Chapter Text
The doors closed on sand, sea, and a lovers' embrace, and the Doctor's hearts sank with regret.
He let his head come to rest on the wooden panels, trying to remind himself why this was the right call. He had to leave now, before he ruined everything by flinging open the doors separating them and whispering those three precious words in her ear himself.
For a split second, his resolve wavered. This wasn't irreversible. Not yet. He could go to her, apologise, grovel, beg on his knees for her to come with him. For both of them to come with him. They would work something out. Anything. He didn't care. As long as it was Rose Tyler and the Doctor, in the TARDIS, as it should be.
His hand grazed the handle, his mind pushing away every bad outcome, hoping against hope that he could still fix this.
Grazed the handle and missed it, as the TARDIS groaned to life, starting the violent journey back across dimensions.
He stared at the doors in shock, not understanding. He hadn't asked the TARDIS to move. He hadn't flicked a single switch, hadn't pulled a single lever.
He turned, lifting his eyes up to the central column, ready to reprimand his ship. How dare She! It was not Her place to make these decisions for him! However, instead of the defiant glow of the console, he met the eyes of Donna Noble.
"It's for the best." Her soft voice matched the sympathy in her expression, but there was a hardness there too. This wasn't just his best friend, who travelled with him and challenged him - it was the DoctorDonna, she knew him inside and out. She had only done what he was going to do himself.
So it was an unrepentant Donna that watched as his face shuttered, every emotion wiped from the surface, buried deep, so deep.
He wouldn't argue with Donna, not now. Oh, it would make it easier to let her go in the long run, to push her away, make her choose to leave him. But she was his best friend, and she deserved better. She certainly deserved better than what was going to happen now.
So he closed himself up, and nodded back to her, not quite meeting her eyes.
"I know." He certainly couldn't blame Donna for following through on his own plan. It was for the best.
Nevertheless, he couldn't help the tendril of an idea that wedged itself in his mind. The walls hadn't closed yet. With both himself and Donna driving…
He moved to lean against one of the coral struts, watching Donna as she played with the TARDIS controls. It was unnerving, watching his best friend go from someone who couldn't fix a toaster to someone who could fly the TARDIS without any direction.
"…it's got mountains that sway in the breeze. Mountains that move. Can you imagine?" Donna was saying as she moved about the console.
Ah yes. The planet Felspoon.
"And how do you know that?" he asked.
"Because it's in your head. And if it's in your head, it's in mine." Donna was doing a remarkable impression of his own façade - all wild energy and relentless bluster.
"And how does that feel?" He didn't want to push it, but he needed to know how long they had left.
"Brilliant! Fantastic! Molto bene! Great big universe, packed into my brain…" The Doctor winced at hearing his own words come out of his friend's mouth, and his face fell even more at her description of her mental landscape.
Some brains were not meant to handle a great big universe of knowledge.
His hearts sank, the incompatibility becoming more and more apparent as Donna fumbled through her next few sentences. He had hoped that they would have more time - weeks at best, but a few hours at least. Surely the universe owed him a few hours with the DoctorDonna.
The last hope he had been harbouring of turning back, of seeing Rose again, was shattered on the floor, along with any chance of Donna and him coming up with a plan to stabilise her mind.
Donna only had minutes left.
He was going to lose them both.
The weight of that reality nearly forced him to his knees. Instead he forced his legs to move, to round the console and come to the side of his friend.
The realisation in Donna's eyes when she figured out that this didn't have to be the end, not for Donna Noble, wasn't the gasp of relief that he had hoped for. Instead, she stepped away from him, her eyes shining with tears and the wild glint of fear.
"I can't go back! Don't make me go back!"
The words pierced the Doctor's already fraying armour, and all he could do was apologise to his best friend. Her time was almost up. Any longer, and she could suffer irreparable damage, and he was not going to lose another person irreparably today.
"Oh, Donna Noble. I am so sorry. But we had the best of times."
His goodbye was almost drowned out by her sobs, and when he reached for her mind with his, he met a weak fluttering resistance, like fists flailing against the granite of his more practised psyche.
It was a matter of seconds for him to find all of their memories together, and to separate the familiar Time Lord psyche from her more alien one. He tucked them carefully into a deep recess of her mind, and secured them with the strongest mental lock that he could.
As she slumped against him, everything that made her the most important woman in the universe hidden from her, he felt the snap of the timelines falling back into place, as the last lingering gap in the void closed.
And the Doctor began the process of burying both of his hearts deeper than ever before.
He was standing on an empty street, face to face with a woman he had just snatched from the jaws of Time, and he had never felt so electric.
