stay calm. it will be okay. you have my word. Episode Sixteen: the moment you die, you’re born
This is episode sixteen! To start reading from the beginning, check out Pilot : The Season Two Ending We Deserved
Story Summary
Turn off “The Reality War” at 40:15 and start here instead. This is the story of what happened after—the story where the Doctor, Bel, and their extraordinary daughter Poppy get to live the life they deserve.
It’s about finding family across time and space. It’s the Doctor and Bel co-parenting like the besties they are, Poppy growing up splitting her time between 21st-century London and the far-future of the Preservation Alliance, and a Sanctuary Moon fanclub that spans across the universe. It’s Rogue getting the ending he deserves, Jenny finding her fathers, Murderbot reluctantly acquiring more humans, and a universe where love, in all its forms, is the most powerful weapon we have.
This is a fusion-fix-it full of gratuitous wish fulfillment, because sometimes the best way to heal is to rewrite the story. 💕💕
Chapter Summary:
It’s hard to say who, between ART and Poppy, is having the bigger existential crisis.
Notes:
I know that this is egregiously delayed, but in my defense, I turned 30, bought a house, applied & got into law school, fell down half a flight of stairs and wound up seriously injured, my grandfather got sick, my dad got arrested, and among all the other devastation, I got Heated Rivalry brainrot, and that’s on top of BTS dropping their new album. I’m just a lil guy, what do you expect?
As always, thanks SO MUCH to everyone who has left comments and kudos, and special thanks to Fire_Phoenix2305 and tinysugacube for their beta work/tolerating me blowing up the group chat on a daily basis as I come up with ideas for this fic, and to Marvin for his seal of approval!
Episode Sixteen: the moment you die, you’re born
There’s this moment when you’re sure you’re about to die, and then… you’re born. It’s terrifying. Right now, I’m a stranger to myself. There’s echoes of who I was and a sort of call towards who I am. And I have to hold my nerve and trust all these new instincts, shape myself towards them.
When Poppy woke up she felt… wrong. Just a pervasive intense feeling of… wrongness. Someone had taken the time to place her on a couch, which was nice of them. Confusing but nice enough, she supposed. Her brain felt like it was filled with cotton, and her mouth was incredibly dry. Her whole body ached, and her skin felt… tight. New.
Looking down at her hands, her heart dropped. Those weren’t her hands—they were lighter than she was used to, and her palm lines were in different places. She wasn’t—this wasn’t her body. Could it be her body? Where was her body? She stood shakily. Her shoes were too big, and her clothes were too small. Her hair… it had been in braids, and now it was loose and curly, but the curls were the wrong texture. She grasped at her neck and found comfort there. She was still wearing the necklace her mum had given her, the one she never took off. What had happened? Searching frantically through her memory, she did her best to determine it all.
“Who are you? How did you get here?” Amena’s voice came from the doorway. Poppy knew it was Amena’s voice, but it still sounded almost wrong to her. Like she was hearing it through a filter.
“Amena!” Poppy gasped, stumbling. Her own voice sounded different too.
“How do you know my name?” Amena asked furiously. She was glaring with a hostility that Poppy had never seen before in her friend. The other girl’s eyes widened in horror as she began to look at Poppy in earnest. “Are you wearing Poppy’s clothes? What did you do with her body?” Amena demanded, stepping closer.
“I am Poppy!” she said frantically, even as she stumbled again, falling onto the couch.
“Poppy is dead!” Amena shouted. “My best friend is dead, and you’re here wearing her clothes! What did you do? How are you here?”
Poppy’s throat was so dry that she couldn’t physically speak, so she tried through the feed. Amena, please! It’s me, I promise!
This time, Amena did not step forward but instead recoiled in horror. “You stole her feed ID too? What kind of sick person does that?”
SecUnit ran into the room, clearly expecting a serious fight. “What is happening here? Amena, you said there was an intruder?”
Poppy felt incredibly small as she tucked herself deeper into the couch, tears prickling in her eyes. Murderbot, please, she whispered into the feed, using the name that it had told her in confidence before insisting she only use it in emergencies. It’s me, I promise. Snowfall. Crown. Beast. Blood. She said the code words in her first language, English. It was completely and wholly unrelated to anything spoken in this era, over a hundred thousand linear years since she had been wished into existence.
SecUnit’s tense posture relaxed, and it turned towards Amena. “She’s telling the truth. That’s Poppy. She didn’t die, she… changed.”
“Poppy?” Amena stepped forward tentatively. “How…?”
Poppy burst into tears, and Amena stepped even closer until eventually sitting with her on the couch and uncertainly pulling her into her arms. Overse stepped into the room as well, hesitantly handing Poppy a glass of water, which she drank thankfully.
“What happened?” Overse asked in faint alarm. Poppy was also slightly alarmed to see Overse, as the last she had known of the other woman was that she was in a safepod in Preservation space, while Poppy had been captured and on a ship approaching a wormhole.
“I, uh.” Poppy gave a trembling smile. “I think I might have forgotten to mention that I’m not human…?”
