Commentary for Bonsai (Seven/Peri, R)
nonelvis asked for commentary on Bonsai.
Teh Prompt for this fic: there exists a statement which is true but has no proof
It was my first-ever porn! *swells with pride* I sort of wish I'd made it filthier, given that. I'll make it up to myself some day.
Bonsai
Once upon a time, I wrote a lot. I wrote long fics, I wrote short fics, I wrote medium fics. I had a look at some of that the other day, and it's not even complete shit, either. I bring this up because I wish I knew where that ability to put one word in front of another had gone. Since some time before I rejoined Who fandom, I've… well, I haven't had writer's block, exactly, but for whatever reason it takes me forever to write anything and it's impossibly difficult and the results are never that smooth. There might be some good things, but the lack of cohesion and flow sets my teeth on edge and I spend forever trying to iron it out and failing miserably (y helo thar, Angle of Reflection). My attention span is… sorry, what?
You're treated to that little confessional because Bonsai is the one exception to that routine in the past two years. I literally have no idea where it came from, because I was a bit off my gourd with a fluke fever and some mental stuff when I wrote it-in about half an hour. It's the only fic I have that really hangs together, partly because the idea is pretty simple and largely because I didn't have time to forget what I was doing. I know it ain't exactly Shakespeare, but I'm honestly happy with how it came out. And I've spent the rest of the time since trying to get back to that. Fucksticks.
Anyway.
He's got his hand in her hair, where it always used to go first. She's got her hand under his jumper, and that's new, covered in question marks, hardly subtle. Nice to know that that much has carried over, at least.
I love Seven, oh, I love him like pie. And I do think he is hot like burning. I just watched Seven step into the doorway of Josiah Wossname's parlor, put his head to one side, and smile mysteriously. For the fourteenth time in a row. However, question mark togs, dude, how am I going to take your mysterious manipulations seriously with QUESTION MARK TOGS?
"Where is she?" Peri asks against his lips.
"Who?" he mutters back, moving from her mouth to the pulse point at her neck. She's got her eyes open; but, then, so does he.
"She. He. Whoever it is." There's no accusation in her voice, and when she gets her hand under his shirt tail and runs her nails over his ribs, it's not to hurt him (yet). It's just that she knows: He never travels alone.
He's silent for a moment, considering while he works at her throat and plunders through her hair. "She's safe," he says eventually.
* * *
Okay, I said I like this fic. I never said I loved every word of it. "[P]lunders through her hair" is like nails on chalkboard to me and twice or thrice I've even cut it out but I always put it back in because something's missing without it and to this day I have not come up with what actually should go there.
It's not time that's relative; it's events.
* * *
That's complete and utter bullshit, actually. BUT IT SOUNDS CLEVER.
Peri runs her hand up his thigh-
No, scratch that; Peri runs her mouth up his thigh-
No, scratch that; Peri pushes him down her body because he owes her-
No, it couldn't have happened like that;
circumstances plainly dictate
that he's already got her hands secured to the headboard.
* * *
Yeah, I have no idea why those last three lines are broken up poetry-like like that, either. Seemed right, though. A bit precious, but kind of the entire idea is, so I reckon better to just go for it.
One, two, three. I'm coming back for you. No, no; he doesn't think like that. He's never thought like that even for Susan, so it isn't possible here.
I like that bit.
One, two, three. Of course, this body is different-from the last, from the others. This is the time for him to decide what he's growing into. Consistency has a higher value this go-around; a merry go-around it is, too, and the Valeyard caught the brass ring. Consistency, in fact, is the only thing accounting for his existence now. One, two, three. Blast. He's oversimplifying again; this isn't self-preservation alone. He does have a duty. To Ace. To home. To Time. To the Matrix.
I'm a lot more ambivalent about that bit. See, it's all more or less stuff I think is true in the world of this fic, but it doesn't quite get there, and the sentences don't quite make a paragraph. That, and even in a fic that runs on obscurity, it's a bit too obscure. (Crit and suggestions very welcome, if anybody's got any!) What the paragraph wanted to do was explain why the Doctor is thinking about-perhaps even visiting? Is he? Isn't he?-Peri at this juncture, why this little not-episode slots in at the moment of his sudden character shift when Ace comes on board. Part of the problem is that I hadn't thought about that issue until my beta, ionlylurkhere, brought it up. So it's a band-aid, basically. I really wish I could get the gap properly closed.
And he has a creeping suspicion that the TARDIS is more than a little responsible for the shape of his brain in this body, because deficiency in the nanites' programming is the only explanation for what happened in the last.
IT ARE FACT. I KNOW IT BECAUSE OF MY LEARNINGS.
One, two, three.
Damn. Scissors again.
* * *
He'd tie her hands to the headboard, if they were using a bed.
You know, I don't actually see Seven as such a kinky bugger, in the ordinary run of things. Just for this one. No idea why. Of course, by my standards, light bondage hardly even counts as kink, so that might be part of it.
