“Doctor, I don’t suppose you could have just let me do the grocering while you recovered your memory AND your sense of balance.”
The way the Master speaks these words, he might as well be reciting Chaucer to a crowded theater; his voice thunders through the supermarket with thespian incredulity. People turn their heads and stare. To them, it’s a highly typical old married couple, except the woman is rather batty and the man is rather melodramatic.
Just another day in London.
“Come on, then, the most most logical way to do this is to sample sundry foodstuffs, while I distract any clerks who happen upon us. Just pinch off a bite of everything not boxed or canned or raw. Unless it’s sushi, which you very well may enjoy. We’ve yet to know.”
He sniffs, laces an arm about her waist and guides her toward the bakery.
“I confess, it’s rather exciting. Will she like cupcakes? Croissants? Shall we go hogwild, and even try a muffin?”
The way his voice thunders through the supermarket doesn’t have half the effect it would have on the Doctor’s previous incarnations- in fact it has less than that, to be sure. Instead of blushing, cursing, or even frowning a bit, she merely smiles wider and lets out delighted snort of laughter at the way he dramatically phrases each word. Every syllable drips with headlining disbelief and if she’s not mistaken, a bit of enervated affection.
He’s done in, and she’s loving every ticking moment. The people staring make her hearts swell and she hopes she can get him to raise his voice a few more times. He’s just so bewitching that way, when he’s lost his head.
“An’ let you ‘ave all the fun? Look’it this place! S’like another planet entirely, f’it were made’a produce, confections an’ tin cans full’a questionable foodstuff. ‘Sides, only way I’m gonna learn is if I try first hand.”
Her eyebrows both lift at once, but she doesn’t comment on his suggestion of partial thievery. She’s done enough for the planet in her collective lives, and besides, it’s not like children don’t do the same thing on a near daily basis in London to begin with. At least if her memory serves, which… well, for this purpose it serves, anyway. Along the way to the bakery, she covertly snatches a bit of this and that, randomly popping things into her mouth and either happily swallowing and adding the full item to the trolley or scrunching her nose with distaste and shoving the half-chewed remnants in her inter-dimensional pocket. She’ll clean that later.
“A muffin? What a scandal! S’like they’ve tried to be cupcakes an’ failed! Not even a scrap’o icing to ‘elp it along. For shame.”
Her voice holds a charming playfulness to it and despite having found more less-than-savory items than ones she likes along the way, she’s still smiling. She does that a lot now, it seems. Once at the bakery, she reluctantly parts from the Master’s side and wanders through the many tiered tables of confectionery wonderment, and breads of course, careful to only try bits of this and that when no one is looking.
No, she’s not embarrassed; his impishness only encourages her. That’s because more than any other face of the Doctor since their boyhood, this Doctor is the most like his Theta Sigma, his co-conspirator and fellow rapscallion. Each would bend into a veritable pretzel to impress and support the other. Each would come out of a day’s mischief exhausted and fulfilled. And walking through this grocery store, he’s never had a more vivid memory of those days in red grasses.
“Lost his head,” hardly. He’s playing her every bit as much as she is him.
“You sound like a damned street peddler, my love,” he ventures to call her by so familiar a title. “Someone auditioning for a Northern version of My Fair bloody Lady. HehHAH. Right, okay, but consider this: you may or may not recall, but in past lives, you adored bananas, and well, there is no such thing as a banana cupcake, but banana nutbread muffins? Those exist in veritable armies.”
The space criminal picks up a plastic container of the aforementioned confection: with a bright orange sticker declaring “SALE!” He wiggles it around in front of his compatriot.
Icarus 