Friendship Dies and True Love Lies
RORY:
I am... was a nurse. I don't know what I am now. My job was to provide support and assistance. Not just to the doctors, but to the patient. When they had no way out, and no happy endings, it became all the more important, the need to hold out that human hand to hold on to.
I did not embrace life in the TARDIS as my wife did. Because I know from experience. Doctors play God more than anyone.
But I love Amy, so I went with them. And I fell off the Universe soon after. Amy didn't even know I was gone. Or that I was there in the first place. I was a Neverwas from Neverwhere. How could a man not have doubts about himself after that?
The Pandorica Opened, and the Universe ended. I was The Last Centurion of the Empire. There to bear witness to the passage of centuries, and marvel at the differences in Earth's history when nobody could look up and see stars above.
Amy had something special with the Doctor. Special enough that I allowed just a little suspicion to creep through. And then I had a special connection of my own. Rory the Roman and The Doctor. We are The Old Soldiers. The last survivors. The terribly old ones, who just want nobody else to die. (Not even a scared ganger girl.) My thoughts jump like that sometimes. Sitting next to that damned box for centuries gave me plenty of time to over-think things. Like the Doctor would if he ever stopped moving for a minute, I suppose.
I tried to lock it up when I got her back. Take the centuries and seal them away in my mind. Right now I can't do that. I have to get all those centuries of patience and of experience and waiting together and hold on to them tightly.
Deep down, I suppose I always knew. Not who River was, but what she was. She was part Time Lord. Months ago, I knew, seeing them back to back, a swift and deadly circle of destruction, him sweeping through their weapons with his Sonic, her sweeping through their lives with her gun; surrounded by The Silence.
Who else would have a chance of flummoxing the Doctor? Who else could play god with the lives of people they loved?
River Song passed judgment on The Doctor. The only one who ever could look the Time Lord in the eye and tell him off. And she told him... She told him that she and the others had kept the original meaning alive. 'Healer' The one who 'makes things better'. They had to keep that alive, because the Time Lord Victorious was a fearsome Warrior to behold. Colonel Run-Away could vouch for that. So could the Cybermen. So could the Daleks. So could every creature in time and space that an innocent child would have nightmares about.
And when they wanted to frighten each other, they told 'Doctor' stories.
There were a few superstitious early Europeans that told scary stories about The Last Centurion. The things I have done to protect her over the centuries I will never tell her.
And now I have to be the strong one again. The one that waits. I can live with that. I have lived long enough to know that the universe is crazy. Things happen in reality that would never be plausible in fiction. You take what you can get.
I have my wife in my arms. I have my daughter with me, and I have a promise from The Time Lord that he will make it all better again. Is it perfect? No. But I can live with it.
The only thing that worries me... Is why was River in prison?
DOCTOR:
I always forget, how I used to be. I've had how many forms? How many reincarnations, and I always forgot how it is to be them. His last two incarnations. The last two faces I wore. They were born of fire, created on battlefields against the Daleks (Ex-ter-min-ate! Daleks! ENEMY! Hate THEM! HATE DALEKS!) and they were born to survive.
I wonder sometimes, if there was something in me that found the right face, the right body, the right personality to survive the moment. When a warrior was needed, one emerged from the Vortex as I was reborn. When a warrior went too far and needed to be removed, you got someone without anger coming so naturally. (AND STILL NOT GINGER! And Ears. Oh, man ears all over the place. I like ears though. Good for headphones. Need to get headphones. Headphones are cool.)
They all thought that it was the same Doctor every time, just another face. Like getting a plastic surgeon (Cassandra, poor thing; did right at the end, deserved to say goodbye to herself, only person ever loved her) to rebuild a face on the same person. But it wasn't.
You never knew who you were going to turn into. What he (Or she, wonder what Martha would make of that?) would do with the lifetime you made for him. I wonder if that's what the last Him thought. If that's why he went around to all the old friends (Captain Jack, wonder if I'll meet him again. Allonsy? Who thinks that's a good catchphrase? Catchphrases are cool.) and made sure of them. (Goodbye Sarah Jane. You will be loved. You will be missed.) Wonder if the last Me was trying to make a clean break, so that I'd never have to come back to this rage. (Rose wouldn't recognize me. "The laws of Time are mine now, and THEY WILL OBEY ME!" Was going a bit off the rails wasn't he? The Master would approve. Let Ten go. Let Rose go. Let them all go. Another man's life.)
