Disclaimer: Tragically, I don't own Doctor Who.
He flipped on the monitor as the timeship materialized. Since a peaceful tropical beach was apparently not in his future, he had decided to try a cruise. "The Queen Elizabeth, the largest ocean liner in the heyday of transatlantic luxury travel. A few days in the middle of the ocean, nothing but water as far as the eye can see, nothing for me to do but relax. That's got to be good for the soul, yeah?" He wasn't quite sure whom he was trying to convince with this speech.
The monitor showed a small room, shelves lining the walls, stacked to the ceiling with sheets and towels. "And good parking skills, if I do say so myself. Linen room – a much better place to land than on the lido deck in front of hundreds of witnesses."
His first clue that yet another holiday plan had gone pear-shaped came in the way the TARDIS door swung heavily inward when he opened it. The inside of his timeship maintained a gyroscopic equilibrium, but the outside was obviously not so horizontal. "Must be riding up a wave," he announced to no one, and waited for the pitch of the room to change as they slid down the other side. When this didn't happen, he pulled against gravity to close the TARDIS door behind him and opened the door of the linen closet.
This was when he received his second clue that all was not right; from the hallway were clearly audible sounds of fear and distress, noisy confusion coming from a multitude of voices. He searched his memory for any incident in the Queen Elizabeth's history that could cause such mass panic, but could think of none. Which could only mean that someone was mucking about with history. "Alien invasion – it's the only explanation. Not the first time I've run up against an unscheduled incursion. The ship's probably being overrun by a whole horde of Da–" The word caught in his throat, too painful to speak, too raw to even think. "–Of Cybermen. Or Sontarans. Maybe Zygons." Well, whoever they were, they were going to find that he was in no mood to be trifled with. He set off through the halls in search of trouble.
As he rounded a corner, a man in steward's livery was hurrying by, and the Doctor grabbed his arm. "Pardon, mate, just a quick question."
The steward swung to face him, face tight with anxiety, but not too far gone to cast a disapproving eye up and down. "What are you doing here?"
"Me? I'm–"
"These are the first-class cabins. Strictly off-limits to steerage passengers, and– Oh, what am I saying?" He made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "First class, third class, what does it matter now? We're all doomed."
"Not if I can help it. I just need you to point me in the direction of the invaders."
"The invaders?"
"Yes, invaders. Attackers. Aliens. Come on, man. Who are they, anyway? Metal robots with handles coming out of their ears, by any chance? It would help if I knew what I was walking into." The steward just goggled at him. The Doctor was rapidly losing patience. "Listen, I happen to know for a fact that the Queen Elizabeth was never sunk by alien invaders. So if you'll kindly point me in the right direction, I'll make sure that history stays on course."
The man finally found his voice. "I don't know anything about any Queen Elizabeth. But the Titanic is going down, and there's nothing you can do to save her. If you want any chance of saving yourself, you'd best get abovedeck, and fast. Now if you'll please let me go, that's exactly what I'm trying to do." He pulled his arm free from the Doctor's grip and ran off down the corridor.
The Time Lord stood rooted in the hallway, shouting at the retreating figure. "Not the Titanic! The Queen Elizabeth, not the Titanic!"
But the delusion shattered as a mob of people swept around him. Their patched and homespun clothing marked them as third-class passengers; but more than that, it marked them as belonging to an era 50 years earlier than he had thought.
They were lost, he realized, stumbling in panic through corridors, up staircases, running into dead ends and locked doors in their quest for the boat deck. And so he did what he did best, what he knew he could still do, even in his broken and fractured state: he took charge. "This way!" he yelled, manoeuvering himself to the front of the pack, letting his nose and the sonic screwdriver lead him to fresh air.
The tragedy of the Titanic had been compounded, he knew, by the gross underutilization of the lifeboats. If he could make it there in time, if he could oversee the loading of the boats and fill them to capacity, hundreds of lives would be spared.
But when he burst through the door onto the boat deck, he saw at once that he was too late; all the lifeboats had been launched. He ran for the railing, leaned over as far as he could, hoping against hope that there was just one raft left for his desperate crew, leaning so far out that his face was slapped with the salt spray of the waves that had reached nearly to this level, leaning so far out that his feet almost came off the deck and he felt hands tugging at the hem of his jacket, pulling him back in. As if it mattered, he thought grimly, when they were all about to end up in the drink anyway.
Unless…wait, he had the best lifeboat there was, a ship of infinite capacity! Ignoring the tiny voice whispering Fixed point in the back of his mind, he shouted "Everyone follow me!" to the crowd milling about the deck. No one paid attention; some were sobbing hysterically, some dashing about in frenzied but fruitless action, some sitting stoic and accepting.
