Only love is all maroon

by Rupzydaisy

He lands in exactly the same place he took off, barely moments ago. This is not what he would call moving forward. It's a second chance. He's old enough and the tired enough to recognise it. He walks to the door and rests a hand on the warm blue wood, thinks a quiet thank you, and takes a deep breath before sticking his head out to blurt it out: "Did I mention it travels in time?"

Only love is all maroon

He's a ghost before his time on the hologram, saying his final words to her as the TARDIS piloted her safely back home.

'Have a great life."

And he wishes it more than anything this face has come to wish for. His own has been too long, but he's glad of the choices he's come to make at the end of it.

x-x

He caught her time and again, in utter wonderment. Confusion, disbelief, and astonishment play across her face like ripples of light on a lake. It's not hidden, and what else would you expect when you're seeing something beyond your own time and space and imagination? The universe unfolds like a terrifying gift and all she does is smile wider and reach out further with that unique human curiosity, and he understands it—thinking it may be the death of him.

When it is the end of him, burning and all aglow in gold with the final parts of him welded back together in an impossible way, he's not bothered a bit. He's alone and he's the only one standing. He'll take it; yes, it's more than he deserves, but it's his life and he's glad he can fix one final thing with it.

x-x

"It's like this..."

He might have explained one day when he had someone knocking around the TARDIS with him. Jamie was a bit more understanding at times, Ace couldn't sit still long enough, and oh how he missed Susan with her good insight. Instead it's him and his own ears and the TARDIS thrums quietly to herself.

"You humans are so small. You've spent millennia just evolving enough to drag yourselves out of water, and then so many more doing who knows what, but then - then you started dreaming and reaching out. You look up at the stars and give them names and stories. You send messages - hello, is anyone out there - and imagine that someone's going to reply. You've got that little grain of hope. Oh it's there, like how sand gets into your socks and underwear when you're sitting on the beach. You just can't quite get rid of that feeling, of being alone, of not being alone."

He knows it's incomprehensible to try and explain to anyone that the reason he kept moving, despite it all; the Time War, being the Last of his kind, that despite the unrelenting flow of Time and the churn of the universe around it - it was because of a tiny spark of hope he had left. A thin and fragile lifeline to rest his sanity on.

He knows that feeling all too well.

He could have wandered, lost amidst the inky black of space, light-years from any star and rotted from his own grief and guilt and shame. He could have. It would have been easy to. No one to call him home. Nowhere to call home. Instead he fell back to the planet he had adopted and placed under his own protection. It's that hope that got to him in the end, nibbling away at him until his legs took him around the console and his hands piloted the TARDIS without a conscious thought. Or rather, it got to him at the beginning, all those years ago. Kept pulling him in like a stretched-out rubber band, back to that small blue-green marble of a planet.

There was another possibility, if he wasn't being so self-centred. Maybe it was the TARDIS doing what was best for the two of them in the only way she knew best. He had picked up that hammer somewhere along his travels, but at no prior point in time had he ever had to use it as much. It became a battle of wills, trying to shift her from her parking spot. But he's been lacking in that ever since the Moment. She had rooted herself on a street corner somewhere, refused to move, and he let the fight go out of him and sits down in the dark console room.

He had landed on a perfectly normal street corner with a perfectly normal view of a drizzly Tuesday. The TARDIS doors swing open days later and blow in a gust of cold air.

"Alright, I'm going"

He tells his blue box and shuffles out, only pausing to grab the first jacket lying on top of the pile by the door. She had created a tube slide of sorts, tipping entire clothes racks to land on the console room just to persuade him to change out of his ruined clothes.

"Back in a bit." His unused voice is a rasp, feeling like a puppet opening and closing his mouth with another's voice echoing in his ears.

He picks the road on the left and wanders down, remembering that there had been a high street of sorts with shops on the map she had frozen on the console screen. The afternoon has a sluggish sort of feel in the air with a steady stream of schoolchildren and parents cutting through the town centre. The dark grey sky is thick with clouds and the drizzle turns into heavy droplets splashing down on the pavement.

