Fic: All Your Beliefs (Ian/Barbara, Susan)
Dec. 4th, 2006 09:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doyleTitle: All Your Beliefs
Author: Doyle
Fandom: Doctor Who (First Doctor era)
Characters/Pairing: Ian/Barbara, Susan
Rating: PG
Notes: For the Ian/Barbara ficathon for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
brideofcthulhu. Part of the request was the inclusion of a character from the EDAs. You shouldn’t need to have read the EDAs to follow this, but further notes at the end just in case. Branches off from canon at Dalek Invasion of Earth.
Summary: The key became part of the story, of course. The Doctor leaves more than just Susan behind.
Perhaps they had offended him without knowing it; perhaps he had decided he’d prefer loneliness to facing questions about how he could bear to leave his grandchild behind; perhaps, as Barbara came to believe, in the moment he simply wasn’t thinking about them at all. He might not have known they weren’t already on board until he realised, later, that the Ship was empty and terribly quiet.
Accident or design, master plan or tragic misjudgement, by the time she and Ian reached the patch of riverbank where the TARDIS had stood the Doctor was gone. Susan stood in the space where her home had been, looking wretchedly up at the sky, and Barbara would have moved to comfort her if she had been able to force herself to move. The Doctor and the Ship gone and the three of them left stranded here; it was too large to take in all at once, the way she had once thought the size of galaxies to be beyond mere mortal comprehension.
Susan took David’s outstretched hand, the childishness seeping away from her face so suddenly that Barbara and Ian looked at one another in surprise, forgetting for a moment that they were two hundred years from home with no way back. “He’s gone,” Susan said, and her voice was clear and hard and grown-up. “He said he would come back one day but he won’t. David and I are getting married. What are you two going to do?” And she opened her hand and her necklace, the key hanging at the end of a silver cord, slithered through her fingers and into the dirt.
“I suppose we’re going to stay together?” Ian asked. Barbara looked at him as if he had lost his mind and he smiled, relieved and really rather beautiful, and she laced her fingers through his and didn’t let go for a long time.
They thought about staying in London, talked vaguely about applying for a house or simply following everyone else in finding somewhere that still had most of its roof and declaring it theirs. Plenty to be done in the reconstruction – Barbara was desperate to get involved in the excavation of the British Library, wanting to piece together the centuries of history she’d missed – but David was set on going to his family’s land, and Susan was sticking to him as doggedly as she’d stuck to her grandfather, and wouldn’t be drawn on what she might want for herself.
The roads north were pitted, rusting HGVs and long-abandoned service stations scattered by the roadside like distance markers. Barbara took her turn at driving in the middle of the night. Ian sat up with her, David and Susan sleeping as best they could squeezed around grain sacks and drums of petrol in the back of the van. It was as she had always imagined driving across America must be like, the stillness that seemed to go on forever and the feeling that there was no other life in the world. For all that she’d seen, she couldn’t remember the stars ever looking so bright or so far away.
“Unbelievable, isn’t it?” Ian said. “David would think we were mad if we told them we’d been there.”
“It’s beginning to feel like it was all a dream.”
“And we’ve slept for a few hundred years?”
She caught the tiny trip in his voice where he almost said ‘slept together’ and covered her mouth, mindful of her laugh waking the others. Third-form humour at best, but it was very late and the world had come within a breath of ending and just this once she was entitled. Ian grinned at her and turned to look out the window at the nothingness. What would he do, she wondered, on this farm of David’s? What would she do?
She thought of her mother as a young woman, driving ambulances in the Blitz, taking on a job she would never have imagined herself capable of simply because it had to be done. She thought of her mother in her sixties, seventies, eighties, waiting for her to come home.
“Penny for them?”
“I was thinking that our families – everyone we knew at home - must be dead,” she said carefully. He just nodded, far too sensible to try to tell her what she already knew, that worse things (so they said) happened at sea and that at least they had each other.
