A Proper House with Doors and Things (2/4)
Title - A Proper House with Doors and Things (2/4)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - Ten, Rose, Jackie, OCs
Spoilers - I don't think there are any, really, but let's say through "A Good Man Goes to War," just to be safe.
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids and their taggers-along, they're all mine.)
Summary - The Doctor wants to buy a house. As usual, what could possibly go wrong?
Author's Notes - Happy Thanksgiving!
Many thanks to chicklet73, who made this better.
Part One
Part Two
They did not quite all fit into Jackie’s flat anymore. Even so, after all this time, she refused to move. It was too late to make changes, she said, and all her friends were all around her. Old dogs, she insisted, could not be taught new tricks.
It meant that, when the family convened in Jackie’s flat, it was crowded. Why they didn’t just use their limitlessly large TARDISes for such conventions was a source of endless mystification to the human parts of the family, but the Time Lords didn’t seem to notice the inconvenience.
They truly, Matt thought, had no concept of space.
“Sixty-five square meters,” the Doctor was saying, enthusiastically, waving a newspaper around. “That’s big enough! It’ll fit all our furniture!”
“All your furniture?” echoed Matt.
“Yup,” affirmed the Doctor, popping the “p.”
“What do you mean when you say ‘all your furniture’?” asked Matt.
“Wellllll, I mean all our furniture.”
All of the Time Lords were looking at Matt as if he was daft, including his children.
“The rooms on your TARDIS have mansion dimensions,” he pointed out, patiently.
“And?” said the Doctor, clearly not seeing a problem.
“Sixty-five square meters is no mansion.”
The Doctor was silent, staring at him.
“He’s saying our stuff won’t fit, Doctor,” Rose told him.
“Our stuff won’t fit.” The Doctor didn’t seem to comprehend that. “But-”
“Same size on the inside as on the outside,” said Brem. “It is not fun. I recommend cheating a bit when it comes to the dimensions of the fridge.”
“Cheating,” exclaimed the Doctor, frowning at his son. “We’re not going to cheat.”
“Then you’re going to need more than sixty-five square meters,” remarked Jackie. “Just your tinkering stuff alone will fill sixty-five square meters.”
“She’s right,” agreed Rose. “And I don’t want you tinkering all over my bed.”
“You make that sound like it’s a bad thing,” pouted the Doctor.
“It is. You inevitably lose something in the bedsheets and blame it on me.”
“Can we change this subject now?” asked Brem.
“Don’t you have a realtor?” said Matt.
“Thank you,” Brem told him.
The Doctor looked at Matt. “What’s that?”
Jackie sighed. “Don’t you know anything?”
The Doctor puffed himself up in indignation.
“Aside from how to travel through time and space,” Jackie headed him off.
The Doctor frowned at her.
Matt kept talking as if he hadn’t been interrupted. He was used to this method of conversing. “A realtor will help you find a house. She’ll, you know, find the right listings and take you to see the places and help you when it comes to making the purchase and getting the mortgage and stuff.”
Matt watched all of the Time Lords mull this idea over. Harry, who had, in his idolization of his uncle Brem, taken to journaling, was taking careful notes in his journal. Matt imagined it looked something like, Realtor: human term. Defined by Dad.
“It sounds like a realtor takes all the fun out of the process,” decided the Doctor. “Like the realtor gets to have all the fun, instead of you.”
Sylvain looked amused. “Time Lords don’t need realtors, Matt,” he said, his eyes twinkling at him. Sylvain had a louche French view of the craziness of this life. He thought Matt was hilarious in his efforts to make things make more sense. Matt supposed Time Agents were more accustomed to nonsensicalities than human medical doctors were.
“Matt has a point, though,” said Rose. “At least if we’re going to look at houses, we should look at ones that are big enough for us. What’s the point if we just go on the TARDIS for family dinners? It would be nice to have a dining room big enough for all of us.”
“So the dining room will stay the same size, no matter how many people are eating in it?” asked Tam. “It’ll still be huge, even if it’s just you and Granddad?”
