(revised) Shit Trip - The War of the Doctor - Neo

The War of the Doctor
by Neo

“Help me, please. Can anybody hear me?”
“Please state the nature of your ailment or injury.”
“I’m not injured, I’m crashing! I don’t need a doctor.”
“A clear statement of your symptoms will help us provide the medical practitioner appropriate to your individual needs.”
“I’m trying to send a distress signal, stop talking about doctors!”
“I’m a Doctor…but probably not the one you’re expecting.”
The Eighth Doctor and Cass dashed around the gunship hurtling through space, mightily impressed by each other. A brave young traveller, forced to cut their adventures short because of the war? The Doctor knew her type very well indeed.
When they came to the TARDIS, Cass hesitated.
“Don’t worry,” the Doctor reassured her, “it’s bigger on the inside.”
“What did you say - bigger on the inside, is that what you said?”
“Yes. Come on, you’ll love it.”
“Is this a TARDIS?”
“Yes, but you’ll be perfectly safe, I promise you.”
“Don’t touch me!”
“I’m not part of the war, I swear to you. I never was.”
“You’re a Time Lord…”
“Yes, I’m a Time Lord, but I’m one of the nice ones!”
“Get away from me!”
“Well, look on the bright side, I’m not a Dalek!”
“Who can tell the difference any more?”
Further words changed nothing. Cass sealed the door between them, and the ship plummeted down, down, down to an empty planet.
The Doctor was jolted to the back of the ship as it crashed, but remained conscious. A blaring alarm sounded, the ship’s computer announcing the rapid spread on an onboard fire
Aching, the Doctor rose from the floor and looked out a nearby window at where the gunship had landed.
Outside was what seemed to be an endless red ocean. It looked completely uninhabited. The Doctor couldn’t remember ever seeing such a place before, but then, his memory was far from reliable.
Irritated at himself for wasting time taking in his surroundings, The Doctor rushed off to find Cass. He ran to the deadlocked door, only to find there was no longer any door. Just fire. He ran through the fire and flames, only to find Cass’ body already floating out on the sea, pooling out of a hole that fire had burned through the side of the ship.
He stared, paying no mind to the flames nipping at his feet. A companion in a sea of blood. What kind of cruel joke was the universe playing on him? How many times had he seen that before?
“Charley, C’rizz, Lucie, Tamsin, Molly…”
A furious explosion burst from the other end of the ship, the force of the blast propelling the Doctor all the way to the TARDIS.
He opened the doors, and walked over to the TARDIS controls with less haste than he should have, given the speed at which the ship was exploding. Nonetheless, he managed to zoom the TARDIS into the sky, turning his back on the oceans beneath him, speeding into the time vortex, light years away, centuries away.
“No more,” he whispered.
There were no more adventures for Cass. There were no more adventures for him. There were worlds out there where the sky was burning, but the seas were full of corpses, and the rivers dreamt of a universe long gone. No more companions, no more peace, no more running away. The universe had beaten him and broken him.
He remembered the day he’d finally escaped from the Divergent Universe, only to face an Earth conquered by Davros, companions that he’d doomed by losing his damned memory yet again, and a genocide on his hands.
“At least you will have a home to return to, Doctor,” Davros had said.
“True”, he had said.
“You feel no guilt or shame at the atrocity you committed?”
“You mean destroying Skaro? You reckon I should be wallowing in angst or something? ‘Did I have the right,’ yadda, yadda, yadda - I had the right! I’ve seen what the Daleks are capable of! I had the right to destroy them.”
He remembered the worst day of his life, talking to the Dalek Time Controller before the worst of it had happened.
“Did you know I once had the chance to avert your creation?” he had said.
“Evidently you failed,” the Dalek Time controller had replied.
“No, I hesitated. I thought I could claim the moral high ground, and I let the Daleks live.”
“You lacked the courage.”
“Yes, yes, I did - but you listen to me. You better hope you don’t give me one single chance to escape, because I will take it. No matter what, I’ll take it, and I will go back in time, and I will wipe the Daleks from the face of history.”
And later that day, after all the deaths he was responsible for, he remembered a conversation with his grandaughter.
“Grandfather…”
“Do you remember that time long, long time ago, we were escaping from a bunch of murderous cavemen. You, me, Ian, Barbara. And that wounded man was holding us up - remember that? And for one moment, just…I entertained the possibility…I picked up a rock…”
“But you didn’t do it, did you? You didn’t kill that man.”
“Only because Chesteron stopped me. Direct action, that’s what that was. Maybe I should be more like that now. Maybe I’ve gone soft.”
Back in the present, he knew now that he had gone soft, and he could see what it had cost him, his companions, the universe.
“No more,” he repeated.
The Eighth Doctor sailed into the Time War.
To fight.

