touch the sky with two arms - for animus_wyrmis
Title: touch the sky with two arms
Author: ilysia_039
Recipient: animus_wyrmis
Rating: PG
Possible Spoilers/Warnings: None to speak of.
Summary: Susan has never had the greatest respect for linear time. Now, slipping through it like water through a sieve, she wonders if it hasn’t just stuck around because no one’s bothered to point out how ridiculous it actually is.
Notes: Beta-read by the fantastic and ever helpful [redacted]. Many thanks!
touch the sky with two arms
What comes out of his mouth the first time she sees him is, “You’re not supposed to be here.” Not a question, no hint of uncertainty. Just warm curiosity and so, so much interest, as if she’s an equation that’s been laid out before him to puzzle over, to solve. She gives him a quick glance and then returns to her tea, sedately stirring in sugar. If a slight smile flits across her face or something bright and sharp shifts in her stomach, that’s no business of his.
“Neither are you.”
Surprise on his face; he should know better, though, she thinks. He scours the café, frowning intently, and then sits opposite her. It’s easy to imagine him bouncing in his seat, but he is still, intent. Long fingers drum quickly on the tabletop. “Then what are you doing here? You’re English, aren’t you?” An almost plaintive sound tinges his voice. He’s plugging numbers into the equation that he’s made her out to be, expecting simple answers. “You should belong here.”
She smiles again and almost laughs. He’s refreshing, this stranger, and she needs refreshment. She’s become stagnant, slow and stupid, an old woman living past her time, waiting only to die. It’s been a gentle decay in the slow several years since she’s been alone, painful at times but mostly just quietly smothering. He, though, is a bolt of lightning, a clap of thunder. Spring rain. He’s fascinating and interesting and she knows that her eyes reflect the same curious fire that’s in his.
“Shouldn’t I?”
He’ll learn soon enough that, if she’s an equation, she necessitates not only irrational numbers but most likely an entire alphabet of variables as well, and maybe a few sideways leaps of logic just in case.
As complicated as she may be, though, Susan already half suspects that the stranger may need extra dimensions to explain, if explicable he is.
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
As it turns out, she’s correct.
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
He walks with her as she makes her way back to her flat, walks through a London made bright and new by an unusually brilliant spring and he tries to puzzle her out. As he scowls and mutters quietly, occasionally firing the odd question at her, Susan watches the city watch them.
She’s quite used to getting second looks from men as she passes- she knows she’s beautiful, though the gazes never cease to lend the slightest hint of tension to her posture- but now that she’s walking with him, the women sneak second glances, too. It’s clear why. In his utter intentness to crack her, he’s quite nearly devastating, all fire and boundless energy and a genius that already she can see bottled up in his frame. It gives his motions elegance and his actions grace; coupled with his lethally brilliant grin, he would be difficult to resist, were Susan anyone else.
But she is herself, and she’s known men with this sort of charisma before. In any case, she’s more interested in his offer of, “Come with me.”
“Why?”
“Do you always question men before you run off with them?” The question startles a laugh out of her and that in turn coaxes a smile out of him. Not a grin, either: a small, slow, almost hesitant smile. It’s that smile that convinces her of two things: one, that she will go with him; and two, that if he ever throws her that lethal grin, ever turns all his genius and fire into that sharp charisma and attempts to use it on her, she will leave, because she’s not interested in the façade he throws up to convince people that he’s not dangerous, and really, she doesn’t think that he is, either.
All these things run through her head, and his smile is replaced by a small smirk; armor going up. It’s so familiar as to be painful, but all she says is, “Only on very special occasions.”
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
Her lack of reaction to his strange blue box is a slight disappointment, judging by the crestfallen look on his face when all she says is, “I do hope you won’t lose me in here.”
One more variable for him to add to his equation of her, she supposes. He frowns. “And you’re really not bothered?” Reaching out to stroke what she supposes are the controls, though they look rather a bit more complicated than most controls she’s seen, he turns the frown into a considering look. “Most people are, you know.”
“I’m not most people. Besides-“ and she hesitates just long enough to add a hint of levity to her voice- “I once found an entire world in the back of a wardrobe.”
“Oh?” The stroking of controls stops, and Susan once again finds herself the center of his undivided attention. “What happened?”
“I got lost.”
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
They’re on her first alien world, her first glimpse of the vastness of space and the length of time and she loves it, for all its strangeness. There are more stars in this sky, and they are closer, and oh, so much younger than she has ever seen them, in this life. Reyathin is uninhabited, and it’s old (in her time the planet’s been dust for millions of years), but it’s what he likes to call a gentle and rewarding start to their travels, and she believes him.
When he offered, within a few hours of her stepping aboard the TARDIS, to show her Earth’s past, she’d declined without so much as a moment’s hesitation. That world’s past is dangerous to her, and she worries that the temptations to go when she should never, can never go, would be too much. She’d much rather see what no one else has ever seen… for the second and third and forth and thousandth times in her life. Now, watching this planet’s dawn, she knows she’s made the right decision.
“How did you know?”
His question startles her from her reverie; she turns from the triple sunrise to face him, only to be struck by the massive star setting just over his shoulder. The lights from the three smaller stars bathe him in pale morning light, even as the raging colors of the sunset paint his back bloody. It’s glorious and confusing and so wrong that she almost forgets his question. “Know what?”
“How did you know that I didn’t belong, the first time we met, other than my brilliant opening remark? Or were you just being clever?”
She wants to laugh, wondering if it’s a joke, and then she realizes that he’s completely serious. There are a thousand reasons she could give, and all would be true, but he already knows that his walk’s not quite right, and his thoughts are too quicksilver fast, and his tenses are an utter wreck, and his gaze puts the thousand yard stare to shame. He wants the truth, because he doesn’t quite trust her yet, and why should he? She doesn’t quite trust him. They’re still strangers and she knows this as well as she knows anything: there’s a lot of time and space on the TARDIS, and in the short time she’s traveled with him they’ve already begun to fill it with all the past they won’t say. Despite all of this, she wants, suddenly, to make herself clear in the monstrous beauty of this dying, birthing sky. It’s all relative, she wants to tell him; and she only knows because how could she not?
“Susan?”
“It’s the eyes,” she says softly, and turns from him. She’s had enough of dying suns in her dreams, giants reaching up and plucking them from the sky, and stars falling. She doesn’t need to see them when she wakes as well.
“The eyes.”
Susan can’t say why this has suddenly become so important, why it’s suddenly become to necessary to make him understand that she knows. He won’t think her mad- at least, she thinks not, but he might not understand, either. She’s honestly not sure which would be worse. “When you lose something as important as… as important as your home and your world, and all the people who knew you in it… you don’t think that ever really goes away, do you?”
There it is then, out in the light of all this world’s suns. She doesn’t want the pressure of his eyes, but his hand comes down onto her shoulder to rest. “Your world in the wardrobe?”
