The Doctor doesn’t dislike the cold in this new body.
Heloathesit.
It doesn’t come to him all at once, either. It grows steadily, as the months go by, and late spring turns into summer, then autumn. As this particular season progresses, so does his displeasure.
By December, he’s come to the conclusion that having an internal temperature this high is absolutely ridiculous and pointless, especially when the outside world is now stuck in freezing temperatures that refuse to go back up. Whenever he steps out of a building, any inch of him that is exposed to the frost immediately starts leaking heat, and he’s powerless against the laws of thermodynamics.
“You are such a dork,” Rose points out the first time he goes outside with his new ‘winter outfit’, which comprises (among other things) three layers of clothes, a thick coat, gloves, a scarf and a woollen hat. “You do realise those are ski goggles you’re wearing, right?”
“My eyeballs were freezing,” he replies into his scarf, still rather unhappy about the stinging sensation in his nose and cheekbones, which remain vulnerable to the cold.
For all of her eye rolling at his supposedly ‘dramatic’ reactions, his wife is not faring any better than him whenever they step out in these arctic conditions.
While she will shamelessly mock him for being so sensitive to the drop in temperature, her solution is to use him as a heat pad, going as far as regularly slipping her freezing little hands all the way beneath layers of coat, jumper, shirt and undershirt to press her icy palms over his back.
“You’re so warm,” she tells him, having somehow burrowed her face so efficiently into the crook of his neck that her nose has managed to bypass the tick scarf to be pressed into his skin.
Well, he knows he is, that’s kind of the problem isn’t it?
Not only is he a good fifteen degrees hotter than his warmest incarnation was, but he’s also a whole degree hotter than her body. Maybe it’s all to do with male versus female physiology, or maybe it’s just the universe being an arse.
He suspects the latter.
Rose does love his warm body, constantly encouraging heat transfer between them; and it’s not like she’s simply borrowing his warmth. She’s stealing it, plain and simple.
Sneaking her icy toes between his legs, splaying her frozen hands upon his shoulder blades, ignoring his hisses of discomfort at the sensation, or how his entire body always breaks into shudders, his skin covered in goose-flesh.
“C’mon, t’s not that bad,” she tells him once, while way too many of her digits poke into his shivering flesh like tiny icicles.
“I beg to differ,” he replies. “I’ll have you know that you’ve turned into a proper thermal thief, lately.”
“Yeah?” she asks against his neck, a laughter in her voice. “Gonna call the cops on me?”
