"ALL YOU DOCTORS"
by Denise Tanaka
Paris, 1934 A.D.
The city had just started to settle after the stock market crash and Great Depression called the Americans home. The cafes and bistros that once rattled with the typewriters of drunken Yankees were now places where one could sit and enjoy a cup of cafe au lait with an old friend.
"Is it really you, Professor?"
"I know I've changed," the Doctor said. "But I thought that, of all people, you would recognize me, Ace."
After the final regeneration of the Time Lord's lifespan, the fourteenth Doctor had metamorphosed into the body of a woman.
Ace smiled. "I haven't been called that in years. My name is Dorothy." She was now a middle-aged woman in a modest blue dress. She wore her long hair pulled back in a loosely pinned twist. Yet her eyes still had the mischievous twinkle of the baseball-bat swinging teenager the Doctor had once travelled with.
"'Years'. Isn't that a strange term? On each world, the years are a different span of time." The Doctor sipped daintily from the little white cup. "I'm no longer sure of how old I really am."
"Are you going to stay for a while?" Ace asked. "I'd love my little ones to meet you."
"As a matter of fact, this isn't purely a social call. Very soon now I'm going to need your help."
The Doctor leaned back against the white cast-iron chair. In this last regeneration, she appeared to be a woman in her thirties, tall and statuesque like Rudolph Valentino's widow. The Doctor's feminine hairstyle was a long cascade of ginger curls. She wore casual travelling clothes—an overcoat and trousers-as if she were about to join Hemingway on an African safari.
"Of course, Professor, anything you need... just name it."
The Doctor added the punch line, "Very soon, I'm going to be an un-wed mother."
Ace chuckled. "Who's the father?"
"You wouldn't believe me. Besides, I haven't met him yet. Not exactly."
"Then you're not...?" Ace nodded meaningfully toward the Doctor's mid-section.
"Hardly."
Ace huffed out her exasperation. "Well then how the hell do you know you're going to...?"
"Shh." The Doctor put a finger to her lips with the commanding air of an orchestra conductor. Ace immediately stopped talking.
The Doctor leaned over the table to whisper. "Do you see that pair who just sat down?"
Ace squinted against the late afternoon sunlight glaring across the tables of the sidewalk cafe. She noticed a demure blonde woman in a straw hat sitting near the edge of a striped awning. Sitting next to her was a tall man with a Fedora hat squashing a wild cloud of curly hair.
"Criminy," said Ace, observing the man's ridiculously long striped scarf draped in three or four loops around his shoulders. "Did his blind Auntie knit him that scarf?"
"Never mind, Ace. Can you distract the for me? Her name's Romana. I need a few minutes with him alone."
"Who is he? A writer? An artist?"
"Just go on."
Ace walked over to the other table and posed with one hand on her hip. Before she could say a word, the Doctor greeted in her in French and proceeded to order lunch for Romana and himself. Since Ace had lived in Paris for over forty years, she could spot an accent in even the most flawless French.
"You're British, aren't you?" Ace responded.
"Not exactly, but I lived there for a time." The Doctor grinned broadly at his little private joke.
Then Ace turned to Romana. "You look familiar."
"I don't see how."
"Let me think. Now I remember! You were in here a few years ago, with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and their rowdy crowd. You owe me four thousand francs."
"That's impossible, I tell you," Romana insisted. "I've never been here before."
"It was you, I'm sure of it! Pay me back my money, or so help me I'll call the police."
The Doctor's deep voice blanketed the tension between the two women. "Now now, ladies, let's not have an argument here. Madame..."
"My name's Dorothy."
"This is a clear-cut case of mistaken identity. But in the interests of correcting injustice and righting wrongs throughout the universe, I shall pay you the four thousand francs. Romana, wait here."
As he stood up to leave, Romana called out, "Doctor, this is ridiculous."
Ace froze, staring at his back as he launched into the pedestrian traffic. She whirled about to check the far table. The chair was empty. The coffee was only half finished.
