I don't own Doctor Who, Mass Effect, The Expanse or any of the other science fiction franchises I've referenced in this short story.
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Doctor Dare.
By TimeTraveller-1900.
The Doctor could see everything while he was in the vortex.
He could see all, he could see the histories, the divergences, and the past and the present of millions of worlds. Here in the Time Vortex, travelling naked with only the shield of the vortex manipulator and his own protections keeping him from being ripped into a trillion sub-atoms by the Time Winds, the Doctor could feel the raw power of time and space.
And it was painful.
When he had been eight, the Doctor had gazed at the raw power of the Time Vortex.
And he had run away.
He had felt the sheer power of time and space, as the Time Lords showed every child of his generation what they were to inherit, the duties of all children who would rise through the Academy. The Doctor had not been able to help himself as he had seen so many things happening and being undone, terrible and brilliant things, blending together over and over until he couldn't even tell them apart anymore.
And he had been running away ever since.
His first escape from Gallifrey had been a rough, rushed and fast affair. In some respects, he was fulfilling a childhood dream of his by fleeing Gallifrey. The dream had lingered even after the mess with Rallon and Millennia when they had foolishly gone off to find the Celestial Toymaker, but it had died off as he had grown older.
He hadn't planned his escape, he had fled the planet because of his knowledge of the Hybrid secret and because of his own political mistakes and misfortune. To use human profanity, he had pissed off the wrong people at the wrong time; even in his first incarnation, he had known when he was going too far to be allowed. Sadly his first self had no idea of what restraint meant; it had forced him to escape, and grab the first TARDIS he could get his hands on.
Okay, so he had been a bit of a rough diamond and a bit of a jerk in his previous life, seeing everybody as beneath him before Ian and Barbara, and the other humans he'd met over the course of his next lives came to make him realise and accept that other people could be brilliant. The lessons began when the First Doctor had come dangerously close to murdering a caveman in cold blood. The Doctor had merely been contemplating going through with the deed, but the practical reasons behind it were still good.
The caveman had been wounded and holding them back, but the Doctor's idea had been borne straight out of practicality and the long-term result of returning to the TARDIS, but the Doctor liked to think he had become a far better person in the years since, especially since the reasons for his current travelling method were a result of putting the wellbeing of human soldiers who'd been kidnapped from Earth from different points in their world's history ahead of his own health.
The Doctor and his companions had been caught in a colossally complicated plan by a race called the War Lords who wanted to conquer the galaxy, or the universe, the plans blurred together after a while. Helped by another renegade Time Lord, the scheme the War Lords had cooked up was to kidnap human soldiers from different periods of history and force them to fight each other on a remote planet that had been specially prepared for them all. The idea was for the humans to fight and kill each other to weed out those who were weak, and then transform them into an army of super soldiers (the Doctor still wasn't entirely sure how they planned to do that, exactly, but the possibilities were not comforting, and it made him wonder why the War Lords needed to take things as far as they had).
Brainwashed and conditioned to think they were still on Earth, and subjected to regular reminders which could not have been good for the brain cells, the soldiers fought on…
But some of them had come to realise something was happening.
Something wrong.
Something sinister.
More than a few of them had slipped through the special forcefields erected to keep the soldiers in their different little war zones, and they had met other soldiers who had realised the same thing, and they formed a resistance movement. The scheme had begun fraying at the edges as the cracks in it widened and deepened by the time the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arrived. After the long conflict the Doctor was confronted by a hearts wrenching moment; how was he going to return the soldiers home?
The time machines the renegade had given the War Lords were already decaying and the TARDIS was useless for getting people to the right places. Okay, he had to admit, he could have asked the renegade for help, but the Doctor had doubted it would work, so he had resorted to contacting the Time Lords for help.
And he had nearly lost everything, including his own life as a result. The Time Lords had sent the humans back to their own times and places, and they had sent Jamie and Zoe home, wiping their memories along the way (why they needed to do that, the Doctor didn't know; he found it horrifying the growth of Jamie and Zoe had just been erased like that), but they had put the Doctor on trial and made it clear they planned on executing him for flouting the laws of non-interference, but the worst offender was his time meddling or as he saw it, helping people.
