Fic - It Also Travels In Time
He knew it was time, of course; he was just trying to deny it.
Denying it might have been more successful if there’d been anything else to do. He’d sorted the problem with the bride - and half suspected the TARDIS, crafty ship that she was, had thrown her at him just to make sure he did something. Didn’t just sit there and spend endless hours working on her circuits, like he had before. After the War.
And the only reason she hadn’t done something like that then, he guessed, was that she’d been just as damaged as he was - flung wildly through the vortex, time and fire tearing her apart from the inside out, shredding the very fabric of her existence, and all the while the echoes of the rest of her kind suffering the same, being burnt out of time and space one by one…
He knew; the same had happened to him. By rights they should both have died, and she wasn’t the only one who needed fixing. But, of course, he was trying not to think about that.
But after sorting the bride out, he didn’t know what to do. He tried throwing himself into the middle of revolutions, landing his TARDIS right in the middle of the battlefield on more than one occasion. Mortal danger was particularly good at distracting his attention. And outwardly he did the same things he’d always done; righted wrongs, saved people, saved the day, saved the world - though he could never save everyone.
Sometimes, however, he landed in the middle of battlefields and walked out of the TARDIS with all the intent in the world and just stopped. Stopped and watched the fighting until he got hit by an arrow, or a laser, or on one occasion a spear, because battlefields weren’t the best of places to stop for a think, really.
At first he worried that he had some sort of death wish. Then he began to worry that he was lacking a life wish, which was probably worse. Death wishes weren’t really that bad; he could have coped with one of those. But this? He wandered the TARDIS for half a day, exploring corridors he’d forgotten about and doors he didn’t remember, trying to come up with a description for it like humans were so fond of doing.
In the end, the best thing he could think of were the clockwork robots that had been trying to get hold of Reinette’s brain. Broken robots on a broken ship trying to do what they’d always done, but in the end for whatever reason they just weren’t working properly any more. Though at least he wasn’t taking people apart to fix the TARDIS.
He reviewed that train of thought, and thought he was possibly starting to go a bit mad.
Then he turned into a corridor and saw a time-worn post-it stuck to the wall, covered in his own handwriting, and he knew he really couldn’t deny what it was time to do any longer.
He stood for a moment anyway, running his fingers over the edges of the note, reading what was written on it. A date, a place, a time; directions to himself he’d scribbled down a lifetime ago and left in the deepest corridors of his ship - an attempt to forget about it that had never really worked. A place he needed to go, because he knew he was supposed to go there, and if he didn’t go… well, he didn’t like to think about what would happen if he didn’t go. And he knew full well - and had known, ever since he lost Rose - that the time to go was now.
Defeated, he peeled the note from the wall and slipped it into his pocket. For a moment he paused, eyes closed, hand still loosely holding the post-it in his pocket - so oddly frail, really, for what it represented, but then wasn’t that always the way? Then he rocked backwards on the balls of his feet, running through a mental checklist of the things he knew he’d need, before heading off to more well-travelled parts of the ship.
The first thing he needed was in a storage room near the wardrobe. A few months ago, browsing the marketplace on Charon, he’d seen the clear blue tubes of antiplastic and shivered as though - to borrow a human phrase - a ghost had just walked over his grave. Or, more accurately, as though a time loop was drawing ever closer to completion.
He’d bought a tube and left it safely here for when he’d need it, hidden in a dusty box at the back of the room. Like the post-it note, he’d been trying to forget any evidence of what he knew he was going to have to do. Now, removing it from its box, he ran a finger over the clear glass vial, remembering the events of years ago and a lifetime away: the cold night air of Earth, laced with early twenty first century industrial pollution, London growing and time shifting around him, the Nestene Consciousness, the living plastic. And Rose, confused and amazed and incredulous and brave, stumbling into a new world.
All gone. All in the past. And it didn’t do to dwell on the past; doubly so when you lived in a time machine.
He slipped the antiplastic into a pocket, and hesitated before reaching for the next item. But he knew what he needed, and since wavering over the morality of it was fairly moot, he took out the tiny bomb he’d constructed, almost a year ago, because he’d had nothing else to do while his companions were sleeping and he’d been in a morbid sort of mood. He’d known, after all, he was going to have to make it at some point. And it wasn’t as though it was going to kill anyone.
Beneath that was a piece of paper folded cleanly into quarters, which he slipped into another pocket. He didn’t need to open it; he could hardly forget what was written inside.
One more thing he needed, and it might be a bit trickier to find. Part of him didn’t want to find it, except he knew that he couldn’t change what had happened. Or what was going to happen, depending on your point of view. He’d have to make a special trip for it, unless…
Jack’s room was still there, untouched and exactly as he’d left it. The TARDIS had moved it a few corridors away, kept it free of dust and the musty, unlived-in smell, but apart from that nothing had changed. Which he was rather counting on, actually.
He made a mental apology to Jack for rummaging through his stuff, then opened the drawer by his bed and hunted through a particularly interesting selection of things until he found the slim tube of lubricant he was looking for. That went in his pocket, and then he resolutely headed to the console room.
He didn’t have a choice in the matter, but he might as well get it over with.
He stuck the post-it to the console - where it, of course, immediately fell down - and started setting the controls to the exact date and location written on the note. To the second. Crossing your own timeline was always tricky; he knew this could be done without damaging Time, because it had already been done. But if he deviated from the events he remembered, he risked changing everything.
Could be for the better. Was very likely to be for the worse, complete with Reapers and the possible end of the universe.
But not going back would also damage Time. Not going back would mean that a meeting between him now and him then had never taken place, and that meeting had changed… well. Everything. It was hardly an insignificant event. The damage that could be caused to the timeline if he didn’t go back could be catastrophic.
All the same, he hesitated before setting the TARDIS into motion. There was always the possibility of waiting, putting it off, going at some future time when he hadn’t…
When he hadn’t just lost Rose.
But he knew this was the right time. He had already been through the encounter once, after all, as his previous self, and although he’d been very careful not to give away any details of the future, the way he’d acted, the things he’d said…
He, the earlier version, had asked how he’d know when it was time to come back and meet himself. And he, the later version, had given a weary half-smile and said he would know.
Well, he did know.
The TARDIS shook even more violently than usual; absently, the Doctor wondered why. Didn’t want to have him cross his own timeline? Though the old girl knew he had to. Perhaps she was simply showing, in the only way she could, that she didn’t want him to have to do this. He ran a hand over the console soothingly, closed his eyes, and felt the ship land.
New Yrtopia in the year 7381, seventh of Jany, 3:44 pm. There was absolutely nothing special about that time or place except that it was closest to where he’d come out of the Vortex after the War, new mind and new body in a scarred and damaged timeship, flung wildly through time and space and completely, completely alone.
