First Steps: Chapter One
May. 10th, 2011 07:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charameiTitle: First Steps (1/5)
Rating: PG-13
Trigger warnings: Everything but Chapter Three is clean. Chapter Three: Miscarriage/infant death. Also, severe burning and dehydration.
Genre: Babyfic! No, wait. Action/Horror.
Characters/Pairings: Snail, Flabbaduckarusa and Tagalong. Or, in adult-speak: the Doctor, Braxiatel, and the Master.
Wordcount: Chapter: 2,161. Fic: 21,925
Continuity: Both uses and discards varying elements of Lungbarrow. Should stand alone, though; don't be put off if you haven't read it.
Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who; I'm just playing in the BBC's sandbox for fun and practice.
Summary: There's being born, and then there's being born into a world with no adults, no clothes, no food and a terrifying alien Thing upstairs. When their Looms birth them straight into the middle of an emergency, can Our Heroes muddle through?
Beta'ed by the amazingin_lighter_ink and finished thanks to the brilliant people over at ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
writethisfanfic. Reviews are always appreciated; leave concrit, and I will love you forever.
Parts: One | Two | Three | Four | Epilogue | PDF
A Loom is an amazing thing. It can take genetic material from one parent, two, six, from the Matrix if necessary. It combines genes, cleanses them of impurities and imperfections: new life from old, new life from none. It moulds hands and feet, and eyes and hearts and lungs. It can make them toddler small, or even smaller if it feels like it, or adult big, big children in big bodies, confused, unnatural, but just as well-made.
The one place where it has to cheat is minds: the creation of real people. It is for this reason, they say, that Rassilon created the Matrix. The Loom takes a little of this and a little of that, and a nervous tic from over there, blends, merges, confuses, assigns an 'I' and a self-identity, folds and pinches and pokes...
It is happening now, in this Loom. He is Rassilon-Millarn-Theden-Sampradaya-Pandora; the last sneaks onto the end like a breath, a bug in the coding that the Loom lets slip because all brains look like bugs to it... he is all of these people, and yet none of them, entirely himself and entirely unique in his sameness. It gives him information, next: his I and his House, his Chapter, read, write, walk, talk, basic physics, music, house-training... he is brown-haired and brown-eyed, he is a child, he is warm and snug and suddenly aware of the warmth and snugness. As soon as he knows how warm and comfortable he is here, it's time to go.
His golden cocoon lowers him gently, stripping itself away as it does so. His legs touch the floor while it still supports him, and he takes his own weight before the last vestiges of it fall away. His cocoon is only the tiniest part of the outer world. The Loom's roof is miles above his head (it seems miles, anyway, but then he knows he's only three feet tall), and a large, ominous door ahead of him opens with a hiss of pneumatic hinges. He hesitates, but the Loom comforts him, giving him that last encouragement even as it urges him to walk forwards.
He walks; it's not so far after all, really. Beyond the doors, mirroring his own situation, he can see another Loom and another boy walking into the world – this one shorter than him and blond, his walk more confident as he turns his head, trying to see everything at once.
They step from hard Loom floors onto tickly orange carpet at the very same instant; now they are only a metre or so apart, naked under stark lighting and dark, panelled walls.
The blond boy stares over the brown-haired one's shoulder, then turns to inspect his own Loom. "They're smaller on the outside!"
The brown-haired one doesn't care. He's far more interested in the weird hole in the blond's tummy. Forgetting the manners that he hasn't yet been taught, he points, and stares, and asks, "What's that?"
The blond-haired boy pokes a finger into it. "Don't know." He looks curiously at the brown-haired one's midriff. "You don't have one."
"It looks like a snail," the brown-haired one says.
"You've never seen a snail!"
This is indisputable. "A wormhole, then."
"You've never seen one of those, either."
"Well, I still say it looks like one. So there!"
The argument thus effectively ended, the two boys stand in awkward silence for a moment, the blond playing idly with his stomach-snail. Suddenly, he looks up and asks, "How do they work, anyway?"
