Disclaimer - I don't own Doctor Who.
I felt Legend of Sea Devils and the whole arc of the Thirteenth Doctor could be better. Much better.
Xxx
The Doctor looked out to sea, shaking her head, wincing in pain. Ever since her last regeneration, she had often wondered if she was suddenly in the Twilight Zone because she found it hard to believe half of the events she'd just gone through happened.
Sometimes she felt like her mind had been wrapped in some kind of cotton wool that prevented her from properly recalling the memories, and what happened. It was weird.
The first time it happened was on Desolation.
The second was the first time she'd encountered the Master since their regeneration from Missy.
The third was on Gallifrey.
Her encounter with that other version of herself, disguised as Ruth, was another example because she now had a hazy memory of what happened in her head.
The whole mess with the Flux had been one of the biggest episodes, because now she looked back in hindsight, she couldn't believe Time was a sentient being, and half of what happened had felt half done, like a TV show whose writers had been enthusiastic they'd run out of ideas part way through and just…gave up.
That certainly was a good description since she didn't have a clear memory of how the Flux was stopped.
The Doctor was afraid to ask her friends what they remembered. She didn't want them to think she was mad, but now, with the Sea Devils dealt with, the Doctor was shaken by the encounter. She had met Sea Devils and Silurians, their land-based cousins before; not once had she given up trying to negotiate peace between both races. She knew if she didn't both side's mutual xenophobia would drive them to launch all-out war.
But she hadn't done it here.
Why not?
Her memories were vague, but the Doctor distinctly remembered running around, trying to destroy the Sea Devils. That was not like her, and she could not believe she had done that without at least trying to make peace; she had tried to negotiate even knowing how cruel and angry Silurians and Sea Devils were towards humans; okay, the Sea Devils she had first met during her third incarnations exile to Earth had been more reasonable, they had merely lashed out because Walker ordered a depth charge attack on their city.
The Doctor was so lost in thought she almost missed the soft sounds of someone walking across the beach. "You okay?" Yaz asked.
The Doctor looked up into her friend's face, seeing the look of worry on Yaz's face. She closed her eyes mentally, knowing Yaz loved her, and wanted her to talk, but what could she say about her memory?
She was about to lie, but she knew that Yaz desperately wanted to help, to know what was wrong. The Doctor knew her desire to keep things a secret was frustrating, but sometimes it helped. The last thing she wanted was a repeat of the mistakes she'd made with Rose, Martha, Donna, Amy, Rory and River.
And then she decided to be honest and realised it could help with her own memory.
"Not really. Yaz, have you ever gone through a day where you know how you did something, only to ask yourself if what you remembered happened?" The Doctor asked.
Yaz blinked. She hadn't expected the question. "Er, sometimes?" She said uncertainly, wondering where this was leading. And the Doctor knew she didn't understand. But she went on.
"Looking back with the Sea Devils…. I told you I'd met them before, what I didn't tell you was I kept trying to make peace with them on humanity's behalf-," the Doctor said.
"Huh? Doctor, you did try to make peace!" Yaz stared at her as if she were mad. "Me and Dan thought you'd gone crazy since the Sea Devils were gunning for us."
"What? But then why don't I remember it?" The Doctor sat suddenly. "All I remember is a lot of running around, trying to destroy them without bothering to speak to them!"
Yaz was looking at her in a manner the Doctor did not like, and it frightened her more than anything. "Doctor, what's happening to you? You've been in a fugue ever since we met. At first, me, Ryan and Graham thought it was just your way, but then it got worse, and during the Flux it was much worse than before, especially when we used the vortex manipulators to escape the Weeping Angels that came after us," Yaz said.
"Vortex Manipulators?" The Doctor whispered. "I...I don't remember that."
Suddenly the Doctor had had enough. She was going to get to the bottom of this if it was the last thing she ever did, and she made up her mind to force a regeneration if it cleared up the memory problems if what she was planning did not work.
"Yaz, I DON'T remember any of that. I remember the Weeping Angels, and the Flux, but so much is clouding my brain. Why did we use manipulators in the first place?" The Doctor asked.
Yaz bit her lip, her worried gaze never leaving the Time Lady; only the genuine horror convinced her that the Doctor was truly not well stopped her from walking off. "The TARDIS collapsed until it became a matchbox. You said it was because the Flux was corrupting the Block Transfer of her structure, and it needed to retreat into something simpler.. when we arrived in the Crimea, we found out the TARDIS used the last of her power to fabricate vortex manipulators. We used them after dealing with the Sontarans."
