Nicky and the Doctor
by P.H. Wise
A Doctor Who/Left Behind Crossover
Prologue: Something Wrong in Time and Space
Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who. That would be the BBC. I do not own Left Behind. That would be Ellenjay (Lahaye and Jenkins). I'm not making any money off of this.
Amy and Rory knew something was wrong when the Doctor suddenly froze in mid-sentence, his expression a peculiar mixture of horror and dumbfounded disbelief.
"Doctor?" When he didn't reply and just kept staring out the TARDIS' open door, Amy exchange a worried glance with Rory. "Doctor, what's wrong?"
The Doctor kept right on staring, eyes wide, and for all Amy could tell, he was staring out into a perfectly ordinary sunny day in an unremarkable suburb somewhere on Earth. The cars were driving on the right hand side of the road: that narrowed it down a bit. "DOCTOR!"
The Doctor spun to face her; he looked like he'd seen a ghost. "Everything," he said.
"What do you mean, 'everything?'" Rory asked.
"Everything's wrong," he insisted, growing agitated. "Everything. The sky, the ground, the people, the hum of the power transformers, all of it, wrong. It's impossible." The Doctor looked out at the suburb of Chicago. "Completely impossible," he muttered.
"When you say 'impossible,'" Rory began, "Do you mean 'universe falling into cracks in time and space and ceasing to exist' impossible, or is this more 'the Time-Lord post just delivered my mail' impossible?"
"The former," the Doctor replied, moving swiftly over to the TARDIS' console. He twisted a few knobs, flipped a few switches, and then swiveled a viewscreen around for the Ponds. "Look." He gestured to the screen, now cycling through views from all around the planet Earth. "What do you see?"
Amy and Rory studied the images for a bit. "I'm not seeing anything out of the..." Amy trailed off as she saw it.
More images flashed across the screen, and the problems quickly became obvious. People were off. And there were cataclysmic accidents on the highways involving hundreds of cars that looked to have been abandoned at least a week prior, some of them still smoldering. Crews were clearing it all away in some places, but it was clearly slow going. There were images of teachers seeming absently puzzled over empty classrooms. Vaguely befuddled daycare workers in empty nurseries. Maternity wards full of women with the distantly troubled looks of those who might have forgotten their car keys.
Amy felt a chill growing in her heart. A deep and awful dread. "There aren't any children," she said.
The Doctor twisted another dial, and the display shifted, now showing the total number of human children on Earth below the age of 14: zero.
"That's impossible," Rory said.
"I know!" the Doctor replied.
"Doctor," Rory said, "Every child on Earth didn't disappear in... when is this?"
"1996," he said.
"Every child on Earth didn't disappear in 1996. It didn't happen."
"Time can be rewritten," Amy said.
"Not like this," the Doctor said. "This is wrong. All of it. This never happened. Never happens. Must never happen." He flipped a few more switches. There were a few cursory reports on 'The Disappearances,' but for all that they happened all of a week ago, no one was really talking about them. Most of the news media reports centered on a newly installed President of Romania named Nicolae Carpathia, who was due to give a speech at the U.N. in the near future.
"Whatever this is," Amy said, "We have to stop it. We have to find what's caused it and stop it."
Rory nodded in agreement.
"Right you are." The Doctor grinned, put on his coat and straightened his bow-tie. "We have a world to save. Come along, Ponds."
They followed him out of the TARDIS and into the clear blue morning of the end of the world.
END PROLOGUE
Author's notes:
So there's this. This story, a version of the prologue for which was originally posted in the comments at Fred Clark's Slacktivist blog (NRA: Catering the Apocalypse) isn't super high on my priorities, but it is something I always find myself coming back to, mostly for my own amusement. I figured I may as well start posting it.
The Left Behind series has a number of problems, but one of them is the fact that it lacks heroes. Buck and Rayford certainly aren't those: heroes act, and all they seem to do is bear witness. And as I read along with the story concurrent with Fred's posts on each section, I found myself increasingly wondering, "What would The Doctor do?" This story is the result.
