Post by Seek on Jul 5, 2011 8:13:59 GMT 10
Title: An Acceptable Time
Rating: G
Couple/Character: Matthias Tunstall
Event: AU pole vault
Words: 1997
Summary: Detective Matthias Tunstall meets someone he doesn’t expect to. Crossover. Thanks to Sidonie for her advice on how to keep someone in-character
Warning: Mention of character death.
-
21st January 2008, Mattes reads off a newspaper he’s lifted, and he gives the vendor a nod and puts it back before he walks on. It was autumn when he was at the station, and now the fierce chill of winter threatens to seep in through the fabric of his coat. He tugs it closer about him, and keeps on walking.
This isn’t the first time he’s lost several months. This is the first time he’s lost them in reverse, and part of Mattes wonders if he’ll see Clary at the station if he makes his way back there.
Clary. He pushes aside the sharp pang of regret and keeps on walking, hands tucked into his pocket. No. Maybe there’s another Mattes there, another Detective Matthias Tunstall, and wouldn’t that be a right mess he’d land himself into?
Keep walking. Start thinking.
He feels eyes staring directly at him; his shoulder-blades itch, and it’s something that Mattes can’t quite scratch. It’s a sense honed only by time and experience, this sense of when someone’s watching. He’s seen the uncanny way Sergeant Ahuda’s able to pick up whenever someone looks at her.
Carefully, Mattes turns his head, trying to catch a glimpse out of the corner of his eye.
A man in a light brown overcoat, arms folded across his chest is staring right at him. The direction of his gaze is unmistakeable; he’s looking at Mattes, not to the left of Mattes or to the right.
When he looks again, trying to fix the man’s features in his mind with a direct glance, the man is gone.
-
Clary leaves on the 17th of November, 2009, with a heavily bandaged leg and a pair of crutches. Mattes would have done something, or said something, if he could, but he doesn’t have any right to tell her what to do with her life.
He’s afraid she might say yes.
The old Clary would snap at him. This one just gives him a long, sad look and says, “Take care of yourself, Mattes.”
He feels the wind through the thick canvas of his coat, chilling him to the core of his aching bones. Twenty years as a constable should be more than enough for anyone. You’re getting old, Tunstall.
“Take care of yourself,” he says, biting back I always do and he watches her limp away from the station for the last time. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so he sticks them in his coat pockets, feeling where the last crumpled receipt from supper at the café down the street is.
“Pearl Skinner was too much for her,” Ahuda says.
He closes his eyes. “I know, Sarge.”
A hand rests lightly on his shoulder. “Coffee’s on me,” Ahuda tells him, “And I know you haven’t had one in ages. C’mon.”
He lets her lead him away and looks back only once. There’s a flutter of brown in a corner, and then it vanishes.
-
A day or two after the tenth, and Mattes finds himself studying the neat angled letters on the marker: 31st March 2007.
It’s twenty-oh-nine, and if he closes his eyes, he can see Clary walking away in twenty-oh-eight, can feel the gentle brush of Ahuda’s fingers, the light concern in her voice. The memories jangle like discordant notes in his brain.
This hasn’t ever happened before.
She’s not supposed to be dead. He’s spoken to her in twenty-oh-eight.
She’s not supposed to be dead.
It’s as simple as that.
By now, he’s almost not surprised when he stands up, dusts off his trousers and turns deliberately to meet the manic dark eyes of the man in the brown overcoat.
April is the cruellest month.
-
It’s the tenth of October now, in 2008. Mattes is almost used to these slips happening more frequently now, as if he can be walking down a street in December 2009 and suddenly it’s April 2006.
He walks right into HQ, greets people with a few short words. Everyone else seems to ignore him, as if he’s invisible. As if he’s fading from their recognition, too, like the divergent memories of Clary and Ahuda that are swimming around in his head.
“Tunstall. Haven’t seen you around.”
“Later, Nyler,” he says, “I’ve got business with HR.”
Nyler rolls his eyes and shrugs haplessly; it’s a gesture any constable who’s dealt with the human resource department recognises by now. “I’d walk faster if I were you. I hear they’re running some kind of check anytime soon.”
“Thanks for the hint.”
“Don’t mention it.” No mention of Clary, though there are dark smudges about Nyler’s eyes. Mattes wonders if Nyler even remembers mentoring her through her probation year.
He just manages to get his foot in the door before HR does its bi-annual cataloguing.
