Remix Fic Of Remixiness
Remix authors have been revealed! So I can cop to having written this one. Although it was a near thing. I'm usually Ms. Obsessive when it comes to getting things done way before deadline, but I really had to sweat to get this one written and in some kind of acceptable shape in time (and made my poor beta sweat over it, too). And then, of course, it proceeded to uphold the inescapable rule that the amount of effort you put into a fic is not remotely proportional to the amount of attention it gets. I actually got rather excited when, the better part of a week after the archive opened, it finally made double digits on the hit count. But I'm not complaining, really; since then it's gotten some very nice comments that have reassured me that aforementioned beta was probably right when she told me it didn't suck.
I included an author's note on AO3 to the effect that I'd thought I'd taken more liberties than usual with the original fic, but on reflection, I'm not sure that's entirely true. I think maybe everything I've done here is stuff I've done before in one remix or another, it's just that somehow the result feels very different for this one.
Anyway. Enough blather from me. Here's the story.
Title: All Your Life Before You (The Natural Course of Events Remix)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Summary: Susan is perceiving many things she's never seen before. One of them is Ace.
Characters/pairings: Susan/Ace, a bit of the First Doctor, a bit of Susan Q from "The Happiness Patrol"
Rating: PG at the absolute most, maybe for one swearword.
Author's Notes: This is a remix of "Bright Young Thing" by livii. Parts of it will probably make somewhat more sense if you've seen the Seventh Doctor story "The Happiness Patrol."
Length: ~3,700 words.
All Your Life Before You (The Natural Course of Events Remix)
The first time it happens, it happens in a dream.
Sleeping snug in her bed, Susan dreams that she wakes up. The room around her is still familiar, still hers; the walls, her blanket, the soothing hum of the TARDIS, all are as they should be. And yet, how strange it all seems! As if she's opened some new sort of eye to look at it with.
The walls are still walls, but they aren't only walls now. They're walls that have been walls, and will be walls, and she can see them - feel them? - extending outward, far outward, into a deep past, and a distant future. Beyond them,Time itself, infinite and convoluted, spreads out around her in a dizzying swirl of colors that aren't colors, sounds that aren't sounds. (But if they were, she thinks they would be music, a tune she could almost hum.) Time touches her, moving around her and through her. It's something both alien and part of her, something that grips her tightly and sets her free. Something... something overwhelming.
She sits up with a gasp, waking up for real this time, but nothing changes.
Nothing changes at all.
She wonders if she is going mad. And then, with a shudder that feels as if it shakes the entire universe, but is really only shaking her, the new eye closes, and once again, she is only little Susan, in her bedroom, in her grandfather's ship.
**
She tells herself later that it must have all been a dream, even the parts that weren't, and she almost believes it, until it happens again. She's awake for it that time, but it's no less strange, and no easier to understand.
And then there is a next time. And a next. Each time it's a little different. In flight, she feels an oozing flow of centuries, a light caress of years, the soundless thud of important moments bumping against the skin of the TARDIS as they pass.
Standing in the console room, safely landed, the minutes outside slide by in a whisper, and her senses instead sink deep into the tangled knot of timelines at the heart of the Ship, pulsing and powerful, and almost unbearably bright. It would be frightening, if it didn't feel so kind. She steadies herself on the edge of the console and closes her eyes to sense it better, but sees only flickering images of other consoles in other shapes, glimpses of people she doesn't know, people who look strange, but feel familiar.
And when it happens on a planet, she can feel the world revolving beneath her, turning and turning and turning with her in an endless spin of days, until she has to grab hold of something - a railing, a rock, her grandfather's hand - to keep herself from being flung away into the past, or the future, or the unknown depths of space.
Her grandfather finally notices, then. Or she's fairly certain he has, anyway. She catches him giving her a new kind of look, some strange mixture of thoughtful and sad and pleased, when he thinks she isn't watching. But he says nothing, until finally, unable to bear it any longer, she pulls him aside and tells him everything. Everything she can put into words, at least. She finds they spill out of her more easily than she was expecting. "Is there something wrong with me, Grandfather?" she says when she's done, feeling silly in case there isn't and nervous in case there is.
What she wants is a clear reply: a yes or no, perhaps a word of helpful advice. But he answers her in stutters and harrumphs and half-finished phrases, sputtering out something about adolescence, and the Temporal Vortex, and her leaving the stabilizing influence of Gallifrey so young. She doesn't understand all of what he's saying, but, embarrassed as he is, he's clearly trying to be reassuring. So she lets herself be reassured.
"Never mind, my dear," he tells her, patting her arm. "It's all part of growing up. Yes, all part of growing up."
