Disclaimer: not mine.
Note: References to BSG-"Islanded in a Stream of Stars," Rita Dove's "Flashcards," and James Wood's New Yorker piece "Why?"
"Why d'you read that stuff?" she'd asked Artie once, after seeing him trot out a quarter of his monthly allowance to buy the new Pratchett.
He hadn't replied, but she'd known; at the funeral, she'd been there to see the horrible normality of the pictures they'd put up. She'd been there when Dad had tried to make those pictures into a life.
She understands there are different ways to grieve, and she knows that she's not any better.
Artie tries to fill up the ordinary spaces of Mum's existence with books about rewriting time and giant turtles, but she—
Angie only has a vague idea of what pornography looks like, but she feels what pornography is in small discrete packets every Tuesday after she comes back from the used bookshop. Paperbacks that seem to glow with compressed energy as she submerges herself in them and irradiates herself with rebellion. Most of them are classics that Dad wouldn't have objected to, but she makes them sacrilege under the light of her mobile in the middle of the night. She makes them her own.
Page by page, she looks for the truth—the real one, not the stuff Clara churns out.
The stuff Clara churns out are:
"I'm going to try making another soufflé today."
"Y'know, my mum, she used to do this thing—when she was trying to clean—"
"D'you remember when Sophie—"
"I don't care," Angie says, slamming down the lid of her laptop; Clara spills memories around like it's magic fairy dust, and it's careless. It's careless Angie wants to hit her for it, to scream that there are only a limited amount of things she can hold on to, that Clara might want to let them all go, but Angie won't.
"I don't care," she says instead, "I've got to look for a book to write for my paper."
She walks out of the kitchen, wanting Clara to shout, to at least glare, but it's never a fight with Clara—instead it's little earthquakes and understanding that stretches like a chasm.
And Angie—Angie is always losing something.
Lying goes all the way down; she'd figured that out, after Mum.
She'd stared at the casket and felt the truth strain against the dirt: I don't believe it anymore. She's still not sure what "it" is—they're family's not religious—but the knowledge is there now. Withholding this big truth make everything else easier—the things she tells her friends. The things she tells Dad, and Artie.
And Clara.
She tells Clara, "You're not my mum," and this is the truth, but it is not all the truth.
Clara says, "I know I'm not," and sometimes, Angie wonders if she knows.
It's the little things that make her hate Clara; the way her nose wrinkles. The way her words accelerate and then shudders still. The way she apologizes for things that are better left alone.
Tuesday, the book in her hand is heavily worn. Angie stares at the faded yellow letters of the title, and then looks back up. "What's this for?"
"You said you wanted a book for your paper."
Angie frowns. Clara's been…not right ever since Angie went to Nina's—manic one day and restrained the next, like she knows something and wants to tell everyone but can't. She wouldn't care, except that Artie does. "And why is this one so special, then?"
Clara's practically bouncing on her heels—so it's manic today. "There's a lot of great stuff in there—it's got some space things and I know you don't care about space like Artie does, but most of it's set on Earth. You can talk about a lot of things for your essay and," she pauses, smiling strangely, "It's a lot more age appropriate that the things you've got stashed in my spare wardrobe."
Angie feels her face heat up despite herself; storing all those books in the extra cupboard in the attic might not have been her most brilliant plan, but she needed a space after Dad caught her with a copy of Lolita in her room a month ago. She doesn't trust Clara's tastes since Clara's the one who's got Artie reading all those Amelia Williams books, but maybe a favor for a favor—
Then the title catches her eye. "Hang on," she says, "I know this book. It's that political one, right—we read part of it for history. Something about how hiring soldiers to fight for you is a bad idea?"
"It's not that one," Angie raises an eyebrow, and watches amused as Clara struggles for the correct words. "It's. That's the Prince, this is—this book, it's about—it starts with this story about a python that swallows an elephant, see—and—"
"Pythons?" Angie says, thrusting the book back into Clara's hands and wondering if Clara's inhaled too much smoke from her latest not-soufflé, "Elephants?"