Her trembling lips mouthed the word, "Doctor?"
One of the essential tools of a time traveller was a currency duplicator. The Doctor merely told it the place, time and amount needed, then tapped his foot impatiently as the note papers reamed out onto his palm.
"And to think of all the time Nostradamus wasted trying to turn lead into gold," he muttered.
Pockets full of franc notes, the Doctor stepped out of his blue police box and carefully turned the key in the door.
"Hello, Doctor," said a female voice just behind him.
Startled, he turned about so suddenly that one coil of the scarf dropped off his shoulder. "Don't you know it's not polite to sneak up on people?"
"I couldn't resist. It's so rarely that I have the opportunity to surprise myself."
His wide, blue eyes squinted down into hers. Sexless, timeless eyes in an incongruous young lady's face. Gradually, his lips peeled away from his teeth in a broad grin.
"Doctor!" he exclaimed joyously.
"I apologize for tracking you down like this, but I'm in the most dire circumstances. I need a little of your time."
"Say no more." He turned partly back toward the TARDIS' lock, but she reached out to stop him with a gentle pressure on top of his hand.
"No, not there. Would you mind stepping into my car?"
She gestured to a blue Buick with tinted windows like mirror glass. He shrugged and went along. She unlocked the door and held it open. "After you."
"Oh please, age before beauty," he replied, and bowed grandly.
So she climbed inside, and he followed right after - bumping his head on the roof.
"It's just a car," he gasped in utter astonishment.
She sighed, "Didn't I say it was? You never listen. My TARDIS is in a storage shed. Still the damned police box. I never did get around to fixing that chameleon circuit."
"So, which regeneration are you?"
"The last."
"Oh, so this is how I turn out in the end?"
The Buick was dark inside, with curtains shielding the driver's compartment. As his eyes adjusted, he could just barely make out the twinkle of her irises staring up at him. She pressed close to one side of his chest.
"I need your help. In this last regeneration, I got rid of a few aspects of my personality that were less than desirable." She paused, in awe of the understatement she had just made. "But I made a mistake. Along with my arrogance, selfishness and pride, I tossed out the natural tendency to dislike myself."
"Oh?"
She slowly slipped her hand in between the loops of the scarf and pressed her palm to one of his hearts. "Surely you feel it."
He closed his eyes, as if that would put up a barrier between their minds. But the relentless psychic pressure of her timeless mind created a ringing in his ears that grew louder the more he tried to block it. If only it were any other Time Lord, he could.
"Don't fight me, Doctor," she whispered. "I need you." And then she went up on her knees to kiss him.
The fourth Doctor stumbled out of the car, one end of his scarf precariously hooked on his left shoulder. He stood tall, and furiously gathered up the scarf into a big bundle in his arms.
The fourteenth Doctor emerged a moment later, and tugged straight the lapels of her canvas overcoat.
He shouted at her, "Utterly reprehensible behavior! One would think that at your age, I would behave better."
The last Doctor hung her head. "I'm sorry. I think Heinlein put it best, in a short story that he has yet to write: 'It's a shock to have it proved to you that you can't resist seducing yourself.' Someday you'll understand."
"Ha ha!" he barked, a bitter imitation of a laugh. "I will never understand how I could break all the laws of space and time and common decency. There isn't even a word for this."
"Yes there is. Oh, on second thought, it does rather stretch the definition."
"I just want to forget this whole, sordid affair. And I don't want to see your face for another ten regenerations!" Scarf's fringe trailing on the cobblestones, he stomped off toward the cafe to rejoin Romana.
The Doctor who watched him go crossed her arms over her stomach.
Northern China, 432 A.D.
Several years later, it was the fifth century according to the European calendar. Northern China had been unified into the State of Wei. Turks and Tibetans had been tromping over the country for a hundred years, and the farmers were too busy staying alive to bother with two odd foreigners living in the mountains on the fringes of Mongolia.