He eyes up the window display in a hardware shop. There was a shiny hammer taking pride of place in the tool section. Then he shakes his head, because if the one he already had wasn't shifting the TARDIS, then a new one wouldn't be much help. The TARDIS had taken a particular liking to this particular street corner despite his efforts to try and realign the breakers with the hammer, so he'd give her that.

It begins to tip down and the rain turns into sheets of water. The street empties save for a few stragglers with enough sense to carry an umbrella. He dawdles, letting the cold rain splatter on his leather jacket and drip down his face. Eventually he makes his way to the end of the parade of shops so he ducks into the fish and chip shop on the corner to join the drenched queue, studying the menu board on the back wall with a look of great concentration.

Food. A choice. He hasn't eaten for days, unsure what this new body liked, what it was allergic to, and whether his tastebuds would revolt out of pure spite. There was an old Earth story about a man who had done wrong, chose wrong, and for the rest of his life only tasted ash on his tongue.

An impatient man with a mass of curly blond hair behind the counter leans forwards expectantly, "And what can I get for you?"

The Doctor looks down at the glass panelled counter with the metal framing reflecting a squashed blob of pink and black at him. Giving himself a shake, he looked past the glass and to the assortment of fried food behind it. The tang of vinegar seemed to make his mouth water, or it might have been the smell of the chips. His stomach twists with hunger. Behind him, he hears the sound of an umbrella being wrestled shut.

"I could have some fish and chips...or maybe...just the chips?"

The man behind the counter stares blankly, tongs poised above the battered fish. "Mate, there's a queue."

He takes in a deep breath, noting that the queue consisted of a bored looking mum with a pushchair and behind her a gaggle of young schoolboys nattering on about football.

"Right, yes, fish and chips then, please. Go nuts with the vinegar."

"That'll be five fifty. Would you like mushy peas? Curry sauce?"

"Oh come on, hurry up!" One of the boys called out, "It's just fish and chips."

It grates on him, not knowing, and his stomach twists again. He barely suppresses the urge to roll his eyes while a little wave of annoyance washes over him. His mouth runs away from him, words dripping with sarcasm, "I don't know, do I like mushy peas?"

But he feels his mouth stretch up in a smile, like something pasted on. A quick glance in the plastic screen confirms it. It surprises him a little. All the silent questioning in the confines of the TARDIS had left him more uncertain than the usual whirlwind of an aftermath following a regeneration.

"Nah, I'll skip the peas, thanks," the Doctor finally decides, and his food was wrapped up promptly.

"Alright, have a good one," says the shopkeeper dismissively as he tidies up the display of food under the hot lights.

The Doctor stares and makes to walk out of the shop, then rocks on his heels and spins back to ask, "What do you think of me? If you had to describe me?"

"What?" The shopkeeper was thrown by the question, tongs still reaching for the battered sausages.

"What's your first impression of me?"

The man in the white coat shrugs and frowns, "I don't know, you sound Northern, look like a biker or something?"

"Huh," the Doctor replies and steps back sharply narrowly missing the pushchair ramming into his ankles as the woman behind launches it forward to order her own food. "I'm Northern?" he asks aloud.

She glares at him in an exasperated way. "Are you done?"

"Yeah, yeah," he throws over his shoulder gripping onto the plastic bag. He walks past the boys loitering by the door pointing at him and throwing out the names of cities in accents that didn't match.

"Yeah, like you're from Liverpool."

"Nah, he's from Manchester."

"You're having a laugh, he sounds like he's from Dudley - ow."

"That's a Geordie accent and Dudley's near Birmingham, my Great Aunt lives there. It's not even up north, idiot!"

"They're children, all children." He scoffs at them under his breath as he passes, "Northern. Lots of planets have a north."

