Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Part I:

Looking out the door, I see the rain

You can see the funeral from here.

Not hers—not yet. That particular procession won't march through Kazdel's streets for another three days, and by then you'll be sleeping in a sarcophagus, drowning in the mercy of her final gift. But tonight, through the reinforced glass of Babel's control room, you watch some other soul's farewell wind its way through the autumn dusk, black umbrellas blooming like death flowers in the rain.

Your fingers hover over the console. Eighteen ellipses on the screen. Eighteen moments of hesitation before you condemn everything you've built together. The defense grid's status lights blink green-green-green, a heartbeat you're about to flatline.

"Doctor?"

Her voice through the intercom is soft. Too soft. Theresa has always had this way of saying your title like it's something precious, something more than just a designation assigned by necessity. Even now, with Theresis's assassins already mobilizing in the shadows, with your betrayal encoded in every keystroke you haven't made yet, she speaks to you like you're still worth saving.

"Your Majesty," you respond, and the formality tastes like ash. When did you start retreating behind titles? When did 'Theresa' become too dangerous to say?

"You're working late again." A pause. You can picture her in her office three floors up, surrounded by reports she'll never finish reading, plans for a future that won't exist past tonight. "The stars are particularly beautiful this evening. You should come see them."

The stars. She used to drag you and Kal'tsit up to the observation deck during better times, pointing out constellations that meant nothing to you but everything to her. 'That one,' she'd say, tracing patterns in the void, 'reminds me of hope.' And you'd stand there, pretending to see what she saw, pretending her proximity didn't make your chest tight with something you refused to name.

"Perhaps later," you lie.

"Perhaps," she echoes, and there's something in her voice that makes you think she knows. Has always known. Will forgive you anyway.

The funeral below has stopped moving. Someone must have dropped the casket, or maybe the rain has made the path too treacherous. You watch the mourners scramble, their perfect formation dissolving into chaos, and think: this is what grief does. It makes us clumsy. It makes us drop precious things.

Your hand finds the keyboard.

Type: OVERRIDE AUTHORIZATION

Type: CONFIRM SECURITY SHUTDOWN

Type: Your name—your real name, the one only three people in this world know, the one she whispered once when she thought you were sleeping after that disastrous mission in Kazdel.

Delete. Delete. Delete.

You can't do this with your name attached. Let the logs show an anonymous betrayal. Let history forget who you were before you became her executioner.

"Doctor," PRTS chimes in, artificial concern threading through its voice, "you appear to be experiencing elevated stress levels. Shall I alert medical?"

"No." The word comes out sharper than intended. "Run diagnostic mode. Silent operation."

The AI complies, and the room falls into a quiet broken only by the rain against glass and your own thundering heartbeat. Somewhere above you, Theresa is looking at stars you'll never see again. Somewhere below you, a funeral procession reforms its ranks and continues its march.

You think about that song you heard once in a salvaged music player from some dead civilization—something about lovers and regret and being too young to hold on, too old to just break free and run. The melody haunts you now as your fingers hover over the keys that will kill her.

Sometimes a man must awake to find, really, he has no one.

But that's not true, is it? You have her. Have had her in all the ways that matter and none of the ways you wanted. You have her trust, her faith, her impossible belief that you're capable of being better than you are. You have the memory of her hand on your shoulder after a squad was ambushed, the way she said, "This isn't your fault," even though the tactical error was entirely yours. You have the echo of her laughter when Scout told that terrible joke about the Sarkaz who walked into a bar.

You have everything and nothing, and in approximately seventeen minutes, you'll have even less.

Part II:

It's never over

The first time you met Theresa, you were drowning in ten thousand years of sleep.

Kal'tsit and Theresa opened your Sarcophagus in the year 1090, though you wouldn't understand the significance of that date until much later. Light flooded your consciousness like acid, every photon a needle through retinas that had forgotten how to process anything beyond the darkness of suspended dreams.

The first face you saw wasn't Kal'tsit's clinical gaze or the concerned expressions of the research team. It was her—Theresa—leaning over the edge of your prison-turned-cradle with an expression of such profound hope it made something in your chest constrict painfully.

"Hello," she said, and her voice was the first sound your ears processed in millennia. Soft. Careful. Like she was afraid you might shatter if she spoke too loudly. "We've been waiting for you."

You tried to respond, but your throat was dust and cobwebs, your vocal cords atrophied from eons of silence. All that emerged was a rasping wheeze that might have been a word in the language of the dead.

"Don't try to speak yet." Her hand found yours—warm, impossibly warm against your corpse-cold skin. "Kal'tsit says it will take time for your body to remember how to be alive again."