"What?"
"The Looms." Before the brown-haired one can respond his brother ducks around the side of his Loom. "Hey, there's a door!"
"I don't think you're meant to go in there," the brown-haired one says, even as curiosity drives him to follow. "We might get in trouble."
"With whom?"
He has a point, and they realise at the same time that nobody's here.
This shouldn't happen. There's meant to be someone waiting for a Loomling when they're born, even if it's only an attendant and not an actual Family member. They know this as perfectly as they know calculus, but now it finally registers that each other doesn't count. There should be a grown-up here, too, and there isn't.
From inside the Loom there's a thump that might be caused by a Loomling sitting down quite heavily. The blond one says in a small voice, "Wonder where they are."
The room now seems an awful lot larger, and nowhere near as friendly. The brown-haired one glances at the door, hoping that someone will walk through and make everything all right, but there's no-one here. His Loom's doors are now firmly closed, forbidding any attempt to return to warmth and comfort. He shivers in the cold air, his skin beginning to rise in little bumps.
He draws nearer to the open Loom side-door. Inside, great white banks of consoles rise like mountains on all sides, broken only by an enormous window that overlooks the womb room below. The blond one sits cross-legged in the middle of them, staring up at the computers as though that will tell him everything he needs to know about how to operate them. His skin has also risen into bumps; he rubs his arms absent-mindedly as he ponders. The brown-haired one huddles up to him for warmth and for a moment they just sit, taking it all in.
"All of this, just to produce one person," the blond one says. His soft voice carries unnaturally in this still, silent world.
The brown-haired one peeps back at the door, but there is still nobody there. He wets his lips. "S'quiet."
"Yes," his brother agrees, and they fall back into silence for a moment before a great profundity occurs in the form of, "I'm cold. And hungry."
"Me too."
"I think..." The blond one looks at the door. His voice grows stronger as he makes his decision. "I think we should go and find someone. They can't really have abandoned us." There is a note of uncertainty in this last sentence that he covers up with, "Besides, I want to know what it's like out there." He scrambles to his feet, pulling the brown-haired one with him, and begins to tow him towards the door. The brown-haired one tugs on his arm to stop him.
"Hold on. What if someone does come?"
The blond one stops dead, his eyes widening as he vocalises his brother's thought. "If we're not here, they might... they might leave without us."
The brown-haired one was really, really hoping that he wouldn't say it. An eternity of this is too horrifying to contemplate.
They instinctively know what to do. They reach for one another's temples, fumbling for a moment before their cold fingers find their marks. Their minds open; at once every thought and feeling becomes available.
He's been aware of his brother ever since he was born, but only in the same way as he's aware of all the other Time Lords out there in the big world; an ongoing chorus in his mind, pleasant and reassuring but above all impersonal. Now every one of his brother's thoughts is his thought, and he's twice as scared, twice as hungry, twice as cold. His – their – tummy gurgles noisily In the same instant he sees the way his brother is burying fear with curiosity. He pushes further into the head-to-head to find out why, and finds that he's being scrutinised too; his brother is prying into the brown-haired one's own secrets. He pokes back hard, and the blond-haired one laughs with unexpected delight. This is fun. They've discovered a game.
"Contact," the brown-haired one giggles.
"Contact," his brother responds, and pushes his fingers further into the brown-haired one's hair.
For a few minutes they just play, messing about in one another's memories, reliving their first few minutes of life over and over; they work out how to make one another feel pleasure, and how to tickle and tease, and then the blond one accidentally does pain. The brown-haired one yelps. The shock yanks him out of his brother's head, reminding him of the cold air and the growing pain in his stomach. It refocuses them and they start to swap ideas, drawing from their limited pool of social understanding and knowledge.
