Post by Witcher Wolf on Jun 11, 2005 5:18:39 GMT -5
A short bridge story that may explain how the 8th Doctor (Paul McGann) became the current 9th Doctor (Chris Eccleston)...as always provided as is, usual copyrights apply to the copyright holders -- this piece is derivative fiction only -- enjoy.
The Time War
The time rotor quietly whispered in the background as the TARDIS spun through the corridors of space-time, whirling as if were an ever-present symbol of its lone occupants desire to move ever onwards and refuse to settle down in one place, some had also said: one person, for too long.
The Doctor was in his comfortable armchair and a small glass of red wine balanced neatly atop a stack of books close by. His favourites lay upon the top, Great Expectations and the Time Machine. As he sat in contemplation of the curious feeling that had drawn him to take a journey back to his home planet for a while, he glanced over at the console and mused.
‘I really must think of another design, I have very little to do now so I might as well do some decorating.’
A brief image zipped through his subconscious and harkened his mind back to a moment where the very nature of his vessel was laid bare for all to see, the Eye of Harmony, this line of thought drew him to another facet of that odd happenstance.
‘Did the Master really end up as part of my TARDIS?’ He shuddered at that thought and busied himself with a few designs, sketching by way of the computer screen with a flamboyant swirl of his fingers.
His ideas ranged from outlandish to practical, teal and oak panels based upon the auxiliary console room and even the thought of a deck chair and beach setting, as a nod to another famous literary classic, more modern than his other favourites.
His eyes studied the screen for a few more moments when he noticed a peculiar blip on one of the many readouts, he tapped a finger on the panel and swung around to take a closer look. He was expecting the time rotor to stop that instant and something terrible to go wrong.
He waited, waited and waited a little more. Nothing did of course and he sighed with relief, moving around to another segment of his hexagonal marvel. He wrinkled his nose and threw a couple of switches and turned a dial, a haphazard almost accidental nudge of his elbow against a lever and he grinned.
‘You read my mind…’
A panel fell down on the underside of the console and the Doctor gave it a reproachful look, taking his sonic screwdriver from inside his coat he muttered a little. “I really should take some time to do some more work on that circuit, oh and I think you need a tune up. I wonder if the Timelords have actually bothered to upgrade you yet.”
The TARDIS gave a low groan as if right on cue and the central column stopped for a few seconds, the Doctor looked into the mass of wires and familiar components and then tilted his head to one side, akin to an animal gesture, like a wolf.
He popped his head back up from the side of the console and just as his eyes met the first layers of panels and dials the rotor whirled back into life.
“Odd,” he mused and went back to the interior of the machine humming to himself, the thrum of the screwdriver matching just off-key his tuneful rendition of ‘If I were a rich man’.
While he was busy tinkering he failed to notice the emergency lights begin to flicker on and off, missed the obvious change in his control room’s lighting and the fact that the TARDIS Cloister bell was ringing flew past his hearing like a flock of birds.
He closed the panel, stood up, moved back to fold his arms and then it dawned on him that something was wrong.
“Oh dear,” he said. “That really cannot be good, things were fine when I left and well, as always things will be fine in due course.”
It was at that moment that the Universe decided to convulse, it was a hiccup in the natural order of things and a shudder ran through it, the TARDIS and the Doctor all at once. He blinked a couple of times and pulled down his scanner, only to see the words: Temporal Anomaly Detected.
“That would explain the bell,” he grumbled a little and began to move around the console like a man possessed, hitting buttons, switches and dials that could have seemed to a random observer had there been any as more of a last ditch attempt to save his skin than any real kind of plan.
Outside the serene nature of the cosmos had altered imperceptibly at first, then in larger waves it began to manifest as great coloured rips across the space-time continuum as if a storm were brewing, lashes of temporal lightning whipped around and across the TARDIS as it whirled ever-onwards.
“No use, I am going to have to try and fly right through this,” the Doctor hated days like these when he seemed to be on top of the world and nothing could go wrong. Of course he secretly enjoyed them as well; they gave his computer-like mind the challenge it needed: without the Cybermen or the Daleks his life would be a humdrum existence of taking infantile Timelords on their first few field trips.
For a moment he imagined himself as an intergalactic tour guide and had visions of guiding people through his machine. “Here is the central column, this is the time rotor, oh and please don’t touch that dial,” he said to thin air. “That could bring about the end of the Universe.”
A few sparks and the first of a series of energy discharges that played over the console brought him back to reality and he wisely stepped back.
"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” he said loudly and braved the console again to make a few minor adjustments. “You can take it old girl, you’ve been through worse.”
The winking bright light atop the box in space-time continued to flash softly as all around the TARDIS time seemed to come apart, the flow bent, twisted and uncoiled like a living spring and spat the Doctor’s vessel out and into another stream of rapidly whirling energy.
