economicalrhinoplasty | Tuck Those Ribbons Under Your Helmet [Closed]

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Tuck Those Ribbons Under Your Helmet [Closed]

Eva waits on the log for a very long time, until the chill from the shoe tree leaves her shivering slightly, her teeth clicking irregularly as a replacement for her normal twitching and jerking. She's become a very patient person, she thinks - she measured her life in three-day cycles for so long that she thinks she no longer views time like a normal human being, but rather in some extended and flimsy nature, like a rubber band with all the elasticity stretched out of it.

Given that she has no watch on her - Stacy's unique perspective on time, even more distorted and deformed than Eva's, has long since made watches useless - she can't properly estimate how much time she spends sitting there waiting, but she expects it must be hours, since she feels tired and bored and tiny icicles are starting to form around her eyelashes and bangs.

Somehow it seems strangely appropriate to sit around waiting for the Doctor. He doesn't seem to follow anyone else's schedule. She wonders how many people before have sat on this log, waiting for something, maybe for the Doctor or for deliverance or for God. Or maybe she's singularly unique, the sole passenger in this log's history, and this is the one moment in time where this log not only exists but is sittable, and has been seen by sentient eyes.

She's starting to think like him. All the silence in her own head is getting to her. Maybe she should get her Yeerk back. She misses conversation.

That's a terrible idea.

She gets up and twists her back some, eking little pops out of her spine. She wipes the ice from her eyes, careful not to harm her makeup, although it did get smeared somewhat during the dumbwaiter trip and library attack. It's the principle of the matter.

Tossing her hair up into a clip again, she walks in the direction the Doctor took off towards, her feet adjusting to the sockless interior of her new shoes. "Doc?"

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The Doctor frowns at Eva, squinting at her as if squinting will suddenly make his hearing pop right back to normal (it can't hurt to try). "What?"

The reason he's squinting becomes apparent because as easy as it would be to pretend he can't hear her, the truth is he's had centuries to get, well, decent to excellent to amazing at several hobbies and apparently he's not too shabby at a bit of lip-reading. The Doctor stares at her mouth moving with one of those almost bird-like looks of his, eyes flicking down to her little tick with her knee, and then back up to her mouth. Eva's still talking. Chatty woman! Quite right about the gun. He's three fourths of a mind to tell her to throw the thing away since she'll only shoot her eye out one of these days.

But he supposes that library is still out there and if it's between the library and the gun, he'll have to let that one slide just this once.

"I'd hardly call that exciting!" The Doctor wraps his arms around himself as he stamps his feet in place. The ringing is slowly dying down, the Doctor speaking with that too-loud voice of someone hard of hearing. "Trapped bush slash tree, I imagine. Death by boredom. It's very horrible,' he adds, almost as an afterthought. As if potential starving or dying of exposure wasn't anything as bad as sitting there with nothing to do for who knew how long.

The Doctor stamps there in front of the ragged shoe tree and rubs his arms together, brrring rather pathetically until he's warm enough to stamp over to Eva and hold out his hand to help her up off the log. Gun or not, she did rescue him; twice, even! He knew this human was a keeper.

"Probably ought to keep moving," he half-yells in her ear. "Everything Forest might've been trapped, so! Moving on!"

He starts to plunge into a random direction, ready to tug Eva after him like all his other companions.

Eva doesn't follow him immediately, but she doesn't take her hand away either. As much as she respects the Doctor, their level of trust is still tenuous (mostly because he never tells her anything), and she has an instinctive reaction deep in the canals of her guts against being ordered around.

But, after a moment of staring at his hand as if it's some toothed thing about to bite her, she places her hand in his. "Alright. On one condition. And it's not a condition you'll much like."

She hoists herself off the log, gentle on her injured ankle and feeling, between the cold and the stress of the day, so very old. Bones pop like fireworks in her ears and joints creak like doors on untended, rusty hinges. Even her hands feel brittle and full of knuckles, more fist-like than dainty, in this ice and snow.