Not quite trusting herself, even after all this time, to speak the name, she makes a noncommittal humming under her breath.
“Oh, Susan.”
They stay like that until the last of the old star’s dying rays fade away, giving the whole world over to its younger lights. Were Susan more romantic, she’d call it a sign. Still, it’s pretty and it’s new, and that’s enough for now.
~+~+~+~+~+~+~
“Trouble with your time is- oh, don’t roll your eyes so, Susan, it’s childish- fine, the time you were living in, is that they’re so close! So close to figuring everything out- well, no, not everything, of course, but quite a lot. The Big Bang- that’s fairly recent. And Einstein! What a brilliant man! We should visit him; he’d love you, Susan, and you’d love him, really-“
“Is this Albert Einstein? The scientist?”
“You know another Einstein?”
“He died last year.”
He pauses. “Did he? Ah, well, I do lose track.” She watches his face, watches his eyes darken for a moment before he shakes whatever thoughts he was having away. “Still, we can visit him, you know. Not a problem-“
She shakes her head, cutting him off mid-thought. “Well, maybe not,” he concedes. There’s a moment of silence during which all that can be heard is the muted hum of the engines and the imagined sound of space and time flowing past. “What I meant to say, though, was that they’re so close, but so far. There’s so much they can’t see yet!”
They’re talking over dinner- well, she’s eating, curled up in one of the command chairs he’s continually rearranging around the TARDIS’ controls and he’s got half the floor ripped up, playing with wires and connections and looking gleeful as a child with a pointy stick and no adult supervision- and, as always happens on these occasions, he takes this opportunity to turn the talk into a lecture. About science, mostly, though from time to time he strays over into math or, on even rarer occasions, music. The music she can relate to, and the math to some degree, but science was never a subject she’d studied with any vigor. Even if had, she has the feeling that whatever knowledge mid-century England would have been able to impart to her would have fallen far, far short of enough to understand the tangents the Doctor tends to go off on.
“Your sun, for example!” he shouts suddenly, thrusting one grease-stained, battered hand up in indignation. She watches the wrench in his loose fingers with cautious interest. “It sings! Rings in dozens and dozens of different harmonics, all surging out through the universe, and no one in your silly time is able to hear a damn bit of it.”
“I know the stars sing,” she says calmly, nudging a noodle across her plate in absent thought. Susan wants him to know this in the same way she wants him to know why she won’t visit Earth’s past, wants him to understand that her view of the stars and the universe may be different from what he’s expecting. “Of course they do.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes.” The glare she levels at him is the one she used to employ, Before. It shuts him up just as efficiently as it always had the ministers and ambassadors and, heaven help her, the Nymphs. “Where I come from, stars are sentient beings. They’re somewhat terrifying, functionally immortal, and have absolutely no tolerance for terrestrial alcohol. Trust me, I know the stars sing.”
By this point, he’s abandoned his wires completely and has reverted to staring up at her. Were he anyone else, he would be open-mouthed and slack-jawed. Unable to contain herself, she adds, “It’s not the singing that’s unbelievable. It’s the pitch.”
~+~+~+~+~+~+~
It’s only later that night that she realizes she hasn’t seen his lethal grin since Reyathin, nearly a month ago, by her inevitably skewed count. When this thought hits her, she stops dead in the middle of slipping into her dressing gown and just thinks for a moment. Dimly she can hear him still tinkering in the control room.
A few moments and endless heartbeats later, she stands behind him, her dressing gown forgotten in the corridor. His dark hair is stuck out at all angles and he’s attempting to lever himself into a tiny compartment partially beneath the controls. Every other word is a curse, or so she suspects, because even though she can’t speak the languages he’s using she knows an obscenity when she hears one.
“Doctor,” she says, and his curses stop.
“Susan?” He cocks his head to peer up at her from the corner of his eye. “To what-“
“I had two brothers and a sister.” She stops, suddenly chilled, licks her lips. He turns to look at her properly now, his face still and his eyes so, so old. “They didn’t belong in that time, either. Good night.”
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
She steps out of the TARDIS and her breath hitches for the smallest hint of a moment before her composure catches up. Though almost no one else would have noticed, Susan can feel his smile as he follows her.
It’s almost… it’s almost like home, achingly so, but just different enough that her heart doesn’t quite break in two at the sight of those mountains in the west and the meadows rolling before them. Maybe it’s that the sun is just a hint too red, or the air just a touch cooler than she remembers. Maybe it’s because the planet is utterly calm in a way that Narnia never was, not even in the dead of Winter.
“How…”
“The old girl picked it out. Your world in the wardrobe, right?” He smiles at her, but she’s aware enough of her friend- and, yes, she concedes now that friend is the only word for what he’s become to her, other than brother, and that word still hurts too much- that, even in the overwhelmingly glorious ache of the place, she can see the hint of uncertainty in the corner of his eyes, the lines of his smile.
“How would she have known?” A thought occurs to her and the next words tumble out almost angrily. “I don’t want her in my head, Doctor. I-“
“No, no! Of course not. But you dream, you know, and it’s very loud, to her, and she can’t help but hear it.”
Susan turns back to the mountains, wanting to frown and cry and laugh and maybe slap the Doctor and kiss his wonderful machine. “She told you this?”
“Yes. I mean, not as such, you know, not the way we’re talking now, although there was one memorable time… but that was a long time ago. A different me.” Though she’s not facing him, she can hear that his smile has slipped into the grin he employs in emergencies. “But you don’t want to hear about that.” But she does, very much. “In any case, happy birthday, Susan.”
“Hmph.” She doubts he hears it, as quiet as it is, but she lets her uncertainty go with a gentle snort and tries to bask in the almost-familiar light. “Thank you.”
The Doctor seems to take that as a peace offering and steps forward to link his arm in hers. “How old are you, anyways?”
A loaded question, of course. Happy birthday, Susan, and welcome to our universe’s attempt at Narnia! Just state your age for the record and all your lost dreams can come true! But she’s being bitter; he’s just being curious, and therefore himself. “I was born in 1928,” she answers instead, knowing as she says it that the answer won’t satisfy him. Even as he opens his mouth to protest she continues. “But it really depends on who you ask. I had three thirteenth birthdays, if that helps your calculations at all.”
He looks like he’s about to launch into another one of his long-winded discussions about the fabric of space-time and how she really can’t have had three thirteenth birthdays, so she interrupts him by saying, “And, really, I could ask you the same question.” She suspects his answer would make even less sense. And, of course, she’s right.
“Well… this model’s still quite young.” Waggling the fingers that aren’t wrapped around her arm dementedly, he flashes her one of his more ridiculous grins. “Hard to count time in the TARDIS, obviously, but I’d say less than four Earth years. Maybe. But, well, there have been-“
“More of you.” Susan’s suspected this for some time; she wonders if he’s always looked like this, though from the way he stoops to pass through doorways that are quite tall enough to accommodate him, she’s sure that at least one of the earlier models was taller.
