Challenges 51-100 Drabbles
50 more drabbles written in response to Challenges 51-100 over at 
dw100. There are a couple of Season 5-related fics, but they are clearly labelled for spoilers.
Title: Fading Before His Eyes
Rating: PG
Character/s: Ten/Rose, Donna
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 51: Mirage. Set during ‘The Stolen Earth’.
Donna’s intimated that she can see the woman down the street. The Doctor’s even been sort of expecting her since the overabundance of Bad Wolf references. Still, it’d seemed like false hope. This, right now, finally seeing Rose, feels like a mirage. An oasis in the desert, with the Doctor being a man dying of thirst.
He runs faster than he ever has in his life, knowing he needs to touch Rose to accept she’s real. However, like a mirage fading on closer inspection, he’s denied that. He’s cut down, and the moment is lost.
Damn the Daleks to hell.
Title: In Safe Hands
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten II/Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 52: Heart. Set post-‘Journey’s End’ in Pete’s World.
Having one heart should feel like he’s not whole. There’s a cavity in his chest where he remembers a beating organ. His body is less efficient. He should feel like that second heart has been torn from him and left him still bleeding.
He doesn’t.
His second heart hasn’t been his own since he met Rose. When she was lost, she took it with her. He dealt with that pain years ago. This, now, is nothing new.
Now Rose is right beside him again. So he knows his second heart is safe and sound, even if he can’t feel it.
Title: The Benefits of Humans
Rating: G
Character/s: Four, Adric.
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 53: Nonsense. Set during the Tom Baker era.
The Doctor sometimes thinks that humans are more trouble than they’re worth. They’re so emotional that he’s surprised they don’t explode, and they’re always talking complete and utter (though often wonderful) nonsense.
Now that there’s only himself and Adric stuck together aboard his suddenly not-quite-big-enough ship, though, he misses human companions. There’s only enough room on the TARDIS for one overly-logical know-it-all.
He thinks it’s a crying shame that it would be considered unacceptable to just push Adric out onto the next inhabited planet and leave him there.
Though he’d probably miss having someone else to do all the prattling.
Title: Hobbits
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, Martha
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 54: Tolkien. Set during Season 3.
“Hobbits are so not real,” Martha admonished the Doctor. “Quit having me on.”
“No, really. Oh, there’s no Bilbo or Frodo, and they’re actually called Ewoks – bit of miscommunication between Lucas and Tolkein, there – but they are, in every way that matters, essentially identical to hobbits.”
“What’s their planet called then? Middle Earth?”
The Doctor frowned thoughtfully. “That’d be confusing, what with Earth being called Earth, and it having its own middle. No, it’s called Hallivaleriform.”
“Oh,” Martha says. She’s still not sure if he’s joking. “Can we go there, then?”
The Doctor grinned. “Why do you think I brought it up?”
Title: Selfless
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 55: Wish. Set post-‘Journey’s End’.
The snake-like species in front of him swayed hypnotically, waiting for his answer.
If the Doctor could wish for anything, what would it be?
He knew this creature could grant it, no matter what.
He could have anything.
He thought of Rose kissing a man who was him, but wasn’t. He thought of Donna having forgotten him, but getting on with life. He thought of Martha, never turning down marriage proposals even when she should.
He could get them back.
“I wish that everyone who’s ever travelled with me will lead happy lives,” he said instead.
He didn’t mention himself.
Title: Picking Up Provisions
Rating: G
Character/s: Eleven, Amy
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 56: Fisher. Set during Season 5 – SPOILERS!
“You want us to go fishing?” Amy asked.
“Fish custard, remember!” the Doctor said, catching his rod momentarily against the TARDIS door as he bounded outside into the drizzle. “We’re out of fish.”
“Can’t you just go buy some?”
“With what money?”
The Doctor looked back at her, eager-eyed, and gestured for her to follow.
Amy rolled her eyes. “Does this look like a fishing outfit?” she muttered.
Well, better to let him get it out of his system, she thought. She crossed her fingers for an alien invasion to get her out of a day otherwise spent in monotony.
Title: Never Quite the Fantasy
Rating: PG-13
Character/s: Ten/Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 57: Dream. Set during ‘Doomsday’.
“Rose,” he’d breathed into her ear.
“He’s calling me,” she’d told her small family later. If she told them the rest, they’d think it was just a fantasy. They’d never up and leave in the middle of the night chasing the Doctor’s voice if they thought it was just a sex dream.
She remembered the way he’d touched her in her dream just as clearly as she’d remembered the frantic look on his face as she’d fallen towards the void. It had felt real.
She’d find him again, now. Maybe then she could compare that dream to the real thing.
Title: A Flicker of Survival Instinct
Rating: G
Character/s: Donna, Sylvia Noble, Wilf
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 58: Chandler / Castellan. Set during ‘Turn Left’.
They rolled candles each evening, hoping to sell them to gather enough money to eat. The reports said that electricity in Leeds would be completely gone in seven months. Surely there’d be a scramble for pre-made candles any day now.
Wilf disappeared into the other room to socialise and keep his spirits up. Donna and Sylvia toiled in near silence.
Donna stopped telling her mother of her schemes to improve things. There was nothing she could do.
Bursts of laughter drifted through the walls. Donna tried to focus on that and the motions of her hands instead of her despair.
Title: Tattoo
Author: Queen of the Castle
Rating: PG-13
Character/s: Ten, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 59: Tattoo. Set during Season 2.
“You do not have a tattoo,” the Doctor snorted. “Rose Tyler, with pink hoodies and panda slippers, getting a tattoo?”
“It’s true!” Rose insisted. “Shareen and I had a few too many and we went off and got it done. There should be breathalysers at those tattoo parlours to stop that, I reckon.”
“Then they’d never make money erasing the bad ones. How bad’s yours?”
“Shareen picked a rose for me. How original.”
“And where is it?” the Doctor asked.
“Tellin’ you that,” Rose said coyly, “would require me to be even drunker than when I got the damn thing.”
Title: Unwitting Recognition
Rating: G
Character/s: Rose, Alt!Jackie
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 60: Anonymous. Set during ‘Rise of the Cybermen’.
Both of the times she’s met her Dad, he’s sort of recognised her without knowing why. He’s treated her as special somehow, telling her things he wouldn’t tell just anyone, giving her his keys without knowing her, that sort of thing. So it doesn’t even occur to Rose that things might be different with her Mum.
Jackie Tyler treats her like some anonymous servant, and Rose very quickly catches on to just how far down the scale Jackie thinks anonymous servants are. Rose waits for an apology, but none comes. Rose means nothing to her.
She holds back her tears.
Title: Wishful Thinking
Rating: PG
Character/s: Martha, Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 61: Shakespeare. Set during ‘The Shakespeare Code’.
Bad breath or no, Martha sort of wished she’d gone ahead and kissed Shakespeare. Even apart from the knowledge (though she’d be sectioned if she shared it with anyone back home) that she’d kissed William Shakespeare, at least she might have seen the Doctor’s reaction. He’d seemed jealous earlier when Shakespeare had been flirting with her. Maybe if he saw what he was missing...
But she’d missed her chance, and the Doctor was no longer acting like she was anything but a transitory passenger. She’d never really been a jealous person, but she thought of that girl, Rose, and sighed.
Title: Cool Champagne on Warm Skin
Rating: PG-13
Character/s: Rose/Ten II
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 62: Vintage. Set post-‘Journey’s End’ in Pete’s World
She licks the champagne up from where it pools on the Doctor’s chest. She misses a bit, which runs down to finally settle in his navel. She follows it, grinning. The champagne is cool against her lips and the bubbles tickle her tongue, but beneath that she can still feel the heat and the texture of his skin.
“Nope,” she said. “Exactly the same.”
“Rose,” the Doctor groans. “That was the best vintage in the whole TARDIS. How can you not taste the difference between that cheap stuff you picked and this?”
Rose smiles. “They both just taste like you.”
