‘You,’ Charley accuses, as seriously as she can possibly manage, ‘are drunk.’
The Doctor waves a languid hand, reclining against the far end of the couch like an aesthete. Entirely appropriate, actually, given where they’ve just come from. ‘One must be for ever drunken,’ he says airily, ‘That is the sole question of importance. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time that bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunken without cease! But how?’
The volume of his speech has risen from mere recitation into a rhetorician’s bellow, infused with all the passion of an actor who will never again have this precise chance to stride the boards, and the Doctor levers himself up, straightening his spine and gesturing expansively as he declaims, ‘With wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what you please. But be... drunken. And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, on the green grass by a moat--’
‘All right, all right!’ Charley laughs, cutting over him before he has the chance to get up and start pacing and gesticulating. ‘I get the picture. Who is that? Or are you just composing poetry on the spot? Mind, I wouldn’t put it past you.’
The Doctor sniffs loudly. ‘Baudelaire, my dear girl. It felt apropos, given our divertissement this evening.’
‘Well, you’ve the first two down, that’s for certain. Are you feeling drunk on virtue as well as wine and poetry?’
‘Mmm, I am perhaps feeling slightly less virtuous than is my wont,’ concedes with the Doctor with a little grin that hints at wickedness. ‘Henri has always been something of a bad influence.’
‘Oho!’ Charley laughs, leaning unsteadily into his space to prod him in the chest. ‘It’s Henri’s fault for getting you drunk, is it?’
‘I am hardly drunk. Tipsy, I’ll grant you. A trifle intoxicated. A shade submerged, as my good friend Plum would have it. Unlike yourself, Charlotte. I did warn you about the sagacity of drinking absinthe.’
‘Yes, well, one can hardly visit the Moulin Rouge with Tolouse-Lautrec, and Bernard, and Gaugin, and not drink absinthe when it’s offered.’ She pauses for a beat, face creasing up. ‘Even if it did taste rather dreadful. Anyway,’ she sticks out her tongue at him, feeling childish, ‘hark at you, Monsieur Hypocrite; you drank enough yourself.’
‘I,’ he puffs himself up, ‘am a Time Lord. It takes more than a few glasses of La Fée Verte to knock me for six.’
Charley only smiles at him with undisguised fondness. ‘If you say so, Doctor.’
Relaxing out of his magisterial attitude, he reclines back against the arm of the couch to eye her speculatively. However drunk he may or may not be, his green eyes are still sharp.
‘You’re a bit of a romantic, aren’t you?’ He sounds pleasantly surprised by this revelation, as if he’s going to be writing it down later under the heading: Things Learned About the Mysterious Charlotte Pollard.
‘Hmm?’
‘Going all starry-eyed over taking absinthe with post-impressionists in the Montmartre.’
Briefly, she wonders what he’d have thought of all those old journals of hers, full of imaginary adventures; Memoirs of an Edwardian Adventuress. Probably mock her teenaged purple prose; though really, if anyone is in no place to talk about a little bit of floridness in writing, it’s him.
‘Oh, but it was good, wasn’t it?’ she enthuses. ‘All the lights and the colours, all so, oh, I don’t know, so vivid and alive and, well, a little bit sordid. And all those writers and artists.’ She laughs. ‘And all of them absolutely off their heads. Oh, and the music, Doctor!’
‘Music!’ he suddenly exclaims, lurching up from the sofa, and sending Charley into another cascade of giggles. ‘That’s what we’re missing. Now, I think I’ve a gramophone somewhere here...’
Charley drapes herself over the back of the couch, peering after him as he fusses through shelves and cabinets. ‘A gramophone? You’ve got this huge ship full of technology, and you listen to your music on a gramophone? Isn’t that a bit, I don’t know, old fashioned?’
‘Sometimes!’ A book goes flying. ‘Old-fashioned!’ A strange looking rubber skull, followed by a tangle of cords. ‘Is exactly what one needs!’ A rugby ball, a wadded-up pennant of some variety. ‘Ah, here we are!’
