End of the World? Cup of Tea (Mickey Susan, 2211 words, 12+)
Susan takes the mission because she can, because she has a knack for these sort of temporal twists: a gift part biology, part enforced experience. Her people are all gone, now, or almost, and she doesn't keep to their traditions, not really, but she knows enough; more than, to deal with the things they would have, once, when they strode across Time and Space like giants. The mission goes how it goes, how they all go, until she turns a corner and there's a face where no face should be.
There's a long moment where they're both just staring at each other across the catwalk. Neither should be there, of course, they're both too obviously human looking for that. He's dark-skinned, shaven, muscled in a necessary sort of way; she's pale, she knows, too slim, a brunette these days. They have the same eyes, not in colour, but in look; seen too much, and not enough. His are wary, touched with recognition. Hers too, she supposes, and sighs.
"Time Agent?" he asks.
She nods. "Torchwood?"
He nods too, cautiously. "James," he says. "James Hardy."
It's clearly, intentionally fake. She smiles.
"Joan Heriot," she says. It's not the surname she meant to pick, but it will do. All the names she uses lately are fake. What's one more?
Her strap blips quietly, and she sees his eyes flick to the device in his hands. Movement, approaching. Not life signs, nothing on this old creaker is alive save them and maybe rats, but definite movements, and it's entirely the wrong era for this, it shouldn't, mustn't happen.
He's looking at her, so she says, "I rigged the temporal shunt and scrambled the sensors. You?"
"Blew navigation and the control cores," he says. "They won't find their way back, not for centuries."
It's clear he's still not going to move until she does. Learned paranoia. She wonders which Time Agents he's met before. There's so few of them left now, so many rotten apples, and he's Torchwood so it's probably the man who these days called himself Harkness, but she can't be sure. She can't be safe.
"Look," she says, and then everything goes to hell, mechanoids unfolding out of the decks at impossible angles, and there's running and shooting and more running and dead ends and, suddenly, 'James's arms around her and they're going, smashing through blaster-weakened plastisteel, out into thin air and down, down, down.
The mechanoid ship imploding back into the time-lanes yanks them apart, smashes them back together.
They should hit rocks, but there's water, suddenly, black and cold and it's only instinct that lets her make something of a dive of it, knife into the bitter cold but better than face first into the flat. She thrashes in the darkness. He grabs her arm, pointing. They surface together, pull themselves out onto the quay.
He's breathing hard. She doesn't have to, and by the time she thinks to fake it, it's already too late.
"Respiratory bypass," he says, and makes a grab for her and she pulls back, but she's water heavy and he manages to get his fingers around her wrist. Not for long. For long enough. "Low body temperature. Two hearts."
"The job's done," she says. He doesn't reach for his weapon, but she thinks he could, and there's a good chance it's waterproof. "Thanks for the help and everything, but I can take it from here."
She gets to her feet. He doesn't.
"You're supposed to be dead," he says and, then, "not that that stops you for long. Tell me you're not the Master."
She freezes, thinks something rude in a language dead so long his species would have to invent new words to cover it. "No," she says, eventually. "I'm not the Master. Or the D--"
"I know you're not him," 'James' says.
"No." She shakes her head, thinks, Grandfather, how could you? All those strays when you could have, you could have-- But, of course, he did, didn't he? He came back. And look how that ended up.
Oh, David. What we did to you. What we do to all of you.
"Look," 'James' says, before she can reach for her strap. "Sorry, that wasn't-- Look," he says again, eyes sincere, one hand out. "I've got a hotel room. I can get you some dry clothes, a drink?"
She shakes her head, turns away, drips up the stone stairs towards the road. It's night and the street lamps blur, black sticks and orange clouds.
"I have tea," he yells after her. "Nice hot cup of tea, do you right!"
Susan clutches to the wall. A sound forces itself out of her, and she can't tell if it's a laugh or a sob, and she curses again. When she looks back, he hasn't moved.
"Okay," she says. "Yes. I would like a cup of tea, thank you."
When he grins, he looks a decade younger, war-touched but still impassioned, still holding on to hope, and she feels something twist in her stomach and resolutely does not look at any of the faces floating at the edge of memory.
#
"I'll leave you out of the report, if you want," he calls from the other room.
