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. Rose (off-camera). Mentions of Donna (obliquely), Martha, and others.
Pairing(s): Ten/Rose
Spoilers: Mentions of events and people in The Runaway Bride, Smith & Jones, The Shakespeare Code and the very beginning of Gridlock.
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. The soubriquet "Stormcrow" is borrowed from the book The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (it's used as a nickname for Gandalf in the book, and the context made me think of the Doctor).
Summary: Was losing Rose the tipping-point?

One
Two
Three

He wonders sometimes whether his losing Rose, was the tipping point. The beginning of a slow-yet-inexorable slide into an unforgiving darkness. For after that – after losing the person for whom he'd forcibly subdued his wilder, darker impulses – who else was left to stop him? He was now truly alone. The results would be disastrous for whichever unlucky beings were foolish enough to cross him.

It hadn't taken long: the Racnoss had been first in line. To see how much he'd regressed, so quickly and mere moments after he'd lost Rose for good… it frightened even him. Half out of his mind with pain and grief he'd done the one thing he'd sworn he'd never do again after enduring the Time War – destroyed an entire species – after the queen of their kind had tried to unleash their voracity back into the universe and had point-blank refused to accept his compromise.

He'd ended up frightening the life out of the person with him at the time, and she'd flatly refused to join him in the TARDIS when he invited her soon after. He'd asked her in his usual nonchalant manner, pretending that he didn't care whether she came with him or not; but it had been an act, and a bad one at that – even she'd known it. No matter how he’d phrased it, he was asking, virtually begging, for company. He knew he couldn't bear to be alone, knew there was a good chance that the universe itself wouldn’t survive it. His grief over Rose was threatening to engulf him and he needed something (anything) to distract him from that deep, dark chasm of pain and misery.

A large block of time followed of which he has no memory. He's not even sure how much time he lost, and he's too frightened even now to try to recover it: he doesn't want to find out what he's done. It must certainly be terrible if his mind has blocked it from him, that same mind which persists in trying to trick him into thinking that Rose is still with him. The same mind that refuses him the blessed relief of being able to forget the fact he had anything to lose, even for a little while.

The next thing he could even vaguely remember doing was trying to save the inhabitants of a London hospital from the Judoon. He almost died himself, thanks to the plasmavore draining his blood from him, which might go a fair way to explaining why he’d momentarily thought he was hallucinating Adeola, although he knew damn well it couldn't have been her. He seems doomed to be forced to remember how he's failed and what he's lost over and over again.

(That reminds him a little of the Greek myth about the man rolling a ball of stone up a slope only to have it crash back down on him just before it made it to the top. What was the fella's name? Tantalus? That, he can't remember. Typical.)

He wishes that Adeola's cousin didn't look so very much like her; it's a memory-trigger he could do without; even after so long, reminders of the horror of Canary Wharf refuse to leave him. Sometimes, although remembering hurts him almost more than he can bear, he welcomes the pain, because it means he can still feel. And, more than anything, because it means he hasn't forgotten her.

The idea that the constant loop playing in his mind, the incessant reminder of all he has lost, is all that there is maddens him (the fact that he is almost certain that he can feel Rose's mind screaming at the back of his isn't helping). He refuses, also, to contemplate how many people must have died in the hospital because of his inability to find that plasmavore sooner; surely there must have been at least a few, and each one of them someone's child. How many people suffered because he wasn't good enough? How many people would have their lives shortened because they couldn't cope with what they'd seen? Yet more guilt to pile on to his conscience.

It was in an attempt to assuage that guilt that he chose to let Martha come with him for a trip in time and space, as a thank-you gift for her saving his life. If he believed in such things, he might call that volunteering to go through Purgatory (which he doesn't, of course; he's only ever believed in her). Letting that lingering image of Adeola on board was a decision which, eventually, both of them would come to regret.

The body count directly attributable to him – the Stormcrow – keeps on rising; genocide in its variant forms starting to feature worryingly often. The Carrionites were next; not killed outright this time but returned to a living death – a disquietingly cold, rational voice in his head insisting that that was surely no worse than being killed, and was the least that they deserved. A punishment not of his own making, but something he calmly, willingly used to be rid of them. This time, hopefully, for ever. And to leave the last three trapped inside their own crystal ball, separated from the rest of their kind after he returned the lot to the Deep Darkness… well, what else did they expect?

He'd called Rose the "Defender of the Earth", the last time he saw her on that parallel world. When that young Carrionite had used the name of his lost love against him it had inspired him to defend the Earth himself, to ensure he didn't lose Rose lifetimes before she was ever born.

That name keeps me fighting.

Maybe, he thought, there was redemption for him yet. Maybe he wasn't quite as far gone as he'd feared. Maybe there was still a chance…

Desperate to distract himself from how he'd started reconsidering the decision not to make the trip through the Void back to his Rose, the universes be damned, he'd taken Martha – not Adeola, she couldn't be Adeola, he'd seen her die – Martha for a trip into the future then, stretching the definition of “just one trip” as far as it could reasonably go. Given the fact that Rose's ghost – created from a mix of the depth of his longing for her and his crushing guilt at losing her – haunted him still, it was entirely unsurprising that they ended up somewhere he'd taken Rose.

New Earth, to be precise.

When he'd read the console screen and realised where he'd landed, where they were – and how it all felt so wrong to be here again without her beside him – he had come very close indeed to pushing Martha back into the TARDIS and taking her straight home. Not that he would ever consider telling her. And she wouldn't have suspected a thing, not one thing, until they'd landed there and she'd opened the door. Many's the time he'd looked across the console at her, considering doing precisely that.