Archive of Our Own

Like the mark of a terrible tyrant
My eyes are like his

- Book of Fate, Luca Wilding

There’s orange dust stuck under your fingernails.

Your face twists in discomfort – displeasure? Anger? No. It was anger, once, not that long ago, with this face, and with the face that was this face but also wasn’t. Ngh. Bad idea. Don’t think about it too hard. It should have settled by now, it should have, only you’re starting to wonder if maybe it’s never going to settle, if this is what settled looks like now; if every thought in the wrong direction feeling like brushing a finger over a live wire is just going to be the way of things from now on.

Well. Wouldn’t be the first time.

No – yes – no, would it?

Your hands drop back into your lap and you look away, out, towards the scattering of stars. The glorious swirling azure of the planet spans below where your feet dangle off the edge of the open platform, dizzying. Intoxicating. All the best space stations have a view from the roof, the rumble of stabilising engines humming through the panels and through your skin and bones – the ones that still don’t completely feel like yours – no. No.  

– in fact, you realise rather abruptly that you could list all the space stations with good views from the roof, if you so desired, which you both do and don’t, so that’s not something you’re going to think about too hard either. No one here to tell, anyway, and you don’t quite fancy the idea of talking to yourself. But the view – it’s stunning. You can see that, now, for the first time. You always did see it. The planet turns below, teeming with life, a sweeping frame of frozen meteors and shattered moons that failed to reach the surface running rings around the atmosphere. White clouds twist and coil in the blue, constantly shifting and evolving into storm systems as you watch, and the timelines – it’s all a blur of possibility from this far away, at this angle. An indistinct glow of future potential, golden threads burning in the dark, woven into the uncertain tapestry of probability, and you keep finding yourself staring at it, blinded by the beauty. At least, from this distance, the feeling of it all brushing against your time sense – which has been extremely sensitive, recently – only hurts the same way as a bruise. An old, distant injury. Pain is experienced through the conduit of time, you know this. The further away you get, the more it dulls. Fades. An ache in your lungs. Dust under your fingernails.

You look down again. Try, for the millionth time, to scrape out the grains. It’s all over your clothes too – orange dust, clinging to you, the gutted insides of a broken hourglass. But what’s shattered glass anyway? Just sand, melted down and changed under the heat of hellfire into something new. Regeneration – only to crack apart on the other side.

Careful, murmurs your mind, still carrying the intonation of the person you use to be – the person you never were. Don’t want to cut yourself. Trust me. Speaking from experience.

A breath of air escapes your lips in a quiet huff, not quite a laugh, not quite a sob, not quite anything. You don’t know. Just like you don’t know anything. And there’s a part of you – petulant, a coiled snake poised to bite – that says this was meant to fix everything. Of course, it didn’t. When does it ever?

Both of the people you used to be – neither of them ever got what they wanted. Two catalysts with an explosive reaction. You’re merely the byproduct of their failure. Nothing but toxic waste left behind.

The dust digs in deeper. Persistent.

You consider ripping your fingernails off altogether and being done with it, but you’re too far-gone from regeneration now for them to heal back in a matter of moments. That’s almost an allure. No, it’s not. Yes, it is. Which part of you had self-destructive tendencies? You can’t really remember now. It’s all – it’s all too much, in your head. You remember, you’d thought it be quieter, like this. That it would be a relief. And in some ways, it is – but in others, it’s a clamour, too many voices too many memories digging their claws in and it’s not better it’s not it’s not it’s not, it’s just –

The timelines tense, an unseen force pulling at the threads. It bites, shark teeth, and you tense instinctively. You know exactly what’s coming, and you need to brace yourself, because you’ve already learnt the hard way –

Reality puckers, pinched between fingers and sucked up through a straw, wrenching your time sense like pouring acid into an open wound until you want to scream with it but you don’t you don’t you don’t you wait it out you wait you wait until –

Until, with a snap, the air splits open and spits someone out onto the lonely roof of the space station, and the timelines twist and bend down to a single, tapered point.

Panting, gasping breaths; the acrid taste of cheap and nasty time travel. Vortex manipulator.

You would know, you think, as your shaking fingers trace the same device that’s coiled around your own wrist like a viper, fangs digging into your skin. A slow poison, carried towards your hearts by a double-pulse that won’t ever stop. A rhythm that drove the person you used to be insane. It might do the same to you. The itch to tap your fingers in time is, sometimes, more than you can stand.

He thought you’d be free of it.

He thought you would change.

Footsteps behind you, coming closer. Boots against deck plating. You don’t turn to look, closing your eyes. You know who it is – that much has been obvious since he arrived and the timelines converged like some kind of temporal eclipse. Black out. You try not to feel too relieved, instead breathing in and tasting the sterile, recirculated air. The tang of faux atmosphere that surrounds the external areas of the space station, making excursions like this one perfectly safe, is somewhat comforting. You can breathe. You don’t have a death wish. Not anymore.

The steps come to a halt, close. A coat brushes against your arm, familiar and foreign.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” says Captain Jack Harkness.

Yes.

It’s you.

Of course, no one can quite decide what that means anymore.

You open your eyes, and a smile twists at your lips. Jack is a fact, a certainty in time – and with him standing so close, he’s managing to cast a complete shadow over your abused time sense. Even the blur of possible futures in the planet below is lost to you now – and that dull ache has vanished to nothing. It’s even soothing the raw edges from where the timelines had been punched through by his vortex manipulator travel. You find yourself both grateful and disgusted all at once, and also strangely unmoored. Like that constant pounding behind your eyes had been an anchor, keeping you in the moment. An old friend, always there for you even as you flinched away. And now, it’s been traded in for another.

“Jack,” you say – first time, with this tongue. Strange. Tastes different. Feels – old. One word, and it carries far too much with it. It catches in your chest on the way out in the way that you’re both surprised by and have learnt to expect. Jack Harkness. It’s been a long time, and you wish it had been longer because you can’t stand him. Only, it’s not been long at all, and you’ve missed him like lungs miss oxygen in the vacuum of space – like a Gallifreyan misses a marmalade sky.

It makes sense that he’s here. Honestly, you should have expected this.

You push yourself up, scrambling, nearly overbalancing – you’re still trying to get the knack of the balance in this body. You’d thought it be easier, seeing as you’re pretty much the same size as you were before, give or take an inch, and also you were in this body before, for over seven decades, only – only – only –

Only you stabilise, wrestling back control. Steady.

“Captain,” you say, starting afresh, pulling a lopsided grin on your face. A couple of times, catching a glimpse of your face in a reflection, you’ve almost reminded yourself of something kinder. A man stood under an outback sky who you still pretend is someone who actually existed. Someone you cared about. Someone you were. Wanted to be. “How’d you find me? – no, wait, don’t tell me –” You hold a hand up in the space between you both, and try not to feel how desperately you’re holding onto your fraying sense of control. Both of the people you’d been once had, after all, had something of a flair for the dramatic. “Heard I was in the area? No, no, that’s far too boring. Oh – did you detect my quantum trail? Get some clever equipment that pinpoints the exact location of individuals with binary-vascular systems? Not many of those around, these days.” Not many indeed. You push the thought aside, stepping closer, eyebrows raised. “Or maybe you saw my face on a wanted poster on some backwater planetary dock and started tracking down my movements? Because I promise, whatever they want me for, I’m definitely responsible –”

You’re stalling. Of course, you are. When are you not? You built two entire lives on being able to talk your way into or out of anything. And sometimes it had gone better than others, but in this case, in this case –

You don’t know yet, is the thing. You can’t tell.  

When is Jack, in all of this? In the convoluted web of criss-crossing timelines?

Does he know what you are?

Jack, who has been watching you with a strange expression, suddenly cracks a wry smile. Recognition, you think. “I have my ways, Doctor. You should know that, by now. Looking good, by the way –” He gestures. “New face.”  

He doesn’t know, then. A shiver of something strange ripples through you, and you have to turn away, a breath caught in your throat. Is that the first time someone’s called you The Doctor since – since –?

“Change back!” Yaz demands,
as you fall against a crystal pillar,
pain and fire and fury
blazing through you,
consuming you,
choking you –

“Can’t be done,” you gasp,
and why won’t she see that
you’re the Doctor now,
just because it’s this face,
just because of what you
did to get here,
but you’re not the Master,
you’re the Doctor,
you are,
only you suddenly remember
that they never do see you,
they always think that someone
has stolen the person
that they loved –

“Doc,” Jack says, again, stepping closer. He reaches out a hand, fingers closing around your arm, and that breath stuck in your throat suddenly slips out, a shudder – because this is the first kind touch someone has given you since you were born.

When you were born, of course, it was different. You were different. Caught in the throes of a regeneration gone wrong – a regeneration gone right – and overpowered by one personality out of the two, the other one pushed down into the depths. But that wouldn’t last for long.

“How did you find me?” you ask again, looking back at Jack and meeting his eyes. It’s both a genuine question and an interrogation. You’re not sure if you wanted to be found or not – but you’ve walked a path across the universe that shouldn’t be follow-able by any old schmuck with a vortex manipulator. There is, after all, orange dust under your fingernails.

Jack meets your eyes without flinching. He always has. When he found you again after you left him behind. When you strung him up in chains during a year that never was. When he stood on the other side of a prison wire fence. He’s not afraid of you – either of you.

“I heard you regenerated,” Jack says. “That’s quite a specific sort of energy, if you know how to detect it.” He raises his eyebrows. “Did you even know that you guys sort of leak traces of that stuff for a little while after you change? Kinda leaves a trail.”

“Right, of course,” you say, glancing away. He’s lying – not about the regeneration energy. But it’s been too long – days, you think. Weeks? Hard to say, when your time sense has been nothing but screaming and pain since this whole thing started to settle. You’ve got theories as to why it didn’t happen right away. You felt it – the branching of timelines. The splintering of bark.

In another world, an adjacent universe – you don’t exist anymore.

“What happened?” Jack asks, quiet. You have to laugh.

“The Doctor died,” you say. “And then I was born.”

“You know what I mean,” Jack presses, shifting. “Where’s the TARDIS? Where’s Yaz?”

You twist back to look at him, a challenge, leaning in, and, oh, the sound of her name is still an exposed nerve, isn’t it? Venomous, alive, writhing and twisting within you. You hadn’t realised. You’ve known this whole time. “Yaz? What makes you think I was with Yaz?”

Jack’s gaze is unreadable, closed. “You’re telling me you’re a few faces further along from when I last met you? When you were a woman?”

You pull a face, the person you once were twisting with discomfort. “I don’t think I was a woman.”

“Fine. You’re telling me that you’re not the one after yellow braces and rainbows?”

“Ages ago, now,” you say, misdirection coming naturally. Not exactly a surprise. “Feel like a whole new person –” Like two whole new people –

“Then why,” Jack cuts in, reaching out to cup your ear, and you feel the metal chain of your earring get caught between your skin and his fingers, “are you still wearing this?”

Ah.

“Can’t I wear what I like?” He should have seen you before. At least you’ve had sense to change, for the most part, since – well. Since. You’re no longer wearing your past selves’ cast-me-downs. Not that they’re quite your past. Not completely. The coat/sweater-vest/celery/recorder combo is gone. Now, you’ve gone with a worn, slightly over-sized leather jacket, a deep purple shirt with a swirling, confused pattern, dark trousers – all faintly coated in that orange dust that just won’t go.

And the earring.

The person you were, the person who didn’t want to let go, to step over the edge – she’s still hanging on. Piercing you. Whispering in your ear.

Jack’s gaze has gone cold. “You’re lying to me.”

