silverwolfcc (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silverwolfcc) wrote2017-11-22 01:47 pm
silverwolfcc) wrote2017-11-22 01:47 pm
Entry tags:
CHAOS THREAD
"Rules!"
Put in a prompt!
Fill out other prompts / Can be with OCs, based on RP, etc.
Try to keep it drabblicious so 300 words or less (note: CC breaks this 24/7)
HAVE FUN!!
= Put a rating in the header if it's over PG13 for the squishy chibi moeblobs
- Mention what fandom/characters you're doing somewhere in advance too lol
Put in a prompt!
Fill out other prompts / Can be with OCs, based on RP, etc.
Try to keep it drabblicious so 300 words or less (note: CC breaks this 24/7)
HAVE FUN!!
= Put a rating in the header if it's over PG13 for the squishy chibi moeblobs
- Mention what fandom/characters you're doing somewhere in advance too lol
Prompt!
Re: Prompt!
But she wasn't just a girl from the Estates anymore, as Mickey pointed out. She was Rose Tyler: Vitex heiress.
She didn't care about that. Really, truly, one hundred percent didn't care about that. Not in the way her Mum insisted she didn't care because Peter mattered more, which was definitely true of her Mum, but the money and comfort would still take every worry and load off Jackie Tyler's mind that had ever been -- if anything... for Rose it brought about a different kind of worry.
These kind of worries.
Money, fame, titles, all of it felt like a rope around her neck.
She strung the pearls there hesitant, comparing them to the silver dress neckline, and took them down, feeling sick and uneasy. Her hand lingered on the plain steel-looking chain on her dresser that held her key to home. The TARDIS. The Doctor had been able to call her back during the paradox with that key, but it didn't work now. It'd been hot then, to remind him the TARDIS was alive and wanted to help when Rose and the Doctor had stopped fighting; but now it was cold. Nothing more than simple metal. A metal she didn't even know the name of, and that was virtually indestructible, but still... plain metal. Rose's eyes stung and she tore her gaze away so she wouldn't ruin her makeup.
Back to the stranger in the mirror. The stranger looked sad. And Rose reached her fingers out to the mirror, gently touching it to try to make her own visage feel better. It was supposed to be... well if not a happy day, certainly a big deal, not something to cry over, but inside part of Rose felt like she was drowning. She took a deep breath to pick herself up and sorted through the other jewelery for a necklace that didn't make her look as fake as she felt. She couldn't wear the key downstairs of course, oh no. Although she debated again putting it in her bra, because it was her safety net, and she never ever took it off. Not even in the shower. Until now.
But that was the point of it, wasn't it?
What good was holding onto the past, to everything she wished and dreamed if she was trying to move on, make her Mum happy in this bright new future she was building?
And Rose didn't want anyone to think she was ungrateful. She wasn't. She knew she'd been an absolute pill to be around the last half a year. And in spite of that, they kept trying. Kept reaching out hands for her to take... even when she was being a bit of a brat and the only hand she wanted was the Doctor's.
Big wolfish teeth bit the inside of her cheek, having broken the habit recently of biting her bottom lip and smudging lipstick. She missed the days of chapstick. And not having to worry about how she looked, just delighting in clothes of the past and the way the Doctor's face lit up when he saw her.
ENOUGH OF THAT! Rose growled, firmly scowling at herself in the mirror! She was not some lovesick puppy who broke without the person she loved most! Her parents, BOTH OF THEM, deserved better than that!
She stubbornly put on a silver chain and replaced the crescent moon (nothing to remind her of space, ta!) with a simple seashell. Perfect. Earth. Maybe not home, but where she needed to keep her head in the game. Rose Tyler: Defender of Earth. And it matched the lighter blue better than a night theme.
A deep breath and the woman in the mirror looked less sad, more determined, as she should.
