Fic: Kalendae. (4/4, Doctor/Rose, AU, PG)
Kalendae. Doctor/Rose, TARDIS, Donna, Amy, everyone, PG-ish, still very AU. This is the end.
(Previous parts: one, two, three, and at A03 here)
"Back to earth," says Donna. They are sitting on two loungers by an enormous zero-gravity pool complex, owned by Lunar Suites Incorporated. It's almost eleven-thirty in the morning. Donna's informed him- strictly speaking, quite accurately- that it's noon somewhere. He agrees, says that her grasp of space-time is rapidly improving, and she tells him to stop thinking for the love of God. She hands him a daiquiri the size of a punch bowl, and puts on her sunglasses. "I mean it. I can hear those creaky wheels turning in your head." He takes a sip of his drink. It tastes like nuclear fruit and bottled sunshine and illegal Lunorian hyper-spirits.
They're not autopilot files. He checked and re-checked them, tried to figure out how they were recorded, when, why. They are not the same programs that were lost long before. They're brand-new video captures, data feeds on voice and movement, preserved smiles and anxious stares, frozen laughs, mimicked posture. A miniature catalogue of Rose Tyler in the wild. He didn't make them. He doesn't know who did. He plays them back a few times, thinking at first that it will help. It doesn't. It only makes it worse, the tinned phrases, things she said to him before, animated and present and solid and real, now played back through the speakers while her edges flicker in his vision. They are the same every time, and that's what makes them unbearable. She always surprised him, even when he felt that he could read her mind, even when he knew her so well he could sense what muscle would twitch in her thigh as she slept. Living people are not puzzle boxes, but roads unfolding across meadows, trails that must be followed. Fresh footprints, broken twigs, gullies to cross over, sudden expanses of sky overhead. All replete with meaning. But she's gone and left him behind in unmarked woods, without a sign. He wanders proverbially as a cloud.
"Back to earth," says Donna. They are sitting on two loungers by an enormous zero-gravity pool complex, owned by Lunar Suites Incorporated. It's almost eleven-thirty in the morning. Donna's informed him- strictly speaking, quite accurately- that it's noon somewhere. He agrees, says that her grasp of space-time is rapidly improving, and she tells him to stop thinking for the love of God. She hands him a daiquiri the size of a punch bowl, and puts on her sunglasses. "I mean it. I can hear those creaky wheels turning in your head." He takes a sip of his drink. It tastes like nuclear fruit and bottled sunshine and illegal Lunorian hyper-spirits. It makes his knees hot and wobbly and his stomach cold. Heightened tolerance, ha ha. Perhaps his biology teachers were joking, but he's got no-one to ask. Donna looks at him over the tops of her lenses. "Better?" He thinks for a minute while frozen chunks of pineapple settle.
"Better," he admits.
He doesn't often worry about time passing. Except for when it's passing too quickly or too slowly, outliers, marks of Wrong. Normal time passing isn't his concern. It's the business of the universe. And for one thing, worrying about that would be wildly ironic. For another, it would be unspeakably sad. If time was indeed linear- which it isn't- then it would be a long line entirely covered in asterisks, urgent notations for lost moments, things left unclaimed and sentences left unfinished, absent friends. It would be a horrible thing to look at, the drawn-out circumstances of his life. There would be a great red line slashed through it, three-quarters of the way down. And at this end, he would be unbearably far from Susan. Unbearably far from his world. Thankfully, time is not a line or a calendar. It's a great big ball that rolls itself around in erratic loops. Everything is still close enough so as to be nearly touching.
"That makes no sense," says Donna. They are locked in a root cellar. They were put there by enormous sentient bees wearing hand-sewn pants. Something's clearly wrong in future Kansas. And why, exactly, is it always oversized Apoidea with them? Perhaps they need a comically large can of Raid for their next outing. Donna steps un-gently on his foot to regain his attention, and he manfully refrains from yelping. "How exactly is time a ball?"
"It's a metaphor," he says, and immediately wonders if that's incorrect. Or outdated. Time might be a dodecahedron, for all he knows anymore. He hasn't been reading the journals. "Time isn't a straightforward progression of one thing after another, unless you're stuck inside it. And half of that's perception, anyhow." She stares at him. "If you could move outside of time, you'd see that things happen simultaneously. Or over and over and over. And that the variables for one thing happening instead of another thing are incredibly complex. Really, it's a mess."
"Pompeii," says Donna. "How could we go to Pompeii, if it's already gone off. Because it's still happening. That's what you're saying."
"Yes, well done."
"Or Agatha Christie," she continues. "We didn't know why she disappeared exactly until we were there, carrying her into the TARDIS. But it was us all along."
"See?" He grins at her. "You're getting the hang of this. Told you, you'd have a head for temporal dynamics if you'd apply yourself." There's an enormous crashing noise against the ceiling above their heads, and a thin shower of dirt lands on top of their shoulders.
"Think you could have a head for getting out of cellars anytime soon?" Donna asks. He holds the sonic up, apologetically.
"No setting for wood."
"No, of course not," Donna sighs. "There's a setting that lets you change the aspect ratio at the cinema, and one for making steam in the dryer, but nothing for wood." She digs around in a pile of old hand tools and broken-up crates and comes up with a crowbar. "Lucky for you, I've got settings of my own," she says. "Stand back." They do break out of the cellar- Donna's nothing if not determined- and eventually the bees get around to telling them about their grand designs for the local human population. Which involve nonviolent labor organizing and advanced organic farming techniques. It's somewhat anticlimactic and also oddly touching.
"Oh," he says.
"WE DID NOT BZZ THINK BZZ YOU COULD BZZ UNDERSTAND US BZZZZ."
"I understand a lot of things," he tells them.
"Except wood," says Donna.
Donna's still shaking as he sits down across from her, turning her hands over in his own palm and curling her fingers around his for comfort. The bug that expired on her back is still twitching its death-throes on the carpet, so he puts an end-table over it to block it from Donna's view. "Your very own parallel world," he muses. "Not the usual treatment, mind you. Most people, the universe just course-corrects around them, but you," he says, and smiles up at her until she cracks the slightest smile in return. He gives her hands a squeeze before he lets them go. "You're something special, Donna Noble."
"Shut it," she says, but the color's coming back into her cheeks. "You don't think- it wasn't real, was it? Any of it?" He's not sure exactly how truthful he ought to be.
"It was real, while you were there," he says. "But it's over now."
"Are you sure?" Donna looks down at her hands again, now splayed nervously across her kneecaps. "You said time's not a line. That could all still be happening, somewhere, where we can't see it."
"No," he says, firmly. "It was just a bubble, and it popped."
"Good," she says. "Good. Rubbish world, anyway." Her eyes still look hollow, distant. More than a little wary. "You died," she adds. He would have liked very much to have been surprised- even shocked- by that information, but he isn't. Thin lines indeed, between here and not-here.
"Don't think about it," he says, but then, he knows how well he follows his own advice.
"You died," she repeats, "and I didn't even know you. But she did. She was the only one who knew you, the only one who remembered you at all."
"She?" he prods the Trickster's bug with his toe. "One of the UNIT people?"
"Yeah," says Donna. And then: "No. No, she wasn't UNIT, I don't think. Didn't have a uniform. Just- just a girl," she says, faintly, caught in the memory of it. "Just a blonde girl in a leather jacket." His blood freezes into icicles that drip down his spine. The simplest description evokes a hundred memories, and all of them are dangerous. "She told me to warn you," Donna says, and her face seizes with fear. "She was there when I- when I died, she said- she told me two words." His hands clench and his face gets hot and he can't think, can't quite form speech, can't do anything but stare at her, eyes wide and jaw tight. Not possible. Not possible at all. There is no reason in the world for it, for the horrible sliver of hope that breaks off his heart in cold shards and lodges itself in his throat. Nothing but an animal yearning, an instinct, a wish that won't come out. It wouldn't be her. Couldn't. The universe wouldn't be that good, that kind, that cruel.
