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rosa_acicularis) wrote2008-01-30 02:31 am
A Commentary for Good Night, Part Four
A rush of current and he is nightmare blind, falling, drowning in air and the dark. His fingers scrabble for purchase on tattered wallpaper as he hurtles downward through hollow corridors, past doors and rooms forgotten. Then his knees hit wooden floorboards, his palms slap against the wall, and everything stops. For a moment, it is so silent. So still. He does not breathe.
“I can’t see,” he murmurs, though there is no one to hear. “Why can’t I—”
The first scream he doesn’t even recognise as a human voice. It’s just noise – shattering, desperate. The second moves him to his feet and he stumbles down the corridor in the dark (in his blindness), reaching for light, for doorframes, for the next person he needs to save. The third and he knows he is too late – he’s well enough acquainted with life to recognise the sound of its passing.
But he is wrong. The scream turns to sobs, the sobs to words, and he stops, his ear pressed to the wall. He listens.
*And here we have the Three Roses. Now we’re dealing directly with the fallout from Do I Twist, Do I Fold. Three Roses, three ways this encounter may have unfolded. The Master claimed he “violated” her – this is rather deliberately vague. And possibly untrue. The Doctor only knows that she came back to him, without any memory of what happened, and suffered a violent, unexplained physical reaction.
So his mind, now forced to deal with the possibilities, goes to the darkest places he can imagine.
“I’ll kill you,” she says, wracked with pain, and he hears the blood thick in her throat. “I’ll fucking kill you and after you die and come back I’ll fucking kill you again.” She chuckles darkly, weakly. “Unless you come back really ugly. Then I’ll take pictures and laugh.”
Rose screams again, high and raw, and he hears it in his bones and his skin and he fumbles futilely for the doorknob, cursing the darkness because it is happening again and again he cannot see—
*He was less than a block away when whatever happened, happened. Tinkering in the TARDIS, while Rose was…what? Raped? Tortured? Forced to listen to Il Divo records? He couldn’t see what was happening then, and now the corridor is dark. He couldn’t reach her then, and now the doors are locked.
“Please,” she says, weeping, “please don’t. I’ll give you, I’ll tell you anything, anything you want, just let me go. Please let me go.” Her voice is small, distant, and he follows it down the corridor to another door, another room. Another Rose. He throws himself against the wood, but the door will not yield. “I can help you,” this new Rose continues, begging, and he has never heard her like this. “The Doctor – he trusts me. Cares about me. I can hurt him. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Him, not me.” She sobs, undone. “Please.”
*It killed me to write that part. It really, really did.
The doorknob rattles in his hands as he tries to force his way into the room, the sonic screwdriver dark and useless. He feels himself shaking, feels his stomach clench, acid and revulsion and horror (once upon a time, there was a girl—)
*The beginning of the Master’s version of Little Red Riding Hood from Do I Twist, Do I Fold.
surging in the back of his throat like vomit (I forgive you, he’d said, and meant it), and still the door will not open.
He hears her cry out, a thin wail from a distant room. He runs blindly, sliding over smooth wooden floors, until he reaches her voice – another door, another lock. She gives a wordless cry and he listens, ear to the door, as she strains for breath, air leaving her lungs in rhythmic grunts as if she is being struck again and again.
“Oh god,” the Rose behind this door moans, her voice breaking. “Oh god, oh god, oh yes—”
*Oh, this is so fucked up. The idea that she might have had sex with the Master and enjoyed it and that to Doctor this is a betrayal beyond offering to harm him to save herself – it’s a very ugly thing to suggest. But once I wrote it I couldn’t make myself unwrite it, so here it stays.
The Doctor reels back, staggering into the wall behind him. “No,” he says, his voice a whisper. Then, fiercely: “Enough.”
There is silence.
*The ghosts were of his creation – he had the power to stop them all along.
Light spills across the floor and he finds himself at the foot of a long staircase. It leads to an open door, to sunlight.
He climbs the stairs and steps out into open sky, onto the widow’s walk perched on the roof of the house, the pale blue paint of its floorboards and railings corroded by years of ocean air. Rose stands with her back to him, feet bare and hair tangled, looking out to sea.
“Once upon a time,” she says, “there were two boys. They were friends, the way boys often are, and though they were very different, they were very much the same. When they became men, they left their homes and their families, striking out – one to the east, the other to the west – to find their fortunes. Both traveled far, and both saw wondrous, horrible things. Both did wondrous, horrible things.” She pauses, the wind in her hair. “They were not friends any longer.”
*The Doctor and the Master, fairy tale style.
orange_crushed 's truly exceptional fic Young Lions. I have adopted it as my personal canon, and I call it Steve.
He stands behind her, his hands in his pockets. Not touching her. “Rose.”
