AN: So, in actuality, these kittens are only a week old. But the thing is, this fic isn't going to last long enough day-wise for them to grow up at all, so I'm just going to sort of pretend they're older. Like they're advanced-ageing kittens. They're not, but just imagine.

DAY 152

Breakfast

The first person into Nerve Centre that morning was Adam Mitchell. He was in there very early, perhaps even as early as seven o'clock in the morning, all because he was the only one who actually appeared to remember that they had a litter of new-born kittens making a little nest in the medibay from where Jonesy – or 'Princess Sparkle Tutu' as Jenny had annoyingly renamed the thing – had given birth to them all. You would think a group of over a dozen people might be a bit more interested in a flock of kittens, but apparently not. Not interested enough to take the time to take care of them.

And so it was Adam who went to look after them, having to go so early so that he could avoid the inevitable grief he would get from his girlfriend if he left her to look at cats while she was awake and around. It was like she wanted him to choose between her and a bunch of helpless babies, which were really his responsibility since he had been the most vocal advocate of bringing the cat onto the TARDIS in the first place. He did like cats. And he'd spent so much time being charitable to humans in the last few days, maybe non-humans were due a break.

It was about time that he decided he was going to let them into Nerve Centre to explore, because they must be getting bored of the medibay and it wasn't like they had much chance of escaping. He just told Helix to make sure not to open the doors for any stray kittens who wanted to wander off, since if any of them did get lost on the TARDIS, they might never be found again, not for millions of years. It would be just like Red Dwarf. They flocked him when he opened the doors, with their mother going to find somewhere to sleep where she wasn't going to be bothered by her children for a few hours. And after that he got a little too caught up in watching what they were doing to go back to bed with Oswin.

There was the friendly calico who liked everyone who came to pet her; there was the blue Abyssinian who was rather timid, even with the other cats, but was best friends with her sister the calico; there was the wrinkly, hairless sphynx cat who pretended he hated everybody but then fell asleep nestled against them (secretly this trait reminded Adam of his other half); then there was the black fur ball who spent most of his time lurking underneath the furniture and swiping his claws at anybody who strayed too close, and Adam was just lucky he wasn't a favourite target of this menacing Maine Coon which was already enormous; and finally was the incredibly nervous and tiny kitten which was probably never going to be allowed off the TARDIS, mainly because it glowed faintly green with ethereal white fur, had a few tentacles, and sometimes floated around the room. It was no wonder Princess Sparkle Tutu wanted a break from them.

Conversation came into the room sometime after Adam's early arrival, in the form of Mickey and Martha. Unbeknownst to Adam – who hadn't been taking note of whispered sentences between a married couple, because the cat with the tentacles had ended up stuck on top of the fridge and he was trying to get it down – Mickey and Martha were talking about how and when they were going to let her parents know that she was pregnant. They stopped as soon as they saw Nerve Centre was empty, though, and Adam didn't hear a word of it.

"What are you doing?" Mickey asked him, because he was kneeling on one of the stools, not being able to reach the kitten from where it was hiding close to the wall without something to elevate his height.

"One of the cats is up here," he said, "He's scared."

"How did it get up there? They can't jump high yet, can they?" Martha questioned, glancing at the Abyssinian, which couldn't even walk properly yet.

"The black one scared him and he floated away," Adam said, "It's under that sofa, be careful."

"Careful?" Mickey asked.

"It'll go for you," Adam explained. Mickey was sceptical of this, and so stooped down in front of the indicated portion of sofa and clicked his fingers in front of the dark gap. A paw came out and slashed the back of his hand.

"Ow!"

"I told you," Adam said, "What'd you go doing that for?"

"Why have you let them out? What if they poo on something?" Martha asked.

"We've all pooed on something at one point or another," he defended them.