Title: Her World Away
Rating: G
Character/s: Donna
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 63: Across the Universe. Set during ‘The Stolen Earth’.
“But that’s my family. My whole world.”
Donna thinks of her Mum and her Grandad, just getting up for the day, looking out the window to see the sunlight just vanish. They’ll have minutes to live after that, at most. Just as long as the Earth’s atmosphere could hold in enough heat to keep them alive. That can’t possibly be long.
They might already be dead, and she’s halfway across the universe from wherever they’ve ended up, unable to do a thing.
The Doctor will find a way to save them, she reassures herself. She can’t stand to think otherwise.
Title: Routines Without Domesticity
Rating: G
Character/s: Nine, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 64: Tea. Set during Season 1.
It was one of the few routines in a life as far from domestic as he could manage.
“My Mum always did this,” Rose had said the first time she’d set the kettle to boil. “One last cuppa at the end of the day.”
The Doctor hated to think about sharing anything beyond an affection for Rose with Jackie Tyler. But he’d heard the tone of sad longing in Rose’s voice. For her, he managed this one mutual custom.
Every (relative) night, they drank tea together in the kitchen. Rose smiled softly each and every time. It was worth it.
Title: Unexpected Responsibilities
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 65: Consequences. Set during ‘The Fires of Pompeii’.
The Doctor doesn’t often think too deeply about the causal consequences of travelling through established historical incidents. He figures he has a sense of what points are fixed, and that’s a sufficient guide. It never occurs to him until it’s staring him in the face that even though he knows what has to happen, he doesn’t always know why.
If he’d never come to Pompeii, Vesuvius would never have erupted and killed thousands. But the Earth would have become New Pyrovillia.
‘Fixed point’ doesn’t mean that there’s not a choice to be made. And it doesn’t mean he isn’t responsible.
Title: A Word Too Often Used
Rating: G
Character/s: Rose, Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 66: Inconceivable. AU post-Season 2. While the Challenge makes me think of ‘The Princess Bride’ the book (love it to death), I daresay it’s more likely Rose has only seen the movie.
Rose Tyler had watched a movie once where a man kept saying the word ‘inconceivable’ over and over, without seeming to know how to use the word correctly. The Doctor, who frequently uses ‘impossible’ to describe things that have already just happened right in front of him (which just proves they are possible) sometimes reminds her of that man.
So when the Doctor, upon seeing her back in his universe for the first time in years, breathes, “Impossible,” there’s really only one thing that Rose can possibly say in response.
“I don’t think that means what you think it means.”
Title: Marriages of Convenience
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten/Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 67: Reputation. Set during Season 2.
The Doctor and Rose have been married several times already throughout time and space, usually to free one of them from prison or slavery. This is the first time it’s happened on Earth.
Somehow that makes it seem more real.
They’ve been stuck in early 19th century England for three weeks now, and he’s frankly sick of Rose being treated like a leper because living alone with a man who’s not her husband has damaged her reputation.
They stand side by side and swear forever, and the Doctor tries to convince himself he’s just doing it to make things easier.
Title: Knowledge as Power
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 68: Ghost. Set during ‘Fear Her’.
“I was a Dad once,” the Doctor says, and then immediately pretends it never happened.
Rose should be used to this sort of thing. She knows next to nothing about his past, no matter how many opportunities she gives him to talk. She doesn’t even know the name of his lost planet. So she should be used to it when he shoves that lack of knowledge in her face, the ghosts of his past acting as a very successful barrier erected between them.
She should be used to it, and it shouldn’t hurt when he does it, but it does.
Title: The View Through Telefocus Lenses
Rating: PG
Character/s: Jack, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 69: Through the Looking Glass. Set during ‘The Empty Child’.
Jack stares through his binoculars at the flailing girl floating across the London sky and thinks that the Time Agency must have gone downhill a bit since he’d left. What sort of trained agent got herself into that much trouble?
Of course, he’s completely charmed by her when she falls into his arms, literally, and says hello twice.
She dances with him and sighs quietly in his ear, and he can’t help but like her after all.
He wonders whether it would be seen as complimentary or insulting if he tells her that her backside looks fabulous through telefocus lenses.
Title: A Different Sort of Prince
Rating: G
Character/s: Rose, Jack
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 70: Magic. Set during ‘The Empty Child’.
Growing up, Rose used to imagine she was one of the beautiful princesses in the Disney films her Mum sat her in front of. There’d be princes, white horses, talking animals and magic, and she’d never have to be taunted for living on a Council Estate again.
She’s rescued mid-fall by an invisible spaceship, her burned hands are fixed by glowing lights, and now she’s slow-dancing with a gorgeous man beside a clock tower.
She thinks Captain Jack Harkness might just be a different sort of prince to what she’d expected, because all of this seems like magic to her.
Title: Noir
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 71: Hardboiled Detective Novel. Set during Season 2.
“She had endless nothingness stretching into her future. She was looking for escape in the worst places. I could tell from the desperate look in her eyes that she needed to be rescued. There I was, a complete stranger, and I was her only chance at really living. But when I took her hand, she shackled my wrist to hers. I’d never be rid of her now. How like a dame.”
“Shut up,” Rose said, laughing. “I was not like that. Anyway, that’s terrible. What was that accent?”
The Doctor glared. “1930s American. And it’s improvised noir. What’d you expect?”
Title: Jumping Into Bushes
Rating: G
Character/s: Rose, Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 72: Hidden. Set during Season 4
Through much practice, Rose Tyler had grown remarkably comfortable with jumping into bushes at a split-second’s notice. It wasn’t a talent she’d ever foreseen coming in handy. Recently, though, it had repeatedly saved her life and protected the fabric of time itself.
She hid in some thick fronds as soon as she caught a glimpse of brown and pinstripes.
She wished she could run up to him instead of hiding. He was right there. But Rose knew it wasn’t time yet.
So she huddled behind a plant, waiting for the Dimension Cannon to reactivate, and watched him with longing eyes.
Title: The Meaning of Silence
Rating: PG
Character/s: Ten, Donna
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 73: Silence. Set during ‘Silence in the Library’.
Perhaps it’s just because this incarnation likes to fill every moment with talking (he’s admitted before that he’s got a gob, and that hasn’t changed). But there’s something unsettling about the concept that in an entire planet, filled with ideas and recorded memories, his is the only voice that can be heard. It’s a library, yes, and libraries are quiet. But there’s a difference between quiet and silence.
Donna doesn’t seem worried, but the Doctor knows before he even checks on the computers that they’re the only ones on the planet. Because silence, to him, always seems to mean death.
Title: The Press of a Button
Rating: G
Character/s: Nine, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 74: Exterminate. Set during ‘Dalek’.
He’s killed her. The Doctor has killed Rose Tyler with just the press of a button. He stupidly thought, after they somehow survived through that missile in Downing Street with barely a scratch on either of them, that they could get through anything together.
Maybe that’s the problem. They hadn’t been together this time. He let her go off alone, and so he wasn’t there to save her. Worse, he’s the one who condemned her.
As if it wasn’t permanently scarred into his mind already, the harsh cry of ‘Exterminate!’ will haunt his dreams for an entirely new reason now.
Title: Alone in the Light
Rating: G
Character/s: Amy, Eleven
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 75: Light. Set during ‘Flesh and Stone’ - SPOILERS!
They kept leaving her. She should be worried for them, since they seem to have faded out of existence. It shouldn’t bother her more that she’s been left behind. She was nothing to them other than some girl they were protecting. It still does hurt, though. Because although she doesn’t think the Doctor intended to leave her here alone by leaving without her, that’s how she’s ended up. She’s alone, and the Angels are coming, and she can’t even open her eyes.
She wonders whether, if that light reaches her, the Doctor will even recall that he left her behind.
Title: The Black Sheep Painted White
Rating: G
Character/s: Eight (mentions of Three and Six)
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 76: Lost Causes. Set during the Time War. References multiple Classic Who eras.
