Archive of Our Own

She begs you to stay. There are tears in her eyes, and you don’t really understand why. It’s alright, it really is, because you’re not dying like you thought you were going to. This planet, this life, isn’t the last, and that’s good. It means that you -

(No, not you. Someone else. The old, weary voice from the phone. He’ll carry on after you.)

- can continue on, keep adventuring, keep running. It means you don’t have to leave her. You so desperately want to stay with her, now, after everything. After she’s more than a puzzle, after you’ve realized how amazing and wonderful she is.  

You are not ready for this chapter of your life to close.

You are going to miss her.

“Please… please don’t change,” she says.

You really don’t have a say in the matter. You would, if you could. You’d stay with her, keep traveling, cling hard and fast to this moment, have it spread out forever, but you’ve spent too long doing that. You think it is time to move on, that your time with her ran out as your days did. As your life ticked by, as you stayed in one place for more than a millennia, as you sent her away.

Your time is over. The clock is striking midnight.

You honestly didn’t think you’d get this far, with your clumsy limbs and your tendency to make too much noise and your risk taking. You think that you lived like your time was limited, like you could feel the end coming, and you ran and tried to do the most you could before it was over. You tried to come to terms with death, with the end, but you think you ran from that, too.

But now you -

(Now the next one)

- can continue on.  

You almost want to dwell on that idea, the one that hadn’t existed a few minutes ago, the one that you never thought you’d have to think again.

(You don’t think about the dread, the sorrow, the knowledge that now you will have to start from the bottom up again, figure out who you are, cope with friends looking at you like a stranger.)

You want to dwell, to dawdle, but there is something inside you, twisting your guts and snapping your bones. It hurts, maybe, in a way the others haven’t. It feels unnatural, borrowed, wrong. It feels like anger and confusion and an identity that will take so, so long to make and kindness that will take so, so long to learn again.

It hurts in a way that freezes time, in a way that seems to last all eternity.

(This wasn’t really what you thought when you’d hoped for a little more time.)

The seconds tick by, the bird pecks at the mountain, and you are stuck between one heartbeat and the next.

You are staring at your companion - her name is Clara.

You remember a different time, a different place, a different face.

You are staring at noone and nothing, and you feel the crushing weight of being alone. You haven’t done this alone like this in so long.

Snow whips around you, and you stumble. You feel sorrow, thick and painful, and you feel guilty for regretting what you did.

(You think of a wedding, of how Donna will still have her grandfather, and you feel even guiltier.)

You feel guilty for not wanting to go, because you have a future, and they’re out there somewhere, and you have no right to stop them from existing. You’ve already cheated this once. You can’t again.

In the end, though, you still don’t want to go, so in your next life you cling, so hard and so fast, to things that will leave, to people who will die. You hate endings, because you don’t want things to end. You don’t want anything to leave, while you’re left alone to crash into someone’s garden and rebuild yourself.

You remember a different time, a different place, a different face.

You are staring at your companion - her name is Rose.

You wish you had more time with her, wish you’d spent a few more minutes just talking, without being enigmatic or harsh, because she doesn’t deserve anything like that. She only deserves the good things, but this life stank of war and regret and mistakes that left gouges upon your soul. You think that she deserved better, but you also know you tried your best, as you were, drowning in the last remnants of the Time War.

You think you were good, this time around, but you think the next one will be fantastic.

You don’t know that the expectation you place on yourself will make it that much worse when he fails. You don’t know that it will weigh heavy on his shoulders and slowly break his spirit when the walls closed and his soul crumbled, piece by piece.

(You remember so many more, so many faces and friends gone by in the blink of an eye. You want to keep them alive in your mind, pretend for just a while that they’re still there, that the story is still being written. You don’t, though, because it hurts too much. So they sleep in your mind, and you forget.)

You said that you will always remember when the Doctor was you. You do not realize that this will send the next one on a wild goose chase. You do not realize he will spend his time running after something that will only burn him in golden flames, that he will patch up his personality with half remembered things and mannerisms that died with stupid old men that didn’t know when to give up.

You do not realize that all the chasing will make it that much harder for the next one to find out who he is, because he will constantly be comparing himself to who he was.

You do not know the impact these tiny, insignificant moments have on you and your future, and you likely never will. It doesn’t matter, though, because the bird has almost chiseled through the mountain and there is golden energy wrapping around you and jerking you back.

