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eponymous_roseTitle: The Deepsky Atlas (10/?)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eponymous_rose
Word Count: 1839
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Adventure, Humour
Characters: Fourth Doctor, Harry Sullivan, Sarah Jane Smith
Summary: Flung into a familiar sort of future, Sarah and Harry have supper.
Part One: Circinus | Part Two: Caelum
Part Three: Eridanus | Part Four: Setus
Part Five: Dorado | Part Six: Leo
Part Seven: Libra | Part Eight: Gemini
Part Nine: Chamaeleon
CHAPTER TEN
"Can I get you anything else?" said the waitress, the tip of her pen hovering over the pad of paper as though it had a life of its own and was eagerly awaiting their permission to burst forth from its shackles and- well, and order dessert. Sarah stared into the dregs of her tea and, in a moment of delicious self-pity, wondered whether anything exciting would ever happen to her again.
"I'm quite all right," said Harry, beaming. "Do you need anything, Sarah?"
"What I need," said Sarah, "is to get back to that bookstore and force that idiot behind the counter to tell us what's happened to the Doctor." The waitress frowned at Harry, who gave a helpless sort of shrug. "And what's happened to the planet we were on," Sarah added, as an afterthought. "And why we seem to be on contemporary Earth again. Eating dinner."
"I'll just get you another glass of water, then," said the waitress, and made her escape into the bustling restaurant.
It looked near enough to the sort of place Sarah had frequented a thousand times before, but there were subtle differences that made her uneasy: for one, several people in the place seemed to be speaking into phones or walkie-talkies of some sort, and the fashions were, quite frankly, tending towards the bizarre.
"Come on, old girl," said Harry, and Sarah couldn't muster up the enthusiasm to so much as glare at him. "We've been in tighter spots before, haven't we? I mean, it's not as though we're surrounded on all sides by giant, scaly monsters. Let's just enjoy a quiet dinner, give ourselves a chance to relax, and then we'll figure out what's happened. All right?"
Sarah sighed. "You're right, Harry. I feel like I can't think straight, going from fighting that great monster thing to sitting in a cosy little restaurant." She laughed, and worried that it sounded a bit hysterical. "We don't even have the money to pay for this meal, do we?"
"Of course we do," said Harry, affronted, and dug into his pockets. He rummaged for a few long moments before emerging with a handful of jelly babies.
Sarah quirked an eyebrow.
"Ah," Harry said. "Maybe not."
"Might I suggest," Sarah drawled, "that instead of hanging about for what would undoubtedly be a divine sort of dessert, we follow a different time-honoured tradition."
"We pull a runner," said Harry, miserably.
"We pull a runner," Sarah agreed, and they stood from the table in unison, effectively attracting the attention of every waitress in the place. Harry and Sarah exchanged glances. "Now would be a good time," she noted, and they ran.
There was an initial uproar over their hasty departure, compounded by the wild cheering of a group of schoolchildren at a nearby table, but Sarah was relieved to note that their experience in escaping monsters of the fanged and furry variety nicely complemented the general apathy of the staff, and the getaway was as clean as could be hoped.
"This," she gasped, rubbing at her sore arm as they caught their breath in an alley a few streets away, "is a useful sort of skill to have."
"It's terrible; if I'd remembered we hadn't any money with us, I wouldn't have suggested we eat supper in the first place," Harry said, and Sarah couldn't help grinning at his anguished expression. He sighed and smiled faintly. "It did feel rather good, though, didn't it?"
"It did, at that," said Sarah. "Actually doing something, I suppose."
"Well," said Harry, and reached down to tie the shoelace that had come undone in their flight, "now I really hope we find the Doctor soon. I don't much fancy living a life of crime just to keep your boredom in check, Sarah Jane."
