Now Turns the Rolling of the Years

Tags

completed stories, cuteness, doctor who, eight is adorable and no one can deny it, fanfiction, humor, original stories, short stories

Now Turns the Rolling of the Years

                New Year’s Day, the year of Our Lord 2000, San Francisco. Just after midnight.

As Chang Lee ran off, the Doctor gave Grace a slightly shy smile. “It’s a bit cold for California, isn’t it?” he asked apologetically. Grace couldn’t help laughing.

“It’s just after midnight, and it’s winter time,” she pointed out. The Doctor slid out of the borrowed frock coat and draped it over her shoulders. It fit her just about as well as it did him.

“Maybe… before I go… would you like to get some hot chocolate?” he asked, hopefully, absently tucking a lock of chestnut hair behind one ear. Grace couldn’t find the heart to deny that wide-eyed, innocent look.

“Where are we going to find hot chocolate in the small hours of the morning on New Year’s Day?” she replied, not wanting to dash his hopes. The Doctor shrugged. The cool air didn’t seem to bother him at all, in shirtsleeves and vest as he was.

“I don’t know yet,” he said with a laugh, and offered her his arm.

---

 

Small groups of people made their way through the streets, cheering and blowing on party horns. At one street corner, Grace awkwardly accepted a pointed party hat that proudly read “2000” from an older man who seemed to be determined to make sure that everyone was enjoying themselves. The Doctor looked in dismay at his own small plastic top hat. “I need bobby pins,” he announced to the whole street. Grace winced, but fortunately no one took any notice. She took the hat from him.

“Here, let me show you how it’s done…” She snapped the elastic under his chin, tipping the hat at a jaunty angle. Tugging on the elastic to keep it from biting into his skin, the Doctor gave her a look of pure horror.

“You can not be serious,” he pronounced solemnly. Grace had to swallow down a laugh. The Doctor took the hat off and handed it to a young woman who happened to be passing by. “Humans are so strange,” he said. This time, Grace couldn’t help but laugh.

The next street over, they met with a group of drunks who, while harmless enough, tried to take them along with them. They ran through the snowless streets, the Doctor laughing merrily and Grace struggling to keep up. It was too easy to evade their pursuers.

Around the next corner was a small shop, still open, though there was no one inside. They stepped inside to catch their breath, and the girl at the counter, who had been dozing, started awake to the jingle of the bell. “Are you alone sleeping in this city of wakeful revelers?” the Doctor asked her, in fine dramatic style. The girl blinked at him, as if she thought she was dreaming still.

“What can I get for you tonight?” she asked, yawning. “We’re all out of most things, but we might be able to rustle something up.”

“Do you have hot chocolate?” the Doctor asked. Grace blinked at him. She’d forgotten the reason for their expedition. The girl nodded.

“It’ll be a moment. I have to heat up the milk.”

“May we come into the kitchen?” the Doctor asked mildly. Grace poked him.

“That’s rude,” she said firmly. The Doctor gave her a startled look. The girl raised her hand placatingly, yawning.

“It’s too late—or too early—for manners,” she said. “It’s warmer back there anyway. Come on.”

The kitchen was clean, neat, and utterly unremarkable, but cosy—a home kitchen made over for commercial purposes. An old-fashioned cross-stitch circle hung on one wall, proclaiming “Remember to Smile!” in bright colors. The girl yawned again as she stepped into the industrial refrigerator, emerging with a gallon of reduced-fat milk. She produced dark chocolate powder and crushed peppermints from a pantry.

“Not much business for a late night,” the Doctor observed. The girl yawned, once more.

“There never is,” she said. “But tonight they’re all at the bars. Which is nice, but I’d still rather go home. I was planning to sleep rather than wait for the ball to drop—until I got called in to work, of course.” Grace mouthed ‘I told you so’ at the Doctor. He gave her a wide-eyed look that clearly said ‘I found us somewhere with hot chocolate, didn’t I?’

“What’s your name?” the Doctor asked. The girl blinked at him, her hand frozen with the measuring spoons halfway out of the chocolate box. She smiled.

