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The dead zone between Christmas and New Year – he didn’t know how humans did it! Even as a member of an incredibly advanced species with a well-developed temporal sense, he felt like he was on the verge of forgetting how many days they’d been here.
And Rose had asked, in a way which he suddenly found particularly difficult to ignore in this body, if she could stay at home until New Years. In any normal scenario, he would have popped off for a bit of solo adventuring and made sure to arrive back in time to pick her up, but what with the TARDIS damaged by his slightly reckless post-regeneration behaviour, he was pretty much stuck here on Earth until he fixed it. Which he estimated could take up to a week anyway. So here the Doctor was, experiencing Christmastide in its entirety.
The only way he had a sense of when it was was by the number of times he’d had a cup of tea. Jackie had demanded, despite his protests, that he pop round for a cup of tea once a day, to “get him out of that box of his”. He’d refused to commit to that, but she had still left him a cuppa outside the TARDIS once a day and he had even ventured out to the Tylers’ flat a couple of times, to Jackie’s great delight. Except today, when she’d been incredibly insistent that he stay out of her hair and the flat.
Some things didn’t change with regeneration and his general distain for domestics was one of them. So, yes, he abhorred the thought that he’d gotten into anything as ridiculous as a routine, especially one with Rose’s mother. But he found himself strangely disconsolate today, missing both Jackie’s (admittedly excellent) tea and the glimpses of Rose that teatime had afforded him. He even, strangely, missed the Only Fools and Horses 1989 Christmas Special which seemed to be playing on repeat on the telly, if only for the way that it seemed to make Rose laugh every time.
The Doctor scowled at the mess of wires in front of him. It’s not like Rose was avoiding him. In fact, he had seen her that very morning, as she’d popped into the TARDIS to pick up some toiletries from her room. She’d looked slightly taken aback by the clutter all over the console room, but he’d reassured her that it was a natural part of the process and that it would all be sorted in a few days.
Really, he had no reason to be moping about her at all, he thought to himself. It was really quite unbecoming of him to be so single-mindedly focused on his companion, when he could be thinking of a way to add a setting to the sonic screwdriver that could untangle these cables for him.
He ran a hand along one of them, trying to find the route through what seemed to be a giant knot in the connector cables. If he remembered correctly, he might actually be the one responsible for this mess – he’d tied them up when he’d removed the extrapolator for reconfiguration – which, in hindsight and a regeneration later, was a really silly idea. With a sigh, he reached into his jacket pocket to retrieve his new glasses in the hope that they might assist him with this task.
He hadn’t made much progress with it, however, before he heard the unmistakable noise of a key turning and the door opening. “Hello?”
The Doctor stuck a hand up through the gap in the grating above and waved it about a bit. “Just down here, one sec!”
He glowered at the cables one more time for good measure and retracted himself from the space underneath the console, clambering up the steps onto the floor of the TARDIS.
Rose was standing there, pretty much exactly where she had been standing this morning - except she looked slightly less horrified at the state the ship was in. In fact, there was a small smile on her face as she took in his appearance. “Nice glasses,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow behind said lenses. “Thanks.”
“Is that a thing that can change then? Your prescription?”
“Yep,” he said, enunciating the ‘p’. “All the cells in my body changed, including my eyeballs. So now I’ve got a bit of farsightedness – not enough to really be an issue, but the glasses come in handy when I’m trying to look at things nearby. Like doing TARDIS repairs.”
“How’s it going?” she asked, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear and – wait a second. There was definitely something different about her appearance.
“Your hair,” he blurted out, rather stupidly. The colour hadn’t changed, but where it had once fallen well past her shoulders, it now ended just above them. With a difference of about 3 or 4 inches, he supposed that was far too much for it to have been a mere trim. No, this change had to have been deliberate.
“You noticed?” said Rose, a hint of something not entirely unlike surprise in her voice. “Most guys wouldn’t.”
“Well, I am naturally about three times more perceptive than the average human male.”
She snorted. “Liar. It took you about two hours to even notice that my hair had turned blue that one time. Jack had to point it out to you.”
The Doctor had to supress his smile at the word ‘you’. Just a simple little thing, and yet the confirmation that she did see him as the same man (the man who hadn’t noticed that the presence of cobalt in the rain on that particular planet had turned Rose’s blonde ultramarine) was enough to make him feel faintly giddy.
“Why the change?” He asked, as he leaned nonchalantly back on the console and tried to ignore his own reaction.
She shrugged. “I dunno, I guess I was fed up of it getting in my way.”
“Yeah, but if you’d really wanted a haircut, all you had to do was wait two days and I could have taken you to the best hairdressers in history. Monsieur Antoine, he did Coco Chanel. Lee Stafford? Or, maybe Nicky Clarke would be more your speed – sometime in the 1990s, you could try a Princess Di.”
“Mum would kill me if I let anyone else cut my hair!”
Ah. So Jackie had been instrumental in this – which explained why he’d been banished from the flat today. She probably didn’t want him getting underfoot.
Rose shifted her weight slightly. “D’you like it?”
The Doctor thought of her hair – the way it got frizzy in even the slightest bit of humidity; the way she would put it up sometimes, allowing him an unhindered view of the back of her neck (and he liked that very much, more than he’d ever allow himself to admit); the way it haloed her face in a way which reminded him, vividly, of tear stains down her face and golden light pouring out of her.
He looked back towards where she was standing, fingering the freshly cut ends of her hair nervously, as if his opinion really did matter to her. A lot had stayed the same. The same golden tones, the same dark roots – but her new haircut framed her face in a different way, giving her a bit more maturity.
“Yeah,” he said, standing up straight. “Yeah, I do.”
“Good.” She nodded, stepping closer by just a fraction of an inch. “So, how’re the repairs going? You said two more days, yeah?”
“Good. Good! There’s a few things left to do, but I should be done on schedule and then we can get going again.”
“Y’know,” she said. “It’s New Year’s Eve. I was gonna go down the pub with Mickey and Shareen. Mum even said she might join us later.”
He grinned at this. “That’s just classic humanity, isn’t it? Assigning arbitrary significance to specific days, all in service of having a good party.”
“Well,” Rose added, scuffing her trainer on the lattice of the TARDIS floor. “I was wondering if you wanted to come.”
“Nah,” he drawled, with a wave of a hand. “I’ve got plenty to finish up here still! You go and have fun with your mates.”
As fascinating as the human customs of celebrating the New Year were, he was sure he’d be cramping Rose’s style if he intruded upon her plans tonight. And as much as a part of him wanted to spend more time with her, he really did have to be getting on with the last few repairs on his list if they were to leave on the 2nd.
Rose nodded, with only a tiny hint of uncertainty to the movement, like she didn’t completely believe his words. But she seemed to accept them nevertheless, as she made for the door.
“Oh, and Rose?”
She turned to look over her shoulder, her hair swishing as she did so. “Yeah?”
“Happy New Year,” he said, beaming at her.
She smiled back at him, mirroring his grin. It was the same smile he’d seen on her face countless times by now, but he felt he could never tire of it. Hopefully that was one thing that wouldn’t change this year.
“Happy New Year, Doctor.”