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Once upon a time, there was a name that was forgotten by everyone but one.
They’re lying on a wash of cyan grass, staring up at a sky that remains deep indigo day and night. It’s obscured occasionally by floating islands and, in the distance, the blue and white spires that one of them will always think of as home. They glitter crystalline in the trimoonlight in a way that he may style himself after one day. Everything glitters at home. The diamondlike spires, the emerald gardens, the bismuth labyrinth of politics. The aurorae of energy they are watching play above them. The eyes of the boy next to him.
Dexa’s dark eyes shine with the immense multicolored dance above them and with his own inner warmth. It’s the sort of warmth that makes it easy for Vasil to take his hand. To run out of the city and towards grassy hills like this, or towards the glossy pools that allow them to peer into the pasts and futures of once-countless words together. By the time the pool clouds with blackness, sooner every time, Dexa has invariably held out his hand again, and Vasil always takes it.
As bright intellectually as he is emotionally, the dominoes easily fall for Dexa to study in the Conservatory. For Vasil, it’s more like a tower of cards. It isn’t long until it all blows over.
When it does, he finds himself at the docks. Rows of black obelisks like obsidian, shining neatly in their individual slots like game pieces in a box. Vasil walks along the row, ghosting his hand along their surfaces, prizes for a path he can no longer follow. His fingers flutter along their surfaces as he imagines a future where it was their controls instead.
Then one of them opens.
It’s a foregone conclusion that he goes inside. The idea that something might be wrong with the ship barely crosses his mind as an excuse for emergencies before the doors have shut behind him with a musical chime. The glassy walls of the hexagonal space light up in a wash of silver and cyan, his first favorite colors. He’s been told the stars once looked like that, although he’s never seen any of them. The pattern flickers in a match to his giddiness as he inspects the hexagonal space. He barely runs his fingers along the flat circular disc that serves akin to a central console before that chime sounds in his ears again. As the threads of reality pull around him, he knows they are departing, and he tips his head back and laughs.
In his travels, he finds a planet where expression is woven through the air in the form of music. Buildings hum their own notes with a living wind. At festivals there is a symphony, when tragedy strikes cities keen with mourning. It makes his blood hum in a way he’ll always remember, even if he can no longer place the source, music buzzing through his teeth and into his mind. He finds a vibrant forest rooted in a nebula, its trees whispering with telepathy like a breeze. He finds a constellation of shifting memories and crumbling blackness, an edge where it shouldn’t be, devoured temporal energy. He makes a game plan with the remaining residents, sends them running before the remainder of their reality is knocked into this new dark pocket. He doesn’t save them permanently. No one can.
He bolts in his ship.
Dexa is always there to hold out his hand when Vasil returns, dark eyes brimming with warmth. He’s an unchanging comfort, moreso even than his home, although he must get a nasty shock the first time Vasil returns with a different face. It doesn’t stop him hearing about his adventures through the cosmos with rapt attention. Each time Vasil sneaks back home, he makes sure to sneak Dexa out of the Conservatory and sustain him with talk of worlds beyond their starless expanse. It renews them both without ever having to change them, the way his eyes light up with wonder.
His face falls with despair as Vasil tells him about the dark pockets.
That’s when they begin to plan together. The people of that dark expanse were sent running back like pieces fleeing a queen on a chessboard, but they can’t run forever. Every day the blackness spreads through the pools, the trail of temporal energy behind Vasil’s ship runs a little darker, reality vanishes with every blink of their eyes. But if it’s impossible to run backwards, perhaps they can move sideways.
Dexa says it like a joke at first. One of his hopeless jests spat in the face of odds so insurmountable they may as well be nonexistent. But then… his expression clears. He grins. Before long, he’s rambling. The plan he proposes is beyond insane. Syncing timestreams enough to jump between ongoing universes is an immense task for fully trained members of the Conservatory. Making a blind leap into a universe after the end of this one is unthinkable. But if they don’t try, soon they will be unthinkable, too. And even with such a slim chance of winning, the way Dexa sounds as he outlines the moves they will make fills Vasil with hope, and more warmth than he can ever remember knowing.
Dexa is the one that insists they make the offer to take others with them. Vasil is the one who must carry it out. So he sets out through the expanse once again, his ship now bedecked in golds and reds, renewed as he is, although the trail of timelines behind it has now nearly faded into the dark.
He finds he hasn’t visited anywhere. Nonexistence is nonlinear, after all.
When he comes back, he spends precious moments that he will soon never have had dialing back and forth through the timestream, searching for an iteration of his planet still suspended in an existing area of reality. His ship’s engine’s kick into overdrive in accompaniment to the effort merely to keep the controls from freezing against his hands.