The Cloister chimed again and he gave a snort. “I know, I know can’t you see I am somewhat busy here?” he kicked a panel loose and began to alter the wiring configuration, muttering to himself. “Oh why didn’t I stop off and do some more repairs, I thought I had all of this fixed since the Master…well…you know.”
The storm outside was getting worse and the convulsions were becoming stronger, more apparent and certainly frequent enough to pose a threat now to the Doctor’s machine. The TARDIS of course being sentient had no choice but to ride the shockwaves and hope it was not torn apart by the conflicting energies of the Universe.
A few more adjustments and the Doctor shot up from under the console and beamed. “There, that should help a little,” he had no idea of course if it would but he had faith in the TARDIS, it was possibly that faith that saved his life back on Earth during the Fenric affair but he never really mentioned that to Ace, not that part.
The interior of the Doctor’s ship began to bend a little and it was rather akin to being stretched, like an elastic band as the machine ground on, straining against the forces that wanted to scatter it to the histories and futures of time itself.
One quake after another bored through the console room and caused a massive series of flashes and bangs to emanate from the control systems, every panel of his machine shut down and the TARDIS interior lighting dimmed then faded to nothing.
The bell stopped ringing with a final low resonant chime that chilled the Doctor to the bone, it sounded like the tolling of a death knell.
For a while the exterior location of the TARDIS remained inert, frozen in time, the massive energy stream that had discharged from one of the tunnel walls had slammed into the vessel and caught it in a vice-like grip, by all rights the machine should have been torn to pieces and the Doctor’s travels ended with it.
Something happened in that moment however that the Timelord could not have foreseen, something that changed everything for a split second. It was as if the Universe sensed the impending death of its favourite wandering son and shifted to one side to allow this event to pass him by.
Space-time rippled like water as if a pebble had been cast into the surface, as if fate in the guise of a white-suited English gentleman had taken an Ace from his pack of cards and palmed it while no-one was looking.
This particular pebble would not disturb things for a long time yet, however.
The Universe is built on the laws of give and take, for every action Newton discovered there is an equal but opposite reaction. Was this then the reason for the existence of the Doctor’s nemesis, the Master? Some Timelords had dared to broach the fact to the Gallifreyan High Council and earned a rebuke for their audacity.
Inside the TARDIS the Doctor pulled a small flashlight from his coat and shone it, the time rotor was frozen and more curiously the emanations from the console were also frozen as well. Sparks and electrical discharges were caught in the act of leaping arc to arc from several of the controls.
“This is very odd,” he mused out loud once more.
A single and spine-chilling almost too familiar old laugh echoed around the interior of his time ship for a few seconds and then all was silent.
“Rassillon?” the Doctor shuddered a little and panned the light over the interior of his TARDIS, but the beam showed nothing. “Or…no wait…I must be hearing things,” as he went to move the beam once more a slight dark figure faded away in the shadows, something had been watching him – the realisation of this caused the hairs to stand up on the back of his neck.
“Steady on there old boy, he’s gone, you saw it…” he slowly approached one of the panels on the console and touched it, it was as cold as ice, and a small indicator screen was stuck on the number: 3.14, it kept repeating it over and over again.
Before he could investigate further the whole room was flooded with a sudden flash of bright light and the console sparked again, time reinstated itself with a bang and he felt nauseous as the feeling of being on the top arc of a rollercoaster passed over him.
He dared to activate a single control and the view-screen flickered into life showing space, the TARDIS had come through and she seemed to be a little worse for wear.
The doctor gave the console an affectionate pat and whispered. “You really are my one true love,” he smiled and began to check the panels for damage, most of it was superficial and would easily clean up with a few licks of paint or in the new reconfiguration.
“Now on to, Gal…” the Doctor’s lips froze in an expression of horror as he looked at the planet the TARDIS drifted around, “li…frey?”
It was not the planet that the Doctor feared but what was in orbit around it, hundreds and hundreds of space ships. Dalek ships ringed his home world like flies around a corpse, each one of them capable of destruction on a scale he’d witnessed more than once.
His hearts froze and he had to lean on the console for support. “How?” was all he could manage after a few hastily taken breaths, “more to the point, why? There are defences and protections unless…oh no…”
He was back at the console, punching in coordinates and throwing levers, hitting buttons and sliding circular dials across. He was once again the manic Doctor and the Universe poised on the edge of something terrible, he could feel it, perhaps it all linked to the event.
The familiar and heart-warming sound of the TARDIS in flight flooded the console room and he breathed again, relieved that the damage had not disabled his vessel, as the wheezing-groaning sound reverberated throughout he continued to monitor the ship’s flight.
Outside the TARDIS winked slowly out of existence just in the nick of time as a Dalek scan array played across the section of space it once occupied.
