{fic} Two Hearts

[emeraldarrows]

Title: Two Hearts {Postscript; Tethered; Do I Dare Disturb The Universe?; Vital Signs; Star-Crossed}
Fandom: Doctor Who
Summary: Reflections on the past and the two hearts of a Time Lord.
Genre: romance, angst
Characters: The Doctor (5, 10, future), Tegan, Turlough, Nyssa, Adric, Kamelion, Donna
Pairings: Five/Tegan, Ten/Donna
Warnings: post-Five's-era or set during "The End Of Time"

Postscript

"People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them." - James Baldwin

It's been one month and two days when the scent of the TARDIS comes flooding back, that odd scent of machine and man, a mixture of salt and spices from thousands of centuries, hundreds of worlds and ages, and dozens of passengers. It's a scent like remembering holidays with family, fresh baked goods and pies, burning candles and logs on a fire, warmth and nostalgia wrapped around the bad years.

She's folding her clothes when she catches the fragrance, all this time and several washings and it still hasn't vanished.

For a moment she feels lost and frightened, like a child separated from her parents in an unknown place. She feels somehow disconnected from those outside her window, faceless forms rushing by. Her hands shake as she clenches them together, wiping them against her skirt. The scent remains imprinted in her skin, stamped where no amount of soap, water, or perfume can erase it.

Finally, she gives up and throws her clothes away, everything she wore in the TARDIS, replaces them with clothes that smell only of Earth and not some distant planet. After a while it wears off her skin and the scent vanishes, pressed away in her memories like violets in a book.

Eventually she forgets.

oooOOOooo

It's been one year to the day and the moment after a storm when she steps outside and tastes the air, the unmistakable taste of clean earth and sky like the air in places she remembers, rich and brimming with life.

She laughs, feeling like running out and exploring a strange place, chasing after the Doctor. But it's only Earth, and she's left him, and there's no going back, not now, not ever, even if the rain still tastes of memories best forgotten.

oooOOOooo

It's been five years when the sound of the TARDIS in flight returns to her mind, not the whoosh of air as it leaves but rather the all- encompassing cacophony as it darts through space, a thousand stars plucking at it, a million notes swirling around them until she thinks her head will burst from the exquisite beauty of it all.

They've stopped on another planet, some strange and rocky place that the Doctor takes in with the enthusiasm of a child at Christmas, when he spies a shining bit of something tucked in a corner of the roof of the TARDIS and climbs up to pull it down. It's a burned out star, colors swirled through it when it catches the light, and he drops it wordlessly into her cupped hands as she teases Adric that he can replace his badge with a real star.

Six days later and eons away, Adric dies, burning up across the galaxies like the bit of space they'd held in their hands, becoming part of endless fields of stars and sky. There's no body to bury, but in the next place they stop she scratches a hole in the ground and buries the piece of star. She's covering it over when the Doctor appears behind her, coming silently like a ghost, the broken fragments of Adric's badge in his open palm. He kneels and lays them beside the star, hand brushing her's as they shift the dirt over the shallow grave.

After that, space sounds different than before, somehow vacant like voices calling, mournful, never the same as before.

It's been five years and she wonders why she remembers it the beautiful way.

oooOOOooo

It's been seven years and two weeks when someone shakes her hand and like floodgates opened the memory pours over her of the feel of his hand in her's, the distance between them as his fingers tightened almost imperceptively in the instant before she pulled away.

His hand was warm and calloused, the steady double threads of his pulse entwining with the racing pace of her single heartbeat. She felt the heat of his hand on her skin after their hands broke apart, fingers curling toward her palm in a clenched fist to steady herself, his words strengthening her resolve. "Brave heart, Tegan."

