City of Waiting
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clocketpatchIt's all unbeta'd. If you see any mistakes please don't hesitate to let me know. The Arrival dates are not a mistake. I'm just ignoring the PS. And if you have a better title idea I'd be happy to hear it since I'm rubbish with titles.
Arrivals
New York City, Year Unknown
There are many different kinds of cold. The graveyard has no compassion, no welcome, no mercy. It is winter and the lawns are dead. The tombstones are grey and unforgiving. An uncertain, wintery precipitation is coming down in fits and starts.
There is a hard beauty wrapped up in all this cold mortality: the frost-bitten curls of the cast iron gate, the secret smile of a stone angel, the handsome stranger lying unconscious on the ground.
The stranger is dressed for early autumn, not ice. The cold wakes him. He clutches his head. If anyone were present to see, they might have questions: Is he a drunk? Is he a madman? Is he in pain, or only confused? Or maybe they would only keep walking. This is New York, the raggedy edge of it, but still there.
It is all hypothetical. There is no one to see. It is not a day for visiting and no funerals are scheduled. The groundskeeper is at home listening to the radio. The priest is in his office writing a sermon.
"Amy?" the stranger asks, hesitates, "Doctor?" more hesitation, "River, if you show up and get me thrown down another flight of stairs you are so grounded."
The rain turns to ice and patters on the frosted ground. The wind blows. In the far distance, car horns and sirens, boats blowing whistles on the river, and the low beehive drone of millions of people burdened by their own problems and lives.
The stranger struggles to his feet. He sees the smiling angel crouched above a nameless tomb. He shudders.
"I beat you," he says. "We beat you. We made a paradox and we beat you."
Each word releases a small fog of white breath into the cold air. The stranger pulls up his hood and clutches his arms across his chest. The hood is quickly blown back. His hair is plastered down by the sleet. Cold water runs down his face and neck.
"Amy!" the man shouts. "Amelia, are you here? Amy, please be here because I'm getting really bad déjà vu right now and I don't want to be dead again."
There is no answer.
"I thought we would be together," the man says. His fists clench as he glares at the statue. Infuriatingly, its expression does not change. It is always the same small smile. Does the angel have a secret? Is it mocking the stranger? The smile conveys innocence, but the man is shouting and begging and cursing.
Is the angel guilty?
"The Doctor warned us," the stranger says. "He said that we would always have to run, for the rest of our lives. He said we would have to be on guard. I thought I could be on guard. I was on guard for 2000 years, but I forgot so quickly. You win. Bravo, you beat the Last Centurion."
The angel continues smiling. Is it pleased? Or is it only stone?
The stranger wants to wait. He does wait, for an impractically long time given the temperature and his light dress. He blows on his fingers for warmth. He searches his pockets and calculates his resources. In a moment of rage, he attacks the angel and knocks it off its plinth and kicks it until its smile is destroyed along with its wings and most of its head. The anger makes him warm. His chest heaves and his foot throbs.
The stranger waits, as he has waited before, but before he had a deadline and a goal. Now he has only uncertainty. The stranger is waiting for a woman named Amy, but she does not arrive. No matter how many times he calls her name, she does not appear.
There are many different kinds of cold. There is despair. There is the insurmountable burden of time and mortality. The stranger is a very average man, physically, but his jaw is set and his eyes are burning. The stranger will wait a thousand years and he will do the impossible – he has done it before.
He will wait. But he cannot wait here. The momentary warmth is fading. It is too cold and he has a body to feel it this time.
He stands over the remains of the angel.
"You win, but we'll still beat you. I will find her."
London, 2016
Now, away from the cold, into a warm, London row house. The only one on its street with a blue door.
Brian knew he shouldn't ought to be still around. His own flat and his own bed were waiting for him down the other side of town, but it felt so empty there. Besides, all his son's plants did need watering and that'd been done, and the washing up. Now it was time for another chore to pass the day.
He'd got behind with all the excitement. The invasion might be over and his cube might've been confiscated, but that was no reason to stop being diligent. Brian set up his camera on a side table in the corner of the lounge. Settling into the chair in front, Brian adjusted the tripod and the focus a few times before starting the recording.
"Brian's Log," he intoned, before launching into the formula: log number, date, measurements (presumed same), weight (presumed same), activity:
"Yesterday, the cubes awakened. The cube which I have been observing moved. After a period of activity, the cubes stopped and went back to normal. After another period, the cube began displaying a countdown. I was not observing my cube at the time due to be abducted by aliens, but I assume it acted similarly to the other cubes. Following the completion of this countdown –"
The doorbell rang. Brian grumbled and fiddled with the camera.
