Fic: Other Women (Annalise, Francine)
My entry for the who_like_giants minor characters ficathon.
Title: Other Women
Author: Doyle
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Annalise, Leo Jones, Francine Jones
Rating: All ages
Word count: 1900
Disclaimer: Doctor Who characters belong to the BBC.
Note: I had three or four ideas half-started for this fest, and then I caught the beginning of Smith and Jones and wondered ‘whatever happened to Annalise…?’ One line rather obviously nicked from Gone With the Wind.
Summary: Normally you couldn’t have paid her to knock on Francine’s front door. Not for a million pounds. Not if they were the last people on Earth.
“Clive! I know you’re in there!”
A curtain twitched in the next door neighbour’s window, but Annalise shot the house a death glare and things went quiet.
She’d never been to Francine’s house before. Clive took fifteen-minute detours to avoid driving past it in the sports car Annalise had helped him pick out; normally you couldn’t have paid her to knock on Francine’s front door. Not for a million pounds. Not if they were the last people on Earth.
Today, though, she was fearless. All the terror had been leeched out of her in those hours she’d spent stuck in Clive’s house, armed soldiers on every door and rolling news on the telly about Martha - quiet little Martha! - being wanted for terrorism; “I barely know her, she’s not like my actual stepdaughter or anything,” Annalise had explained to the two squaddies in the living room, but they hadn’t said a word to her, not even when she got bored enough to make everyone tea and sandwiches.
Scared, then bored, then frantic with worry, because when it was all over - the President and Mr Saxon both shot dead, the news full of pictures of Lucy Saxon in handcuffs, and the soldiers gone without so much as a word of apology or an offer of help with the washing up - when things were on their way to normal, she was left all alone in Clive’s house, with no Clive.
The next morning the phone network was back online, and that was when she’d switched to apocalyptically angry.
“Clive Jones!” she bellowed, and was an inch away from hammering her fists on the front door before she remembered, just in time, her brand new nails. “Call yourself a man, do you? Come out and face me like one, then!”
The door opened a crack and Annalise took a deep breath, ready for a showdown with whichever one of the Joneses answered the door. “Now, look…” she started.
Leo Jones shh-ed her, jerking his head at the baby in his arms.
“Oh,” Annalise said, wind gone from her sails a bit. “Hiya, little Keisha. Did I wake her up?”
“Nah. She’s like her mum. She’d sleep through the end of the…” He looked down at his daughter, frowning a little, and then shook his head. “You ever get déjà vu?”
“No.” Strange question. “I get Cosmo, Heat, Marie Claire…”
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Leo said, “but it’s nice to know you’re still acting like yourself, at least.” He glanced behind him, down the hall, and then stepped outside and pulled the door almost closed. “Has Dad said anything to you?”
“Said anything…!” Keisha yawned and wriggled her tiny hands, and Annalise dropped to a furious whisper. “A text, he sends me. Six months together - he gets me practically put under house arrest, he could have been dead for all I know - and he can’t take two minutes to tell me to my face.” She brandished her phone in front of his eyes. “’Me and Francine are giving it another go’, he says. ‘Sorry’, he says. I’ll show him bloody ‘sorry’.”
Leo shifted Keisha in his arms. “Right,” he said slowly. “So he didn’t happen to mention anything about him and Mum and my sisters joining a cult?”
“What?”
Behind him, the door opened again. Annalise glowered, because she was all geared up for a good, healthy slanging match and now she couldn’t, not with a little baby in the middle of it. Oh, but wouldn’t she just give Clive Jones a piece of her mind, though, even if it had to be a very quiet piece…
Francine and Clive were standing in the doorway, side by side, Mr and Mrs United Front, and Annalise suddenly thought she could see what Leo meant. It wasn’t just that she’d never seen them together and not fighting, although that was weird enough; she would’ve expected Francine to be gloating, Clive to be wearing that look he always had when he was trying to wriggle out of trouble.
