Places to Chat
In which I
Chatterbox: Inkwell
In which I
In which I DESPERATELY NEED someone to talk me out of this madness.
Or,
I was attacked by plot bunnies. They demanded that I write a (serious, well-thought-out) Doctor Who/Twilight crossover. I DON'T KNOW.
This is what I have so far. It... will probably not make much sense if you don't watch Doctor Who and/or haven't seen The Doctor's Wife (which is the best. episode. ever. by the way). Since I'm not sure how many of you are even familiar with the show, basically you need to know that:
1. The Doctor is a nine-hundred-year-old Time Lord currently played by Matt Smith. He is also slightly mad, a genius, and prone to babbling. And he has two hearts. And insists that bow ties are cool (which they are, because the Doctor said so [no, seriously, Matt Smith revived the bow tie industry in the UK]) and so are fezzes and stetsons (which aren't, because River Song said so and shot both of them off of his head when he dared to show up wearing them). Also, he's the last of his kind. And when he dies, he regenerates and gets a new face and a slightly different personality, although the basics stay the same. And I think that's most of the important stuff.
2. The TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space) is his spaceship/time machine. She looks like a blue police box from 1963 and is arguably the most iconic thing from the show. Seriously, google "police box" and the wikipedia entry for TARDIS is the second item on the list. She's bigger on the inside. A lot bigger on the inside. Like, ridiculously huge on the inside. And she's sentient (hence, the "she"). The Doctor refers to her at various times as "old girl" and "dear". And I totally ship them (...no pun intended). And that's canon now. *glee* ...Also "Vworp" is the official onomatopoeia for the sound the TARDIS makes, and spoken aloud it sounds about right, so that's what I'm using even though it looks absolutely ridiculous.
3. The sonic screwdriver is like the most amazing tool ever. It does everything except (a) wood and (b) triplicate the flammability of port. And it goes whirrrrrrr.
4. Also, I should mention that Amy/Amelia and Rory are the current companions. They're married, and they're adorable together. But they don't come into this story much.
5. There are, as I mentioned, a lot of references to The Doctors Wife, which is the Best Episode Ever. This is largely because the episode in question canonizes my OTP for the show. It doesn't have that much bearing on the actual plot itself, though. Yet. It might in the future, but right now it just gets talked about.
6. Doctor Who is the best show ever and if you haven't ever seen it you need to. Immediately. But leave the lights on when you watch the Steven Moffat episodes.
And... that's it.
This takes place in New Moon immediately after Bella gets dumped and goes crazy, and in the Who-verse it's shortly after The Doctor's Wife but before The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People.
To sum up: Edward's departure leaves Bella shattered into a thousand angsty little pieces, and a certain madman with a big blue box finds her before Sam Uley does. (I am so ashamed of myself right now.)
***
...He was gone.
Shakily, not caring that it was useless, Bella followed him into the forest. There were no footprints, but she stumbled on regardless. She could not do anything else. She had to keep moving. If she stopped, it was over.
Love, life, everything... over.
She walked forever, tripping occasionally but always struggling back upright. This could not be happening.
Eventually she fell, and stayed down. She curled into a ball on the damp leaves.
It occurred to her, vaguely, that it was very dark out.
Bella shivered.
Vworp... Vworp... Vworp... Vworp...
He’d been trying to get to Vilkmeres. The natives were friendly, the scenery spectacular, and, frankly, it was as good a place as any to enjoy a bit of time for himself while Amy and Rory were honeymooning. Again.
The TARDIS had other plans, apparently, and she deposited him in a damp, verdant forest somewhere in the middle of the northern Pacific coast of the United States at around ten o’clock at night. It had stopped raining shortly before he arrived; he could smell it.
He smiled, a bit sadly. Petrichor. It means the smell of dust after rain.
Generally the Doctor didn’t linger after landing, but now he spent a moment or two with a hand against the aged blue wood. “We’ll find a way yet, old girl,” he whispered. “You wait and see.”
She hummed softly in reply.
The Doctor grinned, straightened his bow tie, and bounded off to find whatever it was the TARDIS wanted him to fix.
