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Title: Topothesia
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: For the Tenth Doctor, in general.
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phnelt
They are up on the control console, her back against the bright flash of the TARDIS core. She has no clue what part of the controls she's sitting on - balancing on, really, one leg hooked hard around his hips, his pants not all the way off and awkward around his ankles. She bites her lip, shuddering around him; the metal of his ship shudders under her, and she reaches out and finds him with her hands, presses her palm into his shoulder, and closes her eyes.
It's not exactly the same, what he's got: two hearts and all, the double pulse syncopated under her hands, and when his eyes met hers - a little out of focus, his forehead creased with concentration - there was that shine to them, a flicker that says alien like the echoed pulse under her hands. And the rest of it is barely different, hugely different, in ways she doesn't even want to think about. He's thrusting into her, the point of her heel against his back, his hands much too strong, for a scrawny man like him: hard on the angle of her hips, on the outsides of her thighs.
He likes to do it here, on the control consoles, with the TARDIS lit up behind - around- underneath them, as close as possible to the point where time splits open. He'll raise an eyebrow at her, his fingers already finding his tie, and her Doctor is sweet on his knees, her hands in his messy hair, his mouth eager against her. He likes to walk her back, back across the control room until her back is pressed to the upwards surface of the console. He likes to pretend that it's accidental.
She doesn't know what Time Lord women have in their pants, but it must not be that different - or maybe it's just that he's been traveling with humans a long time, and is used to the way they're put together. His tongue pushes up against her, his fingers busy and hot, and when he crooks his fingers and presses upwards with the arrow of his tongue she comes swearing, a hand flying out and landing against the metal of the machine, lingering there, leaving a sweaty handprint like a burn.
Sometimes he is careful. Sometimes he is downright clinical, turning her over, opening her up with careful fingers. Sometimes he hides his mouth in the crook of her shoulderblade, against the inside of her thigh, in the bend of her elbow. Sometimes she feels spread like a landscape, like a map he is drawing against the light of the TARDIS core. He writes with his mouth, with his tongue; draws strange symbols against her breasts, against the curve of her belly, against her thighs. She doesn't know what he's writing. Sometimes, half-drowsing, lying back against the console, she's sure he's drawing the map of somewhere he can't get back to. Sometimes she's sure that he's writing names, and that none of them are her own.
This time is not sometimes, because he is rapid and heavy against her, a little frantic, shoving her bare back up against the smooth not-glass of the TARDIS core. He gasps, sweetly, almost like a human being, and she shifts back, and wraps her other leg around him, and rubs her hand down his trembling, freckled back. When he comes, she is looking upward into the bright blue of the TARDIS, and doesn't see that he was watching her.
-
"I was fifteen," she says, "and he was my boyfriend."
He laughs, and rolls his head against her shoulder. They spend more time than he'd probably admit like this, on his weird little console-room couch, her body close to his in a way she's pretty sure he thinks is platonic.
She pokes him. "What about you? What do you call a Time Lord woman, anyway? Time Lady?"
"Time Lord. Female." he says, and then "And it wasn't a woman."
She gapes at him, but she's being a little sarcastic.
"It was," he says, nestling his head closer against her, her arm wrapped around his shoulders, "a non-lady alien. And I don't mean one of you all, incidentally."
"What sort of alien?" she asks. Inquiring minds want to know. Her chin is on the top of his head; she is sitting up, and purportedly reading a magazine they picked up on Beta Rascalion.
"A blue one," he says, "It was a long time ago, mind, but definitely blue. You remember that sort of thing."
"What was his name?" she asks.
He shifts against her, turns and looks up into her face. "Not he," he says, "your language doesn't have the right pronoun. Ke-it, that was their name. I don't remember the family's name. Or the continent's." His brow furrows. "That's funny. I don't remember."
The Fourthgender Weekly Review of Beta Rascalion has a six-page article on keeping your scales bright in dry weather. On the facing page, an eight-armed lizard in a suit is advertising home appliances.
-
She's with him because she doesn't shoot things, and because she'd happily break down walls to save some anonymous stranger even if there was a door - it's not good sense he needs her for - and because he really hates being alone. If he had any sense, he thinks sometimes, he would get a cat. Or not even a cat - some sort of pet, like the tin dog only less retro. He's sure he could give it some sort of affection circuit, imprint it on him so that it doesn't run away. It certainly seems easy enough with humans - a few explosions, some life-saving dramatics, and bam, he's stuck with them.
But the thing is, a cat doesn't have a sense of history. Or at least they don't yet, at the point she's from. The point at which cats start to have history - a few tens of thousands of years from her birthdate, which is nothing really - is just the point at which they begin to make sense out of time. Humans are good at making sense out of time, especially the humans she comes from, even if the sense they make has nothing to do with reality. Humans are simple enough to think that time starts in one place and ends in another: that you can skip backwards, or forwards, when what he's really doing mostly is making a sideways jumpturn only describable in five or more dimensions. Humans get excited over moving through time; they see change, and forward motion, where all he sees are interlocking spirals of events, most of them fixed, linked, and battened down long before he gets there. His own people lived in a macrame ball of timestuff, all the causes and effects linked up, all the days circling in on each other. It was beautiful, and very staid. That's one reason he likes having humans around. The occasional loose end is a lot more interesting when he's with someone who doesn't understand that everything's mostly already going to have happened.
