Reality War – Alternate Ending

Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who. This is a fan work and no profit has been made from it.
Authors Note: Just my little redoing of the end of The Reality War. I haven't done much, just set up a few plot points I could see being followed up later. Not just the ending, but the further entanglements with the God of Wishes. And of course the Rani. I loved the Rani as a character and Mrs Flood as well. I always felt the Rani should have been there earlier, whenever there was an adventure involving some bizarre experiment and no sign of who was truly behind it (Orient Express in Space), it should have traced back to the Rani's research.

Reality War – Alternate Ending

Ruby kissed the baby's head, initiating the power of the wish. "End the wish," she said softly before blowing.

And that was all that was needed. Reality flexed, overwriting the fiction that Conrad had created. But, reality had been through so many minor changes, tiny corruptions, that there were some things that were no longer certain. And so reality adapted - guessed would be a better word - and filled in those missing gaps as closely as possible.

Even as the Doctor was running through the crumbling Bone Palace, reality was hard at work repairing the damage caused. Running all the way back through time to where the original wish was made and then reverting things to how they should have been. The Doctor would later calculate that it took 0.01745506492 of a Zeptosecond for the correction to be made, resulting in a one degree shift in reality. For the simplest forms of life such a small deviation would be unnoticeable. Of those capable of realising things had changed, their minds would adjust to - by choosing to ignore - the changes.

But while for most one degree did not make a difference, for some it would have real consequences. A child had existed before the Rani had enacted her plan. Now it was gone, erased from history. It was a change that would have gone unnoticed had one person not been stand at the origin of the change.

Even as the Doctor raced to return the TARDIS to Floor Minus 10, the changes were solidifying. And as he kissed the head of the baby, asking for no more wishes... reality became set in stone.

====

It took a long time for anyone to realise quite how ironic the Doctor's wish had been. The Doctor had spent centuries dealing with gods.Some he'd beaten through sheer cleverness. Others he'd trapped, bargained with, out-waited, or simply survived. The details changed from one encounter to the next, but the pattern rarely did. Sooner or later, being a god stopped mattering once the Doctor decided you were a problem that needed solving.

Which should have made this straightforward.

Desiderium, the God of Wishes, had been placed inside the body of a human infant. The intention was simple enough: remove everything that made him what he was. The power. The memories. The awareness. Strip it all away and leave behind an ordinary child who would never know there had once been a god behind his eyes.

That was the theory, anyway; the universe had never shown much respect for theories. And Chaos, in particular, had a habit of treating rules as polite suggestions. The Gods of Chaos didn't break rules so much as slip between them. Meanings shifted or reinterpreted. Definitions stretched ever so slightly. Tiny assumptions created loopholes, causing enormous problems. The more carefully somebody tried to control an outcome, the more likely it seemed that reality would find an escape clause nobody had thought to close.

This loophole was a simple yet particularly impressive one.

Jonas slept peacefully, wrapped in blankets, warm and safe. He looked exactly as he should have. His tiny chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm. Whatever dreams occupied the mind of a sleeping infant, they gave no hint that anything extraordinary had taken place.

Yet something impossible was happening. The Doctor's wish had worked as he had intended, but that was the problem. The burden of godhood was gone, completely vanished from the sleeping baby. Nothing remained of he power, no ancient intelligence lingered beneath the surface. There was no cosmic force stressing the limits of a growing human mind. No imprisoned deity waiting for the day he could break free.

Jonas was simply Jonas. An innocent child doing what most children his age were prone to do: sleep. He was just a child, a very human child. The Doctor had checked several times and found the he was free of all traces of divine influence.

And once that burden disappeared, so did the thing that had been keeping Desiderium bound. For it was true that the gods were bound as much by their environment as every other creature in the cosmos. He had been born into existence as a child and that in turn had limited his abilities to what the child had been capable of doing at that time. The young mind of his vessel, barely capable of understanding what the difference was between the big yellow thing and the small red thing, was completely incapable of understanding how to use the divine power he had been granted. Indeed whenever it appeared that Jonas granted a wish, it was only because Desiderium heard the wish through Jona's ears and took the opportunity to unleash his power.

But in all cases, the God of Wishes had been limited by the weak human form of his vessel. Given time he would have grown in power as the baby aged. But that would have taken time, and the gods were not known for their patience.

The connection between god and vessel held for one final moment and then it was gone. There was no explosion; no blinding light or dramatic tearing of reality. The God of Wishes was not like his more theatrical brethren. One moment a bond existed and the next, it was gone. And he was released.

For an instant Desiderium drifted in confusion in the darkness of his own mind. Then the stars returned as the galaxies turned silently around him. Time unfolded in every direction at once. Distances too large for language felt familiar again.

