Empyrean Intellect || Tenth Doctor x OC

4. The Sky

"You're wife?" The girl repeated, eyes turning to Sky and running over her from top to toe. "You have a wife?"

"I- Eh...eh...yeah."

It had taken a lot more effort to say it aloud than he thought it would. After all this time thinking she was gone, to finally say it felt wrong, like he was lying to himself. It felt too good to be true, to surreal, too impossible. But there she was, and so was Rose.

Rose.

Saying those words to Rose added to the difficulty.

He had suspected how she felt, for a while now, noticing the looks and the little things she said. And he, well, maybe he had started to feel the same over time, with each adventure which passed. Perhaps...perhaps a little bit of the past had started to slip from the forefront of his mind.

But this changed everything. Everything! Sky was there and standing right in front of him with that smile and those eyes which always stayed the same no matter how she regenerated.

Moments seemed to pass but thankfully, Sky sensed the tension. Not that it was hard to miss with how the two gapped at one another. After darting her eyes between the pair until she became uncomfortable, she tried to break them out of it.

"All these years, and you can still find someone who is willing to let you drag them about." She wasn't stupid and she could remember her time as a human, especially those last few days, in great detail. She had seen the looks, the way they acted. 

In that human, Sky had been dead; just a dream. So they looked at each other, that was the last thing she would allow herself to think about in that moment. All that mattered was she had found him, finally.

"You never wanted to join me." The Doctor couldn't help but grin and shake his head, slowly, watching on as Sky started to move around the TARDIS controls, this time looking much more clued up on what each of the buttons actually did.

Each time she grazed a new switch she looked up at the centre column, smiling and laughing. She could feel it, the TARDIS, speaking to her; welcoming her home.

"Spaceman." She chuckled, jokingly but such a simple word made their bond hum. "I had other responsibilities if you remember correctly." She was smiling so brightly, eyes sparkling, but within that glazed shine was a bitterness. A sour taste was left on her tongue from each of the words she spoke. Those memories were the ones which were forever drilling away at the back of their heads.

"I remember." The Doctor still smiled, the reality of it may have been haunting but the memories weren't. The memories were what had kept him fighting all of these years.

"So...what? Are you two still married or what?" It didn't take a genius to spot the bitterness in Rose's voice. But it just so happened there were two geniuses in the room.

"Yes, still, and technically we have been all this time." Where the Doctor looked hard done by, having to tell this girl the true answer, Sky felt a little guilty which wasn't what she had expected so soon.

Suddenly appearing in his life, that had never been her role. She had been the constant, the previous, the first. This was not how her mind had painted the scenario in her dreams, not in the entire century she had been searching.

And harder still, it was not exactly easy being herself right now. Everything was still new, it still seemed foreign like returning to your home after a holiday. Her eyes didn't quite feel right, her tongue felt wrong as she pushed it against her cheeks and she shook her limbs trying to get them to connect to her brain. Sky felt as though she were still floating out of her watch, above her body like a lost soul.