New DW Fic: "Flowers in Summer"
Aug. 14th, 2006 04:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icepixieTitle: Flowers in Summer
Author: Icepixie
Rating: G
Spoilers: "Time of the Daleks" and "Neverland"
Word Count: 4300
Pairing: Eight/Charley is mentioned, but not to an extent exceeding canon. Of course, "Scherzo" is canon...
Summary: Charley comes back to Earth. Cecilia Pollard reports.
Notes: I know that Sissy Pollard appears in one of the Gallifrey audios, but as I haven't heard it, I'm blithely ignoring everything in it. ;) Also, this is set some months after Something Inside, and assumes that C'Rizz left the TARDIS team, at least temporarily, at some point before this begins. (C'Rizz is awesome, don't get me wrong, but unfortunately I couldn't cram him in!)
Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
elflore for the beta!
* * *
9 September, 1931
I was sixteen when Charley disappeared. She escaped from her room at the Kerrington School for Girls one night in October, to steal away on an airship that would meet its end bare hours after it launched. We heard the news the next day.
At the time, Mama had wanted to go to France immediately and scour the hills for Charley, or Charley's remains. But before she could plan any details of crossing the Channel, she gave in to the despair that seemed to hover around the house like a particularly thick fog. Edith was despondent; I could tell because she was even more forgetful than usual. She kept putting salt in the tea, and sugar in the soup. Mama hardly ate anything anyway, and didn't seem to notice what it was when she did put something into her mouth. I'm afraid my appetite was a bit healthier, but I said nothing, because I knew Edith had been especially fond of Charley.
For so long, there was no news. We tiptoed around the house, silent as mice. More than once, I caught myself looking out windows, hoping to see Charley coming up the hill from the river or down the lane that led to town, cheerful and smiling as if she'd just been out for an afternoon walk.
A week into November, we got a telegram from the chief investigator in France, saying that while they had not been able to definitively identify any of the bodies as Charley's, they believed her to be buried somewhere in the mounds of ash and scattered limbs the wrecked airship had left behind. Oh, they put it a lot more euphemistically than that, but it amounted to the same: my older sister, at just eighteen years old, was dead.
Mama didn't come out of her room for a week. I wanted to do the same, but Peg told me in no uncertain terms that she wasn't going to run the house and look after our mother and plan a memorial all by herself. I had to help, and I did.
We let Christmas go by without any acknowledgement besides church. I returned to school when term started in January, and being away from the house seemed to help. Peg got married in April, and Mama even smiled at the wedding.
Peg moved to her new home in London, and then, once I was back for the summer holidays, it was just my mother and me and the servants wandering about in a house that had grown too large for us. Everything was so quiet.
And then on the twenty-seventh of June, near dusk, there was a knock at the front door. I had been going up the stairs to my bedroom, and stopped on the landing to see who it was.
Sarah opened the door to reveal my sister, wearing a dress like I'd never seen before and looking very bedraggled.
"Charley!" I shouted, forgetting my decorum for the moment. I raced back down the stairs and nearly knocked poor Sarah over in my haste to reach Charley. I threw my arms around her, not even noticing the dirt that covered all of her exposed skin until I found remnants of the mud on my dress that night. Her embrace was as strong as it ever had been.
When I pulled back to look at her, I noticed that her smile, normally an infectious grin, didn't reach her eyes. Instead, they held a look that made me think she was seeing something very different to the front hall of Sandcote House.
Perhaps it is only after hearing her describe what had happened that I recognize that expression for what it really was, and not just for the bone-tiredness she must have been feeling. At the time, I didn't stop to think about it; I only said, "We all thought you were dead, Charley!" and before she could answer, I called up the stairs for Mama.
"Cecilia," I heard her say when she got to the top of the stairs, "what on *Earth* is...."
Charley and I both stared up at her. Mama's face had gone white, like she'd seen a spirit. She was very still for a moment, and then she ran down the stairs faster than I'd ever seen her move. "Charlotte...oh, Lottie," she whispered before she pulled my sister to her chest. I heard Charley gasp, the first sound I'd heard out of her since she showed up at the door, and I saw tears on both of their faces.
When Mama let her go, Charley wiped at her eyes, and again I had the feeling that her tears weren't entirely born of joy at being back home. "It's been six months, Charlotte," Mama said. "Where on Earth have you been?"
I must stop here. Mama is taking me to visit Aunt Cordelia in London and to be fitted for new school dresses. We will return on Tuesday.
* * *
14 September, 1931
Charley claimed that Mama would never believe her, and she was right; our mother's stout rationality could not coexist with tales of time travel. Still, she was so pleased to have Charley back from the dead, as it were, that she didn't mind. She said that Charley would tell her what had really happened when she felt that she could. I felt the same way--at least at first.
Charley and I, and Margaret when she was younger, would always spend the long summer afternoons out in the gardens. When we were very little, we heard that two girls in Yorkshire had discovered fairies living at the bottom of their garden. For weeks and weeks, we hunted all over the grounds, particularly down by the river, certain that if fairies lived in Yorkshire then they could just as easily be found in Hampshire.