That had been on the fourth. He’d needed a few days. And the Doctor knew perfectly well that going near his earlier self any sooner would have been practically suicide, in the state of mind he’d been in after the war. Regeneration sickness alone was bad enough - he’d almost strangled a companion, almost crashed the TARDIS permanently. Almost. But regenerating after the Time War…
He stepped out of the TARDIS with barely a glance at the planet around him, sand and grass sweeping down to bright sea to his left. New world he’d never seen before - he hadn’t stepped out of the TARDIS when he’d been here as his ninth self - and he should have been excited, rushing off to the shore to examine the water or commenting on the peculiarities of atmosphere and cloud formation, but he wasn’t. He practically had a script to follow, everything he did and said already planned out by his memories, by the peculiar causality of time loops, but despite this he’d never felt so… directionless.
To his right, not ten steps away, was a second TARDIS; the duplicate earlier copy of his TARDIS, containing the earlier copy of himself. Time, he supposed, to get it over with.
The door opened to his key, of course - it was the same ship - and he stepped inside. The damage wasn’t as bad as he remembered, but then, his earlier self had been working on it for three days straight by now, and Yrtopian days were fairly long. He hadn’t dared to stop. If he’d stopped, if he’d thought about anything else…
The Doctor silently closed the door behind him, remembering those first few days after the War - though days was a misnomer; they’d been one long blur of constantly working on his ship, fixing the damage she’d sustained in the final, desperate strike, because it was easier to work on her than on himself, and he hadn’t been, by pretty much every definition of the word, sane.
He’d been so fully focussed on the ship that he hadn’t heard his later self come in, but this was where the script started, as it were; this was where he had to start following his memories to the letter; that or risk catastrophic consequences to the timeline. The Doctor walked up to where his earlier self was fiddling with some piece of equipment, summoned up his most cheerful grin and asked, ‘Can I help?’
He remembered that; remembered glancing up and seeing this later self and thinking - no, thinking wasn’t the right word. Regeneration sickness and the War made a dangerous combination, and insanity in Time Lords didn’t work like insanity in humans. More complicated brains, more complicated insanity. He’d barely been thinking at all.
He’d still been feeling them dying, in his mind; he’d still been seeing his planet burn, part of him still screaming - and then there’d been the emptiness, simultaneously, the vast and endless emptiness where once he’d been able to feel all the minds of his people, always faintly there, a presence in his mind. And now all of them gone. Like having his eyes torn out or his ears destroyed, but worse - because the blindness, the deafness was in his head, a void, a chasm, a dark silent nothing that threatened to swallow him whole.
And then there was the grief, and the pain, and the guilt and the rage and the self-hatred, and the effects of regeneration scrambling his mind even further, and with all this what remained of himself was only a tiny, tiny fragment of his mind, clinging on to some kind of sanity, in danger at any moment of being dragged into the chaos…
So no, he couldn’t have said he was thinking, at all.
But he did recall, after a moment, realising that he was face to face with a future self. His ability to sense other Time Lords still worked, of course, but sensing yourself was a little different; like hearing the footsteps of a person walking exactly in time with your own.
The Doctor saw the exact moment when his earlier self recognised him, and grinned a little wider, because that was what he remembered himself doing. Really, he didn’t feel particularly like grinning. He felt like getting this entire meeting over with and then heading back to his ship. Finding something to do next.
The earlier him gave a brief nod by way of assent - more by instinct, really, than anything else - then turned back to what he was doing. He’d been working practically on automatic, though he still wondered, to this day, if the TARDIS had been prompting him, somehow.
Can I help? That had been the first thing anyone had said to him since his regeneration, since the war. The words that had broken the silence. Hadn’t been a bad phrase to break the silence, all things considered.
At any rate, that was the first part over and done with, at least. Silently, he headed over to the other side of the console, and set to work replacing some badly burnt out wires.
The Doctor glanced over at his earlier self a couple of times, but mostly got on with the job of fixing the ship. After all, he didn’t need to look at the other him to know what was going through his head; he remembered it.
He tried to keep his mind on the wiring. He’d already done quite a bit of the repairs, but there was plenty of work still to be done, and he worked on in silence for hours. One thing that was different, this time round; having another him there wasn’t helping. It had helped his earlier self, having a vague presence in the darkness of his own head - helped a little, though not enough. Obviously. He’d thought, when he thought about this future meeting at all, that it might have helped both of them, somehow. Instead he just had the knowledge of what was going to happen hanging over his head, like some kind of obligation he couldn’t escape. Like a visit to the dentist, Rose would have said, and he almost smiled.
Finishing the job didn’t take as long as he’d hoped it would - it had seemed like longer, when he’d been sitting on the other side of the console with the Time War still haunting his every move, but things had been different then. He hadn’t been anticipating what was going to happen. He hadn’t had much of a sense of time passing, either.
Reluctantly, he fixed the last wire in place and sighed, sitting back and resting his arms on his knees. It wasn’t a position usually thought of as vulnerable, but it certainly made him feel that way. Everything was different in context, after all. If he’d had the choice, he’d have sat differently, but this was how he remembered himself sitting. He didn’t remember himself looking as uncomfortable as he felt, though.
Waiting, with a kind of resigned dread, he watched the other him. He still hadn’t changed out of his eighth self’s clothes, though they were singed and tattered from the aftermath of war. It wasn’t obvious to the eye, but the Doctor knew his earlier self hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept, and he couldn’t help but feel a little sympathy. Sympathy for himself. That was strange, but well, everything about this encounter was strange. Meeting yourself always was. Meeting yourself in these kinds of circumstances, well…
The subject of his scrutiny looked up at that moment, and the Doctor resigned himself to what was going to happen. ‘I take it you didn’t come here just to fix the TARDIS.’
Someone who hadn’t been through this conversation before wouldn’t have thought him insane, the Doctor thought, watching his earlier self. He looked haunted, yes; pained, certainly, and any number of other things, but not mad. That was the tiny, tiny piece of sanity, clinging on precariously, and when it lost its grip…
‘Nope,’ he replied, but didn’t elaborate further. Partly because he didn’t want to elaborate on what other things were going to happen. Partly because he knew his script.
‘Why, then?’ his earlier self asked flatly.
He shrugged in reply. ‘Causal loop. I’m here because when I was you, I had this same conversation with me now. If that makes sense. I mean, I was you, and I remember-’
‘I get the idea,’ interrupted the other Doctor, eyeing him warily. The Doctor tucked his arms tighter round his knees and looked away, not wanting to meet his eyes. He didn’t know what he might see, if he looked closely enough.
‘That’s pretty much it,’ he said, simply. ‘Why I’m here. I have to be.’
‘And you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.’ It was a statement, not a question, and the other Doctor grinned suddenly; except it couldn’t really be called a grin, it’d be a smirk, perhaps, or something most civilisations didn’t put a name to.
He shook his head in reply. ‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ the other him half-snarled, suddenly angry, suddenly almost vicious. And oh, how tentative was that grip on sanity, now? ‘I’m a murderer. Genocide. I killed them. I-’
‘I’m one too,’ the Doctor replied softly, interrupting. ‘I’m you. Everything you’ve done, I’ve done.’ And more, he added, in his own mind.
The earlier him merely nodded tightly, sharply, that danger more visible, now. The Doctor was well aware that his other self was staring, eyes fixed unblinkingly on him, open wide with pupils dilated to give the unsettling impression that he was being watched by the darkness itself, the darkness inside his head, in his mind. He didn’t look more than he had to.