It’s in the retired personnel file of Detective-Constable Clara Goodwin, a neatly typed Courier 12 report filed right at the top of all the papers and commendations and reports.
STATUS: DECEASED.
PC CLARA GOODWIN DIED OF MULTIPLE STAB WOUNDS INFLICTED TO THE ABDOMEN WHILE ATTEMPTING TO APPREHEND FELON KNOWN AS “PEARL SKINNER”.
Mattes doesn’t know how long he spends staring at the file, thinking or remembering a conversation with Clary in a November that tastes like ashes on the tongue and wind that makes his weary bones ache.
Outside the window, he sees a tall, thin man cross the street, coat flapping about his ankles. He sees a blue 1960s police box, the kind he hasn’t seen for quite a while now.
The two may or may not be connected.
-
In the April of 2009, he brings hyacinths to Clary’s grave. He doesn’t know why, he just does. While he’s hunkered down in the fresh-cut grass, he all but feels the presence behind him again, the same sense of being watched. Straightening up, Mattes says – no, asks – “Have we met?”
“No. We haven’t.” A red Converse trainer nudges at the ground. “Alright, who are you, and are you with Torchwood?”
Mattes blinks, rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand. He doesn’t have the faintest idea what Torchwood is. “No. I’m Detective Matthias Tunstall from Scotland Yard.”
“A copper? Oh, now that’s new. There’s far too many temporal fluctuations around you, Detective Matthias Tunstall,” the man says. His eyebrows are knitted together in a pensive frown.
“Who are you?” Mattes challenges, taking one step forward. “It was 2007 yesterday. Sometimes, I can’t even walk to St Paul's without the year changing to 2008. But no matter where I go…I keep seeing you. Who are you?”
Lips twitch. “You can call me the Doctor.”
“You talked about temporal fluctuations. Is that what’s been happening? I close my eyes, and it’s two months in the past. Maybe three.”
The Doctor (if that is how Mattes is supposed to think of him) sighs and says matter-of-factly, “Time. You’re moving around in time. I didn’t think you were supposed to. Not without all the technology Torchwood’s been cannibalising rather…avidly. But you’re not with them, which means that you’ve been transiting about through time rifts without some form of a vortex manipulator. Terribly crude things, vortex manipulators. But you…you keep going through the rifts. That’s brilliant. I couldn’t get more lucky if I tried.”
“Things are different,” Mattes says, “Different from how I remember them.” He glances over at Clary’s grave, and he notices the Doctor follow his gaze with a slight nod of acknowledgement.
“They are different,” the Doctor says gravely. For a moment, those eyes are old, so old, and Mattes is thinking about the last time he’s spoken to his grandfather. There’s pain, and there’s an almost…wistful edge to them. “They’re not supposed to be.”
“But I remember them.”
“You’re a time traveller,” he replies, “Of course you’ll remember the changes. But crossing into established events is strictly forbidden. You can’t change what’s happened.” There’s an edge to that smile, and a feeling that Mattes knows and doesn’t know what underpins it.
“Then tell me what I’m supposed to do about it,” Mattes retorts stubbornly, “Because something changed. Clary died, when she wasn’t supposed to. Now what can I do?”
The Doctor doubles over for a moment, clutching at his stomach, face wracked with pain. Not quite understanding, Mattes takes a step forward, his worry dissolving and being replaced by concern. “Are you alright?” he asks, wondering if he should call for any kind of aid. Appendicitis?
Fierce dark eyes tear through him as the Doctor glances up. “No – need,” he chokes out, hand reflexively held out as if to push Mattes away. “I’m alright,” he gasps, licking at his dry lips and carefully straightening himself, tugging his coat straight again. Beneath, Mattes catches a glimpse of a blue pinstripe suit. He’s far too pale to be healthy, in any case.
Crazy to wear that kind of thing in April, he thinks, when he’s already cooking in his canvas coat.
“You’re hurt,” he says. That, and ha’pence, grandfather would say, could probably buy him a loaf. Half a loaf, maybe, with the way prices have been shooting up.
The Doctor’s eyes gleam. “I know,” he says darkly. “It can’t be helped.”
“You should see a doctor.”
