[Doctor Who Fic] "The Archivist at the Edge of the Universe"
This is both a part of the Journey's End reaction trilogy and something that slots into a multi-chapter fic that is in the works.
So, this is the Doctor part of the endeavor with the Rose and 10.2 one-shot to follow.
Did I mention it is insane? And very, very sad?
Disclaimer: I can't have it, it's not mine. All other things quoted are also not mine. And it's insane and possibly not comprehensible. Also it is out of my own ball of timey wimeyness.
Spoilers for 4.13, Journey's End.
The Archivist at the Edge of the Universe
~ sciathan file ~
MALDAVARIOS STATION 4.957 TRANSCRIPTION ACTIVATED. REPORT STARTING 47:059 MALDAVARIAN STANDARD TIME, 08698356, IN ACCORDANCE WITH PHILLAPITHIAN CALENDER MODALITIES ESTABLISHED BY THE EIGHTH PRINCIPALITY OF XENOS.
ATTENTION OF THE MISTRESS REQUESTED.
UNKNOWN PRESENCE DETECTED IN STORAGE AREA G9. STATION LIFE COUNT NOW TWO ORGANISMS. UNDERGOING SCAN OF UNKNOWN ENTITY. UNKNOWN BIOLOGY AND CONSTRUCTION. DOES NOT MATCH PRIOR ARCHIVAL EVIDENCE.
ATTENTION OF THE MISTRESS REQUESTED.
"Background radiation scan requested."
YES, MISTRESS.
A pause.
HIGH DENSITY OF BACKGROUND RADIATION DETECTED.
"Very well, funnel doors to the harmony of the hall and bring him here. That is all. Shut down mechanical transcription and switch to genetic mode, parcel 579, System 7 Encryption."
ARCHIVAL BACK UP DEACTIVATED ON 49:059 MST, 08698356. SWITCHING TO PASSIVE MODE.
Footsteps came closer. She did not turn away from the station's window, nor turn her eyes from the reflection of the glass case and its sleeping figure just behind her. Always near her.
The sound stopped at the door to the room.
"Well, that's a neat trick. Maldavarians…brilliant creatures before they blotted themselves out in their civil war - except maybe for their extreme liking for sharp drops without warning."
There was the sound of him brushing himself off. She had not gone from this room in, perhaps, a thousand years, but she remembered that the floor rose up sharply just beyond the door.
The woman with her borrowed face - plain and pale and round - turned to see her visitor, a thin man, standing at the entrance with his hands in the pockets of his trousers. She turned back to the windows.
"Here we live entranced by starlit water and moments that should each last forever. They believed the stars sing, they wanted to match their arcs."
She continued looking out the station's windows for a moment.
"It was been one thousand eight hundred seventy four years, three months, twelve days, seventeen hours, and thirty-four minutes since I last saw you, Doctor."
She could here him walking towards her, until his reflection was in the glass in front of her, transposed onto the stars. He had paused at the capsule, the only item in the otherwise bare and stripped room. His eyes were on her.
"It's good to see your memory is still working well after all that time. Really, seems like just yesterday for me - you haven't changed a bit, still look perfectly not your species. Would have thought you might have gone back to ether or essence or…well, you know." She could see his reflection grin half-heartedly, a little sadly.
"I'm attached to being a human. Attached to who I was, although, I grew old once and did not quite fancy it. Reverse trans-molecular bonding is quite a gift," her voice grew almost inaudible and she added, "…not as if it matters now."
Frowning all the more, the Doctor examined the contents of the capsule, his face not portraying any sense of shock at its contents. A dying star shot past the window in the far distance, the momentary burst of light obscuring any of the reflected shapes in the room.
"I was not who you were expecting to see, was I?"
He frowned and answered her, "I don't know that you were precisely who I had in mind - nor Maldavarios, really, why would anyone want their be-all end-all destination to be Maldavarios…? No offense, obviously."
She chuckled lightly, "I wasn't aware that you were someone who had any such final destinations."
He pulled a mock-contemplative face, "Yes, well, I suppose there is that."
Turning at last to face him, she said, "Is that why you've come here trailing gloom and doom and all the detritus of the lost pieces of the universe?"
