A.N.: So this is a lot longer than I expected; I originally intended it to be the story of why the Ninth Doctor can't fly (which it is), but it also turned into how the leather jacket came to be a part of his outfit as well...
Warnings: Spoilers for everything from Doctor Who (TV Movie) to The Day of the Doctor (including The Night of the Doctor), minor religious references, Doctor self-bashing/self-hating
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 Night of the Doctor, or The Dark Knight Rises)
They were all gone. All of them. Just… gone.
He wasn't really sure if he was still allowed to call himself 'the Doctor'. When he had taken the Sisters' Elixir and forced his own regeneration, he had made a promise to himself to undo his first promise – the one he had made all that time ago, back when he hadn't known what lay ahead for himself and the entire race that he was running so far to leave behind – on the condition that he would go back once it was all over; once the Daleks were defeated and the universe was saved. For a universe at war had no need for the Doctor – but a universe in peace did, and he had already lived eight lives which seemed to prove that point.
Yet, as he had been so many times before even though he was forever reluctant to admit it, he had been wrong.
The universe no longer needed the Doctor.
Not when the Doctor was a monster.
As soon as he had regenerated into this new form – this form that he had no idea what it looked like – he had known that he would need answers. How had the war come to this – that he had had to commit double genocide just to stop the fighting?
Well, nearly doubly genocide.
There was, after all, one Time Lord left.
He needed answers, and there was only one place that he went to when he needed answers, buried away in the depths of the TARDIS somewhere; though he could sense the shifting of the rooms within the ship, and he knew that it was coming closer all the time – like a Weeping Angel when you turned your back to it. But he wasn't sure if he was allowed there, if He would still be there. How could He be, after all that he had done?
So he never made it to the chapel after he regenerated; he had made it up two – no, perhaps three – of the stairs that led up to the rest of the interior of the TARDIS, before a heavy feeling descended upon him, like an anvil resting on his shoulders. He hadn't quite fallen to his knees, but the descent was sudden enough that he might as well have done – he just about had enough time to catch himself on the metal balustrade and twist his body around so that he was sitting upon the step before gravity won its inevitable victory. He was vaguely aware of a pain as he collided with the hard step, but he barely felt it.
That was when his mind had begun to race, and to take him to awful places that he had never wanted to go but that he couldn't help himself but fly towards.
Of course, he thought of Susan. That sweet, innocent girl who he had dragged off of Gallifrey to travel with him, because even then he had somehow known that the Doctor must never travel alone. He had been heartbroken when she gave up travelling with him for David, but at least then he had known where she was. He had no idea if she had been on Gallifrey when he…
Now, she was lost. He had no idea where she was, and she probably wasn't even alive anymore. He wondered if she had known, on that day when they had stolen this TARDIS, that she was running away from a people who had never hurt her, had never harmed her in any way, with the man who would – one day, in a different persona and with a different look – be the one who would take her life?
But it wasn't just Susan, either; so many others had perished at his hands and, as much as the Time Lords were tyrannical and overly self-centred, willing to destroy all life in the universe to transcend as beings of consciousness – they weren't all bad. He had many Time Lord friends who he hadn't thought about when he had been faced with that awful button. If he had spared a minute to think of them, he probably wouldn't have been able to do it.
He found himself wondering where the Corsair had been during that madness – where the Master had been.
The Doctor had given little thought to his best enemy since long before the Time War had broken out. He hadn't seen him since San Francisco, when he had tried to steal all of his regenerations. His fellow Time Lord shouldn't have been able to regenerate after he had been sucked into the Eye of Harmony – after all, he was at the end of his definitive regeneration cycle – but a part of the Doctor would always feel as though the Master had survived somehow; he always seemed to have survived.
Much like the Doctor had.
Yet now, the Doctor had 'won'; he was the ultimate survivor, outliving all of the Time Lords, even those who were hardier than anyone else he had ever met.
Even Rassilon.
It only seemed appropriate that, as the last man standing, he couldn't rise to his feet.
Yet the maelstrom in his mind was interrupted by a loud clang that rang throughout the entire TARDIS – the Cloister Bell.