‘Of course,’ the earlier him said, with no trace of inflection, then added - in a tone which could have been almost casual, if it wasn’t him, if it wasn’t here and now - ‘Murderer.’
He doesn’t deny it; it is true, after all. He remembers the self-hatred seething through him, the horror at what he had done, the anger at the Daleks, at the universe; the violent urge, so alien to him, to find the enemy and kill it, to shred and tear it apart and listen to it scream - the very same impulse he had felt, or would feel, in Van Statten’s underground compound when he came face to face with a Dalek again. But so much more powerful, now, before time or Rose had come to help those wounds. And there were no Daleks here.
There was, however, his own self.
He didn’t reply, and so there was silence, with his earlier self never moving his gaze, and he remembered all that pain and all that anger and all that hatred, and he was beginning, if he was really honest with himself, to feel a little scared. He knew he’d come out of this alive, if not completely unharmed, but that didn’t stop the instinctive fear, trapped and alone with someone dangerous - and he knew exactly how dangerous his earlier self was, right now - with no escape, no choice but to accept the inevitable…
And he might as well get it over with. It was his turn to speak. ‘I can’t tell you anything about the future,’ he said eventually, with a quiet sigh. The other him already knew this, of course, insofar as he could know anything right now, but he had to follow his script.
‘I know that,’ the past him snarled, then hesitated, as though having an idea - his head tilting, ever so slightly, aside, and he remembers feeling - faintly, layered over everything else clawing at his consciousness, but there - feeling slightly vulnerable. Which was laughable, really, when you considered what was about to happen. ‘But does it…’
Does it get better? That’s the question he was trying to ask. Surviving the Time War, living with those memories, that guilt, filling his mind with every breath; who wouldn’t want to ask that question? Even nearly mad, sanity about to collapse at any second, he could still latch on to that ever-present hope, that perhaps things will get better.
And the answer was yes. Because in a little over two days, the man sitting in front of him would save a London teenager from death by plastic dummy, and take her to see the stars, and something about that one tiny human girl would make him laugh and hope and feel like saving the universe again.
And less than two years later he would lose her.
The Doctor sucked in a breath, closing his eyes tightly against the sudden stab of pain, and said ‘Yes. It gets better.’
The other him laughed, a short laugh with nothing of happiness or amusement in it; a cruel laugh, on one level, a bitter or hopeless one, or quite possibly the laugh of the man who is losing his grip on sanity and knows it. ‘Fantastic,’ he said, voice hard and full of sarcasm. ‘Forgive me if I don’t believe you.’
‘I mean it,’ he replied, forcing himself to look up, managing a sad sort of smile. ‘It does. It gets better. It just…’ He sighed. ‘Bad things don’t stop happening.’
‘Not as bad as this.’ He says it flatly, but with a vicious, savage undercurrent, the last word almost spat out, but the Doctor remembers feeling the tiniest stirrings of fear. Fear that there was still more to suffer. The idea of more pain was monstrous. And adding anything to the chaotic cocktail that was his mind…
He shrugged vaguely. ‘Differently bad, perhaps,’ he said. It was true, after all: losing Rose didn’t hurt in the same way as losing Gallifrey, but it still hurt.
‘It burned,’ the other him said, softly, with a tone to his voice which was dark and cold and ancient as the emptiness of space. ‘Gallifrey burned. I watched. I killed them. I felt them die. We felt them die.’
‘All of them,’ the Doctor murmured softly, knowing he would hardly hear it.
And now the Doctor knew he had to meet those eyes. And even if he hadn’t known what was going on in his other self’s mind, he’d have been able to read it from his face; all that madness, all that chaotic darkness made of pain and the fear of pain, of self-hatred and the vast emptiness and anger, anger more than anything, violent and vicious and wanting to hurt, anger at the Daleks, lacking a target, anger at himself, which didn’t. And the tiny sliver of sanity which was still in there somewhere was beginning to lose itself in the maelstrom.
‘I did that,’ he said, savagely simple. ‘Killer. Murderer. Genocide.’
The Doctor nodded, accepting, feeling oddly passive. All the time, thinking ahead to this event, he’d thought that this self - this later, future self - had been at least as agonised as the earlier one; suffering just the same. Because he’d known that he was suffering, this later self, and perhaps he’d been incapable of imagining any great pain that wasn’t like the loss of Gallifrey. It was almost a surprise to find it wasn’t so. Oh, he was still hurting, but this was a quiet pain, a resigned pain. Not a scream, but a whimper.
Get it over with, he thought.
The other him was shifting closer. ‘You killed them. We killed them. We destroyed them.’ It was quiet, harsher than a scream of accusation would have been, and this was hardly accusation; this was cold, savage fact.
He wanted to say something, something to try and calm the other him, to quiet that anger. He could use his psychic abilities, he thought, reach out and force his earlier self back to sanity - and it wouldn’t work in the long term, but it would last long enough for him to be brought back to rationality by more conventional means, and it would stop this, now - but he wouldn’t, because that would be as bad as Rose saving her father. Because of the time line. Because of causality.
So he couldn’t do anything, because he knew what was happening, what did happen and was going to happen. He slipped his hand into his pocket and curled it around the little tube he took from Jack’s drawer, closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable.
‘They’re dead.’ his other self said, quietly, and there was a hand gripping his shoulder too tightly, and this was the start of it.
‘By our hands,’ he agreed, flatly, as though it were a phrase in some sacred ritual, and he suddenly thought of sacrifices to appease angry gods. He held out his hand, flat, palm up, like a symbol.
The other him just punched him in the face.
He felt oddly detached, even as the pain made him wince - if he didn’t remember it had caused nothing but bruising, he’d think he’d fractured his jaw. The force of the blow had thrown him backwards to lie on the floor of the console room, legs still bent at the knee.
And that little bit of violence had been the final crack in his sanity; whatever mental strength had let him contain all that madness for so long was gone, shattered, and everything beneath it was surging forth, carrying his earlier self with it.
All that pain, all that chaos, all that self-hatred and emptiness and rage; enough to drown in, and the Doctor knew and understood - as only someone who had been through the same themselves could ever understand - that simple violence wasn’t enough. Would never be enough. The other him could tear him to pieces, could injure him so badly he was forced to regenerate, and again, and again, until he had no more bodies left and finally died for good, and it wouldn’t be enough.
So, this.
Silently, without looking - without opening his eyes - he reached down to his pocket and pulled out the tube of lubricant he’d take from Jack’s bedside drawer. His earlier self was punching, clawing and tearing, in a way that was more instinctive, savage, than calculated to hurt. Like a wild animal. It didn’t make it any less painful, though. But he caught one of those hands and pressed the lube into it.
It wasn’t, he reflected, about sex. It was about something else entirely, all violence and pain and hurt, and it was singularly hideous, but this was what had happened, was happening.
