Chapter Text
The Doctor is drunk.
Properly, ridiculously, going-to-be-sorry-in-the-morning drunk.
He’s lying on the blanket of fresh snow in Red Square, his brown eyes tracking a zeppelin as it crosses the night sky. Rose stands next to him, her hands on her hips. Her fingertips and toes are warm and buzzing, she’s a bit bleary herself, but not nearly as far gone as he is.
She pushes the toe of her boot forward, nudges him in the side. “C’mon, Doctor, the hotel isn’t far. I’m pretty sure the Moscow police won’t like it if we sleep here.”
He rolls his head toward her. There’s snow caked between the spikes in his hair, a huge grin plastered on his face, and his gaze is dull with a haze of alcohol.
“We ought to get business cards!” he slurs, waving a hand in the air. “We need those now, yeah, ‘cause of the freelancing thing. Bloke in the bar asked me – hic – asked me for my information, and I didn’t have anything to give him! He said I could write it on a napkin, but that just screams unprofessionalism.”
“I don’t think that bloke was asking for your information because he needed help sorting an alien problem,” Rose sighs, giving up on the idea of getting him off the ground anytime soon. She lays down beside him on the bumpy cobbles, resting her head on his arm, which is stuck out perpendicular to his body.
The Doctor’s eyebrows draw together. “He doesn’t have an alien problem? But, but I told him, I said, I’m a freelancer. It’s what I do. Free-lancer. Free-lan-cer.” He makes a popping sound with his lips. “Why is it freelancer, though? Because we don’t work for free. And there aren’t any lances involved – could be, I suppose, in the right circumstances – that would be fun!”
Rose giggles. “Right. Well, for our next job, we’ll try to find something involving knights in armor and lances and maybe some sort of royal tourney. You’re pretty handy with a sword, if I recall.”
“Ooh,” he says, his mouth puckering into a pout, and Rose unconsciously licks her own lips, because it’s not bad to look at, that pout. Makes her think about the things she can do with his bottom lip, and the sounds he makes when she nibbles on it. “I think that was supposed to be a pun. And as far as puns go, Rose Tyler, it wasterrible.”
The celebratory drink after finishing their first official job as freelance alien specialists for UNIT had not gone exactly as Rose had anticipated. The Doctor’s not bad at holding his alcohol – has done all right with lager at quiz nights at the pub back in London – but the minute vodka hit his system, he was loopy as a loon.
He groans softly, his long, lean body wiggling against her side. “I think my left kidney is the rubbish human one. The right one’s the Time Lord one. And right now they’re arguing about who’s responsible for getting me out of this mess.”
Rose rolls onto her side to face him; she’s starting to shiver, the snow’s working its way into the waistband of her jeans. “I told you to stick with lager.”
“Clever,” the Doctor murmurs warmly, turning his face toward hers, blinking slowly. “My clever Rose.” The arm under her head moves, pulls her closer. His opposite arm slips around her waist, and she’s glad it’s the middle of the night, there aren’t many people around, because she’s suddenly seized with the urge to snog the Doctor senseless, right here and now in the middle of Red Square. Judging by the way his hips are pushing against hers, the idea has occurred to him, too.
The Doctor nuzzles her nose, his alcohol-scented breath puffing over her face. His lips brush her mouth, keep moving across her cheek, leaving a trail of little kisses until his mouth is right against her ear.
His voice is low and serious, his words not slurred in the slightest: “Clever girl. It’s in the corner. Always watching, slipping inside your dreams when you sleep. Don’t sleep, Rose. I’m coming.”
The lights of Red Square, the cold, the zeppelin, everything shudders. Glitches. Shatters.
Rose is curled into a fetal position in the corner of a featureless room. She doesn’t exactly wake up – she snaps out of a sleep-like trance, her mind coming back from somewhere else entirely while her body was here, closed in by six dull grey walls. She’s in her knickers and bra, her bare feet caked with dirt and her hair hanging into her eyes.
Leaning on the wall, using it to stand up, she tries to take inventory of her assets, get her bearings. But there are no bearings to take; there’s nothing to indicate where this grey room is, who’s outside of it, what brought her here.
It’s in the corner.
Rose turns her eyes to the right, because the minute the Doctor’s warning echoes in her head, she can see it in her peripheral vision. And even when she’s staring right at it, she can’t quite see it – it must be using a perception filter, something stronger than usual, because she can’t focus on it properly.
But it’s there. Darker grey than the rest of the room, towering a few feet taller than she is. Vaguely humanoid. Silent and unmoving.
“Listen, I don’t know who you are or where you’ve brought me,” she says to it. “But my name’s Rose Tyler, and I think there’s been a misunderstanding. Is there someone I can talk to – a commander or supervisor or something?”
The grey thing shifts. Stays silent.
“I’m only trying to be helpful, honestly,” Rose says. “Because if you’re holding me prisoner here, that means there’s this bloke coming to get me. And he’s been diagnosed with a problem – a condition. A blood and anger and revenge kind of condition. He and I have been working on it, managing it pretty well most of the time, but he’s not exactly in remission yet. When he shows up, there might be a bit of bloodshed, and I think we’d all rather avoid that. So is there someone I can talk to?”
The grey thing doesn’t move, but a low, hardly audible hiss comes from where it’s standing. Every single hair on Rose’s body stands on end; panic begins to tickle at the base of her stomach.
“I can already tell you’re going to be a rubbish roommate,” she hisses back at it, fingers curling, fingernails scratching against the slippery wall behind her.