Fic: Paradox
Title: Paradox
Author: psyfi_geekgirl
BetaBabe: akkajemo
Character/Pairings: Eleven/Rose
Rating: PG
Excerpt: Seven letter word for a situation that contradicts itself…
Word count: 2,601
Disclaimer: I don’t own ‘em. “Not nobody, not nohow…”
A/N: Prompted by then_theres_us challenge 34 (Photos)-pic after the cut.
Timeline: During the nothingness of the Big Bang for him, pre-Journey’s End for her.
BeeeBong!
Tinny chimes rang out of the cheap security bell that was duct taped to the shop door.
Seven letter word for a situation that contradicts itself…
He huffed and tossed aside his ragged crossword onto the counter. Pulling on the hem of his tweed jacket, he then ran a careless hand through his floppy hair. Half past nine on the dot and that nutty old biddy would be in as usual to try and pawn her tacky collection of royal crockery and useless crocheted doilies. He half expected that someday the poor addled thing might remember that he turned her down every day and that she might learn to take up making mobiles out of cat food tins-if she only had the strength in her arthritic hands to grip the metal snips and pliers… But there certainly were a lot of ‘ifs’ in that thought. He sighed.
Without looking up, he buzzed open the security cage and tried to put on his happy and patient face. “Good morning, Mrs. Stevens! Aren’t you looking lovely toda-“
He stopped in mid-flattery to see a blonde woman enter the shop who looked like she’d glided in on rails. She gazed vacantly at the prizes behind glass-coins of the realm, Regency silverware, 18th Century Kilij swords and Japanese tin toys from the 40s. She moved expressionless from case to case coming towards him, all legs, lips and eyes. Later, he will remember that she looked like a ghost that had eyes the colour of melted caramel that could see into his soul.
“Well. Hello there… Miss? Um…” He squinted. “Ma’am? I’m sorry. It’s just we… we don’t get many in here as young as you.”
She made a noise that reminded him of shattering glass and benediction bells. It took him a moment to realise she was laughing.
“Yeah. I’m really not, y’know,” she said wryly and turned to look at him.
His rust bow tie rode the wave of his Adam’s apple as he gulped. He half expected she was right. But then again, for some reason he found it very odd to see such a young man stare back from his own reflection in the glass cabinets.
“Name’s Rose, by the way. Not Mrs. Stevens.”
She had an odd sort of look to her. Nice face and was “put together well,” as the older generation might say--even somebody like Mrs. Stevens. She was beautiful, there was no denying that, but it was her eyes. Her eyes looked tired and careless and ancient, like an old person staring out from the body of a younger vehicle. The eyes told him she was weary from travel and hardened from combat and clouded by grief unimaginable, but of course most of that was impossible, wasn’t it? In the dull beige light of the musty old shop her hair could have been blonde or an ashen grey. It truly was impossible to tell exactly how old she was. But he was willing to lay odds that she was more pricelessly rare than any of the old junk he had in there.
“Do you need, uh… help… with anything? Is there something I could show you?”
Rose mumbled something into the glass of the cabinets, but it sounded to him like she’d said: “You could show me all of time and space.”
“Sorry… What?” he asked.
Rose stood up to face him. “I said, ‘you sure have a very nice place.’”
“Oh, yes! Yes, I see. Thank you. Thought you’d said something totally different, sorry.”
“You’ve got all sorts of old treasures in here. This your shop?”
Was it his? He couldn’t remember anymore. Couldn’t remember much anymore at all, come to think of it. Blimey, he was getting as bad as old Mrs. Stevens! Thinking quickly, he did the only natural thing a twenty-something, seemingly single man would do whilst talking to a beautiful young woman…
He attempted to impress her:
“Yes. I quite love old things. Bit of a history buff, me,” he said wistfully as he lovingly ran a finger along one of the glass cabinets. “Silly, maybe, but I just love to take things that other people have loved but forgotten and find them a home. Everything in here has a story, and I love hearing the stories.”
“How ‘bout you-you got a story?” asked Rose.
“I suppose we’re all stories in the end, aren’t we?” He chuckled.
“Aren’t we just?” agreed Rose.
She turned the corner and stopped in front of one particular case, lingering for a while, staring intently at everything inside it.