After his stint stranded on Earth in his third body had ended, he’d thought the Time Lords had given up on him, figuring there was no changing him. Then he’d been called back to trial and put through another regeneration. He realised he was still the black sheep, but they were willing to try painting him white when they saw fit.
So he wasn’t surprised they’d called him back to Gallifrey with the rumblings of a War spreading. It suited them to make an effort with him again, and yet again he’d come running. He really should stop doing that.
Title: The Luck of the Noble
Rating: G
Character/s: Donna
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 77: Lucky. Set post-‘The End of Time Part Two’.
Donna had never been particularly lucky. She’d always had dodgy jobs. The only time she’d been with a man of means, the engagement had fallen through somehow, though the memory was blurred.
However, she’s just married someone she loves, dirt-broke though he may be. And staring down in shock at a slip of paper she’d been affronted to receive as a wedding gift, she realises she’s won the lottery. Literally. Triple-rollover and all.
They’re rich. For once she really is lucky.
She does wonder, though, why her Mum and Grandad aren’t more surprised when she calls them from the honeymoon.
Title: Handicapped
Rating: PG
Character/s: Rose, Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 78: Wounded. Set during ‘The Christmas Invasion’.
Time seems to stop for Rose with the slash of a blade.
She looks at this new man and can still hardly believe it’s the Doctor. But that doesn’t stop the thought running through her head now.
The Doctor’s had his hand cut off.
He needs both hands. He can barely get out of trouble with both hands, both feet and a nose long enough to balance on. How’s he going to survive with a handicap like that? It might as well be a mortal wound.
When he grows it back, she’s happier than ever that he’s a crazy alien.
Title: Peace Babies
Rating: G
Character/s: Four
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 79: Peace. Set during the Tom Baker era.
For a man who goes about getting into (and sometimes causing) trouble on a massive scale, the Doctor really abhors violence and fighting. War is the dirtiest word imaginable to him, and he hates that it’s often a necessary evil.
He’s violently dispatched enemies before, of course. It’s a necessity to save the universe sometimes. Someone has to save all those unsuspecting creatures. But in the end, he’s still the sort to gallivant around time and space offering peace in the form of a sugary sweet from a little planet called Earth.
“Jelly baby?” he offers with a toothy smile.
Title: Necessary Binding of the Senses
Rating: PG
Character/s: Rose, Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 80: Sweet / Sour. Set during Season 2.
“Bondage, eh?”
He blushes a deep scarlet and pouts.
“You have to wear it or this won’t work.”
Once the blindfold is firmly on, he pushes a small morsel of food into her mouth. It’s an explosion of flavour, brilliantly sweet and sour all at once.
“What is that?” she asks, whipping the blindfold off before he can stop her.
She’s never seen anything that looks so disgusting ever.
She thinks it over for a moment and places the blindfold back on. “I’m gonna pretend I didn’t see that,” she said, and opens her mouth to wait for another bite.
Title: If Wishes Were Cobblers, Then Outlaws Would Dance
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 81: Robin Hood. Set during Season 2. As for the title: don’t worry, it’s not just you. It really has little to do with the fic beyond the Robin Hood – Outlaws connection. Just thought I’d mix it up a bit. ;-)
“I am so like Robin Hood! I steal from the rich and help the poor all the time!”
“You steal from the rich to help yourself, and help the poor without using any money,” Rose laughed. “You’re so not Robin Hood.”
“That legend was based on me, I’m telling you.”
“So you have a band of outlaws lyin’ around, then?”
“Not right now, no.”
“Or, I dunno, some fair maiden waitin’ for you to sweep her off her feet?”
“Well, Rose Marion Tyler, you tell me.”
She gapes for a moment and then throws her pillow at him. “You wish!”
Title: Puffy Adorableness
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 82: Elvis. Set during ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’.
The Doctor has never before liked Elvis Presley as much as he does at this moment. Without even realising it, Elvis has given the Doctor an excuse to see Rose Tyler dressed up in a puffy 1950s outfit, speaking bad period-specific lingo. She’s never seemed as completely adorable to him as she does right this second.
She settles behind him on the scooter, wrapping her arms around him, each hand seeming to instinctively find one of his hearts to rest over. Her front presses comfortably against his back.
The Doctor thinks he just might have discovered his new favourite musician.
Title: The Species That is Woman
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, Donna
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 83: Sherlock Holmes. Set during ‘The Unicorn and the Wasp’.
“You think you’re so Sherlock Holmes, figuring out how all the clues fit together when the average person can’t find the clues in the first place. But here you are, being shown up by a woman.”
“I might think I’m like Holmes in a lot of ways, but unlike him I don’t see women as some foreign species.” The Doctor paused for a moment, then added. “Well, except when they are another species.”
Donna rolled her eyes. “Come on then, you ladies’ man, don’t want to keep Agatha Christie waiting. I can’t wait until she solves the mystery before you!”
Title: The Precarious Tightrope of Reality
Rating: PG
Character/s: Rose, Nine, Mickey, Jack
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 84: Charade. Set during ‘Boomtown’.
Rose flirts back at Jack, but she never initiates it herself.
Rose agrees to go to a hotel with Mickey, but being with him feels like purposely falling into a safety net when she should be at least trying to walk the precarious tightrope.
She’s almost glad for the alien interruption, because both she and Mickey know it’s a charade. She loves him, but it’s over.
She and the Doctor are the ones dancing now. Around each other rather than together, granted, but that’s just for show. Rose knows what she wants.
She just wishes they could drop the act.
Title: Something Intangible
Rating: PG
Character/s: Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 85: Phantom. Set during ‘Midnight’.
No matter how scary corporeal creatures are, they’re never as completely and irrationally terrifying as the unknown.
These people, trapped in a bus with only a lack of forward propulsion and a few knocking sounds to let them know that something’s amiss, couldn’t possibly be more hysterical if confronted by a fleet of Daleks. Not that they’d even recognise a Dalek.
Something is outside, yes. Something they can’t see. Something intangible.
Still, the Doctor hopes it stays unknown. He’s not sure he wants to meet the type of creature hardy enough survive xtonic sunlight. It’d be nearly impossible to stop.
Title: Shadows
Rating: PG
Character/s: Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 86: Shadow. Set during ‘The Forest of the Dead’.
The shadows grow longer around the body, seeking him out. The Doctor, furious, gives them one chance to avoid the wrath bubbling inside him, looking for an outlet.
He’d liked Anita.
But he needs the Vashta Nerada to comply now, because he needs to get the people out of the computer. He needs to save Donna, most of all.
He hopes he’s calmed down by the time the people are safely off the planet, because otherwise he might just consider blowing it out of the sky.
Messing with the people he likes isn’t smart or safe, even for a shadow.
Title: Definitions Make the Man
Rating: PG
Character/s: Ten, Simm!Master
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 87: Archenemy. Set in The Year That Never Was, between ‘The Sound of Drums’ and ‘Last of the Time Lords’.
The Doctor watches the Master prance about the Valiant, too weak and too down-trodden to do much about it. Even at the end of his first life, he’d never felt this old and tired. It’s a good punishment, and an even better way to incapacitate him, he’ll give the Master that.
He studies the Master and wonders how he’d ever describe this relationship. Are they archenemies, or friends, or still (as once) lovers, or even, God forbid, frenemies?
Right now, they are none of those things. They are owner and pet. The Master keeps him, and he revels in it.
Title: Experienced Rider
Rating: PG
Character/s: Rose, Nine
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 88: Spook. Set during Season 1.
“Woah!”
Rose’s horse suddenly reared. The Doctor was at her side in a flash, one hand steadying her and the other running over the horse’s neck, calming it.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I must’ve done something.”
“No, something’s spooked it.”
A minute later she was on his horse instead, with him sitting behind her. His arms rested on either side of her body, holding the reigns. “There you are. Experienced rider, me. No worries of a horse knocking you off now.”
