
Routine outings with her mum resulted in more than just the bare necessities of parenthood. Packages arrived seemingly every day, almost gloatingly refilling the spaces the Doctor had just opened up. She unwrapped them all with a curious blend of wonder and excitement and trepidation.
Sometimes, she barely remembered her own purchases and the two-pack of little dino-printed dungarees or the double electric breast pump were like a surprise present from her past self, jolting her back to the reality where this was happening. This was her life.
This was her life, and it wasn't waiting for her, no matter how much she tried to put certain decisions on hold or tried to tell herself things were temporary.
So, it was a Tuesday. It was after four, but not yet late enough for the autumn sun to have fully sunk behind the London skyline. And her head was still back at Torchwood, in the Archive, where she'd been reassigned from the field to review old disaster footage, looking for signs of alien intervention. She'd moved through the tube stations by reflex, not fully present and yet not terribly far away: her thoughts no longer tended to veer toward another universe, but rather, towards the more tangible and immediate past of this world. She wanted—she thought, as she dug through her handbag for her keyring—to ask the Doctor something specific, actually. About the Territories, and an assassination at which he'd been present in the other universe. She wanted to compare notes.
Retrieving her keys, Rose let herself into the flat. There was no sign of the Doctor in the living room, and when she poked her head into the kitchen, he wasn't there either. She removed her earbuds, cocking her head and listening. Down the hall, she thought she heard shuffling.
"Doctor?" she called.
Instead of an answer, she got a kind of thumping sound, and a muffled grunt. He must have been packing more boxes.
"Doctor, I'm home," she said, raising her voice as she turned down the hallway. She didn't bother with taking off her shoes; she was getting big enough around the middle now that she tended to ask his help with them anyway. But she shrugged off her pink peacoat—a maternity gift from her mum—and folded it over her arm. "First day on desk duty. You were right about the Archive job, though, it's not boring at all. Actually, hey, have you seen the—? Oh."
She jerked to a halt in front of the open office door, suddenly realising…
It wasn't an office at all.
At least, not anymore.
All signs of the packed boxes were gone. The Doctor's desk—which had been the last big holdout, shoved into the back corner where he could often be found hunched at work at all hours—was nowhere to be found. In its place was white wood draped in thick plastic sheeting. It was a piece Rose vividly remembered picking out, and seeing it even through the warped plastic covering brought a sudden flood of tears to her eyes. It was dimensional, real. A crib. And beside it stood the Doctor, stepping clumsily off the last rung of a ladder.
He wore denim cutoffs she didn't even know he owned, as well as a ratty ringer shirt. His feet were bare. And smeared all over him was paint—so much paint, in various shades. A soft, pinky-red dotted his cheeks, and there was a slash of grassy green up his left forearm. Baby blue clotted his hairline, curling the front strands. Yellow sunlight drippings splattered his chest.
He looked like he'd been involved in some kind of technicolour explosion.
In his hand was a white-soaked paint brush. And on his face was an enormous grin.
"The JFK file?" he finished for her. "Yes, I most certainly have. Who do you think sent it through to your desk?"
But Rose barely heard him. Wide-eyed, she wandered past the threshold and into the room which now boasted three blue walls and a vibrant fourth—the wall with a window, looking out over the back courtyard where the elderly neighbour obsessively tended her autumn crocuses.
It was a rainbow he’d painted, that much was obvious. Sketched out in loose strokes, it was a marvellously vivid and yet somehow soft arc framing the window, through which the setting sun was showing off with all her might.
"I took off early today," the Doctor was saying. "Wanted to get this done before you got home. Obviously, the footage didn't keep you for as long as I'd hoped."
The sky boasted stunning swaths of violet and orange and peach. Puffy white clouds, still damp and glossy, floated in freshly-painted patches against the blue wall, mimicking the cloud banks above the sunset. The outside bleeding inward, or possibly the reverse.
Beside the window was another recognisable piece of furniture heaped in plastic: a white wicker rocking chair. She'd liked the look of it in the store, and had sat comfortably in it for over twenty minutes while her swollen ankles complained, but had ultimately deemed it too much of an expense. And unnecessary, given their comfortable sofa in the living room.
Rose stepped closer, drawn to it as if by magnets.
In an instant, she could see the completed picture. She could see the paint dried, the white curtains fluttering against the open window, and herself in the rocker with her face to the breeze, breathing in clean, green spring air. The neighbour would be puttering around her yellow rose bushes. And in Rose's arms, she'd be cradling their baby—her baby, a real and squirming life she'd brought into the world.
The image was so crisp, so perfectly vivid, that she struggled to blink it away. She resisted it, in fact, and wanted to live in that warm, pleasant moment forever.
"I know what we agreed," the Doctor was saying, his voice gentle. And a little uncertain. "But I just thought—well, we'll only have this once, you know, this first time. And just because this home is temporary doesn't mean it hasn't been important. I mean, it's where we—where…"
She turned from the window and the setting sun, arms already outstretched. Her handbag and coat fell to the floor.
The Doctor met her readily, uncaring that paint was smearing them both. He tucked her against his chest and under his chin, where she buried her nose and hid her red-rimmed eyes. She wanted to tell him it was perfect—it was just like she'd imagined, only she'd never imagined it here, and she hadn't even known she was imagining it, really. She wanted to say that she never would have wanted this particular adventure without him and his daft ideas and his smeary paint and his thoughtfulness.
But her voice was stopped in her throat.
"So… surprise?" the Doctor offered weakly.
She snorted a laugh. Swallowed thickly, trying for the right words.
I just know Tentoo absentmindedly writes grocery notes in Gallifreyan because he’s tired and his brain doesn’t want to translate things into English at that moment.
Then Rose has to call him to decipher his list and he completely forgets what he wrote and she has to take photos of it for him to translate and it turns out that the particular paper he handed her was complex math equations he was doing for fun instead of the groceries.
Summary: The Doctor and Rose trudging back to civilization after being abandoned by the Time Lord Doctor, take a break from Jackie and a slight detour on a moonlit beach to work through what this new life will be for them
A/N: A little rusty but I managed something so woo hoo. There will be at least 6 more short fics in this verse.
For TenToo/Rose Microfic Challenge
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