You lean closer, grabbing his wrist and moving his hand away from your ear. “So are you. Jack. How did you find me?” Something vicious flickers through you, and you remember with a distant pleasure that horrifies and sickens you, how much you enjoyed torturing someone who couldn’t die. “Don’t make me ask twice.”

For a moment, Jack just stares back at you, strangely defiant. Then, he twists his hand in your grip, fingers coming around the vortex manipulator, which he deftly unbuckles from your wrist.

“Gotta be careful where you pick these up from,” he says, wry, holding it up in front of your face. “Never know where they’ve been.”

Right. Of course. Stupid, stupid.

You picked up that, after all, in the feverish fervour of post-regeneration, in the desperate panic of a plan-gone-wrong, where you’d happened upon it just…left on the side in the TARDIS, gathering dust. It had probably been there, you muse, since you last wore a leather jacket. Jack had a habit of leaving them around, in case of emergencies. It’s probably been there for years – centuries, even – before you picked it up, scrambling for a way to escape, to run away.

It had been the most Doctor thing you’ve done since you were born.

“I got a couple of old vortex manipulators that I can still track. See where they’ve got to,” Jack says as he slips your – his – manipulator into his coat pocket. “This isn’t one of them, though. This one’s new. But I made sure I could keep an eye on it. I wanted to know if it got activated. Where it would go.” He gives you a hard stare. “Because I gave it to Yaz. New Years, 2021. Just in case.”

You lift your chin, stepping back. In the back of your mind, in memories that are beginning to feel more and more like your own, you’re leaving Jack alone on Satellite Five, lifetimes ago. “Ah.”

“Yeah,” Jack says. “So, I see it gets activated. Goes all over the place. Way out to the edge of the universe, at one point –”

The orange dust grates under your fingernails.

“– and so I figure, hey, maybe something’s going on. I’ll go to the coordinates where it was first activated, see if the TARDIS is there. See if the Doctor or Yaz need my help.” He steps closer again, reaching out to grab your wrist, grip tight – and this time, it’s not a comfort. He’s making sure you don’t get away. “Wanna take a guess what Yaz told me, ‘Doc’?”

He twists the nickname into something sharp, and it shouldn’t feel like a betrayal – you should have seen this coming, you did see it coming, and there’s a flash of violence inside you, and urge to just shove him off the roof, out of the artificial gravity and protective oxygen field and watch him suffocate just to get him to stop. You’ve seen him die before, over and over and over. Your fingers twitch at your side, ready, only – only – only –

The instinct fades, the fire dying before it could even catch.

Because you’re not the same person you were when you stumbled out of that chamber, burning with gold and a desperate fury that was going to burn you up from within.

And, besides, it’s Jack. You can’t untangle all the things you feel about him – the love, the hate, how you used to look down on him with two different sets of eyes in two different heads in two ways, how you ran away from him, how you ran to him –

And you’re like him, she whispers in your ear. Always were – well, I always was. And now you are too. Didn’t even know, and I rejected him for it. Hurt him way more than the Master ever did. That, and so many other things besides.

What does that mean for you, now? Now that you’re both of the people who hurt him the most?

But he doesn’t even see you as that, does he?

Yaz didn’t see any of the Doctor in you. She only saw him.

And, maybe, when you’d first been born, you’d have laughed in his face. A friend of the Doctor’s would never hurt you, because they wouldn’t want to hurt anyone. But your mind, unsettled as it is, has begun to stabilise. And you have the Doctor’s memories, and you know it’s not quite that simple, actually. Dread, slow and cautious as a woken snake, begins to uncurl in your gut.

“Jack,” you start, going for placating. Not even trying to pull out of his grip. Calm as you can. “Listen to me –”

Jack just laughs, bitter, cutting him off. “I’ll be honest, you had me for a moment there. I didn’t know the whole story – wanted to see what you did. What you said. And I thought maybe Yaz got it wrong – maybe it was just a regeneration gone funky or something. Or maybe that you just fixed it – that the Doctor won. But no. I know exactly who you are.” He leans in closer, threatening, all teeth and righteous fury. “And I don’t know how I’m gonna do it yet, but I am gonna get you out of there and get her back –”

He’s not here for you, she says in your head. He’s here to save the Doctor from the Master.

“And who am I, then?” you snarl, right up in his face, but the question burns at the back of your throat. “If you’re so certain –”

“The Master –”

“The Master is dead!” you seethe, merciless.

“Just because you stole her body, that does not make you her –”

“The Doctor is dead too!” It cracks on the way out like a laugh, like a sob, and his grip loosens enough in shock that you manage to pull your arm away and take a step back. “They’re both dead!” You shake your head, near delirious with the truth of it. A breath shudders in your chest. “It’s too late. It’s too late. Maybe, days ago, you could have ripped me apart and got them back, but now –”

But now, things are settling. Blazing timelines, melted down, fusing. Two lives turned to one – and you know it’ll be permanent. You know when it started. You felt it in the pain in your time sense, in the burning that digs behind your eyes, and you’d still be feeling it now if it weren’t for Jack’s blinding presence and the cushioning of liminal space. Your future – their futures – once in flux, molten time, has begun to cool. Forging itself into a new shape.

“I couldn’t give them back to you even if I wanted to,” you tell him, breathless.

And that, it seems, makes Jack stop. He stares at you like a you’re a paradox – something beyond his ability to understand. Or – no. Maybe it’s something else. Something you can’t understand.

“If they’re both dead,” he asks, slow, still. Like he’s hiding a wound. “Then what does that make you?”

“– I AM THE DOCTOR NOW!” you snarl,
spitting in Yaz’s face because
she should see
why doesn’t she see
because this is different now
this is what you wanted
this is what you’re supposed to be
this is WHAT YOU ARE –
“I AM THE DOCTOR!”

But there’s rebellion, even inside of you.
Your body, twisting in pain,
and your mind –

New instincts. Fighting against them.
Can’t get distracted, not now, no no no,
you have plans, but there’s something
that says that this isn’t right,
this isn’t who you are,
that you’re something else –

You don’t know. You don’t know –

“– but why?!” you snarl
through the smoke,
the words wrenched
from your throat
like they’re burning you
on the way out,
still bursting
with your own newness.
“Why are you doing this?!”

“Because,” your mirror image replies,
trembling in the door,
sonic in hand,
“I’m the Doctor –”

“You should go back to Yaz,” you tell him. And you can’t quite tell – your time sense is all but useless right now. No way to know for sure what strand of the timeline Jack is on – is he from your future, or your past? Impossible to say. You don’t even know the full scope of it yourself. But – but you have a hunch. Had one when he first arrived on this roof. Because he’d been there, hadn’t he? In the jaws of your defeat, before you’d run away across the universe with a vortex manipulator. There’d been several figures, shifting in the dark, and your memories are blurred, smeared in a desperate attempt to keep the paradox at bay. But you wouldn’t miss him. A sunspot in your temporal periphery. “It’s not over for her yet.”

Jack’s face is a twisted cocktail of emotions – confusion, distrust, hatred, grief – before he settles on anger. “I’m not going anywhere without you.”

You huff a laugh, turning away. Looking back at the blue.

“You want to take me back across my own timeline?” You suck a breath through your teeth. “Fine. But I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

Is this how it happens, you wonder?

“See, the fact you’re saying it is making me think that’s exactly what I should do.”

A smile quirks at your lips, eyes fixed on the planet below. “Because I’m the Master?” You pause. “Or because I’m the Doctor?”

And there – you see it again, don’t you? The captivating beauty of the planet below. How big, how blue. Of course, that’s how you’ve always seen the universe – you remember that, it’s who you are. Only it isn’t. It isn’t. Because you also remember staring at the boy lying next to you in a field of red grass and wishing you could swipe every Rassilon-damned star out of the sky just so he’d look at you instead. You only looked the universe around you with a burning rage of jealousy, because this is what took the Doctor from you –

And now –

Now, the Doctor is you. The Master is you. You’re both of them, and neither at the same time. Their breath of life and their tombstone all in one.

And you’re looking at the universe with new eyes, and you almost want to cry.

“Honestly?” Jack says in reply to your question, and there’s a hint of amusement in his tone – and something else. You realise, suddenly, that whilst you’ve been lost in thought, he’s been shifting beside you. Fiddling with something. “I’m not really sure. Which is a bit more complicated than I was prepared to expect, coming into this. Which is why…”

He trails off, and you frown, glancing around – just as he lunges to wrap his arm around your neck, hand coming to meet the vortex manipulator strapped on his own wrist, the blindness of your time sense catching you completely off-guard to the shifting timelines –

“– I’ve got to do this.”

“No!” you snarl, you plead, trying to wrench away – but it’s too late too late too late –

Jack activates the vortex manipulator, and even with him so close, he can’t shield you from –

Reality fractures. Atoms turned to shards – your veins and arteries burn, your blood turned snake venom. Timelines don’t just twist around you, they shatter, thread turned to steel turned to shrapnel, piercing your skin and gouging out your eyes and you scream because the universe has turned against you every cell in your body is tearing itself apart and you can’t you can’t you can’t –

 – and you SCREAM
in the centre of the fire,
because you don’t want to burn
(you need to burn)
you don’t want to go
(you don’t want to be you)
you don’t want to die
(you want to be erased)
you don’t want to die –!
(you want to be gone –!)

but then
but then
with no warning
suddenly you’re not dying at all –

You can’t –

– you’re being born.

There’s an ocean in your ears and something cold beneath your cheek.

Every inch of you hurts.

No – no, that’s not quite right. Your body? Fine, actually. Bit chewed out, but still shiny and new, for the most part. It’s levelling out, now. You ripple your fingers, testing. Starting to feel like yours, rather than borrowed glove you just pulled on, burning yourself in the process. No, no, it’s not your body that’s the problem.

It’s your time sense, again.

No no no – it’s not your time sense that’s the problem, but it feels like it is because that’s just the conduit through which you feel the pain. The agony. Your heartrates pick up, skittering in your chest, and a groan escapes your lips. You curl tighter into yourself, pressing your face against the cool, hard floor. It does nothing to abate it. Nothing will, until it’s done. At least, you hope so. You suppose there’s no way to know for sure – this is unprecedented. Unexplored territory. Maybe this is just your life now.

Jack is gone – or, at least, he’s not close by. That much is obvious because you can feel it, rather than having it blocked out by his presence. Your timelines are fusing. And they always had been so entangled – both parts of you had hated the fact, wanted to deny it, to erase it, to run from it – but lives like that aren’t the sort of thing that you can pull apart without there being…extreme consequences. You know that now. You can feel it. Because the braid of the Doctor and the Master’s timelines are now becoming your timeline. Singular – or it will be, soon. Has this ever happened before? You remember, in the Time War – temporal weapons going off right, left and centre, it was only a matter of time before people started getting caught in the cross fire. Two soldiers, hit by the same paradox grenade, and when the resulting implosion tried to mangle two timelines into one –

And the two timelines tore each other apart.

You remember seeing it.

(You remember running. Hiding at the end of the universe, a fobwatch in your hand and a drumbeat in your head, trembling –)

“That's how you stop
two sides warring, Yaz,”
you tell her, staring
at the view before you.
Your handiwork.
It's familiar, deep down
in your stomach, but
not in the way you want it to be.
You squash the feeling down.
 “Destroy them both –”

But you’re not like those soldiers. This is different. This is –

Survivable, you think, even as more pain wracks you, and you shudder. It doesn’t feel like it – and the pain might drive you mad before it’s done with you, but – but this isn’t going to kill you.

Maybe there’s a reason for that, the person you were whispers – and she feels fainter, suddenly. Like maybe, as time goes on, she’s fading away. Maybe, because our two timelines were already so entangled, it means that they can be fused into one. She laughs. The only reason you’re gonna survive this is because of the one thing we were both trying to escape. The history between us.

