Off we go!
This fic is going to be fairly strange. It's the first POV piece I've written for Doctor Who, and capturing the 10th Doctor's voice is no easy feat.
Note the "M" rating, and keep an open mind. This is going somewhere, I promise, but it might not be pretty. You've been warned. :-)
Me
Life is funny. And cruel and brilliant and enigmatic... sort of like me, actually. Only without the good hair and dashing smile.
And like me, sometimes it's all of those at once. We all take stock, we all look at our lives and wonder. That's something all sentient beings in the universe have in common.
Life, though... life is not living. Two totally separate things. Everyone has a life, but not everyone truly lives. Sometimes we forget that – even me.
Life gives you stuff. Living is about what you give back. When someone dies and we eulogise them and we begin to ask ourselves "how did he live?" The question is answered by what he gave back when life gave him stuff. When life gave him lemons, did he make lemonade or just stand there with a sour face wishing he had oranges? Or did he just let the lemons hit him on the head on their way to rolling out of the lemon patch into somewhere else?
But how does one truly live? If you exist as long as I have, you wind up asking that question perhaps more often than is strictly healthy. It can drive you insane, that. Especially if you change your face and personality and philosophy and environment nine times in less than a millennium. Have I lived? Have I done everything I could? Last Tuesday when I was watching Susan Boyle on the telly, how many died on planet X, Y or Z? I should have been there to save them. Or maybe I should have just gone bungee jumping...
Most of my life I've felt that truly living is facing down death, staring it in the face and telling it off. That's just the sort of bloke I am, and will always be. It's only the manner in which I do it that differs from one regeneration to the next.
And most of my life, I've also felt that living is surrounding yourself with people you love and trust and enjoy, people who are not opposed to truly living themselves. And with all of this, the most noble of sentiments, the real answer emerges: living is making the universe a better place. Which I really, genuinely try to do. Usually.
I've oscillated plenty, added to and subtracted from my basic philosophy. A lot of that has depended upon the people and events in my life - what stuff do they give me, and what do I give back? When circumstances destroy my home planet, how do I console myself? When someone I care about winds up exiled to a parallel universe, how do I ensure it doesn't happen again? When someone I care about cares about me a little too much, exactly how badly shall I take it? But almost right up until the day when I regenerated for the ninth time, I felt this was all I needed to know: Make the universe better by facing down death and caring for others. And that's that. Fantastic. I am complete.
Oh, but perhaps not.
And then something changed. Every time I wake from a regeneration, there is a bit of adjustment. I ask myself, who is the Doctor now? Apart from the basics, what am I like? Falling out of the TARDIS on Christmas Eve, I already knew at least one thing: the leather jacket and combat boots had to go. And when I woke up in the TARDIS hours later in Howard's pyjamas and stepped outside to face the Sycorax, I could feel something different. Something was making me different. But what was it? It was a familiar feeling, not totally alien, not particularly unpleasant, but definitely insistent. It was something I hadn't felt for a long time, and it made me feel restless.
And I hate to admit this, but when I looked in the mirror later, the feeling... well, I shouldn't say it got stronger, but I felt validated somehow. Maybe I felt that this body and that feeling made sense together.
Or maybe it was just my considerable ego already rearing its carefully-coiffed head.
I still don't have a name for it, other than something vulgar and inarticulate and not quite fitting to a man of my... whatever. I grappled with it in ways I would previously have thought impossible. Or at least juvenile. I had not been blind before, of course I knew that Rose was... I'll just call her comely. And also intelligent and brave. But suddenly, all of that took on a whole new meaning, and I found myself outwardly drawn to her, and inwardly running, screaming away from the prospect.
And it didn't stop there. Then I ran into Sarah Jane. Suddenly, for the first time in five hundred years, I thought, "I can't believe I blew that chance."
And then I mentally flogged myself even for going there. Our friendship had been... well, not like that anyway. It went without saying that I'd been a different man back then. I thought that man would have been ashamed of me. I began imagining coming to blows with myself. Giant scarf, wide eyes and brillo hair versus pinstriped suit, bedroom eyes and GQ hair. And part of me felt it ws right for the other part of me to win.
I told Mickey, "I could do with a laugh," and that's why I took him on-board. But that was complete rubbish and Rose knew it. She was beginning to see, and so was I. The difference was, she was willing and I wasn't – not fully. I hadn't been in a disposition quite so youthful, in quite some time. Living was taking on an entirely different face, reflecting a side of me that was going to be difficult to quash. I wanted life to give me things it had rarely given me before, and I was ready to give back! Boy, was I ready.
And yet, not ready. I'm still nine hundred, she's still twenty. So... Mickey. He sort of saved the day. For a while.
You can call it self-loathing if you want, but strictly speaking, is that really what it is? Was? Is? I know that I've grown just a bit too attached to myself these days. But can you blame me? A pretty face will let you into places and things that psychic paper could only dream about.
A pretty face will let you live like never before. If you know how to let it.
And I learned. Better late than never.