All Of The Gin Joints
Tell me, he whispers into her ear when they have finished, when they are clinging to each other as if their hands alone turn fiction into reality. Tell me all you have seen, all you have done. Everything.
She tastes blood on her tongue. It's metallic and tangy as she licks it away from her chapped lips, and for once, she thinks she might just bleed to death in this storm. She's never allowed herself to consider death a possibility, but that's foolish, really. For you, I would die a thousand times and still stand up after I have bled myself dry.
Bitter wind strikes her cheeks, and oh how her body aches underneath her leather jacket and trousers. Her wrist watch ticks so softly she can hardly hear it, but it's there, a guiding force, a reminder. That all of her suffering compares little to centuries of crushing loneliness.
Siberia isn't a likely destination for her Doctor, she thinks as she fades away with the push of a button.
She arrives in a world she's never seen before. It's warm and bright and so very red, and for a moment, she wonders if her Doctor has been here. Surely he has, for he has seen the most spectacular things, and this planet with its crimson carpet certainly beats most places she's been.
What she soon realizes, however, is that the red flowers underneath her feet release toxins that, while basically harmless, engulf her in a series of hallucinations so profound that she ends up weeping over her Doctor's lifeless body, screaming until she vomits all over him and he disappears.
And she is alone, again.
Casablanca is warm and dry, but she can't stay long because it hurts. She remembers being perched on a couch, humming As Time Goes By along with Ilse, sobbing into a popcorn bowl and his shoulder when Rick relives memories of Paris, quoting that final scene so perfectly that her Doctor challenged her to a film line-off.
He won, but only because she had only seen the Godfather twice.
They watched Casablanca the night before she fell through a wall.
And then, little by little, things start to align themselves. She meets Donna but doesn't know it. She watches her Doctor, back when he was all big ears and blue eyes, as Kennedy gets shot. She sees her Doctor with the ginger woman she met weeks before and mentally kicks herself for not noticing it before. She's lost in thought until she hears the familiar sound of a big blue box fading away.
She finds her Doctor, but he's dead and that's not right, so she guides Donna to her own death.
And she's so close, she can feel the void stuff vibrate around her.
Okay, she murmurs as she succumbs to sleep. I will tell you everything.