Fic: Five Things That Could Have Happened to Nyssa and the Eighth Doctor
Five Things That Could Have Happened to Nyssa and the Eighth Doctor
by Brewster North, for livii’s Day of Classic (bit on the late side, oops)
Characters/Pairings: Eight, Nyssa (with occasional Eight/Nyssa)
Length: One - 200 words; Two - 352 words; Three - 330 words; Four - 166 words; Five - 307 words
Rating: PG-13 at best. Warnings for occasional crack and innuendo.
Spoilers: not really.
Summary: “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect.” - The Doctor, “Blink”
One: Past (Nyssa), Future (Eight)
“Are you lost, sir?” she asked the stranger sitting on the stairs to the library.
He blinked, startled at first, then smiled and shook his head. “No, I think I must have lost something. I can’t remember what, though.”
“Perhaps you have lost your memory, sir.”
“I think you may be right.” He giggled. She almost started giggling too.
“Do you remember your name, sir? What part of the Empire do you come from?” She was sure he had to come from Traken. He looked very like her Uncle Merlas in his long velvet travelling-coat. But he was so strange, with his large, pale eyes, his sad-pretty face, and his long hair. She still liked him, though.
“Oh, a very long way,” he said. “From another world, another star. I’m the Doctor. I think. I’m trying to remember where I came from, too.”
She brightened. “We’ve got lots of books on stellar cartography, Doctor. Let me show you.”
He took her hand and followed her.
They had just returned to the reading-room, laughing, with two armfuls of heavy tomes when her father burst in and said, “Nyssa! Come to luncheon at once and stop pestering our guest!”
Two: Present (Nyssa), Present (Eight)
It had been a fine night for stargazing, long ago.
“Can you see it?” her father asked as she peered carefully through the objective lens.
“Just look,” said his father, indicating the meteors with a sweep of his arm, “isn’t it beautiful?” He sounded almost surprised at his own emotional reaction.
“I see it,” she said. “Are there people on that planet, too?”
“Yes,” he said. “Does Mother have those on her world?”
“Perhaps,” her father smiled, drawing the blanket a little closer around her shoulders.
“Perhaps,” his father replied, his face instantly a frozen smile that betrayed no feeling.
“We’re looking back in time as well as forward in space, aren’t we?” she said.
“All these different colours,” he said, “they’re all from different elements in the meteors. That’s what my tutor told me.”
“That’s right,” said her father, “and on that planet they’d be looking at our past. In the present, it’s high time a little astronomer was in her bed and sleeping.”
“Right, and wrong,” his father said; “that is what they are, but that is not all they are made from.”
“Just a little longer?” she pleaded, sleepily, pillowing her head against her father’s shoulder.
“Why, what else are they made of?” he demanded sharply.
They’ll still be there tomorrow,” her father reassured her. “Sweet dreams, daughter.”
“Of dreams, my son,” his father said, reaching over to touch his shoulder. “Of dreams.”
Dreaming, they awoke. Her head was pillowed on his near shoulder, one hand resting on the opposite shoulder in a loose embrace.
“Nyssa,” he sighed. “Now I know why I missed you. Cheeky old TARDIS.”
She stared at him in incomprehension.
“I was trying to overhaul the telepathic circuits - she must have tuned me into your thoughts instead. Or maybe I did it, my mind’s been known to wander. I remember how I loved you, even if I wasn’t so good at showing it. Still do. I won’t forget again.” He leant over and kissed her, very gently, as if afraid to disturb her from her dream. “Goodbye, Nyssa.”
“Doctor?” she murmured aloud, unsure why, waking to memories of warmth, velvet, tea, and starlight, but she was alone.
Three: Present (Nyssa), Sideways (Eight)
“Nyssa, come on!” yelled Tegan from outside her bedroom door. “You’ll miss out on all the fun!”
“Coming,” she called back, and returned her attention to the book. For once, it wasn’t a scientific book, but a work of fiction. Aja’ib, it was called, the name picked out in elaborate curlicues of tooled blood-red leather and faded gold stamping. The sheer exoticism of its binding, standing out against a gloomy shelf, had piqued her curiosity, and now she couldn’t put it down.
It had been merely fun (as Tegan would say) to begin with, reading the adventures of a traveller “with the visage of a holy man and the manner of a rogue”, as the book put it, wandering through many lands and battling monsters at every turn, but even when those adventures had taken a turn for the dull, the surreal, the wildly improbable, the horribly cloying, or the excruciatingly baffling, she’d found that she couldn’t stop reading.
She’d even gone to the lengths of testing the pages for psychoactive substances, just to make sure that she hadn’t become somehow physically addicted to the book, without result. Whatever its lure was, it must reside elsewhere.
Idly, lying on her stomach on the bed with the book propped up on her pillow, she turned another page.
The next two pages were written in the most exquisite calligraphy, but the TARDIS refused to translate the language. She sighed in frustration, trying to speak the alien syllables out loud to see if she could understand them...
Tegan looked worriedly at her friend. They were imprisoned and pretty much sunk, the Doctor was hurt, and Nyssa was smiling for some reason. She still had that wretched book, and was reading aloud from it in complete double Dutch.
