vail-kagami: Ornithology for Beginners (Jack/Ten) [PG]
Title: Ornithology for Beginners
Author:
vail_kagami
Beta: nightrider101
Challenge: Infosharing
Rating: PG
Spoilers: None
Warnings: None, except that I couldn't find a detailed description of Stephens Island and probably got it wrong.
Summary: This is, in all honesty, a story about birds.
The door of the TARDIS slammed shut the second Jack got inside, nearly taking off his foot in the process. Less than a second later the entire ship shook, and Jack, lying panting on the floor, thought it was ridiculous for an entire micro cosmos to be shaken by the impact of a bird.
Albeit a big one.
Another bang and the ship shook again. There was a scratching sound, like claws or a gigantic, deadly beak being dragged over wood.
Jack knew - knew - that the TARDIS wasn’t really made of wood. It wouldn’t splinter and break and let in a freaking murderous three metre tall killer bird out for their blood.
Well, at least he was pretty certain.
The bloody bird, unable to learn its lesson, slammed into the ship a third time, harder than before, and his certainty wavered a little.
“How certain are you that the doors will hold?” he asked the expert in all things TARDIS.
“Pretty certain,” the expert assured him with his voice of total assuredness that was far too often followed by a stretched ‘Well, when I say “certain”…’
Jack felt like his fingernails were about to curl up and get ready to crawl away when the bird screamed out its rage outside, its cry very high on the list of the most terrifying things Jack had ever heard. It seemed to do something to his spine and render him motionless, and he forgot all the other sounds that had made the list and put this one right to the top.
The only thing that could have been more terrifying would have been hearing this sound, this close, without a locked, indestructible door between him and the thing that made it.
The cry was answered by a second one, just as close.
“My certainty is wavering,” the Doctor admitted. And then they agreed that they had had enough excitement in the Cenozoic period, and the next time they visited Florida it would be at least fifteen million years later and there would be people serving drinks with little umbrellas stuck in them at the beach, instead of carnivorous, flightless birds.
Fortunately the Doctor at least was not stiff with terror, so he was able to get to his feet and get them away from here. It probably didn’t speak in Jack’s favour that he wished the sudden fading of the ship would scare their predators to death. He had little hope for that, though. They’d probably just turn around and find something else to slaughter.
With the sound of the TARDIS dematerializing, the tension left Jack’s body and he closed his eyes with a sigh, trying to melt into the ground as he relived the moment they had turned around to see a fucking bloody big bird bearing on them where before there had been only high grass. They were lucky they hadn’t got the chance to stray far from the TARDIS, as the bird wasn’t only bloody fucking big but also bloody fucking fast.
When Jack opened his eyes, the Doctor was grinning down at him.
“Now, that was -”
“Don’t say ‘fun’!” Jack warned him. “That wasn’t fun. Sex is fun. Getting drunk and dancing on the table is fun. Watching a trashy movie in the right company is fun. That just now? No fun at all.”
“No need to be grumpy.” The Doctor pouted. “It’s not like it got us. I admit it was a bit more aggressive than I had anticipated...”
“It was a terror bird,” Jack pointed out. “Doctor, it might surprise, even shock you to learn this, but they weren’t given that name because they were so nice!”
“They’re officially called Phorusrhacids -”
“No one but you can even pronounce that!”
“- and they are only called terror birds because people assumed they were terrifying. It’s not like they ever met them in person. Their assumption was based simply on the fact that they were the most dangerous predators of their era.”
“Oh, you’re right.” Jack pushed himself into a sitting position. “They just had to be nice then!”
“I never said ‘nice’. I just thought they might be a little less...”
“Big? Fast? Bloodthirsty?”
“Present,” the Doctor completed his sentence. “I was aiming for another continent.”
“And what would have awaited us there? Killer turtles?”
The Doctor beamed at him. “Well, actually -”
“Don’t tell me. Please.”
The Time Lord pouted while the human rather gracelessly climbed to his feet. It had been a while since anything had caused his body to produce this much adrenaline, and he was still shaking with it. “Do I get a break?” he asked without much hope. “Or are you planning to throw us into the next mortal peril right away?”