Her hair was already done up like Audrey Hepburn, and she winced at the comparison, even in her own mind. It didn't help that she'd also spent 4 months in diction lessons, being taught constantly how to enunciate her r's and h's, Just You Wait ('Enry 'Iggins) from My Fair Lady had become a mental favorite. My Fair Lady indeed. She really had done the whole rags to riches thing. To a Tee.
This was to be her debut ball. A debutante affair. A coming out party or... whatever they called it. She'd been able to skip her sweet sixteen by virtue of living in a different universe, and having run away from home later that year, but in many respects it was her Mum's way of making up for it, and Peter Tyler's way too. And, as her father's PR manager constantly reminded her, it wasn't really about Rose. It was to make business connections. It was to let the public view what they wanted to and make... something of it. Whatever they wanted, really.
A year ago Rose would have rejected it for everything and anything.
A year ago she'd been happy, not borderline catatonic crying in her "bedroom" (the room designated her bedroom) and refusing to come out for three days. A year ago she'd been Dame Rose Tyler of Powell Estates.
Who the woman looking back at Rose from the mirror was? Rose hadn't the foggiest idea.
She looked impressive.
And the type of woman Rose wouldn't have bothered trying to chat up. Which was also the point. She had to be personable but aloof and unapproachable. She all but guaranteed she was going to break halfway through the party and do something outrageous like shove Mickey in the pool and jump in after him, but she closed her eyes and rested her hand on the key once more.
It was for her parents. It wasn't about her. It was for her baby brother or sister who hadn't even been born yet.
She couldn't lie to herself that it would just be one night. It wouldn't. This was just the start. That was why she wanted to linger there as long as she could. Cling to the past a little bit longer, while she could.
Mentally she could see Micks in his tux, looking... ridiculous and it gave her a little bit of breathing room at least. At least someone there would know how much she hated it.
Except would he? Or would even Mickey think this was who Rose wanted to be? Well, she'd just tell him. But then what? Make him upset that she wasn't even trying to give this world her best go? Even though that's what this whole night was ABOUT, and why she was doing it at all?! Ugh, so not worth the fight. Maybe she'd just find some pretty -- honestly Rose didn't even know Mickey's type anymore. He wasn't into this debutante stuff either, only coming for Rose's sake. Maybe they could sneak off like skipping classes and trash talk anyone being too stuffy. Or no... that would defeat the point too.
She almost wanted to scream with frustration. Or break something.
Quiet rebellion for later. For now, stuffing and swallowing all of it. She'd be the picture perfect heiress. Except for maybe trashing her dress in a foodfight -- haha... no. She felt a quiet pang at the thought. The Doctor would have loved to do that with her. No matter how boring or stuffy the party got, the Doctor would have found a way to make it exciting, even if they weren't chasing down monsters or unmasking aliens. He'd have done something completely mad like trying to swing from the chandelier. Or tried to engineer the buffet table to self deliver the jello only to make it explode and coat all the guests. Even the idea of it now was enough to make her giggle. The real Rose Tyler under the James Bond disguise mask.
There was a lump in her throat and she had to quickly powder her eyes.
He'd been there for the cyberman party, the one that was now part of the story. The fake life. That Jackie found her daughter waitressing for her own birthday party and that Rose had rescued her from the party, and over the next three years they reconnected, and the soap opera amnesiac fugue wore off so Jackie brought her daughter back home. It was so melodramatic that the press ate it right up. And so began the process.
Rose gently rested a finger on the seashell with a small bemused frown. Seashell really was appropriate. She was using the disguise like a shell. To hide her real squishy self. Heh.
It wasn't Peter and Jackie Tyler's fault. They -- especially Jackie had been willing to fight for whatever Rose wanted or felt she needed most. It was Rose's decision to go ahead with this.
And it was for the best. And even better if she created a little bit of a stir. A little bit more Eliza Doolittle swearing at the dead quiet horsetrack. Nothing that would upset her parents of course. Not that big of a stir. Just something to keep it all... interesting.
