open | every life is a pile of good things and bad things;

[thedreamer]

Who: The Doctor & you
What: Catch-all for the month!
When: Through August / early September
Where: Lakeside & Milton + all points in between

Content Warnings: Potential warnings for tea time (memory sharing, loss of inhibitions, etc. depending!) Will update accordingly if needed.



[ ooc: no preference with brackets or prose, happy to write either! ]

Comments

[notarat]

[ The other's answer confirms that Billy was very much right in what he was thinking a moment ago, thank you very much. And as much as he likes being proven right, it doesn't feel entirely great in this moment. Like there's some sort of bad aftertaste to this whole thing.

Billy doesn't even fully understand why. He should be glad. He got healed, and he didn't have to do anything for it. His injury is gone, and someone else is stuck with the trouble. He should leave them to that, if the Doctor insists on doing this much.

But he's so unused to charity that he doesn't know what to do with it when it's staring him in the face like this. It's easy to screw over people whom you feel have screwed you over too.

It's harder when it's someone doing something nice, Billy only now finds. ]

I don't understand you. [ He says - plainly, but there's something about his tone that makes him sound like he's thinking. ] How could you care so little about yourself?

[thedreamer]

I care! I do, I just — care on a spectrum, I suppose. I'm here, I've always been here, I'll continue being here and that's all well and good, but you being here is the sort of being here that I care most about ensuring. Well, you and everyone else.

[ Truthfully, it's not something he's thought about much before. So Billy saying it at all gives him pause, but — he is reckless, he's hasty and generally unconcerned with stopping and thinking before he acts. He enjoys being alive, of course, and he wants to be alive as long as he can, but he'd accepted long ago that keeping everyone around him safe first and foremost is his priority. His own well-being falls somewhere on the end of that spectrum.

He lets out a little sigh, trying to summarize his own rambling. ]

I want you to be okay.

cw: semi-indirect mentions of cannibalism

[notarat]

[ It's still baffling. Or-- rather, the entire explanation feels like it's only making things even more baffling. ]

I have seen people devour each other just to survive.

[ Maybe not 'seen' as much as heard about it happening to him, but-- same deal. It's his explanation for how baffling it is. ]

I thought that was the way people are. That someone like you can't exist.

cw: cont. (to be safe)

[thedreamer]

[ While the notion of humans (or any species) eating one another isn't a new concept to him, he's at least encountered that sort of behavior less than others. Which is to say, he's seen so much violence and death and destruction, often for petty reasons, or reasons that would be so easy to overcome if everyone could just stop and think and listen.

But war and death and hurting one another, it goes on and on. He does what he can to stop it, to intervene; and more than he'd ever want, sometimes that blood is on his own hands, but he has to try, to do what he can, whenever he can.

Sometimes it's only small moments like this one, like helping someone who was hurt. ]

Oh, don't give me too much credit. I only exist with any of these sorts of thoughts at all because of others, so many others — so good and kind and brave. And I learned from them, I'm always learning from them.

[ Billy speaks of those who devour others, and even still, the Doctor thinks of the darkness within himself. What good was he in that long and dreadful war? It's always with him, always tucked away, never gone. Today, Billy hurt his ankle and the Doctor could be a Doctor, and that means something to him. ]

I've seen it, so much good — it's here, too, it's all around.

[notarat]

.. you and I see very different worlds.

[ It's a fact he can't really file away all that neatly. The only solution in Billy's mind is to see the other as needlessly naive - dangerously naive, even, when it comes to how it might contribute to the Doctor's own safety. Billy just can't see the way he views the world as anything other than objective.

Which means that someone who doesn't see danger and ill intentions everywhere, the way someone as guarded and worried as Billy does, must be wrong from his point of view.

But--

He looks down at his ankle.

That's the part that he can't combine with that, all the same. ]

Though I.. [ A pause. It's uneasy, like he isn't used to saying this, or admitting this. ] I suppose you showed me something like it today.

[ What else could he call the other helping him so selflessly? Even at the cost of his own body, his own pain? ]

[thedreamer]

[ Perhaps because he's seen so much of the opposite of goodness, he clings so hard to believing in the persistence of it, the glimmer of hope wherever it may be found. And he'll do everything he can to be the one to help, not to harm.

He'd spent so long trapped in his own misery and darkness, he's turned in the opposite direction now. ]

The universe is vast and complicated, and so are all the people and creatures in it. I don't...not see the bad and the terrible, I only just — well, I want to make it better. If I do it long enough, with a little help, maybe everyone could see what you saw. Not only see it, but be it.