Prompt: Somewhere, somewhen, there is a house whose occupants seem to change all the time. Sometimes it is a very handsome man in a great coat. Sometimes, it's a man in a bowtie (sometimes accompanied by a woman, sometimes not). Sometimes there's a mysterious blue box with strange lettering in the front yard. And sometimes it stands empty for years at a time, until the ivy starts to encroach. The Doctor and Jack do domestic in their own ways.
I saw this prompt on sahiya's profile on A Teaspoon and An Open Mind and thought, I wanna do that. So here it is, thanks for reading.
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The house stood desolate and empty on a broken mountain edge. Safe enough to those who dared to venture in.
The house itself looked dark and angry, though that might just have been the ivy growing in its nooks and crannies. The weather generally looked like a storm was brewing overhead so it made the house look even angrier. The storm had never hit however. Not near the house. The house was protected by the field its occupants had put over it, a protection field, or as one had joked The Protego Charm in the Harry Potter series.
On the edge of the house stood a blue box. A bright blue box that never seemed to change yet was always changing. Police Public Call Box was emblazoned on it proudly, and the box held on to it like it was a signal to all who dared to enter her.
The two men that had saved her from falling off the edge were here occasionally. They came and they went. But the house knew that they would never truly leave. At least not the one they called Jack. They had worked together to stabilise the ground underneath her so that she was in no danger, and then to fix up her inside, which by the time they had found her, had been falling apart due to rot and no care. They had started by fixing the kitchen, transforming the broken, glimmering surfacing and broken objects into a glittering area, clean and welcome, with fixed cutlery. They had moved from there to the bedrooms then the living room and the lounge. Then they attempted the stairs. Jack had fallen through a hole and had dislocated his shoulder hitting the floor in the basement. 'Hurts like a bitch Doc.' They had worked from the bottom up, fixing it, stair by stair, until her occupants were at no danger from falling. Then they moved onto the bathroom upstairs, and more bedrooms and more and more rooms that she deigned to remember. They had transformed her from a broken mess into something to be proud of.
She remembered the first time they had been here. The other one had brought Jack in, unconscious and in pain. With a screechy ginger haired girl running after them. She had been irritated then, they had dropped in on her unannounced and she couldn't stop them from entering her, for she had been too weak.
And while Jack had stayed, the Doctor, as Jack had called him, came and went, often taking Jack with him. The Doctor varied from a bow tie and braces and a tweed jacket, with a red haired companion and a brown haired stumbling man, to a maniacal brown haired man wearing a trench coat to a man with weird teeth and a long scarf and frizzy hair with a brunette haired ice queen companion who hated being called a companion.
Jack, and her by default, had even had other visitors. There was one called Jenny who had crash landed, there was Liz 10 who was running through Starship UK and had been dropped off on a singular planet for a break, or River Song, who had turned up, smiled in her mysterious way and winked before leaving. Or even Ian and Barbara who had accidentally touched something they shouldn't have.
The house still felt closest to Jack, who tended to her flowers, and cleaned her insides every week and made sure everything inside ran like clockwork, and as he said. 'The plumbing's a bitch, but we'll deal with it eventually.'
Jack had left at one point, left with his Doctor, and had been gone for 12 years. When they came back, The Doctor dropped him off and mentioned something about fetching Amy and Rory from their honeymoon. 'And it's not what you think, it's not a planet for a honeymoon, it's a planet on a honeymoon, it married an asteroid.'
'12 years though Doc? How are you going to explain that?' Jack grinned.
'Not like it hasn't happened before, and I'll get them before the 12 years is gone, pick them up two weeks after I left them.'
The next time Jack had been gone, he had left with the Doctor he had met previously, with the frizzy hair and the goofy teeth. He had been gone for six months on her time line, but on his time line had been much longer, and while he had been gone, the Doctor with the bow tie had moved in, and she felt like he was babysitting her. 'Well sometimes you just need the spruce up, like the ivy crawling up your drainpipes. Would you like me to leave it there?' She had to admit, babysitting had some uses.
The Doctor was gone by the time Jack came back, he probably didn't want to meet his past self.
The next Doctor to arrive was the manic one with sideburns and the trench coat. Jack wasn't that happy with him but he let him in.
'What do you want Doctor?'
'To see how you were after the Tesnacians.'
'The what?'
'You call them the 4-5-6.'
'Not well enough to see this version of you. You could have done something.'
'No, I couldn't.'
'Yes, well, that's you isn't it. This version of you... it's so weak, spineless. You're a coward.'
The Doctor had left soon after that.
And now Jack stood outside the house, looking at some area of herself that she couldn't see for herself, when the Doctor stepped up next to him.
'I was wondering when you'd return here.'
'Now you don't have to worry.'
'What do you mean?'
'I came to ask if I could stay for a while? Stay out of the TARDIS, and just rest for a moment.'
'You're the last one who I thought would ask for that... But yes, you can. Stay as long as you like.'
'It's just because I'm getting too Time Sensitive. The Time Vortex is giving me a headache.'
'Ohhhh, the mighty Time Lord can't take a little Time in his head?' Jack joked.
The Doctor threw a withering glare at him, that ended up halfway through a smirk and a smile.
'What?'
He leaned in close to the immortal human and whispered 'The ivy that you've been watching for so long is listening to us.'
They turned to look at the ivy and saw the ivy arranged in a face on the wall.
He hasn't left yet. Itching to, but not wanting to actually leave.
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Sooo, finished! Did you like it? Thank you for reading!
