Warnings: Character Study, Speculation, Introspection
A/N: Written for dw_guestfest's Prompt:#38 Orson Pink: So, where did he come from?
I had a solid idea for this one. Actually, that idea wanted to stop me from writing my first prompt (and very nearly did). I was tempted to write this fiction anyway, hang the consequences - but I'm very glad I didn't. See, I had an idea...but this turned out a little different (read: a LOT different) than was planned. I'm rather glad it came out this way, even as I know it will probably read 'confusing' for many...which is rather the point of it all. I just hope it is enjoyable - and that the prompter is happy with it. Then I will consider this 'a fiction well-done' and I will be really glad I sat on this until it told itself. Like I said, NOT what was planned, though the gist is the same. As usual, this fic is mostly unbeta'd and written in one go, so please forgive any mistakes and/or blatant vagueness. And (as always), I apologize for any repetition, misspellings, sentence fails, grammatical oh-noes and general horridness. Unbeta'd fic is overly-thinky/wandery/blithery and unbeta'd.
Disclaimer(s):I do not own the scrumptious Doctor or his lovely companions. That honor goes to the BBC and (for now) the fantastic S. Moffat. The only thing that belongs to me is this fiction - and I am making no profit. Only playing about!

Come down off your throne and leave your body alone.
Somebody must change.
You are the reason I've been waiting so long.
Somebody holds the key.

But I'm near the end and

I just ain't got the time
And I'm wasted and I

Can't find my way home.

by Blind Faith

There was smothering darkness.

Long cold.

Screaming.

No…not screaming. Voices.

Beneath the voices, blaring alarms. Echoes of people who might have been, those who once were – those who never would be.

A sense of the familiar. But where did that come from? What did it mean?

A sigil carved into walls. Pillars – solid, daunting – amid flickers of unreality and unshakeable death. Death lived here. So did potential. The two could not mutually co-exist. But in here, neither could be separated.

Every now and again, there were flickers of Other between the pillars. An expanded world. A dead-living entity of endless vistas and limited space.

'Am I real? What is Real? How do I know of it?'

The screaming, the silence, the dark and cold did not answer. They were an answer, but not to questions posed in the here and now. They answered the past, reflected the future and brought solidness to a reality that did not exist in any dimension except their own.

If this was Hell, it made one wonder how one had gotten there. If it wasn't Hell –

If it wasn't Hell, it must be Home…

O-o-O-o-O

There was a soldier once. Then there was a time-traveler.

They were connected, even as they were not.

There was a toy soldier and a Time Lord.

There was a man who belonged and a man out of his own time at the end of all time. There was no difference between the two, but there was a commonality that could not be denied. Two commonalities if you counted the Time Lord. Three if you pushed back far enough.

Everything was an echo.

The Time Lord himself was an echo. Three times he visited the end of Everything. Each time he met a new revelation that was a beginning, even as it heralded a loss, a downfall.

The Time Lord was the only solid reality in each event. Even as his reality was no more.

There was a knock that came four times (twice, in the Time Lord's recollection, but three times, if he was honest with himself…and he never was).

The Impossible Girl is not forgotten in this.

The catalyst. The beginning. The ending. The savior and the devil. She was all of these things, even as she was none of them. She was the reason and the insanity – and she could not be, if the Time Lord had not been.

The tiniest fractures created the Impossible Girl. The tiniest instances created him.

The perfect disaster. A terrible explanation. And the only thing that mattered to one person.

He was. Yet he was not.

An echo borne of an echo – with only one destination, one timeline, one point of origin – and one ending. They were all the same thing – and the dust would swallow it all if Time was allowed to touch here.

But there was no Time anymore.

How could there be?

It no longer existed.

This did not matter to him, as he was used to that (if he thought long and hard about it). It was the Other Life. The one that could have (should have/might have/never had) been. So clear in its disintegrated inconsistency. It couldn't be more solid that a dream…but dreams cannot be shaken. And he was more than a dream. He was a reality that Might Be. In a place that Cannot Be.

