He's Fire And Ice And Rage

There's nothing of him left inside me. Nothing. You see, I killed them all. Just as I went back and wiped out the Time Lords, Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, the whole lot of them. I traveled back in time to prevent my past selves from making mistakes. I tried to show them how they were passing up the opportunity to attain real power. But each one of those fools preferred their own self-consciously noble, ultimately unsatisfying lifestyles. All of them argued with me, tried to thwart my plans. So I erased them, took them out of existence.

It is London. 24 March 2007. I am at once my current age, somewhere around 2,890, and at equal times my tenth self at around 1,207 (though I believe I was still vain enough in my youth to believe that I should lie about my age). Oh, how foolish and immature I was.

"I didn't think you'd show your face here," my younger self, the one who still calls himself the Doctor, says.

My reply is simple. "I didn't think you'd recognize me. Neural memories, of course. Ripping out through the cosmos. My cosmos."

"How did you get here?" Oh, how impudent I was. How forceful, full of self-importance and valor. Oh, valor. Pity I never realized that caution is the better part of that "noble" trait.

"I hold the fabric of every reality. Every core of every computational moment in the whole of creation from its beginning to its end. I lived through your life once, before I went back and prevented it." What a complicated few years it has been. Since defeating my sixth self, I've had such a time taking care of the universe, finding the weapons I worked so hard to hide in my naieve youth. And now, finding myself again.

"Prevented it?" the Doctor, the one in the brown suit, looks horrified. "How could you...why would you do that?"

( 'Because, Doctor. I can.' Cut for very mild spoilers to 4.14, 'The Planet of the Dead'. )

Muse: The Doctor (Ten)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Word Count: 1,980, not including text from Doctor Who Unbound: He Jests At Scars
Special thanks to salvagestime for the inspiration and beta!

I suppose they…they break my heart.

He has two hearts.

Two lumps of cardiac muscle (cardiac myocyte), each weighing around 11 grams, crammed into his ribcage, which for all intents and purposes could be larger on the inside for all the organs it contains within such a small space. Each heart pumps blood at a rate of 4-6 LPM, working in unison to bring around 12 liters of blood spiraling through his binary cardiovascular system every minute.

It's very little wonder Grace said his blood doesn't look like blood. It simply doesn't. It's like human blood run through a cheese grater. Smaller, more efficient cells, maybe, but different. They don't move nutrients the same way because the hearts don't pump them the same way.

The hearts don't move emotions the same way, either. In the figurative sense, of course, as the muscle of the heart is hardly the part of the body that holds emotion. It's a silly notion derived from human romanticism. In fact, saying "heartsbreak" in Gallifreyan is really just a mockery, a play on words trivializing emotion to its most simplistic form: human.

His left heart is purely Gallifreyan. Solid, beating a single beat without any wavering. It's the heart he was born (created, Loomed, whatever that insignificant term prior to a first regeneration is) with. The heart that beat fiercely as he ran from the Tempered Schism, the heart that first swelled at the sight of a meteor shower, and the heart that first closed up and pushed someone away.

It's a heart that belongs to the Master, in many ways. A heart that was given when the Doctor was young and things seemed so simple. He never quite had the courage to ask for it back, and even now he isn't certain he would. So the heart is his alone as, after all, the Master would never share a possession. Especially one as unique as the Doctor's left heart. Even from his grave the Doctor can often feel the Master's hand curling around his heart like a tumor, threatening to slip out of remission and overtake the entire torso with the slightest change of climate.

It's a heart that ages. He aged as it beat, then as a second one grew with his regeneration, he stopped aging. It never did, though. He can still feel it, hard and crusted, beating against his ribcage during his most trying times. Beating out a staccato of what is right and Lawful at 67 beats per minute without fail.

It's a heart that doesn't truly know how to love. It's the heart Joan laid her hand on when she asked him if one of his hearts belonged to John Smith. It made telling her 'no' easier. It made breaking her all-too-human heart passable. No matter how much his other heart cried out for her.

His right heart is human. First formed (born) after his first regeneration. It sits a little too far to the left, as if worried it might pull away; lose its place in the Doctor's chest. It beats a little off, always few tics too early or too late. Not nearly bad enough for serious medical treatment (so his Time Lord doctors would tell him), but it's enough to be a bother at times. It's the heart that first fell in love, the heart that fluttered for the first time in anticipation, the heart that broke when he couldn't save someone.

