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bakerstreet2023-11-25 11:50 am
hellboi) wrote in bakerstreet2023-11-25 11:50 am
Ending
potential ways to spend your last day(s). Last Love. Romance but make it sad. Apologies. You can't leave this world without making your amends. Time to call up everyone you know and tell them you're sorry for that bad thing you once did seven years ago. You remember that thing? Doomsayer. To hell with ignorant bliss. You're telling everyone just what the hell is going on here! Who cares if it starts mass chaos? Bucket List. There's a lot you've wanted to do and you've only got so much time to do it all. Starting with... Memories. You want to end things on a good note, so why not spend these last days making great memories? Or reminiscing with someone about old ones? Sad Sack. You know, crying in bed is also a valid option. This is a natural reaction. Please don't feel ashamed. Do you need some tissues? Doomsday Preppers. You're not sitting on your ass, no sir. When the end gets here, you want to be prepared. How many cases of water can fit in your basement? Let's find out. Goodbyes. If you're not going to give out apologies, you can at least say your goodbyes to people. Making a phone call, turn up at their house unannounced, it doesn't matter. The world is ending! Denial. Yeah, no, everything's fine. This is great. It's probably all a hoax, after all. You're not letting this bother you one bit. In fact, you're opening up a spreadsheet and getting back to work. Panic. The most realistic response, if we're being honest. Sometimes, you need to lose your shit in a blind panic and you need others to calm you down. And that's okay. Squad Up. You're building your dream apocalypse team. Let's see, you need someone who's good with guns, a computer nerd, a getaway driver... Party Hard. Hello? Has Prince taught us nothing? If the world's going to end, you're sure as hell not seeing it all go down while sober. Best Day Ever. Your last day is going to rock. You're going to make it great, and buy all your favorite foods, and watch all your favorite movies, and it's going to be awesome. Lawless. Punch a cop! Kiss a grandma! Who cares! If the world is ending, there are no rules! Wildcard. You're doomed! Have fun! possible ends. Zombies. A dropped vial in Brazil can set off an outbreak in Texas. Aliens. They're taking over the planet, here to enslave humans or something. Or maybe they just want to be friends! Quick to judge much? Supernatural. Demons? There are demons now? Meteor. Maybe a big, strong, flying superhero could punch that thing back into outer space. Nuclear. War? War never changes. Biotech. Something about messing around with human lives never sat right with you. And look who was right all along! AI. Looking at you, ChatGPT. Toxins. Something got into the air that wasn't supposed to. Spooky, scary mutations imminent. The Unknown. Just because you can't see something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Have we forgotten Bird Box already? Don't look. Or maybe it's the other way around? Blink and it gets you. Nature. The trees are fighting back. Biblical. Oh, ye of little faith... Horrific. Something creepy, and twisted, and wrong. Something out of a horror novel. Fluke. Nothing happens. Literally, nothing happens. Don't you hate when you get all riled up for nothing? Is it too late to take back all those last-day-on-Earth words? Wildcard. However it ends, it's not going to be great. |
christian palter | oc
no subject
Cpl. Dwayne Hicks | Aliens
Maedhros | the silmarillion | ota
Rau le Creuset | Gundam SEED
natasha romanoff | mcu | ota
Kishin Asura ΦΦΦ Soul Eater
The world just kept getting stranger. Things that always happen became things that usually happen and things that never happen became things that just happened. Things started to appear, parades of impossible creatures, all that could generously be described as vaguely clown-like, with a thirst for chaos and killing. Law and order collapsed under the weight of it as people lost their minds.
The sky always had three gargantuan red eyes spreading from horizon to horizon now, their pupils twitching to examine everywhere at once. One minute ago, all three turned to look at a single person. It's not a good omen.
The [14th] Doctor | Doctor Who
last love; aliens
The difference, though, is that... the end of the world isn't always the end of her world. There's been times where the world could've ended, but she could've kept on going. On the other hand, there've been a few times... a handful, two or three, where the world's nearly ended and her world ended too, and she just... stopped.
