Golden
She feels the whole of Satellite Five. Every movement, every particle of dust as it blows through corridors many floors below. Many people, all dead. So many people.
One of them matters.
"I bring life."
A new heartbeat, just outside the room. Emotions. Shock, disbelief. Rapid breathing, trying to convince himself that he is alive; the disturbance of the air. Fear for himself, for the Doctor. She feels it all.
The Doctor is afraid, too, and she doesn't understand why. This is wonderful, this power; running through her veins, blazing just beneath her skin. This is beautiful. Can't he see that? With this power, she can rewrite the world.
There's nothing to be afraid of, there's nothing to fear; she can do anything, she can protect him. They will both live. Without her, he would die and Jack would remain dead, to rot and become dust in an abandoned satellite. This is wonderful. Everything about this is wonderful. Why can't he see that?
He believes that it will kill her, but she is immortal; she is golden; she cannot die. She forgives him his concern, his ignorance. He is still so young; he cannot understand.
But still she sees everything: the room around her, bathed in gold light; and the Doctor on the floor in front of her (you will live, I have saved you, I could never have left you to die, how could you have thought that I would stay behind?); and Jack, just beyond the door; and the particles of the air, stirred by the vibrations of machinery and by his desperate breaths; and the memory of death on the lower floors and the terror on the Earth below and the spinning spinning spinning of the satellite as it orbits and of the Earth and of every single planet in the Universe -
"My head - " it hurts, it hurts, there's too much of everything everywhere and she can't process it all, she doesn't understand. She wasn't ready for this. The power is consuming her, it's burning her to death.
"Come here."
" - is killing me..." he said that he saw this all the time, felt the turn of the Earth and the pain of every failure and every aspect of the world around him and the way it could all be whisked away, destroyed in an instant. How can he live with it, with all the history and the future of every planet pressing in on his mind? All the time. For ever. It is inconceivable.
She sees a world, many years from now, invaded and torn apart. She sees a city ablaze, and a family plagued by illness, and a single man who could have survived if he had paid slightly more attention to his surroundings.
She wants to fix it. All of it. She can't live with all this suffering.
She understands him now, why he is always restless, always on the move. She understands why he seeks out trouble and danger, the extent of the happiness he felt when the nanogenes restored the Earth. She feels the same happiness now as she revives the people on the planet, reshapes the continents, but it's killing her. She can still feel everything, but she is blinded. Her world is a blaze of gold light.
A blaze of gold light and the Doctor.
He's kissing her, she realises, and it should be strange but it feels somehow familiar and right. The power is leaving her, he's taking it into himself, he saves her, she can live again. There is a glorious quietness in her mind as he pulls away, and he catches her when she falls.
As she slips into unconsciousness, the last remnants of the TARDIS' soul tell her that there are quiet footsteps nearby and the disturbance of a pile of dust, and she prays that he remembers Jack.