The person holding her hand is staring and she averts her eyes as hot tears spring unbidden. She blinks them away before they spill over, hand falling limply to her side.

oooOOOooo

It's been ten years when an image forms in her mind, one thought forgotten, tampered down and hammered into place long ago, bolted in a secluded corner of her memory where it could do no harm and rest hidden from the present. It's an image of him, head bent over the console, the light tangled in his hair, turning the strands to liquid gold, spilling over his clothes and onto his hands, fingers framing some alien object, forehead knitted as he examines it.

In that moment her breath had caught as if for the first time she realized that he was a Time Lord, that the deceptively young and human body concealed the ages he'd seen pass, the two hearts that set him apart from her. He'd looked like a fiery angel in that moment, otherworldly, burning in time like a shooting star.

The picture of him is as clear and vivid as if she'd stood beside him only yesterday and she blinks to dispel it.

After a while the memory fades and blurs, dulling with time. And one day it disappears altogether. But she never searches for it so she doesn't know until it's much too late.

oooOOOooo

It's been fifteen years and she's washing dishes, such a mundane task that her mind drifts away from the flat and into her memories, when she realizes that he's gone. She doesn't know why it would occur to her now after all these years but it does and the dish spills from her hand and shatters into the sink, white shards amidst a cloud of soapy water.

The body would still be young by human standards but she knows that her Doctor with his reckless abandonment for his own safety combined with a penchant for danger would not have survived this long. He'd have regenerated at least once by now, transformed into a stranger with an unknown face and mannerisms, a man she might have passed on the street and never known. Her Doctor, with the endearing smile, the ready charm, and the stick of celery, is gone without a parting word or even a gravestone to visit.

When her husband finds her ten minutes later she's leaning over the sink, sobbing. He tries to comfort her, questioning the reason for the tears, and all she can say is "memories". After all, how can she explain that she's mourning someone who isn't even truly dead?

oooOOOooo

It's been thirty years, one month, six days, and ten hours since the moment she left him and it strikes her as absurdly funny that she can remember the exact time, the exact place she last saw him. It's been so long than when the realization comes it's like a punch to the stomach, the air rushing out of her lungs until spots dance before her eyes.

She loved him.

She tries to picture his face, torturing herself with trying to remember whether she'd seen a light in his eyes when he looked at her, struggles to recall the sound of his voice to determine whether a tenderness was tucked beneath the words "Brave heart, Tegan", whether he reached for her hand and withdrew, smiled at her in a way he didn't smile at the others.

But it's been too many decades, years, months, weeks, days, and hours. The time she once never thought of, the eras she walked through, have eroded the only thing she took with her when she left him - her memories. It's too late to know, too late to return and discover the truth.

And thirty years, one month, six days, and ten hours after she left him, she mourns. Not for all she's lost but for all she might have had if she'd stayed.

Tethered

"One need not be a chamber to be haunted; One need not be a house; The brain has corridors surpassing material place." - Emily Dickinson, "Time and Eternity"

There's a hundred times he thought about walking away from her, a thousand times he promises that he'll return her to Heathrow and changes his mind. A careless slip of his fingers, a year off, the wrong planet, and he's missed it yet again, as if he knows instinctively that he needs her, that he needs all of them, to keep him strong. He reminds himself he's become too attached, cared too deeply, and the fall will be harsh and empty. But he puts it out of his mind and misses Heathrow and all the other places just once more.

And then Adric is gone, and Nyssa, the rest of them holding together like paper dolls and still wet glue, hanging by a tab. He sees it in her eyes, the desperation, the sorrow, and he tells himself next time he'll take her to Heathrow, next time he'll take her home. He's become good at lying to himself.

In the end it's Tegan who leaves, the one who has the strength to let go of his hand and walk away from him. It's for the best, he knows. Eventually he would have broken her, destroyed and crushed her like the rest, leaving nothing but a shattered star or a bit of twisted metal.

He doesn't cry for her. He's not sure this body knows how to weep, anymore than it allows itself to dwell on the past too deeply. The only thing he permits it to do is slam his hands against the console and curse the daleks, useless sounds that bounce off the walls and echo back at him as Turlough glances his way.

