I am distracting myself from~stuff~
...by marathoning Buffy the Vampire Slayer (I'm coming up on the halfway point of S5) and rootling around in folders on my laptop. Tomorrow there may be excessive amounts of cleaning, I've not yet decided.
In the process of aforementioned folder rootling I have found a bunch of incomplete fic that's actually not bad. Unfortunately, I also have no idea where I was planning on going with most of said fic, le sigh. So I figured instead that I'd chuck some bits and pieces up here for you guys to poke. :D?
This one was somewhat helpfully titled "Wendy Watson Five Universes" except that I only apparently got one and a half universes into before getting distracted. I think that the only other pertinent information that you need is that I adore crossovers?
An uncertain location (except for the presence of a dead fish. That is about as certain as it is possible to get, plus some extra certainty to drive the point home).
An uncertain time.
On the plus side, Wendy's nose appeared to have shut down in self defence about three minutes ago. On the down side, one of the primary reasons that her sense of smell had run away screaming was currently giving Wendy both the literal and the metaphorical fish-eye.
Dragging her attention away from the dead fish (after some judicious poking with one foot just to make sure that it wasn't going to turn out to be either 1) able to fly, or, 2) a zombie), Wendy concentrated on working at opening the mould covered wooden door that seemed to be the only way out of the room. Quite how she'd ended up in the room was something that Wendy hadn't entirely worked out, but waking up in strange places was getting to be something of a standard work-induced event. At least this time there were no rabbits or snare drums.
In the end, the hinges and the door frame gave way simultaneously, and Wendy found herself stumbling out into daylight that seemed very bright after the dankness of the-Wendy looked over her shoulder-decrepit looking wooden hut. The second thing that Wendy noticed was the wind. It was brisk, and Wendy's sense of smell turned up long enough to cautiously admit to there being the salt-tang of the coast. Squinting around confirmed this. The hut she was walking away from, boots crunching and slipping slightly on shingle, was crouched above the high tide mark of a beach. Where the beach was (besides sandwiched between grey sea and grim cliffs), now that was something more complicated to figure out.
Wendy's Middlewatch not only had a scratched face, it was resolutely dark, no matter how hard she shook it. “Hey, Boss-man?” Nothing.
There were any number of things that Wendy could have said, but she elected to save her breath and continue putting bracing sea air between herself and the certainty of dead fish. After a minute of determined crunching, Wendy realised that her eyes weren't deceiving her: the sprawl of muted colour she could see ahead of her was some kind of town. Towns meant people; people meant phones; phones meant abuse from Ida; Ida eventually meant using the HEYDAR to find out just where Wendy was. Good plan.
Wendy continued forwards, attention turned mostly inwards as she tried to improve on the plan by minimising the Ida part of the equation. She was concentrating so hard on that, in fact, that she dismissed the large shadow and the increased buffeting of wind as weather, merely hunching her shoulders and concentrating on where she was putting her feet.
Until the weather said “Hello.”
Wendy blinked and looked up. And up. And some more.
“Hello,” the dragon (big, black, reptilian) repeated politely. “I do hope that that uniform is only for Longwing Captains, I do not think that Laurence would look well in it at all.” The dragon sat down, making the pebbles of the beach judder and curved its neck around so that its head was closer to Wendy. “I also cannot see how it would be practical for flying. You would be half frozen in no time, and then how would you be able to move around the harness safely?”
“Um,” Wendy managed, this being the first time she'd met any kind of dragon, let alone one the size of a house that sounded like it had stepped out of the pages of Austen.
“Has your dragon seen it yet?” the dragon inquired, oblivious to Wendy gaping at it. “Because not only would you be very cold, you would have nearly no protection from even your own dragon's vitriol. I think that the Corps commanders can be very strange about the oddest things.”
What is strange, Wendy wanted to say, is that you're a giant flying lizard. And what is odd, she would have liked to add, is that you're a giant flying lizard who is talking to me.
“Um.”
“You cannot be based at Dover; Laurence would surely have mentioned meeting you, and I do not like to think what Captain Harcourt will say if that is the new uniform.”
“Dover?”
A clawed foot larger than, oh, Wendy's entire body whistled over her head as the dragon gestured. “Along the coast that way. Laurence said that I could go and have a swim while he is meeting with the Admiralty. Lily is supposed to be rejoining the formation today. Are you with the Folkestone covert?”
“No,” Wendy said. “I'm not with the, uh, Folkestone covert. And I don't have a dragon.”
The dragon blinked with what was clearly surprise and shuffled so that it could look at her even more closely. “Then you are wearing very strange clothes indeed,” it said, before helpfully adding, “you also smell of fish.”
“Thanks, I already knew that.” Wendy stared up at the dragon. It was actually kind of, well, awesome to look at, now that she'd gotten over feeling like a mouse staring up at a hawk. “Uh, hi. I'm Wendy.”
“Oh, how rude of me.” An expression and tone of voice that could only mean embarrassment. “I am Temeraire.”
Wendy ventured a close-mouthed smile (okay, so the no-teeth thing was for chimps, but maybe it worked for dragons, too?) and tried to think of something to say that wasn't along the lines of so, you're a dragon.
