"The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it."

-Marcus Aurelius

1: Forever (or Something Like It)

It would have been important to remember that he can't quite metabolize alcohol the way he used to, but he's past the point the information would have proved useful.

It had been the better part of an hour (forty seven minutes, sixteen seconds) before Pete Tyler's commissioned car arrived to chisel through the tense silence that had gathered around them on that desolate Norwegian waterfront, the aftermath to an intangible explosion they were all sidestepping, pretending not to hear the ringing in their ears. Rose hadn't had much more to say since, but she hadn't broken down. She'd turned into him for a long, limp-armed embrace, whispering that he hadn't even said goodbye.

Lamely, he'd apologized. She'd nodded. Wiped at her eyes. It didn't seem best to elaborate on the idea that she was focused on goodbye when he was still there, here, with her. Instead, he'd focused on the water, the surface chrome bright with late afternoon sunlight. For most of the almost-hour, he'd watched the foamy swell of the peculiarly high tide, listening to Jackie try to explain to Pete via mobile how they'd managed to arrive back only twelve minutes after leaving while Rose stared down at the sand. It wasn't until after they'd left he'd realized she was looking at his footprints. Plimsoll tracks in the damp sand leading back to a heavy square imprint, all of it slowly being effaced by the swelling tide.

It was a silent ride in a newer model Lincoln, decent leg room and black leather seats, fifty-three minutes, thirty nine seconds into Bergen during which he'd thought, strangely, of very little other than an unfamiliar descending exhaustion and being glad that Rose didn't seem outwardly angry, though it went without saying that this had not been her intended final destination nor he her intended Doctor.

The unique experience of being jealous, even for a moment, of yourself, no matter how many times as he'd been unwittingly subjected to the phenomenon, never felt any less preposterous.

("Can you change back?"

"Do you...want me to?")

Jealousy, by definition, implies at least a separation that perhaps he hasn't been willing to accept himself. He'd felt the same in the TARDIS, out of sorts and slightly headachy, watching himself spit out orders to the team gathered at the console like some kind of bizarre out of body experience. He'd watched himself strutting like a rooster, standing beside Rose while she'd watched him with that radiant smile with only a few curious glances in his own direction and a spare friendly swatch of conversation before landing at the bay inlet.

For maybe the first time, he'd felt properly sorry for Mickey Smith. Also, he'd vaguely wanted to punch himself in the jaw. It was a peculiar feeling, and not half disconcerting: this sudden proclivity toward violence.

(Maybe not so sudden. Violence has a lot of definitions.)

Upon arrival, after the sun had set, Rose had gone quietly upstairs with Jackie to their hotel suite, and once Pete finally arrived (three hours, sixteen minutes, forty-four seconds after arrival), he had set him up proper with a drink despite his insistence that he required nothing of the sort, not offended when he had little to say beyond relating the day's events, everything within the interest of Torchwood and their—he'd surmised—fairly thin concepts of global security. Pete had stayed until long past the grand lobby had emptied out, eventually leaving him with the bottle, a room key, a sympathetic smile and an unsolicited line of advice, "Give her some time."

He hadn't told him that time is he's what he's given her, and he can already feel it running out, ticking down. What's probably better advice is that she needs some space. It's just that neither the time nor space she'd prefer to have is not the kind he's able to give her anymore. The other had arrogantly assumed it was only him she'd wanted, and with a remarkable lack of insight, had thought any version would fill that order. It was an oversight he'd have been likely to believed himself if there hadn't been clear evidence to the contrary.

For the record, in his talk with Pete he's left out the details about the destruction of the new Dalek fleet, about genocide, about murder, about how he's gone and done it again. He supposes it's in his genetics, a failure in his initial breeding that made him into the universe's most prolific and reluctant murderer. It was only one of the reasons the other would barely look at him. Instinctive knee-jerk hatred of himself and all he is, all he has done, what he would prove over and over despite so much effort otherwise.

(It was just a Moment, distilled in quantum superposition from the modification of the de-mat gun-a moment the paradox machines and the temporal overrides on the bowships couldn't reach, and there was no other choice left but to use it while he still could.)

