He is mad. He is absolutely, completely, utterly mad, she thinks.
He doesn't look mad. He looks handsome, with his dark hair and his pale skin, with his sharp blue eyes and the soft flush to his cheeks whenever he speaks with her. His cheekbones are high and dashing, his fingers smooth and long, his figure tall and almost but not quite imposing. His lips are red, his teeth are white.
He rarely smiles. He may look handsome, but he does not look beautiful, not with that eternal sadness that's lingering in his eyes. That is important. Handsome, but not beautiful: to be beautiful, he should smile, he should laugh, he should forget the years and years spent uselessly longing for she doesn't know what.
He looks saturnine, and ancient, and as lethal as an avalanche – although if an avalanche kills you, suffocates you slowly as you freeze to death, it's a far more merciful death than the unspeakably cruel deeds he is able to commit. Where there's a great love, she thinks as she looks upon him, there is a great potential for pain.
He may look saturnine, and sad, and insane, but it doesn't put Bella off. It fits him, all of it fits him just right, fits him like the striped scarf around his neck and the dark shadows beneath his eyes. She isn't afraid of him and knows that she should be. Everyone is afraid of him, everyone she's met so far.
Not Bella Swan. She can't imagine fearing the Doctor.
"Hurry! Two more seconds and we'll-" he yells, but Bella will never know what were to happen should she not close the door behind herself in time. She almost trips, he catches her and pushes her through the door; she turns around and throws it close, and there's scratching on the other side, but they're safe. For now. She takes a deep breath. There a three feet door made of some kind of metal protecting them from the huge, grotesque mutant mice with mantis shrimp claws on the other side of it, and she hopes the metal is as solid as it is futuristic.
Behind her, the Doctor, too, takes a few deep breaths. She turns to face him and can't fight a small smile spreading on her face. "Two more seconds and what?" she asks and he looks at her intensely.
"I'll spare you the gruesome details." he says and her smile grows into a grin.
"I was pretty sc... that was really scary. I thought I'd end up as mice meal."
The Doctor clears his throat. "I wouldn't have let them eat you."
"Oh?" she replies. "I can clearly remember you were running from them as well. Running usually isn't the best way to protect somebody, you know."
There's still scratching coming from the other side of the door, but Bella can't seem to care, not at all.
"Bella." His voice is grave. "Nothing could've have happened." He steps closer and suddenly she doesn't feel so brave anymore. "I wouldn't have let anything happen to you..." His words trail off while their conversation carries on through their eyes. He grabs her shoulder and pulls her closer, and Bella's breath catches in her throat. She feels her heart fluttering in her chest, beating fast, the adrenaline of the chase mingling with the pleasant tingling sensation of a hand she's desired for too long on her shoulder, and her eyes close, and she leans forward and –
It is going to happen, it is finally going to happen – the last hours have been building up to this, the Doctor will ––
Someone clears their throat. Bella's eyes fly open and she looks around, startled, shocked. The Doctor draws back. She'd thought the room deserted, but of course, of flipping course someone's in here.
"Excuse me," says a huge alien with red skin and green spots covering his bare arms. It's a male, Bella thinks, and his voice is demure. She's scowling. The situation had been there, it had been perfect, the moment she's dreamed about since she's stepped into the TARDIS, and then there's this... he's hurt, she realizes with a start, the alien's hurt, and she hurries to kneel down by his side.
The room is small and dark and cramped. The walls are a dark brown; it's not wood but metal, yet it feels organic. The dim light comes from an old-fashioned light bulb dangling from the ceiling. Her hands dance across the alien's skin. He looks at her, very puzzled, and the antennae on his head shift imperceptibly. There's crimson blood pouring out of a huge gaping wound on one of his four legs, which is probably why he's sitting on the cold tiled floor. "I apologize, Miss, but-" the alien begins to say, but Bella shushes him.
The scratching slowly trails away. The mice monsters seem to grow bored with the door.
"He's badly hurt, Edward," she tells the Doctor. "Do you have bandages? We need to stop the blood flow, if we don't he might not make it, do you have anything we could-"
The Doctor interrupts her. "He's not hurt. He's- blimey, stop that, that's not his blood, that's his-"
Bella pales and withdraws her hands from the alien's body.
"-tea. He brews tea inside of his body." the Doctor finishes and Bella gasps with relief.
"Oh. Okay. I see." She scrutinizes the alien; it breathes heavily through its nose.
"Indeed. Care for a cuppa? I can't offer milk right now, but..."
"Thanks," Bella says, "I am quite fine."
There is the hint of a smile on the Doctor's face. The alien turns its head slightly and looks at him. The red liquid pours out of his wound, crimson-colored and steaming. The tea smells like raspberries, Bella notices, and cinnamon. "Edward, that is your name, sir?" the alien asks and Bella has to fight a smile on her face.
