A/N: ehehehehehehehe

Thanks to Audrey and Paul. I don't remember what you did, but I'm sure it was helpful. Also to my reviewers: Ashlee Pond, LilyLunaPotter142, notwritten, FlyingLovegood123, Jimbobob5536, and Pointeofdance.


He'd never told Amelia about the TARDIS, he hadn't had the chance. He'd never seen her before today and yet she seemed to know him, or at least to know a John Smith who looked very similar to him and also had a time machine.

Not likely.

And also the world had nineteen minutes to live, so he'd really better get on with fixing things. "No, wait, there was a – a – a thing, wait."

The field was filled with people, people with camera phones, people taking pictures of the no-longer-sun, except for one, a nurse, who was taking a picture of – oh. The multiform. So who was the nurse?

"Go home," he said abruptly, spinning to face her. "Go home, be safe – safer than with me, leave me alone, this'll be dangerous."

Amelia was giving him a very odd look. "No."

He blinked. "Sorry?"

"No!" she yelled louder, grabbing him by the tie. Behind her, a car had pulled up; she stuck the tie between the door and the car as the driver got out, effectively trapping him.

*I like her.*

*You would.*

*No really, she reminds me of Ace.*

*Except with less explosives.*

*Obviously.*

He made one light jerk, noted that he could get out if he was willing to sacrifice the tie, noted that he could get out if he took a moment to undo the tie, noted that he could, if necessary, break open the car and save the tie, and returned his attention to Amelia. "Let. Me. Go."

She stepped closer to him, apparently not intimidated. "Who are you?"

"The Doctor," he snapped, staring darkly at her.

Amelia plainly didn't buy it. "No really. Who are you?"

Maybe he wouldn't have to resort to more explosive measures. "Look at the sky. Eighteen minutes, and your planet burns. If you want to avoid that, let me go now!"

"Well, better talk quickly then," she bit out.

The man whose car he was currently attached to stepped towards them. "Amy, I am going to need my car back."

Amelia turned an almost-frightening glare on him. "Yes. In a bit. Now go and have coffee."

"Yes," the man said slowly, looking afraid and a little bit perplexed, and then wandered off.

Leaving the Doctor with Amelia, which he wasn't sure was a good thing. "Who are you?" Amelia demanded again.

The Doctor lowered his head, fiercely controlling his breathing. "I am the Doctor, but more importantly, right now I'm the only hope this stinking little planet has for survival, so you might just want to let me go." The voices in the back of his head pointed out that he sounded more like the last body he'd had than the present one; he ignored them.

"No," she said stubbornly. "If you're the Doctor, then who was in my backyard twelve years ago, and why do you have the same box?"

He ran his free hand through his hair. "He's the future me," he told her blandly, something that he had figured out ages ago. "Or I'm the past him. Either way, I haven't done that yet. I will, and I will probably have good reasons, but not yet."

*I'm looking forward to it.*

*It promises to be entertaining, at least.*

*Not that this isn't entertaining.*

She still shook her head, and the Doctor took a moment to mentally curse all stubborn humans. "But why didn't you come back?"

"Because I forgot," he roared, pushed beyond the limits of his admittedly shaky patience. "I forgot, or I had something else to do, or I just didn't care. I have better things to do than to visit one little human child, and if you haven't learned that yet, then learn this – I'm not a nice person. I will hurt you, I will betray you, and in the end, you will die."

*Be nice!*

To her credit, she took a step back, away from him – to her stupidity, she didn't move any further. "He said that," she whispered.

Breathing heavily, he looked at her, fingers working in his tie. "Who?"

"John Smith." She was pale, and shaky, and her voice sounded like she looked. Part of him hated himself for scaring her, the rest recognized it as the only way to save her life.

Twisting his wrist, he looped the tie over his head, handing the end to Amelia. "Stay here. Don't get into trouble. Don't die. Think you can do that?"

"Yeah," she said faintly. "No wait!"

