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If he was having an especially honest day, it all started with Jamie and Zoe. If he wasn’t, he would mutter something about Adric and Nyssa. Or perhaps Sarah Jane Smith, but that’s a lie; that time, he just missed.
When the Doctor was young, he didn’t think about death. Death was something that happened to strangers on strange planets, that he tried to prevent and when he couldn’t, he moved on. He cared when people died, especially those that had actually entered the tardis with him, but he rarely thought much about it afterwards.
He locked Susan out of the tardis knowing she might live 10,000 years on this planet without him. One by one, the others who had run away with him—Ian, Barbara, Vicki, Dodo, Steven, and all the rest—left. Usually they chose to go. And they were all young, and strong, and had survived more dangers than most humans would ever encounter, so he didn’t consider their deaths.
And then there were Jamie and Zoe. And he thought, for a moment, that maybe the CIA would punish them too, kill all three to hide the evidence, and only he would come out of it a new person.
He was relieved when they were merely sent back home without him.
And then he was angry.
And then he was left thinking about their deaths while he waited for the Time Lords’ decision on his. Jamie, back in the 1740’s, had learned to work lasers and spaceships and he would be dead before 1800. Zoe knew mathematics centuries beyond anything in her little library, and it would be invented long after her death.
It had begun to sink in, all that they would miss, when the CIA snob returned with his snobby nose and ordered the Doctor back into the room for his own sentencing, which left him too angry and woozy to think any more about mortality.
There is a calendar in the tardis. The Doctor keeps it behind one of the roundels in the console room. He couldn’t tell you which one. He would have to try them all to find it. But he has found it often enough, usually while looking for something else, that he no longer needs to look for it. He knows every day that’s marked. There’s more than one entry to most dates.
It was surprisingly easy not to think about death at UNIT, surrounded by guns and spending much of his time fighting to keep silly humans—or sometimes less silly reptiles—alive. Liz was there and she was smart and the only one with any sense, and then she left. Jo was there and she was bright and sweet, and then she left to start her own life. Sarah was there, running towards danger, and she was never, ever going to leave.
So he left her instead. He felt his hearts freeze when the summons home came in. It had been 26 years since the trial, 21 since Omega. He was bad with time, had always reveled in being wrong about time, but those dates were seared into his time sense with unerring accuracy. He had never planned to go back, much less so soon. A time tot loomed during his trial was still practically an infant, for Rassilon’s sake!
But he didn’t dare refuse. What would they do to him now? Worse, what would they do to yet another of his friends?
And so he left her behind, told her he’d be back, but he knew then he wouldn’t be. He had already imagined out her death, whenever it happened.
It was easier, for a while after that, with Leela and then Romana. Leela was reckless but never stupid. She knew the risks she took and she took them anyway, and the fact that she fully expected to die in battle one day made it easier to grumble at her foolishness without real fear. He didn’t think not to take her to Gallifrey, until the moment she decided to stay and he saw in a flash that her death wouldn’t be any time this century. He wondered if she would regret that one day, but it was too late to ask.
Romana, of course, was like him. He waved goodbye, his hearts bitter, in e-space, but he was sure that in thousands of years she would still be out there, helping where she could.
The year on the front of the calendar, barely legible centuries later, is 1988. There’s a picture of Superman smiling over the world. He thinks Adric might have picked it up on a trip sometime. Or was it Zoe? He seems to remember her reading American comics.
None of the dates inside are for 1988.
And then there was Adric. Adric was where the idea came from to look , to know . The Doctor was always moving, always looking away, always impatient. He loved that boy and he had always thought he’d tell him, he’d make the time, only later because there were cybermen or daleks or the Master to deal with, always more nebulas and crystals to examine.
He didn’t know then how to describe the feeling of watching the ship explode with Adric still on it. He hasn’t found the words to since, either. A part of the universe cracked and never quite sealed back up. He never spoke about it, even as through the haze he left Tegan behind, even as Nyssa cried and screamed at him in the days after. He felt that he had, for the first time in his more than 800 years, truly lost in a way that could never be fixed.
He realized then, he should have looked. When he met that boy—well, when he took him out of e-space—he should have snuck ahead to see what happened. He might have stopped it.
It took most of the next four years for him to accept that he couldn’t and wouldn’t have done that. It broke too many laws, risked too much even for him.