Of course, we didn't find any fairies. We ran into stinging nettles and the occasional toad, and eventually gave up.
Instead of hunting for fairies, we would lie in the grass and make up stories about what their lives, invisible to us, must be like. Sometimes, inspired no doubt by *Peter Pan*, we would move on to pirates and children who could fly. Charley always told the best stories, full of swordfights and magic.
Soon after she'd returned, on a day when we weren't visiting some relative or other so they could see for themselves that she was really back, I asked Charley to tell me how she'd returned.
I saw her thinking over how to answer me, whether to tell a pretty story I might be able to brush off as one of her usual fanciful imaginings, or to give me the true one. "What really happened?" I asked.
She nodded, and launched into her tale. "The Doctor and I were trying to escape these horrible bug things. I don't know what they're called; there wasn't time for him to tell me. He'd offended them somehow, like he often does..."
She smiled a little at this, a soft turn of her lips that I'd rarely seen before. For the first time, I started to wonder exactly what sort of man this Doctor was. "Anyway, we were trying to get back to the TARDIS before they captured us and used us as food for their larvae. We'd almost reached it, after having to practically crawl through a *field* of mud, when I felt..." She moved her hands futilely, looking like she was trying to find words to explain something that could only be felt. She looked at me. "It was like when the TARDIS dematerializes--sort like being sucked backwards through a straw--only she, the ship, wasn't there to keep away the worst of it, and it actually *hurt*.
"And then before I knew what had happened, really, I was standing in the lane, half a mile from the house." She'd pulled up a clump of grass and now started carefully tearing the blades apart, into two or three separate strands, before dropping them back to earth. "I waited for most of the afternoon. I was sure the Doctor would come, that he'd know exactly what had happened and how to find me.
"But it started to get dark, and I didn't hear the TARDIS or see the Doctor. I suppose I was lucky that whatever it was that took me put me down so close to...home." She pronounced it like a foreign word. "I--oh, Sis." She turned her face towards me once more, and I saw tears glittering in the corners of her eyes. "I didn't know *when* I was. I didn't know if I'd find Mama dead and you an old woman, of if I'd come back when we were all children. I had no idea how long I'd been away."
I believed her. I really believed her, if for no other reason than that while Charley often channeled sadness into anger or biting sarcasm, I could count on one hand the number of times I'd seen her truly distraught.
"Do you think he'll come for you?" I asked. "Will he be able to find out what took you and where you went?"
She stared at something over my shoulder, beyond the garden wall. "If there's any possibility," she said, "I know he'll find it."
The resolute voice the words came out in was the same one that had faced down witches in our closet or monsters under my bed. I recognized it--and I also remembered the shaking fear it covered, the way Charley and I had huddled together in my bed when it seemed one of the dark shapes in the closet had moved of its own accord.
* * *
18 September, 1931
I am at school now. Moving-in day was yesterday, and term starts tomorrow. I only have a brief hour to write most nights, and only ten pages left in this book, so I will have to be economical in telling the rest of the story.
* * *
20 September, 1931
The summer trickled by like water in the river that runs behind the house. Charley and I spent a great deal of time in the gardens, she usually with her journal and me with a book or a piece of embroidery. Mama had dismissed our gardener earlier in the year, and as I knew a bit about plants thanks to a botany class I'd taken at school the year before, I took over the weeding duties as well.
After Charley told me how she'd ended up back at home, I kept away from the subject of her travels for a while. She seemed to want to brood, and I had enough to do, turning over the things she'd told us before in a new frame of mind.
On a particularly warm day, when the afternoon was drowsy with the buzzing of bees and chirping of crickets, I was fighting a losing battle to keep my eyes focused on a copy of *A Midsummer Night's Dream* (it had been assigned to all the girls in my year to read over the summer; I had been a bit lax in starting).
"I met Shakespeare once," Charley said suddenly, startling me out of the half-sleep I'd slipped into.
"What?" I asked, feeling cotton-headed and stupid.
"He was eight years old. At the time, anyway. There was a woman who wanted to kill him, oddly enough, and then the Daleks got involved..."
Before I knew it, she was off on another tale. I wondered sometimes at the finer details, and particularly at Charley's actions in a few of them, but I still absolutely believed that she had traveled in time and seen all those wonders. I believed her because of the fear in her voice when she talked about the horrible things she had encountered, as well as the good. Her imitations of the eerie mechanical voices of the Daleks or the Cybermen--unfamiliar to me still, men made out of metal--were incongruous with the brilliant sunshine and the languorous scent of chamomile coming from the flower beds around us. I shivered, even in the oppressive warmth.
* * *
21 September, 1931
When the summer heat became too stifling, we went down to the river and skipped stones in the shallow water. It was a narrow thing, more of a brook than a real river, despite its appellation, but it was wide enough for our purposes. The tall elms and oaks which grew on the banks provided welcome shade from the late-August sun.
