"You still would have deserved my original threat, had I ever thought I had any hopes of following through with it," he said, trying and failing to keep an irritated or indifferent look on his face. But the Doctor's smile, an actual smile despite everything that was going wrong around them both, was infectious, and he found himself giving a grin as well.

It had been so long since he had shared an emotion in particular with the Doctor, he realized. Usually, when one was filled with a kind of exultation, the other was left despairing.

"And while you were in the midst of your followers." He had tried to make quite certain that the prank would not be repeated. He felt the Doctor's eyes on him, and sought them out with his own.

"What?"