Instead he pushes her into the wall-good, sturdy, middle-galactic period architecture, not one piece of which came from Thoros Alpha.
Thoros Alpha? Huh. I guess I was thinking, for whatever reason, that Peri and Yrcanos had ended up shifting over to Thoros Beta's sister planet (they ally themselves with the "Alphans") to do a little conquering. Regardless, it should probably be "Thordon" here.
He's even forgotten his umbrella behind him, he's pressing forward so hard, trying to bury himself in every part of her at once.
MY CAMP!BROLLY FETISH, LET ME SHOW YOU IT
It's all changed, Peri thinks, just before his hand comes and scatters the thought like bread crumbs before birds. He wants her. He used to need her so badly that he couldn't want her.
I've never been happy with the fact that this paragraph contradicts itself, temporally. Strictly speaking, the second two sentences are part of the thought Peri had but lost the thread of in the first sentence, where I say that it's scattered; yet I have to have the explanation there, because it bloody well needs it but I couldn't put it in front effectively. It is like losing track of which cock goes where only with grammar instead of body parts.
"Why are you here?" she whispers in his ear. Then she pulls his head down and around to get her mouth into the space between his ear and his curls, so he'll know she doesn't want an answer. He gasps something alien in a Scottish accent and hauls her hips against his. God. So long. Hard even through cloth-she'd forgotten what he felt like. It's one thing about him that is exactly as it used to be, and she doesn't care if it does make her an idiot, she wants him.
And this paragraph is a bit blenderfied like those canned mysterymeats, but I justify that it sort of should be because the whole fic is and her brain's scrambled with bodice-ripping passion and whatnot. Ho hum.
"I had a dream," he says softly into her hair as he works steadily at getting her belt out and she attacks his fly, "about six months ago, relative time."
"Was I in it?"
"Yes." His fingers skim down her thighs and take her knickers with them. Amazing, that he can do that so lightly when it's happening this fast. "We were making love, and fistfuls of feathers came away in my hands."
Then he pushes her flat, and he kisses her as her body opens around him.
* * *
My bird transformation!fetish, let me show you that, too. Actually, it's just a bit of fanon for me that the Bird Girl image is stuck in the Doctor's head because, when Quillam was doing his mad scientist thing and explaining how the transmogrification was guided by the mind of the subject herself, and points Peri out as "one who would wish to fly away from trouble," he's hella guilty. Also that that's the first time wonders what Peri's personal and family life was like before she met him. In the serial itself, it's rather random and stupid, but it does make a conveniently resonant image to play with in fanfic.
"Back in two ticks, Ace," he says mysteriously, and taps the brolly's red plastic handle against his nose.
Ace laughs, other hands already combing her back into the tangle on the dance floor. "Two or maybe three, right, Professor?" she shouts back. She's much cleverer than Peri.
I hope that doesn't sound like bashing. I mean, if he were thinking of them both in the same sentence, he would notice it.
"Oh, yes!" He smiles and raises his voice over the hubbub. "Three at the most!"
* * *
"Doctor," she whispers as she screws her eyes shut and swings herself atop him. She doesn't ask about who's with him, because for her to do that he'd have to let her talk, and as soon as she's got his name out he's plunged his tongue into her mouth to shut her up.
She shudders when he surges up into her and his arms close over her back. Just like always, then.
* * *
Bonsai is an intentionally open-ended fic, partly because open-ended was the only way to execute the concept, and partly because it makes good ass-covering. But honestly? I think he makes the trip. I think he actually, physically, makes the trip in the TARDIS. The trouble is, of course, that he makes it more than once, and not the same way.
Gallifrey. Peri has never been to Gallifrey. Yet Peri is in the Matrix, and the Matrix is on Gallifrey.
Something else is on Gallifrey, too.
While I'm being honest… these were total throwaway lines. Almost totally, at least. When I put it together, the Matrix angle was a sort of garnish-just an extra question to hang on the periphery about what happens if you've got a record that supposedly has perfect fidelity to existence itself, and then you use time travel to alter history. An embellishment, really. A few people, however, notably cot_after_dark, seem to have read this fic as being very much about the Matrix. That tickles me pink. Is the Doctor in the TARDIS, or is the Doctor in the Matrix? Is the Doctor writing to the disc, or is the disc writing to the world? If the Doctor is in the TARDIS, but the TARDIS is in the Matrix, does it matter which? I don't know, myself. I think it's way cool that people seem to get very different things out of this one.
He's got a flip-flop thing. He went out and got it after Coal Hill; it had been too long since he'd had one. It's good to have it around as a reminder.
Okay, yeah. This was another bit of my fucking up the timing and not really being able to change it. I'd originally put this right after Fenric, not after Remembrance. ionlylurkhere called attention to the fact that that really makes no sense whatsoever, however, and I can't do without the connection and explanation provided by the flip-flop thing. I simply never came up with a better alternative, so I had Seven randomly acquire one. No, it's not very convincing to me, either.
