The Doctor couldn't believe it; the Monk, the Meddling Monk, was on Earth right now, and he was currently using a small time rift in this point of history to help him meddle in the Suffragette movement. When she had first met the Monk for the first time after they'd both left Gallifrey as renegade Time Lords, the Doctor had been under the impression that the Monk was trying to improve on the events that were already going on. She had gotten the view, after hearing how he had helped the Ancient Britons build Stonehenge using anti-gravitational lifts to move the stones into place that the Monk would pop in and out of history, and help it along, although he wasn't afraid of trying to avert the past; the only reason he had tried to interfere with the Battle of Hastings so brazenly was because 1066 was a nexus point in the timeline, so she wasn't that surprised when she learnt he was here.

The Doctor had been on Earth for 3 decades now, and after leaving Torchwood primarily because of some of the more extreme sexist views, but also because she wasn't enjoying working there and dealing with the increasingly dark view they had of the lessons she was giving them which made her feel her agreement to help Queen Victoria had been a monumental mistake; the woman might be the Queen, and her authority was what had created Torchwood in the first place, but the Doctor had heard more than one nasty comment about not only her new gender but also her alien nature.

More than once she had been spoken about as if she wasn't even there. On many a mission, the Doctor had tried to resolve problems peacefully and inspire Torchwood to do the same thing, but the primitives refused to look past their mission, or their standing orders from Victoria to defend Britain, and they didn't care about using their guns to solve the problem.

Torchwood, much to her disgust, had begun building the technology to scavenge from the alien junk that came through the Cardiff Rift to help them build new weapons designed to shoot alien ships down.

They didn't care if the aliens were just explorers, stopping over to explore the Solar system.

They didn't care if the aliens were refugees - oh yes, she had been horrified by what they had done there, and all Victoria would do was to calmly but angrily tell her, reminding her of her place, as if a Time Lord was subservient to a human, that Torchwood was set up to protect the borders of the British Empire, and sacrifices had to be made.

The meetings with Queen Victoria, who had once followed her advice like it was gospel truth - or was it? Was the Queen merely humouring her for some sick human amusement? - only deteriorated even more until finally, the Queen reprimanded her when she complained about how Torchwood was responsible for the slaughter of a refugee ship fleeing an alien invasion, and they'd emerged from hyperspace in the hope they could find a place to settle, but the Queen hadn't cared.

Victoria had barely even asked the Doctor for any help when Torchwood was made responsible for the building of a fleet of rockets that would take Britain into space, but the Doctor, who had become frustrated with Torchwood and increasingly concerned when the project reached her ears, especially since it could give Torchwood the means to take their operation into interplanetary space, which could be disastrous, the Doctor sabotaged the whole thing secretly so it failed, but she always had the feeling that the Queen and some of the members of Torchwood knew she had done it.

Finally, she couldn't take much more, and she'd left, and because she knew of Torchwood's methodology, the Doctor had needed to hide the TARDIS somewhere she could access until she had the means to repair the chameleon circuit; some of the ships which Torchwood captured were sophisticated, but they didn't have the sophistication needed to help her fix the TARDIS. It was a miracle she had gotten the old girl out.

But once she was out of Torchwood for good, the Doctor had told them good riddance and she had walked out, setting off a lot of damage in her wake to cover her tracks.

But then she found herself in another problem.

She was out of work, and while it was tempting to simply hide in the TARDIS, she knew she would need to get food and other essentials besides she would blend in better with the population if she lived like them. She had rented a flat in London, and she'd gotten a job as a maid simply because she didn't have enough money saved up for long-term living due to her stupidity in Torchwood for refusing payment; one of the downsides of her new gender in this incarnation was the humans instantly looked at her judgementally, and pushed her into roles they felt suited her.

The Doctor hated her job, but it was all she had. She hated the fact she needed to hide and change her identity, and she hated the way the men treated her.

The Time Lords had never bothered with gender laws; after existing for a billion years, that kind of thing was too outdated anyway and given their experience with other races, racism was almost a thing other races did. There was no point since it was hard to lay down laws to drive one gender down when a male Time Lord could live as a man for two regenerations, only to live out the next six as a woman. And with how fluidly a Time Lord could regenerate into a form like an Asari or a Na'Vi, things that humans took at face value were something that just didn't happen.

