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dreamtofbeing) wrote2009-08-02 01:05 am
dreamtofbeing) wrote2009-08-02 01:05 am
Entry tags:
Backstory: History
The Doctor was born and grew up on Gallifrey, the planet of the Time Lords, as the son of a Gallifreyan politician. He had one older brother, whom he never knew well, since his brother was already enrolled at the Time Lord Academy when the Doctor was born. He never knew his mother; nobody in his family ever talked about her. His childhood adhered to the traditions of influential Time Lord families--with a strong focus on education and social form and integration, and little room for interpersonal closeness or creativity. Even as a young child, the Doctor was of an imaginative, inquisitive and independent nature, and had a hard time conforming to rules and rituals that he felt lacked any purpose. He saw his father striving to be a part of the system, but never quite making it to the top--he was influential, yes, but never quite as influential as he wanted to be, and his status as an unmarried man (highly unusual in Gallifreyan society) put him just far enough outside of the norm so he would never achieve his goals entirely. Later, the Doctor would blame the outdated traditions and rules of Gallifreyan society for making his father second-best.
At the age of eight, he was sent to the Academy, where he underwent the ritual of initiation--looking into the Untempered Schism, a spatiotemporal rift that let the onlooker catch a glimpse into the Time Vortex, the centre of all time and space. To him, it was a frightening experience that his young and uneducated mind wasn't able yet to fully understand. At the Academy, he received an extensive academic education as well as the mental training that would sharpen his time sense, give him full, conscious control of his telepathic sense and eventually enable him to enter a bond with a TARDIS--a sentient time machine--, a privilege reserved only for alumni of the Time Lord Academy.
He appreciated his classes and teachers for introducing him to new and exciting things that he could never have imagined in his wildest fantasies, but quickly came to resent the academia for their narrow-minded approach to the subject matters. Instead of studying various schools of thought and analyzing ideas others had come up with before him, the Doctor--who soon started to call himself by his chosen nickname, Theta Sigma--preferred to learn independently, form his own opinions, and follow his own interests. As in most parts of Gallifreyan society, independence wasn't supported or appreciated at the Academy, and Theta's grades suffered, sometimes to the point of outright failure. This only fuelled his resentment against a corrupt, unwieldy system that chose empty rituals and traditions over actual knowledge and meaning.
His unwillingness to comply and integrate made Theta stand out from his peers--not someone others looked down on, but someone others couldn't make sense of and either looked to as their leader or stayed away from. The exception to this was one boy, Koschei, another loner, who seemed to be looking for the same thing Theta was looking for-- a way to circumvent the system and to realize dormant potential without being hemmed in by stale rules and pointless traditions. Quite early on, they became friends, feeding off each other's need to understand, to investigate and to change for the better. The system had flaws, huge, glaring flaws, and they seemed to be the only ones who could see that.
First, it was only the Academy, their immediate environment, and they were little more than juvenile partners in crime, egging each other on and daring each other to break the rules, find their limits, and then see of they could overstep them and still get away with it. As they got older, though, their visions didn't die. Quite the opposite, they grew bigger. It wasn't just the Academy that needed to change; the whole planet, the whole system of government and Gallifreyan society needed fixing. When Theta graduated from the Academy--which took him two tries; again, the final exams were a ritualized exercise in futility, and he refused to invest any of his time in preparation--he assumed his title: the Doctor. The man who would heal Gallifrey.
He didn't want to do so single-handedly, though. He knew that to change things for the better, he would need more than a vision. He would need people, followers who believed in the same things he believed in, and he would need Koschei, who was now calling himself the Master. The Master knew how to handle the practical side of things, how to apply the vision to reality, and how to smooth edges and manoeuvre around obstacles that sheer idealism wouldn't move. The Doctor and the Master would be the leaders of the coming reform, but to the Doctor, every single one of their followers was just as important. Every person they could convince to believe in their vision was another step towards changing the world.
This was how the Doctor met his wife. Lanla, a Gallifreyan and not an alumni of the Time Lord Academy, was one of the first people to actively join the Doctor and the Master's movement once they left the relatively contained environment of the Academy. By then, they had already gathered some followers--the other members of the so-called Deca, fellow students with brilliant minds that wouldn't be contained by the Time Lords' traditions--but Lanla was their liaison to the general population. She bridged the social gap that the Doctor saw as one of the most problematic issues in Gallifreyan society and brought them a great number of supporters among the "common" Gallifreyans. The Doctor was able to develop a relationship with her that seemed to almost equal his relationship with the Master--likeminded spirits and a shared vision to work towards.
