A Sky Without Zeppelins: Chapter Forty-Four

[amberfocus]

                                                                                                                        banner by Mitashade

A/N:  Might be a little inappropriate for work but no full on smut.  Glow in the dark alien sex, however, is present.  Recognizable dialog is from the episode The End of the World.

Chapter Forty-Four

Rose swallows hard. She had known going to visit the cemetery where Jonathon’s family was buried was going to be hard for him. What she hadn’t expected is the way it impacts her as she stands there in front of the neat little row of grave markers. She falls to her knees in front of the one of his wife and child, a shared grave, and her eyes close tightly for a long moment before she opens them again.

It’s one of those stones with an embedded picture of the child and his mother and she can see for the first time what they actually looked like. The boy bears a striking resemblance to his mother, his eyes wide and large, his hair dark and full of curls like hers. Elisabeth is strikingly pretty and so young. For the first time she realizes that Elizabeth was her age when she died, that Jonathon was her age when he lost everything, and it staggers her. If she had to deal with that sort of loss right now it would be…she can’t even imagine how hard it would be.

Her finger traces over the lines of the toddler’s face. “He’s so beautiful,” she says.

“Yes,” Jonathon replies, hand on her shoulder. His voice is stoic and she scrambles to her feet, hastily wiping away the tear that has escaped her eye. She is here to comfort him, not the other way around. She slips her arm around his waist and he leans into her. “He was so…alive, curious, into everything, always taking things apart…”

“Sounds like you.”

“He was. He looked like Beth, and a bit like my mother, but his personality…Beth said he was a little me.” He smiled softly, the expression bittersweet. “I wish you could have known him. I wish…so many things.” He spreads his hands helplessly before him.

Rose shifts uncomfortably, thinking that she would have been twelve when Adric died, the same age he would be now if he had lived. She wonders what life would have been like if the boy had survived with his father, what her relationship with Jonathon would have been like, what kind of impression she would have made on the boy and whether or not as a single father Jonathon would have even approached a woman so many years his junior.

She shakes her head to clear it. She should be focusing on what he’s lost, not what ifs and what might have beens. He takes her over to a different row a dozen feet away. “This is my mother and father. Mum, Dad, this is Rose,” he says, his fingers sliding down to grip her hand tightly.

Rose isn’t sure what to say and he doesn’t seem to expect her to say anything. She reads out their names instead. “Lorna Anne Smith and Jonathon Adam Smith, beloved parents.” Her eyes shift to the next grave. “Abigail Brynnan Smith?” she reads with a question in her voice. The date of death is the same and her eyes shift over once more. “Dougal Michael Smith.”

“Mihal,” he corrects her pronunciation of the name Michael. “My brother and sister.”

“I didn’t…I didn’t know, you didn’t tell me…”

Jonathon shivers. “I lost everyone that day. They were still children. Bryn had just turned 17. Dougal was 15.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“I’m the last of the Smiths. They’re all gone. I’m the only survivor. I’m left on my own because there’s no one else.” His voice is so incredibly sad it breaks her heart.

“There’s me.”

He shakes himself then and turns to her and gives her a soft smile. “Yes. There’s you.” He pulls her into his embrace and kisses the top of her head. He holds her closely, tightly. When he releases her she takes a step back and he puts his hands on her shoulders. “Thank you for coming with me to see them. It was what I needed. I think maybe I can start to put the past behind me now.”

“We can come visit as often as you need. I don’t mind coming with you,” she tells him.

He gives her another smile. “I know you don’t, Rose, but it’s hard to come here. And it feels like…I don’t know, like Beth has given me her blessing.” He turns back to the graves and runs his hand along the top of each stone, then goes back to Elisabeth’s and Adric’s marker. “Good-bye,” he says so softly she almost doesn’t hear him. A single tear falls down his face and Rose reaches up and wipes it away with her thumb.

He catches her hand and pulls her away from the graves and they make the short walk back to the waiting car. “You going to be all right?” she asks.

“I’ve got you,” he says. “I’ll always be all right if I have you.”

They get into the car and Jonathon heads off in a direction that is opposite of the one back to their hotel. “Where are we going?” she asks.

“I thought I’d take you to see where I grew up. It’s not to terribly far from here.”

They don’t really talk on the drive, both lost in their own thoughts with soft music playing on the radio. Rose hums along to some of the songs and Jonathon looks over at her with a fond smile when she sings along to one of them in a sweet voice.

“I didn’t know you could sing,” he tells her when the song ends.

Rose shrugs. “I can’t, really.”

“Sounds good to me.” She smiles at him but says nothing more.

They arrive at the edge of the town he grew up in and Jonathon frowns. “What?” Rose asks.

