Soul and Sanity

Hi everyone…

This is a repost of an earlier story, taking into account… I HOPE the very wise editorial feedback I was given regarding the formatting on I am much more accustomed to and didn't realize some of the translations were not the same.

Hope this works better for everyone… and so: on with it!

An episode interactive story… As apocalyptic events unfold around one TARDIS, another materializes in suburban London and finds she alone can save the world by saving her future self. The 5th Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa, and Turlough find themselves embroiled in the paradox that could end the world and the 9th Doctor confronts his own set of demons. Total spoiler for "Father's Day."

I don't own these guys… I just have an overactive imagination that has some playmates wholly owned and profitable only to the BBC. However, I am open to offers of writing jobs on the other side of the pond.

Before we begin:

Since we all love angst for our favorite Time Lord, we came across the idea that the Fifth Doctor was the Doctor who would most likely have the worst time giving the worst news… the best one at giving a certain other Doctor a lecture about instigating paradoxes. … and the most ironic person to give lectures about involvement. While this story is canon, those of you who like my other fics know that hatred of irony is my Fifth Doctor's most frequent and plaintive utterance. I did also think that, despite all the fantastic character work that was done in "Father's Day" that this was a situation that no previous Doctor would EVER have allowed a companion into no matter how a loved one had died. The temptation and the trauma would have been too great. The idea boiled down to Nine needing to be taken to task for this incident and Five perhaps the best Doctor to do it, through Three is a good one also.

Enjoy.. I hope.

"I can't believe it. I really can't. All the crazy things you've done and this has got to be worst."

"I did say I was sorry, Tegan. Surely that counts for something, nor is the situation irreparable."

Tegan rubbed the sleep out of her eyes for the sixth time that morning, or what she had come to think of as morning. It was hard to adjust to the fact that the Doctor barely slept and the ship responded mostly to him. Her own room, however, had adjusted itself to a 24 hour cycle to match her need for some sort of reference. She wondered what cycle it was on for Turlough and automatically frowned as she pictured him hanging from a closet bar like a bat, sleeping opposite her on purpose because he knew she was watching him, even if she didn't know why. He always looked as if he'd been up for hours when she awoke, which was one if the reasons she like to get herself started as soon as possible. The absence of her usual means of doing so was why she was also currently irritated. She looked down at the display as she closed on the side of the console where the Doctor stood.

"I've found it, the shortest hop in the time-stream to Earth. If you were a little more open-minded about trying…"

"We're out of coffee, Doc'. It's simple, and since we're doing a bit of marketing, we're a bit low on celery. Seems some of us just don't eat it."

"Low on celery?" He turned to stare at her as he tabbed in the last coordinates, half alarmed and half wondering if she was fibbing just to alarm him. She smiled up at him after returning his stare dead-pan after a few minutes. He failed to keep the smile off his own face a moment later and with a self-conscious glance at the bit of plant-life attached to his lapel, pointed at the screen on the console. "Here we are, Earth, 1987. The market's a few blocks away but there's probably a bit too much of crowd to move in closer. It is Saturday after all."

Turlough emerged from the side door as Tegan was adjusting her shoe, one hand on the console as she balanced. The Doctor sighed to himself at the mutual polite smirk of dislike that crossed the faces of his two companions in lieu of smiles of greeting. The warm, engaging grin that Tegan was capable of lit her face when Nyssa emerged behind Turlough.

"Where are we? I heard the TARDIS land."

"Earth, London exactly, a little suburb with a few shops just down the block," The Doctor answered, his eyes twitching at something he was seeing on the console.

Tegan leaned over it and blocked his view as her relieved smile changed to one of reassurance at the look of worry in Nyssa's eyes. "Nope, a bit off my time, Nyss. Just stopping for supplies."

Nyssa's smile relaxed and then returned seeming somewhat forced. "Oh, excellent! You'll have your coffee then, right? You'll have it soon?"

The Doctor glanced with sympathy at Nyssa, with whom Tegan shared a room, wondering what it was like to actually have Tegan stumbling around immediately after first waking, knowing there had been no coffee for the past six days. The irony was they had just left Earth, left Mawdryn's nightmarish attempts to drain his remaining regenerations. Little wonder he'd been uninclined to go back to feed his companion's morning monster. He'd relented when she'd finally apologized and asked nicely. Of course, given the way things were going with Turlough, she might have found out that caffeine was toxic to his species.

