Fic: Duck Day Afternoon (Rose, PG)
Oct. 10th, 2006 12:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doyleTitle: Duck Day Afternoon
Author: Doyle
Fandom: Doctor Who (2005)
Characters/Pairings: Rose, Ursula, Mickey/Jake
Rating: PG
Notes: Backup for the Rose gen ficathon for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sakuracorr who wanted Rose meeting the alt version of someone she never met in the series, Rose moving on, fluff with baby sibling and no angst or emo.
Summary: Rose watches the baby, makes a new friend and fails at angst.
It was Thursday. She could tell because Annie was wearing the blue outfit with the cartoon ducks. Her mum’s psycho post-natal calendar/wardrobe obsession was a bit scary (weeks ago Jake had offered a tenner to anyone brave enough to ask what would happen if the baby wore red on a Monday instead of a Friday, and so far his money was safe) but it was handy if, say, you’d been out on a bender with your best mate and his boyfriend the night before and couldn’t remember what day it was.
“It’s my day off,” she mumbled as pathetically as she could, dragging the duvet over her face. Her mother dragged it back, pulling it right off the bed for good measure and somehow depositing Annie beside her on the mattress on the same movement. Rose shivered and watched enviously as her baby sister, snug in her blue quilted ducks, devoted all her attention to trying to eat her own feet.
“If you’re not going to work you can mind your sister. And don’t you ‘oh, mum’ me –“ Rose hadn’t even opened her mouth, and was confused for a second as to whether Jackie might actually be talking to the baby – “you’re out with your mates all the time, when do I get a couple of hours to myself?”
This was probably a rhetorical question except to the downright suicidal. Rose reached over and tickled Annie’s stomach with one finger, satisfied when the motion didn’t make her arm fall off that she could stand to get up. “All right, all right. Let me get dressed and I’ll take her to the park.”
“Good. Don’t let her go on the swings by herself.”
“Mum, she’s only nine months old, I’m not completely stupid.”
“And don’t leave her anywhere. In a shop or something.”
“Mum!”
Jackie narrowed her eyes. “And don’t you run off with any strange men.”
Okay, so that one was fair enough.
**
The quickest way to the park was out the front gates, five minutes down the road and turn left at the sign. Rose decided on the less conventional but more interesting route of going in the opposite direction and taking the next Metro to Mickey and Jake’s. Annie was curled against her chest, fast asleep in her little harness (less chance of being left in a shop that way, apparently) and when she was like that – tiny and cute and not screaming the house down – Rose sometimes looked at her and saw her whole family, herself and Mum and Pete and back on through her grandparents, and the peace and love that rushed through her at times like that felt bigger than the universe.
That never lasted long, though, so right now the plan was to fob her off on Mickey and Jake for an hour and go shopping in town. These planned babysitting arrangements had nothing to do with sharing her mum’s confidence that being gay came with a natural talent for looking after babies. She remembered Jake holding Annie in the hospital the night after she was born, just frowning as he studied her face. “She’s so tiny,” he’d said. “Look at her little mouth.” She’d touched his arm, feeling tender and awful at the same time and about to tell him that maybe he and Mickey could adopt some day, when he’d asked “How the hell do you feed them, then? Do you get special small spoons or what? Thank God we never have to worry about one of these,” and handed her back. Still, they had a sofa for Annie to roll around on, and a big TV to play this world’s equivalent of the CBeebies, and that was just about all you could ask for when you were nine months old.
Mickey answered the intercom on the second minute of continuous buzzing.
“It’s just me, Rose.” Annie stirred and gurgled into the speaker. Rose shhed her, hoping sisterly telepathy would communicate ‘let’s surprise the boys and not give them a chance to pretend not to be in so they can weasel out of looking after you, yeah?’. “Let me up.”
“Jackie’s just off the phone. She says to tell you you can look after the baby yourself for once and that the park’s the other way.”
“Bollocks.”
“Not in front of the baby,” Mickey said and she heard Jake, in the background, add “Which is another reason why she can’t come up.”
“Look, we’ll be in the pub later. See you then. Don’t leave Annie in a shop or anything.”
“That only happened once,” she complained to the world at large, but however hard she buzzed, the door stayed locked.
