A/n: (This is not the last chapter despite appearances)

aches and pains, faltering brains, and a last page

It'd started on a stormy summer day, and he'd thought it was funny.

For the rest of his life, it was that short laugh that haunted him. He heard it at night sometimes, the ache of it the same size as the emptiness weighing on his heart. He heard it in the mornings, staring at her empty chair across the table. And he hated himself so completely for it, so fully, that he cried bitterly because of it.

He was sixty-five and working on a watercolor of his newest grandbaby when he heard Clara calling loudly for Poppy. Initially, he assumed she was on the phone and Poppy was having a conversation with her husband in the background, but then he heard her footsteps traveling anxiously above his head in the room that had been Poppy's, a long while ago now. The Doctor carefully set his paintbrush down and rose tiredly, ignoring the creaks and aches of his knees and spine and hips, and made his way to the stairs.

"Clara?" He yelled in concern. "What's wrong?"

He winced when he heard a loud noise, hopefully some object falling to the floor and not his wife, and let out a breath of relief when he heard her soft steps nearing the top of the stairs. She appeared finally, looking shorter than she ever had before, her hair almost completely grey with only a little brown peppered here and there. She was fiddling nervously with her small, weathered hands, her lips quivering.

"Where's Poppy?" She asked worriedly. There was a deep sadness and distress in her tone that he couldn't understand. "I thought she was staying here another night. Just until Mollie stopped coughing."

The Doctor furrowed his brow, taking a careful step up, feeling the sudden need to be as close to her as possible.

"They left this morning. Mollie was much better. You kissed them goodbye, remember?"

Clara stared at him, her face frozen in that expression of confusion and sadness that he would come to know so sickeningly well in the years to come. After a long moment, a slow smile cracked the surface.

"Yes." She said, and then she laughed lightly. "Oh, yes, I remember. That's what I get for drinking before bed. Poppy's a bad influence."

She kept laughing, and eventually the Doctor joined in, his worry easing a little. He gave a hearty chuckle, a laugh that would live in the worst corners of his mind for the rest of his days. He smiled affectionately at her.

"Maybe you should go back to sleep." He suggested. "Being up all night with that baby has got you all jumbled."

She grinned coyly, and it was so Clara that he couldn't help but forget his concern. He couldn't help but see her as he usually did, as the energetic and happy young woman she'd once been. It was his first mistake and his worst.

"Really getting old now, aren't we?" She teased. She winked. "You've got liver spots and everything."

His affection faded to annoyance. He stamped his foot.

"I've not got liver spots, you impossible woman!" He growled. He tucked his hands behind his back. "They're scars! Battle wounds! From a long life lived!"

Clara waved her hand nonchalantly. "Right, right. Keep forgetting. Your battle wounds."

He glared after her as she laughed, retreating back up the stairs, but then he laughed a bit himself. But quietly, so that his wife wouldn't hear. He didn't want her to know that he still found their banter hilarious after she'd insulted his hands.

He returned to his portrait of Mollie—Poppy's second baby, only a month old now—and didn't question it again for the rest of the night. And he didn't question it the next day, or the next, or the next. A week later he walked into the kitchen and found her rummaging about their storage container cupboard, surrounded in a sea of wayward lids and plastic, mumbling something about her ramekins. The Doctor had taken her elbow gently in his hand and pulled her slowly to her feet, redirecting her to the cupboard on the opposite side of the kitchen that had held the ramekins and cake pans since they moved to this house years ago. She'd been in the cupboard that was exactly where they'd kept the ramekins in their last house.

It'd given him a bad taste in his mouth. He walked around for the next few weeks with that empty feeling in his stomach, like his foot had gone through thin air where a stair was supposed to be. He watched her at night as she slept, feeble and small underneath their duvet, his heart pounding from the stress of his worry. It wasn't until she got lost in the same Sainsbury's they'd been going to for years that he got truly frantic, but by that point, there was nothing to be done.

It was ironic, anyway. A former neurosurgeon, with a degree in neurology, wakes up one morning and realizes his wife has late early-stage Alzheimer's disease. It almost could have been a punch line to a crude joke, one Lottie's ex-husband would have told at dinner and been shunned by Miles for. But it wasn't a joke. Despite his initial laughter, it was not a joke. And no matter how hard the Doctor sobbed, no one arrived and told him any differently.

She understood what was happening to her. He held her hand the day they went in to get her CT scan results. He watched her nod once, firmly, her eyes growing distant as she looked out the window, her hands clenched tightly in her lap. He stared at her wedding ring, now as much a part of her hand as any of her fingers, and had to stand up or he knew he'd scream. He paced back and forth, his chest filling with such pain that there were no words for it, and it wasn't long before Clara was up and sinking her hand in his.

"It's all right, Doctor." She told him. She smiled shakily, even though he could see how scared she was. Anyone would be scared. Only his wife could hear a death sentence and first think to soothe him before all else.

And he broke, an old man of sixty-five, falling straight to his knees on the tiled floor. He wept, his hands shaking with distress and old age, his breaths coming in sharp gasps. He couldn't breathe and he couldn't stop gasping, not even when a nurse pleaded with him to calm down, because he knew. The average life expectancy after diagnosis was seven years. Just seven. Not even three percent of people with the disease lived more than fourteen years after standing in this exact room, hearing these exact words. His wife, his best friend, would be dead by seventy-three. She would not reach eighty. They would not be together for more than seven years more, and then she would leave him forever, and it would be a terrible, long death, one with no dignity and no comforts, not even the comforts of family. She would die absolutely alone, despite the fact that she'd built such a huge, beautiful family. She would be given nothing, even after a life of giving her all.

