Eva Salazar (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
economicalrhinoplasty) wrote2011-12-10 02:46 pm
economicalrhinoplasty) wrote2011-12-10 02:46 pm
Entry tags:
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?"
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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He watches as she decides to investigate the double helix stair without him, his head craning to follow her. She pops her head in, seems to take a moment to take it in, and then pops back out on the staircase's stop landing.
"Why would I walk in on you?" The Doctor asks, honestly baffled. It seems like it's a human thing to be concerned about things like that, and he's not sure why she'd worry about that. Was he supposed to? He doesn't think he was and at any rate, he doesn't need to see naked humans - not quite his thing, thank you! He gives her a puzzled look and turns his back on her so he can continue with his jiggery pokery, something that he feels is loads more important than worrying about showers.
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And with that, she disappears back up the stairs. Not as if she hasn't been wet enough recently, but the warm water and actual soap is soothing, and the conditioner allows her to pull her fingers through her hair without yanking off half her scalp. The towels are even nice and fluffy, if adorned with particularly homely rubber duckies, and soon she discovers that there's a wardrobe nearby.
Satisfied that it won't lead her to Narnia, she helps herself to some clothing that isn't crusted in salt and sand, a t-shirt that says 'Banjos!' on the front and a floor-length skirt made of various fabrics. Unfashionable, but comfortable, at least. To top it off, she finds some shoes to make up for what the library stole from her, a pair of sensible white sneakers.
She heads back down the staircase again, with a gift from the wardrobe for the Doctor. "Here. Suspenders with sequins on them. I want to see if there's a limit to the amount of tackiness you can handle."
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He turns his back as Eva goes about her business, rifling through things and pulling up a few screens, his eyes roving as he almost - almost - forgets he has a companion to look after. It's the smell of lavender and sage that makes the Doctor turn around, his nostrils flaring and ah, there's his human. Well, not his, persay. He suspects she would kill him long and slowly if he let one of those slip, unlike Amy or Jamie. Very touchy about that sort of thing, Eva! Anyway, he thought the BANJO shirt was a lovely touch and she had even found herself a nice set of trainers to go with it. He beams up at her and gives her one of those little waves, waiting until she's made it down the double helix stairs before waving her over to the screen he's put up. It looks nothing more like an old tv from the 1950s, complete with a flickering screen and what looks like far too much fuzz and noise - noise that apparently means something to the Doctor, as he glances over to consult it and then points at one particularly stubborn batch of static.
"Right there. That's where the infection started," The Doctor says with triumph. "I'm not sure why he'd start in the Wardrobe, but yes."
He falls silent, frowning deeply at the monitor. A bubble drifts down and settles in his hair for a moment, right before it pops with a faint scent of fresh popcorn.
Slowbro tag is slowbro 8|
She comes over to the control panel with the strange snowstorm static that the Doctor's watching. She can't make heads or tails of it, and for a brief moment that frustrates her, as if she should be able to just because she spend so many of her prisoner years at the helm of a battleship. But she figures the Doctor probably does actually know what he's doing, so she defers to his judgement of the salt and the pepper.
"Alright. So, now that we know the root of the problem, how do we fix it?"
She still has the damn gun, and honestly she's a little itching at the idea to shoot something over all this - but while she may not be a patient woman, she is practical, and she can't just go in and put ammo through the Wardrobe.
She amends her statement. "And can we fix it?"
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He really, truly hopes not.
The Doctor wants to say that this shouldn’t trigger any time or space travel, especially with how the TARDIS has been grounded since he woke up on Stacy, but he’s also quite sure the old girl can get finicky at times like this as well. Probably didn’t help he’s rewired bits and pieces of her so much over the centuries that even he can’t entirely remember what goes where anymore. It’s possible they might end up careening loose from the Hanger or – worse – falling back through time somewhere and when. The Doctor picks at his lip, tugging at it as he frowns.
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She reaches over and tugs at his wrist, pulling his fingers away from his mouth. "Stop that. It's a disgusting habit." Hypocrisy, thy name is Eva. Her own lip bears quite a few markers of compulsive biting and picking. She claps her hands together and then slaps one on her thigh. "Right then, what should I be doing while you're jettisoning your entire wardrobe?"
