New Fic: Almost a Paradise, part 1 of 4
Title: Almost a Paradise; part one: Clouded Vision
Characters: Nine/Rose (established pairing), Jack.
Word Count: 2000 words, or thereabouts. (this part)
Rating: M, for a bit of smut.
Summary: The Doctor decides to show his two companions one of his favourite places: the Eye of Orion. However…
Author's Notes: Written for misscam’s Easter fic exchange, for ponygirl72. I am extremely late, and hereby grovel for forgiveness. This turned into rather an epic, so there will also be three more parts to come. I won’t say yet what ponygirl72's request was, because it would give away a couple of things. And because I like to be efficient, this is also for the 50lyricsfanfic challenge. My lyrics table is here.
Re: Technobabble. I’m not a scientist, but I am a perfectionist, so I’ve angsted over trying to get my technobabble to make both logical and canon sense. I’ve concluded this is actually impossible, since canon technobabble doesn’t actually make logical sense most of the time, so I fudged it. Sorry. It hurts me more than it hurts you, believe me.
And finally, credit to misscam for looking this over for me, and for being my Official Name Inventor.
Prompt:
Here comes the rain again, falling from the stars;
Drenched in my pain again, becoming who we are.
(“When September Ends” - Green Day)
~ * ~
The Eye of Orion is very old. Older than the Earth, definitely. Once it was the home of a thriving civilisation, but now it exists in perpetual silence.
There are no sentient species. There is no wildlife. Only plant life remains, and like the Earth, some parts are barren and others are lush and verdant.
Some call it a paradise.
~ * ~
He hadn’t intended to visit again; in this life he didn’t seem to enjoy places of simple beauty. He wondered if that would change when he regenerated, or whether the loss of Gallifrey had murdered his inner child for good.
Rose would love it, though. He had come here for Rose, just as he had once come here for Tegan. And once for Susan, once for Sarah Jane, and several other companions along the way. At least once in each body, though he’d somehow managed to miss it last time, despite always intending to show it to Charley.
Jamie had said it reminded him of the highlands of his home. Jo had been enchanted, and a long while after she left he would have done anything to see that particular smile again. Peri had explored with gusto, and Ace had stuffed a canister of nitro-9 in her pocket on the way out of the TARDIS, claiming no planet this quiet could possibly be safe.
He sensed Rose walking up behind him a few seconds before he felt the weight of her head on his shoulder. “It really is beautiful,” she murmured.
The TARDIS doors clattered shut behind them. “Aww, aren’t you guys sweet?” Jack commented, grinning at them. “Now get a room.”
The Doctor opened his mouth to retort, but Rose beat him to it. “Ignore him,” she said, poking out her tongue.
Jack, however, had spotted the ruins a few hundred metres away. “That used to be some sort of structure,” he observed, pointing them out to the Doctor. “I thought you said this planet was uninhabited?”
The Doctor took a step away from Rose, his hand sliding down of its own accord to grasp hers. “Oh it is,” he explained. “Now.”
“What happened to the people who built that, then?” Rose asked.
“They all died out, about two and a half thousand years ago. Polluted their atmosphere so much that they couldn’t survive in it,” the Doctor explained.
“They keep saying we’ll do that on Earth if we’re not careful.”
“We almost did,” Jack piped up. “Luckily, we figured out what we were doing in time and managed to reverse the damage.”
“Who says it was you lot did it?” the Doctor asked.
“What, you stopped global warming?”
“I might’ve done. A few words in a few government ears, maybe a hypnotic suggestion or two-“
“Yeah, right,” Rose interrupted him. “You’re full of it.”
The Doctor managed to look almost hurt. “I am not!”
Jack laughed. “Well, I don’t know about you two, but I’d like have a closer look at those ruins.”
The Doctor looked to Rose, eyebrows raised in a question. She bit her lip and shrugged, so he answered for both of them. “You go on; we’ll join you a bit later.”
The smirk on Jack’s face told them exactly what he thought they’d be doing while he explored, but his only reply was a wink.
“Insufferable cheek,” the Doctor groused when Jack was out of earshot. “Making assumptions like that.”
“Even if they’re right?” Rose asked, a little too innocently.
“Especially if they’re right.”