You feel a fleeting, momentary second of peace.

And then, you die.

.

..

…

And then, everything moves in fast forward, in blurred time and blurred memories and blurred faces. You are not you anymore, and your skin feel strange and your face feels lined and something in you feels knocked just a little to the right, out of your grasp, but you don’t know what it is.

You think you are someone sharp, volatile, but you also feel like that’s not true. You feel like someone who has something crawling under their skin, someone who shifts like plate tectonics.

You feel like someone who leads with the bad instead of the good, but you’re not sure if there’s any good left in you to redeem yourself.

Your mind snags on the sharp edges that have been left behind. Something someone said once. You aren’t supposed to forget how you used to be but - it’s hard to grasp the concept. It flickers like smoke and passes through your hands. You think that you should focus on more important things now, like your companion.

She’s speaking to you, probably, but you can’t quite focus your ears or your eyes. Was recognizing faces always this difficult?

You stand - or, you think you stand. Were you sitting down? You don’t think so.

You say something. It feels heavy and awkward and drops out of your mouth and splatters on the floor and you’re not sure if it made any sort of sense at all. Your feet move in awkward, unfamiliar patterns around the console. Your feet feel uncomfortable in your shoes and you want to take them off. The clothes feel too loose and too tight at the same time.

(You feel like you’re being clawed backwards, like someone is trying to bring back the last one, because you’re not meant to exist. You feel like something is trying to rewind time, send your atoms spinning through space and let the last one die on a planet ravaged by a millennia long war. The feeling passes, but you feel wrong, fundamentally, and that feeling stays.)

You force yourself into the present, such as it is, and you try again to talk to your companion. She’s probably worried. You should try to comfort her.

Instead, your fingers move clumsily around the console, and you know you have no destination in mind, but you think that the illusion of purpose will put her (put you) at ease.

The results are less than ideal. You’re both crashing, running, yelling, and something huge chasing after you. It all amasses into a headache and makes you weary.

(You aren’t used to adventures like these making you weary.)

You make it back to your ship, though you don’t particularly remember leaving it, and you fly.

The next time you land you’re met with people who might be familiar. Faces are still a blur, everything is oversaturated and loud, and you can’t tell a sontaran from a silurian, so you stop focusing on appearance and focus on their timelines. The knotting, twisting patterns are as unique as fingerprints and make it easier to tell them apart. Names, though, are still hard.

Things go black, for a while, and then for a while you’re launched into an adventure of some sort. The details aren’t too important -

(They are, though, they always are.

You think that you’re a broom, that has been replaced bit by bit over and over again.)

- and it ends with an android impaled.

And then, she’s looking at you like you’ve betrayed her, and there’s no true smile on her face. You feel it more than you see it, in the way her timeline shifts away from you, in the possible futures were she leaves. You don’t really understand.

You think you might have done something wrong, and it’s there, in the corners of your mind. The mistakes pile up and you try to ignore them but you know that you can’t run forever, but -

She doesn’t recognize you. She looks at you like you’re a stranger. You feel yourself crumble, just a little.

You know that she’s looking through you, trying to see the old one, the one with the charming smile and the bow tie, trying to find the remnants of him in your eyes, and -

And you’re trying! People liked the old one. You liked the old one. He was dashing and full of energy and could pull words out of the air with ease and carry people along with them and nothing else. He was so much and so full of life and maybe he had his flaws but he was a better man then you are now.

You try to be more like him, you try to emulate his confidence, his cleverness, his charisma. It doesn't fit you, doesn't feel right. It feels like putting on a coat that you haven't worn since you were a kid. It feels like wearing a mask meant for someone else. It feels uncomfortable and unnatural and it sticks in your throat, in your chest, in your head.

She leaves you, standing there, alone. You feel something break inside you, something you didn't know was whole enough to be broken again. You feel the awful weight of rejection, of someone looking through you instead of at you.

You want to sink to your knees and fall apart. Silently and without fanfare. You want to fade into the void, surrender your consciousness to it. You won't cry, though, because you're still too numb.

She gets a phone call.

She comes back, because he asked her to.

(You don't let yourself think about that, the fact that it took a man’s last wish to get her to stay with you. You wonder if you should let her go. If it would be kinder.

You know you won't. You know you can't.)

From then on, things move in fast forward and yet agonizingly slow.