"Oh, I am ancient as the crypt," she says, laughing because she knows he's much older, and yet her spryness is the result of stubbornness while his seems inborn. What an irony it would be to survive the Yeerks and everything the Phantom Tollbooth has thrown at them today only to die of natural causes in thirty or forty years. "Why don't you have to get all crone-like like me? It's hardly fair."

And remembering that she gave him conditions, she starts to follow him. "If you know about some danger lurking in this forest that I don't know about, it's in my interest that you tell me. I wasn't exaggerating when I said information was my best weapon."

Conditions he won't like? The Doctor debates the merits of pretending he's suddenly more deaf than he is. But Eva's already on her feet, complaining about being as old-young as a human can get and he's just watching her, waiting for her to get on with it. He cracks an amused smile at her comment. Crone? To him, she's always going to be painfully young, even when she's withered and white-haired and hobbling around on those funny little walkers with the tennis balls (he supposes if you like that game, you might as well keep some tennis balls close to you. One of those just in case things). If it helps, he thinks she'd look marvelous with her very own set of tennis balls.

Oh Eva Salazar. Old. There's old and then there's Old. He's done Old, both physically and...all over. It's probably for the best she has a short lifespan, because sometimes the Doctor has the thought that maybe there's such a thing as living too long and he wouldn't wish it on a lovely person like Eva.

The Doctor glances over his shoulder at Eva, the gears in his head clicking.

For a moment it looks like he's going to fib to her face. Instead, he says, "I think someone's sabotaged my TARDIS. The Everything Forest, you know. It's hardly Everything." The library's probably had it out for him for a few centuries, so that wasn't exactly enough to clue him in. "Don't wander off and keep close to me."

There's far more snow in this end of the forest, the Doctor's boots crunching through a thick layer as he leads them toward where they might be able to find that lake and the boat he (thinks) he left there. Granted, this was when he had the brainy specs, so it's been awhile. Maybe it's moved. He's aware of Eva's presence behind him, enough to focus him from the mind-numbing boredom seeping into his bones just by traveling in the Nothing Forest. He uses her presence like a lifeline. Right! Focusing. Focus on focusing. The Doctor leads the way, grumbling under his breath to himself and sounding almost his age. Several times he seems about ready to wander off into the forest like a lost old man, sans the white hair, as if he's forgotten where he's planning to go.

Edited 2011-12-14 12:33 (UTC)

"Alright, so it isn't 'everything'. What isn't there, then? Knowing what I don't need to watch out for is almost as useful as knowing what to watch out for."

Her mouth crumples into a grimace at his command that she keeps close. She hates to rely on anyone. It makes her feel like an extension of someone else, and that's a feeling that mucks up her guts like charcoal. Disgusting. But that sense is soon washed over by concern for him. For once, he seems almost doddering.

Well, if she should be the one to lose her body, it's only poetic irony that his mind be swept away into his whimsies and distractions. For the second time that day, she reaches a hand out and ever so gently touches his wrist, the one leading to the hand wrapped around hers. She would never grab him, never try to restrain him - her holding on is only an attempt to keep up, and this gesture isn't about that.

"Take your time, Doc. Rushing yourself doesn't push the bad spirits out." She grins, a bit toothily. "Or the bad persons who'd sabotage the Tollbooth."

The Doctor turns slightly at her touch, as if remembering oh, right, human; Eva Salazar; the Woman Who Duels Libraries. One of his newer friends that he hasn't had the chance to pop in all over her timeline just yet. He peers at her as if for a split second he has trouble placing who she is, especially given how many friends he has over time and space and he does wonder how Ben is doing these days. He blinks, the fog from the Nothing Forest clearing again as he focuses on Eva. Present. She's the present. He literally hasn't seen Ben or Polly for centuries, so --

"It's not that easy." The Doctor sounds nettled. "Not just anyone can do this to the TARDIS. It's supposed to be interesting here, Eva. Not - not snow and there used to be goats grazing in that clearing over there, and over there should be a hot air balloon."

