Chapter Text
Eight years, twenty-five weeks, four days, nine hours and thirteen minutes. It had been that long since she last saw him, the real him, the one who loved her. That day he said goodbye as he had a thousand times before—See you later. Never one for specifics, her Doctor.
Since then, when she called him the only version she got was the younger one, the one who didn’t know who she was, the one who wouldn’t touch her. It didn’t help that he looked the same, smelled the same and made her ache for him in the same way.
He had tried to warn her early on that it would get like this, but she was young and stupid then, and she had never known him to be anything other than besotted with her. She told him that she could handle it; she felt she could at the time, then again back then she felt she could do anything.
He never told her that it would be gradual, that she would witness the love and recognition he had for her fade like a photograph left in the sun. Perhaps it was because that wasn’t how he had perceived it—it was the opposite for him, his hearts were only filling up.
Now when she met him he hardly knew her at all, and she never saw her lover anymore. The stretching length of his absence tore at her and broke her down until she was hollow—a shadow of herself that even she barely recognised.
When she was met with suspicion and anger by the younger Doctor she wanted to ask him—her Doctor—what he’d been thinking, what he’d been feeling. She wanted him to put her mind at ease and tell her that it wasn’t hate that she sometimes thought she saw burning in his eyes, that it was something else. But she couldn’t because he never came. So she wrote to him in her diary, the one place she knew the real him would read it some day, and when she was done she would place an X and try to instil it with how much she missed, and forgave, and loved him.