Hi everyone,
So this is a repost of the whouffle fanfiction formerly known as "Thank You Clara's Boyfriend" and "Managing the Maitlands", which has been off FFnet for a while. This was due to my friends locating this highly embarrassing story I wrote when I was thirteen, and I had to take it down to prevent them reading it. Now, I deem it safe to repost.
I hope the old readers like it as much as they did the first time, and the new ones like it too.
P.S. There's probably about 6 000 000 mistakes, because, like I said, I was 13 when I wrote this.
After Ice Warrior, they take to parking the TARDIS around the corner - Clara figures it might tip the Maitland's off if a big, blue box suddenly appeared out of thin air in their garden.
Today, however, they'd been to the '98 (as in 3098) Olympics for the Genetically Altered and Modified. The crowds had been quite something - being so small, Clara had been shoved around by the hordes of supporters, and twisted her ankle when knocked over by a burly Eurkranian Doshfrikshobble.
The Doctor had insisted they park closer to the house this time, so she didn't have to walk so far, which was silly, really, Clara thought.
"It's fine, look, we're behind a hedge. They won't see us. And isn't it a lovely hedge! With unusually good photosynthesis capabilities," the Doctor rattles.
Clara rolls her eyes. "Yes. Stop admiring your handiwork, I know you did something to it the first day we met."
The Doctor looks a tad put-out. "But my point is that I did something to it, and it STILL WORKS a couple of weeks later."
Clara laughs. "Bye, Doctor," she says, smiling.
"No, I'll walk you back to the house, you're hurt," he tells her, but almost as more of a question than a statement.
Clara shakes her head, however. "It's only ten feet, Doctor, I can manage. See you on Wednesday - the one in two days' time, not in a month or three weeks ago. Got it?"
"Most absolutely definitely," the Doctor replies confidently, giving his Clara a hug and kiss on the forehead before she smiles at him and turns, walking back to the house, waving over her shoulder at him.
The Doctor's really very glad he can just hop to Wednesday - he doesn't think he can wait two actual days to see her again. His Clara.
When Clara opens the door to the Maitland House, Angie and Artie are there waiting there, gazing at her expectantly.
"Hello," Artie says happily as she gives him a hug.
"Who was that?" Angie asks, pointing out the window to where the Doctor had been just moments before, a very suspicious smirk on her face.
Damn. Clara had been hoping not to have to deal with questions about the Doctor, possibly ever. She's only known him a bit over a month, though he has very quickly become one of the most important things in her life, though she doesn't like the idea of acquainting him with the Maitlands, the other important part. His world is dangerous, and she loves it. But her job is to keep the kids safe, because she loves them.
"Who was who?" Clara responds carefully, raising her eyebrows as if she really has no idea what they're talking about.
"That guy you were just with," Angie replies, her voice heavy with implications and her smirk growing.
"Oh," Clara says, acting as though she has only just understood who Angie meant. "That's just a friend of mine," she tells her noncommittally.
"Your friends don't normally come to our house," Artie points out innocently, clearly not onboard the same thought-train as his teenage sister.
Clara shrugs. "He was just taking me home."
Angie looks more and more interested by the second. "From where?"
Clara smiles, pats Artie on the head and manoeuvres her way through the ambush if curious children, heading upstairs. "Out," she tells Angie.
As soon as their nanny is gone, Artie asks his sister, "We've met some of Clara's friends before, and they don't normally kiss her on the forehead, do they?"
Angie grins widely. "No, they don't."
"So what's different about him, then?" her brother continues, clearly completely missing the path down which Angie's mind was going.
"Well," she says, mildly frustrated at Artie's lack of comprehension, "he's tall, handsome… I'd say he's Clara's boyfriend. Or wants to be."
Artie's eyes widen.
Angie laughs at him. "Don't look so shocked, she's 24."
"But…" Artie mutters. Then he frowns at Angie like he thinks she's trying to trick him.
The doorbell rings.
"I'll get it!" Artie shouts from down the hall.
In the kitchen, Clara checks her watch. It's 8:00am, but today is only Tuesday, a mere day since she last saw the doctor (though it already feels like too long). There's a distinct possibility he and the TARDIS could have undershot by a day, however, she supposes.
She listens for a few moments, but doesn't hear anything, Doctor-ish or otherwise. So she goes back to baking her soufflé, assuming it was a mail package or something.
