Chapter Text
“She really hasn’t been very well.”
On the way to the Doctor’s house from another life, they’d had to stop. Lucie Miller’s car had been getting a lot of use today, and to that end, it was running on fumes. The Doctor had taken it upon herself to fill the car back up - taking advantage of the fact that humanity was still in apocalypse mode, or most of them were - to skip all the queues at the petrol station. Ruby had climbed out.
And now, they’re speaking in hushed voices.
“Belinda, I mean.”
“I know. I saw.”
Ruby’s fingers poke through her sleeves, and tangle together nervously. Even quieter, she asks, “Is that our fault?”
“Our fault?”
Ruby gives a worried glance through the back seat window, “What did you do? When you changed everything to make Poppy real-”
“Hey-” the Doctor practically barks, “Poppy was always real.”
“Is that why you changed?”
The Doctor’s shoulders rise and fall. Despondent, she focuses back on the car. “Maybe.”
“Whatever you did, it hurt Belinda somehow - I don’t know. Shirley called it Reality Dissonance, but it was the worst she’d ever heard of, a-- apparently."
The Doctor’s teeth roll over her lip. “I suppose her old memories could be conflicting with her new ones.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Either way, Ruby, it’s not our fault. If I made a mistake, then that’s my problem.”
“You wouldn’t have even known about Poppy if not for me-”
“Ruby…” the Doctor hopes between finishing saying the girl’s name and meeting her eyes, she’d have thought of something to say. But she hasn’t. So, she freezes. She stands there, still, for a long time until the words come - until the courage comes to say them, “Maybe I’ll tell her. I… I will tell her. When everything’s back to normal. Maybe that’ll fix it.”
That’s a lot of maybes. Ruby is quiet. She nods, and she is quiet. She gets back in, and she is quiet. It’s not long until the Doctor follows.
---
The Doctor’s old house - the one her split-self had lived in - is empty: Utterly. When the Doctor spies the TARDIS through the kitchen window, she allows herself to relax. There it is. Her box. Her beautiful blue box, sitting there, waiting for her.
But they need to find the key first.
The Doctor isn’t one to keep spares around, but she also isn’t one to have a house in London and have the Nobles come over for Sunday lunch. She isn’t the kind to have a Nintendo Wii hooked up to the TV (oh, how she loved the Ponds’ Wii), and she isn’t the kind to keep a butterfly diary, which she finds on the coffee table next to a half-emptied, and stone-cold cup of tea. She isn’t the kind for putting up photos: There are faces in these photos that she never thought she’d see again, and really, she isn’t - they’re just photos in frames. Paper. But her split-self - the other her - took these. He met River again. River. There they are, smiling together, backdropped by stars. And here he is with Rose Noble, the both of them in their orange spacesuits, grinning on Mars.
What else isn’t she the kind for? Artistry.
There’s a whole crafts room upstairs. There are paintings, there are sketches, there are models. The paintings and the sketches are better than the models, so she assumes the Fourteenth was just getting into those. She picks up a pencil and tries to copy the doodle of Rose Tyler’s face in an open notebook on a desk inside, but her fingers aren’t used to drawing, so what is meant to be her old friend’s face turns into a very poor imitation.
She catches her reflection in the door on the way out.
She thinks she knows, now, why she looks this way. She ponders on it as she checks the next room. Inside, she finds Ruby, turning her other self’s bedroom inside out.
“I knew this person,” she says to her, quietly. Ruby looks at her; “The person I look like.”
“Yeah?”
The Doctor pinches her tongue between her lips. It feels uncomfortable to form the words in her throat: “She was a-” she clears her throat and tries again, “-A long time ago, my people were at war with another. And that planet crashing down over Earth now is my home: My home, at war. This…” she points to her face, “This person ended it. Brought peace to the universe.”
Ruby stops combing through the other Doctor’s drawers to look at her; “And now that’s all coming back.”
“Now it’s all coming back, so has she.”
“What was her name?”
“Rose.”
Not Noble. Tyler. Rose Tyler. The Doctor breathes in, and out. She looks away. A weight falls on her - not just from the fatigue of being erased - but from thinking about her.
“That just means we’re going to win, doesn’t it?”
“Hm?” the Doctor swipes her thumb across her eye, “What’s that?”
“Rose stopped all this the first time. Now it’s back, and she’s gonna do it again.”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
“Doctor! Is this it?”