"Sequential logic's output," Mel had recited once in a supermarket, "unlike that of combinational logic, depends not only on the input at that instant, but also on the past output states of the sequence."
Three flips back:
* * *
Eh. Not sure I like the "Three flips back:", but I need the repetition of that idea, both to sketch in what the Doctor is doing and to keep things together. Oh, well.
"Déjà vu," he says, as he lets her do what she likes with him and plays again with her hair. "Peri, do you have a feeling this might have happened before?"
His jumper's balled up on the floor nearby. She's trying to get his fly open, but her hands are shaking too badly to manage it and she's about ready to cry from frustration. "Of course it's happened before," she says, and she can feel her lip trembling in spite of herself-
Only, of course she doesn't say that;
She says, "I knew I'd see you again";
No, no; flip;
She says, "I thought I'd never see you again." Yes, that's more likely. He could get away with that.
* * *
I've gotten (for me) a lot of response to this fic, which does nothing bad for my vanity. It's also fun, because the weird circumstances under which this fic was written makes it almost like I didn't write it at all, so it's interesting to see different reactions to it. By a landslide, though, the most common reactions seem to be a) "chilling" and b) "hot". Which also does nothing bad for my vanity. At least one person felt that the fic demonized Seven to the point that I'd ruined her childhood. I'm not saying she was doing it wrong or that anybody else is, either, for I do believe that the author is dead, but it's still surprising to me because while was aiming for hot and chilling, I've always found this scenario to be, mainly, sad. And it might even be sadder for Seven than for Peri. This is the section where it surfaces that he's not entirely in control, not as in control as he thinks he is, and that he has no idea. At this point, he has no way of knowing how just how many times this has happened before-because it has and it hasn't.
(Or is it all in the Matrix? Is it less real even if it is? Etc.)
How much can he get away with? That's the real question. The flip-flop thing is too narrow and contained to tell him.
* * *
Intended implication being that he'd have to do his history-sculpting for real, because simulations won't do. *DRUM ROLL OF DOOM*
Whoever it is who isn't there is still there. Peri knows. She knows him, she's never forgotten; she's never forgotten how he used to look at her in puzzlement until he'd recognize her and his eyes would clear, or how his fingers used to catch and wrap around any available part of her, or how he used his whole hand the time he tried to kill her or the way she'd kept remembering it all through the first time he had her until she came so hard he panicked; and most of all she's never forgotten being chained to the rock at the end, and she knows that he never travels alone.
Another thing that surprised me among the responses to this fic is how many people have said that Six/Peri comes out looking very kinky in this. Frankly, I don't see Six/Peri as kinky at all in this fic's world: Peri is kinky. Six, however, had no idea what was going through her mind, was a little scared of the whole thing, and would have been horrified if he'd known how her mind was working. Everybody rags on Telly!Six for how snide and abrasive he is, but he's really, fundamentally gentle. Seven, well-
He makes side trips alone. He executes missions alone. He even takes holidays alone, but only to seek out company; he does not travel alone. She knows there must be someone and she always knew that there would be. She doesn't want it any other way, either. Peri knows firsthand how much he needs somebody to be there, and how little it matters who it is.
"Oh-" Warm, wet tongue on her ribs, just under her breast. He's moving all wrong. It's fast, and fevered, and a little bit desperate, and if it were her Doctor it would be all right, but he's so much more certain now and it's scary to see him like this.
Down, skimming over her belly, his fingers twisting up into her body. Scary-
"Iliac crest," he mutters as his mouth drags over her hips. "Mons venus-"
"Doctor?" She whimpers. "Doctor, what's-"
Scary. He wrests her knees apart like he can't get her open fast enough. When his mouth closes on her, she finally works out what's off: It's hot, God, he's warm, so warm, all wrong for him, and she remembers the rock like she's been doing all through this-scary-scary-
He penetrates her with his tongue. She comes blindingly hard, and this time it's she who panics.
Mind you, I have no particular reason for upping his body temperature. If you like the half-human theory, and you use same to explain quirks like no doctors having anything odd to say about One and Two's hearts, you could say it's a terribly clever offshoot of that. Or something.
It sounded hot, all right?
He has a reason for being here. That much she knows. Unfortunately, she will never find out what it is, because she will never have had that thought.
One, two, three:
* * *
The Matrix can be changed. Dirty little secret, that, and everybody has been so sure for so long that the Matrix means the truth that nobody's quite sure what happens to the rest of the universe when you change the Matrix.
The Doctor isn't going to find out, either.
LOL DO NOT MIND ME WHILE I LAMPSHADE MY OWN THROWAWAYS
You can't remember something that never happened. That's what memory means. Memory has a definite relationship to time, even for a Time Lord.
Oh, poor Seven. Why no sympathy for Bonsai!Seven? *criez*
The TARDIS, however, remembers all kinds of things that never happened: That's what being a TARDIS means.
My favorite sentence in the fic. Also the most important one, probably.
The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dalí. Salvador: salvator, -oris, Latin, a savior or preserver. The one thing he knows in this incarnation is what he's got to do.
