TITLE: Tame Feral
AUTHOR: Demon Faith
FANDOM: Doctor Who
PAIRING: Jack/Ten/Rose
RATING:PG-13
SUMMARY: How do you reject a gift from the ones you love?
DISCLAIMER: Russell T. Davies owns. Chicafrom3’s beautiful
work is the basis – I claim nothing.
FICS USED: Did You Know?
(Andromeda), Closet
Idealists (Doctor Who), She Don’t Comprehend
(Firefly), Felis Catus (Firefly), Excitement Adventure and
Really Wild Things (Hitchhikers Guide To The
Galaxy)
AUTHOR’S NOTES: I am so glad chicafrom3 decide to participate in this Fandom Mashup challenge because I read some quality fic that I never would have found otherwise. And now (hopefully) I’ve stuffed them all into a fiction tribute worthy of the source.
“It’s a kitten.”
She looks up from the gently inquiring feline eyes into the startling eager blues of Captain Jack Harkness, before glancing sideways at the Doctor, who’s nonchalantly hitting the TARDIS with a spanner.
“You like it?” Jack says hesitantly and she remembers to smile and nod.
“Yes, yes…she’s…is it a she?”
“Uh…” Jack grabs the cat and flips it upside down. “Girl. What are you going to call her?”
The Doctor pretends to be disinterested but she knows he’s listening to every word, gauging her reaction, hoping that their gift will be well received. But he won’t say that, won’t show it – Doctors don’t get involved unless a planet is at stake.
She thinks a while and then says, “Lyn”. It comes from nowhere and neither of them understands, but she does, she knows.
She hates the cat already.
“See?” says Jack. “I told you she’d like it.”
Let them believe that, she thinks. They think they know her
– her boring little 21st Century Earth life, a shop girl from
She first got into a fight when she was six. A boy on the estate had called her mother a whore, said he’d seen her with the milkman, and she had leapt on him, clawing at his face, kicking him in the stomach. There were witnesses but they said nothing. She was only six, after all.
She was eight when she saw her first ghost. An old woman with a shopping bag strode crossly towards her and she stood defiant as she passed right through her. It felt a bit like ice, like someone had cracked an egg on her head and treacle was trickling down her spine. They had been following her ever since – in the shopping centre, at the pool, even sitting beside her at the cinema. They’d fade in and out of view, smiling their sad smiles, as if they knew.
She had watched the ladies who lurked at the edges of the estate since she was nine. Sometimes she wanted to join them, to look in the half-light just half as beautiful as them. They never saw her because she didn’t want to be seen; if she were one of them, she’d be seen, and she would like it.
She broke the nose of the school bully when she was eleven. Sent to a counsellor, she made up something about her traumatic childhood and then skipped out to the playground. He never bothered her.
She met Lyn when she was twelve. She didn’t want to, she wished she never had. A friend of her aunt’s, an old nanny or something like that and she’d been dragged along. She’d tried so hard not to cry. All around were photographs of youth and joy and times gone whilst she sat and decayed, fell apart in misery. All she possessed now, her one care, was her huge tabby cat.
And Rose ran out to the garden, breathing hard, tears streaming down her cheeks as she swore to herself to never, ever become like Lyn.
The cat is staring at her. She ignores it and it wanders over to Jack, mewling.
She was fifteen when she lost her virginity. It was Mickey and it was in the apartment whilst her mum was out. She couldn’t regret it, because it was Mickey and because her mum approved. It didn’t matter now.
When the Doctor and Jack danced with her, together, the three of them, and their hands touched her at four warm points, she pretended it was the first time, that this was new, special with them. She distances herself from the seventeen year old girl who had lived with a musician and entertained the band.
They don’t understand her past, how it hurts to even look at the innocent creature tangling itself in the Doctor’s scarf which Jack is wearing again, how she knows it will hurt them if she were to give the cat back.
She’ll live with it because she loves them and they’ll love
the creature and it will work. It has to work because she’s left that
They’ll never know that, but she thinks they might guess in time. They’re so different and she doesn’t understand how they’re doing this, dancing, loving, surviving. But they are and she won’t question it because she needs it. Who knows? She may even grow to like the cat.
It’s possible. But it’s not probable.
She still hates it.
But she loves them.
Sometimes they make perfect sense.