"Donna-" he croaks. She looks him straight in the face.
"Bad wolf," she says.
He gets up and runs away.
When they fling the doors to the TARDIS open and pile inside to the clamor of the cloister bell, he stops short, halfway up the ramp, and Donna thuds into his back. "What the- Doctor," she says, and goes silent, but he doesn't hear her at all. He can't hear anything over the blood thundering in his ears. Rose is standing on the grating, still and quiet, her hands in her jacket pockets. Her hair is pulled back from her forehead, but she looks the same to him. She looks perfect. His hands fly out to the railings to keep upright, and his mouth drops open. She stares out at them- or over them, past them, he notices suddenly, with a jolt. Rose's eyes don't fully land on his. Or anywhere.
"Hello, Doctor," she says. "If you're seeing this, then Donna's made it. Hello Donna," she adds, glancing around.
"Hello yourself," Donna says. Rose's head turns back a degree, and seems to find him again. He knows now, it's only a recording, but it's so perfect- so vivid, so much better than the others were. She looks solid and real. Alive. It's as if she never went away.
"Sorry to surprise you, but this is big. Too big. We've got planets disappearing out of the sky. The walls of the universes are coming down. And I don't mean only Donna's world, it's every world. Pete's world," she says, with a half-smile, which abruptly fades. "Your world. I was able to cross over, just enough to get into that parallel universe, to get to the TARDIS, and that's not supposed to happen, is it? You said it wasn't possible. So I don't know what's causing it, but I know who can stop it. I know you'll figure it out."
"Rose," he says. He is aware that she can't hear him. But he can't help it. Just to say her name again- to look at her, and say her name, and believe that she could understand. "Rose."
"I've recorded everything we know into the TARDIS data core. All our files. Took me long enough," she says, smirking. "Your controls are a mess, you know that? It took half of UNIT to figure out your memory pass-code was banana backwards."
"Better change it," says Donna, at his elbow.
"I don't know if we'll see each other again," says Rose. "I don't know how far the cannon- dimension cannon, hope you're impressed," she adds, grinning, "will let me jump. But I'm going to keep trying. I meant what I said," she tells him. "And I miss you."
"Don't go," he says, like a child, but she leans over the TARDIS console like she's fiddling with a switch and then blinks out completely. He makes a small, hurt noise in the back of his throat without meaning to. Behind him, Donna puts a hand on his shoulder blade. For a long minute that's all that's really holding him up.
"So," Donna says, at last. Very, very gently. "That bell-"
"End of the world," he says.
"You've got a special bell for the end of the world?" Her can feel, rather than see, her smile. "Yeah, of course you do."
For one brief second he thinks, I'll get to keep her. Donna. He dares to dream it: a world of afternoon cocktails and planet-hopping and evenings with her curled up on the other end of the sofa, watching New New New Strictly Come Dancing and mocking the hosts. It rises like a bubble and pops and leaves him slightly dizzy. There is a second where he almost absolutely believes it could be true. A bright spot, a human lifetime of this happiness. Even after everything, after losing it all. He's even lost bloody Davros. At least that clunky metal bastard remembered things as they once were. Piece by piece the world fell away from him- Sarah-Jane and Martha and Jack and his tempestuous factory-fresh double, carted off to Torchwood to make himself useful and to give them both a little space- and then it was just him and Donna and Donna's wonderful expanding mind, spinning around the Omega Nebula, catching their breath.
"How do you feel?" he asks her. She smiles at him, but when their eyes meet, he can see it- tiny galaxies whirling away, out of control, behind her irises.
"Molto bene," she says.
It's like goodbye.
He is stripping off his sodden tie and jacket, dropping them carelessly over the console, when his coat sleeve catches on a lever and a memory sequence starts up. He sighs heavily and fiddles with the buttons, trying to get the beeping to stop, and then he is face-to-face with Rose. Rose's duplicate, her digital echo. The one from before, in that leather jacket, the one who first warned him, but then never appeared again. He forgets to breathe at first, hologram or no hologram. He remembers staring into the comm screen before the fighting started- before Harriet, no, don't- looking at all the beloved faces, and missing hers was like a bruise.
For a long moment, he can't think of anything to say to her.
"I'm sorry," she says, at last. "I hope I made it to you, but I don't know- we're still working on directing the cannon, and it doesn't always want to listen." She looks away, all fond sadness, to the TARDIS console. "So maybe we just missed each other. It feels like I keep doing that." He puts a hand up to her face, watches it pass through her, distorting the playback slightly, like running his hand over a flashlight. Inside the memory cells, she smiles at him. He didn't make it happen, but he can pretend. "Either way, you've probably found them by now," she says, finally. "The videos I made. For you." For him? And then, he understands. Or thinks he does. One more little mystery she's left him. "After those Krillitanes- and after that thing in the black hole- oh, I don't know why," she confesses. "I don't really know. I just thought, if you had them, I'd still be there, in a way. Some part of me would still be here," she looks upward, "kicking around this place. Haunting you," she says, bitterly. "Now who's the dramatist? Anyway. Maybe it's selfish. I don't want you to forget. And I don't want you to be alone. I hope you're not." She frowns. "You'd better not be. I'm not gonna-" she looks down at her feet for an instant, her mouth twisting at the corners, and his hearts skip. When she looks back up, her jaw's set and her eyes are clear. He knows that look. Had it engraved, internally. "I won't say goodbye to you," she tells him. "I never will."
XI.
When Amy gets locked inside the ship, and he's busy building Calder-esque mobiles to boost the reception in Craig's spare room, he finds himself making an awful lot of excuses. "This never used to happen," he babbles into the receiver, holding his borrowed phone against one shoulder while he tries to string up baling wire across the remains of the toaster. "Well, when I say never, I mean almost never, and when I say almost never-"
"Get to the point," Amy hisses.
"Having an autopilot sort of really drastically reduces the chances of getting trapped in a auto-temporal loop with your keys in the ignition," he says, in one breath. There's a silence on the other end. "Amy?" he says. "Amy? Amy, are you there? Amy, say something. Give me a yell or one of your dismissive Scottish snorts. Imitate a duck. Amy?"
"An autopilot?" she repeats, thoughtfully. "Like, a computer program that drives for you?"
"Very very like." He gets his hand stuck in a wire loop and winces. "Exactly like."
"How do you get one?"
"You make it," he finds himself saying.
He starts out with the basics: operational flight matrix in three-dimensional space, getting the ship to fly upright and not run into anything especially sharp. The simplest programs can handle directional altitude and even a fairly sophisticated form of evasive maneuvers. He doesn't feel the need for a projection anymore, not at first. It seems ghoulish. Somehow wrong. Even though he is already starting to have arguments with the console every time the steering goes off-mark, or veers them into what is arguably a better stasis pattern.
"You're ridiculous," he tells the buttons, as they depress themselves automatically, and adjust for his awful angle of descent. "That was a perfectly fine approach, minus the pine forest." He grumbles and slaps the controls with a bit more force than necessary and Amy stares at him.
"Is it going to talk?" she asks. "Like on Star Trek?" She grins, pleased with herself, and folds her arms over her knees. "Are you going to say hello, computer?"
