Fic: Dating the Cleverest Boy in the World. Epilogue
The final chapter on the shortest day. This is oddly appropriate. (You'll see why.) Anyone's who's been holding back because it's been a WIP - well, it's all done! All 160,000 words. (That's like... nearly two novels? I must be insane.) Anyway, to everyone (5 of you?) who's stuck with me for the past 4 years, words can't begin to explain how much I appreciate you. Thank you for sharing this journey with me, and I hope you've found it worth your while.
Fic index here if anyone wants to catch up, or just follow the tags. Also on AO3 and The Teaspoon.
Summary: Allison had always thought that university would be an adventure. But she'd not imagined that she'd end up dating Harold Saxon's son.
Setting: Winter 2066
Characters: Allison, Alex
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 3600 approx
Feedback: If you've read this far - please?
Dedication: To all my readers. ♥
Epilogue
Winter 2066
There was a plum tree in Allison’s garden. Snowflakes were gently settling on its branches, brightly white against the near-blackness of the bare branches, promising that soon the tree would be as snow-capped as the ground below. Yes, it was a perfectly ordinary tree, except it hadn’t been there two minutes previously.
She almost turned to call out, but two years had been long enough to make her catch herself in time. There would be no answer.
For long moments nothing happened. Snowflakes continued to fall, and the tree stood in the middle of her garden, immovable, as if it had grown roots. Maybe it had. Maybe she had zoned out for so long that a whole tree had grown... But the steely grey sky didn’t look as if it was giving birth to miracles today, and the whirling whiteness was indifferent to the world around it.
(She was used to that. Her world had ended twice within the past seven years, and yet life continued unaffected all around her. Season followed season, sun and rain and snow meaning nothing more than blissfully neutral topics for conversation. She could talk about the weather forever... Other things were impossible to explain or acknowledge.)
Her attention was caught by movement. As if to prove that the day was going out of its way to confound her, a square rectangle of golden light appeared in the dark trunk (like a door opening), and out of it stepped a dark-haired man, dressed in dark colours. He looked up at the falling snow and then turned to take in the garden and the tree he had emerged from, the confusion evident.
Eventually he set eyes on the house. Hesitating for a moment, he then appeared to shrug, before closing the tree-door and walking up the garden path towards Allison’s back door.
Somewhere in the back of her mind it occurred to her that maybe she ought to be afraid. But who-ever-it-was looked as lost as she... And Emily had believed so fiercely in tree elves when she was little.
Shortly afterwards there was a knock at the back door, and (without thinking) she went to open it.
The man looked to be about her own age, late fifties or thereabouts, and stray snowflakes were settling in his well cut, if somewhat unkempt, black hair. The hair at his temples were shot through with white, and his clothes, although obviously good quality, were unremarkable - dark and very ordinary.
The most startling feature overall were his eyes - vivid green, they were studying her with slowly dawning recognition.
“Allison?” the stranger asked softly, tilting his head just so, and Allison could feel her mind very, very slowly ticking over.
“Alex?” she asked eventually, and he blinked.
“No one’s called me that in... centuries. But yes, that used to be my name.”
A pause, as clearly neither knew what to say, then he spoke again.
“Can I come in?”
There didn’t seem to be any particular emotion behind the words, nor did his eyes look at her with that shaded pain she now recalled from previous meetings - despite the unusual colour, his eyes seemed oddly impassive.
Part of her wanted to just slam the door in his face, but another part decided that it would rather have answers. So she shrugged and said ‘OK’.
Cautiously he entered, looking around her kitchen with quiet curiosity - the photos and Emily’s paintings on the walls, the drawings attached to the fridge - and took a seat at the table when she motioned for him to do so.
She found she couldn’t sit, and instead leaned against a cabinet, just watching him. Eventually she spoke, unable to contain herself. She had been raging against fate for a long time - having an actual person to hold responsible was a luxury she didn’t think she’d ever have.
“Did you know? About Adelaide? About Mars? How it would end?”
The words nearly caught in her throat, the pain and the anger and the staggering loss still somehow fresh even though it had been more than six years.
His expression didn’t change. He might have been discussing the weather for all the emotion he displayed.
“That they all died? Of course. Why do you think she’s famous?”
“She's famous because she died?”
“She’s famous because they were the first. Because they inspired the whole world.”
“But they didn’t need to die! How could you know and never say? How could you know and let me pour my whole life into-” She stopped, too angry and too upset to continue.
And he was just sitting there. A stranger in her world, dark-clad and sombre, as if he’d never been her golden boy.
