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[Time, the Thief]
Time, you thief who loves your sweets, put that in. ~Hunt, James Henry Leigh
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Time, she learns, is not quite a tree branching nor a river rushing forever forward. The rush is correct, if not the direction. However, she has yet to be given a metaphor less crude than 'time-wimey' stuff (in her dreams, there is no better metaphor forthcoming).
In the 21st century, she cuts her hair, short and almost boyish. In the 40th , she pets a dog with no nose. It wags both tails.
There are things that must be, the Doctor tells her, columns that time rests upon while the rest twists and turns (Pompeii, she dreams). The universe, she is only now seeing how big, very much depends on butterfly wings. She doesn't understand the reference until he shows her.
In a cave that's not a cave, at the center of all worlds, there is a bird of bright plumage perched above a near skeleton of a man chained to a stone table. Their eyes are white and they do not blink.
They see her (all that is and was and will be) and she cannot turn away, her fingers white as they grip onto his sleeve. Take me away she begs, I know them (have always known them) I do not wish to stay.
Time and his twin locked in a cave, Destiny in chains and the other by duty. As long as time flies free, the worlds proceed ever forward (and backward, timey-wimey he explains). They are columns, he says and repeats.
She is crying in earnest now, please is low and choked, but I love them echoes back.
The dreams come without the aid of sleep. He loved, and erased their existence, an entire planet, his whole people and he is the last (but he won't last). He splintered time and demands she pay (she came with him to escape those dreams, to end what was beginning, but the whole universe knows what she will do), that she fell a kingdom for the sake of worlds she's only now just seen (Camelot will fall, is falling, has fallen, and she will bring it to its knees).
The dreams tell her she will.
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When she wakes, she is back in her chamber, the TARDIS awkwardly parked by her bed.
I'm sorry, he says.
Morgana knows he is not.
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