Fic [Doctor Who]: Things You Need (7/14)
Chapter Title: Foreign Nations
Story: Things You Need
Series: Love in Time
Rating: PG-13 (references to war and mass killings)
Characters: Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Beta: annissag!
Summary: They've turned up wonderful things and terrible ones in their travels. Sometimes the terrible ones just hit way, way, way too close to home. Set a while after "The Satan Pit".
Oh empty your hands
Overheard conversations
Empty your hands
Static from the big bang
Dinosaurs, radio stations
Empty your hands
Genocides and foreign nations
Empty your hands
Let them go
All of time and space, and what does she want to see? Earth.
“Oh, Doctor, please? ‘S not that I don’t love other planets, but the farthest I’d been from home ‘fore I met you was France, just for a weekend. There’s a whole other world there, just there, my world and I’ve never seen it.”
Traveling with Rose is brilliant, all of time and space. She’s brilliant, and sometimes he forgets she’s only twenty, a London shop girl without even any A-levels.
When he was twenty his people considered him a toddler, an infant who’d seen nothing of life, but he’d still seen most of Gallifrey. So no, he doesn’t mind showing her her home world. Good old Earth.
He grins, wiggles his eyebrows, and she giggles, knowing she’s won.
“Your world it is. Where to, Rose Tyler?”
**
Where to turns out to be India. He aims for the golden age of the Mughals, end up in Dandi, 1930, Gandhi and all. They are the palest people marching for independence, and it barely matters.
Where to is New York, New York, 11:59pm on December 31, 1999. He lands the TARDIS in the Times Square subway station-great parking job, if he says so himself. Rose puts up with his lecture about how it’s not the new millennium, actually, until 11:57, when she finally tells him to shut it and enjoy the party. Which they do, historical idiosyncrasies and all.
Where to is apparently also the penguin nursery of Antarctica, the building of the Great Wall of China, and London on V-Day. And a host of other times and places.
He’d forgotten how much fun Earth could be when he wasn’t busy trying to save it.
He gives the TARDIS her head, no parameters but Earth, human history before 2006. It’s time for Rose to get a bit of education the best way possible: seeing the little things, the little places. Meeting the ordinary people who change history every day.
They’re in Japan. Japan, Japan, Japan. Been there, done that. Still pretty…only sort of smoky, this time. They’re on a hill outside one of the smaller cities, the sea sparkling beyond.
Rose lets go his hand, spins round to face him, walking backwards over the rocks and grass. She’s got a huge grin on her face, and not surprisingly, since she’s got an aptitude for this sort of thing, a million questions. Take Rose Tyler out of the Powell Estate and away from her dead-end boyfriends, let her go to school and find her muse, and she could have been a genius, a scholar, a teacher, a guide. But he got her instead, and on the whole he prefers that.
“So Doctor, back in Japan. But when are we?”
He grins back. “Don’t know. Whenever the TARDIS took us, which means whenever the mood struck her to land. Knowing her, that could mean just about anything. But…hmm.” He peers down at the city below. “No earlier than 1920. No later than 1950, wouldn’t have been intact. And…” He sniffs deeply, snorting a bit by mistake. Still not used to this nose, apparently, and it’s been months. Wait… He sniffs again.
“Oh.”
“Oh?”
“No. What? What in the Seven Systems would she do that for? Why bring us here? There’s nothing…”
“Do what? What’s nothing?” The good humor’s gone from Rose’s face. He wishes, not for the first time, that she didn’t know this tone so well. “Doctor, what is it? When are we?”
A plane roars by overhead. He knows without looking: the buzz of one propeller rather than turbines, small plane, low-flying, not built to last more than that one run and an explosive, sacrificial end. Rose is looking, and because they have seen so much of history, she doesn’t have to ask what the insignia of the rising sun means.
The clouds are on his face again, crackling, an inevitable storm. He feels his ninth self, and eighth, settling a death grip around his hearts, and he knows. She’s staring at him: she remembers her timelines, she’s seen that face before-and she knows too. Her eyes dart down to the city, back to him, waiting for him to contradict it.
“That’s Nagasaki. It’s volcano day.”
They’ve been to fixed points before. There’s no reason to stay. She would only watch the clouds change and the fury grow on his face, while he could only see the horror and feel the fresh tearing of loss on hers. And the truth is, they’ve already seen each other’s faces.
She reaches out, a hand on his shoulder, other on his face, studying. He pulls her in, or she does, and they hold each other over Nagasaki, August 9, 1945, forty thousand people about to die.
There’s nothing to do but go back to the TARDIS.
