Doctor Who: The Young War Doctor Chronicles
The Reluctant Doctor: Part One
The man picked himself up, slowly, pushing painfully against the hard, Earth floor beneath him, a blast of fluffy dust that caked the floor like sand and sawdust rising into his mouth as the sudden movement of his hand disrupted its home of many years. Slowly deteriorating, the dust was light enough to be whisked up into the air by the smallest flick of a wrist. Now, it was travelling down a fresh windpipe. The man coughed, choking, spluttering, the dryness spreading throughout his unfamiliar body. His insides had felt moist, almost as if his innards were covered in the embryonic goo of a newly born child. Now, like an oat in a slug, the moisture began to draw away from him, leaving him dry and wheezy. He coughed again. The sound was strange… the dryness had certainly taken its toll, but there was something else… well, there always was for a short time after this process. New body, and all that, especially after what had occured in the lead up to this particular regeneration…
The man finally mustered the energy to lift himself fully from the floor. Brushing the dust from his Edwardian frock, a few droplets of blood splashed the floor, the blood of a complete stranger now, a stranger who no longer existed, both bodily and spiritually. Usually this process merely changed the body, but the man was sure that there was something else this time. He hadn't simply changed his body this time: he had changed who he was, his identity, his promise. This time, he had been born from a decision, for a purpose. The mission embedded in his skull starting flowing back into his mind.
Staggering over to a dusty stone altar, he stroked the young girl who lay lifeless upon it, like a sacrifice. And she was indeed a sacrifice, not by the locals of this world, but by her own action. Her sacrifice was to save the Universe. It had to. He had to. That was his mission, he had to fulfil it. She brought him hope, she was the last hope of the universe, and if he didn't act on that, then this man truly had nothing.
Slowly, and with reverence and respect, he elegantly prized the bandolier from her corpse. Fingering it in his palms, he gulped, his stomach turning as he realised that this was the last time he was to be elegant for some time, an attribute he had last been so attached to. Raising a cynical eyebrow for the first time with his new face, he flung it over his shoulder and strapped it down, not just as a weapon, but as a symbol of what he was fighting for. A reminder of his new promise, and what he had now become.
Then, approaching the dusty, rusted copper wall before him, he looked deep into his new face, his eyes speaking volumes of the terror he had about this new body, unfamiliar to him physically and personally. By the instruction of who he once was, he was now an alien, even to himself, uncomfortable with the thoughts now circulating in his mind. He tried to tell himself that that was the elixir talking, but he knew deep down it was him. It had always been him. This was his destiny. He knew it. He had always known it. Swallowing once more, the last of the dust slipping down his throat, he tried his new voice for the first time, a husky voice, as if left to set in malted whisky. As he began to articulate, he began to find himself quivering at what he was about to declare. Was he really ready to move on? To reject everything he had ever known? To truly become someone else, not in body, but in identity? To move on and never come back? But had he really changed? Or was he always this anyway? Had 'warrior' always been his nature? Had he really just broken the promise, or had he failed to deliver it in the first place after all? Indeed, he had certainly had several opportunities to avert the events that now escalated around him, unfolding to engulf the whole universe. Perhaps, then, through his failings, the war was his fault? Perhaps it was his job to fix it, a job he had denied for so long now, despite knowing all of this deep down? Yes, yes. The person he had once been had failed. He uttered the words that would finally christen his new incarnation:
"Doctor no more".