A Commentary for Good Night, Part Two
Part Two
It happens slowly. He doesn’t notice the building heat beating down on him until the sun has dried his suit so thoroughly that he can feel the rasp of salt against his skin. He squints into blazing daylight and sees a pair of bare, pale feet, ten toes digging into the sand just beyond the tip of his nose. The toenails are painted a vivid, sunflower yellow, the varnish slightly chipped.
*Nail varnish is Very Important Stuff. Also, see how I worked in the sun thing again? Aren’t I clever?
“Well, that’s one way to work on your tan,” Rose says, and he cannot help but reach out and trace the dip and curve of her ankle with his fingertip. “That tickles,” she comments, but doesn’t laugh.
“I didn’t think you’d be here,” he manages to say, and it feels woefully inadequate.
“What, and miss a party like this?” She crouches on the white sand by his side and he takes a moment to drink in the sight of her. Her hair is long, a mess of tangles in the wind, her roots still dark. She wears a ragged, baggy blue jumper, her jeans rolled to just below her knees, and though she smiles, her face is stained with black trails of mascara, a tattoo of tears long past.
*You know, her mascara doesn’t actually run during that Doomsday scene on the beach. Still, I think it’s a fitting visual marker of her grief.
“You look like you’ve had a rough time of it.” Her gaze sweeps his prone figure. “New suit, I see.”
He’s about to disagree when he notices the solid blue of his sleeve. “I suppose it is,” he sighs. In his long life he has learned to savour the unexpected and extraordinary, but the extraordinary has gone too far when it interferes with his wardrobe. He sits and brushes the sand from his shoulders and trouser legs.
She sits and leans over to help, her hands skimming over his now blue lapels. “I like it.”
*As my lovely beta
jlrpuck pointed out, NOBODY likes the blue suit. However, this is not really Rose. This is Rose-in-the-Doctor’s-head, and he does not know any better. Clearly.
He smiles at her. “I’m glad.”
“And I’m glad that you’re glad.” She laughs and hugs her knees to her chest. “We could do that all day.”
“We have,” he replies, remembering. After a moment he reaches out and brushes his thumb over the black marks running down her cheeks. “Rose,” he says, his voice soft, “what are these?”
“Not what you think,” she replies gently, as if speaking to a child. She reaches out, mirroring his gesture, and her fingers come away from his face wet with ink. He stares at her hand, transfixed by the dark liquid running down her fingers and pooling in the creases of her palm. When he looks up, her face is clean and pale.
*The last time he saw her, she was weeping. It stayed with him, as it has stayed with us. But really, it’s not her grief he’s seeing in those mascara tears - it’s his own. Now the tears are on his face, and she is perfectly fine. (Living a fantastic life, far away from him.)
“What does it say?” he asks roughly, feeling for the first time the cool, slick sensation of ink against the skin of his face. Where there is ink there are words, he knows, (grief written on his face like a story) but she shakes her head.
“They’re just salt, Doctor. They don’t have to say anything.”
*It breaks down like this: Tears = Mascara = Ink = Words = Story.
And they say I can’t do math.
She rubs her fingers together, still dripping with ink, and dark spots rain down on the sand below. “If all the world was paper,” she says, “and all the seas were ink.” She stands and takes two steps backward, her footprints marking the sand. “If all the trees,” she continues blithely, “were bread and cheese, what would we have to drink?”
*Yay for more random nursery rhymes! I love this one. Mostly because of the trees/cheese rhyme. Also, ink = the sea. So, the sea = the story.
Another step back and her heels rest on the pointed toes of a pair of black dress shoes. A black-clad arm slides around her waist and the Master answers, “Why, the blood of innocents, of course.” He grins at the Doctor from over her shoulder. “Too easy. Give me another.”
Rose does not react to his voice or his touch - instead, she watches the Doctor with wide eyes, waiting. “Don’t you have the answer?” she asks, untroubled by the Master’s embrace. “You always do.”
“Step away,” the Doctor says, rising to his feet, his voice cold with fury. “Now.”
“Or you’ll what?” the Master replies. “Snuggle me to death?”
“You’re already dead,” the Doctor snaps, and even now he grieves.
