As usual, I don't own Doctor Who.

Unlike other people, I don't have a problem with the Timeless Child concept, although I think there could have been better ways it could have been executed. For instance, the Doctor could have had little snippets of it revealed over her time since it was first brought up on Desolation, instead of getting it all at once. If the writers had done that, then I think the series could have been better accepted.

My best guess is the Timeless Child was brainwashed by the Time Lords into forgetting everything, but they later remembered and threw themselves into the Looms to make a statement to the Time Lords, and then the genetic material would reform to create the Doctor we all know.

Now, in the spirit of the Big Finish Unbound range, I give you a series of short stories showcasing a universe where the Timeless Child wasn't brainwashed, but discovered the future, and didn't want to forget who they were. Many of the Doctor's incarnations will be identical to the ones in the show, but there will be other alternates as well.

Anyway, enjoy.

Doctor Who Unbound

Timeless Traveller.

Exile.

Travelling through the Time Vortex, a white box resembling a simple white cabinet complete with a door was spinning through the hostile environment on a random course to a random point in time and space.

The box appeared simple and completely bare. In fact, to any outside observer, it would have appeared that somebody had just thrown the box into the Time Vortex and discarded it, letting the Vortex carry it on its way to a new time and place in the universe. It was trapped. A simple box left to be battered to pieces by the time winds.

Inside the box, things were very different. The outside of the box appeared small, however, its interior was a vast miniature universe incredibly vast and contained concepts and ideas currently unknown to many races in the cosmos, beginning with an impossibly large control room and carrying on through a vast labyrinth of dimensions those same races would never be able to comprehend at a certain period of their existence. The box was a TARDIS, a time and space ship designed and grown by the Time Lords of Gallifrey.

In the middle of the control room was a tall, well built blonde woman with a pair of glasses perched on her nose as she frantically studied the controls in front of her, dressed in a long dark red coat and black shirt.

This woman was known as the Doctor, although some referred to her as the Other, one of the founders of the Time Lord race. You would think with a title and a standing like that, then the Doctor would have some degree of authority among her adoptive species, but she didn't. Far from it.

Among the Time Lords, the Doctor/the Other, was seen as an outsider.

Once it had bothered her especially after she had first regenerated on Gallifrey during that accident with a friend, but now after so many centuries of being on Gallifrey and seeing the rise of the Time Lords - she had witnessed the rise of Rassilon and Omega as they had both worked on developing time travel, she had seen them conduct the research where they had developed the Eye of Harmony, and she'd had a close-up view as they had snatched a star in the process of becoming a black hole before Omega was sucked in and vanished, she had then watched as the Time Lords ascended with her power of regeneration and their new powers over time and space, watched them as they had begun exploring the universe, slowly engaging in the responsibilities of mastering time travel and making sure nobody damaged the structure in the universe with more unstable time travel methods.

The Doctor hadn't shared any of that glory. No, her claim to fame was in being an outsider who had provided them with the means of starting off their quest for quasi immortality before the twelve regeneration limit had been pushed through, although she had never had it happen to her; they might have altered their genetic structures enough to allow them to also possess the regenerative capability she'd brought with her from... wherever she came from, to be spliced into their own genome, but her own was still unknown and they couldn't tamper with it, and being forced to watch as the Time Lords took her 'contribution' of regeneration which was her own little claim to fame, although Artron's own work had provided them with more control, to her being forced into working in the Division.

A top-secret organisation, the Division actively went behind the back of the Time Lords and interfered with the timelines, ensuring certain events occurred without caring who paid the price.

The Doctor had endured it all; the experiments, the way Tecteun had poked and prodded her, studied her while trying to discover how regeneration worked and how it could be granted to the Gallifreyan people. In time her love for the woman had withered and died as the woman subjected her to more and more painful experiments, costing her several regenerations along the line. It had taken her years before she realised that was what Tecteun wanted; she wanted her to go through her lives, watching them pass as if the grains of sand passing through an hourglass. She had witnessed as Tecteun had become consumed with the desire for 'eternal life' before she eventually discovered the right way to splice the gene codes into her own body, granting her very first regeneration; she had watched for centuries as the Gallifreyans slowly mastered time travel, culminating in the days of Omega and Rassilon, witnessed the first TARDIS experiments before the technology was perfected, and she had joined the Division because she hadn't had much choice.

