Authors Note: Welcome, welcome, one and all to About Time, my lovely little Dr Who fic. Well, I say little... More like an epic actually, of Grecian proportions. This little baby's been swimming around my head for three years, and it's got 60 chapters planned out... so far! Unfortunately, what with Real Life being a bitch and all (I'm allowed to swear, it's rated T) and that annoying little thing called College getting in the way, inspiration, writing, and therefore, updates are going to be a bit slow. Stupid College. Who needs a future anyhow? Just kidding. But I digress. Enjoy the ficlet, dears. This, remember is just the Prologue. Much more to come! I do hope you enjoy my use of extremely extended metaphor; remember it! It's going to come up again in the epilogue!... (if we ever get that far...) But for now please sit back, relax and enjoy your first taste of a little story that is about time. Of course, it's about time for me to shut up and let you get to reading, too, isn't it? That's why I love my title. And yes, it it supposed to be taken both ways. Quite neat, isn't it? I hope you like the story just as much. But I'll shut up now, and let you decide for yourself. If any of you read this entire thing, I will be very impressed. Goodness knows I never do.

Ta,

~Jaded

About Time
A Doctor Who Epic
By JadedofMara

Prologue: Vessel

His mind was brittle. Any stress, any strain of any kind was enough to shatter what was left and send it crumbling down to dust and rubble and silt.

But he was still strong. He could still wet the dust, moisten the silt and piece the rubble back together before anyone realized they were standing in the remains of his sanity.

The Archeologist got the closest. She, by profession accustomed to constructing whole lives and cultures and extinct civilizations from shards of ancient pottery, knew the empty vessel of his mind, could see the broken pieces as they fell, only to be snatched up again before they shattered on the ground.

He never allowed her enough time to study them, to make a thorough examination of what had once been his very soul. He never allowed them to go to dust any longer either; each piece as it fell, broken and worthless, from him hastily stuffed into deep, bigger-on-the-inside pockets of facts and figures, of aliens and history, of space and time.

It was this that had changed with his regeneration. Before, newly emptied, it's clay still moist and pliant with memory, pain and shadow, it had taken far greater force to break the vessel. Lesser strains could not crack its exterior; the vessel still molded to adversity with something similar to its old resilience. But he had not yet the ability to catch the pieces as the vessel finally shattered, falling into innumerable, unidentifiable particles by the fact, the simple, irrefutable fact, that one of them had survived.

He wet the clay, reformed the shattered vessel. It never was the same.

It had just taken final shape, when it once again fractured, this time blown to smithereens by the survival of millions upon millions of billions. By the possibility of the loss of the one drop, the first drop of moisture the vessel had felt since it had entirely emptied in one, horrible, traumatic instant. The one drop that had only so recently grown to two, the second of which had already evaporated under the glare of an extermination beam.

But the unthinkable happened. That small, insignificant drop of moisture turned and in one moment drowned out the Dalek fires. In one moment, condensed the other drop from thin air, never to evaporate again. In one moment, expanded so greatly that it wet the clay, reformed his mind, and filled the entire vessel.

In one moment, he was almost whole again.

In the next, the drop, that wonderful drop, threatened to drown within itself, and he burnt it all away with the fires of regeneration. The drop which had filled him up completely was only a drop again. The vessel hardened in the kiln.

Now, it could not bend, could not stretch to adversity. But now he could, at least, catch the pieces as they fell.

And fall they did. They fell when the Cat-Nuns bred sentient creatures, his own beloved Humans, for experimentation. They fell when he found a drop of scalding hot English breakfast tea, wonderfully, beautifully alive in that dank primary school basement, the way his people were not. They fell each and every time the drop, his brilliant drop of rosewater, threatened to slip away from him.

Each and every time they fell. And each and every time, the rosewater reformed him.

Then came the day that the rosewater drop finally slipped away completely. It was still there, that he knew. It had not evaporated. But he knew with equal certainty that it would never moisten the clay of his mind, the pieces of his soul, the vessel of his hearts, again.

The pieces had fallen. The seething deluge of the Thames, pouring relentlessly down on his head, had threatened to sweep the dust far, irretrievably far away from him.

A sour, steaming drop of burnt workplace coffee seared through the torrent and saved his reason. It hadn't stayed with him; she would seek out adventure, no longer trapped, percolating her life away.

That was all well and good. He would do the same, and when his magnificent ship detected signs of alien activity in a London hospital, he checked himself in; he didn't tell them that the 'stomach cramps' were just the aches of an empty vessel that cracked as it dried.

