Brem's Eleventh Hour (3/?)
Title - Brem's Eleventh Hour (3/?)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
Characters - Amy, OCs
Spoilers - Through "The Eleventh Hour"
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids. They're all mine.)
Summary - "Eleventh Hour" re-imagined for the Chaosverse.
Part One - Part Two
Part Three
Brem, juggling the diaper bag Athena had given him and the baby in his arms, walked through the main corridor of Athena and Matt’s TARDIS toward their large open kitchen. Matt was still dressed in the suit he must have worn to the wedding, although the tie draped around his open collar was undone.
“Hey,” said Brem, walking in.
Matt was pulling a glass out of the cupboard. “Hey. I was just going to make a nightcap, do you want one?”
“No. Thanks. Where’s Theenie?”
“Changing. Hello there, small Time Lord-human,” Matt said to his son. “Did you have a good time with your uncle Brem?” He pulled him into his arms and took off the tiny baseball cap and kissed the top of his head.
“Yes. We had a blast.”
“A metaphorical one, right?”
Brem thought of exploding lampposts and a delighted baby. “Er, for the most part.”
“Bremsstrahlung,” remarked Athena, coming into the kitchen, back in her jeans and Converse. “You’re right on time. That’s very unlike the men in this family. Hello, love.” She kissed Harry’s cheek. “Did Daddy take your baseball cap off?”
“I did, because it’s unnecessary.”
“I have to go,” said Brem, fidgeting a bit.
Athena and Matt both gave him a strange look.
“Well, wait a second,” said Athena, pulling herself up to sit on the counter. “I want to know how the baby was. Was he good?”
“He was very good, and we had a very…boring…day.”
Athena lifted one eyebrow. “No world-saving activities?”
“No,” he lied.
Which was Harry’s cue to suddenly shout, “Incinerate!”
Matt and Athena both looked at the baby, and then at Brem.
“Okay,” said Brem. “There were tiny world-saving activities going on. Infinitesimal ones. They weren’t my fault.” He looked at the baby and added, “Traitor.”
Harry looked pleased with himself and gnawed on his fist.
“My son’s first word was ‘incinerate,’” sighed Matt, and handed Harry across to Athena.
“I was really hopeful it was going to be ‘Mummy,’” said Athena, “but there you have it. Come on, darling, maybe you’ll sleep for a bit, hmm?”
“Incinerate!” cried Harry again, and giggled with obvious pride in his own cleverness.
“Thanks for watching him,” Athena said to Brem, as she left the kitchen.
“Yeah, no problem,” he said, and looked at Matt. “I’m going to go.”
“Where are you running off to, anyway? I’m not mad about the ‘incinerate’ thing, you know.”
“No, no, I don’t think you are.”
“So stay for a drink. A, you know, safe-for-a-Gallifreyan drink.”
“I…There’s a…It’s…”
Matt lifted his eyebrows in expectant puzzlement.
Brem tried to think how to explain it, and then realized that it was alarmingly simple. “There’s a girl,” he said.
“Really?”
“So I met this girl,” said Brem, because now that he’d started, he wanted to get the whole story out, “and she was dressed a policewoman, I think she’s a stripper-“
“You met a stripper?”
“I think so, but she prefers ‘kiss-o-gram.’ Anyway, there was, you know, planet-endangering activities going on-“
“Tiny, infinitesimal ones, right?” interrupted Matt, drily.
“Yes. Yes. And I don’t know, somehow we…I…I asked her to come with me.”
“Did she say yes?”
“Yes,” answered Brem, in astonishment. “She did.”
Matt looked at him for a moment over his drink, and then he smiled. “Good.”
“You think so?”
“Yes. I do. You’re overthinking.” Matt gestured with his drink. “Stop. Don’t think. Just go.”
Brem nodded. “Okay. Yes. I’ll take a rain check on the nightcap.”
Matt made an affirmative noise, and Brem left, saying good-bye to Athena as she turned back into the kitchen, looking perplexedly after him even as she returned his good-bye. “I think Harry will sleep,” she said, and then, “What’s up with Brem?”
