VWORP VWORP VWORP
The TARDIS re-materialized back into the sickbay. Eleven peered out of the Type 40, saw his companion, and grinned.
"Good," He said, walking over to her and examining her shoes,
which she was wearing in bed-with the Sonic. "You haven't been going anywhere."
"You wouldn't happen to have her number," Dean said, walking up to the Doctor, "Would you?"
"Um, no." The Doctor said, glancing at him and then turning back to his companion, before realizing what he meant and turning back to him with a much more forceful "No!"
"Where was the stuff you wanted to show us?" Sam asked hastily, attempting to hijack the conversation before it proceeded any further.
"It'd be down the hall a bit." Eleven said. "Come along Winchesters."
He lead them, Sherlock, and his past self into another hallway, which consisted of lots of polished metal corridors.
"So, where exactly are we?" Sam asked.
"Currently, it's the UNIT headquarters." Eleven answered, "Other than that, it's a bit classified…"
They entered through an automatic door, to find a busy-looking meeting room, despite it's relative vacancy. The walls and the long table in the room both had computer screens built into them. The table was displaying a map of the United States, and the panels on the walls had long, scrolling lines of text. Sitting around the table where Kate Stewart, Osgood, Gordon, and a middle-aged, muscular man with an eye patch and brown hair that was graying at the temples.
Gordon glared at them as they entered, and shot a disdainful look at Kate, who acted as though she didn't notice.
"We've had six more cases since you've been gone." Kate said, as the five took their seats around the table.
"Still following the same pattern?" Eleven asked.
"Correct." Kate said. "Almost everyone with recorded psychic powers has collapsed into the same muttering fit that your friend has."
"Except me, for some reason." Sam pointed out.
"Any more clues?" Sherlock asked.
"Nothing," Kate said, stressed, "None of your omens, no signs, not even anything out of the ordinary, apart from the trances. We're stretched a bit thin at the moment, though, so we might have missed something."
"But they're still going from east to west," Eleven said, as everyone stared at the data as if expecting it to suddenly make sense, "Towards the pacific."
"Nice scarf," Four said, sitting next to Osgood.
"You gave it to me, actually." Osgood said. "Remember?"
"Oh, that's right!" Four said. "You where that little girl I saved from the Zygons - would you like a jelly baby?"
Osgood gasped.
"Inhaler!" Kate snapped.
Osgood pulled out her inhaler and gasped on it, before taking a gelatin confectionery.
"Then I guess we're going to have to do a lot of research." Dean said in a resigned tone of voice.
"That's what we've been doing." Gordon said irritably. "Trouble is, there haven't been any of the usual signs of any sort of monster we've dealt with before."
"Sherlock?" Eleven asked. "I know this is new to you, but what do you make of this?"
"We need to prioritize finding the cause of these…episodes." He said. "What can we rule out?"
"Nothing." Gordon said. "Didn't I just tell you that? We've never seen anything like this."
Sherlock snorted. "If you weren't so baffled, you might notice everything you've missed. Look at the centers of this epidemic. There are the most cases in places like Gotham and Belle Rev." He looked up at the table. "All of the major centers of it are in prisons. That would explain why Sam remains unaffected-his morals seem to make him more-or-less immune"
"But what about my companion?" Eleven asked in a contradictory tone of voice. "She's one of the most innocent people I've ever met."
"She's the norm, not the exception." Kate said. "It's normal for them to go after people with psychic powers. It's the prisons that's baffling."
"Maybe it can increase the psychic abilities of its victims," Sam guessed, "That would explain the prisons."
"And the number of victims." Dean said. "There's an awfully lot of them."
The conversation continued for a moment, but Sherlock noticed that Eleven was staring at the table, darkness etched into his face.
"It can't be." Eleven said. "They burned. I burned them."
"Doctor?" Sherlock asked.
"Your wrists!" Eleven said, his mood changing from a man depressed to a man possessed, hastily pulling back his sleeves and turning his arms inside up. "Everyone show me your wrists!"
"What?" Gordon said.
"I think I know what we're fighting." Eleven said, "And when it possesses people, it leaves a mark on the person's wrist! Now show me your wrists!"
Everyone followed Eleven's lead and turned their wrists up.
