I Am Here ("Parking" challenge)

[templeremus]

Title: I Am Here

Characters: Brian Williams (cameo part for Rory)

Word Count: 1500

Rating: PG for themes of loss and grief

Genre: Character Study/Angst 

Summary: Brian stays to water the plants, and learns - slowly - that no-one can wait forever. Spoilers for episode 7.05, The Angels Take Manhattan. 

The car-key remained on the hall table for nearly six months.

Brian would pick it up while he was dusting, make a fist around it and then let go as suddenly as if it had been red-hot. He had got used to everything else, on his potters around the house: the emptiness, the way the kitchen window sometimes jammed, the gaudy sample-size clothes - Amy’s - in cases lining the spare bedroom. The key, though, was more obtrusive than any of the above: a reminder, sitting quite literally at his fingertips, of what the place most lacked. 

He should have moved out. Concerned neighbours had made that much clear to him within the first month. A house that size was a prime piece of real estate, and there was something unnatural about leaving it as it was. This was a respectable area, after all, not a playground for absentee rich kids. Two doors down there lived a stolidly middle-class family, whose father left for work at six every morning and returned once all four children were in bed. Brian had been on nodding terms with the wife, a slip of a thing in floaty cotton dresses and denim jackets, until he realised that she was a leading light in the campaign to oust him. Now they gave each other a wide berth. The children would scurry to the other side of the road, like startled cats, if they saw Brian in the doorway of the blue house. He felt sorry for them, and then for himself, and turned the radio up a notch until the feeling passed, humming along to the endlessly recycling news jingles until his twice-weekly circuit of each room was complete. 

Forty-seven circuits had gone by without incident. The plants had never looked healthier, and he was starting to lose it. 

The first time he took the key, it was for a run on the shops. The dishcloths needed replacing, and while he was there he thought that he’d get a few more things for the garden: bigger pots and netting, ready for when the birds came. The car crouched, like another reproachful neighbour, a little way down the street. Rory had always been vague about the day he got it - from a friend, apparently, to coincide with the house-move. An embarrassing amount of time had passed before Brian had put two and two together and recognised all the hallmarks of the Doctor. Spontaneous, showy and a tiny bit ridiculous: the impossible time-traveller might as well have left a signed card in the glove compartment. Brian felt his stomach contract as he turned the key in the ignition - it had been idle for so long, after all - but the engine purred into life, and before he knew it he was battling for a parking space at the nearest ugly mega-market. 

He returned with supplies crowding the back seats and with precisely none of the things that he had set out to buy. The tightness in his stomach had eased, but now his palms were sweating. It felt as though the plastic bags were not full of tinned food and blankets, but of something illicit - even though the closest Brian had ever come to breaking the law had been when his son was born, and he had driven through a red light on his way to the hospital. 

Brian used to talk about that day with Rory, in the early stages of his and Amy’s romantic entanglement - the weeks when no-one quite knew the name for what they had, and most people were too wary of her to ask. 
 

“I’m scared, Dad,” Rory had told him, late one evening. He had just come off a 13-hour shift, and his fingers wouldn’t keep still; they had jittered across the table, against his leg, anywhere they came to rest. “I mean, it’s Amy. What if- what if she gets hurt? What if I screw this up?”

Brian, in the middle of buttering four slices of toast for two plates, had made a conscious effort to keep going. For well over a decade, nothing - not schoolwork, or death, or (now) love - had got in the way of last-thing toast. Awkward hugs aside, it had become their single most trustworthy ritual: more precious even than physical contact, because they both knew that it was, in the long term, unsustainable. 

“If it’s Amy,” he had said - treading as lightly as he could on the if, and feeling treacherous all the same - “then you won’t.”

Three weeks after that trip to the mega-market, Brian posted a note through Floaty Mother's letter-box and checked that all the doors and windows in the blue house were locked. In the boot of the car were the clothes that he had taken with him when he moved in - two suitcases’ worth - plus his newly purchased supplies. On the back seat were several framed photographs, a collection of plants, and a few odds and ends that had seemed to reproach him on his goodbye tour. The clutter looked foolish now, but he didn’t stop to re-sort it. There would be time for that later. He shut the rear doors, gave a stiff wave to Floaty Mother’s gawking children on the far side of the road, and started the engine. 

