Title: Living Inside Myself
By: angstytimelord
Pairing: past Jack/Doctor
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: R
Table: 30_losses
Prompt: 27A, Outsider
Disclaimer: This is entirely a product of my own imagination, and I make no profit from it. I do not own the Tenth Doctor. Please do not sue.

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The Doctor leaned against the Tardis, looking out over the hills at the view of London, far below him. He wasn't particularly in the mood to go into the city itself, but for some strange reason, he'd felt like looking at it from a distance.

That was how his life had always been, wasn't it? he told himself with a wry smile. He'd always been on the outside looking in at everyone else, all of the people who "fit in." He would never fit in with them; he'd accepted that long ago, when he was very young.

He'd never been one to care about being like everyone else; it had never mattered much to him what others thought. Even at the Academy, he'd been looked at as a rebel, an outcast. He'd been shunned through much of his life, even by his own people.

But it had never mattered -- because he was what he'd wanted to be ever since he had been old enough to strive for a goal. He was a Time Lord. He'd graduated from the Academy, he had a Tardis, and he'd achieved his dream.

It had mattered to him when he was young that the children around him had excluded him. They'd seen him as strange, odd, an outsider. Fixated on something that they didn't understand, something that set him apart from the rest of them.

There had been one child who had been his friend -- but that friendship was long over, lost in the sands of time. The enmity that had grown between them couldn't be erased, or overcome, even though no one else in the universe knew him so well.

No, that wasn't quite true. Another smile twisted the Doctor's lips, but this one was wistful, the memory playing around the edges of his mind before it burst into full view, front and center. There had been one other man who knew him better than he knew himself.

Jack. The man he'd wanted to spend his life with, the man who he would love until his dying day. Not only the last day of this body's life, but any life he might live in bodies after this one. No one wold ever replace Jack, not in his life or in his hearts.

But even with Jack, there had been times when he'd felt that he was on the outside looking in. The immortal had cared for him -- he'd known that, beyond a shadow of a doubt. But Jack hadn't loved him in the way that the Doctor had loved him.

When Jack had left, that was when he'd started drawing back from others, keeping to himself, living within his own mind more than he ever had before. He still reached out to the world -- but he did it much more cautiously now.

There had been a time when he wasn't so cautious, the Doctor thought with a sigh. He'd jumped into every situation feet first -- leaping without looking, as Jack would have said. Though Jack had always had a tendency to do that himself .....

The Time Lord shook his head, blinking and pushing memories of Jack to the back of his mind. That part of his life was over; there was no need to dwell on the time he'd spent with the immortal. It had been good, but it was in the past.

He was more of an outsider in the world now than he ever had been; what Jack had become frightened him in some ways, even though in others it had brought them closer together for a while. Jack could understand so much about him that others simply couldn't fathom.

Jack knew what it was like to have an extraordinarily long life; he knew what is was like to die and to be reborn, albeit in the same body every time. He could understand that part of the Doctor's existence. But that didn't make Jack understand what it was like to be him.

The only person who could understand that was the Master -- and even then, his understanding was shadowed by the fact that he was stark raving mad, and had been ever since he'd gone through the tests to become a Time Lord.

Had they ever really shared a true friendship, even when they were children? The Doctor wasn't sure of that; even in their formative years, the Master had displayed a talent for deception, and a cruel streak that had come to the forefront after those tests.

He'd been an outsider even then; others had avoided him, thinking that he was strange and driven to have such a singular goal in his mind. The Master was the only one who had understood that goal, and they'd bonded over that in some ways.

But the Master's obsessions had been lurking under that placid surface, even when they'd been young children. And the Doctor had found himself pulling away from them, even though he struggled to keep himself unbiased against the person he felt was a friend.

What would have happened if that friendship had lasted? The Doctor heaved another sigh, a sound full of regrets for what might have been. There was no telling what his life could have been like if the Master hadn't run mad and become the psychopath he was.

He'd hoped that the other man's regenerations might change that; but he'd only seemed to get worse, and the Doctor had reluctantly come to the conclusion that he would never change. The enmity between them had grown, until it was now a gaping chasm that neither of them could ever cross.

And even if he could, would he want to? That was something that he would have to search his soul to find out, and he could never be sure of a completely honest answer. His feelings of friendship for the other Time Lord were .... complicated, to say the least.

But it was only friendship that he felt. No more than that -- and it never had been. While the Master had seemingly felt something that was so much more, and had tried to force the Doctor to feel the same emotions with disastrous results.

His association with the Master when he was a child had made him even more of an outcast; the other children had instinctively shied away from the two of them, as though the strange obsessions that burned within the Master would rub off on the Doctor.

And later, when he was at the Academy, his strained friendship with the Master had continued to make him an outcast amongst his peers. Not only that, but he'd been known as a rebel, someone who refused to adhere to the rules that were laid down for him.

Even in his adult life on Gallifrey, he'd been out of step with everyone around him. He had flouted rules and conventions over and over again, until there had been no way for him to feel comfortable around his own people.

And now, there was no way to change that, no way to make amends for everything he'd done to make any Gallifreyan think better of him. Gallifrey was gone; he could never go back to that world he'd known when he was so much younger than he was now.

He had been living inside himself more than ever since the destruction of his home, and feeling more like an outsider in the world than he ever had before. Now, there was no place for him to call home, no familiar planet for him to go back to.

As well as he knew some of the other planets he'd spent time on, and as comfortable as he felt on some of them, they would never be Gallifrey. They would never be his home -- though he'd even felt like an outsider there for most of his life.

The Doctor took a deep breath, closing his eyes, letting himself remember the burnt-orange skies of his home, the feeling of peace that had always seeped into him when he'd gone back there. He needed that peace to be with him now, to wrap him around him in a warm embrace.

But it was elusive; the more he grasped for that peace, the more it hovered just out of his reach. He couldn't count on that peace to make him feel like less of an outsider. Sighing again, he turned and went back into the Tardis, and a few moments later, the blue box shimmered out of sight.

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