~ * ~
Ten minutes later, Rose lay on the grass with her head on the Doctor’s shoulder. “This planet has some lovely clouds,” she murmured. “When I was a kid, Mum used to take me out for picnics and she’d point out shapes in the clouds. Sometimes she told me it was my Dad making the shapes for us to show he was watching.”
“What shapes do you see, Rose Tyler?” the Doctor’s voice rumbled in her ear.
Both were silent for several minutes. “I can’t see anything,” she said. “Just clouds. What about you?”
He saw Daleks. Hundreds of them, thousands of them swarming through the sky of his memories. “Nothing,” he lied.
Rose knew him well enough to pick up the slight catch in his voice, and she hoisted herself up on her elbows to see his face.
He kept his eyes fixed on the sky for a few more moments, waiting for her to pick up his silent warning of Do Not Ask. When he saw her bite her lip out of the corner of his eye, he shifted his gaze to her face.
She didn’t ask, and he was grateful.
The Doctor allowed his hand to snake across her hip suggestively, and Rose smirked. “Won’t we be doing exactly what Jack expects?”
“Don’t mention Jack when I’m flirting with you Rose.”
She laughed. “Sorry.”
He rolled onto his side to face her. “Do you think Jack expects this?” he asked and kissed her gently, his lips just faintly touching hers.
Leave it to the Doctor to find them a completely beautiful but completely uninhabited planet to frolic on without worrying about embarrassing explanations to aliens who’d found them frolicking in their sacred cave. It was just lucky for them they had Jack to save them from being ritually sacrificed to Laans in appeasement. Another hour and he would’ve been too late.
“Yes,” she breathed.
“Yes he expects it, or yes you like it?”
“Shut up about Jack,” she complained, slapping his shoulder lightly.
He chuckled, and pulled her down to him. “Your wish is my command.”
~ * ~
Deep underground, an almost forgotten surveillance system flashed a message.
Energy source detected.
Braks Kongen was awoken from his light snooze by the buzzing of his console. He assumed the power shortages had caused a malfunction-nothing ever happened in surface surveillance. The Eye rarely received alien visitors.
Sighing, he rummaged in his toolkit for a resonance spanner, but the nature of the alert caught his eye. An energy source? Still probably an error, but one that needed reporting. He patched in to his superior.
“This is Monitor Braks to Supervisor Knegg,” he began.
“Receiving you, Braks. What have you found?”
“Probably nothing, but the system has picked up a possible energy source on the surface.”
There was silence for a moment on the other end of the line. “Artron energy?”
“Yes, Supervisor. Shall I send out a scoutbot?”
“Do so. Patch in when you have more information.”
“Yes, Supervisor.”
~ * ~
Sometimes, Rose thought, the Doctor was extremely single minded. It just wasn’t usually sex on his mind. Right now, however, his intentions were quite clear.
Rose certainly wasn’t complaining.
In fact, when he kissed her there and touched her there, she found it very difficult to even think about complaining.
The Doctor, for his part, was very engrossed in what he was doing. Rose was so young and vibrant and alive, and her smile chased a thousand demons away. Almost.
The grass beneath his back was soft and cool as she moved over him, bending to kiss his eyelids, then the tip of his nose, then his mouth. She threw her head back and laughed joyously as she came, until he rolled atop her and held her gaze.
Her laugh faded at the look on his face. He always looked so serious at the moment of release, and it made her shiver. Breathless, he kissed her one more time, and his eyes fluttered closed. The whisper of her name was a plea for forgiveness.
~ * ~
Brax watched the scene on the surface with interest. The scoutbot confirmed that the energy detected was generated by the male himself.
He patched in to Knegg again.
~ * ~
It was silly, she knew, but suddenly she felt exposed, even though the only other person on the planet was Jack, and he knew quite well when to make himself scarce. She pulled her clothes back on, and it made her feel somewhat better.
The Doctor shook his head at her, but he dressed himself too, and lay back to watch the clouds drifting past. Just clouds now. Rose settled her head back on his shoulder and closed her eyes.
She felt him kiss the top of her head lightly as she drifted off to sleep.
~ * ~
“Supervisor, I have confirmed the energy source. It is a Time Lord,” Brax reported.
“A Time Lord? Secure him at once, Brax. This is just what we need.”
