Fic Commentary: Flowers on Air Chapter 8
This is the fourth installment of the Fic Commentary Meme, where you request 'em and I annotate 'em ( original post here). This one was requested by ladyofcharm . The original text of this story can be found here.
So, okay, this should be interesting because I wrote this long enough ago that it's all just a wee bit fuzzy (and in my fic world, a long time ago means the beginning of July--do not ask me the vice which I have that makes my memory so rubbish, I will never tell). But here goes...
This is the first fic I wrote in any fandom ever. The crossover is what made me want to do it. I knew no one else ever would and the more I thought about it the more intrigued I got: what would happen if the Doctor could watch his dreams? That kind of knocked around in my head for a while, and then The Stolen Earth happened and I, like many others, went slightly bonkers for a week. That's when I started writing this and I was almost done when Journey's End happened and totally threw me for a loop and invalidated the way I wanted to end this story. I know I am way not alone in this tale of woe.
So, roll on Chapter 8:
Lying on her cot, Rose heard the door to the lab open and shut. It was dusk, the sky a close match for the strange orange sky she had seen in the Doctor’s dream. Through the netting of her tent, she could see the tall, gliding figure of the Doctor, clutching something in his hand that had a small blinking green light on it. At first it looked like he might be coming to have a chat with her, and her senses snapped to full attention, but he walked right by and continued up in to the rocks behind the centre.
Rose began weighing the options. On the one hand, she’d already invaded the Doctor’s privacy once today and still felt horrible. And what if he was just taking a walk to have a think, or enjoy the night air? She fussed with her pillow and sheet and heaved a sigh. The crunching sound of his footsteps on the loose gravel of the paths faded in to the distance.
I have a hard time (and I think I've said this in another commentary) keeping Rose concerned for and in love with the Doctor, but not having her slide in to obsession or nagging or being controlling. So, this is my way of hopefully letting my reader know that she's not just following him around yelling at him or sneaking around spying on him, she's giving consideration to just staying put and leaving him be, but in the end decides against that.
After tossing and turning for some time more, she finally decided there was nothing for it.
Rising from her cot, she put her shoes and sweatshirt on, against the cool desert night air. The path didn’t go that far off in to the rocks and she hoped that the Doctor hadn’t decided to go on a complete walk-about. She thought of the TARDIS sitting alone off on the salt flats, and blinked back the sudden, and completely irrational, notion that perhaps he had gone back there, and was leaving her behind.
What, the Doctor just up and leaving a companion alone somewhere with no explanation? Why I never! Heh. Anyway, I stuck this in here to show Rose's anxiety that Something is Not Right between her and the Doctor, even if she can't put her finger on it yet.
The chink in her trust of him that this thought signaled was far more troubling to Rose than the actual prospect of being left here, Doctorless and trapped.
Of course. Because belief in one another and trust is what their entire relationship is based on, and if that is slipping, then the whole thing will topple and she really does have a right to be concerned. Just letting my readers know why Rose is finding the situation scary enough to go running after the Doctor in this way.
She quickened her pace up the path and made less of an effort to deaden her footfalls. Of all the times she’d fled, with some ravening deadly creature behind her, she’d never felt this peculiar sense of urgency before. Something was wrong, with the Doctor, with this whole place, with everyone here, and she had to find out what it was and how to stop it.
Okay, maybe a little anvil-ly there.
Pausing to get her bearings in the increasing darkness, she heard a stone fall off to the right, behind a large boulder. She left the path and followed the sound, coming around the boulder to find the Doctor, sitting on the ground, back resting against the far side, hunched over a portable minidisc player, clutching it with white-knuckled urgency.
“Doctor?” Rose whispered, not wanting to startle him, as it was clear he was so involved in what he was looking at that he hadn’t heard her approach.
He looked up and Rose saw by the glow of the screen that his cheeks were wet with tears and his mouth was completely flattened in to a perfectly straight line. His eyes were wide and red-rimmed, his Adams apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed sobs.
He slammed the screen of the player shut and hissed, “Rose! Go back to bed!”
This is the first time in this fic that the Doctor really acts different from the way we always see him. So, clearly, Something Has Changed.
