Your Stolen Moments ("Stolen" entry)
Apr. 23rd, 2015 02:25 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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who_contestTitle: Your Stolen Moments
Word Count: 3770
Rating: PG
Genre: Family/Drama
Spoilers through to Journey’s End
Pairings or characters: Assorted Tylers, the duplicate Doctor (he gets a name here, though)
Warnings: Some angst, mention of illness. Mostly bittersweet.
Summary: Tony Tyler tries to find his own place in a world where Torchwood is common knowledge, his sister and her boyfriend fight aliens and his parents come from different universes.
It takes him a while.
Tony Tyler is going to be an astronaut.
He knows this with all the certainty of his five years. Mum and Dad must know it too, because this weekend they have built him a spaceship. It’s made of cardboard but it’s tough, and the wings are quite smooth- Dad spent half an hour paring them down with a craft knife on Friday evening. Rose helped him paint the whole thing silver, so that the words ‘This Way Up’ are only faintly visible on the undercarriage. The control panel is circuitry from her old phone, mixed in with bottle tops and a remote repurposed from Tony’s model zeppelin. Six months ago he wanted to fly the life-sized version, running his own mile-high tours of London; but that seems babyish now. Far better to escape the sky completely, the way his sister does in all their bedtime stories.
After tea, Uncle John beckons him into the study.
“Have a look at this, Tiger. I need an astronaut who’ll tell me where it's from.”
Tony lifts the lid of the box on the desk. Inside is a bronze-coloured thing about the heft and shape of a jacket potato. There are curved metal points protruding from one end, like tiny coat hooks. “Did Mum and Dad get you a present, too?”
A conspiratorial shake of the head. “This is from Torchwood. Pete let me borrow it. Well, I say borrowed…”
A thrill of outrage scurries up Tony’s neck. “You stole it?”
John puts a finger to his own lips. “Oi. Don’t let on, or they’ll want it back. I had to try, you see. We’d been doing all sorts to it. Trying to get an idea, trying to see what it might do. Heat, hammers, ultra-red radiation, gamma radiation, X-rays: zip, nada. Nothing doing.” He shakes the box, and the Thing rattles, its hooks glinting in the lamplight. “Because all that time, it was waiting to be held.”
Three seconds in his cupped hands is all it takes. The Thing’s points retract and its whole weight begins to shiver, like there’s a living creature inside desperate to be free. A gleam of light appears beneath John’s little finger where a hook once was, and with it comes a rich, aching note so gentle it seems to be rooted in a different place altogether.
Tony can barely speak. “What’s it for? Who made it?”
His uncle lets the shining, aching Thing fall into its container. It goes quiet straight away. “No idea,” he whispers, and his face twists into an odd crinkled-up expression that Tony doesn’t have a name for, because it’s both happy and sad at once. “Not even the foggiest.”
By the time Tony is in his first year of primary school, John no longer shows him magic from other worlds.
Torchwood has swallowed up half the family, and even weekends are never guaranteed. There are more frequent late-night visitors to the house. Family security guards Mathew and Hannah have both acquired conspicuous weapons. Tony tried asking Dad about them, once, but he only smiled and made an elaborate pantomime of zipping up his mouth. The thought of it makes Tony’s stomach churn with frustration. Just because he’s the youngest everyone is out to protect him, and he doesn’t want protecting; he wants to know.
It’s not as if the rest of the world is blissful in its ignorance. The news channels warn that the Russian ministry of defence has repurposed the Cyber factories rather than closing them. Lockdown drills are routine, and drone-spotting has become something of a hobby. Its more serious adherents even carry a notebook in which to record their sightings. In a moment of well-intentioned folly, Mum suggests that Tony might like to follow suit. “Remember when you were tiny, how you used to throw your arms about when you saw a zeppelin go by? Like, ‘Stop, take me with you, don’t leave me down here’?”
Tony can’t see what that has to do with anything. The drones are as different from zeppelins as insects are from birds. In any case, all the serious playground gossip concerns Cybermen, not drones. Nowadays it seems that every family’s story gets an airing, though Tony has little to add to these discussions. The Tylers’ role was one for the history books, and after a while his schoolfellows give up trying to pump him for any further details. The children in the bottom classes were too young even for the final defeat, but some of those in the prefect year can pretty well describe how they looked. A pale, gangly girl of whom they are all a bit afraid lost both grandfathers and an aunt to the Battersea assault. She distributes her own crude sketches for each dinner table to pore over; blocks of men coloured grey, black yawning holes where the eyes should be. You can tell who's witnessed them first-hand, because suddenly whole sections of the canteen fall silent at a time.
The pictures are still doing the rounds at afternoon break, and the November clouds hide the zeppelins from view. So nobody is paying much attention to the sky until the explosions hit.
