Work Text:
For Mostima, all it ever took was a single breath.
Her eyes weren't necessary- a single breath was all it took to know her location. Lungmen smelled of dust and motor oil, Victoria of old stones. Laterano always had the scent of sweets drifting about, while Kazimierz smelt like rust and sweat.
Rhodes Island smelt of antiseptic. Barely noticeable around the areas more commonly visited, but the tinge only grew stronger the higher up she travelled. The deeper one went in Rhodes Island, the more vital cleanliness was to keeping everything running.
It's muscle memory that guides her steps higher and higher, instead of any conscious thought. Up the elevator, through the hallways, a wordless journey of white tiles and black lines, with the only tinge that sterile scent. She moves as she always has, purposeless, drifting. She slips past crowds, past glimpses and stares, aimlessly floating until she washes up on a familiar metal door.
It only takes a keycard to open this one. With a simple swipe and a 7-digit code, she watches the door slide open, hitting her with a fresh new wave of antiseptic.
There is a person here. Or rather, there is a pile of black cloths, piled up on the chair in the shape of a person. Without missing a beat, Mostima saunters across the room, before poking the pile somewhere along it's upper portion.
It stirs, and Mostima uses the chance to hold up her hand somewhere around the pile's general vicinity.
"Hey, doc. How many fingers?"
The hood shifts upwards, dully taking note or her right hand. "You have ten fingers, there's five on the hand you're raising, and you have two fingers up."
"Yep. That's you all right." Satisfied with the confirmation he wasn't comatose, Mostima walks off to pull open the blinds. The afternoon sunlight poured into the room immediately, revealing yellow sands rolling outside. Tilting her head back, she glances back at the Doctor. "How long have you been sitting there?"
"Not too long." The Doctor answers, a bit too quickly to be convincing.
Mostima rolls her eyes. "You're going to have to excuse us mortals here, but 'not too long' doesn't mean much when it's you. Give me a time?"
"Monday."
"Two days ago... Of course you did, huh?" She mutters, face turned away, looking out through the window. Her blue hair almost melds in with the sky, like a deeper patch in an endless lake. It sways like waves, drifting, unhalting, washing into the sky and back again.
She turns. For a split second, striking blue eyes pierce right through him, followed by a glint of white teeth.
Then a blink, and she vanishes. In an instant, though, a pressure grips the Doctor's arm.
He barely flinches as he turns around, catching an amused smile with a huff of his own. "Where are we going?"
"Somewhere that's not here."
The world cuts.
The Doctor takes a breath- the second one since the world stopped.
The air's different again. This time, it's a dry sort of air, barren and dusty, the kind of air that left a person parched. And yet, it flows unobstructed, in the way only those up high could feel.
And they were. No roof shielded their heads, no walls stifled the wind. The only thing they could feel was the sturdy metal plate he sat on, legs dangling over the edge. Far, far below was the Sargon desert, pale sands colored by the orange streaks of a looming sunset.
As the landship trundled on towards the looming horizon, Mostima yawned. "Here we are. On top of the world.... Or at least the landship." She looked down on the rolling sands with the ghost of a smile, imperceptible and fragile. "Hard to beat a view like this."
The Doctor looked. Not quite at her, not quite past her. "All this time, and you're still not bored?"
"What can I say? Things change. Sometimes more than you think." Her tangled hair swayed in the wind, caught on every sunset breeze that flew past them. "This'll be the only time the dunes ever look this way. Tomorrow, the winds will blow the sands into a completely different pattern, and you'll never see this one again."
"... Ever shifting, ever changing, until the change itself is the only constant."
She chuckles. "Feet on the ground, Doc. Don't start philosophizing until we're both drunk."
"Sorry." Unconsciously, his glove brushes across the cold metal, cradling a bit of sand between his fingertips. "It's a beautiful sight. Makes me wish it wouldn't change."
"That's a silly wish, isn't it?" She looks out towards the sunset, towards the impending night and the day that came after. "After all, you haven't even seen tommorow."
"But tomorrow's existence doesn't make today any less beautiful." The dim light of her wings flicker in his palm, like watery light diluted on grains of sand. "Where have you been off to?"
"A little bit of everywhere, you know? Sometimes Lungmen, Sometimes Minos." She waves her hand carelessly, listing points off the top of her head. "Had a package to Sami too, for a Bob's chain. Fia kept complaining about freezing her tail feathers off the entire time."
The Doctor shifts at the mention of Minos, looking at her more directly. "Minos, huh...? I've never been."
"Of course you'd somehow make it to Sami without visiting Minos once." Mostima chuckles, tail flicking lazily. "It's a real beauty of a place. Take away the pop songs of Siesta and switch them for string ballads, then raise the place up to the mountains. That's Minos for you."
A distant glimmer glinted in her eye, barely watching the last orange streaks fade away. Whatever she was seeing now existed more in her mind than in the space above them.
"Someday, when you get to Minos, you'll have to visit their theaters. The storytellers there... They're some of the best ones around. It'll be like this, watching as sunset falls and you're plunged into darkness. The only lights come from a flickering bonfire, and the only sounds crickets."
The world goes dark. The night reigns over the blackened skies, the only lights the dim flickering of the fallen's halo.
"Then, it starts. A low warble from a Liberi, somewhere you can't quite place. It drifts into the air with ringing strings, just as the fires start to dance and the shadows march on walls. They jump with every drum beat and waver with every wail, until you're no longer staring at shadows from a bonfire, but the cry of a marching army. And as that army marches forward, the song reaches it's peak, and you can almost believe that..."
You can feel their emotions again.
The story wavers, then drifts away. The storyteller falls silent, still as a graven statue in the halls of Laterano. Whatever thoughts simmered in her mind, she willed them to die unsaid. They were for no other to witness- just her.
"How did you manage it?" The Doctor asks.
"I didn't. I just live without it." Her halo's empty lights cast shadow upon her face. Lightless eyes look away towards blackened sands, where grief and joy were buried underneath innumerable particles.
He doesn't speak. It's not his place to, right now.
"It's not too, bad, really. What's the point in getting mad about it now?" Her voice flattens, emotions within as faded as the sunset's rays. "Besides. Not like it really mattered, right? Whatever anyone ends up feeling, it'll be gone before the day's up. Just like these sands."
Those thoughts ring with a familiar sort of hollowness, the kind that left a person adrift in their own lonesome thoughts. Pointless, purposeless, vain. The story of a man, shoring up a sandcastle before the waves washed over his futile protection. The story of a girl, cut adrift of her own tethers and left to drift in an endless sea.
The space between loomed ever-present, irrelevant yet infinite. Voids of choice, circumstance and consequence, countless causes that coalesced into the chill covering them.
He calls out. Not with a cry, but with a caress. His hand falls over her own, and he feels.
Her skin is cold, even underneath her jacket. She stirs at his touch, head turning, before a flickering smile faintly illuminates her face.
She places a hand on top of his.
It's the most she could do. It's the least. It's simple, but incomprehensible. It's thoughtless, yet meaningful.
It's nothing, but it's everything.
And there they wait. Two lonesome souls at the peak of the world.