They've never done this before and they keep stopping to play, so it takes them nearly five minutes to come up with the idea of the note. The blond one clambers up onto one of the mountainous consoles to retrieve paper and a pen, then they huddle on the floor. The blond-haired one dictates as the brown-haired one, who is beginning to shiver quite violently now, tries his best to write neatly with the too-big pen. He blots a few times, but his writing is mostly legible; then, as they admire their handiwork, it occurs to him that something is missing.
"We should sign it," he says.
His brother frowns at the note. "That means we need names. Anyway, I'm fed up thinking of you as brown-hair." He considers for a second, then adds, "I don't know who I want to be."
The brown-haired one doesn't know who he wants to be either; fortunately, his brother has a brainwave.
"We could name each other. I've got plenty of names for you."
This idea is incomprehensible to the brown-haired one.
"It'd only be temporary," his brother wheedles. "It's only a child name anyway. And once we find a grown-up, we can always change them... I think. Come on, else we'll be stuck here forever, and I'm going blue, look."
He holds out his hands. They are indeed turning an unhealthy shade of frozen blue, and the brown-haired one can't feel his toes, so he gives in and scrutinises his brother for something suitable to call him.
His eyes fall on the stomach-snail. "All right. I'll call you Snail."
Snail looks hurt. "That's not very nice."
"You've got one," the brown-haired one points out. "Anyway, you can always change it. You said."
"I suppose I did." Snail eyeballs him, then gives a wicked grin. "Flabbaduckarusa."
"Flabba-what?"
"You can always change it. Let's go, I'm freezing."
Pausing only to sign their new names, they make their way out into a harsh white corridor that sucks all the remaining warmth from Flabbaduckarusa's toes. It curves around an enormous central pillar, with doors set into the outer wall at regular intervals. Any one of those doors, he thinks nervously, could have food, clothes or even a grown-up behind them, but how can they ever hope to try them all? There are so many.
A sudden absence at his side indicates that Snail has vanished again, and he looks around to see his brother dashing down the corridor. He opens the first door he comes to.
"Oh," he calls, clearly disappointed. "It's just more Looms."
That doesn't make sense. Flabbaduckarusa catches up with Snail, his pace leisurely enough that he is able to notice and read the sign saying Prydon Blyledge above the door, and peeks in. The Loom inside has an eerie stillness about it, much like the rest of the floor. He racks his brain to work out what's wrong, then it comes to him. "We're meant to be Loomed in the House, aren't we? Not in some factory."
"Maybe we were. Maybe they lost lots of Cousins."
"I don't think so. There's a name over the door –" Flabbaduckarusa looks back at the door he and Snail came from, just to be sure of the information in his head "– and ours is different."
Snail joins him in the middle of the corridor. His eyes go first to one sign, then another. "Oh."
"Prydon Lungbarrow," Flabbaduckarusa says, trying it out. "Not bad."
Snail wraps his arms around himself, sticking his hands underneath his armpits. "But, look, if there's more than one House's worth of Looms here, then where is everyone?"
His brother's right. Even more than there should have been someone to welcome them into the world, there should be someone here. A technician, a carer – anybody.
He just wants someone to pick him up and put him in some warm clothes and tell him everything's going to be all right. He wants to go home, wherever home is.
From somewhere beyond the ceiling there comes a wave of bestial, alien fury. He and Snail cling to one another it goes on and on, drowning out even Snail's natural, friendly thoughts. Bile rises in Flabbaduckarusa's throat; Snail's face is ashen as he stares unseeing into the distance.
A dark, towering shadow emerges from around the bend at one end of the corridor. It's too big to be a grown-up, the wrong shape to be at all friendly, and as it moves it swishes in peculiar harmony with the fury upstairs. He and Snail stand transfixed for seconds that seem like hours before Snail recovers his wits and cries:
"Run!"
/\/\/\
Parts: One | Two | Three | Four | Epilogue | PDF
Rating: PG-13
Trigger warnings: Everything but Chapter Three is clean. Chapter Three: Miscarriage/infant death. Also, severe burning and dehydration.