“Ah. I see you’ve found our Victorian mourning jewelry section. Certainly not everyone’s cup of tea-macabre bits of finery with bone and hair and such imbedded into them-but people found them extremely comforting back in the day. A bit of “momento mori,” there. Very existential, that, don’t you think?”
She grunted inattentively.
He realised he was babbling, but he found he tended to do that in these situations. He glanced over to the woman, Rose, who appeared to be looking at one piece in particular. She looked up at him inquisitively and he used that as another excuse for more nervous babbling: “That item you’re looking at? So happens it’s my favourite item in the whole shop! You asked for a story and this one certainly is a doozy! Legend has it that an old solider went off to battle in a great war and knew he wasn’t coming back, so he had this locket pendant made for his sweetheart before he went off to fight and told her not to open it until she either received word he was dead or came back home for her. His sweetheart swore that he had secreted part of his soul in the locket and that he would need it to live fully once he’d returned…”
“Lemme guess,” said Rose in a flat voice. “He died in battle.”
“Yes. He did, as most tended to do back then, sadly. She received word. She finally opened the pendant and died herself. Just dropped dead. Of course the item itself was deemed cursed by the family although nobody dared to get rid of it, superstitious as they were. It was kept safe by the family for years until it came to us after an estate sale.”
“S’haunting story. The power of love and longing and all that,” she said, staring at the necklace, with a far away look.
“Yes. Yes it ‘tis. Would you care to try it on?”
“Sorry. Not buying today. But…” she began, reaching into her flowered blouse and pulling up a chain around her neck. “Tell me… John,” she said, reading off his nametag, “I was wondering how much you might give me for this...” With one last yank, she revealed a handsome fob watch. She fingered it absently as she continued to talk, but John did not hear her. His eyes grew wide as he stared at the watch. It seemed to be whispering to him:
Beware…
“I’m sorry,” John interrupted, “but did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“That sound … May I?” he asked, indicating the watch. She handed it over to him. For something so small it was certainly very heavy.
Fitting a loupe into his eye socket he moved to examine the piece. “Certainly is… beautiful,” he said distractedly, something nibbling away at the edge of his consciousness. He turned it over in his palm and ran his fingers along the concentric circles and foreign scribbles engraved on its spring-hinged cover. The design on the case was some sort of complicated geometric pattern, almost as if the engraver asked the viewer to imagine that the casing was invisible and one could see inside to the inner workings-all the gears and movements. As the sensitive pad of his fingertip traced the little grooves and edges he imagined planets spinning through a multicoloured universe and vast, crystal blue glaciers filling in mountain ridges like caulk in a rushed DIY job-everything swirling and sped up-advancing and retreating, exploding and imploding, over and over again.
In its motif, he saw the history of everything, and inside time itself.
The time is now…
He raised it to his ear, disbelievingly. He’d sworn he’d just heard something! But all he could hear was the ordinary movement of time, ticking down, towards inevitability. Whatever it was made out of-some kind of metal he couldn’t identify despite being an expert in such things-it seemed unusually warm in his hand. He shook his head. “Do you know the provenance of this piece? It’s origin? Who owed it before you?”
Rose wore a dreamy expression as she struggled to remember. “I think I found it somewhere. I’ve been traveling for a long time now. I’ve had it for a while, but I can’t remember anymore…” she said, drifting off. He thought her very odd indeed. Perhaps this Rose, as beautiful as she was, was not so far off the mark from Mrs. Stevens as he’d thought?
Remember…
“I remember hearing somewhere that there was a story to it, though,” she continued, eyes suddenly bright. “Kinda like your necklace over there. There was a man… but…” Her eyes dimmed. She shook her head. “I don’t remember how the story goes anymore… if I ever did.”
“Mmmm,” he muttered, not paying much attention. He was still captivated by the peculiar timepiece, but there was something else vaguely there too, like a pebble in his shoe or a piece of food stuck in his teeth. “Well, it still ticks so you’ve taken rather good care of it.”
“Does it? I thought it had stopped working ages ago. That’s why I’d wanted to sell it.”
Give me to her…
“Here,” he said, “open it and see.”
As the watch passed from his hands to hers, her eyes narrowed. “S’funny… I… I don’t remember ever opening it before. It’s like I just recently remembered I even had it.”
