Archive of Our Own ^beta

Fitz entered the kitchen in a huff, and made a beeline for the cupboard upon which the mugs sat. Anji and the Doctor were both seated at the table, Anji with a book in hand, and the Doctor hunched over some pencil-puzzle that appeared to be made up of circles and hexagons, seemingly unaware of their surroundings. 

Anji checked her watch, and without looking up from her book, said “That’s gotta be some kind of record, Fitz. Six hours! Were you playing the whole time?”

She could hear Fitz groan softly, before he replied, “I have to get my chops back, Anj. We were stuck on that planet for months, and nobody besides us had hands! Where was I supposed to find a guitar?”

“Point taken,” said Anji, turning the page, “and it’s not like those sponges were going to oblige you a trip to the neighboring planet!” She chuckled. 

Fitz inhaled sharply as he grabbed a mug, and asked “Is the kettle hot?” to which The Doctor and Anji replied “yes” in chorus. 

Fitz picked up the kettle and as he tilted it to pour, he felt what seemed like an electric shock rip through his fingers and up his right forearm, and he dropped the damn thing. “ Shit ” he spat. Anji took notice and turned around just in time to see the kettle land at an angle before rolling in an arc on the counter and careening to the floor. As Fitz leapt back to avoid the boiling waterfall, he felt the same jolt rip up his left forearm, and he dropped the mug, which, naturally, shattered. Fitz shouted in anguish.

Fitz remained frozen in the middle of a chaos winding down, fearful of Murphy’s law, and of adding any more chaos to the situation. He now looked pleadingly toward the table. Anji’s lips were pursed in what  might constitute a smile, but she scooted out her chair and made her way around the edge of the room to pick the kettle up and set it upright on the counter. 

Before he could ask for someone to hand him the broom, so he could deal with the busted china, the Doctor was already up, broom and dustpan in hand. Fitz stayed tensed up as he felt broom bristles sweep past his sock-feet. He could hear the Doctor humming gently as they swept the fragments into the dustpan. He suddenly realized he’d been holding his breath, and inhaled. 

“Oh, I used to have these butterfingers moments at the office all the time!” Anji reassured Fitz, pulling a towel from beneath the sink to blot up the water. “Those paper cups especially can be a real bitch, especially when you forget the little sleeves...” She wrang the towel out into the sink and bent down for another round.

The Doctor finished sweeping up the visible shards, and deposited them in the bin. “Watch your feet,” they said, offering Fitz a hand to balance on as he stepped out of the incident-radius. As Fitz found his footing, they began to sweep the area once more, to catch any missed bits. Fitz just sank into the nearest chair, embarrassed over the outburst he’d caused. 

Anji had stopped talking to focus on cleaning the water, and other than the Doctor’s faint humming, the kitchen felt mockingly quiet to Fitz. He stared at his hands, flexing them, trying to bring each fingertip to his thumb in turn. His fingers felt like molasses, which is what had prompted him to take a break from practising for tea in the first place. Now, however, they seemed to buzz with background radiation, as though they would go off and hit him with a jolt again at any moment…

“Hey,” piped up Anji as she tossed the towel into the kitchen hamper, “I’m actually going to go for a jog,” She slipped out the door, and poked her head back through “I’ll see you both later!”

Fitz could now hear the Doctor behind him, busily starting a new kettle for a pot of tea, the whole time still humming. He turned in the chair, slinging an arm over the back, and watched the Doctor deftly pull tins of loose tea down from the cupboard. They began to combine them in the sieve of a teapot, a pinch of this, a scoop of that, and a sprinkling of the other. The motions were entrancing to Fitz, like a dance. Soon enough the kettle was whistling again, and the Doctor was pouring hot water into the pot. They picked it up gingerly, and glided over to the table, setting it down, and coming back ‘round once more with two mugs, before sitting down next to Fitz at the table. 

“My own special blend,” they said as they plopped down. They pulled out a fob watch and stared it down for a moment. “It needs five minutes.” They set the watch down on the table. “So,” The Doctor took Fitz’s hands, and looked him in the eye. “Six hours?”

Fitz felt his face go flush. He had been hammering away at his guitar in desperation all day, and the day before that… and the day before that. It hadn’t seemed like any kind of problem at the time, but now that the Doctor was staring deep into his eyes, full of concern, he felt almost embarrassed to admit what he’d done. 

“I…” Fitz started, but he knew the Doctor had heard him the first time, when he’d explained himself to Anji. Chops or no chops, trying to practice endlessly for days in a row wasn’t going to help him. “Give me a second.” He said, and got up to go to the sink.

“Take your time,” the Doctor said softly, and watched Fitz intently with their wide eyes as he turned on the hot tap, and stuck his hands underneath, letting the warm water flow over them. The background buzzing sensation began to subside.

“I mean,” Fitz said over the running water, “I’ve played gigs almost that long, Doc. And everything was so rusty, and I mean rusty, you wouldn’t even want to know!” His chest was quivering as he thought back to the hours he’d just spent trying to revive scales, fingerpicking rolls, and solos that had come so easily to him before they’d all been caught away from the TARDIS, and by extension any guitar he could practice on. He turned off the tap, making his way back over to the table, and fell into it with a sigh. “It- it all felt so distant, like I might not get it back or something. And the more I played the worse it got.”