"No, it most certainly is not going to talk," he says. Three days later, he finds himself asking the empty air above the console just what it thinks it's doing by lowering the buffer resistance, and then he sighs a deep, long, resigned sigh and begins to pick through the audio files. He tries out his own voice- unbearable- and then Amy's, which she rejects totally on grounds of it being too uncanny. Finally he just begins shuffling through the audio settings and voice captures on random, making the rudimentary autopilot say words like course correction and gravitational pull and explosion imminent and uh-oh, and asking Amy to score them on a five-point scale.
In between robotic versions of Jack Harkness saying activate the auto-descent and Charles Dickens shouting engine fire, Rose Tyler's voice suddenly comes out of the speakers, calmly saying temporal distortion, and Amy says, "That one's nice." He could argue, deflect, discourage, take the cowards's route- part of him wants to- but he's tired, and the truth is, he's already spent hundreds of years happily listening to this particular voice telling him he was about to crash-land, even if Amy doesn't know that.
"I've always thought so," he says, quite honestly, and hits a key to save.
One day he finds Amy and Rory talking earnestly to the console, heads bent close over it, like schoolchildren over their books. He can hear Rose's voice, low, through the speakers. He lingers in the hallway and listens to them chatter back and forth for a moment, aware of this being a fairly creepy thing to do and not much caring.
"Who were you?" Amy asks. "I mean, where did the voice come from, if you weren't alive?"
"I don't have that information," says Rose.
"I was plastic for two thousand years," says Rory. There's a gentle, forlorn note in his voice. "Is it like that?"
"No," says Rose, flatly. In the hallway, the Doctor presses a fist against his mouth to keep from laughing. "Can I help you with anything else?"
"It's weird," says Amy, later. "Her just being a voice." He notices the her already, the instant of humanization come and absorbed. He can remember other moments like this one and so he smiles to himself, if a little grimly. "Is that what an autopilot's normally like?"
"They're usually a hologram," he says, and regrets it immediately, because Amy's eyes light up. She was ahead of him already, he sees that now. "Major power drain, holograms," he adds. "Hugely inconvenient to program. Too many variables. You'd need an awful lot of data to make a convincing projection. Voice and movement files, image rendering processors, lots of- things," he says. "Stuff."
"Well," Amy grins, "we've found your stuff already."
"What stuff?"
"A dozen videos of some blonde girl," says Amy, now openly delighted verging on wicked. "You giant space perv." His mouth opens and shuts and nothing useful comes out of it. "Nothing to say for yourself? Making tapes of innocent-"
"I didn't make those," he says, too quickly. And maybe too harshly. He looks away at the console, fiddles with something that doesn't need fiddling with, and all the while he can feel Amy's eyes narrowing at him. "On my honor."
"Who did, then?"
"She did."
"Ah," says Amy. She looks at him, searches his face, and her own expression softens. "Was she," Amy starts, and right then there's a massive explosion underneath them- probably a welcoming shot from the ship he saw passing by their orbit fifteen minutes ago and then forgot about- and he just about kisses the rattling floor in gratitude. There are more explosions and then a chase and the rescue of some orphaned Kexlar eggs, and then much later still, Amy tells him that she has now watched some of the other videos, especially the last two. And afterwards she asks if they could please stop for some ice cream, and then she says nothing more about it.
He renders the autopilot anyway; pulls the right files and links together the right probability sequences, stuff he used to read about in the helplessly awful manual, now put into practical use. He ought to linger longest over the quantum mechanics, but he finds himself also mired in the minutiae of possible responses, language strings, emotional ranges and conversational integration, blinking, laughing, crossing of arms. The algorithms for artificial intelligence are incredibly complex, bordering on mystic. He inputs everything he has, every word and gesture, and then he sits back and waits for it to formulate itself and load. He has no idea why he's doing this, what impulses have compelled him to this spot. But he waits. There's a first second when there is nothing there in front of him, and in the next, she is standing on the grates in a jean skirt, with dark lines around her eyes. For a brief, giddy instant he feels like he's barely two hundred years old, just a baby really, stealing a joyride for the first time.
"Hello," she says, and he shuts her off in a panic. By the time he's taken thirteen deep breaths and turned her back on, her expression is somewhat mysterious. "Should we try that again?" his autopilot asks. Her smirk widens and his pulse hammers harder. Did he program this in, or was it waiting there all this time, some raw sense memory in the circuits, waiting to burst forth? A true ghost in the machine? She taps her insubstantial foot. "Or are you going to run into another button?"
"No," he says, breathless. "No buttons."
"Good," says Rose.
XII.
He goes through a long phase where he refuses to use the autopilot, decides he doesn't need one to run his life or his ship, that he got along fine without it for a few hundred years, that it's purely an attachment to a previous version of himself. He is not sure whether he actually turns her off, or whether she just willfully declines to appear for more than six months after he makes that grand declaration. He tells most people, imperiously, that it's the former.
"I don't have an off-switch," Rose tells them, when he's not in the room. "I just let him think so." And then they're trapped in a chrono-loop that needs two pilots to trigger the release, and she saves him without being asked and then disappears in a sulk, and he feels like he's been an enormous twat. "For the record," says Rose, "you absolutely were."
She doesn't leave him alone again.
"Rose," he says to her, when they are sitting in total darkness, waiting for another fuel cell to charge. They nearly all went out when a dalek ship hooked into the TARDIS and tried to lift out his ship's consciousness, but there's no living thing more tenacious than the sentient vortex under that hood. The ship burned out the daleks and almost herself, too, but for the single cell left glowing away in the core. When that one was done charging he used it to power up Rose, and when she was done yelling at him about that being a frivolous waste of limited energy, she helped him to get the grid back online. Now they're sitting side by side on the floor in the faint blue gleam of fifteen power cells. If his foot leaned against hers, it would go straight through it. He looks at her, edges blurring in the dark, warm and solid-seeming like she used to be, like she is somewhere still. "Rose," he says, again, more softly, and she smiles at him. He wonders for the millionth time how she can do that, how she can feel effortlessly, as if she were not a projection, not a series of codes that he knows he built by hand. But then- I create myself. He always wondered about that, and now he is sure that he wasn't the only one who left traces in her makeup. Her smile is a thing that is part programming and part pure human girl and part heavenly mechanics, a series of events that he will never really understand. "I love you," he says. He's still not sure who he is talking to, which one, except that it must be all of them, every version, every piece. There is no part of her that he hasn't mourned and adored and marveled at.
She puts her hand over his and for a second, it doesn't fall.
"I know," she says.
XIII.
"Am I really dead?" he asks. He feels around the top of his scalp, gingerly, hoping not to knock out any additional bits of brain. But there's no more splitting pain and pressure, and no blood on his fingers when he pulls his hand back to stare at it. There is an old man leaning over him, with his hands resting on the tops of his knees. He looks mildly irritated. The Doctor gapes at him and finds he can't manage a shred of politeness. "Is this some sort of- final hallucination?" he blurts. "The last gasp of consciousness, perhaps. Synapses firing wildly?"
"Do I look like a synapse?" the man huffs.
"Well, you wouldn't," says the Doctor.
"Old gods," says the man, and walks away. For lack of anything better to do- and for the sake of curiosity, the oldest and most demanding god of all as far as he's concerned- the Doctor follows.