He grinned at her, the sudden blinding one that he knew he only used when he was riding an adrenaline rush, and ran off. Leaping over a low fence thing, one of those ones that was just a chain connected to posts, he struggled to keep his balance on the wet grass. "You!"

The nurse turned to look at him.

The Doctor skidded to a halt and grabbed his camera phone. "Thanks." The picture was still on the screen, a man and a dog, perfect but – "Why that? Why take a photo of them?"

The nurse gave him a very odd look, and then turned to Amelia, who – surprise surprise – had disobeyed him and had followed. "Amy."

"Hi," Amelia said. "Oh, ah – This is Rory. He's a – friend."

Why Amelia felt the need to introduce her acquaintances to him was – oh no. No, no, no, she was not coming with him. Not ever, not now, just no.

"Boyfriend," the-recently-named-Rory corrected.

Amelia gave a nervous laugh. "Kind of a boyfriend."

Whatever. "Why did you take that picture?" he asked, more insistently.

Rory, however, just stared at him blankly. "Oh – my god. It's him."

What?

*Oh rrreally, even you should be able to work that one out. Apparently we've been here beforrre.*

*Or after. And be nice, old chap. He's the showrunner. He can have moments of stupidity.*

"Just answer his question," Amy said warningly, but Rory was not about to be disturbed from – well, from whatever he was on about.

"It's him though," Rory said louder. "John Smith. The Raggedy John." Rory shook his head. "He was a story, he was a game –

And speaking of him, the Doctor was all out of patience with stupid humans and their idiocy. "Man and dog," he snapped, grabbing Rory's shirt. "Why. Tell me. Now."

"Sorry." The way he said it sounded like he apologized a lot. "Be-because he can't be there. He's in a hospital –"

And suddenly things made sense. "In a coma," the Doctor finished with Rory. "Right. Multiform. Needs a psychic link. Living but dormant mind."

*Like this one!*

*Well, I wouldn't put it that way…*

*You wouldn't.*

Behind them, the multiform barked. Still out of the human mouth. Honestly, couldn't it learn?

Smirking, the Doctor turned to face it. "Prisoner Zero."

From above, the atmosphere buzzed. The Doctor looked up, sighing. A long, grey, oblong spaceship descended through the shield, giving out occasional flashes of oddly greyish light.

*Hands for who's met them?*

*…*

*Just the current one then. This should be entertaining.*

The Doctor's smirk widened. "That ship up there is scanning for non-terrestrial technology. And I have a sonic screwdriver. Even if it doesn't work the best – especially if it doesn't work the best, it'll get their attention." Raising it dramatically in the air, he pressed the button.

The screwdriver whirred and finally exploded a streetlight. Close enough. And then actually a few more. This was almost exciting. And then – he twisted one of the smaller buttons, the ones that only he could ever seem to find properly. That particular setting he'd invented while with UNIT – it could control vehicles.

The greyish beam from the spaceship narrowed and focused, homing in on them.

"I think someone's going to notice." One, final twist, and the screwdriver caused a phone box – red, not blue, so it didn't really matter – to explode rather spectacularly. It also had the charming effect of completely burning out the screwdriver.

He dropped it, muttering in Gallifreyan. It was nothing, just a screwdriver, and yet – Donna had touched it. Martha had helped bring it about. Rose had seen it. Memory after memory after memory and all of them connected with the metal rod now lying useless in the grass.

Straightening up, he backed away, teeth clenched. It was alright. He could do this. He was the Doctor. He didn't need any accessories.

Up above, the grey beam vanished, the ship beginning to ascend again.

"No, no, no!" he shouted at it. "I have your prisoner!"

The multiform chuckled at him and then dissolved, vanishing down a storm drain.

"Doctor! The drain," Amelia said for no apparent reason. "It just sort of melted and then went down the drain."

*Humans. Always stating the obvious.*

*For once, I agree with you.*

The Doctor shot her a glare. "Of course it did."

"Well, what do we do now?"

He spun to face her, glaring again. "We do nothing. You and your boyfriend can go off and – and kiss, and hope I save the day. I am going to the hospital to try to intimidate it out. And, if I fail, I die. As does this world. So."