She had endured it all.

And now she had no faith in the Time Lords. They had become arrogant

Nowadays the Doctor no longer cared about not being able to fit in, especially after she had been treated. The Doctor had only joined the Division because she had been asked, but after a few centuries she'd had enough, but they had refused to let her go without having her brain wiped clean of her memories. And now the Doctor was on the run from them. She knew she wouldn't get too far, but she could still try.

In the meantime, she needed to come up with a plan that could help her in the long term.

X

"Come on!" The Doctor snarled, slapping her hand against the console in frustration. "We're not going fast enough!"

Alright, she knew it wasn't the fault of the TARDIS; she knew if she tried to break the time limit within the Vortex, the scanners on Gallifrey would pick it up, and then her desperate bout for freedom would be thwarted.

The Doctor checked the navigational controls, sighing with satisfaction when she saw the controls were still randomised although she had made sure Kasterbrous was nowhere near the landing zone. After letting out another sigh, the Doctor leaned against the console and took a moment to think.

She had only just managed to escape Gallifrey, leaving before she'd had a chance to properly think through her actions. Deep down she knew she hadn't really had a plan in her mind when she had made the desperate decision to escape from Gallifrey but she had needed to escape quickly when she had let off the telepathic bomb in the offices of the Division and made it to the TARDIS and escaped. At least she had the head start, although she had needed to go the long way around to the bay, passing close by a number of Loom, she hadn't paid them any attention; she had her view of the Time Lords' need to be so above things like sexual reproduction, but it was irrelevant at this point as she'd been desperate to reach the TARDIS and just go.

She had needed to escape.

Desperately.

The Doctor had been working for the Division for a long time, and while she'd had differing opinions over the course of her regenerations over the years about their methods, she believed they were truly unpleasant. The Time Lords had over the years since they'd gained mastery of time developed a degree of arrogance and self-righteous importance which grated. Gallifrey was no longer the world the Doctor remembered from when Tecteun had brought her there.

And now the Division planned on wiping her memory. When she had discovered what they had in mind, the Doctor had immediately put forward a plan to escape, but now she had the chance to think to herself and what was driving their thought process along the Doctor supposed it made a degree of sick sense the Division would take that direction in order to remain anonymous so no-one would reveal their existence.

Ever since that disaster with Minyos, the Time Lords had gone out of their way to not meddle in the affairs of other races, although the philosophy did exist in a nascent form even before then; some Time Lord pioneers believed that they should not go too far when they visited new worlds, however, it was not until the Time Lords interfered too much with terrible results they stopped.

But the Division took interference into directions that made even those early messes seem normal by comparison, it wasn't a surprise they wanted to keep quiet about it all.

The Doctor listened to the cycling of the engines as the TARDIS was pushed through the Time Vortex. She smiled at the sound, relishing her freedom… and then all the emergency alarms went off, startling her.

"What?" She yelped as she ran around the console, pushing buttons, flicking switches and checking the displays before she stepped back in horror. They'd found her.

The realisation had only just sunk into her mind when a voice boomed from the very walls of the TARDIS.

"We have caught you at last, Doctor," the female voice boomed ironically before hardening. "Don't try to break free. We have the energy signature of your TARDIS."

"Well you know how it is, if you don't try then you won't know, will you?" The Doctor examined the controls, biting her lip as she thought about what she could do. Even if the Time Lords did have her ship's energy signature, there were ideas she could put into effect. If she could use the transference jump… Unfortunately, she didn't have time to try any kind of escape plan because the lights dimmed aside from the emergency lighting.

"No!" The Doctor raced around the controls to try to stop what was happening, but when she tried to adjust the controls she received a minor electric shock. She snatched her hand away, staring at it in shock.