He was on a little moon somewhere past Rigel, helping some colonists with an infestation of sentient fungus, and then of course it'd turned out that the fungus had a point about the whole herbicide deal, and running had turned into negotiating and then naturally back to running again. He remembers all that. And he remembers the distress signal afterwards, an odd thing like an old echo still drumming on, a rattling in the universe's pipes. Rose had been wary but the ship had almost pulled herself apart trying to get at it, follow it, drawn like a magnet, and so he couldn't refuse. It was probably just a leftover from some failed shuttle mission- sad, but not singular- and he'd gone to check it out without really considering just where he was headed. And then- "A black hole," he says, to himself. It's coming back in gasps and glimpses. "There was a black hole. I was on the surface and I looked up and saw it in the sky, opening." He looks at the old man, who is now patiently standing in front of him with his arms crossed. "Black holes don't do that. They don't just- appear, out of nowhere, and they can't just- anyway, there was no time. The TARDIS-" he starts, and then he glances around wildly at the nothingness that seems to surround them, the not-space and the velvet darkness past it. "My TARDIS," he repeats. "My ship. She's not-"
"She's perfectly fine," says the man. He gestures to the left and suddenly the Doctor can see it, faint white lights in the gloom, a humble little glow from the beacon on the top. It's difficult to see or sense the distance. He sprints towards it and he's there much faster than he ought to be, skidding to a halt before the doors, putting his hands out to feel the texture of the wood, the solidity and sturdiness of her. He's still got the key in his pocket, so he pushes inside, and then nearly falls flat on his face. From outside the doors, he can hear the old man chuckling. "She may have redecorated," he says.
"Oh," says the Doctor.
There is no console anymore, no grating, no ramp, no support beams. None of her old skins, all wiped away without a trace. Instead, there's just a round white room with a great ball of light at the center, a little pulsar that seems to inhale and exhale with the regular rhythm of a single heartbeat. It turns slowly, sparking in small flares and glimmering as it rotates. He can feel the light where it touches the skin of his face and neck, the backs of his hands. It makes the small hairs stand up, like a caress.
"Beautiful things, these ships," says the man, at his elbow. "Wish I'd thought of them first."
"What is this?"
"You don't recognize her?" The old man gives him a look of undisguised scorn, which the Doctor really rather resents. Hasn't he just died and gone to- nowhere, after all? He could use a bit of slack with the mental calculations. "Look closer." So the Doctor leans in and stares into that white light, shimmering blue and yellow in certain moments, now bright gold, like the cloud of a nebula or the halo of a star.
"Blon," he says. "Blon Fel-Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen."
"That's not quite what I was expecting you to say, but keep going," says the man.
"She got turned back into an egg," he says. His hands are trembling. "She started over, got a second chance. She looked into the heart of the TARDIS, and the heart of the TARDIS is really-" he stops, stares.
"Always said you were bright," says the old man.
"But you're- you must be, if we're here, and you're-" the Doctor rambles, flabbergasted. "This is the heart of the TARDIS. The actual heart of the TARDIS. And if we're here, standing here, then this is the heart of the black hole. We're actually inside the black hole. And you- you're you. Aren't you?" The old man scowls, but doesn't object to the train of thought. "Him. You're Omega." The greatest hero of the ancient times, the actual father of time and relative dimension in space, glances over at the Doctor with a face like he's been sucking a lemon.
"Ah," he says. "A dismissive nickname I got when I was twenty-seven. So delighted to hear it again."
"I'm sorry," the Doctor says. His brain whirls. "This is really the true Eye-"
"Don't call it that," the old man snaps. "Don't say that foolish thing to me. It hasn't actually brought much harmony, that I'm aware of." They stand in silence for a while, watching the bright star turn slow circles before them. He's never seen it before, like this. Staring into the heart of the ship was at best an exercise in regeneration and carried a high probability of setting one's entire consciousness on fire. But if this is really the core of time, it feels- good. Warm, instead of scorching. He wonders if Rose can see this- if Rose still exists, now, in this place, or if she was washed away with the rest of the programming. If she's entered the universe now, like he has. Gone into the dust. He doesn't feel sad, or lonely, at that thought. She must be here after all. He barely feels anything but the warmth and peace of this light. He could lose himself in the glow of this miniature star, the shifting colors, the tendrils of flame that flicker out and die in the air. He's always thought she was beautiful, and now he knows. She is. More than he could have imagined. She is a whole world in herself.
"I'm really dead, though," says the Doctor, at last. "Aren't I?"
"Do you feel dead?"
"I don't know." He looks down at his hands. "I don't know what I expected. I never was ginger, after all that. Almost a millennium, and not one red hair."
"There's always next time," says Omega.
"Of course," says the Doctor. And then: "Wait, what?"
"You're sure you want to try again?" Omega asks him. They are kneeling on the floor of the TARDIS now, so close to the core that the Doctor can barely see anything but incandescent, searing light. He can't believe he's about to be- turned back into an egg, for lack of a more appropriate metaphor. Omega clears his throat. "There are no guarantees. Of anything. There it is, that's your warning." The Doctor looks at him.
"How many times have we done this?" he asks. "How many times have I come here?"
"Lots," says Omega, which is just infuriating.
"Have I ever turned it down before?"
"Obviously not," says Omega.
"Is it just- is this just a loop, that I keep repeating? All the same things, and the same choices, over and over and over? Does it ever end differently?"
"Well," says Omega. "There are variables. Trillions of variables. Turning left instead of right," he says. "Meeting someone. Asking a question. Asking it again, a different way." The Doctor feels his hearts skip.
"If there are people I want to see again," he says, very quietly, "important people, if there's someone- if there's someone I need to see again, is there a chance-"
"There's always a chance," says Omega.
The Doctor closes his eyes.
I.
He finds Susan in the east wing of the archives, staring at an exhibit on primitive humanoids and wondering aloud about mobile phones.
"What does out of range mean?" she asks him, round-eyed. She is eight years old, growing like a weed- her hair, especially, in a little dark cloud down to her shoulders. "Our communication devices have a standard range of thirteen thousand megaclicks, and if you use a signal booster-"
"Yes, yes," he says, and shuffles her away, down the hall. She rambles on about communication buffers and he doesn't have the heart to say what he's thinking, the sad hurt that aches inside him when he thinks about Susan using the comm panels, sending messages, typing like her human father, sending video calls. Her telepathy is limited, he knows that. It's cloudy, imprecise. She will never be able to speak to her mother's people in quite the way they can speak to one another. He tries not to think about that- about anything beyond this moment- as they pick out souvenirs. They are ambling down the corridor towards the exit when Susan tugs his hand.
"Grandfather," she says. "Look." She points to an antique TARDIS on a plinth. "A Type 40," she breathes, with the eagerness of a true juvenile gearhead. She's been taking apart the atmospheric regulators in the house lately, and relying on him to put them back together. "Isn't it beautiful?" she says, dragging him closer. "I like this one. It's blue. I bet it's still got original coral. Can we get one, grandfather, can we? A TARDIS?" He looks down at her and the words catch in his throat. He doesn't know. He's hardly qualified and she's- well, he knows what his own people are like. They're not in the business of handing out TARDIS keys to just anyone with a case of wanderlust.
"Perhaps," he says. "Someday."
Susan smiles up at him, her hand tight in his.
That night, when she's asleep- fragile and human-looking against her enormous pillows- he shuts off the lamp and puts away the book of technical specifications she's been demanding he read aloud. He shuffles up to the observatory and tries to find his place in his own texts, and can't. Instead, he stares up at the stars beyond the dome, through a sky that's clear as glass. They burn steadily across an unimaginable distance. Why not, he thinks. For the first time, he dares to dream- however briefly and timidly- of a world beyond the academy, beyond ritual and pomp, beyond the rules of time and space and anything, a world where she can be exactly what she wants to be, exactly as she is. Perhaps this is the moment, their moment. Perhaps this is the start. He closes his eyes and thinks of the first lesson, the one that really stuck. He was just a boy looking into the schism, as it turned circles around itself forever, never stopping, always spiraling up out of itself, making a perfect loop until the end of the world. It should have been scary- and it was- but it was also a nameless peace. To know that nothing is ever really over, ever really gone.
