The war was over. They’d done it. They’d finally destroyed the Daleks, now and forever – eliminated them from existence. They could not erase the harm that had already been done, but they could ensure that it would never happen again in the future, or in the past.

In the end, they had to sacrifice themselves to do it, but not one of them questioned whether it was worth it. Even Susan, newly widowed by her human husband, had joined the fight… and now she was gone, too. All gone. All dead. Erased from existence.

As the Doctor slowly awakened, he realized he had to amend that thought. Not all dead; all but one. He just felt ill enough to wish he were dead. That probably meant he had been, or just about. When he managed to open his eyes, he looked first at his hands, but his vision was still too blurry to tell if they had changed.

He rolled onto his back – he knew he could not sit up yet – and surveyed his surroundings. It was the control room of the Tardis. He didn’t remember telling it to leave. He was not that big a coward, especially not if Daleks were involved. Like the others, he would have given his life a hundred times over to eliminate them.

Closing his eyes again, he turned his attention to the time streams. He was not mistaken; the fight was truly over, and there were no other Time Lords in the universe. So why was he still here?

He lifted a hand to brush his hair back and discovered that he didn’t need to; it was short. That could indicate regeneration, or it could simply have been singed in the final strike. He tried to feel his face, searching for changes, but he was just too dazed to be sure.

For a while he stayed where he was, just breathing, waiting until he had some sense of his own equilibrium. When he finally stood up, a wave of dizziness hit him, and he fell back to the floor and vomited on a tangle of wires. Then he cursed in about five hundred languages over how hard it would be to clean up. Was his voice different, or did it just seem that way because his ears were ringing?

Fortunately, that seemed to be exactly what he’d needed to clear his head. The second time he got up, he only had to lean against the control console for a minute before he could walk, and then he went straight toward a bathroom. He turned on the water in the sink and washed up, and then his eye fell on the mirror.

Staring in disbelief, he ran his fingers along the lines of first the reflection, and then his own face. His mind refused to take in the details, refused to let him grasp what he looked like now, only that he had definitely changed. In the indeterminate moments missing from his memory, he had regenerated. But that did no good unless his body was removed from danger, and he’d been at the center of it. How had he escaped? Why had he escaped? He had no right to be alive when all the others were gone!

He was too bewildered even to be angry. Trying to muster some shred of feeling, he tightened his hand into a fist and punched the mirror. It shattered, pieces dropping out of the frame and onto the floor, echoing like tiny bells in the otherwise silent ship. His hand was bleeding, but all he could feel from the cuts was a slight tingling. He was simply numb.

For a moment he just stood there, watching the blood trickle down the back of his hand. As it reached his cuff, he noticed the shirt was no longer white, and in fact it had been badly burned and torn. For lack of any other motivation, he went to the wardrobe to find new clothes. Something black would be appropriate.

After he had changed, his eye fell on an old, battered leather jacket. Somehow, it appealed to him now. If nothing else, the pockets would be useful. He pulled it on, then took everything salvageable – which fortunately included the sonic screwdriver – out of the pockets of his old clothes.

The Tardis chirped, calling him back to the control room. On the way, he grabbed an old cleaning robot out of a closet and directed it toward the wires. For the first time, it occurred to him that it might actually be somewhere. Where exactly, he had no idea.

“I suppose I’ll go and have a look,” he shrugged.

Scene Selection

1. Survivor	4. Revelation
2. The Unicorn	5. Time Spiders
3. Lentil Stew	6. Eternity