So he lay back and waited, feeling horribly passive as things happened. There were hands, of course, clawing, vicious, and he was pushed to the floor, awkwardly positioned and only his trousers off, knees bent up and splayed open, and then there were lubricant-coated fingers pushing their way inside, and then his other self, pinning him down, and-
It hurt quite a bit, of course, but not terribly, and pain wasn’t anything new to him. Mostly it just felt unpleasant, and strangely distant, like his body was temporarily something not belonging to him. Lie back and think of England, he thought, but then, what did he have to think of?
It was over quite quickly, which was something to be thankful for, and then there was silence.
And if there was anything that could bring his other self’s mind back to cold hard sanity after what had happened, after the War, it was realising what had happened; realising that he’d done this.
The earlier him was lying quite still. His head was turned away, hiding his expression, although the Doctor knew exactly what he was thinking as something approximating sanity slowly returned.
He waited for the approximate length of time he remembered, then said, calmly, ‘You should go and find some new clothes.’
It was an excuse for the other him to escape, and for them both to avoid mentioning what had happened. With a brief nod, the other him got to his feet - neither of them looking at the other - and headed quickly for the wardrobe.
With a long sigh - mostly of relief - the Doctor pushed himself up to his feet, then busied himself with buttoning up trousers, checking his jaw, making sure he hadn’t sustained anything but bruises. He had quite a few of them, he could feel, and the obvious soreness - but that was it. He’d had worse, he told himself firmly, closing his eyes and leaning on the console for a moment.
That was that over with, then. All he had to do was wait for his earlier self to return, tell him what to do next and give him the things he’d need, and then it was back to what passed for normality.
To pass the time while he waited for his other self to return, the Doctor ran a hand over the TARDIS, trying to remember what he was supposed to fix… ah, yes, the spatial regulator. He crouched down beside the console, running a hand caringly over the burnt-out component and feeling the TARDIS hum - faint, but there - in reply. ‘It gets better,’ he whispered reassuringly to the ship, starting to take the regulator apart. ‘For you and me both.’
His other self would be in the wardrobe by now, carelessly throwing on the first things he found - though he’d always wondered later if his ship hadn’t subtly picked out the things she thought would be best and positioned them carefully at the entrance. That leather jacket in particular.
He wouldn’t be hurrying back, however. The Doctor couldn’t help but feel sympathetic, remembering what the earlier him was going through - though how could he not be sympathetic towards himself, even in spite of everything that had happened? He remembered being sane again, properly sane for the first time since the war, and catching the merest glimpse of himself in the mirror, newly-dressed, and being unable to look. Because the face in the mirror would be the face of a mass murderer, of someone so twisted and broken and scarred by war that they would…
He’d force himself to look in a mirror later, of course. After meeting Rose, after she’d dragged him into her flat, demanding answers - he’d forced himself to take a look then. All manic energy, chattering on to himself because he was afraid that if he didn’t, he might lose his grip again.
And if he could bend the laws of causality just enough to tell his earlier self one thing, it would be to tell him not to worry. Because it wouldn’t happen. And if he hadn’t had this hanging over him - reminding him, always, what he was capable of - he might not have been so determined to never be anything more than a friend to Rose.
Oh, it wasn’t the only reason - he’d trusted himself a little more after a while, and over time he’d come to know that he’d never do anything to hurt her, no matter how much of his sanity he lost - but it was one of the major ones. And without that, he might not have so many regrets now.
He closed his eyes for a moment, lost in thought, then opened them, forcing himself to think of something else, to focus on the regulator he was working on. He’d just fixed it when he heard the sound of footsteps, and glanced up to see his earlier self stop in the doorway.
‘Still here?’ he asked. The Doctor remembered, then, feeling suddenly afraid - afraid that there was more to come. He straightened up, forcing himself to grin.
‘Just a few things to sort out,’ he said cheerfully. Neither of them would mention what had just happened, of course. They’d get the formalities out of the way, and that would be that. ‘First off,’ he continued, not leaving the console, ‘I came here at exactly fourteen past three, local time. Afternoon, mind you. Write that down on a post-it note or something and stick it in a corridor somewhere. You’ll need it.’
The earlier him nodded. ‘When do I come back?’
‘You’ll know.’ The Doctor said simply, his hands in his pockets and a weary half-smile on his face. ‘Trust me, you’ll know. Ah, and before I forget…’ He pulled out the other items he’d brought; the antiplastic, the bomb and the note. ‘You’ll need these.’
He held them out. There was a brief pause, in which he knew his other self was hesitating, uncertain whether to approach - wondering how mad the next him would have to be not to have fled already - before he stepped up to the console.
‘You need to go to Earth,’ the Doctor said. ‘Earth, London, 2005. The Nestene Consciousness is looking for a snack. Look for a department store called Henrik’s; it’s got a transmitter on the roof. Wait for closing time, then use this,’ he said, handing him the bomb, ‘to blow it up. And before you do, check the basement, make sure no one’s down there.’
The earlier him nodded, and the Doctor felt a wave of bitter loss. Because in that basement he’d meet Rose, this earlier him, so very, very soon. But for him, here and now, Rose was gone.
‘After that,’ he said, carrying on, forcing himself to be cheerful, ‘you’re on your own. I can’t tell you anything more. I can give you this, though. Antiplastic,’ he said, handing the tube over. ‘And one more thing,’ he added, giving him the piece of paper. ‘Don’t look at that now. It’s a note. Read it as soon as you leave London.’
‘Right,’ the earlier him said, tucking it away into his leather jacket. ‘That it, then?’
‘Pretty much,’ he replied. ‘I want to say “don’t make the same mistakes I made”, but that would involve destroying Time, so…’ He shrugged, then held out his hand. ‘Good luck?’
His earlier self stared at him for a moment, then - only slightly wary - shook hands. ‘You too,’ he said.
And with that, he was free to leave. That was it. The script had played itself out. It was over.
Outside, he didn’t turn to look back at his earlier self’s TARDIS. Two days. That was how long it had taken him to finish fixing the TARDIS, and then he was off again. Destination Earth; London. Rose.
And he was alone, on the grassy, windswept plains of a tiny planet. He waited for a minute or two, half wondering if his own future self would appear and tell him what to do, where to go next. Knowing nothing would happen. This time, he was on his own.
He headed back to his own TARDIS, hands in his pockets. He had the whole of time and space at his fingertips, and he didn’t know where to go.
He’d carry on. He always managed to, one way or another.
---
A lifetime ago or a few days later later, depending on your point of view, the Doctor left London behind. A good thing, really, that Rose hadn’t agreed to come with him. He shouldn’t have asked her. Didn’t really know why he had, except it had been a sudden impulse, except that he’d liked her, except that the emptiness in his head where his people had been was threatening to swallow him. Which was all the more reason not to ask her, really.
The note, then. The future him had said to read it as soon as he left, so he opened the paper, revealing a single, simple line of text.
Go back and ask her again. She’ll say yes.
He could have ignored it. Could have stayed away, stayed alone, refused to go near anyone for any longer than he had to - but if he did that, who knew what would happen to Time? The note said to go back, so he had to. No choice. However stupid an idea it was. However likely he was to end up hurting her.
He went back to the same spot, same time, and stuck his head out the door.