Everything, he thinks, is a beginning.
fin.
(Previous parts: one, two, three, and at A03 here)
"Back to earth," says Donna. They are sitting on two loungers by an enormous zero-gravity pool complex, owned by Lunar Suites Incorporated. It's almost eleven-thirty in the morning. Donna's informed him- strictly speaking, quite accurately- that it's noon somewhere. He agrees, says that her grasp of space-time is rapidly improving, and she tells him to stop thinking for the love of God. She hands him a daiquiri the size of a punch bowl, and puts on her sunglasses. "I mean it. I can hear those creaky wheels turning in your head." He takes a sip of his drink. It tastes like nuclear fruit and bottled sunshine and illegal Lunorian hyper-spirits.
They're not autopilot files. He checked and re-checked them, tried to figure out how they were recorded, when, why. They are not the same programs that were lost long before. They're brand-new video captures, data feeds on voice and movement, preserved smiles and anxious stares, frozen laughs, mimicked posture. A miniature catalogue of Rose Tyler in the wild. He didn't make them. He doesn't know who did. He plays them back a few times, thinking at first that it will help. It doesn't. It only makes it worse, the tinned phrases, things she said to him before, animated and present and solid and real, now played back through the speakers while her edges flicker in his vision. They are the same every time, and that's what makes them unbearable. She always surprised him, even when he felt that he could read her mind, even when he knew her so well he could sense what muscle would twitch in her thigh as she slept. Living people are not puzzle boxes, but roads unfolding across meadows, trails that must be followed. Fresh footprints, broken twigs, gullies to cross over, sudden expanses of sky overhead. All replete with meaning. But she's gone and left him behind in unmarked woods, without a sign. He wanders proverbially as a cloud.
"Back to earth," says Donna. They are sitting on two loungers by an enormous zero-gravity pool complex, owned by Lunar Suites Incorporated. It's almost eleven-thirty in the morning. Donna's informed him- strictly speaking, quite accurately- that it's noon somewhere. He agrees, says that her grasp of space-time is rapidly improving, and she tells him to stop thinking for the love of God. She hands him a daiquiri the size of a punch bowl, and puts on her sunglasses. "I mean it. I can hear those creaky wheels turning in your head." He takes a sip of his drink. It tastes like nuclear fruit and bottled sunshine and illegal Lunorian hyper-spirits. It makes his knees hot and wobbly and his stomach cold. Heightened tolerance, ha ha. Perhaps his biology teachers were joking, but he's got no-one to ask. Donna looks at him over the tops of her lenses. "Better?" He thinks for a minute while frozen chunks of pineapple settle.
"Better," he admits.
He doesn't often worry about time passing. Except for when it's passing too quickly or too slowly, outliers, marks of Wrong. Normal time passing isn't his concern. It's the business of the universe. And for one thing, worrying about that would be wildly ironic. For another, it would be unspeakably sad. If time was indeed linear- which it isn't- then it would be a long line entirely covered in asterisks, urgent notations for lost moments, things left unclaimed and sentences left unfinished, absent friends. It would be a horrible thing to look at, the drawn-out circumstances of his life. There would be a great red line slashed through it, three-quarters of the way down. And at this end, he would be unbearably far from Susan. Unbearably far from his world. Thankfully, time is not a line or a calendar. It's a great big ball that rolls itself around in erratic loops. Everything is still close enough so as to be nearly touching.
"That makes no sense," says Donna. They are locked in a root cellar. They were put there by enormous sentient bees wearing hand-sewn pants. Something's clearly wrong in future Kansas. And why, exactly, is it always oversized Apoidea with them? Perhaps they need a comically large can of Raid for their next outing. Donna steps un-gently on his foot to regain his attention, and he manfully refrains from yelping. "How exactly is time a ball?"
"It's a metaphor," he says, and immediately wonders if that's incorrect. Or outdated. Time might be a dodecahedron, for all he knows anymore. He hasn't been reading the journals. "Time isn't a straightforward progression of one thing after another, unless you're stuck inside it. And half of that's perception, anyhow." She stares at him. "If you could move outside of time, you'd see that things happen simultaneously. Or over and over and over. And that the variables for one thing happening instead of another thing are incredibly complex. Really, it's a mess."
"Pompeii," says Donna. "How could we go to Pompeii, if it's already gone off. Because it's still happening. That's what you're saying."
"Yes, well done."
"Or Agatha Christie," she continues. "We didn't know why she disappeared exactly until we were there, carrying her into the TARDIS. But it was us all along."
"See?" He grins at her. "You're getting the hang of this. Told you, you'd have a head for temporal dynamics if you'd apply yourself." There's an enormous crashing noise against the ceiling above their heads, and a thin shower of dirt lands on top of their shoulders.
"Think you could have a head for getting out of cellars anytime soon?" Donna asks. He holds the sonic up, apologetically.
"No setting for wood."
"No, of course not," Donna sighs. "There's a setting that lets you change the aspect ratio at the cinema, and one for making steam in the dryer, but nothing for wood." She digs around in a pile of old hand tools and broken-up crates and comes up with a crowbar. "Lucky for you, I've got settings of my own," she says. "Stand back." They do break out of the cellar- Donna's nothing if not determined- and eventually the bees get around to telling them about their grand designs for the local human population. Which involve nonviolent labor organizing and advanced organic farming techniques. It's somewhat anticlimactic and also oddly touching.
"Oh," he says.
"WE DID NOT BZZ THINK BZZ YOU COULD BZZ UNDERSTAND US BZZZZ."
"I understand a lot of things," he tells them.
"Except wood," says Donna.
Donna's still shaking as he sits down across from her, turning her hands over in his own palm and curling her fingers around his for comfort. The bug that expired on her back is still twitching its death-throes on the carpet, so he puts an end-table over it to block it from Donna's view. "Your very own parallel world," he muses. "Not the usual treatment, mind you. Most people, the universe just course-corrects around them, but you," he says, and smiles up at her until she cracks the slightest smile in return. He gives her hands a squeeze before he lets them go. "You're something special, Donna Noble."
"Shut it," she says, but the color's coming back into her cheeks. "You don't think- it wasn't real, was it? Any of it?" He's not sure exactly how truthful he ought to be.
"It was real, while you were there," he says. "But it's over now."
"Are you sure?" Donna looks down at her hands again, now splayed nervously across her kneecaps. "You said time's not a line. That could all still be happening, somewhere, where we can't see it."
"No," he says, firmly. "It was just a bubble, and it popped."
"Good," she says. "Good. Rubbish world, anyway." Her eyes still look hollow, distant. More than a little wary. "You died," she adds. He would have liked very much to have been surprised- even shocked- by that information, but he isn't. Thin lines indeed, between here and not-here.
"Don't think about it," he says, but then, he knows how well he follows his own advice.
"You died," she repeats, "and I didn't even know you. But she did. She was the only one who knew you, the only one who remembered you at all."
"She?" he prods the Trickster's bug with his toe. "One of the UNIT people?"
"Yeah," says Donna. And then: "No. No, she wasn't UNIT, I don't think. Didn't have a uniform. Just- just a girl," she says, faintly, caught in the memory of it. "Just a blonde girl in a leather jacket." His blood freezes into icicles that drip down his spine. The simplest description evokes a hundred memories, and all of them are dangerous. "She told me to warn you," Donna says, and her face seizes with fear. "She was there when I- when I died, she said- she told me two words." His hands clench and his face gets hot and he can't think, can't quite form speech, can't do anything but stare at her, eyes wide and jaw tight. Not possible. Not possible at all. There is no reason in the world for it, for the horrible sliver of hope that breaks off his heart in cold shards and lodges itself in his throat. Nothing but an animal yearning, an instinct, a wish that won't come out. It wouldn't be her. Couldn't. The universe wouldn't be that good, that kind, that cruel.
