Fic: Everything, Yourself and Home (The Hour Doctor Who Crossover)
I actually wrote fic!
Title: Everything, Yourself and Home
Author: meddow
Rating: Teen
Characters: Lix Storm, Randall Brown, the Eleventh Doctor (Lix/Randall)
Spoilers: The Hour 2x03 (though takes place mostly pre-series), Doctor Who Angels Take Manhattan
Summary: Spain 1938. The Doctor accidentally picks up a pair of British journalists.
---
They're in trouble, and deep down she fears they will not be getting out of this one.
There's shots being fired all around them. A plaster wall explodes to their right and Randall's bleeding from a wound above his eye.
They run into an alley, realising as they do so their mistake. It's a dead end.
“Over there,” Randall says as he wraps and arm around her waist.
She doesn't question where he's leading her or what on earth an English police box is doing in the back alley in a small town in the middle of Spain.
But as they reach it, she pulls open the door and they both fall through it onto a hard metal floor. She opens her eyes and looks up to both a cavernous room filled with light and a man standing over her.
They're in a box that's bigger on the inside containing a man wearing a bow tie.
"Stowaways!” he exclaims with a big grin on his face.
---
The man tells them he's the Doctor and that he's an alien and after throwing some switches informs that that it's no longer Spain outside the door of his box, or Earth, or even the 20th century, but deep cold space.
She doesn't believe him until she pulls open the doors and finds herself faced with Saturn's rings.
Right then and there it's all a bit too much. She hasn't had more than two hours sleep all week or changed her clothes in three days. She's been living on coffee and adrenaline and there's rubble in her hair and Randall's still bleeding and muttering something about Jules Vern. Right then, she doesn't care whether she's being kidnapped by a man from outer space or if she's gone mad. The Doctor says there are bedrooms and she feels safe.
She looks to Randall, tie undone and pressed to his forehead as a bandage and he seems to be thinking the same thing.
It's enough.
---
She wakes to find Randall testing the walls, as if under pressure they would dissolve and they would both wake up. She supposes Randall is being remarkably calm about the whole thing, even if the clothes she had wantonly disregard on the floor some hours before were now neatly folded.
“War correspondents!” the man who called himself the Doctor exclaims as they walked into the console room. “You hear gunshots and you run towards them. And two of you! Let me guess, he's got the notepad, she's got the camera: he's cunning, she's daring, and you're in love.”
At that, Randall starts folding and unfolding a handkerchief. They had never discussed whether or not they were in love.
They try and explain that they would like to return to Spain, but the Doctor will not hear anything of it, telling them to not be silly and that they deserve a holiday.
The first planet he takes them to, all the plants are purple and blue and there's a red gas giant in the yellow sky.
She pulls out her camera and takes a photograph of Randall standing in waist high purple grass, examining a small white flower he's found. He has an expression on his face of a sort of reluctant acceptance that the whole thing is real.
He hears the click of the camera and looks up puzzled. Something about the shock in his face causes her to burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of it all, because one minute they were following each other around Spain and fucking every now and again in his small apartment between days spent witnessing atrocities and evenings spent drinking to forget. The next they've travelled by blue box to a purple alien planet and Randall's looking at flowers.
She's happy. For the first time in years, that weight of everything around them is off her chest. And in that moment, she realises that Randall has become more to her than her strange colleague she sleeps with - that there's more to them than wartime desperation and loneliness and lowered inhibitions.
In that moment she realises she loves him.
---
They're journalists - curious by nature and getting answers is their profession. It doesn't take long for them to find out that the Doctor had recently lost two friends. He was mourning, they speculated, and whoever those two people were, clearly they reminded him of them in some way.
Lix doesn't like the idea of being a replacement, but she does like the idea of photographing the universe on the proviso that he can have them back in time to file the story they'd just survived collecting. If that involved spending some time living in a strange box that was bigger on the inside, so be it.
Randall, meanwhile, seems to be more interested in the box itself than the possibilities of where it could take them.
He sits down next to her in the darkroom that she had discovered and quickly made her office of sorts and produces three hand sketched maps of the TARDIS interior. The day before yesterday, yesterday and today, he names them.