"Good." Eleven said, seeing that everyone' wrists where unmarked, nervously ruffling his hair and getting up. "Can we access all the data on the ship from here?"
"Yes." Kate said. "What are you-?"
"You can't help me with this right now" Eleven said, sonicking one of the wall-panels and observing the data that popped up. "Just...keep talking among yourself, okay?"
The group looked away from him and stared at each other for a while.
"Great." Dean said. "What are we supposed to do in the meantime?"
"Determine our limits." Sherlock suggested.
"What?" Sam asked.
Sherlock looked across the table at the man with the eye patch. "I've read up about you, Director Fury."
Four looked from Sherlock to Fury for a moment, confused, but then he realized.
"Right." He said. "You're only Samuel L. Jackson in some worlds."
Director Fury raised an eyebrow at him.
"If I could finish," Sherlock said irritably, before continuing, "You locked the leader of Hydra inside of a nuclear core and sank their base, and I've seen the number of enemy civilians that have been caught in your crossfire."
Fury leaned in. "What exactly are you suggesting, Mr. Holmes?"
"I'm suggesting that if you're using methods like that, we'll get the Doctor to take us right back to where we belong."
"Great." Gordon said. "You're not one of those self-righteous sons of *** like those two, are you?" He indicated the Winchesters.
"Just because we don't go around slaughtering innocents doesn't mean we're crazy." Dean said.
"Look, I'm going to do whatever it takes to save the Earth." Fury said. "If that means I have to kill civilians, then I'm sorry, but I'm only doing what I think is right. It's how I sleep at night."
"There are other ways," Sherlock said. "You need to ensure that every other method fails before you resort to murder, and you haven't always been good at that."
"I don't see what the hell his past mistakes have to do with this investigation!" Gordon said.
"Then you clearly aren't looking far enough past the edge of your nose," Sherlock said, "There are psychic events all across the country, but use your head. According to your own research, as you get farther west, the psychic events become more intense."
"And how did you come to that 'brilliant' deduction?" Gordon said sarcastically. "The amount of episodes across the US is proportional to the population of those areas, except of course for the jail exception."
Sherlock abruptly got up from his chair, and pointed to one of the readouts on the wall. "If you cross-reference your list of relative strengths of the people who have had psychic powers and the locations of the events-" He continued working for a moment, before turning back to the group dramatically and saying, "You uncover a second pattern. Towards the East Coast, and the North and South farther west, the events tend to be people with stronger psychic powers. As you get father west, the events are more balanced, suggesting that there are more events overall, but they're being covered up somehow."
"How do you cover up people having psychic fits?" Gordon asked. "People dropping all over the place-"
"Because you missed something." Eleven said, spinning back around. "Your map just shows people who are currently having psychic events. If you show people who have come out of psychic events, then the pattern becomes an arrow moving across the United States."
"And it's pointing directly at San Francisco." Sherlock said. "If this is some kind of-" His voice dripped with sarcasm as he said the next two words; "'demonic invasion', then that's probably the focal point."
"I get what you're saying." Fury said. "You think that it's going to come down to the wire, and I'm going to order my men to nuke San Francisco in order to save the US. That's a decision I'm willing to make."
"That's not the problem." Sherlock said. "I'm just worry you'd push that button pre-maturely. Waste lives needlessly."
"Well, tough." Fury said. "I prefer to do jobs myself instead of letting you heroes handle it."
Both Doctors walked over to Fury and stared at him.
"What are you two doing?" Fury asked.
"That's not right." Four said, getting out his Sonic.
"That's not the Nick Fury I know," Eleven said, getting out his Sonic.
Four glared at the nonlethal device. "What kind of a screwdriver is that?"
"A good kind!" Eleven said.
"You look like a little kid with a Nerf gun waving that around!" Four said.
"And you look like a pop star swinging a microphone around when you use that one!" Eleven said, as they both buzzed Fury.
"If we could focus," Dean said wearily.
"What the hell are you two buzzing me for?" Fury asked.
"Because the Fury we know wouldn't make this decision," Eleven said, looking at his screwdriver.
"The Fury we know would rather have heroes handle it than go in all guns a-blazing." Four said.
