//------------------------------//
// Rebirth 
// Story: Equestria: A Flux Tale 
// by Star Sage 
//------------------------------//

“Are you sure this is where you saw him fall?” asks a familiar voice, one you'd heard a few nights. It was nearly enough to get you to rouse from your pain dulled haze. Of course, trying to call out only brings more pain, and fizzing tickle in your mouth that tastes of copper. If you'd been able to see it, you'd probably find bloody bubbles coming out of your mouth now. One of your lungs had collapsed, you thought in some far off corner of your mind.

“I'm sure, Dad. He had to be falling from a ways up, but I've got mom's eyes,” said another voice, and at the mouth of the alley your laying in, bleeding onto the pavement, there come two silhouetted figures. One is slightly larger than the other, with a smooth topped head, while the other has a small glowing horn that shows off her bubble gum pink coat and purple mane.

“Well I don't see...wait, shine your light over there!” shouts the Doctor, his daughter responding with a flash as her horn's glow showers you in bright light. Beside you is a small reflective round thing, probably a hub cab for some fancy carriage here in Canterlot. Unfortunately, you're staring right at it, and what you see would make you cry, if your brain were working enough to realize that that broken, battered figure with a shattered face, was in fact, yourself.

“Oh sweet Gallifrey, what happened to him?” asked the Doctor as he rushes towards you, Sparkler, Derpy, and Dinky Whooves not far behind him. Instantly, his sonic screwdriver is in his mouth as he runs it over you, and his girls all stand behind him, Derpy covering Dinky's eyes once she realizes what they're looking at.

“He fell from way high up dad, I saw him,” said Sparkler, her voice with a slight panicked twinge to it.

“Well, I have no idea what he was doing playing...come on you piece of junk, tell me what's....oh dear,” said the Doctor, as his screwdriver pinged at you.

“What is it, honey?” asked Derpy, as she stared at the Doctor, obviously worried. The brown earth pony didn't answer her right away, his eyes darting this way and that down the alley, before he rushed towards the mouth where they'd come from.

“No time, he doesn't have any, I've got to get him more. Sparkler, use that healing spell you learned in class, try to keep him alive!” he shouted as he rushed off. Sparkler, looking askance at her mother, turned back to you after a moment, and began to focus her magic into you. Her spell, designed to set right broken systems, wasn't really for use on non-ponies, but she was a good student, and knew how to correct the spell for you, at least she thought she did, as she sent a small sparkle of magical energy towards you.

Instantly she regrets this action, as your body, either too broken for it to work, or worse, trying to heal you into a pony, starts to struggle against the magic. What few bones you have are audibly crackling as they rub against each other, your body shaking wildly. Sparkler doesn't stop though. Her dad, he was smart, if he told her to do this, told her to keep you alive, then she could do it, he'd never set her to do something she couldn't.

So she focused, her magical energy narrowing as she dealt with the worst spots. Your lungs had holes in them, your heart too. Those would kill you in minutes, possibly sooner, and so she got to work, using a combination of magic and just magikenesis to hold the wounds closed. So focused was Sparkler on her dad's orders that she failed to hear a familiar wooshing sound, at least until a slamming door interrupted her concentration.

“Excellent, simply brilliant. You've made your daddy very proud of you, Sparkler. Now, you and Dinky bring him into the TARDIS. Gently now, don't jostle him too much,” he advised, as she and her sister surrounded your body with their magic fields, lifting you off the ground, trying their best to hold you, despite your armor fighting them.

Inside the TARDIS, the control room was cluttered with various tools, bits of metal and glass, and a few things that might have been controls from the central panel of the room. The reason they were laying about was quite simple, as the panel had been torn open, and now, in it's place was a pipe that led to a small glass case that sat there. The Doctor, using his hooves, directed the girls, sometimes correcting your course, until finally, you were set down into the case itself.

“Honey, what are you doing to do?” asked Derpy, as the Doctor stared at you through the closed lid of the case, mumbling terms to himself she didn't quite understand.