His brow – whatever it looked like this time around – furrowed at the sound. He was in no immediate danger, and there were no other passengers on the ship to be in any immediate danger; there was absolutely no reason for the Cloister Bell to have rung-
Until, suddenly, there was a loud rumble, and the ground beneath his feet began to shake violently.
He couldn't remember where he had landed the old girl after he had flown away from Gallifrey after he had regenerated, but he was sure that the TARDIS would have instinctively steered away from any impending earthquakes (though it could have been the case that he had completely lost track of time, and centuries had passed while he sat there and wallowed in grief and guilt). Besides, the Cloister Bell only rang if there was danger inside the TARDIS that the walls of the ship could not protect them from: an earthquake was outside of the TARDIS and they could easily run away from it – unless he was about to learn something new about his ship after all this time.
His speculation was halted, however, when he suddenly had the sensation of being in an ascending lift. The entire ship felt as though it had been attached to a pair of wires and was being lifted up.
He pushed himself to his feet, racing over to the doors on the other side of the control room, ripping them open and peering outside.
The stars were moving.
Space was moving.
He peered out of the door, leaning out of the ship and turning his head to look up, and his eyes widened at the sight of what was happening directly above his head.
A massive spaceship loomed, with long, thick wires reaching down to the roof of the TARDIS. From his current angle, he couldn't see how the wires had been attached to the ship, but he felt sure that there was some kind of clamp involved.
Fury rising in his veins, the Doctor leaned back into the confines of the ship and slammed the door shut, racing over to the scanner to try and contact the captain of the spaceship towing the TARDIS. Guilt flickered through his veins at the sight of the Gallifreyan on the screen, but he quickly ignored the memories and began typing furiously.
The screen flickered into life, static briefly shooting across the glass before an image began to form.
The camera in the other spaceship's control room was mounted close to the captain's chair – or at least had been zoomed in substantially. What came into view once the picture settled was a large red blob sitting in a black leather chair. The blob was featureless and formless, with no visible appendages of any kind: no face, no arms, no legs, no nothing.
The Doctor recognised the race immediately.
The Jelvun had been one of the hardest-hit races in the Time War, hailing from Venus and quite advanced in terms of technology; advanced enough that they could hide themselves from their Earthly neighbours, at least.
"Greetings, Time Lord," the blob greeted from an invisible mouth; the tone was amiable, but the Doctor could detect a deep-seated anger in the undertones.
"What is the meaning of this?" the Doctor barked, realising three things simultaneously about this new regeneration of his: firstly, that his voice had the ability to stay strong even after an unknown – but surely significant – amount of time; secondly, this regeneration held an anger at the universe just below the surface; and thirdly, it was Northern. He had the inflection of one who was from somewhere like Salford.
Yet these new discoveries were less important than the events of that current moment in space and time, so he quickly pushed them to the back of his mind.
"You will find out soon enough, Time Lord," the Jelvun hissed, no longer even trying to bury the dislike in his voice.
The connection broke off abruptly, the screen switching off suddenly with a brief, bright white flash filling the screen before it went black once more.
Scowling, the Doctor resumed his feverish typing, tapping rapidly at the keyboard below the scanner screen, but he couldn't connect to the spaceship again.
Huffing in frustration, he threw off his worn leather jacket that had seen him through so many years of war and chuckled it at the floor.
It was at that moment that he realised that he was still wearing the same clothes that he had been wearing from before he had regenerated – that he had worn when he hadn't been the Doctor for only the second time in his life.
His continued wearing of the same outfit was fine, he supposed, for sitting on the stairs of the TARDIS and moping around, but for this – a confrontation with a less-than-pleased alien race who were choosing to voice their displeasure through the kidnap of both the Last of the Time Lords and the last TARDIS in existence – he would need a new look.
Even though he wasn't entirely sure where he had parked the TARDIS when he had run away after regenerating – though his look out of the door had confirmed that he had been merely floating in deep space – he knew that, despite the Jelvun's apt technology, it was going to take some time to reach their home planet in the Earthly Solar System. They might not have been going there, of course, but he felt that it was a fair assumption, and if it was indeed the case, then he would have time to change.
