The Vault of Dreams

Featuring the Alternate 4th Doctor

Inside a dimensionally transcendental blue police box that was hurtling through the Time Vortex, the Doctor was alone. He had left his friends Ellie Finch and Susan a while ago and was aiming to pick them up sometime but things had gotten a little complicated. He even had another TARDIS both on Earth and on Gallifrey to worry about.
"Too many things." he muttered, as he carefully tried to pilot his ship back to Gallifrey, "I need a distraction, to take my mind of what's been happening recently."
As if in response, the TARDIS landed with a thud. He looked at the scanner and smiled.
"Well done, old girl." he said with a smile, before walking outside.

But, when he arrived outside, he found himself surrounded by soldiers who were pointing guns at him.
"Gentlemen, please don't." he requested, raising his hands in the air, "I'm unarmed. Well, apart from a screwdriver. But that's just sonic."
"Stand down, guards." came a voice from nearby: it belonged to an old, brown-haired woman dressed in an elegant velvet jacket, shirt and tie, "It's just the Doctor."
The Doctor's eyes narrowed. Who on Earth was she? And how did she know him?
"You're probably confused. This way, Doctor. You'll know who I am soon enough." she explained, leading him off down a corridor.
The mysterious woman led him to Vault 17K, opened the door and showed him what was inside: bizarrely, it was his own TARDIS.
"That cannot be possible. I left that on Gallifrey." the Doctor said definitively.
"This was found on Earth in 1997. I believe that there was a crisis involving you, your friend Ellie and UNIT around that time?"
"But that TARDIS blew up."
"In another timeline. When you closed the gap between universes, everything that happened in the Dalek invasion un-happened, so to speak, including how you chucked a time bomb into your TARDIS."
"How do you know about that?"
The stranger sighed, knowing she'd been won over.
"I am a Time Lord, Doctor, who has been monitoring your life and tidying up after you ever since you entered this universe. You've been saving planets but in a way that leaves a lot of cleaning up to do. That is my job."
She snapped her fingers and the TARDIS doors opened, revealing the console room.
"Who are you?"
"Doesn't matter. I have a mission for you. Get inside."

Inside the TARDIS, the woman set the co-ordinates for Horvux, a colony planet in the Yuvilian System, and dematerialised the ship.
"I don't understand any of this," the Doctor said, "you're a Time Lord yet you don't want to say who you are; you somehow manage to recover my old TARDIS even though as far as I know it doesn't exist and also you just so happen to run the vault which my TARDIS brings me to. I want answers, whoever you are, so start talking."
"Alright, I'm not a Time Lord. That was just to get you to trust me."
"Then who are you and where are you taking me?"
"My name is Juliet Hepburn and I work for Dr Thomas Armstrong."
"And who is Dr Thomas Armstrong?"
"Head of the Redgrove Foundation. But that's not important. "
"What is important then?"
"Where we're going. You need to follow my instructions, Doctor, or I will erase you from the timelines completely."
"Do that and hell will be unleashed."
"Exactly. Do you want that?"
The TARDIS materialised with a thud and the doors flew open. Juliet walked outside and the Doctor ran after her, desperate to know what she wanted him for.

Outside, the Doctor found himself on a wintry planet, but there were houses nearby. He knocked on the door of the nearest house and smiled charmingly when the door opened.
"Hi, I'm an innocent traveller looking for shelter," he began, instantly recognising the woman facing him: it was Ellie Finch. The Ellie Finch that he had picked up in this universe.
"Doctor." she simply said.
"Ellie. Look, I'm sorry."
"Thanks for saying what I wanted you to say. But why the hell didn't you come back for me and Susan?"
She slapped him. Hard.
"I got distracted. Things got complicated and I got delayed. Anyway, where is Susan?"
"She's dead. She got conscripted into the Time War and got erased from this universe. I managed to pilot the TARDIS to here and settle down, away from the front line."
The Doctor looked ashamed and also saddened by this news.
"I went into my own universe and rewrote my own personal history for this?!"
"Well I'm sorry. But you weren't there to hear the screams, so shut up and get out of my life."
She slammed the door in anger. The Doctor now had no friends left. It was now when he started to think about what he had done: had he been right to abandon Bella and Jemini to go searching for a lost cause? Should he have saved Susan?
"I told you to follow my instructions." Juliet called to him, "Do you see why?"
"Yes. What do you want me to do?" the Doctor reluctantly agreed, walking over to her.

Juliet led the Doctor to a chapel on a nearby hill where, inside the chapel, a Dalek sat, its eyestalk looking at the Doctor.
"DOCTOR, IS THAT YOU?" it asked, almost innocently.
"Do you know me?" he responded, edging towards it carefully.
"I REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED. ON EARTH."
"Earth? What do you mean?"
" DO YOU REMEMBER WHAT WE USED TO HAVE? WE SAVED PLANETS. WE LOVED ONE ANOTHER. IT WAS YOU AND ME. ELLIE FINCH AND THE
DOCTOR."
"You can't be Ellie Finch. Ellie Finch is in a house just up the road. How can two of the same person exist in the same place?"
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN? DON'T YOU REMEMBER HOW WE SOLVED THE MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS? OR ARCHALIA 13?"
The Doctor looked horrified.
"Ellie? How can you be here?"
"I SURVIVED. I ALWAYS SURVIVE. EXTERMINATE!"

TO BE CONTINUED...