Ulysses (4/?) [Ten/Jack/Rose - Firefly crossover - PG-13]
Title: Ulysses (4/?)
Author: aibhinn
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Rose, Jack, Ten (will end up OT3); the Firefly crew.
Spoilers: DW through Journey's End, TW through Children of Earth, and all aired Firefly canon, including episodes and the movie Serenity.
Betas: larielromeniel and canaana, though I did some editing after I got it back from them, so if I messed it up, it's not their fault!
Summary: After the death of the blue-suited Doctor, an immortal Rose uses the dimension cannon to teleport herself back into her home universe. Or should that be 'Verse? Crossover with Joss Whedon's Firefly.
Disclaimer: Nothing is mine. I promise to put everything back where I found it.
Author's Note: The title refers to the poem of the same name by Tennyson, an online version of which can be found here. This chapter fought me mightily, and so it's a bit shorter than it would otherwise have been. And a day late. Sorry!
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10
Chapter 4
Jones stacked the last bag of flour on top of the others and sighed, wiping his forehead with the back of his gloved hand. It was cooler down here in the cellar than anywhere else on the farm, but he knew he couldn't stay for very long; there was too much to do.
Wearily, he climbed back out into the fierce sunlight of late summer. The harvest was nearly over. Several head of stock had been slaughtered and butchered and were even now being smoked, salted, or frozen. Strings of sausages and braids of garlic already hung from the cellar's rafters. Shelves were piled with packages of dried herbs and jars of pickled vegetables, jams and preserves, casks of cider and other juices, barrels of fruit, bags of cornmeal and wheat flour and sugar-anything you could think of that might be needed for a long, hard winter. Which was exactly what this part of the planet had. According to Jacob, once the equinox passed in a week or so, the temperatures would start to drop dramatically. In a month's time, the first flurries would fly, and Jacob would run a rope from the house to the barn so that he could find his way without getting lost, once the real winter came.
"You're welcome to stay," Jacob had told him over dinner last night, glancing at his wife for confirmation. Lizzie had nodded, and so had Andrea. "Ain't found any field hand I trust as much as you in a good, long time. You want to stay on another season, job's yours. We've got an extra bedroom in here for winter, too; ain't no heat in that barn-you'd freeze to death. T'ain't much, but it's warm."
And closer to Andrea, Jones thought, noticing the glance Jacob gave his daughter. Was that a warning to stay away from him, or tacit permission to try for him? Jacob wasn't getting any younger; no doubt he'd like to see his only daughter married and settled before he died.
The thought made Jones ill. Not the thought of Andrea herself; the thought of what he would bring down on her if he did stay. Nobody he cared about stayed safe for long.
"I'll think about it," he'd said, but the truth was, he'd made his decision: Once the harvest was done, he'd be gone. He knew how to get to the city from here: It was about twenty miles down the road that passed by the western boundary of the farm. If he left just after the first moonrise, he could make it by dawn.
Andrea came around the barn, leading Bess, the milch cow, in to be milked. She caught his eye and smiled. He gave a small smile and a polite nod in return. He still wasn't sure what to make of her. She hadn't quite flirted with him, but she seemed to invite him to flirt back; her father made no bones about the fact that he wouldn't mind having Jones for a son-in-law, but she never seemed to have an opinion one way or another.
He didn't know whether to be grateful for that or not, but it didn't really matter. He'd be gone in a day or two anyway.
Supper that night was small and simple, despite the baking-and-cooking frenzy that had been going on in the kitchen all day. "It's the Harvest Festival tomorrow," Lizzie told him when he asked. "And our turn to host it this year. Now you've got the corn in and the wheat ground, tomorrow I'm going to borrow the two of you after lunch to start setting things up outside. We'll have folks bringing tables and chairs and food starting mid-afternoon, but we can get our own things out there sooner than that."
And just like that, Jones was roped in.
Lying in the grass by the river later that night, he toyed with the idea of leaving right away, but discarded it. These people had been good to him, after all; he could stay one more day, and then leave once everything had been cleared away tomorrow. Besides, vanishing would be easy enough. The man Jones used to be had plenty of practice in disappearing once he was in a city, particularly if the city had a spaceport. Once he was in the crowds, he'd be gone for good.
He sighed, breathing in the scent of dried grass and warm dirt from the stubble fields across the river. It was the smell of summer, of warmth and comfort. Cicadas called in the humid night, their song almost lulling him to sleep.
