Summary: "When you were born, you were created from the light spilling from the first star that Creation ever saw." Doctor/Rose, Bad Wolf.
Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who.
Endless
home is behind
the world ahead
and there are many paths to tread.
through shadow
to the edge of night,
until the stars are all alight. -edge of night, billy boyd
Your body is pulled together from the light coming from those very first few stars, weaving together to fashion a vessel so bright and consuming that, if you were mortal, you might burn. Your eyes are the color of flowers, and your body is the color of some precious metal on a planet a million trillion billion years ago. You are infinite and burning, forever and ancient, and you are powerful.
You look out onto this sea of nothingness, delicate stars and meteorites falling through an empty sky. You do not know exactly why or how you have come into being; you know only that you are meant to be here, that you have always meant to be here. You tilt your head back and you howl, breathe stars and galaxies and an entire universe into being.
When you are done, the worlds are satisfactory, for the time being — they are unfinished, and barren, but they are whole.
They are beautiful, in your light flower-eyes.
You live for a millennia more in harmony with the rest of the universes.
You leap across galaxies, nudge planets into being, watch with mild interest as stars burn out before your eyes.
Everything is just so… small, compared to you. The universe is your cradle, and you are growing up fast.
Until eventually, Time and Death and Life finish twiddling their thumbs and work new creatures into being — countless creatures, all across the stars. The Eternals are split cleanly in half, when all is said and done — some angry and disgusted towards these strange creatures, mortals, ephemerals, while the other half is reasonably intrigued by the little insects squirming in their playground.
You are firmly on the latter side of that argument; the creatures interest you, capture you in a way nothing ever has. You traipse across Time, and they are all beautiful, in their own right, but nothing captures you as much as the humans do.
They are… flawed. Easily one of the most flawed races in the whole of creation. They are stubborn and greedy, tempestuous and ambitious in ways that will drag them into wars and misunderstandings all throughout Space and Time. But you are interested in them, even grow to like them.
They are so… small, in the grand scheme of things, and you are so very large, but they are ambitious and beautiful, perfect in all their imperfection.
Eventually, you learn about Gallifrey.
They have already learned about you.
They call you a goddess, whisper a false name under their breaths, hold you in reverence and awe. They fall in love with your legend, the stories the Guardians whisper, but not you. You watch them closely, tear your eyes away from your precious humans long enough to witness the rise of a man named Rassilon, and two others, Omega and the Other, a man whose name was lost to the eons. You watch them grow, flourish, grapple for some power that can compete with your own.
You wonder why they could possibly care so much.
They master the art of time travel, become experts in genetic procreation, their technology advancing beyond most civilizations. They forget your false name, forget you, forget their reasons for moving onwards.
They forget why.
You live, for millennia longer. You live until one day, the stars grow dim and you sense something tearing, ripping, distorting in the center of your universe. It is unlike anything you have ever felt before — it is beyond the simple ripples left behind by the Gallifreyans TARDISes, beyond those silly little Time Agents and the odd Time Storm.
It is beyond a simple rewritten draft of time — whole generations are weaving in and out of existence, galaxies disappearing in a blink of an eye. You bound for the source, propel yourself through stars and deep space until you are at the center of the action.
They cannot see you, but you feel it — the distortion of Space and Time, the inevitable destruction of all you hold dear. The Eternals are placing bets; the Guardians are striking deals. Whole civilizations are starving and withering and it hurts but what can you do, what can you do but sit back and watch them destroy themselves?
The Time Lords are going to rip the universe to shreds. You can feel it, burning through your blood — their decision lies within a wooden box, a Moment created by a fool who thought he could stitch together the skin of a universe.
You watch the box be carried away, a man who calls himself "The Doctor" weighing the single most important decision of his many lives.
You gaze on him, in equal parts judgment, wonder, and pity.
You wonder how you could have possibly created a universe so cruel.
(you glimpse a timeline, then; one where you intervene, where you take the form of a woman from his future or his past or both, maybe somewhere in between. You call yourself the Moment, and you give him a happy ending. He becomes a knight and saves all the sweet little children. He saves Gallifrey, and the universe stays intact. The Daleks die.