***

At times, the Eighth Doctor was thankful of his forgetful mind. It let him forget the fighting. Most of it, anyway. He couldn’t count how much time had passed since that day Cass died and he’s resolved to try to end the war for good. Perhaps by now he’s spent more time fighting in the Time War than he had even living on Orbis.
No matter. It would all be over soon enough.
He’d searched for a surefire way to end the war for a long time, and through missions and calculations too numerous to name, had discovered that the Key of Rassilon, if weaponised, could produce enough destructive energy to end the war for good. By destroying Daleks and Time Lords alike.
Like Cass said - who could tell the difference anymore?
Rassilon himself had altered the Key into a weapon, one he called the Eye of Discord, the Galaxy Eater, the Moment. He’d locked it away deep in the Omega Arsenal, but the Doctor had finally managed to steal it, then install it into a de-mat gun so he could activate it.
He parked the TARDIS on Gallifreyan sands, near the old weathered barn he knew so well. He walked out, silently.
 He didn’t care how close the TARDIS was. It was a shell of its former self as much as he was, awful coral-like structures sprouting and overtake his once-pristine interior room.
 The Doctor’s looks had changed too, he knew. For a while he’d traded the clothes that Charley used to dote over and Lucie used to laugh over, for a much more stripped-down leather jacket, around the time he’d met Molly. Later, in a vain attempt to recapture the hope and wonder of his youth, he’d gone back to his signature Edwardian style. But there was no one to dote on it or laugh at it anymore. He didn’t have any  companions now.
What even was he anymore? He was the Doctor, but that name was tarnished enough that he no longer cared what anyone thought of himself. There was nothing to say, no notice to serve. It had all gone on too long. No more. It was time for an ending.
He walked through the barn doors, took the Moment out of the sack he’d carried it in, and got to work.
As he readied the Moment for activation, he felt a pang of his old self for the first time in quite a while. He’d end the war, he’d destroy the Daleks, but all his own people as well…
But then, the Time Lords were as much the Time War as the Daleks. Perhaps moreso.
He thought on all the evil they’d brought to the universe. Only the monstrous would deserve such an infernal device as the Moment, but it was the monstrous, his own people, the agents of chaos, that had devised it in the first place. The casualties of war were on them as much as the Daleks. They were all cursed. No more. It was time for the Time Lords to right their own wrongs. It was time for the Doctor to act instead of judge.
“Physician, heal thyself.”
He fired.
Immediately, the Moment exploded with red light, scorching his hand and beaming haphazardly off in different directions. One beam hit him squarely in the chest, with such force that he was blown out the back of the barn, outside, right through the TARDIS doors.
Wheezing and bleeding, he stumbled to the TARDIS controls. The red beam had gone right through him, and into the TARDIS too. The cloister bell was ringing, the time rotor sparking, and the structures around the interior were falling, aflame.
As the Doctor pulled the TARDIS up into the sky, the Moment continued to bleed fiery light, consuming everything it touched. He pulled back further and further, as the Moment swallowed up Gallifrey. He pulled up out of Gallifrey, and saw the remaining sky trenches swallowed up by the endless red light.
He continued to lean on the same lever, not quite sure if it was because it would be too physically painful to pull himself off it, or because he wanted to be absolutely certain the Moment ended the Time War.
After Gallifrey, the Moment continued to swallow up all the surrounding Dalek fleets, then spread onwards and outwards. The Eighth was confident at this point it would work as he thought, eating the galaxy away, locking the Time War out of natural time forever, and finally bringing an ending to things.
As he was wont to so often, the Doctor was forgetting something. He looked down and saw he was leaking golden light.
He’d have been willing to go down with his ship, but he could already feel a new consciousness starting to bloom inside him, one that wouldn’t. So he worked the TARDIS controls to sail into the time vortex, away from the red light, away from the Moment, away from the cinders of the Time War.
Warping into the vortex, the Doctor fell back from the controls, onto the TARDIS floor.
This wasn’t going to be easy. In the very early days of the Time War, Rassilon had weaponised regeneration, the idea being that violent regenerations would take out enemies that harmed Time Lords enough to trigger regeneration. There was now less lying peacefully on the floor, and more painfully exploding.
 But then, he deserved plenty of pain.
 The Eighth Doctor succumbed to the golden light, and regenerated.

***

The Ninth Doctor woke up disoriented. The TARDIS had changed. So had he.
He could see the TARDIS was different. That lovely coral, the green light, the smaller and less ostentatious interior. And he could feel he was different. He was born anew, and…and it was over.
Finally, it was over.
He stood up, walked over to the new TARDIS console, and ran some scans. Sure enough…it was over. They were gone. They were all gone.
He staggered back, outside the TARDIS doors, without even checking where he’d landed. Outside, he staggered past signs telling of a new building development in Totter’s Lane. His mind was on other things.
“They’re all gone,” he muttered. “I’m the only one left.”
He was suddenly very aware of the glowing key in his pocket, and started stumbling back towards the TARDIS. Once inside, he doubled over in pain.
“Still cooking,” he muttered. Regeneration energy was still working its way through his system.
He launched the TARDIS into the vortex once more, before keeling over onto the floor again.

***

The Doctor settled into his new self as the pain and memories of the Eighth Doctor faded. He had some small adventures alone, breezing along quickly, never staying along. Just settling into being a Doctor in peacetime again, though never slowing down too much, lest he begin to reflect on his past too much. He wouldn’t even slow down long enough to look at his new self in a mirror.
Eventually the TARDIS alerted him to the Nestene Consciousness causing some sort of issue in London in 2005. Autons, what better problem for a fresh Doctor?
Exploring a store they’d infiltrated, his sonic screwdriver’s scans alerted him to a large concentration of Autons in the basement. Making his way down, he picked up on readings of a human lifeform down there.
Arriving in the nick of time, the Doctor came beside the young woman being menaced by the Autons, and extended his hand.
“Run!”

