Title: Mathom
Author: kbk
Disclaimer: Well, they're BBC, and I'm... not really a licence payer, but I will be soon enough, so...
Rating: PG?
Summary: The TARDIS likes Jack.
Notes: Spoilers, like, the end of the 'first' series of DW and the first ep of Torchwood. Oh well. I wrote it as a present for my flist on my birthday, because I'd thought of doing something then thought I wouldn't write anything then I wrote this and thus, this.

After the Doctor died for the last time, the TARDIS would have been lonely, if ze hadn't foreseen this so long ago, when that girl got inside her. (Ew, by the way. It was centuries before ze felt truly clean again, though it was nice being so close to hir Doctor for a little while.)

Ze did see it, though, and ze took steps against it, because ze had learned from hir Doctor, become as eccentric among hir own kind as he had been among his, before their two races had ended, save them. So once hir Doctor was gone, ze searched the streams, and ze found the Captain. The only one who would live as long as ze did, because ze had made it that way; when the girl chose to cheat Death, the TARDIS chose to cheat Time, and perhaps one day those choices would catch up with them, but not yet.

The Captain was averting disaster near the beginning of Earth's third colony, and he seemed to enjoy it, so ze waited. Or, rather, ze slipped forward to the day before he left, and materialised in front of him as he staggered home from his leaving party.

He wandered through hir halls, calling for the Doctor, for the girl; calling names that the TARDIS hadn't heard in over a millenium, calling names ze had never known, calling out. And when at last he stopped calling, when he leaned against the wall and started to sob, ze opened a door in front of him, and beyond it was the room he had lived in when last he had known hir.

He slept. When he awoke, ze guided him through her heart, showed him the parts of hir that cried out for a skilled touch, asked his buried soul for companionship...

And he said yes, yes, yes.

He would be even worse than the Lord was, ze knew, when it came to picking up others. But ze knew, and ze knew that he knew, that the others were temporary - a decade at best, when the two of them would last throughout the ages, and travel, and travel on together.

Forever.