I don't own Doctor Who.
The Truth.
The Doctor closed her eyes and breathed the sea air into her lungs; she'd been aiming for a beach for some time, ever since the chaotic mess of the Flux, just to unwind, and while the incident with the time-loop the TARDIS had put her, Yaz, Dan, with Nick and Sarah when the Executioner Daleks had come after her, and this new mess with the Sea Devils, the Doctor was happy with the new chance to rest.
"So, are you going to finally tell me what happened?"
The Doctor's head jerked upwards and she turned and found herself staring at Yaz. She sighed inwardly. She had been trying for some time to keep the explanations of what had happened to her, to say nothing of the events with the Master, the time she'd been imprisoned, Division, her hunt for Karvanistra, the mystery of the Flux, being transformed into a Weeping Angel, and her confrontation with Tecteun, from cropping up, but each time Yaz confronted the Doctor on the subject, she was reminded of the terrible image of where she'd allowed Bill to be shot because she'd been more interested in Missy getting rehabilitated than she had with protecting Bill.
She had ignored Bill's truthful and correct warnings and fears of Missy because she was more interested in her selfish desires. The Doctor wanted to make sure that it never, ever happened again. The Doctor didn't want to tell Yaz anything, really, but she knew if she kept much more to herself for much longer, Yaz was going to lose her temper.
Unfortunately, Yaz took her lack of immediate response as a no. "Oh, great, of course!" The probational police officer spat, glaring down at her angrily. "Of course, you'd clam up. It's all you do!"
"Actually, I was thinking," the Doctor replied calmly.
Yaz's angry face deflated. "About what?"
"Where to start," the Doctor bit her lip, and decided that she should talk. She turned back to face the sea, she patted the sand to her side invitingly, "sit down, Yaz."
Yaz cautiously sat down, all the while shooting the Doctor suspicious looks. "Well?" She asked demandingly.
That was a good question, really, but where to start? Finally, the Doctor sighed, turning to Yaz. "Do you remember when we went to that planet to find the TARDIS after I used the Stenza teleport?"
"Yeah, and we ended up in the vacuum of space," Yaz said pointedly.
"I did apologise for that! And it was not my fault the Stenza moved the planet, but anyway, do you remember those cloth things that ambushed us before we used the acetylene gas to burn them?"
Yaz's brow crinkled. "Yeah….?"
"Do you remember what they said to me, about a Timeless Child?" The Doctor visibly could not keep the flinch from surging to the surface, just by saying the name.
Yaz's puzzlement was visibly increasing. "Yes," she said slowly. Where was this going?
"When the Master attacked us with the Kassavin, he was doing it to get my attention. He had already razed Gallifrey to the ground, and he was hunting me down to simply tell me what he had done," the Doctor said grimly; while she wasn't sure about Gallifrey being her homeworld anymore, she had put a lot of work into saving the planet and the Time Lords twice, from the download of the Matrix into her brain during her eighth incarnation as the last minute plan with Compassion during Faction Paradox's attack, and the Last Great Time War.
"What?" Yaz hissed. She'd had some kind of idea of what happened to Gallifrey, to the Time Lords, but hearing it was something else.
"The Master committed genocide against the Time Lords, his own people. He went looking through the Matrix; it's like a supercomputer linking the minds of all of the Time Lords together. He found out about the Timeless Child, realising everything that the Time Lords taught us, everything we were told, the whole purpose of the Time Lords to preserve the timelines, it was nothing more than a great big con, built on the back of a child," the Doctor looked away, seeing Yaz was listening and was not going to say anything, but out of the corner of her eye, the Doctor could see her friend was both concerned and worried about the mention of a child.
Her eyes focused on the sea and the horizon, where she knew another of the Sea Devil settlements was beneath the surface, the Doctor kept talking. "It goes back millions of years, before the Time Lords themselves. History is quite…dim and there's very little recorded; lots of vague legends, accounts, almost like someone was trying to hush every historical account of exploration," the Doctor tilted her head thoughtfully, "perhaps that's what happened, but what is known is that Gallifreyan science was advanced enough to construct spaceships that were capable of travelling the universe. An explorer named Tecteun left Gallifrey, and she began exploring the universe and discovering its secrets. Anyway, on a planet, she found a child standing beneath a wormhole. From what the Master found out in the Matrix, and what I could tell, the child came through the wormhole, but I'm not entirely sure, just like I don't know if the child was abandoned or not if the child was waiting for someone. Tecteun took the child with her, on her journeys before returning to Gallifrey. One day the child had an accident and fell off a cliff, and the child regenerated. The first regeneration on Gallifrey."