He emerges looking pleased with himself, and holding in his arms an old-fashioned gramophone, complete with a fluted horn. ‘There is a particular je ne sais quoi to sound on vinyl, I find. Now!’ He sets down the gramophone with a little oof, and sets to sorting through a heap of records. Charley finds herself quite content simply to watch him, having slid back from her position hanging over the back of the couch into something of a pretzel, the velvet and heavy embroidery of the daringly Aesthetic dress she’d donned for their excursion puddling around her.
The record crackles as the Doctor sets down the needle, the soft susurrus of its rotations the only sound that comes from the gramophone for a few moments before it gives way to a wail of brass and an off-kilter drumbeat, and the Doctor bounds over, throwing out a hand to her. ‘Do you know how to swing, Miss Pollard?’
She can’t help but laugh as he hauls her up, dragging her to the clearest space of floor left among the detritus he’d flung about. ‘I can’t say that I do. But I’m sure you’ll be more than happy to cure me of my ignorance.’
As it turns out, the basic steps of the dance are simple enough, but the Doctor is only marginally more co-ordinated than Charley at the moment, and too impatient to make a terribly good teacher. He keeps trying to lead her into swing-outs and spins that she has no idea what to do with, and though he tuts and tsks at her failure to follow through in the correct fashion, he grins all the while. Charley, for her part, keeps collapsing into giggles, shrieking in surprise when he dips her or tugs her in unexpectedly.
They dance through nearly the whole side of the record, until it’s more or less devolved into both of them just laughing, setting each other off anew each time they make eye contact, leaning helplessly into each other when the laughter makes actual dancing impossible. ‘I think,’ the Doctor pronounces eventually, taking deep breaths to try and quash his continuing chuckles, ‘that may be enough of that particular exercise. Just for the moment.’
‘Mm. Possibly,’ Charley agrees. She feels far too warm, with the combination of alcohol and exercise and her heavy velvet dress, but she smiles up at him anyway, tugging at the hand already hooked through hers, and towing him back to the couch. ‘Oof, come on.’
They both come down on the cushions with a bounce. Though they’d been face to face all through their dancing, only now are they still, and in the moment before they each settle into the comfortable sprawl they’d occupied earlier, somehow unexpectedly close.
The Doctor’s face is flushed with alcohol and good cheer, his eyes lively, and for the first time-- well, the first time possibly ever, Charley looks at him and doesn’t see the other Doctor, or not her Doctor, or a lesser Doctor (though she’s thought that less and less, and hardly at all of late), she just sees… the Doctor. Her Doctor. It’s the smile, she thinks, a little dazed. It reminds her so of the early days with her first Doctor, before Gallifrey and the Divergent Universe, before everything became so complicated. When things were just fun; and the Doctor had been full of bounce and verve and enthusiasm for everything, for the universe, for her, and it had been so very easy to fall in love with him. It’s easy to see, suddenly, that of course they’re the same man, deep down at the heart of things.
She can’t entirely feel her face, but she suspects that it’s fallen into a very likely embarrassing expression, something soft and open and wondering, and quite to her own surprise, she finds that her hand has gone to cup the side of the Doctor’s face. He has very high cheekbones; she never noticed it before.
‘Charlotte?’
Traces of his earlier bonhomie still linger, but the Doctor’s expression has shifted into something curious and uncertain. His eyes are still bright, and his lips half-parted, and there’s something-- something else there too, something Charley can’t quantify, except that in this moment she thinks she’d really like to kiss him. She knows that he’d taste of honey-- at least, he will in a few hundred years’ time-- and she imagines the soft, stunned noise he’d make into her mouth. If ever she could get away with it it would be now, easy to dismiss later once they’d both sobered up.
‘Charlotte... you’re crying.’
It breaks the moment.
‘Am I?’ Charley blinks at him, and then snatches her hand back, pressing it to her own cheek. Indeed, there’s wetness there; she hadn’t felt it, hadn’t even realised, and she flushes, pulling away. ‘Gosh, I am!’ There’s no tremble in her voice, only the tears, and she dashes them away, drawing in a deep breath and blowing it out emphatically. ‘Oh, look at me; I suppose you were right, I am a bit drunk. Silly, emotional,’ she offers, feeling rather flustered.
