A/N: The girl!Doctor incarnation featured was created by Raven.
Four Times When the Doctors Saved the Universe and Once When He Didn't
I - Magic Buttons
"Always buttons, isn't it?" The Doctor leapt up onto the platform, spun around taking in the computer banks in one easy glance. "Never a nice steady lever."
"Hurry up, Doctor!" Rose's voice was wavering just a little as, from across the room, she watched the countdown fall ever closer to zero. The barred doors to the control room shuddered under another barrage of fire.
"But which button? So many to choose from."
Like a kid in a candy shop, thought Rose. "Just get on with it!" she called. "Unless you want everything blown to...whatever it is it gets blown to if this thing goes off."
The Doctor held his hands up in front of him, looked from one thumb to the other. "All right, boys, whose turn is it to save the universe?"
"Doctor! This door's not going to hold much longer!"
"Left it is then." He pressed down on an innocuous little black button. The counter stopped.
Rose leapt up onto the platform, grabbing his arm to balance herself. "Door's gone."
"Just a moment." He reached under the console, pulled out a small cylindrical component and promptly crushed it beneath his shoe. "Right, yes, where were we?" He glanced at the troop of guards running their way, blasters drawn. "I think we'd better make a hasty exit."
"Oh, now you realise that," she said, as the Doctor dived back into the ventilator shaft, Rose following.
There was a sharp crack of metal against something much softer. "Ow! Rose, I've hit my head!"
"Remember to duck next time," she told him, and gave him a poke sharp enough to get him moving again.
They scrambled through the ducts to freedom, and she forgot claustrophobia and dead-ends and getting shot in the back as fear was melted away by adrenaline.
Mortal danger, thought Rose, shouldn't be this much fun.
II - Intersections in Time
"Ah, hello! Don't worry, I'll have you up and out of there in a jiffy!"
The Doctor looked up to see a startlingly familiar face, wearing a startlingly familiar grin, peering down at him. The fact that he had never seen the man before in his life made the recognition a trifle disconcerting.
The fact that the cliff he was clinging to was crumbling under his hands didn't help either.
A rope hit him on the head, before sliding between his arms and, after giving it a firm tug, he grabbed it tightly with both hands. Hand over hand until there was enough length for him to twist his feet around it too. Within a few minutes he found himself crawling over the cliff edge and back to safety, helped by the familiar stranger.
"Thank you." He was a little out of breath. Dusting himself down, he noticed that his stick of celery was torn to shreds. He'd have to see about getting a newer, less illusionary, stick next time.
"Not a problem, Doctor."
Something about the way he said...
"Oh no," said the Doctor.
"Don't worry, don't worry. Just a fly-by visit. I seem to remember this happening. Vaguely. Thought I'd better turn up, since time's taken enough of a beating as it is without me contradicting it. Again."
"Again?"
"Oh yes. No. Wait. I didn't say that. Forget I said that. Which you will. Because I don't remember this bit. That's a relief." The Doctor, this other future Doctor, stuck his hands into his trenchcoat and regarded his previous self. "I look a lot younger than I remember."
The Doctor, the younger Doctor, returned the look. "I'd have thought by your age I might have taken on a more mature aspect."
"Oh really." The Doctor raised his eyebrows in an almost, but not quite, comical fashion. "Well, I hadn't quite forgotten the advantages of wearing a younger body."
The Doctor gave him a cold stare, but the elder pulled a face. "Oh, please, don't think I'm going to be intimidated by that. I've perfected that." And then the youth dropped away, till the Doctor could see only his own, ancient eyes staring back at him.
He wasn't particularly intimidated either. "Was there something else you wanted? I have to find Nyssa."
"A thank you would be nice."
"Thank you."
"I was hoping for a bit more than that."
The Doctor rolled his eyes. "I'm not sure I like what old age is doing to my tastes."
"Well, I was always a bit confused about what Tegan saw in me. I thought distance might give me some perspective."
"Exactly what are you suggesting?"
The Doctor took his hands from his trenchcoat and closed the distance between them very quickly. His breath was warm against the other's skin. "I should like to know what she found so very attractive about me."
His younger self sighed. Another roll of the eyes. More amused this time.