**
After that he stops letting the ship steer. But they need to move on, something else, right away. Something beautiful, unexpected, peaceful, something with a view that doesn’t have a mushroom cloud at the end. Mountains would do, maybe: nothing famous, just mountains.
Rose is sitting on the jumpseat, hands braced against the edge and eyes on her swinging feet, or past them. She’s looked at him and opened her mouth twice since they came back to the TARDIS, and both times she’s shut it again, looked away, found something fiddly to do with her hands.
He hates filling the void for her, although that’s not fair since she’s done it for him for eighteen months now.
“So!” He claps his hands, rubs them together, looks for a rabbit to pull out of his hat. He doesn’t wear a hat. Might be useful, or cool. What kind? Hmm. Oh. Rose, mountains, not Japan, not hats. Right. He plasters on a grin she can’t possibly believe because he can’t even begin to believe it himself.
“So! We’re off! Wonderful views, nice breeze, peaceful meadows ahead.”
A corner of her mouth twitches and gives up, behind the curtain of her hair. She keeps staring at her feet. The problem with companions is if you let them stay around, get attached (never leave them behind), they learn to see past the facades. So he drops it.
“Rose, are you all right?”
She laughs softly but not bitterly, and looks up. “Aren’t we always? I will be, promise. You?”
He doesn’t answer, but lets himself reach out, and while he’s always reaching for her, she always expects the hugs and the hand to hold. Not like this, which is new: a tiny thing, hooking her hair behind her ear and smoothing it back. Her mouth’s in a little “o”; he’s afraid for a moment that it’s all wrong, but she smiles sadly at him. They'll go on; they always do.
“So where to, Doctor?"
*
Notes:
Inspired by The Weepies' "Empty Your Hands".
Dandi is the site of one of the largest marches of the Indian independence movement.
OK. This one was easy to write and hard to evaluate, and I could talk about why I wrote it for a very long time. Suffice to say that Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Little Boy and Fat Man, are never far from my mind watching this show. People make justifications for the decision to use an atomic weapon, but the fact remains that 110,000 to 155,000 people were killed immediately in the bombings, not counting the fact that radiation exposure contributed to tens of thousands of deaths later. Those are statistics; they were people. I don't want to get into politics or my personal views on how this event is treated in the history books, but it is a sensitive subject, and I simply want to say that I have used it here with all respect for the people who were killed in August of 1945.
Linking all the previous chapters is starting to get ridiculous. Use the Things You Need tag below, or find the full story archived at AO3.
Story: Things You Need
Series: Love in Time
Rating: PG-13 (references to war and mass killings)
Characters: Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Beta: annissag!
Summary: They've turned up wonderful things and terrible ones in their travels. Sometimes the terrible ones just hit way, way, way too close to home. Set a while after "The Satan Pit".
Oh empty your hands
Overheard conversations
Empty your hands
Static from the big bang
Dinosaurs, radio stations
Empty your hands
Genocides and foreign nations
Empty your hands
Let them go
All of time and space, and what does she want to see? Earth.
“Oh, Doctor, please? ‘S not that I don’t love other planets, but the farthest I’d been from home ‘fore I met you was France, just for a weekend. There’s a whole other world there, just there, my world and I’ve never seen it.”
Traveling with Rose is brilliant, all of time and space. She’s brilliant, and sometimes he forgets she’s only twenty, a London shop girl without even any A-levels.
When he was twenty his people considered him a toddler, an infant who’d seen nothing of life, but he’d still seen most of Gallifrey. So no, he doesn’t mind showing her her home world. Good old Earth.
He grins, wiggles his eyebrows, and she giggles, knowing she’s won.
“Your world it is. Where to, Rose Tyler?”
**
Where to turns out to be India. He aims for the golden age of the Mughals, end up in Dandi, 1930, Gandhi and all. They are the palest people marching for independence, and it barely matters.
Where to is New York, New York, 11:59pm on December 31, 1999. He lands the TARDIS in the Times Square subway station-great parking job, if he says so himself. Rose puts up with his lecture about how it’s not the new millennium, actually, until 11:57, when she finally tells him to shut it and enjoy the party. Which they do, historical idiosyncrasies and all.
Where to is apparently also the penguin nursery of Antarctica, the building of the Great Wall of China, and London on V-Day. And a host of other times and places.
He’d forgotten how much fun Earth could be when he wasn’t busy trying to save it.
He gives the TARDIS her head, no parameters but Earth, human history before 2006. It’s time for Rose to get a bit of education the best way possible: seeing the little things, the little places. Meeting the ordinary people who change history every day.
They’re in Japan. Japan, Japan, Japan. Been there, done that. Still pretty…only sort of smoky, this time. They’re on a hill outside one of the smaller cities, the sea sparkling beyond.
