Fic - Myths and Legends (6/?)
Title - Myths and Legends (6/?)
Author - joely_jo
Characters - Ten/Rose, OCs (well…, not totally, I suppose)
Rating - PG for early chapters, smut later… ;)
Summary - The TARDIS lands in Denmark, right in the middle of a famous poem from English literary heritage. The Doctor knows they’re not here for a sneak preview, but the hapless Danes are convinced they have their saviour. Will the Doctor solve the mystery in time or will one of history’s most famous texts have a different story to tell?
Author’s Notes - A mammoth undertaking. This story follows an episodic/BBC books format, and is hopefully reasonably historically accurate - goodness knows I’ve done enough research! I’ve made one or two essential changes to the actual plotline of the Beowulf story but then, that’s authorial licence for you! Hopefully there are no Anglo-Saxon professors lurking around here who will eat me alive for doing so. ;)
Many thanks to my fabulous beta readers aibhinn and sensiblecat.
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
CHAPTER SIX
Morning came with a sun spilling blood on the horizon and grey clouds layered up, promising rain and a dull day. For Hrothgar, the night had been spent picking up the pieces of his tormented village, counting the bodies and those still left alive. Eager to help as much as possible, Rose had moved from family to family, comforting the hysterical and the fearful as best she could. The Doctor, meanwhile, had contented himself with analysing the place where the Wraith’s ghostly arm had landed and disappeared like a puff of smoke. Even though there was nothing physical left of the Wraith’s arm, the ground sparkled with energy and shot tongues of static electricity at anyone who dared to reach out and touch it. The doors exhibited exactly the same effect, as did any corpse that had been left behind.
It was late morning when Rose took a pause from her efforts and went to find the Doctor. When she spotted him amongst the milling villagers, he was kneeling on the floor and contemplating the spot where the Wraith’s arm had landed, as if it would somehow provide him with all the answers he sought.
“Hey,” she greeted and held out a mug filled with water and a chunk of rye bread. “It was getting late, so I got you some breakfast.”
Distractedly, he took the mug from her and drank deeply, then bit into the bread. He gave an enthusiastic moan and tore into the bread again. He glanced up at her, chewing, and asked with his mouth full, “How’s Aeswulf?”
Rose sighed. “He’s coping, but busy vowing revenge.”
The Doctor allowed himself a small smile and rocked back on his haunches. He finished the bread and dusted the crumbs from his hands. “That’s the way for these people,” he explained. “They would consider it a slight against their honour to accept death without a fight.”
“I s’pose…” Rose’s voice drifted off. “Have you worked anything more out? What are the sparks coming from everything?”
“Static electricity,” the Doctor replied. He stood up. “Just an electrical imbalance left over as a result of direct contact with the Wraith. Basically, everything the Wraith touched or passed through received what amounted to a lightning strike of charge through it. It’s no wonder that creature’s been wreaking havoc on these poor people.”
Suddenly, the Doctor froze. “Oh!” he cried out. “Oh, oh, oh, my brilliant mind! That’s it!” He karate-chopped the air, and wheeled around to face Rose, a huge grin splitting across his face. She stared at him and shook her head to indicate her confusion. “Static electricity,” the Doctor explained.
“Yeah, I got that part. What about it though?”
“How do you create it, Rose?”
She continued to stare at him, bewildered. “By… rubbing two things together…” she said in a slow voice.
“Yes!” He grabbed up Rose’s hands and pressed their palms together, his own hands covering them. He looked directly into her eyes and rubbed her hands together vigorously, then spoke quickly, “The rubbing creates an excess of negatively or positively charged particles on the surface of an object, which will then spark when it comes into contact with something with the opposite charge. Static electricity is like lightning, but on a much smaller scale. That Wraith is made of nothing but energy, but that energy is negatively charged and that’s how it’s making everything it passes through spark with static electricity.” He released her hands, whipped the sonic screwdriver out of his pocket and then pressed it to her forehead.
“Ow!” Rose exclaimed as a spark ran through her. The Doctor winked.