"I really wanted him to do it. I wanted him to kill me," Charley was saying. She was in the middle of describing her adventure on Gallifrey, the Doctor's planet, where her strange, borrowed existence had caught up with her. "I just...couldn't imagine a universe without him in it." She tossed a stone wildly, without the practiced flick of her wrist that would make it skip. It hit the water and sank out of sight.
I turned her words over in my mind at the same time as I turned another flat stone over in my hand, feeling the damp dirt come off in my palm. I threw it almost without noticing, letting instinct guide my hand. It skipped six times before disappearing under the sluggish water.
I thought of Peg and her husband, and of Eric, the boy who worked for Mr. Smith at the newsagent's in the village and who would sometimes give me a chocolate bar for free. "Do you...love him?"
Charley's response was immediate, strong and sure. "Yes."
She threw another stone then, and this time it skipped clear across the river before landing on the opposite bank and skidding to a stop in the grass.
* * *
23 September, 1931
Two weeks before I was to return to school, Charley and I were in the rose garden, her with a new Christie novel, and me with a pair of scissors with which I was cutting off withered blooms. I had just finished the last bush when we heard what sounded like a wheezing dinosaur from far away, down the hill toward the river.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Charley's book drop to the brick pathway as she jumped up from her chair. "Sissy, it's the TARDIS!" she called back to me as she shot towards the sound.
I followed as quickly as I could. She seemed to have wings on her feet; I could feel my stockings slipping down my legs as I tried in vain to keep up.
The sound faded away as I arrived at the top of the hill. Far below, on the line of level ground that runs alongside the river, just outside the grove of trees, there was a large blue box, just like Charley had described. I had been down there the previous day; it had certainly not been there before.
The door opened, and out stepped a man whom I knew had to be the Doctor.
Charley was still flying down the steep, grassy hillside. It was a wonder that she didn't knock the poor man over with the momentum she had built up, but I suppose the way he was also running towards her counteracted it enough so that when they did collide, they stayed upright.
He lifted her up in his arms and swung her around twice, maybe three times. He had a deep, full laugh that sounded nice against Charley's wordless squeaks of happiness. Still several feet away, I stopped walking; I was panting from the sudden exertion, and my dress was all out of sorts from chasing after Charley.
I set about straightening myself out, trying to give my sister and her Doctor some privacy at the same time. Of course, I couldn't help overhearing their conversation.
Charley asked what had thrown her back through time, and where the Doctor had been. I couldn't hear half of his response--he was speaking into her hair, the two of them still pressed against each other like they'd been glued together--and I didn't understand much of the rest of it. The inhabitants of the last planet they'd been on apparently had rather advanced and complicated-sounding time travel technology, recently developed, and whatever the Doctor had done to anger them had in turn caused them to send Charley and the Doctor "home," him with the TARDIS, luckily. Home being in different directions, they'd been separated. He'd ended up on his Gallifrey, and it had taken nearly a year for him to get away again due to a series of events he claimed he would explain later. It took almost that long again for him to find Charley; he'd found out from the aliens that they'd sent her back to Hampshire, but they'd given him a range of more than a decade in which he might find her.
In between trying to look like I wasn't paying attention to the conversation going on in front of me and blatantly eavesdropping, I pulled up my stockings and brushed down my dress. There was nothing to do for my hair. As I was trying to smooth it down anyway, Charley called my name. "Sissy!"
I walked over to them, my steps slow and measured. They had parted a bit, although the Doctor still had his hand on Charley's back, and she still splayed her fingers over his shoulder. "Doctor, this is my sister, Cecilia. Sissy, the Doctor."
"How do you do," I said, rather absurdly, in my best company voice. I held out my hand.
He grasped it, and I gasped at how cool his skin was. It was almost as cold as the water that ran in the river beside us. I looked up to see his face and found gentle blue eyes--impossibly old, in a face that seemed so young--meeting mine, seeming to look under my skin and take my measure in a way I'd never quite encountered before.
"It's a pleasure to meet you, Miss Pollard," he said.
I nodded, finding myself quite at a loss for words.
Charley wasn't, though. "Sissy, you must see the inside of the TARDIS," she said, and the Doctor looked away from me. I was a bit relieved, actually. He smiled, and opened the door with a courtly flourish. Charley led the way, and I followed her into the gloom.
She'd described the interior of the time machine, but nothing could have prepared me for it. Nothing. It was like being in the cathedral at Winchester, only at the same time it wasn't at all. It soared like the space under the vaulted roof in the cathedral, but it was also peppered with things one would never see in a church, like an armchair and a hatstand and all those levers and switches controlling strange machines. The air was filled not with reverential murmurs, but instead with a hum similar to that of an electric lightbulb. And all of it inside such a small blue box!
"It's beautiful," I said, unconsciously reaching out to stroke the smooth wood of the large hexagonal platform in the center of the room. Noticing that it had buttons and switches with strange labels on them, I quickly pulled my hand back lest I upset one of them.
