Flowers on Air 6/11
TITLE: Flowers on Air
CHARACTERS: Ten/Rose, OC (lots)
RATING: PG/Teen
SPOILERS: None past mid-series-2
SUMMARY: After being temporarily stranded in 1999, the Doctor is faced with a temptation he may not be able to turn from. Can Rose save him from himself?
DISCLAIMER: If I owned any of these characters, I'd have already released a collectors edition of Until the End of the World on region 1 DVD. BBC, RTD, Wim Wenders, full props.
A/N: This is a crossover fic between Doctor Who and the mid-90's film Until the End of the World. Knowing anything about the movie is not required (besides, I'm taking some liberties, and then the Doctor shows up and the timeline's all shot to hell anyway).
This chapter: A new use for the camera is proposed, after seeing the world for the first time in decades turns out to not be such a great thing.
It had begun so innocently. Bringing sight to the sightless, a task so Doctorish it was like an unseen power had brought him to this place, to assist, to improve, to tinker with the wires and processors that made it all possible.
Rose had no choice but to take the Doctor at his word. All of time and space, laid out before him, he was the one who should know what he was doing. What choice did she have but to trust him, as she had so many times before? She at least made a small attempt to not appear to be the party-pooper. When Sam Farber and his new French lover Claire Tourneur (it is in fact always a woman, as it turns out) turned up along with the miraculous camera, she took it upon herself to act as Claire’s advocate. She could tell what sort of family these Farbers were, the kind that bolsters itself against outsiders, brings them in by requiring that they go on several dangerous quests like so many Knights Errant, sucks them dry, and demands complete obedience. While Claire seemed stubborn and intelligent, Rose also caught a distinct whiff of the naïve. Keeping one eye on Claire was what the Doctor liked to call the Domestic Approach and Rose took her role in the relationship seriously. She might not be able to wave a sonic device around and totally reprogram a supercomputer, but she could make an effort to try to save a woman from herself.
Claire Tourneur as it turned out was a gifted “photographer” when it came to the special camera. There was much blustering and stomping about when it became clear that the mysterious Sam Farber was so royally screwed up by his family that he couldn’t even come close to achieving the level of concentration needed for the computers to read his brainwaves clearly. But Claire, she was different. Elegant, measured in her words, and extremely French, the computer seemed to adore her, as indeed most everyone else did as well. She excelled at projecting the electrical impulses of her frontal cortex into the computer, creating images that were pixilated and blurry, but of enough quality that one could clearly see what or who had been filmed. Rose thought she’d better keep one eye on the Doctor as well, given his propensity to do foolish things in the presence of haughty French ladies.
And thus it began.
Edith Farber lost her sight when she was 8 years old. For over six decades, in her mind’s eye the world looked as it does to a child. Her whole life she had sought knowledge of the world and its people, based on her firm belief that the world is beautiful and that people are good. She adored Claire, as a fellow Frenchwoman, but in the end it was Claire who was her undoing.
For Claire showed her what the world really looked like. Edith’s own children appeared and then aged decades in a single moment. Childhood friends, last seen skipping merrily down European cobblestone streets, suddenly manifested as shriveled and hunched crones in dark moldy apartments. The muddy colors of the modern world swirled and swam across the screen. Edith Farber began to descend in to the blackest despair, going in to mourning for everything she had lost, silently and without complaint. Dr. Henry Farber had dedicated his life to bringing her this, and it had turned out to be a gift of a sideshow horror. Given the choice between succumbing to her own grief and killing the father of her children by throwing this gift back in to his face, she embraced the former.
Rose watched, as it all went wrong. Neither Dr. Farber, nor the lab technicians, nor the Doctor, were able to see that the tears of Edith Farber were not shed out of joy. In the brief moments when the Doctor was not working in the lab, Rose made several attempts to express her misgivings, but she had no empirical evidence to present him with. She began to wonder if the Domestic Approach was code for Just Get Out of My Way.
“Her vital signs are all good for a woman her age,” said the Doctor. “She comes to the lab of her own volition, that I know. We never know when she’ll show up, but she does, every day, to see a little bit more.”
Rose chewed on her bottom lip and tried to figure out how to phrase things so as not to sound completely insane.