A few minutes later he burst into a little clearing, and stopped. A girl lay in the leaves, pale, hair tangled, shoulders shaking with great wracking sobs. The Doctor crouched next to her and wasted no time in laying a hand against her forehead-- she was freezing-- and checking her pulse.
“Hello,” he said, softly. She didn’t respond. He brushed a strand of hair out of her face, tucked it behind her ear. The Doctor couldn’t see any signs of physical injury, but he pulled out his screwdriver and scanned her, just in case. Nothing.
He looked up, straining his ears for sounds of a search party, searching for the uncertain glow of a flashlight between the trees. Perhaps no one had missed her yet; she was a teenager, after all, and from what the Doctor knew of human teenagers they did have a tendency to be out at all hours.
The sobbing had receded into pathetic little snuffles now. The girl didn’t even seem to realize he was there. Poor thing.
“Who did this to you?” he asked.
That prompted a fresh wave of sobs, and the Doctor rubbed her shoulder comfortingly. “You can’t stay out here, you know,” he said. “You’ll freeze. It’s just going to get colder.”
“Don’t care,” she choked out around the sobs.
The Doctor smiled at that. He loved how stubborn humans were sometimes. Hated it too, of course, but it was still brilliant. “Yes, well. I’m not really the type to let people freeze to death.” He smiled. “Never interfere with the lives of others unless there’s a child crying, that’s me.”
She let out a defeated little sigh, and closed her eyes. “Go ’way.”
Briefly, the Doctor debated the wisdom of asking her address so he could take her home. He doubted such an approach would be successful, and meanwhile the faint breeze had turned icy. His breath was starting to rise in steamy columns, and the girl was half gone as it was.
He slipped one arm around her shoulders and the other beneath her knees, and stood up. “Sorry,” he whispered as she mumbled a protest. “You’ll thank me later.”
She didn’t respond, and he hurried back to the TARDIS.
Her weathered blue doors swung open as he approached. The control room temperature had skyrocketed in his absence. The Doctor wasn’t bothered much by the cold, but he imagined the sudden warmth would be a relief for the human.
“She’s alright, old girl,” he said as he crossed the control room and shouldered open a door at random. It opened into a bedroom the Doctor hadn’t ever come across before. He smiled. “Just needs a warm place to spend the night, I think.”
He deposited the girl on the bed, removed her shoes, and tucked her in.
She didn’t stir once, and he shut the door behind him gingerly. There was a soft clunk a second afterwards; he imagined the TARDIS had moved the room to a less noisy part of the ship. He took a deep breath and rubbed his hands together. “Right, old girl,” he said, shrugging out of his jacket and taking the steps down to the lower tier of the control room two at a time, “What haven’t we tried yet?”
Since the incident with House, the Doctor had wondered frequently whether he was doing the right thing. He had no doubt it was possible for a TARDIS matrix to store itself in a living or pseudo-living receptacle, provided appropriate means of transference were available and the TARDIS wanted to do so. Certainly there were problems that could potentially result from such an arrangement, but those could be bypassed easily enough. What he really worried about was the morality of the whole issue. The Doctor would love to think that he was going about it completely differently, and for entirely different reasons, than House had, but he would be the first to admit that he was just a tiny bit biased and probably in no position to judge. On the other hand, the TARDIS didn’t seem to take issue with it. Certainly her tendency to explode at random intervals had decreased significantly since he had started.
Usually though he tried not to worry about it, mostly because he was afraid that he might come to the conclusion that it was wrong. He wasn’t sure if he could force himself to stop trying if that happened. Besides... He just wanted to talk with her again. That was all. Even if it was only for a few minutes. If only to tell her that he loved her too. Surely, after seven hundred years, that was a reasonable thing to wish for?
The Doctor hummed tunelessly to himself as he worked, and for hours the only other sound in the TARDIS was the constant faint buzz of the console upstairs, the whir of his screwdriver, and the very occasional crackle of electricity.
Bella awoke in a strange bed. Under ordinary circumstances this would have been extremely alarming, but today she didn’t care. Nothing mattered any more, not really. Agony washed over her as she remembered. A clean break would be better for you... It will be as if I never existed... Goodbye, Bella... I’m tired of pretending to be something I’m not...
She screamed.
