Lament
Consider this an AU, or since we're talking Doctor Who, a Divergence in the Time Line. It may or may not be resolved...
He doesn't mind being underestimated. It helps him survive; it lets others take him for granted and overlook him. Pride doesn't matter when you're talking about survival.
But that doesn't mean he wants his own fate to be that of himselves that follow.
The grief came upon him without warning as he was staring into Jamie's peat fire. The winter winds had been howling at the backs of both their necks, hammering at the hazel withies that wrapped the snows away. Jamie was worried enough to look straight up into the thatch, but of course there was nothing to see but the weakly struggling curl of smoke as it sought the path of least resistance.
"What is it, Doctair?" The boy—always a boy though he is long a man in Human terms, old enough to be a grandfather by now—eyes him over the gasping flame. The fire-bowl in his hand still smokes juniper and a tinder of angelica stalks. The Doctor thinks dizzily that something in the juniper makes him more aware than he should be of things—willowbark, aspirin and wintergreen will kill him, rosemary makes him sneeze, and he's addicted to petroleum-derivative-flavored sweets of Earth…but juniper is something odd that he can't pin down, a scent that opens his mind regardless of his interest in the matter, reminds him of a long-ago journey to the pocket universe of Avalon where he found an aging Jamie in the mists…and an impossibly young Brigadier, trapped into a temporary mortality.
"Nothing, Jamie," he hears himself saying, and he feels obligated to lie to put the boy at ease. "I'm just very tired."
And Jamie accepts that, because he's been telling him to stop and rest for weeks now. He bends down to re-configure the fire in the pit, muttering to himself as a flyaway spark narrowly misses burning a hole in his knew woolen trews. The warmth soaks through the old Time Lord's bones.
Old. He is old. He's older than most of his future selves now, thanks to the CIA and their constant need for "just one more mission" before they return him to his rightful Timestream.
And because he is so old…he is growing aware of impressions, snatches of melody and music in the Seas of Time that wouldn't have made sense to him when he was still young.
Something resonates in his bones, vibrates his tendons and prickles his blood vessels like a strum across harpstrings.
His future is hurting.
The pain of it sings a sand drone, like a weeping man with nothing more than a chanter to express his loss at the funeral. The Doctor flinches and seeks the source of the sorrows, and finds it, to his deep regret, with the self that he was meant to be four lifetimes into his own future.
A premature ending of his incarnation; a deliberate act of bravery.
The Doctor keeps his eyes closed and tries to keep the tears from falling because Jamie will panic if he sees him this way. He tucks his small hands inside his overlarge sleeves and waits as passively as possible for his jumble of thoughts and feelings to hurry up and sort.
You'll be all right, he sends the thought as strongly as he can into the future, through that resonance, because it's not so unlike astral travel and he's quite good at astral travel. Time and space are all one and the same in that dangerous plane. The young man in his poet's words and rainbow's wardrobe is already sliding into the lindos coma that will shape him into something else…something, he is hoping…better. More capable of dealing with the darkness of the Universe.
You were a good man, he thinks as hard as he can, but isn't sure if he's heard yet. Sometimes memory doesn't return until AFTER the regeneration.
Oh, Lad. I am so sorry.
It is a noble sacrifice, to give himself up for the future…to do this now because he can't risk the Valeyard growing stronger. The Doctor can't judge him for this—his Sixth self never hesitates to do the right thing. He would have done the same thing himself, back when he was only 900 years old…but of course, he hasn't been that young in a long time.
The thoughts confuse and trouble him, because he still isn't sure what he is, other than a puppet for the CIA's commands, suspended out of his rightful Time and Place. As far as his future selves are concerned, he was force-regenerated hundreds and hundreds of years ago, screaming on the Council Floor. He's the only one who knows any different; once they let him rejoin his natural Timeline, they assure him, he'll be the Dandy Doctor with his frills and butterfly tie and he won't know better and neither will they. All the centuries of doing the dirty work they didn't want to touch will be erased from his mind—from their minds—as though they never happened, and he'll go straight from screaming to staggering out of the TARDIS and falling face-flat into the heather outside of UNIT HQ.
He knows this because he's seen their scanners of the Event.
