Doctor Who, Special Series; Episode 1: The Missing Piece

A/N: Here we go, chapter 2! No spoilers yet, unless you're really looking. Also no explanation, but we're getting there, don't worry!

Sonic Screwdriver Setting 42: Everyone ready for the episode tonight? I'm certainly not! On that note, still not mine.

I am in danger.

He didn't know where he was going, didn't know where he was, didn't know where he had been. He was just running, through endless stone corridors, down an infinity of ancient staircases, passing door after door after door.

I don't know what's going on.

The Aurors – and he didn't know if those were aliens, or a job, or a race, or any of an almost infinite array of possibilities – weren't following him, yet, but the possibility was there.

I need to get out.

He was pretty sure he was in a castle of some sort, judging by the walls, which meant he could find the main gate. It would be down, and then towards a central room, and then out to the walls.

I need to find the TARDIS.

That was more worrying than anything else. He'd had occasions where he'd lost large chunks of memory before, but he'd always, always known where his TARDIS was. Now he had no clue. It should have been there, hovering on the edge of his consciousness, but it wasn't, and that was terribly, terribly wrong in a way that sent tremors through his body.

I will die if I make one mistake.

He couldn't afford to die right now. In his weakened condition, the regeneration would be slow, painful, and probably explosive, all of which could lead to his enemies killing him mid-transition, which would be… bad.

Clattering to a halt at the foot of the last staircase – and he was sure there was an excellent reason he was only wearing one shoe and one sock – he checked for others. None, fortunately, and, taking off again, he ran through the large double doors right in front of him.

It was sunny outside. Shielding his face with one arm, he blinked rapidly. He looked around, taking deep breaths. A huge expanse of grass, a pathway leading to a clearly-ceremonial gate, with a forest on one side, and a lake on the other.

The forest it was, then. At a full sprint, he ran for the trees, only vaguely noticing – and caring even less – the trench-coat flapping at his heels. Running with only one shoe was a new experience, but he managed – he always did.

I have nothing. No advantages. No gimmicks, no tricks, no – nothing.

The forest was mostly hardwoods, interspersed with evergreens, but little undergrowth. A part of his mind categorized the species by scientific name, common name in English, and recorded name, if any, in Gallifreyan. He ignored that, focusing on getting as far into the forest as possible.

There were other things in there, he could hear them, but he ignored that too. He could run – he could always run – but it looked like, whatever else had been going on, the human-him had been keeping in shape. Sun filtered through the trees, giving him enough light to avoid the protruding roots. If there had been a trail, he was no longer on it. It didn't matter. There were a lot of things that didn't matter now.

RoseMickeyJackSarahJaneDonna MarthaJackieWilfAstridChrist inaAdelaide

Didn't matter, he reminded himself. Didn't matter. All gone. For one reason or another, none of them had come with him – none of them could come with him – this time. Just him. Alone. Always.

There was a cave, of sorts. Panting, he ran into it, collapsing against one side. In shape he was, but not that in shape. The cave roof was barely above his head, and it was just deep enough to have a sharp twist. From the deepest corner, he could lie down and not be visible from outside.

Perfect.

It had taken seemingly forever, but he could finally relax – to a point – and take stock. His clothes – a battered jumper, a zip-up jacket, the trench-coat, a pair of excessively abused trousers, and one boot – were all the wrong size. Whoever had previously owned these clothes had been broader – by a not insignificant amount – across the shoulders, with a thicker waist, but the pants were far too short and the boot too small.

His body was in fairly good condition, although he'd acquired some rather disturbing tattoos, including a moving black skull-and-snake one on his left forearm. Other than that: he'd been well fed, although he was short on sleep, and during his run through the forest, he'd twisted the bare ankle.

Right, now what?

Suddenly remembering, he stuck his tongue out and tasted the air.

15.4 degrees Celsius, nitrogen at 78.08%, oxygen 20.95%, argon 0.93%, carbon dioxide 362 parts per million, et cetera… water vapour about 2% but falling – no rain today then.

The thoughts were automatic. He was on Earth, the original one, and relatively early given the percentage of carbon dioxide. Before Rose – even the thought produced a twinge, but the dates he picked up companions were useful in anchoring his personal timeline – but after their second world war. Human wars and their predilection for guns.

Well, we're making progress then. I know I'm on Earth, northern hemisphere – probably Great Britain given how many times I end up there anyways – in the early summer, no rain coming today, which is new.

That helped, knowing anything about what was going on provided a long-missing sense of certainty.

Need: sleep, water, food, another boot, information, my TARDIS. In that order.

There wasn't anything else he could do. The cave was abandoned, and had been for years, the last inhabitant being a now-deceased bear. Time to sleep. When the sun set, he'd move again, but until then, he was safe enough.

