The Cabinet of Curious Cosmos

10th_13thdoctor

Joan:



“These streets are not the safest place at night,” Joan said. “I should know – I live around here.”

Evelyn:

Insomnia had crept relentlessly upon Evelyn again this night.  As she had found herself in the habit of doing more and more, she had taken to the streets of her aging neighborhood, wandering half-aimlessly and waiting for her mind to relax enough to actually rest tonight.

She had seen the person approaching, illuminated by the streetlight, a tall woman with braids in her hair.  She smiled and shrugged.  “So people keep telling me.  Hasn’t stopped me yet.”

10th_13thdoctor (this is Evelyn's "You're safe here" thread)

The Doctor: 

"You're safe here."

Evelyn:

It was something small.  Innocuous.  The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back after months of a slow widening of the fissure that sliced through the layers of blockades concealing her memories, which had been allowing bits of bleedthrough here and there.

multiversebleed

The Doctor:

The door of that little curiosity shop swung open, and an equally curious gentleman strolled in, the rubber soles of his shoes padding on the floor as he went.

He was curious in a few senses of the word.

He was curious in that he was odd. He had an air of the peculiar about him, eternally out of place, like an “H” wedged into the “S” section of an otherwise meticulous alphabetization.

He was curious in that he was well-made, at least, to some means of reckoning such things. He had a handsomeness to him that, while not precisely conventional, wasn’t especially hard to see, either.

He was curious in that he was difficult to comprehend, he muttered things to himself that one might strain to hear and yet wonder what language it was when one did hear it.

And he was curious in that he was looking for answers, one could see it on his face, in the scrunch of his brow, in the way his questing fingers trailed over shelves and over objects.

As he approached the counter, he smiled gently but a little warily at the shorter, dark-haired woman who waited there.

“‘Ello,” he greeted her. “Sorry to bother– erm– looking for Evelyn Alvar? Was told I could find her here, is she about?”

multiversebleed

The Other (and Galatea):

She had bolted.

She had run hard, and run far, and had gotten further this time than ever she had expected. But even her ferocious strength had its limits, and she fell to her knees, her clothing stained red by the grass of the mountainside.

As she knelt there, hands and knees, breath seething in her lungs, pale platinum-white hair falling all around her face, obscuring the violent visions of her violet eyes…

…she realized, to her fury and her horror, that she was not alone.

Her nostrils flared, and she recognized the scent of him instantly, and she skittered back from him, knocking a stone down the side of the mountain with an echoing clatter.

Galatea, his voice echoed in her mind, as this one did not speak using words as his compatriots did.

She scowled at him, and hissed, and scrabbled for another stone to throw at him.

His face was… featureless. And he wore white. Always only white.

He crouched before her, and he did not try to touch her. But he offered her his hand to sniff, and shook his eerie expressionless head slowly.

He would do what he needed to do to help his people survive the chaos of these Dark Ages. To rise. But he knew that Rassilon, and Omega, his comrades, his brothers, he knew that despite their vision and genius and indomitable will… that they were not flawless beings, and their hearts were badly damaged. He was not like them, this… Other.

I’m sorry, his mind spoke to her mind, and she could hear it, she could hear it in his thoughts that he spoke truth, he spoke sincerity.

I'm so sorry.