The arm around Rose tightens, but she doesn’t so much as flinch. The Master rolls his eyes. “Oh please. Like that’s ever stopped me.”
*How many times does this dude die? A LOT. He’s gotta be about the same age as the Doctor (more or less, as I suppose aligning the personal time lines of independently traveling time travelers must be a pretty wonky business) but he’d used up all thirteen bodies of his by the time the Doctor was on his fourth. And after that he keeps on dying, and he keeps on coming back. He is a cockroach Time Lord.
“Doctor?” She takes a step forward, slipping easily out of the Master’s arms, and her hands settle on her hips. “Are you even listening to a word I’m saying?”
“No,” the Doctor says, his eyes fixed on the man who died in his arms hours before.
“You should be.” Rose’s tone is suddenly grim. “I remember things you’ve forgotten.”
The Master snickers. “Like what? How to nick cheap mascara from the shop round the corner and tuck your miserable, sloppily drunk mother into bed at night?”
The Doctor feels a wonderful, fierce anger build inside him, and he lurches toward the Master. Rose stops him, pressing a hand to his chest, and tries unsuccessfully to meet his gaze. “One for sorrow, two for joy,” she says urgently, her fingernails scratching against the silk of his tie. “Three for a girl, four for a boy. If you’re looking at him, you won’t see it coming.”
*This is, of course, precisely what happened when the Master died on the Valiant. The Doctor couldn’t take his eyes off the Master, and so never saw Lucy coming.
“No,” the Master says with a wry grin. “He won’t.”
“Listen to me,” she pleads, but he has felt so empty for so long and now he is full and he cannot look away from the Master’s smile. “Please, you have to listen. Five for silver, six-”
Her words are interrupted by an impossibly loud crack, and when the Master’s hands leave Rose’s face she slumps to the ground, her neck twisted at an unnatural angle.
*Up until this point, we’ve only peripherally dealt with the events of Do I Twist, Do I Fold. But the Master’s violence against Rose, grouping her with his other victims, marks the rise of this horrible question (what really happened that day?) to the forefront of the dream.
The Master nudges the body with the toe of one well-polished shoe. “Stupid whore,” he says, and smiles. “Shall we dump her into the sea with the others?”
*Is the sea the afterlife? The unknowable? A big, blue, wet thing with fish in it? Oh, the possibilities…
The Doctor cannot move. If this were real (and suddenly he is sure it is not), he thinks he would be doing something, saying something, but instead he is frozen, rooted in place. He stares down at her open, empty eyes and thinks, She’ll get sand in her hair. She hates that.
Then the sand beneath their feet (beneath the corpse) begins to shift, and he staggers backward, away from her. She is sinking, slowly being swallowed by pale earth, and he knows this isn’t real, this isn’t her, but he falls to his knees and grabs for her arm, her hand, her fingers. A strong, thin arm hooks him around the waist and drags him back, pulling him to a safe distance despite his struggles. The body disappears and the sand is left smooth, undisturbed.
“It’s all right,” Martha murmurs, her arms still locked around him. “I promise.”
“That didn’t happen,” he says, and though he knows he’s right his voice shakes. “Tell me it didn’t happen.”
She pulls away slightly. “I don’t need to,” she says, and looks pointedly to where the Master stood only a moment before.
Now he lies crumpled on the sand, his hands over his face. Rose stands over him, her arms folded across her chest. She looks bored. “Honestly,” she says to the twitching figure at her feet, “it’s the same song and dance every time. When is it going to sink into your thick Time Lord skull?” She crouches beside him and tenderly rests her hand on his head. He flinches. “Remember this,” she says with a terrible gentleness. “In the end, I always win.”
*Again with the question he’ll never really have answers to. A moment ago, the Master was a figure that killed happily, easily. Now, Rose has become something powerful. Something dangerous. Both these things are true. But we still don’t know what happened.
Rose looks over at them. “All right, Martha?”
Martha nods. “He’s fine.” She glances at him, smiling slightly. “You are fine, aren’t you?”
He stares at her, speechless.
Martha laughs. “I think you broke him,” she calls out to Rose, who stands and grins at them.
“Give him a minute. He’ll get over it.” She steps over the Master’s prone body and walks to them, brushing sand from her jumper. “Every bloody time,” she mutters to herself. “Sand in places you wouldn’t believe.”