At the sound of Anita’s voice, the Doctor and Ruby head back out onto the landing. At the bottom of the stairs, Anita holds up a silver key, shaped hexagonally with the seal of Rassilon engraved onto its face. Belinda stands next to her, “It was in a lockbox under the sofa.”
“That looks like it!”
It’s a perfect fit for the TARDIS door. Of course it is. When it opens up, it coughs dust, and the Doctor’s first action once inside is to lay her hand on the walkway’s railing. “Hey,” she whispers to the machine, “Miss me? I know I’ve missed you.”
The inside is identical to her own TARDIS - only, no jukebox. She never really used that thing, anyway. Anita stares in awe. She’s seen almost every iteration of the TARDIS’s outside, but she’s never before seen the inside. She knows from hearing the phrase that it was always bigger on the inside, but she didn’t imagine it would be this much bigger. Milky-white walls arch over a central console, lined with small, circular lights. Belinda, behind her, finds herself mimicking the Doctor, her eyes taking it all in again.
She, and Poppy, and the Doctor had all been in the TARDIS together after Omega was done away with. They’d been about to blast off on another adventure together: Mother, daughter, and—
And uncle. Mother, daughter, and uncle, all together. But then, she blinked, and she was at home. Now, she’s back on the TARDIS again. Why should she need to ever step back onto the TARDIS if she’d never left; if she’d never had any intention of leaving. But why -- why didn’t she have any intention of leaving? She can’t take Poppy off around the universe in a time machine - it’s dangerous!
What changed? Something must have changed, and she’s forgotten it: It was burned away with the rest of the books of memories in the library of her mind, inaccessible no matter how hard she tries to find them; to comb through the ash.
Ruby sees the troubled look on her face, and gently takes her upper arm into her hand. “Hey. Come on…”
Belinda blinks, and nods, and sighs, “I never thought I’d see inside here again. For a long time, all I wanted was to never see it again — just go home, back to Poppy.”
Anita’s eyes practically glow, “It’s marvellous!”
Belinda quietly agrees, “Yeah.” She and Ruby stop by the console, as the Doctor darts from left to right around the controls, flicking switches here and pressing buttons there.
“Come on…” the Time Lord growls, “Ah—I’ll just have to put her on manual. My TARDIS wasn’t flying right either.” There comes a disconcerted wooing sound from somewhere within the box. “Not that you aren’t my TARDIS too, of course.”
Ruby rubs Belinda’s back, like it’ll help. Anita remains in awe of the world inside the space ship. Then, the four of them are thrown off their feet by the sudden movement of the TARDIS. The lights flash; on and off, and every colour at once, as the world swirls around them. Anita curls around the strut of one of the railings, and Belinda falls between two of them with a shout. Ruby’s close enough to grab her hand and keep her from falling down to the basin far below. The Doctor isn’t so lucky as to have a Ruby-shaped anchor. She skids along the primary platform, and slips through the railing. She falls, falls, falls, until her back hits the floor with a thud that’s drowned by the screeching of the TARDIS.
“Handbrake!”
Handbrake. Someone needs to pull the handbrake. Anita tries to stand, but gravity pulls her away from the console. Ruby’s busy keeping Belinda from falling. She needs to find those same reserves of strength that had brought her out of that fiery wreck back in London… Three, two, one, here it comes! She tugs Belinda up from over the edge, and Belinda scrambles up along the floor. Hair covers her face, and she blows it aside as she uses the momentum from Ruby’s pull to squirrel herself up towards the centre console, and reach for the nearest handbrake-shaped thing. Her hand finds it. And she yanks downwards.
All at once, the TARDIS comes to a stop. Outside, the blue box flashes into place over Paris, smashes through a street lamp, and crashes through a Corporation car - ripping it in half. It doesn’t stop there. It keeps on barrelling down the street. The two occupiers of the car? They’d been standing just down the way, and though they lift their guns to shoot, the bullets bounce off of the TARDIS’s exterior shell like they were bouncy balls. The box rams into them, knocking them down to the floor.
It stops: It stops right next to another blue box.
Hello, TARDIS A says to TARDIS B, What brings you here?
I suppose, a similar predicament to yours. Have you brought a coat with you? It’s awfully windy out here.
