Little Sparrows with Dreams of Swans [fic]
Title: Little Sparrows with Dreams of Swans
Author:
shadowbyrd
Rating(s): PG - 13
Pairing(s): brief allusion to [onesided] Jack/Doctor
Word Count: 1725
Prompt: 12. Orange for
fanfic100
Warning(s): Angst! No spoilers
Summary: “I used to dream of your world when I was young, and now I have mourned for it, that it lived and I never knew it," How to crush hope.
Once upon a time, when he was just a little boy, short for his age, with dreams, nightmares and fears coming out of his ears, his mother would tell him stories before bed. All three of them, him and his brothers, gathered in Will’s room (because he was the youngest and usually first asleep) to hear their mother’s stories and sometimes their father’s, which were less flowery and distant, but by no means boring. When that story had finished and everyone had said goodnight, his Mom would go through to his room and tell a story just for him - because Will was asleep and Davy wasn’t afraid of the dark (as people without imaginations were wont to be, she murmured to Jack, rocking him gently to stop the tears).
She told him about a planet, which may or not have been real, with orange skies, like the whole horizon was on fire. And she told him about the people who lived there, removed from the rest of the universe by their natural affinity with time.
Gallifrey. Even the name sounded beautifully alien and exotic - a made up name, he was told over and over, but one that sounded like it might actually exist somewhere, in some obscure galaxy, tucked in a corner out of everyone else’s way to avoid getting tangled up in the universe’s other developing species.
She started spinning these stories very early on - he remembers them being part of bedtime even back when “there” and “though” were new to him and it was terribly important he remember “there’s a hen in “when”, but not in “went””. He hadn’t known anything about the Time Lords back then; the stories’ main appeal was the “flame bright sky”. He remembers at night, when the story was finished and the lights were out, stretching his hands up towards the ceiling, wondering what it would be like. His own sky was a boring blue - the only remotely interesting thing about it was the fact that it turned brighter and darker. The closest he got to an orange sky was coming up to sunset, and even then it tended to be more yellow or pink than orange. Would an orange sky be more tangible, closer than his own cool distant blue? Could he reach out and touch it, feel its warmth envelop his fingers?
As he got on with learning his science, he began to wonder. The water on his planet was blue because it mirrored the sky - did that mean Gallifrey’s seas and oceans were orange too? A delightfully prehistoric picture - even if he was over his dinosaur phase.
And what about the grass and the leaves and the plants? Would they be more in keeping with the planet’s rustic scheme? The clouds? Would they be white like back home? And the birds - if there were birds on this planet, and why not? According to Dad nearly 85% of known habitable planets had birds - who was Jack to argue? How splendid must the birds that rode that sky be? He could imagine one, perhaps the smallest of them all, nestling in his hands, could feel the flicker in and out of its bright flame-coloured chest, the brief whisper of its black wings against his fingers (and how like skin they felt, not like the coarse, elegant, monochrome feathers he picked off the ground on the way home from school). He could watch it cock its head at him and, with a pompous, long-suffering air, settle in his hands.
It stayed with him throughout his childhood, that idea of orange skies with two moons hanging in the air. He wanted to find that place, see those skies for himself. It wasn’t until his last few years of school, when he found articles on random artefacts and reports that rounded out the myths that he thought anymore about the Time Lords. It became one of those things; like their forefathers had obsessed over Kennedy’s real assassin, as some had tried to seek out Langdon and Brown’s holy grail, there was a little cluster of people sure the Time Lords were real. They met unofficially and discussed why no one had encountered them:
“- maybe we have come across them and we just don’t know it. You know, they’re pretending to have less power and influence than they really have, you know, hiding in plain sight -”
“- maybe they’re trying to keep out of the way, prevent themselves from interfering with time. That’s what the legends say they did; they prevented other beings from misusing time-travel. They just choose not to intervene with us because they have too many other concerns - after all in the scope of things we can’t be anywhere near as important as we think we are -”
“- what if they used to do that stuff but something happened? Like, I dunno, they died out? There is that myth about them going to war with the Daleks - it could be they were wiped out. But we still have traces of them because they came forward in time, or back in time or whatever, to sort things out here -”
Jack stopped going after a while; it whittled down to the same theories and explanations being passed around for everyone to poke the same holes in as they’d done so many times before, with nothing to stitch them back together.
