A.N.: I'd just like to apologise in advance for the feels.
A.N.2: Ignore the Janto fangirling. I kind of got away with myself a bit there...
Warnings: Massive spoilers for Children of Earth, major but brief religious reference
Series summary: The TARDIS doesn't always take the Doctor where he wants to go, but it always takes him where he needs to go; Time Lords hold a secret behind their backs, and they have a duty to follow.
Disclaimer: Don't own Doctor Who (or the lines from The End of Time Part 2)
Chapter 1 – The Doctor Dies
In the end, the Doctor felt that he deserved to have his revenge. After all, Rassilon had ruined his life and all of his relationships by putting that maddening drumbeat in his head.
Yet he didn't think that the Master should have had to sacrifice himself; when the blinding white light died down and the Master was no longer standing there just in front of him, the Doctor knew exactly where he was: he was stuck, with the other Time Lords, on Gallifrey, on the Last Day – on the worst day.
For all intents and purposes, the Master – his best enemy – was dead.
But he wasn't.
He had been so sure, so terrified, that he would die at some point during this business, but here he was: he was still alive. He was on his hands and knees on the floor of the Naismith mansion covered in cuts and bruises and broken glass, but he was still alive…
Then there were four knocks, and the Doctor knew that it was over.
The four knocks, it turned out, weren't the Master after all; they were Wilf, Donna's wonderful grandfather, who was trapped in a radiation chamber. He didn't deserve to die – especially not like that – so the Doctor took his place and suffered the agony of absorbing all of the radiation as it flooded the chamber.
And then the process started. This would be a slow and painful regeneration as the radiation systematically killed off all of his cells one by one, but at least it would give him enough time to visit everyone before he went.
He started with Martha and Ricky; Martha had gone freelance since Earth had been stolen, having left the red caps of UNIT behind her, and had ended up marrying Ricky – now that, the Doctor hadn't been expecting. Yet they seemed to work well as a couple, and they even went on missions together. Yet not all of the missions that they went on ran smoothly – especially not the ones that ended up with them being in the line of sight of a Sontaran gun.
The Doctor hit the Sontaran on the back of the neck with a hammer that had been lying nearby – they were lucky that their chase had led them to a building site and the Time Lord could find something to help them so quickly – saving their lives before he went off to see the next person.
Sarah Jane had been one of his most faithful companions, sticking by him through a regeneration when so many others wouldn't have been able to deal with it, and seeing three of his faces during her relatively short life; and now she had a son – a son who wasn't looking where he was going when he crossed the road because he was talking on his phone, and the Doctor hadn't been able to save the Pete Tyler of this universe from being run over, but he could certainly save Luke Smith from the same fate.
Jack was depressed; the children of Earth had been hijacked and he had managed to save the day with his friends at Torchwood, but only at a great cost to himself: not only had he lost his grandson and sabotaged his already practically non-existent relationship with his daughter, but he had lost the Welshman in the suit.
The Doctor had seen Jack hit on people of all ages, genders, and species over the years that he had known him – and he had even been hit on a few times himself by the ex-Time Agent – but he knew that there was no one that Jack Harkness had ever truly loved more than Ianto Jones.
So the Doctor told him about Alonso, because Ianto would have wanted him to move on, because Ianto had had no idea just how much Jack had loved him – and just how much Jack would always love him – and if Alonso could go some way to healing the broken 51st Century boy, then that was fine with the Doctor.
The Doctor still felt guilty about Joan Redfern, and how he had so unwillingly and unknowingly deceived her when he had been forced to make himself human. Her great-granddaughter had found her diary and written it up, publishing it as a book some century after the events had happened in the timeline of the universe. She was signing copies of her wondrous story put to paper at a book shop. The Doctor went to see her, because she would know, and he had to know.
He could tell that she recognised him as soon as she saw him. Of course she would have seen pictures of him from her great-grandmother's diaries, and possibly from the journal that he had kept himself during that time, with the drawings of all of his faces as he remembered them from that part of his mind that he had been compelled to lock away, and of course she would believe that that the man now standing before her was the same man that her great-grandmother had loved all those years ago at that school of doomed boys, because she accepted that he had been a man from the stars.
He was grateful for that, because it meant that he didn't need to explain; he could just ask.
"Was she happy? In the end?"