"You're still here."
He was on his feet facing the speaker before he realised who it was. Andrea blinked, and he thought he might have seen a blush stain her cheeks, even in the moonlight. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to startle you again. I was just surprised to see you."
He took a deep breath to slow his respiration back to normal and told his heart that it didn't honestly need to pound quite that hard. "It's okay." Her words finally sank in, and he added, "What do you mean, I'm still here?"
She shrugged and sat down on the grass next to where he'd been lying. "You're leaving soon," she said, as simply as if he'd told her so. "I wasn't sure you'd be willing to stay for the celebration tomorrow."
Slowly, he sank down to the ground again. "Why wouldn't I be?" he asked. "And what makes you think I'm leaving? Jacob's asked me to stay for the winter." Inwardly he was cursing. Had he made his plans that obvious? He'd thought he was being so careful not to show anything on his face. Damn it, he used to be better at this sort of thing. He'd grown sloppy over the past few decades.
"Da an' Lizzie don't know," she said, and he startled again at how close she was to his thoughts. She smiled, a little sadly. "I'm no Reader," she assured him. "But you don't control your expressions around me as well as you do around them. Besides, I ain't stupid, Jones. You're no farm hand, not normally. You can do it, sure, and you work hard, but a man who talks like you, dresses like you, moves like you-this ain't your natural place. We're a stop on the road for you, nothing more. I always knew that."
Her tone wasn't accusatory in the least, but he felt himself flushing nonetheless. "I don't-" he began, and stopped, because he wasn't sure what he was going to say. And what did she mean, he didn't control his expressions around her? "What do you want from me?" he blurted, not sure he wanted to know but desperately sure he needed to.
That sad little quirk of her mouth deepened slightly, and she glanced away. "I don't know," she admitted. She pulled at the grass beneath her, ripping it up out of the soil uselessly. "I don't know what it is about you, Jones. I don't hardly know you, and you don't hardly know me, and it ain't like we mean anything to each other, but-" She looked up at him, and her eyes glistened in the moonlight. "But you're a good man," she said, "and you're hurting, and I don't like it when good men hurt."
Pain stabbed through him, and he turned away from her. "I'm not a good man," he said harshly.
"Good men can do bad things," she said. "It's what makes 'em men and not saints."
He swung around violently, and she flinched, probably at the expression on his face. "I'm neither," he spat, and lurched to his feet. His breath came harshly; his muscles trembled. "I'll stay one more day," he said in a voice he hardly recognised as his own. "But by this time tomorrow, I'll be halfway to Pallas. Don't remember me as a good man who hurt, Andrea. Remember me as a murderer, because that's what I am."
She stood too, and looked at him levelly. "So am I," she said.
He shook his head. "I don't mean killing some guy who tried to rape you," he said. "I did the worst thing a man can do. I killed two of my own. I killed my lover, and I killed my grandson."
That made her flinch again, and he was selfishly glad to see it. Now maybe she'd leave him alone. Now maybe she'd understand what sort of man he really was.
"I killed my brother," she said.
The shock of her words nearly knocked him off his feet. He stared, speechless, into her soft blue eyes. "What happened?" he asked at last.
She looked away. "Doesn't matter now," she said. Now that he was looking for it, he could see the old pain behind her eyes: pain that had always been there, but which he'd never recognised. "I didn't stick a knife in him or anything like that, but if I hadn't…well, done what I done, he wouldn't have been where he was, and he wouldn't have died."
"He was trying to save you, wasn't he." It wasn't a question, though Jones didn't know what made him so sure.
She nodded slowly, still not looking at him. A tear spilled out of her right eye and trickled down her face, glinting in the moonlight. "Yeah. I woulda died if it weren't for him. And he died instead. Three years ago now, just about exactly."
He marvelled at her strength. "How did you keep going?" he wondered aloud. "How did you keep on with that weight dragging at you?" If he'd been able to stay dead, he'd have killed himself right after Stephen's death, he knew it. Here was someone who could die-completely, finally, the way he never could-and yet she was still here, still living. He couldn't fathom it.
