He can't feel his legs and he remembers the Eliot poem, oh how maudlin it had been with its references and its words trapping the grand ideas between the lines.

He can't feel his legs.

(this is how the world en-- oh shut up! I mean, really of all the cliches to think about right now! he yells in his mind)

"Well," he reasons out loud, and grins up at the rather large alien glaring at him, "not like I'd be running now anyway."

—

Eons ago and in the future a baby is born silent. His mother sighs with happiness and he looks around at the glory of the stars and sky and life and wails, lost and confused.

Shush, his mother says, and time wraps an invisible thread around his ankle and pulls.

—

They leave him for dead pinned under a chunk of stone from a demolished skyscraper. In the distance fires burn and he almost feels sorrow at the way the locals scream as they are killed, but time is malleable and flowing and all it takes is one small tap of his hand to change the flow.

"Right," he mutters to himself and smiles up at a falling sky. "Definitely marking this place on the list of Really Bad Places To Visit Ever Again Especially In January. Possibly also on the No Really This Is A Crap Idea list."

He hopes it's quick like last time.

—

"See, I thought about it." Rose begins, pausing to take a lick of her dripping ice cream cone. Her eyebrows raise and she wrinkles her nose as the ice cream drips down her hand. She is perched on a low retainer wall, legs swinging next to his shoulder. Her feet are tanned brown with faint lines of pale white crisscrossing where her sandals protected her skin, pink nail polish painstakingly applied, and he waits but says nothing. "You're always 'oh, woe is me, I'm always alone,' you know, eternal wanderer number 1, yeah?"

"Weeeeell, I did get that nice blue ribbon the once..." he begins, but she shoves his shoulder with her foot and he shuts up.

"But you're not. You've got me and Jack and Mickey and even my mum, though she'd probably smack you if you went round her place--" Here he laughs and she grins. "--and Sarah Jane, K-9..."

And Reinette, her sentence continues unsaid, and he sees the way her eyes darken for a brief second and loves her for the humanity of that one moment. "All these people scattered across the universe, living and remembering you."

She stops abruptly and winces when her ice cream finally loses the battle against the heat and gravity and slides from the cone, landing on the Doctor's shoulder. "Oops," she says, eloquently, and starts laughing when he tilts his head up to look at her with a wounded expression.

"You humans. Odd sense of humor you lot have," he begins, and yanks her down suddenly, hand wrapped around her leg. She lands with an 'oof' next to him, still wheezing with laughter. "Much better on you, anyway." He says, mock consternation in his voice, and his lips curl just so against the corner of her mouth, tongue darting out to catch the last remainder of ice cream caught on her skin.

He tries to tell her what she means, what this moment is, but the words get stuck in his throat and he has to gasp for air before everything brings him down choking and shuddering.

She understands anyway, he thinks, and forgets for awhile how human she is.

—

It hurts, oh, oh, electricity surging through his veins, neurons firing wildly as his nervous system goes haywire and begins to shut down. Last chance to evacuate planet earth he thinks, and slumps over (Doctor!, they always scream in his mind, so young and naïve and afraid) and he screams and screams and screams.

—

He is seven years old again, a golden-haired child skipping school.

"My mum says they used to build TARDISes," his friend says.

He hums his disagreement, concentrating on the loops and swirls of his clumsy writing as he practices the correct way to write the capital nouns. "Everybody knows you can't have a TARDIS without coral. I mean, that's–that's just silly!"

"I think," his friend intones, and rips up a patch of grass, tears the blades into small shreds, red against the milky white of his palm. "It's much better to build things. Then you can make them do whatever you want."

He shivers and wants to say you're weird, but instead what comes out is, "My dad says he wishes he had a sonic screwdriver to make everything right sometimes. Like, just point it and zap!, everything done before dinner."

He grins and turns to look at his friend–aren't grown-ups silly-- and the Master turns in reply, eyes spiraling with madness, and exclaims, "Sonic? Everyone knows lasers are better!"

They don't talk for ages afterward, even after they're placed in the same class in the Academy.