"Please, spare us the details of your sex life," Martha said dryly. He didn't respond, because he had finally snagged the kitten from where it was on top of the fridge, and carefully got down off the stool with the thing hidden in the palms of his hands. As soon as he moved his hand it started to float off again. "Bloody hell!" Martha shouted when she saw it, frightening off the calico that had come to paw at her feet. "That came out of the cat?"

"Yeah," Adam said, "I've asked the Doctor about it, he said it's something to do with Time Lords being able to regenerate into different species and genetics getting crossed through the time vortex." Martha was gawking at it. Adam decided he was going to put it back in the cat box in the other room so that it couldn't float off, so he went to do that while Martha began to have another crisis.

"It's got tentacles, Mickey!" she protested when Adam Mitchell was gone for a moment, "What if our baby has tentacles and glows and floats around? How are we supposed to cope with a floating baby?"

"Uh… well, you know… we'll just have to love it the way it is."

"Tentacles!" she persisted.

"We can't not have a baby just because it might have tentacles."

"Apologies for interrupting unprompted, but my scans pick up no signs of inhuman physical abnormalities forming in the embryo," Helix interjected, "If you would like, Dr Jones, I can keep a constant monitor on the growth of the foetus for all the while you are in my presence?"

"Yeah. Do that. Thanks, Helix," she said, going to sit down at one of the tables where there wasn't a hidden cat waiting to attack her. She would have to watch out for it. Mickey was looking at the back of his hand.

"Can I catch anything from this? I'm bleeding," he said.

"You'll be fine. They've never left the ship, they won't be carrying anything," she told him. He sighed and thought for a moment, realising he was quite hungry, and remembering they had actually come to get breakfast.

"What do you want to eat?"

"I don't know. Not a lot. Maybe some bacon," she said, "A bacon sandwich. A bacon and sausage sandwich, maybe, with ketchup."

"'Not a lot'?" he asked, smiling.

"I need to eat away the feelings of impending doom and anxiety." She said this right as Adam came back from sealing the floating tentacle cat away in the medibay, and he overheard that very last snippet.

"Impending doom and anxiety?"

"Just in general," she lied, "Who knows what horrible event we might stumble across today?" When she said this, she was not thinking about aliens, and neither was Mickey; they were both thinking about what Martha's mother's reaction was going to be when they told her they were going to have a baby. But she had always liked Mickey. Martha thought she would be thrilled to hear the news, potential tentacles and all, but it was still scary.

"There's not a possibility of you cooking for anybody else, is there?" Adam asked carefully.

Mickey sighed, "What do you want?"

"Just some bacon. Maybe. Please. Recently Clara keeps convincing me to cook dinner for her."

"Just tell her to piss off," Martha said.

"Well I don't want her to get food poisoning," Adam said, "Or to starve."

"She's got the nanogenes, neither of those will happen," Martha said.

"And Oswin will have a go at me."

"When does Oswin not have a go at you?" Mickey questioned.

"…She's a lot nicer in private," Adam said.

"So nice you've had to sneak out in the morning because she gets jealous of the kittens?" Martha raised her eyebrows while Mickey sorted out finding a clean frying pan. There was quite a hefty load of washing up in the sink, though. Adam decided he might clean everything later, because it annoyed him to see it all so dirty. He could call up Esther, she would definitely help him clean up after everybody else – after all, her entire life was spent cleaning up after Sally Sparrow.

As though hypnotised by the smell of cooking bacon, it didn't take long for more people to begin to flock into the main room that morning, as Amy Pond led her husband in so that she could try and find breakfast but not lose out on his company.

"Mickey! Do us some bacon, would you?" Rory asked him, grinning. Mickey scowled.

"Why am I making everybody bacon? And I bet nobody is going to do the washing up, are they…"

"We ran out of washing up liquid," Amy said.

"When?" Adam asked. She shrugged.

"Four days ago?"

