rosa_acicularis (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rosa_acicularis) wrote2008-08-27 11:31 am
rosa_acicularis) wrote2008-08-27 11:31 am
Entry tags:
Commentary: Days and Hours
The first of what will be many, many ficly commentaries born of that meme. This one's for principia_coh and kudzita.
principia_coh and kudzita.++
Days and Hours
++
This story wrote itself in one evening. About a year or so ago I was at the grocery store, shopping for dinner and minding my own business, when the scenario burst fully-formed into my poor, protein-deficient little brain. I went straight home and wrote it in one sitting.
Never did get dinner that night.
She’s deciding between orange juice and apple when she catches a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye, just as he turns down the aisle.
Who fic is a perfect opportunity to write the exotic, and so it suits my contrary nature to revel in the mundane whenever possible. A bit of banter in The Empty Child suggested that the Doctor and Rose stop to pick up necessities fairly regularly; for both our older Rose and our post-Doomsday Doctor this begins as a perfectly ordinary errand.
He’s staring at a carton of milk as if within its mild-mannered dairy confines there lurks an alien evil (which isn’t all that unlikely, she thinks, and thanks her lucky stars that she chose to wear trainers for this errand)
Aw. This story was written so long ago that I didn’t even use italics for parentheticals yet. How cute.
so he doesn’t see her when she skips up behind him and links her arm through his.
“Thought you were going to stay home,” she chirps, giving the milk carton a quick once over herself, just to be sure.
She’s been attacked by stranger things.
“Big manly man busy with repairs, sends the little woman out to the shop, isn’t that right?” She grins at him, letting her tongue slip between her teeth. “Did you miss me?”
Just a bit.
He’s not grinning back.
Actually, ‘not grinning’ doesn’t begin to describe the look on his face right now. His expression is disbelief and thunder,
The Oncoming Storm, of course. (It’s a good fannish cliché. I’ve grown quite fond of it.)
and she thinks the world must be ending (again) because the desperation in his eyes is something she’s only seen in those rare moments when he’s sure there’s nothing but darkness on the horizon. Moments when she’s seen just how very close to madness he is.
Dude, you know I love you, but sometimes you got some crazy eyes, mmkay?
Hopelessness, she thinks, and then she notices.
“You’ve changed your tie,” she says softly, slowly. Blue paisley when she left him in the TARDIS twenty minutes ago, solid indigo now.
He looks so young.
If I remember correctly, there was something of a fic trend at this time of encounters between post-Doomsday Doctor and pre-Doomsday Rose. This line is really the first indication that this story would not be heading in that direction. Not that I dislike that direction, of course, but this set-up let me write reunion fic without writing reunion fic, you know? Not that I dislike reunion fic, of course, but I…I think I’ll talk about something else now.
Lines on his face that she knows, lines she has traced with her fingers and the soft brush of her lips, are gone. He looks younger than she ever remembers him being (impossible, fuzzy human memory) but his eyes are ever-so-much older. He stares at her as if she’s impossible.
This word really does get used a lot.
“Oops,” she says, which is sort of a stupid thing to say when you’ve just damaged the fabric of time with a paradox so massive you may as well have just sat down and begun to unravel the multiverse thread by thread and saved yourself the fuss, but she’s not feeling particularly urbane at the moment.
Her hair is brown and long, pulled into a messy bun low against her neck, her face bare of makeup, and there’s a small scar over her left eyebrow, a souvenir from a hostage situation that Mickey and Jake still haven’t forgiven themselves for. She is thirty-seven years old, and he only just lost her.
I am fascinated by the idea of aging Rose. This was my first attempt, though certainly not my last. I lovelovelove writing Pete’s World Rose, with her Doctor indoctrination and her Torchwood training and Mickey and Jake as her BFFs and partners in policing alien crime. This fic takes that a step farther, taking a Pete’s World Rose and reintroducing her to the TARDIS life.
Only I had no intention of writing the actual reunion, so the challenge was to present an interaction between a familiar Doctor (we’d seen series three, we knew the extent of the damage) and a Rose who was very nearly a stranger to us. And me being me, I wrote it from the stranger’s POV.