“No need to worry. I just momentarily charged the screwdriver with positive ions.” He pocketed the sonic screwdriver again with a lop-sided smile. “And now I need to go back to the TARDIS. If we can find a way to super-charge the sonic screwdriver, then I can spark that Wraith back to where it came from!”
But, as they headed out of the main doors, a voice called out, and Aeswulf appeared from the hall at a run. “Doctor! Rose…” he gasped. “Where are you going?”
The Doctor blinked and pulled something of a face. “We’re, um… We’re going out for a walk. To check the coast is clear,” he added, as if this would help.
Aeswulf smiled. “Well, don’t go far, will you? Hrothgar is planning a feast in your honour.”
“A feast?” Rose asked, surprised, and then realised that as far as the Danes were concerned, she and the Doctor had chased their most grievous foe away.
“Yes. He wants to thank you for driving away Grendel last night.” His grin widened. “Doctor, it takes a lot to impress Hrothgar, but you’ve got his attention. And he’s grateful for what you did.”
“Oh. He is?” The Doctor scratched the back of his head. “That’s nice. Trouble is, we’ve got some work to do, so we might not be able to make it.”
Aeswulf’s eyes narrowed and he glanced back towards Heorot. “Take my advice, Doctor; make sure you do. Hrothgar may know more than you assume. Do not forget that he’s seen Grendel clearly on every occasion the beast has attacked.”
“He’s changed his tune,” the Doctor muttered to Rose, then said in a much louder voice, “What do you think, Rose? Fancy being a VIP?”
She smiled and shrugged in agreement. “I think that’s a yes, Aeswulf. You can tell Hrothgar we will be back in a couple of hours,” said the Doctor, beginning to walk away again. After a couple of strides, he paused and half-turned back to Aeswulf. “And tell him I prefer chicken,” he instructed.
****
Back in the TARDIS, Rose climbed onto the jump-seat and sat with her knees pulled up under her chin while the Doctor busied himself with finding and laying out an assortment of baffling items on the console room floor: a short glass tube, several metres of electrical cabling, a logic board, Blu-Tack, some crocodile clips and what looked like the remains of a Van Der Graaf generator. When he was satisfied with the collection of things he’d gathered, he dropped down onto the floor and sat cross-legged. He took out his glasses and then began his usual fiddling, poking and fixing. “What are you doing?” she asked him after a while.
He glanced up at her over the top of his glasses. “Science project,” he replied with a grin. “Wanna help?”
“Okay.” She slipped down and sat down on the floor beside him, mirroring his position. Reaching forwards, he grabbed up the string of cabling and a pair of scissors. “All right. Here we go.” He set the Van Der Graaf generator down between his legs and fiddled with it a moment. “Cut me a length of that cable. About… hm… about twenty centimetres long.”
Rose did as she was instructed and handed it to him. He took it without looking at her. For a long moment, Rose watched him as he worked. He was a picture of intense concentration; his eyes were fixed on the peculiar gadget he was building, a frown knitted on his brow and a pencil held between his teeth. Occasionally, he switched the position of the pencil in his mouth, or made soft grunts of frustration when something didn’t quite do what he wanted it to. “Can I ask you something?” she said, finally.
“Hm-mm…” he replied distractedly.
“When you were fighting the Time Wraith last night, it had this moment when it didn’t know what shape to take. It looked like it was confused. Why?”
Barely pausing from his task, the Doctor glanced at her and explained, “Because I can control my emotions. Remember what I said about the Time Wraiths feeding on emotions?” She nodded. “Well, that was what that one was trying to do last night. It looked at me and it was trying to extract my worst fear so it could change its shape to make me most afraid. But it couldn’t read me clearly enough, so it had to maintain the shape it had taken on immediately before.”
“Oh,” said Rose. “So you can do that, can you? Hide your emotions well enough to confuse something that’s trying to read your mind?”
Picking something up from her tone, the Doctor stopped what he was doing, removed the pencil from his mouth and twisted so he was facing her more directly. In a slightly softer voice, he explained, “Time Lord trick.”
