Title: In Ignorance, Bliss
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: Doctor/TARDIS (kind of, more emotional than romantic)
Summary: "The Doctor's Wife" coda. When the TARDIS is "offlined", in that moment, the Doctor breaks, and there's only one way to continue without her.
The TARDIS is the Doctor's greatest love.
When all his companions are long gone, it's still the two of them.
Always and forever.
He's heard it all before, been accused of unspeakable acts in the console room, had arguments over her sentience.
Rose and Jack particularly used to tease him about it, asking if he wanted a moment alone with her each time they caught him cooing softly to the rotor or muttering in fond exasperation at the wiring.
But they just don't understand.
They can't even grasp what it's like, having Verity there, after he's lost everything else. She's in his mind, warming his heart, filling the empty hole inside of him left by so much loss and pain.
So when her soul is ripped out of her, leaving a shell with no intelligence, no heart, no life, it breaks him a bit.
In that moment, she's gone.
Suddenly, terribly, excruciatingly gone.
The only one he hasn't lost yet, the only one who's always loved him, and she's just gone.
He can't bear it.
His mind stops, his heart shatters, and he wants to die.
He can't lose her, not now, not ever.
That warmth, that eternal companionship, that love, ripped away like this, will kill him.
But he can't die, because if there's even the slightest chance of getting her back… Not to mention Amy and Rory, stuck outside the universe with him, depending on him, to get home, to live.
He can't die.
So he forgets.
He's a Time Lord, more than capable of altering his own memories. It's not even hard.
He just thinks on that feeling, that bond between them, that bit of his own soul tied into it, and hits delete.
And in every memory, back through each and every regeneration, that part disappears.
Since a Time Lord's mind is uniquely adapted to comprehend paradoxes and alterations in the time lines, those memories – most of them really, because in his ever-changing, ever-exciting life, she has been the one constant – warp and morph themselves to accommodate. Anything he said or did to acknowledge that bond is replaced, subtly shifted.
The TARDIS, his sexy old girl, is now just that.
He still loves her with all his heart, she is still his dearest, but not in the way she once had been.
He no longer even remembers her name.
And it was such a beautiful name.
But the memory that such a name existed fades as well.
She is alive, and she is sentient, and she has a soul.
But she is silent.
She has never spoken to him in his mind, has never communicated short of the occasional spark or spontaneous noise.
And now she never will.
Because she was alive, and she was sentient, and she did have a soul.
But not anymore.
Now she is gone, which is why he had to forget.
He's not sure what he had to forget, but he supposes that was the point.
in[fin]ite