A laugh huffs from your lips – and then another wave of pain rushes at you, overwhelming. Ngh! You twist in agony, your back arching, a pained sound dragging itself out between your teeth. And it’s only then, as you move, that you feel it – resistance, pulling your arm back behind you. Well. That’s not a good sign. But it’s only when the pain releases you and your body goes limp, falling back against the floor, that you’re able to turn your head and see.

Your wrist is handcuffed to a pipe on the wall behind you.

For a moment, you just stare at it, still panting for breath. Then, you give it a hard and pointed tug. The chain rattles – but the pipe, it seems, is not going to come away from the wall any time soon.

Well. Fantastic.

There’s still orange dust under your fingernails.

But – but. There’s something else now. There’s something new on your jacket sleeve – yellow sand, amongst the Gallifreyan orange. And then – the ocean. You can hear it again, suddenly. Waves, crashing on a shore – outside? Bright like a jewel, probably, you can just imagine it, stretching out to the horizon line. You twist your head again, trying to get a better look at your surroundings. Some kind of – room? Doesn’t look like a house. More like – like a watch station? Metal walls stretch above you to a ceiling with high windows, warm sunlight streaming in. And there’s – there’s stuff around. Bits and pieces of equipment, cables spilling everywhere. You’re too dizzy to look at it properly and make sense of what it is – to make sense of much at all, to be frank. You’d be able to tell what century you were in if your time sense wasn’t just a screaming mass of pain in the back of your head. But you don’t need many of your faculties to figure out where you are.

The Boeshane Peninsula.

Probably, some time after the place was all but abandoned, judging by the rust on the metal work.

It looks – vaguely familiar.

Interesting, you think – just before the pain ramps up again, and you find yourself curling up against the floor all over again, like maybe, if you try hard enough, you could press yourself into the tiles and through the other side.

It’s been aggravated by using the vortex manipulator – which you’d admit is really your fault rather than Jack’s, if you felt like taking the credit, which you don’t. But after your initial plan went downhill…after you were stumbling around in the TARDIS, panicked and looking for a quick way to escape from not only from Yaz and the others, but also your own future that you’d just seen, cemented into fate –

You’d grabbed a vortex manipulator, and hadn’t thought twice.

It had started already, by then. The fusing of your timelines. You think, maybe, at the beginning, it might have still been possible to prise the Doctor and the Master apart. But no longer. And the further you went – the more you travelled, exposing yourself to the vortex and pure time without the protections of the exo-chronoplasmic shell of a TARDIS –

The further you ran from the epicentre – the branching of timelines –

Well. The worse it got.

And you were starting to change, too. The initial fever of post-regeneration was beginning to fade, the determination to burn everything you set your eyes on began to diminish, and it had instead felt…strange. Like your head was starting to clear after a fit of delirium. Only it hadn’t been delirium – and you certainly didn’t feel more certain about yourself. Your mind was a mess of contradictions, warring instincts trying desperately to survive, your very self of sense become a warzone. And then the memories – the Doctor’s, the Master’s – all twisting around in your head and trying to settle into something coherent and whole. Your memories – your timeline – is a patchwork that’s still being stitched together.

It was then that the way you saw things began to change. You kept – you kept stopping in wonder. The universe was beautiful, now. At first, you fought against it – against all of it. Because – because you wanted to tarnish the name of the Doctor, make it a byword for terror, you wanted to erase the Doctor from existence so you could never be defined by them again, and you wanted to erase yourself so that you could never have to hurt like that again, and then –

And then –

And then, for reasons that you don’t understand, you’d gone to Gallifrey.

Gallifrey.

And you’d sat, crippled by the pain, on a planet where time was dead, and stared at the ravaged citadel that you’d destroyed twice over with two different pairs of hands, and you’d cried.

You still don’t really understand why.

How long had you stayed there for, alone with the ghosts? You don’t know. The Last of the Time Lords. But do you even count, anymore? You’re not sure. You remember finding those files in the Matrix – remember the fury that consumed you until it burst out of you and burnt the whole city down with it. But then you remember how it had felt on the other side of the mirror – to be told that your home was gone all over again. To find this place where you grew up, obliterated. To find out it was him who did it. And then finding out why – to know that the child, those experiments –

It all happened to you.

It all happened to you.

But it didn’t. But it did.

The pain twists again, and a cry rips itself from your throat.

This was – definitely an unforeseen side effect. Deeply unfortunate. But, through the pain, just when you think things can’t get any worse, you feel something else. A twinge in the timelines – no, a tremor. A foreshock, complete with the taste of ozone at the back of your throat. A pained laugh leaves your throat – because, oh. You know what’s coming now.

The wheezing song of the TARDIS dematerialising fills the air, and within moments, you see her, beautiful and blue and real, as if she’d been stood there the entire time. And you should be worried – it’s only going to be bringing people with it, people who have cuffed you to a wall and are probably devising ways to force you to regenerate, but – oh. Oh, no no no, this is – you sit up, breathing shallow, ignoring the pain, because you can feel her. You can feel her, and it’s new and old, something borrowed from the person you were before, the person you are now, but –

The Master had had connections with TARDISes, of course – every Time Lord has, to some degree, in order to pilot. But the Doctor? That was different. Her connection with her ship was – was so rich. So full and blazing, abhorrent and stunning in equal measure. And it’s – it’s so strange, because when you first stepped into her TARDIS – into your TARDIS – it had blocked you out. Shutters down, a flare of sparks. Dirty protest, you’d spat – but there’d been something in you that had been so sad, and you hadn’t been able to figure out why. But it’s obvious now. Because you hadn’t known what you’d been missing. You hadn’t realised –

Because now, the TARDIS is reaching out to you. A brush of its – of her mind against yours. And a gasp shudders from your lips, because this is tentative, this is – this is your ship being uncertain, but she – she thinks she recognises you –

And you recognise her.

And, just like this, this meagre connection – already, it’s symphonic.

For a moment, all you can do is just stare.

Hello, you try, pushing the thought in her direction. In reply, you get a pulse of uncertainty.

Is this you? it seems to say.

You, of course, are getting more and more unsure on that one as time goes by.

Then, the doors open, and it’s only then that it occurs to you that you should have been using the time you’d been alone to come up with some sort of plan. Well. Never mind. You’ll have to improvise, if it comes to it.

The first person out is Jack, whose presence immediately acts as a soothing balm on your battered time sense, even at this distance. The part of you that finds that fact infuriating and disgusting is overpowered by the part that is just so painfully relieved to see him.

The person after that is that man who’d been around before – Vinder, you remember, from when you met him before, during the Flux, memories coming back in a rush. His whole planet had been destroyed, he has a family that he lost but he found them –

And then, right behind him, comes Yaz.

A breath hitches in your throat.

It hits you, suddenly, out of nowhere, that you desperately don’t want to lose any of them.

When had that happened?

“Yaz,” you say – not loud enough. “Yaz!”

She flinches back, and then she sees you, locking eyes. And – well, you don’t know what you expected, but it’s shouldn’t feel like the cut that it is when her gaze goes cold at the sight of you there. She lifts her chin, defiant. Upset.

“You don’t get to speak to her,” Vinder spits, already stepping in front of her. So quick to the defensive, like Yaz even needs defending – and, oh, you have to laugh at that, sharp and a little bit hysterical. They still see you the same, don’t they? No matter how you feel about them, no matter how much you change – it won’t make a difference. You could be the Doctor through and through, and they’d still only ever see the Master when they look at you.

“Ignore him,” says Jack, and something about that grates. You don’t think it would have been much better if he’d called you her, though, since you’re neither him or her – but you’d liked the variety, last time around. Or the time before that. “I think if we can connect in that last section, we might have a chance of reverse engineering it all. You’ve got the sonic, right Yaz?”

You watch, frowning as the three of them move over, looking at the equipment a bit more closely and that’s – oh. Suddenly, you start to recognise it.

Two glass chambers. The deconstructed parts of a piece of equipment that had once hung from the ceiling of the Winter Palace in 1916.

“Forced regeneration,” you murmur, thoughts racing. Your hearts pound in your chest, dread twisting – not because of what you think it’ll do to you, but because you know what it won’t do, and you know they’re going to try anyway.

“Yaz?” Jack says, prompting – and you realise, abruptly, that she’s been staring at you the whole time. She blinks, looking at Jack.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I’ve got it.”

“It’s not going to work,” you tell them as they turn, moving to get to work. They don’t stop, all of them stubbornly ignoring you, but you see their shoulders tense as you speak. Your words grow more urgent as you strain against the handcuffs. “Listen to me, I’m trying to save you time. It’s not going to work. It’s Gallifreyan technology, for a start, and no offence but it’s leagues beyond all of you –”

“Shut the hell up,” Vinder cuts in, sounding bored. You open your mouth to snap back, but a sharp shudder of pain ripples through you – Jack’s too far to put a stop to it completely – and you just let your body collapse back onto the floor, laughing breathlessly.

“You think I’m just trying to make you give up?” you say, panting slightly. You press your free hand against your eyes. “You won’t be able to do it. And besides, you can’t – you can’t feel it like I can. You can’t –” More pain, worse this time. You stop talking, curling into yourself again with a pained hiss of breath. It must be bad, if it’s cutting through Jack’s partial eclipse.

“What’s wrong with him?” Vinder asks.

“He wasn’t like this before,” says Jack. “He seemed pretty much normal. I told you. I almost thought he was actually the Doctor at first.”

“It must be a side effect,” Yaz says. “Something – something to do with what he did. Like his body’s rejecting what’s happened to it.” And there’s a hope in her voice, piercing through with all the grief, the guilt. “Like maybe she’s trying to get through.” 

Ha, you think, not quite able to talk right now. If only.

“Sounds like the Doctor,” Jack says – but he doesn’t sound as convinced, you don’t think. “Come on. We need to get this done already. I don’t know how much time we’ve got to do this before –”

He stops.

“Before what?” Yaz says. He doesn’t answer. “Jack, before what?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Just – let’s just fix this, yeah?”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay,” Yaz says after a moment. Then, there’s a rustle of fabric. “Doctor? What do we need to do next?”

You frown. What? You remove your hand from your face and make yourself look up, just in time to see a hologram of the person you used to be flicker into existence. She puts her hands on her hips and glances around, lips pursed.

“Weeeeell,” she says. “At least it’s not in the Winter Palace anymore! Ten points for avoiding irreversible changes to history by leaving advanced tech left about in the early 20^th Century. Good job, team.”

“It worked,” you breathe, sitting up again. Memories pour into your mind – hours and hours spent hunched over exceptionally small equipment, creating something exceptionally complex. “My AI hologram worked, oh, I am brilliant.”

The AI Doctor flinches, turning to stare at you.

“Is that me?” she asks, flickering. It means she’s upset, you know – it requires more processing power, executing on needless programmes and files. 

For a moment, no one says anything – like maybe they’re expecting you to answer. But out of all of them, you reckon you know the least.

“It’s what he turned you into,” Yaz says eventually. “We’re trying to get you back.”

“Right,” the AI says, still looking at you. Thinking, thinking. It’s probably the only thing in the room that will truly grasp what’s going on. “Right. And how long have – have I been like this?”

You can’t help the slight smile that tugs at your lips. Immediately hitting upon the right question. Of course she is.

“No more than a few hours,” Yaz answers. You look at Jack, and see his expression shift. He’s got to know, you think. “Why? Does it matter?”

