Fitz stared at the Doctor, all sharp edges and gob. He had long since come to terms with fancying blokes, especially blokes who talked a mile a minute, who had great hair and no fashion sense, who were named ‘the Doctor’, and who had, frankly, great bums. The horse thing was a bit more worrying, but since Fitz was also some kind of horse with bat wings, he figured that was basically alright.
The Doctor hadn’t stopped chattering since they’d set off, telling Fitz about everything he’d missed since his departure and the weird things in the simulation around them, and how nice it was to see his old friend again. Fitz, as usual, caught only half of the words being said, of which he understood perhaps two-thirds as individuals, of which, in turn, he could string maybe three-quarters into phrases that made some manner of sense, for a total listening comprehension of ‘holy fuck, this big dumb genius horse is hot’.
“...anyway, that’s why I hate pears now,” the Doctor concluded. “Ah, but look at me mammering on! How’ve you been, Fitz?”
“Er,” said Fitz. “Well. I basically haven’t, I think.”
The Doctor frowned. “Eh?”
“I mean, I’m only a product of your mind,” Fitz pointed out. “Last thing I remember is the last time I saw you. I can’t even properly remember when that is, which I personally think is fairly compelling proof, right?”
The Doctor’s face had fallen as Fitz had been talking. “Oh,” he said flatly. “Right. Stupid of me, really.”
“Well,” Fitz said hurriedly, “I mean, nice of you to ask and all, I didn’t mean to upset you or anything.”
“No, no,” said the Doctor. “You’re alright, Fitz. I just… I haven’t been thinking straight. Not for a very long time, as it happens.”
Fitz looked at him dubiously. “Have you ever?”
The Doctor chuckled at that. “No, I suppose not. But it used to be fun, thinking at right angles to everyone else, folding my thoughts into paper airplanes and letting them loose, turning in corkscrews of rhetoric… Now it’s all barbed wire and twisted metal.”
Fitz said nothing. He couldn’t think of any response to that, not really. Instead he reached out and put a hoof on the Doctor’s back. The Doctor didn’t say anything either, but he did relax a little at the touch. Fitz could remember Sam, back when she had been traveling with them, had commented that the Doctor would turn into an absolute kitty-cat as soon as you started giving him a backrub. Fitz had never worked out if that was something to do with alien biology or if the Doctor was just that starved for touch. Given the way the Time Lord was given to unexpectedly kissing his friends, Fitz was rather inclined to plump for the latter.
“Doc… mate… are you alright?” he asked.
The Doctor paused. Shook his head.
“...How bad is it?”
“You were there when I destroyed Gallifrey,” the Doctor said wearily. “The first time, anyway.”
Fitz’s eyebrows shot up. “The first time?”
“Mm, yeah,” the Doctor said. “Really, I think that about says it all.”
There was a long silence. “...How many…”
“Destroyed by me personally, or in general?”
“Christ, Doc.”
The Doctor huffed. “It was getting out of hand. The Enemy had become the Yssgaroth, the Vampires, the Master and Lolita, Time Lords from one of the Nine Gallifreys’ Nine Gallifreys down the long end of the probability axis, even the bloody Daleks. Daleks with technology to rival the Time Lords. Daleks who’d retroactively been the Enemy all along, in the maze of alternate histories and the ever-shrinking number of futures that the War had become. The fabric of the universe was tearing itself apart. You saw what happened to me when my history came under attack?”
“Which time?”
“Exactly. Apply that to the universe, and increase that by a factor of about five or so.”
Fitz tried to imagine that, but couldn’t quite grasp the scale of it.
The Doctor pursed his lips. “Alright. Imagine San Francisco, but everywhere.”
Fitz whistled low. “So you ended it.”
“Permanently, I thought. I tried to send them all to hell, fighting forever in a Time Lock, like a bagful of cats. But no. Gallifrey’s gone, the Enemy is… probably gone, but the Time Lords and the Daleks remain in some bare dregs. And I killed so many, Fitz.”
He sighed, put his head in his hooves. “It was never meant to happen like this. None of it. Sometimes it seems like everything I touch withers and dies.”
Fitz wasn’t sure what to say to that, either. This Doctor felt much more tired than his had been, much more ground down by the universe. Still, a therapy session, even one with Fitz as a completely-out-of-his-depth therapist, was better than the usual constant peril of how his adventures with the Doctor usually went.
Of course, it was at that moment when something large, scaly, and sharp launched itself out of the foliage and sent both of them flying.
