Title: Middle of the Road
By: angstytimelord
Pairing: gen
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: PG-13
Table: 6, 12_stories
Prompt: 1, Hatred
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.

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There was so much hatred in the world, the Doctor mused as he looked around him at the wooded glade that he was seated in. He really didn't need to add to it himself; there was no reason for him to hate anyone, even though others might think differently.

He couldn't bring himself to say that he hated any of his enemies, not really. Did he really hate them, deep down inside, even after all the pain and troubles they'd caused him over the course of his long life? He didn't think so.

Maybe he should. Maybe it would be more natural for him to feel a black, burning hatred towards them, especially after all the heartaches and grief some of them had caused. But he couldn't find it in himself to feel that kind of antipathy towards anyone.

He'd be thought of as unnatural by so many if he admitted that aloud -- particularly by the humans who had been his friends and even his companions for so long.

Jack would think he was utterly crazy, and he'd be the human who would be most likely to understand why he felt pulled in different directions where his emotions were concerned. But Jack was human -- which meant that a great deal of the time, he saw situations in black and white.

The immortal was probably becoming better with looking at all sides of a situation since he'd become the leader of Torchwood, the Doctor thought, resting his chin on his hands. But he was still human; he would still have a biased opinion on how the Doctor should feel.

So many people had told him that he should hate enemies such as the Daleks, or the Cybermen. And a part of him agreed with them -- a minuscule part that he tried to keep hidden, tried to squelch down and keep bottled up, away from doing harm.

He didn't want to be the sort of person who hated. Once he let himself feel that kind of blackness, he started to swing more to one side than he wanted to.

To be effective at being what he was, he had to stay in the middle of the road. He couldn't lean too much to one side or another, light or dark. He had to strive to keep those two sides of himself balanced, and not let himself be biased towards either.

It was so hard to do sometimes, he thought with a weary sigh. And though he knew that it would be better on all counts if he let himself lean far more towards the light side of his nature than the darker, more vengeful one, he couldn't do that.

Light couldn't exist without darkness. He couldn't let himself be completely taken over by the better angels of his nature, as a human poet had once put it. He had to let that darkness be a part of him -- though he had to be careful not to let it get too strong.

If he did, then he would start to swing closer to that yawning chasm that had long ago swallowed the Master -- and he'd be bloody useless if that happened.

If he was honest with himself, sometimes he thought that he should hate so many of his sworn enemies -- particularly the Cybermen and Daleks. But he couldn't bring himself to hate those races; rather, he pitied them.

They would never know what it was like to experience freedom, and individuality. That wasn't any way to live; it was an existence, not a life. They had no purpose, no sense of who they were or who they could be. They were races to be sorry for, not to blast with hatred.

And really, he found it impossible to summon that kind of mindless hatred into his soul. That would make him no better than them -- and the last thing he wanted to do was sink into the same kind of miasma that possessed their souls.

Did Daleks and Cybermen have souls? The Doctor frowned, pausing in his throughts as he considered the question. That wasn't something he'd thought about before.

And not something that he really wanted to spend time musing on now. He had other things on his mind, thoughts that would probably be easier than wrestling with the concept of races likes those two actually having any kind of emotions.

His lips twisted in a wry smile; that thought alone should be proof that he didn't believe either one of those particular races had souls. Maybe they did, but in his experience, they were cold and unfeeling, completely devoid of any softer qualities.

No, he couldn't hate them, in spite of the way he'd always viewed them. Rather, he hated what they represented -- and he hated their actions. But he couldn't make himself hate the actual race; he didn't feel that most of them had much of a choice in what they became.

And then, of course, there was the Master. He'd once considered the person who was now his greatest enemy to be his closest friend.

Was it possible to hate someone who he'd once been so close to? He didn't think so; he'd asked himself several times over the course of the centuries if he hated the other man, and the honest answer was always a resounding "no."

He hated what the Master did to him; he hated that what had once been a friendship had turned to such enmity. He hated how the Master tried to control him -- and most of all, he hated the fact that the other man could never be looked upon as a friend again.

But he couldn't completely hate the Master. He could hate his enemy's actions, but he couldn't hate the man himself; it wasn't his fault that he'd tumbled headlong into madness and had been unable to save his mind and pull himself back to safety.

The Doctor sighed, rubbing a hand across his forehead. Thinking about all of this was giving him a horrible headache; his mind felt as though it was throbbing.

Hadn't he had this debate before? Yes, with Jack, most definitely, but it hadn't come to a satisfactory conclusion. He and Jack had been on opposite sides of the table with this one, with Jack firmly holding to his belief that the Doctor had a right to hate any of his enemies.

Yet he couldn't believe that the immortal could feel that kind of hatred in his own heart, either .Jack might have seen and done much more than most people would ever be able to conceive of, but he was still human -- with all the attendant compassion of a human.

Jack probably still carried that compassion with him, no matter how hard he tried to pretend that he was a hard, cold man. And if he could temper his decisions with forgiveness in some ways, then how much more was the Doctor required to do so?

The other man might have a duty to protect the Earth, but the Doctor had to protect the entire universe. That made it imperative that he didn't let himself hate.

It wasn't always easy to do, he had to admit. There were times when he lost his temper, when he even made threats that he wasn't sure he could follow through on. Even as the words came out of his mouth, he wondered if he'd have to act on them.

He tried never to show that kind of weakness to his enemies -- even though he had a hard time thinking of that sort of compassion as a weakness. To him, it showed more strength to hold out a hand and offer hope than it did to mindlessly destroy.

Though he was perfectly capable of doing so if he was required to, he thought grimly. He wasn't referred to as an "oncoming storm" for nothing -- and he'd showed little compassion often enough in the past, when he was required to turn himself to stone.

Yes, he'd shown no mercy when he'd found that there was no other solution than to turn his back on the compassion he usually tried to show. Too many times for his liking.

The Doctor sighed again, stretching his arms above his head and wincing. The headache was still there; he'd apparently thought about this subject so much that his brain was protesting against those thoughts and wanting to turn away from them.

Besides, he'd been sitting here for quite a while. It was a beautiful place, peaceful and relaxing, but he'd been cross-legged on the ground for so long that one foot was starting to fall asleep, and his ass was numb. It was past time for him to go.

Getting to his feet, he frowned as he stamped his foot on the ground to relieve the attack of pins and needles that spread up his leg. After a few moments, the feeling returned to his limb, and he headed towards the Tardis with a sigh of relief.

It had been far too easy to think about such a dark topic as whether or not he truly hated anyone here in this place, he thought with a frown. Maybe he was letting that dark side take him over more than it should -- a thought that he knew would only make his headache far worse.

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