FICLET: Time Storm ~ Doctor 10/Harry ~ DW/HP ~ Teen

[batsutousai]

Title: Time Storm
Fandom: Doctor Who/Harry Potter
Author: Batsutousai
Rating: Teen
Pairing: Doctor 10/Harry Potter
Summary: The TARDIS gets a bit stuck in the Time/Space Vortex, and Harry and the Doctor take the chance for a break.

A/N: Every winter season, I send out cards to anyone willing to give me their address, and I decided two winters ago to start adding fic to the cards. This year, I settled on the very loose prompt of getting stuck in a cabin because of a snowstorm. Which some fics held to better than others, whoops. XD

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They woke to the TARDIS making a loud, irritated whine.

"That doesn't sound good," Harry said as he followed the Doctor to the console room.

"She's just crabby," the Doctor replied with a fond pat to the nearest wall. "There's probably some sort of space phlegm in her oxygen intake again."

'Space phlegm,' Harry mouthed in disbelief, shaking his head.

A sense of amusement washed over him, and he reached over to pat the nearest wall with a fond smile; some days, he really wasn't certain if the Doctor's crazy was wearing off on him, or if he'd actually formed a psychic connection of some sort with the TARDIS. Which, according to the manual he'd found in the library and struggled his way through, wasn't unheard of, but TARDISes didn't tend to connect with non-Gallifreyans. Then again, most Gallifreyans didn't shack up with aliens, which might have something to do with it.

(Most Gallifreyans were also dead, as were most TARDISes, so Harry didn't suppose that anything about his interactions with the Doctor and his TARDIS were even vaguely like whatever rules or warnings those in power on Gallifrey might have once decreed. Bully for them, really, though he did sort of hate that his happiness had come in the form of such devastation for the Doctor.)

"Not space phlegm," the Doctor announced from where he was frowning at the view screen. "Time storm."

"A 'time storm'," Harry repeated with no small amount of disbelief; he could only keep from speaking up about so many made-up terms over the course of an hour.

"You think I made that up?" the Doctor replied, his eyes bright with amusement.

"Please. I learnt early on that at least a third of the stuff you say has no basis in reality."

"Your reality, maybe."

Harry inclined his head, giving him that; his particular reality, while growing more in line with the Doctor's every day, was still firmly rooted in his mixed muggle/wizarding upbringing, and there were plenty of things he honestly struggled to accept as part of the universal order. Thankfully, this incarnation of the Doctor was rather more inclined to forgive him his naïveté and was actually willing to explain things in a tone that didn't border on sarcastic or rude.

(In all fairness, however, due to the Doctor's own very scientific and alien upbringing, magic was often beyond the realm of his own accepted reality, so Harry wasn't the only one who questioned the things that came out of his partner's mouth on a semi-regular basis.)

"A 'time storm' is something of an affected term for various anomalies in the time/space vortex," the Doctor explained with a fond smile. "Most of my companions don't bother to read the user manual."

Harry shrugged; after seven years of being a terrible student and almost dying on a dozen different occasions because he didn't know something, he'd learnt his lesson. Mostly. (Okay, actually, he got sick of not understanding the 'technical terms' the Doctor kept using, and he'd suspected he'd been making half of them up on the fly, besides, so he'd decided to try looking them up during periods where they were neither sleeping, nor running head-long into danger. Oddly enough, the Doctor stopped using 'technical terms' after the first time Harry used the actual word for it from the manual.)

"So, which one is this, then?" Harry asked, coming over to peer at the view screen with the Doctor. Not that he could actually understand the Gallifreyan text on the screen. (Something about a security to keep races who shouldn't have access to Time Lord technology from understanding it by gaining the trust of a TARDIS? Or just allowing them to send coded messages mocking non-Gallifreyans in places where said races might see the message.)

"You remember reading about nexus particles? A gathering of delta particles so dense–"

"They can serve as anchors if you want to stay in the vortex for a time," Harry recalled. Not that he could really understand wanting to stay in the time/space vortex, since hiding within for an extended period wouldn't change the trouble you'd be facing once you left, and if time travelling wouldn't protect you from whatever was coming, neither would waiting it out, in his experience. He supposed it might be a safe place for repairs, assuming you had all the components and/or the repairs couldn't be safely done in normal space.

"Got it in one!" The Doctor gave him a quick hug, then gently pushed at him in a silent request for Harry to move out of the way. "Well, we got caught up in a cluster of delta particles attempting to bond. We would have been fine, normally, but we got stuck in place. I just need to make a quick course correction–" he ran around the console, toggling switches and typing keys and hammering buttons "–and, voila! We should be free within an hour or three."

Only on a time ship was 'an hour or three' not a big deal. Not that they were really heading anywhere with any urgency, mind. Mostly they just drifted from time to time and planet to planet, depending on the whims of one of the two of them.

"So, back to bed?"

"Oh, I'm not actually tired any more."

Harry rolled his eyes and tossed the TARDIS' central column a helpless look.

Amusement tinkled in his mind, like a gentle laugh from someone who loved them both very much.

"You two had best not be having secret conversations behind my back," the Doctor said in a tone that was trying to be disapproving, but really just sounded kind of adoring.

"I'm going to make food. Join me when you feel hungry." Because, well, Harry was feeling a bit peckish. Also, the Doctor would get it eventually.

"I'll be there," the Doctor promised, even as he rather obviously turned his attention back to the viewing screen, fiddling with the controls on the side.

It was almost thirty minutes later when the Doctor shouted, "You meant sex!"

Harry choked out a laugh and had to trade his food for his water before the Doctor had to come and perform the Heimlich.

"I think," he told the TARDIS as he heard the sound of the Doctor running from the console room, "that's a new record for him."

Amusement tinkled in his mind again, and then the Doctor was there, catching his hands and using them to pull him up into an embrace. "You could just say," he complained, sounding just embarrassed enough that Harry suspected he was plenty aware of how distracted he'd been. That, or the TARDIS had shared that they were laughing at him.

"Now where would be the fun in that?"

The Doctor snorted. "Where, indeed," he said with a heavy layering of irony, because goodness knew he'd pulled the same thing – implying something that Harry would have got if he was paying attention, instead of just saying it outright from the start – plenty of times. "So, bedroom now?"

"No. Now I get to finish my breakfast. Then we can go back to bed."

The Doctor huffed, but then he leant in and kissed Harry's cheek before letting him go to get some food for himself.

(In the end, it took them just shy of two and a half hours to get free from the delta particles, but neither Harry nor the Doctor were paying attention, at that point.)

.