Eva doesn't even need to mention that it might be wise for him to torch his entire clothing collection and start over for reasons unrelated to a malfunctioning TARDIS. She's seen his handkerchiefs. She's wearing his banjos shirt.
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He has to at least warn her about that. Realistically he thinks her odds of falling into an alternate dimension are low, but he’s had companions with that sort of luck and so he can’t rule out that possibility. He shifts his feel, his mouth pressing into a line, for a moment withdrawn. Maybe he should focus on finding the door and scooting her out into the Hanger before he attempts this. The Doctr does remain blissfully unaware of Eva’s (incorrect) fashion judgments, because look at that banjo. The pinnacle of fashion! And the handkerchiefs were all rather nice once you’d trained your eyes to resist the urge to cross just looking at them.
The Doctor reaches out to make some more modifications to the monitor. His fingers press against the side and suddenly the parts of it spread apart like a slowly expanding galaxy, allowing him to rearrange it to a different sort of console. He does so like an artist, without even thinking, his hands flashing.
“Did you want to keep looking for the door?” He suddenly asked, swiveling toward Eva with a deep frown.
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She spends a few moments watching the Doctor work the console like a conductor in an orchestra, then decides that this is a profound waste of her time - not that he's all that helpful here anyway, but she dislikes admitting that she's out of her league.
It's hard to carry yourself with much grace in the outfit she's in, but she does her best to look somewhat dignified anyway as she skirts out of the room and back towards the marble fountain outside. "Just let me know when you're going to turn off gravity, will you?" she yells back.
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It’s the oops that should probably be worrying. There’s a vaguely ominous sound to that oops, like he hadn’t quite meant for her to hear it.
The world suddenly stretches around Eva, time and space and everything in between howling and bouncing around like Play Dough. It’s the first time the TARDIS has been capable of anything but sitting there in the hanger looking beautiful and right now the results aren’t pretty – the jettisoned bits come screeching off, the wall next to Eva spinning off and shattering as a small time vortex opens up. It’s hauntingly beautiful, in that way the Bleed is. Clothes are spinning around into a spiral toward the vortex, some of it scattered into the 90’s on Earth, others probably burning up in the atmosphere over Halgon (which is unfortunate, because it would’ve been the next closest thing to taste on that horrid planet if they had survived re-entry).
The Doctor hangs on himself for dear life. His legs are kicked out from under him as he clings to whatever he can, the hurricane currently off Cuba slapping him in the face with rain through the time vortex. It’s not quite how he wanted to show time travel to Eva.
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Eva is, fortunately, the type to find some sort of chaos in beauty. Unfortunately, she is not the type for whom beauty is some sort of analgesic to legitimate irritation. When the time vortex finally stops, her hair is in sopping wet ropes, her knuckles are white, and she's fairly sure she's sporting a pretty nasty bruise on the inside of her elbow.
She looks at the Doctor and scrunches up her mouth as if she's gathering an army of invective to launch at him, and just comes up short.
"Now can we go home?"
bses so hard 8D
“Weird,” he says, and leaves it at that.
The Doctor doesn’t seem like he’ll elaborate, instead staring intently at the screen and pulling at his chin. He’s oblivious to the rain water dripping down into his eyes. The noise on the screen is resolving into the same image the window from the console room is picking up right this very second – they’re currently in a gentle orbit around Earth’s soft blue glow, the moon swinging into view as the TARDIS rotates in its drift. After a moment, he glances up to meet eyes with Eva, bedraggled human and all. Continents are in the right place for a mostly-present Earth and he’s happy to say he hasn’t missed the (accidental) mark by several hundred million years. Whew!
He sweeps his hair out of his eyes again and moves to check for any signs of the library laying in wait anywhere. “Well, there you have it. You wanted home, and here we are!”
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"Home?"
She wipes rain from her face and clenches one fist over the fingers on her other hand. Her front teeth dig into the back of her lower lip.
"Do you mean home away from Stacy? What about Marco? He's still on the ship?"
