Broken Space

Ephram didn't generally consider himself to be a beach person. Who wanted sand in uncomfortable places? Seriously? Not him.

But on occassion he enjoyed spending time on one of the rocky outcroppings that had unofficially become patios, with camp chairs and umbrellas underneath palm trees. He'd caught Ianto sweeping the sand away once, so at least he had the reassurance that it was as clean as an anal retentive Welshman could manage it.

So today was actually not bad. Yeah, it was sunny, and hot, but there was a nice breeze blowing, and he had a pitcher of iced tea. So with the sound of the ocean and a new manga, he could almost forget that he was trapped on a desert island with his pregnant ex-girlfriend, who could or could not be speaking to him depending on the day, and that he and his boyfriend still hadn't really talked about what Madison being there even meant.

The plot to Ranma 1/2 hadn't been this complicated.

It's ridiculous how many points pregnancy books can manage to disagree on while still being about the same subject. Madison had started out reading everything she could find, but after a while of comparing contradictions and variations and getting frustrated and a little scared she'd finally decided she would just pick one and trust that it was the right one. What to Expect When You're Expecting is the one she's actually heard of, so that book is the one she kept, and is the one currently under her tea saucer as she relaxes in an armchair with a paperback, a murder mystery.

She sits forward without looking up from her place, reaching for her tea when she suddenly freezes, eyes widening as she lifts her head. "...Oh my god," she gasps, her hand going immediately to her stomach, tea and book forgotten at the flutter she just felt. The baby moved. It moved.

After a certain number of years on the island, Bran has learned not to ask questions. So when he takes Cafall out in the morning and sees a neat, bright row of yellow daffodils have sprouted up overnight in front of the Hub, he just cuts a few to take back inside and doesn't spend too much energy on it.

"Although," he says aloud, "if you really want to make me happy, you'll find a way to send over the rugby results." The island makes no promises.

Back in the kitchen he puts on the kettle, and spends a moment or two deciding what to make for breakfast before mixing up some pancake batter (his sort of pancakes, not Ephram's, though he can probably manage both if pressed), humming to himself as he works.

(Happy St David's Day!)

"I think I need to talk to Ephram before I decide." Madison looked at Andy with an almost apologetic smile. "What'd he say?"

Andy gave her a strange look. "Nothing." He moved from behind the desk to close the office door as Madison watched him, confused.

"I don't understand--"

"He doesn't know." The conversation was just getting more confusing as it continued, really. That wasn't how it was supposed to go.

"You haven't told him."

"No. And I don't plan to."

"What?" Madison's stomach knotted as she frowned at Andy.

"I don't want him to know that you're pregnant."

"He would want to know. He deserves to know," Madison argued, going cold. She'd trusted Andy, taken him at his word, and now this? Why?

"That's true. But it really doesn't matter. I'm going to tell you something and you may not understand it, but that's fine. You don't have to." Madison looked at him in obvious disbelief. "Just listen." Andy paused and Madison waited, feeling her head start to pound. "Ephram lost enough of his childhood when his mother died, but I got lucky. He got lucky. He somehow...managed to salvage that innocence. If he hears this now, all of that innocence is gone. And it will be the end of a childhood that isn't finished yet. Don't do this to him. Please."

Madison wanted to ask what about her, what about all of the plans she'd made? Because this? Put a serious kink in her life, too. She felt the tears that had been threatening start to overspill her eyes and wiped them away with a small gasp that did nothing to alleviate the tightness in her throat and chest. She needed to sit down, felt as if her life which had already been spiraling out of control had just suffered admission to free-fall.

Andy came over to her. Apparently he wasn't finished sucker punching her. "Listen to me, Madison. Whatever you choose to do, if you want to end the pregnancy, if you want to keep the baby, I will pay for it. I will support you. I will see to your comfort and security. Whatever you want, for as long as you want it. But Ephram is not to know."

She couldn't even look at him, felt dirty and cheap. Not that she couldn't use the money, but--God. Andy Brown, the man she had trusted to help her, had just offered to buy her silence. All she had to do was sacrifice her integrity and her love for Ephram, a love that was still there despite them not working out. Lack of emotion had never been the problem after all. "I think this is a mistake." Her voice was thick with tears, but she didn't care.

