A/N- You know in your heart that this day is coming but when it does it hurts so much, I want Amy and Rory back, they were awesome companions. Especially Rory cause he was able to see the little people like Howard and wasn't enamored with the Doctor like everyone else, he was like a better spoken Donna.
He misses her.
He misses him.
He misses them both so much.
Rory and Amy Williams.
His friends, his comrades, his family.
It's for the best, he knows this. Death is the only thing that awaits his companions, whether accidental like Rory's first death or sacrificial like River Song.
In the end the only certainty is that he killed those he loved.
But he's enough of a monster that a small part of him doesn't care.
Does it truly matter if he leads them to their death if he shows them the whole universe in its amazing beauty first?
Planets filled with wonders, constellations dazzling with complexity, species teeming with life so different and yet so familiar to their own.
Rory and Amy always managed to find the similarities of alien species to humanity. They had been so unlike the rest in their determination not to just live in the TARDIS but to make a home of it, decorations, kitchens, matching bathrooms and souvenirs, seriously the souvenirs, just last week he had stepped on an ever changing bottle of nail polish Amy had left near the console after painting her nails. He had cursed, he had threatened to throw the presently green colored chemicals into a black hole, but at the end of the day he had been so happy.
Gallifrey had burned. But Rory and Amy had been setting up a home with him; they had been making a family with him.
What was he supposed to do now?
Where was he supposed to go?
Amy had mentioned River Song. Her daughter, his future...something.
The only other Timelord left in all of creation, beautiful, strong, wilful River Song- surely it would do no harm to...
But River Song was no better than Amy Pond. The woman who wasted her life locked in a prison cell, waiting for him to come get her for brief moments of adventure and happiness. The woman who had such faith in him that she leapt off tall buildings, threw herself into space and trusted him- the man who was sometimes miles, sometimes centuries away- to catch her.
Except that River had seen into his heart and knew that he was not a good man. Rule One- the Doctor lies. She carried that knowledge with her, she wasn't blinded by adoration, she saw him for what he was, a being who had travelled so long and so far from the home he had loved and the good man he had once been that even if some remnant of Gallifrey still existed he would not recognise it.
A being so steeped in the blood of innocents that some days he couldn't stop and breathe for fear of drowning.
No, leave River for the moment. She would find him eventually, she always did.
So this was it then. The Doctor, the sole survivor of Gallifrey, alone in the TARDIS, unable to think of a single planet to visit or a single person who would be unequivocally happy to see him.
The impossible being leaning against his console, gazing ahead to all the years left to him and feeling terror at the thought that they might be spent alone.
Rory and Amy Williams.
How he had loved them.