Except, when he raced up the stairs and burst through the door to the rest of the TARDIS, he wasn't entirely sure where the wardrobe was. True, the TARDIS had an infinite wardrobe – as infinite as the ship itself, thanks to some incredibly complicated mathematics that he could never be bothered to listen to when he was at the Academy – but that didn't really help if you didn't know where it was. The ship had been shifting rooms around, to make it easier for him to find the chapel, and now, it could be almost anywhere.
So, he wandered, taking random corridors and turnings – the first left, the second right, the third on the left – finding all sorts of random things that he had never expected to find. He reached a staircase that looked so much like the one in the control room that he was convinced in a moment that the TARDIS had some kind of Hogwarts attitude to its steps – that was, until he noticed that there was a slight stain on the third step that wasn't on the staircase in the control room; the memory of how that had happened almost brought a smile to his lips, but he quickly shook it away and continued.
After he had passed several bins – far too many than he would ever need, considering the occupancy of the TARDIS had never really surpassed four or five – he found himself faced with a corridor of doors. There were no turnings off of the corridor into another one: just a series of rooms leading off of it.
Checking each door in turn – for he had put markers on the doors that he used the most often, so that he would always be able to recognise them even if he might not be able to find them – his hearts grew heavy as he saw that they were all blank.
Until…
The fifth door on the right hand side had a small motif carved into the metal, at head height: a lion, and a woman holding a wand.
This was the wardrobe.
Pushing open the door, the Doctor blanched at the mess that the room was in. Granted, he never used it too many times – usually only once per regeneration – and he hadn't had a companion to complain to him about the state of the room since before the Time War. He found that he was suddenly realising the value of organisation.
He briefly entertained the idea that he should try and sort out the horrible mess that he found himself faced with, but – as another shudder thudded through the ship – he decided to procrastinate on that particular task, and instead opted to try and find a cleaner part of the wardrobe to find a new outfit.
He had to walk for some time, passing various memories of both clothes that he himself had worn and clothes that his various companions had mistakenly left behind over the years, until he found a slightly tidier section. The clothes here had only been worn once or not at all, and from the looks of the dull and everyday nature of them, he could see why.
The Doctor never really bothered about dressing 'normally'; the Retro Stabilisers sorted out any need to change to fit in with the time zone and place that he had travelled to. His lack of travelling had led him to forgo the flamboyance of his younger lives when the Time War had raged – even before he had regenerated, he had cut off those luscious locks which had so confused him when he had seen that face for the first time in San Francisco – but he found that he had no desire to return to it this time around, either.
He settled on a dark pair of trousers, a plain t-shirt, and a gorgeous, brand new leather jacket. As he slipped the jacket over his shoulders, he glanced to the side, and – with a jolt – saw his new wings.
He was well aware that his pinions had been black during the Time War; what better colour for a warrior's wings than black, after all? Yet now…
The black remained, and he supposed that it was appropriate – maybe that would follow him into his next, and final, regeneration once this one had passed like all of the others. His actions in that non-Doctor form would surely follow him for the rest of his life, so why shouldn't his wings always be stained with the colour that they had had during those long years of conflict?
But they weren't entirely black: the primaries, running along the top of his wings and reaching down their back, were a bright red – not quite blood red, but still with the feel of that substance.
He suddenly realised that the blood of the Time Lords – and, he supposed, the Daleks as well, if indeed those mutants had blood running through the veins of the grotesque creature hidden inside the pepper pot armour – did not cover his hands, as he had thought when he sat on the steps in the TARDIS control room; rather, he wore it on his wings. He doubted that there was anyone else that would be able to see his wings; the red would be a constant reminder, though only to him. He could tell no one of why that colour was there, nor attempt to gain any sympathy for it.
He shucked the jacket into place and retracted his wings so that they sat comfortably at his back and he could no longer see them out of the corner of his eye, and turned back to the exit of the wardrobe, forsaking all of the mirrors as he made his way back to the control room to face the Jelvun when they finally released his TARDIS.
He wasn't sure how much time had passed when there was a resounding thud throughout the ship, and the sensation of motion ceased. However long it had been, however, had only served to increase his fury, so that by the time that the doors of the TARDIS were opened, he was ready to storm out and face them.
