DOCTOR WHO

REASONABLE DOUBT

WRITTEN BY ZARIUS

She couldn't trust what she saw.

She couldn't trust him.

The light around her had burned bright, but she couldn't let it send her spiralling into darkness. There were other lives at stake besides just the ones hidden from her.

Were all those lives she lived hers?

It was impossible to say really, the Matrix was easily the most corruptible device on her home planet, and had been tampered with on many an instance before, usually by a corrupt Gallifreyan, sometimes even by the distillation of her darker impulses, or whatever person The Valeyard professed himself to be.

And yes, even The Master had penetrated The Matrix many times, just as he had done now to uncover the great lie hidden by his people.

But there was room for further doubt to be cast on these revelations.

If the Time Lords had been smart, then why wouldn't they have eliminated this knowledge from their records the way they had redacted great chunks of her past working for 'The Division?'

The light that surrounded her now represented such a redaction, unable to fill in the gaps, that knowledge was either stricken permanently off the record or had been in the hands of another high ranking member of her people. A person now all too likely killed by The Master, or converted to a Cyber-Lord, if they had been unfortunate enough to live that long.

The extent of The Master's plan, the lengths at which he had gone to torture, condemn and convert his people, including the children, was so much to take in.

Perhaps this wasn't even Gallifrey, after all, the last time she saw it prior to its decimated state, it had been positioned at the tail end of the universe before the death of all things.

But then, theirs had always been a story of time travel, The Master perhaps had simply travelled to the pocket universe at a point before their people had used their smarts to find their way out.

She knew her stress over what was redacted and what wasn't, what was truth and lie, would be too much for the Matrix to sustain.

Reality had been denied once, it would be denied again.

But could she hold back the truth for long?

She put this question to the test, spurred on by a projection of Ruth, she attempted to break free of the Matrix's conditioning, she summoned as much of what she knew of herself to the forefront, projecting the dandy, the capable comedian, the champion of time, the bohemian, the white haired Scotsman, the man who forgets, the man who regrets, even the incarnation she long denied to herself, the Doctor of war.

All of this was to push her towards freedom, but she needed one last burst, and a part of her brain could not help but guide her towards a traumatic experience in her days as the bohemian, a near fatal duel of the minds with the renegade time lord Morbius.

He had asked her then just how long she had lived, how far back did her lives go, and she caught a glimpse of all of them then, the shock proved too much for her at the time, and her body almost shut down as she processed the truth, or buried it deep within herself.

She saw so much of herself now; the reality of the matrix could be defied, but not the reality within herself.

As a child, she switched from girl to boy, woman to man, to a face of many colours, to a mere child again, perhaps in the dimension she originally came from, she had been an inventor who had invented the TARDIS, and perhaps she had two grandchildren rather than one. Perhaps she had a name, perhaps she didn't.

Was she a God? Was she more than that?

All she knew in the here and now, she was a physician whose job was to heal the lives around her, to heal herself.

The reality denied, the matrix collapsed around her, and The Doctor was thrown to the floor.

She lay there, motionless, still and quiet within the panoptican. She soon heard commotion, people had found her.

She heard Yaz call her name, she heard Ryan say they were here for her.

Was he here? She thought to herself, the first question of her conscious mind to surface, a question that needed answering.

She opened her eyes, they glanced past the two, her vision was ever so slightly hazy.

As soon as they laid eyes on Graham, they came into focus.

And her smile could not be contained.

One of pure joy, one of unrivalled love and affection. One that made mountains crumble and the very suns blush bright red with passion.

With him at her side, there was no denying reality.

'My fam' she whispered, intending it for Graham more than anyone else in the room with her.

All was well now.

All doubt had gone.