Disclaimer: Doctor Who and Torchwood belong to the BBC and Russell T. Davies. They are not mine, nor will they ever be.
Spoilers: 'End of Days'
The Smile
Anger.
He'd thought it would be anger, when he heard the sound he so desperately wanted to hear, saw the man he so desperately wanted to see.
So much time had passed, and with it his rage, despair, and sense of betrayal had grown. It should have been the other way round. 'Time heals all wounds' – wasn't that the cliché? But no: fury had fuelled his desperate search just as much as longing and need and want and desire – all those emotions mixed together until he was a seething mass of he knew not what.
But the anger didn't come. That sound – like music, it was – reached his ears, and everything else fell away, leaving only hope in its wake.
And he knew that hope was reflected in his face. If Gwen had followed him, found him in that moment, she would have seen it there – the look of a drowning man finally reaching the shore, the smile of such happiness that beside it every other such expression looked like but a pale imitation.
One step. Two. Three. And now he was on the threshold. And the smile was one that could light up the whole universe.
Doctor, my Doctor.
There was no anger now. No rage, no despair, no betrayal. None of that mattered any more. Because he was here, and the smile had found the only one who could match it.