Fic: Stories
Fic Name: Stories
Rating: G
Prompt: #65 - Passing
Claim: Ten/Tardis
Summary: Time continues on for Jamie - as it must.
Spoilers: Obliquely for the end of "The War Games" (S6)
Notes: Written for the doctorwho_100 challenge (prompt chart is here) and x-posted to dwfiction. Let's say it takes place in something of an A/U where "The Two Doctors" never happened, because I don't care to get into Season 6B and all that just now. Indecent amounts of thanks to Kimchi the betagoddess, and to scots_git, my reluctant dialect consultant
(... Been watching quite a bit of classic Who of late, as a sort of comfort food I suppose.)
STORIES
"High as the side of a house it was, and covered all in hair, th' great shaggy thing, wi' eyes like scoops o' red coals! It weren't no beast as they had ever seen before - and inside it weren't beast at all but a great mass of metal an' fire - no thoughts and no soul, just like a clock striking the hours wi'out knowing why it ticks 'em away. The thing hirpled toward 'em till they were stood, backs against the stone walls o' the cave, an' nowhere to run to but into th' arms o' the great beastie itsel'! Wi' a horrible cry like the end o' days, it raised a claw long as a sword - " At this the children set up a sudden chorus of screams, and Victoria came charging into the room.
"Father!" she chided, gathering a few of the smallest to her, where they sniffled into her skirts and peeped at him with wide eyes. "There, now! You see? You've gone to scaring the bairns again wi' your tales!"
"Now, lass, they're only stories. Children like a story of an evening - "
"Aye, stories!" Victoria snapped at him. "Children's stories, proper stories, not this unco nonsense about mechanical men and furred beasties and great monsters frae th' stars! Hush, now, dears, there's nae to fret o'er," she crooned, patting heads and wiping noses. She glanced over her shoulder at the tall, lean boy in the shadows of the corner. "And you, Ben, you're more to blame than your grandfather - lettin' him scare the weans and get himsel' into a state wi' the telling of such tales!"
Ben stepped into the firelight beside his grandfather's chair and put a protective hand on the old man's shoulder. "They're good stories, mother. Grandfather Jamie tells the best tales - much better than the fairy stories we hear of a Sunday!"
"Hush, lad," Jamie murmured under his breath.
"Benjamin James McCrimmon!" Victoria exploded. "I ne'er had a mind tae hear such talk from my ain children! Help your grandfather to bed and take ye off yoursel' - and expect a fair bit o' work on the morrow as punishment for your cheek, as well! And mind you, Father, if that leg pains you again, drink a draught before you lay yoursel' down. You'll wake the house again wi' calling for a doctor all night."
Jamie got stiffly to his feet and regarded his daughter. "And what d'ye mean by that, Victoria?"
"Aye, I hear you as well as any other, all night calling out doctor! doctor! like to wake the hounds in the yard." Jamie caught Ben's glance and smiled as his grandson rolled his eyes behind her back and offered him an arm. He shuffled from the room with Ben, leaving Victoria to sort the children and herd them to bed.
Away from the fireside the passageway was dim and cold, and Jamie leaned heavily on the boy as they made slow progress to his bedchamber. "I'm sorry, lad," he murmured, eyes on the treacherous shadows at his feet. Ben glanced at him curiously. Jamie shook his head. "Your aul' grandfather is slow, boy. Slower and slower, I'm afeared ... "
"Does your leg pain you all that much?"
"Nae, 'tis but stiff wi' the cold." He regarded the boy from the corner of his eye. "And why d'ye ask, lad?"
Ben frowned at the carpet. "'Tis only that ... Mother speaks true: you do call for a doctor, of a night." Jamie grunted.
"Dreams, then, boy. I've no mem'ry of it and no need of a physician, mind. Slow doesn't mean unsound."
"Nae, o' course not." They reached the bedchamber and Ben helped the old man climb stiffly into bed. "I'll raise the fire for ye, Grandfather."
"Good lad. And then you'll sit by me and have a tale o' your own. What'll it be, then?"
Without hesitation Ben answered eagerly, "The blue box."