‘Did I mention,’ he asked, ‘it also travels in time?’
Denying it might have been more successful if there’d been anything else to do. He’d sorted the problem with the bride - and half suspected the TARDIS, crafty ship that she was, had thrown her at him just to make sure he did something. Didn’t just sit there and spend endless hours working on her circuits, like he had before. After the War.
And the only reason she hadn’t done something like that then, he guessed, was that she’d been just as damaged as he was - flung wildly through the vortex, time and fire tearing her apart from the inside out, shredding the very fabric of her existence, and all the while the echoes of the rest of her kind suffering the same, being burnt out of time and space one by one…
He knew; the same had happened to him. By rights they should both have died, and she wasn’t the only one who needed fixing. But, of course, he was trying not to think about that.
But after sorting the bride out, he didn’t know what to do. He tried throwing himself into the middle of revolutions, landing his TARDIS right in the middle of the battlefield on more than one occasion. Mortal danger was particularly good at distracting his attention. And outwardly he did the same things he’d always done; righted wrongs, saved people, saved the day, saved the world - though he could never save everyone.
Sometimes, however, he landed in the middle of battlefields and walked out of the TARDIS with all the intent in the world and just stopped. Stopped and watched the fighting until he got hit by an arrow, or a laser, or on one occasion a spear, because battlefields weren’t the best of places to stop for a think, really.
At first he worried that he had some sort of death wish. Then he began to worry that he was lacking a life wish, which was probably worse. Death wishes weren’t really that bad; he could have coped with one of those. But this? He wandered the TARDIS for half a day, exploring corridors he’d forgotten about and doors he didn’t remember, trying to come up with a description for it like humans were so fond of doing.
In the end, the best thing he could think of were the clockwork robots that had been trying to get hold of Reinette’s brain. Broken robots on a broken ship trying to do what they’d always done, but in the end for whatever reason they just weren’t working properly any more. Though at least he wasn’t taking people apart to fix the TARDIS.
He reviewed that train of thought, and thought he was possibly starting to go a bit mad.
Then he turned into a corridor and saw a time-worn post-it stuck to the wall, covered in his own handwriting, and he knew he really couldn’t deny what it was time to do any longer.
He stood for a moment anyway, running his fingers over the edges of the note, reading what was written on it. A date, a place, a time; directions to himself he’d scribbled down a lifetime ago and left in the deepest corridors of his ship - an attempt to forget about it that had never really worked. A place he needed to go, because he knew he was supposed to go there, and if he didn’t go… well, he didn’t like to think about what would happen if he didn’t go. And he knew full well - and had known, ever since he lost Rose - that the time to go was now.
Defeated, he peeled the note from the wall and slipped it into his pocket. For a moment he paused, eyes closed, hand still loosely holding the post-it in his pocket - so oddly frail, really, for what it represented, but then wasn’t that always the way? Then he rocked backwards on the balls of his feet, running through a mental checklist of the things he knew he’d need, before heading off to more well-travelled parts of the ship.
The first thing he needed was in a storage room near the wardrobe. A few months ago, browsing the marketplace on Charon, he’d seen the clear blue tubes of antiplastic and shivered as though - to borrow a human phrase - a ghost had just walked over his grave. Or, more accurately, as though a time loop was drawing ever closer to completion.
He’d bought a tube and left it safely here for when he’d need it, hidden in a dusty box at the back of the room. Like the post-it note, he’d been trying to forget any evidence of what he knew he was going to have to do. Now, removing it from its box, he ran a finger over the clear glass vial, remembering the events of years ago and a lifetime away: the cold night air of Earth, laced with early twenty first century industrial pollution, London growing and time shifting around him, the Nestene Consciousness, the living plastic. And Rose, confused and amazed and incredulous and brave, stumbling into a new world.
All gone. All in the past. And it didn’t do to dwell on the past; doubly so when you lived in a time machine.
He slipped the antiplastic into a pocket, and hesitated before reaching for the next item. But he knew what he needed, and since wavering over the morality of it was fairly moot, he took out the tiny bomb he’d constructed, almost a year ago, because he’d had nothing else to do while his companions were sleeping and he’d been in a morbid sort of mood. He’d known, after all, he was going to have to make it at some point. And it wasn’t as though it was going to kill anyone.
Beneath that was a piece of paper folded cleanly into quarters, which he slipped into another pocket. He didn’t need to open it; he could hardly forget what was written inside.
One more thing he needed, and it might be a bit trickier to find. Part of him didn’t want to find it, except he knew that he couldn’t change what had happened. Or what was going to happen, depending on your point of view. He’d have to make a special trip for it, unless…
Jack’s room was still there, untouched and exactly as he’d left it. The TARDIS had moved it a few corridors away, kept it free of dust and the musty, unlived-in smell, but apart from that nothing had changed. Which he was rather counting on, actually.
He made a mental apology to Jack for rummaging through his stuff, then opened the drawer by his bed and hunted through a particularly interesting selection of things until he found the slim tube of lubricant he was looking for. That went in his pocket, and then he resolutely headed to the console room.
He didn’t have a choice in the matter, but he might as well get it over with.
He stuck the post-it to the console - where it, of course, immediately fell down - and started setting the controls to the exact date and location written on the note. To the second. Crossing your own timeline was always tricky; he knew this could be done without damaging Time, because it had already been done. But if he deviated from the events he remembered, he risked changing everything.
Could be for the better. Was very likely to be for the worse, complete with Reapers and the possible end of the universe.
But not going back would also damage Time. Not going back would mean that a meeting between him now and him then had never taken place, and that meeting had changed… well. Everything. It was hardly an insignificant event. The damage that could be caused to the timeline if he didn’t go back could be catastrophic.
All the same, he hesitated before setting the TARDIS into motion. There was always the possibility of waiting, putting it off, going at some future time when he hadn’t…
When he hadn’t just lost Rose.
But he knew this was the right time. He had already been through the encounter once, after all, as his previous self, and although he’d been very careful not to give away any details of the future, the way he’d acted, the things he’d said…
He, the earlier version, had asked how he’d know when it was time to come back and meet himself. And he, the later version, had given a weary half-smile and said he would know.
Well, he did know.
The TARDIS shook even more violently than usual; absently, the Doctor wondered why. Didn’t want to have him cross his own timeline? Though the old girl knew he had to. Perhaps she was simply showing, in the only way she could, that she didn’t want him to have to do this. He ran a hand over the console soothingly, closed his eyes, and felt the ship land.
New Yrtopia in the year 7381, seventh of Jany, 3:44 pm. There was absolutely nothing special about that time or place except that it was closest to where he’d come out of the Vortex after the War, new mind and new body in a scarred and damaged timeship, flung wildly through time and space and completely, completely alone.
