[Doctor Who Fic] "Read Between the Lines"
I wrote Rose fic! Only for Mils (and gobs of money) do I do this!
Spoilers up until Doomsday. Hints of Doctor/Rose, but you and interpret it otherwise if you choose to.
Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, Dickens, Keats, and Rowling and even Jane Austen's juvenilia puts me to shame.
For milieva, who has also been kind enough to look this over for me and is one of the only people to actually convince me to write this out. I blame her and a cat named Bingley.
This is set Post-Doomsday.
Read Between the Lines
~ sciathan file ~
Slowly, Rose became aware that she was a keeper of untold stories. Only, the funny thing was that they were all stories that anyone had known in the other world.
She discovered this accidentally when, to welcome in old memories (her mother had said she was bent on misery), she pulled a copy of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol from a shelf in the Tyler Mansion library. Running her hand over the golden letters on the leather spine, an old story unfolded: Scrooge and his redemption, Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim…and other memories…
This story singing in her head, she opened the book and found that nowhere in it was the story she knew.
Marley was dead, yes, to begin with. But Scrooge was never redeemed. Yeah, the ghosts marched past one by one (although the endless "And God bless us all!" that Rose was familiar with from every telly show over the Christmas holidays had evaporated), but they seemed to be products of a diseased imagination, more than a means of redemption.
In the end, the magic of Christmas' effect on Scrooge was…his getting sectioned.
Pete had interrupted her towards the end and eyeing what she was reading, remarked, "Ah, I see you're reading Dickens."
She put the book down, for a moment, not sure of what to say.
"You must like a certain gritty realism."
A flash of Scrooge grasping onto the robe of a child-ghost blended seamlessly into the image of a maid standing beneath a column, dead where she stood.
Absent-mindedly continuing to run her fingers over the embossed letters, more vanished stories ran through her head: Charles Dickens at Christmas surrounded by ghostly Gelth, Scrooge humbled but happy, the same volume with its very different story wedged between a worn copy of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None from the year five billion and the first folio of Hamlet.
"Yeah," she responded shortly and shoved the volume back onto the shelf.
"I guess."
Pete chuckled nervously, feeling a certain tension between him and his not-quite-daughter - an untold story standing between them.
In the days that followed, Rose pulled down what used to be familiar volumes, from school, from the Doctor's haphazardly organized library, hardly worn books her father had not read before he died. Some played out with the familiarity of friends, but in others the words on the page had twisted and grown grotesque - half-truth and half lies or things entirely new covered by familiar titles.
Slowly, Rose learned that her stories were no longer real. Characters that had lived to old age in another world found their fictional lives ended abruptly, loves dissolved or materialized seemingly at random, plots she knew from childhood, had drilled into her head during school, watched mini-series of with her mother, grew unstable and evaporated into something irrevocably different.
(She hears the Doctor's voice narrating a scene from the final Harry Potter book. And her mind straying from the slightly squeaky tone he gave Harry in an otherwise somber scene, she sees him in that moment: his glasses are perched on his nose, he glances up occasionally to see if she cries at the bits that he says he did the first time he read it, and the tip of his tongue sticks out of his mouth when he turns the page.)
Some stories she doesn't dare touch. Better those remain untold in a world where she can no longer tell what the real stories are.
In Torchwood Tower, where she works, she resigns herself to the new plot, tired of misery of her own creation or that of others, wanting the fantastic. She befriends a brash woman there who is the head of personnel for the home office. Donna Noble is a woman who everyone says, almost seriously, argued her way to the top (not that they say this within earshot of her). Rose, who had been trained to look beneath strange skin hues and alien cultures, discovers that for all of her brash personality, Donna has an uncanny ability to see exactly what a person needs when they come to her.
She then proceeds to tell them in a blunt way that Rose (with a pang that she pretends is lessening) often thinks the Doctor would have liked…that was assuming, of course, that he didn't start arguing with her first.
Rose, however, liked her because Donna was the first person who did not seem to care at all that she was Pete Tyler's daughter and that she had emerged out of thin air and, mysteriously, into a position as a specialist for Torchwood. Today, she is reading a newspaper and, even though she looks up and sees that it is the infamous Rose Tyler waiting for her, she says "Just a tic" and continues reading as if no one whatsoever is there.
Quite used to this treatment, Rose leans over the desk and, arching an eyebrow asks, "Whatcha reading?"
"The news," Donna says curtly, enunciating each word and moving the paper closer to her chest. Rose barely manages to catch a glimpse of a book behind the paper. It has a title that begins with the letter P.
