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In his third body, the Doctor lived on Earth for several years, and it wouldn’t be accurate to say that he’d hated every minute of it, but he certainly resented every minute of it. He understood that a forced regeneration and a temporary exile to a relatively nice planet was a laughably light penalty, and he would always look back fondly on some of the people he met during that exile, but the fact remained that he was trapped. When he wasn’t at work, the third Doctor spent a lot of time at the zoo, often finding himself by the tiger enclosure. The sight of such a great beast reduced to restlessly pacing its cage with nothing better to do reminded the Doctor of himself.
The Doctor’s eleventh body spent a long time in one place as well, towards the end of his life. On Trenzalore, not Earth, but it was the same basic principle; he was confined to one town. He spent nine centuries there, in a town under constant attack by all sorts of horrors, until what he thought was his final body grew old and wizened. He resented this, too, but what other options were there?
Then he stayed on Earth again, for seven decades in his twelfth body, lecturing at St. Luke’s. He wasn’t being forcibly confined, nor was he under attack, so it wasn’t as unpleasant as his UNIT era or his siege-of-Trenzalore era—if anything, his biggest complaint was that it was kind of boring—but as always, there was an important reason why he was breaking his usual habit of never staying in one place. He had to guard the vault.
Suffice it to say that the Doctor was no stranger to the stationary lifestyle. But there was always a reason. Sometimes he was stranded; the TARDIS had disappeared or broken down. Sometimes he was on a mission that required him to stay put for a while. Whatever the case, the Doctor did not “settle down.” The expectation, the plan, was always that he would eventually go back to his nomadic ways—or that he would die.
Which made it all the more jarring this time.
The fourteenth Doctor wasn’t stranded on Earth. His TARDIS was perfectly functional and easily accessible. His only “mission” was to become a British citizen and get his driver’s licence (he could drive just fine, thank you very much, but if he was going to be living here as a proper citizen, then should probably drive legally). There was nothing keeping him here in London. Nobody would die if he left. It would be so easy to just get in the TARDIS and go off somewhere exciting. Somehow, every few hours, he made the decision not to.
He went running every day. Got a new pair of shoes specifically for going for a run. Being a Time Lord, he was physically capable of running as fast as he could for hours on end without needing to stop and catch his breath. Being a renegade Time Lord, he was used to having to actually put to use the full extent of his impressive Gallifreyan stamina (often to the dismay of his companions who could only run for a few minutes).
There were times when he missed the feeling of running because he had to. It was what he did best; it was what he was used to. Casually jogging around a nice, peaceful, safe neighbourhood wasn’t the same. If he listened to the right music he could sort-of almost get a bit of adrenaline going, but…not really. Not enough. At least Donna understood.
“If you want, I could chase you around a bit,” she half-joked. “Maybe repeat some short phrases.”
“No, don’t, don’t do that,” said the Doctor. “I’m alright, Donna. Just need time to adjust, that’s all.”
***
It was his own suggestion that he get a job.
“When I said I was retiring, I meant retiring from the, you know…the…Doctor stuff. I can’t just sit around all the time!”
“We did all agree that you need a break,” said Donna.
“You know Time Lords only sleep for one hour at a time!” cried the Doctor. “We’re not meant to—to be—idle! No adventures, fine, but if I don’t get something to do, I’m going to start disassembling the household appliances and building robots out of them. And no, Animal Crossing doesn’t count as something to do!”
He did enjoy playing Animal Crossing (he'd already developed, then torn down, several comically efficient islands), but it wasn’t an occupation.
His first attempt was to simply ask Kate for a job at UNIT. He’d worked for UNIT before, in previous incarnations, so it was worth a shot. Her answer was a gentle but resounding “no.” He managed to hold down a job at an alarm monitoring station for almost a month before getting fired for technobabbling at customers and accusing dealers of scamming people (which they were, but apparently customers weren’t supposed to know that). He’d be lying if he said the idea of going back into the civil service never crossed his mind, but he wasn’t sure he could list prior experience working at the Bureau of Possible Events on his résumé, what with it being on another planet and all.
