the fourteenth doctor; doctor who (doctorfun) wrote in the100, @ 2016-01-25 22:10:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log/thread, doctor (10), doctor (12) |
who ten & twelve!
what uncomfortable conversations, no doubt!
where back at the flat!
when after he’s caught up with martha!
warnings doctor levels of awkward self-interaction?
Things were certainly in a convoluted state of affairs. While his life could be described as much on a regular basis, the added bonus of being confined to a glorified underground bunker on a post-apocalyptic Earth certainly added to its charm. Trapped on Earth, the past, present, and future grinding together nonstop collectively threw him for an inescapable loop.
It wasn’t youth that landed him in hot water more often than not these days. This face had tasted what it was like to be human and longed for it on the worst of days. Loneliness took a toll on any man, and though the Doctor was far from being some so-called ordinary person, he didn’t altogether understand the ensuing effects.
He knew he had stoked a fire that couldn’t be quelled, and that meant running. Running right into the next-next face he’d impossibly have thanks to the Impossible Girl herself.
Stopping at the threshold of the door as he opened it to find his future self in the living room, the Doctor swallowed uncomfortably hard. He hadn’t really had to directly face himself or the consequences of his choices. That face knew what it was like having this one, remembered the feelings and the tragic way they had to end so many times that he felt much older than his years dictated.
Shutting the door audibly behind him, the Doctor shuffled toward his twelfth (but technically thirteenth by direct descent of regeneration, he supposed) face with all the reluctance of a young boy dreading the first glimpse of the Untempered Schism.
“Didn’t expect you to be back here,” he announced him with a cough into his fist, gaze purposefully averted. “Then again, suppose I should have. Right. Ah… Well.” What could he say? How goes it? Do you fancy the weather’s going to get worse? Sorry about that snogging bit earlier, that was unusual, wasn’t it? Do you remember Good Queen Bess?
He settled on a very pronounced nothing further.
The Doctor looked up from where he sat, half-sprawled across one of the living room chairs. He had his guitar at hand, but hadn't really been playing it. The thing about music was it required a certain inspiration that he lacked right now.
Everything came back to the idea that he always lost. Even against himself, he'd lost, not that it had been a competition really. He didn't want Clara in the way his tenth incarnation seemed to, and even if he did, he'd graciously accept that the other was...much better at all of that. And, really, it wasn't any of that at all, even if they'd had that whole moment earlier…
Twelve wanted to tell Ten that had been entirely his fault. He should have known the shared living space was off limits, or set up some sort of system. Except Twelve didn't really know any of that.
"Ah, well, I live here, don't I?" Twelve was looking directly at his counterpart, but not really seeing him. Had he really had that much hair? It was a point of contention that he didn't quite believe. And why had Skaro reappeared? And what was it with his not quite so young counterparts and snogging?
"Now, wasn't really expecting you so soon…"
This Doctor had never abided saying nothing very well at all.
Tugging at his ear, the Doctor looked upon his older face with pronounced guilt. This was all brand new, he didn’t know how to proceed. The way he’d felt about Rose had been as profound and yet infinitely more inexplicable once upon a time, so much so he’d never had the time to do something about it. He always deceived himself into believing there would be more of it, though just masochistic enough to know that it would never be that way.
“You do,” said the Doctor reluctantly, nodding as he frowned at his own folly. “Was a bit unplanned, but then also planned in the sense that the contents of the plan were something of a surprise. Not important, I was just, ah… Blimey, this is a bit weird, isn’t it?”
He remembered being a younger face meeting his older faces. It wasn’t a terribly common occurrence, but in the life he led--that they led--it was bound to happen once in a blue moon. Anything more than that would be catastrophic for the Earth. The Doctor still hadn’t worked out why that wasn’t the case in this universe. How far removed was it from the rest of the Void that it went so unaffected?
“Anyway,” he said with a bit of a cough into his fist. “Was catching Martha up. Remember Martha Jones? Good seeing her again. She was here, then she wasn’t, then she was but gone again, and now she’s back. Starting to think she’s not fond of the place, can’t imagine why.”
Rambling wasn’t helping cut the atmosphere of the room, but at the end of the day, that was all the Doctor had: his gob.
The Doctor raised an eyebrow. "Can't imagine why."
He remembered Martha. He remembered everyone in the end. Some memories were a bit hazier than others, all crammed together as they were with two thousand years of history. But Martha would have been hard to forget. She'd been brilliant, and now she was stuck here with the rest of them.
