Chapter One – Doing the Domestic

Two Weeks Earlier…

It was the rain that woke him. That gentle, constant patter against the glass stirring his subconscious. It reminded him of something, something recent. The memory tried to make him listen with a persistent stream of images emerging from the cloud of sleep. Rain… I wanted to show her the rain. Rain. Africa. Elephants… The lioness. The Incubus-

His eyes opened, his chest clenching as total recollection took the place of the broken links. The scene that greeted him threw him, at first. A darkened room, presenting him with the vague shapes of a sofa and glass coffee table, and a large television in the corner. Jackie's lounge. He wondered how he had gotten there, and then remembered the previous day, agreeing with Rose – quite possibly for the first time in his life – that going to see her mother was absolutely a Good Idea. There had been tea, and chin wag between the two women, and he had nestled himself into the very armchair he was in now… There was no recollection of falling asleep. The last thing he was aware of, was hearing Jackie battering on about some cleaner called Greg and … what was it? A ginger baby? No, not a ginger baby … something to do with babies. Or so he thought. Not that it really mattered, anyway.

The Doctor looked down – and frowned. He was – very comfortably, he had to admit – oh, what was the right word? Snuggled, he decided, fitted the bill rather aptly. He was 'snuggled' beneath a very heavy duvet with Winnie the Pooh smiling at a pot of hunny cradled against his stomach. And there was a pillow supporting his head. He must have been in a really deep sleep to have been shifted forward without noticing. And to have my shoes taken off, he noted to himself as he became aware of his trainer-free feet.

Not that he hadn't needed it. Despite the grogginess of waking, he really did feel so much better. 'A bit of a kip', indeed. He'd been asleep for nearly thirteen hours, which far surpassed Rose on a Saturday…

The Doctor stretched, rolling his bunched muscles and relishing the more than satisfying sensation of the fibres readjusting and his shoulders cracking. Rising from the chair, deciding that he had most definitely slept enough, he realised that, by the authority of Greenwich Mean Time, time had pushed on. It was eight o'clock, and, to make it worse, a Saturday.

Wonderful.

Rose loved Saturdays. As far as she was concerned, they were like the Sabbath, to be regarded with the utmost respect. Thou shalt not arise before ten. He had tried to get her up early on a Saturday, once. He thought that visiting the Alsar Spoorn cluster at five in the morning - Rose Tyler Time - was a magnificent idea. Rose had, to phrase it politely, disagreed, and ensured that he was aware of his error of judgement. That had only been a couple of months ago...

And he was forced to acknowledge that, while Rose and Jackie were both very different people, they both had a strikingly similar attitude towards their weekends. He was doomed to spend at least another two hours on his lonesome. Going outside was not an option, as Jackie's front door had taken to groaning, as if the damned thing had the weight of the universe hanging from its hinges. He rather liked this body, and he anticipated, rather astutely, that the two Tylers would be unlikely to allow him to continue his enjoyment of it if he woke them from their revered slumber.

But inactivity was something that the Doctor generally didn't do so well in. He was not prone to sitting around and waiting for anything in his life, and the universe did not tend to allow him such leisure, anyway. Sleeping for hours on end, while not unknown to him, and only tending to be the result of extreme exhaustion, inevitably lead to his body waking with a pushing buzz of pent-up energy. He felt wired like an erratic cyborg, and the need to propel himself into some activity or other pushed him to look around himself for something constructive to engage in. His eyes lighted upon Jackie's copy of The Times, and a slow grin wormed its way across his features. The paper was an old edition, but that did not phase him in the slightest as he ruffled his way through to the crossword. Jackie hadn't even looked at it. Brilliant!

He told himself that he would pace his mind. There were a potential two hours to kill, after all. Five minutes later, and he huffed, chewing the pen of his veritable mother-in-law through sheer annoyance and scowling at both the offending completed puzzle and Fern Britton's now blue-toothed smile, looking up at him from the page through a brand new pair of Doodle Specs. Free of charge. The biro split as he rolled it through his teeth in frustration, the sudden hairline fissure managing to snag his tongue and make him lurch gracelessly in surprise, spitting the offending piece of plastic out onto the floor.

