The Doctor stood alone in the ruins of Gallifrey.
No. Not alone.
Zagreus waits at the end of the world.
"No. Dreams, memories, illusions. Lies. There is no such person as Zagreus," said the Doctor.
His time is the end of time.
The Doctor started walking. At the end of time, there was only one direction to go. Back. Back down the timeline. Away. After awhile, it seemed to him that he was following someone. A person who kept ahead of him, a shadow always on the verge of vanishing into the distance.
Zagreus sups time at a drip.
He was no longer alone. The Doctor's steps took him through the streets of a vast city. It was night, the sky hidden by fog. Light shone in sporadic patches from streetlights, shopfronts, and vehicle beams. Pedestrians and loiterers surrounded him, filling the air with meaningless babble.
"Hello? Hello, where am I?" The Doctor put himself in the path of an old man walking a dog. The old man gawked, mouth forming sounds but no recognizable words. The face was wrong. It wasn't the face of an old man. It was... it was... the Doctor couldn't focus on it properly to say what was wrong with it. The Doctor slid aside.
"Never mind," he muttered, hearts unaccountably pounding in his chest. Time felt stretched thin. Fragile.
Because bit by bit it's leaking?
"No. It can't be." The Doctor scanned the horizon, saw the same elusive figure he had followed from the end of time. It stood still, waiting. The Doctor set off at a run. "Who are you?" He pushed through the crowd. Faces turned towards him. The same face on each person. The same face, the wrong face, the impossible face. A face drawn out of shadows. The Doctor didn't have time to examine them. Time. He was running out of time. His every increase in speed was matched by the figure ahead of him. The figure never turned; he could only ever see its back. But he had already seen enough. He knew that with every step it took, time became porous around it.
He heard the soft patter of shadows falling like rain. The same pattern repeated over and over. Soon it would become a flood. A name was on the tip of his tongue. A memory that slid away from his grasp.
He opened his eyes and remembered. "Clara!"
That was the name. The face that he couldn't see anymore.
The Doctor breathed deeply, forcing himself to see his surroundings clearly. He was in his bedroom in the TARDIS. He could feel his ship's reassuring presence all around him. A dream. It had only been a dream.
No. That was a lie. It wasn't a dream, or at least not his. Someone was meddling again. He had to check the TARDIS telepathic circuits to be certain, but he guessed enough to be angry already.
"I knew it," he growled when the TARDIS logs confirmed his guess. "My first chance at a good night's sleep - and no, being knocked unconscious by a neural block does not count - in billions of years, and this is what I get?"
He stomped around the console, furiously slamming the view screens this way and that, not deigning to read their displays. "Visions. Prophecies. Nursery rhymes. Must you beam every paranoid fantasy from the Matrix into my head?"
But he could tell that the old girl was worried, even before the cloister bells began tolling. And the urgency he had felt in his dream returned. The Doctor ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. "All right. All right. I'll check. Happy?"
The TARDIS seemed to hum dolefully. But the damned bells stopped, at least.
"It could be a trap, you know." The Doctor almost hoped it was. That would be preferable to the other possibility. Which he didn't care to think about. He took the TARDIS back to the place where he had met her. The waitress who wasn't. Clara, whose name was attached to a hole in his memories.
The Doctor programmed in a small offset to land about half a mile away and half an hour later from where the diner had been, then walked the rest of the way. In case it was a trap.
The site was crawling with police. The Doctor peered past the flashing lights to see that an area had been cordoned off with police tape. He slid on his sonic sunglasses for a quick scan. He analysed the results, and his hopes for a simple trap died. Traces of anti-time contamination had been detected.
The Doctor drew himself straight and strode confidently into the mass of American law enforcement. He flashed the psychic paper at them. "I'm the Doctor. I'm with UNIT. If you have any problem with that, call..." he rattled off a number. "Now tell me what happened here."
"It's a run of the mill domestic violence case," said the officer in charge of the scene, who introduced himself as Corelli. "I see no need for any involvement by, what did you say, UNIT?"
"I know you don't see," snapped the Doctor. "That's why I'm here."