“You made history. You helped change the world. Adelaide’s endeavour lives forever, the cornerstone of all human exploration.”
She shook her head, wanting to shake him. Nice platitudes were all she'd had ever since that fateful November day. She needed more.
“It was my life’s work and she was my best friend. And she died...”
A slow nod. He was too quiet, too old (and considering how old she felt that was almost a joke) - not giving her anywhere to focus her anger. And she needed anger.
“That makes you very fortunate. And I know what you’re thinking, but I can’t change it. Never could, never will. It’s a fixed point in history. Adelaide’s fate as unchanging as the atoms in a diamond - and as bright.”
A small bitter smile, the first hint of real emotion she had seen.
“I’d swap, if I could. Try working on something for the best part of a lifetime, and then see it all destroyed in a moment. And no one, ever, any the wiser.”
At her inquiring look, he explained a little more.
“My Matrix. Worked on it for about fifty years, give or take. And then, when it was nearing completion, it... exploded. I’d miscalculated somewhere. Oh, and the explosion killed me, hence this face.”
She hugged herself, hoping he wasn’t expecting sympathy, because she didn’t have any left. But his words had reminded her of another question she'd never thought anyone would be able to answer.
“But what happened? On Mars, I mean. Why did they die? Was it... Was it something that could have been prevented? Was it- was it me?”
(Her secret fear. Her nightmare, that she had never dared share. Had she miscalculated somewhere? Had she forgotten something? Could she have done something else...)
He considered for a long moment.
“I don’t think so. You had hundreds, if not thousands, of people checking everything. Plus the last message was about water...” Another long pause, as he silently deliberated with himself.
“Maybe the natives - they were called Ice Warriors by the way - would know why. If it was something inherent to the planet, or a one-off threat...”
His voice trailed off, and after a moment she realised he wasn’t going to pick up the thread again. It was strange... He’d put her mind to rest, if not offered an apology - yet he seemed completely detached. His answers were sufficient, yet nothing more, seemingly given more out of politeness than anything else. Like she could have been anyone. But why come here, if not to speak with her about Mars?
Shifting uncomfortably, she cast about for another subject. The anger was gone again, buried beneath loss, and she didn’t have the energy to fuel it.
“So... what have you been doing? If your Matrix didn’t work out?”
Resting his chin on folded hands he frowned lightly, as if casting his mind back was not easy - like throwing a line far back and reeling in old, old memories. (How old was he? The last time she'd seen him he'd almost been a child...)
“What have I done? Mostly trying to rediscover old Time Lord science; how to manipulate the world... Controlling gravity, playing around with the space-time continuum in up to eleven dimensions, that kinda thing. Built an empire. Oh and before that I won a war.”
His voice was reflective, thoughtful. He might have been discussing the finer points of bread making.
“A proper big war, for the whole of the universe. I... rather enjoyed that, although I’m glad it’s not a regular thing. It’s all in the planning, you see, accounting for unknown unknowns... Father was pleased of course, but it took the Doctor a good few decades before he’d talk to me again. Not that I was around much afterwards - I discovered a way to travel between dimensions, so I did a bit of that for a while. But there’s no place like home...”
Listening, she became increasingly uneasy. It wasn’t what he was telling her, but how he said it. A sort of quiet emptiness behind the words, as if he was reciting an old story, or discussing someone else’s life. He’d been a good liar, and one who’d learned to shield his emotions from her, but there was no shield here, no lies. Just a detachment more than bordering on the deeply unnerving. It left only one question.
“Why are you here?”
He lifted his eyes and studied her blankly. Beautiful green eyes, without the tiniest spark of... anything at all.
“My TARDIS brought me here. That’s my spaceship. I don’t know why it chose here and now and you.”
He hadn’t come. He’d been brought. (The tree was a spaceship? The camouflage was incredible. Although that was a topic for another time.) But she could tell that he was actively avoiding her question. She asked again, with more force.
“Why are you here? What happened?”
He seemed frozen, then abruptly he lowered his eyes, swallowing, and the emotionless carapace fell off him in one fell swoop.
“My wife died,” he said, voice barely above a whisper, and the raw emotion in his words might as well have been an actual wound. The recognition hit her so hard that she found herself grasping a chair and sitting down across from him.
(He was wearing a wedding ring, a slim gold band around his finger. She hadn’t even noticed.)
