Photographic Memory (1/2?)
Title: Photographic Memory (1/2?)
Author:
whollyuncertain
Rating: K
Summary: Why humans invented photography.
Disclaimer: Not yet.
Author's Note: A fic I started ages back.
*waves* Hullo. I've been gone for a while - which surprises no one because I have a habit of huge gaps in my writing anyway, but this has been a very long year for me. I don't know if I'm back or if I even have a state of "being back," but do have this fic, as I wrote it and things.
**
As most things do, it starts out as a hobby... or something less. In all honesty, it really starts out as snapshots here and there of things she decides that she, in an appropriately stunned fashion, simply needs to take a photo of, with frozen fingers sinking into buttons while trying to keep back the cold on the beaches of Woman Wept, while keeping the hair out of her face on the mountains of Morielisa or Chyros. They start merely as little momentos saved in blurry pixellated files in the deep recesses of her superphone that utterly fail to encompass the magnificence of what they try to hold, but work well enough as reminders for her brain to fill in the rest.
It soon develops into something more, until she can barely walk twenty feet before she's pulling her phone out again.
Sometimes he walks ahead before noticing that her hand is gone and turns around to see her stalled with her phone twisted at what she's trying to make the best angle. She sometimes backs up. Sometimes she backs up some more, sometimes over rocks and around trees, or trots forward a bit to try again, tripping and never noticing the twitch of amusement at the corner of his mouth, so engrossed in her phone. Then he'll raise his eyebrow and wait with his hands stuffed in his pockets, lingering at the edges of what he estimates to be her frame, kicking a pebble or readjusting the settings of some gadget or another in anticipation for the moment she runs back up to him with a pointless, breathless apology and her hand sliding back into his. Then he'll give her fingers a squeeze, as though he's trying to remind himself to notice the next time they disappear, but it doesn't quite work out all the time.
A lot of the pictures feature his back. Very occasionally, if she's lucky and she sticks her tongue out of the corner of her mouth in just a way, he lets her take photos of his face. She has to turn the pouting onto full power to get him to look at the tiny lens and not make it appear as though he's about to bolt out of frame.
With increasing frequency, her phone is the only light of her room during the night, and the words Jackie Tyler would have to say about that if she knew. But she does it anyway, reliving the day in her mind as she flips through the tiny gallery, and each picture is always more focused than the last. Or more steady. Or has a better angle. Or has less of a glare obscuring a large percentage of what she was trying to catch. Just ever so slightly with each day, she sees it get better, though it's several weeks before she actually begins to notice the improvement. Incrementally, step-by-step, she's managing to capture a millionth of the experience, of standing in a teeming marketplace of people and culture, of gazing over the edge of a rusty orange cliff, of the things she gets to see day after day.
**
One trip back home features some begging because the Tyler household never felt it was a good enough investment to buy a computer, let alone a printer, and has Mickey handing her sheafs of paper the next day, the last few shuttered with the evidence of the ink cartridge going dry and choking out its last few lines of colour. She grabs them from him with a careful fist and engulfs him in a hug, never noticing the longing and regretful way he closes his eyes and tries to, even for a few precious moments, engulf himself in her. They look them over in a nearby chip shop (the only way of showing thanks that she really properly knows when it comes to Mickey), and their conversation for once lacks the snarky Northern voice in the background. Mickey gives her a nudge every now and then with his elbow, points out a couple of ones he thinks are a bit rubbish and though she secretly agrees, it doesn't stop the hail of chips on his head.
It's on one of those days when the Doctor's being difficult, the limited amount of hair he owns looking mussed from hours of trying to fix the TARDIS' whatever it is that's giving him trouble. This is what Mickey can glean after an hour or so of conversation. Most of the time he's alright when she's in the room while he's tinkering, she tells Mickey in a cheerful comment punctuated with a half-shrug and a quick subject change, but not that day. It's easy to catch her misery as the pages come to an end and start again, and when Big-Ears turns up, showered, shaved, and probably wearing a fresh shirt - though personally Mickey can't really tell the difference - she doesn't hug him for an entire five minutes.
Mickey dutifully takes the next picture for her.