The Doctor did not flinch, his reflection quickly lost its fox-quick expressiveness.
"Doctor, to an empath you are a bit akin to a bomb going off when you've had a bad day. And really, when a Time Lord has a bad day you’d expect it to be a bit more severe than having misplaced his keys…rather, I think for you you'd be happy with a bit of a go like that."
He mumbled something that suspiciously sounded like "Lost them in 1969 once, that was enough…" as she walked around the capsule. Carefully, she spread the lace of her simple white gown over its the surface, and sat down.
"Oh, but you're far more than an empath, -" he shot out a number of syllables and tonalities, causing her to grimace "- you're the empress of the empaths. Pshfi are as empathetic as they come. They just lap all that emotion up and archive it - remember what you did on the Earth that one time? Brilliant mess, that lapping up all those words. I've always wondered what your species does with all that archival…stuff."
"My, you have a penchant for skirting the issue. And you still butcher my language - just call me by my human name. Margaret, as you'll remember it."
"Well, you can consider it skirted," he sat down with much less delicacy at the edge of the capsule than she had, "skirted, hemmed, and thrown out into that white dwarf star to the left over there, no no, a little more to the right. Right, just there. And by right I mean left. Oh, and apologies for the name butchery - my Pshfi has been rusty as of late."
She nodded and closed her eyes, listening, always listening to the stars singing. Listening to the stories in the air. Wanting to tell him it was a dead language anyways.
"You and I, Doctor, we have both run here. To escape stories and happy endings gone sour."
"Again. Maldavarios. Not suited to anyone. Although it has apparently exercised a bit of daft allure on the empress of the Pshfi."
He looked expectantly. She frowned - it all seemed so long ago. And the dust of that civil war and the emptiness of the whole system were all that had greeted her here. Here at the quiet limit of the world.
"Earth was too noisy, I had to continually archive stories and thoughts and words that were not mine. My brain was full of other people's words that I did not want to hear anymore. Humans spin stories out of dross and gold and speak and speak and speak. I want only a few stories. But I think it is time to listen again."
She got up, and held out her hand gingerly. Stories - red fire-tinged, and gilded with eastern suns, swirled around him - all draped in an indefinite cloud. A cloud without color, the pearlescent color of mourning on Gallifrey. The color of iridescent smoke.
"Let me read your story," she whispered, "And till my ghastly tale is told, this heart within me burns. And you have two hearts, and so you burn twice as hot from an act of untelling."
For a long moment, he looked at her with such an intensity that she thought she might flinch. After a long moment, he held out his hand and placed it on her own for a moment.
An image. A flicker. Voices. The sound of waves. The sound of rain. The beating of a heart. The feel of a wet coat. Reading the swirl of colors and voices that was a story, distilled.
"I have not seen your story in a very long time. It has grown sadder. For always roaming with a hungry heart, much have I seen and known. You, too, have grown weary and let everything in your grasp rush out again."
"Always speaking in other people's words," he said noncommittally, an edge in his voice.
"Always doling out other people's destinies," she quipped, matching his tone.
He stood up, restlessly, and strode to the windows, she sat down, traced her fingers around a pair of etched words, and spread her finger over the glass, condensation forming around her fingers.
She closed her eyes and listened again, to the story that had come through her fingers, she archived it in the secret parts of herself, with her own secrets. When someone found this archive at the edge of the universe, when she was gone, they would find nothing of the last Pshfi, nor the last Time Lord. The transcription was turned off. They were in a moment that existed as only a segment in time that would not be remembered except in unreadable genetic code.
Time and impermanence keep dancing in their slow, slow waltz.
"Can you hear," she said softly, "the sound of waves? Her voice speaking?"
"No." He said.
"Here at the quiet limit of the world, I hear through you. They are saying to me, Let me go: take back thy gift."
"It was for their own good."
"For theirs or yours?" She rose, leaving a misty handprint on the glass and joined him at the window, "You are the only one that I know that can exist in paradox so often - you are all at once selfless and selfish. You give up to be lonely because it is better even though you do not want to be given up. You are a story to which so many want to write a happy ending, and yet, you don't allow it."
"And you sit here with mummified dreams in a borrowed body, Margaret. How is that better for anyone?"