She laughs a little, tucking her hair behind her ear, and does not look at him. “You know, I love you a lot, but you’re sort of stupid.”
He looks at the floor and smiles. “Can’t really argue with that.”
“A rare moment of humility. It’s almost disturbing.” She turns away from the sea and brushes her fingers over his lapel, her eyes on his. They are wide and impossibly old. He looks to her mouth (to her lips) and there is steel in her smile. “I have a riddle for you.”
*When is a bottle not a bottle, an egg not an egg, and a girl not a girl?
“That’s a surprise.” He leans into her hand. “It’s not the one with all those sacks and cats, is it? ‘Cause that always was a bit beyond me.”
*This is the only riddle I ever try to tell, and everyone has always heard it before:
As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives. Each wife had seven sacks, each sack had seven cats. Each cat had seven kits. Kits, cats, sacks, wives, how many were going to St. Ives?
She skims her fingernails over the knot of his tie, yellow varnish against blue silk.
*Nail varnish is Very Important!
Her smile fades. “He died.”
The Doctor swallows, but the sudden sharpness in his throat stays. “Yes.”
“You wanted to save him.”
“Yes.”
“Because you thought he could save you.” She smiles again, and he feels it like a knife blade. “You killed them all. All of them except him.” She touches his face. “Doctor, nobody wants to be alone.”
He looks to the grey sky above, breathes deeply and tastes salt. “Except hermits.”
*I heard somewhere that David Tennant claims the “Hermits United” bit as his favorite line from series three. I kinda love it too.
“Yes,” she agrees, her voice warm. “Except hermits.” She rests her head against his shoulder, her cheek over his left (human) heart, and his hands settle at her waist. For a moment, it is almost as if they are dancing. “Tell me a story,” she says, and he closes his eyes.
“Once upon a time,” he says, because that is how you begin, “there was a girl.”
“Ooh,” she murmurs into his chest, “good start.”
He pinches her side and she laughs. “A very cheeky, very annoying girl. She had a very loud, very annoying mum, a very dull job in a shop, and an idiot boyfriend.”
“But then one day, something wonderful happened.”
He pinches her again. “Excuse me, who’s telling this story?”
She hides her grin against his suit coat. “You, sir. Sorry, sir. Won’t happen again, sir.”
*An echo of Brother of Mine's speech patterns from Family of Blood.
“I should hope not.” With great dignity, he continues. “Then one day, something wonderful happened. Actually, a lot of wonderful things happened – and lot of terrible things, and a lot of things that are probably best described as being somewhere in between – and soon the girl was lost deep in the dark of the forest, far from the path. Far from home.”
*As in most fairy tales, Rose’s story started when she left the path. The quest, the journey, the adventure – these things happen when you leave home behind and lose yourself in the woods. Which is a very dangerous thing to do, as Charles Perrault’s Little Red Chaperon learned the hard way.
Rose sighs. “And she loved it.”
*But then, Rose Tyler always did like her danger.
(I should write a fic in which Rose and the Doctor go back to 17th century France and Rose kicks good ol’ Chuck in the nuts.)
He rests his chin on the top of her head. “Yes,” he says, his voice thick. “Yes, she did.” He grins, for a moment fiercely happy. “She ran to the stars, a lost little girl, and she did wondrous, horrible things – saved worlds and ended wars and completely massacred my second-best toaster—”
She punches him in the arm. “Oi! I’m not the one who—”
“—and she was nearly lost for good a hundred thousand different times, in a hundred thousand dark places, but, in the end, she survived.” His grip on her waist tightens. “That’s the part of the story you must remember. Because she does. She survives.”
“Does she?” Rose muses. “Sometimes I wonder.”
*You should be wondering too, by the way.
She hums softly under her breath. It is a tune he does not recognise, and it makes him cold. “You want to know what happened that day. What he did to me.”
She says it so simply, and he cannot breathe. “Yes.”
Rose pulls away, hands on his chest, and looks into his eyes. “You can’t. Not ever.”
“I could go back,” the Doctor says, and it sounds like a threat. Like the madness it is. “Easiest thing in the world – just a matter of setting the coordinates.
Her jaw tightens. “You wouldn’t.”
“I would.” He smiles, showing teeth, and it feels as if something inside him is breaking. “There’s no one left to stop me.”
*Donna Noble, please get your ass back in that TARDIS before he destroys the universe. Also, another Creepy Dream Smile, courtesy of the Doctor.
For a moment, her expression (the hard twist of her mouth, the dip of her too-dark eyebrows) is a foreign, unreadable thing to him, needing translation. Then, like a slap to the face, he understands – she is furious. So much time spent grieving her loss, and in that time he forgot she ever looked at him with anything but a smile in her eyes.
