Physician, Heal Thyself, by Chibiness87
Rated: K+
Spoilers: Up to and Including 9.12 Hell Bent.
A/N: Sometimes I agonised over things I've written for months on end and end up not posting them. Sometimes my muse takes over my life and I cannot stop until what is in my head is written down and posted. This is one of the latter.
Stuck between one heartbeat and your very last. All the time in the world, and yet no time at all. Because the universe cannot continue until you do not. It is written. It cannot be changed.
A fixed point.
You should be proud, really.
And maybe if it wasn't that it was your death that was the fixed point, maybe you would be. Because, surly after everything, everything, the universe deserves to give you a break.
(Hey, remember that time you jumped into the Doctor's time-stream to save him and everything he ever did or would do to save the universe?)
Instead you have to watch as the one person to know you, really know you, loses himself. He is terrible at being alone, everyone who has met him can tell this, and yet his own people trapped him in a castle in a confession dial for 4.5 billion years. Four and a half Billion. And for them to stand there and tell you that if he had just confessed he would have been freed, well, now you know they don't know him at all.
This is the thanks he gets.
(Hey, remember that time the Doctor stopped being a warrior and started becoming a doctor and worked out how to move Gallifrey into another dimension and the Time Lords lived?)
So is it any wonder that you do the one thing that will save him, one last time?
Because if he forgets you, if he cannot remember you, he will not remember the pain of losing you before being trapped for all that time. You cannot be sure if he will forget the 4.5 billion years he will have lost, but at least you can do something about the pain. And really, isn't that what you were born to do? To save the Doctor?
So really, who's the Doctor now?
(Hey, remember that time the Doctor was stuck in a shrinking TARDIS and you had to save the world without him?)
You have to make sure the memory block has worked before you let him go. And so you sit and listen as he tells you about this faceless woman he knows saved him, but he cannot remember. And it hurts, does it ever hurt to hear that. Even if you know it's what needs to happen for him to continue on. But travelling with the Doctor, knowing him like you do, you have to test him. Just once.
"She could be me." There is no flash of recognition in his eyes though. And with a sinking heart you know what must be done. To return to Gallifrey to die to save the universe again. So you leave. Because you are the girl who lived to save the Doctor, and who died to save the universe.
Well. Eventually.
(Hey, remember that time…)
(Hey, remember that…)
(Hey, remember…)
(Remember…)
(Run, you clever boy, run. And remember me.)
End