A/n: One Person reviewed the last chapter… ONE PERSON! That saddens me, and gives me less inspiration… The next two chapters ought to bring things full-circle and, hopefully, mess with your head considerably. At any rate: Here's the next bit.
The Doctor shoved a Dalek violently out of his way in annoyance as he trudged in Daveed's wake. The old man seemed to be positively cackling with glee at his TARDIS's failure to start, and doubly so with how perplexed the last Time Lord was regarding how he came to be in the void and yet still have enough material from his own dimension for the TARDIS not to have died.
"Almost there," Daveed said, apparently happy to have someone to talk to. Then again, anyone would be happy to have someone new to talk to after who-knew-how-long with only Daleks for company.
The two rounded a corner and entered a room nearly identical to the one the Doctor and company had entered originally. Nearly being the key word.
A Dalek sat in the corner, manipulator arm out and pumping vigorously at what looked like rather delicate equipment, the weapons attachment firing into old bits of computer equipment. Even as the two watched a piece of glass, one side protected from the elements by an air-tight seal, the other eroded, swept through the air toward them, nearly slicing off Daveed's head in the process.
The man let out a strong curse, drawing the Dalek's attention. Its manipulator arm withdrew from the equipment, thoroughly mangled and sparking metal indicating where it had been touched.
The series of small spheres decorating its lower portions spun out to describe a sphere around the Dalik, with the floor merely interrupting the sphere rather than being incorporated into it.
The weapons attachment sighted in on the Doctor, and the lights on either side of its head lit up to indicate speech.
"You are THE DOCT-OR! You will be ex-TER-minated!"
The last Time Lord sighed. "It's just one of those days, today…"
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"Who are you? What are you doing here, and what do you want?" Rose regarded the man standing before herself and Mickey with a look of abject terror. She backed away as quickly as she could, tripped over a bit of rubbish on the floor, and continued to back away on all fours in a sort of horror-movie crabwalk.
The man took a step toward the TARDIS, giving no visual indication that he even noticed their existence. He leveled the screwdriver with the key and illuminated the latter object with blue light. He finished, and his head twitched.
"Me? I'm not sure who I am, precisely. I appear to be a Time Lord with a TARDIS according to this Daveed fellow, and hologram from someone I don't know telling me not to interact with him in any way, shape, or form if at all possible."
"I… what?"
The man sighed and ran fingers through his stiff hair. "Come inside. Things might make some more sense to you."
He entered the new TARDIS and beckoned Mickey and Rose to follow, the former as quickly as she could, the latter with a small measure of distaste. He had good reason for it.
Three corpses, clawed and hideous, lay in the middle of the TARDIS in various states of decay. Blood coated nearly everything, and a human arm rested in one of the holes decorating what had formerly been an artistically curved support spire, but was now merely a gore-covered bit of metal.
Just entering the place caused one to bow their head. Part of it was in shock, part in a sort of un-knowable lament, and part due to a sudden tremendous increase in gravity.
"Christ!" Mickey and Rose, neither expecting the sudden pressure, fell to the ground as their knees buckled. Mickey remained on his joints while Rose tipped forward and had to catch herself with her hands. With some effort they both stood up.
"Sorry. I suppose I should have warned you about that but, well, I can't really remember anything these days…" The man's head twitched and he walked, with an effort, toward the center of the TARDIS. "I think something's gone wrong with the gravity this thing is supposed to generate. According to Daveed it ought to heal, though how he knows this, I've no clue."
Rose took a moment to survey the delicate controls, and almost wished she hadn't. It was, like the rest of the TARDIS, morbidly identical to The Doctor's. Bits of equipment she'd seen him lovingly caress had been bent at sharp angles, some snapped off. A geared wheel she'd remembered wondering about the purpose of just a day ago now rested in the back of one of the corpses.
"How… How are you even here?" Her voice stammered due partly to her shock and partly to the unaccustomed effort she now had to exert to move her tongue.
"I don't know. I'll show you what I do know. It's a warning from someone I've never met, telling me to try as hard as I can never to spot him."
He pressed a button, obscured almost to the point of invisibility by a large patch of green blood that covered the panel. Just barely visible on the adjoining surface above it was a note, baring the message, "Push me when you forget everything."
The pan depressed it and a bit of audio, highly jarbled, came on. A holographic interpretation of static to the right of this new Time Lord indicated that this was meant to be a holographic message.
"The holograph 'll work when the talking is almost done," the man said dismissively as he noted the attention both Mickey and Rose seemed to be paying to the visual representation of white noise.
"You're very confused at the mo-" the audio cut out for a second. "-be to. Of course I would, but that's immaterial. You ar-" it cut out again.
"I know. Timing couldn't be worse," The man interjected. "Keep listening!" he urged after a moment when the two seemed to have shifted their interest to him.
"Now, then. Take a look at me. Take a goo-" All three present rolled their eyes as the audio cut out once more. "-eed to avoid me at all costs. Got that?"
The holographic projection suddenly flickered to life, revealing a man of shorter than average height with a shock of un-restrained brown hair. He wore a beige suit, tailored to his specific size.
