Sally Sparrow's Journal

( The Crowded Hour )

All the gods lost 2-1, and holes to heaven pointed out to us from light years away - (Sally, Daisy Adair, John Druitt, John Hart) Death of a bird.

( Hide and Seek )

( Time Will Crawl )

You know what to do guys. Please be constructive in your criticism, comments will be screened.

 ( Application under the cut... )

((Tonight, your dreams have all gone wrong. Not quite nightmares but just ...off in that strange way that dreams can be. Share them with us. Or, even better, share them with someone else. Sometimes it's good to talk about these things. ))


It takes her a while to realise that she's in the wrong house. One would think that this would not be the hardest thing to spot, considering that she lived in a city flat. But the place felt right, familiar to the point that what was wrong with it just didn't seem ti register. The bedroom was hers, but not the one she lived in now. Nor was it the one she'd shared for a short time with Larry, the paisley dated wallpaper with the cream trim on the windowsill..that belonged to the flat she'd rented in university.

For some reason, it didn't seem strange to look out that window and see the expansive garden of her Aunt's country home, the gazebo that had stood in the back garden of her parents' house until a storm had brought a tree down through the roof. The kitchen was Kathy's, a place she'd known better than most, she'd brewed countless cups of tea and coffee there, after all.

Larry's mustard coloured couch slouched in the centre of the living room, a stark contrast to furniture she'd known as both a child and adult. Sally Sparrow doesn't wonder why she's in this strange house, doesn't care because it's quiet and it's hers. It's all the comfortable pieces of her past, within reach, incarnate, there to be seen and touched and remembered.

She doesn't know how dangerous it is not to wonder. It's an innocent betrayal of herself, to not question or ponder or want to know why. Contentment is poison for a curious mind but Sally doesn't care. She likes being lost in the halls of her house, trail dust off the banister as she goes downstairs. Remember lullabys and memories.

But the paper is peeling off the sitting room walls in long strips, the furniture covered in dusty plastic. Under the paper, under the paint, reads, 'Sally Sparrow, Duck'.

She looks at the message, "Well that's not right."

Somewhere in the wee hours of the morning, Sally managed to scrounge up enough sleep to sufficiently rise off the couch the next morning. Alex was already fiddling with something in the small kitchen, trying to coax the coffee pot into life, probably. She and Sally exchanged some sleepily mumbled greetings before the blonde staggered off to the bathroom to wash up and get out of the clothes she'd slept in.

CID was buzzing with it's usual lack of enthusiastic fervor. Alex was pouring over the latest case, scrambling to clean up the final loose ends from the fiasco that had left a certain undercover policewoman dead, and the rest of them looking like twats.

The Guv was giving Chris and Ray a good holler in his office the last she'd seen. Shaz was going over some recent inventory tags with Viv in the corner. They were fracturing, bit by bit and everyone knew it. And that's when the hammer walked in. DCI Jim Keats walked among the desks, surveying their little kingdom with a sort of nonchalant smugness, like a well fed cat.

He caught Sally's eye across the room, and tried to offer one of his oh so disarming smiles. She glowered back in return, before slinking off to the kitchenette to fix herself a cup of tea.

That man set her teeth on edge, that was for sure. She didn't like the two faced  weasel or the way he seemed to revel in chaos around them, adding to it.

Distracted, she slopped hot water over the edge of her mug, the boiling liquid splashing on the white knuckles that had been clenching the handle tightly. Sally swore lowly in a manner few, if any ever heard from her. This place had certainly been a terrible influence on her.

((Because she requested Sally, Alex, and Duke, the CID kitten, It's a long story.))


Morning light streamed through the bedroom window...or it would, if the window in question hadn't been in a flat belonging to one Alex Drake, and therefore had been thoroughly hangover-proofed. That meant only a small crack of light snuck under the thickest curtains known to man. And sneak it did, traipsing across the floor and up onto the king sized bed that, on this rare occasion, had had no vacancies. The crafty splinter of sunlight spilled over the face of one Sally Sparrow who winced at the intrusion and rolled over, twisting the sheets in her wake as she fled the intrusive morning.

The movement disrupted a small grey shape nestled in the centre of the bed, who then migrated to higher ground. ( Which in this case, meant making herself comfortable in the small of the blonde's back. )

((Because I'm bloody in love with Ashes to Ashes right now and wanted to do a slightly different spin on this verse.))





Alex Drake is a bloody good copper. That's one thing no one within the halls of CID would refute. She might be a borderline functional alcoholic who had hushed onesided conversations with radios and tellies but she still did her job, and she did it well.  Some might call that eccentric...if eccentric was a nice way of saying 'slightly over the edge of crazy'.

But Sally Sparrow wasn't like that. She was the sane one, the grounded one, the rational dreamer trapped in the asylum with the lunatics. She got up in the morning, peeled her hungover flatmate off the couch more days than not, and went to work. And she did her job, boring, menial and occasionally gruesome as it was, she made the best of a fairly bad situation.