And Tegan was back, Turlough came out of nowhere, and then Nyssa was leaving. It had been ages, but his mind went back to Adric and he wondered how she was going to die. He made a mental note to check, now that she was no longer connected to him and wouldn’t die under his watch. He wrote it on a sticky note and everything—in Gallifreyan, to avoid awkward questions—and hung it on the viewer.
He hadn’t gotten around to it by the time he ran back into her, 50 years older, and 6 months later he was leaving her beyond reach for the rest of her life.
After that, he promised, he would never miss knowing one.
He was taken off guard when Tegan stormed off forever. He thought it had all been fine. She hadn’t been any grumpier than usual.
After the shock wore off, he dumped Turlough on some rock with a bit of a music scene and jumped ahead to find it. He scribbled the date into the first calendar he could put his hands on, lying in the library halfway up a messy stack of books: Tegan Jovanka. June 4, 2045. London, Earth. Heart attack.
He put it somewhere very clever that he was almost sure to never find again, and when much later Turlough left he had to scribble the date on a sticky note and have Peri help him search.
He still checks, after. If he forgets, he always finds himself coincidentally opening just the right roundel to find the calendar.
He also finds it after his own regenerations, and sometimes he adds them:
Me. December 31, 1999. California, Earth. Some idiot human attempted heart surgery.
Me. 2009, I think. Didn’t ask. London, Earth. Saved another charming idiot human from radiation. Master saved me from Rassilon. Weird day.
Me. Mondasian Colony Ship. Missy gone; should have known better.
Me. 2024. London, Earth. Didn’t die this time; REALLY weird day.
Peri isn’t in the calendar. Watching her die alone and abandoned once was enough for him. He couldn’t look back, couldn’t go see.
Mel is, though. Melanie Bush. January 21, 2060. London, Earth. Dementia-fueled mortorbike crash.
He sees her again later more than he thought he would. Kind of wishes he could tell her; she’d like knowing that she died at 96 laughing down the side of a mountain. The Doctor likes knowing it, although he can’t quite figure how she got back to her own time on Earth on her own.
Ace isn’t in the calendar, either. He was too angry to think to check the first time. And the second time, after all of that, he made the sappiest decision of that life and decided he didn’t want to know. And anyway, how would he know what name to write down?
Roz is, extremely unnecessarily, written in the calendar. It felt like the least he could do. Chris is not, largely because things get confusing for anyone left on Gallifrey (he went back to check on Sarah’s death but not Leela’s). Everyone else who traveled with him before the war is there, though half a dozen of them are scribbled out and rewritten because time got loose for a while.
There are no entries from the war at all, for the deaths he saw or the ones he didn’t.
He always thinks he puts it up, but it isn’t always there. Sometimes it’s lying under oily cloths and tools in the console room or on end tables in the hall. Clara found it once, when she was still new, read through it curled in a bright purple armchair, and then threw it in his face. Called him macabre. Told him never to write her death down.
It was a good thing, then, that he doesn't know exactly when she decided to stay dead.
Rose isn’t in the calendar. He doesn’t know when she dies.
Martha is, because he needed to know she’d make it: Martha Jones. September 8, 2083. Quietly asleep.
Donna wasn’t, that first time. He didn’t want to look back at what he’d done. He added her later, after he left her bedside to her children and grandchildren.
Amy and Rory were easy—he was left by their graves—but he didn’t write them down for a long time.
Clara got her wish, and Bill is missing too; he refuses to think of her as dead.
Yaz is there, though. And Ryan, Graham, and Dan. All of them died surrounded by love, at appropriate ages. It wasn’t a blonde bob that watched the moments through distant windows; that one didn’t want to think of death too much.
He’s thinking about taking a funeral tour. He hasn’t tried to go to one since missing Sarah’s. The main problem is finding something appropriate to wear; he owns so little black clothing these days. And, of course, there’s the question of whether to go in companion order or chronologically.
Now that he’s him, he decided never to miss adding another companion to the list. No matter what. He owes it to them.
He regretted that decision after Ruby: Ruby Sunday. December 31, 2049. Cancer.
But she wasn’t gone yet, really, because he had all the time in the universe. And he was never going to break that promise again. He should always know.
He said goodbye to Belinda, the world feeling right and so, so wrong. And for the second time, he felt artron burst inside him but didn’t really die. And he went to find her funeral, to say hello to Poppy and her children.
And, for the first time, he couldn’t do it. The tardis wouldn’t do it. As far as the universe was concerned, Belinda never died.