Genre: Babyfic! No, wait. Action/Horror.
Characters/Pairings: Snail, Flabbaduckarusa and Tagalong. Or, in adult-speak: the Doctor, Braxiatel, and the Master.
Wordcount: Chapter: 2,161. Fic: 21,925
Continuity: Both uses and discards varying elements of Lungbarrow. Should stand alone, though; don't be put off if you haven't read it.
Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who; I'm just playing in the BBC's sandbox for fun and practice.
Summary: There's being born, and then there's being born into a world with no adults, no clothes, no food and a terrifying alien Thing upstairs. When their Looms birth them straight into the middle of an emergency, can Our Heroes muddle through?
Beta'ed by the amazing
in_lighter_ink and finished thanks to the brilliant people over at writethisfanfic. Reviews are always appreciated; leave concrit, and I will love you forever.Parts: One | Two | Three | Four | Epilogue | PDF
A Loom is an amazing thing. It can take genetic material from one parent, two, six, from the Matrix if necessary. It combines genes, cleanses them of impurities and imperfections: new life from old, new life from none. It moulds hands and feet, and eyes and hearts and lungs. It can make them toddler small, or even smaller if it feels like it, or adult big, big children in big bodies, confused, unnatural, but just as well-made.
The one place where it has to cheat is minds: the creation of real people. It is for this reason, they say, that Rassilon created the Matrix. The Loom takes a little of this and a little of that, and a nervous tic from over there, blends, merges, confuses, assigns an 'I' and a self-identity, folds and pinches and pokes...
It is happening now, in this Loom. He is Rassilon-Millarn-Theden-Sampradaya-Pandora; the last sneaks onto the end like a breath, a bug in the coding that the Loom lets slip because all brains look like bugs to it... he is all of these people, and yet none of them, entirely himself and entirely unique in his sameness. It gives him information, next: his I and his House, his Chapter, read, write, walk, talk, basic physics, music, house-training... he is brown-haired and brown-eyed, he is a child, he is warm and snug and suddenly aware of the warmth and snugness. As soon as he knows how warm and comfortable he is here, it's time to go.
His golden cocoon lowers him gently, stripping itself away as it does so. His legs touch the floor while it still supports him, and he takes his own weight before the last vestiges of it fall away. His cocoon is only the tiniest part of the outer world. The Loom's roof is miles above his head (it seems miles, anyway, but then he knows he's only three feet tall), and a large, ominous door ahead of him opens with a hiss of pneumatic hinges. He hesitates, but the Loom comforts him, giving him that last encouragement even as it urges him to walk forwards.
He walks; it's not so far after all, really. Beyond the doors, mirroring his own situation, he can see another Loom and another boy walking into the world – this one shorter than him and blond, his walk more confident as he turns his head, trying to see everything at once.
They step from hard Loom floors onto tickly orange carpet at the very same instant; now they are only a metre or so apart, naked under stark lighting and dark, panelled walls.
The blond boy stares over the brown-haired one's shoulder, then turns to inspect his own Loom. "They're smaller on the outside!"
The brown-haired one doesn't care. He's far more interested in the weird hole in the blond's tummy. Forgetting the manners that he hasn't yet been taught, he points, and stares, and asks, "What's that?"
The blond-haired boy pokes a finger into it. "Don't know." He looks curiously at the brown-haired one's midriff. "You don't have one."
"It looks like a snail," the brown-haired one says.
"You've never seen a snail!"
This is indisputable. "A wormhole, then."
"You've never seen one of those, either."
"Well, I still say it looks like one. So there!"
The argument thus effectively ended, the two boys stand in awkward silence for a moment, the blond playing idly with his stomach-snail. Suddenly, he looks up and asks, "How do they work, anyway?"
"What?"
"The Looms." Before the brown-haired one can respond his brother ducks around the side of his Loom. "Hey, there's a door!"
"I don't think you're meant to go in there," the brown-haired one says, even as curiosity drives him to follow. "We might get in trouble."
