Doctor Who

Carol of the Doctor

Episode Three

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"This is clearly some sort of fabrication," the Doctor said, somewhat unimpressed by everything that was happening in front of her. "There's no way you can be the Timeless Child and you know it."

"But I am," said her doppelgänger. "The Master showed me in the Matrix-"

"The Master?" the Doctor said in shock.

"Hang on a moment," said her doppelgänger, taking out her sonic and scanning the Doctor. The Doctor couldn't help but cringe at the over-elaborate arm swings her other self was doing, surely she didn't look that daft now, did she? Her doppelgänger glanced at the readings, her brow furrowed.

"This isn't possible," the doppelgänger said. "You're the exact same age as me."

"Come again?" said Graham.

"She," the other Doctor said, pointing to the Doctor in front of her, "isn't from my past or my future. She and I are the exact same age, down to the microsecond. But that shouldn't be possible. One of us should be at least a little bit older or younger."

"I don't understand," began Ryan.

"Remember the time you accidentally bumped into your future self? It was a few hours in the future, yes, but you were two distinct individuals due to having different chronological ages. But this... this shouldn't be possible." The Doctor turned back from her companions to this strange Doctor in front of her. "Are you from another universe?"

"No?" the Doctor said in confusion. "Are you?"

"I'm confused," said the young woman, who looked like a far younger version of the woman the Doctor had met hours ago. Was it true that this Yaz woman had travelled with her? Or maybe she travelled with this other Doctor? "Doctor?" the young woman continued, both Doctors in a world of their own.

"Yes?" they said in unison, before glancing at each other in annoyance.

"Okay, this is just too confusing," said Ryan.

"'ere, I know," said Graham. "We'll call our Doctor 'Doctor A'. And you can be 'Doctor B'."

"Fine, whatever," snapped the Doctor, deciding that 'B' was just as good as anything else.

"Right, glad we got that sorted," said Doctor A. "So you must be from some alternate timeline? Parallel to this one, but diverged at a certain point. But to have you exist for so long would take incredibly power."

"The power of the Children," Doctor B mused.

"The who?" asked Doctor A.

"The Children of Gallifrey? The Timeless Child? The Nightmare Child? Paradox? You really have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?"

Doctor A shook her head in confusion. It suddenly occurred to Doctor B that they hadn't even acknowledged the Timeless Child standing next to her. Could they not see it?

"I'm the Timeless Child," Doctor A said slowly. "The Master showed me in the Matrix, like I said. I've lived many, many lives, being an operative for Gallifrey and having my mind wiped several times. In actuality I'm not even a Gallifreyan, I was found on the edge of a portal and experimented on due to my ability to regenerate. The Time Lords took that ability from me and used it to create their entire race."

"But that's not possible," Doctor B said. "The Timeless Child was a weapon of the Time War. Created to defeat the Daleks. You were there when it was created. You were its father."

"I find that very hard to believe," Doctor A scoffed. "Here, let me show you." She stepped forward and put a hand on her duplicates head. Images rushed into the Doctor's mind, strange adventures her copy had gone on. From seeing the Master on a plane, to an alternate version of her battling the Judoon, to the image of a small child in front of a giant portal. The Doctor stepped back, head swirling.

"That portal," Doctor B said. "That's what we used to trap the Children. That was their cage. Somehow they managed to come back through it and fundamentally change history."

"I'm sorry?" said Doctor A.

"No wonder all of this is just wrong," Doctor B said, ignoring her inferior copy. "No wonder everything that happened to you makes no sense. The Children have attacked my own timeline, changed me into something completely new and unrecognizable. You're not the Doctor, you're some strange inferior clone of me."

"Now come on," Graham said, as he and his two friends rushed to the Doctor's aid. Their Doctor waved her hand aside, walking over to the Doctor standing in front of her.

"Who are you to tell me that I don't matter," she said angrily. "As far as I'm concerned you're the abnormal one. I saw your history, same way that you saw mine."

"You let all the Time Lords die!"

"And you forgot Yaz. You abandoned her. You abandoned your fam."

"Yaz..." began Doctor B.

"Let me remind you," said Doctor A sourly, slamming into her duplicate every memory she had of Yaz. Doctor B stumbled back in confusion and shock, suddenly remembering that Yaz existed. Her Yaz, the Yaz from her timeline, the one she'd abandoned in the church by accident...

"You're not better than me," said Doctor A. "You think you're better, you act like you're better, but at least I stood by my friends. At least I tried to do the right thing. What about you? You seemed to just cause more heartache and destruction wherever you went. If I'm not the Doctor than you're not either."

The Doctor stared at her duplicate in shock. The woman in front of her... she was the Doctor, and yet, she wasn't. She was a version of her, a splinter off her timeline, someone who had lived a completely different year to her. She spun back round, facing the child standing beside her.

"Why are you showing me this?" hissed the Doctor, towering over the child.

"You wanted me to stop torturing you," the child said. "You wanted to see what you'd be like if me and my kind never existed. That is her, right there."

"But she thinks she's the Timeless Child, which is just... absurd. Complete and utter nonsense. What did you do?"

"It wasn't me. It would have been one of my siblings. Working together to get revenge on you. To radically alter who you are."

"Why?"

"To stop you. If you weren't the Doctor, if you were just a shallow replica of yourself, a hollow and unrecognizable shell, then you'd be unable to stop them."

