The Doctor turns around very slowly. He is dressed completely in white.
"Time Lords, Time Lords, Time Lords."
"What is a Time Lord? Oh, at least two things. Firstly, a Time Lord is a Gallifreyan, a humanoid confection of genes spun on a Loom; a race of the dead. Then, a coating of genes not-quite their own, symbiotic to the point of being indistinguishable from the host-body."
"But the Time Lords were Lords of Time before they could be described thus."
"A Time Lord is a traveller in time, so there are few. Though they surround themselves with the artifaces of Time Lord society, the denizens of Gallifrey have long-forfeited their namesake. Time Lords in age alone."
"So this is the Doctor: a Time Lord. What really makes a Time Lord?"
"Oh, the third part of the equation. The third signature that you might detect when scanning the person of the Doctor. Symbiotic threads which expand the Doctor into far more than a mere physical incarnation. Time and relative dimensions in space."
"An intelligence different to our understanding."
The Doctor has fallen. The Doctor is trapped, dying underground. He can feel the universe dying around him.
The Doctor has guaranteed its extinction.
The Doctor has changed. The Doctor is confused. The Doctor had been wearing coveralls/the Doctor had been wearing a dandy's clobber.
The Doctor had been exiled to Earth, the option to travel revoked. Then the Doctor had died, part of him, and the rest had slept/then the Doctor moved on.
There had been an other. A new link, a new part in the equation. Ace had been the stop-gap, the bond that secured the cracks in the symbiosis. Now the Doctor is not talking to himself. The Doctor does not want to talk to himself about it.
Memories clash and shatter. There is a future where there should have been none.
The Doctor was wounded. Sections unravelled and cast off into the vortex. Things left to entropy. Taken for granted. Tinkered with.
The Doctor was raped and allowed to give birth to a child-then-hunted. Attacked and shattered.
Invaded again.
Sick.
Perhaps it had been better for the Doctor to go his own separate way. The Doctor had turned, dressed completely in white.
Something happened then. Try to understand the dynamics of the event. The Doctor left, yet the Doctor remained. The Doctor no longer needed to watch over his companions, yet the Doctor remained behind their every move. The Doctor no longer needed the Doctor. Something had changed.
The Doctor pushed, when he had the chance. Trapped himself, dead underground as his other self was. The Doctor needed to start again. But you can never cross the same bridge twice. The past informs the future as much as the present. The Doctor had changed. The Doctor was confused. The Doctor had been wearing coveralls/the Doctor had been wearing a dandy's clobber.
The Doctor knows.
"Then the Doctor is not talking to himself? Not communicating with his other judgment?"
"Only survival keeps them together. The Doctor is the option to travel. For both parts."
"What if we were to confuse the matter?"
"Confuse the matter more than it already is? I'm not sure we could. The Doctor has done an admirable job, as in the past, of entroubling himself. It is only a matter of time before the Doctor shatters again."
"The Doctor will not accept what he/she/it has become?"
"I think not. When the moment arrives, we will be waiting. Ready with our claws."
Return to Travels Without Destination
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