Matt looked at his younger son, whose face was scrunched up with the confusion of this idea. Tam, who knew everything about the anatomy of humans, Time Lords, and assorted other aliens, because Tam wanted to be a doctor like his father and a Doctor like his grandfather (even if Harry was the one who had the term as his middle name). Tam, who knew more than Matt could ever comprehend, even at his young age, and yet couldn’t understand a dining room that would stay the same size.
“It seems,” announced Harry, decisively, “like a waste of space.” He wrote something in his journal with a flourish.
***
Harry was an excellent artist. Athena wasn’t sure where this talent came from, since none of them seemed to be any good at drawing. Her father said he had been good at it, in other regenerations, and she supposed that was the funny thing about the way genes worked, especially triple-helixed DNA genes. At any rate, Harry was drawing an extremely detailed schematic of the Perfect House that he wanted his grandparents to get. The Perfect House looked a great deal like their particular TARDIS, which made sense to Athena: That was the point of a TARDIS. It was the Perfect House. Her parents, she thought, were mad.
But really, she thought, sitting on the floor in her sons’ nursery, watching Harry draw while Tam used his sonic screwdriver to pulse a toy train across the floor, maybe her parents weren’t mad. Maybe her father was just acknowledging that he’d married a human, with a human family, and that came with houses.
“Do you wish we lived in a house?” she asked, abruptly.
Tam looked up at her, looking confused. “What do you mean?”
“Do you wish we lived in a house?”
Tam sat back on his heels, thoughtful. “What do we live in now?”
“A TARDIS,” she reminded him.
“But isn’t a TARDIS a house?” he pointed out, reasonably.
“Welllll. Yes, it’s a type of house.” She smiled. “Wehttam Bremsstrahlung Mailloux, when did you get so clever?”
Tam grinned in delight and shrugged.
“You mean a house that doesn’t change?” Harry asked, from his drawing table. “A house with dining rooms that stay big even when it’s just you eating in them?”
“Yes. A house like that.”
“I bet the TARDIS would do that for us if we asked her,” Tam decided, confidently, and buzzed his sonic screwdriver at his train.
“Yes,” she acknowledged. “I bet she would. What do you think, Harry?” She glanced back over to her older son.
Harry was shading in something. He replied without looking up. “I told you, it seems like a waste of space to me.”
It was Tam who’d been named for him, but it was Harry, she thought, who reminded her most often of Brem. She shook her head a bit, smiling fondly, and then stood up. “Behave,” she told them. “I’ll be back.”
The hallway was dim as she moved to the control room, an acknowledgment that, as far as Matt was concerned, it was the middle of the night. The TARDIS seemed to follow the pattern of an Earth day out of deference to Matt. Athena monitored their path in the Vortex, but everything seemed secure and unremarkable. So she wandered instead to their bedroom, which she almost never used and had used to refer to as “Matt’s room” until he told her it made him feel like a temporary houseguest she was keeping in a spare room, and so she’d made a conscious effort not to think of it that way anymore. She knew she did things like that, more often than she’d like, things that hurt Matt’s feelings, without even knowing she was doing them, without having any idea that whatever she was doing could cause hurt feelings. Sometimes she wanted to ask her father how he’d done it for so many years, lived with a creature as incomprehensible as a human being, how he’d done it so successfully. Then, whenever she was with her parents, she remembered the answer: Her mother was a saint.
Athena tripped over something in the dark on her way to the bed, and wondered how much disarray the room was in. She was terrible at keeping house, she knew, mostly because that’s what TARDISes were for. And Matt had so much clothing. It was impossible for her to keep on top of how much clothing he insisted had to be cleaned as regularly as he insisted it had to be cleaned. He tended to do his own laundry, because he knew it bewildered her, and she was happy with that arrangement, because it was all too confusing for her.
She half-fell into bed with him as a result of the tripping, and then she adjusted herself, wriggling into position, laying next to him and watching the sleeping outline of him.
“You know,” his voice came, “when you lay in the dark and stare at me, it wakes me up.”
“How can that wake you up?” she asked.
“I’m amazing,” he deadpanned, and reached for her, but she pulled back a bit. “Theenie?”