"So that thing, that hid in my house for twelve years," Amelia was saying, but his brain was distracted, there was something huge, something obvious he was missing –

The eye.

The big, blue eye.

What was it with the eye?

*You're becoming slightly obsessed with it.*

*It's this regeneration. The rest of us would never let such a small factor influence our thoughts.*

*To be fair, that hasn't always been a benefit.*

The Doctor made a noise. "Multiforms can live for millennia." There was more information about multiforms, about how they weren't actually a species or anywhere near close. It would like using the word 'fish' to apply to anything in the water, it didn't really define what it was, not really. But that eye.

"So how come you show up on the very day that lot show up, the same minute?"

Amelia was really rather too curious and perceptive for his comfort. "The TARDIS wanted me here and now. I'm here because they were going to be here. That I preceded their arrival is a stroke of incredible luck." Or something. Luck is currently debatable.

"What's he on about?" Rory again. Rory the useless sort-of-boyfriend. Rory with the nose.

Rory who was clever enough to get pictures of the only thing that mattered.

Rory who might also have pictures of other things that mattered.

He could get to like Rory. "Phone. Rory. Give me your phone."

Rory gave him a blank, utterly confused look, but passed over the phone. "How can he be real? He was never real? It was just a game, we were kids. You made me dress up as him."

Without really thinking about it, the Doctor discarded the glorious blackmail opportunity, and flicked through the phone's photo gallery. "These pictures, they're all of patients."

"Coma patients," Rory corrected.

"No, the multiform." Or whatever. He continued flicking. "Seven – no, eight coma patients, eight disguises for Prisoner Zero." He needed, what did he need, what did he need, this was why he never saved two planets in a row, it got his brain all muddled, or that might have been the cricket bat, but either way, neither of those were his fault –

Because I didn't save them the last time.

Because I watched him die the last time.

I've failed.

I've lost.

I brought the body home and then left because I couldn't risk staying longer.

I'd run off again out of fear.

*You tried! That's all we can ever do!*

*I don't recall you listening to that when Adric died.*

*Well, someone else want a go?*

*Trust me. This was not your fault. I remember Katarina. I could no more have prevented her death than you could your human's.*

*He remembers his companion's name, but not the current one's.*

*Shut up, he's making progress.*

"I need a laptop." He shoved the voices back, the ones that pointed out the facts he wasn't ready to confront. Because now he had a plan, or he sort of did, and if there was anyone here he could trust – the humans, but no, he didn't want to encourage them, he was just going to leave the moment he'd stopped the Earth from being blown up, there was no point in even implying that they meant anything to him. "Your – Jeff." Without another word, he spun and ran off, back to the house.

Amelia and Rory stared at him before following.

He took a millisecond to settle. Coming to a dead stop, he faced Amelia. "You want to do something. You want to help. Get everyone else out of that hospital. If you really want to make things better, get everyone but those eight patients out of that hospital. Got that?"

Rory blinked at him. "But he's not real."

Scratch that, maybe he didn't like Rory. "Amelia, get those humans out!"

*I'm not sure I like Rory.*

*You like everyone.*

*This one doesn't need an existential crisis right now. And Rory isn't helping.*

Amelia gave him a briefly shocked look before nodding and dragging Rory off.

The Doctor burst into the same largish house, heading for the back because the back was where any young male still living with his mother would be. "Give me the laptop."

Jeff looked shocked, and tried to hold the laptop away from him.

Taking it anyway, the Doctor sat down on the end of the bed. And yup, conversant with the volume and quantity of Jeff's protests, the webpage open was a rather famous porn site. He hadn't really expected it to be a gay porn site, but that was beside the point. Already working on a new webpage – he hadn't been to this URL in ages, and it was purposefully long and complicated – he experimentally tried a few phrases in Polari.

*I remember inventing that.*

*Of course you did. Use it a lot?*

*Yes, actually. Oh, wait, I forgot – you didn't meet him, did you?*

Jeff's shocked look became more confused. Never mind then.

