Remix the Second
And here's the one I wrote for remixredux08. Interestingly enough, eve11 also remixed this one, for remixthedrabble. Hers took an entirely different approach than mine does, though. Personally, I kind of like hers better, but don't let that fact bias you.
Title: Holes in the Universe (The Enhanced Percussion Remix)
Author: astrogirl2
Summary: The Eighth Doctor, the Time War, the Eye of Harmony, and...?
Rating: PG-ish.
Fandom: Doctor Who
Warnings: Mild slash.
Spoilers: The Doctor Who TV movie, New Who through the end of series 3.
Length: ~1,200 words.
Title, Author and URL of original story: "Still Alone" by vandonovan.
Holes in the Universe (The Enhanced Percussion Remix)
War has become the Doctor's life.
He is not a soldier, not exactly. Not yet. He prefers to think of himself as a field surgeon, suturing together the wounds that battle has inflicted on space and time. It's a never-ending task: not only are there more of them with every passing moment, but every moment there always have been more.
The Doctor works ceaselessly. Here, he closes down a rift before it can suck an inhabited planet in to be consumed by its own past. There, he pinches off a piece of spacetime, removing it from reality before the temporal chaos growing inside it can expand to devour a galaxy. (He tries not to think too much about the beings trapped inside. He succeeds better than he would like.) Over and over, he nudges fractured timelines back into some semblance of their proper form. Sometimes there are fewer Daleks in them when he finishes. Often there are more. It goes on and on for... Well, he can't say "day after day," because even his sense of time is broken, now.
He no longer sleeps. He admits to himself that this is less because he cannot spare whatever it is that now passes for the time than because he is afraid of what he might meet in his dreams. Instead, when he requires rest, or at least some form of rejuvenation, he comes here. To the Cloister Room.
It's funny. For a long time, he avoided this place, for one reason or another. But there is an atmosphere, an energy here at the center of his TARDIS that he finds strangely soothing. And when he places his hand on the cover of his link to the Eye of Harmony, he feels closer, somehow, to Gallifrey. It's a comforting feeling, now, rather than a stifling one. And there is something else, as well...
When he opens the TARDIS's Eye and closes his own eyes, if he goes very still and clears his mind -- a sort of meditation, safer than sleep -- he fancies he can hear... What? A whisper, perhaps. A whisper calling to him, and a faint, familiar brush against his mind, dark, and cold, and paradoxically warm.
He tells himself it's probably his imagination, or some strange trick of the TARDIS, damaged and traumatized as she is. This Eye is a conduit, after all, to the true Eye of Harmony on Gallifrey. A black hole. The black hole, the oldest and most powerful of them all. Nothing can truly exist inside it, and nothing can ever reach out. It's a place where space ceases to exist and Time slows to infinite stillness.
And yet, of course, there are tricks with which to cheat one's way out of non-existence, and if anything can overcome the natural tendencies of Time, it's a sufficiently determined Time Lord. He's seen the former, more than once, and he's living proof of the latter. So far.
It's paranoia, he tells himself. Starting at shadows. Looking for trouble where there is none, when there's trouble enough all around. Or stirring up thoughts of the past, perhaps, to avoid thinking of the future. Still... Still, when the whisper seems to call his name, when he leans forward in the light of the Eye, far enough that a moment's loss of balance might plunge him into oblivion forever, and opens his mind and listens, he feels... a touch. Like skin, like warm leather, like lips. Hot breath and the echo of laughter slide across his ear. Sharp, sudden pain bites into his mouth, and he tastes blood on his tongue, tastes another mouth, and his hearts flutter and beat out of step...
Memories. That's all.
He talks to it sometimes, though. The way one might talk to someone in a coma, perhaps, or hold an imaginary conversation with a person who's left the room. "Hello, old enemy," he says, or sometimes "old friend."
"What would you think if you could see me now, I wonder?" he asks. "Would you laugh? Gloat over how terrible I'm looking? How tired? Defeating myself now with my own do-gooding, you'd probably call it. Working myself into an early grave fighting a losing battle on behalf a universe that probably won't remember any of it happened, in the end. Likely you'd be unhappy it wasn't you and mount a campaign to take me out yourself, before the Daleks got the chance to claim the kill. Or maybe you'd help me. Maybe there's that much of you left. Remember, sometimes, in the old days? We'd... We'd..."