“And I don’t-” he continued, “-I don’t know what to do. I’ve lost people before, I thought I was prepared. Remembered how much it hurts. But this is different. It’s like...” He reached for the words falteringly, hesitating and unsure. “Like I lost a part of myself? And now... It’s as if I have a phantom limb... I keep turning and thinking she’ll be there, keep talking and expecting her to answer, keep imagining I’m hearing her voice, it’s like-”
“-like living with a ghost,” she cut in, and the acknowledgement of shared grief made him look at her properly for the first time.
“I was going to say ‘going insane’, but living with a ghost is probably nearer the truth. I didn’t realise-” He stopped, and she swallowed, trying to pull her self together.
“Andrew died two years ago,” she said, still feeling as if the words couldn’t possibly be true. As if it was all some sort of bad dream and she’d wake up and he’d be there just like he should. Like he’d always been.
“He had a heart attack. He was... seventy. Collapsed one day, out of the blue. The paramedics managed to revive him, but only for a moment. I held his hand. And then he was gone. We were going to travel, enjoy our twilight years-”
She couldn’t continue, eyes blurring, when a cool hand gently laid itself on-top of hers. He didn’t say anything, but she knew he understood. (Everyone expected her to ‘get better’, but how could she? They didn't know what he'd meant.)
After a moment she managed to speak again.
“I know I was lucky. We had almost forty years together. And I have wonderful children and a granddaughter who’s a constant delight, but still-”
She bit back on the bitterness, although she felt sure he knew. Somehow she felt life had owed her more, felt that surely this couldn’t be it. Grow old, fade away... Was that all there was left?
Looking at him she saw her pain mirrored, yet realised she knew nothing about him anymore. And she wanted to.
“Your wife... What was she like?”
He took a sharp breath, as if the question itself was painful, and she tried to smooth the query with an addition.
“I think I saw her once. In Venice? You were still ginger and wearing this extraordinary red coat...”
Her voice faded as he shook his head.
“Ah no. That was Roda. We were... lovers, and she was one of my closest friends. But she was never going to break my hearts, or vice versa. No, I met Saba much later - after the war, after I travelled, after... Jack dragged me along to a costume ball. I was Austin Powers in a fabulously shiny purple suit - not that anyone had ever heard of him, it was Year 5 billion and something, but that’s beside the point - and she was... a perfect match. Not just her gown, which was the identical shade of purple, but we had the exact same green eyes, and her fur was as black as my hair...”
At this point she was jolted out of the description, interrupting the flow of the reminiscences:
“Fur?”
He titled his head, puzzled.
“Sorry, didn’t I say? She was a cat.”
For the longest moment she could only stare, but he didn’t notice as he was reaching into his coat pocket, bringing out some sort of mobile device. Top of her mind was ‘I can’t believe you’d try to be funny now of all times’, except then he held the phone out to her.
“Jack took this picture of us that night.”
And there was the younger counterpart of the man at the other side of her table, grinning somewhat rakishly and clearly posing, his arm tentatively around a human-sized and human-proportioned cat in a gorgeous purple ball gown...
“We grew old together,” he continued, voice soft. “Except she died, and I... didn’t. And she made me promise not to do anything stupid, but I don’t know how to live without her. I was never lonely before, not for three hundred years of living alone on my planet, but now there’s nothing but emptiness.”
They sat in silence for a moment, and Allison tried to imagine life without anyone at all - no children or grandchildren, no siblings, no nieces and nephews, nobody to interfere and drag her back into life... She shivered and caught his eyes.
“Does it get better?”
“I don’t know. It must, right?”
A beat, then something stole into his eyes. Something new, yet something she recognised. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on... He had lifted his head, studying her with sudden intensity.
“Come with me.”
“What do you mean? Whereto?” she asked, taken aback.
“Anywhere. Everywhere.” Leaning forward, his face seemed to light up, a brightness in his eyes that seemed oddly familiar. “I always wanted to show you the stars, but never did. Come now.”
“But... I’m old,” she replied, unsure, even as she could feel a tiny little spark light up somewhere deep down, as something that had been purged so many, many years ago stirred for the first time in decades.
“How old are you?” he asked, as if he’d only just noticed that she wasn't twenty.
“Fifty-nine,” she replied, and he chuckled.
“I’m 1487, so quite frankly that doesn’t even register. Wasn’t Adelaide fifty-nine when she went to Mars?”
“Adelaide was fit,” Allison retorted. Not that she was exactly overweight, but there was a difference between being ‘not fat’ and ‘athletic as an astronaut’.
He shook his head, somewhat overbearing.