Ultimately, he was able to land a day job as a data entry clerk—well, a data-entry-clerk-slash-admin-assistant-slash-customer-service-representative—there weren’t a lot of jobs in the 2020s that weren’t really several different jobs all mashed up into one—which was boring, but marginally less boring than not having anything to do, so he instructed himself to consider it a win.
***
It wasn’t that talking with his coworkers was hard, because it wasn’t. The Doctor was great at talking to people. The issue was that he still had to remind himself that these people were his coworkers. They had a boss, but besides her, the team structure was otherwise, at least on paper, flat. Time Lords did not do “flat team structures.” There was always a hierarchy. Always a leader, almost always a second– and third-in-command, and always somebody at the bottom of the social ladder, and in a team of Time Lords, these structures were usually determined via all sorts of power moves and intricate social rituals (and the occasional bout of telepathic combat). Being a Time Lord, the Doctor was great at positioning himself at the top of almost any given social ladder. For the same reason, he was not as great at being part of a group when he wasn’t also its leader, or its saviour, or both.
Dr. Bajwa, his therapist (Donna, Shaun, Rose, Wilf, Sylvia, Mel, Shirley, and Kate all absolutely insisted he go to therapy) was as kind as he could be about telling the Doctor he needed to work on his ego. Probably kinder than the Doctor deserved, considering the amount of times he’d tried to psychoanalyse and play mind games with the poor man before eventually admitting defeat and starting to open up more.
“It’s not—you know, everybody has…bad habits, flaws, it’s not a moral failing, per se. But I think that if your goal is to get more involved in your community, make more friends…”
“You don’t have to be nice, you know.”
“Well, you have a habit of talking down to people. Now, I get that there’s a cultural aspect to that, you come from a different world, you’re used to dealing with telepaths, I understand your home is…in some ways, more advanced. But when you, um, for lack of a better way of phrasing it, when you sort of grandstand about that, people feel like you’re insulting them. Or maybe they believe that you’re above them in a way that makes you unapproachable. Either way, it’s great to be proud of where you come from! But when it starts to veer more into condescension territory, that just puts more distance between you and the people around you.”
Well, it wasn’t like nobody had ever called the Doctor condescending before. He was pretty sure he’d been called every possible variation of it, starting with “arrogant” and proceeding alphabetically, at least a thousand times. Time Lords weren’t known for their modesty, and the Doctor would be the first to admit his people’s reputation for conceit was well-deserved.
There was a cultural aspect to it. Modesty wasn’t a virtue in Gallifreyan culture. Sure, being too vain wasn’t likely to make you any friends, but what counted as “too” vain was a bit looser on Gallifrey than it was in most human cultures. If you really were better than someone else at something and able to prove it, there was no expectation for you to pretend you weren’t. Of course, if you couldn’t prove it, then that veered into “too vain” territory, but that was beside the point, because the Doctor could easily prove he was smarter and in most ways more capable than the overwhelming majority of humans.
The Doctor wasn’t really sure why he didn’t just knock it off when he realised that in most human societies, the socially correct behaviour was to be modest and humble whether you could outperform others or not.
It wasn’t always on purpose; sometimes he thought he was just…stating facts, only for it to turn out that those facts unfortunately didn’t reflect well on the intelligence of the people around him. Other times, the comments just sort of slipped out, more of a reflex than a premeditated action. In a life-or-death situation, taking control was the best way to keep everyone alive, and that did often involve talking down to them. Sometimes he was condescending on purpose. He liked to think he was getting better on that front, but then again, every incarnation after his first had liked to think that, so whether it was actually true was up for debate.
This time, he wasn’t just wandering about, forming teams around himself. He was trying to integrate into this human society. Flat team structure, he reminded himself for the millionth time. Not above them. One of them.
