Smoke and Sand 6/12
Fandoms: Darkest Night Trilogy / Doctor Who
Rating: PG-13 for some strong language
Timeline: Darkest Night Trilogy - This story is one year after the events of the last book, so everything is fair game.
Doctor Who - New Who seasons 2-4 (10th Doctor), with very heavy emphasis on Blink. However, nothing from season five.
Fandoms - In this story, the end of the second season of filming for Darkest Night takes place in October of 2009, before any information on Waters of Mars was official.
Disclaimer: The characters from the Darkest Night trilogy belong to Tanya Huff and her publisher. The 10th Doctor, Doctor Who, and related characters are all the property of their respective people. David Tennant and Matt Smith (briefly mentioned) are also not mine (more's the pity). In fact, I think the only original character disappears almost immediately. No harm is meant, nor am I making money off of this, so please don't sue. Mistakes are all my own.
I am not familiar with a lot of fanfiction sites. If you would like to link this to people whom you think would like to read it, please ask first. Otherwise, do not repost without permission.
A magic spell gone awry soon has Tony and the cast and crew at CB Productions saddled with a stranger who claims he's a Time Lord. When people start disappearing, Tony has to hope the man isn't crazy if he ever wants to see his friends again.
Tony looked around at the empty alley, surprised. It was certainly a development he hadn't expected. "Gone? How can it be gone? Who would steal a phone box?"
The Doctor paced the alley like a caged tiger, running a hand through his hair which succeeded in doing nothing except making it look more wild than it already had. "Perhaps that was the reason I was brought here," he said. "They didn't want me, they wanted the TARDIS, but who? Think," he growled to himself, pulling at his locks and making them worse.
"Think, but do it somewhere else," Henry said, stepping forward. He ignored the look of surprised confusion the Doctor gave him and stepped forward, turning on the spot and taking a deep breath. He frowned slightly, looking around.
"What are you doing?" the Doctor asked, curious.
"Smelling." He turned in a slow circle. "What does this TARDIS of yours look like?"
"A police box, really," he replied. "She's stuck in that form. From the outside, she's simply wood."
Henry's frown deepened and he studied the alley. "What are you getting?" Tony asked him.
"You," Henry replied. "Amy, Kevin Groves, the Doctor. I also smell something I've never smelled before, and wood and granite."
"Granite?" the Doctor said. "Are you sure?"
"I can tell the difference between granite and cement," Henry said dryly.
The Doctor didn't reply, turning on his heels to study the alley. "There's no granite here."
"Perhaps it had been," Lee suggested. "It's an alley. It could have been an old scent."
"I'm not a bloodhound," Henry said, ignoring Tony's snicker, "but it's very new, sometime this evening. I can't tell what accompanied it, though. I don't know which of these foreign smells besides the wood is your box."
"Does this foreign scent smell like the Doctor?" Tony asked. "What I mean is, the Doctor rides around inside the TARDIS. He should smell like it and it him."
"Her," the Doctor corrected absently. "Good show, though, but you've already said, Henry, that you smelled me and wood and then something foreign, so the foreign scent has to be whoever took her."
"Why is a police box a 'her'?" Lee asked Tony quietly. "I'm familiar with the series, but I haven't really watched it."
"Near as I can tell, the TARDIS is a living creature. He identifies it... her as female, though I'm not sure why," Tony murmured back. He watched the Doctor and Henry explore the alley and shrugged slightly. "Maybe it's some super psychic Time Lord knowledge, the gender of his vehicle. Or maybe it's just because everyone calls their ride a 'she'. Nice to know some inexplicable things are completely universal."
"There is no trail," Henry said. "The scent is here, but not at either end of the alley or any of the doors."
"You're suggesting that whoever stole her flew out of here?" the Doctor asked, frowning. "And smells of granite. Well, that certainly narrows down the list, although why would any of those species be here?"
"You think it was an alien?" Tony said, surprised. "It's usually magic for me."
"It's usually an alien for me," the Doctor replied. "Still, I don't know enough about this world to really say. What is stone and can fly?"
They all sort of frowned, looking around, then Lee snorted. "A gargoyle."
Tony rolled his eyes. "Great. What the hell would a gargoyle need a time machine for? I'm not up on my folktales, but they don't exactly die."
"Oh, of course!" the Doctor exclaimed, pulling his hair. "Oh, oh, you are good." He waved a finger at Lee. "You are just brilliant, but... no, why would they... but they couldn't know I'm.... 1969! But that can't be right. Sally knew us both. Think!"
"It's a wonder he's not bald," Lee noted, watching the Doctor spin in a circle and, once again, pull at his hair.
