fic: some more fairy tale drabbles
Prompt: 034. Why it turned winter.
Author: melignomon
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Amy and 11.
Summary: Amy is captured; the Doctor interferes.
Word count: 350
It isn’t until Hvezda that the Doctor is finally forced to admit that there might, possibly, be a downside to being ginger. It makes one six times more likely to get sacrificed to a ravenous god of volcanoes, for instance.
But those are just odds, and if there was ever one for beating the odds it’s Amelia Pond. The Doctor hasn’t got halfway up the slope of Mount Look-a-Monster-With-Really-Big-Teeth (roughly translated) when he catches sight of Amy coming the other way, alone and covered in ash and wondrously uncaptured. He doesn’t stop his charge, doesn’t even slow down, and throws his arms around her so forcefully that a white cloud of ash puffs out from her skin. His hands stir up more ash as he clenches his fingers into the back of her jacket, and he can feel the fine drift of it tickling the back of his neck as it settles over his head. She coughs, turning her face into his shoulder to avoid breathing the stuff in, and he’s never been so glad for a respiratory bypass.
“Amy, magnificent Amy,” he says. “How did you escape?”
“I shouted ‘look over there, it’s the volcano god’, and when they all went down on their knees I ran,” she says. “They’ll be coming after me soon.”
“No,” the Doctor says. “They won’t.”
“Why? What did you do?” Amy follows the Doctor’s eyes up, to the grim clouds over the tip of the volcano which suddenly seem a lot less grim than they did half an hour ago.
Then there’s a cold wisp on her cheek and she realizes that the white swirling about her isn’t ash; it’s snow.
“Prophecy from the gods,” the Doctor says, as the snow thickens into flurries around them. He brushes his fingertips across her cheek, chasing off a stray snowflake. “No more sacrifices,” he says quietly. “No more capturing and killing. It’s over.” He presses a kiss to her temple, tasting ash and smoke, then takes her hand. “Now to go back four hundred years and give them the prophecy. Come along, Pond.”
Prompt: 038. The partition of an inheritance.
Author: melignomon
Rating: PG-13
Characters: The Doctor, Melody
Summary: River has questions for the Doctor.
Word count: 350
“What am I?” Melody Pond asks the Doctor on her eighteenth birthday, when he arrives to take her away from her parents, from Earth, because she’s being hunted and her home can’t protect her anymore.
"You're human, or very nearly," he tells her. "You've got to know what that means."
The colonists of the Gamma Forest are human, or very nearly, which is why the Doctor drops Melody off to enroll at the university there. Her few brief years in Leadworth had taught her family; her parents had taught her about good so deep that it had no dark side, about good without rules or reservations. In the Gamma Forest she learns more human things: lust and love and the lines between them; death, and mortal fear of death; courage in the face of mortal fear.
Then one day the Doctor comes back for her, and between adventures he teaches her their language, the whorls in which dream and time alone can be truly expressed. He teaches her their history, the religion of gods, how to understand her strange new time-senses and listen to the stars singing their oldest names. Then he takes her to the Medusa Cascade, or what’s left of it, and it sings back to her her own name; one she’s never heard before but has always lived, and will continue to live while star after star burns out.
What am I? she asks the Void, which knows her like an old, old friend. The Void envelopes her as though she was a Time Lord (or very nearly).
"What am I, Doctor?" she asks, centuries later, at the Singing Towers.
He has wept many times that night, but now it seems as though it might be for joy. "The very best of us," he tells her. "Human and Gallifreyan and the very, very best."