* * *
Her nails split his skin down his back. They've done the catch-up and they've found his room and they've got all the most up-to-date uniforms off, and now she's ready to hurt him.
"I remember us on the rock," Peri says, and she knows from his eyes that he remembers, too. There goes that theory, then.
"Do you know what I remember about it?" He presses his lips together primly as he surges forward and slams her against the headboard again, but he doesn't look away. "I remember your arm under my head and your fingers on my face and your voice going on and on," she says through her teeth, because now, oh, yes, now she's ready to hurt him.
I wonder if I'll ever figure out a better way to write that sentence so that it won't have so many italics. And would be more in character.
She clenches her fingers into his shoulders and hisses, "Get it out of my head, Doctor. Fuck me."
And he does-
* * *
No, he decides on further reflection. He needs to remember that.
Another bit that didn't quite make sense even to me or rather the idea did but I didn't find the right set of words but I didn't find a passible substitute, either. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
One, two, three:
* * *
He's sitting-sitting!-in the Alphan throne solemnly, with the hordes clamoring at the gates not a mile away and the TARDIS in the corner, a promise of safety. A cool, blue, alien promise of safety, a much better one than Yrcanos.
I have stuck to my idea that Peri and Yrcanos spent their honeymoon conquering the Alphans, I see. Suspect lines like this came about because I forgot whom Yrcanos was actually supposed to be king of.
"I need you to explain it to me, Peri," he says seriously, and if he doesn't stop doing that while she's sitting in his lap and kissing desperately at his neck, it's going to have a serious impact on her self-esteem.
She makes a noise of frustration in her throat and kicks at the chair. "Damn it," she swears, "this used to work to shut you up-"
His fingers catch in her hair, and it's the tenderness that stops her cold. He's got the red-handled brolly in the other hand and he's smiling at her sadly. "I need you to tell me how they put you to rights, Peri, or else it can't have happened."
And that's the second-most important sentence in the fic. *nods self-importantly*
"Oh, Doctor, does it matter?" she wails. "It happened, didn't it?"
"Are you sure?" he says, eyes glittering. "Are you quite, quite sure?"
Yes, Doctor, I am quite, quite sure; for I'm here, aren't I-
* * *
Oh, Peri. Damn it, even if you didn't like her, you have to grant she got a shitty exit. A shitty, precarious exit.
I tried to fix it, Peri. No, that's a lie.
I'm trying to fix it, Peri. No, that's a lie as well.
I'll try to fix it, Peri. No.
I wish I could fix it, Peri. Yes, that's him down to the ground.
* * *
I think I like that section.
"Need you," he gasps. "Still need you-"
It's not his fault. He thinks he does.
She cries out as he buries himself inside her. He doesn't, though. Need her, that is. She knows he doesn't because if he did he'd take her with him and she knows without asking that he never will, or else he'd have the TARDIS in sight.
* * *
Flip, flop, flip. Nothing for it. It takes time to see the effects of a cut, which really is the point of the whole exercise. And does he trust his judgment enough to do it?
"Bonsai" was a working title, and I originally didn't like it. It grew on me.
Yes. Yes, this time around, he does.
God Complex!Cartmel Masterplan!Mastermind!Seven strikes again! Fathers, lock up your TARDISes! Actually, this fic is maybe saddest of all for the TARDIS. I can't decide. Anyway. Pay no attention while I stretch Seven's ethics past the point of believability.
To every Ω-consistent recursive class c of formulae there correspond recursive class-signs r, such that neither v Gen r nor Neg (v Gen r) belongs to Flg (c) where v is the free variable of r.
Kurt Gödel's famous Prop VI from the 1931 paper On Formally Undecidable Propositions in Principia Mathematica and Related Systems: All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions. This paper is arguably the greatest artifact in all of human history. AND I CO-OPTED IT TO MAKE PORN. \O/
There exists a statement which is true but has no proof.
The common paraphrase of Gödel's Prop VI. To say that I'm playing fast and loose with poor Gödel would be an understatement, but when I got to thinking about my prompt-which I originally made pretty much just because it sounded cool-the idea of translating this into something timey-wimey seemed right. "There exists a statement which is true but has no proof"-i.e., somewhere out there in the system Principia Mathematica is a little piece of truth, but there is no way to navigate to and from it. Likewise an encounter that has unhappened.
Why, yes, there's more pomposity where that came from, why do you ask?
This sentence is false.
Epimenides' paradox. Not equivalent to either of the statements above. It's related by way of being a "one-step paradox," as is excellently and deliciously and thrillingly laid out in Douglas Hofstadter's classic Gödel, Escher, Bach. There are also some shorter, easier layman's overviews of the proof, such as Gödel's Proof. The proof itself, though a staggering piece of logic, isn't actually that difficult, and can be read with some rudimentary preparation, but probably not nearly so profitably as if I were actually competent in that area, ahem.
Mainly, though, it looked good.
Three ticks back: This never happened.
Well, nonelvis, I bet you wish it hadn't, anyway.
