Disclaimer: All to the Beeb, etc.
A/N: This arose from one scene running again and again in my mind, surprisingly from S3, ep: "42" – the Doctor seeing Martha drifting away, knowing there is nothing he can do. Thinking about it, it's sort of an inverse of the comedy dumb show in "Partners in Crime," but that's irrelevant! The point is, he seems so adamant that he cannot save her, seems so despondent at that moment – and yet Earth and the human race are always saved, whilst he is not; he loses everyone, and his heart breaks a little more. This is just a rough exploration of that.
"I CAN'T SAVE YOU!" he screams, noiseless words
Traversing the void between innocence and experience.
Stars whirl between them, heat and dust and distance
Growing with every strangled breath. "I can't save you."
The words lessen, meaning stretching beyond capacity.
And she stares back with eyes as dark as night,
Wide as day, still trusting even now. Disbelieving.
-
In her new mind, she sees it all: the memory, the loss,
The hope and the fall and the rise and the constant fall,
Always running from the darkened valleys below him.
She really understands all that now.
But now his eyes...she knows that look too, his look, her look;
Evens stars must shine their last. Their beauty
Is timeless in his memory, whilst darkened in their own.
-
A heart, a star...and a rose. Twice the thorns have pricked
As he tended to that golden English garden, so far
From the buds they once were. Across ages uncounted
And limitless realities those soft wild petals blew, and
Find solace at last in the second, single arms who
Could tend her for all her days. Born of fire, tamed by earth;
The gentle swash and sinking sand beneath his feet.
-
"...I can't save you." Such true words with so little meaning
Ne'er were spoken; because we have been saved again
And again and again. Like the song on a river, he will
Never yield, and thus our fates with his are sealed.
So much owed by so many to so few, to one; the man
Who deserves it all, to whom we can say only one thing:
"WE CAN'T SAVE YOU! We can't save you!
...We can't save you."