Flower and Willow: Chapter 10
Sep. 27th, 2011 09:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timelord1Here it is at last - Chapter 10. I can't thank ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kelkat9 enough for her beta help with this chapter!! :)
The Doctor put up his hands to deflect the attacking women, laughing in hopes that he could turn the situation into a giggle as quickly as possible. His laughter served to enflame the women and they went at him harder until Rose’s phone rang. Ichisumi and Sumiko were startled into stopping their assault by the sound, and Rose turned her eyes to the Doctor, her expression furious in its blankness as she drew the phone out of the folds of her kimono. She never stopped staring at the Doctor as she answered.
“Hi, mum. No…calm down…I’m fine. He wasn’t drunk. Please….yes, I swear I’m all right…I’m with friends. He’s right here. What happened to your what? What’s a Klubbo?”
The Doctor snickered. Rose bugged her eyes at him, glowering. He stopped, and tried to back away when Rose handed the phone off to him.
“She wants to talk to you,” Rose said through clenched teeth.
“I’m out just now,” he replied, taking another step back only to walk into Ichisumi. Sumiko stepped up, took the phone from Rose’s hand and placed it in the Doctor’s. Ichisumi took his bent elbow and lifted it so the phone went to his ear. He rolled his eyes and said hello.
“You are so lucky my little girl is all right. You’d better never leave her behind again, you skinny little…alien! Or, I’ll snap you in half like the chopstick you are!” Jackie shouted.
“Funny you should say chopstick. We’re in Japan right now,” he said.
“Where in Japan? What are you doin’ in Japan?”
“Rose is learning to be a geisha.” He squeezed his eyes shut and threw his head back, cursing himself as the words came out of his mouth. Jackie’s cursing tirade was so loud the Doctor held the phone away from his ear and they could all hear it.
“This is your mother talking?” Ichisumi asked Rose.
Rose shrugged. “She’s very classy.”
The tirade went on for a few moments, until the Doctor brought the phone back to his ear and pulled out his sonic and started sending little pulses to the phone as he spoke. “Oooh, Jackie? You…there? We…meh…derp…bad…connection…so sorry. Bye!” He hung up and tossed the phone to Rose. She gave him one more good smack on the upper arm before the three women turned and went back up the stairs.
“Breakfast, then?” he asked, following them.
Ichisumi turned on him in a fury. “No. It would be lunch-time, if we had time to stop and eat. Your stunt cost us time in Rose-san’s lessons. You may have to stay another day because of it. Do not darken the doorway of this okiya for at least the next eight hours, if you do not want to be beaten by women again.”
“A whole ‘nother day?” he whined, tilting his chin down so he could give her the full effect of his pleading-puppy eyes. He had expected the look to soften her glare, but it only served to amplify it.
“Perhaps you could spend that time replacing Rose-san’s mother’s Klubbo, whatever that may be.”
He smirked. “Coffee table. It’s not the first one that’s been destroyed since I met the family.”
“I am not in the least surprised by that,” Ichisumi said. “Now, entertain yourself and leave us alone.”
He watched them walk up the stairs, shouting at them when the reached the top. “I didn’t want to come, anyway! Who would want to sit around in a room all day and watch you two do anything?”
He stuck his tongue out at them for good measure, then turned on his heel and went back into the TARDIS, punching in coordinates without paying as much attention as he should have. He went to Ikea Wembley and picked up another Klubbo, then brought the TARDIS to the alley behind Jackie’s flat. He bounded up the back stairs with the box, and knocked on the door. Jackie answered a moment later, holding the television remote and a mug of tea.
“What are you doing here?” she asked with a smile. “Where’s Rose?”
“Oh, just popping by for a quick delivery. So sorry about your coffee table, but here. Klubbo, from Ikea. Matches the woodwork brilliantly. At least I think it did. Hard to tell when it was in pieces. Rose is fine, sends her love. So, erm. Yes. Bye!” He ran down the stairs back to the TARDIS before she could hit him with the remote again. By the time he reached the TARDIS, he had processed what he had seen in the flat, and he walked up to his beloved ship and hit his head against the doors.
“Always check the date, you idiot!” he shouted. Her welcoming smile should have given it away. If not her smile, the fact that her old coffee table was still sitting in front of the television, rather than the splintered remains of the one he had just given her that he would be stopping in to crush at some point in the near future. A child playing in the alley stopped to watch him hit his head several times against the doors before he went inside the TARDIS.