People scatter. A drone plummets down and skids to a halt mere inches from Tony’s shoes, throwing up grit. One of the teachers seizes him and pulls him away almost in the same instant. Then a hatch clicks open on the drone’s belly, and someone gets out.
The panic subsides, replaced by mute astonishment. The creature inside the craft is perhaps six inches tall and smoking gently. Whatever clothes there were are in shreds. For a lack of anything better to do, Tony waves. The former pilot blinks four dark eyes at the playground’s transfixed audience. All four of them widen, in what can only be described as delayed terror. A blue claw no larger than a walnut darts to a lever on the wing of the craft, and the intruder vanishes in a blast of light.
The whole crowd sags as one and then erupts again, shouting and jostling to get a glimpse of the wreckage. Tony wants to laugh, or maybe scream. “They weren’t drones,” his teacher is saying, her voice flat with shock. “Oh, god. And we thought…”
When he finally gets home that evening, the news dancing on his lips, John and Rose are in the kitchen, eating cereal out of mugs.
“Hullo, Tiger,” John grins. “Good day at school?”
Rose swats at her boyfriend with a tea towel. “You okay, Tony?”
Both of them try to pull him into a hug together, and in that moment the relief is so great, Tony almost doesn’t mind that they’ve stolen his thunder.
The Cyberparanoia of that autumn recedes like a feverish nightmare and gradually, inevitably, life goes on. Tony’s sole memento from the almost-invasion is a scrap from a pilot’s uniform, rescued from an overhanging tree after school hours. He keeps it in his pencil case, like a good-luck charm. It’s there every time he reaches for a pen to start a new design.
There’s no telling exactly when the word architect first entered his head. Now that it’s stuck, though, it’s big enough to block out everything else; school, Torchwood, even the constant unease of the news broadcasts. Mum has taken to calling his room “the city”, on account of the finished buildings spread across the carpet. Balled-up paper gathers in drifts at his feet. He’ll make it safe to admire the view again by raising towers that can withstand any missile. He’ll create houses so wonderful that Rose and John will want to stay in them forever.
On Saturday afternoons they colonise the kitchen table and wear old shirts as aprons. John paints in a sky on his design. A thin wash of yellow first, then sunset orange and a brighter tangerine. After a brief inspection he nods, satisfied, and offers up the sketch. Tony traces the dome’s outline with a finger, trying to imagine how it would stand unassisted. “I’ll build it for you,” he tells his uncle, and he means it with every fibre of his being. “When I’m grown up. An’ I’ll make it big enough so we can all live there.”
Here is something he has never told anyone; he can remember how Rose was before John came. In those memories his sister’s visits were both rare and happy, her arms ready to hold him tight; but once in a while her expression would simply go, and then it was as if part of her had left the house and the people in it far behind. John’s eyes, fixed on the picture with its impossible sky, are like that now. It takes a visible effort for him to pull himself back. “You know what, Tony? I think…Mum’ll need her kitchen soon. Up to bed, come on.”
Later that evening, when Mum and Dad are safely bickering downstairs, there is a soft tap at Tony’s bedroom door. Hidden under his duvet, Tony doesn’t sit up; keeps running the fragment of alien cloth between his fingers, out of sight. Mercifully, John doesn’t force the issue. Instead he paces for almost a full minute before coming to a halt by the foot of the bed.
“Sorry, Tiger.” Another pause. Tony waits, and counts each breath. His uncle tries again. “You remember those stories Rose used to tell you, about me and her? S’pose you’ve probably guessed by now, a lot of them are true. Well, ‘course you have. All Torchwood coming and going, hundreds of tiny blue fellas fall out of the sky one afternoon, how could you not? And- well.” John’s voice is thick. Tony thinks he might be crying. Grown-ups can do that- crying without any tears. “I’m going to start at the beginning, okay? The truth, all of it. And I’ll keep on talking ‘til you stay stop. I’m going to tell you about Gallifrey.”
Tony Tyler is twelve years old. His mother and sister are from a parallel Earth and his uncle has a brain from another planet, and on good days he can say that to himself and be fairly sure he hasn’t gone mad.
Other things are harder. Things like his parents’ separate addresses, the endless gossip on the celebrity channels, and the looks people give him when he gets to the school gates. They’ve always been curious, but now they’re pitying, which is worse. On one occasion a girl from his year comes up to him and puts both arms around his waist in front of the whole playground. She whispers something about how sorry she is, and he hears himself saying, “me too” over and over, purely in the hope that it will make her let go. He finds his way to class through the reception entrance after that.
What’s really weird is how little the old routines need altering at home. Dad continues to appear at uncertain intervals with bunches of sad-looking flowers. Rose and John still send jetlagged videmails from different time zones, and Mum insists on herding everybody over for dinner whenever the opportunity presents itself. The staff get the evening off – “Family only”, Mum says, with the kind of expression that makes their six-foot-something chef down tools in an instant- and they eat shepherd’s pie in the kitchen. It would almost be cosy if it wasn’t so exhausting.
