La Veuve Noir
La Veuve Noir. Ten/Rose, Master. Teen. 1,397 words. AU.
My father made one thing clear to me about the Doctor.
The harder they come, the harder they fall.
I remember the smell of a man.
Cloves. Cigarettes or aftershave or something in his skin, I’ll never know.
He died, and the radio kept playing. Sad stories that I couldn’t burn with lighters or matches or wild fires in the woods.
It doesn’t matter. My father used to smell like cloves, when I was a child with wild eyes and skinned knees.
My father is a different man, now, and I’ve yet to put my finger on what so much chaos smells like.
Blood, maybe.
And lace.
The world is all smoke and violin where he is, touching a fag to his mouth and sucking it deep, adjusting the money in his pocket and toeing a scuff on his shoe.
It’s midnight, and she’s late.
When he found me, I didn’t know the difference between a megalomaniac and a kind stranger. Six year olds rarely do. His eyes were soft as he taught me poker and told me my mother didn’t want me anymore.
The difference is little, now. That wasn’t the lesson.
Everyone is finally honest when they’re looking down the barrel of a .22.
Not as much when they’re looking down the barrel of a woman.
Red lips, he said, when I turned thirteen.
They’ll never say no.
The taxi releases her like stories and lies spilling out of Pandora’s box. Her heel steps down with a vehement click against the world, and she’s carving stories into the night air with her pelvis as she walks, step, step, step.
Jazz wafts out from the club behind him, and he can’t stop staring at her mouth.
Blue pinstripes, today.
He wonders if she’ll stay ‘til morning.
He doubts it.
This is what I’m meant to do.
The burning in my blood and the gun in my garter know that just as much as I do.
But the taste.
In rare moments, I think about my real father. Like tonight, when the gun shot residue is spattered like freckles on the backs of my hands.
I never expected such contrast, dark against the floodlights.
Bitter, old cloves in the back of my throat.
Keep walking.
Father says I’m almost there.
“Hey, stranger,” she whispers to his mouth, and it feels like he hasn’t seen her in years.
Her dress swishes in the wind, and his hands find her hair, buoyant like clouds. The night sings, but it’s a different sound with the husky vocals from the club adding the accents.
The world narrows to staccato points with her so near, heartbeat, downbeat, drums.
“Rose,” he returns, the word stretching until his mouth finds hers.
Six months since he first smeared himself against those ruby lips, coming away dark, smudged with the smell of her. He’ll never breathe normally again.
“Let’s go inside,” she says, and takes his hand.
My father loved to be the exception to everything as much as he loved to make me watch the “minor re-education of miscreants”.
There was too much blood for such a mouthful of polite words, but I learned.
It’s the smell that never comes out of your clothes.
The hotel is tall, proud. Garish like bleached bone in the streetlamps.
His hands are against her hips, under her skirt, carving electric letters against her nervous system, fingering the top lace of her stockings. They reach the lift and her mouth smears scarlet trails along his collarbone, a proud path through the forest, a red litany of evidence.
She’s in love with him.
Just a little.
I knew him as Sir, but all the people that came in and out of my life in flurries called my father Master.
I didn’t know why until he told me the story of the Doctor, the man with a beating storm inside to match the cacophony of my father’s drums.
We choose who we are, he said to me.
But we never choose who we love.
It’s naked like this, like little fish, that they’re closest.
Still slick with sweat they tell each other stories. A child’s story about a girl that falls in love with a weeping willow tree by a spring river, a girl who never leaves so he’ll never be alone.
When he tells the same story, it sounds so different in her ears. Like the first cut into a peach, rampant with sweetness and never the same.
She fixes their tea, and feels like her skin should crawl at knowing how much sugar he likes.
Instead the little granules please her as they catch the light, sparkling while they tumble down.
It’s a little like dying, pulling the trigger yourself.
The sound. It never stops.
Neither did my Master’s hatred for the Doctor. I’d never felt so carried away in my life, except years later, when I found myself in the Doctor’s arms with my weapon across the room and forgotten along with my clothes.
My father made one thing clear to me about the Doctor.
The harder they come, the harder they fall.
Sometimes you can’t cover all the bruises.
“I’m leaving London,” he says one morning, the sun strong like a halo behind him, littering the room with dust particles and golden warmth. “I want you to come with me.”
She says yes before she remembers that escape is a myth whose spine she has broken.
Falling in love is exactly like Russian Roulette.