"Oh, and I forgot to mention we have triggered the security systems in your TARDIS only we have switched them to reject you," the voice went on, sounding so smug and amused the Doctor wished the woman was there so she could kill them. "Knowing your history, this precaution is merely prudent. Now," the voice dropped all humour, "you are going to return to Gallifrey with us, and when we arrive you will step out of the TARDIS or suffer the consequences."

The Doctor was tempted to make a snarky remark, but her hearts weren't in it. She knew the Time Lords did not make empty threats on this subject, and she knew it was hopeless. When they arrived back on Gallifrey, her TARDIS was likely to be locked down completely and there was no way she could get access to any Time Lord technology that would help. It was truly the end of the line. "What will you do with me when we get back?" She just had to ask; she knew of course, but she wanted to see if there was anything she could do.

"I would have thought that was obvious, Doctor. Your memory will be wiped."

I also note you won't tell me what will happen to me afterwards, the Doctor noted privately to herself, shivering at the thought of not only losing her memory but having no idea who she was. The thought of losing the centuries of her long life frightened the Doctor dreadfully and she had no idea what the Time Lords or the Division had in mind for her in time.

The Doctor walked around the TARDIS control room, not having anything else to do but think about what was in her limited future. There was nothing she could do, the Time Lords had won. She was finished, they had won. Now her memories would be erased, and Omega knew (always one of her favourite founders next to Artron, the only truly pleasant of all of the founders; Rassilon was nothing more than an arrogant bastard whose delusions for grandeur made way to even greater delusions of grandeur) what would happen to her then.

The Division would likely brainwash her, transform her into what they'd consider to be the most perfect agent, loyal and obedient without any of the soul the Doctor believed was important to herself. She knew there was a solution to the problem. The TARDIS was virtually useless to her at the moment, but there might be a way she could survive on Gallifrey…. But at the same time, the Doctor wondered what would happen to her.

No, not wondered what would happen to her.

Needed to know, she corrected herself. She needed to know what was going to happen to her. The Doctor looked thoughtfully around the room, her eyes picking out the scanner instantly, knowing that if she had the power then she could boot up the Time Scanner facility in the TARDIS, and if she could feed in some of her biodata, maybe rework it in a few minutes with the skills she'd picked up over the centuries. But as she looked around the console room she was confronted with the bigger problem.

A lack of power.

The Doctor looked around the console room for inspiration, her mind racing with various ideas before she settled on the console itself. More specifically the console stem. "Of course, the power cells," she whispered. The Doctor rushed over to the console stem and tore up one of the floor panels and dug in, throwing components out all over the room. She grinned when she saw there were still working trans-power cells, they were glowing green with Artron energy. The Doctor pulled out one of the cells and cradled it in her hand for a moment.

She knew theoretically she could use the cell to jumpstart the TARDIS, but the Doctor knew it was hopeless with the Time Lords possessing her ship's energy signature. They would only chase her again throughout the universe, no matter how hard she tried to hide. There were options to prevent that, of course; she could use the Chameleon Arch to hide her essence while her body was free, and she could bury her TARDIS somewhere on some planet where it wouldn't be found.

No. Even if she went through those hoops to escape the Time Lords, in the long run, she would just be caught out again. And besides, she had spent the last two hundred years of her life trying to run and hide from the Time Lords and look where it had gotten her.

Now she wanted to know what was going to happen to her…

An hour later the Doctor smiled as she admired her work. She had torn the scanner circuitry to shreds while she had linked the device built into the console which detected the DNA or the technology signature of a species to set the TARDIS on course there to it. She had already planted in some of her biodata into the lash-up, connecting it all to the power cell. At the same time, she connected her mind to the telepathic circuits of the TARDIS to help guide the TARDIS into determining potential timelines. She had connected a small palm scanner to the different devices to provide her with better control. Now all she needed to do was to run it.

She prepared to switch on the scanner, her finger poised over the controls… she hesitated. She knew she was about to break the fundamental laws of time just by doing this; looking into the future was not just frowned upon, it was forbidden. The Doctor considered the matter for a moment before she shrugged her shoulders, and decided to do it anyway; with what the Time Lords and the Division had in mind for her, did it make any difference?

