Falling Feels Like Flying (till The Bone Crush)

Falling feels like flying (till the bone crush)

Pairing: Eleventh Doctor x Reader, Tenth Doctor x Reader, Ninth Doctor x Reader

Word Count: 2, 243

Warnings: All angst, no happy ending

Summary: Reader is faced with a gross realisation. What everyone has been saying about her is true, she's a flight risk. Now it's up to her to show the Doctor that.

A/N: This entire thing literally only exists because I read Flight Risk by @storytelling-timelord so from one Elle to another, thank you for giving me the jump start I need to get to writing again!! For everyone else, I super recommend reading her stuff!!

On a day that wasn’t then, but long before today, you would wonder why Jack Harkness would call you this. Why, saddled up in the console room, giving the Doctor a private, sad smile, he would map the words onto your skin, a brand of hot iron at the base of your neck.

“She’s a flight risk,” he would say. He would warn.

And the Doctor would scoff, his Northern drawl spilling from him with ease, with the confidence of a man who was used to being right, of reading people right.

He would say that’s absurd, that you were human, too human. The kind of human who would look just as quickly at a lone daffodil in a field, or a new-born nebula, and see nothing but the beauty in the matter that formed it, of the star dust that danced around you in every bated breath.

No, he would say. You ran because you ran with the Doctor. You wouldn’t run without him.

And Jack would move to reply, his eyes far more honest that the rueful grin he forced his features into, but you would skip into the console room, curious, but unspoken. It had been some time since you established this little tradition with the Doctor, a dance just shy of moving in.

Every month – maybe, time was never accurate on the TARDIS – you would gather more of your belonging, tucking them into the space that made up your room.

And the Doctor would grin, look at you with an expression you wouldn’t be able to name, but would later learn, and ask if you were ready to go.

And Jack would grin, eyes dark though smile bright, pat the Doctor on the shoulder and ask for his own pit stop.

Today however, you roamed the TARDIS’ ever sprawling library, greeting each hard bound book, each fraying paperback, like an old friend.

And there, in golden letters, printed in the grain of an old bookshelf sagging under its own weight, was what you had never thought to be afraid of. Your name.

Your fingers ghosted over the imprint, trailing every stroke, every curve.

Your body went cold.

You knew these halls, floated through them like ink flows on paper, yet you had never seen this. Did you dare ask how long it had been there? Breathe your knowledge of this into the air? What would the Doctor say? Would he tell you he had been the one to do this? Would he see how terrified it made you feel?

Your free hand went to the back of your head, fingers trailing over the fine hair from where your skull met your neck. Your hand stopped as it met the base of your neck. In an instant you gripped tight.

Flight risk.

--

In the beginning, you found falling felt rather like flying. The Doctor didn’t steal your breath, he would snake into your lungs with an easy grin and bright laughter, and you found yourself giving it to him.

You hadn’t known yet, how easily Sarah-Jane Smith saw things. You didn’t yet know about the knowing. How important knowing was when it came to love.

But she knew, you think now she always had.

You only knew four things at that point, which you had thought was enough. First, you loved the Doctor. Second, he loved you. Third, loving one another was hard – harder than anything you had ever done.

Fourth, it was worth it.

But Sarah-Jane Smith had gripped onto the Doctor's arm, eyes wide and afraid as she spoke to him. She was speaking from experience, recognising him in you. Recognising why he loved you.

“She’s a flight risk,” she would say. She would implore.

And the Doctor would laugh, a full body movement that would sweep into his coat. He would say that you were fast, that lighting crackled beneath you, and he was the thunder – hand gripped tight in yours. That flight was fine because he was flying with you.

And you wouldn’t intrude on the way their conversation would unfold. You would turn off the monitor in the console room, toying with the idea of flight.

Because the Doctor was right, wasn’t he? You were already flying, where was the risk if the flying was for him?

Today however, you stumbled into the hallway, tripping over the slippers you had left at the foot of the library door. Your hand grazed the nearest wall, fingers mapping the grooves and nubs that you had tracked thousands of times.

Thousands? Had you really been here long enough for thousands?

You twisted down the hallway, finding your bedroom. You pawed for the light switch, a thin smear of dust pressing into your fingertips. Under the soft light, it barely looked familiar.

Trinkets you had long forgotten about sat on makeshift shelves, detailing adventures you would so often bring up in soft jokes and old laughter. An old journal sat on a desk, framed by photographs and pressings from flowers and leaves of various planets, untouched. Even your bed was locked in time, the sheets firmly tucked in all corners – unslept and well kept.

It had been so long since this had been your room, the room you spent your time in, the room you slept in. The evidence was clear as day. This room, which had once been yours, inviting and warm, was foreign. You were a stranger in your own space.

Had you lost yourself?

Flight risk.

--

Three faces you had known him. Three lifetimes of learning – of cataloguing and developing your very best knowing. Because it was the knowing that was key to any good relationship.

Like the knowing in how the Doctor took his tea, always with a dash of milk, always two sugars.

And in the knowing of how the Doctor looked at the stars, with the sort of wonder you had thought unparalleled, until he looked at you.

Or in the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled – always.

It never was a matter that the face had changed, that the eyes were new, and the slope of his jaw would bend into each new shape. The Doctor, you had come to find, was familiar, the extraordinary bottled into skin and bones with two hearts.

River Song was next, with a curious expression you have yet to unravel. She would take the Doctor’s hand, draw his eyes into her own, her voice low when she spoke. She would tell him how he was playing with fire, how – for once – he was the one who was about to get burned.