The ship slipped back into the Vortex only to reappear a week later in the same spot. The Doctor stepped out, carrying another Klubbo, and stormed up the stairs, knocking on Jackie’s door again.
“You,” she said with a smirk.
“Ah, got it right this time,” he said, setting the new box inside the door.
Jackie put her hand on her hip. “How many of these are you gonna give me?”
“Last one. I promise,” he said.
“Where’s Rose?”
“Japan.” He started down the stairs and was halfway down when Jackie called his name. He looked up at her, expecting to get hit in the face with the remote again, but she was looking at him with a soft smile.
“I’m glad you’re all right,” she said.
“What, from the beating you delivered? I’ll survive.”
Jackie’s eyebrows went up. “No, from...wait.” She turned her head and looked at him sideways. “Maybe it hasn’t happened yet. Rose says sometimes things are, what’d she say? Wimey-timey. Something like that.”
“They can be,” he said from his spot on the stairs. “Best not to say any more, if that’s the case.”
“So I could be talking to you from before what I’m talking about has happened, and even though it’s happened already, it hasn’t happened to you yet?”
He gave her a smile. “Confusing, isn’t it?”
“A bit,” she said with a chuckle. “All right, Rose said I’m not supposed to say nothing when this happens, but I’ll say this. Keep your head down, Doctor.”
He flashed a wink, doing his best to hide the chill that her words had sent through his blood. “I always do.” He bounced down the stairs and into the TARDIS, leaving Jackie standing at the balcony, watching him go.
“I hope you’ll be all right, for Rose’s sake,” she said to the fading image of the TARDIS.
*****
After her lessons that day, Rose and Ichisumi went out for the evening to the teahouses so Rose could observe again. The Doctor watched several hours’ worth of American World War Two movies, speaking along with the actors to get the nasality out of his accent. When Rose came back from her evening out, she found the Doctor lying on the futon, hands clasped behind his head, staring at the ceiling.
“You been waitin’ up?” Rose asked as she picked up her pyjamas to change in the bathroom.
He shrugged. “Did you have a nice time?”
“I’m learning a lot,” she said. “It’s a lot to remember. I hope I do all right.”
“You’re going to be brilliant,” the Doctor said.
“What about you? What’ve you been doing with your time?” she asked.
“Practicing. When we get back, I’ll probably leave you at the okiya and go find some American soldiers, share a beer or two and get the lowdown on the tea house.”
“This seems like a lot of work just to investigate some little time fluctuation,” Rose said. “I’m starting to think that all this was just an excuse to see Ichisumi again.”
The guilty grin that broke over the Doctor’s face made Rose smile. “Well, not initially,” he said.
“I’m glad we came,” Rose said. “Me and Ichisumi just sort of click, you know? Like we’ve been mates forever.”
“It was the same way with me,” he answered.
“I keep trying not to think about her getting killed, but I look at her and I just keep thinking, ‘You poor thing. You’re gonna get murdered.’ I mean, couldn’t we –“
“We can’t. You know it. If we could, I would have done long before I even met you.”
Rose sighed. “It’s so hard, knowing something bad is going to happen to somebody and not being able to tell them.”
“Believe me, she’s better not knowing. If she’s only got a short time to live, it’s better she enjoy it than always waiting for the end,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to know, would you, if something bad were coming?”
“No,” she said after a thoughtful pause. “Ignorance is bliss and all that.”
“So I’ve heard,” he said with a sigh.
Rose left the room to change, and when she came back, she slid under the covers next to him and rested her head on his shoulder like it was the most natural thing in the world. He closed his eyes and turned his head so he could feel her hair against his cheek and breathed in her scent as she snuggled closer to him and fell quickly asleep.
He hoped that whatever it was Jackie Tyler knew about hadn’t had anything to do with the rain. He wasn’t ready to lose Rose yet.
*******
The next morning, after breakfast, Rose and Ichisumi retired to the guestroom for the daily lessons. The Doctor found Sumiko working in the garden. He knelt beside her and helped her weed a patch, the two of them working in companionable silence until he spoke.
“We’re going to meet again some years in the future,” the Doctor said. “When we do, you must promise me that you won’t let on that you remember us.”
“Why?” Sumiko asked.
