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stunt_muppet at 02:27am on 04/10/2009 under doctor who, fic posts, fic posts: gen, the memory always lies
stunt_muppet at 02:27am on 04/10/2009 under doctor who, fic posts, fic posts: gen, the memory always liesYeah, I put it up for public consumption. Why not. Makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something.
A bit of explanation: I originally thought that Chapter 3 of The Memory Always Lies, like Chapter 2, would be bracketed by dream sequences from the perspective of Corporal John Smith. I'm not sure if I'm still going to use that device, but even if I do use it I ended up writing a couple of scenes that just don't fit what I had in mind for said dream sequences. Most don't stand on their own, but this one does, and, as I rather like it, I thought I'd put it up here for your potential reading pleasure.
Title: Sentencing
Characters: Corporal John Smith, OC
Words: ~1200
Rating/Warnings: PG
Warnings (highlight to read): Mild violent imagery, character death.
Notes: Spoilery: This story uses the fanon theory, first made known to me by an anonymous someone on the meme, that the memory blocks imposed on the Doctor during his exile made him unable to hear or communicate with the TARDIS. I'm not sure how clear that is within the scene itself, plus I wanted to give credit where credit was due, so I thought I'd mention it here.
***
The sun is huge and dusky red and mottled, overripe. The heat it gives off blisters his skin but there is nowhere left to escape it.
He knows, somehow, that he is the last one, despite some rational (or desperate) part of his mind protesting that failure to observe does not prove non-existence. There could be someone else left, on the other side of the Earth perhaps. But it’s as factual as the desiccated soil beneath him and the bright yellow seams across the skin of the sun; in a few hours the star will expand and swallow up the Earth, as it would always have done, someday. The rest of humanity – the people he remembers, his friends, his family – have fled or vanished or died, and he instead has merely grown very, very old.
So has she.
He’s certain he wouldn’t be this exhausted if he didn’t have to carry her, but the muscles in her legs have withered from being so long lamed. Had they time he would have supported her as she stood, tried to reverse some of the atrophy – for all the good it did them to try before.
(John is not certain what atrophy is, or why the Sun is expanding, or even how he knows any of this.)
She begged him to let her try to walk, at first. At least he thinks she begged; when he knelt to gather her up in his arms she pushed him away, then clung to him to try to support herself. Her mouth formed some words of entreaty but he could not hear a sound of them. He tried, as gently as he could, to tell her no, that there was too little time to waste any of it on such struggle, but she exhausted herself before she finally, sadly, consented to let him carry her.
He can’t remember the last time he heard her voice, though she pantomimes speech as regularly as anyone. His memories are all made up of elements, threads for each color and sound and sense; surely one of those threads is the sound of her voice, but it lies somewhere amongst the warp of every memory and grows harder to distinguish every day.
He closes his eyes, to drive off the sunlight if nothing else, and searches.
Her voice was already gone by the time all the people left; he had thought the two of them could leave with the rest, but they were tethered to this world, not its people. What was the point of an exile if they gave you free reign so soon as all your fellow-prisoners escaped?
Even without her voice he remembers the syllables on her lips: I don’t understand.
He remembers the days after, and how infrequently she even tried to speak then. She would stare at him as they walked without a word, and he avoided her gaze whenever he could. Because the fear in her bright blue eyes overlay anger, even hate; she resented him for trapping her here with him when she could have been free. And he knew she was right to.
She broke the silence after a few days (what would have been a few days, anyway, if time meant anything anymore), tugging at his lapel as a signal to stop walking and at his arm to put her down. As she held on to his shoulders she maneuvered her dead legs like crutches, until they propped her up as she leaned against him.
Another tug, and a fruitless movement of her hip; she was asking him, once more, to help her walk. And this time (for the last time) he indulged her.
He bore the weight of her body as she rocked back and forth, using what momentum she had to mimic a stride; when she missed a step he caught her and guided her until she could try again. He held on to one leg to keep her steps straight and beneath his fingers her skin hung slack off the bones.