“Yes…” he drags his answer out and turns his gaze to the mountains, waiting for her to pass judgment. His hand tightens momentarily on her arm.
It should bother her, perhaps, that this man changes faces, save for the fact that she does the same, more or less. And when you’ve lived in a world where stars come down on the Winter Equinox and the trees constantly petition for refuge from immoral dwarves and you’re likely to get an earful from a Finch if you’re not careful, fewer things are shocking than might otherwise be the case. “Well, I do hope don’t plan on changing anytime soon. I’ve gotten rather used to you, Doctor, and I would hate to have to learn someone else’s demented habits.”
He brightens visibly. “Ah, Susan, you love my demented habits. You’d have bored yourself to death without me by now, admit it.”
And though she will never speak it aloud, the first thought to cross her mind is, I very nearly did.
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
Susan’s seen neither hair no hide of the Doctor for nearly a fortnight and at this point she’s so far past the point of mere worry that the Murin’click’al are beginning to avoid her. At some level this interests her; they are engaged in the bloodiest civil war she’s ever heard of, much less seen, used to all sorts of atrocities and furies, yet they avoid her. On a more practical level, however, she’s much to busy learning how to use their weapons and understand their culture and find out where on this (literally) godforsaken planet has the Doctor been taken?
She gets her answer two days later, after a raid on a Tiailcha’ war camp. The fighting is fierce and more drawn out than the Murin’click’al commander had expected and Susan, ignoring the orders of the alien general who was, after all, only trying to do as his old friend the Doctor had asked him and keep her safe, takes the strange double bladed weapon of a fallen soldier and goes to war.
There is the initial rush of fear, the thoughts of death and pain and alien world alien air alien war alien weapon but all that subsides almost immediately beneath the surge of adrenaline and the rightness of warring in this body. This is the first battle Susan’s taken part in since the revolt against Miraz, and even in that war she wasn’t really there, trapped in a younger, softer version of herself. Now, though, she is old and hard and her body remembers what it is to fight, what it is to be the queen who hand picked and trained every single archer in the vanguard of her brother’s army. She remembers, and the Tiailcha’ do not forget, not for years after she is gone.
But at the end of the night it is only the Doctor she pays any attention to, her focus trapped by the bruises blossoming on his face and the slightly glazed look to his eyes. “Drugged,” the Murin’click’al medic tells her, and her gaze sharpens. For one brief moment he is Peter, worn from a campaign and injured; Edmund, moving stiffly and not meeting her eyes; Lucy, quiet after the one and only kidnapping attempt ever perpetrated during the Pevensie sovereignty. And then she’s pulling him to his feet, gently. “Doctor? It’s Susan.”
The eyes that meet hers are lost, momentarily, and he says, “Susan… I never… I never meant for you to die, my child.”
She closes her eyes briefly; if he is her ghost then she must be his. “I never did.”
He blinks and his eyes clear. “No, of course not.” There is an abortive attempt at a grin, which she ignores.
“We’re going home.”
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
Interlocking circles, at once mechanical and natural, flow across the screen lazily and he occasionally flicks at one with his fingertips, sending it spinning from the line into nothingness. He mutters under his breath as he does so, strange sounds, like singing or rain or the wind between stars. With one hand manipulating the screen and the other absentmindedly rubbing the back of his neck, the Doctor looks alarmingly like Edmund. It hurts, but not so much as she would have expected.
“Why won’t it translate?” she asks, coming to stand behind him.
He startles at her words, and she can see that he’d had no idea she’d come into the control room at all. Normally he would have, or the TARDIS would have told him; they were both lost within those circles, those sounds. And he stares at her, looking lost for the first time since she’s known him, and imagines that she’s not the only one seeing ghosts tonight.
“You-“ he stops, clears his throat, and when he asks again his voice is stronger. “It won’t translate because I don’t want it to. And neither does she.” He lays a hand on the control panel; the TARDIS almost keens.
Ah. She knows those types of secrets, the ones even you scarcely dare think about, they’re so precious. And she may even share this secret, in a way. In the dim light of the TARDIS’ artificial night, he still reminds her somewhat of her brother. It gives her the courage to ask, “Do you have something to write with?”
Caught off guard, his eyes widen minutely, but he’s never known her to ask for something without reason, she knows, and so he pushes his interlocking circles to one side of the screen with a flick of his wrist, beckoning her forward.
Susan takes the stylus from his unresisting fingers- they should never be so limp, she thinks- and prays that her hands haven’t forgotten the curves and swoops she once knew so well, the thorns and the hooks that she had once labored to learn. It’s surreal, writing this language on a spaceship that’s lazing somewhere in the quieter part of space-time, but it feels right in its own way. The letters look strangely comfortable next to the Doctor’s circles and they, too, remain untranslated. She finishes with a flourish and steps back with a half-smile that no one could mistake for pleasure.
“What-“ he starts, peering down at what she’s written. “That’s not… what is that?” he demands, turning his gaze from the curling words to her face. “It’s… what have you done?”
It’s an old Narnian poem, from before the Winter, sparse and simple, one that many set to music in her court. She would recite it for him, or sing it, but she’s never had much luck translating this language into English, and she’s not entirely certain that all of the sounds in Old Narnian can be spoken in this universe. She’s never had much luck with that, either. “It’s a language, of course.”
“I see that, thank you, but I can’t- I can’t understand it. Never seen it before.” The look on his face as he swings his attention toward her is torn between bewilderment and frustration and a deadly interest. “And that shouldn’t matter, in any case; the TARDIS should translate it. But she can’t.”
“I could have invented it,” she volunteers, almost wishing that she had. The sounds are running through her head now, songs and prayers and ceremonies; all things she’d put carefully away years ago, freed to run rampant.
He dismisses that possibility with a flap of his hand. “You didn’t. And besides, it’d be translated anyhow. No, this is something new, something… different.”
“It’s from… a long time away.” Susan falters, looks down at her hands. His attention is back on their two languages, and he’s frowning. “I couldn’t get there if I tried. I’m the only person in this universe who knows what those words mean, and I can’t even speak them here.”
A silence falls over them; even the engines are quiet. She wonders what it would be like if the TARDIS could get her back; if she could step out those doors, what she would see. Green hills, glinting peaks, the sea going on forever… or night, endless nothingness, the darkness behind stars. That place is gone, and she knows it. She lives here, now, and for some reason that thought is not so oppressive as it might be.
Then suddenly she needs him, and needs him to know that she knows, as if he doesn’t already. He stiffens when she wraps her arms around him, and she understands his surprise; she’s never, in his presence, been demonstrative. She’s never been demonstrative anywhere, but he’s family, she thinks. So she holds tight and waits for him.