"Ah, someone after my own hearts," said the Doctor from somewhere behind me. He sounded pleased.
Charley "harrumphed" lightly. "Just wait until you've lived in this Gothic monstrosity for a year or two. Then you might appreciate a bit of light and simplicity."
"I really should take you forward a couple of decades and introduce you to Frank Lloyd Wright; you'd get along famously..."
I continued to look around the room as they bickered. Everything in there, from the glowing column in the middle of things to the strange instruments scattered around the outskirts, seemed reminiscent of a bird perched on a branch, ready at any moment to spring fluidly into flight.
My attention was brought back to the other two when the Doctor said, "Well, Charley, there's a harvest festival about to start on Marana Five. The Maranans are famed in three galaxies for their hospitality. If we leave now, we can just catch the opening ceremonies."
"That sounds wonderful," Charley agreed.
I turned to face them. "You'll be off, then," I said to my sister, intending it as a question, although it didn't come out that way. It hadn't occurred to me until just then, but when I considered it, I realized that of course she would be leaving with the Doctor. It was what she'd been waiting for the whole summer long.
Charley looked at the Doctor, and it seemed like they had an entire conversation in just that one glance. "You could come with us," the Doctor offered. "I'm sure there's no end of interesting scrapes we could get ourselves into with two adventurous Pollards on board!"
I took a moment to think about it, but really, I'd made my decision the moment the Doctor made the offer. "I--I can't," I said. I love my older sister, but I can't be like her. Where she wants to fly, I prefer to stay on the ground, down among the everyday concerns of life that grow like flowers in a garden, small and pretty and always changing. "This...isn't for me. Thank you very much, though." I started to back away towards the door.
"Sissy," Charley started, obviously wanting to argue, but at a look from the Doctor she held her tongue. Both of them followed me out of the TARDIS and back into the sunshine. I blinked at the sudden brightness.
"I suppose I should tell Mama that I'm leaving," Charley said musingly.
I laughed. "And you think she'd let you get out of the house if you did?"
"Oh. Right." She cringed just a bit.
"Don't worry," I said, "I'll tell her where you've gone."
"Oh, Sissy, that would be--" Charley crept closer to me and lowered her voice to a whisper. "Was it really awful, when I was gone? I don't want to hurt her, but I just can't..." She waved her hands, trying to encompass the house and the life she was leaving. She had taken the time trapped in our circumscribed space--and now, seeing her so full of light and life at the prospect of resuming her travels with the Doctor, I knew she really had been trapped here--with uncustomary grace, but she wouldn't be able to stay much longer without losing some part of herself. She would have left us soon, whether the Doctor came back for her or not.
"I think she'll understand," I told her. "If she knows where you've gone, and not just that you presumably died in an airship crash...she'll be upset, but I think she knows you were never meant to stay with us."
Charley raised her eyebrow. "I'll take that as a compliment." I grinned. We embraced each other, for what I hoped wasn't the last time. Then she stepped away from me and took the Doctor's hand.
"If you're sure..." the Doctor said, inclining his head toward me and indicating the TARDIS. I nodded. I'm pretty sure he had known from the beginning what my decision would be, but had asked just for form's--and Charley's--sake. "It was very good to meet you, Cecilia. I feel rather certain that we'll be seeing each other again."
"I'd like that," I said, meaning it.
With a last, "Goodbye! I'll be back to visit soon, I promise!" from Charley, they stepped into the TARDIS and closed the door behind them.
The light on the top of the box began to blink, and I took a big step back. I had no idea how the thing took off, after all. The noise we'd heard in the garden started again, much louder now that I was standing so close to it. Slowly, the TARDIS faded away, leaving the barest impression in the grass.
I waited for a while, part of me convinced it was just an illusion and that Charley and the Doctor would pop out from behind a tree or something and yell, "Surprise!" But of course it wasn't; fantastic as it seems, they really had vanished completely.
The wind picked up, causing the tall grass and the leaves above my head to murmur to themselves. It was cool on my bare arms, and ruffled my skirt around my knees.
Already trying to decide how I would break the news to Mama, I began the climb back up the hill.
That's the end of this journal. I only have a few lines left on the very last page. However, in times such as these, nothing should go to waste that can be helped, and I find myself with more to say.
When I recall it, the past summer will likely have an air of finality to it that it never really did. The memory plays tricks on us that way. It has already started; I recorded this because I know now that such a summer will never come again. Like sweet peas and snapdragons, plants that only bloom one time before dying, it happened once, and will not be repeated.
Charley will return, or she will not; while I hope for the former, I at least know that she is happy on her chosen path. As am I; my teachers say I may be the first girl from Kerrington to go on to university. Should I go, I would like to study botany.
Fin
Well, Sissy ended up resembling Cassandra Mortmain from I Capture the Castle a bit more than I had inteded, but hey, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? ;) Also, ten points and a cookie to anyone who catches the reference to a particular Paul McGann movie from the late '90s. *g*
Comments are love!