“Rose won’t know you, and we won’t remember that any of this visit at the okiya happened. It will be like seeing you for the first time for Rose, and the first time in a very long time for me. I know that’s hard to understand, but it is very important that you don’t let on anything about this visit until I signal you that it’s all right for us to talk about it.”
“How come you will not remember any of this?”
He started to formulate a brief treatise on the nature of timey-wimey, but decided upon a shorter, simpler answer. “Magic,” he said. “Sometimes the TARDIS takes us somewhere and we can’t remember that we’ve been there before. If we were to find out, it could make some very nasty things happen, so you will have to trust me and play along, until I give you the signal.”
“What will the signal be?” she asked.
He smiled at her. “Jelly Babies.”
*******
That night Ichisumi and Rose did not go to the teahouses, and dinner included both sekihan and fried prawns. The Doctor watched Ichisumi and Rose eating in awkward silence, exchanging glances with each other, until he could stand it no longer.
“Rose is finished with her lessons, isn't she?” he asked.
Ichisumi nodded. “You can leave any time you wish. She will not fail you.”
“She never does,” he said, making eye contact with Rose. She blushed and looked at her bowl of rice. He turned back to Ichisumi. “I can’t thank you enough for your help.”
“I wish I could see your performance,” Ichisumi said, taking Rose’s hand. “You will make a most elegant geisha.”
“Thank you,” Rose said. “You’ve been a wonderful teacher.”
“I assume you will be leaving straight away after dinner,” Ichisumi said to the Doctor. “It is not in your nature to linger.”
“Not typically,” the Doctor said. “But, I think tonight I will make an exception.”
They passed the evening together in the dining room on the premise that Rose needed just a little more practice playing teahouse games. Their laughter spilled out of the front doors of the okiya to join the other festive sounds of the hanamachi, and for at least a few hours the Doctor did not think about the fate awaiting Ichisumi, nor of Jackie Tyler’s ominous slip-up. He didn’t waste even a second to look and see if his rain-soaked future self was standing outside the window watching them laugh and enjoy each other. That night was theirs, no matter what waited for them at the dawn. When they were too tired to play on, he and Rose went up to the guest room and both of them slept, clinging to each other as if afraid someone would come in the night to tear them apart.
kelkat9 enough for her beta help with this chapter!! :)The Doctor put up his hands to deflect the attacking women, laughing in hopes that he could turn the situation into a giggle as quickly as possible. His laughter served to enflame the women and they went at him harder until Rose’s phone rang. Ichisumi and Sumiko were startled into stopping their assault by the sound, and Rose turned her eyes to the Doctor, her expression furious in its blankness as she drew the phone out of the folds of her kimono. She never stopped staring at the Doctor as she answered.
“Hi, mum. No…calm down…I’m fine. He wasn’t drunk. Please….yes, I swear I’m all right…I’m with friends. He’s right here. What happened to your what? What’s a Klubbo?”
The Doctor snickered. Rose bugged her eyes at him, glowering. He stopped, and tried to back away when Rose handed the phone off to him.
“She wants to talk to you,” Rose said through clenched teeth.
“I’m out just now,” he replied, taking another step back only to walk into Ichisumi. Sumiko stepped up, took the phone from Rose’s hand and placed it in the Doctor’s. Ichisumi took his bent elbow and lifted it so the phone went to his ear. He rolled his eyes and said hello.
“You are so lucky my little girl is all right. You’d better never leave her behind again, you skinny little…alien! Or, I’ll snap you in half like the chopstick you are!” Jackie shouted.
“Funny you should say chopstick. We’re in Japan right now,” he said.
“Where in Japan? What are you doin’ in Japan?”
“Rose is learning to be a geisha.” He squeezed his eyes shut and threw his head back, cursing himself as the words came out of his mouth. Jackie’s cursing tirade was so loud the Doctor held the phone away from his ear and they could all hear it.
“This is your mother talking?” Ichisumi asked Rose.
Rose shrugged. “She’s very classy.”
The tirade went on for a few moments, until the Doctor brought the phone back to his ear and pulled out his sonic and started sending little pulses to the phone as he spoke. “Oooh, Jackie? You…there? We…meh…derp…bad…connection…so sorry. Bye!” He hung up and tossed the phone to Rose. She gave him one more good smack on the upper arm before the three women turned and went back up the stairs.
