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kalleahI've made allusions to some vignettes I've been working on in the same continuity as The Calm Before The Storm and Voyages of Discovery, and I'm pleased to post the first of these. Each of these vignettes is told from the POV of a different character from Pete's World.
Note: I strongly recommend reading Voyages first. The vignettes will make much more sense in context, and there are spoilers for that story and the series through Doomsday in them.
Note: I strongly recommend reading Voyages first. The vignettes will make much more sense in context, and there are spoilers for that story and the series through Doomsday in them.
Pete Tyler.
"What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from."
T.S. Eliot
His daughter was born on the day his not-daughter disappeared.
He held the infant girl, swaddled in soft blankets, tenderly. Her skin was ruddy and wrinkled, with the look of countless newborns that he had seen in the arms of friends and family and never before found attractive. In her eyes, now scrunched tightly closed as she grasped hard onto sleep, he saw all the beauty and promise of the world he had helped to save.
While Jackie slept, he made a call to Torchwood and asked his staff to begin a discreet search for Rose. "No media," he instructed. Jackie had been distraught, in the pains of birth, not to have her daughter at her side. He would not have tabloids speculating about Rose to compound her existing anxiety.
Pete sat in the chair by Jackie's bedside and rocked his daughter with more tenderness than he had thought he possessed. He touched her baby hand, crinkled up in an involuntary fist, and felt the velvet skin under his rough fingertip. She looks like Jackie, he thought, all stubborn mouth and deep-set eyes.
In his mind, he wasn't quite sure which Jackie he meant, the one he now loved, or the one he had lost.
More Starting From The End
"What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from."
T.S. Eliot
His daughter was born on the day his not-daughter disappeared.
He held the infant girl, swaddled in soft blankets, tenderly. Her skin was ruddy and wrinkled, with the look of countless newborns that he had seen in the arms of friends and family and never before found attractive. In her eyes, now scrunched tightly closed as she grasped hard onto sleep, he saw all the beauty and promise of the world he had helped to save.
While Jackie slept, he made a call to Torchwood and asked his staff to begin a discreet search for Rose. "No media," he instructed. Jackie had been distraught, in the pains of birth, not to have her daughter at her side. He would not have tabloids speculating about Rose to compound her existing anxiety.
Pete sat in the chair by Jackie's bedside and rocked his daughter with more tenderness than he had thought he possessed. He touched her baby hand, crinkled up in an involuntary fist, and felt the velvet skin under his rough fingertip. She looks like Jackie, he thought, all stubborn mouth and deep-set eyes.
In his mind, he wasn't quite sure which Jackie he meant, the one he now loved, or the one he had lost.
More Starting From The End
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Date: 2007-05-25 06:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-25 09:57 pm (UTC)Yes, there was absolutely a message, but this vignette (and several others) come before anyone has seen the message. In theory, this occurs right after the birth of Jackie and Pete's daughter.