“Doesn’t look familiar,” he tells her.

“How long has it been since you’ve been back?”

“Years.”

“Maybe the landmarks have changed because they’ve been expanding the town. You know how the outskirts of London are always growing,” she says.

“This is a far cry from London.”

“A lot can happen in ten years,” she points out, pretty sure she’s guessing accurately on just how long it’s been.

“I suppose. Good thing I ran it through Illuminate Maps. I memorized the directions and we’re on the right road.”

“What house number are we looking for?” she asks him.

“1874.”

Rose peers out the window until she finds a house number. "There’s 776. I’d say we have a ways to go.” They do. It’s about a mile and a half further along and they are both disappointed to discover that side of the street is now a long row of shops. They pull into the parking area and Jonathon sighs.

“Disappointed?” she asks.

“My memories of it are so vague. I thought maybe seeing it again would help.”

Rose glances around them. “That’s a boat rental place,” she says pointing to it.

“So?”

“So didn’t you say you spent most of your childhood on the river? Maybe if we took a boat out, well, maybe you’d see something you remember. Or we can just go back to the hotel if you’d rather,” she says.

“No, it’s a good idea,” he tells her.

Jonathon arranges for a boat rental while Rose heads to one of the other shops and purchases sandwiches, bottled drinks and crisps. A half hour later they slip out of their mooring in a small sailboat. It’s got a motor mounted on it for going upstream. They decide to take the boat upstream and then sail back to the rental office. They spend the day on the water but Jonathon is completely unable to recognize anything.

“I have such clear memories of being on a boat as a child,” he says in frustration, “but nothing looks familiar. It can’t all have changed!”

“You don’t recognize anything at all?” she asks.

“No!” he says sharply. Rose jumps at the anger in his tone.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I was just trying to help.”

“No, Rose, I’m sorry,” he says in a much softer tone. He reaches for her hand and pulls her close to him, tucking her under his arm and giving her a half hug, his other hand still firmly on the outboard motor. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. You don’t know what it’s like to not remember so much. I may as well have never been to this town. It’s like I didn’t grow up here at all.”

“Maybe we should just go back to the hotel,” she says.

“Yeah, but let’s eat first.” He pulls the boat into a side branch of the river and anchors it and they eat their sandwiches.

“It sure is beautiful,” Rose says. There are private homes on the far side abutting the river and on their side there is still plenty of open land. She can see white dots speckled across the green fields and knows it’s grazing land for sheep.

“Yeah.”

He sighs heavily and rubs at his temples. “Trying to remember always gives me a headache. I can’t go back. It’s not like I want to. I just get tired of this gaping void in my mind.” Rose reaches behind him and makes him shift his shoulders then she reaches up and begins rubbing his temples. His tension lightens under her fingertips and she feels him brightening just a little. “Maybe it’s just time I let go of the past completely. After all, I’ve got this amazing present and a brilliant future with you to look forward to.”

Rose is quiet for a long time. “Have you thought of asking Mr. Lumin to try to heal your mind?” she finally says.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” he says slowly.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. It just feels…wrong.”

“Well, I love you whether you ever remember who you used to be or not. You’re Jonathon and you’re the most amazing man and you’re perfect just the way you are,” she tells him.

“Do you even have any idea of how much I love you?” he asks her softly.

“Yes,” she says. “Now shall we head back for the hotel so you can show me?”



“Do you know where Jonathon has got to this weekend? I need to talk to him,” James Lumin asks Donna as she answers the door to her flat and finds her boss and—boyfriend? lover?—whatever he is to her, huffing on the other side.

“Why didn’t you just teleport?” she asks opening the door and pulling it wide for him to enter. After all, he’s not the one with teleporting issues.

“I had a session with Krattippe today,” he explains. “We’re still trying to heal some of her residual brain damage. It took a lot out of me and I haven’t had time to restore myself. I need a meal and an hour to really rest.”

“Did it work? With Krattippe?”

“Not enough. Not sure it ever will, but I’m not ready to give up. So, Jonathon?” he asks collapsing on her sofa. “He’s not answering his mobile.”

“He took Rose to Scotland for the weekend,” Donna says. “Do you want me to send out for lunch?”

He nods at her. “Scotland? They just went to France,” he mutters.

“This isn’t a holiday and he’s not an on call employee. He’s got a life outside of work, you know.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” she asks pointedly. He sighs. “They’ve gone up to visit the graves of his family,” Donna informs him. “Rose called me before they left and I do have an emergency contact number, but you are not calling it if you’re just having one of your panics.”

“I’m not,” he insists.

“Or one of your too clever by half, brilliant, shining, aha moments that you absolutely must share with the brightest mind that you know.” He looks sheepish.