“You could always stay behind and have a lie in,” the Doctor pointed out while he entered something that looked disturbingly like coordinates into the TARDIS’ navigational unit.
“Doctor,” Jack said with a long suffering sigh, “you’d die without me.”
“Would not. Where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere they don’t have birds.”
The Doctor chuckled. “I’ll do my best.” He keyed in some more incomprehensible symbols, and seconds later the rotor in the centre of the console island began to rise and fall while they materialized.
After a glance at the scanner, the Doctor took his coat from the back of the couch and trotted over to the door. Pulling it open, he paid no attention to the area they had landed in but inspected the door instead, carefully running a hand over the non-wood to check for dents. Only when he was satisfied that his trusty ship had survived another aggressive beast’s attack without permanent damage, he turned his eyes to the new location (it still looked a lot like Earth to Jack) and wandered away.
Jack rolled his eyes and followed. Sometimes it really was tiring to travel with a guy whose butt was so skinny that he couldn’t bear sitting down even for a minute.
Though he had learned to appreciate that butt. There was a reason why he liked to walk behind the Doctor, after all.
Outside he was greeted by greyness. A grey sky, a grey sea rolling against the coast nearby, and grey rocks surrounded by grass that wasn’t grey but didn’t exactly attack the eyes with vivid colour either. It wasn’t cold though, and the wind wasn’t very strong. It didn’t look like it was going to rain anytime soon, the sky just seemed to be grey to go along with the sea. There were trees nearby, and the Doctor was strolling towards them.
Nothing hungry and dangerous seemed to be sneaking up to them, though admittedly if anything sneaking up to them gave the impression of sneaking up to them, it wouldn’t make a very good job of it. There was no cover for anything big nearby, however, and so Jack wasn’t in a hurry to catch up with his friend, but instead used to opportunity to watch the Doctor’s skinny but attractive backside, until he - kind of uselessly given the temperatures and surely with Jack’s disappointment in mind - slipped into his coat.
Then he stopped, and looked down, and when Jack reached him he was crouching in the grass, holding his hand level with his face. On his outstretched finger sat, much to Jack’s delight, a bird.
To its credit, it was very small. The Doctor watched it with a fascinated, yet somewhat wistful expression.
Looking around himself, Jack discovered more of the little creatures hopping through the grass.
“I know it’s hard to be anywhere on Earth without at least seeing a bird in the distance, but couldn’t we just have gone to another planet?” he asked sourly. “I thought ‘No Birds’ would be clear enough for your ship to understand.”
“The TARDIS understands things in a different manner than you or even I do,” the Doctor said, softly as if careful not to startle the bird. “Sometimes the exact meaning of an order gets lost. And sometimes she’s just stubborn. Anyway, when I send her to a place with no birds, she did, in her understanding of things.”
“And in my understanding of things there is no understanding how anyone or anything could view this” - he gestured all around them - “as No Birds. No birds for me means nothing that’s fluttering around.” (To be fair, the terror birds hadn’t been fluttering around at all.)
“They’re flightless.”
Jack had a closer look. They were.
“Flightless winter wrens,” the Doctor explained further. The little bird on his finger hopped left and right, but made no attempt to get away. It eyed the two men with curious black eyes.
“I didn’t know such a thing even existed,” Jack admitted. Ornithology had never been a hobby of his.
“This special subspecies was extinct by the time we first meet. It only exists on this island and gets killed by a cat. That’s why the TARDIS landed here, I suppose. There are no birds here at the time you currently call home.” He put his hand onto the ground and the bird hopped off and away. “Did you know that according to legend the winter wren is the king of the birds? He won a competition of who could fly the highest by hiding under the eagles wings and starting from his back when the eagle got tired.” His eyes were sad. “These little ones never had a chance, of course.”
Jack looked at them with new sympathy; little afterimages of life. “They will get killed by cats?” There were no cats around, yet. It was just a big rock in the sea, certainly not offering itself for inhabitation and people with pets. “How do they even get here?”