Rose lets go his hand, spins round to face him, walking backwards over the rocks and grass. She’s got a huge grin on her face, and not surprisingly, since she’s got an aptitude for this sort of thing, a million questions. Take Rose Tyler out of the Powell Estate and away from her dead-end boyfriends, let her go to school and find her muse, and she could have been a genius, a scholar, a teacher, a guide. But he got her instead, and on the whole he prefers that.
“So Doctor, back in Japan. But when are we?”
He grins back. “Don’t know. Whenever the TARDIS took us, which means whenever the mood struck her to land. Knowing her, that could mean just about anything. But…hmm.” He peers down at the city below. “No earlier than 1920. No later than 1950, wouldn’t have been intact. And…” He sniffs deeply, snorting a bit by mistake. Still not used to this nose, apparently, and it’s been months. Wait… He sniffs again.
“Oh.”
“Oh?”
“No. What? What in the Seven Systems would she do that for? Why bring us here? There’s nothing…”
“Do what? What’s nothing?” The good humor’s gone from Rose’s face. He wishes, not for the first time, that she didn’t know this tone so well. “Doctor, what is it? When are we?”
A plane roars by overhead. He knows without looking: the buzz of one propeller rather than turbines, small plane, low-flying, not built to last more than that one run and an explosive, sacrificial end. Rose is looking, and because they have seen so much of history, she doesn’t have to ask what the insignia of the rising sun means.
The clouds are on his face again, crackling, an inevitable storm. He feels his ninth self, and eighth, settling a death grip around his hearts, and he knows. She’s staring at him: she remembers her timelines, she’s seen that face before-and she knows too. Her eyes dart down to the city, back to him, waiting for him to contradict it.
“That’s Nagasaki. It’s volcano day.”
They’ve been to fixed points before. There’s no reason to stay. She would only watch the clouds change and the fury grow on his face, while he could only see the horror and feel the fresh tearing of loss on hers. And the truth is, they’ve already seen each other’s faces.
She reaches out, a hand on his shoulder, other on his face, studying. He pulls her in, or she does, and they hold each other over Nagasaki, August 9, 1945, forty thousand people about to die.
There’s nothing to do but go back to the TARDIS.
**
After that he stops letting the ship steer. But they need to move on, something else, right away. Something beautiful, unexpected, peaceful, something with a view that doesn’t have a mushroom cloud at the end. Mountains would do, maybe: nothing famous, just mountains.
Rose is sitting on the jumpseat, hands braced against the edge and eyes on her swinging feet, or past them. She’s looked at him and opened her mouth twice since they came back to the TARDIS, and both times she’s shut it again, looked away, found something fiddly to do with her hands.
He hates filling the void for her, although that’s not fair since she’s done it for him for eighteen months now.
“So!” He claps his hands, rubs them together, looks for a rabbit to pull out of his hat. He doesn’t wear a hat. Might be useful, or cool. What kind? Hmm. Oh. Rose, mountains, not Japan, not hats. Right. He plasters on a grin she can’t possibly believe because he can’t even begin to believe it himself.
“So! We’re off! Wonderful views, nice breeze, peaceful meadows ahead.”
A corner of her mouth twitches and gives up, behind the curtain of her hair. She keeps staring at her feet. The problem with companions is if you let them stay around, get attached (never leave them behind), they learn to see past the facades. So he drops it.
“Rose, are you all right?”
She laughs softly but not bitterly, and looks up. “Aren’t we always? I will be, promise. You?”
He doesn’t answer, but lets himself reach out, and while he’s always reaching for her, she always expects the hugs and the hand to hold. Not like this, which is new: a tiny thing, hooking her hair behind her ear and smoothing it back. Her mouth’s in a little “o”; he’s afraid for a moment that it’s all wrong, but she smiles sadly at him. They'll go on; they always do.
“So where to, Doctor?"
*
Notes:
Inspired by The Weepies' "Empty Your Hands".
Dandi is the site of one of the largest marches of the Indian independence movement.
OK. This one was easy to write and hard to evaluate, and I could talk about why I wrote it for a very long time. Suffice to say that Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Little Boy and Fat Man, are never far from my mind watching this show. People make justifications for the decision to use an atomic weapon, but the fact remains that 110,000 to 155,000 people were killed immediately in the bombings, not counting the fact that radiation exposure contributed to tens of thousands of deaths later. Those are statistics; they were people. I don't want to get into politics or my personal views on how this event is treated in the history books, but it is a sensitive subject, and I simply want to say that I have used it here with all respect for the people who were killed in August of 1945.
Linking all the previous chapters is starting to get ridiculous. Use the Things You Need tag below, or find the full story archived at AO3.