It was a game. And the competitive streak in Rose refused to lose or ever give up. It was a game. All the socialites and people trying to break her seashell disguise on one side, her game of chess alone on the other. But she wasn't completely alone. She had her family, and Micks. She was just the Queen of her chess team. She hated chess. She was more of a poker fan. Okay then, she was a high stakes poker game like Casino Royale, only she had a lot of friends and family on her side, just to make the odds even more in her favor.
And the more heiress she looked, the better her poker face. Perfect for bluffing and it would make the surprise when she wasn't bluffing that much more delicious.
"Come on Rose Tyler," the real Rose said to the Rose in the mirror. "Time to give 'em your war face."
It was gonna be a long night wearing a stranger's shoes.
Manic Monday!
In time travel, it doesn't matter what day of the week it was. Monday, Christmas, morning, midnight, Saturnalia, or other weird alien days, it all blurred together into a big holiday of fun and the fantastic.
In Torchwood, there were no weekends. There was no way to schedule incidents, and for people like her father who had to run another business as a shelter (shell!!) corporation to disguise Torchwood's more secretive affairs on the side, the weekends were prime days for actually getting real work done.
Rose Tyler was unaware of how different things would have been for her and Torchwood if Pete's PR team had been less competent. How much more time she would have been forced to spend there creating and filling out paperwork, creating protocols beyond just the basics of fighting supernatural and otherwise mythical monsters and aliens. Instead, she had less to fill her days than she needed.
And that meant she fell into the heiress role even more, if a bit reluctantly at first.
It was good for business. Business connections, funding, using those connections to hide people and secrets that needed hiding. Sometimes she worried about the Streisand Effect having a rebound that the more you tried to hide something, the more people were bound to be curious about it and dig it up when they wouldn't have even cared normally, but that was why being an heiress, a corporate princess as she was called, was so useful. It was so much easier to hide something in plain sight where people wouldn't be looking for it. Like the TARDIS, even if the chameleon circuit had gotten stuck back in the '60s.
It was good for business in all angles, it made her Mum over the moon, and it was better than trying to refrain from groaning out loud and rolling her eyes while her mother went over the billion other ways to decorate the baby's room. Although Rose did enjoy spending time with Peter devising baby-safe toys. That was forever a highlight that didn't even make Rose jealous of all the attention the baby was getting before it was even born. It just made her proud to be able to call him her Dad -- as complicated as their connection to each other was.
But just because it was a highly specialized demand that only Rose Tyler could meet, didn't mean she liked it.
Smiling and copying her Dad's pose to sell Vitex was funny the first few times. And waned very quickly when she got yelled at for getting it wrong, or not looking genuine enough, or not sporty enough, or TOO sporty -- or whatever other nonsense advertising said. Usually Pete's PR department had a sixth sense about such things and rescued her before she blew a gasket on anyone -- which was for their own good more than Rose's.
Still, Mondays actually became a day for Rose to look forward to. No one wanted to cover serious news on the weekends. So it was the best time for her to do something absolutely outrageous like dancing in the company fountain in public, or take a quick job dressed as a hot dog -- something a year ago she would had flat out refused, and now with no one knowing the real her, and everyone knowing her name and face, she jumped at instead. And in Monday mornings the print on the phones and papers was all about her latest stunts, letting little things like unexpected meteor showers in Dublin or missing cows near Leeds go unnoticed.
She was also noticing that someone (almost definitely Pete's PR team) was sabotaging her outrage efforts and catching her at honest more embarrassing moments. The genuine things. Hospital visits to bring toys and flowers. Buying random kids in the park ice cream. The one time she yelled at a mugger and kicked him for trying to mug an old lady and sat on him until the police arrived.
She had half a mind to tell 'em off for it too. But then it would have become a tug of war over the kind of attention she was drawing.
Rose didn't compromise. Not exactly. But she didn't hide the next time she went to an animal shelter, ostensibly looking for a pet for her new baby sibling to be to grow up alongside, but it became a much bigger project than she could have ever imagined. And so she wound up setting up another 3 events for Monday afternoons to get all the at-risk animals adopted and draw attention to the situation.