Sure, the humans had this weird need to be judgemental about things they didn't understand. They squabbled and fought among themselves for no real reason. They were prejudiced against others from other countries, whether it was because of the colour of their skin, the way their eyes were shaped, or even how they spoke! On many other worlds, it didn't make a difference even though there were xenophobes out there, but on this miserable little rock, it did happen.

The Doctor was beginning to question why she liked humans so much. They were arrogant and prejudiced and the way she was spoken down to by the people she served made her feel sick. It pained her Time Lord pride to be spoken to by these primitives. Now, all the Doctor wanted was to find some way of escaping. And she had joined the Suffragette movement out of spite from the treatment she had received while she'd been here.

She didn't care what she had to do. She was even prepared to make deals with the devil if she could.

Anything to get away from her job.

The only problem was getting away would be hard, since Torchwood would shoot down any ship that came close to the planet, and the Doctor had discounted that option very quickly when the idea of building some kind of communicator that could blast a message through hyperspace popped into her mind.

But she had built a detector to pick up on any time machine activity.

And a few days ago, it had gone off.

There was another time machine in the area. At first, she had assumed it was a human time ship, but when she checked she was more than delighted to see it was a TARDIS. Another Time Lord. One check had indicated the TT capsule was more advanced than her own TARDIS. So many ideas had gone through her mind, and she'd quickly gone to meet the other Time Lord, the prospect of meeting one of her kind who was better than the primitive apes on this stinking world (and Earth definitely stank!) had made her ignore the possibility that the Time Lord might be an enemy than an ally.

And then she arrived at the site the other Time Lord had arrived, and within moments she had gotten inside the other TARDIS, her mind awash with possibilities; she could stay in the TARDIS while the Time Lord surveyed the historical events, or she could take the ship and go either back to Gallifrey to steal another TARDIS, resume her travels in time and space while avoiding this point in Earth's history and sticking to moments when the humans knew there was something bigger and better than their narrow views, or she could steal a vortex manipulator.

But when she got inside the TARDIS, discovered it was a Mark 4 TARDIS, with some familiar decorations and a diary full of entries than the ones she'd read up on during that mess in Northumbria in 1066, she came back to Earth with a bump.

The Monk was here.

The Doctor had discovered pretty quickly what he was up to, as well. The Monk hadn't expected to come to 1903, he had hoped to arrive somewhere where he could get the materials to build a new directional unit, but it had failed, but when he arrived in 1903, the world of possibilities opened up to him, especially since he planned on killing Emily Pankhurst. The leading lady of the Suffragette movement, killed, would be a martyr and it would change history, and the Monk didn't care what it would do.

The Doctor's first thought of simply tracking the Monk down and stopping him like normal disappeared, and a plan emerged in her mind, a plan to deal with the Monk, but also to allow her to escape. It took time, but the Doctor was able to construct a new directional unit once she had checked the Monk's TARDIS to look at the systems.

Moving her own TARDIS to the area after shrinking it down to size, the Doctor got to work in the bowels of the Monk's TARDIS, using the materials she had picked up on her own travels to build a new directional unit for the Mark 4 while she used some of the basic techs from the unit from her own ship. It took her the best part of the night, but as she worked on the unit, the Doctor planned what she was going to do to the Monk.

In the morning, she was ready - the Monk had used the Monastery for his base of operations, but it was only a front. He had spent his free time in his TARDIS. So in the morning, everything was ready, and the Monk was going out. But he never made it to the door.

X

The Monk groaned as he woke up, and he blinked in surprise, and he felt furious when he saw he was tied up, but when he saw a blonde woman wearing a 1900s dress in his TARDIS with her back to him, his anger bled away. For a moment he wondered how she could have gotten inside his ship, and how she was able to work the controls with such proficiency…

His eyes narrowed.

She was too good at them to be a stranger. "Who are you?"

The woman turned. "Oh, you're awake," she said.

The Monk said nothing. He just stared. He knew her, and as their minds touched he gasped. "D-Doctor? Is that you?"

"You know it is."

"Doctor, what are you doing with my TARDIS?" The Monk demanded before he remembered a juicy piece of gossip. "I'd heard the mighty had fallen. You were exiled to Earth, in the 20th century, if I remember rightly."