Rose knew he actually wanted her close in case of trouble, but said nothing, simply leaning back into him.
Title: The Chicken Equivalent
Rating: G
Character/s: Martha, Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 89: Witch. Set during ‘The Shakespeare Code’.
“It cackled, it had warts, and it could fly on a broomstick,” Martha said. “There’s no way you can tell me that that wasn’t a witch.”
“‘Witch’ is just the word that’s used when you don’t have another name for it,” the Doctor said. “If I could just find the real name...”
“Well, all right, you get right on that,” Martha said, rolling her eyes. “But if it walks like a chicken, clucks like a chicken, and lays eggs like a chicken, I don’t care if it prefers to be called a wasp; I’m still naming it a bloody chicken.”
Title: Red Capes and Sugar Handouts
Rating: G
Character/s: Rose, Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 90: Trick or Treat. Set during Season 2. Also, catch the reference I couldn’t help throwing in. Could I be any more obvious?
“You can’t be serious!” Rose laughed.
“Yeah!” he says, his voice squeaking with excitement. “Halloween, 2006! In Las Vegas, mind, so you can’t go see your Mum.”
“You’re just afraid of her,” she grins.
“Always.”
“But you can’t seriously want to see a 21st century Halloween. Your life is like that, only more realistic.”
“Rose,” the Doctor said seriously. “Any holiday that involves free handouts of sugar is the best holiday ever conceived. Now come on!”
She giggles and lets herself be pulled out the door, the red cape of her hastily-thrown-together Little Red Riding Hood costume billowing behind her.
Title: Detritus
Rating: PG
Character/s: Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 91: Grave. Set during ‘Planet of the Dead’.
He’d said the sand tasted strange, and here was the answer to the riddle. People, whole cities, ecosystems – all reduced to sand. All across the planet, sand. Like detritus rotting on a forest floor, but somehow less fitting. At least when something was so obviously dead it was a testament to the fact that it lived in the first place.
All across the planet countless grains of sand are all that was left. The world was one big gravesite, but there wasn’t a marker to be seen to note their passing.
It was one of the saddest things he’d ever seen.
Title: Overkill
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 92: Bonfire / Gunpowder. Set during Season 2.
“What, are you signallin’ people fifty light-years away for help?”
“What?”
“The fire,” Rose laughed. “It’s huge!”
“It’s a bonfire,” the Doctor said defensively. “It’s supposed to be big.”
“It’s a bit overkill.”
“See the way the light catches those waves as they come in?” he asked.
Rose looked and nodded, seeming entranced for a moment by the rhythm of it. “Yeah. ’S beautiful.”
“Couldn’t see that with some little barbeque flame, could you?” he said triumphantly.
Rose looks at him askance and then grins. “You’re a nutter.”
If she hadn’t said it with such affection, he might be offended.
Title: Passions Not Shared
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 93: Flowery. Set just prior to ‘Tooth and Claw’. Written because of that comment Martha makes in ‘Gridlock’ about him taking her the same places he took Rose, and being on the rebound. Oh Doctor, you know it’s true.
“You didn’t like it,” the Doctor said, looking downbeat.
“I did! But Shakespeare to me just means schoolwork. I’m sorry. It’s all that Elizabethan language stuff. I just don’t understand it. And it’s so sort of ... flowery.”
The Doctor pouted.
“But seein’ it live was nice!” Rose offered. “Nothin’ beats theatre, and that lot were all into it. Great atmosphere.”
Rose knew the Doctor loved Shakespeare and was disappointed she didn’t share that enthusiasm. But back in the TARDIS, he suggested a concert and let her choose.
Rose grinned, warmed by his efforts to find something they could enjoy together.
Title: Born Under the Wrong Suns
Rating: G
Character/s: Theta Sigma
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 94: Prodigy.
In any other place in the universe, Theta Sigma would be considered a prodigy. But Gallifrey is all about book-learning and emotional detachment. He loves books, really, but he’s not so fond of tests; he can barely sit still for them. As for the emotional detachment, that’s a lost cause. He loves the universe without ever having seen it. Once he’s out there, he’s going to dive in headfirst.
The Time Lords don’t know what to do with him. To them he’s anything but a genius. He’s a failure, if anything. Theta tries not to let that get to him.
Title: Falling Down in the Mud
Rating: PG
Character/s: John Smith
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 95: Soldier. Set in a world that’s AU after ‘Human Nature’/‘Family of Blood’. The Family died off before attacking, but because they weren’t there John Smith refused to open the fob watch once he’d seen his possible future with Joan. This is set three years later. Yes, I’m a cruel, cruel woman.
He’d taught children how to shoot without thinking anything of it. Those same children were probably out there now, in the field of battle. He, a full-grown man, wished he was anywhere but there, even if it was for King and Country. He couldn’t imagine how those young boys must have felt.
He took an unexpected bullet and fell down in the dark, mud splattering all over, including in the wound. He laid there, still.
He’d refused to become the Doctor again because he’d seen the wonderful human future he could have. He saw that future slipping away and cried.
Title: Falling in Slow Motion
Rating: PG
Character/s: Ten, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 96: Frozen. Set during ‘Doomsday’.
He sees Rose’s lever go offline, and sees her determined look, and everything seems to freeze. Daleks moving at a hundred miles per hour through the air look like they’re suspended in near stillness.
He’s a Time Lord. He can slow time around him, just enough to give him the extra time he needs to perceive things and work out the answers.
But this time there is no answer. He can’t let go of his magnaclamp without falling into the void, and that won’t help her.
All his Time Lord talents do is make him watch her fall excruciatingly slowly.
Title: Circular Logic
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, River
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 97: Merry / Marry / Mary. Set during ‘Forest of the Dead’.
The Doctor hates meeting people who already know him. It tends to seal him into a particular future. Changing personal timelines won’t always risk a paradox, obviously, but he tends to meet people during important events that shouldn’t be altered.
Now here’s this woman, not quite ever actually saying it, but still silently conveying that they’re married. And he wonders privately whether he would ever have considered her had he not met her now and known that it had to be so.
He hates to think that’s the basis of what might be the most important relationship of his life.
Title: Wrapped Around Her Little Finger
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 98: Claws / Clause / Claus. Set during Season 2.
“I hate cats.”
Rose gave the Doctor that pleading look, with just a hint of a smile, that never failed to make him cave. “Oh come on. You know we can’t have a dog on the TARDIS. It’d chew on all the wires and we’d end up floating aimlessly in the Vortex for weeks.”
“I don’t remember saying yes to having any animal on board.”
Rose kept up that little smile that both begged him and said she knew she’d already won.
“There’ll be hair everywhere.”
She smiled.
“It’ll claw up my trousers,” he whined.
She kept smiling.
Damn her.
Title: Drinking Challenge
Rating: PG
Character/s: Ten, Donna
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 99: 99 Bottles of Beer. Set during Season 4.
The Doctor claims that he doesn’t get drunk. He babbles on about superior Time Lord physiology and the inherent weaknesses in the human digestion and circulatory systems for ages before Donna finally shuts him up by issuing a drinking challenge.
The Doctor scoffs, asking her if she’s missed all those things he just said. She can’t possibly win.
Four hours later he’s literally under the table, rolling about slurring drinking songs. Donna empties the water out of her leftover vodka bottle and throws out the empty whiskey bottles the Doctor had favoured.
That would shut him up for a while.
Title: Starting Over
Rating: PG
Character/s: Jackie
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 100: Fresh Start. Set during ‘Love and Monsters’.
People around the Powell Estate sometimes call Jackie a slag. She’s been known to frequently take men into her bed, most of whom have been huge mistakes. Rose was only really following Jackie’s example when she ran off with Jimmy Stone.
