Title: The Universe is a Fragile Mistress

Fandoms: Doctor Who/Firefly Crossover

Spoilers/Time: None for Firefly, really. LotTL for Doctor Who.

Pairing, Characters: River Tam, Ten, slight Master/Ten

Rating: PG

Word Count: ~1100. One-Shot

Disclaimer: Neither Doctor Who nor Firefly is mine.

Summary: She cracks the universe open like candy wrappers and leaves glorious litter wasting in her wake.




She says: “I don’t care if I die.”

And somehow, tragically, he feels as if a burden has been lifted.

So he doesn't ask why all he can see in her spiderweb-thoughts is death, more death, and blood loss, or is it loss of blood? Her thoughts arch out like krakens, rising from the depths, and blood is still savage kin and morbid liquids both. He hears one echo, one; can never go back again. It trembles through the psycho-kinetic string dimension like an earthquake.

She spins and dances through the bright crimson lightening on a planet of golden dust and rocks, blithely leaving devastated spires and exquisite patterns in her wake.

She sings for the sentient trees on a forgotten land, and allows her skin to press against theirs.

She leaps into crashing waves too dense for the frail human physiology just to feel her body snap back and arch like a ragdoll amid the violent atomic structures.

He thinks, sometimes, that if she didn’t remind him so much of him, he would let her go, watch her flee, ecstatic and glittering, into the depths of the universe.

But he doesn't. He slips his hands into his pockets and tries to smile for her whenever she returns, battered and bruised, laughing and full of everything he used to be.

She writes on the walls. He will come across curved, elegant lines painted onto the organic hives that grow and breathe and slink through the TARDIS, the mechanical flesh that forms the very foundation of his living ship.

When he goes into her room, she is there, clasped in gossamer stolen from his wardrobe and surrounded by hurricanes of paper, writing, writing, always writing. She looks at him, and speaks in the closest way a human can to Gallifreyan.

“The Oedipal axis cannot abide by the stricture of ascending unknowns – it requires the figures of constancy and desires chaos. The paradox lingers, Doctor, and I can smell him in the walls.”

He looks away, resists the urge to take hands to his feathery head, and instead lets the sadness of her inevitable entropy seep into his eyes.

She is not fooled, and laughs, delightedly.

Then she sits him down and methodically draws and scratches in whorls across the floor as he watches, silent and still, held bound by her tragedy.

When she is finished, she steps, barefoot, up onto the stripped bed, and looks down upon her work with gleaming satisfaction

Predatory eyes glare upwards from the torn floor, brimming with the insidious vortexes of time and death, all infinite rage and childish bewilderment.

The Doctor looks up at her and opens his mouth. In a moment, she is down, toes slamming across the familiar eyes and drumming a heart-fluttering beat, then she is leaning down over him, slender fingers over his lips, black hair a cascade of mermaid filth.

“No, do not speak. It is not time.”

He swallows, drinking the fissured marble scent of her, and feels as if she is the universe - as unholy and brutal a mother as the unyielding time - space infinitum could ever be in its wildest dreams.

He has not spoken since the universe ruptured, folded and fluttered like a butterfly, and all his history, all his people, were rewritten like so much worthless memory.
He will not speak till the death of him has passed and settled within his soul, and somehow, throughout the meddling lines of his life, these two events have become one, and he has not and will not speak since they came to pass.

Time is a tricky thing. He hears her screaming late at night, high and horrified, and knows she understands this.

He does not know how long she has been with him when it happens.

Disaster becomes you, she whispers, and drags him out to stain his mouth candy-purple with the alien snowspheres of Heuranix. When he sees their glazed eyes, tastes a foul bite, and feels the strands of time, the paths of these aliens melding horrifically into a single shapeless visage, he isn’t surprised.

He takes her hand and they run, run, run, and she kills, kills, kills, and he talks, finally he talks, the words splintered glass threads, tearing themselves up and out of his throat like bloody soldiers.

He saves the futures of Heuranix, and she smiles up at him with tears in her eyes.

“Drums don’t stop. They echo through time and will not die. I feel cold.” She gasps, face impossibly beautiful.
“Simon.” And to him, it sounds like home.

He can do nothing, not even with a million tree-branches growing at impossible speeds through the horizons of his mind, a billion budding ideas, grand plans soaring … and all he can do is stare, hands spread across her heaving chest, feeling ribs jutting up like daggers.

She is still speaking.
“I am cooling far too rapidly without sufficient preparation. The neurons cannot pass, thoughts will not collide... Simon.”

When she dies, she dies with sparkles in her voice and all her long dark hair seared to the shorn ends, and he knows he must not mourn.

When he takes her body - so light in his arms now that it lacks her furious soul - forward through the sapphire blackness she loved so brightly, through to the burning deserts of Earth That Was, when he finds him waiting, eyes predatory, unending spirals of time and death and rage and bewilderment, he thinks, maybe, that River was his sustenance.

He lays down her body, arranges pale, elegant hands in the ancient manner, kneels, bows, and kisses her gently on the lips.

A strange sense of time passes while the skies curl and tear asunder over her porcelain face, destroying the Earth he loved so well.

Then he pulls the Doctor away, demanding and beautiful, a being with all the sharp edges of the Doctor’s own soul reflected in monstrous flesh, and he knows, he knows that rivers make their own paths.

And the Lords of Time cannot run paths that were never meant to have existed.

They cannot survive without the paths of the universe unwinding around them in spirals of unending joy.

“She did this.” The Master’s voice was rough, unused and reborn, erupting like supernovas of glee.

She brought them together, slamming realities and crushing galaxies in the fist of her shattered mind, sprinting through countless lives and all of anything that ever was with an unrelenting abandon.

And she never stopped running.