AN: Read this in your head with Ten's voice. And then, of course, please review.

Everything was so monstrously unfair.

So maybe it wasn't a very good excuse, that the Doctor standing right in front of all of you just got swapped somehow through time and space (without any of you really noticing it) for me, who also happens to be the Doctor, but just a later version (not even regenerated-later, but just a bit more progressed in my own personal time-stream), and that somehow makes this whole thing completely and utterly unfair. So maybe that wasn't exactly something the Master was going to buy (or honestly care about).

So what? I was mad. Why was I mad, you ask? Because I was in the middle of my sentence, that's why! I was standing there, chatting with an old friend on Vega Altair, when suddenly the sky turns into a ceiling and the nice refreshing drink I'm reaching for turns into a metal sphere with spiky bits on, and the old friend turns into an 'old friend,' and please note well those curly sarcasm marks around those two words because they are as sure as Skarro not going anywhere anytime soon.

Yeah, I was a little bit upset. People always say that I'm a bit barmy, but I don't really get that. I mean, doesn't it just get boring when everyone always acts the way people expect them to? What's the point of being a living organism then? You never see a rock do anything particularly startling, or kooky, or eccentric, nor a table, a cloud nor anything like that ***unless you are me*** because they're inanimate, for Time's sake! A little spontaneity is a good, living thing.

You can have too much of a good thing, though. Especially when it comes to the Hartle-Hawking State and ekpyrotic interactions. DO NOT overdose on those. (And whatever neurochemicals were possessing me right then, when I found myself standing once more on the Valiant. Don't overdose on those, either.) But do not fool around with branes, because all you'll get is dead. And the universe will explode; that too. Don't do it. I mean it.

That was basically what I started yelling the nanosecond I realized what was going on. I do happen to know that I have a propensity for turbo-talking, but this was abnormal even for me. I was going off on everyone like I'd just come into my room and found it trashed, with all my favorite books ripped up and beer cans on the floor or something. I exploded. I went nova.

Well, maybe I was a little stunned at first. I think the shock was what set me off, because before I could get it into my head that I was in serious danger, the notion came to me that this was all exorbitantly unfair. And when I found myself standing there, with the tip of the laser screwdriver practically poking into my eye, and my 'old friend'... anyway, THERE I WAS, in the middle of something I'd already done, something I'd already had to deal with for a whole year, and I had absolutely no patience for that. And I had been rudely interrupted in the middle of my sentence. I think we went over that bit already, but it was very important to me right then.

So first I finished my sentence. "... teaching their offspring to put sponges over their noses to feed, which actually isn't an inherited behavior at all, but an example of fourth degree learning and highly sophisticated communication." (I was referring to bottlenose dolphins, by the way, who have a delightfully complex civilization and rank about fifth on my favorite species list).

I realized everyone was staring at me as if I'd gone stark raving mad (unfair!), with all due respect to present company, of course. Present company was making themselves very obvious, too. I think I spluttered out something along the lines of, "Is this some kind of sadistic joke?" before this one particular Toclafane dive-bombed me.

Yes, that did happen. Yes, it hadn't happened in the old timeline. It startled me severely, and, when startled, I tend to forget myself. In the next conscious moment I had, the thing had exploded and was smoking at my feet in a sad little half-molten mass. I had my sonic screwdriver out and it was pointed at the spot where the sphere had been. It was one of those amazing lightning-reflex moments that one can only fantasize about having twice, or even once. I'd also forgotten that I didn't ever use my sonic screwdriver to blow up evil flying robots. Which goes to show that you should Never Interrupt Me In The Middle Of A Sentence.

"What the HELL is going on?" I half-screeched. "WHY AM I HERE AGAIN?"

They all kept staring at me. I was fuming. "Right in the middle of my bloody sentence you decide to fudge around with sub-branal frequencies and now here I am in this place and what's going on and why am I yelling? I don't even know!" Then I subsided a little, and took in the surroundings. There were Martha gawping at me like a little goldfish (I don't blame her), and other people, too, who didn't really matter right then, and Jack was lying on the floor, temporarily deceased, and Lucy Saxon with this blank look on her face like she'd seen this kind of outburst before (probably she had), and then him.

