Hitherto
.
She heard it in the dark, a flat, musical human sound diverting from the path, coming somewhere out from the night and across the park. It was making a song, a cheery, spontaneous, pitchy melody that frightened her.
Not primitively so that she was washed a sudden with instinctual fears of harm and death, but deeply in the recess of her soul, where she had learnt to hide things that her mind could no longer cope with; extreme possibilities of loss and loneliness, and of a life spent standing still. That was where the humming reminisced, why it frightened her. It was like listening to an old melancholy music box, or a song she'd had to stop loving.
Above her in the night sky the stars had begun turning out one by one and the moon's light was now waning. The end of the world had started; possibly long before she'd even noticed the first signs, but as she watched the handsome red flicker of Mars dim away unnaturally, she knew at least things were underway. Time, relatively speaking, was up.
And yet there was someone in the park in the dead part of night, perhaps the last night of humanity, humming to himself. Suddenly, she wondered why she wasn't running, shouting and laughing and crying towards that flat and spontaneous and cheerful sound which was definitely, somehow, him.
"Doctor..."
Like a horse let out the box the word tumbled all at once from her lips, astonishing and confusing her. How could it be? Here and now, how could it be him?
She took a step, and then another through the night again, past the flowers on one side of the path and the trees on the other. Another star went out and she didn't see it happening. The moonlight flickered and she didn't notice.
She passed an empty bench bolted down into the prim grass and facing inward to the rest of the park, then another, rounding a gradual corner that seemed to posses no end. The humming grew louder as she began to jog, and her hopes rose more aware and painful. Because he's here!
When she stopped running, it felt like she'd hit a led wall.
It was still a funny sight for the middle of the night, in the middle of a public London city park, to find a man sitting alone with himself on a green painted bench on the grass, in front of a duck pond and next to a bush of roses. But this man was a total stranger.
He was watching the sky and the stars. Humming a song she had never heard before because it was a song that belonged to a dead world she would never be able to visit. His hands were clasped in his lap, his knees swinging back and forth restlessly. His trouser legs were just an inch too short for his gangly long legs and he wore a bow tie and a brown professor's jacket. His hair was floppy and foppish, his face long, his eyes dark and pensive, and he wore an expression of coy distance, so that he appeared like he was a million miles away in thought, but really he'd already seen her coming and now he knew she was standing just a hundred yards away from him on the path behind his bench.
"Hello, Rose Tyler."
She startled, moving a step back from the man gazing at the disappearing stars. Something surmounted her fright in that same moment though, and she felt fear and grievance give rise to anger.
"Who are you? How do you know my name?"
The man stood up and turned around, shadows sliding across his face as he looked away from the flickering moonlight and towards Rose. He smiled, and she believed he wasn't much older than her when she looked at his face straight.
"The stars are going out. Soon, this tiny, fragile planet will be hurtled through space and all of its people will either be killed or enslaved. You've already sensed something happening, something very bad. You've seen the stars disappearing and you've managed to walk through crumbling dimensions to be here. You've defied time as well as space. And you, of all the people on this earth, out of the billions of them, you Rose Tyler, will save them all. Beautiful, noble, amazing you."
He walked around the bench, left the grass and joined her on the path, just an arm's length away from the spot where she was now frozen in place. He dug his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his boots. Looked straight into her with dark, pensive eyes – a young face marred by old, old eyes. A smiling mouth, but then a sad, terrible gaze.
"And yes I know all about you, Rose, where you've been throughout the galaxy and who you've been there with. I know that greater things continue to wait for you to happen to them. I know that you need to go. To him, with him, into the end."
He stepped forward and took her hand. It was ice cold and stalk still in his grip, and he pressed something into it, until she took it.
"This will get you to him. It's a part of him, in a funny way that I can't explain now. But before the last star disappears and the moon is gone, find him. Find him and love him, no matter what happens to him. Because, he needs you..."
He let go of her hand and she brought it to her chest. But she never took her eyes off his, no matter how hard he looked into her.
Under the failing light of the moon she raised her other hand up, white with cold, and touched his face. Strong and young, dark hair akimbo, mouth a little crooked as it smiled...
"You know him then," she said, and a small part of her understood, even if it didn't quite believe.
But even if it was, he wasn't her Doctor, not really. He belonged to somewhere else this one, this still marvellous, magical, strange man.
He jumped a little as Rose took a step towards him, but then she had her arms around his chest and was squeezing until it felt like she would never let go. She cried silently, a couple of tears staining his shirt, and she looked the most relieved woman in the galaxy.
He hugged her back. Held her for so long in turn that she laughed, wondering now if he would ever let go.
Then they stepped back from each other. Above them, another star went out.
He turned away because he could do no more. And he had his own reality to return to, his own continuing life.
"Oi!"
A small breeze carried her voice through the park and then she laughed as he turned back with a look of mock guilt.
"Whoever she is... Whoever's with you now, I hope she keeps you right."
And then she ran. Ran away to get him back, back to the man he once was, and somewhere in time was still to become.
.