In the TARDIS

by mara-anni

Epilogue: Trinity

Eons later, eons before and right now...

An old man stands upon a black rock, floating at the outer reaches of space. At least he thinks it's black. It's hard to tell as the only light in existence comes from the glowing insides of the TARDIS a few paces behind him. The rock is an anomaly; it shouldn't be here any more than he should.

He scans the rock, pushing the dark away, and in the bubble of atmosphere his Sonic Screwdriver trills—the only sound in the whole of the universe. What it tells him somehow he's already guessed; it was his favourite world, after all.

He raises his gaze to the black expanse around him—dark, empty; the stars have all gone out and long ago turned to dust. The web of time has unraveled but for the vestiges that lie in his mind and at the heart of the TARDIS. He's a relic, preserved in a fossil.

Time itself has stretched out of all coherence and he has no clue what comes next. There aren't even any 'could be's' left.

He doesn't know why he's here. He'd planned on spending his last moments somewhere pretty and warm. Under a tree in the sunshine. Or even, in his more morbid moods, gazing upon the final rising of the last burning star. Yet here he is, at the end of all things, in a universe as aged as he feels, on a rock whose atoms should have divided and scattered away eons ago.

Maybe this is the TARDIS's idea of poetic. He's seen it through, he's protected the universe long enough for it to get to this point. Long enough that there was no-where and no-when—no was, is, or ever could be—where he was not.

He considers one last trip, but is too tired now, and maybe the TARDIS is right, maybe this is fitting. They're alone here. Just the two of them. The Doctor in the TARDIS.

Alone.

Behind him a trillion specks of golden dust burst into light, glowing bright and coalescing. A foot forms which takes a step and the golden dust swirls once more before taking shape.

The old man stands alone, the last remnant of matter in a formless universe.

And then a hand slips into his.

His fingers instantly curl around hers; for some reason he isn't surprised to find her here, holding his hand.

He doesn't look at her. He can't; not yet.

'You're here,' he says. 'You came.'

'You doubted?'

'I didn't know.'

'Yes you do—did—you just didn't wanna think about it. I've always been here, from the first moment, in every moment.'

And she has, he thinks, literally. She's been with him before he ever met her. He's tried not to think about it, tried to forget it. Painful, knowing she was always there yet…not there…joined with the heart of the TARDIS. He couldn't talk to her, couldn't see or feel her. Couldn't run and laugh and hold her hand.

'Dalek Caan was a bit of a giveaway, admittedly.' She chuckles, as she does in his dreams, and suddenly the years spent without her don't feel so long. He turns just his head to his right to look at her. 'A lone Dalek breaking the Time Lock?'

She smiles, and there's a touch of mischief in it. She's gazing up at the dark skies and wears formfitting black trousers and a familiar red hoodie with the zip done up. He knows if he looks he'll find the words Punky Fish printed on her back.

When it mattered most, when he'd been more alone than he'd ever been before or since, about to burn his whole world, annihilate his own people, she'd stood with him, held his hand. She was the Moment then. She'd imbued the weapon with her own consciousness to save him and his world.

She meets his gaze, her skin glitters with gold dust; she's like the living embodiment of a star. Inside her eyes a swirl of gold burns for just a moment. Though he can't see it, the golden swirl is in his eyes too.

He gasps as the new memories slot themselves into their proper place—right between the hurting, grieving man with Ood Sigma on a snowy night, and the mad man eating fish fingers and custard with a little Scottish girl out of a fairy tale.

They arrange themselves seamlessly in his mind, as if they'd always been there.

Wide smiles and laughter and a hand on her swollen belly; sharing a thermos of tea with her as they gaze down at Jupiter; her smile when they check on the steadily growing TARDIS; her eyes as she moves beneath him, before he lowers his forehead to hers and joins them completely; a sunset, a picnic rug in the grass and a little blonde girl kisses his cheek; the sound of quiet weeping and an elderly woman with blue eyes in a hospital bed—the eyes close and the monitor by the bed is switched off; his hand and hers bound with cloth; running and laughing; her soft hand, aged and spotted, strokes his wrinkled brow and he whispers a secret in her ear.

And he finally understands what she's given him: the one adventure he thought he could never have.

He smiles. She squeezes his hand.

'So here we are,' he says. 'At the end.' There's nothing to focus on out there in space anymore, so he isn't sure why they still stare.

'Yeah, the end. Or is it the beginning? I get those confused.'

'They're gone. They're all gone. Everything is. The universe is dead. It's the one thing I couldn't save, I suppose. Tick tock goes the clock, even for me.'

'It just needs winding.'

'What?'

'The clock.'

'The universe has expanded too far. It's cold.'

'There are other universes.'

'A collision now would pop this one. There's no reality left here.'

'There could be.'

He shakes his head. 'Its energy has evaporated into the void, no information and nothing to pull it back in. The last star in this universe stopped burning a long time ago.'

'No. There's one more. The last one, the first one. The only one.' She nods toward the TARDIS behind them, still bathing them in the soft light from the opened doors.

She's smiling softly, the patient smile of someone trying to explain something to a particularly dimwitted loved one. He blinks when he realises he's the dimwitted loved one.

He sighs—heavy and tired. Her meaning seeps into his consciousness. Time to stop running; time to stop regretting, to stop forgetting.