Martha gets to her feet. “Tell me about it. Last time the bastard got me,
*The Master was really looking forward to killing Martha. I’m sure it’s a scenario the Doctor dreamed of more than once.
I found an actual hermit crab buried in my back pocket.” She frowns at the memory. “Made a horrible noise when I sat down.”
The Doctor gapes up at the women - one blonde and rumpled and barefoot, the other elegant and serene in her crisp white lab coat. They exchange an indecipherable look and begin to laugh.
“What?” he asks, feeling entirely out of his depth. “What is it?”
“The…the look on your face,” Rose sputters, leaning on Martha’s shoulder for support. “It’s just priceless.”
“Sorry,” Martha says, though her wide grin doesn’t look the least bit repentant. “If it makes you feel any better, we did fight over you at first.”
Rose attempts a sober nod but her smile breaks through. “For a while, actually. Martha’s a hair-puller.”
The other woman rolls her eyes. “Only to keep you from biting me.”
*Little bit of wolf humor, there.
“But now we get on wonderfully. We even have friendly nicknames for each other, don’t we, Dr. Jones?”
“We certainly do.” Martha grins. “Chav.”
“Swot.”
“Slut.”
“Rebound.”
“Corpse.”
*She’s on the list of the dead, back home. He tells Donna she is “so alive” but sometimes he forgets that she is lost only to him.
The sunlight dims and for a moment Rose’s face is again slack and drained of colour, her eyes glassy. Then both women burst into peals of laughter and it is as if he has only imagined her sudden decay.
“Corpse!” Rose repeats, still laughing helplessly. “She gets me with that one every time.”
“But this is impossible.” The Doctor staggers to his feet. “You two have never, will never meet.”
“Rose, stop,” Martha whispers, elbowing her in the side. “I think we’re damaging his fragile male ego.”
.
*It’s not the ego I’d worry about, Martha - his id is what gets him into trouble. No jar of marmalade is safe.
Rose claps a hand over her mouth and stares at him, her wide eyes sparkling. “Sorry,” she says through her fingers, her voice muffled. A moment later, she hiccups.
The Doctor runs a hand through his hair, trying to clear the frustration from his unusually cluttered, uncooperative mind. “I don’t understand any of this,” he says through gritted teeth. “What’s happening?”
“At the moment?” Rose says, uncovering her mouth. “Nothing.”
“But just you wait,” Martha adds, waving a finger in his face.
Rose sighs. “Oh, the waiting is the worst.”
“The very worst,” Martha agrees. “Still, it’s only ever a matter of time-”
“Or a matter of space.”
“Or neither.”
*Martha and Rose have their Tweedledum and Tweedledee moment. I’m not stealing - it’s an homage.
“Yes,” Rose says, nodding, her expression one of mock solemnity. “Sometimes it’s a matter of zeppelins.”
“Or angels.”
“Or Daleks.” They pause and exchange a significant look. “Quite often,” Rose says slowly, “quite often it’s a matter of Daleks.”
Martha gives her shoulder a quick, comforting squeeze. “Three hundred and sixty-five grains of sand,” she says. “A year of waiting and silence and standing still, and now…” the sentence trails off, unfinished.
*Referring to the Year That Never Was. A year of standing still, and now the Doctor can-
A grin blossoms across Rose’s face. “Oh, do you think?” she asks Martha eagerly.
Martha beams. “Well, it’s never failed us before.” Then she is gone, vanished, leaving behind only empty footprints in the sand.
*-run. The Doctor taught Martha all about leaving, and she’s a fast study.
The Doctor swings around, searching for her, but the beach is empty. “I don’t understand. Where did she…”
Rose stares out to sea, her expression distant. “Don’t worry. She’s gotten very good at it.” She doesn’t turn to him but reaches out and presses one hand to his chest, curling her fingers around his tie. Her lips curve in a small, sad smile. “It’s a trick I never learned.”
The Doctor takes her by the elbow and steps closer, willing her to look back at him. “Rose, I know he’s still here. I need to find him.”
She releases his tie and presses two fingers to his lips. “Hush,” she says, and her grin is at once sweet and terrible. “It’s time to run.”
