#it's a short one but I'm too tored to proofread the longer ones oops

[i-am-become-a-name]

Prompt - December 1st. The sea.

It wasn't as if he gravitated there intentionally - frankly, he'd be more comfortably at home on a village green in this regeneration-, or that there was purpose in his fingers over the controls or the brush of the TARDIS's mind against his, but in their quieter moments, they came to the sea.

Oh, they had had some less than pleasant times by the sea , the creeping infections of Eldrad and the Xaranthi, but there was something freeing in the sand and the expanse of water that even Turlough, out of place with his ginger hair and delicate skin, could not help but relent to, albeit with complaints about the profusion of sand.

But it was Tegan the Doctor took a quiet pleasure in watching, the ever present suspicion and underlying unhappiness lifting off her face like the sun burning away the morning's fog. Her shoulders would loosen, shoes left forgotten as she paddled in the shallows, or crouched over rock pools with him, indulging in the childish streak of curiosity and wonder at these civilisations in miniature. He knew that travelling with him was wearing on her, that it would not be long before their time, as it must always, would come to an end.

But each beach was a moment more stolen, a carefully hoarded memory of peace, and friendly bickering, of makeshift driftwood cricket stumps left to stand as they tramped back to the TARDIS, sunburnt, hungry and tired. The seas would wash the physical evidence of their happinesses away, but the universe itself would still remember long after they were all gone.