It was no longer a question of finding the tomb. That was altogether too easy. Approaching that miserable sepulcher, on the other hoof, was a rather more difficult affair. The air crackled with arcane force, the underlying power of reality itself brought to bear on this virtual realm. The structure of the tower had moved around often enough before, as the Crusaders and their compatriots were all well aware. Now, though, the corridor was glitching and crackling like a broken video game, as Button Mash commented.
“I’m not sure what the biggest problem is,” Shining said. “The way the door keeps teleporting all over the wall, the way the floor looks… really unstable, or --”
A ray of brilliant silver light clipped through the wall, illuminating the hall and lowering the temperature about ten degrees. “Or that?” Apple Bloom asked. “‘Cause, Ah’m just gonna say it -- it’s that.”
“Unless the place the floor leads is just some kind of infinite void like you get in some games,” Scootaloo pointed out. “Then you’re just falling forever, probably.”
Trixie tapped her hooves together. “Trixie means… not to sound cowardly, but this probably means that all of the alicorns and draconocci are fighting the Nightmare now, yes? We are all agreed on this? Trixie does not think that any of us would be anything other than a liability going in there.”
Shining Armor looked to be having a deep internal struggle. “I mean -- you know --” He shut his eyes. “Twiley’s in there. And Cady. If they get hurt or -- die, or -- I nearly lost Twilight once today already.”
Trixie nodded. “Trixie understands that. Twilight is Trixie’s friend, too, and Sunset is… well, more than that. But there are other considerations.”
Shining glanced at her. Trixie inclined her horn subtly at the Crusaders.
Shining tightened his jaw and nodded. “Alright. Everypony, back the way we came. They don’t need our help in there…”
“But She does,” Dinky said.
Everypony looked at her. Dinky put a hoof to her forehead, wincing and closing her eyes tight. “The voices again,” she muttered. “The countdown, the nursery rhyme, and now the cry for help…”
Shining looked at the other Crusaders. “What’s she talking about?”
Rumble mulled over his response for a moment. “She’s been getting messages in her head all day, helping us along. It led us to temporal anomalies in Ponyville, showed us the way into the Tower, but we don’t know who -- if it is a who -- was responsible for sending them.”
“A who,” Dinky repeated, her brow furrowing. “And a what. And a where-when, a how… and sometimes why.”
Sweetie Belle took one of Dinky’s hooves in hers. The other unicorn jerked back for a moment before settling into the contact. “Do you know where the messages are coming from?” Sweetie asked softly.
“Yes -- no -- complicated,” Dinky grunted. “Something inside… it shattered, and there’s a piece lodged in my heart…”
“What’s it a piece of?” Sweetie asked.
Dinky shook her head. “Power. Unimaginable power.”
“Where is it from?”
Dinky shuddered, her whole body shaking, feeling almost feverish with chills. Then her eyes popped open, flashing with golden light, her mane frizzing and glowing with the corona of a dying star. “TARDIS,” she said.
Everypony stared as the aura of power faded from her. She clutched at her forehead for several seconds after it passed. “We have to get in there,” she said firmly. “Or at least --”
She glanced around. Softened. “I have to get in there. To try. There’s no need for any of the rest of you to risk your lives.”
She ignored the low, ringing gongs in the back of her head and the screams of the TARDIS that yes there will be, the Crusade had to save me. She had been alone before. For the sake of her friends, for the sake of her love for them, she could be alone again.
Apple Bloom rolled her eyes. “Fuck that noise. Ah’m with you.”
The other Crusaders quickly agreed. Shining Armor pursed his lips and studied Dinky for a long moment. “You know this is necessary?”
“Yeah. I can’t explain it, but… they can’t win unless I get to the TARDIS.”
Shining nodded. He looked at Trixie. “And you? Where do you fall?”
Trixie considered this. “Trixie wants to live,” she said. “On the other hoof, it sounds to Trixie like if this goes south, everypony dies, including Trixie. And Trixie is not sure if Trixie’s presence will make all that much difference, honestly, but at least if she dies first she won’t have to see the rest of the world go. So, yes, Trixie is in.”
“You know,” Rumble said, “that’s the most morbid optimism I’ve ever seen, and I’m friends with her.” He nodded at Dinky.
“Funny,” she said with a slight smirk. “I was gonna say the same thing about you.”
“Touche,” he admitted. “So we’re agreed -- we have to get in.”
