Title: Somebody Else’s Conventional
Author: aces
Warnings: It’s ridiculously Hollywood Blockbuster Summer Romance. I honestly don’t know what came over me.
Rating: PG, mostly for adult language
Word count: around 7500 words
A/N: Second fic for livii for the EDA ficathon on henriettastreet, from the Fitz/Anji possibly-post-Time-War prompt. Er, basically ignores Timeless, so consider it a slight AU.



There was somebody sitting outside Anji’s flat. At the best of times, this would have made her pause; now, after traveling with the Doctor, she almost turned and ran away immediately so she could sort out what she’d do next from a sensible distance.

Then the somebody shifted, and she recognized that body outline, even after years apart. “Fitz?” she said in amazement, walking slowly toward him.

He looked up at the sound of her voice and gave her a tired smile. He didn’t stand. “Hi, Anj,” he said. He was in jeans and a t-shirt, his guitar and a backpack by his side. He almost looked like a student, curled up next to her front door, or a hitchhiker who had forgotten he should be on the road. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Fitz,” she repeated when she reached him. She stood over him, looking down. He tipped his head back against the wall and closed his eyes briefly. “Fitz, what are you doing here?”

He opened his eyes again. “I don’t know,” he said. He was matter-of-fact. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“But what…” She trailed off. There was something—wrong. Fitz was always in the middle of an emotion, not like this—numb, flat, deadened. She held out a hand. “C’mon,” she said, “I’ll make tea.”

He took her hand gratefully.

*

“Where are the Doctor and Trix?” Anji asked carefully a half-hour or so later, as they sat at her kitchen table and drank tea, Fitz’s heavily laced with sugar.

“I don’t know,” he said after a long moment of stirring his drink and staring into it. All his responses had been slow, as if he were on some sort of two-second time delay. “I think Trix is in America somewhere. At least, that’s where we dropped her off. The Doctor…” He set the spoon down and met her eye. “I think he’s dead.”

Anji’s hands spasmed on the tabletop. She put them in her lap. “Oh,” she said at last. She didn’t know what she felt. She’d often thought he was dead in the past, when she’d traveled with him, thought it briefly when things seemed to be at their worst. She’d often thought he was dead in the past, but Fitz—not so often. Fitz was usually the optimist in those cases. Strange, from such a cynic. “How—”

“There was a war. Is? Was. Is, was, and will be, probably.” Fitz ran a hand through his hair, and Anji stared at the lines around his eyes. “With the Daleks.” He shook his head when she frowned a question. “Nah, you never had to run into them. I wish I hadn’t. I don’t know what exactly happened. Nobody would tell me, and then Ace was hustling me off the planet.” He suddenly looked embarrassed, and he met Anji’s eye sheepishly. “She asked me where I wanted to go. I couldn’t think of anywhere else. I—could I crash with you for a bit? Just for a couple days. Till I get my bearings. If I have any bearings left, that is.” He started laughing, and he kept laughing, and Anji pulled one of her hands out from the other in her lap and gripped his arm. He stopped laughing, which was good; it was not a pleasant laugh. “Please,” he said after a moment, staring down into his tea again.

“Of course,” she said. What else could she say? “Of course.”

*

Fitz slept for twenty-four hours solid. She didn’t worry about waking him before she left for work the next day, worried only a bit when she rang during her lunch and he didn’t pick up, and did not come anywhere close to panicking when she came home and found him still sleeping. Some of the lines on his face were smoothed out when he slept. She didn’t remember his face having that many lines when she’d known him. How long had it been since she saw him last? She wanted to tell him she didn’t think the Doctor was really dead; not when a couple months ago an alien spaceship had crashed into Big Ben. Oh, they’d tried to make it all sound like a hoax, and it was an amazing coincidence that whatever had gone wrong had apparently been fixed so quickly and cleanly with only the destruction of No. 10. Anji didn’t know anything for certain, though she probably could have asked and they might even have told her. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know, yet. Sometimes she thought she was still getting used to normal.

Fitz didn’t know about any of that, probably. Fitz had a lot of catching up to do. If he was going to stick around, that is.

*

“How are you?” Fitz finally asked her two days later, after spending most of his time—or so it seemed to her—sitting around her flat, drinking tea and not doing much of anything else. At least he’d finally learned to wash out his teacups thoroughly. Or maybe it was the Doctor who’d never done the washing-up. She’d assumed at the time it was a male conspiracy. “How have things been?”

“I’m—good,” she said after considering a while. “Work is going well—in some ways, it’s a lot easier and a lot harder than it used to be—I’ve caught up with some old friends and made new ones. I go to museums and movies and festivals. It’s really good.”