"Fine. Let it be my mistake." He said it as if it was just so damn easy, as if just sitting back and not telling Ephram would solve everything. But it wouldn't.

"How. How could I do that?"

"You go." And there it was. She was being asked to not only keep her silence, keep something as huge as a baby a secret from Ephram, a secret she felt he deserved to know--now she was being sent away on top of it. This was all too much to deal with at once, especially when she'd thought she made the right choice coming to Andy in the first place.

"I can't--I have to go. I'll...think about it." Andy opened his mouth and before he could say anything else, she promised, "I won't do anything before I talk to you. I won't...go to him." She got to her feet, edging toward the door to his office. "I won't tell him."

"Madison, I know you think--" Madison shook her head as Andy started talking again, raising a hand.

"I really can't, right now. I'm sorry." She turned and fled his office, the converted train station he'd turned into his practice...and came to an abrupt stop as her feet hit sand, looking around in shock and the first tendrils of fear. Day had become night in the blink of an eye, and there was a fire nearby and strangers all around and...

...and Madison sinks to the sand, eyes wide and scared, and hugs her knees to her chest. "What the hell just happened?" she whispers to no one in particular.

[A bit belated, but the island's newest resident has arrived in the middle of the NYE party. BRING IT ON. ;)]

It's an annual tradition, and this year Johnny is feeling particularly celebratory. The island seemed to have gone easy on them this year, for some reason. A few people coming, a few people leaving, and mostly not craziness. In fact, it was so incredibly mundane that Johnny was going stir-crazy. He wouldn't even have minded if the dinosaurs came back, so long as something interesting happened. So this year he'd decided to ring in the next year with a particularly exceptional party in the hopes that something would happen--even if it was just another baby in nine months. With any luck it wouldn't be his.

There was alcohol. Lots of alcohol. And a feast of barbecued boar, roasted fish, fresh vegetables and fruits. There were torches lighting the path from the Compound to Summerfell, and on the beach a large bonfire burned. Best of all, he'd spoken with the sciency types and they'd managed a very special countdown for midnight.

Fireworks. Raw, experimental--but still big explosions of sparks and light. It was going to be awesome.

Working sheepdogs who are not actually working have a lot of energy, and need a lot of exercise. Cafall, used to both working and having the run of the north Welsh mountains, has never taken to a great amount of resting inside, and tends to require several walks a day if Bran doesn't happen to be spending most of the day outside.

And sometimes it's a nice ritual, really, for Bran and Ephram to take him for a walk along the beach about sunset. The three of them are there now, two boys strolling along with the dog walking alert and collected at Bran's heels, ignoring the seagulls that swoop from the sky to taunt him.

[Tag Bran, or tag Ephram, or tag both. Game on. :)]

Delia had mastered balancing on one toe. Well mostly. Enough that Arya had decided she was ready for the next level of balancing. The stairs in the compound were not steep enough to be a challenge to balance at the top of and so they had gone outside to the jungle.

Delia had always been a good climber and had become more so in her quest to catch monkeys. However Arya had very particular ideas about the kind of tree it was suitable to learn balance in and so several had been rejected. It had to be sturdy enough to take her weight but the branches couldn't be too wide or where was the challenge.

"This one?" suggested Delia, at the foot of yet another tree. She didn't wait for and answer and reached up to grap a branch bracing one bare foot on the bark and hauling herself up while Arya considered her choice.

The problem with being a musical genius (well, one of them, anyway), is that when things aren't perfect it can be maddening. Two years, a few hurricanes, and a snowstorm later and the dear old Steinway was having problems holding its tune. Which was driving Ephram batshit.

After scouring the library he came across a Tune Your Own Piano book. A little more scouring in the basement (what Ianto insisted on calling the Archives, but would always be the basement/laundry room to Ephram) and he had everything that he needed--a collection of tuning forks, a little LED flashlight, some wooden wedges that would have to do for the rubber ones the book said he was supposed to have, and a hefty looking wrench for the actual tuning.