Her eyes are closed, pressing into the Doctor's shoulder, with a look of contentment that only comes about after being horribly deprived of something and then having it back. The veins on the Doctor's hands strain, even in the photo, with resisting the urge to cling, grab, and hold. It's not the greatest photo in the world, simplistic, really - cameras aren't really his forte - but it says everything about them; a lot more than they're willing or ready to admit. When Rose finds it on her phone later the next night, her cheeks flush red as she shuts off the screen and sinks into her blankets, wondering at her own expression - not really of contentment like the Doctor's, but almost painful. She wonders why she blushes at the thought.
By the time she figures that one out, he's someone else.
**
At Christmas, delightfully traumatic as it was, she uncovers a very neatly wrapped box that looks almost ragged, as though it had been wrapped several months ago and had been subject to turbulence that one might find in a time machine whose reliance was somewhat debatable. Shooting the new, different Doctor a smile (a bit tentative, a bit unsure), she turns it about curiously and gives it a small shake. Nothing inside it rattles or moves about to allow her any clues, so she gets on the task of unwrapping it. The wrapping is faded and intended for a Christmas centuries ago she's sure, but the box under it is glossy and brand new and depicts the camera that she had been desperately trying not to stare at all those weeks ago, when they'd been walking through the department store searching for a Y'nelkxic.
She knows that his powers of observation can range from pitiful to razor sharp. Clearly they'd been working properly that day, or else she simply was not great at disguising her attention. She squeals and leans over to give him a hug, tries not to think about how different-but-the-same it feels and quickly shucks off the rest of the packaging to get to the camera. The black plastic is smooth and seems almost welcoming to her touch, and is significantly heavier than her tiny phone, every ounce speaking for its weight in high tech electronics, and with a few arm gestures she corals Jackie, Mickey, and the Doctor into the same area long enough to snap a picture.
Shireen, who insists on a meeting once she finds out that the elusive Rose Tyler is back in town for the holidays, doesn't quite understand why her friend can't put the damn thing down for more than five minutes, though she happily stars in several of the photographs in increasingly absurd poses, which are occasionally too light and too dark as Rose fiddles with the absurd amount of controls her new gadget has. Her opposing photographs of Rose are even sloppier, but they capture her well enough to denote that their meeting was a success; her tongue sticks out between her teeth and her fish and chips have been consummately polished off.
As she flips though the previous picture still in the camera, Shireen can't help but comment on the bit of all right that shows up as the dates flash back all the way to Christmas, and then asks her where tall, dark, and intensely brooding went. And then, because she's a good friend, she doesn't ask anymore. because the look on Rose's face plummets into a confused and conflicted anguish that she can't even begin to draw analogy too. Shireen is left wondering for the millionth time if this bloke her friend is travelling with is actually good for her.
The pictures Rose prints when she gets to the TARDIS that night are crystal clear, sharp as anything, and the new Doctor's face, framed by a paper hat and a myriad of different coloured lights coming in from every direction, grins cheerfully at her from the photo in a brilliant imitation of the real thing. It dutifully ends up on the wall, next to the rest of them, and she falls asleep clutching a significantly fuzzier photo of an absurd pair of ears, a temple of a nose, and an awkward, camera shy smile, accompanied side by side with a bright, white, traditionally gorgeous one that she realises now she hasn't photographed enough.
**
Jackie worries. Death is, in many cases, easy, because death is death. There's no this or that - as open-minded as Jackie feels she is, she isn't crazy or into all of that spiritual whatnot. She knows that when people die, they're dead and there's nothing left to do but accept that they won't return because where ever they've ended up after their demise, they clearly didn't decide to come back and stick around. Not that she knows or purports to know what happens after; Jackie certainly isn't privvy to that kind of knowledge, but she knows enough that death is death. She's known that since her father died, and the last smell of cigarettes had faded away. Seems like all men are good for in this family sometimes: dying.
But the Doctor hasn't died, or that's what Rose says. He's just. Different. Entirely bloody different, Jackie yearns to point out, but keeps her mouth shut, having seen the looks of complicated hurt and mourning on her little girl's face whenever the new himself has his head turned. This new Doctor looks perfectly at home in those crisp pinstripes, and the tie- Jackie could never imagine it on old Big Ears. He'd probably grumble and finger it irritably, muttering about its uselessness and hazards and on what planets it's illegal to wear, his sharp face pointing itself into a scowl before he finally ripping it off to go have a bit of a sulk somewhere. Then he'd somehow manage to talk Rose into following him. Horse nebulas or something; Jackie wonders if he's ever known how well he has Rose wrapped around his finger. Probably not - clueless then and clueless now, she thinks, watching the growing mugs of unfinished tea pile up as Rose and the new himself try and figure out his new preferences.