“Boyfriend?” Fitz asked. They were sitting on the couch in the living room, Anji cross-legged at one end and Fitz sprawled at the other. “Is he going to come in and find me and demand satisfaction?”

Anji smiled. “No boyfriend currently,” she said. “I like it this way.”

“Good.” He even sounded like he meant it. He looked around her flat. “Your flat’s as nice as I remember it. You’ve done well for yourself.”

It sounded like something you were supposed to say, to somebody you used to know a long time ago. To an acquaintance. She hadn’t pried, hadn’t asked questions so far; it didn’t seem like a good idea. She’d never quite seen Fitz like this before, and that worried her more than anything. They’d seen whole universes die. So what had he gone through since she left?

“Are you going to be okay, Fitz?” she asked.

“Maybe,” he said, “eventually.”

She nodded, once. “Stay,” she suggested. “Long as you need.” She was a bit surprised at herself for making the offer, but—well, where else would he go?

He leaned over and gave her a fierce one-armed hug. She blinked. “Thanks,” he said, and got up and wandered out of the room.

*

Fitz was not screaming in his sleep, but he might as well have been for all the racket he was making. Anji ran out of her bedroom and found him rolling on the floor of the spare bedroom, knocking into the nightstand next to the bed.

“Fitz!” She dashed across the room and knelt down next to him, grabbing his arm. “What the hell?” She shook him. “Fitz, wake up.”

“The tea’s gone cold,” he said distinctly, and stopped moving.

Anji sat back on her bum, staring down at the man obliviously asleep on the floor. “Oh, well,” she said, feeling oddly indignant, “that cleared everything up.”

She asked him about it, the next day. He told her it was a bad dream, wouldn’t tell her what it entailed, wouldn’t meet her eye. A couple days later nearly the same thing happened—she heard the thud when he fell off the bed this time, and then a delicate clink which, she discovered when she ran out, was a vase her mum had given her as a housewarming gift, the flowers and water strewn across the floor with one of Fitz’s pillows near by.

She woke him up and insisted they remake the bed. Which he didn’t want her to do, because he could do it himself, and he was embarrassed, and being an idiot, but if she told him that he’d just get huffy and refuse to meet her eye again and good god. “If it's made properly,” she said briskly without looking at him, “then maybe you won’t feel a need to go crashing about in your sleep.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed, just as she was about to put the sheet down. “You have work in the morning. I shouldn’t be doing this to you, you didn’t ask—”

“Oh, shut up,” she said tiredly, pushing him off so she could finish tucking in the sheet. “And get that blanket over here, would you? It would be nice if we both got some sleep tonight.”

*

Anji was dreaming about Dave again. She hadn’t dreamed about him in years; she’d barely dreamed at all in the past few years, and usually it was mundane things like lawn mowers on the moon or flying over London. But that night she dreamt about his death, and then she dreamt-remembered other things—the Tigers, Jonas Rust, Fitz frozen in a Siberian cave for a century, all muddled together in an even more disorienting way than they'd been in real life—and when she woke herself up, she didn’t want to go back to sleep.

She wandered into the kitchen, her eyes gummy and her mouth already at day-old-sock level of disgustingness. She opened the refrigerator and looked in blearily. Tea? She didn’t want tea. She wanted something cold, preferably involving chocolate.

She had ice cream, she remembered. She’d bought some on a whim at the store last week. She pulled the tub out of the freezer and got out a spoon and bowl.

“What’s going on?” Fitz mumbled, stumbling into the kitchen five minutes later.

“Sorry,” Anji said softly. Not that there was any reason to speak quietly when both of them were awake now, but you just didn’t talk loudly in the middle of the night. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“Ice cream,” Fitz said and pulled down another bowl. Anji handed him the ice cream scoop without comment.

“Why couldn’t you sleep?”

“I think your dreams are contagious.”

“Oh.” He took a bite of the dessert. “Shit. Sorry, Anji.”

She shrugged one shoulder, played with her spoon in the melting ice cream. “It’s not like they ever really go away,” she pointed out. “They just…go into remission or something.”

“That’s encouraging,” he sighed and pushed his bowl away. He slumped back in his seat and ran his hands through his hair. “Do they have pills yet for making dreams stop?”

“Not really,” Anji told him. “Most of the pills I hear about only make the dreams worse.”

He shivered. “Alcohol it is then.”

She glared at him. “Not tonight.”

He looked at her. “Not tonight,” he agreed. Anji pushed her own bowl away, and he stood up and took them both to the sink to rinse them. He turned around after he’d finished, leaning his back against the counter.

