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The whole world was sand.
It stretched out for miles, pastel yellows and shifting golds, cool and brilliant under the light of a distant young sun. A light breeze skimmed along its surface, picking up tiny grains of the stuff, catching it in his eyelashes and prickling against his skin. As he watched, the curves of the dunes caused a little dust funnel to form in the air, spinning up into an illusion of solidity, then dissolving back into nothing.
A whole world, and all of it sand.
It was entirely possible that the whole universe was sand, now. It could have been a kind of justice, really... Just him and the sand, for however many lives he had left. Because for all that the Time War might have reshaped the universe a thousand times over, nothing that either side had done could ever compare to his single, perfect act of destruction. Daleks and Time Lords alike. All gone in a very literal moment.
And here, in the place from which had wrought this destruction? A whole world of sand.
He probably should have felt something about that. He didn’t, though. They were all just facts. Observations. Data points.
He stretched his legs out, watching the sand fall away under the barest hint of pressure.
“You know,” an unexpected voice declared, brazen and shocking in the silence of the endless desert, “I am so sick of sand planets."
The owner of the voice appeared human looking, a man dressed in a twentieth century Earth military coat that was wildly unsuitable for the climate. But he had a strange sort of aura around him... His timeline was far too solid, far too long, to be any normal sort of creature.
"It’s all right there in the name, really. Sand planet. Literally has nothing better to offer a visitor than that. You do realise that there's a bona fide leisure world just two worlds further out in this system? There's a bar right by immigration that makes an absolutely magnificent Grevilla Daiquiri.” He ran a hand through dark, ruffled hair, then gave a cocky half smile and an eyebrow waggle. “The bartender’s pretty magnificent too, as I recall, so I can’t help but wonder. Whole universe of options to choose from. Why regenerate here?”
A tendril of thought started to curl its way up from somewhere deep in his mind, something important. Something about his regeneration. But when he tried to grasp it, it turned to smoke.
“Are you a hallucination?” he asked. The words scratched in his throat, like maybe they were made of sand as well, but no. They were just new. The first words he’d spoken in this body.
“I suppose that might explain a few things,” the man responded, apparently amused by the thought, “but no. Why do you ask? Have you been seeing things that aren't there?”
He considered the idea. There had been something like a hallucination, he thought. The hours before the sand were getting harder and harder to remember clearly though - every time he tried, they would skitter away, hiding in the darker and dustier corners of his memory. But The Moment - it had spoken, and there had been something. Someone..
“A girl,” he murmured, half to the man and half to himself. “She was blonde.”
The stranger laughed - a loud, uncomplicated sound that glistened like the sand. “Doc, I swear. It's always a blonde with you.” He sat himself down on the sand with a weary huff. “But I promise, I’m solid as they come. Pinch me, if you like?”
He did, which appeared to delight the man far more than it ought. But his thoughts were coming together more quickly, now. Still sluggish, but not quite so much like dragging dead weight through water.
“You're not a hallucination, then," he said, more for his own benefit than the stranger's. "Narrows it down, but not by much. Who are you? And what are you doing here, now?”
The man looked out to the horizon. “Oh, I’m just a traveler. Happened to be passing by.”
Those words felt familiar, in an old and distantly sentimental way. They were the sorts of words he might have used once to avoid explaining himself, in a past life. A long, long since passed life.
“Passing by this… empty sand planet?”
The stranger smirked.
He tried again. “Do you have a name?” That was, after all, the next question he’d normally been asked in those past lives.
The man closed his eyes and tilted his head back decadently, exposing his neck to the sun in a way that somehow, inexplicably, managed to look salacious. “Yep,” he said, with a self-satisfied, irritating pop at the end, and oh. That was new - an actual, real feeling. Irritation. His first real feeling since The Moment. “Quite a few names actually, over the years. But in this corner of the galaxy, most folks know me as The Captain.”
Then a different thought, a different feeling stirred, this one so much sharper and more desperate than the irritation. He dared not name it, lest it be snuffed out, but something of it must have shown through in his face because the Captain’s eyes were suddenly full of empathy.
“Oh. No. I’m sorry Doctor, but it’s not what you’re thinking. I’m human. A bit of a complicated human, temporally speaking, but a human even so.”
That sharp, desperate feeling turned scalding, expanding in his chest until he felt it in every cell of his body. He clenched his jaw and pressed his eyes closed against it, grasping for the first coherent thought he could find as a distraction.
“I don’t use that name any more,” he snapped, letting out some tiny wisp of the fire with it. It wasn't enough. Nowhere near enough.