“She’s not right, Doctor. The way she walks, the way she talks to me and to Claire-“
“Oh, she just loves Claire! They’re always nattering on in French, though I’ve not let on that you and I can understand them, but I try not to listen in. Too much work for me to do in there anyway. This technology is astounding! It’s got so much potential, even beyond being used by the blind.” The Doctor shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth on his heels. “And every time we project images, the computer gets better at reading the brain waves. It learns, Rose! It adapts and makes allowances, like it’s dancing in rhythm with Claire as she works with the camera. Beautiful!”
The Doctor was overcome with the feeling of being so very helpful to someone, and took Rose around the shoulders with one long arm and squeezed her to him. She looked up at him and was hard pressed to find it in herself to rain on his parade. But she still could not enjoy the moment, being so close to him that she could feel his hearts beating, see the pulses fluttering at his neck, it was not comforting as it should have been. How she wanted to just remove herself, and he, from this situation bodily and just lose herself in the feel of him, with nothing to distract from the exquisite pain of it.
He released her without ceremony.
“Just please, be careful with them both, with Claire and Mrs. Farber.” Rose fixed her hair again from where the Doctor’s arm had mussed it. “They’re just humans. Don’t push too hard.”
“What, me? Push anyone too hard? You must have me mistaken for some other Doctor.”
Within a week, Edith Farber had taken to her bed, sick at heart and finally unable to hide it. Rose had hoped that this would mean the end of their stay at the centre, the experiment clearly having gone slightly awry, having not included the human element in the complex equations involved. But the technology was there, able to be studied and improved upon by others. It seemed like a good time to make their goodbyes and walk back out to the desert, to the waiting TARDIS. Rose had planned to speak with the Doctor after dinner one evening. That is, until Claire began to talk about her recurring dreams.
She dreamed, she said, that she was flying high over the Earth. But then the flying turned to falling and the falling to terror until she woke screaming.
“I don’t know what it means,” she said. “I’ve had that dream all my life and it’s like there’s something always off to the side that I can’t see. If I could see it, I could grab on to it and keep myself from falling. If I could just do it once, maybe I’d never fall again in my dreams.”
The conversation moved on, and the rest of those assembled shared the vague memories they each held of their own dreams, or talked about dreaming in general, about symbolism in dreams and what it means when you dream of eating oranges. The Doctor contributed his own rather random knowledge of dream symbolism, much of which Rose imagined came from too much time spent in the medieval period because his tidbits made very little actual sense. Finally in a lull in the conversation, the Doctor reached in to his pocket and put his glasses on. He liked to do this for effect when he had something particularly important to say. Rose resisted the temptation to roll her eyes.
“We can show you your dreams,” he said, with a great deal of gravitas.
Rose let out a small giggle, thinking the Doctor was putting one over, playing the mysterious fortune-teller or tea leaf reader.
“Be serious,” she said.
He turned his bright bespectacled eyes fully on her, and she saw.
“I am being serious.,” he said. “All that camera does is extract information from the brain’s cerebral cortex. It doesn’t have to be what you’re literally seeing. It could be anything your brain thinks it’s seeing. Dr. Farber and I have discussed it a few times. Purely theoretical of course, but it wouldn’t take that much retooling of the software. A couple days’ work. One day if I’m the one doing it.” He flashed a grin.
The small group assembled at the table--a couple of lab technicians, Claire, Sam, Mr. Fitzpatrick, and Rose--looked at one another, and then back at the Doctor, repeatedly.
“Could you really,” began Claire, the odor of naiveté coming off her in waves.
“Absolutement, Mme. Tourneur!” he squeaked. “Just give me a bit of time and I’d say we’ll have you back flying in your dreams in no time!”
Sam reached over, as he often did, and kissed Claire on the cheek and smiled broadly. Mr. Fitzpatrick bristled. Rose couldn’t tell if he was reacting to the sight of his former lover making googly-eyes at Sam Farber (for that was the relationship between them, as far as Rose could suss out) or if it was something more akin to what Rose was feeling.
When would this end? When could they get back on to the TARDIS, where Rose could once again have the Doctor all to herself, where the dreams being discussed were hers and hers only. And where they came true on an hourly basis.