*Abrupt scene change!
A clock chimes - once, twice, three times. The Doctor reaches for Rose, but he is alone in a dim corridor. A nearby grandfather clock continues its gentle ticking and the house smells of old wood and dead air. A few steps away, a door is open.
From within the room an eerily familiar voice calls, “Don’t just stand there. Come in if you’re coming.”
The Doctor steps into the doorway and the man behind the desk looks up from his work. He wears a grey three-piece suit, a bow tie, and a grim expression. “Brilliant,” the man with his face says dryly. “It’s you.”
*I have a confession to make. I wanted to write John Smith so badly. I almost wrote an AU Human Nature/Family of Blood fic with Rose just so I could write him in all his awkward, notDoctor glory. ‘Cause he’s a bit of a jerk, and I like that in a man.
The Doctor looks about the dark study, his hands in his pockets. “Bit dreary, isn’t it? Don’t you have a lamp?”
John Smith frowns. “I suppose you could do better?”
“Well, I could buy myself a lamp. Or build one out of a potato, if it came to that.” He feels better, somehow, now that he’s on solid ground, with creaking wooden floorboards beneath his feet. He walks over to the desk and picks up the nearest book, opening it to find the pages blank. “You don’t like me much, do you?” he asks casually.
Smith sits back in his chair and studies him through half-lidded eyes. “I don’t see why it should matter.”
“I don’t suppose it does.”
“But you want to know anyway.” Smith closes his eyes and rubs absently at his temple, and suddenly the Doctor feels every inch the wayward schoolboy. “No, Doctor. I do not like you.”
The Doctor smiles weakly. “I’m something of an acquired taste. Once you get to know me-”
Smith’s eyes fly open and his usually mild features are fierce. “I know you. I have seen your life, your endless wandering and the destruction that follows in your wake. I have seen the joy you take in it, and it disgusts me.” Smith stands, his knuckles pressing whitely into the surface of his desk. “You are a careless fool, a coward without honour, discipline, or faith. You are as cold and unfeeling as stone, sir, and despite your physical abnormalities, I am sure you are quite heartless.”
The Doctor blinks, speechless for a long moment. “So you won’t be heading up the next meeting of my fan club, then?”
Smith smiles briefly but it does not reach his eyes. He sits. “I have assignments to mark.”
“But this doesn’t make sense. How can you hate me?” The Doctor perches on the edge of the desk. “You’re not some other, separate person - you’re part of me. A part of my mind.”
“And you don’t hate yourself?”
“Well,” the Doctor drawls, “that’s another conversation entirely.” He pauses. “Though an interesting one.”
“Then perhaps you’d be so kind as to go and have it somewhere else?”
The Doctor slips off the desk and runs his fingers through his hair, feeling the grit of sand against his scalp. “I’m looking for someone. He’s-”
“The laughing man,” Smith interrupts flatly. “Yes, I’ve seen him.” His expression shifts, and suddenly he looks unsettled. “He says the most shocking things. I don’t understand but half of it.” The Doctor notes the faint blush of the other man’s cheeks and can’t help but think it bizarre to see that look of Edwardian prudery on his own face.
*I am totally infatuated with the idea of the Master making horribly suggestive sexual comments to poor, hapless John Smith. It would be the best kind of evil fun.
“Yes, he does that. Do you know where he’s gone?”
Smith’s eyes narrow. “What could you possibly want with him? He’s dead.”
“So are you,” the Doctor points out, losing patience. “Look, I’m sorry, but it’s important. I have to find him.”
“He’ll find you,” Smith says simply. “He always does.” He stands and buttons his suit coat, smoothing his lapel in an unconscious gesture. “But I may have something that will interest you in the interim.” He crosses the room and removes the heavy grey dustcover from a gramophone, a massive, antique affair with a yawning brass-lipped mouth. He lifts the needle.
“You’re very helpful all of a sudden,” the Doctor says, his curiosity piqued despite the persistent, restless need to find what he’s lost.
John Smith smiles, a chilling glint of teeth. “You’d be surprised.”
* Ding! And another Creepy Dream Smile on top of that.
The record begins to spin, and he settles the needle into a groove.
