Please enjoy my first Doctor Who fic. If you do not enjoy it, feel free to say so, but please bear in mind that abusive comments will not be tolerated.
The Doctor says he knows what happened.
When the subject arises, he tells anyone listening that "It's a long story. I should know. I was there."
He is lying.
Not about being there. He never lies about being somewhere. If he's never been, he'll say so as he sets the coordinates and flies his companion off to the place he's never been.
The Doctor was there at the first Christmas. He saw men and women in long robes and headdresses walking, riding to their hometowns. He heard them talk about the census and everything but. (It was the latter that interested him when he joined one caravan as an eccentric wanderer. He walked until the sky darkened and listened to one man's story of how a stray dog and a broken harp led to his daughter's marriage.)
He felt the wind in his hair and the dust under his feet. He smelled the dirty animals, the food, the hay.
He saw the weariness and desperation on the young mother-to-be's face, the mingled weariness and indignation on her husband's.
He considered giving them his room.
And then he realized what he had done.
He had created the point—the fixed point—the very point he had wanted to stop.
So he left without alerting the innkeeper to his absence.
There was nothing unusual about the couple, he decided with a small degree of smugness. The European church had gotten that much wrong. She bore no halo, no heavenly beauty, no authority. Artists were fond of painting her as the eternally serene mother of their Messiah, but the real Mary had dirty dark hair, a perfectly ordinary face, and an air of weariness. One wrong word from the innkeeper would have broken her.
Of course, after all she had been through….
No. He didn't want to go there. She was nothing like the artists pictured and that was enough.
He didn't cause Easter. He was careful of that. He kept well away from Pilate, from the one called Yeshua (another thing the church got wrong), from anyone resembling a Pharisee. When he saw thirteen men make their way toward the upper room of a building, he turned on his heel and marched straight the other way.
And it still happened.
The one called Yeshua was arrested, taken to Pilate, and put to death. His friends….
The Doctor didn't want to remember their faces. He didn't want to see them at all. But it seemed they all managed to find him that day, whether they spoke to him or not.
Their faces were covered in grief. Rage. Shock. A dozen different emotions all had their say, coming together into the unmistakable look of a human whose faith had been shaken.
That was when he left.
He would say, later, that it was a long story. But no one ever heard what that long story was.
It went like this.
Gallifrey had an old story—a fairy tale, really—about the Untempered Schism. They said that, eons ago, the first Time Lords were forbidden to look directly into it. They could hold meetings and festivals there, so long as they kept their backs turned.
For many years, they obeyed.
But then they looked.
That was when regeneration changed. To that point, it had been a glorious game, something a Time Lord could do at will when he wanted to see a new face in the mirror. Some did it ten times in a single day, daring one another to choose the most ridiculous faces they could imagine. There was no pain, no fear of a corrupt regeneration, because there was no corruption and nothing to fear. Death was not involved, because death did not exist.
That ended when they looked into the Schism.
The story is utter nonsense, of course. The Schism was an accident of evolution. It made the Time Lords what they are today. Pain and fear are involved in regeneration because pain and fear are a part of life. Every child was made to look into the Schism because…
Because….
Because it was tradition.
Because they must see time and space as it is.
Because that was the way things were.
The Doctor doesn't share that story with anyone. It has always filled him with a vague sense of disquiet. That he remembers the story every time he tries to disprove this race or that race's Promised One doesn't help matters.
He isn't seeing what he wasn't meant to see.
He's a Time Lord. The last Time Lord. He was meant to see everything.
He has seen believers cut down unbelievers over a city.
He has seen them sawn in two rather than recant their faith.
He has seen lifetime churchgoers gossip a kindhearted minister out of a job.
He has seen new converts refuse to flee a plague-ridden city so they could care for the dying.
He has seen soldiers of God steal a baby girl and raise her as a killer.
He has seen a bishop submit to death so a near-stranger could escape.
A stranger who did not trust him.
A stranger who spat on his faith.
He has seen too much and not enough.
When he is alone in the TARDIS, in the still void left by a companion's absence, he finds himself sitting in the open door, dangling his feet over infinity as he sips a cup of tea and his thoughts wander. He stares at the stars and remembers when they were once formless clouds of gas before gravity intervened and pulled that matter slowly toward a newfound center, shaping it over millennia into a burning ball of light. He imagines a pair of hands cupped around the gas, pressing it together and turning it into the jewel it is.
And then he stops.
He sips the scalding tea.
The pain draws him to reality.
The universe is an accident. All universes are accidents. Happy ones, though accidents nonetheless. The supposed creativity involved is the result of an endless set of evolutionary circumstances. Given enough chances, a race can come from nothing. Millions of races can come from nothing. All it takes is time.
But suppose there was a creator being. Such a being would have complete control over not just one world, one reality, but all worlds, all realities. This being would own everything and be entitled to do with it as he or she pleased. Absolute power corrupts absolutely: This being would be the most corrupt being of all, he thinks, far beyond the reach of any sort of reason or the goodness of its creations.
It happened on Akhaten.
It happened on New Earth.
It happened on Gallifrey.
No being could give what believers say their god has given: freedom. It is simply impossible for an all-powerful and supreme creator to cede something as powerful as choice to its creations. Nothing is capable of that sacrifice. Nothing has that sort of faith.
The Doctor sips his tea again, considers adding sugar.
He is thinking too much, he decides. It isn't good to think too much. Bad ideas come to those who do too much thinking.
He needs a new companion.
Yes, that is what he needs. A human boy or girl to gaze at the stars with fresh eyes, to allow him to share ever so briefly the joy of discovery. He needs someone to stare open-mouthed at worlds he has seen a hundred times and ask stupid questions about the TARDIS. He needs a sweet young voice to drown out the questions circling his head, the questions he doesn't want to ask.
He doesn't know the answers.
He could know them, of course. He hates not knowing for too long. He doesn't know the answers because he doesn't want to know.
But there is one question he does know the answer to.
Why don't you want to know?
Because the Doctor is running.
And he never intends to stop.