Title: Seagull
Author: nancybrown
Characters/Pairings: Steven, Jack, Alice/Jenny
Rating: PG
Words: 3100
Spoilers/Warnings: COE-compliant (but death is only the beginning, after all)
Beta: eldarwannabe
Summary: Steven Carter grows up.
AN: The rest of this storyverse is summarised in the "Intersections" file at my profile.
When Steven is five years old, he loses his first baby tooth. His grandmother gives him a kiss and tells him, "Now you watch. If you don't put your tongue in the hole where the tooth is growing, it will grow in gold."
But try as he might, Steven can't resist poking the new hole in his mouth with the tip of his tongue. The soft flesh is sore, spongy, and unfamiliar, and for the first week, he startles whenever he forgets and runs his tongue unsuspecting into the empty pink gum all over again.
His big kid tooth grows in like any other, and after a while he stops noticing at all. A few months later, his grandmother gets sick again. When Steven is six, they bury her and he cries and cries.
When Steven is ten, he dies.
This life is like a crazy dream, like the dream where he can fly, or the dream where he helps Batman rescue Commissioner Gordon. He's on a spaceship, and Mum is here, and the spaceship talks, and Mum's friend Jenny always smiles at him. He can believe he's dreaming.
Then he pokes against the memory, and it's sore and spongy like the hole for a missing tooth. He can remember dying. He startles all over again, and clutches his ears.
"Come here," says Mum, her eyes shiny even if she says she doesn't cry anymore. She can tell, she can always tell, and she hugs him so hard he almost can't breathe.
Jenny isn't smiling, she is just standing there, watching, one hand resting on Hilda's control panel.
"It's going to be okay," Mum says, and he wants to believe her.
"Did you die?" he asks her, and she nods her head.
Jenny says, "Everyone we know does, now and then." Which sounds like dream talk for sure.
He has been aboard the magical ship for three days when a night-time visit to the loo almost gets him lost in space. Hilda opens the wrong door, and it's only because Jenny is very, very fast that Steven isn't blown outside into the cold darkness.
He's too old to cry, which doesn't stop him from curling tight against Mum's shirt as she pulls a blanket around them both and soothes into his hair. "It's all right. It's going to be all right. It was an accident."
After the second time, it's not an accident.
Jenny sits in the control room, talking to Hilda in a low but determined voice.
"I think she understands," Jenny says, finally, but Steven is frightened now, frightened of the watchful eyes all around him, the sense of menace from every silver panel and bulkhead.
The ship takes them to a sector where the people are controlled by a terrible ruler, and Steven is stolen away by guards working for the ruler. He fights them, but it's not worth anything when they are huge and he is ten, and it's only because Mum is a very good shot with her big laser gun that he ever sees her again.
"This isn't feasible," Jenny says, when they have left the sector, left that time.
"Go play," Mum says, and scoots him away to play with his toys. He listens anyway, eyes directly on his favourite car. Around them, Hilda's machines whir and hum, circulating the air, driving them through space.
Jenny says, "I'll program Hilda to take you home." She's hurting, and she's tired, and she is poking against a sore place of her own, he's sure of it.
"We can't go home."
"Can't you? You got what you wanted. Isn't it time for the two of you to move on?" Jenny is always sunshine, but now she is as sharp and cold as an icicle.
Mum takes her hand. They don't say anything for a long, long time.
"I have to keep him safe. But I'm never leaving you behind. What if we found a planet for the three of us?"
"I can't stay on one planet. This is where I'm meant to be." This is a true thing: he can't imagine Jenny in one place, bound to one time.
Mum is quiet again. Then she nods. "Steven needs to have a home. He needs to be safe." She turns her head to watch him, and he hurriedly turns his attention to his toys, but neither fools the other, not the way he pretends not to listen, not the way she pretends her heart isn't breaking.
Jenny says, "Most humans have two parents."
"He can't go back to his father."
"I wasn't thinking about Steven's father."
Mum's mouth twists. "No."
She says "no" three more times that Steven knows about. Then Hilda "accidentally" turns the heat up too high in his cabin and he gasps and chokes before Jenny breaks the door down.
Mum says, "Yes."
This isn't Earth. Steven sees aliens walking around on the streets, gold-furred and teal-scaled and some as small as his hand. Humans, too, but they don't notice the aliens any more than Steven would notice a man with brown hair. Clapboard houses and shops line twisty roads, most faded grey by the sun and by spray from the nearby salt sea. A handful of garish reds and oranges stand out, advertising food and entertainment in fresh paint. It's amazingly normal, and then Steven sees a hovering cart go by and it's just amazing.
One of the scaly aliens gives Mum and Jenny directions. The three of them follow one of the many roads towards the sea amid the cacophony of croaking, cawing seabirds. A cottage, also grey but neat and well-kept, crests one tall hill above a rocky beach. As they approach, Steven sees children, human children, playing under a wide-branched tree. He hasn't played with other kids since he died.
He startles again.