My father taught me to play that, too.
She is practicing her French on a train with him to Scotland when her father calls and the Doctor answers.
It is a moment in time that fractures something in her, blood frozen like winter rivers while the storm and drums collide, deafening her.
“Wrong number,” he says when he returns her phone, but she can’t hear him over the riotous din that has silenced the rest of the world.
Everything goes black, sometimes. It’s like sleeping but I know I’m still there.
It aches in the most delicious way.
I think the Doctor understands.
So I stayed with him, until the end.
It is three weeks into their time in Edinburgh when she sees her father’s men outside their hotel. She gathers the Doctor to her and they leave without packing.
She doesn’t know when the world changed, and she went from carrying a bullet for this man to carrying his hand in hers like it is the only anchor.
The line isn’t so different, maybe. But even the strong feet weary of running, and her gun is no longer heavy enough.
She begins to think of other ways to keep him safe.
Her Doctor.
Everything in life is only lived for the fermata at the end.
When its over, no one knows what to say. They hold their breath and wait for the orchestra to stand.
I don’t remember how I felt when my mother didn’t come home. I don’t feel anything now, not knowing what happened to her.
I’m still waiting for someone to get up and start clapping.
It’s been another season of running until its all their blood knows, well past the heat of summer. The power of the sprint and the sweat of being together are what feed their hunger, now.
It is something worth fighting for.
In the dark and far from home, they hold hands while her father’s right hand man delivers a message with a gun to her Doctor’s temple.
Kill him, or we do. Come home.
More leaves fall.
She raises her chin defiantly, blazing with the fury of goddesses that never existed until this very moment.
“Tell Koschei,” she says, loud, clear. “That I am not his daughter.”
She runs to him, her Doctor, kisses his freckled skin and whispers nonsense to his ears.
He understands, because it is him, because it is her.
“Do it,” he says against her. He presses his cheek to her chest and listens. “I’m glad its you.”
So the bullet is still for him after all.
It clicks in the chamber, and the sound never stops.
I knew the smell of a man once.
I breathe deep and its in my lungs like sweet tar.
It’s the clap of thunder before everything falls.
He was the Doctor, and he made himself. A man more mountainous than both of my fathers.
A man who loved me.
I still hear him, the bubbling river, the wind in the trees.
My father made one thing clear to me about the Doctor.
The harder they come, the harder they fall.
I remember the smell of a man.
Cloves. Cigarettes or aftershave or something in his skin, I’ll never know.
He died, and the radio kept playing. Sad stories that I couldn’t burn with lighters or matches or wild fires in the woods.
It doesn’t matter. My father used to smell like cloves, when I was a child with wild eyes and skinned knees.
My father is a different man, now, and I’ve yet to put my finger on what so much chaos smells like.
Blood, maybe.
And lace.
The world is all smoke and violin where he is, touching a fag to his mouth and sucking it deep, adjusting the money in his pocket and toeing a scuff on his shoe.
It’s midnight, and she’s late.
When he found me, I didn’t know the difference between a megalomaniac and a kind stranger. Six year olds rarely do. His eyes were soft as he taught me poker and told me my mother didn’t want me anymore.
The difference is little, now. That wasn’t the lesson.
Everyone is finally honest when they’re looking down the barrel of a .22.
Not as much when they’re looking down the barrel of a woman.
Red lips, he said, when I turned thirteen.
They’ll never say no.
The taxi releases her like stories and lies spilling out of Pandora’s box. Her heel steps down with a vehement click against the world, and she’s carving stories into the night air with her pelvis as she walks, step, step, step.
Jazz wafts out from the club behind him, and he can’t stop staring at her mouth.
Blue pinstripes, today.
He wonders if she’ll stay ‘til morning.
He doubts it.
This is what I’m meant to do.
The burning in my blood and the gun in my garter know that just as much as I do.
But the taste.
In rare moments, I think about my real father. Like tonight, when the gun shot residue is spattered like freckles on the backs of my hands.
I never expected such contrast, dark against the floodlights.
Bitter, old cloves in the back of my throat.
Keep walking.
Father says I’m almost there.
“Hey, stranger,” she whispers to his mouth, and it feels like he hasn’t seen her in years.
Her dress swishes in the wind, and his hands find her hair, buoyant like clouds. The night sings, but it’s a different sound with the husky vocals from the club adding the accents.
The world narrows to staccato points with her so near, heartbeat, downbeat, drums.