“One of those again…” Rose smiled as her voice drifted off. He was looking directly at her, but she looked away, unable to meet his questioning gaze.
There was an uncomfortable pause. She picked up what was left of the cabling he’d given her and began to roll it into a neat loop. “Do you have a worst fear?” she asked after a moment.
“Oh yes,” he answered. “I’d be a bit strange if I didn’t have one, wouldn’t I? Everybody’s afraid of something.”
He took the ball of cabling from her and set it down on the floor. His face turned thoughtful. “I used to be afraid of doing something that would hurt innocent people, but I quickly learned that being afraid of that was crippling. Then I used to be afraid of getting the people I cared about into trouble.” He smiled at her. “But I had to get over that one when I started taking humans into my TARDIS.”
Rose smiled back. “Jeopardy friendly,” she murmured.
“That’s it.” He paused and blew out a contemplative breath. “When you live as long as I’ve lived, Rose, many of your fears get overcome, whether you want them to or not and whether the process of overcoming them is easy or difficult.” Reaching out, he picked up her hand and Rose drew her eyes away from his, to look down at the way he squeezed her fingers gently. “I’ve spent a long time being afraid of losing people that are important to me, and equally a long time…” He stopped and released her hand, realising that he’d probably said far too much.
She frowned at him and, like the intuitive soul she was, latched onto his unfinished sentence. “What, Doctor?”
“Never mind,” he said and let his eyes fall back to the gadget on the floor in front of him. He picked up the sonic screwdriver and started to work again.
Rose stared, trying to work out what was going through his brain. Sometimes he could be so unfathomable, and it frustrated her that he rarely came out and said anything straight, instead relying on vague assertions and abrupt changes of topic to keep her from finding out things about him. This time, though, she wasn’t going to give up without prodding him for a little bit longer. “What were you going to say?” she asked after a second.
He glanced quickly up at her. “It’s fine. It’s not important. Never mind.”
She frowned again, but then noticed that his hand was shaking ever so slightly. Not enough to be obvious, except for the fact that the sonic screwdriver wasn’t quite firing a straight beam at the gadget he was working on. She reached out and laid a hand on his, moving his thumb from the button on the screwdriver and so shutting it off. He drew in a breath that tremored a little. Slowly, his eyes lifted so they met her gaze.
Rose realised, a beat before it happened, that he was going to kiss her and oddly, her reaction was not at all what she’d ever anticipated. She moved back and, instead of meeting his lips with her own, pressed her face into his neck. The Doctor, momentarily confused, flinched, then his hand settled itself on her back and he pressed her into his chest. He scooted his body forward a little so they were closer together. After a second, he tried to pull back, but she squeezed him and held him tighter, stopping him from withdrawing. “Rose,” he said finally, in a voice so quiet she almost didn’t hear him. “I’m sorry. That was very wrong of me. I…”
“Stop it,” she murmured and this time, allowed herself to pull back. He opened his mouth to say something else but she placed her finger on his lips and shushed him. “I know…”
The Doctor stared at her, not quite sure what to take from those two words. She continued to smile at him, an expression of almost beatific happiness on her face. It took her several moments to realise that his eyes had fallen to her lips and that he was clearly thinking, really thinking, about kissing them again. Rose’s eyes turned the colour of obsidian stone. He reached up with his hand and cupped her cheek, his forefinger touching the very edge of her earlobe, intensely gentle.
Rose gave a little shiver, then she shifted forwards and met his lips. At first, their mouths barely moved and their touch was light and scudding, lips dragging a little as they briefly shifted positions. She sighed into his mouth. He pulled back, his eyelids heavy, and smiled, though it was more in his eyes than on his lips. “All right?” he asked, quietly.
“Mm…” she replied.
His hand found hers and he intertwined their fingers, squeezing a little bit. His eyes fell away from hers and he looked back to the half-finished gadget sitting between them. He sighed. “I need to finish this… Go and make some tea and we’ll talk.” He paused. “And I’ll tell you.”