“Do you want to live in a house?”
“What?”
“A house. Like a human house.”
“We live in something like a human house.”
“A real human house,” she clarified, impatiently.
“Is this some sort of phase all of you are going through right now? The human house phase? Are there some books I can read about how to deal with it?”
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I. What’s wrong with the TARDIS?”
“Nothing’s wrong with the TARDIS.”
“Do you promise?”
“Yes. Why?” It was confusing to her, that this was what he was asking.
“Because the only reason you would ever want to live in a human house was if something was wrong with the TARDIS.”
“That’s not true, Matt.” She was offended. “I’d live in one for you.”
He was silent for a moment. “Theenie,” he said, finally, but she couldn’t tell how to read that.
“I would,” she said, earnestly. “If you wanted to. It’s just…It’s why my father’s doing it, right? A human wife and a human family and I didn’t want you to think that we couldn’t do that. I mean, I know I do such a terrible job with the boys-”
“What are you talking about?” he asked. His voice held that patient exasperation that she recognized from countless other discussions with him, that soft, frustrated affection that she loved so much.
“They’re half you.”
“I’d always hoped so, but the confirmation is good to know.”
She shoved him in the darkness. “I’m trying to-”
“I know.” He pulled her inexorably, almost against her will, until she was sprawled on top of him, pretending that she didn’t want to be. “You ridiculous Gallifreyan.”
“That’s the thing, right? Sometimes I think that to you they must be so…You look at them sometimes and you look like you’re trying to figure them out. Like the thing with the jigsaw puzzles. Like today when they couldn’t understand a human house. And then I think, do they not know enough about where they came from? Both sides of where they came from? There’s so much of you in them, Matt. I see it all the time. And sometimes I think that maybe I’m not doing enough to nurture that, and I don’t mean to be-”
“Stop it,” he cut in, and cupped his hands around her face. “It’s fine.”
“Is it, though?” she asked, fearfully.
“Yes.” He paused. “I won’t lie to you, there are some times that I’m floored by the things they say and do. But I think that’s just being a parent, Athena. And every time I worry maybe they’re too alien for me to understand them anymore, do you know what happens?”
“What?”
“I see them do something that makes your father stare at them like they’ve just landed from another planet. Earth, as a matter of fact. I can see him thinking, ‘That’s their father in them’. And that always makes me feel better.”
She chuckled and leaned her head down, her nose pressed into his neck.
“I said that to my father, you know, once.”
“Said what?” she asked him.
“I said that I was, well, scared. That I had no idea how I was supposed to raise children who were going to turn out so much more amazing than I am.”
She lifted her head and looked down at him. “And what did he say?”
“He said the same thing terrified him when I was small.”
She smiled at him and leaned her head down again, settling against him.
“You’ll tell them that, right?”
“Tell who what?” she asked, contentedly.
“The boys. When they have children. You’ll remind them that I told you that. That parenthood is just like that.”
Athena said nothing, into the stillness of their room. She wanted to tell him to stop being silly, that he would be around when their boys had children, that he would tell them himself. But she knew that might not be true, they both knew it, and Athena tried to be accepting of that, tried not to get bogged down in the fear of it. “Yes,” she said, eventually. “I’ll tell them. If you’re not still here, I’ll tell them.”
“Good.”
He sounded slightly hollow about the whole thing, and she knew that he must wonder about everything he wouldn’t get to see. But to ask him about that would have been the same as admitting that he should regret having children with her at all, and she couldn’t deal with that.
“You make me so very happy,” she said, instead.
“Good,” he said again.
“I worry that I can’t possibly be making you as happy as you make me,” she confessed.
“You know what makes me happy?”
“What?”
“You telling me that I make you happy.”
“How did I get you?” she marveled.
“As fate would have it, I was your brother’s college roommate.”
“Lucky you,” she said.
“Yes,” he responded. “Lucky me.”
