Fic: The World, The Universe (Hex/Ace)
Title: The World, The Universe
Author: Doyle
Characters/Pairing: Hex/Ace, Seven
Rating: PG
Notes: Backup for avendya for the Big Finish ficathon. Prompt was: AU, where Hex leaves after The Settling. Author's choice if Ace comes with him, or stays with the Doctor.
Summary: Hex steps off the yellow brick road.
“If I left now,” he asked her after Wexford - just after, with the bruises still fresh and his head buzzing from lack of sleep - “would you come with me?”
Later on, when he couldn’t stop himself turning over that moment in his head, he was pleased for the small silver lining; it was a very strange place for a heart-to-heart, sat under the lemon trees in the TARDIS library, the teapot steaming between them on the grass and one of the library bats edging around their knees looking for a treat. It was surreal enough, in other words, that he could half pretend it had been a dream, and he hadn’t really asked Ace that question, and she hadn’t looked so bloody sorry for him and then pretended to be busy with the tea.
**
“I’ll stay for now,” he told the Doctor, and this time it was him who didn’t want to meet Ace’s eyes.
“It’ll get better,” she promised.
And it did, for a bit.
He got the feeling she’d told the Doctor to give him the kid gloves treatment, or else he’d decided all on his own that they needed a holiday; either way, the next few trips were unusually free of blood and death and mayhem. They went to the beach, where Ace wore a t-shirt over her swimsuit and he failed to get up the nerve to ask her if she’d mind putting sun-cream on him. They went to the future, far enough in Earth’s history that humans finally had those jetpacks he’d been promised as a kid. They spent a week in his own time, in Iceland, because the Doctor asked if there was anywhere he wanted to go and he picked a country off the top of his head. He’d never once heard of anything bad happening in Iceland. There were glaciers. It was nice.
He was buying drinks for the three of them in a bar on some planet with a ten-syllable name when a girl looked his way and smiled. Hex checked over his shoulder. There was no good-looking guy behind him. Maybe he’d moved. The girl was taller than him, she was blue-skinned, and she was, he wasn’t ashamed to admit, several leagues out of his. She looked like she should have had James Bond or Captain Kirk hanging off her arm. It was possible she was very short-sighted, though, because she was still smiling at him, and now she moved closer.
“All right?” he said.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“You’re joking, aren’t you?” Her smile dropped. “I mean... yeah, that means yes. Sorry.”
“You talk very strangely on Earth,” she said.
“Is it that obvious I’m from Earth?”
She half-turned to look at his table. Ace and the Doctor were talking, facing away from him. “Your sister mentioned it.”
“Good old sis,” Hex said, his good mood quietly evaporating into the air.
**
“Didn’t you like her or something?”
“Ace, she was gorgeous.”
“Well, yeah.”
He was on his back in the orchard, lemons and Ladybird books wheeling in the sky. Four or five hours drinking the local specialties had left him with a sticky sourness across his tongue and teeth; he wasn’t sure he remembered where the floor was.
“You were well in there.”
“You don’t need to pick up women for me.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You don’t, Ace.”
“You’re too scared to talk to women. How’re you ever going to meet anyone?”
“Why should I, anyway? You don’t. The Doctor doesn’t have a girlfriend or a boyfriend or anything like that. Has he ever?”
“It’s different with him…”
“’Cos he makes families, yeah?” Hex would have said he was too pissed to think, but this wasn’t thinking. This was stuff that had been in his head for weeks exiting via his mouth. “He picks us up and makes us his family. And that’s all right, that works for him, but you don’t need to do every single thing in your life the way he does, for God’s sake.”
When he rolled to face her and opened his eyes she was watching him, closer than he’d expected. Even sober, he wouldn’t have known what that look in her eyes meant.
“Ace,” he said, “I’m not your brother.”
He didn’t think he moved an inch, but maybe his eyes had flicked to her mouth or he’d leaned in because she said, “Don’t.” It made him think of the guns over Wexford, the noise he’d thought was thunder. “Don’t.”
“I wasn’t,” he mumbled, feeling drunk and stupid.
She was so good, the next day, at pretending nothing had happened that he nearly believed it.
**
“Is there not some easier way of doing this?”
The Doctor adjusted one of the dials on the one side of the console that wasn’t in bits on the floor. “Such as?”
Hex shrugged. “Change the desktop theme?”
“Oh, well, that would just take all of the fun out…” A minute turn of the dial and the ceiling was gone. The Doctor grinned, looking delighted to be surrounded by nothing but blackness and stars. “You shouldn’t hold your breath,” he observed - Hex exhaled, and let go of his deathly grip on the panel. “If the TARDIS really had opened to space, taking a deep breath would only make things worse.” He tutted. “And you a nurse.”