She stuck out her tongue at him, and he smiled, and for an instant things were nearly back to normal; it felt as though the Doctor were just around the corner, waiting for them, and any minute now he'd notice that they were surrounded by gun-wielding freedom fighters, or mildly disgruntled politicians, or giant ants with terrible night-vision. Harry straightened and caught her glance, and she could tell he'd been thinking along similar lines.
"Well," said Sarah. "We can't stay here all night. We should at least be able to figure out where we are, right?"
"Just go up to someone and ask?" said Harry. "I mean, wouldn't they find that a bit odd?"
Sarah shrugged in what she hoped was an appropriately mysterious and Doctorish sort of way, and stepped back into the street, nearly colliding with a young couple strolling down the other way.
"Watch it," the girl said, and Sarah smiled apologetically.
The girl's boyfriend was eyeing Sarah warily, and for the first time she felt conscious of her assorted cuts and scrapes, cleaned hastily in the restaurant's loo. "Here now, are you all right?"
"Oh, I'm fine," said Sarah, and grinned, hoping to appear more reassuring than manic. "My friend and I just stepped off a bus - terrible day, you know the sort of thing, our heads are all in a whirl - and we were just wondering where we've wound up."
"Didn't know any buses stopped here," said the young man, and the girl elbowed him.
"Shut up, Larry," she said, and smiled. "You're in London, miss. Oxford Street's about a ten minute walk that way."
Sarah made a show of peering in the direction the girl had pointed, wondering whether there was any way she could ask the year without having them call the police on her. "Oh, thanks," she said. "That's wonderful. You wouldn't happen-"
"Come on," said Larry, tugging at the girl's sleeve. "She'll be asking for money next. Let's go."
"Don't be such a bore, Larry," the girl groaned, shrugging him off with an apologetic smile to Sarah. "They're probably just in the city for the millennium celebrations and all. Aren't you, then?"
Sarah blinked, then smiled. "That's right," she said. "Glad we got the right bus after all. Thanks for your help," she added, and, at Larry's suspicious glare, firmly quashed the urge to ask them for money after all.
As the couple strolled off, Sarah turned back to see Harry watching her from the alley. "Fat lot of help you were," she sniffed.
"Seemed to be doing just fine on your own," he said, and grinned. "Remind me not to trust a word you say."
"Which millennium d'you suppose-"
"Well, 2000," said Harry, and paused. "I think. I mean, you might expect more flying cars and such by the time 2100 rolled around."
"Unless we've stumbled into an historical reenactment of some sort," Sarah pointed out. "It could be far later than that."
Harry frowned thoughtfully, then closed his eyes. "No," he said, "it's definitely 2000. Smells right."
Sarah stared at him. "Smells right?"
"Well," said Harry, and pointed behind her. "That helped, too."
She turned to see a banner, hung in a shop window, wishing passersby a Happy Y2K. "Ah," she said as her mind finally made sense of the bizarre acronym. "Y2K? Really? That seems a bit silly."
"It's the future, after all," said Harry. "For all we know, it's perfectly normal to stroll about town with a duck on one's head."
She stared at him, unable to shake the mental image, and this time she made no effort to restrain her laughter. He joined in after a moment, giddy as she was at the prospect of being in the near enough future that there must be another pair of them out there, somewhere, growing older and getting ready to ring in the new millennium a second time-
"This is very strange," said Sarah when even the chuckles had died down. "And I think we should maybe get back to finding the Doctor."
"Right-o," said Harry, his grin fading. "If nothing else, it's getting rather chilly and I'd like to know we have somewhere warm to go for the night."
"All right," said Sarah, with as much cheer as she could muster at the bleak situation. "Let's figure out where we are, shall we?"
"Well," said Harry, "literally, we're in London in late 1999, having strolled through what looks to be a one-way passage in a bookstore that used to be a library in a lighthouse on an alien planet. Metaphorically, we're in something of a pickle."
"Harry," Sarah said, "being cut off from the Doctor, being on a different planet in a different time entirely, is probably a bit bigger than something of a pickle."
