Title: Cause and Effect

Disclaimer: I neither own Doctor Who nor Transformers. Both belong to all respective creators, producers, and distributors. I make no money from this work of fiction.

Characters: Sam, 11th Doctor, 10.5 Doctor

Summary: Non-Linear. The fact that he had all this awareness, all this knowledge while the fob watch containing his Time Lord essence sat in a box amongst his not quite unpacked possessions in Princeton frightened him. Partially because he had no idea how a Chameleon Arch might affect him.

Chapter 1: First Night

The conversion had been a hard one. Granted that Sam had been dead in the five minutes during which the conversion had taken place, the waking had been much less pleasant. Every movement had sent fresh bursts of raw, screaming pain through his nerves, though he'd barely felt it, so preoccupied he'd been with sorting out the information bombarding him from his new (old) senses. It had been a shock to one moment be cradled in warmth and insulated from the pain of his injuries, then wake to find himself with a new awareness of his place in time and space, though the awareness was dimmed, a sensation remembered from a different life as a different man, gained from a psycho-kinetic link that no longer existed primarily because the matching biological structure and mind was gone, burned away in the fires of regeneration.

Frankly, the fact that he had all this awareness, all this knowledge while the fob watch containing his Time Lord essence sat in a box amongst his not quite unpacked possessions in Princeton frightened him. Partially because he had no idea how a Chameleon Arch might affect a Metacrisis.

Then there was also his dependence on the sonic screwdriver to contend with. A sonic screwdriver that was in the Tardis, parked in Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart's garden in the United Kingdom. Granted, he didn't really need the sonic screwdriver, he'd gone through almost seven regenerations without really using the sonic all that much, but in his later years, his Ninth and Tenth, and most recently, his Eleventh had been almost completely dependent on the sonic screwdriver. Not that he was incapable of doing anything without it, it was a case of taking the easy way out. It was quite handy, the sonic, and he'd feel all the better for having it.

It was this which drove him to draw aside Captain Graham at the first opportunity to whisper several codes into his ear before asking him to put in a call for one of his companions, preferably Amy or Rory, as previous companions were likely to get lost in the newly refurbished Time Ship, to go into the Tardis and retrieve his sonic screwdriver. And maybe the mobile that Martha had given to him in his Tenth incarnation. The good Captain, newly transferred from U.N.I.T. into N.E.S.T., was shocked to learn that he was the Doctor, a near legendary figure in the U.N.I.T. archives, the famed (or infamous as the case may be) scientific advisor of U.N.I.T. from the eighties, but quickly overcame his surprise and obediently made the calls. Three days later, the Captain was personally presenting Sam with a package containing both sonic and mobile. The salute that followed left the young man grumbling under his breath to the amusement of the U.N.I.T. affiliated soldiers who had heard a great deal about the Doctor.

Having the sonic screwdriver in his recently acquired dimensionally transcendental pockets lifted one weight off his shoulders but added another. The handiness of the tool meant that he'd kept adding function after function, until the sonic screwdriver could deal with just about anything, with the exception of wood. He'd known he relied too much on the sonic and it was time to break the habit, because feeling naked and uneasy about going only five days without the screwdriver was a major no-no. Having his hands itch for the sonic screwdriver when the situation did not warrant the use of so advanced a piece of technology was unacceptable, and was a habit he'd have to break. And he'd take advantage if his time in Princeton to break the habit.

-

The truth of the matter was, despite being half-human, a Human-Time Lord Meta-crisis took after the Time Lord side more than the Human side, at least, where IQ and extra sensory perception was concerned. The first night after the entire debacle with the Fallen and being chased across the globe by international intelligence agencies, Sam had spent some time in a trance state, sorting through his mind and the knowledge that the Matrix had altered him to contain without burning. That the human part of his new make-up could use that time to rest and recover was only a bonus. Of course, this didn't mean that he did not need to sleep at all, even a Time Lord needed some sleep, though not as much as a Human. It didn't change the fact that he slept twice as much as the average Time Lord, that is to say, an average of eight hours a week, Earth time.

