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watch_is_me'Verse: Personal canon.
Words: 465.
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 seven of a long story I've got drafted and am writing up this week, on how that life might have gone.
Part one is here, part two here, part three here, part four here, part five here, and part six here.
In the end, illness took him away from the war—not the irritation of trench fever, they’d all dealt with that and pulled through, but the terrible wave of influenza.
The flu. He lay in the hospital bed, and, in his lucid moments, wondered at the universe. An entire war, men working so hard to cross distances to kill each other, and you ended up taken down by the man right next to you, your best friend, your comrade, who’d shaken your hand or shared your food.
Well.
At least he’d kept the dreams. They made the fevers rather interesting.
He remembered the face of the other man when he’d made that decision. It had been many long minutes coming. To release the dreams, to stop trying to hunt them down, to gather them all in and make sense of them, to end his desperate quest to understand, to define the Doctor, to discover who the Doctor was, where he was, why he was. To never have to wonder again if his, John Smith's, actions measured up, to no longer feel challenged by this fictive wanderer, this hero who jumped back and forth between reality and fantasy. To live his own life, free of echoes and peripheral-vision glimpses of wonders and horrors that could never, ever, never possibly, exist.
To be free of the dreams, whatever they were, legacy or madness. To run away.
No.
He’d said that, then. To the red-haired other.
No. They’re not yours. They’re not his. They’re mine.
I’m keeping them.
And the other had smiled, and nodded to him, and walked away down the dead-end trench into the dark—and when John had followed, curious where the man might have gone, there was no one there. Only the dimness where the lamps didn’t reach and the featureless flat wall of earth.
What he’d told the other had woken within him then, like a pardon, an amnesty, a self-granted benediction.
The dreams were his. He didn’t have to clutch at them, have to follow them, blind and led and helpless.
The Doctor was his. He was not the Doctor’s.
Whoever that man had been, out in no man’s land on Christmas Day, it didn’t matter. It would never matter again. The stories were his and the Doctor was his, to do with, to dream with, as he liked.
When a man like enough to be his twin, a man in a battered black jacket, came to the side of his cot and looked down at him—a look full of disgust and tight disappointment, condescension and a faint, token tenderness—John met his eyes through the fever and smiled. Hello, Doctor. I’ve fought your war, and I’ve fought mine, and now—now, well, I’ll see how life goes on, won’t I?
I will.
Not you.
It’s my story now.
Part eight is here.
Words: 465.
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 seven of a long story I've got drafted and am writing up this week, on how that life might have gone.
In the end, illness took him away from the war—not the irritation of trench fever, they’d all dealt with that and pulled through, but the terrible wave of influenza.
The flu. He lay in the hospital bed, and, in his lucid moments, wondered at the universe. An entire war, men working so hard to cross distances to kill each other, and you ended up taken down by the man right next to you, your best friend, your comrade, who’d shaken your hand or shared your food.
Well.
At least he’d kept the dreams. They made the fevers rather interesting.
He remembered the face of the other man when he’d made that decision. It had been many long minutes coming. To release the dreams, to stop trying to hunt them down, to gather them all in and make sense of them, to end his desperate quest to understand, to define the Doctor, to discover who the Doctor was, where he was, why he was. To never have to wonder again if his, John Smith's, actions measured up, to no longer feel challenged by this fictive wanderer, this hero who jumped back and forth between reality and fantasy. To live his own life, free of echoes and peripheral-vision glimpses of wonders and horrors that could never, ever, never possibly, exist.
To be free of the dreams, whatever they were, legacy or madness. To run away.
No.
He’d said that, then. To the red-haired other.
No. They’re not yours. They’re not his. They’re mine.
I’m keeping them.
And the other had smiled, and nodded to him, and walked away down the dead-end trench into the dark—and when John had followed, curious where the man might have gone, there was no one there. Only the dimness where the lamps didn’t reach and the featureless flat wall of earth.
What he’d told the other had woken within him then, like a pardon, an amnesty, a self-granted benediction.
The dreams were his. He didn’t have to clutch at them, have to follow them, blind and led and helpless.
The Doctor was his. He was not the Doctor’s.
Whoever that man had been, out in no man’s land on Christmas Day, it didn’t matter. It would never matter again. The stories were his and the Doctor was his, to do with, to dream with, as he liked.
When a man like enough to be his twin, a man in a battered black jacket, came to the side of his cot and looked down at him—a look full of disgust and tight disappointment, condescension and a faint, token tenderness—John met his eyes through the fever and smiled. Hello, Doctor. I’ve fought your war, and I’ve fought mine, and now—now, well, I’ll see how life goes on, won’t I?
I will.
Not you.
It’s my story now.