Fitz had left out the worst part. The stupid song he’d been toying with writing before they’d left to check out a quick distress call - and been pulled away - he hadn’t managed to write any of it down, and it was all gone now. He kept circling back around to it, and it was just there, beyond the tip of his brain, but he couldn’t seem to reach it and- 

The Doctor began pouring the tea into theirs and Fitz’s mugs, bringing Fitz back to reality. “Here,” the Doctor said, lifting the mug near Fitz’s face. “Smell it. Slowly.” As he slowly inhaled, and took in the aroma of the tea, he realized it was the first full breath he’d taken in minutes, possibly hours. Breathing in time with the music made for easy counting, but in the long run left him dazed like this.

The Doctor lifted one of Fitz’s hands tenderly up to the mug so he’d grab it, and Fitz brought his other hand up for security; he wasn’t going to risk breaking another mug, not today. The Doctor let go tentatively, not breaking their intent gaze on Fitz. The mug was warm on his hands, and he cradled it to his lips. Fitz took his first sip. 

The tea was sweet, almost floral, and as it went down, he could feel his shoulders drop a little, relaxing. The Doctor’s face broke from an expression of concern into a light smile, and they lifted a hand to Fitz’s shoulder, squeezing it gently. They lifted their own cup to their lips with their other hand and took a sip.

“Let’s take some time to sit, and drink our tea.” The Doctor said. Fitz closed his eyes for a moment, and just sipped the tea slowly. “Do you feel a bit more centered now?” They asked after a minute or two, and Fitz nodded. Once he finished the cup, he opened his eyes, and set the cup down, and began to fidget with his hands again. This time he took the fingers of one hand by the other, and started pulling them back into a stretch.

He was interrupted by the Doctor quickly setting down their mug and intervening. “Hang on, Fitz.” They said. “You don’t want to pry your hands back like that.” They began to reach down Fitz’s wrist and forearm, as though they were reading some kind of written code with their fingertips, gently probing into his muscles. The Doctor’s thumb ran into a tender spot, and Fitz winced.

The Doctor’s eyebrows furrowed, barely, and they let out a soft “hm,” at that. They kept one hand grasped loosely around Fitz’s forearm, steadying it as they began to take his fingers back once more, more slowly, deliberately this time. The motion stopped the instant Fitz began to feel tension in his forearm, and the Doctor held his hand there, slowly counting under their breath. Thirty counts later, they released his hand, and started on the other one. “You don’t ever want to force your hands, especially at your age”

Fitz’s stomach iced over. “My age?” His mind went reeling, thinking about the Doctor’s perfectly constant appearance over the years, unchanging, as opposed to his own.

“Well, children can stretch their ligaments and they pop right back,” The Doctor explained. The ice in Fitz’s stomach began to thaw, slowly. “But once you’re in your twenties, or sometimes your late teens, they’re simply not as flexible, and you need to be gentle.”

“Yours are still flexible, though, aren’t they?” Fitz asked, afraid to hear the answer. It was almost unfair, the thought of the Doctor being so supple endlessly, timelessly.

The Doctor released his left hand, slowly. “Well, more so than yours,” They admitted, “But not so much more.” The Doctor frowned, taking Fitz’s right-hand fingers and beginning to rub a thumb against them, slowly working out the tension. “Robert was still in his twenties when he ruined his hands.”

Fitz had just barely inhaled in order to ask Robert who? But the Doctor was one step ahead, as always. “Schumann. He was worried about losing the strength in his fingers, and devised a way to work them out, one-at-a-time. But it was ill-conceived, and he only made things worse.” The Doctor slid their fingers contemplatively over Fitz’s index and middle finger, as though to highlight them. They seemed to be looking through Fitz, through the floor, somewhere beyond. Their frown deepened. “He wound up paralyzing two of his fingers, and couldn’t play after that.”

The two sat in deafening silence for a moment, not even breathing. 

The Doctor inhaled, as though coming up from underwater, “At least, not the way he wanted to. He was still a fantastic composer, though. I still have some of his manuscripts lying around somewhere. And his wife! You would have loved her…” They smiled dreamily.

A few days later, the Doctor was folded onto the loveseat in the console room, deep in a book, when Fitz walked in and started fiddling with the phonograph. The Doctor checked their fob watch “Twenty minutes over,” They observed. 

The phonograph now running, with gentle classical guitar pouring out, Fitz plopped down on the loveseat facing the Doctor. “Thanks for letting me know.” Fitz said, as he intertwined his legs with the Doctor’s, bringing the two closer. “I’m trying to hold myself to a time limit, but today I had a breakthrough!” He held out his right hand to the Doctor, who set down their book.

“You did?” They reached out to take Fitz’s hand. They began to gently stretch his hand, then work their fingertips over Fitz’s knuckles, and into the knots at the base of his thumb, which had already greatly subsided. Then the Doctor moved on to his forearm, slowly sweeping their cool thumbs broadly over the muscles in his wrist. 

As the Doctor worked, Fitz started absentmindedly playing with the ruffles in their coat with his free hand. After practising, the veneer his calluses normally placed on his sense of touch was lifted, and Fitz could feel the velvet and lace fully with his sensitive fingertips. It was his favorite part of the new ritual the two had developed.

“Yeah, I, uh, I needed a minute to write down a song I’d started before we got dragged away for so long.” Fitz reached inside his coat, pulling out a notebook and balancing it on his leg to open it. “It finally came back to me today! Isn’t that fantastic?”

The Doctor beamed “It is!”

Fitz started to scan a finger down the lazily scribbled notes on the page. “Scales are coming along… alright I guess. I need a minute before I’m improvising again but they’re on their way. I went over some simple songs I wasn’t too worried about, and they’re fine. There were a few pieces with fiddly bits, and I need to work on them, but…” Fitz looked up and smiled “I’ve got time.”