"Ah," said Harry, looking chastened. "I get your drift. A rather large pickle, all things considered."
"Massive," said Sarah, and they contemplated this notion in silence for a long moment.
"I don't suppose it might have been a transmat beam of some sort?" Harry ventured.
"Transmats don't travel through time," Sarah said.
"Oh," said Harry. "I suppose not."
"Besides," said Sarah after a time, "I didn't feel terribly dizzy or anything. It didn't feel much like anything changed at all, except suddenly the passage wasn't there anymore."
"That's right," Harry said, and they thought for a moment longer.
"This is hopeless," Sarah moaned after another pensive silence. "We need something more to go on. We should go back and snoop around the bookstore-"
"Which will have closed by now," Harry supplied, unhelpfully.
"-or at the very least start asking around to see whether anybody's seen a tall, curly-haired madman with an exceptionally long scarf."
"Oh, dear," said a new voice, and they both whirled towards the source. "What a terribly unflattering description."
Sarah glanced at Harry; he glanced back, and then they went back to gaping at the new arrival. "Doctor!" Sarah gasped, finally. "How did you make it-"
The Doctor smiled and held up a hand. "No questions just yet," he said, and she noticed for the first time that his old, bloodstained shirt had been replaced at some point by something neater, cleaner, and felt a bit put off that he'd taken the time to change before rescuing them.
"But where-"
"I've only just arrived myself," said the Doctor. "It is, I presume, near the end of December in the year 1999?"
"Well," said Harry, "that's all we've managed to discover."
The Doctor peered at them from under the brim of his hat. "Well," he said, "that's exceptionally interesting. Still more interesting is the question of how you two came to be here."
"Well," said Sarah, "we passed through a- well, a passage of sorts, and instead of being back at the lighthouse we were-"
He held up a hand again. "There's no need to explain, because I have a rather more pressing question that you really should answer first."
"Fire away," said Harry with a grin.
The Doctor beamed back, but the smile faded quickly as he glanced from Sarah to Harry and back again. "Just who," he said, "are you?"
Author:
eponymous_roseWord Count: 1839
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Adventure, Humour
Characters: Fourth Doctor, Harry Sullivan, Sarah Jane Smith
Summary: Flung into a familiar sort of future, Sarah and Harry have supper.
Part One: Circinus | Part Two: Caelum
Part Three: Eridanus | Part Four: Setus
Part Five: Dorado | Part Six: Leo
Part Seven: Libra | Part Eight: Gemini
Part Nine: Chamaeleon
CHAPTER TEN
"Can I get you anything else?" said the waitress, the tip of her pen hovering over the pad of paper as though it had a life of its own and was eagerly awaiting their permission to burst forth from its shackles and- well, and order dessert. Sarah stared into the dregs of her tea and, in a moment of delicious self-pity, wondered whether anything exciting would ever happen to her again.
"I'm quite all right," said Harry, beaming. "Do you need anything, Sarah?"
"What I need," said Sarah, "is to get back to that bookstore and force that idiot behind the counter to tell us what's happened to the Doctor." The waitress frowned at Harry, who gave a helpless sort of shrug. "And what's happened to the planet we were on," Sarah added, as an afterthought. "And why we seem to be on contemporary Earth again. Eating dinner."
"I'll just get you another glass of water, then," said the waitress, and made her escape into the bustling restaurant.
It looked near enough to the sort of place Sarah had frequented a thousand times before, but there were subtle differences that made her uneasy: for one, several people in the place seemed to be speaking into phones or walkie-talkies of some sort, and the fashions were, quite frankly, tending towards the bizarre.
"Come on, old girl," said Harry, and Sarah couldn't muster up the enthusiasm to so much as glare at him. "We've been in tighter spots before, haven't we? I mean, it's not as though we're surrounded on all sides by giant, scaly monsters. Let's just enjoy a quiet dinner, give ourselves a chance to relax, and then we'll figure out what's happened. All right?"