"If at all possible, you must not interact with me!" The man in the hologram was The Doctor.
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"Definitely not good!"
The Doctor and Daveed took cover in the hallway outside of the room with the psychotic Dalek and the now-destroyed life support system.
"I thought you said it only had a bit of power in it!" The Time Lord yelled, skewering Daveed with a hard gaze. "You said it would be a quick and easy fix!"
"That I did." Daveed sighed and started running down the corridor. "I don't know where he got the extra power for all the functions he's accessing, but that's currently immaterial. He has the power to destroy everyone present, your TARDIS hasn't the power to leave, and that thing can kill us all."
"We're part of events, now, wouldn't matter if we had the power to leave!"
"True. Turn right, here," Daveed said, ducking a bolt of energy as the Dalek whipped around the corner faster than either had anticipated.
"Listen, we're about to come to a straight-away in a minute," he continued, starting to pant, breath rasping against the back of his throat. "That Dalek is moving too fast for us to get out of the – turn left – way." His voice, though strained from physical exertion, sounded as calm as if he were ordering lunch at a fancy restaurant.
"There isn't a lot of time before we get there, so – Christ that was close! – I've got a lot to tell you in not a lot of time. Thus, simply listen.
"I'll be running back at that thing in a second. Hopefully it hasn't the power to withstand something actually hitting its shield, and I'll drain it of that." The pair spun around a corner and into a swathe of underpowered Daleks. Rather than try to navigate a twisting path through them, The Doctor and Daveed took advantage of the lack of artificial gravity, vaulting up and over the horde of mechanized killers, sticking to the ceiling for a moment, and jumping back to the magnetized floor.
"That being said, you're about to truly become the last Time Lord."
"I'm not alre-"
Daveed's eyes blazed. "What'd I just say? How do you think I knew what that sonic screwdriver was? How do you think I knew what a TARDIS was? How do you think your TARDIS even found energy from your world, here?
"In truth I'm a warren. I was assigned to watch over this station full of Daleks- millions of them – as punishment during the Time War. They were captured on this station and sucked into a smaller containment area to make them harder to locate. I don't know what ultimately happened to the prison, but something has. It's in the void, now, and I doubt it will ever come back.
"You, however, have your TARDIS. Two TARDISes, in fact. They're the same TARDIS, though."
"What?"
"That man. The one I was talking to. You know how I said you didn't want to know who he was?"
"Yes."
"I was right. You told me as much in person. The other person here, he too is a Time Lord. He's you."
The Doctor skidded to a stop to look at Daveed in shock. The man gave him a firm shove in the direction they'd been running, then took off in the opposite one.
"I'm about to become a martyr, you idiot! Don't let it be a waste! Just run!"
Still in shock, The Doctor turned, running as fast as he could in the other direction. "I won't forget this!" he called back, anguish evident in his voice.
"I won't care whether or not you forget it in another minute!" came the reply.
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Daveed sprinted as quickly as he could down the corridor. Perhaps twenty meters separated his body from the corner where the Dalek would be whipping around at any moment. Then it was fifteen… Then ten… Then fi- No, not quite five.
The Dalek spun around the corner a fraction of a second earlier than expected and fired its weapons attachment almost instantly. Daveed leapt free of the magnetic bond keeping his feet fixed to the floor to the wall, from which he jumped to the other side as the spot his feet had been a fraction of a second ago burned black.
Sweat matted his white hair to his head, and golden energy burned in his eyes as though he were regenerating. Wouldn't matter if he did regenerate, though. Upon touching that shield he would be taken apart at a molecular level. It wouldn't matter if he changed each individual atom of his anatomy if they were all scattered across the floor.
Eyes closed he charged into the shield and- he felt nothing. A fraction of a second later he opened his left eye and found the Dalek's eye stalk staring back at him. His inertia carried him forward and a bare instinct allowed him to move his head out of the way before that stalk slammed through his eye to smash his brain.
Despite his efforts, Daveed still slammed into the Dalek with a significant amount of force. Both went tumbling back into the outer section of the corner.
Daveed sat up, shaking his head hard, then dropped his jaw in abject horror. The spots where his body had touched the Dalek where burning bright red.
"Regeneration using TIME LORD DNA commencing! Re-GEN-er-ation! Re-GEN-er-ation!" The individual spheres which composed the Dalek's shield picked themselves off of the floor and spun around him into a sphere, encompassing both of them.
The weapons attachment spun toward Daveed, new energy crackling along its length.
"EX-TER-MINATE!"
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The sound of a body slamming against metal echoed throughout the station. The Doctor kept running, but bowed his head for a moment. "I wasn't the last… For one wonderful, glorious moment I wasn't the last Time Lord… And now… Now I am, once more…"
A/N Numero Dose: OH SNAP! Foreshadowing takes the foreground! There's still one chapter to go, and rest assured, this last one will be action packed. I think this is my favorite story because of this plot and the issues I'm going to raise. Believe me, if you ever met me in real life it would be a shock to you that the kid who runs around with his shirt over his face screaming, "Viva La France!" as loud as he can is capable of such things…