She helped him to his feet when his hysteria gave way to a paralyzed sorrow. She wrapped a frail arm around his shoulders, hers shaking ever so slightly.

"Come on, old man." She told him. Like they'd heard nothing of importance today. And he would have worried she didn't even remember what she'd been told, except for the neverending shaking of her shoulders.

He didn't know what to say and he couldn't stop crying. Miles called and he couldn't even answer, because he couldn't tell Miles, who was more attached to Clara than any of their children, that his mother was dying. That his mother might not remember him. That her brain was dying and she'd eventually forget how to even chew her own food. That his mother, the one that'd birthed him, nursed him, raised him, would be gone before he'd even reach forty. Just like that.

And what about him? How could someone tell him that? How could the neurologist bear to look him in the eye and tell him that his wife, the woman he'd been holding the hand of since he was six, was slowing losing herself and would die in front of him. It was selfish to think that way, he knew, but he'd always been a selfish old man.

Clara wrapped her arms around his frame not even four hours after they got back home, her hands cold against his skin. They were both in their bed, a place they retreated to when tragedy fell, but this time they weren't just there to wait it out. There would be no narrow escapes this time. He would lose her.

"I won't ever forget." She whispered fiercely. She held him with a strength she didn't look like she possessed. "I don't want to forget. I won't ever forget you."

It was only on that last word that her voice broke, shattering quickly to pieces, and soon she was crying into his shirt. But it was not crying that he'd ever heard from his wife. It was long, desperate gasps, somewhere between a wail and a hushed plea. Her tears were hot against his skin and it'd been years, more than he could count, since he'd felt her tears against his skin. They had had such a happy life. He had wanted it to be longer and happier still.

He knew that it was the newer memories that went first, and he knew that there was a good chance she wouldn't forget him completely. He'd been in her life since age six, and depending on just how far the disease progressed before she passed, it was likely she'd always know who he was at least part of the time. It would take extreme neurological damage to get rid of every memory of him. And selfishly that soothed him a little, even though he knew that didn't fix much at all. She'd have the comfort of him, but he had days to dread now, days and maybe weeks where she wouldn't remember they'd had babies together. She might not remember all the places they'd gone and the things they'd done. And there was the horrible possibility that, if a secondary illness didn't kill her first and she made it to the advanced stages, she'd forget him and her and everything they'd ever been. He'd be alone with those memories, and then she would die horribly, and he would truly be left with them.

"Oh God, Clara, please." He whispered, torn and jagged and destroyed. "Not this. Anything but this." As if she could fix it. But that was just it; that's what Clara did. That's what she'd always done. Redeemed and fixed him. And now she couldn't and he couldn't save her either. It was the first time they'd both cried themselves to sleep in each other's arms. He knew it would not be the last.

Her dad's mother had suffered the disease, but their children had never known her, so it wasn't anything that really existed in their family's small universe.

It was Lottie who found out first. She'd come by their house unannounced the next day, arms full of decorations for the party that weekend. They'd forgotten. Their anniversary was in two days. They had been married forty-seven years. Would she know him on their fiftieth?

"Elsie's seeing some bloke now—seems a bit nerdy to me, but you know what I always say, better books than booze. Oliver's pissed about it and keeps asking me to put a tracker in her car, the complete bastard." Lottie rambled, pulling ribbons from the bag and setting them on the kitchen table. Both the Doctor and Clara were quiet and horrified, something Lottie picked up on as soon as she looked up.

She let a bag of balloons fall back into the bag, her face paling.

"Mum? What's wrong?" She asked quietly. She sought the Doctor's eyes, hers worried. "Dad?"

Clara's voice was apologetic when she spoke, sharing what they'd found out as gently as she could. Lottie stared at her for a long moment once she'd finished speaking, her lips parted and her eyes wide, and the Doctor didn't remember crossing the room to hold his daughter, but suddenly she was sobbing into his chest. She understood enough to know what this meant. He hoped the others didn't yet.

He got physically ill when Lottie wrapped herself around her mother, begging her not to go. He left the room and leaned against the wall, nauseated to the point of faintness. He would never be okay again and that was all there was to it.

Ellie knew shortly after Lottie. She was living in Wales with her Welsh husband and six children, but only a month after finding out, the Doctor got a call saying her family was moving to London. He didn't question it. He needed his children around more than he would admit.

The Doctor's very last baby, who wasn't so much a baby anymore, found out next. Poppy cried for hours at their kitchen table, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. She stayed the weekend at their house and kept following Clara around, and at first the Doctor thought it was out of concern, but he realized with a sickening pang that it wasn't. She was already missing her.

Bristol was in Blackpool, living in Dave's old house and working as a barrister. Lottie had offered to tell him, and even though she'd said he'd taken the news okay (as in, he didn't go mad), the Doctor knew better. His suspicions were confirmed when Bristol called him only a week later, saying he was coming home too. The Doctor tried to tell both him and Ellabell that their mother wasn't going to die tomorrow, that this would be a long, hard road, but they wouldn't hear a word he said. It was their mother and she was sick and they wouldn't be anywhere but her side. He knew never to expect anything different.

Miles—like Poppy— had never left London to begin with. He lived with his partner in a ridiculously luxurious flat, bought thanks to his bestselling recipe books. He came over for tea three times a week and the Doctor and Clara pretended everything was okay for weeks upon weeks, but when Clara's speech began suffering, they knew they couldn't hide it any longer. She had to write most everything she would have relied on her short term memory to remember on her arm and she was beginning to suffer from paraphasia. Miles noticed first when she asked him to pass the jilk instead of milk, but he'd done the horrible thing the Doctor had before. Laughed, assumed it was a silly mistake.