Growing up. She's not entirely sure she wants to do that, not just yet. But Time will do what it likes. She can feel that now, too. So she only nods, and smiles, and asks him where they're going next.
**
The readout on the console says the planet is Terra Alpha. Susan has never heard of it; it isn't where they had intended to go. This seems to be happening more and more lately, and she's beginning to wonder whether, one day soon, they'll never know where they're going at all. Her grandfather might even enjoy that.
Still, she can't help feeling, sometimes, that there is some meaning to these unscheduled trips, some pattern that she doesn't understand. Something in the way the TARDIS's hum changes its pitch, the pitch she hears in the back of her mind, rather than with her ears.
But she tells herself not to be silly, and follows her grandfather out of the doors.
They've materialized on a city street. It's dark, and gray, and deserted. It would feel terribly lonely and depressing, Susan thinks, except for the sound of music and voices coming from somewhere nearby.
"Well, my dear," her grandfather says, tapping his cane on the pavement. "Shall we go and see?" But she's already on her way, rounding the corner in front of them.
She emerges from a space between two buildings and finds herself in a public square. There are people everywhere. Mostly women, in pale-colored clothes and bright pink hair, makeup smudged and runny around their eyes. Some are smiling and laughing. Some are sitting by themselves, or with their arms around each other, and weeping, but it looks like tears of relief. They look happy to be crying.
The music is like nothing she's heard before, lively and sad. Susan looks around to see where it's coming from, and her eyes come to rest on a dark-skinned man in a hat and a suit of a kind she's seen before, on Earth. He's slouched against a wall in a position that shouldn't be nearly as comfortable as he makes it look, and for a moment she thinks that he's making the sounds with his mouth. Then she sees his fingers move, and realizes he's holding a small instrument to his lips. He winks at her as he sees her watching, but doesn't stop playing.
It's an odd celebration. But she's certain that's exactly what it is.
She turns to the woman nearest her, who, for some reason, is holding a can of paint. Perhaps it's part of the celebration.
"It's nice," she says, to the woman, or to herself. "To be in a place where something good is happening. We seem to have terribly bad luck with that sort of thing, always arriving just when things are going wrong! It's good to see people being happy."
The woman smiles at her, just a little. "It's easy to be happy, when you have the choice."
Susan nods uncertainly and looks around for her grandfather. There he is, over by the lamppost, speaking with a man who appears to be giving away black ribbons and badges with frowning faces on them.
She's debating whether to go over to him, when a voice from behind her calls out, "Oi! Susan!". She whirls around, confused - who could possibly know her here? - before realizing that the woman next to her has turned, too, and is waving at another young woman, who drops a bag onto a nearby bench as she passes it and starts towards them.
"Oh!," she says, suddenly understanding. "Your name is Susan, too!"
"Susan Q," says the woman.
"Pleased to meet you," she says, holding out her hand. "I'm just Susan." It was part of a longer name, once, but it's not a name she brought with her when she left home.
The other Susan looks at her hand for a moment, as if she isn't quite used to being offered this kind of greeting, but just when Susan is about to withdraw and apologize, thinking perhaps that isn't a custom they use here, she grabs the outstretched hand in hers and pumps it, grinning.
The woman from the bench is already beside them when she finally lets go. "Hello, Ace," says the other Susan.
Ace - what an unusual name! - doesn't look like the rest of the people here. She's wearing a dark-colored jacket, for one thing. It's covered with badges, and Susan looks to see if the frowning face is among them, but there are so many, it's hard to tell.
"Thought I might not see you again before we left," Ace says. "Who's your friend?"
"This is just Susan," Susan Q says.
"Nice to meet you, Just Susan," says Ace.
"Hello," says Susan. She holds out her hand again, and Ace slaps her palm and grips it, warm and strong, then nods towards the paint bucket.
"I hope that's for what I think it's for," she says. "No offense, but pink kind of makes me want to puke."
"It is," says Susan Q, hefting the paint. "You restored the blues to us." She waves a hand towards the other women in the square. "Now it's our turn to repay the favor."
"Ace!" says Ace. Perhaps there's where the name came from.
Susan Q is looking past Ace, now, and Susan follows her gaze towards two other women. They're wearing painters' coveralls, and look as if they're trying to sneak quietly away. "Oh, no, you two!" Susan Q calls out. "I'm not painting that thing by myself!" She grins at Ace. "Got to go!"
"Make sure you don't miss any spots!" Ace calls after her as she runs off, the paint can swinging wildly at her side. A moment later, she has her arms around the other two women, and at least one of them is laughing, so they must not be too terribly cross.