“But he understands. You don’t know what it’s like to have someone who really understands everything,” Lumin says.

She does, though. She feels that way about Rose and the way they both have to deal with eccentrically crazy, genius men. It’s nice having someone who understands. Still… “This is too important to Jonathon. You can wait. Lombardi’s?”

“What?”

“For lunch.”

“Yes, that’s fine. Whatever you’re having. That’s an awfully big step, isn’t it? Taking her to see the graves? They’ve only been together, what? Two and a half months?” he asks.

Donna shrugs and moves to the phone and orders two of the lunch specials before turning back to him. “We’ve gotten just as serious in just as short a time,” she tells him.

“That’s different. We’ve known each other for over five years,” he says. “They’ve just met.”

“It’s always different when you’re the one getting a leg over,” she replies tartly. “They’ve got an epic love story going on. Leave them alone.”

“And what are we,” he asks her, “if they’re so epic?”

“We’re us,” she says simply. “We don’t have to be epic. We can just be comfortable.”

Lumin wrinkles his nose. “What if I want to be epic?” he asks. “What if I want to take you places you’ve never been before? What if I want to whisk you away to Paris for the weekend or Santorini for a long holiday?”

“You don’t have time for that,” she says a little wistfully, “lovely as it might be.”

“Why not? Travel time is nil if we teleport.”

“I already told you I’m not teleporting again,” she replies firmly.

“I think I’ve got the kinks worked out,” he says.

“I rather like you with the kinks worked in,” she teases.

“Of the teleport!” he says sternly and she laughs. It’s almost as fun to shock him as it is to shock Jonathon.

“I don’t like having my molecules rearranged and scrambled all over the place,” she says.

“Not even if it means going to the moon?” he asks.

“Not even if – the moon?” Her eyes are wide as she meets his. “Can you do that?” she asks.

“I can if you’ll let me. Let me take you to the moon. Let me take you on the moon,” he says seriously.

Donna starts to giggle. “James, your lines really could use some work.”

“First time using them,” he says with a wry smile. “I’m afraid I only know what I’ve seen on television.”

“Then you need to be watching better programs.” She decides three hours later when they are standing on the surface of the moon surrounded by a pale, translucent, green energy bubble that bad lines or not, she is utterly, thoroughly, irrevocably in love with this genius, alien man beside her.



Lumin watches Donna as she surreptitiously checks to make sure that she’s still all in one piece. “I’m never going to like teleporting,” she says once she’s sure she’s been properly reassembled. She glances upwards and gasps. “I think it was worth it for this view.” The Earth is hovering above their heads. It is nearly full and brilliantly blue and green and white. “It’s beautiful,” she says.

“Yes. Earth is the prettiest planet I’ve ever seen. Lumos was close, but it didn’t have nearly this much water. That makes a huge difference in what a planet looks like from space,” he tells her.

She reaches out and touches the surface of the bubble. It makes her hand tingle a bit. She pokes her finger into it and the wall moves outwards around her finger. “It’s safe? I mean, there’s enough air in here?”

“Enough to last for several hours,” he reassures her. She pokes at it again. “Don’t do that,” he says.

She yanks her hand away. “Why? Will I damage the field?”

“No, it just tickles.”

“It’s part of you?” she asks.

“Sort of. It’s an extension of my own personal…well, humans would call it an aura. It’s part of me, but it’s not exactly a physical part of me. I’m manipulating it with the use of this,” he shows her a device strapped onto his wrist, “to hold its shape steady. When you disrupt that by poking at it, it sort of gives out a mild discharge of energy that isn’t exactly uncomfortable but I’d rather avoid. Like a tickle.”

"Oh." Her feet scuff against the moon dust beneath then. He’s extended the energy bubble a foot beneath the surface of the moon so that Donna can actually leave footprints in the barren soil. He’s warmed the surface over which they stand so that the chill doesn’t hurt her.

“I’m tempted to make a snow angel,” she says with a laugh.

“You’d get filthy,” he tells her.

“You’ve never minded that before.” He startles, thinking she's teasing him again, but she adds, “That time after we got caught in the storm last month and I ended up covered in mud, I didn’t hear you complaining.”

“That’s because I got to wash it off. But you don’t want to get this much dust in your hair.”

He slides his hand over the back of her head and her gorgeous red hair then puts his arm around her shoulders and pulls her close. He sneaks his hand into the pocket of his jacket and pulls out a handful of cherry blossoms and tosses them into the air. Slowly they drift about the bubble and fill it with their fragrance. He freezes them in place and smiles as Donna watches them in wonder.