***
There was a very particular list of Things the Doctor Didn’t Like. It had started out empty, this list. “What don’t you want in a house?” Rose had asked him, and the Doctor had frowned and said, “What? I want everything in a house!” So Rose had tried again. “What don’t you like, in a house?” “Nothing,” proclaimed the Doctor. “There is nothing I don’t like in a house.”
That turned out to be decidedly not true.
“I don’t like bathrooms that don’t have tubs,” was how it started, him dismissing the first place they saw.
Then: “I don’t like bathrooms that don’t have two sinks.”
And: “I don’t like bathrooms that don’t have natural light.”
“Our bathroom on the TARDIS doesn’t have natural light,” Rose pointed out.
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“Because our bathroom on the TARDIS has unnatural light.”
“So does this one.”
“No, this one has electrical light. That’s very different.”
It wasn’t worth the argument, as Rose hadn’t been taken with the place, either.
Since the Doctor had turned out to be particular about bathrooms, they started being more particular in what places they went to go see, bathroom-wise. But it didn’t matter, because the Doctor was just as demanding with other rooms in the house. “The only spot in the bedroom for the bed is in front of the window, I don’t like that,” he said of one place, and then of another, “But that wall is too big for the bed, it would be lost there.”
There was never enough wardrobe space.
“But…you don’t even really have clothes,” said Rose, helplessly, “you have ties.”
“I have a two-story wardrobe, Rose,” he retorted.
“Full of clothes you never wear!”
“But I might want to wear them! I might! Right now, there is possibility. There is no possibility here!”
The realtors showing the flats and the other house-hunting couples glared at him a lot, as he stalked around sniffing his disapproval of places. Some were too new and some were too old, some were too big and some were too small, none were just right. Rose felt like she was house-hunting with Goldilocks.
“We have a house,” she pointed out to him finally. “We have a perfectly nice house. We don’t need another one.”
“But I thought it would be an exciting adventure,” he pouted. “I was really looking forward to putting up wallpaper.”
“You could put up wallpaper on some walls here,” Rose suggested.
“I can’t, it would smother the TARDIS,” he said, morosely.
Rose knew her Doctor. He had gotten himself excited about this house idea. She didn’t know why, but she recognized that he wasn’t going to be satisfied until they found a house.
***
The house they eventually found was not one Rose would have expected. It was a proper large house, set on a large parcel of land surrounded by a forbidding iron fence. “Danger. Keep Out. Unsafe Structure” read the signs on the fence, but the house was for sale, and the Doctor walked confidently past them, through the overgrown garden, to the house itself. Large, yes, but completely rundown. But the Doctor saw only that the trim was TARDIS blue.
They wandered through good-sized, empty rooms, littered with detritus, abandoned dusty chandeliers and streaked mirrors, moldy walls and broken windows.
“What’s unsafe about the structure?” Rose asked the realtor, who looked as if she had been hoping that they wouldn’t ask.
She opened her mouth to reply.
“The wallpaper is peeling!” exclaimed the Doctor, gleefully, and then, before anyone could say anything else, “We’ll take it.”
***
The house was called Wester Drumlins. The Doctor loved the name. He rolled it around in his mouth like it was a fine wine. “Wester Drumlins,” he would say, bouncing back and forth on his feet. “Wes-ter-drummmmm-lins.” He said it this way whilst following the kids through the house, waiting to hear their verdict.
“It’s brilliant,” was the verdict of Harry and Tam, as they chased each other over broken tile floors.
They were all standing in the conservatory, overgrown with ivy, half of its windows missing.
“It has a conservatory,” the Doctor pointed out, proudly.
“It has…yes,” agreed Athena.
“Welllllll, I think it looks like fun,” announced Brem, with his hands deep in the pockets of his coat. He did a slow circle in the middle of the conservatory, looking up at the sky.
“An adventure, right?” said the Doctor.
Rose saw Matt and Sylvain exchange a look. She understood this look. It was the these-crazy-Time-Lords look. Sometimes she exchanged the look with them. It was good to have people to exchange these looks with, after so many years of being the only human(ish) traveler on the TARDIS. Sometimes, she and Matt and Sylvain went out and drank margaritas and shared stories about their crazy Time Lords.
