Snippets of fiction and stuff.
I've been writing a bit recently, and so I'd like to share some. This is all entirely unfinished, but I need to get them all out so's I can go off and do some homework.
Disclaimer: With the exception of anything taken from the adventures of Al and Robbie, no ownership claimed over the characters portrayed within. This is for fun, not for profit.
He stands before his TARDIS, and that's okay, except that he really doesn't want to turn around, because he's afraid that she'll have changed into something different, hidden her form inside another shell and, oh...
Left him.
Burn with me, he'd said on that spaceship, and how right he was. Because every night he burned with them and always woke up alone with the taste of ashes in his mouth and the smell of smoke in his nostrils, even though there hadn't been any of that. The 'burning' was just the nearest human translation of what happened when something was wiped from the timestream, overwritten. Like a scorch mark in the vortex, a little; unhealed burn marks. Unfaded, because the vortex was essentially timeless.
Still.
Two almighty civilisations, burning. That was an almost-poetic way of putting it. Because only the Master could find anything beautiful in something so horrific.
"You are restless."
And he was. Not that he'd let the stranger in black know this. It was an empty desert around them though.
"I am."
"You are not lost, however. So it is curious that you are here, in this part of my land."
"Maybe I am lost and you just don't know it."
The stranger smiled, and the Doctor woke up.
"How do you live with it? With knowing that..." Cal trailed off, staring into his beer, willing the alcohol to help him with the words.
"I get up, I get dressed, I go to work, and I try every damn day to not think about it. Because if I dwell on it, then others might die. That's all I can do, McCaffrey. That's all anybody can do."
Cal shivered.
"I don't even have that. You know, this is the first day in a week that I've actually gotten out of pyjamas?"
Bell hadn't.
"Cameron fired me partway through the story. From then on, I was strictly freelance. Which is not as glamorous as it sounds," Cal continued, still choosing to stare into the bottom of the bottle, hoping that happiness might spring up from it and give him a hug.
Bell had forgotten about that, and now he mentally kicked himself.
He should have done this earlier.
Cal's eyes were too old for him (and DCI William Bell knew exactly how old he really was, because he'd spent a long time in his office with the case file in front of him and McCaffrey, Cal, Journalist's information open for reading), his face had a few too many lines, although the scruffy beard hid them wonderfully.
But Cal had gotten up some time that day, gotten dressed even with shiny black shoes, had combed his hair and shaved his beard down to a manageable level - he could see the slight bumps of razor burn from here - and there were a few lines on that empty face that were definitely scars, and a few scars in those empty eyes that William could only wish were lines.
He reached over and tugged the empty bottle out of Cal's unresisting (crap, when had it gotten that bad and William hadn't even noticed?) grip.
"My place or yours?" he asked, his voice gentle like none of his subordinates had ever heard.
"Mine's closer," Cal whispered, eyes downcast.
"Mine it is then," responded William, because he'd be damned if he was going to take Cal back to somewhere he'd barely even left in a month.
Cal nodded like he hadn't even heard, and let William bundle him into the passenger seat, and then out of it again fifteen minutes later when William half-carried him inside. He was already asleep by the time he was being tucked into bed.
“Humpty-dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty-dumpty had a great fall.”
She was back.
“I’m not looking at you.”
“All of Gene’s horses and all of Gene’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again.”
A voice right by his ear now, whispered.
“But you didn’t even try to keep him with you, did you Gene? You just left Humpty to his merry eggshell ways, in the end. Didn’t you?”
Gene closed his eyes, breathing in carefully through his nose and then out through his mouth, counting slowly to ten.
Just the way Sam had taught him.
When Gene finally opened his eyes again, he noticed two things.
One was that The Girl was gone.
Second was that he could hear Sam again, faint.
“Gene, I won’t be coming back for a while. I want to, but I can’t. I’ll, uh- I’m going to try to get back as soon as I can, but it might not be for months.” ‘Maybe at all’ rested in the air, as visible and as present as wind.
No!
“Bye.”
The swift feeling of a hand running through his hair, and Sam was-
Almost in his grasp as Gene sat up in a rush-
And then he wasn’t, because Gene woke up to his alarm blaring.
Oh, Jack had stuck around. He’d made sure that they were safe, he’d hidden the truth from Gwen with all the deftness that his years afforded.
And all the while, a portion of his mind screamed in agony.
Death had not mentioned the screaming.