They just both looked… not unhappy, but tired. Older, even, and it struck her for the first time that maybe her mates and his daughters had a point about the age gap, even if Clive did have a flash car and a generous way with presents.
“I really am sorry,” he said. “I should have come round. The text was stupid.” And she had no idea what to do with that; no excuses or jokes or attempts to charm her, just an apology that she could take or leave. That wasn’t a Clive she knew. It wasn’t a Francine she knew who’d just stand and watch the pair of them, not sticking her oar in, even looking a bit sorry for her.
“Did I,” she said, and bit down on her lip because she was not going to ruin her mascara, no way, “did I do something wrong?”
“No,” Clive said quickly. “You didn’t do anything, Annalise.” Not babe or honey or sweetheart. Not with his wife right there, of course.
“Come inside,” Francine said. “Tish is making lunch. We can set another place.”
“See? Cult,” Leo told her quietly, as they followed his parents into the house. “I turn my back on them for five minutes and they all join the bloody Moonies.”
***
All things considered, it was quite a civilized lunch. Annalise sat beside Leo and talked with his girlfriend, Shonara, about Big Brother and the Harvey Nicks sales and what Keisha’s first word might be, and Martha talked more than usual and Tish a lot less. Out of the corner of her eye, Annalise watched Tish eat, the way she was pulling her bowl towards her, scraping up every last drop of the soup, eating the crusts of the bread when she’d always insisted she didn’t like them. Francine and Clive said hardly anything, but once when he got up to get water from the fridge he brushed his hand across Francine’s shoulder and she looked up at him, and Annalise had to look away. They weren’t even doing it to hurt her, she thought, because you couldn’t plan that look, you couldn’t fake a look like that. She just talked more brightly about the made-up party she was off to that evening. Clive wasn’t even listening.
And after lunch was cleared away, and they’d all had coffee and Keisha had been rescued from her high chair, Tish drifted away upstairs and Shonara went to answer her phone and Martha suggested taking the baby out into the garden, and Annalise found herself alone with her ex-boyfriend’s wife. Previously her boyfriend’s ex-wife. What a difference a day made.
Francine was staring out the kitchen window at Clive and her children and grandchild in the garden, and Annalise thought she wasn’t going to speak at all. She couldn’t stand that. Screaming, shaming, hair-pulling, anything but dead silence.
“Go on, then,” she said. “You won. I don’t know how you did it, but you got him back. Well done, you. You might as well gloat. I would.”
“Would you?” Francine’s back was turned, but the ghostly reflection of her in the window smiled a little bit.
“God. I’d put an ad in the papers. Two page spread, full colour. ‘Annalise wins’.”
“You silly girl,” Francine said quietly, and that was more like it, but there was no real malice in the words. “As if it matters.”
“You said you’d never take him back,” Annalise said, hearing the whine in her voice and hating it. “Clive, I expected him to be a liar, all mid-life-crisis and cheating on his wife, but you. You always seemed so sure.”
“People change.”
“Not in a day,” she protested. “In a month or a year, fine, but not in one day. That’s not fair.”
Francine turned around to face her. “Where were you?” she said. “When the… when Saxon murdered the President, where were you?”
It was going to be one of those things people asked for something to say, Annalise thought - years from now, when people ran out of chit-chat about the weather or the football, there’d always be ”Where were you when…?” Francine didn’t ask it that way, though. She said it as if she wanted - needed - to know.
“Clive’s place,” Annalise said. “They dragged him off to meet you, kept me there in case Martha came looking; wanted me to act like everything was normal if she did.”
“Who kept you there - police, army?” She nodded at that. “Maybe they protected you, then,” Francine said, almost to herself. “I sometimes wondered about that. What happened to you afterwards. Not just you, everybody. The postman. Leo’s primary school teachers. The IT girl at work. I wondered if you were hiding or running or already dead. I couldn’t even think about Martha and Leo and Keisha, I’d have gone mad.”