He can never bring himself to continue that line of thought, not out loud. Not where someone who doesn't exist in this reality might theoretically be able to hear it if he did. But he does ponder the thought, sometimes. The Master was -- is? -- was utterly brilliant, and utterly ruthless. And now that the Time Lords' numbers are dwindling, so many of their finest minds lost beyond even the reach of the Matrix... It wouldn't be an impossible plan. From the outside, one could reach in. With access to the Master's biodata and enough care, enough power, he could be reconstructed. He could. And if they can't prevent the worst from happening, it would be terribly fitting, somehow, for the two of them to face the end together.
But, no. Too risky, he tells himself. A bad idea to bring in a new, chaotic element now, especially one with a tenuous grip on sanity and a personal vendetta against the only person so far who's willing to run about performing triage on the cosmos. But also, more quietly, Let him be, let him rest. Let him, at least, not have to suffer this.
If the presence that might be his imagination has any opinions on the matter, it keeps them to itself. Or at least, if there are words, he can never make them out. He tells himself it's probably for the best.
**
When it's all over, when Gallifrey is less than dust and the Doctor wears a new face that has come to him already pre-etched with pain, he stands over the Eye again, and listens.
He hears nothing. He feels nothing. If what was there was only memory and hope, then they are gone. If it was something else, it's just as gone. Dead now, he figures, either way.
It never occurs to him that someone else might have had the same idea he did.
**
When he meets the Master again, despite a year's worth of opportunity, he can never quite bring himself to ask: Do you remember that? Was that real? Was that you? He especially does not ask, Would things have been different if I had been the one to free you? Whatever the answers are, he doesn't believe that it will do either of them any good to hear them.
In the end he whispers the questions anyway, to a silent body cradled in his arms. But wherever the Master has fallen to this time, it is nowhere he can ever hope to reach.
**
He does not go into the Cloister Room again. Nor does he sleep, at least not much. But sometimes when he closes his eyes, he can still almost believe that he hears laughter, and feels the touch of lips.
Title: Holes in the Universe (The Enhanced Percussion Remix)
Author: astrogirl2
Summary: The Eighth Doctor, the Time War, the Eye of Harmony, and...?
Rating: PG-ish.
Fandom: Doctor Who
Warnings: Mild slash.
Spoilers: The Doctor Who TV movie, New Who through the end of series 3.
Length: ~1,200 words.
Title, Author and URL of original story: "Still Alone" by vandonovan.
Holes in the Universe (The Enhanced Percussion Remix)
War has become the Doctor's life.
He is not a soldier, not exactly. Not yet. He prefers to think of himself as a field surgeon, suturing together the wounds that battle has inflicted on space and time. It's a never-ending task: not only are there more of them with every passing moment, but every moment there always have been more.
The Doctor works ceaselessly. Here, he closes down a rift before it can suck an inhabited planet in to be consumed by its own past. There, he pinches off a piece of spacetime, removing it from reality before the temporal chaos growing inside it can expand to devour a galaxy. (He tries not to think too much about the beings trapped inside. He succeeds better than he would like.) Over and over, he nudges fractured timelines back into some semblance of their proper form. Sometimes there are fewer Daleks in them when he finishes. Often there are more. It goes on and on for... Well, he can't say "day after day," because even his sense of time is broken, now.
He no longer sleeps. He admits to himself that this is less because he cannot spare whatever it is that now passes for the time than because he is afraid of what he might meet in his dreams. Instead, when he requires rest, or at least some form of rejuvenation, he comes here. To the Cloister Room.
It's funny. For a long time, he avoided this place, for one reason or another. But there is an atmosphere, an energy here at the center of his TARDIS that he finds strangely soothing. And when he places his hand on the cover of his link to the Eye of Harmony, he feels closer, somehow, to Gallifrey. It's a comforting feeling, now, rather than a stifling one. And there is something else, as well...