"Well, that Fury must be some kind of idealistic fool." Fury said.
Eleven looked at Four nervously. "Doctor…would you mind stepping out for a moment."
Four looked at him curiously.
"I need to tell the director something." Eleven said. "And if I told you, it'd interfere with the first law of time."
"Yes." Four said seriously. "Of course." He left the room.
Eleven looked Fury in the eye. "Nick, I made that decision once."
"You nuked a city rather than let the aliens have it?" He said.
"I nuked an entire planet to prevent its government from destroying time itself." Eleven said softly.
A resounding silence followed these words; Sam and Dean exchanged glances, both trying to wonder what the Doctor had gone through. Sherlock's thoughts where more along the lines of I thought as much.
"Than without you, we wouldn't be here today." Fury said. "I thank you for your service, Doctor."
"Do you know what that's turned me into, Fury?" Eleven said. "I've been torn between feeling sorry for myself and desperately trying to do everything I can to make amends for every innocent life I took. You don't move on from that. You tell yourself that you can, you tell yourself everything will get better, but you can't live with yourself."
"What exactly are you getting at, Doctor?"
"If you do this, then you'll start down a path where we'll have to stop you." The Doctor said. "And trust me. You don't want to go there." He got up irritably. "I'm going to go pull the files on what I think we're fighting. I might be wrong, but it's the only lead we have." He got up and left from the room.
"And we better get you lot up to speed on how these consoles work." Kate said.
"It's obvious." Sherlock said. "This panel distinguishes between what area of the world is shown, and this control..."
Hours later, Eleven and Sherlock both sat at the bedside of the Time Lord's long-haired companion, and chatting quietly.
"There are just too many things that don't make sense for there to not be some force behind this Universe existing." The Doctor said. "For starters, all the people from my Universe shouldn't be here, since they weren't in the Time War. I think someone's trying to bait me, particularly after I heard past me's story with Elsa."
"Who is this...Elsa?" Sherlock asked. "You weren't very specific about it."
"An old friend." Eleven said, "A very old friend, actually, and a queen. But she's a little sensitive, thus how she can be manipulated. She shouldn't even be in this era, she should have come out in medieval times. Even if she had come out in modern times somehow, her life should have followed a path parallel to her normal one and she should be good by now."
"Perhaps we should discover everything we can about this Universe before we proceed." Sherlock said, after a pause.
"You can," The Doctor said, "Whoever or whatever is behind this has interfered with my head. Facts about this world just slip away when I need them, and my Time Lord senses are being limited. My telepathy isn't as strong as it should be, and I can't see fixed and flux points in time like I normally can."
"So we're looking at someone who has intimate knowledge of your race, or at least went through this Time War that you speak of." Sherlock deduced. "Perhaps one of the heroes that the Time Lords used."
"It's…possible." The Doctor admitted, "But none of you should remember the war. You don't."
Sherlock pondered this for a moment. Then he muttered, "Remarkable."
"What is?" Eleven asked.
"We are." Sherlock said, looking him squarely in the eye. "We both have such incredible egos, and yet we're not fighting for dominance, we're working together."
"Oh, trust me, that wasn't how it was when we first met." Eleven said. "It should be a couple months for you- well, it was in the normal timeline. Who knows what will happen in here..."
Four walked in.
"Can I have a word with me?" He asked.
Sherlock looked surprised, then nodded. "Of course."
Eleven watched as Sherlock and Four sat down in the seat that had been freshly vacated.
"Is this our future now?" Four asked with a grin. "Do we get to be childish forever?"
Eleven pondered him grimly for a moment.
"Are you all right?" Four asked him seriously.
"Yeah, you're fine." Eleven responded. "And we're not all young, it's just that I felt particularly depressed when I regenerated last, so I became someone who could handle it."
"So, we both felt the same way when we regenerated."
Eleven nodded, remembering the fear and self-doubt that had preceded his regeneration from Three to Four.
The two sat in silence for a moment, Eleven watching his companion sleep and Four absentmindedly twirling his yo-yo.
Then, Four retracted his yo-yo. For a moment, he stared at it contemplatively, then he looked at his future self, and uttered five simple words.
"Should I have done it?"
Eleven knew immediately what his past self was talking about, but not how to respond.
