Disclaimed

I.

Eiralen is pretty Time Lady, beautiful by most people's standards and ten years his senior (though that hardly matters among Time Lords). He supposes that he might have married her for that superficial observation. True she was smart, and witty in a demure, rare way, but he didn't marry her for that.

Though, to be honest it was hardly his choice to marry her, well he said yes, but she had been chosen more or less by his parents. He could have said no, politely declined, chosen instead to continue his studies (it would have been perfectly acceptable, given that he was considered a genius even on Gallifrey albeit an eccentric one) Eiralen would have married someone else and led, more or less, the exact same life.

In the end he had married her. Married maybe for her looks, maybe for his parents, but mostly because she wanted to marry him. And he wanted to find out why.

He might have been a genius on Gallifrey, maybe even been relatively handsome, but for most he was too much of a trouble maker, too wild and unlike any other Time Lord that they chose not to associate with him outside the civil parameters of brief, public encounters.

Well. Maybe she hasn't wanted to marry him specifically, but his parents offered the option and he wanted to know why and that was the utterly wrong reason to marry her, he found years later, centuries later, by the curious precociousness of humans and all their tedious relationship rules. (He rather like them, the humans that is, not the rules).

It doesn't really work out for them. After the wedding the do the traditional bonding ceremony (not for children) and then that's it. Except it isn't. Their minds are melded, yet Eiralen, in all her meticulous tenacity has all her mind space organized in doors and files, and nothing is open to him. He feels empty that night when they lay together in the smooth sheets of their marital bed. His mind is open to her, left the way it always is so that she can learn and know and find. She doesn't

"Honestly Theta, haven't you even learned to organize your mind space?" She huffs amusedly at him, an exasperated patronizing smile on her lips.

He rolls over and shoves away his thoughts, clearing his mind in the messy most obnoxious way properly, and doesn't stop until there is a labyrinth of chaos hiding everything. It doesn't matter anyway, he thinks bitterly, it's not like we'll be doing that again.

II.

The TARDIS.

A Boy and his Box in all of time and space. That's what they are. She's his soulmate in all the ways that matter. She might be a Bigger-on-the-inside-Police-Public-Call box, but she is his Bigger-on-the-inside-Police-Public-Call box. Through thick and thin she's been there for him, and maybe she can't really speak to him in words, and tell him the things he need to hear, but she always finds the right ways to show him.

It's the way she organizes his study to display the best parts of every companion, or the way she makes his tea and (when he's alone) puts it in Susan's favorite teacup. It's the way she organizes the Library into sections not on genre, subject or author, but by boring to not boring to brilliant.

The TARDIS takes care of him, even when he hits her counsel with a mallet because he doesn't really know what to do, and the way she pretends to let him drive but really just takes him to where he should go.

The TARDIS loves him and he loves her, because when companions come and go it will always be the Doctor in the TARDIS, as it should be.

III.

River Song becomes his way in a convoluted, abstract way he completely doesn't expect. He expected to take the slow path with her, though it seems absurd now. He had expected himself to fall grudgingly in love with her, because it way going to happen anyway and she's probably save his life, and that would be that.

He never expected that he'd have so little time with her. He never expected to fall in love with her violently the way one falls in love with a woman in some sort of angsty girly romance movie. He never expected to feel more than just obligation to River or that their marriage would happen in an aborted Time line or that his mother-in-law would be his best friend.

He expected to have River lose her and then carry on like he does with everyone else, but it just doesn't happen that way. When he loses River, when he takes her out in his new suit and his nice haircut, he falls to pieces because, Rassilon, she's River. She's impossible River, with her wicked humor and vixen ways. She's River who tried to kill him, and River who ended up saving him, and River who lost her childhood because of him.

She's River who'll end up dying for him, because she's is so perfectly herself and he is himself and neither of them can quite remember who they're supposed to be around each other. River he clings to like a ghost because to him that is what she is, and clings to her because he remembers that last time he didn't cling hard enough to a woman, remembers when he didn't let himself indulge her.

He still regrets that.

IV.

He never marries his pink and yellow human. Out of all of them, she's probably the one he should have, because they were good together. Rose, with her peroxide blonde hair and too thick makeup; they went together because they were still trying to find themselves, Rose was trying to find if there was anything more to a chav from the Powell Estate who ruined her future for a boy, and he was trying to find if there could be a future for a man who murdered his own kind.

Rose who smiled when he tried to ruin her (I want chips. She says after she sees her planet burns. Better with two. She says. He loves her, he thinks, he wants to burn those words into his hearts for her). Rose who was small and young and unsure, yet so there, so bright and so brave. He liked that about her. How she could be brave without really needing to know why she needed to be brave.

Rose. There had been weddings with her, countless weddings. Weddings recognized across galaxies, but the thing about marriage is they require consummation. Even Gallifreyan marriages (a fact he doesn't tell River). In all the weddings, some accidental, others traps (his usually, Rose looked so beautiful around all the flowers thinking that it was a festival of some sort, not a tribute to them pledging their lives to each other). He could have done it.

Seduced her. She was already so receptive to him, her heart pounding, hand hot and sweaty in his own, eyes always wandering to his face without wandering. She was waiting for him it seemed always waiting.

The day of ghosts, he swore that he would do right, finally, he would tell her, love her, bind her to him in every way possible if she could just hand on.

And then she's gone.

And it kills him.

It's worse than dying. Worse than coming back. Worse than his crimes, his past, and his future.

When Amy finds the ring a no-longer-in-existence Rory gave her, for a moment he forgets, he thinks its-

"It belongs to a friend of mine."

No, but it can't be.

The ring he meant for Rose is in the tattered brown suit, still there for everyday he'd been in that body. His pockets feel emptier suddenly, even after he replaces Rory's ring into his coat pocket.

He though he'd stopped, after all this time. Stopped missing that girl. His palms still itch. His nose strains for her scent. His ears listen for her voice.

The girl he never married.

What a fool he was.