FIC: After Boe (Doctor Who/Torchwood)
Title: After Boe
Author: Jewels (bjewelled)
Web Link: http://www.bjewelled.co.uk/fanfic/twfic.shtml
Fandom: Doctor Who/Torchwood
Disclaimer: BBC's. !Mine
Summary: There's life after Boe. Spoilers for “Gridlock” and sort of "Last of the Time Lords".
Notes: I don't quite want to believe that the identity of the Face of Boe is who it's implied it is. Although, to cover all my bases, I suppose I should consider the possibility and, really, I don't want him to die. ;.;
When the man who had most recently gone by the name of “The Face of Boe” awakes, he finds himself lying on cool dew dampened grass and, coincidentally, entirely naked. He lies on the grass, staring up at the stars, and dimly realises that he's very cold, and that he should probably be concerned about that, since he hasn't felt the cold in several hundred millennia. It's only when he struggles up into a sitting position, that he realises he's capable of sitting up, and he raises his hands, staring at them.
“Thank god,” he murmurs, turning his hands over. “I'm not just a head anymore.”
It has been so long, he's forgotten what having a body was like. He thinks that is excuse enough for the way he fell over the moment he tried to stand. He was rather out of practice. He's surrounded by trees, but from one direction seems to be coming the dim glow of lights that he associates with civilisation, and starts to tentatively wobble in that direction. He feels newborn, and oddly constricted by a Human form after all this time. But it's refreshing, and makes him feel giddy.
By the time he manages to pick his way through the trees, nicking his feet a good few times on sharp branches and thorns scattered all over the ground, he's managed to remember how this whole 'walking' thing works, and while he's not quite at the level of ability required to stride around like he remembers he used to, he's not about to plant his face in the dirt every other step. He comes out of the trees only a few steps away from the edge of a cliff, which looks out over a valley. In the valley, there's a sprawling city, which spreads out in spokes from some central point. It's coastal, and he can see the river meandering through to a bay that spreads out into the inky blackness of some unknown sea.
But, more to the point, he's not alone.
Someone is sitting there, his legs dangling over the edge of the cliff. The boy, hardly out of his teenage years by the looks of him, barely a man, looks so painfully like someone that he once knew that his heart contracts in a spike of hurt before he reminds himself that the man he remembers is long gone, dead and lost to the passing of billions of years. But he remembers still. He remembers them all.
He realises that the boy has turned to look at him, his mouth open in silent shock.
“Hello,” he says, cheerfully.
The boy stares at him. He doesn't seem too bothered by his state of undress, though perhaps a little surprised. “Hello,” he echoes, uncertainly, “Aren't you cold?”
“Extremely,” he answers, with a grin, though he would have thought that was obvious.
The boy opens his mouth and closes it again, at a brief loss for words. Then he shrugs. “What are you doing out here this time of night?”
“I honestly don't know,” he says, shaking his head ruefully. “The last I remember... well... I was dying. But that's hardly a new experience.” He tilts his head. “I could ask you the same question.”
The boy seems to have resigned himself to a bizarre conversation and speaks candidly. “Looking at the stars and trying to think of a way off this rock that doesn't involve stealing a ship from the spaceport, although that's starting to look more appealing.” At his confused look, the boy adds, “I'm supposed to be career selected in the morning. My current rating has me at 'office worker'.”
“Nothing wrong with office worker,” he says, with a faint smile.
“Sure,” the boy says, sourly, “If all you want to do is file all day. Not that anything interesting happens around this place anyway. Bloody utopias.” He turns back to staring moodily at the city, and away from him.
He tries not to smile at the obvious expression of dissatisfaction with life that the young were so prone to. He looks out over the cliff, at the lights, and realises that he doesn't quite recognise the place, though it seems familiar. “What planet is this?”
The boy frowns. “You don't know what planet you're on?”
He scowls at the boy. “Humour me, would you?”
The boy seems to consider for a moment, then shrugs, thinking it a harmless question. “The planet Torchwood.”
“Torchwood?” He repeats, momentarily thrown, and then he starts to laugh. Civilisations might rise and fall, planets destroyed and reborn, and yet it seemed that, like him, Torchwood has managed to establish itself as a constant, and haunt his existence.
The boy is starting to look nervous. He plainly can't decide whether to run or not, staring with wide eyes at the strange naked man who appears to be laughing for no apparent reason.
He waves his hand in a 'never mind' gesture as he manages to regain control of himself. “Oh, don't worry. I just remembered where I parked, is all. Thanks, kid.”
He turns, and started to walk away, looking for a way off the cliff and towards the lights of the city nearby.
