fic from the attic
Jul. 7th, 2008 02:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivendellroseSo, I was going through my old files while working through my continuing bout of writer's block, and I found this little fic that apparently got written about a year and a half ago and then forgotten. And lo, it was not terrible. ;)
Based on one of the stories Rose tells Mickey in “Boomtown” about her adventures with the Doctor and Jack. I’m not sure why, but the image just wouldn’t get out of my head, and I had to do something with it... Better late than never, right?
Fandom: Doctor Who
Title: Waves of Ice and Stone
Timeline: S1, before the events of "Boomtown"
Characters: Doctor, Rose, Jack
Warnings: Implied threesome... more even than the actual series. ;)
The Doctor told them the planet’s name was Auriga Epsilon. Some twenty years before they visited, a sudden singularity had sucked away most of the nearest sun’s energy, leaving them with a dim brown star rather than the brilliant yellow they’d started out with. High noon on Auriga Epsilon looked like midnight on Earth, with a pale circle of sun high in the sky that looked like a small full moon, but only about half as bright.
“It’s dying,” the Doctor told them, his hands tucked casually into his coat pockets. “Fading away - it’ll peter out in another couple of decades, and the whole system will go dark.
“What about the people? Did anybody live here? People, I mean,” Rose added, looking at the strange little shells on the icy sand in front of them.
“Nah. Things were getting started in that ocean - lots of bacteria, invertebrates, maybe something equivalent to a fish, but nothing smarter than that. Might’ve gotten farther, but it’s hard to say... Now there won’t be anything. It’s too cold for any of the life that had gotten started, and not much can live on the icy rock this planet will be in a short while.”
“Happens all the time, on planets all over the universe,” Jack agreed, rubbing his hands together. “Life’s pretty rare, when you compare it to all the planets that can’t support so much as a few bugs and a slime-mold or two.”
“But that’s good, this time.” The Doctor crossed his arms over his chest and stared out into the frozen sea, apparently unconcerned by the cold around them. “Better here than in your system, or some other place where it would’ve destroyed a whole civilization and all the other lifeforms in the ecosystem.”
“What if it had? To us, like, or somebody like us?”
“In your time?” Jack shrugged. “Maybe a few hundred people could’ve escaped on rockets, moved up to the space station or to a hastily created colony on the moon or Mars, but really? Not a good look-out. Twenty-first century tech wasn’t up to travel and colonization, not on a grand scale. The people who made it probably wouldn’t even have been a genetically viable population, unless they brought cryo-tubes along with sample DNA for fertilization. And the nearest really habitable planet would be too far away to reach with your level of technology, so... I’d have given us twenty years, and then boom. Extinction.”
“Less than that.” The Doctor bent down, examining the patterns made in the sand by some kind of soft-bodied organism that had frozen stiff in mid-motion. “The panic would bring about World War Three faster than any Slitheen plot. You lot wouldn’t have been able to make rational decisions. The people left behind would riot, try to take over, kill the people trying to leave...”
“And you say you like Humans.” Jack sounded insulted.
“I do.” The Doctor looked up, his expression sad. “But you’re idiots, the lot of you.”
“I resent that. I come from a more enlightened time...”
“In which humanity is still exactly the same as it always was, except for an influx of alien DNA brought in by carefully-assisted reproductive habits. You’re good people, Jack, but you’re still a bunch of stupid apes from my perspective.”
“So, what - you would’ve even have helped us?”
He turned to Rose with the expression she’d come to think of as his ‘Oh, Rose’ face - the one that usually came right before he told her something tragic and frustrating that she’d completely missed in her calculations of a situation. “I wouldn’t have been able. What am I going to do - go back in time and fix a whole star? Take the whole population of planet Earth with me on my travels? Not even the Tardis can hold that many people, Rose.”
“Yeah, but... Yeah.” Rose shivered in her thin parka - it had been plenty cozy back home, but she was beginning to learn that it was designed for fashion, not the Antarctic temperatures of an ice-planet - but her reaction wasn’t all about the chill. The huge waves, frozen in the instant their sun’s energy was sappedd, were amazing - beautiful, even, but the idea that a sun could just wink out like that... everything gone in an instant, and no way to ever get it back. Not even with time travel.