"So," Rose points, "is the news behind that book there, or a convenient cover?"
For a moment, Donna is gives her an evaluating look and, her expression melting into a conspiratorial half-smile, she tips the paper down to reveal the cover of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
Unable to think why someone should hide a book like that, Rose burst into laughter and exclaimed, "Are you hiding Jane Austen because you don't want to be thought of as - as…romantic or something…?"
"Shut it!" Donna responded loudly, her mouth drawing into the shape of an "o."
"But…Jane Austen?" Rose continued on in the same volume.
Standing and placing her palms on the edge of the desk Donna whispered fiercely, "Of course I'm hiding Jane Austen. Keep your voice down!"
Just to irritate her, Rose leaned over the desk and continued, "You're hiding the book where Elizabeth Bennet pursues the proud - and very rich - Mr. Darcy and they get married and live in a big house and Colin Firth gets an excuse to go swimming in a lake in only a few period underclothes?"
Far from the desired outcome, Donna looked at her as if she had just turned a bizarre shade of green.
Slowly, and with a seriousness that unsettled Rose for a moment, Donna said, "That's mad."
Between the two of them, Rose began to detect another story shimmering.
"Completely barmy!" Donna said again. Then placing her arms akimbo, she accused, "You're just having a joke - everyone knows - "
"Everyone one knows what? Darcy, Elizabeth, Bingley, even stupid Mr. Collins? It's the one novel everyone has to read by Jane Austen. Maybe Emma, too. But Pride and Prejudice is my favorite."
"Now I know you're joking - Austen only had one novel and it doesn't even have whatever lot you're talking about."
The head of personnel lowered her voice another notch.
"And the scandal of that one was enough to kill any other ones she could have written."
Donna sat down in her chair again, surreptitiously placing the offending book into her purse.
"Everyone knows Emma runs off with Jane Fairfax in Pride and Prejudice. That set the novel back quite a bit - Austen being bonkers and all the proper idiots in the Revolutionary Period thinking the novel was a medium for trash! Of course I'm hiding it!"
Rose opened her mouth and, knowing so differently but not being able to explain, laughed in what she hoped was a convincing manner. Donna joined in.
"Your favorite - Pride and Prejudice," she burst out before laughing again, "Bonkers!"
"Yeah," Rose managed, weakly. "That was a good one."
When Donna had managed to calm herself down, with tears pricking out of her eyes, she got around to asking Rose exactly what she had come for in the first place. Feigning a cheerful mood, Rose pointed to the files on a crash in Surrey and the dossiers of two prospective specialists that she had to review before clearing them to work on the project.
She took them and, mumbling something, left.
Later, in a room in the Tyler Mansion with bare, undecorated walls and file folders strewn over the floor, she thought of Elizabeth and Darcy and wondered how she became one of the only people in the entire world to know their story. She let the thought go and, pushing her work away, took up a position on the window seat, sitting there in silence until it was dark outside.
(In her head the lines "Bright star, would I was as steadfast as thou art - " echoed. She couldn't remember who wrote them, though, and she doubted whether she would be able to find out now. Once, she remembered, when he had thought she was sleeping, Rose had heard the words under the Doctor's breath accompanied only by a plumed feather pen scratching complicated circles within circles on a sheet of paper in front of him. And a sigh. She had always meant to ask about it. Always meant to.)
From then on, Rose was more careful when talking about books and movies and - anything that came from her other life. She kept those stories, suddenly precious, close to her.
Months into her acquaintance, when Rose had been caught staring out of windows of Torchwood's cantina too often all the while ignoring gossip about certain team members and even a sly allusion to Jane Austen (Donna had never let her forget), Donna asked pointedly, "Where did you come from before you were here?"
Rose looked at her for a moment, knowing that to tell that story to someone outside of her family or Mickey probably was exactly what she needed. But it stood like a wall between them: a man in a blue box that held the universe, mixed with images of Scrooge being hauled off, the absent shades of Pemberley, a lilting line of poetry intoned in the dark…Rose Tyler of the Powell Estates.
Now she was the keeper of a story that felt distant and impossible. And worse, she was only the keeper of that story…no longer the heroine.
For the first of many times, she gave Donna a half smile that only got better with practice and confidently said, as she had seen a man without a name do every time he was asked for it, "I did a bit of traveling...you know…places."
Donna gave her a look that told Rose that her friend did not quite believe what she had just told her.
But as she got up to return to her desk and files, all that she could see behind Donna's question was the story of a lonely man whom she had traveled with before being displaced from her own narrative.
