who/labyrinth : "I can live within you" (Ten/Rose, Jareth/Sarah)
title: "I can live within you"
author: fannishliss
genre: Doctor Who/Labyrinth crossover
pairings: Ten/Rose, Jareth/Sarah
rating: G
spoilers: none -- post Doomsday AU
summary: The Doctor runs into someone else who longs for a precious girl.
For the spring Doctor/Rose fixathon: this prompt by
redcirce: "AnyTen/Rose: Labyrinth crossover! Ten gives Jareth advice on spunky, willful Earth girls and Rose gives (older)Sarah advice on sexy yet arrogant immortal not-human men who pretend to be British. Or vice versa" .... this fic has a darker tone than that but I hope it does the trick. :) Thanks to stregamari and flydye8 for beta offers and encouragement!
soundtrack to this fic: see title. I always revise the lyric that way. :)
The Tardis materializes with a fretful whine on a seemingly endless path between rock walls. Before the doors have even opened, a woman comes running around a corner. Her hair is long, dark brown, and sleek. Her face is pale and her color is high. Her eyes are wide with terror. She is batting at things only she can see. The Tardis door opens, just slightly. The woman's eyes fall upon it and she hurls herself toward it in desperation. Her breath is raspy with panic but she is fit, a strong runner. She charges through the Tardis door. It slams shut behind her.
Something follows her around the corner - something huge, with feathers, and eyes, wings and talons. It is darkness and the hunt in one whirling monster. It slows. It has sensed the Tardis. The whirling monster shrinks in on itself. It solidifies and resolves, until it looks something like a man, if a man could be so small and yet so sinister, with hair so perfectly coiffed and eyes so utterly wild.
If a dream can turn flesh, if a wild thing can put on civility, then a nightmare can knock. The monster-become-man bangs with a swagger stick against the Tardis's solid blue door.
The Doctor pops his head out. He's wearing paper spectacles with blue and red lenses. "You knocked?"
"Give me the girl." The man's voice is strange, resonant, hypnotic.
The Doctor shakes his head no with a scoff, then tilts from angle to angle, trying to get a bead with the 3D specs. "I stand as defender of the human race, and she's human, so she's safe in my Tardis until she wants to leave."
The creature's yellow owl's eyes focus angrily on him. "A dazzling labyrinth, your Tardis. I could solve it, if I wanted to."
"I doubt that very much." The Doctor pockets his specs, squints at the sky -orange, flat, no clouds but no sun either. He digs out a yo-yo and begins to do tricks.
The yellow eyes narrow and when they open, one is green and staring, and one is blue. "Sarah's getting exactly what she wanted. Haven't you done the same for your precious girl?"
The Doctor's countenance darkens and his eyes go flat and for a moment he is as terrifyingly alien as the being he is talking with. He breathes out with a hiss and tries for calm. "Don't speak about what you don't understand," he warns between gritted teeth. He looks away and sniffs the air. From within the Tardis comes the faint sound of sobbing, muffled cries and harsh breaths as the woman struggles to regain control over her panic-stricken physiology.
The strange man glares unblinking at the Doctor with his mismatched eyes. "The fleeting beauty of their mortality... how it calls to you, how it sings in your heart like the song of a swan, echoing across midnight waves, dying even as it is uttered. Oh, yes, I know, how we bend the laws of the world and they shake their heads and demand our hearts."
The resonant voice has taken hold. "I ..." Mortality is a gift, he thinks, lending savor and sweetness to a handful of moments. Does immortality dare to complain of tedium, of loss?
The maned man has taken out three crystal juggling spheres. They play across his hands like trained rats. He murmurs on and his voice pounds inside the Doctor's head. "We are powerful, yes, but we cannot escape our nature. I may put on the wings of night and beat against her chamber window... you may change your countenance as you shuck one suit for another... but we are imprisoned by the very laws we shape."
"Will I never find her then?" The blank white wall, the cold shore, the dying star.
"Never say never ever."
The Doctor jolts awake. "You know a way?"
"Not without a price," the dark voice speaks, its cutting edge sharpened.
"Name it."
"Sarah."