After a few moments he relaxes into her, enfolding her strong arms. “What a pair of old miseries we are,” he says, laughing, and she agrees. Her forehead rests on his shoulder and she realizes for the first time that they are almost the same height. She hadn’t expected that, somehow. Beneath the slight whiff of engine oil that constantly pervades him, she catches a scent of clean air and something not entirely unlike lightning and she remembers her first impression of him.
“Narnia.” It’s the first time she’s said the name aloud in years, and her voice is stronger than she ever could have hoped.
“Gallifrey.”
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
“We came back different.” They’ve been left in a small room that’s more cave than anything else; there are no windows, though if there were Susan suspects they would be barred. The entrance they passed through has no door but there’s a quiet hum and a suspicious sheen to the air there that seems to indicate a door’s not really necessary. The Doctor doesn’t seem worried, though, and so Susan won’t be either. Not until he starts joking while avoiding her eyes. Until then, all they can do is fill the blank space, and by Susan’s reckoning it’s her turn.
He takes the bait; she knew he would. He doesn’t know so much about her yet that he can resist a tidbit like this. And somehow, now, she doesn’t mind telling him. “What?”
“My brothers and sister and I. When we came back from Narnia that first time. We’d grown old there, you see, and to return to England young again…” She stops, runs her fingers along the rough, sloping walls, and remembers. She remembers the confusion of tumbling from summer woods onto a polished floor, of trading comfortable age and only slightly aching joints for gangling youth. Experience for bewilderment. “Everything we’d learned, everything we knew… we came back half-mad and brilliant, all of us. We came back all edges, and sharp. It was… hard.”
There is more she wants to say, about how they’d been so right in that world, fit so well, and how they had bumped off the slopes and curves of this world once they’d returned, too jagged to fit properly anymore. But at the moment she opens her mouth to say these things, the fission hum of the un-door dies and their… host enters, looking suspicious.
Several hours of madcap action involving, on the Doctor’s part, a lot of fast talking and the building of some insane device (and damage control on Susan’s) later, and then they’re peacefully milling about under a starry sky with thousands of their alien hosts, another world saved by the Doctor. Susan’s content, then, to walk with him over the grass that crumbles like sand under their feet and reforms as they step away.
There is a dance of some sort, but Susan’s aware that she’s limited to too few planes to join in, and, judging by the outrageous flirting the Doctor’s begun with what she thinks is the Consulate’s mate, they may have to run for it soon anyhow.
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
She’s right, of course, and as they run for the TARDIS, the Doctor shouting platitudes over his shoulder as he does so, she laughs and marvels that this is her normal. And then the thought occurs to her that her whole life has been leading up to this moment, and the moment after it, and the moment after that.
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
“I have met a lot of people who’ve been through traumatic events. A lot of different kinds of people. Victims, survivors, collateral damage. Ghosts.”
They’re sitting on a cliff of diamond, overlooking a sea of cold fire. There’s a flute of something alcoholic in her hand. It tastes like summer sunlight and puts the most glorious golden halo around everything and in this light his words have no power to harm her. “And which one am I?”
“I have no idea.” This seems to delight him, as if he’s almost on the edge of adding, Isn’t it marvelous? It delights her too, in a vague, golden way.
“Which are you, then?”
“Me?” He pauses, considers his own drink, and then gives her one of his rare smiles. “I’m a Doctor.”
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
Susan wakes one morning, a strange feeling in her chest. Strong silvery sunlight filters down on her through an intricate lattice of some native wood and it feels, as she gently circles the sensation, as though this sunlight has pervaded her body, suffusing every nook and cranny. And then there is nothing that follows it, no soft wave of smothering remembrance, no regret, no pain. It is, she realizes, not so much a sensation as an absence of one; there is no knot of anger, of memory.
And she can live with that, with having that open wound scar, leaving her memories intact but all the weight they’ve had (I’msorryIcan’tforgetwhyareyougone) behind. She can breathe again, under this alien sun.
The stillness is interrupted by Jhanti’s panicked voice at her door: “Bera Susan, please, your friend is in the laboratory, and he’s taking apart the quantum manipulator and Bera if he does something wrong he could break down matter or tear a hole in-“
Susan sighs, introspection forgotten, and rises to go save the universe, sunlight still suffusing her.
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
“Doctor.” Her voice calls him back, pulls his hand from the door, if only for a moment more. His face is quiet but not sad, and she can, if she tries, see the barest hint of a smile lingering in the corners of his mouth. “I wasn’t like them, my brothers and my sister. When we came back for good, they could do it, live here but belong there. But I…” she pauses, wondering. “I had one foot in both worlds, and a place in neither. I can’t… I thought I had to have it all, or nothing of it. Do you see?”
“You know I do.”
“And I was so angry.”
And then the smile spreads across his face, no trace of the smugness or false humor that he wears so often in the presence of others. “But not now.”
Susan’s answering smile is just as soft, just as bright and new. “No.”
And it is true, she knows, and she holds that tight as the Doctor and his smile slip inside the TARDIS, and then they are gone. She wants to cry but knows there is no reason; she does so anyhow and the smile diverts the tears in slow tracks down her face.
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
When she wakes in the morning and passes through the hall, she catches a glimpse of herself in the dusty mirror. There are lines that were not there before, and her dark hair holds the smallest hint of grey. The eyes that meet hers in the glass are familiar and yet wonderfully strange, old and full and quieter, now.
The days here in Polly Plummer’s old cottage are slower than they were when she traveled by police box, but Susan doesn’t mind, at first. And by the time she does mind, they begin find her, all of the things on Earth that, like her, are not truly of it. They come at night, on wing and water and land and it is not long before she takes to disappearing from the cottage for stretches of time, and if she is on Earth during these periods, it is not within the scope of human knowledge to find her.
When she is at home, though, she sleeps deeply, dreaming of the smell of lightning and the sea, and the sound of the wind between the stars and the harmonics of the sun. Susan lives in the sky, now, in the spaces between; she’s put a crack in each door and found a place in each world and, while she may not have everything, she’s a long damn way from having nothing.
Original Prompt: I am just going to give a list of things I like! Feel free to pick and choose from there:
- I like girls more than boys mostly! I love all the ladies of Narnia, I love sisterfic, and I love femslash.
- I much, much prefer bookverse to movieverse
- Suuuusan I would love to see her adventuring after Narnia (in whichever universe you like!) -- I would especially love to see her with some good friends after the crash
- Polly! Tell me about the magical adventures Polly had after Narnia
- All my favorite ships are doomed: Lune/Susan, Lucy/Sea Girl, Lucy/Caspian and/or Edmund/Caspian, Susan/people who Can Never Quite Understand, Lucy/people who Can Never Quite Understand.
- If you are into crossovers I also like: Harry Potter, Supernatural, Doctor Who, Mary Poppins.
Prompt words/objects/quotes/whatever: "but I am not someone who likes to wound / rather I have a quiet mind" (Sappho 120, trans Anne Carson)
What I definitely don't want in my fic: Smut, incest, super dark fic. Please don't demonize Susan or baby Lucy.