“She’s a flight risk,” she would say. She would mourn.

And the Doctor would shake his head, because River had seen, same as him, how cemented you were by his side. He would tell of her of the obstacles you had overcome, of the fears you had faced within each other, of the fate defying feats you had both pulled to keep one another in your orbit.

Then Amy – or maybe it was Rory, would call out to you, and their conversation would be lost behind you as you planned for the next adventure.

But the comment would linger, eat away through the goosebumps that would rise when Rivers gaze turned to you.

And it was then that you would wonder about Jack's first comment. It was arrogant, foolish. What did any of them know?

But the Doctors gaze would follow, it would wrap against your throat and claw into your skin.

But as always, you kept your thoughts onto the next adventure.

Today however, you gripped a photograph left on the desk. It was you, grinning into the camera, Martha Jones on one side, the Doctor on the other. You were young, your smile brighter, your eyes wider.

Your hand found itself on your cheek. Your fingers paved over your skin, over the new lines that had formed around your eyes, the creases in your cheeks, the weariness in their colour.

You were older now. So much older.

How many years had gone by? Would you ever be able to count them?

The photo fluttered out of your grasp. There was only one choice.

Flight Risk.

--

Permanency wasn’t a luxury you afforded yourself. Love was hard, and the knowing was harder. You loved knowing people, loved recognising the things that made them smile, made them laugh.

But the knowing in turn was ruthless.

The Doctor was changing, it was a knowledge that wrung itself in your chest, twisting into your veins and clotting itself into your arteries. If you had been self-aware, you would have seen the change you brought with it, how you drew yourself in, built around you more walls before the Doctor could find a jackhammer to carve them through.

You wondered if loving the Doctor truly was good – if the flying was true. How long until the flight was the Doctor leaving, once he saw too much of you?

Madame Kovarian would give you a lazy grin, the eye not hidden by the eye-patch toying with the way she looked at you and the Doctor. It was slow, languid, revelling in all the time she had to unravel you.

It only took her a moment, a cat like pause before her grin would stretch and twist into something wicked.

“She’s a flight risk,” she would say. She would applaud.

The Doctor would waver – he had never done that before. His voice would shake before falling firm. He wouldn’t mention you, he would talk of her, of the tricks she would pull, of the grip she held on to the universe.

And you would tell yourself that was enough, and you would forget it, hyperfocus on the need to fix this, on the need to win. This is what you did with the Doctor, fall into step, a routine so focused your body and his weren’t their own.

Today however, you fumbled for the vortex manipulator you knew was hidden here. You weren’t sure who the one who hid it was. Maybe it was Jack. Maybe it was River. In the end, it didn’t matter.

Your fingers curled around the worn strap, hidden deep in the console. For a moment you marvelled at the memory of the others, of the people who had left their own mark on the TARDIS.

The thought soon soured.

Because how could you think of a mark in the TARDIS, without thinking of yourself. You could see the evidence of you in this very console room. Your jumped hung over the railing. The book you were currently reading sat by the controls. An old mug, paired with the Doctors, sat by the staircase.

It sprawled out in front of you.

You. You.

You.

You tried to place the change, the moment where the you in your bedroom had spilled into the TARDIS. The moment your space was the Doctors.

You were everywhere.

There you were, your sunscreen stuck by the TARDIS front door. You were in the kitchen, tins of your favourite teas lining the shelf by the kettle. Your footsteps marked the hallways, old shoes you had kicked off before reaching your next stop, the scuff from old boots.

Your breath came in shaky, knotting in your throat.

Flight Risk.

--

The Doctor would rip the last page out of every book, all to avoid the ending. It was a quirk of his you knew well – you knew all his quirks well.

And although you knew it, you didn’t understand it.

Leaving was an inevitability for you and him. An end for all endings, even this. There was no permanency here. No proof that things would last, that he would stay. That you would stay.

There couldn’t be. Time was fickle, time was fleeting, and it was flying. Just like you were flying – you were sure of it.

Falling rather felt like flying. Until the fall was less flying, and more bone crashing into cement.

You couldn’t see the Doctor before you left, you had half the heart that he did, and that wasn’t accounting for the physical accuracy of the statement.

It was a rash decision, the logical part of you, the part screaming for you to slow down, knew it was rash. But wasn’t rash what you were known for?

Rash was jumping into a time machine with a man you just met. Rash was dancing with the stars, chasing time figures in the night. Rash was the running, all the running.

So, this time it was you. It wasn’t River, Jack, it wasn’t even the Doctor. It was simply you.

You scrawled a note, leaving it against the final lever on the console, the one the Doctor would throw before his next adventure. Alone.

I’m a flight risk, you had said.

You were gone.

--

If you had stayed, you would have seen it. You would have seen the way the Doctor stood – silent, alone – the note gripped in the palm of his hand.

The Doctor shattered.

His body splayed the TARDIS floor like ceramic before the mosaic, hauntingly tragic, ripped into the seam of the canvas.

By his side lay the ring, the reason he had left the TARDIS at all. It clattered against the railing; louder than the question he could now never ask you.

And it was the Doctor who now knew, who had learned. That the flying, that the falling? Was bone crushingly broken.

A/N^2: I really loved playing with prose while writing this, seriously, it was so fun. Thank you so much for reading! For the regulars, I've got a lot of unfinished wips that should I get the motivation are almost done, so hopefully I'll get to posting again more regularly!

EDIT: I'm writing a happy ending sequel! Lemme know if you'd like to be tagged when it comes out!