His memory followed more slowly. Not an unstoppable flood of revelations, more like the tide coming in. Faces. Voices. Entire worlds. One by one they returned until there was no doubt left about who he was, what he was.

He was not Jonas, a small Earth child that had been chosen as the vessel of the gods. He was not a prisoner trapped inside the weak body of an infant, able to express himself only through giggles. No, he was Desiderium once more, the God of Wishes. And now thanks to the Doctor... he was free.

Gods have a twisted sense about how to reward those that serve them. There are some gods that gift their most faithful with all sorts of poxes and disfiguring ailments. Desiderium was not on of those deities. The Doctor had don him a service. Without knowing and with no intention of accomplishing any more than simply stopping the child from being used to create wishes, the Doctor had set him three.

And so he decided he would gift the Doctor with three wishes. But these were not necessarily the wishes the Doctor might believe that he wanted. They were the things that Desiderium knew the Doctor would be needing. And while the Time Lord was dealing with the consequences of those wishes... Desiderium would be free to pursue his own games, somewhere far from Earth.

====

Poppy was missing and it seemed that only Ruby Sunday could remember that she had ever existed. As a final joke the gods had exchanged the life of a child for a marriage for the Doctor. It was a joke, a test, perhaps even a final trial to determine whether the Time Lord would once again give everything to ensure that things were right. Not perfect, because perfection was impossible, and not even fair, because the universe rarely concerned itself with fairness. Just right.

He had torn his soul in two to stop the Toymaker. He had become a killer to vanquish Sutekh. Across centuries he had sacrificed friends, homes, identities and entire futures whenever the alternative was something he could not live with. The details changed but the choice never really did. Sooner or later the Doctor always found himself standing before some impossible dilemma and being asked how much of himself he was willing to lose.

The answer, more often than not, was everything.

The cruel brilliance of the gods' final move was that they had made the stakes seem so small. No armies were marching. No planets were burning. Reality itself wasn't collapsing into dust. There was only a little girl who had somehow slipped between the cracks of existence and a universe that had quietly adjusted itself around her absence. Nobody mourned her because nobody remembered her. Nobody searched for her because nobody knew she was missing.

Nobody except Ruby.

And eventually, nobody except the Doctor.

For a time he resisted the conclusion. He wanted to resist it. After everything he had lost, after finally allowing himself to accept a measure of happiness, he desperately wanted there to be another answer. Yet every avenue he explored led him back to the same unavoidable truth. Something was wrong.

Not catastrophically wrong.

Just wrong.

Reality sat at an angle it was never meant to occupy, a tiny imperfection buried so deeply within the structure of existence that almost nobody could perceive it. The Doctor could. Once he recognised it, he found himself unable to ignore it, in much the same way a musician cannot ignore a note played fractionally out of tune.

The calculations confirmed what instinct had already told him.

Reality required a shift of precisely 0.01745506492 of a zeptosecond. A correction equivalent to a single degree. Such a tiny adjustment, measured against the scale of the cosmos, that most species would have considered it meaningless. The Doctor knew better. History had taught him that entire civilisations could rise or fall because of differences so small that they were almost impossible to measure.

The difficulty was never the calculation.

The difficulty was the cost.

With the God of Wishes gone there remained only one force capable of making such an adjustment. The Heart of the TARDIS possessed the power. The Time Vortex could carry the correction through every strand of creation. What neither possessed was a source of energy sufficient to drive the process.

Only the Doctor could provide that.

He stood alone within the depths of the TARDIS for what might have been hours or days. Time was always difficult to judge inside a machine that viewed chronology as more of a suggestion than a law. Around him, impossible engines stirred to life. Ancient systems that predated most of the universe began preparing for a task they had never been designed to perform.

Then he began.

The first moments were almost deceptively gentle. He felt warmth spreading through his body as the Heart opened itself to him, as though recognising an old friend. That sensation lasted only seconds before the true strain began. Every cell seemed to burn. Every regeneration he had ever lived through echoed simultaneously within him. It felt as though his entire existence was being stretched across eternity and compressed back into a single instant.

And still he continued.

Every living thing is granted a measure of life. Most spend it slowly and without noticing, allowing it to diminish across years and decades until eventually there is nothing left to give. The Doctor had once known a man who understood such things better than almost anyone, a man who had told him that life energy could accomplish extraordinary things when it was gathered together at one time and one place for a worthy purpose.

Miracles, he had called them.

The Doctor had seen enough miracles to know that they always demanded payment.

So he paid.