The Doctor jerked awake and glanced around wildly, then relaxed as he realized he’d fallen asleep against the TARDIS’s central column. Again.
A heartsbeat later he went back into full alert mode, the screaming that had woken him up registering abruptly. He snatched his screwdriver and sprinted towards the nearest door. It opened into the strange girl’s room.
She had jackknifed herself into a fetal position and was screaming into her knees. The Doctor, quite at a loss as to what to do, rubbed her shoulders and made comforting noises. Eventually the screams became sobs, and the sobs became whimpers, and then she lay still, tears still dribbling down her face.
“Hey,” he said, after a while, still rubbing her shoulder. “It’s going to be okay. Whatever it is, everything's gonna be fine.”
“It won’t.”
There was no emotion in that voice, no expression, just bleak emptiness. A chill ran down the Doctor’s spine.
“Okay,” he said, softly. He sighed. “Look... just... what’s your name?”
She was quiet for so long that he thought perhaps she hadn’t heard him. Then, abruptly, she said. “Bella. Bella Swan.”
“That’s a good name,” he said. Not quite so good as Amelia Pond, but not everyone could be that lucky. “That’s a brilliant name. Now, you listen to me, Miss Bella Swan, I don’t know what happened to you last night, but I do know that no matter how awful it seems right now things will get better. You are too brilliant, and too magnificent, for things to not get better.”
“You don’t know me,” she mumbled, squeezing her eyes shut. “I don’t know who the heck you are, and you don’t know the first thing--” she broke off with a little half-sob.
“I’m the Doctor,” he said, firmly. “I am very old, and very clever, and I know that you’re human and that is enough, Bella Swan, for me to know that you are brilliant.” He grinned at her. “And that you are going to survive this.” He gave her shoulder a final pat and then launched into the control room.
The TARDIS had pulled up a copy of the local phone book on the monitor. The name Charlie Swan had been highlighted. He dialed quickly.
The phone rang only once, and then a gruff, exhausted-sounding male voice answered. “Swan residence.” His voice broke on the last syllable.
“Mr. Swan?”
“Yes.”
“Have you got a daughter, about seventeen, eighteen?”
The man made a chocking sound. “Yes.”
“Bella Swan?”
“Yes! What have you done with her?! Where-”
“I’m the Doctor,” he said. “Your daughter's safe. I found her in the forest last night. I think she must have gotten lost. She was... slightly hypothermic and largely unresponsive, so I brought her back to my house and let her sleep. She’s fine now, but she still refuses to tell me her address-”
“Seven seventy-five K Street,” Mr. Swan said instantly. “The house with the police cruiser in front. Oh, god, are you sure she’s-”
“Physically she’s fine. She's terribly upset, though. As I said, she won’t talk to me, and all I managed to get out of her was her name.” The Doctor cringed at the father’s obvious distress. “I can have her there in five minutes.”
He hung up as Mr. Swan babbled half-delirious thank-you’s. “Right,” he said, straightening his bow tie. “Seven seventy-five K Street.” He flipped a switch on the console and the engines started to phase.
The TARDIS landed at the end of the street. The Doctor glanced outside, confirmed that this was K Street and that there was indeed a police cruiser in front of one of the houses, and dashed back across the control room to Bella’s bedroom. She hadn’t moved since he left her.
“I don’t suppose you can walk?” he asked. She didn’t respond for a moment, and then shook her head once, jerkily.
The Doctor shrugged. He picked up her still-damp shoes, and then scooped her up into his arms. “Remember what I told you,” he said they crossed the control room. “You are brilliant and you will survive.”
Bella said nothing, but he hadn’t really been expecting her to.
Mr. Swan was waiting on the porch by the time the Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS. He saw them almost immediately and sprinted down the street to meet them. The Doctor wasted no time in handing over his daughter; he knew only too well what it felt like to lose a child.
“Bella, honey, are you all right? Did he hurt you? Was it him?”
The Doctor got the distinct feeling that Mr. Swan wasn’t referring to him, not least because the man shot him a look of inexpressible gratitude and jerked his head in the direction of his house.
“You can come in if you like, Doctor,” he said. The Doctor followed him silently.
“Charlie?” Bella mumbled. Her eyes flickered open.
