He sat in the snow; mind reeling and body coursing with pain. He could barely speak, barely move, and barely form a coherent thought. But he had to. He had to move, no matter how painful it might be, he had to keep moving. His song was ending, but there was still work to be done. In his hears he heard it; the sweet sound of another life as it pumped through him. Everything told him it was time, his time, time to let some new man saunter in as he staggers back into the shadows. As he rolled his head to one side, he looked out from the dirty and dank alley way he was in. In the distance, he saw him: The one who had herald his death from the very beginning. The one who told him he could not run, could not hide, the one who had singled him to his home world and shared with him the dreams of him and his kin.
Ood Sigma.
The Ood that had had rescued and freed so long ago, looked back at him with its large, bulbous eyes. It turned its head to the side, as if pondering to itself why the Doctor had chosen an ally way in London of all places to fall. The white orb connected that was tethered to his being by a white, plastic tube, glowed orange, and the Doctor soon heard a familiar voice echoing inside his head.
“We will sing to you, Doctor. The Universe will sing you to your sleep.”
The Doctor stared briefly at his friend, as if processing the words with that infinite brain of his. “Yeah? Well, pardon if I don’t oblige just yet.”
With a grunt, the Doctor pulled himself to his feet, and shook his duster dry of the newly fallen snow. Each limb burned with regenerative energies, every strand of muscle and atom that made up his being screaming for him to just give up. But giving up was not something the Doctor did, ever. What was to come maybe be inevitable, but he would be damned if he adhered to its schedule. After all, he was the Timelord Victorious. The laws of Time and Space bowed to him.
“You cannot delay this any longer, Doctor. Even Timelords must die. Everything that is born must someday die. Thus is the way of the Universe.”
“I’ve saved the universe time and again.” Grunted the Doctor as he took a pained step forward. “I think it can give me a bloody half hour or so to say goodbye.”
Again, the Ood cocked its head. “Goodbyes? But you have already said goodbye. All your companions, all of them. There is no on left.”
“Maybe.” The Doctor sighed as he walked towards his Tardis, keep it, and it alone, in his line of sight. No distractions, nothing to deter him. He had made it his mission to say goodbye to everyone he had met with his last few moments. Damned if he wasn’t going to do just that. “But that’s this universe. Plenty of others… others to go to…”
“There is no time, Doctor. Your song is ending.” The Ood watched in quiet quandary as the doctor passed him. “Even now, it sings to you. We sing to you. Can you hear us Doctor?”
The Ood was right. Past the sound of rushing blood, of pulsing veins and creaking bones of a body so old, he could hear it. His song. The song that would usher him to whatever lay beyond this world.”
“Then call this the Extended version.” With a snap of his fingers, the Tardis doors opened inward, and the Doctor was bathed in the familiar glow of his home. He smiled, happy to see someone who was not forecasting his death. Once inside, the doors shut behind him, and he tossed his coat onto the smooth, organic arch that had grown from the Tardis floor to support the ceiling. As he approached the Tardis Console, he heard Ood Sigma’s voice once again.
“You are out of time, Doctor.”
“I will make time.” He said Breathlessly. Not saying anything more, he placed his head on a round jade dial on the console, putting his fingers in between the teeth of its gear like dial. “In times of great duress, when a Timelord needs more time, they can activate something, something special, from their Tardis.”
He did not know if Ood sigma could still hear him or not, but he Didn’t care. Talking aloud, even just to himself, made him feel as if someone was there. And he needed someone, now more than ever.
“It’s called the Chronovert. It allows a Timelord to take a moment, any moment in time, and remove it from the time stream, allowing a Timelord to use those moments again. The displaced event vanishes from reality as if it never happened. Because now, it never did.”
He looked back behind him, and saw the muddled image of Ood Sigma looking back at him through the fogged glass of the Tardis.
“I’m taking this time.” He said. “Starting just after you told me about your singing me to my sleep. That was a nice sentiment, don’t want to get rid of that. But everything after it… up till now… I’m taking it, and I’m going to use it to say goodbye.” With a jerk of his wrist, he twisted the Chronovert and the Tardis lights shifted from amber to a deep blue. He could feel reality flex and bend around him, twisting and warping as it lost that moment from itself.
“The process is a bit unfair though. Taking a moment from reality and using it to fuel another… it’s a tricky thing.” He sniffed, and scratched behind his ear. It was funny, this habit of his. He never gave it much thought, just one of those quirks that made regeneration special. He was going to miss it. “Since you can’t very well leave a gap in between one moment and another, that would cause reality to bleed all over itself. You would get whole moments in time mixed with others, like... milk spilled into water.”
