Doctor Who: Ω ≠ 1 (The Future Is Now Remix)
[ The Doctor | G | 589 words ]
He said once that he’d make a very bad god.

Original story: Beyond the End of Time by kerravonsen, 400 words.
Remix author: astrogirl2

Ω ≠ 1 (The Future Is Now Remix)

He sometimes used to wonder, back in the last cosmic cycle, why every entity left over from the beginning of the universe appeared to be evil. Why was there never any Good from the Dawn of Time? He supposed only a power-hungry being, of that special obsessive kind, would insist on outliving the universe and surviving into the next.

He knows now that this was wrong. It can happen accidentally. All it takes is the product of an advanced enough civilization, in the right place at the wrong time. And when that accident happens to you and the new universe begins to form, it nucleates around you like the contaminant you are. It molds its strange new physics around you, your self, your will. And when it is finished, whether you like it or not, whether you’ve spent your entire life avoiding it or not, your power is, well... cosmic.

He said once that he’d make a very bad god. He isn’t sure it’s possible for anybody to make a good one. But being him, of course, he can’t resist the urge to interfere.

*

She is very young, but her people are old. Old enough that they seldom do anything now except sit behind their barriers, under their rust-colored sky, and congratulate themselves on their superiority, as if smugness were their only purpose in creation.

But she has traveled the universe, first with her grandfather and then alone. She has seen the beauty, the sadness, the joy and the loneliness of the stars. And everywhere she has been, she has heard stories of the Lonely God, the Time God, the God of the Coming Storm. Legend says he loved the universe so much he went mad trying to punish all its evil and abolish all its pain. That he became a terrible despot in the name of kindness, and knew it, and overthrew himself. They say he locked himself away somewhere to sleep and dream whatever an insane god dreams, until someone comes along who can remind him who he is.

She is young, but she is intelligent and curious, and the stories touch her, perhaps because she, too, is lonely. She pieces together clues from the myths of a thousand worlds to find his resting place, to tap him on the psychic construct that serves him as a shoulder and say, very quietly, the name she has learned in her travels. The name he has forgotten. The name that belonged to a healer, but never to a god.

*

She reminds him of someone. Of course she does. She reminds him of everyone. Most importantly, she reminds him of himself.

She looks at him with curiosity and concern in her eyes. Strange, he thinks, how eyes and feelings remain recognizable, when even the laws of nature themselves have changed.

Eons of sleep fall away as he reads what’s written in those eyes, and suddenly he thinks he understands his mistake. It’s too much, even for him, to care for an entire universe at once. Much better, he realizes — or remembers — to start out small.

“Yes,” he says. “That’s right. I’m the Doctor.” He smiles. “Pleased to meet you! Don’t take this as some sort of prophetic announcement or anything, but I do think that we’re going to be friends.”

*

When the end of the universe arrives again, nothing godlike strives to survive it or beat it back. There is only an ancient wanderer, watching quietly with his last companions.

In the end, he does not outlive everything, after all.