He was burning. Burning from the inside out, just as the world had burned around him, exploding in a flash of fire. He could feel his hearts sizzling inside him as the flames licked his face, devoured his hair, consumed his hands, his body. He was boiling alive like a lobster in a pot, he was burning like a witch at the stake, like a thousand other horrific images from the history of Earth: one of many worlds he’d sacrificed his own to save.
Were they worth it? Humans with their history peppered with barbarism–were they any better than the race he’d given his life and his people to destroy?
Not that it mattered. He wouldn’t live to see if the universe proved worthy of his sacrifice. Not when he could feel his skin crack and curl like wood on the fire. He was burning to death, just like Gallifrey. He was dying. He was…
On the charred floor of the TARDIS, the Doctor opened his eyes. Time wailed in his ear, crying like a child in pain at the blow he’d delivered. The blackened husk of the TARDIS, too, gave silent voice to her own misery. Behind and beyond them rose the ghostly, nonexistent voices of a billion murdered Gallifreyans, all screaming out in agony and outrage.
He was alive.
Clapping charcoal hands uselessly over ears that had been burned away, the Doctor screamed.
~*~
The Doctor awoke with a strangled gasp, hearts pounding out a drum roll in his chest. As a rule, his people had never required much sleep compared to other species. He blamed the amount of it he’d been doing on his recent regeneration and Nyssa’d said nothing to dispute that diagnosis whether she agreed with it or no.
Beside him, Nyssa stirred, most likely wakened by his movement. She’d scarcely let him out of her sight since he’d arrived, even to the point of insisting he share her bed. It might’ve been funny if he thought for a moment it was some sly attempt on her part to seduce him. He knew Nyssa too well, though, not to work out her real reason.
Suicide watch. She still didn’t trust him to choose to live, even knowing the bond between him and his TARDIS.
He might’ve resented that if the dream–no, memory–didn’t still linger so vividly in his thoughts. The Doctor shivered. The sensation of burning with the TARDIS, with Gallifrey, was still all too easy to relive.
A small hand landed gently on his arm. “Doctor?”
He shivered involuntarily. “Just a bad dream. Didn’t mean to wake you.”
“As one whose own dreams are rarely peaceful, I should probably thank you,” was the answer. Nyssa’s hand began to stroke his arm gently. He shivered again, though not for the same reason. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.
“No,” was his honest answer.
Nyssa said nothing for a long time. When she did speak again, it was with unexpected candour. “I dream I’m in the garden, caring for Melkur. Cassia’s alive, Father’s alive, and the Keeper is watching over us all as he always did. For a little while, I’m happy. Then all of a sudden, I notice the plants and trees in the garden have begun to wilt and die. The walls of the city start to crumble. I see Cassia age a thousand years before my eyes before collapsing dead at my feet and decaying first to a skeleton, then dust in moments. My whole world dissolves beneath my feet and in the centre of it all stands the Master, wearing my father’s face and laughing as I cry.” Her voice took on a subtle note of bitterness on this last. Little wonder, considering the scene she described. “I wonder sometimes, what it must’ve been like in those last moments. Did the Keeper know what was coming? Did any of them even have time to be afraid? I hope not. I hope it was quick and painless.”
The Doctor swallowed hard. “I’m sorry.”
She met his eyes evenly. “You didn’t destroy Traken, Doctor.”
“No,” he acknowledged reluctantly. “But if I’d been half so concerned with saving it as with Earth–”
“–we would still have been too late,” she interrupted, her voice quietly resigned. “Believe me, Doctor, I’ve run every scenario in my mind a thousand billion times over the years, wondering what might have been done differently.”
The Doctor’s chest tightened. Oh, he knew all about “what ifs”–he’d entertained more than a few himself in the past few days. Most scenarios involved breaking the Laws of Time. Would that feeling or those doubts ever go away?
“When we were up on the bridge,” he started, his voice sounding hoarse even to his own ears. “You talked about healing. About making this a place of healing.”
Nyssa looked away as if anticipating his question.
“Never mind the Lazars, did you find that here?”
Now it was her turn to answer honestly: “No, Doctor. I wish I could promise you otherwise, but some wounds never completely heal. They only…scar over.”
It took a moment to realise that the short, keening sound he heard came from him. Afterwards, he was never sure which of them had reached for the other first, but he found himself clinging to Nyssa. He hated how grateful he was that she understood something no sentient being should ever have to understand.
“How do you stand it?” he asked helplessly. “How do you live, day after day, with this emptiness?”
“I have my work. I have Nica. I had Lasarti for fifteen years. And I have you.” Nyssa looked at him. “If you want to know what kept me alive, in those early days when the wounds were still fresh…it was you. Tegan and Adric as well, but mostly you. You kept my mind occupied with new problems, new adventures, and that was what I needed.” She dropped her eyes again for a moment before looking back up, her voice quiet with regret. “I’m not sure Adric ever forgave either one of us for that–I took your attention away from him when he was the one you’d promised to mentor.”
