Author's note: I wrote this several years ago and then became so sick I didn't have the energy to post. And it became one of those things that, since it's already been delayed, becomes less and less urgent and therefore even less likely to get done as time goes by. So at this point I figured I had to post, or I'd NEVER get around to it.
The Last Trip1833
He lands near the shipyard, but he doesn't want to stay there. Too many people. So he wanders up the beach, a drifter among the driftwood.
He doesn't tell them about the volcano. Maybe they'll get lucky, maybe they won't. It's no matter to him, none of his business. He doesn't even know what year it is, and he doesn't ask.
He stays a few days anyway. Why not? He has a time machine, and 2005 isn't going anywhere. Besides, the TARDIS is still damaged, still tires easily. Still having trouble finding her way.
She's still decorated in coral. Still. He doesn't try to change it. Not that he likes it, he just can't seem to care. Anyway, he thinks with a tenderness he cannot feel towards any other being in the cosmos right now, especially himself—anyway, if it makes her happy …
So he stays. A naturalist follows him from the shipyard, trying to make conversation. He wants to sketch the Doctor. The Doctor stands on the Sumatran beach and lets the man, Rassilon knows why. Perhaps because he has been kind enough to lend him a pair of shoes to replace the sandals. Perhaps it's because he doesn't intend to return the borrowed items. He supposes he feels guilty about that, though he doesn't feel like he feels guilty. He doesn't feel much of anything.
The Doctor arrived wearing the sandals, an Avarinne tunic, and a battered leather jacket he thinks once belonged to Fitz. The jacket is all that survives from the original TARDIS wardrobe.
In another day or two, he'll move on. He's got one last thing to do, one last trip. He'll come back when it's done, maybe, or find some other empty place.
He has no thoughts beyond that.
1963
He stands in the crowd with a face like stone, like a vengeful god on some hellish Judgement Day.
He doesn't know what he looks like, hasn't stopped to find a mirror since he raised his hands to his face and felt that the last traces of the terrible burns had faded away (he'd regenerated into fire, into a burning ship, and the fire outlasted the healing) but it's a rough sort of face, something most people overlook or look away from. It's a face that could be attractive, if his eyes weren't so empty. It's a face most people assume is of the moment. Unimportant.
He knows none of this. All he knows is that death is coming.
He watches the motorcade in silence. He could leave, but this does not occur to him until later. He has seen so many terrible things that he has forgotten how to stop watching.
He could have shouted out a warning, but this is history. It's not his place to change it, even to save a life.
It's against the rules.
It doesn't occur to him until later that he is the last one, that he could break that rule and no one would stop him. Perhaps he doesn't want it to occur to him until later.
The Vortex
In the TARDIS, he double-checks the note Arkeros left him. A time, a place, an invasion, a planet to save.
Damn Arkeros. He can't muster the anger to curse the Daleks, but he can curse her. She's the sort who'd make one last joke on the way to her grave, one last game, one last meddle. She always had to have the last word and it looked like this time she'd succeeded. Permanently.
Earth about to be destroyed by Nestene.
Well, let it be destroyed, then.
He can't. It isn't caring, exactly, but inertia. He's still the Doctor, apparently. He doesn't know how to stop. As long as he knows he's needed, he can't stop.
But after this … after this, it's over. No one left to save, no place to go.
Just this one last trip and he can rest.
1912
The TARDIS has missed her target. Again.
He helps a man who comes near to fainting in the street. His name is Thomas Daniels, and he's always been a little sickly. Migraines, perhaps.
In no way does he intend to save Thomas. He simply catches his elbow as the man walking past him starts to stumble, and then, having taken possession of the elbow, perforce guides it out of the path of traffic.
Thomas Daniels takes him home to his family. Perhaps he realizes that there is something a bit wrong with the Doctor, as well. The Doctor comes along because he is simply drifting, wandering wherever the wind or the waves or the Thomas Daniels of the world take him. He's letting the TARDIS rest up. Again.
Abigail Daniels is wary of the hard-faced, silent man her husband has brought home. But he speaks in monosyllables and stares straight ahead with empty, haunted blue eyes, like the February sky, and she realizes that he has received enough unkindness from the world, already, for a hundred lifetimes. She fusses over him, gives him leftover soup and fresh-baked bread. She wants to know when he last ate, and the Doctor realizes he's not sure anymore.
He stays a few more days, lying awake in the Daniels' spare room at night, napping in a chair by the fire during the day. He lets them dress him in period clothing. He does not avoid mirrors, but neither does he seek them out.
The children, Simon and Lucy, tug at his hands when he's awake, leading him around the house and through their games of make-believe.