“Understood. Activating transmaterialisation sequence now.”
~ * ~
“Well, this place is definitely quiet, but I wouldn’t have thought it was boring enough to put you to sleep.”
Rose felt a hand on her shoulder and recognised Jack’s voice. She blinked a few times, trying to remember where she was and what he’d just said.
“You all right?” he asked, as she squinted at him.
Rose sat up and stretched. “Yeah. Yeah’m fine.” She looked around. “Where’s the Doctor?”
“I was just going to ask you that.”
Rose frowned. “He must have gone to look at the ruins, like you did.”
Jack shook his head. “I’ve looked all over. He’s not in the TARDIS either, and the sensors aren’t detecting him. Just you and me.”
Rose heard it first. The TARDIS. She turned to Jack and saw that he’d heard it too. “He can’t be leaving without us!” she said, knowing it didn’t make sense even as she said it. Why would he do that? She was beginning to get a slightly sick feeling about this.
Something occurred to her then, and she opened her mouth to say so, but Jack beat her to it. “Rose, that sound is coming from over there.” He pointed to the ruins.
“Only we left the TARDIS over there,” she finished for him, pointing in the other direction.
They followed the sound to the hilltop near the ruins. Just as they got near it, the doors clattered open, and a young girl stepped out. She looked about Rose’s age, but her clothes were somewhat old fashioned. At the very least they were oddly conservative. Rose frowned, not liking what this looked like very much at all, thank you.
The girl saw them and looked puzzled. “Oh, hello.” She turned back to the TARDIS. “Doctor,” she called, “I thought you said this planet was uninhabited?”
“It is, Charley, it is,” a voice called from inside.
Rose did not recognise this voice, and the sick feeling in her gut intensified. This feeling turned out to be not at all unwarranted as the owner of the voice stepped out of the TARDIS. He had longish curly hair and wore a green velvet coat from sometime in the last century. He was certainly not the Doctor.
“Oh, I’m sorry, we didn’t expect anyone else to be here,” he apologised when he saw Rose and Jack gaping at him. “How do you do, I’m the Doctor, and this my friend Charley Pollard.” He beamed at them and offered his hand.
To Be Continued…
~ * ~
Characters: Nine/Rose (established pairing), Jack.
Word Count: 2000 words, or thereabouts. (this part)
Rating: M, for a bit of smut.
Summary: The Doctor decides to show his two companions one of his favourite places: the Eye of Orion. However…
Author's Notes: Written for misscam’s Easter fic exchange, for ponygirl72. I am extremely late, and hereby grovel for forgiveness. This turned into rather an epic, so there will also be three more parts to come. I won’t say yet what ponygirl72's request was, because it would give away a couple of things. And because I like to be efficient, this is also for the 50lyricsfanfic challenge. My lyrics table is here.
Re: Technobabble. I’m not a scientist, but I am a perfectionist, so I’ve angsted over trying to get my technobabble to make both logical and canon sense. I’ve concluded this is actually impossible, since canon technobabble doesn’t actually make logical sense most of the time, so I fudged it. Sorry. It hurts me more than it hurts you, believe me.
And finally, credit to misscam for looking this over for me, and for being my Official Name Inventor.
Prompt:
Here comes the rain again, falling from the stars;
Drenched in my pain again, becoming who we are.
(“When September Ends” - Green Day)
~ * ~
The Eye of Orion is very old. Older than the Earth, definitely. Once it was the home of a thriving civilisation, but now it exists in perpetual silence.
There are no sentient species. There is no wildlife. Only plant life remains, and like the Earth, some parts are barren and others are lush and verdant.
Some call it a paradise.
~ * ~
He hadn’t intended to visit again; in this life he didn’t seem to enjoy places of simple beauty. He wondered if that would change when he regenerated, or whether the loss of Gallifrey had murdered his inner child for good.
Rose would love it, though. He had come here for Rose, just as he had once come here for Tegan. And once for Susan, once for Sarah Jane, and several other companions along the way. At least once in each body, though he’d somehow managed to miss it last time, despite always intending to show it to Charley.
Jamie had said it reminded him of the highlands of his home. Jo had been enchanted, and a long while after she left he would have done anything to see that particular smile again. Peri had explored with gusto, and Ace had stuffed a canister of nitro-9 in her pocket on the way out of the TARDIS, claiming no planet this quiet could possibly be safe.
