Fic: Heartbeats (1/1, All Ages)

[nonelvis]

Title: Heartbeats
Characters/Pairings: Eight, Nine, Delirium, Death
Rating: All Ages
Word count: 2,500
Spoilers: None.
Summary: “You can stay here as long as you like,” Delirium says. “Except I think that won’t be nearly long enough.”
Betas: iainpj and platypus
Disclaimer: Not mine, obviously.
Author's Notes: This is a crossover with Neil Gaiman's Sandman series written for the crossing_who birthday fic challenge A Matter of Hearts.

::xposted to crossing_who and dwfiction, and archived at Teaspoon



There's smoke curling around the TARDIS' shattered console, sparks and flames flickering from where the power reverse-feed used to be, and the Doctor thinks he must be imagining that his hardwood floor has transformed into a broad meadow of multicoloured wildflowers – scarlet sage, rudbeckia, goldenrod. But the grass is soft and cool, its blades tickling his nose and eyelids, and the earth smells sweet and fresh instead of charred. If he's going to hallucinate, he really could have chosen worse surroundings.

He rolls onto his back, stretches his arms their full length and digs his left hand into the ground to feel the dirt on his fingers. It seems real enough, gritty and moist, but when he closes his hand around it and brings it to his nose for a sniff, he finds he's got a palmful of sweets instead. Cherry and clove drops, wrappers crinkling in his grasp.

Not an entirely benign hallucination, then. He hates clove drops.

The Doctor tosses the sweets aside and is startled by a face appearing just inches from his – a girl's, pale, with mismatched blue and green eyes, and a waterfall of shaggy ginger hair tumbling across her shoulders. "Hello," the girl says. "There's rhubarb and cream ones if you like those better. I like sherbet limes, myself. Are there any by your feet?"

"I ... I don't know. I'll have a look." The Doctor starts to draw himself up, pausing midway to lean back on his elbow and rub at a twinge in his chest. Breathes in slowly, scrabbles in the grass by his boots and opens his hand to the girl kneeling beside him. "I'm sorry. I think they're liquorice allsorts."

She scoops them into a fold of her skirt and says, "Ew," wrinkling her nose. "But they'll make nice butterflies, won't they?" And they do, transforming into a flock of stripe-winged insects that encircle her and the Doctor, a pink and black one briefly alighting in his curls as it meanders toward the rudbeckia. The girl laughs, a high and musical sort of giggling, and rises to her feet to whirl like a top among the liquorice creatures she's created. She spins and spins, and from her fingertips muddy washes of colour emerge, filling the sky with fuzzy fragments that bounce against each other in lazy ballistics.

The girl extends a hand toward the Doctor to help him up. He winces as he knocks his head against a plaid rhombus that spirals back upwards, mutating into a snippet of the Beatles' "It Won't Be Long" that yeah-yeah-yeahs its way toward the clouds.

"Let's go for a walk," says the girl. "Sometimes there are brussels sprout trees I like to climb. Way up high, so I can sit under the leaf thingies even though they block out the turquoise clouds. But not the magenta ones. And they're big and round and green and cabbagey and not at all striped or made out of liquorice."

"The clouds ... are cabbagey?" For once the Doctor thinks he may have found someone more daft than he is. He stands, brushing his velvet frock coat to clear it of dirt, but the only thing that falls from it is a shower of clove drops.

"No, silly, the brussels sprouts are. Because they're cabbages. Except when they're oranges and grapes." The girl cocks her head at him, as if seeing him sideways will provide a more useful perspective. "Watch out for the blues."

"The – what?" But he realises quickly enough what she means, as the splinter of a John Lee Hooker song shoots past him, narrowly missing a shoulder. He's sure he's never hallucinated a sky trying to injure him before, an atmosphere that's literally perilous. Assuming, that is, that this is really a hallucination.

"Look," he starts, "can you tell me where I am? The last thing I knew – well, now that I think about it, I'm not sure of the last thing I knew – but I was in my ship. I must have been. And now I'm here. And my ship, she's brilliant, capable of some spectacular tricks, but this ... this isn't the sort of thing she'd do."

The girl's piebald eyes glimmer, and she smiles at him, sweetly but with something awkward and unexpectedly wrong behind it. It's like biting into a toffee and discovering a creamy aubergine centre. The Doctor shivers.

The girl says, "You're in my realm. Usually your people don't come here. But you did. Hi!" She gives him a perky half-wave of her hand.