It's his mother's heart. It's Susan's heart. It's John Smith's heart. It's a heart that falls in love too quickly and it's a heart that bruises too easily. It's the part of him that seems to fall out when he loses someone. It's the part of him that feels empty when he's alone in the Void of space. It's a muscle that's not strong enough to work on its own and requires its aged counterpart just to keep him going.

It's a heart that loves, deeply but quietly. Solidly but fearfully. Completely but imperfectly.

It's the heart he offers to his companions. It's the only part of him that can love. He keeps his cold, aged heart close. Keeps his alien-ness inside while showing them the side of him they might be able to understand.

And perhaps, just perhaps, he's too terrified of them breaking his heart to offer them both. So he gives the one that's already bruised, keeps the hard and cold one safe. Just in case. Because it might happen if he lets it.

But it's a self-fulfilling fear, of course. By only offering them half, he can never offer them enough.

Or perhaps he offers them enough but pulls it back just as quickly, fear of that hurt settling in. Or perhaps he's afraid of damaging what he gives to them more than he's afraid of losing them.

After all, while that right heart may never age, it can grow bitter. Fearful. Jaded.

So he only gives them one.

And when they break his heart---as they inevitably do---the other one still beats that solid, cold rhythm in his chest. Reminding him how he was right to keep himself inside. Reminding him that it's not the first time and it won't be the last.

He simply has to accept it.

Half of him does.

Half of him doesn't.

His hearts beat blood to every part of him. The parts that blush, the parts that cry. The parts that find reason and understanding, the parts that run away.

But as with the two hearts, his parts don't work together. Things don't come out perfectly. No matter how hard he tries, he still loses part of his human heart. Broken as they're ripped away, walk away to another universe, or leave him to be with a being who can offer his only heart without any fear.

But the Doctor has two hearts.

They don't beat in time with the ones he loves.

Muse: The Doctor (Ten)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Word Count: 990
Special thanks to ambitious_woman for the beta!

Hangin' round downtown by myself
And I had so much time
To sit and think about myself
And then there she was

You don't like traveling alone.

But just because you don't like it doesn't mean you won't do it. If a shark stops swimming it will die, and Donna always said that traveling was your way of swimming. So you travel. You've been sticking to Earth lately because Earth is easy. Earth is safe and warm and you can get a new culture just by changing your longitude. Earth is a little bit of everything and that's why you love it.

Today, you are in Bangkok. It's June, 1999. Next month NASA will intentionally crash the Lunar Prospector spacecraft into the Moon. In August, a 7.4-magnitude earthquake will strike northwestern Turkey, killing more than 17,000 and injuring 44,000. In December, dozens will die in Venezuela in a series of mud streams. And, on a less global note right now somewhere on the other side of the world Chang Lee is hugging his friends and Grace Halloway is kissing her boyfriend goodbye and in December you'll be there to make sure that their after-Christmas plans don't turn out quite as right as they hoped.

But Bangkok is wonderful. Oh, you've been here before. Various times, various places. You brought Dodo here once, and Leela. Still, depending on the year and the month and even the time of day, there's always something different.

( It's probably 2 in the morning, now. )

Muse: The Doctor (Ten)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Word Count:1,927

If you're in a bad situation, don't worry it'll change. If you're in a good situation, don't worry it'll change. - John A. Simone, Sr.

"Explain this to me again."

"Do I have to?"

It was probably not physically possible for Donna Noble to be more furious at the Doctor. She was tired, her clothes were torn up, and to top it all off? She was covered in some strange pollen that made her skin flushed and itchy. And if she looked nearly as bad as the red-splotched Doctor looking down at the console, she was never going to go outside again.

"The pollen is from a Derirte plant," he said, slowly and just a hint more patronizing. "Reacts differently with each body chemistry that comes in contact with it. For the Draconians it exfoliates their skin, for the Tereleptils it causes boils…for humans, however, it can prove to be fatal if---"

"Just cut to the chase, Space Man."

The Doctor scratched his head, sending more tiny spores from his gravity-defying hair. He sneezed and sighed.

( If you don't have sexual intercourse in the next hour, you will die. )

Muse: The Doctor (Ten)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Word Count: 764

Author's Note: Based on the rush of extremely bad "Sex-Pollen" Doctor/Donna fics out there on Teaspoon. I'm all for an impossible pairing like D/D (and it ain't like 10ant and t8 don't have a ton of chemistry), but honestly, could you get more cliché??

