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The Doctor’s voice was quiet, barely a whisper swallowed by the vastness of the TARDIS. His eyes struggled against the exhaustion that fought to keep his eyes shut, with eyelids trembling in their effort. He resisted the natural instinct in his body which urged to surrender and fall back into the comforting darkness of his own mind, letting the universe continue without him.
As he succeeded in his battle, the harsh white glow of the console room assaulted his eyes. His vision was flooded with a sterile glare, as the roundels along the walls shimmered and pulsed. Around him, the TARDIS hummed with it’s ancient living engines, groaning like a wounded creature.
“Belinda…” he mumbled, the words weakly falling from his mouth as he gained controlled of his face.
Now sensation returned to his hands, and he could feel the cold floor of the TARDIS as he pressed his fingertips against them. Aching soared through his arms, as he gained a strange unfamiliar awareness of his body. Each nerve and bone, moving and pulsing and screaming into life.
Pushing against the ground, he resisted the faltering as his arms shook violently in their efforts.
Belinda smiled, holding Poppy beneath the basking sunlight of an ordinary Saturday. Poppy’s tiny fingers reached towards the blue sky, feeling the air whisk through her fingers.
The Doctor shook the image, feeling the strange numbness in his memories as though the vivid picture was nothing more than a remnant of a dream. It rested in his mind, like a photograph he never remembered taking, or a lyric he never remembered hearing.
Shaking away the image, trying to rid the fog that cluttered his mind, he turned to glance around the console room. The TARDIS was silent. He reached up, found the edge of the console, and pulled himself to his feet.
His head turned around the TARDIS, before his arm reached to the frame of the console and he heaved himself upwards.
Stars burned in the beautiful mirage of colours of galaxies that scattered the infinitesimal abyss of space. Far in the distance, glinting beautifully, was Joy…
The Doctor felt his breathing hitch and his heartbeats skip, as his gaze fell upon his own reflection. Staring back at him was his face. This wasn’t just any Doctor. It wasn’t an incarnation he had seen before, nor a face he recognised from a previous life.
He saw his face.
Energy erupted from his body. Exploding through his body and bursting out into every direction like a storm desperate to escape him. Light had spilled from his fingertips and filled his vision with a harsh golden glow.
Until eventually, he felt that moment of near death. That near conviction that he would die. He felt his hearts give way for a splinter of a moment, whilst time itself seemed try and draw him away from the universe.
Yet here he was. Alive.
Pressing his hand against his head, he tried to calibrate his memories, but all the recent flashes and snapshots felt like half-formed flashes. Like blurry photographs caught in the rain with bleeding colours, and broken pieces of film struggling to retain anything that resembled an image.
His hands quivered, as he discerned reality from fiction. He drew apart the image of Omega and the Rani, and Conrad and the baby creating wishes, and even his former incarnation and the haunting reminder of the love they never revealed to Yaz.
“There.” he muttered to himself, confidently capturing the last moment that he felt was real. The last moment that felt tangible and vivid…
Around him, the TARDIS was drowned in a harsh, obtuse red glare, distorting everything into a crimson sea. Shadows stretched across the floor. Bells tolled through the console, creating a cacophony of alarm that tore through the labyrinth of the ship. Creaking and groaning rumbling across the ship, stressing the metallic walls as though something was impeding on its dimensional structure. Whistling and roaring and ringing clashed through the air.
“That is the sound of May the 24th,” he had said, his own voice ricocheting through his head as he contemplated what to do next and then –
BOOM! The door exploded inward as a burst of fire and energy ripped through the console room, propelling the doors towards him.
Immediately, the Doctor spun his head around. Searching, frantically, for Belinda. He wondered if that Wish World was a dream – if the Rani and Omega and Poppy were fragments of a confused dreamscape that the explosive destruction of the TARDIS infrastructure had on him.
For a brief moment, his eyes locked onto the doors. Curiosity ran through him, puzzled as he stared at the door. No sign nor blemish of damage sat on its pristinely white paint, which glimmered beneath the harsh blinding light of the console room.
