Fic | Doctor Who | No More I Love Yous

[charleygirl]

Title: No More I Love Yous
Author: charleygirl
Rating: G
Type: Gen, missing scene, angst
Characters Involved/Pairing: The Eighth Doctor, Charley Pollard
Summary: Sometimes you have to make painful decisions...
Disclaimer: Doctor Who and all associated characters and themes belongs to the BBC. Charley Pollard belongs to Big Finish Productions.
Author's Note: Set between Absolution and The Girl Who Never Was. Contains one major spoiler for Absolution. This fic came knocking at the door of my brain at 6.40 this morning, demanding to be written. The title is from a song by Annie Lennox.

NO MORE I LOVE YOUS

Charley watches the Doctor as he potters around the console, setting co-ordinates and muttering to himself, occasionally throwing out the name of an obscure planet and telling her that they’ll visit, that it’s such a wonderful place and he’ll show her those wonders, as though it’s just the two of them, and has always been just the two of them, racketing round the universe together, and there isn’t a ghost hanging over them, reminding her that though he looks like a man, sounds like a man, he isn’t a man at all. He is an alien, a deep, unfathomable alien with moods and behaviour she will never understand, not even if she stays with him for a hundred years.

 

That’s what she wanted once, to be with him, stay by his side for the rest of her life. She laughs inside, bitterly, when she remembers that. So young, so idealistic, ready to give up her own life, to leave behind everything she ever knew, just to be with him. Because he told her he loved her, and she believed him. Believed him even when he tried to push her away, to deny that he had ever meant the words he said so earnestly on the time station, so long ago. He’d been hurt, betrayed…she put his cruel words down to his pain, even to some part of Zagreus that remained inside him, because she knew, she convinced herself that the Doctor would never do anything to hurt her.

 

And she clung to that belief through everything, telling herself that he loved her as she loved him. Of course he did – she was his Charley, he always told her that. She was his one anchor in the Divergent universe, the one familiar point in an unknown world. She was his anchor, and he was hers. Together forever, so far from home.

 

But now…Charley feels cold inside, and the little knot of rage and grief and fear that has settled deep in her gut tightens as she watches the Doctor carrying on as he always does, off to some new place, some new adventure. Business as usual. As though C’rizz had never even existed. She can’t listen to him, can’t bear to hear him burbling on about the delights of this world and that. She can’t bring herself to speak to him, so she stays by the doors, arms wrapped protectively, defensively, around her, acutely aware of the distance between them now, a bigger distance than the few feet of floor that currently separates them. She stands there and watches and tries to work out whether a part of her has just died with C’rizz, the part of her that should have died back when the TARDIS first entered the Divergent universe and the Doctor spurned her love so coldly. The part of her that had loved him so childishly, so impulsively, and that still, somehow, had clung onto the hope that he might love her back.

 

Had she ever really known him? Even in all the time they have shared the TARDIS, there has always been a side of him kept to himself, a distant, alien part of him that Charley could never reach. It is a side that has always scared her a little, an unknown side, a dark side, that he keeps hidden, a side that may even frighten him. This side showed itself on Caerdroia, and she shivers a little at the memory. It brings home to her the realisation that the man she has travelled with for so long is a being she cannot even begin to comprehend. She clings to the human parts of him, because that is all she can understand, but he is so much more than that. And, somehow, so much less, as he cannot grieve for the loss of a friend. Charley doesn’t know whether to feel angry with him or sorry for him. All she wants is to take refuge in her room, give way to the tears, to cry for C’rizz because no one else will. She needs quiet, normality, familiarity, but if this is the Doctor’s way of giving her that, he is going the wrong way about it. Charley doesn’t want new sights, new worlds, new adventures. Not any more.

 

C’rizz might be dead, but at least he has an ending, is at peace, his life reached a conclusion of sorts. What of Charley? Is she alive or dead? Does she exist or not? Should she be standing here at all? If she were to return home to Hampshire in 1930, which she longs to do, will she find another Charlotte Pollard there in her place, one who never ran away to join the R101? Who exactly is she, and where does she really belong? She doesn’t know, but she does know that she can never go back there; never return to Mama, and Cissy and Peg. The Doctor saved her, but he has condemned her to this limbo, the unknowing, this life that isn’t really a life.