"Regeneration?" Yaz repeated a faint glimmer of understanding in her eyes. "That's how you change your face, right?"
The Doctor sometimes wished she had told Yaz, Ryan, and Graham more about regeneration and how it worked. "It's a bit more complicated than that, Yaz. Complicated, painful, almost like driving down a hill very fast with the brake pads worn down to nothingness. Regeneration is where Time Lords, and some other races, renew their bodies after suffering terrible trauma; all organs are rebuilt and replaced on a cellular level, all injuries are repaired, and we can change height, weight, appearance, gender, and aspects of the basic personality are reorganised in a burst of temporal energy. Some Time Lords have theorised when a regeneration comes through, an alternate version of the original incarnation is born; say, you were born as a boy instead of a girl, and while your past is different, your basic personality is the same regardless. Some Time Lords have guessed that because there's a burst of time energy, the new incarnation has been plucked out of the multiverse of possibilities. It's not a great explanation, but it's a theory that isn't without foundation since the blast of time energy from the regeneration affects the greater universe itself."
"How does it affect the universe?" Yaz asked.
"That's a hard question to answer, Yaz, but each time I regenerated it would affect the space-time around myself," the Doctor replied, "like, for instance, in my eighth incarnation the Master opened up the TARDIS and created an even bigger shockwave, and two regenerations ago after I regenerated in the TARDIS, I found myself in a reality where the universe was nearly destroyed and put back together, but before that, I hadn't had any idea of the reality existing or not. But back to the story, Tecteun found something new to explore. She started dissecting the child to discover how regeneration worked."
"She dissected a child, experimented on them?" Yaz yelped in horror.
"Tecteun did. I don't know how many times it happened, but from what I saw in the Matrix, the child regenerated several times, until at last Tecteun cracked it. By that time the Gallfireyans evolved. They used Tecteun's work to give themselves twelve regenerates, thirteen lives before finally dying; I don't know why they did that, but later they became the Time Lords after learning how to travel in time. And it was that moment I asked the Master what happened to the child."
"And…what did he say?" Yaz asked.
The Doctor closed her eyes as she remembered the hollow way the Master had laughed. "He said…I am the Timeless Child, the child who helped found Time Lord society by giving them the power of regeneration."
Yaz was so stunned she was rendered speechless. "You-you're the Timeless Child?"
The Doctor nodded, her expression troubled. "I am, or at least that's what's been implied lately. I was tortured for an unknown amount of time, experimented upon, and I was made part of Division."
"Division? Claire mentioned something called Division, when she was with the Angels?" Yaz jumped on the name.
"Division is, was, an organisation set up in secret by the Time Lords originally, but over the centuries it became something more. You see, the Time Lords adopted a policy of non-interference, but that policy can only be carried on for so long. Sometimes interference is needed," the Doctor explained, looking away darkly
Yaz sensed the Doctor's mood.
"Yeah, well you do it all the time," Yaz teased to shake off the tension.
It worked.
The Doctor laughed. "Maybe I do, but I always try to help," her smile faded a little bit, "but from what I've learnt about them, Division did more than interfere. They shaped the development of worlds, from what was implied. That's dangerous, and there are many races out there who would have not benefited from it further down the line. As the Time Lords began exploring the universe, Division's mandate increased, and they began expanding their membership, recruiting dozens from many species, including Weeping Angels. Do you see the implications there?"
"Weeping Angels? If they're recruiting them, then what about Daleks? Stenza? Sea Devils?" Yaz whispered as she thought about the implications and the news.
The Doctor nodded, "Quite, and for a long time I was once a member of Division."
Yaz stared at her. "You were a member of Division? For how long? What happened?"