His life force flowed into the Heart of the TARDIS and from there into the Time Vortex itself. Reality responded immediately. Across countless worlds tiny fractures began to heal. Memories shifted. Histories corrected themselves. Empty spaces where events should have been slowly filled once more. The universe remembered what had been taken from it.

It remembered Poppy.

As the correction spread outward he could feel the damage it was causing him. His body was failing. Even his regenerative abilities struggled against the sheer scale of what he was attempting. Organs began shutting down. His hearts beat unevenly. The golden energy that had saved him so many times before flickered uncertainly beneath his skin.

Yet beneath the pain came something else.

Relief.

The universe was settling back into place. The discordant note that had haunted him for so long was finally resolving. Existence itself seemed to breathe easier.

When the process finally ended it did so with a burst of light so bright that it briefly outshone the vortex itself. The correction rippled away into infinity and the strain vanished almost instantly, leaving only silence behind.

The Doctor remained standing for a few seconds, swaying slightly as the last of his strength deserted him. Somewhere out there a little girl existed again. Somewhere parents remembered her. Somewhere a future that had been stolen had been restored.

That knowledge brought a faint smile to his face.

Then, with his life force exhausted and his body burnt beyond recovery, the Last of the Time Lords finally fell.

====

Of course there was a price to pay. There was always a price to pay.

Reality had been restored, the impossible distortion corrected, and in exchange one of the Doctor's lives had been spent. It seemed almost appropriate. The gods had attempted to force a bargain upon him, had tried to make him choose between his own happiness and the existence of a child, and in the end he had answered with a trade of his own. Poppy lived. Belinda's life had been restored. The fractures Conrad had carved through history had been erased. The universe was whole again.

And the Doctor was dying.

Not immediately, but the regeneration was had been steadily building from the moment he had collapsed to the floor. Already it had reset his biology just enough for him to function while speaking to Belinda, buying him precious minutes, perhaps an hour if he was careful. Time enough to make certain everything had truly worked. Time enough to confirm that the sacrifice had achieved what it was supposed to achieve.

The TARDIS drifted quietly through the vortex while he checked and rechecked his calculations. He followed timelines that only a Time Lord could perceive, tracing them from cause to consequence and back again. Every path led to the same conclusion. Belinda remembered. Poppy existed. Conrad's alterations had been undone so completely that it was as though they had never happened at all. The universe had accepted the correction without resistance, settling naturally into the shape it had always been intended to occupy.

Only once he was absolutely satisfied did he finally allow himself to stop.

The effort left him leaning heavily against the console, one hand pressed against the coral struts as another wave of regenerative energy surged through him. Golden light flickered briefly beneath the skin of his hands before fading once more. It would not fade for long. He could feel the process accelerating now, gathering momentum with every passing second.

The end of this life had arrived and oddly enough, it was one of those time when he found that he did not mind.

Regeneration had never become routine, no matter how many times he experienced it. There was always fear lurking somewhere beneath the surface. Every incarnation liked to pretend otherwise, liked to put on a brave face and make speeches about renewal and new beginnings, but the truth was more complicated than that. Every regeneration was a death of sorts. The next Doctor inherited the memories, inherited the responsibilities, inherited the endless burden of being the Doctor, but he was never quite the same person.

The old self vanished as the new self arrived. But it was that moment of stillness in between that had always frightened him.

Yet alongside the fear was excitement. Curiosity. The same urge that had carried him out of Gallifrey all those centuries ago. He had no idea who he would become next, and despite everything that had happened he found himself eager to find out.

Besides, the rules had never applied to him in quite the same way they applied to everyone else.

Gallifrey had always loved rules. Limits. Numbers. The Doctor had spent most of his lives proving how little such things mattered. Long ago he had exceeded the regeneration cycle that should have ended him. Somehow he had continued. Perhaps through luck. Perhaps through destiny. Perhaps because the universe itself had become accustomed to having a Doctor around and simply refused to let him leave.

He had occasionally wondered whether he would ever discover his true limits? Well, that question could wait for another day. For now, there was only one thing left to do.

The TARDIS was in no condition to travel further. If what he had done had damaged him, it was certain he had almost killed her. Deep within her impossible structure repair systems had already begun shutting down non-essential functions. What he had asked of her had pushed her far beyond anything her creators had intended. The Heart of the TARDIS had channelled enough energy to shift reality itself back into alignment and the strain had left scars running through systems that existed partly outside conventional physics.

The old girl needed time to heal. Not long, just a few hours while it drank in the latent energy around it and rejuvenated.

The Doctor rested a hand against the console and smiled.

"You did brilliantly," he said softly.

The central column answered with a gentle wheezing groan he chose to interpret as embarrassment.