They hated each other, on reflex, the two of him. It made what had happened back on the beach that much uglier, a feeling of abandonment in a volatile cocktail with the misplaced pride of winning. The competitive pang he'd felt since the moment they'd first been in the same room had washed away in a sudden, unexpected moment of mixed breath and the soft pull of parted lips, and he'd been too swept up in it to even verify the mournful expression he knew he would find looking back at them with his own face.

In retrospect, he isn't proud of himself for it. He'd thrown everything he had into winning that imaginary competition against himself, victorious only because he'd been able to get out the words he'd only ever said to a purple blouse in the dark wardrobe room, where he'd left it in hopes he'd never look at it again.

He'd won because the other had allowed it, he knew that now. He'd only had to say the words. Certainly, both of him had understood what he'd been trying to give her. Certainly, the thought had occurred to him the same as it had to the him that called the shots-what would be best. But, he'd been afraid, dreading that he was beginning a lifetime of watching her with the other, loving her from an untouchable, unwanted distance, watching everything he'd ever wanted just past the range of his reaching fingertips; a custom made hell he'd been intent on smiling through because he was at a loss how else to process it. It was a fear that had receded on the beach only to firmly reblossom in his chest, only slightly modified: he would spend his time here watching her wish he was someone else.

"He's not you," she'd said. "It's still not right," she'd said.

("John Smith is dead, and you look like him.")

This new him, he's left to assume, is a supposed knock-off of the genuine article that would go back to the stars with his soul torn in half again, the one with the TARDIS, the one that Rose Tyler loves. And he'd handed over the one thing he'd-they'd- desperately, helplessly fixated on for years because he'd known what was best for Rose. Because he thought it was his responsibility to give her what was indeed best. Because it was his responsibility. The same way that he would take back Donna's metacrisis-garnered knowledge along with her related memories to keep her from burning out, even when she begged him not to do it the way he knew she would. He had to make it happen because he could compartmentalize, lock everything away, his thoughts and feelings did not get in the way because they could not. Except that sometimes they did. He was getting so old, so sentimental.

On both ends, he'd manipulated her into a better life. With the family she'd always wanted, her potential finally nurtured and taken root. A life...with him, if she wanted it. Whatever that meant.

Donna had told him, later on-over pints on Halifax-Four-what she could recall from that false life in the library. The program reminding her over and over of things she remembered, sidestepping things it wanted her to forget. She'd told him that, for a second, his image had come through. She'd seen him.

And then she'd forgotten.

The computer, it had wanted her to placate her, for her to have what humans crave, the desire burned deep by society and evolution-love, children, a house with a fence, watching telly before bed: a tranquil, picture perfect, safe human existence. Something that couldn't exist once the Doctor got his grubby fingerprints all over anybody's life.

And no, he doesn't want to think about that now. About Donna forgetting. It makes him think of Martha and wonder if it would be better if they all could forget. It makes him think of Sarah Jane. And it makes him think of Rose, promising him forever and him greedily pretending he could delay the moment that would make her a liar.

Now he's here, trying to promise her the same. Maybe it's not a surprise she's learned enough not to trust it; not to reach out and take it without hesitation. There's a part of him that doesn't either. Thinks something will materialize from the darkness and take this all away, cancel it out, another day that never happened. In the thrall of descending exhaustion, he nonsensically imagines the other Doctor emerging from the shadow of the hotel lobby, putting a bullet in his single human heart and changing his mind about everything.

He never would. Not even to himself.

He thinks of the roar of the flood, the howl of fire splitting the cold night under the Thames. He thinks of Donna yelling for him in a wilted wedding gown, and the sensation of timelines splitting decisively but not watching where they spiraled off.