“Wendy.” Temeraire shifted backwards. “Why are you glowing?”
Wendy held up her right hand. It was glowing like a cheap special effect, circa 1975. “I'm not entirely-“
Whiteness.
Adjacent to shelves labelled 'Cap-Cas', a long room composed mainly of dark wood and green carpeting.
Teatime.
Wendy kept one hand outstretched, convinced that she was going to run face first into some kind of optical illusion at any moment, because there was absolutely no way that any room could be this long. Naturally, in complete defiance of both Wendy's expectations and plain common sense, the room resolutely continued to be long enough to contain a vanishing point. Wendy squinted. And possibly its own weather in the form of distant fog.
The possibility of interior weather being something of a distraction, Wendy nearly trod on the upside down teapot that was erratically moving across the carpet, only managing to stop herself at the last moment. It was white china, with a blue oriental pattern, and it seemed to be panting.
After a moment of careful consideration-and then thinking what the hell-Wendy picked the teapot up. There was nothing on the carpet.
“Oi!”
There was, however, a mouse in a bow tie glaring at her from the teapot.
Today was apparently going to be the work day during which she met all the talking animals.
“D'you mind?” the mouse continued. “If I'm late to the tea party then Hatter and the March Hare will start arguing about who gets to pour again, and the last time that happened we ended up with grammasites hanging off everyone's participles and a class four fiction infarction.”
“Sorry?” Wendy offered uncertainly.
“Sorry doesn't get me to the party,” the mouse said. “If you're going to go around picking up people's crockery, you may as well make yourself useful while doing so. Continue down towards the Cars, please.”
The mouse pointed imperiously and, for want of anything else to do (or anything that made any kind of sense at all), Wendy followed its directions.
“You'll be looking for the first edition of Through the Looking Glass.” The mouse sniffed. “I don't suppose you have any cream buns handy?”
“Baked goods aren't really the forte of a Middleman.” Although there had been that one case with the cursed wedding cake.
“Political thrillers aren't really my thing,” the mouse said. “Give me The Complete History of Cheese any day.”
“You know that you're subject to a thirty yard restraining order with respect to all things fromage.” a new voice, that had a certain rumbly underscore to the words, and no apparent owner.
Given that she was currently looking for Alice's Adventures Through the Looking Glass with a mouse in a teapot, Wendy couldn't really be surprised when a patch of previously unoccupied bookshelf near her head developed an acute case of stripy cat.
“Let me guess, you're called Cheshire?”
The cat beamed. “How simply marvellous, a fan.”
The teapot in Wendy's hands sniggered and said something about Warrington, which she decided to ignore as it made the cat's ears flatten and its very green eyes flash. Lacking a lid, Wendy clapped her hand over the open top of the teapot and pasted on a smile.
“Hello! I'm Wendy, and I have no idea what's happening to me today, but I appear to be hallucinating mythological creatures with an Austen fixation and now children's fantasy stories.”
“How exciting,” the cat said. “The orientation session for potential Jurisfiction agents is after the third paragraph of chapter five of Sense and Sensibility.”
Apparently the children's fantasies also had an Austen fixation. Wendy hadn't been aware that her subconscious mind was any kind of literary snob.
*****
This is, uh, kinda complete in a way, and is Doctor Who and narrated from the perspective of...well, you'll see, and works off my personal headcanon that...well, you'll see that, too.
The Story From the Other Direction
As endings go, this one is quiet. No stars explode, nor galaxies crumble. There are no perversions of time, nor creeping of shadows in the corner of the eye (not that she has eyes as such things are usually classified), nor shrieking horrors that do not realise that they are manufacturing their own downfall.
It is simply the day (although where she is currently floating, there are not the planetary systems that require the regular division of time) at the end of all the days, when he he looks at nothing in particular and says; “I feel tired.”
She watches as he sits, curled up under the profusion of wires on the central control panel where there used to be a parabolic interface, and rests his head against an organic curve of metal. He closes eyes that are blackened as much by fatigue bruising as they are by the dim lighting and sighs. One hand trembles through a descriptive gesture that ends with a patting caress to the transparent gloss of the floor.
She sings to him until he smiles and whispers, “Goodbye, sweetie,” and then does nothing else at all.
*****
...I mentioned that I love crossovers, right? Uh. That's the only excuse for this, which is Thursday Next (immediately post First Among Sequels) except for how I tripped and spilled Torchwood (post S1) all over it. This...has a lot more to it than is here, and I actually remember the plot for this one. Sort of.
A Crossover Too Far
Chapter One - With a Twist of Lemon
As well as patrolling the temporal continuum and seeing that everything happens/happened/will happen at the correct time- despite the many and varied interferences of assorted revisionist style organisations- the officers of SpecOps-12 also have a certain responsibility to see that everything also happens/happened/will happen in the correct place; a word which refers only partly to mere geography.
Millon de Floss, Secrets of the ChronoGuard.
I gratefully gulped down the glass of water that the Cat had seen fit to provide for me as soon as it became apparent that my graceless exit from the soon-to-be-defunct The Eyre Affair had left me dangerously dehydrated.
