...wow. I... I'm really sorry about this. It is SERIOUSLY dark and weird. In my defense, I think I wrote it while sick home with a fever reading House of Leaves, so... please, I apologize. Don't get too freaked out, please???

Also: review again, please please please! I'm starting to feel lonely here!

You're staring at me with those wide human eyes, a puzzle I can't decipher. It's always this way. I can never understand it. With Leela, it was peace and some great cosmic understanding, with Ace, a sort of general anger at the entire world, and with you, it's something else. I don't know what.

I don't have time for this.

Like them, you hate me. Hate me for not understanding. For being 'alien'. Can't you see that you're the real alien? The inexplicable?

You love me too, and that's the most infuriating thing of all.

I find you in the library, not reading anything, which frankly is not that big a surprise. I look at you. I love every detail of your clothes, your posture, your humanity.

You're saying something. "I'm not much of a reader," you're saying.

I wait, patiently.

"I'm not a scientist. I'm not a Friend To All Living Things. I'm not even very brave, or adventurous."

"You're human."

"What's so special about that?"

We go all over the place, hot chocolate in the Alps and art galleries on the moons of Rexel Seven, and a good bit of saving the world as well. Only I realize I'm the one dragging you along. You don't seem to mind though.

We stay up late watching movies. All sorts of movies. Black and white and soundless and abstract and holographic, from Earth and Barcelona the planet and Lucifer.

Sometimes the world-saving doesn't go too well and then you just go straight to bed. I stay up rereading H. G. Welles, wishing I dared to fall asleep.

"What are you running away from?"

You look back at me, level over your cup of tea. How delightfully British. "I could ask the same of you."

I smile, briefly, mirthlessly. "Nothing. I'm running away from nothing."

Your tea is the color of entropy.

I think I'm getting tired, or old, or something.

Sometimes at night when the books don't seem as comforting, I walk soundlessly down the long corridors of the TARDIS and my mind. It's endless and labyrinthine. There are staircases that lead nowhere, and windows into blackness. Sometimes I hear things growling in the distance.

There are blank spaces, too. Things I cannot remember. Rather a lot of them. Sometimes I fancy they are growing. Expanding. Creeping, with tendrils. And leafy dark green vines.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and I'm surprised by my own face. As though I'm expecting to be someone else. Someone younger, I think, with lighter hair and brilliant, terrifying eyes.

I don't like being in the TARDIS much any more.

What I like is adventures. Running, with you at my side, holding your hand, excited and glad to be alive for once, doing something good, something right, that's what I enjoy. And if sometimes it doesn't turn out all that well, that's life, right?

Today our shopping spree in a mall in twentieth century Belfast was interrupted by a bombing and you could have been killed but you didn't look like you cared about that, what you cared about was that I couldn't do anything; laws of time and all that. Well, screw them. Who gives a damn! What does it matter, anymore?!

It matters because your planet is still there, even if mine's not. There are still people worth protecting. I have to try very hard to remember this.

We get home and I expect you to go straight into your room and blast rock music as usual on bad days but instead you make tea and then sit in one of the old Victorian armchairs in the console room, your tea in front of you, that damn inexplicable look on your face.

I sit down too. You pour me some tea. I swirl it gently with my spoon but otherwise don't touch it. You start to talk.

One time I asked Ace why she was fighting. She laughed and said, "It's funny, really. I hate the rules and I hate you guys who make the rules. So I'm fighting because you guys have to be there to make the rules so I can hate you."

I didn't get it.

I can't remember what happened to her, but I don't think it was funny.

"It was an explosion, you see. Like that one. A few weeks before we met. A department store... part of a chain called Henrick's. You've probably never heard of it. A stupid human thing.'

"But there was a girl who worked there. Her name was Rose Tyler."

Someone told me once to always expect the unexpected. Whoever they were, it was good advice. Pity I never follow it.

"She was no one, really. Just an ordinary teenager. Failed her high school exams. Didn't really have any aspirations. Not special, really. Except she was. She was magnificent. She was brave and adventurous and sweet and accepting and kind. She got the most out of life. If life is a party, she was in there jazzing to her own music.'

"It should have been her, traveling with you. Not me."

Ah. I remember now. It was the Doctor. Funny I couldn't remember before. I can remember lots of other things about him. His smile. The way that every face I knew him in, he had curly hair.

The way he went completely insane the week before the end.

Yeah, actually, I don't really want to remember that.

Mickey is still talking. I try to listen, but the words seem meaningless. He's looking at me with such calm humanness.

"I know you blew up that store. I know you probably thought there was no one inside. But if you had known... it wouldn't have really mattered to you, would it?"

I have a revelation. It's that we're the same, really. My loss and his. The same. Equal. And look at him. He's fine. He's brilliant, actually. I can't really recall what he was just talking about but look at his face, it's so calm and well-adjusted. So I'm not actually entitled to lose my mind and go running around like a headless chicken. Gracious me.

"Romana? Are you all right? Romana? Can you hear me?"

"Hello?"