His curiosity was probably the one thing that kept me from being blasted. And maybe the fact that I'd just shot one of his hench-balls (that came out a lot wronger than I mean it to) out of the air. I was turning on the spot, shaking my head and espousing variants on the theme of denial, and he was just looking at me, trying desperately to figure out what my game was. I didn't have one. We'd already gone through all this before, and I'd woken up on the wrong side of bed or something, so I wasn't in the mood to play along and wait a year to get out of this place. All this time I was thinking, How is this possible? What did this? but not like that, because it was all equations and facts and models trying to explain everything.

When the undeniable fact of my situation got through to me (I was hoping a bit that maybe this would all turn out to be an hallucination or a temporal glitch of some kind, and end as suddenly as it came), I fell back on an old staple of mine: the authoritative but urgent scan. You can literally get away with anything in the right crowd if you pull out a device and start waving it in the air, because no one really wants to be left wondering whether the invisible demons you're looking for are still there or not. No one argues. The screwdriver came up and the light on the end came on, and I started to dash about the place, not sure of what I was doing but damn sure that if I didn't find something to do that looked important, I was going to be turned into an old geezer again.

"Doctor," said my arch-nemesis.

"Shut up. I'm in the middle of something," my mouth said. I still do not know why I am not dead for that one.

Perhaps it was shock. "Yeah, well... so was I..." the Master said slowly. "Do you... mind...?"

I retorted something along the lines of this: "Yes, I do, because right now the only really important thing is the fact that somehow the main-sequence universe has collided with a Time-Locked shadow plane that I hoped never to see again, and so I think that something very, very cosmic is about to happen and I mean that in a bad way, because it might just kill us all and set off a rapid ekpyrotic expansion that will collapse the fabric of the universe. So have some patience, why don't you!"

Here's why I'm used to saying things like that: no one ever understands me. Well, that's not something to hope for with another Time Lord. I'll give him all due credit; he got it instantly, and plucked out the really big words in that sentence of mine.

"Main-sequence universe? Time-Locked shadow plane?"

"Very... clever... of you..." I was trying to get a reading off the spot I'd appeared in. Sure enough, the quantum fluctuations were off the charts.

"Are you trying to say that...?" the Master began carefully.

"Ooh, yeah, sorry to burst your bubble. I meant that literally, by the way. That seems to be precisely what I've just done... and it's going to get a whole lot worse..."

"I'm supposed to care about that?"

"Er. Yes. Unless you like being swallowed up in a fractal singularity. Well, maybe that's a bit of a stretch. I certainly don't know what you do in your spare time, so maybe you wouldn't mind it. Hard to tell."

I find it hard to imagine what it could have been like inside his mind. One second, he's about to release doom upon the Earth, and the next he's being knocked about by my rushing back and forth, while he'd being told that his world isn't real and it's about to im- and/or explode.

"I see. Isn't it odd that right when I have you beat, you reveal that the universe is about to blow up? Convenient, you might say?"

Has me beat... he has no idea how wrong he is. "Oh? Is it? Funny thing..."

He cracked. It's a specialty of his. "HAVE YOU LOST YOUR BLOODY MIND?" he screamed. I opened my mouth to snark back, and the Master gave me a look of ultimate death and added, "If you say anything like 'Well, you're one to talk' I will turn you into a cricket!"

"Like Tithonous," I pointed out. "Ancient Greek story. Dawn made Tithonous immortal but forgot to ask for eternal youth, so he ended up aging so much he turned into a grasshopper. Was that what you were planning?"

"What," he began.

"Turning me into an old man, and then Gollum or whatever, was cricket the next stage? 'Cause you could just skip to that part. Actually, if you're going to use that thing on me, I'd rather you make me into that little creepy old thing than just plain old, because that was actually kind of fun... I can't believe I just said that... Although, with the universe about to collapse, it might not last as long as before. Probably not a year, at any rate. Five minutes, maybe."