She looked at the capsule between them, and the man lying within it, white just beginning to frost wavy his chestnut hair. A heart that had refused to start again centuries ago in that familiar chest. A preserved relic of the twenty first century. Another time, another planet, another lifetime. And etched into the glass, wringed by a fading handprint, the words "Beloved Husband" were inscribed.
"You're right, you know, Doctor. No one comes to Maldavarios. I've come here to die, but I've been dead for years, living through stories. You don't need to."
She closed her eyes and a confused tangle of voices rang out - "You did this I name you, forever, the cost is him - Don't make me go back!"
And then, plainly, she spoke, "I have shown you yourself."
"He did."
Walking over to him, she ran her fingertips over his cheek.
"He showed you who you feared you might be. Blood and rage. The destroyer of worlds."
He looked straight at her, undaunted, "And I was. I did. He was me."
In her mind's eye he slipped for a moment, splitting into two and away. Another story, diverged.
"Do you ever think, Doctor, about how many have lived in your name? Or do you only think about the dead. The ones that you couldn't save?"
He stood up, and resignedly went to the window again. "I don't play the numbers, Margaret. But my hand - and no pun and no explanation if you didn't make sense of that part - committed genocide. That rage is within me. It's real."
"And you also would have forgiven them. That love is what always extinguishes that rage. You already know that, it's in your story, too."
She closed her eyes. The sound of waves, echoing across the universe. The figure of a girl watching him go, framed by a paneled window.
"Rose has him and he's dangerous and she can do something. There was too much blood. Too many people have died because I've doled out their destinies."
"Are you now going to tell me that too many have lived? They are two parts of the same coin."
He did not respond.
She bowed her head, hearing the woman's voice calling his name, the sound of waves, a cold sense of purpose. But the tendrils of loneliness, the reverberation of that name in his head…and in his heart. A story with a hollow happy ending.
A piece in the story - a part concealed by the teller, a clever way to avoid it - fell into place and, startled, she turned to him, "You didn't tell her you had a change of heart. You didn't tell anyone."
He looked at her, vaguely surprised.
"A stray part of the flow, a stray thought, something you wanted no one to get at - Time Lords can't heal themselves - self evident to you. You didn't want them to know you've literally changed one of your hearts."
"Just physiology."
"Mentality. Archived text - Gallifreyan. Absorbed from someone else…somewhere, somewhere - Enzyme production as related to emotional stimuli engaged with cardiac - "
"No, just physiology. The truth behind it all is much simpler. Just as you have been saying: 'Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, / And after many a summer dies the swan.
/ Me only cruel immortality / Consumes.' She would not have been happy as long as she was worried about me being happy. I would not be happy watching her die. You know that, you chose to love a human."
"You don't choose to love. You know that."
"But you chose to stay, just as I chose to run."
For a moment she closed her eyes. Running her fingers on the capsule. A capsule, a coffin, waiting until she will unlock it, and lay inside it to sleep once more, his arms around her as he fades into dust. She sat down on the capsule and bowed her head.
A choice made, a happy ending tacked onto a story that kept unfolding until that label broke.
The sound of waves, of a woman talking on the phone is Chiswick, the same man (yes, but not the same. A different heart.) in a different world looking up at the sky, grasping out towards a world he could see in all its infinite complexity but could never reach.
"And we are alone."
He sat down next to her and put one arm around her shoulder, a reflection of a gesture from years before.
"No we're not. Not now."
She placed a hand over the clasped hands in the case, never touching.
"But later? Tomorrow? A thousand years from now?"
"Yes," he said, "later, I suppose…"
He did not finish his thought. And a silence that pulsated with untold stories drifted in from the stars.
"Let me go," she whispered when he had left, into the space beyond the window, to the universe, "take back thy gift."
Fin
A/N: Well, that was much less happy than I intended it. Ten usually makes me want to give him a hug, although in Journey's End I kinda wanted to smack him. The Archivist has a long and complex backstory (in case you were confused at parts) that I'm working on. Works used in this stint in her life were primarily "Tithonus" and "Ulysses" by Alfred Tennyson, and some stray lines from "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Kenneth Rexroth's "Another Spring." The Archivist was in a poetic mood.