“Breakfast, then?” he asked, following them.
Ichisumi turned on him in a fury. “No. It would be lunch-time, if we had time to stop and eat. Your stunt cost us time in Rose-san’s lessons. You may have to stay another day because of it. Do not darken the doorway of this okiya for at least the next eight hours, if you do not want to be beaten by women again.”
“A whole ‘nother day?” he whined, tilting his chin down so he could give her the full effect of his pleading-puppy eyes. He had expected the look to soften her glare, but it only served to amplify it.
“Perhaps you could spend that time replacing Rose-san’s mother’s Klubbo, whatever that may be.”
He smirked. “Coffee table. It’s not the first one that’s been destroyed since I met the family.”
“I am not in the least surprised by that,” Ichisumi said. “Now, entertain yourself and leave us alone.”
He watched them walk up the stairs, shouting at them when the reached the top. “I didn’t want to come, anyway! Who would want to sit around in a room all day and watch you two do anything?”
He stuck his tongue out at them for good measure, then turned on his heel and went back into the TARDIS, punching in coordinates without paying as much attention as he should have. He went to Ikea Wembley and picked up another Klubbo, then brought the TARDIS to the alley behind Jackie’s flat. He bounded up the back stairs with the box, and knocked on the door. Jackie answered a moment later, holding the television remote and a mug of tea.
“What are you doing here?” she asked with a smile. “Where’s Rose?”
“Oh, just popping by for a quick delivery. So sorry about your coffee table, but here. Klubbo, from Ikea. Matches the woodwork brilliantly. At least I think it did. Hard to tell when it was in pieces. Rose is fine, sends her love. So, erm. Yes. Bye!” He ran down the stairs back to the TARDIS before she could hit him with the remote again. By the time he reached the TARDIS, he had processed what he had seen in the flat, and he walked up to his beloved ship and hit his head against the doors.
“Always check the date, you idiot!” he shouted. Her welcoming smile should have given it away. If not her smile, the fact that her old coffee table was still sitting in front of the television, rather than the splintered remains of the one he had just given her that he would be stopping in to crush at some point in the near future. A child playing in the alley stopped to watch him hit his head several times against the doors before he went inside the TARDIS.
The ship slipped back into the Vortex only to reappear a week later in the same spot. The Doctor stepped out, carrying another Klubbo, and stormed up the stairs, knocking on Jackie’s door again.
“You,” she said with a smirk.
“Ah, got it right this time,” he said, setting the new box inside the door.
Jackie put her hand on her hip. “How many of these are you gonna give me?”
“Last one. I promise,” he said.
“Where’s Rose?”
“Japan.” He started down the stairs and was halfway down when Jackie called his name. He looked up at her, expecting to get hit in the face with the remote again, but she was looking at him with a soft smile.
“I’m glad you’re all right,” she said.
“What, from the beating you delivered? I’ll survive.”
Jackie’s eyebrows went up. “No, from...wait.” She turned her head and looked at him sideways. “Maybe it hasn’t happened yet. Rose says sometimes things are, what’d she say? Wimey-timey. Something like that.”
“They can be,” he said from his spot on the stairs. “Best not to say any more, if that’s the case.”
“So I could be talking to you from before what I’m talking about has happened, and even though it’s happened already, it hasn’t happened to you yet?”
He gave her a smile. “Confusing, isn’t it?”
“A bit,” she said with a chuckle. “All right, Rose said I’m not supposed to say nothing when this happens, but I’ll say this. Keep your head down, Doctor.”
He flashed a wink, doing his best to hide the chill that her words had sent through his blood. “I always do.” He bounced down the stairs and into the TARDIS, leaving Jackie standing at the balcony, watching him go.
“I hope you’ll be all right, for Rose’s sake,” she said to the fading image of the TARDIS.
*****
After her lessons that day, Rose and Ichisumi went out for the evening to the teahouses so Rose could observe again. The Doctor watched several hours’ worth of American World War Two movies, speaking along with the actors to get the nasality out of his accent. When Rose came back from her evening out, she found the Doctor lying on the futon, hands clasped behind his head, staring at the ceiling.
“You been waitin’ up?” Rose asked as she picked up her pyjamas to change in the bathroom.
He shrugged. “Did you have a nice time?”
“I’m learning a lot,” she said. “It’s a lot to remember. I hope I do all right.”