You are aware of the passage of time, but in the end it becomes nothing but numbers, seconds you spent twiddling your thumbs or saving planets. You think that time must be moving differently, but you know you're just older.

(So much older.)

You’re an old man, and things that used to be easy just aren’t anymore.

You find it hard to talk to people.

You understand the science of talking, of charisma, but putting that knowledge to use is a different matter entirely. You can't seem to get it right.

On instinct, you are brash and rude and you push people away. You are not charming. You are not nice.

(You wonder if you're even good anymore.)

It feels natural, like the cruel words that spill out of your mouth are on train tracks, like they move on their own. You try to derail them, but it doesn't always work.

(You think that you’re tired of masks, and that you’d rather have people see you as you are. Old habits are hard to break, though.)

You try to patch up your personality with half remembered things, with toothy smiles and stolen words. From times when your head wasn't so full of so much. From times when you had color, both inside and out. From times when you didn't feel like you were falling apart.

You think of the others, and you feel a degree of removal from them. You think of scarves and bow ties and umbrellas and eye searing colors. You think of recorders and spoons and metal dogs.

They all belong to someone else, someone long since gone and yet out there somewhere still.

You find that you are more introspective than the others had been. Sometimes, you wonder if you'd realized things before, figured them out, sat down and picked yourself apart. You think if you did then you forgot most of it. You seem to be doing that a lot.

(You think, for no reason at all, of a man standing on the precipice of war that was so hopeful and so naive and how his hope tethered him to a crashing ship.)

You come to realize that you put things on a sliding scale, one weighted by emotion and empathy and all the things that can get in the way. You don't think you should, but you can't help it, and it keeps you fighting even when the battle seems lost, so you don't try to change it as actively as you maybe should.

(You are a hypocrite, an old man that can’t learn from his mistakes, because there’s just too many.)

You look at what you're doing, the words you say and the actions that say more than you ever could, and you ask yourself if you're a good man.

You think you used to be, when you were younger and more idealistic. You think that, somewhere down the line, you must have stopped, because now it doesn’t feel right, doesn’t sound right.

You're not sure about much, if you're being honest. You fairly sure you're old and stupid and biased, though, and getting a clear answer from yourself would take years of meditation and introspection that you don't have the energy nor the patience for.

You want to know if you're a good man, but you don't think you can answer that question. You ask Clara, instead.

As it turns out, she doesn't know, either, and you're lost again.

You think that, at some point, you dropped the kind words and stuck to being a tactician. You don’t know when. Probably a long times ago. You think that it was easier.

(You think of a man fighting a war he wanted no part of, you think of a man who let it change him, break him. You think of trying to heal. You think you must have healed wrong.)

You saw the anger, the fear, the betrayal. You saw the hurt in her eyes, the way she looked at you like you’d done something terrible. You realize that she is not ready for that, for sticking to the big picture and forgetting about the snapshots. You realize that you aren’t, either, but you’ve spent so much time doing it.

You try to cushion the things you do, the things you say, with nice words. They feel like band aids patching up huge wounds. You think it is an inadequate start, but a start nonetheless.

(You still do things she would call terrible. Sometimes, you think you’re in the right. Other times your mistakes follow you, slowly, never stopping, and heralded by flies. You try to learn from them.)

It becomes tiring. So tiring.

You try to be nice, because it’s what she would want, but it takes so much, and you haven’t yet learned to be kind again. Your nerves are rubbed raw, you feel like your skin is too small to hold all that you are.

Things grate on your nerves more than normal, for reasons you don’t want to acknowledge.

Soldiers grate on your nerves. P.E. grates on your nerves.

He knows you in a way you don’t want him to. He sees past the trying , past the regret, past the patched up holes in your soul. He sees you as you are and yet he doesn’t see you at all. You don’t like the feeling he brings with him, of vulnerability, of someone looking past the curtain and seeing that you’re really not that impressive or good or kind at all.

You realize you were cruel to him, but that realization only really hits you when he’s dead. When it’s too late for apologies. You hold the dead in higher regard, somehow, because they have been somewhere you have never been. Because they know more then you could ever know. Because you have so many friends filling up whatever afterlife there might be.

You put those thoughts out of your mind. You try to live, though usually unsuccessfully.

As time goes on you realize that even after everything, you still don’t really know who you are. Not in the way the others had. You realize this one, this life, will take blood sweat and tears to crack. You realize that you need to find out who you are in a way the others didn’t need to or didn’t care to.