She adjusted one of the palm scanner controls, and aside from a brief spark where she was left worried the whole lash-up was doomed to fail, the scanner activated. The Doctor watched as three members of the Division led her as she was now into a bare room where they forced her to sit down in a chair where they clamped a helmet to her head before they stepped back while another threw the switch.

It was hard and bizarre for the Doctor to watch herself going through the memory wiping procedure, flinching in horror as she listened to her future self scream in horror, something which hadn't even happened to her yet - that was one of the more ethical reasons why the Time Lords forbade people from discovering their own futures - but as she watched the procedure end, the Doctor on the screen slumped forward.

One of the Division personnel walked over and examined the Doctor on the screen. "She's unconscious."

"Good. Take her to the laboratory for dissection."

"At once."

"Finally we will discover the full secrets of regeneration…"

So that's what they're doing, they want to dissect me. But why make me into an agent for them in the first place when that's what they'd had in mind the entire time? That makes no sense; did they plan to lull me into a false sense of security while making this plot? No, that makes no sense either. The Time Lords have had me around for millennia, why would they only make a move now? Ooh, conspiracies; they are so confusing albeit they are still compelling, the Doctor thought to herself as she watched.

Suddenly her eyes widened when, as she watched her future self being carried away on a gurney, she watched the future Doctor suddenly collapse into a pile of dust. The Doctor gaped in surprise, her eyes wide in shock. That should not have happened at all. She leaned forward when she saw the stunned Time Lords surround the pile. One of them showed some initiative - if there was one thing the Doctor hated the most about this version of Gallifreyan society it was how seriously they took their training in detachment but it also seemed the attitude and their years stagnating on Gallifrey where everything there was provided from energy to food and drink also stopped them from showing initiative - and pulled a scanner out of the pocket in their robes and examined the pile.

"This wasn't the Doctor," he reported to the others, his expression of astonishment warring with his detached manner. "It was some kind of clone, probably a holographic clone; that's the simplest means of cloning someone."

"Yes," the leading member of the Division said the word slowly, calm warring with rage. "The Doctor's escaped again!"

The image changed. The Doctor frowned as she saw them, instinctively knowing she was looking at a completely different potential timeline to the one she had just seen, thanks to the biological tinkering to her biodata which she'd gained after her time with the Time Lords. She was surprised by what was happening now, but she couldn't help but wonder if what was about to happen to her on Gallifrey was a temporal nexus point.

That would make sense with why she was seeing; she watched as an old man with a young, dark-haired girl worked alongside two people wearing bland clothing helped a race known as the Thals fight off the Daleks and seeing how the old man who was apparently known as the Doctor sabotaged his own TARDIS, effectively stranding them there before being forced to fight against the Daleks because they didn't have much choice… a younger version of the same incarnation travelling with two friends to the Celestial Toyroom (what were they thinking? Surely they knew of the legends of the Toymaker and the things that creature could do?). She wasn't surprised when she saw the other her escape the Toymaker without his friends, the Toymaker promising to return later when the other her posed more of a challenge….. she watched as that particular incarnation's life moved on, but she was mentally disorientated by the way there wasn't any true time scale. Confusedly she saw patches of his youth on Gallifrey; she watched as he emerged from the Loom of the Lungbarrow family without any clue as to his true past or heritage. She saw moments of his education at the Prydonian Academy, the friends he had made and the things he had done….

It went on and on in a confusing mix that gave the Doctor a headache before she adjusted the telepathic circuits a little to try to make the unfolding events appear linear.

When more moments of this other Doctor's life appeared to her, they seemed more ordered and less chaotic than before. She watched as the other Doctor encountered Sensorites, the Daleks on more than one occasion (she was concerned with the Daleks and how quickly they had mastered a bastardised, primitive version of Time Lord technology and she wondered if they had somehow found a very old TARDIS to copy and understand the principles from in order to develop a time machine of that sophistication even if it was definitely crude; then again it was more logical to suppose they had copied the concept of dimensional transcendentalism from observing the way the other Doctor's TARDIS worked), encountering two renegade Time Lords in the form of the Master and the Monk, encountering an alternative timeline where the primitive A.I known as WOTAN was a global threat before negating it later, to encountering the Cybermen of Mondas and undergoing a regeneration.