“Kaitlyn. Though, you could have looked at the name tag,” she said.

“I had to wear one of those for half a day once, years ago, back home,” the Doctor said conversationally. “There’s nothing quite as hearts-stopping as being addressed by your own name by people you don’t know at all. In the end I switched it for one with a name I’d made up. It was less terrifying that way.” Grace blinked. Here she’d been pumping the Doctor for any meaningful scrap of information about himself ever since she’d started talking to him, and now he gave the cashier at a little shop more than he’d given her the entire time. Kaitlyn smiled. “I’m the Doctor, by the way,” the Doctor said gently. Not to be outdone, Grace smiled her brightest.

“And I’m Grace.”

“You’ve got good taste,” Kaitlyn said, smiling at both of them. “Best hot chocolate in San Francisco—though I might be biased.” The Doctor laughed.

“Make that three cups, please,” he said. “My treat.”

On New Year’s Eve, Grace had met the most remarkable man she would ever know and had a bewildering adventure that no one would ever believe. On New Year’s Day, she sat in the back room of a small café, drinking hot chocolate with two people who might have been total strangers before, but whom she now felt as if she’d known all her life.

It was the little things in life, Grace realized, that she’d been missing all along; her love of opera, discovered anew (Kaitlyn was partial to Wagner), new friends, a cup of the best hot chocolate in San Francisco. They laughed together, sharing small stories and big dreams well past three o’clock.

On the last day of 1999, Grace Holloway had the biggest adventure of her life. On the first day of 2000, she had the second biggest.

She would never forget either one.

---

Hopefully you enjoyed my little New Years’ special!

It was inspired by the fact that the 1996 movie takes place around 1999/NewYear’s 2000, and is slightly AU to the end of the film. Not all adventures are scary!

Thanks for reading, thanks for sticking with me throughout 2015, and may God bless you in 2016!

See you all in the new year! 😀

 

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Sherlock Holmes Meta

Tags

i clearly do not know what i am doing at all, meta, sherlock holmes, sir arthur conan doyle, speculation

In “The Greek Interpreter,” Sherlock claims “Vernet, the French artist” as a relative–a grand-uncle, in fact. However, there are three Vernets who were known artists–Claude Joseph Vernet, his son Antoine Charles Horace Vernet, and his grandson Emile Jean-Horace Vernet. It’s unclear which one is Holmes’ grand-uncle.

However, looking at dates, we can make a pretty fair guess as to which Vernet Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was thinking of when he threw out this allusion.

Here, we’re going to make three assumptions:

1. The Vernet who is Holmes’ grand-uncle and his sister (Holmes’ grandmother) were relatively close in age. The sister was probably younger.
2. Holmes’ grandfather would be about the same age as the Vernet we’re looking for.
3. Holmes is in his late thirties or early forties during A Study in Scarlet, the first of Conan Doyle’s stories, which takes place in 1887. (There is probably something to either verify or reject this assumption somewhere in the canon, but I have never noticed it and can’t be bothered to go looking through well over a thousand pages of short stories for it.)

Emile Jean-Horace Vernet was born in 1789 and died in 1863. Assuming Holmes is in his forties during Study in Scarlet, that would put Holmes’ birth date at around 1850. Estimating generation gaps at about forty or fifty years, this Vernet is one or two decades older than Holmes’ father. (It is more likely, given the seven-year age gap between Sherlock and Mycroft, that it’s more like fifty years between Sherlock and his father.)

Moving backward, Antoine Charles Horace Vernet was born 1758, died 1836. Wikipedia states that this Vernet was the youngest of his siblings. His sister is probably the Holmes grandmother, albeit she’d have to have been in her forties (unusually late for a marriage) before Holmes’ father was born.

Their father, Claude Joseph Vernet, 1714-1789, was also an artist. With a great-grandfather, a grand-uncle, and a first cousin once removed all artists, it must have made for some interesting family reunions.

Quick disclaimer: I am by no means a Holmes scholar, and I am not a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, so I really know practically nothing at all on this topic. Feel free to set me straight.

I hope this has been an interesting read, it really has no bearing on anything I’m supposed to be working on right now. I just did it for fun.