“Adelaide went to Mars in a tiny tin can held together with sticky-backed-plastic.” Allison opened her mouth, but he forestalled her. “And I am very impressed with all the work that went into it. However, I have the most sophisticated spaceship in the universe. You could come even if you were in a bath chair.”
Stupid, mad hope was building, but she had lived too long to attach herself to it.
“But even so - I’ll only get older. And I won’t regenerate, I’ll just... deteriorate.”
A small smile appeared on his face - it was but a shadow of his old superiority, but it was unmistakable, and something caught in her throat at the sight.
“Oh I can fix that. You could travel with me forever, and still be back in five minutes, looking not a day older”
The tiny little spark was growing, golden light somehow coalescing into solid reality.
She could go. She could grasp life and run away... It was crazy and wonderful and impossible, and all the issues and difficulties she’d had when younger seemed trivial. Besides he wasn’t young either - not unsure or worried or cautious. He knew who he was, and was comfortable in his own skin... And he was hurting, just like she.
With astonishment she realised that something she had thought long, long dead was turning out to have merely laid dormant, and she felt like she hadn’t in years. Like she had a future.
“Yes,” she said - voice firm, heart beating, almost taking herself by surprise. “Yes, I’ll come with you.”
How could his face have changed completely, yet still light up in exactly the same way?
It took her but moments to turn the heating down and scribble a note (just in case). Then she grabbed a coat and her handbag (she loved her handbag, it had been a birthday present from Andrew when she’d turned fifty), put on some sensible shoes and nodded.
It had gone dark, but the sky was still a flurry of falling snow as they walked down her garden path. He had been silent since her acceptance, merely watching her with eyes so overwhelmed she couldn’t put it into words. But he stopped when they got to the strange plum tree that wasn’t a tree and turned to her, reaching up and gently cradling her cheek, and the touch made her shiver as forty year old memories came back to her and she remembered when she had seen the look before...
('I want to wreathe your head in stars and make the sun dance in your honour. I want to lay galaxies at your feet and stop time so we can never be parted. I want...')
Snowflakes were settling in his hair and on his shoulders - tiny motes swirling in the dark all around them, like dancing specks of light in the silvery moonshine.
“My beautiful Allie - you told me once, so many many years ago now, on a day very much like today, that the way love works is that if one of us falls, the other will catch them. I think that was half-right. I think that how it works is that maybe - maybe we catch each other?”
She nodded, too full of emotions to speak (they had lost love, they had found love - the ache of loss cut too deep to explain, yet the joy of rediscovery was so unprecedented that she had no idea what she was doing).
It was snowing, and she had found her golden boy once again.
Then he pushed the door open, and she knew that despite everything, she truly believed in magic.
Stepping through the door frame, she was faced with a circular room, the centre of which was a golden glass column. Around it was a gleaming white hexagonal console with myriad buttons and levers. The walls were white too, as was the floor. Hugging the walls were curved red sofas and white cabinets, cosy and comfortable, the juxtaposition of comfort and technology reminding her of his house. Looking down, she realised that she was standing on a red mat, and obligingly wiped her feet.
Taking a few steps into the spaceship itself (the dimensions were relative? There even doors, so there had to be far more space than what she could see - he’d probably tell her in great detail later) she noticed a metal... thing at the other side of the room. It looked oddly familiar and somehow it made her shiver. Despite the name being on the tip of her tongue, she couldn’t remember it, and she turned to Alex.
“Sorry, but - what’s that?”
He hesitated momentarily, the first real hesitation she’d seen.
“I told you I won a war... But it’s a long story. I’ll explain later, promise. But please don’t worry - it can’t harm you.”
Then, to the metal-thing:
“Harvey. You’re upsetting our visitor. Scram. I’ll introduce you later.”
Obligingly the thing disappeared through a doorway, and she wondered why she recognised it, before dismissing it from her mind. Wars, strange metal creatures - none of it mattered, that much she knew. Not anymore. Life was long and the past was the past. Goodness knew she hadn’t exactly covered herself in glory at every turn.
“To begin...” he said, flicking a switch, and suddenly the central column began moving, the golden light intensifying - and it was as if the brightness shone all the way into her, lighting old dreams, old hopes... You shouldn’t feel like a teenager when you were a grandmother, yet the excitement and joy that were welling up were unmistakably the same, except deepened by a lifetime’s worth of living. She knew the price of dreams, knew what it was like to see your life’s work and love vanish from your grasp; time itself snatching it out of your hands.
And to be given another chance, to be able to go back...