The name rings into the Doctor's head, as though the man had shouted it to the dark and misty reaches of a gothic cathedral. The Tardis's guest has taken hold of herself. She is listening, the Tardis tells him: Dark eyes, tear bright - a dark bowed head, lifting at the sound of her name.
"I don't bargain with human lives. I'm not that kind of creature." The Doctor remembers another dark-haired beloved, left to live a life.
"I'm not speaking of bargaining. I only wish to live alongside her for a time. To walk where she walks. To breathe the air she has breathed. Perhaps, to feel the silk of her hair and know that she is more than a dream...'real.'" He says the word "real" as though it is a concept with which he does not quite agree.
"I know how you feel, then." The brightness of her hair, her hot breath - to run with her again, side by side. The voice has eaten a hole into his side and he aches. What had been roughly sutured closed is now torn and gaping.
"We both know the stresses of eternity. I've pressed her into my memory like a flower between pages, like a winged miracle dancing forever on its pin."
The Doctor tries to keep his head clear. "Stalker."
"Perhaps. Or, a jittering heartbeat, a small scrap of fur, startled eyes beneath her sheathed talons. I would feel again the weight of her regard, the sting and chafe of her expectations."
"Drown in the salt of her tears?" the Doctor hazards.
The blue and green eyes flash yellow as they pierce into him. "Your poison, not mine. I've always preferred dancing."
"Then what do you offer in return?" The guest is moving toward their conversation, the bright eyes are drying, gaze fixed outward, ears drinking in the beloved voice.
"A Door, Doctor. I am Lord of Doors."
The echoes of possibility ripple across the Doctor's senses, diamonds dropping down into a silent black lake. "What are you?"
"Your kind banished mine so many aeons ago, you forgot that we ever existed. But even the banished will find a hideaway, a cranny..."
"An oubliette?" The word rings strangely along the pathway's crumbling walls.
"Yes. You forgot, and we lived on, and these pretty humans are oh so graceful at remembering."
"You'll open a Door - to my Rose?" The Doctor barely dares to whisper her name, it sears his throat so as it passes.
"I know what it is to long for the fire of a human heart."
"And you think hers burns for you?"
"Even if it doesn't - my only wish is to feel its heat."
"Hold that thought."
Their guest is standing, listening, just behind him. The Doctor looks at her, and she wipes her eyes one last time, nods and straightens and walks out into dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, strong-willed as ever.
"Jareth?" she says, uncertain.
"Sarah." His voice is gentle, adoring. A thought winds silkily through the Doctor's head - everything I've done, I've done for her....
"I turned back again." One sigh out, and she is firm now, steady.
"I knew you would." Arrogant princeling, the Doctor thinks, and hastily tightens his shields when Jareth's wild eyes spark at him.
The woman takes two steps toward the fey thing, who now appears just slightly taller than her. "I saw past your illusions long ago. But now, I want to see reality with you."
"Reality - the one thing I never knew to long for." Jareth's dry words are belied by the entranced look on his face, by the way he lets his black leather gauntlets fall to the ground, the way his hands drift toward her, his juggling spheres floating away on a non-existent breeze.
"A Door, Jareth - you promised." The Doctor reminds him impatiently.
"Yes, yes of course." Jareth gestures carelessly toward a stone wall, and there is a doorway, and golden sunlight is pouring through it. Static discharge, and Rose comes stumbling through, carrying an enormous gun. She assesses her surroundings with trained precision, but when she sees the Tardis, and the Doctor, she drops the weapon and runs.
"Rose!" he cries into her hair. She already has him locked in her arms, choking and laughing and repeating his name, and her emotions sweep him under, love and relief and fury and ecstasy rushing him along like a tide. The Doctor just breathes, and feels, and he senses the universe snapping to rights at their embrace.
He is head to toe covered in love, awash with it - yet one little part of his mind still watches the other pair's reunion. Faerie and mortal join hands, and where they touch, reality shivers - magic re-adheres within the order of things.
"True love, Sarah -a magic I wish to learn."
"Maybe now that I'm a little older, I can teach you."
"We can learn together."
The Doctor and Rose step inside the Tardis, hand in hand, as Sarah and Jareth walk away, heads bent together.