He was their gentle child, their calming, thoughtful one, but when the Doctor told him, he threw his own tea cup against the wall. He slammed his fist there afterwards, once, twice, screaming loudly at nothing at all, until his mother wrapped her arms tight around him and held until he stopped hurting himself. He wept like a baby in her arms, his tears falling angrily and hot down his face, and the Doctor knew it would kill that man when Clara didn't recognize him. Miles would not recover from that.

Once all their children knew, everything changed. Lottie only lived an hour away, but she moved back into their house with Elsie, sensing that the Doctor would need help caring for Clara even if he wasn't ready to even begin to think about that yet. He listened to Elsie laugh on the phone down the hallway, wondering what his sweet granddaughter would do when her grandmother no longer knew who she was. He wondered if she'd grow to resent her.

And it was slow until it wasn't. Sometimes Clara was perfectly all right and perfectly herself, and sometimes she was staring blankly at their grandchildren's shoes, too horrified to admit to any of them that she'd forgotten how to tie shoelaces. She'd remember later that night and tie and retie her own, as if proving to the world that she could, in fact, tie. He saw her hands shake the most in those instances, and it was then that she'd hide in his arms, too scared to even say that she was frightened.

It was a year of crawling decline until she realized the inevitable was happening. Just like before, it all started slow. She'd been making a list of what to get all the grandchildren for Christmas, and the Doctor found her hunched over, staring intently at the tablet with her face stricken. He sat down carefully beside her, gently pulling it over to him.

"I'm missing one." She told him thickly. She lifted her quivering hands and shakily counted on her fingers, brandishing nine. "I've got—nine. Nine grandchildren."

But she said it like a question, glancing quickly to her left to gauge the Doctor's expression, as if to make sure her statement was correct. He felt he could have screamed until his throat bled.

"Exactly." He told her gently, smiling towards her encouragingly. He reached over and wrapped one arm around her small shoulders, pulling her close to his side. "We've got nine. You're just missing one of Ellie's boys. Peter. You've got all the rest, though."

She nodded once, firmly, but when he passed the tablet back to her she only stared at it. She reached up and touched her damp cheeks with her fingertips, her lips quivering.

"Right, Peter. Of course. Little Peter whose first word was 'fuck'." She recalled with a shaky laugh. But her laughter panned off quickly, strangled by her sudden panic. "How could I have forgotten Peter?"

The Doctor just wanted her to feel okay, so he pulled the tablet back to him and quickly typed in what to get for Peter. He smiled reassuringly at Clara.

"There. List's done. You've put great stuff here." He praised.

But his wife crumpled, her face lowering into her hands, her voice hardly more than a pain-soaked whimper.

"Please don't tell Peter that I forgot about him." She pleaded, and it was only then that he heard her tears. "Please don't tell Ellie that I forgot her son. I love him just as much as the rest. I do. I don't know why I forgot him. I don't know why I did that. I'm so sorry."

He pulled Clara down against his chest and wrapped both his arms around her, his own eyes swimming with tears. He kissed her hair and rocked them gently, his heart breaking more than he thought it ever could, and he knew there was more breaking to happen still.

"You have nothing to be sorry for, Clara. Nothing. And I won't tell anyone. I would never." He swore. He kissed her hair again and sniffed, tightening his arms around her. "No one will ever know."

That night, after she'd fallen asleep in their bed, he walked all the way back down the stairs and found the tablet again. He sat down and put his reading glasses on, heaving a sigh as he scanned the list. She'd gotten all the grandchildren, but at lot of the gifts were skewered and meant for past versions of the kids. She'd put down a dollhouse for Elsie, but Elsie was seventeen. Ellabell's triplets—Peter, Matt, and David—were turning five in November, but Clara had decided they needed playmats and teethers- things better suited for infants. He cried as he redid the list, vowing to never tell her he'd done so. He would never tell a soul of it, and as he crawled back into bed beside her that night, he couldn't help but grip her like someone was trying to pull her away.

After years of studying and practicing neurology, he knew what it was like to be the one giving the diagnosis. And now he was suddenly on the other side of things. It was the darkest place he'd ever been.

He didn't know when she'd started on it, but one day almost two years after her diagnosis he found a thick photo album in her bedside table drawer. She was downstairs baking a soufflé with Miles, as it was one of the few things she could still do somewhat normally with Miles' assistance, and the Doctor had been upstairs resting. His back was hurting more and more each day and he knew they'd soon need to move to a bungalow, before Clara got worse and before he could no longer make more than two journeys up and down the stairs. Miles' partner was a GP and told the Doctor at least twice a week that his stress was going to kill him, and that it was responsible for his sharp and premature decline in mobility and his high blood pressure, but the Doctor had nothing to say to that. He couldn't tell him the truth, which was that his heart was breaking and taking most everything else in his body down with it. Oscar was a young man and would think him foolish for it, because he had yet to spend his entire life with another person. He had yet to know how deep the heart's roots could go inside you.

The Doctor's eyes burned so fiercely with tears when he opened the album that he almost put it away to save himself the pain. His wife had always been the practical one, the one to get things done, the one to always know what to do. She hadn't spoke much of her terror about her disease, but he knew she'd understood the severity of it, because the album in his lap was proof of that. She'd understood she would lose it all and she'd begun fighting against it before it even happened. The first page was a picture of their entire family taken only a few months ago. Judging by the slight rip on the page, she'd been replacing it after each get together, probably to save herself confusion over the grandchildren's ages. Each person had a line leading to their name, age (written in pencil so it could be corrected) and relation to her, even though he had yet to see her not recognize someone. That in itself was enough to make him curl up into himself from the pain, but then he turned the page, and he realized it got both infinitely worse and infinitely better. Worse because she'd dedicated an entire page to all of them, a page where she wrote out all the things she loved about each of them, their strange quirks, pictures from each stage of their lives on the children's pages, favorite memories with them. Better because Clara had found a way to take charge of even this in the smallest way she could, and it was reassuring to know her fight was still in her. It was nice to know she'd done this for herself.