The lights dimmed, and Alex almost leapt to the doors, with a flourish pulling them open, and there - surrounding them - were her stars, the stars she had longed for her whole life. Endless and shining, like diamonds across a velvet cloth, and all for her. She could feel him take her hand, and smiled through tears, as in her mind she could hear music, bright and triumphant and joyful. She was, finally, reaching for the stars.
Fic index here if anyone wants to catch up, or just follow the tags. Also on AO3 and The Teaspoon.
Summary: Allison had always thought that university would be an adventure. But she'd not imagined that she'd end up dating Harold Saxon's son.
Setting: Winter 2066
Characters: Allison, Alex
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 3600 approx
Feedback: If you've read this far - please?
Dedication: To all my readers. ♥
Epilogue
Winter 2066
There was a plum tree in Allison’s garden. Snowflakes were gently settling on its branches, brightly white against the near-blackness of the bare branches, promising that soon the tree would be as snow-capped as the ground below. Yes, it was a perfectly ordinary tree, except it hadn’t been there two minutes previously.
She almost turned to call out, but two years had been long enough to make her catch herself in time. There would be no answer.
For long moments nothing happened. Snowflakes continued to fall, and the tree stood in the middle of her garden, immovable, as if it had grown roots. Maybe it had. Maybe she had zoned out for so long that a whole tree had grown... But the steely grey sky didn’t look as if it was giving birth to miracles today, and the whirling whiteness was indifferent to the world around it.
(She was used to that. Her world had ended twice within the past seven years, and yet life continued unaffected all around her. Season followed season, sun and rain and snow meaning nothing more than blissfully neutral topics for conversation. She could talk about the weather forever... Other things were impossible to explain or acknowledge.)
Her attention was caught by movement. As if to prove that the day was going out of its way to confound her, a square rectangle of golden light appeared in the dark trunk (like a door opening), and out of it stepped a dark-haired man, dressed in dark colours. He looked up at the falling snow and then turned to take in the garden and the tree he had emerged from, the confusion evident.
Eventually he set eyes on the house. Hesitating for a moment, he then appeared to shrug, before closing the tree-door and walking up the garden path towards Allison’s back door.
Somewhere in the back of her mind it occurred to her that maybe she ought to be afraid. But who-ever-it-was looked as lost as she... And Emily had believed so fiercely in tree elves when she was little.
Shortly afterwards there was a knock at the back door, and (without thinking) she went to open it.
The man looked to be about her own age, late fifties or thereabouts, and stray snowflakes were settling in his well cut, if somewhat unkempt, black hair. The hair at his temples were shot through with white, and his clothes, although obviously good quality, were unremarkable - dark and very ordinary.
The most startling feature overall were his eyes - vivid green, they were studying her with slowly dawning recognition.
“Allison?” the stranger asked softly, tilting his head just so, and Allison could feel her mind very, very slowly ticking over.
“Alex?” she asked eventually, and he blinked.
“No one’s called me that in... centuries. But yes, that used to be my name.”
A pause, as clearly neither knew what to say, then he spoke again.
“Can I come in?”
There didn’t seem to be any particular emotion behind the words, nor did his eyes look at her with that shaded pain she now recalled from previous meetings - despite the unusual colour, his eyes seemed oddly impassive.
Part of her wanted to just slam the door in his face, but another part decided that it would rather have answers. So she shrugged and said ‘OK’.
Cautiously he entered, looking around her kitchen with quiet curiosity - the photos and Emily’s paintings on the walls, the drawings attached to the fridge - and took a seat at the table when she motioned for him to do so.
She found she couldn’t sit, and instead leaned against a cabinet, just watching him. Eventually she spoke, unable to contain herself. She had been raging against fate for a long time - having an actual person to hold responsible was a luxury she didn’t think she’d ever have.
“Did you know? About Adelaide? About Mars? How it would end?”
The words nearly caught in her throat, the pain and the anger and the staggering loss still somehow fresh even though it had been more than six years.
His expression didn’t change. He might have been discussing the weather for all the emotion he displayed.
“That they all died? Of course. Why do you think she’s famous?”
“She's famous because she died?”
“She’s famous because they were the first. Because they inspired the whole world.”
“But they didn’t need to die! How could you know and never say? How could you know and let me pour my whole life into-” She stopped, too angry and too upset to continue.
And he was just sitting there. A stranger in her world, dark-clad and sombre, as if he’d never been her golden boy.
“You made history. You helped change the world. Adelaide’s endeavour lives forever, the cornerstone of all human exploration.”
She shook her head, wanting to shake him. Nice platitudes were all she'd had ever since that fateful November day. She needed more.