The Doctor left his seat, the movement agitated and his mood made slightly worse by standing awkwardly on the discarded pen. He picked it up, offering it all sorts of torturous promises concerning, amongst other things, the dissection and imaginative reassembly of its components, just as soon as he dared use his sonic screwdriver. He found himself wandering into the kitchen with it, making sure that it was fully aware that he was considering melting it over the gas – and that's where it hit him. He wanted to kill time. What better way to kill time than to cook?

He was relatively good at cooking, when he did it. Rose never complained, anyway. And he was a dab hand when it came to bacon butties… The Doctor shed his crumpled shirt in favour of the blue T shirt underneath, flicked the kettle on and set about raiding the cupboards. If he was going to work, he needed a good cuppa to see him through…

--(0)--

She could hear talking. A great deal of it, actually, and vastly one-sided. His voice drifted through the wood of her door, the enthusiasm for whatever it was he conversed in curbing round the contours of the flat. Was he talking to her mother? He had to be talking to her mother. Hadn't he? If not, he was engaging himself in rather animated conversation. The last option, she decided with a disturbed sigh, was not beyond him, and was the most likely. Oddly, however, it was not the talking that had roused her from sleep. She could smell cooking. Was that bacon? And … pancakes?

Rose disengaged herself from the apparent battle she had been pulled into with her duvet, shuffling a pair of slippers on and opening her door silently, taking herself through the flat to find her mother standing just outside the kitchen. Jackie leaned against the doorframe, her lilac dressing gown wrapped tightly around herself in the chill of the February morning. She jerked her head wordlessly at Rose to come and join her. That smirk on her face said more than a thousand words…

Rose crossed her arms in a vague attempt at warding off the cold, frowning heavily under her mass of tousled bed hair as she joined her mother – and stared.

The Doctor was surrounded by plates piled with pancakes and bacon butties, thickly sliced bread practically crushing the encased bacon under its sheer density. Talk about doorstop. Wedges of lemon sat neatly on a side plate, ready and waiting serenely to be juiced amidst what could only be described as kitchen carnage. Flour paled the counter in spots, making it look as though it had spawned some kind of fungal infection. Dribbles of milk made an odd-looking kind of paste where he had managed to scuff plates and God knew what else through the varying splodges. Pancake mix dribbled over the front of the cooker. Somehow, miraculously, the Doctor stood in the midst, utterly unscathed, his tie round his head like some rudimentary sweatband, as though he was pretending he was Marco Pierre White. Not even a hint of flour … and he was completely unaware of their presence at his back as he tended what seemed to be the last of the pancakes over the hob…

"… Eggs, milk and flour, pancake power,

Look at his milky yellow sunshine face.

Flip it now, flip it good - OO!"

The Doctor tossed the pancake artfully, catching it squarely in the pan with a method that had blatantly been perfected within the past half hour, if the pancake in the corner of the floor was anything to go by, left slouched against the unit like a forgotten soldier.

"Flip it now, flip it good – OO!

Some are salt,

Some are sweet,

Some are fruit,

Some are meat!"

Rose bit down on her fist to calm the threatening tremors. Jackie wasn't faring that much better. The Doctor stopped his rendition of The Mighty Boosh's pancake song as he slipped the finished item onto the pile, and evidently started searching for something amongst the mess, piping up with an entirely new solo that, oddly enough, crashed Rose through a wall of maturity headlong into a forgotten part of her childhood.

"It's very, very funny,

'Cos I know I had some honey;

'Cos it had the label on,

Saying HUNNY.

His questing hand found the jar on the counter, attempting to hide from him behind the crumpled red bag of plain flour.

"A goloptious full-up pot too,

And I don't know where it's got to,

No, I don't know where it's gone –

Well, it's funny."

Without so much as a pause, he dipped his fingers in, slathering them in amber and rambling on all the while… "I love honey, runny, yummy honey. Runny is as honey does," continuing to hum as he pushed his fingers into his mouth, his face twisting in purest ecstasy and his body with it, spinning to face the kitchen at large. He opened his eyes – and froze.

Silence stretched between them, both women fighting with themselves to quell the threatening laughter, and the Doctor looking from one to the other, a rabbit in the figurative headlights. An amber trail peeled down his hand.