He kissed him. He kissed himself. Softly, but insistently. Tongue slipped between his lips, coaxing and gentle.
He tasted of the past, of jam and scones and strong English tea. He was too close not to feel the memories, chips of his past flowing from younger to elder. Places, people... he could see them, he could hear them, trickling into his mind when he had been careful to bury so much of this.
The Doctor stepped back, wearing his most self-assured grin. "Not bad, not bad. But all things considered, I've had better." He paused. "Now there's an idea. D'you think we've got time for a quick-"
"No."
"Aw, come on. Don't be such a spoilsport. At least think about it, yeah?"
"No," repeated the Doctor, just as firmly.
"Doctor!" Rose. Running towards them. His older self beat a hasty retreat, giving his previous self a quick farewell wave. "Nice to meet me!" Not loud enough for Rose to hear.
"Who was that?" she asked, as he caught her hand, led her back to the TARDIS.
"Old friend. Think I gave him a bit of a shock. Or really annoyed him. One or the other. Probably both."
"We off then?"
"We are indeed, onwards and upwards." He swung open the TARDIS door, let Rose enter first.
Looking back, he saw himself standing by the cliff, hands in pockets, gazing across the ocean.
Just as he remembered.
III - Her Way
"Rose, how would you feel if I just cut it all off?" The Doctor was cheerfully assembling what looked like an extremely complicated piece of electronic equipment, but for the past ten minutes her thoughts had seemed to be wholly concerned with the state of her hair.
"All of it?" She had been watching the Doctor carefully ever since they arrived in the nineteen eighties. She seemed strangely at home here and had become even more comfortable, more relaxed, since they had been given this laboratory of UNIT's to work in. At least, the Doctor was working. Rose was making cups of tea and chasing up supplies.
"Well, yes. It would save an awful lot of shampoo. And conditioner. And time. Time's very important, you know."
Rose screwed up her face. "Yes, but..." But it's so pretty. But I love running my fingers through it. But there's nothing I love more than waking up in the morning to find you still asleep with your hair in a tangled mess. "...but I like it," she finished lamely.
She smiled. "Oh. Do you? I'll keep it then. Though it is a bit of a nuisance. Maybe I should go for a trim after this. I remember this lovely hairdresser chap in twenty-sixth century Rome who thought that my-
"Doctor!"
"Hmm?" She followed Rose's glance. One of the components had burst into flames. "Oh."
Rose ran for a fire extinguisher but the Doctor pushed her back. "No, no! Let it burn itself out. Spray that stuff and you'll have ruined everything."
A moment later the fire alarm went off. The Doctor bit down on her bottom lip. "The Brigadier's not going to be too happy about that. Um, right...maybe a delicate use of the fire extinguisher. If you'll allow me?"
The fire out and order restored to the laboratory, the Brigadier had decided to make an appearance.
"It's no use, Ms. Foreman, we can't destroy it using conventional weapons." The Doctor looked up at him, her expression somewhere between amusement and concern. For some reason that Rose wasn't entirely sure of, she had felt that the Brigadier might have some issues accepting her change of gender and she had opted to say she was a distant relative of the Doctor's instead.
"I wouldn't have bothered trying, Brigadier. Dimensional incursions are tricky things, and since this one is composed of anti-time, it's even more tricky. We're lucky it crossed a part of the timeline where there was sufficiently advanced technology for me to create this." She tapped the box where her hastily put together device was housed. "And it was still small enough to be contained. Else it would have been bye-bye Milky Way."
"So it's ready, is it?"
"More or less. Probably best to give it a trial run first."
"You can do that on-site. Ms. Foreman, Miss Tyler, this way if you please?"
Rose paused at the swinging double-doors and took a good look around. It really was just the sort of place that the Doctor might be content in. For a while anyway.
IV - An Intelligent Design
"Bit bleak, isn't it?" Rose turned in a full circle, seeing nothing except barren ground and what looked suspiciously like a very active volcano on the horizon.
"This is Earth," the Doctor told her. "A very, very young Earth." He began to leap across the ground neatly avoiding the cracks and holes. "I've been meaning to do this for a very long time. You see Rose, humanity, despite its many, many, many flaws, manages to do quite a lot of good. You bring people together. Course, by people, I mean sentient life. You're not too bright, you're short-lived, and oh so very fragile. But you do have a knack for getting people to see eye-to-eye. So it would seem sensible to a terribly advanced hostile species to pop back in time and try and mess up things at the very beginning."
