Warnings: Major character deaths, mentions of suicide.
Sometimes it's like sitting at the bottom of a lake of black sludge, stinking, and moving a hand is like dragging it through the reeking mire. They used to go so fast, my hands, and now they're stilling, and it's so much effort just to move…
Rory first. One shot. Snicker-snaker through the air and ping the life's cut, gone, watching the light bleeding out of his eyes and wishing he hadn't; because this is always what happens in the end and it would have been so much better for everyone if he'd just let me die.
I try and push my way through the ooze, slumped against the wall of the TARDIS and then he comes to me and he whispers in my ear and I try to ignore him and I can't, because it's not normal, and I'm not normal. I was never a normal man and now…
Amy next. It affected her more than me – she loved him, of course she did, because she could love and she did, so, so much. I didn't even realise at first, how badly she'd taken it, because I couldn't understand. I walked into her room one day, with those daft bunk beds I'd insisted on, and found her slumped over the ladder with the bottle of pills still in her hand.
He's here now, coming for me, and I want to ignore him, and I want to forget, and I can't have the two things at once because that's not how it works.
If only she'd known what she was making in me, leaving. Because what he said was true – I make people dangerous to themselves. I did it to stop my own madness, because caring for someone was all that kept me sane. Now there's nothing.
He tells me I have nothing left to lose.
They're gone, all of them. Dead, trapped, messed up in so many ways and leaving me to struggle with the worlds that are left, and I can't bring myself to save them all.
He says 'so take it away from them. They don't need it. It's so easy to take the gun, the thing you hate so much, so irrationally.'
My screwdriver, a light, pathetic thing, lies almost forgotten in the bottom of a box. The police went after me but they never caught a man who can sail freely back to before the event happened.
There's just no point in saving them. It's not enough. I have to take away. He says I want to stop them suffering.
I saved the world once before, when the stars were going out, managed everything from an eye of the storm and still had time to make jokes. What is a joke? Nothing when there's no-one to laugh at it. The TARDIS is crying. She doesn't want to go, but she doesn't understand that if I leave her be she'll only see them suffering. It's one button and the universe gets ripped apart.
You have nothing left to lose.
I have nothing left to lose.
Hand balled into a fist, finally moving so freely, and stabbing down.
If they can't have life then no-one can.
Thanks for reading. Reviews welcome.