"English, Doctor, and make sense for the lesser life forms," Tony said.
"The weeping angels," the Doctor said, looking at him. "They're a race that are... well, pretty much your idea of gargoyles, except they aren't meant to frighten people. Well, they do frighten those who know about them," he said randomly, spinning again.
"And back to the point," Tony said dryly.
"Right. The lonely assassins, they're called. They have existed since the beginning of the universe or there about, feeding off of the abstract energies. But how did they know I'm here?" He looked up at the stars, barely visible through all of the lights. "I don't even know where I am exactly."
"Abstract energies?" Tony asked.
"Actually, I'm more interested in the 'assassins' part," Lee interrupted. "Why don't you go over that part again?"
The Doctor lowered his eyes to look at them. "They kill you," he said slowly, "by sending you into the past and letting you live to death. Then, in the present, they feed off of the energy of all of those future moments you no longer have."
Tony and Lee looked at each other. "That's not good," Tony remarked lightly.
"But you can stop them, right?" Lee asked the Doctor. "You're a time-traveler. If something happens, you can save us."
"Not without the TARDIS," the Doctor said, his expression grim as he studied the sky.
"Wait, I don't understand," Tony said. "Why would these angels smell like granite?"
"Because they are. Granite, that is. They are quantum locked. They are incredibly fast, but when observed by any living thing, they turn to stone."
"Well, that's not so bad," Lee said slowly.
"Ah, but then you glance away or blink, and you're dead." The Doctor sniffed. "The TARDIS is full of potential moments and energy. She'd be a feast if they can get into her. Fortunately, they can't, because I have the key." He held up an ordinary-looking chrome key. "Also, I have a psychic connection to the TARDIS. As long as I'm in the same time as her, I can find her."
Tony rolled his eyes. "Yeah, thanks for that service announcement. What would the bad guys do if they didn't know exactly who to attack?"
The Doctor blinked and opened his mouth, but he seemed unsure how to respond, and possibly a little hurt.
"More importantly, we know how to find this TARDIS and get him back home," Henry said.
The alley was suspiciously quiet as both Henry and Lee looked at Tony. "Oh, are you kidding me?" Tony grumbled. "It's two in the morning?"
"And the Doctor's... what? Going to sleep on your couch?" Lee asked, amused. "Oh, wait; you sleep on your couch."
Tony favored his boyfriend with a single finger before holding out his hand for the car keys. "Fine. I'll take the Doctor on a mission to save a wooden box from stone statues while you go home and get some sleep. It's not the first time I've worked on little to no sleep."
"Well," the Doctor interrupted, drawing out the vowel as he rocked on his feet, "there's a small problem. You see, even if we find the TARDIS and take it to safety, I can't leave the angels here and I've no idea how they got here. I still don't even know how I got here."
"So you can't get home without the TARDIS, but you can't save the TARDIS because you don't know how to get home? Doctor, you're not really helping," Lee pointed out.
The theme to the Darkest Night fortunately interrupted whatever mind-boggling nonsense was about to come out of the lanky alien's mouth. Tony pulled out his cell phone and peered at the number. "It's Kevin," he said, flipping the phone open. "Hopefully he'll have some answers for us. Kevin?"
"Tony, I didn't know exactly what I was looking for," Kevin started, his voice sounding a bit far away. Tony couldn't count the number of time Kevin had dropped the phone on him because he'd held it tucked between his chin and shoulder. "There was one, however, that sounded just up your alley."
Tony looked around the wet concrete walls. "No pun intended," he muttered. "What is it?"
"Joshua Bedlam, age seventeen, has apparently gone missing from his home. Nothing unusual there, his parents were out this evening, so he's only been missing for a few hours. However, his parents found a strange pattern drawn in colored sand on his bedroom floor and the melted remnants of candles, along with what appeared to be a book of spells."
Tony's eyebrows went up. "A spell gone wrong."
"And get this," Kevin said. "In the center of the pattern was a home-made DVD. Written on it were three words: doctor, who, and blink."
"Series and episode."
"That's what I thought," Kevin said. "So I looked up 'Blink' in reference to Doctor Who. It's an episode during the third season."
Tony closed his eyes. "With stone angel statues," he said, resigned.
Kevin was quiet for a moment. "Yeah. How did you know that?"
"Because they've stolen the TARDIS," Tony said. "Can you get me that book? I need to see what the kid did so I can figure out how to reverse it. We have got to get rid of the angels."
"That's going to be a little hard," Kevin said. "They wouldn't let me take a look. They want to preserve his room for the police to look at."
