Title: Practice Makes Perfect.
Author: Iby.
Characters and Pairings: The Tenth Doctor, Rose; Rose/Ten.
Genre: Fluff, romance, fluff, humour, fluff, deadly fluff.
Spoilers: Nope, not a spoiler in sight.
Rating: PG.13
Author's Note: Something of a second part to What's Mine Is Yours. You don't have to have read that though, this is a story in its own right.

Summary: Moving in with someone is always a bit of a hit and miss experience, but when one of you is a twenty-three year old human and the other is a nine hundred year old Time Lord, there's a lot that can go wrong!

Written for someone who is feeling poorly. You know who you are.



As the Doctor woke, he quickly realized that his body felt like it was on fire. His skin, disgustingly warm, was sticky and clammy and the damp duvet around him clung to him uncomfortably.

Slightly panicked, he wiggled and kicked to free himself of their bind. After much fuss, he managed to extricate his arms, but the cooler air of the room made him yelp and tuck them back under the duvet again.

His shivered and shook, his skin feeling impossibly hot and his insides feeling impossibly cold, altogether creating a decidedly unpleasant feeling. He couldn’t be sick! He’d been fine when he’d bounced into bed (as was his custom) beside Rose the night before.

Frowning, he turned to study her, lethargy making his movements slow and awkward. He flopped onto his side, his nose pressed against hers.

She was shivering. He quickly reached out and touched her cheek, but was startled to discover that her skin was chilled, a little clammy from sleep, yes, but chilled. She was cold! At his touch she wiggled her nose slightly and curled the duvet around her more tightly, burrowing into its warmth.

As she settled again, ideas started to form in the dusty reaches of his mind. He scooted back away from her to the edge of the bed and leant over the side. His faithful chucks were there, but he pushed them out of the way to inspect the small switch that hung from a cord that disappeared between the mattress and the sheets.

Sure enough, the switch was flicked on. Rose had turned on the electric blanket!

He dived for the switch and turned it off quickly, but in doing so he kicked Rose in the shin. Hard.

“What? What?” she yelped.

He rolled back over to face her and had to stop himself from laughing at her. She’d sat up, trying to force herself into being alert for any danger, but her gaze, or what he could see of it through her rapidly blinking eyes, was directionless and sleepy. Her hair was even more messy than his on a windy day, pointing up and out in a thousand directions.

A slight chuckle escaped his lips and at this she relaxed slightly, flopping back onto the mattress with a small thud. The duvet settled around her and she snuggled under it. “You kicked me,” she grumbled.

He shuffled close to her and kissed her cheek in apology. “Sorry about that.” He wrapped his arms around her, ignoring for a second how unbearably hot his body was.

Rose purred softly and pressed herself closer to him, nestling her body into all the nooks and crannies of his. “You’re lovely and warm,” she whispered against his neck.

The Doctor arched an eyebrow and rested his cheek against the top of her head. “Yes. I am. Possibly because you turned on my electric blanket. I nearly overheated.”

He could feel Rose frown against his skin. “But it was so cold last night. The TARDIS is still having difficulty with the temperature.”

The Doctor pulled back slightly to look down at her. “We’ve different bodies, Rose. In more ways than my being male and your being female. Not human, me.”

She punched his chest lightly. “I know that. You’re always wrapped up in so many layers though! Coats and jackets and Oxfords and Henleys.”

The Doctor reached for her hand and brought it up to his face, pressing her fingers against his cheek. She gasped softly at how damp it was. After a second, she ran her fingers through his hair. It wasn’t soft and thick as it usually was, but slightly stringy from heat.

“When I sleep,” the Doctor said, as he pressed a kiss to her lips to remove the guilty frown that had settled there, “my body sort of recalibrates. Checks that everything’s in working order. It’s harmless, but it means my internal temperate shoots up a bit. Didn’t you notice?”

Rose bit her lip. “Well, I just always thought it was because we’d…you know.”

The Doctor smiled. He couldn’t not. “You’re too adorable by half, you are.”

Rose’s blush was quite simply too much for him to bear.

. . . .

As the Doctor woke, he quickly realized that the body beside him was shivering violently and that the noise he could hear was teeth chattering painfully. He himself felt quite comfortable. He turned to face Rose, who had the duvet tucked under her chin almost desperately, and felt a wave of guilt wash over him. She'd foregone even her own electric blanket in her efforts to keep him cool.

He gently, so as not to wake her, slid out of the bed and made his way over to their chest of drawers. He pulled out a few select items and then padded back across the room to kneel on the mattress beside Rose. Dropping the garments by his knees, he deliberated over where to start.

