This is the first part of a planned two-parter set during and immediately after the final episode of season 5, 'The Big Bang'. I am an avid Amy/Eleven-shipper, so this will tend 'quite strongly' in that direction.

I own nothing, only the feedback I get. Therefore: Reviews are always greatly appreciated. ;-)

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"—

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

Should say: "That is not what I meant at all

That is not it, at all."

~ 'The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock', T.

He had made a refrain for himself.

You are a fool, he whispered to himself and the words sounded loud and harsh in the stillness of the Tardis. The stillness was a palpable thing; the emptiness had an immensity that blocked his breath because it was a stillness and an emptiness that marked the absence of her. You are a fool, he whispered again, trying for severity but the words spoken could not drown the thoughts and the feelings that gave rise to the chant in the first place.

You are a fool, drummed his heartbeats, and you are a fool, seconded the blood in his ears. But his entire being ached nonetheless.

Even when he had torn at his hair and pulled a button from his jacket and stamped on it, his heart ached. Baldness and a useless buttonhole did nothing to conceal the fact. And now he would have to attend a wedding lacking a button. He poked a finger through the tear in the fabric, now sprouting with the flossed ends of overtorn threads.

At the thought of the wedding the irrational dizziness washed over him again and his head swam. You are a fool, he whispered and slammed the hat unto his head.

When her voice sounded from the other side of the Tardis' doors, the breath caught in his throat. The last time he had heard it, impossible aeons of time and unbridgeable expanses of space had lain between them; entire universes that could not be crossed. But they had crossed them. Now there were just the doors, and yet…

There was something so much more.

Beyond the doors she would be wearing her wedding dress. The interminable night had drawn to an end, the dress taken from the hook on the wardrobe's door.

Why was that such a terrible thing?

He froze, watching his trembling hand grip the door-handle. Fool, fool, fool. Oh, he was.

Such. A. Fool.

When he pulls open the door, the sight of her face banishes from his mind all the phrases he had so daintily rehearsed.

So beautiful. He sees something sharp and unfeigned, bright and all-consuming in her eyes, and his chest pangs because he wants it so; and that realisation cannot be drowned by a refrain beaten into him by rationality and a logical mind.

Perhaps that is why he feels more frightened there, standing in the doors of his Tardis, parked in the middle of a wedding feast, than he does facing down the universe's hordes of diverse rogues.

Perhaps that is why he runs, turning his back to her, not looking into the face and the eyes that makes his chest too tight and his brain too dull.

'I only came for the dancing,' he says.

When he is alone in the Tardis again, in orbit somewhere it does not matter where, he sinks down with his back against the console. His hearts beat the words slower now, a clogged, puzzled, throbbing sobbing refrain.

You are a fool.

Part Two: Amy catches up with Eleven in the Tardis.