The Tenth Hour

The Tenth Hour
By Neo
[Note: this takes place during my other shit trip “The War of the Doctor”, but should read fine standalone]

“I don’t want to go,” cried the Doctor, about to regenerate. He braced himself for the golden light to beam out of him.
But it never did. The regeneration never came.
“What? What? What?”

***

The TARDIS crash landed outside a house in Leadworth, 1996. Inside, a young Scottish girl (in an English village) prayed to Santa. She rushed downstairs when she saw the confusing sight of the crashed TARDIS.
The Tenth Doctor clambered out of the TARDIS.
“Hello!” he called out the young girl standing in front of the TARDIS. “I’m the Doctor.”
“Are you okay?” asked Amelia Poind.
“Well,” drawled the Doctor, “more or less.”
“You broke my shed.”
“I know, and I’m so…so sorry,” replied the Doctor
“You’re funny.”
“Oh yes!”
“Who are you?”
“I’m the Doctor! And you’re Amelia Pond.”
“How do you know that?”
“Oh, wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey reasons. Say, do you have any chips? Rose loved chips.”
“Sure...”
“Then allons-y, to the kitchen! Come along Pond. Actually…no. No, don’t do that Doctor.”
Inside, in the kitchen, Amelia and the Doctor chatted away happily over chips. Whenever Amelia wasn’t looking at him, the Doctor’s face would fall in pain and he’d clutch his side, but he kept a brave and cheerful conversation going all the while. He talked of grand adventures, travelling in the TARDIS, all sorts of mysteries and mayhem. Amelia was utterly captivated.
Amelia had no grand mysteries for the Doctor to look into, but she was enthralled by the strange, raggedy figure. He inquired about seeing her room, and so she showed it to him. He fiddled with the crack in the wall for quite a while, but the crack had never bothered her. There’d never been anything strange about it.
Eventually, after the two of them spoke at length about what sort of adventures they could have together, the cloister bell began sounding loudly. The Doctor ran outside to the TARDIS, Amelia in tow.
“Well, Amelia Pond, I don’t want to go, but the engines are phasing, and the TARDIS is going to burn unless I get back in there and sort it out.”
“But it’s just a box,” said Amelia. “How can a box have engines?”
“It’s not just a box,” said the Doctor. “It’s the TARDIS. It’s a type 40 TT capsule time machine. It’s from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous. It’s 903 years old, and it’s the box that’s going to save your lives and all the billion billion people in the galaxy above. You got a problem with that?”
“A time machine? You’ve got a real time machine?”
“Well, not for much longer if I can’t get her stabilised. A little hop into the past should do it. Well, I say little.”
“Can I come?”
“Not safe, I’m afraid. But I’ll be back. I promise you, Amelia Pond, I will be back. Trust me - I’m the Doctor.”
He jumped down into the TARDIS.
“Allons-y!”
The TARDIS dematerialised, Amelia ran to her room, then ran back outside with a suitcase. She sat on it and waited for a long while.

