Observance
888
Once a long time ago, there was a quirk in the fabric of reality, a quirk that expressed itself as a spiral within the vortex of time and space. It acted as a demarcation, the line in the proverbial sand. Travel through time was allegedly impossible beyond that point, that quirk, that twist in time. Even the Gods of the Fourth never knowingly transgressed that Rubicon of history, at least initially. However, things change as they often due in the universe, or at least we're told that. There came a conflict and a battle, and it was planted in fertile soil of hatred, watered with fear and anger and revenge, and it grew strong, and became a mighty war, a war beyond war, a war of wars, and at its end death came to time, the spiral was shattered and the Gods of the Fourth fell, broken and dead, lost to history save two. One slipping past the broken shards of the spiral into the darkness and the other would shortly join him. And though they may not tarry in the great folds of the beyond they had opened the flood gates.
And so it was that time would pass and the Gods of the Fourth would find redemption, and set their Olympus beyond the fractured corpse of the spiral, and to a time at the edge of the darkness. From here they would commit a great crime, and one of the survivors in rage and sadness and grief would commit a greater sin, wounding the universe. In penance and grief the sinner would find themselves slipping beyond the citadel of Gods, slipping beyond the whispered tales of Utopia and beyond still into the greater dark…
He stared down at the monitor. The ship around him groaning, wheezing, gasping, struggling to keep pace as he urged it onwards, onwards beyond the beyond, and beyond even further yet. Degeneracy evolved into singularity, which itself in time started to erode. Time was swirling, twisting, unspooling outwards into the great glaring gulf of the abyss. The speakers sang the song of degenerate cannibalism as gravity waves harmonized across reality's depths. The song was long, and low, mournful like that of some impossibly large cetacean, the last of its noble kind crying out in hopeless desperation to hear another of its choir, but finding nothing but silence and echoes of its pain. The song echoed, slowed and fell to a hum. The ship, exhausted, shut its engines down and he looked up. He turned and moved to the panel of the doors, and he reached out and opened the doors of the vessel and he walked to the edges of infinity itself, and stared out at it.
He could feel it, the thrumming of the massive leviathan at the beginning of the end. Invisible beneath its sheath of gravity and physics, but none the less he felt it. It was the last. Postremo nigrum foramis. Within it sat the total sum of data in the universe. Everything that ever was, was sitting inside its girth, digesting in it existential guts. A billion, billion galaxies of data, a billion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years of history was before him. The humming, strumming of its song representing the erosion of that history, one virtual particle at a time. No one knew how much history had already been lost, how much more time it would take before finally in one, massive, last ignition it would all be gone; the only thing that was known was that the time was coming sooner than later.
"Impressive, isn't it?" He heard her say. His cold steel eyes flashed to one side, but his head didn't shift an inch.
Between him and her were mere meters of the universe. Her TARDIS shifting every second of every moment, adjusting their position as those meters between them expanded into kilometers and light years at a blink of an eye. She tilted her head, and he, saying nothing, resumed staring into the singularity before him.
"Which one was it?" The woman asked, in a tone that suggested sincerity. "The girl or the song?"
"Both…now…maybe…" He said furrowing his eyebrows in reply after what felt like eons, and may have been.
"I see…" She said. She took a breath. "I am very sorry."
"Are you?" He asked quietly.
"Of course! I am many things, but at the end of it I am your friend, and as much as it pains me to accept it, so were they…" The woman replied quietly. "You are in pain and I, well…"
"Want to twist the knife?" He snorted quietly as he stared into the darkness.
"I want to make sure you are ok." She said resolutely, if with a hearty tinge of annoyance. "If you go on and die of grief, I will be ever so cross after all…"
"Yes to think you were bested by a broken heart would be quite embarrassing for you." He replied with something halfway between a scowl and a smile as he stared into the unfurling eternity.
"Well, that and it will be ever so dull without you…" She said folding her arms across her chest as she leaned against the door of her TARDIS. "The universe without the-"
"Looks like this, I suspect. No stars…" The man said. He kept looking into the abyss. He'd seen this vista before, the sky with no stars, though when he had seen it, it wasn't completely dark, there was still hope, still life….still a chance. Not now, not here. "We're dead already, we're so far beyond everything, that even we are dead and long beyond memory and note; everyone is dead…..everything is dead." He lifted his arm pointing a finger to the heart of the existential radiation coming from the singularity's sheath. "Even that is dying, eventually….and all of it, all of us, the universe, all our petty wars, all our victories, all our love and hatred, our apathies and passions…irrecoverable in its loss. This is the last vestige of everything and it's dying, too…in darkness, alone…without witness, without hope, without reward, and it's afraid." He turned his head for the first time and looked her in the eye. "You can hear it; can't you?"
The woman closed her eyes as if to listen to what he was talking about. She shivered slightly and opened them. "Of course not, stop being silly. How old are you? How many have you seen dead and how many have you watched die, how many have I killed in front of you? Stop being so melo-"
"I don't know." He said quietly as he looked back into the abyss. "Something happened, my memories…some of them are gone, the ones of…of…" He fought it, the slipping fragments of half formed memories gliding between his fingers, he grabbed tightly, "…Clara are gone….and I don't know what else." His bushy eyebrows furrowed and he slowly clenched his hands into fists. "And I don't know why, and I don't know how, and I can't seem to track anything down…I just…I just…"
"Need to come back with me. We can work together. We can figure things out. I can help you…" She said the final bit with a slight lilting sing-song fashion as she leaned forward smiling playfully. "Like the old days…"
He looked at her, his face craggy but moist. His eyes searched hers, his head waivered slightly. He took a deep breath and turned his head and looked to the singularity. "No, I think not…"
"I see…well…" She huffed slightly as she stood straight and watched him. She narrowed her icy blue eyes and turned, and started talking back towards him over her shoulder. "I better start something back in the past, so someone can scream for help and you can come running. Maybe something with Ogrons this time, I'm ever so tired of playing with the silver embossed techno-zombies…."
"Yes, probably…" He said with an almost absent acknowledgement as he stared into the darkness. He felt the change as the other TARDIS disappeared into the screaming maw of the past. His eyes narrowed. "And maybe…I stay here…there's one last thing that must be done. An oath to abide by, a promise to be kept….a duty of care to be administered…" He swallowed slightly. "…to preserve causality and bind it at its loosest end."
And so, history unfurled. And the last light, in the last great violence of the universe raged outwards into the darkness, into silence, into the cold. And in the briefest of moments he was the last thing in the universe. Time and Space meant nothing anymore, the last moment, the final moment, the last second of eternity ticked passed. He observed it. And then that done, he stepped back from the edge of it and the blue box drifted silently back into the great maelstrom of history.
888
AN: Such a long time, and then it hit me. The long existential horror of history….irrecoverable…fated to be unmourned, unloved, to die alone in the darkness…finality at its last breath.