“I don’t suppose,” she says, “that I could convince you this is all just a crazy dream?”
And that’s the line, my friends, from which the story sprang.
“Rose.” His voice is low and sharp like broken glass, and it hurts to see how he was, how he is, now that she’s gone. When he found her that day in the world of zeppelins and suppers with Mickey’s gran,
Mickey’s gran is ridiculously awesome, and deserves more love. She was meant to have a scene all to herself in Of Monsters, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. She will just have to get her own fic, then.
(If you all love me, you will write me Granny Smith fic.)
there had been such joy in him she thought he’d burst with it. He’d laughed and she’d laughed and though he’d said he’d missed her (and she’d believed him) she’d never thought it had been like this.
*twitches* Too. Much. Plu. Perfect.
“I’m sorry.” She takes a wary step back. “I have to go.”
He grabs her arm, hard, and drags her back to him. “How?” he asks, teeth flashing in stark florescent light.
Crazy eyes and shiny teeth. Add some curls and it’s positively Old School.
“How are you here? How is that possible?”
It was wonderfully refreshing to write something in which the Doctor is in the dark and Rose knows exactly what’s going on. The reader is more or less in the Doctor’s position – at this point we really only know as much about this potential future as he does, despite the fact that the story is told from Rose’s point of view.
One of the fun things about fan fiction is the way it lets you play around with the massive block of information we call ‘canon’ that each reader brings to the story. In this case, our canon knowledge aligns us with the Doctor, not with the POV character. We want the same answers he does, and we are equally denied.
“You need to let me go,” she says, her voice steady and clear only because she’s had years of practice being the sane one, the sure one, the one who doesn’t fall apart.
This description has gotten a lot of comments over the year or so since it was written, which are always nice to hear – though often I think people read it slightly differently than I intended. I was using her characterization in The Satan Pit as a guideline for her temperament at Torchwood and beyond: positive, goal-orientated, and in control of herself and others.
While the Doctor would rarely, I think, be described as ‘the sane one’, he’s generally a pretty chill dude. Unless you stick him in a bunker with a Dalek. Or offer him an equation that will let him rule the universe. Or steal his companion’s face. Or attempt to unleash giant spider babies on his favorite planet.
Never mind.
If she lets her voice break now she’ll throw her arms around his neck and never let go and then he’ll spend the rest of eternity standing in a Tesco’s with her clinging to him like a barnacle to a rock
A terribly romantic bit of imagery, if I do say so myself.
and never find a way back to her and she won’t be here to throw herself at him in the first place. “I can’t tell you anything,” she says in a patient, reasonable tone that he’ll one day claim makes him ‘batty’. “You know I can’t. Let me go.”
Not surprisingly, he doesn’t. “You’re gone. Trapped. This is impossible.”
That word again. Say it with me, folks: “I do not think it means what you think it means.”
She knows she’ll feel guilty later, but she can’t help herself. She rolls her eyes. “Obviously not.”
Someone needs some sensitivity training.
“I’m here?” He can barely get the words out, the sound catching in his throat. “With you?”
She briefly considers knocking him unconscious with a family-size jug of orange juice and running for it, but she doubts she’d get very far and doesn’t fancy getting tackled by a grief-stricken Time Lord in the deli aisle.
Sometimes, when I get sad? I think about this.
It doesn’t make me not sad, but it does make sad seem a heck of a lot funnier.
Instead, she nods.
He pulls her closer, breathing hard. “You come back?”
His eyes are wide and dark, but there’s something there that wasn’t before, an unfurling awareness of bright things to come that somehow breaks her heart in a way the desperation never could.
“Shit,” she says,
I don’t often resort to vulgar language, but I’d just used the phrase ‘unfurling awareness’ and I needed something to balance it out.
and throws her free arm around his neck, burying her face in his chest and holding him as tightly as she can. He laughs or he sobs into her hair, she can’t tell which, and then her feet leave the ground and he’s spinning her. Her foot catches a stack of yoghurts and a few go skidding across the floor.
And you just know that neither of them bother to clean up afterward. Shame on them.
He sets her down again and when she pulls back to look at his face, he’s her silly, grinning Doctor again.
So she kisses him.
Smoooochies!
