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The Doctor stared at the big red button, glimmering on the TARDIS’ console, and wondered if he could ever live with himself if he pushed it. And if she would ever forgive him if he did.
It was a big red button that wasn’t listed in the manual. It wasn’t spoken about. The old Type 40s had it as standard issue, until a campaign by a group of Time Lords had resulted in it being removed from the specs of all future TARDISes. The Doctor vaguely remembered being a member of that group.
That was because the idea of a suicide button, while sound, was simply too dangerous.
At least, that’s what he and his fellow campaigners had called it. Officially, it was known as the Regeneration Abort Failsafe.
Regeneration was, as one of his earlier selves so accurately put it, a lottery. Blond, brunette, ginger — you never knew what you were going to get. Some Time Lords even ended up changing gender from time to time. For some it was just an annoyance and a price one paid for near-immortality, while others such as Missy and the Corsair embraced the change. Time Lords often changed skin colour, too; the fact the Doctor had been Caucasian each of his lives so far was more a case of odds than anything else.
Not every regeneration was perfect. There had been cases of Time Lords regenerating with major deformities and physical issues. Regenerating into a body with only one arm, or one eye, or even no hearing presented obstacles that could be overcome; one of the Time Lords’ strongest rules of society was you played the hand you were dealt. Preferred being a female, yet saddled with a male body, you toughed it out for the duration (the Citadel had an entire department dedicated to counselling first-time gender-changers; you'd be surprised what, ah, logistics questions arise on such an occasion). Regenerated without eyes? There was tech available to help you cope, but more than one Time Lord eschewed “bionic eyes” in favour of strengthening their other senses. One of The General’s early incarnations was in fact blind and she always maintained that this made her a stronger soldier, both during that life and when she got her vision back on her next regeneration, one hundred years later. Similarly, if a Time Lord had a hearing impairment, or some other issue, it wasn't the end of the world. You played the hand you were dealt; you adapted and got on with life.
The big red button wasn’t for those people. It was meant to be pressed when regeneration resulted in a physical form that simply was not viable and could not survive. Things like regenerations resulting in a Time Lord missing major internal organs, or with no head — the Doctor had once joked to Rose Tyler about regenerating with no head, but the fact was one in 50,000 regenerations did end up with this anomaly. In those cases, Time Lords hoped they regenerated in the company of somebody else because it was estimated that a Time Lord with no head could live approximately 60 seconds. Long enough for someone to push the big red button — the easy option when it was available — or cause enough physical damage to the Time Lord to trigger another regeneration — by far the more difficult option.
The big red button when pressed flooded the TARDIS console room with a form of gas that entered the body through either the mouth and nostrils or (should they not be available) the skin, triggering an instant regeneration. Anyone else present had about 10 seconds to get behind a closing bulkhead to avoid changing as well.
It was a last resort. But it had been taken out of the TARDIS design out of concern that people might misuse the option and use it to effectively commit suicide — or murder. This was particularly a concern for older Time Lords approaching their final allotted regeneration. But there were reports of Time Lords pushing it due to depression, PTSD, or to trigger events that changed the course of civilisations, a taboo the Doctor managed to break without having to change his face.
Now, the Doctor stared at the big red button again and considered pushing it now, taboos be damned.
He had thought he was fine. His memories of Clara restored, he had said goodbye to her in the extraction chamber in Gallifrey, allowing her to fulfill her destiny and return to Trap Street in the 21st century, to meet her death. He’d done far more than say goodbye to her. He’d married her, told her his name, and even said, “I love you” to her — something he never said to anyone — and they had parted knowing how important they were to one another.
He had thought he was fine. Afterwards, he’d travelled briefly with Clara’s companion, the immortal Ashildr, and visited the ashes of Gallifrey at the end of time, where Ashildr, too, went on to meet her destiny.
Saying goodbye to an immortal reminded the Doctor that everything ends eventually. Even the Doctor, though he felt as if he’d already lived forever (spending 4.5 billion years in the most cruel Groundhog Day scenario imaginable does that to a person) knew that, one day, his number would be up. There would be no surprise renewal of his regeneration cycle, he’d take one risk too many, and, if there was truly some form of afterlife awaiting beyond the darkness, maybe he’d be reunited with the people he loved again, including Clara. That thought had given him some comfort, even as the analytical, scientific part of his mind argued otherwise. Missy’s Nethersphere, which had allowed Danny Pink to potentially live again (if the former soldier hadn't arranged for a young boy he'd accidentally killed in Afghanistan to be revived in his place) had been an abomination, rather than a beacon of hope; though, granted, an abomination the Doctor had wished had still been active when Clara died on Trap Street.