Edit: Whoops, coding fixed.
Teh Prompt for this fic: there exists a statement which is true but has no proof
It was my first-ever porn! *swells with pride* I sort of wish I'd made it filthier, given that. I'll make it up to myself some day.
Bonsai
Once upon a time, I wrote a lot. I wrote long fics, I wrote short fics, I wrote medium fics. I had a look at some of that the other day, and it's not even complete shit, either. I bring this up because I wish I knew where that ability to put one word in front of another had gone. Since some time before I rejoined Who fandom, I've… well, I haven't had writer's block, exactly, but for whatever reason it takes me forever to write anything and it's impossibly difficult and the results are never that smooth. There might be some good things, but the lack of cohesion and flow sets my teeth on edge and I spend forever trying to iron it out and failing miserably (y helo thar, Angle of Reflection). My attention span is… sorry, what?
You're treated to that little confessional because Bonsai is the one exception to that routine in the past two years. I literally have no idea where it came from, because I was a bit off my gourd with a fluke fever and some mental stuff when I wrote it-in about half an hour. It's the only fic I have that really hangs together, partly because the idea is pretty simple and largely because I didn't have time to forget what I was doing. I know it ain't exactly Shakespeare, but I'm honestly happy with how it came out. And I've spent the rest of the time since trying to get back to that. Fucksticks.
Anyway.
He's got his hand in her hair, where it always used to go first. She's got her hand under his jumper, and that's new, covered in question marks, hardly subtle. Nice to know that that much has carried over, at least.
I love Seven, oh, I love him like pie. And I do think he is hot like burning. I just watched Seven step into the doorway of Josiah Wossname's parlor, put his head to one side, and smile mysteriously. For the fourteenth time in a row. However, question mark togs, dude, how am I going to take your mysterious manipulations seriously with QUESTION MARK TOGS?
"Where is she?" Peri asks against his lips.
"Who?" he mutters back, moving from her mouth to the pulse point at her neck. She's got her eyes open; but, then, so does he.
"She. He. Whoever it is." There's no accusation in her voice, and when she gets her hand under his shirt tail and runs her nails over his ribs, it's not to hurt him (yet). It's just that she knows: He never travels alone.
He's silent for a moment, considering while he works at her throat and plunders through her hair. "She's safe," he says eventually.
* * *
Okay, I said I like this fic. I never said I loved every word of it. "[P]lunders through her hair" is like nails on chalkboard to me and twice or thrice I've even cut it out but I always put it back in because something's missing without it and to this day I have not come up with what actually should go there.
It's not time that's relative; it's events.
* * *
That's complete and utter bullshit, actually. BUT IT SOUNDS CLEVER.
Peri runs her hand up his thigh-
No, scratch that; Peri runs her mouth up his thigh-
No, scratch that; Peri pushes him down her body because he owes her-
No, it couldn't have happened like that;
circumstances plainly dictate
that he's already got her hands secured to the headboard.
* * *
Yeah, I have no idea why those last three lines are broken up poetry-like like that, either. Seemed right, though. A bit precious, but kind of the entire idea is, so I reckon better to just go for it.
One, two, three. I'm coming back for you. No, no; he doesn't think like that. He's never thought like that even for Susan, so it isn't possible here.
I like that bit.
One, two, three. Of course, this body is different-from the last, from the others. This is the time for him to decide what he's growing into. Consistency has a higher value this go-around; a merry go-around it is, too, and the Valeyard caught the brass ring. Consistency, in fact, is the only thing accounting for his existence now. One, two, three. Blast. He's oversimplifying again; this isn't self-preservation alone. He does have a duty. To Ace. To home. To Time. To the Matrix.
I'm a lot more ambivalent about that bit. See, it's all more or less stuff I think is true in the world of this fic, but it doesn't quite get there, and the sentences don't quite make a paragraph. That, and even in a fic that runs on obscurity, it's a bit too obscure. (Crit and suggestions very welcome, if anybody's got any!) What the paragraph wanted to do was explain why the Doctor is thinking about-perhaps even visiting? Is he? Isn't he?-Peri at this juncture, why this little not-episode slots in at the moment of his sudden character shift when Ace comes on board. Part of the problem is that I hadn't thought about that issue until my beta, ionlylurkhere, brought it up. So it's a band-aid, basically. I really wish I could get the gap properly closed.
And he has a creeping suspicion that the TARDIS is more than a little responsible for the shape of his brain in this body, because deficiency in the nanites' programming is the only explanation for what happened in the last.
IT ARE FACT. I KNOW IT BECAUSE OF MY LEARNINGS.
One, two, three.
Damn. Scissors again.
* * *
He'd tie her hands to the headboard, if they were using a bed.
You know, I don't actually see Seven as such a kinky bugger, in the ordinary run of things. Just for this one. No idea why. Of course, by my standards, light bondage hardly even counts as kink, so that might be part of it.
Instead he pushes her into the wall-good, sturdy, middle-galactic period architecture, not one piece of which came from Thoros Alpha.