“You’re right, though,” he said. “I hadn’t dreamed at all before—before. I used to dream all the time, particularly right after I—well. Right after I was Remembered by the TARDIS. Before I met you. My dreams were all orderly and pristine then. And then I stopped dreaming. And now they’re not orderly and pristine anymore, but—but neither is anything else. So they can’t be. Does that make sense?”

Anji shook her head slowly. “At this point in the morning,” she said tiredly, “nothing much makes sense. Let’s make a pact,” she added suddenly, and Fitz looked up from the lino. “Let’s neither of us have any more dreams tonight and sleep peacefully. And if it works, we make the same pact tomorrow night. How does that sound?”

Fitz reached across the kitchen to shake her hand ceremoniously. “That sounds brilliant,” he said.

*

"Fitz, did you pick up the post?" Anji called out as she walked into the flat, dropping her bag and keys. She heard him cursing softly in the kitchen and headed in that direction. "It wasn't there when I--"

"Bugger, bugger, bugger," he said when she stopped in the doorway.

"What the—?" The kitchen was a mess. There appeared to have been a spaghetti sauce massacre, judging from the red streaks and smears all over the stove, the walls, the kitchen table. Fitz himself. "Fitz? What did you do?"

"I don't know exactly." He was frantically trying to wipe down the table, mostly managing to smear the sauce more around the table and fling some more onto his t-shirt and jeans. "It was not pretty. I didn't think it was possible. Did gravity change on the Earth or something? Is this another parallel timeline I didn't know about with weird gravitational what’sits?"

Anji surveyed the kitchen some more, looked at Fitz's harrassed face, and started laughing. Fitz stopped wiping down the table to glare at her, which only made her laugh harder, leaning against the doorway to support herself.

"I'm sorry," she managed to gasp after a moment, "I'm sorry, but could you possibly get that spaghetti sauce off your nose?"

Fitz's hand went to his nose automatically. He brought his fingers down and stared at the red sauce there. Then he licked them clean and started laughing himself, helplessly. And then he looked startled, and Anji wondered when was the last time he'd laughed properly, because something was funny and not because the only other response was hysterical crying instead, and she went over and gave him a hug before finding another rag to help him clean up the kitchen.

"Why were you cooking?" she asked later, when they'd cleaned everything up and ordered Chinese.

"I wanted to say thanks," he sounded awkward. "For putting up with me again. You didn't even have to this time."

"Fitz," she said, "you're my friend. I wasn't going to kick you out after a weekend, certainly not when--not when you're still getting your bearings."

"Yeah, well, it's still really generous of you." He was fidgeting a little with his wine glass. "So, you know--" He looked up and met her gaze. "Thank you."

She smiled at him, lopsidedly, and clinked wine glasses. "You're welcome."

*

Fitz didn’t smoke. She’d gone to the shops with him a few times, she’d lent him the odd fiver, but she never saw any cigarettes. He slept a lot—“Making up for years worth of sleep deprivation,” he explained it away, and she thought about subtly dropping a book on depression in his room and then decided that would be a really crass thing to do—and he wandered about the neighborhoods nearby, or even ventured onto the Tube to go further afield. One day he took her on a field trip around his 1960s London, showed her some of the buildings of flats in which he’d lived, where Molly’s and the plant shop had been. They were mostly different now, the plant shop gone, Molly’s a different bar entirely. He seemed to take it all in his stride--he'd probably made the trip many times before, in various decades and centuries--but Anji was weirded out. It shouldn’t have changed that much that quickly, or he shouldn’t have seemed that old. She couldn’t explain it, even to herself, and she didn’t try to explain it to him.

She taught him to use computers; he’d picked up lots of bits and pieces over the years but nothing systematic, and watching him peck at the keys drove her mad enough she got him a typing CD course. He grudgingly got a mobile when she insisted, and one day she came home to find her iPod had been taken over by three decades’ worth of music she had not put on there. “Catching up,” he’d explained laconically—he’d gone awfully taciturn these days—but mostly she was impressed he’d worked out how to use the little device without any help from her.

Eventually he started sleeping less. She thought about asking about the lack of cigarettes, and then decided she didn’t want to jinx it.

*

Finally, one night coming home from work, she kicked his legs off the coffee table where he was watching the telly—he’d developed an obsession with reality shows, which quite often made her want to throw sofa cushions at him—and told him, “At least when I was supporting Dave it was because he couldn’t find an acting gig. You’re not even trying.”

“What the hell can I do?” Fitz asked her. It wasn't whiny, or placating. It was an honest question, and it pulled her up short.

She frowned down at him. “I could call a couple people,” she said at last, uncomfortably. “People in UNIT.”

“UNIT?” Fitz looked wary. “Because I get along so famously with soldier types, you mean?”

“They need people like you. Like us,” she said. “They tried to recruit me when I came back; did you know that? I bloody refused. I was done.” She put her hands on her hips, surveying him. “Are you?”