He overslept. By the time he woke up, the sun was well up. This was unusual, but not unduly worrying. In all honesty – not that he'd been honest with himself for years – he was surprised he hadn't gone into a coma.

So. Water, food, boot, information, TARDIS.

Although, since he'd slept longer than intended, these could be addressed in any order he wanted. Still, it was time to leave the cave. Hauling himself upright, he manually straightened his ankle, grimacing at the pain. Yes, he could set up pain blocks to that foot, but not only was it time-consuming, but it also had a bad tendency to shut down the nerves in that area if left on too long, and so, unless it was absolutely necessary, he tended to avoid doing it.

Limping out of the cave, he came to a halt and stared upward. "Nine hundred years old, and this is the first time I see a centaur," he said quietly. He wasn't ready to deal with another being, he was still precariously alien, but he'd have to pull through somehow. Not to mention that he'd been to Earth enough times that he would know if there were centaurs there, and there weren't, so this was wrong, and something had gone terribly sideways, and he didn't have any way to deal with it, and he was not panicking!

The centaur had a chestnut horse-body, while its human half had brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard. "Who are you to invade our lands?"

He blinked upwards at it, shutting down all the rest of his emotional reactions but the innate confusion at the situation. "I am the Doctor. And – ah, I'm not invading. I'm trying to run away, actually."

The centaur bent down. "You call yourself a doctor? Have you not another name?"

"No, I'm the Doctor," he corrected. "And, ah, the rest of it doesn't matter. If you're willing, I need water, food, another boot, some information about the current situation, and my TARDIS, although I doubt you can do anything about that last." He smiled cheekily at the centaur.

Rearing back, the centaur yelled, "You dare make demands of us?"

Recalculating strategies rapidly, the Doctor pasted his smile. "No. I am making requests of you. Although, I do need water, rather rapidly, but you're not being required to do anything."

The centaur's nostrils flared. "We do not answer to humans!"

That struck a few too many nerves. Without his normal human shield prepared, everything the centaur said and did touched on his past. "Then it's a good thing I'm not human, isn't it?" he spat back, the fury only shoddily contained. It had to be contained, he couldn't afford to lose his control now, not now without any sort of protection.

The centaur settled, but only barely. "What are you then? The stars say nothing about human-shaped beings entering our forest."

"A Time Lord," the Doctor said, "and, look, all I want is a bit of help. I swear to you, I'm not invading and I'm not trying to hurt you, I'm just trying to survive long enough to figure out where I am and what's going on!"

Drat it.

That wasn't supposed to come out. He was shocked and terrified that the anger was that close to the surface. There were a thousand and one things he could blame it on, but in reality it had much more to do with his lack of self-control.

The centaur tossed his head. "What is a Time Lord? You look human enough."

The Doctor, trying to conceal his panic – doubt had never been an emotion he was good with, and this was doubt caused by his loss of self-control – stepped forward and looked into the centaur's eyes, projecting slightly.

Low-level telepathic field. I hope this works.

"Me. I am a Time Lord. I protect all equally, not just the species in charge."

The centaur backed up. "You have our permission to travel through our forest. We can do nothing else for you."

The Doctor frowned. "Water? Food? Information about whatever's going on? Another boot?" The TARDIS was a lost cause, for now. He'd come back to that later, but hydration was becoming a problem.

"There is a lake," the centaur said placidly.

Right. That was helpful.

The Doctor pasted his smile back on. "Thank you," he said dryly. Still limping, he made his way away from the cave, away from the useless centaur, away from where he had been, and to somewhere-he-didn't-actually-know-what-yet. It was probably approaching panic time.

I don't know where I am, I don't know where my TARDIS is, I don't know what's going on, I don't have my sonic screwdriver or psychic paper, I don't have any way to find anything out, and I'm about to fall over from dehydration.

Yep. Panic time.

The forest, fortunately, butted up against the lake, allowing him to sneak down and get a drink without worrying unduly about others who might want to kill him, capture him, torture him, extract information from him, or otherwise make it difficult for him to find his TARDIS, which was now first on his list of things-I-need.

Back in the forest, he leaned against a tree, trying to figure out where it had gone so wrong. Evidently the watch had worked, but for some reason, this time the memories hadn't come back. That probably meant something bad – which was stupid. Of course it meant something bad, any time something went even the slightest bit wrong, it meant something bad. Before the watch – what happened before the watch? He couldn't remember, the last thing he remembered was… Actually, that made a lot of sense.

Humming to himself, he wandered through the forest, trying – with no great success – to plan. If someone else – several someones, possibly – had followed him through, then by opening the watch, they'd now know where he was. But he wasn't back at full capacity yet, so even if there was another one here, he wouldn't be able to tell. Which probably meant nothing good.

