Title: Echoes
Author: TardisIsTheOnlyWaytoTravel
Story Summary: Sometimes the Doctor visits an ancient statue on an unimportant little planet. He couldn't tell you why.
Author notes:
So. I naturally disregard the Lungbarrow hypothesis – for a start, Jessa L'rynn's is far more interesting, and to boot it's not packaged in the form of an unappealing and impenetrable novel that in the end, doesn't really go anywhere, and prompts the end result that any kind of awe/respect you might at some point have felt for the Time Lords as a people is more or less crushed. Yeah. Jessa L'Rynn's mythos is better.
All the same, though, something in Lungbarrow sparked this little story. At this point it's simply a one-shot, although possibly I may, one day, expand on it.
So here you go, although if you haven't read the Lungbarrow Wikipedia page (honestly, you understand more of what it's about by reading Wikipedia than the actual book ) this will probably be an intriguing yet inscrutable fic that makes little sense whatsoever.
ECHOES
It was a small planet in a system with eight others (Balarius I, II, IV, V, VI and VII respectively), an ordinary, average, 52nd-century planet in the solar system-equivalent of a middle-class suburb. It had a rather interesting market city, but apart from that, there wasn't really anything that made it stand out.
Which made it all the more strange to find the statue there.
The Doctor didn't go there very often, but every now and then, when he was in a bleak, reflective mood, he would visit the planet so that he could walk down to the city square and gaze at the statue.
It was an old, terribly old statue, carved in hard stone that had somehow resisted wind and rain and all the other forces it had been subjected to over millennia. It was of a man in peculiar robes, tall, with a hawk-like gaze, straight nose and brows drawn together as though in thought. To most people the statue was nothing special. Few even spared it a glance as they went past.
The Doctor stared up at the hard, stone features. They were familiar, of course, even though he'd never in his lifetime met the man; his image had decorated the Academy where the Doctor had grown up, an object of veneration. The great Lord Rassilon, founder of all Time Lord society and engineer of the Time Lords themselves.
The Doctor sat near the statue, looking up at it, his usually mobile face strangely without expression.
"You come here surprisingly often, considering."
The Doctor turned in disbelief to see a living copy of the statue standing next to him, watching him intently.
For a moment he looked comically incredulous; then something dark crept into his eyes and his face closed down as something was put aside.
"Things didn't go the way you intended, did they?"
"Not really, no," the other Time Lord agreed with Rassilon, his voice sober. Somehow, the inflection was subtly changed, altered.
He glanced sideways at the apparition.
"Come to gloat?" His voice was mocking, bitter.
"Strangely enough, no," Rassilon replied calmly. "All things considered, I think that all of us lost."
The other snorted.
There was silence for a while.
"My fault," Rassilon agreed, finally admitting it. "I shouldn't have done what I did. I got too ambitious. Both of us did, in our own ways, and you were the only one who could see what was happening. And in retaliation we drove you to a truly horrible death."
The other shrugged.
"It was inevitable, with your ambition. How's godhood working out for you?"
"Not so well as people imagine," Rassilon said ruefully. "But not nearly as bad as what you went through."
The man sitting next to him waved it away irritably.
"I don't remember most of the time. My awareness is mostly at a subconscious level, you know."
"I know," Rassilon answered.
Once again there was a period of silence.
"I simply cannot help dwelling on the fact that you went to such lengths to place yourself in a position to protect Gallifrey and its people, and yet in the end, you were the one who had to end it."
"Because of you," the other snapped. "Yes. But it's done. It's all done and dead and long gone. You're god of a universe emptied of our people. I suggest you adjust to it."
Rassilon gave him a moment to hunch over moodily, then spoke gently.
"I'm sorry. For all of it."
"I'll live," the other Time Lord muttered, barely audible.
"I know. And for that I'm most sorry of all."
He didn't answer, or look round. Rassilon faded slowly, reluctantly, with a look of regretful sorrow.
After a while, the Doctor blinked, and realised with surprise that he'd been sitting by the statue for over an hour. Odd. It didn't feel like any where near that long, and a Time Lord's sense of time was ordinarily as reliable as an atomic clock. More so. But he often seemed to 'lose' time around the statue. Sometimes he wondered if perhaps Rassilon's influence lingered somehow in this one place. It was a ridiculous notion – the forgotten faded god of a dead people – but all the same, he wondered.
Still, he'd spent enough time staring at the statue. He didn't know why he felt the strange need to visit it sometimes… just that, somewhere deep down, that the statue meant much more in his universe than he knew. Still, it was an odd habit, even for a man who'd accumulated a lot of eccentricities over the lifetimes.
After all, it wasn't as though anything ever happened, was it?
And once again the statue was left alone, with only the forgotten traces of a time that never happened echoing through the timelines.
FIN.