Chapter Text
The Doctor is staring at the message he just typed out, groaning inwardly at just how much effort it is costing him to dredge up the courage to actually hit “Send”.
It’s been a bit over a year – a local year – since the day he’d been supposed to regenerate after being exposed to a fatal dose of radiation.
As far as he knows, he has both regenerated and not – continuing life back home in his next incarnation while his own body, along with his personality, has somehow been transferred to this incredible, unlikely, wonderful world where so many people he had once believed dead are still alive, and he’s given another chance at life.
He’s not arrived undamaged, and his early days here had been an ongoing struggle just to keep him alive, followed by more time spent in agonisingly slow recovery.
He’s about as well now as he expects he’s going to get – and that is far better than he’d expected to ever be again, as he reminds himself now and then. His TARDIS remains gone, travelling on with his next incarnation, but it’s not like he’s needing one anyway. His adventuring days are probably over for good.
Instead, he’s picked one of the larger one-apartment buildings in this world’s main settlement, one already equipped with a small in-house observatory and space for labs and workshops. He’s spent the time since moving in further furnishing it and setting up workstations for himself to study some of the stranger bits of technology that make it in here, to experiment, and to build what strikes his fancy.
Martha Jones’ son August and some of his friends have an open invitation to his home, and they’ve been using it on a regular basis, both to use his equipment for school projects and homework and to look over his own experiments and give him a hand. He enjoys those afternoons.
They’re also one of the things he may be losing if he actually sends off that message and goes through with any plans connected to it.
It wasn’t his idea to begin with.
Well, not really in any case. At least not only. In any case…
No, the entire message wasn’t really his idea. He’d have been happy to just let things continue as they were.
Or maybe not happy but—content?
That was, all the way until Amberdrake had asked him some very pointed, very specific questions.
Back when he’d been incapacitated from the radiation damage his body had taken, confined to clinging to life from a hospital bed, and for the time thereafter as his condition had slowly improved, Amberdrake had been brought in to make sure his joints wouldn’t seize up while he’d been too out of it, and then too weak, to move. As time had progressed, his services had changed a little. Oh, he’s continued to help him with the strictly physical part of getting back on his feet, spending many an hour working strains and minor injuries out of his muscles whenever he’d been too impatient with his body, but he’s also turned out to be an excellent listener – of the sort that encourages a person to talk about all those things that they usually keep to themselves.
He's continued seeing Amberdrake on a more or less regular basis, mostly just to talk these days. It helps him sort his thoughts and keep his memories where they belong. It helps him make sure that the Time Lord Victorious is never going to make an appearance again.
Recently, though, some of the things that have come up are more immediate in nature. He’s not sure why he’s even mentioned it to begin with.
No, that’s not right. He’d mentioned it because he had needed to hear someone else telling him to forget about it all, to take what he has and be content with that.
That, however, was not the response he’d gotten.
And then he’d spent the time since on and off wondering. Is being content with what he has and leaving it at that truly the way to go? How much is he going to regret it over time, never having tried, never actually knowing?
He could have reasoned his way out of that one.
The other thing the kestra’chern has mentioned is harder to discard. How fair is what he’s doing to the other person involved? How close is this once again to making decisions for others? He’s promised himself never to do that again if he can at all help it.
Looking at his screen, he shakes his head and deletes the entire long letter he’s written.
He can’t send it. This may need to be done, but it is not something he can do from behind a screen.
Feel like a ride and a picnic? He types instead. I would like to talk to you about something.
Now that doesn’t sound ominous at all, but nothing he tries adding makes it any better, and eventually he hits “Send” before he can reconsider again.