Gravity [Jenny/Astrid] (Home)
Pairing: Jenny/Astrid
Challenge: Home
Rating: G
Warnings: None, unless you have a problem with kissing people who are basically dead and insubstantial.
Spoilers: Voyage of the Damned & The Doctor's Daughter
Summary: The cosmos is a better place if you can share it with someone.
The cosmos is much bigger than expected.
She sees planets, moons, star clusters. Watches the suns rise on worlds where the sky has a colour and feels the wind in her hair. Meets people who look like her and people who don’t. Learns the names of a hundred species and not one able to understand her words. So many planets, with invisible lines drawn on their surfaces, and too many languages for anyone to know what the other is saying.
She still has a lot of learning to do.
-
On many worlds there is fighting going on and she tries to teach them the first lesson she ever learned. They don’t listen. She begins to understand him a little better. Wherever she goes, death is already there and although that was the world she’s been born (generated) into it doesn’t feel like home.
Saving planets isn’t as easy as she thought it would be. It is hard enough to save a single person.
But even that is worth the effort. This was the second lesson she learned.
-
She’s left the world that created her, didn’t stay to see the new world it became. A tiny little globe in an endless space. There are only limitations down there. Gravity is a prison.
So many worlds, so many little spheres of life. She loves them, feels the excitement but never seems able to share it. It’s a lonely journey.
And a long one. Never does she stay longer than days, feeling like she’s missing her life trapped in a glass case.
There are galaxies out there, calling for her with their distant suns and alien nebulas. All she can do is call back, from this terrible distance. Her tiny ship can carry her only so far.
-
The worlds she sees are frightening or dull or full of beauty. Some take her breath away but she always climbs back into the shuttle she’s stolen, calls it home and takes off to another place she’d never see if she stayed.
She’s run so far but it never feels far enough.
If she stops she’ll never catch up with him.
-
The ghost comes to her in the endless night of outer space, when she watches a small blue planet on its long way around its yellow star and wonders if he’s ever been here, ever seen the light of the rising sun reflected on these oceans. She doesn’t sleep much but she dreams.
The ghost circles round her vessel like the tail of an asteroid, like stardust. She doesn’t open the door but invites it anyway and in it comes, explores her home in a flash of glittering lights. She offers her hand and doesn’t speak when another hand is laid into hers, translucent, glowing. Living starlight.
-
The ship is tiny but it’s enough for her (them) as long as the space around has no limits. The ghost smiles its pretty smile all the time and dances around her home in a form that doesn’t need room to dance. There is a cosmos out there for it to explore but there is no anchor to keep it from getting lost in the darkness. She understands this through the words they never exchange. In the blackness the little ghost has found its beacon of light in her, its very own centre of gravity.
You’re like him, it tells her one day, when she’s watching the red sunset on a world where the sky is burning and the walls of reality are thin and brittle. She never asks.
-
She can’t feel its hair under her palm but she imagines it soft and silken. The lips that touch hers are like the petals of a flower and taste of sunshine. They circle around each other like satellites as they’re falling through space.
The cosmos isn’t any better or bigger now she’s no longer alone but she finds she appreciates it more when she can share it with someone who wants to see it as much as she does. From time to time her ghost takes her hand in a touch she can almost feel and together they run. They’re always running.
And while they’re running they laugh.
May 20, 2008
Challenge: Home
Rating: G
Warnings: None, unless you have a problem with kissing people who are basically dead and insubstantial.
Spoilers: Voyage of the Damned & The Doctor's Daughter
Summary: The cosmos is a better place if you can share it with someone.
The cosmos is much bigger than expected.
She sees planets, moons, star clusters. Watches the suns rise on worlds where the sky has a colour and feels the wind in her hair. Meets people who look like her and people who don’t. Learns the names of a hundred species and not one able to understand her words. So many planets, with invisible lines drawn on their surfaces, and too many languages for anyone to know what the other is saying.
She still has a lot of learning to do.
-
On many worlds there is fighting going on and she tries to teach them the first lesson she ever learned. They don’t listen. She begins to understand him a little better. Wherever she goes, death is already there and although that was the world she’s been born (generated) into it doesn’t feel like home.
Saving planets isn’t as easy as she thought it would be. It is hard enough to save a single person.
But even that is worth the effort. This was the second lesson she learned.
-
She’s left the world that created her, didn’t stay to see the new world it became. A tiny little globe in an endless space. There are only limitations down there. Gravity is a prison.
So many worlds, so many little spheres of life. She loves them, feels the excitement but never seems able to share it. It’s a lonely journey.
And a long one. Never does she stay longer than days, feeling like she’s missing her life trapped in a glass case.
There are galaxies out there, calling for her with their distant suns and alien nebulas. All she can do is call back, from this terrible distance. Her tiny ship can carry her only so far.
-
The worlds she sees are frightening or dull or full of beauty. Some take her breath away but she always climbs back into the shuttle she’s stolen, calls it home and takes off to another place she’d never see if she stayed.
She’s run so far but it never feels far enough.
If she stops she’ll never catch up with him.
-
The ghost comes to her in the endless night of outer space, when she watches a small blue planet on its long way around its yellow star and wonders if he’s ever been here, ever seen the light of the rising sun reflected on these oceans. She doesn’t sleep much but she dreams.
The ghost circles round her vessel like the tail of an asteroid, like stardust. She doesn’t open the door but invites it anyway and in it comes, explores her home in a flash of glittering lights. She offers her hand and doesn’t speak when another hand is laid into hers, translucent, glowing. Living starlight.
-
The ship is tiny but it’s enough for her (them) as long as the space around has no limits. The ghost smiles its pretty smile all the time and dances around her home in a form that doesn’t need room to dance. There is a cosmos out there for it to explore but there is no anchor to keep it from getting lost in the darkness. She understands this through the words they never exchange. In the blackness the little ghost has found its beacon of light in her, its very own centre of gravity.
You’re like him, it tells her one day, when she’s watching the red sunset on a world where the sky is burning and the walls of reality are thin and brittle. She never asks.
-
She can’t feel its hair under her palm but she imagines it soft and silken. The lips that touch hers are like the petals of a flower and taste of sunshine. They circle around each other like satellites as they’re falling through space.
The cosmos isn’t any better or bigger now she’s no longer alone but she finds she appreciates it more when she can share it with someone who wants to see it as much as she does. From time to time her ghost takes her hand in a touch she can almost feel and together they run. They’re always running.
And while they’re running they laugh.
May 20, 2008