The Fine Art of Falling Apart
(A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Event)
abstraction
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Sitting on a park bench, air fills his lungs and chill seeps in through his overcoat, and he wonders what he's doing with himself. Humans wander and talk amongst themselves, and he remains unnoticed, a lone sort of brown figure sitting on a rather cold metal bench, green stretching out beneath him to rush towards an uneven line of trees, silently pressed against the clouded, crowded, grey sky of England. For a moment he contemplates the mathematical impossibilities of the banana, singular, then the entire--
A worn piece of paper is caught in a draft of wind, and folds itself onto his pinstriped leg, refusing to be privy to anymore of the breeze's whimsical follies. He imagines that if it were sentient it would be at the least dizzy, if not possibly owning the stagger of a particularly drunk... sentient being. He sweeps it up from it's curled position and unfolds it tenderly, concerned that even the smallest exertion of pressure would tear and tear and tear it until there was nothing left.
Ink is smeared at the far left of the page but from there it turns into a graceful looping of words, carefully making a single sentence. Goodbyes are only worth the words that linger in their absence, he reads. Well, that's a bit dreary, he thinks, and he creases the paper in half before tucking it into his pocket. He hopes he isn't becoming sentimental in his old age.
He hears her footsteps before he sees her. "There you are! D'you really dislike Mickey so much that you have to run half a mile away? Took me decades to find you."
"Decades?" he replies, sounding surprised. "You look good for your age."
"I moisturize," she quips. He stands up and puts his hands into his pockets, his fingers gently playing with the edges of the paper in his left pocket.
"So, what's new with our friend Mr. Smith, then? Demon dishwasher? Can't find the loo? Lost his favorite sock in a freak laundromat accident?"
She rolls her eyes, failing to suppress a smile. "There's a UFO sighting near a private school, half the staff's been replaced, and now the kids are so smart they'd put Kreskin to shame."
He blinks. "Kreskin? Why would you-- nevermind." He grabs her hand with his and grins widely. "Flying objects soon to be identified? Alien teachers? Students with brains the size of melons?"
"That about sums it up," she laughs.
"Well, what on earth are we standing here for? Sounds like mischief to me."
A few days later he says goodbye to an old friend, and thinks that however the note found it's way to him, well, he's said his farewell and he won't have to do it again for a very, very long time.
He could not be any more wrong.
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She couldn't feel any more wrong if she tried. There is a girl-shaped hole in the universe, this universe at least, a proverbial yawning gap of negative space, and the edges between herself and her idea of completion scrape and grate against one another, creating a dissonance in the chorus she's trying to rewrite.
She still has a hard time with words like alternate and parallel and everything in between, and no adjectives or prepositions will allow the awkwardness to ease. She's trying to grasp that all of this new that she's experiencing really isn't. It's just different, a subtle little change running under the surface of the world; her world, but not. It's confusing gripping the reality and thinking in the abstract, knowing what's out there but realizing how wrong her old knowledge is.
But she's right, she thinks, all these words and numbers floating around inside her head, all of it is right and complete and absolute and completely, absolutely wrong. Every time she wakes up her insides flutter, seize, and then sink. All of this is relative, everything around her, and each brand new day is the same as the last brand new day, but different enough not to count.
Its like this: she knows, for a fact, that the sun will rise, and then set, and then rise again, but she doesn't want to. She knows, in the deep of her bones, that none of this will change, nothing drastic will touch the outside of her atmosphere and change her for the better, because she's the best that she is. She wants to reverse everything she knows, wants to live on the edge of uncertainty and the infinite, and feel the rush of independence infusing new thoughts.
The sun on her face, warming her skin as she squints upwards against bright blue of the sky and the shining silver of zeppelins, she realizes that all of this, the new versus old mentality set against her impossible anticipation, the grass underneath her trainers, the oxygen filling her lungs, the whipping of her hair -- she has felt all of this before. The problem isn't the feeling, it's the knowing, she thinks, so she hugs her chest and looks westward, then eastward, and silently picks a direction and starts walking.
Most of what she thinks has a crooked symmetry to it, a spiderweb which twists and turns, spreads outwards as far as it can go, but inevitably ends at that one single thought in the center that stays with her, that will always stay with her, in the back of her mind, for all of her earthly years.
She doesn't like spending too much time with that thought, but she accepts it, and holds it as close as she can to her heart, and as far away as she can manage without breaking. She always strays to it, rushing back to what she believes was the real start of her life, because that's when she really started living. She loves it and hates it and can't help thinking about it.