“Oh, no, not really,” the AI says, already moving away from Yaz, looking at the equipment that she can’t touch. Misdirection. You recognise it intimately. “If it’s only been a few hours, then it’s fine! Perfect, actually, Time Lords are always in a kind of state of flux right after they’re regenerated, makes them a bit more malleable – and also comes in really handy sometimes. Especially if, say, you accidentally get one of your extremities cut off right after you regenerate! Then you can just grow a new one –!”

“What,” says Vinder.

“And if it hasn’t been a few hours, Doc?” Jack cuts in, already picking up cables.

The AI doesn’t look at him. “We should probably get this connected into some kind of power source – whatever it is, we’re going to need a lot of juice –”

“Doctor.”

“The changes become permanent,” you tell them. More open, this time around. Interesting. Pain threatens to break over you again, but you bite it back, letting yourself slump back to the floor instead. The back of your skull knocks against the tiles. “It’s not – regeneration’s not supposed to be reversable. It’s one way. The only way to change me would – would be to kill me.” A laugh escapes your throat, and you wonder if they’d actually try it. “See who I turn into next.”

And who would you be then? The Doctor? The Master? Or something else? Some twisted combination of the two that doesn’t even have a name.

Even now, still new and on the other side of the mirror, the idea of regenerating again terrifies you more than you’d like to admit. 

“You’re lying,” Yaz says, fierce.

“I’m really, really not.” You wave a hand. “Ask her.”

A pause. If the AI had been physically there, you imagine you would hear her shifting uncomfortably right about now. You know. You used to be the person she was based off.

“I’m right,” she says – and, oh. That’s interesting? “I mean – he’s right. If I’ve been him for too long, then I’ll have stabilised. The process of regeneration – no one knows much about it. Well –” You can imagine her swallowing. “Well, someone knew a lot about it, a long time ago –”

“But she’s dead,” you spit, before anyone can get any stupid ideas about going and looking for Tecteun. The pain wavers at the edges, threatening.

“But she’s dead,” the AI confirms.

“And how long has it been since he – did this?” Vinder asks, right as the pain swarms you, worse this time. Ngk! You twist against the floor, the handcuff digging into your skin as you strain against it, a strangled noise pulled from your throat like barbed wire being tugged out of your lungs. You’re not meant to exist, you realise, a little delirious. You’re an abomination, something that was never meant to happen. But you do, and now time is trying to heal itself, fix the damage – and it will, of course, it always does. Time is very resilient to little anomalies like you. But time is also unfeeling and cruel, and will not even flinch in the face of your suffering as you feel your timelines melt together all the way down to your atoms –

Only, then, suddenly, it starts to fade – exponential, in a way that you can’t quite make sense of, until suddenly there’s someone crouching next to you, a hand around your shoulder and pulling you up –

“What’s wrong with you?” Jack asks, and the pain is practically gone. Still, the sheer relief of it doesn’t stop you lurching forward and clinging to his coat, gasping for breath. You feel him flinch with surprise, tensing, before grabbing your wrist, like he’s half-expecting you to try and choke him or something. That’s fair, you suppose. “Whoa, easy –”

And yet, there’s the concern too. You wonder who he sees when he looks at you.

“My timelines are fusing together,” you tell him, hoping your AI will hear you. She’ll get it. She’s the only one who will for sure. “And it’s very painful, actually –”

“Timelines? Plural?” Jack confirms.

“Yes,” you say. “I’m two people, catch up.”

“The Doctor’s timeline – and the Master’s timeline?”

“Who else?”

“And is it killing you?” Jack says, cutting straight to the point. You have to laugh.

“Probably not. Why? Are you worried about me?”

I’m not worried about you, you expect him to say, hating everything you are. I’m worried about her.

But he doesn’t. He just takes your chin and angles your face so he can look at you. And there’s something so…strangely comforting about his presence. The very thing that the Master had always found so abhorrent about him had become something the Doctor had learnt to love, you realise. The weight of his existence. The certainty. Knowing that, even if her time sense was impaired, there was someone she trusted more than herself standing beside her. Watching her back, when she couldn’t.

Knowing that he would outlive her. That he was the only person who would.

“You’re all that’s left of the her,” he says. “Aren’t you?”

There’s nothing left of her, you want to say, to spit in his face – but it’s not true. Because as much as you want to see him squirm, there’s more of you that wants him to stop looking at you like that, because he just looks so sad. Who wants to fix everything by showing them that you’ve not changed, not really – look. Let’s go see the stars. You’ll get used to me. You’ll see me. I’m sorry for everything that I did to you.

“I’m all that’s left of him, too,” you counter. Warning. Jack swallows, looking away suddenly.

“Yeah.” He glances back at you. “I’m aware of that.”

“Jack,” Yaz says, and you turn and find her just a few feet away, waiting. Holding back. Cautious. “We need to get on with this.” She looks down at you, uncertain. “If we can reverse this, then it’ll reverse that too, right? The timelines fusing.”

You huff out a breath. “It’s too late for that.”

“It’s never too late,” Yaz says, fierce. “Jack, just come back over here –”

“No.” You grab hold of his forearm the moment he tries to pull away from you. You’re not above begging, you suddenly realise. “No, listen, please – you can’t reverse it, and you’ve got bigger things to worry about –”

“Like what?” Yaz asks. “Your plan to turn Earth into a Dalek foundry? Because, yeah, getting the Doctor back is exactly how I fix that problem.”

“You can’t!” you growl, shaking with the urgency of it. Because you’ve realised, suddenly, why you felt like you recognised this place – because you’ve been here before. You were here, and if things don’t go the same as how you remembered – you don’t want your younger self to succeed. You don’t want your plan to come to fruition. You don’t want this, and you hadn’t even realised how much you’d changed since you ran away with that vortex manipulator. “You can’t get her back and if you spend too long trying to rip me apart then you’re going to suddenly find yourself faced with the other me!”

“What other you?” Yaz asks, incredulous.

“Yaz, Jack, stop listening to this,” Vinder cuts in, stepping closer. In the periphery, the AI hologram wavers, taking it all in. “He’s just stalling –”

You turn to Jack, the only one who’s actually a seasoned enough time-traveller to get this. “I’m further along than you. All of you. I’m certain of it, but I can’t tell because you’re blocking my time sense!” You turn to Yaz. “Look at me. Was I wearing this when you last saw me?”

“No,” Yaz says, uncertainty creeping into her voice. “No, you weren’t.”

“So, he got changed – big deal,” Vinder says, growing urgent. “Yaz, come on –”

“Your hair is longer too,” Yaz says, crouching down in front of you – yes, finally.

“Yes,” you breathe. “And the last you saw me – you tried to trick me, using the hologram. But it didn’t work. I got away, with the Cybermen. But that’s not how it ended for me. I – I tracked down where you were. Saw you took the TARDIS – saw you took it to the Boeshane Peninsula. But by then, things were already going wrong –”

“Jack, Yaz –” Vinder says, appealing to both of them now.

“I’m going to come here,” you hiss, urgent. “And when I come, you’ve got to be ready –”

“Since when do you care?” Yaz asks. “Are you trying to say you’re on our side, now? That you want to help? D’you think we’re stupid?” And there are tears in her eyes suddenly. “You’re not her. You’ll never be her, because being the Doctor isn’t about having her body – it’s about what you do –”

Her voice cracks, and it breaks you to see her like this – because of course it does. You remember all that time with her – all the ways you’ve failed her, all the ways you’ve given her the universe, all the things you should have done better and all the things you wanted to tell her but you couldn’t, you couldn’t and now it’s too late and you didn’t want it to end this way, terrified and screaming her name in the middle of the fire –

But then you hate her too, because she wouldn’t see you. She shoved you aside and abandoned you on a broken planet – she came back for you, only to try and turn you back –

You almost wish she had. You wanted her to win. You wanted her to save you.

And you let go of Jack’s arm, suddenly, twisting towards her instead, reaching out a hand. She flinches back, but then freezes, forcing herself to hold still. Like she’s face to face with a venomous snake. You cup her face with your hand, and brush away the tear that falls down her cheek with your thumb.

“I’m sorry,” you say. “I’m so sorry –”

But then, like something’s snapped in her, Yaz’s expression twists, and she shoves you, the force of it sending your back thumping against Jack’s chest.

“You wanted this,” she hisses, furious and bold, blazing with it. She stands, shaking her head. “You don’t get to be sorry.”

Yaz turns, heading back with Vinder towards their equipment, already firing determined questions at the hologram, who looks at you once before turning to answer. You give up, all the fight leaving your frame, and you just laugh.

They’re not going to believe you. Of course, they’re not. Why did you even think they would?

But it would have been nice, you think, to have your friends at your side.

Jack alone remains, slower to move. You shift against him, reluctant to lose contact. Turning to look at him. He’s been quiet, the whole time, like he’s been thinking. Maybe. Maybe –

“Jack,” you say. “Please –”

Jack’s gaze flicks away – but then he turns back to you, gaze flinty.

“You’re not hurting anymore,” he asks. “Why?”

“That’s you. Can’t feel my timelines fusing if I haven’t got a working time sense, can I?”

And you can’t feel time moving, either – not like you normally can – but you know it’s running out. The clock is ticking, orange sand in an hourglass, and it’s only a matter of time before it happens. And you know – the TARDIS is here. How can it be here when you know that –

Oh.

Wait.

Wait.

“You have to help me,” you say, desperate, clutching at his coat with you free hand. “Jack, I know what has to happen –” You yank your wrist against the handcuff, urgency growing. “If you keep me here like this it’s going to break the timeline, and time is far too delicate right now for that –”

“Jack,” Yaz says, calling over, frustrated – afraid, you hear, cutting through her sharp tone. “Jack, stop listening to him, we need your help –”

“I know, just – look, gimme a sec, alright?” He turns back to you, and his eyes are – strange. You can’t quite tell if he’s genuinely concerned or trying to figure out if you’re tricking him. Probably, it’s both. “It was hurting you pretty bad when I was over there.”

“Proximity. The closer you are, the more you block it all out.” Your mind is swirling with panic, but that’s a good thing actually, because you’re used to this, you thrive like this, and your thoughts are rushing down old patterns that are written into the very fabric of your being. You can see it already – the bare bones of a plan that’s absolutely crazy, there’s no way it’ll work – and that’s exactly how you know you’ll be able to pull it off. That is, if you can get someone to uncuff you from the wall. “Jack – be honest with me. Who do you think I am? Who do you see?”

Jack looks torn – but he considers his answer, glancing away.

“I see both of you,” he replies – and then shakes his head, weary. “But that’s not exactly new. I always have. There’s always been a bit of the Master in the Doctor, and –” He swallows. “And a bit of the Doctor in the Master.”

Your hearts pound in your chest. Stretched behind you, your wrist strains against the handcuff, desperation growing. Your fingers flex, clenching and unclenching.

“Is it too much to ask you to trust me?”

Jack closes his eyes at the question – yes, you think, might be the answer. But his hand is at your back, holding you against him, fingers pressed into your jacket. You wonder if he can feel your double heartbeat – if he’s thinking of the last time he held you when you wore a leather jacket, so many lifetimes ago now. For both of you.

“Jack,” you say.

“Why are you different now?” he asks, opening his eyes to stare you in the face. His gaze is cool, unreadable – or, rather, he wants it to be. But you know him too well, you realise abruptly, and he can’t quite hide the fear, the want, the love that’s he’s trying to push back from the corners of his eyes.

He loves the Doctor, is the thing. All this time, and he still loved them.

And even if you aren’t really the Doctor anymore, the last piece of her is within you. And Jack would do anything for that piece – even if it were just a fragment.

“Yaz told me what you were like,” Jack continues, pushing. “I saw what you’ve been planning – what you’re going to do to the Earth. What’s made you change your mind? Seriously. Because it must have been something pretty big if you want me to believe that it’s made you turn around so hard that you’re now going to go back and fight against the Daleks and the Cybermen and yourself.”