Author: ilysia_039
Recipient: animus_wyrmis
Rating: PG
Possible Spoilers/Warnings: None to speak of.
Summary: Susan has never had the greatest respect for linear time. Now, slipping through it like water through a sieve, she wonders if it hasn’t just stuck around because no one’s bothered to point out how ridiculous it actually is.
Notes: Beta-read by the fantastic and ever helpful [redacted]. Many thanks!
touch the sky with two arms
What comes out of his mouth the first time she sees him is, “You’re not supposed to be here.” Not a question, no hint of uncertainty. Just warm curiosity and so, so much interest, as if she’s an equation that’s been laid out before him to puzzle over, to solve. She gives him a quick glance and then returns to her tea, sedately stirring in sugar. If a slight smile flits across her face or something bright and sharp shifts in her stomach, that’s no business of his.
“Neither are you.”
Surprise on his face; he should know better, though, she thinks. He scours the café, frowning intently, and then sits opposite her. It’s easy to imagine him bouncing in his seat, but he is still, intent. Long fingers drum quickly on the tabletop. “Then what are you doing here? You’re English, aren’t you?” An almost plaintive sound tinges his voice. He’s plugging numbers into the equation that he’s made her out to be, expecting simple answers. “You should belong here.”
She smiles again and almost laughs. He’s refreshing, this stranger, and she needs refreshment. She’s become stagnant, slow and stupid, an old woman living past her time, waiting only to die. It’s been a gentle decay in the slow several years since she’s been alone, painful at times but mostly just quietly smothering. He, though, is a bolt of lightning, a clap of thunder. Spring rain. He’s fascinating and interesting and she knows that her eyes reflect the same curious fire that’s in his.
“Shouldn’t I?”
He’ll learn soon enough that, if she’s an equation, she necessitates not only irrational numbers but most likely an entire alphabet of variables as well, and maybe a few sideways leaps of logic just in case.
As complicated as she may be, though, Susan already half suspects that the stranger may need extra dimensions to explain, if explicable he is.
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
As it turns out, she’s correct.
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
He walks with her as she makes her way back to her flat, walks through a London made bright and new by an unusually brilliant spring and he tries to puzzle her out. As he scowls and mutters quietly, occasionally firing the odd question at her, Susan watches the city watch them.
She’s quite used to getting second looks from men as she passes- she knows she’s beautiful, though the gazes never cease to lend the slightest hint of tension to her posture- but now that she’s walking with him, the women sneak second glances, too. It’s clear why. In his utter intentness to crack her, he’s quite nearly devastating, all fire and boundless energy and a genius that already she can see bottled up in his frame. It gives his motions elegance and his actions grace; coupled with his lethally brilliant grin, he would be difficult to resist, were Susan anyone else.
But she is herself, and she’s known men with this sort of charisma before. In any case, she’s more interested in his offer of, “Come with me.”
“Why?”
“Do you always question men before you run off with them?” The question startles a laugh out of her and that in turn coaxes a smile out of him. Not a grin, either: a small, slow, almost hesitant smile. It’s that smile that convinces her of two things: one, that she will go with him; and two, that if he ever throws her that lethal grin, ever turns all his genius and fire into that sharp charisma and attempts to use it on her, she will leave, because she’s not interested in the façade he throws up to convince people that he’s not dangerous, and really, she doesn’t think that he is, either.
All these things run through her head, and his smile is replaced by a small smirk; armor going up. It’s so familiar as to be painful, but all she says is, “Only on very special occasions.”
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
Her lack of reaction to his strange blue box is a slight disappointment, judging by the crestfallen look on his face when all she says is, “I do hope you won’t lose me in here.”
One more variable for him to add to his equation of her, she supposes. He frowns. “And you’re really not bothered?” Reaching out to stroke what she supposes are the controls, though they look rather a bit more complicated than most controls she’s seen, he turns the frown into a considering look. “Most people are, you know.”
“I’m not most people. Besides-“ and she hesitates just long enough to add a hint of levity to her voice- “I once found an entire world in the back of a wardrobe.”
“Oh?” The stroking of controls stops, and Susan once again finds herself the center of his undivided attention. “What happened?”
“I got lost.”
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
They’re on her first alien world, her first glimpse of the vastness of space and the length of time and she loves it, for all its strangeness. There are more stars in this sky, and they are closer, and oh, so much younger than she has ever seen them, in this life. Reyathin is uninhabited, and it’s old (in her time the planet’s been dust for millions of years), but it’s what he likes to call a gentle and rewarding start to their travels, and she believes him.
When he offered, within a few hours of her stepping aboard the TARDIS, to show her Earth’s past, she’d declined without so much as a moment’s hesitation. That world’s past is dangerous to her, and she worries that the temptations to go when she should never, can never go, would be too much. She’d much rather see what no one else has ever seen… for the second and third and forth and thousandth times in her life. Now, watching this planet’s dawn, she knows she’s made the right decision.
“How did you know?”
His question startles her from her reverie; she turns from the triple sunrise to face him, only to be struck by the massive star setting just over his shoulder. The lights from the three smaller stars bathe him in pale morning light, even as the raging colors of the sunset paint his back bloody. It’s glorious and confusing and so wrong that she almost forgets his question. “Know what?”
“How did you know that I didn’t belong, the first time we met, other than my brilliant opening remark? Or were you just being clever?”
She wants to laugh, wondering if it’s a joke, and then she realizes that he’s completely serious. There are a thousand reasons she could give, and all would be true, but he already knows that his walk’s not quite right, and his thoughts are too quicksilver fast, and his tenses are an utter wreck, and his gaze puts the thousand yard stare to shame. He wants the truth, because he doesn’t quite trust her yet, and why should he? She doesn’t quite trust him. They’re still strangers and she knows this as well as she knows anything: there’s a lot of time and space on the TARDIS, and in the short time she’s traveled with him they’ve already begun to fill it with all the past they won’t say. Despite all of this, she wants, suddenly, to make herself clear in the monstrous beauty of this dying, birthing sky. It’s all relative, she wants to tell him; and she only knows because how could she not?
“Susan?”
“It’s the eyes,” she says softly, and turns from him. She’s had enough of dying suns in her dreams, giants reaching up and plucking them from the sky, and stars falling. She doesn’t need to see them when she wakes as well.
“The eyes.”
Susan can’t say why this has suddenly become so important, why it’s suddenly become to necessary to make him understand that she knows. He won’t think her mad- at least, she thinks not, but he might not understand, either. She’s honestly not sure which would be worse. “When you lose something as important as… as important as your home and your world, and all the people who knew you in it… you don’t think that ever really goes away, do you?”
There it is then, out in the light of all this world’s suns. She doesn’t want the pressure of his eyes, but his hand comes down onto her shoulder to rest. “Your world in the wardrobe?”
Not quite trusting herself, even after all this time, to speak the name, she makes a noncommittal humming under her breath.