It was confusing, but he was used to that, too.

And then came the Blue Box. The Time Lord. A familiar, pretty face that was known, even as the name crumbled to ashes in his mouth.

Did he know them? Or did he only think he did?

He gave his name. He told them the Dream (that he believed was reality). Took in the awe and confusion – and was relieved that he was not the only one.

He knew he had to go back to the Reality. But to speak the Dream, believe in it (even for a moment) – it almost brought tears to his eyes. He forgot about himself for a moment. Forgot the nightmare. The cold and long dark. He forgot how he came here, how he walked from one pillar to the next and found himself in a Dream that was Not A Dream.

He knew what it meant, but he could not find a voice to tell it with. So he told what he had Dreamed. What he knew he could have been. And he could see they wanted to believe as badly as he did.

In his pocket was an echo. He showed it to them. He saw the puzzlement on her face, but the terrible fear on the Time Lord's face. He knew that look: it was the ache of a memory long buried. The look of a man who knew he was Dreaming, but couldn't be sure where or when the Dream began.

The fear that it was all a Dream. That it was all an illusion –

And what he might find when he woke up.

It didn't seem to matter in the end, though. The Dream that he showed them (in a photograph, a toy acquired from Home, a face that was his own but was not really his…or so he thought), was the Reality they chose to accept. The Time Lord stowed him away in a place that reeked of Home, though it was so much more (and yet less, somehow) than Home could be. It (She) sang to him, be he could not understand Her. Not really.

She sang to him and he did not know if She could sense he was a Dream – or if She knew his Reality. He feared She would tell – but in the end, it did not seem to matter. The Time Lord came back with the familiar pretty one – drawn, haggard, unknowing of the world around him – and he knew then that he recognized him. Not as a Time Lord, but as the Time Lord. He had seen him many, many times. And he had seen this Face at least once before – long ago in his past future. He saw him and he was no longer afraid. Actually, he was just tired.

He wanted to go Home now. Where he could live in the Reality of what he truly was (alive and dead and maybe all at once). The Dream away from Dreams. Where all Dreams like him came from. He was created there and he was lost there. He was spun from the shattered possibilities the familiar pretty one had designed. He was never truly Real.

But it would be a long, long time before The Time Lord and The Impossible Girl would find that out. If they ever did. He hoped they never would, actually.

They might both be happier that way.

O-o-O-o-O

In the darkness, things could get lost. People, ideas, dreams and hopes. They all were born and (supposedly) died here. He never quite knew how he had gained thought, sentience. Maybe they were all sentient. He had never stopped to ask, as there were those who could fool you with their solidness…only to eat slowly at what you were (might be/could have been) until you were no more. He had a purpose. He had a point. He didn't know what that purpose was. Everything looped in, around, upon itself within this place. Dreams were often the reality – and reality was no more than a dream.

For instance, he knew he had met the familiar pretty one and The Time Lord many, many times. Both at Home and Beyond Home. He just wasn't sure when -

Could it have been before he left? Or after? Had he left yet? Or had he never truly been Away?

It was confusing. Even to one such as he, born of confusion and made of questions.

He knew he had seen them both (together…twice). But he was also quite sure he never had seen them even once.

Which was the truth though?

At Home…truth was hard to come by. They were all True here. Even as they were lies of the Sleeping Machine. They echoed (like the Impossible Girl) and stagnated. Lost and forgotten relics of the future past. Or the past future.

It was easy to mix the two up.

After all, he had met several potentials of The Time Lord. He had also met several of his Realities.

One of them (the first – young, afraid – but daring and stubborn) had dropped a toy soldier here long ago tomorrow. It had moldered in a stasis state, forgotten and alone (as they all were, really), until another of him (loud to hide his heart, bold colors upon his shoulders to hide his fear) ran through, chasing after a version of himself that shouldn't have been. That never was.

There were a few of the Real-Dreams down here that had made it Out. He had. This one should not have.