Thanks for reading, and God Bless!

Escape

Tags

c.s. forester, completed stories, doctor who, fanfiction, horatio hornblower, original stories, science fiction, short stories, yaaaay bush is awesome

I’m supposed to be working on the script for our Doctor Who fan production. Shame on me. But Paul McGann plays both the Doctor (the eighth one) and Lieutenant Bush and Bush in the movies just has this sort of wry, understated humor that was absolutely fantastic and I was sort of daydreaming and then this plot bunny came up. (Hornblower and Bush make such a dynamic team and are such awesome friends and if you dare to disagree with me I will find you and feed you to the Kraken.)

If you were wondering, this actually references some events from the books but is closer to the movies for characterization.

I give you: the Hornblower final frontier resistance AU you never knew you wanted! Late merry Christmas (and especially you, WriteFury! 😉 )

---

Escape

                I am determinedly angry today.

I would say I’ve never been this angry in my life before, but I’ve been angrier. There were bullies in the group home I grew up in and I learned righteous anger early. I still haven’t learned prudence, it seems.

But this morning I woke up, remembered, and decided to hold on to that anger. I am not going to die of gangrene here. There is no British Empire any more, and some would argue that there’s no reason to fight any more. That’s another thing I always have been, though—stubborn. Stubborn as an Old Earth mule.

I wouldn’t know an Old Earth mule if one fell on me out of an apple tree—which is another thing I have never seen. Child of the Frontier, me. Born and abandoned on Proxima Centauri X, the planet no one bothered to name, just numbering it after its star. I don’t even know if I’m remotely British in extraction. But the cause sounded right to me, and that’s why I’m here, right now—William Bush, Third Lieutenant of the HMS Resistance—before it was destroyed. Not even a citizen. And now a prisoner of war. Though Napoleon’s new Empire—New France, though it’s really only a pretense at a culture no one really remembers any more—wouldn’t call it that. To them, we’re anarchist upstarts.

The door creaks open and I look up, though there’s really only one person it could be. It’s a two-room suite in a prison that used to be a hotel, and the front room door has been sealed for the past few weeks, ever since they threw us in here and forgot about us. It’s not so bad… except that Horatio keeps banging on that front door and shouting that we need a doctor.

He might as well not waste his strength or wear his voice out. There is no one coming. The men out there—our jailers—aren’t even military men. They don’t have the same ancient code that we try to uphold. No civilian really understands a soldier. It’s a basic truth of the universe. Their security systems—stolen and smuggled out of Ganymede, no doubt—are good, but nothing else about this place is. They probably haven’t even posted regular guards. Horatio’s clever and I have almost twenty-four years of experience. We’ll find a way out of here.

Just as soon as my leg heals and provided I can fight off any infections that I’ll doubtless contract with no medical care.

Horatio Hornblower, twenty-three, from the Mars colony. Absolutely British, right down to the core. If I’m fighting because the cause was one I could believe in, he’s fighting for his home and the memory of his family. Not that he ever talks about them, but he had one. His father was a doctor who knew a Captain Keene, and I guess it must have seemed like the thing to do at the time.

He’s looking at me now. What is that expression? Is it concern or pity? I don’t want pity. I have no use for it.

“How are you doing?”

It’s almost like he’s never seen an injured man before. No, that’s not entirely accurate. This was… a friend, I guess, though we sort of empathized with each other, in passing—this is the first time we’ve ever had a sustained conversation. It’s rather pathetic, really—almost like he’s never had an actual friend in his life. Or like he’s not quite sure what he’d do if he found one.

“I’m going to heal, and we’re going to escape,” I say firmly. He nods, doubtfully.

“It looks bad.”

“I’m still going to survive. I’ve decided I’m not dying here, and I’m not about to change my mind.” That surprises a sort of snort out of him, and it’s a little bit funny.

“You know, there were veterans of the Taurus civil war, back at home… On Earth, they make prostheses. Good ones, too,” Horatio says hesitantly. I give him a level look.

