fic: All Follow This and Come to Dust
Title: All Follow This and Come to Dust
Author: lonewytch
Fandom/Characters: Doctor Who; Eleven, Amy, Rory.
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2266
Summary: The screen flickers, freezing for a moment, capturing them both in a soft brush of static. Their forms are stuck, still and immobile, suspended in time and, for one guilty second, he wishes he could keep them that way, have them suspended in this moment forever, Amy with her hair blazing and Rory with his lips stretched in an eternal smile.
A/N: This is set any time between the start of Pond Life and the end of The Power of Three. Basically when the Doctor is sensing that the Ponds are intending to stop travelling with him and is waiting for the day they will. A series of observations from his POV as he watches them one day and remembers things they've done, with a side-order of introspection and angst. Title from Cymbeline.
There’s a click, a hiss, a hum, a judder and she lands (finally) with a groan of protest and a sudden shower of blue sparks from the wiring above him. When she finally sinks into calm, he pats the console and shushes her absent-mindedly, pulling the monitor around smoothly on its rail to face him. He sees them before they enter the Tardis, framed in the lines and corners of the screen; Amy running towards the doors, eyes bright and cheeks flushed with excitement, Rory trailing behind her, lurid green shopping bags in his hands. The screen flickers, freezing for a moment, capturing them both in a soft brush of static. Their forms are stuck, still and immobile, suspended in time and, for one guilty second, he wishes he could keep them that way, have them suspended in this moment forever, Amy with her hair blazing and Rory with his lips stretched in an eternal smile.
But the moment doesn’t hold and soon they are freed from the stillness of the screen and the selfish net of his thoughts. At the sight of them moving towards the Tardis, something spreads its way through his chest. It is as if wings begin to open inside him, extending their span wider and wider with each breath. Space is created within him, expansive and deliriously wide. This space is formed in the shape of the two humans, who right now are running towards the blue doors, and it is filled with warmth and light, making his blood shine its way through the valves of his hearts.
Love.
Love is a funny word in their language: so few letters and such a tiny sound. To him, it doesn’t encompass quite enough; it’s too short, too truncated for the vast thing it describes. Its sound isn’t long or musical enough and the substance seems stitched into the shortness of the word. The equivalent Gallifreyan word is laden with swirling meaning, multifold connotations locked inside its curving form and released through the pitch and intonation of the voice. He rolls his tongue over the word in his native language, feels the shape and the taste of it in his mouth as both the Ponds tumble over his threshold. They carry the sweet air and chaotic sounds of the alien city into the space. The spices and the smoke, the cries of hawkers and the clash of wares all rush into the room alongside them, making only the slightest impression upon him. Amy and Rory Pond. They are the anchor and the mark of the moment, filling the room with their presence; warm and oh-so-very human.
They will go home now this trip is over. He can taste it in the air and read it in their body language. He sees the tilt of their heads and the slight tiredness at the corners of Rory’s eyes. The stability of their small planet is calling to them, beckoning them to plant their feet on its surface, to root themselves there, to only reach up towards the sky, rather than actually move within it, beyond it. To stop. He cannot blame them. How could he? But it’s been too long since he belonged anywhere and his feet are too restless to stop. They will go home to gardening and newspapers, to pavements and jobs. To the fairy lights that glitter brightly in their home and to constellations that litter the night, their shapes fixed as they circle through the black skies. He will travel on, the ever-changing stars his fairy lights, the sights and sounds of the Universe his everyday.
Then the Tardis will feel empty, a space voided.
He won’t feel alone. He never feels completely alone, not really. How can he feel alone when he’s held safe by his ship, wrapped tight into her body and bones, the mystery of her maze of corridors his, her response warm under the turn of his hands. Yet even though he’s pressed close into his eternal companion through the black, he knows he will miss the Ponds with an ache that’s arrow-bright inside him. When they are gone, he will ache and the Tardis will brush her mind softly against his, tentative, reaching gently into him, both questioning his sadness and recognising it all at once. She too will feel the gaps inside her where the Orange Girl and the Pretty One’s room sits vacant, nothing stirring the dust within it. She will save the room, he knows this, she will save it as she always does, keeping and hoarding it along with so many other rooms that lie vacant and empty within her, their memories thick in their stale air (rooms he tries not to think about, lest their corners drag him down into the grey sorrow that sits under their surface). She will save the room and she will keep the door unlocked, ready for them and the lights ready to flicker on and dispel the darkness the minute they step inside. She too will wait for them to come back.
