Until We Burn | Dr Who

Chapter Ninety-Six: Journey's End

This new Doctor doesn't say a word, only raises the device in his hands, a gun of sorts, and runs straight towards Davros.

The man imprisoned next to me watches on in panic. "Don't!"

He doesn't get there in time. Davros raises a pointed, silver finger and a bolt of blue lighting shoots out of it, striking him in the chest. The force is enough to knock him to the ground. I gasp, my hands pressing against the barrier, trying to get to him.

"Activate holding cell."

"Doctor!" Donna cries, sprinting out of the Tardis. She snatches up the device. "I've got it, but I don't know what to do."

Another bolt of lighting hits her. She screams, flying back into a pillar of machinery across the room. "Donna! Are you all right? Donna!" the Doctor beside me shouts.

"Destroy the weapon." One of the Daleks obeys, and a ray of light hits the fallen device. It breaks apart in a cloud of smoke. "I was wrong about your warriors, Doctor. They are pathetic."

Rose looks between the two Doctors in bewilderment. "How come there's two of you?"

The other gets to his feet, shaken but very much alive. "Human biological metacrisis."

"Never mind that. Now we've got no way of stopping the Reality Bomb," mine mutters.

"Detonation in twenty rels," the Supreme Dalek's voice announces.

Sneering, Davros calls up another display, this time showing us the web of planets in the dark. They start to glow with white auras. The energy is building again. "Stand witness, Time Lord. Stand witness, humans. Your strategies have failed. Your weapons are useless. And, oh, the end of the universe has come."

"Five... four... three... two... one."

I hold my breath, waiting. The screen flickers off. An alarm sounds.

Peeking up from behind the machinery, Donna hums. "Closing all Z-Neutrino relay loops using an internalised synchronous back-feed reversal loop. That button there!"

"System in shutdown!"

"Detonation negative."

"Explain! Explain! Explain!"

Baffled, the Doctor stares at her. "Donna, you can't even change a plug."

She smirks. "D'you wanna bet, Time Boy?"

"You'll suffer for this." Before Davros can do a thing, though, electricity sparks from his own hand. He screams out in pain.

"Oh, bio-electric dampening field with a retrogressive arc inversion?"

"Exterminate her!"

The Daleks converge around her. She doesn't even seem to notice them. She just types away, pressing buttons and flipping switches. In the same instant, all of their ray guns lose aim, dropping. "Weapons non-functional."

Another flurry of words passes her lips, pure information. "Whoa! Macrotransmission of a K-filter wavelength, blocking Dalek weaponry in a self-replicating energy blindfold matrix?"

Still, the Doctor stood at my side watches on in utter confusion. "How did you work that out? You're—"

"Time Lord," the other says, a proud grin brightening his features. "Part Time Lord."

"Part human!" she cheers. "Oh, yes! That was a two-way biological metacrisis. Half Doctor, half Donna."

Realisation hits. All of those hints, those moments, they were meant for this. "The DoctorDonna. Just like the Ood said, remember? They saw it coming. The DoctorDonna!"