first blueprint

[takeitsleazy]

[he'd had plenty of advance notice about the moon: first from Merlin, then from Hades, and then, the previous evening, from that strange little bird. he didn't know what to expect, but whatever it was, he knew that whatever gave him his power - and his guess was his Eternal nature - was going to be weakened even more than it already had been.

he had to prepare.

so he'd spent part of his first paycheck on something very, very important. a hoodie. on a whim, he'd also grabbed a few other things: some snacks, a few books, and a box of paper clips.

he manages to make it home to his apartment before the sun starts to set, and feels pretty positive and confident about this whole thing. he lines the books up on the coffee table, and puts the snacks which require refridgeration in the kitchen. but as the sun sinks, so does his mood. suddenly, everything starts to look daunting. strange. larger, somehow. something inside him begins to wind up into knots, turning and churning, creating sea changes. what's happening? he doesn't know. but he's --

-- oh. frightened. great. he tries to pace it away, but that only makes the knots worse. soon his stomach hurts, and even glancing at the junk food is a bad idea. he retreats to the bathroom, where he shucks off his suit coat and dress shirt, pulling on the hoodie to stare at himself in the mirror. He tries to will even just his eyes to look the way they really do. Nothing. Not even a faint glimmer. Just ice blue and floating black, wide and human and scared.

Michael pulls the strings tight on the hood, making its tiny little round black ears stand up, and retreats back to the couch, falling over on it sideways. His 3M slides out of the pocket of his pants, and he stands it up against a few of the books to look into it]

[just. staring. congratulations. he's on a couch full of emotion.]

Comments

[bigbadrose]

"Ugh, awful." Yeah, he was right about it being unemotional. Even for Rose. "Completely boring. Just functional. Basement, rooftop, too many layers, and somehow not enough. Every flat is practically a copy of the others. All grey boring concrete and cheap steel. Estates were made after the war for charity."

[takeitsleazy]

"That's terribly unimaginative." He makes a face. "Kind of like a beehive, for humans. Am I getting that about right?"

[bigbadrose]

"Well..." a frown, "It was boring. But also more square. And my Mum might think of herself as the Queen bee, but it's kind of like... there's no drones or workers. It's basically just to keep people from living in cardboard boxes on the street, yeah?" Sigh. Rose paused in coloring to push her hair back with a hand. "Dad's mansion isn't any better. And Torchwood Tower is worse. In BOTH universes. Like a giant phallic obelisk. 'Oh look at us, we're so not overcompensating for feeling inadequate about not being the most intelligent species in the universe or anything!!' -- which they totally were. Obviously. The mansion wasn't... boring? Just so stuffy! Like no one needs that elaborate a staircase, except my alternate universe Mum apparently, because she really liked to make an entrance. And even my room was just... I dunno. Confining." Huff. She knew it might just be because she felt every part of being in Pete's universe made her feel trapped there however.

"The TARDIS was way better."

[takeitsleazy]

"I never understood why humans were so obsessed with mansions," he concurred, picking up a different crayon and turning to a fresh page. "They're so ... overblown. What's the TARDIS built like? I mean - you and the Doctor have told me what it is, but nothing about what it looks like."

[bigbadrose]

Rose shrugged. "I don't get the fascination either. Even for castles, like it's just a fort you have servants in. Takes a mighty big ego to want that. Not just ego, but thick. Like, if you're going to live in a fort, you're just asking to get attacked, and moats and crocodiles are the opposite of deterrents. More like flashing neon signs begging to be invaded. The Doctor just likes them for historical facts value, but he's even worse in museums about that."

As for the TARDIS... "She's not built," Rose beamed dreamily, "She's grown. The outside is a blue police box like they used to have in the sixties. But inside, every room is wildly different. The console room you see when you first enter blows everyone's mind because it's impossibly bigger on the inside. There's these great tall coral arches that glow and she sings so gently and sweetly. The console itself probably changes all the time, even more than the Doctor's face, so he never knows it exactly, just makes it up as he goes, I swear. All buttons and levers, and sometimes he just smashes her with a rubber mallet. She gets to grow her floorplans no matter what the Doctor wants, except for a few things, yeah? So he has a pool in the library which is perfect, you can just float and read at the same time and you never have to worry about temperature or bugs or rain or nothing. There's an entire room just for waterfalls. There's a menagerie of extinct animals he meant to take back where they belonged but they just sort of got lost and stayed with him instead. The closet is like an entire mansion of every time period, all sizes, all places that human-looking people can fit in, and the TARDIS herself likes to arrange the dresses and skirts, because she's very fond of them in particular. Probably more variety than men's clothes, which tend to be more practical."