But the actual tuning turns out to be more difficult than he'd thought. It's not that he can't hear and tune the wire--he can--he just can't get the wrench to do what he wants. So, the book is flat on the piano bench, and Ephram is frowning at it, and the open piano top, with a thoughtful looking expression.

For a variety of reasons, Amelie is throwing a masquerade ball. It had not occurred to her until the later stages that this meant that she would be attending a party. Thankfully, she had found a suitable dress in the basement. Elizabethan, by the look (and feel) of it, but it had a matching mask. Both were light green and embroidered with gold. The mask also had golden feathers.

Of course, there were too few people here for her to be truly anonymous, but that hadn't actually occurred to her until just now.

She tries not to panic - breathing too quickly might make her faint - as she surveys the room. Food, music, and she had found flowers as well. Now all she had to do was hope everything went all right. And play matchmaker. And hope no one talked to her.

She took the biggest breath she dared to take. Should be easy.

Winter is traditionally a time for feasting and celebration. There'd been plenty of that at Thanksgiving, a holiday that Bran has still only celebrated twice. But he knows Ephram and Delia have attachments to it, and if he can make them happy by stuffing them full of food normally reserved for Christmastime, well, it's a small price. Even if it does mean doing it all over again in a month's time.

And in between, there's always this matter of what to do with the leftovers. By the time that even Bright is complaining about eating the same thing for a week on end, it's probably time to do something else.

Which is why what's left of the single turkey unfortunate enough to appear on the island is bubbling away in a pot, surrounded by the remains of the potatoes and some herbs and vegetables out of the garden. And why Bran is crouched on the floor with his head in the cupboard, fishing out other things to pour into the pot and go on making the kitchen smell good.

[It's been a while since I did one of these; come talk to Bran, have some soup, shoot the breeze...whether you know him yet or not!]

What do you get when you combine one already creepy compound and two party addicts with way too much time on their hands?

One amazing party.

The entrance to the Compound has been lined with black and fake cobwebs, and an old tape recorder playing a casette of scary sound effects on a loop. All lights have been covered up, and the only lights one can see are at the end of the hallway.

The end of the hallway is the Lobby, and it's been turned into one hell of a party room (no pun intended). The walls are also covered in black, with the harsh fluorescent lights covered with sheer fabric and mounted squares of colored glass. There's a bar, a non-alcoholic fruit punch for the kiddies, a table full of appetizers and bowls of sugar cane sticks and other sweet things. There's not much left in the basement anymore--Bright and Johnny scoured the shelves and hijacked everything that could be used for a speaker system and begged Alec and the Doctor to help.

Well, Johnny begged. Because he's not above begging a Timelord to play the Professor from Gilligan's Island when it comes to wanting a kickass sound system.

Music from someone's forgotten ipod is now blaring, the bass so loud it makes Johnny's chest vibrate--the perfect volume, in his opinion.

And what would be Halloween without costumes? Because otherwise Johnny Storm wouldn't be the devil his sister always accused him of being and just be a man in a red catsuit, carrying a pitchfork with sparkly red horns on his head--and that would just be silly.


[Set to Halloween Night, naturally, but as we're all going to be gone...pre-play to your heart's content!]

Like basically everybody else on the island, Bright had developed a kind of routine. Most of his wouldn't surprise anybody--surfing, eating, hanging out on the beach, eating again, shooting some hoops, harassing people into having parties. The only part that would was where he got up early and read something. It didn't matter much what, and a lot of the time he didn't understand it anyway, but after the first couple months of what was basically an endless summer vacation, he'd kind of felt like he was reverting back to being dumb. He was used to being dumb, but he didn't really like it, so he tried to learn stuff. He figured this would be a prime opportunity for Ephram to make fun of him--and Delia, though Bran and his vet books probably wouldn't--so he woke up early, didn't tell anybody he was doing it, and finished the whole thing off by catching some early morning waves.

That was most mornings. This morning, he wandered out of his room and saw her.

"Baby!" Bright ran over to his lost love and threw his arms around her. "I missed you!"