His tone stopped her in her tracks. She felt that if she reached out and touched him, she would be burned. It was a completely different man sitting there. Between when he had laid down to record his dreams for the first time and this moment, something had broken inside of him. Something perhaps that had been mended with sellotape and chewing gum so many times that finally at long last it was beyond repair. Or perhaps he’d known all along, since they first arrived and met the man with the camera that records brainwaves, that this would be his ultimate fate. Maybe he had not really wanted to bring sight to the sightless or help a woman with her recurring nightmares. Perhaps those had been just happy side-effects.
In my mind, the latter option is just Rose having a wee panic attack. He didn't really start working on the camera for selfish reasons, but rather because he's the Doctor and you know he totally would. But she's doubting him now, and doubting his motivations. Not good. He, meanwhile, is having a bit of a Time War flashback, obviously.
“I’m not going anywhere, okay?” She sat down a few feet from him. “You know, when you were dreaming, they all wanted to watch on that dirty great telly they’ve got in there. I made them turn it off. If it was me, yeah? You’d be lecturing me about the timeline and showing these people things they shouldn’t see. I should have stopped you before, but I didn’t really understand where it was all going. I still don’t. What are you doing here?”
I did have to address this issue somehow. The Doctor we know and love would never have mucked about with technology and exposing people to information they weren't meant to know. So, this isn't that Doctor anymore, it's someone in the grip of an obsession.
The Doctor remained silent, like a sulking child coming down from a tantrum. With one thumb, he stroked the top of the player. He touched the button that would open it again but pulled back.
Rose asked again, “What are you doing? We could go back to the TARDIS, I’m sure she’s done rebooting now. We could leave, could have left days ago, but we’re still here. You’re still here. Still working on this bloody experiment, but it’s gone a lot beyond that now, hasn’t it?”
Still nothing from the Doctor so she tried a different tack: “Just now as I was coming up here, I had the thought that maybe you’d gone back to the TARDIS without me, and were leaving me here.”
“I would never,” he croaked, the words all clipped short.
LOL. Yeah, mkay. Those words, they do not mean what you think they mean. I think I did write this bit pre-JE but left this in there because he always claims that he never would do stuff right up until the moment that he actually does.
“So you keep insisting. But just for a second I thought you might. What’s going on here is something that made me stop trusting you, just for a second.” She looked closely in to his bloodshot eyes and saw what was there, or wasn’t there. “I think maybe you’ve already left me.”
Ouch. I went back and forth on that last line. Too harsh? Too emo? I erased it and typed it back in again like eight times.
He put the player down on the ground and tipped his head back to rest on the boulder, and stared up at the stars now coming in to focus in the night sky.
“All those worlds. All those suns and planets and galaxies. I can go anywhere, except the one place I want more than anything else.” He laid a hand on the player on the ground, “And here it is. In here. All of these other people here watching their childhood boogey monsters and dreams of flying, it’s all a bit naff, don’t you think? But a whole planet, a whole world, a whole people, preserved forever in ones and zeros, right here. Every night I could dream them in to existence, and every day live my life with them again. As if they never…as if I never….” He trailed off and Rose saw once again the man she had met in that basement, the one who told her to run, not just from the danger at hand but from him, from this damaged shell of a person. Perhaps in this new incarnation he had not healed the wounds of his soul, but was just better at hiding them from her. Better at lying, at charming her in to a false sense of security.
Again, too emo? I do still like how I had him slag off anyone else watching their dreams, because of course he and his dreams are eighty-billion times more special and important. He's wallowing. And my personal characterization of Tenth Doc is expressed here. I see him with most of the same demons as the Ninth, but more adept at hiding them and better at charming the pants (ahem) off everyone so they ignore the obvious serious personality issues he has.
He took a deep shuddering breath.
“And you want me to walk away from that?” He brought his hands up to run them through his hair. “I’m sorry, Rose.”
“You’re going to pick a fantasy over me? Doctor? Look at me. Look me in the eye and tell me that you’re going to pick a fantasy over me.” Rose got on her hands and knees and crawled closer to where the Doctor was sitting. “Tell me that you’re going to pick a fantasy over everything that you believe in.” She kneeled before him and waited, barely daring to breathe, terrified of what the answer was going to be.