It didn't dry completely, of course. Hope, wet and wonderful, always managed to find its way into his dry, hollow soul. An intravenous line dripped saline and saved his life. He thanked her with a trip, a trip for a life.

She thought he was stringing her along, one more trip, one more trip, one more trip. She put her foot down eventually, demanding to be allowed to stay. He acquiesced, verbally. In truth, the pair of them never got beyond a trip for a life.

From exsanguination and asphyxiation in a hospital on the moon, via bi-cardiopulmonary resuscitation. From DNA replication module-induced uni-cardiac arrest in the fourteenth century, by way of percussive restart. From self-delusion in the Undercity of New New York, New Earth, by giving him someone to talk to. From self-induced extermination by looking horrified at the prospect of his death. From death by electrocution atop the incomplete Empire State Building by rerouting part of the gamma strike and coming to find him. From a mutated madman by becoming bait. From immolation by a living sun by needing him to get her home. From being consumed by the Family by being strong, keeping him locked away when she felt she needed him most. From starvation and homelessness in 1969 by braving the prejudices of the time to work in a shop.

Every trip she saved his life. And for every life he gave her a trip.

Then one day, in between trips, on a simple pit-stop, as she put it, a drop of poison fell into his vessel as a man latched on to his magnificent ship. She flew them 100 trillion years of her own accord, but still the poison remained.

A glittering, crystalline drop of cyanide, toxic to him, but not deadly, wrong, but tolerable, and utterly incapable of evaporating. He mourned the spiced ale drop that had become the cyanide, and withstood its effects out of respect for what it once was, before his wonderful rosewater had recondensed it out of Dalek-created vapor.

The presence of the cyanide was nice, he decided. Its very existence was tangible proof that his rosewater had once existed. The saline tended to cleanse him a little too well, and he was starting to forget.

He did not ever want to forget.

But he did, all too soon, for a moment. The saline spoke of a watch, similar to his own, a bigger-on-the-inside vial in which to hide the large vessel of his consciousness, and the consciousness of those like him. He felt it smash, and for the first time in Rassilon only knew how many years, the vessel filled to the brim with a terrifyingly familiar liquid that could stay forever.

He relished it.

It didn't matter to him that the liquid mercury filling his mind would drive him mad, bring him just as much pain and torment as it had so many times in the past, and visit that same torture down on the saline and cyanide. It didn't matter to him that the mercury threatened to destroy his favorite planet, a planet that was almost sacred to him, for all its memories of the rosewater and English breakfast tea and Parisian perfume of his greatest friends, and of the sweet rich cream that had been his wife so, so long ago. It didn't even matter to him that the mercury was partially responsible for ensuring that he only had memories of thick, fragrant cream to sustain him.

He was filled. He was no longer hollow.

It was wonderful.

He had, of course, resisted, fought back, saved his precious Earth and all its exquisitely painful memories from destruction, undone all the damage the mercury had wrought. It had always been this way with them, and so, he had suspected, it always would be.

He had not counted on the mercury vaporizing in the heat of burning gunpowder from a silly little handgun fired by a silly little woman, in the blaze of his eyes in a cold, flat refusal of his pleas to just regenerate, please regenerate, it's only a bullet, regenerate, REGENERATE, DAMN YOU!

Empty again, this time so much more empty than he had been before.

The cyanide understood a little, having lived now but a quarter of what he had, but gazing ahead, terrified of the same, horrific curse. But the cyanide had his own responsibilities now, and good on him for it, he would not forsake them.

The saline thought him utterly mad. How could he mourn that mercury? How could he grieve so, so deeply that it tore open the vessel and smashed it into a thousand million pieces too quickly for him to catch, over that which had nearly been his destruction? She didn't understand, and never could, stupid ape, silly, wonderfully ignorant, naïve little human.

He equally despised and loved her for their misunderstanding. Loved her because she thought she could help him, and tried her hardest to do so. And despised her because, failing that, she left him, utterly alone, trying to fit his dry, fractured soul back together.

Luckily for him, for he was nothing if not lucky, the coffee came back. Still scorching hot, but tempered with wonder of the world around her, she still wanted to seek adventure, but alongside him now. She wet the clay, and the pieces went together a little easier...

You know the drill, my dears... R & R! No idea when the next darling chappy will be up. RL is a bitch and I bow to my muses entirely for this story. When the inspiration strikes, I write. No forcing the timeline.

Good things come to those who wait,

~Jaded