He sensed Rose walking up behind him a few seconds before he felt the weight of her head on his shoulder. “It really is beautiful,” she murmured.
The TARDIS doors clattered shut behind them. “Aww, aren’t you guys sweet?” Jack commented, grinning at them. “Now get a room.”
The Doctor opened his mouth to retort, but Rose beat him to it. “Ignore him,” she said, poking out her tongue.
Jack, however, had spotted the ruins a few hundred metres away. “That used to be some sort of structure,” he observed, pointing them out to the Doctor. “I thought you said this planet was uninhabited?”
The Doctor took a step away from Rose, his hand sliding down of its own accord to grasp hers. “Oh it is,” he explained. “Now.”
“What happened to the people who built that, then?” Rose asked.
“They all died out, about two and a half thousand years ago. Polluted their atmosphere so much that they couldn’t survive in it,” the Doctor explained.
“They keep saying we’ll do that on Earth if we’re not careful.”
“We almost did,” Jack piped up. “Luckily, we figured out what we were doing in time and managed to reverse the damage.”
“Who says it was you lot did it?” the Doctor asked.
“What, you stopped global warming?”
“I might’ve done. A few words in a few government ears, maybe a hypnotic suggestion or two-“
“Yeah, right,” Rose interrupted him. “You’re full of it.”
The Doctor managed to look almost hurt. “I am not!”
Jack laughed. “Well, I don’t know about you two, but I’d like have a closer look at those ruins.”
The Doctor looked to Rose, eyebrows raised in a question. She bit her lip and shrugged, so he answered for both of them. “You go on; we’ll join you a bit later.”
The smirk on Jack’s face told them exactly what he thought they’d be doing while he explored, but his only reply was a wink.
“Insufferable cheek,” the Doctor groused when Jack was out of earshot. “Making assumptions like that.”
“Even if they’re right?” Rose asked, a little too innocently.
“Especially if they’re right.”
~ * ~
Ten minutes later, Rose lay on the grass with her head on the Doctor’s shoulder. “This planet has some lovely clouds,” she murmured. “When I was a kid, Mum used to take me out for picnics and she’d point out shapes in the clouds. Sometimes she told me it was my Dad making the shapes for us to show he was watching.”
“What shapes do you see, Rose Tyler?” the Doctor’s voice rumbled in her ear.
Both were silent for several minutes. “I can’t see anything,” she said. “Just clouds. What about you?”
He saw Daleks. Hundreds of them, thousands of them swarming through the sky of his memories. “Nothing,” he lied.
Rose knew him well enough to pick up the slight catch in his voice, and she hoisted herself up on her elbows to see his face.
He kept his eyes fixed on the sky for a few more moments, waiting for her to pick up his silent warning of Do Not Ask. When he saw her bite her lip out of the corner of his eye, he shifted his gaze to her face.
She didn’t ask, and he was grateful.
The Doctor allowed his hand to snake across her hip suggestively, and Rose smirked. “Won’t we be doing exactly what Jack expects?”
“Don’t mention Jack when I’m flirting with you Rose.”
She laughed. “Sorry.”
He rolled onto his side to face her. “Do you think Jack expects this?” he asked and kissed her gently, his lips just faintly touching hers.
Leave it to the Doctor to find them a completely beautiful but completely uninhabited planet to frolic on without worrying about embarrassing explanations to aliens who’d found them frolicking in their sacred cave. It was just lucky for them they had Jack to save them from being ritually sacrificed to Laans in appeasement. Another hour and he would’ve been too late.
“Yes,” she breathed.
“Yes he expects it, or yes you like it?”
“Shut up about Jack,” she complained, slapping his shoulder lightly.
He chuckled, and pulled her down to him. “Your wish is my command.”
~ * ~
Deep underground, an almost forgotten surveillance system flashed a message.
Energy source detected.
Braks Kongen was awoken from his light snooze by the buzzing of his console. He assumed the power shortages had caused a malfunction-nothing ever happened in surface surveillance. The Eye rarely received alien visitors.
Sighing, he rummaged in his toolkit for a resonance spanner, but the nature of the alert caught his eye. An energy source? Still probably an error, but one that needed reporting. He patched in to his superior.