“Belinda!” he called out again, tearing his attention away from the curiosity for a moment. Darting around the console, he was bemused by her absence. Bemused by the fact that the TARDIS was silent beside its gentle humming and groaning. There was no sign of Belinda at all.
The Doctor pressed his eyes together, trying to race back through his memoires. Trying to remember where he had seen her. Sealing his eyes shut, he reached out into his mind, sorting and arranging the memories.
Poppy smiled, waved her hand towards the Doctor. Belinda smiled, with a faint sadness in her eyes, but a happiness for the child in her hand.
He wondered if that was real. If that Wish World had formed into reality and his regeneration had failed and he had returned to his own face… If this body refused to leave so early, if death was premature for him.
But if that was the case, he pondered, why were those thoughts so distant? Why did it feel like those memories were numbed and false and intangible?
He spun back around to the TARDIS doors, feeling a calling from it. Burning in his mind were those faint, distant, numbing images of when he last approached them. When he could feel his body fizzing with energy, someone new bubbling to the top. His skin pricked with heat and his hearts pattered with their last remaining heartbeats. He had felt time calling towards him, a new voice rattling in his mind.
This time, however, he reached out for the TARDIS doors and drew them open. He had no expectation of what lie before him and with the images that brimmed in his mind, he wasn’t so sure he cared.
Sunlight burned deep into his eyes, and he was met with a garden. A simple garden, plotted with birds and wind. Trees swaying their leaves, and grass teeming with a scent of being freshly cut. He could hear a distant hum of cars tumbling across a road, and a radio tuned to a news broadcast, recalling mundane facts about the world of politics and sport…
There was nothing here. No dying stars or ancient gods or evil villains trying to tear down reality…
It was just a garden.
For a moment, as the Doctor caught his bearings, he wondered if this were Belinda’s home. If the TARDIS had brought him to that garden, where he had said his goodbye to Belinda and Poppy with the aching burning realisation his life was soon to be over. He could hear the birds and feel the sun against his skin in that image, but it still teemed with the confusing detachment all those memories had been riddled with.
Then, the Doctor’s gaze fell on him. Wilf.
Sitting in a wheelchair, with a flask of hot tea brewing in its own swelling boil, his eyes began to twitch. He was drawn to a waking consciousness by the groaning creak of the door, and his sight rose. Bewildered and confused, Wilf paused until his eyes widened and his jaw dropped. He took sight of the Doctor, who stared at him with equal bewilderment, before he thrust his head back to the house.
“It’s him!” he cried, his voice brimming with utter joy. “Donna! Doctor! It’s him, he’s alive!” He spun around to the Doctor, his face raised with nothing but the purity of happiness. “I said you’d live. You’re the strongest man I’ve ever known.”
The Doctor blinked, trying to make sense of the sudden eruption of excitement. “But where am I?”
“Home.” Wilf nodded his head, before raising his hand out for a handshake.
The Doctor, overcome with a sudden jolt of joy, leapt forward and threw his arms around Wilf. “But I died, Wilf. I regenerated. I saved us from the Wish World and then-”
Glancing upwards, his vision blurred from tears and confusion and the impossible weight of clashing realities, he watched as a cluster of faces stepped into the sunlight. Familiar faces of people he had carried through the galaxies and people he had said goodbye to, people he had never expected to see again.
He stared, blinking as he struggled to comprehend the parade that filed out from the house.
Yet amongst them all, his eyes were drawn first to Ruby. Her smile resting on her face with a calm peaceful beauty. The entire garden seemed to fizzle from his peripheral vision as he shot towards her, his voice calling out with excitement.
“Ruby!” he spoke, his voice calling out through the laughter. “Ruby Sunday!” Without a second thought he flung his arms around her and held her secure, feeling the tangible reality of the sight he had beheld. She returned the greeting, but her voice was muffled into his shoulder as he held her in an embrace.
His eyes moved shifted behind her as he let go, first noticing Donna standing a little further back with Shaun towering beside her. She folded her arms tightly, appearing composed despite a tear trickling down her cheek.
The Doctor smiled, his voice quietly uttering, “Donna.” Which provoked a crumple of her face as frustration and affection mixed together.