She pushed the stem to click open it. They both watched in horrified fascination as golden wisps of energy poured out of the watch. Rose gasped as she looked into it and her eyes took on a surreal, golden glow. He heard more whispering coming from inside it, but while he could not make out individual words, he saw tears streaming down Rose’s face as she stared, entranced.
“I’d forgotten!” she gasped and then broke out into wrenching sobs. “How could I have forgotten?”
Finally, the light disappeared as she clicked it shut. Rose turned to John, her eyes still glowing out of her tear-streaked face, hair once again restored to its usual golden sheen. She spoke as if in a trance, filled with the energy of the Vortex: “You are safe, my Doctor. You are protected. Sleeping. But you will sleep no more, for if something can be remembered it can come back.”
She grasped either side of his head and pulled him into a kiss. His breath was both taken away and restored as he rose up through the foggy depths and up into light, a swimmer on land once again. Time and awareness swirled behind his eyes, bringing him back to consciousness, back to himself. He remembered a big bang and confederacy of enemies; a message from Cleopatra on an ancient cliff face; a troubled painter and a missing companion; Daleks and Winston; cracks in the fabric of time; and an Ood in the snow and the pain of a final goodbye.
By the time she released him from her improbable embrace, he remembered, too.
He remembered everything.
“I died in battle,” said Rose simply, her hands hanging limply at the end of her arms, but her eyes still glowing with an infinite power.
The Doctor’s eyes watered as he remembered the sting of the wind on a bay so very far away. “Yes…” he breathed with infinite sadness.
“I scattered the words and I traveled through universes to find you.”
The Doctor involuntarily clutched her hand, finding with surprise that they still perfectly intertwined. “You already have, Rose. You already have. Or rather, you will. I think one more jump ought to do it, now that you’ve remembered who you are.”
“The cracks are closed but you will not have to wait long. Others will remember you soon.”
“Rose, my valiant girl. You’ve saved me again. You’re always saving me…” He clicked open the watch, looked sadly at her and said, “You can let go of it now. I’ll see you soon.” Somehow understanding, she acquiesced and the energy drew out of her like water from a well, siphoning back into the timepiece.
By the time he clicked it shut, she was herself again… and she didn’t know him.
“M’sorry, John, but I’ve decided it’s not for sale,” she said hoarsely as she wiped away tears. “It belonged to a man who-someone I-“ she stammered. “Well he didn’t give it to me, somebody else did-an old soldier-but I know it’s his… Was his…” She sighed. “I think he left it behind for me to find, to somehow let me know that I was getting close. S’funny, but it’s been so long that I’ve been looking I almost forgot what I was doing, but when I opened it just now, it’s like I remembered. I remembered all my time with him. It just brought it all back.” She looked up at him, sorrowful hazel eyes now clear of the golden Vortex but infused with renewed purpose. “M’sorry John, but I can’t give it up now. I can’t believe I would have ever thought to part with it.”
He gently put it back in her hand and closed her fingers around it. “Well, then I think that you best ought to keep it. You never know when he might come back, and just like that old locket-it might come in handy to you both someday. I’m sure he’d be comforted to know that you kept it in such good condition all these years.”
She snaked the chain back around her neck and returned it back within the folds of her shirt, where he knew its ticking would mirror her own beating heart-a metronome of life and time, of love and fate.
“Thank you so much for your time, John. I have to get going. I just remembered I have someplace I need to be.”
“You’re welcome, Rose. I’m sorry we couldn’t make a deal, but thank you for showing me the watch. It’s a really lovely story.”
She grinned at him-finally-wide and warm and Rose, a smile he could never tire to see. Then, turning on her heel, she walked out of the shop.
His breath hitched as he listened to the sickly electronic buzz of the cheap security bell announcing yet another one of Rose’s departures from his life. As his head flinched away, something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye. He picked up the crossword puzzle he had put aside earlier.
Seven letter word for a situation that contradicts itself…
He scribbled in his answer. He knew it didn’t fit the overall puzzle. But it meant the same thing:
BADWOLF
Putting down the crossword, he walked out of the shop, never to return. After all, he had someplace he needed to be, too. There was a certain wedding he couldn’t be late for and if he hadn’t been mistaken, he could hear the faint peal of wedding bells echoing in the tinny, cheap plastic door chime-echoing throughout time, calling him back home.