“I hacked their Ethernet on our first day here. Those get bugs on almost a daily basis. No, I’m going with wood—something I can rely on. I am going to learn to walk again.” There’s a sort of admiration in his smile.

“How long do you think you’ll be?” he asks, sounding a bit less awkward, a bit more considerate, a bit more compassionate, and much more human. He sits down—backwards—on one of the ladder-backed chairs and laces his fingers, resting them on the top slat and his chin on them, brown eyes boring into me. I smile.

“I can’t say exactly, but I’m determined that it’s going to be less than a week,” I say firmly. He smiles.

“I have an idea for us to escape.”

This I Beheld (Or Dreamed It In A Dream)

Tags

completed stories, doctor who, everything, fanfiction, i regret everything, short stories

There’s some pretty messed up stuff in my files that has to do with Doctor Who. Lots of angsty stuff which needs lots of trigger warnings about self-hate. But this is the first time I’ve tried it with the Eighth Doctor. (Ten is so the king of angst…)

This is the result of things like Ten being angsty, me writing a script with Eight, weird things happening to Eight (1996-2005 was a very experimental era for Doctor Who allright, because there was no TV show running, just novels and an audio drama series), Eight getting whumped (IN CANON!), etc…

Blend it all for thirty seconds and then pour it all out on paper. That’s what this is.

I hope you enjoy… I don’t know if anyone will even relate… I don’t know if any of my followers even know the Eighth Doctor… or Grace Holloway… but this is AU since Grace decided not to travel with the Doctor. (Also, she’s a copyright problem… it’s complicated.)

Anyway, enjoy…

If you can…

*sinister laughter*

---

This I Beheld (Or Dreamed It In A Dream)

                Grace blinked. Where was she? She couldn’t tell. Wherever it was, it was white, all white, too bright for her eyes to ever adjust… It wasn’t the light. There was no light. No darkness, either. Just white. It might have been black or gray, come to think of it. It was simple, blank space, a psychic blank space—now where had she heard that before?

But there were messages, too. Writing, all over the four square walls. The floor, also, the ceiling too. There were no doors or windows; no furniture. Just messages.

HELP ME STOP ME SAVE ME PLEASE PLEASE

Over and over again.

HELP ME STOP ME SAVE ME

Grace blinked. It was all the same thing, somehow.

HELP ME STOP ME SAVE ME PLEASE PLEASE FORGIVE ME CONDEMN ME HELP ME PLEASE

The messages were not, so to speak, in contrast to the walls, just as the walls were not any color, not even white or black, just mental blank space. Pure information, sorted by her mind into this form as her brain strove to make sense of the extra-sensory data. This whole room wasn’t real, it was a simulation she had made for herself.

HELP ME STOP ME SAVE ME GRACE GRACE GRACE PLEASE LISTEN I’M TRYING TO TELL YOU JUST LET ME KNOW I NEED TO KNOW I NEED YOU I NEED YOU I NEED YOU

Grace blinked. Her mind was no longer assailed with the extra-sensory data, free to let her back into her own body, into what her senses were telling her. The Doctor stared back at her, his face pale, looking like one of those kids who’d been pulled off the street still trying to shake off the effects of a bad trip…

Was that all that had been? A bad trip?

Their hands were still linked, the cuts in their hands bleeding into each other, the obscene men who had forced them into this for the sake of their vile religion still lingering around the edges of the gray cell. Grace blinked, more slowly than before, her eyelids drifting closed and then open again. She saw the flash of recognition in his eyes.

Faster than human eyes could follow, with literally inhuman strength, the Doctor flipped the table over, heaving it through the mass of their captors and into the opposite wall. He gripped Grace’s unwounded hand firmly, his still slick with blood, and pulled her from the room before the men could react.

---

Grace gently wrapped the Doctor’s cut hand with gauze, despite the fact that it was already scabbing over by the time they got back to the TARDIS. She got up to put the medical kit away, but he snagged her sleeve neatly between two fingers. His blue eyes were mildly curious, completely guileless. “What did you see?” Grace shook her head and kept her mouth tightly shut.

Say what you might about secrets among friends, she thought. But she was too invested in the Doctor to tell him everything.