Releasing the Dial, the Doctor pressed a series of small button around the immediate area of the console. The Tardis let out a small groan, as if it was trying very, very hard to do what the Doctor wanted. “Instead, the time I used up will be taken out of my life and placed back into the time stream. I’ll be trading one moment for another. I won’t remember what I’m about to do. But that’s alright. I’m not exactly the one I’m doing this for.” He pulled a lever, an punched a few numbers and letters on a small typing pad into one of the Display monitors. “As far as Reality is concerned, the gap will have never existed. It’ll just… take the two ends where the moment was, and put them together. True, the end result may be a bit stretched out, time will move a bit slower here, kind of like sand through a funnel, or a worn spot on a VCR tape. But no one will ever notice.”
After making sure the information that the monitor had displayed back to him was correct, The Doctor placed his hand his hand on the shiny red handle of a metal lever. “No one will know what happened. And in exchange… I won’t remember what It is that I am about to do…”
He looked behind him, the blurred image of Ood sigma had gone. All he saw was black. Turning back to the Console, he sighed and looked at the Time Engine column in the middle of the Console. “Right then. Allons-y.”
With a quick tug, the lever fell into the place, and The Tardis kicked to life, flying away through time and space, and even further as the lines and boundaries of reality came undone. He was out of his universe now, and time would act differently. If he stopped now, he could remain in the void forever, never moving forward or back in his timeline. But he couldn’t stop, not even if he wanted to. His song may be ending, but he was the one who would conduct the final notes. With a steadfast look of determination, the Doctor water for the moment when he touched down, when he could begin his final task.
“All aboard.” He said to himself. “Next stop, Equestria.”
The silence of the Equestrian night was cool and still. No one walked the dusty dirt roads, or traveled the rough, cobblestone paths. The only sound that could be heard was of the stillness of the night, and perhaps a cricket or two if one were lucky. But as a soft breeze rolled by, the silence of the night was suddenly broken by a long and distant wail. It was low, at first, like a whistle in the Distance. But it grew louder, and stronger, more powerful like the moan of a banshee queen. Soon the ethereal noise of Ancient and alien technology could be heard up and down the road, coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once.
It was a faint glimmer as it came in, pulsing and rising and fading. At first it was only color, followed by a bright white light to accompany the wailing. Soon, details began to fill in. Panels, words, frosted glass windows and sleek wood edges. It grew louder and brighter as it materialized, and the sound changed from a roaring wail to that of a ghostly siren. After a moment, the Sound stopped with a resounding “thud”. The Tardis had arrived.
It stood there, tall and brilliant. It was both new and ancient, and painted in the bluest of all blue. The night grew still once again, picking up where it had left off before the Tardis arrived as if nothing had ever happened. The wind grew again and blew gently through the tree’s, and the crickets picked up their symphony once again.
For a moment, the Tardis only stood there, looking regal and magnificent as it always did. Slowly, the front doors opened inward, and out stepped the Doctor, looking a bit worse for wear, but still in relatively one piece.
“Check list time.” He thought. “Eyes, got them. Ears, check. Nose… eh...rather small. Teeth, still in place.” The doctor finished with his face and moved down the rest of his body. Traveling in between universes was an incredibly tricky process. It used to be that, back when his people were still around, one could simply pop into an alternate reality just like that, and be back in time for tea. Now however, it was almost impossible. The walls around Reality had solidified, making it a dangerous and often foolish effort to even attempt such a thing. But once in a while, there would be weak points, frayed edges along the periphery wall of reality where it had been worn down due to some cosmic or temporal event. At places like these, with the right equipment and enough power, one could move out of their own reality and into another.
Every reality was different from one another however. Some were so different that it would be simple to spot the differences; floating continents, mysterious new creatures, historical events having happened, never happened, or happening outside their normal timeframes. And then there were those that were so similar, you could drive yourself mad trying to tell the two apart. Lucky for the Doctor that this current universe happened to be of the Former Variety.
As he stepped out into the night, he nearly stumbled, catching himself the Tardis door before he hit the ground. “Right,” He thought. “Hooves. Four legs now, not two… got to remember that.” With a deep breath, the Doctor tried again, this time managing a few steps outward before stopping to stare and take in his surroundings. He had hoped that his landing would have bit a bit more inconspicuous, perhaps in a far off field or near the edge of a forrest or orchard. The Tardis, it seemed, had different ideas in mind. Rather than hide away it had landed a mere couple feet from where the Doctor had hoped to visit first: the Ponyvile Library.
With a smile and a chuckle, the Doctor looked upon the tree building with warm feelings. He had fond memories of this place, very fond. After a very rocky and less then painless landing upon his first arrival to Equestria, the Doctor had awoken to find himself in a strange bed. It wasn’t the first time he had woken up in a strange location, and it most definitely wasn’t the first time he awoke with a new face. It was, however, the first time he had ever awoken with a new face, attached to the body of a pony!
Of course, that had only been another problem for the Doctor to figure out. “Multispacial transdimorphism,” he later explained. “Sort of how something may chance shape depending on elements In its environment. Except in this case, I’m the object, and the environment is another reality.”