"Beep-beepeep eep!" she said, because she was a totally cool vintage Ms Pac-Man arcade game and that was pretty much all she ever said. Ephram had brought her home from a party once and Bright was totally devastated when he'd gone and sold her to buy a piano. Oh, sure, he understood, Ephram, piano, blah blah blah.

He jiggled the joystick. The game beeped again. "Score," he crowed. "Still doesn't even need quarters!"

Half an hour later, he was still playing.

Tory has such fond memories of the kitchen. Well, nothing's really happened in the kitchen but it's where he made the date with Colin that led to things going very well with Colin. So, he has fond memories all the same.

He's not trying to cook or anything ridiculous this time - just making a snack before bed. Ah, bed. He's looking forward to crawling into bed because guess who's there?

If Tory were thinking clearly at the moment, he'd recognize just how much he's lost it. Fortunately, he doesn't have to worry about that.

The Doctor wanted to have a barbecue on the beach. He thought it was a brilliant idea, of course. All of the Doctor's ideas are brilliant, because he's clever like that. Jack snorts, smiling faintly to himself as he builds up the wood he collected into a pile for a bonfire. Sometimes the Doctor's unbridled enthusiasm for everything is annoying, but even when it is, Jack still somehow finds it endearing. Because well...he's the Doctor.

There's a selection of meats and vegetables and sticks set off to one side on a blanket, for people to cook with if they wander by and decide to join in. The Doctor isn't really one for formality: no announcements, no signs or invitations. Just 'you should make a bonfire on the beach, Jack. I'm sure people will come, it's a barbecue. Good old-fashioned Earth tradition, barbecues.' And so Jack is making a fire on the beach, because if the Doctor asks for it, it's pretty much a given that Jack Harkness will provide it.

[Gathering post for all interested, or feel free to catch Jack still in preparation stages.]

I just realised we hadn't posted this yet. Bran and Ephram get married on the beach, accompanied by a few close friends. Timed to 6 June.

Ephram is not that great of a cook, but he does make the attempt every now and then. Ukyo had asked him about pumpkin pie, and so he's making a practice run, having found something resembling squash.

It's better than hanging around the piano, anyway. He hasn't touched the keys since his talk with Edward, fearing them contaminated or worse, jinxed in some way.

"Okay," he says, staring at the cookbook. "Pie crust. Water, sugar, flour, salt, and butter. How hard could that be?"

Dairine had told Ianto once that she meant to look for cat wizards. What she had actually found, or rather, what Rua had found for her, were kittens--tiny, furry, wriggly, playful, too adorable for words kittens. When she'd first found them, they had been tiny mewling balls of fur with squinted, stuck-shut eyes, but they've been growing at an astonishing rate, and when their mother hadn't seemed too fussed about letting Zelda take one of them, Dairine thought the rest must be ready for homes as well.

Really, it's best. Because if she doesn't give them away soon she's going to try to keep them all, and that is a dangerous number of kittens.

She looks down at them, hands on her hips. "Dai stiho," she greets. "I don't suppose any of you are wizards?"

The nearest kitten mews and rubs against her leg. Dairine isn't really sure if that's an answer.

[Free kittens! Come get one if you want one. They're adorable. Fluffy kitties, free to good homes!]

Tory's doing Torchwood research in the rec room, his legs thrown over one arm of a chair as he leans back against the other. Edward's been in an...interesting mood, he might call it, for a few days, and he's not sure what's been going on. Not that Edward would say - he's not always so forthcoming about his feelings.

Regardless, Tory's got work to do and while he could do it at the house, he doesn't especially feel like it, with Edward being broody. So here he is, in relative comfort. There are worse ways to live a life, he thinks.

Edward normally didn't find it necessary to venture terribly far from the home he shared with Tory, but his comments in reference to his conspicuous absence at the wedding had made him think. Tory needed a certain encouragement and a certain presence in his life and Edward, being with him, was meant to be the provider of said comfort. It got him broody and dark.

He knew there was a piano in the common room and, picking a time when it was pleasant outdoors and people were less likely to be milling around inside, he made his way up there and sat down to play.