(Wait. Was this supposed to be a substantive commentary?)
When she pulls away his eyes are still closed, lips slightly parted, frozen in the moment. She’s puzzled, and then, for the second time in only a few minutes, feels like a complete idiot. “Oh,” she says. “We haven’t done that before, have we?”
He shakes his head, eyes closed.
“Oops.”
In a rush of movement his hands are low on her back, holding her to him as his lips dance over her chin, her nose, her throat. Her eyes flutter closed when he reaches the soft skin of her pulse, and then it’s soft kisses against her eyelids and his hands cupping her face.
“How long?” he whispers, fingers twining in her hair. He’s everywhere, and though she’s used to his touch, his intensity, it’s overwhelming. “How long until I find you?”
She laughs weakly, her head bowed against his. “How do you know I don’t find you?”
Which is exactly how it went down in canon. Oh yeah, baby.
“How long?” he asks again, lips hovering at the corner of her mouth.
“I can’t tell you.” She leans into to kiss him fully, but he evades her.
“How long have you been with me since?”
Her eyes fly open and she tries not to gasp as his fingers reach a spot behind her ear that he couldn’t possibly know about yet.
It’s wibbly wobbly timey wimey snogging.
“Can’t tell you that, either,” she replies breathily.
He pulls away just far enough to give her a heated, dangerous grin. “I bet I could persuade you.”
She gives him the same grin right back. “I’d like to see you try.”
His hand is sliding beneath her shirt when they hear a chilly, feminine, “Ahem,” from just behind them. They freeze.
“Oh, crumbs,” the Doctor mutters under his breath,
Is it possible that I wrote this just after watching The Two Doctors for the first time? Either way, this is a Second Doctor shout out. Oh, my giddy aunt.
which, she decides, is a very silly thing to say in any situation, but particularly silly when one is being glared at by a perturbed elderly woman in a green cardigan decorated with large felt cats.
You know the cardigan of which I speak. Our eyes have suffered the sight, and our minds repressed the horror.
Rose reaches for his wrist and pulls his hand out from beneath her shirt.
The Doctor springs into action, stumbling back until they’re standing at a discreet distance from each other. “Yep, you’re definitely going to need to have that looked at,” he says to her, giving her his patented, ‘play along or we’re doomed’ look.
Actually, the patent is pending.
“Contact lens is folded up in there like an origami crane. Disgusting, really.” He turns to the older woman with a charming smile. “Want a look?”
The cat cardigan lady continues to scowl at them, unimpressed.
He laughs awkwardly, hands in his pockets. “You know women these days – so vain, with their contact lenses and their track suits and their Botox.”
It’s 1988,
The perfect year in which to pick up a carton of milk and some toothpaste.
there’s no such thing as Botox, and Rose just happens to be wearing contact lenses. She kicks him in the ankle, hard.
He turns quickly and beams at her. “You look fantastic, by the way. What are you now, thirty-three? Thirty-four?”
He seems to think that shaving off a few years will appease her. He is very silly.
He swings around to smile at the cat cardigan woman again. “Aged very well, don’t you think?”
“Milk,” the woman replies.
The Doctor blinks. “Sorry?”
The woman points to the wall of cartons behind them.
“Right, of course,” he says, embarrassed, and reaches to pull one from the shelf. Rose sees her opportunity. She bends down, swiftly presses her lips to his (ignoring the loud “I never!” from behind them) and then runs away. She runs past her half-full trolley,
Half-full of toothpaste and frozen peas.
out of the shop, through the doors of the TARDIS, and into his arms.
He hugs her so hard her back makes an odd sort of popping sound. It feels wonderful.
“Really, Rose,” he says, his face in her hair. “Oops?”
++
O days and hours, your work is this
To hold me from my proper place,
A little while from his embrace,
For fuller gain of after bliss:
I think I wrote this while I was revising a completed But Broken Lights; whether that’s true or simply misremembered folly, I was definitely still in a Tennyson phase. These stanzas suggested themselves quite emphatically not long after I began writing.