"I don't remember it, Yaz. I honestly don't. I don't have any memory of how long I was there, or even what I was doing. The version of me we met in Gloucester was on the run; I don't know what happened or why, but at some point Division which was being run by a version of Tecteun, ordered for my memories to be removed," the Doctor's voice was solemn, and outwardly her hands were clenched so tightly, and her jaw was tense.
"Why would Tecteun give that order in the first place?" Yaz asked carefully, mindful of how angry the Doctor was.
The Doctor sighed. "I don't know," she admitted, cursing her decision to not open the damn fob watch and just get it over and done with, but after everything that happened with the Flux, she had needed some time to get her mind around everything and come to terms with the revelations of a past she'd never known about. "Really, I don't. It's possible I stumbled across some plan or I had been given a mission I didn't follow up on, but either way, my morality irritated Tecteun, and they ordered my memories to be removed. And they were. I was captured, force regenerated into a new body and regressed into a child for some reason I can't work out - perhaps it was leftover affection, or so then I wouldn't be any the wiser - and my memories were removed, and I was given to a Time Lord family to be raised as one of their own. But I still left Gallifrey the second time around because I instinctively knew the place was not my real home, and I like to think I interfered in Division's schemes."
Yaz closed her eyes and sighed as she absorbed everything the Doctor was saying. Finding out she'd lived a life she'd never known was startling enough, but to hear it like this… "And you've known about this all this time?"
"No," the Doctor shook her head, "Only since I regenerated into this body, clues began to appear; I didn't even know about the Timeless Child until we found ourselves on the Stenza weapon testing planet, but when those things rummaged through my mind, I instinctively wanted them out since its an invasion of privacy and it shouldn't be allowed," the Doctor said. "I mean, sure there were moments where I felt I knew more than I should have done, but I didn't pay any attention to those moments since I was sure I'd picked something up at some point over my last few lives before those moments. But I wasn't expecting to meet a version of myself I'd never been or remember being, and I certainly wasn't expecting to be this Timeless Child. I spent 127 years in prison thinking about it before Jack got me out."
Yaz eyed her. "You looked for Division, didn't you? After you got free because you'd never just ignore that bombshell after the Master revealed the truth."
"You're right. I didn't ignore it, and I did look for Division after I got out. I couldn't find it, but I found someone who'd worked for them."
"You did? Who?"
A sly, pointed smirk appeared on the Doctor's face. "Yaz, you surprise me!" She said with mock surprise. "You kept asking why I was obsessed with getting to Karvanistra, and the penny hasn't dropped yet?"
"Karvanistra is a part of the Division?" Yaz wasn't sure what surprised her most, the news or the fact it hadn't occurred to her.
"Was. I don't know when he left, but when I learnt about it, I chased him throughout the universe. Well, you were there, but I didn't tell you because I felt the less you knew, the better off you'd be, but he couldn't have told me anything. We'd worked together, apparently, and when I just vanished…they put a synaptic collider in his brain that would inject poison into his head, killing him in just a few seconds," the Doctor told her.
"Why didn't you say anything about this, and where the hell did those Weeping Angels take you?" Yaz demanded. "Don't you trust us?"
"Oh, Yaz, I do, it's just….," the Doctor sighed and looked down at her hands, "Do you remember when we met Jack and he mentioned Rose?"
"Yeah."
"Well, you, Dan, Graham, and Ryan were not and I doubt you'll be the last people to ever travel with me in the TARDIS. Before I met you, I had spent 70 years lecturing in a university," the Doctor said, her eyes misting over as she remembered the good and bad times she'd had at St Luke's with nobody but Nardole for company.
"University? What were you doing there?"
The Doctor sighed. "I was guarding the Master's last incarnation, Yaz, a female version of him who was just as mad and dangerous, but she got caught and I took custody of her - long story I'm not in the mood to get into - and I put her into a vault to watch her over for a thousand years, but I became interested in rehabilitating her around about the time I began taking a girl called Bill Potts through time and space on educational little trips, but as time passed Missy gave us a little help."
"Missy?" Yaz blinked in surprise. "The Master?"
"Short for Mistress; one of her previous lives regenerated into a female body, similarly to how my last incarnation regenerated into me; she helped get Bill and me out of a bind on Mars, and I saw a chance to get my old friend back. I came up with a scheme to help her become good."
