When it came to getting everything he'd ever wanted, the Doctor thought as he gazed around the empty TARDIS, this wasn't exactly how he'd imagined it.
He should have been happier than he'd ever been. Worlds - Realities! - saved and well, Daleks defeated, people happy, families reunited, friends... gone. He paced a circuit around the gently humming console, absently tapping a button here, flicking a switch there, remembering the glorious feeling of the TARDIS moving smoothly through space. It had been so long since he'd had that, six hands in place. Right. Whole.
The interior was dim, only the light from the engine illuminating the centre. He should go somewhere, somewhere busy and light and alive. He couldn't quite bring himself to set the co-ordinates, not yet.
If he moved then this was really over.
He wanted someone here. Someone to wonder over the sights he could show them, to laugh and shout and complain about how long he'd been fiddling with the parts under the dash ('This isn't like fixing a car you know!'). He wanted...
'Don't say it. Don't dream, don't think don't think -'
Rose.
He had her! He had her and he was living the one adventure he never thought he could have, old and loved and together. Spending the rest of his life with her. But he wasn't, and he couldn't, and he would never. He'd had to say goodbye to her twice and it had had broken him, once for each heart. The loss was churning in him like an oncoming storm, but he was more than that, she had made him more than that.
Hope was a cruel and wonderful thing. All things must end, and yet he continued, knowing that the next step was just another hello disguising another goodbye. River Song, was she next? He fell too hard, too deep. Every time he told himself 'not again' not another loss to hide, to outrun, and yet he wouldn't refuse her. She said he'd cried that last time. She'd known his name.
He went in out of lives like the tide, destroying things in his path, depositing treasures in his wake. It was a lesson he would never learn, it would break his hearts again. But without possibilities, without hope, what was time and space? Not worth the journey and the journey never ended.
He leant for a moment, resting his forehead forward on the cool surface.
It was time to go.