“Secret best friend stuff, can’t share it.”
“No, no, no, sister status totally trumps secret best friend stuff.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Matt put his drink down. “You are welcome to try to convince me otherwise, however.”
“Oh, excellent, then,” said Athena, and used the loose ends of his tie to tug him over to her.
***
She didn’t think she was going to sleep, until the moment when she woke up, and for a moment she laid in her bed marveling over the fact that she had apparently just been asleep, and then it burst over her what had woken her, the memory of the sound of it. Suddenly wide awake, she stared at her ceiling for a second, and then sat up in bed and listened, hard. All around her was silence but it was a hold-your-breath kind of silence. It was a silence that existed just to be broken.
Amy realized she was smiling. And she really shouldn’t have been smiling. She tried to wipe it off her face, even as she got out of bed and walked to the window. The garden was dark, she could see nothing. But she was still grinning, as she stuck her feet in slippers and grabbed her dressing gown and dashed down the stairs, past the door that had been hidden for all those years, pulling the dressing gown on as she went.
It was standing there, she saw, as soon as she stepped outside. The red box that belonged to him. She paused on her doorstep, gathering her dressing gown in front of her and taking a deep breath. Then the door opened, and he stepped out. He had donned a coat, long and heavy and velvet and old-fashioned. It somehow suited him, even in his jeans and T-shirts as he was, with his hair askew. He swept back the coat to stick his hands in his pockets, and from the light spilling from the inside of his box, she could see that he was smiling at her.
“Hello,” he said.
The smile succeeded in finally wiping the smile off her own face, replacing it with a frown, and she strode determinedly over to him and slapped his face.
“Ow,” he said, just as he had the first time she had slapped his face, and again lifted a hand to his cheek. “What was that for?”
“Two. Years,” she seethed.
He looked genuinely bewildered. “What are you talking about?”
“I asked you to give me ten minutes. Two years ago.”
Brem opened and closed his mouth. He looked at his box and then back at her. “Two years? Are you sure?”
She crossed her arms and felt her mouth twist sardonically. “If I wanted my sanity questioned, I have a new psychiatrist.”
“It’s just…not like me, to…Two years? Really?” He ruffled at his hair and looked again at his box.
“Two years,” she affirmed.
He looked back at her and replaced his hand in his pocket. “I…I don’t know what to say. It’s been ten minutes for me. Less. It’s…” He trailed off.
Amy looked away from him, toward the swing set where she had played as a girl, when the box in her imagination had been bright blue and the man who had stepped out of it had been dressed in a suit and called the Doctor.
“I…” ventured Brem, sounding more uncertain than she’d ever heard him sound before. “I don’t suppose you would…still want to come along?” She stayed still, staring at the swing set. She supposed he took this as an encouraging sign. “Babylon is still out there, you know. Trees with leaves like prisms and skies full of rainbows. Arguing with Freud over some excellent beer. The first human colony on the Moon. The first human colony on Eris’s moon. And Thhhhhhhhhhhhmyr.”
She had to look at them. “What the hell was that noise?”
“The name of the planet with the best sweets in the universe.”
“They couldn’t have given the planet a more appetizing-sounding name?”
“What do you want it to be called? Candyland? It sounds quite appetizing to the aliens who live there.”
“These aliens eat a lot of phlegm, do they?”
“Stop it, before you ruin Thhhhhhhhhhhhmyr for me forever.” He leaned against the red wall of his box and tipped closer to her, a definite invasion of personal space but not an uncomfortable one. “Come,” he said, and he was close enough now that she could the way the smile warmed his eyes. “All of time and space is waiting.”
“How often do you do this?” she asked, fighting to keep her head about her.
“Do what?”
“Seduce women with prisms and rainbows and…you.”
He was silent for a moment, and then he said, with the air of admitting something very personal, “Never. I never do. Or…almost never. Once…before…and it didn’t…Never, really.”