He was a solid echo – determined and suckling on the will of his true self in Reality. He had led that Reality through the potential Dream and somewhere along the way, the Real Version had found the toy soldier. He gazed upon it with surprise and no small amount of fear. He put it in his pocket (as though to hide it from himself), and he continued to chase the echoes of potential future through doorways of Might Be and Never Were.

Those doors were dangerous. Even Dreams like himself didn't go through them. That was how you faded away within the Machine.

A Dream recycled into nothingness.

He did not stop them, though. It was not his Time (yet) even as his Time had passed. It had passed when the Girl Made Impossible split herself along the seams of the Time Lord's regenerations. He knew this because he had been made there. He had also been lost there.

Somewhere, the person he could have been –

Orson Pink. First Official Human Time Traveler.

/Or was he?/

was lost, leaving the person he could never be, wandering amongst those who had been swallowed within the belly of the Machine. Kept safe and cozy, trapped within the gilded cage of nightmares. He was lost here because the Impossible Girl lost something (someone) important. He was lost here because she was Impossible. And she had made herself a Dream within a Reality.

She had walked these halls, dead and alive, true and not. She had been human and a Girl of Time. And she had Dreamed him awake long before she had arrived – between one heart beat and the last.

She had done that eons ago on the edge of a millennia in the future. Without her, he would not exist.

Even as he existed before she would ever be.

O-o-O-o-O

"This way," he whispered, leading her past the Castellan (screaming forever in the hell of his damaged mind).

"Over here," he boomed (heard, yet not), showing her the path beyond the Weeping Angel.

He took their hands – The Impossible Girl Who Was No More and her broken, reckless Time Lord (more broken now than ever, as he had only lost more, with more yet to lose) – showing them the path he had forgotten: the way he had guided him before as a mere boy, just as he had shown him the door when he was in the middle of his first set of lives (chasing his potential darkness through the maze of the Machine, the Matrix of Gallifrey).

He did not speak, did not make himself Real as he showed them the way out. The only way out that Real People like them could go. There were ways out for Dreams (like himself), but not this path.

Never this one.

At least for him (the Orson Pink that could have been); that was no longer the way out. If things had been different, if things had been changed just enough…

Well, he wouldn't have been here to lead the way, would he?

For some reason, he didn't regret not being Real.

If he had been Real – who would have held their hands and taken them to the future through the escape hatch of the past?

Even in a place like the Matrix, there was no answer to that. Or maybe that was too easy.

After all, there was always an answer, wasn't there? He just happened to be one of them.

He glided away on feet that were not, leaving the Time Lord (the Doctor) to whisper his secrets to his Impossible Girl. They were not secrets for a Dream to overhear (even as he already knew them by heart). He had lived this moment again and again, even as this was the first time he had ever been here.

It was just that way here. It always had been.

Even carried on the back of the future past – with one Impossible Girl and her equally impossible Doctor.

O-o-O-o-O

The Matrix was the Home of many things. The Time Lords who created it pretended to understand it – but as it is with all beings who think themselves cleverer than they actually are – the really had no idea what it all meant. Like the world they created (through the destruction of another), they had no idea what they had started or whether it could ever truly end. It just was - which seemed good enough for them.

Not that this bothered entities like Orson in the slightest.

He had arrived when Clara had. Yet his Idea was born before she had ever lived – or died (for the first and last time). He just was (and always would be). He had no real regrets. He had no memories, no home, no true purpose beyond the living death he had been granted. A gift and a curse that had been given to many others (like the Valeyard, the Keeper of the Key, the Master born anew), but none as important as him; at least in his mind.

Without him, the Doctor would not be. Without the Doctor, he (and many, many others) certainly would never have been conjured by the Dream that was their Reality.

As long as time burned and the universe spun, he would Be. And for a while, he would even be Real. In truth, he had more than the other Dreams here could ever have. He was a ghost within the dream – and a reality within the machine. A potential that had always been, in a reality that never was.

At least for now, in this Line of Time.

After all (as the Girl Impossible and the Time Lord Undaunted had proven again and again), time could be rewritten.

And Orson had all that (and more) to wait upon, in his world of Dreams.