Fic: "War to End Wars," Part Fünf
Oct. 23rd, 2008 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
watch_is_me'Verse: Personal canon.
Words: 604.
Prompt: Just me.
In my personal alternate universe canon thingie, the Doctor never reclaimed his human half in the equivalent of the "Human Nature" eps. So John Smith got to live his own, entirely mortal life. This is part five of a long story I've got drafted and am writing up this week, on how that life might have gone.
Also, please imagine the sound of me tearing my hair out trying to whip this part into shape. It is still so not right. Dammit.
Part one is here, part two here,, part three here, and part four here.
He had expected to shy from the trenches, the guns and the fighting, to find himself daydreaming at the wrong moments, to drop his rifle the instant they handed it to him, to languish and misstep and fall behind.
Instead, he flourished.
He learned about himself. Plans, control—he learned to make them, to take them. If he received bad orders, suicidal, hardheaded, small-minded, stupid orders, he twisted them, worked them around into something that functioned. Like the improvements he found he could make to small arms and artillery, gear and vehicles, he reengineered the orders into something that resembled the original—looked just like it, really, from outside, but was quite different inside. He learned to be clever, to hide his good plan within someone else’s idiot plan—or, when that didn’t work, to disobey entirely—but disobey with such commendable results that his commanding officers never said a word, only took credit where it wasn’t due.
He found he didn’t need credit. Didn’t want it, really. It was enough to know what he had done, what he was capable of doing, and to know that he would do it again, as many times as were necessary, to save the lives around him. Even if it meant taking the lives across from him.
The dreams never stopped. If anything, the war brought the dreams closer, wove them into his waking life as well as his sleeping. As he waited in the trenches, in the mud and the tense boredom, with a strip of sky overhead, he wrote and drew and dreamed, incessantly. New creatures, new faces, new snatches of story formed in his mind—and he recorded them, with the urgency and apprehension of a man lost in the woods, following a set of footprints too big to be a mortal’s. There were these metal monsters now—they had a name, in the dreams, but he could never quite bring it up into conscious thought—they were everywhere, with their screeching voices and their carbuncled carapaces. They also waged war—the war, the dreams wanted it to be, insisted it be, the only war that mattered—a terrible war, that went on forever and always—and his Doctor fought in it, lost a face to it, lost a life and more.
The real war became a memory, one he moved through to uncover mirror-moments, to stumble into events and people and sensations that blazed the dreams into life, that gave him more of their horrors, more of that greater war and of the tragedies that followed, more to set down in the pages of his journals.
He sent them back to Joan and Sarah—the journals, the ledgers, the notebooks, the scraps of paper, anything that he could find and fill with words. He always sent letters along with the dream-manuscripts. Each letter, he read over before sending, to make sure it sounded like him, that it didn’t read like the manuscripts, that it spoke of love and humanity and concern and the personal—personal connection, personal need, personal observations. In writing and reading his own letters, and in reading the letters he received from Joan in return, he reminded himself of who he was—a teacher, an Englishman, a husband and a father, a man who loved poetry, the smell of old books, and a brisk walk through the fields on a clear day. He reminded himself that he was John Smith.
He reminded himself that he was the reality.
No one he met had seen the Doctor, that Christmas day.
Part six is here.
Words: 604.
Prompt: Just me.
In my personal alternate universe canon thingie, the Doctor never reclaimed his human half in the equivalent of the "Human Nature" eps. So John Smith got to live his own, entirely mortal life. This is part five of a long story I've got drafted and am writing up this week, on how that life might have gone.
Also, please imagine the sound of me tearing my hair out trying to whip this part into shape. It is still so not right. Dammit.
He had expected to shy from the trenches, the guns and the fighting, to find himself daydreaming at the wrong moments, to drop his rifle the instant they handed it to him, to languish and misstep and fall behind.
Instead, he flourished.
He learned about himself. Plans, control—he learned to make them, to take them. If he received bad orders, suicidal, hardheaded, small-minded, stupid orders, he twisted them, worked them around into something that functioned. Like the improvements he found he could make to small arms and artillery, gear and vehicles, he reengineered the orders into something that resembled the original—looked just like it, really, from outside, but was quite different inside. He learned to be clever, to hide his good plan within someone else’s idiot plan—or, when that didn’t work, to disobey entirely—but disobey with such commendable results that his commanding officers never said a word, only took credit where it wasn’t due.
He found he didn’t need credit. Didn’t want it, really. It was enough to know what he had done, what he was capable of doing, and to know that he would do it again, as many times as were necessary, to save the lives around him. Even if it meant taking the lives across from him.
The dreams never stopped. If anything, the war brought the dreams closer, wove them into his waking life as well as his sleeping. As he waited in the trenches, in the mud and the tense boredom, with a strip of sky overhead, he wrote and drew and dreamed, incessantly. New creatures, new faces, new snatches of story formed in his mind—and he recorded them, with the urgency and apprehension of a man lost in the woods, following a set of footprints too big to be a mortal’s. There were these metal monsters now—they had a name, in the dreams, but he could never quite bring it up into conscious thought—they were everywhere, with their screeching voices and their carbuncled carapaces. They also waged war—the war, the dreams wanted it to be, insisted it be, the only war that mattered—a terrible war, that went on forever and always—and his Doctor fought in it, lost a face to it, lost a life and more.
The real war became a memory, one he moved through to uncover mirror-moments, to stumble into events and people and sensations that blazed the dreams into life, that gave him more of their horrors, more of that greater war and of the tragedies that followed, more to set down in the pages of his journals.
He sent them back to Joan and Sarah—the journals, the ledgers, the notebooks, the scraps of paper, anything that he could find and fill with words. He always sent letters along with the dream-manuscripts. Each letter, he read over before sending, to make sure it sounded like him, that it didn’t read like the manuscripts, that it spoke of love and humanity and concern and the personal—personal connection, personal need, personal observations. In writing and reading his own letters, and in reading the letters he received from Joan in return, he reminded himself of who he was—a teacher, an Englishman, a husband and a father, a man who loved poetry, the smell of old books, and a brisk walk through the fields on a clear day. He reminded himself that he was John Smith.
He reminded himself that he was the reality.
No one he met had seen the Doctor, that Christmas day.