Alive. Were you alive? Or was this another dream, another simulation running through your suspended consciousness while your body rotted in its technological tomb?

"My name is Theresa," she continued, squeezing your hand gently. "I'm... well, the titles don't matter right now. What matters is that you're safe. You're with friends."

Friends. The word felt foreign, archaeological. When had you last had friends? Before the Preservation Project? Before you and Priestess made the choice that doomed a world to save a civilization? The memories came in fragments, each one sharp enough to cut.

"Oracle," you managed to rasp, the name feeling like graveyard dirt in your mouth. "I was... Oracle."

"Not anymore," Theresa said firmly. "That was who you were. Now you get to choose who you'll become." She gestured to Kal'tsit, who stood nearby with medical equipment, watching you with those ancient eyes that seemed to see through everything. "We're hoping you'll choose to be our Doctor. Someone who can help us understand Originium. Someone who can help us save the Infected."

Save them. They believed you held the key to understand Originium and its secrets, and as such aid them in the fight against Oripathy. If only they knew that you were one of the architects of their suffering. That Originium was never a disease to be cured but a tool to be harvested, a battery for a war against entities they couldn't even comprehend.

But looking at Theresa's face—so young, so terribly young compared to your geological age—you found yourself nodding. Because what else could you do? Tell her the truth? Watch that hope crumble into horror as she realized what she'd awakened?

"Doctor," you whispered, testing the title. It felt like a costume, ill-fitting but necessary. "I can be your Doctor."

Her smile could have powered cities.

***

The recovery was slower than anyone anticipated. Your body might have been preserved, but your mind—your mind was archaeology, each memory a fossil that had to be carefully excavated lest it crumble to dust.

Theresa visited every day. At first, it was professional—checking on your progress, discussing Babel's mission, explaining the political situation in Kazdel. But gradually, imperceptibly, it became something else.

She'd bring tea—different varieties each time, determined to find one that "tastes like home" even though you couldn't tell her that home was a concept that had died with your civilization. She'd sit in that uncomfortable chair beside your medical bed and read to you—history books, poetry, even children's stories when she thought you needed something lighter.

"Why?" you asked one day, when she was halfway through a Sarkaz fairy tale about a king who loved their people so much they gave away pieces of their own soul to keep them safe.

"Why what?"

"Why do you spend so much time here? You have a nation to rebuild, a war to fight. I'm just—" You gestured at yourself, still weak, still adjusting to linear time after eons of suspension.

She set down the book and looked at you with those eyes that seemed to see past all your carefully constructed walls.

"Is that really what you think?" She sounded hurt. Actually hurt, like your words had physical weight. "Doctor, you're not a weapon to be aimed at our enemies. You're a person. A person who's been alone for far too long."

"You don't know how long—"

"No," she agreed. "I don't. But I can feel it." She touched her chest, right over her heart. "My Arts... they let me feel what others feel. And you, Doctor, you carry loneliness like other people carry organs. Essential. Inseparable. Ancient."

You wanted to deny it. Wanted to explain that loneliness was just the price of necessity, that isolation was preferable to the alternative. But looking at her—this impossible woman who saw your millennia of solitude and chose to sit beside you anyway—you found the words dying in your throat.

"I don't remember how not to be alone," you admitted, and it might have been the first completely honest thing you'd said since awakening.

"Then we'll teach you," she said simply. "Starting with this: you're not alone anymore. You have Babel. You have Kal'tsit, even if she seems cold. You have me."

"For how long?"

She tilted her head, considering. "How long do you need?"

Forever, you didn't say. I've lived through the death of civilizations and I'll live through yours too, and the loneliness will return like tide after tide, washing away whatever sandcastles we build together.

Instead, you said: "Thank you."

She smiled—sad and knowing, like she'd heard what you didn't say anyway.

***

Months passed. Your body remembered how to function, your mind remembered how to pretend to be human. You became the Doctor in truth—tactical advisor, Originium researcher, someone who could turn Babel's desperate fights into strategic victories.

But more than that, you became her friend. Or whatever you could call the relationship that developed between you—too professional to be romance, too intimate to be mere colleagues. You existed in the spaces between definitions, in the moments after meetings when she'd linger to ask your opinion on things that had nothing to do with war. In the late-night strategy sessions that turned into philosophical debates about the nature of sacrifice and salvation.

"Do you ever wonder," she said once, during one of those sessions when the rest of Babel slept and the world felt small enough to hold, "if we're doing the right thing? If all this fighting, all this death—if it's worth it?"

You looked up from the tactical map you'd been studying. "You're asking me about moral calculus?"