“Thanks, Cat,” I gasped as I used one of the dark wood reading tables of the Great Library to prop myself upright.
“Not at all,” the Cat replied, for once lacking his usual attitude of sunny irrelevance. “I’m just glad that JurisTech managed to lift the textual sieve long enough for you to use your Eject-O-Hat.” He gave me an uncertain look. “Do you need any more water?”
I shook my head and set the empty glass down next to the equally empty pitcher on the table I was leaning against. “I should be fine now, just a little shaken. Have you got any idea who authorised the textual sieve?”
“Kippers.”
“I’m sorry?”
“They always make me feel better,” the Cat clarified with a sigh. “The sieve is entirely anonymous and there have been no sieving orders from the C of G or Text Grand Central. It’s most maddening. Commander Bradshaw is leading the investigation and I think he’s pulling in the JurisFiction Agents from Espionage/Thriller to help.”
“Well, that’s reassuring,” I said as I finally stood upright, with only a slight wobble. “I shall take the kippers under advisement.”
“Oh, no: most definitely under butter and a twist of lemon,” the Cat said with a decisive nod. He began to vanish slowly, starting with his tail and ending with his smile, which seemed rather more half-hearted than usual but which nevertheless hung in the warm, still air of the Library for some time.
Despite my reassurances to the Cheshire Cat, I took my time in walking slowly along the shelves until I reached the elevator, which I took down to ‘A’. Another slow and careful walking along the shelves brought me to ‘Austen’, and I steadied myself for a moment before plucking the nearest copy of Sense & Sensibility from the shelf and reading myself into Norland Park, halfway through chapter five.
“Thursday, my girl!” Bradshaw boomed, as I walked into the ballroom of Norland Park- long ignored in the book and now the official hub for JurisFiction, the BookWorld police force that I belonged to- and took to my seat in a way not all that different from Pickwick taking to her bed of an evening.
“Hello, Commander. Found out anything about the Eyre Affair sieve?” I asked wearily.
“’Fraid not, Thursday,” Bradshaw said apologetically. “I’ve got James Bond and Miss Marple on the case. They should ferret up something within short order. Well: after Bond has finished a poker game for suicidal stakes and Miss Marple gets to the bottom of the poisoned jam incident, that is. But they should definitely be on it within five pages, seven and a paragraph at the most.”
The ball room was filled with that sudden crunched-paper sound of a large-volume bookjumping and the space in between Zhark and Miss Tiggywinkle’s desks was abruptly filled by the aforementioned JurisFiction agents and a disconsolate looking troll.
“I jus’ don’t understand,” the troll was saying- at least, I think that’s what it was saying: it was possessed of a pitted and grimy set of yellowing tusks that arched up from its lower jaw and curved together to almost touch each other in front of its cauliflower-shaped nose, that mangled its speech horribly- “I says to them- says to them that it’s my bridge. I put a sign up and everyfing.”
“The fact remains that you’re from a Stories for Sleepy Times anthology,” Miss Tiggywinkle chided. “You know that Sleepy Times have a very strict violence/gore quota and almost all of that is used up by Jack and the Beanstalk Giant. You can’t just go around threatening to eat people up without having the appropriate internal plot adjustment approved.”
The troll sighed gustily, sending a wave of foul smelling breath in our direction. “I dint fink it’d matter,” he muttered. “Youse never’d noticed if those stupid goats hadn’t ratted on me.”
“JurisFiction always notices,” intoned Emperor Zhark, bringing a momentarily chill into the hearts of all that heard him. “Ah, hello Thursday. Didn’t expect to see you back here so soon.”
I smiled somewhat wanly. “I wasn’t entirely expected to be back, Emperor,” I said as I pulled out my battered TravelBook and turned to the page marked ‘Home’.
“I say, old girl. Are you sure you’re up for a transfictional jump so soon?” Bradshaw asked with some concern.
“I’ll be fine, Commander,” I reassured him. “I just need to check on Land and the kids and sleep.”
“Well, if you’re sure,” Bradshaw said over the continuing argument- punctuated by assorted flatulent sounds- from the troll.
“I’m sure,” I said as I took a deep breath and read myself out.
I stumbled as I materialised in my kitchen, and quickly made my way to the fridge, out of which I scooped a mostly full carton of orange juice which I gulped down without bothering with a glass.
“Aww, Mum.”
I turned at the protest and found myself looking at the black-clad and tangle-headed apparition that was my eldest, Friday.
“You always shout at me for drinking out of the carton,” Friday protested, sweeping the greasy curtain of hair that obscured his face aside long enough to give me a mournful look.
Despite all appearances to the contrary, Friday wasn’t a complete layabout of a sixteen year old- well, he was, but it was also an undercover pose as Friday is, was and will ever be one of the most gifted Chrononauts to exist. Along with his now-impossible elder self, he’d thwarted the chronupt upper echelons of the ChronoGuard, brought about the downfall of the Goliath Corporation, and restored a long-term view to a suffering world. We had Friday to thank for the cancellation of Samaritan Kidney Swap and Granny Death Race 3000 and the renewed ability of people to read.