Once, Jack had managed to sleep.
Ianto prowled behind his eyelids, his hair a mess, his suit torn, scratches forming and healing even as Jack watched.
“The dead stay dead, Jack,” he said bleakly.
This was... after. After he’d made that sacrifice. Death himself had come again, picking up the child, holding him just the way that Jack had held him so recently, so long ago, a lifetime away. Jack had seen them out of the corner of his eye, and that would have hurt but the screaming was briefly, blissfully, silent in that moment, and the quiet scared him more.
Death had helped his grandson wave goodbye, then both had departed, and the screaming started again.
“Sometimes they can come back, Ianto.”
“Like Costello did? Like Owen? Like Lisa? Or perhaps as they did in the tunnel?” Ianto sounded bitter, but Jack was mesmerised by the way the vest was mending itself, even though blood was starting to drip from the ends of the jacket sleeves.
“Like me?” He asked, finally looking at Ianto directly.
Ianto shook his head.
“You haven’t died, Jack. You reach the border, but you never cross. But you will cross it. Some day. Nothing living can remain a fact forever.”
And Jack snapped his eyes open to the dawn.
That had been a week ago. It had been six months since Jack had won Ianto. Jack left that night, to Gwen’s tears and pleas.
Martha had visited, briefly. Before he’d left.
“Jack,” she’d whispered, then held out her arms. The tears hadn’t come,
(they would have gotten Ianto wet)
but she’d tried to understand in her own limited way.
Jack had visited Sarah Jane, tried to feel relieved that her Luke had been unaffected. He didn't ponder the science and the whys due simply because Luke was not human, had not been born and had been grown instead, like a TARDIS and its sisters - they could not affect someone that was not within the right range, and they might have controlled them a thousand ways but the brain patterns of the young were not the patterns that Luke had.
And then he'd taken her Sonic Lipstick for a few moments, fixed his transmat, and returned it with all the skill of a pickpocket. He'd caught Luke's suspicious gaze, but the boy had said nothing.
Probably for the best.
He'd pressed the buttons at random, and found himself...
Elsewhere.
He'd wandered a silent place, felt serenity and peace try to seep its way into his heart.
He found a monument to a war long past/lasting/still continuing/never happened and knew with a sinking heart that this was the Eye of Orion that he'd heard of once in the agency, the place with the only physical reminder of the Last Great Time War. No matter how tranquil this planet was, he would not gain respite here.
Another random punching of buttons, trusting the machine to keep him safe from landing somewhere like the depths of space, and he was elsewhere again.
"You can still hear them, can't you."
The words should have been a question, but Adannaya's flat, almost clinical tone made it a statement of pure fact.
Nicholas looked down at his green tea. Janine was out for the weekend, and Ada had happened to be in town doing a joint-thing with Nicholas's... replacement. He'd run into them and taken Techna's statement because she'd descended on him and told him to. Nicholas had smiled wryly when he recalled that little trick; never letting a second go wasted.
And now here they were, sitting in Nicholas's kitchen and talking. Janine was doing the swing shift that week, so they weren't about to be interrupted.
Well. Adannaya was talking. Nicholas was keeping quiet.
"I can take your silence for a yes as much as I can read your facial expressions, Nicholas. You always were an open book in either form."
Nicholas sighed.
"It's whispers, really. Nothing like the old days, and it's not like anything else has come back. I still can't..."
She nodded, reaching out to hold onto his hand, the one that had somehow stopped holding the mug and had curled into a fist on the table.
"I know. It makes you feel helpless and everything is hyperrealised and it hurts. Like when I had that virus."
"And you dropped out of the air midflight, just started tumbling down and when I caught you you were so cold." Nicholas focused worried blue eyes on her. "I shot a man the other week. Did anybody tell you?"
"Padawan, just for the record, I have absolutely no problem with going out and getting completely blind drunk. I do not, however, condone it when not safe on Corusant - yes, the alcohol there sucks, this is why I like Correllia so much - and with somebody I can trust to stop me from saying anything, or from getting lost on my way back to the temple.
"I also don't condone it when you're under the specific planet's legal age."
Jacob stared up blearily at Mez-Jid through the metal bars. It was still way too bright.
"Didn't get drunk," he mumbled.
"What happened?"
"Had a hot chocolate, and woke up-"
"Here. Kriff. Okay. Okay, I've called in an old favour, you're free, but we're also going to play the blood test game when we get back to the ship. The mission's a scrub."