A young, fair-skinned boy knelt before a low table. He dipped his bamboo brush in black ink and copied a complex character with sweeping diagonals dotted with arrowhead strokes. It was the word, "machine".
The boy leaned back and stared at the dark ink against the white paper. For some reason, a word he had never heard before popped into his mind.
Just then, the door of their shack smacked open with the force of a snowy gust. His ginger-haired mother staggered inside, arms full of firewood, and pushed the door shut with her back.
"Mother, what does 'TARDIS' mean?"
Busy dumping the wood into the box, the last Doctor answered, "What? Oh, 'Time and Relative Dimensions in Space'." Then she snapped upright to stare at him. "So, it's time. When you weaned six months ago, I knew this day was not far off."
"Mother, I don't understand."
"Go and pack your things."
"Why?"
"I'm taking you on a trip."
The last Doctor carried her son piggy-back in Chinese style, with her hands clasped behind herself and under his rear end. She trudged through the freshly fallen powder, her breath billowing behind like the smoke of a steam locomotive.
She carried him up the mountainside to the site of an abandoned pottery kiln. Broken shards of ancient pots littered the landscape.
The Doctor set down the child and told him, "Wait here."
She bent and crawled into a hole in the side of the hill. A tubular shaft rose a good twenty meters into the rock, and its insides were charred with pottery ash. She groped in the dark with her hands, searching for the door to her TARDIS.
It was gone.
The boy screamed, "Mother!"
She burst out to snatch him up protectively.
A saber-toothed tiger roared at their faces. The Doctor stared into the animal's eyes and held it off from pouncing by the sheer force of her will.
Then another monster emerged from nowhere, it seemed. It was a dinosaur, about the size of an alligator, running on two powerful legs and snarling with hunger.
The Doctor reached into her pocket and quickly lit a string of firecrackers. She tossed one string at the tiger and another in the path of the bouncing dinosaur.
The monsters screamed and ran away.
"Get into that kiln," the Doctor ordered the boy. "And don't come out until I come for you."
"But Mother..."
"Go!" She shoved him into the hole, then knelt to wipe away his footprints.
The Doctor hurried away from the kiln and shouted into the icy air, "Where are you? Come out and face me like a man!"
She heard the whir of a motor and turned toward the sound. A black cube approached, hovering a few inches above the snow by means of a bright blue glow - the tell-tale sign of a gravity repeller. The robot had a round orb at the front end with something like an animal face. On the rear was a curved into a question mark.
The Doctor bent over to read the lettering on the side: the Greek letter "Phi" and an underline.
The robot emitted a synthetic "Meow."
"Very funny," the Doctor commented. "Phi-Line. As opposed to K-9."
Phi-Line instructed her, "Bring me your son."
"Never. Suppose you tell me, where is your master?"
"Surrender the boy or you will be destroyed." From the cat-like mouth emerged a small, silver tube. It swiveled up to aim directly between the Doctor's eyes.
She smiled. "You know you can't kill me, Valeyard. Stop playing these childish games."
A TARDIS materialized just behind Phi-Line with a soft sound like a newborn baby's fart. It was a column of opaque crystal that dissolved into thin air. An ugly old man dressed in long black robes and a skull cap stood in its place. He tucked a crystal orb into his pocket.
"Did you think you could hide him from me, Doctor?" the Valeyard growled.
"I've managed up 'til now. What have you done with my TARDIS?"
He chuckled wickedly. "I programmed it to dematerialize by remote control. It is floating through the cosmos indefinitely, and there is no possible way for you to ever bring it back. You are finally marooned on this damned Earth that you seem to have such a fondness for."
She knew he wasn't lying. They had the same mind, the same soul. Whatever they might do to each other, they were incapable of deceit.
The Valeyard spoke to his robot, "Phi-Line, where is the boy?"