“Oh, Susan.”
They stay like that until the last of the old star’s dying rays fade away, giving the whole world over to its younger lights. Were Susan more romantic, she’d call it a sign. Still, it’s pretty and it’s new, and that’s enough for now.
~+~+~+~+~+~+~
“Trouble with your time is- oh, don’t roll your eyes so, Susan, it’s childish- fine, the time you were living in, is that they’re so close! So close to figuring everything out- well, no, not everything, of course, but quite a lot. The Big Bang- that’s fairly recent. And Einstein! What a brilliant man! We should visit him; he’d love you, Susan, and you’d love him, really-“
“Is this Albert Einstein? The scientist?”
“You know another Einstein?”
“He died last year.”
He pauses. “Did he? Ah, well, I do lose track.” She watches his face, watches his eyes darken for a moment before he shakes whatever thoughts he was having away. “Still, we can visit him, you know. Not a problem-“
She shakes her head, cutting him off mid-thought. “Well, maybe not,” he concedes. There’s a moment of silence during which all that can be heard is the muted hum of the engines and the imagined sound of space and time flowing past. “What I meant to say, though, was that they’re so close, but so far. There’s so much they can’t see yet!”
They’re talking over dinner- well, she’s eating, curled up in one of the command chairs he’s continually rearranging around the TARDIS’ controls and he’s got half the floor ripped up, playing with wires and connections and looking gleeful as a child with a pointy stick and no adult supervision- and, as always happens on these occasions, he takes this opportunity to turn the talk into a lecture. About science, mostly, though from time to time he strays over into math or, on even rarer occasions, music. The music she can relate to, and the math to some degree, but science was never a subject she’d studied with any vigor. Even if had, she has the feeling that whatever knowledge mid-century England would have been able to impart to her would have fallen far, far short of enough to understand the tangents the Doctor tends to go off on.
“Your sun, for example!” he shouts suddenly, thrusting one grease-stained, battered hand up in indignation. She watches the wrench in his loose fingers with cautious interest. “It sings! Rings in dozens and dozens of different harmonics, all surging out through the universe, and no one in your silly time is able to hear a damn bit of it.”
“I know the stars sing,” she says calmly, nudging a noodle across her plate in absent thought. Susan wants him to know this in the same way she wants him to know why she won’t visit Earth’s past, wants him to understand that her view of the stars and the universe may be different from what he’s expecting. “Of course they do.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes.” The glare she levels at him is the one she used to employ, Before. It shuts him up just as efficiently as it always had the ministers and ambassadors and, heaven help her, the Nymphs. “Where I come from, stars are sentient beings. They’re somewhat terrifying, functionally immortal, and have absolutely no tolerance for terrestrial alcohol. Trust me, I know the stars sing.”
By this point, he’s abandoned his wires completely and has reverted to staring up at her. Were he anyone else, he would be open-mouthed and slack-jawed. Unable to contain herself, she adds, “It’s not the singing that’s unbelievable. It’s the pitch.”
~+~+~+~+~+~+~
It’s only later that night that she realizes she hasn’t seen his lethal grin since Reyathin, nearly a month ago, by her inevitably skewed count. When this thought hits her, she stops dead in the middle of slipping into her dressing gown and just thinks for a moment. Dimly she can hear him still tinkering in the control room.
A few moments and endless heartbeats later, she stands behind him, her dressing gown forgotten in the corridor. His dark hair is stuck out at all angles and he’s attempting to lever himself into a tiny compartment partially beneath the controls. Every other word is a curse, or so she suspects, because even though she can’t speak the languages he’s using she knows an obscenity when she hears one.
“Doctor,” she says, and his curses stop.
“Susan?” He cocks his head to peer up at her from the corner of his eye. “To what-“
“I had two brothers and a sister.” She stops, suddenly chilled, licks her lips. He turns to look at her properly now, his face still and his eyes so, so old. “They didn’t belong in that time, either. Good night.”
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
She steps out of the TARDIS and her breath hitches for the smallest hint of a moment before her composure catches up. Though almost no one else would have noticed, Susan can feel his smile as he follows her.
It’s almost… it’s almost like home, achingly so, but just different enough that her heart doesn’t quite break in two at the sight of those mountains in the west and the meadows rolling before them. Maybe it’s that the sun is just a hint too red, or the air just a touch cooler than she remembers. Maybe it’s because the planet is utterly calm in a way that Narnia never was, not even in the dead of Winter.
“How…”
“The old girl picked it out. Your world in the wardrobe, right?” He smiles at her, but she’s aware enough of her friend- and, yes, she concedes now that friend is the only word for what he’s become to her, other than brother, and that word still hurts too much- that, even in the overwhelmingly glorious ache of the place, she can see the hint of uncertainty in the corner of his eyes, the lines of his smile.
“How would she have known?” A thought occurs to her and the next words tumble out almost angrily. “I don’t want her in my head, Doctor. I-“
“No, no! Of course not. But you dream, you know, and it’s very loud, to her, and she can’t help but hear it.”
Susan turns back to the mountains, wanting to frown and cry and laugh and maybe slap the Doctor and kiss his wonderful machine. “She told you this?”
“Yes. I mean, not as such, you know, not the way we’re talking now, although there was one memorable time… but that was a long time ago. A different me.” Though she’s not facing him, she can hear that his smile has slipped into the grin he employs in emergencies. “But you don’t want to hear about that.” But she does, very much. “In any case, happy birthday, Susan.”
“Hmph.” She doubts he hears it, as quiet as it is, but she lets her uncertainty go with a gentle snort and tries to bask in the almost-familiar light. “Thank you.”
The Doctor seems to take that as a peace offering and steps forward to link his arm in hers. “How old are you, anyways?”
A loaded question, of course. Happy birthday, Susan, and welcome to our universe’s attempt at Narnia! Just state your age for the record and all your lost dreams can come true! But she’s being bitter; he’s just being curious, and therefore himself. “I was born in 1928,” she answers instead, knowing as she says it that the answer won’t satisfy him. Even as he opens his mouth to protest she continues. “But it really depends on who you ask. I had three thirteenth birthdays, if that helps your calculations at all.”
He looks like he’s about to launch into another one of his long-winded discussions about the fabric of space-time and how she really can’t have had three thirteenth birthdays, so she interrupts him by saying, “And, really, I could ask you the same question.” She suspects his answer would make even less sense. And, of course, she’s right.
“Well… this model’s still quite young.” Waggling the fingers that aren’t wrapped around her arm dementedly, he flashes her one of his more ridiculous grins. “Hard to count time in the TARDIS, obviously, but I’d say less than four Earth years. Maybe. But, well, there have been-“
“More of you.” Susan’s suspected this for some time; she wonders if he’s always looked like this, though from the way he stoops to pass through doorways that are quite tall enough to accommodate him, she’s sure that at least one of the earlier models was taller.