Early in the Fourth Doctor's life, the Time Lords, worried about the growing power of the Daleks, but held back by their non-interference policy, sent the Doctor to the genesis of the Daleks to avert their creation. At a critical moment in this mission, the Doctor hesitated, his moral code forbidding him from exterminating any sentient life, even the Daleks. In the end, all he was able to do as delay the Daleks progress by about a thousand years. When the little balls of hate found out what the Doctor had done, they declared war on the Time Lords.
The most terrible war in all of history.
A Time War.
The Last Great Time War.
The Doctor started the war that claimed the lives of Susan and Romana and the rest of his race, in addition to countless other worlds.
"We wouldn't be talking if you hadn't." Eleven said. "We wouldn't have been able to live with ourselves, and it would have made us a very different person. That you hesitated at all makes you very different from Davros and his creation, and that makes us the Doctor."
"But was it worth it?" Four asked. "Does the good the Daleks create in others inadvertently, the friendships and the alliances, really outweigh all of the evil?"
These words hit Eleven hard. The good the Daleks create in others… All they created in him was rage and darkness.
"What I wondered is what else we could have done." Eleven said, nervously wringing his hands. "Without sacrificing everything we stand for as the Doctor, you know, leading a fleet of Battle TARDISes into Skaro and laying waste to Davros. I think that even if we hadn't hesitated, the Daleks would have survived in some way. We did all we could have. Everyone else would say that we did all we could."
"I'm not asking everyone else." Four pointed out. "I'm asking the Doctor."
"It's just, the Daleks took nearly everything from me." Eleven said darkly. "I can't tell you, well, I suppose I can. I don't remember any of this, you know."
"Do we ever remember meeting ourselves?" Four replied.
"My predecessor remembered meeting your successor." Eleven said, taking a moment to talk slowly to make sure he said all of his words properly. "I think - I think that our brains are open to the time stream somehow, whether it's through a telepathic connection to the TARDIS or through our Time Lord abilities. When we enter into a new Universe, our brains sync up. When we leave, our brain de-syncs, and we lose our memories of that world."
"Well, I suppose that could be true." Four said. "It wouldn't apply to parallel universes because of how similar the timestreams are."
"And we'd remember the memories from our Universe because that's our original Universe, if I remember my Quantum Physics class correctly. I'm just not sure about this Universe-if the TARDIS can run here, then maybe we'll remember what happens here. I don't know."
"And then there's the question of how we're even here." The Fourth Doctor said. "The Laws of time should prevent this."
"I don't know." Eleven said. "We need to figure this out, take it slow."
"Moment." The companion murmured.
Eleven leaned in close to her; Four looked at his future self curiously.
"It is not the moment," She murmured, her hand reaching off of the bedside, and grabbing the edge of Four's scarf. "Last of the Time Lords."
"What?" Four asked, looking at Eleven.
Eleven's face fell.
"Is that what happened because of what I did?" Four asked.
"I didn't say-"
"Your silence speaks volumes." Four said, abruptly getting up and walking off. Eleven watched him go, uncertain of what to do.
"Great." He said, crossing his arms and looking down at his companion.
"Nice going, Doctor. Your timeline is going to be so contaminated now."
Four wished he had his TARDIS. He couldn't explore Eleven's without inevitably running into more spoilers, and he wanted nothing more than to hop on Mario Bros. and forget what he just learned.
But he couldn't forget those words.
Last of the time lords.
They all were dead now, all because of him. Susan, his family, that time Lord that helped him regenerate, all of them…
He felt something very odd, like a sort of stinging in the eyes. After he rubbed them, he realized what it was, sleepiness. Time Lords didn't need to sleep, not really, they just sort of meditated in order to rest-but he knew what it was because of all the human literature he had read.
The Doctor felt his knees buckle as he struggled to hold himself up on the wall, before his head hit the ground.
Everything descended into darkness.
The Doctor was standing in a big, empty space. Around him where his friends-Sarah Jane, Leela, the Brigadier, Mike Yates, Benton, Harry Sullivan, Jo Grant, Liz Shaw, Susan, Ian, and Barbara…
And directly across from them was every monster the Doctor had ever fought. Daleks, Cybermen, Zygons, Sontarans, Silurians, Deamons, Axos, Yetis, Autons, and countless more.
