Junk Food Heaven

Fic: Junk Food Heaven
Author: zotlot
Rating: U
BETA: Wikkid.X
Characters/Pairings: Ten.5/Rose
Spoilers: If you've seen Journey's End, you're good
Disclaimer: I don't own anything you recognize... however, I do own the cereals... mwahaha!
Summary: The Human Doctor (now John Tyler) and Rose are living a 'normal' life as UNIT operatives in Chicago. What happens when he gets curious about his food?

A/N: Hi! I'm back again! Um, okay, this story's a one-shot based on 'Junk Food Heaven', a piece from Bill Bryson's 'Notes from a Big Country'. Just a bit of back story: Rose and 10.5 got married in the parallel universe, and he took her name, becoming John Tyler.

Just to solve any ambiguity there :D, alright, well, as always, read and review!

BETA'd by the amazing Wikkid.X :D

***

Rose Tyler was a woman of many talents. She could build dimensional cannons that would cross universes, absorb the entire time vortex and channel it to do her bidding, and even face down Jackie Tyler when she was in a mood.

Yes, John Tyler (né The Doctor) knew perfectly well what a wonder his wife was. However, there was one talent that he had noticed that she was exceptionally deficient in: food shopping. He had taken her all over the Universe (in a different body, but with the same amazing mind), shown her alien bazaars and malls the size of small moons, helped her to sample some of the finest and most diverse cuisine in the universe, but now that they were submerged in as alien a culture as the Doctor had ever encountered, full time, living in a house with doors and carpets and everything, she still insisted upon eating English health food. She had lived off of it when she was a Torchwood field operative, when she kept to a strict health plan, and she had yet to break the habit. She ran for miles every morning (as did he, it was one of their routine ‘things’ that made this human life so amazing), and when she got back she insisted upon tucking into oat cakes and celery, even though there was plenty of far tastier food to be sampled.

In fact, since their relocation to this Chicago not-quite-suburb, the Doctor had to admit that he had sampled very little of twenty-first-century American culture at all. In fact, besides the whole surrounded-by-American-accents thing, the move had been nearly seamless. As Rose had hoped, really, when they moved to the new UNIT base in Illinois from Torchwood in London. Rose had wanted to “get away” from her hometown, really from her home country all together. If they couldn’t travel in time and space, she’d said, and then at least they could move to a place where there would be enough difference to keep them busy.

And enough freedom from the spectre of him that lurked on every London street corner. He hadn’t realized, until he was stuck there, how much he had marked London as his own, in both his and Rose’s eyes.

Yes, they had needed the move. But now that they were fending for themselves, away from Jackie’s eagle eyes, he found more and more that his own ‘human’ tastes were developing. And he had developed, on this steady rabbit-food diet, an extreme distaste for health food.

So, with this in mind, he approached his wife one morning with a rather unusual request.

Rose stood in the kitchen, her hands on her hips, regarding her husband. “You want to go shopping with me?” her voice was incredulous.

“Yep! Never been to an American supermarket before.”

“So, why would you want to all of a sudden?”

“Well… I want to investigate the food aisles. I think you miss a lot of the food this country has to offer, Rose.”

Roses eyebrows went even higher, “You’re serious? You actually want to do the food shop?”

“Why not?”

“Isn’t it a bit… domestic?”

The Doctor laughed and put his hands tenderly on Rose’s slender shoulders, “Rose, I’m human now, remember? One heart, able to live in a house with curtains and carpets, able to handle a supermarket.”

“I suppose…” Then a comment he had made earlier sank in, “Wait, what did you mean about missing what the supermarket has to offer?”

“Well, I see all these ads and stuff on TV, and you know that rabbit health stuff tastes like Juhuian-gan cardboard…”

“You want to go and buy junk food?” Rose giggled, “What about keeping your girlish figure?”