Zoe had pointed out that before she'd left he'd helped people, but the Doctor had told her it was nothing but an excuse to the Time Lords. And it was. When the Doctor heard about the sentence, he had planned to escape. Escaping the Time Lords had not been easy, and as he twisted through the Time Vortex, propelled through the time winds by the vortex manipulator strapped to his wrist, the Doctor was eternally grateful that he had made it this far as well, but he wouldn't be completely free of Gallifrey until he finally landed. He had set the destination controls of the manipulator to random (he had made sure that he had, and since he had managed to steal the biodata extract the Time Lords had of him from the Matrix, the Time Lords wouldn't be able to track him down so easily.
The Doctor had travelled back in Gallifrey's time and he had collected his biodata extract and his TARDIS - both of them. He had realised in the courtroom the Time Lords would likely look for him if he used his old Type 40 TARDIS. If he just left Gallifrey in his ship, they would simply trace him using the energy signature. Jumping through the Untempered Schism, straight into the Time Vortex was dangerous and even insane, but protected with a vortex manipulator, he had gotten a good way from the Time Lords.
Thanks to his time sensitivity, the Doctor had no problems feeling time go past, but even that was limited. When he finally arrived, the Doctor fell to the ground, groaning.
"Oh, dear," he muttered to himself before he lifted his head. Every part of him ached. "Oh my word, where am I?"
He didn't recognise the planet he had landed on, and as he checked the pocket he had placed the TARDIS and the staser pistol he'd stolen, his hearts chilled as he remembered what he needed to do next. Drawing the pistol, the Doctor closed his eyes before he shot himself in the chest…
X
When he had recovered from the regeneration, the Doctor spent much of his time stealing or hiking across the galaxies. Sometimes he used the vortex manipulator to jump to different times and places, but he also used the manipulator to transport him to eras where time travel technology was more sophisticated, and he was able to use the opportunity to make much-needed repairs to the TARDIS.
The Doctor had learnt his lessons, while the TARDIS was wonderful for taking him on random trips, it was sometimes a better idea to have a TARDIS that sometimes worked, and he eventually did enough work on the ship that his navigational skills became that much better while he had installed a randomiser.
But during his trips, the Doctor stopped a number of Sontaran and Dalek invasions. He saved the Vogans by exploding gold dust throughout the Cybermen's ships before he scattered more gold throughout their empire.
He had no intention of travelling in the TARDIS and not having made any adjustments.
And then he jumped to Earth at the dawn of the 20th century. Helping Queen Victoria survive a werewolf attack, the Doctor was there for the start of the Torchwood institute. Advising Victoria as best as he could, the Doctor remained on Earth for the next two hundred years. He battled against the Nestene Consciousness, the Cybermen, the Daleks, the Silurians and the Sea Devils while he made some small improvements to history while he tried to keep his head down.
In the 1960s and 70s, the Doctor brought the Counter-measures group and then UNIT into Torchwood to spread out the knowledge base while countering any alien attack. By the 2000s and 2010s, the Doctor had gained enough credibility in advice and work for the British government while providing scientific aid to other governments. As a time traveller, the Doctor knew of the upcoming war in Ukraine, and he had provided the Ukrainians with the scientific aid needed to help them to win while giving them and other countries the energy technology that would soon make fossil fuel-derived energies obsolete and pointless. By the time Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian president was facing an army of extremely well-armed soldiers and his attempts to cut off the energy supply to the rest of Europe failed dismally.
The Doctor's aid was never going to stop.
Secretly he provided aid to get the Epstein fusion drive for the next space age up and running. He didn't provide that much aid, just the basic corrections and he watched as the first steps to colonise the planet Mars (thank Rassilon there were no Ice Warriors there), and the discovery of the Prothean ruins which would help humanity get into space even with the Bowie Base destruction. Once the Mass Effect ships were rendered obsolete when humanity discovered the wormholes which would give scientists the inspiration to build the warp (hyperdrive) drive which would make interstellar travel more likely, humanity would spread across the universe.
One day, the Doctor just left. As he listened to the comforting and beautiful sounds of the dematerialisation as his TARDIS departed from Earth, the Doctor went off to resume his travels.