“Maybe you did,” Annalise said, and it was meant to sound bitchy but came out trembly, scared. “Francine, what are you on about? I’m fine. Nothing happened.”
Outside, Martha laughed - “lovely Keisha, who’s a clever girl?” - and Francine half-turned towards the noise, that awful, intense look draining out of her face.
“You should probably be going.” She sounded more like herself than she had all morning and Annalise felt on safer ground, even as she bristled at being chivvied out. “You’ll want to get ready for your party,” Francine added, looking as if she knew quite well that the party didn’t exist. So long as she didn’t say anything to Clive. Let him think she was living it up without an old man cramping her style. It was the least he deserved.
She wondered if she should say goodbye to Martha and Tish and Leo - for a while there they’d been nearly technically her stepchildren - but she decided better not. The other two were too polite to say anything nasty, but you never knew with Tish. She’d always thought, really, that she and Tish were very alike. Maybe she’d keep her number.
It was dull out, but Annalise fished her sunglasses out of her bag anyway and plunked them on her nose. “See you around,” she told Francine breezily at the front door. “Or probably not, but… you know.”
She was glad of the dark glasses, because Francine stared at her for a long moment, and she would have hated to give her the satisfaction of looking away.
“Have a good life, Annalise,” Francine said at last, and shut the door.
She thought about that all the way home in the taxi. Back at her flat, she deleted Clive’s number from her phone, and defriended him on Facebook, and tried to have an angry cry, but only managed a few half-hearted sniffles. She fixed her eye makeup in front of the bathroom mirror and found herself thinking that even if she was - say it - dumped, it was good to be alive.
Must be the Jones’ weird cult-stuff rubbing off on her.
And there was a party tonight. There was always a party somewhere, if you were gorgeous and single. And there were men out there her own age, without wives and kids and daughters who might or might not be terrorists. Lots of them even had sports cars.
Annalise tossed back her hair and smiled at her reflection.
After all, tomorrow was another day.
Title: Other Women
Author: Doyle
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Annalise, Leo Jones, Francine Jones
Rating: All ages
Word count: 1900
Disclaimer: Doctor Who characters belong to the BBC.
Note: I had three or four ideas half-started for this fest, and then I caught the beginning of Smith and Jones and wondered ‘whatever happened to Annalise…?’ One line rather obviously nicked from Gone With the Wind.
Summary: Normally you couldn’t have paid her to knock on Francine’s front door. Not for a million pounds. Not if they were the last people on Earth.
“Clive! I know you’re in there!”
A curtain twitched in the next door neighbour’s window, but Annalise shot the house a death glare and things went quiet.
She’d never been to Francine’s house before. Clive took fifteen-minute detours to avoid driving past it in the sports car Annalise had helped him pick out; normally you couldn’t have paid her to knock on Francine’s front door. Not for a million pounds. Not if they were the last people on Earth.
Today, though, she was fearless. All the terror had been leeched out of her in those hours she’d spent stuck in Clive’s house, armed soldiers on every door and rolling news on the telly about Martha - quiet little Martha! - being wanted for terrorism; “I barely know her, she’s not like my actual stepdaughter or anything,” Annalise had explained to the two squaddies in the living room, but they hadn’t said a word to her, not even when she got bored enough to make everyone tea and sandwiches.
Scared, then bored, then frantic with worry, because when it was all over - the President and Mr Saxon both shot dead, the news full of pictures of Lucy Saxon in handcuffs, and the soldiers gone without so much as a word of apology or an offer of help with the washing up - when things were on their way to normal, she was left all alone in Clive’s house, with no Clive.
The next morning the phone network was back online, and that was when she’d switched to apocalyptically angry.
“Clive Jones!” she bellowed, and was an inch away from hammering her fists on the front door before she remembered, just in time, her brand new nails. “Call yourself a man, do you? Come out and face me like one, then!”