Tony sighed. Of course they did. Was his job ever easy? He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a ratty notebook with a stubby little pencil. "Alright. Give me the address." He scribbled it down. "Okay, check with Amy and see what she got. You two try to pool your resources together. This is starting to look like a singular incident, but let's not get lazy. Oh, and keep an ear out for other people disappearing under strange circumstances."
"Define strange," Kevin said dryly. "I work for a tabloid."
Tony shrugged. "Just... you know, one minute there, the next gone. If I knew what I was looking for, Kevin, I'd say so, but the disappearances will probably be similar to this kid's, minus the obvious signs of magic."
"What'll you be doing?"
Tony shrugged. "Fuck if I know. Making it up as I go along, as usual." He hung up.
"I suppose you'll be wanting me to break you into the house to take a look," Henry said. With his hearing he had, of course, listened to the entire conversation.
The Doctor frowned. "Break into a house?" Tony explained and he nodded. "Then leave getting in to me. You just get us there."
"And how are you going to get in?" Lee asked.
The Doctor studied Lee, his tongue touching his upper teeth as he dug into his coat pocket. With a grin, he flipped open his leather wallet. "Detective John Smith, at your service."
Lee frowned. "But that's blank."
The grin wiped clean off of the Doctor's face. "What?" He turned the wallet around as Tony laughed. "But it's psychic paper. Are you a wizard too?"
"He's been possessed by more than one evil wizard," Tony said, amused.
The Time Lord actually pouted. "Well that's just cheating."
The wizard shook his head but turned to his ex and current boyfriend. "You'll take him home?" he asked Henry.
"I won't let anything happen to him," Henry promised while Lee rolled his eyes.
"I'll be fine," he said, stepping forward to give Tony a quick kiss. "You be careful. If this really is the Doctor, he'll watch your back, but you keep your eyes open all the same. And keep us all in the loop."
Tony raised his hands in surrender. "I will, I will." He smiled warmly at the actor, wondering yet again how he managed to get so lucky. Oh, yeah, he had to stop an evil wizard, a haunted house, and a demonic invasion for that relationship. He more than deserved it.
He finally headed over toward Lee's car. After a moment, he felt the Doctor fall into step behind him. The other man was uncharacteristically quiet, so Tony assumed he was still pouting over the lack of awe his paper had induced. It wasn't until Tony was pulling out of the parking lot that he finally said, "By 'possessed by', you mean psychically and not in any sort of physical way, don't you?"
Tony ran over the curb.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Rating: PG-13 for some strong language
Timeline: Darkest Night Trilogy - This story is one year after the events of the last book, so everything is fair game.
Doctor Who - New Who seasons 2-4 (10th Doctor), with very heavy emphasis on Blink. However, nothing from season five.
Fandoms - In this story, the end of the second season of filming for Darkest Night takes place in October of 2009, before any information on Waters of Mars was official.
Disclaimer: The characters from the Darkest Night trilogy belong to Tanya Huff and her publisher. The 10th Doctor, Doctor Who, and related characters are all the property of their respective people. David Tennant and Matt Smith (briefly mentioned) are also not mine (more's the pity). In fact, I think the only original character disappears almost immediately. No harm is meant, nor am I making money off of this, so please don't sue. Mistakes are all my own.
I am not familiar with a lot of fanfiction sites. If you would like to link this to people whom you think would like to read it, please ask first. Otherwise, do not repost without permission.
A magic spell gone awry soon has Tony and the cast and crew at CB Productions saddled with a stranger who claims he's a Time Lord. When people start disappearing, Tony has to hope the man isn't crazy if he ever wants to see his friends again.
Tony looked around at the empty alley, surprised. It was certainly a development he hadn't expected. "Gone? How can it be gone? Who would steal a phone box?"
The Doctor paced the alley like a caged tiger, running a hand through his hair which succeeded in doing nothing except making it look more wild than it already had. "Perhaps that was the reason I was brought here," he said. "They didn't want me, they wanted the TARDIS, but who? Think," he growled to himself, pulling at his locks and making them worse.
"Think, but do it somewhere else," Henry said, stepping forward. He ignored the look of surprised confusion the Doctor gave him and stepped forward, turning on the spot and taking a deep breath. He frowned slightly, looking around.
"What are you doing?" the Doctor asked, curious.
"Smelling." He turned in a slow circle. "What does this TARDIS of yours look like?"
"A police box, really," he replied. "She's stuck in that form. From the outside, she's simply wood."
Henry's frown deepened and he studied the alley. "What are you getting?" Tony asked him.
"You," Henry replied. "Amy, Kevin Groves, the Doctor. I also smell something I've never smelled before, and wood and granite."
"Granite?" the Doctor said. "Are you sure?"
