Fic [Doctor Who]: The Train
Title: The Train
Rating: PG, for existential angst and general weirdness
Characters/Pairing: hint of Ten/Rose, canonical Nine/Rose, Bad Wolf
Prompt: by takethewords for the then_theres_us Ficathon. Actual prompt is in the notes under the cut.
Summary: At Canary Wharf, Rose fell, and Pete didn't catch her. Rose's travels in the Void as she unravels and something else comes to be. Vague spoilers for "Parting of the Ways".
The train is empty.
The woman who was Rose Tyler slumps against the corridor partition, staring blankly and endlessly through the window into the bare compartment beyond. It occurs to her, vaguely, that her hands hurt. She knows without looking that one of them is bleeding from banging on the doors, on the windows, and the other is streaked red to the elbow from cradling it. Two of her fingers are probably broken, simple fracture of the metacarpal. Rose had no way of know that. She does.
She walks to the end of the car, absorbing it absently to keep from screaming. Seams in the floor-cracks, cracks in the wall! Cracks in the universe! Step on a crack, fall and break your neck!
Or your world.
Really the seams are almost invisible, the car sleek and white and silver, but so empty. It’s like ice and diamonds with something dark waiting just around the corner, ready to take her from herself. She could be in any future. She could be in every future, on this endless train where even the tracks make no sound.
Her footsteps on the cool metallic floor are almost indiscernible, fading off into nothing-and so loud she could tear her eardrums out to make them stop.
She opens the door at the end of the car and walks through, as she has walked through an endless succession of doors already.
Oh. This is the Underground, all grips and seats and sliding doors and Mind the Gap! It may be much cleaner than that last subway, which she thought might have been New York in the nineteen-eighties, but it will never be right. The map on the wall seems to writhe, all of London’s many routes multiplying and twisting and never, never ending. Just like this bloody train. She gives it another look and dismisses it: Rose’s home around the edges, but brittle and empty underneath.
Wait. She struggles for the memory: who is Rose?
She opens another door and walks through, mechanically, because she knows she will never reach the end. None of this is real; it has all happened before. It will go on happening, again and again. It will never happen.
This, she thinks, is the essence of the Void: all things happening at once and all places converging. Naturally they cannot. Thus everything proves nothing.
She pauses. Odd; her hair has turned gray and she feels rather, well, male. It occurs to her that she might once have known someone who could tell her why that is, how it can be that she is only an echo as she experiences every possibility there ever was for her (or him or it), a person who might or might not have been born in 1987 and lived for however long, or not at all.
She already knows. The only way to experience nothing is to know everything that it is possible and impossible to know, including that what you know means nothing. It happens that this is also what going mad feels like: all your possibilities writing you out of existence.
She shuts the door behind her and turns about: the Orient Express or something like it, all first-class cushions and fine furniture, a hungry maw of a dining car. She is being swallowed; it hurts to make herself run for the next door. By it, a placard, so long before route maps: London via Prague, Paris, Stockholm, Rome, Barcelona, and on and on. End of line. London, that rings a bell, and so does Barcelona, a bell being rung in a shuttered church in a foreign city that never was, at the end of the line.
That, of course, is the great anti-cosmic joke: nothing has no end and no beginning. This train has never stopped, and it never will.
She considers lying down and waiting to die, but she may as well walk on, because she knows neither death nor life can come here. On the other hand, what of her is left to go on?
There is only a distant concept of someone as the door opens. A shadow passes through and falls from the end of the train.
No one, no sound, no train, no light, no dark, no time left.
*
It could have been an instant too small to measure; it could have been the distance in space-time from one big bang to the next. In fact, it was neither of these.
“I can see all of time and space. The sun and the moon. The day and the night.”
The wonderfully interesting thing about the Void, the Bad Wolf thinks with the bit of herself that thinks, is that it is a logical extreme. Nothing is a theoretical construct, just like everything. In the end, one sort of infinity collides with the other. You are whatever, whenever, and wherever you want to be.
“Why do they hurt?”
It is already a paradox, and it will carry on being one as she plants the last seeds of Bad Wolf Bay and Shan Shen, the Pete Tyler who survived and the werewolf who devoured the queen, the world that will preserve her from the Void that made her.
“Come here. You need a Doctor.”
In that kiss, the Bad Wolf ends. But in truth, she simply boards a train, and waits.
*
Notes:
The prompt was: "Rose traveling through the Void", and the following picture.