Then, just like that, the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen popped out of thin air. Wearing, of all things, an Oscar Wilde fancy-dress costume.
“Hello,” he said, grinning.
“Oh, no,” groaned the Doctor.
Four: Sideways (Nyssa & Eight)
“This is not how I was expecting my holiday to end up,” the Doctor said, massaging his temples. “I just wish I’d been given some fair warning.”
“For what it’s worth,” Nyssa shot back, and there was nothing more infuriating than being hectored in one’s own voice, “you might have paid more attention to the guidebooks. This sort of psychic transfer is supposed to be a speciality on this planet.”
“Usually on a more temporary basis,” he said ruefully. “Ouch, my head. I only hope we can get changed back before too long. My brain isn’t exactly up to having a Trakenite running about in it; the converse is certainly true of your grey matter. I’m practically bulging at the seams.”
Nyssa made a gesture of restrained irritation. “Let’s plan. One of us must capture our identity-thief, the other must try and repair the mechanism. Any questions?”
“Just one,” said the Doctor, trying not to look too put out. “Mind passing me my sonic screwdriver?”
Five: Future (Nyssa/Eight)
In their defence, they were both abominably drunk. They were two out of half-a-dozen front-line medics taking advantage of a temporary lull in activities. Somehow, a bottle of booze that wasn’t synthanol had made the rounds, and the assembled personnel drank a liquid breakfast, or whatever one called such a libation when nobody’d eaten much in the last little while and the planet they were on was on an unstable time-frame in any case.
Of course, the various laws of probability dictated that, at the height of such festivity, the warning of an incoming raid should sound.
“Incoming -!” someone yelled, everyone preparing to run, except the lone Gallifreyan who stood his ground and bawled out in resonant tones, without missing a beat, “CONFETTI!”
The psionic shell exploded in a smothering rain of paper that filled the mess, and the party continued for a few minutes more. Unnoticed, the confetti-charmer lifted a very pretty young nurse over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and waded out of the place, the first to leave.
After that first softening-up, the air-raid began in earnest. He broke into a rather unsteady run, still carrying her, blundering more by accident than design into an uninhabited shack a short distance from the mess.
“Down,” they agreed, gasping, collapsing to the floor with her sheltered under his armoured bulk, such as it was. The Rewriter could be heard swooping overhead like some angel of death. They held their breath for a long moment, but it passed, with other targets to unpick from space-time.
“Why?” she asked, breaking into drunken sobs. “This was paradise -”
“My fault,” he slurred. “Wherever I go I -”
She kissed him, throwing her arms around his long neck just to shut him up; caught off-guard, he accepted.
The rest was rather inevitable.
by Brewster North, for livii’s Day of Classic (bit on the late side, oops)
Characters/Pairings: Eight, Nyssa (with occasional Eight/Nyssa)
Length: One - 200 words; Two - 352 words; Three - 330 words; Four - 166 words; Five - 307 words
Rating: PG-13 at best. Warnings for occasional crack and innuendo.
Spoilers: not really.
Summary: “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect.” - The Doctor, “Blink”
One: Past (Nyssa), Future (Eight)
“Are you lost, sir?” she asked the stranger sitting on the stairs to the library.
He blinked, startled at first, then smiled and shook his head. “No, I think I must have lost something. I can’t remember what, though.”
“Perhaps you have lost your memory, sir.”
“I think you may be right.” He giggled. She almost started giggling too.
“Do you remember your name, sir? What part of the Empire do you come from?” She was sure he had to come from Traken. He looked very like her Uncle Merlas in his long velvet travelling-coat. But he was so strange, with his large, pale eyes, his sad-pretty face, and his long hair. She still liked him, though.
“Oh, a very long way,” he said. “From another world, another star. I’m the Doctor. I think. I’m trying to remember where I came from, too.”
She brightened. “We’ve got lots of books on stellar cartography, Doctor. Let me show you.”
He took her hand and followed her.
They had just returned to the reading-room, laughing, with two armfuls of heavy tomes when her father burst in and said, “Nyssa! Come to luncheon at once and stop pestering our guest!”
Two: Present (Nyssa), Present (Eight)
It had been a fine night for stargazing, long ago.
“Can you see it?” her father asked as she peered carefully through the objective lens.
“Just look,” said his father, indicating the meteors with a sweep of his arm, “isn’t it beautiful?” He sounded almost surprised at his own emotional reaction.
“I see it,” she said. “Are there people on that planet, too?”
“Yes,” he said. “Does Mother have those on her world?”
“Perhaps,” her father smiled, drawing the blanket a little closer around her shoulders.
“Perhaps,” his father replied, his face instantly a frozen smile that betrayed no feeling.
“We’re looking back in time as well as forward in space, aren’t we?” she said.
“All these different colours,” he said, “they’re all from different elements in the meteors. That’s what my tutor told me.”
“That’s right,” said her father, “and on that planet they’d be looking at our past. In the present, it’s high time a little astronomer was in her bed and sleeping.”
“Right, and wrong,” his father said; “that is what they are, but that is not all they are made from.”
“Just a little longer?” she pleaded, sleepily, pillowing her head against her father’s shoulder.