Then everything is much too warm.
He steps outside into the burning. With a shout over his shoulder to his ship - “If I’m not back, go!” - he’s bolting through fields of fire. The indigo sky is now midnight black, but it’s unclear if their sun has finally been swallowed in its entirety or if it’s coated over by smoke. Either way, he wont be seeing it again. Instead, he focuses his eyes on the city, ignoring the fire licking his skin, the melted crystal pooling under his feet, the pockets of blackness where houses never were occupied by owners he can no longer remember. He discards these useless pieces and holds one name in his mind like both of their lifelines. Dexa. He wont forget.
It’s the greatest solace he’s ever known when he plunges through a plume of smoke and heat and grabs his hand. Dexa’s eyes are wide, his skin is burned… but he’s there. He’s still real. His relief carries him back through the labyrinthine maze of holes in reality, past his skin itching with the breaking laws of time and burned by heat and cold alike. Since there are no docks to reach, they head to a transport gateway once used by matters of state. There is no state in matter, so no one will mind them using it.
Dexa hesitates at the threshold, someone’s name on his lips.
Vasil agrees to go back for them in his stead.
Mere moments into his second solitary run through the city - but it’s different this time, he tells himself. He remembers Dexa still. That must mean he’s made it through - he freezes up with a sensation like ice crawling up his spine. He can’t remember who he was running towards. There’s a hole in his brain like a missing tooth. He’s lost them.
He’s lost.
Cursing, he runs back toward the outskirts. Retreating. Losing. The planet has more gaps than surface at this point. How much remains in the universe? How much more time will he never have had? He runs these questions through his mind as he runs into his ship, pressing his hands flat against the terminal’s surface in lieu of having the breath to shout, “run!” It takes off with a musical chime. Then everything is quiet.
And very cold.
To describe what happened to him as “falling out of sync” is painfully clumsy. It would be even if it were only a discussion of something working across universal and temporal boundaries, let alone across a barely articulable boundary of something that has now never existed. It will have to do.
Never existed. The thought causes Vasil to fumble for a long moment, searching through his mind, shuffling his thoughts for the name of his planet. His people. His family. His friends. Blank cards. Dexa.
Could he have gotten stuck here too? As it flickers across Vasil’s mind to run and check for him, the ship’s walls fall away. In an instant, it is like sight as a concept ceases to exist. There is nothing out there to see. Or hear. Or smell. Or taste. There is, however, something out there to feel. The cold shocks him to his bones, stops his heart, makes him want to be away from it.
The walls close around him again… but the vestigial heat from the engines never was enough to keep it out.
At least he didn’t see Dexa out in the void. He consoles himself with that thought for a long time. Makes up stories about it, as if they can provide him with warmth. Imagining where he might have ended up, the new universe he’d finally be free to explore, to sustain and renew himself with for a change. When it becomes too cold regardless, the ship turns on her engines, but her energy cannot last forever. She is bound to the pulse of the universe, any universe. Without it, the only measure of nonexistent time becomes her draining life force. The flicker of matches in the darkness.
He makes the matches last as long as he can. He learns to do things to make it easier on her. He alters her corridors himself for whatever he needs or wants, like a child’s first attempt at playing with building blocks. There are no rules here, but he adheres to the ones he knows anyway. They’re a cold comfort. He can’t make real warmth. He fills her corridors with constructs and plays with them to keep warm instead. He can’t make the energy she needs. He tries to ignore the sickly dread this causes to fester in his head and warp the games he plays like the frost warps the walls it creeps further along each day. He drives himself to frenzied distraction. He refuses to break his playing to eat or sleep. What would be the point? He doesn’t need such things anymore.
His heart hasn’t restarted since his trip outside, frozen by the cold.
The day the matches run out, it’s as if all the vibrant patterns of color drain away from the beautiful place they have built together. The walls of his playground become as cold and gray as the walls of a prison. He moves to the very center of what will soon have always been solely his domain and places his hands on a flat disc, its shimmer dying in the cold and darkness. With his mind, he reaches out.
Please don’t go. I don’t know what will become of me.
It’s a simple plea, with far too few words for what he really wants to say. But the game is ending, and even given all the turns in the world, he would not be able to encapsulate what he wants to. She, too, cannot manage a response to all he would wish for, but she wraps his mind in warmth for the last time regardless, plays her musical chime into his mind until she no longer can. He’ll always remember it, even when he can no longer place the source.