—

in and out and in and out, the old heave-ho (it always comes down to sex with you lot, he told Donna once, oh how she'd laughed and then said dream on, spaceboy), and he falls, caught in that brief second when his lungs fail before his respiratory bypass system kicks in.

Your oxygen saturation levels are too low; even those won't hold out long, Martha says and he can almost feel her hands cool against his chest as she assesses him.

"I miss you," he says out loud and she smiles and replies good thing you're not dying then, you can visit when you're done being dramatic.

"Oh," He groans, hard asphalt beneath him and he can feel his cells changing, the slow burn of time as she takes him by the hand and gives him a new beginning. "I think we need a second opinion," and he laughs until fireworks burst behind his eyelids.

—

The Doctor remembers, the Doctor forgets.

Gallifrey, at sunset, his mother's voice rising off-key as she sings him to sleep. Stars and lies and lullabies, what rhymes with time? -Lime!- he shouts, three years old and proud.

Rose asks why, and how, and no really, how the hell did you know that lot was allergic to peanuts? and his eyes hold the answers he can't speak.

Time laughs and the wolf howls and he forgets the songs of the third moon of Eittelane, Donna's favorite type of cake. (He thinks he rather liked jam, once, before he couldn't breathe and the TARDIS was weeping again and he said oh please old girl we'll carry on like always--)

He carries the knowledge tucked away, gold threads that gather dust as he watches time spool away from him, reaching, reaching, reaching.

—

"If you were a tree, what would you be?" he sings, feeling light and lazy, endless amounts of time on a Sunday to be amused by silly puns.

"What?" Donna ask, engrossed in another Agatha Christie novel.

He repeats the question three times, dancing about her. "A spruce tree I'd be, I'd be. Old and ageless and me just me."

She dog ends her page and looks up, eyes wide. "....Poor Doctor, everyone knows it doesn't count when your mum says you're good at poetry."

"Ooooh, don't pretend you weren't amazed," he rejoins, dances forward to grin enthusiastically at her. "Got a gold star in excellence for my poetry back at the Academy. A real gold star too, not the sticky type you lot get for excellence in maths and some such."

He ducks, narrowly escaping a direct hit to the face from her book. His grin never fades and she rolls her eyes up at him, but lets him drag her after him to the lounge.

"You idiot," she shrieks an hour later, and crumples up laughing when he fails to remember the words to Miss Mary Mack for the tenth time. "Thought your lot was smart."

"In ways you couldn't imagine," he says, but forgets again anyway just to annoy her.

—

The vortex burns within him, devouring, the beauty of seas rising up to swallow the very world, old and knowing and hopeless but so familiar he aches with it.

I will bathe in the dust and walk in the sea, he thinks and everything is cold and sticky with blood, but he smiles anyway and walks forward to embrace the loop of time as it folds backwards upon itself.

—

Rose grins and takes the other him's hand and they disappear into a side street lit by the ghosts of stars dead millennia ago in faraway galaxies. And her mouth is impossibly pink and wide, dreams in her teeth and hope hidden in the palm of her hand against his. The Doctor tells himself he gave her happiness in the end, and almost believes it.

And Martha calls him, years later, while Thomas fails yet again to not burn the toast and says hello, for an all-knowing Time Lord you are much too prone to forgetting to actually charge the phone properly, and he laughs from millions of light years away.

Donna doesn't remember and he hurts with that knowledge, until she leaves one day with a simple note and he finds her traveling alone with gold threads like stardust wound through her hair. Somewhere in Russia on a dusty train he leans forward and asks her, one traveler to another, why now? And she doesn't recognize him and straightens up in her seat, away from the man with the impossible sights in his eyes but answers anyway. I was tired of waiting.

—

Time twists in upon itself, the biggest tangle in the history of the universe, the end and the beginning buried under layers of debris and dreams and doubts and voices.

The Doctor steps out of the shadows and pulls one end of the thread softly with new hands.

She smiles at him, his first and last companion, and he loves.