Mum takes in the playing children with a worried glance before she knocks on the door. Steven hears voices inside, talking, laughing. It's a fiftieth birthday party, he finds out later, for a brother his mother has never met.
Uncle Jack opens the door. His hair is solid grey, but his face is caught in a smile Steven has always known. For one second, Uncle Jack only sees Mum, and the smile grows wider, happier, like it's his birthday instead and the best present just walked through the door.
And then he sees Steven.
The party runs late into the night. Steven and his Mum are introduced as family, and no-one seems to mind, so caught up the rest are in food and drink and spending time together. Steven runs through the broad brown and emerald grasses with children whose names gradually become the list of his closest friends. Today they are welcoming strangers, and he stuffs his face with fried fish and tart fruits and a slab of cake slathered with cream.
From time to time, he finds his mother sitting in the kitchen with Uncle Jack, and they talk in low, sullen voices unlike the laughter around them. His uncle (but Mum has explained he's not Steven's uncle, not really) has questions, so many questions. He manages a bright smile for the guests, but when he's listening to Mum's answers, Steven thinks Uncle Jack's hiding a whole mouthful of missing teeth, raw and aching. Every time he looks at Steven, he startles.
"How?" is the only real question, asked over and over in different ways, and Mum reminds him of an adventure, tens of thousands of years ago by his reckoning, and a long-lost friend, and a gift.
Mum has said he's older than he looks. He already looks older than Steven's grandmother did.
There's a grandmother here, a proud-faced woman who is introduced to Mum as Uncle Jack's ex-wife. Steven will grow to think of Elena as an extra auntie, a woman still friendly with Jack if no longer sharing his home. She accepts Steven into her brood with a quick hug and an offer of more cake, which Mum declines on his behalf so he isn't sick.
When the rest of the partygoers wander, stagger, or are carried home, Steven himself is too tired to keep his eyes cracked open even a little bit longer. Uncle Jack shows him a bedroom with a high-legged bed piled with old quilts. Steven falls asleep to the sound of the waves on the rocks below.
Mum and Jenny stay three days. Steven remembers this feeling, remembers the short days before Dad finally walked out the door the last time. When Mum leaves, Steven won't go with her back into space and time. The wide-branched tree and the blue-green sea and the village will be his playground, and his mother will be far away, and he will never, ever see his father again.
Mum takes him for long walks beside the shore, with Uncle Jack hovering to keep them both clear of the dangerous places. Jenny watches from a distance, unhappy to be here but unwilling to be the first to say it's time to go. When Steven is older, she will tell him about the Time Vortex, what she can, and she will try to explain how she perceives the delicate fabric of the world twisting and contorting horribly around Steven's grandfather. Today she waits, sunning herself on a rock and watching the sky.
Mum isn't good at ignoring her. She's not good at saying everything Steven needs to hear, either, not good at comforting him. She settles for holding his hand.
He has his first nightmare after she leaves, and if Mum isn't good at comfort, Jack is awful. But he wants to be helpful, Steven figures after the sniffles quiet down. He watches over Steven like a precious thing, like a token unasked for left under his pillow.
They try together.
The birds scare Steven with their horrible cries, but Jack covers his eyes with a light cloth and takes him for a walk. "Listen." As he listens, he learns to tell the difference between the sounds, what calls mean "Hello!" and which mean "Get away from my eggs!" and which are the triumphant faretheewell cries of birds headed off to fly far away from their nests.
When he wakes from the next nightmare days later, he makes himself calm down as Jack rubs a tired hand over his own hair.
"I remember dying."
Jack watches him silently. He doesn't offer up a sorry or an excuse. He does look like he's lived every day Mum said.
"It hurt. You could have stopped it, and you didn't. You stood there, and it hurt, and I died."
Like he's back there in that room, he can hear the worst noise ever, he can feel the vice in his brain, can feel his ears piercing. Steven's eyes well up again in remembered agony.
Jack says, "I know."
And he can't say anything else, there are too many words to say, and too many long years for him, although for Steven it's been barely two weeks.
In the morning, Jack makes him porridge for breakfast. After they eat, they go into the study. Jack has some real books, but most are on an electronic reader. He opens the book reader, shows Steven how to use it.
"When you're a little older, you can read this. Right now, I'm gonna tell you a story."
English is one of the languages spoken on this planet, in this alien village under a too-bright sun and new stars. Steven doesn't know the other languages yet, and his cousins tease him by chattering away in words he can't comprehend. He can't explain where he's from, or what happened, because he doesn't have all the words for it himself, and after enough questions, they stop asking. He sits in classes at the school for less than a week before Jack has a long talk with the teachers and decides Steven will be taught at home instead.
"They think I'm stupid." Steven is not going to cry.
"You're just new to this time. I'll tell you everything you need to know."
