(no subject)
Title: His Own Fear
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: Ten/Jackson Lake
Rating: PG
Spoilers: For "The Next Doctor"
Summary: The memories won't leave him, but perhaps the nightmares will.
Length: 1616
Notes: Written in second person PoV.
The motion of the curtains billowing has you more or less hypnotised. The window’s wide open, despite the snow that’s still falling across London, and the thin material clings to the frame, wafting outside the window, and then exhales suddenly, puffing inwards, powerless against the tug of the night air. Light gauze, nothing more, dragged and blown about by currants and pressure changes, its shadow lost in the darkness of the bedroom, and it’s simply one more piece of evidence that you are losing your mind once more when you find yourself empathising with a net curtain.
It's hot in the room, as if the snow outside is nothing but a mirage. You feel stuffy, almost feverish, and it’s going to be another long, sleepless night. You expected the dreams to go away, but they don’t. Each time your eyes droop, your brain quietens, and sweet Morpheus tugs at your hand, you find yourself suddenly and violently slammed into another of the Doctor’s memories, and wake violently, in floods of sweat, sometimes shouting, sometimes sobbing. He’s a Time Lord and you are not; he’s built to handle such memories, while your mind is human, and has enough of its own to cope with. Some nights you awaken so alone, forgetting the girl downstairs, the boy in the next room, forgetting the city of London outside the window and its Empire beyond; remembering nothing but the deaths of a billion people you never knew, people whose deaths you bear the guilt for. It takes all night to straighten it out, separate your reality from his, and even then you aren’t completely sure you haven’t dreamed up everything you've ever known.
And some nights you sit up with the scream barely rising in your throat, and he’s there before you have time to figure out who you are once more, his arms around you, babbling in that grounding, soothing way he has. You never ask why he’s there, or where he came from, you just let him hold onto you, two grown men clinging to each other in the dead of night, and you know that he’s as shaken as you are when he sees his own fear, his own grief, in your eyes.
The curtain falls motionless and limp; for a moment you wonder if time has frozen still, and only the distant sounds of the city, the whinny of a carthorse, the shouts of night time workers persuade you otherwise. You let your head fall back against the pillows, exhaling loudly, wiping the moisture from your brow. You haven’t heard the door open, didn’t see a thing, but he’s there, the Doctor, lying on top of the covers beside you. He reaches out instinctively, and you mould into his embrace like the two of you were made to fit. He strokes your hair, and you close your eyes, and for a long time neither of you speaks. But in a room with you and the Doctor, silence has little hope of holding sway for long.
“You feel like you,” the Doctor says. You never notice when he touches his mind against yours, reading your thoughts - or your feelings, or both - but he never pretends that he hasn’t done it. “That’s good. Making progress. Very good.”
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” you murmur, against his chest.
“Only a couple of nights. But you may be experiencing some temporal confusion. Can you tell me what date it is?”
You chuckle. “Are you testing me, or don’t you know?”
“Testing you,” he says, seriously.
“It is the twelfth of January 1852. We are in London, England, and my name is Jackson Lake. You are the Doctor. And you’re right. I feel a lot like my old self again.”
The Doctor kicks off his shoes, and throws his jacket into the corner of the room. For a moment you think he’s going to get under the covers with you, but he pauses, catching your eye, and frowns.
“You don’t sound happy about that.”
“Doctor. I’m a mortal man whose head has been expanded a million fold and then abruptly deflated again.” You throw the sheets aside, and pat the mattress until he settles back down, but his eyes don’t soften, and you can’t look away. He’ll have his explanation. He always does. “I may not be the Doctor, but that was no romantic story, no fairy tale I believed in. Everything I thought was real, was real. It simply happened to somebody else. There are cybermen, and alien beings, and... monsters. Things I can’t name, even though I can picture them, still, in my mind’s eye. There are other worlds besides our own, and there are terrible things in our future, things I cannot simply forget. They haunt me. You haunt me.”
