Fic: "War to End Wars," Part One

'Verse: Personal canon.
Words: 502.
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 one of a long story I've got drafted and am writing up this week, on how that life might have gone.


( A war O soldiers not for itself alone, / Far, far more stood silently waiting behind, now to advance in this book )

Part two is here.

Fic: "War to End Wars," Part Deux

'Verse: Personal canon.
Words: 481.
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 two 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.



More and more often, he woke, in the middle of the night, threw on his dressing gown, and retreated to his office. Some nights, she got up herself, went to the kitchen and made something warm to drink, brought it back to him where he sat scribbling at his desk, and sat nearby, sipping from her own mug, watching him write and sketch. Write and sketch, feverishly. Sometimes he'd tell her what he was trying to get down, what he'd seen in his most recent dreams, what he was working so hard to capture, to articulate, to get right. He'd pass sheets of loose paper over to her, appendices and alterations, let her read the vignettes he scrawled in the margins and the long pages of the narrative he couldn’t quite piece together from the fragments. He’d show her his drawings—monsters, landscapes, artifacts, people and places out of fairytales; complicated schematics for impossible devices; tangles of circles like medieval astronomical diagrams. He’d try to explain to her, tell her about his Doctor and the journeys he’d gone on that night—he, the Doctor, living while her John slept. He, the Doctor, bold and arrogant and vivid where her John paced and worried and stood at windows as though waiting for someone— her John, who never talked of his past, of home and family and childhood. Her John, whose eyes held such deep worry for the future.

One night, she asked him,

( What about the Doctor’s family? Does he ever want children? )

Part three is here.

Fic: "War to End Wars," Part Tres

'Verse: Personal canon.
Words: 365.
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 three 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 and part two here.


Less than a year later, he left. His little Sarah, his Sarah Jane—Joan saw the pain in him, the sadness the separation brought him, would bring him, every moment he was away, as he left them at the station. She saw the way he held their baby, only a few months old, breathed in the sweet new scent of her hair, of her scalp, as though he could devour her, take her into himself, carry her within him, out into the battles he went to join.

( He’d received a letter, several weeks earlier, a letter from one of his boys at the front. Peter Mackie, he said, did she remember Peter? The one eye a little bit lazy and the grin? A bold boy, always questioning. )

Part four is here.