No one had gotten what they'd wanted, in those moments on the bleak Norwegian coastline. Rose had wanted him-the other him, the him he'd been until suddenly he wasn't, and hehad likewise wanted Rose. And he, the one left over just by a kind of cellular roulette, he hadn't even been sure what he'd been allowed to want. His mind told him everything was his own to control as it had always been, but one look from his other self, the properly Time Lord version he had just been only minutes before (doubling over in pain against the TARDIS console, the regeneration energy pulsating in his skull, lightning in his veins, the maddening itch over every centimeter of skin) had told him otherwise. In half a day, he'd been reduced to a mere passenger on his own ship and then handed freedom and imprisonment and the whole world on a silver platter.

A punishment in disguise as a reward in disguise as a punishment.

Certainly, in the short time he'd had to consider what the other would do with him, it hadn't been what he'd been expecting, fearing. Perhaps, given the chance, he'd made his own case with a bit of shameless abandon; saying the words he knew the other would not-could not bring himself to say for the same reason he'd hesitated one second too long to get the words through the transmission the last time. So he'd told her; it was his own version of dropping to his knees and begging her not to leave him there to live out a quasi-human life without the one person that had solidified that desire-given it shape. Bosses and taxes and grocery shopping. Birthdays and rent checks, holiday dinners and sick days and sunburns and lying in bed on rainy mornings. Everything he'd maligned because he could never have it.

("Why can't I be John Smith? Why can't I stay?")

("No one's called John Smith! Come off it!")

But since leaving the bay, the length and solidity of her silence had cemented his suspicions that she was not sold on his authenticity as much as she'd let on, and that it was the other Doctor that she wanted, despite how utterly nonsensical such a separation between them really was. Even so, she made it clear she thought of them as two, one genuine and the other some kind of novelty.

Nine hundred and five (give-or-take a couple decades) Earth years worth of the most advanced knowledge the multiverse could offer, and here he is, sitting at a bar on a 21st century parallel Earth, just shy of actually drunk, teetering on the edge of something, looking at the dark reflection of his eye in the bottom of a tumbler of bourbon that doesn't taste remotely like bourbon, feeling bizarrely lost and desperately wanting to talk to Donna Noble.

He's never lost, time runs through him like blood; now he doesn't even know what time it is, what day. Not even sure of the exact year. Not even how long he's been sitting, and even less how many times he'd refilled his glass. When he glances, the image of the bottle flickers from focus. All of this is less to do with any physiological transformation and a lot more to do with being out of sync and not paying attention, but it's still novel, the ability to ignore it all even slightly because he can.

He wants to blame the other, which is a fruitless exercise: finger pointing into a mirror. He wants to blame the other for his slow descent back into the frigid bitter monster he had been, before Rose, even if it's not quite true. This offshoot of his consciousness, (one moment his own-as ever-the next downgraded to a supporting role; the fairness and luck of splitting in two notwithstanding) has not drawn the long straw. Or maybe he had. Perhaps he would have a better time deciding the proverbial length of that particular proverbial straw if Rose had spoken more than a mouthful of words to him since they'd both watched the TARDIS dematerialize into the long shadows of the humid Norwegian afternoon.

Rose, who hasn't lashed out as he's expected, maybe wanted. Rose with that weak, uncertain smile he remembers too well. Maybe he's wanted to hear her deny he was himself, for every aspect he's changed. One heart. One life. Part human.

Once he'd even asked a Dalek how it felt, being human. Hybridized. Not long after, he'd thrown his arrogance in the face of death, that terrifying reward he'd thought he might have wanted but was yet to earn, like sleep at the end of a very long day.

(Later, as always, he'd been ashamed of it; his chasing death like it was some sorry reprieve that it wasn't, would possibly never be. He'd looked down at his hands in his bedroom, his wrists, the steady relax-contract of his hearts beating through those veins, reminding himself that the thing he wanted to die wasn't there in that twitch of blood and flesh-but deeper, and much harder to get at.)

He's wanted to know. More and more, centuries passing like epochs, he's wanted to know what it would feel like to be human, despite everything his upbringing had ingrained in his mind. Time Lord mores, mingling and fraternization with lesser species was anathema on its own, much less canonizing them. He's played so long at being this fanciful thing, this hypnotic tangle of persistence, ingenuity and ordinary fragility, that's it's become practically mythological.

Now, part human or no, all he wants is to prove Rose Tyler wrong.