“I'm going to do something dangerous, but necessary,” he informed her, as he rubbed his hooves along the line leading from the case to the control panel.

“I...” she began, and then looked over at your broken body. It was obvious to her eyes that you weren't going to survive much longer without some kind of miracle. Even the Princesses' magic had limits on what it could heal, and you'd probably passed that, so instead of objecting farther, she walked over to her husband, and stared at the console, trying to follow what he was doing.

“Okay, I'm convinced this will work. Sparkler, Derpy, Ditzy, take positions at the console. I need you three to press button five, throw switch twenty-seven, and turn knob forty-two, when I give the signal,” he ordered his girls, and all three of them took up the requested positions. They knew the console well, from various temporal misadventures with the Doctor over the years, and each fell in where they needed, as the Doctor slowly made his way back over to where you lay.

“Alright, I don't know if you can hear me, but I have to say this, if only to feel better about this. I'm about to open the Heart of the TARDIS up to you. That's a lot of energy, a lot more than any normal human can take, but you....you're not a normal human, you're a Flux, a living warp in reality. I'm hoping you can take it. This is your only chance, I know it, but if it doesn't work, I hope you can forgive me,” he told you, and you could actually hear him, even through the haze.

Idly, your mind realized that that probably meant you were dying completely, with only seconds left before your brain started to atrophy. You still tried to tell him you forgave him, but all that you could manage with a gurgle, and a slight incline of your head. He either understood it, or just didn't think you could answer, because he turned towards his girls.

“On my mark....Allons Y!” he cried, and the girls, knowing what that meant, hit the switch, pushed the button, and turned the knob. The tube leading to the case you were in was opened, and they looked in it to see golden shimmering light flowing through it like gas, making its way down the path, and towards you. They followed, and soon, like the Doctor, were staring down at you, as the light entered your chamber, and you were hidden from them.

The instant the light touched you, you felt, better? No. not better, just different. You felt like you were standing for one, but still, your body refused to move. And rather than standing on solid ground, it felt like you were standing on clouds or something that wasn't entirely solid. You were still injured too, but the injuries felt farther away somehow, like you were sort of floating outside yourself, and were looking in.

Around you was the Void again, and yet, it wasn't the same Void you knew. That was nothingness. Sometimes it had a color, black, white, or red, but this wasn't Nothing. This was definitely Something. Looking into it, you felt nostalgic for some reason, which was odd as you couldn't ever remember being in a bright golden cloud...well, other than that time with Celestia, but this was different. The cloud wasn't solid, and somehow, you felt that was as it should be.

“Hmm, so, you've been inside another TARDIS' heart before?” came a voice. It was feminine, and very light, a young woman's voice. Your vision spun about, trying to find the source, but oddly, it seemed to be coming from all around you. That didn't hold true forever though, as the cloud around you began to press inward at one point, and then slowly it congealed, taking a human shape that glowed brightly for a moment, before resolving into a form of a blond woman in her mid twenties, dressed in what you would normally have called street clothes.

“Rose Tyler?” you said after a moment, remembering that face. Said face was grinning at you after you said that, and you felt the cloud shudder a bit with laughter.

“No, guess again,” she offered, and you looked at her again, finally noticing a detail you had missed before. Namely that she had a golden glow to her eyes to match the cloud she'd been forged from.

“Bad Wolf,” you said, a statement of fact, not a guess, and the entity in front of you just shook her head, before finally nodding.

“I suppose that would be how you know me, but I do have another name,” she told you, and you thought again.

“Type 40 TARDIS, formally of Marnal, now of the Doctor. Number 306 of a line supposed to contain only 305,” you said at last, and this time the entity smiled and nodded at you.

“Right in three. Not bad all things considered. I was expecting it to take a much longer time to guess,” she told you, and you felt oddly smug about that fact that you'd gotten it sooner than the TARDIS had expected. Of course, then the fact that you were talking to the TARDIS, the blue box that moved through Time and Space, and contained a funny little man who tried to make right the wrongs of the universe, as he saw them.

“So, what's going on?” you ask at last, after it stares at you, looking you up and down, as if judging you with its golden glowing eyes.

