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Dec. 12th, 2007 10:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seikilosTitle: Loose Ends
Fandom: Doctor Who
Genre: Introspective
Rating: PG
Words: 2612
Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who.
Summary: After she says goodbye to the Doctor for good, Grace cleans up what's left behind.
Spoilers? For the entire TV movie from start to finish.
Author's Notes: This smacked me up the head like a two-by-four a couple of days ago, so, not being one to ignore such things, I wrote it. It wasn't at all what I expected my first fic for Doctor Who to be, but who am I to argue with inspiration?
The working title for this was "Pieces O' Eight," although I ended up going for the less amusing "Loose Ends." I still should've given into temptation. :P
Anyway, enjoy?
If, by some miracle, there was a part of Dr. Grace Holloway that had yet to believe that the curly-haired man wearing her boyfriend's—ex-boyfriend's—shoes was an alien from outer space, the sight of his blue box fading in and out of view would have been enough to make that part silently slip away into the December night.
He had walked inside after turning back and giving her a small smile. She had waved, he had walked inside, and a kind of hoarse, grinding noise had risen above the pop and whistle of the fireworks overhead. And that was that.
Grace gave a small sigh as she stood there by the ornamental pond, just looking at where the box had been.
If life were a book or a movie, it would be about now she would wonder if it had all been a dream.
She shook her head slightly, but couldn't quite resist taking one step, then another, until she was standing just in front of where the Doctor's blue box had been. She lifted one hand and reached, almost expecting to feel painted wood. Instead, her fingers kept going, meeting no resistance, until her whole hand was inside the space where the box had been.
Now she felt foolish—standing in a park on the first minutes of the new millennium with her arm in the air, feeling around for something that wasn't there. She glanced about a bit, her face heating up, then gingerly let her arm drop when she saw no one.
“Well,” she said aloud as fireworks lit the ground and the pond in front of her, red, blue, and green, “I'd better get home.”
Home wasn't far. The Doctor had been courteous enough to set them down at the other end of the park near her house. It wasn't much more than a ten- or fifteen-minute walk to where she could . . . sit down and try to figure out where she stood.
Because she couldn't just slip back into her routine, she knew, beginning to walk the path that circled the ornamental pond. You couldn't have a—an alien encounter, she thought with a smile, and then walk home, have a snack, and go to bed.
She walked along with several glances at the sky, the air chilly on her face. Tonight, she didn't feel like complaining. In fact, she stopped, closed her eyes, and breathed in the cold, fresh air, welcoming it. After all, she had been dead not half an hour ago. Now that she was back, she was going to enjoy every single thing life had to offer her.
Her pager beeped at her belt and she opened her eyes to grimace. Okay, maybe she wouldn't enjoy that.
She picked it up and looked at the message. For some reason, Nancy in charge of scheduling felt the need to remind her to come in to work tomorrow morning at eight. She grimaced again. Probably because they weren't sure she'd want to, after killing a patient.
She shut off the pager, her eyes flickering toward the skies again and she had the sudden, strong urge to fling her pager into the ornamental pond. Then the urge passed and she felt more than a little childish.
Anyway, the pond was a five-minute walk back.
When she arrived home, she unlocked the door, then stopped. One last look at the star-sprinkled sky, and she wondered, as she would too many times over the years, if she had made the right decision. Dropping everything to have adventures in a time-travelling spaceship with a crazy, gorgeous alien sounded great, but . . . it wasn't realistic. It was the sort of thing kids dreamed about, but Grace wasn't a child anymore—even if tonight, she had been given back the youthful hope she'd had years ago.
Now it was time to take her life and put it back together. The Doctor had shown her everything that had been wrong with it, all the little things that had crept in over the years when she had been too busy to notice, and it was her job to do some spring cleaning.
She pushed open the door to her house and then groaned as she was greeted with another kind of spring cleaning altogether. Brian's stuff was still gone, including, yes, the sofa.
She sighed, and the sound had a lonely echo to it. Suddenly, her house looked too big—embarrassingly so. With only her things, carelessly collected whenever she had time off (which hadn't been often), the effect was stark and depressing.
Well, then, she'd just have to sell the house.