He is not alone by any means. There is the murmur of the console under his palms and the rushing blaze of his ship through the vortex. Yet without them here, separating one day from the next with their sleeping and their waking, it all blends into one. The passing of time becomes meaningless and unmarked by the slice of days. Sidereal time and circadian rhythms do not exist to make any impression on him. Without them clattering through the corridors, filling the ship with the sound of their voices and the smell of coffee, the twists and turn of his ship feel too empty, too silent. When he moves through them, he feels like a ghost.
Yet now, they are here for a time at least. They burst through the doors and Amy immediately dumps her bags on the floor and begins talking at a million miles an hour, her voice brimming with all she has seen. Rory stands to the side, the bags he is carrying clasped forgotten in his hands, just watching her and smiling. Her beauty is reflected in the lines of his face. The Doctor stands, hearing the shape the sounds make in the air yet not really listening. Oh, if you asked him to recount the conversation, the list of shops and curiosities, the litany of events and sights Amy is currently regaling him with, he could repeat every word of the conversation back in exactly the right order. In fact, he could recount every word of the conversation backwards in exactly the right reverse order.
Yet, he is not really taking it in right now because, what he is doing instead, is watching Amy and Rory closely. He is drinking them in, cataloguing their movements and gestures, their bone structure and the hue of their hair, the thousands of expressions and micro expressions that pass over their faces. He is storing them away in the vast library of his memory, in a vault behind thick doors. He keeps on doing this lately. It’s become a compulsion as more and more time goes by, as they are pulled ever closer by the iron gravity of the Earth’s core.
There are so many things stored away in his memory, years and years of time folded up inside him, and must have an entire landscape within his brain given over to the Ponds. He traverses, supplements and reinforces this territory every time he sees them now, adding in colour and flourishes, cradling this part of his internal landscape as if it were glass. When he maps out this bit of his inner-geography, certain memories stick out in a relief so sharp they snag on his mind making him catch his breath.
Like this: Amy’s hair, an orange flame so bright that, for him, it outdid even the shedding of the leaves on Athena 6. Visited from millions of miles around, the small planet was host to several forests of giant, stately trees with trunks so wide it would take ten people with arms stretched wide to encircle, crowned with thick, twisting branches which were hung with smooth leaves the size of small ponies. Once every cycle around their binary stars, they would shed these leaves in a rough approximation of the autumn on Earth. It was a place to visit in order to see every colour imaginable along the red-orange-yellow-brown spectrum overlapping and layering over each other; a place to see some colours that couldn’t be imagined at all.
He had taken them there and the three of them had stood together in a mist so (literally) heavy that, as the light of twin suns broke through, it sank to the ground shrouding their ankles and feet. Rory had held onto one of Amy’s hands and he had taken the other, linking the three of them ever-aware of how Amy had always been the pivot around which they both moved. They had watched together as a soft, orange glow began to appear through the opaque window of the sinking mist, water droplets reflecting and refracting the colour. Then gradually the fiery hue become saturated with more and more intense colour, ripples and layers of red upon orange, upon yellow, upon brown. Finally, shapes had begun to resolve through the mist, as the last of it dropped like silk to trail like lazy spectres around their ankles. As the sun broke fully through, he felt Amy’s hands tighten on his, heard Rory’s sharp intake of breath at the sight of the massive twisted gnarled trunks and the wide leaves with colours so bright they made you squint. He turned to look at both of them, Rory smiling, his profile lit with joy, Amy’s hair under the sun. Both of them brighter than all the colours before him.
Today their faces are equally as happy as he watches them. He glides his fingers over the console as Amy speaks, as she takes items out of the shopping bags to show to him, grumbling good-naturedly when he doesn’t show enough enthusiasm. Impressions wash over him picked up from Rory and Amy by his ship, routed through her psychic circuits and then seeping into his skin where he glides his fingertips across her. Happiness. Excitement. Joy. But under it all, like a hook in the belly, the tug of the Earth and normality.
*
Later that night, his thoughts will not let him be still so he roams the corridors, disturbing the air before him with the thud of his stride. He can hear the low vibration of the Tardis, the throb of her living presence ever-present just beyond the walls as he walks. He knows where he is going but does not want to think too hard or for too long upon why he is doing it.
