You Cannot Live As I Have Lived (And Not Turn Out Like This) (1/?)

[preserved_ginger]

Title: You Cannot Live As I Have Lived (And Not Turn Out Like This)
Rating: PG-13
Beta(s): principia_coh
Setting: post-Voyage of the Damned
Character(s): Ten. Mentions of Six, Four, the Valeyard, and Rose.
Pairing(s): Ten/Rose
Spoilers: Mentions of events from Trial of a Time Lord, Genesis of the Daleks and Last of the Time Lords
A/N: A series of ficlets that looks at how a member of a people "peaceful to the point of indolence" could turn into the Valeyard. The title comes from the book of the same name by Terence Blacker.
Summary: He's looked at what he has become … and shrinks from it.

On occasion, in some of his more rational moments — moments scarce in supply since the Battle of Canary Wharf, and scarcer still in the aftermath of The Year That Never Was — he's looked at what he has become and shrunk from it.

His sixth self had been put on trial centuries ago by his people, his prosecutor an apparition that allegedly was him, created by the Time Lords through a process — never adequately explained — between his twelfth and final incarnations. He'd not relished the experience and, once it was finally over, he'd promised himself he would find a way to prevent that possible future. He swore that he would not permit himself to become someone capable of either the Valeyard's brand of calculated cruelty, or the casual thoughtlessness of the Time Lords who had brought that creature into existence. Yet here he was, showing every sign of turning into precisely that. What had caused him to go so far off-course?

The Time War, he thinks, did most of the damage.

He's still devastated by the role he was forced to play in that unmitigated disaster, to the point of burying the War and anything that recalls it deep in his mind so he doesn't have to spend every waking moment constantly being reminded of what he'd done. In the very darkest days, he had a tendency to blame himself for the whole damn mess anyway; had his fourth self done what had been asked of him and destroyed the Daleks at their inception, carrying out his mission rather than waxing all moral about whether or not he had had the right, wouldn't things have been so very different? If he hadn't shown that compassion on the day, would the Universe still have lost a countless number of lives to that blasted, final war?

But had he not taken the decision he had, though, then that surely still would have been one of the steps toward becoming the Valeyard. Sometimes it felt as if whatever he did, he couldn't ever win against the demons, external or internal. Was it worth even making the effort to try?

Trying to forget it all, his usual MO, has never really worked: every time he has to think of how to extricate himself from the latest mess he's managed to get himself into, each time he’s reminded of someone who might be alive if it weren’t for him, every time he takes a breath, the endless emptiness where the minds of his people used to be brings his new reality into terrifying closeness.

Rose didn't, couldn't, understand the agony that such a separation caused him, to be a member of a mind-joined race now forced to go without that connexion he'd had since infancy, and above all knowing that its absence was his own doing. It's the cruellest part of the War’s legacy; the part that never gives him rest, never gives him the peace of oblivion even for a second.

Comments

[karenor.livejournal.com]

Waaaaaaaah. *huggles Doctor tight*

If i don't see him completely happy for a full five minutes next series, I'm going to write a strongly worded letter, i swear.

[rjrog77.livejournal.com]

*huggles Doctor tight*

Good thinking there!

If i don't see him completely happy for a full five minutes next series, I'm going to write a strongly worded letter, i swear.

I think I'll join you on that, y'know.