Their spluttering hysterics practically ripped the silence – and the tattered remnants of the Doctor's dignity – into shreds. Jackie staggered away into the living room, finding herself unable to look at him anymore, choking out something about suffering a hernia. His fingers were still in his mouth, as though afraid of emerging into what had startlingly been turned into an embarrassing situation. Eventually, he stretched to attempting to talk around his digits. "Um… 'ey wav 'usft -" He finally removed his fingers, giving them a quick lick as Rose straightened herself up finally to look at him through the tears. "I was just … erm … making breakfast," he tried to justify with a sticky voice, glancing shyly at the surrounding mess as though it had just crept up on him whilst he had been distracted.

"So we see." Rose passed by him to the counter crammed with plates, offering him a fond pat on the arm and taking up the sandwiches and pancakes. "C'mon. You can bring the lemon and sugar. And the honey, I suppose."

The Doctor stood for a moment, looking at her and rubbing the back of his neck with his non-honey hand. He wanted to ask her something, she deduced, and felt the tiniest hint of impatience when he did not come right out and say it. "What's the matter?"

He hesitated, mouthing wordlessly, until he finally managed to push the words from his mouth. "How – how long were you and Jackie, you know, standing there …?"

Rose smirked. "Eggs milk and flour, pancake power is when I came in. Don't know about Mum, but she was here before me."

"Oh," he murmured, nodding is head absently. "'Kay then…"

"Oi!" Jackie struck up indignantly from the next room, unseen but by no means forgotten. "I was saving that crossword!"

"When for, the next Stone Age? You'll still be around, I suppose," he added as a sideline under his breath.

Rose gave him a reproachful look as she headed for the dining table, laden with the fruits of his 'work'.

"What?"

--(0)--

As much as he fussed and groaned about her, he really had become quite fond of Jackie Tyler, and she, him … an interesting turn out, considering she had loathed him for the first few months of their tenuous relationship. He had a feeling it was mainly to do with his current body. While he was quicker to temper than he used to be, and far more erratic, he found that there were much softer sides to him behind the sharp edges that his enemies encountered. And the dreaded Domestic did not strike the fear of God into him anymore, either. The travelling life was definitely his calling, and he could never see himself settling down and choosing the carpets he so hated, but he really didn't mind spending time with his companion's family. He accepted Rose's strong relationship with her mother, and while he would gripe and whinge when she requested to go home for a spell, the griping and whinging was never heartfelt. His ninth self had genuinely loathed visiting Jackie Tyler, had detested the very human grounding that family provided, visiting the mother and the idiot then-boyfriend. He regretted that now, appreciating that it was quite possible that the unrelenting attitude must have been quite hurtful to Rose.

Still. Not anymore.

When they eventually left the Powell Estate (following a great deal of cleaning, on his part), the Doctor allowed Rose to take her time saying goodbye to her mother. In fact, it had been she that suggested they head back to the TARDIS. Jackie, while not too thrilled by the idea of them leaving her on her own again, appreciated that her daughter had the entire of Time and Space at her disposal, and that they had stayed over night, a very rare event … and she also appreciated the fact that the Doctor had made breakfast, the level of generated mess left aside.

"Now you take care of yourself, d'y'hear?" she clucked, hands on either side of his face and a heavy maternal glint in her eye. "I don't want you comin' back here half dead again, alright?"

"You know, Jackie," the Doctor managed between a barrage of kisses, "I am over nine hundred years old. I'm a big boy, now."

"Funny," she shot back, "from what I saw earlier, I'd say you were about twelve." She gave him a beaming smile as he attempted to scowl, the expression loosing any weight with the slight colouring of his cheeks.

Rose couldn't help the irrepressible smile at the exchange between the pair. She remembered all too well the time when her mother had slapped him. Hard. Now, despite the jesting and the occasional sniping remark – from both sides – Jackie had grown to actually care about the man who had whisked her daughter away from her. Funny thing, trust…

A final goodbye, and then a warm hello. The TARDIS doors swung shut behind them, and in under a minute, the cobalt box was surrounded not by ceaseless concrete and rubbish bins, but the depth of Time and Space, cocooning them in a sheath of possibilities and promises. Despite his previous itch to get his head into something, the Doctor's usual go-get attitude lacked its trademark enthusiasm. Rose sidled up to his shoulder as he reclined in the jump seat, feet crossed over the lip of the console. A pen lid he had found in his pocket had become the latest victim of his oral fixation, tipping gently between his teeth but no less scarred. But there was an introspective glaze in his eye, and she never liked it when he looked into himself, especially now. She knew what shadows lay in his head.

"You're quiet," she observed, bumping her hip against him gently. I hate it when you're quiet.