(And oh, if you must know: it has a blue box.)
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A blue box is spinning leisurely within the very fabric of time, nowhere and everywhere, forever and infinite, paused for a brief interlude in its otherwise chaotic life.
"So, where to next?" He looks down at the console, concentrating on small switches and levers, trying very very hard not to look up and catch the expression on her face. It's been days since Mickey had left, forever, and he's so rubbish at goodbyes that for a moment he couldn't see how inadequate she thought hers was. Only worth the words.., he thinks. Bugger.
"Dunno. Wherever," a voice replies, "whenever."
"How aboouutt," he says, drawing out the consonants as he is wont to do in this body, "we take a page out of a different doctor's book? Oh! Pun! I'm awfully good at being unintentionally witty, don't you think?" He looks up, expectant, hoping she'll play along. She does.
"Right, and am I supposed to assume this other doctor is much better than the one being unintentionally witty, then?"
He pulls a face of shock and indignation. "Of course not! Best Doctor of them all, me," he assures her, puffing out his chest a little.
She laughs, and the sound is like nothing he can compare it with, only that it feels like that natural thing for her to be doing, maybe all the time.
He grins, huge and ridiculous, and her face lights up in response. "So, what books will we be ripping apart, what exactly are we doing with the pages, and who is this other doctor you're so keen on?"
He raises his eyebrows and quick as a flash he's bouncing towards the other side of the console, grabbing her hand, and leading her (rather jumpingly) to the TARDIS library. When they arrive, slightly out of breath on her part and absolutely enthused on his, he flitters around the bookshelves before grabbing one of the oldest, thickest volumes she's ever seen. He places it excitedly on an empty table (not so much empty as sort of everything-pushed-to-the-left-and-the-sideways-books-don't-look-too-thrilled type of clean) and pulls her towards it.
"Right, so.." she trails off. He blinks, waiting for her to do some unnamed task she's not entirely certain about. After a moment of staring she breaks off with, "Er, what am I doing, exactly?"
"Oh! Yes! Yes, I didn't tell you did I?"
"Pretty sure you skipped that part, yeah."
"Yes. Right. Well, close your eyes, flip open the book to any page you like, and simply put your finger on any point you wish on that page."
Her finger ends up on section 4ƒ, page 63509ə4ʒʻ͍7, almost exactly on the Imagiro Nebula, a cluster of glowing red stars. She looks happily at her finger. "Is this where we're going?"
He glances at her blindly-picked destination. "Looks like! Nice choice. Good villages, weird victory jigs. Blimey, we should do this more often!"
"Where'd you pick up that trick from? What sort of doctor was it?"
"Dr. Dolittle, of course! Get it?" He waits for the familiar glow of understanding behind her eyes.
"Ohh. Yeah. A different doctor's book. Very funny."
He stares at her, glad and.. waiting?
"What?"
"Well?"
"Yes, fine. Dead clever, you are. Hilarious," she replies with a slight roll of her eyes. "Satisfied?"
"It'll do. But just so you know, I gave Hugh Lofting the idea."
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He can't do this anymore. Looking through everything to find a reflection of a past life, hidden in plain sight. It is awkward, disconcerting, and more than a little frustrating, being faced with every moment and every decision he has ever made that led him to this exact moment in time. He grits his teeth and hears a set of footsteps on the metal grating of the TARDIS behind him.
"Something wrong, Doctor?"
He imagines that her voice is a tiny octave higher, that her skin is paling, paling, porcelain, that the hair brushing against her shoulders is blonde and ready to be tucked hastily behind her ear, hazel eyes bright with concern. His hands tighten into fists at his side.
"No, I'm fine. Thank you, Martha."
There is a hesitation, slight but painstakingly obvious, before she accepts his mood and turns away again. His back is to her the entire time, but the feeling of another person walking away from him is like a punch in the gut. A sigh pushes its way into the open air from the deepest part of his lungs.
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The sigh escapes her, unbidden, spilling out into the wind. Air pulls against the strands of her hair, twisting and curling like an invisible semaphore, waving elusively to the cold London sky. The chill prickles against her cheeks and she pulls her jacket tighter, watching the steady wave of the trees and the pale ghost-light that the moon leaves in its wake.