“Sorry. They didn’t teach a lot of space medicine at my uni.” He would have liked to have offered to help, but the Doctor was weeks into this redecoration mania and it was still no clearer what the room was meant to look like; the pieces scattered around were all mahogany and brass, boxes of candles and piles of gramophone records old leather-bound books shoved into the corners. “Doesn’t seem very you, all this.”
“Perhaps it will be, one day,” the Doctor said. For a second he looked different - older? Hex had no clue if the Doctor’s people aged like humans, or if the TARDIS did something more to time than just travel through it.
“How long’s Ace been with you?”
“She was sixteen when we met,” the Doctor answered, after a moment when he seemed to be looking for something far off in the false sky.
So being in the TARDIS didn’t stop you getting older. Ace looked twenty-eight, twenty-nine - definitely not sixteen, though sometimes he thought she acted it. “More than twelve years, then,” he said. “Long time. She’d’ve done less for murder.” He only meant it as a joke but it came out hard and flat and wrong.
The Doctor was too busy with his adjustments to the sky to notice, or he pretended to be. “Oh, I dare say she’ll find something that suits her better one of these days. They usually do.”
**
He’d never expected the holiday to last forever. He’d been so tense waiting for things to get bad again that he was nearly relieved when they did. It felt like things were getting back to normal.
There wasn’t room for two people in the storage cupboard. Ace’s knee was in his side and she was breathing down his neck. In other circumstances he might have enjoyed being this close to her.
The screaming and the gunfire weren’t so close now. “Give it a minute,” Ace whispered. “They’re going to the next floor.”
“There’s hundreds down there.”
“Think there might be guns on any of these shelves? Or a couple of grenades?”
“Not unless hospitals have really changed since my time.” He’d seen bandages and painkillers, though, in the light of the corridor before they’d slammed the door, and he was planning on grabbing as many as he could carry. Leave the heavy artillery to Ace; there were people bleeding and dying outside.
“God, your heart’s racing,” she said. “I think I can hear it.”
“Bet yours isn’t.”
“You get used to this.”
But I don’t want to be the sort of person who could be used to this, he thought. “Nah, that’s just you,” he said. “Nothing scares you.”
Even half an inch from his ear, what she said was too quiet to make out.
“What?”
“In Ireland,” she said, louder, “I thought they’d killed you.”
She was right. His heart was going so fast he could hear it.
**
“You know what you were saying the other day? About how… how everybody finds something that suits them better?”
“You want to stay here,” the Doctor said, kindly, as if he’d been waiting for Hex to work this out.
“Half their staff’s been killed,” Hex said. “It’ll take months for new doctors and nurses to come out from Earth, if they even bother to send any.”
“And they need you.”
“To be honest, I think they need anybody they can get.”
They’d reached the TARDIS.
“I’m sorry I won’t see the new console room,” Hex said. “It’ll look boss when you finish it. Maybe you could send me pictures.” He wanted to hug the Doctor - at least shake his hand or thank him or say how much it had meant to him, being in the TARDIS - but he felt too awkward about it and ended up just shrugging, sticking his hands in his pockets. “I’ll get my stuff, then.”
“Good idea. And while you’re about it,” the Doctor said, “you can tell Ace you’re leaving us.”
**
He couldn’t hug her, either. He couldn’t touch her for fear of losing his hand.
“You knew I wasn’t gonna stay forever.”
“No. Should’ve known you wouldn’t be able to hack it for long.”
“Ace, don’t be like that, please.”
“I thought…”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. Just go.”
“You’re my best mate,” he said. “I don’t want us leaving each other like this.”
“Last time I looked I wasn’t the one leaving.”
“Come with me, then.” But he didn’t think to say it until she’d already stalked away to her room and slammed the door. He didn’t think it would have mattered anyway.
He dropped in on the library on his way out, telling himself he might nick a few books, have something to read on his new planet. The trees in the orchard had decided it was winter all at once. The branches were bare, covered in frost.
**
At four in the morning he was on his own in a corner of the staff canteen, absolutely shattered and almost happy. He’d worked a triple shift and he still didn’t know where he was sleeping, and the stuff that passed for tea in the future was foul. He’d found a place where he was really needed and he’d helped a lot of people. It all balanced out.
There was a lemon on the table in front of him. He stared at it.
“For the tea,” Ace said, sitting down. “I had some while I was waiting. Tastes better without milk. What would you do without me to take care of you?”
There was an excellent chance, he thought, that he was wearing a very stupid smile. He was too tired to really tell.
“One of the paramedics said they could use me, if I learned to fly an ambulance.”
“Handy thing to know,” he agreed. “And they’ve got a spaceport here. If you get bored, you can always go off on adventures.”
“I suppose I’ll have to find us somewhere to live as well,” she said.
“That’d be nice.”