“Not cats. Cat. Singular.” With a sigh, the Doctor got up from the ground. “We’re on Stephens Island, and the land you can see over there is New Zealand. In 1894, that’s about ten years from now, they will build a lighthouse on this island, and the lighthouse keeper will bring his cat, Tibbles. And Tibbles will go hunting and occasionally bring him dead birds as gifts, and he’ll send some of the corpses to a museum for identification. By the time an excited ornithologist comes here to look at this formerly unknown species there’s not one left. It’ll be the first known case of an entire species getting wiped out by a single individual.”
Suddenly Jack felt guilty for his instant dislike of the defenceless little things. They didn’t bear much resemblance to the murderous feathered giant that had tried to eat them, after all.
“We could always -”
“No, we can’t,” the Doctor told him with no reprimand in his voice. “They’re gone, Jack. Like the terror birds are gone. Like your species is gone, from a later point of view. Their time is now. Let’s go back.”
They walked away.
-
“There is something I can’t stop thinking about.”
Jack was half lying on the couch, watching the Doctor as he tinkered with his controls, for once not in a hurry to go anywhere. He was out of his coat and also out of the suit jacket and his shirt was half open, showing - well, the t-shirt he was wearing beneath. But seeing him half out of his clothes might have something to do with the thoughts going through Jack’s mind. “All these birds we came across today remind me of something,” he explained before the Doctor had to ask for insight into his mind. “Did you know that the German word for bird is Vogel?”
The Doctor shot him a long look. “I speak every language this planet has ever produced in at least five different dialects.” Which probably meant that yes, he did know. Jack smirked and got up to stand behind the Time Lord, wrapping his arms around him.
“Did you know that the verb vögeln is derived from it?” He leaned in to whisper into the Doctor’s ear, “Do you know what it means?”
He half expected the Doctor to roll his eyes or slip away, and point out that it always came down to the same basic activity with Jack. Instead, the Doctor turned in his embrace until he was looking at Jack and gave him a slightly mischievous smile he hadn’t seen since the Middle Miocene; a smile that was more terror bird than flightless winter wren.
“Do you know, Jack,” he said, and leaned back into the human’s arms. “I actually do.”
March 5, 2009
Author:
vail_kagami
Beta: nightrider101
Challenge: Infosharing
Rating: PG
Spoilers: None
Warnings: None, except that I couldn't find a detailed description of Stephens Island and probably got it wrong.
Summary: This is, in all honesty, a story about birds.
The door of the TARDIS slammed shut the second Jack got inside, nearly taking off his foot in the process. Less than a second later the entire ship shook, and Jack, lying panting on the floor, thought it was ridiculous for an entire micro cosmos to be shaken by the impact of a bird.
Albeit a big one.
Another bang and the ship shook again. There was a scratching sound, like claws or a gigantic, deadly beak being dragged over wood.
Jack knew - knew - that the TARDIS wasn’t really made of wood. It wouldn’t splinter and break and let in a freaking murderous three metre tall killer bird out for their blood.
Well, at least he was pretty certain.
The bloody bird, unable to learn its lesson, slammed into the ship a third time, harder than before, and his certainty wavered a little.
“How certain are you that the doors will hold?” he asked the expert in all things TARDIS.
“Pretty certain,” the expert assured him with his voice of total assuredness that was far too often followed by a stretched ‘Well, when I say “certain”…’
Jack felt like his fingernails were about to curl up and get ready to crawl away when the bird screamed out its rage outside, its cry very high on the list of the most terrifying things Jack had ever heard. It seemed to do something to his spine and render him motionless, and he forgot all the other sounds that had made the list and put this one right to the top.
The only thing that could have been more terrifying would have been hearing this sound, this close, without a locked, indestructible door between him and the thing that made it.
The cry was answered by a second one, just as close.
“My certainty is wavering,” the Doctor admitted. And then they agreed that they had had enough excitement in the Cenozoic period, and the next time they visited Florida it would be at least fifteen million years later and there would be people serving drinks with little umbrellas stuck in them at the beach, instead of carnivorous, flightless birds.