It rained the whole time David was showing them around the village – hamlet, settlement, ghost town, laid out in a neat, soulless little grid and then abandoned when there were no more supermarkets in the cities, and then no more cities. The fat, rust-tinged raindrops left streaks of dust where they fell. “The air’s filthy,” David’s mother, clinging to her son’s arm, said. “Whatever the Daleks did, they ruined the air.” It was the only time the Daleks were ever mentioned by name. They were always they, metal bogeymen invoked to scare children away from the pits of broken machinery behind the barn.
David said, “Do you like it, Susan? We’ll be happy here, you’ll see.” If he noticed she didn’t speak, he just took it for agreement.
He told Barbara and Ian they could take any of the empty houses they liked, never asking if the two of them were going to be living together. Somewhere they had become a unit; on the journey, or when they realised the Doctor had left them behind, or on some alien world, or standing in a classroom long ago, Barbara saying I need to talk to you about Susan Foreman.
(“I nearly didn’t become a teacher,” Ian said, their first night together when everything was new and even the most ordinary words were given that awed reverence. “I was going to be a research scientist, some important job in Reigate.”
She laughed: “I nearly didn’t tell you about Susan. I felt so silly, I almost went after her on my own.”
He pulled her closer, if that was possible. “Bit of a close-run thing, wasn’t it? If one or two things had gone differently we might have missed each other.”
"All those nearlys! History turns on those moments," she said.)
They looked very carefully around all the identical houses and then chose one far enough from Susan and David to not seem as though they were hovering. The house was the same prefab cube as all the others, with an intact roof, four good walls. It was exactly as big inside as it looked from the outside.
“Just a few months,” Barbara had said when they were deciding to go with Susan. “Just to see her settled, since she’s so adamant about going with David. Six months or a year and we can come back to London, or go somewhere else.”
Six months: and the meagre crop was ready for harvest, all hands needed. “It’s all terribly Lark Rise to Candleford,” Barbara said, laughing against his mouth and not caring that they were both filthy from the fields. A year: and one of David’s sisters was pregnant and ten times as prickly as ever, and since Barbara was the only person who could put up with her it seemed only decent they stay until the birth.
Two years: they had stopped talking about going back to London, started using words like home. The house creaked under the weight of the equipment Ian dragged home for his salvage group, talking up grand schemes of electricity generators and working radios. Barbara, when she had the time, talked to people, writing down their memories of the years before the war. It was a small sort of history, the record of these hundred or so lives, but (she maintained) none the less worthy for it.
They never talked about children. It was something Barbara had assumed, at the back of her mind, would happen eventually, another bridge to be crossed – probably, all things considered, quite a nice bridge, but not something to actively cheer on. She worried more for Susan on that score, had to keep reminding herself that the girl was still only eighteen and looked even younger. David Campbell’s child-bride, who was beginning to spend all her time with Daniel, her new nephew, cradling him on the step and singing softly to him in a language that didn’t sound like any Barbara had ever heard on Earth.
“It’s natural she’d feel out of place,” David said once, in a moment of doubt and honesty. Barbara listened in silence, resenting that he would force this on her because he had decided her gender made her an ideal listener. “She’s so far from home. It’d be different, wouldn’t it? If we had a kid of our own? It’d be… grounding.” That made her think of Ian’s experiments with the generators, grounding the metal to the earth, as if Susan was nothing but a faulty piece of machinery to be mended or thrown away.
“Do you wish things had turned out differently?”
This was eight, nine years down the line, long enough that she’d stopped counting. Seasons turned, work needed to be done, and London faded into a memory; London in their own time just something she’d dreamed once.
When Daniel was young enough for stories she had heard Susan tell him a fairytale that she said she remembered from her own childhood. It finished ‘the story changes, the ending remains the same’. “I would only like things to be different,” Barbara finally said, “if they would have turned out the same way.” He laughed and called her difficult, and said he knew what she meant.
And it might have gone on that way for however many years, if Ian had come home by a different route, if he hadn’t seen two of the men arguing in the fields, if he hadn’t been such an instinctive peacemaker. As it was, he hesitated for a second and then walked over saying, in a friendly sort of way, “Anything I can help with?”
If Tyler hadn’t had quite so much to drink, if he hadn’t still been carrying a field-knife…
History, as his wife could have told him, turns on such moments.
