Ten Moments
By golden orange
Medium: Doctor Who
General Summary: Ten Doctors. Ten moments in a life.
Rating: Teen
Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who or any of the ten Doctors or anyone related to them. You knew this. Good.
Author's Notes: This was the first fic longer than 100 words I'd written in… ooh, a good long while. It was based on a challenge floating around somewhere on livejournal called '25 moments' – essentially twenty-five inspiration words. I chose the first ten and sculpted a moment for each of the ten Doctors (as there were at that point, anyway); as such, some familiarity with both the classic series Doctors and their companions as well as the current series is probably well advised.
Hope you like it!
Warning: Later chapters contain adult situations and nudity. Nothing that incredibly disturbing, but just so's you know.
Chapter summary: The First Doctor's moment.
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The First Doctor: "Scars"
It is a cold, grey and wet November evening, and he is an old man, self-exiled, light years and centuries away from everything and everyone he understands. It is a difficult thing to rip oneself away from one's home forever, and he sometimes wonders whether the scars will ever heal.
It is, he sometimes thinks, easy for these humans. To be trapped on one small planet, confined as a species together and unable to break apart from everything they have ever known, forced to remain together despite their petty divisions. To not know the freedom of travel from world to world and sun to sun, to not feel the temptation to tear apart from their own race when the divisions become too difficult to tolerate and face the cold, hostile universe alone.
Well, not quite alone. He has dear Susan, of course (the name she has chosen to take, as to hide better from any searchers from Home who may not tolerate their decision to flee, her birth name abandoned as they abandoned their home; another sacrifice of his rash decision to flee, another wound he has inflicted on one he loves), but he can see the wounded loneliness in her eyes that she tries so hard to hide from him. Try as she might, she cannot connect with these humans; she is so much older even than the teachers who attempt to indoctrinate her with their primitive understanding of the world, to say nothing of the youths she resembles in appearance only. She tries so hard to fit in, and it pains him deeply to see the hurt she feels as she cannot.
It was not supposed to be like this; the promise of freedom amongst the stars and the ages has become a fearful, lonely exile amongst the abandoned rubbish of a primitive backwater, hiding from the vengeance of those whose technologies they stole and whose ways they so prominently rejected. Trapped amongst beings whose ways they will never belong to and isolated forever from the life they understood, even as they hated everything it represented, living in a Ship that can take them to any point in eternity but which he fears to pilot away from a scrapyard.
A thin drizzle falls, and the fog begins to thicken. He scowls and begins to make his way back home. Such as it is.