“It was my life’s work and she was my best friend. And she died...”
A slow nod. He was too quiet, too old (and considering how old she felt that was almost a joke) - not giving her anywhere to focus her anger. And she needed anger.
“That makes you very fortunate. And I know what you’re thinking, but I can’t change it. Never could, never will. It’s a fixed point in history. Adelaide’s fate as unchanging as the atoms in a diamond - and as bright.”
A small bitter smile, the first hint of real emotion she had seen.
“I’d swap, if I could. Try working on something for the best part of a lifetime, and then see it all destroyed in a moment. And no one, ever, any the wiser.”
At her inquiring look, he explained a little more.
“My Matrix. Worked on it for about fifty years, give or take. And then, when it was nearing completion, it... exploded. I’d miscalculated somewhere. Oh, and the explosion killed me, hence this face.”
She hugged herself, hoping he wasn’t expecting sympathy, because she didn’t have any left. But his words had reminded her of another question she'd never thought anyone would be able to answer.
“But what happened? On Mars, I mean. Why did they die? Was it... Was it something that could have been prevented? Was it- was it me?”
(Her secret fear. Her nightmare, that she had never dared share. Had she miscalculated somewhere? Had she forgotten something? Could she have done something else...)
He considered for a long moment.
“I don’t think so. You had hundreds, if not thousands, of people checking everything. Plus the last message was about water...” Another long pause, as he silently deliberated with himself.
“Maybe the natives - they were called Ice Warriors by the way - would know why. If it was something inherent to the planet, or a one-off threat...”
His voice trailed off, and after a moment she realised he wasn’t going to pick up the thread again. It was strange... He’d put her mind to rest, if not offered an apology - yet he seemed completely detached. His answers were sufficient, yet nothing more, seemingly given more out of politeness than anything else. Like she could have been anyone. But why come here, if not to speak with her about Mars?
Shifting uncomfortably, she cast about for another subject. The anger was gone again, buried beneath loss, and she didn’t have the energy to fuel it.
“So... what have you been doing? If your Matrix didn’t work out?”
Resting his chin on folded hands he frowned lightly, as if casting his mind back was not easy - like throwing a line far back and reeling in old, old memories. (How old was he? The last time she'd seen him he'd almost been a child...)
“What have I done? Mostly trying to rediscover old Time Lord science; how to manipulate the world... Controlling gravity, playing around with the space-time continuum in up to eleven dimensions, that kinda thing. Built an empire. Oh and before that I won a war.”
His voice was reflective, thoughtful. He might have been discussing the finer points of bread making.
“A proper big war, for the whole of the universe. I... rather enjoyed that, although I’m glad it’s not a regular thing. It’s all in the planning, you see, accounting for unknown unknowns... Father was pleased of course, but it took the Doctor a good few decades before he’d talk to me again. Not that I was around much afterwards - I discovered a way to travel between dimensions, so I did a bit of that for a while. But there’s no place like home...”
Listening, she became increasingly uneasy. It wasn’t what he was telling her, but how he said it. A sort of quiet emptiness behind the words, as if he was reciting an old story, or discussing someone else’s life. He’d been a good liar, and one who’d learned to shield his emotions from her, but there was no shield here, no lies. Just a detachment more than bordering on the deeply unnerving. It left only one question.
“Why are you here?”
He lifted his eyes and studied her blankly. Beautiful green eyes, without the tiniest spark of... anything at all.
“My TARDIS brought me here. That’s my spaceship. I don’t know why it chose here and now and you.”
He hadn’t come. He’d been brought. (The tree was a spaceship? The camouflage was incredible. Although that was a topic for another time.) But she could tell that he was actively avoiding her question. She asked again, with more force.
“Why are you here? What happened?”
He seemed frozen, then abruptly he lowered his eyes, swallowing, and the emotionless carapace fell off him in one fell swoop.
“My wife died,” he said, voice barely above a whisper, and the raw emotion in his words might as well have been an actual wound. The recognition hit her so hard that she found herself grasping a chair and sitting down across from him.
(He was wearing a wedding ring, a slim gold band around his finger. She hadn’t even noticed.)
“And I don’t-” he continued, “-I don’t know what to do. I’ve lost people before, I thought I was prepared. Remembered how much it hurts. But this is different. It’s like...” He reached for the words falteringly, hesitating and unsure. “Like I lost a part of myself? And now... It’s as if I have a phantom limb... I keep turning and thinking she’ll be there, keep talking and expecting her to answer, keep imagining I’m hearing her voice, it’s like-”
“-like living with a ghost,” she cut in, and the acknowledgement of shared grief made him look at her properly for the first time.