Sarah sighed. "You're right, Harry. I feel like I can't think straight, going from fighting that great monster thing to sitting in a cosy little restaurant." She laughed, and worried that it sounded a bit hysterical. "We don't even have the money to pay for this meal, do we?"
"Of course we do," said Harry, affronted, and dug into his pockets. He rummaged for a few long moments before emerging with a handful of jelly babies.
Sarah quirked an eyebrow.
"Ah," Harry said. "Maybe not."
"Might I suggest," Sarah drawled, "that instead of hanging about for what would undoubtedly be a divine sort of dessert, we follow a different time-honoured tradition."
"We pull a runner," said Harry, miserably.
"We pull a runner," Sarah agreed, and they stood from the table in unison, effectively attracting the attention of every waitress in the place. Harry and Sarah exchanged glances. "Now would be a good time," she noted, and they ran.
There was an initial uproar over their hasty departure, compounded by the wild cheering of a group of schoolchildren at a nearby table, but Sarah was relieved to note that their experience in escaping monsters of the fanged and furry variety nicely complemented the general apathy of the staff, and the getaway was as clean as could be hoped.
"This," she gasped, rubbing at her sore arm as they caught their breath in an alley a few streets away, "is a useful sort of skill to have."
"It's terrible; if I'd remembered we hadn't any money with us, I wouldn't have suggested we eat supper in the first place," Harry said, and Sarah couldn't help grinning at his anguished expression. He sighed and smiled faintly. "It did feel rather good, though, didn't it?"
"It did, at that," said Sarah. "Actually doing something, I suppose."
"Well," said Harry, and reached down to tie the shoelace that had come undone in their flight, "now I really hope we find the Doctor soon. I don't much fancy living a life of crime just to keep your boredom in check, Sarah Jane."
She stuck out her tongue at him, and he smiled, and for an instant things were nearly back to normal; it felt as though the Doctor were just around the corner, waiting for them, and any minute now he'd notice that they were surrounded by gun-wielding freedom fighters, or mildly disgruntled politicians, or giant ants with terrible night-vision. Harry straightened and caught her glance, and she could tell he'd been thinking along similar lines.
"Well," said Sarah. "We can't stay here all night. We should at least be able to figure out where we are, right?"
"Just go up to someone and ask?" said Harry. "I mean, wouldn't they find that a bit odd?"
Sarah shrugged in what she hoped was an appropriately mysterious and Doctorish sort of way, and stepped back into the street, nearly colliding with a young couple strolling down the other way.
"Watch it," the girl said, and Sarah smiled apologetically.
The girl's boyfriend was eyeing Sarah warily, and for the first time she felt conscious of her assorted cuts and scrapes, cleaned hastily in the restaurant's loo. "Here now, are you all right?"
"Oh, I'm fine," said Sarah, and grinned, hoping to appear more reassuring than manic. "My friend and I just stepped off a bus - terrible day, you know the sort of thing, our heads are all in a whirl - and we were just wondering where we've wound up."
"Didn't know any buses stopped here," said the young man, and the girl elbowed him.
"Shut up, Larry," she said, and smiled. "You're in London, miss. Oxford Street's about a ten minute walk that way."
Sarah made a show of peering in the direction the girl had pointed, wondering whether there was any way she could ask the year without having them call the police on her. "Oh, thanks," she said. "That's wonderful. You wouldn't happen-"
"Come on," said Larry, tugging at the girl's sleeve. "She'll be asking for money next. Let's go."
"Don't be such a bore, Larry," the girl groaned, shrugging him off with an apologetic smile to Sarah. "They're probably just in the city for the millennium celebrations and all. Aren't you, then?"
Sarah blinked, then smiled. "That's right," she said. "Glad we got the right bus after all. Thanks for your help," she added, and, at Larry's suspicious glare, firmly quashed the urge to ask them for money after all.
As the couple strolled off, Sarah turned back to see Harry watching her from the alley. "Fat lot of help you were," she sniffed.