Despite himself the sensation of it repulsed him, made him sick with the thought that she had once been whole, strong, beautiful, free. She once could follow him no matter how fast or far he wandered. She once had a voice like the crack of a sail on a windy day.
Worse than the disgust was the shame that followed it; what right did he have to think such things of her when she had trusted and followed him through his own folly, when her condition was (no matter who actually silenced and withered her) his own fault?
In his distraction he lost his balance, and she tumbled to the ground before he could catch her. He tried to apologize and she –
She started talking again, fast and frantic and still inaudible, her face twisted in frustration. She spoke too fast for him to read her lips but he didn’t need to; she wanted to walk again, wanted to run away and never come back, wanted to know why it wasn’t enough that they’d stayed here for so long, why they had to die here too.
I could fly us away from here, said the memory of her voice. We could watch it all from a million miles away.
He said nothing until she was finished, and when she ran out of fury to fuel her she leaned back against him, her whole body limp as her legs.
And then he lifted her up again, and let her head come to rest on his shoulder, and kept on walking.
---
The hot, heavy air leaves his mouth dry as chalk and his eyes burning; the red light in the sky has grown inescapable. Only a few more minutes now.
He kneels and sets her down, and she looks up very briefly at the sky before turning away from the light again, choosing instead to curl up against him. She tries to hide her face from him but he can hear that she’s crying; he notices, distantly, that the weight in his throat and stinging in his eyes aren’t entirely the fault of the heat.
For all the near-misses and brushes with mortality he has thought little about dying; with her voice so constant in his memory it was easy to think her as close to immortal as anything could be, who long after he had died would be as vibrant and alive as she was the day they met. And instead she’s going to die, broken and silent and far from her home, and he wants to tell her he’s sorry, tell her he’s grateful to have known her, tell her something.
Instead he holds her, her voice a fragmented melody in his mind, as the fire of the star consumes them.
---
When John wakes he doesn’t attach much meaning to the dream; indeed he barely remembers it. But there’s a moment, before he fully regains consciousness, when he has to fight the impulse to rise from his bed and run.
***
Cross-posted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
dwfiction but not to any of the other usual comms, and probably won't go on Teaspoon since how do you put up a "Chapter 2.1" anyway.
A bit of explanation: I originally thought that Chapter 3 of The Memory Always Lies, like Chapter 2, would be bracketed by dream sequences from the perspective of Corporal John Smith. I'm not sure if I'm still going to use that device, but even if I do use it I ended up writing a couple of scenes that just don't fit what I had in mind for said dream sequences. Most don't stand on their own, but this one does, and, as I rather like it, I thought I'd put it up here for your potential reading pleasure.
Title: Sentencing
Characters: Corporal John Smith, OC
Words: ~1200
Rating/Warnings: PG
Warnings (highlight to read): Mild violent imagery, character death.
Notes: Spoilery: This story uses the fanon theory, first made known to me by an anonymous someone on the meme, that the memory blocks imposed on the Doctor during his exile made him unable to hear or communicate with the TARDIS. I'm not sure how clear that is within the scene itself, plus I wanted to give credit where credit was due, so I thought I'd mention it here.
***
The sun is huge and dusky red and mottled, overripe. The heat it gives off blisters his skin but there is nowhere left to escape it.
He knows, somehow, that he is the last one, despite some rational (or desperate) part of his mind protesting that failure to observe does not prove non-existence. There could be someone else left, on the other side of the Earth perhaps. But it’s as factual as the desiccated soil beneath him and the bright yellow seams across the skin of the sun; in a few hours the star will expand and swallow up the Earth, as it would always have done, someday. The rest of humanity – the people he remembers, his friends, his family – have fled or vanished or died, and he instead has merely grown very, very old.
So has she.
He’s certain he wouldn’t be this exhausted if he didn’t have to carry her, but the muscles in her legs have withered from being so long lamed. Had they time he would have supported her as she stood, tried to reverse some of the atrophy – for all the good it did them to try before.
(John is not certain what atrophy is, or why the Sun is expanding, or even how he knows any of this.)