To be continued...
Author - joely_jo
Characters - Ten/Rose, OCs (well…, not totally, I suppose)
Rating - PG for early chapters, smut later… ;)
Summary - The TARDIS lands in Denmark, right in the middle of a famous poem from English literary heritage. The Doctor knows they’re not here for a sneak preview, but the hapless Danes are convinced they have their saviour. Will the Doctor solve the mystery in time or will one of history’s most famous texts have a different story to tell?
Author’s Notes - A mammoth undertaking. This story follows an episodic/BBC books format, and is hopefully reasonably historically accurate - goodness knows I’ve done enough research! I’ve made one or two essential changes to the actual plotline of the Beowulf story but then, that’s authorial licence for you! Hopefully there are no Anglo-Saxon professors lurking around here who will eat me alive for doing so. ;)
Many thanks to my fabulous beta readers aibhinn and sensiblecat.
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
CHAPTER SIX
Morning came with a sun spilling blood on the horizon and grey clouds layered up, promising rain and a dull day. For Hrothgar, the night had been spent picking up the pieces of his tormented village, counting the bodies and those still left alive. Eager to help as much as possible, Rose had moved from family to family, comforting the hysterical and the fearful as best she could. The Doctor, meanwhile, had contented himself with analysing the place where the Wraith’s ghostly arm had landed and disappeared like a puff of smoke. Even though there was nothing physical left of the Wraith’s arm, the ground sparkled with energy and shot tongues of static electricity at anyone who dared to reach out and touch it. The doors exhibited exactly the same effect, as did any corpse that had been left behind.
It was late morning when Rose took a pause from her efforts and went to find the Doctor. When she spotted him amongst the milling villagers, he was kneeling on the floor and contemplating the spot where the Wraith’s arm had landed, as if it would somehow provide him with all the answers he sought.
“Hey,” she greeted and held out a mug filled with water and a chunk of rye bread. “It was getting late, so I got you some breakfast.”
Distractedly, he took the mug from her and drank deeply, then bit into the bread. He gave an enthusiastic moan and tore into the bread again. He glanced up at her, chewing, and asked with his mouth full, “How’s Aeswulf?”
Rose sighed. “He’s coping, but busy vowing revenge.”
The Doctor allowed himself a small smile and rocked back on his haunches. He finished the bread and dusted the crumbs from his hands. “That’s the way for these people,” he explained. “They would consider it a slight against their honour to accept death without a fight.”
“I s’pose…” Rose’s voice drifted off. “Have you worked anything more out? What are the sparks coming from everything?”
“Static electricity,” the Doctor replied. He stood up. “Just an electrical imbalance left over as a result of direct contact with the Wraith. Basically, everything the Wraith touched or passed through received what amounted to a lightning strike of charge through it. It’s no wonder that creature’s been wreaking havoc on these poor people.”
Suddenly, the Doctor froze. “Oh!” he cried out. “Oh, oh, oh, my brilliant mind! That’s it!” He karate-chopped the air, and wheeled around to face Rose, a huge grin splitting across his face. She stared at him and shook her head to indicate her confusion. “Static electricity,” the Doctor explained.
“Yeah, I got that part. What about it though?”
“How do you create it, Rose?”
She continued to stare at him, bewildered. “By… rubbing two things together…” she said in a slow voice.
“Yes!” He grabbed up Rose’s hands and pressed their palms together, his own hands covering them. He looked directly into her eyes and rubbed her hands together vigorously, then spoke quickly, “The rubbing creates an excess of negatively or positively charged particles on the surface of an object, which will then spark when it comes into contact with something with the opposite charge. Static electricity is like lightning, but on a much smaller scale. That Wraith is made of nothing but energy, but that energy is negatively charged and that’s how it’s making everything it passes through spark with static electricity.” He released her hands, whipped the sonic screwdriver out of his pocket and then pressed it to her forehead.
“Ow!” Rose exclaimed as a spark ran through her. The Doctor winked.