And this time, it’s you who’s closing your eyes, emotion rising in your throat. For a moment, you’re not even sure you can speak. Because you know, suddenly. You know exactly why.

“Because I saw it,” you manage, hoarse. You press your face against Jack’s chest. “I finally saw it.”

“Saw what?”

“The universe,” you breathe. “It’s so beautiful.”

And you don’t want it to burn.

You want to see it all.

Around you, Jack suddenly goes very still. Then, with no warning at all, a broken laugh huffs from his throat, quiet and close. He presses his lips into your hair, and you can’t help the breath that shudders out of your mouth.

“You – you kinda remind me of him, y’know,” Jack murmurs, and you immediately know who he means. The first face Jack knew – the one with a leather jacket and a purple v-neck and a universe-worth of guilt following him around like a shadow, hands around his throat. You had been so broken then – so uncertain of who you were anymore. You hadn’t even been able to call yourself the Doctor during the Time War, and then suddenly it was done and you were the only one who had made it out of it all, shattered into so many pieces –

And then there had been Rose. And then Jack –

And you’d learnt to see it again. The quiet wonder of the cosmos.

Your hand flexes against the handcuff.

If he’s going to do what you need him to do, you realise, then he needs to see you as that person again.

Maybe he wouldn’t be completely wrong to do so.

“Jack,” you say. “Please. I can’t do this without your help.”

His hand tightens against your back. “You’re going to go back and cross over your own timeline, right?”

“– but why?!” you snarl
through the smoke,
the words wrenched
from your throat.
“Why are you doing this?!”

“It’s the only way,” you tell him.

Jack huffs, incredulous. “Yeah, and earlier you were saying that I shouldn’t take you back across your own timeline.”

You can’t help but smile. “When have I ever followed my own rules?”

“Yeah, now you sound like the Doctor.” Jack sighs, and it rings bright and strange in your chest. “Ok. But won’t this cause a paradox or something? Because I’m pretty sure the number one rule of time travel is don’t meet yourself –”

“A paradox?” you say, smile widening. “I’m practically counting on it.”

Jack sighs. For a moment, he says nothing, thinking. Deciding. And then –

“Okay,” he says, quiet – just to you. “What do you need me to do?”

You open your mouth to reply, but Vinder calls out before you can.

“Hey, Jack!” he shouts, clearly trying to disrupt their conversation. Consorting with the enemy. “We could actually do with a hand over here.”

“Just uncuff me from the wall,” you say to him, hushed. “Leave the rest to me.”

“You mean I don’t even get to know the rest of the plan?”

You grimace. “You won’t approve.”

“I won’t approve –?”

“Jack,” presses Vinder. “You were the one who said we might have a short timeframe for this, remember?”

“Just trust me,” you hiss, already beginning to pull away from him, bracing yourself – this is going to hurt. But it has to be done. Beside you, Jack pulls back too, reaching into his pocket. He takes out the little key, giving one brief glance in the direction of Vinder and Yaz, hesitating ever so briefly, before clearly deciding to hell with it and reaching over you to where the handcuff is attached to the pipe and releasing it with a click.

“Hey!” Vinder shouts, immediately seeing what’s happened. “What d’you think you’re doing?!”

“Jack?” Yaz says, already moving over as you push yourself to your feet, not even waiting for Jack to release the cuff from your wrist. You’ve decided it might come in handy. “Jack –! He’s not the Doctor.”

Jack holds up his hands, placating. He stands slightly in front of you, almost defensive. It’s painfully predictable – especially since he’s going to regret it in a moment. You tense, ready.

“He’s not the Master either,” Jack counters, standing firm. “He’s different to how you said he was, Yaz – come on, don’t tell me you don’t see – ghk!”

Jack’s heartfelt defence gets cruelly cut short by you grabbing him from behind and pulling the chain of the handcuffs tight across his neck. Irritatingly, you slightly miscalculated how much taller he is that you – but, well, you’ve committed now. Can’t exactly back out.

“Still trust me?” you hiss in Jack’s ear as he struggles against you – he’s not giving it his all, though, you quickly realise. Like he’s not sure if this is part of the plan or not.

“I really hate you,” he replies, choked. “Did – did I ever mention that?”

He’s going to hate you more very soon, you think, but you decide not to tell him that.

“Let him go!” Yaz orders, right as Vinder, beautifully on cue, raises his gun. Ah, perfect. Behind them, the AI hologram flits out of existence, clearly deciding to keep out of the way with this one.

“Or what?” you spit back over Jack’s shoulder, pulling him down closer towards you. He tenses against you, testing. He could still throw in with them against you, that much is obvious. That’s fine. You factored that into your plan. “Gun on the ground. Slide it over to me.”

Vinder laughs. “Not a chance.”

Your gaze flicks to Yaz. “Are you going to have Vinder shoot at me again, Yaz?”

She stares right back at you, gaze burning, but says nothing. You can’t help it – a flicker of pride rushes through you at the sight of it, paradoxical.

“Go on,” you goad, looking back at Vinder, tensing your muscles. Ready. “Make it interesting – try and kill me this time –!”

With that, you shove Jack forwards hard, releasing him – and in the moment that he’s stumbling forwards, you duck down behind him, cutting past and racing towards Vinder. There’s not much distance to cross, and you’ve got the element of surprise – and by the time you reach him, the one shot he manages to get off just grazes your jacket in a singe of fibre before you tackle him to the ground. You go for the gun first – of course, Vinder keeps a tight hold of it, trained to not just drop something like that – but then Yaz joins the fray, grabbing you from the side and trying to pull you off him. Ha! You use the momentum against her, letting yourself be pulled off but elbowing her hard in the gut, badly winding her – one down, temporarily – before going back for Vinder again with even more vigour. And that catches him off guard again – he thought you were off him – and this time, this time, a well-placed knock in the jaw gives you the perfect chance to grab the gun out of his grip, stand, turn –

You shoot Jack right between the eyes right as he reaches you, arms outstretched in an ill-fated attempt to stop you.

He drops to the floor, dead.

“NO!” Vinder cries – because, of course, he doesn’t know that death for Jack Harkness is like a bad cold. Which is exactly why he had to die – because now, as Vinder scrambles to his feet, he’s on the back foot, emotional, shocked, not prepared for you to take it that far without even flinching, and if you’re fast enough which you are, you always are –

All it takes is a hard thwack of Vinder’s own weapon against the side of his head, and he’s down for the count.

Last one. You turn, and Yaz is scrambling up off the floor – quick to recover, but not quite quick enough. She lunges at you with a shout of fury, but you drop down to the ground, pulling her down with you. For a moment, you both wrestle against the floor, trying to gain the upper hand – but you have a very specific goal in mind, and after a moment, you’ve managed to flip your positions so that Yaz has her back against the floor, trapped under the weight of your body and you grab for her arm, fighting against her as she tries to get you off –

And clicking the second ring of the handcuffs shut around her wrist.

Yaz just barks a sharp laugh, incredulous. “I’m not going to be your companion, mate –!”

You ignore her, pulling back so you’re sitting upright, tugging Yaz along with you. You’re both panting for breath, staring at each other. Yaz’s eyes are furious and defiant, and she tugs at the handcuffs without breaking her stare, jarring you.

“What now, then?” she asks, lifting her chin. “Going to drag me along with you on your adventures whilst my home gets destroyed by Daleks and Cybermen?”

“I won’t let them destroy Earth,” you insist. “I won’t.”

“Yeah? Well, funny way to go about it,” Yaz hisses back – but there’s a flicker of uncertainty in her eyes.

“I tried to explain,” you say, leaning forward, a little desperate. You just want her to see. “I tried, but you weren’t going to listen.”

“Because you’re lying to us –”

“I’m not!” Your voice cracks on the word, and you swallow, breath shuddering, forcing yourself to be calm. The anger – it’s deep, a rage that goes down fathoms, and you didn’t just inherit it from him. You got it from her too. “I need my sonic.”

“I’m not giving you anything of hers –”

“Yaz –”

“Don’t call me that –!”

“Yaz.”

That wasn’t you. You both stop, turning – and standing above you both, glimmering in golden light, is the AI hologram. Her eyes are fixed on Yaz, wide and honest and everything the Doctor should be.

“Give me my sonic,” she says. Yaz gapes at her.

“What? Doctor –? He’s –”

“That is me. What’s left of me. And he’s becoming more and more of me the more time goes on.” She looks at you. “Aren’t you?” And then grimaces. “Tendency towards violence aside.”  

You just stare at her, panting for breath, unable to put words to all the emotions churning in your chest right now. She stares directly at you, unflinching, and crouches down beside you. She almost looks – well, a little curious, but mostly sad. Far too sad, far too old, for a programme that’s been activated for less than a few hours.

“He really did this to me, didn’t he?” she breathes. “Forced regeneration.”

You swallow. “Yes.”

“Why?” the question rips itself out of her – and it’s not even hers to ask. She’s not the Doctor, not really. She’s just an echo. A ghost, made up of machine learning and code. That doesn’t mean she can’t feel it all, though – the horror, the betrayal of it. You would know. You created her. “Why would he do that?”

And there are so many answers to that question – and you know all of them. You remember it all. How you couldn’t stand the fact that you meant nothing to the Doctor but the Doctor still defined everything for you – and what if you could change that? What if you could change what it meant to be the Doctor? And you didn’t want to keep going – you didn’t want any of it. The game that you’d both played across the centuries, across the universe, you couldn’t play it anymore. It was all too real. Too real for you and not real enough for her (only it was, it was), and you didn’t even start together, you didn’t even have that to cling to anymore, and everything you were was because of her and you couldn’t stand it and she wouldn’t even do you the decency of dying together in one last flare and burn, and so many things would be better if you could just be her and maybe it wouldn’t work, maybe someone would try and kill you, maybe you’d die together that way instead, maybe, maybe, because when it came down to it all there was only one thing that you’d wanted –

“He didn’t want to be him anymore,” you say, meeting her eyes. She stares at you for a moment – and then her image distorts, different faces coming through. At the same time, by mere chance, a first rush of pain laps at your shores, testing. You shudder with it, but stay strong. Eyes fixed on her.

“You don’t get to kill me to kill yourself,” she tells you once she’s settled again, voice hard.

“I know,” you reply, trembling. And you do – because you’re both the person who wanted to die and the person who wanted so desperately to live. “Only half of me wanted this. The other half didn’t get a choice.”

“I know,” the AI replies – then glances at Yaz. “Yaz – put that down.”

You glance over, broken out of your reverie, just in time to see Yaz drop the piece of metal she’d clearly spent the last few moments where you were distracted carefully reaching for a piece of metal machinery, dragging it silently into her grasp. What she’d been planning to do, you have no idea. Probably, she hadn’t had much of a plan.

“Give me my sonic,” you ask her again, holding out your free hand. “I don’t want to have to take it from you. Please.”

Yaz stares at you for a moment, clearly unconvinced, unhappy – before turning to the AI.

“You can’t really think this is a good plan,” she says. “He just killed Jack –”

“Jack’ll be fine,” she says.

“Doctor –?!”

“He will. He’ll be cross, but – he’ll be fine.” She fixes her gaze on her. “But the Earth won’t be if you don’t let me go.”

“How do you know?”

And the AI glances back at you this time. “Because I’ve been cataloguing everything you’ve said. Even from over here. Handy, being a computer programme, makes you great at multi-tasking.” Her voice softens, suddenly. “And it’s already happened for you, hasn’t it? You saw yourself come back, just to stop you.”