“I'm not sure. I know what is expected of me, to energize you, to make you powerful again, and hope it doesn't kill you. However, such would be useless, so long as I continue you suppress those powers,” said the entity, as it walked around your body. While your head refused to turn, somehow, your gaze followed it, but it still took your mind a moment to process what had been said.

“You're suppressing my powers?” you asked, not incredulously or anything, just as a general statement.

“Indeed. You are a danger to yourself, and those around you. When you first arrived, when the hole opened in the world, I tried to force it shut. Failing that, I tied to neutralize your effect on the world. This resulted in a compression of your form,” she began, as she continued to walk around you.

“Then you vanished somehow. During that moment, my neutralization slipped, and you regained some of your power. Not a lot, not all of it, but enough to grow a bit, and then, when exposed to a high energy source, you were able to begin performing feats of Flux,” she told you, and you remembered Twilight teleporting you, then Celestia touching you with her power. Those were just tastes of the oddness to come of course, but you remembered both quite vividly.

“Once you stabilized, you nearly entered me. Even a partial Flux within my form would have potential to be disastrous, so I halted said advance. I thought that doing so might even make you desire to leave, so I used far more effort than would normally be necessary to repel a threat,” she said this last bit with a tinge of sadness, whether because you hadn't left, or because she had hurt you, you were unsure.

“Then something awoke the Chaos God of this world. Said God tried to destroy you, and in so doing, forced you to exhaust your power, allowing me to suppress it again, this time completely, and without the error that reduced your height. Such was my hope that you would never again need that ability, and I could simply keep you as a normal human for the lifetime your body had,” she told you, finally stopping right in front of you. You could feel her eyes moving up and down your body now, and you realized she was viewing the damage that had been done to your form.

“But now that body is broken, and the Doctor wants me to heal you. I am left with a choice then. I can simply erase you, eliminate you from the timestream. He'll know, but no one else will, and he'll merely think his attempt to help you failed,” she explained.

“Or, or I can release the limiter I have placed on your power, something I cannot restore this time. Once you have that power back, I doubt I will ever again be able to touch you,” she admitted to you, and then just stood there. You thought, perhaps this was where you were supposed to make a case for yourself, but you couldn't really find the words.

You should have been angry of course. This entity, Bad Wolf, Rose Tyler, TARDIS, whatever it was, it had just admitted to limiting you, to suppressing your powers. Yet, thinking back, you remembered that first moment, that horrible second of your life when Celestia had touched you. You had wanted then to draw in all that she was, to consume the Goddess, and become a God yourself. You'd resisted, but it had been tempting beyond words. That put the TARDIS' decision into perspective, and you just floated there in front of it in silence.

“You truly are odd, for a human,” she tells you at last.

“Anyone normally would have been declaring their rage at me for interfering in their business. Others would be protesting that they weren't monsters. But you hang there, silent,” she told you.

“I don't know what to say. I can't argue the point. I was tempted by power, but resisted. I don't know that if I were faced with that same choice again, I could do so once more,” you admitted to her.

“And yet you have done so. You could have stolen the Power of the Sun Goddess. You could have run when the Chaos God threatened this world. You could have left a griffon you barely know to die on that roof top, and saved yourself. Instead you didn't take more power from the Goddess than was offered, instead you stood up to Chaos, knowing he had more power than even the Sun Goddess. Instead you attacked an opponent far larger and stronger than yourself, knowing that you would lose, never even considering for a moment that you could just have left,” she told you, and you think back to all three moments.

The first was the hardest to admit, since you had nearly given in to that temptation. But the second and third. Could you really have run? Either time? No, no, Discord would have hunted you down, even if you could have escaped. But it was more than that. You hadn't gone at him thinking about that. Instead you'd wanted to stop him from hurting this world, a world you had come to think of as home. As for the third. Running hadn't even come into your thoughts. Gilda had tried to rescue you. That meant she wouldn't die. Not if you could help it.

