Wolf Moon: Chapter Eight

[amberfocus]

Redecorating and Inoculating

 
The Doctor raised his eyebrows and gave her a very promising look. “Oh, you’ll see it all right. But for now I’ve got a ton of data to go over and we need to figure out how to put a damper on whatever this is until we’re able to deal with it,” he said waving his hand between them.

He stood up and reached out to Rose to help her up. “Wait,” she said. “Is that a good idea? The fog stopped the surging but won’t touching cause the sparks to reinitiate the pheromone dumping?”

Whipping his hands behind his back he said, “You’re right. It might.”

Rose scrambled up and then bent back down and picked up the tray. “I’ll take care of this mess,” she said. “And then I’ll meet you in the Med Bay.”

He nodded and watched her depart. He took a last glance up at the brilliant Gallifreyan sky and then made his way to the infirmary. He was buried in the analysis of Rose’s body scan when she eventually showed up again. He could sense her standing in the door way just looking at him and suppressed a smile.

She was ogling. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been ogled by anyone. Of course, he probably hadn’t even been aware of it, or if he had, he’d have been irritated by it. Somehow Rose looking at him like she had every intention of one day taking him to bed, and maybe a not too distant day at that did not perturb him in the least. It ought to. It really ought to. He ought not to be thinking about ogling her back either. At least he wasn’t thinking uncomfortably about ogling her back, though.

The Pink Fog, and he was starting to think of it in capital letters now, was still effective. It was just like his ship to make it be pink fog, too. Just like the console room, the kitchen, the wardrobe room, the infirmary, and the corridors. He’d drawn the line at his bedroom and the Gallifrey Room. Well, the TARDIS hadn’t tried to make the Gallifrey Room pink to begin with, but everything else she had. When the TARDIS was particularly annoyed with him, she’d replace the shower curtain in his washroom with a ruffled pastel number. He still couldn’t find what she’d done with his dancing bananas. The things he put up with.

Rose finally stopped staring at him and entered the room, her eyes now firmly on the computer monitor. He glanced up at her. He had to admit that she was a lovely shade of pink, however. Her face was slightly flushed from whatever she’d been thinking about and he rather thought it was him. “Have you discovered anything?” She asked.

“I think I’m going to need a blood sample,” he said. “Then I can take a look at your DNA as well.” He stood up and she backed far enough away that they didn’t touch as he walked around the examining table and rooted around for supplies. He washed his hands at the sink and then snapped on a pair of latex gloves before ripping open the sterile package surrounding the syringe.

Rose sat down on the table and held out her arm. He wrapped a piece of elastic around it just above the elbow and had her pump her fist a few times. Expertly he found the vein and withdrew a vial of blood then put a small bandage over the tiny hole left by the needle. He used the blood to prepare a couple of slides and placed them under the microscope.

“What’s that?” Rose said as an image appeared on the screen behind the microscope.

“That’s what I’m seeing in the microscope,” he said. The computer began a rapid breakdown of what the microscope was viewing.

“Huh,” said the Doctor, pushing back and studying the screen thoughtfully.

“What?”

“Your DNA is currently in a state of flux. It’s changing quite rapidly,” he told her.

Rose frowned. “Am I adapting?” She asked.

“How do you mean?” He wanted to know.

“Well, you said the Bad Wolf was meant to be your mate. That we’re meant to carry on your species, yeah?” She said. Her hand crept up to her mouth and she bit on the edge of her thumb.

“Yeah.” That was a distracting thing she was doing. He wondered what it would feel like to have her teeth biting into his thumb. She pulled her hand away from her mouth and continued.

“From what I know about your kind and humans, we’re not biologically compatible. I mean, our parts should fit,” and she gave him a speculative downward glance, “But we wouldn’t be able to achieve conception.”

“That’s correct.”

“Well, maybe the first contact between us, the first time my skin touched yours, triggered a change in my genetic code,” she reasoned. “Those gold sparks, they’re similar to the energy a Time Lord puts out when regenerating. Maybe they’re reworking my DNA, sort of…um, mini-regenerating my body to make us be compatible so that we will be able to…I mean, if we decide to, we could have children. Together.”

“I was right about you being clever,” he said slowly. “There wouldn’t have been a reason for your body to start changing until it came into contact with mine.”

“Why wouldn’t it have happened with my other Doctor, though?” She asked.

“Well, my best guess would be it was my genetic code that you were gifted with and altered by. Because your original Doctor died and changed every cell in his body, Bad Wolf didn’t recognize him as mate. She recognizes me because I’m genetically identical to the man who did this to you,” he said.

“So I come back into the presence of that him in you and I’m suddenly triggered to change,” she replied. “But it’s still just a theory.”

“A very good one, though. I wonder if the answers weren’t buried in the change of code as well. Are you reasoning this out, Rose, or is it coming to you like a distant memory?” He asked her.

“It kind of sprang fully formed into my mind,” she said.

“I’ll have to do some more analysis, but I think I’ll see if I can prove or disprove this particular theory based on the genetic material and its rate of change,” he told her.

“That sounds mind-numbingly boring,” she told him.

“I’m sure you can find something to do. Have the TARDIS take you on a guided tour and let’s meet back in the kitchen in five hours. We can discuss the results over dinner.”

“Okay.” Rose left the room and the Doctor was oddly disheartened by her lack of being right there next to him. Frowning at himself for acting like a silly school boy he buckled down and got to work.