His hand was on the table. After a minute, she reached out and took it.
Author: Doyle
Characters/Pairing: Hex/Ace, Seven
Rating: PG
Notes: Backup for avendya for the Big Finish ficathon. Prompt was: AU, where Hex leaves after The Settling. Author's choice if Ace comes with him, or stays with the Doctor.
Summary: Hex steps off the yellow brick road.
“If I left now,” he asked her after Wexford - just after, with the bruises still fresh and his head buzzing from lack of sleep - “would you come with me?”
Later on, when he couldn’t stop himself turning over that moment in his head, he was pleased for the small silver lining; it was a very strange place for a heart-to-heart, sat under the lemon trees in the TARDIS library, the teapot steaming between them on the grass and one of the library bats edging around their knees looking for a treat. It was surreal enough, in other words, that he could half pretend it had been a dream, and he hadn’t really asked Ace that question, and she hadn’t looked so bloody sorry for him and then pretended to be busy with the tea.
**
“I’ll stay for now,” he told the Doctor, and this time it was him who didn’t want to meet Ace’s eyes.
“It’ll get better,” she promised.
And it did, for a bit.
He got the feeling she’d told the Doctor to give him the kid gloves treatment, or else he’d decided all on his own that they needed a holiday; either way, the next few trips were unusually free of blood and death and mayhem. They went to the beach, where Ace wore a t-shirt over her swimsuit and he failed to get up the nerve to ask her if she’d mind putting sun-cream on him. They went to the future, far enough in Earth’s history that humans finally had those jetpacks he’d been promised as a kid. They spent a week in his own time, in Iceland, because the Doctor asked if there was anywhere he wanted to go and he picked a country off the top of his head. He’d never once heard of anything bad happening in Iceland. There were glaciers. It was nice.
He was buying drinks for the three of them in a bar on some planet with a ten-syllable name when a girl looked his way and smiled. Hex checked over his shoulder. There was no good-looking guy behind him. Maybe he’d moved. The girl was taller than him, she was blue-skinned, and she was, he wasn’t ashamed to admit, several leagues out of his. She looked like she should have had James Bond or Captain Kirk hanging off her arm. It was possible she was very short-sighted, though, because she was still smiling at him, and now she moved closer.
“All right?” he said.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“You’re joking, aren’t you?” Her smile dropped. “I mean... yeah, that means yes. Sorry.”
“You talk very strangely on Earth,” she said.
“Is it that obvious I’m from Earth?”
She half-turned to look at his table. Ace and the Doctor were talking, facing away from him. “Your sister mentioned it.”
“Good old sis,” Hex said, his good mood quietly evaporating into the air.
**
“Didn’t you like her or something?”
“Ace, she was gorgeous.”
“Well, yeah.”
He was on his back in the orchard, lemons and Ladybird books wheeling in the sky. Four or five hours drinking the local specialties had left him with a sticky sourness across his tongue and teeth; he wasn’t sure he remembered where the floor was.
“You were well in there.”
“You don’t need to pick up women for me.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You don’t, Ace.”
“You’re too scared to talk to women. How’re you ever going to meet anyone?”
“Why should I, anyway? You don’t. The Doctor doesn’t have a girlfriend or a boyfriend or anything like that. Has he ever?”
“It’s different with him…”
“’Cos he makes families, yeah?” Hex would have said he was too pissed to think, but this wasn’t thinking. This was stuff that had been in his head for weeks exiting via his mouth. “He picks us up and makes us his family. And that’s all right, that works for him, but you don’t need to do every single thing in your life the way he does, for God’s sake.”
When he rolled to face her and opened his eyes she was watching him, closer than he’d expected. Even sober, he wouldn’t have known what that look in her eyes meant.
“Ace,” he said, “I’m not your brother.”
He didn’t think he moved an inch, but maybe his eyes had flicked to her mouth or he’d leaned in because she said, “Don’t.” It made him think of the guns over Wexford, the noise he’d thought was thunder. “Don’t.”
“I wasn’t,” he mumbled, feeling drunk and stupid.
She was so good, the next day, at pretending nothing had happened that he nearly believed it.
**
“Is there not some easier way of doing this?”
The Doctor adjusted one of the dials on the one side of the console that wasn’t in bits on the floor. “Such as?”
Hex shrugged. “Change the desktop theme?”
“Oh, well, that would just take all of the fun out…” A minute turn of the dial and the ceiling was gone. The Doctor grinned, looking delighted to be surrounded by nothing but blackness and stars. “You shouldn’t hold your breath,” he observed - Hex exhaled, and let go of his deathly grip on the panel. “If the TARDIS really had opened to space, taking a deep breath would only make things worse.” He tutted. “And you a nurse.”
