(no subject)
Title: Sometimes
Author: Bodldops
Summary: For the prompt 'Ten Years Later', Ace's canon isn't about happy shiny people having happy shiny lives.
Rating: PG
Characters: Ace, the Doctor, with an appearance by Amy Pond and a mention for DI Drake and Spoon
Spoilers: Um... all of the latest DW season, and the end of the last (the last real season anyway), I guess?
Author's Note: Most pups not mine, all tragically used without permission, or their mun's input, thus any and all OOCness is my fault, say very sorry.
Disclaimer: Sorry, today was a bit tragic, so the result is evidently angsty fic.
Sometimes she talked to herself.
At least, that is what people said. One detective tried to profile her, worried when the cheerful if not entirely responsible woman became withdrawn and prone to mood swings (only some of them violent). It was only when that detective saw the second half of the conversation, a frustrated young fantasy-world knight asking the pyro to pass the salt as he was seemingly completely ignored that she caught a glimmer of the truth. The missing half of that conversation had occurred two hours before it was supposed to.
Sometimes she screamed when nothing was wrong.
She wore a watch, an old-fashioned watch, a pocket watch with too many dials and a disturbing number of numerals and no logical sense of conventional time-keeping, but a watch that needed winding like so many watches in this multiverse. Sometimes she forgot, she had other things to do - protect the kitlet against those dangerous boys that seem attracted to her, re-acquaint herself with having a husband and enjoying a husband, explore the corners and holes of Milliways that she never quite managed to do before... And sometimes she forgot to wind the watch.
And there's a leak, in the window, a faint leak, not of air or heat or light but of time. And as the universe skipped backwards blithely so the bar didn't crash smack into the end time skipped and twisted, just a bit, and the last of the multispecies Irregulars who abused the laws of time to defend a doomed planet felt the wrench and panicked despite the knowledge that she was safe.
Sometimes she spoke in a nonsense language.
She babbled, words too long and convoluted to make sense, to even be slurring or a failure to enunciate. Frustration colored her tone and her mood tended to become violent or darkly withdrawn. She tended to run laps around the lake out back, wearing a single-lane track into the grass. This continued, on and off for months, until one incongruously sunny brilliant day she nearly ran smack into a brightly painted blue box, stumbling back out of her path and nearly turning her ankle, thumping down on her ass in the sun-warmed grass. She shouted at the blue box, something angry and multi-syllable and a little bit scared. And a mop-haired man in suspenders and a bow tie poked his head out and shouted back. That silenced her, and they stared at each other for a breathless moment where the only sound was the faint evil cackling of the devil bunnies.
"You can't be here." He said, in the tone of someone who knows he was talking nonsense but has to say it anyway.
"I have no where else to be." She replied, and her voice was only truth, truth and shock and an accent worn so thin it was almost indistinguishable from a dozen others.
"No, you can't be here, it is impossible, physically impossible." He repeated, suddenly sounding angry. A girl in a short skirt and long red hair peeked out from behind him, frowning at both the situation and this impossible place they've landed.
"She wasn't the only one. There were two, more before he killed them but two there, two, and I saw... but it wasn't for me. And I had a feather. He's dead, you know, the Master did it. It's over. I think it's over. Over for me, anyway. Two months, I've been back two months and only my family even believes what happened." The sudden babble cuts off in an almost-sob, and she whispered something in a rough angry desperate jumble of consonants and syllables.
He knelt in front of her, large knobbly hands smoothing over her face, wiping away the tears she's forgotten how to cry.
She'd followed him into hell, and it's only when he returned that she started to fully believe she wasn't there anymore.
"Of course I'm not mad." He whispered back, so softly that Amy could barely hear what she knew she didn't understand, "I've told you before... Aces are rare."
One finger tapped her nose.
Her shoulders hitched once.
The soldier who forgot how to stop fighting, the predator who couldn't stop hunting, the survivor who no longer lived suddenly shattered, remolding into the lost member of the scattered family that this universe-weary traveler had gathered around him. And the Time War took another step towards ending, there at the end of the universe.