The Doctor was needed again.
Author: psyfi_geekgirl
BetaBabe: akkajemo
Character/Pairings: Eleven/Rose
Rating: PG
Excerpt: Seven letter word for a situation that contradicts itself…
Word count: 2,601
Disclaimer: I don’t own ‘em. “Not nobody, not nohow…”
A/N: Prompted by then_theres_us challenge 34 (Photos)-pic after the cut.
Timeline: During the nothingness of the Big Bang for him, pre-Journey’s End for her.
BeeeBong!
Tinny chimes rang out of the cheap security bell that was duct taped to the shop door.
Seven letter word for a situation that contradicts itself…
He huffed and tossed aside his ragged crossword onto the counter. Pulling on the hem of his tweed jacket, he then ran a careless hand through his floppy hair. Half past nine on the dot and that nutty old biddy would be in as usual to try and pawn her tacky collection of royal crockery and useless crocheted doilies. He half expected that someday the poor addled thing might remember that he turned her down every day and that she might learn to take up making mobiles out of cat food tins-if she only had the strength in her arthritic hands to grip the metal snips and pliers… But there certainly were a lot of ‘ifs’ in that thought. He sighed.
Without looking up, he buzzed open the security cage and tried to put on his happy and patient face. “Good morning, Mrs. Stevens! Aren’t you looking lovely toda-“
He stopped in mid-flattery to see a blonde woman enter the shop who looked like she’d glided in on rails. She gazed vacantly at the prizes behind glass-coins of the realm, Regency silverware, 18th Century Kilij swords and Japanese tin toys from the 40s. She moved expressionless from case to case coming towards him, all legs, lips and eyes. Later, he will remember that she looked like a ghost that had eyes the colour of melted caramel that could see into his soul.
“Well. Hello there… Miss? Um…” He squinted. “Ma’am? I’m sorry. It’s just we… we don’t get many in here as young as you.”
She made a noise that reminded him of shattering glass and benediction bells. It took him a moment to realise she was laughing.
“Yeah. I’m really not, y’know,” she said wryly and turned to look at him.
His rust bow tie rode the wave of his Adam’s apple as he gulped. He half expected she was right. But then again, for some reason he found it very odd to see such a young man stare back from his own reflection in the glass cabinets.
“Name’s Rose, by the way. Not Mrs. Stevens.”
She had an odd sort of look to her. Nice face and was “put together well,” as the older generation might say--even somebody like Mrs. Stevens. She was beautiful, there was no denying that, but it was her eyes. Her eyes looked tired and careless and ancient, like an old person staring out from the body of a younger vehicle. The eyes told him she was weary from travel and hardened from combat and clouded by grief unimaginable, but of course most of that was impossible, wasn’t it? In the dull beige light of the musty old shop her hair could have been blonde or an ashen grey. It truly was impossible to tell exactly how old she was. But he was willing to lay odds that she was more pricelessly rare than any of the old junk he had in there.
“Do you need, uh… help… with anything? Is there something I could show you?”
Rose mumbled something into the glass of the cabinets, but it sounded to him like she’d said: “You could show me all of time and space.”
“Sorry… What?” he asked.
Rose stood up to face him. “I said, ‘you sure have a very nice place.’”
“Oh, yes! Yes, I see. Thank you. Thought you’d said something totally different, sorry.”
“You’ve got all sorts of old treasures in here. This your shop?”
Was it his? He couldn’t remember anymore. Couldn’t remember much anymore at all, come to think of it. Blimey, he was getting as bad as old Mrs. Stevens! Thinking quickly, he did the only natural thing a twenty-something, seemingly single man would do whilst talking to a beautiful young woman…
He attempted to impress her:
“Yes. I quite love old things. Bit of a history buff, me,” he said wistfully as he lovingly ran a finger along one of the glass cabinets. “Silly, maybe, but I just love to take things that other people have loved but forgotten and find them a home. Everything in here has a story, and I love hearing the stories.”
“How ‘bout you-you got a story?” asked Rose.
“I suppose we’re all stories in the end, aren’t we?” He chuckled.
“Aren’t we just?” agreed Rose.
She turned the corner and stopped in front of one particular case, lingering for a while, staring intently at everything inside it.