'The eye of Harmony.' The star, eternally frozen in its moment of collapse, burning with the heart of the TARDIS where all of reality is encoded.

'Release the Eye, Doctor. Bring the universe home.'

What the hell, he thinks, one last interference; after all, he was here to help. He's always known what he'd seen in the Untempered Schism would catch up to him eventually. He lifts his Sonic, its tip glows. Next to him, Rose's eyes flash again.

The outer shell of the TARDIS—that blue police box he's loved all these long millennia—bursts into countless points of golden light, like a billion fireflies, slowly sinking into the rock beneath it, leaving only the bare console.

Above it the static star burns. They watch as it shudders, then collapses. It doesn't look like anything. But he feels the universe rushing in at them, contracting at phenomenal speeds, in moments its vast expanse will fit into this one single point, taking them and the heart of the TARDIS with it. In fact he's not sure how they're still here.

Rose is still holding his hand, he realises. Hers is young and smooth; his is wrinkled and old, the skin thinned and speckled.

He nods down toward the rock. 'You did this, then?'

'We always need somewhere to stand.'

'You once said that all things end.'

'There's a beginning in every end.'

He gazes toward the Eye of Harmony a moment. 'It'll stay like this until something ignites it.'

She grins at him then, and looks over the edge of their rock. He follows her gaze. Beneath them he sees their reflection, like a mirror.

'Another universe?' But both universes had expanded so far that the walls between them had thinned. He can see through the mirror; there's another rock just like this one, spinning end over end, hurtling toward them. 'What is that?'

'What's left of Daleg Ulf Stranden.'

And he understands. He tugs her to the console. But in this form she doesn't walk, she swirls about in golden dust, only her hand remaining in his, until she reforms.

He can feel the pressure now, of the shrinking universe around them, of the boulder from Pete's World about to plunge through the barrier and collide with this one. He looks down at her, her skin starts to glow and when he raises his hand to tuck a lock of her hair behind her ear, he sees the glow bubbling under his own skin just as it did when he was about to regenerate.

'It will be different,' he says.

'It's always different. Different pigments on a different canvas. But always us. You, the TARDIS, and me.'

She smiles—all joy and love. The console breaks into gold dust under his glowing hand. But all he sees now are Rose's eyes, him inside them and the entirety of Creation swims inside his mind.

His eyes fluttered open. He blinked to clear the blur from his vision and was met with the wide expanse of the burnt orange sky. It wasn't until he turned his head and noticed the red blades of grass tickling his nose that he realised he was lying down. He rubbed at his head and sat up. He must have fallen asleep.

He couldn't for the life of him recall why he'd come out here. The trees grew thickly along the base of the mountains, and he inhaled the sweet scent of jasmine coming from the tiny white flowers that crept over the rocks and boulders.

Different pigments on a different canvas. The words popped into his head. He decided he must have read them somewhere as he got to his feet and brushed off the grass and forest debris. He pulled a silver leaf out of his hair. How long had he been lying there? The suns hung low in the sky.

A wolf's howl echoed off the white-capped mountains. And he remembered that's what he was doing out here: looking for it.

The forest thinned, giving way to a field of long red grass. A girl, about his own age, stood gazing up at the pale clouds creeping across one of the suns. Her fair hair fluttered in the soft breeze.

'Hello.' She jumped when he spoke, with both hands shooting to her hearts. 'Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you.'

'No, that's okay. I just thought I was alone.' She squinted up at him when he neared, as though she were examining something in a nano-scope.

She wore robes of heliotrope, which marked her Chapter as surely as the Scarlet he wore marked his and explained why he'd never seen her before. The Chapterhouses rarely mixed at the Academy, even in the senior years.

'I'm the Doctor.'

'The Doctor?' Her eyes seemed to warm and she nodded up at him as if she'd come to some understanding. 'You make people better.'

He ducked his head a moment in uncharacteristic embarrassment, then just shrugged at her. You weren't supposed to talk about what you saw in the Schism. And besides, he'd been trying his best to forget it.

'I'm called Rose.' And she handed him the flower she was named for.

'Did you know in Old High Gallifreyan it's called Arkytior—'

She pressed a finger to his lips. 'Sh, it's a secret.'

She winked, smiling. And he forgot everything else.

She looked at him as though she knew who he was and for the first time in his life he wanted to ask someone what they'd seen in the Schism. He resisted.

'We should be heading back, it's getting late.'

She nodded and strolled toward the Mountain of Solace, tossing her remaining flowers carelessly into the grass, and he followed.

'I have class at the Cradles tomorrow.'

'So do I!' The flower he still held twirled between his suddenly nervous fingers. 'Maybe I'll see you there?'

'Maybe. Do you sometimes wonder what it might be like to take a Time Capsule and—'

'Run away?'

'I was intending to say travel. But run away works.'

She smiled; a big toothy grin with the tip of her tongue poking cheekily out between her teeth. And something shifted inside him, a kind of recognition, like something he knew but had forgotten.

A siren wailed and a voice echoed from the distance. 'Final Skimmer to Time Academy.'

She gasped. 'Oh no.'

Without thought the Doctor took her hand in his, gripping tight, and shouted, 'run!'

-The Beginning-

A/N: Reviews are always welcome.