Eventually Dad replaces the flowers with a bottle of wine, which helps. Nobody can keep their guard up while squabbling about corkscrews. The women let Tony sit with his elbows on the table. John volunteers as waiter for the night and drives Rose to distraction by calling her mademoiselle every chance he gets.
“Look at you two.” Mum rests her chin on one hand; her glass is dangerously empty. “Oh, just think: ‘Dr and Mrs Noble’. Grant you, maybe we’ve not been the best example…”
“Mum.” Both children shoot a glance at their father, who chooses to feign temporary deafness.
“’m just saying. Tony could be a page boy, couldn’t you sweetheart?”
“Er,” says Tony. A vision of himself in top hat and tails rises out of the dusk and refuses to shift.
“Leave it, Mum, yeah?” Rose shoves her plate to one side. “Anyway, you can keep your name, y’know. That’s what I did.”
The ensuing silence is so taut that Tony is half-convinced it’s about to snap back and hit somebody in the face. Mum’s fingertips are turning white against her glass, and Dad’s jaw has frozen in mid-chew. “You what?”
Rose’s mouth twitches a little in one corner. “Got married. Didn’t we, John?” She peers round at him for confirmation, but he has managed to kick his dessert spoon halfway across the room and has gone in pursuit. “About- oof, five years ago now. Anyway. Yeah. It was a sort of… spur-of-the-moment thing, really. We didn’t wanna be shouting about it, so we told Dad we were off to get coffee an’ popped down the registry office in our lunch break. Jake was the witness.”
Returned to his seat, John is clutching Rose’s hand underneath the table. In a sudden, vicious movement, Mum plunges her fork into a green bean. “Bloody Jake.”
It is the only sentence they can get out of her for the rest of the evening.
Something is wrong with the air filter on their zeppelin. Tony’s shirt is clinging to him and Mum is fanning herself with the flight safety manual.
“I told your father to get it sorted, but does he ever listen?”
By contrast Stockholm’s touchdown zone is a relief, though the wind stings Tony’s eyes until they water. He blinks to clear them. He hasn't cried in front of either parent since the divorce came through, and he’s damned if he’s going to let anyone think he’s starting now. The security protocols seem to take forever – passports, visa checks, cheek swabs, body scan – and then they are inside the main terminal, waving to the couple in the distance and trying very hard to smile.
Rose relayed the news of John’s illness via Eyechat two months ago, but Tony is shocked by the change in him nonetheless. Every angle in his body is sharper and he has dropped at least an inch in height, characteristic long stride reduced to a hobble. A steward has to help him on the last few steps up the gangway.
The route home is long and oppressive. Despite heroic attempts to stay cheerful, somehow the conversation keeps lurching back in search of explanations. It was working with so many toxic compounds in the lab. It was the physical strain of the early time-travel runs. It was ordinary, dreadfully human misfortune.
“Don’t give up, darling. They can do amazing things, now; none of that horrid chemo.” Mum puts a sympathetic arm on John’s shoulder. “Anya as does the cleaning’s had an artificial heart since she was thirty.”
“My heart,” John says, with a too-tight smile, “is brilliant, thankyouverymuch. It was the right one that was always trouble.”
He winks at Rose, who makes a stifled hiccupping noise from behind her hand. Mum looks daggers at them both. More than ever before, Tony wishes that one person in his life could be totally bloody normal.
A week before his twentieth birthday, Tony falls in love.
Samir is a twenty-two-year-old biocybernetics graduate from the University of Dundee, and once they meet in the flesh – at a rundown Shoreditch café, last on-trend in the early Noughties – it’s absolute. The months of trading personal details on Eyechat have created a familiarity between them that doesn’t quite correspond with the nervous delight of the moment. They try to embrace, but end up shaking hands; laugh off a mistake with the order, and wander the streets long after closing time, until neither can recognise his surroundings. Tony has to send out a trace so an airbus can take them back to the flat.
An Eyechat message alert the next morning drags him bleary-eyed into the front room. Tony cuts the visual on his end of the call before picking up. “D’you have any idea what time it is?”
“Eight-thirty. Also called daylight, or breakfast, or- wake up, little brother. So how’d it go? An’ why’s the picture…” Rose taps at her monitor, and her eyes widen in realisation. “Oh my god, he’s there with you now, isn’t he?”
“Piss. Off.”
“No, hold on. Birthday. Mum wants an idea of who’s coming. Hello? Can you hear me?”
He considers restoring the visual so she can see him storm out, though he’s not wearing nearly enough clothes for the proper dramatic impact. “Hearing you. Ignoring you. Going back to bed.”
She sticks her tongue out at him. Half the time she treats him like he’s still in primary school, and for the other half they’re equals. He’s never quite certain which way the conversation is going to go. “Bring him over. Oh, go on. We’d love it.”