[takeitsleazy]

"A building that's self-aware, and grows? It sounds wonderful." Michael could see why Rose would compare a Janet to it, really, and wonders what would happen if one put a Janet inside a TARDIS ... particularly his Janet, which had become so much more evolved than the others.

"I've never been in a pool. Well, not a swimming pool. Lava pools, yeah, I used to love paddling around in those, but ... that was before this." He gestures to himself, the human shape he chose to inhabit and is now stuck in. It feels especially uncomfortable today, like he's stuffed into it like too much sausage in a casing. He's glad for the hoodie, it's more loose, one less layer of tightness.

[bigbadrose]

"You've been swimming in lava pools? No fair!!!" Rose whined like a puppy, "The Doctor kept promising to take me lava surfing, and then he'd drag me off to a daft Earth castle every time! And then we got separated before I ever got the guts to call him out on it." HUFF!! And Rose added a lava spout in the background of the ice cream. And a little blonde surfer on top. Of course.

"How would you redesign where we are now?? OR if you could get your own floorplans and blueprints for new additional actually nice neighborhoods going?? Not the trap kind, but one you'd be living in yourself here."

[takeitsleazy]

"Me?" He blinked. "Oh. Well ... uh ... I hadn't really thought about what kind of neighborhood I'd want. I always designed them for other people. Maybe ... maybe if you start, it'll give me ideas."

THere was plenty of space in the background, and he picked up another piece of paper, using it as a guide to draw a proper horizon line behind the lava pool.

[bigbadrose]

"Lava surfing!" a determined growl and then Rose let herself go a little crazy with it. "And bungee jumping, and asteroid hopping, and waterfall showers, and stonehenge rock concerts, and meteor showers, and frozen ocean waves reaching up to the moon, trapped in place on Widow Wept, and lots of animals everyone thought was a monster, but were actually nice and kind, and instead of geometric shapes all meant to fall in on themselves, it'd be the opposite! Again, like Widow Wept! Everything in perfect balance with everything else because they're all pulling each other apart and hanging each other up like trapeze artists! And barrage balloons and tightrope walks; but they're all solid, just look dangerous. And you know how those super violent cuttlefish have like sixteen cones of color in their eyes? Everything would be like that, and even if people couldn't see it right away, they'd be able to learn and train their brains to see it psychically! And a racetrack. And dancing gummi bears. And every kind of contest ever. And the only punishment is for being boring."

[takeitsleazy]

He's sketching as fast as he can, and to be fair, he keeps up well. But a few of those things trip him up - the not!monsters, especially. The geometric shapes and the trapezes, though, those he has fun with, using them to fill the spaces not occupied with the rest. His lines are true and straight, and clean, and the racetrack winds around and through everything, even shooting up over the lava for one spectacular corkscrew down around the frozen waves afterwards.

His piece de resistance is a caricature of Shawn, dangling upside down by a bungee being held by the dancing gummi bears, because who else to exemplify being boring than his former boss?

[bigbadrose]

"Perfect!" she giggles and gives him a giant thumbs up.

[takeitsleazy]

"Good! So ... let's see. Oh. There's already ice cream, but there needs to be a bar."

He drafts one in at the top of one of the geometric plateaus, with a patio that stretches between two frozen waves. On the patio, waving to the blonde lava surfer, is a little cartoon Michael with a margarita glass in his hand. He adds a karaoke machine in the corner. And through a window, the tiniest suggestion of something yellow. Maybe hair, if you squint just right.

The perfect neighborhood always has an Eleanor. He does it without thinking.

[bigbadrose]

"Yes!" Beams and giggles as he adds to it, and Rose nods, and makes a weird sort of danceclub with a Jack in it. Not that anyone would know it was Jack, except he has a World War 2 captain's jacket. "Jack and Eleanor would shag," she mumbles to herself without thinking about it, chewing her bottom lip in thought. "That'd be weird, yeah?"

Rose points to some of the minimal space left, "'Ere, can you draw some Glenn Miller music? Or no. What do you think it should be?"

[takeitsleazy]

"Glenn Miller. Yeah, I think I know how that goes."

The scales start out as In The Mood but by the end of the last swooping measures, it's Glenn Miller and His Orchestra's swingin' rendition of She Hates Me by Puddle of Mudd. Oops.

"Why would it be weird? Eleanor's had ..." He counts in his head and realizes it might not be flattering to speak of her in that much detail. "... lots of intimate encounters. Probably about as many as your friend Jack."

[bigbadrose]

That'd be amazing and make Rose die of laughter, if only she could read music and knew how much Hell was obsessed with that song.