Everypony looked back again at the flickering, unstable corridor before them. “Uh,” said Shining. “I’ll… I guess I’ll put up a shield?”
“We’ll help,” Sweetie said, looking at Trixie and Dinky in turn.
“Trixie is… not experienced with shields, but she should be able to help us reach the ship unseen.”
Scootaloo took the TARDIS key from around her neck and draped it over Dinky. “Let’s go,” she said.
Fitz lay on the ground, stunned for a moment, the shock making his ears ring. The Doctor recovered more quickly, it seemed -- Fitz could hear him up and about, dashing around and shouting.
Fitz managed to push himself upright. The first thing that he noticed was that his guitar was toast. He had landed on it awkwardly, smashing it. Hadn’t done his back any favors, either. No time to think about that now, though. He took in the scene. The beast they’d been attacked by looked like some kind of alligator, or maybe a crocodile. Fitz didn’t know the difference, and right now he didn’t much care. It was some great bloody reptile with teeth like daggers and scales like armor, about half the size of a bus. The Doctor was yelling at it and brandishing his sonic screwdriver in its face. The monster shied away from the noise, but it didn’t seem like it was planning on going anywhere.
Fitz looked around for anything that might make a decent weapon. Finding none, he snapped a branch off a nearby tree and charged forward with it, shaking leaves at the creature. It backed away a little more, snarling, then grabbed the branch in its teeth. He barely had time to react before the croc-thing flicked its head and flipped him like a coin.
For the second time in five minutes, Fitz hit the ground. This time he landed much more awkwardly, and he heard a distinct snapping sound from the region of his legs. He grimaced, biting his lip to keep from crying out.
When he looked up again, the Doctor was trying hard to keep the monster lizard at bay, the only thing standing between Fitz and half a ton of scales and teeth.
The Doctor glanced back. “Fitz!” he shouted. “Throw me your guitar!”
“It’s shattered, along with my leg and what remained of my dignity!”
“I know!”
Fitz struggled to twist around and pull the ruins of his guitar off his back. He wrenched around his leg wrong, and this time he couldn’t stop himself from screaming.
The Doctor hesitated, and the beast pressed forth its advantage, sending the Time Lord scurrying backwards. With a scowl, he cranked up the pitch on his screwdriver to the point where Fitz felt it in his back teeth. The beast snarled and cringed. “Fitz?” the Doctor said, starting to sound a little panicky now.
Fitz hastily tossed him the remains of his instrument, strap and all. The Doctor paused a moment to undo the strap, yanking it off the guitar with his teeth. Then he tossed the chunk of wood and metal into the beast’s mouth. It chomped down, and the Doctor sprung forth, landing on its snout and holding on for dear life. “Get on!” he shouted.
Fitz groaned and pulled himself up to hobble forth on his three good legs, all but falling onto the reptile’s snout. It tried to buck them off, but both stallions held on tight. The Doctor pulled the strap of the guitar out flat, then looped it around the monstrous maw, pulling it up tight.
He studied his work a moment, then nodded. “Right! Off we hop.” He scooped Fitz up and pulled him into a rolling fall off the creature’s snout.
Fitz cringed from the pain as they went, doubly so when they came to an abrupt halt by crashing into a tree. Once the spots had faded from his vision, he looked around to see the tail end of the creature stomping off.
The Doctor grinned at him wearily. “Crocodilians,” he said. “Very strong muscles for closing their jaws. Very weak muscles for opening them again.”
“Oh,” said Fitz. “It was a crocodile, then? Thought it might be an alligator.”
“Actually, it was an Egol, a crocodilian species from Betelgeuse VIII. Nasty world, that, all swamps and big reptiles and things. Got taken out by the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster of 3758, along with Betelgeuse VII and IX. Terrible tragedy, that.”
“What’s it doing here, then?”
The Doctor shrugged. “Wandering around with a strap on its mouth, I suppose.” Then he frowned. “Fitz, your leg.”
“Oh, right.” Fitz glanced down. “Not supposed to bend like that, is it?”
“No.”
“Ah.” He paused. “They don’t shoot horses around here, do they?”
The Doctor didn’t find that quite as amusing as Fitz did. “We’ll have to set it with something. The branch might work, I suppose… gah, it’s times like this when I really miss Martha…”
Fitz shivered suddenly, a chill running down his back. “Martha?” he asked.