She laughs, rubbing at her hair with the fluffy pink towel. "I don't think it makes that much of a difference."
"Might save on my paperwork," he says, a grin in his voice.
She smiles at herself in the mirror. It doesn't look fake. Maybe it's just the steam. Her own clothes are hanging up to dry from the shower rail, and there are fresh new ones to put on because the man is carrying an honest-to-God maker in his luggage and she's so tempted to swipe it that she's already feeling guilty.
Not today, she tells herself. You're not that person today. Not Wendy Darling, or Jupiter Jones, or Susan Foreman Campbell Brown Hegarty. Joan Heriot wants a nice cup of tea. And possibly a shiny purple catsuit.
"I once spent five years in a parallel dimension," he calls, over the clinks of cups and saucers and pot and his tone is so normal she almost misses the content.
"You spent--?" she asks, coming out of the bathroom. It's a surprisingly large room, a big bed at the back, but a proper little lounge area around the viewer -- television, she corrects herself. It's still television in this century.
"Five years," he agrees, cheerfully enough. "It wasn't that bad, to be honest, the zeppelins were kind of fun, but I'll tell you one thing: you couldn't get a decent cuppa, not for love nor money."
She doesn't know what to say to this, just takes her cup with a small smile and a quiet thanks, sinks into one of the deep armchairs with her fingers wrapped around her tea, leeching heat. He sits opposite, with his own. It's full of milk, his tea, her tea. Once, she drank it with lemon. Once, she drank it with Shennong, Emperor of China, while her Grandfather huffed and humphed and generally fussed. Such a baby.
He's watching her.
"How'd that happen?" She asks. "The alternate universe thing?"
He shrugs a little. "Crack in space-time. You know how it goes."
She does. God, does she. The war was time-locked, but it was a mess, such a mess. The seams burst. They all -- some, not all, she remembers, only some, only a few -- they went tumbling. The Emperor. He fell. The Master, already gone. A few others. Grandfather, of course, at the last, as Romana had seen, as Brax had told. The three of them, at the last, and then only one.
"You were there, then," he says, quietly. "The last Time War -- you're one of his lot."
"It was another life," she says.
All she'd lost was a regeneration and a planet she'd run from more than once. It shouldn't hurt so much. It shouldn't hurt still. There's a quiet in her head where once there was so much light, even when she was just another girl on Earth.
"What did you look like before?" he asks, and then, pulling a face. "Sorry, that's not-- It doesn't matter. Don't answer that."
She doesn't. What is there to say? He would have called her Asian, she supposes; and ginger, before that; and pixie-ish to begin with. They were just faces. Regeneration made you look at things differently, resorted priorities, created and erased quirks, but it was still continuous. She could line up all the points, draw the straight lines in her head, from Susan, to Susan, to Susan, to Susan. The past never goes away, nor the future.
But there's tea, so she sips it. Flavanoides. Amino acids. Vitamins. Caffeine. Polysaccharides. Tannins and free radicals and all that. She can feel her blood pressure normalise, lipids depressing, cells being shored up against oxidative damage.
'What a wonder is man,' she remembers Barbara saying.
"James," she says.
There's no hesitation before the "Yeah?" He's practised this, she thinks. Answering to a name that isn't his.
She can't remember what, if anything, she was going to say.
"Torchwood?" she says, finally. Sips her tea.
"Funny thing," he says. "I came back with nothing, thinking I could do anything, but somehow I ended up doing the same old thing. I mean, it's good work, and I enjoy it, and I'm good at it, but-- I don't know. I thought I could be something different for once, that I could leave it all behind. You can't, though."
She shakes her head, a no, but an agreement. You can't. Of course you can't.
"Is," he says, and hesitates, and then asks anyway, "is that why you're a Time Agent, now? One of Jack's lot?"
"Jack's one of our lot," she corrects, like the difference matters -- and then she actually thinks about the question. "No. Yes. It's complicated."
"Everything is," he says, no trace of animosity in his tone, but something, a weariness.
Oh, Grandfather, she thinks again, and, he'll tell me, if I ask, this 'James'. He'll give me the details. All the names and places and sad occasions. What are we, that we do this to them? What is she, that she could take her history and spin it into myths and legends, into pain retold with stars and golden highlights, into grand adventures, a girl and her grandfather and a box-ship sailing the edges of forever.
