Like Follows Like (8th Dr Story - Pt 1/4)
anne
<<Here is a repost of my story in its entirety. Heartfelt thanks to
everyone who mailed and encouraged a nervous newbie :-> >>
> LIKE FOLLOWS LIKE (8th Doctor Story)
>
> The mirror was a a large one, nearly five feet square, its
> heavy carved gilt frame still ornamented along the top with
> a spray of the living ivy which had grown against it and
> around it, holding it in the same position it had rested in for
> nearly sixty years, against the wall in one of the farther
> storage rooms. Impatient to bear it away, he hadn't noticed
> the torn strand; it fluttered now in the slow breezes from
> other rooms in the recesses of the TARDIS, currents of air
> which made the lighted candles dance. Nearly a dozen
> tapers had been placed around the little table; they flared
> and guttered, their wax trickling down to join the hardened
> pools formed over the past three days. Candlelight seemed
> to make things clearer to the man who sat motionless before
> the mirror in a high-backed Queen Anne armchair, leaning
> forward until the tip of his nose nearly met his reflection.
> He had been there for several days, and only now raised his
> hand to tentatively touch the face in the mirror.
>
> "Young again" he sighed, and turned his hand in front of his
> eyes, studying the long fingers, the unwrinkled skin, the
> steadiness and supple strength in his wrist. He turned his
> eyes to the mirror again, lifting the dark mass of curly hair
> away from the fine sharp features of a wide-eyed stranger.
> He shut his eyes for a moment, frowning, and thought, Me.
> A fuzzy succession of dizzy kaleidoscope images cascaded
> instantly through his mind, of white and dark and reddish
> and blond heads, old and young men, smiling or serene or
> severe, all fading like ghosts. "Me" he repeated aloud,
> concentrating, trying to bring with the word an image, and
> seeing instead only the darkness inside of his closed lids.
> When he opened his eyes the reflection before him made
> him start in momentary surprise.
>
> He leaned back into the huge armchair (a favorite, he
> thought, snatching at the remnants of half-felt habits like
> cobwebs) and studied the mirror dispassionately, as though
> it held a portrait in a museum. He ran his fingers slowly
> over the velvet frock coat, the loosened shirt collar, the
> texture of the pattern in the waistcoat, and laughed at the
> thought that the clothes seemed more right, more familiar to
> him than the man wearing them. Merriness changed the
> picture, turned up the stranger's finely formed lips, made
> attractive crinkles at the corners of the dark blue eyes; he
> leaned forward again, fascinated by the transformations of
> his own smile.
>
> Hours later the last of the candles flickered, flared briefly
> and died smothered in wax. The huge room was lit only by
> the large column that rose and fell with a slight wheezing
> sound, its glow shedding a dim ruddiness on the elaborate
> array of stops and levers on the console below, on the
> scattered Victorian furnishings of the room, the soft
> opulence of Oriental rugs and elegant bric-a-brac. The man
> in the armchair slept, or seemed to; he had drawn his long
> legs up and lay curled in the depths of the chair like a child,
> hands tucked beneath his chin, the delicately-drawn dark
> lines of his brows knit as though his rest were troubled by
> dreams. He moved, muttering restlessly, and flung out an
> arm. There was a musical crash of shattering porcelain as a
> teacup, forgotten days since where it stood on a little table
> near the chair, fell to the floor. The man groaned and
> opened his eyes.
>
> His gaze fell on the large mirror, still in its place, reflecting
> the dim light and the chair's occupant alike. This time as his
> eyes rested on it he sat bolt-upright with a sharp cry of
> recognition that sounded almost like pain. He had forgotten
> - how could he have forgotten?
>
> Frozen for a moment, he stared open-mouthed, then slid out
> of the chair onto his knees in a single quick motion that sent
> the armchair toppling backwards to the floor with an
> unheard crash. He seized the frame of the heavy mirror and,
> with a strength which seemed unnatural in his slight body,
> lifted it above his head, inches from his upturned face, a face
> that hovered above staring back at him with pale reflected
> shock.
>
> "On my mother's side!" he shouted into his own image, his
> voice astonishing him with its force, "my mother's side!!"
>
> The echoes flew around him from the corners of the vast
> room and then there was silence, broken only by his quick
> panting breaths. He rose to his feet, only slightly unsteady,
> the mirror still held before him at arm's length. For a
> moment it seemed as though he might throw it from him to
> the floor; then he leaned forward and, reversing it, carefully
> replaced the mirror on its table. Turned to the wall, it
> reflected nothing now.