And maybe he'll get his chance, because coming down the carpeted stairs in bare feet, he can hear her. He knows the cadence of her steps, the ghost sound of them walking over the metal grate of his timeship have haunted his thoughts in the silence he desperately tried to fill with words and motion and travelers so he wouldn't have to hear their soft patter over the grated floor of his mind every time he closed his eyes to rest.

He can hear the shift of her clothes over her skin, the sound of her breath, all so familiar from the time they'd delighted and tortured him aboard the TARDIS, first as one man, then relentlessly as another. His flesh had called out for her in a way he could scarcely recall feeling in all his life, and even drowning in bourbon and uncertainty, he feels that echo resounding through him at just her silent approach.

It hadn't been quite that way at first, no. Not quite. It had been gradual, something he'd noticed that inflated in proportion with his adoration of her. It was a curiosity, an inconvenience, a thorn. Then he'd changed, and it had changed. He'd looked down at her in that not-snow on Christmas Day; glancing at her while she pointed to the sky with her fingers curled up near her mouth, excitement in her eyes and frozen ash in her hair.

"Yeah," she'd said, with a tiny nod. "That way."

And, stricken with that silent thunderclap, all he could manage was a smile. He'd just said it a minute before. Everything was new.

Because he'd wanted, wanted in a way that felt different than it had before. Wanted to touch her, wanted to feel her, taste her with a helpless, terrifying intensity that had him scrambling to distance himself back in those days before eventuality did it for him. Because nothing good could come of it. Because he couldn't, and they couldn't, and he had no right and it was wrong, he was so old by comparison and it was better, just so much better for everyone if things hadn't become so entangled and complicated that it became inexorably more painful to lose her when it was time. Because it would be time, there would always be a time. Even if she didn't want to understand it, her vision of forever was so grandiose and young and well-intentioned and human, all he could do was be honored that for as much as she could have meant it, she did. But Rose didn't know what forever felt like, feels like. Didn't understand what she was playing at when she used words that implied the length and depth and breadth of eternity, encompassed the entirety of time as it exists, has ever existed, will exist.

It's a little thing he's noticed over centuries of travel in time and space: languages are limited to the concepts their culture of origin thinks itself capable of understanding at any given time. Languages are liquid, they evolve over time, adapt to discoveries and technology and socio-political advancement. Most languages use the word forever to imply the longest length of time they can imagine, which, given the lifespan of most species, isn't much and is often prone to exaggeration.

Forever cannot be promised or mapped or spoken of properly by anyone that isn't like him. Or like he was. There is only one man like that now, sealed across the void, sitting on the jumpseat in the TARDIS in rain soaked clothes, his face buried in his hands, fighting the impulse to sob even though no one is there to hear it.

He feels it. He doesn't know why, but he knows it. That him he used to be, he's lost everything today. Everyone. Every hope he'd held onto, it's all gone. He'll go a little mad, do something monstrous because there will be no one to stop him, and he'll have trouble caring until it's too late.

Too dangerous to be left on his own, indeed.

As cool a reception as he's receiving, he'd never trade now. This is an opportunity for something extraordinary, like the universe has slipped up and gifted him an accidental reprieve; given its favorite scapegoat something breathtaking. He can't quite fit it all in his very impressive brain.

He's here. With Rose, in her forever, or something like it.

His race knew too well the ephemerality of the physical world, even their faces and personalities could change while they lived on, knowing even stars were born and died and they could see it all at once if they'd just fancied a look. There were few true constants in the equation of the corporeal, the singular timepoints, in what is and what will be. It was nothing if not choosing self preservation over his own petty wants that he'd never touched Rose beyond a litany of too-tight, too-long embraces that had winded him all the same when he'd made himself casually release her. There was one evening, he remembers far too well, standing in a TARDIS corridor somewhere between the library and the swimming pool after a long day in 1953, her warm breath worming through the fabric of his shirt and he'd hung on just a bit too long, swallowing back a torrent of words at the soft bump of her lips on his neck. Letting go had felt like being physically wounded and he'd hurried away, sick with shame at how powerfully he'd wanted to put his mouth where it didn't belong. It's a memory he's stashed away for reference in texture and temperature when he's stooped to recreating her in the silent red-tinted dark behind his eyelids, something to keep him company in place of the howling din of his own thoughts.

