Creak.
He doesn't fit, he knows he doesn't. He's too big for this rubber slat held up by chain; too small for the landscape of mothers, children, trees in bloom.
He's done it before, sat here on a playground just like this. Well, perhaps a bit smaller, but then again Leadworth always did seem tiny in comparison to anything else, to his world — or worlds, plural, he should say, thousands of them waiting to be found in the blue-black tapestry of the sky.
No wonder she'd wanted to leave for so long.
Because of course, he's thinking of her. How could he not? It was a dream, yes, only a dream, but still — that moment, sitting there and rocking gently back and forth, giggling over Rory's ponytail and trying to find the flaw in that psychic-pollen world, it was...
Creak.
He likes a challenge, he knows that now; a puzzle, something to pick apart and put back together again. It's why he's been chasing Clara's ghost for months now. (Ghost? Is that the right word, if she's the woman twice dead?) She's not possible, he'd muttered in the snow, the moment before he felt himself coil like a spring, off again, chasing the mystery.
He'd thought of Amy like that once too. Mad, magnificent, impossible Amy Pond, who couldn't remember the Daleks or her own parents. Impossible. Impossibly red hair, impossibly Scottish, impossibly long legs, impossibly proud and defiant and wonderful and — and —
And very, very definitely… gone.
Creeeeak.
He drags his feet in the wood chips, coming to a stop this time and finally looking up. No one's noticed him — why would they? The mothers are wrapped up in their children, and the children are too wrapped up in their own worlds, the kinds that even he will never be able to visit or rattle off an encyclopedia page's worth of facts about.
It's Amy he's looking for, he knows, even as the name Clara Oswin Oswald circles in his head like a bird searching prey — Amy's fiery head he scans crowds for, Amy's sharp shoulder punches he waits for, her laugh — not musical by any means but hers all the same — he craves echoing around the console room.
Even that ; even his TARDIS was once ginger. She lost her Pond and quite literally turned blue. Now, what's he supposed to make of that?
"Hello!"
No more thoughts of ginger consoles and ginger Ponds; this one is decidedly un-ginger, and in braids. He was so deep in it takes him a moment to come to the surface again, enough to collect himself and reply, "Hello."
He indulges her. She's incredibly… smiley, with bright little eyes set close together over appled cheeks. She's of the kind that asks all the "why" questions, the kind that's truthful even when she don't realize it. Reminds him, she reminds him — no, he refuses to be reminded any more than he already has been today. Yesterday. All the days before.
"Are you lonely?"
There it is. That once-in-a-while question that children ask, the kind adults can never answer without a furrowed brow and a drawn-out Well…
So he takes the, well, childish approach. Question with a question. "Why would I be lonely?"
"Because you're sad." She says it so simply, so plainly, her own brows denting a little bit. The matter-of-factness scares him a little. Is he really so transparent? A deceptively old man, sitting on a swing much too small and yet all too big for him in his grief. Or what's left of it, anyhow.
Sad man, sad man, sad — mad, madman, madman. It hisses through his head, a cosmic mantra of who he is. He can hear himself, gleeful with a fateful hand on a lever:
I am definitely a madman with a box.
And suddenly he hates himself. Here he sits, no more than a gangly boy playing dress-up, looking for a trace of the mad Scottish girl who made him grow up, just a little; just enough for him to know what the fervent double beat in his heart meant, why he drinks in the sight of green eyes.
The Oncoming Storm has been reduced to a breeze, the cosmic adventurer to a war-weary traveller.
"Have you lost something?" she asks, her little forehead lining in a way that it pains him to see.
It takes so many muscles, so much willpower, to give her a smile — and even then, it feels halfhearted. He looks down at his laces, fraying at the edges (raggedy clothes for a raggedy man), and sighs. "No."
But he has. Oh, he has. He's lost the mad girl that made him a madman.
To this curious little braided girl, he is nothing more than a sad man.