Mr. Swan cradled her a bit closer to his chest and whispered, “I’m right here, baby. You’re almost home.”
The Doctor stopped at the driveway. Mr. Swan didn’t notice. He watched the policeman carry his daughter up the porch steps, into the house, watched the door swing shut behind them.
He went back to the TARDIS.
submitted by TNÖ, age 17, Deep Space
(June 22, 2011 - 2:52 am)
(June 22, 2011 - 2:52 am)
Just asking, how is the doctor the last of his kind if he can come back to life?
(June 22, 2011 - 12:38 pm)
To clarify: the "coming back to life" thing is more of a "dies and then explodes and then becomes a different-yet-similar person". It's called regeneration, and if he gets killed again whilst regenerating he gets killed off for real. Also there may or may not be a limit to the Doctor's regenerations; thirteen is standard but apparently Time Lords can take the extra regenerations from other Time Lords that they kill permanently, and the Doctor has killed a lot of Time Lords- see below. And if that is the case the Doctor potentially has unlimited regenerations. Besides, the thirteen-limit hasn't been brought up at all in the New Series, unless I'm forgetting something, so who knows if it's even an issue now.
Anyway, re: No Other Time Lords: A long long time ago there was a Time War. A lot of really terrible things happened. Eventually Gallifrey, the home of the Time Lords, and all the Time Lords themselves, were destroyed (read: blown to bits and put in a Time Lock so nobody could change the events that led to them being destroyed). The Doctor wasn't, mainly because he was the one doing the destroying (long, complicated story... just... watch the show, it is beyond my capabilities to summarize), and a few other renegades (most famously the Master, who is Evil and Crazy and Stuff. Most Time Lords are Evil and Crazy and Stuff, for that matter. The Doctor is one of the few nice ones.) escaped but have since been killed off permanently. Sort of. Time is a weird thing in this show.
The Time Lords did almost do a thing (I'm going to use the show's own phrase and say it was a wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... thing) in The End of Time special in which they attempted to break out of the Time Lock prior to the blowing up, effectively replacing the Earth with Gallifrey 2, but the Master freaked out at them and put a stop to it. And promptly died. It was surprisingly heartbreaking, given that he'd spent the rest of the special eating people.
...
But that isn't the point! The point is do you have anything constructive to say in regards to the story itself! *puppy eyes*
(June 22, 2011 - 6:51 pm)
I heard of "Doctor Who" before, but what is it excactly about? And do you think that I would like it, or at least try it?
-Kiwi☺☻
(June 23, 2011 - 6:59 am)
Wow. I thought this was AMAZING - from a writing standpoint, I loved it; I thought it was very good, you have a great style, and you definitely captured the Doctor. I thought the plot was very creative - I've never actually seen a Twilight/DW crossover before, so points for originality. ;)
“That’s a good name,” he said. Not quite so good as Amelia Pond, but not everyone could be that lucky. “That’s a brilliant name. Now, you listen to me, Miss Bella Swan, I don’t know what happened to you last night, but I do know that no matter how awful it seems right now things will get better. You are too brilliant, and too magnificent, for things to not get better.”
This was my favorite line, just for the record. So the Doctor. So good.
All in all, I love it. :)
(June 23, 2011 - 1:48 pm)
@Kiwi: It's about a time traveling alien who runs around the universe having marvelous adventures with his various human friends, and YES. Definitely. Everyone should watch it.
@Ally: re: Twilight/Doctor Who crossovers: There are a couple on fanfiction, but most of them are either (a) poorly written or (b) written by Rose/Ten shippers, which is IRRITATING. (I know this because I've been going on a Doctor Who crossover binge lately. I found a shockingly good Glee/DW crossover called Fantastic in TARDIS Blue, for example.). Though there is one rather amusing one wherein Time Lord blood makes Twipires explode.
re: the Doctor's characterization: Oh, good. I was a bit worried about that, but I put on his theme ("I Am the Doctor", such a brilliant, wonderful song) and that seemed to help.
I will probably post more later tonight when I finish smoothing out some of the rough edges.
(June 23, 2011 - 11:14 pm)
And... more.
