Work Text:
So now what should I do,
I'm strung out, addicted to you
My body aches, now that you're gone
My supply fell through
- Akira Yamaoka, You're Not Here
I.
Two months. She has become used to the empty spaces. She tells herself it's a good thing. It's the right thing. She's certain that if she repeats it long enough she will eventually believe the lie, if not make it true.
Routine creeps in, and rather than comforting she finds it maddening. Too mundane, too boring, too simple. Too human.
She drinks tea in the morning and a little too much wine alone in the small hours of the night. Wakes from dreams of starlight burning in blue eyes to a pounding in her head and an emptiness in her gut. Her skin feels as if it has been peppered with slivers of glass, and she snags on everything.
It hurts. It will get better, she tells herself. It will get easier. Just give it time.
But time wears on and it gives no comfort. Something tugs at her, a million lines on a million tiny splinters under her skin, plucking her nerves like harp strings. Sometimes she feels that if she turned around fast enough she would see threads unraveling behind her, caught on those splinters, tugging insistently.
Bright blue threads. Blue like his eyes. TARDIS blue.
II.
Four months. Danny leaves. She doesn't blame him. After a time she spent more time looking over his shoulder for a glimpse of a silver-haired head or a bright blue box than she did looking at him. He deserves better than that, and she tells him so. It is a relief for both of them, though neither admit it, and when they part the kiss she presses to his cheek is a grateful one.
The empty spaces remain empty. She maintains them, keeps them clear just in case. It's almost an unconscious act, but not completely. No more than it is when she brews a pot of strong coffee on Wednesday afternoons and sets out two mugs.
Just in case.
Somewhere inside she is still hopeful, but as the afternoon drags on and the shadows get longer and darker she remembers the things he did and the things she said and the emptiness around her that she still can't bring herself to fill, just in case, and the hope drains out of her, bit by bit, like the heat slowly seeping from a coffee pot.
Before long the coffee is stone cold, and so is she.
III.
Six months. Autumn edges closer to winter and the tugging increases. The urge to get away is maddening.
Her flat seems all together too small and too empty still. The walls threaten to close in. The spaces where he should be but isn't seem to get bigger. She wants to get away. She needs to get away. The moon grows fat - pregnant - and she wonders at the life she knows is inside of it, at the fledgling so close to its first flight.
Sometimes she sings to it. Lullabies, reassurances. Apologies.
She almost killed it. Such a long time ago on a day that has not yet come to pass. She thinks of it often when the moon is full. How close it all came to disaster. How close he let it come. The anger has dulled. The ache has not.
She nearly calls him on a night like that. A full November moon throwing cold fire across the living room floor, filling the space where nothing sits, not anymore. She huddles in one corner, drinking too much wine and thinking too many thoughts, hovering over the send button on her phone.
I had faith that you would always make the right choice.
But she nearly made the wrong one, nearly killed a harmless creature for fear of what it might do and could be and on the heels of that she made another choice, one that she wishes she could take back. He had been sincere at the last. Confused and defensive but sincere. She has seen that moment play through in her dreams too many times to not be sure of this and she is afraid to call now not because he might answer, but because he might not. Because he might not forgive her.
He hadn't meant to hurt her, but at that last she had lashed out, and she had wounded him intentionally.
You get back in your lonely bloody TARDIS and you don't come back!
Her hands tremble, and she tells herself it is the wine. The tightness in her chest is the wine, too. So are the tears in her eyes.
The moon wanes. There is a suitcase by the living room door these days.
Just in case.
Sometimes she tries to tells herself it is only the traveling she misses. That she'd become addicted to the thrill of it. The adrenaline. Not him. Not Chin Boy. Not the Gray-Haired Stick Insect. Not those big, sad eyes that she still sees in her dreams, that make her feel all at once like she flying and falling, caught in some inescapable pull that still tugs and tugs until it feels like it will tear her apart.
Addiction is a neater explanation than love, and so she clings to it. Addictions can be fought, maybe even beaten. Controlled.
What fight is there, what fight could their ever be against love?
The empty spaces remain empty. She keeps them that way. Just in case.