CHAPTER ONE
"Just tell him that I love him..."
The Doctor's eyes opened abruptly, his lungs drawing in a sharp breath of cold, scentless air. In the fog between asleep and awake, he wouldn't have been able to tell if the voice he'd just heard was real or only an illusion if he hadn't known, for a fact, that he was alone here. Always alone. Completely alone.
Lying perfectly still for a moment, he let his eyes close again, let his senses come awake, one by one. Finally, he turned onto his back, staring for a moment at the ceiling above him, then the cold, empty room around him. He'd been asleep for nearly six hours. It was more than he needed. But there was simply no reason to get up.
"Nothing's the same..."
His brow furrowed as he sat up, setting his feet on the icy floor. The temperature jolted his senses, distracting him from the whisper that came from nowhere. How far must they have drifted away from any sun for it to be this cold in the Tardis? He'd better go check on that.
"I'm not exactly dressed for swimming..."
The voice was distinct, if not familiar. It was distinctly not his own. The whisper of a memory, without a context, without a meaning. He couldn't place it. Right now, he didn't particularly care to try. His memories as of late were filled with nothing but darkness and loneliness. It was better to live in the moment, and try to forget that there was a past. Or a future. It wasn't hard once he'd gotten used to it.
"I'm sorry. I was expecting someone else."
He stood, dressed sloppily - just for warmth, really - and headed for the control room to check on that missing sun. He must have been tired when he'd parked the Tardis the night before, to not think about that. Not that he gave anything much thought nowadays. Travel itself had more or less lost its meaning. How long had he been drifting in the emptiness of space now? A week? A month? He'd lost track.
And he didn't care.
The twin bottles of malt whiskey on the console - both empty - made him reconsider his state of mind from the night before. Not tired. Drunk. He remembered now. Only vaguely. It took a hell of a lot to get him drunk. But he'd been trying really hard. Again.
"Best friend? I'm flattered."
"One day we will be. The very best of friends."
He frowned as he pushed the bottles aside. One of them fell, and tumbled off the end of the console before shattering on the floor with a deafening crash. He ignored it as he checked the coordinates. "What do you want?" he demanded of no one in particular. Maybe he was still drunk. Was six hours enough to sleep off two bottles of whiskey? Hard to gauge. He didn't feel drunk. At least, not unless he counted the voices in his head.
"Very impressive how you got the Tardis to bring us straight here. It's the first trouble free trip I've had with you."
His hands rested on the controls for a long moment as he stopped, and listened to his own wandering thoughts. The ambiguous lines would've been less disturbing if he could have just placed them. They were like memories, but of scenes he hadn't truly experienced. He'd felt it before, he realized slowly. The formation of a cyclical timeline - not quite a paradox, but a change in his own timestream. Someone was messing with the Web of Time. His memories adjusting to fit a new recorded history. His new recorded history.
Oh, that was just what he needed.
It wasn't anything he'd done; that was for damn sure. He hadn't done much of anything since he'd last left Earth. Left Susan. Left the Daleks and the Monk and the dead bodies - if there even were bodies because at least in Lucie's case, he was sure there wasn't - of friends and family. It had been the last in a long line of events that had slowly worn down not only his hope, but his will to have hope.
"So, where to now?"
"I think it would be best if I took you home, young lady. Where and when?"
"Um..."
The whisper of a memory, however vague, was enough to interrupt his thoughts.
"I'll make it easy for you. You're clearly English and you're clearly from the first half of the 20th century - all that 'operator' business on the phone."
"If you say so."
"What do you mean, if I say so?"
"Well... that's the trouble you see. I can't remember."
"You're saying you've lost your memory?"
That was his own voice - lines he'd never said, but remembered saying all the same. An interference in his past. He probably wouldn't have even noticed it, would've never thought it the least bit strange except that he, unlike most creatures in the universe who compensated for paradoxes as if they were a natural occurrence, knew what was supposed to be. He knew the fixed points in the universe. He knew when they shifted. He knew when strands of the Web of Time were rewritten.
