Doctor Who: The Boy Who Remembered (Fan Fic)

Chapter 17: A Door To Nowhere

The Tardis hovered amongst the clear skies above Paris. The wonders that had been so nearly erased by the Time Thief stood once more in their proper place. After dropping off the Paternoster Gang back in London, and in their respective time period, Benjamin and the Doctor had skipped ahead a few years to perform a proper inspection. Piece by piece, all appeared just as it should have. The reconstructed Bastille stood once more as a testament to the darker underbelly of a forgotten sensibility. Streets were once more filled with bustling bodies and invigorating discussions around liberty and justice; the hammer and forge of a modern world lying just beyond the horizon. And in the heart of it all stood the one sight Benjamin French had waited far too long to see.

"Voila!" grinned the Doctor. "The Eiffel Tower, back in one piece. What do you think? Much smaller than you expected eh?"

"Not at all," the boy could not contain the jovial sense of surprise. "I think it's a lot bigger than I had first imagined."

"Really? You must be lacking in the whole imagination department. I mean, if you think that's big I could show you a tower that stretches between planets. Oh, oh, or a spiralling piece of coral that's grown twice the size of the planet where it started. Or maybe...."

"Alright already, I get it." Benjamin shook his head as he turned back from the edge of the open doors. "You've seen things that make Earth look boring in comparison."

"Not true. I'm offended you'd think I would stoop so low as to brush over the achievements of your species. I know I can be hard headed, brash, and often times utterly confused, but pretentious is not amongst that list."

"Are you sure about that?" he questioned before falling onto a nearby seat. "Because you could have fooled me."

The Doctor did not hide his cold look of judgement as he stood motionless before the Tardis controls. He allowed his scorn to properly sink in before brushing away the insult, "On to more important business then. Now we address the question of what comes next?"

"Maybe we didn't look hard enough for your next clue? You could have hidden it so the Time Thief wouldn't find it? We shouldn't assume this one will be as easy as the other ones we've discovered."

The boy's suggestion had been birthed from an ill-founded optimism the Doctor did not share, "Unfortunately our trail of bread crumbs has come to an end. Or a bird came along and ate the last one."

"A bird?" mocked Benjamin. "Really?"

"Well it would have been an interdimensional bird of sorts. That's not the point," a hand was waved through the air in hopes of carrying forward. "There are no more clues. This is as far as I came the last time around."

Although Benjamin had been trapped in the shifting haze of the mirror's spell, there remained a vague memory of everything the others had unravelled. Paris had been the last stop for the Faceless Doctor, the place where the Time Thief had tried to erase him before he had pulled himself back together. There were already paradoxes forming in the boy's head as he contemplated such a possibility, but then there always came the relative truth of travelling with a Time Lord: there were no rules anymore. After being erased from his own history, Benjamin was travelling with the one person who had managed to write himself back in.

The Doctor had stared down armies, stood before gods without quaking, jumped between dimensions without rupturing the fabric of space, and even travelled to the edges of time if only to watch the birth and death of the universe. But now it seemed there came an even greater challenge, to plunge into the heart of nothingness, to enter the Void where no life could exist let alone endure. It was a thing that, even in Time Lord logic, did not seem possible. Interdimensional travel had its mind-bending rules, going back into one's own timeline held restrictions, even becoming your grandfather's best friend was possible, yet their dilemma was something beyond the measure of even the most flexible rules.