But he had thought he was fine. He had knelt by Clara’s grave on Earth, paid her one last respect, and said, “Goodbye.” He had finally come to accept a sad ending. It was time to move on.
He had thought he was fine for years, actually. He met new friends. He even came close to falling in love with a woman he helped escape from a prison camp on Sontar. Clara and River had both given him permission (as if he needed it) to love someone else, but he wasn’t ready, even though this woman had reminded him so very much of Clara and of River. And so they parted as friends. As for the travellers that came after Clara (the Doctor had stayed true to the promise he'd made her to never use the word "companion" again for anyone but her), he most definitely did not allow himself to grow as close to them as he had with her. It was just too dangerous, for everybody.
But then he found himself alone for a time. Finding people to travel with isn’t like ordering a book online; there’s no catalogue or matchmaking service (though Missy had technically attempted the latter with Clara, come to think of it). The Doctor never knew when, only who, and he hadn’t found any “who’s” for a long time. Decades, by his reckoning.
And it was those times when he was alone that he started to think about the people he’d lost, who were no longer with him anymore. His family: Amy, Rory, River, Susan. People he had loved: Rose Tyler. Reinette. Grace Holloway, whose obituary he’d accidentally stumbled across (fortunately, she’d lived to a ripe old age — long enough to win the Nobel Prize for her pioneering medical research). Romana, who’d been conspicuous by her absence when he’d returned to Gallifrey — he prayed to whatever deity wanted to listen that she’d survived the Time War.
But his thoughts these days always came back to Clara. Her eyes, her kindness, her passion. The regret that they never really came forward with their feelings for each other until literally the last few minutes. The adventures they’d shared. The fun they’d had. Most people he’d travelled with, their time spent together was go-go-go. With Clara and the Doctor, it was different. For them, there was as much adventure in sitting by a fireplace listening to Jane Austen reading aloud from her first draft of Emma as there was chasing Daleks. There was one time the two went camping on Earth. That was all: no alien worlds, no planets to save; the two just found a quiet spot overlooking the Grand Canyon — the TARDIS was left parked a few miles away — and they spent the whole night sitting by a campfire, looking up at the stars.
If this was any other story, this perfect moment might have ended with an emotional love confession, the two kissing passionately under the clear sky. The stuff of which Hallmark Cards are made. But this was the Doctor and Clara. This wasn't how they rolled. At the time, the Doctor had been fine with that. And Clara, by all accounts, was just as content. He was her Doctor. She was his Clara. She’d promised him she wasn’t going anywhere. He said he would always come back for her. They shared a bond that was utterly unbreakable and that no one — not Missy, no one — could tear asunder. Did anything else really need to be said?
And then that damn raven had to destroy it all.
He had thought he was fine. But then he’d started having the waking nightmares — remembering her scream, her falling to the ground. Many times he panicked and thought he’d forgotten the sound of her voice, what she looked like. No neuroblock memory wipe involved this time — he was terrified that he was doing it to himself.
He’d be working on the TARDIS and suddenly his eyes would fill with tears. He’d be visiting friends — tea with Madame Vastra, a UNIT reunion picnic he’d allowed the Osgoods to talk him into attending — and he’d have to excuse himself to avoid having to make up an answer as to why he was suddenly weeping. One of the most bizarre moments occurred when he was squaring off with a Slitheen and the Slitheen asked him if he was all right because he suddenly had tears rolling down his cheeks and it was definitely something not expected from the Oncoming Storm.
The Slitheen incident was a trifle. He could handle those farting thieves in his sleep and sometimes had. But when lives started to become endangered because the Doctor froze up due to the sudden in-rush of memory. Or he pushed a little too hard to save a young girl who happened to resemble Clara back when he first met her as a child in a playground in Blackpool — then it started to be dangerous.
It took him a while to figure out what it was. At first, he thought it was some alien influence or a long-belated regeneration side-effect. The TARDIS once technically started to cry when an alien influence infested it and its psychic circuits went wonky. The Doctor checked her top to bottom to see if history was repeating itself. No luck.
Eventually, it came down to the simple fact that he was missing Clara. Terribly. And the way he increasingly felt, it was almost as of their reunion had never happened — not in the diner TARDIS in Nevada, not when she and Ashildr had tracked him down and he had spent a bittersweet, yet ultimately joyous few hours in her company one more time, ending with her becoming his wife. All he seemed to be able to remember was what happened on Trap Street. The raven zeroing in on her, plunging into her stomach, her body stiffening, her legs buckling, and then her scream.