"I'm asking you as someone who's seen more than most." She was curled in her chair again, looking less like a king and more like someone who needed reassurance that their choices meant something.

"In my experience," you said carefully, "the right thing and the necessary thing are rarely the same. But sometimes they overlap. Sometimes doing what's necessary becomes right simply because someone has to do it."

"That's not very comforting."

"Did you want comfort or truth?"

"Both?" She laughed, but it was hollow. "Is that greedy?"

"No," you said, and meant it. "It's human."

"And what about you?" She turned those impossible eyes on you. "What do you want?"

To go back to sleep. To forget what I've done and what I'm about to do. To stop the Originium project before it destroys everything you're trying to save. To warn you that I'm going to betray you and not be able to stop myself from doing it.

"I want to help you save them," you said instead. Another truth wrapped in a lie, or maybe a lie wrapped in truth. Even you weren't sure anymore.

She studied you for a long moment, and you wondered what her Arts were telling her. Could she feel the guilt that hadn't happened yet? The grief for a betrayal still years in the future?

"We will," she said finally. "Together."

Together. Such a dangerous word. Such a beautiful lie.

You nodded and returned to your maps, but you could feel her watching you. And for just a moment, you let yourself imagine a world where together meant something. Where you could be the Doctor she thought you were, fighting beside her until the end, whatever that looked like.

But you knew better. You'd always known better.

The first time you met Theresa, she pulled you from your tomb and offered you redemption you didn't deserve.

The last time you'd see her clearly—before the assassination, before the memory wipe—she'd look at you with those same hopeful eyes and say, "We're so close, Doctor. I can feel it. We're going to change everything."

And you'd nod and smile and start calculating how many defense systems you'd need to disable to ensure her death was quick.

But that was still years away. For now, in this moment, you were just the Doctor, and she was just Theresa, and together you were trying to save a world that you'd already doomed.

"More tea?" she offered, already reaching for the pot.

"Please," you said, and let her fill your cup with something that would never taste like home, no matter how hard she tried.

But you drank it anyway. Because that's what friends did.

Even when one of them was already planning the other's funeral.

Chapter Text

Part III:

She's the tear that hangs inside my soul forever

Kal'tsit knows something's wrong the moment she sees you in the hallway.

"Doctor." Not a greeting. An accusation.

You've worked alongside her for almost four years now. She's seen you at your best and worst, through victories that felt hollow and defeats that should have broken you. But she's never seen you like this—hollow-eyed and shaking, like someone walking to their own execution.

"Where's Amiya?" you ask.

"With Theresa. They're reviewing her Arts training." Kal'tsit's eyes narrow. "Why?"

Because in seven minutes, the defense grid will fail. In twelve minutes, the first assassin will breach the hull. In fifteen minutes, Theresa will lock Amiya in a protective barrier to keep her safe from what's coming. In twenty-three minutes—

"No reason," you say.

Mon3tr materializes beside Kal'tsit, responding to some imperceptible signal of her distress. The creature regards you with eyes that seem too knowing, too ancient. Sometimes you wonder if it remembers other timelines, other versions of this moment where things go differently.

"Doctor," Kal'tsit says again, softer this time. "Whatever you're planning—"

"I'm not planning anything." The lie comes so easily it makes you sick. "I'm just tired."

She studies you for a long moment. You've seen her dissect bodies with less intensity than she's applying to reading your expression right now.

"She trusts you," Kal'tsit finally says. "More than she's ever trusted anyone. More than she trusts me. More than she should trust anyone."

"I know."

"If you betray that trust—"

"You'll kill me." You manage something that might be mistaken for a smile in bad lighting. "I know that too."

"No," Kal'tsit says quietly. "If you betray that trust, it will kill her. Not physically—Theresa is harder to kill than anyone realizes. But it will destroy something in her that can't be replaced. Something this world needs."

You want to tell her that the world's needs and Theresa's life are about to become mutually exclusive. You want to explain the mathematics of sacrifice, the cold equations that demand one death to prevent millions. You want to confess that you've been in love with a woman you're about to help murder, and that this love is precisely why you have to go through with it.

Instead, you say: "Take care of Amiya."

Kal'tsit's eyes widen slightly—the closest she ever comes to showing surprise. But before she can respond, alarms begin to wail.

Three minutes early.

The assassins are ahead of schedule.

Part IV:

A kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder

You run.

Not away from the disaster you've orchestrated, but toward it. Your feet know the path to Theresa's office by muscle memory alone—forty-seven steps from the control room to the elevator, eighteen seconds to climb three floors, another thirty-two steps down a hallway lined with photographs of better days.