Eeek! I just found a typo. And corrected it, so you'll never know! Anyway, I'm a Rose/Doctor shipper all the way (as if you guys couldn't tell) so I had a little crisis over the Doctor actually doing this. I mean, he wouldn't. Would he? But, for the sake of generating tension and drama (otherwise known as character torture), he is. There'd really be no story if he was just like, "Oh, you're right as usual Rose, whatever was I thinking?"
A tiny corner of the Doctor’s mouth lifted and for a moment Rose was sure he was going to laugh and tell her it had all been a joke. But the corner fell again and he did look her square in the eye.
“Who’s to say you’re not in here too? And everything I believe. These are my dreams, this is the world as I’d most want it, so what if you’re in here too? In ones and zeros, forever.”
Mmmm. Okay so this is the first hint that it ain't just Gallifrey the Doctor's dreaming of. The things he wants most he can never have, and that includes Rose.
It was like a knife to the heart.
“No,” she said. “Oh no you do not. I may be in there, but I’m right here too, and I need you to stay with me.” She grabbed his hand and held it to her chest, let him feel her heart beating. “I’m real, Doctor. I’m right here and I’m real. No ones, no zeros. Just me, being alive.”
He pulled his hand away.
“That’s just the problem, isn’t it? You’re alive, living your human life, aging, growing old…dying. In the end that’s always how it goes. If I could just….” He trailed off and touched the player again. “I’m so tired.”
This was really before I'd fleshed out the many, many reasons why the Doctor refuses Rose (they're more covered in the sequel), so just the old chestnuts here: human lifespan, watching her die, all that stuff.
Rose felt like she was at a dead end. Leaning forward, she did the one last thing she could think of, opened her hand and smacked him square across the mouth. His stubble left a bit of a burn on her palm.
And who among us has not wanted to do this at one time or another, eh?
“I trusted you to never leave me.” She stood up and brushed the dirt off of her jeans, feeling floodgates of a sort open. “I trusted you and I loved you. And you’ll just go on sitting here gazing at your own bloody navel, feeling sorry for yourself. Nine hundred years old and you’ve never learned a single lesson anyone has ever tried teaching you.”
He sat, gaping at her.
Um, go Rose! Yeah, I tend to write Rose as fairly take-charge and kick-ass when the chips are down. I am sort of concieving of this as the first time that she's ever really given him the what-for as Ten, though.
“This is your last chance,” she hissed, “before I walk out of this place and take my chances out there and go live my life in 1999 without you. I can’t stay here anymore.” She turned her back so the Doctor wouldn’t see the tears welling in her eyes and started to walk away.
She made it about four steps before she heard him stand up behind her. “Before you go,” he said, “tell me. Didn’t you feel tempted? To record your dreams?”
I mean, really. So this is probably the part where I talk about the movie this crosses over with *SPOILER ALERT*. In the movie, the only person who doesn't get addicted to watching their dreams is Gene, Claire's former lover. As in this fic, he's a novelist, and while everyone else is busily fucking up their lives, he sits and writes a novel that he eventually gives to Claire to "cure" her of the disease of dreams. It's an interesting ending for a visual art form, to basically tell the viewer: Images are dangerous, words heal. All of the characters that do get addicted are sympathetic protagonists (well, except Dr. Farber who isn't as much of a butt-munch as I make him here but is pretty screwed up as a dad), succumbing to the tempation is not presented as a character flaw in any way, but something very natural that most people would want. So, what sort of people are the ones who can resist this? Gene can because he lives his dreams through words. And Rose?
Before you go. She closed her eyes and let the tears fall freely.
“You were my dream.” She felt naked, raw, suddenly losing her will to fight this. It was all going wrong, and not at the hands of some super-villain on a far off planet, but inside the Doctor’s own mind. Every step as she walked away she expected to hear him behind her, but no sound ever came.
She resists because no one's dreams could ever be as magnificent as her life with the Doctor is. She wants for nothing with him. I think part of what attracted me to writing htis story is that one would expect Rose, the human (and a flawed character--she's no Mary Sue, she's selfish in her desire to be with the Doctor at any expense) would be the one to be tempted by this, but the fact that she's so incredibly invested in traveling with the Doctor and being with him is what makes her impervious to the temptation to watch her dreams. Meanwhile, he's the one who's still got a hole in his soul that he's trying to fill constantly in various ways, despite his great age and wisdom.