“Don’t you start. We thought–” she paused and dismissed the thought, “I see you’re still wearing that handsome face.”
“I didn’t think I was until a moment ago…” He remembered the burning of energy fizzing through his body.
“I think it suits him,” Martha’s voice interjected, catching his head to swing around. She studied his face, pausing as his smiled bristled. “But something’s wrong…”
The Doctor looked at her, his smile fading. “I’m fine,” he said, unconvincingly to everybody who had known him. Martha raised an eyebrow, and the Doctor resisted the urge to argue.
“Well,” Bill interjected, her voice soft and toned with smiles. “It’s definitely still him.” The Doctor turned and gazed at her confused, enough of a response to provoke her to speak. “You know that whole thing where you say you’re fine, but we all know you’re not.”
As the Doctor glanced around, he noticed everybody looked at him with a similar arched eyebrow or a nodding head. “Looks like that’s a group consensus then.”
Graham chuckled to himself, shrugging his shoulders. “Been saying that for years. You can speak a thousand words just with your eyes.”
“Some things don’t change,” added Ryan.
Glancing across, the Doctor’s gaze met Yaz. For a moment, neither spoke. The history between them was sore and sad, and their lives had been filled with too many moments where words should have been said.
Yaz smiled, her voice accepting the words she had to say, “Hi.”
The Doctor’s face softened, calmed by her acceptance. “Hi.” And with that, the word carried away the guilt and shame.
“That weren’t half awkward,” remarked Dan, smirking as he glanced between them. He stuck his hand out for the Doctor to shake, his mind busy trying to make sense of how his Doctor was now this entirely different man.
Mel, Ace, Nyssa and Tegan stood nearby, the latter two with their hands intertwined, watching with their own quiet smiles, people from different chapters of his life who had somehow all arrived at the same moment.
“You’re all...” The words faded from his voice as he let out a confused scoff, trying to make sense of the sight before him. Each of them smiled at him, not quite sure what to say.
“But where’s Belinda?” remarked the Doctor, glancing around with a fright in his heart. “Poppy – what about Poppy?”
Ruby sighed, weakly looking back to the Doctor with a guilt which didn’t translate into anything but a striking terror in the Doctor’s heart.
“Ruby…” His voices trailed, searching around in the hope somebody would offer him an answer. “Where is she?”
“Doctor–”
“No,” interjected the Doctor, shaking his head as he glared back to Ruby. His lip resisted the quivering sensation it tried to take.
“We don’t know where Belinda is.” Ruby stated, sighing heavily. “But Poppy was part of the Wish World.”
“You remember it?” asked the Doctor, briefly slipping into confusion as he stared at Ruby. “It wasn’t a dream?”
“It wasn’t real, either.” Ruby’s voice was weak, as she stared at the Doctor with brimming guilt.
“It was a bubble universe created by the Rani. To her, it was nothing more than a petri dish.” Explained a familiar voice which propelled the Doctor back to a time he had long forgotten.
He glanced ahead, catching sight of his former self, who had decided to settle down on Earth and live out his days with a family.
“But-” the Doctor stammered, trying to make sense of what he was seeing before him. “How did I even get here? Belinda was- was with me.” Now the memory of the exploding TARDIS doors felt concrete in his mind, and his eyes shot between Ruby and his former self, struggling for answers.
“A woman laid you at the door,” said Ruby. “She didn’t say a word, just left you there and knocked on my door. When I looked out the window, all I could see was some woman in a cloak. I contacted UNIT and they brought you here.”
“I knew you weren’t dead though!” chuckled Wilf, wagging his finger at him. “I told them.”
“None of us did,” Yaz interjected, who had spent most of her time unsure where to look. It felt wrong glancing back towards him as he wore the face of a different Doctor.
“I suggested we lay you down in the TARDIS,” noted Bill, nodding her head, “Seem to work last time.” She shrugged, smiling back to the Doctor.
The Doctor shook his head, his voice quivered as he spoke, “We need to find Belinda.” He spun around to the TARDIS doors and glanced back nervously, the faces of them all.
All of his friends, except her.