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He should have known immediately, he thinks later, but helping is his instinct, his nature. An automatic reaction.
It's not until he’s dived in without thought and reached into the burning car wreckage, then, that he realises exactly whose life he is in the middle of saving. It’s only then, when it feels like all the sound in the world has stopped, nothing but his own heartbeats pounding in his ears, that he realises how the air tastes different here, almost metallic. How the buzzing he’d heard when he first stepped out of the TARDIS, quickly dismissed in favour of running towards the almighty crash as two cars had collided in front of him, had been from a distant Zeppelin hovering high in the sky.
And by then it's too late.
Shouldn't be here shouldn't be here shouldn’t be here he thinks, as they load her onto the ambulance. He hangs reluctantly back, shifting his weight from foot to foot, not wanting to be seen, then leans forward despite himself, tries to tell them her name, tries to tell them a quicker way to save her life. He doesn't get very far. "She's – "
A paramedic smiles at him kindly, awkwardly fitting an oxygen mask to her blood-streaked face with one hand while his other fiddles with something on the roof. "It's OK, sir. We know who you are."
Spared repeating her name, he hops up beside her and exhales shakily. He's not sure he could have said it like it's normal, not after all this time.
"Said the car 'sploded," she mumbles fitfully, eyes not quite open, fingers clutching his at once too hard, then too loose, as she flits closer to and further away from this world. She does not seem to notice that his hands are colder than they should be. "Sorry – Dad's new car. Tell him, yeah?"
"Yeah," he replies softly when her fingers curl around his again, tugging his hand for a response. It’s shocking, his thinks, how much blood can fit inside a human body. How easily it can all leave.
"Sorry, sorry..."
For a moment, he thinks she is lost again – perhaps for longer, this time. But she's a fighter, he's always known that, and he underestimates her.
Her eyes flicker open again, clear just for a moment below the matted red streaks in her golden hair. One hand still clutched in his, she raises her other arm with great effort to reach shakily towards the lapel of his brown jacket, dangerously close to his right heart. He gathers her hand up just as her fingertips brush his shirt, brings it up to his lips, tells himself the contact is for her.
"Stay?"
Shouldn't be here shouldn't be here shouldn't.
She doesn't have to ask twice.
--
Once they've cleaned her up at the hospital, his frantic hearts slow a little. Without the blood smears and smoke marks, he can look at her and promise himself she'll be alright.
He's never trusted his own promises much. They don't have a great track record.
Shouldn't be here shouldn't be here.
But what if he wasn't?
"Sir, can we have a word?"
The words are stable and sleeping and quickly regained consciousness. There is a lot of blood. One very lucky. Another if. He doesn't tell the nurse that he cauterised the worst of her wounds with his sonic screwdriver in the ambulance when the paramedic wasn't looking.
He spends the entire conversation peering at her through the gaps in the blinds, one ear carefully trained on her room, the other just about taking in what the nurse says (even though he knows it all by now already, hyperaware of every flicker and beep of their backwards little 21st century monitors and gauges). He nods impatiently, not caring if it’s rude that he can’t tear his eyes away from her long enough to even glance in the nurse’s direction.
"...more and we'd have been worried about potential brain damage, but we've run a couple of scans and the baby's going to be just fine. We'll be monitoring them both carefully, though, of course, and – "
If she says anything else, it's drowned out by the buzzing in his ears. For the first time, he turns his head and stares at her.
Biting her lip, the nurse raises an eyebrow. "You did know she was pregnant, didn't you, sir? Sir?"
The sounds, when they come, feel as remote and unconnected to him as the music echoing tinnily from an ancient radio at the nurses' station across the corridor. "What? Yes. Yes, of course."
Did he say that?
She smiles at him, a little coyly. "We'll keep it quiet until she's ready to tell the public, of course, but there's obviously a lot of press interest. Nothing we can do about the cameras outside, I'm afraid. You understand."
He finds himself rubbing his chin. Living someone else's life, just for a second. A brief memory of flashbulbs going off as he pulled her from that car, not understanding until now.
There's a moment of silence. He thinks he nods. Seconds click by. Elsewhere in the hospital, a baby is born. A man stops breathing.
Inside the room, she sleeps on, undisturbed.
The one adventure I can never have.
And, looking at her through the slats in the blind, his front falling as the nurse steps away, he finally feels like he's back in his own skin.
Her family – his, once? – has been contacted. He can't stay. Any minute now...
It's been so long since he held her hand.
--
Perhaps twenty seconds after he leaves her room, coat snapping round the door frame behind him, he hears the unmistakable echo of Converse hurrying down a corridor, holding him back as he stays to watch what he swore he never would.
There are no words in any of the languages he knows (and he knows a lot) to sum up how it feels to see a worthier, happier, differently broken version of himself brush his trembling fingertips over her stomach and kiss her forehead in palpable relief – to be able to see every possible happy future playing out between them with greater clarity than his ability to see potential timelines had ever afforded him.
Was this what he'd wanted for them when he'd told her she'd made him better, that now she could do the same for him? What Donna had been referring to when she'd asked if they knew what they were being given?
He’d thought so with such conviction back then, but having to watch it with his own eyes, now he's not sure.
The other man takes a seat on the edge of the bed and leans down to kiss her. She opens her eyes sleepily, gives him a look he’s seen her wear a thousand times – beneath alien sunsets, across the kitchen in her mother’s flat, through the darkness in the middle of the night in a room he hasn’t been able to set foot in since that day at Canary Wharf.
He's getting wrinkles.
Shouldn't be here.
On his way out, he catches sight of a newspaper – March, 2013. Almost five years since he left her here.
Is he glad (or bitter, or jealous, or disappointed) that it took them (only, a whole) five years to move on, to carve a life of their own?
A nurse finds him wandering, dazed, through the corridors, tugs him aside and leads him towards the work entrance, telling him with a knowing wink that the papers are out front and won't expect to find him leaving this way. He wonders briefly how his other self deals with the lack of anonymity – wonders if it matters, here, in this life of Torchwood assignments, trips to IKEA and Sunday dinners with the Tylers.
"...always liked you," the nurse is saying, as her colleague comes along and helps usher him down the corridor away from the sound of clicking cameras and jostling notebooks by the front door. "Haven't we, Lisa?"
Lisa is a redhead. He's surprised there's room for that to sting, too, but it does.
"Oh yeah," she says – thankfully, in a Liverpudlian accent. "She deserves some happiness, that girl. Funny childhood. Works too hard. But you'll know that." Lisa-the-Liverpudlian-nurse beams up at him and points a stern finger at him, mockingly. "You keep looking after her, mister. Er, sir."
Strange, how everyone's politer here.
"Are you two gettin' married, like the paper said?" the one who is not Lisa asks eagerly.
Politer, and nosier.
There had been a ring, he realises now, slippery with blood under his fingers as he’d clutched hers in the back of the ambulance.
The nurse looks up at his stony face with something like guilt masking her curiosity. "...Sorry, that was inappropriate."
"Yes, it bloody was," Lisa chimes in. "Are you, though?"
He thanks them for their kindness, he thinks, and disappears into the night before they can realise he's already at their patient's bedside.
Her blood lies in the creases of his fingertips.
Should never have been here.
But he's glad he was.