>
> ****************
>
> There was no telling what his first real memory was of her;
> that he should not be able to remember was an irony which
> had never escaped him. Sometimes he thought his first
> memory was her scent, lilacs, or the rustling of one of the
> silk gowns with their broad skirts which she had still
> insisted on wearing despite his father's gentle objections.
> "I'll hardly be any less strange to them in what your ladies
> wear" she had laughed, "and I never can reconcile myself to
> the brazen idea of showing my ankles." She had taught him
> that there was a name for the sound of the rustle of silk -
> scroop - she had taught him that her language had a name
> for almost everything, had needed to in the bursting
> creativity of her era. "An age of inventors" she had said, "of
> patentors and scientists. Never let them tell you that we
> were savages." He disliked it when she spoke of her time
> and of herself in the past tense, a manner which in her
> English had a finality not found in the language of Gallifrey.
> In that speech there were many ways of referring to things
> gone by, each with its subtle distinction, none of which
> carried this idea of "the past" which clung around human
> tongues like a leaden weight. She had laughed at that as
> well; "A hundred different words for "time", just as the
> Eskimos had for "snow"!" "That's a myth, you know, dear,
> about the Eskimos" his father had said, and earned one of
> her quick frowns - "As though you would know better than
> I!" Her ire was rare, her temper almost always even, smiles
> and caresses her usual manner. He had never really seen her
> angry, not even in the face of the daily small slights, the
> little evidences of contempt, which had been her portion for
> as long as he could remember. When he was a boy his
> father would take him aside after he had seen one or another
> of these incidents, and in a voice that trembled a little (hard
> to believe, now, but he was sure, absolutely sure it had been
> so) had said flatly "Your mother is a good woman, and she
> is very brave. She left her home and everything she had
> known to come here. They don't understand her." Once or
> twice his father had said "They don't understand me"
> instead. Years later he wondered if his father had been
> conscious of it.
>
> He knew all of the stories, had heard them from her at her
> knee beginning well before he was able to understand them,
> continuing well past the time when he had no longer wished
> to listen. How his father had gone to do field research on
> the ethnology of chaos and violence on that backward
> planet considered more suited to the subject than almost any
> other; how he had become comfortable there as the years
> passed, as Victoria came to power, as the steam locomotive
> revolutionized transportation. How he had gone on a hot
> June afternoon in their little pocket of time called 1865 to
> Dover, to board an express train to London which he knew
> would never arrive in London, which would instead leap the
> tracks in a horrifying crash at a place called Staplehurst
> forty miles away, a crash which had made history by killing
> almost a hundred people and by nearly killing many more,
> among them the novelist Charles Dickens. It was near the
> end of his father's stay, and he had wished to gather some
> final data, this on human reaction to wholesale death by
> mechanical crisis.
>
> She had boarded there too, and had sat next to his father in
> the first-class carriage, the one which would lead as the train
> jumped the broken trestle and plowed headfirst into a
> ravine, the one which would sustain the heaviest losses of
> life. She was a bluestocking, in her time which had a name
> for everything, an unmarried educated woman who had read
> Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller, and who was not
> afraid to talk to a strange man in a railway carriage if he
> proved to be interesting. As the hours passed on that bright
> June day his father had found himself feeling what he had
> never felt, had never even heard described as something
> possible to be felt, and yielding to it, had convinced her that
> they should move and sit in the third-class compartment at
> the rear of the train.
>
> This first little transgression against laws which his father
> knew must not be broken had led with headlong swiftness
> to others, more serious, finally most serious. He had kept
> his eye on his gold repeater as the train neared the
> Staplehurst trestle, forty minutes away, then thirty, then
> twenty, then ten, each click of the watch's hands reminding
> him that there was less and less time. "You have a
> fascination with time" she had laughed, finally taking his
> watch from his hand and closing its case with a snap after he
> had failed again to respond to a remark. "You may have
> this back in London, sir. I can't imagine you have any need
> for it before then. The train arrives when it arrives, and no
> amount of your piteous gazing at your fine watch will
> change its fate."
>
> She had smiled then, her face turned to his father in the
> dusty shaft of sunlight from the window, her scent like
> lilacs. His father had astonished himself, was still
> astonishing himself, with his next action; he seized her wrist
> and, hurrying her out of her seat and down the aisle with
> breathless haste, with moments to spare, had taken her to
> the baggage car and showed her the steamer trunk which
> was not a steamer trunk, told her of the horror waiting only
> a few miles and a few minutes away, had begged her to
> come with him instead. Wide-eyed and white-faced as she
> stood in a room where she knew no room could possibly be,
> she had looked into his eyes and accepted.