The old woman – Jeff's grandmother, if he wasn't much mistaken – came into the room. Probably the noise. "What's going on?"

"Just need a –" Bingo, and he was into UNIT's secure servers, and then from there it was easy to get onto – "Webcam work?"

Jeff made a confused noise. "Yeah."

The Doctor nodded. "There's a video conference out there, because the sun's gone odd. And I've got information they need."

Maybe Jack's in it.

Maybe Martha is.

*Maybe they can help settle him.*

*I doubt it.*

He wasn't in the conference itself, not yet, just staring at the lines of code forming the conference, code in C# and JAVA and a few in heavily modified and updated COBOL. "NASA's here, Tokyo Space Centre, and – good." The line didn't read UNIT but it didn't have to. He'd been UNIT's science advisor for years, he'd programmed these codes.

"You can't just hack in on a call like that," Jeff protested.

The Doctor grinned, because he'd gotten to the video conference itself and six faces were all staring at their cameras, probably wondering why he'd shown up. "Can't I?" he said coolly, before focusing all his attention on the computer screen. "You there, from UNIT – go get the Brigadier."

The officer – very young – gaped at him. "Sir, I am UNIT's foremost astronomy expert, and –"

Rolling his eyes, the Doctor whipped out the psychic paper. "Here you go. Now go get the Brigadier!"

*Hasn't he retired?*

*He came back.*

*Of course he did.*

The officer vanished from the camera view as the other five scientists gave him stares of varying credulity and intelligence.

To the Doctor's eternal delight, the blank camera was very quickly filled by the Brigadier, a little older, a little greyer, but with the same fire in his eyes. "What do you want?"

The Doctor smiled, a real smile, for the first time in a very long time. "Hello, Brig. It's me again."

*Hello, Brigadier!*

Something flashed in the Brigadier's eyes, but he quickly shut it down. "Prove it."

"I kept a spare key in the sole of my right shoe when I was short and black haired. The first time, not the second. That's why I wanted my shoes so badly, even though I couldn't remember it at the time. You figured that out within a few days, but not quickly enough to prevent them from trying to take my shoes away. I never thanked you for that. For any of it. So I'll say it now, Brigadier," the Doctor said, the smile turning wistful.

*Hrumph. Just because I didn't say it doesn't mean I didn't think it.*

"Don't," the Brigadier interrupted. "You've almost got me convinced, don't spoil it now. What's going on? Where are you?"

The Doctor grinned. "Escaped prisoner in the Midlands. Escaped alien prisoner, we don't tend to care about the other sort." He pulled Rory's phone out of his pocket, accessing the root programming. It was a very good thing he could type faster than a human, else this would never work. "The charming lot up above are his guards, come to bring him back. I've got fourteen minutes before they decide it's too much work and just blow up the Earth instead. I'm writing you a virus. Don't shut it down. Let it run. And convince everyone else to let it work. Sorry about the mess afterwards –"

The Brigadier sighed. "Don't apologize either. Drives up my blood pressure."

He'd missed the Brigadier. "Righto, then. Here you go." He hit the button on the phone to send the code to Jeff's laptop, hit the button on the laptop to leave the code on the internet, sending it to the six computers he was currently networked with, and also every website Jeff had ever accessed, every IP address he'd ever had contact with.

"Do I want to know what this does?" the Brigadier asked.

"Resets counters. All of them. All over the world. You'll have a right mess with the banks, but you'll still have banks, so that's a plus." The Doctor stood up, passing the laptop back to Jeff. "Lovely chatting with you, Brigadier. Got to go save the world now."

The Brig made a strangled noise. "Doctor! Where are you?"

Grinning, the Doctor slammed shut the laptop. "There you go, Jeff, you'll have some interesting phone calls in twelve minutes, but otherwise you're good."

Now.

He had to get to the hospital. Twelve minutes and he had to get to the hospital. Well, emergency vehicles couldn't have changed that much in twenty years.