(no subject)
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).
It was a one in a million coincidence. The TARDIS flown slightly off course, as was her quirk, and a dull thud in the distance outside the doors as the console went dead and all systems went down.
With no windows, the dark was completely impenetrable. The human eye can adjust to low light, but no matter how wide her pupils dilated, Rose was unable to see if she was even right side up or upside down in the hallway where she’d been making her way to the console room.
“Doctor?” she called, stopping in her tracks to avoid running in to anything. She tried not to panic in the moments before she saw a faint blue light at the end of the hall, tried not to think about all the places they may be stranded, the TARDIS perhaps broken beyond repair this time. “Doctor? Is that you?”
The blue light bobbed up and down.
“Just a momentary glitch, Rose, nothing to worry about.” The Doctor’s voice was chipper in that way that unmistakably said that there was perhaps something to worry about, and the glitch might be slightly more than momentary.
She walked tentatively towards the light, lifting her feet higher than normal for fear of tripping. The floor of the TARDIS in this area was a metal grate and from experience she knew it was less than comfortable to fall on. The Doctor held the sonic screwdriver aloft to guide her in and by its faint light she could see that he held out his hand to guide her through the doorway in to the console room. The dark was so disorienting, she grabbed it much more firmly than she’d really intended and the sonic blinked off as he let go of its control.
“Oi!”
“Sorry. Can you see anything in here? I can’t see a thing!” She softened her grip and held her other hand in front of her face warily.
“Well, I’ve got more rods and cones than you, but it does get awfully dark in here when the lighting systems are down, even for me.” He was talking rapidly as he guided her towards the railing by the door and placed her there, like someone tying a dog up to a railing. “Looks like we’ve had an EMP-an electromagnetic pulse, it stops all electronic equipment for a microsecond. Well, actually there’s the primary EMP and then the magnetohydrodynamic EMP for a few seconds after. Totally normal physical process.”
Rose screwed up her eyes to see if she could make out the look on the Doctor’s face at all. His tone was all technobabble and his usual excitability, but he still hadn’t explained what was actually, currently, wrong with the TARDIS. She decided to just go for the direct approach.
“So, if this EMP thing just lasts for a few seconds, why are we still in the dark?”
He had left her immediate vicinity, she could tell by the sound of his trainers on the floor of the console room, moving here and there, checking this and that. Suddenly the blue light of the sonic screwdriver made another appearance and she could see by its light that he had put his specs on and was poking at something under the console.
“She needs some time to reboot her systems,” he said breezily as he turned the sonic off and plunged them both in to total darkness again. “The sonic works because it’s such a simple device, it takes nearly no time to recover. The TARDIS needs a bit more….leisure.”
“So we just sit here in the dark then?”
There was a pause and then, “Naaah. We’re on Earth! Sol Three! The Solar System! The Milky Way!”
Perhaps with his greater number of rods and cones he could see her eyebrows lift. “Yeah?”
“Oh yes! Slightly off course, but definitely Earth, definitely the 20th century. And the only recorded incidence of a large-scale EMP in the 20th century on Earth was…”
He opened the TARDIS doors with a flourish.
Rose nearly was unable to hear his further explanation as a blinding, harsh, white light flooded her senses-all of her senses. She could hear it, smell it, feel the photons hitting her skin. She instinctively brought her hand up to shield her eyes as the Doctor continued unhindered.
“1999 was the year the Indian nuclear satellite went out of control. D’you remember that, Rose?”
She struggled to regain control of her senses. “I was thirteen, Doctor. All I remember about 1999 was that Gavin Lloyd snogged me underneath the stairs outside the Estate and mum caught us and I was grounded for a month.”
“Well, there would really have been no reason for you to pay any attention to it. Its trajectory made it primarily the problem of the Southern hemisphere.” He stepped outside the doors as he spoke, and at that exact moment, the heat hit Rose.
“Bloody hell!” she exclaimed, forgetting her manners. “It’s like an oven out there!”
