Oh, Lucie Miller. The words want to slide out of his lips and, for an unsentimental old man, he wants to raise his hands and cup her chin just for a moment. It's like having a lost planet back. Just for a second. A whole life. Hers, and his. Who he was. Who he'd been. Before he became. . . . everything he had no choice but to become, and everything he could never take back from himself again.

But it would be too telling, too. She's too smart, or he's cruel, maybe too cruel to them both even right now, or both.
Except she turns away, and as much as he hates it, that is probably saving both of them, even as her voice cracks.

"When did everything become about you, hey?" The Doctor says it soft, like a joke, without stepping out of her space or pulling her back to where she was. "The universe is still holding itself together with filament and invisible string around us right this moment." Before that joke slides away, too, and what's there is real but it's not terribly serious, soft but not coddling. "He will. I -- We --" He gives her an exaggerated raise of eyebrows at the tenses, before nodding, again. "It will."

He was right this second, and he was an old man giving in to what he shouldn't already here.

There was no way his earlier self would or could stay apart from her right after it happened.

When she was the greatest grief and nothing else had usurped that place yet.