Both relationships had a physical aspect--perfectly acceptable in Gallifreyan society--but the Doctor decided to give his relationship with Lanla an official stamp, mostly because it was a political statement underlining his agenda, since tradition frowned upon marriage bonds between Gallifreyans and Time Lords. They had two children, and made a point of educating them in an open-minded way, giving them knowledge and meaning rather than rules and tradition.
The rebellious movement grew bigger and more influential a lot faster than anyone had anticipated. Soon, visions and ideals weren't enough anymore. The Doctor had always tried to achieve the party's goals without having to compromise the ethics they represented, but politics, being an unethical field by definition, demanded compromise and the sacrifice of ideals. The stronger these demands grew, the more they opened a rift between the leaders of the party--mainly the Doctor and the Master, but also the Doctor and Lanla. The Master was dismissing doubts about the ethically questionable actions of the party as unnecessary and unimportant, while Lanla understood the Doctor's unease, but at the same time wasn't idealistic enough to believe that completely sound ethics would ever get them where they wanted to go.
The Doctor disagreed with both of them. The flaws in the system were huge and obvious; they just needed to be patient and keep trying to get through to people--the change didn't need to happen in the system, it needed to happen in people's minds. And in the Doctor's experience, the best way to reach people was honesty.
Inevitably, the Doctor's idealistic dream was shattered eventually. It wasn't an outside influence that brought reality home to him, but it was his long-time friend, lover and partner who turned out to be the most corrupt of all. Behind the Doctor's back, the Master had spent the last few decades helping their political movement along by lying, deceiving and killing, assassinating political enemies and bribing corrupt government officials to lie and steal and betray. The Doctor had not only not noticed, he would have stayed oblivious, had not the Master come to him with his plans, laying them out for him, talking about not only planetary, but universal domination, about rewriting history and forcing cosmic change without any meaning or purpose other than power--power for them to rule over all of creation.
Everything fell apart. The Doctor's vision, which he had developed with the Master and nurtured for most of his life with the certain conviction that it was a shared dream, turned out to be one giant self-deception. The world wouldn't change simply because he wanted it to, not if the one person closest to him had been the one to misunderstand him most of all. The Doctor, aged 264 years at the time, chose to leave Gallifrey, leaving behind not only the Master, his home planet and everything he had worked for in his life so far, but also Lanla and his two children--a family he had based on a lie. The only thing he kept was the TARDIS he had bonded with after graduating from the Academy. He knew that without his support and the protection of his still rather influential heritage, the rebellion would fall apart, but that was what he wanted. It had been based on a corrupt premise, and no good change could come from a movement like that. He had started this, and he was the one who could end it--so he did.
The Doctor went to live on Earth. Ever since his childhood, he had read about this planet, had studied their history and had been impressed and fascinated by the ingenuity and independence that spoke to him through the dryness of the academic texts. His dream of changing Gallifrey may have been broken, but his ideals were still whole--and they wouldn't break, not for a very long time. The Doctor still believed that if you wanted change, if you wanted people to listen, you had to reach out. You needed to make people trust you. Humans wanted to trust him.
For a long while, though, the Doctor kept to himself, interacting with very few people, influencing only individuals' lives. On Gallifrey, he had been working against the strictness of the First Law of Time, the policy of non-interference that stated that all Time Lords were disallowed to influence other, lesser developed societies, but it was still a taboo to him that wasn't easily broken. Only emergencies would urge him to do so, and when a Kerfalian ship crashed to Earth, leaving only one young girl as a survivor, he took her in. The girl grew up with him, chose the name Susan and started to call him grandfather--his current, first regeneration was nearing the end of its life span; he looked old for human standards. And human standards were what Susan lived by, mostly, having grown up on Earth, influenced by human culture and values. What she knew about science, space, time and the history of the universe, she had learned from him.