Thoros Alpha? Huh. I guess I was thinking, for whatever reason, that Peri and Yrcanos had ended up shifting over to Thoros Beta's sister planet (they ally themselves with the "Alphans") to do a little conquering. Regardless, it should probably be "Thordon" here.
He's even forgotten his umbrella behind him, he's pressing forward so hard, trying to bury himself in every part of her at once.
MY CAMP!BROLLY FETISH, LET ME SHOW YOU IT
It's all changed, Peri thinks, just before his hand comes and scatters the thought like bread crumbs before birds. He wants her. He used to need her so badly that he couldn't want her.
I've never been happy with the fact that this paragraph contradicts itself, temporally. Strictly speaking, the second two sentences are part of the thought Peri had but lost the thread of in the first sentence, where I say that it's scattered; yet I have to have the explanation there, because it bloody well needs it but I couldn't put it in front effectively. It is like losing track of which cock goes where only with grammar instead of body parts.
"Why are you here?" she whispers in his ear. Then she pulls his head down and around to get her mouth into the space between his ear and his curls, so he'll know she doesn't want an answer. He gasps something alien in a Scottish accent and hauls her hips against his. God. So long. Hard even through cloth-she'd forgotten what he felt like. It's one thing about him that is exactly as it used to be, and she doesn't care if it does make her an idiot, she wants him.
And this paragraph is a bit blenderfied like those canned mysterymeats, but I justify that it sort of should be because the whole fic is and her brain's scrambled with bodice-ripping passion and whatnot. Ho hum.
"I had a dream," he says softly into her hair as he works steadily at getting her belt out and she attacks his fly, "about six months ago, relative time."
"Was I in it?"
"Yes." His fingers skim down her thighs and take her knickers with them. Amazing, that he can do that so lightly when it's happening this fast. "We were making love, and fistfuls of feathers came away in my hands."
Then he pushes her flat, and he kisses her as her body opens around him.
* * *
My bird transformation!fetish, let me show you that, too. Actually, it's just a bit of fanon for me that the Bird Girl image is stuck in the Doctor's head because, when Quillam was doing his mad scientist thing and explaining how the transmogrification was guided by the mind of the subject herself, and points Peri out as "one who would wish to fly away from trouble," he's hella guilty. Also that that's the first time wonders what Peri's personal and family life was like before she met him. In the serial itself, it's rather random and stupid, but it does make a conveniently resonant image to play with in fanfic.
"Back in two ticks, Ace," he says mysteriously, and taps the brolly's red plastic handle against his nose.
Ace laughs, other hands already combing her back into the tangle on the dance floor. "Two or maybe three, right, Professor?" she shouts back. She's much cleverer than Peri.
I hope that doesn't sound like bashing. I mean, if he were thinking of them both in the same sentence, he would notice it.
"Oh, yes!" He smiles and raises his voice over the hubbub. "Three at the most!"
* * *
"Doctor," she whispers as she screws her eyes shut and swings herself atop him. She doesn't ask about who's with him, because for her to do that he'd have to let her talk, and as soon as she's got his name out he's plunged his tongue into her mouth to shut her up.
She shudders when he surges up into her and his arms close over her back. Just like always, then.
* * *
Bonsai is an intentionally open-ended fic, partly because open-ended was the only way to execute the concept, and partly because it makes good ass-covering. But honestly? I think he makes the trip. I think he actually, physically, makes the trip in the TARDIS. The trouble is, of course, that he makes it more than once, and not the same way.
Gallifrey. Peri has never been to Gallifrey. Yet Peri is in the Matrix, and the Matrix is on Gallifrey.
Something else is on Gallifrey, too.
While I'm being honest… these were total throwaway lines. Almost totally, at least. When I put it together, the Matrix angle was a sort of garnish-just an extra question to hang on the periphery about what happens if you've got a record that supposedly has perfect fidelity to existence itself, and then you use time travel to alter history. An embellishment, really. A few people, however, notably cot_after_dark, seem to have read this fic as being very much about the Matrix. That tickles me pink. Is the Doctor in the TARDIS, or is the Doctor in the Matrix? Is the Doctor writing to the disc, or is the disc writing to the world? If the Doctor is in the TARDIS, but the TARDIS is in the Matrix, does it matter which? I don't know, myself. I think it's way cool that people seem to get very different things out of this one.
He's got a flip-flop thing. He went out and got it after Coal Hill; it had been too long since he'd had one. It's good to have it around as a reminder.
Okay, yeah. This was another bit of my fucking up the timing and not really being able to change it. I'd originally put this right after Fenric, not after Remembrance. ionlylurkhere called attention to the fact that that really makes no sense whatsoever, however, and I can't do without the connection and explanation provided by the flip-flop thing. I simply never came up with a better alternative, so I had Seven randomly acquire one. No, it's not very convincing to me, either.
"Sequential logic's output," Mel had recited once in a supermarket, "unlike that of combinational logic, depends not only on the input at that instant, but also on the past output states of the sequence."