"Aye, ever your favourite, weren't it? Weel, then, a tale o' the blue box it is!" The fire stoked, Ben came to sit by the bedside, boy and old man alike settling into the story like a familiar chair. "And it's nae just a box, ye ken," Jamie began, "but a doorway to worlds, this wonder is, for when you step through - "
when you step through you see shifting sands, towers of glass, birds and monsters and whirling stars. You see the hand of a friend, a wise man whose face you don't quite remember. You hear music and you run - away from or towards, it doesn't matter, either or neither or both. There is danger and wonder and always the hands of friends and that is the blue box: step through the doors and there you are. Somewhere.
When Jamie nodded finally to sleep Ben slipped from the room and crept to his own cot, his mind alight with his grandfather's words. Monsters and men, they coloured his life; he longed to travel, to see and hear and run, to step through the doorway of the blue box like the people in the tales. He huddled under the blankets in the dark, thinking wistfully, If only they weren't just stories.
If only they were real.
***
But to Jamie the stories are real: more real than this cold house, his daughter's sharp tongue, the shrugs of pity for an old man from the village lads. Even his beloved moors, the fields and fens and hills of his land, are becoming just so much dry grass and bare earth, dull and pale in the glow of the tales in his head.
The stories have always been there: ever since the Battle of Culloden, when he woke lame and bloodied but a hero of the field - one of few heroes, of the few left alive - the stories have come, tales of journeys and battles, of sights and thoughts and ideas far beyond the ken of a simple piper. Folk listened, frowning, shook their heads and whispered about the poor lad battle-shocked and touched in the wits and Jamie learned to hold his tongue, to close his eyes and swallow the stories and keep them inside. He married, worked, surrounded himself with children and grandchildren, worked and listened and watched the world change. And it was enough.
Until the world stopped changing. Until it straitened and became dull, until the world shrank to his bedchamber, the hearth and the kitchen garden, the narrow dark hallways and the hoarfrost on the windowpanes. The edges of things have become blurred and the centres have become boring, and the stories rise up in him - insistent, violent, demanding, and so very beautiful. They fill his dreams every night - the blue doors open, a friend beckons - and in the day they whisper to him - monsters and men - and sometimes he thinks if it weren't for his grandson, if it weren't for Ben - so eager to take the stories from him, to carry them with him - he would suffocate, would be crushed under the weight of his own untold tales.
Every morning, as the blue doors close and the world settles dully around him, he hears it again: Now don't go blundering into too much trouble, will you?
And wakes thinking, inexplicably, You're a fine one to talk.
***
The world shrinks again and Jamie can't leave his bed, and the stories come unbidden now and he lives in them. When his grandson comes he holds out a hand, cold and trembling, and draws the boy into the stories with him.
But the winter is cold and too long and there is work to be done just to keep the fires lit and the animals in the barn from freezing in their sleep. Ben walks the hill road in the dark to lessons every morning, slips and skids home on hobnailed boots in the afternoon, hauls and carries and breaks the ice on the troughs, and listens to talk of an apprenticeship in the spring: A counting-house, maybe. A shipwright. A bootmaker.
He bites his tongue and thinks desperately of the blue box. Grandfather falls ill and Ben works hard and late and there is less time for stories. He goes to Jamie's bedchamber when he can to raise the fire and settle into the tales with the old man; and though Jamie sees him, knows him, takes him by the hand, Ben understands that the stories are more real to him now than the dark and cold chamber is; and when Jamie tells him, "The blue doors opened, and the boy and the girl saw an ocean of light beyond," to his grandfather the blue box, the boy and the girl and the ocean of light all happened, and to him the stories are true.
If only they were, Ben thinks.
***
"Hermit about," Cormick muttered over supper by the hearth. Victoria cast a quick eye at Ben, bent over a book at the other end of the table.
"Aye, Husband?" she asked quietly.
"O' sorts."
"Where, then?"
"Th' moor."
A man o' few words is blessing enough, Victoria thought, but getting a tale frae him can be like drawing a tooth frae a cat. She sighed. "Just a' seated there on the moor, lookin' out o'er God's creation?" she said archly. Over his book, Ben suppressed a giggle.
"Nae, woman, he's builded himself a hovel in the hauch. Said he'd come to see how the battle ended. Seemed surprised t' hear it were sixty year an' more past."
"Another bampot," Victoria snorted. "And it sounds as though you had a good enough tove wi' him, Husband."