Over time, though, the Doctor grew restless. He enjoyed having a family in Susan, but his quiet life felt as if he were doing the same thing he had always condemned the Time Lords for doing--avoiding his responsibilities, hiding away and ignoring dormant potential out of fear and lethargy. He became more active, travelled further, back and forth in the entire history of the planet he had chosen as the location of his self-inflicted exile. At first, he took Susan along, but he had destroyed one family already by following his ideals, so when the opportunity presented itself, he left Susan behind in a place where he thought she would find happiness and once again assumed the role of an outsider--this time, however, on his own; he wasn't going to repeat the mistake of sharing his ideals with others who might end up misunderstanding and deceiving him.
He regenerated and travelled with humans not in order to bond with them, but in order to broaden their horizons and give them a better perspective on which to form their moral standards. He began to work with official human organizations and thereby overstepped the line of what Gallifrey would tolerate in regards to interfering with a primitive culture. The Time Lords tracked him down and brought him back to Gallifrey, putting him on trial for breaking the First Law of Time. His influence on the planet still counted for something, so he was able to avoid execution, and was sentenced to a forced regeneration and an official exile on 20th century Earth.
Nothing much changed. Now in his third regeneration, the Doctor became scientific advisor to Earth's United Nations Intelligence Taskforce and integrated himself more and more into the military and political system of the planet. Humans were so naive, so easily influenced, and the Doctor decided he would make sure that they were influenced by him, rather than a random extraterrestrial force whose only interest would be to corrupt and exploit Earth.
As it turned out, one of these forces the Doctor would be protecting Earth from was the Master. Exiled himself, the Master still hadn't given up on his megalomaniac dream of ruling the universe, and he tried again and again to coax the Doctor away from Earth, away from the humans he had promised to protect. For the Doctor, the Master quickly became a symbol of everything he was working against. If they had once been best friends, they were now best enemies, fighting on the exact opposites of the moral scale. The Doctor was right, and the Master was wrong, and the Doctor's continued victories over the Master's schemes and plans seemed to confirm this as a fact.
The Doctor regenerated again, and soon gave up on trying to change things by infiltrating the military and political systems. He was the Doctor; compared to humans, he was inherently right. He could achieve more on his own. Over the last few decades, things on Gallifrey had changed--old traditions had been discarded, unwieldy rules had been disposed of. It was still a lethargic system with too much history woven into it, but there had been some changes. The Doctor returned to his home planet in the hope of being able to make people listen to him now that he was older and not working with one of the worst criminals the planet had ever produced. It didn't quite go as planned, but it did have the effect of the Time Lords revoking his exile and recognizing some of his achievements as valid and progressive.
Now there were two planets in the universe recognizing him as a free, independent thinker who might be able to bring change, and the Doctor was enjoying the validation. Finally, his hard work was paying out. He still refused to become a part of the Gallifreyan system of government in anything but name, but now, this was mainly because he thought they weren't ready for him yet. At some point maybe not too far in the future, Gallifrey would have changed enough so they would listen, and the Doctor would wait for this moment to act and take charge.
Again, his plans didn't quite play out the way he had imagined them, and again, it was the Master who brought him back to reality. The universe and its people had become a game to the Master, and somewhere along the way, the same had happened to the Doctor, without him noticing it. He had lost the connection, he had put himself above everyone else and had been content to play god, just because he could. Out of sheer stubbornness and refusal to admit to being wrong, the Master ended up destroying a large section of the universe--and the Doctor couldn't prevent it, not even when he overcame a century-long feud and joined forces with his nemesis. Countless planets burned and dissolved to dust, and the Master proved the Doctor wrong and vulnerable by ending the life of his fourth regeneration while he himself escaped unharmed.
The Doctor retreated. Not into complete inactivity as he had after leaving Gallifrey for the first time, but into his own life as an independent, self-sufficient individual. He travelled the universe, helped out where he could, showed his companions the wonders of the cosmos, but he always made sure not to enter any commitments. He was the Doctor, but apparently, he wasn't meant to heal on a grand scale. His big dreams and visions had been broken, twice now, and the Doctor decided to focus on smaller things, keeping with his travelling routine mostly because he had gotten so used to a nomad life that he wouldn't have known how to settle down.
