Day 4

So, he'd tried the food synthesizers; It would be a great deal longer until he could say the same of the sleep pods. For once, he didn't come all the way here to waste much of his time with sleeping, given that there was far more to discover here than one person could possibly explore. Since his arrival, he had pretty much been on the move non-stop, taking his sweet time in strolling from one point of interest to the next, pausing only to compulsively scribble a few cryptic, scattered notes into his journal. - He could leave the ordering and proper record-keeping for later, as any of it's results would depend on the quality of his raw data collection anyways, so it was vital that he concentrate on that.

It was only when the average sustainable quality of that concentration itself – feeble as it was these days – began to fluctuate enough to be an annoyance that he was tempted to try one, just for the sake of curiosity; In that way, even that pesky need for rest could be utilized for the sake of research.

So motivated, he'd paused on his way between a building belonging to the local university and what had probably been a hospital to sonic the entrance to one of the student dorms; The simplest accommodation available – which the authorities of Xalax had once prided themselves on giving away for free to anyone who would come to seek an education – consisted of a large room lined with sleep pods and adjacent storage spaces, with several public bathrooms accessible through nearby doors. They were mounted onto the walls in multiple rows, both along its outlines, and up to the height of the ceilings, connected by sleek ladders, in other words, these were almost bunk beds, luxury bunk beds the breadth and length of minivans – let there not be a misconception that the relatively small space indicated a lack of comfort or even privacy.

The amount of functionality that had been crammed into these pods, in practice, equating the amenities of a full room or apartment, was meant as the Xalaxian's political statement to any foreign students, the small amount of space used per student a boast of their commitment to efficiency.

The Doctor still felt that they could have improved on this if they'd had access to some basic dimensional engineering, but let's cut the Fabronians some slack.

Given that he, too, was here to learn, if not quite in the way the students had been, it didn't seem all that inappropriate for him to spend his break here.

Not satisfied with just yanking one open, he climbed one of the ladders until he'd reached the very topmost pod and slid inside to find the last occupants bags, computer terminal and clothing still occupying the storage unit, along with some decorative posters and paraphernalia that, practically enough, could be safely deposited on the shelves because the anti-gravity field only encompassed the padded middle of the unit.

There were even three personal taps installed on the side adjacent to the hall's outer walls, one for water, and another two which, through some nearby dials, could be adjusted to supply various beverages and a selection of edible sludge, the mass-production-friendly, porridge-like cousin of nutrition bricks, for anyone who was too lazy to even walk to the hypothetical canteen.

The sensation of hopping inside the capsule and stopping weightless in mid-air suspension was odd, but nothing beyond the scope of his experience; Even while awake, these cabins had the advantage that one could, for example, remain in a posture comparable to lying on one's stomach while reading books or working on some project without ever experiencing sore Elbows or anything of the sort; Suspended in the air, one could pose, stretch, even periodically move however they deemed it comfortable.

Seriously, his own accommodations back in the dorms of Prydon academy hadn't been this nice, even after he'd managed to wrest control of the upper bunk from the Master-to-be, though he presumed that many of his 20th or 21st century human friends would still have been appalled at the potentially claustrophobic dimensions and relative public-ness of the individual cabins.

For now, this one would serve his purpose.

More or less: While he'd been to many places, many times, made a point of being open to many things and certainly didn't mind being surrounded by mostly technology (Having gotten used to living in such a place at the tender age of eight, and spent countless years living inside a technically huge, sentient, time-traveling cyborg-coral) this whole exercise of sleeping while floating in mid-air without any contact with things such as blankets or pillows took some getting used to – Not because the temperature was anything less than bath-tub levels of comfortable, but because of the lack of sensory input all of this meant.

The chamber was probably isolated from all outside noise as well, not that there was any outside noise that would've allowed him to test this hypothesis.

He could well imagine that it was exactly because of that increased isolation that the Fabronians had preferred it to the beds they'd slept on before, but with his long history and preexisting tendency toward insomnia, this just meant that he found himself far more completely alone with his own thoughts than he would have liked, and it would take a long while and many unsuccessfully applied relaxation and meditation techniques before he finally drifted out of consciousness.

He woke floating just an inch over the surface, curled up like he might have been in his mother's womb in a time so far away it felt like the age of myths, or perhaps this was better described as something closer to a dying animal finding a quiet place when it sensed that its time was near.

