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| Commissioned by Crow T. Robot |
And yet, it was as if this might be a bit too much for her to handle. The pitch was rather straightforward: Doctor Who and the Vampires. She had seen many a story about immortal aristocrats who suck the life out of everyone around them. Hell, she had written some[2]. And yet, she had difficulty writing it. She had the plot all set, a nice four part tale[3] of woe, anger, and love. Maybe it was because she was in Paris at the time. She had only been in the city once before, when she and Amethyst wandered the streets looking for Amazonite. And the city left a rather distasteful impression upon her.
The city had changed since then. The air of romance had returned after it was snuffed out when she was there last. The utopian dreamers had long since gone extinct, and yet the city had a bouquet about itself. Lovers could be seen kissing on bridges above the canals. The architecture had the angularity of age, built less as a place to live in and more like a museum piece to be admired. And yet, Pearl couldn’t like it as much as the other places she had traveled to. She had only been there for a week, but she had already wanted to be anywhere else.
She left her two room apartment and wandered the streets. Paris, even all these years later, was a city that was easy to get lost in. Its streets curved and dead ended into occult meanings and narratives. The lights of the night shown across the sky like lightning bugs in summer. Pearl waltzed through the streets. The sky was clear of cloud and stars. Only the moon shone brightly in its full radiance. She wandered the streets for hours that seemed like moments. Time was a companion for people like Pearl.
In the end, she found herself atop a tall tower shaped like the letter A. She could see the whole of Paris from her perch. The city shone like an array of diamonds. How Pearl disliked this city. She sighed before she saw that she wasn’t alone. Right next to her, leaning on the handrails of the tower, was an old man dressed in a black cloak. He had a wry, melancholic smile on his face. His eyes shown of the infinite potential of the universe. He looked at her and a chuckle began to form.
ALWAYS IN PARIS, EH PEARL?
“Hello William,” Pearl said with a small sense of nostalgia. “Are you still going by William?”
BILL.
“Right,” Pearl nodded as she climbed down from her perch to stand right next to him. “So what are you doing here? It doesn’t look like the business needs to be done here. Unless there’s an old guy with a bad heart round back.”
Death chuckled. NO, NO. I’M ON VACATION.
“Vacation?” Pearl mocked a sense of shock. “I wouldn’t think someone in your line of work got vacation days.”
THEY COME FEW AND FAR BETWEEN, BUT IT HELPS WHEN YOUR GRANDDAUGHTER OFFERS A HELPING HAND[4].
“I didn’t know you had a granddaughter.”
SUSAN. SHE’S BEEN AROUND FOR A LONG WHILE. TRAVELS, MOSTLY. BUT WE ALWAYS TAKE THE TIME TO SPEND THE HOLIDAYS TOGETHER. Death tried to make a chuckle to make himself sound more human, forgetting just who he was talking to.
“That sounds lovely.” There was an air of sadness in Pearl’s voice. There was always a sadness in her voice, but it was more palpable now than before. She turned away from her companion.
IS SOMETHING THE MATTER?
“Oh! It’s nothing, just… I’m working on a script for Doctor Who.”
OH, REALLY?
“Yes, are you familiar?”
NOT IN THE SLIGHTEST, BUT A LOT OF CHILDREN HAVE TOLD ME HOW DELIGHTFUL IT IS. There was an air of sadness in the way he said that last part.
“Well… I got commissioned to write for the show. They want a piece about vampires and the like. Kinda stuck on where to go with it. There’s this scene I’m working on. Doctor Who and Romana, his companion, are having an argument about… Well, Doctor Who is considering making a new character his companion, Rosalind Tyler. But Romana, she feels like she’s being left on the wayside. Like he doesn’t respect her at all. He brushes it off, like he always does. But this time, Romana just lays into him. She’s furious at him for being so aloof, so charming, so… childish! Why can’t he just talk to her like a person?” Death moved one of his bony fingers across the bottom of Pearl’s wet eyes. “Sorry. Didn’t think I’d get so worked up about a story.”
YES… A STORY. HOW IS ROSE, BY THE WAY?
“Rose? Oh, she’s doing marvelously. She’s in America wandering the desert as she does from time to time. We’re, uh… we’re spending some time apart.”
DID ANYTHING HAPPEN BETWEEN YOU TWO?
“DABAWHA-NO! Nothing happened between us. We just needed some time apart. Any couple that’s lasted as long as ours can’t be together forever. I’m sure even Garnet has periods when she splits up[5].” A sweat began to creep down Pearl’s forehead. She sat down, her feet dangling between bars, floating above the Paris skyline. She smiled, if only briefly. “Do you remember when we first met[6]?”
YES. Death sat down next to her, his feet cross-legged the way one does when they don’t know how to cross their legs.
“What was it that the kid said? The one with the blond hair and brown eyes that always felt happier than they should have been. I couldn’t quite make it out from everything else that was going on.”
“I LOVE YOU.” HE WAS SAYING IT TO HIS LOVER, JOAQUIM WILLIS. JOAQUIM NEVER HEARD IT.
“I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. A romantic swept up in a war that cost the lives of countless people, innocent or not. A failed revolution that, at best, didn’t change a thing. We won, in some respects. They aren’t coming back. But Amazonite is in a bubble. Never to see the sun again. Never to dance across the fields. Never to find love. She’s trapped in a bubble, in a sea of bubbles. Everything I did, I did for her. What am I without her?”
Death looked at his friend with a sense of curiosity. He had only known her for moments at a time, but there was a palpable sense of certainty whenever he saw her. She knew who she was and what she wanted. She had an understanding of everything that Death wished he could have. He reached for something he’d heard from somewhere once.