Author: Icepixie
Rating: G
Spoilers: "Time of the Daleks" and "Neverland"
Word Count: 4300
Pairing: Eight/Charley is mentioned, but not to an extent exceeding canon. Of course, "Scherzo" is canon...
Summary: Charley comes back to Earth. Cecilia Pollard reports.
Notes: I know that Sissy Pollard appears in one of the Gallifrey audios, but as I haven't heard it, I'm blithely ignoring everything in it. ;) Also, this is set some months after Something Inside, and assumes that C'Rizz left the TARDIS team, at least temporarily, at some point before this begins. (C'Rizz is awesome, don't get me wrong, but unfortunately I couldn't cram him in!)
Thanks to
elflore for the beta!* * *
9 September, 1931
I was sixteen when Charley disappeared. She escaped from her room at the Kerrington School for Girls one night in October, to steal away on an airship that would meet its end bare hours after it launched. We heard the news the next day.
At the time, Mama had wanted to go to France immediately and scour the hills for Charley, or Charley's remains. But before she could plan any details of crossing the Channel, she gave in to the despair that seemed to hover around the house like a particularly thick fog. Edith was despondent; I could tell because she was even more forgetful than usual. She kept putting salt in the tea, and sugar in the soup. Mama hardly ate anything anyway, and didn't seem to notice what it was when she did put something into her mouth. I'm afraid my appetite was a bit healthier, but I said nothing, because I knew Edith had been especially fond of Charley.
For so long, there was no news. We tiptoed around the house, silent as mice. More than once, I caught myself looking out windows, hoping to see Charley coming up the hill from the river or down the lane that led to town, cheerful and smiling as if she'd just been out for an afternoon walk.
A week into November, we got a telegram from the chief investigator in France, saying that while they had not been able to definitively identify any of the bodies as Charley's, they believed her to be buried somewhere in the mounds of ash and scattered limbs the wrecked airship had left behind. Oh, they put it a lot more euphemistically than that, but it amounted to the same: my older sister, at just eighteen years old, was dead.
Mama didn't come out of her room for a week. I wanted to do the same, but Peg told me in no uncertain terms that she wasn't going to run the house and look after our mother and plan a memorial all by herself. I had to help, and I did.
We let Christmas go by without any acknowledgement besides church. I returned to school when term started in January, and being away from the house seemed to help. Peg got married in April, and Mama even smiled at the wedding.
Peg moved to her new home in London, and then, once I was back for the summer holidays, it was just my mother and me and the servants wandering about in a house that had grown too large for us. Everything was so quiet.
And then on the twenty-seventh of June, near dusk, there was a knock at the front door. I had been going up the stairs to my bedroom, and stopped on the landing to see who it was.
Sarah opened the door to reveal my sister, wearing a dress like I'd never seen before and looking very bedraggled.
"Charley!" I shouted, forgetting my decorum for the moment. I raced back down the stairs and nearly knocked poor Sarah over in my haste to reach Charley. I threw my arms around her, not even noticing the dirt that covered all of her exposed skin until I found remnants of the mud on my dress that night. Her embrace was as strong as it ever had been.
When I pulled back to look at her, I noticed that her smile, normally an infectious grin, didn't reach her eyes. Instead, they held a look that made me think she was seeing something very different to the front hall of Sandcote House.
Perhaps it is only after hearing her describe what had happened that I recognize that expression for what it really was, and not just for the bone-tiredness she must have been feeling. At the time, I didn't stop to think about it; I only said, "We all thought you were dead, Charley!" and before she could answer, I called up the stairs for Mama.
"Cecilia," I heard her say when she got to the top of the stairs, "what on *Earth* is...."
Charley and I both stared up at her. Mama's face had gone white, like she'd seen a spirit. She was very still for a moment, and then she ran down the stairs faster than I'd ever seen her move. "Charlotte...oh, Lottie," she whispered before she pulled my sister to her chest. I heard Charley gasp, the first sound I'd heard out of her since she showed up at the door, and I saw tears on both of their faces.
When Mama let her go, Charley wiped at her eyes, and again I had the feeling that her tears weren't entirely born of joy at being back home. "It's been six months, Charlotte," Mama said. "Where on Earth have you been?"
I must stop here. Mama is taking me to visit Aunt Cordelia in London and to be fitted for new school dresses. We will return on Tuesday.
* * *
14 September, 1931
Charley claimed that Mama would never believe her, and she was right; our mother's stout rationality could not coexist with tales of time travel. Still, she was so pleased to have Charley back from the dead, as it were, that she didn't mind. She said that Charley would tell her what had really happened when she felt that she could. I felt the same way--at least at first.
Charley and I, and Margaret when she was younger, would always spend the long summer afternoons out in the gardens. When we were very little, we heard that two girls in Yorkshire had discovered fairies living at the bottom of their garden. For weeks and weeks, we hunted all over the grounds, particularly down by the river, certain that if fairies lived in Yorkshire then they could just as easily be found in Hampshire.
