Note: This is the PROPER Chapter Seven. Sorry everyone, I uploaded the wrong file and was unable to fix it due to a pesky bug. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: I still don't own Doctor Who, the BBC does. I just love it alot!
07: [Matters Of The Heart(s)]
There was another side to life.
There had to be.
A side that had nothing to do with formulas and numbers, without excitement to push one onwards.
The sweet life, the slow life, the real life.
The sort of life that he'd been but observing from afar for a long, long time now.
It was not as if he had any right to complain, after all, his life as it was now was something he had chosen for himself and stubbornly refused to give up ever since, the best thing he could have found for himself within the boundaries of his personal privileges and limitations.
Everyone knew those little moments of uncertainty where one feels like throwing everything away and laments over every path never taken, every chance never used.
There were probably few people in this big, wide universe who had never found themselves longing for the one single thing they could never have, and he was not one of them.
Those instants where he carelessly allowed himself to ponder the one riddle he would never solve, to wonder what it was like to belong somewhere, were what gave him the ability to value the simple yet brilliant lives of others, and he certainly didn't consider empathy a weakness – Even if its prize was occasional melancholy.
Most of the time, he was content with his life as it was and enjoyed the thrills of his travels as well as the beauty of the galaxies – If he was honest, there had been about 1001 possibilities for him to stop and stay, numerous sets of people and places, but he never really wanted to, not with all of his being.
There were things he envied those leading normal lives for, but if he really considered it; he would probably feel incredibly bored in-between the moments where those things happened. The time where he himself had lived one moment after the other seemed further and further away each day, and he didn't quite remember how he coped with it back then.
Still.
There was another side.
And what he had humbly assumed to be simply not meant for him would very soon offer him its sweet, tempting taste in the most unusual way – Oh, he had met people in the most unconventional ways, it was an unavoidable side effect of his tendency to attract trouble: He more or less kidnapped Ian and Barbara, Tegan happened to stumble into the TARDIS while looking for an actual phone box, he blew up Rose's Job and Donna more or less just appeared in front of him without any sort of prior warning, but all of these encounters looked perfectly normal in comparison to his bizarre first encounter with Grace.
Of course, he had heard of her long before meeting her in person – He had read articles on her extraordinary achievements and found the attitude she displayed in her interviews to be somewhat inspiring – She herself had apparently been inspired by a childhood dream, one she had almost given up herself, until some incident taught her that reality was not as dull as many made it out to be, and that she believed it to be a place where dreams could sometimes come true, at very least for a short, yet nonetheless meaningful time.
She never disclosed what that incident was, but as with so, so many open questions of this world, he ended up finding out, albeit quite unintentionally this time – Their first meeting led to her not for all, but for many intents and purposes killing him.
Messily.
Not that he blamed her – Finding an alien with two hearts on her operating table was certainly not a situation she had to deal with every week.
Still, he certainly didn't want to repeat that one experience – Not just the operation itself, that blurred swirl of pain, blinding lights and agony only interrupted by his on desperate screams and senseless warnings, that was nothing compared to most of the creative torture methods he had been subjected to over the years.
The true ordeal had been the sorry state he'd found himself in after that somewhat delayed, messed up regeneration, cold, alone, confused, in pain and without memories or the slightest feeling of recognition at the sight of his own face.
He did, however, recognize hers when she happened to walk past the spot where he spent the night, and as a hazy memory of her face was, save for a few technical terms he could not arrange in a way that made sense, the only hint pointing towards his identity, he simply followed her in a way that, as he had concluded in hindsight, bore resemblance to the behaviour of an obedient little puppy.
He had asked her for help as politely as he could, however with him being not only himself, but in addition to that not exactly right in the head at the moment, he only succeeded in convincing her that he must've escaped from the psychiatric ward of the hospital she worked in.
Only pulling the very catheter she had accidentally ended his seventh life with out of his chest was enough to convince her.
What followed was a little conversation at her now half-empty house, which resulted in them getting to know each other a bit.
He came to the conclusion that she was exactly as he would have imagined her, even if he didn't recall imagining her in the first place. Still, she was anything but a disappointment, and he felt honoured to have met her for some reason, which couldn't be a bad thing.
And she liked opera music! It was rare to find fellow disciples of science that had an eye for Art, and vice versa. She was certainly an extraordinary individual – and while he still didn't have a clue who he was, he had at very least reached the conclusion that he was bubbly and somewhat scatter-brained, with a puppy-ish streak. For some reason, this felt oddly refreshing and unusual, as if he was not used to it.
As he tried on the shoes she brought him, he idly wondered why their previous owner had packed his furniture and left after stumbling about such a smart, ready witted, competent girlfriend. She was pretty, too, with that dark strawberry-blonde hair of hers and that beaming smile full of flawless teeth. She was pretty much his type.
Normally, he wouldn't even have taken the time for such a tiny observation, as he usually had his head full with urgent problems which required quick solutions – and even if he would let his thoughts wander, he always knew that he would have to depart again, in addition to his crippling inability to take the initiative in such situations.
However, at that precise Moment, he did not remember any of this.
He started to recall things, tough, little by little, one thing at a time, and when the fog lifted itself, that little observation he wouldn't have made had a greater effect than he could have anticipated. Overtaken by a flood of Memories suddenly releasing itself into his head, his instinctual reaction was to just grab her and kiss her.
Yes.
Dying, Amnesia, impending Apocalypse, and last but not least, the recovery of his own identity.
