Last time:

A future Doctor talks to Donna about her baby and the Thirteenth Doctor sends the Tenth Doctor to help a friend.


Chapter 2

In Which the Doctor's in the Morgue

He went to Chiswick, just as his future self asked him to. His TARDIS landed on a warm partly-cloudy spring day. About 11 AM, judging by the sun. The street was empty except for an older woman with silver hair tucked under a yellow sunhat, crouched down at a flowerbed that lined her yard, a pile of weeds beside her.

She was staring at him and the TARDIS. She'd seen.

He smiled. "Hello."

The old lady armed herself with a trowel. "What are you?"

No hiding it. "Alien. Friendly alien." He knelt across the flowerbed and offered his right hand. "My name's the Doctor. Yours?"

She eyed his hand. "What are you doing on Earth?"

At least she asked questions.

"I got a tip-off that something's wrong here, so I came to investigate. I'm trying to help."

The woman raised her brows. "So you're like the galactic police?"

He lowered his hand slightly. "No. More of a freelancer actually, but the Shadow Proclamation – the intergalactic version of the UN, that is – doesn't have jurisdiction here. If it helps, I have worked with human governments in the past."

"Do you have an ID?"

"Yeah." He reached for his psychic paper. "You won't tell anyone, will you? I'm supposed to be hush-hush, but my ship there-" he nodded to the TARDIS, "-must be malfunctioning. She's supposed to land where no one will notice. I'm going to have to look her over later."

He would. Why land so that some old woman immediately knows he's an alien?

The woman looked at the psychic paper. "Jon Smith? You honestly think the name Jon Smith will help you blend in?"

He pouted. "Why does everyone have a hard time believing it? It's a good name."

"It's too common." With the Doctor's hand down, the old woman initiated the handshake. "Jane Walker. I hope you really do come in peace."

He nodded. "Yeah, as I said, I got a tip-off. I'm trying to help. Have you seen anything odd around here?"

"No, nothing alien odd." The woman, Jane Walker, pulled a phone from her pockets and pressed her thumb against her Google Maps app. "Perhaps you're lost?"

"No, I'm in the right place. I know this street pretty well, actually. I used to have a friend who…." A lump formed in his throat. He still wasn't over losing his best friend, and having to talk about her here was just too much. He swallowed. "I used to come here often. I wouldn't have been surprised if you recognized me."

"I just moved in last year. I'm sorry, Doctor, but you're the first alien I've seen any sign of."

She moved in last year. Yes, that explained it. From the Nobles' perspective, it was years since they saw him.

Donna's family. If there was truly no chance of running into Donna, perhaps he could go ask Wilf what was going on.

He was about to straighten up and stroll over to that heart-breakingly familiar house when Jane opened her mouth. "Actually…."

"Yes?" Did she know something after all?

"I don't know if it's what you're looking for or not, but there's a woman on this street. She's having a baby. Her husband left her because it's not his – he said she was making up stories to hide her infidelity, but closed up every time someone asked about the father."

He didn't know what he was looking for, but it was something. He met Jane's gaze. "A woman?"

"Her name is Donna Noble."

His hearts stopped. Donna? Did he hear that right? Sure, she lived here, but she wasn't who his future self sent him for, was she? She was too recent for who she hinted at. "Donna Noble?" His voice came out a bit choked.

His hands started trembling. If her child's father was an alien, that could trigger her memories. He needed to check up on her. That was two friends on the line now.

"Yeah." Jane's eyes rested on his face. "Is she the friend you mentioned?"

He swallowed. "Don't mention aliens to her. Not even me." He hurried to his feet. "If her child is half-alien, that could be medically dangerous either one of them. Where is she?"

"She was in labor this morning. There was a big hullabaloo – Donna was screaming that she wanted to have a home birth, but her mother wouldn't hear of it. She took her to the hospital."

Oh no. Oh no no no no. Did Donna know? Is that why she wanted a home birth?

His eyes were wide. His breathing was shallow. He was distracted with trying to come up with a way to ascertain Donna's safety without depriving her innocent child of its mother. That is, until Jane asked, "Will everything be alright?"

