dw - constants
Title: Constants
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,394
Beta: The ever-lovely and tremendously supportive nylana ♥
Characters: TenII/Rose
Summary: Nine hundred years of space and time, contained inside the leaking faucet of the human mind. The Doctor struggles with the nature of forgetting.
He wishes for a way to explain that for a Time Lord, memory and experience are the only constants; how everything else is just variables in the equation. The complete disconnect between the body and the soul. There is nothing sentimental about it at all. The shuttles fly, and there you go, a body.
Even with a back against a properly sheeted mattress and clad in pyjama bottoms, he still manages to be completely himself. Usually this would count as a victory; at this particular time of night, whether or not it’s a good thing is debatable at best.
This is no new issue, and one as inevitable as any real hurdle that comes with metacrisis. Or just two people who suddenly find themselves as flatmates and a good deal more, he supposes. There was the first grey hair, and the tantrum that lasted embarrassingly long, in retrospect. The second, sixteenth fight about laundry. Toothbrush etiquette, the toilet seat’s rightful position, why the cat ended up in the drainage gutter and short another life. It’s been years; they’ve survived worse.
But then it comes, the gradual slips of memory. Beyond grocery lists, bills, recycling days. First it’s the colour of the Miranda poppies, and then what’s Afrikaans for ‘kettle’. He looks up from flossing his teeth one morning and realizes he’s forgotten the names of half the stars in an entire quadrant of the Scarlet Junction.
Rose notices, like she does when it comes to a lot of things; and these days a lot of that concerns him. He stares at the ridges of white plaster on their ceiling. Imagines he’s a bird, flying above the snow-capped cliffs of the Ood-Sphere. Except he can’t feel the cold. “I’m scared,” he admits. “that I’m starting to forget my life.” Nine hundred years of time and space, contained inside the leaky faucet that is the human mind. Forgetting languages no one is around to speak shouldn’t hurt so much; nor the taste of nectar cocktails, the colour of a Parnassus sunrise. But surprisingly, it does. All of it.
“You’re you, Doctor” her arms wrap around his waist, her cheek between his shoulder blades. Her knees fit the backs of his and he can feel it beating; a heart that cannot last, that is yet so singularly important. “Just because you don’t remember a few things doesn’t mean you’ll become a different person for it.”
Intellectually, he knows it’s true, but he wishes for a way to explain that for a Time Lord, memory and experience are the only constants; how everything else is just variables in the equation. The complete disconnect between the body and the soul. There is nothing sentimental about it at all. The shuttles fly, and there you go, a body. It might come with a sudden talent for spoons, or an inclination towards garnishing one’s suit. If you were lucky, it was a handsome one. If not, better luck next time.
But to do so, he’d have to talk about Gallifrey and its hills, that ridiculous snow globe. Standing in the middle of a long-haired field, the wind gusting through silver foliage and for a moment, letting himself feel so small, so insignificant. There are some things he could never forget, even if he should want to.
He listens to her settling into a state that is all herself and in that way, all the more vulnerable. And he realizes he can see her life nearly as clearly as his own; she’s an infant who smiles as her father dies on the streets, only meters away. She’s nineteen, she dances in a Jywynmyr parade, she cradles her father in her arms until his heart stops. She falls, and returns to him as the woman who is now a little harder, a little warier of the truth. But she sleeps with him, which is supposed to be the ultimate expression of trust (and with him; five times last week, not including the incident in the backseat of her father’s company car), in this bed that is theirs and this duvet that is also theirs, in theory. By morning, it’s mostly hers.
It all must mean something.
One thing he’s realized about this new life with her is that much of his sulking privileges have been revoked. It might be that there’s a lot less room in their apartment than in the TARDIS, where they could’ve given each other the proximity the other needed to grapple their demons with. She has no real space to take a break from him, and he’s sorry for that. It could also be because it’s Jackie’s birthday, and she wants her mother to enjoy herself without a half-alien in expensive cufflinks moping by the punch bowl. Or maybe she’s just a lot more worried about him than he thought.
When she drags him by the lapels of his suit into the kitchen pantry, his first thought is that she’s had a little too much to drink. But then quickly realizes she’s shrugging off the strap of her dress amidst an audience of canned preserves for a very different reason.
He’s well acquainted with that scar over her right breast, like most parts of her body; has kissed it while they made love, and wondered about the story behind the small, crescent-shaped mark. She’s never said, and he’s respected her need for secrets, god knows he has his fair share. But now Rose brushes her hand over it lightly, like a reader over the words on the page. “This is from when I tried to save you, in a universe where you die,” she says quietly. “You had a different face and a ridiculously long scarf, but I knew you.”
