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There are two suns and they are high in the sky, obscured only sometimes by the clouds drifting by. The sky is green. The clouds are painting patterns on the landscape.
It's warm, hot even. The Doctor feels the heat, though it does not bother him. Although Gallifrey was a world of mild climate, his kind has been made robust by means that have nothing to do with nature.
When night falls, the temperature will drop far below freezing, and it would not make a difference to him. He will not be here either way, when it gets dark, as that will not happen for another three decades. A third sun will rise in the west in three hours, long before the other two have touched the horizon, and the first of the twin suns will light the sky again before the third has finished its descent. Nights on this world are rare, and they are deadly.
There is not much diversity in the indigenous lifeforms. Only a few thousand different kinds of mammals, maybe ten thousand species of insects. No reptiles, but deep within the oceans, so far down that the sun never reaches them and the water is always freezing and dark, intelligence is just beginning to blossom. The planet will travel around its suns a hundred thousand times before the first child of the deep will travel up, up, to the bright world above driven by curiosity and the need to prove that there is something up there beyond the currents. It will be even longer before anyone will travel up to the surface and return to tell the tale.
A colony of Draconians has been established on this continent two centuries ago and not survived the first night. The Doctor has stood in its ruins, claimed by the enduring plants that cover this world, and turned into art. When humans from Earth land close to here in seventy thousand years, they will be around for decades before they realize those ruins are anything but rock covered in tick red moss and the remains of a forest. Their colony will fail and the Children of the Deep will never even know they were there.
Their fall will have nothing to do with the Night.
The Doctor takes his hand out of the pocket of his coat, lets it brush through the leaves of the ranks covering a collapsed wall. He has never been here before, did not even know this planet existed until hours ago. He knows its history, future and past, the way he sometimes simply knows things, space and time an open book for him to read. He feels the leaves between his fingers and the strands of time, all the way back to the first hardy blade of grass that did not die in the heat or the cold. He closes his eyes and the stories of this world flow around him like the wind and he knows.
It doesn't happen often, theses days. He has to be open for it, and when he travels the universe with someone else, someone to teach and protect and impress, he closes himself off with all the action. It is, he acknowledges, another way of running way.
In the history of this world he feels all the beauty and all the tragedy. He could travel to the Draconian settlement and save everyone, but he won't. He could travel to the human settlement and make sure their future generations will be there to greet the Children of the Deep, but he won't.
He had a chance to save the first group of humans on Mars and he shouldn't have.
He knows too much, if he allows the knowledge to come. He could be always aware of the things that must happen, and so letting them happen would always be a decision he has to make. (The memory of Mars is full of shame because in a single moment of weakness he has betrayed the only rule of time travel he always respected, but there is some relief, too, perhaps – that it didn't work, that he tried it this one time and it made things worse, because that means he hasn't allowed so, so many people to die for nothing.)
The wind picks up. There will be a storm, later. In a few decades, the drop in temperature during the long dusk will cause great hurricanes, torrential rainfalls, and then snow, so much snow in the dark. For now, there is only a gust of wind, billowing his coat.
The TARDIS is waiting for him in the valley where he left her. Always waiting for him, always there, in the end. His one constant companion, within the death and the chaos, beside the death and the chaos. He reaches the doors and as he pushes them open turns around, on reflex, to call for his friend who should be beside him. When there is no one there there is a hint of shock, an idea of annoyance at the thought that they have wandered off again. He remembers at the same time. He is alone, because he needs to be.
He enters the TARDIS, leaves this world that is already falling to ashes under the soles of his feet. The doors close; not fast enough to make him forget that this is the last time he will see this place. Then he is off to some other world, not allowing himself to stop, and hoping for danger, for explosions, for someone to yell his name across a gaping chasm – anything to distract himself from the fact that he will see that world for the last time as well, with these eyes, that he will leave it in the end to never again walk it with these feet. And perhaps never again with any feet at all.
Every life lived in the material universe is a long collection of lasts. The Doctor knows that; it has always been a source for the joy in his travels, in a way. It has certainly been a drive, for him as much as for everyone else. It has always been a reasons for him to take people along, to make them see the wonders and the beauty in the time that they have (not the only reason). But there is a difference between the abstract knowledge of mortality, and a number hanging over someone's head, counting down.
The TARDIS lands. He did not care to give her any place in particular to go, trusting her to drop him into danger as she always does. But he opens the door and there is a beach, glowing softly with the light of a sun that has just set, and a billion stars in the sky in shapes and clusters that he recognizes as the centre of the Galaxy his people called Eleidfedl when they still bothered to give names to the things they found in the sky. He knows what point in time this is just by looking at it. The planet is new to him, although he can pinpoint its position in the cluster of stars.
