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Summary: Saving the universe had come at a cost… and the cost was him.
Genre: Angst/General
Characters: Tenth Doctor
Spoilers: Season Four finale. The Stolen Earth/Journey's End
Author's Note: One of many I suppose… I hope it is at least a little remarkable and be content with that. Review at your leisure, I write this as much for myself as for anything else.
Crime and Punishment
Crime was something that had consequences. It came with a cost.
The crime hadn't been genocide.
The duplicate, his human counterpart that threw that switch, compelled by the anger, hate and darkness inside him, that had annihilated every Dalek left in existence along with their creator. It was crime of immeasurable magnitude, a crime beyond comprehension to anyone except those who had committed the same crime... like himself. He'd wiped the Time Lords, his own people from existence, and now his duplicate had done the same to the Daleks. But that was not the crime that had been committed.
The crime was being the Doctor - because his duplicate was, in every sense, the same as him - all the same ideas, thoughts, feelings and beliefs. They were one and the same and because of that the Doctor knew beyond a shadow of doubt that had his duplicate not finished it, not murdered the entire Dalek race, then he would have himself. His duplicate was him too and that was a crime that the Doctor could not bare.
He'd left his duplicate with Rose, in that parallel universe, because she had healed him the first time. The one human being, the one naive, beautiful and wonderful woman who had looked right at him, looked right inside him and not seen the monster that was there. She'd saved him, so many times and she could do it again, he believed that with every fibre of his being.
If I believe in one thing... just one thing... I believe in her.
He knew she would save that half of his soul, because that half of his soul, that Doctor, that human Doctor, could feel what he had never allowed himself, had denied himself so long and would have to for the rest of his Time Lord life. His duplicate could freely love Rose Tyler... and that alone was half way to being saved. Her love would do the rest.
But that was rehabilitation. Rose had and would once again make him better... but she couldn't undo everything, she couldn't stop what came next. Punishment. They'd saved the universe but at a cost... and the cost hadn't been the actions of that other Doctor, it wasn't even his crime of just being himself... the cost of his crime was to commit a crime infinitely more terrible than genocide, infinitely more terrible than any crime he'd ever committed before. Everything dies in it's time, the Time Lords had come and gone, and the Daleks now too... each by his hand and maybe those things had even been necessary even if they'd been evil.
But not this... no, this was something different entirely.
The Doctor felt the stiff cold breeze lash against him as he looked out across the vast, sprawling plains below. Patches of red trees and their orange canopies dotted the swaying yellow grassland, herds of migratory animals roving to and fro... or maybe they were still and it was him moving.
This was the planet Felspoon, where the mountains swayed in the breeze. A geomorphic transition mineral that acquired semi-fluidic properties under the compression of the mountain's own mass... a geological oddity unique to one planet.
Mountains that move! Can you imagine?
He looked up at the sky. Far above him the grey clouds scudded back across a pink sky, the dim red star of this system shone balefully through them and burned down hot onto the mountains, the plains and him as well. The meagre heat was snatched away by the cool air at this altitude and he started to draw on his respiratory bypass to compensate for the rarefied atmosphere as he leaned back on the TARDIS. He listened to the wind whistle and keen as he dangled his legs from the cliff. Here he sat alone trying to comprehend his actions.
He had murdered Donna Noble. She lived, she breathed and she went about her life... but she was a shadow of herself. What he'd done to her had been a crime even Rose could never absolve him of, a perverted miscarriage of life and joy and happiness all mutilated and savaged by his action. He'd stripped her away, the part of her that was alive and now there was only a husk who would never know... could never know. To do that to his best friend, to a person who deserved so much more than he could have ever given... from whom he had taken everything... and then to have to live with his actions.
That was his punishment.