Of course, we didn't find any fairies. We ran into stinging nettles and the occasional toad, and eventually gave up.
Instead of hunting for fairies, we would lie in the grass and make up stories about what their lives, invisible to us, must be like. Sometimes, inspired no doubt by *Peter Pan*, we would move on to pirates and children who could fly. Charley always told the best stories, full of swordfights and magic.
Soon after she'd returned, on a day when we weren't visiting some relative or other so they could see for themselves that she was really back, I asked Charley to tell me how she'd returned.
I saw her thinking over how to answer me, whether to tell a pretty story I might be able to brush off as one of her usual fanciful imaginings, or to give me the true one. "What really happened?" I asked.
She nodded, and launched into her tale. "The Doctor and I were trying to escape these horrible bug things. I don't know what they're called; there wasn't time for him to tell me. He'd offended them somehow, like he often does..."
She smiled a little at this, a soft turn of her lips that I'd rarely seen before. For the first time, I started to wonder exactly what sort of man this Doctor was. "Anyway, we were trying to get back to the TARDIS before they captured us and used us as food for their larvae. We'd almost reached it, after having to practically crawl through a *field* of mud, when I felt..." She moved her hands futilely, looking like she was trying to find words to explain something that could only be felt. She looked at me. "It was like when the TARDIS dematerializes--sort like being sucked backwards through a straw--only she, the ship, wasn't there to keep away the worst of it, and it actually *hurt*.
"And then before I knew what had happened, really, I was standing in the lane, half a mile from the house." She'd pulled up a clump of grass and now started carefully tearing the blades apart, into two or three separate strands, before dropping them back to earth. "I waited for most of the afternoon. I was sure the Doctor would come, that he'd know exactly what had happened and how to find me.
"But it started to get dark, and I didn't hear the TARDIS or see the Doctor. I suppose I was lucky that whatever it was that took me put me down so close to...home." She pronounced it like a foreign word. "I--oh, Sis." She turned her face towards me once more, and I saw tears glittering in the corners of her eyes. "I didn't know *when* I was. I didn't know if I'd find Mama dead and you an old woman, of if I'd come back when we were all children. I had no idea how long I'd been away."
I believed her. I really believed her, if for no other reason than that while Charley often channeled sadness into anger or biting sarcasm, I could count on one hand the number of times I'd seen her truly distraught.
"Do you think he'll come for you?" I asked. "Will he be able to find out what took you and where you went?"
She stared at something over my shoulder, beyond the garden wall. "If there's any possibility," she said, "I know he'll find it."
The resolute voice the words came out in was the same one that had faced down witches in our closet or monsters under my bed. I recognized it--and I also remembered the shaking fear it covered, the way Charley and I had huddled together in my bed when it seemed one of the dark shapes in the closet had moved of its own accord.
* * *
18 September, 1931
I am at school now. Moving-in day was yesterday, and term starts tomorrow. I only have a brief hour to write most nights, and only ten pages left in this book, so I will have to be economical in telling the rest of the story.
* * *
20 September, 1931
The summer trickled by like water in the river that runs behind the house. Charley and I spent a great deal of time in the gardens, she usually with her journal and me with a book or a piece of embroidery. Mama had dismissed our gardener earlier in the year, and as I knew a bit about plants thanks to a botany class I'd taken at school the year before, I took over the weeding duties as well.
After Charley told me how she'd ended up back at home, I kept away from the subject of her travels for a while. She seemed to want to brood, and I had enough to do, turning over the things she'd told us before in a new frame of mind.
On a particularly warm day, when the afternoon was drowsy with the buzzing of bees and chirping of crickets, I was fighting a losing battle to keep my eyes focused on a copy of *A Midsummer Night's Dream* (it had been assigned to all the girls in my year to read over the summer; I had been a bit lax in starting).
"I met Shakespeare once," Charley said suddenly, startling me out of the half-sleep I'd slipped into.
"What?" I asked, feeling cotton-headed and stupid.
"He was eight years old. At the time, anyway. There was a woman who wanted to kill him, oddly enough, and then the Daleks got involved..."
Before I knew it, she was off on another tale. I wondered sometimes at the finer details, and particularly at Charley's actions in a few of them, but I still absolutely believed that she had traveled in time and seen all those wonders. I believed her because of the fear in her voice when she talked about the horrible things she had encountered, as well as the good. Her imitations of the eerie mechanical voices of the Daleks or the Cybermen--unfamiliar to me still, men made out of metal--were incongruous with the brilliant sunshine and the languorous scent of chamomile coming from the flower beds around us. I shivered, even in the oppressive warmth.
* * *
21 September, 1931
When the summer heat became too stifling, we went down to the river and skipped stones in the shallow water. It was a narrow thing, more of a brook than a real river, despite its appellation, but it was wide enough for our purposes. The tall elms and oaks which grew on the banks provided welcome shade from the late-August sun.
