What Dreams May Come

A/N: This was written to fill a prompt on Livejournal as part of the Eleventy Kink meme. This particular fill isn't explicit or anything, so don't flip out over the name of the meme. There is a bit of Amy/Doctor/Rory kissing however, all in the name of comfort of course, but you can infer whatever you want out of it if you want.

The Doctor was swimming… Floating? Sinking? He wasn't sure, everything was fuzzy and distorted and slipped away from him when he tried to grasp at it, like trying to grab half-set gelatin in zero-G with rubber gloves on. Oh wait, there was something- Cool?- sliding along his back. Sliding? No not sliding, staying put. He was the one drifting… Slowly things seemed to settle, like the gelatin was finally deciding to set up. It was brighter now. Sort of pink tinged, like the inside of a grapefruit... The color seemed terribly familiar… Sort of indistinct, darker, fading away around the edges. He was sure that he should recognize it.

He was definitely pressed against something cool and flat, he could feel it, muffled slightly through his clothes. He seemed to be pressed against it actually, some intangible force holding him to it. Oh, that must be gravity then- And suddenly his whole sense of orientation decided to reassert itself, dizzying him as his perception turned over.

The Doctor was aware now that he was lying on something cool and flat somewhere with gravity just slightly higher than Earth. Hmm… Laying down… Oh, his eyes must be closed, which would explain the familiar pink as the inside of his eyelids. Perhaps he should open them.

Everything felt more tangible now, and he noticed things with more clarity. His head wasn't laying on the cool surface, it was on something warm and comfortable, tipped up a bit. There was also light streaming down on his closed eyelids, creating that luminescent color effect behind them and…

Oh, a shadow had passed through the light for a second. Something moving? He cracked open his eyes with what felt like a tremendous effort, and flinched involuntarily at the sudden flush of light that met his retinas. Yes, there was something- No, someone- moving above him. They passed through the light again as he opened his eyes a bit further to see them better than their dim outline of missing light.

Who was it? The form resolved itself a bit, a definite humanoid body, brightly haloed by light. He could make out just enough details to say that it was a man – probably- bending towards him. The man's mouth was moving… Oh, he was speaking. The Doctor realized blearily that he should probably be listening, and tuned in to his sense of hearing, like an old, poorly tuned radio warming up.

"Doctor? Doctor, are… awake? … We've ….you … alright?"

The Doctor's concentration was still wandering, unable yet to fully comprehend what the man was saying, only understand snatches here and there. The man sounded concerned… for him?

He knew someone who'd be concerned about him, didn't he? Someone who'd helped him out… a friend? Damon? Damon was an old friend, not a Time Lord, but a technician in the Citadel. He'd even helped him out when the High council had been trying to have him executed that business with Omega.(1) Maybe it was Damon, he looked about the right size, hair looked about the right length, or what he could discern of it at least haloed as it was by the too-bright light.

He became aware of someone else as well- the someone whose lap his head appeared to be laying on. He caught sight of longhair dangling over him for a moment as the person leant forward a bit and it swung into view. The light was still too bright and he couldn't make out much, not even the color, but it was long and he remembered someone with long hair who'd held his head in her lap before.

"Romana?" he whispered, finding his voice. It was raspy and so faint he barely heard it himself but he didn't really mind. He was still drifting a bit, and he let his eyes slide closed again, sheltering from the brilliant light. He was slipping, slipping away…

Oh, there was a hand on his cheek now, soft and patting it gently, demanding his attention. Another hand, slightly calloused and firm took his, pulling it up between them. They were calling him, his old friends were calling him back and how could he deny them? He opened his eyes again and asked some silly little question in Gallifreyan. He wasn't fully conscious of what it even was, some joking remark, perhaps containing a pun based off an old Gallifreyan nursery rhyme. He expected to hear a chuckle; perhaps Romana would jostle him playfully in her lap… But it didn't come.

"What?" he asked again in Gallifreyan, a language he rarely ever spoke anywhere but on Gallifrey, but it was still his native tongue, and it came naturally to him whenever he found Himself in the company of Gallifreyans once again. They were saying something again, and he understood most of it now. Something was wrong though. There was an urgency in their words and their voices, but no, that wasn't it. They were jostling his shoulders now.