Nevermind the vague impression in the back of his head that behind all that dullness, the sort that presses down on you, is the niggling feeling that something Large and Unpleasant is watching them.

It wasn't there before.

The list of people capable of doing this is small and most of them are dead. Should be dead. He thinks they're dead. It's all this terribly dry, stuffy history and he doesn't care to bore Eva with the details that he'd rather keep to himself for the time being. He pats Eva's hand, offering her one of those quiet private smiles of his, and leads her down the path that's spiraling toward the little dock at the edge of a great big expanse of water. Ah, and yes! His eyes light up. The boat's still there! Granted, it...looks like someone was making it and wandered off when something more interesting popped up, but at least it's here! He jogs the last chunk to the bobbing dock, stopping right before the water's edge and turning to Eva with a flourish that's more the Doctor she knows and not the bored-out-of-his-mind old man.

He points at the little dinghy. "Our ride! It's mostly finished. It'll take two."

Eva, he expects that if you can face a man-eating library, this ought to be easy. Besides, a boat ride between two friends! He's rather looking forward to it, the Doctor beaming at Eva.

Eva's not quite sure what barometer the Doctor uses to determine 'interesting', given that they've already found a shoe tree and been attack by malevolent plants, but it's certainly not hers. She finds the entire forest rather interesting, but then again she lived in Southern California. Snow is relatively unusual to her.

That said, she would agree with the Doctor. There is a vague sense of foreboding lingering around the periphery, like something she can't quite focus her eyes on but knows is there. Like it exists in the blanks between objects, the very invisible air, the negative spaces between the trees and their spidery frozen branches.

She called this place the Phantom Tollbooth because it was a book she read Marco, at first, and because the blue box reminded her less of a police object than of a tollbooth. She insisted on keeping the name because it proved to be a more accurate representation than she'd imagined. A magical, nonsensical world that, though its sense of wonder, imbued the rest of the world with similar beauty.

She'd thought that would be the one upside to seeing space, but she was so locked into her own despair at the time - and despair is too kind a word for it, but for all humanity's pain, they've never found a phrase to describe that sort of absolute hopelessness - and she couldn't see any of the glory of space travel and other worlds.

She didn't see the stars. She saw the blackness between them. The negative space.

"A boat!" Eva's face lights up a little. Enthusiasm shines through her expression, which has been getting gradually more pensive and melancholy as they walked. Maybe that's how the forest will kill them, with melancholy and the loneliness of walking beside another person lost in their own head. "It's finished enough for me. Where do you think we're taking it to?"

The Doctor is downright delighted to see Eva taking to the dinghy more than the dumbwaiter. Lovely! He's happy to say that she has the intelligence to know a perfectly good boat when she saw one and she's not going to be one of those humans about it.

"Anywhere!" the Doctor says. He rubs his hands together as he balances on the bobbing dock they're standing on, seeming to get some of that old life back in him now that they're near the edge of the Nothing Forest and Eva's approving of his dinghy. Maybe it was a boredom project, not quite complete, but still. "If we head toward south, we might be able to land near the junkyard and that ought to lead back to the Zero Room."

Come to think of it, he's sure he hasn't shown her the Zero Room yet. Jamie's seen it. But it's nice and quiet and full of bubbles and he thinks Eva might like it after the Nothing Forest and the man-eater library. But that's all in the future and he hopes she's had some sort of sailing experience plus swimming experience, just in case, because you never did know when you might end up going for a little dip. Maybe it’s worth mentioning that there could be all sorts of Things swimming around in the water. The truth is even he doesn’t know. It’s not as if he pops down here all that often! Besides, if he says anything know, Eva might balk. She’s not a very balk-prone human (he likes that), although it’s possible there’s a point where even she might have second thoughts, he just hasn’t discovered what it is yet. Hopefully he won’t.

He never could resist humans like that.