"Correct. I was exiled in the 1860s, and I worked for Queen Victoria for a while before things went wrong," the Doctor replied, "and I joined the Suffragette movement because I merely wanted to get back at the humans for their narrow-minded views."

"Ah, poor you, suffering in exile were we?" The Monk grinned, but the hint of malicious glee was visible, and he was broadcasting it in the telepathic environment in the TARDIS. The Doctor felt as if the TARDIS herself was mocking her.

And in that instance, her temper flared. The Monk's TARDIS had a state of temporal grace that meant guns couldn't be fired, as it did in hers, but in this case, the Doctor had something more effective than a gun or a knife.

She had a shoe. She moved quickly and kicked the Monk really hard in the gut.

Leaving the whimpering, wheezing Time Lord to his own devices, she walked back to the console and checked the controls.

"Wh-where are you taking me, you…you harpy?" The Monk wheezed as he recovered from the kick.

"The 51st century. I just had to escape from Earth, and I want to make sure I can travel without being tied to one place," the Doctor replied without looking at him as she concentrated on the controls.

"Now…you know what you put me through," the Monk said as he now fully recovered.

The Doctor didn't spare him a look. "Okay, I admit it, yeah, I know stranding you in 1066 was a bit much, but it wasn't personal when I took your directional unit; I needed it to deal with the Daleks."

The Monk's sharp mind picked up something. "Have you repaired my directional unit?"

The Doctor turned to him. "Yes, I have."

"You did?" The Monk was surprised that the Doctor would do this for them before remembering she was doing it for herself. "Why?"

"Because you had the only way I could escape, Monk, and I wasn't going to leave you stranded in 1903," the Doctor made a face in disgust, making it clear what she'd thought of her exile. "I wouldn't wish that on anyone, but I want to make sure I never lose my freedom again. So yeah, I've repaired your TARDIS so I could get it back. Now, shut up. I have to concentrate."

The Monk licked his lips, primarily because she lifted up her shoe for emphasis, so he shut his mouth, not wanting to try her patience again even if it was in his nature to mock and jib. When the TARDIS landed, she checked the location and the scanner before she left. Once she was gone, he tried to escape.

But he didn't know what was in store for him…

X

The Doctor stepped out of the vortex manipulator portal, her head aching slightly while her senses, long since blocked by the Time Lords, sang in joy at once more feeling the vortex at its most violent. She had been jumping through the universe with her newly stolen vortex manipulators (she had a whole box of them in the TARDIS) for a week, relatively speaking, visiting other worlds and exploring them while keeping the TARDIS in her pocket. As she closed the flap of the manipulator control pad, the Doctor looked around, breathing the clean air of this world while she looked around. The people here were highly advanced, moving from primitive power sources to more advanced and cleaner ones.

But while she was delighted at having a way of travelling through time and space again, with no intention of returning to Earth anytime soon, unless it was after she regenerated into a different body, the Doctor was worried. She knew it could only be a matter of time before Gallifrey realised she'd escaped and would track her down.

One night during her week of partying across the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, and all the way to Galaxy M900, the Doctor had come up with a plan. She would jump to a different time, and she would steal spaceships and resume her travels. It wasn't as exciting as TARDIS travel, and while the option to use the Monk's TARDIS to return to Gallifrey, and steal another TARDIS had been on the cards, this was the safer option.

If the Time Lords caught either her or the Monk…

Speaking of the Monk, she had sent him all the way back in time. It would take him a little bit to override what she'd done, but he'd be free to travel through time and space. A part of her was disgusted with herself for doing it, but she reasoned the Time Lords could clean up the mess if he did something really stupid.

The Doctor knew that while the Time Lords would be checking the time, space was something they couldn't track. There were millions of galaxies, and the Time Lords didn't have the means to track down one individual among billions among trillions. Their power dwelt in manipulating the Time Vortex, not space. And if she used the manipulator sparingly, then she would be safe.

But that would come later.

For now…for now, the fugitive renegade Time Lord would enjoy herself.

Author's Note - Aannnd this alternate Third Doctor has escaped her exile, but will it last? Only time will tell. Regarding Torchwood, let's say that while she could have used them and shaped their organisation, there were clear signs, especially by Yvonne Hartman's era where the organisation was too arrogant. Why couldn't it have started in the past, where they were basking in their original successes while others regarded the Doctor with suspicion despite her influence?