eponymous_rose

Title: A Nameless Garden
Author:

eponymous_rose
Word Count: 523
Rating: G
Characters: Third Doctor, Jo Grant, references to Susan Foreman
Spoilers: Set during Colony in Space, with allusions to the First Doctor serial The Daleks.

At dawn I asked the lotus,
'What is the meaning of life?'
Slowly she opened her hand
with nothing in it.
- Debra Woolard Bender, Paper Lanterns

The Earth laughs in flowers
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

A NAMELESS GARDEN

He feels a chill, a trepidation, preceding Jo out onto the surface of this new planet, into the cool, clear air.

And the sensation is unfamiliar, distant, beyond the scars left by the Time Lords' rummaging through his mind, but he knows that it's right, that they all learn in the end to stride beyond their self-imposed exiles. She's terrified, shaking at the way the gritty ground under her feet telescopes out to the vast, unimaginable universe, and he can't reach the part of his memory that tells him what to do next, to turn back or to press onward.

The bars of his cage still rattle in his ears, and so he leads her forward.

"Look," she says, and plucks a flower from the ground-

And, in fits and starts, the memory surges back, the image of standing on a dead planet with family and people who aren't friends, not really, not yet, and the dark-haired girl calls out to him, drawing him nearer to see the fragile, petrified beauty.

"It's a flower! A perfect flower!"

He steps away from Jo, and whole lives are flickering in the periphery of his memory, hazy with regeneration and distance and time. She rambles about the petals, and their strange and beautiful colours, and he's reaching, falling into remembrance, swept up by the parade of echoes and shadows-

There had been the Daleks, and he sees them still as they'd been in his eyes, the first time, when they could have been right, could have been good, illusory perfection in a brittle blossom; and the Thals, fragile, strong but without concept of aggression, learning to destroy.

"I'm going to try and pick it up," the dark-haired girl had said of the flower, "and keep it all in one piece."

But at that, the memory shatters, splinters off into shards of déjà-vu, and he's left with the old discomfiture, the terrible urge to run until even Jo wouldn't follow, to pass beyond and above and in directions no language has yet described.

Slowing his pace, he strides off to examine a set of unnatural tracks in the ground, something concrete and real, and Jo trails after him, the flower half-forgotten in her hand.

He wants to turn to her, to explain the flower in the way he'd describe something on Earth, with otherwise simple terms that he'd couch in such mystery that she'd be fascinated, swept up in the possibilities. But he doesn't recognise it, can't place its origin or its type or even whether it might be capable of living on Earth, and instead he ignores it, moves past the itch in his mind drawing him back, back-

When he realises, some time later, that she's no longer holding the flower, he has the most peculiar feeling that he's lost sight of something distant and wonderful and terrible.

Somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind, beyond the maze of synapses and imagination and walls erected by tampering hands, another barrier rises.