II

Lieutenant Harkness of the 134th infantry brigade reloaded his weapon, and checked his unit.
Sergeant Brown nodded at him. Corporal Carter grinned nervously. Privates Donovan and Maliantra gave quick salutes. They were ready.
This was the big offensive. The one they'd all been waiting for. Harkness checked his weapon again. Last minute nerves. Everybody got them. At least, that's what he told himself.
He'd always been scared of fighting, before. At least until Grey vanished...
Grey? He didn't know any Grey. He shook his head clear of the thought. He had a battle to fight.
"Thirty seconds!" his battalion commander called. He checked his unit again. They were ready. He checked his weapon again. It was ready.
He was ready.
"Go! Go! Go!" the commander called, and the troops went over the line.
Carter took a shot in an instant, to the head, and went down. As they went further, Maliantra was blasted apart by a mine.
They reached the Enemy trench. Harkness bashed one of them to the ground.
Brown was behind him, picking off enemy troops from the lip of the trench.
Donavan was stabbed in the heart by an enemy soldier – Harkness screamed in rage and swung his rifle in an arc, breaking his foes neck.
All around him, death was in the air. His Captain was yelling instructions. His comrades were dying all around him.
The Enemy were falling back.
He screamed again, and plunged into the melee.
More of his troops had fallen, but Brown was there, her helmet knocked off, leaving her hair to flow in the wind, and making her look like some sort of Goddess from the old myths…

--

The Doctor was lying in his cell. He had a cut across his face, and a broken rib or two, from all the less subtle torture.
On a more subtle note, his captors had began throwing insults at him, telling him he was worthless, that he would break, no matter what he was telling himself.
Pah, they were doing better with the physical stuff. Sticks and stones are breaking my bones, he thought, but words are just noise.
This was wrong, he had decided after a while. This place. This adventure. It all belonged to a different chapter in his life, one that he had lived. When it'd been cravats, and Paradoxes and Gallifrey and living TARDIS's and Sam and Fitz and Badar, poor man, and Trix and Amnesia and walls and Vore...
Or was that a dream? He was sure he remembered Izzy and Kroton and Destrii and Cybermen and beauty...
What about Charley? And C'rizz? And Lucie? Did he remember them?
That's the trouble with being a Time Lord, he mused. You remember the life you lived, the life you might have lived, or the one that you lived in some weird parallel dimension. And you could never tell which was which. Especially if you thought about it too much, and what else could he do in this situation?
That wasn't a problem for other Time Lords, of course. They stayed at home all the time, and did the same stuff, week in week out, like robots. Even if they were remembering alternate universes, they were practically the same memories. Boring, dull and tedious ones at that.
"This isn't my sort of adventure," he said aloud, as if trying to get someone's attention.
"No," came a very unexpected reply. "But it's my sort to a tee."
He looked over slowly to see who had spoken.
Velvet Jacket. Waistcoat. Cravat.
"Hello me," said the Eighth Doctor. "It's me. You. Whatever."
"Oh balls," the Tenth Doctor replied.

--

Harkness grinned as his men – what few were left – partied.
They'd taken the enemy base. At the cost of over ninety of their friends, they'd conquered. And they felt as though they always would.
Sergeant Brown was standing awkwardly at the side. He walked up to her.
"What's up, Sarge?" he asked jokingly.
"Do you ever feel," she replied, slowly, "as though there's something missing."
"Nope," he replied instantly. She looked up at him, and he held his hands up. "Ok," he said, "yeah, I feel like that occasionally. Every so often. I just drink some al - sol and get on with my day, like everyone else does."
"Well," she replied, "it's strange, because I'm sure there's more to it all than this."
"Don't worry about it Brown," he said.
"Eilidh," she replied. "My name's Eilidh."
"Eilidh," he repeated. "Don't worry about it. We live for the now, not the past, or the future. The past is gone, and tomorrow, we might be dead."
She smiled at him. "You're really deep, aren't you?"
"Sometimes," he smiled back. "But I usually hide it behind the jaw line. May I have this dance?"
He held out his hand, and she took it, and they danced all the remaining night, in the beautiful moonlight…

--

"Surprised to see me?" Eight asked. He was wearing the same long black coat, red cravat and grey waistcoat the Tenth Doctor remembered him dying in. That he remembered wearing when he saved that family from the Titanic…
"Gobsmacked might be a better term," Ten said. "How -?"
"I'm not really here," Eight explained. "I'm a figment of your interior. Your neuroses given form."
"Why?" Ten asked. "Why are you here?"
"Because you've been given too much time to think," Eight said. "And all that guilt on your head is crashing down around you."
"What do you mean?" the Tenth Doctor asked, not quite getting it.
"As soon as the TARDIS landed, shattered, and you stepped out, having just killed our entire race," the Eighth Doctor elaborated. "You were so desperate to do a bit of good that you perverted history. That family were destined to die on Titanic, but you advised them not to go. You told them it was a bad idea. They stayed at home, and while fifteen hundred other people never came back, they lived."
"That," Ten began, but Eight wasn't done.
"Then there's poor Harriet Jones, a woman who trusted you to help her. And what did you do?" he said. "Betrayed her. Brought down her entire government with six words. Because you could. You were wrong. The Sycorax would have returned. They would have destroyed Earth when you weren't looking. And whose fault would it have been? Yours. But when she took the steps necessary, you destroyed her life."
"I," the Tenth Doctor tried to get a word in.
"Then," the Eighth continued, unheeding, "there was home."
"Oh that's not fair," the Tenth said. "That was you."
"No," the Eighth said. "That was us. Our collective self. The one true Doctor at the heart of us all."
"What am I supposed to do about that?" the Tenth Doctor asked.
"Simple," the Eighth said. "Nothing whatsoever."
"Then why bring it up?" the Tenth said.
"Because that's not why I'm here," the Eighth said. "I'm here because you killed me."
"What?!"
"That's right," Eight said, his voice more acidic than the Tenth Doctor ever remembered it. "You killed me. You couldn't handle the guilt of what we'd done, so you killed my incarnation and regenerated into someone who could. Only it didn't work, did it? The Ninth couldn't handle it any better than I could, so when he failed to live up to your standards once – just once, you killed him, and replaced him with yourself."
"You're delusional," the Tenth Doctor said, backing away from the image of his past.
"No, I'm just speaking the truth," Eight said. "A truth you've denied."
"I deny nothing," the Tenth said, anger seeping into his voice. "I did nothing wrong."
"YOU KILLED ME!!" the Eighth Doctor screamed. "I could've survived, I didn't need to die!"
"And you killed me," a new voice, deeper and more colloquial, spoke from the shadows. The Ninth Doctor stepped out, leather jacket and all, blind fury on his face, teeth bared. "I could have survived that Time Vortex energy. Held it in check. I would've been out for a day or two, but that didn't matter, I still would've been me. But you stopped me. You were ashamed because I couldn't kill millions – billions... So you killed me, and made yourself someone who could."
"NO!" Ten yelled. He didn't want to be haunted by these spectre's of his past.
"Face it Doctor," they said together. "You try to deny your nature, but you can't escape the truth."
And then they merged into a single figure, darkly robed, regenerating, light streaming across the Doctor's face.
"You are me," the new man said. "And I am you. And we are one."
The Valeyard smiled at the Doctor.
"And together we will rule all," he finished. "It is Destiny."
The Doctor screamed. And he didn't stop screaming for a long, long time.

--