rude_not_ginger | RP for perfectblue

"I..." she frowned again, ever so slightly, and her own hand absently lingered over the spot on her face where the Doctor's had just been.

"I am not certain," she admitted, quietly. "It is all quite strange, discerning the nature of my relationships with those who claimed me as a friend. If there is anything I have forgotten that is important, that would make a difference in how I relate to you... you would tell me that, would you not?"

The Doctor took a breath, and nodded.

"There's...nothing. We're companions. I've always considered you my friend, but you're very picky on your choices of friends."

He smiled, a little wistfully. "You're very important to me, Illyria." There was weight behind those words, but he couldn't measure it. Well, he supposed he could, but he wouldn't.

"I've been unkind to you, haven't I?"

There was a hint of realization behind her words, something that guessed at more than she spoke aloud.

"You call me a friend in spite of it, and you want that version of me to return, but I've been unkind in the past, because what I am is not given to kindness."

He shook his head, "No, no. You're not unkind. Well, no. No, you are. You're rather particular and sometimes cruel, but...that's just you. I've accepted it."

He gave the back of his head a scratch as he spoke. "You...can be...no, no. That's not it. You're you. I like you, the way you are."

And there it was. Five-year-old Doctor saying he liked Illyria.

She smiled a little, slightly perplexed, but a more genuine smile than Illyria's usual almost-expressions.

"I cannot help but think that I must have been fond of you in return, regardless of my general temperament. So far as I can tell, I did not willfully keep company with those I was not."

"Well, I have a time ship. I'm useful," the Doctor shrugged, a return smile on his own face. This woman before him was very nice, but she wasn't Illyria.

It must've been how Martha felt. Smith wasn't all that bad, but he wasn't the Doctor.

"Is that how I choose my friends?" She asked, not particularly surprised but sounding a little disappointed all the same.

"It must be, of course. The glimpses I've seen in dreams, that goddess would never choose someone less than useful. Wesley was my guide. Glaucon was a follower. You... had a time ship."

She sounded more sorry than anything, at what she must've been to these people who still seemed to miss that cold person she'd been. She couldn't quite fathom why they would.

"Weaeaeaeaeaell, that's the way things turn out."

He awkwardly took a step forward and put a reassuring (he hoped it was reassuring) hand on her shoulder.

"It'll all make a lot more sense once your memories are back. Honestly. You're not as bad as you make yourself sound to be." A pause. "Well, you are. But that's all right."

"Why?" She asked, simply, a tiny sad smile still gracing her features in a way it never did before.

"Why is that all right? Why do you -- why do any of you care for me if that is how I am?"

"I told you," he said, "I like you."

He grinned a small, rather lopsided grin at the woman. Like wasn't a strong enough word. He didn't know a stronger word that would fit that wouldn't completely embarrass him, however.

Funny, he felt more embarrassed about his feelings for Illyria to this not-Illyria than he probably would've to who she actually was.

"I suppose I can hardly object, though I think I must've gotten the better end of the bargain in our acquaintance."

She felt strangely self-conscious in a way she was certain she wouldn't have, otherwise. She was rather certain the goddess-her didn't have any sort of crush on the Time Lord, though she felt as though if she kept up this conversation, her present self might.

"Well, that would be new, I think," he said with a small chuckle, "I'm usually the selfish one in companionship. I had a friend who told me..."

He shook his head, "That I only keep my companions around because I'm lonely. Lonely god or some such nonsense. She actually told me that while I was a human, as a matter of fact."

His eyes looked over Illyria's face, trying to find the woman he'd known before in this human's features. "But I don't imagine it's that way with you. You're important in a different way to me."

Her eyes widened a little at his choice of words, the lonely god, and their similarity to the truth of what she'd been.

"We aren't so different, are we?" she asked, some small understanding dawning again, each little piece of the puzzle almost but not quite clicking. "In my dreams the temple is filled to its limits, buzzing with life, and yet now I keep only the company of one lone follower who stays because he has nowhere else he would belong."

She remembered he'd said she left him, that they'd traveled together and then she'd left, and winced a bit internally at the cruelty of that, unintentional though it may have been. When she spoke again, it was careful and deliberate, but direct, her now-brown eyes unblinking in their certainty.

"I think I must have stayed for more than just your time ship."

Her words were so ridiculously kind.

Further proof of how not-Illyria she was.

And yet she was, still. And completely understanding. Which was entirely frustrating, too.