“W-wait...”
He turns. The boy is chasing after him. He'd taken his long coat off and is holding it out.
The boy halts a few feet away, and looks uncomfortable. “At least take this,” he says, “You'll either catch your death or cause a scandal.”
The coat was a bit big on the boy, and a little small on himself, but it's enough to provide some respite against the chill of the wind and a nod towards modesty. “Thanks, kid,” he says, as he cinches the coat around his waist. He looks at the boy through narrowed eyes, and gives into curiosity. “What's your name?”
The boy blinks. “Yanto,” he says.
He considers laughing again, wondering at the sort of awakening he's receiving this time. It's like all his ghosts come back to haunt him at once, and he can't bring himself to mind. “Come on, Yanto. Want to see my spaceship?”
The boy frowns. “That better not be some sort of euphemism,” he says, darkly.
**
He has no idea when he'd last been on this planet, but it was enough for it to have changed entirely. He remembers leaving her here, telling her he didn't think he'd ever be back and how, if she was smart, she'd go and find someone else to love and show him the Universe.
Apparently she's as stubborn as she is beautiful, because he finds her exactly where he left her, three malms from the coastline, at a place where the mountain peaks to the north seem to be placed perfectly equidistant between the two brightest stars in the sky, though the empty wilderness that had once surrounded her landing spot has been replaced by a vast and sprawling city in the meantime. She's also one given to nostalgia, he realises, as he looks upon her, and the shape she's assumed to wait for his return.
“Isn't she beautiful?” he says to Yanto, as he looked upon the towering mirrored fountain, which spills water from its top to be absorbed somewhere unseen near the bottom. She stands in the centre of a carefully cultivated garden, surrounded by beautiful trees and flowers, and the whole city seemed to have been built around this one central point.
Yanto gapes. “The Artefact?” he says, shocked. “Your ship is the Artefact?”
“Well, that's not what I usually call her,” he says, with a grin, “But if that's your artefact, then yes she is.”
Yanto appears more shocked than when he appeared naked out of the trees. “But... that's been there since the colony was established. Before! It was here when the transports landed, all those millennia ago! Everyone says it's a remnant of a lost civilisation.”
“She is, sort of,” he says, tilting his head thoughtfully. “An orphan of war. Though, not anymore. Of course that's a long and complicated story which I suppose I don't have time to tell you about today.”
“No one...” Yanto shakes his head, trailing off. “No one ever managed to figure out what's inside, or where the water's coming from.”
“It's not water, not really,” he tells the boy, proudly, “She picked up the trick of chameleonics from a cousin of hers, though she was always better at it.” He starts to walk towards her. “You can come in, if you want.”
He's aware of Yanto standing stock still in shock, before he hears the scrabble of footsteps as the boy hurries to catch up. He places his hand against her side, stroking gently.
“Hello,” he murmurs, and he feels the consciousness within uncoiling like a slumbering feline, stretching from top to toe. After a moment, the psychic presence wakes up enough to recognise him, and he's overwhelmed by the gleeful embrace of a power mind almost as old as himself. “I missed you too,” he whispers.
The side of the fountain splits open, revealing a dimly lit interior, and he steps inside, beckoning. “Come on in. She doesn't bite.”
Yanto only hesitates a moment, before following behind, and gasps as he looks around in wonder. “It's dimensionally transcendant,” he says, eyes wide, as he turns in a circle, staring about him. “Though... why does it look like we're underground?”
“It's where she grew up,” he says, looking about her interior and taking a deep breath, smiling. “I think she missed me. I haven't been back here in, oh... I'm not sure how long.”
He brushes his hand against the console that reaches from floor to ceiling in the centre of the room. It looks like a smaller version of the fountain she was mimicing on the outside, though without the water, and it flares out at waist height to form consoles that resemble old computers from the days when Humanity had just about figured out the microchip. The mirrored strips are patterned densely with hexagons, each only as wide as a thumbnail, and red light illuminates them from behind.
Helpfully, she lights up one of the screens, and displays the current date in fourteen different systems of measurement. He raises an eyebrow. It's been nearly three millennia since he died on New Earth, giving what he thought was his last. Apparently he needed that long to recover. He briefly strains to try and recall anything in that dark place that he goes after death, that place he's come to think of as the waiting room, where the Universe pours enough energy into him to replenish what's lost, to reconstruct and rebuild him, to channel him through the Vortex and return him to existence. He wonders if he'd manage to direct it this time, if that was why he's been born looking - if the reflection he can see in her console isn't an illusion - younger than ever before. He wouldn't have put himself far past twenty years.