Author: Bodldops
Summary: For the prompt 'Ten Years Later', Ace's canon isn't about happy shiny people having happy shiny lives.
Rating: PG
Characters: Ace, the Doctor, with an appearance by Amy Pond and a mention for DI Drake and Spoon
Spoilers: Um... all of the latest DW season, and the end of the last (the last real season anyway), I guess?
Author's Note: Most pups not mine, all tragically used without permission, or their mun's input, thus any and all OOCness is my fault, say very sorry.
Disclaimer: Sorry, today was a bit tragic, so the result is evidently angsty fic.
Sometimes she talked to herself.
At least, that is what people said. One detective tried to profile her, worried when the cheerful if not entirely responsible woman became withdrawn and prone to mood swings (only some of them violent). It was only when that detective saw the second half of the conversation, a frustrated young fantasy-world knight asking the pyro to pass the salt as he was seemingly completely ignored that she caught a glimmer of the truth. The missing half of that conversation had occurred two hours before it was supposed to.
Sometimes she screamed when nothing was wrong.
She wore a watch, an old-fashioned watch, a pocket watch with too many dials and a disturbing number of numerals and no logical sense of conventional time-keeping, but a watch that needed winding like so many watches in this multiverse. Sometimes she forgot, she had other things to do - protect the kitlet against those dangerous boys that seem attracted to her, re-acquaint herself with having a husband and enjoying a husband, explore the corners and holes of Milliways that she never quite managed to do before... And sometimes she forgot to wind the watch.
And there's a leak, in the window, a faint leak, not of air or heat or light but of time. And as the universe skipped backwards blithely so the bar didn't crash smack into the end time skipped and twisted, just a bit, and the last of the multispecies Irregulars who abused the laws of time to defend a doomed planet felt the wrench and panicked despite the knowledge that she was safe.
Sometimes she spoke in a nonsense language.
She babbled, words too long and convoluted to make sense, to even be slurring or a failure to enunciate. Frustration colored her tone and her mood tended to become violent or darkly withdrawn. She tended to run laps around the lake out back, wearing a single-lane track into the grass. This continued, on and off for months, until one incongruously sunny brilliant day she nearly ran smack into a brightly painted blue box, stumbling back out of her path and nearly turning her ankle, thumping down on her ass in the sun-warmed grass. She shouted at the blue box, something angry and multi-syllable and a little bit scared. And a mop-haired man in suspenders and a bow tie poked his head out and shouted back. That silenced her, and they stared at each other for a breathless moment where the only sound was the faint evil cackling of the devil bunnies.
"You can't be here." He said, in the tone of someone who knows he was talking nonsense but has to say it anyway.
"I have no where else to be." She replied, and her voice was only truth, truth and shock and an accent worn so thin it was almost indistinguishable from a dozen others.
"No, you can't be here, it is impossible, physically impossible." He repeated, suddenly sounding angry. A girl in a short skirt and long red hair peeked out from behind him, frowning at both the situation and this impossible place they've landed.
"She wasn't the only one. There were two, more before he killed them but two there, two, and I saw... but it wasn't for me. And I had a feather. He's dead, you know, the Master did it. It's over. I think it's over. Over for me, anyway. Two months, I've been back two months and only my family even believes what happened." The sudden babble cuts off in an almost-sob, and she whispered something in a rough angry desperate jumble of consonants and syllables.
He knelt in front of her, large knobbly hands smoothing over her face, wiping away the tears she's forgotten how to cry.
She'd followed him into hell, and it's only when he returned that she started to fully believe she wasn't there anymore.
"Of course I'm not mad." He whispered back, so softly that Amy could barely hear what she knew she didn't understand, "I've told you before... Aces are rare."
One finger tapped her nose.
Her shoulders hitched once.
The soldier who forgot how to stop fighting, the predator who couldn't stop hunting, the survivor who no longer lived suddenly shattered, remolding into the lost member of the scattered family that this universe-weary traveler had gathered around him. And the Time War took another step towards ending, there at the end of the universe.