He lingers by the door, the rain thundering down and splashing on the grey pavement. He was already soaked but he didn't want to rush back to the TARDIS. He had a feeling she might not open her doors if he returned too early.

A timer buzzes and the shopkeeper pulls out freshly fried chips from the fryer, shaking the oil off them and salting them generously. He shovels some into parcels, and then hands over a plastic bag of wrapped food to the group of boys and a shorter boy trying his best to avoid their attention.

"That's three fish and chips, curry sauce and extra scraps," the shopkeeper rattles off the order as he hands them over.

"Thanks, boss." The pulls up his coat hood and sidesteps past the Doctor. With a sheepish grin he looks up at the man and offers up his own opinion, "Err, I think you're a bit serious, like my auntie. She doesn't let anyone get away with anything. Not even my mum."

The Doctor watches him go and then steps out into the rain himself, muttering about mouthy human children on his way back to the TARDIS.

He sits on the broken chair behind the console and picks his way through the chips, prodding the fish and complaining that it got lukewarm and soggy too quickly. The TARDIS responds by lighting up the console dimly, the screen showing a partial floor plan with a single line tracking a path to a specific room. He slides off the chair and balls up the greasy paper while the TARDIS twists the corridors so that they would all lead him to his bedroom.

"I'm going, won't make any promises though." He tells her quietly, and a strip of lights flicker on in the corridor behind him for him to follow.

Inside the TARDIS everything else falls away, but he goes outside again, unwillingly at first as the corridors keep leading to the front doors and the hammer hangs useless on the console under a pile of broken circuits.

Finally he takes to walking out on his own volition.

It was loneliness. The way it tipped off his shoulders and engulfed him. That's what gets to him in the end and he thought he was beyond that, older than that. He was the last Time Lord, the only one left between the bookends of this universe. But when he's standing at the edge of a storm drain by the Thames with Rose Tyler by his side ready to face this new threat, in this small thing, he's not alone.

So on a whim, he ended up making that one-time offer to the shop assistant who risked her life to save his, her boyfriend's, her mother's, her whole planet. In a split second an entire timeline hovers. The possibility of someone sharing the TARDIS with him, flying off to new places and having new adventures. It vanishes into nothingness when she tells him she can't leave.

Then he was off. Falling through time and space and letting the current of the vortex wash him up on a new shore. The TARDIS allows it and years pass. He is buffeted along to uninhabited planets, vast desert moons, and gaseous expanses lacking a single soul. In the middle of nowhere, light-years from any sentient life he can still hear her words, over and over again: "I've got no A-Levels, no job, no future... but I tell you what I have got—Jericho Street Junior School—Under Sevens Gymnastic Team—I got the Bronze!"

When he closes his eyes he sees her yank the chain off the wall and go swinging. The hope of humanity and the future of her little blue-green planet swings with her. He thinks it's the most stupidly incredible thing he's seen. No matter where he went, that memory of her bravery followed. It's that grain of human persistence, the oh-here-we-go now we've seen; a challenge, a mountain, an ocean. Just to overcome something for the sake of it. For the reckless adventure.

He plods on across the universe, or tries to. The TARDIS slowly begins to resist his efforts to move on. The auxiliary brakes malfunction, the levers tip themselves back, navigation coordinates inexplicably adjust themselves. The Earth keeps pulling him back into its gravity.

He ends up landing in exactly the same place he took off, barely moments passing between the years he's lived between now and then. This is not what he would call moving forward. He stares at the screen and then down at the console. It's a second chance. He's old enough and the tired enough to recognise it. He walks to the door and rests a hand on the warm blue wood, thinks a quiet thank you, and takes a deep breath before sticking his head out. He blurts it out before he can chicken out completely: "Did I mention it travels in time?"

He hears his own voice and it sounds flippant; this new face of his tries to shake everything off. If only he was a duck. As if he wasn't waiting with bated breath. As if he hadn't spent years running in a wide orbit around the planet, trying to dredge up a little hope and convincing himself it couldn't exist.

