intrikate88 | Now and Then (1/1)

Title: Now and Then
Author:

intrikate88
Word Count: 720
Rating: G
Disclaimer: I hope I'm prettier than RTD; he still gets the Doctor Who. But I'd be open to a trade.
Summary: Inspired by the last verse (?) of Song for Ten.

"But if you can still dream

Close your eyes and you’ll see

That you can see me now and then."

Whenever he dreams, he is standing on that beach in somebody else’s Norway.

He is always running, running, sometimes hopping- always ending at the same beach, imprinting the same indentations in the wet sand. Sometimes Rose is there. Sometimes she has never been there, and a good deal of the time he knows he has just missed her.

He never slept this much before, except when he was regenerating and hardly even then. But that beach beckons to him and lures him to close his eyes and forget time a while, time that he is always running from and never escapes. (As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.)

It’s maddening, talking to her, when she’s there. There is power in this place, he knows that. The power of two universes, the power of the bad wolf melding with the oncoming storm, roaring to make the worlds tremble. The power pushes the mind to madness; is that why she is here, why he can talk to her still?

“Oh, I’m just fine, me. Always fantastic. I met someone. Martha, Martha Jones. Going to be a doctor, can you believe that? A doctor with a real white coat and stethoscope and a prescription pad- well, maybe not yet- on board the TARDIS. Just taking her on one trip, though. Just a treat for saving my life on this hospital on the moon- oh, don’t worry about it. I’m not keeping her, though. I don’t need another companion for quite a while, Rose… have to recover from keeping up with you, after all, you were a handful, always running off like I told you not to and getting into trouble. I have to get back, though, Martha’s probably poking about with the controls and we can’t be having with that, now, can we?”

Well I woke up today

And you’re on the other side

Our time will never come again

But if you can still dream

Close your eyes and you’ll see

That you can see me now and then

It only took her a few weeks of moping before she finally decided she still wanted to live a fantastic life, live a life he would be proud of, like she wanted so badly for him to be. So she lived, the way he had shown her- to never give up, to never stop fighting for people. Yet it was to dreams she escaped every night.

At noon she would say they were just dreams, nothing special really, just dreams like any girl would have after traveling for so long. There were marketplaces and barren wastelands and cities and dark holes, places from all over the universe, the other universe, her old, her own universe.

Then, every few nights, there was the beach.

At midnight, she could say it was pulling her, drawing her to that place where the universe cracked and she could see through. Sometimes he was there. Sometimes he had never been there, and sometimes he faded away just as she reached him. Those were the worst times, and her pillow was wet when she awoke.

But sometimes, just occasionally, they lingered together, and those times were the best and the worst of all. The best, because he was there, really truly there; the worst, because he was there, and she was dreaming. So she’d wipe a hand across her eyes, and talk, because that’s all she was allowed, this tiny uncertain glimpse, and she could have no more.

“Martha… she sounds nice. Very… nice. Got to meet Shakespeare, yeah? Got to meet Dickens, and now him… you always were such a literature nerd, I’m surprised you never dragged me off to visit Chaucer or Jane Austen.

“Oh, I’m getting by. Living a fantastic life, you know me… Mickey an’ me went on an airship trip to France last week- saw a portrait of Madame de Pompadour in a museum, didn’t look a thing like the one we met, maybe she looked different here.

“Funny thing happened the other day, there was this big gust of wind from the north and it knocked me down. I mean, I know that isn’t that odd but it just felt like something to do with you. Guess I’m just missin’ you a bit.”

In this dream, she can hold his hand.