I took it on the chin when River made her little speech. (River Song, coo-coo-ka-choo Mrs Robinson, so cute in that crib, but oh how she grew...) because I knew she was right. I have changed with the last resurrection, but I am still The Doctor. The weight of all that history is still on my shoulders, (Scarecrow shoulders, still awesome though. Scarecrows are cool. Baines might disagree.) and he had to pay for that.
My fault. (Not my fault, their fault. All Ten of them, how dare they?) No. It is. Little Melody... My fault.
I fell for it too. Let myself think that the Time Lord Victorious was someone else. But he wasn't. Not by enough. Why would a Time Lord be a weapon? How could I forget so quickly?
I almost didn't recognize myself this week. ("Look, I'm angry. That's new. Not really sure what's going to happen.")
I haven't gone to war in this lifetime. I forgot how easy it was.
AMY:
They took her. They took my daughter. Rory's and mine.
And they took her because of him. No, not him. Me. Because I went and ran away with him one night, and took the man I loved with me. We had our honeymoon on another planet, and we made a weapon to be used against her godfather.
A crazy man that I dreamed back into existence, because when I was a little girl I had an imaginary friend, and we ran away together.
Why didn't I see this? I was there when the Pandorica Opened. She saw every scary monster the galaxy had to offer run for their lives, just because The Doctor dared them to come a little closer.
Why would they rather run away than face him? Why didn't I ask that at the time?
I was left alone in a dark hallway; holding a puddle of goo. My daughter. They took her off me... And too late I realize why the name 'Doctor' is so appropriate.
A Doctor does not just save the living. He is the one who declares you dead. When you realize that you have minutes left to live, and no clue how you got there, you look up at a doctor and beg him to save you.
And He's the one who decides, whether or not you can be saved. If you can, he does something brilliant and imaginative and he brings you back from the brink.
And if he decides you cannot, or should not; he's the one that looks at you with wise, kind eyes, filled with sadness, and tells you that your time is up, and you are going to die.
And you believe him, because after all, he's the Doctor.
I look at the Doctor with what used to be my daughter in my arms and I beg him to fix it, and make it all better. But he can't. He's as lost as I am. And I'm in hell, because if he doesn't know what to do...
Until... until She shows up.
My daughter is gone. My best friend has gone after her. And... River. River Song. I made so many suggestive jokes about her and The Doctor. I'm sort of regretting them.
He was my imaginary friend. He'd been in my life for two hours when I was a little girl, and half a day when I grew up, and most of that was me running for my life. Why oh why did I think this was a good idea? I could have just married Rory, been blissfully happy, and had a normal child that nobody would abduct and take to another planet.
What, in the name of everything holy, am I supposed to be feeling right now?
RIVER:
I do remember her. The woman with the eyepatch. I remember everything. She told me you were a demon of darkness. The inky black between the stars spewed forth this Blue Box, and within... The Oncoming Storm. A storm that slew the universe's two mightiest empires in a nanosecond and sent a billion suns dark. And then you started to get dangerous.
And she told me that I was like you.
They never thought for a second that I could fall in love with such a man. They only knew you the way the Darkness knew you. So they never knew you at all.
Demon's Run. They never knew that we named it, My Love. You wondered where I got the name from. It was a nursery rhyme my mother told me. Over and over again. I must make sure she knows it before you bring me back to her.
Demons run when a good man goes to war
Night will fall and drown the sun
When a good man goes to war
Friendship dies and true love lies
Night will fall and the dark will rise
When a good man goes to war
Demons run, but count the cost
The battle's won, but the child is lost,
When a good man goes to war.
The look on his face. The impossible enthusiasm. That's what got me. He had that look when he went after me. And that's the real reason I couldn't go with him. I don't like to be there when that look fades.
I'm sorry, My Love.
AN: Written in half an hour. I tried to make them in character. The Doctor is surprisingly difficult to pin down. I tried to make the way he acts into the way he thinks, always jumping back and forth from one thought to another before getting back on track.
AN2: Sorry! Sorrysorry! Quick re-upload because somewhere in there I shifted tenses. my bad. Fixed now.
Read and review, and please be forgiving.