And of all the stories Rose kept, she kept that one the closest.
Fin
:D
Spoilers up until Doomsday. Hints of Doctor/Rose, but you and interpret it otherwise if you choose to.
Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, Dickens, Keats, and Rowling and even Jane Austen's juvenilia puts me to shame.
For milieva, who has also been kind enough to look this over for me and is one of the only people to actually convince me to write this out. I blame her and a cat named Bingley.
This is set Post-Doomsday.
Read Between the Lines
~ sciathan file ~
Slowly, Rose became aware that she was a keeper of untold stories. Only, the funny thing was that they were all stories that anyone had known in the other world.
She discovered this accidentally when, to welcome in old memories (her mother had said she was bent on misery), she pulled a copy of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol from a shelf in the Tyler Mansion library. Running her hand over the golden letters on the leather spine, an old story unfolded: Scrooge and his redemption, Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim…and other memories…
This story singing in her head, she opened the book and found that nowhere in it was the story she knew.
Marley was dead, yes, to begin with. But Scrooge was never redeemed. Yeah, the ghosts marched past one by one (although the endless "And God bless us all!" that Rose was familiar with from every telly show over the Christmas holidays had evaporated), but they seemed to be products of a diseased imagination, more than a means of redemption.
In the end, the magic of Christmas' effect on Scrooge was…his getting sectioned.
Pete had interrupted her towards the end and eyeing what she was reading, remarked, "Ah, I see you're reading Dickens."
She put the book down, for a moment, not sure of what to say.
"You must like a certain gritty realism."
A flash of Scrooge grasping onto the robe of a child-ghost blended seamlessly into the image of a maid standing beneath a column, dead where she stood.
Absent-mindedly continuing to run her fingers over the embossed letters, more vanished stories ran through her head: Charles Dickens at Christmas surrounded by ghostly Gelth, Scrooge humbled but happy, the same volume with its very different story wedged between a worn copy of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None from the year five billion and the first folio of Hamlet.
"Yeah," she responded shortly and shoved the volume back onto the shelf.
"I guess."
Pete chuckled nervously, feeling a certain tension between him and his not-quite-daughter - an untold story standing between them.
In the days that followed, Rose pulled down what used to be familiar volumes, from school, from the Doctor's haphazardly organized library, hardly worn books her father had not read before he died. Some played out with the familiarity of friends, but in others the words on the page had twisted and grown grotesque - half-truth and half lies or things entirely new covered by familiar titles.
Slowly, Rose learned that her stories were no longer real. Characters that had lived to old age in another world found their fictional lives ended abruptly, loves dissolved or materialized seemingly at random, plots she knew from childhood, had drilled into her head during school, watched mini-series of with her mother, grew unstable and evaporated into something irrevocably different.
(She hears the Doctor's voice narrating a scene from the final Harry Potter book. And her mind straying from the slightly squeaky tone he gave Harry in an otherwise somber scene, she sees him in that moment: his glasses are perched on his nose, he glances up occasionally to see if she cries at the bits that he says he did the first time he read it, and the tip of his tongue sticks out of his mouth when he turns the page.)
Some stories she doesn't dare touch. Better those remain untold in a world where she can no longer tell what the real stories are.
In Torchwood Tower, where she works, she resigns herself to the new plot, tired of misery of her own creation or that of others, wanting the fantastic. She befriends a brash woman there who is the head of personnel for the home office. Donna Noble is a woman who everyone says, almost seriously, argued her way to the top (not that they say this within earshot of her). Rose, who had been trained to look beneath strange skin hues and alien cultures, discovers that for all of her brash personality, Donna has an uncanny ability to see exactly what a person needs when they come to her.
She then proceeds to tell them in a blunt way that Rose (with a pang that she pretends is lessening) often thinks the Doctor would have liked…that was assuming, of course, that he didn't start arguing with her first.
Rose, however, liked her because Donna was the first person who did not seem to care at all that she was Pete Tyler's daughter and that she had emerged out of thin air and, mysteriously, into a position as a specialist for Torchwood. Today, she is reading a newspaper and, even though she looks up and sees that it is the infamous Rose Tyler waiting for her, she says "Just a tic" and continues reading as if no one whatsoever is there.
Quite used to this treatment, Rose leans over the desk and, arching an eyebrow asks, "Whatcha reading?"
"The news," Donna says curtly, enunciating each word and moving the paper closer to her chest. Rose barely manages to catch a glimpse of a book behind the paper. It has a title that begins with the letter P.
"So," Rose points, "is the news behind that book there, or a convenient cover?"