He leaves. He suggests, suggests, that the Daniels do not use their tickets for the maiden voyage of the Titanic. That's all. It's nothing to do with him whether they listen or not, and he doesn't stay long enough to find out.
He has in no way saved them. He's through saving people. It never ends. Once you save one person, once, you're lost. You keep following them around, trying to keep them safe. You start to care.
And then, of course, you want to save everyone. And you can't.
He thinks he can save one more planet, one more time. Just one, and then walk away. Planets aren't so bad. They don't have eyes to haunt you, voices to call after you.
1941
He punches the captain in the stomach. Not nearly as hard as he could, of course, because his strength is more than human, and he doesn't want to hurt anyone any more than he wants to save them. Still, the man doubles up neatly. A clip to the jaw and a hard pinch to a nerve in his shoulder render him unconscious—or close enough for the Doctor's purposes.
He's not sure the uniform of a U-boat captain will get him into the base. Better than the civilian garb of England, 1912, anyway. And the captain was about his size, and stumbled tipsily past the mouth of the alley on his way home from the bar.
What did the German military want with a big blue box, anyway? Probably the outer plasmic shell had one of its hiccups. It happens less often now, but one lapse would reveal it as something otherworldly.
The Doctor leaves Thomas Daniels' donated clothes behind, and his shoes, clumping off in his new black boots. He hadn't bothered to get himself a proper outfit this time around. Even if the TARDIS wardrobe hadn't been burned to ash, there hadn't seemed to be much point. He'd only meant to take the one last trip.
What he was planning on doing after that trip, he has no idea. Curl up in some dark corner of oblivion and wait for the final death? Yeah, maybe. But he suspects he hadn't been thinking that far ahead. He suspects he hadn't been thinking at all.
He suspects that had been Arkeros' plan all along—keep him moving until he healed enough to want to heal. Maybe the TARDIS is in on it, too. Maybe these wrong turns are deliberate.
Now he is starting to think of other trips. Not to Earth, no. Too many memories. Too many people, too many temptations to get involved. He'll go out alone, among the distant stars, he'll wander through the nebulae and orbit the black holes.
Places where life never evolved or died out long ago.
He has half a mind to do that now. But he knows he won't. Damn Arkeros, anyway.
2005
He finally makes it to the department store. By this point he's interested enough in his wardrobe to have a quick look around. He kind of likes some of what he's wearing, but he isn't going to go stomping around the cosmos in a Nazi uniform. He finds some black jeans, and some jumpers he likes the looks of, and takes them. He's going to blow the building up, anyway, nobody will miss them in the rubble.
(He's kept Fitz's jacket. The Doctor was never a leather jacket kind of guy before, but he suspects he is now. Things change.)
He finds he misses turn-of-the-millenium London more than he realized, will miss it more than he expected once he leaves it for good.
He poses as a customer, waiting for the store to close, dodging the last sweeps of the employees before they leave. Now the store is empty, he thinks. Empty save for what's in the basement. He gets there too late to save the electrician.
He's through saving people, anyway. It never ends. It never, ever ends.
The bomb's wired up and he's ready to go when he hears her voice. Plaintive, helpless, stupid, strident, human. Gormless. Yeah, that's the word. Calling out and asking if this is some sort of joke, and demanding for it to stop, because it isn't funny any more.
Humans.
He has to look. He doesn't want to, but he does. He tells himself he won't save anybody. Not really. If he saves someone from his own bomb, that doesn't count.
And there's this bleached-blonde girl in a pink hoodie and too much makeup, backed up against a wall by a bunch of well-dressed homicidal mannequins. He only has a split-second to look at her face as they raise their arms for the killing blows. Her eyes are squeezed shut. She's bright enough to know she's about to die and brave enough not to start shrieking hysterically.
He knows that he can't save her. He can tell at a glance she's trouble, that she'll ask questions, that she'll follow him, that he'll have to save her again, that she still won't give up. Even about to die, there's a little stubborn crease between her eyebrows, an uncompromising set to her slightly-to-big-for-her-face mouth. She's gonna drag him right back into the old trap. By the time he manages to shake her off, there'll be somebody else to save, and someone after that.
It's not his business. She was going to die anyway. His bomb has nothing to do with that fact.
He takes her hand.
It's not like he even has a choice. He's still the Doctor, until he goes to the final death, and this is what the Doctor does.
Big brown eyes snap open, stare at him, curious despite the distraction of impending death. (And they talk about puppies having puppy-dog eyes. Puppies, he decides, have nothing on humans.) Oh, she's going to be a disaster. If she had a head full of nothing but peroxide, she might toddle off to safety, but doesn't, and she won't.
So much for the last trip.
"Run," he says, and they do.
End