“– but why?!” you snarl
through the smoke at
your mirror image
who stands trembling
 in the door,
sonic in hand, –

“I lived one side of it,” you say. “I still need to live the other. And if I don’t, then – then I don’t know.” More pain. You grimace against it, curling into yourself. “Ngh. The timelines are still settling. If I don’t go – I don’t know what will happen to Earth. I don’t know what will happen to anything.”

You look Yaz in the eyes, hand still outstretched, shaking – and she looks so unsure, like she might actually give it to you. But that distrust…you don’t think it’s ever going to go.

“I know I have his face,” you say. “But please.”

She closes her eyes. Her face twists, deeply upset.

“I don’t really have a choice, do I?”

“Not really,” you say, as gentle as you can.

 Her eyes stay closed for a moment, and she lets a shaky breath tumble from her lips, grief slipping out. When she opens her eyes, they’re red and glistening. She looks at you. Then, wordlessly, she reaches into her pocket with her free hand, and gives you the sonic. Your fingers coil around it, and it immediately warms to your skin. A surprised huff of air escapes you.

“Thank you,” you say, before pressing the button and pointing it at your half of the handcuffs. Open open open. Your wrist is immediately released, and you don’t waste any time in yanking Yaz over, still attached, to lock the free cuff around the nearest thing available, which turns out to be edging of one of the regeneration chambers.

“No – no!” Yaz cries, already trying to pull herself back, to stop you – but it’s already too late. The cuff locks with a click. “You absolute arse!”

“Had to be done,” you reply, feeling a little bit bad about it, picking yourself up off the floor. “I can’t take you with me.”

And you would, is the thing. In two heartbeats, you would. But you can’t trust her not to turn on you – you can’t trust any of them.

And you remember it, from the other side. Seeing yourself in the door. Alone.

You shake your head, and start moving, striding over to where Jack lies, still gone from the world. You don’t know how long it takes him to come back, these days. He’s going to hate you for this – but you hope he’ll forgive you, you think, as you reach into his pocket and take out the vortex manipulator that he took off you, strapping it back on your wrist. The worst part, of course, is that you know that he will, even though he shouldn’t

“Don’t leave me here – you might – you might need me!” Yaz shouts at your back, trying to bargain. You hear her tug against the cuffs, the chain rattling, but all she’s doing is hurting herself. You ignore her, already moving back towards where the TARDIS is stood, waiting. “I could help you! If you’re really going to stop this, you shouldn’t go on your own!”

Another rush of pain buffets you. Agh!  You stumble, catching yourself on the glass panel of the other regeneration chamber. You catch a glimpse of your reflection in the pane – strange and new and familiar.

You can’t take Yaz. Even if you were able to trust her –

You’re not sure you’d be able to keep her safe.

“I need you here,” you tell her, breathless, before glancing up. The AI hologram wavers in your periphery, and you turn to look at her. “When everything starts going wrong – as soon as I realise that you all took everything from the Winter Palace – I will come back here. I’ll be desperate. You won’t be able to reason with me. And you’ll need to make sure I can’t take any – any of this. I’ll have some hair-brained plan to use my TARDIS on the Cyberplanet and the dynamorphic power relay you’ve got the other half of here to create some kind weapon that could obliterate Earth from orbit.”

“What?” Yaz says behind you. “You can’t let that happen!”

“You can’t,” you correct, turning back to her. “Jack will uncuff you when he wakes up.” You turn to the AI. “Please try and stop them from just trying to make these work again.” You tap a hand against the chamber pointedly. “You really don’t have time.”

The AI looks at you for a moment, and then nods.

“Got it,” she says. “Go on. Go.”

You give her a curt nod in return, before pushing yourself off the chamber and staggering towards the TARDIS, not looking back once, even as Yaz shouts at your back. You don’t listen to her words. You just place your hand on the blue wood of the door in front of you, suddenly struck with the fact that you definitely don’t have your key.

“Please please please,” you murmur, more a prayer than anything else. Nothing. You sigh, wincing. “I’m really sorry I threatened to throw you in a black hole earlier.”

The door clicks open under your hands.

“Thank you,” you breathe, before pushing yourself inside without even a glance over your shoulder. Just as you shut the door behind you, you hear a loud gasp – the gulping breath of a man who has just come back to life. Jack is awake.

The door clicks shut – locks – and you’re alone.

No – not alone.

Your ship whorps around you, swimming around your mind, choking and beautiful and everything. Your breath hitches.

“Hello, old girl,” you murmur. She wheezes in response.

Hello, she hums at you, somehow using the telepathic, non-verbal equivalent two Gallifreyan tenses at once. Hello for the first time. Hello for the last.

A smile tugs at your lips despite everything, tears pricking at your eyes. You walk inside slowly, up to the nearest glowing column, and lean against it, pressing your forehead against the crystal.

“Do you know who I am?” you ask her, not bothering to hide your desperation for an answer.

The TARDIS whorps, a hum resonating through the crystal and into your bones – and it’s so full, so much grief and loss and joy and love that you can’t quite take it. Because she misses who you were – misses the Doctor, her thief, the one she ran away with to see the universe. And she sees what remains of the Master in you – the one who gutted her, made her a paradox machine, but also the one who fixed her all those years whilst stuck in the vault, doing maintenance when the Doctor refused to –

The two boys that you were once, running through endless red fields and calling up at the sky.

She sees you both, and she grieves you both – but there you are. Both of you in one, standing in her console room, and she must be able to see your timeline forging itself into one, must be able to see not only everything you are but also everything that you will become, your potential –

And she loves you.

So much.  

And suddenly, it doesn’t matter who you are, or what anyone else says you are. You can’t find it in your hearts to care. Because your ship knows you. Your ship sees you, in all your contradictory complexity.

And you could have stood there for hours, you think, just basking in it all – but then another wave of pain hits you, sharp enough to send a cry of pain bursting from your lips. Gah! You push yourself forwards, towards the centre of the room.

“No time. Never enough time,” you mutter to yourself, just managing to catch yourself on the edge of the console before the next wave of pain hits you. Ngh. Is it getting better or worse? You can’t tell. You can almost feel it, though – like it’s working its way toward a point. Tapering off at a particular moment where all this becomes set, and you can imagine exactly what that moment might be.

A fixed point, in your future.

You’ve already seen it.

Well. Not point lingering on the thought. No time, no time. You move around the console with a white-knuckled grip, flipping switches, setting coordinates. The TARDIS doesn’t fight against you this time, but she must sense precisely what you’re doing, because you feel her groan of distinct disapproval at the back of your head.

“I know, I know,” you reply. “But if there was an alternative, I would have done it already. Unless you have any bright ideas, love.”

The TARDIS trills – but she knows this is the only way. Doesn’t mean she has to like it. She likes it even less when you push the thought towards her with more specific details of your plan, giving you a sharp whorp of distress.

“I know,” you hiss. “But if I don’t do this, then –”

You don’t bother completing the sentence. The TARDIS, from her position above and around and within all of time, can see the bigger picture much more than you’ll ever be able to. As such, you hear a hiss of hydraulics behind you, and find a hexagonal panel on the floor behind you has slid away, revealing a small cavity beneath. You immediately go over, crouching down, and you find exactly what you need.

Carefully, almost reverent, you take out one of the small orbs. It appears to have no seams, and is decorated in artistic swirls of circular Gallifreyan. Beauty crafted – and yet its purpose is so ugly that the Time Lords could only stomach using them during the lowest point of their illustrious history.

A paradox grenade. 

The fact that you’re going to use Time War weapons on Earth…

You swallow the thought. Needs must.

Besides. It’s going to be very – controlled.

There is, of course, the fact that you have some insight into the fact that this is actually going to work.

The TARDIS whorps at you in warning, and another wave of pain hits you like a truck. You curl into yourself, fingers tightening around the grenade in your hand.

The timelines are still yet to be set in stone, of course. Things can still go terribly wrong – especially if you’re planning to throw paradoxes in the mix.

But you can’t see any other way.

When the pain fades to something manageable, you force yourself to your feet, stumbling over to the console. You place the grenade carefully on the console – and it’s not even charged yet, but you still feel the way the TARDIS thrums with anxiety.

“Shh,” you soothe her, putting your hand on the dematerialisation lever. It warms under your touch. “It’s okay. You know what we need to do.”

Her presence shifts in the back of your mind, before resolving into something determined. Something steadfast and sure. A hand against your back. A friend by your side.

A shuddering breath escapes your lips – and then, not wanting to wait around any longer, you pull down the lever. Immediately, the time rotors wheeze into motion, the engine groaning into life as the room rocks around you like a ship lost in a tempestuous sea, and a delighted laugh escapes your lips, unbidden.

No turning back now.

On paper, your plan is not actually that convoluted.

Problem One – there are Dalek foundries on Earth, about to use excessive amounts of machinery to destabilise the Earth’s crust and cause catastrophic volcanic eruptions worldwide.

Problem Two – there’s a Cyberplanet in orbit in 1916 that’s going to use the Earth as a cyber-conversion larder, so to speak.

Problem Three – your younger self is running around, having just escaped from Yaz and Vinder’s attempts to deregenerate you. You’re furious, still erratic and feverish with the burning ecstasy of post-regeneration, and also you’re very shortly going to start feeling random bursts of pain as your two distinct timelines begin to fuse together, some key divergence point just passed.

Enter: you.

If you had a companion, you’d be explaining all this with great, whispered fervour as you snuck around, hiding paradox grenades in Dalek volcanic contingents and important Cyberplanet systems. Because the Master, of course, wasn’t an idiot. He’d been very aware that the Cybermen using the planet to convert everyone into more Cybermen – something that would actively change history – wasn’t going to vibe very well with the Daleks, over a hundred years in the future, using the planet as a foundry. And, well, it might work – it’s not like the Daleks will notice if there are a ton of Cybermen around rather than a ton of humans, until the Cybermen get prissy about their planet suddenly being used by Daleks like they’d never even been there (because, of course, they hadn’t). The idea behind that, of course, was that the two would start fighting each other, and the Master – as the Doctor, of course – had planned to watch the ensuing carnage with a box of popcorn and a slushie, possibly joining in the fray at some point if the opportunity presented itself.

But – regardless, the crucial point is that history being messed with creates a sort of paradox energy. And, thus, the potential for history being messed with causes paradox potential energy. This, combined with you crossing your own timeline in order to prevent your own plan…

It means the air is buzzing in anticipation for a paradox.

That sort of thing might normally bring certain consequences with it. Glitching probabilities, reapers gathering like circling vultures, pockets of temporal abnormalities…usually quite dangerous, and the sort of thing you’d want to avoid, naturally. But today, you’re going right into the thick of it, paradox grenades in hand. Because how do you arm a paradox grenade?

With paradox potential energy.

During the Time War, you both remember and don’t remember, the timelines were so pulled at and tangled that paradox grenades were particularly potent. Weapons, charged by the paradox of battles being written and rewritten and unwritten over and over and over and over. Here, it won’t be so strong – which is a good thing. You don’t want to blow a paradox so big that a random Bolivian volcano suddenly never existed – but it would be quite handy if the Daleks and all their machinery inside said Bolivian volcano had never existed.

And that’s exactly what you do. Run around for a bit, dodging your past-self, charging the grenades – and then detonating them, one by one, at each Dalek camp hidden within volcanic caves across the planet. And then, you hit the Cyberplanet too, taking out key systems, key everything. The only thing you can’t touch, of course, is the Master’s gutted TARDIS. A time machine of that complexity getting hit with a paradox grenade would be a great way to unravel the entirety of someone’s history – namely, yours.

It's dangerous, of course – there are multiple times where you misjudge how loaded the grenades are, and almost get caught in the blast radius. It doesn’t help that you’re still getting that pain, rushing you in waves, along with the grating feeling of fluctuating probabilities rubbing up against your already-raw time sense.

