Work Text:
Deserving of Compassion
I am almost hesitant to approach the mirror this time. Truth be told, I’ve always been anxious at the prospect of seeing a new face after a regeneration, but given what had happened during my previous incarnation – that and all the people I’d lost – I was truly afraid.
A man is the sum of his memories, I’d said many centuries ago to companions who are now long gone. What would those memories do to me now? Would they make my appearance as twisted as my mind, something to match the Dream Lord’s taunts and accusations? He said out loud what I’d preferred to keep hidden, from my companions as well as myself. But he confronted me with what I am, deep down, and even I can’t hide from it anymore.
Maybe I truly am a monster. Drenched in the blood of the innocent…my new face will reflect that, I’m almost certain, just as my prior regenerations were responses to what came before them.
My first body…I hung onto it too long. It was already old when I stole the TARDIS, and it was too frail to sustain the rigors of travel and exploration for more than a few years before it finally gave out. I’d grown bitter before leaving Gallifrey, and it was only through Susan and later her human schoolteachers and others that I was brought out of it. So when the time came to change, my appearance reflected my newer attitude. My next incarnation looked much younger, and acted younger as well -- the bitter old man was gone, replaced by someone lighthearted, more willing to play the fool. But the clown’s life was stolen, ended purposefully by the Time Lords as part of my punishment and exile. A more dashing and daring self took his place, someone who wanted to be taken seriously, as if to compensate for the personality of his predecessor (as his had compensated for that of the old man before him). This life ended early as well, bathed in deadly radiation and giving rise to the eccentric adventurer who didn’t care if he was taken seriously or not. A fall stole his life and gave it to a less confident boy who, to his shame, couldn’t even keep his companions safe. Determined not to let another friend die, he would succumb to poison but save his comrade. As if to make up for his precursor’s (perceived) weakness, the new self that followed was a close physical match for a security officer he’d encountered on Gallifrey. Like the guard, he was brash, sometimes even callous, wanting to be strong and invulnerable and not wanting to be hurt again, ever. But this feeling passed along with the body, and my seventh incarnation was again playful and open to new adventures. Sadly, bullets ended his life and gave me a new self with addled memories (at least at first). And then, the Time War began.
That was my greatest failure. I failed my companions, my homeworld, my entire universe. I couldn’t stop the fighting or the killing, or the deaths of countless innocents. By the time that life ended, in the burning wreckage of a starship whose pilot was terrified of even hearing the words “Time Lord” I knew there was only one way to end the war. And I felt then that I could never call myself the Doctor again.
Oh, the things I did during that war…I was almost glad when that body failed, the self I would neither acknowledge nor claim for many years afterward. I wanted to put him behind me, and for a while I did. But the man I became afterwards – after the war was over, after believing I’d wiped out my entire race – he had the same bitterness of my first self. Again, I wanted to be strong, but now I was alone in the universe. Rose saved me from that loneliness and perhaps I had a subconscious desire to be more than what that version of myself could offer her. I saved her, then, and became a man who could give her more (or at least a man who could give her a humanform duplicate who would gladly and joyfully stay with her). But losing her myself and then losing Donna nearly broke my hearts…so when radiation took that life from me, I came back even younger, barely an adult, perhaps as a way to avoid my deeper feelings entirely. It didn’t work. River and Amy and Rory are gone. The Brigadier, one of my oldest friends, is gone. And the reminder on Trenzalore of who I was when I couldn’t even bring myself to use the name ‘Doctor’…how Clara must have seen me…it was too much. I was a monster and I probably always had been.
There was no use in putting it off. I had to look, had to see what the process of regeneration had made me into this time.
I stood before the mirror, taking a deep breath before actually looking into my own eyes.
My eyes. But someone else’s eyes as well.
Staring, I reached out with a shaking hand to touch the glass. If each new self is a reaction to the previous one -- an attempt to add to or compensate for it – why do I now wear the face of Lucius Caecilius Iucundus?
I thought back to that time in my life, my tenth incarnation, when I was still traveling with Donna. Initially I was going to leave Pompeii and its inhabitants to its fate. It was a fixed point in time, I’d said. But Donna had begged me to save just this one family, to show them compassion and take them away from this place. So I did. I rescued Caecilius and his family from certain death, but it was really Donna who saved them. She’d acted as my conscience that day. Donna had already saved me, and later she would save the whole of creation. All for the sake of compassion.
Why this face?
A person is the sum of their memories, of their experiences. And if each new incarnation of a Time Lord really is a response to its predecessor, what does that make me?
I touched the mirror again. I now wore the face of a man who’d been the recipient of my kindness, my ‘humanity’, as Donna would have called the trait. A man who’d loved his family, a good man, someone to whom fate – and myself -- had shown mercy. Years ago, I’d been convinced that a man with this face was worthy of compassion.
I closed my eyes – his eyes -- and wondered if, no matter what my conscious mind may have thought of me, that I might be the same. Even if I was a monster, that maybe, just maybe, I was also like Caecilius.
Someone deserving of compassion.