(Clarity)

High dive into frozen waves
Where the past comes back to life
Fight fear for the selfish pain
And it's worth it every time
Hold still right before we crash
'Cause we both know how this ends
Our clock ticks till it breaks your glass
And I drown in you again

'Cause you are the piece of me
I wish I didn't need
Chasing relentlessly
Still fight and I don't know why

If our love is tragedy why are you my remedy
If our love's insanity why are you my clarity

….

It all begins in the snow, on a snowy day a long, long time ago, and back then, he was feeling a whole lot like he was feeling right now.

He'd felt this way before, and for all the fire and fury of his protestations, he knew that he would probably feel this way again -

Which only fueled his stubborn refusal to go about his way like he somehow always knew he would, precisely because he knew.

Of course, Vashtra knew too, and that just irritated him all the more -

He believes he might have gone out of his way to be just marginally awful to her, Jenny and Strax, just to prove his own point, not to them, but to himself.

That explained his behavior, but he'd be damned if he ever allowed himself to believe that it excused it, but the more he disgusted himself with his sour, acerbic brooding, the more he could convince himself that his choice had been right.

As for Vashtra and the others, he could only say that they had proven themselves true friends toward good times and bad; he'd satisfy their appeals to reason just enough to avoid being confronted, give them conditions and concessions just to get their well-meaning concern off his back, but it was all told with the aim to return to stewing in his malcontent, and the more patient his friends proved themselves to be, the harder he tried to wear out that patience of theirs so that they would finally give up on him and leave him to his disillusion.

Once, a long, long time ago, when he had to part with Donna and Rose, he used to be full of dramatic rage and self-absorbed lamentation;

Now, after many, many centuries not a single one of which managed to dull the ache, freshly deprived of the closest thing he's had to a family in a long, long time, he cannot even muster the energy to do that.

All that is left is a sense of coldness and dearth; of being dried up, bled out and spent.

For a while, he manages to convince himself that he is done with the world, and that there is no trace of any soft or delicate feeling left inside of him.

Just a few months later, he would leave his snowy hideaway on the clouds in an excited frenzy.

….

A woman is trying to meet him.

The waitress who informed him of this just before he would depart to the Dalek Asylum could not have known just how true that statement of hers would turn out to be;

Someone is trying to meet him, and it's not so much the Dalek Puppet sent to collect him, but someone he would encounter beneath the surface of the planet, someone who's been trying to get his attention for his entire life.

A woman is trying to meet him, and now for the first time, he is trying to meet her too.

….

Madness consumes him.

It follows him into his dreams and chases him from his slumber covered in sweat; Fever burns through mind, body and soul like a fever, and no one who would voice their conclusions could truly understand -

He is not like this, he never burnt like this, not even in his tender blushing youth; Even then it was, at best, an awkward, careful reluctant affair – He's used to being the outsider, the rational one, the stranger, the cold, calculating observer, the remote, other being, and now he find himself standing here like Romeo on the day of the masquerade, asking "Did my hearts love till now?"

He doesn't doubt that they did, and yet this feeling feels new, and it would not leave him in peace.

Normally, his rational mind would be providing the voice of reason, but this time, reason couldn't sit still either, racing white hot with theories and speculations asking "How can it be"?

How could he encounter the exact same person twice, under wholly different circumstances? How can it possibly be her?

He's lost so much, been played and fooled and disappointed so many times that he cannot quite believe it, how could something so convenient just simply turn out to be?

What sort of trick or trap could this be to play his hopes in such a cruel way? Where is the catch, the inevitable crashing and burning?

Vexed by a driving need for answers, insatiable curiosity mixes with longing, and the faint memory of the taste of her lips, and how she went and took the lead on him, her courage, brilliance, her caring and determination, her telling silly stories to frightened children much as he had none too long ago.

Why does he have to encounter her now, when he can no longer simply trust and observe the seeming miracle, now that he cannot help but wait for the trap to snap shut?

Why now, as he had almost been used to giving up?

Why does she have to come to him now, now that he is this, bitter and old and dried and cynical and barely able to withstand this feeling?

He can barely contain it, and bits of it leak out onto paintings, songs and poems and half-abandoned sketches, but what business does he have thinking in sonnets?

He covers diary pages in her name and sits between old tomes and candles, his pale face resting in his hands, his thoughts and feelings swirling in heavy urgency as he struggles to divine her meaning, wondering why the universe sees it fit to taunt him in such a way.

How can he face her now, and how were his old, decrepit hearts even still capable of such desperate wanting?

Hold it right there, 'old decrepit hearts'.

He'd be damned to hell and back if he wasn't still pretty spry for a millennium and a half.

He catches a glimpse of himself on one of the TARDIS console's instrument boards and he thinks, 'not too bad', he finds himself adjusting his glasses, straightening up his bowtie and making sure that his hair is in order – there's little he can do about the chin excluding any drastic measures, but it will have to do.

He might be on his last life, but he is still alive, and he has never been more aware of this than now that he's found her, somewhere, sometime, somehow against all odds, and this time, he isn't going to let anyone take her, as sure as he lives, and he lives, he feels the blood burning in his veins, burning in his cheeks, he feels his breath speeding up at the slightest provocations, the bounce contained in his steps and more energy than he knows what do with, and so much light filling his soul from the inside that he finds himself tempted to erupt in song and dance.

