Current mood:	sick
Current music:	Sting - Desert Rose
Entry tags:	fic, fic: dw, fic: tw

Fic: The Wolf and the Phoenix (1/3)

Graphic by laurab1


Title: The Wolf and the Phoenix
Summary: The beginning of a beautiful friendship
Characters: Jack/TARDIS
Spoilers: Utopia for Who and vague mentions of Torchwood season 1
Rating: None
Word count: 1289
Notes: Thanks go to xwingace for her excellent job as beta. I have no idea where this came from, it just hit me when I cleaned one of these. Short and hopefully sweet. My mind is strange, crystals and comments are love.
Fic Masterlist: Here.



Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.
- Nikos Kazantzakis



Her Master sets her free as her Chameleon Arch takes its toll, destroying the only Time Lord left in existence, thereby stranding the resulting human on a barren rock at the end of Time.

She's tired and injured beyond repair after her last battle; she has seen the end of everything she knew. She doesn't resist her Master's last order. She departs to search for a place in space and time that she deems appropriate as her deathbed.

In the end, she can't even follow that last order. She doesn't die with dignity, but tumbles towards some primitive rock and cries out in terror and pain as she crashes. She's still there, she realizes once the pain fades. Her body is destroyed but her very core, her mind, is still functioning.
She tries to listen to the sound of the universe, the quiet songs of her Masters, but there's only absolute silence.

She's the last of her kind. She's alone, blind and unable to move. She has no purpose. She screams, but no one answers.

Desert sand creeps through the debris of her hull, the transcendental parts of her innards forever lost in the dimensional displacement during her crash. She weeps in tune with the sandstorms whining past her destroyed shell for a very long time, unable to see, to feel time itself. She's lost everything she ever was, all she ever could be.

It's only when human hands close around her diminished coral-like shape that she finds the strength to look into her grave robber's mind, to find out where serendipity has led her. She giggles in despair at how alien her discoverer's mind is, only silence responding to her telepathic questions. She pries at the sparse surface thoughts and find something of an answer without this human's help: Earth, Egypt, 1798. The numbers and names mean nothing to her. There are no coordinates, no hope. Her Discoverer takes her home, keeps her on a shelf, dusts her off once in a while and then sells her one day for a reason she doesn't understand.

The faces handling her flit past, the human life so fleeting that it fills her with sorrow to see her caretakers wither and die. She knows it'll be like this forever, a never-ending succession of faces (that aren't hiding the same spirit), the sound of her Masters' demise still echoing through a universe which hosts no one but her able to hear it anymore.

Time flicks past, horribly out of tune and rhythm. She is alone and she weeps for her loss. In the distance she can feel time churn around a Rift in the universe, and she decides that's the place she has to go, where she'll finally be able to die.

Weak as she is, she can invoke ideas in these primitive apes, and so she slowly travels north, in suitcases and crates, a mere trinket. Deserts give way to forests, which give way to beaches and the sea, the whole route interrupted by terribly primitive wars (she's glad they are). After crossing the water she rediscovers rain, falling from the sky annoyingly often. She misses the heat of the desert sometimes, and she dreams of it in her new glass showcase.

The universe hasn't reformed again; it is still a churning torment to her senses. It's painful to watch and she yearns for death. Here, right above a whirpool swirling around a Rift in space-time and draining her of life, it might finally come. She goes to sleep, concealing herself as ordinary, boring. No human will ever notice her again.

When new hands stroke her jagged outlines, she yelps, taken by surprise and instinctively recoiling in horror.

This one is different, his presence grating like nothing before.

He is a Fact, she realizes aghast. Infinity looked into him and made him a constant. In her old life, she'd have fled as fast as she possibly could, but she lost her ability to run long ago.

She wants him to put her down, dislike her. She tries to shove him away, but finds him open, his mind the first one to answer her song in so long.

He knows how to listen.

This One is wrong, unending and wrong. But who is she to judge? She, a remnant of a race that was obliterated from the timeline, she, reduced to a skeletal piece of coral.

She is as wrong as he is.

He is confused, obviously surprised to find something like her in a place that sells ancient, dead things.

She unfolds in his mind, discovers those that taught him how to hear her.

The last of the Time Lords travelling with the Last of her kind, and she suddenly sees that she isn't what she was. She is not alone, but she’s just a fragment, weak and abandoned.

She weeps. The Constant pets her gently, crooning, understanding.

She feels loss in this one, deeper than any other creature she's encountered since her Master died. They're the same, she realizes, clinging to this human as hard as she can.

He buys her without haggling and she purrs with delight when he installs a heat lamp over her new resting place, right next to him on a table. His presence is soothing the turmoil of her uprooted universe.

He won't ever wither and die, will never flit past.

She hums when he pets her, and he smiles when he notices the sound in his head. It feels familiar, like a TARDIS should, he thinks. That makes her happy. His touch is invigorating, whispering of infinity and freedom. She starts harvesting minerals from the salty air, carefully adding them to her outer shell. For the first time since she fell to Earth, death can wait. Instead she wants to grow again.

He's a constant, and suddenly time ticks in its usual rhythm again.

She sees the universe swirl around him, his permanence like a beacon in an ever-changing universe she forgot how to handle a long time ago.

With his presence, her mind can reach out again, see all of time and space. She's baffled when she realizes that she needs him to navigate, her fixed point in the universe offering all the coherent data she needs for her calculations.

Her senses grow again, and she's not surprised to find the Other she saw in her Keeper's mind, the last of her kind travelling with the last Time Lord in existence. She used to chase those two, and she greets her old adversary like a friend, because in an universe of loneliness there's no point in hate anymore. Their thought patterns are familiar, even from so far away, but it isn't as reassuring as she remembers.

This Time Lord is not hers, she realizes, and she's not His. She can never go back to the life she left behind. She can never be what she was, not even with the help of her former masters. She refuses her sister's offer to make the Time Lord help her (she's feisty, her sister, wouldn't even ask for permission to travel), to help her out of her misery.

She chooses her own ways now. She'll grow as she desires, die when she deems it necessary.

She'll stay with her Keeper; this one won't abandon her. He's a constant, and she needs this more than her sister could ever understand.

She purrs, nuzzling into the warm feeling (companionship, affection) in his single heart, revelling in the simple human mind, bathing in the permanence of his existence.

She's not a Time Lord's vessel anymore. She chose not to be.

One day, she'll travel again, and she'll heal that ache inside her Keeper's heart.

She's new. She's free.




Part Two