Uncoiling his long bony limbs, he felt vaguely fascinated that he'd still have any such instincts left inside of him; He was supposed to have been a very thoroughly processed product from a civilization that was very far removed from the mud their primitive precursors had crawled out from, people who, for better or for worse, had long since lost touch with the primal spark of their life – While there had always been rebels and dissenters, a fair share of hermits, monks and whole cultures of deviationists living in the mountains and the wilderness in the style of their faraway ancestors, (though, when it came down to it, Leela wound up practically having to them lessons in being savages before they were any good for staging a rebellion.) joining any of those had never been an option for him – For all he'd learned from the old hermit he'd met in his childhood, his family's history and legacy obliged, and he'd had too restless a nature to ever devote himself to quiet contemplation (glad as he was to have been taught its value) and far too enamored with science and technology to swear them off;

In the end, he'd been trying to do the best with what he'd been given, get the most out of his life, his mind, his body, his background and circumstance – There were only so much places in the universe with ready access to advanced, near-unlimited time travel, after all.

Whether he had succeeded, he honestly couldn't say. Whether he leaned toward 'yes' or 'no' fluctuated with his moods, and those had done a lot of fluctuating lately.

Catching his distorted half-reflection in the hull of the pod, he paused to exhale with a sigh, to lead his long, spidery fingers to the cool surface of the pod's translucent covering.

Sometimes he still had to remind himself that this nigh-cubist agglomeration of sharp, hard shapes was supposed to be him.

He was fairly certain that he'd dreamed. As it was, all things considered, probably to be expected, given that he'd spent a lot of time in a new place and accumulated much in terms of new memories, facts and impressions for his subconscious to catalog and process – but why then did the shreds of images he remembered contain little of the Xalaxian spires and so much more of a very different corner of this star-island, of skies breaking up into patterns, Dalek saucers decloaking, nimble little trails of TARDISes burning in creaking, heated skies as a crowd of human colonists begins to realize that those distant whispers of war had spoken the truth, their eyes changing, their necks craning as understanding began to set in.

Those settlers had come here looking for a simple life, their houses were of simple make, the style of their clothing, perhaps reminiscent of civil war era America, with a few modern items here and there revealing that this simplicity was by choice, but appreciation for fresh air was not going to save them now.

Not all of them realized the full scope of what was going on, some of them were awed, some of them screamed in panic, but in their midst was a brunette young woman in a simple farm girl's clothes, looking up with solemn apprehension. Next to her: A man in a battered leather jacket and a bandolier, with worn, uneven features and heavy, weathered hazel eyes.

He had not yet switched to the peaked, modern hairstyle he'd sported at the national gallery, nor fully given up on regulating the stubble around the outlines of his lower face, but his medium-length, dusty brown hair had already been interspersed with many streaks of deep silver.

(If he remembers correctly, it had been losing color by the week these days, like rays of light beginning to break through dispersing storm clouds)

In that precise moment, he'd been trying to keep up his stern, serious expression against the resignation building up in the arches of his brows – He knew exactly what this meant, what this spectacle entailed for the future of the families and communities that were now drawing closer to each other, grasping for each other's hands all around them, and though he should have been used to this out for centuries, he still felt an overwhelming powerlessness beneath the tired flutter of poems rushing to his mind, this one, taken from a comic book he'd read who-knows-when:

The Future,

Pitch black

Head first

Or, 'turned upon its head', 'completely backwards', such was the subtlety of the original Japanese text, the simultaneous communication of a wrongness and a feeling of being completely overwhelmed by an almighty foe, and falling, falling, falling in the blackness-

At this point in the war, any recitation of often-lauded epic descriptions of injustice had long since been overtaken by random associations from all over his life, the fragmented, dissociated, whimsical language of trauma and corrupted data files. 'Death, destroyer of worlds' did not even cross his mind as he stood before the Moment.

Yet, there were more images:

The same girl, her face contorted in anger, long hair swinging all around her, ruby lips parted to shout-

In an apron and a simple red-and-white headdress, carrying an aged silver tray with tea and malformed cookies of her own making, treading between machinery, hay and long-buried dreams with a mysterious smile, answering his silence with riddles of her own.

"They all say you're dangerous, but to me, you seem just like a normal boy."

"A boy? Hardly. I haven't been any such thing for a long, long time..." he replies, with gravelly voice, finding the idea that he had ever been an innocent almost too ludicrous to believe. She just smiles, in a way he thinks he might have done a long time ago. "Grownups are all just taller children in the end."

But she is a grownup, before her time, most of the time at least – She's simply of the sort that tells the village children stories.

He thinks she has something of a priestess or a medium about her when she dances, something mystic, if such things were real; It's like she alone among the people she ostensibly happily lives with is in touch with a greater, subtler world that extends beyond the obvious.

Turning in a dress of sinful red, circling around a great fire with the other village girls, she's a fae in the woods, a selkie at the shore that can only be glimpsed for a short time, the mad passion of her feet too wild for a human to withstand – Here alone does her black soul lift its veil, here alone can her true nature be glimpsed.

It had been so long since his ears had drunk music –

if they had only met earlier, he might have asked her if she wished to see more of this big vast world.

"You will tell me right now what is going on here!"

