stunt_muppet

...he wants very badly to prove what he said. He can calculate a world into existence and it won’t be a trap, it won’t fold in on itself, and it’ll have a proper history to it and a library with books on telebiogenesis and walls that wouldn’t crumble and no poison string of symbols for the Master to hide behind. And the Doctor could come back whenever he liked.

The meme doesn't instruct me to explain why I chose this bit, but I shall anyway.

1) I just love this whole fic to pieces, and yes, I know I'm like a broken record on this but WHATEVS.

2) The rhetorical part of this that I really appreciate is the run-on clause-heavy sentence followed up by a short, simple sentence. It's effective and emotive.

2b) 'no poison string of symbols for the Master to hide behind' is the best item in the list because it's different. The other items are factual details drawn from the serial itself, but the poison string of symbols is a detail of your engagement with the serial; it's an emotional interpretation.

3) I make a noise at the end of this paragraph every time I read it. And then I make a face like this: ;~;

Current multiverse theory — or at least the last of it he’d heard — dictates that contrary to popular belief multiverses do not split from the parent reality at every arbitrary choice. Rather, a certain threshold of potential change must be reached to trigger fracture. In simpler terms, it’s the big choices that count — to end a life or to spare it; to tell a secret or to keep it; to venture across the void or to stay and continue his repairs. Not that it’s always so obvious what those big choices are.

I adore all of Concerning Multiverse Theory for the little musings and parenthetical asides and everything, but it's this first big paragraph that always hooks me (and then the ending - Conclusion: Theory provides no answers here.). The sentence starting with "In simpler terms" has such a nice symmetry to it; it flows extremely well. ♥

The first of all my dreams was of dark, and mud, and gunpowder smells, bitter and sharp – but I was too young to recognize them. I dreamed of rain and too much shouting and men so caked in their own piss and blood and dirt that they didn’t look human. I dreamed of holes in the ground, and a sound of clicking from the machine gun rounds that seemed to go on forever, and of someone else’s brains on my shirt.
It would be a long time before I knew that I was dreaming of 1914, and the trenches in the fields of France. I dreamed of war before I knew what it was.

Always nonzero.

Mathematics is precision but it is not certainty, it is not solace. It is the footnote at the bottom of those forever-unfolding diagrams, reminding him that it could still all go wrong, for all their effort and their planning.

Thousands of frozen shells of people, sleeping, forever. The sudden surge into the blackness and the cold, and the body’s collapse under the impossible strain. The crack of glass and the buckling titanium and the electromagnets throwing sparks into oblivion.

He has made those unfolding blueprints real, precise and perfect and real, but it’s only certainty that he needs now.

I read this fic so many times when remixing, and this is such a vivid image. I wanted to work it in somewhere, but it proved impossible, and maybe it's best left alone, preserved in exactly this pattern of language.