She shrugged. "One day at a time," she said. "At first, that was all I could do. I got up, got dressed, moved through the day, went to bed. I worked as hard as I could so I'd collapse into bed at night, fall into sleep, and not dream. I took on Matthew's chores as well as my own, and tried with everything I had not only to do two people's work, but to work myself into an early grave as fast as possible." She took a shaky breath, and he realised how much control she was exerting just to talk about this, even now. "But then one day I caught myself laughing at something someone said, and I realised I wasn't just surviving any more: I was living. It was six months after he died. I felt so guilty, I went right then over to his grave yonder, behind the house, and cried myself nearly sick. Lizzie found me and brought me back inside and gave me a good talking to, and she told me something I've never forgotten." She looked up, met Jones's eyes again. "She said, 'Dying for someone's easy; it only takes a second and then it's all over. It's living for someone that's hard. You want to do something in Matthew's memory? Live for him.'"
Jones swallowed. "And what did you do?"
She smiled-a sad smile, but a smile all the same. "I decided to live for him," she said. "This farm was Matthew's life. He loved it-loved everything about it. It was gonna go to him after Da died. Now I'm the heir, and I'm gonna do everything I can to make this farm succeed, no matter what. And I ain't ever gonna sell it. This farm is my tribute to my brother, and I'm gonna be here til I die."
She reached up and brushed a hand over Jones's cheek. "I can't say what you should or shouldn't do," she said quietly. "Except for this. You been beating yourself up over your lover and your grandson, and I can understand that. I beat myself up over Matthew for a long time. Sometimes I still do; sometimes I can't sleep and I stare up at the moons and think, if I hadn't been so stupid, he'd still be here. But there's nothing going to bring him back, and nothing going to bring yours back either. Dyin' ain't the answer, and I bet, if they could, that's what they'd tell you, too. They'd want you to live. Not just survive, live."
She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. "See you in the morning," she said, and walked towards the house. Jones watched her go until she disappeared over the rise, her skirts swishing around her ankles.
Live for them, he thought. Not just continue to breathe, but actually live. It's what Ianto would have wanted. And Tosh, and Owen, and everyone else. Keep moving. Keep fighting. Keep feeling. Keep loving. I've done it for a hundred and fifty years, watching everyone die around me. I did it after the Year that Never Was. Why can't I do it now?
Numbly, he sat down on the grass, staring up at the moons. I miss you, he thought desperately, picturing Ianto's soft smile, Stephen's excited grin. I miss you so much.
For the first time since their deaths, when the tears came, he let them fall.
Author: aibhinn
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Rose, Jack, Ten (will end up OT3); the Firefly crew.
Spoilers: DW through Journey's End, TW through Children of Earth, and all aired Firefly canon, including episodes and the movie Serenity.
Betas: larielromeniel and canaana, though I did some editing after I got it back from them, so if I messed it up, it's not their fault!
Summary: After the death of the blue-suited Doctor, an immortal Rose uses the dimension cannon to teleport herself back into her home universe. Or should that be 'Verse? Crossover with Joss Whedon's Firefly.
Disclaimer: Nothing is mine. I promise to put everything back where I found it.
Author's Note: The title refers to the poem of the same name by Tennyson, an online version of which can be found here. This chapter fought me mightily, and so it's a bit shorter than it would otherwise have been. And a day late. Sorry!
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10
Chapter 4
Jones stacked the last bag of flour on top of the others and sighed, wiping his forehead with the back of his gloved hand. It was cooler down here in the cellar than anywhere else on the farm, but he knew he couldn't stay for very long; there was too much to do.
Wearily, he climbed back out into the fierce sunlight of late summer. The harvest was nearly over. Several head of stock had been slaughtered and butchered and were even now being smoked, salted, or frozen. Strings of sausages and braids of garlic already hung from the cellar's rafters. Shelves were piled with packages of dried herbs and jars of pickled vegetables, jams and preserves, casks of cider and other juices, barrels of fruit, bags of cornmeal and wheat flour and sugar-anything you could think of that might be needed for a long, hard winter. Which was exactly what this part of the planet had. According to Jacob, once the equinox passed in a week or so, the temperatures would start to drop dramatically. In a month's time, the first flurries would fly, and Jacob would run a rope from the house to the barn so that he could find his way without getting lost, once the real winter came.
"You're welcome to stay," Jacob had told him over dinner last night, glancing at his wife for confirmation. Lizzie had nodded, and so had Andrea. "Ain't found any field hand I trust as much as you in a good, long time. You want to stay on another season, job's yours. We've got an extra bedroom in here for winter, too; ain't no heat in that barn-you'd freeze to death. T'ain't much, but it's warm."
