Beta-ed fic: it dun got beta-ed! Omg I am so tired tho~
Fic: Practically Perfect
Fandoms: Doctor Who/Mary Poppins
Rating: PG
Words: 3169
Warnings: None.
Beta: My beloved alas_a_llama.
Notes: This ... did not exactly turn out as planned. But it’s been three years or so in the development, so hopefully it’s at least reasonably good! Charlotte’s father was a real person, by the way; Charlotte herself, however, is not.
Summary: Silents in the nursery do not bode well for the future of Earth; luckily, however, there is at least one Time Lady who is willing to do what must be done. To tidy matters up.
It begins - or began, or will begin - in a nursery in Cherry Tree Lane, with the changing of the wind. Eleven-year-old Jane Banks turns from the first floor window, resolutely not crying at who isn’t there, and sees instead of a prim-faced nanny a white-faced, cold-eyed alien in a suit, staring. Her chin lifts.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she tells it resolutely, though she is.
The alien says nothing, only looks at her with glassy dead eyes like a fish’s. Never looking away from it, Jane reaches to the tiny knife carefully sewn into her white petticoat, and without complaint she marks her own arm.
“When I snap my fingers,” she says, too quiet even for her little brother to hear in the bathroom next door, “You won’t have been here. Because She will be.”
The alien nods, impassive. Her fingers snap like a biscuit.
The alien is gone.
When the nanny arrives, she observes the mark on Jane’s arm with an expression so cold that it isn’t until she leaves that Jane realises her chilliness bespeaks not indifference, but cold hard fury. She listens to Jane’s outpouring and her absolute inability to remember why the mark is there, and says almost nothing in response. Michael is asleep by now - he goes to bed a whole forty-five minutes earlier than she does, rendering her advanced years a source of much pride for her and many sulks for him - and stirs so little while their nanny (for gone on the wind like a dandelion seed or not, she remains their nanny) is there that it is almost as if time as stopped. When Jane has whispered herself into silence, the nanny firmly orders her not to worry and tucks her up in bed with a spoonful of lime cordial medicine and a kiss.
In the morning, aware that to do otherwise would only plunge her brother into a sulking fit which has the potential to last for at least a week, Jane does not tell Michael about Mary Poppins’ most recent visit.
~*~
Some miles away, in the heart of the city, twelve-year-old Miss Charlotte Asquith opens her eyes very wide in the misty pre-dawn light which is streaming through the nursery windows and promptly sits bolt upright, wide awake.
The New Nanny (Miss Whittaker is an excellent woman who has served the family faithfully for the last two years, but to Charlotte she will always be The New Nanny) is accustomed to throwing the curtains open at precisely five minutes past seven whilst extemporising on the subject of the bright new morning, the pretty little birdies and sundry other of God’s special wonders, but Charlotte can see quite clearly on the clock which has spent three years hanging neatly and swirl-encrusted on the nursery wall that it is presently only a quarter to six. Furthermore, the pleasant blue curtains at the windows are not thrown wide: only one curtain is open at all, its partner left neatly in place so that the window appears to be winking at her slyly. This has only happened once before - last year, in fact - and ever since Charlotte has regarded such an event as a harbinger of what her father, on the rare occasions when she sees him, likes to refer to as Interesting Times.
(There is always a decidedly odd look on his face when he says such things, a look somewhere between nostalgia and excitement with a few other things muddled into it that thus far she has been unable to identify. When she enquired about this, her mother informed her absently that she would understand when she was older. Charlotte has long had her suspicions about the veracity of this oft-repeated statement, but nevertheless hopes ardently that she will soon be sufficiently old as to understand, because such a state of being sounds interesting.)
In any case, now that she is awake Charlotte considers that being up and about in the world would be infinitely more amusing than lying unsleepy in her bed, so noiselessly she slips from between her sheets and dips her feet into the nanny-mandated slippers (pink, and therefore hated). Her dressing gown (blue and a gift from her father, and thus grudgingly tolerated) is tugged from its hanger and pulled hastily over her nightgown, and still busily attending to its belt she steals across the nursery and out.