“A doctor can’t help me now,” the Doctor pronounces. There’s something about resignation in the set of his shoulders. A hint of fear in his eyes as he glances down at his hands, and then back at Mattes again, assessing him. “Now, Matthias Tunstall, what I can do is to go about and fix the time shifts. Those shouldn’t be happening, at any rate, and these rifts appear to be centring around you…” he frowns, “…except they can’t be. Not if things have changed. It’s like…oh, I don’t know. Trying to play Purple Haze on a guitar with a teaspoon. Not that I think it can’t be done, mind you. Jimi Hendrix was one versatile chap. I’d bet you ten quid that he could, but that’s hardly the point.”
Before he can think the better of it, or quite follow what the Doctor’s musings, Mattes says, “Take me with you.”
Something in the Doctor’s expression shifts; from haunted to fierce to something that is heavy with resignation and longing and loneliness at the same time. “No,” he replies regretfully, arms folded across his chest. “I’m sorry, Matthias. Time was, I might have asked you to come along. I don’t take companions any more.”
There’s something of Clary’s stubbornness and his own left in him. There is the click of a safety flicking off in Mattes’ brain, and the sharp sound of a gunshot. The feel of the gun in the holster against his hip, hidden from view by his coat. “That grave you’re standing in front of? It’s my partner’s. She wasn’t supposed to be dead. But one day, I’m in the year twenty-oh-nine and I remember talking to her in twenty-oh-eight, but everyone said she’d died in twenty-oh-seven. If you’re going to fix whatever’s screwing around with the timelines, then I’d think you could use a detective, until this is fixed.”
The Doctor studies him as if he hasn’t seen him before. “Molto bene,” he says, finally. “No sense in wasting time, then, Matthias. Allons-y!”
He flashes Mattes a wide, manic grin, one that transforms the gravity of his earlier expression, and beckons, in an almost chameleon-like change of mood. There’s something infectious about the Doctor’s grin, about his seemingly boundless energy. Gone is the tired man, the one with eyes like Mattes’ grandfather, like a skin a snake so easily sloughs. Or perhaps slips into.
“What are you doing?” Mattes calls out, after the Doctor.
The man pauses in the middle of a brisk walk, turns around, and his crazy grin hasn’t yet abated. “Well,” he calls back, “You’re not going to find a time rift standing around like that!”
He jogs to keep up with the man’s stride. Well, alright then, Mattes thinks, and follows.
Just a temporary thing.
Rating: G
Couple/Character: Matthias Tunstall
Event: AU pole vault
Words: 1997
Summary: Detective Matthias Tunstall meets someone he doesn’t expect to. Crossover. Thanks to Sidonie for her advice on how to keep someone in-character
Warning: Mention of character death.
-
21st January 2008, Mattes reads off a newspaper he’s lifted, and he gives the vendor a nod and puts it back before he walks on. It was autumn when he was at the station, and now the fierce chill of winter threatens to seep in through the fabric of his coat. He tugs it closer about him, and keeps on walking.
This isn’t the first time he’s lost several months. This is the first time he’s lost them in reverse, and part of Mattes wonders if he’ll see Clary at the station if he makes his way back there.
Clary. He pushes aside the sharp pang of regret and keeps on walking, hands tucked into his pocket. No. Maybe there’s another Mattes there, another Detective Matthias Tunstall, and wouldn’t that be a right mess he’d land himself into?
Keep walking. Start thinking.
He feels eyes staring directly at him; his shoulder-blades itch, and it’s something that Mattes can’t quite scratch. It’s a sense honed only by time and experience, this sense of when someone’s watching. He’s seen the uncanny way Sergeant Ahuda’s able to pick up whenever someone looks at her.
Carefully, Mattes turns his head, trying to catch a glimpse out of the corner of his eye.
A man in a light brown overcoat, arms folded across his chest is staring right at him. The direction of his gaze is unmistakeable; he’s looking at Mattes, not to the left of Mattes or to the right.
When he looks again, trying to fix the man’s features in his mind with a direct glance, the man is gone.
-
Clary leaves on the 17th of November, 2009, with a heavily bandaged leg and a pair of crutches. Mattes would have done something, or said something, if he could, but he doesn’t have any right to tell her what to do with her life.
He’s afraid she might say yes.
The old Clary would snap at him. This one just gives him a long, sad look and says, “Take care of yourself, Mattes.”
He feels the wind through the thick canvas of his coat, chilling him to the core of his aching bones. Twenty years as a constable should be more than enough for anyone. You’re getting old, Tunstall.
