8a - Fragile Things

 The Dark One began to fade away.

 "Meet John and Henry," echoed the dark one's voice. "They're here to fulfill your part of the prophecy. After all, you'll be quite the Holy Man after they shoot you full of holes."

 "Is that the best you can manage?" shouted the Doctor. "When it comes down to it, is killing me the best you can do?"

 Abruptly, the Dark One reappeared, still looking disconcertingly like Wil. He smiled, the smile of a child taunting a kitten. Slowly, purposefully, he walked towards the Doctor, laid a hand on his shoulder, put his mouth next to the Doctor's ear.

 "Seems good to me," he said. He turned to face John and Henry. "Go on, shoot him." So they did.

 The first bullet pierced the Doctor's chest, jolting him back against the wall, piercing his left heart. The second went wild, hitting him in the thigh, making him stumble forward slightly. The third grazed his scalp, tearing the flesh and hair away from the bone, leaving a vivid gash of red.

 And the Dark One laughed. And laughed. And laughed.

 They were sitting in a ruined gazebo looking out over what had once been a charming lake. The roof was half gone, and there were dead fish floating on the surface of the lake. The shadow of the tower cut across the water like a dark scar, and in that shadow swam strange creatures with long, scaly bodies.

 Gilliam looked at Wil. He seemed so young, although she reckoned that he was about the same age that she had been when she had traveled with the Doctor. She put an arm around him and gave him a hug, and let him rest his head on her shoulder.

 "I don't know, Wil. I just don't know." They sat in silence, watching the things in the water, and the flying creatures swarming around the fault in the space-time continuum that wreathed the top of the tower.

 Androzani Minor, and he had carried her dying body from the caves back to the safety of the TARDIS. He was weak, close to death, and yet he'd risked his life to save her. Stumbling, he spilled some of the bat's milk, leaving only enough for one.

 "Don't give up," she had begged him. She had known him only a short time, but she'd admired his strength, his courage, his honesty.

 "I might regenerate," he had said, almost thoughtfully as he clawed for breath. "I don't know - feels different this time."

 And as the changes had started to flow over him she'd known shock and confusion and guilt.

 Paris, 1791. He had stumbled off the wooden platform, rubbing his neck. His tall imposing frame and garish multicoloured jacket made him quite a spectacle, and the revolutionaries around him -- who had been calling for his head a few moments ago -- watched intently as a young girl in peasant's clothes ran up to him.

 "Doctor!" she had called, launching herself into his arms.

 He had caught her, a bit surprised by her actions. He had humoured her, letting her hug him as though she'd thought he'd abandoned her momentarily.

 "All right, Peri. I think that's enough." He had put her down and disentangled himself from her grasp. For the first time, he had noticed she was crying.

 "What's wrong?" he had asked, his concern materialising out of nowhere. That was him, though - brash one minute, compassionate the next. Sometimes it had driven her crazy. Right then, she wanted to hit him and hug him.

 She had wiped her eyes and smiled. "Nothing. Nothing now."

 The Doctor had adopted a tone of mock disappointment. "Peri, you didn't really think they were going to chop off my head, did you?" In truth, it had been a great deal closer than he'd been comfortable with, but he wasn't about to admit it to his companion. Protecting her.

 She had smiled weakly and sniffed back a few tears. "No. No, I guess not."

 Then he had beamed. "Good. Let's get back to the TARDIS."

 London, 1996. He had looked uncomfortable, hovering around her. Definitely a changed man. Not just in body and in face, but within. He was a gentler, softer, more human man than the one who had left her stranded on an alien planet. And he could make her forgive him with a single smile.

 She had noticed his fingers shaking as he had helped her into the rucksack.

 "Take care, Perpugilliam Brown, he had said, rolling his R's with more enthusiasm than skill."

 "You too, Doctor," she had replied, meaning the words more than she realised. Then a hard stare. "And look after Christopher. We're not as robust as you; we traveling companions are fragile things."

 Then she had kissed him on the lips, silencing him before boarding the Dover train.

 He always surprised her; always came back. It might take him twenty five years. He might have a different face. But he would be back. And in the mean time, all that she could do was go on.

 "He'll come back," she whispered to Wil, but he was asleep, exhausted.

 "He'll come back."

 8b - To End All Wars

 A warm July evening in Los Angeles, 1948, and for the first time in the years since the war began Jane Neiley found herself whistling as she walked home. Good news had that effect on her.

 They had taken to keeping the radio on in the office while they worked. Row upon row of clerks, translating communiques from Japanese and Chinese, each working on different parts of the same message, every message translated twice to checkconsistency. They were too lowly to be trusted with the wholething; loose lips sinking ships and all that.