A bad business, everyone said. He had been a good man, for all that he hadn’t been born in the community, and it was a very bad business indeed. David and the other men agreed without so many words that death, like birth, was something best left to women. Susan was sent to give Barbara the news and ended up weeping in her arms, as if the tears had been damming up inside her since the day her grandfather left.
Barbara held her, dry-eyed, and didn’t let herself pretend that this was some cruel and elaborate practical joke. At the funeral she held Susan’s hand as the girl whispered some prayer or reassurance to herself in her lullaby language, the words prettier and more meaningful than anything else said at the service. Her double pulse beat under Barbara’s fingers, staccato and unearthly.
Afterwards Barbara went home and locked up all the windows, and packed away all her papers, and then she found the hidden place in a drawer even Ian hadn’t known about and brought out the key Susan had dropped that day on the riverbank. It was cold, even when she held it closed in her fist for hours as the house grew dark.
The key became part of the story, of course. Later, the blacksmith told everyone who would listen that it took the best part of a day to melt in the forge, and when he took it out again it was perfectly cool (he never told anyone that while it burned he sat on the floor and wept, helpless against the feeling of time running backwards through his head until he was a child again, and his mother and father were still alive, and the Daleks were fifteen years away and nothing but a nightmare.)
He beat the metal until it was foil, as Barbara had asked (as she had told him to) and she took it from him without a word and walked out of the village.
No-one ever saw her again.
People said, with the imprecise geography of myth, that she had gone off into the mountains, though they rarely took the story to its logical conclusion of death by exposure and a frozen body left for the birds. Once, aching after a day in the fields, David stared out at the dark as if he could see his failing crops and said, “I suppose Barbara must have died.” His wife was silent. The gaslight caught her reflection in the glass, and he was brought up short by the way it made her eyes look. Secure in the daytime, he would laugh at himself for that moment when a shiver crept across his skin and he thought what is it I’ve married? She was only Susan, beautiful, strange Susan, and if she seemed to stay the same year after year while he grew older, well, love often tricked the eyes like that.
Susan went off walking by herself, just until she didn’t feel the seconds pounding at her like nails. She took Daniel, even though he was getting bigger and not so nice, and she wondered what it would be like when he and David and everyone else grew old around her, when she was the only one left. She hoped it would be quiet at last. He was much too big now for stories, but she told him Gallifreyan fairytales while they walked, wishing she could remember the one about how the very first Ships were grown from nothing at all.
As for Barbara:
She would have laughed, a little, at the idea that she might walk off into death for the sake of lost love. She had loved Ian – would easily and honestly say she had loved him more than life – but she knew too much of history to take herself too literally. History was royalty and empires and shifting borders; it was births and mistakes and grave-dirt, beginnings and endings with not enough middle between them. People lost husbands, children, whole families, whole worlds, and picked themselves up and carried on.
What was open for debate was where, exactly, she carried on.
There was an old transmitter on top of the hills. The pylon was invisible from the village – not that anyone would have cared, with no electricity to power it and nothing to transmit or receive in any event. But Ian had been coming up here for years, and she had half-listened to all his explanations of how it was almost working, and idly thought about what could be done if it did work, and if Ian ever showed signs of wanting to leave the life they’d made from what the Doctor had left them with.
Ever the scientist, he’d left notes even a historian could follow. She was self-conscious about the key. That was where she left science behind and moved squarely into magic and wishful thinking. Ian would have laughed. Still, she wrapped the metal foil around the aerial of the small radio she’d brought from home, and could almost make herself believe that something changed about the static, as if the universe was suddenly listening.
She was too weary for stage fright, even with the largest audience she could imagine. “Doctor,” she said, “it’s Barbara. I’d like to leave now.” The generator stopped turning. There was nothing in the notes about how to get it started again, beyond an unhelpful “it does keep doing that” that made her laugh out loud.
And then the universe shifted, time accordioning until she felt as if she could jump into any year of her life, any year of anyone’s life, and she was expanding while the world shrank to a pinpoint around her. It was seconds or years before she could open her eyes.