The stairs are an elegantly balustraded spiral, and Charlotte (who has always mistrusted spiral staircases) has through trial and many errors discovered that it is virtually impossible to successfully navigate them without once making a creak. When she hears murmured, conspiratorial voices below her, therefore, she takes the utmost care (narrowly remembering the squeaking plank in the centre of step nine, an old bête noire) in creeping down as far as she dares, stopping about halfway and cautiously peering between the banisters at those conferring at the bottom.
The figure whose expression she can see in half-lit profile is her father’s, elegant of suit and aristocratically grave of face; the other is immaculately attired in navy blue with prim hints of white, her hair neatly up under her hat and her back familiarly ramrod straight.
Most children, on beholding the unexpected return of a much-beloved figure, are wont to throw themselves at that person with many noisy proclamations of joy. Charlotte Asquith, however, is not most children: she has learnt better. Her father is a great and serious man; no less a statesman is his visitor. Neither, she is aware, are prone to welcoming a sudden shouting embrace. All this being the case, Charlotte neither moves nor makes a sound, but listens as hard as she can until the woman whose face is in shadow very deliberately turns round to face her.
“Only bats flutter and listen in shadows, Charlotte.”
Since the game is up, there is no point in being bashful. She straightens up, therefore, and descends the remaining stairs with a commendable air of self-containment.
“It’s rude to interrupt,” she points out meekly. “Good morning, Papa.”
“Good morning, Charlotte.” Her father looks faintly flustered at the sudden appearance of his youngest daughter. “Ah... Shouldn’t you be asleep?”
“I woke up,” she explains simply. “Miss Whittaker doesn’t know.” Yet, she adds, in the privacy of her own mind, and turns to greet her old nanny politely. “Good morning, Mary Poppins. How do you do?”
“Quite nicely, thank you, Miss Asquith.” Her former nanny is prim and sharp, like tea with a slice of lemon. “Although you would do better to be in bed.”
Mary Poppins’ manner when she says this is so unlike her as to be like a slap in the face, like a quiet London at noon. Wondering what this portends, Charlotte permits herself to be led upstairs - not via the balustrade this once, she notes - to the nursery and in turn to her bed. The air is so still and so heavy with time that for a moment she fancies that the nursery clock has stopped, that all the clocks in all the world have stopped, before she calls herself a fanciful simpleton (which she knows she is not).
She expects, once Mary Poppins has tucked her up in bed with some perfunctory strictures on the evils of eavesdropping, a brief song or perhaps a briefer kiss, but this is not so. What she does get, it turns out, is her former nanny kneeling at her bed to speak to her, their eyes on a level. Even when she has seen her at her most stern, Charlotte has been able to detect a glint in Mary Poppins’ eyes, a sparkle which says that at any time, something could happen. This murky quiet morning is the first time in her life that she can find no trace of such a twinkle, and its absence renders her profoundly uneasy and uncertain why.
“Charlotte?”
“Yes, Mary Poppins?” She is very much wondering, but she asks the question calmly, for although she is uneasy she is not yet afraid.
“I require you to do something for me,” Mary Poppins tells her, and Charlotte is silent and waiting. “Unfortunately, Charlotte, whilst your father is indeed a great man, in certain matters he is also the most supercalifragilistical ignoramus in the multiverse. What he will do in 1914 I shudder to think... But that is quite beside the point at present. The point is, there is a storm brewing beyond this planet, and I require your aid in saving your country from it. Will you help me?”
Mary Poppins has never asked her for help before. Charlotte cannot imagine her ever asking anyone for help, ever. Mary Poppins, after all, never asks for anything. If she were to ask, she is sure, it would be for something grand and terrible, something beyond everything she believes she can do. She can’t imagine what it could be, but she wants more than anything to know. More than that: she wants to know herself, to test her own mettle and to discover if she can run into the dark as if she owns it.