Susan turns to say something to Ace, to ask about the the paint, or the cause of the celebration, but she's distracted by a glimpse of a figure flitting through the crowd: a small man in a hat, carrying some sort of umbrella. Almost as soon as she notices him, he disappears into the crowd. She searches for his face again, but can't find him anywhere. She's trying to think where she's seen him before, why he seems so familiar, when suddenly it happens again. Everything unfolds outward in directions that, a moment ago, might as well not have existed, and the feel of the planet turning towards its future leaves her swaying on her feet. There's something else this time, too: she can see threads of Time converging where they shouldn't, threatening to stick together. She was warned, back in school, about crossing one's own timeline. She thinks maybe this is something like that, but she would be in the center of it, then, wouldn't she? And she's not.
She looks for her grandfather in the crowd, and sees him still standing with the street vendor, his cane waving around before him as he makes an emphatic point. He doesn't seem to have noticed anything at all. Can she really be so much more sensitive to this sort of thing than he is, now? Or has he learned not to look too closely at the way everything is surrounded by its future and its past?
She can see his future and past, too, as clear as anything else's. The days behind him are so small and so few, compared to the days ahead. How funny, when she has always thought of him as old! And such a tangled chaos of days, from tight, clustered little knots to loops as big as Time itself. It all doubles back on itself, too, not just here, but over and over again. Oh, Grandfather, she thinks fondly, what are you going to be doing with yourself?
She can feel that looping thread of his timeline, now, almost as if she's running it through her fingers. Unable to stop herself, even though she is sure this really ought to be something private, she twitches her hands a little and follows his life outward, looking for its end. For a moment she thinks she's found it, but it turns out not to be an end at all. Instead, it's place where he disappears into somewhere her senses cannot follow. Looking at it too long makes her feel a little sick, so she turns her attention back to herself, instead, looking down at her own hand to steady her.
A continuous line of hands dances in front of her, attached to a continuous line of Susans They grow smaller and smaller as they stretch outward into her past. Child Susan, baby Susan, dwindling down to no Susan at all, but always sharp and clear and real. In the other direction, the future is blurrier, and hard to focus on. Because she is too close to it, perhaps. Or perhaps she needs to create it first, before she can see it properly.
One thing she can see: her thread and Grandfather's flow and tangle together, right from the beginning of hers... but not for long. She can see her life ahead of her, swerving away from his, into some hard-to-see unknown. The sight upsets and excites her, and her head begins to swim with fear and possibility. Terra Alpha turns below her, a tight, broken past and a messy, open future swirling together into this moment like a whirlpool, and she clutches at Ace's arm to keep herself from falling out of it.
A hand grasps hers, solid and warm and now. "Oi, you all right? Come on, I think you'd better sit down." The hand leads her over to the bench, and pushes her gently onto it, and that's really rather comforting. It's a solid bench. It's been here for a very long time.
She looks at Ace and gasps a little, because there's her timeline, too. Its beginning is carefully patterned, woven rigidly into some greater framework as if by an unseen craftsman, but before it reaches its end, it blossoms out into something fluid and free. And in the middle, there is a storm, an exuberant chaos, a turning place where it tangles up with Grandfather's life, and a small spot where it rests against Susan's own. It's bright and beautiful and confusing. Susan reaches out to touch it, and finds her fingers touching Ace's hair instead.
"Are you all right?" Ace says again. Her voice is quieter now, her brow furrowed a little in concern.
And, without warning, everything folds in on itself, pasts and futures collapsing down suddenly into one moment, two girls, and a bench.
"I... I think so." Susan blinks. Her hand is still resting against Ace's head. That doesn't seem quite right, but she cannot bring herself to move. "It's just... " Susan takes a breath, and the words tumble out before she can think about them. "Have you ever had a moment where you suddenly saw things differently? Or... or taken a look into your own future, and felt frightened at not knowing what it's going to be like, but even more frightened at the thought that it might just go on being the same?"
"Yeah," says Ace softly. For a moment, she's very still underneath Susan's hand, and then she laughs. It's a good laugh, low and honest "Too right!"
"Or..." Susan's fingers twitch slightly against Ace's hair. It's pulled tightly against her head, but it's softer than it looks. "Or realized that you're very far from home and the dull old life you expected to have forever, but then..."
Ace is looking back at her now, really looking at her, as if she can see more than this current moment, too. "You find out it's not what you wanted, after all."
"Yes! Or it is," says Susan, "but it's not everything you wanted, not forever. And you would think that having experiences no one else has had, being able to see Time from the outside... Well, you'd think it would help, but it doesn't! You can see you need to... to have your own life, someday, but you don't know how."
Ace's eyes narrow a little. "You a mind-reader or something?"
