Twenty five turns of the Earth had led her to this point in Earth's history, to a bar in Montgomery, Alabama. Sitting at one of the tables was a tall woman with long, flowing brunette hair and brown eyes. She wore the fashionable clothes of the period, while she sat by herself, nursing a drink. She had been there at the bar for the last few hours, drinking slowly. She had arrived the day before. She had waited for the last 5 years for this. 5 years.
It was hard to believe it was almost over.
The Doctor looked around the bar. Each one of the patrons were white, American, drinking and laughing and joking. And all along the Doctor could feel the tension whenever dark skinned people walked by, trying to keep their eyes averted, but it didn't stop one or two patrons from sizing them up.
She rolled her eyes, a sneer of disgust on her lips. 'Humans,' she thought to herself in contempt.
For the last two decades she'd been stranded on this planet in this primitive point in the 20th century after her trial on Gallifrey, the Doctor had seen the rise of fascism in Europe; granted, the humans' brand of fascism was still in the nursery compared to the Daleks, but she'd had more than enough.
The Doctor had spent two of her incarnations travelling the universe in her lovely old Type-40 TARDIS.
Okay, granted she wasn't able to control the TARDIS successfully because she'd been forced to remove some of the control systems and replaced them with technology from the real universe, to stop the Time Lords from tracking her down.
For a time it worked; because she'd covered her tracks so well and was always on the move to stop the Time Lords chasing after her, the Doctor was always a few steps ahead.
In the end the Time Lords had caught her.
It had all happened during her second incarnation, with the little Beatle's Tramp. In that incarnation, she had inherited the TARDIS and went on her merry way, travelling the universe, jumping from one crisis to the next while learning as she went.
Deep down, the Doctor had known the Time Lords would and could catch up; more than once, especially when the TARDIS landed in that alternate timeline with WOTAN and then again when she tried to buy time to save Zoe when Ockora was being threatened in a fixed point in history, the Doctor had been terrified of making one mistake, just one decision that would attract the attention of the Time Lords.
But no.
Nothing happened although it had merely made her more cautious. But in the end she was forced to break silence and summon the Time Lords to her. All those years travelling the universe in two incarnations, decades travelling even though from a Time Lords' standards only a century had passed since she and her granddaughter Susan had left Gallifrey; all of that ended when she was forced to contact them for help in stopping the War Games set up by a bunch of war-mongering aliens, who'd kidnapped and brainwashed Rassilon knew how many human soldiers from their own wars on Earth, and set them down to fight to create an invincible army of warriors.
She'd stopped the scheme, but she hadn't been able to get the humans home. So she was forced to contact Gallifrey and bring the Time Lords in to make things better. The Time Lords had gotten the humans home, and they'd caught her, put her on trial.
The Doctor had given a very good performance at her trial, and she'd told the Time Lords not only about the many evils that existed just outside the transduction barriers keeping Gallifrey in a pocket reality of time, but she had also told them of the many potential timelines that would have caused damage to the Web of Time.
The Doctor grimaced into her drink as she recalled how she and her companions, Jamie and Zoe, had tried to escape, but they'd hidden inside the Matrix while he went inside, hoping to find a way to hide himself from the Time Lords again while finding a foolproof way of travelling freely without them bothering him anymore.
Oh, she had found what she'd needed, but as she hacked the Matrix - Gallifrey believed it had the greatest security systems in the universe, but since she still had knowledge of how to hack into the Matrix gleaned from her stupid decision to learn more about the Guardians of Time which led her, Rallon and Millennia into the frying pan with the Celestial Toymaker, and with all the hacking skills she'd picked up over the intervening years since that stupid moment in her past, she had dug deeper and discovered something horrifying that had shaken her to the core.
Everything was a lie….
Everything she had been taught, about Gallifrey, about the Time Lords.
The Founding Fathers of Gallifrey had lied to everyone who passed through the Academy since the Age of the Time Lords had begun. All of it built on the lie of the Timeless Child, a being from a reality distant and yet similar to N-Space. The Timeless Child had been taken to Gallifrey by a group of Gallifreyan explorers who would go on to become the most important figures in the history of the Time Lords, and after an accident where the child regenerated for the first time, two of the Founders had mined the child for the secret, forcing the Child to regenerate so many times before they were able to splice into themselves the power of regeneration even though the old legends of how Rassilon and Artron had gifted the Time Lords with regeneration was true.