That had been on the fourth. He’d needed a few days. And the Doctor knew perfectly well that going near his earlier self any sooner would have been practically suicide, in the state of mind he’d been in after the war. Regeneration sickness alone was bad enough - he’d almost strangled a companion, almost crashed the TARDIS permanently. Almost. But regenerating after the Time War…
He stepped out of the TARDIS with barely a glance at the planet around him, sand and grass sweeping down to bright sea to his left. New world he’d never seen before - he hadn’t stepped out of the TARDIS when he’d been here as his ninth self - and he should have been excited, rushing off to the shore to examine the water or commenting on the peculiarities of atmosphere and cloud formation, but he wasn’t. He practically had a script to follow, everything he did and said already planned out by his memories, by the peculiar causality of time loops, but despite this he’d never felt so… directionless.
To his right, not ten steps away, was a second TARDIS; the duplicate earlier copy of his TARDIS, containing the earlier copy of himself. Time, he supposed, to get it over with.
The door opened to his key, of course - it was the same ship - and he stepped inside. The damage wasn’t as bad as he remembered, but then, his earlier self had been working on it for three days straight by now, and Yrtopian days were fairly long. He hadn’t dared to stop. If he’d stopped, if he’d thought about anything else…
The Doctor silently closed the door behind him, remembering those first few days after the War - though days was a misnomer; they’d been one long blur of constantly working on his ship, fixing the damage she’d sustained in the final, desperate strike, because it was easier to work on her than on himself, and he hadn’t been, by pretty much every definition of the word, sane.
He’d been so fully focussed on the ship that he hadn’t heard his later self come in, but this was where the script started, as it were; this was where he had to start following his memories to the letter; that or risk catastrophic consequences to the timeline. The Doctor walked up to where his earlier self was fiddling with some piece of equipment, summoned up his most cheerful grin and asked, ‘Can I help?’
He remembered that; remembered glancing up and seeing this later self and thinking - no, thinking wasn’t the right word. Regeneration sickness and the War made a dangerous combination, and insanity in Time Lords didn’t work like insanity in humans. More complicated brains, more complicated insanity. He’d barely been thinking at all.
He’d still been feeling them dying, in his mind; he’d still been seeing his planet burn, part of him still screaming - and then there’d been the emptiness, simultaneously, the vast and endless emptiness where once he’d been able to feel all the minds of his people, always faintly there, a presence in his mind. And now all of them gone. Like having his eyes torn out or his ears destroyed, but worse - because the blindness, the deafness was in his head, a void, a chasm, a dark silent nothing that threatened to swallow him whole.
And then there was the grief, and the pain, and the guilt and the rage and the self-hatred, and the effects of regeneration scrambling his mind even further, and with all this what remained of himself was only a tiny, tiny fragment of his mind, clinging on to some kind of sanity, in danger at any moment of being dragged into the chaos…
So no, he couldn’t have said he was thinking, at all.
But he did recall, after a moment, realising that he was face to face with a future self. His ability to sense other Time Lords still worked, of course, but sensing yourself was a little different; like hearing the footsteps of a person walking exactly in time with your own.
The Doctor saw the exact moment when his earlier self recognised him, and grinned a little wider, because that was what he remembered himself doing. Really, he didn’t feel particularly like grinning. He felt like getting this entire meeting over with and then heading back to his ship. Finding something to do next.
The earlier him gave a brief nod by way of assent - more by instinct, really, than anything else - then turned back to what he was doing. He’d been working practically on automatic, though he still wondered, to this day, if the TARDIS had been prompting him, somehow.
Can I help? That had been the first thing anyone had said to him since his regeneration, since the war. The words that had broken the silence. Hadn’t been a bad phrase to break the silence, all things considered.
At any rate, that was the first part over and done with, at least. Silently, he headed over to the other side of the console, and set to work replacing some badly burnt out wires.
The Doctor glanced over at his earlier self a couple of times, but mostly got on with the job of fixing the ship. After all, he didn’t need to look at the other him to know what was going through his head; he remembered it.
He tried to keep his mind on the wiring. He’d already done quite a bit of the repairs, but there was plenty of work still to be done, and he worked on in silence for hours. One thing that was different, this time round; having another him there wasn’t helping. It had helped his earlier self, having a vague presence in the darkness of his own head - helped a little, though not enough. Obviously. He’d thought, when he thought about this future meeting at all, that it might have helped both of them, somehow. Instead he just had the knowledge of what was going to happen hanging over his head, like some kind of obligation he couldn’t escape. Like a visit to the dentist, Rose would have said, and he almost smiled.
Finishing the job didn’t take as long as he’d hoped it would - it had seemed like longer, when he’d been sitting on the other side of the console with the Time War still haunting his every move, but things had been different then. He hadn’t been anticipating what was going to happen. He hadn’t had much of a sense of time passing, either.
Reluctantly, he fixed the last wire in place and sighed, sitting back and resting his arms on his knees. It wasn’t a position usually thought of as vulnerable, but it certainly made him feel that way. Everything was different in context, after all. If he’d had the choice, he’d have sat differently, but this was how he remembered himself sitting. He didn’t remember himself looking as uncomfortable as he felt, though.
Waiting, with a kind of resigned dread, he watched the other him. He still hadn’t changed out of his eighth self’s clothes, though they were singed and tattered from the aftermath of war. It wasn’t obvious to the eye, but the Doctor knew his earlier self hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept, and he couldn’t help but feel a little sympathy. Sympathy for himself. That was strange, but well, everything about this encounter was strange. Meeting yourself always was. Meeting yourself in these kinds of circumstances, well…
The subject of his scrutiny looked up at that moment, and the Doctor resigned himself to what was going to happen. ‘I take it you didn’t come here just to fix the TARDIS.’
Someone who hadn’t been through this conversation before wouldn’t have thought him insane, the Doctor thought, watching his earlier self. He looked haunted, yes; pained, certainly, and any number of other things, but not mad. That was the tiny, tiny piece of sanity, clinging on precariously, and when it lost its grip…
‘Nope,’ he replied, but didn’t elaborate further. Partly because he didn’t want to elaborate on what other things were going to happen. Partly because he knew his script.
‘Why, then?’ his earlier self asked flatly.
He shrugged in reply. ‘Causal loop. I’m here because when I was you, I had this same conversation with me now. If that makes sense. I mean, I was you, and I remember-’
‘I get the idea,’ interrupted the other Doctor, eyeing him warily. The Doctor tucked his arms tighter round his knees and looked away, not wanting to meet his eyes. He didn’t know what he might see, if he looked closely enough.
‘That’s pretty much it,’ he said, simply. ‘Why I’m here. I have to be.’
‘And you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.’ It was a statement, not a question, and the other Doctor grinned suddenly; except it couldn’t really be called a grin, it’d be a smirk, perhaps, or something most civilisations didn’t put a name to.
He shook his head in reply. ‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ the other him half-snarled, suddenly angry, suddenly almost vicious. And oh, how tentative was that grip on sanity, now? ‘I’m a murderer. Genocide. I killed them. I-’
‘I’m one too,’ the Doctor replied softly, interrupting. ‘I’m you. Everything you’ve done, I’ve done.’ And more, he added, in his own mind.
The earlier him merely nodded tightly, sharply, that danger more visible, now. The Doctor was well aware that his other self was staring, eyes fixed unblinkingly on him, open wide with pupils dilated to give the unsettling impression that he was being watched by the darkness itself, the darkness inside his head, in his mind. He didn’t look more than he had to.
