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The Doctor sees the look on Helen’s face one day and knows at once what it means.
She’s finally seeing it. That which everyone sees, eventually, if they stay by their side long enough. It’s just a glimpse, now, a peek through a cracked door marked NO ENTRY that she’s entering anyway, for no other reason than that she can. And, perhaps, because she knows it’s what they would do.
That look on her face is a question, one she usually directs toward Liv, knowing they’ll never answer it. It asks: why is he acting this way? The answer is simple, and she knows it already, but it’s the kind of answer people hate to be reminded of. Because I’m not like you.
Worse: because I’m not like anyone.
They’re a Time Lord dreaming of being a man dreaming of being a Time Lord. Then again, they’re a rubbish man, and a rubbish Time Lord at that. Their timeline has been created and uncreated and recreated, like someone with a tremor trying to build a house of cards blindfolded.
They hate dwelling on memories, but they’ve had so much time to do so since they were stranded. Again, again. The first time was easier, if only because they had less memories to dwell on back then. The second time…
People looked at them like this all the time. That slightly suspicious, slightly nervous look. Like there was some big secret hiding just below their skin. It wasn’t often clear whether they’d pegged them as something supernatural or some other kind of deviant in the eyes of polite society. It didn’t often matter, as the result tended to be the same.
Sometimes they have to remind people, hating every second. I’m not human. I’m not a man. I’m not one of you. Except they’re sure they were human, in some way, at some point. Except they’re not sure they aren’t still human, in whatever way that is. And with that idea trapped in their head like another caged animal, they realize they can’t help but be set apart, even from their other selves.
Day after day, they wander around the outskirts of the zoo and try not to think about the TARDIS. Its pain is a faint undercurrent in their head, ever-present. They feel like a stranger in their body as surely as if they’d just regenerated, everything around them seeming more like a dream than the tangible, physical reality it is.
Liv and Helen threw them a birthday party. It was absurd, but they found themself close to crying as they announced it, a haphazardly constructed cake proffered to them. It was so mundane, so ordinary, so human.
(They used to cry all the time, not quite sure how to stop their tears from falling in this body. They’re not quite sure why or when they stopped. Maybe they ran out.)
They celebrated their fake birthday in the house they’d lived in for longer than they’d stayed anywhere since their hair was long and they wore velvet rather than leather. For some reason, throughout the whole event, they kept thinking I’m not doing it properly. Which was strange, since they’ve hardly ever cared about doing anything properly. They feel as if they’re expected to, which is another thing they’d usually disregard, but it’s different when the expectations are coming from the people they care about.
(When Sister Cantica said Liv and Helen loved them, they felt their throat close up. It felt like she was reading their obituaries, fixing the inevitability of their deaths, making them real. What good had loving them ever done anyone? Charley loved them. Lucie loved them. Molly loved them.
And then they saw what lay beneath their skin.
What will it do to Liv and Helen if they know them, really know them? How long before they wind up alone again?)
It’s not like Liv and Helen aren’t sympathetic. They do their best to support them. They invite them to go out with them and bring them tea and ask them what’s wrong when they disappear for long stretches of time. The only problem is that what’s wrong is always the same, and none of them can do anything about it.
They’ve started to imagine them dying. Not in some big, dramatic scene, the kind they sometimes used to dread before swearing to themself that they’d never allow it to happen (which was bluntly untrue- they’d done it before, they’d do it again- but it was enough to let them get on with their life until they let someone else down).
If they really do end up stuck here forever, the most likely way their friends will die is from old age. The Doctor will watch them grow old, and then they’ll watch them die- that is, if they even have the stomach to stand at their bedsides. They didn’t when Liv was shot, who’s to say they will when that which they once claimed to lord over takes their friends away once again?
They don’t bring it up. It’s not as if they can control their mortality any more than the Doctor can control their pseudo-immortality. Their friends have already been worrying about them giving up. It would be admitting defeat, to show how terrified they really are, how achingly familiar this all is.
The zoo repairs the hole they cut in the enclosure, and they get to watch it happen. Soon enough they’ll find more birds, if they haven’t already, and lock them away just as the others had been. Nobody will know the difference. It will be as if nothing ever happened, and for the average person there will be no way of telling the birds there now are completely different from the ones there before.
They start to wonder if they, too, will die of old age. If the rest of their life will consist of days- 24 hours, 1,440 minutes, 86,400 seconds. All lined up in a row like dominoes, just waiting for someone to knock them over. Waiting for the Doctor to bring an end to them.
Maybe not old age, then, but something close enough. They could live more or less forever, barring accidents, but don’t think they could bear to live this life forever. An ‘accident’ will come around sooner rather than later if they have anything to say about it.