Strawberry-Pomegranate Smoothies

Tags

everyday adventures, food, recipes

I work at Sam’s Club now. One of the advantages is that I know a bunch of the special offers and such.

Like pomegranates.

I had never seen pomegranates at any sort of store before, so you bet I was intrigued! I asked my dad to buy some, and he did.

I had to go online to figure out how to seed the daft thing. It was a very sticky business, but the seeds were good. But there were a lot of them. At least two cups or so, and all this from one little pomegranate!

So I thought, hey, there’s yogurt in the fridge, why not make a smoothie?

Strawberry-Pomegranate Smoothies

Seeds of 1 pomegranate

1 cup yogurt

1 cup frozen strawberries

1/2 cup sugar (or to taste)

Basically what I did was to blend the pomegranate seeds with the yogurt until it was all incorporated, then add the strawberries. I don’t know if pomegranates are “in season” but you might not have to sweeten it, or not sweeten it as much–this also depends on what kind of yogurt you use (I used plain yogurt. Vanilla yogurt is much sweeter.)

Anyway, so now if you have a pomegranate on your hands and are not quite sure how to eat it, you know what to do! 😉

Thanks for reading, and God Bless!

No Worries (Or Not): A College AU

Tags

c.s. forester, fanfiction, horatio hornblower, humor

Also known as “that one story where Horatio is the sarcastic freshman, William Bush is just trying to finish his gen-ed requirements before the end of 2016, and Archie is the popular sophomore who arranges campus events.” The trademarkedly unlikely trio gear up to defeat their deadliest enemy yet: Introductory Chemistry.

(Some notes before we begin: Horatio is majoring in mathematics [of course!], Archie’s major is structural engineering [because why not?] and William’s is history [don’t laugh.])

No Worries (Or Not): Chapter One

“Right. Favorite book.” Archie looked down the list, pushing his glasses up on his nose.

“A Tale of Two Cities,” Horatio said, without looking up from the chemistry textbook.

“I’m not sure. It’s probably Northanger Abbey. Because of the satiric element,” William explained.

“I like Out of the Silent Planet. Favorite movie?”

“Pass,” Horatio said, scribbling angrily in the margins of the textbook. There was no anger in his voice, either at them or at the book.

“Star Wars.” William glared at Archie as the latter snorted. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing! I liked How to Train Your Dragon. How many siblings?”

“Four. And before you ask, all sisters. I’m right smack dab in the middle. And no, I do not like being called ‘Billy.’” William glared at the other two.

“Ha! I have six. Oldest.”

“I’m an only child,” Horatio muttered.

“That’s sad,” Archie remarked.

“Why?” Horatio looked up at him. “It’s not as if I’m at college to run away from anything. I’m here because there’s nothing else to do.”

“I don’t think that’s relevant,” William said, trying to keep the peace.

“Which question?” Horatio asked. William ran a hand over his face.

“You should do forensics.”

“Oh no,” Horatio said, swallowing visibly. “I don’t even test well. What makes you think I could speak in public?”

“Greek,” Archie said succinctly.

“Just because I tried to read Aristotle in the original language does not mean that I’d be good at public speaking or debate,” Horatio protested.

“Moving on… this is the topic that will never be raised again unless we wish it. Religion. I’m actually Catholic.”

“Ordinary, run-of-the-mill Anglican.”

“Um… my mother was Jewish… and we spend a lot of time with her family, Father and I. So we’re sort of Jewish Christian,” Horatio said.

“You don’t have to be ashamed of it,” Archie said. Horatio smiled, a shy smile, William thought.

“You should hear the debates over the Torah,” he said. “It’s actually pretty fun. Especially Cousin Jack. Everyone loves to rile him up.”

“Favorite color. Blue.”

“Blue.”

“Blue.” The other two looked at Horatio, wondering if the freshman had just been unintentionally echoing them. He looked up at them with a raised eyebrow.

“Okay. That concludes that. Now, this is Rule One. As far as this study group is concerned, your sexual orientation is ‘None Of Your Business.’”

“Good, because I wasn’t planning on telling you mine, either,” Horatio said. William sighed.