Summary: Set after Voyage of the Damned. One lonely man, far from home, stops to breathe.
Disclaimer: Owned by BBC and Russel T Davies (at least, I hope he has a copywrite…) not by me. I am not making money and I have no money, so suing me would be a completely pointless enterprise.
I dunno. I set out to write something to Hallelujah sung by Jason Wade and this came out instead.
Sunrise
He sat watching a purple sunrise over hills of a landscape so far from Earth it was actually incalculable. And yet, in a ridiculous part of his brain that had somehow, over a few hundred years, become infused with humanity he thought it looked like a winter morning in Salisbury. He could almost see the great standing stones, standing out stark and grey against the vibrant purple sky.
Dangerous sentimentality, he thought, slightly embarrassed and glad that no one was there to see it. I'm getting soft in my old age. He felt lost and alone, and he was nearly 1000, far too old to feel so young.
And he wished, he so desperately wanted to share that beautiful purple sunrise with someone, with anyone. But the planet was uninhabited and he was so far from Earth that anything he might have said, any of the puns that flitted through his brain (could have just gone to Stonehenge and saved on the gas) would have fallen on hopelessly deaf ears.
He sighed and stood to leave. He had thought to stay until the twin suns rose, but now there seemed little point to it. Useless little planet, anyway, he thought. It was nothing but a tiny little piece of rock, a cosmic blip, at the edge of the universe so far from everything else it was laughable. There were no battles to fight, no civilizations to save, no danger or death, just a quiet, rocky landscape that had never and would never see life--other than the Timelord and TARDIS that currently stood there—for the long millennia of its existence. It did have beautiful sunrises. At one point he had told a girl, someone blonde, that they were the best in the entire universe. There were so many of them marching through his life, so many faces whose names had been forgotten. Truth be told, the number of names he couldn't remember was miniscule compared to the infinite multitudes whose names he could never forget no matter how much he tried, no matter how far he ran.
And humans' lives were so criminally short, their brains terrifyingly small. They had barely enough synapses and grey matter to keep a few decades of memory, let alone a few centuries. They had no capacity for telepathy, very little capacity for true empathy. And yet, somehow they managed to survive and survive right to the end. They had something indefinable that he had never found anywhere else. Perhaps it was their capacity for hope. The Timelords considered it a useless emotion, pausing only long enough to laugh at the quaint customs of a small planet before returning to grand discussions of events they took no part it. No other species he met in his extensive travels seemed to possess the strange little emotion in quite the same way. Perhaps that was the secret.
The purple color had faded to a startling yellow, tinged around the edges of vision with light, almost white, pink. The very tip of one red sun could be seen rising over the crest of a rocky hill far out in the distance, and he knew without turning around that the other would already be mostly visible, silhouetting the TARDIS. With the sun behind her she looked vaguely similar to a standing stone, a lonely giant strangely out of place in an alien landscape so very far from its home world, forlorn and alone.
He felt like gagging. The sentimentality threatened to overtake him, to pull him into a spiral of self-pity and loneliness that was unforgivable in a soldier, and even more inappropriate for a hero. A savior of worlds shouldn't weep for his own small planet. He turned his back on the yellow sky wishing he'd never stopped. It was always a bad idea to stop long enough to think. And so he retreated into the safety of the TARDIS setting the controls to take him to an unstable planet in the most volatile time of its history, refusing to think about humans and their short, short lives, the emptiness in his head, the fires that consumed whole planets and whole species again and again, the unrelenting sameness, the meaningless passage of time, the brilliant purple sky of a planet far away.