“Rose,” he returns, the word stretching until his mouth finds hers.
Six months since he first smeared himself against those ruby lips, coming away dark, smudged with the smell of her. He’ll never breathe normally again.
“Let’s go inside,” she says, and takes his hand.
My father loved to be the exception to everything as much as he loved to make me watch the “minor re-education of miscreants”.
There was too much blood for such a mouthful of polite words, but I learned.
It’s the smell that never comes out of your clothes.
The hotel is tall, proud. Garish like bleached bone in the streetlamps.
His hands are against her hips, under her skirt, carving electric letters against her nervous system, fingering the top lace of her stockings. They reach the lift and her mouth smears scarlet trails along his collarbone, a proud path through the forest, a red litany of evidence.
She’s in love with him.
Just a little.
I knew him as Sir, but all the people that came in and out of my life in flurries called my father Master.
I didn’t know why until he told me the story of the Doctor, the man with a beating storm inside to match the cacophony of my father’s drums.
We choose who we are, he said to me.
But we never choose who we love.
It’s naked like this, like little fish, that they’re closest.
Still slick with sweat they tell each other stories. A child’s story about a girl that falls in love with a weeping willow tree by a spring river, a girl who never leaves so he’ll never be alone.
When he tells the same story, it sounds so different in her ears. Like the first cut into a peach, rampant with sweetness and never the same.
She fixes their tea, and feels like her skin should crawl at knowing how much sugar he likes.
Instead the little granules please her as they catch the light, sparkling while they tumble down.
It’s a little like dying, pulling the trigger yourself.
The sound. It never stops.
Neither did my Master’s hatred for the Doctor. I’d never felt so carried away in my life, except years later, when I found myself in the Doctor’s arms with my weapon across the room and forgotten along with my clothes.
My father made one thing clear to me about the Doctor.
The harder they come, the harder they fall.
Sometimes you can’t cover all the bruises.
“I’m leaving London,” he says one morning, the sun strong like a halo behind him, littering the room with dust particles and golden warmth. “I want you to come with me.”
She says yes before she remembers that escape is a myth whose spine she has broken.
Falling in love is exactly like Russian Roulette.
My father taught me to play that, too.
She is practicing her French on a train with him to Scotland when her father calls and the Doctor answers.
It is a moment in time that fractures something in her, blood frozen like winter rivers while the storm and drums collide, deafening her.
“Wrong number,” he says when he returns her phone, but she can’t hear him over the riotous din that has silenced the rest of the world.
Everything goes black, sometimes. It’s like sleeping but I know I’m still there.
It aches in the most delicious way.
I think the Doctor understands.
So I stayed with him, until the end.
It is three weeks into their time in Edinburgh when she sees her father’s men outside their hotel. She gathers the Doctor to her and they leave without packing.
She doesn’t know when the world changed, and she went from carrying a bullet for this man to carrying his hand in hers like it is the only anchor.
The line isn’t so different, maybe. But even the strong feet weary of running, and her gun is no longer heavy enough.
She begins to think of other ways to keep him safe.
Her Doctor.
Everything in life is only lived for the fermata at the end.
When its over, no one knows what to say. They hold their breath and wait for the orchestra to stand.
I don’t remember how I felt when my mother didn’t come home. I don’t feel anything now, not knowing what happened to her.
I’m still waiting for someone to get up and start clapping.
It’s been another season of running until its all their blood knows, well past the heat of summer. The power of the sprint and the sweat of being together are what feed their hunger, now.
It is something worth fighting for.
In the dark and far from home, they hold hands while her father’s right hand man delivers a message with a gun to her Doctor’s temple.
Kill him, or we do. Come home.
More leaves fall.
She raises her chin defiantly, blazing with the fury of goddesses that never existed until this very moment.
“Tell Koschei,” she says, loud, clear. “That I am not his daughter.”
She runs to him, her Doctor, kisses his freckled skin and whispers nonsense to his ears.
He understands, because it is him, because it is her.
“Do it,” he says against her. He presses his cheek to her chest and listens. “I’m glad its you.”
So the bullet is still for him after all.
It clicks in the chamber, and the sound never stops.
I knew the smell of a man once.
I breathe deep and its in my lungs like sweet tar.
It’s the clap of thunder before everything falls.
He was the Doctor, and he made himself. A man more mountainous than both of my fathers.
A man who loved me.
I still hear him, the bubbling river, the wind in the trees.