And he does. Steven expects maths and science and literature, but Jack teaches him to navigate their small boat by the stars, and how to lure the best fish into his net, and how to cheat at kalaya. They stay up late and sleep in until noon, and Steven learns to count cards and how to tie the trickiest knots and how to swear in every language Jack speaks. Interspersed are lessons about causality and paradoxes, and rhymed mnemonics to keep travellers safe in the slipstream of time.
Steven's uncles and aunts and cousins drop by the grey house at all hours, for tea and hugs and dinners and chats. Elena has the whole family over for a large supper once or twice a solar year. They know Jack's secret, but not all his secrets. He has lovers, no-one serious, and his lovers don't need his secrets, just his affection. Steven is the centre of Jack's world.
On one visit, Mum asks Jack if he's lonely.
He laughs. "You know me, I've always lived like a monk."
She finishes the familiar joke with him: "On your knees in the company of other men." And she sighs, and her face is that of an old woman, and Steven has no idea when this is for her.
Mum comes to visit whenever she can. Her face changes in odd ways, and sometimes she is older and sometimes she's not. Sometimes Jenny comes with her, sometimes she drops her off before running away from the constant headache that is Jack. Sometimes they share a bedroom in the grey seaside cottage when they visit, and Mum is happier than Steven can ever remember.
Jack says it helps to keep a diary and compare notes. He gives Steven a lot of advice about time travel, more than Steven thinks he ought to need, but he pays attention because when he's old enough, he wants to travel with his mother. Jack tells Steven histories, strange details of dynasties and empires long past and yet to come, and he makes Steven reread his autobiography (Steven's allowed to skip the dirty parts), and gives him quizzes as they roast their day's catch over a driftwood fire on the beach.
Steven asks questions in return. A new life has grown in the place where the old loss squatted open and raw, but he pokes at the remembered wounds: why did you let me die, and what could you have done differently then, and what should you have done? He asks crazier questions, the unknowable dreams: if you could spend one more day in the past, when would it be, and if you could see one person, who?
Jack has healed slowly, much slower than a tooth. Steven understands his own restored life is part of that healing, is soothing and nourishing what has been a sore, spongy, sad place in his grandfather's heart. Names repeat over and again in the book, in the stories Jack tells when he doesn't realise he's rambling, in the gentle thanks Mum offers up as she tucks Steven in at night when she visits.
He is listening. He is learning.
Steven grows tall like one of the weedy fronds that line the path up the road to their home, and his skin is a deep, golden brown from the sun. He practises smiles in the mirror until he almost captures Jack's patented grin, but there's a swagger and a confidence missing behind the flirtation.
When he frowns at his failure, Jack pats him on the shoulder. "Your voice hasn't even dropped yet. Give it time."
The village has many pretty girls and pretty boys, most of whom aren't related to him, and he has his first kiss when he's fourteen. He can take the boat out on his own when he's sixteen, and it's out amongst the rocking waves on a gorgeous night full of moons that he loses his virginity. By eighteen, he's broken a pocketful of hearts, but his mind is bursting with more histories and yet-to-bes than anyone other than a Time Agent or a Time Lord.
The Doctor appears one day, and Steven has the guns ready even before the final hum of the TARDIS has faded as she lands. He has read the book, after all. Sure enough there's an invasion on their quiet little colony world which Mum and Jenny have to swoop in to stop. And after that's sorted, what else can they all do but picnic on the beach together?
Mum is older on this visit, her hair as grey as Jack's, and even Jenny sports laugh lines around her mouth and eyes. Mum keeps looking around herself as they all chat and reminisce. The Doctor and Jack and Jenny are happy to be here, but Mum's waiting for another person to join them on their spread blanket on the sand.
Jenny asks Steven a bit loudly, "How old are you now, sweetheart?"
"Almost nineteen."
Jenny glances at Mum, whose face changes, and she stops searching. A yet-to-be, then, one of the perils of never meeting in the right order. Steven will make a note in his diary. He tosses the last crumbs from their lunch to the waiting birds.
He is not as subtle as he thinks he is when he tries to stowaway aboard the TARDIS, and he is deposited back home that same evening with a stern look from the Doctor and a wink from his handsome companion.
When they are gone, Jack folds his arms, watching Steven but not in anger. "Are you ready?"
"For bed? It's not even midnight yet."
"No." Jack goes to his study and opens the safe. There are things inside the lockbox Steven has seen, and things he's never been allowed to touch. Jack preserves papers, photographs, and trinkets that serve as mementoes for the lives Steven has grown to know from his reading and from Jack's stories.
Jack hands him a small device, about the size of an egg.
"What is it?" He brings it up to his eye. Tiny dials and buttons beckon enticingly, but he's bright enough not to press anything yet.
"Freedom. Purpose."
Steven looks again. The symbols etched on the side form into coherent terms, into coordinates and dates.
Outside, he can hear the seabirds cawing to one another in their nests, hears one give the cry that means it is taking flight over the moonlit waters.
A smile breaks over his face. "When do I go?"
The End
AN: The next fic in this series is "When This Long Trick," which you can find at my profile. My favourite words are "I liked this."