He's tried to explain this to her, never very clearly. She asked him once, carefully, how, then, the Timelords could end, coming to the end of their timeline if there was no timeline, only a series of curving pathways in and out of history.
He didn't answer the question, because sometimes she's far too clever for her own good.
The Time War was not like snapping off the end of a ruler. It was like losing a hand. All the interrelated routes of circulation, all the connections to the living body of the universe, were cauterized. Where the Timelords were there is a stump, and he can go and see it if he wants to. To a human, it would look like frozen ash. To him, it would look like absence.
He is never in the mood. He knows it's there.
Sometimes he brushes his fingertips over her hair when she sleeps - she is a hard, deep sleeper, hopelessly mammalian, really not much better than a cat - and wonders when, exactly, humans and their hopeless forward-backward timeline will end. He hasn't seen it yet. The Timelords themselves never went that far. He finds that somewhat comforting.
When he's in the mood to miss things, which he tries not to do too often, what he misses are not things that happened. He can't feel the loss of a particular moment, a day he has lived, a voice he has heard. He can't miss the light on the mountains as he stood outside the city, nine years old. Those things are whole, perfect: they have happened, and therefore exist in time, and it would be letting human thinking get the better of him to think they're over. They were, and therefore are. He's always outside the city, nine years old, watching the sun red on the silver hills. He's always there, with that person in the particular sunlight of a particular day.
What he misses are the things that never happened. He misses chances. He misses missed days. He misses the things that were so close to becoming, except that the universe was pulled out from under them.
He watches her sleep, curious, and he wonders where their end is, and whether he'll get to choose it.
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: For the Tenth Doctor, in general.
Speedbeta by
phneltThey are up on the control console, her back against the bright flash of the TARDIS core. She has no clue what part of the controls she's sitting on - balancing on, really, one leg hooked hard around his hips, his pants not all the way off and awkward around his ankles. She bites her lip, shuddering around him; the metal of his ship shudders under her, and she reaches out and finds him with her hands, presses her palm into his shoulder, and closes her eyes.
It's not exactly the same, what he's got: two hearts and all, the double pulse syncopated under her hands, and when his eyes met hers - a little out of focus, his forehead creased with concentration - there was that shine to them, a flicker that says alien like the echoed pulse under her hands. And the rest of it is barely different, hugely different, in ways she doesn't even want to think about. He's thrusting into her, the point of her heel against his back, his hands much too strong, for a scrawny man like him: hard on the angle of her hips, on the outsides of her thighs.
He likes to do it here, on the control consoles, with the TARDIS lit up behind - around- underneath them, as close as possible to the point where time splits open. He'll raise an eyebrow at her, his fingers already finding his tie, and her Doctor is sweet on his knees, her hands in his messy hair, his mouth eager against her. He likes to walk her back, back across the control room until her back is pressed to the upwards surface of the console. He likes to pretend that it's accidental.
She doesn't know what Time Lord women have in their pants, but it must not be that different - or maybe it's just that he's been traveling with humans a long time, and is used to the way they're put together. His tongue pushes up against her, his fingers busy and hot, and when he crooks his fingers and presses upwards with the arrow of his tongue she comes swearing, a hand flying out and landing against the metal of the machine, lingering there, leaving a sweaty handprint like a burn.
Sometimes he is careful. Sometimes he is downright clinical, turning her over, opening her up with careful fingers. Sometimes he hides his mouth in the crook of her shoulderblade, against the inside of her thigh, in the bend of her elbow. Sometimes she feels spread like a landscape, like a map he is drawing against the light of the TARDIS core. He writes with his mouth, with his tongue; draws strange symbols against her breasts, against the curve of her belly, against her thighs. She doesn't know what he's writing. Sometimes, half-drowsing, lying back against the console, she's sure he's drawing the map of somewhere he can't get back to. Sometimes she's sure that he's writing names, and that none of them are her own.
This time is not sometimes, because he is rapid and heavy against her, a little frantic, shoving her bare back up against the smooth not-glass of the TARDIS core. He gasps, sweetly, almost like a human being, and she shifts back, and wraps her other leg around him, and rubs her hand down his trembling, freckled back. When he comes, she is looking upward into the bright blue of the TARDIS, and doesn't see that he was watching her.
-
"I was fifteen," she says, "and he was my boyfriend."
He laughs, and rolls his head against her shoulder. They spend more time than he'd probably admit like this, on his weird little console-room couch, her body close to his in a way she's pretty sure he thinks is platonic.
She pokes him. "What about you? What do you call a Time Lord woman, anyway? Time Lady?"
"Time Lord. Female." he says, and then "And it wasn't a woman."
She gapes at him, but she's being a little sarcastic.