She blinked. Where had that come from? She wasn't one for snap decisions or spontaneity, but . . . it felt right. It felt like what she should do.
She had a feeling the Doctor would approve.
She walked around, her footsteps echoing on the hardwood floor, drawing attention to the house's ridiculous size. Why had she thought she and Brian needed a place this big if they spent almost no time in it? She worked full time, overtime, even, and he had work of his own. A house this big was more like a museum than anything else.
She stopped right where the sofa had been and crossed her arms, looking around. She was going to have a lot of work to do, selling this place. For one, she was going to have to talk to Brian about it—he had a share in it, too.
Grace let out a breath through her nose. There were so many things she should be feeling about the end of a long-term relationship, and she just couldn't manage any of them. She couldn't even feel anything more than a twinge of annoyance at the man for moving out without saying so much as a single word to her.
Of course, it wasn't as though she hadn't seen it coming. She'd always been called to work in the middle of their time together, and work had always taken precedence. Her gaze dropped to her belt. She couldn't even remember the last time her pager had been off.
And so Brian, being an ordinary man, had put up with it until he hadn't, because he was tired of coming second to the emergency of the day.
She smiled a bit. Brian. Ordinarily nice, ordinarily patient, ordinarily thoughtful, ordinarily good-looking, and ordinarily good in bed.
A face with an unbearably sweet smile and a pair of bright blue eyes appeared in her mind, and along with them came the feeling that it would be a long time before she'd be interested in dating again.
She shook her head. Daydreaming. That wasn't going to sell the house.
Her gaze moved further into the house, into the breakfast area where she had herded the strange man who had followed her home, insisting he had two hearts. Almost without realising it, her feet followed her eyes until she was standing in front of the chair at which he had sat, shirt open, cravat hung around his neck, brown curls frizzing around his beautiful face.
She picked up the stethoscope she had dropped on the table and remembered the feel of long cold fingers curling around hers—artist's hands, she had thought distractedly, but really, she had felt warmer hands in the morgue—moving the stethoscope from the left side of his chest to the right. What had been a dangerous fibrillation was transformed into a miracle, though at the time she hadn't realised how much of a miracle it was.
Her fingers curled around the bell of the stethoscope. There was so much in here that reminded her of him. The figurine he had played with when he told her that she would do great things. She hadn't believed him then, of course, not after he had told her that he had come back from the dead and had thirteen lives. Now, she wasn't at all sure what to think.
Her gaze flickered up to the reproduction of a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci. She'd accused him of name-dropping, but—my god, he must have actually have been there after all. She'd travelled back in time with him; only a few hours, but that little impossibility was all she needed to be convinced of a much bigger one.
She tore her eyes away only to have them glance off the stereo and land on the CD of Madama Butterfly.
“I was with Puccini before he died!”
Grace had another feeling. This one said she would be listening to that CD more than a few times in the days to come.
She set down the stethoscope, then walked to the top of the stairs, feeling a bit aimless and wondering what to do now. She almost laughed aloud when one of the suggestions her mind turned up was “have a snack.”
Instead, she decided to tidy up and prepare for any potential buyers. Never mind it was about one in the morning; it had to get done sometime. As she started at one end of the main room, she tried to remember as much as she could from the tail-ends of home-selling shows she had watched while waiting for something else to come on. Were white walls an advantage or disadvantage? Should she consider painting them?
She couldn't remember much, but the one thing she did know was buyers liked houses with furniture in them. She sighed again. She'd have to rent some; she doubted she could convince Brian to put his back long enough to sell the place.
There was depressingly little to clean, and it didn't take her long to work her way to the end of the room where she kept her microscope and other supplies. At least Brian had had the good sense not to touch those.
She paused, duster in one hand as she frowned at the microscope. That was where she had examined a sample of the Doctor's blood. In fact, if she remembered correctly. . . .
She slid into the seat and peered in. Still there. She had been too frustrated to slip the slide out when she had gone for a walk with the crazy man with two hearts and her ex-boyfriend's shoes.
She still didn't know if he had been humouring her when he let her take the sample. Maybe he had been. Maybe he'd thought it would help him remember, although she was getting the impression that even despite his gentle patience, he hadn't thought it would do much good. It hadn't, come to think of it, but Grace was a doctor, and at that point, she had been clinging to the practical as hard as she could.