But he doesn't remember anything. He just remembers the dark, and then that warm golden light...
“Hundreds of thousands of years, apparently,” he tells Yanto, trying to distract himself from wondering.
Yanto stares at him with an unnerving calm now, that so reminds him of someone else. “You're that old?” he asks.
He shrugs. “It's easy when you're mainlining the Universal energy,” he says, though really, it's anything but. He had thought he'd finally come to an end back there, in that cold and dead Senate, with his old friend watching over him, but he realises it's not so simple. He'll never die. You'd think he'd be used to that by now.
“Wow, this...” Yanto raises his hands to gesture about himself, then drops them. “Wow.”
He fiddles with the console for a second, as the thought occurs to him. His old friend used to do it all the time, and once he got used to the fact that he would always, always outlive them, he found himself following suit. “I'm going to head out of here,” he says, “Want to come along? I promise you it's more interesting than filing for a living.”
Yanto seems somewhat taken aback. “But... but I've know you less than an hour,” he protests.
He shrugs. “I once got married to a girl I'd only known for six minutes.”
“You're clearly insane,” Yanto frowns slightly, gesturing to him and his lack of clothing, “You walked out of the trees naked.”
“Not the craziest thing I've ever done,” he says, “That involved a small porpoise and the contents of the fridge of the Little Chef just outside the Sirius B system.”
“And now,” Yanto's voice is rising, almost slightly hysterically, “You just walk up to the Artefact, which turns out to be a dimensionally transcendental alien space ship, and ask me if I want to come with you!”
He folds his arms and leans against the console. “Well, do you?”
Yanto falls silent, lips pressed together for a long, intense moment. “Alright,” he says, finally. “I think I will. But will you at least tell me your name?”
He blinks, surprised by the question. It's been so long since anyone asked that he isn't sure... ah. Of course. It makes sense. Fate does seem to be trying to tell him something today. “Jack,” he says, after a bare moment's thought. “That's always been one of my favourite names.”
“I still think you're insane, Jack,” Yanto says, then smiles tentatively. “But I'll come with you anyway.”
“Excellent!” He says, and claps his hands together. He puts a hand on the console, and she gleefully slams the doors shut with a bang, he can feel her warming up long unused engines with joy, and flinging herself into the Vortex with nary a second thought about it. “So tell me... have you ever heard of a place called Cardiff?”
Author: Jewels (bjewelled)
Web Link: http://www.bjewelled.co.uk/fanfic/twfic.shtml
Fandom: Doctor Who/Torchwood
Disclaimer: BBC's. !Mine
Summary: There's life after Boe. Spoilers for “Gridlock” and sort of "Last of the Time Lords".
Notes: I don't quite want to believe that the identity of the Face of Boe is who it's implied it is. Although, to cover all my bases, I suppose I should consider the possibility and, really, I don't want him to die. ;.;
When the man who had most recently gone by the name of “The Face of Boe” awakes, he finds himself lying on cool dew dampened grass and, coincidentally, entirely naked. He lies on the grass, staring up at the stars, and dimly realises that he's very cold, and that he should probably be concerned about that, since he hasn't felt the cold in several hundred millennia. It's only when he struggles up into a sitting position, that he realises he's capable of sitting up, and he raises his hands, staring at them.
“Thank god,” he murmurs, turning his hands over. “I'm not just a head anymore.”
It has been so long, he's forgotten what having a body was like. He thinks that is excuse enough for the way he fell over the moment he tried to stand. He was rather out of practice. He's surrounded by trees, but from one direction seems to be coming the dim glow of lights that he associates with civilisation, and starts to tentatively wobble in that direction. He feels newborn, and oddly constricted by a Human form after all this time. But it's refreshing, and makes him feel giddy.
By the time he manages to pick his way through the trees, nicking his feet a good few times on sharp branches and thorns scattered all over the ground, he's managed to remember how this whole 'walking' thing works, and while he's not quite at the level of ability required to stride around like he remembers he used to, he's not about to plant his face in the dirt every other step. He comes out of the trees only a few steps away from the edge of a cliff, which looks out over a valley. In the valley, there's a sprawling city, which spreads out in spokes from some central point. It's coastal, and he can see the river meandering through to a bay that spreads out into the inky blackness of some unknown sea.
But, more to the point, he's not alone.
Someone is sitting there, his legs dangling over the edge of the cliff. The boy, hardly out of his teenage years by the looks of him, barely a man, looks so painfully like someone that he once knew that his heart contracts in a spike of hurt before he reminds himself that the man he remembers is long gone, dead and lost to the passing of billions of years. But he remembers still. He remembers them all.