He becomes a hero, and you the unwilling sidekick with the magic wand. And it would be nice, you think, to be able to do that — to cast a spell and give everyone what they want.
But you know, don't you?
The universe is never so kind, and happy endings are never so clear.)
You are alone.
It is a small price to pay, you think, for the safety of the universe — for all the Eternals and the Guardians and you to be banished to this place. This Nowhere. The Howling, they would call it. The Void. There is no Time in this place, no Space. Just emptiness, just darkness, perhaps not even that, but it's all you see.
You think of the thing humans called death, and you wonder if it would be preferable to this never-ending nothing.
You wonder if it would be akin to dreaming, so you sleep, to try and see what it feels like.
You have never needed sleep, but it comes to you easily in this place, because what else can you do when there is nothing left?
When you were born, you were created from the light spilling from the first star that Creation ever saw.
That light had glittered through your veins, in your pale flower eyes.
That light is dying now, dashed and dim in the suffocating darkness.
It presses into you.
It ends, suddenly, one day.
In a flash of golden light and love, something pulls you towards open air, freedom, something you haven't tasted in so long. You aren't sure exactly what it is, are so out of tune with yourself that you can't even tell if it is malevolent or not, but you are desperate for light and you let it take you, let it have you in exchange for the brightness you are swallowing greedily.
The world screeches to a halt when you gaze upon whatever woke you in wonder, in worry, for an eternity and no time at all.
It is a girl. A human girl. And you know she's a girl, barely out of infancy for her race, never mind comparing her to yourself, when you are all wrapped in Eternity. She is nothing more than a child, and yet…
And yet.
You glimpse her heart. She is bearing it open for you to see, a little crying voice calling come and see. You reel back at the flood of love and desperation radiating from her, at the earnestness of her request.
Help him, her soul is screaming, please, help him.
And you're not quite sure who he is. But this girl, this human, is so set to find him, so ready to lay down her own life at the expense of someone else's. You do not see the usual greed or the ambition in her tiny, weak human heart. You see only love, and sacrifice, and acceptance, and just a touch of fear.
You can't turn your back.
Even if you are technically free now; even if you tether yourself to this little creature, only to be sent back into the Howling.
You will not turn your back.
You feel it.
Love.
Her love, flooding your bloodstream, tainting the golden ichor. It aches, rattles your bones, turns your heart — not your heart, not really — oh so heavy. You wonder how any human could possibly live like this, how such a tiny thing could be so strong.
Your power is bent by her will, ruled by her emotion — you learn her name is Rose Tyler. She is a shop-girl, whatever that is, from twenty-first century Earth. She is soft and stubborn, all beauty and brevity, something simple and small yet so, so large and lively.
She raises her hand and calls upon your power.
"I bring life."
A pulse, a shove, a tug. Gasping breath, timelines twisting. Blue eyes, wide and wondering, a heart who will love and break so many times over learning how to beat again.
"The Time War ends."
A flash, a shudder through the ages. You do what you could not do, so long ago now, and you sew the seams of that bloodbath closed. No one can get in, no one can get out, and nothing anyone ever says will change that. The last remnants of a version of you, a manipulative, doe-eyed, war-twisted version of you leave in the blink of an eye.
Everything falls to dust — the Daleks, the Time Lords, the Eternals, the Guardians. Everything.
Except you.
"I am the Bad Wolf," you and Rose breathe as one, singing a name you plucked from an old human fairytale, "I create myself."
Somewhere, lost in Eternity, a wolf is born from the too-early death of a dwarf star.
In your last moments in Rose Tyler's body, you see the future, and it aches.
It is painful and bittersweet, and leaves something ashy in your not-mouth. A gray sky made up of infinity, sand-stung skin, and tears on the cheeks of a girl — woman, actually; she has always been a woman, you see that now — that you have come to love. It ends happily for two, but the third is left to wander, always carrying that precious pink and yellow human behind his aching hearts.