“Yes…” he drags his answer out and turns his gaze to the mountains, waiting for her to pass judgment. His hand tightens momentarily on her arm.
It should bother her, perhaps, that this man changes faces, save for the fact that she does the same, more or less. And when you’ve lived in a world where stars come down on the Winter Equinox and the trees constantly petition for refuge from immoral dwarves and you’re likely to get an earful from a Finch if you’re not careful, fewer things are shocking than might otherwise be the case. “Well, I do hope don’t plan on changing anytime soon. I’ve gotten rather used to you, Doctor, and I would hate to have to learn someone else’s demented habits.”
He brightens visibly. “Ah, Susan, you love my demented habits. You’d have bored yourself to death without me by now, admit it.”
And though she will never speak it aloud, the first thought to cross her mind is, I very nearly did.
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
Susan’s seen neither hair no hide of the Doctor for nearly a fortnight and at this point she’s so far past the point of mere worry that the Murin’click’al are beginning to avoid her. At some level this interests her; they are engaged in the bloodiest civil war she’s ever heard of, much less seen, used to all sorts of atrocities and furies, yet they avoid her. On a more practical level, however, she’s much to busy learning how to use their weapons and understand their culture and find out where on this (literally) godforsaken planet has the Doctor been taken?
She gets her answer two days later, after a raid on a Tiailcha’ war camp. The fighting is fierce and more drawn out than the Murin’click’al commander had expected and Susan, ignoring the orders of the alien general who was, after all, only trying to do as his old friend the Doctor had asked him and keep her safe, takes the strange double bladed weapon of a fallen soldier and goes to war.
There is the initial rush of fear, the thoughts of death and pain and alien world alien air alien war alien weapon but all that subsides almost immediately beneath the surge of adrenaline and the rightness of warring in this body. This is the first battle Susan’s taken part in since the revolt against Miraz, and even in that war she wasn’t really there, trapped in a younger, softer version of herself. Now, though, she is old and hard and her body remembers what it is to fight, what it is to be the queen who hand picked and trained every single archer in the vanguard of her brother’s army. She remembers, and the Tiailcha’ do not forget, not for years after she is gone.
But at the end of the night it is only the Doctor she pays any attention to, her focus trapped by the bruises blossoming on his face and the slightly glazed look to his eyes. “Drugged,” the Murin’click’al medic tells her, and her gaze sharpens. For one brief moment he is Peter, worn from a campaign and injured; Edmund, moving stiffly and not meeting her eyes; Lucy, quiet after the one and only kidnapping attempt ever perpetrated during the Pevensie sovereignty. And then she’s pulling him to his feet, gently. “Doctor? It’s Susan.”
The eyes that meet hers are lost, momentarily, and he says, “Susan… I never… I never meant for you to die, my child.”
She closes her eyes briefly; if he is her ghost then she must be his. “I never did.”
He blinks and his eyes clear. “No, of course not.” There is an abortive attempt at a grin, which she ignores.
“We’re going home.”
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
Interlocking circles, at once mechanical and natural, flow across the screen lazily and he occasionally flicks at one with his fingertips, sending it spinning from the line into nothingness. He mutters under his breath as he does so, strange sounds, like singing or rain or the wind between stars. With one hand manipulating the screen and the other absentmindedly rubbing the back of his neck, the Doctor looks alarmingly like Edmund. It hurts, but not so much as she would have expected.
“Why won’t it translate?” she asks, coming to stand behind him.
He startles at her words, and she can see that he’d had no idea she’d come into the control room at all. Normally he would have, or the TARDIS would have told him; they were both lost within those circles, those sounds. And he stares at her, looking lost for the first time since she’s known him, and imagines that she’s not the only one seeing ghosts tonight.
“You-“ he stops, clears his throat, and when he asks again his voice is stronger. “It won’t translate because I don’t want it to. And neither does she.” He lays a hand on the control panel; the TARDIS almost keens.
Ah. She knows those types of secrets, the ones even you scarcely dare think about, they’re so precious. And she may even share this secret, in a way. In the dim light of the TARDIS’ artificial night, he still reminds her somewhat of her brother. It gives her the courage to ask, “Do you have something to write with?”
Caught off guard, his eyes widen minutely, but he’s never known her to ask for something without reason, she knows, and so he pushes his interlocking circles to one side of the screen with a flick of his wrist, beckoning her forward.
Susan takes the stylus from his unresisting fingers- they should never be so limp, she thinks- and prays that her hands haven’t forgotten the curves and swoops she once knew so well, the thorns and the hooks that she had once labored to learn. It’s surreal, writing this language on a spaceship that’s lazing somewhere in the quieter part of space-time, but it feels right in its own way. The letters look strangely comfortable next to the Doctor’s circles and they, too, remain untranslated. She finishes with a flourish and steps back with a half-smile that no one could mistake for pleasure.
“What-“ he starts, peering down at what she’s written. “That’s not… what is that?” he demands, turning his gaze from the curling words to her face. “It’s… what have you done?”
It’s an old Narnian poem, from before the Winter, sparse and simple, one that many set to music in her court. She would recite it for him, or sing it, but she’s never had much luck translating this language into English, and she’s not entirely certain that all of the sounds in Old Narnian can be spoken in this universe. She’s never had much luck with that, either. “It’s a language, of course.”
“I see that, thank you, but I can’t- I can’t understand it. Never seen it before.” The look on his face as he swings his attention toward her is torn between bewilderment and frustration and a deadly interest. “And that shouldn’t matter, in any case; the TARDIS should translate it. But she can’t.”
“I could have invented it,” she volunteers, almost wishing that she had. The sounds are running through her head now, songs and prayers and ceremonies; all things she’d put carefully away years ago, freed to run rampant.
He dismisses that possibility with a flap of his hand. “You didn’t. And besides, it’d be translated anyhow. No, this is something new, something… different.”
“It’s from… a long time away.” Susan falters, looks down at her hands. His attention is back on their two languages, and he’s frowning. “I couldn’t get there if I tried. I’m the only person in this universe who knows what those words mean, and I can’t even speak them here.”
A silence falls over them; even the engines are quiet. She wonders what it would be like if the TARDIS could get her back; if she could step out those doors, what she would see. Green hills, glinting peaks, the sea going on forever… or night, endless nothingness, the darkness behind stars. That place is gone, and she knows it. She lives here, now, and for some reason that thought is not so oppressive as it might be.
Then suddenly she needs him, and needs him to know that she knows, as if he doesn’t already. He stiffens when she wraps her arms around him, and she understands his surprise; she’s never, in his presence, been demonstrative. She’s never been demonstrative anywhere, but he’s family, she thinks. So she holds tight and waits for him.
After a few moments he relaxes into her, enfolding her strong arms. “What a pair of old miseries we are,” he says, laughing, and she agrees. Her forehead rests on his shoulder and she realizes for the first time that they are almost the same height. She hadn’t expected that, somehow. Beneath the slight whiff of engine oil that constantly pervades him, she catches a scent of clean air and something not entirely unlike lightning and she remembers her first impression of him.
