Nomad Chapter 1, a doctor who fanfic

Oh here we go, another first literary venture into a beloved fandom. Um, okay! I hate original character fic, as a rule. It's just safer that way in my book. However! Upon finally jumping all in to Doctor Who/Torchwood, I felt the same sort of excitement I did upon discovering Star Wars or LOTR from a writing perspective, in that a whole new MASSIVE world was being presented to me, and oh how my mind went crazy with the many ways I could go playing in it. So, just to ease the fears of the wary, this is not a vehicle for a self-insertation (ooo dirty!) or any such drivel, in fact if I were anything like Fayden I would probably scare myself and/or tell myself to go out and have fun already. Nope, I just wanted to explore the universe, and the sad story of The Boeshane Peninsula stuck in my head.

I was a little lost as far as where to put this...it has far more personal ties to Captain Jack, but a storyline/setting that is so very Doctor Who, which is why I settled on that sorting. This is for my friends, who are so supportive and who enjoy the random character profiles I write when I get writer's block, and wanted to hear more about one character in particular. Here she is :) And she's not Mad Max all the way through either, it all depends on which planet she's stuck on at any given time.

Enough apologetic babbling, storytime.

Nomad

by May

"I know dark clouds will gather 'round me,
I know my way is hard and steep.
But beauteous fields arise before me,
Where God's redeemed, their vigils keep."

Johnny Cash

The caravan didn't see them coming, until it was too late to do anything more productive than send out a distress signal into the desert wastes. The bandits had the line of hovering transports surrounded in a matter of moments, having come out from behind the distant dunes behind them, their boards skimming silently over the wind-blown sand.

"Are you lot really so cruel?" The man standing by the helm of the lead transport sighed, pushing up his tinted goggles and squinting in the relentless, blinding sunlight. "Robbing a caravan of poor folk like yourself, off to sell a year's worth of stores at the markets?"

"Almost convincing." A female voice replied below him. The bandit at the head of the party, who had her (rather old-fashioned but still very capable of making things that were alive suddenly not-alive) gun trained on the caravan leader, pushed back her goggles and hood as well, displaying the fact that, while she was a thief, she wasn't without manners. "I do believe that you're poor." She allowed, pointing her gun at the line of sand-scoured metal transports hovering in place, "But you're working for the Baron of Haerfyn, we saw you leave his estate yesterday." She smirked. "He filled your boxes with whatever he's been stealing over the years, you lot won't get a single credit of the profit it takes in, just a few coins for your time, if that."

"Wonderful," The caravan leader grumbled, "A perceptive bandit." The bandit grinned.

"Give us a hand going through it, and you can take you fair share back to your families?" She offered. The man hesitated, and the 12 bandits surrounding his caravan let their guns drop just a bit.

"And make myself a fugitive while I'm at it?" He asked, to which the female bandit shrugged.

"Who isn't a fugitive on this rock nowadays?" She countered, "You'd have enough gold lining your pockets anyway, could get your family off of this planet, move somewhere with a body of water perhaps."

"Well, when you put it that way," The man stepped off the helm, punching in a cancel to his distress call. "Harry Blue, 'mam."

"How quickly we who are starving do turn!" The female bandit signaled her men off, but there was no need really. The drivers of the other four transports looked like they'd have taken any excuse to pillage the troves they were supposed to be guarding. "I'm Fayden."

"Ah, Trovestine?" Harry Blue guessed brightly, dusting sand from his grey beard, hopping down onto the sand, and leading Fayden toward the back of his transport. She stepped off of her board to follow him, leaving it hovering, its sail flapping in the wind. "I recognized the accent."

"Do suppose most of the colonists on Trovest were originally Earth-American too, but no," Fayden shook her head, her long white-blonde dreadlocks shaking with her. "One system over." Her mouth was set in a hard line as she said this, her legs taking long strides as they walked, "Robeck. The Boeshane Peninsula."

"Jesus," Harry Blue cursed, shaking his head, "Sorry, mate."

"S'all good," The bandit shrugged, reaching for the doors of the transport, not surprised at finding them locked.

"Sorry 'bout that too, deadlocked." Harry slapped the doors ruefully, "But I figure the clever bandit knows how to open 'em?"