***
He went back to the TARDIS. There was something distinctly odd about this tiny, innocuous little town, and he very much doubted that his own curiosity, let alone the TARDIS, would let him leave before he figured it out. A vague, half-formed plan had already started to circulate in his mind.
Step one: Park the TARDIS somewhere inconspicuous.
Step two: Investigate.
Step three: Do a thing.
The Doctor grinned. This, generally, was where things started to get interesting.
The TARDIS rematerialized behind a diner. It had started to rain, and the little alley smelled of rancid chicken and decaying vegetables. The Doctor tried not to breath until he got out onto the street. He walked for a while, keeping an eye out for anything particularly out of the ordinary.
There was nothing. He wandered a bit more until he found a little newspaper stand outside of the grocery store; his screwdriver made quick work of the lock and he pulled one out with a flourish.
The date, apparently, was September 16, 2006.
He rustled through the thin pages impatiently. Small town news was boring. At the very end of the paper, however, the Sheriff’s report caught his eye. There was an infuriatingly brief note that the police had been getting more calls reporting sitings of gigantic wolves, and that there seemed little doubt that the sitings were somehow linked to the deaths of Mr. Harry Jones and several as yet unidentified backpackers.
His stomach clenched. There wasn’t an actual article about the deaths, which meant that this had been going on for a while.
Wolves. Big wolves. That was unusual.
And where better to find wolves than in the forest?
Five minutes and twenty-two seconds later, the Doctor was loping easily through the trees, armed with his sonic screwdriver. The rain had stopped, but there were storm clouds rolling in from the west. He could smell the oncoming fury in the wind.
The forest ended rather abruptly, leaving him on a thin strip of grass. Ten feet away, the ground ended and plunged away into the roiling grey sea. He waved his screwdriver at the area, not really surprised when it turned up nothing. Just a normal stretch of cliffside, nothing important.
He made a note of it, and then went back into the forest.
After several hours of diligent searching he found a single, gigantic footprint. He dropped into a crouch and scanned it; the screwdriver picked up traces of flaked skin and a piece of hair. The DNA of whatever made the print had eight base pairs and, judging from the instability of the cell structures themselves, ran some kind of metagenic process on itself on a fairly regular basis. Probably a shapeshifter. Certainly not terrestrial. At a guess, the Doctor would say something from the Tarsus-Phi binary system, half a galaxy away.
The Doctor rocked back on his heels and adjusted his bow tie nervously. “Oh, that’s not good. That’s very not good.” He gave the screwdriver a good shake and scanned again, just to make sure. “This is really, extremely not good.”
He jumped to his feet spun in a circle, waving the screwdriver. As he rotated around towards the northeast it started to beep, and he sprinted towards the source.
The beeping intensified a few minutes later as he came in sight of a tall fence. From the other side he heard someone- a woman- shouting angrily.
“You jerk- how could you do that to Leah? How dare you! You-”
She was almost certainly shouting at one of the shapeshifters, a hypothesis that was confirmed when a horrible snarl cut off the rest of the woman’s sentence.
“What are you doing? Get away from me!”
The Doctor lunged at the fence and scrambled up. “Get away from him!” he shouted, scrabbling for a foothold on the smooth wood. In front of him was an almost nightmarish tableau; a tearful girl and a terrified older man who the Doctor could only assume was a father stood on the porch, watching as the shapeshifter trembled and buckled and snarled at another, slightly older girl. The Doctor flicked a switch on the screwdriver and pointed it at the shapeshifter desperately. Hacking one’s own genes for purposes of shapeshifting was all well and good, provided you did it right, but it did leave the creatures in question incredibly vulnerable to hypersonic pulses. He hoped.
To the Doctor’s immense relief, it worked. The shapeshifter shrieked in pain and fell to the ground in a crumpled heap of half-wolf, half-man. The Doctor let his arm flop down against the other side of the fence, panting. As the three humans stared in shock at the half-phased and now unconscious shapeshifter, the Doctor scrambled the rest of the way over the fence and dropped onto the slightly dry grass on the other side.
“Hello,” he said, tucking screwdriver into his inside pocket. “I’m the Doctor.”