She smiled a bit, looking at the blood that wasn't at all human. A fat lot of good that had done.
She found herself wondering if she could get the sample sent off for some testing, then abruptly sat back in her chair, away from the microscope. No. She couldn't. They'd want to know where she'd gotten it from, who had blood so remarkable. There would be questions and an inquiry, and even if they'd never find the Doctor in a million years, she, the other doctor, wasn't quite so hard to track down.
She had to get rid of it. She slid the sample out of the clips that held it to the base and fisted it in her hand. Think, she had to think. What other evidence had the Doctor left behind?
There was the X-ray film with his two hearts, the “double exposure” that had gotten her into so much trouble. That was gone; her supervisor had burnt it right in front of her eyes. There might be extra copies, though, if the X-ray techs had thought they had made a mistake—she'd have to find those in the morning and burn them too.
No body to worry about, she thought with a sort of amused grimace. That had taken care of itself.
The edge of the sample plate was biting into the palm of her hand; she relaxed her grip slightly. Aside from the snapped-off probe that had emerged from the Doctor's chest (and where in the world had he put that, anyway?), they were fine. She was fine.
She let out a breath. “All right, Grace. You can do this. Just—worry about finding the last of the film tomorrow, when you go to work.”
That brought her up short. Work—how the hell was she supposed to go to work tomorrow? For a moment, the sound of the monitor flatlining and the Doctor's dying scream filled her head, and she dropped the sample on the table, rubbing her eyes and smearing yesterday's mascara onto her palms and cheeks.
She wasn't going back to the hospital, that was for sure. Especially if the way they dealt with the death of a patient was by covering it up.
She looked up, and her eyes landed on the blood sample. An unhappy smile stretched her lips. Her supervisor hadn't believed her when she had threatened to quit. Boy, was he in for a surprise.
She'd find someplace else to work—someplace a lot less corrupt. There was more than one hospital in San Francisco; she'd have no trouble finding work. In some places, they'd kill for a cardiologist with her experience.
She heard the monitor flatlining again and winced. Okay, maybe that had been a bad choice of words.
The chime of her clock interrupted her thoughts. One thirty in the morning. She could feel her body slowly coming off the adrenaline high that had sustained her for nearly twenty-four hours. For all she had felt strange thinking about coming home, having a snack, and going to bed, it was time to do just that.
Her lips pulled back in something like a smile once more. After all, she'd killed a patient, been accosted by a crazy in the parking lot who'd turned out to be her resurrected patient, been dumped by her boyfriend, died, come back from the dead, helped save the world, travelled in time, and made out with an alien. Her smile widened, became realer. Twice. . . . Well, okay, one-and-a-half times—the last one didn't really count as “making out.” She sighed slightly. That had been goodbye.
Still, she thought as she turned out the lights and headed for her bedroom, it had been one hell of a day. It was definitely time to go to bed.
Provided Brian had left her a place to sleep, at any rate.
*
Six hours later, Grace woke up again. She nearly made herself a cup of coffee, then decided against it. She'd sound more convincingly sick before her coffee, not afterwards.
She made the call, and Nancy had sounded a bit too close to pitying for talking to someone who'd supposedly come down with the twenty-four hour flu. It was pretty obvious she was sure she knew why Grace wasn't coming to work.
Wouldn't she be surprised? Grace thought as she did her best to sound as pathetic as possible.
That done, she made herself a cup of coffee and paused next to her stereo. Her gaze shifted to the Puccini CD, and she found herself picking it up without thinking.
Well . . . why not? It would serve as a comfort—and a reminder.
With the opening notes of Madama Butterfly floating through the house that would soon no longer be hers, Dr. Grace Holloway walked downstairs and started up her computer, ready to update her résumé.
Fandom: Doctor Who
Genre: Introspective
Rating: PG
Words: 2612
Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who.
Summary: After she says goodbye to the Doctor for good, Grace cleans up what's left behind.
Spoilers? For the entire TV movie from start to finish.
Author's Notes: This smacked me up the head like a two-by-four a couple of days ago, so, not being one to ignore such things, I wrote it. It wasn't at all what I expected my first fic for Doctor Who to be, but who am I to argue with inspiration?
