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If you still want prompts (and no pressure if you’ve got a billion) but a combo for ‘tactile’ and ‘under the influence’ could be fun. Use whatever pairing you feel most inspired for!

well, thinky. i was nattering on about four and this is the reason why... hope you like! (forgive any extra mistakes; i didn't exactly have the aid of your eyes looking over things for me. ❤️)

read on ao3.

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|| Somewhere on the planet Ranx, 2116 CE. ||

Rose dipped her finger into the simmering cauldron, where crystals like caramelised sugar clung to the sides in evidence of substantial heat. Fragrant steam billowed around the surface in a lambent cloud.

The digit came away violet—a rich, saturated colour like she'd only seen in the deepest hearts of nebulae, and several shades darker than the potion itself. Surprisingly, it didn't burn.

"Is that good?" she asked, glancing up at the crone who stood hunched nearby. The cauldron—and the dusty old cottage that housed it—belonged to her, as did every ingredient that had gone into the stuff now coating Rose's skin. She gave no answer. "Or… bad? Maybe kind of a mix?"

Nothing.

Which just figured. The woman's answers had been dodgy from the start, and now, they seemed completely unforthcoming. Rose had never considered herself a particularly sceptical person, but this scenario was straining the limits of even her credulity.

There was no way it would work.

Still, she had to try.

"Right," she said, mostly to herself. "Nothing for it, then."

Wrinkling her nose, she cupped her hands together and plunged them into the potion. The heat prickled at her skin, the consistency making the liquid cling and drag at each hair follicle. It was thick, almost like wax.

It stung, but she didn't stop until she'd scooped some up in her open palms.

On the surface, it had a faint golden sheen and carried the scent of something sweet—something familiar—

Hopefully that's good, was her last thought before lowering her head and parting her lips, drinking deep before the liquid fell back through her fingers.

|| The TARDIS galley, date unknown. ||

The day had been the kind that called for a drink.

Not that he drank, as a rule. In fact, he tended to advise against that kind of thing on the TARDIS, considering the ship's tendency to—well, become surreal at a moment's notice.

He refused to use the word "malfunction," if he could help it. It just seemed rude.

Still, despite his better judgement, he was seriously considering pouring himself a little glass of ginger beer—with two spheres of ice, just how he preferred it—when a woman came stumbling through the door in a vague puff of colourful smoke, muttering curses.

"Sh-shit—what did you put in…?" she was saying, trailing off the moment her head lifted and her eyes caught his. To his surprise, she gave a dizzy smile. "Oh, didn't see you there!"

Given the state of her pupils—so wide and dark as to be plainly visible at ten paces—he was surprised she could see anything at all. Still, he said, "And yet, here I am."

The woman giggled like he had told a very amusing joke. "Right, s-sorry, could you—I mean, if it's not too much trouble, would you tell me… where, exactly, I am?" Her delivery of the question was slightly slurred, and the Doctor cocked his head. Was she drunk?

In a sudden huff at seeing this stranger in the carefree attitude he'd meant to enjoy himself, he replied, vaguely, "In my kitchen."

What?

Kitchen, of course, wasn't the word for the TARDIS galley. Not remotely. In fact, it was a word he'd never used to describe the room a day in his lives.

His brow scrunched in self-recrimination.

"Really!" she cried, taking another unsteady step forward. He felt he ought to reach out and help her, but made no move to do so. She'd somehow—quite impossibly, he might add—broken into his ship, after all, and there was no reason to aid her in her intrusion. "A kitchen! I take the witch's potion and it lands me in a strange man's kitchen."

Being neither strange nor a man, the Doctor took some offense to this. But the woman didn't seem to notice; she was too busy shambling toward the table, where his bottle of ginger beer sat untouched. And there was the more important matter at hand:

"A potion, you say?"

"Yeah, and a pr—a pretty useless one, apparently," she answered, picking up the bottle and running a thumb over the label. "It was s'posed to show me—hic—someone I'm—I'm looking for."

He couldn't tell if her accent was thickened by inebriation, or if she just sounded like that in general.

"And… who might you be looking for?"

At his words, the woman's head lifted once again, and she pinned him with an calculating look. Her pupils appeared to be getting back to normal—normal assuming she was human, of course, which was rather a big assumption—but her eyes remained glassy, gleaming with a shattering and refracting light, like a cut gemstone viewed through water. The grin that burst over her face was as crooked and impish as it was unexpected.

"Somebody with," she paused, "really great hair."

Her eyes fixed on his—admittedly rather impressive—mop of curls.

He felt a smug smile beginning to work its way over his face. "Really."

"Extremely very. Just—incredible hair. And so soft," she added dazedly. Then, it was like something was taking her over, moving her without her own conscious will, because she dropped the bottle unceremoniously back to the table—ka-thunk—and took several steps toward him. "'Course, I used to wind him up, 'cause he took so long getting it all ready and sticky-uppy in the morning. So many hair products! He used all the hot water, too. Infinite timesh—hic—ship, yeah? And somehow he still ran out the taps! How's that work?"