Trouble still followed him, and the Time Lords put him on trial, twice. Both times, the Doctor escaped. The Master was still around, still pursuing his plans of universal domination, but as with the Doctor and his goals, it seemed to have become more of a habit than a calling. The universe was changing, but it wasn't a change either the Doctor or the Master had wanted or intentionally caused. Cosmic order was deteriorating, more and more feuds broke out between planets and the people of the universe--but it was a slow change, almost unnoticeable. The Doctor himself found his life getting more violent--now in his seventh regeneration, he seemed to be facing more and more stand-off situations, old enemies who suddenly weren't content anymore with sabre-rattling and small confrontations. The Doctor destroyed the entire Cybermen fleet, he used the Hand of Omega to eradicate Skaro, home planet of the Daleks, but it took him until after the Master had died a pointless death on a nameless planet to realize that the universe was at war.
The call from Gallifrey came not long after. The High Council had decided to do what the Doctor had always wanted them to--discard their policy of non-interference, and use their advanced knowledge and technology to bring peace to the universe. The Doctor returned to his home planet and enlisted in the Gallifreyan military forces. He still didn't like the idea of using force to bring change, but Gallifrey's main enemy in this war were the Daleks--a race made for warfare who didn't give their opponents any choice but to use force themselves. The Doctor was hoping that eliminating this one uncompromising threat would give Gallifrey the chance to bring change to the rest of the universe in a more peaceful way.
Gallifrey had been at peace for a very long time. They had advanced technology and control of the Time Vortex, but they didn't have means or experience to use these powers in a military fashion. The Daleks were experts at war, and, even with their home planet destroyed, were still an enemy that derived a big advantage from their numbers. New Daleks were programmed, not educated, and could be produced in a conveyor-belt fashion--one war machine after the next, filling countless motherships of which each single one had the ability to take out entire solar systems.
All Gallifrey had were the Time Lords--strong, forceful soldiers, but individuals, by far fewer and not as easily replaced as Daleks. Gallifrey, unlike the Daleks, hadn't spent decades taking over and raiding the resources of other planets, so when they realized that the war against the Daleks would not be over as quickly as they had hoped, it was too late to reconsider. Gallifrey fell under siege, and after no more than a century, they were faced with the decision of either surrendering or using their powers over time and space to give them a last chance to win this war.
The High Council began to cancel one Gallifreyan colony after another out of existence. With each new paradox, all the resources that had gone into off-planet investments were returned to Gallifrey, and the siege could continue for another few years. This tactic was a compromise; small paradoxes that wouldn't destabilize the Vortex as much as cancelling the entirety of the Dalek race out of existence would. The plan was to defeat the Daleks and then capture the Time War in a paradox to be guarded and maintained by the Time Lords, the only people in the universe who possessed the knowledge to manage such an alteration of the Vortex.
It was a short-sighted, desperate plan, and it didn't work out. After decades of the planet being under siege, a civil rebellion broke out on Gallifrey. Incidentally, the rebellious movement was led by the new leaders of the party the Master and the Doctor had founded in their late years at the Academy. The civil war brought chaos and destruction to the heart of the Time Lord empire, and along with a stable, central leadership, Gallifrey lost any chance to win the war against the Daleks. With the control of the Time Lords gone, the Time Vortex was destabilizing, and destruction of the entire universe was imminent.
The Doctor's involvement in the early years of the War consisted of heading the intelligence taskforce of the Gallifreyan military. He and his team provided Gallifrey with detailed intelligence on Dalek strategy and tactics, enabling the Time Lords to work pre-emptively and keep one step ahead of the enemy. He also made sure that the Daleks would never capture any of the Time Lords alive, and did everything to prevent them from assimilating Time Lord knowledge and technology and using it to their advantage.
He was good at what he was doing, and for a long time, his work ensured that Gallifrey kept the upper hand in the War. However, even in his seventh and most ruthless regeneration, the Doctor was still a pacifist at heart. The War, the death and the violence and the destruction, no matter how often he told himself they were happening for a good cause, affected him. He got careless, ignored his orders and began to take heedless risks, desperately wanting to end the fighting, no matter what it would take.
