Title: Is Another Man's Treasure.
Author: Iby.
Characters and Pairings: The Ninth Doctor, Rose; Nine/Rose.
Spoilers: Nope.
Rating: PG.13.
Author's Notes: This is the most dialogue I've ever written for the Ninth Doctor, so I'm a trifle nervous.
Summary: The TARDIS is full to the brim with impossible bits and bobs; things that levitate, things that turn invisible, things that spontaneously catch on fire if spoken to in the wrong tone. Despite all of this, it is the completely ordinary, slightly charred frying pan that knocks Rose Tyler for six.



“Hello? Anybody home?” the Doctor asked haughtily with a sharp rap of his knuckles against Rose’s forehead. “What an ape,” he muttered darkly.

The pain, though not long-lasting, knocked Rose's vision back into focus; she'd been staring, and rather obviously at that. She frowned grumpily at him and rubbed her brow; it was entirely too early to be mocked and poked. She’d just spent her first night on the TARDIS, and despite her new but already strong love for the ship she hadn’t slept particularly peacefully.

She turned to glare at him and he shuffled awkwardly, in the way that the past few days had taught her was him almost-possibly-but-not-quite apologising. Still, she was the only one she’d seen be on the receiving end of it so far, so she valued it nonetheless.

“What were you looking at?” he asked as he ambled back over to the stove, where he had a frying pan full of egg slowly cooking. “You looked very surprised.”

She had been. Not for the obvious reasons – not because he was cooking breakfast. He’d have to have picked up a few culinary skills somewhere along the course of his life, and whilst he’d obviously not donned a kiss-the-cook apron and lobster mittens, she wasn’t shocked that he could operate in a kitchen and not kill himself.

It was the cast iron frying pan that had knocked her for six. It was obviously very old and charred black, having long ago lost its silver sheen. There were two lips on the side to facilitate pouring and it didn’t have any kind of protective surface on the handle.

Moreover, it was bloody ordinary.

Rose had spent the evening before, (she wasn’t yet used to living inside the Vortex and clung to her watch and conventional names for time like a life-line) exploring the many halls of the TARDIS. She’d felt like she’d always imagined Harry Potter had felt when he’d stepped into Diagon Alley for the first time; overwhelmed and excited and free from the trappings of the past. Everything he’d always believed about the world, just like everything she’d always believed about the world, had been turned on its head. Things could fly, things could turn invisible, things could glow and whirl and sparkle and twirl and the TARDIS seemed to be full to the brim with rooms to explore.

So, the ordinary old frying pan, cooking ordinary old eggs seemed so incongruous, so anachronistic, that she had to seat herself at the table.

At this, the Doctor stepped towards her and touched her brow again, this time in a much softer and more affectionate way. “Not sick, are you?”

She looked up at him, slightly arrested by his tone but as soon as their gazes met, he hastily withdrew his hand. The affection retreated behind squared shoulders, but Rose knew that it was still there in some way, shape or form.

“You can’t have caught a cold already,” he grumbled, “if you faint on me…”

Rose stood abruptly, demonstrating that her legs were working fine. “Do I strike you as the kind of girl that faints?” Distaste for the word laced her tone.

The Doctor grinned his wide manic grin and shook his head. “Nah, suppose not. So, you alright?”

She nodded and studied the frying pan more intently. Upon closer inspection, it seemed even more ordinary. “That's a really old frying pan.”

The Doctor sniffed indignantly in said cookware’s defence. “Yes, it is. Well done, ten out of ten for observation. It’s does the job. It’s a bit charred I’ll grant, but I did wash it first, thanks.”

“Not just rinsed?” Rose asked around a grin, but waved her hand dismissively when she realized that he wouldn’t have a clue as to what she was talking about. “Never mind.”

He stared at her for a second as if she was quite simply the most bizarre thing he’d ever crossed paths with, before turning his back on her and reaching for a fork. He whisked it through the puddle of egg; clearly, he was going for scrambled.

Not quite done with the conversation, she came to stand beside him, giving him just enough room to move his elbows. Wordlessly, he handed her a knife and small block of fetta. “Don’t cut yourself, eh?”

Knowing that he was deliberately trying to bait her, she bit her tongue around a grin and began to cut the cheese. He added the chunks into the pan as she worked and it wasn’t long before the eggs were done and the cheese melted through.

It was then that she noticed that two plates were set out on the kitchen bench, just waiting to have food heaped upon them. One was a deep blue, the other an off-white with a ring of cartoon monkeys for decoration.

He’d given her an ape plate.

She would have had a go at him, would have said that he wasn’t half as funny as he thought he was, if she hadn’t been so very touched; he’d set her out a plate and had used enough eggs for two.

In no time at all, they were sat at the kitchen table, tucking into their food, two steaming cups of tea warming their noses.

“What were you saying about the frying pan?” he asked as he attacked a particularly stubborn piece of crusty bread with his knife and fork.

“I don’t know…” Rose rested her cutlery on the edge of her plate with a small clink as she thought. “I just thought that things would be different. I mean, you’ve got all these fantastic machines and bits and bobs on board, but you’ve also got an old frying pan. Time and Relative Dimension In Space; Frying Pan.”

He stared at her.

“I…well, I thought that in the future, you’d snap your fingers and a cooked meal would appear out of thin air. It’s kind of surprising how many things have stayed the same.”