You close your eyes as he breathes you in, and before he exhales your essence, you glimpse at pieces of him.
He will always carry Rose Tyler, in this body, in the next, even the ones after that.
Especially in the ones after that.
I want you safe, my Doctor.
You figure it's an easy enough wish to grant, so grant it you do.
You stay on the sidelines in the coming decades, wrap him in comfort with the help of his TARDIS when she leaves, when the next one leaves, and the one after that. You watch over Martha Jones when she walks through a post-apocalyptic Earth that never would be; you kiss away Donna Noble's tears when she has gasping, aching nightmares about a man she thinks never existed. You cradle Amy Pond when she loses the memory of the man she loves, and again when she is taken by Madame Kovarian. You watch the girl who would become River Song, and you become something she dreams of, something she writes about in places no one will ever look.
You look after them, and you cherish them, just as he does. Just as she would.
You look after them, but you don't dare interfere.
Companions come and go. Centuries pass.
He dies on Trenzalore.
No Clara, no Eleven, no Gallifrey. He is lucky in the sense that he'd had no one traveling with him at the time, no one to give false assurances to, no one to send back with the question of why hanging between them like something sacred. No one will ever have to wonder where he'd gone, or if he'd come back. He will end in the cacophony of the universe, without fanfare or festivities, no one crying over his broken body.
No one will bat an eyelash, and no one will realize until much later that someone died here, someone who had defended the universe as a ghost. His TARDIS is dead, the noble timeship breathing her last only moments before her pilot.
You hear his heartsbeats echoing through the empty silence as you lay beside him. You are forever, you are infinite, you are eternal.
You have remained long after Rose Tyler has left.
You will remain, long after he himself leaves, too.
You watch him, his eyes half-open, his breathing slow and labored, and somewhere within that final moment, his eyes fix on you and he can see. You take a deep breath and he doesn't break his gaze, whispering only three words: "Was she happy?"
Such a simple question, with no simple answer. And you could say. You could tell him of the things you have seen through the breach in all your infinity. You can tell him of the way she saved that other world, you can tell him of the way she lived up to her title as Defender of the Earth. You can tell him of her three miscarriages and eventual adoption of a little girl named Amy; you can tell him of her fierce over protectiveness when she met Rory, or the tears of joy she cried when Melody was born. You can tell him about the other him, how he protected that woman until he breathed his very last.
You can tell him how they died in each other's arms, old and weary and happy.
You can tell him how she must still be waiting for him, somewhere in the dream called death.
You can, but you don't.
Instead, you nod your head, and he laughs. Old and heavy and broken, but so, so happy.
"I'm glad," he tells you, sucking in a final breath.
And you are too, you realize, when his hearts stop and the Doctor dies, for the final time.
You are, too.
In the end, you are back in the beginning.
You are cradled in the arms of Eternity. You are ancient, and you are forever, and you have infinity wrapped around you. The Eternals and the Guardians are gone, now, and so is Gallifrey. All that is left are the memories of a pink and yellow woman, valiant enough to save the body and the soul of a bitter old killer.
A bitter old savior.
You are made of stardust, and your eyes are pale and pink, the color of a tiny human's namesake — a tiny human who had held infinity in her heart. You howl in anguish after his death, emotion taking hold of you, erupting from your lips and into being.
A new universe springs into Creation without your conscious consent, and against your better judgment, you gaze into it.
It is small and empty, nothing but stars and dust and gas circling each other. Planets will be born soon, and so will stars. The Void is closed now, and you will not risk the blackness again, but you send a wish into that new world, one that will hopefully be answered, someday.
You close your eyes and dream of a red planet with silver trees, a man who walked in eternity and a woman who had touched it, cradled it in her palms before selfishly, selflessly, letting it go. You dream of imperfect beings with hearts too large for their tiny chests, lords of time and an opportunity for forever—
You open your eyes.
You let them go.
And you wish them all the best.
So, er, how'd I do? Tell me if you liked it. I'm pretty rusty with second person, but I think I liked it.