Indeed, it is. The Doctor’s the first one out, a hand straightening out her back after the fall. She needs to stop falling off things - desperately so. Lightning cracks overhead, and she turns her nose up: Like in her friends’ present day, Earth is on the brink of collapse here, too. No. It’s worse here. Bricks are beginning to lodge free of their buildings, dragged up by Gallifrey’s incoming gravitational pull. Even from down here, the Daleks’ shrill call of extermination rings in Ruby’s, Belinda’s, Anita’s—
—ears. Where’s the Doctor?
There she is. She phases back in, tightening her fists to will herself back. She’d vanished again. First, Belinda’s mind; now, the Doctor; coming in and out like the tide.
“Doctor?”
“Doctor??”
“What’s happening???”
“Shhh!”
They already know, they just haven’t seen it before. And if the Doctor needs to explain, the Doctor will explain later. She likes explaining later; it means she never has to explain - under the guise of forgetting. She touches her fingers to her head, and she feels the essence of time. She tries to. She can’t. She still can’t. The sixth sense is severed, and she’s beginning to get the feeling it’s not coming back: That can be her new sixth sense - eternal dread that something vital has been cut loose. Phantom pain for a sense. So instead, she searches this dimension for absence of time; she crawls through the numbness, looking for the utter absence of all time that would surround a Time Lord, and would be interwoven into a nightmare creature from the dark’s DNA. The Master and the Trickster; to time, minus numbers, and the Doctor feels for them.
Where else? The Eiffel Tower. It’s where the Doctor had come face-to-face with the Master for the first time after her last-last regeneration, and it’ll be where one of them dies.
It’ll be where one of them dies.
“Open fire!”
It seems the Corporation’s gotten wise to asking for surrender. As a hail of bullets come towards the time-travellers, the two TARDISes - the one they’d arrived in, and the one the Doctor had left in Paris - shine: Their rooftop lights shimmering a bright blue. Their exterior force fields combine and expand, and the bullets are frozen in time - stuck in the air.
The Doctor rests her hand on her boxes. Belinda does, too.
“Eiffel Tower,” the Doctor manages to say. Once more, she feels breathless; her vision is a haze. Most of her strength has to be committed to staying opaque, and for a Time Lord, that is a lot of strength.
“Come on,” Belinda says quietly, “Come on,” and she hooks the Doctor’s arm around her shoulder.
“Belinda-”
“Come on.”
Ruby watches them go. Ruby watches everything. The desolation of 1924 Paris. She imagines that this is what her time must look like too, now. This really is it. If the Doctor and Belinda don’t make it— Ah, so she’ll make sure that they will! The soldiers accumulate in their tens; a disorderly force now that central command is gone - presumably lost to the gravity well currently crashing down over Earth. They attack; if not with bullets, then by pounding the ends of their guns against the force field protecting the two humans. The TARDISes shudder, and groan. They’re time machines, not force-field generators. TARDIS A; the split-Doctor’s from the present day - howls out the sound of the cloister bell, its HADS system flicking on. That Doctor isn’t its Doctor, and it’s sitting right next to a duplicate of itself. Still, it holds on; it holds on valiantly. Though its every coral nerve tries to screech away into the time vortex, it stands its ground - fading for just a moment, but coming back.
The Doctor staggers. She falls. The Eiffel Tower is just across the grass. It’s closer now. And closer again. Her vision is failing her.
“Doctor!”
She can hear the tears in Belinda’s voice. But all the same, she collapses onto the green. Her hands fade. Her arms. Her legs; body. They come back, because she drags them kicking and screaming and punching from the matter-less place they keep trying to retreat to, but she’s on her back, staring up at the sky.
Belinda’s over her. The Doctor’s decided that Belinda is exceedingly good at looking sad: She wears grief well. Her eyebrows curve upwards, and a little dimple forms on her brow. There’s a hand on her cheek now. The Doctor looks up into her dark eyes, her own wandering deliriously.
“Doctor?”
“I came back home for you,” the Doctor breathes. The world is crumbling - screaming around them - and her voice is quiet, “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Thoughts of her; park bench on Trion, Haven Centre corridors.
Guilt. Loneliness.
“Of— Of course I was okay.”
What Ruby said - the Doctor knows Belinda’s lying to her. That’s fine. The Doctor lies about being okay a lot of the time too. She grits her teeth, and she twists herself around onto her stomach. From there, standing up again is easy. You just have to negotiate with your legs. Evil legs. They’re the most stubborn of any limb. No limb that houses the knee could ever be moral. Evil legs, evil knees; evil limb, evil joint.
