Title: Petals of Time
Author: June
Rating: M
Summary: It's the ultimate cliché in MandC (or rather, Aubrey-Maturin series) fan fiction: a twentieth century girl, aged nineteen, miraculously ends up in 1805 and sails off to the East Indies posing as a fifteen year old Ship's Boy on H.M.S. Surprise. Along the way she encounters war in all its gruesome reality, copious amounts of weevils, and a certain blue-eyed Captain who upon the discovery of her secret shows more than a little interest. So, yes, it's the ultimate cliché. Why write it anyway? Because I've been wanting to indulge myself in this story, and I hope to be able to write it well.
Chapter: 2?
Pairings: eventually Jack/OFC
Disclaimer: don't own any of Patrick O'Brian marvelous characters, do own Joanne I suppose.
Author's Notes: There's no need to tell me the OFC in this story could well be named Mary Sue instead of Joanne. I actually considered naming her Mary Sue in order to forego any comments pointing out the obvious. I'm also sure I could come up with something more original than this eternally rehashed and not to mention implausible plot, and in fact I have under another pen name, but I just wanted to have some fun writing this. As for the technicalities – this is mixed bookverse and movieverse. Some of it is H.M.S. Surprise (the book), but a lot of it also isn't, and there will probably be some movieverse seeping in here and there, as well as possible mix-ups of timelines and chronology.
Chapter 2: The Crown
The first thing she noticed were the sails. Hundreds of patches of brilliant white, some triangular and near, some mere specks in the distance, reflecting the sunlight in the port. It was impossible, of course, for less than a second before the dark water had carried nothing but the bright coloured ferry to France and the great clunk of grey iron that was one of the Royal Navy's biggest aircraft carriers.
The strangest thing of it all was that there had been nothing strange about the moment. Nothing to distinguish that one split second in which everything, her entire world, had changed from the second preceding it or the second that followed. There had been no thunder, no whirlwind, no inexplicable pull that grabbed and her and spit her out in some undefined past time. She hadn't lost consciousness or fallen asleep to wake up in this strange place. Perhaps she had blinked, but if she had, she had not noticed it. All Joanne had noticed was that suddenly everything she knew was gone.
The first ten minutes or so she merely stood and gaped. The people walking down the dock were different. It wasn't simply that their clothes were different, old-fashioned, Jane-Austen-like, but their faces were different. Strange, unknown. She couldn't put her finger on what it was that made them so different from the faces she knew, for they seemed at once more drawn and worriesome as well more innocent, somehow. She gaped at the many sailors running about the place, the ships, the sounds of the dockyard and the smell of tar around her, the salty and most of all clean taste of the air, taking all of it in, in utter disbelieve. After she had ruled out the possibilities of a film set and the most eleborate prank in the history of candid camera, came the fear.
Joanne had come to Portsmouth to visit an internet friend, a girl her own age, nineteen, whom she had met on a penpal website and with whom she had exchanged emails for nearly six months prior to her trip. They had planned to take the three-hour ferry to Calais together and spend a day shopping there. It would've been an adventure, but the adventure Joanne found herself unwillingly caught up in now was much more than she had ever bargained for.
The next two hours or so she spend sitting on the cobble stones by the side of the street, staring at the spectacle in front of her. The ferry building, gone, the fish and chips stand, gone, the buildings from before, gone, everything replaced with dockyard activity such as it must have been in the days of that old Portsmouth museum ship, the Victory, which her friend Louise had told her they must visit while she was in town. The ship wasn't there now, either, of course. Joanne sat and waited for things to change back to normal, but they didn't. At last the sun began to set on the horizon and she got up, fear weighing heavily on her empty stomach, and dusted off her pair of baggy blue jeans. Het throat constricted painfully and she quickly took a few deep breaths to keep herself from crying.
After another minute or so she felt ready to take in her immediate surroundings again, this time with a more practical aim: she needed to find a refuge. She found it in one of the buildings behind her, which she had noticed as soon as she had gotten off the National Express bus on the docks in her own time. "The Lady Hamilton", the small hotel and pub had been called back when everything had been normal. Now the heavy sign outside the door read "The Crown," but it was still the same place. She pushed open the door and entered the dim-lit pub.
"Hello lad," the thick-set woman behind the bar called as she approached. Joanne was too confused to be insulted, and it wasn't until she had settled into a small bedroom up two flights of stairs that she realised her jeans, shirt and half-long hair apparently made people almost automatically classify her as a boy in this age. For that was the one thing that had become clear to her rather quickly: somehow, impossibly, she had ended up in a time not her own, hundreds of years ago. Reasoning that this glitch in time had to be rectified sooner or later, she figured that if she could stick it out here for a little while she would just as suddenly find herself back in her own day.
Having no money, it cost Joanne her thin gold necklace, a gift from her parents and very dear to her, to secure room and boarding for five days. But as she knew so little about the age she now found herself temporarily stranded in that she did not even know whether she had been ripped off or given a deal, she felt the room was more than necessary to pass the waiting time until she would return to 2005. To calm her still raging nerves, she half-heartedly convinced herself it could not possibly be very long before that would happen.
Even in the dead of night the docks were far from quiet, with cries and laughs of the people in the streets, often drunken sailors, filling the air. Joanne slept restlessly, waking every hour or so and feeling alone and sorry for herself. The next morning however her mood changed considerably. The sun was shining, making the water of the port outside her window sparkle happily, and the breakfast prepared for her by the inn-keeper's wife, though somewhat coarse to her twentieth century taste, provided some much-needed filling of her growling stomach. Convinced that she would soon go home, Joanne decided she might as well take some time to explore this old city.
