Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [11]
It was warmer upstairs. In her bedroom the rain clattered on the skylights. Her belongings were scattered all over the floor, just as she'd left them. The pixies had obviously not bothered to tidy up this time; perhaps they were still waiting for their bowl of milk. Bernice kicked the clothes around until she found the sweatshirt she was looking for, the one with I'M ACE AND THIS IS THE
DOCTOR block-printed on the front above a big cartoon hand pointing to the left. Ace had bought it from a silkscreening stall at the Glastonbury Festival several lifetimes ago. Bernice had one with her own name on it but the ink had run. They'd got one for the Doctor which read: I'M THE DOCTOR
AND THIS IS [DELETE WHERE APPLICABLE]. Ace had joked that she was DELETE and Bernice was APPLICABLE. Bernice had never seen the Doctor wear it.
'Benny.' Chris's voice.
'I'm in here,' she called, muffled by the sweatshirt as she pulled it on.
Chris stood in the doorway, his fair hair slicked back by the rain, his soaking wet robe clinging to his arms and chest.
'Have you seen the storm?' he asked.
'Some of us were sensible enough to be under cover when it arrived,' said Bernice.
Chris gave her a sunny smile, its effect mitigated somewhat by a lightning flash that briefly flattened out his features and turned his eyes into dark hollows. He said something but the words were drowned out by the thunder.
'Here, you wally,' said Bernice, grabbing the rag-quilt off her bed and handing it to Chris. 'Put this round you before you get a chill.'
Chris laughed. 'You sound just like Roz.'
He pulled off his robe, briefly showing the width of his chest, the hard ridges of abdominals before they were hidden under the folds of the quilt. One day, thought Bernice, he's going to make some girl somewhere very cheerful. Not her, of course; it would have to be someone with stamina.
It should have been Kat'laana but she was what? Dead? Not born yet?
Gone certainly, taking a piece of Chris with her. A piece of his innocence that was forever buried below the Detrian permafrost. It had a horrible inevitability, this loss of innocence. It had happened to Ace on Heaven and to herself on King's Cross Station. I went into the time machine on my own two feet and I've been losing bits of me ever since. Like the broken Dyson sphere in the Varteq Veil, all hopes and dreams shattered.
'No, no. I'm not a part of anyone's machine.' Ace had said that, in Paris, meaning not a cog any more, not a pawn, not a soldier.
She couldn't bear the thought of losing Christopher Cwej. Not he of the wet nose and golden fur, the big stupid grin and mindless optimism in the face of danger. She had a premonition then, so intense it was painful. An image of an older Cwej, grim and silent on some nameless desolate plain, his face etched all over with lines of pain, his eyes having lost their lustre, full of anger and hatred.
'Hey,' said Chris, 'are you all right?'
He was watching her, concern on his big open face. Bernice touched her cheeks and was shocked to find them wet with tears.
She wondered which of them she was crying for.
It was a big storm.
They sat on the sofa facing the picture window with the rag-quilt over their knees. The Doctor produced four enormous bowls of what looked like popcorn but tasted of deep-fried plantain. Chris worked his way through two of them during the evening; Bernice and Roz had one each. The, Doctor nibbled.
The lightning became so frequent you could almost have read a book by the light. Flashes would stab down towards the ocean illuminating first one section and then another. Without a horizon to curtail the view the storm seemed to stretch on for ever. Little of the violence of the storm seemed to leak into the villa; rain was deflected by the window field and Bernice suspected that the noise of the thunder was being muted. They were kept snug within a cocoon of safety with just enough storm