The working title for this was "Pieces O' Eight," although I ended up going for the less amusing "Loose Ends." I still should've given into temptation. :P
Anyway, enjoy?
If, by some miracle, there was a part of Dr. Grace Holloway that had yet to believe that the curly-haired man wearing her boyfriend's—ex-boyfriend's—shoes was an alien from outer space, the sight of his blue box fading in and out of view would have been enough to make that part silently slip away into the December night.
He had walked inside after turning back and giving her a small smile. She had waved, he had walked inside, and a kind of hoarse, grinding noise had risen above the pop and whistle of the fireworks overhead. And that was that.
Grace gave a small sigh as she stood there by the ornamental pond, just looking at where the box had been.
If life were a book or a movie, it would be about now she would wonder if it had all been a dream.
She shook her head slightly, but couldn't quite resist taking one step, then another, until she was standing just in front of where the Doctor's blue box had been. She lifted one hand and reached, almost expecting to feel painted wood. Instead, her fingers kept going, meeting no resistance, until her whole hand was inside the space where the box had been.
Now she felt foolish—standing in a park on the first minutes of the new millennium with her arm in the air, feeling around for something that wasn't there. She glanced about a bit, her face heating up, then gingerly let her arm drop when she saw no one.
“Well,” she said aloud as fireworks lit the ground and the pond in front of her, red, blue, and green, “I'd better get home.”
Home wasn't far. The Doctor had been courteous enough to set them down at the other end of the park near her house. It wasn't much more than a ten- or fifteen-minute walk to where she could . . . sit down and try to figure out where she stood.
Because she couldn't just slip back into her routine, she knew, beginning to walk the path that circled the ornamental pond. You couldn't have a—an alien encounter, she thought with a smile, and then walk home, have a snack, and go to bed.
She walked along with several glances at the sky, the air chilly on her face. Tonight, she didn't feel like complaining. In fact, she stopped, closed her eyes, and breathed in the cold, fresh air, welcoming it. After all, she had been dead not half an hour ago. Now that she was back, she was going to enjoy every single thing life had to offer her.
Her pager beeped at her belt and she opened her eyes to grimace. Okay, maybe she wouldn't enjoy that.
She picked it up and looked at the message. For some reason, Nancy in charge of scheduling felt the need to remind her to come in to work tomorrow morning at eight. She grimaced again. Probably because they weren't sure she'd want to, after killing a patient.
She shut off the pager, her eyes flickering toward the skies again and she had the sudden, strong urge to fling her pager into the ornamental pond. Then the urge passed and she felt more than a little childish.
Anyway, the pond was a five-minute walk back.
When she arrived home, she unlocked the door, then stopped. One last look at the star-sprinkled sky, and she wondered, as she would too many times over the years, if she had made the right decision. Dropping everything to have adventures in a time-travelling spaceship with a crazy, gorgeous alien sounded great, but . . . it wasn't realistic. It was the sort of thing kids dreamed about, but Grace wasn't a child anymore—even if tonight, she had been given back the youthful hope she'd had years ago.
Now it was time to take her life and put it back together. The Doctor had shown her everything that had been wrong with it, all the little things that had crept in over the years when she had been too busy to notice, and it was her job to do some spring cleaning.
She pushed open the door to her house and then groaned as she was greeted with another kind of spring cleaning altogether. Brian's stuff was still gone, including, yes, the sofa.
She sighed, and the sound had a lonely echo to it. Suddenly, her house looked too big—embarrassingly so. With only her things, carelessly collected whenever she had time off (which hadn't been often), the effect was stark and depressing.
Well, then, she'd just have to sell the house.
She blinked. Where had that come from? She wasn't one for snap decisions or spontaneity, but . . . it felt right. It felt like what she should do.
She had a feeling the Doctor would approve.
She walked around, her footsteps echoing on the hardwood floor, drawing attention to the house's ridiculous size. Why had she thought she and Brian needed a place this big if they spent almost no time in it? She worked full time, overtime, even, and he had work of his own. A house this big was more like a museum than anything else.
