Domestic Shipping Meme: The Fic (1)
Having received prompts for the following pairings - here they are. As luck would have it, all but one were hand-picked rather than randomly generated pairs.
4. Samantha / Jamie - dusting small breakable things. Suggested by
primsong.
"And just what do you think you're doing?" Samantha demanded, flinging the duster aside.
Jamie gave her a disarming, if somewhat guilty, smile. "Helping you."
"Well, you're not. Leave those things alone, you'll break them."
Jamie set down the porcelain figure with ostentatious caution. "I don't see what you need them all for, anyway."
"They brighten the place up."
"So if I painted the walls yellow, you'd not need them?"
"I didn't say that. You keep your hands off them, they're delicate."
Jamie looked at the row of figurines, reflecting that their physical structure might have been delicate, but their subject matter certainly was not.
"Why're you suddenly so interested in them, anyway?" Samantha persisted. "You never come in here anyway, unless..."
Jamie's heart sank as he saw her leap unerringly to the correct conclusion.
"OK," she said. "What have you done that you don't want me to find out about?" She put her hands on her hips. "You've flooded the kitchen again, haven't you? One of these days I'm gonna kill you, Jamie McCrimmon."
6. Rose / Tegan - balancing somebody's chequebook. Suggested by
justice_turtle (This was the randomly-generated one).
"Right." Rose surveyed the heaps of receipts, bills, bank statements and similar detritus. "We're getting there."
"About time too," Tegan muttered. A glance at the clock showed her that it was past midnight, and their joint attempt to disentangle their financial situation had started well before seven. Though it wasn't as if there was anything better to do. She shivered, grateful for the hoodie Rose had lent her; at the moment, they couldn't afford to run the heating, let alone have a night out on the town.
Rose ticked another entry on her list. "There's still that eighty-three pounds on the twelfth," she said.
"Wasn't that when I had to get the plumber in? That's right." Tegan jumped to her feet, burrowed in a heap of dirty laundry, and uncovered a much-folded piece of paper. "Here's the bill. Clearing something like half a ton of hair out of the sink trap - and it wasn't mine. Much too long and much too blonde."
"Plumber's bill," Rose said, flattening the invoice out and adding it to one of the stacks of paper. "Then there's another payment that evening."
Tegan blushed. "Dinner with the plumber," she explained.
"You asked him out?"
"You're my flatmate, not my mum. Anyway, it didn't work out."
With her tongue slightly out to aid concentration, Rose annotated her list once more. "No wonder we've never got any money."
"Just because you've got a boyfriend," Tegan grumbled. "Pity he can't hold a job down for more than a week - you could do with the money."
"It isn't Don's fault," Rose protested. "People won't give him a fair chance."
"I think it's more to do with him telling everyone what they're doing wrong all the time. And this is me saying it, Rose. He's got a double dose of it, hasn't he? One from the Doctor, and one from this woman Donna."
"He can't help being clever." Rose drew a double line at the bottom of the page, and set the notebook down. "OK. Five pence over. I think we can call it a night."
"And what's the verdict?"
"Financially? We're up the creek and there isn't a paddle in sight." Rose ran her hands through her hair. "We need to find something we can cut back on."
Tegan shivered again. "We've been freezing our backsides off for the last week as it is, and I never want to taste another pot noodle again." She gave Rose a speculative look. "What about hair dye?"
"I've told you before, that's essential. Just like that horrible Vegemite you keep eating."
"Fair enough." Tegan pulled herself to her feet. "Or I suppose we could get proper jobs. I mean, I haven't got anything against defending the Earth, but it doesn't pay the rent."
Rose shook her head emphatically. "I'm not going back to being a shopgirl."
"After you've just spent the whole evening cashing up?" Tegan laughed. "You never stopped. You can take the girl out of the shop..."
8. Fitzwilliam Darcy / Elizabeth Bennet - walking the dog. Suggested by lost_spook.
"Is this, then, part of my duties as mistress of Pemberley?" Elizabeth Darcy asked.
Her husband shook his head. "Not strictly. In the eyes of the world, you would lose no standing by leaving this duty to the grooms."
"But no doubt a conscientious landowner, though he trusted his men, would make his own assay of their work from time to time." Elizabeth smiled. "And a dutiful wife could not fail to accompany him."
"Quite so." Darcy bent down as the spaniel ran up to him and dropped the stick he'd thrown. "Good girl, Sally."
Elizabeth picked up the stick, and hurled it away; the dog raced after it. "I hope that none of your hunting dogs shares my name. An unfortunate confusion might arise."
"I think not." Darcy gave his wife a sideways glance. "I doubt that the man exists who could call you to heel."
9. Clyde / Rani - getting fingerprints off the walls - suggested by
primsong.
Clyde dipped the rag in the soapy water and renewed his attack on the wall. There were, he reflected, good reasons for this duty to fall to him: it certainly wouldn't do for anybody else to see the unnaturally elongated, seven-fingered handprints on the wall, and besides, rendering the alien intruders visible with paint had been his idea in the first place. But that didn't make the task of cleaning up after them any more pleasant.