“No?” The man actually looked genuinely surprised by that, the first time since arriving. “Huh. Why not?”
It was an impossibly large and heavy question. His fingertips worked their way into the sand by his hip without any conscious intent, seeking the grounding effect of the resistance. After a moment he drew his hand back up again, flat this time, and watched as the tiny grains trickled back through his fingers. The fire in his chest still burned, but less like a flame now and more like hot coals. Stable, but ready to flare back to life at the slightest provocation.
“That name was a promise,” he confessed, low, almost a snarl. “One I could not keep.”
The Captain's expression turned shrewd. “Because of the Time War?” he asked. “The Time War that’s over now?”
Was it over? He was still here, after all. Sitting on this sandy, planet-sized scar across space-time. He was never supposed to have survived.
Could the war really be over, if he had survived?
After several minutes, the Captain leaned back on his hands, watching the shimmering haze of the horizon. “You never answered my question. Don't think I didn't notice. Why regenerate here?”
“I regenerated here because I died here,” he answered, terse and a little bit too sharp. The Captain just raised an eyebrow.
“Ah. I suppose that would do it,” he acknowledged.
Their two shadows cast out long and ominous in front of them, now that the sun was to their backs. The Captain took the silence in his stride, waiting with a kind of patience that humans were never meant to possess.
Hours passed, the sun set, and the sky darkened to a deep purple-black. Little specks of light pierced through its fabric, at first just a handful and then multitudes. The longer he looked, the more of them he could name.
He’d not expected that, either. That the universe might continue, largely unchanged.
“I know you think you don’t deserve to have survived,” the Captain said, unprompted. “And I do get that, far better than you would guess.” He sighed, a weary sound that echoed with all the heaviness of his improbable timeline. “But you did survive. You’re here, now, and you’re alive. Maybe that’s not just a coincidence. Maybe you’re here because the Universe still needs a Doctor?”
He huffed, dismissively. “Then it saved the wrong person. I’m not him.”
The Captain said nothing more for a few minutes, just watching him with a thoughtful, almost nostalgic expression. Then he clapped a hand to the Doctor’s back and, inexplicably, grinned.
“They’re tricky things aren’t they, these regenerations? Come on then, Doc. Enough moping about, let’s get you cleaned up.” He heaved himself upright, dusting the sand off his legs and backside and sighing dramatically. “Worst part about planets like this? The sand gets everywhere.” He raised his eyebrows in a way that was bordering on cheeky, holding out a hand to help the Doctor to his feet. “And I mean everywhere.”
---
The inside of the TARDIS had changed since he’d last seen her. The coral pillars around her heart had remained the same, but the space beyond them had grown much darker. The walls, previously straight and practical, now formed an extravagant dome over the time rotor, and low, ethereal lights painted the whole arrangement gold and black, casting deep shadows in a dozen different directions. For the barest hint of a moment he was accosted by a memory of a citadel in flames… And then shut that thought down hard, even as the coals in his chest flared their indignation.
“This your doing?” he asked, gesturing vaguely at everything. The Captain raised his eyebrows, glancing around.
“The new desktop? No, pretty sure that was all her.” He ran a sympathetic hand over one of her coral struts. “She’s grieving too, I think. Just has to express it a bit differently to us.”
That thought also nudged at the hot, angry place in the Doctor’s chest, but he was saved from having to wrestle it back under control by the distraction that was the Captain, taking his hand and drawing him out to the hall.
He wasn’t sure where they were going. The TARDIS layout had always been somewhat variable, but he could feel her shifting around them in real time now, remaking herself into something new. There was a kind of thrill to the uncertainty though, something fresh and new in this regeneration, a hungry curiosity that dampened the pull of the darkness... And then, through a doorway, and they were in a bedroom.
It was more a suite, really, and not one that the Doctor could remember ever having seen before. A curious blend of anachronistic ephemera filled the space; an oversized bed in a fifty-first century colonial style sat below a sketch of Vendovia some time in the seventy-sixth. On the bedside table there was a worn paperback novel and a digital clock, both of which would have been entirely at home on 20th century earth.
And then, as if all this were not already incongruous enough, there was a space that the Doctor could only describe as a cocktail lounge peeking out from around the corner.
He was almost certain he would have remembered a cocktail lounge in his TARDIS, so clearly this was new too.
The Captain led him to the bar, setting him down on a stool before taking himself around the back to a shelf that was stocked to a point of absurdity. He filled a glass, sliding it across to him with an expectant expression. The Doctor looked at it sceptically.