And indeed the sensation was very much that of standing in front of an oven and opening the door, feeling the hot wind wash over you, coming close to singeing and burning your face. The Doctor, with his more efficient binary vascular system merely loosened his tie slightly and reached inside his coat pocket for some sunglasses. He beckoned to her with a grin.
“C’mon! Look at it out here, it’s glorious! The desolation, the vastness, the danger!” At the last word he twittled his fingers about and hopped up and down on each foot in what Rose figured must be some sort of menacing gesture.
She tentatively stepped out and shut the door behind her. “So we’re on Earth, it’s 1999, but this doesn’t look like any part of Earth I’ve ever seen.”
“Welcome to the Australian outback, Rose Tyler.” The Doctor made a sweeping gesture with his rangy arms and doubled the size of his grin. “I’d guess about 400 kilometers outside of Coober Pedy....”
“What-y Whose-y?” Rose surveyed their surroundings, finally adjusted to the unrelenting sunlight. In all directions was this dry, dusty, brown nothingness, punctuated by a few rocks and tumbleweeds here and there, and to the right about a mile away a sharp cliff face.
“Coober Pedy, the opal capital of the world. Of the universe really. Opals are only formed on Earth, unlike most gems which, are naturally occurring in most galaxies. They catch quite a price in the jewelry market of Yarox IV, so if you see one on the ground, well, you can go ahead and treat me to dinner next time we’re there. I quite like the cuisine. Well, I say quite like, it’s okay. Well, I say it’s okay, they’ve got a few tasty dishes. Well, I say a few tasty dishes….but I do enjoy Yaroxian coffee. You can buy me a coffee! A lot of coffee, a really big coffee!” As he jabbered, he’d begun walking, striding on his long legs, his two hearts pumping away in the heat, seemingly paying no attention to Rose puffing and sweating and turning red behind him, scurrying to keep up.
“Doctor!” She huffed, about 6 meters behind him. “Where are we going?”
“Sonic picks up humanoid life forms this way, can’t be that far.” He turned around suddenly, “Come on now Rose, all the exercise we get, you should be in peak physical condition! Spit spot!”
“Should we really be leaving the TARDIS behind? Is it safe?”
“Oh, she’s perfectly safe, absolutely.” He held an open hand behind him and wiggled his fingers.
When Rose went to take his hand she found it cool to the touch, dry, almost refreshing in a way. He helped her keep momentum up with a slight tug. No matter how many times they went through this drill, him grabbing her hand and tugging her this way and that, towards and away from danger, she remained perplexed at how such a slight frame could have such physical power. It thrilled her that she was one of few beings in the Universe that truly knew first-hand the power of the unassuming-looking chappie in the long coat and canvass trainers.
As he brought her forward to walk abreast with him, he continued his monologue, “In 1999 the Indian nuclear satellite went out of control. No one knew where it would land. It soared above the ozone layer like a lethal bird of prey.” He smirked, “Oh, I quite like that! A lethal bird of prey! I should write that down! Anyway, they did soon figure out that it could be shot out of the sky somewhere in the Southern hemisphere, but no one really knew what effect that would have on the surrounding area. And that’s where the EMP came from. A nuclear detonation creates an electro-magnetic pulse, and the electro-magnetic pulse is what creates our current predicament. What an adventure!”
Rose continued to sweat and huff next to him, but the trajectory they were walking was placing them ever closer to the cliff face she’d spied in the distance on her first survey of their surroundings. “Is that….where we’re…going?” She panted, and pointed.
“There’s definitely some people over there, and you know how much I can’t resist meeting new people. Why sit around in the dark waiting for the TARDIS to do her thing when we could be making new friends?”
“People? Out here?” Rose was incredulous. It wasn’t the Powell Estates, and she had seen quite a few strange places that people lived quite happily, but this?
The Doctor just shrugged and continued his bee-line until they arrived at a wooden sign indicating that all new arrivals should wait there to be assessed for radiation contamination.