"What? No. It's nothing like that. It's less like reading minds, and more like... like seeing Time." Susan lowers her hand from Ace's hair, and, impulsively, clasps her hand. "You travel with him, don't you?" Susan says. "With my-- with the Doctor."
"Yeah," says Ace. Her hand tightens against Susan's. "And so do you. Are you from his future?"
Susan laughs a little. "No, you are! You're in his future, Ace. I..." She glances back towards her grandfather, across the crowd. "I don't know what I am."
"Well, you're like me, aren't you?" With her free hand, Ace makes a sweeping gesture around them, at the laughing, crying, celebrating people in the square. "You left whatever ugly little shithole you came from and ran off with the Doctor. And now you get to see the universe! You get to make a difference!"
The memory of feeling the Vortex tugs at Susan's mind, the swirling, bumpy endlessness of it. It's exciting, and fun, but it isn't home. She can't loop and tangle her whole life around the way her grandfather will. She just can't. But how can she leave him to face all of that without her? "You left your family, though," she says, her voice going quiet and small. "Didn't you?"
Ace snorts. "They weren't my family. Not in any way that counts."
"Oh!" says Susan. She feels as if she ought to apologize, but something in Ace's face tells her not to. "But it isn't like that for me. I love my grandfather. I do. And I love traveling. And all the adventure! But I want a home one day. When I'm ready. And he loves it so, he's never going to stop. I don't believe I ever thought about that until just now. I'm glad that he'll have you, and maybe other people, too, to keep him company. It might make it easier to leave."
"Your grandfather--" There's a quiet wonder in Ace's eyes, now. "It's him. It's the Professor. I mean, the Doctor."
"Yes, of course."
"And you don't want to be like him?"
"What I want..." Susan closes her eyes for a moment and remembers that curving arc of her life, leading away into the unknown. "I think I am going to want a home. And a chance to make my own kind of difference. And friends. And someone..." Susan finds herself blushing. "Well, just someone. Someone to... Oh, to share things with. You know?"
"Yeah," says Ace, but although her voice is certain, there's something a little hesitant in her eyes. "Yeah, I know."
"You do," says Susan. "Or you will. I know it." Ace's timeline shimmers in her memory, but she doesn't have to see it again to know it's true. Ace's life will go where Ace needs it to. And so will Susan's. No matter what.
"Oh, well, far be it from me to argue with a Time Lord about the future," says Ace, with a shrug and a twist of irony in her voice that Susan is quite sure means that Ace is perfectly capable of arguing with anyone about anything.
Susan smiles, and because she wants to, she leans forward, and kisses Ace on the lips. She doesn't taste nearly as alien as Susan might have expected. For a moment, Ace hesitates, and then her arms go around Susan and she kisses back, and Susan thinks, yes, she likes this, she is going to want to try lots more of this sometime.
They break apart with little, gasping laughs.
"Wait till I tell the Professor about this!" Ace says.
"Don't you dare!" Susan squeezes Ace's hand. "I'm sure it would have some terrible effect on the timelines."
"Would it really? What, like, some kind of explosion?" Ace looks almost disturbingly eager at the thought.
Susan laughs again. "No, not really."
Ace grins. "Don't worry. I'm not the kind of girl to kiss and tell. I'll just give him smug, mysterious looks."
Susan can easily imagine Ace doing exactly that. "That's probably fair," she says.
"Ace!" calls a voice from across the square, one she almost feels she recognizes. It's not her grandfather's voice. Not yet. But Susan feels a surge of fondness for it, anyway.
"It sounds like he's looking for you," Susan says. "I should go."
"You think we'll see each other again?" Ace says. Susan likes to think her voice sounds hopeful.
"Could be," Susan says. She didn't see it happening, when she saw the future laid out before her. But no one can see everything, can they? "The future is an awfully big place." She gives Ace a quick peck on the cheek, rises from the bench and walks off, into the jubilant sadness of the Terra Alphan night, to find her grandfather.
**
Susan leans backward, her hands bracing herself against the console. Behind her, she can feel the Time Rotor moving up and down, rocking them gently through the Vortex. Around her, she can feel waves of possibilities rippling out in all directions.
"Oh, please, Grandfather!" she says. "You know the time sensitivity bothers me less when we stay in one place!" It's the truth, although a misleading one. The disorienting perceptions are settling down now, wherever she is, becoming the quiet, natural, almost unconscious part of her that she supposes it must be for adults like her grandfather. But this is her last and biggest argument, and she has no reservations about using it to win him over.
He harrumphs in a way that she knows means he is about to give in. "But why Earth?," he says. "Why this... this Coal Hill School, of all places?"
