Title: The What Happens After
Author: azriona
Characters: Nine
Rating: PG
Summary: It's not the Why that matters. It's the What Happens After.
A/N: The prompt from LJ's fishface44 appears at the end of the fic. Nine, pre-Rose, but also contains spoilers for The End of Time. Beta'ed by LJ's earlgreytea68.
The What Happens After
Humans. You're amazing, you lot. You're enormously clever and completely naïve. You're blind as bats and you're quick to find the single thing out of place in a slew of details. You're kind to those who need it, and you're cruel without discrimination. You have more schadenfreude than any other creature in the universe.
Go into a bookstore, wander in the history section for a bit. You start to notice a trend – most of the books, they're not about all the good in the world. Now, you have your books about the invention of salt and how tea saved the British, but they're on the bottom shelf, the leftover remainders on the discount table. No, most of the books are about the bits of history that you're most interested in, which all have a theme. The sinking of the Titanic. The Black Plague. The Crusades. There's entire shelves of the Blitz and the Holocaust and don't even think of reading all the books out there on Henry and his harem of wives. You'd be reading until the end of time.
Do you see it? Do you see what sorts of things you want to know about? The disasters – the destruction – the end of eras. You can't get enough of it. You pick and pick and pick until whatever scab might have remained is gone, your collective wounds open and bleeding.
Look at Kennedy. Now, there's an end of an era for you – or at least the beginning of what spelled the end of an era, for one country, anyway. Handsome, young American president, fashionable wife, nice kids. Shot and killed on a street in Dallas and you're still picking it apart with conspiracy theories and movies and books and songs and before you're done, there'll probably be a West End musical about it.
Kennedy will be dead a hundred years, and historians will argue about who was where and when things happened in what order. Five hundred years, they'll still be talking about it. But by then, the historians will be called archaeologists, and it'll be a noble pursuit in trying to unearth an age-old mystery.
Archaeologists – treasure hunters – explorers. All the same thing, really, digging into places where they don't belong, never belonged, rummaging in a past which is best left to itself. You know why the Titanic sank: a combination of human pride and poor weather conditions. Knowing doesn't bring the Titanic from its watery grave, nor does it make the dead's rest any easier.
Really, it doesn't matter, the why and what-for. Do you think the people in Krakatoa cared why their volcano exploded? The only thing they cared about was trying to get out before they died. An archeologist would give their eyeteeth to be there. Or they think they would. They'd want to be there in their pressure suits and their gas masks and with a safe way to get out of the flames. They wouldn't understand the sheer terror and heartache as your heart pounded thick blood like mucous, the way the dust and the smoke clung to your hair and the insides of your teeth. How it hurt to breathe, and worse to open your eyes.
It's not the why that matters – it's the what happens after.
Humans. You don't think about the what happens after. You look at history and you say it's to learn from your mistakes. But you never learn. Otherwise, why Bosnia? Why Rwanda? Why Darfur? You've learned that lesson a thousand times over – and you'll repeat it until your planet is in cinders.
But this is what you humans, you wonderful, short-sighted, well-meaning humans, that's what you will never understand. These things happen, had to happen, will always happen. They aren't things you can change, no matter how much history you examine, no matter how many archaeologists try to uncover their hidden mysteries. Kennedy, Krakatoa, the Titanic – they're all fixed events, just as Lesotho, Myedbayev, and the Almaty will be. They are catalysts in your growth as the human race.
Had the Titanic not sunk, there wouldn't have been mandates to ensure that all ships had lifeboats enough, that calls for help were never ignored. Had Kennedy not been shot, you would have taken your place in the world for granted, and never have gone to the moon.
Had Krakatoa not exploded, leaving the island in cinders, a blackened, destroyed mess...
Had Krakatoa not exploded, sending each inhabitant into oblivion, as if they had never actually existed at all...
Had Krakatoa not exploded...
Had Krakatoa...
Humans. You're always looking for the why. Your historians, your archaeologists – diggings in the ground, in the dusty library tomes, always wanting to know why something happens. Thinking if you know the why, you can prevent what leads to the what next.
It's not like that. Sometimes, knowing the why doesn't help. It only speeds the what next along.
Why did Krakatoa burn? Because sometimes, that's what planets do. They burn, and everyone there burns with them, whether they deserved it or not. Even if most burn for the ill-conceived intentions of the one.
Why did the Titanic sink? Because someone believed himself invincible, of absolute power and able to control the pull of time and water to his whim. Never mind the thousands of lives he held in the palm of his hand; never mind that he condemned them to a watery grave, locked for the rest of time away from everything they knew or loved in the world.
Why was Kennedy killed? Brought down by the delusions of a madman, really, who pushed the button and ended a charismatic leader's dream of a perfect, timeless world.
Krakatoa burned. The Titanic sits at the bottom of the ocean. Kennedy is dead. The why doesn't matter. Not at all. The only thing that matters is what happened after.
Humankind goes to the stars.
You always have your escape plan.
Everything ends. Everything. Even time will end, eventually, for all of us. For you. For them.
The Titanic lays locked in time at the bottom of the frozen ocean, year by year covered in the silt and sand. Even the memory of it will disappear in time, until its fate is no more than a footnote, a legend whispered among the stars from people who don't quite know the story.
Kennedy is dead, his brothers, his wife, his son, their legacy. They exist only in the faded memories of those who lived with them, as a name carved in granite, and eventually, not at all.
Krakatoa is still locked and burning, a constant fire in the back of my mind. The screams and the tears and the soot and the ash and the dark and the thin discs of suns coldly blazing from overhead. The terror and the frenzy and the certainty and the hesitancy, all stemming from that one moment where a docile mountain turned into a volcano.
Humans, with your historians and your archaeologists. You look for answers, but you're looking in the wrong places. Don't look in your past. There's nothing there you want to see.
Prompt: Nine points and laughs at archaeologists.