More angst, as per usual. Please enjoy, and please review!
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Lucy Saxon was not especially bright but essentially harmless. She had always been that way, ever since she was a little girl, not spoiled but living an easy life. She didn't struggle. She coasted, getting by on her smile and her manners and her Daddy's charm.
She never wanted anything but to be happy, or at least that's what she would have said if you'd asked her. But no one did ask her. She was not particularly memorable as a girl, other than being Lord Cole's daughter. She was more of a thing than a person, a name and face instead of a heart and mind and soul. If you had asked Lucy how she felt about that she would have shrugged it off, smiled, and moved on. It wasn't that she liked being treated that way, but she never knew there was any other way to be treated.
Until she met Harry. Harold Saxon was the first person to look at her and see Lucy, the girl hiding behind her father's title. He looked at her with those almond-shaped brown eyes, so much older than he seemed to be, and saw right through her. There was a kind of manic energy that surrounded him, made him a little mad and more than a little brilliant, something that scared and excited her in equal measure.
Harold Saxon made Lucy wake up. He shook her out of her dream and led her by the hand into reality, where it was dark and harsh and frightening but it was okay because Harry was with her. They had a whirlwind courtship, and even before the wedding he told her who he was. That is okay, she told herself. There was always something different about him. It doesn't change anything. It means he's better, he's more clever, it means he had the whole universe to choose from and he chose you.
Lucy's wedding day was the happiest of her life. She dressed in her gown with careful precision, arranging the skirt in a certain way, adjusting the veil to hide her pretty face. She walked down the idea on her Daddy's arm, said her vows, danced the night away. It was all a blur of light and sound until late at night, when she shed the layers of silk and satin and fell into Harry's arms, a grin animating his handsome face, the softness of his ash-blonde hair in her fingers and the lean length of his body moving against hers.
And because she was innocent and untouched, Harry soothed the pain he had sparked, petting and cooing until Lucy relaxed. They tangled together to come down from their high, Harry's hands stroking the small of her back as he nuzzled her neck.
"Passerotto mio," he murmured, his breath hot on her skin.
"What does that mean?" she whispered back, thinking the words were pretty but meaningless without translation.
"Little bird," he said, "little sparrow." He clutched her close and tight, and from that night on, when he was in a good mood or feeling particularly kind or really just looking for her love, that was what he called her. Little bird.
The Year that Never Was, they'd call it later. At the moment Lucy called it what it was. Hell. She hadn't been married to Harry Saxon in over a year, since he killed President Winters and insisted on being referred to as the Master. A relief, he would tell her that night when he celebrated his victory with her, to be known by his true name again.
She had been attracted to the fire in him since she met him, watched him become more power-hungry and lustful, and even joined him. She saw the end of the universe. She saw the world burn, and Lucy Saxon didn't feel a thing. But that was then. Now she hurt on the outside and the inside.
Harry had stopped being Harry and started being someone else, someone she didn't recognize, and yes he still seemed to care for her but where did her husband go and who was the stranger in his place? Who was the wild-eyed alien who took her, used her, hurt her? Where had the man she'd married gone, the one who'd held her when she cried and whispered his name for her under his breath? He never called her little bird anymore…
The first time he shouted at her she thought there was no worse pain than being called every cruel name she could think up. She changed her definition of pain several times since then, from watching him abuse the helpless Doctor to the first time he hit her and blackened her eye to the rush of cramps and blinding agony she felt when her body, for reasons unknown, rejected the baby that had just started growing there.
But those were old pains, old scars. Numbness never felt so good.
So enamored was Lucy with the idea of freedom that she whispered the name along with everyone else, saw the light and murmured "Doctor" with the others. She watched as the pretty, kind man in a brown suit rose to challenge the Master.
She rose like a phoenix from the flames in her slinky red dress and her fingers clutched the cold metal of the gun that Mrs. Jones had abandoned. No one saw her take it. It was easy, so easy, to lift the thing and pull.
Shot. It reverberated in her mind, over and over, bang bang bang until she almost sympathized with the drumming. The former Mrs. Saxon let the lovely man who couldn't die take her gun, as though she was a danger to anyone but herself anymore.
Lucy stood and watched Har– the Master lie like a felled bird in the Doctor's arms, watched the Doctor beg and then cry when the blonde man on his lap stopped moving. No one saw Lucy start crying too, tears falling down her cheeks for the dead man who wasn't even a person anymore, just an empty shell of the man she used to love, back when she knew how to love.
Lucy cried for Harry Saxon, who had been cut down and replaced by the Master. She cried for her husband, dead and gone, and she cried for all the times his words stung her ears or his hand struck her skin. She cried for the children she never got to have, for the baby who never got to be born. She cried for all the people who had died in the Year, and she cried for the Doctor, who had lost the closest thing he had to someone to love.
And she wept for little Lucy, the sweet, innocent girl who had died somewhere along the way too. Out of all the horrors and death she had seen in the years since she'd first laid eyes on Harold Saxon, out of all the love she'd found and shared and lost again, out of all the times she'd prayed for death and all the times she realized she couldn't really stop loving him, Lucy only really sobbed for one thing that she lost.
Lucy cried for little bird.