I lowered myself into one of the kitchen chairs and sighed. “Darling, you tried to drink the orange juice when you had a stinking head cold. Your father and I were bedridden for two days and Tuesday and Jenny nearly burnt the house down trying to make lasagne.”
Friday gave a long suffering sigh and I got the distinct impression that he was rolling his eyes. “Dad said to tell you that he’s taken Tuesday and Jenny swimming,” he said. “I’m going around Colin’s house and some bloke phoned for you.”
“Who phoned?”
Friday lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “I dunno. Dad wrote a message down for you. I’ll be back for tea.” With that, my only son slouched out of the kitchen. Moments later, the front door banged and I was left alone in the house.
I finished the rest of the orange juice before I decided to test my legs and make my way to the phone in the hallway. As promised, Landen had scribbled a note for me and left it on the dresser next to the phone. It was just a pity that I would need a top-level cryptographer to crack it. Landen has many qualities- not least of which are agreeing to be my husband, and a mean way with a macaroni cheese- but penmanship is not one of them.
A few years ago, a case in the Well led me into the handwritten section and I accidentally ended up in one of Landen’s old hand-written book proposals. I won’t go into details here (mainly because I’m not sure I could describe them, even now) but will merely state that it was a happy day for family and generics alike when Landen first took to his typewriter.
I sighed, crumpled the note up and pushed it into my left jeans pocket, picked up the wireless phone handset and dialled 1471. I tucked the phone under my chin and began to wander to the living room as the ringing tone echoed in my ear for four cycles.
“Braxton-Hicks.”
“Oh, hello, sir,” I said. “It’s Thursday Next here, returning your call…?”
“Ah, Thursday! Glad you got my message. I imagine Landen’s filled you in on my message, so I’d like your opinion. Can you make it down here in, say, thirty minutes?”
I blinked and stopped in the living room doorway- aware in an abstract fashion that Pickwick was happily snoring from the middle of a pile of cushions she had made under the coffee table- utterly confused by what my old SpecOps section commander was talking about.
“I’m afraid Landen didn’t give me any message beyond your phone number, sir.”
“Oh, I see. Well, we’ve had a bit of an… incident happen down here. A couple of my boys picked up some old looking persons out near Cirencester last night. Very peculiar looking pair of men who apparently appeared out of nowhere, along with their car. Landed right on top of the largest display of the Garden Gnome Museum, caused a lot of damage.”
I found myself nodding along, before I remembered that Braxton-Hicks couldn’t see me. “Well, that sounds terrible, sir, but I’m not entirely sure what I can do to help.”
“That’s not the half of it, Thursday. Turns out that the CEA were using the Garden Gnome Museum as the centre of operations for their current sting operation against the Stiltonista. A buy of a half-hundredweight of super-smelly Brie was going down when these men landed on top of it. My lads waded in there and mopped everything up, but I now have the CEA barking at my door about me sheltering Welsh cheeserunners and, well, I’ll be honest with you: these two men look like something right up yours and Spike’s alley.”
“Oh?”
“Mmm, a car Spike would love filled with funny gadgets, and a penchant for billowing greatcoats. I know you keep tabs on all the local ex-SpecOps operatives, so I wanted you to come down here and tell me where they used to belong. Neither of them is giving me anything to go on.”
I sighed and rubbed my face with one hand. I wanted nothing more than a cup of tea and a long sleep, but it seemed as if both of these things were going to be in short supply for some time. Raising my voice slightly, to be heard over the wurble-pflort sounds coming from under the coffee table, I reassured Braxton-Hicks.
“I can be there in half an hour, sir.”
“Good, I’ll-” his voice cut off mid-sentence and everything from the phone became muffled, as if there was something covering the receiver at Braxton-Hicks’ end. The Swindon Chief of Police came back on the line after a moment. “I’ll let the front desk know that you’ll be coming, but they may be snowed under, five of the boys have just arrested a troupe of illegal Shakespearean street players picketing the Cathedral.”
Braxton-Hicks hung up and I thoughtfully returned the phone handset to the cradle in the hallway. His phone call had been entirely mystifying from start to finish, and I found myself wondering if it had anything to do with the assassination attempts in the BookWorld.
*****
And, finally, kicking it old school with some Due South. This is what follows on from An Ocean of Sky (which some people seem to have been reading recently), and I should probably actually do something with it, because I roughly know where this one goes, too.
The Same Deep Waters
The sky is a deep, deep blue the day that Ray leaves. After breakfast (hasty), the drive out to the air field (uncomfortable and jouncing) and the goodbyes (awkward) Fraser finds himself squinting at the sky for a indeterminate amount of time, until he can no longer pretend that the faint scribble of cloud just about the horizon is a Cessna. He drops his gaze back to ground level and blinks rapidly, his vision filled with grey shadow-spots that seem to dance and wink across the snow.
From the vicinity of Fraser’s right knee, Diefenbaker gives his unadorned opinion, followed by a yawn.
“Yes, well, it’s not like this is a fairy tale,” Fraser says harshly. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the airfield’s duty mechanic giving him a suspicious look. Aware that he’s now got to make a living among these people, Fraser makes the effort to straighten his posture, smile in a noncommittal fashion and leave with as much dignity as he can muster.