~
“I don’t expect you to adjust, exactly,” Helen is saying from somewhere behind them, the sound of her voice grating what with the headache building behind their eyes. They’re sifting through her and Liv’s junk drawer, trying to find a spare part they- perhaps foolishly- left there. “But maybe you could get a day job, or… volunteer. Or find some kind of hobby, like I said before. I don’t think it’s good for you to-”
“Yes, I know,” they say, harsher than they intend to. “You don’t expect me to be human. You just expect me to walk and talk and think like one.”
Helen falls silent. They turn to look at her and find she’s gone pale, brows drawn together. They’re pretty sure they know what this expression means, the one time they know and the one time they wish they didn’t. Her eyes say you really think that of me? They try to swallow the nausea tickling the inside of their throat with little success.
“Sorry,” they mutter, in that shameful way they do when Liv’s glaring at him and they’re thinking they deserve one another more than I will ever deserve them.
Helen sighs faintly and glances out the window, the nuances of her expression quickly returning to being a mystery. “I don’t want you to be human, Doctor. I don’t know where you got that idea.”
“I know you’re frustrated with me,” they murmur, unsure of why they’re saying it aloud, making it real.
“I’m frustrated for you,” Helen says, gently, as if she’s talking to a child. “Seeing you try so hard to fix things. You’re wearing yourself down.”
“It’s not me wearing myself down. It’s this place.” Baker Street is a place they chose for themself- they never imagined it would turn into their prison, not like this. They spend their days here surrounded by four walls wondering when (because it has to be when, if they’re to carry on) they’ll return to the TARDIS, and whether they’ll find a hillside blanketed with butterflies’ corpses when they do.
Being stranded on Orbis wasn’t like this. They lived out lifetimes there without feeling the sharp ache they’d become familiar with as of late. They’re used to holding themself a safe distance from humanity, close enough to reach out and touch, but never close enough to subject themself to its scrutiny.
“I am sorry. I know you don’t think that. Maybe I just expect you to,” they mutter to themself. They look down to where their hand hangs halfway in the open drawer, fingertips grazing the edges of reminders scrawled on torn paper- grocery lists and phone numbers and addresses- magnets and pens and and a half-empty bottle of Aspirin that could kill them quicker than a Dalek.
“Do you…” Helen stops, whatever the rest of her sentence might’ve been catching in her throat. “No, never mind. I should go, I told Liv I’d meet her after her shift.” They turn fully, extracting their hand from its in-between state, lingering on the threshold of the drawer, so that they might look at their friend properly. She’s frowning down at her hands as she wrings them together, as if her body’s nervous fidgeting is independent from the rest of her faculties.
“Go on,” they say quietly, urging her on. They only realize how raspy their voice is in that moment, and soon after that they haven’t had anything to drink in at least a day. What have they even been doing? Their memory isn’t good at the best of times, but they’re usually capable of remembering the past few hours, at least.
“Do you wish you were human?” Helen asks, preemptively abashed. It’s the sort of shameful question Koschei and Theta would whisper to each other before either had regenerated once, unable to deny their curiosity nor their apprehension. “Oh, that came out wrong. I just mean… I used to wish I was like other people. People who never had to worry about where they fit.”
(They think of Georgina, tricking herself into believing they were her wayward husband, looking at them as if they were a miracle. They think of long nights spent playing violin until their fingers bled, an orangish tint that nearly stained the strings of the precious gift they would go on to smash in their frustration. They think of Turing, asking if they had a wife, the quiet hope in his voice that they soon tried to snuff, for all the good it did either of them.
They think of too many fingers, reaching out to dip beneath their skin, to steal away the colors that belonged to them, to fold them into the shape of a human like they were a particularly tricky bit of origami. “Just human,” Griffin said, plainly, as if it were obvious. “It doesn’t matter to me which category you fit into, human or Time Lord, just so long as you’re definable. Only one thing at a time.”)
“Sometimes,” they answer, just as quiet as Helen, just as shameful. They can’t bring themself to look her in the eye.
“I know it’s not the sort of thing you’re supposed to think. Because then you wouldn’t be yourself, and so on,” they hear Helen saying, and wonder if she’s staring out the same window they are, eyes tracing the clouds lazily drifting through the bright blue sky. They wished they’d stayed home, so Artron made sure that they would. He only failed to realize that this isn’t really their home, that it never could be. Their home sits on a street corner fighting for its life- the life they’ve treated so carelessly, time and again.
“I’m not myself while I’m here.” Because the Doctor is no person, not really. It is a function, a deed, a set of principles they break more than they follow them. It’s an incredible escaping equation, and it might find itself trapped, but never for long. Or at least, never forever. “If I were someone else, at least I could stand to exist like this.”
They could have a natural human lifespan to look forward to, living and loving and dying. They could take Helen’s hand now, and here, and not find themself unable to think of anything aside from how much warmer it is than their own, how much more fragile and alive and human she is than them.