The Doctor had come to the conclusion that this must be a version of her who'd had their memory completely wiped by the Division and something must have happened later to make this her believe they were the First Doctor. Why else would that version of her (he? It was hard to be one-hundred per cent sure, given how fleeting it was, but his attitude towards regeneration reminded her of how frightened many Time Lords were before the first change)

The trouble was she couldn't be sure.

She had several ideas for how this Doctor had turned out, but it was clear the Time Lords had either thrown her into the Looms to create this Doctor, or she had sacrificed herself. She had heard of some Time Lords who were truly desperate enough to live forever, or they were so bored with their current lives they would throw themselves into the Looms where their bodies would be broken up into a genetic soup which would then wait for centuries within the Loom's pattern buffer, and then centuries later it would be used to create a new clone of the original who'd go on their merry way.

She had never seen that in her own future, but she didn't like the idea of just throwing herself into a Loom with the hope one day a clone of her would live again. Either way she would have lost all her memories and would have had no idea who she was.

The Doctor mentally sighed and focused on the life of this other Doctor while using her own mind as a lens to her focus on them. She was not happy to watch as the next few incarnations of this Doctor were forced to work for the Time Lords, and it brought out the saying in her mind the more things change, the more they stay the same.

It was certainly true here. But what she was concerned about the most was this Doctor seemed to be becoming more and more involved with the affairs of the universe. That was worrying, and while someone might compare it to her own work, she would be quick to tell them there was a stark difference between her own activities and this Doctor.

She watched moments of a smaller, scruffier version of her was caught by the Time Lords and sentenced to exile to Earth, only to be used by an organisation that had the Doctor worried they were linked somehow to the Division, in a number of clandestine memories where his memory would be wiped frequently. She watched in horror as the other her realised this so many times, but was in no position to do anything.

No, I can't let this happen….

She watched in surprise as three different versions of this Doctor's third incarnation came out, which surprised her a great deal that there was such a strong temporal nexus around that point in their collective histories to create such a number of clear alternative timelines.

One was a woman, like her current self, who'd somehow managed to escape their trial and the CIA's missions and their mind wiping. She'd fled to Earth determined to hide from the Time Lords. Only it hadn't worked, she had been tracked down and subsequently exiled to her TARDIS, where she would be erased from history….

The Doctor listened with horror as the Time Lords gave their sentence to that version of herself, and she became even more determined to make sure it didn't happen.

The other third Doctor was luckier; this one, a male incarnation, had been exiled to Earth, only he somehow found himself exiled to a later point than he had expected in the 20th century…. The Doctor watched as this version of her managed to encounter an older, bitterer version of an old friend, discovering to his horror that because of his absence Earth had suffered tremendous damage; the Doctor had only visited the planet a handful of times, but she had a certain liking for the planet even if the humans and their lack of common sense annoyed her, but she would never have wanted a lake to be formed in the centre of one of their cities, craters covering one of their continents…. She watched as he managed to restore his freedom very quickly before she mentally commanded the telepathic circuits to show her what would have happened in a different timeline.

The images changed again in her mind, coalescing into a view of the second Doctor changing into a tall man with white-grey hair. And then she saw the exile to Earth; five pathetically short years stranded on a level 5 planet with an average star… Actually, by the Doctor's current standards, the exile wasn't that bad if you looked at it from a certain way. Yes, the humans were primitive and trying, but they were more tolerable than the Time Lords. The Doctor was intrigued by Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, and she felt the man was someone she would like to know.

