If he is regarded as illegitimate, as false, an irregularity, then so he was and always would be. He's a nowhere man, trapped in a spot between Time and Space, making up invisible plans for complications that have yet to arise, wars that have yet to begin. He's drawn timelines for people not yet born and planned the funerals of people only weeks old. It's like the song says:
iHe's a real nowhere man,
Sitting in his nowhere land,
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody./i
Today, the Doctor is alone, like yesterday, and the day before, and a week earlier still. There is only him, sitting soundlessly in the creaky rocking chair in the library, hands resting folded in his lap. He's asleep, but aware. Ace and Hex have left; Benny has declined his offer to come back; Mel is nowhere to be found, rumored to be on the run with the rest of the Nosferatu's crew.
So his days carry on in a slow rhythm of unconscious motions, his days like crazy paving. He eats, he sleeps, he maintains his physical appearance if not for himself then for what self-pity he may have left. But not today. Today is not the time to sleep until noon in his favorite chair, or watch the stars blaze while eating a whole plate of macaroons, or even occasionally passing by Earth and glancing sadly at its familiar blue-and-green patchwork before dematerializing away.
Reluctantly, slowly, he awakens, stands. He can feel the turn of the wheel, unseen; it's time. Things need to be given an expert's push, events need a catalyst of change. It's true, after all, what he said years ago: there's work to be done.
He's on a grassy hillock in the Highlands, surrounded by sheep and looking into the eyes of a middle-aged Scotsman with a beard and a cutlass and a familiarly patterned tartan kilt. The Doctor talks tersely but understandably. There isn't much time, even when there's all the time in the world.
"When they come, you have to be ready." He taps his nose, gave the man a look. "This is bigger than the both of us, you know."
"What'n are you talking about? And who are you?"
The Doctor looks disappointed for a second, but then remembers. "Oh, right. Mindwipe and all that. Well, then -- it's time you saw the stars again." He looks into the Scot's eyes, and for a clear second, infinity lays out before him in agonizing scale, before collapsing into itself and blinking out.
The next day brought with it the sound of drums and the coming of the Toclafane, and out of the hundreds of people near Culloden, it was a lonely herder by the name of Jamie McCrimmon who led the charge against the invasion, swinging his cutlass in the air in the name of a man named The Doctor.
(But it didn't matter because as soon as the Doctor returned to his TARDIS, he wiped the memory of doing such a thing clean away, so three regenerations later the mystery of the Toclafane and Saxon would still be that -- a mystery.)
The two are sitting at his desk long after class has ended for the day, and she thinks she's in trouble. After a bit of talking, he shrugs and sets the math textbook out of sight.
"I guess you think you've learned enough in my class that you can start not paying attention?" he asks, a veil of accusation in his voice.
She fidgets. "It's just that -- well - I already iknow/i all of this stuff, Professor!"
The Doctor smiles a little at the title, and continues. "Then, isn't it about time we started something more difficult?" He reaches into his bag and pulls out a large hardbound book: iAdvanced Mathematics: Precalculus with Discrete Mathematics and Data Analysis/i.
The title elicits an excited noise from the girl. "Is this--?"
"A warm-up, merely a warm-up. You just need something a bit more intellectually stimulating, that's all." The Doctor nods as the girl picks up the book, flips it around, examines its every inch and centimeter. "And I highly advise you to do the same with your other teachers."
She looks quizzically at the Doctor. "Pardon, Professor?"
He laughs a little. "I imagine your teachers aren't challenging you enough in class, am I right?" Judging from the look that flashes across her face, he's right. "You'll have to start challenging them back. Eventually, you will get a much better learning experience than that which the school can provide you now." He stands, and the girl does the same, clutching the book to her chest tightly. "I'd say ---" He pauses, thinks for a moment with his lips pressed together, then goes on. "Lean the hardest especially on your science and history teachers. You'll learn the most from them, trust me."
A huge smile lights up young Susan's face. "Oh, I will! Thank you!" she says, excited as can be, before traipsing out of the room and out the front doors of Coal Hill School. The Doctor watches her, smiling, and when she's gone from view removes the biodamper from his finger and wipes at his eyes with a handkerchief.
There's no time for tears, for much of anything; he's got an important date to go to, at a party five miles and forty-four years from now, he's going to play matchmaker and change the world in the process.
"Mr Saxon, this is Lucy. Lucy, Mr Saxon."