"Time Lord," the voice that the Doctor recognised from earlier drawled. He turned from the closed doors of the TARDIS to see that the scanner had flickered into life once more, and the same red blob filled the panel. The Jelvun had moved, however; no longer was he in the black leather captain's chair of the spaceship that had dragged the TARDIS away from its resting place in deep space, but in a white leather chair in a room with transparent walls, looking out onto the horrific atmosphere of Venus. The camera was not so focused on him now, either – two other red blobs stood either side of him, presumably for protection. "You may approach."
The Doctor felt his lip curl up in a sneer. "Oh, I can, can I? Thanks very much!"
The screen switched off again as the Doctor turned away, irritation and infuriation running through his veins. He wrenched the doors of the TARDIS open and flung himself out into the Venusian world beyond…
Only to instantly regret that decision.
He had only made it two or three steps before the hostile atmosphere of the planet began to take its toll on his relatively fragile body. His lungs felt as though they were burning with every breath that he took, and there was a rather physical weight pressing on his shoulders and back to go with the metaphorical one that had followed him since he had regenerated.
His wings drooped behind him, only dragging his weight further down. He would have fallen to his knees if two Jelvun had not rushed to his side quickly, placing themselves underneath his arms so that he was supported.
As black spots began to fill his eyes and all he could hear was his own, ragged breathing, the Doctor lifted his head as much as he could and tried to glean as much information about where exactly he was as possible.
He was on a platform – a floating platform, probably miles above the surface of the planet. Everything was bright white, contrasting with the painful reds and oranges of both the Jelvun and the atmosphere.
Ahead of him, an enclosed space held the Jelvun with whom he had spoken, flanked by his two guards. The atmosphere in there, he presumed, would be survivable for a Time Lord; after all, the Jelvun would need somewhere to have diplomatic conversations on their home planet where the atmosphere wouldn't kill the other party.
But then again, he had a horrible sneaking feeling that the conversation that they were about to have would be anything but diplomatic.
He was vaguely aware of the door to the enclosed space sliding open, and he was showed inside a small, glass box that he hadn't noticed before. He was greeted by a sucking sound as the filter in the air lock made the air safe for him, and he couldn't help but gulp down a large lungful of delicious O2 as it was pumped into the room. Now allowed time to recover, his body also tapped into the reserves of regeneration energy that it had from his latest change, and set to working on fixing the damage that the Venusian atmosphere had caused.
It obviously hadn't been as long as he had originally thought since his regeneration.
Once it was safe for him to exit the airlock, another glass door slid open and he straightened himself to his full height before walking through to the oval room beyond.
The entire capsule was made of glass, save for the floor, and the walls looked out onto the turbulent and tempestuous rolling clouds of the planet. As the Doctor's disorientation faded, he noticed that there were two other Jelvun in the room, standing by the farthest walls from him and looking as though they were not doing very much – and, strangely, a humanoid in a bright orange spacesuit and a white helmet with a darkened visor so that their face was not visible, standing behind the leather chair that the Jelvun captain was sitting in, presumably unnoticed by all others in the capsule, who were all facing in the Doctor's direction.
The Doctor briefly looked over at the humanoid, his brow furrowing slightly in a silent question to them: why were they there? Who were they? But they merely raised a hand silently, holding up their index finger and pressing it over the visor of their helmet in a request for him to say nothing. The Doctor, though intrigued, decided to respect their wishes and get back to the humanoid later; he turned back to the Jelvun who had spoken with him via the TARDIS scanner screen.
The Jelvun captain was saying nothing, so the Doctor decided to speak first.
"By paragraph 3 of article 8 of the Shadow Proclamation-"
"The Shadow Proclamation?" the Jelvun chuckled, interrupting the Time Lord. "The Shadow Proclamation lies in tatters, because of the likes of you."
"The likes of me?" the Doctor spat, his lip curling upwards. "I don't make a habit of kidnapping TARDISes and their owners." He decided to gloss over the fact that he didn't exactly own the TARDIS; he didn't really feel that that little titbit was relevant to the conversation. "What does that make you?"
"K'An, the last remaining captain of the last Jelvun Zeroanx," the Jelvun replied smoothly.