“Narnia.” It’s the first time she’s said the name aloud in years, and her voice is stronger than she ever could have hoped.
“Gallifrey.”
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
“We came back different.” They’ve been left in a small room that’s more cave than anything else; there are no windows, though if there were Susan suspects they would be barred. The entrance they passed through has no door but there’s a quiet hum and a suspicious sheen to the air there that seems to indicate a door’s not really necessary. The Doctor doesn’t seem worried, though, and so Susan won’t be either. Not until he starts joking while avoiding her eyes. Until then, all they can do is fill the blank space, and by Susan’s reckoning it’s her turn.
He takes the bait; she knew he would. He doesn’t know so much about her yet that he can resist a tidbit like this. And somehow, now, she doesn’t mind telling him. “What?”
“My brothers and sister and I. When we came back from Narnia that first time. We’d grown old there, you see, and to return to England young again…” She stops, runs her fingers along the rough, sloping walls, and remembers. She remembers the confusion of tumbling from summer woods onto a polished floor, of trading comfortable age and only slightly aching joints for gangling youth. Experience for bewilderment. “Everything we’d learned, everything we knew… we came back half-mad and brilliant, all of us. We came back all edges, and sharp. It was… hard.”
There is more she wants to say, about how they’d been so right in that world, fit so well, and how they had bumped off the slopes and curves of this world once they’d returned, too jagged to fit properly anymore. But at the moment she opens her mouth to say these things, the fission hum of the un-door dies and their… host enters, looking suspicious.
Several hours of madcap action involving, on the Doctor’s part, a lot of fast talking and the building of some insane device (and damage control on Susan’s) later, and then they’re peacefully milling about under a starry sky with thousands of their alien hosts, another world saved by the Doctor. Susan’s content, then, to walk with him over the grass that crumbles like sand under their feet and reforms as they step away.
There is a dance of some sort, but Susan’s aware that she’s limited to too few planes to join in, and, judging by the outrageous flirting the Doctor’s begun with what she thinks is the Consulate’s mate, they may have to run for it soon anyhow.
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
She’s right, of course, and as they run for the TARDIS, the Doctor shouting platitudes over his shoulder as he does so, she laughs and marvels that this is her normal. And then the thought occurs to her that her whole life has been leading up to this moment, and the moment after it, and the moment after that.
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
“I have met a lot of people who’ve been through traumatic events. A lot of different kinds of people. Victims, survivors, collateral damage. Ghosts.”
They’re sitting on a cliff of diamond, overlooking a sea of cold fire. There’s a flute of something alcoholic in her hand. It tastes like summer sunlight and puts the most glorious golden halo around everything and in this light his words have no power to harm her. “And which one am I?”
“I have no idea.” This seems to delight him, as if he’s almost on the edge of adding, Isn’t it marvelous? It delights her too, in a vague, golden way.
“Which are you, then?”
“Me?” He pauses, considers his own drink, and then gives her one of his rare smiles. “I’m a Doctor.”
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
Susan wakes one morning, a strange feeling in her chest. Strong silvery sunlight filters down on her through an intricate lattice of some native wood and it feels, as she gently circles the sensation, as though this sunlight has pervaded her body, suffusing every nook and cranny. And then there is nothing that follows it, no soft wave of smothering remembrance, no regret, no pain. It is, she realizes, not so much a sensation as an absence of one; there is no knot of anger, of memory.
And she can live with that, with having that open wound scar, leaving her memories intact but all the weight they’ve had (I’msorryIcan’tforgetwhyareyougone) behind. She can breathe again, under this alien sun.
The stillness is interrupted by Jhanti’s panicked voice at her door: “Bera Susan, please, your friend is in the laboratory, and he’s taking apart the quantum manipulator and Bera if he does something wrong he could break down matter or tear a hole in-“
Susan sighs, introspection forgotten, and rises to go save the universe, sunlight still suffusing her.
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
“Doctor.” Her voice calls him back, pulls his hand from the door, if only for a moment more. His face is quiet but not sad, and she can, if she tries, see the barest hint of a smile lingering in the corners of his mouth. “I wasn’t like them, my brothers and my sister. When we came back for good, they could do it, live here but belong there. But I…” she pauses, wondering. “I had one foot in both worlds, and a place in neither. I can’t… I thought I had to have it all, or nothing of it. Do you see?”
“You know I do.”
“And I was so angry.”
And then the smile spreads across his face, no trace of the smugness or false humor that he wears so often in the presence of others. “But not now.”
Susan’s answering smile is just as soft, just as bright and new. “No.”
And it is true, she knows, and she holds that tight as the Doctor and his smile slip inside the TARDIS, and then they are gone. She wants to cry but knows there is no reason; she does so anyhow and the smile diverts the tears in slow tracks down her face.
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~
When she wakes in the morning and passes through the hall, she catches a glimpse of herself in the dusty mirror. There are lines that were not there before, and her dark hair holds the smallest hint of grey. The eyes that meet hers in the glass are familiar and yet wonderfully strange, old and full and quieter, now.
The days here in Polly Plummer’s old cottage are slower than they were when she traveled by police box, but Susan doesn’t mind, at first. And by the time she does mind, they begin find her, all of the things on Earth that, like her, are not truly of it. They come at night, on wing and water and land and it is not long before she takes to disappearing from the cottage for stretches of time, and if she is on Earth during these periods, it is not within the scope of human knowledge to find her.
When she is at home, though, she sleeps deeply, dreaming of the smell of lightning and the sea, and the sound of the wind between the stars and the harmonics of the sun. Susan lives in the sky, now, in the spaces between; she’s put a crack in each door and found a place in each world and, while she may not have everything, she’s a long damn way from having nothing.
Original Prompt: I am just going to give a list of things I like! Feel free to pick and choose from there:
- I like girls more than boys mostly! I love all the ladies of Narnia, I love sisterfic, and I love femslash.
- I much, much prefer bookverse to movieverse
- Suuuusan I would love to see her adventuring after Narnia (in whichever universe you like!) -- I would especially love to see her with some good friends after the crash
- Polly! Tell me about the magical adventures Polly had after Narnia
- All my favorite ships are doomed: Lune/Susan, Lucy/Sea Girl, Lucy/Caspian and/or Edmund/Caspian, Susan/people who Can Never Quite Understand, Lucy/people who Can Never Quite Understand.
- If you are into crossovers I also like: Harry Potter, Supernatural, Doctor Who, Mary Poppins.
Prompt words/objects/quotes/whatever: "but I am not someone who likes to wound / rather I have a quiet mind" (Sappho 120, trans Anne Carson)
What I definitely don't want in my fic: Smut, incest, super dark fic. Please don't demonize Susan or baby Lucy.