Clara makes a really interesting sound from the back of her throat—like a tiny, toothless dragon desperately trying to breathe fire.
"Just try it, all right? It's important. My mum read it to me, when I was—'round Artie's age, I think. Maybe younger. And. I loved it. I read it again every year. Give it a chance."
She holds the book out for Angie, and something in her eyes—something a lot like uncertainty—makes Angie take it this time. The pads of her fingers trace the spaces between the raised lettering, and she inhales slowly, feeling like she's peering through some sort of magical glass, feeling as if she can bring something back to life.
When she looks back up, Clara is gone.
"This book," Angie declares, the very next day, "Is bunk."
"Hmm?" Clara, the neglectful nanny that she is, isn't paying attention. She's thumbing through the pages of that travel book Ellie gave her again.
Angie bites back the urge to ask her if she needs some time alone—it's an old joke, and that's not what the trek up to the attic was for. "This book. It's idiotic. There's no really story to it, and all that stuff about children being better than adults, that got tiring after the third page. And," she takes a deep breath, "What was the point of that fox bit? He just. He just runs off and leaves the fox to cry. What good is that?"
Clara still doesn't look up. "One runs the risk of crying a bit if one allows oneself to be tamed."
"It's a mad way to find friends," Angie says, fiercely. They're standing not more than ten feet from each other, but Clara's staring at some fixed point in101 Places to See. She ignores the sudden swooping feeling of distance in the room; if Clara's talking about something deeper, she doesn't want to know what it is. She thinks of Mum, and then she doesn't. "The Prince, he shouldn't have agreed to tame the fox, and the fox—he shouldn't have asked. It's bollocks."
She tosses it onto the bed, and this, at least, causes a reaction. Clara frowns. "You're doing a paper on this book."
"Amn't," Angie says, "Well. Well I was, but this book's rubbish. I'm switching to Code Name Verity—Nina said it was brilliant."
"Keep it, then. If you don't end up switching, it can be a backup. And don't say 'amn't,' we're not in Scotland."
Angie rolls her eyes, but she takes the book back anyway. Something catches her eye as she leaves; Clara flipping through that old travel book isn't anything abnormal, but—
"Where's your leaf?"
Clara tenses, and slowly closes the book. "It's…gone."
"Gone?" She asks incredulously. She doesn't believe that, not for a minute—Clara's stupid about that leaf—she won't let anyone touch it except her. Most days she treats it like it'd fall to dust.
"Gone," Clara echoes, a savage look of regret buried in the contours of her face. She does not look at Angie.
A few days later she and Artie get a hint as to why Clara is acting so weird all of a sudden in the form of a man who—
"Why," she demands, pulling Clara to the kitchen after having her hand pumped profusely by a man calling himself the Doctor, "Have you started dating a giraffe in an old suit?"
"Angie," Clara hisses; then she blushes. "We're not dating. We're friends. Or, not. He. He travels, and he takes me with him. I'm his—I'm his companion."
"You're his companion?" Angie cannot believe anyone can be this stupid. "Do you have any idea how disturbing that sounds? What if he's one of those Catholic priests that goes around touching people?"
"Angie," Clara hisses, again, but Angie's finished with this particular brand of mystery.
"You can go off," she says, walking away in a way that definitely was not flouncing, "I'll try to find your boyfriend's criminal record on the Internet."
It takes her an embarrassing amount of time to figure out what's really going on. Not because of the whole alien-time-travel-thing, mind—because searching "the Doctor" and brought up nothing at all and she never imagined that googling "Clara Oswald" would turn up anything interesting, so she doesn't check until Artie suggests it.
"Why didn't you tell us?" she asks Clara on Sunday, when Clara's reading over a draft of Angie's paper. "We wouldn't have actually told Dad."
Clara shrugs and doesn't take her eyes off the page. "I dunno, you two seemed fairly keen on blackmailing me Wednesday. What do you mean, 'The Prince learned from his mistakes with his rose?'"
"He told the fox not to get attached, didn't he? And, the nanny you hired has an alien boyfriend and leaves every Wednesday to time travel?" Angie snorts. "He wouldn't have believed me."