The Doctor throws his leg over the side of the dinghy, reaching down and unfolding what turns out to be a tiny, almost downright adorable sail. It telescopes out and up in brass sections. Once he finishes with the mast, the Doctor holds out his hand to help Eva into the boat. It’s just large enough for two, complete with paddles and a long-forgotten lunch from several centuries ago. (Might want to avoid sitting in that.)

Edited 2011-12-23 22:44 (UTC)

'Anywhere' isn't quite the answer Eva wants to hear, as it's about as useful as the Doctor's response that she should watch out for anything, but her mood lifts as she steps onto the dinghy. Anywhere.

Anywhere is freedom. A boat is freedom, just them and the currents, drifting, aimless, like puppets without strings. Maybe they can go to the junkyard, or maybe they can take some solace in the relative peace of the river, if it's to be found. And if not, adventure on the water appeals to Eva much more than adventure on land.

Were she a less proud woman she might shed a tear.

"Did I ever tell you I used to sail? Well, not me, specifically. Edriss did, but I think that might have been the only time she had me where I was truly happy." There's a certain calmness to her face now, a sense of being in her element. "I don't believe you've told me about the Zero Room."

She peers into the water and paws at it with her paddle. Finally, deciding that for the moment it's clear enough, she sets the paddle aside and reaches her arm in. "I don't suppose you think it's safe for swimming. It is warm."

He busies himself with turning the brass screws and knobs on the mast. "No. Loads of things you haven't told me like your favorite color or even your favorite food."

The Doctor tightens a few knobs at random. Edriss. Edriss. The name doesn't sound familiar, the Doctor glancing around the mast to shoot the back of Eva's head a Look and a thoughtful frown, both at once because he's wonderful at multi-tasking like that. He wasn't lying when he said there was so much he didn't know about the human, other than that deep sense of almost animal hurt about her. That and a good sense of adventuring. This, he thinks, is her opening up slightly. The Doctor files away that name as something Important; Eva's Past. Female, obviously. Human, alien or Other (yes, Other is a real category) remains to be seen. He opens his mouth to ask who this Edriss is when he notices how Eva is pushing the paddle into the water. It’s almost like she’s in a world of her own, looking much younger than he’s seen her before.

He snaps his mouth shut. Tact. Not his favorite thing, tact! But sometimes – he’ll grudgingly admit – there is a time for it and he has that niggle that this is one of those times. Maybe. Possibly.

The Doctor leans away from the mast to peer into the water after her hand. “Well, can’t say for sure if there are sea monsters. But! I’m sure it’s shark-less, so there’s that.” He gives her a winning smile.

Sea monsters don’t swim this close to shore, so he thinks it’s oh, about mostly-over half safe. Just so she knows. The Doctor flops down on the bench next to Eva, reaching up to loosen his bowties as the shore gradually gets further away and the weather loses some of that chill from the Nothing Forest.

"You didn't guess it was green?" Eva tends to wear green whenever she can. Today her shirt is a pale turquoise leaning more towards green than blue, and her hairclip is a green and gold leaf. She laughs. "Of course it's green. What other color would it be? Blue?"

She peers into the water, ignoring the Doctor's winning smile, although she suspects he's doing it. He does have a nice smile. He tends to just give it out, she thinks, like some resource he'll never deplete. She likes that.

While he loosens his bowtie, she takes the revolver from her holster, pops out the bullets, and lays it down on a flat surface in the boat. A peace offering, almost, although she'd still break the Doctor's hand if he tried to move it. She kicks off her new shoes, too, though they're damp already with melted ice and snow, and pulls the clip from her hair. Then she leans over the edge of the boat and flops backwards into the water, so suddenly it may look like an accident.

Under the water, she blinks her eyes open through a net of flowing hair and stinging water. Nothing, as far as she can see, though she swears the water's clearer below the surface than it looks from above. She breaches again, hair like a messy wet helmet dribbling from her skull, smile wide as she stares up at the Doctor.

"Why the hell not?"

