Fishfinger Custard

"Right, so those were the Dementors of the Galaxy of Rowling – yes, I know, you humans, naming things after your little obsessions, just be glad we didn't end up on the planet Twilight, the vampires there literally suck out your thoughts, and come to think of it, I'm not sure whether the people who named it were fans of the books or not…Anyway, here!" The Doctor dramatically flung open a door to reveal a linen closet. He looked inside with interest for a moment, before just as dramatically shutting it again, spinning on the spot and opening the opposite door. This time the room was something that looked an awful lot like a kitchen, albeit slightly pinker and with several utensils of highly questionable origin.

"A kitchen?" Amy asked, poking her head out from behind him. "You're seriously telling me this place has a kitchen?"

"Well, of course it does, Amy, what do you think we'd do if we got stranded in time somewhere?"

"Have you had to do that before?"

"Mmm," the Doctor said noncommittally, crossing to what was probably a fridge and rooting around inside.

"Wait," Rory said, already feeling the familiar heavy burden of someone about to question the Doctor, "how can any of the stuff in here be in date? When do you ever go…shopping?" He exchanged a glance with Amy, and saw mirrored in his wife's eyes the image of the Doctor trotting around Tesco's with a trolley. Well, actually riding around Tesco's in a trolley and using his screwdriver to guide the temperamental wheel.

"Rory Rory Rory," the Doctor tsked as he started pulling out containers which were, bizarrely enough, of the Tupperware variety, "it's a time machine. If I want to put in a special bit of timey-wimey science to keep some meat in shape, what's to stop me, eh?"

Amy gave Rory her special `did you just question the time-travelling alien?` look, as ever conveniently ignoring her own unspoken thoughts. Rory tried not to look embarrassed.

"Alright," he said quickly, trying to cover up the matter, "so what are you looking for?"

"Come on, Rory, they're Dementors, what do you think?"

Rory stared at his back as he leant in again, briefly wondering whether the fridge was bigger on the inside as well. How often did the Doctor have to stop off for milk? He definitely drank enough tea every day. "Chocolate?" he hazarded, still a little in shock from the idea that time spent reading children's literature had not in fact been wasted.

"In a sense." The Doctor turned to look carefully at the two of them, then seized a covered bowl from somewhere inside and dumped it on the side. "Right, chocolate cake mix for Pond!"

Rory opened his mouth to ask why the Doctor had the mix ready to hand – had he got distracted in the middle of a cake? had he seriously just put it in the fridge for who knew (probably not the Doctor) how long? – but was cut off by his wife's rather different set of priorities.

"You have cake mix?" Amy almost looked affronted. In fact, she did in fact look affronted. "And you didn't mention that before why?"

"Amy, I am trying to introduce you to the wonders of the universe, and part of that is the food, and how much would you actually eat if you knew you could have good old Earth food without ever leaving here?" The Doctor propped his arm on the open door and looked intently at Rory. Rory thanked whatever gods watched over time-travellers that he didn't blush easily.

"Cheesy chips," the Doctor suddenly announced, closing one door and opening another, which had looked like a normal cupboard (of questionable taste regarding interior design) but which apparently concealed a freezer. Rooting around inside, the Doctor emerged bearing three boxes which looked suspiciously like he really had visited Tesco's.

Rory looked at them closely – or at least as closely as he could when the Doctor was passing them in a pile from hand to hand as he closed the door and moved towards the oven (or some space approximation of such). It was when he turned the dial and picked up some trays from yet another cupboard that Rory's brain managed to escape once again from its trolley-focused distractions.

"You know how to cook?"

"Yes." The Doctor looked almost offended. "907, you really think I wouldn't know how to cook?"

Rory and Amy exchanged glances again, Amy barely pausing in her search for a spoon. Pulling open yet another drawer, she uncovered something which looked like a bin until it started emitting flames. Calmly, as if fires broke out in his kitchen all the time (although phrasing it like that…), the Doctor reached over to close it, pressed a button in the top left-hand corner, and then pulled it out again to reveal cutlery.

Amy scowled at him, but took a spoon, uncovered the cake mix and dug in.

Momentarily distracted by the array of buttons on the front of said drawer, Rory apparently missed something important involving the oven, since when he turned around he was suddenly confronted by a plate of steaming chips covered in cheese, held out by a beaming Time Lord. In that slightly detached, resigned and dazed way he'd had to develop as a self-defence mechanism, he assumed it must be some sort of special `timey-wimey` oven and moved on.

Slowly, as if handling a poisonous substance, he reached out and took the plate. "Why chips?" he asked carefully, trying to ignore just how good they smelled.

"`Dementor`'s just a name humans gave them," the Doctor explained, excitedly tapping away at the buttons of a microwave like an evil genius hacking into the Pentagon. "Something familiar in unknown territory. They're a similar concept – feed on fear, that sort of thing – but it's not chocolate that helps, it's just comfort food. Something that makes you feel safe; like home."

There was a ding just as the oven made a rather exciting noise. Rory and Amy simultaneously took a step back, Amy hugging her cake mix to her as if it was the one which needed protecting. Rory decided to ask later how the Doctor knew what their comfort foods were, since that opened up a whole new discussion which he didn't feel ready for so soon after the feeling of cold fingers creeping across his mind. Just that small recollection made him involuntarily shudder.

Suddenly the smell of chips intensified, and he looked down to see Amy holding one up to his mouth. She smirked at him. "Open wide." Obediently he did so, before biting down and feeling the slight trace of her fingers across his mouth. Almost immediately he felt a surprising sensation of warmth spreading through his insides. He smiled at her gratefully, and she leant across to kiss him, rather confusingly leaving traces of chocolate on his lips.