"It's time to wake up Doctor," she said and with a jolt he realized what was wrong. Those words were English, not Gallifreyan. He felt for the presence of f her mind hovering whispering in the background and found only silence. The haze that lingered between sleep and wakefulness was evaporation quicker than morning mist under a swift binary sunrise. That wasn't Romana's voice, or Damon's. His eyes were adjusting to the light quickly now and he could make out their features. He recognized Amy and Rory's concerned faces leaning over him and he was awake as violently and unpleasantly as if someone had tipped a bucket of ice water over his head. He sat up quickly, removing himself from Amy's lap.

"Thank goodness," one of them said, the other launched into an explanation of how they'd been drugged, knocked unconscious, and they'd all been thrown into this cell. They'd been so worried when they couldn't wake him long after they'd recovered themselves- but he wasn't paying any attention. He was much too busy kicking himself mentally. How could he have mistaken these humans for his old friends, he should have noticed that he felt no flicker of telepathic presence, not even when they touched him. How could he have thought that they were Damon and Romana. How could he have hoped when he knew full well they were-

"Dead. All dead, all my fault…" He spoke without thinking, needing the realness of the sound, dispelling the last doubts of the dream state.

"Huh?" Rory spoke articulately.

"Doctor, who's dead? What are you talking about?" Amy asked somewhat more articulately.

"All of them. Gone." He was curling in on himself, hunching over, his knees drawn up to his chest. "There's nothing left of them, nothing where they should be- Just a great big hole." He was whispering faintly, a million miles away, not speaking to them but to the room.

"What hole, Doctor? What is it?" Amy reached towards him hesitantly.

"The hole! The empty space- where their vices should be in the back of my mind. Now there's nothing, only silence, silence!" His tone was growing angry, hissing out each word around clenched teeth. Amy and Rory exchanged worried glances as the Time Lord uncurled himself, voice continuing to rise.

"They never even wanted me, not those musty legions of robbed, sanctimonious fools! I was always and outcast, a renegade!" He was giggling now, hysterical. "Oh if they could see me now! That is irony unmatched in the universe- That I am the only one left!"

Amy and Rory were growing more frightened, never having seen the Doctor in such a state. They had only the faint impression of what he was raving about, gleaned from his previous passing references to being the last of his kind.

"Doctor, please, calm down. We don't understand!" Rory's nurse's training wouldn't allow him to sit by and watch someone clearly in such distress, and he was the Doctor's friend besides, so he reached out and laid a hand his arm, feeling the tremors running through tensed muscles. The doctor reacted violently, brushing off the hand, jumping to his feet and was looming over him almost faster than the nurse could register.

"You don't understand? Of course you don't understand! How could your pathetic, human mind even begin to comprehend what it's like? There are billions of you! You'll never know what it means to be alone- You couldn't even if you were, you mind-blind ape!" screamed the Doctor as he vented his uncontrolled emotions straight at Rory, tearing at the human race.

"You all live your happy little lives in ignorance. You're so fragile; you couldn't take it if you actually saw anything! You don't have time sense- For Rassilon's sake, most of you aren't even remotely telepathic!" He paused, chest heaving. There was a long, and terrible silence during which Amy clung to her husband's arm while the Doctor stared them down, ancient eyes smoldering, less like coals, more like dying stars in their final troughs of blazing furry. It was a thing to behold, and they both began to get an inkling what all those legends that had been mentioned were really talking about when they called the Doctor "The Oncoming Storm."

"Why do you all get to live, when nothing remains of them- not even stardust. They were great and ancient and mighty. They were the Lords of Time and you are nothing beside them," the Doctor intoned in a deadly tone. "I am nothing…" His voice shifted, choking up in his throat. "I am a disgrace. Rassilon, look at me," he sank to his knees. "I am all that is left of the proud Time Lords, and not even worthy of my title." A hollow chuckle punctuated his sentence. "I should have died with them." A sob distorted the last words as he crumpled, curling in on himself once more.