"I'm sorry." She stands abruptly. "I should-- Thank you for the tea, and the clothes, but I really should go."
"Don't," he says, too loud, and then, softer, "I mean-- Look, I just thought you might want to talk, or something. To someone who knows. Well, not knows, knows, or -- I haven't been there. But I. I could have listened once, and I didn't, I don't know what difference it would have made if I had, you know? If I'd made that effort. But I can listen, if you want."
"No," she says, too sharply, too cold. "Some things -- some things, you just don't. You just don't."
And he's nodding like he gets it, and she hopes to hell he doesn't, and he says, "or we could just sit, you know? You don't have to tell me your real name or anything. We could just sit. There's tea. A bit of company? I think I have some biscuits somewhere."
A laugh escapes her, short, shocked. "Biscuits. You have biscuits?"
"I have a maker," he says with an earnest little smile. "That's like biscuits if you wait five minutes and you don't mind if they taste kind of cardboard-y."
"You were -- you're his favourite race in the universe, you know," she says, finally.
"Us stupid apes," he agrees.
"You didn't tell me your real name either," she says, and sits again.
"Policy," he says, shrugging. "Bit stupid if you ask me. It's not like I'm in the phone book anyway." He suddenly pulls a face. "God, I hope we're not. We're a bit pants at the whole 'secret agency' business."
She giggles. It still might be a sob. She sips tea until she doesn't care which. The silence gets long, and longer.
"Don't suppose you watch the footie?" he asks, forcing a grin.
"West Ham are rubbish this year," she hears herself say, and she doesn't know which of the two of them are more surprised.
"You know," he says, and his smile is more genuine this time, "if we turn the box on, I reckon we might catch the last half of Match of the Day."
I should be getting back, she opens her mouth to say, but that leads right to 'for what?' so what comes out is actually, "do they still have the two Alans?"
"Sometimes," he says, picking up the remote. "Let's see who we get."
This sort of surprise, she can deal with. The future's still waiting, of course, and the past is right there, up tight behind them, but they've got now, for a while, and tea, and a bit of footie, and they just saved the time-line from invading robot death, so even if everything else is still a bit shit, it's not a bad way to end a day.
Not a bad way at all.
There's a long moment where they're both just staring at each other across the catwalk. Neither should be there, of course, they're both too obviously human looking for that. He's dark-skinned, shaven, muscled in a necessary sort of way; she's pale, she knows, too slim, a brunette these days. They have the same eyes, not in colour, but in look; seen too much, and not enough. His are wary, touched with recognition. Hers too, she supposes, and sighs.
"Time Agent?" he asks.
She nods. "Torchwood?"
He nods too, cautiously. "James," he says. "James Hardy."
It's clearly, intentionally fake. She smiles.
"Joan Heriot," she says. It's not the surname she meant to pick, but it will do. All the names she uses lately are fake. What's one more?
Her strap blips quietly, and she sees his eyes flick to the device in his hands. Movement, approaching. Not life signs, nothing on this old creaker is alive save them and maybe rats, but definite movements, and it's entirely the wrong era for this, it shouldn't, mustn't happen.
He's looking at her, so she says, "I rigged the temporal shunt and scrambled the sensors. You?"
"Blew navigation and the control cores," he says. "They won't find their way back, not for centuries."
It's clear he's still not going to move until she does. Learned paranoia. She wonders which Time Agents he's met before. There's so few of them left now, so many rotten apples, and he's Torchwood so it's probably the man who these days called himself Harkness, but she can't be sure. She can't be safe.
"Look," she says, and then everything goes to hell, mechanoids unfolding out of the decks at impossible angles, and there's running and shooting and more running and dead ends and, suddenly, 'James's arms around her and they're going, smashing through blaster-weakened plastisteel, out into thin air and down, down, down.
The mechanoid ship imploding back into the time-lanes yanks them apart, smashes them back together.
They should hit rocks, but there's water, suddenly, black and cold and it's only instinct that lets her make something of a dive of it, knife into the bitter cold but better than face first into the flat. She thrashes in the darkness. He grabs her arm, pointing. They surface together, pull themselves out onto the quay.