"Problem with the thermal sieves," he answered. "I'll get round to fixing them eventually."

And then, he realised. "Hang on, timeship?" he cried, at just the same moment she said, "Doctor?"

In an instant, she was lurching towards him again, and he ought to have been skilled at mistrusting people at this point; it ought to have been an embedded trait—but he still, somehow, found himself reaching out and steadying the woman, only to be quite tremendously startled when she fell forward into his arms and clung to him like a limpet.

"Oh my God," she was saying, her voice pitching higher with every word. "It worked. I mean, you're the wrong you—or, I mean, you're still you, of course, but—Doctor!" She practically laughed his name, and it was an inexpressibly joyful sound that rattled his ribcage where she was pressed. "God, you feel nice."

And if he'd had any doubts before that the woman was three sheets to the wind, they disappeared the second she pulled her head back—and then pressed both hands to the center of his chest, right over the dip of his solar plexus, before dragging them down until her fingertips scraped his stomach through his Oxford. He wasn't sure whether he was glad he'd foregone the vest today or not.

She repeated the process several times, then began feeling her way down his arms, over his shoulders. An altogether odd experience, though not unpleasant, and she seemed transfixed by her foggy explorations.

"You're rather a—well, a tactile sort of person, aren't you, to get this cosy this fast," he pronounced when she'd finally pushed the fingers of one hand up under the collar of his shirt, running along his trapezius.

She seemed abashed, but made no move to stop. "It's just, you look so—so good!" she cried, and then, laughing, she corrected herself. "That's—I meant to say—you're in good shape, not…" Pausing the efforts of one hand, she made a vague, dismissive gesture. "Not covered in blood or anything."

He frowned. "Am I often covered in blood when you see me?"

That seemed to strike her as yet another good joke. "Sometimes, but then again, so am I!"

It was, he had to admit, a disconcerting image.

The woman, for all her oddities, had a kind of vigour to her. A brightness, which lit her features and made her generously doled out smiles feel almost calculated to stimulate the production of dopamine in his brain. He didn't care for the mental image of her covered in blood.

The possibility still remained that she was dangerous—that all her talk of blood and witches and potions was indicative of some tendency toward the darker things in the universe. She could be an ally of his enemies: goodness knows he had many.

She could even be an enemy herself. One from his future, perhaps?

But some stubborn part of his brain resisted the notion. It wasn't that he couldn't believe those things; it was simply that he didn't want to.

The prospect alarmed him. He was unused to not believing things merely because he didn't want them to be true.

"You do realise," he finally said, "that I still don't have any idea who you are."

This, finally, brought her roving hands to a stop.

She was just running her fingers along the nape of his neck, tangling in the loose curls there, when she paused. The pressure of the touch made his skin tingle with the urge to rise in gooseflesh, but he suppressed the impulse. She didn't quite let go of him, but her face visibly fell, lines forming where there had been none. He felt in an instant that her age was not what he might've suspected it to be.

"Oh," she said, rather weakly. "Of course. I hadn't thought of that."

He felt obliged to remind her, "You also appeared on my TARDIS out of seemingly thin air. Which is impossible." Impossible for her, he did not say, if she really was only a human woman under a witch's spell.

A limp smile tugged at her lips. "And yet," she murmured, tipping impossibly closer, "here I am." The movement seemed unconscious on her part, and had altogether unexpected results.

Because—the impression which had been forming suddenly finalised, and the Doctor understood without a shadow of a doubt that the person in his arms with her hands in his hair was his future.

There were other possible explanations, naturally; he was a man of science and ought therefore to have given them due consideration.

But some things were simple, or perhaps, irreducibly complex.

She was his future. He could feel it. It was as simple and as complex as that.

And there was also the matter of the TARDIS key.

He spied it hanging on a chain from her neck, shifted free from her jacket on the momentum of her body. Shiny coppery gold, it was daubed with a fat, glittering droplet of some violet substance which did not move, but which swirled with the unmistakable light of time.

Witch's potion, indeed.

That was pure, uncut temporal particulate.

"Here you are," he agreed, softening. And then, after a moment: "Are you going to continue?"

"Continue what?"

"Being tactile." The woman's mouth popped open in clear surprise, and he couldn't help but grin. "You see, I've worked it out and you pose no danger to either of us, so I thought I might let you finish before I set you to rights. You'll likely wake up back where you started, thinking this was all a dream."

This time, his skin prickled very insistently at the urgent convulsing of her fingers in his hair. "A dream—is it a dream?" she asked in wonderment. He thought it was a little endearing, how the effects of the Vortex had her struggling to keep up.

Then again, a dose that strong would be enough to get even the steadiest sort of person pissed as a newt.

"Not precisely. More of a vision. A spatio-temporal projection."

"A projection," she whispered, looking inexplicably sad.

