Disclaimer: I do not own anything from Doctor Who. I do however retain rights to the story itself, and any characters which appear within that are not part of official Doctor Who cannon.
Chapter 1.
The Doctor sank down wearily in his chair.
The monitor showed the Titanic slowly moving away towards its rendezvous with the repair and rescue ships of the Max Capricorn Cruise Line.
The words came unbidden to his mind: "You can save Astrid. You have the power. Go back and save her. It would be so easy."
"No!" his mind shot back. "I don't have the right. It's not my place to decide who lives and who….dies."
The years weighed heavily on him at times like these. He felt so old; so empty; so alone.
A small light on the console started blinking, bringing the Doctor out of his melancholy for the moment.
He reached out and flipped a switch, then turned his head back toward the monitor to check the systems readout displayed there.
"Low fuel." he thought. "Damn. What a time for a pit stop."
He was setting the controls for Cardiff and the rift when a second light caught his attention.
His eyebrows knitted together as he checked the new information. According to the readings, the Tardis was now drifting slowly backwards through time. But that was impossible. He was sure he had remembered to set the drift compensators.
Swiftly the Doctor moved round the console. He had set them. Some force was gently pulling the Tardis back through time.
Resetting the scanner for a temporal sweep, he soon located the source.
"1965….London….Shoreditch...oh snap." the Doctor thought. "Coal Hill School."
Something at the school was giving off temporal energy. He felt certain it couldn't possibly be the Tardis with one of his previous selves, because he couldn't remember visiting Coal Hill in 1965.
He also discarded the possibility of it being a future incarnation upon checking the energy signature of the disturbance. It was definitely not a Tardis, but there was something vaguely familiar about it. Something nagged at the back of his memory.
He was about to run further scans, when the energy waves simply stopped.
"Well, Doctor" he said to himself, "there's only one way to find out what it is. Looks like it's time to go to school."