Can't have done, would have done, should have done...
All things are hypothetical until they are fixed and, in his mind, everything is fixed. It was one of those things that people did not understand when he tried to explain things to them in his way with his clever words and deductions. They did not understand that all paths were fixed in time and he could see them all because he was beyond human, he was something different and their human eyes could not comprehend that. His eyes sought out each human thread and each string that emanated from the human heart and looped with others, creating a tangled web that he had to walk through every day.
It was more than just a jumbled mess, he could see every life, the shadows etched in time. At crime scenes the picture was painted, like a reel of film played slowly, frame by frame by frame, overlaid in a path that was clearly visible to him and no one else. It should have made him feel special, feel honored, but instead people called him 'freak' and 'psychopath'. The only person who could see him for what he was, the only person who cared, was ironically a doctor.
"Quickly, back to Baker Street," was all he ever had to say and he was running again, a companion on his heels. He was taller than he was used to, and running was so much easier, so much more like flying while his doctor jogged in double-time, always by this side and always his equal, even if he did not say so as often as he should; he was bitter and old, beyond outward praise, either giving or receiving. It shocked him whenever his companion issued any sort of compliment.
This doctor helped people, helped him, and that was so important; without companions he would lose his way and when he lost his way things got terribly twisted and the strings would tangle and fray in massive knots around him until he was encased in sorrow and death and only another hand could pull him out. A human hand. Humans were silly and frail and had too many emotions but he was childish, stubborn, and too uncaring to last long on his own. He needed to be kept in check and because the world was funny, he was given a doctor to care for him. When he was so bound in his misery there was his doctor there to help him untangle the mass of emptiness that threatened to swallow him. This doctor saved people and loved people and the people he saved and loved had the courtesy to love him back when he was finished; it always seemed that when he was the Doctor, the people he loved died and the people he saved hated him. His companions loved him but they always left.
He used to have so many companions call him that, so many people who knew his secret, and then he was stuck, he could not move forward or backward and this was his last life. This universe was his own and it was strange, to be sure, but here he was consigned to stay. There were so many ways that he could have gone but this was the best, he knew it had to be, because there were people here whom he cared about. Here, he could protect people because he had never been known in this place as the Doctor. It was a release from all responsibility and all his past mistakes because here he was someone else entirely. And more importantly, his doctor had promised not to leave.
He wished that he could prove his companion's true worth but that method was lost to him; John would never get to see new planets and he would never sail among the stars. There were times when he thought to tell his doctor everything, all the ways he could see the lives and choice of others, how he had once traveled galaxies, how he had once been in love hundreds and hundreds of years ago. He had told his doctor, once, when he was stumbling drunk and all he got was a smile.
"I knew you couldn't be from this world," was all he got by way of conversation before his doctor had wrestled him to the sofa with strict orders to sleep it off and text him next time, he was worried sick with not knowing. It was funny, he had laughed until he cried, and cried until he felt sick; he was always telling his companions not to run off on their own and do stupid things and here was his doctor throwing it back at him, giving him a sobering taste of his own medicine.
His doctor had gone up the steps to his room, turning off all the lights after leaving a glass of water within the fallen man's reach. He waited until his doctor's breathing had evened out before rising on decidedly unsteady feet and wobbling to the window.
There, barely visible behind all the other stars and the light pollution that poured off of cities, he could just see the faint gleam of orange that he had charted every time he looked out the window; the light was growing dimmer and dimmer by the night and his gut clenched. By his best estimate, he had a few more years of looking at that miniscule pin-prick of light before it faded from the sky. He could never go back, he did not have the means to go back, and he did not have the means to save that light. This was the end of time, the end of his time. His home was gone and his planet was no more than an echo of a shadow of a memory of the past. This place was not his home and was not his world and here he would die among the humans he had spent so much of his precious lives saving.
This was his last life, the very last one and he would outlive any friends he had here, he would outlive his Torchwood appointed 'guardian', that poor man had no idea just who he was. He would pass them all in age and fall into obscurity until the day his body got too frail for existing any longer; maybe he would chose to end it sooner than later, he could if he wanted, but he remembered the hatred of being ancient beyond reason and how easy it was to become young again. But this time there would be no regeneration, no ancient genetic magic that would revive him. It would not be waking up in a new body. He did not know what it would be, but he knew it would be...he knew it would be final.
He had never been ginger (there was that once case, though), he had always been rude, he always had two good and strong legs that kept him running away from anything and everything. His mind had always been sharp and he had always had good enough friends.
"All the time I spent saving this bloody planet," he rested his cheek on the window, eyes fixated on his long-gone home. "Mine was forgotten dust."
His doctor had been right, he was not from this planet and he would never fit in, no matter how hard he tried. Something hard-wired humans to keep away from him; maybe it was the thrum of his two hearts, maybe it was his over-all nature. He never really had a chance at a human life. Freak, sociopath, psychopath, he doesn't have friends, you should stay away from him, might be dangerous... There was nothing his doctor could to to fix two broken hearts and he himself had no choice but to wait it out and suffer the pain alone. And he always ended up alone.
"I was never meant to die here," he murmured against the glass, never seeing his doctor in the reflection. "I was never meant to..."
The tears he finally allowed to fall rolled down the glass like rain. High above and impossibly far away, the dying orange light of all that was his life flickered and winked.