He realises that the boy has turned to look at him, his mouth open in silent shock.
“Hello,” he says, cheerfully.
The boy stares at him. He doesn't seem too bothered by his state of undress, though perhaps a little surprised. “Hello,” he echoes, uncertainly, “Aren't you cold?”
“Extremely,” he answers, with a grin, though he would have thought that was obvious.
The boy opens his mouth and closes it again, at a brief loss for words. Then he shrugs. “What are you doing out here this time of night?”
“I honestly don't know,” he says, shaking his head ruefully. “The last I remember... well... I was dying. But that's hardly a new experience.” He tilts his head. “I could ask you the same question.”
The boy seems to have resigned himself to a bizarre conversation and speaks candidly. “Looking at the stars and trying to think of a way off this rock that doesn't involve stealing a ship from the spaceport, although that's starting to look more appealing.” At his confused look, the boy adds, “I'm supposed to be career selected in the morning. My current rating has me at 'office worker'.”
“Nothing wrong with office worker,” he says, with a faint smile.
“Sure,” the boy says, sourly, “If all you want to do is file all day. Not that anything interesting happens around this place anyway. Bloody utopias.” He turns back to staring moodily at the city, and away from him.
He tries not to smile at the obvious expression of dissatisfaction with life that the young were so prone to. He looks out over the cliff, at the lights, and realises that he doesn't quite recognise the place, though it seems familiar. “What planet is this?”
The boy frowns. “You don't know what planet you're on?”
He scowls at the boy. “Humour me, would you?”
The boy seems to consider for a moment, then shrugs, thinking it a harmless question. “The planet Torchwood.”
“Torchwood?” He repeats, momentarily thrown, and then he starts to laugh. Civilisations might rise and fall, planets destroyed and reborn, and yet it seemed that, like him, Torchwood has managed to establish itself as a constant, and haunt his existence.
The boy is starting to look nervous. He plainly can't decide whether to run or not, staring with wide eyes at the strange naked man who appears to be laughing for no apparent reason.
He waves his hand in a 'never mind' gesture as he manages to regain control of himself. “Oh, don't worry. I just remembered where I parked, is all. Thanks, kid.”
He turns, and started to walk away, looking for a way off the cliff and towards the lights of the city nearby.
“W-wait...”
He turns. The boy is chasing after him. He'd taken his long coat off and is holding it out.
The boy halts a few feet away, and looks uncomfortable. “At least take this,” he says, “You'll either catch your death or cause a scandal.”
The coat was a bit big on the boy, and a little small on himself, but it's enough to provide some respite against the chill of the wind and a nod towards modesty. “Thanks, kid,” he says, as he cinches the coat around his waist. He looks at the boy through narrowed eyes, and gives into curiosity. “What's your name?”
The boy blinks. “Yanto,” he says.
He considers laughing again, wondering at the sort of awakening he's receiving this time. It's like all his ghosts come back to haunt him at once, and he can't bring himself to mind. “Come on, Yanto. Want to see my spaceship?”
The boy frowns. “That better not be some sort of euphemism,” he says, darkly.
**
He has no idea when he'd last been on this planet, but it was enough for it to have changed entirely. He remembers leaving her here, telling her he didn't think he'd ever be back and how, if she was smart, she'd go and find someone else to love and show him the Universe.
Apparently she's as stubborn as she is beautiful, because he finds her exactly where he left her, three malms from the coastline, at a place where the mountain peaks to the north seem to be placed perfectly equidistant between the two brightest stars in the sky, though the empty wilderness that had once surrounded her landing spot has been replaced by a vast and sprawling city in the meantime. She's also one given to nostalgia, he realises, as he looks upon her, and the shape she's assumed to wait for his return.
“Isn't she beautiful?” he says to Yanto, as he looked upon the towering mirrored fountain, which spills water from its top to be absorbed somewhere unseen near the bottom. She stands in the centre of a carefully cultivated garden, surrounded by beautiful trees and flowers, and the whole city seemed to have been built around this one central point.
Yanto gapes. “The Artefact?” he says, shocked. “Your ship is the Artefact?”
“Well, that's not what I usually call her,” he says, with a grin, “But if that's your artefact, then yes she is.”
Yanto appears more shocked than when he appeared naked out of the trees. “But... that's been there since the colony was established. Before! It was here when the transports landed, all those millennia ago! Everyone says it's a remnant of a lost civilisation.”
“She is, sort of,” he says, tilting his head thoughtfully. “An orphan of war. Though, not anymore. Of course that's a long and complicated story which I suppose I don't have time to tell you about today.”