He read through all his children's pages, laughing at all the funny pictures and memories from their childhoods, his chest ringing with longing for how it had been. He stared at a picture of him and Clara, so young (he did the math quickly—they couldn't have been more than thirty-two) with a newborn Miles and all the other kids surrounding them, so small and happy. Clara had managed to capture each child's spirit in each page, and the Doctor almost felt that she could have read them without any memories at all and loved their children. Perhaps that had been the point of it.

He read through his grandchildren's, which were understandably shorter as they hadn't lived as long as their children, and he thought it was over. But the last three pages were his, and just the existence of them was enough to make him close it quickly, fearing he'd lose his own mind at this. He didn't like to acknowledge that she could forget him. He didn't like to think she even knew she could either.

He waited until he felt less liable to scream, and then he opened it back up to the start of his section. The first page and the back of it were just pictures. The first was one of them at age seven, hanging upside down from a tree. Ellie was in the background, holding Clara's dress around her ankles to keep her from flashing the camera. The Doctor didn't remember, but he supposed it was Dave who took it. Both him and Clara were laughing hysterically about something, their mouths and lips stained red from whatever they'd been eating (probably one of Ellie's strawberry iced lollies), and Clara's hair was hanging down towards the ground, the tips almost brushing the grass. There was another of them at age ten in front of their school, sitting side by side on the curb with their arms crossed in front of their chests and angry scowls on their faces. He couldn't remember what had pissed them off so much, but the picture made him laugh now. One from around age fourteen, and he could tell it was before he'd told her how he felt, because he was sitting close to her and blushing deeply because she'd taken his hand in hers, and that was the time in his life where Clara simply touching him could have him walking on air for hours. There were three from their time in the States, two from their wedding day and one of them in the sun in Texas, a little barer than they needed to be. And the rest were from scattered moments in their life. They were in their mid-twenties in one, sitting on Dave's sofa at Christmastime, Clara in the Doctor's lap and her head resting against his shoulder as she laughed. He stared at his younger self, admiring how truly happy he looked, his eyes alight with contentment and his hand resting between her shoulder blades. They were brand new parents in another picture, sitting together in Clara's hospital bed, newborn Lottie cradled in the Doctor's arms, and he saw both fear and joy in their eyes that time. Then they were twenty-eight and on a picnic blanket, twenty-one month old Lottie in the Doctor's lap and week-old Ellabell clutched in Clara's arms, and he thought they both looked more tired and happier than two people could ever be. Ellie and Lottie were wrestling on the floor in the background of the next picture, which had been their failed attempt at a family photo the day after they took Bristol home, and in that one they both had their faces turned back towards the two brawling sisters, eyebrows lowered and mouths opened as they scolded. Their next family photo was them all piled in the bed, newborn Miles on the Doctor's chest and Bristol clinging jealously to Clara's waist, his eyes trained suspiciously on the newborn baby instead of the camera. Ellie and Lottie were smiling angelically at the lenses at least, and he and Clara were smiling, looking exasperated but content despite. He remembered they'd taken so many pictures that day because the kids just couldn't understand the timer the camera was on and always posed two seconds too late. The first picture with Poppy always made the Doctor laugh, because they were both sitting together on the hospital bed, looking down at the infant with expressions of she's-beautiful-but-what-have-we-gotten-ourselves-into, their faces stretched with smiles and their eyes a little startled. He'd scheduled himself for a vasectomy that day, mostly because Clara had had a caesarean section with Poppy and he hadn't wanted her to get cut open again. All four of their children were sitting on the edge of the bed in that picture, laughing loudly at something Rory must have said from behind the camera. And the rest were simply small moments they all had together. One from a holiday they all took to Spain four years after Poppy was born. Clara and the Doctor on their twentieth anniversary. Another family holiday they'd taken when the kids were all older. And lastly, a picture of the two together, right after their last child had moved out.

He was drowning in pained nostalgia, but turning the page only made it worse. Clara was honest and detailed in her descriptions of her husband and seemed to have only praises for him. If she had criticisms to give, they were not present here. Her favorite things about him were his voice in the morning, his hands, the way he always smelled of Jammie Dodgers even when she was certain he hadn't had any that day, the way he cried at each child's birth like he'd never been happier in his entire life, his chin, his curiosity about anything and everything, the way he protected those he loved, and on and on the list went, weaving details of her love for him that made even him understand for a moment why she might love him after all. Her list of favorite memories was long and detailed, and it was so intriguing to the Doctor to read, to see some of his own favorite memories shining back at him on paper. It made him happier than almost anything else to see a lot of the times he'd tried to make her happy on that list, because it was proof that he'd succeeded.

There were four pages left, and perhaps there was more she wanted to add, but he couldn't let it be anything more about him. Because she was his other half, she was what made him better, and she couldn't forget herself. He filled out those four pages about her, as if he was the one slowly losing his memories, just so she knew who she was even when she couldn't remember. Even when she wasn't sure of anything at all, she'd be able to turn here, and remember that she was brilliant with computers, that she used to be able to tie cherry stems with her tongue, that she'd been manager of an entire technology department for years while raising five kids and never failing to make them all laugh. That she could drive a motorbike, that she took a teaspoon of sugar in her tea unless she was stressed, that she'd been to one hundred and one countries and found a way to make him feel at home in each and every one of them. That she was his impossible girl and always had been.