She had expected a police box. The shape that formed was a young woman, pale and plump with red hair. After so long with the same hundred faces it was almost as much of a shock to see a new face as to see her grow solid from the air. Barbara watched this with equanimity and realised that nothing would surprise her ever again.
The woman clucked her tongue in irritation. “What are you doing sending time signals? You’ll have Daleks swarming all over the planet.”
“They’ve already gone.”
“Cause and effect muddled up again. There is a War on, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” she found herself saying, “I don’t know who you are.” Not quite true, because there was something very familiar about how she had appeared, and they were close enough now that Barbara could feel the same vibration deep in her head she had sometimes felt late at night in the TARDIS.
Ian would have said it wasn’t possible, she was sure of that. But why not? If the Doctor’s people could make a Ship that moved in time and space, why not one that walked and talked? If you could touch the alien sands the Doctor had asked them, would that convince you? She reached out, brushed her fingers across the woman’s velvet sleeve, and she was convinced.
“My name’s Barbara,” she said. “Do you have a name?”
A sly look crept over a face unsuited to sly looks. “I’m Compassion. I was in the Vortex, listening for signals. And there you were. Would you like to come inside?”
The junkyard in Totters Lane, all those years ago. An abandoned transmitter station in a place she’d briefly called home. The story changes, the ending remains the same.
“Where will we go?” she asked, unable to work out if she cared what the answer would be.
“Humans… anywhere. Everywhere. I can take you to the Doctor, if you like. Come if you’re coming, but I’m going now.”
The offer hung in the air, and the story might have gone another way entirely.
“I’ll come with you,” she said, and if she was given to those sorts of thoughts she would have hoped that wherever he was, Ian was proud.
NB: Compassion is one of the Eighth Doctor’s companions in the BBC books – she’s a human cult member obsessed with receiving and obeying signals who eventually becomes a humanoid TARDIS. ‘The story changes, the ending remains the same’ is the motto of the Celestial Intervention Agency according to the audio play ‘The Kingmaker’.
Author: Doyle
Fandom: Doctor Who (First Doctor era)
Characters/Pairing: Ian/Barbara, Susan
Rating: PG
Notes: For the Ian/Barbara ficathon for
brideofcthulhu. Part of the request was the inclusion of a character from the EDAs. You shouldn’t need to have read the EDAs to follow this, but further notes at the end just in case. Branches off from canon at Dalek Invasion of Earth.Summary: The key became part of the story, of course. The Doctor leaves more than just Susan behind.
Perhaps they had offended him without knowing it; perhaps he had decided he’d prefer loneliness to facing questions about how he could bear to leave his grandchild behind; perhaps, as Barbara came to believe, in the moment he simply wasn’t thinking about them at all. He might not have known they weren’t already on board until he realised, later, that the Ship was empty and terribly quiet.
Accident or design, master plan or tragic misjudgement, by the time she and Ian reached the patch of riverbank where the TARDIS had stood the Doctor was gone. Susan stood in the space where her home had been, looking wretchedly up at the sky, and Barbara would have moved to comfort her if she had been able to force herself to move. The Doctor and the Ship gone and the three of them left stranded here; it was too large to take in all at once, the way she had once thought the size of galaxies to be beyond mere mortal comprehension.
Susan took David’s outstretched hand, the childishness seeping away from her face so suddenly that Barbara and Ian looked at one another in surprise, forgetting for a moment that they were two hundred years from home with no way back. “He’s gone,” Susan said, and her voice was clear and hard and grown-up. “He said he would come back one day but he won’t. David and I are getting married. What are you two going to do?” And she opened her hand and her necklace, the key hanging at the end of a silver cord, slithered through her fingers and into the dirt.
“I suppose we’re going to stay together?” Ian asked. Barbara looked at him as if he had lost his mind and he smiled, relieved and really rather beautiful, and she laced her fingers through his and didn’t let go for a long time.
They thought about staying in London, talked vaguely about applying for a house or simply following everyone else in finding somewhere that still had most of its roof and declaring it theirs. Plenty to be done in the reconstruction – Barbara was desperate to get involved in the excavation of the British Library, wanting to piece together the centuries of history she’d missed – but David was set on going to his family’s land, and Susan was sticking to him as doggedly as she’d stuck to her grandfather, and wouldn’t be drawn on what she might want for herself.