As was the case for most of the bits of In Memoriam that I used in BBL, certain otherwise obvious textual interpretations were lost when it was removed from its context. The ‘bliss’ Alfred mentions is a heavenly reunion, not an earthly one. His friend is dead, separated from him by a distance much greater than that between our heroes. The ‘days and hours’ of his mortal life keep him from Arthur Hallam, and it is only when they have run their course that the friends will be reunited.
That out of distance might ensue
Desire of nearness doubly sweet;
And unto meeting when we meet,
Delight a hundredfold accrue,
For every grain of sand that runs,
And every span of shade that steals,
And every kiss of toothed wheels,
And all the courses of the suns.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H.
When I say that this story wrote itself, I’m not exaggerating. There was no planning stage to speak of, no notes, no editing. It makes it a bit hard to talk about, as (I shudder to say this, but it’s true) there was very little thought put into its creation. Maybe ‘thought’ isn’t the right word – there was very little deliberation, and few deliberate choices on my part. My intent (such as it was) was to give our older Rose some small understanding of what occurred in her absence, and to give the Doctor something to hope for.
Also, I owed the cat cardigan lady a favor.
++
Days and Hours
++
This story wrote itself in one evening. About a year or so ago I was at the grocery store, shopping for dinner and minding my own business, when the scenario burst fully-formed into my poor, protein-deficient little brain. I went straight home and wrote it in one sitting.
Never did get dinner that night.
She’s deciding between orange juice and apple when she catches a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye, just as he turns down the aisle.
Who fic is a perfect opportunity to write the exotic, and so it suits my contrary nature to revel in the mundane whenever possible. A bit of banter in The Empty Child suggested that the Doctor and Rose stop to pick up necessities fairly regularly; for both our older Rose and our post-Doomsday Doctor this begins as a perfectly ordinary errand.
He’s staring at a carton of milk as if within its mild-mannered dairy confines there lurks an alien evil (which isn’t all that unlikely, she thinks, and thanks her lucky stars that she chose to wear trainers for this errand)
Aw. This story was written so long ago that I didn’t even use italics for parentheticals yet. How cute.
so he doesn’t see her when she skips up behind him and links her arm through his.
“Thought you were going to stay home,” she chirps, giving the milk carton a quick once over herself, just to be sure.
She’s been attacked by stranger things.
“Big manly man busy with repairs, sends the little woman out to the shop, isn’t that right?” She grins at him, letting her tongue slip between her teeth. “Did you miss me?”
Just a bit.
He’s not grinning back.
Actually, ‘not grinning’ doesn’t begin to describe the look on his face right now. His expression is disbelief and thunder,
The Oncoming Storm, of course. (It’s a good fannish cliché. I’ve grown quite fond of it.)
and she thinks the world must be ending (again) because the desperation in his eyes is something she’s only seen in those rare moments when he’s sure there’s nothing but darkness on the horizon. Moments when she’s seen just how very close to madness he is.
Dude, you know I love you, but sometimes you got some crazy eyes, mmkay?
Hopelessness, she thinks, and then she notices.
“You’ve changed your tie,” she says softly, slowly. Blue paisley when she left him in the TARDIS twenty minutes ago, solid indigo now.
He looks so young.
If I remember correctly, there was something of a fic trend at this time of encounters between post-Doomsday Doctor and pre-Doomsday Rose. This line is really the first indication that this story would not be heading in that direction. Not that I dislike that direction, of course, but this set-up let me write reunion fic without writing reunion fic, you know? Not that I dislike reunion fic, of course, but I…I think I’ll talk about something else now.
Lines on his face that she knows, lines she has traced with her fingers and the soft brush of her lips, are gone. He looks younger than she ever remembers him being (impossible, fuzzy human memory) but his eyes are ever-so-much older. He stares at her as if she’s impossible.
This word really does get used a lot.
“Oops,” she says, which is sort of a stupid thing to say when you’ve just damaged the fabric of time with a paradox so massive you may as well have just sat down and begun to unravel the multiverse thread by thread and saved yourself the fuss, but she’s not feeling particularly urbane at the moment.
Her hair is brown and long, pulled into a messy bun low against her neck, her face bare of makeup, and there’s a small scar over her left eyebrow, a souvenir from a hostage situation that Mickey and Jake still haven’t forgiven themselves for. She is thirty-seven years old, and he only just lost her.