When he finished, he missed her so acutely that he had to limp down the stairs. She was sitting on the sofa with Lottie, laughing about something Miles had said, and he sat down beside her without a word and held her close.

"I love you so much, Clara." He whispered into her hair. He saw Miles' eyes getting misty, but he couldn't protect them from this anymore. Clara gripped him back lightly, nuzzling the curve his neck.

"I love you too, Doctor." She told him, her tone a little surprised. When he sat back and she saw his tear-filled eyes, she frowned, her hand rising to cup his cheek. She rubbed her thumb along his wrinkled skin.

"You're all right." She told him gently. "Do you want to try the soufflé Miles and I jade? No. Not—the soufflé Miles and—" She stopped, shut her eyes briefly with frustration. The room grew quiet as it always did. Lottie set her hand on her mother's leg.

"Made." She supplied quietly, sensitive to her mother's embarrassment.

Clara exhaled heavily and nodded, eventually opening her eyes.

"Made. The soufflé we made." She said tiredly. She looked very much like she wanted to sleep after that, and the Doctor leaned against the back of the sofa, gently guiding her head to his chest. She didn't sleep, but she didn't talk either, her eyes trained unseeingly on the half-empty glass of water on the coffee table. He stroked her hair and tried not to cry.

She'd been right to say that he was okay (physically anyway). But the problem was that she wasn't, that her brain was deteriorating, that he was going to lose her. That their story together was going to come to an end very soon now, and he wasn't ready for it. They'd done all they wanted and so much more, but he still wasn't ready, and he knew now that he'd never be.

"I'd love some of the soufflé." He finally said thickly, directing the response to Miles. He felt Clara smile briefly against his chest.

Miles nudged Oscar and nodded towards the kitchen, and Oscar quickly went to get the Doctor a plate, telling him firmly that he needed to rest or his joints would be inflamed all night. The Doctor would normally roll his eyes and sigh "spouses", sharing an exasperated look with his son, but not today. Today he was tired.

It was Elsie she misplaced first. Clara woke up one morning and called her Lottie and continued to do so, talking to her as if they'd all just gone back in time twenty-two years and Elsie was her nineteen year old mother.

Elsie was shaken up and didn't have the heart to set her grandmother right. Lottie was at the supermarket and the Doctor spent a long time holding Clara's hand, flipping through the pages of the photo album on her lap, quietly watching her study all the forgotten years with her creased eyes.

She pursed her lips tightly, her eyes welling with tears. She couldn't look her husband in the eye.

"I don't remember." She told him, and the words were like physical strikes. He'd known this day was coming, but it hurt all the same. She looked at the picture of Lottie holding Elsie at the hospital and touched her daughter's face, swallowing thickly.

"The birth— was—" she stopped, stumbling over her words as her brain struggled to find the correct ones. She inhaled deeply with frustration, spewing out made up words and then shaking her head angrily when she didn't feel those were right. The Doctor swept her hair back over her shoulder gently.

"The birth was fine." He replied. "It was quick, like yours with Lottie was. You were there the entire time. You held her hand and you cried when you held Elsie for the first time."

Clara sniffed, her tears running down her lips and dripping off her chin. He wiped them away but he knew it was no good. He couldn't fix this.

She nodded once and looked up at him, her eyes so vulnerable. She touched his chin with trembling fingers.

"Tell me more?" She requested.

He nodded once and scooted closer to her, hoping his body warmth would make her hands less cold and her face less pale.

"Elsie was a little jaundiced—you called her carrot as a nickname and Lottie hated it, but it eventually stuck. You had a made up song for her all about your "little carrot Elsie" and she used to love when you sang it to her. Lottie used to joke and call you Elsie's "Grand C" and she still calls you Gransy. All the grandkids do." He paused, his throat tightening. "Do you—do you remember them?"

She pressed a hand to her forehead, her mouth twisting.

"I don't—I've got—" her groan of frustration was terrifying and heartbreaking. She shook her head, her eyes sparkling with tears. "I can't explain."

He nodded and blinked quickly to fight back against his own tears, because he had to be the strong one now. He'd decided a long time ago that he would do that for her. She'd come to him a few months ago and asked him to do something he couldn't. She'd wanted him to promise to kill her when she stopped remembering her children. A little euthanasia, she'd said, and she'd laughed like it was no big deal. And maybe it would have been easier on him and all of them had he agreed to it. But she was his wife, his beautiful Clara, and he would rather die than be the one responsible for killing her. How could he take her from himself? How could he take her from their children? He realized he loved her enough to do it the hard way. He loved her enough to watch her die day by day and he loved her enough to make sure she was as happy as she could possibly be as that happened. She would die with dignity and he would be there for her, even if it killed him inside. Even if it devastated him.

So he kissed her temple and began speaking for her, carefully and slowly, watching for her nods or shakes to see if he had it right. He almost always did.

"Do you remember some things but you're not sure what it is you remember?" He asked gently.

She nodded, once, her eyes confused and shadowed. He nodded back and the next question hurt.

"But you do remember me, right?"

She leaned her head against his shoulder.

"Yes." She said.

He could breathe, even if his breaths were painful.

"And I remember you. How beautiful you were and still are. How funny, so funny. How you were always and still are exactly what I need." He told her softly.

She lifted her head and turned towards him, her hand finding his cheek. She ran her thumb over his skin.

"This means 'I love you'." She decided, and he knew it was for when things were truly bad, when her language abilities were deteriorated to a point where she might not even be able to say that or anything at all.

He smiled tearfully and lifted his hand as well, cupping her cheek and caressing it right back. I love you too.