The Tardis dematerializes. The Labyrinth shimmers and fades. Lovers are reunited. The universe dreams on.
author: fannishliss
genre: Doctor Who/Labyrinth crossover
pairings: Ten/Rose, Jareth/Sarah
rating: G
spoilers: none -- post Doomsday AU
summary: The Doctor runs into someone else who longs for a precious girl.
For the spring Doctor/Rose fixathon: this prompt by
redcirce: "AnyTen/Rose: Labyrinth crossover! Ten gives Jareth advice on spunky, willful Earth girls and Rose gives (older)Sarah advice on sexy yet arrogant immortal not-human men who pretend to be British. Or vice versa" .... this fic has a darker tone than that but I hope it does the trick. :) Thanks to stregamari and flydye8 for beta offers and encouragement!
soundtrack to this fic: see title. I always revise the lyric that way. :)
The Tardis materializes with a fretful whine on a seemingly endless path between rock walls. Before the doors have even opened, a woman comes running around a corner. Her hair is long, dark brown, and sleek. Her face is pale and her color is high. Her eyes are wide with terror. She is batting at things only she can see. The Tardis door opens, just slightly. The woman's eyes fall upon it and she hurls herself toward it in desperation. Her breath is raspy with panic but she is fit, a strong runner. She charges through the Tardis door. It slams shut behind her.
Something follows her around the corner - something huge, with feathers, and eyes, wings and talons. It is darkness and the hunt in one whirling monster. It slows. It has sensed the Tardis. The whirling monster shrinks in on itself. It solidifies and resolves, until it looks something like a man, if a man could be so small and yet so sinister, with hair so perfectly coiffed and eyes so utterly wild.
If a dream can turn flesh, if a wild thing can put on civility, then a nightmare can knock. The monster-become-man bangs with a swagger stick against the Tardis's solid blue door.
The Doctor pops his head out. He's wearing paper spectacles with blue and red lenses. "You knocked?"
"Give me the girl." The man's voice is strange, resonant, hypnotic.
The Doctor shakes his head no with a scoff, then tilts from angle to angle, trying to get a bead with the 3D specs. "I stand as defender of the human race, and she's human, so she's safe in my Tardis until she wants to leave."
The creature's yellow owl's eyes focus angrily on him. "A dazzling labyrinth, your Tardis. I could solve it, if I wanted to."
"I doubt that very much." The Doctor pockets his specs, squints at the sky -orange, flat, no clouds but no sun either. He digs out a yo-yo and begins to do tricks.
The yellow eyes narrow and when they open, one is green and staring, and one is blue. "Sarah's getting exactly what she wanted. Haven't you done the same for your precious girl?"
The Doctor's countenance darkens and his eyes go flat and for a moment he is as terrifyingly alien as the being he is talking with. He breathes out with a hiss and tries for calm. "Don't speak about what you don't understand," he warns between gritted teeth. He looks away and sniffs the air. From within the Tardis comes the faint sound of sobbing, muffled cries and harsh breaths as the woman struggles to regain control over her panic-stricken physiology.
The strange man glares unblinking at the Doctor with his mismatched eyes. "The fleeting beauty of their mortality... how it calls to you, how it sings in your heart like the song of a swan, echoing across midnight waves, dying even as it is uttered. Oh, yes, I know, how we bend the laws of the world and they shake their heads and demand our hearts."
The resonant voice has taken hold. "I ..." Mortality is a gift, he thinks, lending savor and sweetness to a handful of moments. Does immortality dare to complain of tedium, of loss?
The maned man has taken out three crystal juggling spheres. They play across his hands like trained rats. He murmurs on and his voice pounds inside the Doctor's head. "We are powerful, yes, but we cannot escape our nature. I may put on the wings of night and beat against her chamber window... you may change your countenance as you shuck one suit for another... but we are imprisoned by the very laws we shape."
"Will I never find her then?" The blank white wall, the cold shore, the dying star.
"Never say never ever."
The Doctor jolts awake. "You know a way?"
"Not without a price," the dark voice speaks, its cutting edge sharpened.
"Name it."
"Sarah."