"Someone I met once had recently been there." She'd been able to sense it, just behind Ace: an image of a place with friendly, familiar timelines crossing it. She's been wondering ever since, who I. M. Foreman is, and what might be in his yard.
Her grandfather doesn't understand. But he loves her. So of course they will stop, for now.
The rest of her future will come in its own time.
I included an author's note on AO3 to the effect that I'd thought I'd taken more liberties than usual with the original fic, but on reflection, I'm not sure that's entirely true. I think maybe everything I've done here is stuff I've done before in one remix or another, it's just that somehow the result feels very different for this one.
Anyway. Enough blather from me. Here's the story.
Title: All Your Life Before You (The Natural Course of Events Remix)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Summary: Susan is perceiving many things she's never seen before. One of them is Ace.
Characters/pairings: Susan/Ace, a bit of the First Doctor, a bit of Susan Q from "The Happiness Patrol"
Rating: PG at the absolute most, maybe for one swearword.
Author's Notes: This is a remix of "Bright Young Thing" by livii. Parts of it will probably make somewhat more sense if you've seen the Seventh Doctor story "The Happiness Patrol."
Length: ~3,700 words.
All Your Life Before You (The Natural Course of Events Remix)
The first time it happens, it happens in a dream.
Sleeping snug in her bed, Susan dreams that she wakes up. The room around her is still familiar, still hers; the walls, her blanket, the soothing hum of the TARDIS, all are as they should be. And yet, how strange it all seems! As if she's opened some new sort of eye to look at it with.
The walls are still walls, but they aren't only walls now. They're walls that have been walls, and will be walls, and she can see them - feel them? - extending outward, far outward, into a deep past, and a distant future. Beyond them,Time itself, infinite and convoluted, spreads out around her in a dizzying swirl of colors that aren't colors, sounds that aren't sounds. (But if they were, she thinks they would be music, a tune she could almost hum.) Time touches her, moving around her and through her. It's something both alien and part of her, something that grips her tightly and sets her free. Something... something overwhelming.
She sits up with a gasp, waking up for real this time, but nothing changes.
Nothing changes at all.
She wonders if she is going mad. And then, with a shudder that feels as if it shakes the entire universe, but is really only shaking her, the new eye closes, and once again, she is only little Susan, in her bedroom, in her grandfather's ship.
**
She tells herself later that it must have all been a dream, even the parts that weren't, and she almost believes it, until it happens again. She's awake for it that time, but it's no less strange, and no easier to understand.
And then there is a next time. And a next. Each time it's a little different. In flight, she feels an oozing flow of centuries, a light caress of years, the soundless thud of important moments bumping against the skin of the TARDIS as they pass.
Standing in the console room, safely landed, the minutes outside slide by in a whisper, and her senses instead sink deep into the tangled knot of timelines at the heart of the Ship, pulsing and powerful, and almost unbearably bright. It would be frightening, if it didn't feel so kind. She steadies herself on the edge of the console and closes her eyes to sense it better, but sees only flickering images of other consoles in other shapes, glimpses of people she doesn't know, people who look strange, but feel familiar.
And when it happens on a planet, she can feel the world revolving beneath her, turning and turning and turning with her in an endless spin of days, until she has to grab hold of something - a railing, a rock, her grandfather's hand - to keep herself from being flung away into the past, or the future, or the unknown depths of space.
Her grandfather finally notices, then. Or she's fairly certain he has, anyway. She catches him giving her a new kind of look, some strange mixture of thoughtful and sad and pleased, when he thinks she isn't watching. But he says nothing, until finally, unable to bear it any longer, she pulls him aside and tells him everything. Everything she can put into words, at least. She finds they spill out of her more easily than she was expecting. "Is there something wrong with me, Grandfather?" she says when she's done, feeling silly in case there isn't and nervous in case there is.
What she wants is a clear reply: a yes or no, perhaps a word of helpful advice. But he answers her in stutters and harrumphs and half-finished phrases, sputtering out something about adolescence, and the Temporal Vortex, and her leaving the stabilizing influence of Gallifrey so young. She doesn't understand all of what he's saying, but, embarrassed as he is, he's clearly trying to be reassuring. So she lets herself be reassured.
"Never mind, my dear," he tells her, patting her arm. "It's all part of growing up. Yes, all part of growing up."
Growing up. She's not entirely sure she wants to do that, not just yet. But Time will do what it likes. She can feel that now, too. So she only nods, and smiles, and asks him where they're going next.
**
The readout on the console says the planet is Terra Alpha. Susan has never heard of it; it isn't where they had intended to go. This seems to be happening more and more lately, and she's beginning to wonder whether, one day soon, they'll never know where they're going at all. Her grandfather might even enjoy that.