Eventually, he and most of his team were killed in a Dalek attack. The Doctor regenerated to find himself a prisoner of war on the Daleks' new home planet. He and his ship were the first Time Lord/TARDIS team the Daleks had managed to capture alive. They used his vulnerable post-regenerative state to extract information from his mind. This knowledge combined with the captured TARDIS helped the Daleks turn the tide of the War. When the siege on Gallifrey began, the Doctor was being held captive by the Daleks--too valuable a prisoner to kill, the Daleks kept him in stasis in their high security facility, using him when they needed an "interface" to operate or modify Gallifreyan technology or when they needed to predict the Time Lords' next moves.
The Doctor was freed very shortly before the end of the War when one of the temporal anomalies that had become rather common in the rapidly deteriorating space-time of the universe hit the new Dalek home planet. He managed to escape in his TARDIS, only to find the universe falling apart at the seams around him. The War had gone badly, on both sides. The Daleks were a disorganized force, striking and destroying without strategy, and Gallifrey had drowned in the chaos of a vicious civil upheaval. The Vortex was deteriorating, and the Doctor soon traced the instability back to the temporal manipulations Gallifrey had implemented in order to postpone their surrender. He realized that the only way to prevent the collapse of time itself was to eliminate the centre of those multiple and multi-layered paradoxes. So the Doctor destroyed Gallifrey, thereby realigning the Vortex and sending a temporal shockwave through all of time and space that left very few Dalek motherships and no Time Lords except the Doctor as survivors.
The Time War left the Doctor empty, disoriented and completely alone in the universe. Time had warped and changed with the demise of the Time Lords, and the Gallifreyan time sense made the Doctor acutely aware of every nuance that had shifted out of alignment. It made it impossible for him to even attempt to move on--time was wrong, it was broken, and it seemed like he had no place in this new order of the universe. He kept travelling, finding locations from his old life that were different now, whose place in the grand scheme of time and space had shifted--nothing was familiar anymore, it all felt like a farce.
Eventually, the Doctor forced regeneration from his eighth to his ninth. When he started out, he wasn't sure if he was going to let his body complete the regeneration, but when he more or less unconsciously decided to change his body and live, he resolved to follow through on that decision. Gallifrey may have been his home planet, but there was still the Earth, whose people had taken him in once before. Earth, early 21st century, an era he knew well enough not to feel too out of place.
After no more than a few weeks, he met Rose Tyler. Initially, he tried to keep her at an arm's length, not wanting and not ready to share his life with anyone, but she took an interest and wouldn't relent no matter how much he tried to push her away. So, eventually, he invited her to travel with him, the way he used to travel with human companions at his side--showing her the universe, introducing her to new concepts and ideas and watching her marvel at the beauty of it all.
Having Rose at his side went a long way toward helping the Doctor reassert his place and purpose. Time was still out of joint, the universe was still changed, but maybe, just maybe, he would be able to find a way of living with these changes. Rose showed compassion and willingness to help when he couldn't, and she gradually reminded him of his ideals, the idea of all life in the universe being equal and equally precious, which he had thought he'd lost during the years he spent fighting and imprisoned.
When the Dalek Emperor, who had survived the War by mere chance, launched an attack on Earth using an army of newly cloned Daleks--again, Daleks are war machines, easily rebuilt and replaceable, and all it took was one of the leading forces surviving to resurrect the threat--the Doctor was faced with the decision of eradicating the Dalek fleet and all life on Earth, or surrendering.
The last year with Rose had changed the Doctor, had given him back some of his faith in the power of compassion, and he decided to surrender. The Daleks would have killed him and taken over the Earth without a second thought--Daleks don't exactly have the capacity for second thoughts--but Rose saved the Doctor once again by absorbing the essence of the heart of the TARDIS and dissolving the Dalek fleet to dust. The Doctor, in turn, saved her by taking the Vortex energy into himself and regenerating into his tenth incarnation.
With his regeneration, the Doctor became a new man. Absorbing the Vortex energy had given him back his place in the universe, and he knew who he was now--he was the Doctor, protector of planet Earth, defender of the human race, travelling through time and space in his TARDIS with Rose Tyler at his side. Together, they saved planets, freed people from oppression, even defeated the Devil. The past, the War, those things were over and done with. He was the Doctor, maybe more so than he had ever been, and as long as he had Rose at his side, nothing would ever be able to keep him down for long.