She had a feeling she was going to need a lot of margaritas in her future.
Next Part
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - Ten, Rose, Jackie, OCs
Spoilers - I don't think there are any, really, but let's say through "A Good Man Goes to War," just to be safe.
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids and their taggers-along, they're all mine.)
Summary - The Doctor wants to buy a house. As usual, what could possibly go wrong?
Author's Notes - Happy Thanksgiving!
Many thanks to chicklet73, who made this better.
Part One
Part Two
They did not quite all fit into Jackie’s flat anymore. Even so, after all this time, she refused to move. It was too late to make changes, she said, and all her friends were all around her. Old dogs, she insisted, could not be taught new tricks.
It meant that, when the family convened in Jackie’s flat, it was crowded. Why they didn’t just use their limitlessly large TARDISes for such conventions was a source of endless mystification to the human parts of the family, but the Time Lords didn’t seem to notice the inconvenience.
They truly, Matt thought, had no concept of space.
“Sixty-five square meters,” the Doctor was saying, enthusiastically, waving a newspaper around. “That’s big enough! It’ll fit all our furniture!”
“All your furniture?” echoed Matt.
“Yup,” affirmed the Doctor, popping the “p.”
“What do you mean when you say ‘all your furniture’?” asked Matt.
“Wellllll, I mean all our furniture.”
All of the Time Lords were looking at Matt as if he was daft, including his children.
“The rooms on your TARDIS have mansion dimensions,” he pointed out, patiently.
“And?” said the Doctor, clearly not seeing a problem.
“Sixty-five square meters is no mansion.”
The Doctor was silent, staring at him.
“He’s saying our stuff won’t fit, Doctor,” Rose told him.
“Our stuff won’t fit.” The Doctor didn’t seem to comprehend that. “But-”
“Same size on the inside as on the outside,” said Brem. “It is not fun. I recommend cheating a bit when it comes to the dimensions of the fridge.”
“Cheating,” exclaimed the Doctor, frowning at his son. “We’re not going to cheat.”
“Then you’re going to need more than sixty-five square meters,” remarked Jackie. “Just your tinkering stuff alone will fill sixty-five square meters.”
“She’s right,” agreed Rose. “And I don’t want you tinkering all over my bed.”
“You make that sound like it’s a bad thing,” pouted the Doctor.
“It is. You inevitably lose something in the bedsheets and blame it on me.”
“Can we change this subject now?” asked Brem.
“Don’t you have a realtor?” said Matt.
“Thank you,” Brem told him.
The Doctor looked at Matt. “What’s that?”
Jackie sighed. “Don’t you know anything?”
The Doctor puffed himself up in indignation.
“Aside from how to travel through time and space,” Jackie headed him off.
The Doctor frowned at her.
Matt kept talking as if he hadn’t been interrupted. He was used to this method of conversing. “A realtor will help you find a house. She’ll, you know, find the right listings and take you to see the places and help you when it comes to making the purchase and getting the mortgage and stuff.”
Matt watched all of the Time Lords mull this idea over. Harry, who had, in his idolization of his uncle Brem, taken to journaling, was taking careful notes in his journal. Matt imagined it looked something like, Realtor: human term. Defined by Dad.
“It sounds like a realtor takes all the fun out of the process,” decided the Doctor. “Like the realtor gets to have all the fun, instead of you.”
Sylvain looked amused. “Time Lords don’t need realtors, Matt,” he said, his eyes twinkling at him. Sylvain had a louche French view of the craziness of this life. He thought Matt was hilarious in his efforts to make things make more sense. Matt supposed Time Agents were more accustomed to nonsensicalities than human medical doctors were.
“Matt has a point, though,” said Rose. “At least if we’re going to look at houses, we should look at ones that are big enough for us. What’s the point if we just go on the TARDIS for family dinners? It would be nice to have a dining room big enough for all of us.”
“So the dining room will stay the same size, no matter how many people are eating in it?” asked Tam. “It’ll still be huge, even if it’s just you and Granddad?”
