Memories

888

He flipped switches as he walked around the console. It was rare he used this function, but he was going to do it. He flipped the last switch and the entire room shimmered slightly before the walls, floors and ceiling disappeared, melting away and replaced by the outside. Even the console shimmered into nothing. He took a deep breath. The black, the total darkness of space, and below him the Earth and its moon turned slowly. The continents were splitting apart. The fledgling Gulf of Mexico pristine yet.

It burned past him. He looked up watching as the transport ship burned past. Behind it a blue box jolted and shook after it. He narrowed his eyes as he watched as the box twisted and bolted off course stopping miles behind the ship. He watched the transport vessel flared brightly as it hit the outer atmosphere.

He replayed this moment in his head over and over again. Each time trying to think of a way to stop it. He stood here now, watching the ship as it tumbled to the Earth. He was powerless, watching the events unfurling, cascading into the immutable future. Illogically, he was hoping and praying for the ship to suddenly pull up, for something to happen to change what was coming, what had already happened centuries ago.

He closed his eyes turning his head away as the Gulf of Mexico flared as the nuclear drives of the freighter detonated. The water vaporized, bits of crust and upper mantle flung upwards. Rocks flew past him, some of them bright red with heat.

He looked up to see the blue box. It simply hung there, as stunned as he was. He remembered it all. The shouting, the crying, the accusations. He watched as the box disappeared into the dark. He pivoted back on the balls of his feet and he turned putting his hand out and his fingers played across the invisible console. The darkness around him, the planet below, it all shimmered as the walls and ceiling and floor reappeared with the console.

Why was it that he could remember him? Why was it that every moment of how he lost him was burnt into his memory? The Cybermen, the cries of Nyssa, the shouts from Tegan, it was branded, tattooed into his brain, and yet he couldn't remember her. Not really anyways. What he remembered were the gaps, the inconsistencies in his history, the holes left behind. From what he could cobble together was that she was his companion, and that something happened to her, but the Time Lords were involved, he remembered that or he remembered the bits not involving her, he remembered everything except her specifically. He looked down to the leather, scooter jacket hanging on the guardrail in the console room. And whatever had happened with her was so horrific to him that he had chosen to forget it.

His eyebrows bunched together as he glared down at the blinking lights of the console. The problem with being him was that memories were all he had. Which meant that he had to investigate when he found that they were compromised.

He turned and looked at the chalkboard behind him. On it was scrawled a one word question, 'Why?'. If he wanted to truly forget something he'd simply move on, run away. It was how he dealt with things, but fleeing them. He wouldn't just erase his memories. He most certainly wouldn't have done so in such a sloppy fashion as he apparently had. It was screaming out for him to go searching for the thing that fit in the holes. Logically that meant that he did it to highlight something, to make him go looking for that which he wasn't remembering, to remember the forgotten. What was the past trying to figure out that it needed him to forget it? A problem that needed a fresh set of eyes? Maybe he was forced into some action, maybe he'd been attacked by a memetic parasite. Maybe he was trying to protect something, someone.

Either way he was tracing his footsteps back, again, and again, somewhere there was a clue that he'd overlooked, something he'd ignore. He walked around the console and picked up his electric guitar. He started strumming. It was the closest he could bring himself to remembering her. The subconscious mind would bleed secrets from the depths as he played; the truth would come out of hiding as long as he didn't look at it, it hid just outside of his view. He closed his eyes as he played softly in the corner. He had to keep poking sticks into the holes in his memories, all so far he had gotten was a tune, a name, snippets of stories, but that was a enough for him to continue. Clara existed, she was real, she was a physical property of the universe. That meant she could be found, could be known, could be measured, could be analyzed and extrapolated. His ears listened as the tune wandered into existence. It wafted and twirled, but it was always that set of notes, that string of music. That tune, that music, why was it so important…why was that the one tune that wandered to the surface, always, always when he searched for her? As he played, suddenly a flicker of an image flashed across his mind's eye, his fingers free of his conscious thought tripped, shifted, the tune was changing the image was resolving…he was nearly there, nearly-

There was a ding, and then the TARDIS shimmied slightly, jostling him, his fingers slipping against the strings. His mind was jarred back just as it was starting to form an image of the missing. He growled in annoyance as the console pinged quietly, urgently. He extricated himself from the guitar putting it down gently and walked to the console. A medical emergency on Mendorax Dellora 5343, they needed a doctor…

888

AN: I was loathe to put this in this anthology, as it is kinda out of the remit of the anthology. Also, I'm playing fast and loose with what happened around the last finale. It was initially going to be just a musing on the first part of this, but the rest of it flowed out of it. This was never to see the light of day, but I really like it, I like it's flow, it's mouth feel….and rare for me in that there is no dialogue…