Here's a tissue. And some chocolate.
Enjoy-ish!
So, this is the Doctor part of the endeavor with the Rose and 10.2 one-shot to follow.
Did I mention it is insane? And very, very sad?
Disclaimer: I can't have it, it's not mine. All other things quoted are also not mine. And it's insane and possibly not comprehensible. Also it is out of my own ball of timey wimeyness.
Spoilers for 4.13, Journey's End.
The Archivist at the Edge of the Universe
~ sciathan file ~
MALDAVARIOS STATION 4.957 TRANSCRIPTION ACTIVATED. REPORT STARTING 47:059 MALDAVARIAN STANDARD TIME, 08698356, IN ACCORDANCE WITH PHILLAPITHIAN CALENDER MODALITIES ESTABLISHED BY THE EIGHTH PRINCIPALITY OF XENOS.
ATTENTION OF THE MISTRESS REQUESTED.
UNKNOWN PRESENCE DETECTED IN STORAGE AREA G9. STATION LIFE COUNT NOW TWO ORGANISMS. UNDERGOING SCAN OF UNKNOWN ENTITY. UNKNOWN BIOLOGY AND CONSTRUCTION. DOES NOT MATCH PRIOR ARCHIVAL EVIDENCE.
ATTENTION OF THE MISTRESS REQUESTED.
"Background radiation scan requested."
YES, MISTRESS.
A pause.
HIGH DENSITY OF BACKGROUND RADIATION DETECTED.
"Very well, funnel doors to the harmony of the hall and bring him here. That is all. Shut down mechanical transcription and switch to genetic mode, parcel 579, System 7 Encryption."
ARCHIVAL BACK UP DEACTIVATED ON 49:059 MST, 08698356. SWITCHING TO PASSIVE MODE.
Footsteps came closer. She did not turn away from the station's window, nor turn her eyes from the reflection of the glass case and its sleeping figure just behind her. Always near her.
The sound stopped at the door to the room.
"Well, that's a neat trick. Maldavarians…brilliant creatures before they blotted themselves out in their civil war - except maybe for their extreme liking for sharp drops without warning."
There was the sound of him brushing himself off. She had not gone from this room in, perhaps, a thousand years, but she remembered that the floor rose up sharply just beyond the door.
The woman with her borrowed face - plain and pale and round - turned to see her visitor, a thin man, standing at the entrance with his hands in the pockets of his trousers. She turned back to the windows.
"Here we live entranced by starlit water and moments that should each last forever. They believed the stars sing, they wanted to match their arcs."
She continued looking out the station's windows for a moment.
"It was been one thousand eight hundred seventy four years, three months, twelve days, seventeen hours, and thirty-four minutes since I last saw you, Doctor."
She could here him walking towards her, until his reflection was in the glass in front of her, transposed onto the stars. He had paused at the capsule, the only item in the otherwise bare and stripped room. His eyes were on her.
"It's good to see your memory is still working well after all that time. Really, seems like just yesterday for me - you haven't changed a bit, still look perfectly not your species. Would have thought you might have gone back to ether or essence or…well, you know." She could see his reflection grin half-heartedly, a little sadly.
"I'm attached to being a human. Attached to who I was, although, I grew old once and did not quite fancy it. Reverse trans-molecular bonding is quite a gift," her voice grew almost inaudible and she added, "…not as if it matters now."
Frowning all the more, the Doctor examined the contents of the capsule, his face not portraying any sense of shock at its contents. A dying star shot past the window in the far distance, the momentary burst of light obscuring any of the reflected shapes in the room.
"I was not who you were expecting to see, was I?"
He frowned and answered her, "I don't know that you were precisely who I had in mind - nor Maldavarios, really, why would anyone want their be-all end-all destination to be Maldavarios…? No offense, obviously."
She chuckled lightly, "I wasn't aware that you were someone who had any such final destinations."
He pulled a mock-contemplative face, "Yes, well, I suppose there is that."
Turning at last to face him, she said, "Is that why you've come here trailing gloom and doom and all the detritus of the lost pieces of the universe?"
The Doctor did not flinch, his reflection quickly lost its fox-quick expressiveness.
