The Legend of Gallifrey Part 12: X
Whenever the TARDIS materialized in a universe-wide dystopia, then something bad was guaranteed to happen. The only reason the Doctor didn't immediately leave was because he'd been summoned by the mysterious X, wh he'd met once before two regenerations ago, without whom he'd never survived that Silent.
The universe that the Doctor arrived in was fragmented, about five pieces of a universe, each only a quarter of a galaxy across. They were held together by an interuniversal form of gravity that kept this makeshift universe from literally falling to pieces.
The TARDIS materialized on a desert planet, with wind and dust blowing everywhere and a lone figure in a billowing black cloak and goggles standing alone. Since the Doctor had seen him last, he'd swapped his sweatshirt for a black collared shirt that was unbuttoned halfway down, revealing a dark blue t-shirt. He also had a staff that seemed to be made of salvaged tech, but otherwise he hadn't changed a bit.
The Doctor had. Last time he'd seen X, he'd been almost bald and been wearing a leather jacket. Now, he had his dark red bow tie and tweed jacket, but X knew it was him.
"Hello again, X," the Doctor said. "You said you needed my help. What with?"
X bowed in a very formal manner, then gestured towards the TARDIS. The Doctor nodded and opened the door, gesturing for X to enter, which he did. When both were inside, the Doctor activated the dematerialization process, and X lowered his goggles to around his neck.
"Thank you for coming, Doctor. I know you're busy trying to find your friend Clara, and I'm grateful that you took the time to assist me," he said.
"How did you-"
"How I know what you're up to is not important at the moment. What is important is that you assist me in saving what is left of the universe I live in."
"You need what now?"
"In this universe of leftovers, the intergalactic police force is a race you know as the Reapers. Do you remember them? A race of dragon-like creatures who arrive at paradoxes and temporal contradictions to sterilize the wound in time?"
The Doctor nodded.
"After the paradox ravaged the universe, the Reapers descended upon the remains and began patrolling everywhere, and now they've set their sights on the device that maintains the universal gravity. They believe they can take care of it better than the Gargoyles, but only the Gargoyles know everything about the device. The Reapers still seek to take the device, and without assistance the Gargoyles will lose. The Reapers are the most powerful single race left over."
The Doctor stood there a moment, taking in everything that X had just said. A universe of leftovers was under threat from a race of time dragons. After seeing dinosaurs on a spaceship, this didn't actually seem very ridiculous.
X grabbed a lever on the console and turned it in a circle, and the TARDIS made a materialization noise. The TARDIS appeared in an old temple-like stone building with poor lighting, so the Doctor grabbed his flashlight, but X stopped him.
"The Gargoyles can only speak if they can't be seen," X said. "Leave the flashlight here."
The Doctor slowly put the flashlight back down and followed X out the door into the dimly lit stone room. The only reason he could see at all was due to a hole in the roof that let in a little light.
X walked into the middle of the room and raised his staff. "I brought him, your old enemy and the only one who could defeat the Reapers! Gargoyles, I present to you… the Doctor!"
For a moment, nothing happened. Then a grinding noise echoed throughout the room, like stone on stone, and a familiar voice was heard from the corner.
"Hello Doctor," it said. "It's nice to see you again. Well, not really, that's just what you'd say. It has been a while, hasn't it?"
The Doctor knew that voice instantly.
"Angel Bob?" he asked.
The voice laughed. "Yes, it's me, Doctor. But don't worry, I'm not the enemy this time. That would be the Reapers."
"But… how are you here? You got sucked into the crack in the universe."
"That is a very long and complicated story, most of which I don't know myself, but I did end up here, along with my people. We all use Bob's voice now, and we guard the device that holds the universe together. We are the Gargoyles."
X looked back at the Doctor. "I can vouch for them, I've known them for centuries. They guard the Foundry with an unmatched ferocity. The only creatures who could defeat them are the Reapers."
"Foundry?" That word stuck in the Doctor's mind. "As in Rassilon? You mean this…"
"Yes, Doctor," said X. "This is Gallifrey."
The Doctor's eyes widened, then he ran out the door and out of the Foundry, into a world of ash. In the distance, the broken citadel of Arcadia was visible, with half the glass dome/sphere missing and most of the city destroyed. Several lights were on in the remains, indicating there were some people alive in there, but there were so few lights that it could barely be considered a civilization. The ground around it was grey and covered in ash that blew around in the nearly endless wind, and the sky was black with smoke.
The Doctor stared in disbelief. Gallifrey was back in the sky, but it was in ruins, and filled with scavengers who had been unlucky enough to live past the death of the universe.
He watched the citadel, completely still. On the horizon, something began to fly towards the Foundry. The Doctor was snapped out of staring at the citadel when he realized that the flying thing was a Reaper. The Doctor ran back inside to X and Angel Bob.
"They're coming!" he yelled. "The Reapers are on the horizon!"