"Good? Doctor, the Master is a psychopath! He tried to crash us in a plane, he tried to wipe out the human race! Why do you keep ignoring that?" Yaz demanded.
The Doctor looked down at the pebbles on the beach, cringing and violently grinding her teeth in her anger. She was furious, but she wasn't angry with Yaz. No, she wasn't angry with Yaz since the question was a good one. She was angrier with herself for indulging her former friend too much whereas she hadn't with her other Time Lord enemies, it was simply because the Master had been her best friend and she wanted him back.
But he kept throwing everything she tried to do back into her face.
He tried to ally himself with the Sea Devils when he was imprisoned under the care of that idiot, Trenchard.
He had torn her TARDIS apart when he'd repurposed her into a paradox machine, twisting the future humanity into monsters.
He had turned Bill into a Cyberman!
Missy had later gone off with him.
"I ask myself the same question, Yaz," the Doctor eventually lifted her gaze, her anger barely abated yet, "I have given the Master so many chances. I'm a sucker for it. But when I had Missy in that university for 70 years, I was hopeful she could be the friend I thought was gone. Bill was terrified of Missy, and rightfully so as it turned out. I took Missy, Bill, and another companion called Nardole out in the TARDIS. It was a random flight. I programmed the controls to find a place in the trouble and gave Missy the task of making it better. She went out on this ship which had been trapped in a black hole. It seemed to go well at first, but when a panicky technician appeared, Missy didn't calm him down and when I tried it didn't work either, and Bill paid the price."
"What happened to her?" Yaz demanded quietly.
The Doctor closed her eyes, feeling her chest constrict as the memory of herself and Bill sitting in the university park munching on chips entered her mind, how she had ignored Bill's well-founded fears about Missy and her fears of being killed, and how she broke her promise by letting her selfish desire for her old friend to come back cloud her judgement instead of her common sense. "The blast tore a hole in Bill's chest," the Doctor looked away, "and she was taken to the lower levels of the ship. The black hole was causing a time dilation for the whole ship, so while I made the mistake of staying on the flight deck planning, Bill spent years in the lower levels."
"Years?! What the fuck were you doing when Missy let Bill get shot?" Yaz demanded angrily.
The Doctor saw her expression out of her peripheral vision. At this point she was positive the blinders were being lifted. She knew Yaz idolised her and while it was flattering, the Doctor didn't want to be idolised. She made mistakes that had terrible consequences, and what had happened to Bill was one of the worst. "I had come out of the TARDIS to stop him from shooting anyone, he was demanding if we were humans because the ship was Mondasian. The Mondasians came from a planet from Mondas, Earth's twin world which was ripped out of orbit in some stellar disaster. Its people were millennia ahead of the humans on Earth, and they were forced to eke out a meagre existence under their world. But Bill spilt the beans, and he shot her before I could stop him. She was shot to stop the Cybermen from rising."
"Cybermen? What do they have to do with this?"
The Doctor was left wondering if she could ever finish telling Yaz about the mess with Tecteun. But at the same time, there were benefits to getting it all out. She knew Yaz became irritated and frustrated with how she refused to talk about her past. She just wanted it all out in the open. "Yaz, Mondas's people were becoming weaker and they were fighting extinction. They began exchanging body parts for machines, and cybernetics. They hacked away at themselves until they began wiping their brains of all emotion to stop themselves from screaming at what they were doing to themselves."
It took Yaz only a moment to realise what she was speaking about, and when the name drifted out of her mouth, she felt sick, "The Cybermen."
The Doctor flinched but nodded. "Yes," she said solemnly, "the Cybermen. Their history is part of the universe, Yaz. They've inspired so many races into studying cybernetics and using it to become their version of the Cybermen because they want to become immortal or because they're fighting a war, and they need to survive. I even met an alternate version of the Cybermen, who came from a parallel Earth created by a dying man just so he could survive. Bill found herself in the depths of the ship, and they fitted her with cybernetic parts, under the Master's supervision. The incarnation before Missy had arrived on the ship, killed everyone in authority and set himself up as a king even though his TARDIS was stuck."
"Over a black hole?" Yaz said pointedly.