The remnants of the shattered fixed point were sparking in the air around them, fizzing across his skin. The unbridled potential of a new timeline hung in the air, like a fuse waiting to be lit.
It had been easy, so easy, to change the fates of the occupants of Bowie Base One. Oh there was still a crater in the red dusty Martian surface, still some people he hadn't managed to save. But there were three people alive in the world today who weren't alive before, and he had saved them. Him.
He had outlived all the Daleks, all the Time Lords, and all the lesser temporal species besides. The war had ended all of them - he had ended all of them. And now he had conquered Time itself.
"For a long time now, I thought I was just a survivor, but I'm not." No, he knew better now. Time was his to control, to shape, to wield. "I'm the winner. That's who I am. The Time Lord Victorious."
The title had a rather nice ring to it. The Time Lord Victorious was on a roll. This was just one fixed point, a tiny anchoring point in the web of time that would eventually reattach in a new configuration. And if one small strand could be moved about, there would be larger ones that could be too.
He just had to find which ones to tug at.
"And there's no one to stop you." Adelaide sounded like she was challenging a petulant toddler, and her tone grated at him.
He had saved her, transported them all home, and had even unlocked her front door for her. Her whole future, whole life, given to her on a platter.
How dare she challenge him now? There was nothing he couldn't do, not any more.
In another timeline, the Doctor might have lingered. There would be footsteps fading inside the house, the snick of a door… and a lazer shot. The snap as Time reasserted itself would have sent the Doctor to his knees.
But in this timeline, the Time Lord Victorious stormed through the doors of his TARDIS, taking off before the Captain could even reach her door. Already thousands of light years away, the shock of Time falling back into place would be felt as mere ripples.
His next plan was taking shape in his head.
It was his turn to find salvation.
The TARDIS groaned as Her Time Lord wrenched yet another lever into a position that it should not be in. He was currently flying around the console, working himself into a manic state, as yet another plan looked like it would fail at the last hurdle.
What had started as irritation was now boiling over into rage.
Why was it so simple to scoop up a few humans and change a fixed point, but when he just wanted to nudge his own timeline - just a little bit! - the entire fabric of reality threatened to unravel?
Damn everything. The universe owed him. How many times did he have to prove his worth before he got his reward?
He had checked his plan extensively, and theoretically, the events surrounding Canary Wharf were stable. A tiny intrusion through the Void to Pete's World right before the closure should have been possible. It should have changed nothing! To all observers in this universe, time would carry on as it always had.
It was the right time, the right place, and yet every time he ran the program to pilot the TARDIS through the gaps, it reacted as if the walls were still there, totally intact.
The potential paradox of crossing his own timeline wasn't even a concern here. He had no intention of coming face to face with his past self, or interfering with past events. All the safeguards and cautionary tales that had prevented him from attempting this before were just that - pointless rules.
So why would it not WORK?
A warning blared through the console room, and the TARDIS lurched suddenly, causing the Time Lord to slip on the grating. He whacked the stabilizers violently, but instead of evening out the ship launched into a manoeuvre that felt suspiciously like crashing.
The entire room seemed to flip upside down momentarily before everything came crashing down, right way up this time. Having narrowly avoided landing on the hard metal floor, the Time Lord now threw himself at the switch which would shut the whole program down.
The TARDIS responded eagerly, coming to a complete standstill in seconds.
Almost on cue, the controls caught fire, sending him reeling backwards, swearing in Gallifreyan. It was only a moment's work to put the fire out, but the seared patches of the panel remained, the blackened patches a visual reminder of what he had just done - to his own timeline, and to his wonderful ship.
Gradually the sounds of the old time machine got quieter and quieter, until the room was near silent.
The Doctor slumped onto the jumpseat, letting his head drop into his hands. His plan to cross the universes, to bring Rose Tyler home before the larger gaps closed for good, was just not possible.
It was sitting there, with the smell of smoke permeating the air and hyper aware of the too-quiet hum of the TARDIS, that the Doctor started to wonder if he had gone too far this time. With no one to hold him back, he had turned into exactly the kind of man that he had fought against for so long. Someone who would break the rules of the universe for personal gain, because he thought he was above them.
There was a reason why defying Time never paid off, he cursed himself, and that was because Time was determined to protect itself. It already knew his every move, every possible strategy that it would need to counter.
Even in the depths of his arrogance, he had known that there were some events that Time wouldn't allow him to meddle with. Things that were so universe-shaking that they were locked away from the rest of reality completely.