The Doctor ran an unconscious hand down his skinny waistline. “It can’t be that bad. I mean, we spent ages before looking for a decent chippy. How different can American food really be?” He looked down into her eyes, the pout on his face that he knew that she couldn’t resist.

Rose was a little taken aback by the Doctor’s determination. She looked up again at the man she had married, taking once again the enthusiasm, the boundless energy that filled his whole body. This him was different. The former him had been more… compressed. Like he had been holding an immense power inside, working to contain it the whole time. This Doctor was more relaxed, the energy was still there, but the fires had cooled in his eyes.

He didn’t scare her anymore. And now, standing before her, a childish pout on his face, all puppy-dog eyes and pleading, she was reminded more of Tony when he wanted sweets than the fearsome Oncoming Storm.

Rose sighed. “Alright, if you have to; I was going later today anyway.”

***

They arrived at the Wal Mart at two o’clock that afternoon. It was a massive hypermarket, bigger than anything you could have achieved planning permission for back in London. The Doctor eyed it with an unimpressed raised eyebrow as he and Rose walked to the front doors.

However, any disappointment faded as soon as they were inside. The room was a paradise of brightly coloured packaging, advertising, and American consumerism. He was accosted by the smells of roasting chicken and frying meats on spits and deli counters. People shouted to each other, chatted quietly, argued and made up all around him; the sounds of hundreds of American citizens going about their everyday lives. Their energy seemed to reverberate in the air.

The Doctor grinned, rubbing his hands together with glee. The familiar endorphin rush of exploration and discovery filled his brain, and he headed off into the nearest varicoloured aisle with a bright grin on his face.

***

Rose tried as hard as she possibly could to keep an eye on her rather over-enthused companion, but really she didn’t stand a chance. He had once called her “jeopardy friendly” and had told her repeatedly not to run off. She had learnt early on that that was a rule only for human companions, not Time Lords, or those with Time Lord brains. As she had made her way to the vegetable aisles and small section of the supermarket dedicated to healthy food and organic, she spotted a flash of skinny, pinstriped arse headed in the direction of the cereal aisles.

She shrugged. He could take care of himself, and she had the credit cards.

***

The Doctor was sure that the cereal aisle alone could have occupied him for the rest of the afternoon. His superior mind counted at least one hundred and fifty different brands of breakfast meal; every possible foodstuff that could be puffed, coated in sugar and then covered in milk was there on those shelves. He bounced on the soles of his black converse-clad feet as he perused the shelves, knowing for sure that Rose could never have truly explored this store. If she had seen this aisle, then there would be no need for the muesli she insisted upon eating.

Hs eyes finally came to rest upon a red and white striped box with a large picture of a mad rabbit on the front. From what he could tell, the cereal consisted of chocolate-chip cookies that you simply doused in milk and ate out of the bowl. It claimed, also, to be “part of a balanced diet” which, coupled with the knowledge that Rose really did love chocolate, would help him to convince her of the brilliance of this invention.

Similar logic indicated his absolute duty in grabbing a box of “Honey Clusters” - endorsed by a rather manic-looking bear - “Sugar Puff Magic Squares” - which claimed by the design of the box to be something to do with chess - and the fearsomely brightly advertised “Chocolate-Honey-Sugar-Crunch” which seemed to contain every kind of sugar and E-Number ever discovered by twenty-first century man.

He ended up with an armload of huge cereal boxes, as he regretfully left the aisle. He walked briskly along the centre aisle, finally spotting Rose’s blonde head over the top of a vegetable crisper. He rushed over to her and deposited his spoils in her large trolley.

She took the in violently bright pile with a sceptical raised eyebrow. “What’s all this, then?”

“Breakfast.” The Doctor explained, before rushing back off into the store. He stopped as he saw her eyeing the pile less than enthusiastically. “And don’t even think about going back and changing it for muesli!” he warned before scooting off in a random direction and leaving his wife to wonder how he had read her mind.

