had we but world enough, and time | Doctor Who | The (War) Doctor/The Moment
t: had we but world enough, and time
f: Doctor Who
c: The (War) Doctor/The Moment
ch: trope_bingo - 24 hours to live.
r/wc: G/2160
w: Spoilers for The Day of The Doctor - set at the end.
s: “And you weren’t even going to say goodbye,” she says.
n: [Title from To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell. Which is a beautiful poem with a shitty sentiment that I once wrote a whole essay on. Anyway.] I went on AO3 to see if anyone else had written anything with this pairing and NO ONE HAD, SHAME ON YOU ALL, this was like ALL I WANTED FROM THAT EPISODE OMG. Anyway, I haven’t had a chance to rewatch, so minor details might be a bit wobbly.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
- Andrew Marvell
It’s a strange feeling, knowing that you’ve outlived your usefulness, that you can lay it all down and die, and the person you’re about to be will still, after it all, somehow, perhaps be better. Regeneration bites at his fingertips, irreversible, and all he can really summon up is plain relief.
“And you weren’t even going to say goodbye,” she says, and he turns too fast, the world tipping and flaming and swaying as eyes that are no longer his but not yet his struggle to focus.
His tongue hesitates on what are you doing here, sitting on the edge of the TARDIS console with her legs swinging, lower lip caught between her teeth in a sheepish but not necessarily repentant grin.
“I deactivated you,” he says instead, his voice tangled; not quite his own.
She rolls her eyes, and says: “you brought me back with you anyway.”
The box is hidden deep inside the TARDIS, deep inside enough that no one will ever find it, not even him, not even for a tempting minute. He won’t know he still has it when this is all over. He hopes he won’t know he still has it.
“Perhaps you’re supposed to stay in your box,” he suggests, mild, and closes his eyes to pinch the regeneration in its tracks, keep him like this for just a little longer.
“You should take your own advice, one of these days,” she responds. Winks.
The change is rippling through him, stripping out bones and muscles and organs; he won’t be like this for much longer.
He laughs anyway.
-
The Moment laces their fingers together: touching and not touching, real and not real, both of them caught between personalities, not quite existing.
“If the Galaxy Eater can activate itself, we’re all doomed,” he says, looking down at something that should not be happening and yet is. If he looks away, it doesn’t quite feel solid, someone else’s hands, someone else’s body.
“No one should die alone,” she replies simply.
He pulls himself away from her, unsure if the tingles pinging through his knuckles are from her or from himself, from him, the next Doctor pushing against the sinews of this body, this world.
“It’s time,” he tells her, and: “I’m ready.”
The Moment draws her knees up to her chest, huddles her arms around them. For a second, she’s a child, not a creature born half of imagination and half of the morality of machines. For a second, there’s something almost vulnerable in the slip of her mouth, the bat of blackened eyelashes.
“Who says that I was talking about you?”
-
The stars pinwheel across an empty sky, sparkling and screaming and raging against the dying of the light.
“How long have you got?” The Moment asks him.
They sip tea, seated in the TARDIS doorway, while beneath their boots a galaxy spins on and on and on. His tastebuds are flickering - one minute the tea is too sweet, one minute too bitter - and now and then his toes curl with the fight of not yet, not now, just a little longer. What’s happening cannot be undone and he doesn’t even want it to be; still, there are a few more loose ends, a little more to be finished.
“Hours,” he says, shrugging. “Less, if I give in now.”
She purses her lips, and sips her tea. She cannot hold the cup, cannot be drinking the tea, definitely shouldn’t have asked for extra sugar, but he’s happy enough to let them both maintain the surface tension of illusion. This life hasn’t had many quiet moments, without the sound of distant gunfire, without the certain knowledge that what is coming next is worse.
He tries not to think about the fact that his memories are already shredding and scattering. This too shall pass.
“You can’t die,” he reminds her after a while, knowing she can hear everything that he thinks, and trying not to complete the sentence with you were never alive to begin with, because that’s hardly true, not anymore.
“This particular interface will,” she replies. “And you’ll forget me and where I am, and it will be very very lonely for a very long time.”
Not forever, he notes.
“No,” she says aloud, “no, not forever.”
He should destroy her, and he tells her as much.
The Moment laughs sadly. “You won’t, though.”
He should. He should. He should. She props her chin on her hand, watching him with large, patient eyes.
“If you won’t, no one ever will,” she adds. “Wasn’t that what you were born to do? What others wouldn’t?”
