A/N: The title and summary are from a quote by J. M. Barrie
He can't grieve for her, she's not dead; he can't hold her, much as he aches to, because she's not here; but he can, and does, still love her. And although he knows that she's not here, it doesn't get any easier because his mind is forever playing tricks on him and making him think for a second that it's all not true and that when he opens his eyes/returns to the console room/defeats the latest monster (and any other number of increasingly unhinged, desperate bargains he's made with himself) she'll be there smiling up at him again as if she'd never left.
Of course, it doesn't work like that.
His nightmares, for so long filled with the echoing screams of a dying planet, have changed and now instead of the images of his long-dead people burning themselves into the back of his eyelids, it's her. He can't shake that last image he has of her - wind-whipped hair falling into her eyes as she listens to him stuff up telling her the one thing in their relationship he had absolutely needed to get right.
He didn't say it back, and although he's (almost) certain that she knows - already knows he feels for her what she feels for him, and more - he carries with him that extra little piece of guilt over the fact that he has managed, yet again, to break her heart. Yet in some of his bitterest, darkest moods he wonders if that's not exactly unfair, since she's managed – not by choice, he grudgingly concedes, but still – to break his.
She promised me "for ever".
He's still resentful, even now – months after it happened – of how the universe managed to play yet another cosmic joke on him and not even allow him time to process the fact that a universe separates him from his love and that as far as he can see there's no way to change that. He can't remember much about the incident with Donna and the Racnoss, and he's grateful. Predictably, though, the one thing he can remember about the whole thing is the most painful- the time when his mind flashed back to when he still had Rose.