Fic Commentary: Touching Time Chapter 4
This is the third installment of the Fic Commentary Meme, where you request 'em and I annotate 'em ( original post here). This one was requested by prynne12. The original text of this story can be found here.
So here we are with Chapter 4 of Touching Time. This story, as is the others in this series, is about trying to figure out why two people who so clearly want to be together aren't yet, despite what would seem to be ample opportunity.
Quick summary of the story thus far is that I've done something totally insane and trapped the Doctor and Rose in separate quarantine rooms, where they can converse through the wall, but not actually see one another. For days. Many was the time while writing this that I thought I had given myself a completely impossible task. OH THE TALKING!!! So. Much. Talking.
Anyway.
"So what book did you bring?" The Doctor's query sounded to Rose like some sort of demented chat-up line. She'd been watching telly with the volume down extremely low, in the hopes that he couldn't hear through the wall that she was very much indulging in an extremely guilty pleasure.
"The Scarlet Letter. Thought that if I was going to travel with you I should make an effort to improve myself."
Rose is a little insecure about being a school drop-out while travelling with the most brilliant man in the universe. Wouldn't you be?
And how did I pick the Scarlet Letter? Well, a combination of things. Firstly, it's one of my very favourite books. I have a serious history with it that consists of me absolutely hating it, hating every single page, wanting to rip it in to tiny pieces and burn it, when I first read it. And then I had to read it again for another class in the same bloody year and I went completely apeshit on my teacher over it. I made her cry. No, really. But then that time when I read it, I totally loved it, but of course now I couldn't tell anyone that because I'd already come out on record as loathing it, and I was 16 so you'll have that. I had a jean jacket at the time (hi, it was the early 90's) that I did all sorts of adolescent stuff to, wrote on it, dyed it, bleached it, this and that, whatever. I wound up embroidering a scarlet letter on to the front pocket. I was an odd child. Anyway, moving on, love the book, have now taught it twice (once to a group of very ambitions advanced ESOL learners in China and once to a gaggle of surly 11th graders here stateside), read it many times.
So, I was thinking as I was writing this, I want Rose to read a book and tell the Doctor about it that has something to do with their current situation. It has to be a book I know well and have read myself, obviously, so I just sort of started to flip through in my mind the books I've read recently. And it just kind of came to me, a book about two people who love each other but can't be together because of various bogus and non-bogus reasons? The Scarlet Letter.
"You don't need improving," he said frankly, as if he was talking about a computer upgrade. "Hawthorne, eh?"
Rose turned the television off and turned to face the wall behind her bed. "Yeah, found it in the library."
"Bit of a gloomy Gus. Melville was a lot more fun."
"To read?" Rose sort of already knew that wasn't going to be the answer. She'd never actually seen the Doctor read anything for pleasure, though books abounded on the TARDIS. She had a feeling that whenever he wanted to know something, his first choice was to just go to the source and experience it first-hand.
"No, to party with." The 'of course' remained silent. "So tell me about it."
I can never resist an opportunity to have the Doctor talking about meeting historical personages. It's one of the fabulous things about a character who can travel in both time and space. There's actually a "deleted scene" from this chapter where he goes on at length about CS Lewis and Screwtape (Screwtape is, of course, an alien). But I couldn't make that fit in with the rest of the narrative flow.
"About partying with Herman Melville?"
"No, about that book." He sounded like he was trying to come off as casual but was in reality getting quite over-excited. Rose imagined him on the other side of the wall engaging in his full panoply of tics. The image made her grin from ear to ear.
Don't we all love the Tenth Doctor's tics? I wanted to leave my reader free to imagine all their favourites going on here. But let me tell you, it is hard goddamn work writing dialogue where the character's POV does not include what the other character is looking like.
"What, you haven't read it?" she teased.
"All the books in the entire Universe and I'm supposed to have read the whole lot? I'm old, Rose, but I'm not that old."
"It was in your library." And so it was, a leather-bound edition, just the right size to easily slip into her rucksack and comfortable enough to hold and read poolside.
"It was a gift, from an old friend. I just never got 'round to it. I think you may have noticed that I'm a busy chap."
You know, I never really think of the Doctor as a big reader. He respects books because he respects knowledge, but if you had the choice between reading about the Trojan War and actually going and watching it, which would you choose?
Also, I imagine the friend who gave this to him as being Sarah Jane. She's so sympatico with Rose's over this issue, I think.
"Well, it's been a bit of a slog if I'm honest," said Rose. "If I weren't stuck here with only your sparkling conversation to entertain me, I might never have finished it."
"Have you then? Finished it?"
"Yes, unfortunately," she sighed. "And we've got what...?"
His answer came before she'd even begun to count on her fingers. "Thirty-nine point one two eight three hours to go."
"You got a timer set over there or something?"
"If you could see me, I'd be tapping my temple with my finger as if to say, I'm so clever, I don't need a watch to tell the time. But since you can't, I'll just have to say it proper. I'm so clever, I don't need a watch to tell the time."
Heh. I crack my own self up sometimes.
"Mmm. I always forget." It was so easy to forget. He looked like a man, (usually) talked like a man, certainly smelled like a man in some fairly tantalizing ways, and it was so easy to forget that he was not human at all, that he had extra senses and abilities and a way of thinking about the Universe that she would never be able to fully understand. Loving him as a man was easy. Loving him as a Time Lord was something that Rose was not entirely certain she was up to.
I didn't want to present Rose as being completely the Voice of Reason here and the Doctor as just being a twat. There's things going on here that she doesn't know about, and really can't know about, she only thinks she knows the score. She's got several valid points, but so does he. He has not revealed his yet though, so she can only guess.