***
It was funny, how much he found himself thinking about his Gallifreyan heritage in this incarnation (mostly in the context of how different their society was from the one he lived in now), now that he knew they weren’t actually his original people. He wasn’t loomed into House Lungbarrow, he was found abandoned on this universe’s doorstep and…he didn’t really want to waste time and energy thinking about what his old self’s life must have been like with Tecteun. She said he’d considered her his mother. She also, apparently, experimented on him. He wasn’t inclined to imagine his life as her adopted-child-slash-test-subject was an idyllic one. Then again, his life in House Lungbarrow before he went off to the Academy was hardly sunshine and rainbows, either.
So he was some sort of being from another universe, some great cosmic mystery. He didn’t remember that life at all. How was he supposed to feel about facts of his own life that he only knew about in the same way people know about events in the lives of historical figures?
It wasn’t worth thinking about. He remembered House Lungbarrow, and the Academy, and the Bureau, and he remembered the orange sky and the red grass, the two suns and the silver trees, he remembered how he thought he would end up in the army and he remembered the barn in the Drylands where he would go to get away from his cousins and cry about the prospect of military service. The Deca. Rebelling against Pundat III. The assassination of Quences. He remembered Gallifrey, being Gallifreyan. It may have taken him more than one try, and he may have barely scraped by, but he made it through the Academy fair and square. He was a Time Lord.
He was a Time Lord.
Whatever he used to be, wherever he came from before Tecteun found him, it wasn’t relevant.
He wasn’t sure if he was proud to be a Time Lord; he had enough criticisms of their society to fill several novels the length of which would put every long-winded nineteenth-century human classic to shame and the contents of which would get all of them banned on Gallifrey and quite possibly retconned out of existence by He-Of-Many-Epithets himself.
Of course, the fact that he was also a renegade muddied it all even further. There was a time, earlier in his life, when he hadn’t considered himself one. When he first left, he wasn’t planning on staying away forever; every renegade thought they’d go back to Gallifrey someday and become a perfectly respectable member of non-linear society. But he was a renegade. In fact, he was the renegade, the archetype, the one every Time Lord probably thought of first when someone brought up renegades. He was disowned from House Lungbarrow. He’d been executed for interference (most Time Lords that worked in the judiciary didn’t like it when people referred to the forced-regeneration penalty as execution, but most Time Lords who’d actually been subjected to it insisted on the term).
In his tenth incarnation, the Doctor came awfully close to completely renouncing that part of himself. He refused not only to speak Gallifreyan, but also to read or listen to it. He held their civilization up on a pedestal almost high enough that Rassilon might have thought it sufficiently reverent, all the while refusing to allow himself to be a part of it. From the moment he regenerated, the tenth Doctor moulded himself to be more palatable to humans. His looks, his personality, the way he spoke, he was desperate to be more human, but he was never able to really integrate into human society either; sometimes because he saw himself as above them, other times because he saw himself as unworthy of them. He was a Time Lord only when being one set him apart from humanity.
By now, the Doctor had probably spent more time on Earth than on Gallifrey.
Earth was the first planet he came to after fleeing with Susan. English was one of the first non-Gallifreyan languages he learned.
The tenth Doctor had torn himself up inside refusing to embrace either people, refusing to let himself belong anywhere. And that impulse still raged in the fourteenth Doctor, the impulse to set himself aside from everybody, too much of a renegade to belong to one, too much of a Time Lord to belong to the other, and by Rassilon, Omega, and the Other, he was not even going to bother with the whole Timeless Child mess.
Could he be both?
Could he figure out the extent to which he still had any claim to his past on Gallifrey? Could he do that and integrate into this new life, become a member of this 2020s-era human society? Was there room for that?
***
Drunken conversations with his coworker Sajjad made things a bit easier. His late grandmother used to tell him stories about her experience coming to the UK from Egypt. The Doctor’s first instinct was to think that his experience was nothing like that at all. He’d never really thought of the term “immigrant” as something that could apply to him. Except…he was working on not putting himself a notch above humanity anymore, and when he really thought about the stories Sajjad told about his gran, they weren’t un relatable.