"I loved you..."
He stopped as he slowly, unsurely, recognized the voice.
"Let me tell you a story."
"Charley?"
He frowned as he looked around the console room for anything that might have triggered memories of her. It had been a long time since he'd left her. Too long. So much pain and heartbreak since then. So much death...
But the memories were coming faster now, clearer, more intense. Memories he'd never lived, but had all the same. And it was her voice. He knew her voice...
"You meet a girl on the R-101 airship. She's meant to die in the crash."
"If this is something in my future, I don't think -"
"But you save her. And that tears at the fabric of time itself, the Web of Time. But in a way, you don't care. Because you're in love with her."
"Sounds like I became reckless in my old age."
"Isn't that what old age is for?"
He stood very still as the whispers took shape, memories he'd forgotten somehow, unbidden, flooded back to his mind. A million snapshots. "For some reason, you seem to be very well aware of the delicacy of the Web of Time. And I know for a fact that you aren't stupid!" A thousand scenes. "Who are you and what are you doing here!" A hundred conversations and endless, endless whispers. "Even if it didn't violate the laws of space and time, what would I say?" Bleeding, one into another.
"What about C'Rizz?"
His mind stopped on a familiar scene. This one, he knew. He knew how it had begun and he knew how it ended. And he swallowed hard as he took a step back from the console, as if touching it somehow made the forbidden memory more real.
"What about him?"
"Won't he...? I mean, he'll be expecting you back."
The Doctor chuckled. "Charley, I would be very surprised if C'Rizz doesn't already know exactly what was on both our minds when you asked me to help take your clothes off."
She blushed slightly. "Well I, for one, was thinking that even a contortionist would have a great deal of trouble getting out of that boned corset while tied up inside of it."
"And that's all you were thinking?" he teased.
He clamped down his mind, blocking out that memory before it could progress any further. For a moment, there was nothing but silence. Defenses raised, confusion swirling, the Doctor took a moment to organize his thoughts before he turned away from the console and headed up the steps, to the left, into the hallway. At the end of the room, to the right, he threw the door open with little regard for the hinges. Dark and silent, just as it should be. The center of the confusion. The eye of the storm.
He stepped forward slowly, into the empty room. There wasn't much left. She'd packed before she'd gone. Not that she'd had much to take with her. She'd never been one to accumulate trinkets and trophies from the places they'd visited. So many places...
"Of course! July 11, 1982 Italy beats Germany 3-1 in the World Cup Final!"
"Oh. That's football, isn't it? Oh, I thought something important had happened, like Italian spacemen landing on the moon..."
But that had all ended. He remembered very clearly how it had ended. He didn't have to step into this room to remember that. It was always there, lingering in his thoughts, a perplexity of anger and grief and sadness.
"I'm bailing out."
She'd walked away from him. She'd even left a note, asking him to never look for her. And those memories were still crystal clear; they hadn't changed. Even standing in this room, they hadn't changed. So what had?
"I'm from your future."
The realization hit him like a head-on collision. A former incarnation. These memories - the lines of dialogue, the fragmented thoughts - they belonged to an earlier version of himself. She had met a former incarnation!
"When I heard the Tardis coming back to me I thought, 'Thank God you're safe!' But it wasn't you, it was..."
"It was me."
Awestruck, he stared at the empty room around him. But it still didn't make any sense. Why now? What had triggered his memory now, and all at once? A smell? A thought? A vague dream? It wasn't the first time he'd gained new memories long after the fact. Every time he crossed his own timestream, he did that. But this was new. It was different. This was... repressed.
"You really don't get it, do you? I saw you die! I was grieving!"
"Grieving?"
"You stupid man, don't you understand! I wanted you back. More than anything I wanted you back and to have told you would've been to let you go. I wasn't ready for that. I'm still not."
He frowned as that memory played itself out, and then stopped abruptly. It was wrong. It felt wrong. That man who looked like him - a previous incarnation of him, but still him - wasn't right. There was something about his thoughts that felt foreign. Subtle, but noticeable. That wasn't him. So why was that memory surfacing at all?