"A hospital?" he whispered. Wait. Chiswick Mercy, his future self said. Was there a Chiswick Mercy Hospital? Could his future self have sent him for Donna after all? All she had to do was tell him and he'd have gone. He bent over to look at Jane's phone screen. "Is there a hospital called Chiswick Mercy around here?"

Jane typed the name into the search. Just a few blocks away, a location marker popped up.

"That's it!" The Doctor dashed back to his TARDIS, but a mental prodding stopped him from leaving right away. He turned. "Thank you. Could I ask one more favor?"

"What is it?"

"Donna." He ran his hand through his hair. "I'm going to help her out as much as I can, but she could die if she remembers about aliens. I can't be here for her anymore. I just want someone to be nice to her."

"I'll help out how I can."

He grinned. "Thank you. This is why I love humans – you lot are brilliant, you are."

Bounding into his TARDIS, he piloted it to Chiswick Mercy. He landed outside the front doors moments later. The hospital towered above him like a fortress.


"Push."

"AAARGH!" With one last agonizing effort, her baby was out, wailing at the top of his lungs. Donna made no effort to hide the tears flooding her face. "Give him to me."

Sylvia, having been the one to comfort her through the ordeal, patted her hand. "Soon. They're getting him cleaned up and checking up on him. See, the hospital wasn't so bad, was it? I can't understand what was going through your head when you said you didn't want to come."

Donna looked at her mother, glad she was crying now. Her tears would affect her, and she really needed the help with the trouble her mother placed them into. "He can't be here. Please, Mum. He's your only grandchild and they'll kill him."

"Why would they do that?" Sylvia ran her hand across Donna's sweaty forehead. "Are you alright? Is there something you're not telling me?"

"There's something you haven't been telling me," Donna hissed back. "I know you know about him. I used to have this wonderful friend called the Doctor." When Sylvia's eyes widened, Donna knew she played her cards right. She continued. "Then I forgot him. Mum, why did I stop traveling with him? Why did you and Gramps hide him from me? And how did you expect me to be honest with you about anyone like him when I remembered?"

"You can't remember! He said-"

The argument was interrupted only by a young black-haired nurse asking for the name for the birth certificate, to which Donna supplied Jonathon Wilfred Noble.

Silent tension shoved itself between mother and daughter as long as it could. As soon as the nurse left to make the hospital's copy of the birth certificate, Sylvia whispered, "He brought you home one day. He said there'd been an accident and he had to wipe your memory. He said you'd die if you ever remembered him."

This was the Doctor's fault then. "Did he? Well, I'm clearly a corpse. I don't remember everything, but I remember him." Donna glared at the white hospital blanket covering her. "Mum, I need you to get Jon. Stop the doctors from examining him, or call a lawyer or something."

Sylvia swallowed. She asked, voice trembling, "Jon's part alien, isn't he?"

"Yeah." Donna looked over to where a nurse was putting a diaper on her cleaned-off baby. "He can't be here."

The nurse strolled over to the doctor, who was waiting with a stethoscope.

"Oi!" Donna shouted at them. "Are you deaf? I said give him to me."

The doctor placed the stethoscope on Jon's chest. Instead of fussing, Jon examined it from the metal bit on his chest, along the cord, and up to the doctor's ears.

"Can't you see he's fine?" Sylvia snapped. "Give him to my daughter."

The doctor frowned at them. "The baby is not fine. His vitals are all wrong. He needs to go to intensive care."

Jon yanked one of the ear pieces from the doctor's ear, cooing.

Sylvia took a step toward the two of them. "He's not acting sick. Just let my daughter have him."

"I can't. I'm too concerned about this kid's health."

Donna filled her lungs to maximize her volume. "I'm his mother, and I say give him to me!" When Jon started fussing, she quickly apologized to the infant. "Look, I've read all the parenting books I could get. I know how important it is to hold your baby after he's first born. I don't want to deprive him and cripple his emotional development."

Sighing, the doctor shook his head. "His vitals are strange enough that not taking care of this now would be child neglect. We'll keep you informed."

He left from a storm of scolding from both women, but nothing either Noble could do could prevent the doctor from taking Jon from them. The moment he was through the door with the infant, Donna exchanged a look with her mother. "I don't suppose you know how to contact him?"

