"Couldn't Sleep"
A/N: Slightly Dark, horror short story for those who enjoy those sorts of things. Must have been inspired from all the Poe I've been rereading lately…
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He is in the midst of flames and shadows, of screams of pain and fright, and he stumbles through the smoke and falling ash, unable to see, unable to determine up from down. His hearts are beating frantically in his chest and his mouth tastes bitter.
His home is burning. His people are burning, sacrificed to both save and protect the universe.
Their death throes are powerful, unimaginably overpowering, and even with raising his mental shields he cannot keep them out. Their screams reverberate through his skull until he want to reach through his ears and tear his own brain apart just to escape from what he has done.
He falls to his knees and screams.
And with a jerk he wakes.
It's cold in his rooms. Overlapped with deep and darker shadows, sliced through by faint moonlight shining through the open window. Thin satiny curtains flutter in the slight breeze that is raising goosebumps along his unclothed flesh. There is no smoke, no flames. No screams of a people long since dead. He is safe. His single human heart is racing like mad in his chest, a deep chilling terror running through his veins and he wants to curl in on himself and cry, wishing that he had never made that awful awful decision. No matter that he was simply a duplicate of the Time Lord 'the Doctor' who happened to be him in almost every sense of the word—the guilt of the destruction of Gallifrey would be his worst demon.
Or it had been.
Always… it is always his fault. His fault that everyone dies.
Soft, sudden movement by the door makes him freeze. His spine shudders and he raises his head to look.
"Rose?"
She stands silently in front of the closed door, watching him. Her eyes are dark in the nighttime hues but hearing her name she smiles that wide beautiful smile that stills makes his heart skip a beat. Taking permission from his speaking, she makes her way across the wooden floor and climbs on top of the bed. The sheets rustle like dry leaves as she reaches his side.
"Couldn't sleep," she whispers without needing him to ask. Her skin is cold, and she is clearly looking to cuddle with him to warm herself up. She slips beneath the covers.
"Rose…" His voice is choked with rough emotion and suppressed tears, but he does not know what he is supposed to say. What can he possibly say that will make her understand?
She beats him to saying something. "It's okay," she says. She strokes his face lovingly. "I know."
"Rose—" he says again, but this time she bends and kisses him. A deep, passionate kiss that he remembers from a lonely beach in Norway so many years ago. She won't let him wallow in guilt tonight. She presses closer, hands stroking his hair, down his grey-sprinkled sideburns. He responds despite the remaining terror of the nightmare, curling into her touch, moaning her name a third time deep in his throat. He breaks off her kiss and trails his own down her throat, shifting so that now he's the one on top.
He needs her. He wants her. He's terrified of her. She's been gone so long. "Why do you keep coming back to me?" he whispers. There's no reason that she should. Following Bad Wolf Bay she brushed him aside and it took a long time for her to warm up to him. Then she left suddenly one day, without warning or notice, right in the middle of their relationship. And now she only acknowledges him and their old relationship at night in the deepest shadows, under cover of night so that no one will know.
She looks up at him. "Why wouldn't I?" she replies, like it's the most obvious thing in the world.
Her words leave him cold suddenly. He stops and pulls back. "You left me," he bites out. Bitter. Angry. "You were supposed to stay here with me and make me better. Not go out and…" He cannot voice her betrayal. His voice breaks but his anger is still going strong. He can do nothing, however, and despite his frustrations bends down and kisses her again. He's damned and living a life of secrets and shadows, but what else is new?
"Gallifrey again?" she inquires when they finally pull apart.
He nods. "Always."
Her mouth quirks in a wry grin. "At least it's still only Gallifrey."
He wants to play ignorant and demand to know what she means by that. But he knows. He has seen horrors and tragedies since then that are just as terrible to remember as that. And he is thankful, on some hated little level, that it is only Gallifrey that he has nightmares about.
"Yeah," he mutters reluctantly. He looks down at her again, wanting to apologize, wanting to make her smile again at least once more. He's broken inside, abandoned in an alternate dimension with no way to find his way back to what he had once known. Abandoned to grow old and die in a very human little life that just isn't enough time. He wants her to come back. He wants her to heal him; to pick up the shattered pieces of himself and mold them back together.
She won't.
She can't.
'It's odd," he says now, laying facedown in the pillow by her head, "how in dreams you can't ever tell that it's not real. And then you wake up and there's still that slight disorientation—like you know it's real but it doesn't feel it."
His spine shivers again. She shifts and looks down at him. Her features are distorted by the shadows. He catches a wisp of death.
"And what, Doctor," she asks softly in a voice of rough decay, "makes you think that this is real?"
And he wakes. Really wakes. He's shaking worse than he did with the supposed nightmare of Gallifrey's destruction and even his bones seem to be iced over, his heart in his throat. He feels the remnants of death hanging like a cloak in the air and terrified he finally forces himself to look.
The sheets beside him are messed up as if a body had been lying there.
Clutched in his hands he holds the dress that Rose had been buried in.