Author's Note: Here's Emily's version of that delicious angst circa end of series 5.
Episode Tag 5x06
If you fail, you die. If you succeed, if you change the future, you might never have existed. You could just... disappear.
They were... She had begun...
No matter.
What was required from her at this moment, what he needed from her was strength. A strength to mirror his own, to fill any small fractures in his unwavering determination. The man was strong in a way she could never hope to fathom. There were few, if any, who would do what he were about to do. He hadn't told the others, hadn't spoken a word, but Emily could see Matt Anderson's mind at work. She knew the decision he'd made almost before he'd even settled upon it.
And he couldn't leave her like this, ignoring that it might be 'goodbye'.
"You're going to drive it yourself," she said. It was not an accusation, merely a statement of an awful fact.
He tried to reassure her, in his way, without making promises, without making excuses. She knew she shouldn't, but she told him her fears, that she would lose him no matter what the outcome. He silenced her, a sorrow and longing mirroring her own in his eyes. They kissed.
When he pulled away to leave her, no further protestation passed her lips. She had to let him go. He would not be the man over whom she was breaking her heart if he could be persuaded otherwise. This decision was part of what defined him. And she loved him, would not change him for the world, even if it meant she would lose him forever.
As soon as Matt had set about his terrible task, the others calling and shouting after him, regret stung Emily, spreading through her like venom flooding her veins. She regretted not saying the words. The reasons had been valid at the time. Life was complicated. Their emotional and physical stability was tenuous at best. He had enough consuming his thoughts, and she had just witnessed her husband die. Granted Henry had been a man she did not care much for, but it had been a traumatic experience nonetheless.
Various, futile attempts at dismissal. Excuses, the lot of her reasoning. The truth of the matter was solid and unwavering, like a boulder firmly entrenched in the seabed despite the tempest raging at the ocean surface. She loved Matt. And she should have told him so.
And now it was too late. The enormous, horrible gateway surged and collapsed upon itself, taking with it her heart.
Except, he had known. She had seen it in his eyes. It was much more a comfort than the surprisingly tender gesture of Captain Becker's embracing her.
And it was also an agony. Emily loved Matt. And he knew it. And there were so many things to regret. Not things done, but things not done, that would never be done. And they washed over her in a flood.
She regretted the loss of all the days they would not have. All those subtle smiles that originated deep inside of Matt and lit him from within, brightening his eyes even when he denied them from his lips. All the laughter she'd never coax from him, the joy he'd never bring her. Never again lying in his arms, safe and warm after a trying day. And most of all, shocking and indecent as it was, Emily regretted never having lain with him, never having taken him inside of her body in the manner a wife welcomes her husband into her. No. That was not quite right. She'd been a wife before. She regretted not lying with Matt as a woman takes the man she loves to her bed.
She regretted not knowing every single part of him, every mood, every thought, every inch of skin, every beat of his heart.
Would she forget the little she did know? Would every person he'd ever met?
She did not want to forget Matt Anderson. She could not. The pain of losing him would be preferable to the fleeting emptiness she would inevitably feel, the void his absence would leave even if she could never articulate the reason, never recall the man.
Oh, it hurt worse than any pain she'd previously borne. The ache swelled until every other sensation was a numb whisper. She did not feel Becker's hand on her arm. She did not feel the tears on her cheeks. She only felt the devastating grief of loss and heartache.
Just as quickly as her world had turned dark, it became light again, as if the sun once more peaked out from behind the blanket of an eclipse. For there was a silhouette amongst the billows of smoke and debris. Even through the stinging blindness of tears, her eyes detected it, latched upon it, could not blink or waver. Her heart, which had dropped out the bottom of her stomach, leapt into her throat, pounding its excited rhythm in her ears.
The silhouette was human.
There was a man amid the remains of the fantastical destruction. And Emily could only think of one man it could possibly be. There was only one man that would be walking towards them from the heart of that awesome and terrible spectacle. Certainly, it must be the same man who had disappeared into the great gateway?
She called his name aloud, uncertain and hopeful, desperate for her eyes not to be deceiving her heart.
It was him.
And now he was running towards them.
Matt Anderson.
Alive and as happy as she'd ever seen him. And the same man with whom she had helplessly, hopelessly, undeniably and irrevocably fallen in love.
The world was the most beautiful it had ever been, in the billions years since it had formed, in the paltry few decades of Emily's life.
It was beautiful.
A/N: Where will I take this now? Stick around to find out… ;-)