Eyes Wide Shut
What use are emotions if you will not save the woman you love?
It was like opening your eyes when you hadn't even realised they were closed.
Like staring at the mirror for the first time and realising that it's your own reflection staring back at you, like someone pointing out a note that had been taped to your back for such a long, long time without your notice. And it ached. So very much, as his eyes remained fixed on the monitor and he knew it was either the world or Rose Tyler. The world, or his world.
Because it had never been about showing her the stars, had it? It had never been about a good deed for the girl on the council estate, never been about the wonders and the thrills he knew would change her life to see. From the beginning he'd known that. It was always about him, everything was about him – about his selfishness because he knew she'd fix him, about his loneliness because he wanted company. He'd seduced her wanderlust to lead her from her home, from where she was safe just for the sake of satisfying his own self-absorbed desires.
And now she was going to die.
He'd been so lonely when he met her, wounded and scarred and hurting, the burning of his people still etched so fiercely into his memory that he wished not a thousand times that he'd burnt with them – because he couldn't feel them. The space in his head where he had once felt connected to them all, like a web spread across every star that ever was and every supernova that ever would be, all tied together through common species and powerful, ancient laws. After the Moment that all ended, and he was blinking alone like a light left on in the middle of the Universe where everything else had gone out. He'd regenerated cold and forgotten and been reborn the shell of the man he used to be.
He'd continued in the TARDIS, stopping now and again to solve minor mysteries like the swapping suns of Calvador, the hunting Morlocks of Sandoon who only wanted a determinate line of their own territory; he'd cured the plague of the 33rd century and beaten Garry Kasparov to a game of chess in 1984. For what? To imagine everything was still turning on its axis and nothing was different to how it was before, all the while avoiding the overwhelming question that raced from planet to planet in his wake, threatening to consume him.
When the Time Lords had fallen, why hadn't the Universe stopped spinning?
Why hadn't the ripples of their great destruction been felt in every corner of the cosmos?
He knew why. He'd done more than burnt Gallifrey, he'd erased it from existence; time-locked it so nothing could get in, and nothing could get out. They would continue to wage war and no side would ever gain the upper hand, stuck in a loop of unending annihilation in their own pocket of galaxy near the Medusa Cascade. Nothing went in. Nothing came out.
Except one Dalek.
One soon to be very, very sorry Dalek as it continued to point its gunstick at Rose Tyler's back.
Because he'd been grieving and despondent and longing for something more and then he'd found her. He'd wanted entertainment so he'd let her follow him around; he hadn't wanted to be alone anymore so he'd invited her to travel with him. He didn't want to be broken anymore so when she'd refused, he'd persisted and lured her away with charm and smiles and Did I Mention It Also Travels In Time?
At first he just wanted to impress her – he wanted to show someone just how magnificent he was, and by extension how incredible his people were. He wanted someone to remember him, he wanted to affect someone so profoundly that he'd forever make an impact on their life in the way that none of his species would be able to do again. For the sake of the Time Lords, he'd wanted to shape Rose Tyler to his every whim and create someone who looked at him like he was the most amazing person in the Universe; to slowly put him back together and remind him of what it was to be the Doctor.
For the sake of his solitary beating hearts, he'd wanted a friend.
He wasn't sure when she'd become more than a passenger – possibly that moment in 1869 when he'd been so sure he was going to die in a dungeon in Cardiff, and although he'd appeared cavalier the only thing he'd been worried about was the fact that she might die in a dungeon in Cardiff, when to him she was the brightest light in the whole Universe, about to be snuffed out because of one of his mistakes. It was probably the moment he'd grabbed her hand and told her how glad he was to have met her, and she'd replied with the warmest smile and told him the same. To her it might have been a nice comment to get them through the fact that they were on the brink of death, but to him it was everything – he wasn't just the executer of two great peoples, he was someone else. He was a person someone had been glad to meet. He was healing.
That was probably the moment he fell in love with her, too.
Then he'd sworn to protect her lest the hand of Jackie Tyler reach all the way across time and slap him hard in the face for losing her, but that wasn't his only incentive – she was everything he'd been looking for, the only thing worth caring for thrown carelessly into his path, so delicate and yet not and burning so dazzlingly that even the centre of the Rings of Akhaten paled in comparison. Of course he loved her; how could he not? And yet even with nine-hundred years of vast knowledge and experience behind him, it had taken the mechanical drone of his greatest enemy to point it out to him.
Like opening your eyes, when you never even knew they were closed.
What use are emotions if you will not save the woman you love?
What use were emotions if not for Rose? She was the only reason he knew he still had them. What use was he having what he knew set him apart from the Daleks if he didn't even use them? Without Rose he'd shown no compassion for that Dalek, alone and purposeless in an unfamiliar environment – he had seen it, and he had tortured it without a second thought. Is that what Rose would have wanted him to do?
The Dalek, twisted as it was, had a point. He'd been trying to make himself as hard as it was, tried to ignore all of the feelings that were constant and tempestuous, waging war in his mind ever since the Time Lords had been erased from existence. Casting blame on that metal shell had been easier than the slow and painful road Rose had been taking him down and he'd regressed like a scared little boy confronted with the source of his sadness and the testament of his crimes.
"You would make a good Dalek."
The very thought had chilled him so deeply he was sure he would have remained motionless had the bumbling humans behind him not drawn his attention again. He'd been so ready to kill, so ready to destroy, to exterminate, that he'd sealed the bulkhead when he knew in both of his hearts that Rose wouldn't have been able to make it. For all intents and purposes he'd killed her, only so he could satisfy his burning rage and erase the remaining evidence of his guilt towards the end of the last Great Time War. To harden his heart enough to murder that creature, he had sacrificed Rose.
It was like the War, all over again.
What use are emotions if you will not save the woman you love?
Without her, what was there? What made him any better than that killing machine when by writing off Rose he'd be writing off feeling, and all that's good in the Universe for the sake of cold, brutal death? In that moment he felt he should have been born a Dalek. He could have been a soldier; could have fought and could have died and never put anyone in danger, never destroyed the Time Lords or lured Rose Tyler from her safe little council estate, never fallen in love with her and never had her hurt because of the mistakes of a past he was still running from.
He was wrong in one respect – the ripples of the destruction of the Time Lords were still echoing across time. Just in the places he went. They battered on his skull and poisoned his view of the Universe, filling him with cynicism and rage and making him just as bad as the foes he'd done all he could to fight.
But then there was Rose.
Glimmering, wonderful, fantastic Rose.
And she made him better.
Maybe he hadn't realised it before now, named the intensity of his feeling toward her and recognised the magnitude of all she was doing for him until that very moment – until that Dalek, reluctantly gifted with emotions itself, understood her meaning to him perfectly and spared her to use as another weapon against him. By Rassilon, he'd been lucky enough to be granted a second chance. Rose said he couldn't get rid of her, and if it took sacrificing all of time for him to make that statement a fact then he knew he'd do it. Because, what use were emotions if he wouldn't save the woman he loved?
He wasn't a monster. He wasn't a murderer.
Not anymore.
He looked at van Statten, fear shining in the man's eyes at the decision he already knew the Doctor had made.
"I killed her once," he said, "I can't do it again."
Inspired by all that angst in the Doctor's eyes after the Dalek said that. Let me know what you thought! :)