***

Twelve years later, the TARDIS materialised in the same backyard. The Tenth Doctor sauntered outside, waving a strange device around that kept insistently dinging.
“Oh yes,” he said merrily, “new days! It’s that feeling you get, right at the back of your head, that impulse, that strangle little impulse. That mad little voice saying go on, go on! On I go!”
Inside, a very grown up Amy Pond - in a very grown-up policewoman outfit - knocked the Doctor on the head with a cricket bat, rendering him unconscious. His dinging device clattered to the ground.
When he came to, he was very disoriented, but recognised the ding-ding-dinging of his dinging device.
“White male, early forties, breaking and entering. Send me some back-up. I’ve got him restrained. Oi! You, sit still!”
“Cricket bat? Love the cricket bat!”
“You were breaking and entering.”
“Well, I was following this,” he said, looking pointedly at his dinging device beside him. “It’s a machine that goes…ding! It lights up in the presence of shapeshifter DNA. Adapted it from some old Time Lord technology to detect holes in Dalek defences, I thought I could put that to much better use, so I made it able to microwave frozen dinners from up to twenty feet, and download comics from the future. I never know when to stop!”
Amy gawped at the Doctor, as he babbled on.
“I thought,” he continued, “said my goodbyes, didn’t need to, clean break, why not go sort out some Zygon problems, and look what I find, the perfect toy for it! Love the Zygons!”
“Do you want to shut up now? I’ve got back up on the way.”
“Well, you are a policewoman.”
“And you’re breaking and entering. You see how this works?”
“But why’d it lead me here? You’re not a Zygon, are you? No, it would be dinging faster if you were. But there must be one in here. What’s your name, by the way? I’m the Doctor.”
Amy squinted at him suspiciously.
“You’re the Doctor? And you don’t know who I am?”
“Yes, and no! Should I? Have I met you and forgotten you? That’s rather rude of me. If so, I’m sorry, I’m so…so sorry. Ooh, or have I just met you out of order? Did that with a lovely girl by the name of Sally Sparrow once, you see, I was-”
“Out of order…? Wait, why am I listening to this - enough out of you!”
“Yes, yes, quite right, sidetracked, but seriously, Zygons. Big red rubbery things, covered in suckers. Have you seen any? Who else lives here?”
“Aunt Sharon. Da-erm, Augustus Pond, that is. And Tabetha Pond.”
“Your aunt and parents then?”
“I didn’t say that!”
“You said aunt. Look, I’m just trying to help! I’m the Doctor. What’s your name?”
“…Amy. Amy Pond. You really can’t remember?”
The Doctor looked at her seriously.
“I’ve properly hurt you haven’t I? You really do know me?”
“Yes!” Amy let it all out. “You said I’d see you again! I waited all night! I waited twelve years.”
The Doctor mulled that over.
“I’ve had some pretty, well, dramatic events in my life lately,” he said. “Got into a lot of trouble. Got a bit…cooked. Thought I was done for. I wasn’t. But maybe, maybe my mind did get a bit cooked after all. Maybe there’s some things I can’t remember anymore. Amy Pond, I think you’re one of those things. I’m sorry, I’m so…so sorry. But I can’t remember meeting you before now.”
Amy pondered that.
“I suppose you did come back. Eventually.”
“Oh yes!”
“Are you from another planet?”
“Oh yes!”
“Okay.”
“So, what do you think?”
“Of what?”
“Of the Zygon! Shall we go on an adventure, Amy Pond?”
Amy said nothing at first, but then undid his restraints.

***

In their first adventure together, the Tenth Doctor and Amy Pond dealt with a Zygon posing as Amy’s aunt Sharon, and rescued the real Aunt Sharon. When they returned to the Pond house in Leadworth, the Doctor seemed very interested in the crack  in her wall. He fiddled with it for quite some time. The crack had never bothered Amy, there’d never been anything strange about it. He asked if he could leave his dinging device by the wall, babbling on about.
“It’s like the opposite of a time rift,” he said, “it soaks up time. You’d never notice it, but if there was ever an explosion in the vortex around here, well, the whole thing might invert, and then you’d have a problem on your hands. A crack sucking things in. But for now, it just collects time, like a chronon loop! Lovely! Love the chronon loop. If I leave my dinging device here, well, not only would it run its calculations quicker - quicker calcuations, so grown up - but beam the sonic resonancies of its data back in time. Like an overflowing cup, the overflowing time would leak over and backwards. Just a thought!”
Amy let the Doctor leave the dinging device there, for as long as he wanted, in exchange for trips in the TARDIS. And so the adventures went on.
Space whales in the future, Daleks in the past. Weeping Angels, weeping fiances. The fiance, Rory, ended up joining them on adventures too. Silurians, Van Gogh. The Doctor was more mature in matters of love than he used to be, and gently helped set Amy and Rory on their way as best he could. They ended up getting married, the Doctor happily in attendance. The Doctor began to see them less and less as he went on missions alone to fight the Daleks, while Amy and Rory began to prefer more and more the adventures of married life, than of Daleks in the sky.
The Doctor began to fight more and more recklessly against the Daleks as their new empire grew and grew. The victory of the Daleks showed the Doctor how little over the Time War he was, and he began to fight more and more outrageously. The Daleks eventually forming a new Skaro sent him into an apoplectic fit. He was the last of the Time Lords, but as long as one Time Lord lived, the Time War would rage on.
The Tenth Doctor sailed the TARDIS into Skaro. To fight.