“THE SECTOR IS CLEAR!” An all too familiar distorted sound passed from inside the Dalek’s shell as it smoothly rolled over the metallic floor of the mother-ship.
The Time War
The time rotor quietly whispered in the background as the TARDIS spun through the corridors of space-time, whirling as if were an ever-present symbol of its lone occupants desire to move ever onwards and refuse to settle down in one place, some had also said: one person, for too long.
The Doctor was in his comfortable armchair and a small glass of red wine balanced neatly atop a stack of books close by. His favourites lay upon the top, Great Expectations and the Time Machine. As he sat in contemplation of the curious feeling that had drawn him to take a journey back to his home planet for a while, he glanced over at the console and mused.
‘I really must think of another design, I have very little to do now so I might as well do some decorating.’
A brief image zipped through his subconscious and harkened his mind back to a moment where the very nature of his vessel was laid bare for all to see, the Eye of Harmony, this line of thought drew him to another facet of that odd happenstance.
‘Did the Master really end up as part of my TARDIS?’ He shuddered at that thought and busied himself with a few designs, sketching by way of the computer screen with a flamboyant swirl of his fingers.
His ideas ranged from outlandish to practical, teal and oak panels based upon the auxiliary console room and even the thought of a deck chair and beach setting, as a nod to another famous literary classic, more modern than his other favourites.
His eyes studied the screen for a few more moments when he noticed a peculiar blip on one of the many readouts, he tapped a finger on the panel and swung around to take a closer look. He was expecting the time rotor to stop that instant and something terrible to go wrong.
He waited, waited and waited a little more. Nothing did of course and he sighed with relief, moving around to another segment of his hexagonal marvel. He wrinkled his nose and threw a couple of switches and turned a dial, a haphazard almost accidental nudge of his elbow against a lever and he grinned.
‘You read my mind…’
A panel fell down on the underside of the console and the Doctor gave it a reproachful look, taking his sonic screwdriver from inside his coat he muttered a little. “I really should take some time to do some more work on that circuit, oh and I think you need a tune up. I wonder if the Timelords have actually bothered to upgrade you yet.”
The TARDIS gave a low groan as if right on cue and the central column stopped for a few seconds, the Doctor looked into the mass of wires and familiar components and then tilted his head to one side, akin to an animal gesture, like a wolf.
He popped his head back up from the side of the console and just as his eyes met the first layers of panels and dials the rotor whirled back into life.
“Odd,” he mused and went back to the interior of the machine humming to himself, the thrum of the screwdriver matching just off-key his tuneful rendition of ‘If I were a rich man’.
While he was busy tinkering he failed to notice the emergency lights begin to flicker on and off, missed the obvious change in his control room’s lighting and the fact that the TARDIS Cloister bell was ringing flew past his hearing like a flock of birds.
He closed the panel, stood up, moved back to fold his arms and then it dawned on him that something was wrong.
“Oh dear,” he said. “That really cannot be good, things were fine when I left and well, as always things will be fine in due course.”
It was at that moment that the Universe decided to convulse, it was a hiccup in the natural order of things and a shudder ran through it, the TARDIS and the Doctor all at once. He blinked a couple of times and pulled down his scanner, only to see the words: Temporal Anomaly Detected.
“That would explain the bell,” he grumbled a little and began to move around the console like a man possessed, hitting buttons, switches and dials that could have seemed to a random observer had there been any as more of a last ditch attempt to save his skin than any real kind of plan.
Outside the serene nature of the cosmos had altered imperceptibly at first, then in larger waves it began to manifest as great coloured rips across the space-time continuum as if a storm were brewing, lashes of temporal lightning whipped around and across the TARDIS as it whirled ever-onwards.
“No use, I am going to have to try and fly right through this,” the Doctor hated days like these when he seemed to be on top of the world and nothing could go wrong. Of course he secretly enjoyed them as well; they gave his computer-like mind the challenge it needed: without the Cybermen or the Daleks his life would be a humdrum existence of taking infantile Timelords on their first few field trips.
For a moment he imagined himself as an intergalactic tour guide and had visions of guiding people through his machine. “Here is the central column, this is the time rotor, oh and please don’t touch that dial,” he said to thin air. “That could bring about the end of the Universe.”
A few sparks and the first of a series of energy discharges that played over the console brought him back to reality and he wisely stepped back.
"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” he said loudly and braved the console again to make a few minor adjustments. “You can take it old girl, you’ve been through worse.”
The winking bright light atop the box in space-time continued to flash softly as all around the TARDIS time seemed to come apart, the flow bent, twisted and uncoiled like a living spring and spat the Doctor’s vessel out and into another stream of rapidly whirling energy.