"Donna-" he croaks. She looks him straight in the face.
"Bad wolf," she says.
He gets up and runs away.
When they fling the doors to the TARDIS open and pile inside to the clamor of the cloister bell, he stops short, halfway up the ramp, and Donna thuds into his back. "What the- Doctor," she says, and goes silent, but he doesn't hear her at all. He can't hear anything over the blood thundering in his ears. Rose is standing on the grating, still and quiet, her hands in her jacket pockets. Her hair is pulled back from her forehead, but she looks the same to him. She looks perfect. His hands fly out to the railings to keep upright, and his mouth drops open. She stares out at them- or over them, past them, he notices suddenly, with a jolt. Rose's eyes don't fully land on his. Or anywhere.
"Hello, Doctor," she says. "If you're seeing this, then Donna's made it. Hello Donna," she adds, glancing around.
"Hello yourself," Donna says. Rose's head turns back a degree, and seems to find him again. He knows now, it's only a recording, but it's so perfect- so vivid, so much better than the others were. She looks solid and real. Alive. It's as if she never went away.
"Sorry to surprise you, but this is big. Too big. We've got planets disappearing out of the sky. The walls of the universes are coming down. And I don't mean only Donna's world, it's every world. Pete's world," she says, with a half-smile, which abruptly fades. "Your world. I was able to cross over, just enough to get into that parallel universe, to get to the TARDIS, and that's not supposed to happen, is it? You said it wasn't possible. So I don't know what's causing it, but I know who can stop it. I know you'll figure it out."
"Rose," he says. He is aware that she can't hear him. But he can't help it. Just to say her name again- to look at her, and say her name, and believe that she could understand. "Rose."
"I've recorded everything we know into the TARDIS data core. All our files. Took me long enough," she says, smirking. "Your controls are a mess, you know that? It took half of UNIT to figure out your memory pass-code was banana backwards."
"Better change it," says Donna, at his elbow.
"I don't know if we'll see each other again," says Rose. "I don't know how far the cannon- dimension cannon, hope you're impressed," she adds, grinning, "will let me jump. But I'm going to keep trying. I meant what I said," she tells him. "And I miss you."
"Don't go," he says, like a child, but she leans over the TARDIS console like she's fiddling with a switch and then blinks out completely. He makes a small, hurt noise in the back of his throat without meaning to. Behind him, Donna puts a hand on his shoulder blade. For a long minute that's all that's really holding him up.
"So," Donna says, at last. Very, very gently. "That bell-"
"End of the world," he says.
"You've got a special bell for the end of the world?" Her can feel, rather than see, her smile. "Yeah, of course you do."
For one brief second he thinks, I'll get to keep her. Donna. He dares to dream it: a world of afternoon cocktails and planet-hopping and evenings with her curled up on the other end of the sofa, watching New New New Strictly Come Dancing and mocking the hosts. It rises like a bubble and pops and leaves him slightly dizzy. There is a second where he almost absolutely believes it could be true. A bright spot, a human lifetime of this happiness. Even after everything, after losing it all. He's even lost bloody Davros. At least that clunky metal bastard remembered things as they once were. Piece by piece the world fell away from him- Sarah-Jane and Martha and Jack and his tempestuous factory-fresh double, carted off to Torchwood to make himself useful and to give them both a little space- and then it was just him and Donna and Donna's wonderful expanding mind, spinning around the Omega Nebula, catching their breath.
"How do you feel?" he asks her. She smiles at him, but when their eyes meet, he can see it- tiny galaxies whirling away, out of control, behind her irises.
"Molto bene," she says.
It's like goodbye.
He is stripping off his sodden tie and jacket, dropping them carelessly over the console, when his coat sleeve catches on a lever and a memory sequence starts up. He sighs heavily and fiddles with the buttons, trying to get the beeping to stop, and then he is face-to-face with Rose. Rose's duplicate, her digital echo. The one from before, in that leather jacket, the one who first warned him, but then never appeared again. He forgets to breathe at first, hologram or no hologram. He remembers staring into the comm screen before the fighting started- before Harriet, no, don't- looking at all the beloved faces, and missing hers was like a bruise.
For a long moment, he can't think of anything to say to her.
"I'm sorry," she says, at last. "I hope I made it to you, but I don't know- we're still working on directing the cannon, and it doesn't always want to listen." She looks away, all fond sadness, to the TARDIS console. "So maybe we just missed each other. It feels like I keep doing that." He puts a hand up to her face, watches it pass through her, distorting the playback slightly, like running his hand over a flashlight. Inside the memory cells, she smiles at him. He didn't make it happen, but he can pretend. "Either way, you've probably found them by now," she says, finally. "The videos I made. For you." For him? And then, he understands. Or thinks he does. One more little mystery she's left him. "After those Krillitanes- and after that thing in the black hole- oh, I don't know why," she confesses. "I don't really know. I just thought, if you had them, I'd still be there, in a way. Some part of me would still be here," she looks upward, "kicking around this place. Haunting you," she says, bitterly. "Now who's the dramatist? Anyway. Maybe it's selfish. I don't want you to forget. And I don't want you to be alone. I hope you're not." She frowns. "You'd better not be. I'm not gonna-" she looks down at her feet for an instant, her mouth twisting at the corners, and his hearts skip. When she looks back up, her jaw's set and her eyes are clear. He knows that look. Had it engraved, internally. "I won't say goodbye to you," she tells him. "I never will."
XI.
When Amy gets locked inside the ship, and he's busy building Calder-esque mobiles to boost the reception in Craig's spare room, he finds himself making an awful lot of excuses. "This never used to happen," he babbles into the receiver, holding his borrowed phone against one shoulder while he tries to string up baling wire across the remains of the toaster. "Well, when I say never, I mean almost never, and when I say almost never-"
"Get to the point," Amy hisses.
"Having an autopilot sort of really drastically reduces the chances of getting trapped in a auto-temporal loop with your keys in the ignition," he says, in one breath. There's a silence on the other end. "Amy?" he says. "Amy? Amy, are you there? Amy, say something. Give me a yell or one of your dismissive Scottish snorts. Imitate a duck. Amy?"
"An autopilot?" she repeats, thoughtfully. "Like, a computer program that drives for you?"
"Very very like." He gets his hand stuck in a wire loop and winces. "Exactly like."
"How do you get one?"
"You make it," he finds himself saying.
He starts out with the basics: operational flight matrix in three-dimensional space, getting the ship to fly upright and not run into anything especially sharp. The simplest programs can handle directional altitude and even a fairly sophisticated form of evasive maneuvers. He doesn't feel the need for a projection anymore, not at first. It seems ghoulish. Somehow wrong. Even though he is already starting to have arguments with the console every time the steering goes off-mark, or veers them into what is arguably a better stasis pattern.
"You're ridiculous," he tells the buttons, as they depress themselves automatically, and adjust for his awful angle of descent. "That was a perfectly fine approach, minus the pine forest." He grumbles and slaps the controls with a bit more force than necessary and Amy stares at him.
"Is it going to talk?" she asks. "Like on Star Trek?" She grins, pleased with herself, and folds her arms over her knees. "Are you going to say hello, computer?"
"No, it most certainly is not going to talk," he says. Three days later, he finds himself asking the empty air above the console just what it thinks it's doing by lowering the buffer resistance, and then he sighs a deep, long, resigned sigh and begins to pick through the audio files. He tries out his own voice- unbearable- and then Amy's, which she rejects totally on grounds of it being too uncanny. Finally he just begins shuffling through the audio settings and voice captures on random, making the rudimentary autopilot say words like course correction and gravitational pull and explosion imminent and uh-oh, and asking Amy to score them on a five-point scale.