Smiling suddenly, Rory looked over at the Doctor, then felt his eyes widen. "Doctor… What are you eating?"

"What?" The Doctor took an item from a plate in his hand, dipped it inside a bowl on what was probably a counter, and ate it. Rory suddenly felt like gagging.

"That's not… Is that what you eat?" He shook his head. "No, I've seen you eat. …What?"

Amy patted his shoulder. "Don't worry, you get used to it."

"But…"

"Rory, I told you about this. Now eat your chips before I start stealing them." To make good on her threat, she reached across and took one before he could react.

The Doctor ate another one, smiling – no, smirking, the Doctor was honest to God smirking – at him. "You heard her. Eat up, Mr Pond."

"I'm not Mr Pond," Rory objected automatically, obeying but still staring at the food in the Doctor's hand. "What do you even call that?"

The Doctor lifted a breaded delicacy, waving it in a mocking fashion, letting some of the thick yellow liquid drip back into the bowl and smirking at him all the while. "Fishfinger custard."

"Fishfinger custard," Rory echoed hoarsely.

"Fishfinger custard," the Doctor confirmed, before adding, "Well, fishfingers and custard technically."

Rory looked helplessly at Amy. She seemed unsympathetic.

"Welcome to my childhood, Rory boy."

Rory opened his mouth to object further, but then choked as something solid and coated in some sticky substance was forced into his mouth. Faced with a choice between choking and biting down, he chose the latter, and then gagged as his tastebuds seemed to flail in confusion at the bizarre mix of former sealife and a dessert sauce. Looking tearily up, he saw the Doctor triumphantly waving the other half, which had not escaped a custard coating. "Don't beat it 'til you've tasted it," he beamed, then frowned and turned to Amy. "Is that it?"

She shrugged. "Close enough," she assured him, then leant forward to eat the other half. To Rory's surprise, while she did look confused at first, she still managed to swallow. He was starting to despair of ever eating anything else.

Slowly she nodded. "Good enough, Raggedy Man." Then she held out her bowl. "Want any?"

The Doctor eagerly seized a spoonful, and then, without even asking (which Rory should probably be more annoyed about), turned and took a chip from Rory's plate. As he bit down on it he suddenly leant into Rory's personal space (not that the Doctor had left much of that intact) and Rory swallowed in brief shock. Then his eyes widened.

"That…doesn't taste too bad."

"You humans, you always act surprised when that happens," the Doctor muttered with a shake of his head. "Like cheese on your chips is any different."

"Hey, it's a lot – " Rory started, then yelled and held his plate away as the Doctor decided to prove his point. This temporarily thwarted the time-travelling alien, but not the wife with a kleptomaniac streak, who quickly pilfered several chips. Rory snatched it away from her too, then made a grab for her spoon, carrying on undeterred even as she span away, shrieking and hugging the bowl to her chest like a five-year-old, before she shouted at the Doctor for sticking his finger into the mixture. The two humans turned on him, before both their gazes drifted down to the bowl of custard, and then to the tray of fishfingers on the side.

The Doctor raised an eyebrow challengingly.

The air trembled with anticipation, eerily reminiscent of that trip to the Old West which had gone rather wrong.

Then Amy broke eye contact, sitting down at the counter and stubbornly sticking a spoonful of chocolate in her mouth. "Not worth it," she muttered to herself, sounding rather annoyed. Rory briefly wondered about fighting for her honour, but then the Doctor dipped another fishfinger into the custard and held it up tauntingly.

Rory's stomach did a strange twist.

The Doctor smirked again, raising the fishfinger slowly as a triumphant prelude to consuming it.

'Honour,' Rory thought, summoning up his plastic memories of more stomach-turning foodstuffs. 'Honey-frieddormouse.' He was rewarded by the Doctor's sudden comical look of small-child-horror as he snatched the fishfinger from his hand and stuffed it into his mouth, before forcing himself to chew once, twice, even – oh God – three times, and then swallowing.

"That's my man," Amy announced from the sidelines, but somehow Rory felt he had been more rewarded by the look of surprise on the Doctor's face. Surprise turning to satisfaction.

Grabbing three more plates, the Doctor set them out on the counter, along with spoons. Then he took his fishfingers and shared them out, before looking expectantly at Rory. Slowly, hardly believing what he was doing (which was actually pretty common around the Doctor), he divided his chips into three portions. Then the two of them looked at Amy.

She scowled back at them, hugging the bowl tighter to her chest. "Oh no you don't."

Rory raised an eyebrow.

"No."

Glancing to the side, he saw the Doctor attempt a pleading expression. It was slightly disturbing, both because, well, it was the Doctor doing puppy-dogeyes, and also because he seemed surprisingly good at them (after he'd apparently remembered how).

"My comfort food."

It looked like the Doctor was about to try something else – possibly crocodile tears – but Rory just shrugged and said airily, "Fine." He seated himself at the counter and pulled a plate towards him. He looked pointedly at the Doctor, who looked slightly confused, then sat down opposite him, taking another plate.

Just as Rory was reaching out towards the custard, Amy snapped, "Oh, alright then," scooping out some of her cake mix and dumping it on his plate. He didn't say anything in return, but just smiled at her, then at the Doctor, who was looking at him appraisingly.

Feeling a little stupid, and yet somehow feeling that it was also right, Rory gave his fishfinger a suitably thick and gloopy coating.

"To fishfinger custard."

Now it was the Doctor's turn to exchange glances with Amy, but their matching smiles suggested Rory didn't have to feel like such an idiot, especially when they both took up their own samples and coated them.

"To fishfinger custard," they echoed, holding out their foodstuffs towards Rory's, like some sort of edible coated swords.

Then they all downed them.

Rory thought to himself that they really didn't taste that bad, once you gave them a shot.