Just This Once

888

He sat at the top of a hill. He stared upwards into the depths of the darkness. The air around him was crisp, and alien to a point. He breathed in the atmosphere the TARDIS was pumping into the small shell that surrounded her exterior and looked across the vista in front him. Ice as hard as rock, boulders of water were spread here and there in the valley below him. Piercing upwards from the water rocks were spears of clay. Millions of them filled the valley, going up the foothills into the mountains beyond. Even around him a few stood some several stories tall. Each one shimmered in the scant daylight coming from the star many, many astronomical units away. It was barely a brighter star barely outshining the surrounding constellations that moved around it. Behind him a massive planet was cresting over the horizon.

The planet behind him was the gaseous world Movaza VI, the largest planet in the Movaza star system. He looked again upwards into the dark, day lit sky. It had just happened. The universe was still burning in places but the fires were slowly going out. The initial shockwaves of the final battle of the Last Great Time War had already past. The ensuing aftershocks and tremors would still ripple and bounce up and down the time vortex for a few decades yet, but even they would eventually calm. Peace and sanity would finally win against the tyrannical madness of the war.

His knees buckled slightly as a wave of dizziness washed over him and he fell backwards landing heavily on his tail bone. He winced as he reached into the pocket of his pants and pulled out the battered sonic screwdriver. The housing was cracked, the resonator was bent and twisted. All the things he remembered using this screwdriver for. All the bombs this thing had set off, all the orders to fire that this thing had indicated, all the death this screwdriver had caused. He narrowed his eyes and threw the machine out into the distance. A small burst of energy sparked as it flipped through the atmospheric shell. It tumbled into the darkness, but he heard it clatter down the side of the plateau, it's metallic body pinging as it bounced from aqueous boulder to aqueous boulder, before one final loud cracking, smashing sound indicating the device finally losing its long battle against entropy, time and space and Daleks and Time Lords. Bits of it echoed up as the shattered components undoubtedly splattered their guts across the fields of ice and bounced off the clay spires.

He came here to pay penance. This world was once verdant. Once populated with intelligence. This world was once much closer to its sun and home to a peaceful race of artisans. Then the war came. History warped, the planet's history changed, a rogue black hole one side or the other had lobbed in some forgotten battle had dragged this planet out of position in its primordial past. The cooking organic chemistry froze, the planet grew frigid and never knew the magnificent spark of life, and no one ever knew, no one but him that is. Now this world was dead. Forever dead…

He glared down at the ground in front of him. Just beyond the atmospheric shell the light of the TARDIS reached out illuminating one of the spires. He saw the sparkles of some mineral glistening in the light. Tiny flickers, little flecks of impotent reflection. His mind at first ignored it, but the flickers seemed to blink, to change. Slowly he stood. Slowly he walked to the edge of the atmospheric shell. His shadow fell over the spire, but the sparkling didn't stop. It continued, blinking impotently in the dark. He ran to the TARDIS and closed the door. He turned and walked back to the edge of the atmospheric shell. It was small, it was very slight but as his eyes adjusted to the darkness he could just barely see it. Out there in the great valley below him, tiny flickers. Light shimmered, flecks of illumination danced up and down the valley, over the distant foothills and up the mountain beyond. He turned looking around him, and even here the spires of clay blinked and flickered in the most minor way.

He started to laugh. He clapped his hands loudly together, taking a long jerking stride back as he looked out at the symphony of light flitting in strange incomprehensible patterns across the panorama and laughed in confused joviality. He wheeled around and watched. There were patterns, he knew it, it looked as if it was more than simple chemical reactions sparking in the dark. His eyes locked onto them and he jumped punching the air as the TARDIS caught the signal.

Tears formed in his eyes as he listened. The voice in his head was small and tinny. A little electrical fizzle in the frozen depths. A tiny 'Yes, I'm here. Do you hear me? I hear you!' in the frigid darkness.

"This is…fantastic…" he shouted out to it, tears trailing down his eyes curling around a smile larger than life itself.

"Fan-tas-tic…." the voice replied, so small but filled with freshness and excitement and hope.

It echoed in his head and he could tell it wasn't just one voice. It was millions, it was billions, all together, in concerted chorus, a single mind, spread across a population of billions right across the continent, maybe across the entire moon. This was the symphony of this world's life singing to him in its small metallic voice. This was the first concert it had ever given for anyone else, the first conversation it ever had had with anyone but itself. It was new life, never known before, never seen before, never experienced ever before. I tiny life born of the wilds and the fire, a final nail of creation in the death throes of the war.

"You're alive! ALIVE!" He laughed loudly as he ran around the perimeter of the atmospheric shell, yelling into the darkness beyond. "Unbelievable! Forgive me, not unbelievable, completely unexpected! You. Are. Alive! HAHA!"

"A-LIVE! WE. ARE. A-LIVE! HA-HA!" mimicked the voice in his head.

"I thought this world had been killed, it's life erased... Oh, but chemistry is clever, the universe wills out in the end! Time Lords and Daleks, turned their full might against it, tried to blow it up, tried to erase it, but in the end life still comes through, the universe wins!" He smiled proudly, sweeping his hands out as if to hug the expanse. He ran to one of the spires closest and stared at it. "FANTASTIC! Some clay, some metal, some silane-carbon organic analogues, a little fluid - amazing! Just fantastic!"

"A-ma-zing! We are a-live!" the voice chirped. "Just Fan-tas-tic!"

"I'm so sorry, about what happened to your world…you should have been so much more…" he said looking at the spires. "I tried to help where I could. I tried everything but in the end, I couldn't save any of you…"

The spires went dark. The blinking stopped. The voice stopped. He narrowed his eyes and frowned concerned he'd offended or reminded them of some long past evil. The silence was deafening as it seemed to echo from spire tip to spiral tip across the valley and up the foothills and the mountain and swept past him in one giant wave of cold, dark silence.

Finally, the light came back. The voice filled his head quiet, gentle, and he smiled. He tried to swallowed a sob back but he couldn't and he cupped his hands over his faced as he cried, listening to the voice speak in his head.

"YOU - ARE - A-LIVE! FAN-TAS-TIC! A-MAZ-ING! LIFE - WINS!" The metallic hiss intoned joyfully. There was another brief bout of darkened silence. He sniffed, reigning in his tears, or trying, but failing as the lights resumed. "We…For-give…You…"

888

A/N: This one is kinda short. It's origins come in the form of a book titled Life As We Do Not Know It, by astrobiologist Peter Ward. One thing that Doctor Who isn't remembered for, and to some extent doesn't do as much as it could and has done more-so in the books, is ability to be truly alien. To have life forms that are truly alien. People made of song and all that….but this is a little more practical. Plus it's nice to give the Doctor a victory.