Starman [ Life on Mars / Doctor Who Crossover ]

Chapter 1 Iron Man

In 2008, a man waited by the Thames.

He leaned on a railing and looked out at the river, at reflected lights and fluoresced flashes, old lamps faded from glory and refurbished with neon splendor. A brilliant wheel turned slowly in the distance, rising out of the skyline like a second moon.

He remembered the day the wheel had been finished and he remembered the day it would be destroyed. Bars of steel and nuts and bolts, discarded and rusting, crumbling, falling away to shadows and dust.

It was strange, he thought, how much could change over time -- a little time, some years, a fraction of a cosmic moment in the suffocating vastness of infinity. It was strange how much that moment could matter, how the loss of something within it could turn a man, could tear him apart at the seams.

Could make him feel like a ghost, long gone.