Title: Eight Goes Into Nine, With No Remainder
Warnings: Disturbing themes. Depressing. Regen!fic, dark, angsty, wild conjecture, canon-fracturing, possible mischaracterization of Eight. Spoilers for Doctor Who from the Fourth Doctor through the Ninth. Also weird and arty. Egregious adverb abuse. :-P
Disclaimer: The BBC owns the Doctor. Although Fox TV might own bits of Eight, I really don't know...
Summary: Written for the comment-fic prompt - Eight and Nine - self-regeneration. See also "Warnings" above.
A/N: My sincere apologies if I'm stomping the hell out of fanon or canon of any sort. This may or may not represent my own thoughts on what went down when Eight regenerated.
Originally posted on Livejournal Feb 15th, 2009.
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Eight Goes Into Nine, With No Remainder
by CaffieneKitty
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It had built throughout time, surreptitiously, until suddenly it was war, ranging across the universe and through every era. The Daleks stealing Timelord technology, breaking the interlocks that prevented travel into Gallifrey's own past; the Timelords breaking Gallifrey's most stringent law themselves and in the process, damaging their own history almost as much as the Daleks.
The Doctor tried, he really did, but when it came down to it, he was still at heart the man who refused to touch two wires together and kill off the Daleks before they began their reign of intergalactic destruction. A simple touch of two wires.
He'd been away from Gallifrey so long, when the long-forgotten alarm rang through the TARDIS calling him back, the world he ran back to was not the one he'd run from millennia ago. None of that was the Daleks' doing. He'd lost so much, so much.
He'd gone home and defended the Looms, the Panopticon, the transduction barrier, side-by-side again with Leela, K-9 and Andred. But it wasn't enough. Nothing was enough. The Great Key was found and lost; the Crown of Rassilon broken and useless as the Daleks corrupted the Timelord Matrix. Andred wore the Sash of Rassilon after the Doctor refused it, as though it still meant something.
Together they helped the Council and remaining Timelords run away, escaping the besieged Citadel, running to the mountains to hide, to rebuild a new defense. Together they saw those same mountains burn as the first firestorms swept the horizon.
When the Citadel fell and all fell with it - Andred pushing Rassilon's Sash into the Doctor's hands before running back into the fires overtaking the transduction barrier control room, Leela dead at the gates - the Doctor ran, alone. Back to the TARDIS, the only place he could go. Fled into the vortex and away.
He couldn't do this. He couldn't be a warrior. Not the kind that was needed. He was a man who liked sweets and humanity and went around the universe, saving every civilization but his own. His own hadn't needed saving for a long time, and he'd thought it never would again. But that time had come; Gallifrey was falling and he was as far from being its leader and protector as he'd ever been. Gallifrey would fall, had fallen. The Daleks and other species that thrived on mayhem and destruction would spread across the universe, unchecked. All life everywhere was in danger of extinction.
He could not be this man anymore. He could not be a man in a TARDIS set out like a Victorian tea room, wearing a velvet frock coat with a pocket full of jelly babies, a man whose only use for a deadly weapon was to threaten his own life. He had to become another person. A harder one. One that could lead and make the decisions no one should have to make, one that would touch two wires together to stop things before they began. He had to become that person. He had to change.
The Doctor ran to the TARDIS cloakroom, dropped the Sash next to the mirror, stripped off the velvet coat and tossed it and its sugar-filled pockets into a corner. After a quick search, he found something to write with, a lipstick left behind by one of the people who'd shared his journey. He knelt in front of the mirror. The Cloister bell was always ringing now, lights pulsing dim and red, turning the reflection of his face into a blood-red ghoul, eyes hollow shadows, curling hair lit by the red light like fire.
He had forgotten who he was the last time, when he'd regenerated alone and unaware in a San Francisco morgue, and it had nearly cost the Earth. That instance of forgetting had haunted his travels since. It could not happen this time. There was no time for instability and self-reflection and growing awareness and wondering if his nose was all right. The Doctor reached forward and wrote on the mirror quickly, then closed his eyes, sat back on his heels, and died.
It was easy to die when your hearts had already been ripped out.
As he opened his eyes again for the first time (for the ninth time), the first thing he saw was the message he'd left for himself on the mirror, scrawled in red, obscuring the reflection of his new face:
Everyone and everything is dying.
Stop running and fight.
The Doctor got to his feet, picked up the Sash of Rassilon, and ran back, into battle.
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(that's it)
Post A/N: And if you're wondering what happened to K-9, he's, um, safe on a tropical island somewhere having mechanical Mai Tais and a hot wax treatment. Or he's hiding out in the TARDIS somewhere. *handwaves* I'll kill Leela, Andred and Eight in fic, but I'm not killing K-9 Mark I, dammit.