Humans; they adapt, they grow while staying the same. They begin so small and have the potential to become so much more that when they realize it, he can barely look into their light. “Whatever you forget and whatever you don’t,” she says, “Whoever you become; it doesn’t matter, ‘cause I’ll still love you. Just hold on to that, and we’ll be fine.”
They used to say God is in the details.
Because, hey - the Untempered Schism is all very vast and not a little frightening. He has it on good account that there have been crazier side effects that comes with staring through a tear in the space/time continuum. He could’ve gotten a percussive beat stuck in his head for all of eternity, for one. Or - maybe not, but in some cases - worse, he might’ve been inspired and gone on to do great things, by certain definitions.
Hijacking a time ship and taking apart all that space, piece by terrifying piece, can seem reasonable enough to a Time Lord who’s barely hit the century mark. It’s a weirdly plausible thing at that age, to be vastly intelligent yet so remarkably stupid at the same time. The fear itself is almost as intoxicating as the thought that if you tear through it like it needed mending anyways, you can discover the inner workings, see what makes it tick. And even if you don’t find God in it, one day it might make it all seem less frightening.
“Will you tell her stories?” Rose asks, dreamily. They lay in the grass of their handkerchief garden that floods in the winter and grows anew in the spring. She’s facing the north and he the south, eye level with her navel. Her hands fold over the rise in her dress. “About the TARDIS, and all the places we went?”
The ground is warm under their backs, and there’s that fear, even for this little thing that has not even come into being yet. He already knows that he loves her, more than anything in this universe; both of them, mother and child. He’s just afraid it won’t be enough to save them. He speaks around the tightening knot in his throat, “Do you think she’ll believe me?”
Rose shifts, and for a moment, she is wreathed by the sun (she creates herself). But she comes back down to Earth. To him. Frames his face with both her hands, “Of course,” her breath falling on his lips, “Always.”
The world begins like this - a man and a woman, in their garden, living their lives. The ground is warm between them and there still, that faith in her eyes. And since he’s looking into them, it must be in his as well.
In the back of his mind he can sense already his daughter’s Time, unfurling like a flower. He hopes for Rose’s smile, and maybe his wanderlust. He hopes for her forgiveness.
He takes her hand. “Then I’ll start with this.”
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,394
Beta: The ever-lovely and tremendously supportive nylana ♥
Characters: TenII/Rose
Summary: Nine hundred years of space and time, contained inside the leaking faucet of the human mind. The Doctor struggles with the nature of forgetting.
He wishes for a way to explain that for a Time Lord, memory and experience are the only constants; how everything else is just variables in the equation. The complete disconnect between the body and the soul. There is nothing sentimental about it at all. The shuttles fly, and there you go, a body.
Even with a back against a properly sheeted mattress and clad in pyjama bottoms, he still manages to be completely himself. Usually this would count as a victory; at this particular time of night, whether or not it’s a good thing is debatable at best.
This is no new issue, and one as inevitable as any real hurdle that comes with metacrisis. Or just two people who suddenly find themselves as flatmates and a good deal more, he supposes. There was the first grey hair, and the tantrum that lasted embarrassingly long, in retrospect. The second, sixteenth fight about laundry. Toothbrush etiquette, the toilet seat’s rightful position, why the cat ended up in the drainage gutter and short another life. It’s been years; they’ve survived worse.
But then it comes, the gradual slips of memory. Beyond grocery lists, bills, recycling days. First it’s the colour of the Miranda poppies, and then what’s Afrikaans for ‘kettle’. He looks up from flossing his teeth one morning and realizes he’s forgotten the names of half the stars in an entire quadrant of the Scarlet Junction.
Rose notices, like she does when it comes to a lot of things; and these days a lot of that concerns him. He stares at the ridges of white plaster on their ceiling. Imagines he’s a bird, flying above the snow-capped cliffs of the Ood-Sphere. Except he can’t feel the cold. “I’m scared,” he admits. “that I’m starting to forget my life.” Nine hundred years of time and space, contained inside the leaky faucet that is the human mind. Forgetting languages no one is around to speak shouldn’t hurt so much; nor the taste of nectar cocktails, the colour of a Parnassus sunrise. But surprisingly, it does. All of it.
“You’re you, Doctor” her arms wrap around his waist, her cheek between his shoulder blades. Her knees fit the backs of his and he can feel it beating; a heart that cannot last, that is yet so singularly important. “Just because you don’t remember a few things doesn’t mean you’ll become a different person for it.”
