A/N: So I cried my heart out at the 50th Anniversary and felt the need. Sorry. Also this is my first Who fic in two years so this is kind of a big deal for me xD
The memories are already fading.
The Doctor can feel it to the tips of his fingers, the slight edges of what happened mere seconds ago fading and becoming blurred and fuzzy about the edges, as if they'd happened years ago. It'll come soon, quick, and he'll be back where he was. Back to avoiding the Ood Song; back to regret; back to believing everybody dead.
It doesn't matter that they saved Gallifrey, not here, not now. Some new man centuries from now gets to celebrate with his pretty little brunette, and know that his planet lived. But all of that is forever to come. This Doctor, the Doctor standing in his coral struts and golden light, must endure the worst still yet.
There's one memory, though, that he knows he has to keep. He holds it close, stands very, very still with his fingers clenched, and slams his eyes closed. The other Doctor, the later one, didn't notice. The words Bad Wolf passed him by. Is that what four centuries will do to him? Will he forget not only the children he will believe he killed, but also the woman who saved him, who took the entire time vortex into her very soul and ended the War once and for all, who brought him back to life?
His future self is impressive as anything, yes, even this Doctor can admit that. And this one's seen River Song, and heard 'spoilers' in that same tone, so there's something big coming there. That later one can probably also open the TARDIS with a finger-snap, and stop armies in their tracks. All the things that future-woman said, and maybe she'll be something special, something worth holding on to.
But not yet: this Doctor's not done holding onto the last girl he loved, and the past has always been more compelling than the future. An old friend of his, Fitzgerald, wrote something about that. Time travel will change your perspective a bit.
He can barely remember his future's face anymore, but those words, Bad Wolf, and a chill down his spine and an old, old man, a face he'll never forget. Did he do something massive, something good, today? Did something happen?
No, that's impossible: he hasn't done anything good since Mars. He's fairly sure he's forgotten how.
He's given himself up to the gallivanting excess everyone has always accused him of. He's rolled in fields with Good Queen Bess, and taught Nero how to fiddle, and set the sky over early China on fire with the world's first fireworks. He doesn't want to follow the Ood song; he doesn't want to go anywhere at all.
One day he'll have to.
But not today.
Today, he has a past to visit. Another TARDIS, another life, because suddenly crossing his own time stream is exactly what he needs to do, even if just as suddenly he can't remember quite why. Something to do with the end of the War, and the Moment, and the life he always tries to forget and the Bad Wolf. Two words scattered throughout time and space, a message, to lead himself here.
There will never come a day when those two words don't send him running. And if he does, then he will truly know he has become someone new, because now he is running, around the console, shouting equations and jumping, a frenetic whirl of mad, impossible, irrational activity.
Last time, he ran outside and there it was. Now, he has to go to it, and there's only one source, one place in time and space where he can find it, find her.
The TARDIS throws her doors open at just the right moment, and the Doctor leaps into the blackness of pure time, hoping against hope that he's right, that this time, this one time in a thousand, he's in the right place.
He hasn't gone to see her since the beach in Norway that second time. He has roamed the universe blind, living on what feels like borrowed time, because he tried to get past those bright eyes and that brighter smile before and it never worked. No matter how far from home he runs, those two words will send him running right back.
She's standing beside the console, her head down, that endless stream of golden light pouring from the open vortex and into her eyes. He has to raise his arm as a shield from the glare, but Rose does not shift, does not move, and never blinks.
He's waiting for the moment, the moment when the stream stops, when she'll look up and see him. Not Rose Tyler, no, the universe won't allow that, that would be too much a reward, too much a comfort, for someone as undeserving as the Doctor. To have someone loved and lost restored, just once, for good… far better men than he have been rewarded with far less.
To go to see her, to steal her yesterdays before they met, would invite utter disaster. And he could, of course he could: a shape-changer cuff and a smile and he could be her best friend in nursery and her favourite teacher in high school and her boyfriend before Mickey and anything inbetween. But he doesn't, because those times are for between her and the world beneath her feet, and he doesn't come along until later, when she's becoming who she'll be.
