She dreams of clear skies sometimes, though she never says a word. Clear skies, motorways full of cars, and tea from an electric kettle on Tuesday afternoons while Eastenders plays on telly and her mum badgers her about work. But clear skies the most, skies full of clouds and bright summer sunshine, so brilliant you can hardly stand it. Skies so inky black that the stars in them hang like big bulbs of light, skies a million different colors and none of them blue.

The dirigibles, you see. She never got used to them. Everything else was easy—traveling with the Doctor made them easy. But she never got over the dirigibles.

It's easier to be alone when there's only one of you, she realizes. And for all her talk, she's gotten used to being alone. Eating alone, working alone, sleeping alone. God, he even wants to join her in the bed and she can understand, yes, but space. People need it, it's just a thing, no I can't explain it, oh don't pout now you know I hate it when you pout.

She tells herself she doesn't mind it, but the heat of him so near is stifling. She sweats where their skin touches, itches where his legs rasp against hers. She loves him, loves him, loves him, but she needs room to breathe.

Ever since he got here—rather, ever since she got here—it's been this way. She's closed in, boxed up like a package left unopened. She can't stand closed doors and leaves her windows cracked. She was never like this back home. She was never like this with him. He knows it. She knows it. And it hurts.

Things get easier, slowly though they do. She hates it a little bit, the idea that she's walking when she could be running, taking the slow path when the fast lane is just beside. But their seedling is growing and so is their love and sometimes walking is okay, when she has a hand in hers and a sky above her head.

She watches them sometimes—the dirigibles. She follows their paths with her eyes as they drift along, wondering how they have room to maneuver. Occasionally she'll catch a glimpse of a cloud, a patch of bright blue. But mostly grey. Just grey, grey, grey.

It takes her far longer than she cares to admit to realize that he feels the same. He might cuddle too close at night and keep her hand longer than she's used to, but the air presses on him in the same places as her. His eyes are deeper than everyone else's, his shoulders heavier. It's a weight, those memories of his. She'll keep his head in her lap, stroke her fingers through his hair, murmur a song her dad sang to her one night, when his ghostly whispers haunted her dreams.

They lay in the grass in the dark of twilight, trying to pick out constellations through the shadows of the aircraft floating above them. Even that feels too close, too confined. Once they had the entire universe laid out ahead of them. Now they sit, planetbound, waiting for a song that may never be sung.

The dreams get worse—or as much worse as dreams about skies can get. Longer, more real, more vivid. Every morning she wakes with tears in her eyes, afterimages clouding her vision as she gets out of bed. The damn dirigibles float outside her window, like balloons on invisible strings. She imagines a great pair of scissors, big enough to snip the lines and cut everything loose and then, maybe then, she wouldn't feel so confined when she stood in the open. Maybe then the steel band around her chest would break.

She remembers a line from home about glass houses—the quotations here are all messed up, from different people or not existing at all—something about throwing stones. Hypocrisy was the message, but as with most things that's gotten lost. She thinks about glass houses, though, how they're as good for looking out as they are for looking in. She doesn't live in glass house, she thinks, but rather a glass box. No room to move, no room to breathe. No room to throw a stone to get herself out.

Maybe everyone's like that, she thinks. Maybe we all live in our own little boxes. Maybe me and him are the only ones who see.

Breaking glass hurts. But freedom—stars and skies and songs sung with hearts and the three of them soaring so high, above the dirigibles and the clouds and the blue—that freedom is worth it.

/end