The feline ears twirled, then the robot turned toward the hillside. "In a small cave, there."
"I won't let you take him!" The Doctor rushed at the man in black.
Phi-Line spit a couple of laser blasts at her ankles. The Doctor cried out and fell face forward into the snow.
The Valeyard raised his right arm, holding the crystal orb to the glare of the sun. Lightning flashed out of it, and where the bolts struck more monsters materialized: a polar bear, a pterodactyl, and a leopard.
The Valeyard strolled casually up the hillside, with Phi-Line obediently trailing behind.
The Doctor frantically lit more firecrackers. The leopard ran off, but the polar bear only became angry at the noise. The winged dinosaur took off and circled overhead like a giant vulture.
The last Doctor rolled to her other side and dug into her pocket for a little gadget that resembled a pocket watch. "You're my last hope," she whispered as she flicked it open. The watch's face had a dozen golden needles spinning around all the hours at the same time.
The pterodactyl was ready to dive.
A familiar grinding noise signaled the materialization of another TARDIS. The old blue police box appeared out of nothing. The door opened, and strong hands pulled her inside.
"No," she panted. "The boy, he's got the boy."
"Who? There's no one around for miles but you...Doctor."
She looked up at the seventh Doctor, a short man wearing a white leisure suit and a straw hat. His eyes were beginning to show the weight of increasing self-knowledge.
She thought, This was only the beginning. With each new face came new memories.
"I have half a mind to kick you back out into the cold and let you freeze." For some reason, this regeneration had a bit of a brogue and rolled every "R" with dramatic effect.
"Ah, but that's only half your mind," she answered. "The other half is on my side."
The seventh Doctor paced around the TARDIS console to work out some of his irritation. "Well, I'm waiting."
"He calls himself the Valeyard, sometimes, but most often he is known as the Doctor. He is me. He is us."
"I know. But the last I saw of him, he was trapped in the Matrix on Gallifrey."
"The Master helped him escape. For years now, the Valeyard has been hunting me." She paused meaningfully. "And my son."
"Your son?" He bent over her, like a teacher about to rap her knuckles for talking aloud in class.
"Yes, my son, myself. The child we conceived in Paris..."
The Doctor launched into another circle around the console. "Have you completely lost your mind? How could you create such a damnable paradox!"
"I needed to be whole again." She began to tell him the truth, "My twelfth regeneration did not go well. I was arrested by the High Council of Gallifrey and accused of the ultimate, unspeakable crime."
"A worse crime than fathering a child with yourself?" he asked indignantly.
"Genocide on the universe," she said. "Then using the TARDIS to restore what I had destroyed."
"I see."
The last Doctor held her breath for a moment, glad that her previous incarnation chose not to ask the dreaded question. Did you do it? Whimsical and charming, with his straw hat and umbrella, he was still a Time Lord and knew better than to ask questions that might be answered.
"The High Council subjected me to a mind probe to ascertain the facts, and in the process, I was driven hopelessly insane."
The seventh Doctor calmed down a bit and started rummaging about for a first-aid kit. "Go on, I'm listening."
"Naturally, the Council felt terribly guilty and offered me a means by which I could go on living with a clear mind. They helped me amalgamate my dark side, my paranoia, my hate, my insanity. So I regenerated into two persons: one being a woman free of hate and rage, and the other an ugly old man who is nothing but the sum of all my repressed evil."
"So all those years ago, when they put me on trial and collaborated with him...?"
"It was still to appease their own consciences. They cannot refuse the Valeyard any request, for they know it was their own incompetence that set him loose upon the universe."
The Doctor plopped himself down beside her on the floor. With the first-aid kit from underneath the console, he began tending to the laser blasts on her ankles. "And of course you can't kill him or you destroy yourself... myself."
"Yes. He and I are both distinct parts of a complete individual. Strangely, I find that I miss my arrogance and stubbornness. It's made me less effective in a crisis. As Paul McCartney said, 'I'm not half the man I used to be.'" She chuckled, attempting to lighten the mood, then winced as he dabbed on some antiseptic.
