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Again, somehow, always, Steven is on a beach. The sand is soft and gray. He’s not actually there, though; he’s standing in the TARDIS, staring out across the misty remnants of the forgotten city. He’s not actually there, though; he’s in the control room of the Time and Relative Dimensions in Space ship, the one he could hardly believe before, the one he arrogantly dismissed. The one that will take him away from this misty, sandy dream - this nightmare - and into another. The doors shut silently behind Vicki and the Doctor, like even the time machine is holding its breath.
There’s a pause, like the air is untangling itself, like the grains of sand in Steven’s socks and the copper in his hair and the salt under his eyes will shake free if they all just wait a moment. But then Vicki lurches forward, a jerky half-step, and awkwardly says,
“That shower isn’t going to take itself.” She speaks hoarsely, stiff with something that happened away from Steven and the Doctor, something that put steel in her. “I’m going to–well–”
If Steven turned around, which he didn’t, he would see Vicki’s clear eyes trail over the Doctor and he would see her mouth purse full with questions. But he didn’t, and so he doesn’t. (He doesn’t want to face them again, won’t let them see his face. He can feel it all over him, his cheeks, his brow, his neck, his shoulder, the rapidly drying cloth of his shirt.) He only nods mutely and makes his own exit from that cramped room. It’s suffocating.
As Steven passes through the door that leads deep down into the veins of the TARDIS, he feels the Doctor’s eyes burn into him, hot and bright and piercing. He ignores it, just like he ignores the sweat and dirt and grime on his clammy skin and the uncomfortable way his thick clothes grasp at him, his body stickied with heat and water and fear. The Doctor doesn’t call after him, and he’s glad for it, because he’s not sure he can face anyone else yet, not before his stomach stops twisting in that sort of half-hearted dread, like someone’s set fire to his skin and he’s yet to notice.
His feet carry him forwards though he has no direction, his footfalls and heartbeat a thunderstorm to the otherwise silent halls, the neverending white corridors that twist and turn him upside down until he’s back in the box, the cage, the past.
He’s filthy, and he should shower. He should tear off his clothes and pass out on his bed. But he can’t. He can’t, he can’t, not with the taste—
The TARDIS makes it easy for him. The first exit he finds is a pair of massive double doors, cypress wood so ancient that even beyond the reach of time and water and weather, it has rotted, the sterile, hostile air of the time ship biting into the organic matter. It never stood a chance. Steven recognizes the doors, of course, although they’re always changing; it’s the library. The wood is sometimes polished and mahogany, or heavy and oak, or something entirely alien and pale-green with raw sapling bark curling youthfully around the mangled scars of metal hinges. But today it is cypress. Not made for an eccentric, senile man’s collection of books, but for the piers and docks and boats of a city on water.
Steven places his palm on the door and pushes. He does not look at the stains he leaves. The door thuds shut behind him, a long, groaning sound that ends with a boom of noise and nearly startles him. Nearly. He’s not sure he can hear anything over his own steady, even breathing, coming hard and heavy like wind buffeting sails, veering him off course.
The library, as always, is breathtaking. Much like the doors, every time he comes here - which isn’t too often, or at least it wasn’t before - it’s different. He’s not sure if he’s running into hundreds of different libraries or if they’re all just a part of this vast, endless one, and he doesn’t much care for an explanation, or anything aside from what he’s looking for at the moment. There’s ample space, and books, and a tinge to the air that smells of age and time long passed, and the walls are not white. Steven swallows hard, tasting iron on his tongue and committing it to memory.
Today, the library is tighter, older; still enormous in its sweeping arches and warm lighting, but now the ceilings are baroque and crystal art arcs along the dome overhead. The shelves are a deep, dark wood against the cleaner coral of the walls. The main hall he’s standing in is vast and straight, like a ballroom devoid of music and its dancers, but little winding paths branch off here and there, like the TARDIS is curling everywhere, a vine winding even throughout the old Earth architecture, leaking in with anachronistic beauty. The halls twine through the bookcases, which are stacked so high they seem to tower and loom overhead, curving with the senseless shape of the walls and meeting in the ceiling, covering what could have been paintings or plasters.
And there are so many books. Steven is suddenly aware of how incredibly small he is, has become, standing alone and weak and panting in the middle of this place of knowledge and prestige. Everything grand and formal and intelligent and learned, everything that he is not. He is no student, he is no writer, he is no spook. And no matter how he wants to protest, he knows he’s no space pilot, either, and hardly a soldier; he has no one to save, no one to defend. He’s simply a very foolish man. A very, very foolish man who thought he was so much more. And now he has no idea where to start. He’s back on the beach, thrown over the shore, into the deep, deep, silver-blue leagues. But his hands are twitching, now, and he rubs his sweating palms along the velvet of his trousers, wincing at the damp they leave behind.
The frantic thrum of his pulse is starting to roll up his throat, and Steven is a deer frozen between fight or flight, as if there’s anything to fight, as if there’s anywhere to run. There are no more sweet things to say.