It’s tiring, like so many other things, and realizations only come every so often, but it’s progress.

As time goes on, you learn more about yourself.

You learn that you are capable of cruelty, if left unchecked. This is not as much of a surprise as you wish it was. You hope there will be someone there to stop you if you ever stray too far from your carefully constructed morals and rules.

You learn that not everything is easy or good, but you knew that already.

You learn that you are tired and weary of things you never thought you could be. You find that you need to stop more often, to rest, because running is becoming too much.

(You learn that, sometimes, you sort of wish everything would stop. Or maybe you wish you would.)

In the midst of it all, you are met with the face of your childhood friend, quite literally, and it takes you too long to realize who she is. You think that you were fooling yourself. Or maybe she’s just a really good actor.

She brings back memories, of times long past and lives long dead. She brings back faces you thought you’d buried, feelings and mistakes you thought you’d forgotten. You hate her for it as much as you’re glad she’s still alive.

Playing the sentimental old fool, in the end, only costs time and lives. By the time you’ve accepted her presence, as soon as you’ve accepted that she’s alive and well, by the time you’ve moved on, everything’s already gone to hell.

You’re on an airplane, and you’re saddled with more responsibility than anyone should give you. You’re asked to save the world.

This is no different from your average saturday, so you think the formal request shouldn’t change anything. It does, though, in a strange way that slips through your fingers like smoke.

She talks to you, in winding words, in sporadic sentences, in tricks and deceptions and you want to grab her and ask her what’s so scary about saying what you mean. You want to skip past the lies, the subterfuge, the nemesis act, and you want her to talk to you.

(You think later, much later, when you’ve had time to dwell on things, that that is probably what people feel like when they talk to you.)

You want to ask her if she remembers when you were little, when you would play together, run together. You want to ask her if she misses it as much as you do. You want to be able to ask her that without any reason not to.

Above all else, you just want her to be good.

You think that Kate and Osgood are dead, and there’s no reason for that to be the case. You think that she will never be your idea of good.

You want to stop, you want to acknowledge it and everything else, to pause and mourn, but you can’t. There are more pressing matters.

It all converges in a graveyard.

(For a fleeing moment you think that you finally look like you belong, among grey stones and the dead. You think you’re being a little overdramatic.)

It was all for you, it turns out. A gift.

It horrifies you.

You’re put on display. There is a magnifying glass scrutinizing you and all your choices. What you say and what you do suddenly hold a weight that they usually don’t.

In a terrifying moment that seems to stretch on endlessly you are not allowed to be a person. In that moment, you are everything anyone has ever called you, you are every overly poetic title and curse anyone has ever leveled at you.

You feel a terrible weight on your shoulders. You think that when you ran all those years ago you never expected to end up here.

You feel yourself crack under the pressure, the expectation.

You realize something, in the moment before it feels like you’re going to fall apart.

You had tried to find an answer, a definite one, because surely someone was either good or bad. Surely, the weight of someone’s actions ultimately determined which side of the spectrum they fell on. If your good deeds outweighed the bad, then you were good. If your bad deeds outweighed the good, then you were bad.

You don’t know when you started seeing the world in monochrome, but you’re starting to see the grey again. You’re starting to see how foolish you are, and how you keep fooling yourself, time and time again.

You think you should dwell more on your mistakes and learn from them, instead of let them break you. At the same time, you don’t know if you could, because there are so many and sometimes you can’t tell which is which.

You think that you are an idiot.

You let Clara think she’s gone. You lie about Missy, you lie about your home.

(It seems that you’re still not done making mistakes. You know you never will be.)

As it turns out, Clara lies to you, too.

You are both fools, trying to do the right thing in the moment. You are both blinded by emotion and ambition and freshly learned lessons that haven’t been hammered out with addendums and footnotes.

You’re both fooled into thinking you’re good and right when really you’re neither, but you’re not necessarily the opposite, if there even is one.

Time passes. You think more. You learn more.

You learn, sometime after Missy, that - and this should be frightening, but it’s not - you don’t care to continue on.

You leave a boy alone on a battlefield.

The guilt eats you alive.

You wish you could fabricate good choices out of bad situations, but as you once told Clara, sometimes the only choices you can make are bad ones, but you still have to choose. You wish that helped with the guilt.