The name rings into the Doctor's head, as though the man had shouted it to the dark and misty reaches of a gothic cathedral. The Tardis's guest has taken hold of herself. She is listening, the Tardis tells him: Dark eyes, tear bright - a dark bowed head, lifting at the sound of her name.
"I don't bargain with human lives. I'm not that kind of creature." The Doctor remembers another dark-haired beloved, left to live a life.
"I'm not speaking of bargaining. I only wish to live alongside her for a time. To walk where she walks. To breathe the air she has breathed. Perhaps, to feel the silk of her hair and know that she is more than a dream...'real.'" He says the word "real" as though it is a concept with which he does not quite agree.
"I know how you feel, then." The brightness of her hair, her hot breath - to run with her again, side by side. The voice has eaten a hole into his side and he aches. What had been roughly sutured closed is now torn and gaping.
"We both know the stresses of eternity. I've pressed her into my memory like a flower between pages, like a winged miracle dancing forever on its pin."
The Doctor tries to keep his head clear. "Stalker."
"Perhaps. Or, a jittering heartbeat, a small scrap of fur, startled eyes beneath her sheathed talons. I would feel again the weight of her regard, the sting and chafe of her expectations."
"Drown in the salt of her tears?" the Doctor hazards.
The blue and green eyes flash yellow as they pierce into him. "Your poison, not mine. I've always preferred dancing."
"Then what do you offer in return?" The guest is moving toward their conversation, the bright eyes are drying, gaze fixed outward, ears drinking in the beloved voice.
"A Door, Doctor. I am Lord of Doors."
The echoes of possibility ripple across the Doctor's senses, diamonds dropping down into a silent black lake. "What are you?"
"Your kind banished mine so many aeons ago, you forgot that we ever existed. But even the banished will find a hideaway, a cranny..."
"An oubliette?" The word rings strangely along the pathway's crumbling walls.
"Yes. You forgot, and we lived on, and these pretty humans are oh so graceful at remembering."
"You'll open a Door - to my Rose?" The Doctor barely dares to whisper her name, it sears his throat so as it passes.
"I know what it is to long for the fire of a human heart."
"And you think hers burns for you?"
"Even if it doesn't - my only wish is to feel its heat."
"Hold that thought."
Their guest is standing, listening, just behind him. The Doctor looks at her, and she wipes her eyes one last time, nods and straightens and walks out into dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, strong-willed as ever.
"Jareth?" she says, uncertain.
"Sarah." His voice is gentle, adoring. A thought winds silkily through the Doctor's head - everything I've done, I've done for her....
"I turned back again." One sigh out, and she is firm now, steady.
"I knew you would." Arrogant princeling, the Doctor thinks, and hastily tightens his shields when Jareth's wild eyes spark at him.
The woman takes two steps toward the fey thing, who now appears just slightly taller than her. "I saw past your illusions long ago. But now, I want to see reality with you."
"Reality - the one thing I never knew to long for." Jareth's dry words are belied by the entranced look on his face, by the way he lets his black leather gauntlets fall to the ground, the way his hands drift toward her, his juggling spheres floating away on a non-existent breeze.
"A Door, Jareth - you promised." The Doctor reminds him impatiently.
"Yes, yes of course." Jareth gestures carelessly toward a stone wall, and there is a doorway, and golden sunlight is pouring through it. Static discharge, and Rose comes stumbling through, carrying an enormous gun. She assesses her surroundings with trained precision, but when she sees the Tardis, and the Doctor, she drops the weapon and runs.
"Rose!" he cries into her hair. She already has him locked in her arms, choking and laughing and repeating his name, and her emotions sweep him under, love and relief and fury and ecstasy rushing him along like a tide. The Doctor just breathes, and feels, and he senses the universe snapping to rights at their embrace.
He is head to toe covered in love, awash with it - yet one little part of his mind still watches the other pair's reunion. Faerie and mortal join hands, and where they touch, reality shivers - magic re-adheres within the order of things.
"True love, Sarah -a magic I wish to learn."
"Maybe now that I'm a little older, I can teach you."
"We can learn together."
The Doctor and Rose step inside the Tardis, hand in hand, as Sarah and Jareth walk away, heads bent together.
The Tardis dematerializes. The Labyrinth shimmers and fades. Lovers are reunited. The universe dreams on.