Chapter Text
The disastrous day began in the Heathrow airport. Normally, John Smith – the Doctor to his friends and colleagues – enjoyed traveling and took all the delays in stride, but Gallifrey Inc. was threatening to pull the plug on his latest vaccine that could improve and save the lives of millions world-wide. The vaccine had spent the last six months in the development stages, but the new CEO of Saxon Inc. had abruptly cut 75% of their funding. The stocks of Gallifrey Inc. had plummeted and the Doctor and Gallifrey Inc. were floundering. The start-up company had invested everything into the Doctor’s latest vaccine, but if they couldn’t find an immediate investor, Gallifrey Inc. would be bankrupt by the end of the year and the much-needed vaccine would never be completed.
Any hopes of salvaging his career, completing the vaccine, and rescuing the company that had taken him in like a family from financial ruin was now pinned on one company that had shown some recent interest in the vaccine.
Vitex.
Vitex’s CEO was currently at their American headquarters in Los Angeles. Donna Noble generally handled this sort of thing, but Pete Tyler had requested to meet the Doctor himself, and Donna had Bronchitis. The Doctor loved traveling, but he was anxious about the meeting and he was already running behind schedule.
Thanks to Donna’s brilliance, the Doctor had managed to get on one of the few direct flights to LAX, but the departure kept getting pushed back. By the time the pretty blonde fetched up against the bar and rammed her valise into his kneecap, the Doctor had been waiting for three hours and was two banana daiquiris deep at the airport bar.
“Oi! Mind the knees!”
She whipped around and the Doctor’s breath caught in his throat.
“Sorry,” she said with a dazzling apologetic smile. “Lost my balance. Think I broke one of my heels running through the airport,” she confessed with a wince.
“Let me take a look,” he offered before he could stop himself.
The Doctor was usually quite good with fixing things, but unfortunately this innate ability did not extend to women’s footwear.
Twenty minutes later, she was barefoot and sharing a stool with him at the packed bar, and they had yet another round of banana daiquiris in front of them.
“’s not your fault,” she assured him, patting his leg. The Doctor tried to disguise the shiver that went through him at her touch.
“I broke your other heel too,” he lamented.
“’s okay,” she said, squeezing his knee, “I hate high heels, can’t run in them.”
The Doctor gazed out at the crowd passing in and out of the duty-free shop across the way and a brilliant idea occurred to him.
“Wait here,” he instructed her.
He was back in a jiffy with a newly purchased pair of Chucks for her. They even matched her red blouse. She laughed when he made sure to point this out to her and launched into a lecture on the merits of proper footwear and little shops in airports. The Doctor wished he could’ve recorded that laugh and could’ve bottled the feeling that it evoked inside of him.
Suddenly, the crew announced that they were preparing for boarding.
“Sorry, I’ve got to run for my life,” he said, throwing some money down on the bar to cover both drinks.
It didn’t occur to him until he was seated at the back of the plane with his nose in a book and a warm tingly feeling resonating in his chest that he’d felt so comfortable with her, and yet he hadn’t even learned her name.
*
The flight was a nightmare. Rose loved travelling and was looking forward to seeing her father and finally getting a tour of Los Angeles and the new Vitex Headquarters, but the flight had been turbulent and in spite of everything Rose had tried to do to help, her seatmate had gotten violently ill. She hadn’t been the only one. The plane was forced to make an emergency landing because of the inclement weather and one of the flight attendants suddenly taking ill as well. Rose was seated in first class and was therefore one of the first to exit the plane, only after another flight attendant assured her that the other woman would be fine and was being seen to by a doctor.
Rose didn’t know where they ended up, but it became immediately clear judging from the empty terminal, that this place was a far cry from Heathrow. All of the gates were empty, save for a few sparrows that were hopping from seat to seat, eagerly looking for crumbs.
“Where are we?” Rose wondered aloud.
“No idea,” a voice said cheerfully and Rose turned to find the bloke from the airport bar beaming at her. “Hello again,” he greeted her, wiggling his fingers.
“Hello,” Rose echoed, smiling widely. He had some great hair, some really great hair. She honestly wasn’t sure how long they stood there staring at each other as the rest of the passengers flowed around them and ran for the baggage claim and the customer service desk.
