A/N: Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, c6 - threeshot with chapters exactly 500 words
Lonely Times
1.
The Time Door could be a very lonely place, sometimes.
Not always. She had the past, present and future at her fingertips after all. See whatever time she wanted, whoever's time she wanted. It could be a dreamy bliss from which she never had to wake...
But she did. Because she had a duty to perform, and part of her, at least, had to remain outside the door, in the frigid cold.
And that cold part of her was the lonely one: the one who couldn't drown in dream-like images she could bear witness to but never truly be a part of... She was free in the sense that she could fall in love with anyone and it wouldn't affect them at all, and trapped in the sense that not one person she saw would know of her existence, let alone love her back.
And it wasn't just love, but that was the plainest thing: the one that made the heart inside her chest ache so.
But she'd accepted this duty. She who was the princess of a kingdom that no longer existed. That was cast adrift. And this was the role that had anchored her.
And she was content to fulfil it. To bear witness to all these manner of things. To watch silently: to feel happiness and despair and grief in turn, at things she couldn't change - daren't change - and things did not last.
Her job was to watch that all and do two specific things. Make sure no-one else interfered - and make sure the world endured.
Fulfilling the second of those roles meant she only prolonged her time in guarding the door...but that was okay. The door was her home, and she doubted she could leave it otherwise. The hums of those past times that would never return except by a hand like hers (and she would never do it) hummed in her garnet orb. Echoes of the future sung to her behind the door and both of those were like drugs that dragged her in and kept her there. But she had her orb to sate that. To pull her back if she'd been under too long - and there was the other thing. On the other side of the door there was air, in which she could only drown in loneliness. But time had a different ocean that would seize her and not let go if she let it sweep her away, and the garnet orb and the duty that bound her to the other side were the only reasons she could swim against the current.
And that stretching loneliness was sometimes the reason she didn't want to swim, the reason she wanted so simply bob like a pebble in the sea until she sunk, until she drowned. But there were stronger things than her single, feeble heart, and so she endured. Waif-like, at times, and wondering how much longer she could manage it, but she endured.
And then Small Lady came.