"That I did. Good man. He come into the village tae ask after things. Englishman, he is, and young to be so daft as weel ... looked about and talked wi' one and all, and went back tae his box - "
"Box?" Ben raised his head.
"Aye, boy. Livin' in a box wi'out room e'en to lie down in. Must be some sort o' holy man."
"Doitit, if ye ask me ... "
"Did you see this box?" Ben asked urgently. Cormick fixed a curious gaze on his son and nodded slowly.
"That I did, lad."
"What - what did it look like?"
"And why do you need tae know?"
"Now, woman, hush." Cormick turned back to Ben. "Tall, like, and thin, wi' windae up high. Writing upon it as weel, though it stood too far away to read of it."
Ben swallowed, his heart beating fast. "And what colour was it?"
"Colour?"
"Aye."
"Why, t'were blue, lad."
***
Ben wakes his grandfather before dawn, helps him to dress; tells him they must go to the moor, that there is something to see. It is barely spring, still cold and dark, and Ben isn't certain that the old man understands him. He takes Jamie's hand and they slip from the house. The walk is long and slow and Jamie is quiet but not silent, whispering stories to the shadows as they pass. It has been so long since he has walked this road that it doesn't recognise him any longer.
The sun is rising as they reach the moor. They stop and watch as the light picks out first hills and hollows, then shapes and outlines, and finally colours; and Ben can only stand and stare as he sees his grandfather's tales illuminated slowly before him.
Jamie is silent for long moments, the stories stilled on his lips as suddenly, finally, he remembers. He remembers, and on legs that are barely shaking at all he stumbles across the field, Ben running after him, both crying out at the top of their voices, "Creag an tuire!", laughing and running together until they come to the box and stop, clutching each other, breathing hard, still laughing, and waiting for the blue doors to open.
Glossary for the Scottish-Impaired:
hirpled - lurched
unco - bizarre
weans - children
hauch - meadow
bampot - idiot, nutter
tove - to gossip, to chat
doitit - foolish, witless
"Creag an tuire" - "The Boar's Rock"(Jamie's battlecry and the motto of the MacLaren Clan)
Rating: G
Prompt: #65 - Passing
Claim: Ten/Tardis
Summary: Time continues on for Jamie - as it must.
Spoilers: Obliquely for the end of "The War Games" (S6)
Notes: Written for the doctorwho_100 challenge (prompt chart is here) and x-posted to dwfiction. Let's say it takes place in something of an A/U where "The Two Doctors" never happened, because I don't care to get into Season 6B and all that just now. Indecent amounts of thanks to Kimchi the betagoddess, and to scots_git, my reluctant dialect consultant
(... Been watching quite a bit of classic Who of late, as a sort of comfort food I suppose.)
STORIES
"High as the side of a house it was, and covered all in hair, th' great shaggy thing, wi' eyes like scoops o' red coals! It weren't no beast as they had ever seen before - and inside it weren't beast at all but a great mass of metal an' fire - no thoughts and no soul, just like a clock striking the hours wi'out knowing why it ticks 'em away. The thing hirpled toward 'em till they were stood, backs against the stone walls o' the cave, an' nowhere to run to but into th' arms o' the great beastie itsel'! Wi' a horrible cry like the end o' days, it raised a claw long as a sword - " At this the children set up a sudden chorus of screams, and Victoria came charging into the room.
"Father!" she chided, gathering a few of the smallest to her, where they sniffled into her skirts and peeped at him with wide eyes. "There, now! You see? You've gone to scaring the bairns again wi' your tales!"
"Now, lass, they're only stories. Children like a story of an evening - "
"Aye, stories!" Victoria snapped at him. "Children's stories, proper stories, not this unco nonsense about mechanical men and furred beasties and great monsters frae th' stars! Hush, now, dears, there's nae to fret o'er," she crooned, patting heads and wiping noses. She glanced over her shoulder at the tall, lean boy in the shadows of the corner. "And you, Ben, you're more to blame than your grandfather - lettin' him scare the weans and get himsel' into a state wi' the telling of such tales!"
Ben stepped into the firelight beside his grandfather's chair and put a protective hand on the old man's shoulder. "They're good stories, mother. Grandfather Jamie tells the best tales - much better than the fairy stories we hear of a Sunday!"
