‘If you really loved me there wouldn’t be a choice’ for Charley and Eight?
(I... don’t really know how this happened. Forgive me?)
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“If you really loved me there wouldn’t be a choice.”
The words lance through her, a spear twisting it’s blade invisibly into her heart, splitting it and leaving her to bleed. Her vision swims, the world tilting sideways in the dark until she could see nothing but the Doctor’s face, expression twisting into something hard and ugly- his face flickering somehow through the haze of her vision.
Everything felt wrong, heavy and stretched and pulled to it’s edges.
Love.
The word echoes in her mind. She loves him. She does. She has… so long now. Oh so long. But this was wrong. It wasn’t him. Somehow. Where were they?
“It isn’t a choice.”
“Don’t lie, Charley,” his voice said, velvet tones hiding a biting sharpness and the tang of something darker still.
She shook her head, pushing herself up from the ground, cool and solid beneath her palms.
“Whatever you are - don’t call me that.”
He laughed, deep and cold, as she stared down at him, sitting still on what was clearly now the floor of console room.
Her fingers twitch, growing clammy around the sword hilt there. How long had that been there? She felt the pull of gravity- on herself, on the sword. That inexorable need to fall and let it sweep everything away. She couldn’t let go. Her fingers tighten around the sword, holding on.
“Can’t do it twice?”
Her eyes flash down to meet his, blue as ever, but not his. They look like ice, chips of blue in dim lights of the TARDIS column. The tip of the sword glints in that same light. And she knows.
He wasn’t a man. He wasn’t even a monster. He certainly wasn’t the Doctor. He was a nightmare.
Love, she thinks again, in the face of a figment her mind had created.
She thinks of the things her grandmother used to say to her when she was a child about what love is.
Love is real. Love is deep. Love is patient. All of those things might well have been true, but she was still learning what love looked like.
But there was one thing she knew.
Love isn’t fear.
She pushes the sword forward.
And wakes up.