Fic: Unwilling Sleep
Word count: 831
Rating: T
Characters & pairings: Jenny, Vastra, River -- Jenny/Vastra
Summary: Post Name of The Doctor. Vastra is frightened. And River uses the conference room to best advantage. Library theories if you squint.
The room had reverted in her distress. The sleek screens were gone. There was no trace of overlapping paintings from distant Silurian chambers, or even the exhausted grandeur of a turn-of-the-century Taj Mahal. Instead, Vastra opened her eyes to all the horror of her first days above in polluted, human Earth. The Library had taken it all, its walls peeling; sweating tobacco and burning rubber. Wet ash and ink. Gritty, dead mud chilled her, slowed her. There was stone at her back. Beneath her feet. Her nostrils burned with a city’s refuse and gunpowder.
Vastra shuddered, unsure if she wanted to draw her clothes tighter about her or rend them to bits. Her throat felt dry, her eyes heavy with the powder that, if she had only paid attention, she would have seen Jenny slip into her tea.
(”Please, ma’am.” Jenny. (Never Jane). Eyes dark and hands gentle on the other woman’s face. Her whole body a plea, coaxing and exasperated and frightened by turns. “I don’t need watching. I’m safe. Safe as houses.”
"They came to this house.")
Vastra had thought she would never be as vulnerable-never as small and wretched and scared with hardly the room for anger-as she had been the day she had opened her eyes to a home that was no longer hers, full of naked, pink apes that destroyed near all they touched.
(”I’m sorry, ma’am. So sorry. So sorry.”)
The room choked with her. Vastra shut her eyes. Shut them tight. “Oh, dear heart,” she whispered. “Why did you make me sleep?”
(”…I think I’ve been murdered.”)
“So you might talk to someone, I would think.”
The Silurian’s breath caught, leaving her coughing hard enough to double over, hands clenching in her skirts.
“Dreams, remember.” River’s voice was kind. The strong, low pull of it ever at odds with Vastra’s memories of a squalling child. “All of us can travel, here.”
This made her laugh, eyes opening to see the professor eying the dismal London walls with disfavour. She scowled, and the Library took on new colours. A large, cluttered bedroom painted darkest blue, with bed fittings in brass and the walls crowded with photographs and scrawled scraps of paper. The photographs-for all their bright colurs-had no faces, but Vastra saw a lot of red.
“That’s better,” River said, dropping to the floor and sitting on someone’s crumpled shirt.
“What is this place?”
“An old memory. But it’s precious.”
Twenty-First Century bedrooms were a challenge for the Veiled Lady. There was never an easy place to sit, even in dreams. Vastra settled on the edge of the bed. “Then I..” She winced, extricating a small, hard-backed volume from beneath her, and tried again. “I thank you for sharing it.” The book had landed open beside her, falling to the overleaf.
To Amy, it read. Even though you’re rubbish st keeping diaries. Love ya. Mels.
“Jenny is safe?” River pulled her back, a warm, slightly weathered hand reaching to clasp her longer, scaled one. This wrist, Vastra saw with her detective’s eyes, had been broken. And never properly set. Vastra let herself get lost in these details.She tried to find lines. Paths in the skin that mortals from her borrowed time said could tell a life. If any chirologist could read this woman, she thought, they might be on to something.
“She is,” Vastra managed. “She is at home, and thinks she has done me a service. I’ve…worried her.”
“”She vanished,” River said. “She vanished-she died--and you couldn’t do a thing.” The time traveler tilted her head, meeting Vastra’s eyes. “That’s unbearable.” Her lips twitched. “Trust me. I know.”
“I never imagined life without her, you know.” Vastra shuddered, feeling her muscles burn, “There are apes who play games with that idea. ‘What would you do if I died tomorrow?’ they might say. Or, ‘If you died, I would cry for a year and a day and never find another like you.’ Have you heard of-?”
“-oh, yes,” River said, squeezing her hand. “Overrated drama.
“I have never played those games,” Vastra continued. “And never would. River, when she died it was…I was alone.” She shuddered. “How have you borne this for years?”
River’s laugh was small, and clogged with the more human sounds of sadness. “Hush. Aunt Vastra.” She released Vastra’s hand. Moved to the bed, which squeaked and shifted alarmingly as warm, strong arms fit about her, the shorter form nothing like Jenny’s but comforting nonetheless.She wept. Vasta, lacking tear ducts, could not, but the embrace was tight and quiet and full of words neither would make the other say. Her hand tangled gently in River’s tangle of hair-brass to fit the bed. When they did draw apart, River wiped her eyes and willed teacups into the room. Then filled them with brandy.
Vastra had admired Professor River Song. She had enjoyed the wicked girl and over-knowing woman. She had felt for The Doctor, mutinous and drained from loss. But she had never, until this forced night of sleep, understood her.