"So what were you planning to do with the boy?"
"I waited for him to wean, then I would have taken him to Rassilon. He'd have been safe there until he was older."
The Doctor got a faraway look in his eyes. "And so it begins again."
"Help me." She rested her hand on his, and he jerked away from her touch. "Please, Doctor. I know how to find him. He cannot hide from me, anymore than I could from him. Help me get the boy to safety."
"I have no choice, do I?"
Gallifrey, on a random day in the past
The Valeyard dragged the squirming little boy by the arm through a pair of thick mahogany doors. It was a small office, paneled in black wood, carpeted in drab green, and had an oppressive musty stench as if no one had opened a window in centuries.
The lone occupant of the room was a thin woman with a bloodless face wearing long grey robes. She stood up as the Valeyard entered, then bowed half from reverence and half from fear.
"Doctor, I am honored. How can I be of service?"
"Take care of this orphan until I return. Keep him busy, Matron, for he tends to be lackadaisical."
The Valeyard pushed the boy so hard that he stumbled face first into the huge wooden desk that occupied the center of the room. The boy bumped his nose and began to cry.
The woman called Matron grabbed the boy's wrist and gave it a firm slap. "Here now! None of that."
The boy took a deep breath and screamed. The tears continued to pour down his cheeks.
"Quiet! Quiet, I said! Come along, you, I have just the thing." She pinched the boy's earlobe and pulled him along. He had to run to keep up with her. He squirmed and slapped at her iron fingers but she was too strong.
The Matron took him to a dimly lit ward. Everything was grey, the walls, the ceiling, the floor. Hundreds of identical stainless steel cribs were lined along either wall. Each one contained a red-faced screaming infant. A couple of women, dressed in grey, strolled casually up and down the room with trays of glass bottles which they matter-of-factly deposited into the cribs in turn.
"See? These are babies and right now you're acting like one. Now stop whining, and go help the nurses."
She gave him a shove.
The boy stumbled a few steps, then stopped. He stood stiffly, alone in the middle of the room, and kept crying until he vomited all over his trousers and shoes.
Surprised at himself, he stopped crying and looked to see if one of the nurses would come clean him up. Yet they were completely oblivious to him.
As the bitter liquid leaked into his shoes, he began to shiver. "Mother," he whispered. "Help me."
The last Doctor sat on the floor beneath the TARDIS console, her face in her hands. "I can't feel him," she whimpered.
The seventh Doctor busied himself flicking dials and switches, sometimes bouncing up to his tip-toes to reach across the board. "There's only one place that he could go and be completely shielded from your perception."
She dropped her hands. "Oh no. But why? What would he have to gain by going back there?"
"He wants the same thing you do, to be whole and to go on living."
"With my son." She moaned in horror and covered her face again.
The Doctor kept his eyes fixed on the controls as he set the coordinates for the citadel of Gallifrey.
The boy couldn't stay inactive for long, and resigned himself to assisting the nurses with feeding and cleaning the infants. It seemed he was always on his feet. As soon as one went to sleep, another woke up.
He began to feel pity for the babies, but if he tried to pick one up the nurses spanked him severely.
So he collected odds and ends from the rubbish, such as cracked bottle nipples and bits of string. He fashioned mobiles and hung them over some of the cribs, so he could give them a twirl while he fed the infants. Sometimes they smiled.
It became an obsession to find discarded items he could make into toys. Instead of sleeping at night, he crept about the dark hallways and filled his pockets with spoons, buttons, and lost sipper cups.
He went farther from his room each time, and eventually learned the way to other wards. The children were segregated by age, and throughout their lives progressed to larger and larger beds. The treasures in the cobwebbed corners were better here - keys, coins, and toy staser guns.