"Of course I do, Harry Blue!" Fayden said brightly, reaching out to punch a code into the keypad on the metal doorframe. "It's locked with a private home code which belongs to the good Baron himself. Ah!" The doors slid open, revealing an interior piled high with gold, gadgets, and general alien splendor. "Take your fill, Harry Blue…"

The men who'd been hired to guard the caravan were indeed a poor lot, eager to make a little money carting a rich man's spoils off to the intergalactic market. They really didn't mind turning on that greedy man though, their planet was run by his lot, and it was only a matter of time before most poor folk turned to piracy. It was easier to feed your family as an outlaw than it was while waiting for scraps, even if the tradeoff was a possible stint in jail. Thus, the social structure on the planet Ananda (and most surrounding planets) was such that most pirates and desert bandits weren't a bad sort to have on your side, while the lawmakers and businessmen were widely distained and generally hated.

Even so, Harry Blue had never seen a band of nomads who worked quite the way that Fayden's lot did. They portioned out everything equally, including their new members and bartering back and forth, that was nothing strange. What was odd though was that, even though they all looked to Fayden as their leader, she took almost nothing from the spoils. Most bands would give such a smart, calculating leader the bulk of their loot, even if she was so young, that was the traditional structure. But no, she simply watched, arms folded, feet planted far apart, as her party sorted through the transports and carried off what they wished.

Afterwards, she'd sort through each person's loot with a scanner that fit in her palm. Usually she found nothing, but a few times the scanner would start buzzing, and Fayden would take whatever it had found. No one ever contested her claim to the object she'd found in their pile, in fact, they seemed pleased for her. And that was how the raid ended. Each member of the band of pirates had a sizable sack of goods to haul back to their tents beyond the dunes, while their leader took only a handful. Harry Blue said nothing at the time, he was too busy trying to figure out which would fetch a better price at the market…a used DNA scanner or a gold-plated personal communicator. But he did notice.

That night the clan of nomads returned to their tents, pitched by a network of caves that ran through a stone canyon in the desert. Surrounded by dunes and mostly invisible if one were to scan the sandy horizon above, the canyon was a perfect place to hide, though Fayden made it clear that they'd move camp further down the gorge come morning. Once those transports were found abandoned, empty and cannibalized for parts, any bandits in the area would be targeted.

But for that evening, the clan celebrated. Fires were lit and music was playing, children were playing or zipping around on boards, honey wine was being passed around as the new members were welcomed. Fayden was not to be found during any of it. She said goodnight to her clan, and retired to her tent to look over her own meager spoils.

The suns of Ananda were harsh, everyone wore protective, sun-bleached outerwear. Now though, with the night dark and cool around her, Fayden removed her cloaks and boots and set them by the door of the tent. She sat cross-legged on the oriental rug spread over the floor, no longer a shapeless, covered thing but looking like the young girl she was. Her long blonde dreadlocks fell to her waist, tied back from her face with a silk band. Most of her clothes were the expected, practical, sand-colored wears, from her linen pants, cotton skirt to her hand-knit shirt, but the brown cinch and gold-threaded kilt were a surprise. It was the sort of craftsmanship that had once come out of Boeshane.

She sat still for a time, listening to the jumble of noises that wafted in from outside. Sounds of happiness. Fayden might not have been joining in physically, as most probably thought the twenty-year-old should be doing, but she was glad enough for them. She'd seen some of the confused looks from the new acquisitions when they saw her, saw how young she was, how she hardly took anything for herself. That wasn't how bandit clans worked, the leader always took the biggest cut and was always the first one to escape that dust bowl of a planet.

In Fayden's clan, things worked differently. Her followers were always the first ones to get their families away and starting a new life, on a better rock. In fact, in about three months time, odds were that her clan would be made up of a whole new set of faces, following her lead. She used her brain and an academy knowledge of technology to get them rich and away from Ananda. They loved her for that, they respected her for that, but what they didn't realize was that Fayden Amorisha hadn't left Ananda yet because she was brimming with an inhuman amount of altruism. She just wasn't done yet.

A few more moments passed, before she opened her eyes and looked down at the meager pile of goods in front of her. She smiled, reaching over to where her cloak lay and pulling her scanner out of a pocket. Carefully she picked through each item, scanning it over to make sure it really was from where she thought it was. The DNA scanner was set to pick up a very distinct mix…a certain kind of sand, a certain level of folic acid in wooden items, certain remnants from certain immunizations that any biological matter would have, etc. All of these things together would mean that an item had originally come from one place. Her place, her home, her Boeshane Peninsula.

