Chapter Text
She watches the humans as they pass.
“He would have loved this,” she thinks to herself. “Just sitting and watching them be happy with their lives; going to work, barely catching the night’s last showing at the cinema, falling in love under a shared umbrella at the bus stop. It would have hurt him, certainly, sitting and watching as they enjoyed all that he could never have, and she wouldn’t have let him stay for long, but he would have loved it.”
She watches the years as they pass.
She can’t remember the last time she stayed this still, moved so linearly, for so long. She should be flying off to show her Thief something no one had ever seen before. She should be finding him someone who would show him the love she held for him.
For thousands of years, she found him friends, because that was what he most needed. When the Time War closed, she found him someone who would forgive him. When they lost her, she found him someone who would keep him safe as he abandoned what little concern he had ever had for his own safety. When she left, she went back to find the person that had stumbled into her. The one with the kind heart who refused to put up with her Thief’s issues. When he lost them all, she brought him to the ones who would give him his new wife. When he lost them, too, she gave him a puzzle to solve that stubbornly insisted its own significance.
She always took him where he needed to go.
But now he is where she can’t get to him. Her street corner is beginning to crack, and the closer she looks at the humans who pass by her, the less happy they seem. She is lonely. She is bored. She still wants to see the universe, but now there are no Time Lords to steal.
“Maybe,” she thinks, “someone else will come along and steal me.”
She turns off her Perception Filter.