DW/Firefly Crossover Fic: Apocatastasis, 2/5(?)

[intrikate88]

Title: Apocatastasis (2/5?)
Author: intrikate88
Disclaimer: I tried to seduce RTD and get him to give me Doctor Who rights, but he's not into women, and I tried with Joss for ownership of Firefly, and his wife didn't like that, and Joss said it would only bring me heartache anyway, so as it stands now, I own nothing.
Spoilers: "Doomsday" for Doctor Who, and possibly "Lazarus Experiment" if I really get plotty and ambitious. Post "Objects in Space", pre/during-BDM for Fireflyverse.
Rating: PG? There's nothing really heavy, but just to be safe.
Prompt: Two prompts! 1) Ten is intrigued. Inara is suspicious. There is banter. And eye sex. 2) "You don't want to wait until it's too late."
Notes/Warnings: One traveller (that strokes bits of his ship) is missing his companion, while one Companion is missing travelling. Then things begin to explode, several people are taken hostage, the Doctor is mistaken for another doctor, and a good deal of fun suspense is had by all, as the Operative tries his hardest to get to one little girl, River Tam.

In case  you're wondering about the title, dictionary.com defines it as: the state of being restored or reestablished; restitution. 

Beta'd by the fantastic goldy_dollar. Written for the sonic_tea ficathon.

Updated on Wednesdays.

Inara stumbled against the Doctor as explosions rocked the TARDIS. She gasped, “My girls!” and moved to run out. The Doctor grabbed her arm.

 

“You can’t go out now,” he told her. “Nothing can get past the door, but things are still exploding out there.”

 

“My girls, they’re all asleep,” Inara insisted. “I have to go make sure they all get out.”

 

Still, the Doctor maintained his hold on her arm. “Listen,” he said. “All the explosions sound quite localized.” A sudden boom almost knocked them off their feet. “Well, most of them.”

 

Inara’s eyes narrowed. “They sound,” she said, “quite like the incense bombs I confiscated earlier.”

 

“Ooh, incense bombs? Very good, very good. I like them. Alright, I think they’ve stopped now. Let’s go and have a look, shall we?” He stepped first from the TARDIS and Inara followed him out. He offered her his arm gallantly. As they walked away, a decorative ceiling beam crashed to the floor behind them.

 

The alarms were already sounding. A soothing, accent-less voice was saying over the intercom, “Please make your way to the exit immediately. Please make your way to the exit immediately.” Girls were appearing, their heads poking out the doorways of their rooms. “Mistress ‘Nara, what’s going on?” a few cried, but she only answered serenely that they should all go outside and make a line on the lawn, just as they had practiced.

 

The presence of smoke and flames didn’t keep them from noticing and wondering about the strange grinning man on her arm. Soon everyone was lined up on the lawn outside, murmuring. The priestesses took count of the girls; two were missing.

 

“Which ones?” Inara asked, stepping forward. The Doctor hovered behind her, hands once again jammed in his pockets as he surveyed the outside of the Companion House. He squinted at the smoke coming from on corner, wandering closer and slipping his glasses on.

 

“Amila and Lilleen,” one of the older girls told her.

 

“It would be,” Inara said grimly. “Which girls are-“

 

“Can I see one of those incense bombs?” the Doctor interrupted, tapping Inara’s bare shoulder. Inara, though annoyed at the intrusion, acquiesced with grace and drew some of the sticks from her robe’s pocket for him.

 

She continued talking to the student assistant while the Doctor examined the incense, peering at it and sniffing it, but she didn’t trail off in utter distraction until he began to lick it. Seldom had she seen such thorough licking, despite her worldliness. “Doctor, what are you doing?”

 

“This is the wrong kind of explosive,” he said, ignoring her question. (He considered it irrelevant and pointless; clearly he was licking it and thus the question did not deserve a response. If everyone was as brilliant as him they would realize this and not ask such questions, but if everybody was as brilliant as him, then they wouldn’t get into half the scrapes they did and he would get bored.) “This is just a magnesium compound, makes a flash and a great big lovely boom but doesn’t actually do anything. Other than make your ears bleed. But that explosion, that wasn’t this stuff at all. Lots of flames, walls coming down- this incense bomb couldn’t do that.”

 

“The girls- Amila and Lilleen- had quite a lot of them earlier.”