He'd been too attached, almost from the outset. Far, far too attached, too emotional in a way he had not consciously allowed but fallen prey to all the same. Because she was sanctuary; she was sunshine and open plains under any sky, rainstorms and quasars and spiderwebs and star nurseries a hundred-million light years wide, she was youth and wonderment and a bursting electric pinpoint of infinite potentialities, a white hot spark of impulse and joyful mortality. She was empathy and deep compassion, she was selfishness and want, quick humor and brazen guts, the dichotomy of courage and cowardice, she was the entire human race embodied in a single set of hands and eyes and lips and he'd fallen in love with her with all the grace of a plunging dive off a building and into concrete. He hadn't even the tools to resist it.

She was everything he'd ever admired in nine hundred years with so little sleep to mark off the days, to create darkness between time to section it all off, to make sense of it all. She was a lungful of air after years underwater.

So he'd watched her, held her hand, towed her through streets and fields and corridors. Coveted her, experienced the universe as something beautiful again through her eyes, instead of something cruel and empty; something that only gives to take back. Allowed for an idealized, almost courtly, platonic kind of love and then disgusted himself as he'd degraded it with crude fantasies, base desires that had honestly surprised him in their unapologetic vulgarity; their sweet harmony in profane counterpoint. This imagined ritual of courtly love, desecrated by a carnal shadow that passed through him with regularity like a cold wind, was always accompanied shortly thereafter by the uncomfortable certainty that he'd become depraved in his old age, that he was a complete fool and that he was so very, very far in over his head.

And when he did sleep-oh. If he had believed in any Gods, he would have been begging them all for help. For clarity. For mercy.

It had been one of the unforgivable imperfections of the Time Lord race, that they still were at the mercy of biology. Of chemicals and tissue, nerve endings, impulses. As long as they were made of bone and blood, as long as they lived with hearts beating and synapses firing, they could not rise above painful solitude and bestial lusts and become the deities they envisioned ruling from their shining world. Their incomprehensible arrogance had made Gallifrey an ember. And then not even that.

Born among the temporal elite of the cosmos with an intellect deep and cavernous as the depth of space, he has seen the rise and fall of great empires, the white-hot death scenes and birth of stars (dwarfs and cepheids, binary systems, pulsars and eventual supergiants) he's skipped along the length of galactic filaments three-hundred-million parsecs long, rode the charged particle bowshock of systems hurtling through the interstellar medium, seen the fires of a true hell where even death lacked any finality, gazed into the maw of the Nightmare Child as it split through the fabric of an entire supercluster. He's seen the end of time and the expiration of matter, watched suns and worlds and civilizations and people born and die and like erosion from water or wind, it has worn over him. He has watched it all-all from the outside, looking in. He is infinitesimal and enormous, subtle and blaring, magnanimous and subversive. All of this that he is, was, has ever been and he'd been helplessly enamoured with a twenty-year-old, 21st century shop girl from South London-and the fiber of his existence brutally admonished him for it.

It was like a quasar falling in love with a firework. The slow burn of eternity mesmerized by a flash of brilliant, gorgeous light. Trying to find metaphors to accentuate the smallness and the hugeness and the out-of-proportion-ness of it all do nothing to make it any less true. Less incredible or foolhardy. He'd not thought himself even capable of feeling so recklessly smitten, not as old and wise and hardhearted as he'd thought he'd become-as, perhaps, he'd always thought himself.

Well.

His existence is nothing if not increasingly bizarre. Case in point: hotel bar. Norway. Somewhere past two in the morning local time (if he thought very hard about it), the soft crush of carpet under footsoles coming up so slowly behind him.

One frail human life. One chance and only about sixty more Earth-years left, give or take. In a bourbon haze, he can feel the muted clock-tick of his own single heart, counting down the seconds.