He shifted on the sofa uncomfortably. “I could start a band?” he asked in a small voice, and Anji started laughing, despite herself.

“Do what you bloody well want,” she told him, throwing a cushion at him after all. “Just do something.”

*

Anji went out for drinks most Friday nights with some of her co-workers, the ones she could stand, the ones she actually looked forward to relaxing with and chatting about non-work things. One Friday, she told Fitz to come pick her up at the bar so they could get dinner and a movie afterward; they were still debating over whether to go to the latest X-Men or Tomb Raider or a showing of a couple Carry On movies at one of the local cinemas. Anji wanted action, Fitz wanted brainless comedy and something involving less of a sci-fi plot that sounded like his previous life, thankyouverymuch. Anji had to admit he had a point about that one.

“He’s a bit dishy,” Sarah elbowed Anji, nodding toward the entrance, eyes dancing. Anji looked round with a little grin; she enjoyed Sarah’s complete disregard for tact, particularly when looking over the potentials on a Friday night. The grin flipped when she saw who Sarah was eyeing.

“That’s my friend I was telling you about,” she said, standing up and waving. Fitz caught the movement and turned toward them, trying to smile. It almost looked like a proper smile, but Anji knew Fitz's proper smiles. He still had flat edges, still wasn't quite his old self. It worried her, sometimes.

“Oh-ho,” Sarah crowed, and the others at the table looked at them. “You didn’t say your friend was a he.”

“What difference does it make?” Anji sounded irritated and she knew it.

“Or that he was dishy,” Jas added, and Eric and Donal both groaned.

“He’s not dishy,” Anji said, “he’s Fitz.”

“Ouch,” Fitz said, right behind her, and Anji felt every inch of her skin flush with embarrassment. “No, really, Anj, tell me how you really feel.”

She swung around, but now he was genuinely smiling, and she relaxed. She smiled back, and gave him a quick peck on the cheek, despite the fact that she knew Sarah and Jas were waggling their eyebrows at each other, and Eric and Donal were probably rolling their eyes. He deserved something after overhearing that thoughtless remark. She introduced him round to her co-workers, and they found another chair and made room for him at the table, insisting he stay for a drink before he and Anji toddled off.

She didn’t think of him as attractive, though he probably was, in that certain scruffy way he had. He was her friend. He’d been her friend for years, and he was grief-stricken right now the way she had been when Dave had died, and they were friends.

She just wanted to be there for him.

*

Anji had goaded him into it. She’d seen the poster for the open mic night at one of the local bars as they were leaving, and she’d turned to him and said, “You should do it.”

She’d had a bit more to drink than she should have, she would later admit to herself, but right then she didn’t really care about that. He’d shaken his head, she’d poked him in the chest. “You. Should. Do. It.”

“Why?”

“I remember Hitchemus,” she said. “I remember how much you enjoyed it.”

“I haven’t played much since then. I haven’t had a chance to play with an audience at all since then.” He’d taken her elbow, guided her down the street back to the flat. She’d brushed him off, quite able to walk on her own.

“So it’s the perfect time to start again,” she’d said.

And now she was here, waiting for him to go on, and she was nervous on his behalf, and how daft was that? She wanted him to do well, though. He’d been smiling a lot more lately, more his old self. Talking more, dreaming less. And at least if he was playing proper songs on a stage here then he wasn’t annoying her neighbors—their neighbors?—with his constant strumming back at the flat.

When he wasn’t watching reality shows, that is.

Fitz came on with his guitar after a band that clearly wanted to be the next Metallica. He grinned out at the audience—Anji sort-of recognized the grin as one of his devil-may-care ones, but there was a bit more presence and charisma to it than that, and she wondered if that was a performance thing or something—and said, “Time for a change of pace, yeah?”

And he was good. Anji was surprised; she’d forgotten how good he was. Not only at the playing but at bantering with the audience, keeping them amused and kindly disposed toward their entertainer.

He grinned again at the applause as he stood up to vacate the stage, that same devil-may-care grin, and he nodded, and he jumped off the stage, and Anji handed him a drink and kissed his cheek.

“Oh,” he sounded surprised, “that good, was I?” He looked pleased.

“Of course you were,” she said. “Told you you would be.”

*

“Okay,” Fitz said one night as soon as Anji was in the door. He was standing in the kitchen doorway, tensed. Anji tossed her bag onto a chair and frowned at him. “Okay, I did it. I talked to somebody at UNIT, and they’re going to see me tomorrow morning—god, at nine, could you set the alarm for me?—and I’m going to work for UNIT. And I can start paying you back for the food and the space and the clothes and all the money you’ve lent me and—Anji, I could barely cut it at the plant shop, what the hell am I doing trying to get a proper job?”