"Hush, lad," Jamie murmured under his breath.
"Benjamin James McCrimmon!" Victoria exploded. "I ne'er had a mind tae hear such talk from my ain children! Help your grandfather to bed and take ye off yoursel' - and expect a fair bit o' work on the morrow as punishment for your cheek, as well! And mind you, Father, if that leg pains you again, drink a draught before you lay yoursel' down. You'll wake the house again wi' calling for a doctor all night."
Jamie got stiffly to his feet and regarded his daughter. "And what d'ye mean by that, Victoria?"
"Aye, I hear you as well as any other, all night calling out doctor! doctor! like to wake the hounds in the yard." Jamie caught Ben's glance and smiled as his grandson rolled his eyes behind her back and offered him an arm. He shuffled from the room with Ben, leaving Victoria to sort the children and herd them to bed.
Away from the fireside the passageway was dim and cold, and Jamie leaned heavily on the boy as they made slow progress to his bedchamber. "I'm sorry, lad," he murmured, eyes on the treacherous shadows at his feet. Ben glanced at him curiously. Jamie shook his head. "Your aul' grandfather is slow, boy. Slower and slower, I'm afeared ... "
"Does your leg pain you all that much?"
"Nae, 'tis but stiff wi' the cold." He regarded the boy from the corner of his eye. "And why d'ye ask, lad?"
Ben frowned at the carpet. "'Tis only that ... Mother speaks true: you do call for a doctor, of a night." Jamie grunted.
"Dreams, then, boy. I've no mem'ry of it and no need of a physician, mind. Slow doesn't mean unsound."
"Nae, o' course not." They reached the bedchamber and Ben helped the old man climb stiffly into bed. "I'll raise the fire for ye, Grandfather."
"Good lad. And then you'll sit by me and have a tale o' your own. What'll it be, then?"
Without hesitation Ben answered eagerly, "The blue box."
"Aye, ever your favourite, weren't it? Weel, then, a tale o' the blue box it is!" The fire stoked, Ben came to sit by the bedside, boy and old man alike settling into the story like a familiar chair. "And it's nae just a box, ye ken," Jamie began, "but a doorway to worlds, this wonder is, for when you step through - "
when you step through you see shifting sands, towers of glass, birds and monsters and whirling stars. You see the hand of a friend, a wise man whose face you don't quite remember. You hear music and you run - away from or towards, it doesn't matter, either or neither or both. There is danger and wonder and always the hands of friends and that is the blue box: step through the doors and there you are. Somewhere.
When Jamie nodded finally to sleep Ben slipped from the room and crept to his own cot, his mind alight with his grandfather's words. Monsters and men, they coloured his life; he longed to travel, to see and hear and run, to step through the doorway of the blue box like the people in the tales. He huddled under the blankets in the dark, thinking wistfully, If only they weren't just stories.
If only they were real.
***
But to Jamie the stories are real: more real than this cold house, his daughter's sharp tongue, the shrugs of pity for an old man from the village lads. Even his beloved moors, the fields and fens and hills of his land, are becoming just so much dry grass and bare earth, dull and pale in the glow of the tales in his head.
The stories have always been there: ever since the Battle of Culloden, when he woke lame and bloodied but a hero of the field - one of few heroes, of the few left alive - the stories have come, tales of journeys and battles, of sights and thoughts and ideas far beyond the ken of a simple piper. Folk listened, frowning, shook their heads and whispered about the poor lad battle-shocked and touched in the wits and Jamie learned to hold his tongue, to close his eyes and swallow the stories and keep them inside. He married, worked, surrounded himself with children and grandchildren, worked and listened and watched the world change. And it was enough.
Until the world stopped changing. Until it straitened and became dull, until the world shrank to his bedchamber, the hearth and the kitchen garden, the narrow dark hallways and the hoarfrost on the windowpanes. The edges of things have become blurred and the centres have become boring, and the stories rise up in him - insistent, violent, demanding, and so very beautiful. They fill his dreams every night - the blue doors open, a friend beckons - and in the day they whisper to him - monsters and men - and sometimes he thinks if it weren't for his grandson, if it weren't for Ben - so eager to take the stories from him, to carry them with him - he would suffocate, would be crushed under the weight of his own untold tales.
