Prompt: Beginnings
Characters: 11th Doctor and Amy Pond (mentioned)
Mood: Hopeful
AN: This is my first fanfic, so go easy guys. I hope you enjoy the many more (I hope) to come!

There was no color. There was no sound or structure, no emotions or form. There was no measure of time, if time existed here at all. There was no gravity, and no weightlessness, no ratio of mass or distance. The titles and names of... somewhere... had apparently fallen away. His memories seemed to have died, but how he wasn't sure.

This feels an awful lot like thinking. He thought, unsure of how the thought was even possible and what it meant, making him doubt that it was a tangible thought at all. But as soon as the thought formed in the nothingness, the words because true. And as if through some sort of crack in the universe, bit of him seemed to slip into place and he could think again.

The Doctor, he was called. His memories slowly returned to him. Who he was, why he was here. It all seemed to do with the crack. The crack in Amelia Pond's bedroom wall, the crack that had followed them into the Byzantium, the cracks throughout time and space that led him to the opening of the Pandorica, and eventually, the rebooting of the universe.

And then he could feel again. The force of emotion was so strong it would have knocked him off of his feet, if he had feet. Did he have feet? He didn't know, he couldn't see. He was still nothing more than a conscious mind, suddenly hit with a wave of sadness. Somewhere in some universe he used to be a part of, everyone he knew was still alive, graced with the new beginning he had given them, but ignorant to the favor. The last memory he retained was of him stepping into the crack, into his death. And suddenly, here he was.

"If this is what dying feels like, it's rubbish!" He yelled out, the sound disappearing as quick as it had appeared, nothing to bounce off of and travel back to him from. But then he could speak, and he could hear, and there was still nothing.

The words, however lost to living ears they may now be, still rung true in his mind. He never expected the experience of his end to be grand. He didn't think he deserved that. No, the most he thought he could hope for was that when the time came for him to go, it would feel... complete. But instead he felt more alive than he was comfortable with, more solid and structural than a man who had cheated death ten times could imagine death would feel. Which provoked the blissful thought: What if he wasn't dead?

"No, no, no, don't think like that," he chided himself, "You're dead, you died. It's over." He paused, every word he wanted to say caught up in the moments that weren't passing. "You have to let them go."

He buried his burning hopes deep down into his core where their flames licked every emotion he couldn't let himself feel. He knew his last hope had been in vain the moment he stepped through the crack. Amelia Pond, extraordinary Amelia Pond, she would remember so much. She would bring back her parents and he childhood he'd so ruthlessly stolen from her. She would be able to live it now, live it right. Live without his interference. Because she wouldn't remember him. The memory of him would fade until it was no more than a dream, and with every moment she lived her life the right way, the harder the dream would be to remember.

And through all of that, why would she remember a story told to her while she slept? Why would she hang onto a selfish old man's final attempt at self preservation?

Suddenly, everything was wrong. His mind disoriented and he felt like every bit of the reality he was clinging to was being pulled every which way. A sickening rush of nausea ran through him as, to his amazement, he realized he could move fingers and legs. He fell and before he could spring his arms out and react, his back and slammed down hard against a cold, hard surface.

He gasped for breath as it scuttled away from him. The landing had knocked the air right from his lungs and he lay on the ground for a moment, the terrible feeling of suffocation rattling through him. Once he had taken a few shaky breaths, he peeled his eyes open.

Immediately he closed them. It couldn't be. Not again. It must be his mind playing tricks on him. He couldn't have actually survived. He opened them. What the hell? The barely coherent thoughts shot out of his mind like bullets in the dark, none finding any truth to pierce or clarity to draw out.

He repeated the process with his eyes so rapidly the vision blurred and the view of the TARDIS celling was nearly impossible to make out. He sat up, and as his disoriented body started to register the things around him, the console room spun and swayed. But as the voice of Amy Pond radiated into the blue box from whatever wedding setting lay the TARDIS doors, the Doctor's face broke into a grin.

She remembered.