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Rose woke up to the smell of hot chocolate. Considering that they'd spent the past week in the remains of the Amazonian rainforest with the Yanomami Revisionists, and the week before that on the desert planet of Tangori Prime, the presence of cocoa was slightly unnerving.
Out of place.
Bloody weird, actually.
She stumbled into the Doctor's favourite kitchen and stared at brown pinstriped back for a while. He was humming something unfamiliar and occasionally bursting into full-fledged song with accompanying gestures (a la Fosse), and he faced the stove, so his back was in full display. By the point that he noticed her, he had made a complete arse of himself, or would have if Rose had been awake enough to care. Instead, she only noted that it was a nice back, if a little on the thin side.
He turned around and smiled at her, looking ever so pleased with himself. "Rose!" he said. There was a large smudge of cocoa across his left cheek. The colour matched his suit rather nicely.
"Yeah." Rose blinked a few times. "Who else. What's with the drinking chocolate?"
"It's snowing!"
She blinked a few more times and rubbed her eyes. This wasn't unusual, but it was...different. Her Doctor rarely made cocoa. Instead, it was tea all the time. Tea, tea, tea, until she wanted to throw the box of loose Twinings Earl Grey at his head... "Pardon?"
The Doctor grinned at her and fairly bounced. "You know, snow. Frozen precipitation. With the sleds and the skiing and the making of vaguely anthropomorphic sculptures."
"I know what snow is," Rose muttered and stomped out of the kitchen, down through the console room, and to the door. Opening it, she found a sunny grassy field, with a brook nearby. Off in the distance, there were bison, and she could vaguely hear them lowing to one another. No clouds in sight, and the temperature was quite comfortable enough for her to be standing there barefoot and in a long t-shirt and warm-up trousers.
Yet another few blinks. She reopened her eyes a little wider. Still bison and plains and lowing noises. The Doctor had obviously gone mad.
Wouldn't be the first time, Rose thought, and headed back to the kitchen. "It's 20 degrees and sunny, Doctor."
"Well, yes." He looked at her like she was the one who was insane. "But it's snowing somewhere, sometime. And I have this drinking chocolate that we got yesterday, and we're not running for our lives. So why don't you just sit about and do nothing, and have a cuppa with me? It's a good day for it."
This last was accompanied by a puppy dog look; one that Rose hadn't quite got used to and therefore succumbed to rather easily. The Doctor was terribly good at it, too, and he must have known it...because she said, "Okay," and settled down in a chair across from him.
And though nothing particularly interesting happened, it was a good day.
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...same song, different verse...
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Theta Sigma woke up because of two things. The first was that his room smelled of cocoa, and the second was that there was an argument going on around him.
The latter was typical--when one lived with Koschei, argument was anything but rare. Cocoa, however, was not standard fare at the Academy, particularly not in the room that belonged to Theta and Koschei. Their room usually smelled of cheap alcohol, chemistry experiments, and Calarian takeaway, and that was on a good day.
So Theta Sigma sat up and opened his eyes, only to find Koschei stirring something (presumably drinking chocolate) in a beaker over a burner--the one he'd been using just last night, actually. He was gloating at Ushas without looking up, and Ushas was alternately covering her ears and humming or ranting back at him. Theta wasn't entirely certain what the song was, but it sounded like something from a musical.
He cleared his throat and rubbed his eyes to find that the scene hadn't changed at all.
"Oh, it's you," Koschei said, still eyeing the bubbling, fragrant brown liquid.
"I live here," Theta replied. "As do you, and as she does not. What's going on?"
Koschei blinked and gestured vaguely out a window. "It's snowing."
Ushas looked as if she wanted to throw things, preferably at Koschei's head. Theta decided not to ask why. "Does this mean that there needs to be chocolate and arguments in my room while I'm asleep?" he said.
"It means," Ushas said through clenched teeth, "that someone has been playing games with the climate control again. Making this lovely, unplanned snow day for us all, on the day I was supposed to finish my rather critical experiment in the biotemporal mechanics lab."
This took a moment to sink in. Spontaneous inclement weather was traditionally rare on Gallifrey. It wasn't as if Ushas couldn't merely hike through seven centimetres of snow to the lab anyhow; she'd done it in worse storms. It was just that there were several very respected traditions in the Prydonian house, and one of them was...
"Snow riot," Theta said. "Brilliant."
"He did this on purpose. I know he did." She turned to Koschei and called him something tremendously rude and untranslatable. "You think that just because biotemp bores you, the rest of us should be equally unimpressed."
Koschei drawled, "Like I'd go to that amount of trouble to ruin your plans, sweet Ushas. Lady Wendanci's lecture on emerging quantum fields is...was...today, and I had no desire to snore through three hours of it. Isn't this more fun? Besides, you know you can't miss the riot..."
"I hate getting wet," Ushas muttered, and plopped down on the other bed. Theta Sigma said nothing. Instead, he looked out the window. It was still snowing.
After a moment, he asked, "You did wash that out before you started, right?"
"Think of it as an adventure." Koschei waved the beaker in front of his face, and despite himself, Theta took it.
FIN