Three flips back:
* * *
Eh. Not sure I like the "Three flips back:", but I need the repetition of that idea, both to sketch in what the Doctor is doing and to keep things together. Oh, well.
"Déjà vu," he says, as he lets her do what she likes with him and plays again with her hair. "Peri, do you have a feeling this might have happened before?"
His jumper's balled up on the floor nearby. She's trying to get his fly open, but her hands are shaking too badly to manage it and she's about ready to cry from frustration. "Of course it's happened before," she says, and she can feel her lip trembling in spite of herself-
Only, of course she doesn't say that;
She says, "I knew I'd see you again";
No, no; flip;
She says, "I thought I'd never see you again." Yes, that's more likely. He could get away with that.
* * *
I've gotten (for me) a lot of response to this fic, which does nothing bad for my vanity. It's also fun, because the weird circumstances under which this fic was written makes it almost like I didn't write it at all, so it's interesting to see different reactions to it. By a landslide, though, the most common reactions seem to be a) "chilling" and b) "hot". Which also does nothing bad for my vanity. At least one person felt that the fic demonized Seven to the point that I'd ruined her childhood. I'm not saying she was doing it wrong or that anybody else is, either, for I do believe that the author is dead, but it's still surprising to me because while was aiming for hot and chilling, I've always found this scenario to be, mainly, sad. And it might even be sadder for Seven than for Peri. This is the section where it surfaces that he's not entirely in control, not as in control as he thinks he is, and that he has no idea. At this point, he has no way of knowing how just how many times this has happened before-because it has and it hasn't.
(Or is it all in the Matrix? Is it less real even if it is? Etc.)
How much can he get away with? That's the real question. The flip-flop thing is too narrow and contained to tell him.
* * *
Intended implication being that he'd have to do his history-sculpting for real, because simulations won't do. *DRUM ROLL OF DOOM*
Whoever it is who isn't there is still there. Peri knows. She knows him, she's never forgotten; she's never forgotten how he used to look at her in puzzlement until he'd recognize her and his eyes would clear, or how his fingers used to catch and wrap around any available part of her, or how he used his whole hand the time he tried to kill her or the way she'd kept remembering it all through the first time he had her until she came so hard he panicked; and most of all she's never forgotten being chained to the rock at the end, and she knows that he never travels alone.
Another thing that surprised me among the responses to this fic is how many people have said that Six/Peri comes out looking very kinky in this. Frankly, I don't see Six/Peri as kinky at all in this fic's world: Peri is kinky. Six, however, had no idea what was going through her mind, was a little scared of the whole thing, and would have been horrified if he'd known how her mind was working. Everybody rags on Telly!Six for how snide and abrasive he is, but he's really, fundamentally gentle. Seven, well-
He makes side trips alone. He executes missions alone. He even takes holidays alone, but only to seek out company; he does not travel alone. She knows there must be someone and she always knew that there would be. She doesn't want it any other way, either. Peri knows firsthand how much he needs somebody to be there, and how little it matters who it is.
"Oh-" Warm, wet tongue on her ribs, just under her breast. He's moving all wrong. It's fast, and fevered, and a little bit desperate, and if it were her Doctor it would be all right, but he's so much more certain now and it's scary to see him like this.
Down, skimming over her belly, his fingers twisting up into her body. Scary-
"Iliac crest," he mutters as his mouth drags over her hips. "Mons venus-"
"Doctor?" She whimpers. "Doctor, what's-"
Scary. He wrests her knees apart like he can't get her open fast enough. When his mouth closes on her, she finally works out what's off: It's hot, God, he's warm, so warm, all wrong for him, and she remembers the rock like she's been doing all through this-scary-scary-
He penetrates her with his tongue. She comes blindingly hard, and this time it's she who panics.
Mind you, I have no particular reason for upping his body temperature. If you like the half-human theory, and you use same to explain quirks like no doctors having anything odd to say about One and Two's hearts, you could say it's a terribly clever offshoot of that. Or something.
It sounded hot, all right?
He has a reason for being here. That much she knows. Unfortunately, she will never find out what it is, because she will never have had that thought.
One, two, three:
* * *
The Matrix can be changed. Dirty little secret, that, and everybody has been so sure for so long that the Matrix means the truth that nobody's quite sure what happens to the rest of the universe when you change the Matrix.
The Doctor isn't going to find out, either.
LOL DO NOT MIND ME WHILE I LAMPSHADE MY OWN THROWAWAYS
You can't remember something that never happened. That's what memory means. Memory has a definite relationship to time, even for a Time Lord.
Oh, poor Seven. Why no sympathy for Bonsai!Seven? *criez*
The TARDIS, however, remembers all kinds of things that never happened: That's what being a TARDIS means.
My favorite sentence in the fic. Also the most important one, probably.
The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dalí. Salvador: salvator, -oris, Latin, a savior or preserver. The one thing he knows in this incarnation is what he's got to do.
