earlgreytea68 | "College," Chapter Twenty-Six -- Commentary, Part 2

Part One can be found here.

“We can have that once I make sure the kids know I’m okay. And I’m very much looking forward to that sex, let me tell you.”

It seemed to me that the Doctor would want to have sex, but I also couldn’t imagine writing a sex scene at this point. I wanted to tie up all the loose ends, and not get distracted.

“Oh, it’s going to be spectacular,” he promised her.

She grinned as she rolled out of bed and then caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. “Huh.”

“What?” he asked, anxiously, studying her reflection with her.

“I…I…look great.”

“Wellllll, for someone who just died—”

“No, no, I mean, I look…Don’t you think I look, I don’t know, years younger?” She looked at him.

This is me fixing another issue. Rose basically stops aging at this point. So she doesn’t live for centuries as a decrepit old woman.

He shrugged. “Rose, you always look gorgeous to me.”

And she does, too. He’s a sweetheart.

She looked back in the mirror. “Apparently, your heart’s desire that the TARDIS was granting you was a permanently young, hot wife.”

The Doctor pulled open the door and looked back at her. “Quite right, too,” he said.

I couldn’t resist this.

********

Dinner had been demolished by the kids in the kitchen, and they were sitting around the kitchen table, laughing hilariously while munching on a spread of several different desserts.

“You gave her a sonic device for Christmas?” Athena was scolding Brem, when her parents appeared in the doorway, and a sudden silence fell over the kitchen.

I was supposed to add a part in here, before I posted, about Kate defending the sonic device because it basically saved her life earlier that day. But I forgot. Oops!

Athena and Fortuna both jumped up at the same time and barreled into their mother, who caught them and hugged them fiercely. Matt and Kate, suddenly feeling like they were intruding, looked away and both fiddled with silverware.

Brem waited until Athena and Fortuna had gotten their fill of hugs, when his mother looked over to him and smiled.

“Ah, Brem,” she said. “You always do hang back when I make a big homecoming.”

Because when Rose came back from the parallel universe, Brem did wait for her to be finished with Athena, before he came forward.

He smiled back and stood up and hugged her, tightly and fiercely, and she ruffled his hair. And then she let go of him and looked beyond him to the table.

“And what are we having here?” she asked. “A feast?”

“More dessert than we’ll be able to eat in our next three regenerations,” Athena answered.

“I may have gone a bit overboard,” said Fortuna, sheepishly.

“We need a fresh pot of tea,” his mother commented, and his father instantly leaped over to fill the kettle. “Hello, Matt,” she continued, pleasantly, sitting down, and then she smiled at Kate. “And you must be Kate. It’s so lovely to meet you finally. I’ve heard so much about you.”

“I’ve heard a lot about you guys, too,” replied Kate.

“Did he tell you all about the TARDIS?” asked the Doctor.

“Yes,” she answered. “Actually, I thought it’d be bigger in here.”

I desperately wanted Kate not to state the obvious “bigger on the inside.” Because Kate is way, way, way too awesome.

The Doctor and Brem both looked at her with mouths agape. Kate winked across the table at Rose.

“Oh, you’re fabulous,” said Rose. “You and I are definitely going to have tea together.”

“I may have oversold it a bit,” Brem told his father’s accusatory glance.

The TARDIS saved him, launching into the opening notes of Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, and the Doctor lit up. “Top banana,” he said, and reached for Rose and pulled her out of her seat into one of those jaunty, overenthusiastic dances he was prone to.

“What is this song?” asked Kate, bewildered, as Brem moved to sit next to her and draped an arm over her shoulders.

Which was my reaction the first time I saw “Tooth & Claw.”

“Oh, a ridiculous song,” he said, fondly. “My father loves it.”

“He probably seduced your mother with it once,” she commented, snuggling into him.

“Oh, please don’t talk about things like that,” he complained, and she laughed, and he brushed a kiss over the top of her head.

“I should go,” Matt said.

Brem looked at him. “You don’t have to. Really.”

“I know I don’t, but I…” He glanced at Athena, then back to Brem. “But I should go.”

“Okay,” said Brem, after a second. “Thank you. Really. So much.”

“It was nothing,” Matt said, dismissively. “I’ll see you next year, right?”

“Definitely. We’re living together, aren’t we?”

“I didn’t know if you were just going to disappear in your spaceship here and never be seen again.”

Brem smiled. “I’m coming back. And if you’re very, very good, I might even take you for a whirl in this spaceship of mine.”