'So some things are consistent. Good, that gives me something to work with,' the Doctor mused to herself before deciding to get it over with. She was desperate. There was only one true way of finding out.
The Doctor rubbed her face and her eyes, pressing against her memories but she still couldn't access them without seeing the fake ones she knew were just wrong.
"Yaz, have you ever seen the Vulcan mind meld from Star Trek?" She asked.
"Er, yeah, why?"
"Something is just wrong with my mind. I don't have any clear memories of the Flux, and even before, and I want it stopped. I want to remember, but do you mind if I just read your mind and you can see my memories from my point of view?" The Doctor asked.
Yaz was stunned. She knew the Doctor was mildly telepathic after deducing it during their time together since she sometimes seemed to know what she and the others in the TARDIS were thinking, but she had never expected her to ask this. At the same time, she was genuinely worried for her friend and realised this might be her only chance to recover. She had not expected this at all, and it made her wonder if her memories were tampered with.
"Okay, I'll help, but could you do me a favour?" Yaz asked.
"Anything," the Doctor replied at once.
Yaz bit her lip, "This is scaring me, I want to make sure my memory isn't tampered with."
"Do you feel it has?"
"I dunno, but can you please check?"
"I will." The Doctor nodded and she twisted herself around. "Face me," she instructed.
While she was waiting for Yaz to do as she was told, the Doctor took a deep breath and called upon her Time Lord training. Slowly she reached out and pressed her fingers gently into Yaz's face. "If you don't mind looking at a memory, picture a door and close it. I won't look."
Yaz nodded.
"At the same time, I'll show you my memories, so you will know what is truth and fiction. And I'll look through your mind to see if it's been tampered with."
"O-okay," Yaz was now scared she might have made a mistake. The Doctor sensed her fear.
"It will be fine, Yaz," She was quick to reassure her. "It will be fine."
The Doctor closed her eyes and allowed Yaz to come into her mind - she had a head chock full of memories, it would overwhelm the human's brain if she suddenly shoved them all there - and at the same time, she read Yaz's mind.
Xxxxx
Yaz was beginning to wonder if she was suddenly in over her head - pun not intended, depending on your point of view. She had longed to know more about the Doctor, this just was not what she had in mind. She was in the background of the Doctor's memories; watching as a small boy stood in front of the Untempered Schism, played truant with younger versions of the Master, the Rani, the Monk, and Drax, being told that he could not come by a younger version of the Corsair….on and on, seeing the Doctor's life, the highs and the lows, the tragedies and the pain brought on by their exile to Earth, the loss of their freedom, the regaining of their freedom, the fights with the Daleks, the Sontarans, the Sea Devils and the Master.
Then she saw the confusing tangle of the Eighth Doctor's lifetime, how that Doctor walked Earth for a century after losing his memory and got it back, restoring Gallifrey to the timeline again, only to go through so many conspiracies later.
By the time she reached the current Doctor's time, Yaz was left reeling from the influx of information, she could tell what was fact and what was fiction. When she found herself in a version of the TARDIS, watching the Twelfth Doctor regenerate while in absolute agony, hardly shocking since she had seen him being shot and electrocuted by Cybermen, she found herself seeing the Master as she knew him, pointing something at the TARDIS console just as the Doctor she knew appeared….
Xxxxx
The Doctor liked human minds. She knew their briefness was special, and as she read Yaz's mind, seeing her memories, seeing the way she had grown before becoming a police officer who had a hefty ambition to reach the top to shake off her mental insecurities, she found more reason to see Yaz as special.
But as she read Yaz's mind, she felt her memory unblocking.
Reading another's mind made it easy for her to compare what she had thought she had known. Her regeneration was the same. So was her first adventure in her current body, but on Desolation the confrontation with those cloth things went differently; they had taunted the others with her as well, trying to catch them off guard and psych them. There was no mention of the Timeless Child.
Not once.
Some of her next adventures were largely the same, only darker; she had taken her predecessor's last words to heart, but she did have limits. The confrontation with Krasko during that mess in Montgomery went as she remembered, but she had hacked into Jack Robert's computer, and aired his dirty laundry, rather than letting him get away with building that hotel on the landfill. The mess with Kerblam was the same, too.
But the second confrontation with Tzim-Sha was different; she had warned Graham of the dangers of getting revenge, letting him know she had been standing in the abyss before. When it came down to it, she was the one who ended the Stenza's life. Not that she cared.