***

“By the way, did I mention it also travels in time?”
The Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler sailed across the stars. Ghosts from the past, aliens from the future, flying, dancing, always together.
Until now. Rose was stuck back in dreary London, while the Doctor was fighting Daleks 20000 years into the future, yet right now!
There was nothing for her here. She had to go back. She had to save him.
“Keep going!” Rose yelled.
The TARDIS still wasn’t opening up, hard as Mickey pulled.
“Put your foot down!” Jackie yelled outside.
“Faster!”
“Give it some more, Mickey!”
“Keep going!”
“Come on, come on!”
“Keep going!”
“Give it some more!”
Mickey’s yells were drowned out as the TARDIS console finally opened up, finally blossomed with golden light, enveloping Rose, drinking her in. The time vortex poured into her, the TARDIS poured into her, like honey to the bee.
As Rose was swallowed up by the vortex, time broke apart for her. Past and future, cause and effect, they were meaningless now.
She was barrelling through the vortex into the future, to the Doctor, but she was also closing the TARDIS doors before Mickey or Jackie could react.
She was tearing apart a Dalek fleet, but she was also kissing the Doctor. She was bursting with the heart of the TARDIS, all the time in the vortex, and she was letting go all that power, it leaking out her eyes and into the Doctor’s.
The sun and the moon, the day and night, they weren’t separated by anything anymore. They were all together and they were all discrete, they were all at once and they were forever apart.
She could see so much more, but it was all so much, she could barely make sense of it. There was no throughline, no narrative, no story, just utter chaos.
She willed herself toward an ending, any ending, to try and get her bearings, to try and keep her consciousness above the tides of time.
She pushed her mind forward and could see Rose’s final goodbye - her final goodbye - to the Doctor, at Dårlig Ulv Stranden. Bad Wolf Bay.
An ending. She needed to anchor herself to it, to keep her mind from being swallowed up. Rose Tyler, the TARDIS, the time vortex, she had to bind them together.
Time swam over her again and she felt her mind adrift in the vortex, but she focused on that ending, Bad Wolf Bay. When she suddenly became aware she was on Satellite 5 again, she held that ending in mind, and left herself a reminder.
“I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself.”
The Doctor looked up at her in astonishment, but she was busy looking at the signage above her. BADWOLF CORPORATION. She knew that was from her, but she had to create it in the first place to not get lost, to keep her mind. She had to remember cause and effect, past and present, or she’d be gone, her mind would melt away amongst the vortex, and all that’s left would be the TARDIS and a young shopgirl, separate, of no use to anyone. This was her only chance.
“I take the words, I scatter them in time and space. A message to lead myself here.”
She pushed, and scattered the words throughout time, and took them deep into her as well. Bad Wolf. That’s who she was. The name anchored her. She could see the whole of time and space, every single atom of existence, but that name, it focused her, it anchored her, it kept her conscious.
The Bad Wolf felt herself pulled back, and suddenly she was conscious of the TARDIS doors closing,  the ship beginning to vault through the vortex. But it wasn’t as overwhelming now. She was the Bad Wolf. She was in control, above the waves.
She could see everything, change anything. She had so much power, and so much time to use it.
She focused her mind onto the Doctor and drank him in, all of him, not just her Doctor, but all that he’d been before and all he’d be in future as well. She wanted him safe. She wanted him happy. For so long, he’d remain unhappy. The Time War had hurt him so much.
She focused on where he hurt the most and saw a younger him firing an ornate, complicated looking device. He killed his people, turned into her Doctor, and the war ended. He burst with pain, then burst with light.
But she could change that.
The Bad Wolf became acutely aware of just how much she could impose her will onto time and space. There were no limitations. As long as she anchored herself, remembered what she was, kept thinking in straight lines, in stories and narratives, in beginnings and endings, in cause and effect…as long as she did that, she could push her will freely.
She could do more than save the Doctor. She could heal him, help him. But first she had to know what she was dealing with. She pulled herself back to the beginning, and watched.

***

Gallifrey. Stealing the TARDIS. It was so new, such a beginning, that she didn’t dare try and push earlier and learn more. She sped on. The Doctor, the First Doctor. The junkyard. The granddaughter. The teachers. The Daleks. And, eventually, an ending.
The Second Doctor. More Daleks. She was uncomfortable lingering this early. It was so far from her Doctor it was hard to feel any anchors. She was keenly aware of how easily she could slip away. So she sped through, faster and faster.
The Time Lords. The Third Doctor. The Fourth, the Fifth, the Sixth. The timeline grew more frayed, it lapsed, but it was still one continuous stream.
The Seventh Doctor. As she tried to focus on the Seventh Doctor, she felt her sense of sight and visuals slide away. Her understanding of the Doctor came to her just in thoughts, in words. It wasn’t like the same stream of the first six Doctors anymore, but then, was she focusing as hard on them as she was on him now? Maybe it was never as continuous as she thought.
Sight returned to her, blindingly, and she saw him become the Doctor that would end it all. The one before hers, the one who’d end the Time War. But then her sight blinked out again, and her awareness was back to thoughts and words. Some time passed until she begin to feel speech creeping in, and then her sense of past Doctors began to be filled with speech too, retroactively. She was becoming more and more aware of how to think, how to understand, how to feel across the vortex.
Again, the Eighth Doctor ended the Time War, and regenerated into the Ninth. She saw herself eventually save the Ninth, then adventure with the Tenth,  before the final goodbye at Bad Wolf Bay. It wasn’t long after that he changed again, and then he was so young, so mad, but so empty too. There were no great mysteries for the Eleventh Doctor, no great enemies. He lived an uneventful life before regenerating into the Twelfth Doctor, another young man but this time with ginger hair, and with a habit of exclaiming “quel dommage!” He lived a long life but eventually that too came to an end, with the Doctor all alone.
He did not regenerate again.
The Bad Wolf did not like that ending. The Eleventh Doctor retreated into childishness and never came to terms with his age, let alone the Time War. As for the Twelfth Doctor, well he was all alone right to the end. These were not the endings she wanted for the Doctor.
And so the Bad Wolf plunged into the Doctor’s timeline, and began making changes.

***

The Bad Wolf was touched by how the Tenth Doctor stayed the same for Rose, for her, but expending a regeneration that way seemed to stunt him.
What if it didn’t? What if the chamber containing his previously discarded hand wasn’t in the TARDIS, what if he had no receptacle to push his regeneration into? What if the Tenth became the Eleventh early, after being shot by a Dalek and standing in a TARDIS with Rose Tyler, Jack Harkness, and Donna Noble?
She didn’t know if it would improve anything, and at the back of her mind thought that trying to fix the Eighth Doctor would help more in the long run, but didn’t she have all the time in the world? She could always change things back if they didn’t work. She had all the time she needed.
So she willed herself into that moment in the TARDIS, and opened the TARDIS floor so Jack’s chamber with the hand fell down. No one noticed, all too busy focusing on the Doctor.
Events did not proceed according to plan. The Eleventh Doctor was too alien, too manic to comfort his companions or think up a plan to stop the Daleks, and eventually annoyed the Supreme Dalek with his new catchphrases so much that he was exterminated.
The Bad Wolf pulled her mind back, pained. No, this wouldn’t do. The Bad Wolf pulled back and restored the Tenth Doctor’s hand chamber to the TARDIS before he began to regenerate, and let events proceed as they had before, as they had properly. Back to normal.
The Eleventh Doctor troubled her. Bringing him in early than usual didn’t improve things.
What would happen if he came later?

