fic: There is Nothing in the Universe That You Are Not
There are wonders laid all across the length of the Universe, littered and streaked across the black. They shine out like fires for those who know how to see them.
Things so terrible and things so beautiful that sometimes you cannot tell the difference between the two. It can be a thin line when you have all of time and space at your disposal.
There are sights and sounds that can break a heart into pieces. Some of them, literally. Forces that can unknit sinew and muscle from nerves and bone, and spill blood out into the sky.
But there are also things out there that can bring a heart to the point of ecstasy and hold it there indefinitely on the brink, perhaps forever. There’s just a hairline between joy and terror sometimes. He knows this too.
~
One thing scares him.
There are unknowable corners of space, places where the light of stars cannot reach. These corners are bound into an endless dark with only the quiet hum of radiation in its most basic form breaking across them.
In these places, the black is like a liquid ink; space bends strangely around itself; time moves in fits and starts and then not at all, because there is no one and nothing there to mark it or gather its threads together.
He isn’t scared of much, but these places frighten him. They echo off the insides of his bones, seeming to set up a resonance and drawing out a terrible temptation to just set the Tardis spinning and finally come to rest there forever.
He wonders about this sometimes, wonders what he would become given the rest of time, nothing and nobody but himself and the Tardis to wind it out in the black. Part of him aches for it - and that turns him cold, a fear hardening like ice over his skin.
Once he takes her to one of these places to show her, because River Song has no fear, except perhaps the fear of losing him.
He shows her the suffocating blackness and tells her about the ache in his bones, about the fascination of staying there. And then he promises her he will never ever do it - which is the whole reason he took her there in the first place. He needs her to hear him say that.
~
His view backwards, forwards and sideways across Time is like watching a million spinning wheels and looms working away at once. But instead of spinning and weaving fibre, they work golden timelines into a vast tapestry, a shining cloth which is thrown across all of reality.
Different races across the Universe have glimpsed and speculated on this nature and shape of Time, and on a thing they call Fate.
The Norse people of planet Earth called Time and the journey of a person’s thread within it, Wyrd. They too conceived of reality as a cloth that a life is woven into, each person’s thread touching on and weaving through others; intersections and knots which are part of the bigger pattern.
Other species on other planets have different names for it. He’s heard thousands of them in his life, all of them collectively making up a language that tries to make sense of where things have come from and where they are going to.
Some ascribe a mystical origin to the movement of the stars and to the movement of the Universe through itself; the face of a Divine Being shining out. To him it’s nothing but Time itself. It is the only God he bows to, and then not always willingly.
He puts his fingers to her temples and shows her how if she focuses, she too can feel her awareness spread out amongst these threads. He guides her mind so she can see journey of the stars, how they are birthed in the bleak past and how they eventually die into dark. He shows her endings and beginnings coded inside her blood, and feels her grow a little more like him.
~
Some things in Time are in flux, lines rewriting themselves and changing like a web reweaving.
Events move through each other, pass each other by, and things happen as they did, or don’t happen as they should have done. Then the pattern changes position and moves into new shapes. It happens constantly, and the lights in his head shift, blur and reform.
He wonders sometimes, just how much of his and River’s past and future is in flux. She must always end where he begins. She must always meet him at Silencio. Both those things are certain to him, facts as immutable as rock. Their beginning and their ending makes a loop, an ever returning circle, in which they feed back into each other. An endless mobius strip that burns hot inside his mind, brighter than a freshly born star.
But in-between these two places they move like a current around each other, they eddy and swirl onto thresholds where everything else could shift. He’s working blind into his own future and he worries that somehow he will slip.
Perhaps there will be some small detail he will overlook; letting go of her hand when they’re running out there through the dark; a time he doesn’t kiss her when he was meant to; words that he doesn’t say, things that stay like dust in his mouth and are blown away into his past and never spoken.
He worries that if he changes anything that happened to her, time will change and shape around it, bending around her form like light, accommodating a new path. His past will rewrite as it happens and he will be someone slightly different. She won’t become the exact woman that he knew back then and is coming to know now.