Still, she can't help feeling, sometimes, that there is some meaning to these unscheduled trips, some pattern that she doesn't understand. Something in the way the TARDIS's hum changes its pitch, the pitch she hears in the back of her mind, rather than with her ears.
But she tells herself not to be silly, and follows her grandfather out of the doors.
They've materialized on a city street. It's dark, and gray, and deserted. It would feel terribly lonely and depressing, Susan thinks, except for the sound of music and voices coming from somewhere nearby.
"Well, my dear," her grandfather says, tapping his cane on the pavement. "Shall we go and see?" But she's already on her way, rounding the corner in front of them.
She emerges from a space between two buildings and finds herself in a public square. There are people everywhere. Mostly women, in pale-colored clothes and bright pink hair, makeup smudged and runny around their eyes. Some are smiling and laughing. Some are sitting by themselves, or with their arms around each other, and weeping, but it looks like tears of relief. They look happy to be crying.
The music is like nothing she's heard before, lively and sad. Susan looks around to see where it's coming from, and her eyes come to rest on a dark-skinned man in a hat and a suit of a kind she's seen before, on Earth. He's slouched against a wall in a position that shouldn't be nearly as comfortable as he makes it look, and for a moment she thinks that he's making the sounds with his mouth. Then she sees his fingers move, and realizes he's holding a small instrument to his lips. He winks at her as he sees her watching, but doesn't stop playing.
It's an odd celebration. But she's certain that's exactly what it is.
She turns to the woman nearest her, who, for some reason, is holding a can of paint. Perhaps it's part of the celebration.
"It's nice," she says, to the woman, or to herself. "To be in a place where something good is happening. We seem to have terribly bad luck with that sort of thing, always arriving just when things are going wrong! It's good to see people being happy."
The woman smiles at her, just a little. "It's easy to be happy, when you have the choice."
Susan nods uncertainly and looks around for her grandfather. There he is, over by the lamppost, speaking with a man who appears to be giving away black ribbons and badges with frowning faces on them.
She's debating whether to go over to him, when a voice from behind her calls out, "Oi! Susan!". She whirls around, confused - who could possibly know her here? - before realizing that the woman next to her has turned, too, and is waving at another young woman, who drops a bag onto a nearby bench as she passes it and starts towards them.
"Oh!," she says, suddenly understanding. "Your name is Susan, too!"
"Susan Q," says the woman.
"Pleased to meet you," she says, holding out her hand. "I'm just Susan." It was part of a longer name, once, but it's not a name she brought with her when she left home.
The other Susan looks at her hand for a moment, as if she isn't quite used to being offered this kind of greeting, but just when Susan is about to withdraw and apologize, thinking perhaps that isn't a custom they use here, she grabs the outstretched hand in hers and pumps it, grinning.
The woman from the bench is already beside them when she finally lets go. "Hello, Ace," says the other Susan.
Ace - what an unusual name! - doesn't look like the rest of the people here. She's wearing a dark-colored jacket, for one thing. It's covered with badges, and Susan looks to see if the frowning face is among them, but there are so many, it's hard to tell.
"Thought I might not see you again before we left," Ace says. "Who's your friend?"
"This is just Susan," Susan Q says.
"Nice to meet you, Just Susan," says Ace.
"Hello," says Susan. She holds out her hand again, and Ace slaps her palm and grips it, warm and strong, then nods towards the paint bucket.
"I hope that's for what I think it's for," she says. "No offense, but pink kind of makes me want to puke."
"It is," says Susan Q, hefting the paint. "You restored the blues to us." She waves a hand towards the other women in the square. "Now it's our turn to repay the favor."
"Ace!" says Ace. Perhaps there's where the name came from.
Susan Q is looking past Ace, now, and Susan follows her gaze towards two other women. They're wearing painters' coveralls, and look as if they're trying to sneak quietly away. "Oh, no, you two!" Susan Q calls out. "I'm not painting that thing by myself!" She grins at Ace. "Got to go!"
"Make sure you don't miss any spots!" Ace calls after her as she runs off, the paint can swinging wildly at her side. A moment later, she has her arms around the other two women, and at least one of them is laughing, so they must not be too terribly cross.
Susan turns to say something to Ace, to ask about the the paint, or the cause of the celebration, but she's distracted by a glimpse of a figure flitting through the crowd: a small man in a hat, carrying some sort of umbrella. Almost as soon as she notices him, he disappears into the crowd. She searches for his face again, but can't find him anywhere. She's trying to think where she's seen him before, why he seems so familiar, when suddenly it happens again. Everything unfolds outward in directions that, a moment ago, might as well not have existed, and the feel of the planet turning towards its future leaves her swaying on her feet. There's something else this time, too: she can see threads of Time converging where they shouldn't, threatening to stick together. She was warned, back in school, about crossing one's own timeline. She thinks maybe this is something like that, but she would be in the center of it, then, wouldn't she? And she's not.