For a handful of heartbeats, he thinks about the cravats that became bandages for blood that wasn’t always his own, the tick of the stopwatch that he used to time the space between explosions, the multiple colours in the striped scarf that he used as a tourniquet. Raiding the accessories of other lives for things to ruin in a new existence of frantic survival.
He never thought he’d regenerate again. This would be the end, he would be the last, a bastardised boy under a banner he’d carved when he was much more naïve than he is now.
“I think,” he says carefully, “I think I’m rather too old for that sort of thing, my dear.”
The Moment’s grimace could just about be a grateful smile.
-
“Are you ashamed to be seen with me?” The Moment asks, hair golden in the sunlight, ruffled in the breeze.
“No one else can see you,” he reminds her, for the way she bares her teeth in a grin that’s almost happy, if happiness is something a weapon of destruction can feel in any honest way.
“Do you like having an imaginary friend, for once?” She spins on one toe, and he wonders for a moment about the girl whose face she’s stolen, the girl in the future she deems important enough to help him save a world.
Did he save it? He’s already forgetting. All those lives, sand between his fingers, no matter how tightly he clenched his fists.
“As opposed to what?” he manages.
“Aren’t you usually the imaginary friend?” She frowns, a comically exaggerated picture of annoyance. A child, a woman, and an infinitely powerful machine, all tangled together in torn tights and wild blonde curls, nobody sure about just how far her existence can really stretch. “Perhaps you haven’t done that bit yet.”
“Perhaps not,” he agrees.
In truth, he hasn’t let himself think much about him. About The Doctor. About that man plucking at his ribcage and clawing at his skin, ready to burst through when he can no longer cling onto these last shreds of freedom, these last, well, moments in a life full of inglorious war and frantic decisions. He has saved Gallifrey or damned it to hell, and those boys with their too-dark eyes are still somehow older than he has ever been, with their patched and stained youthful smiles.
They are by an endless sea, reflecting back the rich immutable purple of the sky above, ten thousand worlds away from the burned craters of his ultimate sins. He stands in the valley of the shadow of his death, and The Moment hooks her chin over his shoulder and blows breath he shouldn’t feel into his ear, and says: “well, if you’re not ashamed, then take me dancing, kid.”
“‘Kid’?” he echoes, letting her lead him away from the tangled waves.
The Moment arches an eyebrow, girl and queen and universe destroyer. “I’m older than you’ll ever be,” she tells him, “older than the youngest face you’ll ever wear.”
He thinks, again, that she’s telling him pieces of a future she thinks that he remembers; in any case, that’s no explanation for the reassurance that floods his chest. Or perhaps that’s just his hearts exploding, making way for new ones.
-
His run is lopsided now, a mixture of his own stolid pace and something longer, strides born from legs he doesn’t have yet. The Moment streaks past him, light on unreal feet that leave no prints in the ash, her laughter a thread to tug him onwards.
“Does it always feel this way to save lives?” she asks, pausing to let him catch up; she isn’t even out of breath, because of course she doesn’t breathe.
He isn’t sure that he still has lungs; if the lungs in his chest are the ones that clogged with the dust of Gallifrey as bodies fell around him, or if they’re new ones, ready to take deep lungfuls of something different. Maybe this time it won’t be like that. Maybe this time nobody dies. Maybe this time everybody lives.
“As far as I can remember,” he agrees, and follows the shadow she doesn’t cast all the way back to the TARDIS, the sound of nothing at all exploding behind him as for once he leaves a planet that isn’t burning.
It makes a change.
-
“You’re better at this than I thought you’d be,” The Moment tells him, her hands light on his shoulders, both there and not there, music drifting through the windows of a party that they’re not invited to.
“I’m better at this than I thought I’d be,” he allows, “this lifetime hasn’t had much time for dancing.”
She tips her head in acknowledgement, her boots soundless on the ground. He realises that she won’t ever have danced before, won’t have stood beneath cool bright starlight in a year forgotten by most of this planet by the end of it. He’s lived so many lives it’s sometimes hard to look at them all, and The Moment has never lived anything at all.
“Don’t pity me,” she warns, twirls and catches his hands. She bites her lip, and says: “it’s different, the next time we do this.”
He doesn’t bother telling her that his time has dwindled to minutes, that she has to return to her box, that this will never happen again and, once it’s finished, will never have happened, a memory that won’t live on in anyone’s mind. He’s created events in these final hours that erase themselves as fast as they happen: a legacy for nobody at all.