Then again, she's not entirely sure that Rose knows how much the Doctor's wrapped around her finger, whether he's old or new. The hurt's coming from both ways as far as Jackie can see, and she rolls her eyes when he accidentally trips over (the new, after the last one was completely shattered, thanks very much) coffee table, setting several mugs rattling in his haste to make room for her on the couch. She's not particularly thrilled when they ask her to take a picture of the miserable state of her living room, but she obliges as long as she never has to see it and they promise to tidy up afterwards.
**
Soon the Doctor's body and personality are not the only new thing around here. After tutting for days about the increasingly disheveled and unkempt about state of Rose's hair, Jackie insists on cutting it. She even offers to do the roots, but is wrestled away from the idea almost physically by Rose, who is not at all thinking of half-delirious passing comments from the not-exactly-dead Doctor about the nice dichotomy of colour he once thought her roots gave her.
Her mother, as usual, talks about "himself," much to Rose's chagrin, as she clips her hair up and out of the way. The Doctor, in the meantime, has made himself readily scarce. Rose takes a gander and guesses it's several hours with the old girl, patting her and cooing apologies at her in that sincere way he could rarely do to anyone or anything else.
As the snips let the old hair drop to the floor, she wonders if when she gets out of the chair, it will feel like a new beginning with a new Doctor. Her brain tells her it won't be that easy, her heart hopes that it will.
What if this new Doctor thinks she dresses like a slob? Him and his fancy get up: suit, tie, the whole lot, except maybe for the Chucks.
She takes a photo in the mirror, still wearing the nylon get up that's supposed to stop hair from getting on her, and it's a very nice shot of her mother putting the finishing touches on her hair. It all falls into a perfect line now by her shoulders, slightly and perfectly curved and neat, not uneven and with the million split ends she preferred to ignore. Next to the previous pictures, she does feel like a new person. New camera, new haircut.
New Doctor.
end part i.
Author:
whollyuncertain
Rating: K
Summary: Why humans invented photography.
Disclaimer: Not yet.
Author's Note: A fic I started ages back.
*waves* Hullo. I've been gone for a while - which surprises no one because I have a habit of huge gaps in my writing anyway, but this has been a very long year for me. I don't know if I'm back or if I even have a state of "being back," but do have this fic, as I wrote it and things.
**
As most things do, it starts out as a hobby... or something less. In all honesty, it really starts out as snapshots here and there of things she decides that she, in an appropriately stunned fashion, simply needs to take a photo of, with frozen fingers sinking into buttons while trying to keep back the cold on the beaches of Woman Wept, while keeping the hair out of her face on the mountains of Morielisa or Chyros. They start merely as little momentos saved in blurry pixellated files in the deep recesses of her superphone that utterly fail to encompass the magnificence of what they try to hold, but work well enough as reminders for her brain to fill in the rest.
It soon develops into something more, until she can barely walk twenty feet before she's pulling her phone out again.
Sometimes he walks ahead before noticing that her hand is gone and turns around to see her stalled with her phone twisted at what she's trying to make the best angle. She sometimes backs up. Sometimes she backs up some more, sometimes over rocks and around trees, or trots forward a bit to try again, tripping and never noticing the twitch of amusement at the corner of his mouth, so engrossed in her phone. Then he'll raise his eyebrow and wait with his hands stuffed in his pockets, lingering at the edges of what he estimates to be her frame, kicking a pebble or readjusting the settings of some gadget or another in anticipation for the moment she runs back up to him with a pointless, breathless apology and her hand sliding back into his. Then he'll give her fingers a squeeze, as though he's trying to remind himself to notice the next time they disappear, but it doesn't quite work out all the time.
A lot of the pictures feature his back. Very occasionally, if she's lucky and she sticks her tongue out of the corner of her mouth in just a way, he lets her take photos of his face. She has to turn the pouting onto full power to get him to look at the tiny lens and not make it appear as though he's about to bolt out of frame.