As it turns out, in the end, the choice you make is mercy. It helps, for a while, but the knowledge that you left that boy to die at any point still chips away at you.

(The knowledge of what you could have done - what you thought you’d done - still chips away at you, centuries and light years away from that barn.)

You are alone one night - never a good thing to be - and you are struck with a realization.

The thought of dying again, of changing again, is beyond unattractive. The idea of building yourself up again, of starting this whole process over again, of relearning things you thought you’d hammered into the fabric of your being again, seems insurmountable. It boils in your stomach and melts like acid in your mouth. It sends your head spinning.

You feel awful. Tired. Afraid of living.

You don’t want to change again.

You can’t change again.

You think it would break you. You know for a fact that it will erase who you are and replace you with someone else. You hate that thought as much as the others.

You think that you would rather just die.

(You think that this is not a new thought, and that it has been chasing you for a long time.)

You think you might not have a choice in the matter. You think that someone, somewhere, would gather your atoms if you threw yourself into a supernova and stitch you back together again, as a new person, a new Doctor that has to discover who they are again - and again - and again.

(That does not mean you can’t try.)

Time Lords are not meant to go past thirteen faces, a fact that has been drilled into your head and that chased you all through your last life. You are at the brink. You are that last face, or you would be, if it wasn’t for a wonderful, impossible girl who saved your life in innumerable ways, time and time again.

You think that you understand why they don’t have more, why there aren’t infinite regenerations stitched into the fabric of every Time Lord. You think that, in the face of losing your identity over and over, switching your face for another go at life is not worth it.

Or maybe you’re just old fashioned.

You remember who you used to be, in vague terms. You remember the things that happened, the people you knew. The things you felt are far away and distant, like you dreamt them, like everything before that night in England, where an ancient creature was plucked out of its time and burned on the banks of the Thames, was something you read in a story.

The memories and the emotions feel like they belonged to someone else, someone who died long ago and left you with the mementoes of their life. You know that, somewhere deep in your ship, there are rooms of bits and bobs and memories that don’t mean much to anyone except the one who’s gone.

You think of that happening to you as you are now - you think of some new person walking out of the ashes of who you used to be and you think of being reduced to nothing but what you wore and a handful of personality traits. You think of being looked back at through a memory in someone else’s head.

You think the awful, sticky, clinging feeling these thoughts bring would be worrying to Clara, so you don’t bring them up.

(You realize too late that, if you’re just going to change someday, it might be better if you drifted in an ether, without a distinct identity or personality to be overridden by the next one. It would make it less painful, you think, if there was nothing to worry about losing.)

You cope in your own ways, but you know Clara would admonish you for the obviously unhealthy methods you have.

You try to ignore the thoughts that make it hard to leave your ship and you work hard to save lives.

If you don’t keep a particularly close eye on your own well being, well, it was just a momentary lapse in judgement.

You talk a lot - you always have - because the silence, the suggestion that there should be more going on, more to do in the fleeting moments that slip through even your fingers like sand, grates on your ears and your mind and you're filled to bursting with a feeling of urgency - that you are wasting away your moments, and you must get going.

You talk a lot, but you don’t say much. Sometimes, even when it’s important, you let words spill out of your mouth, ones you don’t check because they sound like they might work in your head. By the time you’re done talking you’re not sure if you got your point across or not.

Your filters are being worn down slowly, by time, by exhaustion. You’ve done this so many times before that you’re no longer sure if this one thing, this tiny cluster of people, this backwater planet, really matter at all.

You are grabbed forcibly by your lapels and reminded that, yes, they matter. They all matter. They always matter.

You take a few steps back. You let yourself care again, because callous is not something you're allowed to be.

You are the Doctor. It is your job to care. To save people.

The identity is easy to cling to, a way to define yourself when you feel like you’re losing yourself. When you almost make a mistake you wouldn't be able to come back from.  

Even so, you find that you are forgetting things, more and more. Things don’t click like they used to. You think they haven’t for a long time.

There’s too much in your head now, making the puzzle pieces in your head warp and drift, making it harder to recall things from ages ago, back before you weren’t so old and tired.

You find it hard to care about things, but you know that you care deeply and viscerally about Clara. You’re teetering on an edge with her that you can’t name. She’s teetering on an edge, too. She’s becoming too much like you.

Things are fine for a while, even if you are worried about her, but then you feel your world fall apart.