"Master?"
"I am not taking chances, kid. Come on."
He tastes of alcohol.
Alcohol and gunshot residue, which is a little bit like dust but has has a slight brassy tang to it, like the buttons on her overalls that she used to gnaw on sometimes when she was a kid, or maybe a bit like coppery-blood. It's not unpleasant, it's a lot better than some of the other things she's tasted in a kiss, and it's certainly not entirely unexpected.
The alcohol isn't recent though, and for a single moment she wishes that it were; that he'd come down to the shooting range the worse for drink, and then she shakes herself from that thought because it's a stupid one.
Idly, as his tongue slides against hers, she wonders what it would be like to fuck him. Would he like it slow, or fast, or what? He has three ex-wives who all still love and adore him - she's seen the pictures, heard the rumors even though she's in LA and he's fresh from New York - he's gotta do something right. Maybe he's just very... attentive, in bed. And out, because he's following where she leads with this kiss, and he's so very gentle about it...
Their phones ring. A break in the case she and Crews are working on, it has to be, because otherwise why would both of their phones go off at the same time?
But did it have to be now?
The Doctor picked up the ring that lay on the ground, and held it between perfectly manicured red fingernails as she looked at it cautiously.
“You’re quite sure I should be doing this.”
“Absolutely, my dear.”
“And I should be doing this… why?”
Because if you don’t, then it’s a paradox. Because you just forgave me, and it’s time to prove that forgiveness. Because I’m asking you to.
The Master didn’t say any of those things. Instead, he placed both hands lightly on her shoulders, resisted the urge to play with her hair.
“I’m here now, aren’t I?” he asked, his voice almost a purr.
"Look away from me please, sir. Look away from me. Face away from me, sir!" Albert repeated this a few times until the man finally did look away, spitting out blood onto the floor. "Delightful," he muttered
"Next time, we do this one my way, okay?"
"I hardly think that dashing into the store and yelling at the top of our lungs 'drop the fucking guns you sons of bitches or I will blow your fucking kneecaps off' would be considered necessary or appropriate by the DA," Albert responded as he snapped on one of the handcuffs, hearing the sirens - finally! - arrive.
"Hey, it worked!" she answered, defensive, helping her own charge roll to his feet.
Disclaimer: With the exception of anything taken from the adventures of Al and Robbie, no ownership claimed over the characters portrayed within. This is for fun, not for profit.
He stands before his TARDIS, and that's okay, except that he really doesn't want to turn around, because he's afraid that she'll have changed into something different, hidden her form inside another shell and, oh...
Left him.
Burn with me, he'd said on that spaceship, and how right he was. Because every night he burned with them and always woke up alone with the taste of ashes in his mouth and the smell of smoke in his nostrils, even though there hadn't been any of that. The 'burning' was just the nearest human translation of what happened when something was wiped from the timestream, overwritten. Like a scorch mark in the vortex, a little; unhealed burn marks. Unfaded, because the vortex was essentially timeless.
Still.
Two almighty civilisations, burning. That was an almost-poetic way of putting it. Because only the Master could find anything beautiful in something so horrific.
"You are restless."
And he was. Not that he'd let the stranger in black know this. It was an empty desert around them though.
"I am."
"You are not lost, however. So it is curious that you are here, in this part of my land."
"Maybe I am lost and you just don't know it."
The stranger smiled, and the Doctor woke up.
"How do you live with it? With knowing that..." Cal trailed off, staring into his beer, willing the alcohol to help him with the words.
"I get up, I get dressed, I go to work, and I try every damn day to not think about it. Because if I dwell on it, then others might die. That's all I can do, McCaffrey. That's all anybody can do."
Cal shivered.
"I don't even have that. You know, this is the first day in a week that I've actually gotten out of pyjamas?"
Bell hadn't.
"Cameron fired me partway through the story. From then on, I was strictly freelance. Which is not as glamorous as it sounds," Cal continued, still choosing to stare into the bottom of the bottle, hoping that happiness might spring up from it and give him a hug.
Bell had forgotten about that, and now he mentally kicked himself.
He should have done this earlier.
Cal's eyes were too old for him (and DCI William Bell knew exactly how old he really was, because he'd spent a long time in his office with the case file in front of him and McCaffrey, Cal, Journalist's information open for reading), his face had a few too many lines, although the scruffy beard hid them wonderfully.