“Why, what else are they made of?” he demanded sharply.
They’ll still be there tomorrow,” her father reassured her. “Sweet dreams, daughter.”
“Of dreams, my son,” his father said, reaching over to touch his shoulder. “Of dreams.”
Dreaming, they awoke. Her head was pillowed on his near shoulder, one hand resting on the opposite shoulder in a loose embrace.
“Nyssa,” he sighed. “Now I know why I missed you. Cheeky old TARDIS.”
She stared at him in incomprehension.
“I was trying to overhaul the telepathic circuits - she must have tuned me into your thoughts instead. Or maybe I did it, my mind’s been known to wander. I remember how I loved you, even if I wasn’t so good at showing it. Still do. I won’t forget again.” He leant over and kissed her, very gently, as if afraid to disturb her from her dream. “Goodbye, Nyssa.”
“Doctor?” she murmured aloud, unsure why, waking to memories of warmth, velvet, tea, and starlight, but she was alone.
Three: Present (Nyssa), Sideways (Eight)
“Nyssa, come on!” yelled Tegan from outside her bedroom door. “You’ll miss out on all the fun!”
“Coming,” she called back, and returned her attention to the book. For once, it wasn’t a scientific book, but a work of fiction. Aja’ib, it was called, the name picked out in elaborate curlicues of tooled blood-red leather and faded gold stamping. The sheer exoticism of its binding, standing out against a gloomy shelf, had piqued her curiosity, and now she couldn’t put it down.
It had been merely fun (as Tegan would say) to begin with, reading the adventures of a traveller “with the visage of a holy man and the manner of a rogue”, as the book put it, wandering through many lands and battling monsters at every turn, but even when those adventures had taken a turn for the dull, the surreal, the wildly improbable, the horribly cloying, or the excruciatingly baffling, she’d found that she couldn’t stop reading.
She’d even gone to the lengths of testing the pages for psychoactive substances, just to make sure that she hadn’t become somehow physically addicted to the book, without result. Whatever its lure was, it must reside elsewhere.
Idly, lying on her stomach on the bed with the book propped up on her pillow, she turned another page.
The next two pages were written in the most exquisite calligraphy, but the TARDIS refused to translate the language. She sighed in frustration, trying to speak the alien syllables out loud to see if she could understand them...
Tegan looked worriedly at her friend. They were imprisoned and pretty much sunk, the Doctor was hurt, and Nyssa was smiling for some reason. She still had that wretched book, and was reading aloud from it in complete double Dutch.
Then, just like that, the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen popped out of thin air. Wearing, of all things, an Oscar Wilde fancy-dress costume.
“Hello,” he said, grinning.
“Oh, no,” groaned the Doctor.
Four: Sideways (Nyssa & Eight)
“This is not how I was expecting my holiday to end up,” the Doctor said, massaging his temples. “I just wish I’d been given some fair warning.”
“For what it’s worth,” Nyssa shot back, and there was nothing more infuriating than being hectored in one’s own voice, “you might have paid more attention to the guidebooks. This sort of psychic transfer is supposed to be a speciality on this planet.”
“Usually on a more temporary basis,” he said ruefully. “Ouch, my head. I only hope we can get changed back before too long. My brain isn’t exactly up to having a Trakenite running about in it; the converse is certainly true of your grey matter. I’m practically bulging at the seams.”
Nyssa made a gesture of restrained irritation. “Let’s plan. One of us must capture our identity-thief, the other must try and repair the mechanism. Any questions?”
“Just one,” said the Doctor, trying not to look too put out. “Mind passing me my sonic screwdriver?”
Five: Future (Nyssa/Eight)
In their defence, they were both abominably drunk. They were two out of half-a-dozen front-line medics taking advantage of a temporary lull in activities. Somehow, a bottle of booze that wasn’t synthanol had made the rounds, and the assembled personnel drank a liquid breakfast, or whatever one called such a libation when nobody’d eaten much in the last little while and the planet they were on was on an unstable time-frame in any case.
Of course, the various laws of probability dictated that, at the height of such festivity, the warning of an incoming raid should sound.
“Incoming -!” someone yelled, everyone preparing to run, except the lone Gallifreyan who stood his ground and bawled out in resonant tones, without missing a beat, “CONFETTI!”
The psionic shell exploded in a smothering rain of paper that filled the mess, and the party continued for a few minutes more. Unnoticed, the confetti-charmer lifted a very pretty young nurse over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and waded out of the place, the first to leave.
After that first softening-up, the air-raid began in earnest. He broke into a rather unsteady run, still carrying her, blundering more by accident than design into an uninhabited shack a short distance from the mess.
“Down,” they agreed, gasping, collapsing to the floor with her sheltered under his armoured bulk, such as it was. The Rewriter could be heard swooping overhead like some angel of death. They held their breath for a long moment, but it passed, with other targets to unpick from space-time.
“Why?” she asked, breaking into drunken sobs. “This was paradise -”
“My fault,” he slurred. “Wherever I go I -”
She kissed him, throwing her arms around his long neck just to shut him up; caught off-guard, he accepted.
The rest was rather inevitable.