PLEASE NOTE: There is small section of war flashbacks in the beginning of the chapter. It includes gore, violence, and may possibly be PTSD triggering. I tried to be a real as possible (the war happens to be WWI and I recently studied it) with the description, so it might be unsuitable for some readers.
Chapter 3 - Graffiti II
Old Mr. Smith, AKA The Doctor himself, stood in the familiar girl's bathroom, yet another punk complaint slip in his hand.
No school today. November 11th. Armistice Day. Remembrance Day.
On the 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month, in 1918.
He remembered it as clear as day. He had only been away from Gallifrey for a few hundred or so years, and decided to have some fun. Apparently the current conflicts on Earth were being described as a 'splendid little war', so the alien decided to go and waste some time and possibly get a kick out of the barbaric human warfare.
He was so wrong.
Theta -back when he didn't go by The Doctor- was assigned to the Western Front. The trenches. He was sent to the front lines- mostly he did 'rat duty', which was clubbing the rats that swarmed the trenches with his military-issued shovel. But when it came to protecting their front, he was the same as almost any other soldier. He fired shotguns, helped load machine guns, and threw grenades. Eventually death became normal to him. No one could safely venture out into the mud of no-man's land to retrieve the fallen, so they decayed and turned to white-yellow bones as the giant rodents and the rain ate away at their flesh. When grenades and artillery missed and exploded beyond their wire fence, the grey cloudy skies filled with a red-pink mist from the blast. No one spoke of it, but they all knew it was the stale blood of bodies left behind, spurting out forcefully for one last time.
He was scarred to a point- but he soon learned that this race was alike in appearance, but barely alike in beliefs and actions. Gallifreyans glorified war. It was necessary, but time of peace was best- but when war did come, a Gallifreyan should feel honored to be chosen to fight for their people's cause. Humans, did feel the same sense of pride in a way, but it was more an enforced emotion with Gallifreyans by the High Council. Mutiny was less common with their armies and death was considered an easy, painless punishment compared to regeneration torture, which was constant violence and killing, causing the renegade to regenerate over and over, beaten to regeneration each time until eventual death. By the time he was remembering all this, mind you, the torture had been declared illegal and the Council members were stripped of Time Lord status, regeneration abilities, and were exiled.
But all in all, he wasn't truly scarred due to his Gallifreyan mindset. What he saw was merely like a medical student in a hospital- knowledge and information to be collected and categorized for later use.
He sonic-ed to toilets, dropping blue cleaning gel in them and turning up the seats for a full I-actually-cleaned-these-with-my-bare-hands look. This time he was handed the slip personally to him by the secretary and not in his staff mailbox. Upon reading it, complaining once more about the vandalism -now new- in the girl's lavatory. Apparently almost all of them containing the same phrase. After reading the pink slip over, he turned to the secretary. "Do you by chance subscribe to meme theory?" He asked, analyzing the slip as if there might be some new meaning to it if he stared hard enough. The woman began to say something, but he immediately interrupted. "Meme theory is a type of memetic epidemiology that suggests that items of gossip are like living things that seek to reproduce using humans as their host." He explained, even though she had begun to ignore him. "I think it infects children the most." He grimaced to himself.
So there he was, facing stalls with various scripts of handwriting, with the familiar daunting message: 'Ozzie loves the Scottie'.
He huffed, seeing that letting a single drawing slip from removal last month had now caused it to spread like wildfire. He took his spray bottle and washcloth, brandishing them at every 'Ozzie loves the Scottie' that occupied the set of stalls. As he did this, he sang softly to himself. "Oh, I would do anything for love...
I would do anything for love, but I won't do that."