Angel Bob yelled at the Weeping Angels to mobilize, and scraping was heard from all over the Foundry.
"We can't watch the fight," X said. "The Reapers perceive the universe in a different way than you and me. The Angels will be able to move while the Reapers watch, but not while we do. We have to protect the device from whatever escapes the Angels."
"You brought me here to fight the Reapers, didn't you?" the Doctor asked. "Let me fight them! I can't while I'm stuck on guard duty! I need to find some way to neutralize them, or turn them away!"
"I know I did, but I know what you'll end up doing, and you'll need the device to do it," X said. He ushered the Doctor towards a door behind the TARDIS.
"How do you know what I'm gonna do?" the Doctor asked.
"That would tie into who I am. Now is not the time for that revelation," X said. "Come on, you have work to do."
Through the door was a gigantic room with a pillar of technology in the center, and wires extending from the pillar and into the walls. Lights pulsed up and down the pillar indicating that it was active. The design showed that it was definitely Gallifreyan in origin, probably built in the last days before the paradox collapsed everything in existence into five pieces of the universe.
X pointed his staff at the pillar and the end of the staff lit up. A noise like the Doctor's sonic screwdriver emanated off of it, and from the base of the pillar a control panel extended.
He tossed his staff up in the air and caught it in his hand. "Sonic staff," he said. "Built it myself out of old pieces of… well, that's another story. Neat, isn't it?"
The Doctor nodded. He'd heard of sonic pens and laser screwdrivers, but the sonic staff was admittedly a new one, but that wasn't important right now. The Doctor had begun to form a plan, just as X had promised him, and it centered around this device, assuming the Doctor could get it to work.
He walked over to the control panel and began typing quickly, and for some reason the firewalls gave way beneath him like paper. Once he got to the center of the program, everything made sense.
The device was made here in the Foundry by an unnamed Time Lord for the purpose that it served now. Whoever had made it had known what would happen, even that the Doctor would need it to hold back the Reapers, because there was a subroutine that, when activated, would release a pulse that would unglue all the Reapers and trap them in a portion of the Vortex that was perfectly hospitable for them, but inescapable.
The Doctor activated the subroutine and the lights that were going up and down the pillar began to pulse quicker and brighter, and it began to make a noise like it was gathering energy from its surroundings.
From the top of the pillar, a ding sounded. The pillar was ready to stop the Reapers, but it seemed almost too easy. The Doctor went to activate it, but hesitated. Why was this so easy as to press a button?
X was standing just off to the side, and he saw the Doctor hesitate. "What's wrong?"
he asked.
"It's too easy," he said. "I just need to press a button, and the Reapers are gone? Something is very wrong here, and I think you know what it is, X."
X stiffened and took a shaky breath. "Hit the button," he said. "No strings attached. Afterwords, you'll get the whole story. And I'll tell you who I am."
The Doctor looked at him, contemplating what he'd just said. This man, who he'd been wondering about for over 300 years, was finally offering up everything the Doctor wanted to know about him, and all the Doctor had to do was press a button.
He thought for a moment, then pressed it.
The pillar lit up impossibly bright, and X and the Doctor covered their eyes instinctively. It then let out a noise like when a computer turns on, and the foundry released a golden wave of energy that swept across the planet. Every Reaper that was caught in it, which was all of them, dissolved into gold as it was dislocated from time and swept into a pocket of the Vortex. All the Weeping Angels, or Gargoyles, as they called themselves now, settled onto the ground as they watched the Reapers vacate their new homeworld.
Then the light settled down, and X and the Doctor slowly blinked their sight back as they uncovered their eyes. The Doctor propped himself up on the control panel, and X leaned on his staff. Angel Bob appeared in the doorway, frozen in his statue form with a calm look on his face.
"The Reapers have been driven away," Bob said. "The device is safe."
The Doctor stood up slowly, teetering a little bit but still standing on his own two feet. X lifted his staff off of the ground and held it in his hand. He looked over at Bob and nodded.
The Doctor and X stepped into the Doctor's TARDIS, and it dematerialized, heading for the planet that X had summoned the Doctor to at the beginning of all this. When the ding sounded, showing that they had arrived, X gripped his staff and looked at the Doctor.
"I promised you my story when we were done, didn't I?" he asked. The Doctor nodded.
X gestured towards the stairs, telling the Doctor that he should sit down, and the Doctor complied. X leaned against the console.
"Where to start is the difficult bit," he said.
"How about from the beginning?" the Doctor suggested.
"That far back?" X said. "Very well then. As you know, I'm a Time Lord, but I got bored on Gallifrey and stole a TARDIS to run away and see the universe. With my granddaughter, Susan."
The Doctor's hearts skipped a beat.
"You're…" he began.
X nodded. "I'm you. A future version of you."
The Doctor's mind raced with questions. "Tell me everything," he said.