So, okay, this should be interesting because I wrote this long enough ago that it's all just a wee bit fuzzy (and in my fic world, a long time ago means the beginning of July--do not ask me the vice which I have that makes my memory so rubbish, I will never tell). But here goes...
This is the first fic I wrote in any fandom ever. The crossover is what made me want to do it. I knew no one else ever would and the more I thought about it the more intrigued I got: what would happen if the Doctor could watch his dreams? That kind of knocked around in my head for a while, and then The Stolen Earth happened and I, like many others, went slightly bonkers for a week. That's when I started writing this and I was almost done when Journey's End happened and totally threw me for a loop and invalidated the way I wanted to end this story. I know I am way not alone in this tale of woe.
So, roll on Chapter 8:
Lying on her cot, Rose heard the door to the lab open and shut. It was dusk, the sky a close match for the strange orange sky she had seen in the Doctor’s dream. Through the netting of her tent, she could see the tall, gliding figure of the Doctor, clutching something in his hand that had a small blinking green light on it. At first it looked like he might be coming to have a chat with her, and her senses snapped to full attention, but he walked right by and continued up in to the rocks behind the centre.
Rose began weighing the options. On the one hand, she’d already invaded the Doctor’s privacy once today and still felt horrible. And what if he was just taking a walk to have a think, or enjoy the night air? She fussed with her pillow and sheet and heaved a sigh. The crunching sound of his footsteps on the loose gravel of the paths faded in to the distance.
I have a hard time (and I think I've said this in another commentary) keeping Rose concerned for and in love with the Doctor, but not having her slide in to obsession or nagging or being controlling. So, this is my way of hopefully letting my reader know that she's not just following him around yelling at him or sneaking around spying on him, she's giving consideration to just staying put and leaving him be, but in the end decides against that.
After tossing and turning for some time more, she finally decided there was nothing for it.
Rising from her cot, she put her shoes and sweatshirt on, against the cool desert night air. The path didn’t go that far off in to the rocks and she hoped that the Doctor hadn’t decided to go on a complete walk-about. She thought of the TARDIS sitting alone off on the salt flats, and blinked back the sudden, and completely irrational, notion that perhaps he had gone back there, and was leaving her behind.
What, the Doctor just up and leaving a companion alone somewhere with no explanation? Why I never! Heh. Anyway, I stuck this in here to show Rose's anxiety that Something is Not Right between her and the Doctor, even if she can't put her finger on it yet.
The chink in her trust of him that this thought signaled was far more troubling to Rose than the actual prospect of being left here, Doctorless and trapped.
Of course. Because belief in one another and trust is what their entire relationship is based on, and if that is slipping, then the whole thing will topple and she really does have a right to be concerned. Just letting my readers know why Rose is finding the situation scary enough to go running after the Doctor in this way.
She quickened her pace up the path and made less of an effort to deaden her footfalls. Of all the times she’d fled, with some ravening deadly creature behind her, she’d never felt this peculiar sense of urgency before. Something was wrong, with the Doctor, with this whole place, with everyone here, and she had to find out what it was and how to stop it.
Okay, maybe a little anvil-ly there.
Pausing to get her bearings in the increasing darkness, she heard a stone fall off to the right, behind a large boulder. She left the path and followed the sound, coming around the boulder to find the Doctor, sitting on the ground, back resting against the far side, hunched over a portable minidisc player, clutching it with white-knuckled urgency.
“Doctor?” Rose whispered, not wanting to startle him, as it was clear he was so involved in what he was looking at that he hadn’t heard her approach.
He looked up and Rose saw by the glow of the screen that his cheeks were wet with tears and his mouth was completely flattened in to a perfectly straight line. His eyes were wide and red-rimmed, his Adams apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed sobs.
He slammed the screen of the player shut and hissed, “Rose! Go back to bed!”
This is the first time in this fic that the Doctor really acts different from the way we always see him. So, clearly, Something Has Changed.