She shouldn’t have believed him, but she did, and that made it so much harder to say no. “It was two years, Brem, and I…I didn’t think you were ever coming back. I had to…I couldn’t…”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But doesn’t that mean you’ve been waiting long enough?”
She looked from him, the intent single-mindedness of his gaze, toward her house. There was a dim glow through her bedroom window, from the faerie lights she still left on while she slept, and in that bedroom was so much responsibility, and was it a life she had chosen or one she had defaulted into because the one she had really wanted had taken two years to show up?
She stared at her house. “Can you get me back by tomorrow morning?”
“Yes,” he said, firmly. “I’m normally a very good pilot, I don’t know what…Yes. Why? What happens tomorrow?”
“Nothing,” she answered, and knew she had answered too quickly, that it sounded defensive. She looked at him and tried to shrug. “Stuff,” she elaborated, lamely.
His gaze was searching and appraising but his tone was light. “Fine. Back in time for stuff tomorrow. Easy-peasy-et cetera.”
“Fine,” she said. “Let’s go.” When she stepped through the door, she did not look back at her house.
***
The tour of the box took much longer than she would have anticipated. TARDIS, he called it. Time And Relative Dimension In Space. And it was huge, room after room after room. Brem named them all, showing them off with what was obvious pride, and he was adorable about it, practically bouncing, his velvet coat swept back so that his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his jeans.
Finally, the last door he opened revealed a bedroom, fairly non-descript.
“Oh,” he said, looking at it. “This is for you.” He looked at her then. “If you let her know what you’d like, she’ll do the decorating for you.”
“Let who know?”
“The TARDIS, of course.”
“The TARDIS?” echoed Amy, blankly.
Brem nodded, looking disinclined to engage in further explanation.
“The…ship?” Amy sought to clarify.
“Yes. The ship.”
“The ship will decorate for me?”
“If you ask her nicely, yes. I used to have different colored walls every week on my parents’ TARDIS.”
Amy looked at her bedroom, thinking this was ridiculous. And wasn’t that the point of this whole excursion? She’d always wanted a life full of ridiculous things. Maybe Brem was telling the truth. Wouldn’t it be brilliant if she could just ask a ship to decorate for her. She felt the grin stretch across her face, as she announced, “Could I have orange walls, please?”
She waited, practically bouncing in eagerness, but the walls stayed stubbornly white.
“Nothing’s happening,” she pointed out, sadly.
“Well, she doesn’t do it in front of you,” responded Brem, indignantly. “She’s got some, you know, modesty.”
“A watched ship never paints walls?”
“A watched TARDIS never paints walls,” Brem corrected her. “Ships that aren’t TARDISes don’t do much of anything, whether you watch them or not.”
“You’re a snob.”
“This, Amy Pond, is the Ferrari of time and space travel.” He gestured expansively.
“Is it? So prove it,” she challenged him.
“Where do you want to go?”
“You keep promising me a planet with a sky full of rainbows.”
He ducked his head closer to her. He had dark eyes that were slightly wicked and very enticing, but in a way she’d never seen a man’s eyes be wicked or enticing before, a way that made her wonder if she even knew what he might be enticing her to. And it was possible that she didn’t know, and that was the great thing about this alien called Brem: When he was seducing her, she thought he wasn’t necessarily thinking that the point of the seduction was a shag, and how many men did you meet like that?
“Want to see it?” he asked, his voice low.
He had a smattering of freckles over the bridge of his nose. Amy looked at them for a second, and then said, grin spreading again irresistibly, “Oh, yes.”
He took her hand and pulled her after him, with a “Come on!” as he dashed down the hallway.
She couldn’t help but laugh, as they tumbled into the control room together.
“You have no idea,” he said, leaving her by the chair in the room and dancing around the console in the middle, punching at buttons and shoving at levers, “the sheer amount of stuff you need to travel through space.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Well, first, you need all this.” He indicated the console in front of him, with all its controls, and the odd, breathing column in the middle. “I mean, you don’t need all this, but traveling without all of this is primitive.”