YOU HAVE EACH OTHER. ISN’T THAT ENOUGH?
Pearl smiled and pulled herself up. “Yeah. I guess it is.” She walked away from her friend.
WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
“Are you talking philosophically or geographically?”
PHILOSOPHICALLY.
“Then I’m going to write.” She skipped down the steps of the tower with a bounce in her heart.
Pearl returned to her apartment three hours later. It was quite easy to get lost in that ancient city. She approached her script and tossed aside the Rosalind Tyler subplot. It wasn’t quite working for her and didn’t feel right for this story. Maybe she would find herself in someone else’s story one of these days, but she had no place in Pearl’s. It took Pearl five days to finish the story[7].
She would never again meet Death directly.
[1] It is the province of Romantics to assume that capital R Romances can only happen once in a lifetime. But then, most lifetimes are surprisingly fleeting.
[2] Of note, is the poem The Hole in the Ground, which frames the vampire as an ecological threat rather than a physical one. It is considered by many scholars to be among her lesser works.
[3] The story would ultimately be expanded to six parts, then lost due to a production strike that would ultimately cause uber fans who think Doctor Who should be kept as far away as possible from identity politics to attempt to recreate it before being novelized by a noted reactionary (Pearl was busy at the time mourning the loss of her first love to write it herself), and finally animated by the BBC.
[4] This is a rather polite way of saying SUSAN NOTICED THAT I WAS OVERWORKING MYSELF WITH THIS VIETNAM BUSINESS AND TOLD ME THAT IF I DON’T TAKE A WEEK OFF, SHE’D HIT ME WITH A POKER. I WASN’T SURE IF SHE WAS JOKING. SO MUCH OF HER MOTHER IN HER.
[5] She would, but it wouldn’t happen until shortly after Rose died.
[6] It was in May of 1968, when she and Amethyst were chasing after a corrupted Amazonite. For many, Paris is a city of art and romance. For Pearl, it would always be a city of death.
[7] From here, the history of Pearl within Doctor Who gets a little bit more complex. She would not write for this incarnation of the show for many years, but she would have a rather prolific career writing for the various novel spin offs that were made shortly after Doctor Who was canceled. She would work with various incarnations of the Doctor, including the seventh and eighth incarnations, where it was said that she did her best work. She wrote at least one draft of Human Nature and Return of the Living Dad, as well as edited the Virgin Decalog series, wherein she first encountered the work of Steven Moffat. While the work was extremely clever in a “look at me, I’m putting an entire academic essay into my short story while also alternating between two timelines” sort of way, it was nevertheless still capable of pulling off that cleverness such that it was charming rather than grating. She would not meet the Scottish playwright until the production of the comedy short The Curse of The Fatal Death, which Rose Quartz had a small cameo in. They hit it off rather nicely, exchanging phone numbers (or, rather, Steven gave Pearl his work number while she stood there looking rather confused). Pearl would write three more novels before inexplicably dropping an incomplete draft of her final novel, the Eighth Doctor Adventure Loveless, onto her editors, forcing a rather dreadful back half by Gary Russell that received a number of wretched reviews such that even Doctor Who Magazine openly dunked on it upon release. Pearl would attempt to return to the world of fiction writing during the depressive state that made her send in an unfinished draft, including a rather ill-advised one season American television series that still has a modicum of a cult following among the AV Club crowd and a collection of poems from over the millennia with annotations that were often longer than the poems themselves. But eventually, she gave up on writing altogether. Roughly a decade and a half after Loveless, Pearl finally got herself a cell phone and decided to call someone whom she had met at a rock concert a few weeks earlier. Unfortunately, for some inexplicable reason, she instead grabbed the phone number Steven had given her all those years ago. When she asked to speak to S, she was transferred to Steven’s new office at the BBC. He was quite pleased to talk to Pearl after all these years. And while she wished she could be talking to her lady friend, Pearl was likewise pleased to hear from him as well. After sharing pleasantries, Steven asked Pearl if she had be writing anything as of late. Pearl noted that she hadn’t, but (for reasons she couldn’t quite articulate) she’d be up to start again. Unbeknownst to Pearl, Steven was in a bit of a bind. He was in the midst of editing the script of the two part episode We Dare Not Go a-Hunting/For Fear of Little Men. However, due to a last minute vacation on the part of writer Peter Harness, it had to be pared down to a first part while the second was to be written by a safe pair of hands. He was just about to call Toby Whithouse to write the second part when Pearl accidentally dialed his number. And Steven, being aware of her work four years prior showrunning the rather underrated (if somewhat flawed) Return (though still capable of being aired such that it didn’t need too much retooling for a BBC budget), asked if she’d be willing to write a script for the season. Pearl accepted and began work on a script. It took her roughly three months to complete, with the final draft taking the longest to work on due to personal issues occurring in Pearl’s life. But she got the draft done just in time for the wedding. The story, For Want of a Rose, was aired on June 3rd, 2017 to critical acclaim (though that didn’t stop certain segments of the notoriously catty Doctor Who fandom to treat it as if it was a blight against everything that’s good about Doctor Who). It told of a romance between Doctor Who’s companion, Bill Potts, and the late Heather in the backdrop of a fascist utopia. It was a story of letting go of loves lost, of fighting against systems of cruelty while still remembering that there are people within them. It also had what is considered by many to be the funniest Nardole gag, wherein he, dressed as Kerry Moonbeam during his “Fascism is OK” phase (down to the absurdly rubbish wig), proceeds to perform a punk rock ballad about conforming to the fascist order that the audience instantly falls in love with. It was a fitting end to Pearl’s career in Doctor Who. (That it wasn’t is a completely different story entirely.)
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