They feel as they find themself feeling more often than not, in this body. Caught in an in-between state, somewhere between life and death, forgetting to breathe for minutes at a time, going days- weeks- without eating or sleeping, trying to solve the same unsolvable problem.
(A few days ago- they guess a few days, time has little meaning nowadays, when all the days blend together like one long dream- they found themself staring at their body in the mirror. They don’t remember removing their jacket and shirt, peeling off layers like shedding their second skin. They only remember realizing they had to squint to see the scar in the center of their chest, what used to be a great ugly tear having long since faded to mauve to pink to white.
They’ve never quite come together, this body and this mind. They should be united, inexorably linked, as they are to their Ship. Yet when they watch their movements in the mirror it’s through a stranger’s half human eyes, gray or green or blue, marked D for all of the above and E for none of the above.
They’ve always wanted to be more human, a perverse desire they used to keep tucked away in the darker corners of their symbiotic nuclei, to be known only by their closest, oldest friend. Since they regenerated into this body, killed with gloved hands on their skin and a tube in their chest, resurrected alone in a freezing box meant for a dead man, since they got what they wanted, they find themself wishing to be more alien for the first time.
At least then I wouldn’t keep falling short, trying to be one thing or the other, never quite managing either.
It isn’t true, obviously it isn’t. They never fit on Gallifrey, even when their eyes were capable of autonomous thought and never blurred with tears at inopportune moments. It’s just easier to pretend they left by choice rather than necessity.)
“I can’t say I know how you feel, exactly… but I’ve felt similar,” Helen says, and her hand is on their shoulder, squeezing lightly as if to ground them, not knowing they’d do anything not to be here in this moment. Or maybe she’s just trying to show them how inevitable it all is, their acceptance of this normal life in this abnormal body, their giving up, their giving in.
“I want you to stay yourself, if it counts for anything.” She says it as if they have a choice. Someday- maybe in a thousand years, maybe in one, maybe tomorrow- they’ll become someone else, and if their experience this time around is anything to go by they’ll all but forget what it was like to be themself. They’ll become a stranger to themself again.
(As if they ever stopped being one, this time. As if they ever will.)
“I could say the same of you,” they murmur, hand drifting up to brush against hers, feeling the warmth in her skin buzzing under their fingertips.
“I’m sure you would,” she says, and they’re sure they catch a hint of bitterness carefully tucked between the words. They know she has barriers upon barriers built up over the years, that she’ll likely never divest herself of completely. It’s almost comforting, like looking out of one cage to see another, knowing they’ll never come close enough to touch its inhabitants even as they live out parallel lives. They’d become so used to feeling like less than a person they forgot that even people (real ones, not ones woven out of tampered biodata and malformed memories) feel that way.
“I’m sorry,” they repeat, and it feels more like reprimanding themself than apologizing to Helen.
“What for?”
“You should go to Liv. You’ll be late.” Not an answer, a request. Let me be alone, please. I can’t bear to look at you. You can never go home again because of me and I blamed you for the mess I let you make of your life.
“Okay,” she says, taking a reluctant step back. Her hand retreats with the rest of her, leaving the Doctor an individual once more, no longer the second in a pair, the third in a trio. “You could come, if you wanted. She’d be glad to see you.”
They shake their head. They don’t know if they’re saying no, I couldn’t come or no, she wouldn’t be glad. Maybe both.
“Okay. You should come see her later, though. If you aren’t terribly busy.” She smiles as easy as ever, and their eyes can’t find any noticeable lines of tension in her face. Maybe she’s always on edge and they’ve just never stopped to notice. Liv will have noticed right away, they’re sure. Maybe anyone else would have.
“What have I done to get you acting like my mother? I know I haven’t been on my best behavior lately, but…” They don’t finish the sentence. They both know she’s not just asking them to say hello. She wants to check on them again, wants Liv to check on them. As if they’re a child who can’t be left to their own devices, not a Time Lord well into their second millennium. They suppose they can’t blame her when they’d still be living in never-neverland if they could, they think ruefully.
“I’ll pop in later,” they say, as casually as they can when Helen is looking at them like that again, the silent worry, the disconnect, the I don’t understand you, the I can’t help you. “Go on and meet Liv, I’ll see you then.”
“Yes. I will,” she says quietly, then turns away. They feel almost like a weeping angel- the second she stops looking at them, whatever mild expression they’d subconsciously schooled their face into falls away. She shuts the door behind her and leaves them alone. They feel like an intruder, standing in someone else’s apartment in a house that should have been theirs alone on a planet they never should have set foot on.
They tell themself they won’t allow themself to stay stranded here forever. That hollow promise is enough to let them get on with their life, for now.