Charlotte Asquith says, “What must I do?”
~*~
Forty-five minutes, sixteen hundred and eleven years and three galaxies later, Mary Poppins is not entirely surprised to run into what might as well be the same huge-eyed, slit-mouthed alien being as that encountered on a tiny blue-marble planet by Jane Banks of Cherry Tree Lane. Her lips purse, disapproving, and her eyes narrow.
“I am not amused by your games,” she informs it, her fingers tightening bone-white on the handle of her respectable TARDIS carpet-bag. “Nor am I impressed. I did not extricate myself from a time-lock behind the Horsehead Nebula to be the flibbertigibbet plaything of the Silents.”
The Silent watches her, impassive. The Time Lady known to twelve galaxies as Mary Poppins raises her eyebrows, an expression which in over nine hundred years of existence has instilled near-instant obedience in eight hundred and thirteen races; still the only response is silent, insouciant unresponsiveness as she calmly marks her arm with the parrot’s beak of her sonic umbrella. Her dark eyes are without a hint of light or sparkle now; there is only fearlessness and steel, like the molten stone at the heart of planets.
“Playtime,” she informs it sharply, “Is over.”
She snaps her fingers. The planet - actually a small moon, but thus far she has not cared to inform its proud inhabitants of this fairly inconsequential fact - feels its gravity shift and warp like a face in a fairground mirror. There is a scent of ozone like the world after a lightning strike, and the faintest screech of brakes going vworp, vworp.
The Time Lady is gone.
~*~
“Bert,” Mary Poppins says decisively, “Something must be done.”
“Quite right you are,” her ex-companion agrees. “And when you find out what that is, if you’ll excuse me, you just let me know.”
She fixes him with a dreadfully baleful eye. “I left you on Earth as a chimney-sweep for cheeking me, Bertellifrenz. Next time, I won’t be nearly so generous.”
Once he might have been abashed, but not now.
“Well, why are they here and who are they here for?”
“Two very excellent questions. If you’d like to give me the answers to them, too, I shouldn’t be nearly so concerned,” Mary says tartly. “But they certainly didn’t go to all the trouble of breaking out of that moon Draxpatellicolundar imprisoned them in for nothing. Of course, Drax always could be a dreadfully sloppy workman - I was half-surprised they hadn’t broken out eons ago - but still, it must have been painful for them.”
Bert is respectfully silent, principally on the grounds that he has no idea what to say to that and even his mother-tongue’s old standby of ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ doesn’t seem as if it will quite cut the mustard this time. One day, he thinks, he really must learn some Welsh.
“What do you need me to do?” he asks at last.
“Look after the children,” she commands immediately. “I don’t believe for one moment that the Silents are remotely suicidal enough to harm my children, but I have never believed in taking silly chances, either. And for Gallifrey’s sake do something about that accent - you’ve been here twenty-six years and you still sound as if I picked you up from Tarsus Vee last week.”
“It gets me by all right,” he retorts, defensive. “And it’s not as if anyone understands the real locals, either. But I’ll keep a good weather-eye on the little’uns, never you fear.”
“Oh, very well,” the Time Lady says impatiently, and rises from the park bench they are sharing to the accompaniment of scandalised looks from passersby. “And do take care of yourself, Bert. You made a very useful companion and I should hate to have to train up another myself.”
Bert salutes mutely. Mary Poppins once again clicks her fingers -
- And is gone.
~*~
The loss of the other Time Lords, Mary Poppins considers dispassionately, was really most inconvenient. Oh, they’ll turn up one day, she is sure - the Doctor’s histrionics about being ‘the very very last’ notwithstanding. He seems to be enjoying his over-reacting too much for her to spoil it with common sense, but for now there are still only one or two Time Lords and Ladies who have struggled into the light like ragged dolls rescuing themselves from claustrophobic not-death between the cushions of the universe’s sofa. Romana is floating around somewhere in time, she knows, and Drax the eternally unkempt was lurking unsteadily in the shadow of Malrene’s seventeenth-century orbit when he last deigned to make contact with anyone. Iris Wildthyme, thank spircles, has yet to put in an appearance - and nor has the Rani, but she personally doubts that that means anything. The Rani obeys no rules but her own, and there is no force in or beyond creation that could lock her away in time or space - certainly not the Doctor. One of them should probably tell him so, she thinks coldly, but not her. If he wants to wail and weep over his destruction of their home then let him: it will be his due.
