Chapter Six: Dream
It was always the same. She stood there laughing at him, something he said, perhaps something someone else said, maybe Jack. And then the world turned upside down. And she was walking away from him, even as his fingers grasped for her. Pink and yellow and luminous and she faded from his vision even as he screamed her name.
The dreams hadn't faded with John Smith's identity.
Some nights he dream about other companions. There was his beloved Susan of course, dead and gone. There was Jamie every so often with his constant jokes and sense of humor. Other times there was poor, ill-fated Adric, the boy genius who tried just too hard, or Zoe who couldn't remember him. Neither could Donna, who along with Sarah had been one of his closest female friends, they both had kicked him into shape and he had thought the world of them. But both of them had lives now with families and no room for him. There were those who became something more than they were when he found them, like Victoria who became such and independent woman, and Jo who had finally found her voice and followed her heart away from him, and Ace who had grown from her teenaged rebellion. He had so many companions he would dream about wonder about, long for at times. But no one plagued him like Rose Tyler did. He sat in the darkness of the console room, the memory of her laughter, of that sly way her tongue would sneak out from between her teeth, the way her hand fit in his, and he wondered why he bothered sleeping at all.
And then it occurred to him as the shadows deepened around him that he perhaps wasn't even really awake in the first place. He was certain as they coalesced into a shape with a single bright star blazing in one of the deep, dark eyes forming he was in fact very much asleep. Funny, he hadn't even noticed it until Morpheus was practically standing right in front of him.
"So much for your vaunted senses, Lord of Time," came the soft, deprecating chuckle from out of the depths. The Doctor shrugged at the tall, gangly figure with his mop of night-black hair and his deathly-pale face. He had come used to such visits from this figure and the others like him.
"I see your entry is still spot on, Lord of Dreams," the Doctor greeted him, opening his arms wide, the fabric of his pinstriped suit rustling in its embrace of the console room. "How can I welcome you to my humble abode?"
"Humble it is not." Morpheus practically snorted as he moved, liquid like, around the console, smiling in dreamy softness at the time rotor. "Your ship dreams all the time. The stories she has to tell, the places she has gone, the things she has seen. She is beautiful."
"Thank you." The Doctor wasn't sure if he should be appreciative or not of such a comment but felt he should say something. In the face of Morpheus it was always best. The Dream Lord could be temperamental at the best of times, cruel at the worst. And over his long, long life he had come to know the man the best of all the phantom beings that haunted his life.
"To what do I owe this visit?" He might as well be welcoming if he was going to have a visitor. "I could put on a kettle, make a cuppa, perhaps find some of those biscuits that Donna used to like…"
"You know the reason you keep dreaming about her, don't you?" The gaunt man turned, cutting right to the chase, his dark robes swirling around him like night. The Doctor paused.
"Which her?" He knew he couldn't play coy with the likes of this being. None of his kind liked it. But he couldn't seem to help himself as he pretended to be very busy studying his sonic screwdriver.
"You play ignorant because you like being sly and clever, but I know your heart, Doctor. Just as I know who you really are." The man, who went by Morpheus though that wasn't his real name, could see beneath the mask of the man who went by the name of the Doctor. He smiled a thin smile, almost sad, as his jet eyes regarded him for long moments. "You pretend to yourself because it hurts so deeply. But dreams don't lie."
"Sure they do, all the time." The Doctor challenged cheerfully, knowing he was playing with fire as he did so. "I mean, everyone has dreams they can't explain, like walking down the street naked while eating a donut, or seeing a dancing midget who talks backwards, or having a giant meat pie land on your head, killing you, though why anyone would dream that I can't imagine…"
If he thought he could best the other man by letting his gob run non-stop he was mistaken. He merely stared at the Doctor with his fathomless eyes until he finally silenced himself, ashamed in the utter weakness he displayed before someone like this. Still, he couldn't help the self-conscious shrug and wry smile.
"Was worth a go, wasn't it?"
Morpheus wasn't nearly as amused.
"Dreams are fantasies, but even fantasies have a bit of truth in them, do they not?" The tall man leaned against one coral strut; arms and legs crossed in a copy of a pose the Doctor knew so well. "One imagines they are naked because of their own fears and anxieties, one sees a dancing midget because they are confused by a situation in front of them."