The Doctor raises his dark eyebrows. "It is my name, yes, but that doesn't mean you shall call me thus. Others usually know me as the Doctor."
The alien visibly pales; Bella isn't sure if that's because of the Doctor's words or because he has freaking tea pouring out of his abdomen, for God's sake. "The Doctor," he whispers and raises one hand, pointing at a small door hidden behind a corner. His hand is shaking. Okay, probably the former, then. "The Doctor. The Oncoming Storm. The Terror of the Universe. The-"
"Wait, no," Bella interrupts him; she has heard quite enough. "Oncoming Storm? What's that about? He won't hurt you."
The alien looks at Edward with a fear so palpable Bella shudders. The time lord doesn't react – he simply stares at the alien.
"Leave, Doctor. Please. This is no place for you. There is the door. It will lead you outside."
Still the Doctor doesn't react. Bella frowns.
"Explain it to me, what do you mean, why do you want him to leave?" she asks and immediately regrets doing so.
"He will kill you," the alien says.
They visit every place, every time, every galaxy, it seems to Bella. They have watched three suns setting, the yellow ocean turned an oscillating purple and red by their light. They have partaken in a Venetian carnival in 1589; they have partaken in a fair in Rio de Janeiro in 2310; they have danced with the inhabitants of a Vanarlia in the gentle light of four moons. They have rescued one cat and two cat-human-hybrids and enough humans to populate one minor banana republic. They froze atop a mountain teeming with strange nine-legged yeti-creatures; they burned their tongues when they tried a traditional dish from the people of Serenitas, the moon's capital.
They travel back in time, to twenty years before her birth, and Bella sees her grandparents, alive and well and healthy; it's a view stranger and more unfamiliar than all those suns and moons and nine-legged animals.
There are lakes to swim in, there are trees to climb, there is a whole universe to explore. She can't remember a time she's been both more elated and more depressed than with Edward. Her heart beats in her chest, loud, excited, and in the most painful manner, and she is incredibly alive.
She doesn't know if Edward's alive, too.
"Bella," the Doctor whispers and she looks up. They're in the middle of a conference of huge, zucchini-shaped aliens who wear the most impressive flowery dresses.
"Hm?"
"I believe we must... there is something needing to be discussed. I do not like it, but it is necessary."
He seems so ancient. He always seems to be incredibly ancient.
"And what's that?" she whispers back as quietly as possible. She doesn't want to disturb the proceedings, but she's calm and feels like she's finally ready for this conversation that's been dangling over their heads for an eternity. There is a kind of scepter handed to a very tiny zucchini. Her eyes are glued to the aliens, but her mind is focused on the Doctor.
"I do not wish to lose you."
"Me neither," she replies. There is a soft music playing in the background, some kind of space harp, and thin zucchini-y aliens are singing of a homeland they've never known. She grows serious; the Doctor's tone implies this is something they should've talked about a long time ago. "Doctor, I... don't want to leave you. Ever again."
"Edward," he whispers without taking his eyes off the conference. "That is the name my parents have given me a thousand years ago. Edward. You may call me by my name."
"Edward," she repeats and doesn't fully understand what this means, not yet.
The conference as well as their conversation is interrupted when a herd of huge mutant mice with mantis shrimp claws break in. The Doctor – Edward, Edward, that's his true name, and Bella doesn't know which she prefers – takes her hand and they begin to run. They end up in a small room with an alien who's bleeding tea and telling Bella the Doctor's a murderer.
Bella grew up with her mother by the beach. They weren't well-off, but neither were they poor, and any time her mother would look for her, she would find her daughter by the seaside, no matter the weather and no matter Bella's age. There was something eternal about the ocean, she thought: it stretched to the horizon and far beyond, like the stars above her head but much more tangible. She loved the ocean, and the gentle waves lapping at her feet had been her greatest loss when she'd decided to live with her father.
She had been a teenager by then. She had felt grown-up, but she hadn't been, and she wouldn't be for a long time, she knows that now. She is still wondering if she'll ever cease being young, now, with the Doctor by her side. But he hadn't been there then, and she had spent her days in foggy Forks, wondering if there was something she was missing out on. (She had been missing out on everything, truly.)
She had her car (that made all the wrong sounds) and she had her father (who said all the wrong things) and she had her friends, new friends who'd never know the waves. She had her school and she even had a boyfriend; a boyfriend and a dog. (Sometimes she thought the two were one and the same.)
She had everything. And she had nothing.
"Do you want to see a Heymixian food conference?" the Doctor asks and Bella raises her eyebrows. They just visited a planet where they narrowly avoided certain death, as is prone to happen when traveling with the Doctor. Bella won't complain. She would take any fate to be close to the Doctor.