“I’d expect nothing less from the Ferrari of space travel,” remarked Amy, making herself comfortable in the chair.
“Exactly,” he said, pointing at her in approval, and then disappearing momentarily behind the column. “And you need equations,” he called, still out of sight. “Lots and lots and lots of equations.” He emerged from behind the column. “See? Equations.” He tipped a monitor in her direction, covered in ever-changing circles and squiggles.
“Those are equations?” said Amy.
“Yup,” answered Brem, popping his “p,” his back to her now.
“I don’t understand them.”
“Welllllll, you wouldn’t, would you?”
Amy rolled her eyes. “Is it in another language?”
“Yes,” he replied, shortly, sounding a bit distracted.
“What language is it?”
“My language.”
“So is English your second language, then?”
“Amy, if I told you how many languages I speak, you wouldn’t believe me.” He was on the other side of the console again, almost about to disappear behind the column again, his face puckered in concentration at the buttons and knobs in front of him.
“Try me.”
He made a noncommittal noise as he disappeared behind the column, and there was silence for a second. Then he stuck his head around the column so he could see her and said, “You know, I actually have no idea how many languages I speak. But it’s way more than two.”
“And what’s your native language called?”
“Gallifreyan,” he answered, his eyes back on the controls. “But English really was my first language, my mother’s an Earth native. London native, actually.”
“All of time and space to choose from, and you lot keep ending up in Britain?”
“It’s a good place to end up. Earth is a good place to end up, honestly. I’ve seen a lot out there, I can tell you that with authority. But.” He pulled up on two levers and looked up at her with a grin, as the ship bumped to a stop and fell silent around them. “Out there is Babylon. Also a good place to end up.”
Amy looked at him for a second. “So you’re telling me that there’s another planet outside that door?”
“Have I lied to you yet?”
“You mean, other than telling me you’d be back in ten minutes?”
“Oh. Yes. Other than that.”
She studied him seriously. “I don’t know. I still can’t make up my mind about you.”
“Well, good. You don’t want to make any final decisions about me until you see Babylon. So. Go ahead.” He nodded toward the door.
Amy, feeling nervous now, stood slowly and walked over to the door just as slowly, laid her hand against it. More ridiculousness, she thought. She was going to wake up any second now.
She opened the door carefully, and her breath caught, because it was just as he had said. They were standing in a forest, where every tree was dripping with crystals, the glint of light off of them so dazzling that she had to squint. She cast her eyes up toward the sky, to escape the dazzle of the crystal trees, there was the sky, dancing with rainbows, rainbows that slid and streaked as the crystal leaves danced in the breeze.
She felt Brem step out next to her and close the door behind them.
“It’s…unbelievable,” she breathed. Somehow, speaking at more than a hush seemed inappropriate.
“D’you like it?” he asked, sounding almost shy.
“I’m on another planet,” she breathed, amazed, staring at the rainbows in the skies.
“Yes. You are. One of the nicest there is, too.”
“And I’m in my nightie,” she realized, abruptly.
“Oh.” He paused, and she wondered if he was verifying it. “Yes. You appear to be. Do you want to change?”
“I don’t want to wake up,” she admitted.
His hand curled into hers, which felt astonishingly natural, given that they had really only just met, and when he spoke his mouth was against her ear, his breath against her skin. “Amy Pond,” he murmured. “You are not dreaming this.”
She turned so she could look at him, that smattering of freckles she’d noticed before flooding her vision. “Promise?”
“Yes,” he responded, gravely.
“I may be making up my mind to think good things about you,” she confessed, a little breathlessly.
When he smiled, it seemed to lighten everything about him. “Likewise. Now go change, I have something I want to show you.”
“How can you possibly have anything else to show me?”
“I have a lot of tricks up my sleeves,” said Brem. “They’re multidimensional.”
“You don’t make any sense at all, and that’s the best thing about you.”
