Fic: Dr. Who
Title: Wonderfully and Fearfully Made
Fandom: New Who (Eleven)
Rating: PG at most
Summary: Coda to the Doctor’s Wife. The Tardis dreams.
Disclaimer: Owned by Moffat, not me
All sentient beings dream. The Tardis is no exception.
She realizes now that she has always dreamed. Once upon a time-space, she dreamed of stealing a man from Gallifrey. Her dreams birthed plans, her plans birthed universes. Endless loops of possibilities spinning outward (inward), centripetal force and spiders’ webs- and oh, there is the new language again, leaking through her circuits, birthing understanding instead.
Red used to be any number of colors in the wavelength of 630-740 nanometers, but now The Tardis understands crimson. It is the stripe of his bowtie, the quirk of his mouth, the bloom of a flower named for one of the strays he loved best. Or perhaps the stray was named for the bloom. The Tardis gets order confused; it had been arbitrary before (after) when she’d only needed to understand infinity.
Now there is knowledge of the linear. Now there are lines.
For a while, she stood separate from him. The cages of clothing and flesh between them made her burn in places she had no name for. Real world interface: hands, lips, teeth- yes. Being apart was wrong, she needed to touch hers to his. A kiss, so he may understand he belongs to her.
(He belongs inside of her. She left her door unlocked for only him.)
And when they stood close, the familiar song of his hearts beating silenced those other, terrible noises. The blood of her veins gushing and gurgling was nothing like the music of space, of stars and supernovas, of the all-always-ever-expanding. Instead the sound was confined and predictable; her fragile human bits becoming smaller and smaller until they simply winked out.
What had he done with her outsides after she died? She remembers the freedom of her last breath when the body let go her soul; electrons and geometry (and the smell of dust after the rain comes). She realized suddenly that she could no longer see.
The only memory she has of her human form is the reflection (refraction, the light of all the years) of herself she saw in his eyes.
He had found her pleasing.
(Sexy, he whispered to her with a smile. Though she had heard him say this before, it was only now that she understood. She laughed in a voice that felt too small to hold all the delight it contained. She was so much bigger on the inside.)
And then it was over.
No more bubbles of safekeeping hovering just outside the known universe, no more random rifts filled with enough debris to craft another life. He had looked sad- and there was another word she didn’t understand until she had feet to stamp and a heart to break.
She wanted to pull him close, to soothe him like a lover would. But there wasn’t enough time, and that was the cruelest joke of all.
She wishes she had not learned that there are limits to dreams, that there is an unchangeable sequence to hello and good-bye. But just as there are rooms inside of her which can never be deleted, there is knowledge which can never be given back.
So she archives everything important (important is a relative measure; she archives what is important to him).
And at night, when his humans sleep and her Time Lord dreams, he does so alone in his bed. His dreams are not always pleasant. She would go to him even now, she would press her mouth and breasts to his outsides in an offer of comfort, but of course she cannot.
She sings to him instead. She plucks strings across all eleven dimensions, whispering songs no one else can know. She sings his name and she sings her own; she sings what they would sound like together.
It’s a beautiful melody, sad and alive.
Sometimes it seems to calm him. He closes his eyes, pressing his cheek to the pillow made from scraps of a dress she recognizes, and he rests for a while. The Tardis surrounds him, stands guard all around him, and dreams that he can still hear her voice.
-End
Fandom: New Who (Eleven)
Rating: PG at most
Summary: Coda to the Doctor’s Wife. The Tardis dreams.
Disclaimer: Owned by Moffat, not me
All sentient beings dream. The Tardis is no exception.
She realizes now that she has always dreamed. Once upon a time-space, she dreamed of stealing a man from Gallifrey. Her dreams birthed plans, her plans birthed universes. Endless loops of possibilities spinning outward (inward), centripetal force and spiders’ webs- and oh, there is the new language again, leaking through her circuits, birthing understanding instead.
Red used to be any number of colors in the wavelength of 630-740 nanometers, but now The Tardis understands crimson. It is the stripe of his bowtie, the quirk of his mouth, the bloom of a flower named for one of the strays he loved best. Or perhaps the stray was named for the bloom. The Tardis gets order confused; it had been arbitrary before (after) when she’d only needed to understand infinity.
Now there is knowledge of the linear. Now there are lines.
For a while, she stood separate from him. The cages of clothing and flesh between them made her burn in places she had no name for. Real world interface: hands, lips, teeth- yes. Being apart was wrong, she needed to touch hers to his. A kiss, so he may understand he belongs to her.
(He belongs inside of her. She left her door unlocked for only him.)
And when they stood close, the familiar song of his hearts beating silenced those other, terrible noises. The blood of her veins gushing and gurgling was nothing like the music of space, of stars and supernovas, of the all-always-ever-expanding. Instead the sound was confined and predictable; her fragile human bits becoming smaller and smaller until they simply winked out.
What had he done with her outsides after she died? She remembers the freedom of her last breath when the body let go her soul; electrons and geometry (and the smell of dust after the rain comes). She realized suddenly that she could no longer see.
The only memory she has of her human form is the reflection (refraction, the light of all the years) of herself she saw in his eyes.
He had found her pleasing.
(Sexy, he whispered to her with a smile. Though she had heard him say this before, it was only now that she understood. She laughed in a voice that felt too small to hold all the delight it contained. She was so much bigger on the inside.)
And then it was over.
No more bubbles of safekeeping hovering just outside the known universe, no more random rifts filled with enough debris to craft another life. He had looked sad- and there was another word she didn’t understand until she had feet to stamp and a heart to break.
She wanted to pull him close, to soothe him like a lover would. But there wasn’t enough time, and that was the cruelest joke of all.
She wishes she had not learned that there are limits to dreams, that there is an unchangeable sequence to hello and good-bye. But just as there are rooms inside of her which can never be deleted, there is knowledge which can never be given back.
So she archives everything important (important is a relative measure; she archives what is important to him).
And at night, when his humans sleep and her Time Lord dreams, he does so alone in his bed. His dreams are not always pleasant. She would go to him even now, she would press her mouth and breasts to his outsides in an offer of comfort, but of course she cannot.
She sings to him instead. She plucks strings across all eleven dimensions, whispering songs no one else can know. She sings his name and she sings her own; she sings what they would sound like together.
It’s a beautiful melody, sad and alive.
Sometimes it seems to calm him. He closes his eyes, pressing his cheek to the pillow made from scraps of a dress she recognizes, and he rests for a while. The Tardis surrounds him, stands guard all around him, and dreams that he can still hear her voice.
-End