All of a sudden, everything is too much. He tries to bail. “Wait. I’m not- I mean, I don’t even know if he…”
His sister’s face comes in close. He can see the sleep in the corners of each eye, and the beginnings of lines about her forehead. It’s a shock to think of her getting older, somehow, in a way that’s different to thinking about Mum or Dad. Until that mission in Stockholm three years ago, time was always on her side.
“Got a secret for you, Tony. No-one ever starts off knowing. Knowing comes after. Don’t know- do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean,” Tony says- but she’s gone, and he’s left scowling at the walls.
His head is fuzzy with an adrenaline hangover from that peculiar fear-joy of the night before, so he makes coffee and paces the front room while the mug goes cold. The hologram model he’s been working on flickers by his desk. He tore up most of his old architectural plans in a fit of belated teenage angst last Christmas, but he’s rebuilding now, in a class with thirty other students at UCL. The end-of-term exams are next month.
At one time there were people who thought they would never see any new buildings again. They thought the Cybermen would flatten the lot, or the sky would choke with the airbuses, or something new and even more terrible would swoop down upon them and finish the job that Lumic started. But here’s the thing; despairing of the world doesn’t stop it from turning, and it doesn’t stop people from needing, either. In the same inarticulate way that a baby needs food and warmth and shelter, everyone who lost heart kept on needing all those things. In due course needing turned to wanting, and they began to seek out some kind of life for themselves once more.
Finally, they realised that they wanted hope. And bit by bit, the world gave it back to them.
The bedroom door opens, and Samir leans in to kiss Tony’s shoulder. “Who was that?”
Tony decides that time travel is overrated. Nobody can be sure which parts of a life are most worth experiencing, not unless they’ve lived through all the other parts too. No- if it were ever down to him, he’d have the ability to stop time altogether. Not often and not for long, just whenever a moment like this arose. To give him space to marvel at it before it became past.
“My sister.” And then, while joy has the upper hand on fear inside him, he asks: “D’you wanna stay a bit longer?”
When Mum and Dad split up, Rose left her third-storey flat opposite Torchwood HQ and fought her way through the London media to the steps of the big house, pausing only to stamp on a cameraman who tried to get his foot under her car wheels. For the next fortnight she drove Tony to school and back again, made tea when they got in and approached each legal wrangle like a pitched battle for the future of the Earth. It was both magnificent and slightly unnerving, and - to his continued shame- Tony had been half-glad when an unexpected Gastropod invasion put an end to the mourning period.
The second homecoming had been different altogether. The air ambulance had landed on their front lawn sometime after midnight, casting its lights through Tony’s bedroom window. He’d been too afraid to look, but he could hear Rose’s voice out on the stairway, the furious love and the tension in it, and John’s brittle whisper in reply, No I’m fine don’t worry I’m fine.
The following summer Tony went straight from his A-level celebrations to flat-hunting on the outskirts of the city, and to this day he couldn’t tell you whether he was moving out, growing up or running away. Maybe a mixture of all three. But he didn’t go far, he tells himself – and however far he ends up going, he’ll always belong here, always feel that strange bubble of lightness in his chest when the gates open up.
John is standing in the driveway, albeit with Rose’s arm supporting him at the waist. His hair has grown back across the crown of his head. There is more ginger in it than before. “Hullo. You must be Samir.”
“Hi, guys.” Rose gives them a wave with her free hand. “Dad’s on his way over an’ Mum’s got control of the bunting, so brace yourselves.”
Even after all these years, the ease with which his sister and uncle fit together can still catch Tony by surprise. Perhaps there’s a little more concern in Rose’s gaze now, but they have both shifted to make room for it, just as a well-built house settles on its foundations. He used to search for that understanding in his parents, and feel cheated when he couldn’t find it. He’s only just beginning to get an idea of the work involved. “I thought about what you said.”
To her credit, his sister doesn’t miss a beat. “And?”
Tony lets out a long breath between his teeth. “And- I still don’t know.”
“Good. Good start. Oi- you two.” Samir has got John onto the subject of bio-programming and he has moved off to one side, the better to gesticulate his way through a particularly knotty sentence. Rose fixes them with a look that owes a great deal to Jackie Tyler. “We gonna be stood here all day?”
A zeppelin passes low overhead, putting them all in shadow. For the first time that the house can remember, nobody stops to watch it go.
Word Count: 3770
Rating: PG
Genre: Family/Drama
Spoilers through to Journey’s End
Pairings or characters: Assorted Tylers, the duplicate Doctor (he gets a name here, though)
Warnings: Some angst, mention of illness. Mostly bittersweet.
Summary: Tony Tyler tries to find his own place in a world where Torchwood is common knowledge, his sister and her boyfriend fight aliens and his parents come from different universes.
It takes him a while.
Tony Tyler is going to be an astronaut.