"How did you know-" I detected hysteria. He had really thought his plan was Doctor-proof. Poor guy.

"Because I'm NOT the same person who was standing here about twenty-eight seconds ago, I'm... later than that one! I come after! Look, I'm not even wearing the same clothesnevermindIam..." I tried to remember what I had worn that day. Oh, that brown suit... and here I am, in the brown suit... But WAIT! "LOOOook at my tie!" I hooted triumphantly. "Oh, god, that sounded... simian. Must be coming down with something. But look! It's definitely not the same color!"

"Ohhh, I see," he nodded, tapping his laser screwdriver to his lips and looking generally like he did not see at all in any way. "So... let me just review where we're at... you want me to, what? Stop my attack on poor, defenseless Earth and help you save the world? Because your tie changed colors?"

"Does it do that, normally?" I asked. "I mean, just to make sure. It's a normal tie, you know. 100% cotton. Made of pure fabric. Here, smell it if you like. Totally normal cotton... maybe a bit of polyester... yeah, make that 75% cotton."

"Get that... get your tie out of my face! I'm not smelling it... I'd rather strangle you with it! Just... stop... ruining... my... fun!"

"But... come on! It's seriously not the same thing! At all! You can see that! Smell it! Whatever! I was replaced by... well, me, but a more updated me. And that's a bad thing, because I shouldn't be here! You can't ignore that! Ties don't change color on their own!"

"Uh, Doctor?" asked Jack Harkness. He'd decided to join the conversation, I suppose. Maybe he would have, earlier, but he was dead then. "This coming from a man who used to have big ears and a buzz cut? Maybe not the most unbelievable-"

"But it's not a Time Lord tie! It doesn't regenerate! Come on, work with me!"

"Well, your hair's looking a bit different," Jack offered. "It was kind of going this way" (he gestured) "before, and now it's going this way" (he gestured again, in a slightly different direction). "Still looks great, though." He gave me a thumbs-up. Only Captain Jack can make such an innocent gesture seem suggestive.

"Thanks, but please don't flirt," I told him. "I'm trying to stop the end of the universe here."

"Yes," interjected the Master. "Er. Please... don't flirt with him. That's just not... not good..."

We all looked at him.

"Oh, thanks," I said, "I never knew you cared."

"Don't look at me like that," the Master said indignantly. He actually seemed defensive. Him, defensive because I'm acting absolutely out of my mind. Fancy that! I should have done this ages ago.

"All right, so I have to find some way to fix this... think, Doctor, think! Argh!"

Martha suddenly unstuck herself. "Oh! Oh! You could... find a way of switching back with your other self, the one that's supposed to be here."

"But how am I supposed to... there's no way I could... and how did this happen in the first place? It makes no sense!"

"Were you traveling through any temporal rift-y things?" Jack posited. "That's usually a good way to get thrown out of your time stream."

"I was standing in a park on Vega Altair, chatting about dolphins," I pointed out. "Not really very rift-y, no. Unless... maybe it was the drink..."

"Does anyone care that I'm about to conquer your planet?" yelled the Master.

"He's not, is he?" asked Martha, who had good reason to be concerned over this. "I thought you'd stop him."

"Oh, I will, don't worry. I'm still around, aren't I? I would know." I blurted this out without thinking, and then stuffed my fist in my mouth. "I probably shouldn't have told you that," I said through my knuckles. "But I suppose time can't get more tangled right now."

"So you're from the future and you're saying that you've already stopped me?"

"Noooo... no... not really... okay, yes. Essentially. So maybe you could help out a bit? Seeing as you know that trying to kill me or enslave me or otherwise stop me isn't really going to... er... stop me?"

"Well, when you put it like that..." he muttered, looked crestfallen. "I can't turn you old?"

"Please refrain from doing so," I agreed. "It probably won't help the situation."

"But... I want to! And... and... " He didn't need anything other reason, as it turned out. That was good enough for him to point the laser screwdriver in my direction.

"NO!" I shouted. "No! No, you've got the wrong Doctor! Well, not really, but... yes really! I've... I've got temporal extraterritoriality, me! Stop! Oh sh-"