#so i guess i'll just have to lie in the tomb i carved for myself

[johannstutt413]

(requested by anonymous; continuing from this)

It was a perfectly normal day on Rhodes Island, and W was in terrible pain. Not physical pain, no, that was far more easy to stomach. No, the pain she was experiencing was emotional, spiritual, existential, like she was dying, and in a way, she was. Her purpose, it seemed, was dying, falling through her hands like ash in an ivory hourglass, counting down to the moment she finally had to admit that he was gone.

Of course, he wasn’t, at least not physically; she’d had her suspicions when she’d first confessed to the new Doctor, simultaneously feeling him out mentally as she did physically, but there were no cracks to tear into, no masks to peel back, no openings to dive through. This new Doctor who’d taken the old one’s body - which she’d finally found proof of when she’d seen his bare back lying in her bed this morning, the morning after the first salvo of the apocalypse - had in fact fully consumed him, subsumed him, replaced him, leaving nothing but confusion and disbelief and dread and sorrow in his wake...Well, maybe not in his wake, since that implied anyone but W felt like this, but-

There was a knock on the bathroom door. A familiar voice - an all too familiar voice - in an unfamiliar-until-recently tone. “Dubbs? You’ve been in there for awhile now, and I haven’t heard a flush...Is everything okay?”

“I’m...fine.” No, not even slightly, and the Sarkaz knew he’d read it in the tone of her response, but there was nothing she could do about that. There was nothing she could, period. Everything had fallen apart, every plan fallen through, every scheme to unveil the imposter and execute him for his treason proven to be castles built in and of sand-

“Alright.” The Doctor gently slid his hand along the door a couple of times. Maybe symbolically patting her head or something? “I’ll be out here if you need anything.”

She did. “Actually, could...could you come in here? I didn’t lock it.”

“Yeah, of course.” With the speed he did just that, there was no denying he’d had his hand on the knob in case...in case of what? What would she have- oh. Yeah, there was that possibility, wasn’t there? The coward’s way out? No, not her, not today at least.

“I, um...” Damnit, there wasn’t a way for her to look badass and say this, was there? Fuck it, why start caring about that with him now? “You’ve got me really fucked up right now, Doctor.”

He didn’t react to that nearly as strongly as she expected; all he did was squat in front of the (closed) toilet she was sitting on and gently caress her cheek. “How so?”

“You’re too...good. Too not evil. Too not...the you I need to kill.”

“You’re starting to realize that guy’s not around anymore, huh?” A moment passed after he finished those words, and W collapsed onto him. “Oh, Dubbs-”

The Sarkaz pounded a fist against his right shoulder. “It’s not fair! I was supposed to come back from all this time, training to be the right kind of cold-hearted killer and saboteur to destroy him from the roots up, and utterly annihilate him in revenge for what the Doctor did to Theresa, but I come back - at your request - to find that Rhodes Island is some damn paradise, and the Doctor is now the savior-king who runs it as a benevolent lord? What hell is this?! Why didn’t I just die when she did, huh? Why did he leave me to suffer?! WHY?!”

“Oh, Dubbs...” The Doctor just wrapped his arms around her, taking the light physical abuse as she continued beating on his back even as she cried into his neck.

“It’s not fair! It’s not fair! Why does love fucking work like this?” She pressed her head against him as if she thought she could crack her skull open that way. “I used to hate the person in this body so much I’d burn armies to the ground, but now I just wanna...I just wanna...I...” Now she wasn't sure where the tears were coming from, but come they did.

And he simply sat there, holding her gently but firmly, until her wailing had calmed down enough for her to register what he was going to say. “You never said goodbye, did you?”

“The fuck are you talking about? Do you say goodbye to your enemies, too, like the Sankta you are?”

“I admit, I prefer shooting them with my pistol like any normal person.” He sighed, his breath tickling her ear and somehow grounding her in the moment. “No, Dubbs, I meant you never said goodbye to Theresa, did you?”

That just set her off again.

Another long moment of wailing in the Doctor’s arms passed before W was once again ready to receive. “Do you think she’d want you to remember her as the cause for all this anger? All this pain? All this suffering, both yours and others’?”

“N-no, she...she’d hate that.” She scoffed. “No, she didn’t hate anything. Just like you, she was a saint, a truly pure soul that the world couldn’t bear to compare itself to.”

“You know she snored when she slept?”

...What? “How do you-”

“She snored. After she and the Doctor were ready to go to bed, Theresa would settle herself under the covers, snuggle up to him, wrap her arms around him, and snore directly in his ear.” He chuckled. “I think she actually made him more deaf in his left ear than his right, if my hearing’s anything to go by.”

“You remember that?” Oh, now things were getting worse again. If it turned out there was still part of the old Doctor in there-

But he shook his head. “The Doctor kept a journal, and he wrote that sort of thing down. It’s a lot of reading - dozens of notebooks written in a child’s scribble more than handwriting, incessantly reporting every little thing Theresa, Amiya, Dr. Kal’tsit, and a certain Sarkaz did.”

“No, there’s...” W shook her head. “He didn’t notice me.”

“He must have, because there isn’t another soul here who ‘sang the Queen’s praises day and night,’ who ‘must’ve dreamed of holding her the way [he] did in the heat of passion.’ Honestly, some of it shouldn’t have been written down, I think there’s a strong case for his arrest in there, and that’s before he openly plotted her murder.”

The grip around his waist was iron-tight. “He what.”

“It was no accident,” the Doctor admitted. “The Doctor killed her on purpose.”

“...Why?”

He sighed. “Because she was too pure for this world, and he didn’t want her to live long enough to become a villain. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one who thought that way, because at one point he wrote that Theresa asked her to do it, but to make it a surprise so she didn’t give anything away or try to prepare. One of their best-kept secrets, I guess.”

“That’s...” Okay, now she knew she was fucking insane. “That’s what I would do if I were him.”

“I know you would; the difference is, you’re not him, and I’m not Theresa. I’m just as broken and imperfect as anyone else here, so you don’t have to kill me to save me. You’d be too late on that end, anyway.” He smiled sadly at her, pain visible in his eyes, too. She wasn’t the only one.

W sighed and buried her face in his neck again. “Fuck.”

“Yeah, me too.” The Doctor still continued to refuse to let go. “I know it’s going to take time, and even when you’ve had time, you may never feel like yourself again - I know I never will - but Dubbs, so long as I’m still breathing, I want you to promise me you won’t let me let go, okay?”

“Let go? Of what?”

He pulled back enough so she had to look him in the eye. “Of you, silly.”

“Doctor.” It wasn’t him, but...it was, somehow. “They’ll have to blast me away with my own detonator to do that.”

“Then you’d better not let that thing out of your sight.” The smile was genuine, but his eyes told her how serious he was.

The Sarkaz tilted her head just enough as she leaned forward so her lips could do the same for him.