Joan's great-granddaughter, who looked so like her that the little bit of John Smith still left inside of him cried out from within that this was the same woman that he had fallen in love with all those years ago – but, of course, it wasn't – nodded and answered his question simply.
"Yes, yes, she was," she assured him, and the Doctor was relieved. Joan Redfern was a good woman, and she deserved to be happy – especially after all he had put her through.
Donna was next, but he wouldn't be able to see Donna herself, not face to face; it was far too risky, and no one deserved to die on their wedding day – especially not someone who had once been the most important woman in the universe.
He didn't go and see her straight away, though; he went to see her father first, and got a quid off of him so that he could buy a lottery ticket that he knew was going to make Donna a very rich woman.
Then he went to the wedding, and he saw her come out of the church with her new husband. Her dress didn't have straps, and the scars from when she had been the Doctor Donna would have bene visible on her back – the Doctor briefly wondered how Sylvia and Wilf had explained those away to her, and to the rest of her friends and family who might have happened upon them at some point in the months and years since they had appeared.
Sylvia noticed him first, standing outside the TARDIS and watching the proceedings. She and Wilf came over, and that was the last time that he was going to see any of them, so he gave them the lottery ticket as a wedding present for his best friend and went back to the TARDIS by himself, because he was very close to the end and there was only one more person who he had to see.
He couldn't be seen – it would mess up the timelines if he was seen – so he stayed out of the way, leaning up against a wall as the pain of his radiation poisoning slowly began to kick in. He had, up to this point, been ignoring the torture of all his cells slowly dying, but it was getting more and more difficult to focus on anything else, and he was so distracted by it that he almost didn't notice when Rose walked passed, her back to him him as she made her way back home.
Oh.
Ow.
He hadn't quite expected it to hurt that much when he saw her again; it certainly was far more painful than slowly deteriorating from radiation poisoning could ever be.
She hadn't noticed that he was there, and he wasn't planning on letting her; this Rose hadn't met him yet, and she couldn't see him before she had met him, because if she had seen him this early in her personal timeline, then she should have recognised him during the Auton invasion, and she hadn't, so she couldn't have seen him on this cold and snowy New Year's Eve.
But a wave of agony washed over him from the radiation, and he couldn't help but let out a small groan.
"You alright, mate?"
Damn. She had seen him. Would that change time? Or would she forget what she had seen this night?
"Yeah," he lied as he looked back up at her from the snow-covered ground.
"Too much to drink?" she smirked, and the Doctor couldn't believe how much he had missed seeing her smile.
"You could say that."
"Maybe it's time you went home," she suggested, and as he felt his hearts rate drop, she didn't know just how close to home he actually was. He nodded in response. "Anyway; happy New Year!"
"And yourself," he nodded, and Rose turned to walk away, but he wasn't ready to let her leave just yet, because surely this would be the last time that he would ever see her – but that didn't really matter, now that he was dying, because she had been the love of his ninth life, and maybe his tenth would find someone else, but even if he didn't, he could tell from this instant that Rose Tyler would not occupy the same space in his new hearts as she had done in these old and tired and wan hearts that were slowly beating to a stop in his chest.
"What year is it?" he called, just so that she would turn around and he would get to see her face again.
"Blimey, how much have you had?" she laughed. "2005, January the first."
The Doctor knew it; he just needed to hear it from her. It was almost bittersweet that he was ending his time a mere few months before she was starting hers.
"I reckon this year'll be great," he told her. "For both of us."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
Rose chuckled, backing away slightly, but she still had a sincere smile on her face. "See you."
Yes, he thought, you will.
But as he watched her go through the door to the block of flats in which she lived, the radiation poisoning kicked in with a vengeance. He cried out in pain, knowing that he had to get to the TARDIS, but he was only halfway there when he collapsed onto his hands and knees in the middle of the Powell Estate.
But Ood Sigma was there, telling him that the universe was going to sing him to sleep. He hadn't been lying, and the song that followed was hauntingly beautiful – as though it had a power of its own, which the Doctor had no doubt that it did. It gave him the strength that he needed to push himself up off of the ground and onto his feet, and stumble towards the TARDIS. An overwhelming feeling of finality washed over him as he stepped through the familiar door and set the old girl in flight.
Once they were in the Time Vortex, he stood next to the control panel, watching with defeated mournfulness as the golden regeneration energy began to glow around his hands.
It was starting.