After Mum, she created complicated scenarios in her head that would lead to her dad recognizing Clara for the truly horrible person she was, but not like this. Not now.
"I wouldn't have told," she repeats.
When she looks up from Angie's essay, Clara's gaze is warm. "I know."
Knowing that he's a time-traveling alien with two hearts doesn't make the Doctor any less irritating.
"Time and Relative Dimensions in Space." The way he talks hadn't been an act at all, because after the initial protest (something about no children in his weird blue outhouse) he's rambling about everything in sight, words dropping out like pebbles. "TARDIS for short. Imagine something big—the Lake District, that's big—it can take you anywhere in the Lake District in no time at all. Or in any time you want! You can learn things. You can have fun! Like me, I'm fun. Entertaining and educational, and nothing dangerous at all."
"Where should we go? I can take you to the Moon. Well, not the Moon, it's boring and there's nothing there." He spins around as Artie's eyes bug out. "Hedgewick's World of Wonders. It's like the moon, but it's an amusement park—there's the Spacey Zoomer and Natty Longshoe's—how about that? You can learn about space. Entertaining and educational!"
"I don't want to go to some alien version of Blackpool Beach," she says, putting as much scorn as possible in her voice, "This thing, it can go anywhere?"
He looks far too pleased. "Yes! And—"
"Can we go to the Mariana Trench, then?"
The Doctor's hands stop flapping about. "Ah. Well. No. Well, the TARDIS—"
Angie rolls her eyes.
They wind up going to the Moon-not-the-Moon-more-like-Blackpool-Beach. It doesn't end well.
They do finally get back to the house. Artie's practically vibrating with anxiety, but Clara is completely still, her back and shoulders forming a rigid line. When she turns around her face looks as if it have been carved in relief—one of those marble things Francesca's dad always goes on about. "Don't you ever—" she swallows, hard. "Don't you ever again."
"Clara," Artie says, surprised, and before Angie can stop him he runs and throws his arms around her.
Angie watches as Clara tries hold him close and flinch away at the same time. Afterwards she will roll her eyes; afterwards she'll imitate Clara's melodrama and Clara will half-heartedly protest; afterwards, she will (without telling Artie) promise Clara that they'll not Get Involved again. Right now, she says: "You're not our mum."
Artie makes a quiet noise of protest, but Clara's eyes are calm again when she looks up at Angie. "No," she agrees, "No I'm not."
The Doctor's little speech about entertaining and educational journeys had been entirely rubbish; she knows that now, and she has a sneaking suspicion that everyone who ever catches a quick look at his face has a tendency of Getting Involved, no matter how hard they try not to.
Wednesday next: she and Artie come back from the cinema to find the house empty and a congealing bowl of egg mixture in the kitchen.
Artie ducks under her arm to survey the sitting room. "Where's Clara? And the Doctor?"
She hates hates hates the poorly-hidden excitement in Artie's voice whenever he mentions the Doctor—it's dangerous, whatever they're off doing—the only reason she'd even decided to sneak off earlier was so they wouldn't be dragged into another situation. "On another adventure, probably."
Artie frowns. "We've been gone three hours," he points out, "Even if they left an hour ago she'd be back."
"Maybe they had a nice snog in our kitchen before leaving half an hour ago, then," Still, Artie's right; one of the benefits of that time machine of the Doctor has is that Clara always comes back obnoxiously quick from one of her excursions. "Or maybe they went on two in a row."
"And left the soufflé like that? Clara wouldn't."
A silence falls between them and solidifies somewhere around Angie's diaphragm, then—
"Should we call Dad?"
She breathes in, slowly. "He said he wouldn't come back tonight," she decides, "We'll not tell him yet."
Angie paints her face the best she can, but Artie's always been unfairly observant. "You're worried."
He's asking for permission to be worried as well, but she's not going to give it to him. "Amn't," she says, emphatically. "I know you've got homework. Do it, and I'll make supper."