"Don't be silly. You're the one who befriended him."

Donna stared out into the gleaming white hallway through which the doctor had taken Jon, wondering if she would ever see her son again. "I don't. I know a woman named Martha Jones does. I'm not sure how to contact her either. The most I remember about her is that she works for a place called UNIT. I need you to see what help you can get."


The Doctor grumbled about wardrobe-ruining Hoodels as he finished replacing his hot-pink-splattered clothes with a clean white bow tie. It was a shame to lose his favorite red neckwear. "So much for taking River there tonight. How am I supposed to enjoy a fun-filled evening with my wife if the natives' only idea of fun is to make visitors to their planet look unmanly?"

Not wanting to risk another bow tie by returning in person, the Doctor picked up the TARDIS phone to cancel his restaurant reservation. With that done, he stomped around the console. "Now what do I do? I mean, I could take River to the first ever anti-grav golf course, but I want to test this bow tie for a few hours first to make sure it's the coolest."

He stopped and ran through random ideas from the TARDIS first, pausing on one in particular. "Records in London? Yes, I suppose there are a lot of those. I'll have to wipe them, but just wiping them is boring. Let's go at Christmas. There always used to be alien invasions at Christmas. Maybe I'll get lucky."

Now laughing to himself, he raced around to fly to his destination. He grinned when the TARDIS signaled their arrival. "Now to stop an invasion and wipe some records. What do you think, Old Girl? Will there be people trying to kill me?"

The TARDIS hummed.

"I guess I'll have to see for myself then." The Doctor pushed the door open into bright sunlight. Warm spring air drifted inside. "This looks nothing like Christmas."

"What?" a voice squeaked.

The Doctor looked over. There stood himself, a matter of paces away from his own TARDIS. His younger self, the matchstick version of him to be exact, with the wild hair and the pinstripes that made him seem even taller and slimmer than he really was. "What are you doing here? I don't remember this."

His younger self blinked. "What? What am I doing here? What are you doing here? And how? How do you exist? I only have one regeneration left, and I've met her."

The Doctor leaned against his TARDIS. "Her? As in some girl? We could have picked up another regeneration somewhere… somehow… but are you sure she was us? It's not the first time you made this mistake. Or have you done that yet?"

"Jackson Lake." His younger self started to circle his present incarnation's TARDIS and peering at it as though it could be a trick. "I suppose we'll have to pick up another regeneration, because I did not make a mistake this time – she has our memories, our TARDIS, and she sent me to help Donna. Don't you remember? You can't be here now unless future us sent you too. But you have no clue who she is, so she didn't. And you forgot."

The Doctor bristled. "I forgot? If I don't remember, you're the one who forgets, sometime between you and me."

The brown eyes of his past glared at him across the pavement. "You can't be here. Whatever you were doing, come back some other time."

He knew the laws of time of course. He straightened his bow tie. "Fine. But you don't do anything stupid here. Make absolutely sure that nothing happens to Donna."

"That's my intention, Chinny."

"Fine." The Doctor rested his hand on his TARDIS door. He threw a smile at his past self, which his past self returned. "Good to see you, Doctor."

"And you."

The Doctor entered his TARDIS and reset the time coordinates for Christmas in a few years' time – oh, he was a few years off to begin with. As fun as it was to run into himself, he still had a bow tie to break in and some records to erase.

When he rematerialized, his past self's TARDIS was still in sight. He ran back in to check the time coordinates.

He'd returned thirty seconds after he left. No matter what he did, he could not get his ship to take him away from that point in space and time. Finally, he shook his head. "He must forget because of me. I'll see what needs doing."

Without any real effort at all on his part, the Doctor slipped into the hospital and found an empty lift. He kept his eyes peeled for his younger self within the trickling traffic, but before he could find him, he encountered a black-haired nurse pacing behind a glossy counter top and cursing to herself.

He stopped. "Are you alright?"

"Don't use this hospital. It's horrible." The nurse rubbed at her eyes. "Sorry, I don't think I could tell anyone about it without making things worse. I don't think they've done anything illegal."