"That's how you got onto the TARDIS: you couldn't really be here, but you have been before, and that's more or less the same thing."

The woman frowned. "But I can feel you." Her words were accompanied by a determined tug. It was obvious she really was very attached to his hair, in the corporeal realm as well as the abstract.

He didn't mind.

"That's because our timelines are physically linked, and there's the… witch's potion, as you said, to help things along. You clearly already know what I feel like, and it's becoming apparent to me that I will, at some point, know what you feel like." He smirked at her baffled expression. "Call it a presentiment."

"Right, so…"

Pulling her bottom lip between her teeth, the woman worked it over in serious thought. Each bat of her eyelashes seemed to fan more aureate sparks over the warm brown surface of her irises. She really had to be very inebriated, but was composing herself rather well, considering.

"I guess, that means—can I—?"

"Yes," he agreed, not knowing what he was agreeing to.

When she pushed up onto her toes, hands braced about his neck and lips pressing soft into the corner of his mouth, he got the idea.

She whispered an apology. "Aim's off. Bloody potion."

"It's perfectly all right, er—I don't know your name."

"Not s'posed to tell," she answered, a little scolding. "You know better, Doctor." Her aim was improving, however, and therefore, his interest in other subjects was beginning to wane.

The woman was sweet and solid in his hands, and she tasted like something sugary—and, in glorious counterpoint, more than a little like unspent time—the intake of which became his sole focus for a good long while.

That, and the varying pressure—the give-and-take—at which he was not terribly practised, but which he felt very willing to learn.

A thought occurred to him. "Do we often—do this, when you see me?"

The woman smiled. Just a little, knowing thing: an answer in itself. And then it turned sweet, a little wistful, as she said, "Sometimes, yeah—when we're not covered in blood."

Before he could decide whether that worried him or not, her lips found his again, and the issue was put very firmly to one side.

He did eventually begin to wonder if her back hurt from stretching to reach him, or perhaps her neck, from tilting it back invitingly—if, possibly, her toes ached from standing on them so long—and he'd come to the decision that they were going to have to either stop—a dreadful idea—or sit down to equalise their heights, when—mid-kiss, and with her one hand still working his hair into a state of havoc while the other slipped back beneath his shirt collar—the woman simply…

Simply disappeared.

In a puff of smoke, violet and indigo, just as she'd arrived.

His lips felt bruised, almost tingling from the sudden absence of pressure, and without her weight holding him down, his centre of gravity abruptly shifted. He stumbled forward, leaning against the table while he caught his breath.

His respiratory bypass hadn't even kicked in until now, he'd been so caught up. In her absence, the practicalities came flooding back.

He'd had a visitation via psycho-projection and Vortex consumption, and the visitor had snogged him. Thoroughly.

The Doctor tipped his head back and laughed.

Romana was never going to believe him.

Left in the now-empty space was the bottle of ginger beer, the single glass containing two melting spheres of ice, and a scent on the air.

Ozone, burning. Crushed violets.

The woman was well and truly gone.

Back to his future, presumably. He sighed, a bit wistfully. He'd never even asked her why she was looking for him…

The Doctor thought maybe he wouldn't bother with the drink after all. Things seemed to be getting surreal enough without it.

|| Back on the planet Ranx, 2116 CE. ||

Rose came back on tiptoe, her heels lowering gracelessly back to the packed dirt floor of the witch's cottage. Her head was positively splitting. Everything was too bright to her sensitive eyes, even the odd werelight of the witch's concoction, still simmering and swirling away before her.

The Doctor had seemed not to think it was really any kind of potion, but had given her no clue as to what it actually was she'd been meddling with.

It took several seconds for her to place the crone again, who was grinning through greenish teeth across the cauldron.

Rose's hands lowered to her sides; they felt oddly bereft without a tangle of hair beneath them, and there was a kind of soreness in her muscles from holding her arms up for such a long time. He really was very tall, that particular iteration. He had at least an inch or two on her own Doctor.

She pressed her lips hard together, so as not to blush at the comparisons she couldn't help but make.

"Well," she said primly. "That did not go as expected."

For once, the witch seemed inclined to answer: her needle-point incisors flashed as she asked, "You want more? More time?"

Rose held a hand to her mouth, sealing her lips. More time.

All around her, the air seemed thick and heady with the roiling heat of the potentially dangerous not-a-potion, and yet, the temptation to drink more—to see if she could reach out again, get another foothold, stay longer, see more—loomed large.

But…

"Better not," she said, letting out a breath. Her head cleared a little. It wasn't as simple as stealing time, not if she was to find a permanent way back. "I'll just have to find another way to see him."

Armed with this determination and little else—except, she smiled, for the lingering candy-sweet taste on her tongue—Rose thanked the witch, and turned her back on the cottage.

She felt content in the knowledge that she'd at least, for a moment, been with him again. That she'd seen him, touched him. Kissed him again. After so long…

And it would not be the last time.

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