Yowzah Oneshot Collection (1)

80(M)Mattex

Alex Kingston was more than a bit jet-lagged when she showed up on set for the read-through of the second episode of Series 7 to feature River Song. Since it was summer, she’d thought she could bring Salome, but then her daughter’s best friend had begged Salome to go to some sort of girl scout sleep-away camp. Instead of bringing her daughter with her for the two weeks of work and two weeks of vacation Alex had planned,  she’d ended up staying home until the absolute last minute, helping a nervous-but-excited Salome pack all the essentials (and a few non-essentials, such as one teddy bear that Salome had firmly insisted she didn’t need, but that Alex knew she would be grateful to discover hiding in her bags when she arrived) she would need for her three weeks at camp. Florian was then going to pick her up and have her live with him for the fourth week, after which Alex would be back. All of this of course necessitated that she take the last possible flight out of LA to get to the Monday-morning readthrough. She’d “slept” on the plane, technically, if one could really call that sleeping, and headed straight for the meeting after she landed. Thank goodness the Doctor Who team had thought to check on her flight details and send along a cab to pick her up, because she wasn’t sure she would have had the presence of mind at the moment to do so herself.

Once she arrived she attempted to sneak into the back of the room, clutching the script they’d mailed her two weeks ago and hiding the bags under her eyes behind sunglasses. At the front of the room Steven went through the revisions they would be using in today’s readthrough. Unfortunately her attempted sneaking was rendered rather moot by the cry of “Kingston!” shouted by the ever-gangly, often-cheerful Matt Smith who obviously wanted her to sit by him. As the whole room was now staring at her, she smiled, removed the sunglasses, and headed for the seat next to Matt, nodding to Steven and pausing to introduce herself to the new girl on her way by. Matt eagerly patted the seat of the chair next to him and she couldn’t help but laugh - the man was always slightly reminiscent of a puppy with a new toy whenever she came into town. It would have been a blatant lie for her to say that she didn’t enjoy it, and even look forward to it. They flirted almost as relentlessly as their characters, and Alex always felt so alive around him - it was a real ego-boost to be able to play that game with someone as young as Matt.

At the moment, his eagerness wasn’t helping her exhaustion however, and she sighed audibly as she sank into her seat, dropping her bag next to her and putting her head in her hands for a second.  He nudged her, and she opened her eyes to glare at him through the fingers of her right hand and a puff of curls. Instead of puppy dog excitement, she was met with the eyes of a man who’d done enough jet-setting of his own to know what jet-lag looked and felt like, now that he’d had a chance to see her up close. He slid his coffee toward her arms and she grabbed it without hesitation. Then he gestured for her script, and she handed it over to him. She mouthed, “Thank you,” before sinking back into the chair with the coffee, and he smiled, opening to the page they were currently adjusting and taking notes on her script as well as his own. Alex proceeded to sip at the hot coffee, feeling almost alive by the time they started the readthrough properly. Matt handed her script back to her without comment and they both settled into their roles, flying through the readthrough and earning many laughs and occasional applause as River and the Doctor. He ad-libbed a few lines about her hair and she threw in a quip about removing his bow tie with her teeth.

As they reached the end of the script they came to their kissing scene, and as they finished the lines leading up to it, Alex looked over at Matt, planning to wink or at the very least make a kissy face in jest. She found him frowning down at his script, eyes glued to the line “they kiss.” She looked back at her own script and re-read the line as well, trying to come up with something that could be bothering Matt. He usually spent the week of a kissing shoot making references to the kiss as often as possible and really building it up like some sort of reward for both of them. She had text messages from him saved on her phone from the Wedding of River Song shoot with goofy things like “T-minus 10h to snogging!” And it had seemed like they’d both had a wonderful time shooting that scene. She even recalled their mutual quips about kissing all night being immortalized on that Confidential show. She smiled to herself as she remembered the warmth of his arms around her and the brilliance of his smile as they’d pulled away from each other. She almost laughed at herself - all well and good to enjoy a stage kiss, Alex, but let’s not get out of hand.