I am fascinated by the idea of aging Rose. This was my first attempt, though certainly not my last. I lovelovelove writing Pete’s World Rose, with her Doctor indoctrination and her Torchwood training and Mickey and Jake as her BFFs and partners in policing alien crime. This fic takes that a step farther, taking a Pete’s World Rose and reintroducing her to the TARDIS life.
Only I had no intention of writing the actual reunion, so the challenge was to present an interaction between a familiar Doctor (we’d seen series three, we knew the extent of the damage) and a Rose who was very nearly a stranger to us. And me being me, I wrote it from the stranger’s POV.
“I don’t suppose,” she says, “that I could convince you this is all just a crazy dream?”
And that’s the line, my friends, from which the story sprang.
“Rose.” His voice is low and sharp like broken glass, and it hurts to see how he was, how he is, now that she’s gone. When he found her that day in the world of zeppelins and suppers with Mickey’s gran,
Mickey’s gran is ridiculously awesome, and deserves more love. She was meant to have a scene all to herself in Of Monsters, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. She will just have to get her own fic, then.
(If you all love me, you will write me Granny Smith fic.)
there had been such joy in him she thought he’d burst with it. He’d laughed and she’d laughed and though he’d said he’d missed her (and she’d believed him) she’d never thought it had been like this.
*twitches* Too. Much. Plu. Perfect.
“I’m sorry.” She takes a wary step back. “I have to go.”
He grabs her arm, hard, and drags her back to him. “How?” he asks, teeth flashing in stark florescent light.
Crazy eyes and shiny teeth. Add some curls and it’s positively Old School.
“How are you here? How is that possible?”
It was wonderfully refreshing to write something in which the Doctor is in the dark and Rose knows exactly what’s going on. The reader is more or less in the Doctor’s position – at this point we really only know as much about this potential future as he does, despite the fact that the story is told from Rose’s point of view.
One of the fun things about fan fiction is the way it lets you play around with the massive block of information we call ‘canon’ that each reader brings to the story. In this case, our canon knowledge aligns us with the Doctor, not with the POV character. We want the same answers he does, and we are equally denied.
“You need to let me go,” she says, her voice steady and clear only because she’s had years of practice being the sane one, the sure one, the one who doesn’t fall apart.
This description has gotten a lot of comments over the year or so since it was written, which are always nice to hear – though often I think people read it slightly differently than I intended. I was using her characterization in The Satan Pit as a guideline for her temperament at Torchwood and beyond: positive, goal-orientated, and in control of herself and others.
While the Doctor would rarely, I think, be described as ‘the sane one’, he’s generally a pretty chill dude. Unless you stick him in a bunker with a Dalek. Or offer him an equation that will let him rule the universe. Or steal his companion’s face. Or attempt to unleash giant spider babies on his favorite planet.
Never mind.
If she lets her voice break now she’ll throw her arms around his neck and never let go and then he’ll spend the rest of eternity standing in a Tesco’s with her clinging to him like a barnacle to a rock
A terribly romantic bit of imagery, if I do say so myself.
and never find a way back to her and she won’t be here to throw herself at him in the first place. “I can’t tell you anything,” she says in a patient, reasonable tone that he’ll one day claim makes him ‘batty’. “You know I can’t. Let me go.”
Not surprisingly, he doesn’t. “You’re gone. Trapped. This is impossible.”
That word again. Say it with me, folks: “I do not think it means what you think it means.”
She knows she’ll feel guilty later, but she can’t help herself. She rolls her eyes. “Obviously not.”
Someone needs some sensitivity training.
“I’m here?” He can barely get the words out, the sound catching in his throat. “With you?”
She briefly considers knocking him unconscious with a family-size jug of orange juice and running for it, but she doubts she’d get very far and doesn’t fancy getting tackled by a grief-stricken Time Lord in the deli aisle.
Sometimes, when I get sad? I think about this.
It doesn’t make me not sad, but it does make sad seem a heck of a lot funnier.
Instead, she nods.
He pulls her closer, breathing hard. “You come back?”
His eyes are wide and dark, but there’s something there that wasn’t before, an unfurling awareness of bright things to come that somehow breaks her heart in a way the desperation never could.