Together they found a quiet corner of the universe. No planets. No inhabited systems. No risk of collateral damage should the regeneration become particularly energetic. Just a lonely fragment of nothingness suspended amid an ocean of stars. And there the TARDIS materialised and fell silent.

For a while the Doctor simply stood in the doorway looking out.

The view was magnificent. Vast clouds of glowing gas stretched across the darkness in colours no human eye could properly perceive. Distant galaxies rotated in stately silence. Stars burned with indifferent majesty, each one surrounded by its own stories, its own histories, its own triumphs and tragedies. It reminded him just how enormous the universe really was and how fortunate he had been to spend so much of his life exploring it.

Not everyone received that privilege.

The Doctor had seen wonders beyond counting. He had walked at the birth of empires and watched the final sunsets of worlds. He had stood beside gods and monsters and ordinary people who were far more remarkable than either. There had been pain, certainly. More loss than he cared to remember. Entire lifetimes of grief. Yet when he looked back upon it all, when he weighed every terrible moment against every beautiful one, he found the balance tilted firmly toward gratitude.

Then he saw it: a single star shining brightly among countless others. And recognition came to him immediately as the smile that spread across his face was warm and genuine.

"Joy to the World," he proclaimed, allowing the words to driftout into the darkness.

His hands were glowing openly now. Golden energy poured between his fingers and danced across his sleeves. The regeneration could no longer be delayed. Every instinct told him that he had reached the point of no return.

For a moment he simply stood there watching the distant star.

"And that is what it has been," he said quietly. "An absolute joy."

The energy erupted from him a heartbeat later.

Light flooded from every part of his body, illuminating the TARDIS interior with impossible brilliance. The regeneration tore through him with all the force of a supernova compressed into human form. Cells broke apart and rebuilt themselves. Matter became energy and energy became possibility. Every atom of his being was dismantled and reconstructed according to patterns that had not existed a moment before.

It was chaos, terror... a moment of absolute rebirth.

And it was at that precise moment, when the Doctor existed as little more than a storm of living energy suspended between one identity and the next, that something entirely unexpected occurred.

Deep within the TARDIS, buried among memories accumulated across centuries of travel, an ancient imprint stirred. Something only the ship remembered. A trace left behind, an echo preserved within systems that experienced time differently from the rest of the universe. A memory so old that even the Doctor had forgotten it existed.

Ordinarily it would have remained dormant.

Ordinarily there would have been no opportunity.

But regeneration was not an ordinary event. The Doctor's body had been reduced to pure possibility, his future not yet decided, his identity existing in a state of temporary uncertainty. For the briefest of moments a door stood open.

The imprint stepped through.

Not out of malice. Not even out of intention.... a need had arisen; an opportunity had presented itself.

And so the memory took shape as the forming regeneration altered course. New patterns emerged where others had been expected. Possibilities rearranged themselves. The process was subtle enough that the Doctor never noticed it happening, yet significant enough that the result was no longer entirely his own.

A woman stood in the doorway of the TARDIS, blinking once as awareness settled into place. Then she looked out at the distant star and smiled, a broad smile filled with unmistakable delight.

"Oh, hello," she said.

The star continued to shine silently in the darkness.

The woman folded her arms and remarked: "Fancy seeing you here," as the TARDIS vanished.

====

Two sugar cubes plopped into the hot tea as she looked across the table, amusement barely concealed at the state of the woman opposite.

"I see you got out then," Mrs Flood remarked. "Would you like a cup?"

Across from her the Rani glared back, her hair and clothes still covered in the saliva of Omega. After Mrs Flood had made a show of collecting samples of the mad god's spittle, the glare had only intensified.

"Oh don't be like that," Mrs Flood continued. "You should be grateful. If I hadn't seen what happened and thought to myself that perhaps having a second teleport device on hand... you would be god poop. I guess it was all a little wibbly wobbly, timey..."

"Don't you dare finish that sentence!" Rani snapped.

Mrs Flood instantly fell silent, subservient once more to the whims of her future self.

"Did you secure the samples you took?"

"Yes Ma'am," Mrs Flood replied. "They're being analysed as we speak and any Time Lord genetic material is being extracted."

And for the first time, the Rani saw that there was a bright side to her horrifying demise inside Omega. She had gotten hold of the means to rebuild the Time Lord race. It had just not been in the way she had hoped.

"The Doctor knew what would happen," she groused before burying the emotions and once again seizing control. "He will pay for that. Come along Mrs Flood, there's science to be done."

"Yes Ma'am."

And with that they stood from the table, contemplating briefly whose house they had borrowed for their brief respite. Before vanishing once more.

End