“It didn’t happen to Earth, Rose.” Jack’s hand settled on her arm, and his breath puffed warm against her cheek. “It won’t. I’m living proof.”
“He’s right.” The Doctor circled around to the other side of her, so she was between them, but didn’t block her view of the frozen ocean. “You’ve seen the end of Earth, you know how it goes.”
“But other planets...” She trailed off, desperately trying to make herself understood and feeling unbelievably inadequate to the task. “This kinda thing happens all the time, all over the universe, right? And it’s like... It’s like it’s not enough there’s Daleks and Slitheen and all those other things out tryin’ to destroy the everybody. ‘Cause the universe is doing a good job all on its own. Everything... everything dies. This planet died. My planet dies. And it’s all normal - that’s how the universe thinks it’s supposed to be.”
“That’s about the sum of it, yup.”
A certain cold false cheer in his voice caught Rose’s attention and woke her to herself, to her memory of what had happned to him. “I’m sorry! Your planet, I didn’t mean...”
“It’s all right, Rose. It happens.”
“Difference is,” Jack interjected, pulling off his great-coat and draping it over her shoulders, squeezing them as he settled the heavy fabric over her, “that we’ve got the time to be more than bacteria. You and me and the Doc here, all of us are the winners. Our species developed spinal columns and mathematics and the universal theorem in physics...”
“Speak for yourself on that one,” the Doctor grumbled, and jabbed a thumb in Rose’s direction. “This lot still haven’t figured out what’s wrong with String Theory.”
“Yeah, well, give them another couple centuries.” Jack waved his hand vaguely. “What I mean is, we get the chance these little anemones and whatever don’t get. And we keep going.”
“But it’s not like it’s a trade-off,” Rose insisted. “Not like you givin’ me your coat. We don’t live ‘cause they died.”
“Maybe we do.” Jack shrugged. “Maybe these sea anemone things would’ve developed into the next Daleks if their sun hadn’t gone out, and we’d all be enslaved as cattle, getting milked for our bodily fluids. Not that that might not be fun under different circumstances, mind you,” he added with a cheeky, if somewhat forced, grin. “Nobody knows. Well, except maybe him, and he’s not telling us lower lifeforms, right, Doctor?”
“Exactly. Know the whole of creation, me; I’m just keeping it a secret for you lot. Like hiding Christmas presents in the closet.” The Doctor grinned at them.
“Sure. Anyway... come on, it’s getting cold out here.” Jack rubbed his hands briskly. “Let’s go back to the Tardis. Somebody didn’t warn us it was going to be quite so nippy out here, and while I appreciate the chance to show off my chivalry, sitting around without my coat in this weather my butt’s liable to freeze off. And that would be a great loss for humanity.”
They walked quickly once the decision was made, back up the pure white dunes to a sheltered rock-face where the Tardis waited, glowing dimly in the eternal night. Stepping into her doors was a relief, though Rose’s hands and cheeks immediately started burning with the sudden change in temperature. And as for Jack...
“Uh, guys...”
The Doctor and Rose turned to their companion, who was standing stock still, staring at his hands with something like shocked fascination.
“So, I’m kinda... blue. Don’t you think?”
“More like white.” The Doctor stepped forward immediately and caught Jack’s hands. “Hypothermia. It’s a mild case, but... Rose, get the medical kit from under the console.”
Jack pushed on a weak grin. “Couldn’t you just help me warm up, Doc?”
“I’m a Time Lord. My body temperature’s naturally a good bit lower than yours to begin with, and our walk in the cold out there hasn’t helped. Good to see your sense of humor survives intact, though,” the Doctor growled as he rummaged through a bin of tools and random implements.
“Rose...?”
“Aww, come off it, Jack - does everything have to be about sex? You’re freezing... here, take your coat back...”
“It’s better for him to keep it off for now. The Tardis is warmer than him, the coat’ll just keep his own body temperature in at the moment.” The Doctor pursed his lips. “At the risk of giving him unneeded encouragement, getting into bed with another warm body might be the best cure we can offer. If you’re up to it, Rose...”
Jack turned to her, his smile a little more honest. “I’m not gonna die here, but I certainly wouldn’t say no...”
“Well, you did give me your coat out there.” Rose grinned. “I’d say that deserves a reward, wouldn’t you, Doctor?”