**
A coffee shop, she told herself, was a bit like a park. An indoors park, that served coffee, and didn’t have swings. But she picked one that at least had a children’s area, and Annie was soon safely enclosed in a paddling pool full of squashy plastic balls. “I went to a whole planet like this once,” Rose told her, holding a red ball in front of her nose. Annie lunged for it, gurgling. Must be nice to have the one thing you wanted most in the world be a little toy, and right there for grabbing. “Only the balls, they turned out to really be aliens – or different bits of one really big alien, I can’t remember – but anyway, you should’ve seen the Doctor bounce around trying to talk to them.” Annie closed her mouth around her new favourite thing, not the slightest bit interested in the Doctor or the planet of the bouncy things whose name she’d forgotten. “I’ll tell you more about it when you’re older,” Rose said.
A girl at the next table was looking weirdly at her when she sat down. That’d be her, talking about alien planets in public again, then: “I make up these stories for her,” Rose said, a bit feebly. “There’s one with a horse on a spaceship I think she likes.”
“Oh.” The girl pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and closed the notebook she’d been writing in. She was short, about Rose’s age, with dark hair and a voice that sounded as if she had a cold. For a second Rose worried about exposing Annie to germs, then thought about the sixty million snotty kids who used that ball pool every day and decided it was a bit late to think about it. “I’m not very good with children.”
“God, me neither… oh, she’s not mine though,” she added, before the girl with glasses could ring Social Services. Did they have Social Services here? Or Childline? When Annie was older and rowing with Mum and Dad, who was she going to threaten at the top of her voice to ring? “She’s my kid sister. I’m babysitting her for the day. Giving Mum a break.”
“My name’s Ursula,” she said, sounding like she’d practised this as a kid, maybe to introduce herself at a party, and never had much reason to say it.
“Hiya. I’m Rose. The baby’s Annie, but only ‘cos my dad promised to take my mum to Barbados if she gave up on calling her Shiloh.”
“My mother wouldn’t give up on Ursula.” She didn’t sound pleased about it. Rose had once been to the smallest planet around Ursa Minor, and in fact to the New Year there in Ursula City, but she didn’t mention it.
Stuck for anything else to say, they watched Annie flop over in the pool for a while.
“I like the little ducks on her dress.”
“It’s a Thursday,” Rose said automatically. She started to explain this, but Ursula just nodded. “What’re you writing? The next Harry Potter?”
“Who?”
One book, Rose thought, if she or Mickey had just been able to bring one book through the Void between universes they could have made a fortune… “Nothing, ignore me.”
“It’s for my thesis.” She leaned forward, glancing over her shoulder as if there might be spies lurking in the baskets of beans, and said, “I’m writing about Lumic and the Cybermen.”
“Oh, right.” Great, the world really needed another book about Lumic. Everybody who’d ever met him had done their tell-all in the papers by now, surely. Even her mum had bought a copy of Cybus Secrets From Beyond the Grave.
“My theory,” Ursula told her, “is that Lumic had outside help. Designing the Cybermen, building them - it could all have been the master plan of a sinister extraterrestrial intelligence.”
“Extra-terrestrial? You mean – aliens?”
“Aliens.”
She could only remember one alien being involved, and he’d definitely been on the anti-Lumic side. “So you’re pretty sure aliens exist, then.” That was different. Nobody thought about aliens much here; there was hardly any sci-fi on TV, even. Not that she would have noticed, but Mickey moaned about it a bit.
“Aliens are real,” Ursula said, gripping her coffee mug with both hands. “I’ve seen them.”
“Really?”
She turned pink. “Well, not seen them, exactly. But there are things that are just strange, aren’t they? And sometimes I think… it’d be nice if there were aliens and things. More than us, I mean. Like the story you were telling your little sister.”
Rose tapped her spoon of the top of her cup and thought about that. It was a good reason to believe in something, she thought; because you thought it’d be nice. “You know what? I reckon you’re right.”
“You’re just making fun of me,” Ursula said sternly.
“I’m not, honest!” Look, she nearly said, what if you were right – not about the Lumic thing, but about aliens being real? What if I told you that the story I was telling really happened, and loads of other stories did too, and about a year ago I was crying on a beach because there was this guy, this alien, and I thought he was my whole world? But that wasn’t the sort of thing you went round saying to total strangers in coffee shops, so she slipped a business card out of her purse and said, “When you get finished with uni, you should give these people a ring.”
Ursula flipped it back and forth, letting the hologram T catch the light. “Torchwood,” she read. “I’ve never heard of them.”
“Oh,” Rose said, “I think we’re just your sort of people. Pass us the sugar?”