The only thing that keeps him from buckling to his knees when silence falls are the warm embers of his rage. With that, he destroys everything he had clumsily learned to build. He breaks apart his constructs like the mindless dolls they are. He tears down the walls of what she was and leaves himself alone in the void for the first time since he stopped existing.
He stays like that for a long time.
His skin frosts over.
It’s unbearable.
He raises the walls again and coats them in a new color and shape. Gone is the skeleton of a spaceship and in its stead is the base of a vibrant toyroom. His constructs still lie broken on the ground within, the warm eyes of his former favorite now staring at him in cold and lifeless accusation, so he refurbishes them too. He changes their faces with barely a thought, mind still frozen numb from his time outside. It ought to have happened to his favorite eventually anyway, if they had only had the existence to see it.
From then on, he refurbishes regularly. He topples his domain like a Jenga tower and raises a fresh game board in its place. He creates his blue planet like a marble and saves it. He creates his green planet like a pool ball and knocks it into a pocket of darkness. He renews it all manually and hollowly, now, each time the frost eating across the walls becomes too pervasive, each time his nonexistent breath would freeze solid rather than pluming in the stead of any air.
Eventually, others join him again for the first time, stumbling past the nonexistent boundary of law and into his space. He plays games with them, too. He is well practiced against all of his challengers, and his delight at winning against them gives him the goodwill to play host to each of them for a very long stretch of nonexistent time indeed.
A guest arrives who calls himself The Doctor. He introduces himself in his turn as the Toymaker, matching him falsehood for falsehood. He challenges him with a trilogic game of transposing pieces across an empty space, tasking The Doctor with the delicate balance that had once been asked of him, completing in the transfer before his moves run out for good. The Doctor makes it through the blackness by relying on the Toymaker in a way that flickers through his memory with the light of fire on melting gems.
It can’t be.
He tosses the thought out of his mind as he remodels again in the wake of his loss, its weight no more than the ball in a game of jacks.
Much like the ball in a game of jacks, though, the thought always bounces back down into his head. It returns each time the Doctor does, with fewer jacks of doubt to excuse his throwing it away each time. As the man who now calls himself The Doctor offers him the use of the TARDIS in the guise of a game, as the Toymaker sees the warmth in his eyes, the last of his doubts is scooped away by the hand of recognition. He wins the game held out to him like an open hand to take. He uses his winnings to repair the physicality of the room. The memory of anything else to be restored within his Toyroom has been washed away by the blackness around him. The same way the memory of anything before this has been washed away. The same way that he has been forgotten by anyone who made it past this empty space and onto the third post of the trilogic game.
The way he hasn’t forgotten Dexa.
Despite their brief magic circle of understanding, The Doctor leaves him like he is nearly a stranger. His dark eyes pull at the Toymaker like puppet strings, binding him in rage and the ache of his long-cold heart. He is ancient, and familiar, and doomed by this cold purgatory to never have known him at all. He pulls on these strings until they are wrapped around his own hands and restitches himself with their threads of memory. Brilliant reds and silvers, too many teeth, a laugh like a musical chime dredged from the depths of his voideaten memories.
Until there is another tug at his heart. That of a line in the sand, a line in the salt, blown away at long last. He hurdles over it and into a world of sight, sound, and substance. He takes the colorful bricks of culture that fall around him and assembles a shop that can disappear with a blink and the chime of clearing lines when he needs it to. He extends the strings wrapped around him to wooden scaffolds, to people, to television cables. He lives a blissfully comprehensible amount of time and steps through decades instantaneously into a tower he’ll take stability from until humanity topples.
Then, a guest arrives who calls himself The Doctor. This time, the Gallifreyan costume he wears has worn too thin for him to deny that there is something else underneath. The Toymaker matches him truth for truth, putting on costumes and voices equally obvious in their pretend. He dances with logic and reality, runs through time from confrontation, plays a brilliant game of mirrors with the man who rambles in the face of odds so insurmountable they may as well be nonexistent.
With the boy who beat the odds and kept existing.
And you know full well that I’ve had many faces. Containing something far more.
For a moment, a reality is restored, and they are the same.
So come with me. Leave this tiny world. We can take your games back to the stars.
For a moment, they are cut from the same deck.
We can play across the cosmos.
For a moment, Dexa holds out his hand. The sort of warmth shines in his eyes that makes it easy for Vasil to take his hand. To run off into the sustenance of a sky filled with stars.
We can be celestial.
But… the moment doesn’t truly exist. Nonexistence is nonlinear. The boy who is reaching to him has never been celestial, has never been, has forgotten himself.
Vasil was lost to the void long before he ever set foot in reality.
It isn’t long before the Toymaker is too.
Once upon a time, there were two names, forgotten by everyone.