(She is sitting in solitude on a rock on the outermost ring of the planet Saturn, looking out at space. Around her, the universe moves on along its curve, like an artist drawing a circle over and over, slow and painstaking and beautiful in its singing quietness. She is watching space and time and wondering if she shall ever go home again.)
She has never liked working with others of her race: they are too flashy, too mercurial, too smug. Unlike many - her mind flicks again to the Doctor, and she delicately snorts with disgust - she has rarely been moved to take a companion, either. Bert was an enforced anomaly, uncomfortable as a horse-hair vest until she grew accustomed. She finds it ... easier to deal with children, their minds more sensible and quicker to grasp the multiverse and its disordered logic, and above all easier to leave. Children may claim they expect intransience, but in her experience a kiss and a distraction are all that is required to leave without that hated word ‘goodbye’. When she leaves them, she leaves without promises, leaves behind only a tiny fragment of her heart like a bead on a string, and that is enough - for her and for them.
Nevertheless, just now she feels the lack of a second voice, even a dissenting one: another presence to share this battle with. The knowledge that Gallifrey was there, even in its criticising illumination a lighthouse in the dark space-sea, has always anchored her even as she has flung herself away from its fractal strangeness. The fact that it is now no longer there to be returned to - not in any now, gone from all her pasts and all her futures - unnerves her at all the strangest moments, she finds.
And still. And still. It is inconvenient, the destruction of her people. Really most inconvenient at times like this. No wonder she generally prefers to involve herself in the small sharp happinesses and tragedies of children. There, at least, there are only problems she knows herself to be well able to solve, and if there is death then she knows it is no fault or responsibility of hers. The Doctor and Romana adore the grand heroic sacrifices of others’ blood; if she prefers to save a life through tea parties on the ceiling then at least it shall be her own work, and good work too.
Nevertheless. Wishes are not kisses and neither gets the job done, as Bert has been known to proclaim after a few pints too many, and she has a job to do which getting maudlin over Gallifrey will do nothing to resolve. A particular course of action is indicated; it is not a pleasant one, but she has never been one to flinch in the face of Doing One’s Duty. If she is right - and she is never wrong - the Silents have been employed for the purpose of disturbing time-locked events, and therefore must be stopped. If she is right - and she knows she is, knows it as well as she knows her own name and the sound of the time-patterns at the heart of all things - then she who has spent a thousand lifetimes nurturing young life must ensure that one of the rawest and bloodiest and most shameful passages of this world’s raw and bloody history comes to pass. She will usher in the Age of War, because to do otherwise would be to leave this planet alone and as defenceless as a child without the technological advancements forty years of world wars will bring, from Germany to Korea. At least, she thinks, her children shall not be so undefended. At least she can give them that.
(It is a paltry gift, she knows, hardly worthy of her children’s brilliant-shining potential, but it is all she can give. She has learnt to be grateful for small mercies, and she fears her children must do the same.
After this, she knows, she will not be able to touch her psychic paper tape-measure for at least a regeneration, for fear of what it will tell her. She does not want to know her own thoughts any more.)
Her heels click, sharp as a soldier on the parade ground. Her back (no corsetry; she is a Time Lady, and is corseted by nothing and no-one) is as straight as a sergeant’s baton as she marches into time, trusty carpet-bag tight in her hand, whistling.
No spoonful of sugar can make this chore any easier to swallow, but she is the adult, the Guardian, the Nanny. She will make the choices, because no-one else can, and she will shoulder the responsibility alone. The nursery must be cleaned up, and she hasn’t much time.