Fortunately the Doctor at least was not stiff with terror, so he was able to get to his feet and get them away from here. It probably didn’t speak in Jack’s favour that he wished the sudden fading of the ship would scare their predators to death. He had little hope for that, though. They’d probably just turn around and find something else to slaughter.
With the sound of the TARDIS dematerializing, the tension left Jack’s body and he closed his eyes with a sigh, trying to melt into the ground as he relived the moment they had turned around to see a fucking bloody big bird bearing on them where before there had been only high grass. They were lucky they hadn’t got the chance to stray far from the TARDIS, as the bird wasn’t only bloody fucking big but also bloody fucking fast.
When Jack opened his eyes, the Doctor was grinning down at him.
“Now, that was -”
“Don’t say ‘fun’!” Jack warned him. “That wasn’t fun. Sex is fun. Getting drunk and dancing on the table is fun. Watching a trashy movie in the right company is fun. That just now? No fun at all.”
“No need to be grumpy.” The Doctor pouted. “It’s not like it got us. I admit it was a bit more aggressive than I had anticipated...”
“It was a terror bird,” Jack pointed out. “Doctor, it might surprise, even shock you to learn this, but they weren’t given that name because they were so nice!”
“They’re officially called Phorusrhacids -”
“No one but you can even pronounce that!”
“- and they are only called terror birds because people assumed they were terrifying. It’s not like they ever met them in person. Their assumption was based simply on the fact that they were the most dangerous predators of their era.”
“Oh, you’re right.” Jack pushed himself into a sitting position. “They just had to be nice then!”
“I never said ‘nice’. I just thought they might be a little less...”
“Big? Fast? Bloodthirsty?”
“Present,” the Doctor completed his sentence. “I was aiming for another continent.”
“And what would have awaited us there? Killer turtles?”
The Doctor beamed at him. “Well, actually -”
“Don’t tell me. Please.”
The Time Lord pouted while the human rather gracelessly climbed to his feet. It had been a while since anything had caused his body to produce this much adrenaline, and he was still shaking with it. “Do I get a break?” he asked without much hope. “Or are you planning to throw us into the next mortal peril right away?”
“You could always stay behind and have a lie in,” the Doctor pointed out while he entered something that looked disturbingly like coordinates into the TARDIS’ navigational unit.
“Doctor,” Jack said with a long suffering sigh, “you’d die without me.”
“Would not. Where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere they don’t have birds.”
The Doctor chuckled. “I’ll do my best.” He keyed in some more incomprehensible symbols, and seconds later the rotor in the centre of the console island began to rise and fall while they materialized.
After a glance at the scanner, the Doctor took his coat from the back of the couch and trotted over to the door. Pulling it open, he paid no attention to the area they had landed in but inspected the door instead, carefully running a hand over the non-wood to check for dents. Only when he was satisfied that his trusty ship had survived another aggressive beast’s attack without permanent damage, he turned his eyes to the new location (it still looked a lot like Earth to Jack) and wandered away.
Jack rolled his eyes and followed. Sometimes it really was tiring to travel with a guy whose butt was so skinny that he couldn’t bear sitting down even for a minute.
Though he had learned to appreciate that butt. There was a reason why he liked to walk behind the Doctor, after all.
Outside he was greeted by greyness. A grey sky, a grey sea rolling against the coast nearby, and grey rocks surrounded by grass that wasn’t grey but didn’t exactly attack the eyes with vivid colour either. It wasn’t cold though, and the wind wasn’t very strong. It didn’t look like it was going to rain anytime soon, the sky just seemed to be grey to go along with the sea. There were trees nearby, and the Doctor was strolling towards them.
Nothing hungry and dangerous seemed to be sneaking up to them, though admittedly if anything sneaking up to them gave the impression of sneaking up to them, it wouldn’t make a very good job of it. There was no cover for anything big nearby, however, and so Jack wasn’t in a hurry to catch up with his friend, but instead used to opportunity to watch the Doctor’s skinny but attractive backside, until he - kind of uselessly given the temperatures and surely with Jack’s disappointment in mind - slipped into his coat.
Then he stopped, and looked down, and when Jack reached him he was crouching in the grass, holding his hand level with his face. On his outstretched finger sat, much to Jack’s delight, a bird.
