Here
OOC: This is an unofficial attempt at muse prompt no. 7, over at
our_magic_place. It's unofficial simply because I don't meet the requirements to join just yet and due to the minute variation on the prompt, which states "after several hours", while this is set one year on.
Joan tried the handle tentatively, half hoping that the door wouldn't open, that the room was securely locked and preserved. She hadn't been in that room since he'd died. She hadn't had the courage. But ... a year had passed since then and she found that she'd missed him and his bumbling sincerity, his smile; his chaotic imagination.
With a breath of apprehension, she turned the knob easily and the door opened without complaint save the mild squeak of surprise cheeping from unaccustomed hinges. The light coating of dust on the ground stirred and swept into the air half-heartedly at her feet, staining the immaculately polished pumps.
She stood in the doorway a moment. Staring. It had changed since she was last there. Not that it was entirely unexpected, but the knowledge of that room kept unsoiled gave her some measure of comfort in the back of her mind, almost as though a piece of John had been carefully stowed away.
Silly, she thought to herself glumly as she surveyed the empty space of the room. The desk was gone, as were most of the material items John had kept but The Doctor had neglected to take with him. In their place was dust and dirt, something Joan was sure John would have abhorred. Littering the floor were canvas sacks of what must have been
John's clothing, and boxes filled with random trinkets of little value.
He was gone then. Just like her husband after he was killed.
Joan took a hesitant step forward, further disturbing the room and the perfection she had wanted for it. Even the windows were bare, the curtains laying in folded piles on the armchair next to them. What hurt most though was the fireplace. She went to it carefully and ran a finger across the mantle absently. Everything was gone. The horn he'd kept on the top, the Bible, everything.
Her hand came to rest on the area where he'd once kept his fob watch. Essentially where John had kept himself. That was when she'd spotted it. Through the corner of her eye she saw something sitting idly on the seat of the club chair by the window to her right. She turned to it, stepping closer to inspect it.
It was the journal.
But ... she'd kept it at her home. She'd left it in the drawer of her writing desk. She'd locked it! What on Earth ...? It lay open on the chair to the next page that had been waiting to be used, the one after the drawing of her.
It wasn't a new page. Not anymore. Someone had written on it. Joan picked up the journal and raised the page to her eyes to better scrutinise the sloppy scrawl in its centre. It looked - no, no, that would be impossible ... but it did. It looked like John's handwriting! The same as if he'd dreamt the message, for that was what it was, Joan realised, upon reading the messy hand. It was written as though he'd dreamt it and hurriedly scribbled it on the page before he forgot it.
It couldn't have been. John was dead. But ... -
"We are such stuff,
As dreams are made on ~ The Tempest"
That was what it said. And beneath it;
"Here."
A smile brightened her features in a way that they hadn't in an awfully long time, too long it had seemed. She hugged the journal to her chest and grinned at the world outside. He'd answered the question she'd asked herself since he'd died.
John hadn't gone. He'd merely been misplaced.
And now she'd found him.