You feel like the ground has opened up and you’re in free fall, like you’re in deep space without a spacesuit. You stare at her in horror and you know there’s nothing you can do. There is agony in your hearts and you know that she is going to die.

You know it’s your fault because you brought her here. You know it’s your fault because you didn’t just let her drift away and live her own life. You know it’s your fault because you lead by example and your suicidal tendencies may have looked like bravery or cunning to her.

It’s your fault and she’s going to die if you don’t do something.

So you do.

You rip off the mask, the identity, the name you’ve been clinging to and hiding behind, the one you’ve been trying to live up to. This is not the time to hold back, because if you do then Clara will most certainly die.

You can’t be the Doctor right now, because he has too many rules and too many regrets.

You have to be whoever you are now, with this face and this body. You have to be the person who left her alone with those androids, who left her alone on the moon to make a terrible choice. You have to be the person who makes the bad choices because they’re the only ones to make.

You have to be willing to be what you’re afraid of.

(Deep down, you know you don’t want to be, not really. But words are flowing out of your mouth, threats that you will deliver on, and you don’t know if you’ll be able to stop yourself. You don’t know if you even want to.)

Clara stares at you, scared. She doesn’t believe what you’re saying. She doesn't believe in the man behind the mask.

Or maybe she does, but she won’t accept it. Like the countless other times, she won’t let you fall off the edge of the cliff.

She won’t let you disgrace her memory. She won’t let anyone else suffer.

(“What about me?”

“If I could do something about that, I would.”)

And so she steps out in the street.

There is the sharp cry of a raven and then -

You’re sent off, somewhere. It looks like a castle.

It is a torture chamber, fashioned especially for you, complete with your nightmares from childhood.

Time ticks by, painfully slowly, and painfully endless.

Every time you almost give up. Every time you just barely find the strength to keep going.

A bird chisels his way through the mountain with his fist and the memory of all he’s lost.

And then, after the universe has burned itself out, you find your way back to the desert that was once your home.

Except it has been so, so long, and it doesn’t feel quite like home. Not like you’d hoped it would. It is disappointing. You think you didn’t spend all this time mourning to be disappointed. You think the universe owes you more than this.

You feel like you’re close to shaking apart, like the repetition has sunk its claws into you and won’t let go, like you’ve forgotten how to not be scared. You think it’s even harder to think.

There is a boy in the desert, in a place that had once been a battlefield. You tell him to tell them that you’re back.

And then, you make one bad decision after another, because you have a plan that was formed in the space of a few minutes over the course of billions and billions of years, and you will make it work, because the alternative is terrible and terrifying.

You can’t cope with the thought of failure, because then what did you fight so hard and so long for?

You banish the man that carries the weight of a billion billion souls like they’re nothing, the man that founded your society, the man that was a legend, the man that was once your hero, like so many others, only to prove corrupt and beyond redemption.

You think that it is somehow anticlimactic.

(You think, in some dark corner of your mind, that he deserved to suffer more.)

And then, they ask you for your help, but you have another plan that you won’t let them stand in the way of.

You kill a man but you can’t seem to care, because her hand is in yours again and she’s safe.

And then -

And then -

And then what?

You find yourself in a diner. You tell your story to the nice girl there, who’s stuck in the middle of a desert that was never and will never be her home.

You write a song, and you try to pour all that you feel into it. You try to turn it into a face, a person, a memory, but it just ends up sounding sad. You hoped it would remove the aching emptiness in your soul that’s been carved out and left behind somewhere with someone you don’t recall but it doesn’t.

You write more songs. They get closer, but it’s never quite enough.

(Sometimes, in the depths of night, on the rare occasions you sleep, your mind slips back to that routine and you leap up and try to remember how long it's been, if you should be moving again or if you can stand still just a little longer.

The memories are so much harder to bear when you’ve lost the supports that kept you going, kept you fighting. Now, you have the memories of what you did, of the fear and the pain and none of the relief.

Sometimes, you almost think you can remember her face.

Sometimes, you want to cry and yell and break something because the good things never last but the bad follows you, hunts you in a castle for billions of years and kills you countless times.

These feelings always fade with the sun.)

You are alone for a while. Never a good thing to be.

You start thinking too much.

You think that you have lost a lot. Battles, arguments, planets. Friends. You think that somewhere along the road of loss, you started to get desperate. Desperate to keep those you love, desperate to win, even once, and to have it last.