"It's not my memory," he muttered quietly, under his breath. Come to think of it, he didn't feel particularly connected to any of these new memories. Like none of them were real. But then, where were they all coming from?
"You know, the Viyrans are very secretive about their work. It's part of their mission to make sure that no one knows about the viruses. So if anyone does get to know anything -"
"They kill them?" The Doctor eyed her warily. "You're here to kill me?"
"No." Charley stared back at him with tears in her eyes. "Oh, Doctor, no. They have ways of altering people's memories."
"Ah, now that makes more sense," he muttered under his breath. He didn't like it, but it made sense. He didn't remember because he wasn't supposed to remember.
He turned away from the room that had once been occupied by Charlotte Pollard and headed back to the control room. "That would mean this is your doing," he addressed the console from the top of the stairwell. "Your Matrix, your memory, not mine."
No answer came. He wasn't expecting one. It wasn't as if the Tardis had a language center of its own, after all. He descended slowly, eyes narrowed at the time rotor as if he could somehow address the Tardis directly through it. But if she understood anything, it was only the emotion behind his words. And there was certainly emotion there. He could hear the accusatory tone in his own voice, building with every step, and he did nothing to curb it.
"But why tell me now? Why tell me at all? If I allowed my memory of her to be erased completely, that was probably for the best. Why bring it up now?"
"If you can hear me... Just tell him that I love him."
Silence lingered in the chilled room around him as those words settled. He could see her, in his mind. He could feel her presence, her sadness and grief. He let it pass over him, through him, before he finally responded.
"Why?" he demanded, stepping closer to the console. "You don't like Charley; you never have. Why go through all this trouble to deliver a message from her?"
The answering thought was a memory much more recent. There should have been nothing in particular about last night that made it different from all the rest. Loneliness and emptiness, drunkenness and sadness. But for some reason, last night had been an end point. In a fury, he'd ripped through the control room like a tornado, leaving a mess of tattered books and broken trinkets in his wake.
He'd found his way to his bedroom, to Charley's - the only one he'd retained when he'd jettisoned the rest. His companions were gone - all of them. They all left, all perished in the end. He was always left alone. But last night, he'd regretted getting rid of their rooms. He would've much rather they had still been there, so that he could've ripped them to shreds as well.
The furious, drunken stupor had ultimately left him sobbing impotent tears on the steps he now found himself standing on. He'd been thinking of Lucie, and her last moments. He'd been thinking of Susan. He wouldn't even let himself acknowledge that he'd been thinking of Charley.
But the Tardis knew.
"I was so... hurt, so angry. All those human emotions I don't imagine you could possibly understand."
"Stop it," he warned, glaring at the time rotor.
" After what happened to C'Rizz... the way the Doctor reacted... I don't know why I thought he would react any differently if I left, if I'd died."
"I said stop!"
He shut down his mind hard, blocking her out, silencing the communicative efforts of a time ship that had no language, only emotion and memory. Endless memory. Memories he didn't want and things he didn't want to know.
"Why now!" he yelled angrily, storming down the rest of the steps. "Why do you have to do this now? You could've picked any moment, any time in these past years. If she ever said any of those words, then you've always known it. You could've told me when I needed to hear it, when I was trying to figure out how I was supposed to move on, when I still loved her. You could've told me anytime so why now!"
But the Tardis had gone silent. There was no thought, no stirring, no answer. Feeling the impotent anger well up inside of him, the Doctor smashed the side of his fist against the console. But it did nothing except hurt his hand. "Answer me, damn it!"
But there was nothing.
Frustrated and furious, the Doctor reached out and grabbed the empty bottle from the step beside him and threw it as hard as he could at the time rotor console. It hit with a crack and the bottle shattered, raining down even more broken glass on the floor and on him. As the rage subsided into shock and then numbness, he turned and slid down until he was sitting against the pillar, silent sobs wracking his narrow frame as he clung to his knees.
"Fine," he finally whispered with heartbroken resolve. "You win. Whatever you want, you win."