in which intrikate88 discovers drugs can be LOLarious in writin

[intrikate88]

To anybody who read last night's post, you should be aware that I look a Lunesta to sleep before writing it. (The speculation on Martha being Mickey and Rose's lovechild, however, had nothing to do with drugs. I'm sorry.) I was fairly lucid for awhile. You can see exactly where I got absolutely and totally loopy, though, at the last few paragraphs of fic. But since that craziness really ought to be preserved for posterity (especially since I can't remember writing a damn bit of it LOL) I'm going to make a new post with an edited, somewhat-more-intelligible version of the fic fragment! (with what I am tentatively guessing I meant to say?)

 

The Doctor had told Rose once, more than once, that the TARDIS was a living thing. What they had failed to remember, both of them, was that living things have a persistent tendency to reproduce, if given suitable circumstances and a possible place to gestate and develop. Life has a funny way of finding a way.

When the time vortex was unleashed from its home in the heart of the TARDIS, it did so like a hormone-crazed teenager at a high school house party with no supervision, and latched itself promiscuously. to the first person to devote all her attention to it: Rose Tyler. And though the Doctor drew out the time vortex and sent it, giddy and stupefied and possibly wearing underpants on its head, to its room, it was too late: it had already had its fun, and Rose wasn't using any protection.

The TARDIS had, in short, knocked Rose up.

This wasn't as dire as might first be assumed.

The developing baby TARDIS was quite content in its situation. It had its big daddy police box nearby, glowing warmly at it, and a mummy that traveled all through time and space, and brought it with her and showed it all the secret pathways in the universe.

And suddenly, the world went all wrong in a most distressing way. Mummy left Daddy, and went so far away the baby could barely sense the TARDIS at all, its energy just a faint glimmer that it pulled towards, just before even that glimmer gave out entirely.

Perhaps Rose should have wondered a little more about the way it felt like her heart was breaking, but it isn't surprising she didn't. Her own adolescent rebellion stage was still recent enough for her to have little distanced perspective on it, and after all, that was a human stage, not a time vortex. She thought nothing of always confusing directions that led her down wrong streets, because she saw all the streets that weren't there. She simply got a side job at a fashionable bar to fill the time between consulting for Torchwood, and it was there she discovered that humans, whether they be in normal or alternate universes, are always doing the same things and having the same problems, returning to the same places, and being extraordinarily dull.

The Doctor wouldn't have thought that way about humans. He would have stopped with 'extraordinary'.

It either proved that it takes one to know one, or that Rose, if she intended to live a fantastic life, would need to make some adjustments. (Prenatal vitamins were probably out of the question at this point, and there was no telling what a hungry, growing time vortex needed, anyway.)

Rose Tyler has dreams, but she doesn't remember them: dreams of endless walking through hazy paths between times, whispering phrases in people's ears, or picking up the spay can to decorate the walls with BAD WOLF herself. There is a message pounding away as she walks in dreaming, so rhythmic it infects her waking hours, but she must create its pieces before even trying to put it together. Maybe it will tell her why she sometimes glows golden by accident, and why she never needs a lamp to read by, and the how when she makes appointments, she is never late and never early.

None of these new traits are unobtrusive, or at least  not enough to distract her from her disgust at being alone and earthbound, so she ignores the changes and blames them on her new universe, as if the whole world was an mild allergy that inconvenienced her. It's an attitude more functional than the epic understandings of the universe she once accustomed herself to, with the Doctor. Understatement, she finds, works.

That is, up until the afternoon she walks into her flat and discovers her kitchen to be residing in 1879. "Hi," she says to a startled young woman in a parlor maid's uniform, "I'm to go change clothes. I've walked around too naked in Victorian times once before. It was enough for me."

She heads for her bedroom, which is remarkably traditionally-decorated at the moment, despite the fact that  just that morning, it looked like she had thoroughly pillaged IKEA to furnish it. Surely IKEA didn't produce that iron bed, or the oak wardrobe, or the vases of flowers under glass domes and the shadowboxes of dead butterflies.

Rose wouldn't ever decorate with glass-enclosed vases of dried roses. She fights the urge to drop them out the window, since this is probably somebody else's bedroom in 1879. Though she's going to borrow that somebody's clothes anyway, she tries not to touch her surroundings too much. This feels like a real place, and without the Doctor's guidance, she doesn't know if it is safe to alter anything.

The golden latticework spreading across her skin like the glow of a cigarette smoked too fast only reinforces this idea. She looks around, thinking that there are bound be gloves somewhere. They will hide back her touch which could drop a few seconds or millennia on an object, turning it to dust. Closing the bedroom door, she pulls on a chemise, a corset that fits suspiciously well, and a striped frock. If Queen Victoria is lurking around some corner, she will find nothing to be unamused at.

It is as Rose is pulling on a pair of black satin gloves that the room fades back into the shapes of IKEA practicality, and when she pulls a glove off, her skin is only the golden-tinted ivory that she is accustomed to. She feels like she has forgotten something important, but instead of pursuing it, she exchanges the striped dress for black slacks and a black buttoned blouse, and leaves for work.

***

SHOULD I CONTINUE Y/N? REVIEW GUYZZ! :P (Ignore my highly ironic ff.n-girl ending. But let me know if I ought to bother continuing anyway?)

PS-- I SWEAR IT WAS THE LUNESTA LAST NIGHT I DON'T WRITE LIKE THAT REALLY REALLY.

PPS-- the_spdn, you can link to this fic this time. I mean it, I'm okay now.

Comments

[kayling.livejournal.com]

Um YES because you are a fan-fucking-tastic writer (although I'm glad I read the coherent version first).

[andi-horton.livejournal.com]

Well as you know I do maintain that I prefer "found 1879 in her kitchen" but on the whole, I dearly love how you incorporated the most awkward, twisty phrases into something that actually makes sense-- in a DW-type way, at least :P

Love you muchly, and I hope you are getting a spiffy new phone even as I type this!