Who: The Doctor and OPEN What: The Doctor finally decides to stop running. Where: The TARDIS, his TARDIS, parked near the cemetery. When: January 9th Rating: TBD Notes: [ Since I've been gone for a bit, I decided not to backdate, but I'm bringing him back with a bit of a re-introduction post and a very loud muse!]
A snap of his fingers drew the doors of the TARDIS swinging open and made way for bright red shoes to go pressing out into the outside world. "Ah." He commented on the heels of a deep, chilled, breath. "There. See?" He phrased the question over his shoulder. "Told you. Much better. See? Look. Everything's fine. No universal collapse. No fire falling from the sky. Nothing bad at all." His expression shifted into a teasing smile as he turned on a heel to look back through the open doors of the TARDIS. "And you were worried about me...I told you, really, you were just being paranoid. I'm here, well, really, lots of me's here, nothing they couldn't handle."
The truth of the matter was, though, that all of it had been more than he'd been ready to handle. His whole life he'd put his feet to the ground, his eyes to the stars, and his heart to time - his whole, entire, life he'd done very little more than run. He'd run so far and so fast, never looking back over his shoulder, never even second guessing his own actions, or the impact they'd cause. Davros has cited this in him, had pointed into the hearts of The Doctor and pulled forth the grand truth which he'd hoped never to face - and it hadn't gotten any better from there.
Coming face to face with one of his oldest and most unforgiving of nemesi, had been only the beginning of the long spiral. He'd dealt with the figurative representation a man who thought he was him. He'd dealt with a thief on a planet of the dead. He'd met the first colonists of Mars and been shown, first hand, just how wrong of him it was to think that he could change the rules. Then he'd come here, to Red Oak, and he was quite sure he was being punished for his transgressions against all of time.
River song was here, his Metacrisis self was here, his future self was here, The Master was here his future companions were here and even Rose was here. The only people who seemed, blissfully, absent had been Jack Harkness and Jenny. Still, that hadn't been enough to convince him that, somehow, some way, he'd ended up in the closest things a Time Lord could ever imagine that would resemble a, very real, hell. Maybe he really had run afoul of the great beast back along? He didn't know. He couldn't think.
He knew the game, all the Time Lords did. What was gone was gone and what they touched, what they did, could never be undone by them. You had to live for a very, very, long time with all the things you'd ever done playing just behind your eyes. All your memories, all your mistakes, all the things you missed and all the things you'd done wrong...all the people you'd failed...they were always right there, just waiting, but that wasn't enough for him. For what he'd done, for the wrongs he'd committed, he'd been punished by having it all presented to him, forcing him to live through that which he'd always run from.
He'd done the only thing he could think to do then, and shut himself up in his TARDIS. She worked, even if she wouldn't fly and didn't make sense, and The Doctor knew he needed that time to simply think on what he'd done. He needed to reflect on just who he was, and on the type of Time Lord he would be now. He was 'The Time Lord Victorious', he was 'The Oncoming Storm', he was a thousand and one monikers to a thousand and one other races. He was the face of hope, a hero of countless times. He was the greatest and most dangerous man the universe had ever known to others, but who was he to himself?
It took countless hours of thinking, of quiet, with nothing but the comforting hum and clang of the TARDIS to soothe his mind. When he finally reached the conclusion it seemed as simple as it ever had: He was The Doctor. He was a man who did his best to do good and right by the world. He experienced what he could, when he could, as he could, and did his best not to leave a mess of things in his wake because, when he did, there was nothing he could do about it. It had occurred to him, all at once, that maybe this wasn't hell, but rather a chance for him to set right the things which he'd set wrong in the first place. He was The Doctor, after all, and fixing things was the one thing he was better at than anything.
So, he did what any self-respecting, Time Lord with a TARDIS and access to a giant communications network would do. He sent a message, announcing himself, and that he'd be venturing into the middle of town for a bit of a walk, and set out to do just that.
"Now, and don't get jealous, I just spent a lot of time with you, I've got things to do, places to go, people to see, and a fantastic - oh, haven't used that one in awhile - new world to go explore. You just stay put." He snapped his fingers again, closing the doors behind him, before he turned on his heel and made his way to one of his favorite places in the whole of time and space: Destination Unknown