Once, at a church.
Twice, on a beach.
The second time, some version of him was with her to help her come back to life. It's been years. Not quite ten, but maybe more than ten, but also maybe less — hard to say, considering all the jumping around they'd done.
He warned her, maybe halfway through them. That his body was never meant to last, something about things on a molecular level not being stable. Him — the original him, hers — couldn't have known, probably. But he — the newer one, the angrier one, who still loved her regardless — told her he'd find her a way to get back before it came to that. She wouldn't be alone. She wouldn't be stranded. Maybe she could find Him, he couldn't guarantee that, but he could give her a shot — and, worse comes to worst, she'd have a way to travel on her own.
The world ended, her world ended, and Rose Tyler crashes through the barrier between worlds.
...right into the middle of a chaotic scene, because of course. No time to cry. No time to grieve. World's always ending, and she looks up from the hefty device strapped to her forearm to see a slew of bodies on a concrete floor, a handful of humans with guns pointed at a handful of somethings covered in blood, with stretching smiles filled with teeth and arms that are too long, and claws raised, and terror drenching both sides, and Him on the opposite side of the room trying to wield a sonic screwdriver like it's Excalibur.
"Um. Hello," she says brightly, a tense smile plastered on her face, shifting the tactical bag hanging off one of her shoulders. "Sorry, am I interrupting something? I could come back later if you lot wanna carry on... eating... each other?"
no subject
World's end. Time ends. Life ends.
And then it all begins again.
Merciless and hopeful,
stubborn and shining.
But this world;
this world is ending,
and it can't be saved.
Not for lack of trying, but the causal collapse of the planet's core from the invasion had gone too far—went too far before he'd gotten here, but he hadn't known soon enough—and the point now is distraction and division. And hope—that the last few batches of refugees from the city will reach the last of the ships and skiffs and rickety life pods. That he'll be able to save at least a few of these brave people who stayed to hold off this latest wave of attackers.
"Come on, now! A taste of a Time Lord doesn't come that easy!"
Antic motion and a foolhardy smile, more steel than light, keep him in the fray. There are explosions outside, smoke and sparks coming up from the vents, and the blaster fire. It's chaotic and noisy, heartbeats pounding in his ears. And. Still.
He hears it.
Her.Freezes in a way every impulse, training, and knowledge knows is wrong wrong wrong; jerking toward that new
oldsound so violently it feels like his movement shatters the air as though it'd been made of glass and he slammed straight through it. He knows it. That lilt. That voice.Locked down deep where feet don't creep, and curious children's fingers can't pry.
Where the dust never settles, and bones don't either.
With Romana. And Susan.
The Master. Donna. And—
Rose.
Standing there, brilliant as a candle—burning golden light; caught up in her hair and more; a blister that doesn't blink away—her mouth crooked at the corners. His whole body torn between jackknife impulses that the wall next to him kindly decides for him, exploding into a shower of sparks he has to dodge, while something moves in the shadows too close to her.
"Behind you!"
no subject
She looks at him.
Time doesn't stand still, though it feels like it ought to. It feels like she deserves for it to, after everything. She should get just a moment to look at him and try and see the answer to questions in his eyes, read it in his face like she's always been able to.
But the universe never gives them that chance, ever, in a million years. It's just chaos and running every single moment, and it's as brilliant and firey as it always is — and as frightening and frustrating as it always could be.
You look different, she wants to say. You look the same, but different.
She'd have thought he'd have another face by now. Or maybe not. Maybe no time's passed for him at all, or maybe it's been a thousand thousand years, it's impossible to tell.
Behind you!
Instinct and reflex kick in. They've been running, her and the other him, nearly nonstop after they left that beach. For Torchwood, while he worked on the device that let them travel. For themselves, afterward. She can still move just as fast as ever even ten years older — this time, it's to go wide-eyed and look down at the thing on her forearm. It's to slam a button with her other palm and, just as quickly as she appeared, she disappears again as though she was never there.