As the record plays, there is the fizzling of static and the low, indistinct murmur of his own voice. A familiar, feminine laugh, and then the words become clear, like an image lurching into focus.
“…never just the one story, you know. A thousand stories, a thousand once upon a times, happily ever afters and that’s why you stay out of the woodses all interweaving and intertwining and…well…” His recorded voice trails off.
The laugh again. “Well?” a warm, alto voice prompts. In French.
“Well, I was going to say ‘intercoursing’, but that’s not exactly a word, is it? Copulating! Yes, copulating. Because you take the stories you know, you rub them together hard enough, shoot off a few sparks, and eventually a whole host of new stories are born, and they’re the same princesses and lost little girls and hungry wolves, but they’re entirely different. Evolution.”
*I have observed their mating habits in the wild, and this is a fairly accurate description of fairy tale reproductive behavior.
Though in real life there’s a bit more mounting involved.
There is a brief pause. “Why is it that whenever I talk to you, suddenly everything is about sex?”
*Um…no comment.
Reinette’s laugh echoes in the dim study, and his breath catches. “I couldn’t begin to imagine. You were going to tell me a story.”
“No, you already know the story. I was going to ask you to tell it to me.”
There is a crackling, white silence. “You said there were thousands of versions. Thousands of endings.”
“There are,” his recorded self replies soberly. “What ending do you know?”
Reinette sighs, the sound like a whisper. “She dies.”
*Now, this really set my inner-geek aflame. The real Madame de Pompadour would have been familiar with a very different version of Little Red Riding Hood than we know today. At the time, literary fairy tales were very big at the French court, and Charles Perrault (otherwise known as That Didactic Sexist Bastard) dominated that scene, even for some time after his death in 1703. In his La Petit Chaperon rouge, Little Red dies. Permanently. End of story.
(Perrault’s moral? This, young ladies, is why you should never flirt with a man, because if you do he will rape and kill you, and it’ll be all your fault.)
A hundred years later the Brothers Grimm would defy all reason and the acidic properties of lupine digestive juices and resurrect her, allowing her to emerge from the wolf’s belly the wiser for her journey. But Reinette would have never known this version of the story, or the much earlier folk (a.k.a. peasant) tales in which Little Red kicks the wolf’s ass all by herself and laughs all the way home.
“Devoured.” He hears the hardness in his own voice.
“By the wolf, yes. It is the price she pays, for talking to a stranger. The woods are a dangerous place.” There is a pause. “Are there stories in which she is saved?”
“By a passing woodcutter, by a huntsman.” Then he adds with something like hope, “Sometimes she saves herself.”
“But we will never know for sure,” she says, voice rich with her impossible understanding of the things he keeps hidden. “You try not to think about that story.”
The record spins silently for several moments. The light from the windows has faded; the room is dark. His reply, when it comes, is low and uneven. “It’s not a story, Reinette. I just like to pretend it is.”
*He couldn’t deal with what the Master told him on the Valiant that night. Not fully. He shoved it away and focused on the Archangel network and saving the Earth - problems he could solve. The conversation with Reinette cloaks the incident (and his ignorance of it) in metaphor, but now he has to accept the truth - something happened that day. Something horrible and real and he’s never going to know. But it’s not a story.
The gramophone falls silent. The Doctor walks over and lifts the needle. John Smith is gone, and he stands alone in the room. In the corridor, the grandfather clock chimes. He counts silently. After the seventh chime, there is silence.
“One for sorrow, two for joy,” the Doctor whispers to the empty room. “Three for a girl, and four for a boy. Five for the moon, six for the sun-”
*Now, this is what I was talking about when I did my whole ‘my interpretation means squat’ spiel before. In her comments,
salienne pointed out that while the Master’s counting rhyme refers to Martha and Rose as silver and gold, here the Doctor changes it to the moon and sun. She wrote: “The Master would think of Rose and Martha as acquisitions, one better than the other, while the Doctor makes them more precious and eternal and not things to be possessed, expressing almost (but not quite) the same sentiment.”
This in no way occurred to me while I was writing, but it is gorgeous and I LOVE it. And now it is all mine. Mua ha ha ha.
Ahem.
“You’re mucking it up,” a voice like a boy’s says from behind him, but when he turns there is no one there.