Meant to Be (TARDIS Family Adventures: Part 1)

Chapter 14: Picnics and Promises

Chapter Summary: The TARDIS team have been working hard to rebuild Teni. After a particularly long, hard day for both the Doctor and Scarlett, she surprises him.

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The next two months seemed to go by rather quickly.

Donna continued to work with organizing the recovery and reconstruction tasks, triaging the most important. She spent most of her days in her new office with a group of four to five personnel assisting her with communications. They had to stay days ahead of the work, send reports over to Balen and Scarlett for approval, and then dole out the tasks to the appropriate departments and people.

Jack made himself busy working with local law enforcement, assisting with manual labor when needed, and generally doing anything to actually be in the field working. Days would go by when they wouldn't see him, then he'd show up at the TARDIS, shower, eat, update Donna on his work, she'd give him another list of tasks, and he'd be gone.

Jacob and the Doctor were enjoying their work, getting to use their technical prowess to really assist in getting the planet back up and running. They spent most of their work hours together, so much time that they typically required little to no communication, verbal or telepathic, to know what each other needed as they completed their tasks.

Thankfully, after a few weeks, Donna had convinced the two Time Lords to stop wearing their suits and find more suitable work clothes. Not straying too far from their normal colors of brown and blue, the Doctor wore either light or dark brown trousers and usually a white t-shirt. Of course, Jacob stuck with blue trousers, but tended to change the colour of his shirt. They both insisted on continuing to wear their sneakers.

Several evenings a week they would have dinner with Balen and Scarlett; usually Jack would show up for at least one of these meals. A few evenings Jacob and Donna would take their meal together, while the Doctor would spend time on the TARDIS, usually reading some book or the other. They tried to include him as much as possible, feeling guilty that he wasn't able to spend as much time with Scarlett as they knew he would like. Typically he would wave them off, insisting they go off on their own. He would have breakfast with them before starting out their days, although it didn't surprise Donna that many mornings she would wake up to find that the Doctor and Jacob were already gone from the TARDIS. Despite her new Time Lord biology, she still loved sleep more than any of the rest of them.

Scarlett spent most of her days in meetings, sometimes with dignitaries from closely-allied planets, sometimes with the Elders, sometimes it was just her and Balen. She was doing everything in her power to make the transition of power as smooth as possible. Her favorite times, though, were going out into the city and towns to actually be with her people. She tried as much as possible to 'get her own hands dirty' as Jack had said, helping with a few projects as time allowed. Balen had tried to sneak in a few visits for her to the work sites that the Doctor was working on. The Time Lord would walk with her through the work site, explaining whatever project they were working on, and their progress. Most of their visits included lots of shared glances, and an occasional telepathic conversation.

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About a month into the reconstruction efforts, the Doctor had just gotten back to the Citadel after a long day of work. He had sent Jacob ahead earlier while he finished up the last of the work on a particularly difficult repair on a power grid. It had been a tough day and it showed. His hair was more askew than normal, his hands, face, and clothing were dirty. He was ready for a shower and prepared to turn the hot water up as high as was bearable to soothe his sore muscles. He even planned on going straight to bed after a quiet dinner in the TARDIS kitchen.