***

The TARDIS crash landed outside a house in Leadworth, 1996. Inside, a young Scottish girl (in an English village) prayed to Santa. She rushed downstairs when she saw the confusing sight of the crashed TARDIS.
The Tenth Doctor clambered out of the TARDIS.
“Hello!” he called out the young girl standing in front of the TARDIS. “I’m the Doctor.”
Amy Williams would eventually realise what exactly had happened that night, but Amelia Pond had no idea. The Doctor enjoyed a much more lowkey style victory lap of companions - just the one companion, really - before regeneration.
After some conversation over chips, the Doctor asked to see inside her room, where he fiddled with the crack in the wall for a while, waving his silly sonic screwdriver around it, and muttering about calculations and dinging noises. Eventually he exclaimed cheerfully, but was cut short by the insistent sounding of the cloister bell.
Again (before), the two of them were outside.
“A time machine? You’ve got a real time machine?”
“Well, not for much longer if I can’t get her stabilised. A little hop into the past should do it. Well, I say little.”
“Can I come?”
“Not safe, I’m afraid. But I’ll be back. I promise you, Amelia Pond, I will be back. Trust me - I’m the Doctor.”
He jumped down into the TARDIS.
“Allons-y!”
Again, the Tenth Doctor sailed the TARDIS into Skaro. To fight.

***

The Dalek fleet surrounding Skaro had shot down the Doctor as he tried to enter Skaro. Skaro’s defences were so great that to calculate a way through them would take hundreds of years. The Daleks were confident they’d caused sufficient damage to trigger a regeneration in the Doctor.
So the Daleks inside Skaro were very shocked when the Doctor, somehow bypassing all their defences, materialised in the middle of the war room with Davros and the Supreme Dalek.
“Well, you’re probably wondering how I got past your shields, aren’t you Daleks? It’d take years and years to calculate the exact harmonic resonancies to bypass this level of Dalek shielding. Luckily,” he babbled, waving his sonic screwdriver, “I had plenty of time!”
His grin turned to a grimace as his regeneration overtook him. He deployed his regeneration in a way that would have made Rassilon proud - as a weapon. Many Daleks fell to his explosion of a torrent of golden energy, from a regeneration stalled too long. The legions of Daleks in the room crowded around both the Supreme Dalek and Davros, to shield them. Many fell to the Time Lord explosion, but the Supreme Dalek and Davros remained safe.
Eventually the golden light dissipated, and the Tenth Doctor became the Eleventh.
“It matters not how you breached our defences,” the Supreme Dalek boomed. “You are in greatest concentration of Daleks in the universe. You are not an invader, you are but a madman in a box, in a Dalek trap!”
“Supreme Dalek,” the Eleventh Doctor replied, “there’s something you better understand about me, ‘cause it’s important. And one day your life may depend on it. I am definitely a mad man with a box.”
“Terminate your prattle!” roared the Supreme Dalek.
“Wibbly wobbly-”
“Desist!”
“Timey-wimey-”
“Cease the mockery!”
“Humany-wumany-”
“Exterminate!”
The Doctor staggered back as he  began to leak golden light again.
“You think you can stop me now, Daleks? If you want my life, come and get it!” the Eleventh Doctor roared.
Again, he exploded in an outpouring of golden energy, but it only managed to hit the Supreme Dalek, not Davros. The stream of golden energy came to an end, and the Eleventh Doctor became the Twelfth.
This Twelfth Doctor was a ginger-haired, middle-aged man. He swaggered over to the TARDIS and gave the doors an affectionate knock.
“These polices boxes, they’re ever so good aren’t they?” he said cheerfully.
“You have destroyed only a small fraction of my Daleks, Doctor,” drawled Davros, “you are still surrounded by my new Dalek empire. It is fitting that you should once again bear witness to the resurrection and triumph of Davros, lord and creator of the Dalek race.”
“Quel dommage, Davros!” exclaimed the Doctor.
Waving his sonic screwdriver around, the Doctor triggered some sort of meltdown in the computer systems in the room. He ran back to his TARDIS and warped it to a safe distance in outer space outside of Skaro, but still with the planet in view.
The Doctor watched the planet explode by his hand, for the second time.
“Finally,” said the Doctor, “the Daleks are gone forever!”
And they were.
Until the next time.