He says nothing more and her name goes unspoken, tucked in her room, the quiet walls slowly assimilated back into the TARDIS and erased as if she never set foot there.

He says little to Turlough after that but he feels them drifting apart, knows somehow without being told that he'll lose him, too, soon. He only feels gratitude when Turlough chooses to stay behind, his own voice unable to form the words to ask him to leave before he destroys him, also, or before he gets killed. He sees the quickly hidden look of sorrow in Turlough's eyes when he brushes past him, little of a goodbye and not a backwards glance, and he realizes numbly that he feels no guilt over his rudeness, as if the ability to feel at all had been taken away with Tegan, melted down like Kamelion.

It's a long time later when he remembers that he's not alone, that Peri has been speaking all this time and he hasn't heard a word, that he still has someone with him. But for some reason he can't feel comforted, not with every link to the past severed and broken, all strings binding him cut, leaving him free and ungrounded, wiped clean of the past and all it held. All he can feel is loss, like an umbilical cord cut thrusting him into a strange world, or the tether from an astronaut snapped in two leaving him floating through endless space and time.

He thinks perhaps he's lived too long in this regeneration, seen too much and grown weary. The body, still new by human standards, has become old before it's time. Time is running down for him like sands through a hourglass and he can't seem to even mourn for himself or wish for more time. He doesn't need it after all.

No matter what body he's in he carries his memories with him, each face etched into him, memories of Turlough's voice calling through the walls "Doctor!", of Nyssa's brushed kiss against his cheek when she stayed behind on Terminus and he didn't try to persuade her to leave that place, death and plague-ridden that it was, of Kamelion's pleading metallic eyes, and of the ship exploding, blowing Adric, bright and vibrant Adric who could calculate figures in the thousands without even trying, who barely lived at all outside of the TARDIS, to a million tiny pieces across the galaxies, and Tegan, always Tegan, with her hand out, the gap between them as wide as time itself.

The body doesn't matter. Their faces will stay with him forever, haunting his dreams, whispering in his regrets, and not dying with this form.

He has an eternity to remember.

Do I Dare Disturb The Universe?

"Do I dare disturb the universe? In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall. Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume?" - t. s. Eliot

In many ways her life began and was forever changed in a series of moments.

The moment she first stepped into the TARDIS. The moment she met the Doctor. The moment she first started loving him. The moment Adric died. The moment she left.

Each tiny fragment of time like a puzzle forming her life, changing, altering, shaping....

She wonders how different her life might have been if she'd chosen another police box that day.

Or if another of those moments would have changed everything.

Perhaps it was Adric's death that had been the final nail in the coffin, the last straw that had broken them both. Adric, so vibrant and full of life, so young, suddenly and violently snuffed out in a senseless instant. She couldn't believe it had been for a greater good, couldn't accept that he had saved the world. No, Adric was dead and it didn't matter who he had saved or how he had sacrificed, only that he was gone.

Perhaps it was many things, slowly building like a house of cards that finally came crashing down on her, crushing whatever made it fun, made their world seem safe.

If he'd begged her to stay would she have turned back?

He wasn't human, after all, and not bound and cursed with the emotions that drove her race. For all his inborn compassion he valued time above everything..above life, and above love. Head governed heart.

Love. She'd shut the thought out of her heart long ago. It was impossible, unimaginable.

Yes, that was the word. Unimaginable.

She would like to simply forget, to blot it all out of her mind as if it had simply been a dream, as if that police box had contained nothing but a telephone and not the rooms and corridors of a space craft.

Perhaps she had only imagined it - the carnage, the tragedy, the fleeting moments of happiness, or the awe of the TARDIS hurling itself through space.

Perhaps she only imagined the times he looked at her, the quickly hidden smiles, the words of praise, the quiet companionship between them.

Perhaps she only imagined the color of his eyes and hair, the boyish charm, or the flashes of remorse and bitter sorrow.