Sighing aloud this time, he herded Tegan toward the other two and ushered them all out of the door, pausing quickly to lock it. A sound was echoing through the timeship that was wiped from existence before it could reach his ears, the sound that was and couldn't be, a slow, single toll of the cloister bell. It hung in the emptiness of what had been; for a moment only the sound remained.

The Doctor stared about as he scurried to keep up with Tegan, the skin on the back of his neck coming to attention as they moved farther from the time ship. The more he stared, it seemed, the less he saw, fewer cars, fewer bits of litter blowing about, fewer streams of smoke on the horizon, fewer people.

They were six blocks along when he realized his small party was the only sign of human habitation that existed as far as he could sense and see. He stopped abruptly, holding Nyssa back with him, but he could tell that she wasn't surprised by the hand on her shoulder or the look of cold alarm in his eyes. He saw it in her own as his awareness of trouble fed hers.

Tegan and Turlough stopped a few yards ahead, realizing they were alone, and after a glance at one another followed the searching gazes of the Time Lord and the young Trakenite. In moments, they moved back to them, their own sense of dread finally engaged. Tegan drew herself up slightly, "Doc', where is every---?"

"Later, Tegan. All of you, back to the TARDIS, we haven't much..." His voice failed him moments later, his face becoming ashen as he stared at the winged stone beasts circling the small suburb, distant but closing quickly, too quickly for his companions to cover six blocks at a run. Tegan's hand on his arm broke his transfixed stare.

"What's wrong? What are those things?"

He swallowed and looked around at the buildings surrounding them, guessing their ages from their architecture and wear, from their evidence of habitation and the signs out front, from the cornerstones. The church… the church… it would be the oldest and strongest. He took an unsteady breath and looked at the young faces staring up at him in varied degrees of increasing alarm and worry.

"They're…; they are something that should never be. They are… the end, the end of everything." The words seemed to galvanize him and he turned toward the church and pointed. "In there, hurry. I need time to think, what there is of it. Go. Go!" Cursing Tegan's shoes, he grabbed her arm and dragged her as they ran.

Gashed, twisted, uncaring of collateral, Time contorted. Reality collapsed. Reality reformed. …then distorted and bled. Bled a same drop again. Again. Again. Within the wound a hidden door closed, a door ancient to that which surrounded it, a last stronghold. Around it, the wound festered anew. The parasites fed.

The Doctor shivered as he felt a weakness in the fortress of age around them, the refuge he had herded the wedding party back into opened for a terrifying moment and sealed again. Somewhere, a door had opened to them, more strangely it had closed…, and he knew it could not close on its own, a moment's weakness should have been all the Reapers needed to be upon them.

His eyes drifted over the wedding party, its numbers halved and quartered, guests vanished in the bloodied mists of Time. They were his charges now, his alone, a Time Lord to whom Time had become an enemy, a Time Lord who couldn't even tell how much Time they had left… how little.

He looked from one side of the church to the next between the infant and the young, vibrant woman she would be. He wondered how great the wound would become when the greatest paradox came, when Rose Tyler, in an instant, died twice.

The image of her vanishing from existence ran its cold knife through him and he gathered the cold into himself and turned it outward. He could only suspend the moment for a brief time within the ancient walls; it would do nothing to stop the passage of time beyond them, but it would give him time to think, time away from their voices and the hope they placed upon him, hope worse than accusation. Around him, Time, already fluxing and weakened, was easily slaved to his will; a few moments more of focus and he could stop it completely. He needed to act and more importantly, to think. He herded the others before him as he spoke.

"Nothing in the Universe can handle those things. Time's been damaged. They've come to sterilize the wound by consuming everything inside it."

Rose's was the last voice he heard. "Is this because… is this my fault?"

The Doctor sighed as the words hung in the air and went to find the source of the second mystery, whatever had caused the opening to heal itself, hoping that it was not a lure to draw him away from the others. As a lure, it was inescapable and perfect.

"How long will that hold?"