He paused, something akin to humor glimmering in the starlit depths. "I can't explain a giant meat pie, however."
"See, that's my point, why anyone would dream that," began the Doctor, but he was silenced by one look of the imposing figure.
"You dream of a woman you loved and lost and let get away again." Morpheus regarded him with the all the even, matter-of-factness that now cut at the Doctor's heart. "Because you, Lord of Time, dared to fall in love with a mortal woman and she broke your hearts."
Rose Tyler had. Or rather, he had set it up that way, stacked the deck in that favor. Both of himselves had been in on that, for both he and the version of himself formed from the metacrises had known the truth. They both desperately loved the same woman. And only one of them would ever have a chance at living the sort of life with Rose Tyler that they wished. For one, his song was just beginning. For the other, his song was soon ending.
"I couldn't let Rose stay," the Doctor replied simply.
"How noble of you," Morpheus replied dryly, without a trace of comfort in his sardonic smile.
"What do you know of it," the Doctor snapped viciously, hints of the tempest that raged just beneath the surface all the time with rising to the surface. Even this one, Morpheus as so many called him, backed down somewhat in the face of that.
"I know what it means to fall in love with a human, Lord of Time." Something like empathy, maybe, appeared in the glassy darkness of his expression. "I too have loved and I too have lost. Perhaps, in that sense, I understand your pain all too well."
"Do you?" The Doctor had trouble believing that of one such as he. "I gave her everything I could, you know. I would have done anything for her. I gave her me."
"And yet you are still alone."
He hadn't meant it cruelly. At least the Doctor didn't believe so. But still it ached to hear, cutting to the quick.
"Yes, I am."
What else could he say?
"Everything is changing," he sighed, slumping into his seat, rumpling his suit. "I will be changing soon. I know it. I know what's coming. Everything that Rose loves…everything about me that loves her, it will all change. It will all end and if she had stayed who knows how things would have ended. It's happened before, with companions, things are different once I change." Poor Peri, he recalled. He'd nearly killed her.
"Whether you believe me or not," came the dark voice from the corner, "I understand better than you know."
The Doctor turned up to study the man, if that was what he could call him.
"I feel that same weight you do, Doctor. That weight of responsibility, of duty, of promises made. And I know what it is like to know that change is on the wind."
Sadness. The Doctor was surprised at that. The few times he had encountered one of Morpheus' kind he had detected it here and there, those real emotions others felt. But not to this depth, not like this.
"What changes await you, Dream Lord?"
The other man merely shrugged. "Didn't you once say that everything dies? Everything comes to an end?"
He had. "I didn't think there was an end to a dream?"
"Perhaps not an end to a dream, merely just a change of perspective." He looked old all of the sudden, old and tired. Very much how the Doctor himself felt. "Perhaps a change of perspective will be good for both of us."
Perhaps it would be. He had lost so much and had hurt so much. Perhaps it would be good to have a change of outlook. "I will still miss her, you know."
"That's why I send you those dreams. So you won't forget."
"How can I forget Rose Tyler?" The Doctor couldn't imagine it. "She gave me hope when I thought I had none at all."
"And you get to live out your days with her, in a fashion."
Just not the fashion he had wanted, the Doctor silently added.
Morpheus shook his dark tangle of hair, unfairly more magnificent than even his. "You will learn to love again, Doctor. You always do. It's the way of us dreamers. We can't seem to help ourselves."
"It won't be the same," the Doctor replied mulishly.
"Do you want it to be?"
"No." Of that he was certain. "No, I want Rose Tyler to be just her. When next I come to love someone it shall be different."
"As it should be." The Lord of Dreams stood to his full height, which disconcertingly was taller even than the Doctor's in this form. "Rest well and dream, Doctor."
The darkness of the robes that clad the form of Morpheus rose then, swirling around the console room, covering the face of the master of dreams, till only the singular light of his eye shone in the depths. Soon even the light of the time rotor itself winked out as the TARDIS formed a pleasant hum in the Doctor's existence.
He slept that night for the first time in a long while. And it was, for once, a dreamless sleep.