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-8-
Ruby had rarely seen the Doctor like this. She could see on his expressive and handsome face he was furious and hurt, and she couldn't blame him for it, not one little bit because she had felt the exact same thing the moment those survivors of the ongoing massacre of Fine Time had said to him.
The expression on his face made her feel nothing but hurt for him, and it broke her heart.
He looked as if his entire world had been shaken up, and he didn't know where to go from here. Ruby had been travelling long enough with the Time Lord to know he would do anything he could to save anyone, and so to be rejected simply on the basis of his skin colour… really hurt him so much.
Ruby felt nothing but anger and contempt for the people of Fine Time
When the TARDIS had landed on the planet Fine Time was on, they had quickly discovered the forcefield stopping them from materialising anywhere close enough to do any real good, from their earlier investigations they had discovered creatures were attacking and eating the inhabitants, but they hadn't been able to do anything about it. There were just too many barriers stopping them from getting to the source of the trouble and putting a stop to it, and their research into the people here had shown the Doctor and Ruby that these people, in this part of the future, lived in a society where they lived their lives in literal bubbles, but these bubbles were too much of a reminder of her own time for Ruby's comfort.
She was more than aware many people her age and in her time spent on things like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter, and they seemed to live in their own mental bubbles, but she had never imagined encountering a world where everyone had computer generated bubbles powered by an AI which had become so hateful towards them, it created life forms which hunted them down in alphabetical order, but now she had met the people of Fine Time, Ruby honestly didn't care what happened to them now she'd had a moment to calm down and think.
Ruby watched the Doctor carefully as he walked around the console in a daze, angrily setting the TARDIS into motion. She kept out of his way to give him some space. But she waited for a short time before she cleared her throat.
"Doctor?"
The Doctor was still.
"Doctor?" Ruby tried again.
This time the Doctor snapped out of it. He turned and gave off that beautiful grin she loved him for. "Ruby! Where to next?" He asked, clearly hoping to shove everything that happened into a strong box. But she wasn't going to let him.
"Doctor, you're not okay," Ruby said sadly.
"What are you talking about? Of course, I'm okay-." The Doctor trailed off, a smile fading while she folded her arms and gave him an unimpressed "Who are you kidding?" look. Finally, the Doctor sighed. "I'm not okay," he said and he held onto the TARDIS console for sheer strength. "I don't think I've ever gone through anything like that before, Ruby," he sighed. "I mean, people have refused my help in the past, but never because of my skin colour."
The Doctor shook his head, his expression twisting into that expression with a fake smile of disgust, the same one you get when you discover something so incredibly horrifying, that you could not help but smile at how the dots joined (she would not think of those AI dots).
"I should have seen it, Ruby; there were only white people in the bubble cloud of Fine Time and on their homeworld. There were no blacks, no Asians. And those people…they are going out into a wilderness on a planet they've been forbidden to even explore, just to escape the dots and those things the AI created, but I didn't, and those people refused to even let me help them just because my current skin colour is black!" He finished in disgust.
Ruby knew how he felt. "A lot of my mum and grans friends were funny about me being raised and adopted by them, but I grew up with black friends. But Doctor, it wasn't your fault. I never even imagined they'd be so stupid to ignore our help because of that," she shook her head as she remembered her childhood and how many people mocked her loved ones and even made monkey noises around her to rile her up. "It's called racism. You'd think by my time we'd have done away with things like that, but humans are stupid."
"Many species are; one race I know was so xenophobic they went to war against a cousin race of theirs and destroyed their planet with nuclear weapons before they mutated and merged with cybernetic tanks and began destroying races who were different from them," the Doctor's already dark skin darkened more at the thought of the Daleks, "But I've encountered racism before; I've travelled with black people before, and they were attacked for something so base. I just never thought it would happen to me."
"You'll just have to deal with it, Doctor, there's nothing you can do," Ruby said practically.
"The one time I really saw the true state of my companions suffering due to racism was when I was being hunted by these shape-shifting creatures that wanted to live forever by consuming my essence," the Doctor looked down as he remembered the time the Family of Blood hunted him down, "I was forced to hide a year before the First World War. Martha Jones, my companion at the time, a bright, amazing woman…she was training to be a doctor herself, and yet she was treated like dirt."
Whenever he thought of Martha Jones nowadays, the Doctor really felt nothing but disgust and self-loathing about how she had gone through agony because of her crush on his tenth self, who'd been so screwed up because of Rose he hadn't seen what he had been doing, being too arrogant and self-assured to look beyond his nose (while his predecessor showed the same personality, his fourteenth self had a lot more wisdom and would never have allowed Martha to suffer).
Ruby touched his arm in comfort.
"She fancied that me," he added softly.
Ruby's eyes lit up in understanding. "That regeneration thing, yeah? You told me about that."
"Yes. I told you because I don't know if it could happen while we travel together. I met her a few lives ago and she fancied me, but I was too dismissive of her because of past pains; looking back, remembering how she was treated by those people in 1913, I feel sick because I could have helped them, Ruby," a tear trickled down his face.
Ruby smiled softly and rubbed the tear away. "Don't forget I made the offer too, Doctor, and they refused. There's nothing we can do, and perhaps that's for the best. I didn't like Lindy that much, I thought she was arrogant and dismissive; you were there when I asked her those questions about her work colleagues and she didn't give a damn, and she couldn't even walk straight without help, and I've got some suspicions about what happened to Ricky September."
The Doctor frowned. While it seemed in his nature to help others, Ricky wouldn't have just left Lindy like that.
"And there was that way she just…dismissed her own mother's death, and the deaths of everyone on her homeworld," Ruby wondered what kind of vapid, ignorant society would allow something like that. "We might have saved them this time, Doctor, and that's all we can do."
The Doctor nodded and looked down, tears still trickling down his cheeks.