She’ll make Belinda okay. She’ll make up for everything.
Across the grass. It’s quiet. Towards the lift. It’s quiet.
The Doctor stumbles inside, and before Belinda can follow, she spins and draws the door shut.
“Doctor!”
“I’m sorry.”
Belinda curls her fingers into the metal grating, stern, worried. Stern and worried Belinda.
“It’s not for you - what’s up there. I’ll be like you. I’ll be okay.”
Her thumb presses a button, but it vanishes upon touch. She tries again, and finds more success.
“You had better be!”
She will be. Somehow, she just knows.
Somehow.
The Watcher: It stands on the pavilion. Its eyeless face watches the Doctor’s ascent.
The force shield around the TARDISes begins to crack, like it’s made of glass - thankfully durable glass, but glass all the same. The Corporation soldiers have gotten the bright idea to use one of their cars to ram at it: All attempts cease when a troop-carrier comes flying overhead, and has its propellers ripped out by the opposing gravity. As it crashes down, a few of the armoured people beyond the TARDISes’ bubble lift upwards: Flightless bird goes down, land-dwellers go up. There is yelling amongst their ranks.
“Can you drop the shields?”
“Are you nuts?” Anita yells.
“Please?” Ruby begs the TARDIS. The two boxes seem to woo with relief as they do; TARDIS A finally allowed to blink away into the time vortex. Ruby leaps up, and she grabs the wrist of one of the floating soldiers. Guns lift, but she’s had enough of these invaders: “Would you put those down and help?”
The lift inside the tower stops. The Master has her back turned to the little lobby in which it arrives.
The Doctor can hear her breathing from inside; like there’s nothing in the universe but her. Out she steps, onto the railings, their backs both lit by the warm lamps inside; fronts darkened by the sky.
The Master’s knuckles are white. She clutches the railing of the tower’s peak, her eyes closed. There’s a tranquility to her: Tranquility in surrender to the end.
That’s not all. She wears a belt, with two decorated scabbards on either side. Rapiers.
Strange, the Doctor thinks, for her to have her eyes closed. She expected the Master might like to watch; might like to watch the Earth razed.
The Doctor watches, for as long as she can bare; watches buildings lifted up into the black hole that is Gallifrey.
Finally, the Master says, “I’m glad you came.”
“You didn’t make it easy.”
“No, but I’m still glad. I’d have accepted it if you were erased from time - but,” the Master draws in a shaky, jubilant breath, “I’d much prefer to do it myself.”
“Or, I kill you. That would surely negate your deal with the Trickster.”
The Master nods slowly, “That’s why I brought two swords. That’s why it doesn’t really matter what happens. Either way, I die.”
She draws one. She turns to the Doctor, and she offers it to her; the blade shines red, reflecting the sky. The Doctor looks into the glint of the steel, then turns her nose forwards again.
The Master stands.
The Doctor practically hears her teeth grind with fury.
“Take it.”
“No.”
“You’ll die if you don’t. This entire world - this entire universe will die if you don’t.”
“Threatening the universe stopped working on me three gods ago.”
She can feel the Trickster’s presence here, but still, she can’t bring herself to care. The Trickster is a vehicle by which the Master emerged from her prison of gold.
The Master practically snarls. Perhaps she can feel it too. She throws the sword over the edge, and then she draws the second. The Doctor backs up as the blade points towards her. “It was us!” the Master yells, her composure dissolving, “Always just us! Playing our games! And you had to go and be important!”
She swipes at the Doctor; the Doctor leaps backwards. The end of the rapier nearly cuts her.
“You ruined it!”
Another swipe. The Doctor dodges to the right, and overwhelmed with a red mist charges forwards. She grabs the Master’s collar. “You’re the only person I could ever count on seeing!” she practically sobs, “Everyone else goes away; leaves me; dies, but I could always expect you! You were always around the corner! You were always fun…”
“You- You tried to change me— In that box! That prison!”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
The Master’s eyes widen. For the first time in a very long time, the Doctor thinks she sees her best friend.
“I don’t need you to change.”
Her hand is on the Master’s wrist, pushing the sword away.
“I never needed you to change. That’s what I tried to say when we had that fight—I just want my friend back. I want you back, as you, whoever that is. If you want to hurt people, I’ll come to stop you. And that can be it.”
The Master is silent.
“Just stop this.”
“If—”
The Doctor draws in breath.