(It’s funny, you think, how one loss overturns all the good you’ve done.)

You think that somewhere down the line you’re going to make a rash decision, one you can’t take back. You think you’re going to do something that will do more harm than good. You think you’re going to be truly selfish and almost bring down the universe with it.

You’re afraid that sometime in your future you’re going to tear apart the universe to help the ones you love.

You hope that someone will be there to stop you.

(Someone has, maybe. The thought sounds familiar, the desperation lingering in your head, in your hearts. Someone has, someone has. You can't for the life of you remember who.)

You wonder, for a while, if it would be better for everyone if you stopped forming connections with people, if you isolated yourself and kept yourself away from everything. If you stopped caring.

And then, you find your wife, and that notion is stuffed down in the darker parts of your soul, hopefully never to see the light again.

But she thinks that you don’t love her and that you never have. It is a terrible blow to you, but you think that it has been chipping away at her for so much longer. You have to fix this.

You spend 24 blissful years with her (with plenty of vacations and adventures between) and you feel truly happy, truly content, and you never want it to end.

It does, though, because of course it does. But River has spent long nights with you, reminding you that you are loved, always, and you put as much energy as you possibly can reminding her of the same.

She picks away slowly at all the horrible, toxic thoughts that have been festering in your mind for so long. She dismantles all of them and smoothes your edges and teaches you a thing or two about healthy coping mechanisms.

You try to do the same, but you’re so bad at dealing with your own problems that you think you didn’t actually do much. She appreciates the effort, but in the end it’s her that helps you.

She reminds you that you don’t always have to be the hero.

She reminds you that the end of one thing doesn't mean the end of everything.

She reminds you that you'll always have your memories to look back on fondly.

(You don't tell her that you're tired of having so many memories to look back on.)

It ends, because it must, and you are sad for a time.

(Sad feels flimsy, ephemeral, but you don't want to give it more power over you, because River wouldn't want that.)

After Darillium, you have a - not a companion. You don't think Nardole is a companion. He’s - a carer.

(Somebody who cares so you don't have to.)

You rebuilt him because you knew how badly you handle being alone, and you know you can’t be.

He sticks with you through your years long brooding streak, through the long nights where you can do nothing but stare and think of all you’ve lost and mourn them.

He sticks with you through daring escapades and idiotic risks and unlike the others he understands perfectly what you’re doing.

He doesn’t try to explain it away with bravery. You’re almost grateful.

He sticks with you when you find your best friend again, when you pledge to watch over her. To make her better.

He sticks with you through 70 years at a university where you teach and live and put up with linear time because you have your best friend with you and a job to do.

(You're not tired of adventuring. You'd laugh at anyone who dared suggest it. You're not tired of that. You're just tired of losing.)

Missy might be getting better, or maybe that's just wishful thinking. You try to put all of your effort into helping her, into rehabilitating her. Into getting your friend back.

Ultimately, your attention is diverted by a young woman.

She is so radiant and good, stalwart in who she is and so proud in her identity. She is amazing and full of life, she wants to accomplish things, she wants to learn. She wants to do so much and be so much but she’s stuck in a university cafeteria serving chips.

You want to be more like her.

It has been so long since you've formed a meaningful connection with anyone beyond your immediate group of acquaintances that you make a rash and unplanned decision.

She wants to learn - she is not a student. You go about fixing that.

She is intrigued by you, or maybe she's interested in the things you can teach her. You're not used to someone being interested in you, and just you. Not the identity you’ve built up, or the legends that follow you, or the short lived wonder at the universe.

You’re not used to someone being friends with the man behind the mask.

You're not used to that word, either. It died with all the others, and you've been too crass and rude this time around for anyone to call you that and mean it like she does.

You were going to show her the stars eventually, but she takes the step first.

You ask her when she wants to go, past or future.

She says future. She wants to see if it's happy.

You so, so want it to be happy. For her. You don't want to let her down, so you try.

It doesn't quite work out like you'd hoped, but it's the start. The next tipping point.

You break your vow, way too early. You leave earth - it's a time machine, it'll be fine. You go on adventures, you fall back into the familiar rhythm.

Then, it's unfamiliar, because you can't see.

Then, it's unfamiliar because the earth has been traded away.

Then, it's unfamiliar because your friend, who has spent so much time dancing out of your reach, burning planets and people, is reforming - or trying to.

