Once Upon A Time - G
For dw_challenge, sort of. Doctor Who fanfic.


Title: Once Upon A Time
Rating: G
Words: 1556
Timeline During The End of the World (If you haven't seen it, it makes little or no sense.)
Challenge: "Home."
Disclaimer: Doctor Who & co. belong to BBC, yadda yadda. They have pitchforks.




Jabe rested a hand on his arm.

"I just want to say," she whispered, "how sorry I am."


Home is a beautiful word, and one she does not understand. Travelling the universe, she has been too busy at galactic parties and luxury spaceships to remember the aching loneliness deep in her. Sometimes she catches herself staring out a glass window at the vast expanse of stars and longing for something, although she does not know what. Sometimes she dreams of a beautiful place and wakes up crying. Sometimes images flicker into her mind, seeded by old generations, and she has to catch her breath midsentence or she will fall.

Jabe's hand still tingles from when he touched it. There is new life pumping through her veins, coursing through her thoughts. Rebirth; a seed pushed into the soil, springing pale green shoots into the open air as it has never before. Laughter bubbles in her throat, casting her dark face in a halo of happiness.

When she was eight years old, her mother told her a story.

Once upon a time there was a race of gods, and they could travel through the galaxies, breathing in the exotic tastes of a hundred thousand different worlds in a hundred thousand different times, seeing and hearing what no mortal was meant to see or hear. Once there was a race of gods, who could bend time and space to their will, shape it and recreate it into something entirely new. But the gods preferred to leave time untouched, to observe from afar but affect no change. They stayed on their homeworld, lived admist the cool shade of their orchards, ate sweet plump fruit and tended to the beauty of their world. They were gods, and yet they did nothing. They were powerful and beautiful and immortal, until one day the universe cursed them, and they fell into darkness, never to be seen again.

Throughout her life there has been an anchor, tugging her closer and closer to that beautiful dangerous unknown word home. She stood on the platform today sipping wine and laughing with her companions, pampered in her lavish lifestyle, and yet she glanced out the window at a blue-green globe beneath her and felt a sharp crushing pain. Even as she follows him, moving through passages choked with pipelines and wires and computer consoles, she can feel the tug of a planet calling to her. It's waiting for me, she thinks, and feels a twinge of fear, and beyond it, something else -- a needle-pointed hunger.

She trails after him as he scans a console with his glowing blue tool, pausing to throw a grin at her. She can see behind his façade, the frenzied drive burning him, feeding his dangerous impulses. He looks for trouble when there is none, creating it as he goes, consumed by a need that he cannot describe. He is an angel of death, and yet as they move closer to the heart of the station, Jabe thinks, I could follow him anywhere.

When she was sixteen, a slender sapling of a girl, she heard a story.

Once upon a time there was a race of angels, and they were gifted by powers no mortal was meant to have. And the gods said to them, Use it wisely, or we will take everything away from you. So they used their powers sparingly, and made rules so that all would use them well and nothing would be taken away from them. All save for one who mocked them and used his powers as he wished. He became the fallen angel, the Lucifer of their world, and they turned their backs on him. And the gods said, You have not used your gifts well, and smote them all out of the skies, to become a whispered legend passed on by the rest of the universe.

Steel and glass. They have caged her in her whole life. Sometimes when she pauses to look out a window at a star-strewn sky, she feels the bars of her prison, and pines for a word that is unknown to her. When she closes her eyes, she can feel something stifled in her for centuries, waiting to break loose -- out of the corners of her sight she senses something more. At night she wakes up weeping, and the comforts of a world laden with expensive silks and spicy perfumes can do nothing for her.

Home.

He came and her world changed. She loves him, not in the way of playful flirting, but as a god. As an angel. Lucifer was Gabriel after all, and he brings meaning to her empty desperate world. But even with him at her side, she senses something is wrong. She can feel the Earth anchoring her to it all the more painfully; she can feel its last laboured breaths drawing in and out. She soaks in the waning heat of the Sun and longs for more, longs for the touch of cool dark soil against her wood-textured skin, longs for the sight of a dewy morning in a place long gone. For something she does not understand.

I'm a descendant of the tropical rainforest, she had told him. The words bring to mind a memory that is not hers, a memory stitched into her DNA from generations long gone, of insects humming and birds chirping and a rain-soaked world, and she almost sobs, because that world is hers and not hers. She will never have that beautiful thing called home.

When she was twenty-five, society's darling, a very drunk historian told her a tale.

Once upon a time there was a species. A race who unlocked the secrets of space and time, who could maneouver it and manipulate it as they pleased. Like gods or angels, they could do anything, knew everything. They would have lived forever, divine beings moving amongst the mortal universe, except that they waged war with beings who were as terrible as they were beautiful. A war like nothing the galaxies had ever seen, and then a series of wars, until they were stained with blood and the universe wept. And then they wiped each other out of existence, and left all of creation aching for the emptiness.

She would have done anything for him. She has seen something that for all her life she had never imagined she would see -- experienced something that she has never felt or comprehended. She has seen one of the divine, she has felt the boundaries of her world evaporate into nothingness.

She has tasted life.

You're made of wood, he says, and his eyes glisten with tears. She knows. Of course she knows what she is doing. She watches him sprint across the walkway, trying desperately to save her and himself and the rest of the people on the station. For his sake, she fights the pain. She can feel every moment, every degree of heat blazing through her, searching for a weak point to feed on. Her hands clench around the switch -- she will not let it up, not until he has reached the end of the walkway.

Even as she gasps for air, she can feel the laboured breathing of the Earth, the last rays of a dying sun. She can feel the anchor, the link between herself and a planet below, a world that was once packed with cool dark soil, that had felt a new spring morning and seen hundreds of birds. Hundreds of trees.

As she stands dying, watching him, she tells herself a new story.

Once upon a time there was a race of angels, who understood the motors of a ticking clock, learned how to wind the clock backwards and forwards. Once there was a race of immortal beings who discovered how to step from one galaxy to another, who forged time and space and could wield them like swords. They saw stars collapse and empires fall and the universe change again and again, and they knew all that they should not know. And among the angels was a god, and he used his powers as a god would, not sparingly, but wisely. And then his people waged war with the other divine, and they were driven into extinction, to be forgotten by the rest of the universe save as a legend. And only the god remained, terribly alone, immortal and divine.

Flames tear at her, sucking greedily into her heart, searing through her, unbearable. Don't let go don't let go screams a voice in her mind, and she grips the switch with her failing strength. She sees the Doctor whirl around, sees his stricken face. Don't think about it, shrieks the voice in her mind, and the pain burns into her, charring flesh into emptiness.

And amidst the pain she feels something, the deep fierce hunger seizing inside of her, the unbearable pain, not of the fire, but of something inside her soul, crying out. She feels the world dissolve before her, sees a dewy spring morning in a rain-soaked forest, feels the rich dark soil beneath her feet and hears birds chirping. She can see the green -- so much green, beautiful and fertile, a hundred different shades -- and knows, finally, the word home.