“You inviting me?”
“Wouldn’t be the same party without you,” Jack quipped.
The Doctor hesitated.
“I know, I know - I still haven’t bought you that drink.” Jack shrugged. “If you’re not into the idea, Doc, just say so. I won’t say I won’t be disappointed - hell, heartbroken’s more like it. But I understand.”
“It’s not that.”
“I thought it might not be.” Jack strode up to the Doctor, his cold apparently forgotten. “What about what we said earlier, to Rose? About everything ending, and it being natural. You’re not the first man to lose everything, Doc. Cliche as it is, I figure it’s better to love and lose...”
“That’s not the point.”
“I think it is.”
“Rose...” the Doctor sighed, but his companion interrupted him before he could really start to argue.
“No, listen. You want us with you, you laugh and tease us, but when it comes to actually letting us in--”
She’d expected to be silenced, but not by a kiss. And yet, there it was - the Doctor grabbing her shoulders suddenly, forcefully, and pressing his mouth against hers. He hadn’t been kidding about the temperature difference - kissing him was almost like kissing someone who’d been sucking on an ice-cube, and the shiver that went down Rose’s spine at that sensation and the possibilities it raised wasn’t entirely from the cold. A moment later, she felt another pair of hands - equally cold, but only temporarily so - slide between them, one on her stomach and another cupping her breast, while a tall and definitely male body pressed against her back.
“We really gonna do this, then?” The Doctor’s tone reminded Rose of early on in their time together, when he’d offered her a chance to step back from the danger in the life he led and go back home, while still giving the impression his offer was a test - that he was holding back to make sure he wouldn’t get hurt.
“Think we’re already doing it,” she offered. “This is just the last step we haven’t taken.”
“I like the way you think.” Jack leaned over Rose’s shoulder and caught the Doctor’s mouth with a solid kiss.
When they parted, the Doctor looked each of them solemnly in the eyes, one after the other, and then shook his head. “On your heads, then, if it goes wrong.” He turned and walked out of the console room, then paused in the doorway, turning back to them. “Coming, then? Or are you all talk?”
The two Humans shared an incredulous glance, then bolted to join him, both grinning bright enough to light the dark skies of Auriga Epsilon. And the Doctor, for his part, felt just a bit more of the ice melt away.
Based on one of the stories Rose tells Mickey in “Boomtown” about her adventures with the Doctor and Jack. I’m not sure why, but the image just wouldn’t get out of my head, and I had to do something with it... Better late than never, right?
Fandom: Doctor Who
Title: Waves of Ice and Stone
Timeline: S1, before the events of "Boomtown"
Characters: Doctor, Rose, Jack
Warnings: Implied threesome... more even than the actual series. ;)
The Doctor told them the planet’s name was Auriga Epsilon. Some twenty years before they visited, a sudden singularity had sucked away most of the nearest sun’s energy, leaving them with a dim brown star rather than the brilliant yellow they’d started out with. High noon on Auriga Epsilon looked like midnight on Earth, with a pale circle of sun high in the sky that looked like a small full moon, but only about half as bright.
“It’s dying,” the Doctor told them, his hands tucked casually into his coat pockets. “Fading away - it’ll peter out in another couple of decades, and the whole system will go dark.
“What about the people? Did anybody live here? People, I mean,” Rose added, looking at the strange little shells on the icy sand in front of them.
“Nah. Things were getting started in that ocean - lots of bacteria, invertebrates, maybe something equivalent to a fish, but nothing smarter than that. Might’ve gotten farther, but it’s hard to say... Now there won’t be anything. It’s too cold for any of the life that had gotten started, and not much can live on the icy rock this planet will be in a short while.”
“Happens all the time, on planets all over the universe,” Jack agreed, rubbing his hands together. “Life’s pretty rare, when you compare it to all the planets that can’t support so much as a few bugs and a slime-mold or two.”
“But that’s good, this time.” The Doctor crossed his arms over his chest and stared out into the frozen sea, apparently unconcerned by the cold around them. “Better here than in your system, or some other place where it would’ve destroyed a whole civilization and all the other lifeforms in the ecosystem.”
“What if it had? To us, like, or somebody like us?”
