Fic: "Zero to the Bone"
Dec. 13th, 2008 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
watch_is_me'Verse: Personal canon—any 'verse, really. I'm sure he does this in his multiverse!verse, too.
Words: 798
Prompts: None, just me—and watching Castrovalva. This was a 30-mins., no real rewriting, I just want to write something, I haven't in ages piece. So rather stream-of-consciousness and undisciplined.
You retreat.
You often do, these days. It used to be all running, and saving, and the worlds around you, the universe, a blur of sights and sounds and new experiences and friends by your side.
It used to be wonder and each moment new and nothing constant except the beauty and the terror and the new faces you would see in a crowd, the eyes met across a room, the adventures. The invitations. The stowaways and the tagalongs, and the human beings you loved the moment you saw them and loved until the moment they left and love still and will always love.
Even though you destroyed their future.
Even though you ended what they become.
Because you chose. Because something in you said, yes, you loved them, but the universe mattered more. The final death of the destroyers mattered more than the possible life of those you loved.
So you retreat.
You come here.
They made repairs for you, when you came back, the renegade returning, to volunteer for the Time War. They didn't have to summon you. You knew. You knew that War would need you, and you knew there was nowhere to run. For the first time.
The TARDIS runs better now than it ever did, though it maintains those idiosyncracies you love, the round-and-round-she-goes-where-she-stops-nobody-knows unpredictability of her travel. She doesn't have to. She does it because she loves you.
You don't know what to do with that. You don't know where to put that, how to accept that gift.
It doesn't matter. Because she gave it to you anyway. Your life, your body, your freedom, your mind. She remembered them all for you and put them back together and you are her labor of love and you cannot give that back. This gift that keeps on giving.
And taking.
The Zero Room. That's where you retreat to. The TARDIS has one again, because of those repairs, during the War, replacing the rooms you've had to jettison, over the years. Castrovalva. You repeat the word to yourself, remember how it felt on your Fifth's tongue. Castrovalva.
The Dwellings of Simplicity.
The place of peace.
You wonder if there is such a place.
Not here.
You remember when you first came here, when you first began to hear the drums. To really hear them, not just that faint pressure at the back of your mind, the anger, the drive to act, the feeling that you were losing something, that your mind was no longer entirely your own, that you were changing, had changed, and the war had remade you in a way regeneration never could. Taken you and made you its own. Its avatar.
To drive out the sickness, to heal the wound, to break the bone so that it might be reset.
You had never been like that. You remember who you were, and you were never like that.
So when you began to hear them, after the TARDIS pieced you back together, after the watch, you were almost relieved.
There.
That was it.
That was the problem. If you could just fix that, make the drums go away, cure the source, you would lose the symptoms.
You could be yourself again.
The first thing you did was come here. The Zero Room. Cut out all outside interference. Shut out the drums and then work from there, discover where they were coming from, seek out their origins.
You remember standing in this room, waiting. Waiting for the drums to quiet, for the peace of the Zero Room to fall over you. For the signal to be blocked.
You waited. You yelled. Come on, come on, come on, to the TARDIS, to yourself, this had to work, they had to go away, you'd never be able to work properly, to go through the careful procedures, the clever scientific and technical experimentations, inventions, needed to trace their source across time and space, to develop a means of blocking them when you weren't in the Zero Room, if you couldn't silence them while you worked.
You needed peace.
You needed quiet.
You needed to know they weren't a part of you.
You came back, each day for days. You stayed in the Zero Room for hours. For a week. Alone.
They never went away.
They didn't come from outside.
They came from inside.
You heard your heartsbeat.
1-2-3-4.
You heard the drums.
1-2-3-4.
A
1
Part
2
Of
3
You
4
No.
Nononono.
1-2-3-4.
You come here now, to listen. To retreat.
Not from the drums, but from the rest of the universe.
From the universe that needs you to ignore the drums.
You come here to be the man you've become.
Alone.
Where no one can be hurt.