"With whom?"
He has a point, and they realise at the same time that nobody's here.
This shouldn't happen. There's meant to be someone waiting for a Loomling when they're born, even if it's only an attendant and not an actual Family member. They know this as perfectly as they know calculus, but now it finally registers that each other doesn't count. There should be a grown-up here, too, and there isn't.
From inside the Loom there's a thump that might be caused by a Loomling sitting down quite heavily. The blond one says in a small voice, "Wonder where they are."
The room now seems an awful lot larger, and nowhere near as friendly. The brown-haired one glances at the door, hoping that someone will walk through and make everything all right, but there's no-one here. His Loom's doors are now firmly closed, forbidding any attempt to return to warmth and comfort. He shivers in the cold air, his skin beginning to rise in little bumps.
He draws nearer to the open Loom side-door. Inside, great white banks of consoles rise like mountains on all sides, broken only by an enormous window that overlooks the womb room below. The blond one sits cross-legged in the middle of them, staring up at the computers as though that will tell him everything he needs to know about how to operate them. His skin has also risen into bumps; he rubs his arms absent-mindedly as he ponders. The brown-haired one huddles up to him for warmth and for a moment they just sit, taking it all in.
"All of this, just to produce one person," the blond one says. His soft voice carries unnaturally in this still, silent world.
The brown-haired one peeps back at the door, but there is still nobody there. He wets his lips. "S'quiet."
"Yes," his brother agrees, and they fall back into silence for a moment before a great profundity occurs in the form of, "I'm cold. And hungry."
"Me too."
"I think..." The blond one looks at the door. His voice grows stronger as he makes his decision. "I think we should go and find someone. They can't really have abandoned us." There is a note of uncertainty in this last sentence that he covers up with, "Besides, I want to know what it's like out there." He scrambles to his feet, pulling the brown-haired one with him, and begins to tow him towards the door. The brown-haired one tugs on his arm to stop him.
"Hold on. What if someone does come?"
The blond one stops dead, his eyes widening as he vocalises his brother's thought. "If we're not here, they might... they might leave without us."
The brown-haired one was really, really hoping that he wouldn't say it. An eternity of this is too horrifying to contemplate.
They instinctively know what to do. They reach for one another's temples, fumbling for a moment before their cold fingers find their marks. Their minds open; at once every thought and feeling becomes available.
He's been aware of his brother ever since he was born, but only in the same way as he's aware of all the other Time Lords out there in the big world; an ongoing chorus in his mind, pleasant and reassuring but above all impersonal. Now every one of his brother's thoughts is his thought, and he's twice as scared, twice as hungry, twice as cold. His – their – tummy gurgles noisily In the same instant he sees the way his brother is burying fear with curiosity. He pushes further into the head-to-head to find out why, and finds that he's being scrutinised too; his brother is prying into the brown-haired one's own secrets. He pokes back hard, and the blond-haired one laughs with unexpected delight. This is fun. They've discovered a game.
"Contact," the brown-haired one giggles.
"Contact," his brother responds, and pushes his fingers further into the brown-haired one's hair.
For a few minutes they just play, messing about in one another's memories, reliving their first few minutes of life over and over; they work out how to make one another feel pleasure, and how to tickle and tease, and then the blond one accidentally does pain. The brown-haired one yelps. The shock yanks him out of his brother's head, reminding him of the cold air and the growing pain in his stomach. It refocuses them and they start to swap ideas, drawing from their limited pool of social understanding and knowledge.
They've never done this before and they keep stopping to play, so it takes them nearly five minutes to come up with the idea of the note. The blond one clambers up onto one of the mountainous consoles to retrieve paper and a pen, then they huddle on the floor. The blond-haired one dictates as the brown-haired one, who is beginning to shiver quite violently now, tries his best to write neatly with the too-big pen. He blots a few times, but his writing is mostly legible; then, as they admire their handiwork, it occurs to him that something is missing.
