Current mood:	gloomy
Entry tags:	fic, fic: dw

Fic: Memento Mori
Title: Memento Mori
Spoilers: End of the World
Characters: Nine/Rose
Summary: How could he not try to remember them all?
Words: 788
Rating: None
Notes: Written last night for the challenge on dwfiction about the mourning rituals on Gallifrey. This one came to me on a long drive back home. It's unbetaed, so I'm always grateful for suggestions to make this better. Comments are love, no comments always let me think it was utterly boring and without them I'll never see what I did wrong!
Fic Masterlist: Here, archived at alien_sands




His garden is eerie, Rose decides, as she carefully treads through the undergrowth, suddenly yearning for a nice cup of tea instead of having an adventure in the more feral parts of the TARDIS.

Gardens. Who has gardens in a space ship anyway?

She'd spotted a Dodo very early on, and spent a long time petting it before the bird decided she could be a threat and hurriedly waddled away. Other creatures, horses the size of sheep, strangely striped mixtures between cats and dogs and the almost alien cries from things still hidden in the trees, always following her.

The strangeness makes her flee into a little clearing, deciding it's time to search for the door soon. But now something bigger is moving in the shrubs, and a shriek escapes her lips before she realizes it's the Doctor, smiling, asking what she thinks of his little biosphere. He insists that everything is from Earth, somewhere, somewhen at least. It's his 'Earth Garden' after all, he explains.

When she asks how he got all of it into his ship he snorts, explains the few animals are real while everything else is made up from his mind. He thinks he's so impressive. She has to admit that maybe sometimes he is.

When she asks if there is a garden for his home planet as well his silence is all she needs as an answer. He stalks away from her, his stare suddenly fixed on a spot on the ground, where a single yellow flower is stretching its head from a cluster of linear leaves. She can tell from the almost violent way he rips it off that it isn't supposed to be here, not supposed to be seen.

"Nice lily" she comments, as he slumps down against a giant tree fern, not minding the soggy moss underneath.

"Not supposed to be one..." he answers, his voice revealing that he's as far away as his eyes already told her. The flower speaks of that the other, his garden, hidden somewhere, waiting for him to walk through his past again.

She sits beside him, waiting.

"I can't remember it right," he says, with a tinge of desperation in his voice, flicking the helpless flower through his fingers, his fist suddenly and almost viciously closing around it, crushing it.

Crushing until his fingernails break the skin of his palm, the pain helping him to focus. He had to remember.

Time Lords, more than any other species, understood that death was just a matter of time. They just evaded it a bit longer than others, regeneration always coming in handy between a rock and a hard place. But a man was the sum of his memories, a Time Lord even more so. The Matrix made sure that nothing, nobody could be ever forgotten. Oblivion was more terrifying than death.

Only few never reached the Matrix, accidents happened, wars were fought, paradoxes tended to implode. But they were remembered, taken into eternity through the minds of others. A lost life saved bit by bit. The living sat and remembered, catalogued, making sure nothing was lost. They didn't talk about it, because talk could falsify facts, just like emotions always did. To outsiders they seemed cold in their grief, because there wasn't any. Mourning was a thing for lesser species, it cost too much time and every Time Lord hated wasting it with a vengeance.

Now he was alone. If he forgot, they would be gone forever.

He tried to remember every detail (Romana, her blonde strands caressing her cheek), of anyone he ever lost (Adric, the way he'd driven him mad with that naïve logic), everyone who ever died for him (Jabe, that compassion in her eyes) and those he left behind (Sarah-Jane, that smile when he first shook her hand). Companions were one thing, but remembering an entire planet was a futile and painful task at best. It always brought him to the edge of madness, yet he was too scared to look away.

How could he not try to remember them all?

And this stupid flower in his hand refuses to be anything else than an inferior member of the terran family of the Liliaceae when it should be the Gallifreyan Flower of Remembrance. The memory had obviously seeped through into this garden, and yet it is wrong. He can't remember how it smelled. That scares him to death, makes him crush the flower, until it's gone. Obliterated like so many of his people he never met, never knew, could never remember. He can't tell if that is what humans call grief, it feels more like desperation.

The girl beside him waits until he opens his fist again (a smile always tugging at the corners of her mouth) and brushes the yellow sludge off his fingers. She grabs his hand, as she has so many times before, her hand warm against his palm, her head resting on his shoulder.

"Tell me about your home world," she whispers, and he does. Maybe they can remember together.