He worries that then he would see her thread brighter against all the others, but no longer wrapped and anchored into him.
There are no guarantees.
~
One day he pushes the Tardis on and out to one of the edges of the Universe. There is a hidden place he knows, far beyond the milieu of stars. A place where they can both sit and look down upon galaxies and how they thread out into space.
He takes her there, then throws open the doors, listens to her gasp. They sit at the Tardis doorway, legs dangling out into nothingness. Her feet are bare, and she swings them out into the warmth of the Tardis’s protective shell.
Inside the sphere of his ship they are safe from having their breath stolen into the dark. The glow from the console room is at their back, living and vital, and he leans against her as they look at the lines drawn out below them.
From this distance, the galaxies are spots of light forming tracks. They gather together into lines, one following the other as if they cannot bear to be alone in the void.
There are spirals of light and ellipses casting out rays. There are galaxies like lenses, ones like rings. Some with a terrible black heart at their centre, pulling stars in a tide around them, swallowing them up one by one.
In some places the light flares brightly where two or more of them are locked into a slow and terrible dance which will lead them into a gradual collision. Whole solar systems burning up into ash, billions of miles from where they sit watching.
~
The larger pattern of Time always holds its shape.
Some things that occur are static and unchangeable. Points of matter, of happening that have been there since Time began and will be there until Time ends. These are the pieces of the pattern that hold, and that the rest of the threads always move through.
These events are like towers that Time sheets itself over, fixed points of contact that hold the threads and carry the cloth, pushing up into it and giving it its shape.
With his forehead pressed to hers, he shows her this shape that Time that is fixed upon. He shows her how one event leads to another, leads to another, leads to another and so on; how there’s a pattern woven between the points that describes everything.
She tells him she feels it like a beacon light from every tower, each shining to the next, interconnecting them all. If at one tower, the fire is not lit then the next will fall, and then the one after that, pulling Time down after them.
One day, on a lakeside in Utah, he saw this very thing happen. A tower crashing down and bringing the rest of Time with it, tearing the cloth, bunching it all together in ripples and waves, walls of Time jostling against each other.
He can’t think of anyone who could bring one of those points down by their will and love alone, except her. Even those who were strongest back at the Academy so many years ago couldn’t accomplish an act like that.
Except perhaps himself. Maybe he could do it for her. He thought he’d forgotten how to understand what love is, how it works, how it’s a force that can make the galaxies turn and Time fall; but now he understands.
He keeps his admiration a secret.
~
The great mystery of Time is that if fixed point leads to fixed point, then out there somewhere there must be a beginning. The first tower raised that the first threads were anchored to, the place where Time began.
It was a question that occupied and obsessed the Timelords for centuries, and was studied to the point of madness at the Academy. The search for the First Tower, the first fixed point that began all it all. If they could find it they could grasp the nature of Time itself, see the larger pattern and what it meant.
They created new forms of the Gallifreyan language to try and understand it. Circles within circles, describing points and patterns of maths and physics. The language and the study of it led them ever backwards and inwards, following static point after point after point.
In the end, the greatest minds of the Academy found themselves exactly back at the first point where they had started, and realised how apt the circling language was that they had created. Time had the last laugh.
He teaches her to write this language of Time. She already knows it inside her mind and her heart, it was pressed into her the first time she ever stepped inside the Tardis; but it’s another thing to make the shapes, to consider the forms and what they mean as you track them onto paper.
They sit in his library and write the symbols that echo in him like home.
He wraps his hand around hers as she holds the pencil, and guides the silver graphite line twisting and curling over the page in front of them. Words that scorch the Universe dry life, death, time, harmony, binary, movement.
~
There are wonders laid across the Universe. Things that clutch at the heart, that make the eyes wide and the pupils blown. Things a person will always remember because the sight of them burns into you, and you carry the beauty of them with you forever.
There is a woman laid across his life. She is everything.
There is nothing in the Universe that she is not.
.
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