She snaps her fingers ---
--- she is gone.
Fandoms: Doctor Who/Mary Poppins
Rating: PG
Words: 3169
Warnings: None.
Beta: My beloved alas_a_llama.
Notes: This ... did not exactly turn out as planned. But it’s been three years or so in the development, so hopefully it’s at least reasonably good! Charlotte’s father was a real person, by the way; Charlotte herself, however, is not.
Summary: Silents in the nursery do not bode well for the future of Earth; luckily, however, there is at least one Time Lady who is willing to do what must be done. To tidy matters up.
It begins - or began, or will begin - in a nursery in Cherry Tree Lane, with the changing of the wind. Eleven-year-old Jane Banks turns from the first floor window, resolutely not crying at who isn’t there, and sees instead of a prim-faced nanny a white-faced, cold-eyed alien in a suit, staring. Her chin lifts.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she tells it resolutely, though she is.
The alien says nothing, only looks at her with glassy dead eyes like a fish’s. Never looking away from it, Jane reaches to the tiny knife carefully sewn into her white petticoat, and without complaint she marks her own arm.
“When I snap my fingers,” she says, too quiet even for her little brother to hear in the bathroom next door, “You won’t have been here. Because She will be.”
The alien nods, impassive. Her fingers snap like a biscuit.
The alien is gone.
When the nanny arrives, she observes the mark on Jane’s arm with an expression so cold that it isn’t until she leaves that Jane realises her chilliness bespeaks not indifference, but cold hard fury. She listens to Jane’s outpouring and her absolute inability to remember why the mark is there, and says almost nothing in response. Michael is asleep by now - he goes to bed a whole forty-five minutes earlier than she does, rendering her advanced years a source of much pride for her and many sulks for him - and stirs so little while their nanny (for gone on the wind like a dandelion seed or not, she remains their nanny) is there that it is almost as if time as stopped. When Jane has whispered herself into silence, the nanny firmly orders her not to worry and tucks her up in bed with a spoonful of lime cordial medicine and a kiss.
In the morning, aware that to do otherwise would only plunge her brother into a sulking fit which has the potential to last for at least a week, Jane does not tell Michael about Mary Poppins’ most recent visit.
~*~
Some miles away, in the heart of the city, twelve-year-old Miss Charlotte Asquith opens her eyes very wide in the misty pre-dawn light which is streaming through the nursery windows and promptly sits bolt upright, wide awake.
The New Nanny (Miss Whittaker is an excellent woman who has served the family faithfully for the last two years, but to Charlotte she will always be The New Nanny) is accustomed to throwing the curtains open at precisely five minutes past seven whilst extemporising on the subject of the bright new morning, the pretty little birdies and sundry other of God’s special wonders, but Charlotte can see quite clearly on the clock which has spent three years hanging neatly and swirl-encrusted on the nursery wall that it is presently only a quarter to six. Furthermore, the pleasant blue curtains at the windows are not thrown wide: only one curtain is open at all, its partner left neatly in place so that the window appears to be winking at her slyly. This has only happened once before - last year, in fact - and ever since Charlotte has regarded such an event as a harbinger of what her father, on the rare occasions when she sees him, likes to refer to as Interesting Times.
(There is always a decidedly odd look on his face when he says such things, a look somewhere between nostalgia and excitement with a few other things muddled into it that thus far she has been unable to identify. When she enquired about this, her mother informed her absently that she would understand when she was older. Charlotte has long had her suspicions about the veracity of this oft-repeated statement, but nevertheless hopes ardently that she will soon be sufficiently old as to understand, because such a state of being sounds interesting.)
In any case, now that she is awake Charlotte considers that being up and about in the world would be infinitely more amusing than lying unsleepy in her bed, so noiselessly she slips from between her sheets and dips her feet into the nanny-mandated slippers (pink, and therefore hated). Her dressing gown (blue and a gift from her father, and thus grudgingly tolerated) is tugged from its hanger and pulled hastily over her nightgown, and still busily attending to its belt she steals across the nursery and out.