“Heh, such morals are rare in any species. So I am at a crossroad. If I restore you as you should be, the only way to heal you, then you will no longer be within my power to neutralize. If I let you die though, he will be disappointed, and I will have let it happen merely because of what you might do, a maybe that you have already seemed to have shown is impossible,” she tells you, standing there, staring into your eyes.

You say nothing, for there is nothing to say. Either she helps you now, and you live, or she withholds it, and you die. Even if the latter, you can't get mad at her. She was doing what she did to protect the Doctor, and maybe the world at large. Such decisions were never easy. Such choices defined a person, entity, or whatever, and they were for them alone to pick.

“And that's all I needed to hear,” she said simply, and then the light from inside her grew bright. Now instead of just covering her eyes, she became a being made from it. Her flesh glowed, her hair shimmered as if spun of starlight, and her smile brightened even the darkest corners of your thoughts.

“First, to undo what I have done,” she told you, and waved her hand. In that instant, you could feel your star again, that piece of energy within yourself. It was tiny now, not the blazing sun it had been, instead a single flickering flame appeared in your mind. It was yourself though, and you curled around it mentally for warmth, trying to heal yourself with it, only to find that the light it glowed with was not enough to repair even a part of the damage done to you.

“And now, to jump start your powers. I would advise that you try not to die. Also, when you see him again, please tell the Doctor, 'I love him',” she said to you, and moved her hand. The light around you parted, but behind it was not darkness as one might have surmised, but a single globe of light, which grew brighter still as it got closer.

“Now gaze into the Eye of Harmony, and be reborn!” she shouted the last, and the sphere you were looking into seemed to stretch outward, moving an arm of light towards you. When it touched, you were lost in fire, as you star grew larger, first with the power of this strange sun, then it grew simply because it wanted to. Your star wanted to a bright, blazing sun, brighter even than this one, and this it was, threatening as it grew to burn you to ash.

Outside the Whooves' stared at the case, watching as the light infused you. Slowly it gathered about you, becoming a second skin, making it seem like you were glowing golden. The Doctor continued to mumble something about 'impossible' as he watched, while the others were too distracted to say anything as the light began to finally fade, the vent from the control panel closing of its own accord, leaving you a glowing form within the case.

Inside yourself, the world was different now. You were still looking from outside, sort of. It wasn't like you weren't looking through your own eyes, or hearing with your ears or the like. However, now you could....taste the world somehow. It was like the universe was opened up to you, and you could now see everything about you in a whole new way.

You healed yourself with a thought. Not even willing it to happen, just one second you were injured, gravely so, but then the next you realized you didn't want to be, and suddenly, you weren't. Next you wanted to rise, but something was blocking you, your hand met resistance, and you didn't want that to be there, so another thought, and the top of the case vanished. Not blowing outward, not dissolving away or anything. Just one moment, it was there, and then the next it wasn't.

That event was enough to cause Derpy to grab her daughters and push them back, while the Doctor jumped between his girls and you, the sonic screwdriver just appearing between his lips. Not that he could stop the Bad Wolf, or whatever it was you were if you meant them harm, but he might be able to delay you, just long enough for you to come back yourself.

It was unnecessary of course. You were more yourself now than ever before. You were in complete control of everything, and with another thought, you were standing. You could have possibly have picked yourself up physically, but you were still weak, and so just used your power to do it. Stepping out of the case was all you though, and you walked towards the Whooves family, your every step a light plink on the floor of the TARDIS, until you stood right in front of the Doctor.

“She still loves you,” you told him in a voice the resonated, like it was you saying it a million times at once. Leaning down you smiled at him, trying to reassure him, before rising back up. Then it was over. Your senses, your new and old ones, crashed, hard. The light surrounding you popped, scattering into little droplet stars that faded into nothing, while you stood there.

“And again, I'm naked,” you observe wryly, before your body can't support itself, and falls forward. The last thing you know is that something catches you, magic, of a color you hadn't seen before. It was coming from the two filly unicorns, while their mom and dad helped. That was nice and as you fell into the Void once more, you wondered how you should thank them for stopping you fall.