"We should sign it," he says.
His brother frowns at the note. "That means we need names. Anyway, I'm fed up thinking of you as brown-hair." He considers for a second, then adds, "I don't know who I want to be."
The brown-haired one doesn't know who he wants to be either; fortunately, his brother has a brainwave.
"We could name each other. I've got plenty of names for you."
This idea is incomprehensible to the brown-haired one.
"It'd only be temporary," his brother wheedles. "It's only a child name anyway. And once we find a grown-up, we can always change them... I think. Come on, else we'll be stuck here forever, and I'm going blue, look."
He holds out his hands. They are indeed turning an unhealthy shade of frozen blue, and the brown-haired one can't feel his toes, so he gives in and scrutinises his brother for something suitable to call him.
His eyes fall on the stomach-snail. "All right. I'll call you Snail."
Snail looks hurt. "That's not very nice."
"You've got one," the brown-haired one points out. "Anyway, you can always change it. You said."
"I suppose I did." Snail eyeballs him, then gives a wicked grin. "Flabbaduckarusa."
"Flabba-what?"
"You can always change it. Let's go, I'm freezing."
Pausing only to sign their new names, they make their way out into a harsh white corridor that sucks all the remaining warmth from Flabbaduckarusa's toes. It curves around an enormous central pillar, with doors set into the outer wall at regular intervals. Any one of those doors, he thinks nervously, could have food, clothes or even a grown-up behind them, but how can they ever hope to try them all? There are so many.
A sudden absence at his side indicates that Snail has vanished again, and he looks around to see his brother dashing down the corridor. He opens the first door he comes to.
"Oh," he calls, clearly disappointed. "It's just more Looms."
That doesn't make sense. Flabbaduckarusa catches up with Snail, his pace leisurely enough that he is able to notice and read the sign saying Prydon Blyledge above the door, and peeks in. The Loom inside has an eerie stillness about it, much like the rest of the floor. He racks his brain to work out what's wrong, then it comes to him. "We're meant to be Loomed in the House, aren't we? Not in some factory."
"Maybe we were. Maybe they lost lots of Cousins."
"I don't think so. There's a name over the door –" Flabbaduckarusa looks back at the door he and Snail came from, just to be sure of the information in his head "– and ours is different."
Snail joins him in the middle of the corridor. His eyes go first to one sign, then another. "Oh."
"Prydon Lungbarrow," Flabbaduckarusa says, trying it out. "Not bad."
Snail wraps his arms around himself, sticking his hands underneath his armpits. "But, look, if there's more than one House's worth of Looms here, then where is everyone?"
His brother's right. Even more than there should have been someone to welcome them into the world, there should be someone here. A technician, a carer – anybody.
He just wants someone to pick him up and put him in some warm clothes and tell him everything's going to be all right. He wants to go home, wherever home is.
From somewhere beyond the ceiling there comes a wave of bestial, alien fury. He and Snail cling to one another it goes on and on, drowning out even Snail's natural, friendly thoughts. Bile rises in Flabbaduckarusa's throat; Snail's face is ashen as he stares unseeing into the distance.
A dark, towering shadow emerges from around the bend at one end of the corridor. It's too big to be a grown-up, the wrong shape to be at all friendly, and as it moves it swishes in peculiar harmony with the fury upstairs. He and Snail stand transfixed for seconds that seem like hours before Snail recovers his wits and cries:
"Run!"
Parts: One | Two | Three | Four | Epilogue | PDF
no subject
Date: 2011-05-11 05:59 am (UTC)As soon as he knows how warm and comfortable he is here, it's time to go.
This line is indescribably sad.
On the other hand, your genre description made me laugh out loud!
Looking forward to the rest.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-11 06:02 am (UTC)I'm planning on posting a chapter a day, so you won't have long to wait :)
And yeah, trying to find a genre to fit this was an... interesting challenge. It's episode fic, I guess, except everyone's a toddler...