“I haven’t got the slightest idea what you’re sulking about right now, but you are full of shit. I don’t know who you think you’re fooling, me or yourself, but you only ever play at fixing your TARDIS when you’re sulking. You know how I know? When I fixed it, the poor thing was so irritated she showed me video files of the ‘error logs’. Unprompted. So please, before you start messing with those wires and literally reroute the temperature controls to the console room through the engine room, potentially dropping the temperature in here to about 6 Kelvin to compensate, please, just put it down and come with me? I get it. You’re still mad I flat out refused to respond to you on Sedition. You think I was trying to hurt you. That I’m angry with you. I’m not used to having complex feelings, Doctor. I pretty much stuck to a constant five or six for the last thousand years. Silence was pretty much the safest thing I could do for either of us, because at the time, I thought it would be best if maybe I just... disappeared from your life forever. Because here’s the thing. We’re bad for each other. We always have been, pulling each other this way and that but always, always towards the edge of sanity and mayhem and chaos, whether it was good or evil. And I think, once you get far enough down that road, the lines between good and evil get much, much blurrier. Blurry enough that this time, I ran away, and you had to chase me down. I always thought maybe you were running away from me, but I get it now. Maybe you wouldn’t destroy galaxies in my name, and maybe I would never learn to care about anyone or anything enough destroy myself for its sake but, oh, we did. We loved each other enough to tear each other to shreds and drag each other kicking and screaming through thousands of years and that is terrifying and beautiful and deadly and I was just... so scared that maybe one day, I wouldn’t be the one dying, because, well, death is for other people, my dear.
“...People like you. I’ll survive anything you throw at me, but I don’t know if you’d survive me at my most desperate.” Her voice is almost perfectly steady as she continues her explanation, but there’s just enough of a tremor to betray how emotional she’s getting. “I don’t hate you. I never could. But I didn’t know how else to pull us back from the edge. I’m still not sure. So I want to sort of... give you a gift. To make up for all the incredibly terrible ones I’ve given you over the years, and I promise, there is no one else involved except tangentially and I did not cause a single death to produce this gift. Not even an injury. It’s an actual, genuine gift, and I won’t lie and tell you it won’t hurt but... Dealing with what we’ve done to each other is going to have to hurt, Doctor. Because what’s driven us both here, what we’ve always both been running from, was pain. And we can’t keep running from it or else you know how it’s going to end. You know where this story has been going. Please. Just... for a few minutes, let it go, and trust me to make history here with the first real good decision either us have made about the other in a very long time.”