She ends up burning Clara's half-finished soufflé to a crisp ("Shut up," she'd said to Artie, before he could say anything) and they make do with cold sandwiches. Wordlessly they agree to sit together afterwards in the boiling lounge; it's an uncommonly hot day. While Artie pretends to read, Angie runs through phone numbers in her head: Dad's office. Mrs. Privet from next door. 999.
(She's tried Clara's twice already, but mentally schedules another call at nine-thirty.)
The anxious glances Artie sends her over his book don't help with anything so she sends him to bed early and keeps watch alone. It's just getting to the point where the urge to call Dad is overwhelming when the odd wheezing sounds off; Angie shifts to a more casual position to dispel any suggestions that she might have been worried or anything before abruptly realizing that the increasing noise is echoing from inside the sitting room instead of near the front porch as usual.
The phone in her hand thunks to the floor as the TARDIS fully materializes and the Doctor steps out, overbalances on one foot and nearly drops the bundle in his arms. A still face peeks out; Angie stares, and for a suffocating moment dead she's dead no she CAN'T—
Then Clara's chest heaves. Angie feels the leather of the armchair stick briefly to her thighs, then she is in motion—the soles of her bare feet slamming onto the hard wood of the staircase, arms stiffly at her side. Her head seems to have detached itself from the rest of her body.
The Doctor is in front of her, huffing as he spits out his pebble-words. "It's all right," he says, "It'sallright it'sallright. Remnants of temporal energy, Strax gave her something but the journey back was difficult, so she—she woke up before. She'll wake up again. She'll wake."
They enter Clara's room and suddenly she is talking, faster than Angie's ever heard her speak. "You can't reverse the polarity without damaging the—why Darlig Ulv, you're a bit like me. Don't touch that, that's for—" she abruptly switches so some kind of alien language—harsh, guttural sounds; Angie flinches back a few paces despite herself.
The Doctor moves like a stop-motion doll—he deposits Clara on the bed and shakes apart her blanket, nearly knocking over the lamp. Then he looks around wildly. "Where are the Jammie Dodgers? Last time I was—"
He breaks off, and seems to notice Angie for the first time. In her sleep, Clara continues to mumble strings of senseless words. For a second the Doctor flounders in the air, then he says, quieter: "She will wake."
Only after Clara settles into a calmer patch, only after she leads the Doctor back down the stairs for a cup of tea, does the question spill out of her mouth. "What happened?"
"She jumped—" He stops, and looks at her, really looks at her. Angie glares back. Don't you dare, she thinks, but the Doctor does. To him she is a little girl who can only see the truth as refracted light. "She. She was so brave."
"I don't care that she was brave," Angie swears that the floor seems to bubble under her feet, and she grips the mug in her hand, tighter, tighter. It doesn't matter; Clara will tell her when she wakes. "When will she be up?"
He shrugs, miserably. "I dunno." One of his hands is flying all over the place—pushing back his hair in one moment, tapping at the edge of the table in the next—while the other is just completely still. "We made a stop in Victorian London so Strax—an alien friend, he's a nurse—could take a look at her, and he said that she would need—rest. But. But he's not sure. That—I don't think anyone's ever done that before. She…"
He trails off. Angie thinks of seismic waves, of cracks far beyond the epicenter. There is no noise save the tsunami in her skull.
"She ever tell you how her mum died?" Angie asks, partly to keep the sound at bay, partly because suddenly it's all she can do but dig her nails into his chest and rip him to bits, twin hearts and all.
The Doctor looks at her; then his eyes lose their focus again. "No."
"She came to visit us in—we didn't live here yet, we lived in a flat near Central London. Our families have always been close, see—my mum and Ellie were flatmates in uni—so. Aunt Ellie came to visit. Just her, 'cause Clara had—some kind of competition in Blackpool."
He's still peering sightlessly at her, and his hand flaps listlessly on the edge of his chair. He doesn't understand yet, Angie realizes. He doesn't know. He might have never known if not for her.
"Night before Ellie was about take the train back to Blackpool, Clara called her. I think—I think she was upset, because she'd lost at whatever she'd stayed at home for, and Ellie was—she was a great mum, you know, you should hear Clara blather on about her now, she does it all the time—so she decided to go to Queen's Arcade, near where we lived? To get something for Clara, so she'd cheer up. It was early March."
