Chapter Text
When I was nineteen years old I met a man called the Doctor. He grabbed my hand and told me to run and I did. We never stopped running. He took me away from home in his magical machine and showed me the whole of time and space. I thought it would last forever.
I was wrong.
The army of ghosts came, and Torchwood and the war. We were separated by a wall that could never be breached, him on one side and I on the other in an entirely different universe. I’d tried to save the universe and in the process I’d lost him.
He’d said I could never see him again, speaking as a hologram on a deserted beach in Norway. I don’t know that I ever believed him. I’d told him forever and I’d meant it. I loved him, and even if he couldn’t say it back, I knew that he loved me, too.
So I never gave up.
I went back and found my Doctor. I’m not saying it was easy, because it was anything but. I saw things I should never have seen, did things I shouldn’t have been able to do, things that burn within me still. But I kept going, because I knew he was out there, somewhere.
I found my Doctor in the midst of a darkness that was unlike anything either of our universes had ever seen. Death and destruction like I wouldn’t have believed possible.
But I found him. I was not leaving him again. We were going to save the universe again and be together. We’d travel and have adventures and everything would be as it was before.
Things never happen the way you think they will. To save his life the Doctor changed into two men, identical but for the fact that one was human. One heart, one lifetime. Entirely unlike the Doctor.
And then the Doctor did what I never thought he would do. He left me behind again, left his human counterpart. Trapped us together on a world where neither one of us belonged, where neither one of us wanted to be.
Some women would be angry. Some would be devastated. Some would give up.
I did all those things. And then I realized I’d been given a gift.
Maybe you think I should have tried harder to keep him, to stay with him, to go back to his universe and find him again.
Maybe you wouldn’t think I could be happy, under the circumstances.
You’d be wrong.