The Slow Path
Disclaimer: Let's face it, we all know I don't own Doctor Who and that this is a complete formality.
Disclaimer Take Two: I also don't own Snow Patrol or their songs, I just worship whatever they deign to record...
A/N: This is yet another of my obligatory 'Happy Birthday, Ianto!' fics, for my amazing writing buddy...she just keeps getting older so that I have to write more! Anyway, to cut to the chase, I keep writing RoseTenToo fics where Rose is uncertain of how she feels about her new Doctor!Clone so I thought it was only fair that TenToo had a chance to be a little lost for a change, and this was the result. Reviews fill me with happy thoughts and make me keep writing, so please press the pretty little button at the bottom of the page when you're done!
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A new empire beckons, a new kingdom in the distance,
No gods are present, just the sky, the earth, and us.
No wings, no halos, nor the thunder in the footsteps,
'Cause fear and anger, they are law unto themselves.
It's just like you told me, that I should learn to let it all go,
It just took 'til now for me to get just what you meant.
My heart is thumping, I can feel it in my fingers,
No fear, no anger, we are law unto ourselves.
The Weight of Love – Snow Patrol
…
The screams went on and on, like a drill burrowing its way into the very roots of his mind. Never before did he ever think he would feel remorse for the death of a Dalek, but some nagging moral voice at the back of his brain was pushing him, coaxing its way into his nightmares. 'Murderer.' He knew the voice, of course. It was Him. His 'Better Half', his Time Lord half; the one who said that any genocide would have to be committed over his dead body. Except his body is very much alive and the moment of genocide was very deliberate. It was the memories of war; of battle and bloodshed and death, of all his lost comrades. 'His' lost comrades. The memories are false, someone else's mistakes and triumphs, loves and losses, the dust on someone else's shoes somehow ingrained onto his like it almost belonged there. He would never go in for the kill; that was what Davros had succeeded in proving. He was always too moral and good. But a hybrid? A clone? A poor copy of 'The Man Who Never Would'? Well, he could do it. Would do it. Just a push of a button, that's all. All it took to end millions of lives. Oh, Dalek lives, of course, and in doing so, he had saved the universe. But there would be no reward, nor respite, for 'The Man With Blood On His Hands'.
Not even her.
One heart. One singular human heart. One cardio-vascular system. Whichever terminology he assigned to it, the outcome was always the same. This would always be a half-life, a blink of an eye; the slow path. It had never really been something that had ever appealed to him, not even with all his pontificating speeches about wanting the 'one adventure I could never have'. Or was it? How would he know? All his opinions and experiences had been pre-determined by another man who had a much longer future ahead of him to fix previous mistakes and make further ones. A man who could play with Time.
He could see it, he knew what everyone was wondering: will she love him? Could she ever bring herself to feel anything for a flimsy copy of the man that she loved? He didn't know the answer to this weighty and seemingly very problematic question, but more to the point, he didn't think he really cared either. The connection between his mind and that of his pompous Time Lord counterpart had been fragile enough to begin with but with distance and time came a frightening clarity that he hadn't anticipated. The screams, the trauma, all the loss and pain and heartache remained in his nightmares, but the softer emotions waxed and waned and almost faded into forgetfulness. When he looked at her, all pink and yellow and broken, he felt sympathy, but nothing much else. He began to wonder rather treacherously whether the question of whether she would ever love him or not was a little bit moot, and whether the more worrying question should be whether he would ever come to love her.
Thrown together like a couple in the thralls of domestic bliss, he began to watch her go about her daily life with a paradoxically indifferent interest. There was a level of curiosity in what He had seen in her, this plain-Jane shop girl, that he just couldn't seem to shake; a wonder about what interest he felt fleetingly in what lay inside her pretty little head. Nothing much, as far as he could see. There was an inherent embarrassment that he had been so bold and so open with his supposed feelings on that windswept Norwegian beach before he had learned to think for himself, to separate the real from the film reels of memories that he couldn't really feel properly. She kept looking at him with a sense of trepidation and suspicion, as if wondering whether he might suddenly spring a declaration on her again, or perhaps worrying that he might not. He settled for saying nothing at all in the hopes that it might be safer to keep a little distance between them. His singular heart was still doing a little healing and growing of its own without taking on the responsibility of putting the pieces of hers back together.
In the end, it happened without either of them even noticing. One not particularly special night, he awoke from an awful nightmare of half-remembered terror. He had writhed around in his own sweat, clutching at the dark and the nothingness. She was there, next to him, with a tentative hand on his shoulder. Not too soft, not too overbearing. Just right. He finally realised that she hadn't been waiting for her feelings to make a sudden unexpected appearance, or to grow or mature, she had merely been waiting for him to stop projecting blame for his situation onto her. To see her as a human being, as much as he now was. She had been waiting for him to find his humanity, and in turn, to find her, sitting right next to him, stroking his unruly hair and telling him that they were both going to make a fresh start, together.