But Cal had gotten up some time that day, gotten dressed even with shiny black shoes, had combed his hair and shaved his beard down to a manageable level - he could see the slight bumps of razor burn from here - and there were a few lines on that empty face that were definitely scars, and a few scars in those empty eyes that William could only wish were lines.
He reached over and tugged the empty bottle out of Cal's unresisting (crap, when had it gotten that bad and William hadn't even noticed?) grip.
"My place or yours?" he asked, his voice gentle like none of his subordinates had ever heard.
"Mine's closer," Cal whispered, eyes downcast.
"Mine it is then," responded William, because he'd be damned if he was going to take Cal back to somewhere he'd barely even left in a month.
Cal nodded like he hadn't even heard, and let William bundle him into the passenger seat, and then out of it again fifteen minutes later when William half-carried him inside. He was already asleep by the time he was being tucked into bed.
“Humpty-dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty-dumpty had a great fall.”
She was back.
“I’m not looking at you.”
“All of Gene’s horses and all of Gene’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again.”
A voice right by his ear now, whispered.
“But you didn’t even try to keep him with you, did you Gene? You just left Humpty to his merry eggshell ways, in the end. Didn’t you?”
Gene closed his eyes, breathing in carefully through his nose and then out through his mouth, counting slowly to ten.
Just the way Sam had taught him.
When Gene finally opened his eyes again, he noticed two things.
One was that The Girl was gone.
Second was that he could hear Sam again, faint.
“Gene, I won’t be coming back for a while. I want to, but I can’t. I’ll, uh- I’m going to try to get back as soon as I can, but it might not be for months.” ‘Maybe at all’ rested in the air, as visible and as present as wind.
No!
“Bye.”
The swift feeling of a hand running through his hair, and Sam was-
Almost in his grasp as Gene sat up in a rush-
And then he wasn’t, because Gene woke up to his alarm blaring.
Oh, Jack had stuck around. He’d made sure that they were safe, he’d hidden the truth from Gwen with all the deftness that his years afforded.
And all the while, a portion of his mind screamed in agony.
Death had not mentioned the screaming.
Once, Jack had managed to sleep.
Ianto prowled behind his eyelids, his hair a mess, his suit torn, scratches forming and healing even as Jack watched.
“The dead stay dead, Jack,” he said bleakly.
This was... after. After he’d made that sacrifice. Death himself had come again, picking up the child, holding him just the way that Jack had held him so recently, so long ago, a lifetime away. Jack had seen them out of the corner of his eye, and that would have hurt but the screaming was briefly, blissfully, silent in that moment, and the quiet scared him more.
Death had helped his grandson wave goodbye, then both had departed, and the screaming started again.
“Sometimes they can come back, Ianto.”
“Like Costello did? Like Owen? Like Lisa? Or perhaps as they did in the tunnel?” Ianto sounded bitter, but Jack was mesmerised by the way the vest was mending itself, even though blood was starting to drip from the ends of the jacket sleeves.
“Like me?” He asked, finally looking at Ianto directly.
Ianto shook his head.
“You haven’t died, Jack. You reach the border, but you never cross. But you will cross it. Some day. Nothing living can remain a fact forever.”
And Jack snapped his eyes open to the dawn.
That had been a week ago. It had been six months since Jack had won Ianto. Jack left that night, to Gwen’s tears and pleas.
Martha had visited, briefly. Before he’d left.
“Jack,” she’d whispered, then held out her arms. The tears hadn’t come,
(they would have gotten Ianto wet)
but she’d tried to understand in her own limited way.
Jack had visited Sarah Jane, tried to feel relieved that her Luke had been unaffected. He didn't ponder the science and the whys due simply because Luke was not human, had not been born and had been grown instead, like a TARDIS and its sisters - they could not affect someone that was not within the right range, and they might have controlled them a thousand ways but the brain patterns of the young were not the patterns that Luke had.
And then he'd taken her Sonic Lipstick for a few moments, fixed his transmat, and returned it with all the skill of a pickpocket. He'd caught Luke's suspicious gaze, but the boy had said nothing.
Probably for the best.
He'd pressed the buttons at random, and found himself...
Elsewhere.
He'd wandered a silent place, felt serenity and peace try to seep its way into his heart.
He found a monument to a war long past/lasting/still continuing/never happened and knew with a sinking heart that this was the Eye of Orion that he'd heard of once in the agency, the place with the only physical reminder of the Last Great Time War. No matter how tranquil this planet was, he would not gain respite here.