“You’re going to be brilliant,” the Doctor said.
“What about you? What’ve you been doing with your time?” she asked.
“Practicing. When we get back, I’ll probably leave you at the okiya and go find some American soldiers, share a beer or two and get the lowdown on the tea house.”
“This seems like a lot of work just to investigate some little time fluctuation,” Rose said. “I’m starting to think that all this was just an excuse to see Ichisumi again.”
The guilty grin that broke over the Doctor’s face made Rose smile. “Well, not initially,” he said.
“I’m glad we came,” Rose said. “Me and Ichisumi just sort of click, you know? Like we’ve been mates forever.”
“It was the same way with me,” he answered.
“I keep trying not to think about her getting killed, but I look at her and I just keep thinking, ‘You poor thing. You’re gonna get murdered.’ I mean, couldn’t we –“
“We can’t. You know it. If we could, I would have done long before I even met you.”
Rose sighed. “It’s so hard, knowing something bad is going to happen to somebody and not being able to tell them.”
“Believe me, she’s better not knowing. If she’s only got a short time to live, it’s better she enjoy it than always waiting for the end,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to know, would you, if something bad were coming?”
“No,” she said after a thoughtful pause. “Ignorance is bliss and all that.”
“So I’ve heard,” he said with a sigh.
Rose left the room to change, and when she came back, she slid under the covers next to him and rested her head on his shoulder like it was the most natural thing in the world. He closed his eyes and turned his head so he could feel her hair against his cheek and breathed in her scent as she snuggled closer to him and fell quickly asleep.
He hoped that whatever it was Jackie Tyler knew about hadn’t had anything to do with the rain. He wasn’t ready to lose Rose yet.
*******
The next morning, after breakfast, Rose and Ichisumi retired to the guestroom for the daily lessons. The Doctor found Sumiko working in the garden. He knelt beside her and helped her weed a patch, the two of them working in companionable silence until he spoke.
“We’re going to meet again some years in the future,” the Doctor said. “When we do, you must promise me that you won’t let on that you remember us.”
“Why?” Sumiko asked.
“Rose won’t know you, and we won’t remember that any of this visit at the okiya happened. It will be like seeing you for the first time for Rose, and the first time in a very long time for me. I know that’s hard to understand, but it is very important that you don’t let on anything about this visit until I signal you that it’s all right for us to talk about it.”
“How come you will not remember any of this?”
He started to formulate a brief treatise on the nature of timey-wimey, but decided upon a shorter, simpler answer. “Magic,” he said. “Sometimes the TARDIS takes us somewhere and we can’t remember that we’ve been there before. If we were to find out, it could make some very nasty things happen, so you will have to trust me and play along, until I give you the signal.”
“What will the signal be?” she asked.
He smiled at her. “Jelly Babies.”
*******
That night Ichisumi and Rose did not go to the teahouses, and dinner included both sekihan and fried prawns. The Doctor watched Ichisumi and Rose eating in awkward silence, exchanging glances with each other, until he could stand it no longer.
“Rose is finished with her lessons, isn't she?” he asked.
Ichisumi nodded. “You can leave any time you wish. She will not fail you.”
“She never does,” he said, making eye contact with Rose. She blushed and looked at her bowl of rice. He turned back to Ichisumi. “I can’t thank you enough for your help.”
“I wish I could see your performance,” Ichisumi said, taking Rose’s hand. “You will make a most elegant geisha.”
“Thank you,” Rose said. “You’ve been a wonderful teacher.”
“I assume you will be leaving straight away after dinner,” Ichisumi said to the Doctor. “It is not in your nature to linger.”
“Not typically,” the Doctor said. “But, I think tonight I will make an exception.”
They passed the evening together in the dining room on the premise that Rose needed just a little more practice playing teahouse games. Their laughter spilled out of the front doors of the okiya to join the other festive sounds of the hanamachi, and for at least a few hours the Doctor did not think about the fate awaiting Ichisumi, nor of Jackie Tyler’s ominous slip-up. He didn’t waste even a second to look and see if his rain-soaked future self was standing outside the window watching them laugh and enjoy each other. That night was theirs, no matter what waited for them at the dawn. When they were too tired to play on, he and Rose went up to the guest room and both of them slept, clinging to each other as if afraid someone would come in the night to tear them apart.