He chuckles gently, and lifts his own hand to brush the pad of his thumb softly under her eye, tracing the ridge between eye socket and cheekbone, and Charley bites her lip. ‘I did tell you,’ he says wryly. ‘Absinthe.’
She laughs, the sort of laugh particular to when one is so discombobulated one can hardly manage anything else. ‘Yes, well. You can save your I-told-you-so’s for my hangover tomorrow, if you don’t mind.’
And then, feeling that she’s made enough of a fool of herself that a little more sentimentality hardly matters at this point, she shifts over, pulling her legs up onto the couch and tucking herself in to snuggle against the Doctor’s chest. Ordinarily, he might have frozen up, awkward and unsure what to do with unexpected and uninvited cuddling, but at the moment, he allows it without question or complaint, even hooking an arm around Charley’s shoulders.
It feels nice. Companionable. Charley blinks away a few stray tears, and nuzzles determinedly into him, eyes shut and face pressed to his jacket. He’s quite soft under all the layers of cloth, sturdy and comfortable. It makes her wonder why she hasn’t had a go at cuddling him before; he’s clearly built for it.
‘You ought to’ve worn velvet too,’ she mutters after a while, voice half-muffled. ‘Be more comfortable than this.’
His chuckles send his chest and stomach bouncing under her, and his hand tightens briefly on her shoulder. ‘Velvet? Oh, goodness me, I’ve done velvet before. In another life. Could hardly get me out of the stuff. I don’t know that I’ve quite the constitution for it this time ‘round.’
‘Another regeneration, you mean?’ It only occurs to her after she’s said it to wonder whether this Doctor had ever mentioned regeneration to her. She hopes he has, because that would be a hard one to lie her way out of.
He must have, for he doesn’t seem surprised by the question, just hums agreement. ‘Several bodies ago, yes. Tastes do change.’
‘What was he like? Er. What were you like, I suppose I should say.’ Somehow it hasn’t occurred to her to ask about the Doctor’s previous selves. She supposes the subject never came up, or she was just too busy learning to adjust to this Doctor that bringing others into the discussion would have been simply overegging the pudding. Maybe it would have been too strange. But now she’s curious, and there seems no reason not to ask.
Above her, the Doctor blows out a long breath. ‘Ohhh, young. Terribly young. Not to say that I looked young,’ he amends, ‘You probably would have thought me in my 50’s, to look at me, very patrician. But really I was a bit of a teenager, then. Terribly self-important, very prickly, vain as a peacock--’
‘Not that you’re any of those things now.’
He gives her a friendly little cuff. ‘Piffle. Nonsense and rot. What was I-- oh yes, velvet and ruffles and opera capes and leather gloves, the whole lot; I thought myself a proper dandy. Very fond of fast cars and martial arts.’ He sounds somewhat baffled by his past self’s taste. When Charley makes no response, he continues on the topic, voice falling into a lulling murmur. ‘I’d been exiled to Earth, you see. The Time Lords-- my people-- thought I was doing too much interfering, so they stuck me there as punishment. Crippled my TARDIS and removed my ability to fix her. Well, I suppose you can see why that might make one a trifle moody.’
‘Mmm,’ mumbles Charley.
The Doctor lifts his arm to peer down at her, and when he speaks, his voice is soft with wry amusement. ‘Are you planning on falling asleep there?’
Charley yawns cavernously, snuggling further into his chest and lazily looping an arm around his waist. ‘No.’ She yawns again. ‘M not asleep, really. Keep going?’
But she’s coming down from the giddy heights of intoxication into the slow, sleepy drifting end, and the Doctor is so very comfortable, and his voice a modulated, soothing cadence above her, that it’s the easiest thing in the world to sink down into unconsciousness. It wraps her like spider-silk, soft and clinging, and she falls asleep to the sound of the Doctor talking about UNIT, the Brigadier, and the Master, and Jo Grant, and Sarah Jane Smith, and alien invasions.
She doesn’t dream, sleeping the deep sleep of the drunk, but when she wakes some hours later with a headache, still on the couch with the Doctor’s coat draped over her as a blanket, she feels as though she has.