She stopped right where the sofa had been and crossed her arms, looking around. She was going to have a lot of work to do, selling this place. For one, she was going to have to talk to Brian about it—he had a share in it, too.
Grace let out a breath through her nose. There were so many things she should be feeling about the end of a long-term relationship, and she just couldn't manage any of them. She couldn't even feel anything more than a twinge of annoyance at the man for moving out without saying so much as a single word to her.
Of course, it wasn't as though she hadn't seen it coming. She'd always been called to work in the middle of their time together, and work had always taken precedence. Her gaze dropped to her belt. She couldn't even remember the last time her pager had been off.
And so Brian, being an ordinary man, had put up with it until he hadn't, because he was tired of coming second to the emergency of the day.
She smiled a bit. Brian. Ordinarily nice, ordinarily patient, ordinarily thoughtful, ordinarily good-looking, and ordinarily good in bed.
A face with an unbearably sweet smile and a pair of bright blue eyes appeared in her mind, and along with them came the feeling that it would be a long time before she'd be interested in dating again.
She shook her head. Daydreaming. That wasn't going to sell the house.
Her gaze moved further into the house, into the breakfast area where she had herded the strange man who had followed her home, insisting he had two hearts. Almost without realising it, her feet followed her eyes until she was standing in front of the chair at which he had sat, shirt open, cravat hung around his neck, brown curls frizzing around his beautiful face.
She picked up the stethoscope she had dropped on the table and remembered the feel of long cold fingers curling around hers—artist's hands, she had thought distractedly, but really, she had felt warmer hands in the morgue—moving the stethoscope from the left side of his chest to the right. What had been a dangerous fibrillation was transformed into a miracle, though at the time she hadn't realised how much of a miracle it was.
Her fingers curled around the bell of the stethoscope. There was so much in here that reminded her of him. The figurine he had played with when he told her that she would do great things. She hadn't believed him then, of course, not after he had told her that he had come back from the dead and had thirteen lives. Now, she wasn't at all sure what to think.
Her gaze flickered up to the reproduction of a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci. She'd accused him of name-dropping, but—my god, he must have actually have been there after all. She'd travelled back in time with him; only a few hours, but that little impossibility was all she needed to be convinced of a much bigger one.
She tore her eyes away only to have them glance off the stereo and land on the CD of Madama Butterfly.
“I was with Puccini before he died!”
Grace had another feeling. This one said she would be listening to that CD more than a few times in the days to come.
She set down the stethoscope, then walked to the top of the stairs, feeling a bit aimless and wondering what to do now. She almost laughed aloud when one of the suggestions her mind turned up was “have a snack.”
Instead, she decided to tidy up and prepare for any potential buyers. Never mind it was about one in the morning; it had to get done sometime. As she started at one end of the main room, she tried to remember as much as she could from the tail-ends of home-selling shows she had watched while waiting for something else to come on. Were white walls an advantage or disadvantage? Should she consider painting them?
She couldn't remember much, but the one thing she did know was buyers liked houses with furniture in them. She sighed again. She'd have to rent some; she doubted she could convince Brian to put his back long enough to sell the place.
There was depressingly little to clean, and it didn't take her long to work her way to the end of the room where she kept her microscope and other supplies. At least Brian had had the good sense not to touch those.
She paused, duster in one hand as she frowned at the microscope. That was where she had examined a sample of the Doctor's blood. In fact, if she remembered correctly. . . .
She slid into the seat and peered in. Still there. She had been too frustrated to slip the slide out when she had gone for a walk with the crazy man with two hearts and her ex-boyfriend's shoes.
She still didn't know if he had been humouring her when he let her take the sample. Maybe he had been. Maybe he'd thought it would help him remember, although she was getting the impression that even despite his gentle patience, he hadn't thought it would do much good. It hadn't, come to think of it, but Grace was a doctor, and at that point, she had been clinging to the practical as hard as she could.
She smiled a bit, looking at the blood that wasn't at all human. A fat lot of good that had done.
She found herself wondering if she could get the sample sent off for some testing, then abruptly sat back in her chair, away from the microscope. No. She couldn't. They'd want to know where she'd gotten it from, who had blood so remarkable. There would be questions and an inquiry, and even if they'd never find the Doctor in a million years, she, the other doctor, wasn't quite so hard to track down.