She watched as this Doctor frequently became frustrated and annoyed by the technical limitations of the period as he struggled to remember how to repair his TARDIS. She watched as he encountered the species known as the Silurians and the Sea Devils, the Primords, the Daleks, the Nestene Consciousness….. And she saw the missions the Time Lords forced on the other her. While the Time Lords didn't tinker with the other Doctor's mind as they had before, she was still annoyed that in her future the Time Lords would still force him to do their dirty work; yes, the time where they had sent this version of her to Solos was one of the few exceptions, but the deliberate way they had sent her other self to Peladon and Uxarieus, using the TARDIS and the cruel way they had taken her other self's hopes for freedom and tore them apart without a thought. The Doctor had good memories of her association with Omega, so it was painful when she saw her other self and his previous two incarnations encounter a deranged version of the stellar engineer and astrophysicist stranded in a universe of antimatter, who wanted to drain the Time Lords of their power and use it to free himself. But Omega couldn't. He had spent so long in the antimatter cosmos his body had literally been eaten away, leaving his mind behind only. Her hearts broke for him, but truthfully she didn't condemn her other-selves for destroying him with that flute which had been lodged in the forcefield generator and was not converted into antimatter like everything else Omega had sucked into that realm. She mentally narrowed her eyes at the way the Time Lords had freed her other self; her other self might have been delighted but she wasn't for some reason.

Other events of the other Doctor's timeline appeared telepathically and were beamed into her mind, but they were coming in at different strengths. She theorised the TARDIS's mind and the governing circuit was trying to prevent her from learning too much of her other self's potential future, but that didn't stop her. She wanted to know what other horrors her other self would have to endure if the Division got what they wanted, and if it broke the laws of time, so be it.

She watched as her other self changed with each regeneration, going through a number of human or alien companions, encountering new and old enemies as he went. However, the time she spent watching their times were intermittent although there were moments which stuck in her mind. There was a curiously murky part of the temporal images and she guessed there was a tremendous amount of temporal activity from paradoxes or time itself was so badly affected.

She was surprised when the murkiness shifted, and she witnessed a version of her travelling around who believed the ends justified the means, and he was unafraid to get his hands dirty to have that belief realised, either from murder or subterfuge; she witnessed as this her landed his TARDIS inside a sea-base where secret illegal genetic experiments were being carried out….she watched as the other new, who was clearly the Doctor of an alternate timeline, killed the man responsible for the experiments before killing another scientist who had been used as a guinea pig….she watched as this Doctor also condemned someone to suffer in solitude by cutting them off from the Ethereal.

The Doctor was annoyed there wasn't much more about this version of herself as the murkiness appeared again as she once more wanted to see what was happening to the prime Doctor. The murkiness shifted, revealing new versions of herself. One was a tall man with an angular face, short dark hair and big ears who travelled in a universe where he claimed to be the last of the Time Lords. The Doctor was surprised when she observed and heard what the Doctor was saying in those images.

For a moment the Doctor wondered if her future self had discovered the truth of his origins, that he was not a Time Lord, but then she realised that couldn't be true since he had claimed to be a Time Lord and was the last. Something had clearly happened to Gallifrey, and whatever it was it must have been tremendous. That was clearly the reason for the temporal murkiness she'd encountered, and she realised the reason was partly because of the TARDIS trying to prevent her from learning too much of the future, but whatever had happened in the future around that point of her future self's timeline must have been tremendous to cause that much damage. She watched as this Doctor travelled with a human girl, and thanks to having so many female incarnations, she was able to see that this girl was taking advantage of the Doctor. One of the biggest notable instances was when this girl, Rose Tyler apparently, manipulated her future self into taking her back in time to see her father die…. Only to tell him to go back again, and she created a wound in time. After seeing the way her future self was killed by the Reapers, the Doctor wondered what had caused her future self so much mental pain he would consider keeping this manipulative girl.

More and more images passed through her mind, darkening with more murkiness again although she wondered what had caused this one before they finally coalesced into something more solid. This time showing the Doctor an unfamiliar man with floppy brown hair wearing a bow tie. The Doctor looked at him, head tilted in curiosity at the appearance of this future her; she knew regeneration was a lottery, but she hadn't expected this…

And then she saw that the floppy-haired man was not alone. In the background was a reptilian woman, a redhead wearing what looked like a hospital gown, and - bizarrely enough - a man wearing what looked like a set of Roman centurion armour. The floppy-haired man was looking at a woman with big, curly hair.