Thinking back to those days, when he would explain things about the universe and how everything worked, and he had a starry eyed companion with a thirst for knowledge possible even greater than his own… those were the days.
But those days were almost over. Even in this new, smaller, body, he could feel the surge of energy building up inside him. It would take time for it to reach critical levels, maybe an hour, maybe less, but it would build, and it would happen. He had to make the most of the time he had now. Luckily, not all realities were in temporal sync. A few moments in one universe could equal a few hours in another. Before leaving the Tardis, he had set a timer to warn him before his time ran out, when the Chronovert would finish what it had started and take back the time he had “borrowed” from it. But no matter how much time he had now, it would run out, in one way or another.
With a deep breath, he walked forward carefully, making sure he had his footing…er, “hoofing” as it were. As he raised a hoof to the door, he heard a click, and watched as the door swung open before. Standing there, in the pale light of a hovering, flickering candle, was a purple unicorn, looking back at him; mouth agape and with wide, surprised eyes.
“Hello, Twilight Sparkle. “The Doctor said with a soft smile. “Did you miss me?”
For a moment, Twilight simply stammered, making a couple of sounds as her mind tried to catch up to the situation. Feeling a bit uneasy, the Doctor shifted his weight from foot to foot.
“May I come in?”
Twilight nodded, still processing. “Yeah… of course… I’ll put on some tea.
The Doctor smiled. “I would like that.” He waited for the mare to step aside before he walked in. Though it was dark inside, the Doctor could make out the fain shapes of books from the moonlight that streamed in through the windows, stack of them, all sitting on the floor in various piles. Papers were tacked to the walls, with pieces of string running between them and back to others, as if they were some sort of bizarre spider web.
There was a snap in the air, the light, as a match hovered in the air, enveloped by lavender light and touching the wick of various candles. With more light, the Doctor could see more of what was actually and intricate web of newspaper clippings and pieces of parchment. Different colors of string ran between different pieces, sometimes over lapping or running parallel to others. In the center of the web was a crude drawing of the Tardis.
“The last time I saw you was when you said you were leaving.”
The Doctor turned, a bit shocked, as Twilight walked in with two cups of levitating tea. “We had just comeback from the Seventh Ring of Ulysiam. There were Daleks there, they were trying to harness the ration of a nearby atomic meteor storm to kill off all life on Ulysiam.”
The Doctor nodded. “Yes, they… wanted to create a new Skaro. You managed to rig the machine that was siphoning off the radiation of the meteors, and made it explode.”
Twilight smiled a bit and floated over a cup to the Doctor. “We got away in the Tardis and watched the explosion from a distance… It was beautiful and terrible all at the same time. “
The Doctor smiled and sipped from his cup. Rose petal and ginger. He had grown to enjoy it during his last visit. “You left after that.”
“You scared me.”
The Doctor stopped drinking, looking up over his cup at Twilight, who looked back with a smile that was both happy and sad at the same time.
“That night… on Ulysiam… you were so… angry. I had never seen you like that before. It wasn’t just anger you were feeling… in your eyes, I could see it.” He smile dropped as she looked the Doctor in the eyes. “It was hatred… pure hatred… You didn’t just want the Daleks to go away… you wanted them to suffer.”
She was right. That night, out on Ulysiam, he saw how the Daleks wanted to exterminate all life on the planet below. They had followed him, somehow, through the weak spot between their universes. They had followed him, to Equestria, and almost made a new empire, one that would have consumed the entire galaxy. Pure evil, in a virgin universe.
“But I couldn’t blame you.” Twilight continued speaking, the Doctor listening intently as she did. “You told me what they had done to you… and your people. And as much as I wanted to tell you that an eye for an eye did absolutely nothing… I couldn’t… Part of me…” She stopped, her eyes on the verge of tears. She took a deep breath, her breath shuddering as she did. “Part of me wanted to see them suffer too…”
The Two of them said nothing, Twilight looking away and sniffing to fight back tears, while the Doctor kept a concerned look as he thought. Pictures flashed in his mind, images of a more recent adventure. Friends, enemies, he could see them as plain as day, and he could hear them too. One set or words, something he was told by someone he had thought long dead, rang especially loudly.
“The man who abhors violence, never carrying a gun, but this is the truth, Doctor: You take ordinary people and fashion them into weapons… Behold, the Children of Time, transformed into weapons. I may have created the daleks, Doctor, you made this.”
“Davros…” The doctor said softly.
“What?”
The Doctor blinked. “Nothing… just… remembering something someone said to me.”
Twilight smiled a bit. “Another companion?”