The Time War, for instance - time locked, always happening, but never in this part of the observable universe. Oh, he could cross his timeline before or afterwards, if he so desired, but never during, and never on Gallifrey. Only his old self with the frock coat and the fluffy hair had that dubious privilege. And only the TARDIS from that part of his timeline could lock onto those coordinates.
Oh.
Universe-shaking things… like unstable holes in the walls of the universe, for instance?
He jumped up, his hands moving to his hair and making a complete mess, before the manic energy found an outlet in his fingers dancing over the controls of the ship.
He was stupid. A complete fool. Of course forcing his way through was never going to work. Relative to him, any gaps in the walls were closed. Sealed. Kaput.
He would have to hitch a lift instead.
He wasn't stupid enough to stowaway, of course - that way spelled disaster of various magnitudes, including the fact that he would probably be stranded in the parallel world. Not to mention that on that last trip through the void there had already been more than enough Doctors on the TARDIS.
No, instead, he was simply going to hook his TARDIS up to the other one - like hooking up a trailer to a car, - and get a tow across the void.
The ship's hum changed in pitch just enough for him to get the impression that she didn't appreciate the trailer metaphor. Thankfully, however, it didn't sound like she was actually discouraging him from his new plan.
"What do you think?" The Doctor asked, carefully moving a wire away from a charred bit of console and reattaching it securely to the same circuit. The TARDIS seemed to hold her breath.
"Once more into the breach?" He smirked at his own joke, waiting for the time ship to flash her approval before moving to set the new coordinates.
They landed on the edge of a park in London, the screen helpfully pinpointing the artron energy that signalled the presence of another TARDIS.
Earth was already back in the sky. He would have to be quick to establish the connection between the ships. If memory served him, this was the last stop before Pete's World.
He rushed around the console, letting his hands follow the program which would tie the ships together, flipping a couple of switches here and there to adjust for the fact that it was another version of the same TARDIS, and not a different ship altogether.
No sooner had he activated the program, then he heard the telltale whooshing sound of the other TARDIS taking off. There was a small delay, and then a giant jolt that sent the Doctor sprawling onto the hard metal grating.
The central column was grating along quicker than usual, as his wonderful time ship fought to keep up through the Void. It was imperative that his ship didn't create too much drag and throw the firsts ship off course. He also didn't want to be too close behind and risk landing early. It needed to look like he never left the beach in the first place, his ship materialising just as the younger version took off.
One wrong move now would send both TARDISes tumbling into the void, collapsing the time loop - and probably two universes along with it.
It wasn't a gentle journey, and his ship almost seemed determined to throw him across the room despite his firm grip on the dematerialisation lever.
"Come on, come on, come on!" His refrain got louder with each iteration as he coaxed Her to maintain Her position behind the leading TARDIS.
And then it was a manic dance across the controls, setting up the final landing coordinates, and trying to time it just so, to make it seem as if he had never left.
The ship landed with more weight than normal, and the jolt rattled every bone in the Time Lord's body. There was a loud groan from the console as the engines wound down, and for a moment the Doctor wondered if the TARDIS was going to power off completely.
Thankfully, the Old Girl settled after a moment. Her lights were dimmer than usual and the artificial gravity seemed to be unnaturally high, and he crossed his fingers that her power cells would hold out long enough to get them back to the prime universe.
However, for now, he had made it. Right outside those doors should be one Rose Tyler. The thought of seeing her again, which had sustained him through his efforts to breach the void, was suddenly a terrifying one. What if she hated him for leaving? What if she refused to come back with him?
Worst of all, what if he had mistimed the landing, and there was no one there at all?
The seconds ticked by, time pressing on him with the awareness that there were only minutes before the void would close, making leaving impossible. Despite that, his legs found themselves walking towards the monitor instead of the doors, avoiding for a few more seconds what waited for him out on the beach.
Before the screen could even show him the spacetime coordinates, the piece of grating that he was standing on tipped sideways, sending him stumbling down the ramp towards the thin wooden barriers separating him from the outside world.
Clearly the TARDIS thought he had wasted enough time already.
He let his head rest on the wooden panels for a moment. This wasn't irreversible. Not yet. He could still turn around and fly away, leaving them all to the happy ending that he had previously envisaged for them.
For a moment, his resolve wavered, but not enough to tip the scales. What about his happy ending? He was determined that he was going to get it this time, alternate realities and timelines be damned.
His hand grazed the handle, and the latch clicked open.
And when he pulled the door open, he prayed that the next time he stepped foot on his ship that it would be the Doctor and Rose Tyler. In the TARDIS. As it should be.