"Doctor, to an empath you are a bit akin to a bomb going off when you've had a bad day. And really, when a Time Lord has a bad day you’d expect it to be a bit more severe than having misplaced his keys…rather, I think for you you'd be happy with a bit of a go like that."
He mumbled something that suspiciously sounded like "Lost them in 1969 once, that was enough…" as she walked around the capsule. Carefully, she spread the lace of her simple white gown over its the surface, and sat down.
"Oh, but you're far more than an empath, -" he shot out a number of syllables and tonalities, causing her to grimace "- you're the empress of the empaths. Pshfi are as empathetic as they come. They just lap all that emotion up and archive it - remember what you did on the Earth that one time? Brilliant mess, that lapping up all those words. I've always wondered what your species does with all that archival…stuff."
"My, you have a penchant for skirting the issue. And you still butcher my language - just call me by my human name. Margaret, as you'll remember it."
"Well, you can consider it skirted," he sat down with much less delicacy at the edge of the capsule than she had, "skirted, hemmed, and thrown out into that white dwarf star to the left over there, no no, a little more to the right. Right, just there. And by right I mean left. Oh, and apologies for the name butchery - my Pshfi has been rusty as of late."
She nodded and closed her eyes, listening, always listening to the stars singing. Listening to the stories in the air. Wanting to tell him it was a dead language anyways.
"You and I, Doctor, we have both run here. To escape stories and happy endings gone sour."
"Again. Maldavarios. Not suited to anyone. Although it has apparently exercised a bit of daft allure on the empress of the Pshfi."
He looked expectantly. She frowned - it all seemed so long ago. And the dust of that civil war and the emptiness of the whole system were all that had greeted her here. Here at the quiet limit of the world.
"Earth was too noisy, I had to continually archive stories and thoughts and words that were not mine. My brain was full of other people's words that I did not want to hear anymore. Humans spin stories out of dross and gold and speak and speak and speak. I want only a few stories. But I think it is time to listen again."
She got up, and held out her hand gingerly. Stories - red fire-tinged, and gilded with eastern suns, swirled around him - all draped in an indefinite cloud. A cloud without color, the pearlescent color of mourning on Gallifrey. The color of iridescent smoke.
"Let me read your story," she whispered, "And till my ghastly tale is told, this heart within me burns. And you have two hearts, and so you burn twice as hot from an act of untelling."
For a long moment, he looked at her with such an intensity that she thought she might flinch. After a long moment, he held out his hand and placed it on her own for a moment.
An image. A flicker. Voices. The sound of waves. The sound of rain. The beating of a heart. The feel of a wet coat. Reading the swirl of colors and voices that was a story, distilled.
"I have not seen your story in a very long time. It has grown sadder. For always roaming with a hungry heart, much have I seen and known. You, too, have grown weary and let everything in your grasp rush out again."
"Always speaking in other people's words," he said noncommittally, an edge in his voice.
"Always doling out other people's destinies," she quipped, matching his tone.
He stood up, restlessly, and strode to the windows, she sat down, traced her fingers around a pair of etched words, and spread her finger over the glass, condensation forming around her fingers.
She closed her eyes and listened again, to the story that had come through her fingers, she archived it in the secret parts of herself, with her own secrets. When someone found this archive at the edge of the universe, when she was gone, they would find nothing of the last Pshfi, nor the last Time Lord. The transcription was turned off. They were in a moment that existed as only a segment in time that would not be remembered except in unreadable genetic code.
Time and impermanence keep dancing in their slow, slow waltz.
"Can you hear," she said softly, "the sound of waves? Her voice speaking?"
"No." He said.
"Here at the quiet limit of the world, I hear through you. They are saying to me, Let me go: take back thy gift."
"It was for their own good."
"For theirs or yours?" She rose, leaving a misty handprint on the glass and joined him at the window, "You are the only one that I know that can exist in paradox so often - you are all at once selfless and selfish. You give up to be lonely because it is better even though you do not want to be given up. You are a story to which so many want to write a happy ending, and yet, you don't allow it."
"And you sit here with mummified dreams in a borrowed body, Margaret. How is that better for anyone?"