He forces himself to revisit some of the old rooms, places that once breathed with life, rooms that were once filled with colour, sound and laughter; rooms inhabited at different points in time by those he had loved and then lost. Just a small space of a crack of each door, just a whisper of a glimpse into their interior - this is all he dares. The doors are stiff and the air in the rooms slightly stale from lack of use, but they are still beloved to him and he would never disturb or change them. All are archived and backed up in case of mishap. She knew he would want to keep them, stashed far away in the maze of her corridors where only he can find them. He knows, in turn, that she wants to keep them too, hoarding them like precious jewels and singing out her endless song into their vacant spaces.
The last room he visits is theirs. The door stands open, a black slice of darkness against the softly buzzing lights in the corridor. The smell of Amy’s perfume hangs in the air of the room and drifts out into the corridor; jasmine and musk lingering in the warmth. Amy and Rory’s shapes are visible amongst the tangle of sheets. A pale arm, blue-hued in the darkness of the room. A halo of hair. The soft metronome of their breathing.
Everything passes. Who better than him to know this? There are slight wrinkles at the corner of Amy’s eyes now, more pronounced, deepening as she smiles and laughs. There is the way Rory holds himself carefully, the way earlier on, he had placed the bags on the floor gingerly, as if his back twinged a little. Their youth is passing into maturity and in the end they will fade into everything that comes after, just like all the others: inevitable endings, the relentlessness of mortality, the unknown. It all comes to ash eventually, even he will too someday. Stars turn back to dust, energy is transmuted, everything changes.
In the end, though, the Universe moves on. So, he supposes, must he. But he takes comfort in this: the Universe remembers itself through its own small losses and victories; in pulses of radiation and scatterings of light travelling through the black; in new forms perpetually being made and then destroyed; in the underpinning physics that say that none of it can ever ever be completely lost forever, none of it can ever become completely unknown to itself. Nothing is utterly lost.
Ultimately, the Universe remembers itself through the inhale and exhale of the whole big, mad and glorious chaos being recreated over and over.
As for him….he remembers himself through them.
Author: lonewytch
Fandom/Characters: Doctor Who; Eleven, Amy, Rory.
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2266
Summary: The screen flickers, freezing for a moment, capturing them both in a soft brush of static. Their forms are stuck, still and immobile, suspended in time and, for one guilty second, he wishes he could keep them that way, have them suspended in this moment forever, Amy with her hair blazing and Rory with his lips stretched in an eternal smile.
A/N: This is set any time between the start of Pond Life and the end of The Power of Three. Basically when the Doctor is sensing that the Ponds are intending to stop travelling with him and is waiting for the day they will. A series of observations from his POV as he watches them one day and remembers things they've done, with a side-order of introspection and angst. Title from Cymbeline.
There’s a click, a hiss, a hum, a judder and she lands (finally) with a groan of protest and a sudden shower of blue sparks from the wiring above him. When she finally sinks into calm, he pats the console and shushes her absent-mindedly, pulling the monitor around smoothly on its rail to face him. He sees them before they enter the Tardis, framed in the lines and corners of the screen; Amy running towards the doors, eyes bright and cheeks flushed with excitement, Rory trailing behind her, lurid green shopping bags in his hands. The screen flickers, freezing for a moment, capturing them both in a soft brush of static. Their forms are stuck, still and immobile, suspended in time and, for one guilty second, he wishes he could keep them that way, have them suspended in this moment forever, Amy with her hair blazing and Rory with his lips stretched in an eternal smile.
But the moment doesn’t hold and soon they are freed from the stillness of the screen and the selfish net of his thoughts. At the sight of them moving towards the Tardis, something spreads its way through his chest. It is as if wings begin to open inside him, extending their span wider and wider with each breath. Space is created within him, expansive and deliriously wide. This space is formed in the shape of the two humans, who right now are running towards the blue doors, and it is filled with warmth and light, making his blood shine its way through the valves of his hearts.
Love.