A man with his legacies spread around the universe for everyone to spit upon, there’s something he likes about the disposability of the pieces of his life he’s living now: something just for him, and perhaps for a couple of boxes containing far more than they appear to on the outside.
“We won’t do this again,” he says, with finality, with sorrow, with relief.
“You’re not the only Doctor who dances,” she tells him.
He thinks about the girl she isn’t, and then he doesn’t.
“Are you the only Bad Wolf who dances?” he asks.
“I think I am,” she agrees.
He lets her go, and the regeneration is roaring like a caged animal, like a wave about to break, like a star about to die. Irrevocable splinters are gathering in his teeth, behind his eyes, down his back, and he can barely see the TARDIS as he staggers toward her, wanting to press his final breaths into her embrace.
He can’t look behind, to see if The Moment follows.
-
(The young prince, bored at a party he didn’t want to attend and hiding behind the curtains from his bossy parents, will remember him for the rest of his life: the old man dancing with himself in the garden, what looked like fire flickering down his fingers.)
-
“‘And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’,” The Moment tells him, watching him with eyes glowing gold, and he’s losing so much of this so fast, the faces he will one day see in the mirror, the sacrifice that wasn’t a sacrifice, the hope that he knows will extinguish when everything changes. “That’s what you say, isn’t it?”
She’s keeping her distance, the energy is roiling off him like steam, gold-bright and bittersweet, and the TARDIS is glittering and trembling around him, anticipating the change.
“You can say whatever you like,” he tells her, pressing his shaking hands to the console to try and keep them steady.
“Alright then,” she says, tilting her head. “You hate to be alone. Whoever you are, whatever you look like, you like to have people with you. Companions. Assistants. Friends.”
The words are pinpricks, but they sting anyway. He has been on this road for longer than he will admit, and the steps were ever so solitary.
“Perhaps I was yours,” she muses. Her voice is sad and hopeful and for a second she’s not a machine, she’s just a woman. Just someone else who has been alone for a long, long time.
“Perhaps you were,” he agrees, and she steps forward into the glowing, burning, shifting mass of his arms and his chest and his mouth and then, in the end, both of them are gone.
-
f: Doctor Who
c: The (War) Doctor/The Moment
ch: trope_bingo - 24 hours to live.
r/wc: G/2160
w: Spoilers for The Day of The Doctor - set at the end.
s: “And you weren’t even going to say goodbye,” she says.
n: [Title from To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell. Which is a beautiful poem with a shitty sentiment that I once wrote a whole essay on. Anyway.] I went on AO3 to see if anyone else had written anything with this pairing and NO ONE HAD, SHAME ON YOU ALL, this was like ALL I WANTED FROM THAT EPISODE OMG. Anyway, I haven’t had a chance to rewatch, so minor details might be a bit wobbly.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
- Andrew Marvell
It’s a strange feeling, knowing that you’ve outlived your usefulness, that you can lay it all down and die, and the person you’re about to be will still, after it all, somehow, perhaps be better. Regeneration bites at his fingertips, irreversible, and all he can really summon up is plain relief.
“And you weren’t even going to say goodbye,” she says, and he turns too fast, the world tipping and flaming and swaying as eyes that are no longer his but not yet his struggle to focus.
His tongue hesitates on what are you doing here, sitting on the edge of the TARDIS console with her legs swinging, lower lip caught between her teeth in a sheepish but not necessarily repentant grin.
“I deactivated you,” he says instead, his voice tangled; not quite his own.
She rolls her eyes, and says: “you brought me back with you anyway.”
The box is hidden deep inside the TARDIS, deep inside enough that no one will ever find it, not even him, not even for a tempting minute. He won’t know he still has it when this is all over. He hopes he won’t know he still has it.
“Perhaps you’re supposed to stay in your box,” he suggests, mild, and closes his eyes to pinch the regeneration in its tracks, keep him like this for just a little longer.
“You should take your own advice, one of these days,” she responds. Winks.
The change is rippling through him, stripping out bones and muscles and organs; he won’t be like this for much longer.
He laughs anyway.
-
The Moment laces their fingers together: touching and not touching, real and not real, both of them caught between personalities, not quite existing.
“If the Galaxy Eater can activate itself, we’re all doomed,” he says, looking down at something that should not be happening and yet is. If he looks away, it doesn’t quite feel solid, someone else’s hands, someone else’s body.
