| Date: 10 January 2008
Characters: Professor Yana, Estelle Cole Location: outside Link to IJ: thread #30008 |
 The Professor took his second cup of coffee outside the hotel, and sat down on a bench not far from it. He'd always had a tendency to get his days and nights mixed up, although day and night had been pretty arbitrary where he'd come from. He wasn't quite used to there being stars in the sky yet, and he was looking up at them when he heard someone walk up beside him. |
 "They're beautiful, aren't they?" Estelle asked as she stopped next to his bench and looked up. |
| He smiled at her. "They are." |
| "I've always wondered what we must look like from them," she said, then turned to smile back at him. |
| "How do you imagine that we do?" |
| "Blue and brown and swirly," she said, looking back up to the sky. "At least from not too far out." |
| He laughed. "I'll bet you're right." He moved over, so she could sit if she liked. |
| She did, sweeping her skirt under her.
"I guess from even farther, it would look just like these stars and planets." |
| "It would," he said, nodding. He looked back up at the stars. "I'm still not used to being able to see them." |
| "You can't see them where you're from?" |
| "No. Although I suppose it makes more sense to say that you can't see them when I'm from. Far enough in the future that the stars have burned out." |
| "Oh." She fell silent as she tried to contemplate how far that must be. She couldn't quite wrap her brain around it. |
| "Listen to me, going on," he said, apologetically. "What about you? Where are you from?" |
| "Nothing so impressive," she said, smiling again. "Earth, !($)s." It didn't feel weird to say it like that anymore. |
| He laughed. "Well, it's impressive to me. I wasn't entirely sure that Earth wasn't a myth until I started meeting people here. Makes me wonder. What about Atlantis? Is Atlantis mythical?" That last was teasing, just a little, but he wouldn't have been surprised at this point if it was real. |
| "I want to tell you no," she admitted, "But I can't. I've learned so many things here, I don't think I can't not believe in the possibility of anything anymore." |
| He grinned ruefully and shook his head. "Exactly. This is quite a place." |
| "It is. And the people are so interesting!" |
| He thought her enthusiasm was charming. And contagious.
"They are. People from all different places and times, ending up here. I'd love to know why. And how." |
| "Well, how did you get here?" |
| "I have no idea. I was looking for some spare cables, walked into a storage room, and ended up in a hallway in the hotel. Luckily Jack was there to tell me I hadn't completely lost my mind." |
| She really needed to find Jack again now that she was back.
"He seems to help out a lot of people," she said. "I saw a strange light and, well, touched it. At least, the first time." |
| "The first time?" |
| "I was here and then I was ... sent? Is that the right way to describe it? I was sent home again. And then back." |
| "Sent is as good a word as any, I would think. Had time passed while you were gone?" |
| "Not that I could tell," she said. "But there wasn't anyone really around exactly where I was, and they weren't expecting to see me for a few minutes so they wouldn't have thought me missing." |
| He nodded. "That makes sense. Sounds like not much time had passed, anyway. That makes me feel better. It's one thing for people to tell you that this place is outside of space and time, but it's another to hear it from someone who's gone and come back. So, no light the second time?" |
| "No light," she said. "Just a door." |
| "That sounds familiar." He remembered something she had said earlier. "You said Jack helps a lot of people. Did you meet him here?" |
| "He rescued me from a terrible shoe tragedy," she said impishly. |
| He laughed. "I'm sure he was glad to do it. He seems like just the type to avert danger from marauding shoes." |
| "He's very dashing," she agreed. |
| He tried not to grin at that, he really did. "Who else have you met here? Have you met the Doctor yet?" |
| "I have! He taught me how juggle. Well, he tried to teach me how." |
| "Gravity tends to win that game eventually. Or it did with me, anyway." |
| "I ruined more fruit than I juggled," she confided. |
| "Never tried it with fruit, but I can't imagine that it would've turned out any better." |
| "How long have you been here?" |
| He had to think about it. Time was weird here, and he'd never been all that good at keeping track anyway. "A week? Week and a half?" he guessed. |
| "Does it feel longer and shorter?" |
| "It really does. I thought it was just me, though. I'm good at losing track of time. It feels like that to you, too?" |
| She nodded. "It does." |
| "What is this place, do you think?" |
| "It's ..." She fell silent, thinking. "It's between. It's no place and every time. It's ... it's like where the fairies go. Elsewhere." |
| He studied her for a moment. "I think you've come closer to answering that question than anybody I've talked to. Closer to what it feels like." He was serious. Oh, before he met the Doctor he might've said something about the fairies, but like she said about Atlantis, it was hard to disbelieve in much of anything here. |
| She looked down, flushing slightly at the praise. When she looked back up at him she was smiling and looked pleased.
