(fic) an old box on a cloud
Title: An Old Box on A Cloud
Word Count: 765
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Tardis(/11), River
Author's Note: The Christmas special really broke me, okay? My heart kept clenching up whenever they showed my darling bb - the Tardis just looks so sad and unhappy. So this is mostly just Tardis emotional-vomit. I am in mourning for my playful, golden girl.
It wasn’t immediate, you know. These kinds of changes take time.
It begins with a corridor that has been empty too long. Where the ghosts of happy feet chasing and running and dancing echo so hauntingly that the pain is too much to bear… And that is how a corridor disappears. With all its doors and mysteries and memories. It disappears with a blink of an eye. (And isn’t the imagery just too much?)
The first time, she was surprised. She reached out and sobbed as well she could.
Her lights flickered and danced, she shifted coordinates, she creaked and sighed. But he didn’t hear, he didn’t see.
And a corridor disappeared right from inside her.
One by one, she retreated into herself. A room here, a light there. It took too much energy to be so large, when there was nothing stretching her out. There are no laughing children in her bowels - darting into new rooms, daring her to surprise them, delighting in her imagination, in the way she anticipated their every whim. She dims without the laughter and love to keep her bright. She becomes a reflection of him (she is always a reflection of him, a mirror of his heart) - she grows harder and sterile and dark. She is blue where they were all once glowing.
There is no one to play; all the toys get stripped away.
She resents him as his heart grows colder and he gets quieter and there is no movement anymore. She screams at him to move! To dream! To run about once more. She longs to rip the book from his hands that he reads day and night, another woman’s glasses perched on his nose. She resents the changes inside of her, she resists each bulb dimming, each disappearance, each shrinking space… but has no energy or power to stop the change.
One room she covets. One room she keeps locked to him. Even when he pounds and kicks at it, even when he sobs against the frame, even when he presses his cheek against the handle and whispers a name.
He sleeps slumped up against the door.
It is her sacred space, now. She keeps it from him. She is possessive of only this one thing. It is untouched. There is a pair of dirty socks in the corner, an uncapped lipstick tube on the table, the bed is still rumpled as though they just crawled out of it moments ago… there’s a smell that lingers in the air. It is her space alone and she protects it from his prying eyes and his questioning hands.
There, in that space, where they three made a precious girl with shining eyes who is all smiles and wild hair and deep feelings. It is her space, too. It belongs to only the four of them and he is not allowed in.
He has his book. And his mourning. And his bitterness. And his solitude.
She has this room. She holds onto it smugly and keeps it hidden from his darkening influence.
Her paint peels as she sits atop a cloud, her insides shrinking and darkening around his mourning, closing in on his sullen soul, reading the same book over and over.
In the beginning, she would move in the night without his permission. She would go to the girl with the shining smile that is her daughter and his lover. This woman looks upon her peeling paint and gasps. This woman could make the glow come back.
But they only just sit and stare at each other as he sleeps the night away. One behind her bars, with a soft smile and a soft tear trickling. The other with chipped, peeling paint and a single, blinking light. These two wives, they regard each other and they know. They smile to each other as best they can. They reach to each other as best they can. A mother and a daughter. Two wives to a mad man trapped in a box that is closing in around him.
And in the morning, he scolds her and tirades. In the morning, he takes them back to their cloud. And two wives grow harder. And he removes himself from everything but pain.
She reflects it back to him in blues and greys and stark lines. And mourns with him, her old self. The self that grew in a child’s garden and became a playground. Here on a cloud with a bitter old man, she laments the loss of that childish magic.
She is just an old, battered box on a cloud.
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