The errant hand slows, and then stops completely.
The crashing around Angie's ears crescendos. "They said it was some kind of madman, on the telly? But I looked into it more after we found out about you. It wasn't some bloke with a gun." She pauses, and then twists the knife. "It was these Autumns or something—alien mannequins. One of the other people that was shot, he ran a blog about you. And you were there that night, weren't you? You were there and you couldn't do anything."
"Angie," the Doctor says. It's an apology, but it's the wrong one.
"I was at the funeral, 'course." She's still not really clear on why she's telling him this, except that she wants him to hurt. "I was little, back then—'bout six—but I remember it was the only thing everyone talked about. How sudden it was."
The Doctor no longer looks frantic, or pained—just like a balloon with a puncture. It's the way Dad sometimes looks at her, when he remembers that Mum is gone. "They're always sudden."
Angie wants to hit him. "You don't know anything. My mum," the room suddenly seemed stuffy and far too warm, so she draws in a shaky breath before starting again. "My mum, she had cancer. In her—in her lungs, and it took her ages to die. It wasn't sudden, it was years and years since I was eight. And sometimes she'd get better, and we'd all think that maybe it'd just be better from then on, but it never—she was never just better. And when she finally just—died everyone went on and on about how brave she was like she was—like she'd fought in a war or something, but she didn't. She wasn't even brave—she just gave up at the end." She'd said Angie one last time, and her voice had been unrecognizable. "You think you know death because you've been around but you don't. You don't. Real death happens when you're at home missing someone when they're still there, not when you're somewhere in space thinking of the universe."
In this light, the Doctor is a gargoyle with a face frozen in fault. "Angie," he says, again.
"Do you do this all the time, then?" she plows on, and she is calm, she is calm. She is fourteen and a basilisk. She can make a god flinch away. "D'you just pick up young women off the streets and sacrifice them to save the world? I bet you don't even care what happens to her. I bet you don't."
The chair he had been sitting on shoots back an inch, and suddenly the Doctor is looming over her, promising green flame and the ruin of planets. "Don't you dare," he whispers, harshly, "Don't you dare say that."
"I'll say what I want," Angie says, feeling the submerged fury and letting it pulse behind her temples. She stands up too, to match him. It doesn't matter what the Cybermite whispered, about the Oncoming Storm; Clara's never been able to tell her off. "You're not my—It's my house, you're the one who doesn't belong."
His eyes flash with something like helpless fury and she thinks I've gone too far, but the Doctor sits back down, and the metallic tang of the air is gone. He's just a lonely old man. He opens his mouth, but closes it again, and swallows hard. "Angie," he begins, but there's a sound from the bed, a muffled and confused "Doctor?" and he runs from her.
She lets them have their goodbye; the Doctor had saved them from the Cybermen once, and she'd been grateful. She'd been grateful.
She sits on the staircase and listens to Clara and the Doctor talk, tracing their rising and falling pitches against left palm. Mum had tried to teach her palmistry, before, but Angie never paid proper attention—never appreciated it at all.
In the room, she hears the Doctor whisper a contrition, "You shouldn't have."
When Clara replies, it's clear as a church bell. "I'd do it again," she says, and Angie's fingernail cuts deep into her head line.
The Doctor leaves without looking at her but Angie doesn't spare him a thought—he can carry on feeling guilty for the rest of his stupid life. She moves to get up, to find Clara, but Clara beats her to it and sits with her on the stairs.
"You don't understand," she says, before Angie can offer up a "Have you gone off your trolley." Her eyes radiate with a defiant intensity that makes Angie shiver. "We—we can only see the world piecemeal every day, but he—the Doctor, he's vergence, you see. The things he's shown me—it's a chance to be more. D'you know what that's like? It's a better way to live, and I don't have to just—sit back and let it happen anymore, I can do something." She is golden like an alien god. "Sometimes you can't just let someone else handle it because everyone else is gone. I saved the Doctor tonight! I saved him hundreds of times. Who else can do that? Who else will save the universe except me, and him?"