Anji blinked a lot. Then she walked across the flat until she stood in front of him.

“Fitz,” she said, “it’s UNIT. They’re not exactly a regular 9-5 Monday-Friday sort of office job.” She continued to look at him, thoughtfully. “And they’re not going to ask you to carry a gun around and shoot at aliens, either, I’m pretty sure.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” he shot back, “as I absolutely refuse to use a gun ever again.”

She frowned. He shook his head and turned around, padding back into the kitchen. He was barefoot; he always went around the flat barefoot. She couldn’t remember him ever doing that in the TARDIS and—when the hell did he get so comfortable invading her space? When the hell did she let him?

She followed him into the kitchen and watched him open cupboards and drawers at random. “This feels like a really bad idea, Anji,” he said, staring into the refrigerator.

“All you’re doing is going in for an interview,” she told him. “You go in tomorrow morning—and yes, I’ll reset the alarm for you—you hear out what they have to say, you think about it. It’s not inevitable, Fitz, nothing is inevitable.”

“Isn’t it?” He looked up at her, gave her that intense look she saw maybe once a year. It always unsettled her because it was so out of character for him. “Don’t you ever get the feeling that some things are inevitable? That you can’t back out of them no matter how hard you try?”

“No,” she said, and closed the refrigerator door, leaning against it so he couldn’t open it again. He folded his arms, now that he had nothing to hold onto. “I don’t. And after every distorted reality and screwed-up fantasy world we’ve seen, I wouldn’t expect you to either.” She straightened, put her hands on her hips and glared up at him. “You’re going to go in tomorrow, you’re going to talk to them, and then you’re going to weigh your options. Do you have a tie? Dammit, you don’t have a tie. I might still have some from D—or G—no, let’s go shopping. We can pick up some dinner.”

“What, tie? What? No no,” Fitz looked around in near-panic, and Anji would have started laughing hysterically if she knew he wasn’t really panicking about other things and using the tie as an excuse. “I don’t wear ties. Not even when the Beatles wore ties did I wear ties.”

“Don’t worry,” she consoled him with a grin—she couldn’t help it—“I’m sure we can find you one that suits your personality.” She walked into the living room.

Fitz followed. “Oh god.” He looked stricken. “I don’t do conventional.”

Anji picked up her bag again and went to unlock the front door. “This isn’t conventional,” she assured him, gesturing for him to go first. “This was never going to be conventional.”

*

“Well?” Anji asked that night when Fitz walked into the flat and softly closed the door behind him. She was sitting on the couch, a trashy thriller paperback in her lap.

“They asked after you,” he said. His tie was hanging loose around his neck. He sat down next to her on the couch—their thighs touched, and she was startled at the closeness, but she didn’t move away—and then he propped his feet up on the coffee table. She’d almost given up on trying to get him to stop doing that. “I told them there was about a snowball’s chance in hell of you working for them.”

“And you?” Anji kept looking down at the book in her lap. “More or less than a snowball’s chance?”

She hadn’t goaded him into this. She’d suggested it to him exactly once and dropped it. She wasn’t sure it was right for him, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to get involved again, which she knew she would simply by association. She wasn’t out to save the world, but—she did think sometimes she could do a better job helping out than most of the people in charge did. And she trusted Fitz to do it better than most of those military types, which was another surprising thing.

“More,” he said, and Anji refocused on him. He’d slid the tie off and was holding it, fidgeting with it. “I can’t sit around watching reality shows for the rest of my life, can I?”

“Absolutely not,” Anji told him fervently, and pushed the remote further under the seat cushion she was sitting on.

*

It was the fourth time that Fitz almost died. The first two times involved somebody else’s science experiments going badly, and Anji didn’t hear the end of it for days due to the perpetual griping, and she got the impression he didn’t actually come anywhere near dying, just had some embarrassing scratches and bruises. She also got the impression he was hanging around in science labs because he was bored. She didn’t find out about the third time till days afterward, when she walked into the bathroom and found him changing bandages she hadn’t even known were there, and she’d ended up having to demand an explanation even as she ripped the gauze out of his hands to take care of it herself, never mind that her hands were shaking so badly she had to tear the tape with her teeth. A gunshot wound, alien incursion, took on the likenesses of friends, nobody knew who was real and who wasn’t, “friendly fire.” Fitz had been embarrassed and tentative, and Anji had snapped at him and immediately felt guilty.