“I was going to say ‘going insane’, but living with a ghost is probably nearer the truth. I didn’t realise-” He stopped, and she swallowed, trying to pull her self together.
“Andrew died two years ago,” she said, still feeling as if the words couldn’t possibly be true. As if it was all some sort of bad dream and she’d wake up and he’d be there just like he should. Like he’d always been.
“He had a heart attack. He was... seventy. Collapsed one day, out of the blue. The paramedics managed to revive him, but only for a moment. I held his hand. And then he was gone. We were going to travel, enjoy our twilight years-”
She couldn’t continue, eyes blurring, when a cool hand gently laid itself on-top of hers. He didn’t say anything, but she knew he understood. (Everyone expected her to ‘get better’, but how could she? They didn't know what he'd meant.)
After a moment she managed to speak again.
“I know I was lucky. We had almost forty years together. And I have wonderful children and a granddaughter who’s a constant delight, but still-”
She bit back on the bitterness, although she felt sure he knew. Somehow she felt life had owed her more, felt that surely this couldn’t be it. Grow old, fade away... Was that all there was left?
Looking at him she saw her pain mirrored, yet realised she knew nothing about him anymore. And she wanted to.
“Your wife... What was she like?”
He took a sharp breath, as if the question itself was painful, and she tried to smooth the query with an addition.
“I think I saw her once. In Venice? You were still ginger and wearing this extraordinary red coat...”
Her voice faded as he shook his head.
“Ah no. That was Roda. We were... lovers, and she was one of my closest friends. But she was never going to break my hearts, or vice versa. No, I met Saba much later - after the war, after I travelled, after... Jack dragged me along to a costume ball. I was Austin Powers in a fabulously shiny purple suit - not that anyone had ever heard of him, it was Year 5 billion and something, but that’s beside the point - and she was... a perfect match. Not just her gown, which was the identical shade of purple, but we had the exact same green eyes, and her fur was as black as my hair...”
At this point she was jolted out of the description, interrupting the flow of the reminiscences:
“Fur?”
He titled his head, puzzled.
“Sorry, didn’t I say? She was a cat.”
For the longest moment she could only stare, but he didn’t notice as he was reaching into his coat pocket, bringing out some sort of mobile device. Top of her mind was ‘I can’t believe you’d try to be funny now of all times’, except then he held the phone out to her.
“Jack took this picture of us that night.”
And there was the younger counterpart of the man at the other side of her table, grinning somewhat rakishly and clearly posing, his arm tentatively around a human-sized and human-proportioned cat in a gorgeous purple ball gown...
“We grew old together,” he continued, voice soft. “Except she died, and I... didn’t. And she made me promise not to do anything stupid, but I don’t know how to live without her. I was never lonely before, not for three hundred years of living alone on my planet, but now there’s nothing but emptiness.”
They sat in silence for a moment, and Allison tried to imagine life without anyone at all - no children or grandchildren, no siblings, no nieces and nephews, nobody to interfere and drag her back into life... She shivered and caught his eyes.
“Does it get better?”
“I don’t know. It must, right?”
A beat, then something stole into his eyes. Something new, yet something she recognised. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on... He had lifted his head, studying her with sudden intensity.
“Come with me.”
“What do you mean? Whereto?” she asked, taken aback.
“Anywhere. Everywhere.” Leaning forward, his face seemed to light up, a brightness in his eyes that seemed oddly familiar. “I always wanted to show you the stars, but never did. Come now.”
“But... I’m old,” she replied, unsure, even as she could feel a tiny little spark light up somewhere deep down, as something that had been purged so many, many years ago stirred for the first time in decades.
“How old are you?” he asked, as if he’d only just noticed that she wasn't twenty.
“Fifty-nine,” she replied, and he chuckled.
“I’m 1487, so quite frankly that doesn’t even register. Wasn’t Adelaide fifty-nine when she went to Mars?”
“Adelaide was fit,” Allison retorted. Not that she was exactly overweight, but there was a difference between being ‘not fat’ and ‘athletic as an astronaut’.
He shook his head, somewhat overbearing.
“Adelaide went to Mars in a tiny tin can held together with sticky-backed-plastic.” Allison opened her mouth, but he forestalled her. “And I am very impressed with all the work that went into it. However, I have the most sophisticated spaceship in the universe. You could come even if you were in a bath chair.”
Stupid, mad hope was building, but she had lived too long to attach herself to it.