"Why didn't anybody go buy more?" he asked, and stared around at a bunch of 'innocent' faces belonging to people all perfectly capable of buying washing up liquid, but who apparently did not want to spend the entire fifty pence another bottle would cost. If they even paid for it and didn't rob a supermarket in the middle of the night, which was what they usually did.

"Me and Rory will go shopping if you make bacon for us," Amy volunteered.

"Will we?" Rory asked her.

"Yes, shut up," she hissed. That was good enough for Mickey. It seemed that while they ran out of washing up liquid, they had an apparently endless supply of meat.

"I'll do the washing up," Adam finally declared, "I'm sure I can trick someone into helping me." He was planning on asking Clara, who would probably help him without really complaining, as long as he didn't catch her when she was busy with something else.

"We haven't got any sponges, either," said Amy.

"Make a list then, for when you go rob Asda tomorrow."

"A list? With what?" Amy asked him.

"A pen?"

"A pen? Where am I supposed to find a pen?"

"What about your phone?"

"I'd rather write a proper list."

"Then-!?" Adam was not coping well with talking to Amy.

"I'm going out!" a newcomer declared as soon as the doors from the Bedroom Circle began to open. It was the Doctor, the Eleventh Doctor, and being as his wife was nowhere to be seen, it was not clear whom he was talking to.

"…Alright," Martha said eventually when no one else responded, "Good for you?"

"What are these things doing everywhere?" he said when the calico shuffled towards him and started crawling over his foot, "Did someone set them loose? Little devils." He picked it up to look at it closer. At least the Doctor liked the cats, Adam thought. Somebody else cared.

"Where are you going?" Amy asked him.

"Football."

"Who's playing?" Mickey asked.

"Me," he answered, "It's a thing now. Craig and I. Our thing. Calls me up whenever they're a man down and I step in. Jenny keeps asking if she can come with me but I told her she can't because it would be very unfair to everybody else to have an ex-soldier and professional acrobat playing. What about you? Do you want to play football?" He spoke to the kitten, which tried to meow but could not quite managed it and just made a croaky noise. Amy couldn't resist saying, "Aww!" when she saw this. Eleven finally put it back down on one of the sofas. "But they're two men down today. For five-a-side."

"Take Jenny," Martha suggested, "If she already wants to come. Put her on the opposite team to you."

"No! She'll win. I'm not having her beat me at sports. No, no, no. One of you. Adam."

"I can't, I'm doing the washing up today," he said.

"What? All day?"

"Have you seen how much there is?" Adam pointed at it all next to the sink. Mountains of dirty crockery. It wasn't a good environment for the kittens.

"Yes. Well. Someone else. Mickey!"

"Mickey's busy today," Martha said quickly, but Eleven still looked at Mickey for an answer himself.

"…Mickey's busy today," he repeated, then turned back to the bacon. Eleven frowned and glanced between he and Martha for a moment, and Martha just smiled.

"I'd come, but I wouldn't want to set the ball on fire," Martha said. Eleven looked to Amy next.

"I don't want to," she said, then she went to sit down, "Rory will go."

"Excellent!" Eleven beamed.

"Uh, what? Amy?" Rory asked, "What about my bacon?" Eleven put an arm around Rory's shoulder to lead him out of the room. "Isn't there time for breakfast?"

"Time for breakfast? When all forms of physical matter are ultimately going to decay around us to the point that everything in the known universe is rendered utterly obsolete and irrelevant as every single sun explodes?" Eleven questioned. Rory didn't know what to say. "No time for food. Or Craig might have some food. There's the potential both for and not for food, but really we could be catapulted into oblivion at any second, so we'd best leave now. Careful not to step on the cats."

"No – but – see, I was going to – Amy?"

"Have fun!" Amy called after them, "My two boys playing football. I wish I could be there to cheer you on, but… I'm hungry." Rory was glaring at her when the door into the console room closed. "Thank god he's gone. I can have a nap later without him waking me up every time he hears people having sex."

Martha commented blandly, "How exciting for you," as they all settled in to receive their bacon.