Yowzah Oneshot Collection (1)

126(G)

            There is Nothing in the    
         Universe That You Are Not

                      lonewytch

There are wonders laid all across the length of the Universe, littered and streaked across the black. They shine out like fires for those who know how to see them.

Things so terrible and things so beautiful that sometimes you cannot tell the difference between the two. It can be a thin line when you have all of time and space at your disposal. 

There are sights and sounds that can break a heart into pieces. Some of them, literally. Forces that can unknit sinew and muscle from nerves and bone, and spill blood out into the sky.

But there are also things out there that can bring a heart to the point of ecstasy and hold it there indefinitely on the brink, perhaps forever. There’s just a hairline between joy and terror sometimes. He knows this too.

~

One thing scares him.

There are unknowable corners of space, places where the light of stars cannot reach. These corners are bound into an endless dark with only the quiet hum of radiation in its most basic form breaking across them.

In these places, the black is like a liquid ink;  space bends strangely around itself; time moves in fits and starts and then not at all, because there is no one and nothing there to mark it or gather its threads together.

He isn’t scared of much, but these places frighten him. They echo off the insides of his bones, seeming to set up a resonance and drawing out a terrible temptation to just set the Tardis spinning and finally come to rest there forever. 

He wonders about this sometimes, wonders what he would become given the rest of time, nothing and nobody but himself and the Tardis to wind it out in the black. Part of him aches for it - and that turns him cold, a fear hardening like ice over his skin.

Once he takes her to one of these places to show her, because River Song has no fear, except perhaps the fear of losing him.

He shows her the suffocating blackness and tells her about the ache in his bones, about the fascination of staying there. And then he promises her he will never ever do it - which is the whole reason he took her there in the first place. He needs her to hear him say that.

~

His view backwards, forwards and sideways across Time is like watching a million spinning wheels and looms working away at once. But instead of spinning and weaving fibre, they work golden timelines into a vast tapestry, a shining cloth which is thrown across all of reality.

Different races across the Universe have glimpsed and speculated on this nature and shape of Time, and on a thing they call Fate.

The Norse people of planet Earth called Time and the journey of a person’s thread within it, Wyrd. They too conceived of reality as a cloth that a life is woven into, each person’s thread touching on and weaving through others; intersections and knots which are part of the bigger pattern.

Other species on other planets have different names for it. He’s heard thousands of them in his life, all of them collectively making up a language that tries to make sense of where things have come from and where they are going to.