She wants to ask how she can be here, if it was random coincidence or an act of fate. She doesn't know what she believes in and sometimes a hopelessness will bubble up inside her until she wants to cry I'm too young! I'm too young for my heart to die. Instead, she exhales slowly and begins telling the faded, lonely stars which galaxy is closest, what sort of people live there, and her favorite attribute, before continuing onto the next galaxy, nebula, celestial body; everything she remembers humming inside of her as she lets it out. The words crystallize in the air, small breaths clouding into wisps and floating out into space, and she likes the solidarity of seeing her dialogue with the constellations take shape in front of her.
She whispers an unknown tune, a song which she has always associated with her travels and the glowing infinity of time, and the sounds are drawn out into the breeze to be carried to new destinations; something which she can no longer do. Something crumbles away inside of her and her breathing is a little unsteady but she talks, on and on and on to the only thing that will believe her, the only thing that can completely understand: Time.
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Time is all locked up in her heart -- but she is not waiting. Not quite. Shaky breaths mingling with the cold salt, and the taste of air bitter in the back of her throat, she will realize seconds which should have been are now washed away into nothing, and when she breathes in, and the chill shocks her lungs, the things that she wanted to say and hear and know, that were haphazardly protected by some sort of self-preservation -- well, the thoughts she was going to think melt away on the breeze, and her head will be blank from nothing, and then there will only be air.
She is not waiting, not quite. It is more that the years mean nothing to her anymore, that the dreams and the street cannot touch her, and she can name each of the ribs guarding something precious within her, an empty white cage made of syllable and stone. The calm of the cold embraces her, and she can see the truth beneath things, and when she blinks it is only because her lashes long for activity. Between the heavens and the seas, in the gap of her body and her mind, white noise filters in, the static of liquid crashing, swirling, smoothing against grains of time. The sea washes over her feet, again and again, and she's completely still but she's sinking and sinking and sinking right to the center of the earth.
She remains on the edges of time, gilded as they are, implacable, unhurt, beyond, the hours slipping between her fingers, and one day you will open your eyes and see her, a ghost in the sand, too far to see clearly, and after that, the dark.
She will recall the images of when she was life and love and glory, and it is not a reaping. Instead, she will pluck you, gently, like a feather, or a flower for her hair.
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Flowers grow uncertainly beneath her window, afraid that the shadow she casts will block them from soaking up the sun. She reflects about the passing of time to them, and they steadily grow stronger with her words and her tender care, vainly stretching to reach at least the lowest part of the sky, and they forget their innocent, youthful fears of the dark.
Sometimes she will sit, legs crossed, when the weather is nice, a mere foot away from them, and in her hands there will be bound leather and paper and ink. She reads to them, awkward at first and later slipping into a more comfortable soothing pace, and the words that roll off her tongue are beautiful and wondrous and like nothing they've experienced before. She changes her voice in some parts of the story, and imitates the sounds of brand new stars, and the whispering ends of longing thoughts, and sometimes she will rise unexpectedly and simply walk away.
Time passes, they can feel it in their green and in the warmth of the soil, and one day she comes back with a small girl in hand, and sits her next to their growing garden, their family, and remarks about a story she once knew, about a girl who tripped down a rabbit hole surprisingly shaped like a box, sort of blue, and the marvelous things that she found there. The sun inches westward across the sky and the small girl listens to the bigger girl talk about a bewildered sort of rabbit who would sometimes change his nice leather jacket for a stripier one, a cat who would often smile, but, in actuality, loved wearing a wimple, and about a queen of hearts who sometimes liked to dance and wear pretty French dresses.
The bigger girl suddenly pulls the smaller girl into her arms, and decides to point them out, calling their names, and they happily unfurl their leaves in pride. The small girl holds the hand of their friend, who is always content to simply let them know how she is feeling that particular day, and the small girl lets out a happy cry as she points to the loveliest and reddest of them all.
"That's you! That's you!" she laughs and their friend, the bigger girl, the sister girl, pulls herself off the ground and lifts the little one to her feet. They walk with their hands held between them and their arms swing daintily frontwards and backwards. The little one laughs again, like wind chimes tinkling in the clear air, and the flowers drink in the sound the same as they would the sun.
They know their friend will return, maybe with more pretty words and delicate giggles, because she's part of their family. She's a flower too, even when the weather isn't quite as nice and the soft slow fall of rain keeps them apart.