‘Of course,’ the earlier him said, with no trace of inflection, then added - in a tone which could have been almost casual, if it wasn’t him, if it wasn’t here and now - ‘Murderer.’
He doesn’t deny it; it is true, after all. He remembers the self-hatred seething through him, the horror at what he had done, the anger at the Daleks, at the universe; the violent urge, so alien to him, to find the enemy and kill it, to shred and tear it apart and listen to it scream - the very same impulse he had felt, or would feel, in Van Statten’s underground compound when he came face to face with a Dalek again. But so much more powerful, now, before time or Rose had come to help those wounds. And there were no Daleks here.
There was, however, his own self.
He didn’t reply, and so there was silence, with his earlier self never moving his gaze, and he remembered all that pain and all that anger and all that hatred, and he was beginning, if he was really honest with himself, to feel a little scared. He knew he’d come out of this alive, if not completely unharmed, but that didn’t stop the instinctive fear, trapped and alone with someone dangerous - and he knew exactly how dangerous his earlier self was, right now - with no escape, no choice but to accept the inevitable…
And he might as well get it over with. It was his turn to speak. ‘I can’t tell you anything about the future,’ he said eventually, with a quiet sigh. The other him already knew this, of course, insofar as he could know anything right now, but he had to follow his script.
‘I know that,’ the past him snarled, then hesitated, as though having an idea - his head tilting, ever so slightly, aside, and he remembers feeling - faintly, layered over everything else clawing at his consciousness, but there - feeling slightly vulnerable. Which was laughable, really, when you considered what was about to happen. ‘But does it…’
Does it get better? That’s the question he was trying to ask. Surviving the Time War, living with those memories, that guilt, filling his mind with every breath; who wouldn’t want to ask that question? Even nearly mad, sanity about to collapse at any second, he could still latch on to that ever-present hope, that perhaps things will get better.
And the answer was yes. Because in a little over two days, the man sitting in front of him would save a London teenager from death by plastic dummy, and take her to see the stars, and something about that one tiny human girl would make him laugh and hope and feel like saving the universe again.
And less than two years later he would lose her.
The Doctor sucked in a breath, closing his eyes tightly against the sudden stab of pain, and said ‘Yes. It gets better.’
The other him laughed, a short laugh with nothing of happiness or amusement in it; a cruel laugh, on one level, a bitter or hopeless one, or quite possibly the laugh of the man who is losing his grip on sanity and knows it. ‘Fantastic,’ he said, voice hard and full of sarcasm. ‘Forgive me if I don’t believe you.’
‘I mean it,’ he replied, forcing himself to look up, managing a sad sort of smile. ‘It does. It gets better. It just…’ He sighed. ‘Bad things don’t stop happening.’
‘Not as bad as this.’ He says it flatly, but with a vicious, savage undercurrent, the last word almost spat out, but the Doctor remembers feeling the tiniest stirrings of fear. Fear that there was still more to suffer. The idea of more pain was monstrous. And adding anything to the chaotic cocktail that was his mind…
He shrugged vaguely. ‘Differently bad, perhaps,’ he said. It was true, after all: losing Rose didn’t hurt in the same way as losing Gallifrey, but it still hurt.
‘It burned,’ the other him said, softly, with a tone to his voice which was dark and cold and ancient as the emptiness of space. ‘Gallifrey burned. I watched. I killed them. I felt them die. We felt them die.’
‘All of them,’ the Doctor murmured softly, knowing he would hardly hear it.
And now the Doctor knew he had to meet those eyes. And even if he hadn’t known what was going on in his other self’s mind, he’d have been able to read it from his face; all that madness, all that chaotic darkness made of pain and the fear of pain, of self-hatred and the vast emptiness and anger, anger more than anything, violent and vicious and wanting to hurt, anger at the Daleks, lacking a target, anger at himself, which didn’t. And the tiny sliver of sanity which was still in there somewhere was beginning to lose itself in the maelstrom.
‘I did that,’ he said, savagely simple. ‘Killer. Murderer. Genocide.’
The Doctor nodded, accepting, feeling oddly passive. All the time, thinking ahead to this event, he’d thought that this self - this later, future self - had been at least as agonised as the earlier one; suffering just the same. Because he’d known that he was suffering, this later self, and perhaps he’d been incapable of imagining any great pain that wasn’t like the loss of Gallifrey. It was almost a surprise to find it wasn’t so. Oh, he was still hurting, but this was a quiet pain, a resigned pain. Not a scream, but a whimper.
Get it over with, he thought.
The other him was shifting closer. ‘You killed them. We killed them. We destroyed them.’ It was quiet, harsher than a scream of accusation would have been, and this was hardly accusation; this was cold, savage fact.
He wanted to say something, something to try and calm the other him, to quiet that anger. He could use his psychic abilities, he thought, reach out and force his earlier self back to sanity - and it wouldn’t work in the long term, but it would last long enough for him to be brought back to rationality by more conventional means, and it would stop this, now - but he wouldn’t, because that would be as bad as Rose saving her father. Because of the time line. Because of causality.
So he couldn’t do anything, because he knew what was happening, what did happen and was going to happen. He slipped his hand into his pocket and curled it around the little tube he took from Jack’s drawer, closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable.
‘They’re dead.’ his other self said, quietly, and there was a hand gripping his shoulder too tightly, and this was the start of it.
‘By our hands,’ he agreed, flatly, as though it were a phrase in some sacred ritual, and he suddenly thought of sacrifices to appease angry gods. He held out his hand, flat, palm up, like a symbol.
The other him just punched him in the face.
He felt oddly detached, even as the pain made him wince - if he didn’t remember it had caused nothing but bruising, he’d think he’d fractured his jaw. The force of the blow had thrown him backwards to lie on the floor of the console room, legs still bent at the knee.
And that little bit of violence had been the final crack in his sanity; whatever mental strength had let him contain all that madness for so long was gone, shattered, and everything beneath it was surging forth, carrying his earlier self with it.
All that pain, all that chaos, all that self-hatred and emptiness and rage; enough to drown in, and the Doctor knew and understood - as only someone who had been through the same themselves could ever understand - that simple violence wasn’t enough. Would never be enough. The other him could tear him to pieces, could injure him so badly he was forced to regenerate, and again, and again, until he had no more bodies left and finally died for good, and it wouldn’t be enough.
So, this.
Silently, without looking - without opening his eyes - he reached down to his pocket and pulled out the tube of lubricant he’d take from Jack’s bedside drawer. His earlier self was punching, clawing and tearing, in a way that was more instinctive, savage, than calculated to hurt. Like a wild animal. It didn’t make it any less painful, though. But he caught one of those hands and pressed the lube into it.
It wasn’t, he reflected, about sex. It was about something else entirely, all violence and pain and hurt, and it was singularly hideous, but this was what had happened, was happening.