And it wasn't that she didn't want Pete's PR team not to stress out, not exactly.
But she was a little bemused when Monday became their least hectic day of the week. Some way or another.
PROMPT
no subject
She didn't look up, already knowing who it was, and secretly grinning to herself. She kept tooling away on her cannon.
"Did you know space is actually pretty quiet?" she unscrewed pieces of the alien tech, cannibalizing it to see what she could do with it.
"It fucking is not," he growled derisively.
"It's true," Rose replied, not even looking up, just unfurling her blueprints. "It's a vacuum of course, so even though every star has its own signature sound, the space between is empty, it's very quiet."
He didn't say anything, and didn't move to block her light or move to her field of vision, so she pretended she didn't notice either.
She screwed some pieces back together, and held it up like a bazooka, one eye closed, as she pointed it at the light.
"In space, no one can hear you blow up your ex's planet," she drawled in deadpan.
He left without a word after that, much to Rose's eternal internal amusement.
Of course Gallifrey wasn't anywhere to be blown up, but then Rose hadn't been serious about any of it anyway.
no subject
no subject
John, I am... your... mother!
Dear Fellow Traveler || Lyrics -> Not a drabble
Under the moon
I saw you standing in the shadows and your eyes were blue
You put your hand out
Opened the door
You said come with me boy, I want to show you something more
You spoke my language
And touched my limbs
It wasn't difficult
To pull me from myself again
And in our travels
We found our roads
You held it like a mirror, showing me the life I chose
And now we turn to my beautiful city
Black skies changed into blue
And my love is so wise and so pretty
But tonight I still dream of you
Dear fellow traveler
Under the moon
I think I'm growing weary and I'm hoping you'll come soon
And if I see you
In clean new clothes
I hope you hold the mirror up to show me what I chose
And I returned to my beautiful city
Black skies change into blue
And though my love is so wise and so pretty
Some nights I'll still dream of you
And I'll return to my beautiful city
Black skies change into blue
And though my love is so wise and so pretty
Some nights I'll still dream of you,
You
And I know you're out there, in the shadows
I know you're out there, in the shadows
I know you're out there, in the shadows
Dear fellow traveler, underneath the moon
Dear fellow traveler, underneath the moon
Dear fellow traveler, underneath the moon
no subject
Before Pete's Universe, she always thought it was Powell Estates that was in her bones more than even being British. And this coming from the girl who got caught in the London blitz with a Union Jack across her chest, who witnessed the coronation of the Queen in the 1950s... on the telly like everyone else, but still. Then again maybe that was why it was London, not just the Estates anymore. Even as a child the Estates hadn't been as big as they seemed. Tall. Good for sitting on the roof and talking with the bloke she brought back home a year late from traveling, to be sure. But cramped flats, fire hazards, broken elevators, gated windows, and don't even get her started about that damn cat flap. Powell Estates was where she grew up. Even when she ran away and moved out the first time, she still came back to those bloody estates. It defined her more than she'd wanted to admit, and then she just embraced it.
But even Powell Estates had never been big enough for Rose. How many times had her Mum gone crazy from Rose running all over the rest of London? Taking doubledeckers sight seeing since she was old enough to board one alone. How many times had she gone out to the Thames and dreamed of crossing it?
Living in Pete's mansion the first few nights had been torture. Not because it wasn't the Estates, but because it wasn't the TARDIS.
But it was still London.
Same smell, same overcast skies that were bloody hard to see stars from. Same streets. WHich was kind of funny given the different Universe and all the zeppelins and things that should have been different.
It wasn't the Doctor's Universe, but it was still London. It was still the river they'd all but swum as ghost half-fish aliens for the feast.
Almost NONE of the bands were the same, but it was still the center of rock'n'roll, especially punk, and it was a comfort to know that somehow the Beatles were universal.
