If he hears her walking up the steps, he gives no sign of it. He just continues to sit on the bench and stare straight ahead at the mountains on the horizon.
“Here you are,” she says, her voice uncharacteristically friendly and lilting, as she sits beside him. She wonders why she said that. He obviously knows he's here. Why is she talking so nonsensically?
“Here I am.” He draws out the words, like he's just realizing that he is, indeed, here. His voice sounds hoarse. Without shifting his gaze away from the mountains, he asks “Is he gone?”
“Yes.” She turns her head away from him so that she is sharing his view of the mountains. They sit in amicable silence for a while. She thinks it feels amicable. It's certainly not uncomfortable.
He breaks the silence. “He wouldn't go with me. I asked him. Did you know that?”
“I did.” She does know that. She knows so much more than that. She's positive that he has no idea exactly how much she does know.
She really shouldn't know as much as she does, she thinks. In fact, she's never understood why she was made privy to any of it at all. It wasn't that she minded knowing, exactly, but it was still odd. Everything they would do to each other, how good it all felt.....why she should know that? Why should she have been told things like His love is too much. It's like a fire that's burning and destroying me and everything else in its path, turning everything into piles of ash that all look the same. It's warped and it's frightening. It scares me. And while it was never mentioned, she's nonetheless always known that, for all it's scariness, that love was somehow better.
He suddenly turns his head and looks at her. “What will you do now?”
She answers immediately. “Get back to my work. I have a few experiments in progress and a number more in mind. I haven't been able to devote as much time as I've wanted to any of them this past little while, what with my other obligations. With those substantially lessened, I can get back to them. What about you?”
His gaze turns back to the mountains. “I suppose I could take a crack at universal domination.” She laughs. He doesn't. She stops laughing. The silence between them is infinitely less amicable than it had been a moment ago.
He's so transparent she can almost hear him yelling his plans to the mountains in the distance. She doesn't bother keeping the disdain out of her voice. “What is it you plan to do? Throw a frightened tantrum so he comes back to hug you and kiss you and calm you down? Launch an evil plot so he comes back to stop you? Try to kill him so he kills you first? Let it go. He's gone.”
“I want him back. Anyway I can get him.” His voice is a solid steel band of resolve, but the thing she hears most in it is the love. And it is scary; the Doctor had that much right. Then she sees the utter bleakness in the his eyes and realizes something the Doctor clearly never did --- his particular brand of love is a fire that will consume its creator before it burns anything else.
“So you're going to attract his attention anyway you can because even negative attention is better than being left here with none of his attention at all? Don't do it. It will only hurt you. He'll hurt you. He hurts everyone he touches. Don't put yourself through it. Not for him.”
Now it's his turn to sound disdainful. “He was right. You've never loved him, have you?”
You have to have things too structured, too controlled. You're too dispassionate. That may be a excellent quality for your work, but it's making you harder and harder to deal with as time passes.
Of course. It made perfect sense, actually. The Doctor told her things about him, so obviously the Doctor told him things about her. She ignores the cramp in her gut and the weight on her chest.
She doesn't want to strike back. She doesn't want to expend her energy on petty retaliation. She doesn't even want to make him feel any worse than he so clearly does, but she can't stop herself from sniping back. “If by love you mean being such an insane stalker that I finally chased him away from Gallifrey, then no. I never have loved him.”
They glare at each other for a moment, then he looks back at the mountains on the horizon.
“Is that what he told you?” His voice sounds so tired and resigned, and she knows it's because of her choice of words. She feels a twinge of the conscience the Doctor insists she doesn't have.
“What do you mean?”
“That he was leaving because I ... because of me? Because of how I am?”
“No.”
“Did he tell you I frighten him?”
“Yes.” She gives him the truth --- just the plain, unadorned, unexaggerated truth. She sees that it hurts him more than any angry, barbed, rancorous lie she could have given him.
“That's why he left me, isn't it? He wasn't saying it just to be spiteful. He may have had other reasons for leaving Gallifrey but he left me because the way that I feel for him frightens him, didn't he?”
She's oddly uncomfortable about telling him the truth again now that she knows he'll find it painful. He deserves the truth, though. She searches for words that are far less brutal than the “yes” she has on the tip of her tongue. “From what he's told me over time, I believe that's an accurate conclusion.”
She's surprised at the quiet, gentle tone of his voice as he asks “Is that why he left you? Because you frighten him?”
Yes, yes, you've said it, my dear, and I've heard it, but that doesn't make it so. Whatever you feel for me...whatever this is between us ...it's too sterile, too barren. Yes, it's stable and safe. And no, it doesn't frighten me. But its entirely lacking in passion. It's not enough. Not for me.
“No. He left me because of something else.”
He smiles ruefully. “He really doesn't know what he wants, does he?”
“Not really. He never has.”
“Strange,” he says in a musing voice.
“What is?”
“That you and I should have such clear ideas about what we want and are willing to work to get it, while he just waits for things to come floating by and plucks out whatever catches his eye in the moment.”
“He's like a child that way. He isn't ready to be responsible for defining what he wants or helping to create it. He just wants it.”
He draws in a breath and stands. He turns and offers her his hand to help her up.
“Well then, Rani. Considering the two of us do have ideas and plans and are willing to work towards them, perhaps we should both move forward with our respective lives. That sounds like the best thing to do now, yes? Or did you have other suggestions?”
She puts her hand in his and rises to her feet. “No. I completely agree with you, Master. I think moving forward with our lives is the very best thing either of us can do.”
If that's possible, she thinks. She doesn't say it out loud.
Author's Chapter Notes:
First Doctor's era. This chapter is PG.