gallifreyburning:

When it came to the words “I love you,” the Doctor seemed intent on making up for lost time. Maybe it was the fact that he’d never said it in all the years they’d traveled together, or the way their first conversation on Bad Wolf Bay had been cut short, or the time they’d been apart. Maybe it was simply that his single human heart felt too small to hold all his Time Lord emotions and they spilled right out of him. 

Whichever the case, Rose wasn’t sure what to make of it.

At the little hotel in Norway, the morning after the TARDIS vanished and left them here with Jackie, Rose came out of her room to find his door just across the hall was open. The lights were off and he was hunched on the floor with something in his lap, tongue between his teeth in concentration and sonic screwdriver buzzing in one hand. She watched him for a quiet minute, thinking of all the times during the last few years she would’ve given anything to have him here just like this, weighing that against her anger and disappointment and confusion over being abandoned again by the other Doctor. 

He finally looked up from his task. “Plug-in kettle’s broken. They don’t have those little packets of sugar and creamer you like, but I thought if I could get it working, I could brew us a cuppa before Pete’s zeppelin gets here.”

Rose crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t you usually need your specs for that kind of work?” He didn’t reach for his glasses. It occurred to her that perhaps he didn’t have them, that maybe they’d been in his brown suit.

“I meant what I said, you know.”

“I’m not in the mood for tea, Doctor.”

“No. Not about the tea. The other thing.”

Well. He’d hardly spoken two words to her since the beach, accepting her desire for a separate room without comment and merely nodding at her when she said good night. She knew with perfect clarity what other thing he meant, cold wind whipping off the ocean, his breath warm in her ear: I love you.

“Did you plan it out, the both of you, the way things were going to go?” she asked, goose bumps pricking her from scalp to toes.

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