“Dr. Martha Jones,” the Doctor said, working on peeling the bark off the branch. “Brilliant woman, an absolute star. Not that I ever appreciated her for it. Still, she’s happy enough now…”
The world started to get a little fuzzy. “Doctor?” Fitz said. “Er, I don’t think you’ve got to worry about that leg anymore…”
“Hm? Fitz? Fitz!”
The sound of galloping hooves faded to nothing.
Dr. Martha Jones blinked several times to clear her head. There was a horse standing over her, his mouth agape. “What?” he said.
She looked down. She was also a horse for some reason. She let out a long breath through her nose. “Sure,” she said. “This might as well happen.” The stallion shook his head. “What?” he said again.
Martha smirked slightly. “Hello, Doctor.”
“What?”
In the event, it was surprisingly easy to make it to the door. Although the hallway flickered and glitched around them, the stones under the travelers’ hooves became solid as they passed, as though the ponies were temporarily imbuing the hallway with reality.
The beams of energy that lashed through the walls remained something of an obstacle. They hit the shield spell relatively infrequently, but each one was enough to make it ring like a gong and force Shining Armor almost to his knees with the stress of maintaining its stability. By the time they reached the door, Apple Bloom and Rumble had to stand on each side of him, trying to keep him standing upright as he sagged. Dinky and Sweetie Belle, each contributing their own power to smaller internal shield spells, were less affected by the forceful blows, but the effect was clearly still being felt by both mares.
The doors, it seemed, would be the most pressing issue, since they never stayed still for more than a few seconds at a time. However, as they approached the spot on the wall where the doors ought to have been, they shimmered back into place, much as the floor had done.
Shining moved to open the door, but Trixie held up a hoof. After a few moments, there came a particularly bright flash and Trixie shoved the door open, the others hurrying to keep up with her. As they passed into the room beyond, she lit her horn and cast an illusion over the shield, reflecting light off its surface. It wasn’t quite invisible, not fully, but in the smoky, battle-torn tomb, it was good enough.
The battle itself was hard to follow, exactly. Six luminous beings, burning with arcane fury, were pouring their energy onto apparently random spots in the room. Their opponents were never quite standing where the gods struck. The Interface’s eyes were glowing gold, and the air seemed to shimmer around it and the Valeyard alike. It took Dinky a moment, but she soon realized what they were doing -- using the energy stolen from the TARDIS to shift their positions in time and space so that the raw forces of the universe would never touch them. But it was clear that they couldn’t keep it up forever. The golden energy leaking from the machine was evidence enough of that. It felt so familiar, somehow. Welcoming.
“Dinky!” Scootaloo hissed. “Come on!”
She blinked. She hadn’t realized that she’d stopped. “...Sorry,” she muttered, hurrying along with the others.
“The big golden hole is new,” Button said quietly. “What is it?”
“Wrong,” Dinky replied shortly. “This whole place… it makes me feel sick just being here.”
“Don’t worry. We’re nearly to the TARDIS,” Shining said, peering through the smoke and dust. The blue box stood sentinel in the center of the room, untouched by the fighting going on all around it. Nevertheless, there was something wrong with it -- the lights were off, and it had faded to a greyer shade of blue. It even seemed to have shrunk a little, as though it was shriveling up.
They were almost to the door. That’s when it happened. The Interface, apparently tired of playing defense, struck out with a golden beam of light. It struck Twilight full in the chest.
Trixie’s eyes went wide, and she tried to grab Shining’s horn, but too little, too late, and Twilight was caught in a shield spell just before she would have plowed into the back wall.
There was a pause.
“It seems,” said the Valeyard, “That we have some unexpected guests.”
“Run,” Trixie said.
In the next moment, the shield blew apart on contact with another golden ray, sending the occupants sprawling.
The gods were screaming, pouring more force onto the villains, but the Interface was not deterred as he walked forward to where Dinky struggled to rise from the ground. It reached her, put a hoof on her chest, and glanced up. “I don’t believe I have any remaining qualms about my power supply,” the Nightmare said coolly. An instant later, all six were stopped as though in amber, glowing faintly golden, their eyes blazing with fear and anger.
The Nightmare studied Dinky as though she were a slide under a microscope. “You have something I want,” it said. The clouds of golden energy coalesced around the pair. The Nightmare fizzled and popped, smoke pouring from its body. “I intend to take it back.”
Dinky tried to scream, but the golden energy poured into her mouth, her ears, nose, eyes, through every pore, like searching for like.
