headcanons about eldritch!doctor except not actually about them:
- there’s no way that splintering herself across time and space didn’t do something to clara. earth feels so small now, and every time she returns to her home planet she feels restricted and claustrophobic, like she’s trying to occupy a space meant only for a single person. she lies like breathing, desperately trying to find a version of events that fits each of her millions upon millions of lives. clara oswald is a badly sewn together patchwork of forgotten memories and whispered stories and she is much less scared of that than she should be
- river song is mostly human but slightly curled and fraying at the edges, and for most of her life she has kept a strict grasp on her mortal form, terrified that she’ll be punished for being wrong. it takes her a good long time to let these edges slip, and the first time happens while she’s with her parents. they don’t react badly (my beautiful beautiful girl amy murmurs and river cries in her arms as rory carefully combs his fingers through hair that flickers in and out of reality and feels like static) and she starts becoming more and more comfortable with her true form. the doctor’s always been able to see her of course
- amy never talks about it, but those years living by a crack leaking time and space didn’t exactly leave her unscathed. she remembers timelines that never happened and sees things that should remain unseen. where rory sees an old tired timelord, amy’s always been able to see a splintered and shiny mass of time energy that weaves through dimensions. river flares fever bright in her eyes and rory flickers between flesh and plastic. new york is a gnarled wound in time and she pretends that it doesn’t burn every time she blinks
- she doesn’t remember anything afterwards but there’s still something off about donna noble and the way she seems to almost. grow a little. the way that her eyes light up and there’s something so much bigger behind them. she takes up camping, and doesn’t quite know how to explain how much more settled she feels sleeping under the stars (if there were any onlookers, they’d be able to see how the stars pulse in time with the too quick rise and fall of her chest)
- rose has always sworn that she has nothing of the bad wolf left but sometimes, when she grins, she almost seems to have too many teeth in her smile. she prefers the day, prefers the sun and the bright blue sky; she spends so much time in bright places that it takes her a while to realise that her eyes reflect the light
martha jones spends a year with a perception filter around her neck hiding from a planetary wide psychic network and now sometimes, if she isn’t concentrating, people just. don’t notice her. they step around her absentmindedly, as though she’s background noise. not just people, signals just seem to bounce away from her. the only number she can consistently call is the tardis’, because all the others just don’t always connect, as though the satellites still can’t see her. when she speaks, her words thrum with hope and desperation and pain and psychic energy that existed and then didn’t. it’s hard for people to hold martha’s face in their mind, to remember anything about her features or her mannerisms, but, even if they can’t quite remember who said them, her words always settle somewhere deep inside their minds and never quite leave
(mickey smith spent years in a universe that wasn’t his own, spent years exposed to different dimensional frequencies than the ones he grew up with. martha relaxes, essence fading and blending into the fabric of the universe; he can still always see her)
(humans can’t perceive what time lords can, exactly, but they can still tell something’s off with jack harkness. there’s something almost magnetically jarring about him, something that compels people to keep their eyes on him. it takes them a while to realise that when he’s with martha, their energies balance out. it’s almost like they’re normal)
A few classic companions, if I may!
- Ian and Barbara (so it is rumoured) haven't aged a day since the '60s, and their movements are oddly in sync. When they walk, there is a rhythm to it, and when Ian drops something, Barbara can catch it before it hits the ground. There is something to be said about each being the only piece of their own time and place that the other had, something to be said for nostalgia and trust and bonding and the strange psychic effects of a once-junked TARDIS. Regardless of the precise cause, there's something about them that gives their colleagues the strangest feeling -- something unearthly.
- Jo Jones (nee Grant) has always been charming, but ever after her days in UNIT, her smile has had an extra little edge to it. Not that it's offputting; quite the reverse in fact. The smile draws people in, makes them a little more open to talking, make them a little more willing to converse with the activist who's just chained herself to their biggest bulldozer, and that's when her words spill free, a million little shining things with flexible prods and pokes and edges that pick open every locked door they come across and leaves people stumbling into agreeing with her even if they aren't quite sure what she wanted from them to begin with.
- Peri's timeline is a knotted, gnarled thing with a dozen different ends and iterations, and new paths seem to form all the time. The Queen of Yrcanos has a peculiar glint in her eye when speaking with petitioners, scanning visions unseen of might-bes and could-have-beens. Peri Brown, Worrier Queen of Los Angeles scrutinizes her celebrity guests with the same exacting eye, and so does Peri Brown, manager of pro wrestling star Yrcanos, and on and on, each interaction a delicate decision of which branch of the timeline she should keep and which she should prune.
- Ace burns inside, a light that shines through her eyes. Her Professor taught her well in the fine art of plotting and strategizing, but they also refined her understanding of when to simply flip the chessboard off the table. Her skin is hot to the touch, and even her scrutiny is painfully warm. She leaves a desolation in her wake, a swathe of corrupt politicians toppled, greedy corporations bankrupted, and wannabe warlords burned out. No one could ever catch her ever lighting the blaze, of course -- just watching from the sidelines. Smiling.
- Dr. Grace Holloway is famed in San Francisco for her uncanny knack for bringing patients away from death's door. Certainly, there are... rumours floating around her, products of envious minds no doubt. The way that clocks seem to run fast or slow when she stands near them for too long is mere coincidence. The way the lights flicker and the seconds seem to skip when she's in the middle of surgery is just stress. And of course she has a pulse, at least when it's being checked. She's the best surgeon at the hospital. The administrators can ignore that she looks like a corpse when glimpsed in periphery.