Perhaps she only imagined that he cared.

Yes, she decides, it was only a dream and nothing more.

"Brave heart, Tegan."

He's somewhere above Earth, five years after she left him, and he left her.

She must have moved on by now. Married, perhaps, even a child. Earth bound in every aspect, and - he hopes - content.

If he'd begged her to stay would she have turned back?

He looks down from the console room, hand pressed against the glass as if holding back the years, holding within any regrets and sorrows.

For an instant he imagines that he sees her, a microscopic dot on the face of earth, a fragile body containing a vibrant soul.

A faint smile lifts his lips as he remembers the sound of her voice. "Mouth on legs" indeed.

He remembers that final goodbye, hands firmly grasped at arms' length like a business deal. He wonders if that's all he was to her..a intergalactic tour guide and nothing more.

Perhaps he only imagined the light in her eyes, the look that sometimes was cast his way when she thought he wasn't looking.

Some memories are burned into his mind, some scars too thick, some wounds too deep to heal. And yet, if he could only convince himself that it never happened, he could move on and forget.

Perhaps it was all a dream.

He reaches forward, and with a steady hand, turns the TARDIS away from Earth.

"Brave heart, Tegan."

She's somewhere in the midst of Earth, in a secluded park, alone on a Saturday evening. Stargazing, maybe, or simply remembering.

Her eyes lift toward the darkness above, to infinite time and space curled around the universe, to a vast landscape of stars, and to - for just a moment - a faint flash of blue that quickly vanishes.

And then she's left with the stars and the memories.

Vital Signs

"A final comfort that is small, but not cold: The heart is the only broken instrument that works." - T.E. Kalem

The heart stopped at the exact instant she always knew it would, the moment he died, winding slowly down like an old clock before ceasing it's endless pounding, the other heart taking up it's place, only to start again later, strong and steady, yet a different rhythm than before.

She supposed "regeneration" was the correct and proper term, but she couldn't bring herself to think of his changing that way. The essence that made him the Doctor, a Time Lord, might remain, but she couldn't help thinking that something had been irrevocably lost with the regeneration, that whatever she had loved in him had been snuffed out like a candle in the wind.

No one came and told her that the Doctor had quietly slipped away, another body housing his spirit, she'd simply known it, like an old man with a pain in his bones knows it will rain, or by seeing the clouds on the water he knows that a storm is on it's way. She felt it in every fiber and nerve of her body, a sudden shudder like a chilling wind, a microscopic twitch somewhere deep inside that told her. She felt the heart stop and start again, changed but strong.

Her heart.

She'd thought of it that way, two hearts formed side by side within his chest. He wasn't human, after all, and couldn't give her all his heart, or even both. But one was her's, a place in him that softened when he looked at her, a light she imagined in his eyes. Yes, it was her heart that had stopped, and his that had gone on without missing a beat as it had before, as it would in the future.

He wasn't dead, not truly, but she mourned him as if he was, for with him had gone all she loved, his smile, his eyes, his voice, the way he looked at her. Another's eyes couldn't hold the warmth his had.

But that had died before he did, died when she left him.

She saw him once, only once, after the regeneration, walking by, glancing over, perhaps thinking she wasn't at home, that she didn't see him. She'd watched through the curtains as the stranger passed by with an unfamiliar walk, a different tone and bearing, an odd manner. But she had felt, like a magnet seeking another, that it was him, had known it as surely as she'd known when he was gone.

He still remembered her, perhaps even cared a little. But not as before. That part of him had broken off and slowly vanished, fading into the darkness along with the faces he'd worn before, the eyes he'd looked through.

But somewhere inside him her heart was beating again, a different rhythm but beating, a memory and nothing more, resting beside his own ageless heart, conjoined to sustain his life.

It was cruel, she thought, that humans should have only one heart.