The world turns on, his hearts thump, he breathes out.

Rose Tyler says something to her boyfriend that he can't hear and extracts herself from his arms, barely looking back as she runs into the TARDIS.

x-x

He gets his second chance and too soon after his time runs out.

What he means to say is…you've been the very best of me.

There's a lot he meant to say, but sometimes he thinks he might not have to.

x-x

She got it quickly at the beginning, that he's seen incomparable things. That the few short days, weeks, months she's travelled with him are nothing to the long stretches of eons rolling out like an empty desert road and the distant hazy mirage of a horizon. That he must have seen utter wonders, sights that make lungs stop breathing. Icons and heroes and legends in the flesh. Railing against the wrongs in the universe and doing whatever small acts he can to try and put things right. It's impressive, she knows it and so does he, but for all his posturing it never comes off as a grating kind of arrogance.

She sees incomparable things too, standing on the viewing deck looking down on the last few minutes of the Earth, gas ghosts possessing dead bodies, staring down a Dalek only to give it the final order it desired. She becomes more than the shop assistant she was while she's brushing past these people born in different times. She gets to shake hands with ghosts and step into dreams. She becomes a person's last hope and makes it count.

It becomes a habit, her sitting on the bathroom countertop with a bowl full of cereal, bleary-eyed but cheerful. He scrapes at his jaw with a razor while she shovels breakfast into her mouth. It's become a welcome habit. A normal everyday routine they've slotted themselves into. She thinks on how once so recently she was sharing a tiny council flat with her mother. Now the place she calls home spins through the time vortex and has corridors she hasn't even walked down yet.

He's not too bad. Grumpy in the mornings like you wouldn't believe. Blunter than a butter knife and with sarcasm drier than the Sahara. Quick to launch himself into a curious situation, but she's learning to keep up, keep her eyes open. They're both fish out of water but when it comes to righting wrongs having a different perspective on the universe helps. He sees everything, and that's hard to understand. But she sees people in places and at the end of everything, even at the end of the Earth, all it really comes down to is someone standing up and making a choice, even if it's not the easiest one.

"You get your villains, like that numpty back there, who thinks that power is the be all and end all. And I can understand that, because it's all gone to their head. But then you've also got right numpties. For the life of me, I cannot understand why he thought picking up that... was a good idea? Ouch -"

He scowls as blood oozes, bright and red and shining. She hands him a face towel and waits for his reply, indulging him. He sticks on a sarcastic smile and obliges, "That's because they're stupid. They think just because they've got-"

He could go on complaining all day. He has before.

"Wait! I know this one...the flashiest guns and, er, armies up their sleeves." She raises her spoon triumphantly and beams at him.

"Utter morons!" He tacks it on for emphasis and ignores the way she grins at the back of his head as he stomps out looking for his jacket.

Rose Tyler of the Powell Estate laughs loud and long inside one of the many bathrooms inside a little blue box twirling away inside a wormhole or a black hole or something giant and terrifying. She thinks she can get used to this life. It moves so fast she's racing hard to keep up with aliens and strange new planets. They land on one with three suns and a sky that is always illuminated. He casually mentions that in a billion years one of them will shrink to become a white dwarf, a smaller, brighter version of itself, and then suggests they could hop back in the TARDIS to see it tomorrow. Her mind whirls at the thought and all the others like it.

At least until her mum looks at her funny, keeps pressing her about who she will be if she keeps this up. Some "other woman in an alien marketplace" rings loud in her ears. It follows her into her bedroom and when Rose Tyler, time and space traveler, flops back on her bed, the walls seem to shrink in. She's outgrown things. It's like a slap in the face and even though she knows her mum didn't say it to hurt her feelings on purpose it doesn't mean that they're not both drifting further from each other. Like tectonic plates floating away, or just a mother and daughter living in a poxy council flat they call home not recognising each other they way they did a few months ago.