Steven is hit with a wave of exhaustion, all of a sudden, like the enormity of the room has sapped him of himself. He slowly walks about the enormous hall, then speeds up, faster, faster, pacing against the bookcases, in a frenzy, hands colliding with shelves and vases and glass as he scans and scans and scans. (He needs to be delicate, he must be delicate. Steven Taylor has never been gentle. Has he?) He knows the Doctor has old Earth literature here, he knows because he’s seen it, he just didn’t know — he didn’t care, he never cared, he was too busy puffing up his chest and his stride to bother — his fingers clumsily trace spines, streaking the polished wood of the shelves and the crumpling bindings with flakes of rusty red that he cannot notice. He’s not sure if his eyes are seeing, or when his vision started blurring, or when tears started to cut down his cheeks and renew the dried blood still flaking there.
And then—
There —
A conspicuous pile of books beside an old chair—
Steven falls to his knees and pulls the first one he can reach. It’s like the TARDIS has been expecting him, has been waiting for him to brave himself inside, has been waiting all these years. Steven gathers one book, and then another, and then the next, until his arms are full and he’s fully seated on the floor.
He cannot stop to wonder what he is doing, watching the pile teeter on his lap and spill out of his arms onto the floor in a clatter of death. Unthinking, unseeing, he takes one from the desecration of all in the shape of words. He opens it, shaking; not the first page but somewhere close enough, not that continuity has ever done anything for him. Steven tries to fit the words together, the delicate press of ink on the thin page, a kiss of a story barely remembered. He’s only gathered one sentence—
On Hellespont, guilty of true-love’s blood,
—Steven turns the page, and then another, and then another, mindlessly–
Grief makes her pale, because she moves not there.
–and another, and another, and over, and over, and the days are slipping by, too, the whiteness and the blankness and the metal hum of it all–
For every street like to a firmament glistered with breathing stars who, where they went, frighted the melancholy earth which deemed Eternal heaven to burn,
–He closes the book a little more firmly than strictly warranted and reaches for another. He was looking for plays, for stories, for magic and theater, anything that could knit the past few days together into something comprehensible, something fictional. Not—not—
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?
He kneeled, but unto her devoutly prayed.
The next volume he finds is smaller. He ignores the portrait on the cover; it’s not him, it could never be him. His face is too – too – and his hair, and his scar, and he –
Come live with me and be my love,
It’s not a play, it’s not a script. It’s a collection of poems, thin and bound in black and gold. If Steven holds his breath, he can pretend it was–that this–
Come live with me, and be my love.
Steven strokes his thumb down the yellowed page, and only then does he notice the red he’s smeared down the margins. Oh no. Oh, no, no. Steven makes a strangled sound in the back of his throat. It’s not quite a sob, coming out halfway and dry, and his voice scrapes against his throat like the seawater in his eyes has flooded his mouth. But one choked noise turns into another, and then Steven is crying, fat, messy tears falling onto the pages, marking patterns besides the blood he has stained the story with.
He licks his chapped lips and tastes blood, thick and dry and crusting the peeling skin, and he wonders why the Doctor and Vicki didn’t ask after the marks of crimson guilt painting his face and clothes, the flaking lifeblood that tastes of salt and metal and grit. He presses the back of his hand to his mouth, not quite wiping away the taste, only holding it there against the spit and the blood and the honey, swallowing back childish, noisy sobs as his chest flares in hiccups. He is nothing but a child, stubborn and stupid, and so very, very close to the sun.
Later, after Steven has pulled off his old, bloodstained clothes, meek and defenseless and bare in the darkness of it all, he will sit on the floor of his room in the TARDIS. He’ll shiver from the cold, but his skin is still sticky with his encounters, like he’s been doused in sour wine, like he’s still dreaming, still chasing. Somewhere else, in another room of that mysterious stolen TARDIS, Vicki is lying on her bed, freshly bathed - with much gratitude and relief, as comes to the human mind after scrubbing away the memory of the body and all its deadness - of the adventure and dressed in the coziest of alien wool there is to be offered, staring at the posters of her bed and wondering if her father would have loved Venice. Somewhere entirely different, in a room of buzzing, cheeping controls and buttons - a machine to the shallowest of eyes, and a heart to the kindest - the Doctor is bracing his hands against the console, eyes transfixed on the rotor, wondering things about worlds of blood oranges skies we can only pretend to imagine.
Steven will finish reading the book. Beside him, on the floor in a respected pile - not beaten or torn or carelessly tossed, but neat, spines ordered and flush, a soldier’s preparation - is a collection of books; plays, poems, scraps, espionage and love letters and notes compiled, half-finished breaths of a man long gone. And though he might see them in the corner of his eye, a glance of guilt, or pore over some in late nights fighting for sleep, Steven won’t read them all. In fact, in enough time, the pile will begin to taper, fade, disappear, until only one or two stories are left, lost somewhere under the cypress floorboards of time and memory.
But for now Steven sits in the silence, two fingers pressed to his lips, and - gently, gently - he cries.
Then live with me, and be my love.