It was still the center of counter fashion, punk rock and jeans, dyed hair and mohawks, clashing Paris' attempts at elegance.
It was still the city of nightclubs and chippies and double-deckers, -- even if that latter also included a term for hot air balloons in this crazy world.
It was London, and she didn't love it, could never, would never be able to shake the feeling of being trapped in it, but it was beautiful.
She couldn't walk over the same streets she once ran hand in hand with the best friend she'd ever had, better even than Mickey, though she wouldn't tell him that and risk hurting him, even if she suspected he must have known by now. But she took the bridges and lanes at a jog, smiling to anyone who recognized her, and hiding the hurt when she hit places that reminded her of him. Two different faces, blue eyes that stopped her cold in her tracks, and fantastic fluffy hair just meant for fingers to get lost in. A corner here, a building of flats there. Fortunately London was just big enough to get lost in, and lose some memories to.
London was her city.
Now, more than ever. Because she could no longer travel those roads. No longer sail the stars. She remembered Sarah Jane's advice and complaint about returning to a normal Earth life after traveling with the Doctor. Nothing would ever be the same again. And Rose didn't want it to be! She wondered sometimes which part Sarah Jane missed most. What it would take for Rose to be willing to move on and settle in the city, her city the way she told her Mum she was trying -- and meant it too!
She needed London, but London needed her too.
She needed to be needed. To tell herself that there was something she could do no one else could, even if that was just existing. Once it had just been holding the Doctor's hand. And she desperately longed to do that again, and dreamed of it every night, flying in the stars, just holding his hand...
But she was making the world a better place. One day at a time. One mission at a time.
It was hard.
She missed him, she wanted to be selfish again. To go back to flying. She was grounded and it was difficult. He would hear him call her name in her sleep, but wake alone, trying to fight back the tears.
London had always watched over Rose. She wondered sometimes if it wasn't the Doctor going backwards to watch over her himself like the time he got her her favorite bike for Christmas. She could definitely imagine him watching her from the shadows. Like a skulking ghost. London was just big enough he would have blended in, though not around the Estates.
But now in Pete's Universe she was still be watched from the shadows. Not in a malevolent way. Instead the kind of way that no other planet in the universe held. Only London.
The lights of buildings reminded her of eyes and windows to the soul. The Doctor's blue eyes before regeneration had always seen straight to her core in a way that couldn't be replicated. London's eyes were like a wary animal, but just as gentle. Nowhere near as ancient as the Doctor's, but just as capable of being terrifying as the Oncoming Storm.
Most people's blue eyes she could look straight into, fearlessly, always moving onward.
Most people's.
And she could face London's eyes head on, they were like the Doctor's, and she wanted to heal the pain in them, hurting from more than just cybermen and wars. Like the Doctor's.
But there was something about Ian's that unsettled her in a way she couldn't put her finger on. A glint of something she either wanted to imagine, or thought wasn't there that should be. Like a window with shades drawn. She knew it wasn't polite to look when people made it clear they didn't want to be looked in on. It wasn't even just that it was rude. It filled her with an ache deep inside she was scared he would see if he looked back into her eyes.
The longing to travel.
Trying to substitute the roads for home.
She told herself over and over that the Doctor would be fine. He'd had friends before Rose like Sarah Jane, he would again after her -- a thought that didn't actually comfort her in the least.
She'd forogtten that she didn't just hold his hand for his sake, but hers as well.
London was a lot of things, bigger now, and the zeppelin lights at night were strange and wonderful enough she could almost trick herself into believing she was sleeping under some strange alien sky, not London again. But even if the strange eyes of London were watching over her, they weren't a hand to hold.
And so she couldn't go over the same bridges and roads she'd run while holding his hand.
She liked to think now the whole city was holding her hand, needing her as much as she needed them. And maybe it was true. Maybe it was.
But whether she jogged to promote Vitex or just for the feel of it again, the nights were the worst. Especially when she rolled over from a nightmare of losing him to grab his hand and go running with him, but he wasn't there.