With increasing frequency, her phone is the only light of her room during the night, and the words Jackie Tyler would have to say about that if she knew. But she does it anyway, reliving the day in her mind as she flips through the tiny gallery, and each picture is always more focused than the last. Or more steady. Or has a better angle. Or has less of a glare obscuring a large percentage of what she was trying to catch. Just ever so slightly with each day, she sees it get better, though it's several weeks before she actually begins to notice the improvement. Incrementally, step-by-step, she's managing to capture a millionth of the experience, of standing in a teeming marketplace of people and culture, of gazing over the edge of a rusty orange cliff, of the things she gets to see day after day.
**
One trip back home features some begging because the Tyler household never felt it was a good enough investment to buy a computer, let alone a printer, and has Mickey handing her sheafs of paper the next day, the last few shuttered with the evidence of the ink cartridge going dry and choking out its last few lines of colour. She grabs them from him with a careful fist and engulfs him in a hug, never noticing the longing and regretful way he closes his eyes and tries to, even for a few precious moments, engulf himself in her. They look them over in a nearby chip shop (the only way of showing thanks that she really properly knows when it comes to Mickey), and their conversation for once lacks the snarky Northern voice in the background. Mickey gives her a nudge every now and then with his elbow, points out a couple of ones he thinks are a bit rubbish and though she secretly agrees, it doesn't stop the hail of chips on his head.
It's on one of those days when the Doctor's being difficult, the limited amount of hair he owns looking mussed from hours of trying to fix the TARDIS' whatever it is that's giving him trouble. This is what Mickey can glean after an hour or so of conversation. Most of the time he's alright when she's in the room while he's tinkering, she tells Mickey in a cheerful comment punctuated with a half-shrug and a quick subject change, but not that day. It's easy to catch her misery as the pages come to an end and start again, and when Big-Ears turns up, showered, shaved, and probably wearing a fresh shirt - though personally Mickey can't really tell the difference - she doesn't hug him for an entire five minutes.
Mickey dutifully takes the next picture for her.
Her eyes are closed, pressing into the Doctor's shoulder, with a look of contentment that only comes about after being horribly deprived of something and then having it back. The veins on the Doctor's hands strain, even in the photo, with resisting the urge to cling, grab, and hold. It's not the greatest photo in the world, simplistic, really - cameras aren't really his forte - but it says everything about them; a lot more than they're willing or ready to admit. When Rose finds it on her phone later the next night, her cheeks flush red as she shuts off the screen and sinks into her blankets, wondering at her own expression - not really of contentment like the Doctor's, but almost painful. She wonders why she blushes at the thought.
By the time she figures that one out, he's someone else.
**
At Christmas, delightfully traumatic as it was, she uncovers a very neatly wrapped box that looks almost ragged, as though it had been wrapped several months ago and had been subject to turbulence that one might find in a time machine whose reliance was somewhat debatable. Shooting the new, different Doctor a smile (a bit tentative, a bit unsure), she turns it about curiously and gives it a small shake. Nothing inside it rattles or moves about to allow her any clues, so she gets on the task of unwrapping it. The wrapping is faded and intended for a Christmas centuries ago she's sure, but the box under it is glossy and brand new and depicts the camera that she had been desperately trying not to stare at all those weeks ago, when they'd been walking through the department store searching for a Y'nelkxic.
She knows that his powers of observation can range from pitiful to razor sharp. Clearly they'd been working properly that day, or else she simply was not great at disguising her attention. She squeals and leans over to give him a hug, tries not to think about how different-but-the-same it feels and quickly shucks off the rest of the packaging to get to the camera. The black plastic is smooth and seems almost welcoming to her touch, and is significantly heavier than her tiny phone, every ounce speaking for its weight in high tech electronics, and with a few arm gestures she corals Jackie, Mickey, and the Doctor into the same area long enough to snap a picture.
Shireen, who insists on a meeting once she finds out that the elusive Rose Tyler is back in town for the holidays, doesn't quite understand why her friend can't put the damn thing down for more than five minutes, though she happily stars in several of the photographs in increasingly absurd poses, which are occasionally too light and too dark as Rose fiddles with the absurd amount of controls her new gadget has. Her opposing photographs of Rose are even sloppier, but they capture her well enough to denote that their meeting was a success; her tongue sticks out between her teeth and her fish and chips have been consummately polished off.