He kept coming back to that awful moment more and more often these days. Not just remembering her death, but even worse, he couldn’t stop his analytical mind from dissecting every microsecond of those final hours — from the time Rigsy had phoned the TARDIS to tell them about his mysterious tattoo, to the moment he knelt on the ground, cradling Clara's lifeless body as if trying to squeeze life back into her — trying to figure out how he could have stopped it from happening. He lived in terror of one day coming up with an answer, far too late to help Clara. Her death was a fixed point before; after returning to Gallifrey and returning her to the timestream, it became a locked point. Absolutely nothing could be done.
The Doctor looked at the big red button and considered whether to push it. Taboos are damned. He couldn’t go on like this. He couldn’t continue to be compromised like this. Not when the universe was sometimes — who was he kidding? Often — at stake. Everybody loses someone, the Doctor had once told himself (using Clara’s image to do it during his imprisonment in the confession dial). He was being bloody selfish if he thought he was the only one. But, at the same time, if he continued to hurt decades later, would it get worse the longer he lived? Who might die if he continued to grieve like this?
The Doctor had no intention of committing suicide. But aborting his current regeneration and starting fresh … maybe that was the key. Of course not everything changes with a regeneration. Even now, he still remembered how much he loved Rose Tyler, and River Song, and Susan’s grandmother, the President’s Wife. Their loss still hurt deeply. And he expected the same would be true of Clara, even when he had a new face and body. But regeneration also allowed a clean slate, and while the hurt would still be there, it wouldn’t be pain, the type that, no matter how far he ran in his box, was still there.
The forced regeneration would probably hurt. A lot. A Time Lord regenerating into a body with no hearts or no head wouldn’t care, but the big red button wasn’t meant to be pushed for an able-bodied Gallifreyan. And considering he’d subconsciously directed his latest regeneration with the memory of a Roman man he’d once saved from the eruption of Vesuvius, God knows what his next incarnation would end up being. Knowing his luck, not only would he change gender, but he’d end up looking like Clara. That would be the cruel irony.
So what if he did press the big red button? Doing so would be an admission of defeat, of giving up. Why can’t I just lose! he had screamed when he finally hit rock bottom while inside the confession dial. He knew he had screamed those words millions and billions of times. So maybe loss was a good thing. Loss makes people stronger. Let this incarnation go. The eyebrows even scared himself in the mirror, and his hair was so untamable it could be seen from space. Lived long enough. Start fresh. Maybe a younger-looking body, or perhaps one so old that he was no longer physically capable of the types of feelings and desire he’d had for Clara. Or he’d come out of it as a female and, if nothing else, maybe she’d consider things from a new perspective.
But what would Clara have thought of his decision? What about River? She’d probably kick him in the arse. Both of them faced death with dignity and grace. He had never been so proud of Clara as when she gracefully approached her death on Trap Street. She never ran and she died with her head held high — both then and later when she returned to extraction chamber. Ashildr was right; it was beautiful, and it made him feel hellish awful to even think that. River barely gave it a second thought when she hooked herself up into what was by all accounts an electric chair in order to save people in the Library. He’d watched her die, and had been just as powerless to stop it, though he was able to cheat and create a sentient avatar that lived on for a while inside the CAL supercomputer, and he had a chance to say goodbye to her later ... twice.
Clara had no option to regenerate. River couldn’t either (thanks to the fact she’d given up the ability to save him centuries earlier). If they could face death with such grace, what the hell gave the Doctor the right not to face life?
"What if I just don't want to do this anymore?" the Doctor spoke out loud.
“There’s always a big red button to push with you, isn’t there Doctor? But then, I always knew what buttons to push, too, eh?”
That voice, soft, low and melodious, with a Blackpool lilt that was like none other. The Doctor looked to his left and there she was, standing right next to him. Like she used to. Those expressive brown eyes, upturned smile. Perfect.
“Your next life can wait, Doctor. I know it’s hard. But live this one. For me. For River. For all of us. Please. You don’t need to do this. Live instead. As yourself. Play with the hand you've been dealt. Make it a strength.”
They say it’s hard to maintain eye contact with an illusion. Almost as if the illusion doesn’t want to truly be seen. But Clara and the Doctor never played by the rules. Even though Clara wasn’t really there, just as she was never really there in the confession dial, the Doctor locked eyes with her.
“For you?” the Doctor spoke aloud.
“For me.”
A hand nearly enveloped in a grey blouse with sleeves just a little too long reached over and snapped the protective cover shut over the big red button. Or maybe it was the Doctor’s hand because then she was gone. The big red button withdrew into the console.
He knew he’d have to live with it — the sudden bursts of emotion, missing Clara. Maybe it would fade over time. Maybe when he eventually regenerated for real he’d walk away without the pain. Or, for all he knew, it would still be there when he reached his twenty-fourth life. But he would live with it. For her.