A moment later — or, actually, in the same moment — but technically, several moments earlier, she reappears on the other side of the wall behind him, exploding it in a shower of sparks as she blows it open with a big, giant bloody explosive gun she certainly hadn't had in hand a split second ago.
Which is to say, she disappeared to reappear ten minutes earlier than she had in the first place, and on the other side of the bloody compound, and now she's blowing open their escape route.
"This way! Run!"
no subject
How many times have his personal reminders of mercy and weapons of masochism worn that face?
His bones are haptic electricity—and if he couldn't feel the way time rippled, reknitting where that space was, ripped again anew as concrete blew—he knows there's a version of this where everyone in that room could have paid dear for a trespass too deep. But, then, she's there. In the opening that just blew out to his side, before she disappeared, as she disappeared, flecks of debris in her hair and on her jacket, and she's shouting orders.
Eyebrows go up, chaotic sharp surprise, and more questions, simultaneously as it slashes manic through those dark brown eyes, and his mouth rounds up at the same time. It is caustically comic and carrying, even in the middle of a warzone, more sass than serious. "Yes, ma'am." Before he throws a look back, and there's that serious part. "You heard the lady! This way! Everyone out!"
He should wait, normally would (though normally changes with the wind—what even is normal now? There's no one here for demarcating it but him, and who else knows just how well he lies), but he sprints out of the opening toward her side of it instead. He does look back, counting for those heading for the hole and both of them, as well, but a clawing, cold, demanding something down in the deep of him doesn't want to watch her vanish from half a room away again.
"What are you doing here?" Is rushed logic when it wants to be too many other things. Dead and buried things. They don't have time for that. There was never time for that. There's only this battlefield, and swallowing down the burn of just looking at her, the violent mash of wanting to pick her up—to hug her or just keep running until daylight could never find them again, was anyone's guess—and looking for the only version himself that was allowed that kind of insanity. "Who else is with you?"
no subject
What are you doing here hurts in an irrational way, probably only because she's got so many bleeding emotions about it all. She's hurt, and she's angry, and she's grieving (and she's so, so desperately happy to see him, and so insecure and uncertain after everything). Once upon a time, it was simpler, and she'd have thrown her arms around him by now, and they'd have managed to fit in one hug even as they were running for their lives. Now, she barely has time to throw that expended, now-useless gun to the ground so it doesn't weigh her down.
He asks her a question, and she lets that anger out by answering him sharply, pointedly.
"There's no one else. Just me." And she hopes he's hit with the entire weight of that implication; selfishly, she wants it to cut, just a little. But then she's bouncing back to the chaos of the moment, swiftly changing tracks back to, "There's no time right now, we have to get these people out, Doctor. Where are we taking them?"
It might also feel a little good to leave him wondering, questions unanswered, for just a little longer. Only because he left her again, on a beach again, without asking her what she wanted, again, and then his metacrisis left her, in the worst and most permanent way, and though that's not technically his fault she'll lump the blame on him for a minute too.
no subject
The edge of the retort was lost for the few words and chasm of uncertainties.
Where is his metacrisis? When is she from? Where? Where's her family? Did she stay and do as he asked, or is there a chance she brooked that request like every other command or well-wished ending she'd thrown on a floor so long ago when she disagreed, and he's been forced to take the long way round to this moment, this meeting?
Did she get here safely again, or is hell chasing on her heels from Pete's World, stalking Earth first and then the greater universe? If so, how? (And where, where, where is he? Dangerous and placed in the only hands who had managed to make him better than it once. Was he still out there? Unchecked? Did she know how bad that could be, would be? Without her to—)
She's right. (Wasn't she always.)