After a moment just long enough to make his feelings on the matter utterly clear, Dief trails him.
Also on DreamWidth, comment where you will!
In the process of aforementioned folder rootling I have found a bunch of incomplete fic that's actually not bad. Unfortunately, I also have no idea where I was planning on going with most of said fic, le sigh. So I figured instead that I'd chuck some bits and pieces up here for you guys to poke. :D?
This one was somewhat helpfully titled "Wendy Watson Five Universes" except that I only apparently got one and a half universes into before getting distracted. I think that the only other pertinent information that you need is that I adore crossovers?
An uncertain location (except for the presence of a dead fish. That is about as certain as it is possible to get, plus some extra certainty to drive the point home).
An uncertain time.
On the plus side, Wendy's nose appeared to have shut down in self defence about three minutes ago. On the down side, one of the primary reasons that her sense of smell had run away screaming was currently giving Wendy both the literal and the metaphorical fish-eye.
Dragging her attention away from the dead fish (after some judicious poking with one foot just to make sure that it wasn't going to turn out to be either 1) able to fly, or, 2) a zombie), Wendy concentrated on working at opening the mould covered wooden door that seemed to be the only way out of the room. Quite how she'd ended up in the room was something that Wendy hadn't entirely worked out, but waking up in strange places was getting to be something of a standard work-induced event. At least this time there were no rabbits or snare drums.
In the end, the hinges and the door frame gave way simultaneously, and Wendy found herself stumbling out into daylight that seemed very bright after the dankness of the-Wendy looked over her shoulder-decrepit looking wooden hut. The second thing that Wendy noticed was the wind. It was brisk, and Wendy's sense of smell turned up long enough to cautiously admit to there being the salt-tang of the coast. Squinting around confirmed this. The hut she was walking away from, boots crunching and slipping slightly on shingle, was crouched above the high tide mark of a beach. Where the beach was (besides sandwiched between grey sea and grim cliffs), now that was something more complicated to figure out.
Wendy's Middlewatch not only had a scratched face, it was resolutely dark, no matter how hard she shook it. “Hey, Boss-man?” Nothing.
There were any number of things that Wendy could have said, but she elected to save her breath and continue putting bracing sea air between herself and the certainty of dead fish. After a minute of determined crunching, Wendy realised that her eyes weren't deceiving her: the sprawl of muted colour she could see ahead of her was some kind of town. Towns meant people; people meant phones; phones meant abuse from Ida; Ida eventually meant using the HEYDAR to find out just where Wendy was. Good plan.
Wendy continued forwards, attention turned mostly inwards as she tried to improve on the plan by minimising the Ida part of the equation. She was concentrating so hard on that, in fact, that she dismissed the large shadow and the increased buffeting of wind as weather, merely hunching her shoulders and concentrating on where she was putting her feet.
Until the weather said “Hello.”
Wendy blinked and looked up. And up. And some more.
“Hello,” the dragon (big, black, reptilian) repeated politely. “I do hope that that uniform is only for Longwing Captains, I do not think that Laurence would look well in it at all.” The dragon sat down, making the pebbles of the beach judder and curved its neck around so that its head was closer to Wendy. “I also cannot see how it would be practical for flying. You would be half frozen in no time, and then how would you be able to move around the harness safely?”
“Um,” Wendy managed, this being the first time she'd met any kind of dragon, let alone one the size of a house that sounded like it had stepped out of the pages of Austen.
“Has your dragon seen it yet?” the dragon inquired, oblivious to Wendy gaping at it. “Because not only would you be very cold, you would have nearly no protection from even your own dragon's vitriol. I think that the Corps commanders can be very strange about the oddest things.”
What is strange, Wendy wanted to say, is that you're a giant flying lizard. And what is odd, she would have liked to add, is that you're a giant flying lizard who is talking to me.
“Um.”
“You cannot be based at Dover; Laurence would surely have mentioned meeting you, and I do not like to think what Captain Harcourt will say if that is the new uniform.”
“Dover?”
A clawed foot larger than, oh, Wendy's entire body whistled over her head as the dragon gestured. “Along the coast that way. Laurence said that I could go and have a swim while he is meeting with the Admiralty. Lily is supposed to be rejoining the formation today. Are you with the Folkestone covert?”
“No,” Wendy said. “I'm not with the, uh, Folkestone covert. And I don't have a dragon.”
The dragon blinked with what was clearly surprise and shuffled so that it could look at her even more closely. “Then you are wearing very strange clothes indeed,” it said, before helpfully adding, “you also smell of fish.”
“Thanks, I already knew that.” Wendy stared up at the dragon. It was actually kind of, well, awesome to look at, now that she'd gotten over feeling like a mouse staring up at a hawk. “Uh, hi. I'm Wendy.”
“Oh, how rude of me.” An expression and tone of voice that could only mean embarrassment. “I am Temeraire.”
Wendy ventured a close-mouthed smile (okay, so the no-teeth thing was for chimps, but maybe it worked for dragons, too?) and tried to think of something to say that wasn't along the lines of so, you're a dragon.
“Wendy.” Temeraire shifted backwards. “Why are you glowing?”