***

Towards the end of the Tenth Doctor, so many from his past returned. The Time Lords. The Master. Rassilon. The Bad Wolf sped through them all, to the proper end of the Tenth Doctor. Four knocks.
“They gone, then?” asked Wilf. “Yeah, goodo. If you could let me out?”
“Yeah.”
“Only, this thing seems to be making a bit of a noise.”
“The Master left the nuclear bolt running. It’s gone into overload.”
“And that’s bad, is it?”
“No, because all the excess radiation gets vented inside there. Vinvocci glass contains it. All five hundred thousand rads, about to flood that thing.”
“Oh. Well, you better let me out then.”
“Except it’s gone critical. Touch one control and it floods. Even the sonic would set it off.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sure.”
“Look…just leave me.”
“Okay, right then, I will. Because you had to go in there, didn’t you? You had to go and get stuck, oh yes! Because that’s who you are, Wilfred. You were always this. Waiting for me all this time.”
“No really, just leave me. I’m an old man, Doctor. I’ve had my time.”
“Well, exactly. Look at you. Not remotely important. But me? I could do so much more. So much more! But this is what I get. My reward. And it’s not fair! Oh. Oh…lived too long.”
“No, no, no, please, please don’t, no, don’t! Please don’t! Please!”
“Wilfred, it’s my honour. Better be quick. Three, two, one.”
It was trivial for the Bad Wolf to focus her will into the chamber and displace most of the radiation far off in time. The Doctor will still be hurt, enough that he’d think he was going to regenerate…but he wouldn’t.
A short conversation with Wilf, and off the Doctor went, on his tour of companions, readying himself for what he thought was his end. Eventually, after seeing her a final time (for him), he staggered back into the TARDIS.
“I don’t want to go.”
And he didn’t.
It didn’t take long for the Doctor and the remaining Daleks in the universe to begin the Time War anew. Again, his tangles with the Daleks saw him perish. This timeline hadn’t healed the Doctor at all, it had just exposed how bound to the Time War he still was, how doomed he was to repeat it again and again.
So, the Bad Wolf pulled back and restored the timeline to how it originally was. Clearly, saving the Doctor, healing the Doctor, it wasn’t going to be quick or easy.

***

She began to experiment more and more wildly. She tried setting up events to make the Eighth Doctor regenerate earlier, before using the Moment, but it kept resulting in Ninth Doctors different to hers.
One timeline saw an older, fussier Ninth Doctor tangled up with a race called the Shalka, with an android Master in tow.
One timeline saw a suave Ninth Doctor fall in love with a woman called Emma, and burn through all his regenerations rapidly in an encounter with the Master.
Another timeline saw a bald Doctor who loved to try out different voices gain a fetishistic obsession with the Daleks, as he tried to bring the Time War to a big finish.
None of these would do, none of these were her Ninth Doctor. She settled the Eighth Doctor’s regeneration back to how it originally was.
Sometimes, for inspiration, she’d bring herself back to the moment she did (or rather, she would) save the Ninth Doctor from the Emperor of the Daleks and his scavenger fleet.
“You’ve got the entire vortex running through your head,” the Doctor would say. “You’re gonna burn!”
Indeed, she felt increasing amounts of pain the more she played with time. But wasn’t she the avatar of time, of the vortex? How could she be hurting herself?
Sometimes it felt like something was on the outside of her, pressing in. Was that Rose’s body? Or was that the vortex itself? Was something trying to break into time, into the universe?
She quickly zoomed through the Doctor’s timelines to investigate. Nothing seemed particularly different. The Tenth Doctor now encountered a woman named River Song, that was new, but it wasn’t until the Eleventh Doctor that there were big changes.
There was something different about the crack behind Amelia Pond’s wall.
“You’ve had some cowboys in here. Not actual cowboys. Though that can happen.”
This was all new. Before, the crack was just a crack, albeit one that leaked artron energy. Now, there was something behind it.
The Bad Wolf zoomed through the Eleventh Doctor’s timeline and saw all sorts of new things. Rory died, but came back. The Doctor was trapped, but escaped. The TARDIS exploded, then didn’t. All sorts of new enemies pursued the Doctor in the name of silence. Eventually the Doctor visited his grave - a new one, at that, on the planet Trenzalore. He never met any younger versions of himself, something she thought might help him cope with such a revelation, but instead proceeded to unwittingly arrive at Trenzalore long, long before it would become his grave.
“There you are,” the Doctor said, inside a house in Trenzalore he was investigating with his newest companion. “What took you so long?”
“What’s wrong?” asked Clara. “It’s only a crack in the wall.”
“I knew. I always knew it wasn’t over.”
“What is it?”
“A split in the skin of reality. A tiny sliver of the 26th of June, 2010. The day the universe blew up.”
“Missed that…”
“I rebooted it, put it all back together again.”
“That’s good!”
“Well it was my TARDIS that blew it up in the first place, I felt a degree of responsibility. But the scar tissue remains. A structural weakness in the whole universe. And something’s trying to get through it, from outside our universe, from somewhere else. Of course, of course. It makes sense.”
“It does?”
“Yes. If you tried to break through a wall, you’d choose the weakest spot. If you were trying to break into this universe, you’d choose this crack, because…no, if you were trying to break back into this universe.”
The Doctor turned to his other new companion, the disembodied Cyberman head he called handles.
“You said Gallifrey,” he said to the head. “Why did you say Gallifrey?”
“Analysis of message composition indicates Gallifreyan origin,” replied Handles, “according to TARDIS data banks.”
“You said Gallifrey was gone,” said Clara.
“I did. I did. I blew it up. I killed them all, I don’t understand how this can be happening! The message is coming through here. The truth field is too, at a guess. If it’s somehow the Time Lords…if it’s the Time Lords…”
The Doctor pulled something out of his pocket.
“Seal of the High Council of Time Lords, nicked it off the Master in the Death Zone,” he said as he placed it onto Handles. “There is an algorithm imprinted in the atomic structure. Use it to decode the message.”
“Message decoding. Message analysis proceeding. Information available. The message is a request for information.”
“It’s a question, why can’t you just say it’s a question?”
“It is being projected through all of time and space on a repeating cycle.”
“The oldest question in the universe, hidden in plain sight…”
“Warning, translation will be available to all life-forms in range. Translation follows…”
The Doctor paced around the room nervously, as Handles began to relay the message.
“Doctor who? Doctor who? Doctor who? Doctor who?”
The voice started out in Handles’ robotic tones, but began to take on the tone of its actual speaker as Handles tuned more accurately onto its resonancies. The Doctor expected the voice to be the General’s, or perhaps Rassilon’s, but it was neither. It was harsher, louder, more distorted, and yet almost reminded him of the voice of one his younger selves.
“A question only I could answer. A truth field to make sure I’m not lying. If I give my name, they’ll know they’ve found the right place, and that it’s safe to come through.”
“The Time Lords? Okay, so what then? If you answer the question and they come back, what happens?”
“Ah, you need to take this to the TARDIS and put it in the charger slot for the sonic.”
“Why?”
“Hell. All hell, that’s what happens if the Time Lords come back. I don’t know how they’ve done it, but I know there’s half a universe up there already, waiting to open fire. Now please, just go to the TARDIS and do what I say.”
After tricking Clara and having the TARDIS take her back home, the Doctor guarded the town of Christmas on the planet Trenzalore for nine hundred years, from a seemingly endless siege.