The stairs are an elegantly balustraded spiral, and Charlotte (who has always mistrusted spiral staircases) has through trial and many errors discovered that it is virtually impossible to successfully navigate them without once making a creak. When she hears murmured, conspiratorial voices below her, therefore, she takes the utmost care (narrowly remembering the squeaking plank in the centre of step nine, an old bête noire) in creeping down as far as she dares, stopping about halfway and cautiously peering between the banisters at those conferring at the bottom.
The figure whose expression she can see in half-lit profile is her father’s, elegant of suit and aristocratically grave of face; the other is immaculately attired in navy blue with prim hints of white, her hair neatly up under her hat and her back familiarly ramrod straight.
Most children, on beholding the unexpected return of a much-beloved figure, are wont to throw themselves at that person with many noisy proclamations of joy. Charlotte Asquith, however, is not most children: she has learnt better. Her father is a great and serious man; no less a statesman is his visitor. Neither, she is aware, are prone to welcoming a sudden shouting embrace. All this being the case, Charlotte neither moves nor makes a sound, but listens as hard as she can until the woman whose face is in shadow very deliberately turns round to face her.
“Only bats flutter and listen in shadows, Charlotte.”
Since the game is up, there is no point in being bashful. She straightens up, therefore, and descends the remaining stairs with a commendable air of self-containment.
“It’s rude to interrupt,” she points out meekly. “Good morning, Papa.”
“Good morning, Charlotte.” Her father looks faintly flustered at the sudden appearance of his youngest daughter. “Ah... Shouldn’t you be asleep?”
“I woke up,” she explains simply. “Miss Whittaker doesn’t know.” Yet, she adds, in the privacy of her own mind, and turns to greet her old nanny politely. “Good morning, Mary Poppins. How do you do?”
“Quite nicely, thank you, Miss Asquith.” Her former nanny is prim and sharp, like tea with a slice of lemon. “Although you would do better to be in bed.”
Mary Poppins’ manner when she says this is so unlike her as to be like a slap in the face, like a quiet London at noon. Wondering what this portends, Charlotte permits herself to be led upstairs - not via the balustrade this once, she notes - to the nursery and in turn to her bed. The air is so still and so heavy with time that for a moment she fancies that the nursery clock has stopped, that all the clocks in all the world have stopped, before she calls herself a fanciful simpleton (which she knows she is not).
She expects, once Mary Poppins has tucked her up in bed with some perfunctory strictures on the evils of eavesdropping, a brief song or perhaps a briefer kiss, but this is not so. What she does get, it turns out, is her former nanny kneeling at her bed to speak to her, their eyes on a level. Even when she has seen her at her most stern, Charlotte has been able to detect a glint in Mary Poppins’ eyes, a sparkle which says that at any time, something could happen. This murky quiet morning is the first time in her life that she can find no trace of such a twinkle, and its absence renders her profoundly uneasy and uncertain why.
“Charlotte?”
“Yes, Mary Poppins?” She is very much wondering, but she asks the question calmly, for although she is uneasy she is not yet afraid.
“I require you to do something for me,” Mary Poppins tells her, and Charlotte is silent and waiting. “Unfortunately, Charlotte, whilst your father is indeed a great man, in certain matters he is also the most supercalifragilistical ignoramus in the multiverse. What he will do in 1914 I shudder to think... But that is quite beside the point at present. The point is, there is a storm brewing beyond this planet, and I require your aid in saving your country from it. Will you help me?”
Mary Poppins has never asked her for help before. Charlotte cannot imagine her ever asking anyone for help, ever. Mary Poppins, after all, never asks for anything. If she were to ask, she is sure, it would be for something grand and terrible, something beyond everything she believes she can do. She can’t imagine what it could be, but she wants more than anything to know. More than that: she wants to know herself, to test her own mettle and to discover if she can run into the dark as if she owns it.
Charlotte Asquith says, “What must I do?”