"I don't care about saving the universe," says Angie. She is Vesuvius, with the power to encase people in ash where they stand before they disappear forever. "You're our nanny—Artie was watching the door for hours after dinner—it's not my job to take care of him, all right, and I was—you can't just fly off every Wednesday and come back in that state—one day you'll be light years away and you won't come back and what will happen to us?"
A flash of something crosses over Clara's face and she doesn't look defiant anymore, only like she had finally cupped the world in her hands only to look down and see it wither. And maybe she had. "Angie," she begins, "Angie, I didn't think—"
But Angie is done. "No you didn't," she spits, and walks away, leaving the ruins of Clara in her wake. Fourteen, her heart hums, I am only fourteen.
By the time Angie grudgingly admits to herself, I ought to apologize for yelling, probably, it's too late. The sun breaks over the kitchen counter and Clara forgives her without a word. She is islanded in a sea of stars.
People leave, bit by bit and all at once; Angie thinks she needs to have that branded in every chamber of her heart, because she always forgets.
It's Wednesday again, and Clara is (always) leaving.
"I bought some biscuits yesterday if you get hungry—don't touch the oven again, I still haven't cleaned off whatever that black stuff was from last time."
It's a contingency plan, and the fact that Clara is even making one makes Angie want to shut her away in her room until she comes to her senses; she rolls her eyes instead. "All right."
"Make sure Artie finishes his homework before he starts reading that robot book he got from the library."
"I will."
"I've left the number for my new mobile on the table. If you two set the house on fire—"
Angie scoffs and Clara pretends not to notice; it's the old familiar song. "—you can call me and I'll make him take the TARDIS back, wherever we are. Where is that cardie?"
"Right," Angie says, and hesitates as Clara paces round the room, still muttering under her breath. "D'you know where you're going, this time?"
Clara abruptly stops pacing, but her eyes keep casting about around the room at anywhere except Angie's face. "Hasn't told me yet. Look, Angie—"
"I don't care," Angie says before Clara can say anything else, because she doesn't. She's tired of hovering near the steps of their cramped porch straining her ears for that weird dinosaur sound. She's tired of clenching her phone so tightly it leaves a little indent on her hand that doesn't disappear until the next day. She's tired of climbing the dark before sleep and compulsively looking up the names of criminal damage lawyers in case something happens too close to Mrs. Privet's petunias. She's tired. She's tired. Clara is leaving again and she doesn't care. Dad's getting more and more responses to his advert, and they're going to get a proper nanny soon, and Angie—
She misses her mum. There aren't enough geological ages to mold her into who she wants to be.
Angie rolls her eyes again, but then she remembers that Clara still isn't looking at her. "Just…don't split yourself into a million pieces for him again? Or something."
"No," Clara agrees, finally rescuing her cardigan from behind the bureau. "That was a one-time offer."
"Or something," Angie reminds her, but Clara only smiles.
She watches as Clara makes her way to the front door. The air suddenly seems to fill with the fact of her leaving—there must be some parts of space, Angie thinks, which even the TARDIS can't reach.
Clara's looking at her now, still smiling. "Well, Angelica Maitland," she says, sticking her hand out; for her it seems effortless. "The house is yours."
"I," Angie replies.
She wants to say, I decided to switch back because I got to the end of that prince book, and I cried.
She wants to say, I looked for a word that means not-mother in every language book I could find. I looked for a word for you to fill the empty space after Mum and I never could.
She wants to say, I don't want you to go.
"I'll come back," Clara says, still smiling at her; it's a promise.
She feels her head jerk down, and back up again into a nod. "Be careful."
There's a second, a span that drops through the pit of her stomach and embeds itself somewhere deep in the inner core, when Angie thinks that there might be tears. Hurriedly, she adds, "I mean. Artie'd probably—"
"Angie," That sound again; more an exhale than anything else. "Just shut up for a minute, all right?"
Without asking or anything, Clara hugs her. It's too tight and immediately the smell of disinfectant assaults Angie's nose; not like a mother's at all.
Angie lets her.