"Well, then soldier," the woman asked, an arrogance in her voice the Doctor despised instantly, but her mocking smile made the Doctor dislike her even more. "How goes the day?"

The floppy-haired man marched up to her, his expression showing his anger with every step. "Where the hell have you been?" He asked, stressing each word of his question before he stopped in front of her. "Every time you have asked I have been there, where the HELL were you today?" He demanded in a shaky voice before he came to a halt in front of her while he shook with rage.

The woman's mocking smile faded a little bit, but it was too late, the Doctor had already worked out this was not a woman she would want to know.

No this was not some woman that she would like; the Doctor admired confidence in people, no question, but after seeing the line drawn between some of her own previous selves who'd been more arrogant than confident, she had come to see the dangers of being too arrogant.

Unfortunately, this woman seemed to be performing a balancing act over that line; that smile on her face and the arrogant way she was speaking made the Doctor suspect she felt nothing could happen to her because she was her.

But she knew something big must have happened to make this floppy-haired her lash out like that.

"I couldn't have prevented this," she began, unperturbed with his anger, but the floppy-haired man interrupted her, clearly too angry to care about what she was going to say.

"You could have tried!" He growled as he stalked away, clearly too angry to look at her.

"And so, my love, could you," the woman said quietly, making the future Doctor turn curiously at what she was about to say, however both the current Doctor and the future Doctor knew this was not going to be good.

The woman turned to the couple who were still embracing each other - the Doctor wished she knew what had been happening so she could give it some context, but there was nothing - and she said, "I know you're not alright, but hold tight, Amy because you're going to be."

The floppy-haired Doctor jabbed out an arm, pointing at the couple. "You think I wanted this," he began, drawing the woman's attention back to him, " I can do this. This wasn't me!"

The Doctor frowned mentally, What's he talking about?

"This was exactly you. All this, all of it. You make them so afraid. When you began, all those years ago, sailing off to see the Universe, did you ever think you'd become this? The man who could turn an army around at the mention of his name? Doctor? The word for healer and wise man, throughout the universe. We get that word from you, you know. But if you carry on the way you are, what might that word mean. Hmm? To the people of the Gamma Forests, the word 'Doctor' means Mighty warrior."

Throughout this diatribe, the Doctor watched as her floppy-haired self's face looked more and more stricken by what he was hearing. The Doctor in her current self was looking at her future self in horror, feeling and sensing his agony clearly…. Her dislike for this woman increased with each word she was forced to listen to, and to see how each one brought her future self down. But what had he done? What was happening? What was she implying? And then the thought crossed her mind. Was it the adventures this future version of her had in different lives, was it the number of enemies his various selves had collected over the years that had led to whatever it was that had happened.

The more the Doctor thought of it, the more likely it seemed…. However, she wanted to know more about what had happened in this current mess. She concentrated hard on the telepathic circuits and she went back from that incarnations' point of view so she could see the past. She listened to a woman with an eye-patch tell the floppy-haired Doctor that her organisation had gone to a lot of trouble to steal a child, fooling him in the process….all because of a war against him, a war he hadn't even known about.

A child?

They had kidnapped a child just to turn them into a weapon against her future self. The Doctor remembered how her relationship with Tecteun had changed, going from loving adoptive mother and adoptive child into a scientist and a lab specimen, and as a result, she despised any kind of circumstances where another would be manipulated or hurt in any way.

But her circumstances were different, this child had been kidnapped from her mother to be used as a weapon. However, she moved on, witnessing as her floppy-haired future self spend weeks and weeks looking for the baby, only to meet her in the form of his companions' dangerous friend (the Doctor didn't like the way the girl Amy had romanticised her future self; it was clear those romances had been blown out of all proportions to the deranged Melody Pond), resulting in his near death. The implication that Melody Pond had the power to regenerate was troubling for her, and the Doctor wondered what other Time Lord abilities the woman had. But as she watched Melody gain a change of heart towards her future self, she realised her view of her had not changed, especially considering the arrogant deranged persona she'd possessed in the last incarnation. The Doctor watched with amazement as the next temporal image coalesced in her mind, and she realised time must have been damaged to bring this high resolution.