“In your time?” Jack shrugged. “Maybe a few hundred people could’ve escaped on rockets, moved up to the space station or to a hastily created colony on the moon or Mars, but really? Not a good look-out. Twenty-first century tech wasn’t up to travel and colonization, not on a grand scale. The people who made it probably wouldn’t even have been a genetically viable population, unless they brought cryo-tubes along with sample DNA for fertilization. And the nearest really habitable planet would be too far away to reach with your level of technology, so... I’d have given us twenty years, and then boom. Extinction.”
“Less than that.” The Doctor bent down, examining the patterns made in the sand by some kind of soft-bodied organism that had frozen stiff in mid-motion. “The panic would bring about World War Three faster than any Slitheen plot. You lot wouldn’t have been able to make rational decisions. The people left behind would riot, try to take over, kill the people trying to leave...”
“And you say you like Humans.” Jack sounded insulted.
“I do.” The Doctor looked up, his expression sad. “But you’re idiots, the lot of you.”
“I resent that. I come from a more enlightened time...”
“In which humanity is still exactly the same as it always was, except for an influx of alien DNA brought in by carefully-assisted reproductive habits. You’re good people, Jack, but you’re still a bunch of stupid apes from my perspective.”
“So, what - you would’ve even have helped us?”
He turned to Rose with the expression she’d come to think of as his ‘Oh, Rose’ face - the one that usually came right before he told her something tragic and frustrating that she’d completely missed in her calculations of a situation. “I wouldn’t have been able. What am I going to do - go back in time and fix a whole star? Take the whole population of planet Earth with me on my travels? Not even the Tardis can hold that many people, Rose.”
“Yeah, but... Yeah.” Rose shivered in her thin parka - it had been plenty cozy back home, but she was beginning to learn that it was designed for fashion, not the Antarctic temperatures of an ice-planet - but her reaction wasn’t all about the chill. The huge waves, frozen in the instant their sun’s energy was sappedd, were amazing - beautiful, even, but the idea that a sun could just wink out like that... everything gone in an instant, and no way to ever get it back. Not even with time travel.
“It didn’t happen to Earth, Rose.” Jack’s hand settled on her arm, and his breath puffed warm against her cheek. “It won’t. I’m living proof.”
“He’s right.” The Doctor circled around to the other side of her, so she was between them, but didn’t block her view of the frozen ocean. “You’ve seen the end of Earth, you know how it goes.”
“But other planets...” She trailed off, desperately trying to make herself understood and feeling unbelievably inadequate to the task. “This kinda thing happens all the time, all over the universe, right? And it’s like... It’s like it’s not enough there’s Daleks and Slitheen and all those other things out tryin’ to destroy the everybody. ‘Cause the universe is doing a good job all on its own. Everything... everything dies. This planet died. My planet dies. And it’s all normal - that’s how the universe thinks it’s supposed to be.”
“That’s about the sum of it, yup.”
A certain cold false cheer in his voice caught Rose’s attention and woke her to herself, to her memory of what had happned to him. “I’m sorry! Your planet, I didn’t mean...”
“It’s all right, Rose. It happens.”
“Difference is,” Jack interjected, pulling off his great-coat and draping it over her shoulders, squeezing them as he settled the heavy fabric over her, “that we’ve got the time to be more than bacteria. You and me and the Doc here, all of us are the winners. Our species developed spinal columns and mathematics and the universal theorem in physics...”
“Speak for yourself on that one,” the Doctor grumbled, and jabbed a thumb in Rose’s direction. “This lot still haven’t figured out what’s wrong with String Theory.”
“Yeah, well, give them another couple centuries.” Jack waved his hand vaguely. “What I mean is, we get the chance these little anemones and whatever don’t get. And we keep going.”
“But it’s not like it’s a trade-off,” Rose insisted. “Not like you givin’ me your coat. We don’t live ‘cause they died.”
“Maybe we do.” Jack shrugged. “Maybe these sea anemone things would’ve developed into the next Daleks if their sun hadn’t gone out, and we’d all be enslaved as cattle, getting milked for our bodily fluids. Not that that might not be fun under different circumstances, mind you,” he added with a cheeky, if somewhat forced, grin. “Nobody knows. Well, except maybe him, and he’s not telling us lower lifeforms, right, Doctor?”
“Exactly. Know the whole of creation, me; I’m just keeping it a secret for you lot. Like hiding Christmas presents in the closet.” The Doctor grinned at them.