It didn't seem quite fair.
"It's got to be the weather, or you know… I don't know. Hard to say what a place like this is thinking, bringing us all together without any consideration for where we want to be…"
He recognized that wasn't an unusual occurrence. The TARDIS did it all the time. But this? This whole mess seemed a bit much.
"Don't you agree?"
Clara had been spot on in her assessment long ago. He attempted to avoid his future self because he was afraid of him. No matter how far he’d fallen, the Doctor didn’t want to go back and change. He’d grown too sentimental, too connected to everything this face meant. Staring vacantly at the floor, he tried to focus on the turn of the Earth.
All he could sense was the impact of his older face’s words.
“Well…” He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “I don’t know about want, perhaps ‘need’ is the operative word, but… Yes and no, a bit. I agree a bit.”
Coming around the sofa, he took a seat on the coffee table across from his successor. Hands clasped together between his knees, the Doctor carried on avoiding a direct visual encounter. He wasn’t prepared for exploring the feelings he was experiencing with Clara let alone having been caught enjoying them like some sort of… human.
“You want to be back traveling the stars with Clara,” he stated as the world’s simplest observation. “Hard to sort out of a way back now, even for us. Haven’t stopped looking though. Might be easier if I can get the TARDIS fully grown. Should be done before the year’s up, but who knows? Point is… I haven’t got one. Do have a question though, a distracting one, if you’ll humor me.”
"Oh?" said the Doctor, eyes fixed on his younger self. He wasn't as afraid as he should have been of such a statement. He'd seen it all, or so he thought. That he'd seen himself with Clara… Well, he didn't know what that made him feel. His younger self was right. He needed to be traveling the stars, not cooped up in an apocalyptic stronghold. It reminded him too much of UNIT, of his exile all those years ago. "What is it?"
As much as the Doctor yearned to be among the stars, too, he couldn’t help the tiny bit of selfishness that made him want to stick around in Mount Weather, too. It didn’t suit his need to run, what with the limited locations for him to run to, but he had a place there. He had his friends back in defiance of time itself, and he wanted to enjoy that for as long as he could.
“Before I came here, I thought I was going to live,” he began, expression falling. “But, it was him, wasn’t it? Wilfred Mott. I’ve got his gun in my pocket somewhere. When I look at it, I remember… I’ve got to save him, don’t I?”
The Doctor's expression turned dark. Of all the questions, that was the one he least wanted to answer.
"It's what we do," he said, fidgeting with one of the strings on his guitar. "We save them. I'm not a hero, but sometimes, I think the right choices happen upon me…" He looked up from his guitar, a sad look on his face.
"Like you and Clara. You made the right decision there."
There was no argument from his younger face. With a furrowed brow, he stared at the floor. It was easy to put the pieces together then. Wilfred was the end, the reason their paths crossed were because of it. Before he could delve deeper into those thoughts, his impossible face said something disarming.
“Sorry?” He questioned, head lifting to send him a questioning look. “You mean…?” The trouble with talking to a future face was lacking the details to bring him to that point. He was a different man each time. That face he wore resonated with the Doctor now, all the talk of saving people steeped him deeper into nostalgia.
“Right, of course,” he interjected hastily. “She's brilliant, but you know that.”
The older Doctor considered the other's face for a moment. Of all the possibilities that he saw there, he thought that this was the right one. It was so rare for the Doctor now to have any sense of what the right path was, having lived so long on all of the wrong ones. And yet, whatever his own feelings about the situation, he knew that what he had said was true.
"I mean, I'm always better when she's at my back. She's brilliant, perhaps more so than I am in some ways. You know how it is… You live long enough, and you start to see the world the wrong way… "
He let the sentence trail off into silence. "You start to think you can stop the impossible."
“Then you meet it and wonder why you’d ever want to stop it in the first place,” he nodded, eyes a thousand yards away. There was a tiny bit of comfort in the exchange shared, strange as it was to be comforted by his future face in a way. He understood his successor’s words. Although the Doctor’s response might not have seemed as though he had, he suspected he hadn’t gone misunderstood in return.
He knew himself pretty well, after all, even if he didn’t like the mistakes he would go on to make. That was the trouble with mistakes, they were awfully unpleasant things. For now, they’d just have to grapple with the missteps taken in the wavering present in which they were trapped.