"So, what's it about then, eh? And if you could stretch it out for thirty-nine or so hours, that'd be brilliant."
"I could read you the whole thing ten times in thirty-nine hours." Rose regretted her words as soon as they exited her mouth.
"Oh yes please," the Doctor fairly shouted.
"No. Sorry Doctor, I'm--I'm ever so fond of you but I don't think so, no. I'll give you the Cliff's Notes version."
"Well go on then."
Rose took a deep breath, suddenly feeling herself every bit the uneducated girl from the council estate and unsure whether she had really gotten anything worthwhile from this dense book. "Right, so, basically there's this guy and this lady who are secretly in love, and he even gets her up the duff which shocks the pants off of all these horrid stuck-up prigs she lives with and they make her wear this big red 'A' for adulterer around. But the guy, he thinks they can never ever be together for all these daft reasons, so he just lets all this happen to her and never says a thing."
How on the spot do you feel when people ask you to tell them about books? For an English major, I'm alarmingly uncomfortable with it. I even have a joke with my husband because I can't stand it when people ask me about books they've read, "So what part are you at?" I clam up and can't talk about it. Weird, I know.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah, like he's a vicar sort of, but it's not like they're Catholics or anything so he can get married. And she's already married, but her husband disappeared before she even met this other bloke, so she might as well be a widow. So these two are hopelessly in love, though beats me what she sees in him, and she has this baby and he just totally ignores her and lets everyone go on thinking she's a total slut. But the whole time this jerk is torturing himself--literally, with like whips and stuff--over her. And he could go be with her any time he wanted, run away with her, go somewhere where no one knew either of them and be a family together. But he doesn't."
"Why not, do you think?" The Doctor's tone was getting a bit too GCSE for Rose's taste.
The Doctor is pretty clear on what she is trying to do here at this point, because there's obviously a lot more to Hawthorne's story than just this bit, and as he reveals later, he knows that. He's trying to pick Rose's brain about where she's coming from, through the intermediary of the book.
"Beats me. He thinks he doesn't deserve her, or that God or whatever is judging him, he cares what all these other prats think about him 'cause he's some hotshot preacher and he likes it that everyone fancies him for that. He's got all these ideas about why they can't be together, and in the end he just dies all stupidly 'cause of...some other stuff. But the point is, all his ideas about could and should, all they do is make absolutely everyone in to right miseries." Rose fervently hoped that her interpretation was not completely wrong and off the wall, but then again if the Doctor hadn't read it, how would he know?
"This guy, this vicar," she continued, "he's got a good heart at first, but he's so caught up in the way he thinks life should be, he never lets himself enjoy life the way it actually is. And this poor woman, she loves him so much, she never tells anyone it was him that got her in trouble, and she wastes her life like that. I think it's the saddest thing I've ever read."
I actually don't think it's the saddest thing I've ever read. That's just Rose. I don't feel that Hester wastes her life, or that she is a "poor woman". She's one of the strongest female characters in all of literature, from where I'm sitting. But if Rose is kind of latching on to this aspect of the story, and identifying her own situation with Hester, and seeing the end of this story as one possible end to hers, she's going to see it as pretty bleak. This was a perspective I saw in many of my students when I taught it in high school, and given that Rose at this point is only a few years older than them, it makes sense.
There was a moment of silence and Rose reclined slightly on to the pillows of the bed.
"But still," the Doctor finally said, "don't you think Hester's a better person for it, at the end of it all?"
Rose was examining some of her split ends and contemplating getting her little scissors out of her manicure kit. "Oh, I don't know--hang on! You have read it, haven't you?" She sat upright again and stared daggers at the wall.
"Might have done. Once or twice," came the answer, all innocence and charm.
"You made like you hadn't and you let me gibber on and on so you could have a go? That's very nice, Doctor. Are you that bored?" Rose balled both her hands up in to little fists. What was he on about, making fun of a young girl's flawed interpretation of a very difficult piece of literature? And after she'd really begun to feel a connection with the book, as difficult as it had been to read, he had to ruin it.
The Doctor can be a git, can't he?
"I wasn't trying to have a go. I'm legitimately interested in your take on it." His voice was smooth like honey, and calm.
"Can't have been worth much," she pouted. "I'm hardly what you'd call a scholar."
"Nonsense. You're brilliant! Couldn't stand to be with you if you weren't," he sniffed.
Maybe not so brilliant, Rose thought to herself. Maybe just stubborn, and foolish, as she'd said before in the desert. He'd already tried to send her away by force once, and even with hundreds of thousands of years between them it could not stop her from making good on her promise to be with him forever. Or at least the human version of forever. Perhaps without a whole lot of schooling, and of debatable prudence, Rose Tyler was nothing if not determined. In Rose, the Doctor had met an immovable object who more than equaled his unstoppable force. She would simply refuse to let him be her Reverend Dimmesdale, and that would be an end on it.
Oh, Rose. Rose, Rose, Rose. Okay, so the way I tend to write Rose, she's always just 100% stubborn and determined, and the object of her determination is pretty much always Doctor-related. Nothing stops this woman. I feel the evidence is there in canon. How many times did she have to overcome ridiculous obstacles in order to return to the Doctor? In her early period I think ignorance does largely come in to play. It's easy to be determined when you aren't really fully cognisant of the nature of the obstacles. The Rose we meet in Turn Left onward however I think is a much older, smarter, more canny woman but still equally stubborn and determined. She knows exactly what she's up against, and she does it anyway.
But here, we've still got Young Rose, perhaps only just beginning to realise what the true nature of the man she loves is and what the reality of their life together could be (or not be).