#@mmmarty is writing a doctor who au and i wrote this based on that

[sgrumby]

“How can we breathe?”

“Force field,” Barry replies, his legs dangling over the rim of the TARDIS. “Keeps the bad guys out and the oxygen in. I, uh, wouldn’t be able to answer the phone without it.” He reaches up sheepishly and pops open the hatch on the door to reveal a rotary phone.

Lup gives him a look that he’s beginning to realise means she thinks he’s being tremendously stupid. “Why couldn’t you wire it in to the console? Or install a door so it opens from the inside, even?”

“Hey, have you seen that?” He changes the subject with his usual tact. “Look, wow, supernova.”

She grins and sits down next to him, kicking her feet in the vacuum of space. “It is pretty.”

“I should think so,” he grumbles. “Take a girl halfway across the universe and a million years back in time and all she can do is criticise my phone.”

“I’m just saying, I thought the Time Lords would’ve invented better phones! It’s rotary, Barry, it’s from the sixties!”

“It’s retro,” he insists. “It fits the police box aesthetic. Did you miss where it says PUBLIC CALL on the top?”

“Did you miss where it says PULL TO OPEN?”

“Shut up.”

“Why is it a police box, though?” She asks. “That seems… very sixties. You’d be right at home with my gran.”

“Chameleon circuit got stuck,” he says. “She’s designed to change her outside to blend in. I could fix it but, honestly, I like the blue. Plus, uh, it used to be real hard to find the door on a rock or a tree or - if there was nothing else around sometimes she’d materialise as a blade of grass, or whatever, and then I couldn’t even get out. I’m not sure if she was messing with me, or if she was designed to do that, or - it’s just easier this way.”

“It’s nice, actually,” she says. “Comforting, somehow. It feels sturdy. I can’t imagine it as a rock or a tree.”

He pats the floor next to him, and the engines go dwummmm. “She used to be different inside, too. All white and sterile. She had these big roundels - it was really weird. I don’t know who designed the UI, but it wasn’t good. As soon as I figured out how to redecorate I got on it.”

“You designed the coral?” Lup hadn’t really questioned the organic-looking arches and pillars. They’d been low on her list of priorities when she’d found herself in a time machine, and then the question had just fallen by the wayside.

“Well, I mean, I gave her a brief. I wanted it to feel more comfy, you know? This is my home, not a science lab. Well, it’s a lab, a little bit, but it’s - you know what I mean.”

“Wait, wait, gave her a brief?” Lup looks back in at the console, with its mess of wires and mismatched switches and knobs. She’d assumed that was the result of a few decades of Barry conducting haphazard repairs, but now he mentions it, they do look a little like some kind of sophisticated nervous system. “How sentient is this ship, exactly?”

Barry pulls a face, hesitates, and shrugs. “I dunno.”

“What!”

“Well, like, I told you that she’s soulbound, so she’s intelligent to some extent. I have a degree of control over the interior, and - I always kind of feel like she is. Like, I can do everything right on the console, and I’ll find myself halfway across the universe from where I asked her to go.”

“That’s a broken satnav, Barry, not sentience.”

“But it’s always where I need to go,” he elaborates. “Like, there’ll be someone who needs help, or a distress call, or something neat to go and see. Like this! This supernova. I’ve never been here before, and I basically just told the TARDIS that I wanted to show you something ro - something cool.”

He blushes at his slip, but Lup’s wrapped up in her thoughts.

“So, what, you just said “make me something comfy” and she made big coral pillars?”

“It’s a little more elaborate than that, but yeah, pretty much. I don’t know either, really. She’s… eccentric.”

“And the car seats?”

Barry shrugs again. “No idea. I needed somewhere to sit, that’s what I got.”

Lup hums, unhappily. “Can she see us? Feel us? I don’t like the idea that we’re walking around inside a sentient being.”

“I don’t think she minds. She can lock you out, if she likes. One regeneration I got a haircut she didn’t like and she wouldn’t let me in til it grew out. I was trapped on Gorvon Six for months.” The engine makes another dwummm noise, and Barry scowls. “It’s not funny!”

Lup can’t help but laugh at the expression on his face. “The more I learn the more I realise who’s in charge here.”

“I’m in charge!” He protests. “I’m a Time Lord! You know they used to grow TARDISes like bonsai? In little pots?”

“Oh, you’re getting pushed around by a bonsai?”

“I’m gonna go find Taako,” Barry grumbles. “Maybe he’ll be polite and respectful.”

Lup gives him a look.

“Okay, yeah, fine,” he concedes.

She laughs again and turns back to the star, gleaming brilliantly before them. The light plays across her face, reddy-orange, making her hair seem to glow and her eyes seem to sparkle.

Barry’s seen beauty in the universe. He’s seen nebulae, the births of stars, watched the sunrise on Heloyus, which orbits in a complex path between thirty different suns and, once every ten thousand years, sees a simultaneous thirty-sun sunrise. And yet, somehow, watching Lup…

“Want to grab pizza?” He offers.

“Shit, yes,” she grins. “Alien pizza?”

“Future pizza,” he counteroffers, jumping up from the floor of the TARDIS. “November 18th, 2045. The restaurant opened that day and burned down the next, but it’s the best pizza I’ve ever had. I pretty much singlehandedly earned them their money back, cos I keep parking the TARDIS in different places and ordering takeaway. You should see the look on the delivery guy’s face every time he sees me and my enormous blue box in a different area of London, all on one night.” He holds a hand out to help her up, and she takes it gladly.

“How do you order takeaway! You don’t have an address!”

“I just tell them the street,” he says. “It’s not like there’s a lot of blue boxes lying around.”

She considers that for a second. “Okay, yeah, that’s fair, I guess. What’s your order? Hawaiian?”

He narrows his eyes, hands frozen above the console. “How did you know that?”

“Shot in the dark. You seem like you’d go nuts for pineapple on pizza, is all.”

“What does that mean?”

“Alien tastebuds,” she says with a shrug. “I’ll grab Taako.”

“So rude,” he murmurs, and flips a switch on the console, setting the rotors whirring once again as Lup skips out of the room.