She begged him to let her try to walk, at first. At least he thinks she begged; when he knelt to gather her up in his arms she pushed him away, then clung to him to try to support herself. Her mouth formed some words of entreaty but he could not hear a sound of them. He tried, as gently as he could, to tell her no, that there was too little time to waste any of it on such struggle, but she exhausted herself before she finally, sadly, consented to let him carry her.
He can’t remember the last time he heard her voice, though she pantomimes speech as regularly as anyone. His memories are all made up of elements, threads for each color and sound and sense; surely one of those threads is the sound of her voice, but it lies somewhere amongst the warp of every memory and grows harder to distinguish every day.
He closes his eyes, to drive off the sunlight if nothing else, and searches.
Her voice was already gone by the time all the people left; he had thought the two of them could leave with the rest, but they were tethered to this world, not its people. What was the point of an exile if they gave you free reign so soon as all your fellow-prisoners escaped?
Even without her voice he remembers the syllables on her lips: I don’t understand.
He remembers the days after, and how infrequently she even tried to speak then. She would stare at him as they walked without a word, and he avoided her gaze whenever he could. Because the fear in her bright blue eyes overlay anger, even hate; she resented him for trapping her here with him when she could have been free. And he knew she was right to.
She broke the silence after a few days (what would have been a few days, anyway, if time meant anything anymore), tugging at his lapel as a signal to stop walking and at his arm to put her down. As she held on to his shoulders she maneuvered her dead legs like crutches, until they propped her up as she leaned against him.
Another tug, and a fruitless movement of her hip; she was asking him, once more, to help her walk. And this time (for the last time) he indulged her.
He bore the weight of her body as she rocked back and forth, using what momentum she had to mimic a stride; when she missed a step he caught her and guided her until she could try again. He held on to one leg to keep her steps straight and beneath his fingers her skin hung slack off the bones.
Despite himself the sensation of it repulsed him, made him sick with the thought that she had once been whole, strong, beautiful, free. She once could follow him no matter how fast or far he wandered. She once had a voice like the crack of a sail on a windy day.
Worse than the disgust was the shame that followed it; what right did he have to think such things of her when she had trusted and followed him through his own folly, when her condition was (no matter who actually silenced and withered her) his own fault?
In his distraction he lost his balance, and she tumbled to the ground before he could catch her. He tried to apologize and she –
She started talking again, fast and frantic and still inaudible, her face twisted in frustration. She spoke too fast for him to read her lips but he didn’t need to; she wanted to walk again, wanted to run away and never come back, wanted to know why it wasn’t enough that they’d stayed here for so long, why they had to die here too.
I could fly us away from here, said the memory of her voice. We could watch it all from a million miles away.
He said nothing until she was finished, and when she ran out of fury to fuel her she leaned back against him, her whole body limp as her legs.
And then he lifted her up again, and let her head come to rest on his shoulder, and kept on walking.
---
The hot, heavy air leaves his mouth dry as chalk and his eyes burning; the red light in the sky has grown inescapable. Only a few more minutes now.
He kneels and sets her down, and she looks up very briefly at the sky before turning away from the light again, choosing instead to curl up against him. She tries to hide her face from him but he can hear that she’s crying; he notices, distantly, that the weight in his throat and stinging in his eyes aren’t entirely the fault of the heat.
For all the near-misses and brushes with mortality he has thought little about dying; with her voice so constant in his memory it was easy to think her as close to immortal as anything could be, who long after he had died would be as vibrant and alive as she was the day they met. And instead she’s going to die, broken and silent and far from her home, and he wants to tell her he’s sorry, tell her he’s grateful to have known her, tell her something.
Instead he holds her, her voice a fragmented melody in his mind, as the fire of the star consumes them.
---
When John wakes he doesn’t attach much meaning to the dream; indeed he barely remembers it. But there’s a moment, before he fully regains consciousness, when he has to fight the impulse to rise from his bed and run.
***
Cross-posted to
dwfiction but not to any of the other usual comms, and probably won't go on Teaspoon since how do you put up a "Chapter 2.1" anyway. 
sleepy
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