#in which the doctor is literally me rn
“Time Lords don’t get sick, Rose.” The Doctor looked at his wife, trying his best to sniffle as discretely as possible.
“Of course they don’t,” Rose said placatingly, though she was mentally rolling her eyes at her husband’s childish protests. “You’re merely experiencing a slight soreness of the upper throat, combined with a dull throbbing in your left temple, and a nose that has caught the runs of its own accord.”
The Doctor nodded. Finally, Rose was beginning to understand his plight. “In other words, you’ve caught a cold.” He frowned, opening his mouth to retaliate, when runny mucus began dripping from his nose. Rose was ready with a tissue, which he grabbed unceremoniously and swiped away the offending bogies.
“Oh, this is rubbish,” he muttered, crumpling the sticky tissue into a ball. “Stuck with twenty-first century medication, as a human no less, and your lot hasn’t even cured the common cold.”
“Still like to insult species when you’re stressed, then,” Rose said tersely. “Into the kitchen with you, there’ll be some chicken soup. Should help clear your sinuses. God knows I’ll breathe better when you do,” she added under her breath. Had the Doctor been able to think clearly, he would have heard the underlying tension in his wife’s comment, but as it were, he didn’t and so he shuffled along behind her to the kitchen.
Though he’d meant to follow her directly, the Doctor was slower than Rose and she had already begun heating the soup over the stovetop. In the final minute before she ladled the soup into a bowl, the Doctor had wiped his nose another three times and had nearly drifted off to sleep.
“I’m not making you soup if you’re gonna use it as a pillow,” Rose gently pulled the Doctor upright. “You need to get some liquids in ya, replace what you lost last night. Or don’t you remember me pulling your face from the toilet?”
The Doctor vaguely remembered the coolness of porcelain against his cheek. Not saying anything, he stared at the soup.
“Now, despite your retching last night, I think you’re doing better today. Mostly because I don’t think that retching was part of the rest of this. But that’s not gonna last if you don’t eat anything,” Rose continued firmly. “And it’ll be worse if you heave on an empty stomach, besides.”
The Doctor nodded mutely, trying to clear his throat. Giving up on that, he looked from Rose to the soup, picking up the spoon. The hot soup trickled down his throat without any effort on his part, soothing the soreness. Each mouthful brought the same temporary relief and before he knew it, the bowl was empty.
All that remained was a pressure in his head, resistant against the pain relievers Rose had given him after finishing the soup.
“You’ve got to give the medication time to work,” Rose lightly admonished his negative thinking. “It’s not instantaneous, ya know.”
The Doctor nodded. He stood, shuffling into the sitting room where he turned on the telly. He tuned it to an old movie they’d seen dozens of times and set the volume so that it was barely audible. Rose joined him on the sofa. She frowned and shifted experimentally before lifting up the pillow, under which were a dozen sweets wrappers. At least now she knew why the Doctor had thrown up the night before. It had probably been simply a coincidence that his body had decided to get a cold the day after he’d overindulged in the leftover Halloween sweets.
Rose gently held the Doctor’s head in her lap as he slept and she watched the film, a forty-second century remake of the Casablancasequel, though most of her attention was stolen by the sleeping Doctor. She comforted him through every restless move and wiped his nose as it ran, though he remained obliviously unconscious. Perhaps Time Lords never got sick, but biological metacrisis part-Time Lord part-humans were a different matter. Ten years on, and this was their life together. Short and human as it may have been, in sickness and in health, they were still the Doctor and Rose Tyler together, in their TARDIS, like they should be.
mentions of Halloween candy binging, so tagging @doctorroseprompts b/c it kinda fits their anon prompt