The boy knew that there was an upper floor that was inaccessible except to the nurses, who had keys. The mystery of that forbidden area was so tantalizing that he decided to risk whatever punishment the nurses might deal out just for the chance of going there.
One night, he stole a key from the nurse's pocket as she slept. He ventured through the door and up a spiral staircase. As he stepped onto the plush carpeting, his ears were ringing - and then he realized it was music.
In a daze, he wandered boldly down the halls. There were no wards here, just private rooms with names on the doors.
One door was ajar. The boy peered inside.
Sitting beneath the warm glow of a yellow lamp was a woman, rocking back and forth. In her arms was a bundle of blankets.
She looked up and made eye contact with the boy. Then she smiled, and put one finger to her lips to signal, "Shh."
The boy stepped cautiously inside. "Who are you?"
"My name is Romana. What's your name, little boy?"
As he came nearer, he could see that the infant cuddling on the woman's lap was almost asleep. "I used to be a baby."
"I'm sure you did," Romana whispered with a smile.
"Time changes things."
"Yes, little boy. Yes, it does."
A hard hand clamped over the boy's mouth, and another pinched his ear. The Matron!
The boy squinted his eyes shut. He let himself be dragged out, knowing resistance was useless, and descended again to the dark floor below.
First, she spanked him with a wooden paddle and then made him kneel on a hard wood railing for a full hour. He had to kneel with his back to the clock but he could hear it tick-tock, tick-tock, every second of every minute of that hour. He took his punishment without crying or complaining, for he knew that this was merely the price to be paid. Nothing the nurses could do to him would ever deprive him of the beautiful moment he had just shared.
The next day, the Matron called him into her office to be lectured upon what an evil little boy he was and how insidious it was of him to go where he had been expressly forbidden. At the end of it, she demanded, "Do you understand?"
The boy asked, "Why are those babies allowed to be with their mothers and mine are not?"
The Matron gasped at his audacity, but decided to tell him in the hopes of intimidating him from such actions in the future. "Those children are going to be Time Lords."
"Then what of my babies?"
"They are just the ordinary citizens of Gallifrey."
"Why can't they be Time Lords too?"
The Matron folded her arms. "It is quite impractical, not to mention dangerous, for everyone to be privy to the mysteries of travelling through space and time."
"I will." The little boy raised his chin proudly. "Someday, I'm going to be a Time Lord."
The Matron opened her mouth wide to cackle away her amusement at the boy's arrogance.
As further punishment for sneaking up to the Time Lords' level, the boy was denied supper. With his stomach in knots, he obediently fed the helpless infants he had come to think of as his own. He kept his spirits up, for their sakes. He twirled the mobiles, made goo-goo faces, and sang the nursery rhymes his mother had sung to him.
The door opened, and a cold draft of air blew through the ward. The infants began to cry all at once.
The boy looked up and saw the Valeyard, his black robes a stark contrast to the drab colors around him. That ugly old face twisted into a wicked grin.
"Come with me, Boy. Everything is arranged."
"No!"
The boy jumped off his step-stool and ran out a side door. He turned over trays of milk bottles and hurled blankets off their shelves. When he glanced back, he saw the Valeyard scramble over the obstacles without losing a beat.
The nurses raised their hands in alarm. "Here now, what's all this?"
"Catch him!" the Valeyard bellowed.
The boy ducked and swerved away from all the hands that scooped through the air. He ran through the toddlers' ward screaming, "Help!"
All the toddlers stood up in their cribs at the same time. They waited for the boy to pass, and then pelted the nurses and the Valeyard with the contents of their cribs. The nurses put their arms over their heads as blankets, bowls, boxes of crackers, and soggy diapers rained down on them.
The Valeyard charged through the mess with his blue eyes focused on the boy. Alone, he pursued him into the preschoolers' ward.
The Matron stood as a man and woman entered her office, unannounced. "This is highly irregular. You must go back out and make an appointment with the Registrar."