 So they relied on the radio for news from the front lines, depressing though it was. Base after base in the South Pacific falling to the yellow peril.

 The President, broadcasting from a secret location, had recently announced that so far almost two in five American men had given their lives for their country. Jane had lost her husband, her brother and her father, back in the African campaign of 1942. Shortly after that she had joined the Hamilton Movement, trying to pressure the government into the one course of action that would minimise the loss of life; surrender.

 For six years, she had put up with the abuse from her fellow patriotic Americans. "Coward" painted across her windows, people muttering as she walked by, pulling their children out of her way, in case she tainted them with her dangerous ideas. And she held her head up, and ignored them, because she knew she was right.

 Earlier that July evening, the President had announced his intention to surrender, as Britain had done three years earlier. He had sounded old, and frail, although still in his early fifties. Jane felt relieved, and a strange mixture of happiness and sadness. She took the long route home, stopping to watch the children play in the park. One or two of them she knew; Dennis and Isaac from next door, the Lacey girls from number eighteen forty. They had a future now. It might not be the bright future she had always hoped for, but any future was better than none.

 Winifred Bambera from the Hamilton Movement was waiting for her at the door to her apartment. They hugged, and kissed each others cheeks. They talked late into the evening, drinking wine and planning for the future.

 They were so deep in their conversation that they lost track of time. It was almost midnight before they realised; well after curfew, and certainly too late for Winifred to get home. Jane was happy to let her stay over; she offered to make up a bed on the sofa.

 Then the power cut out, and they scrambled around in the dark, trying to find matches and a candle. And somehow, in the dark, they found each other face to face, and Winifred pulled Jane to her, and held her and kissed her.

 They were still kissing when the first of the six nuclear missiles dropped that night exploded three miles north of them, its toxic fireball surging outwards, enveloping everything in its path with a rushing, angry noise. They even tried to run from the blast as the blistering wind tore through them, ripping the flesh from their bones, and reducing them to only ash and memories.

 And the city of the angels burned.

 8c - Protectorate

 The Dark One took care over England.

 After the Great Fire destroyed London in 1666, civil war broke out. Rival factions claimed the right to the capital; one group favouring rebuilding London, another claiming Manchester as a more natural site for a capital, making it easier to keep an eye on the rebellious Scots. By 1690, the Northern faction had taken Oxford, and the Southern faction surrendered.

 With most of middle England still in confusion, the Scots took the opportunity to invade from the North, while their French Allies landed ships all along the South coast, sweeping up through the country.

 Manchester fell in 1694, after a lengthy siege. The English Parliament was disbanded, and a smaller puppet government set up in its place, managed from Edinburgh. And for two hundred years Britain flourished. There were occasional wars, true, border disputes between the English and the Scots, some incursions from the Welsh, but these seldom lasted.

 Throughout the nineteenth century, continental Europe went through a period of revolution and renewal; fighting between each other and within themselves. Monarchies were overthrown, republics set up, religions persecuted.

 Following the systematic extermination of the Welsh between 1815 and 1832, the British quietly renounced war. They saw themselves as enlightened, building a military purely for self defence. Their centres of learning were renowned all over the world, and many countries sought to join the British Empire. None were turned away. At its peak, the British Empire consisted of over a hundred countries, scattered across the globe.

 1914 saw an end to that.

 The Belgian premier had petitioned the British for membership of the Empire, in an effort to stave off a more aggressive proposal from neighbouring Germany. While a diplomatic solution was still being sought, German troops invaded Belgium from the East. The British sent in a peace keeping force to repel the intruders, but were outgunned and outmaneuvered. Further, with the poor combat training of the British troops, they panicked somewhat, and accidentally massacred several hundred thousand Belgians.

 From there, war escalated, with the rest of the world picking sides apparently at random. Britain enlisted the Russians to take the battle to Germany's Eastern Front, but this was frustrated by the Chinese military expansion, leading to the fall of Moscow in 1922. The Japanese entered the war in 1935, bombing an American Naval Base in the South Pacific, believing it to be a secret British listening post. Rather than admit their involvement, the Americans did not react immediately, waiting for a carefully planned "plea for help" from the British in 1937.

 Following a lengthy bombardment of Edinburgh and other major British cities, the British surrendered in 1942, choosing to become a protectorate of the enlightened German Republic rather than face annihilation. It was a pathetic shadow of its former self, with only one city escaping bombardment.