This prompt also inspired another story, "End of Line".
Rating: PG, for existential angst and general weirdness
Characters/Pairing: hint of Ten/Rose, canonical Nine/Rose, Bad Wolf
Prompt: by takethewords for the then_theres_us Ficathon. Actual prompt is in the notes under the cut.
Summary: At Canary Wharf, Rose fell, and Pete didn't catch her. Rose's travels in the Void as she unravels and something else comes to be. Vague spoilers for "Parting of the Ways".
The train is empty.
The woman who was Rose Tyler slumps against the corridor partition, staring blankly and endlessly through the window into the bare compartment beyond. It occurs to her, vaguely, that her hands hurt. She knows without looking that one of them is bleeding from banging on the doors, on the windows, and the other is streaked red to the elbow from cradling it. Two of her fingers are probably broken, simple fracture of the metacarpal. Rose had no way of know that. She does.
She walks to the end of the car, absorbing it absently to keep from screaming. Seams in the floor-cracks, cracks in the wall! Cracks in the universe! Step on a crack, fall and break your neck!
Or your world.
Really the seams are almost invisible, the car sleek and white and silver, but so empty. It’s like ice and diamonds with something dark waiting just around the corner, ready to take her from herself. She could be in any future. She could be in every future, on this endless train where even the tracks make no sound.
Her footsteps on the cool metallic floor are almost indiscernible, fading off into nothing-and so loud she could tear her eardrums out to make them stop.
She opens the door at the end of the car and walks through, as she has walked through an endless succession of doors already.
Oh. This is the Underground, all grips and seats and sliding doors and Mind the Gap! It may be much cleaner than that last subway, which she thought might have been New York in the nineteen-eighties, but it will never be right. The map on the wall seems to writhe, all of London’s many routes multiplying and twisting and never, never ending. Just like this bloody train. She gives it another look and dismisses it: Rose’s home around the edges, but brittle and empty underneath.
Wait. She struggles for the memory: who is Rose?
She opens another door and walks through, mechanically, because she knows she will never reach the end. None of this is real; it has all happened before. It will go on happening, again and again. It will never happen.
This, she thinks, is the essence of the Void: all things happening at once and all places converging. Naturally they cannot. Thus everything proves nothing.
She pauses. Odd; her hair has turned gray and she feels rather, well, male. It occurs to her that she might once have known someone who could tell her why that is, how it can be that she is only an echo as she experiences every possibility there ever was for her (or him or it), a person who might or might not have been born in 1987 and lived for however long, or not at all.
She already knows. The only way to experience nothing is to know everything that it is possible and impossible to know, including that what you know means nothing. It happens that this is also what going mad feels like: all your possibilities writing you out of existence.
She shuts the door behind her and turns about: the Orient Express or something like it, all first-class cushions and fine furniture, a hungry maw of a dining car. She is being swallowed; it hurts to make herself run for the next door. By it, a placard, so long before route maps: London via Prague, Paris, Stockholm, Rome, Barcelona, and on and on. End of line. London, that rings a bell, and so does Barcelona, a bell being rung in a shuttered church in a foreign city that never was, at the end of the line.
That, of course, is the great anti-cosmic joke: nothing has no end and no beginning. This train has never stopped, and it never will.
She considers lying down and waiting to die, but she may as well walk on, because she knows neither death nor life can come here. On the other hand, what of her is left to go on?
There is only a distant concept of someone as the door opens. A shadow passes through and falls from the end of the train.
No one, no sound, no train, no light, no dark, no time left.
*
It could have been an instant too small to measure; it could have been the distance in space-time from one big bang to the next. In fact, it was neither of these.
“I can see all of time and space. The sun and the moon. The day and the night.”
The wonderfully interesting thing about the Void, the Bad Wolf thinks with the bit of herself that thinks, is that it is a logical extreme. Nothing is a theoretical construct, just like everything. In the end, one sort of infinity collides with the other. You are whatever, whenever, and wherever you want to be.
“Why do they hurt?”
It is already a paradox, and it will carry on being one as she plants the last seeds of Bad Wolf Bay and Shan Shen, the Pete Tyler who survived and the werewolf who devoured the queen, the world that will preserve her from the Void that made her.
“Come here. You need a Doctor.”
In that kiss, the Bad Wolf ends. But in truth, she simply boards a train, and waits.
*
Notes:
The prompt was: "Rose traveling through the Void", and the following picture.
This prompt also inspired another story, "End of Line".