“No need to worry. I just momentarily charged the screwdriver with positive ions.” He pocketed the sonic screwdriver again with a lop-sided smile. “And now I need to go back to the TARDIS. If we can find a way to super-charge the sonic screwdriver, then I can spark that Wraith back to where it came from!”
But, as they headed out of the main doors, a voice called out, and Aeswulf appeared from the hall at a run. “Doctor! Rose…” he gasped. “Where are you going?”
The Doctor blinked and pulled something of a face. “We’re, um… We’re going out for a walk. To check the coast is clear,” he added, as if this would help.
Aeswulf smiled. “Well, don’t go far, will you? Hrothgar is planning a feast in your honour.”
“A feast?” Rose asked, surprised, and then realised that as far as the Danes were concerned, she and the Doctor had chased their most grievous foe away.
“Yes. He wants to thank you for driving away Grendel last night.” His grin widened. “Doctor, it takes a lot to impress Hrothgar, but you’ve got his attention. And he’s grateful for what you did.”
“Oh. He is?” The Doctor scratched the back of his head. “That’s nice. Trouble is, we’ve got some work to do, so we might not be able to make it.”
Aeswulf’s eyes narrowed and he glanced back towards Heorot. “Take my advice, Doctor; make sure you do. Hrothgar may know more than you assume. Do not forget that he’s seen Grendel clearly on every occasion the beast has attacked.”
“He’s changed his tune,” the Doctor muttered to Rose, then said in a much louder voice, “What do you think, Rose? Fancy being a VIP?”
She smiled and shrugged in agreement. “I think that’s a yes, Aeswulf. You can tell Hrothgar we will be back in a couple of hours,” said the Doctor, beginning to walk away again. After a couple of strides, he paused and half-turned back to Aeswulf. “And tell him I prefer chicken,” he instructed.
****
Back in the TARDIS, Rose climbed onto the jump-seat and sat with her knees pulled up under her chin while the Doctor busied himself with finding and laying out an assortment of baffling items on the console room floor: a short glass tube, several metres of electrical cabling, a logic board, Blu-Tack, some crocodile clips and what looked like the remains of a Van Der Graaf generator. When he was satisfied with the collection of things he’d gathered, he dropped down onto the floor and sat cross-legged. He took out his glasses and then began his usual fiddling, poking and fixing. “What are you doing?” she asked him after a while.
He glanced up at her over the top of his glasses. “Science project,” he replied with a grin. “Wanna help?”
“Okay.” She slipped down and sat down on the floor beside him, mirroring his position. Reaching forwards, he grabbed up the string of cabling and a pair of scissors. “All right. Here we go.” He set the Van Der Graaf generator down between his legs and fiddled with it a moment. “Cut me a length of that cable. About… hm… about twenty centimetres long.”
Rose did as she was instructed and handed it to him. He took it without looking at her. For a long moment, Rose watched him as he worked. He was a picture of intense concentration; his eyes were fixed on the peculiar gadget he was building, a frown knitted on his brow and a pencil held between his teeth. Occasionally, he switched the position of the pencil in his mouth, or made soft grunts of frustration when something didn’t quite do what he wanted it to. “Can I ask you something?” she said, finally.
“Hm-mm…” he replied distractedly.
“When you were fighting the Time Wraith last night, it had this moment when it didn’t know what shape to take. It looked like it was confused. Why?”
Barely pausing from his task, the Doctor glanced at her and explained, “Because I can control my emotions. Remember what I said about the Time Wraiths feeding on emotions?” She nodded. “Well, that was what that one was trying to do last night. It looked at me and it was trying to extract my worst fear so it could change its shape to make me most afraid. But it couldn’t read me clearly enough, so it had to maintain the shape it had taken on immediately before.”
“Oh,” said Rose. “So you can do that, can you? Hide your emotions well enough to confuse something that’s trying to read your mind?”
Picking something up from her tone, the Doctor stopped what he was doing, removed the pencil from his mouth and twisted so he was facing her more directly. In a slightly softer voice, he explained, “Time Lord trick.”