“You and I are going to get along very well,” he said, and grinned.
Next Part
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
Characters - Amy, OCs
Spoilers - Through "The Eleventh Hour"
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids. They're all mine.)
Summary - "Eleventh Hour" re-imagined for the Chaosverse.
Part One - Part Two
Part Three
Brem, juggling the diaper bag Athena had given him and the baby in his arms, walked through the main corridor of Athena and Matt’s TARDIS toward their large open kitchen. Matt was still dressed in the suit he must have worn to the wedding, although the tie draped around his open collar was undone.
“Hey,” said Brem, walking in.
Matt was pulling a glass out of the cupboard. “Hey. I was just going to make a nightcap, do you want one?”
“No. Thanks. Where’s Theenie?”
“Changing. Hello there, small Time Lord-human,” Matt said to his son. “Did you have a good time with your uncle Brem?” He pulled him into his arms and took off the tiny baseball cap and kissed the top of his head.
“Yes. We had a blast.”
“A metaphorical one, right?”
Brem thought of exploding lampposts and a delighted baby. “Er, for the most part.”
“Bremsstrahlung,” remarked Athena, coming into the kitchen, back in her jeans and Converse. “You’re right on time. That’s very unlike the men in this family. Hello, love.” She kissed Harry’s cheek. “Did Daddy take your baseball cap off?”
“I did, because it’s unnecessary.”
“I have to go,” said Brem, fidgeting a bit.
Athena and Matt both gave him a strange look.
“Well, wait a second,” said Athena, pulling herself up to sit on the counter. “I want to know how the baby was. Was he good?”
“He was very good, and we had a very…boring…day.”
Athena lifted one eyebrow. “No world-saving activities?”
“No,” he lied.
Which was Harry’s cue to suddenly shout, “Incinerate!”
Matt and Athena both looked at the baby, and then at Brem.
“Okay,” said Brem. “There were tiny world-saving activities going on. Infinitesimal ones. They weren’t my fault.” He looked at the baby and added, “Traitor.”
Harry looked pleased with himself and gnawed on his fist.
“My son’s first word was ‘incinerate,’” sighed Matt, and handed Harry across to Athena.
“I was really hopeful it was going to be ‘Mummy,’” said Athena, “but there you have it. Come on, darling, maybe you’ll sleep for a bit, hmm?”
“Incinerate!” cried Harry again, and giggled with obvious pride in his own cleverness.
“Thanks for watching him,” Athena said to Brem, as she left the kitchen.
“Yeah, no problem,” he said, and looked at Matt. “I’m going to go.”
“Where are you running off to, anyway? I’m not mad about the ‘incinerate’ thing, you know.”
“No, no, I don’t think you are.”
“So stay for a drink. A, you know, safe-for-a-Gallifreyan drink.”
“I…There’s a…It’s…”
Matt lifted his eyebrows in expectant puzzlement.
Brem tried to think how to explain it, and then realized that it was alarmingly simple. “There’s a girl,” he said.
“Really?”
“So I met this girl,” said Brem, because now that he’d started, he wanted to get the whole story out, “and she was dressed a policewoman, I think she’s a stripper-“
“You met a stripper?”
“I think so, but she prefers ‘kiss-o-gram.’ Anyway, there was, you know, planet-endangering activities going on-“
“Tiny, infinitesimal ones, right?” interrupted Matt, drily.
“Yes. Yes. And I don’t know, somehow we…I…I asked her to come with me.”
“Did she say yes?”
“Yes,” answered Brem, in astonishment. “She did.”
Matt looked at him for a moment over his drink, and then he smiled. “Good.”
“You think so?”
“Yes. I do. You’re overthinking.” Matt gestured with his drink. “Stop. Don’t think. Just go.”
Brem nodded. “Okay. Yes. I’ll take a rain check on the nightcap.”
Matt made an affirmative noise, and Brem left, saying good-bye to Athena as she turned back into the kitchen, looking perplexedly after him even as she returned his good-bye. “I think Harry will sleep,” she said, and then, “What’s up with Brem?”