She looks for her grandfather in the crowd, and sees him still standing with the street vendor, his cane waving around before him as he makes an emphatic point. He doesn't seem to have noticed anything at all. Can she really be so much more sensitive to this sort of thing than he is, now? Or has he learned not to look too closely at the way everything is surrounded by its future and its past?
She can see his future and past, too, as clear as anything else's. The days behind him are so small and so few, compared to the days ahead. How funny, when she has always thought of him as old! And such a tangled chaos of days, from tight, clustered little knots to loops as big as Time itself. It all doubles back on itself, too, not just here, but over and over again. Oh, Grandfather, she thinks fondly, what are you going to be doing with yourself?
She can feel that looping thread of his timeline, now, almost as if she's running it through her fingers. Unable to stop herself, even though she is sure this really ought to be something private, she twitches her hands a little and follows his life outward, looking for its end. For a moment she thinks she's found it, but it turns out not to be an end at all. Instead, it's place where he disappears into somewhere her senses cannot follow. Looking at it too long makes her feel a little sick, so she turns her attention back to herself, instead, looking down at her own hand to steady her.
A continuous line of hands dances in front of her, attached to a continuous line of Susans They grow smaller and smaller as they stretch outward into her past. Child Susan, baby Susan, dwindling down to no Susan at all, but always sharp and clear and real. In the other direction, the future is blurrier, and hard to focus on. Because she is too close to it, perhaps. Or perhaps she needs to create it first, before she can see it properly.
One thing she can see: her thread and Grandfather's flow and tangle together, right from the beginning of hers... but not for long. She can see her life ahead of her, swerving away from his, into some hard-to-see unknown. The sight upsets and excites her, and her head begins to swim with fear and possibility. Terra Alpha turns below her, a tight, broken past and a messy, open future swirling together into this moment like a whirlpool, and she clutches at Ace's arm to keep herself from falling out of it.
A hand grasps hers, solid and warm and now. "Oi, you all right? Come on, I think you'd better sit down." The hand leads her over to the bench, and pushes her gently onto it, and that's really rather comforting. It's a solid bench. It's been here for a very long time.
She looks at Ace and gasps a little, because there's her timeline, too. Its beginning is carefully patterned, woven rigidly into some greater framework as if by an unseen craftsman, but before it reaches its end, it blossoms out into something fluid and free. And in the middle, there is a storm, an exuberant chaos, a turning place where it tangles up with Grandfather's life, and a small spot where it rests against Susan's own. It's bright and beautiful and confusing. Susan reaches out to touch it, and finds her fingers touching Ace's hair instead.
"Are you all right?" Ace says again. Her voice is quieter now, her brow furrowed a little in concern.
And, without warning, everything folds in on itself, pasts and futures collapsing down suddenly into one moment, two girls, and a bench.
"I... I think so." Susan blinks. Her hand is still resting against Ace's head. That doesn't seem quite right, but she cannot bring herself to move. "It's just... " Susan takes a breath, and the words tumble out before she can think about them. "Have you ever had a moment where you suddenly saw things differently? Or... or taken a look into your own future, and felt frightened at not knowing what it's going to be like, but even more frightened at the thought that it might just go on being the same?"
"Yeah," says Ace softly. For a moment, she's very still underneath Susan's hand, and then she laughs. It's a good laugh, low and honest "Too right!"
"Or..." Susan's fingers twitch slightly against Ace's hair. It's pulled tightly against her head, but it's softer than it looks. "Or realized that you're very far from home and the dull old life you expected to have forever, but then..."
Ace is looking back at her now, really looking at her, as if she can see more than this current moment, too. "You find out it's not what you wanted, after all."
"Yes! Or it is," says Susan, "but it's not everything you wanted, not forever. And you would think that having experiences no one else has had, being able to see Time from the outside... Well, you'd think it would help, but it doesn't! You can see you need to... to have your own life, someday, but you don't know how."
Ace's eyes narrow a little. "You a mind-reader or something?"
"What? No. It's nothing like that. It's less like reading minds, and more like... like seeing Time." Susan lowers her hand from Ace's hair, and, impulsively, clasps her hand. "You travel with him, don't you?" Susan says. "With my-- with the Doctor."
"Yeah," says Ace. Her hand tightens against Susan's. "And so do you. Are you from his future?"