“Take care of yourself,” he says, biting back I always do and he watches her limp away from the station for the last time. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so he sticks them in his coat pockets, feeling where the last crumpled receipt from supper at the café down the street is.
“Pearl Skinner was too much for her,” Ahuda says.
He closes his eyes. “I know, Sarge.”
A hand rests lightly on his shoulder. “Coffee’s on me,” Ahuda tells him, “And I know you haven’t had one in ages. C’mon.”
He lets her lead him away and looks back only once. There’s a flutter of brown in a corner, and then it vanishes.
-
A day or two after the tenth, and Mattes finds himself studying the neat angled letters on the marker: 31st March 2007.
It’s twenty-oh-nine, and if he closes his eyes, he can see Clary walking away in twenty-oh-eight, can feel the gentle brush of Ahuda’s fingers, the light concern in her voice. The memories jangle like discordant notes in his brain.
This hasn’t ever happened before.
She’s not supposed to be dead. He’s spoken to her in twenty-oh-eight.
She’s not supposed to be dead.
It’s as simple as that.
By now, he’s almost not surprised when he stands up, dusts off his trousers and turns deliberately to meet the manic dark eyes of the man in the brown overcoat.
April is the cruellest month.
-
It’s the tenth of October now, in 2008. Mattes is almost used to these slips happening more frequently now, as if he can be walking down a street in December 2009 and suddenly it’s April 2006.
He walks right into HQ, greets people with a few short words. Everyone else seems to ignore him, as if he’s invisible. As if he’s fading from their recognition, too, like the divergent memories of Clary and Ahuda that are swimming around in his head.
“Tunstall. Haven’t seen you around.”
“Later, Nyler,” he says, “I’ve got business with HR.”
Nyler rolls his eyes and shrugs haplessly; it’s a gesture any constable who’s dealt with the human resource department recognises by now. “I’d walk faster if I were you. I hear they’re running some kind of check anytime soon.”
“Thanks for the hint.”
“Don’t mention it.” No mention of Clary, though there are dark smudges about Nyler’s eyes. Mattes wonders if Nyler even remembers mentoring her through her probation year.
He just manages to get his foot in the door before HR does its bi-annual cataloguing.
It’s in the retired personnel file of Detective-Constable Clara Goodwin, a neatly typed Courier 12 report filed right at the top of all the papers and commendations and reports.
STATUS: DECEASED.
PC CLARA GOODWIN DIED OF MULTIPLE STAB WOUNDS INFLICTED TO THE ABDOMEN WHILE ATTEMPTING TO APPREHEND FELON KNOWN AS “PEARL SKINNER”.
Mattes doesn’t know how long he spends staring at the file, thinking or remembering a conversation with Clary in a November that tastes like ashes on the tongue and wind that makes his weary bones ache.
Outside the window, he sees a tall, thin man cross the street, coat flapping about his ankles. He sees a blue 1960s police box, the kind he hasn’t seen for quite a while now.
The two may or may not be connected.
-
In the April of 2009, he brings hyacinths to Clary’s grave. He doesn’t know why, he just does. While he’s hunkered down in the fresh-cut grass, he all but feels the presence behind him again, the same sense of being watched. Straightening up, Mattes says – no, asks – “Have we met?”
“No. We haven’t.” A red Converse trainer nudges at the ground. “Alright, who are you, and are you with Torchwood?”
Mattes blinks, rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand. He doesn’t have the faintest idea what Torchwood is. “No. I’m Detective Matthias Tunstall from Scotland Yard.”
“A copper? Oh, now that’s new. There’s far too many temporal fluctuations around you, Detective Matthias Tunstall,” the man says. His eyebrows are knitted together in a pensive frown.
“Who are you?” Mattes challenges, taking one step forward. “It was 2007 yesterday. Sometimes, I can’t even walk to St Paul's without the year changing to 2008. But no matter where I go…I keep seeing you. Who are you?”
Lips twitch. “You can call me the Doctor.”
“You talked about temporal fluctuations. Is that what’s been happening? I close my eyes, and it’s two months in the past. Maybe three.”
The Doctor (if that is how Mattes is supposed to think of him) sighs and says matter-of-factly, “Time. You’re moving around in time. I didn’t think you were supposed to. Not without all the technology Torchwood’s been cannibalising rather…avidly. But you’re not with them, which means that you’ve been transiting about through time rifts without some form of a vortex manipulator. Terribly crude things, vortex manipulators. But you…you keep going through the rifts. That’s brilliant. I couldn’t get more lucky if I tried.”