"What's a Heymixian food conference? Will there be Heymixian food?" she asks and then – he laughs. He rarely, rarely laughs. She can barely believe her ears.
"Don't laugh!" she complains but she can feel a smile growing on her lips as well. "Don't laugh, don't laugh! Why're you laughing?"
"You seemed so-" he says, snorts, and tries to hold back his laughter. "You seemed so genuine. No, no, there's no food, none at all. Not at a... no, no."
She lightly punches his arm. "Don't make fun of me, 'course you are wiser, you're wiser and older and far more amazing than I'll ever be."
Immediately, he stops laughing. "Don't say that, no." he says and falls silent; but it's the kind of silence that waits and waits and waits, stretches on, a silence that grows with each quiet moment passing between them. "Don't say that you're less amazing than me." is what stops the silence from engulfing them completely. "Don't say that you're less amazing than anyone. I am a Time Lord, I can never grow, I can never learn. You are far more than I'll ever be. You are potential. You are beautiful."
Bella feels a blush growing on her cheeks. She remains silent.
"You're brilliant, and... Amazing. So very much. We need to talk, we need to-"
She feels panic rising in her chest, panic and joy.
"Won't we miss the food conference?" she asks desperately, and wonders why she did that immediately – she wants to hear what the Doctor will say to her, she wants to need to talk, she wants-
She wants him. Not some stupid conference. "I mean, I've always wanted to see real Heymixians. How do they look like?" Still she's continuing to babble on, nonsense, the first things that come to her mind. She could hit herself, and hit herself with a freaking rock. "And why do they call it a food conference if there's no actual food involved? Bit disappointing, yeah?"
"Bella," the Doctor says, "Bella," and still she can't seem to shut up, doesn't even understand her own words anymore.
"Fine, okay, all right. Let us visit Heymixia III. It is a coronation, they call it a food conference because of linguistic oddities you wouldn't believe even if I knew what exactly they were." he says.
That, finally, enables Bella to quiet down. She finds herself smiling, unsure if that's because she's embarrassed and would like to fall out of the TARDIS at once or because the Doctor's tone has turned kind. His voice is so often laden with the bitterness of his past that the kindness in his core comes unexpected and effective.
"Heymixia. Yes. Thank you." she says and they leave.
Bella finds out about his name during their travels. When he tells people he's the Doctor, not only the tea-bleeding alien fears him; most everyone else does, too. The Doctor, apparently, is not a well-loved man. They say he is a murderer. They say he has killed. He never answers these people.
She thinks he's been running for a long, long time, from something she doesn't know and might never know.
They fear the Doctor: she has never feared the Doctor. Yet she does prefer Edward. Nobody else is allowed to call him Edward. When someone tries, he silences them. All of them. Ever since the Heymixian coronation slash conference, when he's told her his name, she has treasured it highly, has kept it close to her heart.
One night, she finds out that time lords never give out their real names. They are the Doctor, or the Pilot, or the Master, or the Scientist, or John or Jane or Sam, but they never let anyone know of their true names. With one exception, but Bella can't be sure if that is true. While the Doctor is trying out a delicacy on a distant moon, she talks to a two-headed historian. They tell her (well, the left head tells her) that when time lords exchange their true names, it is to be understood as a marriage ceremony. The right head tells her that's nonsense and that time lords don't have a true name.
Bella, to be quite honest, is more inclined to believe the left head's words. By that point, they haven't so much as kissed, but to believe she's his wife (his wife) does not feel far-fetched.
"That's very wrong. Vampires hail from Venice, not Transylvania."
There's a new boy in Forks and he's – he's the weirdest young man Bella's ever seen. He claims his name is John and he claims his parents are doctors, but somehow, she doesn't quite believe him. He's beautiful, but there's a huge dark hole where other people's souls are – she doesn't understand him. Not at all. And he doesn't understand her. Yet she finds herself in his company more often than not.
He excels at Maths, he's pretty bad at Chemistry. "Is salt acid supposed to hurt?" he asks one day in the lab.
Bella nods.
"Oh," he replies, "ouch, then."
He's the weirdest boy she has ever met, that John Cullen.
When huge androids intent on eradicating human life and human emotions come to Forks, he takes her hand and they fight. It's not his father who's a doctor she discovers that day: it's him. He's the Doctor and the cybermen are a mere nuisance to him, but when the leader's laser gun is pointed at the Doctor, it is Bella who saves him.
After the inevitable defeat of the cybermen, they end up in the TARDIS together. "It's so huge!" Bella says when she sees the interior, colored in mute brown and red tones.
"It's my home," the Doctor replies.
