Chapter Text
"Will I ever see you again?"
"You can’t."
She can’t, but he can. He does. He sees her dancing at a wedding, in a flash of gold ribbon, a teasing tongue on a billboard. She’s everywhere, a spirit flickering in the corner of his eye only to evaporate when he cranes his neck to look. The weightless image of her hair, fanning out in the wind as she disappears through a crack in the universes.
It’s been a month but he still tastes her residual energy and his bitter regret on his tongue when he walks down certain TARDIS corridors, startles at her warm scent when it drifts by his nose at the most unexpected of times. He chases them both, sniffing the air like a bloodhound, but they remain elusive, ethereal, ephemeral.
Some days he hears fabric rustling just behind him in his empty time ship, whips his head around only to behold barren space and time. The questions she would ask, her un-uttered exclamations of glee echo between his ears, rampaging through his thoughts like wild beasts.
He feels her in the space between: the abandoned bedroom with the bed un-tucked in anticipation of her return; his empty hand; the holes in his hearts she clawed for purchase as her fingers slipped from the lever. The gaping space in his mind where she used to stockpile her endless faith.
Her absent touch is the most raw of wounds to his tactile-centered senses and all at once, idly spinning a dial on his ship, he can’t take it anymore. Touch in the negative overwhelms his higher-order functions, pulsing in its pain, and he needs to feel her, touch her; his nerves need to sense her skin and perceive her stroking his thumb like she used to when they were out of danger and he needs to feel out of danger, needs to be consoled by the anatomy of her cells pressed to his cells and the signal that only touch can provide that he’s be alright and that she’ll be alright and—
It’s an impulse, not a decision, when he sets the TARDIS into flight, but it’s the strongest, most salient impulse that has ever thrummed along his synapses.
She can’t. But he can.