He's breathing hard. She doesn't have to, and by the time she thinks to fake it, it's already too late.
"Respiratory bypass," he says, and makes a grab for her and she pulls back, but she's water heavy and he manages to get his fingers around her wrist. Not for long. For long enough. "Low body temperature. Two hearts."
"The job's done," she says. He doesn't reach for his weapon, but she thinks he could, and there's a good chance it's waterproof. "Thanks for the help and everything, but I can take it from here."
She gets to her feet. He doesn't.
"You're supposed to be dead," he says and, then, "not that that stops you for long. Tell me you're not the Master."
She freezes, thinks something rude in a language dead so long his species would have to invent new words to cover it. "No," she says, eventually. "I'm not the Master. Or the D--"
"I know you're not him," 'James' says.
"No." She shakes her head, thinks, Grandfather, how could you? All those strays when you could have, you could have-- But, of course, he did, didn't he? He came back. And look how that ended up.
Oh, David. What we did to you. What we do to all of you.
"Look," 'James' says, before she can reach for her strap. "Sorry, that wasn't-- Look," he says again, eyes sincere, one hand out. "I've got a hotel room. I can get you some dry clothes, a drink?"
She shakes her head, turns away, drips up the stone stairs towards the road. It's night and the street lamps blur, black sticks and orange clouds.
"I have tea," he yells after her. "Nice hot cup of tea, do you right!"
Susan clutches to the wall. A sound forces itself out of her, and she can't tell if it's a laugh or a sob, and she curses again. When she looks back, he hasn't moved.
"Okay," she says. "Yes. I would like a cup of tea, thank you."
When he grins, he looks a decade younger, war-touched but still impassioned, still holding on to hope, and she feels something twist in her stomach and resolutely does not look at any of the faces floating at the edge of memory.
#
"I'll leave you out of the report, if you want," he calls from the other room.
She laughs, rubbing at her hair with the fluffy pink towel. "I don't think it makes that much of a difference."
"Might save on my paperwork," he says, a grin in his voice.
She smiles at herself in the mirror. It doesn't look fake. Maybe it's just the steam. Her own clothes are hanging up to dry from the shower rail, and there are fresh new ones to put on because the man is carrying an honest-to-God maker in his luggage and she's so tempted to swipe it that she's already feeling guilty.
Not today, she tells herself. You're not that person today. Not Wendy Darling, or Jupiter Jones, or Susan Foreman Campbell Brown Hegarty. Joan Heriot wants a nice cup of tea. And possibly a shiny purple catsuit.
"I once spent five years in a parallel dimension," he calls, over the clinks of cups and saucers and pot and his tone is so normal she almost misses the content.
"You spent--?" she asks, coming out of the bathroom. It's a surprisingly large room, a big bed at the back, but a proper little lounge area around the viewer -- television, she corrects herself. It's still television in this century.
"Five years," he agrees, cheerfully enough. "It wasn't that bad, to be honest, the zeppelins were kind of fun, but I'll tell you one thing: you couldn't get a decent cuppa, not for love nor money."
She doesn't know what to say to this, just takes her cup with a small smile and a quiet thanks, sinks into one of the deep armchairs with her fingers wrapped around her tea, leeching heat. He sits opposite, with his own. It's full of milk, his tea, her tea. Once, she drank it with lemon. Once, she drank it with Shennong, Emperor of China, while her Grandfather huffed and humphed and generally fussed. Such a baby.
He's watching her.
"How'd that happen?" She asks. "The alternate universe thing?"
He shrugs a little. "Crack in space-time. You know how it goes."
She does. God, does she. The war was time-locked, but it was a mess, such a mess. The seams burst. They all -- some, not all, she remembers, only some, only a few -- they went tumbling. The Emperor. He fell. The Master, already gone. A few others. Grandfather, of course, at the last, as Romana had seen, as Brax had told. The three of them, at the last, and then only one.
"You were there, then," he says, quietly. "The last Time War -- you're one of his lot."
"It was another life," she says.
All she'd lost was a regeneration and a planet she'd run from more than once. It shouldn't hurt so much. It shouldn't hurt still. There's a quiet in her head where once there was so much light, even when she was just another girl on Earth.