You come here to listen to your final days.
1-2-3-4.
4-3-2-1.
Zero.
Words: 798
Prompts: None, just me—and watching Castrovalva. This was a 30-mins., no real rewriting, I just want to write something, I haven't in ages piece. So rather stream-of-consciousness and undisciplined.
You retreat.
You often do, these days. It used to be all running, and saving, and the worlds around you, the universe, a blur of sights and sounds and new experiences and friends by your side.
It used to be wonder and each moment new and nothing constant except the beauty and the terror and the new faces you would see in a crowd, the eyes met across a room, the adventures. The invitations. The stowaways and the tagalongs, and the human beings you loved the moment you saw them and loved until the moment they left and love still and will always love.
Even though you destroyed their future.
Even though you ended what they become.
Because you chose. Because something in you said, yes, you loved them, but the universe mattered more. The final death of the destroyers mattered more than the possible life of those you loved.
So you retreat.
You come here.
They made repairs for you, when you came back, the renegade returning, to volunteer for the Time War. They didn't have to summon you. You knew. You knew that War would need you, and you knew there was nowhere to run. For the first time.
The TARDIS runs better now than it ever did, though it maintains those idiosyncracies you love, the round-and-round-she-goes-where-she-stops-nobody-knows unpredictability of her travel. She doesn't have to. She does it because she loves you.
You don't know what to do with that. You don't know where to put that, how to accept that gift.
It doesn't matter. Because she gave it to you anyway. Your life, your body, your freedom, your mind. She remembered them all for you and put them back together and you are her labor of love and you cannot give that back. This gift that keeps on giving.
And taking.
The Zero Room. That's where you retreat to. The TARDIS has one again, because of those repairs, during the War, replacing the rooms you've had to jettison, over the years. Castrovalva. You repeat the word to yourself, remember how it felt on your Fifth's tongue. Castrovalva.
The Dwellings of Simplicity.
The place of peace.
You wonder if there is such a place.
Not here.
You remember when you first came here, when you first began to hear the drums. To really hear them, not just that faint pressure at the back of your mind, the anger, the drive to act, the feeling that you were losing something, that your mind was no longer entirely your own, that you were changing, had changed, and the war had remade you in a way regeneration never could. Taken you and made you its own. Its avatar.
To drive out the sickness, to heal the wound, to break the bone so that it might be reset.
You had never been like that. You remember who you were, and you were never like that.
So when you began to hear them, after the TARDIS pieced you back together, after the watch, you were almost relieved.
There.
That was it.
That was the problem. If you could just fix that, make the drums go away, cure the source, you would lose the symptoms.
You could be yourself again.
The first thing you did was come here. The Zero Room. Cut out all outside interference. Shut out the drums and then work from there, discover where they were coming from, seek out their origins.
You remember standing in this room, waiting. Waiting for the drums to quiet, for the peace of the Zero Room to fall over you. For the signal to be blocked.
You waited. You yelled. Come on, come on, come on, to the TARDIS, to yourself, this had to work, they had to go away, you'd never be able to work properly, to go through the careful procedures, the clever scientific and technical experimentations, inventions, needed to trace their source across time and space, to develop a means of blocking them when you weren't in the Zero Room, if you couldn't silence them while you worked.
You needed peace.
You needed quiet.
You needed to know they weren't a part of you.
You came back, each day for days. You stayed in the Zero Room for hours. For a week. Alone.
They never went away.
They didn't come from outside.
They came from inside.
You heard your heartsbeat.
1-2-3-4.
You heard the drums.
1-2-3-4.
A
1
Part
2
Of
3
You
4
No.
Nononono.
1-2-3-4.
You come here now, to listen. To retreat.
Not from the drums, but from the rest of the universe.
From the universe that needs you to ignore the drums.
You come here to be the man you've become.
Alone.
Where no one can be hurt.
You come here to listen to your final days.
1-2-3-4.
4-3-2-1.
Zero.