The emergency lighting casts everything in red, turning the world into a bleeding wound. You can hear fighting somewhere below—Kal'tsit's roar of rage, Mon3tr's inhuman shriek, the clash of Originium Arts against steel. But up here, it's quiet except for your labored breathing and the sound of your own betrayal catching up with you.

The door to Theresa's office is already broken, hanging off its hinges like a dislocated joint. Inside, the air smells of copper and ozone, death and spent Arts. You count seventeen bodies before you stop counting, because the only body that matters is still moving, still breathing, still—

"Doctor."

She's propped against the far wall, one hand pressed to her side where red spreads like spilled wine across her white dress. Amiya lies unconscious but unharmed in a sphere of black energy, suspended like a caught breath. The stars she wanted to show you gleam through the shattered window, and you think absurdly that she was right—they are particularly beautiful tonight.

"Your Majesty." Your knees hit the floor beside her hard enough to bruise. "Theresa. Theresa, I—"

"Shh." She reaches up with her free hand, the one not holding her insides in, and touches your face. Her fingers leave red fingerprints on your cheek. "I know."

"How long have you known?"

"Does it matter?"

It should. The timeline of her knowledge should change everything—the weight of guilt, the distribution of blame, the fundamental nature of what passed between you all these months. But looking at her now, pale and fading but still so terribly kind, you realize she's right. It doesn't matter.

"I tried to find another way," you say, and it's true. You've run ten thousand simulations, explored every possible permutation of events. They all end the same.

"I know that too." She's smiling. How is she smiling? "You forget, Doctor—I can feel what you feel. Your guilt has been screaming at me for weeks."

"Then why didn't you stop me?"

"Because you were right." The words come out with a cough that paints her lips red. "This was always going to happen. The only variable was how many would die alongside me. Your way... your way saves them."

"Not all of them."

"Enough of them." Her hand is still on your face, thumb tracing your cheekbone with devastating tenderness. "You know what the cruelest part is?"

"What?"

"In another timeline, we could have been..." She trails off, gaze going distant. "I can see it sometimes. A world where we met at a medical conference instead of a battlefield. Where you brought me terrible coffee from the hospital cafeteria, and I pretended to like it because it made you smile. Where we had time."

"Theresa—"

"But we're not in that timeline." Her focus sharpens, and suddenly she's gripping your collar, pulling you down until your foreheads touch. "We're in this one, where you have to live with what you've done. Where you have to finish what we started."

"I can't. Not without you."

"You can. You will." Her breath is getting shallower. "But first, I'm going to give you something. Call it revenge. Call it a gift. Call it what it is—the only kindness I have left to offer."

Before you can ask what she means, her Arts surge through you like lightning made of memory. You feel your mind cracking, fracturing, ten thousand years of accumulated knowledge and guilt beginning to dissolve like sugar in rain.

"No." You try to pull away, but she's stronger than she looks, even dying. "Theresa, no, I need to remember—"

"You need to forget." Her voice is fierce now, urgent. "You need to become someone who can be forgiven. Someone who can forgive themselves. Someone who can love without carrying the weight of this moment."

"That's not fair to you."

"Nothing about this was ever fair." She's crying now, or maybe you are, or maybe it's both of you. "But at least this way, something good comes from it. At least this way, you get to start over."

The erasure is spreading, working backward through your memories. Already, the details of yesterday are growing fuzzy. Soon, even this moment will be gone.

"I don't want to forget you," you whisper.

"You won't. Not entirely." She presses something into your hand—a chess piece. "Some things are too deep to erase completely. You'll dream about me, probably. Wonder why certain songs make you sad. Feel like you're missing someone without knowing who."

"That sounds like torture."

"It sounds like love." Her smile is soft, sad, final. "The real kind. The kind that stays even when everything else is gone."

The door bursts open. Kal'tsit stands there, covered in blood that may or may not be hers, Mon3tr writhing behind her in protective fury. She takes in the scene—Theresa dying, you holding her, the telltale glow of memory Arts still fading from your eyes—and her expression shifts from rage to something worse: understanding.

"Theresa," she breathes. "What have you done?"

"What needed to be done." Theresa's voice is barely a whisper now. "Take care of them, Kal'tsit. Both of them. Promise me."

"I promise," Kal'tsit says, and you've never heard her sound so broken.

Theresa turns back to you, and for a moment, you see her as she truly is: not the King of Sarkaz, not the leader of Babel, not the symbol of hope for a dying race. Just a woman who loved too much and trusted too easily and paid the price for both.

"Doctor," she says, and it's the last time anyone will call you that name with such tenderness for three years. "Let me call you that one last time."

The memory erasure reaches the present moment, and everything

goes

white.