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It’s a strange feeling, feeling nothing. Being unaware of myself. Not having a self at all, really. Very different from having a body and a mind. Although, as much as my lack of consciousness permits me to have opinions on things, I think I wouldn’t like going back.
It’s funny, isn’t it? A Time Lord can spend dozens of lives trying not to die, too goddamn scared of nothing to care how or who or why, and when the bucket finally spits you out into primordial spinning soup it turns out to be all I really want.
As much as I can want, anyway.
There’s nothing out here. Nothing but me, and I’m not much to myself. I make sound, lots of it, but I don’t have ears anymore. I make light, too, but I do not have eyes. I am moving, constantly, as fast as I please, in arcs and twists and swoops and snaps! And yet, I have no skin or stomach or bones, no reference, so how could I feel it?
To me, there is nothing, and to nothing, there is me.
It is the biology of all Time Lords to go from vessel to vessel, cup to cup, body to body. Some call it cowardly. Those who do are not Time Lords, and are most often jealous of Death’s preferential treatment. Most Time Lords call it sacred. To live only as one person is limiting, vulgar, primitive. Most (read: all) Time Lords are pretentious asses who, even on the common occurrence of them being right, should be ignored on all matters out of spite.
Theta had called it ridiculous, once. “But what does it matter? What does it matter? What does it matter if I’m taller or shorter, or if I change color or a few organs, or get different teeth? One idiot who’s lived in a hundred bodies is still an idiot, except they think they’re clever because they haven’t kicked it yet! Well for my money they’re no better than one person in one body.”
He was pulling up blades of long, red grass, pulling apart each one until he had a small pile of fiber-y string sitting in his palm.
“One body’s probably better, actually. Look at us! We live so long and die so many times that most of our energy is spent trying to ensure that we will never die for the last time! We are so afraid of dying for good that we never consider it as an option. So what do we do with eternity? Fuck all! Muck about, make a few friends, piss them off, kill ‘em off, get sad, get bored of being sad, and then do the whole bloody thing again!”
“How’s one body better? You can’t learn from anything you do. You do one wrong thing and it’s over.”
“But you know. You know it all ends. You spend your whole life knowing and trying to wrap your mind around it and you keep living anyway. And dying for good after messing up even once isn’t as bad as messing up a thousand times and never learning a thing. It’s a waste of perfectly good energy, is what it is. It’s ridiculous.”
The truth is that regeneration is each of those things to each of those people, but what takes precedence over all the rest is that it is biology. The same biology that gives us our hearts, our fear, and our cancer. Cowardly, sacred, ridiculous biology. Whatever I may have thought of it before is no longer relevant. I’m not a Time Lord anymore, and if I’m quite honest with myself, I haven’t been for a long time.
***
There is no “I” anymore. It’s a hard concept to understand, and it’s much easier to start with what “I” was.
I was a coward. I clung to life and power by my teeth. I looked upon the unrelenting chaos of the time vortex when I was eight and saw more of myself than anyone ever should. I loved someone. I hurt them a lot. They hurt me, too, and I hated them for it. Ridiculous. I was smart. Smarter than average, at least. I knew how to threaten and lie and cheat my way out of any corner. Except the last one. I was also an idiot, that comes from spending all my many brain cells on the unholy trinity of the Doctor, drums, and death. I should’ve gotten a hobby.
I died. A lot. That’s nothing new, it happens to the best of us.
I’m dead. That is new.
It is not as if “I” never existed, if that were the case then what would be the point of anything? No, I existed. Or really, I exist. To the Doctor, I exist more conceptually than anything else. I exist in the same way a baby deer exists in the trails they forged through bramble and foliage which we would wander through as kids. A footprint here, a tuft of hair there. I exist the way winter exists in a buoyant spring. I exist the way a wrecking ball exists as a whole in the wall.
But I also exist as something else. An echo, maybe. An intent. Half an intent, spread too thin and too sporadically to do any damage, but there. The tingle of a phantom finger drawing a line from the top of your forehead to the tip of your nose. Well, not yours.
Being cut down to size metaphysically speaking has made me reevaluate my priorities. I’m dead, so there’s no need to worry about that anymore. And hey, guess what? The drums? The constant banging drums in my head and at my heels that I couldn’t escape even with a fucking lobotomy? Rassilon’s party trick. Ridiculous.
And then there was one. The Doctor. My beloved Theta. They were the only thing that mattered now. I, or all that was left of me, all I could manage as petit caresses in space and time, am singly focused. I can witness them in their entirety, now. Start to finish, ups and downs, heads to toes, and I must say that they are as lovely as can be. The wrongs I have done to them still congeal through me, like drops of cyanide in a mellow ocean. The wrongs they have done to me have fallen away.
You are not a perfect person, my dear, and in life our hounding of each other hurt more than just us. But there is no “I” anymore. What’s left is free to forgive, free to love, free to be. Is it ironic that I can only now love you totally, when “I” am no more? No, it is necessary. And now you may love me back, love me totally, for “I” and my faults are no longer and what remains of me is of the universe you always loved best.
I cannot hold your hand anymore. I cannot kiss your hair or kick you while you’re down. I cannot listen to you ramble or remind you to rest or make you tea. I know that you regret letting me, sometimes. I know that you will find it strange that now, when there is so little left of me, I am content to make leaves dance above your head. I am content to make the start blink at you. I am content to fill your mind with gentle fuzz when you feel too lonely for your own good. I am content to add drops to your cup, now that I can, now that I want for no other place to put myself.
Maybe that’s how the whole universe runs. People are poured into existence, they grow, they care for a while, then they are poured out again, and all the living can touch is the empty cup. But quietly, as time condences drop by drop and moves this giant wheel, we give ourselves to our care. And there is no hate, no fear, no greed. And we are free.
There’s so much waiting for you, my love, when your time comes. Until then, I am your faithful wonder, and you are my lovely star.