They're all completely different - and she wonders for a moment how she didn't notice that the rooms were changing, and secondly, why Randall was not straightening the photographs she had hanging on pegs at the thought of living somewhere where change was constant.
“It's not random,” he says. “It's playful. She's alive.”
It's a puzzle, she realises, and that's what's helping him.
---
She leans on the TARDIS door frame, taking photographs of an accretion disk spiralling around a black hole. That matter, the Doctor had told them, was once a planet. Life had begun there, evolved and died, and now all that was left was being swallowed and destroyed - and the sight is beautiful.
Randall sits with his back against the other side of the doorway reading book from the very planet they were watching that he found in the library. He lifts his head up every now and again to study the thing before them.
The Doctor's off working on the TARDIS console. He has big plans, he tells them, a massive revamp and he even has blueprints, which is a first for him. His plans leave just them in peace.
She gives a sigh and pushes the camera back in her pocket, and lights a cigarette.
It won't work. No matter what she does with the exposure, it'll never look like more than white dots and grey clouds on a black background. Nothing to say a civilisation was here, one that nobody aside from the Doctor has ever known.
“They wrote in sonnets,” Randall says, interrupting her thoughts. “Fourteen lines in iambic pentameter with a rhyming couplet. The sonnet predates human civilisation.”
“They invented the sonnet and what's left?” She asks. “My terrible photographs and a book of poetry.”
He puts hand up towards hers. She takes it. They stay there for a long moment while the smoke from her cigarette drifts out into space.
---
They visit the market on Yantala Five, the biggest market place in five galaxies. It covers and entire planet, the Doctor tells them. Billions of people shop there every day and there's an entire continent devoted to shoes.
There's humanoids of different sizes and colours, some with two eyes, most with more. And things that look like giant spiders with elephant noses that laugh heartily at Randall's attempts to keep his tie straight in the hustle and bustle, which only serves to set him off more, until she pulls his face to hers and kisses him right there in the street.
As they walk through the streets, there stalls everywhere with objects they had never seen before and smells that ranged from divine to the stomach churning. Randall has to play with every strange object he finds (and straightens more than a few stall fronts while he's at it), while she takes photographs of stall holders sitting proudly behind their wares and children playing in the streets.
Eventually, Randall gives on object to her, a glass sculpture that looks deceptively like a round paperweight filled with intricate swirls, and the moment she touches it the swirls inside it change to blue. The exact same blue as her eyes.
But before long, they've uncovered a back alley slavery ring and Randall's posing as a wealthy potential buyer from some planet they've never heard of while she sneaks around a warehouse getting photographic evidence.
In no time at all, they're running for their lives. The Doctor eventually swoops in with this screwdriver and a list of twenty five inter-galactic regulations that the slave traders are breaking (which Lix is certain he's made up) and before long the ringleaders are being lead off and the slaves freed.
“Journalists,” the Doctor mutters as they walk back to the TARDIS. “Professional snoopy busybodies and daredevils - I can't decided whether you're all mad or marvellous. Clearly marvellous in this instant.”
She lines up her photographs a few hours later, photographs of smiling children and shopkeepers and Randall rummaging through books at a stall and people locked in cages with desperation in their eyes.
Randall passes her a whiskey glass and they silently toast. It's a tradition they had developed some month earlier, a toast to the cruelty of the world, except it was now a toast to the cruelty of the universe. Acknowledgement, defiance and a hope of one day forgetting it all.
---
It's the fifth planet they reach when things start to go wrong. It seems like any other - a future human colony and a bustling city. The Doctor's wanders off looking for potential parts for the TARDIS while Randall and her get invited on an official tour, which he takes up and she declines, deciding there's more interesting things to be seen if she goes with a local invite - between the pair of them, they'll see most of what there is to see.
Soon alarms are blaring in the streets and people are running past her and she can hear something marching towards her. Heavy footsteps. Heavier than any human could make.
