The Big Bad Wolf

Harry fell. He fell through time. He fell through space. He twisted and turned, end over end, in a maelstrom of colour, lightning and cloud. He fell through the bounds of reality itself, ricochetting off the edges of creation. He fell, and he screamed. His screams were lost to the winds of the time vortex… and then… it stopped.

The little blue light at the end of Harry's eyestalk flickered briefly, warily, unwilling to be assaulted by the overload of data once more. But there was no data to be overloaded by. Harry's casing sat in a boundless white space, drifting through the void.

"Well... what have we here," a voice echoed around him, from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. "A lone little Dalek? How have you made it to my sanctum?"

Harry could not bring himself to respond. His mind was shattered, confused, he had no idea where he was, or even what he was. The vocal processors of his Dalekanium shell could only perceive his panic and fear in the way it was designed.

"EX-TER-MIN-ATE," The casing yelled, shooting off bolt after bolt of energy into the depths of nothing.

"Oh… so angry and alone, as your kind always is. I believe I shall do away with you now," the ethereal voice remarked. "But wait… there's something more, just below the surface… what are you?"

"What…Am…I?" The casing replied, a fragment of Harry briefly able to respond.

Without warning the casing stopped firing, its gun arm surrounded by a golden glow. Before Harry's unbelieving mechanical eye golden motes of light began to swirl and coalesce into the form of a young woman.

"What are you indeed," the woman murmured, allowing the tips of her fingers to trail across the damaged casing, a trail of sparks in their wake. "Dalek on the outside, human on the inside, total physical conversion but your mind resisted the change…"

"What…Are…You?" Harry replied, the woman's touch was electric, but it served to calm him somewhat. His casing burned where she touched, but in a pleasant way, as if her very touch had imbued him with the ability to think and heal.

"Me? I have gone by many names through the aeons. Some know me as The Moment. Others the Miracle. I have always preferred… Bad Wolf," Her eyes glinted with that, a flicker of power around her pupils, golden and pure. "In truth, I am an aspect of the Vortex, one of many, the strongest by far."

"I…Do not…Understand,"Harry replied, he could barely make sense of what had happened to his own body, let alone the connotations behind this creatures words.

"No, No I don't suppose that you would," Bad Wolf remarked, almost to itself, "Your brain is all scrambled up, swirled around in that tin can like eggs. But don't worry little Dalek, I can fix that."

"Fix…?"

"Oh yes, I should think so, fix you up and send you on your way… In fact, I believe I know just the man to send you to."

The woman rushed toward Harry with unnatural speed and placed both of her hands upon his casing, channelling power directly through the contact. The Dalek began to scream again, but she paid it no mind, he wouldn't remember this part when it was all over. Slowly the casing began to burn away, disintegrating into the same motes of light that the Bad Wolf had appeared with, revealing the tentacled form of the organics within, the final vestiges of the Dalek's humanity mutated beyond recognition. She reached into its core as it writhed in the air and grasped its constituent genetic structure, changing it back into something the original human mind would comprehend as its own.

Then she sent it, still forming, spinning back through the Vortex.

xXx

She was impossible. She had been there on the Dalek Asylum, she had been there in Victorian London and she had died both times. The madman erupted in a spate of giddy laughter as he rushed around the console of the time machine, seemingly hitting buttons and pulling levers at random. Oh, of course, the pain of losing his best friends, the first face his face had seen, that was still weighing heavily on his mind. But he had just been presented with a mystery. Not just any old mystery, a completely impossible mystery, a mystery like none he had ever been presented with before. The impossible girl, dead twice in two completely different time zones on two completely different planets. He loved a challenge, and it didn't get much more challenging than that.

He swung a final lever down with a flourish, and then stopped dead when the cloister bells began to chime. He jumped back from the console as it began to spark and shudder, a stream of golden light pouring from each explosion, to become concentrated in a singular mass on the floor. It bubbled and warped, seeming to filter through a stream of different potential shapes, before eventually settling on the shape of a young boy dressed in pyjamas and glasses with a distinctive lightning bolt scar on his forehead.

"Well," The Doctor said, "That's new."

He whipped out his sonic screwdriver, but before he could begin a scan the TARDIS main console burst into yet another flurry of sparks and flames, the central column wheezing and grinding with more fervour than before, as if it were protesting against the new arrival. With a hard jolt and a final cough, the TARDIS came to a stop, acrid smoke spewing from the console.