"Seemed to be doing just fine on your own," he said, and grinned. "Remind me not to trust a word you say."
"Which millennium d'you suppose-"
"Well, 2000," said Harry, and paused. "I think. I mean, you might expect more flying cars and such by the time 2100 rolled around."
"Unless we've stumbled into an historical reenactment of some sort," Sarah pointed out. "It could be far later than that."
Harry frowned thoughtfully, then closed his eyes. "No," he said, "it's definitely 2000. Smells right."
Sarah stared at him. "Smells right?"
"Well," said Harry, and pointed behind her. "That helped, too."
She turned to see a banner, hung in a shop window, wishing passersby a Happy Y2K. "Ah," she said as her mind finally made sense of the bizarre acronym. "Y2K? Really? That seems a bit silly."
"It's the future, after all," said Harry. "For all we know, it's perfectly normal to stroll about town with a duck on one's head."
She stared at him, unable to shake the mental image, and this time she made no effort to restrain her laughter. He joined in after a moment, giddy as she was at the prospect of being in the near enough future that there must be another pair of them out there, somewhere, growing older and getting ready to ring in the new millennium a second time-
"This is very strange," said Sarah when even the chuckles had died down. "And I think we should maybe get back to finding the Doctor."
"Right-o," said Harry, his grin fading. "If nothing else, it's getting rather chilly and I'd like to know we have somewhere warm to go for the night."
"All right," said Sarah, with as much cheer as she could muster at the bleak situation. "Let's figure out where we are, shall we?"
"Well," said Harry, "literally, we're in London in late 1999, having strolled through what looks to be a one-way passage in a bookstore that used to be a library in a lighthouse on an alien planet. Metaphorically, we're in something of a pickle."
"Harry," Sarah said, "being cut off from the Doctor, being on a different planet in a different time entirely, is probably a bit bigger than something of a pickle."
"Ah," said Harry, looking chastened. "I get your drift. A rather large pickle, all things considered."
"Massive," said Sarah, and they contemplated this notion in silence for a long moment.
"I don't suppose it might have been a transmat beam of some sort?" Harry ventured.
"Transmats don't travel through time," Sarah said.
"Oh," said Harry. "I suppose not."
"Besides," said Sarah after a time, "I didn't feel terribly dizzy or anything. It didn't feel much like anything changed at all, except suddenly the passage wasn't there anymore."
"That's right," Harry said, and they thought for a moment longer.
"This is hopeless," Sarah moaned after another pensive silence. "We need something more to go on. We should go back and snoop around the bookstore-"
"Which will have closed by now," Harry supplied, unhelpfully.
"-or at the very least start asking around to see whether anybody's seen a tall, curly-haired madman with an exceptionally long scarf."
"Oh, dear," said a new voice, and they both whirled towards the source. "What a terribly unflattering description."
Sarah glanced at Harry; he glanced back, and then they went back to gaping at the new arrival. "Doctor!" Sarah gasped, finally. "How did you make it-"
The Doctor smiled and held up a hand. "No questions just yet," he said, and she noticed for the first time that his old, bloodstained shirt had been replaced at some point by something neater, cleaner, and felt a bit put off that he'd taken the time to change before rescuing them.
"But where-"
"I've only just arrived myself," said the Doctor. "It is, I presume, near the end of December in the year 1999?"
"Well," said Harry, "that's all we've managed to discover."
The Doctor peered at them from under the brim of his hat. "Well," he said, "that's exceptionally interesting. Still more interesting is the question of how you two came to be here."
"Well," said Sarah, "we passed through a- well, a passage of sorts, and instead of being back at the lighthouse we were-"
He held up a hand again. "There's no need to explain, because I have a rather more pressing question that you really should answer first."
"Fire away," said Harry with a grin.
The Doctor beamed back, but the smile faded quickly as he glanced from Sarah to Harry and back again. "Just who," he said, "are you?"