“Sorry. They didn’t teach a lot of space medicine at my uni.” He would have liked to have offered to help, but the Doctor was weeks into this redecoration mania and it was still no clearer what the room was meant to look like; the pieces scattered around were all mahogany and brass, boxes of candles and piles of gramophone records old leather-bound books shoved into the corners. “Doesn’t seem very you, all this.”
“Perhaps it will be, one day,” the Doctor said. For a second he looked different - older? Hex had no clue if the Doctor’s people aged like humans, or if the TARDIS did something more to time than just travel through it.
“How long’s Ace been with you?”
“She was sixteen when we met,” the Doctor answered, after a moment when he seemed to be looking for something far off in the false sky.
So being in the TARDIS didn’t stop you getting older. Ace looked twenty-eight, twenty-nine - definitely not sixteen, though sometimes he thought she acted it. “More than twelve years, then,” he said. “Long time. She’d’ve done less for murder.” He only meant it as a joke but it came out hard and flat and wrong.
The Doctor was too busy with his adjustments to the sky to notice, or he pretended to be. “Oh, I dare say she’ll find something that suits her better one of these days. They usually do.”
**
He’d never expected the holiday to last forever. He’d been so tense waiting for things to get bad again that he was nearly relieved when they did. It felt like things were getting back to normal.
There wasn’t room for two people in the storage cupboard. Ace’s knee was in his side and she was breathing down his neck. In other circumstances he might have enjoyed being this close to her.
The screaming and the gunfire weren’t so close now. “Give it a minute,” Ace whispered. “They’re going to the next floor.”
“There’s hundreds down there.”
“Think there might be guns on any of these shelves? Or a couple of grenades?”
“Not unless hospitals have really changed since my time.” He’d seen bandages and painkillers, though, in the light of the corridor before they’d slammed the door, and he was planning on grabbing as many as he could carry. Leave the heavy artillery to Ace; there were people bleeding and dying outside.
“God, your heart’s racing,” she said. “I think I can hear it.”
“Bet yours isn’t.”
“You get used to this.”
But I don’t want to be the sort of person who could be used to this, he thought. “Nah, that’s just you,” he said. “Nothing scares you.”
Even half an inch from his ear, what she said was too quiet to make out.
“What?”
“In Ireland,” she said, louder, “I thought they’d killed you.”
She was right. His heart was going so fast he could hear it.
**
“You know what you were saying the other day? About how… how everybody finds something that suits them better?”
“You want to stay here,” the Doctor said, kindly, as if he’d been waiting for Hex to work this out.
“Half their staff’s been killed,” Hex said. “It’ll take months for new doctors and nurses to come out from Earth, if they even bother to send any.”
“And they need you.”
“To be honest, I think they need anybody they can get.”
They’d reached the TARDIS.
“I’m sorry I won’t see the new console room,” Hex said. “It’ll look boss when you finish it. Maybe you could send me pictures.” He wanted to hug the Doctor - at least shake his hand or thank him or say how much it had meant to him, being in the TARDIS - but he felt too awkward about it and ended up just shrugging, sticking his hands in his pockets. “I’ll get my stuff, then.”
“Good idea. And while you’re about it,” the Doctor said, “you can tell Ace you’re leaving us.”
**
He couldn’t hug her, either. He couldn’t touch her for fear of losing his hand.
“You knew I wasn’t gonna stay forever.”
“No. Should’ve known you wouldn’t be able to hack it for long.”
“Ace, don’t be like that, please.”
“I thought…”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. Just go.”
“You’re my best mate,” he said. “I don’t want us leaving each other like this.”
“Last time I looked I wasn’t the one leaving.”
“Come with me, then.” But he didn’t think to say it until she’d already stalked away to her room and slammed the door. He didn’t think it would have mattered anyway.
He dropped in on the library on his way out, telling himself he might nick a few books, have something to read on his new planet. The trees in the orchard had decided it was winter all at once. The branches were bare, covered in frost.
**
At four in the morning he was on his own in a corner of the staff canteen, absolutely shattered and almost happy. He’d worked a triple shift and he still didn’t know where he was sleeping, and the stuff that passed for tea in the future was foul. He’d found a place where he was really needed and he’d helped a lot of people. It all balanced out.
There was a lemon on the table in front of him. He stared at it.
“For the tea,” Ace said, sitting down. “I had some while I was waiting. Tastes better without milk. What would you do without me to take care of you?”
There was an excellent chance, he thought, that he was wearing a very stupid smile. He was too tired to really tell.
“One of the paramedics said they could use me, if I learned to fly an ambulance.”
“Handy thing to know,” he agreed. “And they’ve got a spaceport here. If you get bored, you can always go off on adventures.”
“I suppose I’ll have to find us somewhere to live as well,” she said.
“That’d be nice.”
His hand was on the table. After a minute, she reached out and took it.