“Nice Chucks,” he complimented her with a wink.
“Thanks,” she said with a touch-touched grin that caused him to sway toward her as if she was magnetic. “’m Rose,” she introduced herself.
“I’m the Doctor,” he said, taking her hand. The way his fingers curled around hers, felt right, so right that she was reluctant to let go.
“Are you hungry?” he asked, stuffing his hands in his pockets and rocking back on his heels.
“Starved,” Rose admitted. “I want chips.”
“Allon-sy,” he said, leading the way. “Let’s go find a chippie.”
*
It quickly became clear that they were not in London anymore.
“Closed?” The Doctor sputtered for the fourth time in the last ten minutes. “What do you mean you’re closed?”
“It’s gonna snow,” the manager of the fourth and final place to eat explained with a shrug. “The whole airport’s shutting down.”
“But what about our flight?”
The manager shrugged again.
“It’ll be rescheduled,” he grunted, “Maybe in a few days?”
“A few days?” The Doctor’s jaw dropped, but the manager was already pushing past him with his staff eagerly following him out of the terminal.
Rose and the Doctor discovered that while they’d wasted their time tracking down all four of the places that served food, their fellow passengers had been discussing and making rearrangements. By the time they got to the last couple of harried airport employees, there wasn’t much left.
“We don’t know when the next flight out will be,” the kindly representative, Lynda explained to them and one other passenger in a ballcap. “They’re saying we could get six inches of snow.”
“Six? That’s it?” barked the passenger with a nasally accent next to them, “Where I come from, that’s nothing. Let me tell you about the blizzard of ’78. I had to dig myself out of a snow drift eight feet high and walk all the way to the packie for a six-pack of beer-”
“We only have five snow ploughs for the entire state and one of them got hit by a truck yesterday,” Lynda interrupted him. “But they salted the roads two days ago, so hopefully we’ll be up and running by Wednesday.”
“Two days ago!” the passenger barked. “What the fuck is that supposed to do? Do you guys even know how to de-ice a plane? Does anyone here even own an ice scraper? Or a shovel?”
“If the snow sticks and we get as much as they’re predicting,” Lynda explained to a very confused Rose and the Doctor, “The whole state will shut down for the next forty-eight hours, possibly longer depending on how quickly it melts. I’m sorry. I can put you up in a room in the hotel across the road, courtesy of British Airways, but I’ve only got one room left.”
Rose and the Doctor were too stunned to disagree. With a few clicks the agent had arranged for them to share a room for a night, possibly two, depending on the weather.
“There’s a convenience store right outside the hotel,” she informed them, “I’d recommend stocking up on supplies before we get snowed in and they close.”
“Where’s the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts? What about Market Basket?” the other man was demanding as Rose and the Doctor gathered up their baggage and hurried out before the shop closed.
Luckily the hotel was in walking distance, but the shop was attached to a petrol station. Rose and the Doctor were shocked by the number of cars lined up for petrol and the amount of people who left their cars running to do their shopping. The shop was small, but what little they had was swept up into the arms of anxious, fearful people prepared to weather an apocalypse. Surely, Rose and the Doctor must’ve heard the weather reports wrong, because the shelves were practically bare. One of the clerks told them that a fist fight had nearly erupted over the last case of water. All that remained now was one slightly squished loaf of bread and a carton of milk that had the sell by date rubbed off.
The Doctor opened the milk up, sniffed it, and decided that it would do. He added the last three jars of some weird organic jam to their basket as well, ignoring Rose’s roll of her eyes when he insisted on opening that up to sample as well.
The Doctor actually crowed in triumph when the shopkeeper brought out some bananas that had been missed in the back. But once Rose confessed that she’d actually brought tea and biscuits from home at her father’s request, the Doctor gave her a smile so blindingly bright that her face warmed.
“Rose,” he gushed, taking her hand and swinging it between them, “You are fantastic!”
They left the shop together just as it was beginning to snow. Tiny flurries drifted down around them and the Doctor made a dramatic show of trying to catch them on his tongue. He kept her laughing right up until they approached the front desk of the hotel and found out they’d been given a room.
A room with only one bed.