"UNIT?" Another police officer, this one young and depressingly enthusiastic, hurried over to them. "You're really from UNIT? Wow."
"What is UNIT again, exactly?" Corelli asked in an aside to the new arrival.
"Unified Intelligence Task Force," explained the young officer. "They defend the Earth from alien invaders and..."
"Aliens? Oh, those guys. The European spook hunters. Fine. Go see if his credentials check out. If they do, you can be our official liaison," said Corelli. "Now shoo, both of you. I have work to do."
The young officer stuck out a hand. "I'm Mike Esposito. You can call me Mike. Wow. Are we about to be invaded? Are there spaceships?"
The Doctor frowned dubiously at the proffered hand. Then shook it gingerly. "I hope not. And of course there are spaceships. If you mean, will you see one, I have no idea."
"Right, right." Mike made some phone calls. The Doctor watched over his shoulder. He was disturbed to see that he had accidentally landed a day later than he had meant to. But it shouldn't matter too much, should it? He cut off that line of thought when Mike turned back to him. The boy gave him a thumbs up and a wide grin. "Ok, right, it's all cool. UNIT said they didn't send you, but to trust you, anyway, if we value our lives."
Mike followed the Doctor as the latter made his way slowly through the crime scene, explaining the situation as they walked. Something about a man shooting his wife. The man was in custody now, while the woman was at a local hospital. The Doctor barely listened. The faint buzz of anti-time seethed at the edge of hearing, making his teeth itch. It was flowing into his body, wearing away at his self-control. Why was it doing that? Was he an anti-time magnet now?
Then he realized. It was like water, always flowing downhill. The Doctor had once contained a vast quantity of anti-time. Even though he had later rid himself of all (almost all) of it, it was like emptying a lake: the depression still remained to be filled if a new source of water appeared. Actually, that was a good thing, thought the Doctor. It would make the clean-up easier. Now he just had to find the source of the leak. "This woman. The one who was shot. I need to see her. You have a car?"
Mike nodded.
"What are you waiting for, then?"
"It's her. It's here." The Doctor's face was grim. He straightened, slipping the sonic sunglasses back into his pocket. A wounded woman lay unconscious on the bed before him, attached to monitors and IVs, a mask and breathing tube covering half her face. She had perhaps a fifty-fifty chance of surviving her injuries, but her timeline was being eaten away, drained moment by moment as the shadow of anti-time expanded through her.
"What is?" Mike hovered behind the Doctor, fending off the nurse and the guard at the door of the room.
"The hole. The broken thread in the fabric of time."
"What?"
"I have to close it. I have to seal the break." The Doctor set his hands to the woman's skull, causing a squawk of protest from the nurse. "I think I can do this telepathically."
"What are you doing? Stop that!"
"Stay back, please," said Mike.
The Doctor ignored them all. He closed his eyes. Focused his thoughts. An entity of anti-time had forced its way into the mind and body of this woman. A Neverperson? He sensed the same flavor of anger, of resentment, but here it was dilute, lacking full sentience. The important thing was to remove it. And seal the hole, using whatever he could find. He seized the tattered ends of the woman's timeline and knotted them. A crude patch, but it was enough. Time would heal. As for the shadow infesting the woman...
Anti-time flooded into the Doctor. He jerked back with a gasp of pain. He heard movement around him, and flung up his hands in a gesture of warding. Without opening his eyes, he rasped, "Stay away! Don't touch me!"
"Ok, ok, I'm not touching you. All you all right?" Mike. That was Mike's voice. The young cop.
The Doctor forced himself to concentrate. Horrifying revelation crawled through his thoughts. Words flooded uncontrollably from his mouth. "I can see them. So many of them. Splinters of one person, stabbed through the fabric of time like a thousand needles. Using my timeline as the entrypoint! But I didn't die on Trenzalore as the Eleventh. There was no timeline for the Great Intelligence to hijack. No reason for Clara to..."
"Who's Clara?" asked Mike. "The victim's name is Yasmin Philips. You're not making any sense."