When he opens the TARDIS's Eye and closes his own eyes, if he goes very still and clears his mind -- a sort of meditation, safer than sleep -- he fancies he can hear... What? A whisper, perhaps. A whisper calling to him, and a faint, familiar brush against his mind, dark, and cold, and paradoxically warm.
He tells himself it's probably his imagination, or some strange trick of the TARDIS, damaged and traumatized as she is. This Eye is a conduit, after all, to the true Eye of Harmony on Gallifrey. A black hole. The black hole, the oldest and most powerful of them all. Nothing can truly exist inside it, and nothing can ever reach out. It's a place where space ceases to exist and Time slows to infinite stillness.
And yet, of course, there are tricks with which to cheat one's way out of non-existence, and if anything can overcome the natural tendencies of Time, it's a sufficiently determined Time Lord. He's seen the former, more than once, and he's living proof of the latter. So far.
It's paranoia, he tells himself. Starting at shadows. Looking for trouble where there is none, when there's trouble enough all around. Or stirring up thoughts of the past, perhaps, to avoid thinking of the future. Still... Still, when the whisper seems to call his name, when he leans forward in the light of the Eye, far enough that a moment's loss of balance might plunge him into oblivion forever, and opens his mind and listens, he feels... a touch. Like skin, like warm leather, like lips. Hot breath and the echo of laughter slide across his ear. Sharp, sudden pain bites into his mouth, and he tastes blood on his tongue, tastes another mouth, and his hearts flutter and beat out of step...
Memories. That's all.
He talks to it sometimes, though. The way one might talk to someone in a coma, perhaps, or hold an imaginary conversation with a person who's left the room. "Hello, old enemy," he says, or sometimes "old friend."
"What would you think if you could see me now, I wonder?" he asks. "Would you laugh? Gloat over how terrible I'm looking? How tired? Defeating myself now with my own do-gooding, you'd probably call it. Working myself into an early grave fighting a losing battle on behalf a universe that probably won't remember any of it happened, in the end. Likely you'd be unhappy it wasn't you and mount a campaign to take me out yourself, before the Daleks got the chance to claim the kill. Or maybe you'd help me. Maybe there's that much of you left. Remember, sometimes, in the old days? We'd... We'd..."
He can never bring himself to continue that line of thought, not out loud. Not where someone who doesn't exist in this reality might theoretically be able to hear it if he did. But he does ponder the thought, sometimes. The Master was -- is? -- was utterly brilliant, and utterly ruthless. And now that the Time Lords' numbers are dwindling, so many of their finest minds lost beyond even the reach of the Matrix... It wouldn't be an impossible plan. From the outside, one could reach in. With access to the Master's biodata and enough care, enough power, he could be reconstructed. He could. And if they can't prevent the worst from happening, it would be terribly fitting, somehow, for the two of them to face the end together.
But, no. Too risky, he tells himself. A bad idea to bring in a new, chaotic element now, especially one with a tenuous grip on sanity and a personal vendetta against the only person so far who's willing to run about performing triage on the cosmos. But also, more quietly, Let him be, let him rest. Let him, at least, not have to suffer this.
If the presence that might be his imagination has any opinions on the matter, it keeps them to itself. Or at least, if there are words, he can never make them out. He tells himself it's probably for the best.
**
When it's all over, when Gallifrey is less than dust and the Doctor wears a new face that has come to him already pre-etched with pain, he stands over the Eye again, and listens.
He hears nothing. He feels nothing. If what was there was only memory and hope, then they are gone. If it was something else, it's just as gone. Dead now, he figures, either way.
It never occurs to him that someone else might have had the same idea he did.
**
When he meets the Master again, despite a year's worth of opportunity, he can never quite bring himself to ask: Do you remember that? Was that real? Was that you? He especially does not ask, Would things have been different if I had been the one to free you? Whatever the answers are, he doesn't believe that it will do either of them any good to hear them.
In the end he whispers the questions anyway, to a silent body cradled in his arms. But wherever the Master has fallen to this time, it is nowhere he can ever hope to reach.
**
He does not go into the Cloister Room again. Nor does he sleep, at least not much. But sometimes when he closes his eyes, he can still almost believe that he hears laughter, and feels the touch of lips.