Every morning, as the blue doors close and the world settles dully around him, he hears it again: Now don't go blundering into too much trouble, will you?
And wakes thinking, inexplicably, You're a fine one to talk.
***
The world shrinks again and Jamie can't leave his bed, and the stories come unbidden now and he lives in them. When his grandson comes he holds out a hand, cold and trembling, and draws the boy into the stories with him.
But the winter is cold and too long and there is work to be done just to keep the fires lit and the animals in the barn from freezing in their sleep. Ben walks the hill road in the dark to lessons every morning, slips and skids home on hobnailed boots in the afternoon, hauls and carries and breaks the ice on the troughs, and listens to talk of an apprenticeship in the spring: A counting-house, maybe. A shipwright. A bootmaker.
He bites his tongue and thinks desperately of the blue box. Grandfather falls ill and Ben works hard and late and there is less time for stories. He goes to Jamie's bedchamber when he can to raise the fire and settle into the tales with the old man; and though Jamie sees him, knows him, takes him by the hand, Ben understands that the stories are more real to him now than the dark and cold chamber is; and when Jamie tells him, "The blue doors opened, and the boy and the girl saw an ocean of light beyond," to his grandfather the blue box, the boy and the girl and the ocean of light all happened, and to him the stories are true.
If only they were, Ben thinks.
***
"Hermit about," Cormick muttered over supper by the hearth. Victoria cast a quick eye at Ben, bent over a book at the other end of the table.
"Aye, Husband?" she asked quietly.
"O' sorts."
"Where, then?"
"Th' moor."
A man o' few words is blessing enough, Victoria thought, but getting a tale frae him can be like drawing a tooth frae a cat. She sighed. "Just a' seated there on the moor, lookin' out o'er God's creation?" she said archly. Over his book, Ben suppressed a giggle.
"Nae, woman, he's builded himself a hovel in the hauch. Said he'd come to see how the battle ended. Seemed surprised t' hear it were sixty year an' more past."
"Another bampot," Victoria snorted. "And it sounds as though you had a good enough tove wi' him, Husband."
"That I did. Good man. He come into the village tae ask after things. Englishman, he is, and young to be so daft as weel ... looked about and talked wi' one and all, and went back tae his box - "
"Box?" Ben raised his head.
"Aye, boy. Livin' in a box wi'out room e'en to lie down in. Must be some sort o' holy man."
"Doitit, if ye ask me ... "
"Did you see this box?" Ben asked urgently. Cormick fixed a curious gaze on his son and nodded slowly.
"That I did, lad."
"What - what did it look like?"
"And why do you need tae know?"
"Now, woman, hush." Cormick turned back to Ben. "Tall, like, and thin, wi' windae up high. Writing upon it as weel, though it stood too far away to read of it."
Ben swallowed, his heart beating fast. "And what colour was it?"
"Colour?"
"Aye."
"Why, t'were blue, lad."
***
Ben wakes his grandfather before dawn, helps him to dress; tells him they must go to the moor, that there is something to see. It is barely spring, still cold and dark, and Ben isn't certain that the old man understands him. He takes Jamie's hand and they slip from the house. The walk is long and slow and Jamie is quiet but not silent, whispering stories to the shadows as they pass. It has been so long since he has walked this road that it doesn't recognise him any longer.
The sun is rising as they reach the moor. They stop and watch as the light picks out first hills and hollows, then shapes and outlines, and finally colours; and Ben can only stand and stare as he sees his grandfather's tales illuminated slowly before him.
Jamie is silent for long moments, the stories stilled on his lips as suddenly, finally, he remembers. He remembers, and on legs that are barely shaking at all he stumbles across the field, Ben running after him, both crying out at the top of their voices, "Creag an tuire!", laughing and running together until they come to the box and stop, clutching each other, breathing hard, still laughing, and waiting for the blue doors to open.
Glossary for the Scottish-Impaired:
hirpled - lurched
unco - bizarre
weans - children
hauch - meadow
bampot - idiot, nutter
tove - to gossip, to chat
doitit - foolish, witless
"Creag an tuire" - "The Boar's Rock"(Jamie's battlecry and the motto of the MacLaren Clan)