His tone stopped her in her tracks. She felt that if she reached out and touched him, she would be burned. It was a completely different man sitting there. Between when he had laid down to record his dreams for the first time and this moment, something had broken inside of him. Something perhaps that had been mended with sellotape and chewing gum so many times that finally at long last it was beyond repair. Or perhaps he’d known all along, since they first arrived and met the man with the camera that records brainwaves, that this would be his ultimate fate. Maybe he had not really wanted to bring sight to the sightless or help a woman with her recurring nightmares. Perhaps those had been just happy side-effects.
In my mind, the latter option is just Rose having a wee panic attack. He didn't really start working on the camera for selfish reasons, but rather because he's the Doctor and you know he totally would. But she's doubting him now, and doubting his motivations. Not good. He, meanwhile, is having a bit of a Time War flashback, obviously.
“I’m not going anywhere, okay?” She sat down a few feet from him. “You know, when you were dreaming, they all wanted to watch on that dirty great telly they’ve got in there. I made them turn it off. If it was me, yeah? You’d be lecturing me about the timeline and showing these people things they shouldn’t see. I should have stopped you before, but I didn’t really understand where it was all going. I still don’t. What are you doing here?”
I did have to address this issue somehow. The Doctor we know and love would never have mucked about with technology and exposing people to information they weren't meant to know. So, this isn't that Doctor anymore, it's someone in the grip of an obsession.
The Doctor remained silent, like a sulking child coming down from a tantrum. With one thumb, he stroked the top of the player. He touched the button that would open it again but pulled back.
Rose asked again, “What are you doing? We could go back to the TARDIS, I’m sure she’s done rebooting now. We could leave, could have left days ago, but we’re still here. You’re still here. Still working on this bloody experiment, but it’s gone a lot beyond that now, hasn’t it?”
Still nothing from the Doctor so she tried a different tack: “Just now as I was coming up here, I had the thought that maybe you’d gone back to the TARDIS without me, and were leaving me here.”
“I would never,” he croaked, the words all clipped short.
LOL. Yeah, mkay. Those words, they do not mean what you think they mean. I think I did write this bit pre-JE but left this in there because he always claims that he never would do stuff right up until the moment that he actually does.
“So you keep insisting. But just for a second I thought you might. What’s going on here is something that made me stop trusting you, just for a second.” She looked closely in to his bloodshot eyes and saw what was there, or wasn’t there. “I think maybe you’ve already left me.”
Ouch. I went back and forth on that last line. Too harsh? Too emo? I erased it and typed it back in again like eight times.
He put the player down on the ground and tipped his head back to rest on the boulder, and stared up at the stars now coming in to focus in the night sky.
“All those worlds. All those suns and planets and galaxies. I can go anywhere, except the one place I want more than anything else.” He laid a hand on the player on the ground, “And here it is. In here. All of these other people here watching their childhood boogey monsters and dreams of flying, it’s all a bit naff, don’t you think? But a whole planet, a whole world, a whole people, preserved forever in ones and zeros, right here. Every night I could dream them in to existence, and every day live my life with them again. As if they never…as if I never….” He trailed off and Rose saw once again the man she had met in that basement, the one who told her to run, not just from the danger at hand but from him, from this damaged shell of a person. Perhaps in this new incarnation he had not healed the wounds of his soul, but was just better at hiding them from her. Better at lying, at charming her in to a false sense of security.
Again, too emo? I do still like how I had him slag off anyone else watching their dreams, because of course he and his dreams are eighty-billion times more special and important. He's wallowing. And my personal characterization of Tenth Doc is expressed here. I see him with most of the same demons as the Ninth, but more adept at hiding them and better at charming the pants (ahem) off everyone so they ignore the obvious serious personality issues he has.
He took a deep shuddering breath.
“And you want me to walk away from that?” He brought his hands up to run them through his hair. “I’m sorry, Rose.”
“You’re going to pick a fantasy over me? Doctor? Look at me. Look me in the eye and tell me that you’re going to pick a fantasy over me.” Rose got on her hands and knees and crawled closer to where the Doctor was sitting. “Tell me that you’re going to pick a fantasy over everything that you believe in.” She kneeled before him and waited, barely daring to breathe, terrified of what the answer was going to be.