The psychic paper was in the Doctor's hand before the nurse could say celery. Why she'd want to say celery then, he wouldn't know, but it was in his hand in less than the amount of time it would have taken her to say it. As her eyes moved along to read his psychic projection, the nurse visibly relaxed. "Thank goodness. Maybe you can help, Doctor Smith. It's one of the infants. He had some strange vitals, so Doctor Hooper took him to intensive care. They did a few tests and just handed him over to an outside agency – specialists, but no one knows what they actually do."

A sick feeling stirred in the Doctor's gut. A child? No. There was no way he was leaving a child to meet a horrible fate. "Let's get him back to his family. Show me the way, will you, Miss…?"

"Stonebridge. Mary Stonebridge. It's right this way."


Two blue eyes opened. Above them was the latest version of the TARDIS' console room ceiling.

Hearts racing, the Doctor sat up. She checked herself for injuries. Nothing. No sign of being hit with energy from the Matrix. "I'm alright?" Her lips turned upward. "Lucky!"

She picked herself up the floor and raced around the console, looking for anything damaged there. "Of course I'm alive. The one who shot me – that was me. Future me, that is. Evil me. The Valeyard. He needs me alive so I can regenerate into him."

Regenerate…. Thought occurring to her, she checked her reflection on the gleaming metal back of a screen. A beautiful blonde-haired blue-eyed woman stared back. She was still her, so then what did the Valeyard do? She checked herself once over again. Nothing.

She leaned one hand on the TARDIS, free hand tugging at her hair. "Think! If I do turn evil, why shoot my past self without making her regenerate?" Finally, her eyes snapped toward the TARDIS door. "There may still be a clue in the Matrix. I'm heading back out to look. Thanks for picking me up, Old Girl."

But by the time she got to the door, the handle was missing. The police box's wood was fused into the metal walls of her ship. Rolling her eyes, she reached in her coat pocket for her sonic screwdriver. Even that was rubbish.

Perhaps this was the reason the TARDIS never programmed her screwdrivers to do wood? Because the she didn't approve of the Doctor being able to use it on her exterior?

Well, the Doctor didn't approve of the TARDIS keeping her captive. She banged on the inside of the door. "Let me out!"

The TARDIS made a strange noise halfway between a buzz and a chime.

The Doctor slammed her palm to the wood. "I just shot myself and I want to know why. Now let me OUT!"

No amount of shouting or pleading or kicking made any difference to her beloved blue box. Finally, the Doctor doubled back inside, sighing in irritation. "What's gotten into you?" She examined her equipment closer, until she found something very strange on the temporal flow meter. Her jaw dropped. "Are you serious? You're sustaining a paradox right now? Here, in this room?"

She placed a trembling hand against the screen. "You mean me of course. Have I … died?"

Her eyes widened. She knew exactly what the Valeyard did to her now. She was 99% certain of it. "He erased me. He erased this version of me. I never regenerated into a woman, yet here I am. I won't last long if I leave the TARDIS."

Troubled, the Doctor closed her eyes and started reviewing her memories. Her sixth self was already altered, but her seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and even her previous self, they were all there. It was just her who was gone. How did attempting to strangle Peri then lead to her much-later self regenerating into the Valeyard? Nothing else was altered. If she wanted to exist again, she needed to travel along her own timeline in the TARDIS. What a risky endeavor, and yet there was no other choice.

No, if she tried just a little harder, mixed some telepathy in her efforts, perhaps she could find something here.

Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.

That was a heartbeat. Just a single heartbeat. Not a double one.

Hers. His. The Doctor's. The duplicate Doctor's from the Crucible. There was still nothing different about that memory either.

She didn't hear it before it happened, not like Donna. She knew it would catch up to her eventually, she being on the other side of the Doppler Shift, so to speak, but now? She was busy! She was trying to think.

This was affecting her present, her future, and her past! She didn't need her other selves distracting her.

Her other selves…. Her breath caught in her throat. "It's not that there was only one change. It's just that I'm not well-connected to the resulting timeline."

She stuck her hands in her pockets, thinking. "The Valeyard was first around when the Time Lords pulled him out of the Matrix to put my sixth self on trial. As his future self, the first version he could replace is the seventh. It makes sense that he started planting the seeds of himself in him. As to where he manifests, he was supposedly sometime between my tenth and final-" Final. Was that her? She hoped not. Not when everything was new again. There was so much more she could see and do. "-self."