“Ah. I see you’ve found our Victorian mourning jewelry section. Certainly not everyone’s cup of tea-macabre bits of finery with bone and hair and such imbedded into them-but people found them extremely comforting back in the day. A bit of “momento mori,” there. Very existential, that, don’t you think?”
She grunted inattentively.
He realised he was babbling, but he found he tended to do that in these situations. He glanced over to the woman, Rose, who appeared to be looking at one piece in particular. She looked up at him inquisitively and he used that as another excuse for more nervous babbling: “That item you’re looking at? So happens it’s my favourite item in the whole shop! You asked for a story and this one certainly is a doozy! Legend has it that an old solider went off to battle in a great war and knew he wasn’t coming back, so he had this locket pendant made for his sweetheart before he went off to fight and told her not to open it until she either received word he was dead or came back home for her. His sweetheart swore that he had secreted part of his soul in the locket and that he would need it to live fully once he’d returned…”
“Lemme guess,” said Rose in a flat voice. “He died in battle.”
“Yes. He did, as most tended to do back then, sadly. She received word. She finally opened the pendant and died herself. Just dropped dead. Of course the item itself was deemed cursed by the family although nobody dared to get rid of it, superstitious as they were. It was kept safe by the family for years until it came to us after an estate sale.”
“S’haunting story. The power of love and longing and all that,” she said, staring at the necklace, with a far away look.
“Yes. Yes it ‘tis. Would you care to try it on?”
“Sorry. Not buying today. But…” she began, reaching into her flowered blouse and pulling up a chain around her neck. “Tell me… John,” she said, reading off his nametag, “I was wondering how much you might give me for this...” With one last yank, she revealed a handsome fob watch. She fingered it absently as she continued to talk, but John did not hear her. His eyes grew wide as he stared at the watch. It seemed to be whispering to him:
Beware…
“I’m sorry,” John interrupted, “but did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“That sound … May I?” he asked, indicating the watch. She handed it over to him. For something so small it was certainly very heavy.
Fitting a loupe into his eye socket he moved to examine the piece. “Certainly is… beautiful,” he said distractedly, something nibbling away at the edge of his consciousness. He turned it over in his palm and ran his fingers along the concentric circles and foreign scribbles engraved on its spring-hinged cover. The design on the case was some sort of complicated geometric pattern, almost as if the engraver asked the viewer to imagine that the casing was invisible and one could see inside to the inner workings-all the gears and movements. As the sensitive pad of his fingertip traced the little grooves and edges he imagined planets spinning through a multicoloured universe and vast, crystal blue glaciers filling in mountain ridges like caulk in a rushed DIY job-everything swirling and sped up-advancing and retreating, exploding and imploding, over and over again.
In its motif, he saw the history of everything, and inside time itself.
The time is now…
He raised it to his ear, disbelievingly. He’d sworn he’d just heard something! But all he could hear was the ordinary movement of time, ticking down, towards inevitability. Whatever it was made out of-some kind of metal he couldn’t identify despite being an expert in such things-it seemed unusually warm in his hand. He shook his head. “Do you know the provenance of this piece? It’s origin? Who owed it before you?”
Rose wore a dreamy expression as she struggled to remember. “I think I found it somewhere. I’ve been traveling for a long time now. I’ve had it for a while, but I can’t remember anymore…” she said, drifting off. He thought her very odd indeed. Perhaps this Rose, as beautiful as she was, was not so far off the mark from Mrs. Stevens as he’d thought?
Remember…
“I remember hearing somewhere that there was a story to it, though,” she continued, eyes suddenly bright. “Kinda like your necklace over there. There was a man… but…” Her eyes dimmed. She shook her head. “I don’t remember how the story goes anymore… if I ever did.”
“Mmmm,” he muttered, not paying much attention. He was still captivated by the peculiar timepiece, but there was something else vaguely there too, like a pebble in his shoe or a piece of food stuck in his teeth. “Well, it still ticks so you’ve taken rather good care of it.”
“Does it? I thought it had stopped working ages ago. That’s why I’d wanted to sell it.”
Give me to her…
“Here,” he said, “open it and see.”
As the watch passed from his hands to hers, her eyes narrowed. “S’funny… I… I don’t remember ever opening it before. It’s like I just recently remembered I even had it.”
