Soliloquy in Grief

You tell yourself you need the ride today. You say it's just a nip around the cosmos, a stroll through Time-Space, just a twist and a snap of your fingers and you're home…

…except this time there won't be a home to go back to.

The last of the Time Lords buried his hands deep in the pockets of his anonymous jacket, shrugging his shoulders against the wind whipping sand into his shoes on the shore of a yet unnamed sea, thick with the smell of a sparsely-populated Earth. He'd let his hair grow long in the past immeasurable time since Earth Death: it slapped at his face and tried to tangle itself in his eyebrows. He ignored it with the single-minded ferocity of a wolf on the hunt.

It's hard to keep track of time, he thought vaguely, when you never stay in one part of it very long.

The Doctor tossed his head like a wild horse running. He looked back to where the TARDIS shone an alien blue on the virgin sand. Somewhere inside, the girl was sleeping. She'd sleep a long time, he knew. It wasn't easy to recover from seeing your world become dust and fire and light. It wasn't easy to come to terms with the allowance of death.

Help her…

He shut his eyes. He told himself it was to keep out the sand. He knew it was really to keep everything else in.

He'd never done that before—allowed death. Nor had he ever allowed for the intimacy of the tree's touch, nor the intensity of denying walls long enough to pass through them. All these revelations had nonetheless occurred too late to save what mattered. Except for Rose. And that victory was not without its grain of salt.

It had been a delicious kind of revenge, watching her face as her planet died. Of course, now he was left with the nagging question of whether he'd only asked her along in the first place so he could unload that pain onto someone else's shoulders. Where had that unexpected streak of cruelty come from?

Cruelty. The word left a bitter taste in his mouth, but he was too used to truth to be able to deny that his actions had been nothing more than mere base cruelty. He winced as the word repeated itself to his internal hearing with a little more force. It was cruel, Doctor, and you're not the only one who knows it. You can run from the witnesses until your time runs out, but the truth will always be there, sure as the air you breathe and the shoes on your feet and the new and unspeakably tragic dimension in that young woman's eyes. You put that there, Doctor. That is to be your immortality. She's just like you now, but what has that proved? Only that you can inflict pain without purpose. Just like every other wretched, wallowing creature who ever felt wronged by its Fate or its God or itself.

"Christ," he murmured. It was an expletive he'd found himself fond of since he first heard it. He understood well enough its origin, and though the word was otherwise as meaningless to him as any monosyllabic utterance of slime-molds, he had found that it carried a great deal of weight on its own, and was somehow all the more fulfilling to stammer out when all other words failed him. He allowed his eyes to open again, brave in the wind. His expressive lips formed themselves into a subtle scowl.

Her eyes.

He'd watched them, since the first time he'd looked into them. He'd come to know the girl's moods, her fears, her hesitations, her masks. He recalled the flitting triumph when e saw her realize that the living plastic was no dream. He remembered the bright knowingness in her realization of the Ferris wheel. But most of all, he regretfully reveled in the stony calm of the end of the world.

The wind was getting colder. Wasn't it? He noticed he was shivering. Cold he was used to, so why…?

He thought he was used to a lot of things. He thought he could outrun the demons. He thought he could outlive the universe. He thought he could weather the storm. But it turned out that when what you're running from is yourself, when the time you're trying to exceed is nothing more than the time you have to live through, when the walls you build against the storm do nothing because the storm is inside…

A gust of ocean wind took him by surprise and sent him sprawling backwards. He yanked his hands from his pockets and managed to catch himself half way in a spin, though not without considerable discomfort to the jarred elbows and an ankle. He hissed an alien curse and eased back into a crouch, but the betrayed ankle objected persistently and he was obligated to seat himself. With one knee raised to support a defiant arm, the other foot tucked neatly against his body, he resembled some shipwrecked Odysseus, stained with sand on a naked island with only the company of the nymph's desire…

Suddenly he understood all too well the mythical Hero's longing for home and family. He'd heard… or read… or perhaps witnessed firsthand that tale, sometime too far past to recall in circumstances. It was a gripping tale: a quest through battles unnumbered, villains whose essences are the stuff of nightmares, intrigue, deception, the test of a wife's fidelity, the riddle of the bed… carved out of a tree…

The riddle of the tree, and suddenly he can't breathe right. A pain splinters his throat. Something malleable as clay but immovable as this island.

You tell yourself you need the anger…

Against his will, barely knowing what was happening, his vision blurred. He squinted, then blinked, as if to clear away the dust crystals. He felt something hot against the back of his hand. Rain…? He looked down, blinked again, and realized… he was crying.

The sensation puzzled him. It was almost like regeneration—the disorientation, the difference in muscular control, a new face to learn, a new voice…

He had never heard this voice before. Barely audible above the waves, it hinted at the mechanical lifelessness in robotic voices, and the high-pitched vowels of alien tongues. This language was indeed very alien to him. He could not remember, in any past of his, having expressed Grief in anything more than the briefest of whispers, if that. This was his own soliloquy. He was unaccustomed to poignancy. There was physical pain, as if all he had seen threatened to shatter him as well.

It took time. Time to readjust, to take hold and steady himself. Just another regeneration, that's all. Take a deep breath and say it again. Just another…

When it was all over, he rose with his own steady grace. He followed his feet back to the welcoming blue door, then inside. Closed, locked, cocooned, he leaned back against the familiar metal and scrubbed his face with the heels of his palms. The salt and sand had rubbed the skin raw. His cheeks radiated heat like an ancient sun. He turned his head to one side to press the abused skin against the walls. It felt like heaven. He turned to the other side and made the fever die down there, too. At last, with a sniff and a sigh, he pushed himself back onto his feet.

It seemed somehow natural that he should drift into Rose's company. Not even the lifelessly silent walls of the TARDIS could hear his noiseless tread. Not even the draft created by the air filters was disturbed by his shallow breath as he stood near to her and looked at her.

Her eyes.

The slightest crease in the skin between her pale brows had found its way into residence since he showed her the end of her world. No other evidence had written itself upon her face yet. She was still so new.

I'm sorry. But all the walls heard was the faintest rustle of a sleeve against a blanket. What dreams, good or ill, that inhabited that room were left untouched, to live out their lives for as long as sleep held her in its merciful arms.

The Doctor returned to the centre of his fortress. With weary desperation, he spun the dial and pulled the impossible home into motion. In seconds, all was still once more.

He would wait a while to find out where and when they had landed. For now, it was enough that no sounds of conflict penetrated the otherwise impenetrable walls. For now, it would have to be enough to sleep. And he wondered if, when he woke, he would even remember the soliloquy.

It would have to be enough, for now, to wait.