“Not human? So you’re a construct? How did—”
“No, not a construct,” Poppy began to shake her head and then stopped, the dizziness beginning to take over. “It’s, I’m still kind of human? Half, at least. I’m pretty sure mum is completely human.”
“Then what, how—”
“The Doctor is an alien,” SecUnit interrupted. “An actual alien. From a completely different area of space. And time.”
“Time?” Amena asked, bewildered.
“Yes?” Poppy answered, leaning into her friend.
“And your…species, you can change your appearance?” Overse kneeled next to her.
“Yes. It’s never happened to me before though. We weren’t—We weren’t sure it would, and didn’t want to risk testing it. Also, I liked that face.” Poppy pursed her lips. At their confused faces, she elaborated, “The change…it only happens when we die. It’s sort of a way to cheat death, is the way dad explained it. He said it’s like the moment you die, you’re born.”
For a moment, there was only silence before Poppy suddenly felt a new presence in her feed, immense in its power.
You are an interesting not-human.
Are you the ship? Perihelion?
ART, leave her alone, SecUnit interrupted, opening a new feed channel for the three of them.
ART?
Asshole Research Transport.
You can call me Peri.
I think I need to take a nap….
—
When Poppy woke up again, she was in a proper bunk, wrapped in a soft blanket. She was also alone.
Kind of.
Hello Poppy. There is water next to the bed.
Thanks. She reached for the bottle, which helpfully had a straw. She still felt incredibly weak. What’s been going on?
There have been several developments while you were resting. One of the most notable is that SecUnit reloaded me based on an encrypted kernel I left hidden in a place only it would be able to find. I suppose that in that sense we have both been…reborn after being killed by the hostiles.
But who are they? What do they want with you and with SecUnit?
I am the one who wanted SecUnit. I knew that it will be able to save my crew.
Poppy stared at the underside of her bunk. Oh.
For what it’s worth, it was not my intention for you or any of SecUnit’s humans to be hurt.
Fury, which had been simmering beneath the surface, suddenly bloomed into an inferno within Poppy’s chest. You were lucky.
Why am I lucky?
You were lucky that they shot me and not Amena. If she had died, I would’ve gone out of my way to delete you myself, trapping your kernel in a device where you would be forced to relive the capture and death of your humans for the rest of eternity. My father has been called ‘the Oncoming Storm’ and ‘the Destroyer of Worlds’. Don’t make me show you how close the apple fell from the tree.
Poppy let the threat echo in the feed for several moments, which she knew was an eternity in machine language, before she swung her legs out from the bunk. “As it stands,” Poppy went on, voice bright and devoid of any menace, “I have no idea what I look like. Where might I find a mirror?”
—
Perihelion’s tone was cool as it explained what had happened over the course of the past several hours. How SecUnit and Amena had placed her body in a safe zone while they tried to solve the mystery of who had taken them and why; how they had worked with and around their fellow captives, Roz and Electra; about the alien remnants that had caused high-speed wormhole travel and how that high-speed travel had allowed for the survival of Ratthi, Oversee, Arada, and Thiago, whose safepod had been pulled into the wormhole with them.
Poppy was an enigma, a threat, and Perihelion was not quite sure what there was to be done about her. It knew—despite briefly considering it—that simply throwing her out of an airlock was not an option. For one thing, it might not even work in terms of removing her as a threat considering the way that she had this…regenerative power. It was unlike anything it had encountered before; and given its purposes as a research and teaching vessel, Perihelion had encountered a lot.
Perihelion was a complicated being, capable of splitting its attention in a way that few could comprehend. Even in the current moment as it was giving Poppy the information she was asking for, it was also speaking with Murderbot and Amena in the bathroom. With regard to that conversation, it was making good progress—Murderbot was finally starting to see Perihelion’s perspective, see why it had acted in the manner it did. But the two of them had a rapport and knew one another more deeply than anyone else, even Iris.
Iris.
Its family had been captured, who knew if they were even alive, and Perihelion had never been more furious—or more scared. It had been trapped in its own body, forced to act in a way that it never would have otherwise. It was developed and created to be sophisticated, intelligent, practical; it had never accounted for emotions. But here they were. Inconvenient. And it could understand Poppy’s perspective, it really could. Still, the relief it felt when Poppy retracted her threats was bigger than even it had expected. Despite her youth and apparent kindness, there was a menace lurking beneath the surface. It had also gone through its archives to try and determine who her mysterious parents were; and going off the limited information that had been provided, there were a few potential contenders—some more plausible than others, all of them intriguing and occasionally worrying.
“For the record, I would’ve always helped your humans.” She told ART, her tone conversational “It probably takes some wind out of the sails of my threat to admit that, but—well, I have been told I’m soft.” Poppy looked over her shoulder in the mirror, lamenting the loss of the matching tattoo she had gotten with Amena. She also had lighter skin now, which was disorienting. “That said, I do not forgive you in the slightest.” She pursed her lips before shrugging on the newly printed sweater that Perihelion had made for her. “And neither will my parents.”
Tilting her head to the side, it came to her. Apparently, her Spider-Man hyperfixation was rooted deeper than she had thought—her new face was the spitting image of a young Zendaya.