Adrenaline pumping, she hides in an alley and readies her camera, prepared to get the photograph and then run. She's worried about Randall and wishes she knew where he was - or the Doctor for that matter. But looking though the viewfinder, her doubts seems to vanish as seconds seem to turn into minutes and all she can hear is the steady marching and the distant wail of the sirens and her own breathing.
As the marching creatures round the corner, the flash of her camera reflects off their steel armour.
---
Her hands wont stop shaking.
The Doctor works away on the TARDIS, not talking, just pulling at wires and waving around that screwdriver of his.
Randall hasn't told her what happened. But she knows it was not his blood that covered his clothes when she finally found him in that slaughterhouse. Maybe she should have forced out of him whatever he went through, maybe she should be there for him, but she found she just could not. She's barely keeping herself together. There's not enough of her to keep Randall together as well.
Now he's turned to a bottle of whiskey and she doesn't know where he's got to - she suspects he's passed out drunk in the library and she envies him for that.
She has a bottle of whiskey herself, but hasn't drunk nearly enough of it yet.
They burnt. They all burnt in front of her, all the people that had yet to be converted to cold steel drones and she saw it all through her camera lens. Madness, destruction and genocide all captured on the one roll of film she had left on her when things went to hell.
And that one roll now sits, waiting to be developed.
Another day she decides. For now, she just wants more to drink and for her hands to stop shaking long enough to light a cigarette.
---
After that the peace is shattered. No matter where they land, there'd death and destruction and Lix is certain they have caused it. Like the war they had left behind was catching up with them through time and space and reminding them of where they should be. Not on some planet or moon or asteroid but once again filing stories from their small apartment in Madrid.
It's calling her back, but she doesn't want to go.
They keep going from planet to planet with death following in their wake, but she hopes it has to end - because for a few moments, they were perfect.
And she wonders if she finally understands Randall, that strange drive of his, that knowing that there is a perfect way that they could be, but to never ever being able to find it.
Instead with every planet they reach they're pulling further away from each other. She in her darkroom with rolls of film to be developed, Randall in the library with books and a bottle of whiskey and the Doctor in the console room with his blueprints.
They're all living separate lives.
---
She sees the empty whiskey bottles and the Doctor eyeing them and she wonders if he's ever going to say anything.
He doesn't.
He does however, one very bad day when they're in a crashing ship being attached by rat-like green alien termites, turn to her camera.
She swats at rat creature away and notices the perfect photograph opportunity - a body lying face down on the floor in a pool of blood. It was the first mate, his name she thinks was Meyers.
She readies her camera when the Doctor notices. She doesn't know why, maybe because he finds her instincts to document rather than aid and protect repugnant and that particularly day he'd had enough.
Or maybe it's because he knows she's stopped developing the photographs she takes.
He yells at her, “For two seconds, stop taking photos!” Then he grabs her hands and pulls the camera away from her.
And she's just left there, standing on some foreign spaceship, the crew screaming around her as fires roar from consoles and rat creatures jump from vents onto crew members and attack them.
And she just freezes, unable to move.
The Doctor seems to realise what he's done instantly and thrusts the camera back into her hands and tells her that he's sorry and to carry on, but it's too late. She's lost her nerve now and her hands begin to shake.
She sees one of the rat creatures crawling up a console before her and time seems to slow down as it eyes her. Part of her tells her to take the shot and jump out of the way, but another part of her tells her to run. Neither instinct is winning and she still can't move.
It leaps.
She stands, still frozen.
And Randall's there with a fire extinguisher, shooting it down mid flight. Next thing she knows she feels Randall's arms around her and he's pulling her through a door.
“Where are you going?” the Doctor yells
“Getting her out of here,” Randall screams back at him.
They hide in a storage cupboard. Randall being silent and still while she fiddles with film, trying to place a new load back into the camera with her shaking hands and failing.
“I can't. I...I just can't,” she mutters.
“I know,” Randall replies. It's the only solace Randall can offer.
She can smell the whiskey on his breath.
---
There's no looks from the Doctor after that. He's largely silent and throws himself further into his construction project.
Randall's there, but not in any way that matters. He's always drunk, but now he's never sober. The sex they're having late at night when neither of them sleeps, is mechanical - devoid of the passion and care it once had.
