Event Collapse ("Release" entry)
Oct. 14th, 2015 09:40 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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who_contestTitle: Event Collapse
Rating: PG
Genre: Angst/Missing Scene
Word Count: 550
Pairings or Characters: The Eleventh Doctor
Warnings: None
Summary: Everybody lives, and the Universe is dying.
Prequel to The Wedding of River Song, so spoilers for that episode. Passing reference to The Sontaren Stratagem/The Poison Sky.
Were it not for the wrongness of it, he could learn to love a world like this.
The morning dawns brilliant orange at two minutes past five, as the first cars begin to drift past his cell window. Tourists aim their cameras from the roofs of airbuses, or press themselves against train doors as they clatter by. If he stands on tiptoes he can see all the way down the Thames, where fishing sloops and Viking longboats vie for space alongside HMS Victory. Faced with the noise and heat of the city, it can be hard to remember that this is a planet in its death throes. Every present and every future at his fingertips, held in a perfect, fatal moment of disintegration.
Whenever he’s not shackled, the guards mostly leave him be. It’s crowded in the Tower, with so much history collapsed in on itself, and he rarely lacks for company. He plays hide-and-seek with Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury; spars a little with Henry XII on one of the monarch’s flying visits. Mary Stuart keeps to her room, but her soft, relentless praying filters through the brickwork nonetheless.
The others know he’s different, even if they can’t pinpoint the reason for that knowledge. Time works on him in insidious ways, through hunger and thirst and boredom. Dirt collects under his fingernails, and his hair touches his collarbone. Most subtle of all are the mental pressures, the weight of his own helplessness expanding with each new breath. He can feel his internal clock begin to stutter, fighting to keep pace as reality starts its steady grind to a halt.
Emperor Churchill is calling him “soothsayer”. One of the Beefeaters, a portly Silurian who serves lunch out of tin bowls, turns this into a private joke. “Now then, soothsayer. If you can predict tomorrow’s menu, there’s an extra helping in it for you. Get it right three days in a row, I might even stretch to coffee.”
He wants to reply that there’ll be no tomorrow, just as there was no yesterday. Instead pity (or maybe it is cowardice) gets the better of him, and he only smiles. In this world truth and madness can run so close together as to be indistinguishable. Either one might attract too much notice.
Late one evening, at two minutes past five, UNIT arrives to reapply the handcuffs. (“Hullo, Ross”, he says in passing, and the man who answers to Greyhound 40 blenches.) Any hopes of release are dashed when they pass the ground floor and keep heading down. The lift doors disgorge them at the main laboratory, and he is frogmarched out into harsh electric light.
In the far corner, Vincent is putting the closing touches to Café Terrace at Night. Surrounded by the technology of innumerable ages, he looks wilder than ever, scabs of paint flaking from his jacket. The finished piece is exactly as history – the other Earth’s history, the right one- would have it. The officer nearest the easel hesitates, blinking, like someone caught between sleep and wakefulness. Vincent rinses the last brush clean and takes a few paces back.
“Perhaps there may be more like us. Others who remember. Do you think so, Doctor?”
He can barely speak. “Yes. Maybe.”
Beneath his eyelids, the stars are going out.
Rating: PG
Genre: Angst/Missing Scene
Word Count: 550
Pairings or Characters: The Eleventh Doctor
Warnings: None
Summary: Everybody lives, and the Universe is dying.
Prequel to The Wedding of River Song, so spoilers for that episode. Passing reference to The Sontaren Stratagem/The Poison Sky.
Were it not for the wrongness of it, he could learn to love a world like this.
The morning dawns brilliant orange at two minutes past five, as the first cars begin to drift past his cell window. Tourists aim their cameras from the roofs of airbuses, or press themselves against train doors as they clatter by. If he stands on tiptoes he can see all the way down the Thames, where fishing sloops and Viking longboats vie for space alongside HMS Victory. Faced with the noise and heat of the city, it can be hard to remember that this is a planet in its death throes. Every present and every future at his fingertips, held in a perfect, fatal moment of disintegration.
Whenever he’s not shackled, the guards mostly leave him be. It’s crowded in the Tower, with so much history collapsed in on itself, and he rarely lacks for company. He plays hide-and-seek with Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury; spars a little with Henry XII on one of the monarch’s flying visits. Mary Stuart keeps to her room, but her soft, relentless praying filters through the brickwork nonetheless.
The others know he’s different, even if they can’t pinpoint the reason for that knowledge. Time works on him in insidious ways, through hunger and thirst and boredom. Dirt collects under his fingernails, and his hair touches his collarbone. Most subtle of all are the mental pressures, the weight of his own helplessness expanding with each new breath. He can feel his internal clock begin to stutter, fighting to keep pace as reality starts its steady grind to a halt.
Emperor Churchill is calling him “soothsayer”. One of the Beefeaters, a portly Silurian who serves lunch out of tin bowls, turns this into a private joke. “Now then, soothsayer. If you can predict tomorrow’s menu, there’s an extra helping in it for you. Get it right three days in a row, I might even stretch to coffee.”
He wants to reply that there’ll be no tomorrow, just as there was no yesterday. Instead pity (or maybe it is cowardice) gets the better of him, and he only smiles. In this world truth and madness can run so close together as to be indistinguishable. Either one might attract too much notice.
Late one evening, at two minutes past five, UNIT arrives to reapply the handcuffs. (“Hullo, Ross”, he says in passing, and the man who answers to Greyhound 40 blenches.) Any hopes of release are dashed when they pass the ground floor and keep heading down. The lift doors disgorge them at the main laboratory, and he is frogmarched out into harsh electric light.
In the far corner, Vincent is putting the closing touches to Café Terrace at Night. Surrounded by the technology of innumerable ages, he looks wilder than ever, scabs of paint flaking from his jacket. The finished piece is exactly as history – the other Earth’s history, the right one- would have it. The officer nearest the easel hesitates, blinking, like someone caught between sleep and wakefulness. Vincent rinses the last brush clean and takes a few paces back.
“Perhaps there may be more like us. Others who remember. Do you think so, Doctor?”
He can barely speak. “Yes. Maybe.”
Beneath his eyelids, the stars are going out.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-14 08:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-14 08:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-14 09:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-14 09:18 am (UTC)Which makes his total and complete forgiveness of River at the climax of the episode all the more important, to me.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-14 11:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-14 12:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-16 01:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-16 04:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-19 06:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-19 07:25 am (UTC)I'm not entirely sure which one I'd prefer, although the Doctor seems to know.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-19 10:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-19 08:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-20 06:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-20 03:44 am (UTC)In this world truth and madness can run so close together as to be indistinguishable. Either one might attract too much notice.
AND THIS.
Vincent rinses the last brush clean and takes a few paces back.
“Perhaps there may be more like us. Others who remember. Do you think so, Doctor?”
He can barely speak. “Yes. Maybe.”
Beneath his eyelids, the stars are going out.
These lines...they are the reasons I writhe with glorious envy and cling to every sublime word. Just gorgeous. Meaning layered over meaning and I look forwardly (eagerly) to every work you produce because YES. PERFECTION.
*HUGS*
(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-20 06:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-20 08:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-21 07:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-24 01:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-24 04:22 pm (UTC)I remember seeing a prompt kicking around on LJ a while back for an AU of this episode where River and the Doctor have no plan to save each other, and end up living in the dying universe until it collapses.
This is obviously not that fic, being a prequel, but it did make me think of the sadness and implicit horror of a world that's broken apart on River's love.