It was a boring day. Actually – checking the watch, whose functionality was predetermined based on the presence or absence of an interior self-sustaining life form – it was a boring fifteen minutes. He didn't do well with extended periods of time where nothing happened. Okay, yes, he knew how much time had passed, far more accurately than the watch did – fifteen minutes, forty-two point seven three seconds, actually – but he had been hoping, in some bizarre way, that more time had passed than he had perceived, because he was really bored!

I don't like the slow path!

To pass the time, he began categorizing information. Unfortunately, that was one process he couldn't slow down, which made it a rather ineffective way to pass the time, but he tried anyway.

What I know: Nothing. I know nothing about what is going on and I'm going to die today if I can't solve this now!

And the exercise collapsed in shambles around him.

Then you're not making it simple enough, a small voice told him. Make the problems simpler!

What I know: I'm lost. Somewhere. No, that's something I don't know. Trying again.

What I know: I'm lost. I don't have my TARIDS, sonic screwdriver, or psychic paper. I'm also missing a boot. And none of my clothes fit right. With access to water, I can now survive almost indefinitely, although the lack of food will become unpleasant at some point. Um… I've got to know something else…

Right, so, moving on: Where I am. When I am. Where – and when – any of the aforementioned missing objects are. Where I got the clothes from, because honestly, I would never wear anything like this. No, that's something I do know this time.

Back to what I don't know: What I was doing as a human. Why I don't have any memories of that time. What to do now.

534 more milliseconds had passed.

He began thumping his head against the trunk. One. Two. Three. Four.

He had nothing. No resources, no technology, no… no nothing. He'd never had so little to work with, not even when the Master was up to his tricks again. Even then he'd had sleeper agents, and secret weapons, and aces up his sleeves – both of them, as often as possible – not what he had now, which was… nothing. He hated this, absolutely hated being powerless.

It was a horrible day. Being forced to take the same time that everyone else did left him in an awful mood, culminating in trying to drop kick a stone into the centre of the lake. It didn't work, and now his foot hurt. Tired and hungry, he limped back to the cave, preparing to slip into the healing coma. Maybe that would restore enough of his memories to allow him to get out of here. Otherwise – he wasn't quite ready to die, although at this point it might actually be helpful. If worst came to worst, he could always ask one of the centaurs to do it, he was sure they'd be pleased to be rid of him. Throughout the day, there'd always been one in the corner of his eye: invisible, if he'd been human. He wasn't, so he amused himself by waving to them. They didn't look pleased.

An absolutely sadistic grin was on his face as he stumbled into the cave, unprepared to come face-to-face with the dead bear. Apparently someone had been here, although they were gone now. Presumably it was the same someone who had stapled a piece of A4 paper to the bear's rotting nose.

In large, friendly letters on the top, it read, DON'T PANIC.

Not panicking – of course he'd read the book – he tore the paper off, and sat down in the back of the cave.

The first two words were the only ones written in English; the rest was in Old High Gallifreyan.

Verification Code: I loved Rose but would never admit it to avoid breaking both our hearts when she died of old age.

The Doctor dropped the paper. The Old High Gallifreyan should have been a clue; of the two others in all the universes who could write that language, only one was likely to be writing to him. But the code confirmed it. All Time Lords who spent a lot of time involved in their own timelines – and everyone got to that point sooner or later – came up with a verification code to identify themselves with in the rare situations when contact with a past or future self was essential.

Picking up the paper again, he continued reading.

Hi. It's me. We can make it out of this one; you just can't give up hope. Try major population centres for help. Can't tell you much more, you know the rules. Stupid things, but it doesn't turn out well when we break them. There was a reason for the quote. And remembering what our TARDIS is will be useful. Survival is about to become very, very important. All the rest of our morals may have to wait. I'm about a month ahead of you.

Below that were his coordinates, written, not in Gallifreyan, but in the base code of the universe, that bizarre combination of human letters and numbers, together with symbols from a thousand thousand other civilizations that had ever, in all of eternity, reached the stars, jumbled together in the strangest language to ever exist. The first Time Lord had transcribed it and programmed it into all the TARDISes. Few other Time Lords took the trouble to learn it – why would you? Even if your TARDIS broke, it was still a quick hop home for repairs – but after The War, the Doctor had spent fifty years on the most boring planet he could find teaching it to himself.

Scotland, near Inverness. That's odd.

His eyes flicked back and forth, translating rapidly.

1995. Boring year. Why am I here? Well, other than that boring is good for hiding in.

He checked the back of the paper, and then returned to the front.

Another universe? That's not good. That's really, really, fantastically not good. And kind of fun. Actually, this could be cool. A new universe! Not a split off from mine, but a whole new one! With new rules! And it would explain the centaurs, if nothing else.

The Doctor grinned, ripping the paper into shreds. Now he had something to do.