"I really wanted him to do it. I wanted him to kill me," Charley was saying. She was in the middle of describing her adventure on Gallifrey, the Doctor's planet, where her strange, borrowed existence had caught up with her. "I just...couldn't imagine a universe without him in it." She tossed a stone wildly, without the practiced flick of her wrist that would make it skip. It hit the water and sank out of sight.
I turned her words over in my mind at the same time as I turned another flat stone over in my hand, feeling the damp dirt come off in my palm. I threw it almost without noticing, letting instinct guide my hand. It skipped six times before disappearing under the sluggish water.
I thought of Peg and her husband, and of Eric, the boy who worked for Mr. Smith at the newsagent's in the village and who would sometimes give me a chocolate bar for free. "Do you...love him?"
Charley's response was immediate, strong and sure. "Yes."
She threw another stone then, and this time it skipped clear across the river before landing on the opposite bank and skidding to a stop in the grass.
* * *
23 September, 1931
Two weeks before I was to return to school, Charley and I were in the rose garden, her with a new Christie novel, and me with a pair of scissors with which I was cutting off withered blooms. I had just finished the last bush when we heard what sounded like a wheezing dinosaur from far away, down the hill toward the river.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Charley's book drop to the brick pathway as she jumped up from her chair. "Sissy, it's the TARDIS!" she called back to me as she shot towards the sound.
I followed as quickly as I could. She seemed to have wings on her feet; I could feel my stockings slipping down my legs as I tried in vain to keep up.
The sound faded away as I arrived at the top of the hill. Far below, on the line of level ground that runs alongside the river, just outside the grove of trees, there was a large blue box, just like Charley had described. I had been down there the previous day; it had certainly not been there before.
The door opened, and out stepped a man whom I knew had to be the Doctor.
Charley was still flying down the steep, grassy hillside. It was a wonder that she didn't knock the poor man over with the momentum she had built up, but I suppose the way he was also running towards her counteracted it enough so that when they did collide, they stayed upright.
He lifted her up in his arms and swung her around twice, maybe three times. He had a deep, full laugh that sounded nice against Charley's wordless squeaks of happiness. Still several feet away, I stopped walking; I was panting from the sudden exertion, and my dress was all out of sorts from chasing after Charley.
I set about straightening myself out, trying to give my sister and her Doctor some privacy at the same time. Of course, I couldn't help overhearing their conversation.
Charley asked what had thrown her back through time, and where the Doctor had been. I couldn't hear half of his response--he was speaking into her hair, the two of them still pressed against each other like they'd been glued together--and I didn't understand much of the rest of it. The inhabitants of the last planet they'd been on apparently had rather advanced and complicated-sounding time travel technology, recently developed, and whatever the Doctor had done to anger them had in turn caused them to send Charley and the Doctor "home," him with the TARDIS, luckily. Home being in different directions, they'd been separated. He'd ended up on his Gallifrey, and it had taken nearly a year for him to get away again due to a series of events he claimed he would explain later. It took almost that long again for him to find Charley; he'd found out from the aliens that they'd sent her back to Hampshire, but they'd given him a range of more than a decade in which he might find her.
In between trying to look like I wasn't paying attention to the conversation going on in front of me and blatantly eavesdropping, I pulled up my stockings and brushed down my dress. There was nothing to do for my hair. As I was trying to smooth it down anyway, Charley called my name. "Sissy!"
I walked over to them, my steps slow and measured. They had parted a bit, although the Doctor still had his hand on Charley's back, and she still splayed her fingers over his shoulder. "Doctor, this is my sister, Cecilia. Sissy, the Doctor."
"How do you do," I said, rather absurdly, in my best company voice. I held out my hand.
He grasped it, and I gasped at how cool his skin was. It was almost as cold as the water that ran in the river beside us. I looked up to see his face and found gentle blue eyes--impossibly old, in a face that seemed so young--meeting mine, seeming to look under my skin and take my measure in a way I'd never quite encountered before.
"It's a pleasure to meet you, Miss Pollard," he said.
I nodded, finding myself quite at a loss for words.
Charley wasn't, though. "Sissy, you must see the inside of the TARDIS," she said, and the Doctor looked away from me. I was a bit relieved, actually. He smiled, and opened the door with a courtly flourish. Charley led the way, and I followed her into the gloom.
She'd described the interior of the time machine, but nothing could have prepared me for it. Nothing. It was like being in the cathedral at Winchester, only at the same time it wasn't at all. It soared like the space under the vaulted roof in the cathedral, but it was also peppered with things one would never see in a church, like an armchair and a hatstand and all those levers and switches controlling strange machines. The air was filled not with reverential murmurs, but instead with a hum similar to that of an electric lightbulb. And all of it inside such a small blue box!
"It's beautiful," I said, unconsciously reaching out to stroke the smooth wood of the large hexagonal platform in the center of the room. Noticing that it had buttons and switches with strange labels on them, I quickly pulled my hand back lest I upset one of them.