Matt looked at his younger son, whose face was scrunched up with the confusion of this idea. Tam, who knew everything about the anatomy of humans, Time Lords, and assorted other aliens, because Tam wanted to be a doctor like his father and a Doctor like his grandfather (even if Harry was the one who had the term as his middle name). Tam, who knew more than Matt could ever comprehend, even at his young age, and yet couldn’t understand a dining room that would stay the same size.
“It seems,” announced Harry, decisively, “like a waste of space.” He wrote something in his journal with a flourish.
***
Harry was an excellent artist. Athena wasn’t sure where this talent came from, since none of them seemed to be any good at drawing. Her father said he had been good at it, in other regenerations, and she supposed that was the funny thing about the way genes worked, especially triple-helixed DNA genes. At any rate, Harry was drawing an extremely detailed schematic of the Perfect House that he wanted his grandparents to get. The Perfect House looked a great deal like their particular TARDIS, which made sense to Athena: That was the point of a TARDIS. It was the Perfect House. Her parents, she thought, were mad.
But really, she thought, sitting on the floor in her sons’ nursery, watching Harry draw while Tam used his sonic screwdriver to pulse a toy train across the floor, maybe her parents weren’t mad. Maybe her father was just acknowledging that he’d married a human, with a human family, and that came with houses.
“Do you wish we lived in a house?” she asked, abruptly.
Tam looked up at her, looking confused. “What do you mean?”
“Do you wish we lived in a house?”
Tam sat back on his heels, thoughtful. “What do we live in now?”
“A TARDIS,” she reminded him.
“But isn’t a TARDIS a house?” he pointed out, reasonably.
“Welllll. Yes, it’s a type of house.” She smiled. “Wehttam Bremsstrahlung Mailloux, when did you get so clever?”
Tam grinned in delight and shrugged.
“You mean a house that doesn’t change?” Harry asked, from his drawing table. “A house with dining rooms that stay big even when it’s just you eating in them?”
“Yes. A house like that.”
“I bet the TARDIS would do that for us if we asked her,” Tam decided, confidently, and buzzed his sonic screwdriver at his train.
“Yes,” she acknowledged. “I bet she would. What do you think, Harry?” She glanced back over to her older son.
Harry was shading in something. He replied without looking up. “I told you, it seems like a waste of space to me.”
It was Tam who’d been named for him, but it was Harry, she thought, who reminded her most often of Brem. She shook her head a bit, smiling fondly, and then stood up. “Behave,” she told them. “I’ll be back.”
The hallway was dim as she moved to the control room, an acknowledgment that, as far as Matt was concerned, it was the middle of the night. The TARDIS seemed to follow the pattern of an Earth day out of deference to Matt. Athena monitored their path in the Vortex, but everything seemed secure and unremarkable. So she wandered instead to their bedroom, which she almost never used and had used to refer to as “Matt’s room” until he told her it made him feel like a temporary houseguest she was keeping in a spare room, and so she’d made a conscious effort not to think of it that way anymore. She knew she did things like that, more often than she’d like, things that hurt Matt’s feelings, without even knowing she was doing them, without having any idea that whatever she was doing could cause hurt feelings. Sometimes she wanted to ask her father how he’d done it for so many years, lived with a creature as incomprehensible as a human being, how he’d done it so successfully. Then, whenever she was with her parents, she remembered the answer: Her mother was a saint.
Athena tripped over something in the dark on her way to the bed, and wondered how much disarray the room was in. She was terrible at keeping house, she knew, mostly because that’s what TARDISes were for. And Matt had so much clothing. It was impossible for her to keep on top of how much clothing he insisted had to be cleaned as regularly as he insisted it had to be cleaned. He tended to do his own laundry, because he knew it bewildered her, and she was happy with that arrangement, because it was all too confusing for her.
She half-fell into bed with him as a result of the tripping, and then she adjusted herself, wriggling into position, laying next to him and watching the sleeping outline of him.
“You know,” his voice came, “when you lay in the dark and stare at me, it wakes me up.”
“How can that wake you up?” she asked.
“I’m amazing,” he deadpanned, and reached for her, but she pulled back a bit. “Theenie?”