***

Eventually the Eleventh Doctor regenerated out of old age (wearing a bit thin…), taking many Daleks out in the explosive process.
The new Twelfth Doctor was different from other ones the Bad Wolf had seen. He was refined where the Eleventh was goofy, dark where the Eleventh was pale, bald where the Eleventh had been haired.
After some  time, he too came to an end, and with that, so did the Siege. The few survivors had nothing to fight for, now the entity behind the cracks would never be able to get its answer. The TARDIS, automatically returned after depositing Clara back home so long ago, would eventually suffer a size leak, and a much younger Eleventh Doctor and Clara would visit the great grave it became.
Something bothered the Bad Wolf all the while. She’d seen the Eighth Doctor destroy the Time Lords. It couldn’t be them behind the crack. Who could it be?
She scanned back through the Doctor’s timeline, all the way from the First Doctor, looking for anything to help her understand, when she heard a voice, the very same voice that asked “Doctor who?” on Trenzalore.
“Keep away!”
“Doctor! Doctor, it is you! Is this the TARDIS? I mean, what’s happened? It’s all been like a dream…I found myself here, when I was last in the Time Station with those awful Neverpeople, and…oh Doctor, come on, let me help you.”
“I said keep away!”
“Oh! Doctor, what’s wrong? Have you been injured or something?”
“Injured? No, I have not been injured. This TARDIS contained all of the Time Station when it exploded. This ship was filled to bursting with a great mass of the fiercest, fizzing energy.”
“What, Anti-Time?”
“A crude term for such a matter of life and death. But now that the breach is resolved, now that the problem of you is resolved…well, all that remains of that stuff in this whole reality is held…in here.”
“What, in the TARDIS?”
“No. In…here…”
“Y-you’re scaring me now. Stop it, Doctor, please-”
“Doctor? Doctor? I hold the last vestiges of the most awesome power ever imagined. Imagined, yes! How much better if I should take my title from a work of imagination, a creature willed to power by the undying anger of an unreal race!”
“Doctor, I haven’t got the faintest idea what you’re on about, but I really think you need help, so if you’ll just let me-”
The Eighth Doctor slapped Charley Pollard hard across her face. She screamed, and fell to the floor.
“Doctor, Doctor, what’s wrong with you?”
“I told you girl, I AM NOT THE DOCTOR! I am become he who sits inside your head, he who lives among the dead, he who sees you in your bed, and eats you when you’re sleeping. I am become…ZAGREUS!”

***

The Bad Wolf observed the confusing events that followed. This Zagreus figure seemed to be a manifestation of Anti-Time, a dark mirror to time itself, born of tampering with the passage of time. With a sinking feeling, understanding came to the Bad Wolf.
She reflected on just how massively she’d tampered in the vortex, on how freely she had experimented with enormous changes to the web of time. In the Doctor’s original timeline, Zagreus was eventually defeated by the Eighth Doctor, and the remnants of his existence purged from the Doctor’s body by Rassilon when the Doctor exited a parallel pocket universe Rassilon used as a plaything. The Divergent Universe.
Was she to the actual universe, as Rassilon was to the Divergent? Just what had she wrought?
Previously, when Rassilon had purged Zagreus from the Eighth Doctor, the Divergent Universe was able to end and reset itself, free from all life. But her tampering with time seemed to embolden it, enliven it, lend it strength. It fed off the massive amounts of Anti-Time she had produced in tinkering with the Doctor’s timestream. Rassilon did successfully expel Zagreus from the Eighth Doctor, but now Zagreus festered inside a Divergent Universe that the Time Lords mistakenly thought dealt with.
The cracks in time the Silence had formed blowing up the TARDIS in an attempt to prevent the Doctor from answering the great question and beginning the Time War anew, were the very cracks in the skin of the universe that Zagreus was able to question the Doctor through. An endless paradox loop sustaining itself, this was not something she could undo without causing such massive changes, and thus Anti-Time. That very Anti-Time would enlarge the cracks wide enough for Zagreus to come through, before she could change things enough to prevent Zagreus existing in the first place.
It was maddening. She was trapped.
She sensed Zagreus wasn’t alone in the Divergent Universe, but joined by a legion of entities feeding off Anti-Time as well. Whether Neverpeople, or the race known as the Divergents, she wasn’t sure - Zagreus remained rather confusing for her. She could tell that, while monstrous and powerful, they’d still be annihilated if the Papal Mainframe, Daleks, or any other great force met them on Trenzalore when they emerged.
Hence, the siege. The Doctor mistakenly thought Zagreus and the Neverpeople were the Time Lords, because Zagreus was born of the Doctor, he had his memories, he was of Gallifreyan origin. He could trick him as easily as he could trick himself, and that was something both the forgetful Eighth and childish Eleventh Doctors were very good at. And what better assurance that it was safe to pass into the universe than a secret only the Doctor knew - his name?
The Doctor dying alone on a planet-sized warfield graveyard was tragedy enough, but at least it would prevent Zagreus from ever crossing over.
But then…the Doctor wasn’t the only one who time travelled. All manner of races eventually gained that technology. And the more they used it, the greater the cracks would grow. Eventually, Zagreus would be able to come through, and wreak his great destruction upon the universe.
The Bad Wolf had to stop him. But if she did it directly, it would only make him stronger, only grow the cracks wider.
No, she couldn’t confront this head on. She had to deal it indirectly. As long as she observed timelines without changing them, the Anti-Time wouldn’t increase, so she went over and over the Eighth Doctor’s timeline until Zagreus made more sense to her.
The problem seemed to be that her manipulation of the Doctor’s timeline had galvanised the Anti-Time within the Divergent Universe to the point that, rather than repeat in an endless sustainable loop, it would grow exponentially. This gave the shell of Zagreus more and more strength, and saw the atoms of the annihilated Neverpeople bind together, in a reversal of entropy. Anti-Time, anti-entropy. But the more Neverpeople, the more Anti-Time, and the more Anti-Time, the more Zagreus, and on and on it went.
The Neverpeople were so bound to Zagreus’ continued existence that only he could kill him. If anyone else tried, they would simply immediately reconstitute themselves. But Zagreus had been so bound to the Doctor’s existence, that the Doctor would be able to kill them for good.
There were moments and locations in the Time War where pocket universes opened up long enough for the Doctor to warp back into the Divergent Universe without bringing them directly into the actual universe.
Yes. This could work. If the Doctor destroyed the Neverpeople, the Anti-Time would finally permanently disperse, Zagreus would lose enough power to be able to be dealt with, the Divergent Universe could be cleansed and closed off, and there would be nothing behind the cracks to trouble the universe.
The only problem was, she knew none of the Doctors after the Eighth Doctor would have it in them to genocide an entire race. Not again. Perhaps some of the younger Doctors would, particularly the Seventh, but Zagreus retained the imprint of the Eighth Doctor, and all the memories of his younger selves…he’d be able to think exactly like them, and counter them with ease.
As for the Eighth Doctor himself, he was too close to things. Even if he could be persuaded to wipe out the Neverpeople, Zagreus was too close to him. She didn’t think the Eighth Doctor would be able to resist being overtaken by Zagreus.
What then? The only solution seemed to be…create a new Doctor. Before Trenzalore. A Doctor early enough in the timeline to work, at a safe point.
The more the Bad Wolf considered the idea, the better it seemed. If a Doctor was split off between the Eighth and Ninth, perhaps all the angst and pain of the Time War could be concentrated into one incarnation. The Eighth Doctor could regenerate uncorrupted, never having succumbed to the war and combat. A Doctor born in blood and battle would surely have the temperament to deal with the Neverpeople.
And so the Bad Wolf vowed to grow a new Doctor in his timeline

