A/N – This is the first fic I've written in a long time, so I apologise in advance for...well, the entire thing really. ;)

A lot of this fic is based on a dream that I had once, which seemed to link together quite well. Just a quick author's note – it's set in the time between The Runaway Bride and Smith and Jones, so the Doctor is currently alone. This is half because I don't know much about Martha Jones (then again, not many people do – she's still new) and because she doesn't really fit into it anyway. You'll see why later. Also, sorry it takes a while to get going.

I don't own Doctor Who or any of the associated areas of it, if I did then chances are I wouldn't be writing this right now.

Please R&R, authors live on feedback!

There was a large tremor. The TARDIS shook violently, flinging the Doctor backwards away from the control panel and onto the floor. Like some sort of time-travelling ninja, he immediatly sprung to his feet, grinned and jumped back up to resume his position at the controls. He loved a challenge.

"Right then." he began muttering to himself, as he always did, "What's wrong, old girl?"

There was another violent tremor, as if by response to his question. The Doctor frowned and held onto the rail surrounding the central column. On the other hand, this was a challenge that maybe he shouldn't have been so excited about. The TARDIS was well-known (by those that had travelled in it) for shaking like a small earthquake from time to time, but this was one of those "special times" where it was shaking, but in a peculiar way. The intervals inbetween the end and start of the tremors seemed to form a rough pattern, and while the Doctor suspected that sinister forces were at work, his optimism soon grew and he put it down to coincidence. He would be landing soon. It had been at least two weeks (well, maybe more, maybe less – the TARDIS was a time machine after all) since the events involving Donna and the Racnoss incident on Earth, and the TARDIS was now drifting far, far away from the over-visited blue and green planet. It wasn't that he hated the planet – after all, Earth was famous for being the home planet of bananas, one of the Doctor's favourite things. That, and when he compared them to some of the spear-weilding ape-like creatures in the universe, the humans weren't so bad. Brilliant, in fact. After a few minutes of thinking about the Earth, the Doctor remembered why he was taking a break from there. Earth was where she left.

Here he was, the Lonely God, wandering alone through space once more, albeit with a lot more shaking than wandering often entailed. For some reason, the Doctor had temporarily decided to take the effort for fixing the TARDIS, and instead put into performing other actions instead. One such action involved sitting crosslegged on the floor, looking up at the ceiling of the dome-shaped room and reflecting on everything he'd done his entire life. The moment he thought of his granddaughter Susan, he shook his head and immediatly stopped this potentially long and tedious process. Pausing only to pick up the sonic screwdriver which had been jostled out of his pocket through the tremors, he grabbed onto the rail and pulled himself to his feet. It was time to fix the damned thing. With newfound dedication to fix the TARDIS's flight pattern, he marched towards the panel. About what he counted to be half a second, he found himself on the other side of the room, sprawled on the floor. A flashing monitor revealed to him the TARDIS's location.

"...is there planet an even there?" he grumbled to himself, rubbing his head. "No, even a planet. That's the one!". Although worried that he'd hurt himself (because nobody else was there to yell "Doctor!" – something that he refused to admit he missed), he began to contemplate the facts he had been presented with. It was a rare occasion. While he knew exactly what part of space he was in, he had just entered the outskirts of a planet's atmosphere – a planet which he had never seen nor heard of...ever.

"This can't be right. I know everything! Why don't I know this?" he questioned, folding his arms and sighing. When it became apparant that he wasn't going to get an answer, the Doctor buried his ace in his hands. "I'm going to have to take a look."

The tremors came to a halt. The Doctor bolted for the door, and opened it. Just like every other time he opened the TARDIS door midflight in space, the view was incredible. Breathing in, the Doctor began looking for something. Anything. Preferably something which would explain why his flight was disrupted. As the TARDIS rotated slowly, due to the engines shutting off, he felt something was wrong. Just as the Doctor's instinct told him to, he ducked, just as a large bolt of electricity flew at the spot in space and time where his head had been, flew backwards in the direction of the control panel and there was a small explosion. Ignoring it, the Doctor extended his search into the direction the bolt had come from. When he saw where it had come from, his expression changed from one of worry to one of intrigue. He reached into his pocket, took out what looked like a small disposible camera and took a couple of holiday snapshots.

It was a cluster of gold-coloured stars, in a vortex formation. They were spinning slowly – something must have happened to them within the last hundred years or so, but what? In order to create such a spectacle, there must have been quite an event.

"Explosion? Implosion? Teleportation? Racnoss?" he wondered aloud. The Doctor decided that going back in time and finding out wasn't the best idea, considering that the control panel had been electrocuted recently, and touching it was probably out of the question. Instead, the sight of a small, very orange dusty planet came into sight, and he had a more 'creative' idea. It was time for a closer look, bit how?

Suddenly, the console behind him lit up with a bright golden, unnatural glow. The Doctor span on the spot to look at it, before shielding his eyes with his arm. There was something familiar about it – the colour, not the glow, as if it was clawing at his distant memories. Before he knew what was happening, the TARDIS began to hurtle towards the planet below. The Doctor grinned.

"Good, I was just starting to get bored."