Sail On, Sailor, Sail On

[vail_kagami]

Rating: G
Prompt: #068 - Lightning
Claim: The Time War
Table: Here
Spoilers: Extention of the last scene of the EDA The Year of Intelligent Tigers
Characters/Pairings: Karl/Eighth Doctor
Summary: Karl knows that when the Doctor and his friends leave, they leave for good.
Note: The title is a line from the song Fitz has written for the Doctor.

The

Comments

[nightrider101]

Wow! I have no idea what this is from, but I love the descriptions of the Doctor. So vivid and just perfect!

No longer a god, but not any more human.

You know I had to point that out. :)

Beautiful writing as always!

So how many do you have left on your time table? You have to be close to meeting your goal!

[vail_kagami]

This was the 49th story... I wrote it spontaneously after finishing the book last night. Since I can't sleep lately I have too much time on my hands, despite everything.
Glad you liked it, even if you don't know the background. If I find the book again (mine was a second-hand order and looks dreadful; it's a surprise no pages are missing) I'll send it to you - you'll like it!

Today's another final, isn't it? Good luck!

[nightrider101]

I'd love to read the book! :) At the moment, I'm anxiously counting down the days to the new episode of DW. We're so close!

I'm off to take my last final. Ugh... Then it will be over! YAY!

Hope you're having a relaxing weekend. :)

[kateorman]

Yay!

[vail_kagami]

Oh, I just love your icon!

And I love the novel, as if that wasn't obvious. It's my favourite EDA so far. (And it's a shame my bought-second-hand-at-amazon copy looks like it's been pulled out of someone's garbage... At least there were no missing pages.)

[brewsternorth]

Oh *wibble*. This is gorgeous.

[eviltigerlily]

This is so beautiful and sad. Bounce! *sobs*

Fitz, who had waited all that time for the Doctor’s return from the Bewilderness to give him a pair of clean socks

Oh, Fitz. He's so the Doctor's wife.

Karl could have given Fitz a last line for his song

Heh, yeah. Also, why do people always refer to Fitz as boy? Surely Karl is about the same age or younger.

[vail_kagami]

Thank you!

Bounce! *sobs*
Yeah... Broke my heart, that one...

Also, why do people always refer to Fitz as boy?
I have no idea - I just know Karl did. It seemed odd to me too. But people always do. Perhaps because he doesn't exactly give the impression of being an adult. Or simply because the Doctor does.
After all, Fitz managed to stay here for a few months, and there for a year, and adding it all up he still never got older than twenty-seven...

[eve11]

You know, this story hits a strange chord in me, because it reminds me just what is truly involved in the Doctor forgiving Karl. Oh, at the end of the novel, I couldn't do it. Karl in your story here seems to me unburdened in a way that I wish he wasn't; he speculates about Bounce and doesn't even realize that she was one of the ones he killed in his "moment of weakness". It was that death, over all the others, that hardened me to him. I suppose I'll have to work harder at forgiveness. I don't know if that's intentional or not, but it's definitely what came first to my mind.

And at the same time, I can see Karl's intelligence and his perserverance and his artistry coming through in his voice too; he sees the truth about the Doctor and he accepts it-- well, experiences it the same way the Doctor experiences butterflies that flit past. (And yeah, the line about the Doctor and war hits all the much harder because of course we know what is coming with the Time War.) It paints a conflicting portrait, or maybe I'm judging Karl too

[vail_kagami]

I feel a bit conlicted about Karl myself. I liked him a lot and he worked well with the Doctor, and in a way I can even understand what he was feeling when he killed the tigers - but the fact that he killed Bounce... well, it's had to forgive that, and without doubt the author did that on purpose.
Since the tigers were, well, tiger-shaped it's easy to forget that they were intelligent beings not too different from humans. If there had been a number of human corpses lying around, among them that of a drowned teenager, the situation would have been entire different. Like this, I think it's easier for Karl to blind out the magnitude of what he did.