(A short Fanfiction tale in celebration of 50 years for all of you fans who will dearly miss Eccleston in The Day of the Doctor. Here is how I see his character becoming involved in the story...)

"The Eve of the Doctor"

What I did...I did without choice.

And it was not in the name of the Doctor.

As I felt my planet, and the reality of the solar system surrounding it, burning in a flame hotter than all the fires of any hell, I felt my soul tear into a million shreds. I collapse to my knees, an old man finished for good.

They made me a Warrior. I was no longer the Doctor. Perhaps I never would be again.

Until he was born.

I lay on the floor of the TARDIS, as the screaming over trillions of victims, whether Dalek or Time Lord or any of the others lost in this war, overcame me. I felt my hearts each break and slow to a dead silence. I felt the flames engulf me, burning everything. There was no pain, no pain left except for the pain of my losses. The Doctor was dead. I hoped beyond all hope that I would die to.

And he was born.

The orange fire around me turned to miraculous golden light, turning the blackened flesh into smooth, healthy skin once more.

No...NO! I did not deserve it...I did not want it...

Pain of the body returned, worse pain than any I had ever felt before, no matter how many changes I had felt.

Slowly, I opened my eyes. The TARDIS was new, it was different. It looked broken and weak, with a sickly green light bathed over my new body.

I stood, shakily, trying not to vomit as I slowly shook my head. I felt younger again, and my hair had vanished. My hands were strong and my hearts both beating once more in that damned rhythm.

The Doctor had been reborn.

...

I looked at her one more time. The silly blonde with the idiot boyfriend clinging to her like a frightened child, staring at me as if I were the incarnation of evil.

No, I thought to myself. Perhaps I really am that.

I closed the door, turning away to return to the console. I laid in some random coordinates, not really caring where I would go, before pulling the dematerialization lever.

The familiar groaning sound of the TARDIS engines greeted me as the old girl who had survived more than even myself began to fade in and out of time. We soared through the vortex as I took a seat in a ruined, torn chair.

I waited patiently, just thinking. There was no point in continuing, was there? I had thought, after the war, that maybe I could go back to being the Doctor. There had even been another one, another stupid ape I could make better. But did I do that? Had I ever made these beautiful people better?

The TARDIS have a violent lurch and I fell forward, bracing myself as we shakily landed in god knows where.

Throwing back on my leather jacket, I pulled a door open before exiting into a large field, surrounded by trees. It looked ordinary, and tasted of Earth, yet there was something significantly different about it.

And as I looked around, that was when I looked into the face of my old nightmare. I saw him again. I saw me.

"I took me a trip through a ruptured timeline and a strange painting to get here," he said, his voice groggy and old. "But I take it...you're the next one?"

I couldn't believe me own eyes. That was a first, in its own right.

"This is impossible," I said. "This is absolutely-"

"Impossible?" the Warrior interjected. "We've never lived in a world where impossible exists...Doctor."

He walked closer to me and I stated into his old, sad eyes. The eyes were even older than his wrinkled face. They were the same eyes; they had been ever since I was a boy.

"It is strange, though," he whispered to me. "To look into my face, an older and more experienced me. Yet that face looks so much younger than my own."

After a moment of silence, I spoke again.

"I'm the Doctor again. That means I want to forget about you. I don't know how our paths crossed, time shouldn't have allowed it. But right now, I'm saying NO!"

I wheeled around, stomping back towards the open doors of the TARDIS, ready to fly off away from all my problems.

"You can't run away from the day forever," he called, making me stop in the doorframe. "Soon, you'll have to save it."

I slowly turned to face him again.

"You can remember things, right?" he asked. "Things that never should have happened. What about all those centuries ago, when Omega was breaking from his chains in the Anti-Universe? Do you remember the other Doctors? There were two others there."

"No," I responded. "There was only me, and Jo, and the Brig-"

And then I could see clearly three different sets of memories. An old man sitting in a suspended space speaking to two successors, or a small clown making fun of his dandy of a replacement, or of the dandy, trying to make sense of it all.

"What about the day Rassilon nearly became freed?" the Warrior continued. "The day the Master was sent to save us. When we were in our fifth and we saw Susan again and we fought with the Brigadier and Sarah Jane. But then it becomes different. You can see the first four there too, all in the same room as well. How?"

I shuddered, gasping for air as my memories changed. I could see all my old lives changing, they were all intertwining, Doctors meeting other Doctors, HOW?!

And there were other memories too. A trapped dimension where the seventh had to change back into the sixth and the fifth and so on, but then the third was there too, but his own person! And a day where the fifth found himself in the TARDIS, the new TARDIS! But there was a new Doctor there, with spiky hair and a blue suit. Memories of all the other Doctors meeting all the other Doctors. But none of it ever happened!

"IT NEVER HAPPENED!"

"It did now," the Warrior said, calmly. "Our timeline was never truly saved, there was nothing dear Clara could do. Our timeline is folding in on itself, all the Doctors will meet and the paradoxes will be too great to control."

I took in several more breaths before standing tall to look down at the lonely, sad man.

"Then what do we do?"

He smiled and turned away before walking through the trees. I followed him, leaving the TARDIS abandoned. As I caught up with him, we walked together towards a pair of idiots. One was the man I had seen through the fifth's memory, and the other was a younger face with a bow tie and a dark suit. The two looked over at us, their faces grave. They obviously recognized their own faces, the faces of the past.

"Hello," the Warrior greeted, smiling. "We're looking for the Doctor."

The Tenth's eyes darted from me to the Warrior and then to the Doctor standing next to him. He looked back at us before replying.

"Well...you've come to the right place."