I've know the Doctor for a long time now. He took me away in his little blue box and showed me the stars. And I loved every second.
Oh, how I wish my story could start like that. I wish that I could stand here and tell you that I'm ones of the few - the lucky, cursed few - who've met the Doctor. But I'm not, like so many others, and it's cruel. Even now, though Martha is standing before me, telling me that he's had so many companions, that he's touched so many lives - I don't feel it. Hundreds, she says, have travelled with the Doctor, if only for a brief instant, and thousands more have met him. She gestures around the room, at the smiling faces, as if that proved something. But I shake my head, and tell her that she's not looking at the full picture; thousands, yes - but out of hundreds of thousands of millions of billions. And it hurts the most because he thinks he ruins their lives; for him, thousands out of the hundreds of thousands of millions of billions would be a optimistic approach. I've never met the Doctor, but when it comes to his personal past, I know he's not an optimist. Martha doesn't seem to realise that he's so wrapped up in pain that he dare not, could not look back and smile. Cannot move on. Maybe she'll realise that he needs to hurt, he needs to feel the pain, to be able feel the good and the right and the proper and the love.
I want to tell you that the good overbalances the bad, but I don't think it does. He's in an almost-perfect balance, the Doctor, his sanity balancing on a knife edge; one teensy push, and he should fall. And yet, push after push, he doesn't. Why not? How, after all this time, can he still stand tall? The Master fell long before the fall of Gallifrey; when he finally found Romana she was merely a shadow, lost without her world and home; the Rani, too, had given up, her spirit broken by the great War, along with the others he found during his travels. And so, the Doctor realised that the Face of Boe had been right, in a cruel, twisted way that neither of them predicted. There were many Timelords scattered across the stars: cowards who fled the battle, or children evacuated by their parents, or outcasts living on other planets. But he was all the more alone for that, because each of them were broken, the delicate knife-balance of their sanity having long since fallen.
And that, I've realised, is the silence. The Doctor's mind breaking down, push after push after push. Yes, the Doctor had gone crazy before; but crazy with power, and hope. Not now. His will is being crumbled, finding Timelord after Timelord after Timelord, and finding them lost, lost, lost. It isn't made of suicidal thoughts; his Ninth self had been very tempted just to throw himself into the Vortex. His Tenth, too, was going to, but was saved by a poisoned bride. It isn't the lack of will to live, but the lack of everything. Numbness. I once heard someone say: "Everybody knows that everybody dies, and nobody knows it like the Doctor. But I do think that all the skies of all the worlds might just turn dark if he ever, for one moment, accepts it."
But he's not accepting it. He's not looking at the universe and thinking: Oh, there's no point anymore. He's just not looking at the universe at all. River's here too, and she shakes her head at me as I write. She doesn't understand either, though she should. And she doesn't like it, not knowing, because for such a long time she had the upper hand in her relationship with the Doctor - the first time she'd had the upper hand in her life.
He's breaking, and no-one believes the world will end. 'The Doctor will come if there's something wrong,' they say. He won't, not in this state - his lack of anything is causing the universe herself to sigh. Like the edges of a dream fading as the dreamer awakes, the Silence will come. The Silence of the Doctor's mind; because the Silence is not a thing, it is the Doctor - or rather, the lack of. Without the Doctor looking over the universe's shoulder, prodding a timeline back into place, fixing a rip here, a tear there, the end will come.
As the many streams of thought in his head slowly, one by one, turn to nothing, the world will burn, and the Doctor will sit there. Not because he doesn't care; he cares as much as ever, loves and hates and laughs and cries and runs as much as ever, but he can't see the universe anymore. Like meditation, but he doesn't know he's meditating, because he's not.
His mind is dying, falling apart piece by piece.
And no-one believes me.
Even him not caring would be better - even him causing the destruction himself would be better, because then there's something to fight against, something to fight for. Fight against the Doctor's terror. Fight for the Doctor to believe again.
But his Children of Time cannot fight if they do not need to; and the Doctor sees nothing wrong with the universe, as she breathes a final sigh.
...
Ooooh, I know, how depressing. I dunno what happened there, I just wrote.
Review please! :D
(I may have just spoiled the mood that I was trying for in that fic with this note. Oh well.)