“Secret best friend stuff, can’t share it.”
“No, no, no, sister status totally trumps secret best friend stuff.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Matt put his drink down. “You are welcome to try to convince me otherwise, however.”
“Oh, excellent, then,” said Athena, and used the loose ends of his tie to tug him over to her.
***
She didn’t think she was going to sleep, until the moment when she woke up, and for a moment she laid in her bed marveling over the fact that she had apparently just been asleep, and then it burst over her what had woken her, the memory of the sound of it. Suddenly wide awake, she stared at her ceiling for a second, and then sat up in bed and listened, hard. All around her was silence but it was a hold-your-breath kind of silence. It was a silence that existed just to be broken.
Amy realized she was smiling. And she really shouldn’t have been smiling. She tried to wipe it off her face, even as she got out of bed and walked to the window. The garden was dark, she could see nothing. But she was still grinning, as she stuck her feet in slippers and grabbed her dressing gown and dashed down the stairs, past the door that had been hidden for all those years, pulling the dressing gown on as she went.
It was standing there, she saw, as soon as she stepped outside. The red box that belonged to him. She paused on her doorstep, gathering her dressing gown in front of her and taking a deep breath. Then the door opened, and he stepped out. He had donned a coat, long and heavy and velvet and old-fashioned. It somehow suited him, even in his jeans and T-shirts as he was, with his hair askew. He swept back the coat to stick his hands in his pockets, and from the light spilling from the inside of his box, she could see that he was smiling at her.
“Hello,” he said.
The smile succeeded in finally wiping the smile off her own face, replacing it with a frown, and she strode determinedly over to him and slapped his face.
“Ow,” he said, just as he had the first time she had slapped his face, and again lifted a hand to his cheek. “What was that for?”
“Two. Years,” she seethed.
He looked genuinely bewildered. “What are you talking about?”
“I asked you to give me ten minutes. Two years ago.”
Brem opened and closed his mouth. He looked at his box and then back at her. “Two years? Are you sure?”
She crossed her arms and felt her mouth twist sardonically. “If I wanted my sanity questioned, I have a new psychiatrist.”
“It’s just…not like me, to…Two years? Really?” He ruffled at his hair and looked again at his box.
“Two years,” she affirmed.
He looked back at her and replaced his hand in his pocket. “I…I don’t know what to say. It’s been ten minutes for me. Less. It’s…” He trailed off.
Amy looked away from him, toward the swing set where she had played as a girl, when the box in her imagination had been bright blue and the man who had stepped out of it had been dressed in a suit and called the Doctor.
“I…” ventured Brem, sounding more uncertain than she’d ever heard him sound before. “I don’t suppose you would…still want to come along?” She stayed still, staring at the swing set. She supposed he took this as an encouraging sign. “Babylon is still out there, you know. Trees with leaves like prisms and skies full of rainbows. Arguing with Freud over some excellent beer. The first human colony on the Moon. The first human colony on Eris’s moon. And Thhhhhhhhhhhhmyr.”
She had to look at them. “What the hell was that noise?”
“The name of the planet with the best sweets in the universe.”
“They couldn’t have given the planet a more appetizing-sounding name?”
“What do you want it to be called? Candyland? It sounds quite appetizing to the aliens who live there.”
“These aliens eat a lot of phlegm, do they?”
“Stop it, before you ruin Thhhhhhhhhhhhmyr for me forever.” He leaned against the red wall of his box and tipped closer to her, a definite invasion of personal space but not an uncomfortable one. “Come,” he said, and he was close enough now that she could the way the smile warmed his eyes. “All of time and space is waiting.”
“How often do you do this?” she asked, fighting to keep her head about her.
“Do what?”
“Seduce women with prisms and rainbows and…you.”
He was silent for a moment, and then he said, with the air of admitting something very personal, “Never. I never do. Or…almost never. Once…before…and it didn’t…Never, really.”