"Artie!" Clara calls ten minutes later, "I've got another 'Amelia Williams' book for you from the library!"
She gets no response, however, and frowns. Normally Artie would be thundering down the stairs in order to grab the novel from her hands.
An inkling of worry flashes through Clara's mind. Come to think of it, she hasn't seen or heard Artie since he answered the door.
"Angie?" she calls up the stairs.
"What now, Clara, I'm talking to Nina!" the teen shouts back. So that was where the phone had go to, Clara thought.
"Have you seen Artie?"
"I can hear him laughing outside, he's probably playing with his footy ball or something," Angie tells her, not making an appearance from behind her closed bedroom door.
Curiously, Clara heads for the front door. Normally, Artie didn't play by himself - perhaps the knock at the door had been the children's father coming back for something? This was unlikely, however - even if he had, George wouldn't have time to stay and play kick-a-rounds.
Placing the Amelia Williams book, The Lonely Keeper (about an immortal Roman centurion who guarded an 'impossible secret long after rest of his kind were gone') on the counter, Clara ventures out into the small yard.
Angie is right - Artie is out there, playing with his football, but he is by no means alone. The person he passes the ball to flails about enough to take up the same space as three normal people.
Clara is half caught between smiling at the easy way Artie and the Doctor seem to be getting along (which doesn't surprise her, as they're both children, really) or to be slightly nervous at the fact that one of her charges has now clearly met her friend, which will almost definitely lead to more questions.
She stands there quietly in the doorway for a moment, with neither of the two boys noticing her. Clara smirks as the Doctor continually misses the ball, getting distracted by things such as oddly shaped clouds and uncoordinated pigeons. She wonders if all Timelords are this ADHD. When he focuses on the football though, he really is very good.
After about three minutes, Clara coughs gently, causing the Doctor to jump and miss the ball again, which in turn, like a chain reaction, causes Clara to laugh.
"Clara," he says happily, flashing her one of his trademark grins which Clara cannot help but instinctively return.
"You undershot, Chin, you're early by a day," she tells him, her eyebrows arching sternly so that just for a moment, he withers, actually believing her to be cross with him rather than quietly glad.
"Sorry," the Doctor mutters hurriedly. "I can go back and try again, the TARDIS has been acting all funny since you started calling her a 'Snogbox' -"
Clara cuts him off right there, placing a finger carefully on his lips, but looking at Artie. The kid hasn't been following the conversation very well (unsurprisingly, with the Doctor talking all timey wimey) but his eyes widen at the word 'snog', clearly something he understands.
Fearing he may have drastically misinterpreted the Doctor's comment, Clara quickly runs a series of explanations through her head: that her friend's car is called the 'Snogbox', though this might lead to more questions… Possibly that 'SNOG' is an acronym for 'Super-New Organic and Green' - they could pretend the Doctor owned a Smart-car. Though then Artie would probably want to see it, he did have the typical young-boy love of automobiles, dammit…
She is saved from explaining the TARDIS's nickname by the sudden smell of burning that fills the air.
"My soufflé!" Clara curses, turning and dashing back inside, the Doctor and Artie following behind her.
In the kitchen, Smoke issues in clouds from the oven, the pastry inside a blackened mess.
"This was definitely not my fault," Clara exclaims angrily, coughing as the swathes of black smoke attempt to smother her. "I only left it alone for ten minutes, stupid soufflé,"
Not wanting to see Clara choke on the smoke, the Doctor dashes in front of her and rescues the oven himself, grabbing the china bowl the pastry bakes in with a hand protected from the heat by his ridiculously adorable purple jacket.
When he pulls open the oven door, another smell suspiciously like a burning fuse permeates the air. The Doctor sets the charred wreck of a soufflé on the kitchen counter, before turning to Clara.
"Your oven may or may not be completely and utterly broken," he informs her, "but as someone with the experience of the thirty-two cooking and kitchen maintenance classes up his sleeve that he took to work out how to use the TARDIS bakery, I'd say it's a little bit… well, broken," he finishes lamely, beginning to reach inside his jacket. Clara knows he is about to grab his Sonic, so she quickly reaches out and grabs his wrist.
"Uh-uh, Doctor," she mutters quietly.
After half a second, it clicks in the Doctor's brain that she doesn't want Artie to see something as boldly alien-cross-James-Bond as his screwdriver.