Even from the depths of her misery Bella realized pretty quickly that she was going to have to act normal. Charlie would worry. So she showered and ate, and went to school and did her homework and spoke when spoken to. Inside, though, she knew she would never feel anything but pain ever again, regardless of what the Doctor seemed to think.
She felt like a zombie. She might have contemplated suicide, had she been able to muster the energy to try.
The girl who had almost been attacked was approaching the hysterical phase now. “What- was- that- that-”
The Doctor, now crouched by the shapeshifter’s head, was engrossed in his diagnostic work and not really paying a lot of attention to what he was saying. “It’s called a Yenoruk. Shapeshifting alien from Tarsus-Phi. Brilliant race. Found out that if you blast someone with hypersonic pulses and then use electromagnetic currents to manipulate the weakened DNA you can throw the cells into a permanent state of instability and-- pow!-- instant shapeshifting. A single treatment in the onset of puberty can spark transformations for life.” He looked up and grinned. She looked a bit shocked. “Thing is... what is he doing here?”
“What did you do to him?” the other girl asked.
“Jammed his cellular structure. Hypersonic pulse, puts the cells in a state of temporary stasis, so they can’t change. He’ll be alright, if that’s what your asking. What’s your name?”
She looked a bit startled by the sudden change of subject, but she said, “Leah. I- Leah. And this is my dad.” She gestured vaguely at the older man. The Doctor smiled.
“And you?” he glanced at the other girl, who was starting to regain a bit of color.
“Emily.”
“Right, Emily and Leah and dad.” He stood up. “Why don’t you all tell me what happened.”
It was a short story, but it took a long time to tell. There were a lot of tears.
The shapeshifter was named Sam. He had been dating Leah, and they were very much in love. She’d had it on good authority that he was going to propose soon. Then Emily came to visit, and suddenly Sam had started professing his undying love for Leah’s older cousin. Notes left in the window of her car, roses on her seats, that sort of thing. It stayed secret for about a week, until Emily finally got fed up and told him to back off. And the Doctor had seen what happened next.
He stayed quiet for a moment after Emily finished talking, mulling it over while the girls sniffled and clutched their mugs of tea.
“Right,” he said at last. “Okay. Shapeshifter comes to Earth from Tarsus-Phi, gets romantically involved with the locals. Part of a deception, probably, ties into the perception field he must have set up so no one would notice he just appeared one day. But what does he want?”
Leah’s father shook his head. “But I’ve known Sam all his life,” he said. “And his dad and I; we’re great friends. Fishing buddies.” A thought seemed to occur to him suddenly. “You wouldn’t be the same Doctor that found Chief Swan’s daughter the other night, would you?”
The Doctor smiled. “Yeah. That’s me. Sort of what I do.”
Leah snorted. “What, you go around saving people?”
“Yeah.”
“In a bow tie?”
The Doctor gave her an indignant look, and straightened the bow tie. “Bow ties are cool.”
She looked like she very much doubted this, and the Doctor silently bemoaned the lack of fashion sense in the human race.
A few minutes later he said his goodbyes to the three of them, and slung the half-phased shapeshifter over his shoulder. He was surprisingly lightweight, given his size. Bit lopsided, though, which was irritating.
The Doctor had just lost sight of the house and gotten onto a rutted dirt road when several boys caught sight of him. They ran towards him, shouting. They all seemed to be severely underdressed, given that the weather was taking another turn for the worse. He dropped the shapeshifter gracelessly and pulled out his screwdriver. A rather nasty idea had occurred to him; the newspaper had said wolves, plural.
“What have you done to Sam?” the nearest one demanded. He stopped abruptly and stared at the deformed body in obvious horror. The Doctor flicked the screwdriver in his direction and it confirmed what he had already guessed.
“You’re a shapeshifter- you’re all... Yenoruks.” That explained the clothes, anyway, creatures with cells that volatile generated a lot of extra heat. “What are you doing here?” he asked. He stepped over Sam’s body, strode towards them. “Tell me.”
“What’s happening? What’s wrong with Sam?”
The Doctor wondered if he really did just have a face that no one listened to. He shouted over the growing panic. “It’s all right. He’ll be fine. I just jammed him, temporarily. It was an emergency. He was about to kill somebody.”