“Sure. Anyway... come on, it’s getting cold out here.” Jack rubbed his hands briskly. “Let’s go back to the Tardis. Somebody didn’t warn us it was going to be quite so nippy out here, and while I appreciate the chance to show off my chivalry, sitting around without my coat in this weather my butt’s liable to freeze off. And that would be a great loss for humanity.”
They walked quickly once the decision was made, back up the pure white dunes to a sheltered rock-face where the Tardis waited, glowing dimly in the eternal night. Stepping into her doors was a relief, though Rose’s hands and cheeks immediately started burning with the sudden change in temperature. And as for Jack...
“Uh, guys...”
The Doctor and Rose turned to their companion, who was standing stock still, staring at his hands with something like shocked fascination.
“So, I’m kinda... blue. Don’t you think?”
“More like white.” The Doctor stepped forward immediately and caught Jack’s hands. “Hypothermia. It’s a mild case, but... Rose, get the medical kit from under the console.”
Jack pushed on a weak grin. “Couldn’t you just help me warm up, Doc?”
“I’m a Time Lord. My body temperature’s naturally a good bit lower than yours to begin with, and our walk in the cold out there hasn’t helped. Good to see your sense of humor survives intact, though,” the Doctor growled as he rummaged through a bin of tools and random implements.
“Rose...?”
“Aww, come off it, Jack - does everything have to be about sex? You’re freezing... here, take your coat back...”
“It’s better for him to keep it off for now. The Tardis is warmer than him, the coat’ll just keep his own body temperature in at the moment.” The Doctor pursed his lips. “At the risk of giving him unneeded encouragement, getting into bed with another warm body might be the best cure we can offer. If you’re up to it, Rose...”
Jack turned to her, his smile a little more honest. “I’m not gonna die here, but I certainly wouldn’t say no...”
“Well, you did give me your coat out there.” Rose grinned. “I’d say that deserves a reward, wouldn’t you, Doctor?”
“You inviting me?”
“Wouldn’t be the same party without you,” Jack quipped.
The Doctor hesitated.
“I know, I know - I still haven’t bought you that drink.” Jack shrugged. “If you’re not into the idea, Doc, just say so. I won’t say I won’t be disappointed - hell, heartbroken’s more like it. But I understand.”
“It’s not that.”
“I thought it might not be.” Jack strode up to the Doctor, his cold apparently forgotten. “What about what we said earlier, to Rose? About everything ending, and it being natural. You’re not the first man to lose everything, Doc. Cliche as it is, I figure it’s better to love and lose...”
“That’s not the point.”
“I think it is.”
“Rose...” the Doctor sighed, but his companion interrupted him before he could really start to argue.
“No, listen. You want us with you, you laugh and tease us, but when it comes to actually letting us in--”
She’d expected to be silenced, but not by a kiss. And yet, there it was - the Doctor grabbing her shoulders suddenly, forcefully, and pressing his mouth against hers. He hadn’t been kidding about the temperature difference - kissing him was almost like kissing someone who’d been sucking on an ice-cube, and the shiver that went down Rose’s spine at that sensation and the possibilities it raised wasn’t entirely from the cold. A moment later, she felt another pair of hands - equally cold, but only temporarily so - slide between them, one on her stomach and another cupping her breast, while a tall and definitely male body pressed against her back.
“We really gonna do this, then?” The Doctor’s tone reminded Rose of early on in their time together, when he’d offered her a chance to step back from the danger in the life he led and go back home, while still giving the impression his offer was a test - that he was holding back to make sure he wouldn’t get hurt.
“Think we’re already doing it,” she offered. “This is just the last step we haven’t taken.”
“I like the way you think.” Jack leaned over Rose’s shoulder and caught the Doctor’s mouth with a solid kiss.
When they parted, the Doctor looked each of them solemnly in the eyes, one after the other, and then shook his head. “On your heads, then, if it goes wrong.” He turned and walked out of the console room, then paused in the doorway, turning back to them. “Coming, then? Or are you all talk?”
The two Humans shared an incredulous glance, then bolted to join him, both grinning bright enough to light the dark skies of Auriga Epsilon. And the Doctor, for his part, felt just a bit more of the ice melt away.
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