"He may not look it, but people have told me that he's a Lord of Time.",

She says, playfully-confident with a held, mysterious smile, like she just told a secret, standing at his side with glittering eyes. He's observant enough to gather that she's probably still daunted, and much more impressed by the strange new place unfolding before her eyes, although she's hiding it well. Years ago, this might have made him smile, but the lightness in her words is poisoned by what they actually mean, unbeknownst to her, and the creeping certainty that she might very soon find out.

"That Bandolier of yours... What's the meaning behind it? And don't tell me 'to store ammunition', because I've seen how you hold it between your fingers whenever things seem to be going south.""It's a memento from somebody I couldn't save, to remind myself why it is that I keep going through this strife."

"Let me tell you something about the Daleks, Your Grace... - ...whatever horrid aberrations might dwell inside their metal shells right now, my friend here tells me they're descended from creatures not much unlike you or I, a culture of scholars even, before they discarded everything that they were to take a form that would help them win a long and desperate war – A war that has taken to the stars and now continues here, a war they bring everywhere they go. I think there's something to be learned from that. Everyone here, think really hard, about what it is that we're fighting to preserve here, and who is going to have destroyed it first at the rate that we're going – Us, or the Daleks?"

"I don't have a Name, nor do I have the need for one. Your Name is what you use to leave a recognizeable mark of yourself on the world, your Signature is what you put beneath the things you are proud of, and the things I have done since the beginning of this war merit nothing but shame and oblivion. Whatever it may have been long ago, the way things are going, it will be a forgotten name soon, washed away with all of the world... and it probably deserves to be."

"I'm not that selfish, you know? I understand that my village isn't more important than this whole galaxy... but... it was them I set out to protect. It was them I was going to return to when this is over."

"You keep saying you're a warrior, but the more time I spend with you, the less you seem like one. But you seem too good at what you're doing to be a draftee or something. Before this war broke out, what were you? Where did you work?"

She folds her hands behind her neck and she leans back, looking up at unfamiliar constellations as she waits for their marshmallows to roast over the campfire.

"You know, you could almost say that you kidnapped me. Rather like Professor Aronax." "Not you." "Not me? Does that mean that there's been someone else whom you did kidnap?"

Her hands adjusting his simple, frayed scarf, making sure that he was prepared for the snowy landscape they were about to step into – the first gesture of caring that had been directed at his person in a very very long time.

Before long, they stand before the gates of the ancient city, glowing glyphs in the walls and columns, and she takes note of some minute shift in his voice, some uniquely specific mixture of routine and wonder as he trails off to speak and speculate about the builders of what was now merely a strategic point of interest in a war that threatened to turn this Galaxy into a bloody battlefield.

"You used to be a scholar, didn't you?"

And indeed: Pitch black, head first.

That's when he'd woken, but back then, the fighting had merely continued elsewhere.

In the years to come, he'd left these disjointed images to themselves and made a point of being prosaic.

The universe hadn't; From the boulevards of Xalax, the string of stars extinguished by the Time War could still be seen.

He'd been there more than a thousand years ago, and yet, it would be another thousand years (in linear time), until his younger self arrived there, centuries until the Nevetiva Galaxy even saw its first human colonists.

On his second visit, the first one to Fabron, he'd seen the spires, too, but their forms were half-molten by terrific heat, further, broken settlements had gathered on top of them like layers of sediments, broken, limbless statues, rusty bath tubs filled with rainwater. He'd seen these stars, too, but it was only old light, a supply that ran out somewhere en route to Fabron, because the ceasing of their light had not reached this world yet, and likewise, the image he'd be seeing if he were outside right now would not be particularly fresh, either - "right now" could be so very, very relative.

Incidentally, he realized as he was climbing down the ladder, he had no idea if those stars would even be up, or even if they had been up when he first arrived here, having taken the route inside the buildings and structures between the last few points of interests he'd given a thorough viewing, mostly for practicality's sake. He hadn't bothered with a watch attuned to this time zone either, as he wouldn't be staying for long and wasn't expecting to meet anyone here who'd insist on punctuality.

He had absolutely neglected to keep track of how long he'd been wandering in the corridors, and he had even less of an idea how long he'd been asleep; Might have been longer than usual, might not have been – He certainly had no sore spots or crumpled covers to show for it, no disheveled morning hair, absolutely no physical sense of having been in the same position for long, bless these Fabronians and their ingenious technology.

He wasn't sure he felt all that rested, either, but that was a common side effect of prolonged refusal to adhere to any sort of regular sleep patterns, and something he'd learned to efficiently ignore long ago.

Then again, he no longer had any particularly solid idea for how long he'd even been here – In the ruins of Xalax and the universe in general. Couldn't have been more than a week – in Xalax, obviously. Not in the world.

In any case, he supposed that it would just have been a simple number of no further use, and that it was time to stuff those washed-out memories of no further relevance back into whatever hollow or crevice they'd emerged from and head back to base.