"I don't think this place can be explained," she said. "I think it just is and ... and maybe it collects people who need to learn to accept that sort of thing into their lives?" Or have it confirmed for them. |
| "In that case..." He paused. Looked up at the sky, and back at her. "I've never been good at accepting things as they are. Maybe you're right. Do you think people stay until they figure it out? Because it might take me a while." He was smiling a little, but it wasn't quite a joke. |
| "Oh I'm no expert!" she hurriedly replied. "I'm just ... I'm just a secretary who believes in fairies and likes to pretend she can go off on little adventures and ... I don't know. Your time? Was it very awful? Maybe this place is meant to be a sanctuary for you. If time doesn't pass in the real world..." She really hated calling it that; this world was as real as the other to her. "... maybe you're here to solve something that you're working on there but you don't have the time. Maybe you're here to take a break from it. There's so many things that could be the reasons, maybe they all sort of cancel each other out." |
| "First of all," he said, "You're not 'just' anything, and like you said earlier, it's hard to disbelieve in anything here. Second, yes, there are a lot of things this place could be, and it could be several things at once or it could be completely random, but don't be so quick to discount that first theory. It's the best one I've heard, anyway."
He paused for a moment. "Before I ended up here," he explained, "I had been working on a big project for a long time. Something that people's lives depended on, or that's how it seemed, anyway. So when I first got here, I looked at it as a break from that. But the people I've met here...I do wonder. Your theory seems to work." |
| "Do you miss it? Your home?" she asked quietly. |
| "It's not so much that I miss it as...I want to know what happens next." Well. He's not so sure about that as he was a couple of days ago. "I miss being busy, and I miss feeling like I'm doing something to help." |
| "Oh! I completely understand!" she exclaimed as she laid her hand on his arm. "There's a war going on at home and part of me feels guilty for being here. For not being able to help and being safe while others are back there, risking their lives!" |
| "No one's risking their lives while you're here," he said, patting her hand. "In between, remember? What would you be doing-" he corrected himself. "What will you be doing when you go back?"
For the first time, he wished time was passing, because he wanted to keep her here until her war was over. |
| "That's true," she agreed. "I work as a secretary in the war department, but I want to sign up for the new program they have. Women pilots who will do ferry duty for supplies and things." |
| ...Now he definitely wanted to keep her here until the war was over.
"That's very brave of you," he said, and hoped he didn't sound as worried as he felt. |
| She smiled and took his hand.
"I only want to do my part," she said. |
| He squeezed her hand gently and smiled back. "I'm sure you will. What are you going to be piloting?" Because it couldn't be spacecraft, not that early, he could work that out at least. |
| "Well, if they accept me, I'll take whatever they put me in," she said sincerely. "I think they start us out on light, single-engine planes, though." |
| "You'll get to see the Earth from somewhere above the ground, anyway," he said, smiling at the thought of the adventure. "Have you been in a plane before?" |
| "A few times," she said. "It was lovely." Of course, she'd never tried to fly a plane herself, but she'd gotten to fly. |
| "What did you like about it?" |
| "It... it felt like being free somehow. As if anything was possible." |
| He nodded. "I can remember the first time I was ever on a spaceship, and it felt the same way. Knowing that the next time I had my feet on the ground, it'd be somewhere I'd never seen before." He smiled at the memory. |
| Estelle looked back up at the stars.
"It's hard for me to imagine other worlds being someplace that we can go," she admitted. "I try, sometimes, but they all simply end up looking like, London or the Scottish wild or pictures I've seen of India..." |
| "There probably are planets that look like all those places somewhere in the universe. And humans end up traveling all across it, so there might be places that look like that on purpose, because they want to remember home." |
| "Tell me about someplace you've been?" she asked. She tilted her head on to his shoulder without thinking. |
| Just as unthinkingly, he put his arm around her shoulders. "I was on a planet once that had had a sudden drastic climate change centuries before. An ice age that happened so fast that the ocean waves froze. You could walk out there, and look up at these waves that were four times as tall as you are, or higher, and they glowed. I think it was actually some kind of organism that lived on them that glowed, but still. Blue and green crystal waves. It was beautiful. Provided you had a really warm coat." |
| "Oh," Estelle said. And it was more sigh than actual word. "It's sounds beautiful." |
| "It really was. Your turn--tell me something about Earth." |
| "Well." She thought for a moment, then began describing her favorite dance hall. How it looked and sounded. What the people were like. Why she liked to dance so much. |
| "They dance at the end of the universe, too," he said, quietly. "Almost a hundred trillion years from your time, and they still dance." He thought about that, her people dancing in the face of war and his in defiance of the end of time itself. "And for the much the same reasons, I think." |
| "I'm glad," she said. "I'm glad after all that time some things are still the same." |
| "So am I." He chuckled then, and rubbed her shoulder gently. "You should kick me when I start getting philosophical. Thank you for humoring an old man, though." |
| "I don't mind," she assured him. "You remind me of my grandfather. I ... don't suppose you like tea?" |
| "I haven't tried the tea here. But I'm willing to take a chance that it's better than what passes for tea where I'm from. Shall we track some down and see?" He smiled at her. |
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