He knows this with all the certainty of his five years. Mum and Dad must know it too, because this weekend they have built him a spaceship. It’s made of cardboard but it’s tough, and the wings are quite smooth- Dad spent half an hour paring them down with a craft knife on Friday evening. Rose helped him paint the whole thing silver, so that the words ‘This Way Up’ are only faintly visible on the undercarriage. The control panel is circuitry from her old phone, mixed in with bottle tops and a remote repurposed from Tony’s model zeppelin. Six months ago he wanted to fly the life-sized version, running his own mile-high tours of London; but that seems babyish now. Far better to escape the sky completely, the way his sister does in all their bedtime stories.
After tea, Uncle John beckons him into the study.
“Have a look at this, Tiger. I need an astronaut who’ll tell me where it's from.”
Tony lifts the lid of the box on the desk. Inside is a bronze-coloured thing about the heft and shape of a jacket potato. There are curved metal points protruding from one end, like tiny coat hooks. “Did Mum and Dad get you a present, too?”
A conspiratorial shake of the head. “This is from Torchwood. Pete let me borrow it. Well, I say borrowed…”
A thrill of outrage scurries up Tony’s neck. “You stole it?”
John puts a finger to his own lips. “Oi. Don’t let on, or they’ll want it back. I had to try, you see. We’d been doing all sorts to it. Trying to get an idea, trying to see what it might do. Heat, hammers, ultra-red radiation, gamma radiation, X-rays: zip, nada. Nothing doing.” He shakes the box, and the Thing rattles, its hooks glinting in the lamplight. “Because all that time, it was waiting to be held.”
Three seconds in his cupped hands is all it takes. The Thing’s points retract and its whole weight begins to shiver, like there’s a living creature inside desperate to be free. A gleam of light appears beneath John’s little finger where a hook once was, and with it comes a rich, aching note so gentle it seems to be rooted in a different place altogether.
Tony can barely speak. “What’s it for? Who made it?”
His uncle lets the shining, aching Thing fall into its container. It goes quiet straight away. “No idea,” he whispers, and his face twists into an odd crinkled-up expression that Tony doesn’t have a name for, because it’s both happy and sad at once. “Not even the foggiest.”
By the time Tony is in his first year of primary school, John no longer shows him magic from other worlds.
Torchwood has swallowed up half the family, and even weekends are never guaranteed. There are more frequent late-night visitors to the house. Family security guards Mathew and Hannah have both acquired conspicuous weapons. Tony tried asking Dad about them, once, but he only smiled and made an elaborate pantomime of zipping up his mouth. The thought of it makes Tony’s stomach churn with frustration. Just because he’s the youngest everyone is out to protect him, and he doesn’t want protecting; he wants to know.
It’s not as if the rest of the world is blissful in its ignorance. The news channels warn that the Russian ministry of defence has repurposed the Cyber factories rather than closing them. Lockdown drills are routine, and drone-spotting has become something of a hobby. Its more serious adherents even carry a notebook in which to record their sightings. In a moment of well-intentioned folly, Mum suggests that Tony might like to follow suit. “Remember when you were tiny, how you used to throw your arms about when you saw a zeppelin go by? Like, ‘Stop, take me with you, don’t leave me down here’?”
Tony can’t see what that has to do with anything. The drones are as different from zeppelins as insects are from birds. In any case, all the serious playground gossip concerns Cybermen, not drones. Nowadays it seems that every family’s story gets an airing, though Tony has little to add to these discussions. The Tylers’ role was one for the history books, and after a while his schoolfellows give up trying to pump him for any further details. The children in the bottom classes were too young even for the final defeat, but some of those in the prefect year can pretty well describe how they looked. A pale, gangly girl of whom they are all a bit afraid lost both grandfathers and an aunt to the Battersea assault. She distributes her own crude sketches for each dinner table to pore over; blocks of men coloured grey, black yawning holes where the eyes should be. You can tell who's witnessed them first-hand, because suddenly whole sections of the canteen fall silent at a time.
The pictures are still doing the rounds at afternoon break, and the November clouds hide the zeppelins from view. So nobody is paying much attention to the sky until the explosions hit.
People scatter. A drone plummets down and skids to a halt mere inches from Tony’s shoes, throwing up grit. One of the teachers seizes him and pulls him away almost in the same instant. Then a hatch clicks open on the drone’s belly, and someone gets out.
The panic subsides, replaced by mute astonishment. The creature inside the craft is perhaps six inches tall and smoking gently. Whatever clothes there were are in shreds. For a lack of anything better to do, Tony waves. The former pilot blinks four dark eyes at the playground’s transfixed audience. All four of them widen, in what can only be described as delayed terror. A blue claw no larger than a walnut darts to a lever on the wing of the craft, and the intruder vanishes in a blast of light.