X took a deep breath. "Although there will one day be many incarnations of us, the ones that will be involved in the paradox are a long ways behind me personally. The thing about me is that I come from a future where you fail, and the paradox consumes the universe. That was several millennia ago for me. I've used up every life that my body can withstand protecting what's left. I watched each version of me that was to be involved in the paradox to be sure they were ready, albeit from a distance.
"When I left the ninth Doctor to enter the paradox, I came across the same Reapers that you trapped in the Vortex. They tore up my TARDIS and left me on this planet, and my TARDIS crash landed with the Nimons, irradiated with the paradox energy that both it and me acquired from living through the destruction of the universe. It was here on this planet that M first approached me with her plan.
"She said that there might be a way to keep the universe from experiencing its demise, and that the Doctor was the only one who could make that happen. I told her that the Doctor died along with the rest of the universe. She agreed.
"It is only with interference from the future that the outcome of the upcoming battle can be altered. It is only because of M and, as much as I hate it, Rassilon, that this future that you've seen can be avoided."
The Doctor sat there for a moment taking it all in and watching X's face. His face was the Doctor's face, but at the same time the Doctor had died along with the rest of the universe and his friends, and X was what was left.
"Do you have any questions?" X asked. He did still have several questions.
"What did you mean when you said you'd used up every life that your body could withstand?"
"I've gained enough extra lives to officially be the longest living Time Lord in history, even more than Rassilon. All those lives take a toll. There was a reason we were limited to thirteen lives, because after that there's something I've come to call undying syndrome, where after a certain number of regenerations the cells of a Time Lord's body slowly begin to break down, and eventually can't stand any more regeneration energy without dissolving entirely. After my long life, I've reached that point. If I were ever to regenerate, I'd dissolve entirely."
"How long does this take?"
"A very, very long time. You don't have anything to worry about for many thousands of years."
"What about M? Who is she?"
"She hasn't even told me that, only that she's known you her whole life."
"When I met you back on Traken, that was you before you met M?"
X nodded. "Time travel can be very confusing, and with the paradox looming on the horizon it's even getting dangerous, but I know that you can understand."
"This is a lot to take in," the Doctor said. "This future I've just seen… it can be avoided? And only because of interference from my future?"
X nodded. "Yes, that's it exactly. You remember when I told you that while M was the voice of good and Rassilon was the voice of evil, I was the voice of neutral, and I wanted what was best for you? Now you remember why."
"The goggles," the Doctor said. "Back in the Nimon city, I found a pair of goggles in the TARDIS. Those were yours?"
"My spare set of sonic goggles, yes," X said. "They're a modified version of my sonic sunglasses that you will make next regeneration."
"And your staff? You said you made it out of spare parts."
"I was defending the Foundry from the Dalek scavengers. They were closing in and all I had was my TARDIS, so I took my sonic screwdriver, which had broken several faces ago, and I used spare parts to create a larger version of it. It redirected the scavengers' guidance circuits and caused them to fly straight into the citadel."
The Doctor and X stared at each other for a few minutes.
"Any more questions?" X finally asked.
"I do have one more," the Doctor said. "It's about the paradox."
"Ah, yes, the paradox. I can;t go into too much detail about that, time says you have to figure most of that out on your own, but I can tell you some things."
"What causes the paradox?"
"We do. Or, at least, the us from the Time War, the one with the beard. He does what he's ultimately best at, and all of time and space dies as a result."
The Doctor remembered the Voord telling him that someone significant was going to die, but they hadn't known who. Someone dies, and the paradox forms as a result, but this paradox was so massive that it encompassed nearly all of time and space.
"I believe this is where our conversation ends, Doctor," X said. "I can remember that much. I apologize if you have any more questions, but you have one more visitor, then you and your other selves have work to do."
X stepped out the door and vanished into the wasteland. The Doctor would see him again before all this was over, and if he failed then he'd be living X's life. Either way, X was to be a big part of his life in the future.
Behind him, someone appeared with a zap. The Doctor turned around to see M, wearing a white T-shirt and unzipped black sweatshirt, with tan pants and her traditional red converse shoes.
"He told you everything then," she said. The Doctor nodded.
"So you've likely figured out the nature of the paradox, and ultimately what you must do to save the universe, with help from your future," she said.
"You aren't a future me as well, are you?" the Doctor asked.
M laughed. "Of course I'm not. You'll only be seeing two of your future selves during this adventure, and they are X and 12. You don't have to worry about anything else, you're already confused enough."
"So if I know everything now, why are you here?" he asked.
"It's been several hundred years since I've seen this version of you," she said. "I wanted to see it again before the universe ends."
The Doctor was shocked to see a tear roll down her cheek, but she quickly wiped it away.
"I'll see you soon," she said. Then she disappeared.
The Doctor yanked the wibbly lever, and the TARDIS descended into darkness.