She pushed the stem to click open it. They both watched in horrified fascination as golden wisps of energy poured out of the watch. Rose gasped as she looked into it and her eyes took on a surreal, golden glow. He heard more whispering coming from inside it, but while he could not make out individual words, he saw tears streaming down Rose’s face as she stared, entranced.
“I’d forgotten!” she gasped and then broke out into wrenching sobs. “How could I have forgotten?”
Finally, the light disappeared as she clicked it shut. Rose turned to John, her eyes still glowing out of her tear-streaked face, hair once again restored to its usual golden sheen. She spoke as if in a trance, filled with the energy of the Vortex: “You are safe, my Doctor. You are protected. Sleeping. But you will sleep no more, for if something can be remembered it can come back.”
She grasped either side of his head and pulled him into a kiss. His breath was both taken away and restored as he rose up through the foggy depths and up into light, a swimmer on land once again. Time and awareness swirled behind his eyes, bringing him back to consciousness, back to himself. He remembered a big bang and confederacy of enemies; a message from Cleopatra on an ancient cliff face; a troubled painter and a missing companion; Daleks and Winston; cracks in the fabric of time; and an Ood in the snow and the pain of a final goodbye.
By the time she released him from her improbable embrace, he remembered, too.
He remembered everything.
“I died in battle,” said Rose simply, her hands hanging limply at the end of her arms, but her eyes still glowing with an infinite power.
The Doctor’s eyes watered as he remembered the sting of the wind on a bay so very far away. “Yes…” he breathed with infinite sadness.
“I scattered the words and I traveled through universes to find you.”
The Doctor involuntarily clutched her hand, finding with surprise that they still perfectly intertwined. “You already have, Rose. You already have. Or rather, you will. I think one more jump ought to do it, now that you’ve remembered who you are.”
“The cracks are closed but you will not have to wait long. Others will remember you soon.”
“Rose, my valiant girl. You’ve saved me again. You’re always saving me…” He clicked open the watch, looked sadly at her and said, “You can let go of it now. I’ll see you soon.” Somehow understanding, she acquiesced and the energy drew out of her like water from a well, siphoning back into the timepiece.
By the time he clicked it shut, she was herself again… and she didn’t know him.
“M’sorry, John, but I’ve decided it’s not for sale,” she said hoarsely as she wiped away tears. “It belonged to a man who-someone I-“ she stammered. “Well he didn’t give it to me, somebody else did-an old soldier-but I know it’s his… Was his…” She sighed. “I think he left it behind for me to find, to somehow let me know that I was getting close. S’funny, but it’s been so long that I’ve been looking I almost forgot what I was doing, but when I opened it just now, it’s like I remembered. I remembered all my time with him. It just brought it all back.” She looked up at him, sorrowful hazel eyes now clear of the golden Vortex but infused with renewed purpose. “M’sorry John, but I can’t give it up now. I can’t believe I would have ever thought to part with it.”
He gently put it back in her hand and closed her fingers around it. “Well, then I think that you best ought to keep it. You never know when he might come back, and just like that old locket-it might come in handy to you both someday. I’m sure he’d be comforted to know that you kept it in such good condition all these years.”
She snaked the chain back around her neck and returned it back within the folds of her shirt, where he knew its ticking would mirror her own beating heart-a metronome of life and time, of love and fate.
“Thank you so much for your time, John. I have to get going. I just remembered I have someplace I need to be.”
“You’re welcome, Rose. I’m sorry we couldn’t make a deal, but thank you for showing me the watch. It’s a really lovely story.”
She grinned at him-finally-wide and warm and Rose, a smile he could never tire to see. Then, turning on her heel, she walked out of the shop.
His breath hitched as he listened to the sickly electronic buzz of the cheap security bell announcing yet another one of Rose’s departures from his life. As his head flinched away, something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye. He picked up the crossword puzzle he had put aside earlier.
Seven letter word for a situation that contradicts itself…
He scribbled in his answer. He knew it didn’t fit the overall puzzle. But it meant the same thing:
BADWOLF
Putting down the crossword, he walked out of the shop, never to return. After all, he had someplace he needed to be, too. There was a certain wedding he couldn’t be late for and if he hadn’t been mistaken, he could hear the faint peal of wedding bells echoing in the tinny, cheap plastic door chime-echoing throughout time, calling him back home.
The Doctor was needed again.