But all Jackie’s hoping for is to start over. Twenty years after Pete, and she still hasn’t managed that. So every time she meets a man like that nice Elton, she tells herself this might be it, and that she should do anything to hold onto it. Because she doesn’t know how much longer she can take being alone.
dw100. There are a couple of Season 5-related fics, but they are clearly labelled for spoilers. Title: Fading Before His Eyes
Rating: PG
Character/s: Ten/Rose, Donna
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 51: Mirage. Set during ‘The Stolen Earth’.
Donna’s intimated that she can see the woman down the street. The Doctor’s even been sort of expecting her since the overabundance of Bad Wolf references. Still, it’d seemed like false hope. This, right now, finally seeing Rose, feels like a mirage. An oasis in the desert, with the Doctor being a man dying of thirst.
He runs faster than he ever has in his life, knowing he needs to touch Rose to accept she’s real. However, like a mirage fading on closer inspection, he’s denied that. He’s cut down, and the moment is lost.
Damn the Daleks to hell.
Title: In Safe Hands
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten II/Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 52: Heart. Set post-‘Journey’s End’ in Pete’s World.
Having one heart should feel like he’s not whole. There’s a cavity in his chest where he remembers a beating organ. His body is less efficient. He should feel like that second heart has been torn from him and left him still bleeding.
He doesn’t.
His second heart hasn’t been his own since he met Rose. When she was lost, she took it with her. He dealt with that pain years ago. This, now, is nothing new.
Now Rose is right beside him again. So he knows his second heart is safe and sound, even if he can’t feel it.
Title: The Benefits of Humans
Rating: G
Character/s: Four, Adric.
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 53: Nonsense. Set during the Tom Baker era.
The Doctor sometimes thinks that humans are more trouble than they’re worth. They’re so emotional that he’s surprised they don’t explode, and they’re always talking complete and utter (though often wonderful) nonsense.
Now that there’s only himself and Adric stuck together aboard his suddenly not-quite-big-enough ship, though, he misses human companions. There’s only enough room on the TARDIS for one overly-logical know-it-all.
He thinks it’s a crying shame that it would be considered unacceptable to just push Adric out onto the next inhabited planet and leave him there.
Though he’d probably miss having someone else to do all the prattling.
Title: Hobbits
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, Martha
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 54: Tolkien. Set during Season 3.
“Hobbits are so not real,” Martha admonished the Doctor. “Quit having me on.”
“No, really. Oh, there’s no Bilbo or Frodo, and they’re actually called Ewoks – bit of miscommunication between Lucas and Tolkein, there – but they are, in every way that matters, essentially identical to hobbits.”
“What’s their planet called then? Middle Earth?”
The Doctor frowned thoughtfully. “That’d be confusing, what with Earth being called Earth, and it having its own middle. No, it’s called Hallivaleriform.”
“Oh,” Martha says. She’s still not sure if he’s joking. “Can we go there, then?”
The Doctor grinned. “Why do you think I brought it up?”
Title: Selfless
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 55: Wish. Set post-‘Journey’s End’.
The snake-like species in front of him swayed hypnotically, waiting for his answer.
If the Doctor could wish for anything, what would it be?
He knew this creature could grant it, no matter what.
He could have anything.
He thought of Rose kissing a man who was him, but wasn’t. He thought of Donna having forgotten him, but getting on with life. He thought of Martha, never turning down marriage proposals even when she should.
He could get them back.
“I wish that everyone who’s ever travelled with me will lead happy lives,” he said instead.
He didn’t mention himself.
Title: Picking Up Provisions
Rating: G
Character/s: Eleven, Amy
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 56: Fisher. Set during Season 5 – SPOILERS!
“You want us to go fishing?” Amy asked.
“Fish custard, remember!” the Doctor said, catching his rod momentarily against the TARDIS door as he bounded outside into the drizzle. “We’re out of fish.”
“Can’t you just go buy some?”
“With what money?”
The Doctor looked back at her, eager-eyed, and gestured for her to follow.
Amy rolled her eyes. “Does this look like a fishing outfit?” she muttered.
Well, better to let him get it out of his system, she thought. She crossed her fingers for an alien invasion to get her out of a day otherwise spent in monotony.
Title: Never Quite the Fantasy
Rating: PG-13
Character/s: Ten/Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 57: Dream. Set during ‘Doomsday’.
“Rose,” he’d breathed into her ear.
“He’s calling me,” she’d told her small family later. If she told them the rest, they’d think it was just a fantasy. They’d never up and leave in the middle of the night chasing the Doctor’s voice if they thought it was just a sex dream.
She remembered the way he’d touched her in her dream just as clearly as she’d remembered the frantic look on his face as she’d fallen towards the void. It had felt real.
She’d find him again, now. Maybe then she could compare that dream to the real thing.
Title: A Flicker of Survival Instinct
Rating: G
Character/s: Donna, Sylvia Noble, Wilf
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 58: Chandler / Castellan. Set during ‘Turn Left’.
They rolled candles each evening, hoping to sell them to gather enough money to eat. The reports said that electricity in Leeds would be completely gone in seven months. Surely there’d be a scramble for pre-made candles any day now.
Wilf disappeared into the other room to socialise and keep his spirits up. Donna and Sylvia toiled in near silence.
Donna stopped telling her mother of her schemes to improve things. There was nothing she could do.
Bursts of laughter drifted through the walls. Donna tried to focus on that and the motions of her hands instead of her despair.
Title: Tattoo
Author: Queen of the Castle
Rating: PG-13
Character/s: Ten, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 59: Tattoo. Set during Season 2.
“You do not have a tattoo,” the Doctor snorted. “Rose Tyler, with pink hoodies and panda slippers, getting a tattoo?”
“It’s true!” Rose insisted. “Shareen and I had a few too many and we went off and got it done. There should be breathalysers at those tattoo parlours to stop that, I reckon.”
“Then they’d never make money erasing the bad ones. How bad’s yours?”
“Shareen picked a rose for me. How original.”
“And where is it?” the Doctor asked.
“Tellin’ you that,” Rose said coyly, “would require me to be even drunker than when I got the damn thing.”
Title: Unwitting Recognition
Rating: G
Character/s: Rose, Alt!Jackie
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 60: Anonymous. Set during ‘Rise of the Cybermen’.
Both of the times she’s met her Dad, he’s sort of recognised her without knowing why. He’s treated her as special somehow, telling her things he wouldn’t tell just anyone, giving her his keys without knowing her, that sort of thing. So it doesn’t even occur to Rose that things might be different with her Mum.
Jackie Tyler treats her like some anonymous servant, and Rose very quickly catches on to just how far down the scale Jackie thinks anonymous servants are. Rose waits for an apology, but none comes. Rose means nothing to her.
She holds back her tears.
Title: Wishful Thinking
Rating: PG
Character/s: Martha, Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 61: Shakespeare. Set during ‘The Shakespeare Code’.
Bad breath or no, Martha sort of wished she’d gone ahead and kissed Shakespeare. Even apart from the knowledge (though she’d be sectioned if she shared it with anyone back home) that she’d kissed William Shakespeare, at least she might have seen the Doctor’s reaction. He’d seemed jealous earlier when Shakespeare had been flirting with her. Maybe if he saw what he was missing...
But she’d missed her chance, and the Doctor was no longer acting like she was anything but a transitory passenger. She’d never really been a jealous person, but she thought of that girl, Rose, and sighed.
Title: Cool Champagne on Warm Skin
Rating: PG-13
Character/s: Rose/Ten II
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 62: Vintage. Set post-‘Journey’s End’ in Pete’s World
She licks the champagne up from where it pools on the Doctor’s chest. She misses a bit, which runs down to finally settle in his navel. She follows it, grinning. The champagne is cool against her lips and the bubbles tickle her tongue, but beneath that she can still feel the heat and the texture of his skin.
“Nope,” she said. “Exactly the same.”
“Rose,” the Doctor groans. “That was the best vintage in the whole TARDIS. How can you not taste the difference between that cheap stuff you picked and this?”
Rose smiles. “They both just taste like you.”
Title: Her World Away
Rating: G
Character/s: Donna
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 63: Across the Universe. Set during ‘The Stolen Earth’.