Author: Doyle
Fandom: Doctor Who (2005)
Characters/Pairings: Rose, Ursula, Mickey/Jake
Rating: PG
Notes: Backup for the Rose gen ficathon for
sakuracorr who wanted Rose meeting the alt version of someone she never met in the series, Rose moving on, fluff with baby sibling and no angst or emo.Summary: Rose watches the baby, makes a new friend and fails at angst.
It was Thursday. She could tell because Annie was wearing the blue outfit with the cartoon ducks. Her mum’s psycho post-natal calendar/wardrobe obsession was a bit scary (weeks ago Jake had offered a tenner to anyone brave enough to ask what would happen if the baby wore red on a Monday instead of a Friday, and so far his money was safe) but it was handy if, say, you’d been out on a bender with your best mate and his boyfriend the night before and couldn’t remember what day it was.
“It’s my day off,” she mumbled as pathetically as she could, dragging the duvet over her face. Her mother dragged it back, pulling it right off the bed for good measure and somehow depositing Annie beside her on the mattress on the same movement. Rose shivered and watched enviously as her baby sister, snug in her blue quilted ducks, devoted all her attention to trying to eat her own feet.
“If you’re not going to work you can mind your sister. And don’t you ‘oh, mum’ me –“ Rose hadn’t even opened her mouth, and was confused for a second as to whether Jackie might actually be talking to the baby – “you’re out with your mates all the time, when do I get a couple of hours to myself?”
This was probably a rhetorical question except to the downright suicidal. Rose reached over and tickled Annie’s stomach with one finger, satisfied when the motion didn’t make her arm fall off that she could stand to get up. “All right, all right. Let me get dressed and I’ll take her to the park.”
“Good. Don’t let her go on the swings by herself.”
“Mum, she’s only nine months old, I’m not completely stupid.”
“And don’t leave her anywhere. In a shop or something.”
“Mum!”
Jackie narrowed her eyes. “And don’t you run off with any strange men.”
Okay, so that one was fair enough.
**
The quickest way to the park was out the front gates, five minutes down the road and turn left at the sign. Rose decided on the less conventional but more interesting route of going in the opposite direction and taking the next Metro to Mickey and Jake’s. Annie was curled against her chest, fast asleep in her little harness (less chance of being left in a shop that way, apparently) and when she was like that – tiny and cute and not screaming the house down – Rose sometimes looked at her and saw her whole family, herself and Mum and Pete and back on through her grandparents, and the peace and love that rushed through her at times like that felt bigger than the universe.
That never lasted long, though, so right now the plan was to fob her off on Mickey and Jake for an hour and go shopping in town. These planned babysitting arrangements had nothing to do with sharing her mum’s confidence that being gay came with a natural talent for looking after babies. She remembered Jake holding Annie in the hospital the night after she was born, just frowning as he studied her face. “She’s so tiny,” he’d said. “Look at her little mouth.” She’d touched his arm, feeling tender and awful at the same time and about to tell him that maybe he and Mickey could adopt some day, when he’d asked “How the hell do you feed them, then? Do you get special small spoons or what? Thank God we never have to worry about one of these,” and handed her back. Still, they had a sofa for Annie to roll around on, and a big TV to play this world’s equivalent of the CBeebies, and that was just about all you could ask for when you were nine months old.
Mickey answered the intercom on the second minute of continuous buzzing.
“It’s just me, Rose.” Annie stirred and gurgled into the speaker. Rose shhed her, hoping sisterly telepathy would communicate ‘let’s surprise the boys and not give them a chance to pretend not to be in so they can weasel out of looking after you, yeah?’. “Let me up.”
“Jackie’s just off the phone. She says to tell you you can look after the baby yourself for once and that the park’s the other way.”
“Bollocks.”
“Not in front of the baby,” Mickey said and she heard Jake, in the background, add “Which is another reason why she can’t come up.”
“Look, we’ll be in the pub later. See you then. Don’t leave Annie in a shop or anything.”
“That only happened once,” she complained to the world at large, but however hard she buzzed, the door stayed locked.