She's still smiling. He wishes she'd stop doing that.

"What's your name?" he asks hoarsely, already suspecting the answer.

"I'm Delirium. A long long long long long time ago I used to be Delight." She frowns. "Long long long ago. Long ago buried in Destiny's garden."

Delirium moves closer to him, lays her palms flat against his chest. "You hold so many hearts," she says. "That's how I knew you were different. So many more hearts than everyone else."

"Just the two," he says. "Though the left one -" he inhales, his breath raspy. "The left one's a bit tetchy today."

"Hearts that taste like golden mist and ambergris and little fluffy bunnies. Some hearts you ordered with coffee in Paris instead of lemon biscuits. Thorny hearts and patient hearts and jealous hearts and the heart of a sailor washed ashore.

"And thousands and thousands of hearts for my sister."

"Stop," he says, his eyes wide. He staggers backwards, stumbles, landing hard on his arse on a pile of plastic buttons that clatter and rattle across his hands and feet as he struggles to right himself. The constantly shifting buttons prevent him from finding a stable grip, and there's something sliding slickly down his left arm, making things even worse.

When he raises his left hand to see what's the matter, it's covered in blood. Three circular buttons drop from his palm, plinking as they hit the pile below.

If this is Delirium, he knows all too well who her sister is. After all, they've met seven times before. And his heart, and his breath, and the blood, it all makes sense now, enough that he's surprised it didn't occur to him before, considering he'd never expected to survive his mission in the first place.

"You can stay here as long as you like," Delirium says. "Except I think that won't be nearly long enough."

Beside her, the coloured shapes shimmer and part, creating a rectangular space the size of a door. When the door opens, admitting a pale, slender woman dressed in black jeans and spaghetti-strap top, a silver ankh pendant nestled between her breasts, the Doctor is almost relieved. At least now there's a familiar face to keep him company while he hallucinates.

"Hey, I almost didn't make it in time," Death says to her sister. "Thanks for keeping him here for a while. Some idiot blew up a planet; I've been busy all afternoon."

She crouches next to the Doctor and caresses his cheek. "Hi there, idiot."

The Doctor faints.

* * *

When he comes to, he's back in the console room, lying on the hardwood floor. His chest feels weighted down, as if a cat has settled in for a nap over his left heart. Except he left Wolsey behind with Benny what feels like a hundred years ago.

He raises his head slightly to look for the cat and instead sees two U-shaped steel rods quivering in his chest, generating low-frequency waves he can feel in the pit of his stomach. Tuning forks, purchased the previous week to help boost the power reverse-feed; either he must not have welded them solidly enough, or the force of the explosion would have sent them flying anyway.

Too late to fix things now, he thinks, and flops his head back to the floor. "Ow," he says. Though at this point, a bump on the head is the least of his worries.

Death is sitting cross-legged next to him. "At least this isn't such an embarrassing way to go," she says cheerfully. "Last time I met you here, you'd just knocked yourself out on the console. I'd probably rank this one somewhere between the fall from the satellite dish and that cock-up on the operating table."

"'Carrot juice,'" says the Doctor, flashing a weak grin at his companion and then coughing up a little blood. "Those were really rotten last words."

"Not exactly Oscar Wilde, was it? 'Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.'"

"In my defence, I was taken by surprise." The Doctor coughs again, grimacing as the vibrations in his chest agitate the tuning forks. "Give me a moment. This time I want to compose something suitable for the occasion."

Death leans over and kisses his forehead. A chill blooms outward from where her lips have touched him, but despite that, he feels calmer, steadied, even as Death rises to her feet and says, "I don't think you have more than a moment anyway, at least not in this body. Talk fast – but then again, you always do."

A green and black liquorice butterfly skitters past his vision and lands on the remnants of the gravitic anomaliser. Its wings drift down to its sides, then up again slowly, feebly, in time with the Doctor's breath. He inhales, feeling liquid catch in his throat.

"You have them all now, don't you?" he asks.

"I do."

Something in Death's words sinks in. At least, not in this body.

"I'm going to survive this?" There is shock and bitterness in his voice. "I'll be the only one left?"

"Yes," Death says. "We'll see each other again, and again, and again. And I know you'd like me to apologise for that, but I can't. It's just the way things work out sometimes."