The world that the Doctor had now immersed himself in was one of few mysteries. Every food around him seemed specifically designed to accommodate as many chemicals as possible in order to make you simultaneously waddle under your own weight and crave more of the stuff that got you there in the first place. Still, he inspected the aisles with wide eyes, taking one of anything that caught his eye and depositing it in his newly-found basket.

One such food was a large pot of violently pink goo called “Fluff” which appeared to be marshmallow sandwich filling. He grabbed a massive tub of it, and relished the idea that, should it turn out to be inedible, he could at least use it in repairs, as it shared much the same chemical content as super-glue.

Finally, he reached the heart of the store, “Aisle Seven”, which appeared to be purely made up of “food for the terminally obese”. Not a slim-fast brand was in sight, as he walked up and down the aisle, taking in its wonders, his groaning basket swinging in his hand. He found an entire section devoted entirely to a sugar-coated substance called “toaster pastry”. In all his travels, he had never encountered such an item, but, as it appeared to be covered in sugar, he added an armload to his basket.

By this point, Rose had finished her shopping, loaded up their Jeep, and come back in to find her husband. When she saw his basket, she immediately fetched a trolley, knowing instinctively from years of experience that that basket was perilously close to destruction. She followed the Doctor through the store, commenting on his purchases with an ever increasing scepticism. She watched microwave burgers, toaster strudel, choco-toffee-spreads, all manner of junk food disappear into that trolley, until, finally, in the frozen-foods aisle, she snapped.

“No.”

“What? What’s wrong with a breakfast pizza?”

“What did you just say? It’s like ‘what’s wrong with blue?’. Just. No.”

“But Rose, c’mon, it looks so tasty! It’s pizza! You like pizza!”

“You are not bringing home something called breakfast pizza. I will let you have” - she reached into the trolley for some samples - “Chocolate-Honey-Sugar-Crunch and Toaster Pastries and.’ She lifted out a packet she hadn’t noticed before. “What’s this?”

The Doctor looked over her shoulder. “Microwave pancakes.”

“Microwave pancakes,” Rose repeated, but with less enthusiasm.

“Isn’t science wonderful?” The Doctor said, with a bright grin.

Rose Tyler crossed her arms and gave him a look that was all Jackie “You’re going to eat it all,” she said. “Every bit of everything that you don’t put back on the shelves now. You do understand that?”

“Of course.” The Doctor said, all sincerity.

***

The look on her face at that moment stayed there for the next three or four weeks. It was a wicked, smug, ‘I told you so’ look that returned every mealtime, every time he complained of feeling bloated or a stitch while they ran.

The pancakes and some of the cereals were alright, and, although it proved to be almost completely inedible, the Fluff was, as he had hoped, very useful in repairs to UNIT’s alien tech, which had been entrusted to him as the local expert.

However, the biggest mistake was most definitely the breakfast pizzas. They were damp and chewy, and seemed to have very little flavour for the amount of salt they contained. Out of desperation, one day when Rose was out he even tried one with the neon-pink Fluff, but all that resulted was a sticky, disgusting mess that was in the bin before Rose could come home and do something about it.

What unnerved him most, however, about that particular combination was the fact that he could have sworn that it had glared at him from the bin. He slammed it closed with a triumphant “HA!” and, when one of its brethren was found behind the fridge a month later, he insisted upon categorizing it as medical waste and sterilizing the fridge after.

Finally, two months after the Wal Mart raid, the Doctor ate his last artery-clogging, tooth-rotting spoonful of Chocolate-Honey-Sugar-Crunch cereal.

His belly was bloated, his mind was addled, and he was sure that, should he ever touch a “French fry” again, he would explode.

He stood up, and, without a hint of shame, grabbed a stick of celery and an oatcake from the cupboard. He ignored Rose, who had sneaked in and insisted upon watching his last jaunt into he land of American Food, and loftily refused to acknowledge her smirk, sweeping past her without a backwards glance.

That was the first and last time the Doctor ever visited the Wal Mart.