* * *
Her nails split his skin down his back. They've done the catch-up and they've found his room and they've got all the most up-to-date uniforms off, and now she's ready to hurt him.
"I remember us on the rock," Peri says, and she knows from his eyes that he remembers, too. There goes that theory, then.
"Do you know what I remember about it?" He presses his lips together primly as he surges forward and slams her against the headboard again, but he doesn't look away. "I remember your arm under my head and your fingers on my face and your voice going on and on," she says through her teeth, because now, oh, yes, now she's ready to hurt him.
I wonder if I'll ever figure out a better way to write that sentence so that it won't have so many italics. And would be more in character.
She clenches her fingers into his shoulders and hisses, "Get it out of my head, Doctor. Fuck me."
And he does-
* * *
No, he decides on further reflection. He needs to remember that.
Another bit that didn't quite make sense even to me or rather the idea did but I didn't find the right set of words but I didn't find a passible substitute, either. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
One, two, three:
* * *
He's sitting-sitting!-in the Alphan throne solemnly, with the hordes clamoring at the gates not a mile away and the TARDIS in the corner, a promise of safety. A cool, blue, alien promise of safety, a much better one than Yrcanos.
I have stuck to my idea that Peri and Yrcanos spent their honeymoon conquering the Alphans, I see. Suspect lines like this came about because I forgot whom Yrcanos was actually supposed to be king of.
"I need you to explain it to me, Peri," he says seriously, and if he doesn't stop doing that while she's sitting in his lap and kissing desperately at his neck, it's going to have a serious impact on her self-esteem.
She makes a noise of frustration in her throat and kicks at the chair. "Damn it," she swears, "this used to work to shut you up-"
His fingers catch in her hair, and it's the tenderness that stops her cold. He's got the red-handled brolly in the other hand and he's smiling at her sadly. "I need you to tell me how they put you to rights, Peri, or else it can't have happened."
And that's the second-most important sentence in the fic. *nods self-importantly*
"Oh, Doctor, does it matter?" she wails. "It happened, didn't it?"
"Are you sure?" he says, eyes glittering. "Are you quite, quite sure?"
Yes, Doctor, I am quite, quite sure; for I'm here, aren't I-
* * *
Oh, Peri. Damn it, even if you didn't like her, you have to grant she got a shitty exit. A shitty, precarious exit.
I tried to fix it, Peri. No, that's a lie.
I'm trying to fix it, Peri. No, that's a lie as well.
I'll try to fix it, Peri. No.
I wish I could fix it, Peri. Yes, that's him down to the ground.
* * *
I think I like that section.
"Need you," he gasps. "Still need you-"
It's not his fault. He thinks he does.
She cries out as he buries himself inside her. He doesn't, though. Need her, that is. She knows he doesn't because if he did he'd take her with him and she knows without asking that he never will, or else he'd have the TARDIS in sight.
* * *
Flip, flop, flip. Nothing for it. It takes time to see the effects of a cut, which really is the point of the whole exercise. And does he trust his judgment enough to do it?
"Bonsai" was a working title, and I originally didn't like it. It grew on me.
Yes. Yes, this time around, he does.
God Complex!Cartmel Masterplan!Mastermind!Seven strikes again! Fathers, lock up your TARDISes! Actually, this fic is maybe saddest of all for the TARDIS. I can't decide. Anyway. Pay no attention while I stretch Seven's ethics past the point of believability.
To every Ω-consistent recursive class c of formulae there correspond recursive class-signs r, such that neither v Gen r nor Neg (v Gen r) belongs to Flg (c) where v is the free variable of r.
Kurt Gödel's famous Prop VI from the 1931 paper On Formally Undecidable Propositions in Principia Mathematica and Related Systems: All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions. This paper is arguably the greatest artifact in all of human history. AND I CO-OPTED IT TO MAKE PORN. \O/
There exists a statement which is true but has no proof.
The common paraphrase of Gödel's Prop VI. To say that I'm playing fast and loose with poor Gödel would be an understatement, but when I got to thinking about my prompt-which I originally made pretty much just because it sounded cool-the idea of translating this into something timey-wimey seemed right. "There exists a statement which is true but has no proof"-i.e., somewhere out there in the system Principia Mathematica is a little piece of truth, but there is no way to navigate to and from it. Likewise an encounter that has unhappened.
Why, yes, there's more pomposity where that came from, why do you ask?
This sentence is false.
Epimenides' paradox. Not equivalent to either of the statements above. It's related by way of being a "one-step paradox," as is excellently and deliciously and thrillingly laid out in Douglas Hofstadter's classic Gödel, Escher, Bach. There are also some shorter, easier layman's overviews of the proof, such as Gödel's Proof. The proof itself, though a staggering piece of logic, isn't actually that difficult, and can be read with some rudimentary preparation, but probably not nearly so profitably as if I were actually competent in that area, ahem.
Mainly, though, it looked good.
Three ticks back: This never happened.
Well, nonelvis, I bet you wish it hadn't, anyway.
Edit: Whoops, coding fixed.