For sherlockedbyben who wanted a story featuring the classic Doctors. As I may have mentioned before, I haven't seen much Classic Who (I am working on rectifying that though) so I'm going to stick with what I know about it. This prompt features the Fifth Doctor but there are allusions to other Doctors. It is set after The King's Demons serial but there are no spoilers.
His companions were asleep in the Tardis and he lamented once again at the fact that humans required so much sleep. Mind you, they had just spent an exhausting time in the company of King John so perhaps it was deserved. The Doctor, on the other hand, was restless, bored and full of adrenaline. He had spent a short time fiddling with the Tardis' console and then decided to walk through the corridors of his ship. He had been walking pretty aimlessly through the Tardis when he reached a dead end with a door in front of him. He looked around him slightly perplexed. Obviously, he wasn't the only one who was bored; the Tardis appeared to have rearranged the rooms.
Intrigued and because he had nothing better to do, the Doctor opened the door in front of him and walked inside the room. He was slightly surprised to see it was the wardrobe. As he stepped through the racks of clothing, memories sprang to his mind about the times he or his companions wore those clothes. He smiled widely as he continued his wander through the wardrobe. All of a sudden, he tripped. He looked down and saw a piece of string, no, wool. Curious, he picked it up and began to follow it. As he walked, he rolled the wool back into a ball and he also noticed that it changed colour the more he bundled it up. He rounded a corner and he realised what the wool led to: his multi-coloured scarf that he wore in his previous regeneration. What was once exceedingly long was now just a meagre few inches long. It would barely go round his neck once. The Doctor's stomach churned slightly as he suddenly felt a pang of regret and guilt that he had been the one to dismantle the scarf.
"I was in a bad place," he said aloud. He felt the need to justify his actions to himself and also the Tardis. The Tardis bleeped in acknowledgement and allowed the Doctor to continue. "Regeneration is always tricky. Anything can happen in the first 15 hours following a regeneration. I could lose a limb, have a bad reaction to carrot juice or unravel a knitted scarf."
He eyed the remains of the scarf speculatively. He shifted the ball of wool to one hand and with his other hand, he reached inside his dimensionally transcendent pocket to pull out a pair of knitting needles, that also doubled up as linear ultraviolet transmitters. He settled himself down on the floor as he had found something to do while the others slept. When Tegan found him in the morning, the Doctor was asleep, snuggled into the finished scarf with the knitting needles still in his hands.