"Yeah," Rose made a face, "That's what makes it weird." She tried to figure out how to translate it into easier terms for Michael to get, but barring using himself, it didn't seem possible. "Weird for me. Normal every day for them, which is why it would happen, but it's like..." she rolled a hand in a circle, at a loss for words. "Oh!! Imagine if you met someone with your face, right? Like a completely alternate universe version of you! And instead of being an asexual architect sort-of-demon, they were like, I dunno, really into shagging other people... it's a weird disconnect, right? Like it's not really you, but it's your face, and it's weird!" Rose nodded, pleased with this analogy. "For humans, family members are kind of like that. Not that Jack's family, and I was kind of happy my parents got back together. But Jack bein' my friend, and Eleanor bein' yours, and them shaggin'... it's weird. For me. Not for them."

[takeitsleazy]

"Ohhhh, I see." He nodded. "I know exactly what you mean. It's how I felt when Janet married Jason."

His face twists in discomfort at the mention of it, but it doesn't last long. "I mean, aside from the fact that Janets aren't .... really supposed to get involved with humans, and I'm not even sure if ... wait. When you say 'shagging' you do mean sex, and not something strange to do with rugs, right?"

[bigbadrose]

"You are SO her Dad!" sorry, not sorry.

"Yes, sex," Rose made a small face, but as to carpets, "Whut?"

[takeitsleazy]

"Wh- No! No I'm not! Why does everyone keep --"

UGH. He closes his eyes, holds up his hands, and sighs. He just can't with you people, he just. Can. Not.

"Shag. It's a kind of carpet. Generally really cheap and tacky."

[bigbadrose]

"Adopted. You're generally protective of her, she's always your backup, and let me ask you this. Remember how she made Derek with windchime--" Rose devolved into giggles again, that was never going to get old. "You know..." All the giggles, but she tried to breathe. "I once created a paradox that nearly destroyed the multiverse, and would have, but both the Doctor and my Dad sacrificed themselves to stop it. My Dad said he couldn't be there to take me to ball games or picnics or movies or watch me graduate or get bronze in gymnastics, but he was my Dad, so it was his job to fix any of my mistakes, yeah?"

A nod.

"Right yeah, think they come from the same origin. Word-wise."

[takeitsleazy]

"So you're saying I helped her get rid of Derek for the same reason. ... I can follow that. But she's not my child, she's just my friend. And friends can do that kind of thing, too, can't they? I mean ... I tried to sacrifice myself for Eleanor and I know I'm not her father. Adopted or otherwise. We're just ... friends. Also, what do sex and carpets have to do with -- you know what, I don't want to know."

[bigbadrose]

Rose thinks about it. "Maybe. It's different. Fathers and daughters and friends though." How to pinpoint it? Rose really couldn't. Her father rescued her even after turning his back on her once, rescued her multiple times, took her in as his own, gave her a job, home, life, tried to help her repeatedly even when she didn't deserve it. It was confusing and complicated. "Your friendship with Eleanor and Janet is different too, yeah?"

Rose shook her head. "But see, it does faze you that Janet got weirdly corrupted with Jason, and not that Eleanor has... err sexual relations, yeah?? That's a more father-daughter-y thing. Although the Doctor would definitely be weirded out by the TARDIS getting married or having a rebound fling too," Rose nodded.

[takeitsleazy]

"Eleanor's history doesn't bother me because it's her history," he clarified. "She was already an Arizona trashbag - her words, by the way, not mine - when I met her. Janet ... how do I explain this. Ah. Would you marry a smartphone?"

[bigbadrose]

"I fused my heart and soul with the TARDIS," Rose answered blandly, but quirked her eyebrows in deep amusement. "So only Eleanor's history doesn't bother you? What if she was here and decided to snog or shag the Doctor now? You originally didn't think her getting it on with Jack would be weird, but was that only because you weren't thinking of how it relates to you??"

[takeitsleazy]

He shifted uncomfortably, feeling some new, fresh knot of hell start to tie itself together beneath his ribs. "I don't like to think about anyone kissing or screwing anyone, Rose. It's all very ... foreign and disturbing to me. I mean - look at kissing. You mash your food holes together. Gross."

There's some other layer to this, something he isn't completely aware of, something he isn't sure he wants to unearth. You know: the part that Rose probably had pegged by the third or fourth time he talked about her. How fond he is of her. How protective.

[bigbadrose]

Oh definitely. And being Rose, she wanted to dig it all up and make a mess of it. Especially because it was similar to her and the Doctor and equally why the Doctor tended to repress his feelings about Rose and et cetera.

"Spoken like someone who's never been kissed," Rose smirked darkly at him. "We use our mouths to talk and whistle too, of course they're used for pleasure. And snogging."

A beat... and luckily for Michael, Rose unfortunately derailed her own thoughts. "Although the Doctor can taste chemical composition with his tongue, so he's always licking wood and blood and things, I have no idea if he snogs. He once flirted with a treeperson by breathing heavily on her. Weird, right?"