watch_is_me | Entries tagged with style: narrative

'Verse: Personal canon—any 'verse, really. I'm sure he does this in his multiverse!verse, too.
Words: 798
Prompts: None, just me—and watching Castrovalva. This was a 30-mins., no real rewriting, I just want to write something, I haven't in ages piece. So rather stream-of-consciousness and undisciplined.

You retreat.

You often do, these days. It used to be all running, and saving, and the worlds around you, the universe, a blur of sights and sounds and new experiences and friends by your side.

It used to be wonder and each moment new and nothing constant except the beauty and the terror and the new faces you would see in a crowd, the eyes met across a room, the adventures. The invitations. The stowaways and the tagalongs, and the human beings you loved the moment you saw them and loved until the moment they left and love still and will always love.

Even though you destroyed their future.

Even though you ended what they become.

Because you chose. Because something in you said, yes, you loved them, but the universe mattered more. The final death of the destroyers mattered more than the possible life of those you loved.

So you retreat.

You come here.

They made repairs for you, when you came back, the renegade returning, to volunteer for the Time War. They didn't have to summon you. You knew. You knew that War would need you, and you knew there was nowhere to run. For the first time.

The TARDIS runs better now than it ever did, though it maintains those idiosyncracies you love, the round-and-round-she-goes-where-she-stops-nobody-knows unpredictability of her travel. She doesn't have to. She does it because she loves you.

You don't know what to do with that. You don't know where to put that, how to accept that gift.

It doesn't matter. Because she gave it to you anyway. Your life, your body, your freedom, your mind. She remembered them all for you and put them back together and you are her labor of love and you cannot give that back. This gift that keeps on giving.

And taking.

( The Zero Room. That's where you retreat to. )

Current Music: APC - Fiddle and the Drum

'Verse: Personal canon, I think. A bit of self-retconning.
Words: 1,163
Prompts: Lessee. Well, now that I know more about canon and am over my initial Mad Enthusiasm of New Musedom (well, a bit, at least), I've pondered going back and smoothing out my muse's AU backstory. Particularly the way he gets out of the watch, making it something less violent and potentially OOC and less complicated. What with everyone kind of mourning the upcoming loss of Ten, I thought I'd write...the opposite of loss. In a way. Also, I owe a lot to reading

brigadiertardis's characterization of the TARDIS, in this fic. So shout-out there!

So, what's needed to read this? In my AU, the Doctor had no companions when he used the Chameleon Arch to hide from the Family of Blood. He left his human half in 1913, to live and die normally, and threw his Time Lord watch half out into space and time, locked away in the TARDIS. This is how he became himself again, after.

She was patient. She had always been patient, with him. Patient when he left, patient as he had his adventures, as he met and brought back and left and lost his many friends; patient as he made a mess of her circuits and a mess of her rooms; patient as he remade himself, over and over again. Patient as she learned the quirks and needs of each of his new faces, each of his personalities, the little things that would never be the same again and the great beautiful certainties that always held steady, that made him her Doctor, her partner, her family, her symbiote, her self.

Home, his humans said, is where your heart is—and hers was with him and his with hers, a fourth heart beating along with their shared three. They lived within each other and were each other, and she was always patient, because he was her and she was him, but now…

( Now she had waited for so long, and she was losing her mind. Had lost it, when he locked himself away from her. )

'Verse: Personal canon.
Words: 992.
Prompt:

badcompany_muse, "Vengeance." Yes, this is where that went in my head. With all of the Doctor's potential for Oncoming Stormness, he ends up...doing this.

Sally waved to the Doctor, as he swung out of the movie-rental shop and came sauntering across the parking lot toward her and the TARDIS. He’d parked rather far out—most of the free spaces had been for the handicapped, and he’d insisted that he wasn’t, thank you, no matter what Sally might say about his piloting skills—so she had time to judge his mood by his body language, as he waved back, ducked past a car reversing out of its spot, bounced over to her, hands in pockets, grinning, with that walk he had, like the tarmac was ever so slightly rubber or Time Lords ever so slightly gravity-resistant.

She didn’t need the TARDIS to translate. That body language read: OH, yes, I was up to something, and it went well. Very well, and I’m impressed with myself now, and the universe should share that. My impression. Impressiveness. The degree to which I have left an impressive impression on myself.

( Well, maybe the TARDIS didn’t need to translate so much as run grammar-check. )

'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: 1,242
Prompt:

oncoming_storms, prompt 61.2.d, "Dystopia."

Playing a bit fast and loose with canon, here, as the effects of the Delta Wave weren't described this way in Season 1's finale. But, what the hey, I didn't feel like doing a Serenity redux and maybe the good Doctor didn't have time to get the device *quite* right. Or maybe his writer's just evil and wanted to make sure he destroyed Earth good and proper. Like Pompeii, but a whole planet! Go, you, Doctor.

Not thrilled with this one, but, well, I wrote it, so. Eh. It goes out into the world, to do what damage it may. :|

( It is not there just to be looked at. It's also there to be looked from. )

'Verse: Personal canon.
Words: 903.
Prompt:

oncoming_storms, 59.3, "Caught in an embarrassing situation"—as well as a conversation with

not_from_mars

“Doctor.”

“Mm?” The Doctor didn’t look up from the TARDIS’ scanner—ever since LoA had succeeded in breaking into her, back on Earth, he’d treated her with greater care, checking her condition between adventures. This particular adventure, she’d taken quite a beating—power reserves drained; masses of connections disconnected and buffers debuffed; and the Oct-III Metatemporal Heisenberg Particle Counter blown right offline. That’d need replacing. Where to find a new one? “Twenty-second century? No, nope, still uncertain about their particles. Fifty-third? Hm…”

( “Doctor.” )

NO LONGER PERSONAL CANON (RETCONNED OUT) 1 NOV 2008

Once upon a time, there was a man called the Doctor. He'd lived for centuries; he'd seen war and death and the faces of friends lost to time and accident and choice. Through it all, he'd survived, selfish and center, the bright star at the heart of his own universe.

The death of Gallifrey, double genocide at his hands, left him shaken. But not, another great selfish adventurer might say, stirred. He kept on running, in his blue box, and he kept on seeing and summoning wonders.

( Except for one. )