To its credit, it was very small. The Doctor watched it with a fascinated, yet somewhat wistful expression.
Looking around himself, Jack discovered more of the little creatures hopping through the grass.
“I know it’s hard to be anywhere on Earth without at least seeing a bird in the distance, but couldn’t we just have gone to another planet?” he asked sourly. “I thought ‘No Birds’ would be clear enough for your ship to understand.”
“The TARDIS understands things in a different manner than you or even I do,” the Doctor said, softly as if careful not to startle the bird. “Sometimes the exact meaning of an order gets lost. And sometimes she’s just stubborn. Anyway, when I send her to a place with no birds, she did, in her understanding of things.”
“And in my understanding of things there is no understanding how anyone or anything could view this” - he gestured all around them - “as No Birds. No birds for me means nothing that’s fluttering around.” (To be fair, the terror birds hadn’t been fluttering around at all.)
“They’re flightless.”
Jack had a closer look. They were.
“Flightless winter wrens,” the Doctor explained further. The little bird on his finger hopped left and right, but made no attempt to get away. It eyed the two men with curious black eyes.
“I didn’t know such a thing even existed,” Jack admitted. Ornithology had never been a hobby of his.
“This special subspecies was extinct by the time we first meet. It only exists on this island and gets killed by a cat. That’s why the TARDIS landed here, I suppose. There are no birds here at the time you currently call home.” He put his hand onto the ground and the bird hopped off and away. “Did you know that according to legend the winter wren is the king of the birds? He won a competition of who could fly the highest by hiding under the eagles wings and starting from his back when the eagle got tired.” His eyes were sad. “These little ones never had a chance, of course.”
Jack looked at them with new sympathy; little afterimages of life. “They will get killed by cats?” There were no cats around, yet. It was just a big rock in the sea, certainly not offering itself for inhabitation and people with pets. “How do they even get here?”
“Not cats. Cat. Singular.” With a sigh, the Doctor got up from the ground. “We’re on Stephens Island, and the land you can see over there is New Zealand. In 1894, that’s about ten years from now, they will build a lighthouse on this island, and the lighthouse keeper will bring his cat, Tibbles. And Tibbles will go hunting and occasionally bring him dead birds as gifts, and he’ll send some of the corpses to a museum for identification. By the time an excited ornithologist comes here to look at this formerly unknown species there’s not one left. It’ll be the first known case of an entire species getting wiped out by a single individual.”
Suddenly Jack felt guilty for his instant dislike of the defenceless little things. They didn’t bear much resemblance to the murderous feathered giant that had tried to eat them, after all.
“We could always -”
“No, we can’t,” the Doctor told him with no reprimand in his voice. “They’re gone, Jack. Like the terror birds are gone. Like your species is gone, from a later point of view. Their time is now. Let’s go back.”
They walked away.
-
“There is something I can’t stop thinking about.”
Jack was half lying on the couch, watching the Doctor as he tinkered with his controls, for once not in a hurry to go anywhere. He was out of his coat and also out of the suit jacket and his shirt was half open, showing - well, the t-shirt he was wearing beneath. But seeing him half out of his clothes might have something to do with the thoughts going through Jack’s mind. “All these birds we came across today remind me of something,” he explained before the Doctor had to ask for insight into his mind. “Did you know that the German word for bird is Vogel?”
The Doctor shot him a long look. “I speak every language this planet has ever produced in at least five different dialects.” Which probably meant that yes, he did know. Jack smirked and got up to stand behind the Time Lord, wrapping his arms around him.
“Did you know that the verb vögeln is derived from it?” He leaned in to whisper into the Doctor’s ear, “Do you know what it means?”
He half expected the Doctor to roll his eyes or slip away, and point out that it always came down to the same basic activity with Jack. Instead, the Doctor turned in his embrace until he was looking at Jack and gave him a slightly mischievous smile he hadn’t seen since the Middle Miocene; a smile that was more terror bird than flightless winter wren.
“Do you know, Jack,” he said, and leaned back into the human’s arms. “I actually do.”
March 5, 2009