“Do you want to live in a house?”
“What?”
“A house. Like a human house.”
“We live in something like a human house.”
“A real human house,” she clarified, impatiently.
“Is this some sort of phase all of you are going through right now? The human house phase? Are there some books I can read about how to deal with it?”
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I. What’s wrong with the TARDIS?”
“Nothing’s wrong with the TARDIS.”
“Do you promise?”
“Yes. Why?” It was confusing to her, that this was what he was asking.
“Because the only reason you would ever want to live in a human house was if something was wrong with the TARDIS.”
“That’s not true, Matt.” She was offended. “I’d live in one for you.”
He was silent for a moment. “Theenie,” he said, finally, but she couldn’t tell how to read that.
“I would,” she said, earnestly. “If you wanted to. It’s just…It’s why my father’s doing it, right? A human wife and a human family and I didn’t want you to think that we couldn’t do that. I mean, I know I do such a terrible job with the boys-”
“What are you talking about?” he asked. His voice held that patient exasperation that she recognized from countless other discussions with him, that soft, frustrated affection that she loved so much.
“They’re half you.”
“I’d always hoped so, but the confirmation is good to know.”
She shoved him in the darkness. “I’m trying to-”
“I know.” He pulled her inexorably, almost against her will, until she was sprawled on top of him, pretending that she didn’t want to be. “You ridiculous Gallifreyan.”
“That’s the thing, right? Sometimes I think that to you they must be so…You look at them sometimes and you look like you’re trying to figure them out. Like the thing with the jigsaw puzzles. Like today when they couldn’t understand a human house. And then I think, do they not know enough about where they came from? Both sides of where they came from? There’s so much of you in them, Matt. I see it all the time. And sometimes I think that maybe I’m not doing enough to nurture that, and I don’t mean to be-”
“Stop it,” he cut in, and cupped his hands around her face. “It’s fine.”
“Is it, though?” she asked, fearfully.
“Yes.” He paused. “I won’t lie to you, there are some times that I’m floored by the things they say and do. But I think that’s just being a parent, Athena. And every time I worry maybe they’re too alien for me to understand them anymore, do you know what happens?”
“What?”
“I see them do something that makes your father stare at them like they’ve just landed from another planet. Earth, as a matter of fact. I can see him thinking, ‘That’s their father in them’. And that always makes me feel better.”
She chuckled and leaned her head down, her nose pressed into his neck.
“I said that to my father, you know, once.”
“Said what?” she asked him.
“I said that I was, well, scared. That I had no idea how I was supposed to raise children who were going to turn out so much more amazing than I am.”
She lifted her head and looked down at him. “And what did he say?”
“He said the same thing terrified him when I was small.”
She smiled at him and leaned her head down again, settling against him.
“You’ll tell them that, right?”
“Tell who what?” she asked, contentedly.
“The boys. When they have children. You’ll remind them that I told you that. That parenthood is just like that.”
Athena said nothing, into the stillness of their room. She wanted to tell him to stop being silly, that he would be around when their boys had children, that he would tell them himself. But she knew that might not be true, they both knew it, and Athena tried to be accepting of that, tried not to get bogged down in the fear of it. “Yes,” she said, eventually. “I’ll tell them. If you’re not still here, I’ll tell them.”
“Good.”
He sounded slightly hollow about the whole thing, and she knew that he must wonder about everything he wouldn’t get to see. But to ask him about that would have been the same as admitting that he should regret having children with her at all, and she couldn’t deal with that.
“You make me so very happy,” she said, instead.
“Good,” he said again.
“I worry that I can’t possibly be making you as happy as you make me,” she confessed.
“You know what makes me happy?”
“What?”
“You telling me that I make you happy.”
“How did I get you?” she marveled.
“As fate would have it, I was your brother’s college roommate.”
“Lucky you,” she said.
“Yes,” he responded. “Lucky me.”
***
There was a very particular list of Things the Doctor Didn’t Like. It had started out empty, this list. “What don’t you want in a house?” Rose had asked him, and the Doctor had frowned and said, “What? I want everything in a house!” So Rose had tried again. “What don’t you like, in a house?” “Nothing,” proclaimed the Doctor. “There is nothing I don’t like in a house.”
