Part 30 (1/2)

At odd times, the Doctor appeared in Ace's 'dream' too, fighting alongside her, tight-lipped. In her most lucid moments, when she remembered that this wasn't the real world, she congratulated herself on his silence. He would always loom large in her thoughts, she knew that. But her need need for him, once so terribly strong, so much a part of her, was suitably in the past. She had grown up. for him, once so terribly strong, so much a part of her, was suitably in the past. She had grown up.

The Doctor found catharsis too in his own journey. Fully aware of the nature of his surroundings, he concocted a fictional attack by Daleks and battled them in Earth's big cities, from London to Paris to New York to Tokyo. It was so simple. He was fighting evil, showing no mercy as he blasted those who had never deserved to exist. An ideal, black and white world, in which he wished he could live more often.

But he couldn't help thinking about those greys of reality.

And no matter how he strained to hold them back, they were still denting the barrier he had set up in his mind.

232.

This Doctor's worst nightmare was working itself free.

Jason's last adventure ever went unrelated. He would return to the TARDIS later, a flush of colour in his cheeks, proclaiming that he had just had the best time of his life.

High up in the black sky of Detrios, the Miracle shuddered and began to die.

The Doctor had been the first to reach the crystal's centre. He had not needed a pill: his own post-hypnotic command was all he required to temporarily banish the solidified contents of his mind. It had not been long before his generator had confirmed that Ace and Jason were in position too. They had activated their devices together and the air had s.h.i.+mmered, a force wall forming around the universal breach. Too much fictional energy had already seeped into this dimension, but with Jason sucking it in like a battery on recharge, that shouldn't be a problem for long.

In the meantime, there was always the return journey to fret about.

For that, the Doctor created an idealized representation of Skaro, and continued his Dalek-hunting activities there. He even did what, in a previous incarnation, he had been unable to face: he confronted Davros in his own control centre and shot him down dead.

If only real-life solutions could be as simple.

The Doctor's head was aching and he wasn't able to keep control for much longer. The images of Skaro broke up and faded and suddenly he was running through blackness, desperate to reach the surface of the Miracle before . . .

Before . . .

A man stepped out of the darkness before him and barred his path. The Doctor's hearts sank.

'I've been wanting to talk to you.' The tone was threatening.

'I deny you!' the Doctor spat. 'You can't keep me here.'

The newcomer laughed, and the laugh was rich and malevolent. 'You're too late. I already have.' The blackness was metamorphosing, taking on form around him. Brick walls 233 formed into a perfect square. A room with no doors. 'A barrier, like the one you've kept me behind all these years.'

'You should have stayed there,' the Doctor growled.

'Why? Are you so afraid of me? Of what I might say?'

The facade crumbled. The Doctor's shoulders slumped. There was no point in denying it. 'I am.'

The other man's face darkened and a scowl wrinkled his brow. 'You killed me!' the sixth Doctor spat. 'You were so desperate to exist yourself that you ended my life. I accuse you, ”Doctor”, of murder. Of suicide in the first degree!'

At first, no one could believe it.

Chris couldn't either, although he had known what the Doctor was planning. He was wrenched from his introspection, becoming painfully aware of the crowd that had bayed for his blood but a moment before. He looked up and saw the hopes of the Detrian people destroyed, their Miracle shrinking; deflating and deforming like a child's balloon with a slow puncture.

It was Roz who dragged him forcibly back to reality. She was free of her noose and pulling at the knots which bound him.

'We've got our chance,' she hissed.

As they leapt down from the scaffold, someone shouted after them, but the previously dumbstruck crowd had started panicking and the voice was lost in noise as people realized they were going to die. Chris tried not to think about that. It felt like he was somewhere else, like this was all some terrible nightmare.

Any second now, I'm going to wake up and I'll be inside that d.a.m.ned crystal, delivering the Doctor's generator and I won't be responsible for any of this!

There were people wailing in his path and dropping, screaming, to the ground and hammering and crying for a G.o.d that no longer existed. Chris was dragged on by Roz's unrelenting grip when all he really wanted to do was fall and weep alongside them. She anch.o.r.ed him to the real world, propelling him through the h.e.l.lish miasma of clutching hands and beseeching faces.

At one point, he lost her. He wheeled around and staggered 234 and almost fell, but somebody took hold of him and lifted him up and pressed a flat, round, metal object into his hand. 'A good luck charm,' the old woman whispered, her lined face looking kindly down on him, her eyes staring rea.s.surance from beneath her tattered cowl. 'I know it's not your fault. Do what you have to. Do what you think is right.'

The crowd s.h.i.+fted then and the woman was gone, but Roz was back. 'Snap out of it. The time for grieving is when we're safe.'

He ran, but he was thinking of Kat'lanna and wondering how he'd ever believed that rescuing one person might somehow absolve him; might allow him to forget what he had done here.

What they had all done.

Without looking, Chris knew that the crystal was almost gone. He knew that the people who lived on Detrios were doomed. Real, three-dimensional people with personalities he would never get to know and as much right to their own existence as the single one he had sought to find. He stayed close to his partner and tried to draw strength from her, the one constant in his life at that moment. Roz Forrester was all that was stopping him from giving up, from dying alongside them, from letting the pain end.

Roz Forrester, and the whispered words of a woman who had just been faced with her own mortality. 'Do what you have to.

Do what you think is right.'

The Doctor's predecessor was just as he remembered him. That catlike arrogance and the childish naivete in his handsome features; that costume, the jacket of clas.h.i.+ng patchwork, the supreme evidence of an unbalanced nature. He hated him. But no, what he really hated was his own past. And, perhaps, his future. He had spent so many years avoiding both.

He wanted to keep on avoiding them.

'I refuse to listen to you.' He turned away, but the sixth Doctor reached for his shoulder, spun him round and pressed him up against the wall. His eyes were insane, his smile one of hatred.

'You don't have a choice. You can't hide from my opinions 235 by closing your mind to them. The energies in this crystal have brought me out of your subconscious, given me form. I won't surrender my existence again.'

'What do you intend to do?'

'I want my life back.'

'You can't have it.'

'You owe it to me!'

'I had to take it!'

His past self pulled away. The Doctor stumbled from the wall, recovered his composure and confronted him, eyes glittering with determination. 'You were unstable. You were travelling the road that leads to the Valeyard.'

'I was trying to avoid it!'

'But you still met Melanie, you still destroyed the Vervoids.

You might have delayed our future but you couldn't avert it.

You almost killed Mel on Earth in 1999, when you were so close to becoming the Valeyard yourself. That was when I had to act. I had to come out and stop you.'

'And kill me!'