Part 1 – The Last Life

"Fan fiction is... rubbish," said the Doctor, clicking past a particularly long-winded text-based effort and towards the reviews. "Now then, what have I been up to in the books?"

He realised he was talking out-loud, and stopped himself. The silence was a bit eerie without a companion or two to break it. In this incarnation, tousle-haired, bright-eyed, with a lilting Scottish accent and shamefully fond of looking himself up on the Internet, the Doctor was in the midst of his twelfth incarnation.

"Oh no, how bland!" he'd cried, gazing at himself in a hand-mirror shortly after regenerating. "I'm like a generic Doctor! I think I'll even put on a frock coat."

The console groaned and the Doctor scratched his arse thoughtfully.

"Somewhere interesting at last, maybe." he muttered, heading for the door. "I hope if someone ever writes about the adventure I'm about to have, they make it a lot more interesting than "The Books" usually do."

His laughter faded away as he bounded through the open console room door.

Few accounts of the Doctor's adventures down the years had remembered to recount how much they stank. Yet, reasoned the Universe-weary Time Lord to himself, everything smelt to some degree. Skaro had an acrid smell of death about it. Karn had wilted him with its odd aroma of mercury and burnt up spacecraft. Indeed, many of the humans the Doctor had encountered throughout his long life had reeked. It was life, he pondered, before wondering how he had stumbled upon this train of thought it in the first place. Oh yes. Solos. Stinks of sulphur. Everything stinks of something, he mused as he picked his way through the rocky, moonlight path. The tin hut ahead of him was picked out by his torch light.

"You know Professor, just lately I've become very..."

"Like Marti Pellow?" interrupted the Professor.

"No.... self-referential!" exclaimed the Doctor crossly. "You see, even by telling you that I'm displaying an unhealthy obsession with myself, I’m... Marti Pellow? What on Earth are you talking about?"

"What's that you say?" murmured the broad-shouldered, bald-headed man beside him. It was Professor Sondegaard, an old friend of the Doctor’s from a previous misadventure.

"Even by coming here, I'm harking back to one of my old escapades, and not a particularly exciting one at that," continued the Doctor. "And by the way, could you try not to have such a bad accent. It's terribly clichéd."

"Sorry." muttered Sondegaard, poking at the slides on a rusting microscope in front of him. "And you're right, it did go on forever."

"So why am I here?" asked the Doctor, more to himself than anything. "Do you know last week I went to tea with the Celestial Toymaker? It's true. I know I'm an awful name-dropper for telling you but..."

"Never heard of him," butted in the Professor rudely, once again paying more attention to his microscope slides.

"Well no. And then I thought, I wonder how Tegan is. And isn't it about time I called in that ten nargs that Vega Nexus owes me."

"Doctor, I would appreciate your help more than your convention anecdotes," said Sondegaard. But at that moment, the room shook around them.

"Bless my bald head, a tremor!" exclaimed Professor Sondegaard.

"Professor, is this why you brought me here?" the Doctor snapped, his beautiful hair tumbling over his eyes as a second tremor rocked the room.

"No!" stormed the Professor. "I mean yes. Doctor, I knew the end would come to Solos. And I knew it would be now. I just didn't want to die alone."

"You selfish fool!" yelled the Doctor. Sondegaard took a step back.

"What?"

"You... bastard!" yelled the Doctor.

"But this is so unlike you Doctor," the Professor reasoned. "All the years I've known you, you've been selfless, kind and generous, always willing to lay down your life for your friends."

"I'm on my very last regeneration!" stormed the Doctor, his brow furrowing. The room shook once more, and Sondegaard reached for the Doctors arm to steady himself, but in a clever bit of symbolism, the Doctor brushed it away.

"No," he said, finally. "This will not do!"

"All my lives have been wasted helping others, frittered away in the name of charity and good intentions. Where has being kind ever got me? You, Professor, I gave up my tenth life for your planet because the life-force of a Time Lord was needed to repel the destructive energy of the 500th planetary solstice. I wouldn't have minded but you forgot to turn over a page of your calendar and I perished for nothing."

"We are beyond recrimination now!" yelled the Professor, as a wall full of glass vials toppled over and shattered around him.

"That’s what they all say!" blasted the Doctor, amid the chaos around him. "No... I'm going to escape from this, and then... and then, I'm going to live... and I mean really live!"

And then the stone roof buckled, caved in, and crushed them both to death.

Death. The final death of a Time Lord.

"Hmmmm mmmmm. Well then. Get out of that one without moving! What?" mumbled a voice. And suddenly, the next life had arrived.