"Real, proper, boring fixing, then, huh?" he asks sadly, his head hanging just a bit, having simply assumed that she will want him to get the oven working again. She actually wouldn't have asked, it would seem a little domestic of him, but since he's already thought of it…
Clara nods. "Real, proper, boring fixing," she confirms.
The Doctor is put out only for a moment, however – he soon twirls about to face Artie. "Ok, kid, do you know where your dad keeps his tools?"
Artie nods enthusiastically, keen to help. He grabs the Doctor by the hand and drags him away, taking him to the small shed at the back of the garden.
When they are gone, Clara opens the windows to allow the smoke to dissipate. She leans against the bench, biting her thumbnail as she waits for the boys to return.
After a minute, Angie comes clumping down the stairs, holding her laptop in one hand and typing with the other.
"Hey, Clara," she says, "do you know the difference between a colonization and a settlement? Only I'm trying to work out which one's best to use for my assignment on Australia,"
"They're synonyms, really," the Doctor replies, entering with Artie and a toolbox, "though there are several differences if you want to get nit-picky. But this is only 2013, so it's not politically incorrect to use 'settlement' yet, though in a few years…"
"Thanks," Angie mutters, having tuned out after 'synonyms'. It takes her several seconds, but eventually she realizes it wasn't Clara who spoke.
Angie looks up from her laptop screen, taking in the scene below her – the Doctor standing quite close to Clara, really - much, much closer than the space deems necessary, and then hand resting gently on her shoulder probably isn't required either; Artie, happily holding a tool box in one hand and a football in the other.
"Oh," she says, a smirk jumping onto her face despite the warning look in Clara's eyes. "Hi."
The Doctor waves back at her a bit. "Hello," he replies. "You must be Angie. I'm the Doctor. Clara's told me all about you and your brother," he tells her, smiling. "Are you doing homework?"
Angie nods, jumping quickly down the last few stairs. "Why are you called the Doctor? Don't you have a name?"
"Angie-" Clara begins, but the Doctor cuts her off.
"No, it's fine. I do have a name, actually, but it's a very boring one – John Smith. Ever so dull. Everyone just calls me the Doctor, for as long as I can remember – it's one of those nicknames you don't quite know how you got, you just… have it. I suppose it's because I like fixing things," he explains.
Perhaps you've put Clara's heart on your list, Angie thinks to herself. If he really is Clara's boyfriend, she could have some proper fun teasing her nanny about him.
Angie puts her computer down gently on the kitchen table. The Doctor's eyes dance over to the Word document that's open.
"Erm… when's this due?" he asks Angie.
"Today," she replies casually.
He looks over it some more. "Australia was settled in the seventeen hundreds, not the eighteen hundreds; the Dutch got there first, not after; it was James Cook who discovered it, not William – I have no idea where you got that from…" the Doctor rattles off, combing quickly through Angie's work and correcting her errors as he goes.
Clara watches the Doctor's face intently, and she can see he is this close to recommending they all go back and see Australia settled in the first place.
"Doctor, one second," she says carefully, taking his hand and pulling him off to the side, just out of earshot of the kids, who watch them intently. "Angie, do your work," Clara instructs quickly.
"Nope," the girl replies, too interested in observing the dynamic between her babysitter and this new guy to bother with her assignment.
When the two in question get further down the hall, however, Artie tugs at Angie's sleeve, insisting in a whisper, "He so is not Clara's boyfriend."
Angie raises her eyebrows at him. "What makes you think that?"
"She hasn't kissed him," Artie says confidently, as if this is concrete proof.
"That's because we're here, stupid," his sister rolls her eyes. "But have you seen the way they look at each other? Just like mum and dad used to."
Artie nods a little. "Yes, but still… Clara can't have a boyfriend."
"Why not?"
"Um… because she's our Clara. Not his."
Angie rolls her eyes again. "Well, he played footy with you, is presumably about to fix the oven and is trying to help me with my homework. If he's not already Clara's boyfriend, you can see he'd certainly like to be."
There you go!
Now, unfortunately, even though I'm reposting this fic, it's unlikely new chapters will pop up. I still love DW, but fanfiction-wise, I've kind of migrated to writing for Castle (if you watch it and want my username, send a PM, and I'll give it to you).
Anyway, more chapters to come!
x.