So he lay back and waited, feeling horribly passive as things happened. There were hands, of course, clawing, vicious, and he was pushed to the floor, awkwardly positioned and only his trousers off, knees bent up and splayed open, and then there were lubricant-coated fingers pushing their way inside, and then his other self, pinning him down, and-
It hurt quite a bit, of course, but not terribly, and pain wasn’t anything new to him. Mostly it just felt unpleasant, and strangely distant, like his body was temporarily something not belonging to him. Lie back and think of England, he thought, but then, what did he have to think of?
It was over quite quickly, which was something to be thankful for, and then there was silence.
And if there was anything that could bring his other self’s mind back to cold hard sanity after what had happened, after the War, it was realising what had happened; realising that he’d done this.
The earlier him was lying quite still. His head was turned away, hiding his expression, although the Doctor knew exactly what he was thinking as something approximating sanity slowly returned.
He waited for the approximate length of time he remembered, then said, calmly, ‘You should go and find some new clothes.’
It was an excuse for the other him to escape, and for them both to avoid mentioning what had happened. With a brief nod, the other him got to his feet - neither of them looking at the other - and headed quickly for the wardrobe.
With a long sigh - mostly of relief - the Doctor pushed himself up to his feet, then busied himself with buttoning up trousers, checking his jaw, making sure he hadn’t sustained anything but bruises. He had quite a few of them, he could feel, and the obvious soreness - but that was it. He’d had worse, he told himself firmly, closing his eyes and leaning on the console for a moment.
That was that over with, then. All he had to do was wait for his earlier self to return, tell him what to do next and give him the things he’d need, and then it was back to what passed for normality.
To pass the time while he waited for his other self to return, the Doctor ran a hand over the TARDIS, trying to remember what he was supposed to fix… ah, yes, the spatial regulator. He crouched down beside the console, running a hand caringly over the burnt-out component and feeling the TARDIS hum - faint, but there - in reply. ‘It gets better,’ he whispered reassuringly to the ship, starting to take the regulator apart. ‘For you and me both.’
His other self would be in the wardrobe by now, carelessly throwing on the first things he found - though he’d always wondered later if his ship hadn’t subtly picked out the things she thought would be best and positioned them carefully at the entrance. That leather jacket in particular.
He wouldn’t be hurrying back, however. The Doctor couldn’t help but feel sympathetic, remembering what the earlier him was going through - though how could he not be sympathetic towards himself, even in spite of everything that had happened? He remembered being sane again, properly sane for the first time since the war, and catching the merest glimpse of himself in the mirror, newly-dressed, and being unable to look. Because the face in the mirror would be the face of a mass murderer, of someone so twisted and broken and scarred by war that they would…
He’d force himself to look in a mirror later, of course. After meeting Rose, after she’d dragged him into her flat, demanding answers - he’d forced himself to take a look then. All manic energy, chattering on to himself because he was afraid that if he didn’t, he might lose his grip again.
And if he could bend the laws of causality just enough to tell his earlier self one thing, it would be to tell him not to worry. Because it wouldn’t happen. And if he hadn’t had this hanging over him - reminding him, always, what he was capable of - he might not have been so determined to never be anything more than a friend to Rose.
Oh, it wasn’t the only reason - he’d trusted himself a little more after a while, and over time he’d come to know that he’d never do anything to hurt her, no matter how much of his sanity he lost - but it was one of the major ones. And without that, he might not have so many regrets now.
He closed his eyes for a moment, lost in thought, then opened them, forcing himself to think of something else, to focus on the regulator he was working on. He’d just fixed it when he heard the sound of footsteps, and glanced up to see his earlier self stop in the doorway.
‘Still here?’ he asked. The Doctor remembered, then, feeling suddenly afraid - afraid that there was more to come. He straightened up, forcing himself to grin.
‘Just a few things to sort out,’ he said cheerfully. Neither of them would mention what had just happened, of course. They’d get the formalities out of the way, and that would be that. ‘First off,’ he continued, not leaving the console, ‘I came here at exactly fourteen past three, local time. Afternoon, mind you. Write that down on a post-it note or something and stick it in a corridor somewhere. You’ll need it.’
The earlier him nodded. ‘When do I come back?’
‘You’ll know.’ The Doctor said simply, his hands in his pockets and a weary half-smile on his face. ‘Trust me, you’ll know. Ah, and before I forget…’ He pulled out the other items he’d brought; the antiplastic, the bomb and the note. ‘You’ll need these.’
He held them out. There was a brief pause, in which he knew his other self was hesitating, uncertain whether to approach - wondering how mad the next him would have to be not to have fled already - before he stepped up to the console.
‘You need to go to Earth,’ the Doctor said. ‘Earth, London, 2005. The Nestene Consciousness is looking for a snack. Look for a department store called Henrik’s; it’s got a transmitter on the roof. Wait for closing time, then use this,’ he said, handing him the bomb, ‘to blow it up. And before you do, check the basement, make sure no one’s down there.’
The earlier him nodded, and the Doctor felt a wave of bitter loss. Because in that basement he’d meet Rose, this earlier him, so very, very soon. But for him, here and now, Rose was gone.
‘After that,’ he said, carrying on, forcing himself to be cheerful, ‘you’re on your own. I can’t tell you anything more. I can give you this, though. Antiplastic,’ he said, handing the tube over. ‘And one more thing,’ he added, giving him the piece of paper. ‘Don’t look at that now. It’s a note. Read it as soon as you leave London.’
‘Right,’ the earlier him said, tucking it away into his leather jacket. ‘That it, then?’
‘Pretty much,’ he replied. ‘I want to say “don’t make the same mistakes I made”, but that would involve destroying Time, so…’ He shrugged, then held out his hand. ‘Good luck?’
His earlier self stared at him for a moment, then - only slightly wary - shook hands. ‘You too,’ he said.
And with that, he was free to leave. That was it. The script had played itself out. It was over.
Outside, he didn’t turn to look back at his earlier self’s TARDIS. Two days. That was how long it had taken him to finish fixing the TARDIS, and then he was off again. Destination Earth; London. Rose.
And he was alone, on the grassy, windswept plains of a tiny planet. He waited for a minute or two, half wondering if his own future self would appear and tell him what to do, where to go next. Knowing nothing would happen. This time, he was on his own.
He headed back to his own TARDIS, hands in his pockets. He had the whole of time and space at his fingertips, and he didn’t know where to go.
He’d carry on. He always managed to, one way or another.
---
A lifetime ago or a few days later later, depending on your point of view, the Doctor left London behind. A good thing, really, that Rose hadn’t agreed to come with him. He shouldn’t have asked her. Didn’t really know why he had, except it had been a sudden impulse, except that he’d liked her, except that the emptiness in his head where his people had been was threatening to swallow him. Which was all the more reason not to ask her, really.
The note, then. The future him had said to read it as soon as he left, so he opened the paper, revealing a single, simple line of text.
Go back and ask her again. She’ll say yes.
He could have ignored it. Could have stayed away, stayed alone, refused to go near anyone for any longer than he had to - but if he did that, who knew what would happen to Time? The note said to go back, so he had to. No choice. However stupid an idea it was. However likely he was to end up hurting her.
He went back to the same spot, same time, and stuck his head out the door.
‘Did I mention,’ he asked, ‘it also travels in time?’