But she's spent longer in the TARDIS. She's been counting.

It was all a little too shiny at first. But that's been wearing off. She saw the end of the Earth. She saw her father die. She sees the hurt in her mum's eyes when she sits down with her properly, chipped mug of tea with three sugars pushed forwards as a lifeline for when she says, "Mum, it was me. I was the girl who held his hand."

She pulls the sleeves of her hoodie over her hands reaching out on the table and waits until the realisation dawns on her mum's face, "Oh, Rose."

"I might be out there, somewhere. But there's no one else I can be? Do you get it, mum?"

She remembers those words when she stands in an alien town on an alien planet watching a little alien girl stare at her. There's a hulking black shadow behind her. It's mostly shapeless but its form is held together by something. She thinks of water liquid trapped inside a glass bottle and hesitantly takes a step forward despite her heart thumping away in her chest.

"Hello there," she clears her throat and tries again, "We've been looking for you." Her eyes slide to the left and right, wondering how far away the Doctor is, but there's no time to wait and the TARDIS is close enough.

She knows she can do this. Because there's no one else who can.

"Well, I say we, my friend the Doctor, he's a bit tied up at the moment trying to break the magnetic whatsit around the planet's atmosphere so we can get you out of here. But I'm here, to help."

She extends a hand and the shadow ripples, grows blacker than a starless night and it towers over the little alien girl.

"I want to help," Rose carries on, holding her breath and smiling at her.

The alien girl glows gold, then red like the setting sun and a luminescent phosphorus sort of blue that she's only seen in pictures of sea creatures. Her three arms twist slowly closer to the bulk of her body. The TARDIS translates for her, straight into pure thought and feeling. It's an overwhelming way to communicate, but instantaneous. She's looking for safety and she believes her.

All three of them turn to the sound of approaching footsteps, the raucous babble of a hunt underway. The whine of lasers firing into the jungle-like foliage gets closer and Rose smiles wider, trusting the TARDIS to put her intent across, "I promise I can help you get away, just walk towards me."

The shadow shrinks down, until it's knee height for Rose and in line with the alien's first left limb. It shuffles forwards first in a protective manner, and the child follows. The shadow moves closer to her and a ribbon of darkness reaches out to wrap gently around Rose's hand, and a single thought fills her mind in gold and blue. "Promise?"

"Yes, now we need to run." Rose tells the two of them as the Doctor rounds a corner at a sprint and gestures wildly for them to get moving. Her smile is all teeth and she sucks in a deep breath, "Let's go!"

x-x

His words are all thick and raw in his throat; they feel too small. He feels incapable of searching for better ones, because they wouldn't help. He remembers the promise he once made to Jackie and thinks about the times they faced insurmountable odds. Of her chasing as he runs and the constant quiet terror of her falling behind and he having to go back to Earth without her. He had dreaded the idea of having to climb up the steps of the block of flats, to knock on Rose Tyler's front door and tell her mum she was never coming home. It's worse when he's standing in front of her watching her say goodbye to Jackie inside a government bunker room with Slitheen in the doorway. It's worse when she volunteers with a shrug and tells him to ignite the ethanol.

Would he have gone back and faced Jackie Tyler?

Or would he have ran, a coward every time?

He makes the Emergency Protocol video and hopes he never has to use it.

It's useless against the sheer will of Rose Tyler.

She isn't a coward, he'd argue that she never has been. Rose didn't choose to go to Marbella in 1989. Instead she chucked her luggage at him and moved into the TARDIS with a wide grin slapped across her face. Rose stared down Cassandra, the last human, tightly stretched on her frame spouting nonsense about purity, empathised with the last Dalek and offered it peace, and hung off a barrage balloon in the middle of the Blitz.