Their hearts broke for him. Amy moved to approach him, but Rory put up a hand, halting her. They hesitated, unsure how he would react to another attempt at consolation, but the Time Lord had merely wrapped his arms around his knees and was rocking back and forth, sobbing brokenly with his head bent to his breast. Rory and Amy exchanged another look in silent conference before going to him. They knelt on either side of him and carefully wrapped their arms around him, surrounding him with their comforting presence. They stilled his rocking and Amy rubbed gentle circles on his tense back. They whispered soft nonsense to the tune of how it was alright for 45 minutes before his sobs faded and his tears ran dry. Rory was finally able to coax him into lifting his face from his knees and met the blood-shot eyes, rimmed with raw red.

"Doctor, it's all right. Really, we've got you now," he intoned firmly.

"I- I'm sorry," the distraught alien croaked his voice raw and painful sounding enough to make his two companions wince in sympathy.

"It's all right Doctor, you were hysterical before, we know you didn't mean it," Amy soothed, brushing his disheveled hair away from his face.

"I'm sorry, it… It's just so frustrating sometimes."

"We forgive you Doctor. It would be nice though to know what that was all about," Rory prodded gently, squeezing the Doctor reassuringly although feeling a slight twinge of guilt for prying.

"I suppose I owe it to you- after all this… OK then, I suppose it's like this." He drew a deep, steadying breath before launching into the story. "Once there was a planet called Gallifrey… A planet of brilliant orange skies, and rolling fields of long red grass, and breathtaking forests of silver leaved trees that reflected the light of the binary suns. It was beautiful, and the people that lived there flourished for tens of thousands of years. They evolved with basic telepathy, as many races do, touch telepathy especially.

"They discovered when they reached the stars that they were different from many of the other races thorough – they had a special sense. It was called time sense, more than just feeling the passage of time, they could see it. They could trace its waves and understand it's complexities as not other race could. On some occasions, certain Gallifreyans found that they could even affect or alter the flow of time to some small degree.

"Eventually, there arose a leader called Rassilon. He was a scientist along with his two associates, Omega, and the Other, whose true name is lost to history. Together the three discovered how to make travel in the time vortex possible. Omega devised a plan to capture a black hole, called the eye of harmony, and imprison it in the planet's core, using it as a source of nearly unlimited, transmittable power.

"History becomes a bit muddled but it all went sour between them. Omega was mad, and believed that the other two were trying to steal his triumph. He initiated the final stage of the project on his own and was consumed by it. He ended up trapped in the anti-matter universe, the Other mysteriously drops out of the records, and Rassilon ended up with all the credit. They had already built the first TARDIS, which Rassilon brought online, and he became the founder of Time Lord society, and the first Lord President of the High Council of Time Lords."

The two humans weren't sure where this story was going precisely, or what it had to do with their actual question, but neither of them wanted to interrupt the Doctor as he seemed to be reciting something he'd been told as a child. Besides, this was far more information then they'd ever been able to get out of him about himself or his people to date.

"To abridge ten thousand years of stuffy, xenophobic, societal stagnation, there was eventually a war. A was to end all wars, a war for the universe, the Last Great Time War. There was a terrible threat to the whole universe- the Daleks. Monstrous creatures created by the mad scientist Davros. Both sides suffered horrible casualties, and with each battle, the atrocities committed by both sides and their allies grew more terrible. Whole systems were swallowed up, burned to ash by a war that raged across the stars of whole galaxies.

"Skaro, the Daleks' home planet had been destroyed, but still the Daleks came. Hundreds of inhabited planets had been ravaged, leaving thousands of species extinct, or their populations fragmented beyond any hope of recovery. It was the final days of the war, and Gallifrey was burning. The planet's impenetrable defenses were being pierced and the citadel of the Time Lords was under siege from orbit. Everyone had been drafted into the war, even exiles and renegades like me had been called back. In those final days, the universe seemed to be collapsing about our ears, and the High ordered us all home. We abandoned all other points and return to defend Gallifrey, our last stand.

"In the end there was no way we could win. The entire Dalek fleet was in orbit and it all came down to one last weapon. We couldn't win, but we would take them with us, saving the universe from them. They would have gone on to kill every living thing that was not a Dalek, that was their directorate. There was dissent in the council, Time Lord's were not known for their selflessness. But on that terrible last day, the leader of the assembly came to me. And put the trigger device in my hand, and ordered me to use it.

"I went to my TARDIS, connected it into the console, and primed it. I took off… Then I pressed the trigger.