When they're done, he pulls away at her touch.
She doesn't even know what triggers it when he finally goes off. He rushes back to the TARDIS and she follows. On reaching their room he's starting to move things about and she grabs his hands - it worked in the past - but this time he just forces her way.
“I need you to go,” he says.
And she does.
She can't talk to him, he won't even let her touch him any more. She doesn't know how to help him - the photographer who takes photographs she can't bring herself to develop can't even help herself - and so she goes as asked.
She waits in the library for three hours and then returns and the room's spotless. Everything neat and tidy.
Except the glass sculpture he gave her is now chipped and cracked.
“I'm sorry,” he says, as she examines it closer.
“That's...that's meaningless,” she mutters as she hurries out of the room.
She heads into the console room, pulls open the TARDIS doors and throws the sculpture into space. Watching it drift away, she lets out a sob.
When she turns around, the Doctor's there. He was watching her.
“He's...it's something he can't,” the Doctor starts.
“I know,” she says. “Which only makes it worse.”
---When she finds Randall there's a mostly empty bottle of whiskey besides him and his eyes are ringed red.
“When you found me, in that factory...” he stares into the glass in his hand and then looks up at her. “Deficient,” he says. “The Cybermen found me deficient. Not worthy of conversion.”
Her heart breaks. She knows him - she loves him - and she knows it's the idea that he's mad has been eating away at him his whole life. Now his very life is testament to whatever is in his head that makes him so afraid of himself.
“My life because I am deficient,” he says. “Faulty. Inferior. Unsatisfactory. Defective,” he stands up suddenly and throws the glass in his hand across the room, where it shatters.
“Damaged,” she says, because they are. Damaged and broken and beyond repair.
Wherever Randall's gone in his head, he's not coming back. They've had their moment.
---
She can't take the looks of disappointment from the Doctor any more. So when he suggests dropping them back off in Spain, she agrees.
It'd be best for them all.
She wonders what his last two travelling companions were like, the ones he misses so much. She knows her and Randall pale in comparison. She, who is only brave when she has a camera in her hand and Randall can barely function any more unless he's drunk. He doesn't want to travel any more with two people who far too often smell of whiskey and fuck loudly because sometimes its the only thing they can do which makes them feel anything but tired and numb.
The Doctor doesn't want them.
They wish him luck with his travels and he tells them they'll go on to do great things with their lives, and there's a flash of guilt and pity in his eyes that tells her more about her future than she wants to know.
They file their story.
One week later she realises she's pregnant. Three months later, Randall walks out - but he's lost to alcohol and the turmoil in his mind long before he leaves.
---
She survives Spain, she survives parting with her daughter, she survives the war. She decides to quit photography and stay in London. She finds radio doesn't suit her but the new medium of television does. She meets Bel Rowley and Freddie Lyon. She becomes part of The Hour.
And between Spain and Lime Grove there's many others who share her bed and body and more bottles of whiskey than stars in the sky but no men from space, and no contact from Randall.
Nearly twenty years pass before Randall walks back into her life.
---Isaac mentions to Freddie who mentions to Bel who mentions to her, that he's considering science fiction for his next radio play but couldn't think of a good plot.
Between that and Randall stalking the halls she thinks of the box of photographs she keeps at her flat and finds just the one she's looking for beneath pictures of a marketplace and Randall and rolls and rolls of undeveloped film.
She calls Isaac into her office and hands him the photograph.
“For your next play,” she says.
“You're giving me a photograph?” he asks.
“Darling, I'm giving you a plot,” she replies. “Do you know what that is?”
Isaac looks clueless and of course Randall walks in at that moment. He stands in the doorway where she can see him in her peripheral vision. She chooses to ignore him and focuses on Isaac.
“It's the matter stream of a destroyed planet heading towards a black hole to be consumed and lost to the universe. A planet that had life and history and literature and this is all that is left.”
“That and a book of poetry,” Randall adds, which causes her to look at him standing there and acknowledge his presence.
Isaac looks from her to Randall and back again, the poor boy clearly not knowing what to think about their exchange.
“Yes. But what is it really?” Isaac asks.