And closer to Andrea, Jones thought, noticing the glance Jacob gave his daughter. Was that a warning to stay away from him, or tacit permission to try for him? Jacob wasn't getting any younger; no doubt he'd like to see his only daughter married and settled before he died.
The thought made Jones ill. Not the thought of Andrea herself; the thought of what he would bring down on her if he did stay. Nobody he cared about stayed safe for long.
"I'll think about it," he'd said, but the truth was, he'd made his decision: Once the harvest was done, he'd be gone. He knew how to get to the city from here: It was about twenty miles down the road that passed by the western boundary of the farm. If he left just after the first moonrise, he could make it by dawn.
Andrea came around the barn, leading Bess, the milch cow, in to be milked. She caught his eye and smiled. He gave a small smile and a polite nod in return. He still wasn't sure what to make of her. She hadn't quite flirted with him, but she seemed to invite him to flirt back; her father made no bones about the fact that he wouldn't mind having Jones for a son-in-law, but she never seemed to have an opinion one way or another.
He didn't know whether to be grateful for that or not, but it didn't really matter. He'd be gone in a day or two anyway.
Supper that night was small and simple, despite the baking-and-cooking frenzy that had been going on in the kitchen all day. "It's the Harvest Festival tomorrow," Lizzie told him when he asked. "And our turn to host it this year. Now you've got the corn in and the wheat ground, tomorrow I'm going to borrow the two of you after lunch to start setting things up outside. We'll have folks bringing tables and chairs and food starting mid-afternoon, but we can get our own things out there sooner than that."
And just like that, Jones was roped in.
Lying in the grass by the river later that night, he toyed with the idea of leaving right away, but discarded it. These people had been good to him, after all; he could stay one more day, and then leave once everything had been cleared away tomorrow. Besides, vanishing would be easy enough. The man Jones used to be had plenty of practice in disappearing once he was in a city, particularly if the city had a spaceport. Once he was in the crowds, he'd be gone for good.
He sighed, breathing in the scent of dried grass and warm dirt from the stubble fields across the river. It was the smell of summer, of warmth and comfort. Cicadas called in the humid night, their song almost lulling him to sleep.
"You're still here."
He was on his feet facing the speaker before he realised who it was. Andrea blinked, and he thought he might have seen a blush stain her cheeks, even in the moonlight. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to startle you again. I was just surprised to see you."
He took a deep breath to slow his respiration back to normal and told his heart that it didn't honestly need to pound quite that hard. "It's okay." Her words finally sank in, and he added, "What do you mean, I'm still here?"
She shrugged and sat down on the grass next to where he'd been lying. "You're leaving soon," she said, as simply as if he'd told her so. "I wasn't sure you'd be willing to stay for the celebration tomorrow."
Slowly, he sank down to the ground again. "Why wouldn't I be?" he asked. "And what makes you think I'm leaving? Jacob's asked me to stay for the winter." Inwardly he was cursing. Had he made his plans that obvious? He'd thought he was being so careful not to show anything on his face. Damn it, he used to be better at this sort of thing. He'd grown sloppy over the past few decades.
"Da an' Lizzie don't know," she said, and he startled again at how close she was to his thoughts. She smiled, a little sadly. "I'm no Reader," she assured him. "But you don't control your expressions around me as well as you do around them. Besides, I ain't stupid, Jones. You're no farm hand, not normally. You can do it, sure, and you work hard, but a man who talks like you, dresses like you, moves like you-this ain't your natural place. We're a stop on the road for you, nothing more. I always knew that."
Her tone wasn't accusatory in the least, but he felt himself flushing nonetheless. "I don't-" he began, and stopped, because he wasn't sure what he was going to say. And what did she mean, he didn't control his expressions around her? "What do you want from me?" he blurted, not sure he wanted to know but desperately sure he needed to.
That sad little quirk of her mouth deepened slightly, and she glanced away. "I don't know," she admitted. She pulled at the grass beneath her, ripping it up out of the soil uselessly. "I don't know what it is about you, Jones. I don't hardly know you, and you don't hardly know me, and it ain't like we mean anything to each other, but-" She looked up at him, and her eyes glistened in the moonlight. "But you're a good man," she said, "and you're hurting, and I don't like it when good men hurt."
Pain stabbed through him, and he turned away from her. "I'm not a good man," he said harshly.
