There is a moment, which to Smith stretches for an eternity, between John Smith dying and the Doctor returning to his body. In this moment, inside their shared mind, they stand before each other and the Doctor doesn't smile or joke. He doesn't even have the decency to look ashamed.
"You teach History, don't you? You should know that there's always some poor bugger having to die so that some other git can go on to get all the glory."
John Smith is fast becoming Time Lord and at the same time fading – fast dying.
He does teach History. He isn't dying, though. Dying involves bodies and death certificates and burials. Remembrance. Napoleon died. Bismarck died. His profession is to commemorate dead human beings, to immortalise their actions and inactions. His life is to remember them. And now his life will be forgotten. He's being wiped out of existence, never to be seen or heard again. A fading memory. That's all. And it isn't fair.
"No one will remember me." It sounds petulant when it passes his lips. But he wants this Doctor to know. He wants someone to know about his humanity. The thoughts he was too ashamed to voice. The fears he couldn't even write in his journal.
"They all wanted you and they'll never remember me."
"She'll remember you."
He bemoans his own fate for a second more, resenting his inability to be either mortal or immortal. It's not fair to give a concept a mind, hopes and fears. The worst kind of cruelty. To create and forget a living creature so quickly. Oh, intolerable.
(Humans, the Doctor decides, are always doing this. Such a self involved species.)
But he remembers, with a slight knife twist to his single heart, Joan. Instantly, he doesn't matter.
He stares at this identical man, defiantly. "Please. Be kind to her. She's – well, she's marvellous. And I can't bear to have the world be any crueller to her."
(Humans, the Doctor decides, are always doing this. Even when being wiped out of existence, cast into oblivion, they care more about another human's heart than their own fate.)
"Just be kind. It's the most important thing, Doctor. Kindness." Something in his voice suggests some doubt of the Doctor's morality, some idea that kindness is only a human virtue and cruelty an inhuman one. It rankles in a way. It hits, he supposes, awfully close to the bone.
"I'll look after her."
"No – she doesn't need looked after. She doesn't need anything, you see. She'll be alright, Joan." He clears his throat and attempts a smile. "I'd have liked her to have been my Joan."
And in a second he's gone. The eternity is over and there aren't even atoms to scatter. A tiny voice beseeching mercy in the recesses of the Doctor's conscience. That's all.
(But, to the Doctor, sometimes it's everything.)
So this is my awkward way of getting interaction between the Doctor and John Smith. Because I love John Smith more than I love homo-erotic 90s Britpop. Which I love a lot. Besides, although I believe that Joan and John's story is the most tragic and perfect in Who history (Parting of the Ways? Please.) I couldn't let it go without some wanky fiction, you know?
REVIEW. Caps are proven to make people do things.