"No idea. Did anyone notice the year on the cornerstone outside?" The Doctor looked at Turlough first then glanced at the others. Outside the door, visible through the low windows beside it, they could see the claws of the great bat that seemed to be made of stone still hacking at the door. It seemed as if such a thing should give way to the beast at once but it was making no progress and screeching its frustration. Just on the far side of the ancient wood, the Time Lord rested his hands on it placidly but with great concentration evident on his face. He was reinforcing it somehow, even Turlough, with his very short tenure on the TARDIS knew that, and they each remained silent, although Tegan was biting her lips.

The grotesque, clawed bat flew away with a final shriek and the Doctor stepped back from the door to sit down on a wide white pile of canvas that stood nearly a meter tall and not quite three meters long. A folded up tent, he thought absently, now sat on instead of under. He looked up at three pairs of expectant eyes and wondered how to tell them that this time they seemed to have stumbled upon the end of the world, Tegan's at least. She was looking between him and the small windows in their stone frames, the closest one, as always, to speaking.

"They're called reapers," he began, pre-empting her, "they should have no place here. I've been to Earth's future hundreds of times since this year and these creatures only show up to destroy, to devour that which doesn't belong in time." He was staring past the three of them now, alternately sickened, frustrated, curious, and terrified. The world was ending and he had no way of knowing why, not even being a Time Lord meant anything to reapers, at least being a lone Time Lord, and he now felt a knife in his mind where the TARDIS had been. Still, he'd never underestimate her gift for self-preservation, nor her instinct to preserve his. Three faces were still staring at him, however, in this room that definitely still existed at the moment. He was, after all, the Time Lord… one who was perhaps soon to be Lord of Nothing. Well, whatever he was about to be, he wasn't about to become it sitting on a tent in a basement.

The Doctor stood up and glanced at the windows, determination overcoming mystified shock. "Something terrible obviously went on just before we arrived, a catastrophic incident in time, something that didn't before now. It was either cruelly intentional or colossally stupid but no matter which the reapers are here to take advantage of it. They're parasitic temporal entities and nothing can withstand their absorption, but the older a thing is, the more duration it's had in time, the harder it is for them to destroy."

Nyssa nodded slightly, "That's why you brought us in here."

"Yes, exactly. However, now there's no way out and going beyond these walls is impossible, even for me, so it looks like if we're to solve this, we'll have to find a way to do it from here."

Turlough, still in his school's stuffy and plain uniform frowned at the windows again, "That sounds rather difficult. What are the chances that the focal point of all this could possibly be in the one place we ended up looking for… coffee?" He gave Tegan a disdaining look, as if he was hoping to find a way to blame her for their predicament.

Tegan looked up at him briefly, having missed the dismissive look he'd given her. As for their being at the focal point, it seemed as if the same doubts were occurring to her but she wasn't inclined to show agreement with him regardless. The Doctor managed a smile despite the circumstances as he watched the progression of Tegan's thoughts go from aggravated agreement with Turlough, to resentment at agreeing with Turlough, to suspicion that Turlough might have caused the whole thing. He knew her too well but welcomed the next step in her mood as she met his eye and wondered at the dim smile there. "All right, where do we start?"

"Well, it's very doubtful that we'll learn anything just in this room. Our first order of business is to see if anyone else has taken shelter in here who might tell us what was going on just before the reapers arrived."

Tegan nodded, a tiny chance was better than none. "Good then, there's a door back there and one up toward the front of the church."

Turlough had already assumed Tegan was considering the chance he was to blame and wanted to allay her suspicions before they grew to something dangerous to his own agenda. (Although, at the moment, it was hard to worry much over what the Black Guardian wanted of him.) Turlough decided to try and be of help immediately and headed for the door Tegan had pointed at behind them. He had just turned the handle when the other door flew open and a man stepped through it and stopped dead, a man with close-cropped hair, black pants, and a comfortably worn leather jacket. He was staring at the Doctor with wide, slightly manic blue eyes and a mysteriously outraged and bizarrely… relieved… expression. The stranger suddenly threw up his arms in exasperation and folded them tightly over his chest as they fell.

"Oh, of course. Fantastic. Great! I shoulda' bloody well known it was me!"

Tegan, Nyssa, and even Turlough suddenly knew he wasn't… exactly… speaking about himself.