My Alternative story for The Unquiet Dead. In which people act just a little stupid in the past :P
Stupidity and the Past
Why is it, when a good idea is spoken aloud there had to be one, just one person that thought it bad? He wasn't talking about anything bad here. He would be saving lives, from bodies of people that have already had their time.
No one else was complaining. Certainly not Sneed or his maid, Gwyneth. Even Charles was okay with it.
The only one who thought it was wrong and disrespectful, was Rose.
She also let Gwyneth know that she thinks the servant girl was stupid. And while Rose tried to say that she hadn't thought or felt that, everyone else in the room knew to trust Gwyneth's judgement on such matters by then.
The girl could basically see people's thoughts, see bits of their future or past, and it was getting stronger and stronger as the days rolled on.
Gwyneth needed this no matter what Rose's thoughts and feelings on the subject were. And Rose says she's going to donate her organs when she dies. Hah! Not likely, with her attitude.
Death is the end of one life. If that death could save another person's life like through donating organs, or as a vehicle to move around in, then he was damn well going to make it happen. It would only be temporary after all. He planned to take them to some planet where they could make new bodies for themselves.
It was his fault to begin with, that they lost their world and their corporeal form. It was least he could do to make things right. One species would have been saved, making what he had done in that stupid one second worth it.
He needed this just as much as Gwyneth did.
Rose probably believes that if someone killed her in this day and age that she couldn't die. Or that she'd just wake up right back in her own room in her mum's flat, having beans on toast and watching telly.
He didn't bother telling Rose that the only one being stupid then was her. By the slight blush on her cheeks, he thought she was beginning to learn that all on her own.
Well, she was new to this sort of thing still. It was her second trip after all. There was still plenty of time for her to get used to this type of life.
She'll have to stop thinking everyone from an earlier time period than hers was thick though, or she'd get into more trouble than even him. Gwyneth was showing an understanding and compassion that not very many people had at all.
To Gwyneth, the Gelth were angels and she had been born to help them. To him, they were a species that by rights should have died, but still they live and were still, to this moment, fighting to not die out.
The extinction of his own race but for him was hard enough to accept. He didn't want to have to be the one to tell them that no, they couldn't borrow a few bodies that are no longer being used, so that they could live.
He started it, and he was going to end it, and if Rose didn't get too angry over it, he was pretty sure right then that it would be a good ending. If he was lucky, and he sure hoped he was, since they seem to be very much a benign race, everybody would live.
He needed a day like that.
He hoped one would come sooner rather than later.