Work Text:
I.
He dies in transport. It is a study in spectacle; the grand exit he makes is one light show hidden in the greatest light show in the unknown universe, and when she wakes, it is all so very new. New eyes notice new colors, new ears give new lilt to voices, new skin and teeth and gristle to ruin, blood to spill. Blank slate.
The star broke and split the sky. The star broke that so long split her mind, fractured it in four.
She is… fresh. Celestial as only shiny things straight out of the box can be. She wonders why. She ought to be stardust. She ought to still be ‘he,’ jittering apart at the seams. Instead she lies in a white room in white clothing, new long hair loose around new slender shoulders.
This is dangerous; she knows where she is, and she knows its peril. If she tries to escape, there will be hell to pay.
Ah, well. She’ll live. She always does.
II.
They are arrogant, her brothers and sisters. They have spent so long at the top of the universe, and then alone in it, that they think themselves greater than they are the way tiny dogs think they are ferocious. She ducks their teeth and walks away with scores deep in the flesh of her arm, no more and no less.
Your bite has weakened. Your knives are dull, she thinks, and walks into the lion’s den.
III.
It's hilarious, this game. It's hilarious how hilarious she finds it all. Her sense of humor is as shiny and new as the rest of her. She and her laughter waltz across gravestones, fill lungs with wet air and the remains of dead things.
Here is a grandfather, a mother, an aunt. Here is the widower everyone loved, here is the child they all forgot, here is the girl who carried her bruises and let them swallow her. There's nothing funny about death; rather, she finds levity in the cessation of life and how it all clicks together in the end, peeling off the old layers to give life to the new ones. Like her.
There's always been something lovely about holding the strings, but this is novel. She tastes the comedies like wine, irony and satire and simple pun, samplings of the marvelous game they will play.
Heaven indeed.
IV.
There is a memory she has that matches up to this one.
When she was he, when he was brilliant and good, his best friend kissed him in a silver tree while Gallifrey sang and burned with Citadel sunset. They were young and clever, they were utterly unwise, they were in love, just that little bit. Gallifrey sang and burned, sang and burned.
Now he is she, and she is still brilliant, and she is not good. She is brilliant and evil and she kisses her best friend in a slick silver hallway while Earth sings and the match waits expectantly in her sleeve. They are old and clever, they are no wiser, they are still in love that little bit. They are also in hate, and in friendship, and tangled up in strings of something called History, that jumble of moments that everyone views from a different angle and no one actually understands. In a moment she will strike the match on the sole of her shoe, while his focus is on her face and her lips, and Earth will scream and burn, that girl will scream and burn.
He will scream and burn and rise from the ashes at the crest of the wave, because he is hers and she only accepts the best.
V.
They’re interesting, his girls. They're the variable in the otherwise static equation of him, the shifting alongside the steady. He changes, but it is all surface; a planet’s core breathes the same however the crags of its face change. The girls are the moons that orbit, shatter, form, every one different yet every one in some ways the same:
They seek adventure. They are willful and strong. They are righteous in the way only humans can be, fiercely defensive of their morals and their choices. They take choices from him, sometimes, both when they need to and when they should not.
You can learn a lot about a person by the company they keep. She wonders what it meant when he tried to keep (her). She wonders what it means that she tries to keep him.
VI.
This is the point:
She will shatter worlds for him. She will put her fist through glass and use the heat of her blood to melt and recast the shards into something she thinks worthy of him. She will breathe life into the grave if it revives the idea of Them in his wayward mind, will destroy stars, systems, galaxies if it will bring his eyes away from those human lights and onto hers.
This is the point:
They are flash flames, bright, beautiful and gone in a moment. She is the fire in the dark depths of water, constant and present until the darkness closes around them both. They are lovely, but they leave; she is tarnished, but she stays.
This is the point:
Her best friend kisses her in a damp field of the dead, and she can not imagine a more perfect way to spend a moment. She can not imagine a better place than a graveyard, than a hallway where skeletons keep vigil, than a tree with silver leaves beneath a sky afire. She cannot imagine anyone else to follow.
VII.
The dial arrives in a small box, tied with a wide ribbon and a tag that reads ‘Please’ in lopsided rings. She stares at it for several long moments, remembering. She breathes through her nose.
“Terribly sorry,” she says to empty air, “but no.”
She would shatter worlds for him. Certainly shattering the skull of a would-be killer is the least she can do.