This romantic illusion didn't last long. The Daleks returned, this time accompanied by the Cybermen, and the Earth was threatened once more. Echoes of the War reminded the Doctor that the past was not over, it would always be part of the universe's history, and thereby, through the time sense and his connection to the Vortex, a part of him. He managed to defeat both Cybermen and Daleks, managed to prevent planetary destruction, but his victory claimed Rose as a tribute. She was cast into a different universe, and the Doctor was left with the realization that no matter how hard he tried, he would never be human and would never be able to outrun his past and his responsibilities as a Time Lord.
Once again, the Doctor was lost. Gallifrey was still and would stay gone, and his attempt to find himself a new home and a new purpose had failed. Once again, he came close to ending his life, and once again, a human saved him--Donna, a woman who had just lost her own purpose in life. He asked her to come with him--reaching out, trying to find someone to connect to--, but she declined. He was too alien. He scared her.
The Doctor refused to give up, and eventually found Martha Jones. However, afraid of growing too attached--she was human, and they're so fragile, humans, so fleeting--the Doctor kept her at an arm's length, never letting her come close, playing the mysterious, dazzling stranger and distracting her or running away whenever she tried to connect. It was working, for him, anyway, and he would have kept it up, had they not ended up at the end of the universe, where the Doctor met another ghost from his past, someone he had presumed long dead.
The Master, resurrected by the Gallifreyan High Council to fight in the Time War, had survived. Cast away to the end of the universe, the temporal shockwave that had eliminated every trace of Gallifreyan presence in the known universe had passed him by. When the Doctor realized who the Master was, he tried to reach out to him--they were the only two left, there was no point in continuing their old feud, anything either of them had ever hoped for was inevitably lost, anyway.
The Master wouldn't listen, as had always been his habit. He stole the Doctor's TARDIS and infiltrated the political system of the 21st century, putting the whole British population under a hypnotic spell and making them elect him Prime Minister. He created a paradox and brought the human race from the future to the 21st century to slaughter their own, and he used the human race to build rockets and war machinery, still bent on ruling over the universe, as he had been ever since he had been young.
All of this happened too quickly for the Doctor to prevent it. Once again, he found himself imprisoned, this time not by an alien threat, but by the only other survivor of his own race. The Master devastated the Earth, and he made the Doctor stand helpless witness as his second home planet fell victim to war and death and destruction.
Had the events of this year been part of the main time stream and therefore irreversible, it may have been enough for the Doctor to finally give up after all. But they weren't. They were a paradox; all he had to do to reverse them was destroy the Master's paradox machine, and time would right itself and the Earth would be safe.
He defeated the Master just before the Master could launch his ships to start a universal war. The Doctor beat him using his own technology--the Archangel Network, which the Master had been using to hypnotize the entire planet--against him, and stood united with the whole of the human race against an external threat, like he had done many times in his third regeneration. By helping the human race, the Doctor chose sides, and the Master took revenge by letting himself die, once more leaving the Doctor as the last of his kind in the universe.
The Doctor didn't know where to turn now. Should he insist on being alone, on keeping to himself as the odd one out, or should he accept the risks that would come with being part of something and with sharing himself with others? He could have gone either way, but then Donna, the human woman who had saved him once before, showed up again. She knew who he was, had declined the offer to travel with him because she knew, but she had reconsidered. She was willing to accept the risks. The Doctor, in an act of faith and maybe against better knowledge, decided to accept the risks as well.
For a year, they travelled together, and Donna became a closer friend than any of the other companions the Doctor had had after the War. She knew him, she accepted him, and she stopped him when he went too far. She understood what he wanted--someone who would speak their mind and wouldn't accept everything at face value, who would force him to re-evaluate his decisions. In turn, he could give her what she had always wanted--a life beyond her every-day routine, a chance to see the universe and to take action in ways that actually mattered.
Eventually, their luck ran out. Davros, the creator of the Daleks, pulled out of the early years of the Time War by one of the few Dalek survivors, moved the Earth in an attempt to build a device that would destroy the whole of reality. The Doctor, aided by Donna as well as a lot of the humans he had formerly travelled with, managed to stop him, but in the process, Donna ended up taking his mind into her own--a human body/Time Lord mind merge resulting from a human/Time Lord metacrisis. Her human brain wasn't equipped to deal with the plethora of knowledge and information, though, and the Doctor saw himself forced to wipe her mind, making her forget everything--her newly acquired knowledge, everything she knew about him, everything she had seen and learned on her travels with him. Donna had to go back to being an ordinary human with an ordinary life, and the Doctor was on his own again.