He tried again. "I know where there's another liferaft. Come on!" This time a few heads turned, a few people stepped towards him. It wasn't much, but there was no time to waste trying to convince the rest.
And then suddenly, there was no time at all. The ship pitched forward, downward, and a wall of displaced water swept along the deck, washing away dozens of hapless victims. The Doctor grabbed for the railing, felt his arms nearly wrench from their sockets as the momentum of the wave swung his body up and over his grip onto the outside of the rail, but managed to keep clinging on. There was a terrible grinding, groaning sound as fatigued metal lost its battle against physics and the ship broke in half. The deck lights flickered and went out, plunging the whole nightmare into moonless, inky blackness. The Doctor could feel rather than see that the boat's angle was steadily increasing, that the stern section he clung to was now nearly vertical in the water. It was far too late to try to reach the TARDIS; he had moments, at best, before the whole thing went under and pulled him down in its wake. He braced his feet against the side of the ship and jackknifed off.
At some point in the depths of the Time War, he thought he had lost the will to live. Death seemed a welcome release from the soul-crushing horrors of the war, from the unrelenting guilt in its aftermath. But as soon as his body plunged into the frigid water, as soon as he inhaled a lungful of saline and surfaced, choking, coughing, he knew it wasn't true. He still wasn't quite sure how to get on with living, but he knew he wasn't ready for dying.
His boots were heavy, weighing him down, and he kicked them off, then struck out for…he had no idea where, just knew he had to get as far as possible from the foundering behemoth. He could feel the suction as the Titanic slipped beneath the waves, but he kept on stroking, kept on moving away. The cold seemed to be a living creature, now slashing at him with razor-sharp claws, now squeezing at his hearts. He could endure it longer than a human could, but he knew that even he would reach his limit.
Something broke the waves with a violent splash, narrowly missing him, causing him to yelp and roll sideways. He could just make it out in the faint starlight: a wooden door, torn from its hinges, propelled to the surface by its buoyancy. Around him, he could hear similar splashes mixed in with the moans of the dying, and he swam harder to escape the debris field.
A ghostly shape loomed in front of him; in the near-total darkness, he didn't see it until he nearly swam into it. It was an iceberg, a baby sibling of the one that had caused the calamity, but big enough for his purposes. He dragged himself out of the water, clambered up the side until he found a spot out of reach of the lapping waves and flat enough to rest on. He tucked his hands up under his arms, curled himself into a ball, focused all his reserves of energy on maintaining a viable body temperature, and waited for daybreak.
The sound of cheering from a nearby lifeboat roused him from a dangerously deep slumber. He took a mental inventory of his condition. Not good. Violent shivers wracked his body; his teeth chattered uncontrollably; he couldn't feel his feet. He opened his eyes, but the night was still pitch black, and the view with his eyelids up was not much different than with them down. Except that…ah yes, now he could see the cause of the cheers: the lights of a ship, still far in the distance but drawing closer. Rescue was on the way.
He tried to sit up, but every frozen muscle in his body protested the attempt. "Objection duly noted and overruled," he said through gritted teeth, and forced himself upright through sheer willpower.
He wondered how hard it would be to attract their attention, a lone man on an icefloe. Then he wondered how hard it would be to explain how he had managed to survive temperatures that would have killed any human. Well, it wasn't like he had a choice about seeking rescue, not if he didn't want to set a record for shortest time between regenerations.
He strained to see into the distance, tried to judge the speed of the approaching ship and how long until it arrived. He pulled himself to his feet, knees bent to maintain his balance on the gently rocking ice, arms wrapped tightly around his body for the scant warmth it provided, and twisted side to side from the waist in the hope that motion would generate heat. And it was as he swung his torso as far around as his stiff muscles would go that he saw what was just then the most welcome sight in the universe: a large box, bobbing in the waves, barely visible in the darkness except for four words glowing a soft white.
"Oh yes! My magnificent, fantastic, buoyant, waterproof girl!" Without hesitation, he plunged into the icy sea, biting back a yelp at the shock. He swam to his salvation, which was conveniently floating with the door pointed up to the sky, and half-climbed, half-fell inside.
He was greeted by a blast of warm air; the TARDIS had obviously raised the thermostat in preparation for his arrival. As soon as he closed the door, the interior dimensions rotated and stabilized so that the floor was once more beneath him. He staggered to the jump chair, where he found waiting for him a clean set of clothes, warm as if fresh from the dryer, and a thick blanket. He stripped off his stiff, wet outfit, put on the other, wrapped himself in the blanket, and sank immediately into a deep sleep right on the grating.