Then the anger is gone, evaporated, and in its place waits a feral, affectionate grin. “No one?” she repeats, voice sweetly mocking. She begins to laugh, and it sounds like the sea. “Oh, Doctor,” she says, golden and fierce. “You’d be surprised.”
*Ding!
She skips away from him then, feet bare against grey cement, stopping at the brick barrier between the roof of the Powell Estate and the deadly drop to the city streets below. Behind her, early 21st century
*Abrupt scene change!
“Tell me a story,” she calls to him, tongue curling over her teeth. “Tell me how you save the little lost girl this time, Doctor. Do you want to be her noble huntsman? Her humble woodcutter, who just happens to be strolling by with a nice, sharp axe?” Her head tips to one side, her smile wry. “Her knight on a white horse?”
*Yeah, ‘cause that worked so well for him before.
The Doctor follows her, but she dances out of his reach, still smiling. He lets his empty hands drop to his sides. “That’s enough, Rose.”
“Oh no, sir. Not nearly, sir, not nearly enough. You, sir,” she says, poking him hard in the chest, “have forgotten the story.”
He knocks her hand away. “It’s not a story,” he bites out, and she giggles, wisps of her hair blowing into his face.
“To you, that’s all it is. All it’ll ever be. Because you’ve forgotten.”
*But what did he forget, Rose?
She leans into him, as if to whisper a precious secret in his ear. “Bottles and eggs, the moon and the sea – all nonsense, pretty as it is.
*It’s not the trappings of the dream that matters.
They’re just words, and you’ll forget them, but listen, listen: one for sorrow, two for joy. Three for a girl, four for a boy.” She presses her lips to his cheek, her mouth chaste and sweet and burning cold. “Hidden in rhymes and riddles, it waits.”
*But what waits, Rose?
She steps back, smiling. “You won’t see it coming.”
*Could you vague that up for me a bit?
He takes her by the shoulders, holds her still and looks into her unfathomable eyes. His fingers bruise. “What is it, Rose? What won’t I see?”
She looks back at him, serene. “Once upon a time, there was a girl, and she was lost. A man found her. His hands were cold. He laughed, and she wept.”
*headdesk*
He closes his eyes, but her pale face follows him, burning against the darkness of his eyelids. “Rose,” he says, and it feels like prayer.
“But you’ve forgotten what comes next. You always do.” She brushes her fingers over his brow, a benediction. “When,” she says softly, “is a lost girl not a lost girl?”
She waits, and he opens his eyes. “Tell me.”
“Well, when she’s a wolf, of course.” Then she grins, and he sees the sun.
*OH. That old chestnut. That chestnut with sharp, pointy teeth that hides and waits and that he won’t ever see coming.
She laughs, blue jumper and golden hair and dark, dark eyes, and the sky beyond her is in flame. The city of
*Why not? It’s the end of the world.
and Rose spins out of his reach, jumping up onto the ledge of the building. She balances there for a heart stopping moment, her hair aglow in the citylight and floating around her face like a halo. “Good night, Doctor,” she says.
*And we have a title. Also a Beatles song, of which I am quite fond.
“Sleep tight.” And then she falls.
*Splat.
The Doctor stands, unmoving. Barely breathing. “Oh,” he says faintly. “I’m dreaming.”
A hand claps him hard on the back. “By Jove, I think he’s got it!” The Master’s grinning face pops into view, and the Doctor stumbles backward. “Finally. Do you have any idea how unbearably dull it is in here? Well, you probably do, it being your brain and all, but really. I was about to do something desperate, like crash the weekly UNIT Scrabble tournament
*You know, you just know that there is a weekly UNIT Scrabble tournament in the Doctor’s head, and that the Brig gets very cranky whenever he loses.
or help your Miss Jones wax her bikini line
*Martha, I am so, so sorry.
, but I’d much rather gal pal around with you.” The Master sits on the roof ledge and peers down the sheer face of the Powell Estate. “Oh, ew,” he says, grimacing with delight. “There’s blonde all over the pavement. And no one’s even bothering to clean it up. Just disgusting the way these people live, isn’t it?”
The Doctor swallows, hard. “Master.”
“But did you see that exit? The girl’s got flare, I’ll give her that. Though,” the Master pauses, frowning, “it does seem as if that nasty god complex of yours is catching.
*No kidding. On the previous page, her name was like “prayer”, her touch a “benediction”, and her hair a “halo”. Two can play at this game, Russell my friend.
The phony omniscience and all that glowing just before she went splat – I can only imagine she caught that little eccentricity from you.” He places a hand over his right heart, his expression pained. “You know, I’m more than a bit concerned for my own mental well-being.”
*Ha.
“You’re already psychotic,” the Doctor points out. “How much worse could it get?”
The Master sighs. “Oh, sure. Kick a man when he’s dead.”
“Down.”
“What?”