“But that’s my family. My whole world.”
Donna thinks of her Mum and her Grandad, just getting up for the day, looking out the window to see the sunlight just vanish. They’ll have minutes to live after that, at most. Just as long as the Earth’s atmosphere could hold in enough heat to keep them alive. That can’t possibly be long.
They might already be dead, and she’s halfway across the universe from wherever they’ve ended up, unable to do a thing.
The Doctor will find a way to save them, she reassures herself. She can’t stand to think otherwise.
Title: Routines Without Domesticity
Rating: G
Character/s: Nine, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 64: Tea. Set during Season 1.
It was one of the few routines in a life as far from domestic as he could manage.
“My Mum always did this,” Rose had said the first time she’d set the kettle to boil. “One last cuppa at the end of the day.”
The Doctor hated to think about sharing anything beyond an affection for Rose with Jackie Tyler. But he’d heard the tone of sad longing in Rose’s voice. For her, he managed this one mutual custom.
Every (relative) night, they drank tea together in the kitchen. Rose smiled softly each and every time. It was worth it.
Title: Unexpected Responsibilities
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 65: Consequences. Set during ‘The Fires of Pompeii’.
The Doctor doesn’t often think too deeply about the causal consequences of travelling through established historical incidents. He figures he has a sense of what points are fixed, and that’s a sufficient guide. It never occurs to him until it’s staring him in the face that even though he knows what has to happen, he doesn’t always know why.
If he’d never come to Pompeii, Vesuvius would never have erupted and killed thousands. But the Earth would have become New Pyrovillia.
‘Fixed point’ doesn’t mean that there’s not a choice to be made. And it doesn’t mean he isn’t responsible.
Title: A Word Too Often Used
Rating: G
Character/s: Rose, Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 66: Inconceivable. AU post-Season 2. While the Challenge makes me think of ‘The Princess Bride’ the book (love it to death), I daresay it’s more likely Rose has only seen the movie.
Rose Tyler had watched a movie once where a man kept saying the word ‘inconceivable’ over and over, without seeming to know how to use the word correctly. The Doctor, who frequently uses ‘impossible’ to describe things that have already just happened right in front of him (which just proves they are possible) sometimes reminds her of that man.
So when the Doctor, upon seeing her back in his universe for the first time in years, breathes, “Impossible,” there’s really only one thing that Rose can possibly say in response.
“I don’t think that means what you think it means.”
Title: Marriages of Convenience
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten/Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 67: Reputation. Set during Season 2.
The Doctor and Rose have been married several times already throughout time and space, usually to free one of them from prison or slavery. This is the first time it’s happened on Earth.
Somehow that makes it seem more real.
They’ve been stuck in early 19th century England for three weeks now, and he’s frankly sick of Rose being treated like a leper because living alone with a man who’s not her husband has damaged her reputation.
They stand side by side and swear forever, and the Doctor tries to convince himself he’s just doing it to make things easier.
Title: Knowledge as Power
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 68: Ghost. Set during ‘Fear Her’.
“I was a Dad once,” the Doctor says, and then immediately pretends it never happened.
Rose should be used to this sort of thing. She knows next to nothing about his past, no matter how many opportunities she gives him to talk. She doesn’t even know the name of his lost planet. So she should be used to it when he shoves that lack of knowledge in her face, the ghosts of his past acting as a very successful barrier erected between them.
She should be used to it, and it shouldn’t hurt when he does it, but it does.
Title: The View Through Telefocus Lenses
Rating: PG
Character/s: Jack, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 69: Through the Looking Glass. Set during ‘The Empty Child’.
Jack stares through his binoculars at the flailing girl floating across the London sky and thinks that the Time Agency must have gone downhill a bit since he’d left. What sort of trained agent got herself into that much trouble?
Of course, he’s completely charmed by her when she falls into his arms, literally, and says hello twice.
She dances with him and sighs quietly in his ear, and he can’t help but like her after all.
He wonders whether it would be seen as complimentary or insulting if he tells her that her backside looks fabulous through telefocus lenses.
Title: A Different Sort of Prince
Rating: G
Character/s: Rose, Jack
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 70: Magic. Set during ‘The Empty Child’.
Growing up, Rose used to imagine she was one of the beautiful princesses in the Disney films her Mum sat her in front of. There’d be princes, white horses, talking animals and magic, and she’d never have to be taunted for living on a Council Estate again.
She’s rescued mid-fall by an invisible spaceship, her burned hands are fixed by glowing lights, and now she’s slow-dancing with a gorgeous man beside a clock tower.
She thinks Captain Jack Harkness might just be a different sort of prince to what she’d expected, because all of this seems like magic to her.
Title: Noir
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 71: Hardboiled Detective Novel. Set during Season 2.
“She had endless nothingness stretching into her future. She was looking for escape in the worst places. I could tell from the desperate look in her eyes that she needed to be rescued. There I was, a complete stranger, and I was her only chance at really living. But when I took her hand, she shackled my wrist to hers. I’d never be rid of her now. How like a dame.”
“Shut up,” Rose said, laughing. “I was not like that. Anyway, that’s terrible. What was that accent?”
The Doctor glared. “1930s American. And it’s improvised noir. What’d you expect?”
Title: Jumping Into Bushes
Rating: G
Character/s: Rose, Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 72: Hidden. Set during Season 4
Through much practice, Rose Tyler had grown remarkably comfortable with jumping into bushes at a split-second’s notice. It wasn’t a talent she’d ever foreseen coming in handy. Recently, though, it had repeatedly saved her life and protected the fabric of time itself.
She hid in some thick fronds as soon as she caught a glimpse of brown and pinstripes.
She wished she could run up to him instead of hiding. He was right there. But Rose knew it wasn’t time yet.
So she huddled behind a plant, waiting for the Dimension Cannon to reactivate, and watched him with longing eyes.
Title: The Meaning of Silence
Rating: PG
Character/s: Ten, Donna
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 73: Silence. Set during ‘Silence in the Library’.
Perhaps it’s just because this incarnation likes to fill every moment with talking (he’s admitted before that he’s got a gob, and that hasn’t changed). But there’s something unsettling about the concept that in an entire planet, filled with ideas and recorded memories, his is the only voice that can be heard. It’s a library, yes, and libraries are quiet. But there’s a difference between quiet and silence.
Donna doesn’t seem worried, but the Doctor knows before he even checks on the computers that they’re the only ones on the planet. Because silence, to him, always seems to mean death.
Title: The Press of a Button
Rating: G
Character/s: Nine, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 74: Exterminate. Set during ‘Dalek’.
He’s killed her. The Doctor has killed Rose Tyler with just the press of a button. He stupidly thought, after they somehow survived through that missile in Downing Street with barely a scratch on either of them, that they could get through anything together.
Maybe that’s the problem. They hadn’t been together this time. He let her go off alone, and so he wasn’t there to save her. Worse, he’s the one who condemned her.
As if it wasn’t permanently scarred into his mind already, the harsh cry of ‘Exterminate!’ will haunt his dreams for an entirely new reason now.
Title: Alone in the Light
Rating: G
Character/s: Amy, Eleven
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 75: Light. Set during ‘Flesh and Stone’ - SPOILERS!
They kept leaving her. She should be worried for them, since they seem to have faded out of existence. It shouldn’t bother her more that she’s been left behind. She was nothing to them other than some girl they were protecting. It still does hurt, though. Because although she doesn’t think the Doctor intended to leave her here alone by leaving without her, that’s how she’s ended up. She’s alone, and the Angels are coming, and she can’t even open her eyes.
She wonders whether, if that light reaches her, the Doctor will even recall that he left her behind.
Title: The Black Sheep Painted White
Rating: G
Character/s: Eight (mentions of Three and Six)
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 76: Lost Causes. Set during the Time War. References multiple Classic Who eras.
