Disclaimer: I don't own anything you would recognise here.

A/N: I usually don't bother my betas with challenges, but I promise that I would get this one betaed and reposted later. And if someone spot the references to the books of my favourite writer and name him I'll give them either cyber cookies or write them a story by their request.:)

The challenge was the "Heart of the TARDIS Weekly Prompts" from the TARDIS forum. The prompts were:

Word: Beginning

Word2: Ending

Word3: fireworks

Sentence: It really was a matter of perception.

Quote: So me and you... there's a turn up for the books"

Lyric: "We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet For auld lang syne" Auld Lang Syne


Most stories start with the beginning, but what really is a beginning? For them end and beginning didn't really matter, because the end for one could very well be the beginning for the other. The beginning and the end are just a matter of a perception really, or that's what any time traveller would have been taught. But since we are not time travellers, we still need to start from a relative beginning, and what a beginning it would be.

Maybe it wasn't really a beginning it was middle really, it was their relative beginnings somewhere in the middle where their lives met and they knew each other. He took her to the post- World War I- Paris and just before the WWII, where the poor and even not only so, lived a bohemian life expecting it to be ruined by the impending war. They were dancing to Glen Miller in a restaurant on the Riviera, but in the woman's eyes something would still be missing. Perhaps it was the man; perhaps it was the general mood of the melancholic, bohemian clientele of the restaurant. Perhaps it was just her and the night around.

Everyone was living, snatching the last leisure moments before the storm and the bombs. The man in a tweed jacket would dip the woman back to end the dance and lead her back to the table, where cheap champagne would wait them in a fake crystal glasses. She would toss her beautiful blonde curls and he would think that he would be the one to send her to her dead. The two of them almost strangers or at least she was as good as that for him, the only thing he knew for certain about this enigmatic woman was her death. But he wasn't alone in that, because she knew his end as well. They both knew their ends before they discovered each other's beginnings. But the story would not be half as good if it was any different. After all they have never been a simple people, or a simple couple. So their story should not be so. And what a story that was, a story for the books.

Clinking with their glasses of champagne in a toast they both would turn their faces up to look at the sky and the fireworks above them. It would be another festive about some won war or the French Revolution, none of them was really concentrated to remember. They watched the fireworks in silence the man thinking how blood thirsty these humans were. They were just recently out from one war and already preparing for another, all the while they were celebrating yet another war. He would look at the fireworks and would think about their lives. His and the life of the woman sitting next to him, they were so much like the fireworks that burned in the sky. Soaring up towards the sky, burning, flying to explode into magnificent bright colours, to shine the brightest just before they burn out. Reaching their pick, their most beautiful form and colour only to immediately turn around and start to fall to the ground pulled by its gravity. Dark, spent and burned out getting back down, but still had that short moment of shining brightness. One moment in which they reached the sky.

And when the fireworks are over she would turn her head and stare into his eyes, with these gorgeous green eyes of hers, and he would know that she had thought the same. The emerald of her eyes would be glistening with unshed tears and he would take her head and kiss her lightly before pulling her up and taking her for a stroll around the streets of Paris.

And maybe his end would be her beginning, and maybe his beginning would be her end, or it could also be all in the middle, but this didn't matter. They would turn it all around and make it work, because they knew the workings of the Universe and of Time itself.

In some darkened alley she would turn around to him taking his hand and smiling. She would toss her wild curls with a flick of her head and would say.

"So me and you... there's a turn up for the books""