The roads north were pitted, rusting HGVs and long-abandoned service stations scattered by the roadside like distance markers. Barbara took her turn at driving in the middle of the night. Ian sat up with her, David and Susan sleeping as best they could squeezed around grain sacks and drums of petrol in the back of the van. It was as she had always imagined driving across America must be like, the stillness that seemed to go on forever and the feeling that there was no other life in the world. For all that she’d seen, she couldn’t remember the stars ever looking so bright or so far away.
“Unbelievable, isn’t it?” Ian said. “David would think we were mad if we told them we’d been there.”
“It’s beginning to feel like it was all a dream.”
“And we’ve slept for a few hundred years?”
She caught the tiny trip in his voice where he almost said ‘slept together’ and covered her mouth, mindful of her laugh waking the others. Third-form humour at best, but it was very late and the world had come within a breath of ending and just this once she was entitled. Ian grinned at her and turned to look out the window at the nothingness. What would he do, she wondered, on this farm of David’s? What would she do?
She thought of her mother as a young woman, driving ambulances in the Blitz, taking on a job she would never have imagined herself capable of simply because it had to be done. She thought of her mother in her sixties, seventies, eighties, waiting for her to come home.
“Penny for them?”
“I was thinking that our families – everyone we knew at home - must be dead,” she said carefully. He just nodded, far too sensible to try to tell her what she already knew, that worse things (so they said) happened at sea and that at least they had each other.
It rained the whole time David was showing them around the village – hamlet, settlement, ghost town, laid out in a neat, soulless little grid and then abandoned when there were no more supermarkets in the cities, and then no more cities. The fat, rust-tinged raindrops left streaks of dust where they fell. “The air’s filthy,” David’s mother, clinging to her son’s arm, said. “Whatever the Daleks did, they ruined the air.” It was the only time the Daleks were ever mentioned by name. They were always they, metal bogeymen invoked to scare children away from the pits of broken machinery behind the barn.
David said, “Do you like it, Susan? We’ll be happy here, you’ll see.” If he noticed she didn’t speak, he just took it for agreement.
He told Barbara and Ian they could take any of the empty houses they liked, never asking if the two of them were going to be living together. Somewhere they had become a unit; on the journey, or when they realised the Doctor had left them behind, or on some alien world, or standing in a classroom long ago, Barbara saying I need to talk to you about Susan Foreman.
(“I nearly didn’t become a teacher,” Ian said, their first night together when everything was new and even the most ordinary words were given that awed reverence. “I was going to be a research scientist, some important job in Reigate.”
She laughed: “I nearly didn’t tell you about Susan. I felt so silly, I almost went after her on my own.”
He pulled her closer, if that was possible. “Bit of a close-run thing, wasn’t it? If one or two things had gone differently we might have missed each other.”
"All those nearlys! History turns on those moments," she said.)
They looked very carefully around all the identical houses and then chose one far enough from Susan and David to not seem as though they were hovering. The house was the same prefab cube as all the others, with an intact roof, four good walls. It was exactly as big inside as it looked from the outside.
“Just a few months,” Barbara had said when they were deciding to go with Susan. “Just to see her settled, since she’s so adamant about going with David. Six months or a year and we can come back to London, or go somewhere else.”
Six months: and the meagre crop was ready for harvest, all hands needed. “It’s all terribly Lark Rise to Candleford,” Barbara said, laughing against his mouth and not caring that they were both filthy from the fields. A year: and one of David’s sisters was pregnant and ten times as prickly as ever, and since Barbara was the only person who could put up with her it seemed only decent they stay until the birth.
Two years: they had stopped talking about going back to London, started using words like home. The house creaked under the weight of the equipment Ian dragged home for his salvage group, talking up grand schemes of electricity generators and working radios. Barbara, when she had the time, talked to people, writing down their memories of the years before the war. It was a small sort of history, the record of these hundred or so lives, but (she maintained) none the less worthy for it.