The door opened a crack and Annalise took a deep breath, ready for a showdown with whichever one of the Joneses answered the door. “Now, look…” she started.
Leo Jones shh-ed her, jerking his head at the baby in his arms.
“Oh,” Annalise said, wind gone from her sails a bit. “Hiya, little Keisha. Did I wake her up?”
“Nah. She’s like her mum. She’d sleep through the end of the…” He looked down at his daughter, frowning a little, and then shook his head. “You ever get déjà vu?”
“No.” Strange question. “I get Cosmo, Heat, Marie Claire…”
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Leo said, “but it’s nice to know you’re still acting like yourself, at least.” He glanced behind him, down the hall, and then stepped outside and pulled the door almost closed. “Has Dad said anything to you?”
“Said anything…!” Keisha yawned and wriggled her tiny hands, and Annalise dropped to a furious whisper. “A text, he sends me. Six months together - he gets me practically put under house arrest, he could have been dead for all I know - and he can’t take two minutes to tell me to my face.” She brandished her phone in front of his eyes. “’Me and Francine are giving it another go’, he says. ‘Sorry’, he says. I’ll show him bloody ‘sorry’.”
Leo shifted Keisha in his arms. “Right,” he said slowly. “So he didn’t happen to mention anything about him and Mum and my sisters joining a cult?”
“What?”
Behind him, the door opened again. Annalise glowered, because she was all geared up for a good, healthy slanging match and now she couldn’t, not with a little baby in the middle of it. Oh, but wouldn’t she just give Clive Jones a piece of her mind, though, even if it had to be a very quiet piece…
Francine and Clive were standing in the doorway, side by side, Mr and Mrs United Front, and Annalise suddenly thought she could see what Leo meant. It wasn’t just that she’d never seen them together and not fighting, although that was weird enough; she would’ve expected Francine to be gloating, Clive to be wearing that look he always had when he was trying to wriggle out of trouble.
They just both looked… not unhappy, but tired. Older, even, and it struck her for the first time that maybe her mates and his daughters had a point about the age gap, even if Clive did have a flash car and a generous way with presents.
“I really am sorry,” he said. “I should have come round. The text was stupid.” And she had no idea what to do with that; no excuses or jokes or attempts to charm her, just an apology that she could take or leave. That wasn’t a Clive she knew. It wasn’t a Francine she knew who’d just stand and watch the pair of them, not sticking her oar in, even looking a bit sorry for her.
“Did I,” she said, and bit down on her lip because she was not going to ruin her mascara, no way, “did I do something wrong?”
“No,” Clive said quickly. “You didn’t do anything, Annalise.” Not babe or honey or sweetheart. Not with his wife right there, of course.
“Come inside,” Francine said. “Tish is making lunch. We can set another place.”
“See? Cult,” Leo told her quietly, as they followed his parents into the house. “I turn my back on them for five minutes and they all join the bloody Moonies.”
***
All things considered, it was quite a civilized lunch. Annalise sat beside Leo and talked with his girlfriend, Shonara, about Big Brother and the Harvey Nicks sales and what Keisha’s first word might be, and Martha talked more than usual and Tish a lot less. Out of the corner of her eye, Annalise watched Tish eat, the way she was pulling her bowl towards her, scraping up every last drop of the soup, eating the crusts of the bread when she’d always insisted she didn’t like them. Francine and Clive said hardly anything, but once when he got up to get water from the fridge he brushed his hand across Francine’s shoulder and she looked up at him, and Annalise had to look away. They weren’t even doing it to hurt her, she thought, because you couldn’t plan that look, you couldn’t fake a look like that. She just talked more brightly about the made-up party she was off to that evening. Clive wasn’t even listening.
And after lunch was cleared away, and they’d all had coffee and Keisha had been rescued from her high chair, Tish drifted away upstairs and Shonara went to answer her phone and Martha suggested taking the baby out into the garden, and Annalise found herself alone with her ex-boyfriend’s wife. Previously her boyfriend’s ex-wife. What a difference a day made.