"I can tell the difference between granite and cement," Henry said dryly.
The Doctor didn't reply, turning on his heels to study the alley. "There's no granite here."
"Perhaps it had been," Lee suggested. "It's an alley. It could have been an old scent."
"I'm not a bloodhound," Henry said, ignoring Tony's snicker, "but it's very new, sometime this evening. I can't tell what accompanied it, though. I don't know which of these foreign smells besides the wood is your box."
"Does this foreign scent smell like the Doctor?" Tony asked. "What I mean is, the Doctor rides around inside the TARDIS. He should smell like it and it him."
"Her," the Doctor corrected absently. "Good show, though, but you've already said, Henry, that you smelled me and wood and then something foreign, so the foreign scent has to be whoever took her."
"Why is a police box a 'her'?" Lee asked Tony quietly. "I'm familiar with the series, but I haven't really watched it."
"Near as I can tell, the TARDIS is a living creature. He identifies it... her as female, though I'm not sure why," Tony murmured back. He watched the Doctor and Henry explore the alley and shrugged slightly. "Maybe it's some super psychic Time Lord knowledge, the gender of his vehicle. Or maybe it's just because everyone calls their ride a 'she'. Nice to know some inexplicable things are completely universal."
"There is no trail," Henry said. "The scent is here, but not at either end of the alley or any of the doors."
"You're suggesting that whoever stole her flew out of here?" the Doctor asked, frowning. "And smells of granite. Well, that certainly narrows down the list, although why would any of those species be here?"
"You think it was an alien?" Tony said, surprised. "It's usually magic for me."
"It's usually an alien for me," the Doctor replied. "Still, I don't know enough about this world to really say. What is stone and can fly?"
They all sort of frowned, looking around, then Lee snorted. "A gargoyle."
Tony rolled his eyes. "Great. What the hell would a gargoyle need a time machine for? I'm not up on my folktales, but they don't exactly die."
"Oh, of course!" the Doctor exclaimed, pulling his hair. "Oh, oh, you are good." He waved a finger at Lee. "You are just brilliant, but... no, why would they... but they couldn't know I'm.... 1969! But that can't be right. Sally knew us both. Think!"
"It's a wonder he's not bald," Lee noted, watching the Doctor spin in a circle and, once again, pull at his hair.
"English, Doctor, and make sense for the lesser life forms," Tony said.
"The weeping angels," the Doctor said, looking at him. "They're a race that are... well, pretty much your idea of gargoyles, except they aren't meant to frighten people. Well, they do frighten those who know about them," he said randomly, spinning again.
"And back to the point," Tony said dryly.
"Right. The lonely assassins, they're called. They have existed since the beginning of the universe or there about, feeding off of the abstract energies. But how did they know I'm here?" He looked up at the stars, barely visible through all of the lights. "I don't even know where I am exactly."
"Abstract energies?" Tony asked.
"Actually, I'm more interested in the 'assassins' part," Lee interrupted. "Why don't you go over that part again?"
The Doctor lowered his eyes to look at them. "They kill you," he said slowly, "by sending you into the past and letting you live to death. Then, in the present, they feed off of the energy of all of those future moments you no longer have."
Tony and Lee looked at each other. "That's not good," Tony remarked lightly.
"But you can stop them, right?" Lee asked the Doctor. "You're a time-traveler. If something happens, you can save us."
"Not without the TARDIS," the Doctor said, his expression grim as he studied the sky.
"Wait, I don't understand," Tony said. "Why would these angels smell like granite?"
"Because they are. Granite, that is. They are quantum locked. They are incredibly fast, but when observed by any living thing, they turn to stone."
"Well, that's not so bad," Lee said slowly.
"Ah, but then you glance away or blink, and you're dead." The Doctor sniffed. "The TARDIS is full of potential moments and energy. She'd be a feast if they can get into her. Fortunately, they can't, because I have the key." He held up an ordinary-looking chrome key. "Also, I have a psychic connection to the TARDIS. As long as I'm in the same time as her, I can find her."
Tony rolled his eyes. "Yeah, thanks for that service announcement. What would the bad guys do if they didn't know exactly who to attack?"
The Doctor blinked and opened his mouth, but he seemed unsure how to respond, and possibly a little hurt.
"More importantly, we know how to find this TARDIS and get him back home," Henry said.
The alley was suspiciously quiet as both Henry and Lee looked at Tony. "Oh, are you kidding me?" Tony grumbled. "It's two in the morning?"
"And the Doctor's... what? Going to sleep on your couch?" Lee asked, amused. "Oh, wait; you sleep on your couch."