You want to give her a chance to prove herself, so you do.

It was a mistake, and you should have known, but it was not her mistake.

(But, in a way, it sort of was.)

You feel the way time is wrong in the ship, how the top moves like a glacier while the bottom is a waterfall. The seconds tick by as days, the minutes as years.

You try to be the commanding voice in the room, the voice of reason, (the coward hiding behind a title burned in the stars), but there is the taste of a discharged energy weapon in the air, and Bill is -

Bill is -

You feel the ground fall out from under you, and it feels like you are stuck drifting in space without a spacesuit.

You haven't failed this badly since - (there is a void where a name should be).

You have to save her, have to help her, so you try.

You find that you are too late. You find yourself staring at the faces of your best friend. The one you held as he died but didn't, the one who disappeared back home, the one you never thought you’d see again.

The one you've come to know better than the rest, because she didn't push away, even though she could have. The one you spent hours with, in the Vault, as she thought on her past and cried, and the next day pretended it didn't happen.

You cannot help but feel betrayed, though you are not surprised.

(You dared to hope. You are thrust back onto the weatherbeaten track that you are oh so tired of.)

They are planning to kill you, but that isn't new. What is new is the lack of fear, the lack of, well, much of anything. You are worried, of course, for the other people on the ship, the ones who will soon be overrun, but not for yourself.

You know your time ran out long ago. You know that you’re a clerical error. A mistake. You know you should never have existed in the first place.

You manage to get them on your side through a manipulation in the computer - a single number.

(Unbidden, you think that you will soon be nothing but a number in a long line of faces - of people who had tried to carry on the name you'd given yourself, but had ultimately fallen short in some way.)

You unite, because now you have a common enemy, but it's only for a while, and he doesn't care, doesn't want to stay past the bare minimum required. You're not sure about her. You hope.

Bill - you try to hear her, through the limited range of inflections that now dot her speech, and it takes a while to separate the harsh tones you'd always associated with death and danger, but you do, because you owe her that much and so much more.

You wish you could save her but -

There are tears in her eyes, and where there's tears, there's hope. You hope, as much as you can, but in the end you have to fight alone, because everyone has left.

You feel something tear through your body, then another. Cybermen are shooting at you, so you fight back.

You end up on the ground, your body slowly crumbling, smoke and fire billowing up into the sky.

There are no stars.

You suppose after you failed you wouldn't deserve them, and even if you saw them they wouldn't be real, because it's not a real sky, but you'd still hoped. There is an empty void in your chest, and you tell yourself it is because the sky is dark and lifeless, and not because your friends are somewhere, dead, dying, or alive yet gone.

You think that you're glad they're not there, because you don't want them to see you like this.

You feel energy pushing out of you, healing your wounds, fixing you. Changing you.

You feel a spike of terrible fear. You feel how you are, and you feel how you might be, and you are afraid, once again, of being looked back at through memories in someone else's head. You cannot build yourself up from nothing, not again. You have done it too many times - this would be well and truly pushing past the limit.

You wonder how you managed to get this far after all of the stupid, uselessly risky choices you’ve made. You feel like, somehow, you’ve failed once again, because you’re going to change.

You feel the weight of exhaustion and your wounds pushing down on you, and you feel like if you stay on the ground you will sink through the grating so you have to get up and -

You are in your TARDIS and you don't know when or how you ended up there, and you don't think it really matters.

You say something familiar, and it drops out of your mouth and splatters on the floor and you have no idea if it made any sort of sense at all, but it doesn't matter because there is no one there to hear. Your feet stumble around your ship’s console, but you are too injured and desperate to operate the ship.

You feel the walls pushing in on you, you feel your breath catching in the recycled air of your ship, and you have to get out you have to -

Cold wind stings your body, and you fall to your knees.

There is fear, desperation. There is the feeling of being too much, of everything moving too fast, of too many mistakes, of too many regrets. You are scared.  

You feel warmth - painful, and you close your eyes and hear yelling that you're certain is your own.

You can't change again. You won't.

“No, no, it’s utterly ridiculous. I won’t change, I won’t do it.”

You look up. You see an elderly man in clothes not necessarily appropriate for the time or place. Something shifts, in you, in the air, in everything. The stakes have been rearranged, the rules changed.

You get up. You have to convince a stubborn old man to keep on living.