“Are you sure there aren’t any other rooms available?” the Doctor asked the concierge. But the man apologized that they were all booked up because of the grounded flights and the ‘blizzard’ coming in.
“Isn’t it exciting? They’re saying we could get up to a foot of snow!” the concierge squealed, “I’ve never seen snow before. I can’t wait to build my first snowman!” He clapped his hands together enthusiastically, oblivious to Rose and the Doctor’s strained smiles as they considered the prospect of sharing a hotel room and a bed with a stranger for multiple nights.
The lift was small, but their room seemed even smaller to Rose once the door clicked shut behind them. Logically Rose knew the hotel room was probably larger than most of the rooms she’d stayed in over the last few years, but she didn’t think the Doctor had been quite so tall, so manly and so attractive until they were in a confined space together.
And that was bad, very bad, because Rose had just gotten out of an awful relationship and she had no intention of starting another one. After Jimmy Stone, Rose didn’t want to even look at another man, let alone sleep in the same bed as one.
No matter how much more fit and brilliant the bloke appeared to be in comparison to her ex.
“I can sleep on the floor,” Rose offered generously at the same time as he did.
They looked at each other and then glanced away again with a bit of nervous laughter. The Doctor rubbed at the nape of his neck and Rose sat down on the edge of the bed to unlace her Chucks that unfortunately weren’t quite broken in yet. She couldn’t quite disguise a flinch as she removed her left shoe. The new shoes had made the blisters that had formed from her ruined heel worse.
“Mind if I take a look?” he offered, and Rose folded her arms over her chest.
“You broke my other heel,” she reminded him pointedly. “’m not sure I trust you around anything.”
“I’m a Doctor,” he assured her, “Well, sort of,” he mollified removing a pair of specs from the inside of his suit jacket, “I have a Doctorate in Physics and Chemistry, but I only did a brief stint in Engineering, Astronomy and Medicine, but that has to count for something, right?”
Rose blinked at him and he took that as permission. Kneeling down on the carpet at her feet, he carefully examined her left foot. Her eyelids slid to half-mast as he started to massage her heel and the arch of her foot, and then her toes. She was practically purring by the time he finished up with one foot and moved onto the other.
“You spend a lot of time on your feet,” he noted, repeating the same glorious patterns on her right foot.
“Used to work in a shop, twelve-hour shifts, constantly running around,” she explained, suppressing a moan of pleasure as he hit just the right spot with his magical fingers. The Doctor must’ve caught the sound she made, because he abruptly released her foot and stood up.
“Right, well, it looks like as long as you don’t wear shoes for the next few days those blisters should heal up on their own,” he said, backing away from her. The room was so small that he didn’t get very far.
“Don’t think that should be much of a problem, seeing as we’re not going anywhere for the next couple of days,” Rose sighed and looked out the window. In the glow of lamplight in the car park, she could see the snowflakes coming down faster and heavier.
The Doctor stepped toward the window and pushed the curtains wide. If it kept snowing like this then there was no way he was going to get out in time to make his appointment with Pete Tyler, and if he didn’t get the funding for Vitex, his colleagues and friends were going to lose their jobs, and the Doctor would never get a chance to get the vaccine out for a disease that was affecting millions of lives.
“You alright?”
He turned around and found Rose, bathed in the soft ambient lighting of the hotel room. The red blouse paired beautifully with what was left of her lipstick and highlighted the healthy rosy flush to her cheeks. She’d taken her hair down from its updo and her hair was longer than he expected, spilling down over her shoulders.
Rose reminded him a bit of Reinette, but there was nothing fake about her or her beauty. Her kindness and the beating heart that it came from was all genuine. It was a shame he’d sworn off relationships after his affair with the Parisian had ended in heartbreak, because he already knew that Rose was beautiful inside and out.
“I’m fine,” he lied.
She gave him a sceptical look, but fortunately she didn’t press him as she gathered up her toiletries and a change of clothes.
“Gonna use the loo, unless…” She waited for him to object, but he motioned for her to go ahead.
And then he was left alone again to contemplate how he was about to lose everything he’d worked for over the last decade, letting down more and more people with every snowflake that piled up outside.
TO BE CONTINUED...