i never understood the war doctor???
like eight is dying, and ey’re all like “make me a warrior”
and then we get john hurt and all they do is graffiti things and im sorry but thats not a warrior either the elixir fucked up or moffat just like, ignored his own minisode for the 50th
The trouble is one’s basic nature.
The Doctor has not been in this new body long enough to sort out a new set of pronouns, let alone change clothes or find a companion. But they always were quick at finding trouble, and so naturally the first thing they did after taking off was to crash-land on a remote planet and get arrested by a gun-toting mob of angry aliens with eight eyes apiece and turquiose hair growing out of their backs.
No problem, they think grimly as they are ushered down the usual badly-lit corridors into the usual badly-secured cell, The priestesses made me a warrior, didn’t they? I’ll just grab that guard’s gun and –
And –
Oh, cora.
They can picture it very clearly. They pretend to stumble, fall into Guard #1, grab xir gun and shoot Guard #2 before he can react, then turn, shoot Guard #1 and run off down the corridor as fast as their new legs will carry them. (Exactly how fast that will be, they don’t know. Fast enough, hopefully.)
There will be very little blood, but plenty of gaping laser burns and the stench of scorching flesh. Guard #2’s face will be blackened beyond all recognition. It will be a senseless waste of life and the whole thing will look like a stunt from one of those action films humans are so fond of.
They’ve been in enough wars over the millennia to know that this is not how war works. War is brutal and bloody and above all tedious, neither side giving an inch and neither side trying anything more inventive than the next way to kill. Above all, war is for the young.
(They catch the end of that thought as it goes by, and surreptitiously put a hand to their face. Wrinkles. They’d forgotten the wrinkles for a moment there. The last body went on and on forever with barely a change: now it seems all that lack of aging has caught up with them. Typical.)
The elixir was meant to make them a warrior, they think sourly, and resign themself to not stealing the gun as the guards open the cell door and shove them inside. A soldier. Not another dried up, tired-of-the-universe, can’t-go-on, seen-too-much wretch like the last one ended up being. Something more like the seventh –
Oh no, I’m not going there again.
Ah.
And there it is. They cannot be newly a warrior, because they are not new to war. Instead the elixir has done all it can, and has made them what they are: an old soldier. tired and beaten down and absolutely fed up of guns. This is no good at all. The last one ran out of things to hope for long ago, and now here they are, and they…
…they… have… hope.
It’s a remarkable discovery. They had been without it for so long, and yet here it is, nestling snugly and warmly inside of them as if it never went anywhere. What a miracle-worker regeneration is.
“Right,” they say to themself, “Let’s start with that, then.”
First the cell, then the aliens – without using a gun – then the pronouns and the clothes. And then the Time War. Even an old soldier can fight, if they have to.
It’s them or the Daleks. And it might – it just might – actually turn out all right in the end.
this is a good fic i like the fic