He took a breath. Nodded slowly. Glanced around as if the fob watch could see what he was thinking. "Now, I'm going to do something. I've...it's something I've... Don't be afraid, and don't tell her, because she'll probably hate me if you do."

He leaned down and quickly, chastely, kissed her on the mouth.

It took her by surprise, and yet it didn't, because she'd been half-waiting for someone to kiss her over the course of three very strange conversations with three equally strange men who she suspected had more reasons for the awkwardness with which they spoke to her than just the fact that she was different.

It was such a brief and chaste sort of kiss that she hardly had time to react properly, but she didn't pull away, either, but stood blinking at him after, a tiny smile upon her lips.

"...Well," she said, after a moment's pause. "That was certainly a great deal more direct than the others were."

"Others?"

He was still a bit shell-shocked by his own actions. To do something so intimate, and especially with Illyria. Kissing just wasn't common in his species.

And yet, it was something he'd wanted to do with her for a long time. He had to keep it in his mind that it would be the last time he was able to kiss her, as well.

"Oh, yes," she said lightly, bizarrely amused by the ridiculousness of her whole situation.

"I may not have had a great deal of experience in being human, and my intuition may be incorrect, but as far as I can tell, Glaucon has been rather excessively careful in the way that he alludes to our relationship in a way that makes me suspect it is not entirely purely goddess-and-worshiper, and Wesley largely refuses to speak of the nature of our relationship at all, but has said enough for me to guess that there was a particular sort of affection present."

The Doctor nodded, slowly, then took a step back. Pushed back his own emotions. Repressed, as he was rather good at doing, especially in recent years.

"Oh, well, you've come to know them better than I have, I'm afraid. Their opinions of you are unknown to me."

Illyria frowned, not having intended to push him away.

"I did not mean... it's not that I find it purely amusing, or that I don't return your affections. I like you, but I don't... I don't know if I normally do, or if whatever I may feel now is only going to go away, or whether or not I'm accidentally hurting either of the other two who won't even tell me for certain if my intuitions are correct."

She sounded a little frustrated at that, at her own lack of enough information to even allow herself to choose as she pleased.

He shook his head, "It's not...I just...I'm not human. I don't have the luxury of a timespan. I have forever and that means...I don't..."

He made a brief gesture between them, then looked back up at her face, to her eyes. They were brown, and clear. None of the haze that Illyria brought, none of the millenia of depth. All the same, they were still lovely.

"No matter...how much I might...want to."

That was as close to a declaration of feelings as the Doctor was possibly capable of.

She nodded, slowly, stung more than a bit, but not so much by his words as by the truth of them, and the impossible choice she was faced with.

"I know. And that first part wouldn't be a problem, because any moment you're going to find the object that returns my memories and makes me a goddess again, and then I have forever, too."

She blinked at a sudden sting in her eyes, quite certain that she would never forgive herself later if she allowed it to be anything more than that.

"But then I won't be me. Not this me. I'll be her, and as far as I can tell she doesn't even have feelings, much less act upon them."

The Doctor smiled. It was a small, rueful smile, but a smile nonetheless.

He won't love you.

If he isn't you, I don't want him to.

He remembered the terror that John felt, and how he knew the Doctor wouldn't love Joan, and how he knew the Doctor couldn't love Joan, and so he didn't want to lose that.

"You're afraid," he said, "That you're going to die. This you that you've discovered. I understand."

Another move of intimacy, this one to bring her into a hug.

She hugged him in return, certain the other her wouldn't have, and equally certain she didn't care. There was a certain fierceness to the action, as though she were doing it in defiance of the other her's wishes almost as much as for the comfort that it offered.

"I don't want to be her," she admitted, quietly. "I've only just gotten to be me."

"Shhh," he cooed, pressing a kiss to her hair, "When you're her, you'll love it. I promise. And she's...she's wonderful, in her own way."

He pulled back just enough to smile down at her.

"You are wonderful."

She took a deep breath and nodded, collecting herself and releasing him from the hug before she did anything ridiculous like cry. She'd hate herself for that later, and she hated the other her a little bit for giving her that much knowledge, now. For stifling bits and pieces of her humanity even while she still possessed it.

"Thank you for thinking so," she replied, with a sad but appreciative smile. It wasn't enough, anything else she could've said.

So she didn't, and instead kissed him, much in the same manner he'd kissed her earlier: soft and chaste and quickly, but kindly, because she knew she was certain to be unkind later and didn't want that to be the only way he ever thought of her.

RP for perfectblue

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