That turned out to be decidedly not true.
“I don’t like bathrooms that don’t have tubs,” was how it started, him dismissing the first place they saw.
Then: “I don’t like bathrooms that don’t have two sinks.”
And: “I don’t like bathrooms that don’t have natural light.”
“Our bathroom on the TARDIS doesn’t have natural light,” Rose pointed out.
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“Because our bathroom on the TARDIS has unnatural light.”
“So does this one.”
“No, this one has electrical light. That’s very different.”
It wasn’t worth the argument, as Rose hadn’t been taken with the place, either.
Since the Doctor had turned out to be particular about bathrooms, they started being more particular in what places they went to go see, bathroom-wise. But it didn’t matter, because the Doctor was just as demanding with other rooms in the house. “The only spot in the bedroom for the bed is in front of the window, I don’t like that,” he said of one place, and then of another, “But that wall is too big for the bed, it would be lost there.”
There was never enough wardrobe space.
“But…you don’t even really have clothes,” said Rose, helplessly, “you have ties.”
“I have a two-story wardrobe, Rose,” he retorted.
“Full of clothes you never wear!”
“But I might want to wear them! I might! Right now, there is possibility. There is no possibility here!”
The realtors showing the flats and the other house-hunting couples glared at him a lot, as he stalked around sniffing his disapproval of places. Some were too new and some were too old, some were too big and some were too small, none were just right. Rose felt like she was house-hunting with Goldilocks.
“We have a house,” she pointed out to him finally. “We have a perfectly nice house. We don’t need another one.”
“But I thought it would be an exciting adventure,” he pouted. “I was really looking forward to putting up wallpaper.”
“You could put up wallpaper on some walls here,” Rose suggested.
“I can’t, it would smother the TARDIS,” he said, morosely.
Rose knew her Doctor. He had gotten himself excited about this house idea. She didn’t know why, but she recognized that he wasn’t going to be satisfied until they found a house.
***
The house they eventually found was not one Rose would have expected. It was a proper large house, set on a large parcel of land surrounded by a forbidding iron fence. “Danger. Keep Out. Unsafe Structure” read the signs on the fence, but the house was for sale, and the Doctor walked confidently past them, through the overgrown garden, to the house itself. Large, yes, but completely rundown. But the Doctor saw only that the trim was TARDIS blue.
They wandered through good-sized, empty rooms, littered with detritus, abandoned dusty chandeliers and streaked mirrors, moldy walls and broken windows.
“What’s unsafe about the structure?” Rose asked the realtor, who looked as if she had been hoping that they wouldn’t ask.
She opened her mouth to reply.
“The wallpaper is peeling!” exclaimed the Doctor, gleefully, and then, before anyone could say anything else, “We’ll take it.”
***
The house was called Wester Drumlins. The Doctor loved the name. He rolled it around in his mouth like it was a fine wine. “Wester Drumlins,” he would say, bouncing back and forth on his feet. “Wes-ter-drummmmm-lins.” He said it this way whilst following the kids through the house, waiting to hear their verdict.
“It’s brilliant,” was the verdict of Harry and Tam, as they chased each other over broken tile floors.
They were all standing in the conservatory, overgrown with ivy, half of its windows missing.
“It has a conservatory,” the Doctor pointed out, proudly.
“It has…yes,” agreed Athena.
“Welllllll, I think it looks like fun,” announced Brem, with his hands deep in the pockets of his coat. He did a slow circle in the middle of the conservatory, looking up at the sky.
“An adventure, right?” said the Doctor.
Rose saw Matt and Sylvain exchange a look. She understood this look. It was the these-crazy-Time-Lords look. Sometimes she exchanged the look with them. It was good to have people to exchange these looks with, after so many years of being the only human(ish) traveler on the TARDIS. Sometimes, she and Matt and Sylvain went out and drank margaritas and shared stories about their crazy Time Lords.
She had a feeling she was going to need a lot of margaritas in her future.
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