But she didn't lose her grip on reality, didn't forget that there was a very real technical explanation behind her current predicament. Didn't forget that that it was just one little time rift that had dumped her here. Didn't forget that there was a certain Time Lord no doubt trying to track her back down at this very moment. That was what happened, that was why she was here.

Because she's not like Alex, she's not lost and in the dark, she has an explanation for all of this. She's not crazy.

Four months pass, she starts to doubt her own memories. Doubt the increasingly vague recollection of that day.

Five months pass. Alex takes a bullet. Alex is in a coma. The fantasy starts to bleed into reality and Sally starts to doubt everything.

Eight months. Alex wakes up, Sally doesn't know how to tell her about the dreams, about looking up at that almost circular shaft of light and waking up screaming. She's forced to soon enough.

Nine months. Shaz likes her new haircut, she doesn't tell anyone the shorter manageable style is less for fashion and more so she never has to look in a mirror if she can help it. Anything to avoid the ghastly smile that's starting to lurk in the corners of every reflective surface.

She stops developing her own photos, hiding from the voices in the shadows of the darkroom and the impossible things she sometimes sees in the developing film. There and gone, blink and it's over. The department plod who takes over the job botches it half the time and she doesn't care.

The dreams don't stop.

And there comes a time when this rational dreamer can't stop denying the fact that it feels like she's losing her mind. But she can't be, can't be the one that's slipping. Can't be, isn't. Can't shake the feeling that the asylum is crumbling around her and she'll go with it.

But she can't be, because there's an explanation behind all of this. Because she remembers what really happened even if she dreams about falling.

She can't be, because she's not like Alex. Her logic is her anchor, but day by day doubt gnaws away at the moorings and Sally begins to understand what it feels like to be lost.

((Requested by rude_not_ginger , who wanted Sally/Ten, "Goodbye kiss"))





They never say hello as well as they say goodbye.

Hellos always come with trepidation, hope, plans and fears and so much unknown that could stretch out behind them once they pass. A hello is a beginning, and beginnings scare her sometimes because she doesn't know where they might leave her, or where she might find herself if she follows them. Goodbyes, on the other hand, are simple, final, and beautifully painful. No one writes songs about hellos, but they've written thousands about goodbye. 

It was just three hours. Three hours for her, while he recalibrated the engines and took the TARDIS for a quick spin around to galaxy. Three hours for her, much longer for him. Time enough to watch a people burn.

But three hours later and it's still spring in London, late in the lazy afternoon when the trees in the park cast their long shadows, and she's waiting. Legs swinging gently off the edge of the bench, attention wrapped and rapt in the book she's cradling in her lap, reading by the dappling light from the trees. Somehow she doesn't hear the engines land in the soft grass to her left, doesn't look up until she spots a pair of cream chucks trot into her vision. She gets as far up as the set of his jaw and knows something's wrong. More than should have gone wrong in three hours.

She's wearing a light summer dress without trousers underneath and it occurs to him that that girl who ran out to him in the street one day in 2007 had grown up when he wasn't looking. Eyes always on the screen and the stars of the universe and never beside him in the console room.

She sets down her book, Charlotte Bronte can wait, and stands, searching his face to give up what she knew it never would. And the closer he steps the more it sinks in.

"Sally..." He begins.

"It's alright, I understand", she ends.

He reaches one hand forward, threading fingers through her hair, pushing it back from her face. It was shorter than it used to be, brushing the tops of her shoulders, (she'd cut it months ago, he'd never seemed to notice and she didn't think it was worth pointing out) There's nothing left to say.

The kiss he presses to the curve of her cheek lingers too close to the corner of her mouth,  long enough for the two elderly woman on the next bench to notice, prompting sweetly nostalgic chatter. Words like how sweet, and look at that, a real gentleman, and reminds me of James and I, float in more than audible whispers through the heavy spring air.

They only stop when he pulls back, and without a word, turns and walks away.

Title: Well this is one place where your gods can't dwell
Verse: Hide and Seek
Serial: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Characters: Sally Sparrow and Helen Magnus ( notanemptymotto )
Setting: London, 2010, The UK Sanctuary
Relative Time: 11:56 PM



The drive back to the Sanctuary  was quiet, and felt unnaturally long. Sally watched the streets and unlit shops pass by the window, the pane misting as they went with the beginnings of a light rain. She knew she should give Larry a call, let him know she was alright at least, to be honest he was the only one left around who cared to ask, and she owed it to him. She owed him a lot, really, after everything that had happened to them and between them over the years he's still come out of it a good hearted guy who somehow still thought the world of her. That was probably more than she deserved, but she owed him one phonecall at least, as a friend.

But that would have to wait, until she was alone and preferably somehow done with this case, although there was no end currently in sight. Sally didn't mind, it kept her busy, kept her thinking.