literen | FIC * Turn Back Time * Doctor Who * the Doctor

Title: Turn Back Time
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: the Doctor
Words: ~550
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Summary: "Crossing into established events is strictly forbidden. Except for cheap tricks." --the Doctor in "Smith and Jones"
Beta: none
Notes: Written for this song meme:

ladybracknell gave me the song If I Could Turn Back Time by Cher, which was totally a free pass for me to look into the Doctor's mind.

Out of all the people in the universe, the Doctor should know about time travel. Time Lord, last of them, it comes with the job description. Well, not a job per se, more like a hobby. A very absorbing, full-time hobby that threatens to kill him constantly (and sometimes has). Nevertheless.

The Doctor knows all about time, thank you very much. Wibbly wobbly and everything. He might not be good at explaining it, especially to humans, especially when there's something about to blow up and not much time to get into the tricky details of non-linear time and space, but it's all very clear in his mind.

Fixed points and points in flux. It's as simple as that for him, and if someone were to ask him what was the difference he wouldn't be able to explain. People have asked, actually. They keep asking all the time. As far as the Doctor is concerned, they might as well be asking why the sky is blue instead of purple. It just is.

(Okay, the Doctor would be perfectly able to explain that it's because of the sunlight scattering in the air. And it's not even true of all planets, not even most planets, but 21st century humans are so self-absorbed. Maybe the metaphor was not completely correct, but it doesn't matter since most people wouldn't understand anyway.)

So, the Doctor knows only too well that he can't just hop on the TARDIS and go back every time he makes a mistake. All kinds of terrible things could happen, such as an entire race dying or a couple of planets blowing up. And that's just the best possible outcome.

Of course this is the simplified version that he gives to his friends to keep them from getting any strange ideas. One of them meeting their past or future self, now that could really make the universe implode. They couldn't handle it. Not like the Doctor does.

For all his talk about not intersecting his own timeline, the Doctor has been able to meet himself on several different occasions without suffering anything worse than mild embarrassment at his own past fashion choices.

(Well, apart from that occasion, that had been a close one. And that other time, but he's not going to bring it up now. Or ever again. In fact, let's just forget it happened. Except that it'll happen again in his future...)

The point is, in many cases the Doctor could go back in time to fix his own mistakes. Sometimes he's so close to do it, he just wants to ignore all consequences and go. He never does, but he always ends up regretting it, imagining all the possible scenarios in which things things went a different way.

And he knows that in some other parallel universe things did go differently, and maybe there's another Doctor who went back and now is happier. Or possibly dead. He'll never know. He's decided to play by the rules.

At least for most of the time. Then there's times when he just doesn't care and goes back to watch the moon landing four times in a week, standing side by side with himself and grinning like a loon while humanity takes its first steps into space. He doesn't regret a single one of those trips.