His lip trembles, his wide eyes search your face for something you don’t know how to provide. Your instinct is to touch him, and you reach for his hand. It closes around yours as though you are hauling him over a dangerous precipice, and his expressions says he knows you can take the weight.
“I know,” he breathes. “Oh, I know, and I wish I could reach into you and take those memories away, but it would be far too dangerous.” He glances away from your face for just a single moment, but in that moment you know he’s lying.
“Doctor.”
“It would, it really would. There are risks involved in changing someone’s memories that I would never ask you to take for the sake of a good night’s sleep. You’ll just have to drink some camomile tea and count sheep like everybody else. Or, you know, the barnyard animal of your choice.”
“Oh, I believe that part,” you admit. “But I don’t think you’d take your memories from me, even if you could.” You’ve never seen his face so pale, his eyes so wide, but you plough on regardless, still grasping his hand, lying inches away from him. “You finally have somebody who understands. It would take a stronger man than I to throw that away. I cannot blame you for wanting to keep hold of me.”
“…Oh.”
“And I know that’s why you keep coming back. You’re no longer the only man in the universe who has faced down the Master, or defeated Fenric, or comforted Nyssa and Tegan. Every night I am plagued by new dreams, and every morning I awake with the realisation that my nightmares are your reality. No, I do not blame you for leaving them with me - how could I take away your knowledge that there is someone here that can empathise with you so completely?”
The Doctor holds your gaze for a moment, and then nods, as though coming to a difficult decision. He reaches towards your face, rests one hand lightly on your temple.
“Let me try something.”
“What is it?”
“You won’t feel anything. Hold still.”
He’s right; you feel nothing but the slight pressure of his fingers on your skin, the gentle tingle of physical contact. But it’s enough, and you find yourself leaning towards him, and even as you close your eyes, your lips find his. He responds immediately, holding your hand more tightly still, and a moment later he’s lying back on the sheets and pulling you down with him.
It’s hot in the room, still, the breeze barely stirring the curtains and the air heavy with that old familiar mix of lust and fear. And you were right, it’s going to be a long, sleepless night.
***
He’s gone in the morning. You have no idea when he left, or how he snuck out without making a sound since you have no memory of falling asleep - that is, morning has arrived and you feel calm, settled, unafraid, which you attribute to the lack of nightmares, and therefore the lack of sleep.
You lie still for a while, before you realise it’s getting cold. There’s a scattering of half-melted snow across the carpet, and the harsh, white winter sun glints off the full-length mirror in the corner. The sight seems to trigger a memory, perhaps something you’d forgotten, a moment from your childhood, but the more you chase it around your head the more elusive it becomes. Finally you lie still and let your thoughts roam freely. Rosita will have gone down to the market already, and Freddy has been sleeping a lot, so you’ve no wish to disturb him. That leaves you alone with your thoughts, and you begin to lose track of the passage of time.
It’s only when a starling whistles somewhere in the neighbourhood that you remember. You did dream last night, but it was different. There was no screaming, no sobbing, no monstrous sounds of tearing metal or hollering beasts. No race against time, no running for your life. Nothing but a dazzling white landscape beneath a golden sky, the peaks of distant mountains dark against the horizon, and someone’s arm in yours. The two of you walking along an enormous bridge over a chasm, a bridge made by the trunk of a fallen tree ten times the length of any tree you’ve ever seen on Earth. There’s a gentle flurry of wings, and a delicate, white bird with a crest of silver feathers swoops down to investigate you. It settles on your companion’s shoulder and starts to sing.
“He’s never seen people before,” you remark. “Listen to that! Probably telling all his mates he’s found some funny pink monkey things, that sadly we‘re not edible but it might be worth looking for a laugh.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. People have never seen him before, either. You’ve discovered a new species, Rose! I suppose that means you get to name him.”
And that’s all you can remember, except for the lingering impression of two people walking together through the snow, both smiling, both happy, as the red sun begins to set behind the mountains.