“But even so - I’ll only get older. And I won’t regenerate, I’ll just... deteriorate.”
A small smile appeared on his face - it was but a shadow of his old superiority, but it was unmistakable, and something caught in her throat at the sight.
“Oh I can fix that. You could travel with me forever, and still be back in five minutes, looking not a day older”
The tiny little spark was growing, golden light somehow coalescing into solid reality.
She could go. She could grasp life and run away... It was crazy and wonderful and impossible, and all the issues and difficulties she’d had when younger seemed trivial. Besides he wasn’t young either - not unsure or worried or cautious. He knew who he was, and was comfortable in his own skin... And he was hurting, just like she.
With astonishment she realised that something she had thought long, long dead was turning out to have merely laid dormant, and she felt like she hadn’t in years. Like she had a future.
“Yes,” she said - voice firm, heart beating, almost taking herself by surprise. “Yes, I’ll come with you.”
How could his face have changed completely, yet still light up in exactly the same way?
It took her but moments to turn the heating down and scribble a note (just in case). Then she grabbed a coat and her handbag (she loved her handbag, it had been a birthday present from Andrew when she’d turned fifty), put on some sensible shoes and nodded.
It had gone dark, but the sky was still a flurry of falling snow as they walked down her garden path. He had been silent since her acceptance, merely watching her with eyes so overwhelmed she couldn’t put it into words. But he stopped when they got to the strange plum tree that wasn’t a tree and turned to her, reaching up and gently cradling her cheek, and the touch made her shiver as forty year old memories came back to her and she remembered when she had seen the look before...
('I want to wreathe your head in stars and make the sun dance in your honour. I want to lay galaxies at your feet and stop time so we can never be parted. I want...')
Snowflakes were settling in his hair and on his shoulders - tiny motes swirling in the dark all around them, like dancing specks of light in the silvery moonshine.
“My beautiful Allie - you told me once, so many many years ago now, on a day very much like today, that the way love works is that if one of us falls, the other will catch them. I think that was half-right. I think that how it works is that maybe - maybe we catch each other?”
She nodded, too full of emotions to speak (they had lost love, they had found love - the ache of loss cut too deep to explain, yet the joy of rediscovery was so unprecedented that she had no idea what she was doing).
It was snowing, and she had found her golden boy once again.
Then he pushed the door open, and she knew that despite everything, she truly believed in magic.
Stepping through the door frame, she was faced with a circular room, the centre of which was a golden glass column. Around it was a gleaming white hexagonal console with myriad buttons and levers. The walls were white too, as was the floor. Hugging the walls were curved red sofas and white cabinets, cosy and comfortable, the juxtaposition of comfort and technology reminding her of his house. Looking down, she realised that she was standing on a red mat, and obligingly wiped her feet.
Taking a few steps into the spaceship itself (the dimensions were relative? There even doors, so there had to be far more space than what she could see - he’d probably tell her in great detail later) she noticed a metal... thing at the other side of the room. It looked oddly familiar and somehow it made her shiver. Despite the name being on the tip of her tongue, she couldn’t remember it, and she turned to Alex.
“Sorry, but - what’s that?”
He hesitated momentarily, the first real hesitation she’d seen.
“I told you I won a war... But it’s a long story. I’ll explain later, promise. But please don’t worry - it can’t harm you.”
Then, to the metal-thing:
“Harvey. You’re upsetting our visitor. Scram. I’ll introduce you later.”
Obligingly the thing disappeared through a doorway, and she wondered why she recognised it, before dismissing it from her mind. Wars, strange metal creatures - none of it mattered, that much she knew. Not anymore. Life was long and the past was the past. Goodness knew she hadn’t exactly covered herself in glory at every turn.
“To begin...” he said, flicking a switch, and suddenly the central column began moving, the golden light intensifying - and it was as if the brightness shone all the way into her, lighting old dreams, old hopes... You shouldn’t feel like a teenager when you were a grandmother, yet the excitement and joy that were welling up were unmistakably the same, except deepened by a lifetime’s worth of living. She knew the price of dreams, knew what it was like to see your life’s work and love vanish from your grasp; time itself snatching it out of your hands.
And to be given another chance, to be able to go back...
The lights dimmed, and Alex almost leapt to the doors, with a flourish pulling them open, and there - surrounding them - were her stars, the stars she had longed for her whole life. Endless and shining, like diamonds across a velvet cloth, and all for her. She could feel him take her hand, and smiled through tears, as in her mind she could hear music, bright and triumphant and joyful. She was, finally, reaching for the stars.