Choice
A Doctor Who Fanfiction by After the Silence
Summary: "The multiverse is a tree, and with each choice a new branch appears." Sometimes, those branches are darker than others. A story about decisions. AU as all get out.
Word Count: 1389
Notes: Been working on this forever, and now what do you get? A prologue. You must be so excited. Special thanks to my sister, as usual, for letting me show her this and telling me it wasn't rubbish, even though I was quite proud of it anyway.
Disclaimer: Je ne possède pas le Doctor Who. Désolée.
Prologue: The Tree
Once, a very long time ago it seemed, Martha Jones had loved books. She still did, of course. Opening a new novel remained one of her favorite things in the universe. The sight of a new story still filled her with anticipation, the soft crack of the spine continued to send shivers down her own, and reading those first few words persisted in flushing her body with the euphoria she'd begun to expect from such an experience. When she had the time (which she rarely did, as the near-infinite amount of time life on the TARDIS offered often ended up far more full than she would ever have thought possible), she was likely to be found curled up in a chair in the ship's vast library, making up for years of dull medical textbooks through prose. Still, none of these new literary experiences, both earthly and alien, came close to filling her with the wonder she had so often experienced as a child, spending hours upon hours hiding from familial drama and daughterly responsibility in a world of her favorite authors' creations, mouthing the words as her eyes passed over them like they were a prayer.
To this day, she enjoyed the way the words of her childhood tasted on her tongue. During the empty hours (waiting for sleep, waiting for the Doctor, waiting for release from prison), she recited them. "'Are you a animal, vegetable, or mineral?'" she would whisper, or, "'sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'", or even, "Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much." The phrases had become wonderfully familiar due to the endless repetition, and now rolled off the tongue as easily as her own name. They intrigued the Doctor, too, she was pleased to note. The first time she'd begun to whisper to herself, alone with him in a dark dungeon after he'd stopped talking to focus his energies on resonating concrete, of all things (an idea he'd chuckled at when he'd first mentioned it, though why was anyone's guess), he'd raised an eyebrow. Still, he hadn't stopped her then, or any of the times after that, and it had gotten to the point where, after a few minutes of thoughtful silence, he would ask her for one of her brilliant stories, Martha Jones, if you will, and she would sigh and begin, choosing from what must have seemed to him an endless supply, smiling a secret smile to herself at the pleasure she seemed to to bring to the man she admitted she was falling deeper in love with with each passing day.
Of all these stories, though, the one he seemed most interested in (and thus the one she repeated most often, for what other purpose did it serve, this quiet repetition of much-loved words and phrases?) was one she couldn't even remember the name of, let alone where she'd first heard it. It didn't seem like something she would have read anywhere. She couldn't remember what such a book would have looked or felt like, and her efforts towards finding the story online or in a store all went unrewarded. It was, she supposed, a rather odd story for a child to have come across, but she must have liked it well enough at the time to memorize it for herself.
"The multiverse is a tree," it began, "and with each choice a new branch appears. There are large branches and small branches, and branches of many sizes in-between. The shapes and colors of these branches vary and some, child, are much darker than others."
The story continued like that for a while, strange and vague and utterly confusing, before turning to the allegorical tale of a young child ("very much like yourself," the narrator warned, "but so, so much sadder") who had made a very important choice, one which had resulted in the creation of a very large, very dark branch, where absolutely everything was wrong. At first, the child did not notice anything different, thinking everything to be the same as before. Eventually, though, it became clear he was in a new universe, and that a great many people had suffered and were suffering as a result of the creation of that universe, and that it was up to him to set things to rights. In the end, he died trying to destroy his horrid creation, but the choice had already been made, and was irreversible. Martha had a vague recollection of telling this story to Tish and Leo, and of them being completely enraptured only to yell at her in the end, telling her it was a horrifying story, and not any good at all. Then, they'd gone off to play with the neighbor kids, leaving her sobbing and alone.
The Doctor didn't do this, of course. Instead, he listened very intently every time, even as he worked out with another part of his mind their daring escape. Afterwards, back on the TARDIS, he would fall unusually quiet, obviously unsettled. Despite this, he never actually talked to Martha about it, and wouldn't mention the strange story even in passing. Martha never pushed, of course. She was sensible, and knew when to leave well enough alone, especially when it came to oddly attractive aliens with no sense of personal boundaries.
Still, all this repetition of a single story meant she thought a great deal about it herself, even when she was far from a prison cell. In particular she thought about the idea of the universe being a tree, and what impact that might have on the world around her. Did I create a new branch, just now? she would wonder to herself, after saying some thing or another to one or another being, I wonder what color it is, and what size. Probably very small. She knew a great deal more now about the nature of the universe than she ever had before. She knew about timelines, and causal nexuses, and the impact one word in one galaxy could have on another, billions of lightyears away - all this from listening to the Doctor's rambling, babbling voice as they hopped about from place to place. Given all this, and one off-hand mention of other universes (which he wouldn't go very far into, even though she did ask), the tree theory made more and more sense. With all the universe-saving the Doctor was doing, she could easily imagine the appearance of another universe where he hadn't arrived in time to avert a disaster, or of a particularly large, probably very dark branch (perhaps more of a second tree) where he had never existed at all. The Doctor made a lot of decisions, she realized, and those decisions had a lot of weight. The more she thought about it, the more it made sense considering the universe (multiverse?) as she now knew it.
Eventually, she made it into a sort of a game, guessing which decisions held the most weight, which moments were the most pivotal in all their adventuring, and what sort of branch each choice was likely to create on the universal tree. Most of the time, it was obviously just a small one, more like a twig. Occasionally, though, it was obvious to Martha that the Doctor had just created something very large. On these occasions, she even thought she felt a little something of the split - a tingle running down her spine as he spoke the final, deciding words. Completely a part of her imagination, of course, but very interesting, nonetheless.
This, though, was out of the ordinary.
A great big decision was being made, she knew, and she wasn't even a part of it. The parties involved didn't want her there, had forced her to leave, and now she was left staring up at the night sky, terrified. She pictured the Doctor's face, twisted with agony, imagined the thoughts currently running though his dulled mind. There were two courses of action he could take here, and the building feeling in her chest was beginning to convince her of which one it would be.
Seconds passed, then minutes. A blinding light passed through her mind, and she ran off screaming.
& Fin. Read and Review, or my cat will come after you