His face lifted to hers, and he regarded her for a time, his softened gaze inspecting her own. He could see it in her, that shade of worry lacing the skin at her lips and eyes in a fine net. She tried to shield it from him, but the openness of her heart was always her reliable betrayer. Oh, Rosie-Rose. I'm sorry. The events of the past days were still fresh on them both, that intimacy they had shared spanning beyond the claws of a simple evil. She knew him now, and he would never be able to shut her out. I shouldn't have shut her out in the first place. The pen lid flicked to the corner of his mouth so that he could make his answer. "I was thinking it was time for a bit of a jog."

She sighed inwardly, but decided to play up to him. "You sure you can actually run? Y'know, after that tiny breakfast you had, I'm amazed you've got the energy…" The quip was an irresistible cherry. Honestly, she didn't know how someone of such slight build could fit twelve pancakes and two bacon butties in their stomach.

"I was hungry! And I make good pancakes, if I may say so myself…"

"Oh, absolutely," she agreed, nodding her head condescendingly. "So good it's a wonder people don't sing about 'em…"

"I didn't write the song," he defended, a little petulance snagging his tone, though the light of play shone in his eyes all the same. "And you can't deny the sheer brilliance of Winnie the Pooh, either. Anyway, there are more pressing matters at hand than my singing." A touch of gravity tilted his tone, and his eyes became that little bit darker. Reading her, as he was so very good at doing. "You're thinking that I'm thinking about that thing that you saw in my head."

"And are you?"

"Yes." He couldn't shield her from it anymore, she had seen with her own eyes. She knew his nightmares were made of her.

Rose hesitated, fighting with herself to push the words into the air between them and not have them hiding in her anymore. "It's just … it was scary, you know? And I can't stop thinking, it's still in your head, all the time. All those people, and…" Me.

He stood up, taking her hands and pulling her into a gentle hug. She breathed in the scent of him, feeling the press of his burden and the steady flutter of his hearts under her cheek. "Oh, Rose," he sighed, smoothing her hair. "I wish you'd never seen any of it."

"Is it such a bad thing that I did see it, though?" She pulled back from the embrace, searching his face and finding herself resenting the way he tried to shift the reason behind their conversation onto her. "Is it such a bad thing that I know, Doctor?"

For the first time in a very, very long time, he couldn't answer her. He wanted to say that it helped him. In spite of everything they had gone through together, he had revealed so very little of himself to her. And now, she had seen into him. Rose Tyler had walked the haunted roads of his nightmares and stood up to his own fears. She had held him and shown such an incredible level of strength. She had not paled at the dying version of herself that the darkest of nights threw at him, but had stared his fear down. She had given him the strength to fight back. But then, she had always been strong…

"Rose -"

The lighting balked red and the TARDIS practically screamed at him, both ringing the air around them and zipping alarm through his telepathic connection with her. He released himself from Rose in a heartbeat, pulling the monitor to round. "Distress signal," he threw at her, raising his voice above the harsh siren. "Hold on!" He practically lunged the ship down the co-ordinates, clamping down a lever with one foot and speeding his fingers over control switches.

When the TARDIS eventually landed, the jarring impact was enough to throw them both over. The Doctor didn't stay grounded long, hauling himself from the grilling and lifting Rose from her crumpled position, barely pausing with his quick "Are you alright?"

"Fine," Rose managed as he pulled her to the doors.

They stepped out onto a narrow street. The summer sun smiled down on them in what should be a beautiful afternoon. But, even as his feet made those first steps on the road, the Doctor's senses stirred uncomfortably. Every hair stood on end, and his teeth itched. Something was very definitely wrong with this place…

In the next street, the rumbling of a cheering crowd and a band, playing something that struck up dangerous images in his head –

"Doctor…"

He looked to her, and saw that she pointed at one of the houses. He followed her finger, and swallowed dryly.

It wafted lazily in the wind, suspended from the window like it was the most natural thing in the world, a great cloth of red and white and black. There were others like it, colouring the front of every house. But it wasn't the colour that made their hands reach out to hold one another, or the fact that the flag was emblazoned with uniform neatness on every house. It was that emblem, stark and jagged on a white circle, dead centre in a wash of red. The Nazi swastika seemed to grin at them from every angle, laughing at their knowledge of its meaning as it bathed them in its shadow.