And directly in-front of the Doctor was an ornate sword, which was embedded in a large stone in the ground. The blade itself looked fine enough, but it was the hilt that unnerved the Doctor, as it was in the shape of a large, menacing snake.
The Doctor knew that this sword could smite his enemies. He approached it, but then hesitated.
Never cruel or cowardly, he thought. Never give up, never give in.
"Doctor!" The Time Lord didn't know which of his friends had said it, but the army of enemies was on the move, coming towards his friends. Lasers began to fire, and the Doctor watched as his friends, one by one, began to fall.
"No!" The Doctor said, tears in his eyes, reaching for the sword. "I won't let anyone else die because of me!"
The snake abruptly sprang to life and embedded itself into the Doctor's wrist.
In the real world, the Doctor's eyes snapped open, and he sat up.
Back in the conference room, Sherlock found Sam and Dean still in the meeting room, looking over charts.
"I doubt you'll get very far without the Doctor." He said, taking a seat at the table. "He seems to know what it is we're up against."
"We're not working on the current case." Dean said. "We're working on finding the children like Sam."
"Like Sam?" Sherlock said, frowning. "I'm afraid I am quite unaware of what it is you are talking about."
Sam and Dean glanced at each other. Sam nodded.
"See, Sam has visions." Dean said. "He can see things before they happen."
"And we found lots of other kids with similar powers as me," Sam said. "As it turns out, their mothers were also killed when they also were six months old, like mine was. But not everyone follows this pattern, so we're searching for a different one."
"The demon's got some kind of plan for them," Dean said, "Something that involves the end of the world."
"I wouldn't worry about it too much." Sherlock said. "Our friend in Gotham city had his mother murdered by a demon, remember?"
"That's just the problem." Dean said. "Apparently, these kids go psycho towards the end."
Sherlock sat there for a moment, watching as the brothers worked.
"How do you separate fact from fiction?" He asked.
"It depends on what evidence we find." Dean said. "If we dig up a case that makes it obvious that a monster's real, then we go from there. If not, then we assume that it's myth."
"Most myths have their basis in some kind of fact." Sam said. "But they're often idealized by time."
"And then of course Hollywood completely screws with people's perception of things." Sam said.
Sherlock stared at the two of them for a moment.
"What is it?" Sam asked.
"You two have grown to be quite curious people." Sherlock said. "Dean, you're a lot like the Doctor."
Dean snorted. "You're comparing me to a lunatic in a scarf?"
"You do realize why they act the way they do, don't you?" Sherlock said. "It's the same reason you drink and flirt and listen to all of your rock music." He leaned in. "It's because of what you've seen."
Dean's eyebrows raised. What Sherlock said made sense. He had been trying to keep the darkness from driving him mad by partying.
"And as for Sam," Sherlock said, looking at the younger Winchester, "You must use some different method from going insane. Religion, perhaps-"
Suddenly, the door to the room slammed shut, and all three of them jumped.
"What the-?" Dean said.
"Someone must have locked the door from the outside." Sherlock said. "But who-?"
A deep, rich laugh filled the room.
"Precisely." Four's voice echoed over the intercom.
Meanwhile, Eleven stared at the wall, admiring his handiwork. The words Hello Sweetie where engraved into it.
He jumped as the door slammed behind him.
"What?" Eleven said, running towards the door and sonicking it.
"It's deadlocked, Doctor." Four's voice said, as Eleven's face darkened, and he stepped away from the door. "You can't get out of here, not unless you've made some serious improvements to your little buzz-wand."
"I should have warned him, shouldn't I?" Eleven said in a soft and dangerous. "Warned him to beware of you. But you're dead. I killed you all!"
Four's laugh sounded again, feeling hollow without it's usual warmth. "It'll take more than a good man to kill us. It's too late, Doctor. I can just kill your body and you will have never defeated us. History will be re-written."
"You know that that would destroy time itself!" Eleven said desperately. "You have to leave him before he regenerates to get rid of you, otherwise-
"I have complete control over his body." Four's voice replied. "The Doctor is now under the complete control of the Mara."