Love is a funny word in their language: so few letters and such a tiny sound. To him, it doesn’t encompass quite enough; it’s too short, too truncated for the vast thing it describes. Its sound isn’t long or musical enough and the substance seems stitched into the shortness of the word. The equivalent Gallifreyan word is laden with swirling meaning, multifold connotations locked inside its curving form and released through the pitch and intonation of the voice. He rolls his tongue over the word in his native language, feels the shape and the taste of it in his mouth as both the Ponds tumble over his threshold. They carry the sweet air and chaotic sounds of the alien city into the space. The spices and the smoke, the cries of hawkers and the clash of wares all rush into the room alongside them, making only the slightest impression upon him. Amy and Rory Pond. They are the anchor and the mark of the moment, filling the room with their presence; warm and oh-so-very human.
They will go home now this trip is over. He can taste it in the air and read it in their body language. He sees the tilt of their heads and the slight tiredness at the corners of Rory’s eyes. The stability of their small planet is calling to them, beckoning them to plant their feet on its surface, to root themselves there, to only reach up towards the sky, rather than actually move within it, beyond it. To stop. He cannot blame them. How could he? But it’s been too long since he belonged anywhere and his feet are too restless to stop. They will go home to gardening and newspapers, to pavements and jobs. To the fairy lights that glitter brightly in their home and to constellations that litter the night, their shapes fixed as they circle through the black skies. He will travel on, the ever-changing stars his fairy lights, the sights and sounds of the Universe his everyday.
Then the Tardis will feel empty, a space voided.
He won’t feel alone. He never feels completely alone, not really. How can he feel alone when he’s held safe by his ship, wrapped tight into her body and bones, the mystery of her maze of corridors his, her response warm under the turn of his hands. Yet even though he’s pressed close into his eternal companion through the black, he knows he will miss the Ponds with an ache that’s arrow-bright inside him. When they are gone, he will ache and the Tardis will brush her mind softly against his, tentative, reaching gently into him, both questioning his sadness and recognising it all at once. She too will feel the gaps inside her where the Orange Girl and the Pretty One’s room sits vacant, nothing stirring the dust within it. She will save the room, he knows this, she will save it as she always does, keeping and hoarding it along with so many other rooms that lie vacant and empty within her, their memories thick in their stale air (rooms he tries not to think about, lest their corners drag him down into the grey sorrow that sits under their surface). She will save the room and she will keep the door unlocked, ready for them and the lights ready to flicker on and dispel the darkness the minute they step inside. She too will wait for them to come back.
He is not alone by any means. There is the murmur of the console under his palms and the rushing blaze of his ship through the vortex. Yet without them here, separating one day from the next with their sleeping and their waking, it all blends into one. The passing of time becomes meaningless and unmarked by the slice of days. Sidereal time and circadian rhythms do not exist to make any impression on him. Without them clattering through the corridors, filling the ship with the sound of their voices and the smell of coffee, the twists and turn of his ship feel too empty, too silent. When he moves through them, he feels like a ghost.
Yet now, they are here for a time at least. They burst through the doors and Amy immediately dumps her bags on the floor and begins talking at a million miles an hour, her voice brimming with all she has seen. Rory stands to the side, the bags he is carrying clasped forgotten in his hands, just watching her and smiling. Her beauty is reflected in the lines of his face. The Doctor stands, hearing the shape the sounds make in the air yet not really listening. Oh, if you asked him to recount the conversation, the list of shops and curiosities, the litany of events and sights Amy is currently regaling him with, he could repeat every word of the conversation back in exactly the right order. In fact, he could recount every word of the conversation backwards in exactly the right reverse order.
Yet, he is not really taking it in right now because, what he is doing instead, is watching Amy and Rory closely. He is drinking them in, cataloguing their movements and gestures, their bone structure and the hue of their hair, the thousands of expressions and micro expressions that pass over their faces. He is storing them away in the vast library of his memory, in a vault behind thick doors. He keeps on doing this lately. It’s become a compulsion as more and more time goes by, as they are pulled ever closer by the iron gravity of the Earth’s core.
There are so many things stored away in his memory, years and years of time folded up inside him, and must have an entire landscape within his brain given over to the Ponds. He traverses, supplements and reinforces this territory every time he sees them now, adding in colour and flourishes, cradling this part of his internal landscape as if it were glass. When he maps out this bit of his inner-geography, certain memories stick out in a relief so sharp they snag on his mind making him catch his breath.