The whole mess with the Recon Dalek was different, too; while it was largely the same as it had been before, she had told her friends about some of her previous fights with the Daleks. The thought of the Daleks made the Doctor mentally grimace as she thought of how many battles she'd had with them, seeing the carnage and destruction they left in their wake. The disease that Davros inflicted on creation still made her sick.
But instead of letting the Recon Dalek's remains be found, as she had before, she went back and gathered it and chucked it into the supernova.
There was no cloudy memory of when she and her friends met the Master, but the only haze she did find was instead of letting Daniel Barton run away, without UNIT around anymore, there was nothing she could do. The destruction of Gallifrey happened; Yaz's untampered memories and her new recollections made that clear.
Again, no Timeless Child. The Master never dropped that holoprojector into her pocket, and she found no clues to what happened.
But there were differences. Instead of travelling to that alternate Earth, she and her friends had travelled around a little bit, yet she did make secret side trips back to Gallifrey in the hopes of accessing what was left of the Citadels' Matrix records to find out what happened. But she found nothing. They'd been erased. She did try to find out who was responsible; she had put a lot of work into saving the Time Lords, even if she lost her memory because of unsynched timelines and that confrontation with Rassilon made her wonder if it was worth it, she just wanted to know who'd done it.
The mess with the Judoon was also largely the same, but a lot of it was rewritten.
Ruth, her other self, was actually from a parallel universe, just like that version she'd met a few lifetimes ago during the Time War when she had gone through that regenerative crisis. That incarnation had been a version of her third self, who'd arrived on Earth after the 70s, and found a different world. Ruth was the same, and Gat was a Time Lord who'd hired Judoon to prevent the Time Lords of this reality from even knowing they were there. That Doctor was even more extreme in her desire to make the universe a better place than the Doctor was herself, and she had no scruples in killing Gat.
And then there was Gallifrey, again. And the Cybermen.
She had no memories of the Timeless Child.
None.
Instead, she remembered the Master locking her in the Matrix, giving her knowledge of a secret history of the Time Lords, one where he discovered she was a Founder of Gallifrey, which made him lose it so badly he wiped everyone out, and feeling several memories being pushed into her mind, giving her a fictional account of Tecteun finding her as a child on some planet with the mouth of a wormhole open above her.
But she had been there.
Instead of the Timeless Child, the Master had determined that she, the Doctor, was a Loom Jumper. A Time Lord who threw themselves into the progenation machines which gave birth to Time Lords. She had gone with Tecteun and three others whom she knew were younger versions of Rassilon, Omega, and Artron, three of the principal founding fathers of Gallifrey.
They had left Gallifrey in a warp drive ship, later modifying it to travel faster through wormholes.
They had explored numerous worlds and learned many secrets.
They had seen many times thanks to discovering time warps, discovering the basic wonders of time that inspired them all and would be the primary spark which made them embark on the journey to mastering time forever.
They had gone through wormholes to different parts of the universe.
They had dealt with so many ancient threats.
They had eventually arrived on a planet with the wormhole in question. But there was no child. They had gone through the wormhole after seeing it was safe and would not move like others they discovered had in the past, and they explored the other universe for decades before coming back. After years of studying the wormhole and its effects, since it was a different wormhole than anything they'd encountered, they left.
Eventually, they returned to Gallifrey.
When they returned home, the quintet decided to master time travel after realising immortality was impractical, after that, the Eye of Harmony was created, and the most basic time machines were created before the first regenerations happened.
To the Doctor's surprise, the quintet realised they should create an organisation dedicated to subtly and silently manipulating and interfering in the affairs of others while maintaining the Doctrine of Non-Interference after discovering the consequences.
The Doctor reared mentally back in shock. It never happened, she realised, the Timeless Child. She'd always had her doubts, wondering if it was a dream, so it had been a risk for the Master to even go that far, he knew she had been in the Matrix before so she would know if something was wrong.
There was no chase for Karvanistra, he never existed, but Vinder and Bell did. So did Dan. She had met Dan with Yaz during a little bit of trouble with a Blathereen, who'd wanted to cash in on the tourist opportunities on Earth and he began travelling with her and Yaz before the mess with the Flux.
The Doctor grimaced when she thought about the Flux. As before, it was an entropy wave, but she, Yaz, and Dan arrived during the Crimea war and found it overrun with Sontarans while the TARDIS lost her power the same way she had to rid herself of the paradox infection that destroyed that version of Gallifrey in her eighth life.
They'd met Vinder and Bell later. There was no Storm or Azure. They didn't exist. Vinder and Bell were both struggling to survive since they were separated, so their histories were the same, only the Doctor had helped bring them back; a task made easier by the fact Bell was pregnant, so all they'd needed to do was track down Vinder's biodata.