She looks to Randall.
“A moment,” he says.
Title: Everything, Yourself and Home
Author: meddow
Rating: Teen
Characters: Lix Storm, Randall Brown, the Eleventh Doctor (Lix/Randall)
Spoilers: The Hour 2x03 (though takes place mostly pre-series), Doctor Who Angels Take Manhattan
Summary: Spain 1938. The Doctor accidentally picks up a pair of British journalists.
---
They're in trouble, and deep down she fears they will not be getting out of this one.
There's shots being fired all around them. A plaster wall explodes to their right and Randall's bleeding from a wound above his eye.
They run into an alley, realising as they do so their mistake. It's a dead end.
“Over there,” Randall says as he wraps and arm around her waist.
She doesn't question where he's leading her or what on earth an English police box is doing in the back alley in a small town in the middle of Spain.
But as they reach it, she pulls open the door and they both fall through it onto a hard metal floor. She opens her eyes and looks up to both a cavernous room filled with light and a man standing over her.
They're in a box that's bigger on the inside containing a man wearing a bow tie.
"Stowaways!” he exclaims with a big grin on his face.
---
The man tells them he's the Doctor and that he's an alien and after throwing some switches informs that that it's no longer Spain outside the door of his box, or Earth, or even the 20th century, but deep cold space.
She doesn't believe him until she pulls open the doors and finds herself faced with Saturn's rings.
Right then and there it's all a bit too much. She hasn't had more than two hours sleep all week or changed her clothes in three days. She's been living on coffee and adrenaline and there's rubble in her hair and Randall's still bleeding and muttering something about Jules Vern. Right then, she doesn't care whether she's being kidnapped by a man from outer space or if she's gone mad. The Doctor says there are bedrooms and she feels safe.
She looks to Randall, tie undone and pressed to his forehead as a bandage and he seems to be thinking the same thing.
It's enough.
---
She wakes to find Randall testing the walls, as if under pressure they would dissolve and they would both wake up. She supposes Randall is being remarkably calm about the whole thing, even if the clothes she had wantonly disregard on the floor some hours before were now neatly folded.
“War correspondents!” the man who called himself the Doctor exclaims as they walked into the console room. “You hear gunshots and you run towards them. And two of you! Let me guess, he's got the notepad, she's got the camera: he's cunning, she's daring, and you're in love.”
At that, Randall starts folding and unfolding a handkerchief. They had never discussed whether or not they were in love.
They try and explain that they would like to return to Spain, but the Doctor will not hear anything of it, telling them to not be silly and that they deserve a holiday.
The first planet he takes them to, all the plants are purple and blue and there's a red gas giant in the yellow sky.
She pulls out her camera and takes a photograph of Randall standing in waist high purple grass, examining a small white flower he's found. He has an expression on his face of a sort of reluctant acceptance that the whole thing is real.
He hears the click of the camera and looks up puzzled. Something about the shock in his face causes her to burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of it all, because one minute they were following each other around Spain and fucking every now and again in his small apartment between days spent witnessing atrocities and evenings spent drinking to forget. The next they've travelled by blue box to a purple alien planet and Randall's looking at flowers.
She's happy. For the first time in years, that weight of everything around them is off her chest. And in that moment, she realises that Randall has become more to her than her strange colleague she sleeps with - that there's more to them than wartime desperation and loneliness and lowered inhibitions.
In that moment she realises she loves him.
---
They're journalists - curious by nature and getting answers is their profession. It doesn't take long for them to find out that the Doctor had recently lost two friends. He was mourning, they speculated, and whoever those two people were, clearly they reminded him of them in some way.
Lix doesn't like the idea of being a replacement, but she does like the idea of photographing the universe on the proviso that he can have them back in time to file the story they'd just survived collecting. If that involved spending some time living in a strange box that was bigger on the inside, so be it.
Randall, meanwhile, seems to be more interested in the box itself than the possibilities of where it could take them.
He sits down next to her in the darkroom that she had discovered and quickly made her office of sorts and produces three hand sketched maps of the TARDIS interior. The day before yesterday, yesterday and today, he names them.