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: Ten/Jackson Lake
Rating: PG
Spoilers: For "The Next Doctor"
Summary: The memories won't leave him, but perhaps the nightmares will.
Length: 1616
Notes: Written in second person PoV.
The motion of the curtains billowing has you more or less hypnotised. The window’s wide open, despite the snow that’s still falling across London, and the thin material clings to the frame, wafting outside the window, and then exhales suddenly, puffing inwards, powerless against the tug of the night air. Light gauze, nothing more, dragged and blown about by currants and pressure changes, its shadow lost in the darkness of the bedroom, and it’s simply one more piece of evidence that you are losing your mind once more when you find yourself empathising with a net curtain.
It's hot in the room, as if the snow outside is nothing but a mirage. You feel stuffy, almost feverish, and it’s going to be another long, sleepless night. You expected the dreams to go away, but they don’t. Each time your eyes droop, your brain quietens, and sweet Morpheus tugs at your hand, you find yourself suddenly and violently slammed into another of the Doctor’s memories, and wake violently, in floods of sweat, sometimes shouting, sometimes sobbing. He’s a Time Lord and you are not; he’s built to handle such memories, while your mind is human, and has enough of its own to cope with. Some nights you awaken so alone, forgetting the girl downstairs, the boy in the next room, forgetting the city of London outside the window and its Empire beyond; remembering nothing but the deaths of a billion people you never knew, people whose deaths you bear the guilt for. It takes all night to straighten it out, separate your reality from his, and even then you aren’t completely sure you haven’t dreamed up everything you've ever known.
And some nights you sit up with the scream barely rising in your throat, and he’s there before you have time to figure out who you are once more, his arms around you, babbling in that grounding, soothing way he has. You never ask why he’s there, or where he came from, you just let him hold onto you, two grown men clinging to each other in the dead of night, and you know that he’s as shaken as you are when he sees his own fear, his own grief, in your eyes.
The curtain falls motionless and limp; for a moment you wonder if time has frozen still, and only the distant sounds of the city, the whinny of a carthorse, the shouts of night time workers persuade you otherwise. You let your head fall back against the pillows, exhaling loudly, wiping the moisture from your brow. You haven’t heard the door open, didn’t see a thing, but he’s there, the Doctor, lying on top of the covers beside you. He reaches out instinctively, and you mould into his embrace like the two of you were made to fit. He strokes your hair, and you close your eyes, and for a long time neither of you speaks. But in a room with you and the Doctor, silence has little hope of holding sway for long.
“You feel like you,” the Doctor says. You never notice when he touches his mind against yours, reading your thoughts - or your feelings, or both - but he never pretends that he hasn’t done it. “That’s good. Making progress. Very good.”
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” you murmur, against his chest.
“Only a couple of nights. But you may be experiencing some temporal confusion. Can you tell me what date it is?”
You chuckle. “Are you testing me, or don’t you know?”
“Testing you,” he says, seriously.
“It is the twelfth of January 1852. We are in London, England, and my name is Jackson Lake. You are the Doctor. And you’re right. I feel a lot like my old self again.”
The Doctor kicks off his shoes, and throws his jacket into the corner of the room. For a moment you think he’s going to get under the covers with you, but he pauses, catching your eye, and frowns.
“You don’t sound happy about that.”
“Doctor. I’m a mortal man whose head has been expanded a million fold and then abruptly deflated again.” You throw the sheets aside, and pat the mattress until he settles back down, but his eyes don’t soften, and you can’t look away. He’ll have his explanation. He always does. “I may not be the Doctor, but that was no romantic story, no fairy tale I believed in. Everything I thought was real, was real. It simply happened to somebody else. There are cybermen, and alien beings, and... monsters. Things I can’t name, even though I can picture them, still, in my mind’s eye. There are other worlds besides our own, and there are terrible things in our future, things I cannot simply forget. They haunt me. You haunt me.”