"Alright, K'An," the Doctor parried rapidly, "what do you want me to do? Build you another Zeroanx? Cause I'm not sure I have the spare parts, to be perfectly honest."
If Jelvun had mouths, the Doctor was sure that K'An would have been smirking. As it was, however, they didn't, and so K'An merely slinked back further into the leather chair, as though making himself more comfortable.
"Time Lords," K'An began, musing; "Always so arrogant; always so self-centred. At times I had to remind myself that the horrors that have come to pass during the last few centuries were not merely the acts of a civil war."
"Well, look on the bright side. I'm not a Dalek."
"Who can tell the difference anymore?"
The Doctor mentally shook his head, ridding himself of that memory.
"They pay no attention to the devastation they cause," K'An continued, and the Doctor felt his brow furrow. He knew that the Jelvun had been affected awfully by the war – but so had so many of the other peoples and races throughout the universe, and most of that destruction had come at the hands of the Daleks; well, the plungers and pistols of the Daleks. The Time Lords only ever fought with the Daleks directly – so what damage did K'An think that Gallifreyans had caused to the Jelvun?
"What are you talking about?" the Doctor asked, genuinely confused.
"K'An constricted his entire body, the blob that made up his physical form tensing in the equivalent of making a fist. He loosened after a while, but the anger that had caused the action remained.
"Do you not understand why we are up here? Floating far above the surface rather than using one of the buildings down below?"
The Doctor suddenly realised that it was a bit strange that they were having their conversation up here. There was no real reason for them not to be on the surface.
"Go on, then," the Doctor nodded. "Why are we having this conversation up here rather than on the surface?"
K'An shifted slightly in his chair, as though making himself comfortable to tell a long story.
"We wanted nothing to do with your war," K'An began, practically spitting with anger. "We almost thought that we were safe. The Ice Warriors were involved, of course, but the conflict didn't seem to reach beyond the Red Planet, and we convinced ourselves that, as long as Earth was safe, we would be safe."
"But you were wrong," the Doctor added, his voice dulled. He was still furious at K'An and his Jelvun Zeroanx crew for kidnapping him and the TARDIS, but he also had a sympathy for those who had fought during the Time War – especially if they, like him, had been forced to fight after years and decades of resisting the front line.
K'An paused slightly, his silence confirming the Doctor's statement.
"We had been preparing for a possible conflict as soon as Dalek ships began to enter the Solar System, but we had no knowledge of Daleks nor their technology. We are not yet advanced enough to reach Skaro with any hope of returning. So all we had to work on were rumours and speculation, and even then, our technology was insufficient when the Daleks came from nowhere, without even a minute's notice.
"They came to the surface via a temporal shift. There was slaughter."
The Doctor found himself grieving for all of the Jelvun who had been exterminated, as he felt grief for all who had perished during the Time War – both by the work of the Daleks and by the work of his own hand – but he still didn't understand what this had to do with him.
"The Time Lords couldn't be everywhere," he reminded K'An. "We were fighting to save ourselves, and we couldn't go to the aid of every planet that the Daleks reached-"
"Your people were here as well."
The Doctor stopped abruptly, blinking in surprise at what K'An had just said. He had no recollection of receiving any orders to go to Venus throughout the entire time that he fought during the Time War, and his black-winged regeneration had lived long enough that – had this particular attack have occurred before Cass' ship crashed into Karn and the Sisters had forced his regeneration and saved his life – the Jelvun would have been able to repopulate at least half-way back to the normal level.
"What do you mean?" he asked tentatively, his mouth feeling dry.
"The Time Lords followed the Daleks along the temporal shift and resumed their battle as though it was the empty fields of Kathadoon. Thousands were caught in the crossfire," K'An answered, sounding livid as his body tensed again.
The Doctor suddenly became aware of a pattering sound that seemed to surround them all, but he ignored it and continued to listen to K'An's outburst.
"And then, when your people sensed that they were losing, they left our people to extermination and retreated to Gallifrey. The Daleks, of course, stayed behind to complete their work, and then left the same way that they had come. There are two hundred people on this Hover Platform: the only remaining members of the Jelvun race."
The Doctor listened to the story that K'An told him, appalled but – unfortunately – not disbelieving to hear what the fellow members of his race had done on Venus. He responded with the two words that had – for the most part – defined his previous regeneration.