(To Chapter 2)
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).
It was a one in a million coincidence. The TARDIS flown slightly off course, as was her quirk, and a dull thud in the distance outside the doors as the console went dead and all systems went down.
With no windows, the dark was completely impenetrable. The human eye can adjust to low light, but no matter how wide her pupils dilated, Rose was unable to see if she was even right side up or upside down in the hallway where she’d been making her way to the console room.
“Doctor?” she called, stopping in her tracks to avoid running in to anything. She tried not to panic in the moments before she saw a faint blue light at the end of the hall, tried not to think about all the places they may be stranded, the TARDIS perhaps broken beyond repair this time. “Doctor? Is that you?”
The blue light bobbed up and down.
“Just a momentary glitch, Rose, nothing to worry about.” The Doctor’s voice was chipper in that way that unmistakably said that there was perhaps something to worry about, and the glitch might be slightly more than momentary.
She walked tentatively towards the light, lifting her feet higher than normal for fear of tripping. The floor of the TARDIS in this area was a metal grate and from experience she knew it was less than comfortable to fall on. The Doctor held the sonic screwdriver aloft to guide her in and by its faint light she could see that he held out his hand to guide her through the doorway in to the console room. The dark was so disorienting, she grabbed it much more firmly than she’d really intended and the sonic blinked off as he let go of its control.
“Oi!”
“Sorry. Can you see anything in here? I can’t see a thing!” She softened her grip and held her other hand in front of her face warily.
“Well, I’ve got more rods and cones than you, but it does get awfully dark in here when the lighting systems are down, even for me.” He was talking rapidly as he guided her towards the railing by the door and placed her there, like someone tying a dog up to a railing. “Looks like we’ve had an EMP-an electromagnetic pulse, it stops all electronic equipment for a microsecond. Well, actually there’s the primary EMP and then the magnetohydrodynamic EMP for a few seconds after. Totally normal physical process.”
Rose screwed up her eyes to see if she could make out the look on the Doctor’s face at all. His tone was all technobabble and his usual excitability, but he still hadn’t explained what was actually, currently, wrong with the TARDIS. She decided to just go for the direct approach.
“So, if this EMP thing just lasts for a few seconds, why are we still in the dark?”
He had left her immediate vicinity, she could tell by the sound of his trainers on the floor of the console room, moving here and there, checking this and that. Suddenly the blue light of the sonic screwdriver made another appearance and she could see by its light that he had put his specs on and was poking at something under the console.
“She needs some time to reboot her systems,” he said breezily as he turned the sonic off and plunged them both in to total darkness again. “The sonic works because it’s such a simple device, it takes nearly no time to recover. The TARDIS needs a bit more….leisure.”
“So we just sit here in the dark then?”
There was a pause and then, “Naaah. We’re on Earth! Sol Three! The Solar System! The Milky Way!”
Perhaps with his greater number of rods and cones he could see her eyebrows lift. “Yeah?”
“Oh yes! Slightly off course, but definitely Earth, definitely the 20th century. And the only recorded incidence of a large-scale EMP in the 20th century on Earth was…”
He opened the TARDIS doors with a flourish.
Rose nearly was unable to hear his further explanation as a blinding, harsh, white light flooded her senses-all of her senses. She could hear it, smell it, feel the photons hitting her skin. She instinctively brought her hand up to shield her eyes as the Doctor continued unhindered.
“1999 was the year the Indian nuclear satellite went out of control. D’you remember that, Rose?”
She struggled to regain control of her senses. “I was thirteen, Doctor. All I remember about 1999 was that Gavin Lloyd snogged me underneath the stairs outside the Estate and mum caught us and I was grounded for a month.”
“Well, there would really have been no reason for you to pay any attention to it. Its trajectory made it primarily the problem of the Southern hemisphere.” He stepped outside the doors as he spoke, and at that exact moment, the heat hit Rose.
“Bloody hell!” she exclaimed, forgetting her manners. “It’s like an oven out there!”