She pulled fists from her jackets to place them on the controls instead. "Seeds. Versions that have been replaced. I've got to go check on my past selves." The Doctor made her fingers relax as she reached toward the boring-ers. "You've really saved me this time, but it's far from over. Let's go."

With the TARDIS set for stealth – brakes off and turned invisible – they hopped through time and space. The Doctor could only observe as she revisited the most vulnerable points of her existence.

Inside a spacious console room, her eighth self listened to a female voice – a recording left by one Lucie Miller, killed while going against the Daleks. The Doctor knew her previous self was so tempted right now – so tempted to break the Laws of Time to save their friend. Loss. Desperation. Hopelessness. But no sign of the Valeyard. The Doctor had to already possess some darkness on their own for the Valeyard to ever have potential.

The heartbeat in her head pounded harder, as though to fore-warn her of an awful danger, echo though it was.

She landed inside a barn next – a barn devoid of animals, filled instead with a warm dirt floor and memories of childhood. Her younger self was there as an old man, searching a metal-covered box for a big red button to destroy Daleks and Time Lords both in a single moment. Guilt. Torment. She felt them for the longest time, believing that she destroyed her own planet and billions of children with it. It was the time her best intentions could pave the path to hell. Such a pivotal moment, and the Valeyard stayed far from it.

The heartbeat pounded yet harder.

On only the next trip, she encountered a horror on Gallifrey. It was her immediate predecessor here – the one with the thick white eyebrows. Here, that same loss and desperation felt by her eighth self festered into selfish bitterness in action. The younger Doctor shot the War General close-range, square in the chest of his red armor, grabbed Clara's hand, and ran away. The moment was an excellent candidate for the Valeyard to target, but it wasn't where he struck. Even as the Doctor watched, her previous self flickered as he ran through the hallways. Wherever the Valeyard was, it was earlier than this.

The Doctor ran for the door to invite Eyebrows aboard before it was too late for him, but the damage was done: that Doctor was gone. She swallowed, closing her ship's door with a shaking hand. "We've got to keep going. You choose this time. I can't."

BA-DUM! BAD-DUM! The heartbeat was so loud! Could the TARDIS hear it too?

The Doctor returned to the console and pulled a single green lever. In just a few seconds, the cloister bell sounded and she looked at the screen to see where they were.

They were in a morgue. A morgue she doubted she noticed much of at the time, as out of it as she was when she woke up, but a morgue she recognized nonetheless. The cold metal table with her dead sheet-clad seventh body was a giveaway.

Her younger self wasn't alone in the morgue: he was only an outline, but the Valeyard was in there with him, a hand on his chest.

The Doctor ran for the doors again. This time, they opened. She charged the Valeyard, but he dissipated into less than smoke.

She could still feel herself slipping. It was like the molecules in her body weren't convinced they were supposed to be there. They pulled at their bonds like dogs on a leash. She had to get back to the TARDIS.

But if the Valeyard already succeeded with her younger self, there was no point. She had to check and reverse it if necessary.

She put her hand to the pale chest beside her. Finally, the heartbeat in her head slowed.

The heartbeats under her hand weren't present at all. Shouldn't they be starting up by now? Frowning, she moved her fingers to her seventh self's temples.

This was very, very not good. No, he wasn't going to regenerate into the Valeyard, but at this rate, he wasn't going to regenerate at all. Her evil future self may have just killed them for being unable to finish.

"I'm going to have to help you out. Jump-start your regeneration. Mind you, I still have temporal backlash from my second regeneration into our pinstripe-loving form. You're going to wake up very confused, even thinking that you're the version that's half-human." She put her hands back on his chest, one on each side, and let the golden glow of regeneration flow out through her hands and into her younger self. The energy entered his body with a flash that puttered out.

She couldn't see it now, but there was a pulse under her fingers again – it took. Her younger self just needed a bit of time. She herself didn't have the time to stick around out here, outside her TARDIS. She ran back in and snapped her fingers to close the door behind her in a hurry.

Just for a moment, anyone looking could have seen right through her.


Next time:

Donna has a shady visitor.

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