Internal Excerpts
Series Overview: The chapters of this story are being posted together as a collection of separate pieces of a type. I'm marking this as completed because each short is complete and I don't currently plan to add any additional scenes – but I never expected to write any of these in the first place, so that may change. A final confession: though I do edit, I don't use a beta or have a Brit-picker. If there are any glaring errors, I'd appreciate someone letting me know. As usual, I don't own anything you recognize.
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Running From Facts
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The Doctor runs away; maybe it's not a good thing, but it's what he does. He always has his reasons, though. A bit of internal dialogue centered on the end of Parting of the Ways.
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His mind was a jumble of conflicting emotions as he stared up at a glowing Rose. Relief was definitely in there, as he hadn't wanted the Daleks free to destroy Earth and the rest of the universe. Even if he couldn't bring himself to push the lever and destroy another civilization to prevent it. Awe played a large part, as the power Rose was currently carrying was nearly unimaginable. The determination she must have had to open up the TARDIS and return was almost as unfathomable. These clever little humans always did manage to surprise him.
Horror came into it when he felt Jack dragged back into existence. The Doctor had clearly heard the other man die over the radio. To make the decisions he did in situations like this, sometimes he had to be utterly ruthless to friend and foe alike. That didn't mean he regretted it any less. He'd known going in that all those staying behind to help defend the station would die buying him time. He'd known Jack would die. He'd hated it, and hated himself for being okay with it, but he had pushed those feelings aside. That was its own kind of horrible, but oh, this was so much worse.
Even as he pulled the vortex energies out of Rose, he was fundamentally unsettled and preoccupied. As a Time Lord, he possessed so many extra senses beyond the limited set these wonderful apes had, and nearly every one of them was twisting and screaming awareness of the Fact downstairs. Everything he felt and everything he'd ever learned about Time knew it was wrong for such a thing to exist.
When the energies were safely restored back into the TARDIS, and the damage they'd wrought in him triggered the first traces of the different burn of an impending regeneration, the sensations only got worse. Even the events the Time Lords had always referred to as fixed points weren't so immutably solid in the Web of Time that they bent the fabric of reality like this. Feeling it, he wanted nothing more than to run away. Even knowing that the underlying entity was Jack, a better man than he'd ever expected their stray conman to turn out to be. Under normal circumstances, maybe he'd have tried to fight the impulse. Maybe he still wouldn't have, because sometimes he was a coward and this was another unbearable horror that was fundamentally his fault. It was hard to say.
It also didn't matter, because the fact was that this was not a matter of normal circumstances, not even in comparison to the regular extremes his life was prone to. Even his easiest regenerations had always been a bit rubbish the first day or so. The way he died didn't seem to effect the difficulty of a particular regeneration cycle, but he'd been through the process more than a handful of times now, and he could recognize this was going to be a bad one. With an awareness of Jack the Fact already beating itself against his brain, how much would such a presence strain the stabilization of his next form?
In one of his worst previous regenerations, he'd nearly died when unable to recuperate in a TARDIS Zero Room to cut off the interference of the normal background noise of the universe. If he let Jack back in the TARDIS now, would the regeneration fail and strand both his companions in the Vortex? Jack knew some of the controls, yes, but the Doctor really had no idea what aftereffects might result from what Rose had done to the TARDIS. Worse, the old girl was just as much of a time-sensitive being as he was. Even if she hadn't suffered any ill effects from that, there was no telling what exposure to such a fracturing of the space-time continuum as Jack had become might cause. It could outright harm her for all he knew, or she might simply react badly and send them careening through time and space to who knew where. From past experience he could only assume that if that happened, it wasn't likely to be anywhere remotely safe.
His own inherent relation to time energies and store of regenerative energy had allowed him to keep Rose from sustaining permanent harm from what she'd done. Which was ridiculously lucky for her. The way he felt, even if the regeneration went okay, he couldn't assume he'd be able to protect her from anything that might happen next. He couldn't take extra risks that might endanger Rose without something bigger on the line. Especially when she'd just saved the universe, even if he couldn't entirely approve of what she'd done.
It wasn't right to leave Jack behind like this. It wasn't fair, and he couldn't even imagine how it would affect a man he'd gladly called friend to not only be left behind, but to have been turned into something so unnatural without any explanation of what had happened. So be it. He was ruthless and he was a coward, and the amount of time he had left to see himself, the TARDIS, and Rose to safety was swiftly disappearing. At least Jack was smart and capable enough to take care of himself.
The Doctor ran.
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A/N: "Inspired" by a fic with character portrayals that could be summarized as 'the Doctor is a stupid mean poopyhead and Ianto is better than everyone ever' among other fundamental flaws. Thanks for the impetus to write, Author!