"The last hanger." He points, weight dancing back and forth, on the tips and balls of his feet, but he doesn't pause, doesn't even look down or think to get permission. When has he ever? This is a war zone, and she's right. They have no time for questions or quibbles. She's his responsibility now, again. And she doesn't know the where. But she knows how to lead and how to follow, his Rose Tyler. "Over there."
The blaster fire that starts shooting up the ground and the wall nearby announces not only their people starting to make it toward the hole in the wall now, too. He reaches for her hand, wrapping his fingers tight around hers, already tugging her that way, starting to pick up speed into sprinting toward the hallway they'll need. "The Tardis and the last two ships, for this lot, are waiting there."
???????????
It's a death knell. To a version of Earth already well on its way to rotting from the inside out. And a death knell to him.
And yet while he doesn't have the senses for Time Lords, he hears her like a siren's call, pulling him across a gutted planet.
"You're too late."
How's this for the world's worst mirror?
How's this for a that face coming back?
It's one thing to be standing before another regeneration, but no, here's that discarded thing, lost like it was slipped between a car seat, but the cracks of the universes instead.
Here's the other threads of your metacrisis, Doctor.
"Talk about insult to injury. You come here? Now? What took you so long, got lost on the way? Had to stop for a cup of tea first?"
!!!!!!!!!!!
"How'm I here? I can't be here. We can't be here; you know that." His hand possessively stroked the flat of the closed second door as he spoke to the Tardis, even as his MetaCrisis hissed words that made no sense in his own bitterly angry voice in his direction. Making him play pickup sticks with a rant he'd been far more tempted to ignore. Except that he couldn't. He just always had to know, didn't he?
"Too late for what exactly?"
And. He couldn't stop the thought.
If he was there, where was Rose?
no subject
His laughter is rung-out as his gaze dips away and his arms drop.
He's the one without time under his skin and yet it's the Doctor that's the late one.
Always too late, aren't they? Time Lord, human, doesn't matter.
"Too late to save the day," he answers.
I Am the End
She's there, like a ghost, drifting in behind him, just out of the corner of his eyes as the walls close in around him, replacing his former surroundings and his desperate work to save everyone, as he does. She's closed him up in a box, not his box. Four small walls. No doors, no windows, ugly wallpaper. It'll make him very, very angry, she's certain.
A dangerous little man in a box.
She's in two places. With another face, with another wild man debating on a bad decision that could kill so many (but determined it's his only choice, the litany always the same).
And with him, this impossible man that shouldn't be here, but she heard him rattling around in the floorboards of this planet.
She's not sure he'll even remember her like this. It was--well, it was supposed to be for him, just not... this him. Perhaps that'll add to his anger.
"This isn't your moment."
no subject
A whisper fading in and out. His jaw snaps, bones jar, familiarity deeper than sound, deeper than realization, sending him spinning, and his eyes widen. Briefly too vast, too dark, a chasm through which all things have fallen—including this one—impossible—but it's suddenly impossibly her. Shifting hazel eyes. Curls that were always this did of windswept. But that's impossible. Impossible. It can't be R—
She's gone. She's trapped. She's safe. Happy. Far, far, far away from whatever this is.
And the telepathic excavation of that grave turns shock toward cold rage—Flint and freezing fire.
"This isn't going to be your moment either if you keep looking like that." He's getting closer, slamming straight forward into the burning void, words pouring out of his mouth as though he could outrun with a sound that face and his trajectory toward it. "Who are you? What are you?"
no subject
She pops her lips, exaggerating the sound as she leans away, unperturbed by his rage. It bounces off of her with the ease of someone so very accustomed to dealing with the Type. Such a silly, always angry, raggedy man--
Nope.
Wrong one.
But even this one isn't quite right.
"'s'not my fault this is the face your lives call to," she says, low and petulant. "So many of you--far more than I remember--which is..." She trails off, frowning deeply, confused. "Strange," she whispers in a lull. "You're very strange, did anyone ever tell you that? Of course they have." She paces about the four walls, fingers loosely laced together behind her, steps an off-beat meander.