(To Chapter 7)
CHARACTERS: Ten/Rose, OC (lots)
RATING: PG/Teen
SPOILERS: None past mid-series-2
SUMMARY: After being temporarily stranded in 1999, the Doctor is faced with a temptation he may not be able to turn from. Can Rose save him from himself?
DISCLAIMER: If I owned any of these characters, I'd have already released a collectors edition of Until the End of the World on region 1 DVD. BBC, RTD, Wim Wenders, full props.
A/N: This is a crossover fic between Doctor Who and the mid-90's film Until the End of the World. Knowing anything about the movie is not required (besides, I'm taking some liberties, and then the Doctor shows up and the timeline's all shot to hell anyway).
This chapter: A new use for the camera is proposed, after seeing the world for the first time in decades turns out to not be such a great thing.
It had begun so innocently. Bringing sight to the sightless, a task so Doctorish it was like an unseen power had brought him to this place, to assist, to improve, to tinker with the wires and processors that made it all possible.
Rose had no choice but to take the Doctor at his word. All of time and space, laid out before him, he was the one who should know what he was doing. What choice did she have but to trust him, as she had so many times before? She at least made a small attempt to not appear to be the party-pooper. When Sam Farber and his new French lover Claire Tourneur (it is in fact always a woman, as it turns out) turned up along with the miraculous camera, she took it upon herself to act as Claire’s advocate. She could tell what sort of family these Farbers were, the kind that bolsters itself against outsiders, brings them in by requiring that they go on several dangerous quests like so many Knights Errant, sucks them dry, and demands complete obedience. While Claire seemed stubborn and intelligent, Rose also caught a distinct whiff of the naïve. Keeping one eye on Claire was what the Doctor liked to call the Domestic Approach and Rose took her role in the relationship seriously. She might not be able to wave a sonic device around and totally reprogram a supercomputer, but she could make an effort to try to save a woman from herself.
Claire Tourneur as it turned out was a gifted “photographer” when it came to the special camera. There was much blustering and stomping about when it became clear that the mysterious Sam Farber was so royally screwed up by his family that he couldn’t even come close to achieving the level of concentration needed for the computers to read his brainwaves clearly. But Claire, she was different. Elegant, measured in her words, and extremely French, the computer seemed to adore her, as indeed most everyone else did as well. She excelled at projecting the electrical impulses of her frontal cortex into the computer, creating images that were pixilated and blurry, but of enough quality that one could clearly see what or who had been filmed. Rose thought she’d better keep one eye on the Doctor as well, given his propensity to do foolish things in the presence of haughty French ladies.
And thus it began.
Edith Farber lost her sight when she was 8 years old. For over six decades, in her mind’s eye the world looked as it does to a child. Her whole life she had sought knowledge of the world and its people, based on her firm belief that the world is beautiful and that people are good. She adored Claire, as a fellow Frenchwoman, but in the end it was Claire who was her undoing.
For Claire showed her what the world really looked like. Edith’s own children appeared and then aged decades in a single moment. Childhood friends, last seen skipping merrily down European cobblestone streets, suddenly manifested as shriveled and hunched crones in dark moldy apartments. The muddy colors of the modern world swirled and swam across the screen. Edith Farber began to descend in to the blackest despair, going in to mourning for everything she had lost, silently and without complaint. Dr. Henry Farber had dedicated his life to bringing her this, and it had turned out to be a gift of a sideshow horror. Given the choice between succumbing to her own grief and killing the father of her children by throwing this gift back in to his face, she embraced the former.
Rose watched, as it all went wrong. Neither Dr. Farber, nor the lab technicians, nor the Doctor, were able to see that the tears of Edith Farber were not shed out of joy. In the brief moments when the Doctor was not working in the lab, Rose made several attempts to express her misgivings, but she had no empirical evidence to present him with. She began to wonder if the Domestic Approach was code for Just Get Out of My Way.
“Her vital signs are all good for a woman her age,” said the Doctor. “She comes to the lab of her own volition, that I know. We never know when she’ll show up, but she does, every day, to see a little bit more.”
Rose chewed on her bottom lip and tried to figure out how to phrase things so as not to sound completely insane.