When he awoke some time later, he was feeling much better physically. Mentally was another matter. His dreams had been filled with the cries of the doomed passengers blending into cries of doomed Gallifreyans, with the water and ice of the North Atlantic somehow mingling with the fire and smoke of the last day of the Time War. He hadn't helped them, hadn't saved them, not then, not now, and he was utterly exhausted.
The bobbing motion of the TARDIS reminded him that he had not dematerialized before passing out. He set a course for a holding pattern in the Vortex for lack of any other destination in mind, and leaned back against a coral strut. And there he stayed, staring dully into the time rotor, until his lethargy and numbness gave way to a blinding white-hot rage. "Useless!" he shouted at his reflection. "Utter waste of flesh! No good to anyone! Why are you even still alive? How did you manage to destroy everyone but yourself? What is the point of you?" His hand closed around the mallet that hung from the console, and he reared back, ready to obliterate his image by shattering the rotor.
The tolling of the cloister bell shocked him back to his senses. Never before had he heard it ring at the mere anticipation of danger. But then, never before had the source of the danger been one who was telepathically linked to the ship. He dropped the mallet to the grating and stroked the console soothingly. "I'm sorry, old girl. It's not you I'm mad at. It's just…I've done so much wrong, it seems I'll never do anything right again."
The unending hum of the ship, so familiar, so comforting, deepened and strengthened. And the monitor flashed to life with a series of pictures. He saw various scenes of London streets, people milling about amid the carnage of shattered glass and fallen shop dummies. The last image was of Rose, the first time he had left her, just outside a back door of Henrik's, still in shock at her first experience with the Autons. Then the screen faded to black.
He bowed his head. "Yes, I know. A lot of people died there. Starting with that electrician at Henrik's, ending with everyone the Autons mowed down before…before the anti-plastic. My fault. If I had acted faster, if I had done more…" The tone of the humming changed again, somehow managed to convey disapproval. Another series of images appeared; this time, the figures walking the streets were all plastic dummies, the bodies lying still on the pavement human. The last image was of Rose, cringing in the basement of her shop, with no one to grasp her hand or tell her to run, as an Auton raised its hand for the final blow. The Doctor closed his eyes before it came. "That never happened! I saved her. I stopped…we stopped the Consciousness. How can you – oh. Oh, I see. You are linked to all possible timelines, even the ones that never happened, aren't you?" The original pictures flashed by again, and this time in the close-up on Rose, he could see that her face contained shock, yes, but also puzzlement and wonder and mobile, expressive life. And now he understood what the TARDIS was trying to convey. "People died, but people lived. The Nestene Consciousness didn't conquer the planet. I didn't save the shop electrician, but I did save the shop clerk." The ship hummed her approval of his comprehension. "Sorry, I appreciate what you're trying to do, but what I did with the Consciousness, whatever bit of good I managed to achieve…on balance, it's not enough. It could never be enough." He sank to the floor, back to the console, tipped his head back against the pedestal, rubbed his face with both hands. "But maybe that's not the point, eh, girl? I can't atone for what I've done. But, against all expectations, I'm still here. And as long as I am, maybe I can still manage to make a difference to someone every once in a while."
He sat there for a few minutes more, elbows on his bent knees, head in his hands, until a new thought occurred to him and he slapped his palms on the floor. "But you know what? I am mad at you. You're the one who keeps dropping me in places where I can't make a difference. Krakatoa, the Titanic – what's your game? And don't try to act all innocent with me," he added as the pitch of the humming rose. "One such trip might just mean some knackered circuits, but two in a row – that's no accident. So what are you playing at?" He jumped to his feet, looked to the monitor for a response, but it was blank. He frowned. "What, you want me to work it out for myself? Okay, fine." He paced around the console, running a hand along the edge, for several minutes, while he tried to organize his racing thoughts. "Is it…are you trying to say that not everything is my fault? That there are some events beyond my control, and I just have to accept them? 'Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change', that sort of thing?" The lights flickered in agreement. "Well, thanks all the same, but I can do without any more of your lessons, yeah? If you think my life is still worth living, if you think that there is still some good I can do, then take me someplace where I can do it. Go on, then. Have at it." He closed his eyes, hit some random switches and twirled some dials, and let his ship take him where she willed.
To be continued in Chapter 3: Quayside
Author's note: Special thanks to James for his awesome Googling skills in discovering that the deck of a ship that holds the lifeboats is called the boat deck. In retrospect, I probably should have guessed that.