The fourth time, somebody called Anji. Fitz had gone missing; he’d been taken hostage aboard an alien spaceship along with some other personnel, and they were notifying everyone’s loved ones, or next-of-kin, or…something. Anji hung up the phone, not having quite heard everything the corporal said, and stared at her computer screen at work, her hands clenched in her lap as she told herself, You badgered him into it. He was just getting on your nerves, sitting on your couch all day long, mooning over the Doctor. You did this.

Which was crap—she knew it was crap, it was all crap—but she couldn’t stop digging her nails into her palms, and when Sarah paused by her desk and took one look at her before turning around to inform their supervisor that she was taking Anji home—“Bad news,” Anji heard somebody else whisper, rumor mill already starting—Anji wanted to scream and scream and scream. But she didn’t. The scream was too big and too comprehensive to get past her throat. Anji had always preferred having her breakdowns in private, anyway.

Sarah drove Anji's car home, walked her to her flat, waited for Anji to unlock the door and then walked right into the kitchen to start boiling the water. Anji dropped everything by the door and started laughing. “That’s the English way, right?” she said, still standing by the opened front door. “The sky is falling, let’s make tea.”

“That’s right,” Sarah said calmly, walking back into the living area. She closed and locked the front door, picked up Anji’s things, and steered Anji into the kitchen. “I have no idea how we managed as a nation before we had tea. Or chocolate, can you imagine? Life without tea or chocolate. Or mobiles. I’m so glad I live in the twenty-first century.” She pulled down two mugs and started spooning sugar in one of them.

“No sugar for me,” Anji said.

“Sorry, sweetie,” Sarah said, “you’re getting sugar. You’ve had a shock. It’s got to be strong, sweet tea, remember? It’s the only way it works.” The water started boiling. Sarah poured the tea and brought the mugs over to the table, setting one down in front of Anji. Sarah sat down at her side.

“Right,” she said, “what happened to Fitz?”

Anji flinched away. “What makes you think it was Fitz?”

“Because you’re still living with him—or he’s living with you, I suppose—and you haven’t killed him yet, and if it were anybody in your family you’d be saying a lot more than you are.” There went Sarah again, as blunt as ever, and Anji found she still needed it, like splashing her face with cold water first thing in the morning. She took a sip of the tea and made a face. Far too much sugar; it was the way Fitz—

“He’s missing,” she said abruptly, her hands tightening around the mug even though it was still too hot and it hurt. “He—shit, I haven’t had to deal with this in years, the bastard is missing.”

“Missing?” Sarah frowned. “What—how—”

“I can’t…I don’t know.” It was only a partial lie. Anji stood up and started pacing the kitchen. “His work—it’s all confidential, under the Official Secrets Act.”

“Fitz?” Sarah raised an eyebrow. She’d spent enough time with him in the past few months of Friday nights at the pub. “Not his style, surely? When did he start working?”

Anji shrugged. “A couple months ago.” She started laughing again, tried to bite it down, couldn’t. “Just a couple months ago, and already all this has happened, I swear he’s as much a magnet for trouble as the Doct—” She turned around, away from her friend, until she could get a grip on herself.

Sarah came up behind her, put an arm around her shoulders. Anji would have shrugged her off, but—no. She wanted the comfort. “You and Fitz went through a lot, didn’t you,” Sarah said. “I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but some of the things you two say—” Anji saw the other woman shake her head out of the corner of her eye. “I’m sure he’s okay, Anji.”

“Of course he is,” Anji sighed, walking back to the table, slipping out of Sarah’s touch carefully. She sat down, sipped from her tea again. It was cooler, drinkable. The sugary sweetness wasn’t so bad this time. “He always is. We always are. We’re fucking indestructible.”

She could feel Sarah’s worried gaze on her back. “I’m not used to this,” Anji said after a moment. “Okay, maybe I am a bit, but usually when I was worried about my friends before I wasn’t just waiting. I was worried about me too, and trying to do something to stop it, and now—I don’t know what to do.” She looked at the landline phone, hooked up to the wall, then glanced at her mobile on the kitchen table. “I could go,” she said, “but would I do any good?”

“Go?” Sarah asked. “Go where?”

Anji didn’t have an answer, not one that Sarah would accept anyway. Which was fine, because that was when her mobile rang. Anji sprang up, snatching it from the table, and answered it.

“Hello?”

“Anji, thank god,” Fitz’s voice was a massive sigh of relief on the other end of the line, and Anji slid down the wall in a move she probably would have mocked mercilessly if she’d seen it in a movie, but right then her knees weren’t working quite right. “Listen, can you, uh, get to Cardiff?”

“Cardiff?” she repeated. “What on earth are you doing in Cardiff?”

“I’m not sure I can explain,” he sounded a little strained. “Everything’s sorted now—well, almost—but I could really use your help. And the lift. And some money, actually; I sort of left without my wallet—”

Anji could feel another laugh bubbling up, but it couldn’t get past the lump in her throat this time. “Cardiff,” she said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can, okay?”