They're all completely different - and she wonders for a moment how she didn't notice that the rooms were changing, and secondly, why Randall was not straightening the photographs she had hanging on pegs at the thought of living somewhere where change was constant.
“It's not random,” he says. “It's playful. She's alive.”
It's a puzzle, she realises, and that's what's helping him.
---
She leans on the TARDIS door frame, taking photographs of an accretion disk spiralling around a black hole. That matter, the Doctor had told them, was once a planet. Life had begun there, evolved and died, and now all that was left was being swallowed and destroyed - and the sight is beautiful.
Randall sits with his back against the other side of the doorway reading book from the very planet they were watching that he found in the library. He lifts his head up every now and again to study the thing before them.
The Doctor's off working on the TARDIS console. He has big plans, he tells them, a massive revamp and he even has blueprints, which is a first for him. His plans leave just them in peace.
She gives a sigh and pushes the camera back in her pocket, and lights a cigarette.
It won't work. No matter what she does with the exposure, it'll never look like more than white dots and grey clouds on a black background. Nothing to say a civilisation was here, one that nobody aside from the Doctor has ever known.
“They wrote in sonnets,” Randall says, interrupting her thoughts. “Fourteen lines in iambic pentameter with a rhyming couplet. The sonnet predates human civilisation.”
“They invented the sonnet and what's left?” She asks. “My terrible photographs and a book of poetry.”
He puts hand up towards hers. She takes it. They stay there for a long moment while the smoke from her cigarette drifts out into space.
---
They visit the market on Yantala Five, the biggest market place in five galaxies. It covers and entire planet, the Doctor tells them. Billions of people shop there every day and there's an entire continent devoted to shoes.
There's humanoids of different sizes and colours, some with two eyes, most with more. And things that look like giant spiders with elephant noses that laugh heartily at Randall's attempts to keep his tie straight in the hustle and bustle, which only serves to set him off more, until she pulls his face to hers and kisses him right there in the street.
As they walk through the streets, there stalls everywhere with objects they had never seen before and smells that ranged from divine to the stomach churning. Randall has to play with every strange object he finds (and straightens more than a few stall fronts while he's at it), while she takes photographs of stall holders sitting proudly behind their wares and children playing in the streets.
Eventually, Randall gives on object to her, a glass sculpture that looks deceptively like a round paperweight filled with intricate swirls, and the moment she touches it the swirls inside it change to blue. The exact same blue as her eyes.
But before long, they've uncovered a back alley slavery ring and Randall's posing as a wealthy potential buyer from some planet they've never heard of while she sneaks around a warehouse getting photographic evidence.
In no time at all, they're running for their lives. The Doctor eventually swoops in with this screwdriver and a list of twenty five inter-galactic regulations that the slave traders are breaking (which Lix is certain he's made up) and before long the ringleaders are being lead off and the slaves freed.
“Journalists,” the Doctor mutters as they walk back to the TARDIS. “Professional snoopy busybodies and daredevils - I can't decided whether you're all mad or marvellous. Clearly marvellous in this instant.”
She lines up her photographs a few hours later, photographs of smiling children and shopkeepers and Randall rummaging through books at a stall and people locked in cages with desperation in their eyes.
Randall passes her a whiskey glass and they silently toast. It's a tradition they had developed some month earlier, a toast to the cruelty of the world, except it was now a toast to the cruelty of the universe. Acknowledgement, defiance and a hope of one day forgetting it all.
---
It's the fifth planet they reach when things start to go wrong. It seems like any other - a future human colony and a bustling city. The Doctor's wanders off looking for potential parts for the TARDIS while Randall and her get invited on an official tour, which he takes up and she declines, deciding there's more interesting things to be seen if she goes with a local invite - between the pair of them, they'll see most of what there is to see.
Soon alarms are blaring in the streets and people are running past her and she can hear something marching towards her. Heavy footsteps. Heavier than any human could make.
Adrenaline pumping, she hides in an alley and readies her camera, prepared to get the photograph and then run. She's worried about Randall and wishes she knew where he was - or the Doctor for that matter. But looking though the viewfinder, her doubts seems to vanish as seconds seem to turn into minutes and all she can hear is the steady marching and the distant wail of the sirens and her own breathing.
