The Adventure of the Dozen Doctors

by WhovianJack

**New Chapter Every Other Thursday** Sherlock gets sent into a coma, meets all incarnations of the Doctor up to #11, and gets wrapped up in a war between two alien species that have begun to use humans as hosts. (Most of that comes much later, I'm just previewing.) Co-written with my friend. A prelude was published separately: /s/9240536/1/Never-Ceasing

11. finally posting an ending, 7 years later

...And then the fic didn't get updated for seven years.

Washington, DC

7 January 2021

12:58 AM

Hi, everyone. This is me, one of the authors, coming in to provide a little closure on this story [checks watch] seven years after it was last updated. Sorry about that, if you were invested in it.

When I started writing this story, I was 14 years old, and in eighth grade. My co-author and I were boyfriend and girlfriend. The two of us were really, really into Doctor Who and Sherlock. I had gotten her into the former, she had gotten me into the latter. We had grand plans for a crossover story between the two franchises, and wrote the beginning and most of the end of it. However, we couldn't really write a middle to bridge the two ends together. I guess I figured we would work it out as we went along. Turns out, I ran out of inspiration and motivation to write those middle chapters pretty quickly. I wanted to incorporate each Doctor into the plot in their own unique and interesting way, but one big problem was that I hadn't watched a lot of the classic Doctors, and another big problem was that we didn't have enough plot to spread across each of their chapters. So the ship of this fanfiction got stranded in the middle, without enough fuel to make it to the end.

Here's what would have happened in the end of the story, as best as I remember it:

Two alien species, one made of sentient smoke and the other made of sentient oxygen (I think they were called the Paltronites and the Merinians respectively) have been fighting a war for centuries, and now they've come to Earth and started using humans as hosts. It would have been revealed that the Eighth Doctor, prior to Sherlock finding him dying, had been possessed by a Merinian, and had gotten shot by a Paltronite that was possessing Lestrade. After Sherlock and co. get his body back to the TARDIS, he regenerates into the Ninth Doctor offscreen (this story was plotted out before the War Doctor was a thing! that's how old this was!) and dramatically returns at the end. The whole "repeating eights" motif was inspired by the fact that the fraction 8/9 (as in, the Doctors) is 0.888888 repeating, because I was a huge math nerd in eighth grade. I think I was going to try and justify it by saying that eight is the atomic number of oxygen, which the Paltronites were made of.

At the climax of the story, Sherlock volunteers to be possessed by a Merinian, and there's a big showdown between him and Lestrade and maybe some other possessed humans? And Sherlock and the good guys win, of course, and the evil Paltronites are banished.

Also, there was supposed to have been an implied sex scene between Sherlock and the Eleventh Doctor at one point, because we were idiot kids who didn't know what we were doing and we thought that good fanfiction had to involve gay sex. Pro tip: it doesn't.

So yeah. That's what would have been. My coauthor and I broke up a few months after we stopped updating this fic, and later had a VERY acrimonious series of fights that ended our friendship. We haven't talked since the fall of our senior year, and I have no idea what she's up to these days. I have some pretty complicated feelings about all of this.

I am now 22 years old. Since this fic was written, I have realized I was a trans woman. I have attended and dropped out of college. I have had and beaten cancer. I haven't been interested in Sherlock in a long time, which maybe isn't surprising. I'm still idly interested in Doctor Who - I've dutifully kept up with the new seasons - but it's no longer the obsession it was when I was 14 and 15.

Writing this pseudo-epilogue has let me exorcise a few figurative demons. I'm finally tying up a loose thread that I left dangling a long time ago. I have no idea if anyone is going to read this at all, let alone any of the people who read the original fic back in 2013. Apparently this story has 24 follows, but who knows how many of those people will get the notification.

I may very well be the only person this will provide closure for. Oh well. At least it's something.

Thank you. This is the end of the Adventure of the Dozen Doctors.

-Jenna