Thank you so much for the reviews! I'm so happy you're enjoying it! I've updated and added on to chapter three to end the story - there wasn't enough for a full chapter four.
The next day, the Doctor made an effort. He landed them somewhere he said was a surprise, strode to the front door and flung it open theatrically.
"Behold, Ahmelo Beach, pride of the Beta system!" He tried not to show his surprise when that turned out to be, for once, exactly where they were. No unexpected slobbering beast was there to devour them, no interplanetary war had broken out, no unexpected typhoon was raging just off shore – instead, soft, white sand littered with shells sloped gently down to the edge of purple-tinted surf. The beach was deserted. The air was warm. It appeared to be late afternoon.
"You look startled," Amy noted.
"Not at all," he replied, and clapped his hands briskly. "Now! Everyone go find something appropriately beachy to wear and meet back here in ten minutes. We're taking a day off."
Shortly thereafter, they were buried toe deep in sand with baskets of books and snacks, wearing tropical shirts and swimsuits and the most ridiculous straw hats they could find. The afternoon passed quietly, all of them reading and swimming and snoozing. As dusk approached, they decided to build a bonfire and enjoy the night sky. Rory massed a large pile of driftwood and salvaged some newsprint from the ship for kindling, and the Doctor used the sonic screwdriver to spark it alight.
"Better, Ponds?" the Doctor asked quietly. The Doctor lay back on a blanket, propped up on his elbows with his feet near the fire. He closed his eyes, but his face was golden in the light, his expression gentle.
"It's a lovely fire, Doctor," Amy replied. "Great job."
The Doctor smiled a little. "You know that's not what I meant."
They all stared into the fire, transfixed by the tiny sparks flying up out of it. It had been good to have a day when no one was afraid or running for their life, when they could just be still. Honestly, such things hardly ever happened around the Doctor, even when everything was fine. The silence that fell was companionable. Amy flopped down beside the Doctor, her head tucked into his shoulder as she gazed up into the sky, while Rory amused himself tossing small bits of paper into the fire to watch them dance and glow.
"Watch this," the Doctor said, suddenly inspired. He pulled out the sonic and pointed it at the fire, and suddenly the streams of sparks rising were dancing in a spiral pattern. He adjusted a setting on the screwdriver and applied it again and they started to raise and form swirling, pulsing stars, a whole tiny galaxy. They all watched it intently, even the Doctor spellbound by the spectacle's ephemeral beauty. The soft shush of the surf in the background and the crackle of the flames were hypnotic.
"Doctor, we know how much you miss her," Rory said. "You haven't been right since we left House."
The fact that The Doctor didn't immediately tense up or pull away felt like progress. He sat up and picked up the stick Rory had been poking the fire with and rooted around a bit at the kindling, causing more sparks to flicker and rise.
"You're right, you're right," he sighed. "I know I haven't. I thought some good old fashioned running would get me back to rights. It hasn't." He poked, and a shower of sparks flew, coalesced into something that looked like an angelfish, or perhaps a star whale. "Perhaps I need an army to fight."
Amy laid a hand on his shoulder. "She's still here with us, you know."
"Yes, yes, but I can't talk with her anymore. You have no idea what that was like. Nine hundred years she's been with me and I never really got to meet her until then." He poked the fire again. "And I got to speak with her for what, an hour? Slightly less?"
A cloud of bright, amber sparks swirled up and became a shape that looked something like a woman. It whorled around madly, tracing a circle around the perimeter of the fire. All three of them watched it, enraptured. With its crooked skirts and its odd hair, it was hauntingly familiar. The Doctor's hearts caught in his throat and his hands clutched at the blanket. The figure danced to music that no one else could hear, pirouetting crazily, and then dispersed into the night sky.
Rory realized that none of them had been breathing.
"A madman and his box," the Doctor mused. "You have no idea what it's like to constantly have everyone and everything slipping away from you."
"I know something about that," Rory said quietly, causing Amy and the Doctor to turn to look at him, startled. It was true. Two thousand years Rory waited outside the Pandorica, during which he had inevitably become entangled in the lives of the people he encountered, despite his intentions of holding himself away from the world. He had made and lost friends and lovers, fought and bonded with fellow soldiers and seen them cut down, treated the sick and bemoaned the lack of modern medicine as he failed more often than not to save them, and watched the rise and fall of numerous cultures. He had wept when Rome burned, shut away the horror of the whole villages he knew and loved lost to the plague, seen the bombs fall on London and watched children burn and starve. Rory knew a few things about loss.
The Doctor turned to him with new eyes, considering. "Rory the Roman. Roranicus. I hadn't thought about that. Yes, I suppose you do."
"I had Amy, though," Rory said, "through it all. I had her to come back to."
"And you have us," Amy added. "So stop torturing the computers of the world and come back to the living. Enough laptops have died for you this month. And we miss you."
The Doctor genuinely laughed, a sound they had not heard in quite some time, and then he reached out and took both of their hands. He leapt wildly to his feet. "Come on, Ponds," he said, "it's time to dance."
"There's no music," Rory pointed out, stumbling up to standing.
"Rubbish," the Doctor said. "We are alive, we have warm sand beneath our toes, and we have a fire. What else do we need?" And they leapt and spun beneath the stars in the sky, like sparks themselves, feeling the fierce and fragile joy of being alive.
2
Later that night, after the Ponds were tucked into bed, the Doctor revisited his workroom. It really was quite a large pile of dead laptops, he had to admit. He picked up the goggles, but idly this time, fingered his soldering iron. For some reason he just didn't feel like trying it again tonight. Was that progress? He supposed it was. He sat down on his stool, his brain feeling calmer than usual. In the background, the ship hummed along as it always did inside his mind - not words exactly, but a presence nonetheless. He could feel her. That wasn't nothing.
He closed his eyes and pictured Idris as he'd last seen her. That crazy gray dress, with its bustle and uneven skirts, hair wild and spilling out of every effort to contain it, eyes wide with interest at every sensation. My beautiful idiot, she had called him. You have what you have always had. You have me.
"I do," he mused quietly. "I do still have you. It's different, but you're still with me." The ship hummed a little in response, and the lights gave a friendly little flicker.
"You hear me, don't you?" he asked. Again a little flicker. And whether it was the TARDIS and it's song or some way the ship was touching his mind, the Doctor was suddenly infused with a feeling of warmth and comfort. He would almost call it ... companionship.
He realized, suddenly, that he was, after all, a Time Lord. He was prone to the oddest of relationships and held things in his head that would burn through the brain of an ordinary human. He could sense multiple flows of time at once, the whirling chaos of space. He had looked into the untempered schism and survived it relatively intact. Who was to say that his relationship with the TARDIS was less intense simply because they would never again be face to face? They were bound on a quantum and telepathic level, would never truly be apart. Who else in the universe could say such a thing?
He squared his shoulders, picked up a box, and started sweeping pieces of equipment into it. Enough. He was going to have to give up this new hobby, stop driving himself to the edge of despair every night chasing after an illusion. The reality was here in front of him, in every molecule of his body and of the ship around him, in the hum in the air and the soft song the TARDIS played in his mind.
The Doctor was the last of his kind, she was the last of hers, and they were the lasts together.
He was not, and would never be, alone.