She had to get rid of it. She slid the sample out of the clips that held it to the base and fisted it in her hand. Think, she had to think. What other evidence had the Doctor left behind?
There was the X-ray film with his two hearts, the “double exposure” that had gotten her into so much trouble. That was gone; her supervisor had burnt it right in front of her eyes. There might be extra copies, though, if the X-ray techs had thought they had made a mistake—she'd have to find those in the morning and burn them too.
No body to worry about, she thought with a sort of amused grimace. That had taken care of itself.
The edge of the sample plate was biting into the palm of her hand; she relaxed her grip slightly. Aside from the snapped-off probe that had emerged from the Doctor's chest (and where in the world had he put that, anyway?), they were fine. She was fine.
She let out a breath. “All right, Grace. You can do this. Just—worry about finding the last of the film tomorrow, when you go to work.”
That brought her up short. Work—how the hell was she supposed to go to work tomorrow? For a moment, the sound of the monitor flatlining and the Doctor's dying scream filled her head, and she dropped the sample on the table, rubbing her eyes and smearing yesterday's mascara onto her palms and cheeks.
She wasn't going back to the hospital, that was for sure. Especially if the way they dealt with the death of a patient was by covering it up.
She looked up, and her eyes landed on the blood sample. An unhappy smile stretched her lips. Her supervisor hadn't believed her when she had threatened to quit. Boy, was he in for a surprise.
She'd find someplace else to work—someplace a lot less corrupt. There was more than one hospital in San Francisco; she'd have no trouble finding work. In some places, they'd kill for a cardiologist with her experience.
She heard the monitor flatlining again and winced. Okay, maybe that had been a bad choice of words.
The chime of her clock interrupted her thoughts. One thirty in the morning. She could feel her body slowly coming off the adrenaline high that had sustained her for nearly twenty-four hours. For all she had felt strange thinking about coming home, having a snack, and going to bed, it was time to do just that.
Her lips pulled back in something like a smile once more. After all, she'd killed a patient, been accosted by a crazy in the parking lot who'd turned out to be her resurrected patient, been dumped by her boyfriend, died, come back from the dead, helped save the world, travelled in time, and made out with an alien. Her smile widened, became realer. Twice. . . . Well, okay, one-and-a-half times—the last one didn't really count as “making out.” She sighed slightly. That had been goodbye.
Still, she thought as she turned out the lights and headed for her bedroom, it had been one hell of a day. It was definitely time to go to bed.
Provided Brian had left her a place to sleep, at any rate.
*
Six hours later, Grace woke up again. She nearly made herself a cup of coffee, then decided against it. She'd sound more convincingly sick before her coffee, not afterwards.
She made the call, and Nancy had sounded a bit too close to pitying for talking to someone who'd supposedly come down with the twenty-four hour flu. It was pretty obvious she was sure she knew why Grace wasn't coming to work.
Wouldn't she be surprised? Grace thought as she did her best to sound as pathetic as possible.
That done, she made herself a cup of coffee and paused next to her stereo. Her gaze shifted to the Puccini CD, and she found herself picking it up without thinking.
Well . . . why not? It would serve as a comfort—and a reminder.
With the opening notes of Madama Butterfly floating through the house that would soon no longer be hers, Dr. Grace Holloway walked downstairs and started up her computer, ready to update her résumé.
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-28 04:22 pm (UTC)One little nitpick, though. When she went out to her SUV, she was carrying boxes and mentioned something to the Doctor about her "oath being revoked" when he said "But you can help me! You're a doctor!"
Obviously, she didn't lose her right to be a doctor, however, I think this did imply that she already did quit.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-28 05:59 pm (UTC)"Yeah, well, my oath's just expired!"
Yeah, I think you're right in that she's quit, but I don't think she actually formally quit at that point (her boss was all "You won't do that."), though the boxes implied she was pretty serious about it. What I had in mind for the end of the fic was her quitting on an official basis. Maybe I should rewrite that part to make it clearer....
no subject
Date: 2008-01-28 06:27 pm (UTC)BTW, that's a perfect icon for this post. It's like "OHHHH!"