A/N: It's been a while since I've been inside The Doctor's head but the events of JE wouldn't let me go!
The usual thanks go to Dr D for the Beta.
The ususal disclaimer: Doctor Who belongs to the BBC and not to me (sadly) and I've only borrowed their wonderful creation!
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Time is a peculiar phenomenon especially for those of us who travel in it. We can live our lives in strange back-to-front ways where events have happened to those around us but haven't happened to us yet. A Queen wanted my head and I'd not yet met her. A woman who knew me without me knowing her died for me so that I could survive and in my future find a way to save her.
Events like those make it seem that time isn't fixed… effect does not always follow cause…I think I summed it up best when I said it is like a ball of wibbly wobbly timey whimey stuff…but even amongst the flux there are things…places… people.. points in time that are fixed.
They can NEVER be changed no matter what the consequences of that action might be and to a Time Lord they just aren't right.
Our burden….my burden now as I am the last of the Time Lords…is to be able to see time, to feel it, to know it every second of every day. I can see what is, what was, what will be and more importantly perhaps, what can never be. I know which events I can affect and which, no matter how much I want to, I can't.
The Time War is one of those points… it is a fixed point in the history of a Universe that is now changed beyond all recognition. I can't go back to that point and change the course of history…I just can't….I really, really can't. Can I?
I made the Time War what it is and I can't undo that…nobody can and nobody should. It was an event that was more cataclysmic than anybody had ever imagined. Whole worlds were destroyed, their histories now just stories told by others who never knew them, distorted like Chinese whispers as the centuries pass, until they eventually fade from existence altogether. Davros was more right than he imagined when he called me 'the destroyer of worlds'.
Then I killed him, the last of the Daleks, their creator. I stood helplessly by whilst he taunted me and chose to die. Now not only am I the last of the Time Lords I am also the last survivor of the Time War. The last person who truly knows what happened and why and those are events and reasons that I will never be able to share ….with anybody…. Not now…not in my future… never…ever.
That is a hard burden and one that makes me weary every day. One that I try not to dwell on but it lives inside me and shapes me, shapes my actions even if I don't realise it. The Time War changed me then and continues to change me now. It is one of the reasons I seek a companion, to help temper the effects of the Time War they make me stop and question my actions and my reasons and as Donna told me – I need that and she was right.
The Time War is over but its legacy would have destroyed me as certainly as I destroyed my people if I hadn't met Rose. I was full of fire and hatred, burning with a need for….revenge, retribution, the answer to the question that burnt in my mind…why me…and she was there to see the good in everything and to make me realise that my path of self destruction wasn't the way to exorcise the ghosts of the Time War. She saved me…more than once…and more than once I let her go and never told her what she did for me, what she did to save her universe from me.
She saved me with love, a love that I couldn't return no matter how much I wanted to. She saved her universe by a selfless act that left her trapped in a parallel world from which there should have been no way back. When I left her in Bad Wolf Bay still unable to tell her how I felt I had hoped that she would eventually find happiness in her new world, because I knew we would never meet again and the last thing I wanted was for her to hate me for what I had been forced to do to her.
Travelling between alternate dimensions threatens the whole fabric of time and space, Pete and Mickey knew that and yet they helped her to find a way to do that. They helped Rose to come back to me. They helped her to find me when we both needed each other the most.
What she did in crossing between parallel worlds has shown me that with enough belief anything is possible even things that shouldn't be. If Rose Tyler could cross the vastness of space to be with me then what possibilities did that hold for me, the last of the Time Lords, to whom the vagaries of time and space are nothing more than an inconvenience?
Davros said that Dalek Caan had flown into the Time War to save him and that should never have happened. It is impossible, it SHOULD have been impossible and yet Caan found a way to break into the Time War.
The greatest self imposed rule I made for myself has now been shattered and by a creature born of hatred and of war, born of the very things that the Time War was supposed to end.
It destroyed him and ultimately it made me destroy too but it also made me see that even the truths that we hold to be self evident aren't always what they seem to be. If Caan could enter the Time War then if I did, if I could, maybe I could save them, the Time Lords, my family, maybe even me from the despair and destruction that follows me like a curse. Crossing your own time line is strictly forbidden but for once I don't care and because of me there is nobody to stop me.
Somebody once said the Time Lords were 'dusty old senators' and maybe he was right, maybe this is one law, one rule that was made to be broken. I wouldn't be the first Time Lord to break it and change the course of history and if I do…if I can get inside the Time War and change things then maybe I'll not be the last Time Lord to break it either.
To no longer have to be alone…to have the true companionship that only another Time Lord can bring has to be worth the risk…my brief time with The Master for all its horror showed me that only another Time Lord knows what it is like to be me.
It is a risk, the biggest most dangerous risk I could ever take. It took Caan's mind and it could easily take mine… but I have already stood in the heat of the battles of the Time War, I watched the Medusa Cascade split apart before I was forced to seal the rift, I saw the Crucible fall and the devastation at the Gates of Elysium and so many other horrors that I don't ever want to dwell on and I'm still me. I CAN survive the madness of the Time War because it is a madness mostly of my own making but it is also a madness that nobody else could survive and so, if I am going to do this, it is something that I have to do alone, NOBODY can share this with me and that is fine.
I don't need a companion, I don't need a moral centre, a conscience, I have a goal. I know what my destiny is…I have to open up the Time War and I have to put everything right.
The universe will take a different path and only I will know if it is better than before…or just different. Have I that right? The right to change everything? I've done it already when I ended the Time War so why not again… this time it will be better, it must be better…I will MAKE it better for all the races, not just my own.
It will change my history and I won't meet all those people who changed my life, Rose, Martha, Donna, Jack and so many others, but I won't need them because I will be a different man. If they never meet me then they won't know me and their lives will take a different path and who is to say those lives won't turn out to be better than the ones they had with me. I will have my people back and for all their faults they are still my people, Time Lords, the oldest and wisest civilisation in the known universe.
I rush around the TARDIS console, setting dials and co-ordinates with a zeal and a passion I haven't felt in a long time. This is right.. this is what I should have done a long time ago… this is….
Cardiff!! In 2020. And there is Jack Harkness pounding down my door like his life depended on it
"Where the HELL have you been?" he asks (not for the first time). "Do you KNOW what kind of trouble we're in?"
"Again?" I ask him. "What is it now?"
As he launches into a long explanation I push the thoughts of the Time War from my mind.
It will wait whilst I have one last adventure with a friend who will soon no longer know me. I owe him that.
It has waited for such a long time already and time will continue to ebb and flow around it.
When I'm ready the Time War will still be there and when I am finished it will be as if it never happened.
I can do that…can't I, change all of history, change all of everything, make it all better....or make it all worse?