He began with the beanie. It was an ugly shade of orange and had two big flaps to cover one’s ears. He’d gotten the pattern from a man he’d met a few years before, who’d been working on a Firefly transport. He gently slipped a hand under Rose’s head and lifted it up from her pillow. He tugged the beanie down with his free hand, adjusting it so that the flaps rested over her ears. With her head still propped up by his hand, he started in on the second garment.

A nose-warmer. Green and woolly, with straps that went behind the ears.

She was going to force a regeneration on him for this, he was sure. He was grateful that she was such a heavy sleeper.

He reached underneath the duvet in search of her hands, and if he let his fingers wander over her body a little more than was strictly necessary, there was nobody in the room who’d mind. Eventually, he set to work, tugging the far-too-large mittens onto her hands.

Finally, came the scarf. The scarf; impossibly long and impossibly odd and stripy. He looped it over her, more a blanket than anything else. Never, so many regenerations ago, would he have predicted that it would one day end up wrapped around a sleepy, shivery little human woman whom he would love and who would share his bed.

He smiled down at her, overcome by fondness and leant down to kiss what he could of her lips, covered as she was by so much wool. The nose-warmer caught at his stubble a little.

As he deepened the kiss, slipping his tongue between her lips, he felt her slowly wake up, moving against his body. She began to kiss him back, still too sleepy to notice the foreign object on her nose. It was only when she reached up to slip her mitten-covered hands into his hair that something within her clicked and she broke the kiss.

“Wha…? What’s…” she scrunched up her face and wriggled her nose experimentally.

The Doctor grinned and sat back up, looking down at her as she tried to figure out what was going on.

“It’s a nose-warmer, Rose,” he said, as if the answer was perfectly obvious and that she was a little daft for asking. He did so love to play with her when she was sleepy.

Her eyebrows rose to hide beneath the ugly beanie. “It’s a what? Why…I’m…” she trailed off and wiggled her nose again.

“You looked cold,” the Doctor sing-songed in explanation.

Rose’s eyes widened and then narrowed in understanding. “This is payback for yesterday, right? For nearly cooking you alive?”

The Doctor shrugged, the epitome of innocence.

Rose touched her mitten-covered hands to her face and pushed the nose-warmer down so that it rested just above her top lip. “Once I get myself out of this, you’re going to be in so much trouble.” She tried to unloop the ties from behind her ears, but having her fingers enclosed in wool and her ears covered by the flaps of the beanie made the task difficult

Taking pity on her, the Doctor slid his fingers underneath the ties and pulled the nose-warmer off, dropping it onto the bed-side table.

Rose began to work on the mittens, but was dismayed to find that the Doctor had tied the elasticised cords around her wrists. There was no way to tug them off without fingers.

She glared up at him. “Big. Trouble.”

The Doctor laughed and flopped down beside her, taking her hands in his and rubbing them to create friction and warmth. “Well,” he drew the word out, as was his custom, “that’s the best kind, innit?”

Rose chuckled and rolled her eyes. “You’re daft, you are. Of course, and I’m sure that this hasn’t occurred to you, if you don’t free my hands,” she lowered her voice, as if she was about to share some horrible truth with him, “I won’t be able to hold yours ever again.”

Quick as lightening, the Doctor scrabbled to release the ties around her wrists. He tugged the mittens off and flung them into the corner of the room. He caught her hands in his and laced his fingers tightly through hers.

Rose laughed delightedly. “You’re too easy, you are! Now, come on, someone’s got to take the beanie off.”

The Doctor frowned and looked down at their clasped hands, which he’d brought to rest against his chest. He didn’t want to let go, but at Rose’s pout, he freed one hand and pulled the beanie off, throwing it in the same direction at the mittens. Quickly, he curled his hand back around hers again and tried not to laugh at how mussed her hair was.

“Well, if you won’t wear mittens and beanies, how to do you expect to keep warm?

Rose shrugged innocently, as if she had no idea, but the gleam in her eye and the way she shuffled closer to him told him the truth. She draped a leg over his hip, her pyjama clad thigh coming to rest against him. He felt a spike of warmth shoot through him.

The Doctor grinned and freed his hands, safe in the knowledge that they could be doing other interesting things. “I like your thinking.” He rolled them over, covering her body with his like a warm blanket.

Her fingers quested between their chests to wrap around the scarf. She began to tug it off but the Doctor gripped her wrist and stopped her.

“Leave it on.”

. . . .

Hope you're feeling better, love.