For a moment, Donna is gives her an evaluating look and, her expression melting into a conspiratorial half-smile, she tips the paper down to reveal the cover of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
Unable to think why someone should hide a book like that, Rose burst into laughter and exclaimed, "Are you hiding Jane Austen because you don't want to be thought of as - as…romantic or something…?"
"Shut it!" Donna responded loudly, her mouth drawing into the shape of an "o."
"But…Jane Austen?" Rose continued on in the same volume.
Standing and placing her palms on the edge of the desk Donna whispered fiercely, "Of course I'm hiding Jane Austen. Keep your voice down!"
Just to irritate her, Rose leaned over the desk and continued, "You're hiding the book where Elizabeth Bennet pursues the proud - and very rich - Mr. Darcy and they get married and live in a big house and Colin Firth gets an excuse to go swimming in a lake in only a few period underclothes?"
Far from the desired outcome, Donna looked at her as if she had just turned a bizarre shade of green.
Slowly, and with a seriousness that unsettled Rose for a moment, Donna said, "That's mad."
Between the two of them, Rose began to detect another story shimmering.
"Completely barmy!" Donna said again. Then placing her arms akimbo, she accused, "You're just having a joke - everyone knows - "
"Everyone one knows what? Darcy, Elizabeth, Bingley, even stupid Mr. Collins? It's the one novel everyone has to read by Jane Austen. Maybe Emma, too. But Pride and Prejudice is my favorite."
"Now I know you're joking - Austen only had one novel and it doesn't even have whatever lot you're talking about."
The head of personnel lowered her voice another notch.
"And the scandal of that one was enough to kill any other ones she could have written."
Donna sat down in her chair again, surreptitiously placing the offending book into her purse.
"Everyone knows Emma runs off with Jane Fairfax in Pride and Prejudice. That set the novel back quite a bit - Austen being bonkers and all the proper idiots in the Revolutionary Period thinking the novel was a medium for trash! Of course I'm hiding it!"
Rose opened her mouth and, knowing so differently but not being able to explain, laughed in what she hoped was a convincing manner. Donna joined in.
"Your favorite - Pride and Prejudice," she burst out before laughing again, "Bonkers!"
"Yeah," Rose managed, weakly. "That was a good one."
When Donna had managed to calm herself down, with tears pricking out of her eyes, she got around to asking Rose exactly what she had come for in the first place. Feigning a cheerful mood, Rose pointed to the files on a crash in Surrey and the dossiers of two prospective specialists that she had to review before clearing them to work on the project.
She took them and, mumbling something, left.
Later, in a room in the Tyler Mansion with bare, undecorated walls and file folders strewn over the floor, she thought of Elizabeth and Darcy and wondered how she became one of the only people in the entire world to know their story. She let the thought go and, pushing her work away, took up a position on the window seat, sitting there in silence until it was dark outside.
(In her head the lines "Bright star, would I was as steadfast as thou art - " echoed. She couldn't remember who wrote them, though, and she doubted whether she would be able to find out now. Once, she remembered, when he had thought she was sleeping, Rose had heard the words under the Doctor's breath accompanied only by a plumed feather pen scratching complicated circles within circles on a sheet of paper in front of him. And a sigh. She had always meant to ask about it. Always meant to.)
From then on, Rose was more careful when talking about books and movies and - anything that came from her other life. She kept those stories, suddenly precious, close to her.
Months into her acquaintance, when Rose had been caught staring out of windows of Torchwood's cantina too often all the while ignoring gossip about certain team members and even a sly allusion to Jane Austen (Donna had never let her forget), Donna asked pointedly, "Where did you come from before you were here?"
Rose looked at her for a moment, knowing that to tell that story to someone outside of her family or Mickey probably was exactly what she needed. But it stood like a wall between them: a man in a blue box that held the universe, mixed with images of Scrooge being hauled off, the absent shades of Pemberley, a lilting line of poetry intoned in the dark…Rose Tyler of the Powell Estates.
Now she was the keeper of a story that felt distant and impossible. And worse, she was only the keeper of that story…no longer the heroine.
For the first of many times, she gave Donna a half smile that only got better with practice and confidently said, as she had seen a man without a name do every time he was asked for it, "I did a bit of traveling...you know…places."
Donna gave her a look that told Rose that her friend did not quite believe what she had just told her.
But as she got up to return to her desk and files, all that she could see behind Donna's question was the story of a lonely man whom she had traveled with before being displaced from her own narrative.
And of all the stories Rose kept, she kept that one the closest.
Fin
:D