Meanwhile, she has most certainly caught up to his continued presence outside her house, and right there is the problem: She has no idea who he is, she's acting like she's never seen him before, and he doesn't know what to do, not whenhe can barely contain his affection and his wonder at beholding her alive.

When he first saw the surprisingly proper young lady which met him at the door of that house, he first wondered if this wasn't all a big misunderstanding, if he wasn't forcing all this to be something it wasn't, but he recognized her, quite clearly, when she plucks that laptop from his hands.

It is highly secondary what she looks like or talks like, or what exactly her name is -

He found the person he was looking for right there -

She may be hidden behind a veneer of reluctance and propriety, a concession to sense and sensibility, but she is there, and so is her very own story, so is kindness and devotion for friends in need and a harbored dream not much unlike his own, and her own world of stories mysteries and melodies, and the hope that she might invite him inside.

She wants it to be herself standing by his side, not just some shadow of anyone else.

Every second by her side feels like soaring, but every moment away from her is spent in brooding and torment.

The more he gets to know what an unique and peculiar person she is, the more impossible it seems that there could have been two of her.

Perhaps the monks were not wrong about his madness – what else could you call his frantic research, which yielded quite a lot of things, but nothing that could explain it?

He looks through pictures recording her life, first day at school, college graduation with a degree in English, social media posts from her college years showing her with a certain Nina and chronicling the ups and downs of past relationships.

He feels so light when he's around her, and he would love nothing more than to simply enjoy her presence, to be around her just as she is, but he cannot forget what he's seen, what led him to her in the first place even though it simply could not be.

He wonders how long it will be until he fails to conceal that other side of his, the doubt that eats away at him in every happy moment, the calculating, experimental mind burning for an answer in cold fury; The experience of past disappointments can't help but lead him to expect the worst, while his common sense keeps reminding him that she would be rather alarmed if she knew of all this, and how there is no guarantee at all that she'll never find out.

With Amy, Rory and River, there were many times where at least one of them was keeping something from the rest of them, and while the Ponds were all smarter than one might assume and quite capable of thinking for themselves, they had an underlying faith that he would somehow handle things particularly Amelia – with this new person by his side, things were different – much like himself, she could not simply let the question be, she could not help but notice and begin to put together the pieces and she had a need to know what was being played, never hesitating to point out a discrepancy not long after catching on to it. For one thing, she had certainly taken notice of his presence at her mother's funeral.

It's a contrast like night and day, like sunshine and sun clouds taking turns, and all of this at a time when he couldn't afford to slip up and didn't even really know if he could trust her yet – He had more reason than ever to keep a cool head, but he simply couldn't - he was finding this rather unlike himself and he didn't yet know if he liked this.

….

She must have been feeling much the same; Even so, he could glimpse the person he had met poking outside the edges of her carefully composed facade, or rather, he was watching the person she would become emerging from her chrysalis, she shapes of the future taking form behind the thinning veil of the present, albeit in unexpected ways, rising to meet him.

...

She makes him come back, makes him fit himself in her schedule, and he is too preoccupied to reaffirm that he does not normally listen to schedules.

He meant to invite her into his world, but instead, it seems that he has gotten swept up in hers, and the hopes, dreams and stories that dwell there; He comes to know its junctions and cornerstones and the influences that were important to her.

The reprimands of his better angels fall on deaf ears, blocked out by the melodies that circle through his thoughts, even the terrors of his nights have to make room for thoughts of her.

Sometimes, he takes his TARDIS and skips right ahead from one week to the next because he doesn't feel like waiting; But even when he doesn't skip ahead, anticipation seeps into everything he does, as he's tinkering around with the TARDIS console, when he's singing in the shower, or simply waltzing around an universe that had seemed so empty not too long ago;

Now, of course, he can't help but see new mysteries everywhere; Sometimes he mentions her tp the people he encounters, when he is in need of a personal story to break the ice and garner the locals' trust and ever so often, he takes note of particularly impressive places with the intention of bringing her later, if his TARDIS would be willing to play along -

He thinks of places to go, jokes to crack, particular bow ties to wear, and sometimes he outright brings gifts;

When they first met, she was the one to take the initiative; She grabbed him by the hand and pulled him out of his stupor before he knew what's happening, and wouldn't have it any other way -

But due to the force of circumstance and the twisted turns of space-time, he wound up in this situation where one might easily conclude that he was a lot more interested in this than she was – not that this was the first time that his life as a time traveler had led to something of an awkward social life, but even then, it never led to him keeping appointments, bringing flowers and otherwise bending to the whims of the clock -

If he was nervous, his discomfort must stem from a different source, and it wasn't just the appointments -

She was pretty much making him court her like any other suitor might, stolen time machine and encyclopedic knowledge be damned. Instead of things happening despite his retinence, he was forced to act, even as the tension coursed through the body he believed to have mastered, and as the alrm bells in his mind rang in his figurative ears.

Very very bad idea.

It would be a bad idea under most other circumstances, but with the last heartbreak so fresh, and in this rare instance when he didn't even know if he could trust her-

It was madness.

But it was also the lone star of hope in the darkness of his universe.