The Doctor waves a languid hand, reclining against the far end of the couch like an aesthete. Entirely appropriate, actually, given where they’ve just come from. ‘One must be for ever drunken,’ he says airily, ‘That is the sole question of importance. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time that bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunken without cease! But how?’
The volume of his speech has risen from mere recitation into a rhetorician’s bellow, infused with all the passion of an actor who will never again have this precise chance to stride the boards, and the Doctor levers himself up, straightening his spine and gesturing expansively as he declaims, ‘With wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what you please. But be... drunken. And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, on the green grass by a moat--’
‘All right, all right!’ Charley laughs, cutting over him before he has the chance to get up and start pacing and gesticulating. ‘I get the picture. Who is that? Or are you just composing poetry on the spot? Mind, I wouldn’t put it past you.’
The Doctor sniffs loudly. ‘Baudelaire, my dear girl. It felt apropos, given our divertissement this evening.’
‘Well, you’ve the first two down, that’s for certain. Are you feeling drunk on virtue as well as wine and poetry?’
‘Mmm, I am perhaps feeling slightly less virtuous than is my wont,’ concedes with the Doctor with a little grin that hints at wickedness. ‘Henri has always been something of a bad influence.’
‘Oho!’ Charley laughs, leaning unsteadily into his space to prod him in the chest. ‘It’s Henri’s fault for getting you drunk, is it?’
‘I am hardly drunk. Tipsy, I’ll grant you. A trifle intoxicated. A shade submerged, as my good friend Plum would have it. Unlike yourself, Charlotte. I did warn you about the sagacity of drinking absinthe.’
‘Yes, well, one can hardly visit the Moulin Rouge with Tolouse-Lautrec, and Bernard, and Gaugin, and not drink absinthe when it’s offered.’ She pauses for a beat, face creasing up. ‘Even if it did taste rather dreadful. Anyway,’ she sticks out her tongue at him, feeling childish, ‘hark at you, Monsieur Hypocrite; you drank enough yourself.’
‘I,’ he puffs himself up, ‘am a Time Lord. It takes more than a few glasses of La Fée Verte to knock me for six.’
Charley only smiles at him with undisguised fondness. ‘If you say so, Doctor.’
Relaxing out of his magisterial attitude, he reclines back against the arm of the couch to eye her speculatively. However drunk he may or may not be, his green eyes are still sharp.
‘You’re a bit of a romantic, aren’t you?’ He sounds pleasantly surprised by this revelation, as if he’s going to be writing it down later under the heading: Things Learned About the Mysterious Charlotte Pollard.
‘Hmm?’
‘Going all starry-eyed over taking absinthe with post-impressionists in the Montmartre.’
Briefly, she wonders what he’d have thought of all those old journals of hers, full of imaginary adventures; Memoirs of an Edwardian Adventuress. Probably mock her teenaged purple prose; though really, if anyone is in no place to talk about a little bit of floridness in writing, it’s him.
‘Oh, but it was good, wasn’t it?’ she enthuses. ‘All the lights and the colours, all so, oh, I don’t know, so vivid and alive and, well, a little bit sordid. And all those writers and artists.’ She laughs. ‘And all of them absolutely off their heads. Oh, and the music, Doctor!’
‘Music!’ he suddenly exclaims, lurching up from the sofa, and sending Charley into another cascade of giggles. ‘That’s what we’re missing. Now, I think I’ve a gramophone somewhere here...’
Charley drapes herself over the back of the couch, peering after him as he fusses through shelves and cabinets. ‘A gramophone? You’ve got this huge ship full of technology, and you listen to your music on a gramophone? Isn’t that a bit, I don’t know, old fashioned?’
‘Sometimes!’ A book goes flying. ‘Old-fashioned!’ A strange looking rubber skull, followed by a tangle of cords. ‘Is exactly what one needs!’ A rugby ball, a wadded-up pennant of some variety. ‘Ah, here we are!’