Francine was staring out the kitchen window at Clive and her children and grandchild in the garden, and Annalise thought she wasn’t going to speak at all. She couldn’t stand that. Screaming, shaming, hair-pulling, anything but dead silence.
“Go on, then,” she said. “You won. I don’t know how you did it, but you got him back. Well done, you. You might as well gloat. I would.”
“Would you?” Francine’s back was turned, but the ghostly reflection of her in the window smiled a little bit.
“God. I’d put an ad in the papers. Two page spread, full colour. ‘Annalise wins’.”
“You silly girl,” Francine said quietly, and that was more like it, but there was no real malice in the words. “As if it matters.”
“You said you’d never take him back,” Annalise said, hearing the whine in her voice and hating it. “Clive, I expected him to be a liar, all mid-life-crisis and cheating on his wife, but you. You always seemed so sure.”
“People change.”
“Not in a day,” she protested. “In a month or a year, fine, but not in one day. That’s not fair.”
Francine turned around to face her. “Where were you?” she said. “When the… when Saxon murdered the President, where were you?”
It was going to be one of those things people asked for something to say, Annalise thought - years from now, when people ran out of chit-chat about the weather or the football, there’d always be ”Where were you when…?” Francine didn’t ask it that way, though. She said it as if she wanted - needed - to know.
“Clive’s place,” Annalise said. “They dragged him off to meet you, kept me there in case Martha came looking; wanted me to act like everything was normal if she did.”
“Who kept you there - police, army?” She nodded at that. “Maybe they protected you, then,” Francine said, almost to herself. “I sometimes wondered about that. What happened to you afterwards. Not just you, everybody. The postman. Leo’s primary school teachers. The IT girl at work. I wondered if you were hiding or running or already dead. I couldn’t even think about Martha and Leo and Keisha, I’d have gone mad.”
“Maybe you did,” Annalise said, and it was meant to sound bitchy but came out trembly, scared. “Francine, what are you on about? I’m fine. Nothing happened.”
Outside, Martha laughed - “lovely Keisha, who’s a clever girl?” - and Francine half-turned towards the noise, that awful, intense look draining out of her face.
“You should probably be going.” She sounded more like herself than she had all morning and Annalise felt on safer ground, even as she bristled at being chivvied out. “You’ll want to get ready for your party,” Francine added, looking as if she knew quite well that the party didn’t exist. So long as she didn’t say anything to Clive. Let him think she was living it up without an old man cramping her style. It was the least he deserved.
She wondered if she should say goodbye to Martha and Tish and Leo - for a while there they’d been nearly technically her stepchildren - but she decided better not. The other two were too polite to say anything nasty, but you never knew with Tish. She’d always thought, really, that she and Tish were very alike. Maybe she’d keep her number.
It was dull out, but Annalise fished her sunglasses out of her bag anyway and plunked them on her nose. “See you around,” she told Francine breezily at the front door. “Or probably not, but… you know.”
She was glad of the dark glasses, because Francine stared at her for a long moment, and she would have hated to give her the satisfaction of looking away.
“Have a good life, Annalise,” Francine said at last, and shut the door.
She thought about that all the way home in the taxi. Back at her flat, she deleted Clive’s number from her phone, and defriended him on Facebook, and tried to have an angry cry, but only managed a few half-hearted sniffles. She fixed her eye makeup in front of the bathroom mirror and found herself thinking that even if she was - say it - dumped, it was good to be alive.
Must be the Jones’ weird cult-stuff rubbing off on her.
And there was a party tonight. There was always a party somewhere, if you were gorgeous and single. And there were men out there her own age, without wives and kids and daughters who might or might not be terrorists. Lots of them even had sports cars.
Annalise tossed back her hair and smiled at her reflection.
After all, tomorrow was another day.