“It’s just water,” the Captain reassured him. “I’d offer you something stronger, but I’d wager you’re too dehydrated to properly appreciate it.”
The Doctor examined the glass briefly, then gave it an experimental sip. The water was icy against his tongue, cooling a track all the way down his throat, and suddenly he was gulping at it, desperately chasing the relief he hadn’t realised he needed.
Then, cruelly, the glass was being drawn away from his mouth by a hand not his own. He tried to chase after it, but to no avail.
“Slow down, Doc. You’ll make yourself sick. Small sips, yeah?”
He glared obstinately at the Captain for a moment, but the effort was short lived. He nodded a begrudging acceptance instead, and control of the glass was once again returned to him.
He sipped more slowly this time, and when it ran dry, another full glass was offered in its place. The Captain turned his attention to mixing up something much more colourful, and substantially more alcoholic, for himself, then found a particularly garish purple swizzle stick to stir it with, so by the time the Doctor had drained this second glass and exchanged it once more for a full one, he was feeling… Not calmer, precisely, but not so close to the emotional precipice. Finally clear headed enough to come to an important conclusion.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he pointed out.
The Captain shrugged. “Probably not, but the time lines were already in flux. Odds are that you’ll forget me pretty soon after I’m gone. And even if you don’t, well, I’m sure you’ll manage to look surprised next time we meet.”
“My people would have prevented this, you know. Stopped you,” he pointed out, letting that thought nudge gently at the angry place inside him. It hissed and spat, but also seemed subtly appeased by the acknowledgement.
“They might have tried,” the Captain smirked, but there was an empathy there that the Doctor could only take at face value. To ask more would be wrong. And yet...
“Will I…” he began, and then stopped, silently berating himself for his lack of self control. It was one of the earliest lessons learned, after all. Never ask a time traveller about your own future.
They might just tell you.
The Captain took a swig of his drink, staining his upper lip very slightly red, but the lines around his eyes were soft with understanding.
“You’ll be okay,” he said, with that distant sort of certainty that time travellers so often wore. “It might take a while, and it’s going to hurt a lot along the way. But you’ll get there, in the end.”
The Doctor narrowed his eyes, trying to discern exactly what was behind this certainty, but the man was irritatingly inscrutable.
“Going to need to do something about those clothes though. Not that I don’t love a man in a bandolier, but I’m pretty sure that coat was meant for someone slightly shorter than you." He grinned, looking downright flirtatious. "And I don't want you to take this personally, but you really need a shower.”
The Doctor drew straight in his chair. "A shower?" he echoed, wary.
"Mm hmm." The Captain smiled disarmingly, leaning on the bar.
The Doctor crossed his arms and leaned back, eyes narrowing once more. "This the part where you offer to join me then, is it?" he asked suspiciously.
The Captain's laugh was loud, joyous, positively bursting. "Oh, and with an invitation like that!" he grinned, his voice dancing atop an undercurrent of humour, before settling into a wry, nostalgic sort of amusement. "Some other time, maybe… You’ll have to buy me a drink first."
---
His shower was brief but, as the Captain had quite rightly identified, extremely overdue. When the Doctor did finally return to the strange bedroom suite to acknowledge that fact though, the Captain was already gone.
In his place was left a stack of clean clothes; thick soled black boots, plain black trousers, and a top made from soft ando-fleece that had, incongruously, been crafted into a very traditional, Earth-styled V-neck.
And a coat. Black, this time, not brown like the one he’d worn for so long, but with leather as soft and supple as any he’d ever owned. New, yet already perfectly worn in, like it had been made for him.
It probably had been. The contents of the TARDIS’s wardrobe were as much a dynamic construction as the rest of her, after all.
He slipped it on, letting it settle on his shoulders. It was light, comfortable, strong, a layer of armour to protect him from a universe that was at once both unthinkably old, and horrifyingly new.
His hand found its way into a pocket, where a slip of paper had been stashed. A note, handwritten, with a freshness to the ink that would have made its origin clear even if it had not clearly been signed off, “Your Captain”.
Time to go home, Doc, it said, and then a set of temporo-spatial coordinates.
It took him a moment, his brain still suffering from the lingering effects of regeneration and the state of temporal flux, but the calculation was not especially hard. He’d done it many times before, after all. They were coordinates for the Sol system. Earth. Early 2005.
Perhaps the Captain had a point. Earth was not his home, not really, but it had been something like a home, for a time, when he had needed one.
Always something distracting going on there, at any rate. He could do with some distracting.
“Earth,” he said aloud, and the TARDIS hummed her approval. “Yeah. Let’s go to Earth.”