A/N: Hope this one makes sense... I'm going crazy from a lack of new episodes...
Sweet Nightmares
He's seen her in his dreams so many times, felt her fiery hair and imagined what could have been if she had grown up with him. If he hadn't left her the first time, all those years ago. If he hadn't left her the second time, and the third, and the fourth... and the last time, decades ago even for him.
At first it feels so tantalizingly real. He takes her to the lands that a seven year old girl would love. He protects her from the evil that he had let her older self see. He is the perfect man, and she is the perfect companion. They eat fish sticks and custard together, and she is always young, young and innocent, young and special and separated from Earth.
And then, on the distant beautiful moon of a growing galaxy, he dies. His murderer pulls on his bowtie and gives him a cackling grin, and the Doctor knows.
Then. He lies on the floor of his ship and remembers Amelia, his beautiful little girl. The girl who dreamed from the day they met until the day he finally stopped disappointing her. Until he "saved" her, all those years ago. He had always wondered how one glorious night had placed such undeserved adoration and glowing universes inside of her mind.
"We both know why," the Dream Lord smiles, looking subdued. The Doctor can engage in self-loathing alone.
"It was me," he whispers, because he's living in a dream, has been living in a dream since the ending of forever, when the Scottish girl stepped outside his door.
"Don't be foolish," the Dream Lord snaps, crossing his legs. "You were alone. She was alone. I brought you together. Isn't that what you've always wanted?"
The Doctor remembers her swimming in the skies of one planet, drinking a crimson goblet of liquified laughter, of watching her grow older. Most of all, he remembers the unrestrained luster in her eyes, the way she would jump off of frozen cliffs, her yells filled not with terror, not with joy, nor wild fearlessness. No, there had been a sleepy, unconscious knowledge.
I'm always happy to dream of you, she had told him once at the tender age of ten when he carried her on his back through the Water Gardens of Monutpel. It all feels so real.
He cries and watches his own self be repulsed. Because he and Amy Pond have been woven together inextricably, tangled and ripped until he doesn't even know when to start the blame. He has ruined her again, and like before, he's torn holes in her heart as easily as he does in time. Only he could reach across a milennia and wrench her from her rightful place, steal her heart and preserve it in his TARDIS until the rest of the world turned to dust, and not even know.
"Her Raggedy Doctor," the Dream Lord laughs, "Oh, she always was a lovely visionary. The man who will rip away at himself until there's nothing left."