Doctor Who? Not mine.
A/N: The Ninth Doctor has always been my favorite (And he was the one who brought me into Doctor Who. My mother grew up Doctor Who and felt it was appropriate to indoctrinate all her children in this tradition.). And while I'll cringe and sigh and wonder what the hell I liked so much about his episodes when I re-watch them five years down the track, his character is what drew me in and he keeps me fascinated in a way the other Doctor's simply don't.
And the Time War? That's a big blank slate for anyone to go play around with. Plus fancy titles such as Oncoming Storm and Lonely God? My headcanon went a little nuts with the ideas it stirred up. These will just be some short stories exploring what my mind dredged up.
I should note that all my canon knowledge of Doctor Who encompasses new Who and a lot of the Eighth Doctor novels, the last Seventh Doctor novels and nothing more. For all the other Doctors, it's all fanon for me, I'm afraid.
Tempest
He is born amongst the dead and he knows that he has come back wrong.
Very wrong.
Life comes rushing through his body as he draws his first breath for the ninth time. His eyes open to harsh red sunlight and devastation, he is lying upon on a pile of ruined corpses in the midst of a shattered city. His mission, his existence comes rushing back, the Time War, Daleks, Themos Five and the knowledge that they have lost this battle.
Themos Five has fallen.
He sits up for the first time –the ninth first time, really- and everything wobbles and shifts. He is wrong, some part of his mind whispers and he stares at his hands, covered in thick, dark orange Themosian blood. But then his identity reasserts itself over the wrongness, he is the Doctor, this is his ninth body and Themos Five is about to be erased from time and all existence. His new left hand automatically glides over to his new right wrist where the recall beacon should be to send him home.
There's nothing there.
It's gone, gone in the explosion that had killed him and the Themosian contingent that he'd been leading to death and war.
He feels the first trace of concern and worry in his new body. The Time Lords had already withdrawn from the planet; he knows this due to the subdued hum in the back of his mind. If there were any of his people closer, his own psychic awareness would be thrumming away at their presence. There is also a message that had been left for him in his unconscious mind and he'd gleaned its contents almost as soon as he awoke, a temporal withdrawal for the entire sector had been called. Themos Five was a focal point for many of its neighboring planets; too many timelines interweaved within in it that its loss would destabilize the entire region.
The Doctor cannot stay here; he carefully climbs his way down from the bloodied bodies, ignoring the empty gazes of the dead.
It is a pity to lose Themos Five for many reasons, many of them sentimental and irrelevant despite the fond memories he has of this world. The most practical is that the Themosians were a powerful race of beings and useful allies. Evolved from a feline-like species, they were quick and devastating on the battlefield, their sharp reflexes allowing them to avoid enemy fire. And they were deadly accurate in return, once the Time Lords had upgraded their weaponry to pierce Dalek armor, Themosian contingents had become the default choice for ground battles.
And this…this broken world that the Doctor stood on, a world of corpses and fractured timelines, was the Enemy's retaliation. Despite their best efforts at keeping it hidden, keeping it protected -safe- Themos Five had fallen.
Another casualty, another battlefield lost, unfortunate but not unexpected.
There would be more. There would always be more.
The Doctor stood still and surveyed the dying sky. If his battle armour was still intact, he'd be able to see up into the atmosphere and identify the location of Gallifreyan battleships still in orbit. But he has nothing on him, he is naked down to his skin. The time-bomb that had hit had been powerful enough to overcome the temporal buffers inlaid in his armour; it had been incinerated trying to absorb the shock. And even then, that had not been enough.
It was useless to ruminate on what had happened. He needed to leave as soon as possible. He took an unsteady step forward, he would need to find communication, secure communication, and request for a recall before the Daleks travelled back in time and destroyed Themos Five at its very beginning.
He takes another step and stumbles, his hands fly out to catch his fall.
And lightning flashes from his hands as he hits the ground.
His hearts stop. He stares at the hand in front of him -his hand, how can this be his hand?- his left hand. A hand that can shoot lightning. And its his. His hand. It's not regeneration energy leaking from his body; this is Time in its purest form.
And it's coming from him.
His brain pounds away inside his head in warning as something warm-bright inside him catches his attention. There's an enormous reservoir inside of him and it is full of Time, of Possibility, of Eternity, all for his using. He could do anything with this, anything that he wants and he wants to. He could reach inside of it and use it to move him from here to one of those ships waiting in orbit.
It would be easy.
Easier than breathing.
His vision wavers and something, that thing that whispered he was wrong, it screeches a blatant refusal and he curls up in agony. There's a hurricane of questions inside his mind but at the same time his brain is trying to block them. Just accept it, the bigger part of him says, gazing eagerly at that pool of Time. It's there, it's his and it'll keep him alive to fight another day.
The questions are silenced. Almost. Then one slips through and everything in his mind shatters.
If it's been there all along, why have I never used it?
He remembers and he knows.
He knows what he is, what's been done to him.
He is not the Doctor.
Not the Doctor at all. But the Doctor did this to him, made him this way, because the Doctor couldn't-
He laughs hysterically, disbelieving. The ground shakes. No- the planet shakes. It's a tremor through time, the death knell of Themos Five right as it is struck right in the moment of its birth.
The Not-Doctor straightens; his mind calm and accepting what is inevitable.
With a flicker, he is gone from Themos Five, a planet that never was and never will be.