One of the boys snarled at him, trembling slightly. The Doctor raised his screwdriver. “Don’t. I’m warning you, don’t-”
The snarl deepened, and the boy started to shake in earnest. The Doctor sighed. “I’m sorry. I really am sorry.” He switched on the screwdriver, and a few seconds later the boy collapsed, whimpering. “That’ll sting for a bit. But I don’t fancy getting this face torn off just yet, the nose is growing on me. Now.” The Doctor pushed his hair out of his eyes. “Which of you wants to tell me what you’re all doing on this planet?”
A look of blank incomprehension met this statement. He tried again.
“Oh, come on now, this place is lightyears away from your home. What good is it doing you to pretend to be human? What are you here for?”
They were looking very nervous now. The smallest of them stepped forward, tentatively, and said, “Please, we don’t know what you’re talking about!”
The Doctor squinted at them. “No... no, you really don’t, do you? But that’s... that’s not possible...” He turned away from them, ran his hand through his hair again, then swung back around. “Alright, then, what are you?”
He saw them exchanging glances, clearly wondering how much to tell him, but he cut them off before they could even begin to construct a lie. “No, I know you’re shapeshifters and I know you turn into great big wolves. You can trust me. I’ll help you if I can.” He grinned. “But first you need to tell me what you are.”
“Who are you? And what did you do to Pete and Sam?”
“I’m the Doctor,” he said. “And I told you, I jammed their cellular states so they couldn’t phase. Knocked your Sam out entirely because he was halfway through. It’ll wear off in a few hours, nothing to worry about. Now you need to tell me what you are.”
Again there was that hesitation, and then the smallest one said, “We’re werewolves.”
The Doctor blinked. “No, you’re not. I’ve met werewolves, they’re nothing like you. They’re uncontrollable killing machines that change in the light of the moon and then destroy everything in their path.”
The one nearest him cleared his throat and said, “Well, really we’re throwbacks to our tribe’s spirit warriors. But we call ourselves werewolves for convenience.”
“Oh, well,” the Doctor said, clapping his hands once. “That makes sense. I met some Venetian fish like you once, only they were pretending to be vampires. Long story. Spirit warriors?”
They exchanged glances once again. “We aren’t allowed to talk about it. We could bring you to one of our elders?”
That sounded like an excellent suggestion to the Doctor. He loved it when aliens cooperated. “Sure. Take me to your leader.” He grinned. “I have always wanted to say that.”
“You’re sure Sam and Pete will be alright.”
“Oh, yeah. Bit of a headache for a while, though. And tell your Sam to stay away from Emily. I don’t want any repeats of what almost happened. And he’s staying put until he’s in a state to explain himself.” He shot a glare at the inert, mutated form.
The elder turned out to be Mr. Billy Black, who sat in a wheelchair and wore a stetson. The Doctor shook his hand enthusiastically. “Brilliant to meet you. I’m the Doctor. Nice hat.”
The other man raised his eyebrows. “Are you making fun of me, sir?”
“No, no, no, not at all. Stetsons are cool. I’ve been meaning to get one myself, actually.” He grinned, then sat down on the railing of Mr. Black’s porch. “So. Tell me about the spirit warriors.”
Mr. Black’s eyes strayed to where Sam was lying in a heap of fur and skin. The rest of the shapeshifters had taken Pete home.
“The spirit warriors, Mr. Black?”
The man sighed, and began. His voice took on the rich tone of a true storyteller, and the Doctor listened silently. It wasn’t often that he heard a good story told by a good speaker, after all.
((at this point I blatantly c&p'd Meyer's legends, mainly because she's much better at folklore than novelizing and I'm rubbish at writing good myths. If you really want to read it it's in chapter 11 of Eclipse. This section goes from "In the beginning" to "that is not the end of the story…" I'm not reposting it here, because it isn't mine.))
Mr. Black paused, presumably for dramatic effect. The Doctor, unable to stop himself any longer, spoke.
“Of course, calling them ‘spirit warriors’ is a bit of a misnomer. From the description I’d say it’s something more along the lines of a form of subatomic particle resonation, that’s a rather primitive form of telekinesis perfected by, yes, the Yenoruk. Your shifters aren’t invaders, they’re descendants. Oh, that is spectacular.” He fidgeted excitedly. “Of course! Hundreds of years ago a pack of Yenoruks must have fallen through a rift in time and space, and ended up here... And then they interbred with humans, that’s why your primary forms only have two arms.”