And so it was five days after Egypt, when Sam and Leo had been resettled in their dormitories in Princeton, that Sam finally allowed his mind to rest along with his body.

Sleep came with little difficulty. With the application of the breathing and meditation exercises that all Time Lords were required to master, he'd fallen from the world of the waking into the realm of dreams as seamlessly as each breath he took...

-

A solitary figure, hooded and cloaked, carried a box through the mausoleum, past shelf after shelf of blankly staring human skulls.

"Who is that? Who is carrying me? I demand to know!" a voice demanded angrily from the box. "I'm a head. I have rights. I want my doors open this time."

The cloaked figure set the box onto a plinth.

"I demand that my door is open!"

The figure slid open the box with a swift gesture to reveal a bald blue head. Wordlessly, the figure turned and walked away.

"Is it you? It is you isn't it?" the disembodied head asked. The figure paused and slowly shuffled around to partially face the head. "It is you! I can sense it! How did you do it? How could you have possibly escaped!"

The figure dropped the cape to reveal a youngish man with floppy brown hair and green eyes clad in a distinctive tweed jacket with a blue bowtie. He turned and smirked at the befuddled head.

"The Teselecta. The Doctor in a Doctor suit," he sounded unmistakably smug as he strode toward the disembodied head on a plinth. "Time said I had to be on that beach, so I dressed for the occasion. Barely got singed in that boat."

"So you're really going to do this? Let them all think you're dead."

"It's the only way. Then they can all forget me. I got too big, Dorium, too noisy. It's time to step back in to the shadows."

"And Doctor Song? Imprisoned all her days?"

"Her days, yes," the Doctor agreed, "As for her nights, well," his lips twitched into a suggestive smile, "that's between her and me, isn't it?"

Dorium chuckled. "So many secrets, Doctor, of course, I'll help you keep them."

"Well, you're not exactly going anywhere are you?"

"But you're a fool nonetheless," Dorium's voice shifted from amused camaraderie to rebuking in seconds, "It's all still waiting for you, The Fields of Trenzalore, the Fall of the Eleventh, and the Question."

The Doctor smiled and mock saluted the head in a box, "Goodbye, Dorium." He turned and strode away without looking back.

"The first question: the question that must never be answered: hidden in plain sight!" Dorium's voice rose as the Doctor got farther and farther away, "The question you've been running from all your life!"

That line wiped any hint of geniality from the Doctor's face as he increased his pace slightly.

"Doctor who?"

The Doctor paused in front of his TARDIS and turned to look back, lifting his head slowly.

"Doctor who?" Dorium called.

Unseen by the head, a corner of the Doctor's lips lifted in a wry, cold smirk.

"Doctor WHO!"

-

The young man jerked awake, sitting up with a gasp. He stared blankly at the poster covered walls in front of him for a moment before turning slightly and taking in the entire dormitory and his roommate curled up under the covers in the bed on the other side of the room. The room was silent but for the ticking of a clock and the soft, whuffling snores of his roommate.

He turned and pulled open a drawer in the bedside table and drew out a small silver pocketwatch engraved in an elaborate pattern and concentric circles. He held it gently in his right hand, gently thumbing the catch, but applying no pressure. He could hear a faint whispering from the watch, and the weight and warmth of ages oozing from the aged metal. The young man known as Samuel James Witwicky twisted in his bed and reached under his pillow to pull out a cylindrical object seemingly made of brass topped by a green bulb in silver brackets. He aimed it at one of the three desktop computers and pressed a button, and the green bulb flashed to life with a low whining buzz, and the computer monitor lit up. He stopped pressing the button, and the light and buzzing ceased, and Sam smiled a slow, secretive smile, one reminiscent of a floppy haired man with a love for tweed a bowties whom many thought to have died not too long ago on the shores of a lake in Utah.

-

TBC.