You can't rewrite History. Not. One. Line!
"You can't rewrite history. Not. One. Line!"
The Doctor thought about the words her original incarnation had admonished Barbara with during that business with the Aztecs as she watched as Yaz held the watch her grandmother Umbreen had given her, and she could see the young woman's troubled expression; it wasn't something that was truly unexpected, discovering that her grandmother had married a Hindu during the Partition of India. She had been reluctant to take the TARDIS back in time after Yaz brought the watch to her. Companions visiting the past of their families was never a good idea, and it never really ended well.
She hated to admit it, but the Doctor had been terrified Yaz would let her down in a way that was similar to how Rose had asked/demanded to be taken back in time to see her father die, only to create an alternate timeline where Earth was being consumed by the Reapers.
Her first incarnation's beliefs were partly due to his own beliefs the timelines were immutable, thanks to Time Lord involvement and monitoring, but it was due to her fear of being caught by them after she and Susan had first fled Gallifrey in the TARDIS that the Doctor went out of her way not to make things easier for the Time Lords to capture them.
Oh, before they met Ian and Barbara, the Doctor and Susan had been keeping their heads down - more or less; there had been incidents during their early travels where they had interfered to a small degree which in the long run wouldn't have caused any problems, or they had become drawn into situations beyond their control.
But when Ian and Barbara forced their way into the TARDIS…
The Doctor smiled nostalgically for a moment as she thought about their early adventures (she didn't dare think about her first two trips to Skaro; she wanted to think happy thoughts, not gloomy ones about the Daleks); travelling across Marinus for the keys to a machine she did not like, encountering the Sensorites, Marco Polo, the Phoenicians, the mess on Destination with the Master. But the Doctor hadn't been surprised when Barbara, so overwhelmed by the Aztec's sudden reverence for her simply for wearing a piece of jewellery, had wanted to try to alter history to stop the Aztecs from committing human sacrifices. The history teacher had always been a compassionate woman, no doubt about that, but the Doctor knew it wouldn't do any good; not only would time not allow it since the Aztec religion was fixed history, but even if Barbara had managed to convert enough people against that religion, it would not do good in the long term. But one of the biggest reasons why the Doctor had opposed Barbara's attempts at changing history was down to her fear of the Time Lords being alerted.
Some Time Lords like the Monk and the Master didn't care about changing history; to them, they believed as Time Lords they had the right to change whatever they wished without thinking of the consequences; the Doctor remembered hearing how Romana, Braxiatel and Leela had visited an alternate version of Gallifrey where the Time Lords there were interventionists who wilfully changed history according to that Gallifrey's design. They incited wars, assassinated key players at important moments, and they mitigated the side effects.
The thought of a Gallifrey like that was horrifying, but not impossible since the Time Lords she had known the best had the same choice, but Rassilon had decided to go for non-interference in the affairs of the universe.
The Doctor frowned as her mind turned to the Monk. Out of all of her Time Lord enemies, the Monk was one the Doctor, although she would never admit it since the Monk reminded her too much of her seventh self, felt was close to her own methods. Sure, some had claimed the Master was her equal, but while that was true at times, the Monk's similarities to her seventh self were too hard to ignore.
As her eighth self had explained to Lucie on Deimos, the Monk and her seventh incarnation were both men with a master plan, both of them believed the ends justified the means; but even during that confrontation in London after Ace had attacked her, the Monk had made a good point about how she had broken the Laws of Time by leaving notes for herself in order to help her.
The Doctor remembered the way the Monk referred to her as a hypocrite; and she was, she had done much the same thing he and Knox had done, meddling with history although she preferred to think she did not abuse it the way the Monk or Knox had (she still had no idea who Knox was, or even what had made him decide to take that Type 70 TARDIS from Gryben), she preferred to think she was protecting history rather than changing it to fit with her own desires.
One of the biggest examples of how much like the Monk she was reminded her of that mess where her tenth self had ended up back in the pre-Time War universe and ran into a female incarnation of the Monk who was trying to get back the velocitar of her TARDIS back from a human scientist whom she had foolishly allowed entrance to her TARDIS to when she was helping him develop time travel.
The Nun had once more pointed out how similar she and the Doctor were; both of them had changed their own pasts in radical ways. The Doctor was still haunted by her encounter with Faction Paradox in San Francisco, especially since the encounter would be part of the avalanche of paradoxes in that part of her life.
When time was falling apart because she had taken the velocitar out of Sheldrake's time tunnel generators, the Doctor and the Nun had worked together to save time. At one point the Doctor had realised that she could use the set-up to really change history; with it, she could ensure so many things had not taken place.
The paradoxes with Fitz and Sam, while she was dealing with the looming shadow of a mysterious Enemy who was capable of matching the Time Lords, resulting in that long chase through time and space from the Time Lords when Compassion transformed into a TARDIS, before the Faction's battle which resulted in the destruction Gallifrey, and the Doctor compressing the matrix into her mind.
She could ensure Padrac didn't try to destroy the universe.
With the setup, she could ensure the Time War never took place.
But the Nun had stopped her from making that mistake; the Doctor didn't know why she had done that, but it was possible the Nun was intimidated by the lines she was willing to cross when she had the chance, lines that even the Monk wouldn't cross since it could damage history. The Doctor still wasn't sure why, but she privately believed the Nun realised that all of the events that she, the Doctor, had plans to alter would cause too much damage.
It was ironic; the Doctor knew the Monk had no qualms or problems with meddling with time, but it seemed that even the Monk, who frequently meddled so much with history could tell that kind of meddling could potentially tear holes in the universe.
Shaking off her stroll down memory lane, the Doctor looked at Yaz; after her experiences with Rose, and how that went, she had been worried Yaz might make some stupid mistake which would paradox her out of existence, but she hadn't. While the business with the Thijarians had been jarring since the Doctor had not expected them to suddenly change their culture in such a drastic way, she could sort of understand.
Maybe she did interfere with history, but at least she knew the definition for 'better' was way different from that of the Monk.
Author's Note - The Meddling Monk was a renegade Time Lord who meddled in history; in a meeting with the Seventh Doctor in the novel No Future, the Monk was revealed as being behind a small collection of parallel universes including one where the Silurians defeated humanity and killed the Third Doctor in an alternative to Doctor Who and the Silurians. In the same book, the Monk pointed out the Seventh Doctor had adopted some of his own methods, something the Eighth Doctor later picked up on when meeting him again in The Resurrection of Mars, where he described his predecessor to Lucie Miller in the Big Finish productions.
The story with the Nun, a female incarnation of the Monk, was first featured in the Dalek Universe 1 boxset, The Wrong Woman where the Nun pretended to be a female version of the Doctor. She stated she had changed her past so many times she didn't even know which regeneration she was on. The Tenth Doctor was dragged into the pre-Time War universe and he worked with the Nun when time was damaged and he paused when he realised he could change the past...only for the Time meddler, he has degraded over the years to pull him back.
Robert Knox was a human with an unknown name, who had bought a TARDIS and used it to try to change history. I hope you liked the references to the Eighth Doctor novels.
Please let me know what you think.