“She’s not right, Doctor. The way she walks, the way she talks to me and to Claire-“
“Oh, she just loves Claire! They’re always nattering on in French, though I’ve not let on that you and I can understand them, but I try not to listen in. Too much work for me to do in there anyway. This technology is astounding! It’s got so much potential, even beyond being used by the blind.” The Doctor shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth on his heels. “And every time we project images, the computer gets better at reading the brain waves. It learns, Rose! It adapts and makes allowances, like it’s dancing in rhythm with Claire as she works with the camera. Beautiful!”
The Doctor was overcome with the feeling of being so very helpful to someone, and took Rose around the shoulders with one long arm and squeezed her to him. She looked up at him and was hard pressed to find it in herself to rain on his parade. But she still could not enjoy the moment, being so close to him that she could feel his hearts beating, see the pulses fluttering at his neck, it was not comforting as it should have been. How she wanted to just remove herself, and he, from this situation bodily and just lose herself in the feel of him, with nothing to distract from the exquisite pain of it.
He released her without ceremony.
“Just please, be careful with them both, with Claire and Mrs. Farber.” Rose fixed her hair again from where the Doctor’s arm had mussed it. “They’re just humans. Don’t push too hard.”
“What, me? Push anyone too hard? You must have me mistaken for some other Doctor.”
Within a week, Edith Farber had taken to her bed, sick at heart and finally unable to hide it. Rose had hoped that this would mean the end of their stay at the centre, the experiment clearly having gone slightly awry, having not included the human element in the complex equations involved. But the technology was there, able to be studied and improved upon by others. It seemed like a good time to make their goodbyes and walk back out to the desert, to the waiting TARDIS. Rose had planned to speak with the Doctor after dinner one evening. That is, until Claire began to talk about her recurring dreams.
She dreamed, she said, that she was flying high over the Earth. But then the flying turned to falling and the falling to terror until she woke screaming.
“I don’t know what it means,” she said. “I’ve had that dream all my life and it’s like there’s something always off to the side that I can’t see. If I could see it, I could grab on to it and keep myself from falling. If I could just do it once, maybe I’d never fall again in my dreams.”
The conversation moved on, and the rest of those assembled shared the vague memories they each held of their own dreams, or talked about dreaming in general, about symbolism in dreams and what it means when you dream of eating oranges. The Doctor contributed his own rather random knowledge of dream symbolism, much of which Rose imagined came from too much time spent in the medieval period because his tidbits made very little actual sense. Finally in a lull in the conversation, the Doctor reached in to his pocket and put his glasses on. He liked to do this for effect when he had something particularly important to say. Rose resisted the temptation to roll her eyes.
“We can show you your dreams,” he said, with a great deal of gravitas.
Rose let out a small giggle, thinking the Doctor was putting one over, playing the mysterious fortune-teller or tea leaf reader.
“Be serious,” she said.
He turned his bright bespectacled eyes fully on her, and she saw.
“I am being serious.,” he said. “All that camera does is extract information from the brain’s cerebral cortex. It doesn’t have to be what you’re literally seeing. It could be anything your brain thinks it’s seeing. Dr. Farber and I have discussed it a few times. Purely theoretical of course, but it wouldn’t take that much retooling of the software. A couple days’ work. One day if I’m the one doing it.” He flashed a grin.
The small group assembled at the table--a couple of lab technicians, Claire, Sam, Mr. Fitzpatrick, and Rose--looked at one another, and then back at the Doctor, repeatedly.
“Could you really,” began Claire, the odor of naiveté coming off her in waves.
“Absolutement, Mme. Tourneur!” he squeaked. “Just give me a bit of time and I’d say we’ll have you back flying in your dreams in no time!”
Sam reached over, as he often did, and kissed Claire on the cheek and smiled broadly. Mr. Fitzpatrick bristled. Rose couldn’t tell if he was reacting to the sight of his former lover making googly-eyes at Sam Farber (for that was the relationship between them, as far as Rose could suss out) or if it was something more akin to what Rose was feeling.
When would this end? When could they get back on to the TARDIS, where Rose could once again have the Doctor all to herself, where the dreams being discussed were hers and hers only. And where they came true on an hourly basis.
(To Chapter 7)