the division years - 13 x oc (gxg)

Prologue (updated)

I really thought I'd never see her again, you know.

It's funny, how time and space can pull on each other until suddenly, out of nowhere, miracles are born. I was still stardust when my miracle was born, on the other end of that wormhole that spat out one being, and an entire race. Call us timelords what you like- an accident, an experiment - I say a miracle.

Another miracle occurred today: My Doctor came back to me.

My name is Tau Upsilon Phi. You've never heard of me, even though I was here first. I came before all that Earth, Human nonsense. The original, you might say.

It all started one day, long ago - so, so long ago. We were TARDIS racing - seeing which one of us could fly solo from the beginning of the universe to the end and back again fastest. I'd won last time, and the time before that, but she wouldn't quit. I'd seen her that very morning as I was walking by the academy, running around an old discarded console which stood lopsidedly at the edge of a heap of scrap metal near the engineering campus. I watched as she ran around and around, pressing buttons, pulling levers. It was a Type 39, with a different set-up, but I decided to refrain from telling her that. I enjoyed winning.

We were kids, back then. She was almost a hundred, and I was younger, but only by less than a decade. She would graduate next winter. I dreaded the cold, because I dreaded her departure. The day we went racing, though, it was still summer. The crimson grasses tickled our knees as we ran side-by-side to the rental lot, shoving each other and laughing, our hearts big and full like Earthen fruit.

We raced in four rounds. I won three of them. One the last one, something went wrong with my coordinates, and I landed a couple decades short of the end of the universe. She was on her way back by the time I could find a mallet and get things restarted, but I didn't tell her that. Instead I landed at the beginning again and stepped out of my ship, and there she was, standing on a suspended space rock a few meters from hers - sweaty, breathing hard, her coat discarded - and staring at me in disbelief.

I miss her smile. I miss the way she looked that day, standing against the backdrop of the beautiful miracle that birthed our entire world. The stars that shone in her multi-colored eyes were the only other witnesses to my falling in love for the first time.

I still remember how it felt - the complete loss of control. It was the saddest joy, and the happiest sorrow. I wonder if she felt it, too.

I hugged her, there on that desolate rock. Breathed her in. "Theta," I said to her, softly.

She pushed me back, and our eyes met. I remember how my heart tumbled like the slowly forming planets around us. Her gaze was like candlelight. "Yes?" she said through her smile.

And that was the day I told her I wanted to be hers forever.