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The memory is this: The sun is warm on the back of his neck, and the body sidled up next to him is lovely and glowing and human, and he laughs deep and joyful just because it feels completely right to do so. She laughs because he does and, fingers entwined, he pulls her into long golden grasses, and the sun reflects off the white of her dress and the straight of her teeth, and he spins them around and around and the shine in her eyes could mean something or everything and he feels so free. She believes that this will never end, and he is trying his damnedest to make the most of it before it does.
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This is the end.
Perhaps it is too dramatic and staccato to leave on it's own, but the truth is always left to fend for itself, and this is the most honest it can get. Because it is the end, of a life, or maybe a heart, or maybe even two.
There is considerably less destruction then normal, but maybe the damage they face is not something they are able to fight, or even see. The fire and brimstone and calls to war they feel are standard in apocalyptic events do not approach their scene, maybe out of kindness, but more likely out of cruelty.
Theirs is a special death, but only in the way that it is not a death at all, but an impossible future in which their lives are not lived.
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"Okay, the sonic screwdriver, your transtemporal electro-modifier, and... your favorite tie are all in a tent, yeah? And it's on fire. What do you save?"
"You haven't gone mad have you? I know you thought that whole Lex'qtenn incident was a bit harsh, but you did violate their no-touching-things law, so it's all on your head, you know. Besides, they were friendly weren't they? They had those cute little.. eyes. And the moon system! Did you know that--"
"Hold on a minute. First off, I was not harsh about that Lexwhatever thing. If you can maybe remember a girl being hung upside down from a five-story mushroom? Can you try that? Got the image now? You may not be surprised that this girl had no intention whatsoever to accidently trip over her friend's big feet, and land on purple alien flowers and have an entire tribe start yellin' things the TARDIS won't even translate. Second," she continues, eyes narrowing, "you're rubbish at answering questions."
"Now look," he says, striding over and plucking the glossy magazine right from her fingers, "I'm sure you think asking questions from... hold on." He closes the magazine and reads the cover, "..from The Quiggle is a sufficient way to torture a nine hundred year old alien, but honestly, haven't we got better things to be doing? Exploring the universe, all that? I'm assuming you haven't forgotten you're in a dimensionally transcendental time machine," he finishes a little smugly.
She watches him flip through the pages of the magazine, scanning articles with blatant disbelief, and smiles. He glances up for a moment in between page turning and mumbling something about oh, they don't come from Sweden, they're bloody alien, and when he looks up again from the text he stares at her, rather confused. "What?"
She doesn't say anything, but her smile turns into a grin. "Oh, come on! What is it? What?"
She gets out of the control chair and begins walking out of the console room, saying, "You just don't want to admit you'd save the tie."
She misses the face he pulls. She's completely right.
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"I'm right and you know it."
"Mickey.."
"No. Maybe it'd be better if it wasn't comin' from me, but it's true. You can't keep doing this, Rose. You can't keep.. I know it's not the same as travelin', I know it isn't. I did it too, remember? But you need to stop throwin' yourself into the bad situations not carin' if you come out or not."
She laughs awkwardly in disagreement and tries to wave it off, but even she can tell the sound rings false in the safety of the room.
"Look, just promise me you'll at least take a break, yeah? Get away from all this work and think about what you're doin'. There are people countin' on you, and not just to save the day, but to be alive when the day's over. You've got family, you've got us. You've got me," he adds.
She looks away, but she doesn't respond. She never pegged him as this observant before.
"Just promise me. Please. Go on holiday, have a nice weekend in Clovelly or something."
She chuckles, and he smiles in return. "Okay," she says. "Just don't come complaining when I uncover some alien plot. Wait and see, they always like the small towns," she jokes.
He puts his hand over hers and leaves the room. Her chair swivels behind her desk and she looks out of her floor-to-ceiling window. The city is as busy and bustling as it normally is, and she still has a strange sort of shock when she glances the zeppelins floating in the skyline. Her sigh is soaked up on the glass and she pushes herself out of her chair. She fingers the name plate on her desk, silently contemplating her conversation with Mickey. It's not as if there was no hope. She'd been living a life, not so different from her old one, but even then the aftertaste was bittersweet.
She replaces the name plate in it's normal spot next to her desk lamp, and leaves the room. The letters engraved into her door as she walks away are official and informative:
Rose Tyler
Earth Defender
Torchwood Inst.
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Rose.