She looked at the capsule between them, and the man lying within it, white just beginning to frost wavy his chestnut hair. A heart that had refused to start again centuries ago in that familiar chest. A preserved relic of the twenty first century. Another time, another planet, another lifetime. And etched into the glass, wringed by a fading handprint, the words "Beloved Husband" were inscribed.
"You're right, you know, Doctor. No one comes to Maldavarios. I've come here to die, but I've been dead for years, living through stories. You don't need to."
She closed her eyes and a confused tangle of voices rang out - "You did this I name you, forever, the cost is him - Don't make me go back!"
And then, plainly, she spoke, "I have shown you yourself."
"He did."
Walking over to him, she ran her fingertips over his cheek.
"He showed you who you feared you might be. Blood and rage. The destroyer of worlds."
He looked straight at her, undaunted, "And I was. I did. He was me."
In her mind's eye he slipped for a moment, splitting into two and away. Another story, diverged.
"Do you ever think, Doctor, about how many have lived in your name? Or do you only think about the dead. The ones that you couldn't save?"
He stood up, and resignedly went to the window again. "I don't play the numbers, Margaret. But my hand - and no pun and no explanation if you didn't make sense of that part - committed genocide. That rage is within me. It's real."
"And you also would have forgiven them. That love is what always extinguishes that rage. You already know that, it's in your story, too."
She closed her eyes. The sound of waves, echoing across the universe. The figure of a girl watching him go, framed by a paneled window.
"Rose has him and he's dangerous and she can do something. There was too much blood. Too many people have died because I've doled out their destinies."
"Are you now going to tell me that too many have lived? They are two parts of the same coin."
He did not respond.
She bowed her head, hearing the woman's voice calling his name, the sound of waves, a cold sense of purpose. But the tendrils of loneliness, the reverberation of that name in his head…and in his heart. A story with a hollow happy ending.
A piece in the story - a part concealed by the teller, a clever way to avoid it - fell into place and, startled, she turned to him, "You didn't tell her you had a change of heart. You didn't tell anyone."
He looked at her, vaguely surprised.
"A stray part of the flow, a stray thought, something you wanted no one to get at - Time Lords can't heal themselves - self evident to you. You didn't want them to know you've literally changed one of your hearts."
"Just physiology."
"Mentality. Archived text - Gallifreyan. Absorbed from someone else…somewhere, somewhere - Enzyme production as related to emotional stimuli engaged with cardiac - "
"No, just physiology. The truth behind it all is much simpler. Just as you have been saying: 'Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, / And after many a summer dies the swan.
/ Me only cruel immortality / Consumes.' She would not have been happy as long as she was worried about me being happy. I would not be happy watching her die. You know that, you chose to love a human."
"You don't choose to love. You know that."
"But you chose to stay, just as I chose to run."
For a moment she closed her eyes. Running her fingers on the capsule. A capsule, a coffin, waiting until she will unlock it, and lay inside it to sleep once more, his arms around her as he fades into dust. She sat down on the capsule and bowed her head.
A choice made, a happy ending tacked onto a story that kept unfolding until that label broke.
The sound of waves, of a woman talking on the phone is Chiswick, the same man (yes, but not the same. A different heart.) in a different world looking up at the sky, grasping out towards a world he could see in all its infinite complexity but could never reach.
"And we are alone."
He sat down next to her and put one arm around her shoulder, a reflection of a gesture from years before.
"No we're not. Not now."
She placed a hand over the clasped hands in the case, never touching.
"But later? Tomorrow? A thousand years from now?"
"Yes," he said, "later, I suppose…"
He did not finish his thought. And a silence that pulsated with untold stories drifted in from the stars.
"Let me go," she whispered when he had left, into the space beyond the window, to the universe, "take back thy gift."
Fin
A/N: Well, that was much less happy than I intended it. Ten usually makes me want to give him a hug, although in Journey's End I kinda wanted to smack him. The Archivist has a long and complex backstory (in case you were confused at parts) that I'm working on. Works used in this stint in her life were primarily "Tithonus" and "Ulysses" by Alfred Tennyson, and some stray lines from "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Kenneth Rexroth's "Another Spring." The Archivist was in a poetic mood.
Here's a tissue. And some chocolate.
Enjoy-ish!