They never talked about children. It was something Barbara had assumed, at the back of her mind, would happen eventually, another bridge to be crossed – probably, all things considered, quite a nice bridge, but not something to actively cheer on. She worried more for Susan on that score, had to keep reminding herself that the girl was still only eighteen and looked even younger. David Campbell’s child-bride, who was beginning to spend all her time with Daniel, her new nephew, cradling him on the step and singing softly to him in a language that didn’t sound like any Barbara had ever heard on Earth.
“It’s natural she’d feel out of place,” David said once, in a moment of doubt and honesty. Barbara listened in silence, resenting that he would force this on her because he had decided her gender made her an ideal listener. “She’s so far from home. It’d be different, wouldn’t it? If we had a kid of our own? It’d be… grounding.” That made her think of Ian’s experiments with the generators, grounding the metal to the earth, as if Susan was nothing but a faulty piece of machinery to be mended or thrown away.
“Do you wish things had turned out differently?”
This was eight, nine years down the line, long enough that she’d stopped counting. Seasons turned, work needed to be done, and London faded into a memory; London in their own time just something she’d dreamed once.
When Daniel was young enough for stories she had heard Susan tell him a fairytale that she said she remembered from her own childhood. It finished ‘the story changes, the ending remains the same’. “I would only like things to be different,” Barbara finally said, “if they would have turned out the same way.” He laughed and called her difficult, and said he knew what she meant.
And it might have gone on that way for however many years, if Ian had come home by a different route, if he hadn’t seen two of the men arguing in the fields, if he hadn’t been such an instinctive peacemaker. As it was, he hesitated for a second and then walked over saying, in a friendly sort of way, “Anything I can help with?”
If Tyler hadn’t had quite so much to drink, if he hadn’t still been carrying a field-knife…
History, as his wife could have told him, turns on such moments.
A bad business, everyone said. He had been a good man, for all that he hadn’t been born in the community, and it was a very bad business indeed. David and the other men agreed without so many words that death, like birth, was something best left to women. Susan was sent to give Barbara the news and ended up weeping in her arms, as if the tears had been damming up inside her since the day her grandfather left.
Barbara held her, dry-eyed, and didn’t let herself pretend that this was some cruel and elaborate practical joke. At the funeral she held Susan’s hand as the girl whispered some prayer or reassurance to herself in her lullaby language, the words prettier and more meaningful than anything else said at the service. Her double pulse beat under Barbara’s fingers, staccato and unearthly.
Afterwards Barbara went home and locked up all the windows, and packed away all her papers, and then she found the hidden place in a drawer even Ian hadn’t known about and brought out the key Susan had dropped that day on the riverbank. It was cold, even when she held it closed in her fist for hours as the house grew dark.
The key became part of the story, of course. Later, the blacksmith told everyone who would listen that it took the best part of a day to melt in the forge, and when he took it out again it was perfectly cool (he never told anyone that while it burned he sat on the floor and wept, helpless against the feeling of time running backwards through his head until he was a child again, and his mother and father were still alive, and the Daleks were fifteen years away and nothing but a nightmare.)
He beat the metal until it was foil, as Barbara had asked (as she had told him to) and she took it from him without a word and walked out of the village.
No-one ever saw her again.
People said, with the imprecise geography of myth, that she had gone off into the mountains, though they rarely took the story to its logical conclusion of death by exposure and a frozen body left for the birds. Once, aching after a day in the fields, David stared out at the dark as if he could see his failing crops and said, “I suppose Barbara must have died.” His wife was silent. The gaslight caught her reflection in the glass, and he was brought up short by the way it made her eyes look. Secure in the daytime, he would laugh at himself for that moment when a shiver crept across his skin and he thought what is it I’ve married? She was only Susan, beautiful, strange Susan, and if she seemed to stay the same year after year while he grew older, well, love often tricked the eyes like that.
Susan went off walking by herself, just until she didn’t feel the seconds pounding at her like nails. She took Daniel, even though he was getting bigger and not so nice, and she wondered what it would be like when he and David and everyone else grew old around her, when she was the only one left. She hoped it would be quiet at last. He was much too big now for stories, but she told him Gallifreyan fairytales while they walked, wishing she could remember the one about how the very first Ships were grown from nothing at all.