As the marching creatures round the corner, the flash of her camera reflects off their steel armour.
---
Her hands wont stop shaking.
The Doctor works away on the TARDIS, not talking, just pulling at wires and waving around that screwdriver of his.
Randall hasn't told her what happened. But she knows it was not his blood that covered his clothes when she finally found him in that slaughterhouse. Maybe she should have forced out of him whatever he went through, maybe she should be there for him, but she found she just could not. She's barely keeping herself together. There's not enough of her to keep Randall together as well.
Now he's turned to a bottle of whiskey and she doesn't know where he's got to - she suspects he's passed out drunk in the library and she envies him for that.
She has a bottle of whiskey herself, but hasn't drunk nearly enough of it yet.
They burnt. They all burnt in front of her, all the people that had yet to be converted to cold steel drones and she saw it all through her camera lens. Madness, destruction and genocide all captured on the one roll of film she had left on her when things went to hell.
And that one roll now sits, waiting to be developed.
Another day she decides. For now, she just wants more to drink and for her hands to stop shaking long enough to light a cigarette.
---
After that the peace is shattered. No matter where they land, there'd death and destruction and Lix is certain they have caused it. Like the war they had left behind was catching up with them through time and space and reminding them of where they should be. Not on some planet or moon or asteroid but once again filing stories from their small apartment in Madrid.
It's calling her back, but she doesn't want to go.
They keep going from planet to planet with death following in their wake, but she hopes it has to end - because for a few moments, they were perfect.
And she wonders if she finally understands Randall, that strange drive of his, that knowing that there is a perfect way that they could be, but to never ever being able to find it.
Instead with every planet they reach they're pulling further away from each other. She in her darkroom with rolls of film to be developed, Randall in the library with books and a bottle of whiskey and the Doctor in the console room with his blueprints.
They're all living separate lives.
---
She sees the empty whiskey bottles and the Doctor eyeing them and she wonders if he's ever going to say anything.
He doesn't.
He does however, one very bad day when they're in a crashing ship being attached by rat-like green alien termites, turn to her camera.
She swats at rat creature away and notices the perfect photograph opportunity - a body lying face down on the floor in a pool of blood. It was the first mate, his name she thinks was Meyers.
She readies her camera when the Doctor notices. She doesn't know why, maybe because he finds her instincts to document rather than aid and protect repugnant and that particularly day he'd had enough.
Or maybe it's because he knows she's stopped developing the photographs she takes.
He yells at her, “For two seconds, stop taking photos!” Then he grabs her hands and pulls the camera away from her.
And she's just left there, standing on some foreign spaceship, the crew screaming around her as fires roar from consoles and rat creatures jump from vents onto crew members and attack them.
And she just freezes, unable to move.
The Doctor seems to realise what he's done instantly and thrusts the camera back into her hands and tells her that he's sorry and to carry on, but it's too late. She's lost her nerve now and her hands begin to shake.
She sees one of the rat creatures crawling up a console before her and time seems to slow down as it eyes her. Part of her tells her to take the shot and jump out of the way, but another part of her tells her to run. Neither instinct is winning and she still can't move.
It leaps.
She stands, still frozen.
And Randall's there with a fire extinguisher, shooting it down mid flight. Next thing she knows she feels Randall's arms around her and he's pulling her through a door.
“Where are you going?” the Doctor yells
“Getting her out of here,” Randall screams back at him.
They hide in a storage cupboard. Randall being silent and still while she fiddles with film, trying to place a new load back into the camera with her shaking hands and failing.
“I can't. I...I just can't,” she mutters.
“I know,” Randall replies. It's the only solace Randall can offer.
She can smell the whiskey on his breath.
---
There's no looks from the Doctor after that. He's largely silent and throws himself further into his construction project.
Randall's there, but not in any way that matters. He's always drunk, but now he's never sober. The sex they're having late at night when neither of them sleeps, is mechanical - devoid of the passion and care it once had.
When they're done, he pulls away at her touch.