After his stint stranded on Earth in his third body had ended, he’d thought the Time Lords had given up on him, figuring there was no changing him. Then he’d been called back to trial and put through another regeneration. He realised he was still the black sheep, but they were willing to try painting him white when they saw fit.
So he wasn’t surprised they’d called him back to Gallifrey with the rumblings of a War spreading. It suited them to make an effort with him again, and yet again he’d come running. He really should stop doing that.
Title: The Luck of the Noble
Rating: G
Character/s: Donna
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 77: Lucky. Set post-‘The End of Time Part Two’.
Donna had never been particularly lucky. She’d always had dodgy jobs. The only time she’d been with a man of means, the engagement had fallen through somehow, though the memory was blurred.
However, she’s just married someone she loves, dirt-broke though he may be. And staring down in shock at a slip of paper she’d been affronted to receive as a wedding gift, she realises she’s won the lottery. Literally. Triple-rollover and all.
They’re rich. For once she really is lucky.
She does wonder, though, why her Mum and Grandad aren’t more surprised when she calls them from the honeymoon.
Title: Handicapped
Rating: PG
Character/s: Rose, Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 78: Wounded. Set during ‘The Christmas Invasion’.
Time seems to stop for Rose with the slash of a blade.
She looks at this new man and can still hardly believe it’s the Doctor. But that doesn’t stop the thought running through her head now.
The Doctor’s had his hand cut off.
He needs both hands. He can barely get out of trouble with both hands, both feet and a nose long enough to balance on. How’s he going to survive with a handicap like that? It might as well be a mortal wound.
When he grows it back, she’s happier than ever that he’s a crazy alien.
Title: Peace Babies
Rating: G
Character/s: Four
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 79: Peace. Set during the Tom Baker era.
For a man who goes about getting into (and sometimes causing) trouble on a massive scale, the Doctor really abhors violence and fighting. War is the dirtiest word imaginable to him, and he hates that it’s often a necessary evil.
He’s violently dispatched enemies before, of course. It’s a necessity to save the universe sometimes. Someone has to save all those unsuspecting creatures. But in the end, he’s still the sort to gallivant around time and space offering peace in the form of a sugary sweet from a little planet called Earth.
“Jelly baby?” he offers with a toothy smile.
Title: Necessary Binding of the Senses
Rating: PG
Character/s: Rose, Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 80: Sweet / Sour. Set during Season 2.
“Bondage, eh?”
He blushes a deep scarlet and pouts.
“You have to wear it or this won’t work.”
Once the blindfold is firmly on, he pushes a small morsel of food into her mouth. It’s an explosion of flavour, brilliantly sweet and sour all at once.
“What is that?” she asks, whipping the blindfold off before he can stop her.
She’s never seen anything that looks so disgusting ever.
She thinks it over for a moment and places the blindfold back on. “I’m gonna pretend I didn’t see that,” she said, and opens her mouth to wait for another bite.
Title: If Wishes Were Cobblers, Then Outlaws Would Dance
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 81: Robin Hood. Set during Season 2. As for the title: don’t worry, it’s not just you. It really has little to do with the fic beyond the Robin Hood – Outlaws connection. Just thought I’d mix it up a bit. ;-)
“I am so like Robin Hood! I steal from the rich and help the poor all the time!”
“You steal from the rich to help yourself, and help the poor without using any money,” Rose laughed. “You’re so not Robin Hood.”
“That legend was based on me, I’m telling you.”
“So you have a band of outlaws lyin’ around, then?”
“Not right now, no.”
“Or, I dunno, some fair maiden waitin’ for you to sweep her off her feet?”
“Well, Rose Marion Tyler, you tell me.”
She gapes for a moment and then throws her pillow at him. “You wish!”
Title: Puffy Adorableness
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 82: Elvis. Set during ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’.
The Doctor has never before liked Elvis Presley as much as he does at this moment. Without even realising it, Elvis has given the Doctor an excuse to see Rose Tyler dressed up in a puffy 1950s outfit, speaking bad period-specific lingo. She’s never seemed as completely adorable to him as she does right this second.
She settles behind him on the scooter, wrapping her arms around him, each hand seeming to instinctively find one of his hearts to rest over. Her front presses comfortably against his back.
The Doctor thinks he just might have discovered his new favourite musician.
Title: The Species That is Woman
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, Donna
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 83: Sherlock Holmes. Set during ‘The Unicorn and the Wasp’.
“You think you’re so Sherlock Holmes, figuring out how all the clues fit together when the average person can’t find the clues in the first place. But here you are, being shown up by a woman.”
“I might think I’m like Holmes in a lot of ways, but unlike him I don’t see women as some foreign species.” The Doctor paused for a moment, then added. “Well, except when they are another species.”
Donna rolled her eyes. “Come on then, you ladies’ man, don’t want to keep Agatha Christie waiting. I can’t wait until she solves the mystery before you!”
Title: The Precarious Tightrope of Reality
Rating: PG
Character/s: Rose, Nine, Mickey, Jack
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 84: Charade. Set during ‘Boomtown’.
Rose flirts back at Jack, but she never initiates it herself.
Rose agrees to go to a hotel with Mickey, but being with him feels like purposely falling into a safety net when she should be at least trying to walk the precarious tightrope.
She’s almost glad for the alien interruption, because both she and Mickey know it’s a charade. She loves him, but it’s over.
She and the Doctor are the ones dancing now. Around each other rather than together, granted, but that’s just for show. Rose knows what she wants.
She just wishes they could drop the act.
Title: Something Intangible
Rating: PG
Character/s: Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 85: Phantom. Set during ‘Midnight’.
No matter how scary corporeal creatures are, they’re never as completely and irrationally terrifying as the unknown.
These people, trapped in a bus with only a lack of forward propulsion and a few knocking sounds to let them know that something’s amiss, couldn’t possibly be more hysterical if confronted by a fleet of Daleks. Not that they’d even recognise a Dalek.
Something is outside, yes. Something they can’t see. Something intangible.
Still, the Doctor hopes it stays unknown. He’s not sure he wants to meet the type of creature hardy enough survive xtonic sunlight. It’d be nearly impossible to stop.
Title: Shadows
Rating: PG
Character/s: Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 86: Shadow. Set during ‘The Forest of the Dead’.
The shadows grow longer around the body, seeking him out. The Doctor, furious, gives them one chance to avoid the wrath bubbling inside him, looking for an outlet.
He’d liked Anita.
But he needs the Vashta Nerada to comply now, because he needs to get the people out of the computer. He needs to save Donna, most of all.
He hopes he’s calmed down by the time the people are safely off the planet, because otherwise he might just consider blowing it out of the sky.
Messing with the people he likes isn’t smart or safe, even for a shadow.
Title: Definitions Make the Man
Rating: PG
Character/s: Ten, Simm!Master
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 87: Archenemy. Set in The Year That Never Was, between ‘The Sound of Drums’ and ‘Last of the Time Lords’.
The Doctor watches the Master prance about the Valiant, too weak and too down-trodden to do much about it. Even at the end of his first life, he’d never felt this old and tired. It’s a good punishment, and an even better way to incapacitate him, he’ll give the Master that.
He studies the Master and wonders how he’d ever describe this relationship. Are they archenemies, or friends, or still (as once) lovers, or even, God forbid, frenemies?
Right now, they are none of those things. They are owner and pet. The Master keeps him, and he revels in it.
Title: Experienced Rider
Rating: PG
Character/s: Rose, Nine
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 88: Spook. Set during Season 1.
“Woah!”
Rose’s horse suddenly reared. The Doctor was at her side in a flash, one hand steadying her and the other running over the horse’s neck, calming it.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I must’ve done something.”
“No, something’s spooked it.”
A minute later she was on his horse instead, with him sitting behind her. His arms rested on either side of her body, holding the reigns. “There you are. Experienced rider, me. No worries of a horse knocking you off now.”
Rose knew he actually wanted her close in case of trouble, but said nothing, simply leaning back into him.