Then came the war, and such frivolities were forgotten. The Time Lords and their grand, distant purposes left him, making room for the bodies and the weapons training, but their world, their sky, their songbirds always stayed with him. That one little bit of fantasy he held on to, cradling it, giving it gentle strokes and warm murmurs to better make its nest, like a little bird curled up in his bloodied, muddied hands.
It kept him warm and, though he wasn’t innocent enough for it to give him hope, it kept him from despair. He put it into words only once; to console his friend as they struggled, cold and alone, back to camp to pass on the information the enemy had failed to wrest from them and be debriefed. He lay awake in bed the night after his friend was shot, suspected of passing information to the enemy, no matter how many times Jack screamed he hadn’t, in all those hours of torture not a word had passed his lips; and his little bird lay curled up in his hands - it could be dead but for those flutters of breath Jack saw in its chest and the gentle heat that warmed his numb fingertips.
Then next time he went back home to the Boshane Peninsula the bombs had fallen, and for an excruciatingly indefinable length of time, which felt suspiciously like forever, Jack thought he had gone mad.
“- something’s happened. You’ve been captured, you’ve been tortured… being tortured? This isn’t real, they’re giving you drugs to screw up your head, this isn’t real -”
“- it’s a dream, that’s all it is, it’s just a nightmare and in the morning you’re going wake up and not remember any of it. Tears in the rain -”
“- son, haven’t you figured it out yet? You’ve gone mad from the atrocities and the shell shock. You’re on a psych ward somewhere if you’re lucky, otherwise they’re probably about to shoot you for faking -”
The sky was burning, scorched red and yellow and orange, the sun was lost like a leaf in the grass, the whole horizon on fire. The birds dropped black and burnt and still, little more than charcoal figures.
He cried and screamed and beat the ground and he had to be physically restrained from tearing his body suit off and no one could figure out why. In his cold white cell he cried himself sick, shaking with grief. No one understood. He hadn’t lost anyone; his family had managed to evacuate in time; none of his friends were caught in the blasts - he’d only had that one friend in the forces with him, but keep quiet, because we’re not supposed to talk about him.
He never bothered to try and explain to anyone what he was mourning, until some clever doctor psychiatrist had the idea of bringing his mother in to see him. He hugged her and told her in a great tumbling rush, words shoving and falling over one another as they hadn’t since he was ten and Davy had sneered at him for being afraid of the dark. He told her about how the skies were orange in a way he hadn’t wanted and he told her all about the little bird that had nested in his hands and died a sudden death, going cold and stiff and crumbling into black dust that clung to his hands and he hadn’t meant to kill it, he really hadn’t, because he loved that bird more than anything in the world.
And that is why he looks for the Doctor, now he knows that Gallifrey was real and that birds like that beautiful little thing, that charcoal figurine lived and breathed and sang - how he would have loved to hear it sing - he has to find him so he can tell him how his dream died twice.
He wants to meet him again, if only to say, “I used to dream of your world when I was young, and now I have mourned for it, that it lived and I never knew it, that it is dead and I will never know it; I will never stand upon the earth, to see and hear and touch and smell and taste. I fell in love with that world long before I fell in love with you, before I even met you, and I’m still confined to only imagining it. I’ll never hold that bird in my hands again.”
And it doesn’t matter if it makes sense or not, if the Doctor understands it or he doesn’t; he just has to tell him.
Until that day he’ll lie under the pale blue skies that sometimes turn grey when the sun’s not there, and darken to indigo when the Earth turns away, and he’ll count the blackbirds, cawing and flapping in the unreachable distance, with rainbows of colour hidden in the shimmer of their wings.