"I don't understand the logic either. The ship was only just stopping itself from falling into the black hole. But the Master has always favoured gaining and keeping power over anything else, even at the expense of more immediate concerns," the Doctor shook her head as she thought about the things the Master had done over the years, "but in that case, he was overthrown and he had to go in hiding. He manipulated the colonists to study cybernetics, and Bill became a Cyberman. I was too late by a matter of hours. I don't know what happened to her after I fought them back, but I regenerated in the aftermath. I swore to myself to be kind, but inwardly I was so guilty about Bill, I was prepared to keep anyone else who travelled with me at arm's length. I couldn't let what happened to Bill happen to anybody else."
Yaz's eyes shot open and then narrowed. "Is that why you refuse to talk about yourself because you feel guilty?"
"Yes. I care about you too much," the Doctor nodded, her face set and her eyes dark. "I'm afraid if I tell you too much, you would be in danger."
"Doctor, half the time we're being shot at, threatened, and you go swanning off and we are left trying to work out what's going on. What you're doing is contradictory and counterproductive!" Yaz's voice began rising in a shout.
"I don't want any more people to travel with me and end up paying the price, Yaz!" The Doctor's tone matched Yaz's. "I'm sorry! I know I keep secrets, and it's a part of my current persona. I can't help it. When Bill…. Was converted, and the Master and Missy walked away, I gave up on them and I also realised I should be making greater strides in keeping you and everyone else who travels with me safe and sound."
"Okay, I can understand that," Yaz replied as she calmed down and she began looking at all of this from the Doctor's point of view, but at the same time she found it hard to believe the Doctor thought this would all work. "But you've travelled with many people; Jack, this Rose, and Bill, and Jack know a great deal about you…"
"Only because at the time I was more open, but when I began travelling with Rose, I even gave her boyfriend who was a computer whiz a virus to wipe out all mention of me on the internet, but my next two selves became incredibly comfortable with the reputation we'd accumulated, and a young family paid the price. The TARDIS crashed into a garden shed in the aftermath of an explosive regeneration, and I became the imaginary friend of a little girl, who idolised me to the point of wearing blinders - sometimes I think it would have been better if I had cut myself off from her life, but there were other mysteries I had to deal with her - and her daughter paid the price; she was kidnapped all because a secretive group wanted to use her as a weapon to kill me. I destroyed her life, wrecking it from an early age. I'm terrible with taking people with me in the TARDIS because it causes nothing but pain and grief further down the road."
The Doctor hated the fact she became so choked up at the end. She shook her head. "Tecteun was right, about what she said to me," she whispered.
"Tecteun? She's still alive?!" Yaz asked, knowing the Doctor was changing the subject and moving it along, and truthfully she was pleased by that; she wanted nothing more than to wrap the Doctor up in her arms and squeeze her, to measure her that she hadn't ruined her (Yaz's) life. But this latest surprise was something unexpected to her.
The Doctor shook her head. "No, not anymore. I had to kill her, Yaz. She was in charge of the Division and she was the one who orchestrated the Flux. She gave the order to set it off."
"You killed her?" Yaz whispered.
The Doctor nodded, weighing her next words. "You didn't meet her, Yaz. She had pretty much condemned the entire universe, the Gallifreyan explorer who had left Gallifrey and had travelled the cosmos for….god knows how long to explore its wonders was not in there. Until now she had come to see the universe in the same detached manner as a scientist would examine a petri dish and find the results were not what she wanted. But when she threatened you, I….I just couldn't cope with it."
Yaz swallowed hard, wondering just how Tecteun had threatened her to make the Doctor willingly kill for her. "What did she say and do?"
The Doctor bit her lip, wondering how she could explain this. "When I was on Division, I learnt they were planning on moving to another universe and starting all over again; there was no doubt in my mind at all if that universe….failed, like ours had, she would order a Flux-like event to occur there as well. But when she promised to transport you into the middle of the next Flux event when I promised to cause her all kinds of grief, I snapped. We were in the Void and there were devices we had to wear to ensure we didn't suffer any ill effects. I tore Tecteun's off and shoved her into a transmat that sent her back to our universe, and I made sure she was sent to a point in time where the Flux was just starting; she had only a minute to realise what was going on before she just…faded away. I thought it was poetic justice, being sent into the beginning of the event she was responsible for."
Yaz just stared at her.