By the time he stopped for fuel, they - the car, the plants and the photographs - were almost at the coast. The petrol station was the kind visited by long-haul lorry drivers, and smelt like it too: under-notes of urine, days-old sweat and cheap coffee, a combination like the beginnings of a hangover. 

Brian went through the travel magazines, choosing the four whose titles sounded familiar. He wished that he’d kept a box-file for everything that Amy wrote, but she had gone out of her way to make that difficult - sometimes writing under a different name, sometimes failing to mention a big feature piece until Rory brought it up. At first Brian had thought she acted out of embarrassment, a sense that these articles and magazines were beneath her. Later - after the Doctor had whisked the three of them aboard a spaceship, and then let Brian sit and watch the Earth turn - he understood. With a secret that huge and that unpredictable, little secrets became more important, not less. They gave one a sense of control. 

The boy at the till had a barely-there moustache, like a pencilled-over mistake on his upper lip. “Anything else,” he said - the low drone of the terminally bored, lacking the energy even to turn the words into a question.

Brian was scanning the contents pages of the first magazine, running his finger down the articles in the way that a novice gambler might choose a racehorse, or a child a new nursery rhyme. 

“No, ta,” he said: and then, having found a place and held it in his mind a while: “How good’s your Spanish?”

The boy turned pink: rubbed at the moustache with one finger, as though that might get rid of it. “I -- ss-sorry, um, I don’t…”

Brian cursed himself, silently. That was the trouble with the Doctor’s breed of madness; it fell short in the real world, taking on meanings that were never intended, getting twisted in the minds of people who were too preoccupied with themselves to listen, or too afraid to change. 

“Forget it. I was miles away there. Thanks for the…”

He left clutching the magazines under one arm, while his free hand closed over the key in his pocket, squeezing until it hurt. Once back in the car he felt calm again, but lonelier than when he had got out. The clutter behind him looked more and more like rubbish. He had the urge to reopen the door and fling it onto the concourse. Maybe chuck the magazines, too, with their glowing advertisements and glossy, plumped-up print. Instead he stuffed them into the seat’s back pocket, reaching as he did so for the nearest of the framed pictures. 

Amy, in halterneck top and with her hair in a sideways twist, was holding a champagne glass up for the camera. Beside her, Rory was laughing at something that she - or another person, away from the lens - had said. His eyes, almost shut, were on her, and his glass was nowhere to be seen. 

Brian flipped the picture over to look for a date, but there was none. He righted it, and slid it - along with the others, one after another - into the now-empty shopping bag, tying a knot in the handle for extra security. 

“Rightio,” he said, into the absence and enclosed, ineffectual quiet. Pulling out slowly, one eye on the bag next to him, he joined the queue for the motorway.

Within minutes - long enough to doubt everything so far, and long enough to force that doubt into retreat - they were moving again. 

Comments

[unfeathered]

Oh, this is lovely! I do so love Brian, for all that we didn't see very much of him. He was such a wonderful steady, stable counterpoint to the Doctor's erratic madness, and I love the way you get into his head here, and all the lovely little details. :-)

[templeremus]

Thank you. You're spot-on about Brian's role as a counterpoint to the Doctor - it 100 per cent makes sense that he would raise someone as steadfast and sensible and kind as Rory. The Doctor is kind, too, of course, but not in the everyday, tea-and-toast way. It's rarely the sort of kindness that takes steady, monotonous hard work.
That's why the world needs people like Brian, just as much as it needs heroes like the Doctor.

[paynesgrey]

Thoroughly enjoyed this. I loved this little look into Brian's life. Well done.

[templeremus]

Thank you. Brian is an underappreciated character, I feel. He injects a welcome note of homeliness into the Ponds' life while also being very much his own person: loyal, patient, determined to do what's right in his own private way. The similarities with Rory are there, but they're not the whole reason for his being part of the Doctor's inner circle.