Regeneration X

“You’re meddlesome.  You like to meddle and you know it,” said Sarah Jane.  “You talk a lot of nonsense about the integrity of timelines and paradoxes and whatnot but in the end you don’t care.  You meddle….you can’t help yourself.”

The Doctor huffed slightly and looked up from the open flap in the TARDIS console he had been poring over for the last hour.  In a tone that meandered somewhere on the border between exasperation and amusement he said “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

Sarah Jane Smith feigned gasping surprise.  “Really?  You can’t think of a single example?  Everything we do saves a planet, stops an invasion, fixes a hole in time or whatever.  I don’t recall a moment when you thought about the consequences of any of that.”

The Doctor straightened, smiled, shook his head slowly and popped a jelly-baby into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully. 

“I hardly think that’s fair,” he eventually responded, his stentorian tones conveying the authority and experience of a thousand years of self-justification.  “Surely you can’t have forgotten Skaro?  I could have stopped the birth of the Daleks but I chose otherwise.  That was awfully well-thought-through and considerate of me I thought.” 

“The exception that proves the rule,” Sarah Jane replied quickly, folding her arms and refusing to back down, reminding the Doctor just why he enjoyed her companionship on his travels so much.  They had just left San Martino in Renaissance Italy after a nasty run-in with the Mandragora Helix and the TARDIS was, as usual, spinning outside of eternity waiting for the next adventure.

“Alright,” the Doctor grinned toothily.  “Give me an example.”

Ready for him, Sarah pounced.  “I’ll do better than that,” she crowed.  “I’ll give you three…”

---

“Do you remember,” Sarah began, “that dodgy old fellow we picked up by accident down at the bottom of a power plant in a big space station once?  We were materializing and he had been falling down a shaft or something…”

The Doctor scratched his chin thoughtfully.  “Actually yes,” he replied.  “Nice chap, bit of an unfortunate skin condition.  What was his name again? Plumpy?”

Sarah smiled.  “Palpatine”.

“Oh, that’s right,” the Doctor said, clicking his fingers.  “That was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.  The poor chap looked like he had just been in a terrible altercation.  We gave him a nice cup of tea and then dropped him off at his home planet, Exegol yes?  Not exactly a garden spot as I recall.”

“Yes.  And do you remember what happened after that?”

The Doctor curled a strand of hair between two fingers.  “Not precisely…” he murmured, sheepishly.

“Of course you don’t.  But I pay attention.  That ‘nice chap’ went on to try to take over the galaxy with his evil army as we found out later when we met that lovely granddaughter of his on Tatooine.  We should have just let him drop down the shaft!”

“Well,” the Doctor sighed, “I always like to give people the benefit of the doubt.  Surely my ‘meddling’ usually turns out better than that?”

“Sometimes,” Sarah conceded.  “There was that time when you fixed some weird breach in time that created a wonky alternative universe.”

“You’ll have to be more specific,” the Doctor laughed softly.  “That sort of thing happens a lot.”

“We landed on a human starship – the Enterprise it was called – and they were about to go into battle with a bunch of alien enemy ships.  But the whole war with these Klingons was caused by an accidental rift in time that the TARDIS picked up and we went over to fix.”

“Oh yes, I do remember that one.  I thought I handled it all terribly well.  I just pointed out to a lady crew member from a time-sensitive species on the ship that this timeline was wibbly wobbly and shouldn’t exist.”

“Guinan, yes. What was the name of her species again?” Sarah asked.

“El Aurian.  I knew she would be perfect,” the Doctor opined.  “Good listeners that lot.  And she mixes a mean high-ball too.  I’ve been kicked out of a lot worse bars in the universe than that Ten Forward place.”  He paused.  “So, my ‘meddling’ isn’t always blatant, but it does help.”

“I’ll grant that,” Sarah responded, nodding.  “The consequences can be a little weird sometimes though.  There was that real head-scratcher when we helped those colonists from Caprica find Earth that time.”

“The ones that ended up using their faster than light travel so much that they ended up back on prehistoric Earth instead of when they wanted to get there?” the Doctor smiled.  “Yes, they ended up violating causality all over the place, bless them.  It was a good thing we pointed them in the right direction and gave that Starbuck young lady a good talking to otherwise who knows where or when they would have ended up.  Especially since that ship of theirs, the Battlestar Galactica, had definitely seen better days.”

“I suppose they all turned out alright in the end,” Sarah admitted, uncrossing her arms and reaching into the Doctor’s pocket for a jelly baby.  “But I think you’ll admit you really can’t keep yourself to yourself all that well.”

“Part and parcel of being a Time Lord, Sarah Jane,” the Doctor said, rather grandly.  He walked around the TARDIS console to where a small, green light had begun flashing.  “Hmmm,” he murmured, flicking on a nearby screen and reading the contents. “Looks like something odd is happening at the Nunton Experimental Complex in Gloucestershire.  I think we should take a look.”  He grinned broadly at Sarah, who looked not at all amused.

“Here we go again,” she thought.