dw - long walks into perdition
a/n: written for challenge 19 at then_theres_us. Prompt under cut.
He always knew there were ghosts on the TARDIS.
They come to him inexplicably, without real reason or rhyme. Sometimes he’s hurtling through the vortex when he gets a waft of the lotion Polly used to slather on her hands, like white tea and something floral. Jamie’s footfalls pace the hallway outside the library, and its steadiness is the only thing known to lull him to sleep. In the kitchen, dropping a tin of biscuits on his foot when a sudden bang issues from the console room, and he stands there for several long minutes, waiting for a sheepish, sorry, Professor, that never comes.
They’re good company, on days he finds himself travelling alone. He babbles and dances around his console and asks where to, Vicky? Peri? Adric? They’re safe; they won’t hurt him, because what they all have in common other than this mad, daft alien is the fact that he’s seen each of them die. Some - the kindest - in old age, wizen and ready, their spirit already sitting up, waiting. Some not a block away from home, blood pooling like haloes on the asphalt. There are no accidents in his life; they always ask for him at the end and he comes without fail.
But that’s all they are here, just ghosts of memory. Sometimes they’re a comfort and sometimes they aren’t. The first time he heard Susan’s laugh his knees buckled and he collapsed against the grated floor, sobbing. Such painless, harmless things.
It is when she appears from the blue-lit shadows of the console room, saying his name like a promise, do the ghosts begin to haunt him.
He checks when she first appears, double- and triple-checks when she starts talking. Their timelines are strung like a harp; he touches them and briefly they sing sing sing of the victorious and a shine as bright and piercing as starlight. They’re still straight, linear, taut. He turns away from the as of now unforeseeable, yet inevitable end of hers. Where the best case scenario happens during her sleep, a mind as fuzzy as cotton lint. Quiet, glorious days. Halcyon years. Who knows where his will go. Perhaps he’ll trip down the ramp one day and fall into the heart of a nebula, or something.
All that matters is that she’s still alive, in his timeline at least. There and somehow here and not here, her shape strung together like constellations. Impossible, he calls to no one at all (he has to remind himself, because she even still smiled like she used to, for god’s sake), just - impossible. It’s not your time. You’re still alive, somewhere.
Silence replies, save for the murmur of the TARDIS, reassuring him. The shades are shapeless and indefinite. There really isn’t anything he can do, he tells himself, so he falls back on all he knows and just runs.
The lever is pulled, the engine booms. He gets the acutest sense of hands hovering over his, as they’re tumbled into the cosmos.
Quite by accident, he starts going to places he thinks she’d have liked. There’s the museum of neon sheep art, for one. It’s a painting. Something shimmers at the edge of the canvas, some unearthly pencil sketching her shape, the angles of her elbows, the wide-eyed stare. It’s beautiful, Doctor. And it’s in that fashion they name a pulsing star, antique bidets, 1819 Warsaw. She kisses their mirages and illusions because they’re just bursting with promise.
And gradually, slowly, she picks up her yellows in the wheat fields of France, pinks for her cheeks in Jywynmyr. The radio of the universe tunes to her laugher until the static disappears. She gains depth, a facade of tangibility. But he still forces himself to stand a little ways away at all times, hands clenching and unfurling, and a sharpness ricocheting in his gut that could be either euphoria or despair.
They’ve begun to mean the same things, these days. And it’s then he realizes - though she'll ask as the others did, he won’t ever see her die. It’s something like a comfort, and more so like a loss.
In his stronger moments, he tries. He really does. You don’t go. Not the first time I ask, not the second. He reaches to hold her by the shoulders, to shake her until something rattles and falls loose, until she becomes someone less of the girl he’s always needed with a desperation he’s never quite been able to quantify. Choose Mickey. Nice, safe, daft Mickey. Choose your mother and Earth chips and twenty-four hour clocks. You fell, Rose. The walls crumpled like paper and I burned a star but it wasn’t enough. Find me when the night is too black. There’s a beach, and it’s ours, but not by choice. Throw down your gauntlet and I -
Look. She points, walks right through him. Is that the Pythia? Why, she’s lovely! D’you think she’d be willing to read my palm, Doctor? And then all he can do is watch her; at her and behind her and through her, her being and his space, wondering.
They say that the road to damnation starts with being given what you want. They say you’re crazy if you see a girl in the shadows of your time ship, the one you lost to a parallel universe and someone that was you, but angrier, better, braver. They say, when in Rome - , Rose winks across his six-digit ransom, tumbleweeds bouncing past her ankles. So what’re you these days, the Sundance Kid?
He grows convinced that this is all there ever was. A glitch in the matrix. A trick of the blue light. She was an impossibility from the start; a girl who was as human as the rest, blood singing with the Vortex. The way she buttered her toast and made hardened criminals weep. How well their hands had fit, his palm sliding over hers. What wishful thinking. Each time it comes to this he’s driven mad, just a little bit. Days are spent putting up shelves in the TARDIS. He asks the Duchess of Newbury-Rotenberg out on a date and takes her spelunking. He visits a base on Mars. He forgets himself, but he repeats her name under his breath like a way of counting the time that passes by.
Take me somewhere, Doctor. There is a steel-masked judge reading his list of charges, and he’s laughing so hard he’s crying in the defendant’s box at the faces she’s making behind the horns of the jurors. He goes to Seville and eats enough tapas for two. She’s swinging her legs on the captain’s chair, reading a stained hymnal. She’s crying for her father, the salt of her tears leaking through the grating. She does this, with smiles and laughter like intermittent showers that drench just enough. They carve up sufficient empty space, gouge out enough for absence.
Then comes the day of astounding clarity; it’s Christmas, and she’s the tail end of a comet. They’ll both burn in the end, and now there is nothing left to lose. So he crosses the star-spangled distance and crushes the ghost of atoms, this flyaway distortion to his chest. He cradles her shine and her memory, her epitaphs and statues, into shaking hands.
Tell me, he begs. Tell me what you want, and I’ll find it for you. We’ll go to Barcelona. I’ll take you to Heliopolis, where the rooms are made of gold. Just tell me. He does it for peace. He does it because he knows she’s only a phantom, a print on frosted glass. He does it because their time is always running short and he can never deny her anything.
I want it all, she hums at his neck. And all I want is you.