"When I woke up I had regenerated, and Gallifrey was gone. The Daleks were gone and so were the Time Lords. We'd been thrown a tremendous distance through time and space, and my TARDIS was crippled, barely clinging to life. We both should have died. Neither of us knows how or why, but we survived, and now we are the last. There's a time lock around the whole war, part of the final solution. No one can ever go back to it, there's even a distortion of space over the heart of it. There's just a black space in the stars where my home used to be."

Rory stared open mouthed as the Doctor finished telling his story. The Time lord's depthless eyes were glassy, fixed on a point far beyond the cell wall he was facing over his companions' shoulders. The two humans wrapped their arms tighter around their friend, as if they could protect him from the horrors he had just described.

"Doctor," Amy started carefully. "Who is Romana? You called for her, earlier."

The Doctor swallowed and closed his eyes in remembrance. Romana, short for Romanadvoratrelundar, is- was a Time Lady, and one of my Dearest friends. She had been Lady President at some point and at that time she was the Leader of the Assembly." Amy's eyes widened in understanding, tears gathering along her eye lashes as he spoke. "She came to me that terrible day and gave me the trigger. 'Go.' That was all she said. She looked me in the eyes, and then walked away. That was the last I ever saw of her.

"I suppose I still owe you two an explanation for before. When I first regained consciousness, I was very disoriented, and thoroughly confused. I- The gravity here is slightly higher than that on Earth, and very, very close to what it was on Gallifrey, the closest I've ever felt in fact. In my confusion I mistook it for Gallifrey. When I saw you two, I couldn't see you very well with the light in my eyes, and I mistook you for two of my friends on Gallifrey, Romana and Damon. I- I was more than a little perturbed when I came fully awake and realized you weren't who I had been thinking you were. It all just kind of came crashing down on me. For a moment there I thought I was back home, with the Time Lords still alive and Gallifrey still within reach… And then it was just- just all gone again." Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes again and Amy shushed him, wiping them away with her fingers.

"He, hey now," Amy chided him gently, "No more of that now."

The Doctor's expression was so desolate, his voice so hollow, his eyes so empty. It was as if his soul had emptied out with his tears. Rory wanted desperately to wipe that look off his friend's face, but he didn't know how to reach him. So when a bizarre and daring idea occurred to him – one so crazy that it just might work, he grabbed onto it, trusting that Amy would understand.

Without hesitation, he leaned forward and pressed his lips against the doctors. He felt the huddled man start violently and attempt to jerk back, a gesture hindered by Amy, who still had her arms wrapped around him from behind. The Doctor's lips were oddly cool he noticed, and bore the salty tang of the tears that had run down them. He kissed tenderly, coaxing him out of the shell he had retreated into. He was becoming worried that he'd frightened the other man off when he finally felt a tentative response from the lips beneath his own. When he pulled back for breath, the Doctor starred him with wide eyes like a deer caught in a car's headlights.

Rory's gaze slid over to Amy, waiting to see what her reaction would be, and the Doctor stiffened, anticipating her reaction. Whatever he expected, it certainly wasn't for Amy to pull his shin around and kiss him. By the time she was done with him he looked nearly as dazed as when he first came to.

"Oh," he breathed softly, looking up at the two of them, slowly turning his head from one to the other.

"Oh," Amy repeated weight as satisfied smirk curling the corner of her lips.

"It's all right now Doctor, it's all all right," Rory repeated soothingly.

Amy brushed his hair back again, the Doctor's eyes slipped closed, and Rory leant in for another Kiss.

Notes:

(1) See "The Arc of Infinity", a fifth doctor (Peter Davison) episode where the High Council attempts to execute the Doctor for something they're fully aware he has no control over. Damon is an old friend of the Doctor's who helps produce critical evidence. - It's not a bad episode, and it features Colin Baker (who went on to eventually become the sixth doctor) as the captain of the guard who shoots the Doctor on sight, funnily enough.

A/N:

Hope you guys enjoyed my first fill, and probably my first completed fanfic project ever.

Please forgive my rambling about the Time War. I really didn't intend to write about it, it just sort of happened… I tried to be rather vague and brief, since it wasn't really the focus…

-Pinfeathers