Wendy held up her right hand. It was glowing like a cheap special effect, circa 1975. “I'm not entirely-“
Whiteness.
Adjacent to shelves labelled 'Cap-Cas', a long room composed mainly of dark wood and green carpeting.
Teatime.
Wendy kept one hand outstretched, convinced that she was going to run face first into some kind of optical illusion at any moment, because there was absolutely no way that any room could be this long. Naturally, in complete defiance of both Wendy's expectations and plain common sense, the room resolutely continued to be long enough to contain a vanishing point. Wendy squinted. And possibly its own weather in the form of distant fog.
The possibility of interior weather being something of a distraction, Wendy nearly trod on the upside down teapot that was erratically moving across the carpet, only managing to stop herself at the last moment. It was white china, with a blue oriental pattern, and it seemed to be panting.
After a moment of careful consideration-and then thinking what the hell-Wendy picked the teapot up. There was nothing on the carpet.
“Oi!”
There was, however, a mouse in a bow tie glaring at her from the teapot.
Today was apparently going to be the work day during which she met all the talking animals.
“D'you mind?” the mouse continued. “If I'm late to the tea party then Hatter and the March Hare will start arguing about who gets to pour again, and the last time that happened we ended up with grammasites hanging off everyone's participles and a class four fiction infarction.”
“Sorry?” Wendy offered uncertainly.
“Sorry doesn't get me to the party,” the mouse said. “If you're going to go around picking up people's crockery, you may as well make yourself useful while doing so. Continue down towards the Cars, please.”
The mouse pointed imperiously and, for want of anything else to do (or anything that made any kind of sense at all), Wendy followed its directions.
“You'll be looking for the first edition of Through the Looking Glass.” The mouse sniffed. “I don't suppose you have any cream buns handy?”
“Baked goods aren't really the forte of a Middleman.” Although there had been that one case with the cursed wedding cake.
“Political thrillers aren't really my thing,” the mouse said. “Give me The Complete History of Cheese any day.”
“You know that you're subject to a thirty yard restraining order with respect to all things fromage.” a new voice, that had a certain rumbly underscore to the words, and no apparent owner.
Given that she was currently looking for Alice's Adventures Through the Looking Glass with a mouse in a teapot, Wendy couldn't really be surprised when a patch of previously unoccupied bookshelf near her head developed an acute case of stripy cat.
“Let me guess, you're called Cheshire?”
The cat beamed. “How simply marvellous, a fan.”
The teapot in Wendy's hands sniggered and said something about Warrington, which she decided to ignore as it made the cat's ears flatten and its very green eyes flash. Lacking a lid, Wendy clapped her hand over the open top of the teapot and pasted on a smile.
“Hello! I'm Wendy, and I have no idea what's happening to me today, but I appear to be hallucinating mythological creatures with an Austen fixation and now children's fantasy stories.”
“How exciting,” the cat said. “The orientation session for potential Jurisfiction agents is after the third paragraph of chapter five of Sense and Sensibility.”
Apparently the children's fantasies also had an Austen fixation. Wendy hadn't been aware that her subconscious mind was any kind of literary snob.
*****
This is, uh, kinda complete in a way, and is Doctor Who and narrated from the perspective of...well, you'll see, and works off my personal headcanon that...well, you'll see that, too.
The Story From the Other Direction
As endings go, this one is quiet. No stars explode, nor galaxies crumble. There are no perversions of time, nor creeping of shadows in the corner of the eye (not that she has eyes as such things are usually classified), nor shrieking horrors that do not realise that they are manufacturing their own downfall.
It is simply the day (although where she is currently floating, there are not the planetary systems that require the regular division of time) at the end of all the days, when he he looks at nothing in particular and says; “I feel tired.”
She watches as he sits, curled up under the profusion of wires on the central control panel where there used to be a parabolic interface, and rests his head against an organic curve of metal. He closes eyes that are blackened as much by fatigue bruising as they are by the dim lighting and sighs. One hand trembles through a descriptive gesture that ends with a patting caress to the transparent gloss of the floor.
She sings to him until he smiles and whispers, “Goodbye, sweetie,” and then does nothing else at all.
*****
...I mentioned that I love crossovers, right? Uh. That's the only excuse for this, which is Thursday Next (immediately post First Among Sequels) except for how I tripped and spilled Torchwood (post S1) all over it. This...has a lot more to it than is here, and I actually remember the plot for this one. Sort of.
A Crossover Too Far
Chapter One - With a Twist of Lemon
As well as patrolling the temporal continuum and seeing that everything happens/happened/will happen at the correct time- despite the many and varied interferences of assorted revisionist style organisations- the officers of SpecOps-12 also have a certain responsibility to see that everything also happens/happened/will happen in the correct place; a word which refers only partly to mere geography.
Millon de Floss, Secrets of the ChronoGuard.
I gratefully gulped down the glass of water that the Cat had seen fit to provide for me as soon as it became apparent that my graceless exit from the soon-to-be-defunct The Eyre Affair had left me dangerously dehydrated.
“Thanks, Cat,” I gasped as I used one of the dark wood reading tables of the Great Library to prop myself upright.