“No one should die alone,” she replies simply.
He pulls himself away from her, unsure if the tingles pinging through his knuckles are from her or from himself, from him, the next Doctor pushing against the sinews of this body, this world.
“It’s time,” he tells her, and: “I’m ready.”
The Moment draws her knees up to her chest, huddles her arms around them. For a second, she’s a child, not a creature born half of imagination and half of the morality of machines. For a second, there’s something almost vulnerable in the slip of her mouth, the bat of blackened eyelashes.
“Who says that I was talking about you?”
-
The stars pinwheel across an empty sky, sparkling and screaming and raging against the dying of the light.
“How long have you got?” The Moment asks him.
They sip tea, seated in the TARDIS doorway, while beneath their boots a galaxy spins on and on and on. His tastebuds are flickering - one minute the tea is too sweet, one minute too bitter - and now and then his toes curl with the fight of not yet, not now, just a little longer. What’s happening cannot be undone and he doesn’t even want it to be; still, there are a few more loose ends, a little more to be finished.
“Hours,” he says, shrugging. “Less, if I give in now.”
She purses her lips, and sips her tea. She cannot hold the cup, cannot be drinking the tea, definitely shouldn’t have asked for extra sugar, but he’s happy enough to let them both maintain the surface tension of illusion. This life hasn’t had many quiet moments, without the sound of distant gunfire, without the certain knowledge that what is coming next is worse.
He tries not to think about the fact that his memories are already shredding and scattering. This too shall pass.
“You can’t die,” he reminds her after a while, knowing she can hear everything that he thinks, and trying not to complete the sentence with you were never alive to begin with, because that’s hardly true, not anymore.
“This particular interface will,” she replies. “And you’ll forget me and where I am, and it will be very very lonely for a very long time.”
Not forever, he notes.
“No,” she says aloud, “no, not forever.”
He should destroy her, and he tells her as much.
The Moment laughs sadly. “You won’t, though.”
He should. He should. He should. She props her chin on her hand, watching him with large, patient eyes.
“If you won’t, no one ever will,” she adds. “Wasn’t that what you were born to do? What others wouldn’t?”
For a handful of heartbeats, he thinks about the cravats that became bandages for blood that wasn’t always his own, the tick of the stopwatch that he used to time the space between explosions, the multiple colours in the striped scarf that he used as a tourniquet. Raiding the accessories of other lives for things to ruin in a new existence of frantic survival.
He never thought he’d regenerate again. This would be the end, he would be the last, a bastardised boy under a banner he’d carved when he was much more naïve than he is now.
“I think,” he says carefully, “I think I’m rather too old for that sort of thing, my dear.”
The Moment’s grimace could just about be a grateful smile.
-
“Are you ashamed to be seen with me?” The Moment asks, hair golden in the sunlight, ruffled in the breeze.
“No one else can see you,” he reminds her, for the way she bares her teeth in a grin that’s almost happy, if happiness is something a weapon of destruction can feel in any honest way.
“Do you like having an imaginary friend, for once?” She spins on one toe, and he wonders for a moment about the girl whose face she’s stolen, the girl in the future she deems important enough to help him save a world.
Did he save it? He’s already forgetting. All those lives, sand between his fingers, no matter how tightly he clenched his fists.
“As opposed to what?” he manages.
“Aren’t you usually the imaginary friend?” She frowns, a comically exaggerated picture of annoyance. A child, a woman, and an infinitely powerful machine, all tangled together in torn tights and wild blonde curls, nobody sure about just how far her existence can really stretch. “Perhaps you haven’t done that bit yet.”
“Perhaps not,” he agrees.
In truth, he hasn’t let himself think much about him. About The Doctor. About that man plucking at his ribcage and clawing at his skin, ready to burst through when he can no longer cling onto these last shreds of freedom, these last, well, moments in a life full of inglorious war and frantic decisions. He has saved Gallifrey or damned it to hell, and those boys with their too-dark eyes are still somehow older than he has ever been, with their patched and stained youthful smiles.
They are by an endless sea, reflecting back the rich immutable purple of the sky above, ten thousand worlds away from the burned craters of his ultimate sins. He stands in the valley of the shadow of his death, and The Moment hooks her chin over his shoulder and blows breath he shouldn’t feel into his ear, and says: “well, if you’re not ashamed, then take me dancing, kid.”