"Ah, someone after my own hearts," said the Doctor from somewhere behind me. He sounded pleased.
Charley "harrumphed" lightly. "Just wait until you've lived in this Gothic monstrosity for a year or two. Then you might appreciate a bit of light and simplicity."
"I really should take you forward a couple of decades and introduce you to Frank Lloyd Wright; you'd get along famously..."
I continued to look around the room as they bickered. Everything in there, from the glowing column in the middle of things to the strange instruments scattered around the outskirts, seemed reminiscent of a bird perched on a branch, ready at any moment to spring fluidly into flight.
My attention was brought back to the other two when the Doctor said, "Well, Charley, there's a harvest festival about to start on Marana Five. The Maranans are famed in three galaxies for their hospitality. If we leave now, we can just catch the opening ceremonies."
"That sounds wonderful," Charley agreed.
I turned to face them. "You'll be off, then," I said to my sister, intending it as a question, although it didn't come out that way. It hadn't occurred to me until just then, but when I considered it, I realized that of course she would be leaving with the Doctor. It was what she'd been waiting for the whole summer long.
Charley looked at the Doctor, and it seemed like they had an entire conversation in just that one glance. "You could come with us," the Doctor offered. "I'm sure there's no end of interesting scrapes we could get ourselves into with two adventurous Pollards on board!"
I took a moment to think about it, but really, I'd made my decision the moment the Doctor made the offer. "I--I can't," I said. I love my older sister, but I can't be like her. Where she wants to fly, I prefer to stay on the ground, down among the everyday concerns of life that grow like flowers in a garden, small and pretty and always changing. "This...isn't for me. Thank you very much, though." I started to back away towards the door.
"Sissy," Charley started, obviously wanting to argue, but at a look from the Doctor she held her tongue. Both of them followed me out of the TARDIS and back into the sunshine. I blinked at the sudden brightness.
"I suppose I should tell Mama that I'm leaving," Charley said musingly.
I laughed. "And you think she'd let you get out of the house if you did?"
"Oh. Right." She cringed just a bit.
"Don't worry," I said, "I'll tell her where you've gone."
"Oh, Sissy, that would be--" Charley crept closer to me and lowered her voice to a whisper. "Was it really awful, when I was gone? I don't want to hurt her, but I just can't..." She waved her hands, trying to encompass the house and the life she was leaving. She had taken the time trapped in our circumscribed space--and now, seeing her so full of light and life at the prospect of resuming her travels with the Doctor, I knew she really had been trapped here--with uncustomary grace, but she wouldn't be able to stay much longer without losing some part of herself. She would have left us soon, whether the Doctor came back for her or not.
"I think she'll understand," I told her. "If she knows where you've gone, and not just that you presumably died in an airship crash...she'll be upset, but I think she knows you were never meant to stay with us."
Charley raised her eyebrow. "I'll take that as a compliment." I grinned. We embraced each other, for what I hoped wasn't the last time. Then she stepped away from me and took the Doctor's hand.
"If you're sure..." the Doctor said, inclining his head toward me and indicating the TARDIS. I nodded. I'm pretty sure he had known from the beginning what my decision would be, but had asked just for form's--and Charley's--sake. "It was very good to meet you, Cecilia. I feel rather certain that we'll be seeing each other again."
"I'd like that," I said, meaning it.
With a last, "Goodbye! I'll be back to visit soon, I promise!" from Charley, they stepped into the TARDIS and closed the door behind them.
The light on the top of the box began to blink, and I took a big step back. I had no idea how the thing took off, after all. The noise we'd heard in the garden started again, much louder now that I was standing so close to it. Slowly, the TARDIS faded away, leaving the barest impression in the grass.
I waited for a while, part of me convinced it was just an illusion and that Charley and the Doctor would pop out from behind a tree or something and yell, "Surprise!" But of course it wasn't; fantastic as it seems, they really had vanished completely.
The wind picked up, causing the tall grass and the leaves above my head to murmur to themselves. It was cool on my bare arms, and ruffled my skirt around my knees.
Already trying to decide how I would break the news to Mama, I began the climb back up the hill.
That's the end of this journal. I only have a few lines left on the very last page. However, in times such as these, nothing should go to waste that can be helped, and I find myself with more to say.
When I recall it, the past summer will likely have an air of finality to it that it never really did. The memory plays tricks on us that way. It has already started; I recorded this because I know now that such a summer will never come again. Like sweet peas and snapdragons, plants that only bloom one time before dying, it happened once, and will not be repeated.
Charley will return, or she will not; while I hope for the former, I at least know that she is happy on her chosen path. As am I; my teachers say I may be the first girl from Kerrington to go on to university. Should I go, I would like to study botany.
Well, Sissy ended up resembling Cassandra Mortmain from I Capture the Castle a bit more than I had inteded, but hey, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? ;) Also, ten points and a cookie to anyone who catches the reference to a particular Paul McGann movie from the late '90s. *g*
Comments are love!
