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The Doctor had been fond of bars when his first body was still young. Then, as he got older, the fun of it wore off; it was hard to enjoy going out and getting hammered when he was busy worrying about politics and the government and that sort of thing. Since he fled Gallifrey, his enjoyment of nightlife establishments fluctuated over the centuries between occasional enjoyment and absolute loathing.
All in all, his tenth incarnation wasn’t fond of bars. But there were times when that was the sort of mood he ended up in.
The fourteenth Doctor clearly remembered one such occasion. He—his tenth self, that is—was in the sort of mood where he wanted to stay awake for two weeks, get in a fistfight, or maybe just pick a direction and run until he couldn’t stand anymore. He needed every single one of his three-dimensional senses to be absolutely blasted or else he felt like he might actually regenerate from sheer…stress? Jitters? He felt like somebody had taken a five-dimensional axe to his epasi. It wasn’t pleasant, not one bit. What it was was the perfect motivation to eat a whole hand of ginger, head off to a karaoke club, and do enough shots to give a human fatal alcohol poisoning.
This particular moment wasn’t dangerous in terms of temporal meta-collision, but the fact that these two bodies looked so similar might make things awkward. Fourteen didn’t want to have to break the news to his shortest-lived incarnation. He wasn’t sure what, exactly, compelled him to return to that night at the club at all in the first place, but he was sure some part of him needed to.
He came to the club wearing a mask, when Ten was halfway through Born to Run; it was the last song he sang that night.
His voice was good—actually, it was excellent—but nobody goes to a karaoke club to listen to the same person hog the mic for almost two hours straight, especially should that person insist on singing obnoxiously well. Karaoke is supposed to be about sounding terrible without a care in the world, but the tenth Doctor couldn’t resist the urge to show off if his life depended on it.
Ten took what was supposed to be a brief break from singing until his vocal cords gave out to return to the bar and order yet another three shots; somebody else snatched the mic the second he set it down, as if worried he might try to start singing again. He managed to down the first two shots with only minor difficulty, but spat up the third one (which would actually have been his thirty-ninth that night had he succeeded in shooting it) and dropped the glass. It shattered against the floor. If Ten noticed (Fourteen honestly could not remember if he’d noticed or not), he didn’t give any indication. He stood up from the bar stool, and almost immediately collapsed.
Fourteen couldn’t remember how the night had gone after that. He’d blacked out and the next thing he knew, he was waking up in bed on the TARDIS, hungover, with no idea of how he’d made it back (or of why he’d gone to bed of all things, rather than sleeping on the floor of the console room). Maybe he didn’t remember because he’d been drunker than any five-dimensional entity had any business being. Or, perhaps, he didn’t remember because this was where the temporal meta-collision began. Either one was possible. He could easily just let Ten pass out here at the bar and leave him to figure out how he got back to the TARDIS on his own. That would be the wise thing to do.
Well, no version of the Doctor was known for being wise. They were all known for being reckless and impulsive, and Fourteen, though he was working on himself, was no exception. Both bodies’ alasta bristled when he caught Ten in his arms (it was almost more of a reflex than a decision). God, Fourteen knew he’d gained a lot of weight since settling down, but there was a difference between knowing that logically, seeing the number on the scale go up, and having his arms around his former body’s delicate shoulders, feeling how worn-thin he’d been back in the day.
The former Doctor’s eyes were still open, his antexes still tense and alert; he was, strictly speaking, still conscious. He wasn’t lucid enough, though, to get a good look at the exposed half of his rescuer’s face. He wasn’t aware enough to really do anything besides lie limp in Fourteen’s arms and mumble some completely incomprehensible half-English half-Gallifreyan nonsense.
He didn’t speak Gallifreyan often in that body. In fact, he didn’t even want to hear it most of the time; he could remember breaking down one night and begging the TARDIS to just show him English instead. Having to listen to the language of a dead civilization was just too much. It wasn’t like anybody could tell English didn’t always come easily to him, after all. When he spoke, the tenses, pronouns, familial titles, it all sounded perfectly fine to any native speaker; nobody needed to know the Doctor himself found them a bit confusing. Earth was the closest thing he'd had to a home planet at the time.
His eleventh self had no problem speaking his own language, nor did any of the subsequent incarnations. But Ten only ever spoke it when he was too exhausted, intoxicated, or emotionally compromised to remember not to.
The bartender gave Fourteen a look as he made to leave; he removed his mask.
“He’s family,” he said, vaguely gesturing to his younger self and hoping the resemblance between them would remove the need to explain any further. “I’m just taking him home, I think he’s had more than enough.”