 As a result of its survival, Cambridge became the sole centre of study in the British Protectorate. So it made sense that in 1997, Professor Ysabelle Givenchy worked there on her experiments into aging; experiments that led to a rupture in the Vortex and the release of the Dark One.

 The Dark One took care over England.

 The final assault on humanity came from Africa, though. Venom. A snake that should not have been able to evolve; spitting venom that infected through contact with skin, causing fevers, and diseased breath, killing in hours. The body then exploded, spraying the venom as a gas, infecting the very air. The Japanese and the Germans accused each other of inventing it in their laboratories, demanding the antidote rather than trying to analyse the Venom, trying to understand it, to find a cure.

 By 2022, when they identified the factors in the blood that granted immunity the population of the Earth was just under one hundred thousand.

 8d - Pieces of Ace

 Time shattered.

 She lay dead in the Doctor's arms. His umbrella was broken.

 Time shattered.

 As she jumped through the twentieth century, she saw it change around her, in subtle ways, and in drastic ways. The English language twisted slightly, showing a greater French influence, and a greater Gaelic influence.

 The streets were clean in England, and the trains ran on time.

 Perivale didn't exist. She didn't miss it.

 She found her mum, living in Norfolk, working in one of the state sponsored factories in 1987. She kept a photograph of her daughter on her mantelpiece. Her daughter was missing, and in that day and age you didn't ask where people went when they vanished.

 In 2010 she saw the effects of Venom, and spent three months in isolation in a hospital in Vladivostok infected with it. Something alien in her bloodstream finally rejected it, but it was touch and go for a while. Her Doctor, Fyodor Kerensky, wanted her to stay so that he could study her body, try to find out how she survived. She asked for a day to think about it; within that day, Kerensky was dead.

 She jumped on.

 Time shattered.

 She sat on the President's desk, one leg hanging free, her hair pulled back into a pony tail.

 "How did you get in here?" asked Romana.

 Ace tapped her belt. "Private transmat. Tinkered with it a bit to improve the efficiency. Circumvented some security features."

 "More to the point, why did you get in here?"

 "Okay." Ace jumped off the desk, grabbing a light pen from her back pocket and drawing a quick map in the air with a few fiery lines. "We're here, trapped in the Capitol, right? And over here we have the Balrog. See how they're only on one side of us?"

 "I see. Go on."

 "So I was wondering where they've come from. So I went and did some snooping." She tapped her transmat again.

 "And?"

 Ace drew a small circle on the map.

 "This," she said, "is a small cave on the South face of Mount Grent. The Balrog are coming out of there. It's an ornate place, pretty pillars, carvings of monkeys, giant sandstone elephants, all that sort of stuff. Every hour on the hour six more emerge, regular as clockwork. I couldn't get inside without being seen, though."

 "Elephants, you say?"

 "Elephants."

 Romana paused for a moment. "Elephants without ears?" The note of alarm in her voice was evident.

 "It was old, I kind of assumed they had fallen off."

 "The shrine of the Eternals?" hissed Romana to herself, turning away from Ace to gaze down at the Capitol for her window.

 "The shrine of the whats?"

 "You just described the shrine of the Eternals, the gods of Gallifrey, somewhere between archetypes and physical beings. They live outside time, and rarely, if ever intervene. When they do, they tend to do it through champions."

 "Oh. I think I met one once."

 Romana glared at Ace, who ignored it.

 "The shrine was lost about three thousand years ago, apparently. I read about it when I was a Time Tot."

 "Time Tot?"

 "Gallifreyans have a capacity for pretension which is only surpassed by their lack of imagination in naming things."

 Ace remembered her classes at the Academy; "The Hand of Omega", "The Rod of Rassilon", "The Holy Hand Grenade of Borusa".

 "I know what you mean."

 "So," Romana turned, sitting on the window sill, bracing herself with her hands. "How would you propose that we make use of this information. Full scale assault with a battalion of Chancery guards?"

 "Well, we could do that, or."

 "Or?"

 "Or I could transmat in, plant some explosives, transmat out and blow the place up."

 Time shattered.

 8e - Ark

 "Leila! Leila!"

 She is sitting on the farmhouse porch, a rug over her legs, calling for her grand-daughter. The little girl, just four years old is playing in the dust of the road with Dolly, a small hard plastic toy, about twelve inches tall with a sculpted painted face, no clothes and with one hand missing. There is no danger from traffic - there hasn't been traffic for over a decade now. She just wants Leila where she can keep an eye on her, watch her playing.