“No one...” Yanto shakes his head, trailing off. “No one ever managed to figure out what's inside, or where the water's coming from.”
“It's not water, not really,” he tells the boy, proudly, “She picked up the trick of chameleonics from a cousin of hers, though she was always better at it.” He starts to walk towards her. “You can come in, if you want.”
He's aware of Yanto standing stock still in shock, before he hears the scrabble of footsteps as the boy hurries to catch up. He places his hand against her side, stroking gently.
“Hello,” he murmurs, and he feels the consciousness within uncoiling like a slumbering feline, stretching from top to toe. After a moment, the psychic presence wakes up enough to recognise him, and he's overwhelmed by the gleeful embrace of a power mind almost as old as himself. “I missed you too,” he whispers.
The side of the fountain splits open, revealing a dimly lit interior, and he steps inside, beckoning. “Come on in. She doesn't bite.”
Yanto only hesitates a moment, before following behind, and gasps as he looks around in wonder. “It's dimensionally transcendant,” he says, eyes wide, as he turns in a circle, staring about him. “Though... why does it look like we're underground?”
“It's where she grew up,” he says, looking about her interior and taking a deep breath, smiling. “I think she missed me. I haven't been back here in, oh... I'm not sure how long.”
He brushes his hand against the console that reaches from floor to ceiling in the centre of the room. It looks like a smaller version of the fountain she was mimicing on the outside, though without the water, and it flares out at waist height to form consoles that resemble old computers from the days when Humanity had just about figured out the microchip. The mirrored strips are patterned densely with hexagons, each only as wide as a thumbnail, and red light illuminates them from behind.
Helpfully, she lights up one of the screens, and displays the current date in fourteen different systems of measurement. He raises an eyebrow. It's been nearly three millennia since he died on New Earth, giving what he thought was his last. Apparently he needed that long to recover. He briefly strains to try and recall anything in that dark place that he goes after death, that place he's come to think of as the waiting room, where the Universe pours enough energy into him to replenish what's lost, to reconstruct and rebuild him, to channel him through the Vortex and return him to existence. He wonders if he'd manage to direct it this time, if that was why he's been born looking - if the reflection he can see in her console isn't an illusion - younger than ever before. He wouldn't have put himself far past twenty years.
But he doesn't remember anything. He just remembers the dark, and then that warm golden light...
“Hundreds of thousands of years, apparently,” he tells Yanto, trying to distract himself from wondering.
Yanto stares at him with an unnerving calm now, that so reminds him of someone else. “You're that old?” he asks.
He shrugs. “It's easy when you're mainlining the Universal energy,” he says, though really, it's anything but. He had thought he'd finally come to an end back there, in that cold and dead Senate, with his old friend watching over him, but he realises it's not so simple. He'll never die. You'd think he'd be used to that by now.
“Wow, this...” Yanto raises his hands to gesture about himself, then drops them. “Wow.”
He fiddles with the console for a second, as the thought occurs to him. His old friend used to do it all the time, and once he got used to the fact that he would always, always outlive them, he found himself following suit. “I'm going to head out of here,” he says, “Want to come along? I promise you it's more interesting than filing for a living.”
Yanto seems somewhat taken aback. “But... but I've know you less than an hour,” he protests.
He shrugs. “I once got married to a girl I'd only known for six minutes.”
“You're clearly insane,” Yanto frowns slightly, gesturing to him and his lack of clothing, “You walked out of the trees naked.”
“Not the craziest thing I've ever done,” he says, “That involved a small porpoise and the contents of the fridge of the Little Chef just outside the Sirius B system.”
“And now,” Yanto's voice is rising, almost slightly hysterically, “You just walk up to the Artefact, which turns out to be a dimensionally transcendental alien space ship, and ask me if I want to come with you!”
He folds his arms and leans against the console. “Well, do you?”
Yanto falls silent, lips pressed together for a long, intense moment. “Alright,” he says, finally. “I think I will. But will you at least tell me your name?”
He blinks, surprised by the question. It's been so long since anyone asked that he isn't sure... ah. Of course. It makes sense. Fate does seem to be trying to tell him something today. “Jack,” he says, after a bare moment's thought. “That's always been one of my favourite names.”
“I still think you're insane, Jack,” Yanto says, then smiles tentatively. “But I'll come with you anyway.”
“Excellent!” He says, and claps his hands together. He puts a hand on the console, and she gleefully slams the doors shut with a bang, he can feel her warming up long unused engines with joy, and flinging herself into the Vortex with nary a second thought about it. “So tell me... have you ever heard of a place called Cardiff?”