“If I stop this, I… I get trapped again. I can’t breathe when I’m in there. I can’t see, or-or feel anything.”
“I’ll find a way. You know I will.”
The Master growls. Then, she screams. She closes her eyes, because she can’t bear to look, as she points her sword and strikes it through the Doctor’s core. She feels sickly warmth drip down onto her hands, and a sudden exhalation as the Doctor curves forwards into her. With the last embers of her strength, the Doctor curls her arms around the Master’s shoulders.
The end of the world doesn’t matter anymore. The Master just lets her hold her.
“You know I will.”
She shunts her off with her shoulder. The Doctor, limp, falls over the railing of the Eiffel Tower. Down, down, down— Until she can’t hold on anymore, and her body fades.
The universe does the opposite. Everything is once again real to the Master’s ears. The sword, running with the orange-red of a Time Lord’s blood, and the swirling tornado over Paris, and the laughter in her ear. That dreadful laughter, ever-present like the drums. She turns, and points her blade. “Trickster!”
Her voice would echo through the cosmos if she willed it to. And from the dark of the night, it emerges.
“Satisfied, Lord of Time?”
Yes. Oh, yes. She is. Very satisfied. She lifts her blade, the point stained with rust, and she growls:
“Deal’s off.”
Belinda had seen a body fall from the tower, but it never made an impact. It vanished in midair, like cold breath on a window. Then, so does the end of the universe. It’s all gone; like that, and she’s standing on freshly-cut green grass, beneath a bright blue sky. There’s birdsong. There’s voices: They’re in French, but the TARDIS makes them English for her. She only turns away from the Eiffel Tower when she hears the stomp of feet behind her. It’s Ruby and Anita. The world is back to normal, but both of them are still caked in the dirt of adventure.
It’s not until she follows the horror in their eyes that her mounting optimism goes away.
Killed. Suffocated like a starving flame.
Killed. Like the Doctor.
She’d been gone, but like the natural order of things, she’s back. She lies on the grass. Belinda doesn’t think she’ll be getting back up this time. She hurries to her side; she kneels next to her, with Ruby and Belinda. And the Doctor’s eyes search for them: The Doctor’s big, brown eyes, rolling with water.
She looks down. There’s a small weight in her hand, and when she curls her elbow to bring that hand up into the light, and she opens it, she finds a golden tooth sitting in her palm.
The deal is very off. The Master sits there, inside her tomb; tiny, and the Doctor’s problem. She’ll fix it. She’ll make everything better; with Belinda, with the Master. She closes her hand again, wrapping the Master up in a firm blanket of safety. The Doctor’s going to keep her promise.
Belinda’s shaking hands rise up to the Doctor’s stomach. She needs- She needs to stop the bleeding. Did she fall? What does she do for two-hundred broken bones?
“Belinda.”
She meets the Doctor’s eyes.
“It’s fine.”
“But you’re-”
“I’m tired.”
It’s true. It’s the truest thing she’s ever said. She’s tired, and she’s done her job. Her free hand reaches up to her face, and she feels Rose Tyler one last time.
There’s a fourth onlooker. A Watcher, if you will. It wasn’t there, and now it is; like the fixed world, like the Doctor’s body, like the flicker of hope that sparks in Belinda again when she looks up to see it. She searches for Ruby and Anita’s reactions. Is this good? Is this bad?
Ruby holds Belinda’s hand. It’s good.
It must be.
The silver stranger reaches down towards the Doctor, and its fingers of silver spread towards her; stretching beyond their capability. The rest of its body follows, as its physical form dissolves into light, morphing around the woman like a cocoon - a protective shield. Brown eyes stare out from behind the veil.
Brown eyes.
Brown eyes.
Blue eyes.
The most vibrant, most beautiful, widest blue eyes Belinda’s ever seen. Blonde hair shifts beneath the silver.
Blonde hair.
Blonde hair.
Red hair.
Like flames. Like a phoenix’s: The flames of rebirth. Still long, too, and wavy, down the Doctor’s shoulders.
Her new face’s first gift to the world is a wide smile.
And she sits up. Her new eyes draw across her friends’ faces at first like they’re unfamiliar, then she takes a second pass— Yes, Belinda thinks she’s still a she. She’ll have to ask later on. Now wouldn’t be a good time. Those eyes take a second pass, a more familiar pass.
And the Doctor collapses back on the grass.