 

“Then we’d be deaf and I wouldn’t be explaining this to you, which clearly I am, so it’s a different bomb. Something your girls couldn’t get their hands on.”

 

“Then,” said Inara, her mouth pulling tighter, “we have a bigger problem.”

 

* * *

 

“Two months ago,” Inara began, once the two of them had removed themselves to a teaching pavilion some ways away from the rest of the student body, “there were men that came to the Training House, supposedly to be interviewed by some of the older girls. These men said they were looking for personal Companions. But when they arrived, they appeared less interested in the Companions that in looking around the Training House. The other priestesses and I were concerned they were… inappropriately interested in the younger girls, and they were asked to leave.”

 

“But who were they? Where did they come from, who did they represent? Were they together?”

 

Inara confirmed that they were. “We did some of our own investigation- we have ways, you know; it’s standard procedure to check into our clients’ backgrounds. And we found out they were all employed by the Alliance as aides to military generals, intelligence ministers, developmental research- but even that much information was hard to find. Then a month ago we were served with a search warrant, and all the girls were examined, the rosters were demanded, and all the Companions that had been traveling over the past two years were questioned.”

 

“They were looking for something,” the Doctor concluded.

 

“Someone,” Inara clarified.

 

The Doctor raised an eyebrow at her. “And you know who, don’t you?”

 

Inara looked down, played with the hem of her robe. “I can guess. There was-“

 

“Mistress Inara!”

 

A dark-haired girl of about fourteen came running up the hill to the pavilion. She was gasping for breath, possibly from the run and more probably from the corset she wore. Inara, who had been leaning on a desk, straightened up. “Amila, Nish was looking for you, you weren’t-“

 

“Mistress Inara, there’s men, and they have Lilleen, and our parents. They made us blow up the dormitory, I didn’t want to but now there’s this new man and he showed us a wave of our families and-“

 

Inara held up a hand, and the girl went silent, but the tortured expression remained on her face. “Who are these men, Amila?”

 

“Well, it’s just one now. He’s called the Operative.”

 

“What kind of name is ‘The Operative’?” the Doctor wondered.

 

“What kind of name is ‘The Doctor’?” Inara retorted.

 

He looked perplexed. “Well, mine…”

 

“Is he from the Alliance, Amila?”

 

“Yes, Mistress Inara.”

 

Inara went quiet a moment. “This is too far,” she said, seemingly to herself. “We cooperate with the Alliance, there’s no call to compel young girls to catch another little girl-“ She broke off, then mumbled, “No wonder Mal’s always avoiding them, they don’t know their place.”

 

“Well, let’s go rescue her then! C’mon,” the Doctor said, slithering off the desk he had been sitting cross-legged on.

 

“We can’t, they-“ Inara objected, and then in the face of the Doctor’s optimism and intent, she couldn’t remember her objections. Except for the one that the Alliance might just crush them, but the Doctor’s dismissal of the importance of risk evaluation infected her too. “Alright then,” Inara conceded, finding a smile was growing on her face. “Let’s go rescue her.”

Comments

[magicamethyst80.livejournal.com]

First off, thanks for posting this fic on dw_crossovers, even though I'm not a huge fan of smutt, I'm always looking for interesting crossovers.

Onto this fic, love how you were able to pull off Ten/Inara/Companion House, without turing this into pure smutt. You even feature a storyline, a good storyline. Hats off to you for turning something that most people would simply use as smutt, and turning it into something interesting. I also appreciate how you keep things between The Doctor and Inara strictly platonic as opposed to how most other authors would handle that relationship.

I'm very curious to find out who the Operative is and how The Doctor deals with him. Also curious to see where you are going to take this fic in regards to the strictly platonic relationship between Inara and The Doctor.

[intrikate88.livejournal.com]

How very odd! I'm not sure that I've ever heard of dw_crossovers before today, much less posted there. But however you managed to find your way here, thank you for saying such nice things.

Yes, it is one of the great challenges of my life not to dissolve helplessly into great puddles of smutt-smut and to keep things strictly platonic by chopping them into little convex regular polyhedra with cookie cutters. Anyway, geometry witticisms aside, I'm always fascinated with juxtapositioned plot ideas, so sex in a Companion House wouldn't strike me as particularly unique or interesting to explore, as a concept. Things blowing up and people being kidnapped, however... that's a whole 'nother matter.

I'm glad you are enjoying this fic and I do hope you'll keep reading!