"We don't have time for a bureaucratic runaround," the man said, brandishing a colorful umbrella with a handle in the shape of a question mark. "Has a man calling himself 'the Doctor' brought a little boy to you recently?"
The woman helpfully described, "Brown hair, blue eyes, about so tall?"
The Matron clenched her fists. "That would not be proper procedure."
"Then you won't mind if we walk about the wards?" Without waiting for approval, he started off with the woman at his side.
"Now see here!" The Matron rushed up behind them and matched their brisk pace. "I'll not have strangers disturbing the children."
By then, the giggles, shouts and screams of hundreds of childish voices could be heard reverberating through the walls.
The Doctor, holding his umbrella, glanced back over his shoulder at the Matron. "It sounds as if they are already disturbed."
He threw open the door to the preschoolers' ward as if he were king of the castle.
"Mother!" The boy ran into his mother's arms as she knelt to catch him.
The Valeyard skidded on the mess the children had thrown into the middle of the floor, but regained his dignity immediately. He shouted, "Shut up!" but the children kept screaming and throwing things at him.
The seventh Doctor raised one hand and called out, "Quiet!" It was something more than just the power of his voice that hushed every thing in the room. Something in his dark eyes held their attention.
"Mother, take me home. I hate this place."
"Shh," she responded and stroked his hair.
The Valeyard said, "You must deliver the boy to me. I have made a bargain with the High Council. I will be given his whole regeneration cycle: fourteen new lifetimes."
"No! He's not for you!" She leaped to her feet and pushed the boy away. She ran to the Valeyard and grabbed the crystal from his pocket. The two of them struggled for a moment before the opaque column materialized around them. It began to glow in pulses along with a soft, swishing sound.
A chunk of metal flew out of the column, in a flash of lightning, and thudded to the floor. Then the TARDIS vanished.
"Mother!" the boy screamed. He rushed to the spot where the TARDIS had been and stomped his feet in anger. "Mother come back!"
The seventh Doctor went down on one knee to examine the gadget. It was a re-materialization circuit. Without it, the TARDIS could never land. The two of them were doomed to drift through the universe outside of space and time.
Inside the TARDIS, the Valeyard glared across the control console at the last Doctor's gentle feminine face. "You're going to live to regret that, Doctor."
She had the courage to smile back. "I don't think so. We belong together, you and I."
The Doctor in the nursery reached for the boy's hand, but he twisted away.
"I don't like you! I want my mother."
"Seems to me you have two choices. Either you accept a ride from me, or you stay here."
The boy sniffed and wiped his face with the back of his sleeve. "I hate it here."
"Come on, then."
The seventh Doctor strolled out past the Matron, and the boy tagged along behind.
"Where are you taking me?" the boy asked.
"To someone you may call your uncle. You'll be safe with him, until you're old enough."
"Old enough?"
"To go to the Academy."
"Why?"
"Well, to be a Time Lord, of course."
"Like my mother?"
The Doctor smiled. "Exactly like your mother."
When the boy saw the blue police box, he bounced ahead of the Doctor. "What's my uncle like?"
The Doctor lifted the key and hesitated. He suddenly remembered the greatest Time Lord who had ever lived, Rassilon, at the apex of his power. He was a staggeringly impressive figure in a lofty crown, who carried a long golden staff. Each accessory on his wardrobe amplified the power of his eternal mind. The heavens bowed down in fear at the twitch of his eyebrow.
This child alone would be privileged to bounce on his knee.
The Doctor leaned over to whisper a secret. "Don't tell anyone, but he has an insatiable sweet tooth. We'd best stop and get a tub of ice cream along the way."
"What's ice cream?"
The Doctor ruffled the boy's wavy hair. "You've got a lot to learn."
They entered the blue police box together. After a moment, it emitted a grating sound and vanished into thin air.
The Matron watched it fade. She sighed with relief and said, "At last, now things can get back to normal."
The End