“Great.” Another relieved, breathy sigh. “I’ll meet you at the train station, yeah? Thanks, Anji, seriously, you have no idea—oh, crap, that’s a really big dinosaur—” The connection clicked off abruptly, leaving her with silence.

“Dinosaur?” she repeated, blankly.

“Anji?”

Anji looked up. Sarah was still standing there, looking worried. “Hi,” Anji said. “I have to go to Cardiff. Could you tell work I won’t be in tomorrow? I’m sure I’ll be back on Friday.”

“Of course,” Sarah nodded a little in confusion. “Was that Fitz? Is everything—okay? Dinosaurs?”

Anji giggled. And then she stood up, dropped her mobile in her trouser pocket, adjusted her suit, and turned around, already deciding what she needed to pack and making a mental note to stop by the ATM and get out some cash. “Everything’s okay,” she assured Sarah. “Everything is utterly, perfectly normal.”

*

Fitz was waiting on the train platform, as promised—which was good, since Anji had told him exactly when she’d be arriving, and for once the trains were running on time—and he surprised her thoroughly by giving her the most massive hug she’d ever received from possibly anyone. She surprised herself by holding on just as tightly.

“Sorry,” he was gabbling, “sorry, sorry, it was mental, I didn’t know what was happening and then all of a sudden I was on a Sedlucian ship, and it got caught up in this time rift—did you know there was a time rift running through Cardiff? I sure as hell didn’t—and we were spat back out somewhere around here and Torchwood found us and they are seriously mental, and now I apparently have all these forms to fill out and I couldn’t take it anymore—”

“Fitz,” Anji cut across him, and he stopped speaking. “Torchwood?”

“Uh, yeah.” He shrugged. “They’re sort of parallel to UNIT? I guess? Only not really part of the government? Watch out for Captain Jack,” he added in a warning voice. “He slaps. And pinches.”

Anji blinked. “And you needed me here why?”

“Because you’re sensible,” he said as he walked her away from the station. He still had his arm around her shoulders, and again she didn’t try to shrug it off. It was strangely familiar. And nice. “Nobody else there is sensible, I swear, and the UNIT soldiers are all in a state of shock—or maybe they’re just like that all the time; I still haven’t decided, I don’t spend that much time with the regular troops—and I couldn’t handle the dinosaur anymore. You can,” he waved his hands vaguely, in some gesture that apparently meant she would work miracles and/or do his paperwork for him, “and then we can go back and pretend this never happened.”

“Did you tell anybody you were calling me?” she asked after a moment.

“Er, not until after I did,” he admitted. “But it’s not like you’re out of the loop or something; I mean, you know more than these people do.”

Anji stopped moving. “Fitz,” she said. “They called me to tell me you were missing.”

“Oh.” He looked embarrassed. “They asked me who my emergency contact was when they hired me on; I mean, who else was I going to tell them—” He looked at her face, then looked away again. “I’m sorry,” he said.

She reached up to pull his face around, and then she snogged him thoroughly. “Mmm,” he said in surprise, and then he started kissing her back. They broke it off and simultaneously took a step back. “Wait, what?” he said. “Did you—not that I don’t—that was quite nice, and I wouldn’t mind—wait, sorry, what?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I honestly do not know.” She tapped his lips, thoughtfully. “But it’s something to think about. Dinosaur?” she added as she started striding briskly again.

*

“Right,” Anji said the following Monday morning, bright and early, after marching into the UNIT HQ where Fitz had an office. (“An office,” he’d repeated his entire first week, over and over. “What the hell do I do with an office?” Anji had bought him a fern and a mini Zen sand garden. He’d said the fern was a bad nostalgia trip, but he’d kept it anyway. She was pleased to see it was still alive.) “Could you please try not to get yourself killed this week?”

“I make no promises,” Fitz said, slouching into his chair. He tended never to straighten his tie fully, and he never left a suit jacket on for any longer than he was absolutely forced to, but he did actually regularly wear suits now, and it still weirded Anji out, but probably not as much as it did Fitz. “I’m staying away from the labs, though.”

“Because you’ve been ordered to,” another voice noted, and Fitz straightened in his chair. Anji turned around to find a very old gentleman standing in the doorway.

“Sir,” Fitz said, and Anji raised her eyebrows at him. He waggled his back at her, meaningfully, even if Anji had no idea what meaning he was trying to convey.

“Hmm.” The older gent sounded amused by Fitz’s politeness, and Anji looked at him inquiringly again. “Miss Kapoor, I presume? Lethbridge-Stewart. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.” He held out a hand, and Anji shook it.