Author:
shadowbyrd
Rating(s): PG - 13
Pairing(s): brief allusion to [onesided] Jack/Doctor
Word Count: 1725
Prompt: 12. Orange for
fanfic100
Warning(s): Angst! No spoilers
Summary: “I used to dream of your world when I was young, and now I have mourned for it, that it lived and I never knew it," How to crush hope.
Once upon a time, when he was just a little boy, short for his age, with dreams, nightmares and fears coming out of his ears, his mother would tell him stories before bed. All three of them, him and his brothers, gathered in Will’s room (because he was the youngest and usually first asleep) to hear their mother’s stories and sometimes their father’s, which were less flowery and distant, but by no means boring. When that story had finished and everyone had said goodnight, his Mom would go through to his room and tell a story just for him - because Will was asleep and Davy wasn’t afraid of the dark (as people without imaginations were wont to be, she murmured to Jack, rocking him gently to stop the tears).
She told him about a planet, which may or not have been real, with orange skies, like the whole horizon was on fire. And she told him about the people who lived there, removed from the rest of the universe by their natural affinity with time.
Gallifrey. Even the name sounded beautifully alien and exotic - a made up name, he was told over and over, but one that sounded like it might actually exist somewhere, in some obscure galaxy, tucked in a corner out of everyone else’s way to avoid getting tangled up in the universe’s other developing species.
She started spinning these stories very early on - he remembers them being part of bedtime even back when “there” and “though” were new to him and it was terribly important he remember “there’s a hen in “when”, but not in “went””. He hadn’t known anything about the Time Lords back then; the stories’ main appeal was the “flame bright sky”. He remembers at night, when the story was finished and the lights were out, stretching his hands up towards the ceiling, wondering what it would be like. His own sky was a boring blue - the only remotely interesting thing about it was the fact that it turned brighter and darker. The closest he got to an orange sky was coming up to sunset, and even then it tended to be more yellow or pink than orange. Would an orange sky be more tangible, closer than his own cool distant blue? Could he reach out and touch it, feel its warmth envelop his fingers?
As he got on with learning his science, he began to wonder. The water on his planet was blue because it mirrored the sky - did that mean Gallifrey’s seas and oceans were orange too? A delightfully prehistoric picture - even if he was over his dinosaur phase.
And what about the grass and the leaves and the plants? Would they be more in keeping with the planet’s rustic scheme? The clouds? Would they be white like back home? And the birds - if there were birds on this planet, and why not? According to Dad nearly 85% of known habitable planets had birds - who was Jack to argue? How splendid must the birds that rode that sky be? He could imagine one, perhaps the smallest of them all, nestling in his hands, could feel the flicker in and out of its bright flame-coloured chest, the brief whisper of its black wings against his fingers (and how like skin they felt, not like the coarse, elegant, monochrome feathers he picked off the ground on the way home from school). He could watch it cock its head at him and, with a pompous, long-suffering air, settle in his hands.
It stayed with him throughout his childhood, that idea of orange skies with two moons hanging in the air. He wanted to find that place, see those skies for himself. It wasn’t until his last few years of school, when he found articles on random artefacts and reports that rounded out the myths that he thought anymore about the Time Lords. It became one of those things; like their forefathers had obsessed over Kennedy’s real assassin, as some had tried to seek out Langdon and Brown’s holy grail, there was a little cluster of people sure the Time Lords were real. They met unofficially and discussed why no one had encountered them:
“- maybe we have come across them and we just don’t know it. You know, they’re pretending to have less power and influence than they really have, you know, hiding in plain sight -”
“- maybe they’re trying to keep out of the way, prevent themselves from interfering with time. That’s what the legends say they did; they prevented other beings from misusing time-travel. They just choose not to intervene with us because they have too many other concerns - after all in the scope of things we can’t be anywhere near as important as we think we are -”
“- what if they used to do that stuff but something happened? Like, I dunno, they died out? There is that myth about them going to war with the Daleks - it could be they were wiped out. But we still have traces of them because they came forward in time, or back in time or whatever, to sort things out here -”
Jack stopped going after a while; it whittled down to the same theories and explanations being passed around for everyone to poke the same holes in as they’d done so many times before, with nothing to stitch them back together.