“This is Monitor Braks to Supervisor Knegg,” he began.
“Receiving you, Braks. What have you found?”
“Probably nothing, but the system has picked up a possible energy source on the surface.”
There was silence for a moment on the other end of the line. “Artron energy?”
“Yes, Supervisor. Shall I send out a scoutbot?”
“Do so. Patch in when you have more information.”
“Yes, Supervisor.”
~ * ~
Sometimes, Rose thought, the Doctor was extremely single minded. It just wasn’t usually sex on his mind. Right now, however, his intentions were quite clear.
Rose certainly wasn’t complaining.
In fact, when he kissed her there and touched her there, she found it very difficult to even think about complaining.
The Doctor, for his part, was very engrossed in what he was doing. Rose was so young and vibrant and alive, and her smile chased a thousand demons away. Almost.
The grass beneath his back was soft and cool as she moved over him, bending to kiss his eyelids, then the tip of his nose, then his mouth. She threw her head back and laughed joyously as she came, until he rolled atop her and held her gaze.
Her laugh faded at the look on his face. He always looked so serious at the moment of release, and it made her shiver. Breathless, he kissed her one more time, and his eyes fluttered closed. The whisper of her name was a plea for forgiveness.
~ * ~
Brax watched the scene on the surface with interest. The scoutbot confirmed that the energy detected was generated by the male himself.
He patched in to Knegg again.
~ * ~
It was silly, she knew, but suddenly she felt exposed, even though the only other person on the planet was Jack, and he knew quite well when to make himself scarce. She pulled her clothes back on, and it made her feel somewhat better.
The Doctor shook his head at her, but he dressed himself too, and lay back to watch the clouds drifting past. Just clouds now. Rose settled her head back on his shoulder and closed her eyes.
She felt him kiss the top of her head lightly as she drifted off to sleep.
~ * ~
“Supervisor, I have confirmed the energy source. It is a Time Lord,” Brax reported.
“A Time Lord? Secure him at once, Brax. This is just what we need.”
“Understood. Activating transmaterialisation sequence now.”
~ * ~
“Well, this place is definitely quiet, but I wouldn’t have thought it was boring enough to put you to sleep.”
Rose felt a hand on her shoulder and recognised Jack’s voice. She blinked a few times, trying to remember where she was and what he’d just said.
“You all right?” he asked, as she squinted at him.
Rose sat up and stretched. “Yeah. Yeah’m fine.” She looked around. “Where’s the Doctor?”
“I was just going to ask you that.”
Rose frowned. “He must have gone to look at the ruins, like you did.”
Jack shook his head. “I’ve looked all over. He’s not in the TARDIS either, and the sensors aren’t detecting him. Just you and me.”
Rose heard it first. The TARDIS. She turned to Jack and saw that he’d heard it too. “He can’t be leaving without us!” she said, knowing it didn’t make sense even as she said it. Why would he do that? She was beginning to get a slightly sick feeling about this.
Something occurred to her then, and she opened her mouth to say so, but Jack beat her to it. “Rose, that sound is coming from over there.” He pointed to the ruins.
“Only we left the TARDIS over there,” she finished for him, pointing in the other direction.
They followed the sound to the hilltop near the ruins. Just as they got near it, the doors clattered open, and a young girl stepped out. She looked about Rose’s age, but her clothes were somewhat old fashioned. At the very least they were oddly conservative. Rose frowned, not liking what this looked like very much at all, thank you.
The girl saw them and looked puzzled. “Oh, hello.” She turned back to the TARDIS. “Doctor,” she called, “I thought you said this planet was uninhabited?”
“It is, Charley, it is,” a voice called from inside.
Rose did not recognise this voice, and the sick feeling in her gut intensified. This feeling turned out to be not at all unwarranted as the owner of the voice stepped out of the TARDIS. He had longish curly hair and wore a green velvet coat from sometime in the last century. He was certainly not the Doctor.
“Oh, I’m sorry, we didn’t expect anyone else to be here,” he apologised when he saw Rose and Jack gaping at him. “How do you do, I’m the Doctor, and this my friend Charley Pollard.” He beamed at them and offered his hand.
To Be Continued…
~ * ~