“Maybe, had circumstances been different.” He looked at Twilight, thinking about everything she had just said, and everything that Davros had said that night on the crucible. “Twilight…”
She raised a hoof, stopping him. “No, Doctor, don’t worry… I just… I’ve wanted to say that for a long time… I just… never thought I would get too…”
Swallowing any further words, the Doctor turned back to the wall. “You’ve been busy since the last time… Project of yours?”
Twilight sipped her tea, and then set the empty cup on a stack of books. “Sort of… When you had left, I didn’t know if you had gone back to your world, or met someone else.” She walked over to the Center picture, the one of the Tardis, and pointed at it. “After everything you showed me… I started doing my own research, keeping an ear to the ground and an eye out for anything strange.” She continued on from the center along a blue string that connected to a newspaper clipping. “I found this in an old newspaper from a couple years ago. It mentions a tornado that was supposed to run right through town, but then… it just vanished.”
The Doctor nodded, and followed Twilight’s hoof as she moved along a green line to a couple of pages tacked to the wall. “This is from an old journal I found in the Canterlot archives. I copied what they the pages said. They talked about a Pony in a blue box that stopped some moving tombstones from coming to life… said the stones looked like angelic pegasi…”
“you’ve been following me.” The Doctor smiled a bit. “Didn’t think you were such a fan.”
Blushing, Twilight chuckled. “It’s kept me busy… for a while it was difficult getting back to normal life.”
“Well… aside from the stalkerish web you have made, which is actually quite flattering really, I’d say you have been coping very well. Tell me,” He scratched behind his ear. “How long has it been since we last traveled?”
“Couple of months.”
“Ah. Well… sorry about the lack of contact… been a bit busy and what not.”
Twilight shook her head. “It’s alright Doctor… you lead a busy life.”
“It’s funny, you know? I came here with a purpose in mind, limited amount of time, and here we are chatting about the old days…” He smiled and tapped at the floor with the tip of his hoof. “I’m going to miss those times…”
At his words, Twilight stopped smiling. She walked over to the Doctor, looking at him with eyes full of curiosity. “What do you mean?”
At first , the Doctor was hesitant. Did he dare tell her the Truth? That he was dying? That every passing minute, a hundred more cells burst with regenerative energy? That any moment he could turn into someone else, or forget what he was doing entirely? Looking back at Twilight, the Doctor remembered why he had chosen her to travel with him all those months ago.
She was inquisitive to a fault, always wanting to know more and more. He could talk on and on about quantum temporal theory, or how the sequential dynamics in a fluctuating point of reality. Whatever it was, even If she didn’t understand, she still listened intently, and looked at the Doctor with those big, sparkling eyes.
“I have to go away, Twilight… and, I wanted to say goodbye.” The words hung heavy in the air, like lead weights. Saying them made both of his hearts hurt, or maybe that was just the regeneration.
She looked at him again, those probing, curious eyes, searching his face for some clue as to what he was saying. He knew she wanted to know, wanted to help. He could see it in the way she held herself, the way her tail was slightly raised, the way she raised her front left hoof off the ground. It was in her nature to want to help others with their problems, and he could tell that she wanted to help him with this. But as she scanned them, their eyes met again, and all at once, it was as if she knew. He face fell, and she inhaled slowly, like a silent gasp. She took a few steps back, and sat on the floor.
“Will I… Will you ever come back?”
The Shrugged as best he could on four feet. “I would like to think so.”
She nodded, but avoided eye contact. She sniffed, and then cleared her throat. “Well... I don’t want to keep you… probably others you want to say goodbye too…”
He nodded. “Yeah… there are a few… and time is a bit-“ His words were cut short. Twilight had thrown herself against him, hugging the Doctor tight. He thought he heard the sound of a sob, but dismissed it and focused on the moment. He wrapped his forelegs around her, and the two stood there hugging in silence.
“I’m going to hold you to that…” she broke the hug and backed away a bit. “This world needs you too.”
The Doctor smiled. “I’ll be back, someday. And Twilight?”
“Yes?”
The Doctor walked over to her, looking her in the eyes. “You are Brilliant. You are really, truly brilliant, don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise. Traveling with you was… well… it was Brilliant.” He kissed her forehead, and then turned to walk away.
Twilight watched in silence as he walked away, back out the front door and into the night, leaving her, the curious mare, alone once again. As the ethereal engines of the Tardis picked up again, she walked to the door, peering out into the night. She watched as the blue box faded away, listening to the sounds of the universe as it dematerialized, off again to some other destination. Once it was truly gone, and the light had faded from her eyes, she sighed and closed the door. It was very late, and for the first time she the Tardis awoke her with its arrival, she felt how tired she really was. But before extinguishing the lights and heading off back to her bed, she walked towards one of the the stacks of books, and picked up a small journal. Floating a quill over from another nearby stack, she flipped the journal over to its cover. She opened it and began to write, the light from a nearby candle reflecting off the copper colored letters on the front.
It read “Torchhoof.”
