SPOILERS: All of Doctor Who season three. Seriously, if you haven't watched the series yet, especially the last three episodes (Utopia, The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords), and you don't want spoilers, don't read this story.
If you have seen the S3 finale… this idea has been in my head for ages now. It comes from the end of "Last of the Time Lords". When you've read the story, you'll know which scene.
(Jack – I suppose we should call him that – narrates)
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Time to Sleep
I'm so tired…
I've been alive for so long. Billions of years now. I've seen so many friends grow old and die. I've seen civilisations rise and fall.
And I'm still here, still alive.
I feel so old. I can barely remember how it felt to be young and strong any more. I wish I could just stop, die like everyone else I've ever known, but I can't.
For so long, I've hidden most of the memories from myself. I told myself it wasn't good for me to keep dwelling on the past. It worked for a while. Until something happened that brought everything flooding back.
At the time I was in a hospital on a planet called New Earth, run by an order of nuns. While I was there, I saw him again. The Doctor. The only person I've met in five billion years who was like me. He looked… he looked so young. He looked the same as he had done that day we said goodbye, but there was something lighter, happier about him. I realised that this must be just after his regeneration. Just after… what happened to me. I knew I was right because Rose was with him. She looked wonderful. It had been so long since I'd seen her. I remembered a barrage balloon and a Union Jack t-shirt, and sighed.
Eventually they left, of course. But I knew now where I was in the Doctor's own personal, convoluted timeline. Martha had told a younger version of me about a trip to New Earth, so I waited. I waited for over a hundred years – no time at all when you're five billion years old. What I did not anticipate, was what would happen in that time. New Earth suffered a catastrophe in the form of a highly contagious virus. Fortunately much of the population was travelling on the Motorway beneath the city… as the people above ground died; I put all my energy into keeping those on the Motorway safe until the end of the quarantine.
The Doctor and Martha arrived, in time. By then, I was too weak to open up the Motorway on my own… I needed them to help me. I felt so tired… as if almost all my energy was gone. I had just enough left, as it happened, to get a good look at Martha and the Doctor again, and to warn them. You see, I knew what would happen to them. They would meet me, in my brash younger self, and we would find ourselves in Malcassairo, and then the Master… but anyway, I knew I had to warn them, and also that I didn't have enough time to tell them everything.
So in the end, I said only four words. I used my last four words to warn them about what was coming. I said "You Are Not Alone". I can only hope that the Doctor works it out in time.
I felt myself slipping away. It felt a little like the other times I had 'died'. As everything went dark, I saw the faces of people I knew once… Rose, my team at Torchwood – all long dead now, the Doctor, a man whose name I took after he died in 1941.
I'm so tired. Perhaps now, finally, I can sleep.
Finis