This incredible list was what it took for him to overcome, or, more accurately, overlook his restraints and kiss the pretty woman in front of his face.
They were both completely overwhelmed by the sensations, if not for the exact same reasons – Grace, however, being the way she was, immediately grasped the opportunity and demanded another kiss right away.
And he gladly complied.
He, too, had to try this again and ascertain himself that it had been real before he could possibly start believing that this had actually happened to him and not to someone else, to confirm that he hadn't just been watching some other man he would now have to part with.
Greedily, both their lips took enough for a lifetime, hers, finally claiming the prize they had been searching for so long in all the wrong places, assuring themselves of the very real presence of something she thought to be a dream, seizing the opportunity she had always been waiting for, knowing that it would never come again ("I finally found the right guy and he's from another planet!"), and his, fulfilling the undisclosed desires of the hearts driving them, allowing her to fill voids that he had never been aware of.
Almost shell-shocked and yet paradoxically euphoric at the same time, he came to the realization that he had been wishing for something like this for a long time now, deep within his most vague, most fleeting dreams.
He couldn't believe that this was kissing – He had done this before, but that was a long, long time ago – It had been centuries. It must have been centuries, for him to feel like a clueless schoolboy again, like he'd been touched for the very first time.
He had honestly forgotten what it felt like – And he no longer had any post-regeneration amnesia he could blame for that particular memory lapse.
Unfortunately for the two of them, the trouble he was supposed to be thinking about right now, namely, the Master, caught up to them in that very instant.
As far as explaining the Situation to Grace and getting her to help him without wasting too much of their extremely limited time was concerned, the best he could say was that he had learned from his mistakes by the time he found himself in a similar situation during the Atraxi incident.
He guessed that he could be happy not to have left her house in a straightjacket, and to make things worse, the ambulance she called already contained a proper madman at the time of its arrival: The Master, dressed in black as always.
He could understand the shades, as they were meant as disguise, but seriously?
A leather trench coat?
Had he watched a little too much Terminator lately?
Maybe it had been too early to hope for an improvement in his fashion sense after he had swapped the medieval-looking outfit for a suit.
As he should have expected, things escalated into a car chase – motorcycle chase, actually, but who bothers with the details? He hadn't had any of those since the good old UNIT Days!
The motorcycle itself had been a hand-me-down from a policeman whom he had persuaded with a little help from Grace – He had tried it with his own methods, including Jelly Babies, but it hadn't really worked, so Grace had taken the matters into her own hands.
While he did not normally approve of pointing firearms at other people, he knew that Grace wouldn't have fired the gun. The determination with which she had demanded the keys had actually been quite impressive.
She had potential – he knew that she would realize it in the future, but he didn't think it would break to many rules if he took her with him and returned her in time.
They made quite an effective team, and despite her initial refusal to believe any of it, she adapted to the situation fairly quickly and certainly proved herself useful – in fact, that competence of hers ended up saving the earth and its surroundings.
Oh, and she also returned from the dead, with a little help from the TARDIS.
His Spaceship and he could never resist fixing anyone who declared to have "grown up."
So it happened that, at the turn of the Millennium, both he and Grace Holloway got a taste of a side of this world that they had neglected for a long time, in a way, complimenting and filling each other with inspiration.
It was a bit ironic – He knew of the future of so many people and thorough this adventure, he had been distributing hints of what was to come in the new Millennium, but Grace, this amazing woman with the bright smile, unrepentantly declined his offer to tell her of what was to come, as much as she had asked him for clues earlier.
And yes, why should she want to hear of anything he could tell her if she had been somewhere he had never been before?
It was exactly the other way around.
She was in the position to give him a hint, and she did.
And while it was nice to know that there was nothing to fear within the boundaries of the undiscovered country, as Shakespeare had called it, he was not too keen to go and see it anytime soon – The undiscovered spots of this world were more than enough to satiate his curiosity for now.
Nevertheless, there was one thing he would give her, maybe not as useful as a glimpse into her future, yet – or at least so he hoped – something equally memorable.
Just one more taste of the world where dreams come true.
Quite literally so.
It was not quite as easy as it had been back in the park when he had just regained his Memories – He guessed that this was, ironically, a good sigh.
He felt like himself again, for better or for worse, stuck with no choice but to do things his own way.
His head and lips moved hesitantly, carefully, as if he was afraid to either break her somehow, or to do just plain old do it wrong, placing a tender farewell kiss upon her lips as the fireworks coloured the canopy above them, celebrating the birth of a new era not only for the two of them, but for the rest of this planet as well.
Of course, he asked her to come with him, but he already knew her answer from the beginning. She had told them that he knew who she was and where she belonged, and so did he, now that the aftereffects of the regeneration had completely worn off.
He was not concerned about any of her qualities going to waste; he already knew that she would make the best out of them, as well as he also knew that she would never forget her bubbly, chaotic, sweet-loving futuristic lover.
He had no regrets here, no reason to feel sad or disappointed.
It was time for their ways to part.
When she asked him to come with him instead, he showed her an honest smile and told her that it was a tempting offer – This was no lie, it truly was tempting, but in the end, he had already known how he would decide.
He always had.
Still… Now he was certain that that there was another side to life.
And that it had been nice to get to know it, however briefly.
So, there it is! Sorry for the wait^^ This one is a bit shorter, but I'm mostly pleased with it's flow and the way it turned out. So, 7 Chapters are done, 7 more to go! It's time for the New Series! As for the contents of the next chapter, I believe that it will be sufficient to say that it's title is going to be 08:[Bad Wolf].