He emerges looking pleased with himself, and holding in his arms an old-fashioned gramophone, complete with a fluted horn. ‘There is a particular je ne sais quoi to sound on vinyl, I find. Now!’ He sets down the gramophone with a little oof, and sets to sorting through a heap of records. Charley finds herself quite content simply to watch him, having slid back from her position hanging over the back of the couch into something of a pretzel, the velvet and heavy embroidery of the daringly Aesthetic dress she’d donned for their excursion puddling around her.
The record crackles as the Doctor sets down the needle, the soft susurrus of its rotations the only sound that comes from the gramophone for a few moments before it gives way to a wail of brass and an off-kilter drumbeat, and the Doctor bounds over, throwing out a hand to her. ‘Do you know how to swing, Miss Pollard?’
She can’t help but laugh as he hauls her up, dragging her to the clearest space of floor left among the detritus he’d flung about. ‘I can’t say that I do. But I’m sure you’ll be more than happy to cure me of my ignorance.’
As it turns out, the basic steps of the dance are simple enough, but the Doctor is only marginally more co-ordinated than Charley at the moment, and too impatient to make a terribly good teacher. He keeps trying to lead her into swing-outs and spins that she has no idea what to do with, and though he tuts and tsks at her failure to follow through in the correct fashion, he grins all the while. Charley, for her part, keeps collapsing into giggles, shrieking in surprise when he dips her or tugs her in unexpectedly.
They dance through nearly the whole side of the record, until it’s more or less devolved into both of them just laughing, setting each other off anew each time they make eye contact, leaning helplessly into each other when the laughter makes actual dancing impossible. ‘I think,’ the Doctor pronounces eventually, taking deep breaths to try and quash his continuing chuckles, ‘that may be enough of that particular exercise. Just for the moment.’
‘Mm. Possibly,’ Charley agrees. She feels far too warm, with the combination of alcohol and exercise and her heavy velvet dress, but she smiles up at him anyway, tugging at the hand already hooked through hers, and towing him back to the couch. ‘Oof, come on.’
They both come down on the cushions with a bounce. Though they’d been face to face all through their dancing, only now are they still, and in the moment before they each settle into the comfortable sprawl they’d occupied earlier, somehow unexpectedly close.
The Doctor’s face is flushed with alcohol and good cheer, his eyes lively, and for the first time-- well, the first time possibly ever, Charley looks at him and doesn’t see the other Doctor, or not her Doctor, or a lesser Doctor (though she’s thought that less and less, and hardly at all of late), she just sees… the Doctor. Her Doctor. It’s the smile, she thinks, a little dazed. It reminds her so of the early days with her first Doctor, before Gallifrey and the Divergent Universe, before everything became so complicated. When things were just fun; and the Doctor had been full of bounce and verve and enthusiasm for everything, for the universe, for her, and it had been so very easy to fall in love with him. It’s easy to see, suddenly, that of course they’re the same man, deep down at the heart of things.
She can’t entirely feel her face, but she suspects that it’s fallen into a very likely embarrassing expression, something soft and open and wondering, and quite to her own surprise, she finds that her hand has gone to cup the side of the Doctor’s face. He has very high cheekbones; she never noticed it before.
‘Charlotte?’
Traces of his earlier bonhomie still linger, but the Doctor’s expression has shifted into something curious and uncertain. His eyes are still bright, and his lips half-parted, and there’s something-- something else there too, something Charley can’t quantify, except that in this moment she thinks she’d really like to kiss him. She knows that he’d taste of honey-- at least, he will in a few hundred years’ time-- and she imagines the soft, stunned noise he’d make into her mouth. If ever she could get away with it it would be now, easy to dismiss later once they’d both sobered up.
‘Charlotte... you’re crying.’
It breaks the moment.
‘Am I?’ Charley blinks at him, and then snatches her hand back, pressing it to her own cheek. Indeed, there’s wetness there; she hadn’t felt it, hadn’t even realised, and she flushes, pulling away. ‘Gosh, I am!’ There’s no tremble in her voice, only the tears, and she dashes them away, drawing in a deep breath and blowing it out emphatically. ‘Oh, look at me; I suppose you were right, I am a bit drunk. Silly, emotional,’ she offers, feeling rather flustered.