"It makes perfect sense!" retorted the Doctor, his eyes still tightly shut. To see anything would be too much. It was already too much. "So many lives that no longer ever existed. Ripped out from the fabric of time. Dispersed! But they're brief echoes, degraded from the original. That's why, that's why they're not as strong as the Neverpeople I met before. But still dangerous. Still deadly. And now her single thread of life stretches away from the moment of death, pulling other lives out of time with it. Snip! Snip! The threads break. And so the shades cluster about her like flies to a wound, consuming, obliterating, unraveling..."
"Dangerous?" Mike latched onto the one understandable bit in alarm. "Is she in danger? Are we?"
The Doctor clamped his lips together. He breathed carefully until his thoughts ceased swirling so chaotically. Anti-time possession. It always turned him into a ranting lunatic. But he was in control now. He could hang on to himself. Not forever, but long enough. He opened his eyes at last and looked at Mike, then at the patient in the hospital bed.
"If she lives, she'll lose about eight years. Won't remember anything. But otherwise she's safe." The Doctor was already striding out the door. "One more. The husband. I need to see him, too."
The Doctor watched the man, the man who had shot his wife, from across the table in the interview room at the police station. The Doctor only needed to see him, not speak to him. The man was tainted by anti-time, but his timeline was still intact, if frayed a bit at the edges. The Doctor held his gaze, letting the taint drip free of him and into the Doctor.
The man squirmed, unnerved by the Doctor's silence, and possibly feeling the stomach-twisting flow of anti-time leaking out of his body. He burst out at last, "It wasn't my fault! It wasn't her. My real wife is dead, killed by that thing. It was a demon, an abomination, one of them alien monsters pretending to be her."
The Doctor stared coldly at the man. He spoke for the first time since meeting him. "And shooting her was your first response to your suspicions?"
"I had to do it. You have to understand. Hey! Hey, where are you going?"
But the Doctor had already gone. Mike shrugged once at the prisoner before following the Doctor, saying to the officers at the station, "Ok, I think we're done here. Thanks."
Once in the car, Mike asked, "So what was that all about? Is the murderer an alien or something? He looked human to me."
"He is human."
"Then why did you...?" Mike continued asking in puzzlement in between the Doctor directing him back to the TARDIS.
"You want to see a space ship?" The Doctor asked as he climbed out of the police car.
"What? Yes, of course. Where?" Mike trailed after the Doctor.
The Doctor held up a forbidding palm. "Stay here. Watch carefully."
"Ok," said Mike, stopping obediently. "What's that blue box thing? Why does it say 'Police'?"
The Doctor unlocked the doors and stepped inside. He poked his head outside one last time. "Good bye, Mike." The doors clicked shut.
"Good bye...? What?" Mike watched in astonishment as the blue box made a loud wheezing, groaning noise, and vanished.
The Doctor sat on the floor of the Zero Room with his back propped against a wall. He stared blankly at the closed door, trying to recover his wits. He had barely managed to dematerialize the TARDIS into the vortex before the anti-time had stormed his mind again. He didn't listen to his own voice spewing threats and insults as he staggered down into the bowels of the TARDIS, seeking the one place that could grant him a modicum of peace.
The walls of the Zero Room were, naturally, layered with zero matter, the one substance in the material universe that could partially mute the effects of anti-time.
"Well, what do I do now?" the Doctor asked aloud. "I can't stay in this room forever. And that wasn't the only broken strand of time, was it? There could be hundreds more. Thousands."
Then there was the problem of what to do with the anti-time, assuming he was successful in patching the web of time and clearing up what was basically a reality-threatening toxic waste spill.
"I can't trust myself when it's affecting me. And I can't dump it in the TARDIS, either." The Doctor emptied his pockets, hoping for inspiration in the growing pile of knick-knacks, string, toys, and assorted junk in front of him. Then his eyes fixed on one item in particular. Inspiration struck.
"Of course," he murmured. "A self-contained universe, but one with no living creatures inside, no timelines to unravel. And I already have a telepathic link to it. All I need to do is fix a transduction barrier across the exit..."
He smiled and picked up the item: his confession dial.