That's when Bella feels herself smiling for the first time in her life, it seems.
They travel to a few planets and have a few adventures before the Doctor proposes visiting a real Heymixian food conference. And things go downhill from there. Or uphill.
As usual, it depends solely on the point of view.
She never learns much about him. He'll always stay old and ancient to her, she fears; never scaring her, but nevertheless, there will always be parts of him she doesn't understand. Could never understand. She gets glimpses into his past. Small windows to look into a room that's bigger than even the TARDIS. He was a boy once, a little child, he must've been. He must've had parents once, who named him Edward and who taught him how to read and walk and do various other things. He has siblings, he tells her one evening while they're sitting at the edge of the TARDIS and stargazing – "you would love them," he tells her, "I miss them." And that's all she hears about his siblings.
She knows people fear him. People fear him more than they fear mutant mice with mantis shrimp claws (and in Bella's opinion, mutant mice are something to be very, very afraid of). So he must've done awful things.
There are no more time lords. Nobody but Edward. In nights she spends awake instead of asleep in a warm bed in the TARDIS, she wonders if that has something to do with how people fear him so much. Do they fear him because he is the last of his species? Or do they fear him because he's made sure he's the last of his species? She believes it's the former. She forces herself to believe it's the former. He always speaks of his family as if they were long lost, but it's clear he's missing them. He wouldn't have killed them.
Right?
Bella rarely thinks of her family. Once a month (give or take, you can never be certain aboard a time-travel machine), they stop by her father's house. They have lunch with him. He tells her of everything that happens in Forks, and she tells him of the planets and eras she has discovered.
And then, they fly away again, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations. And as long as Bella is with Edward, she is happy.
"He will not kill me," Bella replies to the tea-bleeding alien. "That is utter nonsense. This is the Doctor."
"He has killed," the alien says but Bella doesn't listen to him. Instead, she speaks.
"He couldn't hurt a fly, much less a human being. He's is far too gentle. He never wants to hurt people, even when's he clearly angry. He keeps himself in check. He's the best man, well, the best humanoid creature I've ever met. And if you believe he poses a serious danger to you-" Bravely, she reaches out and takes Edward's hand, "then you can fuck right off, dear Mister Alien."
The alien raises one eyebrow. Edward snorts and wraps one arm around her waist.
"Let us get out of here," he says and she complies.
When they step out, there's the blinding light of what feels like thirty suns, for a moment – but Bella quickly realizes it's one single moon, nothing else, no suns at all, a full moon coloring the world light grey. There's wind, cruelly cold, and an endless nothingness stretching out around them.
"Bella, I-"
She holds her breath.
"He is right. I could hurt you. I could kill you. I killed so many, why should you be the exception." His tone is grave, and he steps back. There's distance between them. Bella can physically feel it, the distance is smooth pain that's coming and going in waves.
"But you won't, you wouldn't, never! You won't kill me. I know it, you're not a monster." she replies, her voice strong and sure, and draws him closer. Immediately, his arms are around her waist again. The distance is painful not only to her, Bella thinks dimly as her eyes flutter close.
They kiss. It's short and sweet and chaste, nothing more than their lips touching for a few seconds.
It feels like an eternity to Bella, though.
When she opens her eyes, Edward is smiling. Her heart beats and she can feel his two hearts beating just as quickly. There's snow around them, she realizes, grey snow whirling along with the violent wind. Yet she feels warm in the Doctor's arms, with the soft feeling of his lips lingering on hers.
He is mad. He is completely, absolutely, utterly mad, she'll still be thinking in five years. She's still be thinking that in ten years, and in fifteen.
She'll tell their daughter how they first met, with the cybermen threatening to annihilate life as it is known. She'll raise Renesmee with her two hearts and her bright brown eyes in the TARDIS.
They'll kiss, her and Edward, more than once. They'll kiss and love and are practically married. There will never be a ceremony on Earth, but they will marry on at least a dozen different planets (three of these marriage ceremonies will be interrupted by menacing threats and they'll have to flee, but it will always be worth it). Bella will stay the only one to call the Doctor by his given name – it will always be forbidden to their daughter, even.
And Bella, Bella will never be afraid of him. He has saved her countless times, with the first time the most important one, when he spirited her away from what she doesn't call 'home' anymore. Her home will be the TARDIS and her home will be with Edward. Bella won't even be able to imagine fearing him.
Bella will never be afraid of the most dangerous individual in the universe.
Bella will never stop loving him.
Bella will stay by his side.
And Edward is not lonely anymore.
(Until the day she dies. Until the day their daughter dies. That'll feel like abandoning his planet all over again. But he's still got decades with his girls. And he will use those years, will show them everything in the universe, will take their hands and run, and he will love them, love them, love them.)