She's got all the time in the world, always, infinite.
Him? Hmmmm.
"Why are you so loud? Past and future wrapped up in that face of yours and I didn't--" She stops walking, completely still, immobile, sharp wolfish gaze snapping to him like he's a snack. Unblinking gaze, flecks of gold there and gone. "I didn't hear you with the others. Your time ticked over the counter." She laughs, the moment broken, and winks, coy, "I wonder if you're cheating? Well. It's not my concern. I need you to stay here."
Oh, he asked her questions, didn't he? Well, how's it feel to have all your ramblin' rambled back at you from another being?
no subject
The words are too dangerously true. Closed doors and closed boxes. Closed universes; as though he could ever run fastest enough, run far enough. Escape, the sound of her voice mingled into the others. Words they all say themselves, but words he'd prompted her to say more than once. Been foolish enough to grasp for. To want to believe. To chose. For even a splinter of a shards breath in time.
The face he pulls up when he wants most to be reminded how far he can fall.
—no. He will not be played.
That card isn't for turning.
Not even for touching.
"I don't just stay put." Stern and prompt, even as his eyes widened and narrowed, her eyes glowed golden as the Time Vortex. An image that didn't hold the text of it. The power. The endless star song. The reckless and, once admitted, also need to run away and see everything. That Rose had taken into herself. Human and fallible, fragile
and beautiful, every cell of her woven with time and starlingand so, so very brave."And you didn't answer the question. What are you." Clipped, demanding rather than asking. And why was she talking like she could see through him—into him?—talking circles around him, talking to the air. Almost too familiarly. Something tugged at the far reaches. Something familiar. Something wrong. "What is this place? Why are you trying to hold me here?"
no subject
He doesn't have much choice.
She sighs, spins, and puts her back to one of the walls, watching him.
Memories are such a tiring thing, aren't they?
She turns her attention away from him for a second, to the other side of the planet, before it snaps back to him.
"I'm the Moment," she says, and waits. To see if there's any recognition at all before she answers the rest of his questions. This would be a lot easier if her existence chimed somewhere in his head. She'd like to think what she's doing here is a frightening answer connected to what she is.
no subject
The faintest, bare whisper of his body, wanting to step back.
"That's not possible."
Not here. Not that. Not her. The Galaxy Eater, the final creation of the Ancients, the worst of the Omega Arsenal, hidden dark and deep, furthest, in the Time Vault Zero, the 'original' doom of Gallifrey, with his fingerprints forever pressed into it in blood, just as stolen by him as the Tardis—wearing the face of Rose Tyler. With glowing eyes, playing upon The Bad Wolf. A device for mass destruction carrying the voice, who when all was said and done and might be ending, carried all of time itself, cried with every bit a human heart I bring life.
Somewhere, it tugs again. Tickles. Fiddly.
I don't want to be used.
Where? How? It's still there in his mind.
That voice. Gabby's description of her.
He remembers. He forgets.
He wins.
They live.
They lose.
Those cruel words,
spit black in
hisher face.(Again.
Always
again.
A hand out.
A hand burned.)
Pulverised? Burned? Nuked? All of the above.
Everyone killed. Everything burned.
"You can't be—" Real isn't the word to come out here. The Moment is real as real can be. The arrogance of the Time Lords manifold into one spot. It can trap, and it can burn, and there's every likelihood of both (but never neither). "—this. Why are you this? Why do you need a face? Now, or at all. Why are you here now?" Leaps to. "What are you keeping me from? What's happening out there?"
no subject
"Making it seem like it's my fault, of course. My appearance is not my choosing." Not entirely, anyway. She did choose it, again, but it's all from him. "You're the reason I wear this face. My interface adapts to the one I see. Time is always entangled but this visage is what your lives call out to--so you change it."
