"Thank you."
He looks down at me with bemused interest and scrubs his fingertips through my short hair.
"What for?"
I bury my face quickly into his chest, both avoiding his gaze and hiding my surely embarrassingly loopy grin. I can feel him chuckle and try to gently pry my head away from him so he can look at me, but I stubbornly nuzzle farther into the folds of his jacket, close enough now to the warmth of his body to feel his right heart beating steadily against my cheek.
"Eh?" he laughs, jostling me playfully with the leg I'm leaning on. I giggle and bring my right hand up to rest over his other heart to feel it beat in syncopation with the one right by my ear. "Koschei…" he groans out in mock frustration. "You can't just do that, you know. What are you thanking me for?"
Finally I turn my face up to meet his gaze with a wide grin. His hand leaves my hair and comes under my arm to hold me in a two-armed hug against him. I lean up and press a hard kiss against his lips to which he responds happily for a moment before pulling back to stare at me expectantly.
"Thank you," I murmur again. He rolls his eyes and opens his mouth to reprimand me for wasting his time but I press the fingers of my right hand gently against his lips. "I'm not finished. Thank you for this. Thank you for bringing me here, making me stay, making sure neither of us are alone anymore." He's smiling dazzlingly by this time, and my next words make him gasp softly and pull me fiercely to him in the most passionate kiss he'd ever given me.
"Thank you for saving me."
He was yelling, screaming at me desperately, but I could barely hear him, let alone understand him as I felt the life drain from me through the hole in my gut, seemingly so small but apparently big enough to kill me. The drumming in my head was louder than it had ever been. From time to time it would die down just long enough for me to hear some of what he was trying to say to me.
"…can't end like this. You and me, all the things we've done…" Suddenly there was a painful wrenching somewhere in my stomach that I suspected had nothing to do with the bullet. "…we're the only two left," he was saying. "There's no one else…"
I felt a single tear fall from his cheek onto the base of my neck with impossible detail. I could see him screaming "Regenerate!", but it was hardly a whisper compared to the drumming, which was now growing ever louder. The pain in my stomach was stabbing and constant, but the grief in his eyes was exquisite to watch. So weak, so human, him crying and begging, pleading with me to live. Me, his greatest enemy, the only one who'd ever defeated him, if only for one year ultimately to be erased from time. I smiled.
"How about that?" I managed to murmur. "I win…"
The wrenching feeling in my gut clenched violently at the heartbreak I could see my words causing him, painful and confusing at the same time. I gasped and grunted, straining against the pain as I felt the last of my life force slipping away. I stared up wide-eyed at him, the only other Time Lord left living, soon to be the only Time Lord at all. The only person who had ever had any hope of helping me.
The beating of drums filled my head, so much louder now than it had ever been. Pounding, agonizing drums beating ruthlessly against my skull. I looked up at him desperately; my oldest friend, my greatest enemy. The last man alive who could say he ever really knew me.
"Will it stop, Doctor?" I whispered. "The drumming. Will it stop?"
The last things I saw were the Doctor's horribly pained face, the ceiling, my eyelids sliding closed, then nothing. And it did. The drumming, it stopped.
Thank you.