A/N: Since the 50th anniversary special is coming up, I wanted to write a brief DW fic about the Time War, and a bit about the unknown characters who fought in it.
Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who.
Nameless Dust In Tomorrow's Ashes
Space lay around them, its usual vastness seeming strangely small and claustrophobic from the denseness of the unnatural debris that littered the vacuum. The empty shells of flying saucers and dead Battle TARDISes drifted through the wasteland, steadily being drawn into orbit around the dark star at the heart of the system. Given time, they would gather dust and accrete into the asteroid belt already circling the fading sun, before the sun itself would stutter and die. Its core would first collapse and then explode, the shockwave tearing up every object nearby and the cosmos swallowing up all evidence that a battle had ever been fought here.
But time was the weapon that had been used to wreak this devastation, and not enough of it was left to permit the remains to steadily decay.
Around one of the inner gas giants of the system a TARDIS still lingered, hovering in the planet's shadow just beyond its gravitational field. A temporal breach had been torn in her hull, but there was still enough life in her for the Time Lords on board to control her navigation, although her arsenal of time torpedoes had long since run out. Her failing systems had rendered the displays on her console screens hazy, but it was enough for the two pilots to see out to where the victorious Dalek forces were now swarming through the outer planets. Farther beyond that a handful of TARDISes were still putting up a fight, but they wouldn't last long.
On board the lone TARDIS hiding among the debris out of the enemy's sight, the two Time Lords turned to look at each other. There should have been a third pilot, but she had been lost when trying to repair the crack in the hull, caught in a time wind and doomed to an eternity of perpetual regeneration. The two that remained consisted of a male who was on his ninth regeneration, tall and dark skinned, and a younger female who was on her fifth regeneration, which had given her curly red hair and an abundance of freckles. The one aspect in which they looked alike was the expression of sorrow and pain on each of their faces.
"It's over," the younger one said, in a tone that sounded completely broken. "We've lost."
"It would seem we have." The older one's response was dry, as if he was unable to accept the defeat.
"Now what do we do?" the first questioned, "They haven't seen us down here and they're heading towards the outer rim. Our comms are down, but we might have enough power left to access the Vortex. If we can make it back to an outpost we could warn them that the Daleks managed to break through our lines…"
The older one shook his head. "The battle's left a temporal retardation halo all around this system. We wouldn't make it in time. If the Daleks get out of here they'll move on to the Ayreus Quasar, then Gallifrey. We have to find a way to stop them."
"But how?" She sounded almost hopeful when she asked the question, but perhaps it was just desperation.
He gave her a grim look. "Colossus 109 is a dying star, sitting exactly on the Chandrasekhar Limit. The electron degeneracy pressure in the core keeps it from collapsing, but applying the uncertainty principle to its mass creates a quantum superposition of a neutron star and an iron condensate. Just a slight disruption to the mass at the centre of the star would be enough to trigger a collapse, and the resulting supernova would be enough to obliterate the Daleks before they even reached the edges of the system."
The younger Time Lord bit her lip. "But even if we had a way to do that, how would we escape the supernova?"
He didn't say anything in response to that, but held her gaze with the same grim look in his eyes. After a moment she understood, and blinked slowly in acceptance.
"Of course," she muttered quietly. Her tone sounded resigned. If the Daleks made it to Gallifrey that would be the end for both of them, and they both knew that they had nothing left to lose.
"We fly the TARDIS into the heart of the sun," the older one said, with a restored sense of purpose in his voice. "What power we have remaining will be enough to disrupt the final stages of nuclear fusion, then the only thing left will be collapse. The supernova it generates will create a huge temporal disruption, but gravity should be enough to keep it locally contained. I think a black hole is the most likely way for this to end. The Dalek Fleet will never escape. Not for eternity."
He was flicking switches on the console to set the TARDIS on its course into oblivion, his jaw clenched tightly. Similarly determined, she joined him, taking control of her side of the console and that of their fallen comrade. "I wonder what that will be like," she speculated darkly, "A singularity from inside a TARDIS? Or maybe we'll be disintegrated before we find out."
He looked up at her grimly. "Let's hope so."
The younger Time Lord swallowed as she made the final adjustments to the controls. Strangely, although she was still undeniably afraid, the certainty of what was about to happen left her with an odd sense of calm. It gave her chance to organise her thoughts, knowing there was only a short time ahead of her that she had to prepare for, and forcing her to reflect on all that had gone before.
The name she'd chosen for herself back at the Academy was The Scholar. She'd never imagined that a soldier instead was what she'd turn out to be, dying on a battlefield a million light years from Gallifrey. Her companion was The Architect, usually far more interested in construction than destruction. How funny it was that the pair of them should be about to destroy an entire star system, the last two Time Lords remaining with the chance to take out a Dalek Fleet.
"It's funny isn't it?" she mused reflectively, "How when you've got all your regenerations ahead of you, you never really think about death. But now, here we are. And tomorrow we won't be here at all. We won't be anywhere or anything, just statistics to make up the death toll and nameless dust drifting among the stars."
There was only one more lever left to pull now, to drag the TARDIS out from hiding and send it hurtling towards the sun, but both were hesitating briefly before they did so. There were tears in her eyes as her hand closed around the final control, and he tried to give her a comforting smile as his hand closed on top of hers.
"Tomorrow's an odd sort of thing," he said softly, "There are some places in the universe where it's already tomorrow, and places where it was tomorrow yesterday, or won't be tomorrow for thousands of years, and some places where tomorrow doesn't exist at all. I guess that's where we going."
She swallowed, trying to return the smile. "Well, I'm sure that will be an adventure."
Then, simultaneously, they pulled the lever.
If the Daleks hadn't noticed the last surviving TARDIS before, then surely they would now. The resilient little spacecraft was emerging from behind the planet that had obscured it, heading on a collision course with the sun.
One Dalek ship noticed it at first, pivoting round from where the fleet was exiting the system and instead flying back towards the centre, quickly followed by its comrades as the others realised what was happening. The Dalek flying saucers were in better shape than the TARDIS, and faster, but the Gallifreyan craft was still out of range and it had much less distance to close.
The harsh, robotic cries of "Exterminate!" couldn't be heard in space, but The Scholar and The Architect could hear them in their heads well enough, recalling the single brutal word to which so many of their friends and comrades had died. But now the extermination wouldn't be coming from the Daleks, because the entire fleet of mutants in metal shells were about to be obliterated, and they were never going to reach Gallifrey. There would be more of them, both Time Lords knew. Countless more. But still they hoped that perhaps by destroying even this one fleet, it might change the course of the war. Or perhaps it wouldn't, and maybe the Daleks would still be victorious in the end, but the thought that this time they had been defeated gave the Gallifreyans something to hope for as they plunged into the nuclear storm that was the star Colossus 109.
At first they felt the shockwave, the TARDIS' exterior screaming against the heat and pressure as the impact violently shook the control room.
The Scholar and the Architect looked at each other one final time.
And then they knew nothing.