 Her legs fail her sometimes, even when she is walking with her stick. Her hands betray her, letting the gnarled oak staff slip from her fingers. Norna or one of the others usually pick it up for her though. They don't leave her alone for long. Her eyesight is going, too.

 Her family have kept this farm just outside the wreckage of new Melbourne for fifteen years now, keeping themselves self sufficient, working the land and defending themselves from occasional marauders. She's more or less useless now. If it wasn't for Leila she would be nothing but a burden, and she could not live with that thought. Eight of them; herself, her two children, her five grand children.

 "Tegan?"

 The voice is coming from behind her.

 "Doctor?" she says as she turns. She has always expected him to come to her once before she died, and she knew she had to be close to death. She was eighty three years old, and had survived the horrors of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. She was tired.

 "No, not the Doctor," he says.

 Her eyes open wide in surprise.

 "You you?"

 "You remember me, don't you, Tegan."

 "I remember you, but I can't remember your name. I'm sorry."

 "Marriner."

 She remembers him now. He had been in a military uniform, rather than the loose cotton shirt and tailored slacks he is now wearing, but other than that he has not changed. His chiseled features, his piercing blue eyes are just as she remembers them from She shudders as she realises that she had not seen him for over sixty years.

 "It has been a long time, Marriner, but yes, I remember you."

 "You do!" He seems thrilled, and flattered.

 She turns away from him, back to watch Leila.

 He is puzzled.

 "Tegan," he says. "I want you to come with me." He says it as though it is the most reasonable request in the universe, and doesn't understand when she laughs at him.

 "Where to?" she asks.

 "Out of time," he says like it is the simplest thing in the universe, only a step away. "Come and live with me beyond time. I've left you alone all your life - that's what you wanted, isn't it? Now come and share mine. You're dying. You have no future. Let me give you one."

 She looks at him, through him.

 He is still pathetic.

 "Go away," she says through clenched teeth.

 "Tegan."

 "GO AWAY."

 "I don't understand."

 "That's the problem, isn't it. You have no conception of humanity, of what it is to be alive. You take the form of a man, but you're not one. You don't understand at all." She reaches out a hand to point at Leila. "There is my future, Marriner, there in the dust with a doll. She will do things I never did, go to places I never dreamed of. She will help build a new world. What did you ever do? What did you create? What are you for? What are any of you for?"

 He stands there, saying nothing, his eyes turned to the ground, looking at his feet, in their perfect brown brogue shoes.

 Leila runs up to Tegan and tugs on her skirt.

 "Nana," she says. "Who are you talking to?"

 "Nobody, bunny. Go and play with Dolly."

 "Okay."

 "Is there anything I can do for you?" His voice wavers as he speaks. "To make amends?"

 "You can go away," she says, not meeting his gaze. "You and all the other Eternals. We don't need you. We never have, you know. We can make enough of a mess of things ourselves, without you lot forcing the issue. Leave us alone. We don't need you. We don't want you."

 "Very well."

 And then there are millions of them, stretching out in all directions. A dark-haired woman in a simple red dress picks up Leila and hands her to Tegan, who holds her tight.

 "You knew my champion," she says, kissing Tegan on the cheek.

 A dry wind picks up, rustling the clothing of the Eternals, sweeping through them as they fall apart like sand sculptures, images of humanity falling away, becoming little more than dust on the road.

 Leila still in her arms, Tegan strides back into the house, her back straight, and admires her youthful reflection.

 8f - Faith

 "Without faith I am nothing."

 The Gods of Gallifrey were no more; the Eternals had gone. No more champions. No more forces beyond time moving their pawns around a temporal chessboard.

 The Dark One was confused, disoriented.

 The unhappening of the Eternals affected him in ways he had not expected. His grip on this Universe was slipping.

 "It's over!" cried the Doctor. He had twelve major wounds now - one leg and one arm were unusable, and his intestine was hanging free. His face was a bloody mess, a flap of skin hanging loose over what had been an ear.

 There was just one way. He had to anchor himself.

 With the last of his presence, he threw his essence at the Doctor, clutching at the hope that their similarity would give him the purchase he needed on this Universe.

 It worked.

 As John and Henry continued to shoot him, he reached out his shattered arms to point at them. Beams of dark fire lanced from his fingers to their bodies, sending them flying across the room, landing awkwardly, limbs twisted.

 He kept them like that for a while, watching their bodies twisting and arcing as he tormented them.

 Then he got bored and blew up their lettuce-heads, sending vegetation and brains splattering over the walls.

 He walked over to their corpses, dragging his injured leg.

 "And now," he said to nobody in particular, "the fun begins."

 To be continued...