Death is so, so beautiful, with her china-doll face and that winsome smile, and the dark eyes that twinkle at him with the sparkle of ancient stardust. She's kept the Doctor company on every journey to her realm, but today, his hearts irretrievably broken, he finds only the barest comfort in her presence.

No need for poetic last words, then, if this isn't really the end. He closes his eyes. "I'm ready now," he says.

Death raises her right arm, and below it a curtain of stars and blackness appears. There's a rushing, whispering sound of fluttering wings, so many wings of birds and butterflies and a million more creatures besides, and then a flaring of golden light that illuminates the duskiest Gothic crevices of the TARDIS interior.

Death is gone. A longer, leaner body lies upon the floor, unconscious, and the TARDIS, preprogrammed to seek her final resting place on a familiar world in Mutter's Spiral, takes control, whirling through space and time toward her second home.

* * *

Outside a new residential building in Totters Lane, a blue police box appears, teetering unsteadily on one corner before dropping to a halt in a puff of gravel dust.

The Doctor peeks out of the front door. "We're here!" he cries, excited, and backs out the door, patting the side of the box. "Good girl. We'll wait here for reinforcements."

He rotates in place, taking in his surroundings, then shielding his eyes to look up at the sun, a sallow ball obscured by overcast skies. "Just the one," he whispers. "Just the one. Why aren't there two?" Takes a weak step forward, falls to his knees and vomits.

He hears the sound of someone's feet crunching the gravel next to him and turns his head to look at his visitor. Combat boots, fishnet stockings, ripped denim miniskirt, black T-shirt, fiery ginger hair in a buzz-cut. And mismatched eyes, one sapphire, one jade.

"You left," Delirium says. "My doggie and I got lonely and so I went looking for you, but my doggie didn't want to come. He's chasing butterflies. But I found you! I like your hair." She pats the Doctor's head, her fingers prickling on his scalp, strangely cool now without its mop of curls. "We match! Except you aren't ginger but I could make you ginger or polka-dot or covered in ivy."

The Doctor raises his right hand, dented and cut from his fall on the gravel, and touches his hair. "No ... this'll do." He takes Delirium's outstretched hand and rises, bits of stone falling from his clothing, and notices his wrists and calves are more exposed than usual. "Hmm. Must be taller this time round."

Delirium hooks her arm in his and walks with him toward the block of flats, humming a melody that shifts every time he's close to identifying it. For a moment, a few bars remind him of a Gallifreyan lullabye, and his stomach lurches again.

"Oh," he says. "Look at that lovely wooden bench. Lovely, lovely wooden bench for sitting and oh." He plops down on the bench and immediately lowers his head between his knees, breathing heavily.

Delirium folds herself up beside him. She is still humming that maddeningly vague tune, or perhaps she's humming five tunes at once, three backwards, two forwards. Even if he were at his best, he'd have a hard time working it out, and right now he's simply trying not to vomit again.

Eventually the nausea passes, and he leans against the back of the bench, exhausted. Delirium is giggling and beating a rhythm on the bench slats for eight miniature Chinese lion puppets dancing in midair. The Doctor extends a hand, and a lion jigs its way across it, then leaps up, twirling into a helix, and vanishes in an unexpected streak of flame.

Delirium frowns, and the other lions disappear. "I don't think they like you," she says.

"I don't think I like me," he responds, slumping and burying his head in his hands. "They're gone. Every last one of them gone, and it's my fault. I'm the only one left." He stares at Delirium. "And you, are you here to torment me with what might have been? Or is that your other sister?"

Delirium says nothing, only leans in and hugs him tightly, her cheek resting on his back. The Doctor cannot feel her heartbeat but knows she can feel his, two hearts painfully knitted back together, beating in steady defiance.

When he closes his eyes, he can see the swirling colours and shapes of Delirium's realm, and the girl welcoming him into the meadow of flowers and candy butterflies. "Come on," she says. "We can have so much fun before you leave again. I still want to climb a tree."

The Doctor takes her hand, smiles, runs alongside her toward the brussels sprout trees. Tomorrow he will be more alone than he's ever been. Today he has the girl, and the tree, and the ridiculous coloured sky, and the kind of peace hours of forgetfulness will bring.

Delirium starts to hum again, and now, now he thinks he recognises the tune.

Comments

[lulu-42.livejournal.com]

Almost two years later I am still rec'ing this fic.

*hearts*

[nonelvis]

Aw, I'm glad you like it so much! Thanks for the rec.