Intellectually, he knows it’s true, but he wishes for a way to explain that for a Time Lord, memory and experience are the only constants; how everything else is just variables in the equation. The complete disconnect between the body and the soul. There is nothing sentimental about it at all. The shuttles fly, and there you go, a body. It might come with a sudden talent for spoons, or an inclination towards garnishing one’s suit. If you were lucky, it was a handsome one. If not, better luck next time.
But to do so, he’d have to talk about Gallifrey and its hills, that ridiculous snow globe. Standing in the middle of a long-haired field, the wind gusting through silver foliage and for a moment, letting himself feel so small, so insignificant. There are some things he could never forget, even if he should want to.
He listens to her settling into a state that is all herself and in that way, all the more vulnerable. And he realizes he can see her life nearly as clearly as his own; she’s an infant who smiles as her father dies on the streets, only meters away. She’s nineteen, she dances in a Jywynmyr parade, she cradles her father in her arms until his heart stops. She falls, and returns to him as the woman who is now a little harder, a little warier of the truth. But she sleeps with him, which is supposed to be the ultimate expression of trust (and with him; five times last week, not including the incident in the backseat of her father’s company car), in this bed that is theirs and this duvet that is also theirs, in theory. By morning, it’s mostly hers.
It all must mean something.
One thing he’s realized about this new life with her is that much of his sulking privileges have been revoked. It might be that there’s a lot less room in their apartment than in the TARDIS, where they could’ve given each other the proximity the other needed to grapple their demons with. She has no real space to take a break from him, and he’s sorry for that. It could also be because it’s Jackie’s birthday, and she wants her mother to enjoy herself without a half-alien in expensive cufflinks moping by the punch bowl. Or maybe she’s just a lot more worried about him than he thought.
When she drags him by the lapels of his suit into the kitchen pantry, his first thought is that she’s had a little too much to drink. But then quickly realizes she’s shrugging off the strap of her dress amidst an audience of canned preserves for a very different reason.
He’s well acquainted with that scar over her right breast, like most parts of her body; has kissed it while they made love, and wondered about the story behind the small, crescent-shaped mark. She’s never said, and he’s respected her need for secrets, god knows he has his fair share. But now Rose brushes her hand over it lightly, like a reader over the words on the page. “This is from when I tried to save you, in a universe where you die,” she says quietly. “You had a different face and a ridiculously long scarf, but I knew you.”
Humans; they adapt, they grow while staying the same. They begin so small and have the potential to become so much more that when they realize it, he can barely look into their light. “Whatever you forget and whatever you don’t,” she says, “Whoever you become; it doesn’t matter, ‘cause I’ll still love you. Just hold on to that, and we’ll be fine.”
They used to say God is in the details.
Because, hey - the Untempered Schism is all very vast and not a little frightening. He has it on good account that there have been crazier side effects that comes with staring through a tear in the space/time continuum. He could’ve gotten a percussive beat stuck in his head for all of eternity, for one. Or - maybe not, but in some cases - worse, he might’ve been inspired and gone on to do great things, by certain definitions.
Hijacking a time ship and taking apart all that space, piece by terrifying piece, can seem reasonable enough to a Time Lord who’s barely hit the century mark. It’s a weirdly plausible thing at that age, to be vastly intelligent yet so remarkably stupid at the same time. The fear itself is almost as intoxicating as the thought that if you tear through it like it needed mending anyways, you can discover the inner workings, see what makes it tick. And even if you don’t find God in it, one day it might make it all seem less frightening.
“Will you tell her stories?” Rose asks, dreamily. They lay in the grass of their handkerchief garden that floods in the winter and grows anew in the spring. She’s facing the north and he the south, eye level with her navel. Her hands fold over the rise in her dress. “About the TARDIS, and all the places we went?”
The ground is warm under their backs, and there’s that fear, even for this little thing that has not even come into being yet. He already knows that he loves her, more than anything in this universe; both of them, mother and child. He’s just afraid it won’t be enough to save them. He speaks around the tightening knot in his throat, “Do you think she’ll believe me?”
Rose shifts, and for a moment, she is wreathed by the sun (she creates herself). But she comes back down to Earth. To him. Frames his face with both her hands, “Of course,” her breath falling on his lips, “Always.”
The world begins like this - a man and a woman, in their garden, living their lives. The ground is warm between them and there still, that faith in her eyes. And since he’s looking into them, it must be in his as well.
In the back of his mind he can sense already his daughter’s Time, unfurling like a flower. He hopes for Rose’s smile, and maybe his wanderlust. He hopes for her forgiveness.
He takes her hand. “Then I’ll start with this.”