He didn't get a chance to figure out where to go next, though. When he activated his TARDIS after bringing Donna home, he was planning to leave Earth. Instead, he ended up in the Master's base of operation.
The Master, who had survived his "death" by storing his consciousness in a ring and having an accomplice transfer it to a clone of his old body, had spent the last year building a device that would turn the Doctor human while leaving him with his identity and his skills and memories intact--as far as a human brain could grasp them. The Master implemented this plan as a form of ultimate revenge, to get back at the Doctor for holding out on him for all his life and especially during the year the Master spent in control of the Earth.
After turning the Doctor human, the Master kept him locked up for thirty days, torturing and neglecting him. Then Torchwood intervened, rescuing the Doctor and capturing the Master. They handed the Doctor over to U.N.I.T.'s medical division, namely one Dr. Martha Jones, who treated him as a medical doctor as well as helped him as a friend.
It took about a month for the Doctor's physical injuries to heal. Martha Jones treated him for immune deficiency and built up his immune system using vaccines. When he left the hospital, the Doctor was stable enough to function normally as a human--physically.
Psychologically, however, the loss of the time and the telepathic sense as well as the loss of his mental bond with the TARDIS plus the month of physical and psychological torture left scars that wouldn't heal as quickly or easily. A month after the rescue operation, Martha wasn't comfortable releasing the Doctor from the hospital to care for himself. Her options being rather limited, she decided to transfer him to the hospital's psych ward. The Doctor, albeit reluctantly, agreed to admit himself voluntarily, and stayed for another month of treatment.
After four weeks, however, he knew his own mind again--enough, anyway, to get bored. As a voluntary patient, he was able to leave against medical advice, which he did when boredom and unanswered questions were starting to get too overwhelming. He sought out Torchwood, both to find out what happened to the TARDIS, and to finally get some answers about the Master--so far, all he had been told was that the Master had been taken into custody. He found out that Torchwood had turned the Master human, using his own technology against him, and that the TARDIS was gone. When the Master had been turned human and the last Time Lord in the universe had ceased to exist, she had locked her doors and retreated into the Vortex.
The Doctor didn't approve of Torchwood's actions, and held Jack Harkness responsible. He approved even less of the neglect and abuse the Master had been subject to as a prisoner of Torchwood. The Doctor assumed responsibility for the Master, making Torchwood release him and assign him a flat in Cardiff. He believed--or wanted to believe--that he would be able to put his own anger and issues aside in order to help the Master adapt.
Things didn't quite work out the way the Doctor would have liked them to. After no more than a few weeks, he ended up getting into a physical fight with the Master, accidentally injuring the Master--dangerously injuring him; the Master came within inches of bleeding to death. Scared by the force of his own emotions and his inability to control them, the Doctor, after making sure the Master got all the help he needed, left the UK, making U.N.I.T. get him a job as an experimental particle researcher in the subatomic physics department at the University of Toronto, Canada.
For the first few months, the Doctor kept contact with Britain to a very bare minimum. He isolated himself, trying to deal with his problems on his own like he had always done. Being new to the way humans function in a crisis, he didn't fare too well, going through bouts of depression and lethargy which affected his job and his attempts to build himself an existence in his new environment. Martha, who was stationed in New York, kept an eye on him and provided sometimes unwelcome help and advice.
After about four months, the Doctor found that the loneliness was getting unbearable. Martha was the only person who knew him as the Doctor, and she lived a ten hours' drive away. He didn't have his bond with the TARDIS anymore, and building a connection to people at his work place proved surprisingly difficult. Martha was providing him with carefully hand-picked pieces of information about what was going on in the UK, which didn't outright say that the Master wasn't doing very well, but definitely indicated it between the lines. So finally, the Doctor decided to re-establish contact.
He started writing letters. At first, he kept them short and careful, keeping most of himself and his emotional state out of the writing, but when the Master didn't reply, the Doctor started to use the letters as a sort of journal. It felt safe, telling the Master about his life and his job and the thoughts that kept his mind occupied day in and day out, since the Master, even if he was reading the letters, apparently had decided not to comment. The letters gave the Doctor a focus, a way to reflect on his new life and his new self, and brought him some stability. He was beginning to cope.