And indeed the sensation was very much that of standing in front of an oven and opening the door, feeling the hot wind wash over you, coming close to singeing and burning your face. The Doctor, with his more efficient binary vascular system merely loosened his tie slightly and reached inside his coat pocket for some sunglasses. He beckoned to her with a grin.
“C’mon! Look at it out here, it’s glorious! The desolation, the vastness, the danger!” At the last word he twittled his fingers about and hopped up and down on each foot in what Rose figured must be some sort of menacing gesture.
She tentatively stepped out and shut the door behind her. “So we’re on Earth, it’s 1999, but this doesn’t look like any part of Earth I’ve ever seen.”
“Welcome to the Australian outback, Rose Tyler.” The Doctor made a sweeping gesture with his rangy arms and doubled the size of his grin. “I’d guess about 400 kilometers outside of Coober Pedy....”
“What-y Whose-y?” Rose surveyed their surroundings, finally adjusted to the unrelenting sunlight. In all directions was this dry, dusty, brown nothingness, punctuated by a few rocks and tumbleweeds here and there, and to the right about a mile away a sharp cliff face.
“Coober Pedy, the opal capital of the world. Of the universe really. Opals are only formed on Earth, unlike most gems which, are naturally occurring in most galaxies. They catch quite a price in the jewelry market of Yarox IV, so if you see one on the ground, well, you can go ahead and treat me to dinner next time we’re there. I quite like the cuisine. Well, I say quite like, it’s okay. Well, I say it’s okay, they’ve got a few tasty dishes. Well, I say a few tasty dishes….but I do enjoy Yaroxian coffee. You can buy me a coffee! A lot of coffee, a really big coffee!” As he jabbered, he’d begun walking, striding on his long legs, his two hearts pumping away in the heat, seemingly paying no attention to Rose puffing and sweating and turning red behind him, scurrying to keep up.
“Doctor!” She huffed, about 6 meters behind him. “Where are we going?”
“Sonic picks up humanoid life forms this way, can’t be that far.” He turned around suddenly, “Come on now Rose, all the exercise we get, you should be in peak physical condition! Spit spot!”
“Should we really be leaving the TARDIS behind? Is it safe?”
“Oh, she’s perfectly safe, absolutely.” He held an open hand behind him and wiggled his fingers.
When Rose went to take his hand she found it cool to the touch, dry, almost refreshing in a way. He helped her keep momentum up with a slight tug. No matter how many times they went through this drill, him grabbing her hand and tugging her this way and that, towards and away from danger, she remained perplexed at how such a slight frame could have such physical power. It thrilled her that she was one of few beings in the Universe that truly knew first-hand the power of the unassuming-looking chappie in the long coat and canvass trainers.
As he brought her forward to walk abreast with him, he continued his monologue, “In 1999 the Indian nuclear satellite went out of control. No one knew where it would land. It soared above the ozone layer like a lethal bird of prey.” He smirked, “Oh, I quite like that! A lethal bird of prey! I should write that down! Anyway, they did soon figure out that it could be shot out of the sky somewhere in the Southern hemisphere, but no one really knew what effect that would have on the surrounding area. And that’s where the EMP came from. A nuclear detonation creates an electro-magnetic pulse, and the electro-magnetic pulse is what creates our current predicament. What an adventure!”
Rose continued to sweat and huff next to him, but the trajectory they were walking was placing them ever closer to the cliff face she’d spied in the distance on her first survey of their surroundings. “Is that….where we’re…going?” She panted, and pointed.
“There’s definitely some people over there, and you know how much I can’t resist meeting new people. Why sit around in the dark waiting for the TARDIS to do her thing when we could be making new friends?”
“People? Out here?” Rose was incredulous. It wasn’t the Powell Estates, and she had seen quite a few strange places that people lived quite happily, but this?
The Doctor just shrugged and continued his bee-line until they arrived at a wooden sign indicating that all new arrivals should wait there to be assessed for radiation contamination.
(To Chapter 2)