**
A coffee shop, she told herself, was a bit like a park. An indoors park, that served coffee, and didn’t have swings. But she picked one that at least had a children’s area, and Annie was soon safely enclosed in a paddling pool full of squashy plastic balls. “I went to a whole planet like this once,” Rose told her, holding a red ball in front of her nose. Annie lunged for it, gurgling. Must be nice to have the one thing you wanted most in the world be a little toy, and right there for grabbing. “Only the balls, they turned out to really be aliens – or different bits of one really big alien, I can’t remember – but anyway, you should’ve seen the Doctor bounce around trying to talk to them.” Annie closed her mouth around her new favourite thing, not the slightest bit interested in the Doctor or the planet of the bouncy things whose name she’d forgotten. “I’ll tell you more about it when you’re older,” Rose said.
A girl at the next table was looking weirdly at her when she sat down. That’d be her, talking about alien planets in public again, then: “I make up these stories for her,” Rose said, a bit feebly. “There’s one with a horse on a spaceship I think she likes.”
“Oh.” The girl pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and closed the notebook she’d been writing in. She was short, about Rose’s age, with dark hair and a voice that sounded as if she had a cold. For a second Rose worried about exposing Annie to germs, then thought about the sixty million snotty kids who used that ball pool every day and decided it was a bit late to think about it. “I’m not very good with children.”
“God, me neither… oh, she’s not mine though,” she added, before the girl with glasses could ring Social Services. Did they have Social Services here? Or Childline? When Annie was older and rowing with Mum and Dad, who was she going to threaten at the top of her voice to ring? “She’s my kid sister. I’m babysitting her for the day. Giving Mum a break.”
“My name’s Ursula,” she said, sounding like she’d practised this as a kid, maybe to introduce herself at a party, and never had much reason to say it.
“Hiya. I’m Rose. The baby’s Annie, but only ‘cos my dad promised to take my mum to Barbados if she gave up on calling her Shiloh.”
“My mother wouldn’t give up on Ursula.” She didn’t sound pleased about it. Rose had once been to the smallest planet around Ursa Minor, and in fact to the New Year there in Ursula City, but she didn’t mention it.
Stuck for anything else to say, they watched Annie flop over in the pool for a while.
“I like the little ducks on her dress.”
“It’s a Thursday,” Rose said automatically. She started to explain this, but Ursula just nodded. “What’re you writing? The next Harry Potter?”
“Who?”
One book, Rose thought, if she or Mickey had just been able to bring one book through the Void between universes they could have made a fortune… “Nothing, ignore me.”
“It’s for my thesis.” She leaned forward, glancing over her shoulder as if there might be spies lurking in the baskets of beans, and said, “I’m writing about Lumic and the Cybermen.”
“Oh, right.” Great, the world really needed another book about Lumic. Everybody who’d ever met him had done their tell-all in the papers by now, surely. Even her mum had bought a copy of Cybus Secrets From Beyond the Grave.
“My theory,” Ursula told her, “is that Lumic had outside help. Designing the Cybermen, building them - it could all have been the master plan of a sinister extraterrestrial intelligence.”
“Extra-terrestrial? You mean – aliens?”
“Aliens.”
She could only remember one alien being involved, and he’d definitely been on the anti-Lumic side. “So you’re pretty sure aliens exist, then.” That was different. Nobody thought about aliens much here; there was hardly any sci-fi on TV, even. Not that she would have noticed, but Mickey moaned about it a bit.
“Aliens are real,” Ursula said, gripping her coffee mug with both hands. “I’ve seen them.”
“Really?”
She turned pink. “Well, not seen them, exactly. But there are things that are just strange, aren’t they? And sometimes I think… it’d be nice if there were aliens and things. More than us, I mean. Like the story you were telling your little sister.”
Rose tapped her spoon of the top of her cup and thought about that. It was a good reason to believe in something, she thought; because you thought it’d be nice. “You know what? I reckon you’re right.”
“You’re just making fun of me,” Ursula said sternly.
“I’m not, honest!” Look, she nearly said, what if you were right – not about the Lumic thing, but about aliens being real? What if I told you that the story I was telling really happened, and loads of other stories did too, and about a year ago I was crying on a beach because there was this guy, this alien, and I thought he was my whole world? But that wasn’t the sort of thing you went round saying to total strangers in coffee shops, so she slipped a business card out of her purse and said, “When you get finished with uni, you should give these people a ring.”
Ursula flipped it back and forth, letting the hologram T catch the light. “Torchwood,” she read. “I’ve never heard of them.”
“Oh,” Rose said, “I think we’re just your sort of people. Pass us the sugar?”
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on 2006-10-10 12:00 am (UTC)no subject
on 2006-10-10 12:01 am (UTC)