“He’s a friend of the Doctor’s,” Fitz said in a low voice. “Was.”

“Is.” Anji would have dropped her hand, but the Brigadier still held on, his grip surprisingly strong. He put his other hand over both of theirs and squeezed reassuringly. “I’ve seen more versions of the chap than you’d ever believe, my boy, and he’s not dead. We’ve told you about—”

“Yeah, I heard about who was involved in that,” Fitz cut him off, and the Brigadier let go of Anji and confronted Fitz. “But how do you know he isn’t some previous—”

“I’ve never met that version of him,” the Brigadier interrupted him. “And weren’t you the one who said he was wearing your jacket when you saw the pictures?”

“You saw pictures?” Anji glared at Fitz. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What? Uh—look, I picked up that coat in the TARDIS, it could have been around for centuries—I didn’t tell you because you were already so bloody certain he was still alive—what? Argh!” Fitz swung around in his desk chair and looked out the window.

“Good work with the Sedlucian,” the Brigadier said gently to Fitz’s back after the silence went too long and got too awkward. “And with Torchwood. Not everyone—understands Captain Harkness’ style.”

Anji snorted. “There isn’t a great deal to misunderstand,” she said when the Brigadier looked at her. “He doesn’t leave much left unpropositioned.”

Fitz snorted as well, but he still didn’t turn around.

“Good job yourself, Miss Kapoor,” Lethbridge-Stewart said approvingly. “We could use more people like you.”

“I’m sure I’ve already told your people—”

“I know what you’ve told them,” he was surprisingly polite about this interruption. “I also know what projects they were trying to get you to work on. I have something in mind that is much more up your alley and would make excellent use of your financial skills and abilities to weigh potential risks and fluctuations within a system.”

Anji studied him. “UNIT’s retirement plan?” she queried, and he laughed.

“That could probably use some help, but no, that wasn’t what I was thinking.”

“Careful, Anj,” Fitz said. He was still staring out the window. He sounded grim. “He can be very persuasive.”

“And yet I can’t get you to wear a tie properly.” Lethbridge-Stewart sounded regretful, and Anji looked at him in surprise. He winked at her, and she found herself warming a bit to him. “Would you care to join me for a cup of tea, Miss Kapoor? We could discuss this possible project further.”

“Yes, alright,” Anji said, and Fitz finally swung around to look at them again, in shock this time. She didn’t take her eyes away from the old soldier. “Would you mind giving me a minute?”

“Not at all.” The Brigadier smiled at them both benevolently before leaving the office.

“Anji—”

“It was stupid of me, really,” she said, coming around the desk to lean against it, facing Fitz. He looked up at her, worried. “I should have known better than to send you off alone into a dangerous situation. It’s hopeless.”

“But Anji, you said—”

“I know what I said,” she sighed. “I was done with it. I’d still rather be done with it, but you—no. And I obviously can’t let you out of my sight; you really are almost as bad as the Doctor, you know that?” He flinched, and she put her hand on his cheek. “Stop it,” she chided. “He’s still out there, you’re still here, get over it. And you’d bloody well better show me these pictures this afternoon,” she added, taking her hand away from his face.

He grabbed her hand and squeezed it. “You won’t like them,” he said. “His ears stick out now.”

“Good,” she said, not knowing why, and he grinned up at her. Then he kissed her, quickly, before she could stop him. “Fitz,” she warned.

“You don’t want to do this,” he said. “You don’t want to get mixed up in this saving-the-planet thing again, you said it yourself; you only put me onto it because you were sick of me crowding up your couch and spare room—”

“I know that’s what I said, and I meant it.” She took a deep breath, steadying herself. “But you—you were right. It was this or another plant shop or playing open mic nights at bars across the city. And frankly, this is the best use of your skills.”

“Says you.”

“I know,” she rolled her eyes, “I’ve already said it, haven’t I? Anyway, you still play open mic nights.” She looked around the office, saw Lethbridge-Stewart sitting in the little lobby area outside. “Look, I’ve been bored at work,” she said. “It’s not challenging anymore, or I’m just not interested the way I used to be. I think it is time for a job change. At least working with UNIT would mean staying focused, seeing the world-saving out to the very end instead of jumping off just when somebody else had to pick up the pieces. Might be a slight career swerve, but,” she shrugged, “I’ve survived previous career swerves, haven’t I?”

Fitz looked at her seriously. “Just hear him out,” he said. “You don’t have to make any decisions right away. Weigh your options, yeah?”

Anji quirked a grin, then leant down to kiss his forehead. “Always,” she said.

He half-smiled. “We’re really not conventional at all, are we,” he said.

“Never could be,” she told him fondly, and went outside to hear Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart’s offer.