“One of those again…” Rose smiled as her voice drifted off. He was looking directly at her, but she looked away, unable to meet his questioning gaze.
There was an uncomfortable pause. She picked up what was left of the cabling he’d given her and began to roll it into a neat loop. “Do you have a worst fear?” she asked after a moment.
“Oh yes,” he answered. “I’d be a bit strange if I didn’t have one, wouldn’t I? Everybody’s afraid of something.”
He took the ball of cabling from her and set it down on the floor. His face turned thoughtful. “I used to be afraid of doing something that would hurt innocent people, but I quickly learned that being afraid of that was crippling. Then I used to be afraid of getting the people I cared about into trouble.” He smiled at her. “But I had to get over that one when I started taking humans into my TARDIS.”
Rose smiled back. “Jeopardy friendly,” she murmured.
“That’s it.” He paused and blew out a contemplative breath. “When you live as long as I’ve lived, Rose, many of your fears get overcome, whether you want them to or not and whether the process of overcoming them is easy or difficult.” Reaching out, he picked up her hand and Rose drew her eyes away from his, to look down at the way he squeezed her fingers gently. “I’ve spent a long time being afraid of losing people that are important to me, and equally a long time…” He stopped and released her hand, realising that he’d probably said far too much.
She frowned at him and, like the intuitive soul she was, latched onto his unfinished sentence. “What, Doctor?”
“Never mind,” he said and let his eyes fall back to the gadget on the floor in front of him. He picked up the sonic screwdriver and started to work again.
Rose stared, trying to work out what was going through his brain. Sometimes he could be so unfathomable, and it frustrated her that he rarely came out and said anything straight, instead relying on vague assertions and abrupt changes of topic to keep her from finding out things about him. This time, though, she wasn’t going to give up without prodding him for a little bit longer. “What were you going to say?” she asked after a second.
He glanced quickly up at her. “It’s fine. It’s not important. Never mind.”
She frowned again, but then noticed that his hand was shaking ever so slightly. Not enough to be obvious, except for the fact that the sonic screwdriver wasn’t quite firing a straight beam at the gadget he was working on. She reached out and laid a hand on his, moving his thumb from the button on the screwdriver and so shutting it off. He drew in a breath that tremored a little. Slowly, his eyes lifted so they met her gaze.
Rose realised, a beat before it happened, that he was going to kiss her and oddly, her reaction was not at all what she’d ever anticipated. She moved back and, instead of meeting his lips with her own, pressed her face into his neck. The Doctor, momentarily confused, flinched, then his hand settled itself on her back and he pressed her into his chest. He scooted his body forward a little so they were closer together. After a second, he tried to pull back, but she squeezed him and held him tighter, stopping him from withdrawing. “Rose,” he said finally, in a voice so quiet she almost didn’t hear him. “I’m sorry. That was very wrong of me. I…”
“Stop it,” she murmured and this time, allowed herself to pull back. He opened his mouth to say something else but she placed her finger on his lips and shushed him. “I know…”
The Doctor stared at her, not quite sure what to take from those two words. She continued to smile at him, an expression of almost beatific happiness on her face. It took her several moments to realise that his eyes had fallen to her lips and that he was clearly thinking, really thinking, about kissing them again. Rose’s eyes turned the colour of obsidian stone. He reached up with his hand and cupped her cheek, his forefinger touching the very edge of her earlobe, intensely gentle.
Rose gave a little shiver, then she shifted forwards and met his lips. At first, their mouths barely moved and their touch was light and scudding, lips dragging a little as they briefly shifted positions. She sighed into his mouth. He pulled back, his eyelids heavy, and smiled, though it was more in his eyes than on his lips. “All right?” he asked, quietly.
“Mm…” she replied.
His hand found hers and he intertwined their fingers, squeezing a little bit. His eyes fell away from hers and he looked back to the half-finished gadget sitting between them. He sighed. “I need to finish this… Go and make some tea and we’ll talk.” He paused. “And I’ll tell you.”
To be continued...