The whole crowd sags as one and then erupts again, shouting and jostling to get a glimpse of the wreckage. Tony wants to laugh, or maybe scream. “They weren’t drones,” his teacher is saying, her voice flat with shock. “Oh, god. And we thought…”
When he finally gets home that evening, the news dancing on his lips, John and Rose are in the kitchen, eating cereal out of mugs.
“Hullo, Tiger,” John grins. “Good day at school?”
Rose swats at her boyfriend with a tea towel. “You okay, Tony?”
Both of them try to pull him into a hug together, and in that moment the relief is so great, Tony almost doesn’t mind that they’ve stolen his thunder.
The Cyberparanoia of that autumn recedes like a feverish nightmare and gradually, inevitably, life goes on. Tony’s sole memento from the almost-invasion is a scrap from a pilot’s uniform, rescued from an overhanging tree after school hours. He keeps it in his pencil case, like a good-luck charm. It’s there every time he reaches for a pen to start a new design.
There’s no telling exactly when the word architect first entered his head. Now that it’s stuck, though, it’s big enough to block out everything else; school, Torchwood, even the constant unease of the news broadcasts. Mum has taken to calling his room “the city”, on account of the finished buildings spread across the carpet. Balled-up paper gathers in drifts at his feet. He’ll make it safe to admire the view again by raising towers that can withstand any missile. He’ll create houses so wonderful that Rose and John will want to stay in them forever.
On Saturday afternoons they colonise the kitchen table and wear old shirts as aprons. John paints in a sky on his design. A thin wash of yellow first, then sunset orange and a brighter tangerine. After a brief inspection he nods, satisfied, and offers up the sketch. Tony traces the dome’s outline with a finger, trying to imagine how it would stand unassisted. “I’ll build it for you,” he tells his uncle, and he means it with every fibre of his being. “When I’m grown up. An’ I’ll make it big enough so we can all live there.”
Here is something he has never told anyone; he can remember how Rose was before John came. In those memories his sister’s visits were both rare and happy, her arms ready to hold him tight; but once in a while her expression would simply go, and then it was as if part of her had left the house and the people in it far behind. John’s eyes, fixed on the picture with its impossible sky, are like that now. It takes a visible effort for him to pull himself back. “You know what, Tony? I think…Mum’ll need her kitchen soon. Up to bed, come on.”
Later that evening, when Mum and Dad are safely bickering downstairs, there is a soft tap at Tony’s bedroom door. Hidden under his duvet, Tony doesn’t sit up; keeps running the fragment of alien cloth between his fingers, out of sight. Mercifully, John doesn’t force the issue. Instead he paces for almost a full minute before coming to a halt by the foot of the bed.
“Sorry, Tiger.” Another pause. Tony waits, and counts each breath. His uncle tries again. “You remember those stories Rose used to tell you, about me and her? S’pose you’ve probably guessed by now, a lot of them are true. Well, ‘course you have. All Torchwood coming and going, hundreds of tiny blue fellas fall out of the sky one afternoon, how could you not? And- well.” John’s voice is thick. Tony thinks he might be crying. Grown-ups can do that- crying without any tears. “I’m going to start at the beginning, okay? The truth, all of it. And I’ll keep on talking ‘til you stay stop. I’m going to tell you about Gallifrey.”
Tony Tyler is twelve years old. His mother and sister are from a parallel Earth and his uncle has a brain from another planet, and on good days he can say that to himself and be fairly sure he hasn’t gone mad.
Other things are harder. Things like his parents’ separate addresses, the endless gossip on the celebrity channels, and the looks people give him when he gets to the school gates. They’ve always been curious, but now they’re pitying, which is worse. On one occasion a girl from his year comes up to him and puts both arms around his waist in front of the whole playground. She whispers something about how sorry she is, and he hears himself saying, “me too” over and over, purely in the hope that it will make her let go. He finds his way to class through the reception entrance after that.
What’s really weird is how little the old routines need altering at home. Dad continues to appear at uncertain intervals with bunches of sad-looking flowers. Rose and John still send jetlagged videmails from different time zones, and Mum insists on herding everybody over for dinner whenever the opportunity presents itself. The staff get the evening off – “Family only”, Mum says, with the kind of expression that makes their six-foot-something chef down tools in an instant- and they eat shepherd’s pie in the kitchen. It would almost be cosy if it wasn’t so exhausting.
Eventually Dad replaces the flowers with a bottle of wine, which helps. Nobody can keep their guard up while squabbling about corkscrews. The women let Tony sit with his elbows on the table. John volunteers as waiter for the night and drives Rose to distraction by calling her mademoiselle every chance he gets.
“Look at you two.” Mum rests her chin on one hand; her glass is dangerously empty. “Oh, just think: ‘Dr and Mrs Noble’. Grant you, maybe we’ve not been the best example…”
“Mum.” Both children shoot a glance at their father, who chooses to feign temporary deafness.
“’m just saying. Tony could be a page boy, couldn’t you sweetheart?”
“Er,” says Tony. A vision of himself in top hat and tails rises out of the dusk and refuses to shift.