The Doctor resumed attacking the crust and after a second succeeded in liberating it from the rest of the slice. Something about him seemed awkward, and Rose knew to proceed with caution.

“Can you do that?”

Popping the morsel into his mouth, the Doctor chewed thoughtfully. Eventually, his adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “Bit lazy, aren’t you? Want to click your fingers?”

Rose sighed and tucked back into her food. Sometimes, he just wasn’t worth the trouble.

He took a gulp of his tea. “Yeah, it can be done like that. Humans have worked hard to figure out ways to not work hard for a millennia.” His tone was somewhat affectionate and entirely amused. “You’re a backwards lot, you are.”

“Don’t know why you bother with us, eh?” she asked, tongue poking out between her teeth.

He looked at her, really looked into her eyes and she felt herself flush lightly under his gaze. “I reckon I’ve got a good idea,” he said softly

It occurred to her then that maybe, despite his constant moaning about all things domestic, he was almost relishing the chance to cook for someone. Enjoying, in his own strange way, things that were ordinary and plain.

After a moment, he dropped his eyes back to his plate. He sized it up, and then looked at hers, sizing it up also.

“Oh honestly,” Rose huffed. Nevertheless, she slid his near-empty plate towards her with a chuckle, and started to fork some of her own food onto it. “I don’t know where you put it.”

. . . .
. . . .
. . . .

This is something of a little add-on, I suppose; a blooper of sorts. I was going to attack the theme of this story through a bed at first, but then I decided to go with a frying pan instead.

;

In a tangle of arms and legs, the Doctor and Rose flopped onto the bed with a squeak of springs and a girlish giggle.

“You drank too much tonight,” the Doctor whispered against the skin of her shoulder in admonishment

Rose made a noise of disagreement, but it was short lived as she decided that kissing his neck was a better way to occupy her lips. “I” kiss and lick, “did,” nibble and suck, “not drink too much.”

With a grin of disbelief, the Doctor slipped his hands under the hem of her top and started to peel it up and off. A few awkward, slightly drunken wiggles saw them both divested of their shirts.

“Yes, you really did.”

Rose ran her fingers through his closely cropped hair, trying to tug his head away from her shoulder and somewhere that would facilitate her lips meeting his. “Didn’t, didn’t, didn’t,” she sing-songed.

He leaned in and snogged her good and properly, his tongue sliding against hers. After a minute, he pulled away and licked his lips, as if he’s just taste-tested a dish and was contemplating it. “I could tell you the exact chemical percentage of alcohol that’s in your blood stream, if you’d like.”

Rose rolled her eyes. “Do you seriously not want to do this because I’m drunk? There, ok, yes, I admitted it. I am on the guilty side of tipsy.”

The Doctor laughed and started in on the buttons of her jeans. “I’m not nearly that chivalrous. If this wasn’t the eighty-second time and all, then yeah, I’d wait.”

Rose patted his head and decided that there were even better places for his lips to be than on hers. “Good boy.”

A fairly impressive amount of time later saw them spooning, the Doctor’s hand on Rose’s stomach and his legs tangled between hers. The duvet was wrapped snugly around them and Rose picked at it absently. “Do we ever stop using beds?”

“What?” the Doctor asked from somewhere near her ear. “Well…we’ve had sex on the kitchen table a couple of times, haven’t we? And there was that one time on the Console.”

Rose laughed loudly, warmly, happily. “No! No, that’s not what I mean! I mean, do beds go out of fashion? Do humans start sleeping on air pockets or something? Do we start using invisible blankets? Or does the duvet and the mattress withstand the test of time?”

“Ah,” the Doctor said as if he’d just understood something very deep and meaningful. “This is the Frying Pan Mark Two. There are lots of different beds, yes. Lots of different species in the universe means that there needs to be a lot of variety. The Octralites have eight legs of varying lengths, all of which go in different directions, so they couldn’t very well sleep on something like what we've got. There are levitating beds and gel beds and-”

“-gel beds?” Rose asked curiously.

The Doctor nodded and began to stroke the skin just above her navel. “Yeah, they’re big blocks of gel. I won’t get into what they’re made of, but they come in varying colours and sizes so as to be multi-species friendly. When you lie on it, it moves and moulds around your body so that it’s a mattress, a pillow and a blanket all in one. Not for the claustrophobic.”

Rose shivered at the thought. “So…why have we got this?”

The Doctor stilled behind her and Rose got the impression that he was almost…almost hurt by her words.

“I mean, I love this bed to pieces,” she quickly amended, “don’t get me wrong. It’s given me a lot of good nights with you. A few good lazy afternoons, too, not to mention some lovely sleepy mornings.”

His ego sufficiently stroked, the Doctor relaxed back against her and nuzzled her hair. “Well, we’re both bipedal, both have human form, so we don’t need anywhere to put our three foot spikes, because we don't have any. We’ve got the TARDIS to regulate the temperature, so we don’t need a fire-bed like the Lizards of Kraaaaaaal. Our eyes don’t have to be taken out of their sockets and attached to our elbows to sleep, like the Kaliks of Dorset, so we don’t need much in the way of protective storage. A plain old bed seems to do us justice.”

Imagination whirling, filled with images of aliens with three-foot long spikes, Rose chuckled. “Yeah, it really does. So,” she drummed her fingers over his knuckles, “any chance of an omelette?”