But she watched in incredulity as her floppy-haired self seemed to be falling in love with Melody Pond, aka River Song. What was he thinking? Had he forgotten how the woman had tried to kill him?

The Doctor considered the matter, and she realised that the differences between herself and this Doctor were very clear. She had been raised on Gallifrey and turned into an experiment, forced to lose several of her lives, forced to be an agent for the Time Lords and hunted and hounded throughout time and space. In comparison, this Doctor didn't know anything about his heritage but he had been travelling through time and space, interfering in the affairs of others, but he also seemed naive, and for some reason that she couldn't work out, he married this woman, this assassin who had tried to kill him…..

What was wrong? Had their I.Q dropped so sharply? The image cut out. The Doctor instantly tried to adjust the Time Scanner function to at least get the whole thing going although a part of her wondered if what she'd seen was more than enough, but at the same time, she wondered why she was bothering, especially after seeing how her future self would create the circumstances which would result in the kidnapping of an innocent child.

She gave up after her third attempt failed, and she realised that the TARDIS herself had stopped her learning too much about her future; that made sense given how the TARDIS' in-depth programming prevented people from breaking the Laws of Time. She should have expected it, really. While her ship had allowed her to watch only a small amount without giving her any true clue as to what had happened to her master print, there were still possibilities. She had learnt a great deal now.

The Doctor put down the scanner and disconnected herself from the telepathic circuits and walked over to the console, avoiding touching any of the controls while she stood in thought.

She hadn't liked that future. It was one thing watching her future self becoming so foolish he would even consider marrying his killer, but the kidnapping of a baby just to create a weapon since she had Time Lord abilities sickened her, but there were so many other things she didn't like about that version of her. But there were also other moments she didn't like; the capture and exile by the Time Lords, the enforced regeneration, being forced to do their dirty work.

The Doctor wanted to change that history. She knew there was a temporal nexus point which started from the moment she arrived on Gallifrey, she had seen it, seen how a clone of herself had fallen apart in a cloud of dust before seeing that other timeline. The other timeline had come together because of the Looming of her future self, essentially a clone. It would be easy to induce a change in the timeline. She knew how to create the clone, that was not a problem, but her true problem lay in what she did then. She would need to find some way to escape. She didn't know what would happen to the timeline if the clone broke down, but she knew in the other timeline her future self had emerged from the Loom…

Wait.

The Doctor gaped as she realised she had the answer.

The Loom of the Lungbarrow family. What if she as she was now took the place of her clone? Live his life, leave Gallifrey and begin travelling through time and space? Yes! It was just possible! At the same time, she would have plenty of time to think about the future she had just witnessed unfolding and find ways of avoiding it, although a part of her wondered if that was even possible. Some of it could be fixed. She closed her eyes as she thought about her ideas, pushing all thought about the other Doctor's life from her mind; she would think about what she had just seen later and if her plans worked then she would have plenty of time in the future, and a smile crossed her face. Perhaps there was a way out of this mess after all. And there was a way she could change her own future. However, there were a few issues, and she looked around the TARDIS console room, pacing up and down as she tried to work out what to do. The biggest issue at the moment was how she could be adopted by the family without any trouble.

And then she realised, the answer was all around her.

The Chameleon Arch caught her eye, and she grinned. Well, one problem solved. But there was something else she had a problem with. And then she saw the answer; ironic, it was the console room. She could modify the TARDIS to act as a time teleportation chamber which would generate a time corridor into the future, depositing her into the Loom at the time of the Looming. As she considered the matter, she felt regret to the notion she would be essentially killing another living being, taking their place in the world, but it would have to be done. She had been forced to do many distasteful things in her life, and it had shaped her in ways she did not like.

The Doctor shook her head and she left the console room, heading for the laboratory. She had a lot of work to do.