What's wrong with blue? The Doctor thinks that's the natural choice, given how beautifully blue blue is and at any rate, Eva is suddenly falling back into the water that is torn between whether it wants to be blue or green or blue-green/green/blue (funny distinction), the Doctor rushing to the edge of the dinghy and nearly tipping himself into the sea right after Eva. The side of the boat dips over dangerously under his weight as he clings to the railing and leans over.

Eva, you look like a wet cat. The water utterly kills her hair so that it's plastered flat against her skull and he has to say, he's seen even wet cats have better days. But she's grinning up at him, this grin that he can't help but find innocent because she's so young and - and human, and it's a downright infectious thing, an Eva Salazar smile! It's enough to make him pretend not to see the gun, or at least not consider (too much) how easy it would be to accidentally drop it off the side of the boat into the depths.

"Why no sharks? Or is this one of those rhetorical question things? They're really just questions," the Doctor sniffs. He bobs his head, trying to peer past Eva for any sign of sharks and/or anything of the sea monster variety.

Edited 2011-12-28 08:34 (UTC)

"Why not join me? Besides that we need someone to attend the boat." Honestly, taking a relaxing swim through water that may or may not contain mortal threats is probably not her brightest idea, but she's riding a little high on having survived not one, but two bizarre threats in the TARDIS.

She ducks back under the water and, while she's down there, rubs the last of the makeup off her face. When she opens them again she sees a shoal of glittering fish a few yards away, but on closer examination, they appear to be cooking utensils mimicking fish and not actual creatures. Maybe it's a trick of the light.

Then she swims under the boat, appears on the other side, and flicks water at the Doctor's head. "You'd like it down here. It's very you."

That's true, except he's certain that if he has a word or two or several (or a couple), the dinghy will be quite understanding and wait for them without sailing off on its own. Fairly certain. Certain enough to frown at Eva, nose crinkling at the water sprinkling his face, the Doctor starts to shrug out of his jacket to prove a point. Off comes the jacket as he works at his buttons and braces. Speaking of braces, brace for it, Eva, because you're going to get one of those rare moments that might be seared into your eyeballs and the memory centers in that highly-evolved monkey brain of yours. The Doctor's shirt flaps off and smacks into the bench.

You have now seen the Doctor shirtless, Eva Salazar.

Take a moment to adjust to it.

The Doctor is all ridiculous skinniness as he turns on the cramped deck, holding his footing and kicking off his boots. They thunk against the wood The trousers stay, thankfully. He balances near the edge of the dinghy, makes sure Eva is watching, holds his nose with his fingers and takes a picture-perfect cannonball into the water.

A few long moments later he surfaces next to Eva, squirting out a stream of water, his hair in his eyes. "No sea monsters so far! Can't hurt to check twice."

Don't ask how he's treading the water. It's a long tradition on some asteroid Eva hasn't ever heard of, and looks like he ought to be drowning but isn't. The Doctor flails around as he turns in the water to check their bearings, pleased that Eva is a decently aquatic human on top of everything else. Renaissance Woman. Woman-person. Earthling, resident of the Milky Way. She ought to smile more. Bit of a toothy smile but he likes it.

Edited 2011-12-30 02:10 (UTC)

Eva raises her eyebrows, blinking water out of her eyelashes. She shakes her head at the Doctor. How odd it is to see him with less poofy hair. He could almost pass for a typical human and not an eccentric one, if not for the flailing and the fact that he still uses his fingers to plug his nose."You look like my husband ten years ago."

That isn't a compliment.

Eva dips back under the water, more at home there than anywhere on the ground. Weightless, unrestrained by the snares of gravity and age and pain. No sea monsters as far as she can see, although the cutlery fish are coming a bit closer. She hopes the forks and knives among them don't have sharp teeth she can't see.

The Doctor's kicking up a bit of a froth. She surfaces again, takes a deep breath, and dives down beneath him. She reaches up and tugs his ankle, playing the age-old game of "I'm a shark, rawr" with him.

Her smile, shark-like, like any of the rest of her, is indeed all teeth.