“Not at all,” the Cat replied, for once lacking his usual attitude of sunny irrelevance. “I’m just glad that JurisTech managed to lift the textual sieve long enough for you to use your Eject-O-Hat.” He gave me an uncertain look. “Do you need any more water?”
I shook my head and set the empty glass down next to the equally empty pitcher on the table I was leaning against. “I should be fine now, just a little shaken. Have you got any idea who authorised the textual sieve?”
“Kippers.”
“I’m sorry?”
“They always make me feel better,” the Cat clarified with a sigh. “The sieve is entirely anonymous and there have been no sieving orders from the C of G or Text Grand Central. It’s most maddening. Commander Bradshaw is leading the investigation and I think he’s pulling in the JurisFiction Agents from Espionage/Thriller to help.”
“Well, that’s reassuring,” I said as I finally stood upright, with only a slight wobble. “I shall take the kippers under advisement.”
“Oh, no: most definitely under butter and a twist of lemon,” the Cat said with a decisive nod. He began to vanish slowly, starting with his tail and ending with his smile, which seemed rather more half-hearted than usual but which nevertheless hung in the warm, still air of the Library for some time.
Despite my reassurances to the Cheshire Cat, I took my time in walking slowly along the shelves until I reached the elevator, which I took down to ‘A’. Another slow and careful walking along the shelves brought me to ‘Austen’, and I steadied myself for a moment before plucking the nearest copy of Sense & Sensibility from the shelf and reading myself into Norland Park, halfway through chapter five.
“Thursday, my girl!” Bradshaw boomed, as I walked into the ballroom of Norland Park- long ignored in the book and now the official hub for JurisFiction, the BookWorld police force that I belonged to- and took to my seat in a way not all that different from Pickwick taking to her bed of an evening.
“Hello, Commander. Found out anything about the Eyre Affair sieve?” I asked wearily.
“’Fraid not, Thursday,” Bradshaw said apologetically. “I’ve got James Bond and Miss Marple on the case. They should ferret up something within short order. Well: after Bond has finished a poker game for suicidal stakes and Miss Marple gets to the bottom of the poisoned jam incident, that is. But they should definitely be on it within five pages, seven and a paragraph at the most.”
The ball room was filled with that sudden crunched-paper sound of a large-volume bookjumping and the space in between Zhark and Miss Tiggywinkle’s desks was abruptly filled by the aforementioned JurisFiction agents and a disconsolate looking troll.
“I jus’ don’t understand,” the troll was saying- at least, I think that’s what it was saying: it was possessed of a pitted and grimy set of yellowing tusks that arched up from its lower jaw and curved together to almost touch each other in front of its cauliflower-shaped nose, that mangled its speech horribly- “I says to them- says to them that it’s my bridge. I put a sign up and everyfing.”
“The fact remains that you’re from a Stories for Sleepy Times anthology,” Miss Tiggywinkle chided. “You know that Sleepy Times have a very strict violence/gore quota and almost all of that is used up by Jack and the Beanstalk Giant. You can’t just go around threatening to eat people up without having the appropriate internal plot adjustment approved.”
The troll sighed gustily, sending a wave of foul smelling breath in our direction. “I dint fink it’d matter,” he muttered. “Youse never’d noticed if those stupid goats hadn’t ratted on me.”
“JurisFiction always notices,” intoned Emperor Zhark, bringing a momentarily chill into the hearts of all that heard him. “Ah, hello Thursday. Didn’t expect to see you back here so soon.”
I smiled somewhat wanly. “I wasn’t entirely expected to be back, Emperor,” I said as I pulled out my battered TravelBook and turned to the page marked ‘Home’.
“I say, old girl. Are you sure you’re up for a transfictional jump so soon?” Bradshaw asked with some concern.
“I’ll be fine, Commander,” I reassured him. “I just need to check on Land and the kids and sleep.”
“Well, if you’re sure,” Bradshaw said over the continuing argument- punctuated by assorted flatulent sounds- from the troll.
“I’m sure,” I said as I took a deep breath and read myself out.
I stumbled as I materialised in my kitchen, and quickly made my way to the fridge, out of which I scooped a mostly full carton of orange juice which I gulped down without bothering with a glass.
“Aww, Mum.”
I turned at the protest and found myself looking at the black-clad and tangle-headed apparition that was my eldest, Friday.
“You always shout at me for drinking out of the carton,” Friday protested, sweeping the greasy curtain of hair that obscured his face aside long enough to give me a mournful look.
Despite all appearances to the contrary, Friday wasn’t a complete layabout of a sixteen year old- well, he was, but it was also an undercover pose as Friday is, was and will ever be one of the most gifted Chrononauts to exist. Along with his now-impossible elder self, he’d thwarted the chronupt upper echelons of the ChronoGuard, brought about the downfall of the Goliath Corporation, and restored a long-term view to a suffering world. We had Friday to thank for the cancellation of Samaritan Kidney Swap and Granny Death Race 3000 and the renewed ability of people to read.
I lowered myself into one of the kitchen chairs and sighed. “Darling, you tried to drink the orange juice when you had a stinking head cold. Your father and I were bedridden for two days and Tuesday and Jenny nearly burnt the house down trying to make lasagne.”