Together, they tried to stop more and more of the universe from falling apart, and their journeys led them to so many places the Doctor did not remember thanks to the clouded memories.
But they did run into the Weeping Angels.
And Division.
Within the void in the dimension void ship, Division existed largely as the Doctor recalled, but looking at it now, the Doctor saw the wide differences. Tecteun and her younger self had worked together, yes. That was consistent with what she'd learnt, and what the Master had discovered. But somewhere along the lines, during so many regeneration cycles (that was surprise; Division had pumped her with fresh charges of regeneration energy, just like she had been after ageing on Trenzalore, from what was implied, Division found her too valuable to throw away as she had skills and insights few of them had despite the variety of members they brought in), but then something happened and they took her memories and put them in a watch.
Consistent.
Tecteun was also responsible for the Flux, but only because the universe had not turned out how she'd wanted. She didn't care if she, the Doctor, had learnt about her hidden, original life. She didn't care if the Master wiped out Gallifrey. She didn't even care about the way Gallifrey had been destroyed three times. Somewhere along the line, and this had disgusted the Doctor at the time, Tecteun had lost any kind of compassion, if she had any at all, deeming the universe as a failed experiment and Division would cut its losses while destroying the universe so it couldn't cause problems later and move to a new universe to start again. She didn't care about the races facing extinction.
Without Swarm and Azure around, it had been up to the Doctor to stop Tecteun. She had killed the old Time Lady, pushing her through the teleport portal into deep space right before the Flux. The Doctor and her friends were able to shunt the Flux into a different timeline after going back in time to stop it. In the aftermath, they learned the Grand Serpent tried to take over Earth, but the Doctor killed his telepathic pets and exiled him to a volcanic planet.
Xxxxx
The Doctor and Yaz gasped as they snapped out of the telepathic trance, panting wildly. Instantly Yaz was hugging her. "I saw it all, Doctor, it was the Master," she said.
"I know. He tricked me," the Doctor had her eyes screwed tightly as the memory blocks came down, and she gritted her teeth in pain.
"Are you okay?"
"Of course, I'm not okay! My mind is swamped by different memories!" The Doctor opened her eyes and sighed at the look of hurt on Yaz's face. Her friend had helped her and this was how she was repaid. "I'm sorry, Yaz," she whispered. "I didn't mean to snap. I'm just…I've wiped the memory of people before, and I've gone through it myself once or twice. It's never pleasant, but I don't do it unless I have to. But sorting these memories out is hard and it's giving me a headache."
"Sorry," Yaz wasn't sure what else she could say.
The Doctor looked away and groaned as a wave of dizziness surged through her.
"Why did he do this? The Master. I mean, I know he's insane, but why do all of this?" Yaz struggled to understand.
The Doctor shook her head. She regretted it quickly. "I don't know. But he had something in mind, but why do all this?" She struggled to understand it herself.
"He did something in the TARDIS, right as you were regenerating."
"I saw that. He was tampering with the TARDIS telepathic circuits. Regeneration always shakes up a Time Lord's mind, the best time to brainwash us, but why he bothered I don't know," the Doctor gritted her teeth, summoning her first and seventh personas, knowing her first incarnations' mind was sharpened to compensate for her old age in that body before encountering Mondas, and her seventh incarnation's manipulative tendencies gave her a perception few could match. "The only thing that makes sense is he has some long-term plan, and he needs me in a particular mindset to make it work."
"But why would he take it so far; Gallifrey, Division - yeah, I saw what you did - all of that, why?" Yaz asked.
The Doctor had no answer. She couldn't answer. "I was thinking of opening up the fob watch in the TARDIS," she confessed. The TARDIS! God, she had to find out what the Master had done.
"But not anymore?" Yaz was sharp enough to catch the past tense.
The Doctor shook her head, almost smiling at the way Yaz's mind, sharpened by her travels in the TARDIS, had picked up on what she meant. "No," she said with a sigh. "My brain has just become clearer now, but I'm still recovering. I don't want to shove more memories on top."
"Ah, that makes more sense. But are you going to open that watch?" Yaz asked quietly.
The Doctor sighed. That was a good question, but one she didn't have an answer for. She had no intention of opening the watch now, but she knew the day would come when she would. Maybe it would be the last act of her current life, and a part of the Thirteenth Doctor felt that would be a great end to her life, unlocking the secrets of an old existence she hadn't known about except subconsciously.