Off-switch

 

Now that I've sworn never to procrastinate again... some of you may be happy to know that I got the paper done and handed in on time. *I* am happy at least, or will be, perhaps, when I get the marks back later this month. 

Anyway, thanks to everyone who kicked and encouraged me until the damn thing got done and out of the way.

(and as a historical footnote, I don't really hate goats, wheat, or archaeology. I just get mildly displeased with them from time to time)

So this is some strange plot-bunny that sludged its way out of my brain yesterday. Any feedback would be very welcome.

The land was ice. Thordon rolled in an elliptical orbit around its sun, and during the hundred year winter everything froze except for a few cold-resistant mosses. Those pale grey and blue survivors clung to ink black rocks that rose in jutting spires at random intervals from the snow.

An army camped around those rocks. A relatively small one; just a bit over two hundred; soldiers and their warrior wives, all of them wrapped in furs and armed with swords, axes, and spears. They sat with their backs against the great woolly mammals called ugrfas which they used as mounts and beasts of burden. They laughed, and drank, and gambled. And more than one pair of man and wife took advantage of their bond.

It seemed a primitive assembly, but incongruous with that were the generators placed around the outskirts of the camp. Shooting out from the small metal boxes was a green web of flickering energy which covered and protected the men and women from the elements.
In the middle of the gathering, lounging on the back of his sleeping ugrfa with ale running down his untrimmed beard and a lusty song pouring out of his lungs, was the army's leader: King Ycranos. He finished his ballad and started another.

“To live is to fight, and to fight is to live, so I'll fight 'til I die and I'll fight while I live.” He took another swig of his drink. “Death or glory men!”

A score of men and women met his toast with a roar of goodwill and gulped back on their own mugs of ale. In the chaos and celebration the king's wife slipped away from the group to the very edge of the camp, where the green net hit the ground. She looked up through it to the stars studding the sky so, so far away.

Her name was Peri.

She was a young woman, just past twenty, with an open face and a bob of black hair. Though she wore the same animal skins as the rest of the group, she plainly wasn't the same as them. There was a delicateness and a beauty to her that they lacked. There was also a sorrow.

“Why'd you have to do it?” she asked the stars. She had an American accent, but it sounded garbled, the way accents became when their owners spent a long time living abroad.

She raised a hand to wipe away the beginnings of moisture from her cheeks, and then quickly burrowed back into her furry sleeve. Her breath stood in a cloud in front of her. Even within the force field it was cold, especially this far from the centre. The mocking stars shone clearly overhead. How had it come to this?

She's been traveling. She was on her way to Morocco when her bastard uncle decided to do “what was best for her” and strand her on his stupid boat. If he hadn't been such an ass she'd be back on Earth, graduating university with a degree in botany. She'd be getting a nice quiet job in a greenhouse somewhere instead of being trapped on this barren rock.

Instead she had tried to swim back to land, nearly drowned, been rescued by the Doctor's companion, met the Doctor, and been swept off on a whirl-wind exciting adventure of a lifetime. Then the Doctor had regenerated and it had all gone to shit. A few years of traveling with his new sarcastic, bossy, egotistical persona. A few years of putting up with that revolting coat and wanting to go home but being half afraid to ask because maybe he wouldn't, or maybe he would.

Then he went and betrayed her to a bunch of crazy slugs who wanted her body, and right up until the end she had herself convinced that it was some kind of double bluff on his part. He had died to save her life before, granted that had been a different him, he wouldn't just let her get killed, by slugs.

But he did. Or didn't. It was all kind of jumbled in her mind. They had done something to her. She remembered being possessed, and then not being possessed, and then waking up strapped to a table with her head shaved and Yrcanos shouting some crazy prayer over her.
And the Doctor never came back.

So she had taken the only option and married Yrcanos, who seemed to have nothing else on his mind, and so became a queen.
She laughed at that.

What would her uncle think of her? His delicate little niece, a warrior queen on a planet light years from the Milky Way.

She took another glance at the stars, and then at the frozen wastes outside the force field.

She would have rather worked in a greenhouse.