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Brian doesn’t have the Doctor’s best interests at heart.
When they say ‘the Doctor’s’ they don’t mean their own, though that much is true as well. They mean the Doctor’s- future, separate enough for now, but still invariably themself- intentions. The Doctor from the future, one or more regenerations removed from them. An echo of the aftereffects of their death.
They shouldn’t care so much. No, they should, but they shouldn’t care in the way that they do. The concern they feel is the concern a mother feels for a fetus still trapped within her body, yet to emerge and realize itself as a human being, real to her and no one else. They should worry for that future Doctor as an extension of themself, not something new and immature and in need of guidance, as if the loom is still more than just a distant memory to him.
And yet, they do.
The Doctor is well aware that in a chronological sense, they are younger than the Time Lord they will go on to become, still brimming with childish indignance at how unfair it all is. It’s strange, that all they can see is a reflection of their early years in this body, when their mind still didn’t fit quite right and its emotions felt more than a touch to the left of the space they thought they should be.
They wonder how long this Doctor, with pinstripes and glasses he doesn’t really need and delusions of grandeur, has existed. They wonder how long he’ll last.
Not long, if Brian has a say in it. He’s all too glad to encourage recklessness in the Doctor turned Admiral (at his behest, no less) as long as it doesn’t endanger his own wellbeing. They can’t tell if the grudge he irrationally maintained for something they hadn’t even done has carried over to their later incarnations or not. Sometimes it seems like Brian has some mild distaste for his chosen Doctor, and sometimes he’s nothing less than the perfect polite companion (if you ignore the wanton violence).
To be honest, they’ve recently found it difficult to tell if Brian really does still hold a grudge against their current self. He’s gotten along with them well enough over the last few days, despite his previous straightforwardness about his desire to kill them in some painful way. They wonder if Brian even knows what’s going on in his own head, or if that kind of self-awareness was cut out along with his hind brain.
Their older self doesn’t seem to care whether Brian secretly hates him, as long as he stays by his side. Maybe he thinks he deserves someone as terrible as he is, in his younger selves’ eyes. Maybe he just needs a witness, as they always have in some shape or form, and Brian is the only one with enough morbid curiosity to stick around and watch all the atrocities they’re set on committing with no emotional response stronger than an interested remark or a concerned glance.
The Doctor doesn’t ask their future self what happened to them to make him think himself so far beyond redemption. They know better than to do that, than to disturb the delicate thread of coincidence supporting the Web of Time despite the major paradox they’re living through.
They want to, more than anything. They want to peek ahead, not even to the last page- they hope- but somewhere in the middle, far enough to reassure themself their narrative isn’t doomed. They worry more, day by day, that they wouldn’t like what they saw if they did, and there would be no comfort to be found between those lines.
~
They’re hovering in their older self’s bedroom, a gaudy place, wastefully opulent. They suspect their taste has shifted from the gothic in the past years, and they can’t say they’re a fan. They reckon they have a right to half of the ridiculous bed, or at least a third, if they’re accounting for their other wayward self. Their older incarnation hasn’t offered, but they invited themself in without room for argument, needing privacy for the conversation they intend to have.
“You’re being manipulated,” they tell their young older self, furrowing their brows and widening their eyes just enough to look imploring and empathetic. Unfortunately, they’ve never been good at comforting people, and they’ve coincidentally never been good at receiving comfort either.
The other Doctor doesn’t even seem to see it as the attempt at comfort it had been. Instead he looks generally confused, glancing around himself briefly as if the supposed manipulator will suddenly reveal themself if he squints hard enough.
“Manipulated? And who on Gallifrey do you suppose is doing that?” He spreads his arms out to either side in an unwitting mockery of the arrogance of the High Council. This Doctor isn’t wearing the Prydonian robes he dug up from some dusty corner of the TARDIS any more, but they reckon that he still has a nagging itch on his neck that he refuses to scratch out of some perverted idea of decorum. “I’m in control here,” he says, as leaders soon to find themselves relieved of their positions often do.
“I mean,” the Doctor starts, then casts their eyes around to check for uninvited Ood lurking in the corners of the room before continuing, fears relatively assuaged, “Brian would betray you at the drop of a hat. You should be careful, trusting someone like him.”
He doesn’t seem concerned the whole time they’re talking until they warn him off of trusting Brian, at which point his eyes go dark. It’s not a very promising sign, they think with a stifled sigh. “I’m well aware of my companion’s motivations,” he says stiffly, as insulted as if the Doctor had been accusing him rather than Brian. “I don’t need you to tell me who to trust.”
“Yet you’d trust an assassin over yourself,” they say, voice pitching up incredulously.
“Yes, well,” the Doctor says with an amused quirk to his mouth, “Perhaps I just know better by now. You’d say anything to get me on your side, I know. I was you.”
“You are me,” they correct, unable to mask their frustration. The way he looks at them makes their skin crawl- as if just because he has their memories he has the right to sift through them and brandish them like the weapons he’d recently become uncharacteristically quick to use. He was more than willing to bring up their mistakes with Charley, digging into still-open wounds with all the surgical expertise of Davros. “No better, no…” They trail off.