Eeek! I just found a typo. And corrected it, so you'll never know! Anyway, I'm a Rose/Doctor shipper all the way (as if you guys couldn't tell) so I had a little crisis over the Doctor actually doing this. I mean, he wouldn't. Would he? But, for the sake of generating tension and drama (otherwise known as character torture), he is. There'd really be no story if he was just like, "Oh, you're right as usual Rose, whatever was I thinking?"
A tiny corner of the Doctor’s mouth lifted and for a moment Rose was sure he was going to laugh and tell her it had all been a joke. But the corner fell again and he did look her square in the eye.
“Who’s to say you’re not in here too? And everything I believe. These are my dreams, this is the world as I’d most want it, so what if you’re in here too? In ones and zeros, forever.”
Mmmm. Okay so this is the first hint that it ain't just Gallifrey the Doctor's dreaming of. The things he wants most he can never have, and that includes Rose.
It was like a knife to the heart.
“No,” she said. “Oh no you do not. I may be in there, but I’m right here too, and I need you to stay with me.” She grabbed his hand and held it to her chest, let him feel her heart beating. “I’m real, Doctor. I’m right here and I’m real. No ones, no zeros. Just me, being alive.”
He pulled his hand away.
“That’s just the problem, isn’t it? You’re alive, living your human life, aging, growing old…dying. In the end that’s always how it goes. If I could just….” He trailed off and touched the player again. “I’m so tired.”
This was really before I'd fleshed out the many, many reasons why the Doctor refuses Rose (they're more covered in the sequel), so just the old chestnuts here: human lifespan, watching her die, all that stuff.
Rose felt like she was at a dead end. Leaning forward, she did the one last thing she could think of, opened her hand and smacked him square across the mouth. His stubble left a bit of a burn on her palm.
And who among us has not wanted to do this at one time or another, eh?
“I trusted you to never leave me.” She stood up and brushed the dirt off of her jeans, feeling floodgates of a sort open. “I trusted you and I loved you. And you’ll just go on sitting here gazing at your own bloody navel, feeling sorry for yourself. Nine hundred years old and you’ve never learned a single lesson anyone has ever tried teaching you.”
He sat, gaping at her.
Um, go Rose! Yeah, I tend to write Rose as fairly take-charge and kick-ass when the chips are down. I am sort of concieving of this as the first time that she's ever really given him the what-for as Ten, though.
“This is your last chance,” she hissed, “before I walk out of this place and take my chances out there and go live my life in 1999 without you. I can’t stay here anymore.” She turned her back so the Doctor wouldn’t see the tears welling in her eyes and started to walk away.
She made it about four steps before she heard him stand up behind her. “Before you go,” he said, “tell me. Didn’t you feel tempted? To record your dreams?”
I mean, really. So this is probably the part where I talk about the movie this crosses over with *SPOILER ALERT*. In the movie, the only person who doesn't get addicted to watching their dreams is Gene, Claire's former lover. As in this fic, he's a novelist, and while everyone else is busily fucking up their lives, he sits and writes a novel that he eventually gives to Claire to "cure" her of the disease of dreams. It's an interesting ending for a visual art form, to basically tell the viewer: Images are dangerous, words heal. All of the characters that do get addicted are sympathetic protagonists (well, except Dr. Farber who isn't as much of a butt-munch as I make him here but is pretty screwed up as a dad), succumbing to the tempation is not presented as a character flaw in any way, but something very natural that most people would want. So, what sort of people are the ones who can resist this? Gene can because he lives his dreams through words. And Rose?
Before you go. She closed her eyes and let the tears fall freely.
“You were my dream.” She felt naked, raw, suddenly losing her will to fight this. It was all going wrong, and not at the hands of some super-villain on a far off planet, but inside the Doctor’s own mind. Every step as she walked away she expected to hear him behind her, but no sound ever came.
She resists because no one's dreams could ever be as magnificent as her life with the Doctor is. She wants for nothing with him. I think part of what attracted me to writing htis story is that one would expect Rose, the human (and a flawed character--she's no Mary Sue, she's selfish in her desire to be with the Doctor at any expense) would be the one to be tempted by this, but the fact that she's so incredibly invested in traveling with the Doctor and being with him is what makes her impervious to the temptation to watch her dreams. Meanwhile, he's the one who's still got a hole in his soul that he's trying to fill constantly in various ways, despite his great age and wisdom.