Disclaimer: No, I don't own any of this, except for stuff you don't recognize.

I hope you enjoy the sort of "alternate history" I'm trying to work with here. And I really did have this idea before "Day of the Doctor". I'm just sort of lazy like that.

Lock & Key

By Scott Jewett

Chapter 1: The Chase is On

Back at the TARDIS…

"So!" the Doctor said, jumping to his feet. "Where to next? You're obviously feeling better…care for a trip? Ancient Greece? The Crystal Planet in the Xaxon Star Belt? Actual living crystals. Nicest beings you ever met…bit fragile though…"

"Doctor," Clara said, interrupting his spiel, "if it's all the same to you, I'd like to head home for a while. All that time travel and intense pain really took it out of me." The Doctor looked a bit crestfallen.

"Yes…of course…don't know what I was thinking" he said, rubbing his hands together. "Well then…to the control room?" Clara's response was interrupted by a massive blast that knocked the room sideways. Clara and the Doctor cried out in surprise as they were thrown into a corner, one on top of the other.

"Well!" the Doctor cried, hardly disguising his delight at a problem. "That was unexpected!" He leapt to his feet, pulling Clara off the floor.

"What was that?" Clara asked, seconds before another blast hit, throwing the pair around again.

"Explosions, I imagine!" the Doctor replied. "Two of them. Something hitting the TARDIS, and someone attacking us!" He dashed off to the control room, Clara in his wake, as subsequent explosions rocked the corridor left and right.

"Who would be attacking you for no reason, Doctor?" Clara cried over the sudden eruption of a loud klaxon alarm.

"Oh, I'm sure they've got a reason, Clara, we just don't know what it is! And remind me when this is over to fix that alarm. Far too slow!" The Doctor skidded to a halt in front of the TARDIS console, flicking two switches and pulling on a string.

"All right, here we go…Who's out there shooting at my ship? Identify yourselves!" There was silence for a beat, and then…

"Doctor. The Dalek Empire knows of your secret." The Doctor and Clara froze at the sound of the Dalek's voice.

"No…" Clara whispered. "Not them…not now!" Having no idea what was going on, the Doctor decided to go with a bluff.

"I've got more secrets than you can imagine, oh Supreme Dalek or whatever you call yourself, so get to the point so I can get on with stopping you! Wait a minute. You know who I am?" The Doctor spun around to face Clara, whipping out his sonic screwdriver. A quick scan revealed the truth.

"Oh, I see. Some clever little Dalek locked on to the remnants of the neural net in Clara's head!"

"The what?" Clara whimpered.

"You were Oswin, remember? They made her one of them, connected her to the Dalek neural network. You must have some remnant of it in your brain that they could make contact with."

"Correct, Doctor" the commander replied, "and that is not all we found." A hologram appeared in the TARDIS, showing the War Doctor's actions. The Doctor's eyes widened.

"No…NO!" he shouted. "You can't! I know what you want to do…you can't do it! I won't let you!"

"You will not stop us, Doctor" the commander replied. "We will acquire your device. We will restore the glory of the Dalek Empire. We will destroy Gallifrey. And you will be exterminated. Exterminate!" The battle cry of the Daleks repeated and echoed through the TARDIS before the Doctor shut down the communication. He took a deep breath, turned back around, and scanned Clara.

"All right, this should do it…" The screwdriver chattered through various settings as he waved it back and forth in front of Clara's eyes. "The neural net should be disabled. Now, to more important things!" The Doctor spun back around, manipulating instruments like a madman. Clara, naturally, was confused.

"Doctor, I don't know if you remember, but I don't. Literally. I might have been there and seen what you did, but I don't remember now! Can you please enlighten me?" The Doctor stopped his mad dash and turned around.

"Clara. What you just saw was how I ended the Last Great Time War. It was a battle that was literally destroying space and time, between Time Lords and Daleks. The weapon I stole from Gallifrey was known as the Time Lock. It locked every living thing in the galaxy out of time itself. Essentially, the Time War is frozen at the exact moment in time that I turned that key, while the rest of the universe has gone on. Now the Daleks are after the lock. Once they have it, they'll do whatever it takes to get the key from me-this key, in fact" he said, pulling the key to the TARDIS out of his pocket. "The one advantage we have is that I separated the components of the lock and hid them among multiple parallel universes. No, wait, two. I disabled the neural net, so the Daleks won't be able to use you to spy." He went back to his work. Clara came up next to him.

"So…parallel universes?"

"Yes. You see, every single thing we do or don't do creates its own universe. There's now a whole new universe in which you didn't just come up next to me. And another one," he added, pushing a button, "where I didn't just push that button. Although in that one, the TARDIS has probably just exploded. That button was important. Anyway, the universes I selected to hide the pieces of the lock in are probably going to look familiar to you if you've read and watched a lot of books and movies."

"What?"

"Every piece of pop culture, Clara, in this universe and others, actually exists somewhere in the multiverse, because there's always a universe where the circumstances needed to bring about that exact pop culture item actually happened. Now, give me a second…" The Doctor continued his fiddling with the TARDIS console. "Boost the power…jettison the massage parlor…enter the coordinates…locking on to the exact dimensional matrix…Yes!"

"Wait a minute, Doctor!" Clara exclaimed. "You…the other you…just said that traveling between dimensions is nearly impossible without the Time Lords!"

"Yes, I did" the Doctor replied, "but that's nearly impossible. Not entirely. And the Daleks will find a way no matter what, Time Lords or no. It's in their nature to be especially single-minded when they want something. So we have to get to the first piece of the lock before they do. Hold on to something!" He reached for the lever.

"Doctor, where exactly are we going?" Clara worried.

"To school! GERONIMO!" The Doctor yanked the lever. The lights in the TARDIS almost immediately went out, and a loud banging sound rang out as the room tilted nearly upside down. From the outside, the Daleks watched the TARDIS flicker in and out of existence repeatedly before disappearing.

"Follow them."

A/N: And there's the prologue. Read and review!