 

Where can she go? She can’t go home, but she can’t stay here, she knows that now. The idealistic girl who longed for adventure might be dead, but Charley goes on. And, no matter how much she might still love him, she knows that she cannot stay with a man who can weep over a crushed butterfly but shows no more emotion when a close friend goes to his death than he would over a glass of spilt milk.

 

And so she has to end it. End it now, before her heart breaks.

 

 

***

 

 

The Doctor know what she wants of him, knows what she expects: grief, tears, anger, recrimination, all the human emotions associated with death. He knows what she wants, and knows that he can’t give it to her. He’s spent too long battling those emotions, hiding them, locking them away, to give vent to them now. It’s the only way he can carry on. He’s walked hand in hand with death for so long…he knows that tears will never move her, that anger will make no difference. All he can do is go on, and feel her sharp gaze at his shoulder, always within reach. It’s the life he lives, and the risk he takes. The risk they all take.

 

He knows that Charley doesn’t understand, and wouldn’t understand even if her were to explain it to her. There is a list, engraved on his hearts, the names of those who have travelled with him and paid the ultimate price. C’rizz is with them now, in the ranks of the fallen, and the Doctor will never forget him. It is his way of coping, to remember them, not to grieve for them. Grieving serves no useful purpose – it will not bring them back.

 

But Charley doesn’t understand because she has a normal human life span and a normal human’s perceptions, no matter what she might have seen during her time in the TARDIS. Just in that moment she wants him to behave in the way she believes he should, wants something normal and familiar and human to cling to, and he can’t do that for her. He wouldn’t know how. He’s lived a long time, and even if he is a little more human this time round, in a thousand years he has seen too much death, too much suffering. He hasn’t enough tears to encompass it all. And so he doesn’t cry. Can’t cry. It might be better for him, for everyone, if he could, but what use are tears?

 

So he sets the co-ordinates, hands moving over the controls without much thought as he talks, more to himself than to her, knowing that she’s not listening to him anyway. He can see her from the corner of his eye, shrouded in the shadows by the door and hugging herself so tightly she might snap. Deliberately keeping herself apart from him. He wishes he could comfort her, but knows she is beyond him now. They have crossed a line. He doesn’t talk about anything that matters because, deep down in his hearts of hearts, he knows that she has already made her decision, knows that he has finally lost her.

 

His Charley.

 

Oh, Charley, if only you had done as you were told on Gallifrey. You could have gone home, back to your family who needed you far more than I had any right to. You could have lived that life that time had planned for you. But instead you followed a bitter old Time Lord to his fate because you didn’t want him to be alone. I didn’t deserve that sacrifice, Charley. And now look what’s happened. You should have left me then, I tried to make you go, tried to make you see that I couldn’t be the person you really wanted me to be. I’m not a knight in shining armour, your romantic prince. I’m an old man, scarred by experience and the cruelties of the universe, no matter what face I present to the world. I muddle through as best I can, and sometimes I’m wrong, but I carry on. It’s the only life I know. This is the way I deal with things, the only way I know how. I wish you hadn’t had to find out like this.

 

He can’t tell her, because the words won’t come and he knows she won’t listen to him. She’s too angry to hear anything he says. And maybe he deserves that. Looking down at the co-ordinates he has set, he waits, one hand hovering over the dematerialisation lever. He knows what’s coming.

 

“Take me home.”

 

And he does.

 

 

FIN

Comments

[pamdram.livejournal.com]

*bows at the feet of the Queen of Angst*
This was lovely. You get inside their heads so well! And I always loved that song :)

[charleygirl.livejournal.com]

Thanks, hon! *huggles*

After the trouble I've been having with the muse lately, am amazed it got written so fast. Wouldn't let me go back to sleep! :)