The citizenship process was interesting, since the Doctor had lived in the UK for more than five years before. He’d lived there for seventy years in his twelfth body. He also had all sorts of powerful friends in high places who were oddly thrilled at the idea of him actually being British on paper. He himself wasn’t sure how to feel about it. It wouldn’t be his first time becoming a legal citizen somewhere besides Gallifrey, but this time around felt so much more concrete.
It was January 2025 when everything was officially in order.
He and the Temple-Nobles went out to Chris’s Fish Bar for fish and chips to celebrate, like a normal family.
***
Maybe it was a selfish way to feel, but there were times when the Doctor was glad Donna had some of his memories. Most of the time he wished that whole metacrisis thing had never happened, and part of him didn’t like people knowing things about him without him telling them (even if it was Donna), but sometimes it was nice, accidentally telling a joke that only made sense from a non-linear standpoint and having someone around who’d actually laugh. Donna asked, sometimes, about the things she’d seen when she was…well, him. She was usually kind enough not to press the matter on sore topics, but the Doctor knew it wouldn’t be fair of him to expect a connection that strong not to change the dynamic of their relationship. He wasn’t going to successfully be a part of human society if he kept trying to be mysterious.
“Can’t believe your name used to be Theta Sigma,” said Donna. “I swear, Time Lords have the weirdest names. I couldn’t be a Time Lord, I’d have to be named something like—”
“Donna—”
“Like Pi Kappa Delta, or John Biochemistry, or Anthrax, or—”
“Donna, stop!” the Doctor laughed.
***
Time Lords were the bureaucrats of time. You’d be hard pressed to find a Time Lord who never worked in, or at least adjacent to, government or law or the civil service. They loved organising things, categorising, regulating, they loved paperwork and red tape and yet somehow they didn’t really do any of this when it came to gender and sexuality. To them, sex was a fashion choice and sexuality was simply irrelevant. All of it was so unimportant that even the great administrators of the laws of reality didn’t see any of it as worth regulating and categorising.
The Doctor learned quickly that it wasn’t quite as irrelevant to humans. No, indeed, their societies tended to have strict, rigid ideas about gender. Everything from colours to animals to personality traits to jobs to inanimate objects to everything was ascribed to masculinity or femininity, with every other culture disagreeing on what belonged to which, and of course ne’er the two shall meet and there were no alternative options. Being born with a penis meant you were a man and you could only do, say, like, think Man Things, and you had to want to have sex with women, but not other men. It was both oversimplified and overly complicated and the Doctor didn’t bother with it. He knew most humans perceived most of his bodies as male, and that didn’t bother him, but he certainly wasn’t a Man in the human sense, no more than his thirteenth incarnation was a Woman. He was—no, he reminded himself not to think that Time Lords were “above” that—simply not interested.
He admired the humans who flouted all the rigidity of their societies’ gendered expectations. If there was one thing he really had always stood for from the day he was loomed—wait, no—from his earliest second-childhood memories—it was trampling on stupid social norms.
The idea that he himself could be considered queer had only ever occurred to him in the sense of it being silly.
Rose was so enthusiastic to discuss these things with him, though, and the last thing he wanted to do was make her feel silly for that. He loved listening to her talk about the things she was interested in. More importantly, it was clear she felt like she could relate to him, and he didn’t want to ruin that for her. This time period wasn’t the friendliest when it came to how governments treated people who didn’t ascribe to the gender norms of the era, and Rose was so strong in dealing with it all, but she was just a kid. It wasn’t fair that she should have to “be strong” while people in power tried to paint people like her as some kind of threat simply because they dared to…not…do gender the way they were arbitrarily “supposed to.” The least he could do was support her.