Ten visited and witnessed Clara get lost in her own home for the first time. The Doctor found her in the garden, her arms locked around herself, her eyes haunted as she told him tearfully I don't know where I am. Where am I?

Ten helped her back into the house and declared Clara's necessity to go into long-term, terminal care.

The Doctor shut the door in his brother's face and refused to talk to him for weeks afterwards.

Bristol moved into their house as well, having no children or spouse to hold him anywhere else. Clara lost control of her speech to the point that it was only single phrases or words at a time, and even those were exhausting to her. She couldn't write, couldn't read much, couldn't walk to the bathroom without assistance. She recognized her children half of the time, giving them overjoyed smiles and caressing their cheeks with her thumb, but the other half she merely stared out the window, sparing them brief, indifferent looks. The Doctor wondered what it must have been like in her head. Drafty, he decided. The world must have been a terribly confusing place. She must have had so many different memories running around in her mind at certain points, so many things she couldn't quite make sense of, and then a dizzying lack of them at others. He wondered who she thought their children and grandchildren were on days she stared right through them. He wondered who she thought she was.

Sometimes she didn't remember when he talked about their wedding, but she always wanted him near. At the very least, he was always a familiar person, a constant in her life. There was a terrifying morning when he woke up to find her looking down at him in confusion, like she had no idea who he was or what he was doing beside her, but all he had to do was say her name and she was relaxing again.

It was the afternoon after that terrifying morning and he was sitting downstairs, tears building hot behind his eyes, when Bristol handed him a mug of tea and his concerns.

"I brought Mum a mug and helped her drink some—I think it made her happy." He said. "She held my hand and she remembered our camping trip when I was nine." He smiled briefly at that, but it soon dwindled.

The Doctor took the offered tea but he couldn't stomach it. He let it warm his hands anyway. His entire body was worse for the wear these days, and he let Bristol help him to the sofa when he noticed his father's knees were quaking.

Bristol's words were quiet. "I wish you'd let us take care of you, too. You're not looking so good, Dad. Ellie's worried to death. Poppy's about ready to move in, too. And, well, you know Lottie. She wakes up every time you go to the bathroom during the night, listening to make sure you don't fall."

The Doctor hadn't known that. He made a quiet decision to try and switch around his bathroom times, so his baby could sleep more. She needed it. This was terribly hard on her, too.

"I'm fine." The Doctor said gruffly, but he heard the way his own voice broke.

Bristol glanced down at his own mug, his shoulders tense. He sounded very close to tears when he spoke.

"I know you don't want to be apart from Mum, but…this isn't good for you. You've lost so much weight and you can hardly make it up the stairs."

The Doctor pinned his son with an accusatory glance.

"So what? You think we should just throw your mother into a care home? Like she's not worth anything to us anymore?" The Doctor snapped. He hid his shaking hands underneath his thighs. "Over my dead body. Literally, Bristol. You will have to step over my dead corpse to get her out of this house."

Bristol's mouth quivered.

"Stop, Dad. Please don't talk like that." Bristol pleaded. "You know that isn't what I meant."

The Doctor was finding it difficult to breathe. His chest was tight and he had to tug at the collar of his shirt.

"Then what do you mean?" He pressed.

Bristol was looking at him in concern. "Are you feeling all right, Dad?"

"What do you mean?!" He repeated, louder still.

Bristol grew quiet. He looked away.

"I mean Mum's dying. And having you die on us as well doesn't help that."

Bristol always was their bluntest child. The Doctor rose up slowly, his entire body screaming out in pain as he did, and hobbled from the room.

"I can't even look at you." He told his son.

Later, he regretted the hateful words. He rested beside his wife and whispered to her, telling her what he'd said, his voice laced with guilt. She listened intently, her brown eyes on his, and then she pressed her forehead against his chest. She reached up a little later, her hand finding his face.

"You're—the best dad." She told him slowly, deliberately. She reached down and patted the photo album resting on her legs like it was proof. She poured over it many hours each day, the pictures bringing her comfort, like it helped to know that they'd all been happy, even if she couldn't quite remember what that happiness felt like.

"I'm not ready to not be a husband anymore." He admitted a little later, his voice weaving with tears. He gasped out a sob and pressed his face against her hair, his chest tighter still. "I'm not ready to lose you."

It seemed to frustrate her more than it ever had that she couldn't get herself to say the words she must have sensed were in her somewhere. She stroked his back and found three words for him.

"It all ends." She shared, and after she said it she seemed confused and unsure of what they'd been talking about.

At first it did nothing to soothe him. He only cried harder, because he hadn't ever wanted one of the things that ended to be his wife. But the longer he held her, the more he thought, and he realized that she was right. It all had to end somewhere: every story, every life, every dream. If nothing ended, nothing could ever begin. He had been blessed to know her for sixty-four years, so much longer than most everyone else got to know their wives, and he had to remember that he was blessed despite this curse.

He found Bristol the next morning. He was sitting at the table with Lottie and Poppy, who had Mollie asleep in her lap and suitcases lining the hall.

"Hi, Dad." Poppy greeted.

The Doctor sighed in resignation, knowing there was no use asking her to go home. He could hear her husband Charlie playing out in the garden with their eldest daughter, Posy.

"Hi, Poppy." He said. "I see you've moved back in."

Poppy inclined her head in agreement. "I see you're still refusing to let anyone help you."

He was grouchy and pulled thin the entire morning, snapping left and right at his children, giving his grandchildren greetings that lacked the proper warmth. Poppy followed him into his study where his watercolors were, her face lined with so much sadness that the Doctor was immediately arrested by a strong, paternal urge to fix whatever it was that was hurting her. But he quickly realized that it was something he couldn't fix no matter how deeply he wanted to.