"So you're showing me this... to have me help you stop them? But..."

The Doctor turned back and looked at her other self and her fam. They'd frozen during the argument, allowing the Doctor to look at them in greater detail. They seemed to be almost two-dimensional, lacking any and all depth.

"If my siblings run out of control this is what you're reduced to," the child said. "Nothing of any importance. Certainly unable to stop them."

"But why do you want to stop them? Surely you realize that I have to put you back in the cage as well?"

"I know that," the child said solemnly. "And I don't mind if I go back into the cage, as long as..."

"As long as what?" the Doctor asked cautiously.

"As long as you're with me," the child said. "If you come in with us, you can entertain us, take us on adventures, keep us happy. You stay with us, and we won't want to escape."

"You want me to trap myself in your universe?" the Doctor said in horror. "To be one of your playthings, forever trapped under your control? Are you crazy? I'll never do it."

"I'm afraid you'd say that," the child said sadly, tears welling up in its eyes. "But it's the only way of stopping them."

"No," the Doctor said defiantly. "I will stop your siblings. I will stop you. I will throw you back into the cage where you belong, and make sure you can never, ever get out again. I will make sure the universe is never threatened by your kind again. I'm the Doctor, and you are the monster. And I will never, ever give up."

The child looked up at its parent in fear, the same way any child looks up to a parent when their caregiver is displeased with them. But the child knew that it had to have its parent understand what was happening, why it was important, why it mattered.

"So be it," the child said sadly, and snapped its fingers once more.

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Once the lights around the Doctor faded she found herself back in her TARDIS. The same crystals poked up from the ground, a convenient thing to hang onto whenever things went wrong. The same central console hummed and purred. The Doctor put her hand on it, shocked that she'd ever be back there.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" said a female voice. The Doctor turned to see a woman storming angrily towards her. The Doctor leapt back in shock, ready to get her sonic out as a way of protecting herself, but paused. The TARDIS didn't seem to react to this woman, and the Doctor had learned a long time ago that it was always best to trust the old girl.

"Who are you?" the Doctor asked. "And what are you doing in my TARDIS?"

"I could ask you the same question," the woman replied, checking the instruments.

"Well I'm the Doctor," the Doctor said. "And this is my home. What you're doing here is beyond me."

"I'm Yaz," the woman said, much to the Doctor's confusion. "And this is my home. You're not welcome here."

"Did you say Yaz?" The woman in front of her looked nothing like the Yaz she'd met twice now, and it seemed too big of a coincidence to ignore. Then again whose to say there was only one Yaz in existence? The universe was a big place, after all. Or hopefully still was.

"You got a problem with that, Doctor," said Yaz, almost spitting the last word. Satisfied that the TARDIS was okay she walked back over to the armchair she had been sitting in, picking up her book. The Doctor cautiously wandered over, wondering where she found an original printing of H. G. Well's 'The Time Machine'.

"Is the Doctor nearby?" the Doctor asked curiously.

"There hasn't been a Doctor here for centuries," Yaz replied in discontent, picking up her cream custard biscuit and eating it while also flipping the page.

"Where is she? Or he? They? Pronouns have always been confusing, you lot love to use them."

"She disappeared a long time ago," Yaz said, still not looking at the Doctor, focusing solely on her book.

"Where did she go?"

"Dunno. One day she was here, next moment she wasn't. I've been here ever since, looking after the old girl. Only thing worth doing at this point."

"Well shouldn't we go look for the Doctor? I can't help but feel personally invested in their safety."

"Good luck with that," said Yaz, as she refused to look at her new arrival.

"You don't mind if I pilot the TARDIS then?" Yaz said nothing, which the Doctor took as the all-clear. She went over to the console, checking the various instruments.

"Hang on," the Doctor said in confusion. "Have we already landed?"

"You could say that," Yaz said back, still not paying attention.

"But it also says we're in flight..." The Doctor turned on the scanner, only to be faced with static. That was concerned above all else. The Doctor glanced back at the stranger in the armchair, then back to the controls. They said they'd landed, and the shields were on at full strength regardless...

"I'm just popping out," the Doctor said, waiting for any reaction that opening those doors would be a terminal mistake. There was none, so the Doctor shrugged and made her way to the doors, opening them to find...

There was nothing. Absolutely nothing. There wasn't even any black or white, cos that would have been something. There was just... the absence of anything and everything.

"Where are we?" the Doctor called back in confusion.

"On Earth," Yaz replied. "Sheffield, to be specific. Its exact co-ordinates."

The Doctor scowled, rummaging through her pockets and finding a yo yo. She let it fly forward, past the TARDIS shields, into the nothingness. As soon as it left the shields it disappeared. It ceased to exist. It never existed. The string fell down limply, cut off from the toy.

"This can't be Sheffield," the Doctor said. "This is... nothing."

"Correct," said Yaz, suddenly standing behind the Doctor. "That is nothing. That is what happens when the Children of Gallifrey get bored of the universe. That is what happens when their temper tantrum gets out of control. That is everything that survives of it."

"How do you know that?"

"Because I'm the one that let it happen. I'm the one that caused the end of the universe."

"But that would mean..." began the Doctor, before looking closely at Yaz, her face filled with horror.

"Hello Doctor," said Yaz. "Welcome to your future."