The Weight of Eternities
From the Doctor Who Series 3 episode "The Lazarus Experiment":
“You’re so sentimental, Doctor... Maybe you are older than you look.”
Freezing in her high heels and evening dress, Martha feels a cold shiver down her spine that has nothing to do with the temperature. The pale young man curled up on the transept of Southwark Cathedral twitches and spasms before them, naked save for the altar cloth wrapped around his waist. Every fiber of his being fighting the monster about to emerge from within, lost and afraid.
But his mouth sneers, defiant to the end, and his piercing blue eyes are fixed on the Doctor.
He's forsaken the title of “Professor”. Even given up his birth name, “Richard”. Now he is only Lazarus – a vain old man who twisted and corrupted genetic science to snatch his youth back from the days gone by, heedless of what it might do to his nature; who cut a bloody swathe through the lives of others in a desperate scramble to prolong his own.
Who, true to his namesake, has risen from the dead again and who – even tonight – still seeks power over the last and most irresistible enemy of humanity: death.
And the Doctor, pacing slowly around him, stands in his way.
“I’m old enough to know a longer life isn’t always a better one.”
It’s just the two of them, now. One brilliant mind set against the other. Martha and Tish are only bystanders, the rest of the world forgotten.
“In the end, you just get tired.”
His face is so young, his eyes so ancient. The scruffy hair and dishevelled James-Bond tuxedo nothing more than put-ons, affectations. Shadows from the cathedral gloom give him lines he’s never had in daylight.
“Tired of the struggle. Tired of losing everyone that matters to you.”
Listening to him, Martha can’t help but be moved by the unbearable sadness in his voice, heavy with the weight of eternities. Technically, she met the Doctor only last night – though they’ve travelled to so many places together since then. Shakespeare and New York and Daleks. All that running, across space and time.
Just “one more trip”. One more. Just one. Again and again and again, like they’re staving off the inevitable.
“Tired of watching everything… turn to dust.”
Is he thinking of Rose? Or are his hearts back with his people, and that burnt orange sky he told her about, consumed by war while he – last of the Time Lords – is forever cursed to survive? Martha wonders how much she still doesn’t know about the Doctor; how much he still hasn’t told her. The sheer immeasurable breadth of all that knowledge and experience; the things he’s seen, the loves he’s lost.
He heaves a sigh, and crouches down in front of the professor. Dark brown eyes gazing into the blue. So quiet. So weary. Trying, ever-so-gently, to reach across the ages and find some common ground between them. The one thing that could unite them both as equals.
“If you live long enough, Lazarus, the only certainty left is that you’ll end up alone.”
Lazarus glowers back. He knows the Doctor’s right. As a man of science, he’s smart and clever enough to understand how much tonight has cost him. His work. His machine. His reputation. Dear Lady Thaw...
Men greater than he have even written about it, across the centuries of human history – Eliot, with his wastelands and hollow men; Herodotus and his Fountain of Youth.
But for someone like Lazarus, pride and cruelty and righteousness win the day.
“That’s a price worth paying.”
And Martha sees the Doctor’s eyes harden.