"Good men can do bad things," she said. "It's what makes 'em men and not saints."
He swung around violently, and she flinched, probably at the expression on his face. "I'm neither," he spat, and lurched to his feet. His breath came harshly; his muscles trembled. "I'll stay one more day," he said in a voice he hardly recognised as his own. "But by this time tomorrow, I'll be halfway to Pallas. Don't remember me as a good man who hurt, Andrea. Remember me as a murderer, because that's what I am."
She stood too, and looked at him levelly. "So am I," she said.
He shook his head. "I don't mean killing some guy who tried to rape you," he said. "I did the worst thing a man can do. I killed two of my own. I killed my lover, and I killed my grandson."
That made her flinch again, and he was selfishly glad to see it. Now maybe she'd leave him alone. Now maybe she'd understand what sort of man he really was.
"I killed my brother," she said.
The shock of her words nearly knocked him off his feet. He stared, speechless, into her soft blue eyes. "What happened?" he asked at last.
She looked away. "Doesn't matter now," she said. Now that he was looking for it, he could see the old pain behind her eyes: pain that had always been there, but which he'd never recognised. "I didn't stick a knife in him or anything like that, but if I hadn't…well, done what I done, he wouldn't have been where he was, and he wouldn't have died."
"He was trying to save you, wasn't he." It wasn't a question, though Jones didn't know what made him so sure.
She nodded slowly, still not looking at him. A tear spilled out of her right eye and trickled down her face, glinting in the moonlight. "Yeah. I woulda died if it weren't for him. And he died instead. Three years ago now, just about exactly."
He marvelled at her strength. "How did you keep going?" he wondered aloud. "How did you keep on with that weight dragging at you?" If he'd been able to stay dead, he'd have killed himself right after Stephen's death, he knew it. Here was someone who could die-completely, finally, the way he never could-and yet she was still here, still living. He couldn't fathom it.
She shrugged. "One day at a time," she said. "At first, that was all I could do. I got up, got dressed, moved through the day, went to bed. I worked as hard as I could so I'd collapse into bed at night, fall into sleep, and not dream. I took on Matthew's chores as well as my own, and tried with everything I had not only to do two people's work, but to work myself into an early grave as fast as possible." She took a shaky breath, and he realised how much control she was exerting just to talk about this, even now. "But then one day I caught myself laughing at something someone said, and I realised I wasn't just surviving any more: I was living. It was six months after he died. I felt so guilty, I went right then over to his grave yonder, behind the house, and cried myself nearly sick. Lizzie found me and brought me back inside and gave me a good talking to, and she told me something I've never forgotten." She looked up, met Jones's eyes again. "She said, 'Dying for someone's easy; it only takes a second and then it's all over. It's living for someone that's hard. You want to do something in Matthew's memory? Live for him.'"
Jones swallowed. "And what did you do?"
She smiled-a sad smile, but a smile all the same. "I decided to live for him," she said. "This farm was Matthew's life. He loved it-loved everything about it. It was gonna go to him after Da died. Now I'm the heir, and I'm gonna do everything I can to make this farm succeed, no matter what. And I ain't ever gonna sell it. This farm is my tribute to my brother, and I'm gonna be here til I die."
She reached up and brushed a hand over Jones's cheek. "I can't say what you should or shouldn't do," she said quietly. "Except for this. You been beating yourself up over your lover and your grandson, and I can understand that. I beat myself up over Matthew for a long time. Sometimes I still do; sometimes I can't sleep and I stare up at the moons and think, if I hadn't been so stupid, he'd still be here. But there's nothing going to bring him back, and nothing going to bring yours back either. Dyin' ain't the answer, and I bet, if they could, that's what they'd tell you, too. They'd want you to live. Not just survive, live."
She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. "See you in the morning," she said, and walked towards the house. Jones watched her go until she disappeared over the rise, her skirts swishing around her ankles.
Live for them, he thought. Not just continue to breathe, but actually live. It's what Ianto would have wanted. And Tosh, and Owen, and everyone else. Keep moving. Keep fighting. Keep feeling. Keep loving. I've done it for a hundred and fifty years, watching everyone die around me. I did it after the Year that Never Was. Why can't I do it now?
Numbly, he sat down on the grass, staring up at the moons. I miss you, he thought desperately, picturing Ianto's soft smile, Stephen's excited grin. I miss you so much.
For the first time since their deaths, when the tears came, he let them fall.