She stares not at the blue and white orb, but instead at the blackness surrounding it. In a way, oblivion seems more comfortable, and she wonders how much she invested in using outer space as a way to escape everything she didn't want to go back to.
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“That’s what I meant. Earth. One of them, anyway.” The Doctor looks somewhat uncomfortable. “I’d imagine so, yes. Unless he’s somehow snuck in the TARDIS while we were lost.”
It’s possible, but not likely. He wouldn’t be able to tell anyway without doing a lifeform scan. The Doctor reached out to poke a few controls and then decided to reach in and rip out the wiring. His hands came up with a bunch of wires that looked like they’d seen better days, the Doctor blowing on them and giving them a good frown.
“Either way, we’ll have to land and look about making repairs before we start thinking about any more jumps.”
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She straightens out her Banjos! outfit, on the off chance that they've landed somewhere public. She's probably only famous on her Earth, but it's worth looking as meagerly presentable as one can while wearing the contents of the Doctor's wardrobe. She can only hope that any photo evidence that she wore this that is taken will be burned.
Funny, how she can go from fighting for her life against a library and calling the shots in a war to worrying about her t-shirt.
"You might want to let me out first, because you'll scare the locals. With your you-ness."
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Somehow he’ll get her back to Stacy and Marco. The details of how are still something of a work in progress, but if there is anything he can say he's very good at it, it's juggling works in progress. The Doctor fumbles and fiddles with the TARDIS, ducking and bobbing as he checks the readings and generally giving an impression of a giant tweed-wearing groundhog popping up. Something he sees makes him frown.
"We'll have to make something of a traditional landing," he tells Eva. At least it's not the crashing variety? "The old girl won't be able to materialize like normal until I've had a proper look and acquired some better supplies."
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And naturally, she feels the invasion of privacy that comes from media attention much more keenly than most would.
"Please tell me that you mean something more like a hot air balloon coming to rest and not a jet plane nosediving into the Pacific." She looks at the knobs, but this sort is all foreign to her. She thinks about how she still can't figure out a desktop computer but can pilot a Blade Ship, thinks of how in his element the Doctor looks right now. "I'll hold onto my hat anyway."
And with that she goes to visit the half-jettisoned wardrobe, rooting through until she returns with a baseball cap. It'll help cover the beast the trip has made of her hair. "And for that, I'll need a hat."
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The fact Eva has the presence of mind to get a hat while she’s at it makes him fall a little in love with her. It’s almost a good enough excuse to pretend he didn’t hear her question. Not so much a hot air balloon! Even a jet nose diving into the Pacific might be softer! Glancing up from the controls, he knows he can’t lie to her. Granted, she’s come this far.
“It’s not quite like a jet nosediving into the Pacific. Think bellyflop,” he says, which really is true. At this point the Doctor is something of a connoisseur in crash landings and he can say that this was more of the bellyflop variety. Gave off that sort of vibe, really. “I’d hold onto something.”
The TARDIS gives a spinning lurch as it bellyflops through Earth’s atmosphere. The Doctor takes his own advice and clings to the control console with his arms and legs.
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"Oh, fantastic." Eva knows it's a thin line to walk between being irritated at this whole ordeal and becoming one of those troublesome people who whines about everything, so she's doing her best to stay competent, but he makes it so difficult for her when he says things like "oh it's just a bellyflop". It's as if the Doctor's transformed into a lifetime's worth of Famous Last Words these days.
She scrambles over to the control console, figuring that bony as he is the Doctor's at least softer than the wall, and braces herself. Hopefully her stylish hat will protect her from splattering her brains everywhere, although, she thinks, maybe it would be horribly suiting for her to die from a brain injury. A few seconds until impact. She whispers a prayer that she makes it back to her kid.
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The Doctor glances over as Eva joins him. There’s just enough time for him to throw a few levers, steam spitting out of a crack in the TARDIS’s control console with the sound of a whistling tea kettle (possibly enough time to throw in a prayer), before the ground rushes up impossibly large in the viewscreen. The TARDIS smacks into the ground, seems to skid and then flips end over end until it comes to a rest upside down. As it spins out of control, the Doctor tries to cushion Eva as best he can – easier said then done as the room lurches out from under their feet and does a very good hamster-ball impression.