“‘Kid’?” he echoes, letting her lead him away from the tangled waves.
The Moment arches an eyebrow, girl and queen and universe destroyer. “I’m older than you’ll ever be,” she tells him, “older than the youngest face you’ll ever wear.”
He thinks, again, that she’s telling him pieces of a future she thinks that he remembers; in any case, that’s no explanation for the reassurance that floods his chest. Or perhaps that’s just his hearts exploding, making way for new ones.
-
His run is lopsided now, a mixture of his own stolid pace and something longer, strides born from legs he doesn’t have yet. The Moment streaks past him, light on unreal feet that leave no prints in the ash, her laughter a thread to tug him onwards.
“Does it always feel this way to save lives?” she asks, pausing to let him catch up; she isn’t even out of breath, because of course she doesn’t breathe.
He isn’t sure that he still has lungs; if the lungs in his chest are the ones that clogged with the dust of Gallifrey as bodies fell around him, or if they’re new ones, ready to take deep lungfuls of something different. Maybe this time it won’t be like that. Maybe this time nobody dies. Maybe this time everybody lives.
“As far as I can remember,” he agrees, and follows the shadow she doesn’t cast all the way back to the TARDIS, the sound of nothing at all exploding behind him as for once he leaves a planet that isn’t burning.
It makes a change.
-
“You’re better at this than I thought you’d be,” The Moment tells him, her hands light on his shoulders, both there and not there, music drifting through the windows of a party that they’re not invited to.
“I’m better at this than I thought I’d be,” he allows, “this lifetime hasn’t had much time for dancing.”
She tips her head in acknowledgement, her boots soundless on the ground. He realises that she won’t ever have danced before, won’t have stood beneath cool bright starlight in a year forgotten by most of this planet by the end of it. He’s lived so many lives it’s sometimes hard to look at them all, and The Moment has never lived anything at all.
“Don’t pity me,” she warns, twirls and catches his hands. She bites her lip, and says: “it’s different, the next time we do this.”
He doesn’t bother telling her that his time has dwindled to minutes, that she has to return to her box, that this will never happen again and, once it’s finished, will never have happened, a memory that won’t live on in anyone’s mind. He’s created events in these final hours that erase themselves as fast as they happen: a legacy for nobody at all.
A man with his legacies spread around the universe for everyone to spit upon, there’s something he likes about the disposability of the pieces of his life he’s living now: something just for him, and perhaps for a couple of boxes containing far more than they appear to on the outside.
“We won’t do this again,” he says, with finality, with sorrow, with relief.
“You’re not the only Doctor who dances,” she tells him.
He thinks about the girl she isn’t, and then he doesn’t.
“Are you the only Bad Wolf who dances?” he asks.
“I think I am,” she agrees.
He lets her go, and the regeneration is roaring like a caged animal, like a wave about to break, like a star about to die. Irrevocable splinters are gathering in his teeth, behind his eyes, down his back, and he can barely see the TARDIS as he staggers toward her, wanting to press his final breaths into her embrace.
He can’t look behind, to see if The Moment follows.
-
(The young prince, bored at a party he didn’t want to attend and hiding behind the curtains from his bossy parents, will remember him for the rest of his life: the old man dancing with himself in the garden, what looked like fire flickering down his fingers.)
-
“‘And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’,” The Moment tells him, watching him with eyes glowing gold, and he’s losing so much of this so fast, the faces he will one day see in the mirror, the sacrifice that wasn’t a sacrifice, the hope that he knows will extinguish when everything changes. “That’s what you say, isn’t it?”
She’s keeping her distance, the energy is roiling off him like steam, gold-bright and bittersweet, and the TARDIS is glittering and trembling around him, anticipating the change.
“You can say whatever you like,” he tells her, pressing his shaking hands to the console to try and keep them steady.
“Alright then,” she says, tilting her head. “You hate to be alone. Whoever you are, whatever you look like, you like to have people with you. Companions. Assistants. Friends.”
The words are pinpricks, but they sting anyway. He has been on this road for longer than he will admit, and the steps were ever so solitary.
“Perhaps I was yours,” she muses. Her voice is sad and hopeful and for a second she’s not a machine, she’s just a woman. Just someone else who has been alone for a long, long time.
“Perhaps you were,” he agrees, and she steps forward into the glowing, burning, shifting mass of his arms and his chest and his mouth and then, in the end, both of them are gone.
-