"What did you look like before?" he asks, and then, pulling a face. "Sorry, that's not-- It doesn't matter. Don't answer that."
She doesn't. What is there to say? He would have called her Asian, she supposes; and ginger, before that; and pixie-ish to begin with. They were just faces. Regeneration made you look at things differently, resorted priorities, created and erased quirks, but it was still continuous. She could line up all the points, draw the straight lines in her head, from Susan, to Susan, to Susan, to Susan. The past never goes away, nor the future.
But there's tea, so she sips it. Flavanoides. Amino acids. Vitamins. Caffeine. Polysaccharides. Tannins and free radicals and all that. She can feel her blood pressure normalise, lipids depressing, cells being shored up against oxidative damage.
'What a wonder is man,' she remembers Barbara saying.
"James," she says.
There's no hesitation before the "Yeah?" He's practised this, she thinks. Answering to a name that isn't his.
She can't remember what, if anything, she was going to say.
"Torchwood?" she says, finally. Sips her tea.
"Funny thing," he says. "I came back with nothing, thinking I could do anything, but somehow I ended up doing the same old thing. I mean, it's good work, and I enjoy it, and I'm good at it, but-- I don't know. I thought I could be something different for once, that I could leave it all behind. You can't, though."
She shakes her head, a no, but an agreement. You can't. Of course you can't.
"Is," he says, and hesitates, and then asks anyway, "is that why you're a Time Agent, now? One of Jack's lot?"
"Jack's one of our lot," she corrects, like the difference matters -- and then she actually thinks about the question. "No. Yes. It's complicated."
"Everything is," he says, no trace of animosity in his tone, but something, a weariness.
Oh, Grandfather, she thinks again, and, he'll tell me, if I ask, this 'James'. He'll give me the details. All the names and places and sad occasions. What are we, that we do this to them? What is she, that she could take her history and spin it into myths and legends, into pain retold with stars and golden highlights, into grand adventures, a girl and her grandfather and a box-ship sailing the edges of forever.
"I'm sorry." She stands abruptly. "I should-- Thank you for the tea, and the clothes, but I really should go."
"Don't," he says, too loud, and then, softer, "I mean-- Look, I just thought you might want to talk, or something. To someone who knows. Well, not knows, knows, or -- I haven't been there. But I. I could have listened once, and I didn't, I don't know what difference it would have made if I had, you know? If I'd made that effort. But I can listen, if you want."
"No," she says, too sharply, too cold. "Some things -- some things, you just don't. You just don't."
And he's nodding like he gets it, and she hopes to hell he doesn't, and he says, "or we could just sit, you know? You don't have to tell me your real name or anything. We could just sit. There's tea. A bit of company? I think I have some biscuits somewhere."
A laugh escapes her, short, shocked. "Biscuits. You have biscuits?"
"I have a maker," he says with an earnest little smile. "That's like biscuits if you wait five minutes and you don't mind if they taste kind of cardboard-y."
"You were -- you're his favourite race in the universe, you know," she says, finally.
"Us stupid apes," he agrees.
"You didn't tell me your real name either," she says, and sits again.
"Policy," he says, shrugging. "Bit stupid if you ask me. It's not like I'm in the phone book anyway." He suddenly pulls a face. "God, I hope we're not. We're a bit pants at the whole 'secret agency' business."
She giggles. It still might be a sob. She sips tea until she doesn't care which. The silence gets long, and longer.
"Don't suppose you watch the footie?" he asks, forcing a grin.
"West Ham are rubbish this year," she hears herself say, and she doesn't know which of the two of them are more surprised.
"You know," he says, and his smile is more genuine this time, "if we turn the box on, I reckon we might catch the last half of Match of the Day."
I should be getting back, she opens her mouth to say, but that leads right to 'for what?' so what comes out is actually, "do they still have the two Alans?"
"Sometimes," he says, picking up the remote. "Let's see who we get."
This sort of surprise, she can deal with. The future's still waiting, of course, and the past is right there, up tight behind them, but they've got now, for a while, and tea, and a bit of footie, and they just saved the time-line from invading robot death, so even if everything else is still a bit shit, it's not a bad way to end a day.
Not a bad way at all.