When he’s able to make sense of which up is up and which one’s all very relative, he’s been thrown to the ceiling, the control console far overhead and dangling bits and pieces of wiring that he thinks might be important. A cloud of smoke hangs there, the Doctor coughing and swiveling around, trying to find out where Eva’s gotten tossed to.
“Eva?”
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"A for effort, D for execution." She says, wiping away a bit of saliva that worked its way out of her mouth during the tumble. "Where are we?"
She's hoping it's a golf course, honestly. Somewhere clearly civilized, but not where a million people will swarm them in curiosity - from the feel of that landing, she doesn't think the TARDIS just materialized the way she's been told it usually does. A golf course would do her nicely.
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Bits and pieces of it are hanging off at haphazard angles. He has to hook his leg under part of it to keep his footing, the floor tilting at angle. It’s also giving off a suspiciously bobbing sensation. The Doctor makes a grab at the monitor and pulls it to him, consulting the screen flickering on in spurts. Ah. He’d thought so. It certainly explained the soft landing! (It’s not a golf course – the old girl didn’t much care for golf courses). The Doctor peers over his shoulder at Eva.
“A pond. Some sort of park, but the TARDIS can’t say which one.” He hit the monitor’s side. It fuzzes with static. “Poor girl. Anyway! Let’s take a look around, shall we?”
He disentangled himself from the console. Unlike Eva, he’s rather hoping they have some gawkers after being stuck so long in one place. Besides, they could better place which/when this Earth was by visiting the resident Earthlings. Hopefully Eva won’t be an alien here, the Doctor thinks privately, sneaking a glance at the human.
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She resists the urge to groan at herself. Rather than blinking at the console, she tries to open the door without asking the Doctor's permission or opinion - she never did much love computers. Water from the pond floods in across the floor, but she lifts up her pants by the cuff of her legs to keep them from getting wet too as she steps out and, blinking in the light of day, looks around.
"I see people!" she calls back in. "But they don't see us. Yet."
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Still envious he hadn't thought of something so brilliant - not that he has a monopoly on brilliance, it’s just he’s usually the one to come up with stuff like that! - the Doctor wades through the water sloshing in after Eva, sunlight spilling into their faces along with air that doesn't smell like it's gone through one too many rounds of Stacy's scrubbers. It doesn't take long for him to join his friend popping his head out.
"Oh, they will," the Doctor says smugly. "Hard to miss the TARDIS."
He reaches in as a muddy-colored fish flops into the TARDIS, tossing him back out as he balances dangerously on the edge of the time machine and waves at the people standing on the bank.
“Hello! We could use a boat or boat-ish thing if you have one!”
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She squints out at their faces. A few fingers are pointed, but they're less at her than at her outfit or, of course, the materializing blue box. Not that the Doctor looks much less outlandish than she does.
But it's a relief. She has her anonymity still, just a beat-up badly-dressed mystery woman in a spaceship instead of the face of the devil. It means lies and explanations, but it beats people being afraid of her anyday. It casts a light upon her mood.
"Hello! We come in peace!" She turns to the Doctor and flashes a grin. "Years on an alien spaceship and I never really got to say that. I feel as if I've just accomplished a rite of passage."
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“Congratulations!” The Doctor pounds Eva on the back. “Never gets old! Shame you had to wait this long.”
The Doctor pops up next to his human friend, a tall skinny stranger with a water-logged bowtie hanging at an angle around his neck. The TARDIS gives a lurch as it bobs. He grabs hold onto the side, deciding now might be a good time to insist that they probably caught to close the doors before more water gets in. As it is, he’s not entirely sure how sea-worthy the old girl happens to be these days. She could sink if they’re not careful.
“Ah, look. They’re finally sending a boat,” he squints. “No, a dinghy. Like I said, a boat-like thing!”
The Doctor clambers up onto the very edge of the TARDIS, all ungainly limbs, and moves like a spider over her as he reaches in to help Eva out and close the doors at the same time.
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