Title: Paying the Price
By: angstytimelord
Pairing: gen
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: PG
Table: slash_me_twice
Prompt: 61, Normal
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.

***

He'd never been what anyone could possibly think of as "normal." Not when he was a child, not as an adult. Not at any point in his life -- and certainly not now when he was over 900 years old and probably had the most extensive part of his long life behind him.

But why would he even want to be what others might perceive as normal? the Doctor asked himself, propping his chin on his hand and staring at the Tardis' console without really seeing it. Normality didn't seem to him to be all that entertaining.

It hadn't been considered normal for him to be so fixated on becoming a Time Lord when he was a child; in fact, his parents had been told that they should take him to a doctor to find out just why he'd had such an obsession with what he wanted to be.

Children often wanted to be Time Lords, one doctor after another had explained to his worried parents when they'd followed that advice. But it was something that they usually grew out of -- after all, most of the children who thought that was their goal went on to form other desires.

But he hadn't. He'd stuck with wanting to be a Time Lord; it was all he'd wanted to do with his life, and he had eventually convinced his parents to let him take part in the tests.

They'd actually been rather proud of him when he'd succeeded in achieving his goal -- even though they hadn't thought that he could actually do it. That had been a barrier that had formed between himself and his parents early on, one that had never quite been broken down.

He'd gone to visit them when Gallifrey still existed -- dutifully, as any good son would have done. But even with his all of his successes, he'd never felt that he was able to please them. He'd never been just what they'd wanted him to become.

They had loved him, of course. He was their son -- even though they'd had a hard time expressing their inner feelings, as so many people on his planet did, he'd known that deep down inside, they'd cared for him, and even felt pride in his accomplishments, in a way.

That hadn't stopped them from castigating him about his mistakes, though, he reminded himself with a scowl. Those had seemed far more important to his parents than all the times he'd been successful at doing something he'd set out to achieve -- they remembed the failures far more clearly.

And he would never be able to forget the fact that they had thought his desire to be a Time Lord marked him as "abnormal," and that they had wanted to change him.

All right, so he couldn't hold that against them. They had probably only been trying to do what they might have thought was best -- but holding him back and trying to force him to be the proverbial square peg in a round hole hadn't been the best way to go about it.

It had been their insistence on making him see doctors who they'd hoped would convince him that being a Time Lord was hopeless dream that had first given him the idea of taking the name of "The Doctor," though he'd never admitted that to anyone.

There had been other reasons he'd chosen that moniker, of course. Some of them he'd revealed, and some of them would remain his secrets forever. But that had been his first glimmer of what he wanted to call himself -- though it hadn't been for the best of reasons.

He'd hated those doctors. He'd hated how they had tried to convince him that being like everyone else was what he needed to concentrate on doing, that being a Time Lord was beyond his reach, and that he had to forget about his dreams and settle for a life he didn't want.

He hadn't done that, of course. He'd stuck to his guns, kept his eyes on what he wanted, and hadn't let anyone make him turn away from that dream.

And in the end, he'd achieved it. It had been the ultimate way of showing everyone that they had been wrong about him, that he had been able to do what he wanted -- and that being "normal" wasn't what he should have concentrated on, not when he could aim higher.

So many people since then had looked at him askance for being different, for not "fitting in" with the world as they thought it should be. And he'd accepted that; after all, most people he met didn't know more than the rigid little box they'd been taught to live in.

But there had been people who should have known better, people who should have realized that he wasn't going to be like anyone else they had ever known. People who had looked at some of the things he'd said and done with shock and horror.

Jack had looked at him in that way more than once -- and when the immortal had done that, a part of him had died. Jack, of all people, should have been able to accept him as he was, and not expected him to be "normal" and fit in with everyone else's conventional ideas.

That time was long gone, the Doctor reminded himself. He and Jack were no longer lovers, no longer partners. There was no use wishing for what could no longer be.

Looking back at all the times that he'd been told he should be more "normal" really wasn't going to do him any good, the Doctor thought with a sigh, straightening up and looking around him. He was never going to be anyone else's idea of normal. Not for all of his life.

And, besides, he would never want to be the textbook image of normality. That would be terribly boring, at least for him. It would mean giving up everything that he was -- his original mind, his way of living, everything that made him who he was.

He would never give up what he loved most about his life -- which was being unlike anyone else. Even if that meant that he would spend the rest of his life alone, it was the price that he would have to pay for clinging to his individuality. And he'd continue paying that price.

That price wasn't too high, even though at times it might seem as though it was, the Doctor told himself, trying to push the thoughts that had been plaguing him to the back of his mind. He'd paid higher prices, for things that he didn't believe in nearly as much.

Being who he was had always been a high price to pay. But he wasn't going to give that up -- he'd worked too hard to become who and what he was, and there had been too many other people who had sacrificed too much for him along the way.

Normality was a state of mind, the Doctor told himself firmly. And if his version of normal didn't fit with everyone else's -- well, that was just one more thing that made him unique, something else for him to cling to that was all his own and not what others thought he was supposed to be.

***