~*~
Forty-five minutes, sixteen hundred and eleven years and three galaxies later, Mary Poppins is not entirely surprised to run into what might as well be the same huge-eyed, slit-mouthed alien being as that encountered on a tiny blue-marble planet by Jane Banks of Cherry Tree Lane. Her lips purse, disapproving, and her eyes narrow.
“I am not amused by your games,” she informs it, her fingers tightening bone-white on the handle of her respectable TARDIS carpet-bag. “Nor am I impressed. I did not extricate myself from a time-lock behind the Horsehead Nebula to be the flibbertigibbet plaything of the Silents.”
The Silent watches her, impassive. The Time Lady known to twelve galaxies as Mary Poppins raises her eyebrows, an expression which in over nine hundred years of existence has instilled near-instant obedience in eight hundred and thirteen races; still the only response is silent, insouciant unresponsiveness as she calmly marks her arm with the parrot’s beak of her sonic umbrella. Her dark eyes are without a hint of light or sparkle now; there is only fearlessness and steel, like the molten stone at the heart of planets.
“Playtime,” she informs it sharply, “Is over.”
She snaps her fingers. The planet - actually a small moon, but thus far she has not cared to inform its proud inhabitants of this fairly inconsequential fact - feels its gravity shift and warp like a face in a fairground mirror. There is a scent of ozone like the world after a lightning strike, and the faintest screech of brakes going vworp, vworp.
The Time Lady is gone.
~*~
“Bert,” Mary Poppins says decisively, “Something must be done.”
“Quite right you are,” her ex-companion agrees. “And when you find out what that is, if you’ll excuse me, you just let me know.”
She fixes him with a dreadfully baleful eye. “I left you on Earth as a chimney-sweep for cheeking me, Bertellifrenz. Next time, I won’t be nearly so generous.”
Once he might have been abashed, but not now.
“Well, why are they here and who are they here for?”
“Two very excellent questions. If you’d like to give me the answers to them, too, I shouldn’t be nearly so concerned,” Mary says tartly. “But they certainly didn’t go to all the trouble of breaking out of that moon Draxpatellicolundar imprisoned them in for nothing. Of course, Drax always could be a dreadfully sloppy workman - I was half-surprised they hadn’t broken out eons ago - but still, it must have been painful for them.”
Bert is respectfully silent, principally on the grounds that he has no idea what to say to that and even his mother-tongue’s old standby of ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ doesn’t seem as if it will quite cut the mustard this time. One day, he thinks, he really must learn some Welsh.
“What do you need me to do?” he asks at last.
“Look after the children,” she commands immediately. “I don’t believe for one moment that the Silents are remotely suicidal enough to harm my children, but I have never believed in taking silly chances, either. And for Gallifrey’s sake do something about that accent - you’ve been here twenty-six years and you still sound as if I picked you up from Tarsus Vee last week.”
“It gets me by all right,” he retorts, defensive. “And it’s not as if anyone understands the real locals, either. But I’ll keep a good weather-eye on the little’uns, never you fear.”
“Oh, very well,” the Time Lady says impatiently, and rises from the park bench they are sharing to the accompaniment of scandalised looks from passersby. “And do take care of yourself, Bert. You made a very useful companion and I should hate to have to train up another myself.”
Bert salutes mutely. Mary Poppins once again clicks her fingers -
- And is gone.
~*~
The loss of the other Time Lords, Mary Poppins considers dispassionately, was really most inconvenient. Oh, they’ll turn up one day, she is sure - the Doctor’s histrionics about being ‘the very very last’ notwithstanding. He seems to be enjoying his over-reacting too much for her to spoil it with common sense, but for now there are still only one or two Time Lords and Ladies who have struggled into the light like ragged dolls rescuing themselves from claustrophobic not-death between the cushions of the universe’s sofa. Romana is floating around somewhere in time, she knows, and Drax the eternally unkempt was lurking unsteadily in the shadow of Malrene’s seventeenth-century orbit when he last deigned to make contact with anyone. Iris Wildthyme, thank spircles, has yet to put in an appearance - and nor has the Rani, but she personally doubts that that means anything. The Rani obeys no rules but her own, and there is no force in or beyond creation that could lock her away in time or space - certainly not the Doctor. One of them should probably tell him so, she thinks coldly, but not her. If he wants to wail and weep over his destruction of their home then let him: it will be his due.