Title: The Chicken Equivalent
Rating: G
Character/s: Martha, Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 89: Witch. Set during ‘The Shakespeare Code’.
“It cackled, it had warts, and it could fly on a broomstick,” Martha said. “There’s no way you can tell me that that wasn’t a witch.”
“‘Witch’ is just the word that’s used when you don’t have another name for it,” the Doctor said. “If I could just find the real name...”
“Well, all right, you get right on that,” Martha said, rolling her eyes. “But if it walks like a chicken, clucks like a chicken, and lays eggs like a chicken, I don’t care if it prefers to be called a wasp; I’m still naming it a bloody chicken.”
Title: Red Capes and Sugar Handouts
Rating: G
Character/s: Rose, Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 90: Trick or Treat. Set during Season 2. Also, catch the reference I couldn’t help throwing in. Could I be any more obvious?
“You can’t be serious!” Rose laughed.
“Yeah!” he says, his voice squeaking with excitement. “Halloween, 2006! In Las Vegas, mind, so you can’t go see your Mum.”
“You’re just afraid of her,” she grins.
“Always.”
“But you can’t seriously want to see a 21st century Halloween. Your life is like that, only more realistic.”
“Rose,” the Doctor said seriously. “Any holiday that involves free handouts of sugar is the best holiday ever conceived. Now come on!”
She giggles and lets herself be pulled out the door, the red cape of her hastily-thrown-together Little Red Riding Hood costume billowing behind her.
Title: Detritus
Rating: PG
Character/s: Ten
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 91: Grave. Set during ‘Planet of the Dead’.
He’d said the sand tasted strange, and here was the answer to the riddle. People, whole cities, ecosystems – all reduced to sand. All across the planet, sand. Like detritus rotting on a forest floor, but somehow less fitting. At least when something was so obviously dead it was a testament to the fact that it lived in the first place.
All across the planet countless grains of sand are all that was left. The world was one big gravesite, but there wasn’t a marker to be seen to note their passing.
It was one of the saddest things he’d ever seen.
Title: Overkill
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 92: Bonfire / Gunpowder. Set during Season 2.
“What, are you signallin’ people fifty light-years away for help?”
“What?”
“The fire,” Rose laughed. “It’s huge!”
“It’s a bonfire,” the Doctor said defensively. “It’s supposed to be big.”
“It’s a bit overkill.”
“See the way the light catches those waves as they come in?” he asked.
Rose looked and nodded, seeming entranced for a moment by the rhythm of it. “Yeah. ’S beautiful.”
“Couldn’t see that with some little barbeque flame, could you?” he said triumphantly.
Rose looks at him askance and then grins. “You’re a nutter.”
If she hadn’t said it with such affection, he might be offended.
Title: Passions Not Shared
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 93: Flowery. Set just prior to ‘Tooth and Claw’. Written because of that comment Martha makes in ‘Gridlock’ about him taking her the same places he took Rose, and being on the rebound. Oh Doctor, you know it’s true.
“You didn’t like it,” the Doctor said, looking downbeat.
“I did! But Shakespeare to me just means schoolwork. I’m sorry. It’s all that Elizabethan language stuff. I just don’t understand it. And it’s so sort of ... flowery.”
The Doctor pouted.
“But seein’ it live was nice!” Rose offered. “Nothin’ beats theatre, and that lot were all into it. Great atmosphere.”
Rose knew the Doctor loved Shakespeare and was disappointed she didn’t share that enthusiasm. But back in the TARDIS, he suggested a concert and let her choose.
Rose grinned, warmed by his efforts to find something they could enjoy together.
Title: Born Under the Wrong Suns
Rating: G
Character/s: Theta Sigma
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 94: Prodigy.
In any other place in the universe, Theta Sigma would be considered a prodigy. But Gallifrey is all about book-learning and emotional detachment. He loves books, really, but he’s not so fond of tests; he can barely sit still for them. As for the emotional detachment, that’s a lost cause. He loves the universe without ever having seen it. Once he’s out there, he’s going to dive in headfirst.
The Time Lords don’t know what to do with him. To them he’s anything but a genius. He’s a failure, if anything. Theta tries not to let that get to him.
Title: Falling Down in the Mud
Rating: PG
Character/s: John Smith
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 95: Soldier. Set in a world that’s AU after ‘Human Nature’/‘Family of Blood’. The Family died off before attacking, but because they weren’t there John Smith refused to open the fob watch once he’d seen his possible future with Joan. This is set three years later. Yes, I’m a cruel, cruel woman.
He’d taught children how to shoot without thinking anything of it. Those same children were probably out there now, in the field of battle. He, a full-grown man, wished he was anywhere but there, even if it was for King and Country. He couldn’t imagine how those young boys must have felt.
He took an unexpected bullet and fell down in the dark, mud splattering all over, including in the wound. He laid there, still.
He’d refused to become the Doctor again because he’d seen the wonderful human future he could have. He saw that future slipping away and cried.
Title: Falling in Slow Motion
Rating: PG
Character/s: Ten, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 96: Frozen. Set during ‘Doomsday’.
He sees Rose’s lever go offline, and sees her determined look, and everything seems to freeze. Daleks moving at a hundred miles per hour through the air look like they’re suspended in near stillness.
He’s a Time Lord. He can slow time around him, just enough to give him the extra time he needs to perceive things and work out the answers.
But this time there is no answer. He can’t let go of his magnaclamp without falling into the void, and that won’t help her.
All his Time Lord talents do is make him watch her fall excruciatingly slowly.
Title: Circular Logic
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, River
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 97: Merry / Marry / Mary. Set during ‘Forest of the Dead’.
The Doctor hates meeting people who already know him. It tends to seal him into a particular future. Changing personal timelines won’t always risk a paradox, obviously, but he tends to meet people during important events that shouldn’t be altered.
Now here’s this woman, not quite ever actually saying it, but still silently conveying that they’re married. And he wonders privately whether he would ever have considered her had he not met her now and known that it had to be so.
He hates to think that’s the basis of what might be the most important relationship of his life.
Title: Wrapped Around Her Little Finger
Rating: G
Character/s: Ten, Rose
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 98: Claws / Clause / Claus. Set during Season 2.
“I hate cats.”
Rose gave the Doctor that pleading look, with just a hint of a smile, that never failed to make him cave. “Oh come on. You know we can’t have a dog on the TARDIS. It’d chew on all the wires and we’d end up floating aimlessly in the Vortex for weeks.”
“I don’t remember saying yes to having any animal on board.”
Rose kept up that little smile that both begged him and said she knew she’d already won.
“There’ll be hair everywhere.”
She smiled.
“It’ll claw up my trousers,” he whined.
She kept smiling.
Damn her.
Title: Drinking Challenge
Rating: PG
Character/s: Ten, Donna
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 99: 99 Bottles of Beer. Set during Season 4.
The Doctor claims that he doesn’t get drunk. He babbles on about superior Time Lord physiology and the inherent weaknesses in the human digestion and circulatory systems for ages before Donna finally shuts him up by issuing a drinking challenge.
The Doctor scoffs, asking her if she’s missed all those things he just said. She can’t possibly win.
Four hours later he’s literally under the table, rolling about slurring drinking songs. Donna empties the water out of her leftover vodka bottle and throws out the empty whiskey bottles the Doctor had favoured.
That would shut him up for a while.
Title: Starting Over
Rating: PG
Character/s: Jackie
Author’s Notes: Written for Challenge 100: Fresh Start. Set during ‘Love and Monsters’.
People around the Powell Estate sometimes call Jackie a slag. She’s been known to frequently take men into her bed, most of whom have been huge mistakes. Rose was only really following Jackie’s example when she ran off with Jimmy Stone.
But all Jackie’s hoping for is to start over. Twenty years after Pete, and she still hasn’t managed that. So every time she meets a man like that nice Elton, she tells herself this might be it, and that she should do anything to hold onto it. Because she doesn’t know how much longer she can take being alone.