Short Fic: Duality

Jun 17, 2008 17:35

Title: Duality
Author: Kesshin
Characters: Nine, Rose
Rating: PG
Summary: This is how it starts- this is a beginning that no one got to see. He fades into the walls.
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Author's Notes: This is, once again, for northern_magic. I haven't been able to write more of Jupiter Juice, so I decided to post something, for chrissake. Apologies. I wrote this a while ago. Here, Rose. Have some angsty Nine. 
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It’s a sound wave that spreads across an infinity.

Three infinities, at least.

It’s done.

His head is sloshing full of a buzzing. A smell that is not, but could be, glass burning coats the back of his throat with a smoky sheen.

He chokes on life.

But not life, not yet. There is the death to go through, and a decision to make.

When to mourn?

Two ways to go.

He chooses the first, and so that is the last of his eighth life- spilled out into a shout.

It’s a sound wave that spreads across an infinity.

He will never go out with a whimper.

But he’ll start that way.

It starts.

Buzzing in his head would be ridiculous, now. There’s a thrum instead. It sinks into his bones and past his bones, and new bones. They knife into the flesh of his cheeks.

Eyes flash open with the shock of breathing, and those eyes are forever shocked blue.

He lets himself breathe. It’s a step in a direction, the right or wrong, he’s not sure which yet.

He could stop breathing.

He could keep breathing and just stay there, stay on his recently elongated back.

This is the first part of his ninth life-

He gets up.

Dust is brushed off and support beams examined, and the wardrobe room-

He’s taller. And cold, cold…

The lights in the ship are low. If he dresses dark, then he fades into the walls. With the jacket on, he’s nearly colorless.

This is what draws him out into light after weeks-

The kitchen makes tea. One cup, set in a spotlight, deceptively innocent as a mousetrap. ‘Don’t you want some tannins?’ his ship seems to say.

He’s already mourned. That is a life away.

But as the Doctor sips at his Earl Grey, he knows that the mourning isn’t over.

He drinks the whole cup dry and it’s good.

--

He isn’t hungry much, but when he is, he eats. Food turns to dying stars and scalded rocks in his mouth.

When he’s thirsty, he drinks- tea and more tea. He didn’t like it sweet before, but now he piles on the sugar, just to make sure he can taste the sweetness.

He is glad there is still sweetness.

He never sleeps.

Someone once said, ‘Man cannot live off bread alone.’

He is not a man, not in the specific sense, and he prefers meat to bread. This is the revised sentence that he pieces together in his head: ‘You,’ (he never refers to what he is in the specific sense, so it’s ‘you’), ‘cannot live off of tea and the decrepit remains of your kitchen stock alone.’

The part about tea and dwindling kitchen stocks is not the important part.

When he isn’t sleeping, which is always, another revised sentence seeps behind his eyes:

‘You cannot live alone.’

“Sod off,” he says, to no one.

--

He isn’t hungry or thirsty or sleepy. He wants to save something, very, very badly.

--

The people are teal.

He barely notices.

“You’re not killing it,” one of them says, tugging on the sleeve of the Doctor’s jacket.

A flinch.

“I’m making it better,” he explains through gritted teeth. His head is bent over a sprawling bouquet of wires and machinery, “This is what you get for messing with your sun. It’s hardly responsible behavior; your race should have been past this eons ago.”

“Sorry.”

“Good,” his voice is a blade, and bright, “You won’t do it again, then. I’ll just spark your ailing star right up-”

The teal man shifts awkwardly, “It was too bright for us. That was the trouble, you see? We needed to hurt it. If it had stayed that way, we’d have died.”

A flinch, but it doesn’t show.

“Will we die?”

He would say ‘no,’ normally.

Just ‘no.’

The Doctor says, “Never.”

He moves the sun to a different system and brings in a new one.

The people don’t thank him.

They would have, with metaphorical bells on, but he doesn’t stay long enough for them to get a word out.

He sleeps for two weeks.

This is another beginning to his ninth life:

He gets up.

Again.

And again.

And then.

--

“-you come blundering in, almost ruin the whole thing.”

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He knows that sometimes she can hear what he isn’t saying.

He’s glad there is still sweetness.

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doctor who, fanfiction

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