As for Barbara:
She would have laughed, a little, at the idea that she might walk off into death for the sake of lost love. She had loved Ian – would easily and honestly say she had loved him more than life – but she knew too much of history to take herself too literally. History was royalty and empires and shifting borders; it was births and mistakes and grave-dirt, beginnings and endings with not enough middle between them. People lost husbands, children, whole families, whole worlds, and picked themselves up and carried on.
What was open for debate was where, exactly, she carried on.
There was an old transmitter on top of the hills. The pylon was invisible from the village – not that anyone would have cared, with no electricity to power it and nothing to transmit or receive in any event. But Ian had been coming up here for years, and she had half-listened to all his explanations of how it was almost working, and idly thought about what could be done if it did work, and if Ian ever showed signs of wanting to leave the life they’d made from what the Doctor had left them with.
Ever the scientist, he’d left notes even a historian could follow. She was self-conscious about the key. That was where she left science behind and moved squarely into magic and wishful thinking. Ian would have laughed. Still, she wrapped the metal foil around the aerial of the small radio she’d brought from home, and could almost make herself believe that something changed about the static, as if the universe was suddenly listening.
She was too weary for stage fright, even with the largest audience she could imagine. “Doctor,” she said, “it’s Barbara. I’d like to leave now.” The generator stopped turning. There was nothing in the notes about how to get it started again, beyond an unhelpful “it does keep doing that” that made her laugh out loud.
And then the universe shifted, time accordioning until she felt as if she could jump into any year of her life, any year of anyone’s life, and she was expanding while the world shrank to a pinpoint around her. It was seconds or years before she could open her eyes.
She had expected a police box. The shape that formed was a young woman, pale and plump with red hair. After so long with the same hundred faces it was almost as much of a shock to see a new face as to see her grow solid from the air. Barbara watched this with equanimity and realised that nothing would surprise her ever again.
The woman clucked her tongue in irritation. “What are you doing sending time signals? You’ll have Daleks swarming all over the planet.”
“They’ve already gone.”
“Cause and effect muddled up again. There is a War on, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” she found herself saying, “I don’t know who you are.” Not quite true, because there was something very familiar about how she had appeared, and they were close enough now that Barbara could feel the same vibration deep in her head she had sometimes felt late at night in the TARDIS.
Ian would have said it wasn’t possible, she was sure of that. But why not? If the Doctor’s people could make a Ship that moved in time and space, why not one that walked and talked? If you could touch the alien sands the Doctor had asked them, would that convince you? She reached out, brushed her fingers across the woman’s velvet sleeve, and she was convinced.
“My name’s Barbara,” she said. “Do you have a name?”
A sly look crept over a face unsuited to sly looks. “I’m Compassion. I was in the Vortex, listening for signals. And there you were. Would you like to come inside?”
The junkyard in Totters Lane, all those years ago. An abandoned transmitter station in a place she’d briefly called home. The story changes, the ending remains the same.
“Where will we go?” she asked, unable to work out if she cared what the answer would be.
“Humans… anywhere. Everywhere. I can take you to the Doctor, if you like. Come if you’re coming, but I’m going now.”
The offer hung in the air, and the story might have gone another way entirely.
“I’ll come with you,” she said, and if she was given to those sorts of thoughts she would have hoped that wherever he was, Ian was proud.
NB: Compassion is one of the Eighth Doctor’s companions in the BBC books – she’s a human cult member obsessed with receiving and obeying signals who eventually becomes a humanoid TARDIS. ‘The story changes, the ending remains the same’ is the motto of the Celestial Intervention Agency according to the audio play ‘The Kingmaker’.
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on 2006-12-06 01:32 am (UTC)So clever, so layered, such good characterizations. A fascinating set-up and everyone plays out exactly how you think they would, and even better besides. Broke my heart, too, but in such a good way.
Thank you so much for participating in the ficathon, and especially for producing this story, which, really, still flailing, here.