Every once in a while, when he steps out of line, they remind him this is his eventual fate...if he does what they say.
Yes.
Too bad he wasn't convinced that would be QUITE so simple.
He lives as an echo side by side his future incarnations, unable to help them, frozen from interfering rather than corrupt his Timestream beyond repair.
But it hurts to glimpse these little bits and pieces of suffering he will endure when he becomes these futureselves:
Parting ways with tiny Jo Grant was hard enough—she reminded him of Jamie's wide-eyed goodness and she had been good for him…the growing realization that people had to leave for the sake of their own lives.
The weariness that soaked into his fourth self-a big. booming, laughing madman worn out with too many problems.
So much of his fourth self never really recovered from that CIA job with the Daleks. Oh, that terrible choice. His younger self would not have hesitated to touch the wires and blow the Daleks out of Time and Space.
But his younger self hadn't been working for the CIA at the time.
Anything the Agency made him do was circumspect; there were agendas hidden inside agendas, and when he riddled them out it was all he could do to keep the knowledge to himself.
His Fifth Self had been almost single-mindedly optimistic in comparison-defiant, even. He argued with Cybermen. He protested the values of life and never, ever stopped. But Adric...Adric had been like having Zoe back and he had bonded with the boy, watching him grow with pride...and his death still ached in his hearts.
It wasn't fair to feel the losses and the pains that hadn't happened to him yet, but he was terrified of complaining of his lot. There were other parolees with the CIA. They endured it until they couldn't endure it any more, these juxtaposed memories cross-cut between their body's interrupted Timestream and the stream of their futureselves…. …and as soon as they let their traumas slip…well. They went for a "medical exam" and no one ever saw them again, not even in a new body.
Best to keep his mouth shut. Best to keep this to himself. And try to let his futureselves know, somehow, that when they suffered they didn't suffer alone. He tried to let them know that he was aware of them somehow…and for the most part, the tiny crumbs of comfort he sensed they took from his presence justified the agony he went through…but it wasn't easy. Look at the old Dandy. In so many ways, he was what the Doctor had wanted to BE. He'd never had the chance to let him know how proud he was to see his future…just a whisper in a future mind sickened with radiation poisoning. He'd died for a good reason and that helped…but he had still died. He hadn't lived very long at all in that big, proud body.
But then…when he thought of it…none of them had.
He was hundreds of years older than the 453 he'd been born into with this shape and size…and that made him by default older than all of his future selves he'd so far encountered. And yet he was still ridiculously young in Time Lord standards.
Younger still was his future selves, who couldn't seem to get through a hundred years or more without doing something that forced them to regenerate.
Oh, what a mess it all was.
The Doctor huddled before the fire, warming his hands as Jamie assembled the pot of broth and bread for supper. Tomorrow they'd be marching all over the worst bits of wintry Scotland in hopes of finding the source of this temporal lesion, and assuming they survived that, they'd report back to the CIA. And why was it he no longer believed them when they said he'd done well and there was "just another mission" to complete before they'd let him finish his sentence and promote on to his Exile on Earth?
Because the CIA didn't believe in fixing what wasn't broken, and as long as they had a willing agent, why let him go?
They wouldn't. And as long as Jamie was with him, they had two puppets, not one.
The aging Time Lord closed his eyes for a moment, letting the scent of juniper paper his nostrils. The smoke soothed him, gave him a brief disconnected sensation with reality that he sorely needed.
On the other side of the Temporal Tides, his latest Future Self was becoming a new man. How long would it be before he sensed his Seventh Self's death and rebirth into Eighth? No sense asking those questions…
He sighed, and Jamie glanced back up, his strong hands poised over the hot steaming broth. Sharp hazel eyes looked through his soul, not liking what they saw. Oh, Jamie. Dear old Jamie. If they did survive this mission, he was going to send him in hiding. Just see if he wouldn't.
He smiled silently, quietly burying the lament of the past for the sake of the present. He might be a mongrel trapped out of time, but he still had a responsibility to look out for Jamie and Victoria and Zoe. They were well-aged humans, but they were still his Children of Time and whatever happened next…well, it would happen regardless.
He just had to wait and see, and hope that someday he would finally…FINALLY…learn what his true role was in this temporal displacement.