Current location:	my garret
Current mood:	loopy
Current music:	the overworked radiators
Entry tags:	doctorwho100, dr who, fic, tardis, ten, ten/tardis

Fic: Lesson
Fic Name: Lesson
Rating: PG-13 for some implied smut. And one weensy little curse word.
Prompt: #88 - Control
Claim: Ten/Tardis
Summary: Everyone has squicks - even the TARDIS.
Spoilers: Not a one.
Notes: A truly silly little fic written for the doctorwho_100 challenge. (Prompt chart is here.) Also partly inspired by the latest o_b_b challenge (though it didn't turn out to quite follow directions there, as it happened ... ) and x-posted to dwfiction.

LESSON

The more she thought about it, the more it pissed her off. I have sensors, she brooded crossly. I have screens and readouts - I'm telepathic, for fuck's sake. If he wants to know how I'm feeling, all he has to do is ask me.

But the licking has got to stop.

It wasn't that she didn't appreciate the Doctor's ... eccentricities. Some could be quite fun indeed, and after ten regenerations she'd experienced enough of them to fill a ledger. (Ooh, now that's a thought, she mused, a tell-all book! Serve him right if everyone in the universe knew what a tosser he can be sometimes. 'My Life With the Time Lord' - no, that'd never sell - 'Time Lord of My Heart,' then. Something nice and smutty. )

And is it really so unreasonable, she thought, one bloody request? It's not like I'm the only one. Turlough had that thing about feet, Sarah Jane always wanted the lights on, you couldn't get near Adric with a tub of clotted cream, Ace got very peculiar about that jacket ... just about the only one who had never raised a single objection to anything was Jack. (A flush crept up her wall panels as she remembered one time in particular: Jack working late to repair a fault in her heating system, stripped to the waist and buried under her console - now there was a human who really appreciated technology. So few of them could.)

The problem, she reflected, was that every time she asked the Doctor to stop, he thought she was being coy; and flat-out telling him to knock it off just turned him on more. Obsessed, he is - which, she did have to admit, was rather flattering. After nine hundred years together the spark was still there - hells, this regeneration is so frisky, it's practically a full-on conflagration. She shivered pleasantly. It'd be perfect, if only he could keep his tongue in his mouth for ten minutes.

She'd tried everything.

Recalling his eighth regeneration's fastidiousness about clothing she'd contrived to hide the wardrobe from the Doctor for a week, leaving him with nothing but one of Romana's frillier leftover dresses - which backfired so spectacularly that even after she'd given up and let him back into the wardrobe he'd kept on wearing it for a full fortnight, even adding a smart hat and handbag for a state dinner on Golobus.

His fifth regeneration might not have liked seeing himself on vid screens, but once she'd turned them on, she'd not been able to pry this one away from the monitors. Eventually she'd had to disable the feeds in his quarters, the control room, the galley, the pool, thirteen corridors, the library, all of the showers, and both machine gantries.

And she'd learned the hard (though fun) way that he didn't share his fourth regeneration's aversion to forceful restraint, or his seventh's to raspberries, or his ninth's to pain.

Nothing seemed to work.

But she'd be damned if she was going to go though the rest of time with patches of damp on her walls and constant slobber all over her console. She hummed angrily and checked the external sensors. Had enough? she thought smugly. Outside, ankle-deep in slush, the Doctor nodded miserably, freezing rain sluicing over him and dripping off the end of his nose.

Learned your lesson, then?

"Y-y-yessss," he muttered through chattering teeth.

Right, then, she though, and unlocked the doors. The Doctor squelched damply inside. Sorry it had to come to this, she thought at him, but you just wouldn't listen to me. Are we square now?

"Yes."

And no more drooling all over my dials or lapping the walls?

He nodded contritely and shivered. She knocked the temperature up a few degrees and thought Okay. Go take a nice hot bath, then, right? He nodded again and, shoulders slumped, shuffled defeatedly towards the corridor. He stopped at the doorway.

And looked up, a wicked gleam in his eye. Oh no you don't, she thought. He grinned.

Slowly, deliberately, and with infinite pleasure, the Doctor ran his tongue along the doorframe and, whistling, strode out of the room.