It didn’t take him long to remember where the TARDIS—the old TARDIS—was parked near the club. Nor was it particularly physically demanding to carry Ten there; he didn’t weigh nearly as much as he should.
Time Lords were, above all else, durable. Barring any complications, a Time Lord could run without stopping for hours on end without getting tired or winded. Go for weeks without drinking water. It was nearly impossible for a Time Lord to die of heat stroke, and actually impossible for one to die of hypothermia. Suffice it to say that starving was similarly difficult; a Time Lord actually managing to be noticeably underweight was downright impressive. Well, the tenth Doctor was known for his dedication to being impressive, so perhaps it made sense.
Fourteen actually forgot about the part where he would wake up in bed wondering how he got there; he brought Ten to his bedroom not to avoid messing with his own timeline, but because he could tell he needed it. Was that self-pity?
The Doctor, across all their various bodies, never found it easy to decide to what extent they considered interacting with their own past or future selves to be akin to socialising with other people. Indeed, their opinion on the matter varied by incarnation; the very first had trouble thinking of any of the others as the same person as himself or each other (an aversion ironically shared by the tenth), while the second and eleventh had no such trouble, and the rest…for the most part, tried not to think about it too much.
In Gallifreyan, there were different pronouns to clarify this sort of thing. The fourteenth Doctor could refer to his own immediate predecessor by a feminine first-person past-tense pronoun that would by definition make it clear he was talking about his own previous body. In English, he could either refer to Thirteen by “me” and “I,” which could get confusing, or by “she” and “her,” which could also get confusing. Neither felt truly correct.
To his credit, he did intend to leave after seeing to it that Ten was tucked into bed the way he remembered. The plan was to just go back home and binge watch some awful sitcom with Donna and not think about this interaction for at least a few years. But no version of the Doctor could ever carry out a plan from start to finish, for better or for worse.
“Wait.”
Ten’s voice was hoarse. Shaky. Fourteen pointedly chalked it up to singing too much. He stopped in his tracks.
“You should sleep,” he said.
“Please don’t go,” his past self whispered.
Fourteen knew the sound of his own voice holding back tears.
He didn’t even stop to think whether or not it was a good idea to turn on his heel, to walk right back over to the bed and lay down and throw his arms around his former self, to hold him like nothing else mattered. Was that pathetic of him? And was it pathetic of Ten to burst into tears and cling to his own future self like a frightened animal? Any of the other Doctors in between would almost certainly think so. Eleven would prefer to fling himself into a black hole than show this sort of vulnerability. Twelve simply would never sink this low to begin with; oh, he could be sad, he could be angry, but never pathetic. Thirteen would have left the room at least forty-five seconds ago—no, she would never have stepped in at the club in the first place. She wouldn’t have gone.
But Fourteen had to hold his predecessor as he broke down. He had to do that much. A Time Lord could live for over a thousand years in one body before needing to regenerate from old age, and the Doctor’s tenth body only lasted six. Not six-hundred, not sixty, just six. Six years, and he spent so much of that time in this frantic, desperate… manic state.
As he was now, the fourteenth Doctor was making progress in the field of accepting emotional support from other people. He still had plenty more progress left to make, but he was leaps and bounds past…well, most of his predecessors, actually, if not all of them.
As he was then, the tenth Doctor would have preferred to bite his own fingers off than to need emotional support so blatantly. He wouldn’t remember this moment with Fourteen. As far as he knew, he never once broke down in somebody’s arms like this—in fact, he never even allowed himself to fantasise about it, because even that felt shameful, even with no other telepaths around to read what he was thinking. He allowed himself a degree of intimacy with Rose that he hadn’t had with anybody since before the war. Even she never saw him like this.
Of course the only person who ever did see him like this was merely himself a few millennia down the line. Of course he still felt pathetic for breaking down, even with only himself as a witness. And of course he was still too soft to stop and think about the Blinovitch Limitation Effect for a moment before trying to comfort himself.
It didn’t take more than a handful of minutes before Ten stopped crying in favour of finally passing out cold as his future self rubbed his back. Whether this sudden onset of sleep had more to do with the alcohol, sheer exhaustion, or telepathic interference on his successor’s part was a mystery.
Fourteen knew damn well he didn’t remember anybody else being with him when he woke up after that night, so he gathered the willpower to slip away, moving as slowly as he could to avoid waking Ten (he had, after all, been awake for two weeks straight).
It didn’t matter that doing so made his hearts ache; he’d get over it. And, by extension, so would Ten. He’d just have to die first.