It only occurred to him a couple of years into his retirement that, well, “nonbinary” wasn’t an inaccurate way to describe him. Nor, for that matter, was “bisexual.” The labels did, essentially, more or less, describe how he was. It felt strange because, well, on Gallifrey, pretty much everybody was nonbinary and bisexual. Even those Time Lords who had a preference for being one gender or the other held that preference the same way a human might have a preference to wear dark clothing. People were often surprised to learn that the term “Time Lady” was not simply a catch-all term for any female Time Lord, but rather closer to an equivalent of “goth” or “visual kei” or “historybounding.” A style, not a deep-seated personal identity.
(They were also often surprised to learn that there were masculine equivalents, but the words for those were harder to translate to English.)
When he went to queer events, it was to support Rose; he wasn’t sure he had any right to include himself in that sort of space. Cultural differences. What claim did he have to any part of Earth’s history besides the parts he was responsible for protecting?
***
The Doctor was a naturalised British citizen (legally, his name was John Noble now). He owned a house, where he lived with his family. He had a driver’s licence. He voted in elections, and went to the pub to watch football and cheer for Chelsea and get in the occasional drunken political argument with other patrons. He managed, somehow, to keep a data entry job while studying to be a P.E. teacher. He even went to staff events that weren’t strictly mandatory. Some weekends, he went out clubbing; not out of a desperation to have the manic jitters blasted out of his body by loud music, but just because it was a fun way to blow off steam and find people to hook up with.
He also still spent a lot of time hanging around the TARDIS, taking the most mundane time travel trips (she refused to take him anywhere or anywhen fun, which…was probably for the best) with the Temple-Nobles. As a family, they celebrated Christmas and Easter, and Otherstide and the Feasts of Rassilon and Omega. After a few family board game nights that were boring to him and Donna and a bit too exciting for Shaun and Rose, he tried to come up with an approximation of Sepulchasm that could be played without telekinesis. He swapped grade school sports stories with Shaun, of how some poor kid on Shaun’s old football team got his nose broken, and that time someone on the Doctor’s old zero-grav hyperball team almost made someone on the other team regenerate.
These days, quite a few of Donna, Shaun, and Rose’s various playlists included Gallifreyan pop music (some of it actually the work of the Doctor’s first incarnation in his youth, though he didn’t tell them that). He even managed to teach them some phrases in Gallifreyan;
“Hekona we’la—”
“HeQona, like, it’s a, it’s more of a clicking sound.” He paused to make a few clicking sounds with his tongue. “With a k sort of sound, you’re talking to somebody whose timeline isn’t in sync with yours, like, for me, it is currently too hot outside, for you, it will be in the future. First-person present-tense addressing second-person past-tense.”
“That makes no sense,” laughed Rose.
“Only because English doesn’t account for time travel!”
“I mean…”
“Well, Time Lords have been using time travel since we invented linear time, so the language had to develop with that in mind. If you really wanted to get fluent in Gallifreyan, you’d have to get the hang of different tenses for time travel, maybe develop some telepathic abilities, and it wouldn’t hurt to be able to see in five dimensions, you miss a lot of body language only seeing three!”
This sort of multiculturalism would actually be scandalous—well, maybe not scandalous, but certainly frowned upon—on Gallifrey. For all his first self’s political activism, he never did manage to change anyone’s mind about isolationism. Granted, the Doctor as a Time Lord partaking so much in the British culture of the 2020s would be viewed as much less acceptable than him teaching his human family about Gallifreyan culture.
If anything, the fact that those stubborn old bellends would hate this lifestyle just made the Doctor enjoy it more.
***
Wilf passed away in 2029. He was one-hundred years old, which the Doctor understood was ancient for a human, and he went peacefully, in his sleep. It was, overall, actually the best-case scenario; a long life and a painless death. That didn’t make it any less jarring.
There was no counting how many human deaths the Doctor had witnessed over the course of his lives, but he wasn’t used to watching it play out the slow, boring, normal way. Watching them get older. Wilf was in his late seventies when the Doctor first met him. It was a miracle they got to know each other even this long. No amount of logical understanding on that front was of any comfort at the funeral. The Doctor spent most of the service weeping.