As she flips though the previous picture still in the camera, Shireen can't help but comment on the bit of all right that shows up as the dates flash back all the way to Christmas, and then asks her where tall, dark, and intensely brooding went. And then, because she's a good friend, she doesn't ask anymore. because the look on Rose's face plummets into a confused and conflicted anguish that she can't even begin to draw analogy too. Shireen is left wondering for the millionth time if this bloke her friend is travelling with is actually good for her.
The pictures Rose prints when she gets to the TARDIS that night are crystal clear, sharp as anything, and the new Doctor's face, framed by a paper hat and a myriad of different coloured lights coming in from every direction, grins cheerfully at her from the photo in a brilliant imitation of the real thing. It dutifully ends up on the wall, next to the rest of them, and she falls asleep clutching a significantly fuzzier photo of an absurd pair of ears, a temple of a nose, and an awkward, camera shy smile, accompanied side by side with a bright, white, traditionally gorgeous one that she realises now she hasn't photographed enough.
**
Jackie worries. Death is, in many cases, easy, because death is death. There's no this or that - as open-minded as Jackie feels she is, she isn't crazy or into all of that spiritual whatnot. She knows that when people die, they're dead and there's nothing left to do but accept that they won't return because where ever they've ended up after their demise, they clearly didn't decide to come back and stick around. Not that she knows or purports to know what happens after; Jackie certainly isn't privvy to that kind of knowledge, but she knows enough that death is death. She's known that since her father died, and the last smell of cigarettes had faded away. Seems like all men are good for in this family sometimes: dying.
But the Doctor hasn't died, or that's what Rose says. He's just. Different. Entirely bloody different, Jackie yearns to point out, but keeps her mouth shut, having seen the looks of complicated hurt and mourning on her little girl's face whenever the new himself has his head turned. This new Doctor looks perfectly at home in those crisp pinstripes, and the tie- Jackie could never imagine it on old Big Ears. He'd probably grumble and finger it irritably, muttering about its uselessness and hazards and on what planets it's illegal to wear, his sharp face pointing itself into a scowl before he finally ripping it off to go have a bit of a sulk somewhere. Then he'd somehow manage to talk Rose into following him. Horse nebulas or something; Jackie wonders if he's ever known how well he has Rose wrapped around his finger. Probably not - clueless then and clueless now, she thinks, watching the growing mugs of unfinished tea pile up as Rose and the new himself try and figure out his new preferences.
Then again, she's not entirely sure that Rose knows how much the Doctor's wrapped around her finger, whether he's old or new. The hurt's coming from both ways as far as Jackie can see, and she rolls her eyes when he accidentally trips over (the new, after the last one was completely shattered, thanks very much) coffee table, setting several mugs rattling in his haste to make room for her on the couch. She's not particularly thrilled when they ask her to take a picture of the miserable state of her living room, but she obliges as long as she never has to see it and they promise to tidy up afterwards.
**
Soon the Doctor's body and personality are not the only new thing around here. After tutting for days about the increasingly disheveled and unkempt about state of Rose's hair, Jackie insists on cutting it. She even offers to do the roots, but is wrestled away from the idea almost physically by Rose, who is not at all thinking of half-delirious passing comments from the not-exactly-dead Doctor about the nice dichotomy of colour he once thought her roots gave her.
Her mother, as usual, talks about "himself," much to Rose's chagrin, as she clips her hair up and out of the way. The Doctor, in the meantime, has made himself readily scarce. Rose takes a gander and guesses it's several hours with the old girl, patting her and cooing apologies at her in that sincere way he could rarely do to anyone or anything else.
As the snips let the old hair drop to the floor, she wonders if when she gets out of the chair, it will feel like a new beginning with a new Doctor. Her brain tells her it won't be that easy, her heart hopes that it will.
What if this new Doctor thinks she dresses like a slob? Him and his fancy get up: suit, tie, the whole lot, except maybe for the Chucks.
She takes a photo in the mirror, still wearing the nylon get up that's supposed to stop hair from getting on her, and it's a very nice shot of her mother putting the finishing touches on her hair. It all falls into a perfect line now by her shoulders, slightly and perfectly curved and neat, not uneven and with the million split ends she preferred to ignore. Next to the previous pictures, she does feel like a new person. New camera, new haircut.
New Doctor.
end part i.