There's a very angry woman shouting at him, but she's better than she was half an hour ago, now that she's stopped hitting the Doctor with her handbag. He said his name was Ben Jackson and that not to worry, he had his daughter and she was safe at his apartment only a couple streets away; he forgot the twenty-first century era tensions surrounding things like disappearances, so the woman had come in swinging and didn't stop for quite a while. Now she shouts very rude things at him, and the Doctor can't make up his mind which is worse, the physical or the verbal abuse.
"Where's my daughter, you little pervert?"
"Hold on a minute, ioi/i, hold on! I didn't do anything---"
"Yes you did! You've bloody kidnapped her and killed her, didn't you? Haven't you?"
"I assure you, I've done no such thing, please calm down --- iAh/i!"
He rubs his cheek, which is now bright red and stinging, frowns.
"And you'll get another slap if you don't tell me where my daughter is!"
A voice from behind him, standing in the doorway of the apartment, which is hiding the Doctor's familiar blue box. "Mum? That you?"
He smiles. "See? No harm done." He allows the two women to meet in the hallway, hug each other fiercely as can be, quietly slipping past them and back into the apartment, gets to packing up his equipment.
"Oh, iDonna/i, I thought I'd lost you forever."
"What, me?" She grins cheekily, but her eyes are wet. "I'm super temp, remember? Saviour of the universe? Bloody fantastic?"
"Yes, yes you are," Sylvia sobs into the younger woman's shoulder, "You're so fantastic."
They do not hear the Doctor leave, but they hear his ship leave. Donna can feel the TARDIS dematerialize inside of her, and through the warmth of the spare key glowing in her pocket, as the ship fades away into the night.
He puts away the Chameleon Arch and fob watch, now cracked and broken from the strain of turning someone half-Time Lord into a full human, and is standing in front of the closed chest he's placed them in, pondering over his next move as studiously as a chess player of his caliber would, when he hears the door swing open behind him, and soon Ace is at his back, her breath on his shoulder, telling him what an idiot he is before wrapping her arms round his waist and threatening to never let go until he hugs her back.
An hour later, they're lying next to each other in bed, touching only a little cause they're tired of touching after an hour of getting reacquanted. Ace's hair is loose and fanned out around her head; she can't help but angle an arm over the Doctor's head and play with a loose strand of his hair which curls up at her touch.
"Hmm," the Doctor says, "I wonder." He leaves it at that, prompting Ace to ask what he's wondering. He looked over at Ace, and for a moment he looks more open than he's ever been in years.
"Am I what you would call a bastard?"
Ace chokes for a moment, then laughs. "Who, you?"
She sees the Doctor nod and adds, "Well, you're not the easiest to get along with . . . not exactly bastard material, though. Why?"
A pause, and then the Doctor says, "Just wondering."
"No, no, ino/i." Ace props herself up onto her elbows and gives the Doctor a look. "I know you well enough to know you don't just wonder, you analyze something until you've got it memorized down to its very molecules. What gives, Professor?"
The Doctor looks at Ace. "Let's go on an adventure," he says to the woman he just had sex with and hasn't seen for almost half a year linear time (but he knows would follow him to the ends of the earth if the path was solid enough) and the light is his eye is just about enough to convince her that this time he means it.
So they do, and they have bloody good fun doing so, doing what they do: running through corridors while holding hands, tossing cans of nitroglycerine into abandoned buildings; saving whole civilizations with only vacuum cleaner parts, some string and a half-melted gum ball. And it is fantastic.
A week later (their time), they spend the night together in an underground cell in a nearby solar system. They huddle together for warmth and sketch battle plans in the dirt with their fingers. The Doctor holds Ace close to him long after she's fallen asleep, fingertips smudged with dust, and thinks he can keep her safe until the morning comes because he's the Doctor and it's just how things work with him.
The next morning, two suns rise over the horizon but no one is around to see them, for Ace is dead and the Doctor is setting the whole world on fire.
iI detest any movement displacing still lines,
And never do I weep and never laugh./i
"Baudelaire. 1857."
He performs the autopsy, buries her in a grave in Paris, reads lines of poetry in the original French before walking away, not looking back.
A second later, the tombstone reading Dorothy McShane disappears because it was never there to begin with, and at that moment, the universe begins to crack.
(Scholars will later point to this event as one of the focal points of the reality-changing aspects of the last great Time War. The Doctor will remember it as the moment he realized a man like him was not worth the effort of rescuing.)