"Got to start the whole thing over after that. Not very professional with a doorbell in the middle. Never mind." The doorbell rang again. "It'll hold. I'm coming."
Brian carefully stood up and made his way over to the entrance way. He pushed open the door and found the female head of UNIT standing on the front stoop.
"Stewart!" he exclaimed, pleased to have remembered. "I was just doing my log."
"Please, Kate. UNIT has been very grateful for your continued diligence in recording the activities of the cubes," Katherine Stewart said. Brian looked at her. Everything she wore was grey, but her smile and neat blonde hair kept it from being overly stern. A black laptop bag hung off her left shoulder.
"Just doing my public duty," said Brian.
"And very well you did it too. Is the Doctor still around?"
"No, he's gone off with my son and his wife. The three of them off exploring the universe."
Brian hesitated. He knew that the head of a big organization like UNIT probably didn't want to stop by for a tea and biscuit with him. The Doctor maybe. His extraordinary son and daughter-in-law at a pinch. Still, no sense being rude and maybe she did want to discuss the log.
"Would you like to come in for some tea?" he asked.
"I would like that very much," Kate said, stepping across the threshold.
"I would've wanted to go with them," Brian said as he led the way to the kitchen. "But I'm not completely daft you know. Seeing the stars and all would be lovely, but they're grown-ups; they need room to breathe and I can travel just as well on my own. There's a lifetime's worth of ground to tread on this planet even without the time travelling. And I don't fancy getting shot at again either."
"There are few things more unpleasant than being shot at," said Kate, deadpan.
"Being hit isn't very nice either," said Brian.
"On that I agree with you."
"You can sit here," said Brian, indicating a tall folding chair near the kitchen island.
Brian bustled around getting the kettle on and setting out tea things. Katherine Stewart watched him with her indecipherable expression. She was so calm, with every word perfectly chosen and enunciated. Brian couldn't figure out completely if she was laughing at him or if they'd just been having a perfectly normal conversation about being shot at. When did his life start to include days like this?
And Kate was still watching him. Did she want him to say something? This was what happened to his marriage with Rory's mother – Brian just didn't understand when people wanted him to talk or stop talking. Or at least, he didn't understand when Rory's mother wanted him to talk or stop talking. Though Kate… Katherine… Stewart – and did she have some kind of fancy UNIT title to go with that? – she was younger than Rory's mother and less… scattered. She solved problems for a living. If his wandering conversational approach annoyed her she would be polite enough not to show it.
Water boiled, bags in pot, water in pot, pot on counter. Brian liked straightforward routines like tea. Nothing confusing about tea.
"Shall I be mother?" Katherine asked.
Brian nodded and she poured. Her black laptop case was up on the countertop beside the cups. The light coming through the window fell across it, interspaced with shadows from the trees out in the garden. A lattice of shadow branches over the counter and the cups and the bag.
"I'm afraid that this isn't a purely social visit," Kate said, setting the pot down. She took a little milk in her cup, no sugar. The spoon clinked against porcelain as she stirred it in. "I have some documents."
"What kind of documents?" Brian asked. His brain motored on with possibilities before he'd even finished the question and they spilled out of his mouth in a rush: "Research on the cubes? Forms swearing me to secrecy? Printouts of my logs to go over? Reports on new alien incursions?"
Katherine waited patiently for the spiel to end. "Letters, mostly," she said. "I've been holding them in trust."
She unzipped the main compartment of her bag. Inside, in lieu of the computer the bag was designed to hold, sat a hodgepodge of yellowing envelopes and faded postcards. All of the documents were sorted into piles held together with loose rubber bands. A dog eared paperback took up one corner of the case. The smell of old paper wafted up to mix with the tea Katherine had just poured.
"You wanted the Doctor to look at them?" Brian asked. He tried to read Katherine's face. She wasn't smiling anymore, but she didn't look cross. The wind must've been picking up outside because the shadows on her face were moving. Shadow branches in a shadow wind.
"No, I want you to look at them."
Sad, that was it. The answer clicked over in Brian's mind. She looked sad. Wistful. Remembering. Her eyes caught a hold of his and he could tell she was trying to give him assurance.
"Me?" Brian asked.