Then came the war, and such frivolities were forgotten. The Time Lords and their grand, distant purposes left him, making room for the bodies and the weapons training, but their world, their sky, their songbirds always stayed with him. That one little bit of fantasy he held on to, cradling it, giving it gentle strokes and warm murmurs to better make its nest, like a little bird curled up in his bloodied, muddied hands.
It kept him warm and, though he wasn’t innocent enough for it to give him hope, it kept him from despair. He put it into words only once; to console his friend as they struggled, cold and alone, back to camp to pass on the information the enemy had failed to wrest from them and be debriefed. He lay awake in bed the night after his friend was shot, suspected of passing information to the enemy, no matter how many times Jack screamed he hadn’t, in all those hours of torture not a word had passed his lips; and his little bird lay curled up in his hands - it could be dead but for those flutters of breath Jack saw in its chest and the gentle heat that warmed his numb fingertips.
Then next time he went back home to the Boshane Peninsula the bombs had fallen, and for an excruciatingly indefinable length of time, which felt suspiciously like forever, Jack thought he had gone mad.
“- something’s happened. You’ve been captured, you’ve been tortured… being tortured? This isn’t real, they’re giving you drugs to screw up your head, this isn’t real -”
“- it’s a dream, that’s all it is, it’s just a nightmare and in the morning you’re going wake up and not remember any of it. Tears in the rain -”
“- son, haven’t you figured it out yet? You’ve gone mad from the atrocities and the shell shock. You’re on a psych ward somewhere if you’re lucky, otherwise they’re probably about to shoot you for faking -”
The sky was burning, scorched red and yellow and orange, the sun was lost like a leaf in the grass, the whole horizon on fire. The birds dropped black and burnt and still, little more than charcoal figures.
He cried and screamed and beat the ground and he had to be physically restrained from tearing his body suit off and no one could figure out why. In his cold white cell he cried himself sick, shaking with grief. No one understood. He hadn’t lost anyone; his family had managed to evacuate in time; none of his friends were caught in the blasts - he’d only had that one friend in the forces with him, but keep quiet, because we’re not supposed to talk about him.
He never bothered to try and explain to anyone what he was mourning, until some clever doctor psychiatrist had the idea of bringing his mother in to see him. He hugged her and told her in a great tumbling rush, words shoving and falling over one another as they hadn’t since he was ten and Davy had sneered at him for being afraid of the dark. He told her about how the skies were orange in a way he hadn’t wanted and he told her all about the little bird that had nested in his hands and died a sudden death, going cold and stiff and crumbling into black dust that clung to his hands and he hadn’t meant to kill it, he really hadn’t, because he loved that bird more than anything in the world.
And that is why he looks for the Doctor, now he knows that Gallifrey was real and that birds like that beautiful little thing, that charcoal figurine lived and breathed and sang - how he would have loved to hear it sing - he has to find him so he can tell him how his dream died twice.
He wants to meet him again, if only to say, “I used to dream of your world when I was young, and now I have mourned for it, that it lived and I never knew it, that it is dead and I will never know it; I will never stand upon the earth, to see and hear and touch and smell and taste. I fell in love with that world long before I fell in love with you, before I even met you, and I’m still confined to only imagining it. I’ll never hold that bird in my hands again.”
And it doesn’t matter if it makes sense or not, if the Doctor understands it or he doesn’t; he just has to tell him.
Until that day he’ll lie under the pale blue skies that sometimes turn grey when the sun’s not there, and darken to indigo when the Earth turns away, and he’ll count the blackbirds, cawing and flapping in the unreachable distance, with rainbows of colour hidden in the shimmer of their wings.