It might not be a compliment but even so, the Doctor has enough time and presence of mind to shoot her a baffled, almost wary look. Very stern look! Possibly a bit scared. He might just be remembering that time Amy had a go at him; it's the sort of thing to make a very big impression. His eyebrows scrunch at her as he does one of those frowns. Twice might be more than he's willing to handle right now, not that Eva isn't a lovely woman (most of the time)...it's just she's, well, human! Sometimes he means it as an insult. Other times, it's the highest of compliments. Depends on his mood.

The Doctor continues to tread water the Aonh style, third Tier, when Eva sinks under the water, presumably to have another look at the cutlery shoal wiggling closer to investigate.

Odd, he doesn't remember putting in a cutlery shoal! It's possible he's forgotten. Old age does that to you! Eva ought to name it since she found them, it's only --

The Doctor gives an undignified ~~squeak~~ ~~yelp~~ sound that most certainly is none of the above when he suddenly feels someone grabbing at his ankles. They're just as skinny as the rest of him. Now they give a surprised little kick as he ducks his head in, deciding that at the very least he wants to see if there's an entire kitchen there.

Eva. Toothy smile and what if that had been a real kitchen nibbling him? He might not believe it next time because of Eva! The Doctor Who Cries Wolf. Kitchen-wolf-slash-shark to be precise. The Doctor resurfaces and tosses his wet hair out of his eyes.

"Enjoying yourself? Don't answer, smile like that tells me all I need to know!" The Doctor continues that awkward flail/flounder of his. It's one of the fastest strokes in the Blue Rim Nebula's arm, so he'd advise against Eva getting any funny ideas about racing him. Not unless she wants to be terribly embarrassed! "Did you name the shoal? Probably haven't seen a proper human in decades! Centuries? Probably centuries."

Maybe longer. Either way, at least they're not trying to poke her in all sorts of awkward places to see if she was done.

Edited 2011-12-30 09:47 (UTC)

"I'll have to think of a terribly punny name for them." She does an underwater barrel roll and comes up again. She forgets, fairly often, how nice it is to be able to move. She's not just floating or swimming, she's dancing, some instinctive dance that only her bones know the steps to.

She pops her head back up again. "Platies. Like the little orange fish but, you know, they go on plates."

Although as she ducks back under again, it does seem like the cutlery is getting a bit more aggressive. And while the spoons are fine, she sees a school of serrated knives make a turn for them thirty feet away.

"Doc, it might be time to get back onto shore, don't you think?" She strokes back to the dinghy and holds out a hand to help him back up before she rescues herself from the platies.

Ooh, that is good! The Doctor feels jealous. Platies! Why didn't he think of that? It's downright brilliant! Platies. He rolls the word around, tries it on for size like a hat, and decides he'll have to add it into the Oxford dictionary next time he drops in.

He flail-treads water as Eva ducks her head back under to enjoy her shoal of platies, the Doctor shading his eyes and glancing around. A few white clouds are scooting across the sky, cottony wisps that are wisely staying away from the airspace over the Nothing Forest. Very smart! Despite the library still out there hungering for human, the Doctor has to say that of the traps he's seen in the TARDIS, so far he thinks that Nothing Forest is probably the worst: you could wander around in there for months, years, your mind withering in on itself and you'd be aware of it happening the whole time! It's almost brilliant in how cruel it is.

The Doctor's distracted as one of the platies bumps against his leg, glancing down just in time for Eva to surface again. "What? Oh! Yes, back to the dinghy. Platies," he mutters to himself, under his breath. "It's almost too good."

He flounders back to the boat, accepting her hand as he flops back over the side and onto the deck. It's less of a flop and more of a skinny wet slither. Eva's sense of self-preservation proves to be right on the mark. There's the sound of some of the cutlery trying to dig into the wood of the dinghy, a scratching sound that eventually goes away as they discover they can't get too far. The Doctor heaves himself onto the bench, groping about for his braces.