“I feel like I’m inside a snow globe,” she tells him and he laughs. “How do they stay suspended like that? There’s obviously a bit of gravity.” She jumps and hits her head against the bubble before easily coming back down. She smoothes her hair, which has gone crazy with static from hitting the energy field, into place.

“A bit, but not too much. As for the blossoms, they’re in a state of temporal grace.”

“What’s that mean?” she asks. “And none of your scientific explanations,” she says as he opens his mouth. He rewords what he was about to say.

“They’re sort of suspended in time and space. They’re still falling actually, just at a much slower rate than you did when you jumped and came back down again.

“You can do that?”

“It’s very experimental. And I can’t do it on a large scale or with anything bigger than a golf ball.”

He leans over and kisses the side of her face. She turns into him and raises her lips to his and he kisses her softly. “So, Donna Noble, would you like to make love on the moon?”

She smiles. “You know what I’d like?”

“What?”

“I’d like to know what it’s like to really make love with you.”

He frowns. “We always really make love.”

“In your human form we do, but you said once…you said that there was another way we could…” She trails off uncertainly. It’s incredibly rare for Donna to not be confident.

“You want me to make love to you in my natural form?” he asks in astonishment. He’d never thought that would be an option.

“I’m curious,” she says with a shrug. “And it’s got to be difficult for you, not being able to do what comes naturally.”

“Human sex comes pretty naturally,” he says. “I’m in that form more often than my real one. And I don’t mind. It’s amazing like that.”

“Don’t you want to?” she asks.

“Of course I do. I just don’t want you to feel like you have to.”

“I’m offering aren’t I?” she asks.

“I don’t want you doing this because you feel obligated,” he begins.

“Like I would! If you think I’d do anything because I felt obligated to you than you don’t know me as well as I’d like to think you do,” she says indignantly.

“It might change how you feel about me,” he says. “It’s…alien.”

“You’re an alien, you big goof. I’ve been sleeping with you for weeks already. I think I can handle a bit more strangeness without it changing how I feel about you.”

“I don’t want to lose you.”

“Don’t be stupid,” she tells him. “I love you.”

He stills against her. “You do?”

“Do you really think I’d be shagging an alien if I didn’t?” she asks him. “I love you.”

He smiles and dips his head to kiss her. When he breaks the kiss she sighs. “I’ve been in love with you for a very long time, Donna.”

“Yeah. Figured that out a while ago,” she says with a smirk. “So, alien sex please.”

“I’ll take us back to Earth.”

She frowns at him and crosses her arms. “What’s the point of having alien sex for the first time if we’re not on the moon?”

“What?”

“Well, it’d be fun, wouldn’t it?” she asks.

“I don’t want to flash the Earth,” he tells her.

“You afraid some old man in a back field with a telescope might be watching?” she asks.

“No, I mean literally flash the Earth. My light will…when we…er…get to that point of things, I’ll sort of—.”

“Become a strobe light?”

“For lack of a better term, yes. Much slower than that, but I’ll pulse and the flashes will be visible from Earth,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to worry them.”

“Oh, I’m sure they’ll have lots of fun trying to explain it,” she says. “Come on, James. It’ll be fun. You remember what fun is, right?” She reaches out and lightly strokes the front of his trousers. He hisses.

“You have a streak of pure evil in you, Donna Noble.”

“Don’t I know it. Shut up and do me, alien boy.”

Donna strips off all of her clothes and turns to face him, proud and gorgeous. He lets himself go, dissolving into his natural form, his own clothing falling to the dust as he loses coherence. He moves towards her, wrapping his light all around her until she glows softly green. He pushes slowly past the barrier of her skin until he’s circulating part of his energy through her bloodstream and then he slides inside her through every orifice. She shivers as he connects with her mind. She’s nervous and a little bit scared but there is no hesitation in her. She wishes to continue.

Lumin gently begins connecting himself to her nervous system, putting every nerve on high alert and weaving himself tightly into the pleasure center of her brain. Once the final connections are made he lets go of his careful control and with a sudden jerk they are like one physical creature. Donna’s body rises into the air and she writhes with the sudden sensations that are circulating through both of them, the heightened sexual energy he channels through her core coming back to him on a giant feedback loop.

Her pleasure becomes his pleasure and his pleasure begins to expand as his energy fills the inside of the energy bubble he’s generating. He pushes more and more of himself inside her and he feels it as the colors within him begin to change. The green flashes over into blue and then into red only to fall back into green again. As Donna’s mind begins to focus more and more intently on achieving orgasm he narrows his own focus, concentrating on sending electrical impulses to just the right place and when she falls over the edge, he goes with her in a cascade of light that crashes through her and provides a light show on Earth that lasts for seven hours.

Ch. 45:  http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/255392.html