Donna and Shaun were getting older too. She would be turning sixty later that year. Her hair was greying steadily. She was still healthy, as was he, and late-fifties wasn’t really old by human standards, but it still served as a stark reminder that all this wasn’t going to last forever. Sylvia wasn’t long for this world. Rose was still young, but with the human lifespan being what it was, that didn’t mean much from the Doctor’s perspective. The Doctor may have stopped running, but he was still a Time Lord. Even if he couldn’t regenerate anymore (and he wasn’t even certain he couldn’t), this body could live over a thousand years, and nobody in his family had more than a few decades.
What would he do when they were all gone? Would he stay on Earth and honour his commitment to spend this particular lifetime at rest? Would he go back to his old renegade ways and consider this all a particularly bittersweet vacation? How long would he keep visiting Wilf’s grave? Or, when the time came, Donna’s? Rose’s?
***
2030 was a new year and the Doctor was determined to make the most of it, and every year now until the inevitable was actually upon him. No use stressing about something that could be decades away. He lived in a linear society now. Didn’t stop him from perceiving time differently, but…something, something, “when in Rome” (or in this case, “when on Earth”). He got his QTS and managed to do a good enough job teaching P.E. at a school a bit of a commute away. He didn’t mind the commute. More time to play silly little mobile phone games. And write. And make music on GarageBand. And scroll endlessly on social media, which after enough years on Earth had finally gotten to him; Donna had to remind him sometimes not to get too invested in arguing about historical events on Reddit.
Rose had moved out and was working on her Bachelor of Fine Arts (family board game nights were now on an indefinite moratorium, since Shaun could not deal with the combined forces of his wife and brother-in-law without Rose around to balance them out), but she and the Doctor were still in contact regularly; they volunteered at a lot of the same places.
June that year was the first time he actually walked in the pride parade. He still wasn’t one-hundred-percent reassured that he had the right, but the other folks at the pride organisation he volunteered at on weekends seemed intent on convincing him he should join them, and, well, logically, if they wanted him there, then…how else was membership in any community determined, but by popular opinion?
He’d always enjoyed pride events. Everything, from the overwhelming noise to the bright colours and fantastic outfits to the social messaging and defiance of it all was just spectacular. The other times he’d attended the parade, over the past six-ish years, he’d resisted the urge to wear some incredibly flamboyant and eye-catching outfit, figuring he shouldn’t draw attention to himself. He’d since learned that if there was any occasion on Earth that was the perfect occasion for him to shamelessly give in to his still-immutable Time Lord urge to show off and be eye-catching, that occasion was a pride parade.
This year, he wore a downright garish ensemble, many-layered and heavily-accessorised and full of rainbows and the colours of the nonbinary flag, put together to resemble a loose approximation of Gallifreyan casual dress. It was a strange outfit even compared to the pride crowd. His sixth incarnation might find it a bit too much. The other parade-goers loved it.
***
In November 2033, the Doctor threw a party. Some of the people in attendance knew it was celebrating ten years since he’d stepped down as a wanderer through time and space. Others—the friends who knew him as a human gym teacher named John Noble—didn’t know the occasion, but were thankfully too polite to ask. Or to ask how a seemingly ordinary man was able to get over a hundred people together from all different walks of life for whatever it was.
The doubts at the back of his mind—whether he was really in his rights to participate in these events, how long this life could last, what would happen when it all came crashing down, and it would come crashing down—they never left; he wasn’t sure they ever would. There would come a day when the decision not to go back to his old ways would stop being second nature and start being the preferable option.
But there was a big difference between “there would come a day” and “something you had to worry about right now,” and right now, the Doctor was busy having drinks and laughing and exchanging work stories. There would come a day when the Doctor would end up on his own again. He still felt a little bit like an alien scientist conducting research on human social behaviour. But right now, he felt just as much like a part of that same society. And in a linear, three-dimensional society, right now was all that mattered.