In between robotic versions of Jack Harkness saying activate the auto-descent and Charles Dickens shouting engine fire, Rose Tyler's voice suddenly comes out of the speakers, calmly saying temporal distortion, and Amy says, "That one's nice." He could argue, deflect, discourage, take the cowards's route- part of him wants to- but he's tired, and the truth is, he's already spent hundreds of years happily listening to this particular voice telling him he was about to crash-land, even if Amy doesn't know that.
"I've always thought so," he says, quite honestly, and hits a key to save.
One day he finds Amy and Rory talking earnestly to the console, heads bent close over it, like schoolchildren over their books. He can hear Rose's voice, low, through the speakers. He lingers in the hallway and listens to them chatter back and forth for a moment, aware of this being a fairly creepy thing to do and not much caring.
"Who were you?" Amy asks. "I mean, where did the voice come from, if you weren't alive?"
"I don't have that information," says Rose.
"I was plastic for two thousand years," says Rory. There's a gentle, forlorn note in his voice. "Is it like that?"
"No," says Rose, flatly. In the hallway, the Doctor presses a fist against his mouth to keep from laughing. "Can I help you with anything else?"
"It's weird," says Amy, later. "Her just being a voice." He notices the her already, the instant of humanization come and absorbed. He can remember other moments like this one and so he smiles to himself, if a little grimly. "Is that what an autopilot's normally like?"
"They're usually a hologram," he says, and regrets it immediately, because Amy's eyes light up. She was ahead of him already, he sees that now. "Major power drain, holograms," he adds. "Hugely inconvenient to program. Too many variables. You'd need an awful lot of data to make a convincing projection. Voice and movement files, image rendering processors, lots of- things," he says. "Stuff."
"Well," Amy grins, "we've found your stuff already."
"What stuff?"
"A dozen videos of some blonde girl," says Amy, now openly delighted verging on wicked. "You giant space perv." His mouth opens and shuts and nothing useful comes out of it. "Nothing to say for yourself? Making tapes of innocent-"
"I didn't make those," he says, too quickly. And maybe too harshly. He looks away at the console, fiddles with something that doesn't need fiddling with, and all the while he can feel Amy's eyes narrowing at him. "On my honor."
"Who did, then?"
"She did."
"Ah," says Amy. She looks at him, searches his face, and her own expression softens. "Was she," Amy starts, and right then there's a massive explosion underneath them- probably a welcoming shot from the ship he saw passing by their orbit fifteen minutes ago and then forgot about- and he just about kisses the rattling floor in gratitude. There are more explosions and then a chase and the rescue of some orphaned Kexlar eggs, and then much later still, Amy tells him that she has now watched some of the other videos, especially the last two. And afterwards she asks if they could please stop for some ice cream, and then she says nothing more about it.
He renders the autopilot anyway; pulls the right files and links together the right probability sequences, stuff he used to read about in the helplessly awful manual, now put into practical use. He ought to linger longest over the quantum mechanics, but he finds himself also mired in the minutiae of possible responses, language strings, emotional ranges and conversational integration, blinking, laughing, crossing of arms. The algorithms for artificial intelligence are incredibly complex, bordering on mystic. He inputs everything he has, every word and gesture, and then he sits back and waits for it to formulate itself and load. He has no idea why he's doing this, what impulses have compelled him to this spot. But he waits. There's a first second when there is nothing there in front of him, and in the next, she is standing on the grates in a jean skirt, with dark lines around her eyes. For a brief, giddy instant he feels like he's barely two hundred years old, just a baby really, stealing a joyride for the first time.
"Hello," she says, and he shuts her off in a panic. By the time he's taken thirteen deep breaths and turned her back on, her expression is somewhat mysterious. "Should we try that again?" his autopilot asks. Her smirk widens and his pulse hammers harder. Did he program this in, or was it waiting there all this time, some raw sense memory in the circuits, waiting to burst forth? A true ghost in the machine? She taps her insubstantial foot. "Or are you going to run into another button?"
"No," he says, breathless. "No buttons."
"Good," says Rose.
XII.
He goes through a long phase where he refuses to use the autopilot, decides he doesn't need one to run his life or his ship, that he got along fine without it for a few hundred years, that it's purely an attachment to a previous version of himself. He is not sure whether he actually turns her off, or whether she just willfully declines to appear for more than six months after he makes that grand declaration. He tells most people, imperiously, that it's the former.
"I don't have an off-switch," Rose tells them, when he's not in the room. "I just let him think so." And then they're trapped in a chrono-loop that needs two pilots to trigger the release, and she saves him without being asked and then disappears in a sulk, and he feels like he's been an enormous twat. "For the record," says Rose, "you absolutely were."
She doesn't leave him alone again.
"Rose," he says to her, when they are sitting in total darkness, waiting for another fuel cell to charge. They nearly all went out when a dalek ship hooked into the TARDIS and tried to lift out his ship's consciousness, but there's no living thing more tenacious than the sentient vortex under that hood. The ship burned out the daleks and almost herself, too, but for the single cell left glowing away in the core. When that one was done charging he used it to power up Rose, and when she was done yelling at him about that being a frivolous waste of limited energy, she helped him to get the grid back online. Now they're sitting side by side on the floor in the faint blue gleam of fifteen power cells. If his foot leaned against hers, it would go straight through it. He looks at her, edges blurring in the dark, warm and solid-seeming like she used to be, like she is somewhere still. "Rose," he says, again, more softly, and she smiles at him. He wonders for the millionth time how she can do that, how she can feel effortlessly, as if she were not a projection, not a series of codes that he knows he built by hand. But then- I create myself. He always wondered about that, and now he is sure that he wasn't the only one who left traces in her makeup. Her smile is a thing that is part programming and part pure human girl and part heavenly mechanics, a series of events that he will never really understand. "I love you," he says. He's still not sure who he is talking to, which one, except that it must be all of them, every version, every piece. There is no part of her that he hasn't mourned and adored and marveled at.
She puts her hand over his and for a second, it doesn't fall.
"I know," she says.
XIII.
"Am I really dead?" he asks. He feels around the top of his scalp, gingerly, hoping not to knock out any additional bits of brain. But there's no more splitting pain and pressure, and no blood on his fingers when he pulls his hand back to stare at it. There is an old man leaning over him, with his hands resting on the tops of his knees. He looks mildly irritated. The Doctor gapes at him and finds he can't manage a shred of politeness. "Is this some sort of- final hallucination?" he blurts. "The last gasp of consciousness, perhaps. Synapses firing wildly?"
"Do I look like a synapse?" the man huffs.
"Well, you wouldn't," says the Doctor.
"Old gods," says the man, and walks away. For lack of anything better to do- and for the sake of curiosity, the oldest and most demanding god of all as far as he's concerned- the Doctor follows.