The TARDIS used to be reliable when it came to disaster. Now she shows him new places, as if she wanted him to see them before his countdown runs out.
The Doctor thinks about leaving and programming in a destination on fire, simply to make a point. Being aware of his upcoming end is bad, but the wait is worse. He has been willing to throw him life away so many times, never hesitating. Welcoming it, even. This slow itching towards the inevitable is torture.
Sometimes he wonders how humans and other short lived creatures do it. Not often, however, as he knows the answer: they forget. They ignore. They focus on everything else because that is the only way they can live. The Doctor's people, being essentially immortal, do not have any such filters.
He closes the doors behind him and steps into the sand. It's coarse, more pebble than grain, and shimmering softly, the glow only slowly fading into the water as the ground gradually drops. The reflection of the stars is dancing on the soft waves. It's beautiful, breathtakingly so, and the Doctor feels like crying at the sight. This planet is empty; not one else will see this for millions of years, and he has no one to share it with.
The thought is tempting, and has been for a long time, to go and find a friend to travel with again. Take them here. Let them be the only living being to ever stand in this place. (Except for him, and he kind of doesn't count.) He won't, because he shouldn't. There is too much danger in that.
The Doctor slips out of his converse. They are not designed to be easily slipped out of, but he has developed tricks; useful skill. The shoes are left behind as he walks down over the smooth grains of glow until his feet touch the water and the water touches the legs of his trousers, soaking them. It's almost warm, and very gentle. For a moment the Doctor closes his eyes and feels the world.
One wave. Two. Three. Four. Then a fifth. No one is going to knock here. He could stay in this spot forever and be safe.
But that would be no different from dying in the end. This world is not an escape. It is simply something beautiful to look at.
Eventually the Doctor finds himself sitting in the strange sand, between the water and the TARDIS, looking up at the sky. The stars. So many of them, and hardly any that he has visited. He remembers the promise he made with an old friend so long ago, now impossibly out of reach. The Master is lost and has been for so long, and with one regeneration left on his cycle, the Doctor is rapidly running out of time, even if his upcoming end is not final. They have seen hardly anything, and less of it together. Perhaps there is some sort of comfort in the fact that after all these lifetimes, the cosmos is still full of wonder.
So vast and unknown even now. There are areas of space he has never even heard of, where there are no stories told about him and his existence does not matter. He wonders how, after so many lifetimes trying to make a difference, there is more relief than resentment in the idea that the universe will go on without him.
A star dies. The Doctor can sense it, and looks up to where it still is in the sky, bright and strong, and will be for another hundred years before the light of its final moment reaches this world. He closes his eyes and listens to the waves, wondering how many more oceans he will see; if this is the last one.
The star is still up there with all the others, but somewhere its end has already happened. Right here and now, however, that end is a prophecy. Telling a tale before its time.
That is what prophecies are, after all: a wrong order of things. The Doctor has heard about his upcoming end from the Ood, from an old woman on a bus, and he has never doubted that they spoke the truth.
Time is in flux, of course. A prophecy not coming true does not mean the prophet was wrong. Sometimes it simply means they predicted the wrong timeline. The Time Lords always liked to work with timeline predictions, but even their prophecies left room for interpretation and error, especially when the event predicted was 0far down the line. There are so many opportunities for the cosmos to go another way. The Doctor has found, however, that prophecies about someone's personal future are usually a lot more accurate the closer to that person's death they are made, when there are fewer and fewer alternative routes to take until only one inevitable line remains. When the walls are closing in and all roads become the road not travelled.
The Doctor is standing in the graveyard of countless opportunities discarded. He is walking on thin air.
He is sitting on the beach of a planet with no name under the light of a million stars, and many of them are only there because of him, and not a single being on a single world that circles them knows his name.
(Donna knew his name, for one glorious moment before it started eating her mind.)
(Somewhere very far from here, the Ood are singing a song for both of them.)
(He can hear it, when he closes his eyes and listens. It reveberates between the stars.)
The water is touching his feet again. The tide is coming in. The Doctor gets up and goes to collect his shoes before they are washed away. It's time for him to leave.
The sand crunches under his feet as he walks back to the TARDIS. There is no wind here, ever, and the water will not reach all the way up to where his box and his footsteps left their impriants on this shimmering beach. They will remain for a very long time.
6 September 2018