He beamed at Mr. Black, who looked distinctly put out.
The Doctor shook his head. “Sorry. You said there was more to the story?”
“Yes,” Mr. Black said, coldly.
“Sorry, sorry. What’s the rest of it?”
Mr. Black took deep breath, and continued. “That,” he said dramatically, “was the story of the spirit warriors. Not... whatever you said.”
“Sorry, and this is...?”
(("This is the story of the third wife's sacrifice…" to "This was the enemy of the Makahs"))
“Sorry,” the Doctor said, “Stone corpse? Actual stone?”
“Yes,” Mr. Black said stiffly.
“These creatures, they weren’t... angel-shaped by any chance, were they?”
“No.”
The Doctor shrugged. “Sorry, just a thought. Please, continue.”
Mr. Black glared at him for a moment before starting again.
(("Yaha Uta described…" to "…ever tried to put himself together again."))
“Fascinating,” the Doctor muttered, almost without realizing he was speaking aloud. “Sound like a silicon-based lifeform to me. Maybe-”
“Doctor,” Mr. Black said sharply. “Will you allow me to finish the story?”
“Sorry, yes, of course.” The Doctor folded his hands together and smiled.
“Good.
(("They called it the Cold One…" to "…their presence does tend to draw in others." And that's the last of it.))
The Doctor stood up at that. “They’re still here?”
Mr. Black shook his head. “They left two days ago. The Swan girl was... romantically involved with one of them. That, I imagine, was why she was so terribly distressed.” His lips thinned in obvious disapproval.
The Doctor slumped back onto the rail, disappointed. Two new species in just one day wasn’t something he came across often.
“Good story,” he said.
“Thank you.” Mr. Black stared at him calculatingly. “You believe it, don’t you?”
“More or less. I don’t buy that these ‘cold ones’ are vampires any more than you lot are werewolves. I’ve met vampires, too, and they aren’t made of rock and they really don’t glitter.” The Doctor shrugged. “But silicon-based lifeforms with refractory skin cells that drink blood for sustenance? Easy. I can think of at least, oh, four different species that fit that description just off the top of my head.”
Mr. Black stared at him blankly. He looked like he had a lot of questions, but the Doctor was feeling the familiar tug of insatiable curiosity and he really didn’t have the time. “I should go, now, thank you for the story, give Sam an ice pack when he wakes up and tell him I’ll be back here within twenty-four hours to have a little chat about the girl he was menacing when I found him.” The Doctor sniffed; there was a storm coming.
He ran off before Mr. Black could protest.
Half a minute later something else occurred to him and he ran back. “Sorry,” he said, stumbling to halt in front of the porch steps. “But the ‘cold ones’ you made the treaty with- what were their names?”
Mr. Black blinked. “Cullen. They-”
The Doctor sprinted away again. “Thanks!” he shouted over his shoulder.
(June 24, 2011 - 12:12 am)
...I really do need to start watching that, don't I? I've been hearing lots of talk about it and it sounds utterly utterly brill.
Anyway, it's quite well-written; I like it.
(June 24, 2011 - 4:06 pm)
TNO, I have only just read the first part to your story, and I was very surprised by how well it was written. Not surprised in the sense that I thought before reading it that you couldn't do so well- I haven't actually read much of your writing on here, but I am very glad I have now. I think you have a gift for writing, though you probably already know it. Great work! And I will be planning to read your second part as soon as I can... I've got tennis...and cleaning... and stuff like that to do for now.
P.S. Oh yeah, I haven't seen Doctor Who yet, but we are going to the library tomorrow and I'll check to see if they have it, or I could always order it in from Netflix...- I will continue this conversation with myself on which to do later.
(July 7, 2011 - 2:46 pm)
Oh yeah, and Happy 18th Birthday!!!
[} [} [} cakes...
O~~~ O~~~ O~~~ balloons...
+# +# +# and presents!
-Kiwi☺☻
(July 7, 2011 - 7:30 pm)