Then it began to pull back.
It felt like she was having her soul extracted. Surely there was no need for it to be this slow, this agonizing. She tried to struggle, but couldn’t overcome the monster’s force. The Nightmare laughed.
Then a big rock hit it in the face.
The energy stopped moving. Dinky had no time to think, she just acted. She pulled back on the energy, reeling it in. The Nightmare recovered and quickly started to fight back, but Dinky had inertia on her side. She pulled, and it pulled, both determined not to let the other overtake them --
And the tug-of-war rope snapped. Both of them went sprawling. Sweetie Belle pulled Dinky to her hooves as Apple Bloom hefted another rock. “Move!” she shouted.
Above them, the alicorns and draconocci began to move again, slowly. Shining and Trixie were busy fending off the Valeyard, preventing him from approaching the Crusaders or the TARDIS, defending their position and distracting the foe with illusions and trickery.
Dinky fumbled with the key around her neck, shoving it haphazardly at the lock as her friends gathered around. Finally, she opened the door and all but fell through, the others quickly following her. Rumble glanced back at the tableau. The Nightmare was regaining its footing, enraged. Shining and Trixie were slowly losing ground. He looked up at the alicorns and draconocci as they slowly unfroze. A lazy bolt of blue magic crept down and enveloped the two unicorns. When it had vanished, so had they.
Cadance looked at him slowly and gave a small, sad smile. Rumble nodded back and shut the door, locking it behind him.
“Okay,” he said. “Now what?” He looked around for Dinky.
She lay on the floor, shaking, as her eyes glowed pure gold. “Oh,” said Rumble. “Shit.”
Dinky screamed with far too many voices.
Outside, the Nightmare shook its head as if to clear it, then gazed up at the thawing gods. “There won’t be any round three, thank you,” it snarled. The remaining golden energy coalesced into bubbles of time that surrounded each of the gods, sealing them off from the world outside.
None of them reacted. They merely looked at him, silent in their judgement. Well, except for Discord, who immediately started making armpit fart noises at their foes below.
The Nightmare snarled and sat back, temporarily stymied and weary. After a moment, it said, “This changes nothing.”
“Good,” the Valeyard said. “In that case, I’ll take my leave, as agreed.”
The Nightmare nodded. “There are too many rogue factions at work,” it growled. “You see to the one in Ponyville. I’ll take care of the ones up here.”
“And the power of the TARDIS?”
“The child cannot hold it forever. One way or another, I will recoup what is mine by right of conquest.”
The Valeyard nodded. “You may wish not to kill the rogue agents,” he noted. “They could prove useful bargaining chips.”
“Hm.” The Nightmare said nothing more as the Valeyard walked over and passed through the rift.
Nurse Redheart stood in the coma ward. Things had calmed down somewhat. Fluttershy and Ditzy Doo’s heart rates had returned to normal, the various gods were no longer oozing corruption from their very pores, and almost everything appeared to be fine. The alicorns and draconocci had higher heart rates than she would have liked, and they were going through magic drips like Pinkie Pie went through pastries, but they didn’t seem to be in imminent peril, which was a nice change.
“How are you holding up, hon?”
The pager beeped. “I’m doing alright. Like I said before, my memories are… getting fuzzy. But I can remember the most important things, like Button and you.”
“Romana said she could fix it. I’m sure your memory will recover when she does.”
“I hope so.”
Redheart sighed and held the device to her chest. “The coma, the attack, the shield… I don’t know how any of us are going to make it out.” She paused. “I’m sorry. That’s not something you need to hear right now.”
“No. But it’s something you needed to say, and that’s still impo --”
Redheart frowned and shook the pager. “Tender? Hon? You still there?”
“Something’s happening. With the Doctor. I can see something moving, like a shadow out of time…”
Redheart glanced up, and immediately the Doctor’s heartsbeat rose, his eyes shot open, and he sat bolt upright, gasping for air.
Redheart stepped back, ears flat against her head as her patient checked himself over from tip to tail, studying his hooves, running his tongue along his teeth, brushing back his mane.
“...Doctor?” Redheart said, her voice shaking.
The Time Lord’s gaze flicked to her, and for a moment, his dark brown eyes seemed to cut her open, dissecting her mind and soul as he studied, dispassionately, her entire life. It lasted only an instant before he broke into a grin -- hesitant at first, then slowly more eager. “I’m back,” he croaked, voice rusty from misuse. “I’m back!”