No, she returns to the station with the TARDIS brakes jammed on hard and loud. The doors fling open to pour golden light into the control room and he's beyond shocked. He sees impossible things every day. This sight goes beyond that. This human, all breakable and fleeting, is human no longer. The Bad Wolf smiles benevolently at him and he feels small for the first time in a long time. She's crossing lines with this immense power, altering reality just to save him.

He makes his decision in a heartbeat and knows in the next that he can't fix this problem with his two hands, not this time around.

He blinks and his hearts thump softly. He's lived longer than he would have ever imagined. It's more than he could have hoped for. It's more than he deserved. He'd choose this strand of reality each and every time, landing the TARDIS back in that damp alley and asking her for a second time.

It's childish for someone so old but he thinks it isn't fair.

But when has fairness ever come into their lives? Rose Tyler and the Doctor, living on the knife edge of possibilities, gambling with the outcomes of Time by throwing little stones in the river to see their own ideas and little discrepancies take to history. Everywhere they went, she threw herself into the situation and stood her ground. In all those places Time conceded, it folded its cards and it tipped its king. The timelines bent for the better. So now he wants to call in any favour the universe had ever held for him because to feel like this, after all his efforts, after all of hers, it has to mean something. Everything she does is so human, too human, and somewhere on the space station Jack Harkness breathes once again.

Bad Wolf understands. Rose Tyler had made her choice. The Doctor can go whistle. For once in forever, the weight of the universe isn't in his hands, despite his being the only hands that can bear this.

So he does the only thing he thinks he can.

For one moment they are the same.

He's joked before that he's half-human. He's spent long enough rubbing shoulders with them through the millennia. He could give a million reasons, maybe even a zillion, why he's stuck around so long. They're a fascinating bunch. They spend ages just learning to walk upright and then to reach the furthest corners of their planet, and once they've finally stopped fighting each other long enough to sit down and share their tiny human dreams of reaching out to the furthest depths of space…well, that is that. Nothing bridges the gap of impossibility better than a human or two, and the hope between them.

These humans make fantastic choices, and terrible choices. He can't deny that. It's in their nature, and in his too. Time Lords aren't exempt, only they suffered badly for them and the universe burned with the damage inflicted by Gallifrey's most powerful people. He can't judge, not since he made the worst choice that will forever hang on his shoulders and flash behind his eyes every time he blinks. He's there to watch and give a little nudge to remind Earth that they can choose better, define themselves better. He's there to make sure they have a better future than his own people. He puts himself between the planet and the rest of the universe so that if there is a monster with a threat, he'll make them think twice because the shadow he casts is a big one and fits neatly into four words: Time Lord, last of. Learn from my mistakes.

Only, as Bad Wolf she casts a far bigger shadow, she's reached into the strands of the universe and she's tugged on them, looping and tying them up neatly. It's sheer power and extraordinary. For one shining moment he feels it sink into his bones and heart.

And then he can feel himself coming apart, like a jumper fraying at the sleeves, like socks with holes at the toes, like ribbons of a hot golden sun peeling apart under the pull of a black hole. He is burning but the universe is put to right and Bad Wolf relinquishes Rose Tyler by accepting the decision he makes. For a shining brilliant moment he understands too. That's the funny thing about consequences; they have a habit of catching up on you. The understanding fades quickly, reduced to ashes with the rest of his self. He crumbles slowly, falling apart and being rebuilt to save himself.

His mind is always the last to go, neurons chasing each other around and away. He thinks that there has to be a better way to say it, a way they both deserved.

"Rose Tyler-"

But there's not. He doesn't have time for any of that. He smiles around the pain and then he's gone.

x-x

She is terrified.

Funny that, how they had swapped places in an instant, and then back again.

This time around his mouth runs away from him and his hearts are thudding like he's just run a marathon. She steps a little closer and he somehow manages to pull himself together, babbles on about Barcelona. Three days later she stands beside him and takes his hand, not the regrown one; his hearts thump thump thump thump into overdrive and he wonders, oh right, it's like this then.