"I'm sorry."
"Sorry isn't good enough!" K'An bellowed, his entire body wobbling like a bowlful of jelly.
The Doctor's sympathy for the Jelvun race remained, but his rage at the particular Jelvun before him increased tenfold.
"Well, what do you want me to do?" he snapped, gesturing ambiguously with his arms and then letting them fall back down to his sides with a slap. "The war is over, there's no one left-"
"Oh, we are well aware of the fate of the Time Lords," K'An interrupted, and the amusement in his voice made the Doctor's blood chill. His face set in a scowl, but he was too angry to say anything, so he let K'An continue.
"You are the only one left; the only one we could find with our biometric radar." The sound of a smirk returned to his voice. "And that makes our job so much easier."
The Doctor momentarily forgot his anger in favour of perplexity. "Job?" he queried. "What job?"
"You said yourself, the war is over. And what happens when a war is over?" K'An left a pause, as though he was expecting the Doctor to answer; as it was, the Time Lord left the question rhetorical on his part. "The war criminals are brought to justice."
The Doctor glowered, trying to avoid raising his voice. "And am I a war criminal?"
"You are a Time Lord," K'An replied, as though this was all he needed to say to answer the Doctor's question. "All Time Lords are war criminals, and this is a sentencing hearing."
The Doctor took a deep breath in and exhaled through his nose.
"And what is my sentence?"
K'An straightened himself up, and answered matter-of-factly, "Execution."
The Doctor snorted. "You think you can just kill a Time Lord?" he asked. He may only have had one more regeneration left in his cycle – and, with the Time Lords gone, no hope of gaining another one – but it would still take a lot for the Jelvun to take both his current life and his next life from him, especially considering their current desolated state. "You don't have any technology left!"
"On the contrary," K'An parried, "we will do nothing. We just had to wait long enough for it to start raining."
Before the Doctor could react, the two Jelvun who had been standing at the side of the capsule surged forward and rammed into him, shoving him towards the air lock and out onto the uncovered platform beyond. As he was being pushed back, he saw the humanoid figure who had been standing behind K'An and his bodyguards lift their arms to touch a Vortex Manipulator that he hadn't noticed on their wrist, disappearing in a flash of blue light.
Yet the Doctor didn't have a lot of time to ponder on the humanoid now, for he now realised what the pattering that he had heard earlier had been: rain – and on Venus, it rained sulphuric acid.
The Jelvun might have adapted to dealing with the hostile climate of their home planet, but Time Lord's hadn't; not only was his body battered by the atmosphere, but the rain was cutting into him as it fell from the sky.
The Jelvun released him as he was half-way to the TARDIS, and he turned towards his beloved ship, racing as the rain cut into his wings and melted the sensitive feathers.
It took longer than he would have liked to fish the TARDIS key from the pocket of his leather jacket – which was now looking incredibly weathered rather than brand new – and force his way into the ship.
Once he was inside, the rest of his regeneration energy got to work on fixing his battered body, though he could sense that there wasn't a lot left – at least, not enough to sort out his wings. He tried not to pay attention to the fact that he would probably never fly in this regeneration now in favour of focusing on getting as far away from Venus as possible.
He decided on Pluto.
Pluto was good.
The familiar wheezing sound of the TARDIS dematerialising calmed his fraught nerves, but as soon as he landed, the searing agony that the raindrops still burning through his pinions became too much, and he collapsed sideways onto the floor, his ruined wings lying stretched out behind him.
A.N.2: *WARNING! SPOILERS FOR THE TIME OF THE DOCTOR IN THIS AUTHOR'S NOTE* Okay, so I have said that Nine knows that his next regeneration (Eleven in this series) is his last. However, even without Ten as part of the Doctor's first regeneration cycle, the Doctor still thinks that Eleven is his last regeneration, for reasons that I will explain... at some point... that I haven't actually decided yet... But it's not a mistake; Matt Smith's Doctor is still the last regeneration in the Doctor's first regeneration cycle in this series, even though David Tennant's Doctor has been cut out.
UPDATE 27/09/14: Part sixteen of the Angel!Verse, Retrieved from Within, is up now.