***

The Bad Wolf willed herself to the moment the Eighth Doctor made the choice to fight in the Time War, on a crashing gunship with a young pilot called Cass.
All she did was divert the ship’s course. Easy enough - in the days of the Time War, ships unexpectedly warping through space and time wasn’t uncommon. Instead of heading to a planet of red seas, she diverted it to Kasterborous, nearer Karn than Gallifrey.
“Help me, please. Can anybody hear me?”
“Please state the nature of your ailment or injury.”
“I’m not injured, I’m crashing! I don’t need a doctor.”
“A clear statement of your symptoms will help us provide the medical practitioner appropriate to your individual needs.”
“I’m trying to send a distress signal, stop talking about doctors!”
“I’m a Doctor…but probably not the one you’re expecting.”
Events proceeded much as they had before, until the ship crashed on an entirely different planet than it once had.
Cass died upon impact. So did the Doctor, in a sense. The Sisterhood of Karn managed to convince him of the necessity of participating in the Time War, and the Doctor despondently began to agree on fashioning a regeneration suited to the task.
A romantic, tragic end. It suited him.
“Physician, heal thyself.”
The Eighth Doctor regenerated, but not into the Ninth Doctor. Instead, he became the War Doctor.

***

The Bad Wolf pushed ahead some years to see the development of this new incarnation.
The War Doctor took no joy or pleasure from fighting in the Time War, but fight he did.
She didn’t want to see him this way. She rushed far, far forward, but as he aged, the War Doctor became less and less able to fight, and more and more woeful over not being a Doctor in the same way as the others. He still managed to use the Moment and end the Time War much as the Eighth Doctor had once done, but only very reluctantly.
So she pulled back to his relative youth, and diverted his TARDIS far, far into the future, at the time of the Siege of Trenzalore, so that a passing pocket universe lined up adjacent to the Divergent Universe. He was nothing if not clever. He’d be able to work it out.
Zagreus and the Neverpeople managed to break into this pocket dimension, but the physical dimensions of it were so alien that they didn’t manifest in their original forms, but instead in bizarre, twisted manifestations. They began to feast on the timelines of the pocket universe’s native inhabitants. The threat was so great that other Time Lords joined the War Doctor in the fray, to prevent them breaking into the universe proper. The Neverpeople, bleeding Anti-Time, became known as the Army of Meanwhiles and Neverweres, while Zagreus, far too twisted to be recognised as looking anything like the Doctor, became known as the Could’ve-Been-King. They used Anti-Time to nullify any that came close to them, constantly destroying the progression of time in the pocket universe.
Only the War Doctor remained pragmatic enough, cold enough, to not assist the native species being massacred, or the Time Lords rushing in to help. He watched, studied, and eventually grasped the nature of what they were fighting. The only thing he didn’t work out was her involvement.
Of course, the War Doctor succeeded in the fight when he did enter.Firstly, he bound the native populations of the pocket universe to endlessly die, be reborn, and die again, suffering in the grip of Anti-Time. He used the generation of potential energy much the way a Weeping Angel would. Monstrously.
Secondly, he took the TARDIS of a Time Lord that died in the fighting, and turned it into a Paradox Machine he bound to a certain energy emanating from Trenzalore - the power of his own TARDIS, leeching out as the size leak took effect after the Doctor’s final death. Now, when he solved the issue of Zagreus and the Neverpeople, it wouldn’t retroactively undo the existence of the cracks from the Eleventh Doctor’s timeline. Instead it would just prevent Zagreus and the Neverpeople ever breaking through the cracks after the Siege of Trenzalore ended. The Doctor would die in battle, but the universe would be saved.
After fixing time in these ways, he entered the Divergent Universe itself, and acted more monstrously than Zagreus could ever anticipated. Because he wasn’t truly a Doctor. He was not bound to that name. And so, he wiped out the Neverpeople, the entire race.
The Anti-Time dispersed. Zagreus was so weakened that he presented no further threat; there was no way for him to regain any power now that the War Doctor had broken their link and his source of Anti-Time. There was no need to kill him. It would be a cruel act, a cowardly act.
The Bad Wolf rushed forward in time before she could see if the War Doctor would do it.
She didn’t want to know.