A single heart to beat, to push blood through vessels, to support life. A single heart that, when stopped, ended that life. There was no backup heart if it failed. Only one heart to live, to love, to give, to have.

To break.

Star-Crossed

"Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time."-George Orwell, 1984

In the future when he's not himself and some of the pain has ebbed he'll go back in Donna's life and watch her grow up.

She was a lonely child.

It shouldn't matter, not anymore, but it does. It's come down to unimportant things in the end like the way her eyes light up when she looks through a telescope for the first time and sees the stars so close she could put out her hand and touch them, or the way the sunlight dances in her hair like a flame rippling along a page from an old book.

He's careful, of course, to never let her see him, to never get too close, even if she'll never know him now, or remember him when they meet later. He's simply the background figure unnoticed in the corner of her eyes, the stranger who smiles when she pushes herself in the swing for the first time on the playground and laughs at the freedom of it. There's her first steps and birthdays, and then she's growing up and too close to when he knew her so he turns the TARDIS away and watches in his mind as the flame licks at her hair, time erasing all that could have been.

Like all the others who have come and gone before her there's nothing in the TARDIS that holds her memory. Her reflection, the clothes she once wore, even the scent of her perfume has faded and been replaced. No, he amends, not replaced. There's a part of him that will never be filled, an ache that will never vanish.

For a short time her arms took away the nightmares, and clinging to her somehow stabilized his world enough to go on, silencing the screams and horrors of the centuries he's seen pass and crumble into dust.

And then he lost her.

oooOOOooo

When he's dying he goes to see her.

He hasn't allowed himself to see her before, and through all the centuries of time he's traveled their paths have never crossed again. Whatever fate placed Tegan in his path all those years before has turned away from both of them.

She doesn't know him, of course. How could she, after all these years and different faces? And yet she turns his way, looking at him with an expression that tells him that she senses something, a connection, a shared memory, if nothing else. She always was too intuitive, he remembers, and a faint smile breaks through the pain.

But she doesn't walk toward him. There's that space between them, again, he remembers, like the one her hand stretched across that final day, a forced distance. She was always the strong one, the one determined to never stay behind, the one who always went after him and saved him in more ways than one.

It was he who needed her, and all those times he could have taken her back to Heathrow his fingers fumbled on the console, a twist to the left, a turn to the right, and she stayed a little longer, a few more days, until finally he couldn't hold her any longer.

And then she left him.

oooOOOooo

He still thinks of Adric sometimes. He's had a dozen companions since then and still that one stays burned into his mind. He thinks it's because that regeneration died with his name on his lips, stained like poisoned berries onto the mouth of every regeneration to come.

Adric wasn't the easiest to get along with but there was so much potential in the boy, so much brilliance. He could have saved worlds. He could have done just about anything. Anything but survive.

Tegan hadn't been the same after that. He'd seen it in her eyes when she looked at him, the flicker of hope everytime they went in the past, quickly snuffed out as she realized that he was never going back there, that that moment in time was gone, burned up in the stars like Adric, and all his muttering of converging timelines meant only couldn't save and numb apologies wrapped in excuses.

A few more deaths and she was gone, shaking his hand and telling him a day was too much. But it wasn't that day she was thinking of, but another one, the day Adric died, and it's his face she's seeing on the dead. He knows because every now and then he sees it there himself.

He wonders sometimes if he should have gone back and saved him, swept him out of that place before that moment, taken a chance on unraveling a bit of the past.

He thinks he's lived too long.

oooOOOooo

When he's dying there is one he can never see, a boy with a star on his chest who burned up across the galaxies, frozen in time with all the "could have beens" strewn around him. And there's two he can never say goodbye to, the ones he'll never be able to touch or even speak to again. They were nothing alike, he supposes, yet they had more in common than the others. They never gave up on him, pieced the broken bits of him together, held his hand fast through the darkness, and broke both his hearts.

In the end they all leave him. But only if he doesn't leave them first.