The Time of Change

I Will Always Remember

I nearly fall face first on the floor. My knees buckle and force me to take a step forward, toward where I saw her spring around the corner into the hallway. Every part of me is alive with energy, with need and want and curiosity and something else I can't give a name to. The walls, the TARDIS, the town of Christmas, the planet of Trenzalore, the entire universe dissolves around me. With my breaths coming in uneven, shaky rasps, I speak the name I've avoided for so many centuries. The name that strikes me with a bolt of electrostatic lightning more powerful than any other at the very thought of it. The name whose letters I never allowed to conjoin in my brain for fear that I'd think of a fate worse than death for myself: an eternal, endless life living without her beside me.

"Annalise?" I call weakly. Pressure I hadn't known was on my chest is lifted, and suddenly breathing isn't so difficult.

"Who's Annalise?" Clara demands shrilly, sounding frightened.

I take a few more steps nearer to the ramp, and the stairs, and I listen more acutely than I ever believed possible. And I wait. "The first face this face saw," I breathe to Clara behind me. I hear no noises coming from the hallway, but who could hear anything over the ridiculous sound of the flowing of my blood? The horribly cliché sound of life. Now I realize why I've always been so annoyed by it. It's life coursing through me, not blood or anything. Pure, unfiltered, non-retractable life that I can never get rid of, never. "We all change, when you think about it," I continue. I still don't look back for fear I'll miss her, because I know I saw her, I know it. "We're all different people all through our lives. And that's okay." Now I do turn around, my hands clapping together in front of me. Clara's face is far more hurt than I expected and I have to remind myself of what's happening, that nothing I feel will change this. I flap my hands around like a madman when I talk, my mouth moving rapidly with the slightest of smiles curving my lips. "That's good. You've got to keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be." I pause for a moment, my index fingers extended in mid-turn as I attempted to make a sphere out of the free air in front of me. I drop my hands and look right at Clara, force her to meet my eyes. And she does.

"I will not forget... one line of this," I tell her, and now I hear my own voice beginning to crack, to falter. "Not one day. I swear. I will always remember when the Doctor was me."

Footsteps.

I turn, this time more slowly, more measuredly, my balance waning as the pain increases astronomically. I hold my breath as a pair of spiked black boots hit the steps. The boots are attached to thin legs concealed by dark blue jeans that hug them tightly, conformingly. And the legs attach to a flat torso clothed by a red blouse and leather jacket. Pale white skin peaks out here and there from the wrists to the fingertips, and from the sternum to the top of the forehead. A pair of square black glasses contrast the whiteness with shocking clarity. Behind the spectacles are the most striking, electrifying, astonishing, compelling, arresting, startling, remarkable, salient clear blue eyes I've ever seen. They are inset under long, thick eyelashes that brush rosy cheekbones when they are blinked. Dark eyebrows form medium-wide arches on the pale, smooth forehead. A mass of deep brown, loosely curled hair cascades on leather-clad shoulders and frames the face with natural grace. A tiny nose with the smallest of upward curves sits in the center of the angular yet wonderfully soft-featured face. Thin pink lips are smiling sheepishly, and a dimple forms at the right corner of the mouth. It's shaped like a perfect oval, deep and smoothly-rounded. Something on the left hand twinkles as it catches the light, and I see a golden wedding band on her ring finger.

I take in all of this before she even gets to the next step. By the time she gets to me, I've stopped breathing entirely. I don't have to wonder if she's real, because I know she isn't. Maybe not physically. She's here, with me, right now, and that's real enough. As if she heard my thought as I used to hear hers, her timid smile grows wider, more like the one I knew. She searches my eyes with hers, those (try as I might) indescribable crystalline blues, like she's looking for me, the actual me. And I want to take both her hands in mine and pull her into me and hold her as tightly as I can and never let her go, not till this is over and I've changed again. I want to feel her against me again and know she's there, even though she isn't really there, and then I won't have to think about having to survive yet another life but this time, a life devoid of her completely. A life where she will never show up to save the day, and me, and everyone else, contemporaneously stealing my heart a little bit more each time until it's completely hers and there's nothing left to take except all of me, which she's already gotten. And I want to ask if she was really engineered to murder me, and how she could have possibly fought against her genetic programming like that, and why she did it, because honestly, I wasn't worth the fight. And I want her to punch my arm and tell me sternly that I'm wonderful, because as conceited as that is, I always loved hearing it because I knew she meant it. And I want to say her name aloud again, over and over until it's not even a word anymore but just the sound of my breathing, until her name is the oxygen I take in and the carbon dioxide I breathe out and the cells that reproduce within me and the feel of the air around me, until she is everything and nothing all at once.