They weren't the most expensive items in the haul, usually, unless it was something that was obviously of Boe craftsmanship such as the fabric of her kilt, or driftwood jewelry, the sorts of things she'd grown up watching her mother and her neighbors make and sell to merchants. Those would catch anyone a good price at a space market, the rarity had gone up after all. But it wasn't the monetary value that concerned Fayden. Which was why, in amongst a few priceless sea glass necklaces at her feet, there was also an old plastic doll, a splintery cricket bat, and a glass jar full of sand.

She opened up the trunk which sat opposite her, and tucked these items all away inside, pausing as she lifted one of the necklaces. The wire had broken, and the beads would soon fall off. Carefully, the pirate opened the jar of sand and let the beads fall inside. Grinning to herself, she saved one of the bigger beads, holding it up to the light of her lantern. The sea glass shone blue-green in the light, reminding her of oceans and waves and the bright blue eyes of her mother. Fayden pulled one of her dreadlocks forward and strung the bead onto it, twisting and nipping the hair around it so it would stay. Glancing in a stained mirror propped up on the trunk, she inspected the effect. In amongst all the other odds and bobs hanging in her hair (magpie's nest, one of her fellow pirates had called it), she thought it looked nice.

Shutting the trunk, Fayden sighed, removing her cinch and skirts and then lying down on her cot. She was finding less and less as the weeks went by, and she'd robbed nearly every baron on this hemisphere over the last year and a half. She'd have to start moving to the other side of the world soon…but there wasn't much there, on the dark side, only a handful of settlements run by the rich. Even so, she would check each one, and she would rob them blind. Ananda housed a good chunk of the greedy people who'd picked the bones of Boeshane after the tragedy, instead of using their money to help the survivors. Fayden figured she was just doing what the law didn't, this side of the universe.

And after she was done on Ananda…she didn't know what. Fayden decided she would deal with that hurdle when it came. Maybe start putting away a little coin for herself, but that was all the planning she felt like doing. She had her objective…and that was taking back home. With that thought in her head, she turned off her lantern, pulled her wool blanket up over her shoulders, and willed herself to sleep.

Every night they were the same dreams, the same faces, the same places. The blinding suns, the dazzling seas, the unified housing that outsiders always thought looked so cold. To Fayden, they just looked like home. She dreamed of being small, sitting on the dunes and burying her feet in the sand. She dreamed of falling asleep to the sound of the wind grinding sand and salt water against the stone walls outside.

She dreamed of watching her mother sit at the loom, threading fibers of gold and silk and cotton. She dreamed of watching the big boys play cricket games on the beach, of birds, of salty water.

She dreamed of the days when people started dying. She dreamed of the days after, when no one came to help. She dreamed of the day she watched him leave, seventeen and solemn, while she sat on the driftwood waving, twelve and all ankles and elbows. She thought of how he never came back. None of them came back. One by one they died or moved away, and none of them ever came back. It was as if they wanted to forget, to pretend that pointless little colony was nothing but a bad memory, a bad place, a heartbreak place…

She is 16 and her mother has died and there's no one left in the settlement and they always talked about how proud they were of one of their boys making something of himself but he never came back no one ever comes back and her mother's gone and who will take care of me now and everyone's dead and gone….

Fayden sat up with a thudding heart, shaking limbs. Shades and sensations faded into the darker corners of her mind.

She hated those dreams. But she supposed it was tradeoff, all those things that looked and smelled like home and brought her such joy to see had to have a side effect of some sort. Looking at the hazy blue light that seeped in around the edges of her tent, Fayden noted that it was almost dawn. A good time to be awake.

Without giving her dreams and memories another moment of thought, Fayden took a deep breath and calmed herself, her face becoming hard and expressionless, and too old for her youthful features. There were things to do, and a whole camp of people to move. It was time to start the day.

Author's Notes: Reviews are nice, be kind to me! Next chapter: Thievery, Murder, The Hazards Of Poulated Planets (Even If They Do Smell Better) and Why We Do Not Try To Pick The Pockets Of Rose Tyler.