"We'll probably have to make a few stops. Human metabolisms, that sort of thing. Food. Stuff like that." He waves his hand at the vague idea of Stuff. "I didn't get to install a proper hyper-drive on this, so..."

She follows him up, surprisingly strong despite favoring one shoulder. She's kept herself in shape since being freed. The body requires upkeep. If she's bound to this one, she needs to keep it fit.

Eva has much less interest in the sky than she does in the water. She even dangles her fingers in still, taunting the platies. As the knives come up to attack her fingers she jerks her hand up, barely out the way, seeing if they can jump. When they don't, she sticks her hand back in and wiggles her fingertips, continuing to tease them as she leans back and talks to the Doctor.

She grins. She's clearly pleased he approves of the name. Daniel Jackson could take some notes on appreciating her sparkling wit.

"Food?" She stretches out in the boat, taking up a little of the Doctor's personal space, but less like flirting and more like a cat presuming the whole ship belongs to her. "How long do you expect we'll be lost? I'll start to miss the creature comforts, eventually."

After a long while, though. The presence of a boat and intelligent conversation elevates this above her months living with the Hork-Bajir in the woods. "Hyper-drive?"

The Doctor combs his fingers through his hair, patting himself dry with his bunched-up shirt. He doesn't seem to mind her taking up what bit of boat she can find, instead glancing at her as he struggles back into his shirt and casts about for his bowtie, one hand reaching back and fumbling for his braces. It's like a one-man version of Twister sans mat and logic.

"Could be awhile. Depends on the wind and if things have shifted more than I've estimated," the Doctor shrugs, the I get lost every other weekend type of shrug. It's meant to be reassuring. "If we had a hyper-drive, I'd say a matter of hours."

He frowns at her as he locates his other brace, pulling it over his scrawny shoulder with a snap. He could spend all day thinking on Ifs and Buts and Well, You Coulds. They're further out at sea now, the water lapping against the hull of the dinghy and the sail puffed out and doing its job quite well despite all that time off-duty. The Doctor continues to fuss around with the boat, mostly because he needs to keep busy, partially because if he doesn't, the ship's components which might have been hobbled together out of several interesting but volatile components will start to set off a chain reaction and blow the deck out from under them. Makes for an interesting boat ride, at least!

It's starting to get dark when the Doctor pauses in his fiddling to pop back up next to Eva, his sonic screwdriver in his hand.

"Night sailing or pop off to get some sleep?" he asks, as if picking up a conversation they haven't had yet. "You humans haven't figured out how to sleep with one eye open yet, have you?"

"How far out do you expect land is?"

Perhaps Eva should have thought more closely on the idea of getting wet before staying still on a boat for a long time in cold weather. She's just about chilled, although she supposes if it becomes a problem she can drop back into the water to warm up and hope not to become a snack of the floating cutlery. The water's warmer than the air by a good margin; the last traces of light catch on wafts of evaporation, miniature steam billows dancing over the surface and being buffeted by the small waves.

"No, not yet. Won't you be bored to death while I sleep? Unless you're incredibly interested in my snoring."

She wraps her arms around herself, chilled. "But I'm competent enough for some night sailing. That's how I died, you know. The first time."

"Far-ish." The Doctor is completely unhelpful. He reaches down and cranks a crank and turns a few knobs that need to be turned to keep the mast from wandering right off the boat. "Not much of a cat-nap person myself. I can always talk to myself if you're busy snoring."

He glances over at Eva as she hugs herself. It's getting colder, perhaps because they're off the coast of the Nothing Forest, and for a moment he thinks it's just that. But then she mentions dying, and, well. Dying is far more complicated than it should be. And it's downright odd she's had a first time because with humans, that sort of thing tends to be rather final, doesn't it? Most definitely from her time period. He's estimated her to be about 1990's-2000'sish. Not as accurate as he'd like but it's accurate enough. The Doctor pulls off his jacket, offering it to Eva as a tweed blanket.

He hunkers down on his own seat, those skinny legs of his stretching as he rests his elbows on them and leans forward.

