Author's Note: I do not own anything even remotely related to Doctor Who (in fact, I own very little of anything, if the truth be told!)
BECAUSE THE SADNESS WILL LAST FOREVER
The darkness was coming for him.
It was unavoidable, unchangeable, his fate as immutable as the paths of the stars in the heavens.
Because he was losing the battle, the war he had fought all his life, the struggle against the sadness. The worst part was that he knew it. He could feel his fingers slipping, one by one, losing their fragile, tenuous grip on the cliff face of his sanity. He could feel the drop yawning below him, the never-ending fall into total blackness.
He had heard it said that a man's life was measured in words, that every man was given a certain amount of words to utter in his lifetime, and when his allotted utterance was spent, he would die. But Vincent was an artist. He communicated not with words, but with the brush. His life was measured in paintings. He now held in his hands his last and possibly most important work. His story was finally told.
He was Vincent Van Gogh. He lived to paint. But it was becoming ever more difficult, close to impossible. He drank too much, smoked too much, ate too little, his physical health declining in a vicious parallel with his mental state. Some days – many, many days – he could not even rise from his bed, could not summon the energy or even the desire to reach for a paint brush.
Instead, he just lay there and cried, feeling the rotting sadness eroding him from within.
He tried to think of the good things. Because, in spite of all, there were still some good things.
Amy. Amy had been a good thing. Mad, impossible Amy Pond with her red, red hair, redder than Vincent's own. He could see her now, in the small courtyard behind his house, sitting in the bright sun, her Titian hair gleaming, surrounded by buckets and buckets of spectacular yellow sunflowers. She had challenged him to paint them, those strange flowers, so vibrant and yet so ephemeral, inching towards death even at the height of their glory. And so he had, thinking of her as he did so, dedicating the picture to her : For Amy.
He almost wished that she had accepted his half-joking, half-serious marriage proposal. They could have had babies, lots and lots of red-haired babies. He would have no children now. His paintings were his only progeny.
Amy knew the sadness. Vincent had lived with it for too long not to recognise it in another. It was hidden, deep inside her, so deep she did not even seem to know it was there. A yearning, a festering grief, a longing for part of her that was forever missing.
The Doctor had it too. A fathomless pool of endless sorrow, so profound that Vincent could not even begin to guess at its depth. But unlike Amy, the Doctor could not hide from his burden – he drank from the dreadful pool every day, whether he wanted to or not. No matter how far he ran, no matter how fast he talked, no matter how many times he refused to look back, the sadness was always there, riding on his back, a pitiless passenger.
The Doctor was another good thing. Vincent remembered him stumbling around the courtyard in the dark, slashing wildly in all the wrong places at the invisible Krafayis, a comical memory which tugged a reluctant grin from the corner of his mouth even now. Often, the Doctor appeared more of a lunatic than Vincent himself. But not really, not where it counted. To the artist, who saw everything in colours, the Doctor was a fractured prism with a core of ancient, white fire, shedding rainbows of light wherever he went, different to everyone who saw him and yet always essentially the same.
Amy and the Doctor...two strange, unforgettable visitors who had brought him the gift of hope. So far in the future, that beautiful, wondrous museum, filled with hundreds of people, looking at his paintings – that odd, studious-looking man with the peculiar black eye-glasses, telling the Doctor that Vincent Van Gogh was one of, if not the, most respected artists of all time. Now he knew that, whatever happened, he would be remembered, his hard-fought battle had not been in vain.
Believe me, there is always hope, the Doctor had told him. Hope was like a fragile candle flame, glowing alone like a star in a sea of darkness. But Vincent had been burning his candle at both ends and it was going out.
During the day, the colours hurt his eyes. Once, they had welcomed him in, drawn him into a magical circle of warmth and freedom and expression, helped him to see brilliance and wonders and enchantment that others could not. Now the world was a desperate migraine of kaleidoscoping hues, drilling into his brain like an infinite vision of hell itself.
During the night...oh, those endless, endless nights...Death sang to him, her voice high and sweet and seductive. The same song, over and over...The Pandorica is opening...The Pandorica is opening...The Pandorica is opening. He was plagued by fragmented dreams:- a double sun setting in a bright orange sky; fields of long, waving red grass; a bloody war he did not understand, raging between the stars; everlasting fire, an inferno of spreading death and destruction; the Doctor, imprisoned helplessly for eternity by a phalanx of strange creatures, each so different, yet each linked together in concentrated hate; and the Doctor's magic blue box, exploding, shredding itself into a billion pieces, once a living entity, now screaming in horrific pain as she died.
Vincent looked down at the painting in his hands. He had depicted it to the best of his ability, that nightmarish explosion, a terrible swirl of golden light, the blue box irreparably torn apart. Once before, the Doctor had seen a message in one of his paintings from far in the future. Vincent could only hope, only pray, that he would somehow see this one too. He had to believe that somehow, the Doctor's future was not as fixed as his own, that it could still be changed. Because that, in itself, was hope, not just for him, but for the Universe.
Solemnly, he sealed the painting inside the gap in the attic wall, hidden from all eyes until the time was right.
Satisfied at last with his labours, he went back down the stairs and put on his ragged straw hat. Out of habit, he reached for his paintbox and easel.
The fields were waiting for him. He could see them in his mind's eye, just as he had painted them, many times before – the dark, brooding skies, the iridescent gold of the boundless wheat stalks, the bewildering indecision of the three paths threading off in different directions, the murder of ominous black crows flying overhead like a foreboding of sorrow and death.
He picked up the gun, feeling its ugly weight in his hand, so different from the creative promise of a paintbrush.
For the good of all, he thought to himself. Because the sadness will last forever.
And without looking back, he walked towards the door.