“Shit,” she says,
I don’t often resort to vulgar language, but I’d just used the phrase ‘unfurling awareness’ and I needed something to balance it out.
and throws her free arm around his neck, burying her face in his chest and holding him as tightly as she can. He laughs or he sobs into her hair, she can’t tell which, and then her feet leave the ground and he’s spinning her. Her foot catches a stack of yoghurts and a few go skidding across the floor.
And you just know that neither of them bother to clean up afterward. Shame on them.
He sets her down again and when she pulls back to look at his face, he’s her silly, grinning Doctor again.
So she kisses him.
Smoooochies!
(Wait. Was this supposed to be a substantive commentary?)
When she pulls away his eyes are still closed, lips slightly parted, frozen in the moment. She’s puzzled, and then, for the second time in only a few minutes, feels like a complete idiot. “Oh,” she says. “We haven’t done that before, have we?”
He shakes his head, eyes closed.
“Oops.”
In a rush of movement his hands are low on her back, holding her to him as his lips dance over her chin, her nose, her throat. Her eyes flutter closed when he reaches the soft skin of her pulse, and then it’s soft kisses against her eyelids and his hands cupping her face.
“How long?” he whispers, fingers twining in her hair. He’s everywhere, and though she’s used to his touch, his intensity, it’s overwhelming. “How long until I find you?”
She laughs weakly, her head bowed against his. “How do you know I don’t find you?”
Which is exactly how it went down in canon. Oh yeah, baby.
“How long?” he asks again, lips hovering at the corner of her mouth.
“I can’t tell you.” She leans into to kiss him fully, but he evades her.
“How long have you been with me since?”
Her eyes fly open and she tries not to gasp as his fingers reach a spot behind her ear that he couldn’t possibly know about yet.
It’s wibbly wobbly timey wimey snogging.
“Can’t tell you that, either,” she replies breathily.
He pulls away just far enough to give her a heated, dangerous grin. “I bet I could persuade you.”
She gives him the same grin right back. “I’d like to see you try.”
His hand is sliding beneath her shirt when they hear a chilly, feminine, “Ahem,” from just behind them. They freeze.
“Oh, crumbs,” the Doctor mutters under his breath,
Is it possible that I wrote this just after watching The Two Doctors for the first time? Either way, this is a Second Doctor shout out. Oh, my giddy aunt.
which, she decides, is a very silly thing to say in any situation, but particularly silly when one is being glared at by a perturbed elderly woman in a green cardigan decorated with large felt cats.
You know the cardigan of which I speak. Our eyes have suffered the sight, and our minds repressed the horror.
Rose reaches for his wrist and pulls his hand out from beneath her shirt.
The Doctor springs into action, stumbling back until they’re standing at a discreet distance from each other. “Yep, you’re definitely going to need to have that looked at,” he says to her, giving her his patented, ‘play along or we’re doomed’ look.
Actually, the patent is pending.
“Contact lens is folded up in there like an origami crane. Disgusting, really.” He turns to the older woman with a charming smile. “Want a look?”
The cat cardigan lady continues to scowl at them, unimpressed.
He laughs awkwardly, hands in his pockets. “You know women these days – so vain, with their contact lenses and their track suits and their Botox.”
It’s 1988,
The perfect year in which to pick up a carton of milk and some toothpaste.
there’s no such thing as Botox, and Rose just happens to be wearing contact lenses. She kicks him in the ankle, hard.
He turns quickly and beams at her. “You look fantastic, by the way. What are you now, thirty-three? Thirty-four?”
He seems to think that shaving off a few years will appease her. He is very silly.
He swings around to smile at the cat cardigan woman again. “Aged very well, don’t you think?”
“Milk,” the woman replies.
The Doctor blinks. “Sorry?”
The woman points to the wall of cartons behind them.
“Right, of course,” he says, embarrassed, and reaches to pull one from the shelf. Rose sees her opportunity. She bends down, swiftly presses her lips to his (ignoring the loud “I never!” from behind them) and then runs away. She runs past her half-full trolley,
Half-full of toothpaste and frozen peas.
out of the shop, through the doors of the TARDIS, and into his arms.
