timelord1 | With You Day and Night

This is in response to a prompt from

larxene_12's response to my posted prompt meme. Here is the picture. The story is under the cut.

The boy with the unpronounceable middle name ran through the field with his eyes closed, his arms spread wide. He didn’t need to see to know where he was going; he knew every stone of his field as well as he knew every inch of his house nearly half a mile behind him. It was just after sunrise and the world was fresh and peaceful in the morning light. His favorite time of the day, because he knew his friend would be waiting for him at their usual spot. As the boy crested the hill he opened his eyes and saw the lanky man in the dirty pinstripe suit leaning against the tree.

“Good morning, Jack!” the man cried with a grin. “How was breakfast?”

Jack shrugged. “Mum made banana muffins.” He took one out of his pocket and tossed it to the man, who ate it as if it were the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted. Jack wondered if the little tidbits he brought from his breakfast table were the only things the man got to eat all day. Jack got a boost from his friend and started climbing the tree. His friend followed. It was odd that a grownup would be so good at climbing trees, but Jack wasn’t complaining. The man was his only friend in the world. Sometimes it felt as if there were only three people in the world; himself, his mum, and the man in the pinstriped suit.

“D’you like bananas?” his friend asked.

“Bananas are good,” Jack answered. “I don’t think mum likes them very much, though.”

“Why’s that?”

Jack hung from a branch by his hands and looked down at his friend. “Whenever she makes something with bananas in it, she cries. But she does it all the time anyway. She’s crazy.”

Something dark and sort of sad passed over Jack’s friend’s face, but it was gone a second later, replaced by the usual carefree smile.

“She’ll be all right. Still working in the lab, is she?”

“Every day,” Jack grunted as he swung up to the next branch. “All day, all night, except when she stops to make me lunch and dinner, and tuck me in at night.”

“Does she tell you stories?” the man asked.

“Uh-huh,” Jack answered. He was inching out towards the end of a thick limb.

“Answer ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ Jack,” his friend said with just a touch of sternness.

Jack made a face. “Yeessssssss,” he said. “She tells me stories of the Doctor and his magic TARDIS. The Doctor flies all over the universe in his magic blue TARDIS and saves everyone he meets. I don’t know why mum tells me the stories, though, because she always gets sad by the end.”

His friend looked sad. “Do you cheer her up when she gets like that?”

“I give her a hug and tell her it’s all right,” Jack said. “I don’t know what else to do – I’m just a kid, you know.”

His friend’s smile was glittering. “Yes, you are.”

They spent the afternoon together as usual, only parting long enough for Jack to run home and eat his mother’s distracted attempt at a bologna sandwich. She looked very tired that day as she set the lunch down in front of him, muttered something about a blood sample and went back downstairs into her lab, trailing her hands through her graying blonde hair.

Jack came back to the tree and found his friend napping in the shade cast by the branches. He’d brought his friend a banana, and set it in the grass next to him while he ran off to play in the field. When he came back some time later, he found his friend awake, rubbing his face with his hands and looking at the sky.

“Getting to be almost dark,” his friend said, getting to his feet. “The sun will be down in sixteen minutes. The days are so short here. You should get home and lock your doors.”

“You could come with me,” Jack said, toeing the ground with his dirty trainer. “I bet mum would like to meet you.”

“I can’t do that,” his friend said. “We’ve had this discussion before.”

“Will you come some day?”

His friend nodded. “Some day, when the moon turns, or your mum comes out of the lab. Give me a hug, now, and get along. Make sure she eats something for supper.”

“I wish you could come and have supper with us,” Jack said, as if the wheedling would help. It hadn’t, all these years. Not once.

“Just remember, you can always find me in the morning. I’m with you, Jack, day and night. Whether you can see me or not.”

Jack hugged the man as he did every night, and ran off towards the house with his arms spread wide, zooming through the grass. He pretended he was the Doctor, flying in the TARDIS. Sometimes he pretended the blue police box in the barn was his magic TARDIS, and wondered if it were bigger on the inside. The doors were locked, though, and his mum didn’t have a key, so he had never been inside. It had been there as long as he could remember, and he was sure it was just a piece of farm equipment and not a real magic box.

“Did you have a nice day?” his mum asked, looming over a steaming pot of spaghetti.

“I did. I played in the field by the tree. When is the moon going to turn?” Jack asked.

His mum dropped the whole box of spaghetti into the pot. “What did you say?”

“My friend said he would come to meet you when the moon turns, or when you come out of the lab.” Jack said, taking a piece of cheese out of the refrigerator.

“What does your friend look like?” his mum asked, lifting her gaze to the windows that looked out into the field where their tree stood in the distance. The moon was just starting to come up, wide and full in the cloudless sky.

“He’s tall,” Jack said. “He’s skinny and he wears the same suit every day. I think it’s the only one he has.”

“No,” his mum said softly. “He has another one.”

No sooner had the moon come fully up from the lip of the horizon that the howling began. Jack’s mum cried all through dinner and couldn’t manage a story about the Doctor when it was time for Jack to go to bed. She just sat in the room with him and smiled her sad smile for a few minutes before announcing that she had work to do in the lab and left him untucked-in, the light still on in his room.

Jack shut the light off and went to sit by his window to watch the grass move in the night wind. Sometimes, if he was lucky, he would see an owl or a bat flying by his window. That night, as he sat by the window in his pinstriped jim-jams, he saw a wolf sitting by the tree where he played with his friend every day. The wolf’s head was thrown back as it howled at the moon, and for some reason the sight of it filled Jack with so much fear and sadness that he hid under his blankets for almost an hour before falling asleep.

******

The next morning while Jack was still sleeping, Rose Tyler snuck out of the only house on the Third Moon of Icaria and shot the wolf with a tranquilizer as he paced the ground near Jack’s tree. Once he was down, she brought out her kit of syringes and drew half a dozen samples of the wolf’s blood. It was easier if she only ever saw the wolf. If she saw him as she knew him, she would let him in and beg him to stay. He would accept, promising to be careful, but the moon would catch them by surprise one night, and the bite that had given him the disease that had turned him into a lupine wavelength haemovariform would overwhelm him and he would tear Rose and their son to pieces.

She just wished with all her might that the Second Moon of Icaria would turn its dark side towards them. The moon in the sky had been full every night for the last eight years.

Mood status: chipper
Playlist: Bob Marley: Buffalo Soldier