He clambers along the slope, trying to keep up with his father's long strides. "Come on, Brax!" he calls. "We'll miss it."
"I am coming, and we won't." His brother appears alongside him. "You're always so—so excitable." The last word is pronounced with all the superiority that only a year's difference can produce. He's about to retort, Going away doesn't make you grown-up, when they reach the top of the hill.
"Here we are," their father says. "Just the place." For once, he doesn't sound serious; they can almost hear a smile in his voice. He stretches out on the grass, and the two of them lie beside him, gazing expectantly upward.
The earth is still warm, but a soft breeze stirs in the leaves below. "There's the first one," Braxiatel murmurs, as a burst of light streaks across the darkness. Soon the sky is full of more meteors than either of them can count, purple and green and yellow, even brighter than the fixed stars. And tomorrow his father will go back to the capital, and his brother will leave for the Academy, and, for now, this is enough.
Night has already fallen, but the park is gleaming with fairy lights. He walks beside Grace, noticing the trees and the signs and the buildings and trying to make sense of it all. He knows he can't really be human (his hearts beat, steadily), but he doesn't think he's an experiment. She asks if he has any memories of his family, and, deep inside him, something stirs.
"Wait, I remember," he exclaims. "I'm with my father, we're lying back in the grass, it's a warm Gallifreyan night—"
"Gallifreyan?"
He saw the orange sky turned dusky and filled with stars. Time and space are wheeling around him, and he feels the lurch of the earth as it turns. Everything he's done and everyone he's been rushes back into his head—I shall come back, would you like a jelly baby, the tea is getting cold—until, at last, he's whole. He hasn't kissed anyone in centuries, but Grace doesn't seem to mind.
Gallifrey is dying.
The console room is in flames, and the cloister bell is echoing in his ears. He lies just as he fell, hearts straining. The TARDIS is tearing itself apart, hurtling towards Earth like a meteor, and suddenly his mind fixes not on the pitiless voices in the dome, not on the Nightmare Child and the Could-Have-Been King, but on that last night at the hillside, the night that could never come again. He exhales a wisp of gold, and, even as his body convulses with light, he thinks: this is what it is to be a falling star.