“Leave it, Mum, yeah?” Rose shoves her plate to one side. “Anyway, you can keep your name, y’know. That’s what I did.”
The ensuing silence is so taut that Tony is half-convinced it’s about to snap back and hit somebody in the face. Mum’s fingertips are turning white against her glass, and Dad’s jaw has frozen in mid-chew. “You what?”
Rose’s mouth twitches a little in one corner. “Got married. Didn’t we, John?” She peers round at him for confirmation, but he has managed to kick his dessert spoon halfway across the room and has gone in pursuit. “About- oof, five years ago now. Anyway. Yeah. It was a sort of… spur-of-the-moment thing, really. We didn’t wanna be shouting about it, so we told Dad we were off to get coffee an’ popped down the registry office in our lunch break. Jake was the witness.”
Returned to his seat, John is clutching Rose’s hand underneath the table. In a sudden, vicious movement, Mum plunges her fork into a green bean. “Bloody Jake.”
It is the only sentence they can get out of her for the rest of the evening.
Something is wrong with the air filter on their zeppelin. Tony’s shirt is clinging to him and Mum is fanning herself with the flight safety manual.
“I told your father to get it sorted, but does he ever listen?”
By contrast Stockholm’s touchdown zone is a relief, though the wind stings Tony’s eyes until they water. He blinks to clear them. He hasn't cried in front of either parent since the divorce came through, and he’s damned if he’s going to let anyone think he’s starting now. The security protocols seem to take forever – passports, visa checks, cheek swabs, body scan – and then they are inside the main terminal, waving to the couple in the distance and trying very hard to smile.
Rose relayed the news of John’s illness via Eyechat two months ago, but Tony is shocked by the change in him nonetheless. Every angle in his body is sharper and he has dropped at least an inch in height, characteristic long stride reduced to a hobble. A steward has to help him on the last few steps up the gangway.
The route home is long and oppressive. Despite heroic attempts to stay cheerful, somehow the conversation keeps lurching back in search of explanations. It was working with so many toxic compounds in the lab. It was the physical strain of the early time-travel runs. It was ordinary, dreadfully human misfortune.
“Don’t give up, darling. They can do amazing things, now; none of that horrid chemo.” Mum puts a sympathetic arm on John’s shoulder. “Anya as does the cleaning’s had an artificial heart since she was thirty.”
“My heart,” John says, with a too-tight smile, “is brilliant, thankyouverymuch. It was the right one that was always trouble.”
He winks at Rose, who makes a stifled hiccupping noise from behind her hand. Mum looks daggers at them both. More than ever before, Tony wishes that one person in his life could be totally bloody normal.
A week before his twentieth birthday, Tony falls in love.
Samir is a twenty-two-year-old biocybernetics graduate from the University of Dundee, and once they meet in the flesh – at a rundown Shoreditch café, last on-trend in the early Noughties – it’s absolute. The months of trading personal details on Eyechat have created a familiarity between them that doesn’t quite correspond with the nervous delight of the moment. They try to embrace, but end up shaking hands; laugh off a mistake with the order, and wander the streets long after closing time, until neither can recognise his surroundings. Tony has to send out a trace so an airbus can take them back to the flat.
An Eyechat message alert the next morning drags him bleary-eyed into the front room. Tony cuts the visual on his end of the call before picking up. “D’you have any idea what time it is?”
“Eight-thirty. Also called daylight, or breakfast, or- wake up, little brother. So how’d it go? An’ why’s the picture…” Rose taps at her monitor, and her eyes widen in realisation. “Oh my god, he’s there with you now, isn’t he?”
“Piss. Off.”
“No, hold on. Birthday. Mum wants an idea of who’s coming. Hello? Can you hear me?”
He considers restoring the visual so she can see him storm out, though he’s not wearing nearly enough clothes for the proper dramatic impact. “Hearing you. Ignoring you. Going back to bed.”
She sticks her tongue out at him. Half the time she treats him like he’s still in primary school, and for the other half they’re equals. He’s never quite certain which way the conversation is going to go. “Bring him over. Oh, go on. We’d love it.”
All of a sudden, everything is too much. He tries to bail. “Wait. I’m not- I mean, I don’t even know if he…”
His sister’s face comes in close. He can see the sleep in the corners of each eye, and the beginnings of lines about her forehead. It’s a shock to think of her getting older, somehow, in a way that’s different to thinking about Mum or Dad. Until that mission in Stockholm three years ago, time was always on her side.
“Got a secret for you, Tony. No-one ever starts off knowing. Knowing comes after. Don’t know- do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean,” Tony says- but she’s gone, and he’s left scowling at the walls.
His head is fuzzy with an adrenaline hangover from that peculiar fear-joy of the night before, so he makes coffee and paces the front room while the mug goes cold. The hologram model he’s been working on flickers by his desk. He tore up most of his old architectural plans in a fit of belated teenage angst last Christmas, but he’s rebuilding now, in a class with thirty other students at UCL. The end-of-term exams are next month.