Tony favored his boyfriend with a single finger before holding out his hand for the car keys. "Fine. I'll take the Doctor on a mission to save a wooden box from stone statues while you go home and get some sleep. It's not the first time I've worked on little to no sleep."
"Well," the Doctor interrupted, drawing out the vowel as he rocked on his feet, "there's a small problem. You see, even if we find the TARDIS and take it to safety, I can't leave the angels here and I've no idea how they got here. I still don't even know how I got here."
"So you can't get home without the TARDIS, but you can't save the TARDIS because you don't know how to get home? Doctor, you're not really helping," Lee pointed out.
The theme to the Darkest Night fortunately interrupted whatever mind-boggling nonsense was about to come out of the lanky alien's mouth. Tony pulled out his cell phone and peered at the number. "It's Kevin," he said, flipping the phone open. "Hopefully he'll have some answers for us. Kevin?"
"Tony, I didn't know exactly what I was looking for," Kevin started, his voice sounding a bit far away. Tony couldn't count the number of time Kevin had dropped the phone on him because he'd held it tucked between his chin and shoulder. "There was one, however, that sounded just up your alley."
Tony looked around the wet concrete walls. "No pun intended," he muttered. "What is it?"
"Joshua Bedlam, age seventeen, has apparently gone missing from his home. Nothing unusual there, his parents were out this evening, so he's only been missing for a few hours. However, his parents found a strange pattern drawn in colored sand on his bedroom floor and the melted remnants of candles, along with what appeared to be a book of spells."
Tony's eyebrows went up. "A spell gone wrong."
"And get this," Kevin said. "In the center of the pattern was a home-made DVD. Written on it were three words: doctor, who, and blink."
"Series and episode."
"That's what I thought," Kevin said. "So I looked up 'Blink' in reference to Doctor Who. It's an episode during the third season."
Tony closed his eyes. "With stone angel statues," he said, resigned.
Kevin was quiet for a moment. "Yeah. How did you know that?"
"Because they've stolen the TARDIS," Tony said. "Can you get me that book? I need to see what the kid did so I can figure out how to reverse it. We have got to get rid of the angels."
"That's going to be a little hard," Kevin said. "They wouldn't let me take a look. They want to preserve his room for the police to look at."
Tony sighed. Of course they did. Was his job ever easy? He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a ratty notebook with a stubby little pencil. "Alright. Give me the address." He scribbled it down. "Okay, check with Amy and see what she got. You two try to pool your resources together. This is starting to look like a singular incident, but let's not get lazy. Oh, and keep an ear out for other people disappearing under strange circumstances."
"Define strange," Kevin said dryly. "I work for a tabloid."
Tony shrugged. "Just... you know, one minute there, the next gone. If I knew what I was looking for, Kevin, I'd say so, but the disappearances will probably be similar to this kid's, minus the obvious signs of magic."
"What'll you be doing?"
Tony shrugged. "Fuck if I know. Making it up as I go along, as usual." He hung up.
"I suppose you'll be wanting me to break you into the house to take a look," Henry said. With his hearing he had, of course, listened to the entire conversation.
The Doctor frowned. "Break into a house?" Tony explained and he nodded. "Then leave getting in to me. You just get us there."
"And how are you going to get in?" Lee asked.
The Doctor studied Lee, his tongue touching his upper teeth as he dug into his coat pocket. With a grin, he flipped open his leather wallet. "Detective John Smith, at your service."
Lee frowned. "But that's blank."
The grin wiped clean off of the Doctor's face. "What?" He turned the wallet around as Tony laughed. "But it's psychic paper. Are you a wizard too?"
"He's been possessed by more than one evil wizard," Tony said, amused.
The Time Lord actually pouted. "Well that's just cheating."
The wizard shook his head but turned to his ex and current boyfriend. "You'll take him home?" he asked Henry.
"I won't let anything happen to him," Henry promised while Lee rolled his eyes.
"I'll be fine," he said, stepping forward to give Tony a quick kiss. "You be careful. If this really is the Doctor, he'll watch your back, but you keep your eyes open all the same. And keep us all in the loop."
Tony raised his hands in surrender. "I will, I will." He smiled warmly at the actor, wondering yet again how he managed to get so lucky. Oh, yeah, he had to stop an evil wizard, a haunted house, and a demonic invasion for that relationship. He more than deserved it.
He finally headed over toward Lee's car. After a moment, he felt the Doctor fall into step behind him. The other man was uncharacteristically quiet, so Tony assumed he was still pouting over the lack of awe his paper had induced. It wasn't until Tony was pulling out of the parking lot that he finally said, "By 'possessed by', you mean psychically and not in any sort of physical way, don't you?"
Tony ran over the curb.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five