“Can’t even say it, can you?” His dark eyes burn into them, make their hearts beat faster in their chest. He knows they’ve judged him, without even knowing why he’s done all he has. They want to believe he’s not too far gone, of course they do.
(Yet they could hardly bring themself to believe that of their own self. Whenever they feel the doubt creeping in around their edges, bleeding into their core like ink spilt across a page, they hardly ever try to salvage what remains.
When their head was full of their antithesis and self-absorbed despair, they chose to run away to die in another universe. When they knew they’d sentenced the Earth to a painful death at the hands of the Daleks, they nearly sped up the process just to destroy themself in the crossfire. When Lucie…
They burn bridges when these things happen. Who’s to say they’re any better than their future self? They’d almost regret being so harsh on him to start.
Almost. Maybe if they hadn’t watched Mordeela burn at his behest.)
The other Doctor is looking at them with a small frown and an emotion they’re worried might be pity. Something like an apology passes through their inherent telepathic link, though what for, they can’t discern.
“Listen. Brian has helped me a lot these last few weeks. I know he’s not perfect-“ That’s an understatement if the Doctor’s ever heard one. “-but he’s all I’ve got right now, apart from you and a ship full of mercenaries more worried about a paycheck than their lives. And while I appreciate what you’re trying to do…” He tugs his ear, a tic they’ve noticed he picked up in this regeneration. “Well. I’ve never done very well with just myself for company.”
(They remember burrowing into the soft parts of Kro’ka’s mind, picking him apart from the inside out. They remember looking on in horror at the state they left him in, recoiling in disgust at the grim display of their own capacity for violence. They remember being appalled at the lengths their psyche would go to in order to deny their nature. It came easy to them, even as far back as the Academy, hoisting a rock over their head and bringing it down and hearing the crack of a skull shattering and feeling blood spurt across their face and-
They understand what he means. It’s harder to look themself in the eye with enough perspective to see that they’re wrong more often than they’re right.)
“Do you remember Atharna? Moslin Town?” they ask flippantly, already expecting the answer they’ll get.
“No,” he mutters, furrowing his brow in either concentration or confusion. “If you’re referring to some specific encounter there, which I get the feeling you are.”
“Yes.” They sit down on the edge of his bed, around which they’ve been lingering for the past ten minutes. When he looks mildly offended they’re reminded that this all has been getting to his head, more than he’d like to admit. “I told him the story about Godfather Death. And then he tried to kill half of a young couple.”
“Well,” he hems, as if they’re talking about a faux pas rather than attempted murder, “He is an assassin. I’m redirecting his… skillset… into a more productive direction. Surely that’s a good thing.”
“Like wiping out the Kotturuh?” They frown, eyes wandering along the designs carved into the ornate bedposts, pointedly avoiding his gaze. They vowed to destroy the Daleks, once. To wipe them from the face of history. They still wonder if they had been right then, or if they were right to change their mind. If they were taking the coward’s way out then or now. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Well, I do,” the Doctor says firmly, but when they glance at him he’s looking into the middle distance like someone who really doesn’t but is trying to convince themself they do. They’ve always been this way, they suppose, and maybe they always will be. For all they pride themselves on their ability to change, they wonder if it’s all just superficial, and they’re doomed to keep repeating the same mistakes for the rest of their regeneration cycle- if they make it that far.
This version of them can’t have many bodies left. Three at most. They thought they were feeling the weight of their years when they used to insist on telling people how long it was since they were reborn rather than how long it was since their first self came to be. Now they see the wear of time in everything this Doctor says, everything he does. When he’s not playing pretend, calling himself ‘Admiral’ or ‘Time Lord Victorious’, he looks tired enough to lay down and die right there and then. Rassilon knows they’ve wanted to do so more than ever in this body, and they suppose it sticks around, even more permanent than the scars between their hearts and across their throat.
“I’ll take your word for it, for now. But I’ll be keeping an eye on him, for our sakes.” They flop down on the bed unceremoniously, prompting an irritated but unsurprised huff from their older self. Soon he’s being shoved to the edge of the bed, far enough that their shoulders won’t touch if they lay side by side, the older Doctor having decided getting them to leave is either a unwinnable battle or a pointless one.
They don’t sleep- they’d slept a few days ago, curled up in their cell on the Dalek ship, forcing themself to ignore the stench of blood and rot, one hand resting against the pot holding of their lost spider plant.
Their older self, on the other hand, sleeps like the dead. It’s ironic, what with them being the most dead of all three of them.
(They wonder if it was his body in the casket they dragged across Quiesca, if it was his body they destroyed along with an animal sacrificed to the stars. They wonder if he’ll be as scared as she was, when he knows his time is up.
Something in his face tells them he will be.)
SkellyMyDude Tue 07 Oct 2025 07:21AM UTC
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doctorcorvid Tue 07 Oct 2025 04:59PM UTC
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