The End of the Universe (Doctor Who fanific)

Chapter 7

The new arrival looked between them, finally breaking into a smile as if this was some grand adventure. "Hello, I'm the Eighth, by the way."

Seven rolled his eyes at the newcomer, "Just my luck. I turn into Lord Byron's doppelganger."

Eight didn't look at all offended, merely watching Seven with slightly raised eyebrows. "Everyone always thinks I'm a poet and I can never work out why. I've never written a poem in my life. Well, this one, anyway. I did know some excellent poets"

"Chaucer!" Four said with a grin. "I'll never forget it, 'Geoff,' I said, 'you can write all you want but no one wants to read about the miller's wife telling a story." Oh, he proved me wrong!"

"Can we get back to business?" Six asked exasperatedly. "Now that we know we are in fact trapped here?" Eight nodded to Ten, who was whispering in his ear, probably filling him in hastily.

"Well, how do we tell if whatever's keeping us trapped is on the inside or the outside?" Eight asked, once he'd been caught up.

Five went over to the scanner. "It's not reading anything other than the collapse itself. As far as the TARDIS knows, we're the only living things in the entire universe. What an odd feeling."

Eleven shuddered, "Yeah, I've never really liked being on my own." Ten nodded fervently next to him.

"Speak for yourself, young man," One said. "I didn't run away from Gallifrey so I could be with all these infernal, narrow-minded fools the universe is populated with!"

"Ooo, now that's a bit harsh, isn't it?" Eight asked, looking reproachfully at One before going on. "Could it be just the timelines collapsing, coalescing on each other and preventing us from leaving? I'd imagine even the TARDIS would have a hard time finding her way through that."

"And we all just came here on our own, did we?" Nine asked.

"Well, if we had, wouldn't we expect to meet each other?" Eight asked logically. "It's not like there's much space to spread out."

"So we just walked into our own demise?" Three asked. "All of us at once? It seems a bit too much of a coincidence."

Eleven shook his head, "No, there's something else going on here. I can feel it. Nice try though, Not-Lord-Byron."

They all quieted down, the realization that this might be it for them all sinking in. "So that's it then," Six said. "Either we wait here for someone to kill us, or we wait here to die with the universe."

"Doesn't really give us many options, does it?" Five asked.

"No, but this is ridiculous!" Eleven said, jumping up. "I've seen and done more things than anyone could possibly dream of. I've survived more things than some civilizations have. I ended the Last Great Time War. I refuse to believe that this is the end." He sat down heavily, "There's always something else that can be done."

"Are you feeling better?" Four asked teasingly once he'd finished.

"Not really, no," Eleven answered peevishly.

Eight watched him in interest. "So the Time War did end."

Nine scoffed and said bitterly, "No thanks to you. Did it ever occur to you that if you'd intervened from the start, you could have stopped it before it really got started?" He glared at his direct predecessor as if his optimism was a direct affront to everything that had occurred.

"You know just as well as I do that it was a fixed point in time. There wasn't anything I could have done to stop it. I would only have made it worse," Eight answered calmly.

"Like we've ever really cared about that," Nine said with a glare.

"The fixed point in time or the making things worse?" Seven asked quietly, but the argument had escalated and no one heard him as Eight and Nine stared daggers at each other.

"Hang on a minute," Ten stepped in, looking at Nine in reproach. "Don't go blaming him for the war, that's on all of us. Every one of us."

"Yes, I've been wondering how exactly this war got started," One said.

"No one really knows," Ten said. "Some people say it was when Skaro was destroyed*, others that it was at the very beginning, that they found out the Time Lords tried to stop the Daleks' creation**. It was overnight, seemingly. One day everything was ordinary, the next, the whole universe was torn apart. Daleks and Time Lords fighting across all time and space." He sighed and looked down as he remembered, and the others fell silent, trying to imagine the scale of it.

"Well, if it started at the beginning, then I'm responsible," Four said reasonably. "I was the one the Time Lords sent to stop Davros. And I failed. The Daleks never would have existed if I'd done what they sent me to do." He sank into a chair, staring off at the wall morosely.

" I'm the one who destroyed Skaro," Seven said. "None of us are blameless. We each carry the weight of what our other selves have done, or will do."

"Maybe," Nine said. Then he smiled, "Least it means I'm not bearing all the weight of it myself."

"We've all been doing that for too long," Eleven said quietly.

The TARDIS hummed gently and Ten took a look at the scanner. "Down to a quarter of the universe now. All those stars..."

"Do you know, we're probably the only being who can say we've seen it from beginning to end?" One said, with a slightly wicked grin. He giggled. "Imagine that? Me, of all people?"

"Well, who else would it be?" A new, harsher voice asked as the TARDIS was thrown to one side. "Come on, what are you all doing there, giving up?"

*From the Seventh Doctor serial, Remembrance of the Daleks

**From the Fourth Doctor serial, Genesis of the Daleks

Just as a tally, we now have Doctors One, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, and Twelve (yes, he was the one who just showed up there at the end).