“I think,” Rose told the TARDIS, “That you’re being unreasonable.” The TARDIS made a sour noise. “Because I don’t want my room to be pink,” she said. “I outgrew pink bedrooms about eight years ago. I know you’re trying to be nice and make me a pretty room, but you really ought to let me pick the color scheme myself. Besides, enough else on this ship is pink.”

The TARDIS relented and the room shimmered in front of her eyes, the walls turning a light blue and the bedding and accents turning a few darker shades of blue and yellow. “That’s so much better.”

Rose sat down on her new bed and crossed her arms. “Now, we need to have a talk.” The TARDIS flickered her lights apprehensively. “Do you even like the color pink or do you just use it to bother him?” There was absolutely no response from the ship. Rose rolled across the bed until she was next to the wall and put both of her palms flat against it.

“What do you think about this?” She asked the ship. As vividly as she could, she drew up her memories of what the console room had looked like on her old TARDIS with its beautiful soaring architecture and the coral support struts.

This TARDIS replaced the image in her mind with an identical image in pink. Rose tried hard not to smile. “For me?” She asked the ship. There was hesitation but she felt a slight ripple under her hands and then a surge of power. “Thank you,” she told the ship.

“Now, pale green for the Medical Bay,” she requested. “And don’t argue. Green is the most common color used in hospitals across the universe. It’s a color of life and healing. And while we’re at it, let’s make the kitchen yellow. Not too bright a yellow, something pale but sunny.”

The TARDIS gave a little whine that reminded Rose of Pete’s first wife’s Yorkshire terrier. “The corridors can stay pink,” she said. “And the wardrobe room.” The TARDIS brightened. “And my washroom, too. In fact, can I have the curtain out of the Doctor’s shower?” The TARDIS hummed with happy approval.

“It’s called balance,” Rose said, stroking the wall softly. “You and me and him, we all have to live together now. And I want it to be good.” She sighed and laid her face against the wall. “You seem to want me here. You seem to like me. And I like him. I want us all to be happy.”

The TARDIS was practically purring now. She probably could have asked it to paint itself plaid at this point, she thought with a wry grin. As she pulled away from the wall the TARDIS protested. “I want to see how well you’ve redecorated,” Rose told her.

As Rose walked down the corridor to the console room she trailed her fingers along the wall, feeling like she was scratching a cat behind the ears. The poor ship seemed starved for affection. How bad had her relationship with the Doctor been? It had been obvious to Rose almost from the first minute that the two of them weren’t bonded properly. But her old Doctor had always been touching his ship and this one had hardly done at all, other than to pound the console in retaliation for the TARDIS shocking her.

She was definitely going to have to improve the relationship between the man and his ship. The ship could be snarky and opinionated and do what she wanted but Rose wouldn’t allow her to be hateful or spiteful. And she wouldn’t allow the Doctor to be either. They both wanted her here now. And she wasn’t going to put up with them hurting each other emotionally.

For a minute she almost felt like she was managing the twins. Her little brother Kyle and little sister Sarah had a love/hate relationship that bordered on vicious at times but they both had always craved Rose’s attention desperately. She’d figured out a long time ago how to use that to everyone’s advantage. Hopefully the skills she’d used coping with her siblings would work here as well. A little give, a little take, and a happy family would emerge.

Rose stopped in her tracks, then shuffled over to the new jump seat and sat down in it. She wouldn’t be seeing the twins again in all likelihood or her Mum and Pete. She didn’t imagine this Doctor would be so understanding about visiting family as the last one was. Nor the one before that, who really hadn’t been but he’d been willing to put up with her Mum for her.

The TARDIS pressed herself up against Rose’s mind. One thing this particular model of TARDIS could do was pilot herself. She made it very clear to Rose that if Rose wanted to visit her family, the TARDIS would be setting down on Earth whenever Rose wanted. “Thank you,” she said.

Slowly she rose and made her way to the kitchen to start on dinner. A half an hour later as she was transferring food to the table the Doctor came into the kitchen and picked her up, swinging her around and giving her the hug she’d wanted from the moment she’d first met him.

“What are you doing?” She asked. “The pheromones…” He set her down and then slowly reached for her hand. When his fingers grasped hers she gasped at the soft warm glow that emanated from the clasping digits. The sparks were gone.

“I was able to make up a tiny amount of serum from your blood to inoculate myself, to build up enough of a resistance to the sparking, to change the response just enough that it wouldn’t fully turn on the Time Lord sex drive. There won’t be any danger of violence between us. Though we may still feel a slow kind of burn. The attraction that began with the sparks won’t go away completely. And you’re theory was correct. Your DNA is adapting to allow us to create children,” he explained.

“Oh. So the whole mating thing…”

“Yeah. One day. If you want it to happen, we could.”

“Do you want it to happen?” She asked curiously.

He looked at her, almost looked into her mind, and then smiled slowly. “Yeah,” he said softly. “What do you want?”

“I think…I think I want…I think I want dinner,” she said, unable to put into words exactly what she wanted. But maybe she could show him. Standing up on her tiptoes she grabbed hold of his shoulder with her free hand then slid her fingers to the back of his neck. Tugging him forward just a little bit she brushed her lips feather-softly across his.

Then she was pulling away quickly, blushing furiously, and turning back to her transfer of food to the table.

Ch. 9:  http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/7044.html