Three Words

A Doctor Who General/Angst Fanfic

Summary:
Three words can make you or break you. Fulfill a promise, make a friend, save a life. The problem lies in choosing the right three words.

Rated K for only slight innuendos and the like.

Disclaimer: No OCs here. Just the Doctor, and references to his companions, none whom have or ever will belong to me.

A/N: I was reading something and it hit me how many three-word sentences changed the Doctor. Or affected him. Or are a defining part of him. So this was born.

Spoilers: This specific chapter's a spoiler for Doomsday, but I'm guessing most of you have seen that.

Chapter One: I Love You (496 words)

"I love you."

There have never been more heavily-weighted words, he realizes. She says them, and it could almost come as a throw-away comment. But not from her lips. Nothing from her lips is ever a throw-away comment. There's always some sense to be had in whatever she's thinking, whatever she's saying. Even from that first time they met, when she somehow managed to wheedle his entire story out of him. She hadn't even said that much. "Who are you?" was all she asked. But since then, since he told her to forget him, she's become something more than nobody.

It was the biggest mistake of his life to tell her to forget him. He should have known, should have realized, that she was the type to never forget things, to always remember the little details and spend ages wondering about them. To pick up on the little things, the said and unsaid, everything every gesture ever meant. And she did pick up on it, and she did notice it, and she did put everything together and she understood, all along, that he loved her and she loved him, and it only took until the end of their time for her to say it.

There have never words that have such double meaning, he knows. They're the biggest throw-away comment in the world. Everyone says it to anyone, and no one ever means it. They're almost like saying hi, these days. These days, if you don't love someone, you can't possibly know them. And yes, he's loved her since he met her. He fell in love with how completely accepting of his outlandish story she was, the first time he ever told it to her. Maybe that should have made him realize that their story could never be anything more than outlandish. Ridiculous.

Impossible.

That's what they were, the words, the actions, the two of them. Everything they did was impossible. He was impossible – the last of the Time Lords, murderer of Daleks and his own people. She was impossible – a lowly human, but had taken in the Time Vortex and prevented the end of the universe by screwing with the world. Together, they were even more impossible. Impossible, unlikely, couldn't possibly exist. And now she was stuck there, and he was stuck here, and it was impossible that they'd ever see each other again.

So he had to say it. He had to.

"Rose Tyler, –"

He stopped, for a fraction of a second, so imperceptibly small that he knew she and the rest of the world – either one – would never notice, but it gave him all the time in the world to decide. And he realized, and he stopped, and put two and two together and got not five, not seventy, not some deformed window, not absolutely nothing at all, but got something impossible.

Them. They were impossible.

So he had no need to say it.

He'd be seeing her again.

A/N: This was also a little excuse for me to explain away his not saying "I love you" along with not saying goodbye.