Chasing The Paradox - Epilogue: Each Other
On the final day of the biodome’s existence, with less than five hours before the temporal paradox holding it in place collapsed and left nothing but a barren moon, a man lay in the grass, pale and dark-haired. He wore a white t-shirt with an expensive suit; his eyes were closed, hands folded on his stomach.
After some time, a second man approached. Without even opening his eyes, the first remarked, ‘It all went fine.’
‘Good,’ the second said, sitting down in the grass beside him. The second man had hair a lighter shade of brown and a sharply pronounced nose; he wore a plain white shirt and trousers. ‘You got everything right when you were speaking to me? Like I told you?’
‘Time hasn’t shattered, has it?’ the first man asked. ‘Besides, even if I got it wrong, you’ll simply remember it differently, meaning you told it to me differently, meaning I actually didn’t get it wrong at all, because-’
‘Yes, I know how paradoxes work,’ the second man said. In answer, his companion opened his eyes, a small smile curving his lips, and reached up to take the other’s shoulder and pull him down to lie in the grass.
They lay there together for a while, in the warm glow of the distant sun, watching the gas giant sail overhead. ‘Did we have to do this as soon as I regenerated?’ the darker-haired man asked. ‘My head hurts.’
‘You said you felt fine,’ said the other, to which the only answer was a shrug. ‘And besides, yes, we did need to do this as soon as you regenerated, with the way you go through bodies-’
‘You can’t talk either.’
‘With the way we both go through bodies, for all I know, if we’d left it any longer you’d have been eaten by something with several hundred teeth and a terrible sense of timing, and that would have been about the end of it for temporal causality.’
‘Which went out the window a while ago,’ the darker-haired man pointed out.
‘Centuries ago,’ the other agreed. ‘But it’s held together so far, and we both have a vested interest in not tearing our timelines to shreds.’
‘It was a good idea to come as soon as we could, I suppose.’ The Time Lord tucked one arm behind his head, frowning up at the dark sky above them. ‘Can you feel that?’
‘What?’
‘The protection’s starting to falter. Whole place’s just beginning to come apart. Just at the edges.’
The lighter haired man closed his eyes for a moment. ‘I feel it,’ he said. ‘Still. Good couple of hours before it becomes temporally unstable.’
‘Does this mean we’re back to being friends again?’ asked the other.
‘We haven’t been fighting since halfway through that assassination, so I’d assumed so. It was a bit of a petty argument, anyway.’
The darker-haired man laughed softly. ‘For us, yes,’ he said, then pushed himself up on one elbow and kissed the other man on the lips before settling back into the grass. ‘Don’t let me fall asleep.’
‘Yes, because I was planning on letting you doze off and wake up on a barren moon with no oxygen,’ the other deadpanned.
They lay together in the grass, talking and sometimes laughing, their bodies just touching at the shoulders and hips and occasionally brushing more closely, more deliberately. Time passed in that quiet place, the distant star moving through the heavens, the gas giant taking up less and less of the sky, viewed through the transparent biodome.
Five hours later, the dome flickered and was gone, leaving nothing but the empty, airless surface of an unimportant moon. By the time that happened, though, the Time Lords had already gone to separate destinations in their separate TARDISes - though they both knew that no matter what happened, no matter what circumstances drove them apart or flung them back together, no matter how they were hurt or what they lost, they’d always end up together again, eventually. And on the best days, that made everything worthwhile.
THE END