"It was," he says, nestling his head closer against her, her arm wrapped around his shoulders, "a non-lady alien. And I don't mean one of you all, incidentally."
"What sort of alien?" she asks. Inquiring minds want to know. Her chin is on the top of his head; she is sitting up, and purportedly reading a magazine they picked up on Beta Rascalion.
"A blue one," he says, "It was a long time ago, mind, but definitely blue. You remember that sort of thing."
"What was his name?" she asks.
He shifts against her, turns and looks up into her face. "Not he," he says, "your language doesn't have the right pronoun. Ke-it, that was their name. I don't remember the family's name. Or the continent's." His brow furrows. "That's funny. I don't remember."
The Fourthgender Weekly Review of Beta Rascalion has a six-page article on keeping your scales bright in dry weather. On the facing page, an eight-armed lizard in a suit is advertising home appliances.
-
She's with him because she doesn't shoot things, and because she'd happily break down walls to save some anonymous stranger even if there was a door - it's not good sense he needs her for - and because he really hates being alone. If he had any sense, he thinks sometimes, he would get a cat. Or not even a cat - some sort of pet, like the tin dog only less retro. He's sure he could give it some sort of affection circuit, imprint it on him so that it doesn't run away. It certainly seems easy enough with humans - a few explosions, some life-saving dramatics, and bam, he's stuck with them.
But the thing is, a cat doesn't have a sense of history. Or at least they don't yet, at the point she's from. The point at which cats start to have history - a few tens of thousands of years from her birthdate, which is nothing really - is just the point at which they begin to make sense out of time. Humans are good at making sense out of time, especially the humans she comes from, even if the sense they make has nothing to do with reality. Humans are simple enough to think that time starts in one place and ends in another: that you can skip backwards, or forwards, when what he's really doing mostly is making a sideways jumpturn only describable in five or more dimensions. Humans get excited over moving through time; they see change, and forward motion, where all he sees are interlocking spirals of events, most of them fixed, linked, and battened down long before he gets there. His own people lived in a macrame ball of timestuff, all the causes and effects linked up, all the days circling in on each other. It was beautiful, and very staid. That's one reason he likes having humans around. The occasional loose end is a lot more interesting when he's with someone who doesn't understand that everything's mostly already going to have happened.
He's tried to explain this to her, never very clearly. She asked him once, carefully, how, then, the Timelords could end, coming to the end of their timeline if there was no timeline, only a series of curving pathways in and out of history.
He didn't answer the question, because sometimes she's far too clever for her own good.
The Time War was not like snapping off the end of a ruler. It was like losing a hand. All the interrelated routes of circulation, all the connections to the living body of the universe, were cauterized. Where the Timelords were there is a stump, and he can go and see it if he wants to. To a human, it would look like frozen ash. To him, it would look like absence.
He is never in the mood. He knows it's there.
Sometimes he brushes his fingertips over her hair when she sleeps - she is a hard, deep sleeper, hopelessly mammalian, really not much better than a cat - and wonders when, exactly, humans and their hopeless forward-backward timeline will end. He hasn't seen it yet. The Timelords themselves never went that far. He finds that somewhat comforting.
When he's in the mood to miss things, which he tries not to do too often, what he misses are not things that happened. He can't feel the loss of a particular moment, a day he has lived, a voice he has heard. He can't miss the light on the mountains as he stood outside the city, nine years old. Those things are whole, perfect: they have happened, and therefore exist in time, and it would be letting human thinking get the better of him to think they're over. They were, and therefore are. He's always outside the city, nine years old, watching the sun red on the silver hills. He's always there, with that person in the particular sunlight of a particular day.
What he misses are the things that never happened. He misses chances. He misses missed days. He misses the things that were so close to becoming, except that the universe was pulled out from under them.
He watches her sleep, curious, and he wonders where their end is, and whether he'll get to choose it.
no subject
The occasional loose end is a lot more interesting when he's with someone who doesn't understand that everything's mostly already going to have happened.
a lot. Beautiful. Great fiction overall: first hot, then sad.
no subject
I fail at timeliness!
I liked this a whole big bunch. I really like the non-linear thing you've got here, I think it does a great job of conveying the very alien-ness of the Doctor.
Also: Control room sex FTW!
(And now back to my regularly scheduled end of semester freakout.)
Re: I fail at timeliness!
yeah, I'm not usually good with linearity anyway, but the Doctor seems to demand special measures. Aw. Poor Doctor. Writing this really made me like him a lot.
"Gosh, next to you, I'm downright linear!"
But thanks for the good wishes!!
Re: "Gosh, next to you, I'm downright linear!"
... I may have to rethink my plans.
Yep, continuing good luck, que le vaya bien, take care!
Re: "Gosh, next to you, I'm downright linear!"
And huzzah! Only the exam left to go.
no subject
I love the kitchy-ness of comparing time to a macrame ball, and the sad, doomed, beauty you give the timelords and the doctor.
thanks!
Thanks for reading!
Re: thanks!
;) it was a pleasure
no subject
Oh, this is very nice. I love the whole thread of sadness and loneliness running through -- poor Ten.
no subject