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I've danced with a woman long dead, for whom I was salvation, damnation, distraction. A dream packed away in a child's dolls house taken out of its wrappings in the attic on a rainy afternoon. I've danced with Rose, for whom I've been prince and prancing juggler, action hero and Aristotelian. And yet he was the only one who took me at my word when I said I didn't dance. He asked once, outright, at the beginning and never had the chance to ask again. He asked and I refused him. A decade before the war years, during those years, Noel danced with his boy, with his cad, on the dance floor of the Cafe de Paris in Coventry Street. It was scandalous. It was just after closing time. Just Noel and his Georgie-boy prince. Noel danced with his boy. I never had the chance to dance with mine.
Irony is bitter and palpable.
Nothing that happened was about her, not really. Despite Rose's misconceptions and Mickey's surprising tact, well let's just say I wasn't fooling myself that anything that happened was really about Reinette at all. You ever run from something, only to find that it's leeching you dry like a parasite? Grief can be like that when you chuck it into a cocktail shaker with a swirl of regret. Missed chances can choke you just as well as a miss-swallowed daiquiri.
Did he drink daiquiris in the basement of the Ritz Hotel as bombs dropped; amid flattened masonry, wood, lintels, plaster and children's... toys? Did he twirl a cocktail stick in a martini, or slam back whiskey, poured over melting ice, while London froze during that war-time winter? I never asked.
I regenerated.
He... didn't.
And ever since the gap that was once filled by his flirtatious tone, by his agile, able hands manning the ships controls, that space which was rightfully his, yaws wide. Then wider still. A temporal canyon of festering grief that sits somewhere below my right heart, somewhere above my solar plexus. A sea of grief that eats away at me like a gluttonous acidic parasite. And Rose thinks I'm so bloody happy! Do you know how difficult it is to be this happy all the time? He'd think I was main-lining something. Stopping off in dodgy bars, buying small bags of blow. Grief can be as sweet as sugar. Grief can be as dizzying as coke.
It was the broken clock that really got to me. Smashed glass and metal.
Demolished.
Deactivated.
Dead.
Just like him; left lying on that battle-station floor. Alone. No green pastures for my... For him. No peace and tranquility. And how bitter my unshed grief each and every subsequent unfolding day.
Reinette's letter sits in my coat pocket. Thick textured paper, almost a linen weave, like sheets. He never slept upon my sheets, upon my bed. He never asked and I... Hubris to believe that you have time, even when it's meant to dance at the ends of your fingertips. Folly to believe that you can wait for the right moment. And when it comes, it's a bullet to the chest. Machine gun fire that would have opened up his chest, smashed through his ribs, turned his heart to shredded muscle. A pool of bloody seeping meat where once was life and love and joy.
Rose was the one to tell me that the clockwork crew used human organs to power the ship. As if they still held the resonance of the people they'd once been so integral to. As if a heart can be quantified, measured and weighed as nothing but muscular tissue. It isn't from that mass of muscle that we love. We dream from some indefinable chemical mix of blood and endorphins, of possibility and hope and attraction. We dream of connection. Reinette was as sweet as she was challenging. Self-possessed, elegant in mind and demeanor, flirtatious, witty. Not as overt about it as he was, despite the fact that she took the initiative and kissed me. He waited. And waited a moment too long until brevity caught up with us.
I spurred the horse on through the glass and yes, for the main thought about the girl; Reinette... the woman. Thought about the timeline. Thought about the possibilities that come with lack of choice. For if I'd stayed in France, well a clean blade to the neck and regeneration would have been difficult. Another bullet or two and this malarky would have been over. He'd be so... disgusted that I even entertained that thought. My flirtatious Captain, who would have coaxed himself into whatever bed Reinette wasn't sharing with the king and fully enjoyed both our... company. He would have fooled himself that he could share. And maybe it would have been simpler, had I done the same.
He asked me to dance, once and I refused.
Why?
How could I forget that chance is fleeting?
Rose never mentions him. Rose has forgotten him and we're ... alright. Travelling with Mickey. Travelling on a fantastic, fantabulous tour of the universe, chasing the monsters out from under the bed. My monsters sleep with me, curled up safe and calm beneath crisp cotton sheets. Or they sleep alone, without me as I pace the TARDIS corridors at night. It was never about smart, brilliant, beautiful, funny Reinette.
If I stare at her words long enough they'll fade, as will the scent of banana from my sticky fingers. And when I ask the TARDIS nicely, calmly, she'll play Coward's song for me. Once and again and again and again. Coward's song for a man so self-proclaimed, who evolved into anything but. And to that refrain maybe I can sleep. For a while. An hour. Half that.
Time melds and shifts in my memories, if I sleep, when I sleep. If the TARDIS plays the right lullaby it will be 1942 0r 1943 and I'll be waiting, watching couples dance. Waiting for those blue eyes to smile at me from across a darkened room, for that broad, beautiful hand to reach out to mine and pull me onto the dance floor. Waiting for the dream that pains me and enchains me...
I cannot bear to think his name.