If you can. If your hearts don't ache. If willpower and subconscious and soul don't get their wires crossed, like his ever-thinking mind could just stop.
And why should she have a face? Isn't it so much harder to push a big red button when there's judgmental eyes on the other side? Making you question your every motive? Making you really think about the gall of your choices--
"Choices. Someone is making a choice. Why shouldn't they get that opportunity, like you? Is it ego? To think you have the right to interfere? They're seeing what they need, just as you had. And they need time, Time Lord."
no subject
Like the claxon. Like the gong. Like his hearts. Ratcheted up too high. Too fast. Jarring in his bones. Manic in his blood. In this too small space. There's poison in that. You change it. When his eyebrows furrow in disbelief, then confusion, then consideration—all of them quick as blink—gaze darting wildly about that face that takes much longer right after, and if he wills himself to see through it, to see whatever it is underneath the telepathic print projecting his personally chosen punishment, the last person he couldn't deny or lie to—is he actually?
It's not them he lies best to; it's himself. (And she never let him.) It's the greatest weapon ever made—a failsafe with a consciousness fundamentally set against its user and its use. You'd have to be heartless to stare unblinkingly into it and still. He had. And he hadn't.
The same as he still broke every mirror in the Tardis to keep from looking at his new face after it. And then she happened. Rose. Who made him better. Standing between him and the darkness, him and his rage, his loathing—that cannibalistic maw that had become his entire personal compass in the wake of such devastation, the weight of all those deaths, the ability to take them, and the audacity to live beyond it.
Who remind him why he made the promise.
Why he couldn't forget it. Why he'd never forget her.
(And, oh, isn't that a bitter lie, too.
To call it that, and stop there?)
He could. He tells himself that. Will her way. Like he sealed her away. Distracted her to slink away. He could do it. Again. Because it's not actually her. He could. Something base and frantic in the thought, but he's frozen in that consideration. Frozen in the light of her woven, vaguely gold, in the most rumpled of mismatched article choices, and still looking at him with that face, those eyes. The one that can't be outrun. Lied to.
Un-loved.His hard brown gaze slides off her. Is that shame? Or bitter weariness? In the silent echo of his words not voiced. He's never felt so old or so far from everything. Everyone. The home that was not his first home, but was definitely his last. The look back toward it—her; them—is more cracked, but that doesn't mean that it is broken.
"Who's making this choice?"
"And what are they choosing about?"
No. More specific. Brutual. Ruthless. With himself and the last child of the War in Heaven. "What are they destroying?"
A hand comes up, pointing at her. "And why are you here? With me?" And what does she look like to this other person? "I'm not deciding anything. I have no use for you." It's cold and cruel and as much false as it could be true. The Doctor is so many things that he both should be and shouldn't, and his roots are a tree that go down and down into the smoke.
"Unless they're doing something you know, I'll have to stop."
no subject
Her smile is that same cruelty, because she's never Rose Tyler with this consciousness. And while Bad Wolf doesn't have that cruelty either, this mind has seen the darkness of all things just as much as the light. It's so easy to conjure that.
But it's because he doesn't understand. She can give him all the pieces--she will give him all the pieces--but he may still turn a blind eye.
"The who doesn't matter." It's not one of him, at least. She'd let their paths cross if that were the case. "But a galaxy, of course," she says, empty. "So many small men looking for a clean slate. Not wanting to see other options. Just want to push a button and make it all go away. Why would anyone dig me up from the dust for less than a galaxy?"
She's maybe mocking him. Just a little.
Maybe he'll burn through his rage and his mind will be more clearer. Wouldn't that be nice?
Perhaps she should get him a cup of tea.
Musa | Fate: The Winx Saga | M/F
Alina Starkov | Shadow and Bone | M/F
Stiles Stilinski | Teen Wolf | M/M
Steve Harrington — Stranger Things
rukia | bleach
Rose Tyler | Doctor Who
Morgan Jay Finnigan | OC | OTA