The Time of Change

The Message Decoded

I turn to see Clara walking in, and I sigh, relieved. "There you are! What took you so long?" I demand. She looks at me, startled. "What's wrong? It's only a crack in the wall."

She gestures her hand toward the wall I'm crouched beside within a room inside the clock tower. I touch its edge warily. This is so much more -- so much more -- than just a crack. And I don't think she'll ever be able to fully comprehend the magnitude of importance this one crack holds for everything, everyone. This crack, though it's taken me years to work out, is my fault. I caused it. When my TARDIS exploded (and that's another story entirely, one that I haven't the time nor patience to explain), it created a rip. A ripple. A fragment of shrapnel, dragged along the seam of space-time reality, just gentle enough so that it tears the seam slightly. Enough to be noticed, but not to be worrisome. It was always just a mystery to me, a puzzle that I could never solve no matter how hard I tried. But when I lost her, I had nothing but time on my hands to spend on working out the puzzles of my life, my existence. And that's what I did. When the TARDIS burst, it made the small bit of time it possesses to explode along with it. And I should have known all along, because maybe I could have stopped it, maybe I could have saved Hunter and anyone else who'd fallen ill fate because of this crack in the wall, in every wall in every room in every country in every world. This crack that broke her heart when it killed Hunter, and then took him away as fast as it had happened. This crack that I've been chasing for centuries. And it has the nerve to sit there and smile at me, like it's wronged no one and nothing, like it isn't made of total evil. The light that floods out of it isn't warm, it's cold. Freezing light. A complete contradiction of itself, because isn't the light supposed to symbolize goodness, purity, warmth? No. Not anymore.

"I knew," I whisper to myself as she walks to my side. I brush my fingertip along the mouth of the crack. "I always knew it wasn't over." I feel Clara shiver beside me. "What is it?" she asks. I don't look at her, don't look at anything other than this infernal crack in the wall. "A split in the skin of reality," I reply. My finger slips into the crack the tiniest bit, and all the other times I've seen it come rushing back into me, filling me up with the emotions I felt and the problems it caused. And I remember exactly when it happened, now.

"A tiny sliver of the twenty-sixth of June, 2010," I recall. "The day the universe blew up."

Clara's eyebrows shoot upward, and she tilts her head to the side a little. "Must've missed that." I still don't look at her as I speak. And I can't really stop speaking; it's like, by going through what I did to fix it, I can make it somehow less my fault even though it is totally, irreversibly my fault. "I rebooted it, put it all back together."

"That's good."

"Well, it was my TARDIS that blew it up in the first place," I tell her. "I felt a degree of responsibility. But the scar tissue remains... a structural weakness in the whole universe." A bright ray of light beams out and shines on my face, and I clamp my eyes shut immediately. "Whoa!" I hiss. "And someone's trying to get through it from outside our universe, from somewhere else entirely. Of course, of course... It makes so much sense..."

"It does?" says Clara skeptically. "Yes," I reply, a bit more sharply than I intended. "If you were trying to break through a wall, you'd choose the weakest spot. If you were trying to break into this universe, you'd choose this crack, because --" I stop as a thought invades my mind, unwelcome and unwarranted. My breath hitches in my throat. "No," I breathe. "If you were trying to break back into this universe..." I look at Handles, who's been sitting amply by my knees this whole time, silent. "You said Gallifrey," I tell him. "Why did you say Gallifrey?"

He answers at once. "Analysis of the message composition indicates Gallifreyan origin, according to TARDIS databanks." Clara glances at me, and him, and now me again. "You said Gallifrey was gone," she says, not quite a statement and not quite a question.