One Chance
It was Jack who gave him the idea in the end, but despite the advisability of keeping his distance he's not content to simply stand and watch her from the sidelines. Eleven completely separate lives and he has never been that sort of a man.
He only gets one chance per body, then. She's not the type to forget.
The first time – for her – he tries to seduce her. He should have known she wouldn't let him.
She's single (convenient, that), stuck in the time between Jimmy and returning to Mickey, months and months before meeting him.
He didn't mean to find her this way, but now he that has he can't stop Jack's words from ringing in his ears. Never said hello… How can he pass up an opportunity like this? He's never believed in fate but tonight he's ever-so-slightly inclined to use it as an excuse.
It's his Eleventh body; he's bitter and drunk and so far detached from the gentle love they once shared that he can barely remember the feel of his hand in hers. His lips on her neck, then, and her back against the wall, and he almost thinks he's won but then she knees him in the groin and slaps him around the head with her handbag. She's only seventeen. He should have known.
She half-runs, half-stumbles away, one frightened, regretful glance back in his direction, and it's all there in her eyes: she thought he was different. He talked. He understood her. He wasn't like Jimmy Stones.
Perhaps using the knowledge he gained of her so many years ago and speaking her thoughts before she's even thought them was a little bit of a cheat, a little bit manipulative, but he's so, so tired of having regrets. He hates what if more than anything else in the universe right now.
She blinks once, twice, salt water seeping out of the corners, hovering at the end of the alleyway and unable to believe the change in him. She leaves, her already broken trust in tatters, and he's never felt like such a pathetic excuse for a person.
--
The second time is an accident, he swears, and it's a good job he's in his twelfth body and therefore unrecognisable or else he thinks he'd get a slap off Jackie, too. And what else can he do but try and mend her, now that he's contributed to breaking her so thoroughly in two entirely separate times?
He's gentle and tender, this time, kisses her under the stars and whispers long-forgotten words in her ear. Perhaps it's more reckless this way, but he can't help himself.
She's never done this before. He knows she won't again. She's not the type to just fall into bed with men she doesn't know, but he does know her, better than he knows himself. She just isn't aware of it yet. There are a thousand voices screaming protests in his head, but once she smiles he can't stop. He doesn't think there's a single person alive who would be unwilling to move Heaven and Earth to make her happy.
It's tempting, far too tempting, to stay. This is why he can never go back, why he'll never admit that he wants to. The pull is too strong, and she'd claim him forever without even saying a word.
He holds her through the night, but by the time she wakes up, he's gone.
She spends entirely too long in the shower, scrubbing at the claims he's left on her skin, inky purple hearts and finger marks. She tries to wash and scald him away, but she can never erase him from her mind. She tells a man who is him-but-not-quite all about it one day in a conversation about past lovers, a wistful look for what could have been quickly losing its potency when she remembers what she has right in front of her. He shouldn't've been surprised that it would turn out to be him.
--
The next time is, for both of them, the third. He's in his last body, reckless and alone, and what laws are there to stop him now? It's so easy to believe that she could have given him this long when neither of them were given the chance to prove it.
This isn't an accident. He had to wait seventy years for another chance. He tries to find her when she's travelling with him some time after the regeneration, to tell her that, damnit, he loves her and for Rassilon's sake don't go messing around with levers, but just because he's abandoned all sanity doesn't mean everyone has.
The TARDIS knows it's a bad idea even if he won't let himself believe it. She intervenes and he's taken back to an early adventure long before regeneration where he doesn't let the girl out of his sight. All he is left with is the sight of her and it's hardly comforting. Their blind happiness hurts. Don't they know what's to come?
A much younger version of himself goes to take her hand before pulling his fingers back abruptly when she, unwitting and full of that sense of wonder that never left her, rushes delightedly over to a glittering market stall placed before a temple. He wants to scream at his past, tell him to take every chance he can and touch her all he wants because one day soon she will be gone and he will be reduced to this, skulking in alleyways and terrified to step in lest he confuses her timeline any more than he already has.
He leaves before anything can happen. So do they.
--
The real second time, she might not be on his side but her memories are. He will come to remember and use this two years back and one-hundred-and-two forward, when she is seventeen years young and he is more than a century older than even now.
He doesn't know himself yet but he knows her. Knows he loves her and he died to save her; knows he'd do it all over again given the chance; knows, most of all, that he doesn't ever want this to change. He can't put a label on what they have, but he's not about to lose it.
Blood burns through his veins and he's practically twitching with the effort of restraint. Feeling inexplicably freer than he has in a long time, he's consumed by the sudden urge to jump and shout and run for his life all over again, but what's important right now is the scared girl in front of him and convincing her that he's here and he's real and he remembers just as much as she does.
His nerves are new and tingling. The way their hands fit together seems different even to him.
"Run," he says, unable to help the smile that spreads across his face when a glimmer of recognition tumbles into her eyes.
"Doctor?" She whispers the word as though trying it out, not quite sure that it belongs to him yet.
"Hello," he smiles, and he sees the truth in her expression when she gasps and backs away. She believes him whether she wants to or not. Even he doesn't quite feel like he fits in this skin, but he knows that all they need is time.
Right now, they have all the time in the world.
--
"Run," he insists, for the first time in a not-so-first body, taking the hand of a woman who has held him twice already without ever really meeting him and who will come to be the only hand that fits for a whole other him no-one has even considered yet. She's so completely and utterly woven into his timeline, into his life, that he couldn't not meet her.
She grips his fingers and runs. It's as simple as that.