Poppy had obviously been planning some sort of intervention, but after he looked at her tiredly, she simply sat with him and leaned her head against his shoulder as he painted. She watched his paintbrush as it made gentle, pink curves, recreating Clara's smile underneath that autumn tree fifty-two years ago. He only had to glance at the picture for reference a couple of times. Where Clara's memory was dying, his was flourishing, clinging tenaciously to all he lived for.

"She was so beautiful." Poppy said fondly.

He closed his eyes and pictured the brief, scattered smile she'd given him that morning.

"She's still beautiful." He responded.

Poppy's voice was thoughtful.

"Lottie told me that Mum called her a few weeks after she found out and she asked her to watch out for you. She said that Mum spent the past few years worried mostly about you and us."

The Doctor paused and swallowed thickly. He glanced at Poppy sadly.

"Does that surprise you?" He wanted to know.

Poppy shook her head. "Of course not. That's Mum. Only…I guess…" she stopped. When the Doctor looked down at her, tears were clinging to her light eyelashes. "I guess I just never pictured life without her. I never imagined that I'd have to. It hurts to see you without her. It hurts to know she doesn't remember my graduation, or a lot of my childhood, or even me sometimes. That's my mum and she's going away and I—" Poppy sniffed and reached up, wiping her tears away. "I just mean that there will never be another woman like that and I think the world will be so much sadder for it. I feel like my children are losing something so integral to a happy future. I feel…angry." She looked up at her dad. "Why am I so angry?"

He couldn't keep painting. His hands were shaking too badly.

"Because life has not treated your mother the way she deserved." He responded finally.

Poppy let out a full sob at those words, nodding her head slightly in agreement.

"She doesn't deserve this, Daddy. She's up there and she's so scared and confused and I can't even stand it. It hurts so much to look at her and see her stare through me. It's not fair. It's not fair."

Her tears were bitter as they seeped into the Doctor's sleeve. He had long gotten over his anger. Now he was just tired and beaten.

"How do you do it?" Poppy asked. Her voice was weaving with guilt and pain as she searched for answers. "I've only been here half a day and I feel so upset I think I might be sick. How can you stand to sit by her and watch her die?"

The Doctor swallowed his tears and looked back at his painting, finding the deep warmth of Clara's eyes easily. He found the strength to wrap an arm around his daughter and hold her as she cried, his pain-induced indifference giving way to an odd certainty.

"Because I stood beside her and watched her live." He told Poppy. But she only cried harder at that and he knew she needed more. She needed to know where to find the strength, and the Doctor would tell her. He would tell her where he always found his. "There's something your mum said a long, long time ago. Way before you were born, long before we were even married. I'd invited her over to my house for dinner on her birthday, and back then she and my mother didn't get on well at all. It was a disaster to say the least. Uncle Ten and I got into an argument and then Tara got into a fight with your mum and she said—well, I can't remember the exact words anymore, but she basically accused Clara of not knowing what real love was, because she was so young." The Doctor paused and took a deep breath against a sudden wave of dizziness. Poppy assumed he was overcome with emotion and didn't question it. There was a dull ache behind his eyes as he continued. "Your mum said that she knew what love, real love, was. She said that love was when she held her mother's hand as she died. At the time it hurt me to see her sad, but I didn't really understand it. And Poppy, I didn't understand it until this happened. I didn't understand just how much love it takes to do what I'm doing, what you and your siblings are doing. It takes unquestioning, selfless, practically idiotic love to watch someone die. There is no greater pain than this. There's no greater proclamation of love. You can—you can marry someone a million times, you can have a dozen babies with them, but always remember that the people you truly love are the people you would spoon-feed when they don't have the strength to lift their own arm up for that long. My Clara was clever, so clever, even at that young age. Because she knew what I only just learnt. And she is always where I got my strength from, Poppy. Your mum has been my strength for as long as I can remember. And you have so much of her in you, and that's how I know you're going to be okay. Because you're her baby and she's stronger than anything."

It was a long time before Poppy could speak. She kissed her father and told him over and over that she loved him, that she loved Clara, and the Doctor repeated those words back for both of them.

"Watching you five grow was her favorite part of life." He promised Poppy. "You'll never truly understand how much she loves you all."

He sent Lottie into the study after he left, worried about his youngest daughter. Lottie went to check on Poppy while he walked up the stairs as quickly as he could, because he understood something else from Clara's remembered words. He remembered her regret for the things she hadn't said, and he swore he wouldn't let there be anything left that he hadn't said.

Miles was in the room when he walked in, telling Clara all about how his and Oscar's adoption papers had been finalized. Clara was holding his hand, which meant this was a good afternoon for her. Sometimes she got worse as the sun got closer to falling behind the clouds.

Miles rose when his father entered, after pressing a kiss to his mother's cheek.

"Love you to the moon and back, Mum." He told her.

Clara squeezed his hand in response, her eyes filled with grand affection that slowly dwindled, her brow furrowing as she grew presumably confused. Miles touched his father's arm lightly in concern as he passed.

The Doctor pushed the chair beside the bed out of the way and sat beside her, wrapping his arm around her shoulders. For a moment she cringed back from his touch, her eyes faraway and lost, but then he whispered her name and I'm here, it's me, it's the Doctor until she was holding him as tightly as she could manage (which wasn't very tight at all).

"Ellie's coming over for dinner." He told her. He gently pulled the photo album from her hands and flipped to Ellabell's page, pointing first to the picture of her as a little girl. Clara remembered those best. She touched the picture tenderly, her way of letting him know she knew just who they were talking about even if it was in a scattered, timeless kind of way.

He swallowed the lump in his throat.

