"Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home."
-Matsuo Basho, Narrow Road (tr. Sam Hamill)


The M1 stretched out before them, and Alex peered out the rear view mirror before casting a sideways glance at her daughter in the passenger's seat.

“Chin up, Molls,” she chirped. “We're driving towards your new home. You could be a bit more excited.”

Molly huffed a sigh, her slender form curled up in the seat as she peered out the window. “Easy for you to say, Mum. You've lived in London your whole life.”

“Which is precisely why Cambridge is such a great opportunity for you,” Alex replied. “You can always come back to London after university. It's not as if you're moving to another planet.”

“Might as well be,” Molly answered, glumly. Alex wasn't sure what had happened to the intense excitement that had surrounded her daughter the day she had received her acceptance letter in the post. For the last two years, Molly had talked about leaving London as if it were the only thing she'd wanted in the whole world. Alex didn't remember being as confused and disgruntled at eighteen as her daughter seemed now.

“You can come back every other weekend, if you'd like.”

Molly readjusted herself in her seat, looking down at her hands and looking back up at her mother. “What are you going to do with me gone?”

“Hm, I don't know. Maybe I'll try dating again.”

“Mum.”

“Really. I think your poor, old mum could use a bit of companionship...”

“Mum.”

( Alex looked over again, and Molly's eyes were welling up with tears. )


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Cut for length
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Muse: Alex Drake, Ashes to Ashes
Prompt: #327 - "Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home."
Verse: Open Verse, speculative post-series
Word Count: 936

I've lost control.

This world – this creation of my own mind (if that's really what it is, I can't even be sure now) – but this world, this world I live in now, it's as if all within it is completely beyond my grasp. I thought this was about staying in control. Staying in command. Having a rule over my subconscious. All of that was to keep me afloat. ( All of that was to keep me alive. )


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Cut for length and spoilers through 2x08
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Muse: Alex Drake, Ashes to Ashes
Prompt: #320 - What do you command?
Verse: Open and Canon Verses
Word Count: 320

The leaves of the old book were delicate in your hands. You handled them gently, and the ridiculous thought occurred to you that your should be wearing gloves. You've seen them in museums, the broad, calloused hands of the tour guide somehow softened by thin silk as he paged through a book so old that he wasn't sure when it was made.

But this book wasn't nearly as old. It was your grandmother's, one of the few things your mother kept, and one of the few things you took as your own. It reminds you of your mother, the way the fragile pages slide under the pads of your fingers, like thin flesh that could be torn apart. But that wouldn't stop you, because this was your ritual. A warming glass of wine, and the soft light of the lamp next to you, and the book that was once your mother's in your hands. When you read it you would mumble to yourself, as if you could remember your mother's voice weaving through the words on the page.

“I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;”

It's a memory, and like all memories of that world it appears suddenly in your mind, like a flash a light in the darkness. You barely remember it now, so you grasp to the single thread you can, anything to remind you of what you left behind. ( It's so important you get back, why can't you remember that? )


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Cut for length and minor spoilers for the second series.
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Muse: Alex Drake, Ashes to Ashes
Prompt: #313 - Write about something old, something new, or something borrowed.
Verse: Open and Canon Verses
Word Count: 1180
Note: This also involves a prompt given to me by pi_sparrow, who challenged me to write in the second person and include a line from a Robert Frost poem, fireworks, broken glass, and a baby. The poem used is "A Minor Bird" by Robert Frost.

I've forgotten the details.

All the small things. The tiny things I never even knew I knew. What colour were those eyes? What was the sound of that laugh? The tone of that anger?

Sometimes I still hear it. There's a voice that haunts me (It's in the darkness, when I can hear it whisper to me in the night.). But I've lost the details. I've lost the meaning. I've forgotten the importance.

I don't think I wanted it to be like this. Is it easier to forget? Is it easier to move on, if you think the world you came from wasn't real?

That made it easier for Sam. I think, that was why he did what he did. ( What I could never, ever do. )

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Cut for length and minor spoilers for the series.
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Muse: Alex Drake, Ashes to Ashes
Prompt: #309 - What have you forgotten?
Verse: Open Verse, speculative post-series
Word Count: 510

{Thanks to pi_sparrow for the help!}

When I was young, I often fantasized that my parents had survived the explosion.

It made things a bit easier, to lie in bed and pretend that they weren't home not because they were dead, but because they were both safely tucked away in hospital. They couldn't call because they were both in a coma, but they would eventually wake up. And then one day they would come home and life would be the way it was before I saw them die.

I could have never dreamt that one day, my fantasy, my small tendril of hope that I clung to so tightly, would be my own daughter's reality. And I doubt that it gives her any of the same comfort that it once gave me.

The idea that I could have wished such a fate as my own on my parents in daunting. I fear, at times, that I have outlived my own body. Somewhere, in 2008, I'm wasting away in a hospital bed, as Molly watches. And here, in 1981, I live every day as if I have a chance of seeing her again.

I can't expect to know what will happen, if my body dies. Will my existence in 1981 simply cease? Or will I be trapped here forever? Will I grow, age, start to forget, and eventually die, like Sam? Have I died already, and I just will never know?

I'm trapped in my mind, I feel alive as I have ever been, even as my physical body fights and fades and slips steadily from my grip.

It's far to common to outlive others.

No one ever talks about what a curse it must be to outlive yourself.

Muse: Alex Drake, Ashes to Ashes
Prompt: #305: Write about something you've outlived.
Verse: Open/Canon Verse
Word Count: 282