“Kick a man when he’s down.”
“Right.” The Master grins. “That too.”
The Doctor’s fingers curl into fists. “Why are you here?”
“Well,” the Master says, tapping out a jaunty rhythm against his kneecaps, “I came for the brutal psychological torture, but I stayed for the late nights spent talking about everything and nothing, the Sundays in the park, that naughty thing you do with the pencil when you’re working on a crossword—”
*Something involving his tongue, no doubt.
“If I ever bothered with a crossword, I’d do it in ink.”
The Master winks. “Of course you would, pookie.” Then he stands and gives the Doctor a brilliant, shit-eating grin. “I’m here, old friend, because you want me here.” He turns to look out over the holocaust consuming the city, a dark figure silhouetted by flame. “I could burn every sky on every world you’ve ever seen, and you would still want me here. I could make her weep blood, and you would embrace me like a brother.” The Master slips behind him, standing at his shoulder, mouth at his ear. “Now, I’m certainly no expert, but tell me, Doctor, tell me true: is that good? Is that right?”
The Master laughs, the sound of waves against sand. “Oh no,” he says. “Not anymore.” He rests his hands on the Doctor’s shoulders and whispers: “One for sorrow, two for joy. Three for a girl, four for a boy. Five for silver, six for gold—” The Master chuckles, low and wry. “And seven for a secret, never to be told.”
*Well, that was illuminating.
The Doctor opens his eyes, and together they watch as the world burns.
His old friend squeezes his shoulder, fingers like iron. “I’m here,” he says, and is gone.
++
The Doctor woke to an empty ship, the dream forgotten before he opened his eyes.
++
Worlds away, Jackie Tyler rests on tired knees before a child’s bed. “Sweetheart,” she says, brushing the fringe from her son’s eyes,
*An echo of the Martha’s treatment of the miniMaster from the beginning of the dream.
“it’s long past your bedtime.”
The boy wriggles impatiently beneath his blankets. “But she promised me a story. She did.”
*I don’t name him here, but this is Matthew Tyler. He’s the second brother I’ve written for Rose (no one but jlrpuck has met Reggie yet, but he’s a pip, as my mother would say) and I’ve grown very attached to him. I really like writing kids, as I find them far superior to adults in almost every way imaginable. “Gay and innocent and heartless”, as J.M. Barrie once wrote – and if he wrote it, it must be true.
Though I have yet to state it explicitly, Rose and the Doctor never advanced beyond the realm of friendship and lingering looks in this universe o’ mine. Thus, little Matt really is Rose’s brother. (Though I sort of hinted in the dream that this might not be the case, no doubt because I am a troublesome creature.)
Jackie sighs. “I know, love.” She straightens the sheets, looking to wrinkles and creases and not her young son’s face. “Rose wants to be here, she does, but she has responsibilities. Plenty of worries, our Rose.” A shadow passes over her face, and it is pushed aside as quickly as it had come. “Tomorrow night, love. She’ll be here tomorrow night.”
“She promised,” the boy mutters, even as his eyelids flutter closed.
“Good night, sleep tight,” Jackie says softly, reciting old, familiar words. “Wake up bright in the morning light—” She touches her lips to his forehead. “To do what’s right, with all your might.”
*”But tell me, Doctor, tell me true: is that good? Is that right?”
She rises to her feet and steps back toward the open door.
“Thank you, Mum,” Rose says from the doorway, her voice low, almost unrecognizable. “I know you hate to lie to him.”
*”You’re lying.”
Jackie gives her eldest a hard look. “Yeah. I do.”
Rose turns away, her exhaustion written on her face in shadows. “I just…I couldn’t tonight. Tomorrow will be better.”
“I’m sure it will, sweetheart.” Jackie walks past her, standing in the dim light of the corridor. “I wish you’d tell me what’s wrong,” she says. “I wish you’d let me help.”
Rose gives a strange, strangled little laugh. “You do help, Mum. You really do. But I can’t—”
*I’m not going to say now what’s happening to Rose. But it’s not good, and I don’t think it’s giving much away to say that it’s about wolves and stories and what waits in the dark.
She pauses, and looks back to her brother’s dark bedroom. “You’ve forgotten the nightlights,” she says,
*“Can nothing harm us, Mother, after the nightlights are lit?”
“Nothing, precious. They are the eyes a mother leaves behind to guard her children.”
My one Peter Pan reference.
her face troubled, and slips into the room.
Jackie watches from the hall. “He’s not afraid of the dark, Rose.”
Rose turns the tiny knob under the lamp until her brother’s face glows warmly in its light. She smiles. “Lucky him.”
She presses her fingers to her lips (red nail varnish like blood against her too pale skin)
and, touching them to his cheek, wishes her baby brother a dreamless sleep.
++
And in the darkness, the wolf waits.