"Humans can survive in this?" Rose looked up at the sky dubiously.
"Ah. No, we're a bit earlier than that. We shouldn't even be able to breathe, but I had the TARDIS force field extended to create an atmosphere pocket for us." He stopped, peered over the edge of the rock he had landed on. "Here we are. Come and look."
Rose looked. "Yuck."
The Doctor grinned. "That's you."
"Thanks a lot."
"I mean, it will be you. That yuck is what all life on this planet evolves from. Very important. Very fragile."
"It's still kinda gross."
"There's only one number separating you from that. In the grand scale of things that number of generations...well, that number's pretty big actually, on almost any scale, but still, you're related. Say hello to Grandma Slime." He crouched over the pit, quite fascinated.
"So we're just going to stand here and make sure it's okay for the next million years?"
"Course not. Just wanted to make sure there was nothing interfering. Nothing else, anyway. I seem to remember a rather upset Jagaroth who wanted to kill you all off round about now. No, this is the next important stage when the first moments of life appear on the planet."
"Doctor?"
"Mmm?"
"If this is as delicate and as important as you say..."
"Mm-hmm."
"Should you really have stuck an oxygen atmosphere right over the pit where life starts?"
"Ah." The Doctor continued to stare at the slime for a few moments. "Rose?"
"Yes, Doctor?"
"I've just had a fantastic idea. I seem to remember a very good party going on in the Crab Nebula about a hundred thousand years away, give or take a century. Would you like to go?"
"Course I would," she said.
"Oh good." He scrambled to his feet and backed carefully away from the pit.
"So what happens if you have messed it up?" she asked, reluctantly, but felt it really was a rather pertinent point.
"Time isn't so bad once you get to know her," he said. "I'm sure everything will be just fine. Or perhaps we were meant to do this. Thus making us responsible for all life on Earth. Yes, that must be it. A predestination paradox."
"You made that up."
"I most certainly did not. I happened to excel in the temporal sciences when I was at school," he said, before adding glumly, "It was about he only thing I did excel at."
"Well, you know how great I was at exams."
He fumbled for the key to the TARDIS, pushed the door open. "Rose, remind me to not to try and show-off for at least a week."
V - Sunset
They held hands, watched the sun go down. Black. Red light receding faster than the wind.
"We safe here?" Rose grasped his fingers just a little more tightly. This is Nature at its most magnificent, its most devastating.
"More or less," the Doctor told her.
"So what's gonna happen? We go in and stop the Big Crunch?"
"It's not exactly a crunch, you know. More of a fading away."
"Well?" she insists.
"What do you think?"
She's wiser now. "No, no, we just watch." But she can't hide the sadness in her voice.
"Everything dies. Everything has its time. Matter. Energy. They decay and change and reform. Make new planets, new galaxies-"
"-new universes?" She looks up at him, the hope is palatable.
He nods. "New universes."
"It's terrifying. Amazing, but terrifying."
"Good terrifying?"
"I think so."
They watch in silence. Watch the light dying.
"If this is it, if this is the end and everything's gone, then what was it all for?" Her voice is quiet; she's speaking to herself.
Still, the Doctor answers. "That's what you have to figure out for yourself." He gives her hand a squeeze and she looks up, meets his eyes. "Cause when you do, that's when you finally realise what's important and what isn't. And everything makes a lot more sense."
"You know the answer don't you?"
"I know my answer."
Rose turned back to the scanner, felt an unwanted tear prickling at her eye. "Doctor, I'm scared."
"We can leave."
"No, no I want to see it." They wait. Light swirls, coalesces, fades. "What happens now?" she whispers.
"I don't know. No-one does."
The time rotor starts to move. The Doctor has touched nothing, but the ship knows that it cannot endure this time for much longer. It will protect its charges.
"Now where?" Rose asks, suddenly rather breathless.
"That's a very good question. A very good question indeed." His hands fly across the console; he barely looks at the co-ordinates. "Let's find out."
End.