It's white. Everything around her is perfectly white, untouched, untainted, and the feeling of nothing unsettles her a little. She looks carefully at her un-surroundings and she doesn't panic. Nope, this is her, not panicking. She remembers lying comfortably on her alt-bed in her alt-room in her alt-world, reading stacks of papers and forms because saving the earth means absolutely nothing unless you can document it properly. She remembers..
Rose.
..the edges blurring a little, a gravity shift and a sideways pull, and, she suddenly notices, there's a buzzing inside her head. It's familiar, like it's filling up an empty space inside her mind that was meant specifically for it's use, and the more she concentrates the more it thins and changes pitch until it's a steady hum. Her stomach drops. And then drops some more, and she's almost certain that, well, that her stomach has just left her body through impossible means because she knows that hum, it's so perfectly familiar, because it's..
Rose.
..him. It's him. She spins around, trying to find some change in the un-scenery, some sort of glimpse of brown, or blue. Or both. She sees.. nothing. She still can't distinguish the white from the white from the white. She's about to laugh in a fit of absurd frustration, a desperate way for her mind to grip the possibility that yes, she is sort of, probably, going mad. She's a total nutter. Completely gone. She's--
Hello.
She gasps. She turns and suddenly he's there. This is impossible, this is so impossible, and she has finally snapped. Oh god, she has completely lost it. He smiles and it's everything she remembers and more, and he looks so real against the backdrop of nothing, so three-dimensional and marvelous and impossible. She wants to say so many things, she wants to laugh and cry and scream and this torrent of feelings rushing through her leaves her incoherent and ridiculous, so the most she can manage is a pleased sort of "Um..?"
His grin gets wider, and wider, and suddenly she can't see him anymore, because he has pulled her to him so she's all wrapped up in thin little stripes decoratively placed on brown. He's crushing her against his chest, his face in her hair, against her neck, and he's saying something, something that sounds like "Rose, oh Rose." When she inhales it's so incredibly him that her brain is overloaded with this mad idea that it is really him, that he's here, right now, and she can go back and they can live with each other and he can show her so much more and.. the grip he has on her tightens and she squeaks in delight, her heart catching in her throat, and she notices that her eyes are warming and ready to burst with little drops of salt water, but can't find any scrap of will within her that could manage to care.
"I can't believe it," she breathes, her own returning hug nearly as bone-crushing as his. He pulls away from her after a long moment, and slides his hands down into hers, entwining their fingers so their palms meet. "Hello," he says.
She laughs heartily, loud and wonderful, throwing her head back to let the feeling rush through her. She grins at him, huge and full of relief, and she's so busy soaking up the moment she can't think of a single thing to say.
"Rose Tyler. I've waited a long time to see you."
The smile she's giving is beginning to hurt her jaw. "Me too," she says.
"Where are we?" she asks a little unexpectedly, even to herself. "I was doing paperwork, and then.."
"Blegh, paperwork? What on earth are you doing paperwork for? Wait, let me guess -- taxes?" he says, pulling a horrified face.
"No, you silly man," she replies good-naturedly, bumping her shoulder against his, "Apparently you can't properly save anyone if you don't write everythin' down perfect. Drives me up a wall, to tell you the truth."
He smiles, and she sees right through him.
"So how come you didn't answer my first question? Where are we?"
He sobers a little, and looks straight into her eyes. "You are exactly where you always were. I'm just visiting a little."
Her heart opens up, and an avalanche of stones happen to make their way in. "What do you mean? What--"
"You're dreaming, Rose. But I'm coming. I'm finding a way to get to you, and I will. I promise you." He looks so intensely sincere that she can't help the calm spreading through her limbs, the relief visible in the set of her shoulders.
"How long? How long until you get here?"
"I don't know. Just, follow the sound of my voice. I'm not sure where I'll end up, so you're going to have to listen for me, okay? Can you do that for me?"
"Yeah, of course I can Doctor, but--"
He untangles their hands and cups her cheek. "Remember," he says quietly. "It isn't certain yet, but I will find you."
She leans into his hand a little, and his eyes soften. "I trust you," she sighs.
She bolts up right in bed, startled and confused, looking around at the familiar surroundings. Desk, chair, papers, window, bookshelf, papers, papers, bed. She's in bed, and.. what just happened? A phantom feeling of safety courses through her blood and the light in her mind is dim, but steadily grows brighter as she tries to hang onto the feeling. Oh. He's coming. She relaxes, and sinks into the mattress, not caring as more paper floats softly to the ground from her bed.
When she sleeps, it's dreamless.