It hits you again just after you’ve planted the last grenade. The Cyberplanet is in tatters, threatening to collapse under the weight of its own paradox, and suddenly your knees are buckling. You fall against a random piece of machinery, swallowed by a shadow – and just in time. Because just as you disappear from view, you feel it.

Yourself.

The other you storms past where you’re hidden, tense with pain and fury. And – oh, you remember this. Fuzzy and indistinct with fury and regeneration energy, but potent. By this point, you’d realised that someone was sabotaging you. You’d decided that, somehow, it was Yaz, although you hadn’t quite been able to understand how she was so thoroughly managing to cause you so many problems. The other theory, of course, was that you’d miscalculated how much messing with history was going to cause problems, and that, somehow, the paradox energy was gobbling up everything. Ironically, you’d not been far off, in the end.

Still – your memory means that you know exactly where your past self is going. Grimacing against the pain, you peer around the machinery that’s hiding you from view, just in time to watch your younger self stop, back to you, and stare at what lies ahead. You remember this too – because, suddenly, amongst your furious anger and everything falling apart around you, you’d found something.

The Doctor’s TARDIS.

The last thing this you remembers, of course, is that Yaz had it. You have no idea that, actually, you will bring it here, just a little further down the line.

You hear yourself laugh, delighted and furious in equal measure – and step forward, towards the ship. As you watch, you push against the door without any tenderness. You couldn’t really feel her, not then. Now, you can – you feel her recoil against you, resisting. Not wanting to let you in. The door stays locked, and the lights in the windows stay dark.

“Come on,” the other you growls. “Or wasn’t I clear enough earlier about throwing you in a black hole if you don’t do as you’re told?”

You close your eyes, willing your ship to open her doors.

Let me in, love, you think. I know I’m not me yet, but please. This won’t work if you don’t.

There’s a thrill of reluctance in the back of your mind – but then, you hear the click of the door opening. The other you practically falls into the ship with a yelp, having not expected the door to open quite so quickly.

A grin tugs at your lips, remembering the way you’d fallen on your face. Okay. You definitely had deserved that.

The door shuts on your younger self snarling curses at the console room ceiling, and within moments, the TARDIS is dematerialising. A breath shudders from your lips, before your fingers come to brush against the vortex manipulator on your wrist. Yes. All the pieces are in place, set to play.

Energy crackles at the edge of your perception, and you turn, glancing around. A flicker of red and blue lightning flashes through the cyberstructures around you.

Oh, you think. You’d forgotten, amongst everything else, about the Qurunx.

Quickly, you push yourself to your feet, stumbling as you go. You have to pick a precarious route down the rocky side of the crater, ignoring the continuing rolling pain that keeps coming and going, and within a few minutes you’re stood before the energy being, panting for breath. It flinches back from you, clearly recognising your face. You hold your hands up disarming.

“It’s okay,” you say, soft, slightly awed. How did you never see how beautiful it was before? What a creature. What a universe. And as you watch it straining against its shackles, chained – you can barely speak. You relate to it, abruptly, deeply, through the person within you who was once a child in a lab, dying over and over. And you can’t understand how anyone could be so cruel as to use such an incredible, sentient being like this, even as you remember being the person who did precisely that.

The guilt is the worst part – like acid in your throat, biting and burning. Such a thing had always defined the Doctor, and the Master had raged against that – until Missy had stood in the TARDIS, a tear rolling down her cheek and wondering what that could possibly mean.

What does it mean now that you feel it?

And can you even take the blame for what was done to the Qurunx? You’re not sure. How much do you count as the Master? How much do you count as the Doctor?

You’re not her, Yaz had snarled at you, tears in her eyes. You’ll never be her, because being the Doctor isn’t about having her body, it’s about what you do.

In your hand, you grip the sonic, tight.

Pain washes over you – but you ignore it. You stand straight, defiant against your past, looking up at the Qurunx.

“I’m sorry I did this to you,” you tell it. “I’m sorry – that you were taken and that you've been used against your will.” You step forward. “I’ll set you free. But – I need one more thing from you.” You wonder if you can even ask, after everything, but you have to try. “Channel your energy down into this planet. Disintegrate everything. It’s already unstable – the paradoxes will eat it up from within – but I can’t guarantee that it’ll be gone. But with you…”

The Qurunx shifts and twists above you, uncertain – but then, you’re using the sonic, releasing its chains. You can practically sense its surprise – and honestly, you expect it to just go. You wouldn’t blame it. But then, it moves back, and a beam of energy shoots out of it, directly into the planet. You can’t help but laugh in delight as the ground begins to destabilise around you, stumbling backwards.

“Yes, that’s it!” you say – and you almost wish you could stay to watch the show.

But you have a meeting with destiny, and you wouldn’t dare be late.

When you return to the Boeshane, there’s already carnage. Smoke billows everywhere, choking. The air sings with certainty, multiple timelines channelling towards one moment. Probabilities are strung tight, options narrowing down into a single thread. A fixed point.

And you know this. You know it.

You’ve seen it before.

The smoke is so thick that as you enter, from the back of the room, all you can see is the light from the TARDIS lamp like a beacon, hazy in the gloom. Shadowy figures move before you. You hear shouts – your own voice, angry and erratic, and then Yaz, snapping back at you, fierce and bold. You remember this. You can almost see it –

“– I’m going to destroy
everything,” you tell her,
shaking with fury,
but you force your voice to
sound calm, controlled,
because she can’t know
how out of control
this has all become,
but you’re the Doctor now,
and that means that
you’re going to win.
“I’m going to blast that
ENTIRE planet out of the sky,
and I’m going to make you
watch it, Yasmin Khan.
Over and over and over –”

“And how are you going to do that, mate?” she calls back, cocky. “We’ve destroyed all your fancy equipment. Not much without it now, are you?”

You creep closer, silent in the smoke, coming around the side. The TARDIS is off to the side, doors left open, and the smoke is thick enough at the moment that you think you can get to it without being seen. But it will clear. You know it will. You remember –

“You think I can’t find another way?”
A laugh bursts from your lips,
even as part of you from within
twists against you, rebellious.
That’s been getting stronger
as time has gone on –
strange, new instincts that
you can’t pin down,
but you cling to your anger,
the only thing strong enough to
overpower them. You step forward
towards Yaz and the others
in the smoke. Jack Harkness is there
too, you can tell – blinding and
abhorrent against your inexplicably
painful time sense.
“You think that stopping me here is
going to be enough?”

“You can try,” Yaz says, sounding confident, but you know she must be scared. Scared, and hiding it – for the sake of the universe. That pride wells up in you again, bright and bursting. “But we’re going to be here to stop you – every single time.”

You hear yourself laugh, bitter.

“Oh, really?” you say.
“Working against the Doctor?
Do you really think you
can stop me?”

The timelines shift, settling, right as you approach the TARDIS. You cringe against the pain of it, biting your lip, catching yourself on the wood – and it’s as bad as you’ve ever had it, maybe worse, grey bristling at the edges of your sight, but you have to keep standing. You can’t get this wrong now. Your younger self can’t see you – but, thankfully, your back is turned, far too busy focusing on Yaz and the others to notice any movement behind you. But Yaz. She’s facing you. You see her clock you – your gazes meet, fleeting. Of course. Of course they do –

You see her eyes flick to
the side – uncertainty, fear,
and it’s almost quaint.
Little humans playing hero,
but they have absolutely
no idea what they’re up against.
Maybe you should show them just how
little they are. You step closer,
a grin splitting your lips,
fingers flexing around the
TCE gripped in your hand.
“I am the Doctor, Yasmin Khan.
When did you ever see anyone
defeat the Doctor? Do you
really, seriously think you
stand even a FRACTION of
a chance against me?”

And you manage to stand, reaching the TARDIS doors, and you take the sonic out of your pocket, gripping it in your hand. A gust of wind breezes through the window, and the smoke clears – and you see Yaz smile.

“Maybe not,” she says, before she locks eyes with you. “But he does.”

And you see yourself turn – you remember turning – and there you are, standing in the TARDIS doors, sonic in your hand, trying to hide the fact that you’re shaking. You know you don’t succeed. You don’t care.

Your younger self stares at you in shock – horror – and then, you remember, the anger comes. Fury, so abject and blistering that you don’t even think – you raise the TCE at yourself, with no thought about your future, almost hoping that it will work. None of this, after all, was about trying to survive. But you want to live. You want to live. And so, quicker than your mirror, you raise the sonic. Its whine pierces the air, shrill, and the TCE immediately erupts into sparks, rendered useless. Your younger self yelps in surprise, dropping it, before turning back around to you, just staring.

“You. It – all of this has been you?”

You sound disgusted, horrified – and strange. Only, it’s not strange, not to you. Because you remember how it felt to look at the person you would become – the other side of the mirror, only it’s not, because it’s you, and you’ve become something new, something different, something more.

You smile at yourself, forcing yourself to stand against the pain, and you say nothing. You don’t need to answer. You know that you know.

“But why?!” the younger you snarls through the smoke, the words wrenched from your throat like they’re burning on the way out. You’re still so new – you don’t understand. You can’t yet. But you will. Around you, the timelines are humming with energy, a building crescendo. “Why are you doing this?!”

And there’s only one answer you can give – and it’s not because you heard it before, not because you have to follow the script. It’s not even because it’s all that you are. Because it’s not all of you – you are many things, a combination of two people who hated each other and loved each other so brilliantly that they could have burned the whole universe with it.

But, for Time Lords, a name is a choice. A promise. An oath that you act upon from that day out. It’s not who you are. It’s who you decide to be.

And right now, in this moment, you’re taking that oath for your own.

“Because,” you say, trembling in the door, “I’m the Doctor.”

For a moment, the pair of you just stare at each other, enraptured. Then, abruptly – but not without warning, because you remembering doing it – your younger self lunges forwards, lurching towards the TARDIS doors. You don’t hesitate, ducking out of the way, letting yourself run past you, heading towards the console – and you know exactly what you’re planning. But you’re always one step ahead, and so you point your sonic at the console, pressing it down and thinking with intent – lock lock lock! And the TARDIS hates being sonicked, but for once she doesn’t argue with you, and the console shuts down with a shunk.

“No no no!” the other you snarls, furious, hitting the console like that’s going to make it work. You step into the console room, fighting against the pain, the oppressive weight of the timelines around you, and you hear movement behind you – Yaz and Vinder, you know, you remember seeing them, crowding the door behind the person you were destined to become –

“Just give up, mate!” Yaz says behind you. “You said it yourself – when does the Doctor ever get beaten?”

And you know what’s about to happen, so it’s no surprise at all when you see the horror of defeat flash across your face, before you turn, glancing around, looking for a way out. And you find one – acting immediately by throwing yourself up the stairs, staggering up them and practically falling into the corridor beyond, scrambling out of sight. Beside you, Yaz lurches forward – but you throw your arm out, catching her before she can go.

“Don’t bother,” you manage to say, pain and time buzzing in your ears. “In five seconds, I’ll be gone.”

“What?” Vinder says on your other side – but you don’t deign him with an answer. You can’t, actually. Because you can feel it – the rush of time reaching its apex, and you know the moment where it solidifies is imminent, hinging on the press of your fingers against a dusty vortex manipulator in the corridor beyond.

You don’t see when it happens – but suddenly everything is white with pain, a cry wrenching itself from your lips. You think someone tries to grab your arm – you think your knees hit the floor. You can’t tell. You can’t see. You can’t hear anything except the ringing of certainty against your mind, the scream of agony that makes up your shredded time sense, and then – and then –

Like a dislocated joint put back into place – like a broken bone being set –

“My timelines,” you breathe, brushing your fingers along it in delirious wonder. A straight, strong line, piercing gold. Of course, it would take a fixed point to finish the job. “They’re one. It’s – it’s one.”