She shouldn’t have believed him, but she did, and that made it so much harder to say no. “It was two years, Brem, and I…I didn’t think you were ever coming back. I had to…I couldn’t…”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But doesn’t that mean you’ve been waiting long enough?”
She looked from him, the intent single-mindedness of his gaze, toward her house. There was a dim glow through her bedroom window, from the faerie lights she still left on while she slept, and in that bedroom was so much responsibility, and was it a life she had chosen or one she had defaulted into because the one she had really wanted had taken two years to show up?
She stared at her house. “Can you get me back by tomorrow morning?”
“Yes,” he said, firmly. “I’m normally a very good pilot, I don’t know what…Yes. Why? What happens tomorrow?”
“Nothing,” she answered, and knew she had answered too quickly, that it sounded defensive. She looked at him and tried to shrug. “Stuff,” she elaborated, lamely.
His gaze was searching and appraising but his tone was light. “Fine. Back in time for stuff tomorrow. Easy-peasy-et cetera.”
“Fine,” she said. “Let’s go.” When she stepped through the door, she did not look back at her house.
***
The tour of the box took much longer than she would have anticipated. TARDIS, he called it. Time And Relative Dimension In Space. And it was huge, room after room after room. Brem named them all, showing them off with what was obvious pride, and he was adorable about it, practically bouncing, his velvet coat swept back so that his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his jeans.
Finally, the last door he opened revealed a bedroom, fairly non-descript.
“Oh,” he said, looking at it. “This is for you.” He looked at her then. “If you let her know what you’d like, she’ll do the decorating for you.”
“Let who know?”
“The TARDIS, of course.”
“The TARDIS?” echoed Amy, blankly.
Brem nodded, looking disinclined to engage in further explanation.
“The…ship?” Amy sought to clarify.
“Yes. The ship.”
“The ship will decorate for me?”
“If you ask her nicely, yes. I used to have different colored walls every week on my parents’ TARDIS.”
Amy looked at her bedroom, thinking this was ridiculous. And wasn’t that the point of this whole excursion? She’d always wanted a life full of ridiculous things. Maybe Brem was telling the truth. Wouldn’t it be brilliant if she could just ask a ship to decorate for her. She felt the grin stretch across her face, as she announced, “Could I have orange walls, please?”
She waited, practically bouncing in eagerness, but the walls stayed stubbornly white.
“Nothing’s happening,” she pointed out, sadly.
“Well, she doesn’t do it in front of you,” responded Brem, indignantly. “She’s got some, you know, modesty.”
“A watched ship never paints walls?”
“A watched TARDIS never paints walls,” Brem corrected her. “Ships that aren’t TARDISes don’t do much of anything, whether you watch them or not.”
“You’re a snob.”
“This, Amy Pond, is the Ferrari of time and space travel.” He gestured expansively.
“Is it? So prove it,” she challenged him.
“Where do you want to go?”
“You keep promising me a planet with a sky full of rainbows.”
He ducked his head closer to her. He had dark eyes that were slightly wicked and very enticing, but in a way she’d never seen a man’s eyes be wicked or enticing before, a way that made her wonder if she even knew what he might be enticing her to. And it was possible that she didn’t know, and that was the great thing about this alien called Brem: When he was seducing her, she thought he wasn’t necessarily thinking that the point of the seduction was a shag, and how many men did you meet like that?
“Want to see it?” he asked, his voice low.
He had a smattering of freckles over the bridge of his nose. Amy looked at them for a second, and then said, grin spreading again irresistibly, “Oh, yes.”
He took her hand and pulled her after him, with a “Come on!” as he dashed down the hallway.
She couldn’t help but laugh, as they tumbled into the control room together.
“You have no idea,” he said, leaving her by the chair in the room and dancing around the console in the middle, punching at buttons and shoving at levers, “the sheer amount of stuff you need to travel through space.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Well, first, you need all this.” He indicated the console in front of him, with all its controls, and the odd, breathing column in the middle. “I mean, you don’t need all this, but traveling without all of this is primitive.”
