Brem's Eleventh Hour (4/?)
Title - Brem's Eleventh Hour (4/?)
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.
Author's Note - This is the last section I have written. More notes at the end.
Part One - Part Two - Part Three
“She’ll have put clothing in your room for you,” Brem told her, as she followed him back through the hallways of his ship to the room that belonged to her, opening it for her.
“Oh!” she exclaimed in surprise. “The walls are orange!”
Brem looked quizzical. “Isn’t that what you asked her for? Check your wardrobe, there should be clothing, come find me when you’re done.”
Amy was distracted by the new orange walls, and when she translated what he’d said, she said, “But how will I-“ and found that he’d already left. Well, she supposed she’d figure out how to find him on this maze of a TARDIS when she was done figuring out what clothing was in her wardrobe.
It turned out there was beautiful clothing in her wardrobe, exactly what she would have chosen for herself if she’d had a lot of money to spend on the high street, and all exactly her size.
Amy placed a hand against the orange wall and said, feeling silly even as she said it but also thinking that no other reaction was even close to being appropriate, “You’re amazing.”
The lights in her room glowed a little brighter for a second.
Amy, shaking her head at all this lovely absurdity with which she was surrounded, tried to figure out exactly what she ought to change into. Brem had given absolutely no guidance about what would be appropriate, and she was unaccountably nervous. Was it a date? Should she dress like it was a date? Would she look silly if she dressed too posh?
She finally decided on boots, leggings, and a skirt, and then a not-too-revealing top. Didn’t want to overdo it, she decided. And then she grabbed a coat. It hadn’t been cold out on the planet, but it also hadn’t been warm, and she figured that she ought to be prepared for her first outing on an alien planet.
She freshened her makeup a bit and checked her hair and then decided that she was fussing, and she shouldn’t fuss. He probably didn’t even mean for it to be a date. He was an alien. He probably didn’t date.
She stepped out into the hallway and tried to figure out how she was going to find Brem, but the doorway across the hall from her turned out to unexpectedly lead to the library, and Brem was sitting in the library, surrounded by stacks of books.
He looked up as she entered. “Ready?” he inquired, leaping up immediately.
“Yeah.” She eyed the books. “But if you’re in the middle of something…”
“Oh, I’m not, don’t worry, I’ve read these books a lot.” His eyes were on her legs, which was the most normal thing he’d ever done. Then he looked into her eyes, his eyebrows lifted. “Not very practical for running, is it?”
Amy was surprised. “Are we going to be running?”
“Probably.”
“Why?”
“Because running always seems to be involved when I’m around. But who knows? Maybe you’ll be good luck. Maybe we will have a nice quiet time of things.” She was following him, as he walked down the hallway. “Maybe we will explore Babylon, we will learn things, we will meet some nice natives.” He paused and looked back at her, his hand on the door. “No running.” He opened it and gestured for her to precede him, which she did, a bit hesitantly.
But when she stepped out onto Babylon again, it was just the same as it had been: beautiful, peaceful, still.
She smiled and took a deep breath. “That smell, it’s almost like…flowers?”
“Of course.” Brem had started walking, and he gestured to the trees.
Amy took a closer look at the prism leaves. “But…the leaves are made of glass.”
Brem shook his head. “Just something that looks like glass.”
Amy, curious, leaned forward and sniffed at the nearest prism leaf. It did indeed smell like flowers. She ran to catch up with Brem. “So the glass here smells like flowers?”
“The glass here is a flower.”
“But why should the glass smell like flowers? We’re not on Earth, the trees could smell like…anything, they could smell like something I’ve never smelled before.”
“They could,” said Brem, casually, hands in his pockets. “They don’t.”
They walked in silence for a little while, coming to the equivalent of a brook, only composed of bright purple water and flooded with things that looked like swimming dragonflies. She spent a little while standing watching them trickle by, before looking up to find Brem watching her. The slight breeze had tousled his hair even more, and she thought how you could easily be distracted by Brem’s hair, until you realized that he had the most compelling pair of eyes you had ever encountered. Compelling because she had no idea what he was thinking.
So she asked him. “What are you thinking?”
“That…I don’t know,” he finished.
She walked slowly over to him, watching him watch her. It was odd, because she felt simultaneously that he was still actively seducing her, and yet also would have darted away from her at the slightest provocation. “You don’t know what?”
He answered slowly. “I don’t even know what I don’t know.” He smiled a bit. “And that’s unusual for me. I’ve known everything worth knowing since I was very, very young.”
“I cannot imagine you very, very young.”
“I was cute.”
She grinned. “I bet you were.”
He smiled back. And, for one frantic moment, she thought he might be intending to kiss her, so she hurriedly grabbed one of his hands out of his pocket and threaded her fingers through it and swung it between them.
“So. Anything else to see on this planet?”
“Let’s see,” he said, leading them along now. The trees were less dense now, and the sun was setting, the rainbows lower in the sky, dancing over the wild thicket of his hair. He kept her hand in his as they walked. She half-skipped, feeling playful.
“So you grew up on a TARDIS, huh?” she ventured, after a little while.
“I did, yes.”
“And then you got your own.”
“Yes.”
“So how do I get my own?”
“You can’t.”
“Pretend I’m not a human female. How would I get my own?”