And then, in the numbness of the aftershock, reality slips away from you completely, and you’re left with nothing but the senseless dark.

“What are you going to do now?”

The question comes hours later, after you’ve woken. Sea salt and wind tease at your hair, seabirds crying in the distance as you sit on a rocky outcrop, a dark scar on the otherwise endless beach of the Boeshane Peninsula. The brilliant blue of the waves crash against the surf, far removed from pondering over matters of time – the past, the future, the present.  

“I don’t know,” you tell Yaz, a hand coming up to rub at the back of your neck. A dry laugh escapes your lips. “I don’t even know what to call myself.”

The pain has stopped now, at least. That’s been gone since you woke up, the ocean in your ears and sunlight streaming in above you – but this time, you hadn’t been handcuffed to a wall. You had, however, been faced with a very unimpressed looking Jack Harkness. You’d sighed.

I guess, you’d said. I do owe you something of an apology?

You guess? Jack had said, incredulous.

“You’re not going to go by the Doctor, then?” Yaz asks, frowning at you. You glance at her, curious. The wind tugs at her braids, at the collar of her leather jacket, and she looks relaxed. Quietly confident. A far cry from that uncertain police officer in Sheffield who just happened to end up on the wrong train – or the right one, maybe.

You think she looks just as beautiful as the rest of the universe.

“What do you think?” you ask her, genuine. “Am I the Doctor now?”

Yaz meets your eyes, and seems to seriously consider the question. Her expression twists, brow creasing. “I don’t know. I mean –” She swallows. “You’re not like you were. And who you were before – he weren’t the Doctor. But – well, I said it, didn’t I?” She looks away. “Being the Doctor – it’s more about what you do.”

You nod, waiting for her verdict.

“I still don’t know,” she admits. “I mean – I saw you kill Jack. You didn’t even flinch –”

“I knew he’d come back,” you counter, but it’s a weak argument.

“That’s really not the point,” Yaz snaps back – but then her face twists again, conflicted. “And I think you were wrong to do it. But – but I think you thought that you needed to. I think you thought it was the only way.”

“You weren’t ever going to trust me.”

“No,” Yaz agrees. “We weren’t. Well – I think Jack might’ve.” She shakes her head, incredulous. “He was the one most sticking up for you after you went off, even after you shot him. Saying that you’d be back, and we had to do what you said. Well, him and the hologram that she made.” She looks away. “That you made.”

She goes quiet – but you don’t say anything. She’s not finished yet.

“And you did come back,” she says after a moment. “You came back – and you did it. Vinder and I went to check, whilst Jack sat with you and made sure you didn’t run off when you woke up. All those Daleks – the Cyberplanet –” She looks at you. “You stopped all of them. It were like they’d never even been there.” Another pause – and then: “Picked up Tegan, Kate and Ace, by the way. And Graham – turned out he’d been running around in a volcano.”

You huff a laugh at that, but a shiver of fear runs through you at the thought of what could have happened. “He’s lucky. Could’ve been caught in the crossfire.”

“We all could’ve,” Yaz says – and it’s a little pointed. She pauses again, and you can practically feel her wrestling with all the questions she wants to ask. “She never really explained it. The two of you.”

“She wanted to,” you tell her. “She wanted to tell you everything.”

Yaz looks away, up to the sky. When she speaks, her voice is raw. “Yeah. I know she did.”

You swallow, wondering what you can say that would fix this – that would make it better. It’s the only thing you ever wanted, back when you were her. The Master wanted everything to hurt like he was hurting – but the Doctor had only ever wanted everything to be okay.

But you don’t think you can fix this. You know what the happy ending would have been, if Yaz had won the day. It would have ended with you being torn apart, and the Doctor and the Master’s timelines would have remained separate – two golden threads, twisting and tangling throughout history, connected and inseparable, but discrete. Yaz would have gotten her Doctor back – and the Master would have staggered out of that chamber and screamed down the universe.

“They were friends,” you say, careful. “Sometimes better than that. Sometimes worse. But it always came back to that. They – no one else understood us.” You have to close your eyes. “We were the only ones like each other, and our lives were defined by each other, and no matter what happened, we just – we couldn’t escape it. That line stretched between us, drawing us back in to each other.” You choke on a laugh. “I think it was only a matter of time before we ended up strangling ourselves with it.”

Yaz swallows, staring out at the ocean. “She cared about him.”

“Yes. More than you can imagine. She couldn’t help it.” You follow her gaze, out to sea. Clouds are gathering on the horizon as you watch – an oncoming storm, maybe. “And he cared about her. Too much. He couldn’t stand it, in the end.”

Yaz doesn’t say anything.

“If I’m the Doctor,” you say, careful. “Truly, completely – then the Master is dead. For good.” A lump forms in your throat, twisted and complicated – and you’re enough of the Doctor that the very idea of that outcome is intolerable to you. “But if I’m not – if I’m a combination of them both – something new –”

“Then they’re both gone,” Yaz finishes.

“Yes.”

You sit in silence, together. By the time you speak again, the clouds are closer. Threatening.

“I think there’s only one thing I can do now,” you tell her. “And that’s – to keep going. Find out who I am now. Figure out what name I want. Maybe – maybe it’ll change each day. Maybe I’ll stick with the Doctor, if that’s who I decide to be. I don’t know.” You huff a laugh. “I guess…I’ll have to honour who I was before, whilst choosing who I’m going to be next.”

In the corner of your eye, you see Yaz give a tearful smile. “Yeah. I guess you will.”

You look at her, suddenly nervous. “You could still come with me. If you wanted to.”

Her smile turns strange, even as she tries to keep it on her lips – but she shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I – I almost think I would. But –” And she closes her eyes again. “But my best friend in the whole universe just died. Horribly. And she screamed my name, and all I could do was watch –”

And she turns and looks right at you, eyes brimming with tears.

“And I know you’re not the same,” she says. “I know – I know that you’re all that’s left of her. I know that, in some ways, you are her. But you have his eyes.” Her expression warps with grief. “I’m sorry.”

For a few seconds, you just sit there, not saying anything. You’re not sure if you can. You just nod instead, not looking at her. Because you understand. Of course you do. You expected her to say exactly this, and it makes sense that she would –

But it still cuts something deep within you.

After a moment, you stand.

“We should head in,” you say, even though the storm is still miles out across the sea. But, the point still stands. Places to be. A universe to see, with new eyes.

Beside you, Yaz stands as well, and together you move off the rocks and down onto the sand, before picking your way back towards the watch station. You both remain silent the whole time, heads down, the wind growing stronger as the clouds roll in. It’s only when you’re still a few metres from the door, about to head in, that Yaz reaches out and takes your arm, holding your back.

“Are you going to be okay?” she asks. “I mean – I mean if you’re not okay. If you need someone –” She closes her eyes. “I can’t travel with you. But – if you need someone…you can talk to me, okay?” She opens her eyes and shakes her head. “Unless you’re going to be as bad as her about that sort of thing.” She shrugs. “I don’t know. You seem a lot better at talking than she did.”  

A smile manages to tug at your lips at that.

“Can you see any of her when you look at me?” you have to ask. The wind blows, playing with the chain of your earring.

Yaz’s expression does something complicated – and you watch as she tries to answer, but then gives up, instead reaching for you. For a second, you don’t understand what’s happening – and then you realise that she’s pulling you into a hug. What?

“I think I can,” she says in your ear, voice cracking. “Which is kind of making all of this harder.”

You shift, wrapping your arms around her back, returning the embrace.

“She – I loved being her. And I loved being with you,” you tell her. “And the part of me that’s her – I didn’t want this. I don’t like how it ended. But that doesn’t take away the time we had, yeah? Because nobody else got to be us. Nobody else got to live our days.”

Yaz nods into your shoulder.

“We can still text?” you offer – and that gets you a choked laugh.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, ‘course we can.”

The pair of you stay together for a long moment – then, you pull away, untangling from each other. Yaz wipes her eyes, before glancing at you. “Time to go?”

You swallow, then nod. “Time to go.”

Together, you step back inside the watch station. By now, the smoke has long since cleared, and most of the remains of the equipment has been cleared. Jack crouches next to the last pile of it, sifting through it for any little tidbits that might be salvageable. It doesn’t look very promising to you.  

“Where’s Vinder?” Yaz asks, glancing around for the other man.

“Took him home with a vortex manipulator – seemed happy that we’d got things under control here.” He stands, hands in his pockets as he turns to look at you both. “Everything okay?”

You look at Yaz, leaving her to answer. After a moment, she nods.

“Yeah,” she says. “Everything’s fine.”

You move past the two of them, towards where the TARDIS is still parked off to the side. You brush your hand against her frame, and smile to yourself as the ship hums, windows lighting up with a soft, orange glow. You’d wondered, is the thing, what ended up happening to her after you ran. But it all comes back around in the end. You always find each other, somehow.

And that was a Doctor-y thought. Hm. You tilt your head, not quite sure how to untangle it. Not sure if you should.

“So, what’s the plan now?” Jack asks, and you look up to find him leaning against the TARDIS opposite you, eyebrows raised.

“I’ll probably figure it out as I go along,” you say, looking up at the TARDIS. “Take Yaz home, then – same as usual. The same, just – a bit different, too.”

Jack glances at Yaz. “You’re definitely going back, then?”

They must have talked about it, you think, whilst you were unconscious. But Yaz nods.

“Yeah,” she says, and swallows – but then steps closer. “Probably for the best. I mean –” She reaches over, giving you a light punch in the shoulder. “I don’t want to show up this one’s leather jacket game.”

You can’t help but smile at her, wild and genuine. “Well, that’s probably your influence on me.”

Yaz glances away at that. Jack clears his throat. “Well. If Yaz is going –”

He doesn’t finish, and you raise your eyebrows. “Are you asking if there’s a slot open?”

Jack sighs, shaking his head. “Look, I’m just saying. You might be half Doctor and half Master, but you’re all trouble, alright? You need someone to keep an eye on you. Especially this time around, considering, well –” He gestures at you. “You know.”

You frown at him. “Do you really want to?”

He huffs a laugh, incredulous. “You really still have to ask that?”

The smile tugging at your lips is more uncertain now, not quite sure where you stand. “I’ve hurt you a lot.”

“Which one of you?” Jack asks. “Doesn’t matter, anyway. It’s never mattered.”

“I shot you.”

“Yep, and you’ll definitely be making up for that. One apology was not enough,” Jack teases, grinning – but there’s a faltering there. “Come on, Doc. You’re gonna make me think you don’t want me around.”

But you do, you find suddenly – and it surprises both parts of you. But you do.

“It’d be nice, having you around,” you tell him, and then tilt your head again. “You’re probably the best person to have to deal with this version of me. I’m still not sure what I’m going to be like.”

Jack laughs at that, before opening the door of the TARDIS and stepping inside. “Yeah, well, I was gonna say, this offer isn’t optional – for the sake of the rest of the universe, if nothing else.”

You laugh at that.

“Probably wise,” you say, before looking back at Yaz, who looks amused, the warmth of the sunlight on her face hiding at least some of her grief. She’s looking at Jack as he disappears into the console room – but then her gaze shifts to you. She looks uncertain for a moment – but then manages a smile.

“One last trip, then?” she says.

And you nod, stepping to the side and holding the door open for her.

“One last trip,” you say – and as she brushes past you, you cast one more look out into the brightness of the room beyond, pausing for a moment, before stepping into your ship and pushing the door shut behind you.