***

The Doctor’s timeline was now stable. There was no Twelfth Doctor anymore, since the War Doctor used a regeneration up, but the War Doctor regenerated into the Ninth Doctor much the same way the Eighth had, after using the Moment. The Eleventh Doctor saw his grave on Trenzalore in his earlier years, then made his grave in Trenzalore in his later ones.
Displacing all the fighting in the Time War to the War Doctor instead of the Eighth Doctor gave the Eighth a cleaner break and neater ending, but didn’t help the later Doctors cope with what they did. Doctor or not, he was the same man. The Bad Wolf realised there were no simple solutions, not the way she’d hoped.
There was no more chance of corrupting timelines or producing dangerous amounts of Anti-Time, now there was no conduit for it and no loop for it to sustain itself in. But still, the Bad Wolf did not feel particularly inclined to interefere with the Doctor’s timeline any more. Hadn’t she done enough? She would save the Ninth Doctor, and the Doctor’s final end was noble enough.
Still, she couldn’t bear the thought of all that guilt of the Time War resting on the Doctor forever.
So she dove into Gallifrey’s past, replaced the Moment as the Time Lords knew it with a knew device, a weapon so powerful and so advanced that it became sentient and developed a conscience. Of course, that conscience was her. She integrated herself with the Moment, inhabited it, drove her consciousness into it, and eventually found herself stolen by the War Doctor, and taken to a very weathered barn on Gallifreyan sands.

***

“Time Lords of Gallifrey, Daleks of Skaro, I serve notice on you all. Too long I have stayed my hand - no more. Today, you leave me no choice. Today, this war will end. No more. No more…”
The War Doctor walked through the barn doors, took the Moment out of the sack he’d carried it in, and got to work.
“How, how do you work? Why is there never a big red button?”
The Bad Wolf took physical form, and, in the corner of the room, slowly rose. Projecting an avatar outside the vortex and onto actual physical space was disorienting.
“Hello? Is somebody there?” the War Doctor asked.
“It’s nothing,” the Bad Wolf replied. “It’s just a wolf.”
“Don’t sit on that!” exclaimed the War Doctor, appalled at the way she sat on the Moment’s physical shell.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not a chair, it’s the most dangerous weapon in the universe!”
“Why can’t it be both? Why did you park so far away? Didn’t you want her to see it?”
“Want who to see?”
“The TARDIS. You walked for miles, and miles, and miles, and miles, and miles…”
“I was thinking.”
“I heard you.”
“You heard me?”
“No more,” she said, mocking the way he spoke. “No more!”
“Stop it.”
“No more!”
“Who are you?” he asked, before turning the face the Moment - the box - again. “It’s activating. Get out of here.”
He tried to take hold of it, but recoiled in pain.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“The interface is hot!”
“Well, I do my best…”
“There’s a power source inside…you’re the interface?”
“They must have told you the Moment had a conscience,” she said. “Hello! Oh, look at you. Stuck between a girl and a box - story of your life, eh, Doctor?”
“You know me?”
“I hear you. All of you, jangling around in that dusty old head of yours. I chose this face and form especially for you. It’s from your past. Or possibly your future. I always get those two mixed up.”
“I don’t have a future.”
“I think I’m called Rose Tyler,” she said, sorting through the mass of thoughts in her mind. “No. Yes. No, sorry, no. No, in this form, I’m called…Bad Wolf. Are you afraid of the big bad wolf, Doctor?”
They argued over his name for a while, before getting to the point.
“If you have been inside my head, then you know what I’ve seen. The suffering. Every moment in time and space is burning. It must end, and I intend to end it the only way I can.”
“And you’re going to use me to end it by killing them all, Daleks and Time Lords alike. I could, but there will be consequences for you.”
“I have no desire to survive this.”
“That’s your punishment. If you do this, if you kill them all, that’s the consequence. You live. Gallifrey, you’re going to burn it, and all those Daleks with it, but all those children too. How many children are on Gallifrey right now?”
“I don’t know.”
“One day you will count them. One terrible night. Do you want to see what that will turn you into? Come on - aren’t you curious?”
She pulled down part of the vortex into the room, in the form of a shimmering, whirling portal.
“I’m opening windows to your future. A tangle in time through the days to come, to the man today will make of you.”
From the portal, out dropped a fez. Then into the portal, jumped a Doctor.

