Flash Fiction Comment-a-Thon Round 2
Welcome to Round 2 of the Flash Fiction Comment-a-Thon! Each round, we are looking to get flash fiction stories (stories that take up no more than the space of an LJ comment) on a related theme across the spectrum of Doctor Who, from a multitude of authors. Below is the prompt; post a comment to claim an era and I will put you on the list. When
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“So where are we going, Professor?” She tries to contain her excitement, but it’s impossible. It’s all she can do not to bounce about like a puppy dog.
He looks up from the controls studding the great six-sided console, does a Laurel and Hardy double-take: “What did I just say about rrrule number two?”
“Yeah, sorry, Professor,” she says, with an insolent smile, dumping her rucksack and rushing to his side, to see what he’s up to. “So where are we…?”
“Oh, you know…” He recklessly slams a lever back on the nearest panel, adjusts the large red plastic knob beside it with safecracker precision. “Here and there, near and far.” His fingers dance over a selection of buttons and switches. As he hits the last one, he’s not even looking because he’s too busy smiling conspiratorially at her: “There and…back again.”
“Ace,” she comments, nodding at the console: “Nice technology.”
“That’s certainly one way of describing it.”
The big glass column thing in the centre of the console starts to rise and fall, slowly and stiffly at first but gaining speed and fluency. The Professor quickly snatches his hat from where he left it on said column and tosses it onto the nearby hat stand with James Bond nonchalance. Again, he doesn’t even look. He’s too cool to bother looking before he leaps, just like her. She wonders whether this trait ever gets him in as much trouble as she’s been in over the years. From their brief acquaintance since he came to Iceworld with Mel and left with her instead, she would say that that was a dead certainty.
As the column continues its steady beat, she becomes aware of the sound, at the very edge of her hearing. It’s a quiet pulse, in time to the column’s movement. In…out…in…out… It’s…
“Professor,” she murmurs, lowering her voice without even meaning to. “Your ship, is it…?”
“She,” he corrects her, with an admonishing finger.
“Is…she…breathing?”
He gives her another impish smile, eyes twinkling: “What would you say if I told you she was?”
“I’d say Gordon Bennett, Professor, pull the other one!”
“Not breathing, exactly,” he admits. “She isn’t alive in the sense that you or I are alive, but that doesn’t mean that she isn’t. And she, by the way, has a name. Time And Relative Dimension In Space, or…”
“TARDIS,” she half-whispers, slotting the letters together in her head; she could practically hear him pronouncing the capitals.
“Yes, we have a new crrrrewmember,” he announces, theatrically, and she realises he isn’t talking to her. He’s talking to the ship. “Now, you be on your best behaviour with her.” He twinkles at her again, dropping his voice: “I think she likes you.”
“Oh, brill!” She knows he’s doing that eccentric uncle thing at her again, that he probably doesn’t really talk to his time machine and that the machine probably hasn’t really expressed an opinion on her. It makes her heart soar all the same. “Er…hello,” she says loudly, in the general direction of the ceiling.
“She really isn’t very communicative with humans,” he tells her, sounding wistful about it. “She barely communicates with me nowadays…”
“So are we really going to see the Twelve Galaxies?” she asks him.
“Do you want to?” he answers. “They do say they’re quite picturesque if you view them from the Scorpion Nebula.”
“Yeah, “they” say lots of things, Professor. Is that what you do? Go around looking at the sights and stuff?”
“Well, amongst other things…”
“Such as?”
“You know,” he says. And she does. “Interfering in things that are none of my business, except I think they are; righting wrongs. Looking for trouble, and often finding it.”
“Wicked,” she grins. “Let’s go and find some, then.”
His half-smile widens; clearly, he approves. “That’s what I was hoping you were going to say.”
END…?
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*HUGS*
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