"Why is it always me that's got to do this?" he muttered.
"Isn't 'fate' your usual explanation?" Rani's voice asked, from behind him.
Clyde swung round. Rani was standing in the doorway, still spattered with paint, sympathy in her eyes and another bucket in her hand.
"Thought you were off to get cleaned up," he said.
Rani shrugged. "It can wait. I expect by the time Luke and the rest have finished there won't be any hot water left anyway." She took her place beside Clyde and began scrubbing at another of the handprints. "Might as well make sure you stay out of trouble."
"What, by making sure we're alone together and no-one's going to disturb us?" He grinned. "Count me in."
Rani flicked a few soapsuds at him. "Any more of that and I'll tell Sarah Jane not to bother running the boiler. A cold shower might do you some good."
10. Lord Dark senior / Miss Hawk - waxing wooden floors. Suggested by
primsong; since number 6 was taken, she gave me free choice which pair to use.
Taking care that nobody was watching her, Lady Dark (née Hawk) crept into the billiard room. As she had anticipated, the sun was just above the horizon, its golden-orange rays caressing the faded green baize on the table and the ancient panels, throwing even the smallest irregularity into high relief.
Which was, of course, why she'd made the effort to be here exactly now.
Her ladyship looked down at the parquet floor. Sure enough, the faint scratches she'd caught sight of three days ago were visible once more, forming the shapes of letters: one letter to each tile. Hastily, her ladyship pulled out her notebook and began to jot down the letters. Doubtless the long-ago designers of the floor had hidden several words in the grid, which together would make up the clue to the treasure she sought. In the short time since her marriage, she had already learned that her husband's ancestors had prized wordplay above all else.
Darting from one vantage point to another, she noted down all the letters on the open floor. That still left the tiles under the billiard table; she dropped to hands and knees and crawled into the narrow space, trying to make out the faint carvings...
"Hermione?"
Lady Dark jumped, and looked up. Her husband was standing in the doorway, a look of well-bred surprise on his face.
"Whatever are you doing down there?" he asked.
"I... that is..." Her ladyship fumbled for an excuse, and said the first thing that came into her mind. "Polishing the floor."
Lord Dark raised his eyebrows. "There's no need to do that. My family may have fallen on hard times, but I can still afford a cleaning lady. Mrs Baker and her daughter come round on Saturdays, you know." He held out his hand. "Now, you come out of there and leave the floor to itself. Otherwise you'll have people thinking you're crackers."
15. Dr Gemma Corwyn / Second Doctor - doing the ironing. Suggested by jjpor.
"Doctor?"
The Doctor looked up from the TARDIS console. "Yes, Doctor Corwyn?"
"Where's the iron?"
"Oh." The Doctor considered the matter. "Do you know, I'm not altogether sure we have one."
Gemma looked him over. "I can see you wouldn't have any use for it. We'll have to do something about that, you know."
"Oh, we will, will we?" The Doctor clutched his threadbare jacket as if he feared it would be confiscated. "Let me see. I'm sure Victoria- yes, Victoria would have been the person to ask. It's a pity she left us."
"And since then it's just been you and Jamie?" Gemma didn't exactly snort, but her expression was eloquent. "No wonder everything's such a mess. Well, I'm not going to let you sit around all day when there's tidying to be done. If I can't get on with the ironing, it'll have to be the washing-up, and I'm certainly not doing that on my own."
"Ah. Well, now that I think about it, there might be one or two places we could look..."
The Doctor hurried in the direction of Victoria's former room. Gemma smiled to herself, and followed him. Her triumph was short-lived, though; she found him on the threshold, a primitive-looking flatiron in his hand.
"There you are," he said.
Gemma folded her arms. "Doctor, don't be ridiculous. What sort of an iron is that supposed to be?"
"Well it's what Victoria was used to. I think she used an electric ring to heat it-"
"I'm not letting that anywhere near my clothes. I can't begin to imagine the damage it could do." Gemma unfolded her arms again, the better to raise an admonitory finger. "Doctor, either I get a proper iron - with a thermostat and automatic tracking control and everything - or I'll have you washing up from now until midnight."
"Not to worry." The Doctor produced the sonic screwdriver from his pocket. "I should have most of the right parts in the power annexe. This should be quite a simple project, I think."
Before Gemma could say anything, he had scuttled away down the corridor. Left to herself, she strolled pensively back to where she'd left the basket of clean, but still un-ironed laundry, pausing only to scoop up and return to their rightful place two pairs of the Doctor's shoes and a bag of what appeared to be alien vegetables.
"You could just have landed somewhere and bought one," she said, to the empty air. "There wasn't any need to go to all the trouble-"
She shook her head. As the Doctor himself had said, it was a simple enough project. What could possibly go wrong?
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