(She is sitting in solitude on a rock on the outermost ring of the planet Saturn, looking out at space. Around her, the universe moves on along its curve, like an artist drawing a circle over and over, slow and painstaking and beautiful in its singing quietness. She is watching space and time and wondering if she shall ever go home again.)
She has never liked working with others of her race: they are too flashy, too mercurial, too smug. Unlike many - her mind flicks again to the Doctor, and she delicately snorts with disgust - she has rarely been moved to take a companion, either. Bert was an enforced anomaly, uncomfortable as a horse-hair vest until she grew accustomed. She finds it ... easier to deal with children, their minds more sensible and quicker to grasp the multiverse and its disordered logic, and above all easier to leave. Children may claim they expect intransience, but in her experience a kiss and a distraction are all that is required to leave without that hated word ‘goodbye’. When she leaves them, she leaves without promises, leaves behind only a tiny fragment of her heart like a bead on a string, and that is enough - for her and for them.
Nevertheless, just now she feels the lack of a second voice, even a dissenting one: another presence to share this battle with. The knowledge that Gallifrey was there, even in its criticising illumination a lighthouse in the dark space-sea, has always anchored her even as she has flung herself away from its fractal strangeness. The fact that it is now no longer there to be returned to - not in any now, gone from all her pasts and all her futures - unnerves her at all the strangest moments, she finds.
And still. And still. It is inconvenient, the destruction of her people. Really most inconvenient at times like this. No wonder she generally prefers to involve herself in the small sharp happinesses and tragedies of children. There, at least, there are only problems she knows herself to be well able to solve, and if there is death then she knows it is no fault or responsibility of hers. The Doctor and Romana adore the grand heroic sacrifices of others’ blood; if she prefers to save a life through tea parties on the ceiling then at least it shall be her own work, and good work too.
Nevertheless. Wishes are not kisses and neither gets the job done, as Bert has been known to proclaim after a few pints too many, and she has a job to do which getting maudlin over Gallifrey will do nothing to resolve. A particular course of action is indicated; it is not a pleasant one, but she has never been one to flinch in the face of Doing One’s Duty. If she is right - and she is never wrong - the Silents have been employed for the purpose of disturbing time-locked events, and therefore must be stopped. If she is right - and she knows she is, knows it as well as she knows her own name and the sound of the time-patterns at the heart of all things - then she who has spent a thousand lifetimes nurturing young life must ensure that one of the rawest and bloodiest and most shameful passages of this world’s raw and bloody history comes to pass. She will usher in the Age of War, because to do otherwise would be to leave this planet alone and as defenceless as a child without the technological advancements forty years of world wars will bring, from Germany to Korea. At least, she thinks, her children shall not be so undefended. At least she can give them that.
(It is a paltry gift, she knows, hardly worthy of her children’s brilliant-shining potential, but it is all she can give. She has learnt to be grateful for small mercies, and she fears her children must do the same.
After this, she knows, she will not be able to touch her psychic paper tape-measure for at least a regeneration, for fear of what it will tell her. She does not want to know her own thoughts any more.)
Her heels click, sharp as a soldier on the parade ground. Her back (no corsetry; she is a Time Lady, and is corseted by nothing and no-one) is as straight as a sergeant’s baton as she marches into time, trusty carpet-bag tight in her hand, whistling.
No spoonful of sugar can make this chore any easier to swallow, but she is the adult, the Guardian, the Nanny. She will make the choices, because no-one else can, and she will shoulder the responsibility alone. The nursery must be cleaned up, and she hasn’t much time.
She snaps her fingers ---
--- she is gone.