The Journal of Impossible Things

10 November 1913

Dreams slip away if one does not keep them written down. It is as I was telling Martha this morning. The way the mind works is that the more important stays in the forefront while those things that are less important to the moment stay hidden. My dreams, as I've come to discover, are less important to my mind than they are to me, so they vanish.

All the same, let me be more brief. Professor Moffat always finds time to tell me that the Bard says brevity is the soul of wit. While I prefer history to literature, I can take that idea to heart.

Last night I dreamed I was running. (The story takes place in the year of our Lord 2007!) It was Martha and I, running. There is almost always some sort of danger or running involved in these dreams, as I have come to notice. The Doctor's life is always one of adventure, occasionally heartbreak, and danger from which he must always run. He wears the most unusual shoes because of how they improve this ability.

Martha and I are running from some sort of evil (another constant in the dreams), pushing past people and running along corridors until we arrive back at the magic box. I'm not safe in the box because the evil can track me. Martha is unlike her normally well-collected self; she appears to be very frustrated, anxious, and confused.

In my dreams, Martha and I have a significantly different relationship. She is my traveling companion. An equal, of sorts. The concept itself seems ridiculous as I write it because a world where a woman of color could be on equal terms with a respected schoolteacher is absurd. However, in the Doctor's world Martha stands on equal footing with him and he trusts her. There is no doubt in his mind that she is loyal and brave.

Audaces Fortuna Juvat.

The magic box has the answer, as it frequently does. I move beneath the front spiral desk of the main room and pull objects out from within her depths.

Martha, you trust me, don't you? I say to my companion.

Her response is both immediate and endearing. Of course I do. She says the words with conviction as I have never heard from my quiet housemaid.

It all depends on you, I tell her. I then stand and hold my fob watch to her. I begin to explain to her the importance of the watch, but as I have said, dreams fade away at times. No, they don't fade. Not the dreams about the Doctor.

They run. Run away at full gallop and I am left wondering what it was I dreamt at all. It feels as if my mind only shows me a glimmer to remind me that this storybook hero in my mind is there, but I'm not allowed to see his full story just yet.

It is funny how dreams are like that.

Muse: John Smith / the Doctor (Ten)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Word Count: 489
All IC Responses will be replied to by John Smith

"When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her." - Oscar Wilde

We won, you know, Doctor.

He says the words with a deep sigh of relief as he gazes out over the Earth. Littered with the Toclafane; screaming humans beneath cowering in their homes or shelters or wherever they're hiding.

Stopped the War, you did. Did you realize you were going to do that? Oh, of course you did. You wouldn't have done it otherwise.

He puts his forehead against the glass and takes a breath. His fingers beat out the drum against the wall again and again.

(  So much pain. So many lives just taken  )

Muse: The Doctor (Ten)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Word Count: 606

"Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
- William Butler Yeats, "He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven"


Following this ficlet.

She dreams of starfire.

Twisted, burning portals of worlds and universes, and the blur of a swirling vortex of time and space. She has never dreamed like this before, and the experience is both comforting and terrifying.

She sleeps, and he can not. It's a strange experience, considering he has always slept within her when she was not as she is. Now, she dreams as she lies in his arms, wrapped up within his trench coat. (  He can feel her dreams; feel the euphoria of imagining she is still a police box with a labyrinth within. )

Muse: The Doctor (Ten)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Word Count: 1,108

It was after many, many, many glasses of hypervodka that they shared this conversation. The world was saved, yeah? The Doctor had returned to the Hub smelling like ashes and looking like he'd lost his best friend rather than his mortal enemy and Jack had a few cases of the overly strong alcohol in his office.

"Besides," he said, "My crew, they're off in the Himalayas, we've got the place to ourselves. And I haven't been drunk in a year. Positively tragic, I’m telling you."

( Martha concurred, then tilted her head at the Doctor, 'You <i>can</i> get intoxicated, can't you? Alien metabolism and all?' )

Muse: The Doctor (Ten)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Word Count: 1,141

What'll you all have, then?

"Banana daiquiri, please."

"Sissy drink if'n I ever heard one."

"Diet coke with vodka."

"Ain't like you gotta worry 'bout that figure, yer lookin' awful nice already."

"Scotch. Make it a double. A very big one."

"Now ain't that---"

"Are you quite done insulting everyone else's drinks? Don't you have your own to pick?"

( And the muses play a bit of poker… )

Muse(s): The Doctor (Ten), Jayne Cobb, Dr. Allison Cameron, Sam Tyler
Fandom(s): Doctor Who, Firefly / Serenity, House, MD, Life on Mars
Word Count: 1,100