At one time there were people who thought they would never see any new buildings again. They thought the Cybermen would flatten the lot, or the sky would choke with the airbuses, or something new and even more terrible would swoop down upon them and finish the job that Lumic started. But here’s the thing; despairing of the world doesn’t stop it from turning, and it doesn’t stop people from needing, either. In the same inarticulate way that a baby needs food and warmth and shelter, everyone who lost heart kept on needing all those things. In due course needing turned to wanting, and they began to seek out some kind of life for themselves once more.
Finally, they realised that they wanted hope. And bit by bit, the world gave it back to them.
The bedroom door opens, and Samir leans in to kiss Tony’s shoulder. “Who was that?”
Tony decides that time travel is overrated. Nobody can be sure which parts of a life are most worth experiencing, not unless they’ve lived through all the other parts too. No- if it were ever down to him, he’d have the ability to stop time altogether. Not often and not for long, just whenever a moment like this arose. To give him space to marvel at it before it became past.
“My sister.” And then, while joy has the upper hand on fear inside him, he asks: “D’you wanna stay a bit longer?”
When Mum and Dad split up, Rose left her third-storey flat opposite Torchwood HQ and fought her way through the London media to the steps of the big house, pausing only to stamp on a cameraman who tried to get his foot under her car wheels. For the next fortnight she drove Tony to school and back again, made tea when they got in and approached each legal wrangle like a pitched battle for the future of the Earth. It was both magnificent and slightly unnerving, and - to his continued shame- Tony had been half-glad when an unexpected Gastropod invasion put an end to the mourning period.
The second homecoming had been different altogether. The air ambulance had landed on their front lawn sometime after midnight, casting its lights through Tony’s bedroom window. He’d been too afraid to look, but he could hear Rose’s voice out on the stairway, the furious love and the tension in it, and John’s brittle whisper in reply, No I’m fine don’t worry I’m fine.
The following summer Tony went straight from his A-level celebrations to flat-hunting on the outskirts of the city, and to this day he couldn’t tell you whether he was moving out, growing up or running away. Maybe a mixture of all three. But he didn’t go far, he tells himself – and however far he ends up going, he’ll always belong here, always feel that strange bubble of lightness in his chest when the gates open up.
John is standing in the driveway, albeit with Rose’s arm supporting him at the waist. His hair has grown back across the crown of his head. There is more ginger in it than before. “Hullo. You must be Samir.”
“Hi, guys.” Rose gives them a wave with her free hand. “Dad’s on his way over an’ Mum’s got control of the bunting, so brace yourselves.”
Even after all these years, the ease with which his sister and uncle fit together can still catch Tony by surprise. Perhaps there’s a little more concern in Rose’s gaze now, but they have both shifted to make room for it, just as a well-built house settles on its foundations. He used to search for that understanding in his parents, and feel cheated when he couldn’t find it. He’s only just beginning to get an idea of the work involved. “I thought about what you said.”
To her credit, his sister doesn’t miss a beat. “And?”
Tony lets out a long breath between his teeth. “And- I still don’t know.”
“Good. Good start. Oi- you two.” Samir has got John onto the subject of bio-programming and he has moved off to one side, the better to gesticulate his way through a particularly knotty sentence. Rose fixes them with a look that owes a great deal to Jackie Tyler. “We gonna be stood here all day?”
A zeppelin passes low overhead, putting them all in shadow. For the first time that the house can remember, nobody stops to watch it go.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-29 03:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-29 08:56 pm (UTC)All that made it surprisingly easy to picture how the Tylers' life in the parallel universe might go. Not quite the way Tony expected it to go, or the way Rose would have chosen for herself when she got the chance. But a life worth having all the same.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-05-05 08:28 pm (UTC)That is how life always goes really, never following expectations, but still worthwhile in the end :)
(no subject)
Date: 2015-05-11 07:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-05-11 07:36 am (UTC)But they are both such determined characters, I think they would have pulled through somehow- in the messy human way that's never going to be perfect but is still worth fighting for.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-05-16 08:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-05-17 06:46 pm (UTC)Both post-2005 showrunners, in their own ways, explore and celebrate the very human bravery in that sort of life; the strength that's required in staying put and trying to figure out the people around you, day after day.
It's an adventure that many of the characters on the show are reluctant to have, for one reason or another. But the lucky ones eventually get a shot at it.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-05-19 03:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-05-19 06:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-05-19 11:25 pm (UTC)It also makes me decidedly jealous of your sheer talent, but that is besides the point. *Beams*
Brava!! Another smashing delight, m'dear!
*HUGS*
(no subject)
Date: 2015-05-20 07:32 am (UTC)And Pete's world is a great one to play with in fic - there's so much possibility there.