Susan laughs a little. "No, you are! You're in his future, Ace. I..." She glances back towards her grandfather, across the crowd. "I don't know what I am."
"Well, you're like me, aren't you?" With her free hand, Ace makes a sweeping gesture around them, at the laughing, crying, celebrating people in the square. "You left whatever ugly little shithole you came from and ran off with the Doctor. And now you get to see the universe! You get to make a difference!"
The memory of feeling the Vortex tugs at Susan's mind, the swirling, bumpy endlessness of it. It's exciting, and fun, but it isn't home. She can't loop and tangle her whole life around the way her grandfather will. She just can't. But how can she leave him to face all of that without her? "You left your family, though," she says, her voice going quiet and small. "Didn't you?"
Ace snorts. "They weren't my family. Not in any way that counts."
"Oh!" says Susan. She feels as if she ought to apologize, but something in Ace's face tells her not to. "But it isn't like that for me. I love my grandfather. I do. And I love traveling. And all the adventure! But I want a home one day. When I'm ready. And he loves it so, he's never going to stop. I don't believe I ever thought about that until just now. I'm glad that he'll have you, and maybe other people, too, to keep him company. It might make it easier to leave."
"Your grandfather--" There's a quiet wonder in Ace's eyes, now. "It's him. It's the Professor. I mean, the Doctor."
"Yes, of course."
"And you don't want to be like him?"
"What I want..." Susan closes her eyes for a moment and remembers that curving arc of her life, leading away into the unknown. "I think I am going to want a home. And a chance to make my own kind of difference. And friends. And someone..." Susan finds herself blushing. "Well, just someone. Someone to... Oh, to share things with. You know?"
"Yeah," says Ace, but although her voice is certain, there's something a little hesitant in her eyes. "Yeah, I know."
"You do," says Susan. "Or you will. I know it." Ace's timeline shimmers in her memory, but she doesn't have to see it again to know it's true. Ace's life will go where Ace needs it to. And so will Susan's. No matter what.
"Oh, well, far be it from me to argue with a Time Lord about the future," says Ace, with a shrug and a twist of irony in her voice that Susan is quite sure means that Ace is perfectly capable of arguing with anyone about anything.
Susan smiles, and because she wants to, she leans forward, and kisses Ace on the lips. She doesn't taste nearly as alien as Susan might have expected. For a moment, Ace hesitates, and then her arms go around Susan and she kisses back, and Susan thinks, yes, she likes this, she is going to want to try lots more of this sometime.
They break apart with little, gasping laughs.
"Wait till I tell the Professor about this!" Ace says.
"Don't you dare!" Susan squeezes Ace's hand. "I'm sure it would have some terrible effect on the timelines."
"Would it really? What, like, some kind of explosion?" Ace looks almost disturbingly eager at the thought.
Susan laughs again. "No, not really."
Ace grins. "Don't worry. I'm not the kind of girl to kiss and tell. I'll just give him smug, mysterious looks."
Susan can easily imagine Ace doing exactly that. "That's probably fair," she says.
"Ace!" calls a voice from across the square, one she almost feels she recognizes. It's not her grandfather's voice. Not yet. But Susan feels a surge of fondness for it, anyway.
"It sounds like he's looking for you," Susan says. "I should go."
"You think we'll see each other again?" Ace says. Susan likes to think her voice sounds hopeful.
"Could be," Susan says. She didn't see it happening, when she saw the future laid out before her. But no one can see everything, can they? "The future is an awfully big place." She gives Ace a quick peck on the cheek, rises from the bench and walks off, into the jubilant sadness of the Terra Alphan night, to find her grandfather.
**
Susan leans backward, her hands bracing herself against the console. Behind her, she can feel the Time Rotor moving up and down, rocking them gently through the Vortex. Around her, she can feel waves of possibilities rippling out in all directions.
"Oh, please, Grandfather!" she says. "You know the time sensitivity bothers me less when we stay in one place!" It's the truth, although a misleading one. The disorienting perceptions are settling down now, wherever she is, becoming the quiet, natural, almost unconscious part of her that she supposes it must be for adults like her grandfather. But this is her last and biggest argument, and she has no reservations about using it to win him over.
He harrumphs in a way that she knows means he is about to give in. "But why Earth?," he says. "Why this... this Coal Hill School, of all places?"
"Someone I met once had recently been there." She'd been able to sense it, just behind Ace: an image of a place with friendly, familiar timelines crossing it. She's been wondering ever since, who I. M. Foreman is, and what might be in his yard.
Her grandfather doesn't understand. But he loves her. So of course they will stop, for now.
The rest of her future will come in its own time.