The Doctor snorted deliberately–not to make light of Adric, for that was another burden of guilt he still carried, but to ease her mind about any share in the blame. “Some mentor. I doubt I knew what I was doing half the time, that incarnation.”
Nyssa raised a slim eyebrow and smirked at him. “And this is different from the usual, how?”
He glared at her. “I think someone’s spent a bit too much time with Tegan.”
Nyssa’s expression softened into a wistful smile. It made her entire face look almost as young as when he’d first known her. She laid a hand on his chest, his left heart. Her voice turned quiet and serious again. “The point is…you gave me a reason to live long before Terminus did. Thank you for that.”
The Doctor covered her hand with his own. To his surprise, the strange frisson of energy that had earlier passed between them returned stronger this time. More than a spark, it was a steady electric current. It ran directly from her hand to his hearts…and other parts of his anatomy as well.
When they spoke about it in the days and months that followed, neither he nor Nyssa was ever able to remember clearly who made the first move. Truth be told, it hardly mattered, for both of them wanted the same thing.
They were intellectuals, the pair of them, always thinking. But thinking all too often meant remembering and there was one memory neither could easily avoid: standing witness to their world’s destruction. One wound was older than the other, but seeing it inflicted on another still ripped open the scar.
However it happened, they met in the middle: the last son of Gallifrey and the last daughter of Traken, seeking solace in each other from a grief too weighty to shoulder alone but too unique to easily share.
~*~
The Doctor could count on one hand the companions he’d had or ever contemplated a romantic or sexual relationship with whilst they travelled with him and Nyssa had never been on that list. At first, she’d been too young, then later, too beholden. It wouldn’t have been right to put that sort of pressure on their relationship when she had nowhere else to go if she didn’t feel the same.
But that was no longer true. She had a life here, separate and independent of him, and he was the one with no home left but the TARDIS. Tragedy had rendered them equals.
He thought about the family she’d had the last time he saw her, when she’d answered his psychic call during his very difficult fifth regeneration. A stab of guilt pierced him that he hadn’t thought to ask–or hadn’t wanted to–last night. Then again, from the moment the Doctor arrived, Nyssa had spoken of her husband in the past tense. Whatever else last night might have been, it wasn’t likely to add “home wrecker” to his increasingly dubious list of skills and titles.
He was glad of that. In the brief time that the Doctor had known the man Nyssa married, he’d come to respect Lasarti.
Beside him, Nyssa slept peacefully, the voices of the dying for once temporarily stilled. He could feel it through the bond he’d once forged between them, to save his own life in the midst of that nearly unsuccessful regeneration. Nyssa had used that bond to save his life again, this time against his will. Their physical union seemed to have cemented it–one more thing he might regret if she hadn’t consented to both just as freely.
Too freely, perhaps. With the echoing absence of the Time Lords in his mind, it would be all too easy to make that link a lifeline. He could reshape his world, even his universe, around her. He hadn’t been himself–not this himself, anyway–for very long, but already he knew he was a drowning man. A drowning man didn’t easily let go of what kept him afloat, even if it meant pulling it under with him.
The Doctor shuddered. Rather than risk it, he closed his eyes and deliberately severed the link instead.
Nyssa stirred. She rolled over and looked at him with concerned eyes. “Doctor?”
“What happened to them?” he surprised himself by asking. “Lasarti and Nica, I mean.”
The shadow in Nyssa’s eyes returned at the mention of her family. She smiled sadly. “Lasarti died some five years ago. His species may have been biologically compatible with mine, but they were also far shorter lived.”
“I’m sorry,” he told her simply.
Nyssa shook her head. “I knew what I was getting into when I married him. As for Nica…well, she grew up and left home, just as I once did.” Sadness turned to pride for a moment. “She’s studying medicine at the finest school in the empire. She may return when she’s finished, but she may also decide to set up her own practice somewhere else. Whatever it is, it will be her choice.”
The choice she’d been denied. Allowed that choice, the Doctor couldn’t help but think Nyssa would likely have never left Traken. Not permanently, anyway. Her nature was as inclined towards contentment as his was to discontent and restlessness.
Nyssa studied him shrewdly. She’d become far too perceptive where he was concerned of late. “Come here.” She climbed smoothly out of the bed and gestured for him to follow her to the window.
That she had a window–that she had made her home far enough from the centre of the station that she could look out on the stars–well, that was a choice he could understand.
They stood there staring out at the universe for a long moment before Nyssa spoke again. “The universe turns on all our choices, Doctor, not only yours, and I’ve no doubt it will continue to turn in spite of them as well. I chose Terminus. I chose to make love to you last night, as much for my own sake as for yours. The choices I wasn’t don’t invalidate the ones I was or will be given. I’d appreciate if you didn’t try to take them away from me out of some misguided sense of responsibility for my welfare.”
His eyes snapped to hers. “Excuse me?”
Nyssa stood on tiptoe to give him a gentle kiss. “I’m saying you don’t need to save me, anymore, Doctor. I’m perfectly capable of saving myself.”
He swallowed hard and looked at her, an impossibly difficult confession on his lips: “I’m not.”