Like this: Amy’s hair, an orange flame so bright that, for him, it outdid even the shedding of the leaves on Athena 6. Visited from millions of miles around, the small planet was host to several forests of giant, stately trees with trunks so wide it would take ten people with arms stretched wide to encircle, crowned with thick, twisting branches which were hung with smooth leaves the size of small ponies. Once every cycle around their binary stars, they would shed these leaves in a rough approximation of the autumn on Earth. It was a place to visit in order to see every colour imaginable along the red-orange-yellow-brown spectrum overlapping and layering over each other; a place to see some colours that couldn’t be imagined at all.
He had taken them there and the three of them had stood together in a mist so (literally) heavy that, as the light of twin suns broke through, it sank to the ground shrouding their ankles and feet. Rory had held onto one of Amy’s hands and he had taken the other, linking the three of them ever-aware of how Amy had always been the pivot around which they both moved. They had watched together as a soft, orange glow began to appear through the opaque window of the sinking mist, water droplets reflecting and refracting the colour. Then gradually the fiery hue become saturated with more and more intense colour, ripples and layers of red upon orange, upon yellow, upon brown. Finally, shapes had begun to resolve through the mist, as the last of it dropped like silk to trail like lazy spectres around their ankles. As the sun broke fully through, he felt Amy’s hands tighten on his, heard Rory’s sharp intake of breath at the sight of the massive twisted gnarled trunks and the wide leaves with colours so bright they made you squint. He turned to look at both of them, Rory smiling, his profile lit with joy, Amy’s hair under the sun. Both of them brighter than all the colours before him.
Today their faces are equally as happy as he watches them. He glides his fingers over the console as Amy speaks, as she takes items out of the shopping bags to show to him, grumbling good-naturedly when he doesn’t show enough enthusiasm. Impressions wash over him picked up from Rory and Amy by his ship, routed through her psychic circuits and then seeping into his skin where he glides his fingertips across her. Happiness. Excitement. Joy. But under it all, like a hook in the belly, the tug of the Earth and normality.
*
Later that night, his thoughts will not let him be still so he roams the corridors, disturbing the air before him with the thud of his stride. He can hear the low vibration of the Tardis, the throb of her living presence ever-present just beyond the walls as he walks. He knows where he is going but does not want to think too hard or for too long upon why he is doing it.
He forces himself to revisit some of the old rooms, places that once breathed with life, rooms that were once filled with colour, sound and laughter; rooms inhabited at different points in time by those he had loved and then lost. Just a small space of a crack of each door, just a whisper of a glimpse into their interior - this is all he dares. The doors are stiff and the air in the rooms slightly stale from lack of use, but they are still beloved to him and he would never disturb or change them. All are archived and backed up in case of mishap. She knew he would want to keep them, stashed far away in the maze of her corridors where only he can find them. He knows, in turn, that she wants to keep them too, hoarding them like precious jewels and singing out her endless song into their vacant spaces.
The last room he visits is theirs. The door stands open, a black slice of darkness against the softly buzzing lights in the corridor. The smell of Amy’s perfume hangs in the air of the room and drifts out into the corridor; jasmine and musk lingering in the warmth. Amy and Rory’s shapes are visible amongst the tangle of sheets. A pale arm, blue-hued in the darkness of the room. A halo of hair. The soft metronome of their breathing.
Everything passes. Who better than him to know this? There are slight wrinkles at the corner of Amy’s eyes now, more pronounced, deepening as she smiles and laughs. There is the way Rory holds himself carefully, the way earlier on, he had placed the bags on the floor gingerly, as if his back twinged a little. Their youth is passing into maturity and in the end they will fade into everything that comes after, just like all the others: inevitable endings, the relentlessness of mortality, the unknown. It all comes to ash eventually, even he will too someday. Stars turn back to dust, energy is transmuted, everything changes.
In the end, though, the Universe moves on. So, he supposes, must he. But he takes comfort in this: the Universe remembers itself through its own small losses and victories; in pulses of radiation and scatterings of light travelling through the black; in new forms perpetually being made and then destroyed; in the underpinning physics that say that none of it can ever ever be completely lost forever, none of it can ever become completely unknown to itself. Nothing is utterly lost.
Ultimately, the Universe remembers itself through the inhale and exhale of the whole big, mad and glorious chaos being recreated over and over.
As for him….he remembers himself through them.