Another random punching of buttons, trusting the machine to keep him safe from landing somewhere like the depths of space, and he was elsewhere again.
"You can still hear them, can't you."
The words should have been a question, but Adannaya's flat, almost clinical tone made it a statement of pure fact.
Nicholas looked down at his green tea. Janine was out for the weekend, and Ada had happened to be in town doing a joint-thing with Nicholas's... replacement. He'd run into them and taken Techna's statement because she'd descended on him and told him to. Nicholas had smiled wryly when he recalled that little trick; never letting a second go wasted.
And now here they were, sitting in Nicholas's kitchen and talking. Janine was doing the swing shift that week, so they weren't about to be interrupted.
Well. Adannaya was talking. Nicholas was keeping quiet.
"I can take your silence for a yes as much as I can read your facial expressions, Nicholas. You always were an open book in either form."
Nicholas sighed.
"It's whispers, really. Nothing like the old days, and it's not like anything else has come back. I still can't..."
She nodded, reaching out to hold onto his hand, the one that had somehow stopped holding the mug and had curled into a fist on the table.
"I know. It makes you feel helpless and everything is hyperrealised and it hurts. Like when I had that virus."
"And you dropped out of the air midflight, just started tumbling down and when I caught you you were so cold." Nicholas focused worried blue eyes on her. "I shot a man the other week. Did anybody tell you?"
"Padawan, just for the record, I have absolutely no problem with going out and getting completely blind drunk. I do not, however, condone it when not safe on Corusant - yes, the alcohol there sucks, this is why I like Correllia so much - and with somebody I can trust to stop me from saying anything, or from getting lost on my way back to the temple.
"I also don't condone it when you're under the specific planet's legal age."
Jacob stared up blearily at Mez-Jid through the metal bars. It was still way too bright.
"Didn't get drunk," he mumbled.
"What happened?"
"Had a hot chocolate, and woke up-"
"Here. Kriff. Okay. Okay, I've called in an old favour, you're free, but we're also going to play the blood test game when we get back to the ship. The mission's a scrub."
"Master?"
"I am not taking chances, kid. Come on."
He tastes of alcohol.
Alcohol and gunshot residue, which is a little bit like dust but has has a slight brassy tang to it, like the buttons on her overalls that she used to gnaw on sometimes when she was a kid, or maybe a bit like coppery-blood. It's not unpleasant, it's a lot better than some of the other things she's tasted in a kiss, and it's certainly not entirely unexpected.
The alcohol isn't recent though, and for a single moment she wishes that it were; that he'd come down to the shooting range the worse for drink, and then she shakes herself from that thought because it's a stupid one.
Idly, as his tongue slides against hers, she wonders what it would be like to fuck him. Would he like it slow, or fast, or what? He has three ex-wives who all still love and adore him - she's seen the pictures, heard the rumors even though she's in LA and he's fresh from New York - he's gotta do something right. Maybe he's just very... attentive, in bed. And out, because he's following where she leads with this kiss, and he's so very gentle about it...
Their phones ring. A break in the case she and Crews are working on, it has to be, because otherwise why would both of their phones go off at the same time?
But did it have to be now?
The Doctor picked up the ring that lay on the ground, and held it between perfectly manicured red fingernails as she looked at it cautiously.
“You’re quite sure I should be doing this.”
“Absolutely, my dear.”
“And I should be doing this… why?”
Because if you don’t, then it’s a paradox. Because you just forgave me, and it’s time to prove that forgiveness. Because I’m asking you to.
The Master didn’t say any of those things. Instead, he placed both hands lightly on her shoulders, resisted the urge to play with her hair.
“I’m here now, aren’t I?” he asked, his voice almost a purr.
"Look away from me please, sir. Look away from me. Face away from me, sir!" Albert repeated this a few times until the man finally did look away, spitting out blood onto the floor. "Delightful," he muttered
"Next time, we do this one my way, okay?"
"I hardly think that dashing into the store and yelling at the top of our lungs 'drop the fucking guns you sons of bitches or I will blow your fucking kneecaps off' would be considered necessary or appropriate by the DA," Albert responded as he snapped on one of the handcuffs, hearing the sirens - finally! - arrive.
"Hey, it worked!" she answered, defensive, helping her own charge roll to his feet.