He chuckles gently, and lifts his own hand to brush the pad of his thumb softly under her eye, tracing the ridge between eye socket and cheekbone, and Charley bites her lip. ‘I did tell you,’ he says wryly. ‘Absinthe.’
She laughs, the sort of laugh particular to when one is so discombobulated one can hardly manage anything else. ‘Yes, well. You can save your I-told-you-so’s for my hangover tomorrow, if you don’t mind.’
And then, feeling that she’s made enough of a fool of herself that a little more sentimentality hardly matters at this point, she shifts over, pulling her legs up onto the couch and tucking herself in to snuggle against the Doctor’s chest. Ordinarily, he might have frozen up, awkward and unsure what to do with unexpected and uninvited cuddling, but at the moment, he allows it without question or complaint, even hooking an arm around Charley’s shoulders.
It feels nice. Companionable. Charley blinks away a few stray tears, and nuzzles determinedly into him, eyes shut and face pressed to his jacket. He’s quite soft under all the layers of cloth, sturdy and comfortable. It makes her wonder why she hasn’t had a go at cuddling him before; he’s clearly built for it.
‘You ought to’ve worn velvet too,’ she mutters after a while, voice half-muffled. ‘Be more comfortable than this.’
His chuckles send his chest and stomach bouncing under her, and his hand tightens briefly on her shoulder. ‘Velvet? Oh, goodness me, I’ve done velvet before. In another life. Could hardly get me out of the stuff. I don’t know that I’ve quite the constitution for it this time ‘round.’
‘Another regeneration, you mean?’ It only occurs to her after she’s said it to wonder whether this Doctor had ever mentioned regeneration to her. She hopes he has, because that would be a hard one to lie her way out of.
He must have, for he doesn’t seem surprised by the question, just hums agreement. ‘Several bodies ago, yes. Tastes do change.’
‘What was he like? Er. What were you like, I suppose I should say.’ Somehow it hasn’t occurred to her to ask about the Doctor’s previous selves. She supposes the subject never came up, or she was just too busy learning to adjust to this Doctor that bringing others into the discussion would have been simply overegging the pudding. Maybe it would have been too strange. But now she’s curious, and there seems no reason not to ask.
Above her, the Doctor blows out a long breath. ‘Ohhh, young. Terribly young. Not to say that I looked young,’ he amends, ‘You probably would have thought me in my 50’s, to look at me, very patrician. But really I was a bit of a teenager, then. Terribly self-important, very prickly, vain as a peacock--’
‘Not that you’re any of those things now.’
He gives her a friendly little cuff. ‘Piffle. Nonsense and rot. What was I-- oh yes, velvet and ruffles and opera capes and leather gloves, the whole lot; I thought myself a proper dandy. Very fond of fast cars and martial arts.’ He sounds somewhat baffled by his past self’s taste. When Charley makes no response, he continues on the topic, voice falling into a lulling murmur. ‘I’d been exiled to Earth, you see. The Time Lords-- my people-- thought I was doing too much interfering, so they stuck me there as punishment. Crippled my TARDIS and removed my ability to fix her. Well, I suppose you can see why that might make one a trifle moody.’
‘Mmm,’ mumbles Charley.
The Doctor lifts his arm to peer down at her, and when he speaks, his voice is soft with wry amusement. ‘Are you planning on falling asleep there?’
Charley yawns cavernously, snuggling further into his chest and lazily looping an arm around his waist. ‘No.’ She yawns again. ‘M not asleep, really. Keep going?’
But she’s coming down from the giddy heights of intoxication into the slow, sleepy drifting end, and the Doctor is so very comfortable, and his voice a modulated, soothing cadence above her, that it’s the easiest thing in the world to sink down into unconsciousness. It wraps her like spider-silk, soft and clinging, and she falls asleep to the sound of the Doctor talking about UNIT, the Brigadier, and the Master, and Jo Grant, and Sarah Jane Smith, and alien invasions.
She doesn’t dream, sleeping the deep sleep of the drunk, but when she wakes some hours later with a headache, still on the couch with the Doctor’s coat draped over her as a blanket, she feels as though she has.