She doesn't even know what triggers it when he finally goes off. He rushes back to the TARDIS and she follows. On reaching their room he's starting to move things about and she grabs his hands - it worked in the past - but this time he just forces her way.
“I need you to go,” he says.
And she does.
She can't talk to him, he won't even let her touch him any more. She doesn't know how to help him - the photographer who takes photographs she can't bring herself to develop can't even help herself - and so she goes as asked.
She waits in the library for three hours and then returns and the room's spotless. Everything neat and tidy.
Except the glass sculpture he gave her is now chipped and cracked.
“I'm sorry,” he says, as she examines it closer.
“That's...that's meaningless,” she mutters as she hurries out of the room.
She heads into the console room, pulls open the TARDIS doors and throws the sculpture into space. Watching it drift away, she lets out a sob.
When she turns around, the Doctor's there. He was watching her.
“He's...it's something he can't,” the Doctor starts.
“I know,” she says. “Which only makes it worse.”
---When she finds Randall there's a mostly empty bottle of whiskey besides him and his eyes are ringed red.
“When you found me, in that factory...” he stares into the glass in his hand and then looks up at her. “Deficient,” he says. “The Cybermen found me deficient. Not worthy of conversion.”
Her heart breaks. She knows him - she loves him - and she knows it's the idea that he's mad has been eating away at him his whole life. Now his very life is testament to whatever is in his head that makes him so afraid of himself.
“My life because I am deficient,” he says. “Faulty. Inferior. Unsatisfactory. Defective,” he stands up suddenly and throws the glass in his hand across the room, where it shatters.
“Damaged,” she says, because they are. Damaged and broken and beyond repair.
Wherever Randall's gone in his head, he's not coming back. They've had their moment.
---
She can't take the looks of disappointment from the Doctor any more. So when he suggests dropping them back off in Spain, she agrees.
It'd be best for them all.
She wonders what his last two travelling companions were like, the ones he misses so much. She knows her and Randall pale in comparison. She, who is only brave when she has a camera in her hand and Randall can barely function any more unless he's drunk. He doesn't want to travel any more with two people who far too often smell of whiskey and fuck loudly because sometimes its the only thing they can do which makes them feel anything but tired and numb.
The Doctor doesn't want them.
They wish him luck with his travels and he tells them they'll go on to do great things with their lives, and there's a flash of guilt and pity in his eyes that tells her more about her future than she wants to know.
They file their story.
One week later she realises she's pregnant. Three months later, Randall walks out - but he's lost to alcohol and the turmoil in his mind long before he leaves.
---
She survives Spain, she survives parting with her daughter, she survives the war. She decides to quit photography and stay in London. She finds radio doesn't suit her but the new medium of television does. She meets Bel Rowley and Freddie Lyon. She becomes part of The Hour.
And between Spain and Lime Grove there's many others who share her bed and body and more bottles of whiskey than stars in the sky but no men from space, and no contact from Randall.
Nearly twenty years pass before Randall walks back into her life.
---Isaac mentions to Freddie who mentions to Bel who mentions to her, that he's considering science fiction for his next radio play but couldn't think of a good plot.
Between that and Randall stalking the halls she thinks of the box of photographs she keeps at her flat and finds just the one she's looking for beneath pictures of a marketplace and Randall and rolls and rolls of undeveloped film.
She calls Isaac into her office and hands him the photograph.
“For your next play,” she says.
“You're giving me a photograph?” he asks.
“Darling, I'm giving you a plot,” she replies. “Do you know what that is?”
Isaac looks clueless and of course Randall walks in at that moment. He stands in the doorway where she can see him in her peripheral vision. She chooses to ignore him and focuses on Isaac.
“It's the matter stream of a destroyed planet heading towards a black hole to be consumed and lost to the universe. A planet that had life and history and literature and this is all that is left.”
“That and a book of poetry,” Randall adds, which causes her to look at him standing there and acknowledge his presence.
Isaac looks from her to Randall and back again, the poor boy clearly not knowing what to think about their exchange.
“Yes. But what is it really?” Isaac asks.
She looks to Randall.
“A moment,” he says.