***

“Anyone lose a fez?”
“You! How can can you be here? More to the point, why are you here?”
“Good afternoon,” said the War Doctor, cheerful to be away from the war. “I’m looking for the Doctor.”
“Well,” replied the Tenth Doctor, side-by-side with the Eleventh, “you’ve certainly come to the right place.”
The Bad Wolf watched the three Doctors have a grand adventure together, getting captured by English soldiers, ingeniously devising a solution to unlock a wooden door, settling a dangerous conflict between humans and Zygons, and finally all at the barn in Gallifrey together.
Alone, the Doctor - whether the Eighth, or his successor - could always manage enough self-loathing to use the Moment, but three of them together, with a companion in tow…it wasn’t easy to begin with, and it was much, much harder like that.
Across space and time, far, far away, another Doctor wrestled with a similar conflict.
“It’s ready,” exclaimed the Ninth Doctor, as the Delta Wave’s calculations finally finished. A handle extended from the device, the would-be instrument of the destruction of two races.
The Bad Wolf extended a similar instrument from the Moment, in the shape of a big red button.
“You wanted a big red button,” she said to the War Doctor.
“Go away, all of you,” said the War Doctor wearily. “This is for me.”
“These events should be time-locked,” replied the Tenth Doctor, “we shouldn’t even be here.”
“So something let us through,” mused the Eleventh Doctor.
“You clever boys,” said the Bad Wolf, but only projecting herself to the War Doctor.
“Go back,” he said. “Go back to your lives. Go and be the Doctor that I could never be. Make it worthwhile.”
“All those years, burying you in my memory…”
“Pretending you didn’t exist. Keeping you a secret, even from myself…”
“Pretending you weren’t the Doctor, when you were the Doctor more than anybody else.”
“You were the Doctor on the day it wasn’t possible to get it right.”
“But this time…”
“You don’t have to do it alone.”
The three of them placed their hands onto the Moment together.
“Thank you,” said the War Doctor, moved.
As the Doctors prepared to commit dual genocide, the companion, Clara, cried. She could barely stand to see what they were about to do.
The Moment projected the Time War all around them, to drive home the gravity of the situation even further. She wasn’t going to interfere with his timelines anymore, but she was going to try and nudge him in a new direction for himself.
“There isn’t any other way,” said the Eleventh Doctor, in the barn. “There never was. Either I destroy my own people, or let the universe burn.
On a Dalek ship millenia away, the Ninth Doctor faced the Emperor of the Daleks.
“You really want to think about this, because if I activate this signal, every living creature dies.”
Back in the barn, Clara was crying.
“Look at you. The three of you. The warrior, the hero, and you.” She looked to the Eleventh Doctor.
“And what am I?” he asked.
“Have you really forgotten?”
“I want to see you become like me,” boomed the Emperor of the Daleks, so long ago, so far ahead. “Hail the Doctor, the Great Exterminator.”
“We’ve got enough warriors,” said Clara, back at the barn. “Any old idiot can be a hero.”
“Then what do I do?” asked the Eleventh Doctor.
“Prove yourself Doctor,” intoned the Emperor of the Daleks. “What are you, coward or killer?”
“Be a doctor,” said Clara. “You told me the name you chose was a promise. What was the promise?”
“Never cruel or cowardly,” said the Tenth Doctor.
“Never give up, never give in,” said the War Doctor.
“Coward, any day,” said the Ninth Doctor, pulling his hands away from the Delta Wave.
“Gentlemen, I have had four hundred years to think about this…I’ve changed my mind!” exclaimed the Eleventh Doctor, pulling his hands away from the Moment.
The Bad Wolf gleefully retracted the doomsday button from the Moment’s display.
“There’s still a billion billion Daleks up there, attacking.”
“Yeah, there is. There is.”
“But there’s something those billion billion Daleks don’t know.”
“Because if they did, they’d probably send for reinforcements!”
“What? What don’t they know?”
“This time there’s three of us.”

***

The three Doctors - no, not three, all thirteen - proceeded to save Gallifrey, and undo the ending of the Time War. The Bad Wolf had never felt more pride, or more love, for him.
She materialised onto the Dalek ship before the Daleks could exterminate the Ninth Doctor.
In her mind, she was on the Dalek ship, but she was also in the vortex. She was at Trenzalore, she was at Gallifrey, she was at Skaro, she was on Earth. She’d opened a door for the Doctor, but this time hadn’t forced him through. She gave him the opportunity to change time, but didn’t change it in his stead. And he more than rose to the occasion.
He gave himself to peace, as she gave herself to time.
He looked into himself, three of his selves, the War Doctor, the Tenth Doctor, the Eleventh Doctor.
She looked into herself, three of her selves, Rose Tyler, the Bad Wolf, and the Moment.
“I looked into the TARDIS, and the TARDIS looked into me,” she said on the Dalek ship.
She pulled herself out from the Doctor’s heroics and went to survey Trenzalore again. There was something different now, something bright, so very bright, but she didn’t want to look any further. She’d looked enough. It was time to go back and save her Doctor.
On and on the events at Trenzalore would loop, always leading the Doctor there.
On and on the events in the vortex would loop, always leading her to Bad Wolf Bay.
“I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself. I take the words, I scatter them in time and space. A message to lead myself here.”
 Bizarrely, the Zagreus loop had been completely overwritten, for a  pocket universe was now adjacent to the proper one, one that really did contain Gallifrey. It really was the Time Lords asking “Doctor who?” behind the crack in the wall at Trenzalore now. Zagreus was gone, for good.
“I want you safe. My Doctor. Protected from the false god.”
She reflected how the Doctor both had destroyed Gallifrey, and hadn’t. The Time Lords and the Daleks, their war seemed so small in comparison to all the Doctor’s timelines stretching out.
“You are tiny.”
His pain and guilt was real, but at the same time, it wasn’t. Both instances were real. Both emotions were true. All the timelines, all the permutations, all the stories, they were all real in their time.
“I can see the whole of time and space.”
She could see that now. So many possibilities and timelines stretching out forever, not cancelling each other out so much as spinning out more and more possibilities, ever onwards. What was a fleet of Daleks above Earth? What could be more trivial?
“Every single atom of your existence, I divide them.”
Her mind flashed to the barn, to both the Eighth Doctor and the War Doctor ending the Time War, one way or another.
“Everything must come to dust. All things. Everything dies. The Time War ends.”
Jack was gaping at the Tenth Doctor regenerating into the Eleventh Doctor alongside Donna Noble and Rose Tyler, and he was gaping at the Tenth Doctor regenerating into himself, but right now, he was dead on this very ship. No more.
“How can I let go of this? I bring life.”
Her mind was burning with the power of the TARDIS, of the time vortex. The pain was overwhelming. She could hear herself, or the Doctor. Words were skipping from her mind.
“The sun and the moon, the day and night. Why do they hurt?”
All the Doctor’s timelines stretched out before her. All the insanity between the Eighth and Ninth Doctor. All the Ninth Doctors. The endless variations afterwards.
“I can see everything. All that is, all that was, all that ever could be.”
Tears ran down her face.
“My head,” she said
“Come here,” he said
“It’s killing me.”
“I think you need a Doctor.”
The Doctor kissed her, and took all her pain. She collapsed to the ground as that vast godhead and consciousness left her, leaving her time for just one final thought.
The life of the Doctor wasn’t defined just by the Time War, or the Siege of Trenzalore, or any other battle he’d fought in. It was defined by the endless conflict between all the different lives he lived, by all the stories told of him. That neverending fountain of new adventures, that neverending sprawl of different timelines, that neverending conflict between all the tales of the man with so many faces - that was the war of the doctor.