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“Doctor, just come in!” Rose grabbed his arm in an attempt to drag him into her flat. It wasn’t a big flat, but it wasn’t small by any means; there was enough room for Rose and Jackie, and sometimes Mickey. The Doctor tried to resist Rose’s tugging, but eventually just accepted his fate and allowed himself to be dragged up the stairs.
“What’s up with you? God, you’re acting like my flat’s a torture chamber or something.” Rose asked as she knocked on the door.
“It is when your mother’s in,”Jackie opened the door, and immediately wrapped her arms around her daughter,
“Rose! You should’ve told me you were coming!” she clasped her hands on Rose’s shoulders and held her at arm’s length, “Why didn’t you just let yourself in?”
The three of them walked into the sitting room. Rose dropped herself onto the sofa, while The Doctor just stood with his hands in his pockets, looking around the oh-so-familiar council flat.
“I lost my key,” Rose told her mother,
“What did you do that for?” Jackie rolled her eyes at the Doctor, “Honestly, she’s always been like this; second day of senior school I had to fork out to get a new one cut- “
“We were messing around, and my key fell out my pocket into a drain, that wasn’t my fault,”
“Well you should’ve known better than to leave your keys in your outside blazer pocket,”The two continued to bicker as Jackie boiled the kettle and prepared three mugs of tea, but it was obvious they loved each other.
“How do you like your tea, Doctor?”
The Doctor remained silent for a few moments,
“I’m not sure,”
“Well, you did have it with two sugars” Rose commented, “Or are you telling me that your taste buds change too?”
“Oi! As a matter of fact, they do; I remember there was a time when I regularly took my tea with only eight sugars – oh that was tricky in the 13th century.”
Rose ignored this entire sentence “So you don’t know how you like your tea anymore?”
“No”
“Well then,” Rose rolled her sleeves up over her elbows, “We’ll have to find out!”
She walked into the kitchen, grabbed a tray, and placed the three cups of tea along with an entire bag of sugar and two pints of milk,
“Rose! Those were our cups too!” Jackie said, but Rose took no notice,
“We can make more, this is important” she called from the other room
Knowing better than to argue further, Jackie just left them to it, and went to her room. She wasn’t happy with the two of them performing this strange experiment, but she knew her daughter, and once she wanted to do something, she would do it regardless.“So, if we start off with a plain black brew, and then add more from there. We’ll have one mug for just milk, one for just sugar, and one for both?”
Rose started pouring milk into one of the cups. She looked at the Doctor, who was now sitting cross-legged on the floor by the coffee table, and the two burst out laughing.
“This is never going to work. Mum’ll go nuts if we waste all this stuff anyway,” she started stirring the milky tea absent-mindedly, thinking about everything and nothing all at once.
The Doctor was pretty far into his own mind as well, but he had a proper subject to focus his attention to; he was acutely aware of how each regeneration took his tea, but had no idea how he was drawn to each conclusion. Nine-hundred years old, at least nine different ways of taking his tea, and yet not the foggiest idea as to the method one would use to find how one would like his tea. It wasn’t just a small change each time, either; he had once gone from four sugars to double that, and then all the way back down to two – surely he should remember how he decided on such a drastic difference? Unless…“Rose! I’ve got it!”
“Got what?”
“I’ll explain in a moment – this is important!”
From the speed of The Doctor’s movements, you would think he were curing some awful disease, but in reality all he was doing was making tea, albeit with remarkable precision. Tea was important to Gallifreans – or at least it was to The Doctor – and Rose knew this, but it was still very funny seeing this man, seemingly in his mid-thirties, scrabbling around this small kitchen frantically in the name of tea, and had to bite her tongue hard to stop herself exploding into peals of laughter.
“So you’ve worked out how you like your tea now?”
“Not quite, but I’ve an idea.”He dropped the last sugar cube into the light brown liquid with a flourish, and basked in the fumes for a few moments. He ceremoniously lifted the mug to his lips; in any other situation Rose would burst out laughing once more, but in this moment she found herself holding her breath in anticipation. Several surprised and pleased expressions found themselves on The Doctor’s face, but seemingly the whole world waited for the final verdict before celebrating. He savoured the taste for a few moments and swallowed.
“How is it?”
The Doctor exhaled deeply in satisfaction,
“Perfect”It was hard to believe that anyone could be this happy about making a cup of tea, but The Doctor himself was hard to believe. He had finally worked out how to make his tea just right – this was important.
“So how’d you work it out? You got it right first try!”
“Instinct.”