He hugs her so hard her back makes an odd sort of popping sound. It feels wonderful.
“Really, Rose,” he says, his face in her hair. “Oops?”
++
O days and hours, your work is this
To hold me from my proper place,
A little while from his embrace,
For fuller gain of after bliss:
I think I wrote this while I was revising a completed But Broken Lights; whether that’s true or simply misremembered folly, I was definitely still in a Tennyson phase. These stanzas suggested themselves quite emphatically not long after I began writing.
As was the case for most of the bits of In Memoriam that I used in BBL, certain otherwise obvious textual interpretations were lost when it was removed from its context. The ‘bliss’ Alfred mentions is a heavenly reunion, not an earthly one. His friend is dead, separated from him by a distance much greater than that between our heroes. The ‘days and hours’ of his mortal life keep him from Arthur Hallam, and it is only when they have run their course that the friends will be reunited.
That out of distance might ensue
Desire of nearness doubly sweet;
And unto meeting when we meet,
Delight a hundredfold accrue,
For every grain of sand that runs,
And every span of shade that steals,
And every kiss of toothed wheels,
And all the courses of the suns.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H.
When I say that this story wrote itself, I’m not exaggerating. There was no planning stage to speak of, no notes, no editing. It makes it a bit hard to talk about, as (I shudder to say this, but it’s true) there was very little thought put into its creation. Maybe ‘thought’ isn’t the right word – there was very little deliberation, and few deliberate choices on my part. My intent (such as it was) was to give our older Rose some small understanding of what occurred in her absence, and to give the Doctor something to hope for.
Also, I owed the cat cardigan lady a favor.
++
no subject
Laughing at work is never a good idea, but you know what? Your writing give me the happy, content, I-went-through-so-much-to-get-out laughter even on the second or third reads. The wise, learned laughter.
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no subject
Oh, the Doctor and Rose would totes have the best times CVS has ever known.
Which is exactly how it went down in canon. Oh yeah, baby.
You are so fantastic.
no subject
I really enjoy your Rose, because while Who fandom has a lot of excellent authors, I think you're one of the few who give Rose the respect she deserves while keeping sight of the fact that she's (only?) human. And by the same token, you let the Doctor be the several-steps-behind one without forgetting that he's pretty hardcore.
Not as hardcore as Rose, though.
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Never!
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I love this fic. Trufax. The commentary is very interesting. Do moar. *bats eyelashes*
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MY EVIL PLAN IS COMPLETE.
No, seriously. They would be freakin' adorable.
*bats eyelashes*
Don't flap those things at me, missy. I know your game.
(Snakes and ladders? Scrabble?)
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(not in the creepy statues way)
(I guess it's still a little creepy?)
Pick the game. And I will play it. I will surely lose, however, if it's dance dance revolution. It turns out I suck at it.
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*snort*
"Sometimes, when I get sad? I think about this."
I love that image. XD
An entertaining fic made even more so with the commentary. :)
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*laughs* It's the truth!
Sometimes, when I get sad? I think about this.
It doesn’t make me not sad, but it does make sad seem a heck of a lot funnier.
I may have to copy you in that strategy!
There should be a sequel-in-spirit to this fic where the Doctor, shortly after JE, goes out shopping and runs into Donna, years later and with all memories intact. She could slap the living daylights out of him in the produce section. It would be fabulous.
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Except this time it's not the Daleks that are prompting it.
It’s wibbly wobbly timey wimey snogging.
That and he's spent a lot of time thinking about it. XD
Is it possible that I wrote this just after watching The Two Doctors for the first time? Either way, this is a Second Doctor shout out. Oh, my giddy aunt.
And then there was the Two shout-out in Planet of the Ood (check out the "Oh dear" on Ten)!
My intent (such as it was) was to give our older Rose some small understanding of what occurred in her absence, and to give the Doctor something to hope for.
Not to diss on Russell, but I held out hope up until the obvious point in JE that he was basically playing out an extended dance remix of Days and Hours.
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Would you mind terribly if I just sit here and be your fangirl?
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Oh, and - if 'commentaried' isn't already a word, then it absolutely should be.
Thanks so much for reading!