“Oi,” his father called, from where he was in the progress of dipping his mother. “Whose spaceship is it?”

“Concentrate on not dropping her,” Brem called back, and turned back just in time to watch Athena plant a thorough kiss on Matt’s lips.

This was one of the bits written in the original AIM chat between Kristin and me: that Athena would end the year by shocking Matt with a kiss.

She pulled away. “Thanks for everything,” she grinned at him. “You’ve been great. See you next year, yeah?” Then she winked.

“Yeah,” he answered, dazedly.

“I’ll show you out of the TARDIS,” Fortuna said, sending a short glare Athena’s way.

“That was a bit…” Brem said to Athena, at a loss for words.

She shrugged. “He deserved it. I’m a good kisser.”

“Really not talking about this,” Brem told her.

“She is just like you,” his father told his mother.

“I know,” his mother laughed, as his father twirled her away.

Brem turned back to Kate. “You must have a million questions.”

“I do. But you’ll tell me the answers eventually. We’ve got time, you and I. So much time. Because you’re the lord of it, aren’t you?” She grinned.

He grinned back. “And I use it wisely.” (This is a reference to the inscription Kate had engraved on his pocket watch.) He leaned forward and kissed her, as the TARDIS’s song choice switched, and then he pulled back and started laughing.

Kate was bewildered. “What?”

“We’re dancing to this,” he said, and pulled her up out of her seat.

“I can’t really…salsa,” she protested.

“It isn’t salsa,” he frowned at her. “Juanes is rokero with cumbia influences. And I love this song. I brought my mother back to Juanes, all those years ago, and we danced to this song on a beach in the Caribbean.”

I…love this. I love the parallel of it. Brem’s story ends with him dancing to Juanes, and scolding Kate in exactly the same way his father scolded his mother all these years ago. I just…*love* it.

She smiled at him. “That’s a lovely memory,” she said.

“You know,” he realized, musingly, “I have a lot of those. A lot. They far outweigh the bad.”

This was an important lesson for Brem to learn: to focus on the positive.

“Which is good,” she told him.

He pulled her a bit closer, so he could lean forward and sing the words in her ear, dimly aware of his father’s voice singing to his mother only a few steps away. No se va la herida grande que mi queda…

“Brem,” she said. “You do know that’s Spanish, right?”

He laughed.

********

“I don’t care,” said Brem. “I still look completely ridiculous, and it was an enormous waste of time, and it rained, and I was cold—”

You should know: When I graduated from Harvard, it rained, and I was cold. Yes. So what if it’s all steeped in tradition and you’re sitting out on Harvard Yard and the Secretary-General of the United Nations is talking to you? When you’re soaked through and shivering, you kind of lose sight of the majesty of the whole thing.

“Brem,” his grandmother cut him off. “You graduated from Harvard. It’s time to stop complaining. And what was your major? I didn’t understand that part.”

“My degree is in General Studies. Because I qualified for too many different concentrations.” (This was a late addition. I almost forgot to close that loop.) Brem, sulking, took off his cap and mortarboard and felt his limp hair. “And that bloody hat ruined my hair.”

“Yes, you are in dire need of some product,” his father told him, gravely.

“You look fine, Brem,” his mother told him, and then hugged him fiercely. “I am so, so, terribly proud of you. Have I told you that today?”

“Several dozen times,” Athena pointed out.

“You’ll get told several dozen times when you graduate, too,” Rose promised her.

Yes, Athena’s currently in university now, too.

“I’m changing,” Brem announced, and headed down the TARDIS hallway to his bedroom, where he removed the silly graduation robe and the soaked clothing underneath it and replaced them with a dry outfit: jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt topped by a short-sleeved T-shirt, then he carefully did his hair, and then he stood for a second, looking at this bedroom with all his stuff from college back in it, waiting for the next decision that he had to make, about where he ought to go and what he ought to do. He reached out and brushed his fingers over the journals that represented his college years.

“Going to publish them as your memoirs?” drawled his father.

You may or may not remember, but original “Chaos Theory” ends with Brem titling his memoirs. I really wanted him to title this fic the same way.

Brem looked at where he was leaning in the doorway, arms and legs crossed, and smiled, remembering. “Yes. I shall call them Chaos Theory on Dimensionally Stable Objects on Earth College Campuses.”

“No one’s going to buy anything with a title that long, you know.”

“Why not? It’s going to be an entire Chaos series. Certainly an apt word to describe our life, don’t you think?”

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