"Clara, I think I loved you more than anyone has ever loved." He touched her nose, still so funny and wonderful. "I still do."

His second unforgivable mistake was that he missed her illness until it was too late.

After the fact, he remembered that he'd learned all about how pneumonia manifested itself in the elderly in his schooling so long ago. He remembered that, a lot of the time, they didn't even cough that much at all. Confusion was the most frequent symptom for the elderly, but his wife…well, she was always confused.

He'd noted passively that she was refusing liquids more than she used to. She'd started touching her chest whenever she took deep breaths, and the Doctor had noticed that, but he was too tired and too dizzy to realize that it was from stabbing pain. She never told him it was, never cried out in agony, never cried at all. It wasn't until he woke up abruptly in the night, frightened to death to see her skin a light shade of blue, her breaths coming shallowly and quickly and more a wheeze than anything, that he realized she'd been dying underneath his watch once more.

He tried to carry her from the room, screaming as loudly as he could for one of his children, but his knees gave out only a few steps from the bed. He could only think about breaking the fall for her, could only think about her in general, and he remembered being briefly glad when she fell on top of him instead of on the floor, right before his head slammed hard into the corner of the bedside table. He saw a flash of white and felt such deep, tugging pain, and then he heard his children enter the room.

Lottie crouched beside him and touched his shoulder as Bristol and Poppy picked Clara up.

"Dad, are—"

He couldn't remember for a moment where he was, or what he was doing, but then a little came through.

"Your mum, take her to hospital," he said urgently. Lottie turned and looked at her mother with fear, and the Doctor took that moment to reach up and touch the back of his head, where he felt sharp pain. When he glanced at his hand, his vision was blurred and tilted, but he saw that his hand was wet with blood. He wiped the blood on the sheets as he began trying to stand up. It was hard with his dizziness, but he forced himself to stand upright, to keep his children's concern on Clara.

Lottie took his arm while Poppy and Bristol carried Clara downstairs and to the car, understanding the urgency in the Doctor's voice. He leaned against Lottie, his heart beating so hard he could hear it in his head. His vision kept going black and he stumbled forward, causing Lottie to cry out in surprise and tighten her hold on him, carefully tugging him back upright.

"Dad, you're bleeding," she told him softly, her voice trembling with worry. She reached up and touched his head and he couldn't help but cry out with pain. When he opened his eyes, the light hurt so badly he hissed. His neck was sore and his head was aching and he realized, all at once, that he was not okay either. His heart was still beating and he felt so weak he could hardly stand or lift the corners of his lips.

"I'm fine. I want—Clara." He said.

Lottie touched his cheeks, trying to get his eyes focused on her, but he was having a difficult time keeping his eyelids open.

"You're going to hospital." She decided.

"Please." He whispered, and it was his desperation that stopped his daughter. He leaned against the wall and struggled to catch his breath against his rapid heart rate. "Please, Lottie, just let me—see Clara. First. Please."

His daughter didn't make him any promises as she helped him to the car. She kept an eye on him as she drove, and she made him talk to Oscar on the phone. The Doctor pretended to be coherent. The funny thing was that he knew all about brains and he knew how much he wasn't all right. So he knew exactly how to pretend he was.

It was only his crying that won over his daughter. She talked him into sitting in a wheelchair and she pushed him to the room Clara was in. He was dazed and confused as the doctor talked to him and all he heard was that his wife was going to die. Something about her state being so weakened, her body so frail, that she had no chance of fighting off the viral infection. His children obviously thought he was going to lose it, but he knew suddenly that this was what Clara had talked about. This was the end.

He was dizzier than ever, and when his children's backs were turned, he lifted his arms briefly into the air. He saw his right drifting down, felt the pain building in his head, understood the jumbling of his words.

"Leave us alone." He requested with the last of his ability.

Lottie touched her dad's arm, teary and worried.

"You need to get your head looked at, Dad." She said.

He shook his head. "Don't take my last moments with her away."

His daughter stared at him, her mother's determined eyes locked on his, and then she nodded once. She squeezed his hand and ushered her siblings from the room, shutting it after them.

The Doctor had a hard time getting himself over to her bedside. His right side was weaker than it should have been. He rested his head on the elevated mattress when he finally got close to her, his breathing almost as rapid as his heartbeat.

"Stroke caused by intraparenchymal hemorrhage. I bet… the bleeding's in my medulla oblongata." All his children's worries about his high blood pressure had been warranted after all. He turned his face to the side so his left cheek was pressed against the sheets. He moved his left arm up with difficulty, resting his hand on her leg. He wanted to lift his head, to see her face, but the pain was so terrible, so mounting, that he couldn't get himself to. He went to smile. Felt only half his mouth perk up. "Life's got mercy."

The wave of pressure and pain in his head swelled until he felt like the room was actually spinning. His heart was pounding so hard and he felt liable to throw up. He didn't think about dying, even though he knew he was. He didn't think about what might happen afterwards. He thought about what Clara told him all those years ago, about how she'd wanted to die together in a bed, and he hoped his head was near enough to her lap to have sufficed. He hoped this completed her wish.

And through his pain and confusion and dizziness, he felt something that wasn't pressure, that wasn't aching. It wasn't until she moved her hand from his head to his cheek that he understood it was her, that she was touching him, that she was alive enough to realize what was happening. He wanted to smile again, thinking that if she could, she would have tried to beat him to it. Would have said ladies first, Doctor, that coy look in her eyes. But she'd left him a long while ago. The Clara that was left somewhere inside of her had settled her hand on the side of his face now, and slowly, almost dreamily, like he were making it up, she rubbed her thumb back and forth as his world grew dark. I love you.