"You," Katherine confirmed. "The letters were sent to my father originally, but all of them were addressed to you."
"Who would be sending me letters?" Brian asked.
He could hear the wind outside now. The branches were fairly crashing against the side of the house. There'd been a few clouds gathered up when he'd opened the door, but this was going to be a big storm. Brian listed off in his mind all the people who sent him mail: magazine subscriptions, his bank, his phone company, the government, the junk mail people –
He didn't get to the answer until he looked at the bag again and noticed the Christmas cards.
New York City, 1961
She made her choice.
She'd made it before, driving a van into a wall during a dream. She'd made it before, taking his hand and stepping backwards into oblivion. Now she made it again, turning her back on a statue. Third time the charm –
Goodbye
It felt like getting picking up and violently swung to one side, smashed against a wall, and then held there. It was like G-force pressing you into your seat during a rocket liftoff, followed too fast by the weightlessness of space. Everything tingled and then every sub-atomic particle was zapped apart, zipped together again, and repeat. Causality looped into a twisted figure eight and you felt the squeeze as the sand forced its way through the hourglass bottleneck backwards and your life along with it.
When the ride finally ended a half-second life time later, Amy was deposited with a thump onto a none-too-clean sidewalk. Her head throbbed and she was momentarily confused and disorientated. Her first real thought was that she felt like being sick all over the place. Her second thought was that she felt sad and brushing her cheek with the back of her hand confirmed that she had been crying.
Amy's third thought was a rush of memory as her entire life confronted her. Snapshots bullied their way back and forth across her mind:
Do the Macarena. Brush aside that strand of hair, he needs a trim. He's trying to look grungy but it doesn't stick and he can't actually play the guitar though she's heard him sing the lead in the school play and his voice isn't bad but he thinks she thinks guitarists are sexy. Lean in for the kiss and lose a lifetime…
The only lips brushing hers this time are stone.
The rush of memories ended as abruptly as it began. In its place came a rush of purpose as Amy really remembered why she was where she was (wherever she was).
"Where are you stupid face?" Amy shouted.
She didn't get an answer.
Her surroundings had seemed grey and fuzzy at first, but as the moment ticked away reality seemed to impose itself over the haze, the universe sketching itself in in an ever expanding circle around her. The sidewalk was fairly crowded. People stepped around Amy without looking at her. Cars and cabs and buses honked angrily on the street. Amy looked at the people and the vehicles.
Being in the past always felt a little surreal. You got an idea of the past from movies and books, but that was always a groomed version. Here the vintage cars were dirty and scuffed and dinged. Here the men and women dressed in the same clothing you'd see in ancient fashion magazines or old movies, but the men and women weren't models and the clothing didn't come out the back of a costume trailer. A wave of realization pounded into Amy and the wave's name was never: never see her mother again, never see the TARDIS-blue door again, never see the TARDIS, never see the Doctor. Never.
It beat against the inside of her head; a blunt, unstoppable throb.
"Rory!" she shouted. He should be there. He should be right there. That's what the Doctor and River had promised. They'd said this was her best chance.
People just kept walking by. Amy felt like maybe she didn't exist at all. Maybe she was a ghost and that was why Rory couldn't see her, couldn't respond. She remembered jumping off a roof. Maybe this was death? No, be practical, she thought. Take deep breaths. Separate the past from the present.
But the present is the past now, her mind screamed.
They had said this was her best chance. No, River had said. The Doctor had said that he didn't know. But River knew, and River had managed to dodge through the time distortions before. She just had to take stock, keep calm, observe her surroundings, and come up with a rational course of action.
She wasn't in the graveyard. The angel had displaced her through space as well as time. Maybe Rory was still in the graveyard. Maybe he had been displaced somewhere else entirely. But he had to be in the city and he had to be in the same time. It was just a matter of finding him.
Amy looked up and saw an angel carved into the side of the building above her. Just the face. Smiling.
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Looking forward to the rest, whenever it might emerge!!!
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There is a good 12,000 words written at the moment, so if I can get a moment of uninterrupted internet to get those words formatted and posted they should be up before too long.
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One beta-ish comment:
Brian knew he shouldn't ought to be still around
Either: Brian knew he shouldn't still be around.
Or: Brian knew he ought not to be around still.
But not that combination of both.
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Thank you for the beta comment. I had a feeling that line was grammatically not quite there, but I liked the way it rolled off my tongue a bit too much. Will change it!
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Yeah - that's a pure Americanism... :D
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