His lip trembles, his wide eyes search your face for something you don’t know how to provide. Your instinct is to touch him, and you reach for his hand. It closes around yours as though you are hauling him over a dangerous precipice, and his expressions says he knows you can take the weight.
“I know,” he breathes. “Oh, I know, and I wish I could reach into you and take those memories away, but it would be far too dangerous.” He glances away from your face for just a single moment, but in that moment you know he’s lying.
“Doctor.”
“It would, it really would. There are risks involved in changing someone’s memories that I would never ask you to take for the sake of a good night’s sleep. You’ll just have to drink some camomile tea and count sheep like everybody else. Or, you know, the barnyard animal of your choice.”
“Oh, I believe that part,” you admit. “But I don’t think you’d take your memories from me, even if you could.” You’ve never seen his face so pale, his eyes so wide, but you plough on regardless, still grasping his hand, lying inches away from him. “You finally have somebody who understands. It would take a stronger man than I to throw that away. I cannot blame you for wanting to keep hold of me.”
“…Oh.”
“And I know that’s why you keep coming back. You’re no longer the only man in the universe who has faced down the Master, or defeated Fenric, or comforted Nyssa and Tegan. Every night I am plagued by new dreams, and every morning I awake with the realisation that my nightmares are your reality. No, I do not blame you for leaving them with me - how could I take away your knowledge that there is someone here that can empathise with you so completely?”
The Doctor holds your gaze for a moment, and then nods, as though coming to a difficult decision. He reaches towards your face, rests one hand lightly on your temple.
“Let me try something.”
“What is it?”
“You won’t feel anything. Hold still.”
He’s right; you feel nothing but the slight pressure of his fingers on your skin, the gentle tingle of physical contact. But it’s enough, and you find yourself leaning towards him, and even as you close your eyes, your lips find his. He responds immediately, holding your hand more tightly still, and a moment later he’s lying back on the sheets and pulling you down with him.
It’s hot in the room, still, the breeze barely stirring the curtains and the air heavy with that old familiar mix of lust and fear. And you were right, it’s going to be a long, sleepless night.
***
He’s gone in the morning. You have no idea when he left, or how he snuck out without making a sound since you have no memory of falling asleep - that is, morning has arrived and you feel calm, settled, unafraid, which you attribute to the lack of nightmares, and therefore the lack of sleep.
You lie still for a while, before you realise it’s getting cold. There’s a scattering of half-melted snow across the carpet, and the harsh, white winter sun glints off the full-length mirror in the corner. The sight seems to trigger a memory, perhaps something you’d forgotten, a moment from your childhood, but the more you chase it around your head the more elusive it becomes. Finally you lie still and let your thoughts roam freely. Rosita will have gone down to the market already, and Freddy has been sleeping a lot, so you’ve no wish to disturb him. That leaves you alone with your thoughts, and you begin to lose track of the passage of time.
It’s only when a starling whistles somewhere in the neighbourhood that you remember. You did dream last night, but it was different. There was no screaming, no sobbing, no monstrous sounds of tearing metal or hollering beasts. No race against time, no running for your life. Nothing but a dazzling white landscape beneath a golden sky, the peaks of distant mountains dark against the horizon, and someone’s arm in yours. The two of you walking along an enormous bridge over a chasm, a bridge made by the trunk of a fallen tree ten times the length of any tree you’ve ever seen on Earth. There’s a gentle flurry of wings, and a delicate, white bird with a crest of silver feathers swoops down to investigate you. It settles on your companion’s shoulder and starts to sing.
“He’s never seen people before,” you remark. “Listen to that! Probably telling all his mates he’s found some funny pink monkey things, that sadly we‘re not edible but it might be worth looking for a laugh.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. People have never seen him before, either. You’ve discovered a new species, Rose! I suppose that means you get to name him.”
And that’s all you can remember, except for the lingering impression of two people walking together through the snow, both smiling, both happy, as the red sun begins to set behind the mountains.