Friday gave a long suffering sigh and I got the distinct impression that he was rolling his eyes. “Dad said to tell you that he’s taken Tuesday and Jenny swimming,” he said. “I’m going around Colin’s house and some bloke phoned for you.”
“Who phoned?”
Friday lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “I dunno. Dad wrote a message down for you. I’ll be back for tea.” With that, my only son slouched out of the kitchen. Moments later, the front door banged and I was left alone in the house.
I finished the rest of the orange juice before I decided to test my legs and make my way to the phone in the hallway. As promised, Landen had scribbled a note for me and left it on the dresser next to the phone. It was just a pity that I would need a top-level cryptographer to crack it. Landen has many qualities- not least of which are agreeing to be my husband, and a mean way with a macaroni cheese- but penmanship is not one of them.
A few years ago, a case in the Well led me into the handwritten section and I accidentally ended up in one of Landen’s old hand-written book proposals. I won’t go into details here (mainly because I’m not sure I could describe them, even now) but will merely state that it was a happy day for family and generics alike when Landen first took to his typewriter.
I sighed, crumpled the note up and pushed it into my left jeans pocket, picked up the wireless phone handset and dialled 1471. I tucked the phone under my chin and began to wander to the living room as the ringing tone echoed in my ear for four cycles.
“Braxton-Hicks.”
“Oh, hello, sir,” I said. “It’s Thursday Next here, returning your call…?”
“Ah, Thursday! Glad you got my message. I imagine Landen’s filled you in on my message, so I’d like your opinion. Can you make it down here in, say, thirty minutes?”
I blinked and stopped in the living room doorway- aware in an abstract fashion that Pickwick was happily snoring from the middle of a pile of cushions she had made under the coffee table- utterly confused by what my old SpecOps section commander was talking about.
“I’m afraid Landen didn’t give me any message beyond your phone number, sir.”
“Oh, I see. Well, we’ve had a bit of an… incident happen down here. A couple of my boys picked up some old looking persons out near Cirencester last night. Very peculiar looking pair of men who apparently appeared out of nowhere, along with their car. Landed right on top of the largest display of the Garden Gnome Museum, caused a lot of damage.”
I found myself nodding along, before I remembered that Braxton-Hicks couldn’t see me. “Well, that sounds terrible, sir, but I’m not entirely sure what I can do to help.”
“That’s not the half of it, Thursday. Turns out that the CEA were using the Garden Gnome Museum as the centre of operations for their current sting operation against the Stiltonista. A buy of a half-hundredweight of super-smelly Brie was going down when these men landed on top of it. My lads waded in there and mopped everything up, but I now have the CEA barking at my door about me sheltering Welsh cheeserunners and, well, I’ll be honest with you: these two men look like something right up yours and Spike’s alley.”
“Oh?”
“Mmm, a car Spike would love filled with funny gadgets, and a penchant for billowing greatcoats. I know you keep tabs on all the local ex-SpecOps operatives, so I wanted you to come down here and tell me where they used to belong. Neither of them is giving me anything to go on.”
I sighed and rubbed my face with one hand. I wanted nothing more than a cup of tea and a long sleep, but it seemed as if both of these things were going to be in short supply for some time. Raising my voice slightly, to be heard over the wurble-pflort sounds coming from under the coffee table, I reassured Braxton-Hicks.
“I can be there in half an hour, sir.”
“Good, I’ll-” his voice cut off mid-sentence and everything from the phone became muffled, as if there was something covering the receiver at Braxton-Hicks’ end. The Swindon Chief of Police came back on the line after a moment. “I’ll let the front desk know that you’ll be coming, but they may be snowed under, five of the boys have just arrested a troupe of illegal Shakespearean street players picketing the Cathedral.”
Braxton-Hicks hung up and I thoughtfully returned the phone handset to the cradle in the hallway. His phone call had been entirely mystifying from start to finish, and I found myself wondering if it had anything to do with the assassination attempts in the BookWorld.
*****
And, finally, kicking it old school with some Due South. This is what follows on from An Ocean of Sky (which some people seem to have been reading recently), and I should probably actually do something with it, because I roughly know where this one goes, too.
The Same Deep Waters
The sky is a deep, deep blue the day that Ray leaves. After breakfast (hasty), the drive out to the air field (uncomfortable and jouncing) and the goodbyes (awkward) Fraser finds himself squinting at the sky for a indeterminate amount of time, until he can no longer pretend that the faint scribble of cloud just about the horizon is a Cessna. He drops his gaze back to ground level and blinks rapidly, his vision filled with grey shadow-spots that seem to dance and wink across the snow.
From the vicinity of Fraser’s right knee, Diefenbaker gives his unadorned opinion, followed by a yawn.
“Yes, well, it’s not like this is a fairy tale,” Fraser says harshly. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the airfield’s duty mechanic giving him a suspicious look. Aware that he’s now got to make a living among these people, Fraser makes the effort to straighten his posture, smile in a noncommittal fashion and leave with as much dignity as he can muster.
After a moment just long enough to make his feelings on the matter utterly clear, Dief trails him.
Also on DreamWidth, comment where you will!