The Cabinet of Curious Cosmos

10th_13thdoctor

Evelyn:

“What have they done to you?”

The Doctor:

The Doctor found it hard to focus. He could see Evelyn when he looked up at her from where he sat on the ground, but her outer edges looked…blurry. Her image kept shifting and changing from blurry to clear and back to blurry again. He shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut to try to fix it, but it was no use. And on top of it, sheets of sweat kept falling into his eyes and making them sting.

‘Eb-bel-en,” he slurred. “M’I glad t’see you.”

10th_13thdoctor

The Doctor:

The night was crisp and black; to the Doctor, it felt mildly crystalline. The stars like crushed diamonds smeared themselves across the clear sky above his head; high in the inky blackness, the moon hung as a single pale baleful eye glowing, phosphorescent.

He liked nights like this, on Earth. Other places certainly had their own nighttime charms. He thought of the last sunset he’d on Vendi IV which was absolutely glorious – a spectacular gradient of indigo fading upwards into violet and black, its deep juicy colors glimmering and coruscating off the leaves.

But he loved the clear crispness of Earth nights. Especially near rivers or lakes. The water served as a glittery, wrinkled mirror of the sky above. And tonight, he sat at the water’s edge, watching the river undulate and ripple its nighttime reflections.



He’d begun to meditate, his eyes still open, drinking in the scene around him. Suddenly, he heard a strange noise from some trees to his left, shattering him out of his reverie.

He rose from his spot in the grass and walked over to the trees to investigate.

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.