He was on a little moon somewhere past Rigel, helping some colonists with an infestation of sentient fungus, and then of course it'd turned out that the fungus had a point about the whole herbicide deal, and running had turned into negotiating and then naturally back to running again. He remembers all that. And he remembers the distress signal afterwards, an odd thing like an old echo still drumming on, a rattling in the universe's pipes. Rose had been wary but the ship had almost pulled herself apart trying to get at it, follow it, drawn like a magnet, and so he couldn't refuse. It was probably just a leftover from some failed shuttle mission- sad, but not singular- and he'd gone to check it out without really considering just where he was headed. And then- "A black hole," he says, to himself. It's coming back in gasps and glimpses. "There was a black hole. I was on the surface and I looked up and saw it in the sky, opening." He looks at the old man, who is now patiently standing in front of him with his arms crossed. "Black holes don't do that. They don't just- appear, out of nowhere, and they can't just- anyway, there was no time. The TARDIS-" he starts, and then he glances around wildly at the nothingness that seems to surround them, the not-space and the velvet darkness past it. "My TARDIS," he repeats. "My ship. She's not-"
"She's perfectly fine," says the man. He gestures to the left and suddenly the Doctor can see it, faint white lights in the gloom, a humble little glow from the beacon on the top. It's difficult to see or sense the distance. He sprints towards it and he's there much faster than he ought to be, skidding to a halt before the doors, putting his hands out to feel the texture of the wood, the solidity and sturdiness of her. He's still got the key in his pocket, so he pushes inside, and then nearly falls flat on his face. From outside the doors, he can hear the old man chuckling. "She may have redecorated," he says.
"Oh," says the Doctor.
There is no console anymore, no grating, no ramp, no support beams. None of her old skins, all wiped away without a trace. Instead, there's just a round white room with a great ball of light at the center, a little pulsar that seems to inhale and exhale with the regular rhythm of a single heartbeat. It turns slowly, sparking in small flares and glimmering as it rotates. He can feel the light where it touches the skin of his face and neck, the backs of his hands. It makes the small hairs stand up, like a caress.
"Beautiful things, these ships," says the man, at his elbow. "Wish I'd thought of them first."
"What is this?"
"You don't recognize her?" The old man gives him a look of undisguised scorn, which the Doctor really rather resents. Hasn't he just died and gone to- nowhere, after all? He could use a bit of slack with the mental calculations. "Look closer." So the Doctor leans in and stares into that white light, shimmering blue and yellow in certain moments, now bright gold, like the cloud of a nebula or the halo of a star.
"Blon," he says. "Blon Fel-Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen."
"That's not quite what I was expecting you to say, but keep going," says the man.
"She got turned back into an egg," he says. His hands are trembling. "She started over, got a second chance. She looked into the heart of the TARDIS, and the heart of the TARDIS is really-" he stops, stares.
"Always said you were bright," says the old man.
"But you're- you must be, if we're here, and you're-" the Doctor rambles, flabbergasted. "This is the heart of the TARDIS. The actual heart of the TARDIS. And if we're here, standing here, then this is the heart of the black hole. We're actually inside the black hole. And you- you're you. Aren't you?" The old man scowls, but doesn't object to the train of thought. "Him. You're Omega." The greatest hero of the ancient times, the actual father of time and relative dimension in space, glances over at the Doctor with a face like he's been sucking a lemon.
"Ah," he says. "A dismissive nickname I got when I was twenty-seven. So delighted to hear it again."
"I'm sorry," the Doctor says. His brain whirls. "This is really the true Eye-"
"Don't call it that," the old man snaps. "Don't say that foolish thing to me. It hasn't actually brought much harmony, that I'm aware of." They stand in silence for a while, watching the bright star turn slow circles before them. He's never seen it before, like this. Staring into the heart of the ship was at best an exercise in regeneration and carried a high probability of setting one's entire consciousness on fire. But if this is really the core of time, it feels- good. Warm, instead of scorching. He wonders if Rose can see this- if Rose still exists, now, in this place, or if she was washed away with the rest of the programming. If she's entered the universe now, like he has. Gone into the dust. He doesn't feel sad, or lonely, at that thought. She must be here after all. He barely feels anything but the warmth and peace of this light. He could lose himself in the glow of this miniature star, the shifting colors, the tendrils of flame that flicker out and die in the air. He's always thought she was beautiful, and now he knows. She is. More than he could have imagined. She is a whole world in herself.
"I'm really dead, though," says the Doctor, at last. "Aren't I?"
"Do you feel dead?"
"I don't know." He looks down at his hands. "I don't know what I expected. I never was ginger, after all that. Almost a millennium, and not one red hair."
"There's always next time," says Omega.
"Of course," says the Doctor. And then: "Wait, what?"
"You're sure you want to try again?" Omega asks him. They are kneeling on the floor of the TARDIS now, so close to the core that the Doctor can barely see anything but incandescent, searing light. He can't believe he's about to be- turned back into an egg, for lack of a more appropriate metaphor. Omega clears his throat. "There are no guarantees. Of anything. There it is, that's your warning." The Doctor looks at him.
"How many times have we done this?" he asks. "How many times have I come here?"
"Lots," says Omega, which is just infuriating.
"Have I ever turned it down before?"
"Obviously not," says Omega.
"Is it just- is this just a loop, that I keep repeating? All the same things, and the same choices, over and over and over? Does it ever end differently?"
"Well," says Omega. "There are variables. Trillions of variables. Turning left instead of right," he says. "Meeting someone. Asking a question. Asking it again, a different way." The Doctor feels his hearts skip.
"If there are people I want to see again," he says, very quietly, "important people, if there's someone- if there's someone I need to see again, is there a chance-"
"There's always a chance," says Omega.
The Doctor closes his eyes.
I.
He finds Susan in the east wing of the archives, staring at an exhibit on primitive humanoids and wondering aloud about mobile phones.
"What does out of range mean?" she asks him, round-eyed. She is eight years old, growing like a weed- her hair, especially, in a little dark cloud down to her shoulders. "Our communication devices have a standard range of thirteen thousand megaclicks, and if you use a signal booster-"
"Yes, yes," he says, and shuffles her away, down the hall. She rambles on about communication buffers and he doesn't have the heart to say what he's thinking, the sad hurt that aches inside him when he thinks about Susan using the comm panels, sending messages, typing like her human father, sending video calls. Her telepathy is limited, he knows that. It's cloudy, imprecise. She will never be able to speak to her mother's people in quite the way they can speak to one another. He tries not to think about that- about anything beyond this moment- as they pick out souvenirs. They are ambling down the corridor towards the exit when Susan tugs his hand.
"Grandfather," she says. "Look." She points to an antique TARDIS on a plinth. "A Type 40," she breathes, with the eagerness of a true juvenile gearhead. She's been taking apart the atmospheric regulators in the house lately, and relying on him to put them back together. "Isn't it beautiful?" she says, dragging him closer. "I like this one. It's blue. I bet it's still got original coral. Can we get one, grandfather, can we? A TARDIS?" He looks down at her and the words catch in his throat. He doesn't know. He's hardly qualified and she's- well, he knows what his own people are like. They're not in the business of handing out TARDIS keys to just anyone with a case of wanderlust.
"Perhaps," he says. "Someday."
Susan smiles up at him, her hand tight in his.
That night, when she's asleep- fragile and human-looking against her enormous pillows- he shuts off the lamp and puts away the book of technical specifications she's been demanding he read aloud. He shuffles up to the observatory and tries to find his place in his own texts, and can't. Instead, he stares up at the stars beyond the dome, through a sky that's clear as glass. They burn steadily across an unimaginable distance. Why not, he thinks. For the first time, he dares to dream- however briefly and timidly- of a world beyond the academy, beyond ritual and pomp, beyond the rules of time and space and anything, a world where she can be exactly what she wants to be, exactly as she is. Perhaps this is the moment, their moment. Perhaps this is the start. He closes his eyes and thinks of the first lesson, the one that really stuck. He was just a boy looking into the schism, as it turned circles around itself forever, never stopping, always spiraling up out of itself, making a perfect loop until the end of the world. It should have been scary- and it was- but it was also a nameless peace. To know that nothing is ever really over, ever really gone.
Everything, he thinks, is a beginning.
fin.