And who she'll be is the woman before him, who at last, finally, snaps up her head in a movement too jerky and graceless, too decisive to be her. Because all that is left, in the minutes now between the vortex and the Daleks and his past self, is the Bad Wolf, and he has a question.
"Rose?" he hazards, just to make sure. She doesn't blink.
"That is the form's name," the voice that comes is like a choir, musical and speaking in complete unison, unearthly and strange even to his jaded, over-experienced ears. "And you are the Doctor."
I can see everything: all that is, all that was, all that ever could be…
And so here, now, she can see what is and what was and what could be, the Moment, the one thing he can still remember from the last days that feel like a dream, slipping between his fingers like sand. The Moment matters, and she can tell him why.
"I have a question."
"You are out of your time," she protests, and it's Rose's voice carrying the choir, and it trembles like she is about to cry and oh, Rassilon give him strength, resisting the urge to heal her himself and to hell with time and space and causality is the hardest thing he's done in a long, long time. He is not the Time Lord Victorious, no matter how he screams, no matter how he begs and commands and attempts to bend the rules of time. Rose would tell him not to, and so he does not.
"I'll only stay a minute," he promises, "Just until you reach me, him, the other me, and then I'll be gone."
"Forever?" she asks, choked, and oh lord, how much of Rose is in there?
"Only for a little while," he says, a little softer, warm. She didn't remember afterwards, and he lied to her just before he grew this face right before her eyes. She won't remember and that's good, because he's bent the universe to his arrogant heart more than enough already for one lifetime.
She nods, accepting his terms. "Your question?"
"The Moment," he says, "you'll be there, somehow, with a past me. You'll stop me from doing something awful… or make me. I don't know which anymore."
"What do you want to know, Time Lord?"
"I have to know if you were there," he presses, "if this is part of that."
"Not me," the Bad Wolf sighs, "but someone else, in this form, with this power. I was there for just a moment or two, here and there, fragmented. It would not show you; will not show you; has not shown you."
"Shown me what?"
"Her," she breathes, "me. This body you miss. Always before or after, never at once. But soon, I think, soon for you. You will see her again, after you, before me."
"How?"
"The Universe will sing you to sleep," she sighs, "and humans dream, when they sleep, and you are human, aren't you Doctor? More human than the one I rush to, and far more than the one you run toward. You are too human to last long at all, running hot, too hot, like me, we are the same. Humans dream, and you will see her again."
She steps forward, and he cannot move, but she steps away from the console and approaches him, one hand raised. She is burning up, sweat on her brow and cheek and lips, her hand like flame against his cheek when she touches him.
"It will hurt less, when you become him," she promises, "your skin will grow thick, and you will smile. You will be alright."
"I'm always alright," he banters back, but even he can hear the edge in those words. He misses Donna. Donna wouldn't have let this happen, wouldn't have let him be this stupid and come to ask a question he knew he didn't want an answer to.
"You never have been," she says, "that's why you're here. You think if I can tell you she's there, that I'm there, that I'm locked away in time, then you can save me, and save you, and be alright. But you have to let go. You have to let the Universe sing."
"And then what?" he asks, his hand having come to cup her wrist, all the contact it seems he will be allowed from this Rose who is not Rose, and not his to touch.
"And then a new song begins, and you smile again."
She steps back, and he lets her go. The TARDIS lands. He steps back, and back, through the portal and back into his own TARDIS, and lets her go to face her destiny, the Daleks and his angry former self. And although that man is scared, terrified even, the Doctor longs for nothing more than to go back, and live it all again. He is jealous of the man she is now saving, bathed in golden light and time itself, who was him once but who never will be again.
For a moment, he wonders if that stranger, the man who might have been him from the dream that might have really happened, ever thinks the same of this moment. does he ever look back, and wish he was still running from the Ood song, still hoping that this story didn't have to end yet?
Or is he always looking forward, forgetful as a fool and happy with it, running into the sun because he dare not look back?
The Doctor spins on his heel to face the console, and sets a course for the planet of the Ood. He charts the song as time coordinates, and flies right into it, headlong, never looking back: straight on until morning.