The Cloister chimed again and he gave a snort. “I know, I know can’t you see I am somewhat busy here?” he kicked a panel loose and began to alter the wiring configuration, muttering to himself. “Oh why didn’t I stop off and do some more repairs, I thought I had all of this fixed since the Master…well…you know.”
The storm outside was getting worse and the convulsions were becoming stronger, more apparent and certainly frequent enough to pose a threat now to the Doctor’s machine. The TARDIS of course being sentient had no choice but to ride the shockwaves and hope it was not torn apart by the conflicting energies of the Universe.
A few more adjustments and the Doctor shot up from under the console and beamed. “There, that should help a little,” he had no idea of course if it would but he had faith in the TARDIS, it was possibly that faith that saved his life back on Earth during the Fenric affair but he never really mentioned that to Ace, not that part.
The interior of the Doctor’s ship began to bend a little and it was rather akin to being stretched, like an elastic band as the machine ground on, straining against the forces that wanted to scatter it to the histories and futures of time itself.
One quake after another bored through the console room and caused a massive series of flashes and bangs to emanate from the control systems, every panel of his machine shut down and the TARDIS interior lighting dimmed then faded to nothing.
The bell stopped ringing with a final low resonant chime that chilled the Doctor to the bone, it sounded like the tolling of a death knell.
For a while the exterior location of the TARDIS remained inert, frozen in time, the massive energy stream that had discharged from one of the tunnel walls had slammed into the vessel and caught it in a vice-like grip, by all rights the machine should have been torn to pieces and the Doctor’s travels ended with it.
Something happened in that moment however that the Timelord could not have foreseen, something that changed everything for a split second. It was as if the Universe sensed the impending death of its favourite wandering son and shifted to one side to allow this event to pass him by.
Space-time rippled like water as if a pebble had been cast into the surface, as if fate in the guise of a white-suited English gentleman had taken an Ace from his pack of cards and palmed it while no-one was looking.
This particular pebble would not disturb things for a long time yet, however.
The Universe is built on the laws of give and take, for every action Newton discovered there is an equal but opposite reaction. Was this then the reason for the existence of the Doctor’s nemesis, the Master? Some Timelords had dared to broach the fact to the Gallifreyan High Council and earned a rebuke for their audacity.
Inside the TARDIS the Doctor pulled a small flashlight from his coat and shone it, the time rotor was frozen and more curiously the emanations from the console were also frozen as well. Sparks and electrical discharges were caught in the act of leaping arc to arc from several of the controls.
“This is very odd,” he mused out loud once more.
A single and spine-chilling almost too familiar old laugh echoed around the interior of his time ship for a few seconds and then all was silent.
“Rassillon?” the Doctor shuddered a little and panned the light over the interior of his TARDIS, but the beam showed nothing. “Or…no wait…I must be hearing things,” as he went to move the beam once more a slight dark figure faded away in the shadows, something had been watching him – the realisation of this caused the hairs to stand up on the back of his neck.
“Steady on there old boy, he’s gone, you saw it…” he slowly approached one of the panels on the console and touched it, it was as cold as ice, and a small indicator screen was stuck on the number: 3.14, it kept repeating it over and over again.
Before he could investigate further the whole room was flooded with a sudden flash of bright light and the console sparked again, time reinstated itself with a bang and he felt nauseous as the feeling of being on the top arc of a rollercoaster passed over him.
He dared to activate a single control and the view-screen flickered into life showing space, the TARDIS had come through and she seemed to be a little worse for wear.
The doctor gave the console an affectionate pat and whispered. “You really are my one true love,” he smiled and began to check the panels for damage, most of it was superficial and would easily clean up with a few licks of paint or in the new reconfiguration.
“Now on to, Gal…” the Doctor’s lips froze in an expression of horror as he looked at the planet the TARDIS drifted around, “li…frey?”
It was not the planet that the Doctor feared but what was in orbit around it, hundreds and hundreds of space ships. Dalek ships ringed his home world like flies around a corpse, each one of them capable of destruction on a scale he’d witnessed more than once.
His hearts froze and he had to lean on the console for support. “How?” was all he could manage after a few hastily taken breaths, “more to the point, why? There are defences and protections unless…oh no…”
He was back at the console, punching in coordinates and throwing levers, hitting buttons and sliding circular dials across. He was once again the manic Doctor and the Universe poised on the edge of something terrible, he could feel it, perhaps it all linked to the event.
The familiar and heart-warming sound of the TARDIS in flight flooded the console room and he breathed again, relieved that the damage had not disabled his vessel, as the wheezing-groaning sound reverberated throughout he continued to monitor the ship’s flight.
Outside the TARDIS winked slowly out of existence just in the nick of time as a Dalek scan array played across the section of space it once occupied.
“THE SECTOR IS CLEAR!” An all too familiar distorted sound passed from inside the Dalek’s shell as it smoothly rolled over the metallic floor of the mother-ship.