While the injection was the catalyst, the Eye of Harmony (yes, it existed) and the Untempered Schism provided the 'charges' of regeneration energy to power the cycle, the injection had come from an innocent child. What made it worse was the Child…was the Doctor!
The Doctor was not Gallifreyan.
She was actually from a different reality, and she'd been tortured so many times until the Time Lords had been created. It made her feel physically ill to discover it, but she had learnt there was a clandestine organisation, known as Division, she had been a part of, and then they had taken her memories.
Reeling from the discovery, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe had rushed back to the TARDIS; the Doctor had planned it out, she would telepathically freeze Gallifrey, like Salyavin before he became Chronotis, and would then telepathically erase himself from the memories of the Time Lords, only he had it wrong. The Time Lords caught them and sent Jamie and Zoe home, their memories of their travels leaving before the Doctor's final sentence was passed.
Exile on Earth. Their defence was good enough to warrant that. The Time Lords would force the Second Doctor to regenerate, while making sure the Third Doctor was stranded on Earth, the TARDIS was left with an inhibitor that stopped her moving through time, not space although she couldn't leave the planet itself. The Doctor chose a female incarnation after being unimpressed with the choices, and asked to be exiled in 1930s Earth.
She asked for that point for a few reasons. The first, she could explore more of the 20th century. She could help people from an earlier point in life. The second, was to wait until a time traveller arrived so she could hitch a ride although failing that, she could get to the Hand of Omega and the Dalek time machine her first self had dealt with.
The Doctor had regenerated in her first female body, and she'd arrived on Earth to begin her exile. She had watched the fall of Mosley, saw World War 2 from afar, and now thanks to a modified temporal detector she had learnt of a time traveller's arrival before it happened, and further checking showed this time travellers was an unpleasant murderer from the future, who'd already spent time in prison and believed dark skinned people should know their place, and believed Rosa Parks was responsible for the woes.
Only the Doctor was ready for him.
The Doctor checked her watch and the detector. She had plenty of time, but she decided to get to the warehouse where she'd pinned down his arrival. She finished her drink, but she deliberately didn't bother tipping the servers.
-0-
The warehouse was fairly dark when the Doctor arrived, and after checking the detector again - she had broken a few of the Laws of Time by making sure it peered into the future, but she didn't care - and she worked out he would materialise in the centre of the warehouse. Slipping out her gun, the Doctor waited.
Finally he arrived, as a bright light opened up like a door in front of him. The time traveller was a man with slicked dark hair and a beard with roguish features, wearing a black leather jacket and a white t shirt. He'd certainly done his research. For a moment he looked around, staggering as he got used to his new time, and there was a grimace on his face because of how rough the time jump was. Not encouraging for an exiled Time Lady whose TARDIS no longer worked, but it was going to have to do for now.
The Doctor shot the time traveller in the head before he noticed her. The silenced gun made three thump-thump-thump noises as the bullets went into his head and his chest; he died before he hit the ground. The Doctor dashed over and studied his body, her eyes fixing on the vortex manipulator strapped to his wrist. Eagerly she snatched it off, and then her eyes caught sight of the case in his hand. She hadn't seen it when he'd materialised, but now she was interested.
An information brick, a multi-intercept and surveillance device, and a temporal displacement weapon. Nasty. There was a spare chronoplasm power cell. The Doctor frowned as she studied the weapon, seeing it was set to displace someone in the past, and since she knew he was here to subject Rosa Parks to the same fate, she wondered why he didn't just kill her.
Intrigued enough, the Doctor scanned the body. Looking at the readings, she saw there was a restrictor in his head, wired in so then he wouldn't commit more murders. She knew enough of his past to know he delighted in senseless murder.
The Doctor masked her disgust and she studied the vortex manipulator. It was old, out of date; the chronoplasm cell was exhausted but it still worked, but she was still going to get the time machine back to her TARDIS so she could work on it a little more.