“Things are different,” Mattes says, “Different from how I remember them.” He glances over at Clary’s grave, and he notices the Doctor follow his gaze with a slight nod of acknowledgement.
“They are different,” the Doctor says gravely. For a moment, those eyes are old, so old, and Mattes is thinking about the last time he’s spoken to his grandfather. There’s pain, and there’s an almost…wistful edge to them. “They’re not supposed to be.”
“But I remember them.”
“You’re a time traveller,” he replies, “Of course you’ll remember the changes. But crossing into established events is strictly forbidden. You can’t change what’s happened.” There’s an edge to that smile, and a feeling that Mattes knows and doesn’t know what underpins it.
“Then tell me what I’m supposed to do about it,” Mattes retorts stubbornly, “Because something changed. Clary died, when she wasn’t supposed to. Now what can I do?”
The Doctor doubles over for a moment, clutching at his stomach, face wracked with pain. Not quite understanding, Mattes takes a step forward, his worry dissolving and being replaced by concern. “Are you alright?” he asks, wondering if he should call for any kind of aid. Appendicitis?
Fierce dark eyes tear through him as the Doctor glances up. “No – need,” he chokes out, hand reflexively held out as if to push Mattes away. “I’m alright,” he gasps, licking at his dry lips and carefully straightening himself, tugging his coat straight again. Beneath, Mattes catches a glimpse of a blue pinstripe suit. He’s far too pale to be healthy, in any case.
Crazy to wear that kind of thing in April, he thinks, when he’s already cooking in his canvas coat.
“You’re hurt,” he says. That, and ha’pence, grandfather would say, could probably buy him a loaf. Half a loaf, maybe, with the way prices have been shooting up.
The Doctor’s eyes gleam. “I know,” he says darkly. “It can’t be helped.”
“You should see a doctor.”
“A doctor can’t help me now,” the Doctor pronounces. There’s something about resignation in the set of his shoulders. A hint of fear in his eyes as he glances down at his hands, and then back at Mattes again, assessing him. “Now, Matthias Tunstall, what I can do is to go about and fix the time shifts. Those shouldn’t be happening, at any rate, and these rifts appear to be centring around you…” he frowns, “…except they can’t be. Not if things have changed. It’s like…oh, I don’t know. Trying to play Purple Haze on a guitar with a teaspoon. Not that I think it can’t be done, mind you. Jimi Hendrix was one versatile chap. I’d bet you ten quid that he could, but that’s hardly the point.”
Before he can think the better of it, or quite follow what the Doctor’s musings, Mattes says, “Take me with you.”
Something in the Doctor’s expression shifts; from haunted to fierce to something that is heavy with resignation and longing and loneliness at the same time. “No,” he replies regretfully, arms folded across his chest. “I’m sorry, Matthias. Time was, I might have asked you to come along. I don’t take companions any more.”
There’s something of Clary’s stubbornness and his own left in him. There is the click of a safety flicking off in Mattes’ brain, and the sharp sound of a gunshot. The feel of the gun in the holster against his hip, hidden from view by his coat. “That grave you’re standing in front of? It’s my partner’s. She wasn’t supposed to be dead. But one day, I’m in the year twenty-oh-nine and I remember talking to her in twenty-oh-eight, but everyone said she’d died in twenty-oh-seven. If you’re going to fix whatever’s screwing around with the timelines, then I’d think you could use a detective, until this is fixed.”
The Doctor studies him as if he hasn’t seen him before. “Molto bene,” he says, finally. “No sense in wasting time, then, Matthias. Allons-y!”
He flashes Mattes a wide, manic grin, one that transforms the gravity of his earlier expression, and beckons, in an almost chameleon-like change of mood. There’s something infectious about the Doctor’s grin, about his seemingly boundless energy. Gone is the tired man, the one with eyes like Mattes’ grandfather, like a skin a snake so easily sloughs. Or perhaps slips into.
“What are you doing?” Mattes calls out, after the Doctor.
The man pauses in the middle of a brisk walk, turns around, and his crazy grin hasn’t yet abated. “Well,” he calls back, “You’re not going to find a time rift standing around like that!”
He jogs to keep up with the man’s stride. Well, alright then, Mattes thinks, and follows.
Just a temporary thing.