A short character study prompted by rewatching The Husbands of River Song and discovering Dr. Nyarlathotep the other week (although this isn't very Nyarlathotep).
It was impossible not to notice. Not for her, anyway. The mania, the whirlwind of motion, everything so calculated, so distracting. It was impossible not to notice in person.
It should have been impossible to kill him. All her lives, trained for a task that no one had ever accomplished, and that no one could hope to accomplish. That was why they raised her without hope. It was easy, almost. Something so ancient succumbing to a passing kiss. But really, he hadn't. She knew that. It was impossible not to notice, and she understood—she thought she understood—and so she brought him back, and so she died.
Obsession wasn't the word. She woke up in that hospital very much alive and very much knowing that he had been there. The blue diary sat silent, bow-tied, on the table, with cracked filaments of time woven into its pages by an eccentric hand, or maybe by the hand of someone who existed before there was such a thing as eccentricity, or normality, or chaos. He had given her her life, new with blank pages, ready with impatience. He was a little more on the nose about those sorts of issues than scholars liked to theorize.
Curiosity was closer to the word, and she researched, intents masked by study. He was an impossible being for an improbable woman. She had two lifetimes of data before her but only the one going forwards, with time's vortex still trying to reach for her, his manipulations the frost on the window. Easy to follow. Trace. Design. So she would. She couldn't not, knots of influence she opted not to ignore compelling her towards him. But there were stories.
She knew the large ones. The ones skewed by Kovarian, the meaning of 'Doctor' in so many languages, the titles, and the ideas, and the legends. None of them could see him, not properly, or everything would be so much more. More fear, if they knew—if they could even catch the barest scent—of who their savior, destroyer, whatever, was. They spoke of wars, of plagues, of supernovas, and black holes, and creation, and nonexistence, and nevertime. They spoke of him in awe and hush and glee and presumptions of understanding. Presumptions. Assumptions defined by limited perceptions. She understood that she could see him clearer than any other living thing left in the universe. Universes.
There were poems that told of him. Of him and his blue box. Of him and of her. None of them ended well, but all of them ended. Some were cut short by the author's life span. Others, oral history, destroyed by war or denial. And others, somehow sadder, by proper and defined endings. She feared these. He was a being without understandable end, so how could there be countable minutes, and countable encounters, and countable pages? She didn't need to ask.
Every story she wrote she penned by hand. Every moment she filled she filled with memory. Every word, every thought; her own story, her own life, and her decision to love him. And every time she wrote his name—the one he went by, not the one he told her in a pocket of time he created from nothing; the noise of their own universe being ripped from nevertime into permanency only barely strong enough to mask his words because he whispered—every time she wrote his name, she crafted more of his future. It was an art, he, incomprehensible. And she was devoted.
The poems said that he was her husband. They said that anytime she was in danger, he would appear for her, just as she would save him. The poems were wrong. Simplifying him into three dimensional terms, assigning to him understandable emotions, imagining that some appeal from her would bring him to her like a doctor to their injured patient. What was a visual medium to math? Time nor the universe can love, and she had no pretensions of being able to confine him to such impossibilities.
She had five pages remaining in her diary. Five pages, for three score epics. It was always the proper length. Always, impossibly, the proper amount. The stories end with her on Darillium, and him standing immovable, next to her. Five pages and one night, and then she would die.
It was impossible for her not to have noticed. How every play of the light moved quicksilver over him, how grand and false his words were, how perfect his mask at last constructed itself. It was impossible for her to not have noticed until he as good as showed her. It was impossible for him to have come to her, just for her. It was impossible. Not with so little left.
It should have been impossible. All her life, trying to accept her fate and knowing as a fact that she loved something to whom love was incomprehensibly small, and yet there he was. She had been raised without hope to prevent falter and failure, and she had failed. Something so ancient, succumbing to her cry for help, there before she knew she needed it. There because this was the end. It was impossible not to notice, and she understood. She hadn't noticed.