“I’d expect nothing less from the Ferrari of space travel,” remarked Amy, making herself comfortable in the chair.
“Exactly,” he said, pointing at her in approval, and then disappearing momentarily behind the column. “And you need equations,” he called, still out of sight. “Lots and lots and lots of equations.” He emerged from behind the column. “See? Equations.” He tipped a monitor in her direction, covered in ever-changing circles and squiggles.
“Those are equations?” said Amy.
“Yup,” answered Brem, popping his “p,” his back to her now.
“I don’t understand them.”
“Welllllll, you wouldn’t, would you?”
Amy rolled her eyes. “Is it in another language?”
“Yes,” he replied, shortly, sounding a bit distracted.
“What language is it?”
“My language.”
“So is English your second language, then?”
“Amy, if I told you how many languages I speak, you wouldn’t believe me.” He was on the other side of the console again, almost about to disappear behind the column again, his face puckered in concentration at the buttons and knobs in front of him.
“Try me.”
He made a noncommittal noise as he disappeared behind the column, and there was silence for a second. Then he stuck his head around the column so he could see her and said, “You know, I actually have no idea how many languages I speak. But it’s way more than two.”
“And what’s your native language called?”
“Gallifreyan,” he answered, his eyes back on the controls. “But English really was my first language, my mother’s an Earth native. London native, actually.”
“All of time and space to choose from, and you lot keep ending up in Britain?”
“It’s a good place to end up. Earth is a good place to end up, honestly. I’ve seen a lot out there, I can tell you that with authority. But.” He pulled up on two levers and looked up at her with a grin, as the ship bumped to a stop and fell silent around them. “Out there is Babylon. Also a good place to end up.”
Amy looked at him for a second. “So you’re telling me that there’s another planet outside that door?”
“Have I lied to you yet?”
“You mean, other than telling me you’d be back in ten minutes?”
“Oh. Yes. Other than that.”
She studied him seriously. “I don’t know. I still can’t make up my mind about you.”
“Well, good. You don’t want to make any final decisions about me until you see Babylon. So. Go ahead.” He nodded toward the door.
Amy, feeling nervous now, stood slowly and walked over to the door just as slowly, laid her hand against it. More ridiculousness, she thought. She was going to wake up any second now.
She opened the door carefully, and her breath caught, because it was just as he had said. They were standing in a forest, where every tree was dripping with crystals, the glint of light off of them so dazzling that she had to squint. She cast her eyes up toward the sky, to escape the dazzle of the crystal trees, there was the sky, dancing with rainbows, rainbows that slid and streaked as the crystal leaves danced in the breeze.
She felt Brem step out next to her and close the door behind them.
“It’s…unbelievable,” she breathed. Somehow, speaking at more than a hush seemed inappropriate.
“D’you like it?” he asked, sounding almost shy.
“I’m on another planet,” she breathed, amazed, staring at the rainbows in the skies.
“Yes. You are. One of the nicest there is, too.”
“And I’m in my nightie,” she realized, abruptly.
“Oh.” He paused, and she wondered if he was verifying it. “Yes. You appear to be. Do you want to change?”
“I don’t want to wake up,” she admitted.
His hand curled into hers, which felt astonishingly natural, given that they had really only just met, and when he spoke his mouth was against her ear, his breath against her skin. “Amy Pond,” he murmured. “You are not dreaming this.”
She turned so she could look at him, that smattering of freckles she’d noticed before flooding her vision. “Promise?”
“Yes,” he responded, gravely.
“I may be making up my mind to think good things about you,” she confessed, a little breathlessly.
When he smiled, it seemed to lighten everything about him. “Likewise. Now go change, I have something I want to show you.”
“How can you possibly have anything else to show me?”
“I have a lot of tricks up my sleeves,” said Brem. “They’re multidimensional.”
“You don’t make any sense at all, and that’s the best thing about you.”
“You and I are going to get along very well,” he said, and grinned.
Next Part