A year after the Doctor had run away to Canada, the Master decided to reply after all. Hearing from the Master burst the protective bubble the Doctor had built around his existence in Toronto. It threw him, and it took him a couple of months to pluck up the courage to answer the Master. When he did, though, a careful letter exchange was established, and the Doctor was able to find his balance again.
Until, yet a year later, he got a phone call from Ianto Jones. The Doctor was still in contact with Martha, who was giving him regular updates about what was going on back in the UK, but it wasn't until Ianto's phone call that the Doctor realized how badly the Master was coping with his situation. As a member of Torchwood, Ianto was able to observe the Master's self-destructive behaviour first hand, and as an observant person, he concluded that the one person who would be able to help was the Doctor.
The Doctor flew to Cardiff to meet the Master. It would be the first in a series of visits, each lasting only for a few days. Being the one in control over when and how long those visits would be, the Doctor found that he could handle meeting the Master--that he actually enjoyed meeting him; that he had missed being with someone who knew him as who he was.
For another two years, those visits were a regular routine, something the Doctor found himself looking forward to more and more as time was passing. His life in Canada, while having seemed reassuringly monotonous before, became increasingly boring to him. He was missing the adventure and the activity of his former life. He was already considering going back to the UK for good when something happened that would make the decision a lot easier on him.
During one of the Doctor's visits to Cardiff, the spatiotemporal rift running through the city started to close. This rift was the reason Torchwood 3 set up base in Cardiff in the first place, since it presented a gap to other dimensions and realities. Four years ago, when Torchwood had taken the Master prisoner, they had injected him with Rift Microorganisms that would starve and kill their host if the host moved too far from the Rift, and therefore, the city. The closing of the Rift not only endangered the Master's life, though, but it also threatened to destabilize Cardiff space-time and make the whole city, and maybe all of Wales, sink into the oblivion of the Void, the space between universes.
In this moment of crisis, the Doctor joined the Torchwood team. While the members of Torchwood were defending Cardiff from the infiltration of interdimensional threats which had skyrocketed with the destabilization of the Rift, the Master and the Doctor were working together to build a Rift Bracer, a device that would keep the Rift open and Cardiff reality established in its current shape.
They were successful, saving Cardiff--and the Master's life--in the very last second. The experience made the Doctor realize that he didn't belong in Canada, teaching and researching at a university. He pulled a few strings, using his still-strong influence on the UK military and the government, and replaced Jack Harkness as the head of Torchwood, putting the Master second-in-command, partly to keep an eye on him, and partly because he decided that anything less would have been a waste of potential.
In 2013, the Doctor is a 41-year-old human in a more-or-less stable, but non-exclusive relationship with the Master, and is leading the Torchwood organization, despite the fact that it was founded in order to protect Earth from the likes of him. Some days, he enjoys the irony. Some days, he resents it. Most days, he doesn't care either way, and simply goes about his job as any human would.
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The Master says thanks ever so much, he's glad you see his 'potential.'
. . . And I have this mental image of the Master in bed for, like, a week, with this Gigantic Stack of the Doctor's letters, catching up on what the loon's been up to the past year. Probably balling each letter up and tossing it into a corner as he finishes. And completely ignoring Torchwood. They want him that badly, they can come and get him.
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Except maybe while you were being a goo snake.Ahaha, I can see that. Call from Jack: "Why are you not at work?" -- Master: "Can't come in today. Busy catching up on love letters." *crumples latest letter to a ball and chucks it in the general direction of the bin*
I need to figure out what exactly the Doctor put into those letters. Because if he was being entirely honest in them and really using them as a kind of journal, some stuff might have ended up in there that in retrospect he maybe wouldn't want the Master to read or know.
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*has put a chair up against his front door, under the doorknob. Going low-tech against Torchwood tends to stymie them*
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Doctor: *he never thought you'd read these. :| Well, that's not true. But while he was writing most of these, he wasn't expecting to ever having to interact with you again.* *this letter is about you. More precisely, about how he wishes you would have died after all when he shoved you through that door. Even though it does finish with a note about how he's feeling pretty down at the moment, and how to not take this letter too serious--no, strike that. The Master should please take every single word entirely seriously. Bastard.*