watch_is_me | Entries tagged with setting: historical

More chatplay, again with

laser_not_sonic. Having played out a scenario with the Master fobwatched as Harry Saxon traveling with my Doctor, we ended up playing out another scenario with both Doctor and Master fobwatched, turn-of-the-century-ish. This isn't my Doctor; this is a canon one, fobwatched, so that was a bit of a switch for me, he's less touchy.

This one's relatively short! Really. And they're just being cute, not much substance, and talking about taking a break from their lives to travel together. Without any fighting! That'd be a first, if they were still Time Lords.

( They're close, as close as too people can be, and of course they want to be closer, that's the human condition. It makes for wonderful discourse, but it's not something that can be helped. )

'Verse: Personal canon.
Words: 741.
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 eight of a long story I've got drafted and am writing up this week, on how that life might have gone.

LOOK I FINISHED IT. IF YOU HAVE FEEDBACK OR READ ALL OF THIS OR ANYTHING, HELLO, I LOVE YOU FOREVER AND GIVE YOU KITTENS AND COOKIES. KITTEN COOKIES. *hyper!~~~~~~~*

Part one is here, part two here, part three here, part four here, part five here,, part six here, and part seven here.

Joan smiled at her husband as he sat poring over his manuscript, Alistair on his knee, grabbing after the pages. It was almost finished, he’d told her. Now, he should be modest, really he should, but it was quite an accomplishment, a fantastic storyline, it out-Wellsed Wells—amazing, to finally wrestle all of the snippets and impressions he’d collected into some semblance of order, a real, coherent tale, a hero’s journey. Wonderful, he told her at night, before they went to bed, it was wonderful, realizing that his dreams weren’t sacrosanct and that he could shape them, order them around, if he wanted to. Amend them and rework them and use them to write a novel, an actual novel, not some mad universal travelogue.

( He’d always wanted to write a novel. )

'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. )

Part eight is here.

Current Music: VNV Nation - Dark Angel

'Verse: Personal canon.
Words: 649.
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 six of a long story I've got drafted and am writing up this week, on how that life might have gone.

And here I have my personal future canon and my Grand Overarching Scheme for my AU meandering on in to say hello. Hello, G.O.S.!

Part one is here, part two here, part three here, part four here, and part five here.

One night, while he was jammed into his niche in the mud of the trench wall, trying to sleep and trying to ignore the itching of the bloody lice that had moved into his hair and clothing (and doing neither with any great success), a man stepped out of the dark between lamps and spoke to him.

( Hello, John )

Part seven is here.

'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. )

Part six is here.

'Verse: Personal canon.
Words: 490.
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 four 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, and part three here.

The Doctor, the letter had said. Peter Mackie had met a man who called himself the Doctor, in the war, out in no man’s land, between the trenches, during that Christmas truce that had been in all the papers. A distant man, with dark eyes, dressed all in black, traveling with a woman. Sally Sparrow. The name didn’t mean anything to him, to John Smith. There had never been a Sally in his dreams—other women, young and brave and beautiful, and Joan had teased him about that, made him blush and hurry to explain to her that there were men who traveled with the Doctor, here, look at this picture, this remembered dialogue—but never a Sally. It had struck him, felt almost like a betrayal, to hear a new name associated with his Doctor, a name that didn’t come from the stories his mind wove for him at night.

( He should, perhaps, have been *more* startled by his Doctor appearing in the real world, jumping from private fiction to perceivable fact. He should have doubted. )

Part five is here.

'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.

'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.

'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.

Verse: Personal canon.
Words: 3,687.
Prompt:

oncoming_storms, Prompt 30.2.b, "Hope," and some personal research.

EDIT: Fixed my obvious historical error, go, me!

I know it's a lot of text, this piece, not broken up by dialogue, but I'd love feedback on it! I did quite a bit of research to get it put together, and I'd very much like to hear what people think. I'd like to believe it's worth the textiness, but that's me reading it. What are you folks' reactions? I shall give you Interweb virtual cookies for your thoughts!

Dear Mother and Father,

I know that you will wonder why I am writing again so soon. My last letter was only a week ago, so that this one may arrive right behind it. You’ll think that your son has all the time in the world here, to write and to stargaze. The war, I can hear you say, that must all be a sham in the papers, the dear boy’s down there larking about, writing us serial novels and learning the constellations. A Continental vacation, that’s what it is, government-paid!

It’s not like that. Paper’s hard to get, and time is harder, and a dry spot in the trenches, even harder still. So you’ll have to believe me when I tell you I’m writing again because I’ve got a story worth telling. Really worth telling, and I hope you put this on to the local paper, though I don’t doubt they’ll think I’m mad.

( It’s a story about Christmas, Mum and Da, and about peace and the best parts of us English. Maybe the Germans, too, though I don’t know about that. )