He glanced at her. “No. You can’t. There are only four in the entire universe: my parents’, my sisters’, and mine. That’s it.”
That gave her pause. “Only four in the whole universe?”
“Yup.”
“Why do I feel like I’m not getting the whole story there?”
“That makes us even,” remarked Brem.
“Why do you say that?” she asked in alarm.
He stopped walking to peer at her intently. “Wellllllll, because I haven’t gotten the whole story with you.”
“I-“ she squeaked, but was cut off by what sounded like a horn sounding a deep, low, long note. The prisms in the trees shivered, a wave of softly tinkling glass.
Brem straightened, looking away from her, his gaze suddenly sharp, dropping her hand.
“Brem-“ she began, quizzical.
“Shhh.” He held his hand up toward her, the universal gesture for “hush,” and turned his head left and then right, eyes narrowed. “Do you hear that?” he breathed.
“I don’t hear…” And then she did. A sound like thunder, rising from very far away, and then seeming to come up through the ground, which trembled beneath them. The trees shivered again, but the tinkling of the glass was not soft. The prisms bounced violently against each other.
Brem looked around them, wild-eyed, and muttered a word she didn’t understand, then lunged for her hand. “We have to run,” he said, and took off full-speed, to punctuate the point.
She made an exclamation, being pulled in his wake. “Brem,” she protested. “What is going on?”
“We’re being hunted,” he informed her, shortly, dashing around the trembling trees.
She wanted to demand that he explain exactly what he meant by that, because surely it couldn’t be as bad as she thought, surely he couldn’t have meant that, but the ground was shaking so violently now that she would never have been able to keep her balance if her hand hadn’t been in his. He seemed to have a remarkable sense of balance himself, keeping her upright and not losing any speed, but eventually the ground was undulating so much that even he stumbled, reaching out a hand to a tree trunk to catch himself.
The tree vibrated under his hand, and he recoiled immediately, scrambling backward, turning to her and grabbing for her without warning, tucking her practically underneath the cover of his coat, at the same time that a crash sounded, like dozens of wineglasses falling off a table at once. Tiny, sharp needles pricked at her, even through the heavy velvet of his coat. One nicked at her cheek, and she turned her face instinctively into his chest to protect it. He flinched, momentarily, and then leaned his head down, spoke into her ear. “Keep your head down,” he said, and took off again, dragging her along.
It wasn’t needles, she realized. It was glass. The forest was raining glass on them, the prisms splintering into tiny shards, and some more sizeable ones that Brem was trying to dodge them through. And then, abruptly, the ground heaved so violently that they were both thrown off their feet. She landed with a thud, on a bunch of broken glass, and heard Brem land near her, with a small grunt.
The ground was peeling apart underneath her. She watched it, astonished, as that long, low note sounded again, calling, and then a tentacle snaked its way out, pushing through the soil that it had pushed aside.
She acted without thinking, grabbing the nearest shard of glass and stabbing at the tentacle, which retreated back into the ground.
Brem reached over and pushed the dirt back into place.
“We’re being hunted from below,” she gasped.
“Yes,” he affirmed, pulling her up.
“How?”
“They’re subterranean creatures. Come on.”
“No, you’re making it worse.” She dug her heels in, pulling him to a stop.
“We have to get back to the TARDIS,” he bit out at her. “Move.”
“Wait just a second. They can hear us running. We need to climb a tree.”
“The trees are breaking,” he pointed out, impatiently. “Come back here!”
Because she had dropped his hand and had now swung up the nearest tree. There was more glass on the ground than in the trees at that point, it was almost easier to climb the trees than to keep running through the flying glass.
“Amy!” he shouted up at her, as she climbed higher. “Come back down here! Are you mad? That tree’s going to collapse underneath you! We have to get back to the TARDIS!”
“Come and get me,” she called down to him, and hoisted herself up another branch, thinking, grimly, that as impractical as her outfit had been for running, it was even less practical for climbing trees.
She glanced down, in time to see him, grumbling, swing himself up over the first branch and reach for the next one. She stopped climbing, perching on her current branch and watching as he climbed to the next branch. And, when he reached the next one, the ground stopped trembling and the tree stopped shaking.
Brem looked down in confusion. “They left.”
“Yes,” she said.
He was silent for a second. “Because they couldn’t hear us,” he realized. “Oh, of course.” He looked up and grinned at her. “That was brilliant of you.”
She grinned back.
“Of course, now we’re stuck in a tree.”
“I thought you’d have a Plan C up your sleeve.”
“Well, of course I do, it’s just not, you know, fully-formed yet. But it’ll come to me.”
“Before nightfall?”
“Absolutely. Possibly.”
Amy sighed and settled on her branch to wait.
Author's Note - So this was where I stopped writing. It was right around "Vampires of Venice," because my idea was that next Brem would take her on a date to Venice, and the vampires would interrupt it. And then there would be a part where Amy met Ten and he realized she was Amelia. And then I assumed there would be a part where Amy would finally tell Brem she was supposed to be marrying Rory in the "morning." And then...I don't know. Maybe I'll finish this someday, and the characters will gradually become clearer, and I'll get it. Truthfully, I can't support any woman picking another man over my beloved Brem. But I'm also no longer sure I think Amy deserves him. So I may, in the end, finish this, put Amy with Rory, and come up with an OC I think is good enough for Brem, whoever she might be. :-)