"I didn't know. Bit of a thing to pull off, dying and changing your mind?" The Doctor tilts his head curiously. Never could resist the odd, the weird, the interesting.

"Thank you. Are you one of those people who sleeps like a log?" She folds the tweed blanket over lap and smooths it with her hands.

"Dying is an art," she quotes. "And I do it exceptionally well." She dips her hand back into the water and tilts her head back at him in perfect imitation. "They faked my death, back in the day. Drowned at sea, they said. And then there were just a few more times I was presumed dead before the end of the war. No actual resurrections, although in the eye of the public I'm practically a phoenix."

It's probably nothing compared to what he's seen. Faked deaths are the stuff of spy novels and soap operas, not of universes full of sparkling individuals and races pulsing with progress. But it's important to her.

She cracks her knuckles and runs a hand through her wet, tangled hair. As she continues talking she clips it back again. "Besides, aren't I always full of surprises?"

The Doctor’s mouth quirks in a half-smile. Log, no. Not much for sleeping.

“You wouldn’t be on this boat if you weren’t,” the Doctor says and means it. At first it seems like you could pin Eva down as a survivor, a drunk in that tavern, another one of those humans. Special but not go on a few adventures with the woman special. But Eva surprises him more often than not and he knows he likes that about her. “Don’t worry about fake-dying or real-dying here. You’ll be fine. In fact, you ought to write that down at the start of every day: ‘You’ll Be Fine’.”

He slaps his hands against his pockets, trying to find a pen and paper to give to Eva and realizes that whatever he has might be a bit soggy. Maybe later. For now he focuses on trying to steer the dinghy someplace they can land, shading his hands as if he can see in the dark. The boat dips and bobs in the ocean, the starlight – amazingly enough, there was a night sky in the TARDIS, the most painfully clear night sky a human can imagine – and he can see the growing outline of what might be a whale or a landmass.

Eva looks for a moment like she has a smart and witty comeback to that, 'you'll be fine', and then for a moment like she has a really cynical retort that will prove to the Doctor that life is a dark, dim place. But she pauses. Because she doesn't believe that. Life is beautiful, life is sweet, and yes, life is painful and hard and some days it's all she can do to get out of bed in the morning and she's hitting the sauce before lunch, but he's right.

You'll Be Fine.

Even if it's something she doesn't believe yet, it's something she wants to. Maybe she'll get there. Maybe she won't. But at the crossroads between stubborn optimism and jaded defeat, how could she choose the latter? Even with her son dead. With her mind fragmented. With her husband carrying the burden a family that no longer fits together right, deceitful puzzle pieces with parts that seem to match and patterns that clash. With her body broken and twisted. She wants to believe. And wanting is the first step.

So she smiles.

"Maybe I will. Later. When I'm not dripping." She squints out into the darkness, wishing she could have her glasses. "What do you think that is?"

The Doctor claps Eva on the shoulder, a warm, almost grandfatherly gesture. "Good! And that, I think, is land. Or possibly a parked whale, but I'm personally thinking land if you must ask."

Not that he has anything against introducing her to whales: some of his best friends are whales, he knows a wonderful humpback whale with a terrible sense of humor and a dream to win a Nobel Prize -- the flippers of course tend to make that a bit on the difficult side but the Doctor believes sooner or later he'll get on with it. He legs it past Eva to the other end of the dinghy, fiddling around with the hull and sonicing something that probably has no business being soniced. The dinghy puts on another burst of speed. Water chops against the sides as the Doctor steers them toward the dark landmass.

As they get closer, they can see that it's a small island, the shadows of trees standing black against the night sky. The dinghy scraps up against the sand as the Doctor vaults out, splashing up to his knees and holding out his hand for Eva.

"Probably one of the safest places, if you're looking to avoid libraries. Not big fans of water, you know!" The Doctor swivels around as an owl hoots somewhere in the distance. "We probably should check to make sure there's nothing else with teeth here though."

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